Beachwood outreach

Steve Rhodes was kind enough to post the Poof! piece in slightly altered form--not exactly the kind of Indonesia Journal piece I was hoping to see in print--and to include a note asking readers for job leads: http://tinyurl.com/68sv7tr. If nothing else, maybe there's room behind the bar at the Beachwood. Or the Beacon.

Thanks to everyone who's already contacted me with job postings, job ideas, possible job offers, possible loan offers, well wishes, condolences, outrage, and pep talks. Please keep them all coming and maybe something good shakes out of this particular predicament after all.

Poof!

One of the last things I did in August before heading to O'Hare for my flight to Jakarta was to cut a check for $5,000 to a hedge fund manager and friend of my mom's named Jim Brandolino. He'd been managing money for my mother and me for more than seven years, and his little investment pool, based on the quarterly statements he provided, was the only investment I had that was anywhere near successful. I figured I'd park some additional savings with Brandolino while I was away earning peanuts in Indonesia and tap the funds when I got back for a security deposit and rent on a new apartment. It seemed like a decent idea. I'd just seen Brandolino at my going-away party the month before and he was in fine fettle: The funds were plodding along, we were making better-than-modest money in a shit market, and Brandolino was working on a book to share his investment strategies with the wider world. He bought me a beer at the party and toasted my Southeast Asian adventure. To your success, he said.

To my success! A couple weeks ago, Brandolino walked in to the U.S. Attorney's office in Chicago and confessed that his investment empire was in fact a cheap and flimsy fraud. He mismanaged about half the money he'd been given--some of it from friends of his Italian immigrant parents in Joliet, some of it from people like my mom and me, some of it from west and southwest suburban business owners and working-class stiffs--and spent the rest of it on himself. The quarterly statements I'd been receiving for years showing regular if sometimes small gains were pure fiction. Make-believe. Criminal. By the time he walked into the federal building on LaSalle Street, Brandolino had frittered away almost everything he'd taken from investors and was left with little more than a used BMW 7-series, a gaudy Rolex, and an ownership stake in an unbuilt condominium in Greece.

You can read more about the government's allegations against Brandolino here http://tinyurl.com/488n2ob, and here http://tinyurl.com/6ytgflo.

Big spender, POS.

This of course means that Brandolino bought me that drink at Schuba's with my own money, and he used my money when he treated me and Angela and mom and my aunt to a last-minute, penthouse skybox ticket to see the Hawks play right before the playoffs last year. Looking back on the latter, I wish he'd at least sprung for the dessert cart. He used my money and my mom's money and the money of a couple dozen other dupes to underwrite his trips to southern Europe, to pay for an annual summer dinner cruise for investors that always featured an open bar, to pay the rent on his South Loop condo. He used our money to promote himself and his business as the chief sponsor of an annual Misericordia fundraiser on Madison Street in Forest Park. He spent it on a freelance writer who was supposed to help him complete his masterwork, Train to Trade: What Pros Do Differently. (The book title, as it appears on various Web sites today, has evolved. Last summer, Brandolino handed out promotional pamphlets for the still-unpublished book that had it subtitled What Pros Do Different. As folks got deeper into the open bar on the dinner cruise, they began carping about the poor grammar of the subtitle. Brandolino was polite about the criticism but clearly annoyed. This was his party, and his book, and he'd call it whatever he wanted. Or not. At some point he gave in and added the adverbial form.) He used my money and the money of his other victims to reward himself for a life he didn't earn or deserve, and I'll be recovering from his fucking greed and avarice for a long time.

I learned about Brandolino's crimes when I returned from Lombok Monday night and I've spent a lot of the last week burning up the phone and my gmail account communicating with my mother and others in Chicago. A very seriously looming question for me at this point is whether the Year of Living Volcanically is headed for an early end. I'm still trying to sort that out but thought I'd make this very difficult private loss public in case you, dear reader, have a line on a paying job I might want to consider. In all seriousness. I may or may not land a teaching position for next fall but that job market's pretty grim and I need to either make something happen soon or be ready to hit the ground running when I get back to the U.S. in May. I've got feelers out among some of my graduate school friends and among a few of my former colleagues--thanks to those of you who've already responded with leads or with other vitally necessary counsel--but I thought I'd cast a wider net. If you're reading this you probably know something of my professional background and skills. If that's the case and you know of a job opening for which I'd be suited, please don't keep it to yourself.

The full-contact classroom

Today in class we did some interactive English learning. Which is to say we spent most of the day crashing into one another, or rather that a couple all-boy classes did. It's a simple game that's a little like musical chairs but played in a circle, and one kid's always stuck in the middle. The scramble not to be that guy--who has do some a fair amount of talking in front of everybody--is what makes the game fun, and actually laugh-out-loud funny.

Especially when two students collided at full speed, shoulder to shoulder, both bouncing off one another and falling slowly, backward, straight to the floor. The game was less funny when some of the guys started boarding one another into the chairs, hard and pretty savage shoves from behind at near-full-speed. I eventually got that part worked out of the game, which was nice because nothing gets Indonesian boys talking, even in English, faster than some physical pinballing.

As advertised

I'm writing from the airport in Jakarta, making my way back to Central Java after wrapping up my stay in Lombok. Added on a long weekend after our mid-year conference ended--and glad I had an extra day after I joined several other Fulbrighters in falling violently sick during our time at the Sheraton Senggigi. My bout came the night before we were supposed to check out and knocked me down hard. We checked out Friday afternoon and at one point about 8:30 a.m. I wasn't even sure I'd be able to leave my bed. But I did and joined another afflicted ETA at the hospital for the most frustrating non-diagnosis I've had yet here.

At least six of our group of 44 fell out with similar symptoms--I'll spare you--during our three-day stay and I think at least four of the six visited the same doctor for help. This doctor's principal strength was her English, which was definitely the best in her hospital, but she was beyond reluctant to diagnose our troubles. Instead, she asked a coupe questions about the timing and quantity of body fluids passed, had an orderly take our blood pressure and temperature (with an underarm thermometer), and then asked us what kind of medicine we wanted for treatment. Uh, what kind do you think we need? Well, maybe I needed an IV. Or maybe rehydration salts would do. And maybe we needed an anti-nausea medicine or maybe we didn't. But probably definitely we needed some antibiotics for an infection.

Doctor, is it your opinion that we have an infection?

It's hard to tell.

Then why prescribe an antibiotic?

Do you not want an antibiotic?

Most of the doctor's time, after she answered or didn't answer my questions and those of my friend, was spent working out the order for our drugs. She presented each of us with a completely different set of prescriptions, and one my friend figured was about twice as expensive as it should be. (She'd been sick in the same hospital before and the earlier bill had been significantly cheaper.) We asked about the cost--oh, yes, the doctor could prescribe less expensive medications--and why two people suffering the exact same symptoms would be prescribed none of the same medicine.

The composition is the same, the doctor said.

The medicines are the same? So why prescribe different ones? What do these different medicines do differently?

The composition is the same.

So we haggled down the price a bit and shuffled exhaustedly back to the car and spent a restful hour in our hotel beds before checking out. My friend and I sent the night Friday in the house of a fellow ETA and the next morning felt well enough to catch up with a good group on the beaches of Kuta, a mostly unspoiled beach and surfing destination on the south shore of Lombok. I wasn't feeling up to any surfing but I was able to walk the beach a bit and wade into the bathtub waters of our little bay.

Kuta Bay.

A view from the porch.

I rented a beachfront hut and a scooter for $20 and spent a night about 35 yards from the very spot where the high-tide waters of the Bali Sea crashed a little too noisily against the sands. I eventually got to sleep but, man, even a gentle sea is a massive force. Not exactly lapping. But I'm quibbling. The setting and the company and the mostly rainless weather and the monkeys down the beach and the fishermen laying evening nets in the bay and the jagged hills fencing us in and the shady recesses of our porches, where we could sit and read or talk or just sit, this was Indonesia As Advertised: The sunsplashed beach idyll. Pretty nice. I mean, not Door County nice but decent.

Evening fisherman.

Monkey on a beach.

Enter Lombok

The view last night from the hotel beach in Senggigi. Rainy today but the sand, wet or not, is still only about 100 yards from my hotel room.

Halfway and MLK

The entire 44-member Fulbright ETA contingent descends on East Java this weekend for the beginning of a two-city, halfway-there tour. We'll be in Surabaya from Sunday to Tuesday, participating in a teacher-training outreach effort that has us visiting a bunch of area high schools, and then we're off for three full days in one of the nicer beachfront hotels in island paradisiacal Lombok. I promise to get some pictures up from the latter. Maybe even the former.

In Surabaya, we're working in groups of four and are supposed to both introduce/promote MLK Day in 30 minutes then use some State Department-issue edu materials to demonstrate novel approaches to teaching English. I'll be using some folk-song CDs and intend to have the Indonesian English teachers singing Oh, Susanna in the round.

On the MLK front, I'd really like to play his Mountain Top speech and talk about my trip last winter with Angela to the Lorraine Motel and how what's really interesting about King, once you've heard the Dream speech a thousand times in a high school classroom, is where he and his movement ended up in 1968. Or how deeply moving it is to stand inside the civil rights museum housed inside the old hotel building, and to look out on the balcony corner where King was shot in the throat by James Earl Ray. Ray used a .30-06 and shot King from a window about 150 yards away. A fucking howitzer shot at easy range. You can walk up to the balcony from inside the museum and get within about four feet of the spot where King fell to the concrete floor. It's marked with a red brick and you look at it through a picture window. The space between the motel wall and the railing is only about a yard or so wide. King was standing on the balcony when Ray shot him and King crumpled, destroyed at 39, into this small and unremarkable piece of motor lodge real estate. Ray took aim from a bathroom window in a shabby rooming house, across a city lot filled with trash and sodden mattresses. Certainly King could see the garbage and the mattresses from the balcony. They were right out his door, right across the street.

The museum includes a mock-up of the room King was staying in at the Lorraine--in 1968 a black-owned motel that King chose deliberately as a base of operations after coming in for criticism when he stayed at posher digs during an earlier visit to Memphis--and it's a picture of threadbare modesty. All sites of memory and commemoration are in some way artificial and scripted--especially when they're housed in museums--but, honestly, I can't picture a better or clearer representation of how truly remarkable a person and moral, oratorical force King was than that worn little motel room with the peeling wallpaper and unrepaired broken baseboard along the back wall. Against great state and private capital power, including a despicably criminal FBI, King fought with his voice, his words, and ideas. That part we sort of know but, really, that's all the guy had. In the beginning, and in the end. You just cannot listen to the Mountain Top speech, with its spooky and heartbreaking premonitions, and miss King's fatigue. He talks about it explicitly. His fight, the nation's fight for racial and economic equality, went on and on and on. And remains incomplete.

So we celebrate the Dream speech and the early Civil Rights movement and remain unreconciled with the latter part of that project. Sure, blacks are people, too. Of course! We've got a black president! But should we all consider a different approach to social change? What did the Civil Rights Act really do? In 1968, it was a deeply disappointing and incomplete second emancipation. Even King was disillusioned. He spends probably too much time in his last-ever speech reminiscing about Birmingham and Bull Connnor; those were clear-cut vistories, in the end. But after? Where did the dream go? A very bright American friend of mine here recently asked me if it was true that King had become a Socialist and a even a kind of radical Socialist by the time of his death. I said, more like Black Collectivist. Maybe on the way to Communist! And why the fuck not? He died supporting a garbageman's strike. A very different setting than the March on Washington. Who talks about this?

A cool and colorful day

Maybe the nicest day yet in Magelang: Relatively cool throughout and on into sunset, which saw the prettiest clouds of the New Year if not possibly the old. Darkness fell about 15 minutes after I snapped these pictures, and the night's just been about a perfect simulacrum of early fall. Maybe 75 degrees, very little humidity. Crickets and lizards chirping. A good day to be in Central Java.