Oh well, MTV Desi has me pegged.  They’re exactly right about me but at least they acknowledge that I also acknowledge that I am one more gawking American.

And I can’t complain about being named an honorary Desi, sort of.

New York Press Delves Into the Paan Game
by Abdullah

When I first saw the headline “Confessions of a White, Middle-Aged Paan Eater” on the cover of this week’s New York Press, naturally, I grabbed a copy and asked myself the question you’re asking yourself right now; What the hell is the New York Press?   Well, it’s a paper that’s running a cover story about something inherently Desi that’s breaking into mainstream culture. And why not? It didn’t take long for Americans to adopt the more… CONT’D AT MTVDESI.COM>> 

The Asia Society also commented and was a tad less snarky than MTV (but who am I to complain about being snarky in a blog post from time to time, eh?).

A Paean to Paan
by Aliya Sabharwal

…From describing his initiation into the practice of paan-chewing to drawing interesting comparisons to the tobacco-dipping culture of his Appalachian relatives, Stanley seems to have seriously and diligently researched this “local” practice. But the result is a riot for those familiar with paan chewing or chewers, if only for the novelty of reading an eloquent homage to the substance.  CONT’D AT ASIASOCIETY.ORG>>

Well, now it’s just too much. My paan habit has also made the celebrity gossip page of India Abroad, the major newspaper for Indian expats around the world, getting top billing over Tom Cruise’s tweets to Anil Kapoor (see p. 6).  I’m truly honored and humbled.

Jeffrey Stanley is Addicted to Paan…CONT’D AT INDIA ABROAD>>

[images via mtvdesi.com, asiasociety.org, and indiaabroad-digital.com]

I heart paan

I bought tobacco paan from this walla near the Belur Math monastery along the banks of the Ganges in West Bengal, India.

This week’s New York Press, ”New York’s Plummy Weekly Newspaper,” cover story is my monologue thinly disguised as an essay, ‘Confessions of a White, Middle-Aged Paan Eater’, the title a loose parody of Thomas de Quincey’s scandalous 1821 memoir Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.

Enjoy the article, go to your nearest Indian grocer and enjoy some meeta paan, and if you’re craving more dope on the delicacy here’s a short clip of me ordering it from a paan walla just across from the ancient Udayagiri and Khandagiri Caves in Bhubaneswar, the capital of the state of Orissa in eastern India, this past January (footage courtesy of documentary filmmaker David Gaynes).

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And the article…

Confessions of a White, Middle-Aged Paan Eater

JEFFREY STANLEY is addicted to what may arguably be India’s most disgusting export

I pull my hat low as I pound the rain-slicked sidewalks of Curry Hill around noon on a frigid November weekday. I look about furtively as I walk up Lexington, stopping outside of a DVD shop before I dart inside. There I meet my sugar man, a Punjabi who only goes by the nom de commerce Arora.  By now I know his real name, but he likes to go by the one-word moniker.  I’m happy to…CONT’D AT NYPRESS.COM>>

[IHeartPaan logo, paan walla photo and video are property of me. Logo via nypress.com]

Only my second trip in ten years to Baghdad by the Bay reminded me that SF is short on culture but long on history, fog, rain and redwoods. The redwoods were here before the city and will, the good Lord willing, be here long after the city’s gone, so make a drive across the Golden Gate Bridge to Muir Woods first and foremost on your list, followed by a drive along the Pacific Coast’s awe-inspiring Shoreline Highway.

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Back in the city, hit In-N-Out Burger down by Fisherman’s Wharf, a West Coast tradition since 1947, where the meat is fresh and never frozen, the fries are cut from fresh potatoes on the premises and fried in cholesterol-free vegetable  oil.  Sure, it’s a burger and  fries and isn’t ever really going to be good for you, but these are better for you than others, and besides the taste is incredible; a burger and  fries the way nature intended it.
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For a dash of history nothing beats a cable car ride. Yes, it’s really only for tourists these days and there are only 3 lines still in operation, down from the 22 lines that operated for locals back in the day, but it’s a living piece of US history and a mechanical wonder. In fact the cable cars are fully mechanical, not electric. Check it out:

 And for a bit of culture I recommend a visit to the legendary Magic Theatre,  started during the Summer of Love and taking its name from one of my favorite novels, Hesse’s Steppenwolf.  The play I saw was a faux Restoration comedy that’s better left undiscussed.

I topped off the trip with a drink at Top of the Mark, an historic, elegant bar atop the Mark Hopkins Hotel in Knob Hill.  I recommend their specialty martini the Manhattan Jack.  I know, it’s not a real martini because it’s not gin or vodka but it’s still a lovely drink – Jack Daniel’s, vermouth, and a cherry.  You’d swear it contained bitters or some sweet liquer but nope.  I had two and my envious companions also each ordered a round of them and we watched the repeated lightning strikes across the evening skyline during yet another rainstorm.

In case you haven’t already heard, I must with heavy heart relay to you the sad news that Segway company owner James Heselden rolled off a cliff on his Segway and died yesterday in London.  He is not to be confused with the Segway’s creator and original company owner Dean Kamen.  Naturally the ‘net is already splitting at the seams with wisecracks (“maybe he was showing the post office that Segways can be used for air mail”). Even prior to this tragic event Youtube already featured a plethora of home vids depicting “Segway dorks,” “Segway nerds,” etc, etc. 

James Dean behind the wheel of his Porsche racecar. He died in a crash on the way to a race on September 30, 1955.

Well, I’m here to flip this thing upright and tell you that dying on a Segway doesn’t make Mr. Heselden lame, it makes him a motherfucking badass.  So you can run and tell that, homeboy.  You heard me.  Don’t believe it? I share as proof some private cell phone footage of my one and only Segway ride, a tour with friends through DC on April 29, 2007. Perhaps if you’ve got the guts you too will take command of a Segway someday and feel its gyroscopic power rumbling beneath your feet — unless of course you’re too chicken.

[Photos via telegraph.co.uk and theselvedgeyard.wordpress.com.  Born to be Wild by Steppenwolf.]

I was thrilled to return to the verdant and lonely shadowland that is the New Jersey Pine Barrens for Labor Day weekend. Three days a’campin’ in the sasquatch-infested Bass River State Forest where I went a’hikin’ and a’fishin’. I kept a big pickerel and threw back a coupla baby cats along the squatchy shores of Lake Absegami.  No cryptids — neither a squatch nor his winged cousin the Jersey Devil (pictured right) — reared their ugly heads, and I searched in earnest, including a night walk around the lake and some daytime recon along the Barrens’ many isolated footpaths for my next visit.  Bigfoot had given me the brush-off, but I did find some sasquatch scat on the Batona Trail. Or was it a load of horse shit? I never can tell.     

More to the point, summer ended with a lovely weekend outdoors.  

Some visual foreshadowing above Lake Absegami. The cloud fish foretold of my...

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...reeling in a keeper moments later.

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*[photos via coasttocoastam.com, cryptomundo.com, and me]

"Respect a bear's space."

And from Boston on to a few days in New Hampshire for a visit to my favorite fishing spot that’s always teeming with wild brook trout, keeper after keeper, day after day. 

One can spend hours in
this
narrow

mountain gorge hopscotching up the rocks in the middle of the stream and throwing a line in to fish each hole and never see another person. 

For obvious reasons the exact location must remain a secret

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betwixt me and the trees. 

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I could tell you,

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but then

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I’d have to thrill you.

Slow men at work near Fenway Park.

Unless one wants to see Jersey Boys the theatre scene seems to be on hiatus in Boston during late July and early August but that’s okay, there’s plenty of street theatre everywhere one looks.

I’ve spent the past few days in Beantown, my first time here in at least ten years, and have enjoyed seeking out alternatives to the usual sights like the “Glory monument,” Beacon Hill, the Old South Church, the Old North Church, and Faneuil Hall. If you’ve never seen these nation-making locales (and reminders of our genocide about which residents of this so-called bastion of liberalism still live in a deep, dark denial) then  make them your first order of business when you come to Boston.

Bosch.

If you’ve seen them, then consider something off the tourist trolley line like the Museum of Fine Arts and its extensive collection of mummies and 15th century Flemish religious paintings, the kind that, with their vibrant colors and expressive faces, look like they were painted yesterday for a graphic novel.

There’s also the Mapparium at Christian Scientist headquarters, a 3-story stained glass globe built in 1935 that one enters through a gangplank and explores from the inside.

Okay, I confess I did buy a ticket for one of the trolley tours. They’re an easy way to get around the city and take in a few sights at the same time.  While waiting in line to board I heard the dad of a Red Sox apparel-clad family say “…blah blah blah Roanoke blah blah blah.”  I asked if he was from Roanoke, Virginia, my hometown, and he said yes.  I reminisced with him and his wife about the world’s largest man-made star and the world’s smallest Graceland before they departed with their kids at the first stop, Fenway Park.

I rode the whole loop but by 3/4s through the ride the trolley had become completely empty except for me. It was rush hour and we were crawling so the driver-guide asked if I’d mind our skipping the last three historic site stops so he could take me straight back to the final stop and knock off for the day. I told him no prob, and as a result I got my own private trolley tour of sites not on their usual  itinerary, like the location of the 1950 Brinks armored car robbery, the 1919 molasses flood and the Crispus Attucks monument on Boston Common.

I also recommend the Back Bay Fens which I (continue reading…)

Tagore Celebration in Kolkata, 5/8/10

Rabindranath Tagore (May 8, 1861 – August 8, 1941)  the first Asian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, was born 150 years ago this weekend.  Celebrations are underway in India, especially in his hometown of Kolkata, West Bengal, and across the globe.  Would that I were there.

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A few of my pix from the historic Tagore family home Jorasanko, winter 2010, Kolkata.

I had the pleasure of visiting the Tagore family home, Jorasanko, earlier this year, which continued to turn me on to this Bengali Renaissance Man’s works in poetry, theatre, fiction and music.  Today Jorasanko is a museum operated by nearby Rabindra Bharati University named in Rabindranath’s honor and focusing on performing arts and the humanities.  My fellow travelers and I were fortunate to have a personal tour guide at Jorasanko, music faculty Prof. Ghosh.  He also took me to visit the campus and meet with the Performing Arts chair and some of the faculty, and I wound up giving an impromptu lecture and Q&A about contemporary US theatre to the bright, informed and eager undergrads in an Ancient Greek Theatre class.

The visit to Jorasanko and the university campus wound up indirectly turning me on to the works of Tagore’s precursors such as Ishwar Chandra Gupta (1812-1859), largely forgotten today in Tagore’s long shadow.

I leave you with one of Tagore’s poems:

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Leave this chanting and singing and telling of beads!
Whom dost thou worship in this lonely dark corner of a temple with doors all shut?
Open thine eyes and see thy God is not before thee!

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He is there where the tiller is tilling the hard ground and where the pathmaker is breaking stones.
He is with them in sun and in shower, and his garment is covered with dust.
Put off thy holy mantle and even like him come down on the dusty soil!

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Deliverance? Where is this deliverance to be found?
Our master himself has joyfully taken upon him the bonds of creation;
he is bound with us all for ever.

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Come out of thy meditations and leave aside thy flowers and incense!
What harm is there if thy clothes become tattered and stained?
Meet him and stand by him in toil and in sweat of thy brow.

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The above poem is very Walt Whitman, eh?  It’s from Tagore’s Nobel-winning collection Gitanjali.

The man, the legend, Rabindranath Tagore. Statue at the entrance to Rabindra Bharati University, winter 2010, Kolkata.

Einstein and Tagore keepin' it real in Berlin, July 14, 1930

[pix taken from indiablooms.com and schoolofwisdom.com; the rest are mine]

Dispatches
Notes From All Over
Monte Carlo

(Originally published in Hemispheres, United Airlines’ in-flight magazine, August, 2009.)

“I’m still learning, still messing up,” admits the rap star Nelly, ordering lunch from the snack bar at the Sporting Club in Monte Carlo moments after being bumped from the 2009 European Poker Tour’s grand finale tournament. Europe’s answer to the U.S.’s World Series of Poker, the EPT is an array of tournaments culminating in a championship, which this year brought 935 players to Monaco, on the Côte d’Azur.

Rather than seeming chastened after his losses, the multiplatinum artist wants more. “I’ll stick around for some other games,” he says. “It’s not like other kinds of gambling where you’re just playing against the house. It’s personal.”

Besides, you have to start somewhere. Isabelle “No Mercy” Mercier had a respectable job as a corporate lawyer in Montreal, but she quit to become a dealer and is now one of the top players in the world, complete with her own clothing line and a memoir currently being adapted by a pair of screenwriters. “I will never go back to law, ever, ever,” she says, relaxing on a plush red sofa in the players lounge. “My message is, if you’re not doing what you’re supposed to do you’re going to be miserable.”

Chicago native Gavin Griffin, a top U.S. pro, was a speech pathology major in Texas when he started playing kitchen table poker with friends. He drove to Vegas for the 2004 World Series of Poker, won a tournament in an upset and quit school to go pro. “My parents weren’t real happy about it,” he recalls with a boyish smirk. Now 27, Griffin has earned $4.5 million.

Nelly, despite receiving just so-so reviews for his last album, 2008’s Brass Knuckles, insists poker will remain strictly a hobby. “After this,” he says, “I got to get back to work.”