I'm Jeff Severns Guntzel, senior editor at Utne Reader. I used to help out with Punk Planet Magazine and I did a year as an alt-weekly hack for Village Voice Media. That's me. Nice to see you. Let's have some fun. Or something.
I can’t make sense of a city without a map. Driving it or walking it doesn’t help much. I need a map. And my stars is Baghdad huge. It swallows you up like Los Angeles. You can drive forever–and fast–and you’re still in Baghdad.
Problem: maps were banned and burned during Iraq’s epic blood-blunder of a war with Iran (enemies love maps). For my first trip to Iraq in 1998, I had packed a fifth or sixth generation map photocopied from an old travel book. The book hadn’t been laid flat for the original copy and a huge chunk of the city–the part I was in–was missing.
My first mapless outing in Baghdad in 1998 was an oddball mission. I was looking for pencils.
I found them in a cramped stationary store on Sa’doun Street. Yellow pencils. Red sparkly pencils. Tiger striped pencils. Iraq had pencils. I was looking for a notebook when the balding, pear-shaped clerk waved me over to the counter. His whole face was squished around a prankster’s smirk.
“I know what you want,” he said.
He turned to the shelf behind him. His worn heels left the ground as he reached high and pulled something from behind something else. He slid the something to my side of the glass counter. It was a full-color 1983 tourist map of Baghdad–with the city’s name written like this:
My smile got me that map for free. I stuffed it into my bag–sly and swift with a shoplifter’s grace.
My colleague Paul Schmelzer put together this hilarious (and not hilarious) little clip. It’s my fault he didn’t finish his count. I can be heard running up behind him at the end and saying “go left!”–I ruined a perfectly good count. The good news? I had just finished my own count and got to 100 even.
This count needs a soundtrack. How about “Riot Squad” by Bad Brains?
My old man is in the hospital–so I’m in my hometown. I’ve been staring out a window in a hospital on a hill and the view is fabulous. Lush trees and a bridge in the distance. But I’ve been staring a long time and I’m beginning to wish there were mountains.
Tooling around the internet, I found a page called Peter’s Guide to Map Creation: How to Draw Mountains. It’s a charming little tutorial, and I’m going to give it a shot on the dry erase board here, right under the words: NURSE: JAMI.
I’ve just discovered the photographs of Swedish photographer Lars Tunbjork. He has this series called Office. Two photos from the series had me digging through the pictures I took in Baghdad at the Ministry of Health just after the invasion and the looting. Here they are:
First, don’t miss the newest exhibit at Square America, my favorite found photos site.
I pulled a picture from the collection to post here. And following a path I won’t retrace here, I came upon an Adrienne Rich quote and included it below the picture. Now I can’t stop going back and forth between the two.
“Much male fear of feminism is the fear that, in becoming whole human beings, women will cease to mother men, to provide the breast, the lullaby, the continuous attention associated by the infant with the mother. Much male fear of feminism is infantilism — the longing to remain the mother’s son, to possess a woman who exists purely for him.”
