David Gutowksi, the impresario behind Largehearted Boy, recently asked me to contribute to his blog. Largehearted Boy is an inventive site that, among other things, has writers provide a “soundtrack” to go along with their books. I’ll paste the first few songs I chose for Smile When You’re Lying and then provide the Largehearted Boy link to the rest of my “soundtrack.”

Since Smile When You’re Lying is basically a memoir masquerading as a travel book, and since numerous songs are referenced throughout, it’s easy to come up with an accompanying “soundtrack” pegging songs to specific chapters. The trick will be keeping it concise. There’s a great moment in Chuck Klosterman’s Killing Yourself to Live in which Klosterman tries to decide what CDs to bring along on a (pre-iPod) road trip—after punishing rounds of cuts, and mindful of limited car space, he finally decides to pack a mere 600 CDs. No promises, but I’ll try to keep my list slightly more manageable.

Intro: You Deserve Better
“Li’l Darling” — Count Basie
A rare chapter that presents no obvious musical cues, so I’ll take the opportunity to list a transcendent ballad written by Neal Hefti, one of those sadly forgotten geniuses of American song (spanning generations, he later wrote the “Batman” theme). I was introduced to Count Basie by a high school band teacher named Stan Sells and have never stopped buying his records (Count Basie’s, not Stan Sells’).

Chapter 1: “Welcome to Thailand, Ulysses S. Grant!”
“Tomorrow People” — Ziggy Marley and the Melody Makers
This chapter deals with a trip to Thailand in 1988. You couldn’t go anywhere in Bangkok that summer without hearing Ziggy Marley or Tracy Chapman. I bought pirated cassettes of both and paid a cabbie to drive me around for an hour while I looked at the dysfunction out the window and listened to “Fast Car” and “Revolution” and “Tomorrow People.” This before all my cash was stolen and I could no longer afford to so brazenly laugh in the face of Peak Oil. (We’re all doomed, by the way.)

Chapter 2: Baked Alaska: How Drugs, Tourism, and Petroleum Tamed the Last Frontier
“Fight or Fall” — Thin Lizzy
“Black Market” — Weather Report
“After the Lovin’” — Engelbert Humeprdink
Thin Lizzy comes as tribute to everyone who ever sparked a doob in the woods outside Floyd Dryden Jr. High. As explained in the book, I wasn’t among the wool-encased hipster trendsetters in halibut jackets (you may have to be from Southeast Alaska to get that reference), but I did love their music.

I spent a large chunk of my early youth as an inveterate jazz snob; insufferable in a 15-year-old, but there you are. Weather Report represents 70s jazz fusion, the most unfairly maligned genre in music history. In high school, I obsessed over bands and musicians like Weather Report, Pat Metheny, Jeff Lorber, Herbie Hancock, Stanley Clarke, etc. Given that this period of pop music was dominated by the likes of Loverboy, Scorpions, AC/DC, and Pink Floyd, it might not surprise you to learn that I didn’t notch a single date in high school. Even so, as the inclusion here demonstrates, I hold no grudge against Joe Zawinul and Jaco Pastorius.

“After the Lovin’” because “adult contemporary” was the only type of music Juneau’s two identical radio stations played back in the day and, I don’t know, it’s either a cool sing or the repetition brainwashed me.

Chapter 3: Canned Hams, Kendo Beatdowns, and the Penis Olympics—The Education of an Accidental Ambassador in Japan
“Headstart for Happiness” — The Style Council
With a certain age group of British men, it’s possible to start a fight simply by walking into a pub and declaring that The Style Council was in fact a better band than The Jam. (True, by the way.) Life in Japan fired my suicidal imagination like no other place and there were dark weekends there when only my discovery of Paul Weller’s new and improved incarnation pulled me through.

To read the rest of this piece, go to: http://www.largeheartedboy.com/blog/archive/2007/12/book_notes_chuc_2.html

As a rule, I’m bored with discussions of race relations in America and related history. This isn’t because I don’t consider the topic to be an important and ultimately defining subject in any review of U.S. society. It’s just that from my point of view the problems always get framed in the most irrelevant terms imaginable — how a talk-show host defamed a certain ethnic group, why an offhand remark made by a politician betrays racial insensitivity. Such obvious red herrings. You want to fix racial inequity in this country, focus 100 percent on education. Overhaul the school system to legitimately give all groups equal access to equally funded schools and stop wasting time griping about racist jokes and the ten percent of prejudiced Neanderthals who will always be with us and you’ll get to the mountaintop a lot faster.

I’m not a bullhead about this. I’m willing to admit, as with most issues, to a lot of gray territory, and to the limitations of my typically reductive logic. I’m also willing to concede points to those more familiar with the tribulations of living in a racially divided world, particularly to any non-white person in this country. Still, after a couple decades of discussion, debate, and spittle-filled shouting matches, this pretty much sums up my core position: It’s all about education; if you want to change racial discrimination, discussion of any other point is a waste of time.

That said, it’s pretty much impossible to tool around Africa and not reflect on all aspects of the history of African-Americans. It sounds naïve, I know, but it’s startling to travel across the continent and see so many American faces. It really brings history into clear and unsettling focus to come face to face with the people whose ancestors we know primarily as terrible statistics from history books and disturbing cinematic recreations of the slave trade. I spent November in South Africa, Zambia, Botswana, Namibia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and was consistently moved by the familiarity of the people and the instant “American” kinship we shared. In a weird way, this often made me feel at home in a very foreign place.

In Botswana, I came across a guy in a market who bore an absolutely uncanny resemblance to the late rapper Tupac Shakur. (Jay-Z and Kanye are amazing, but for me, hip hop as art form begins with the Sugar Hill Gang and ends with Tupac, so I’m sort of partial to this story). I was so taken with the similarity that I actually followed the guy around for a few minutes, trying to get in position to snap a surreptitious photo or two to show to friends back home. Seriously, you could start an entire “Tupac lives” cottage industry with a couple pictures of this dude. Alas, the guy never emerged from the crowd near the fresh goat section, and I felt too awkward to approach him with my bizarre request for a photo.

All of this felt a little impolitic; it’s strange to wonder if a future rapper’s people had been snatched from the very acre of earth you’re vacationing on. Nevertheless, I mentioned the Tupac doppelganger to Ace, the philosophical, 26-year-old African I was temporarily traveling with. It turned out Ace was also a huge fan of the man he referred to in reverential tones as “the late, great legend.”

“There was also a guy at my school, near here, who looked so much like the late, great legend that we only called him ‘Tupac,’” Ace told me. “His real name was discarded. He became known as Tupac, even to his parents. So maybe those infamous genes can be traced to this place.”

It’s staggering to stand in a barren landscape still dotted with circular mud huts and grass roofs and ponder the fantastic historic and generational calamity that led from an unfortunate bushman or woman taken away from southern Africa, to the likeness of a martyr sanctified on T-shirts around the planet. Not to mention the immortal lyric, “Even as a crack fiend, mama, you always was a black queen, mama.”

Petty bribes to traffic cops and soldiers are an accepted feature of daily life for visitors as well as citizens in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Usually these are taken care of after a bit of theatrical debate and a payoff of two or three dollars worth of Congolese francs. After you adjust to this near daily occurrence in the Congo’s magnificently dysfunctional cities, the process starts to feel more annoying than outrageous. As you move up the ranks to work out “problems” with government officials, the encounters become more civil—far fewer automatic weapons are involved, for instance—but pricier.

This I discovered a few weeks ago after an immigration official at Kinshasa’s D’Jili International Airport “inadvertently” stamped a September arrival date into my passport. The date conflicted with the November date on the official visa issued to me by the DRC embassy in Washington, DC, not to mention my actual arrival date of November 14. The clerical “error” made it appear as though I’d entered the country illegally, a regrettable “mistake” subsequently taken advantage of by officials throughout the country.

In a mid-sized town, a few hours east of Kinshasa, a run-in with a typically eagle-eyed local officer—who’d spotted my passport issue like he knew it was coming—ended with me coughing up ten bucks, but also, more happily, hauling away a souvenir of a type I’m sure no one else has. After an interminable session of intense but respectful argument about how best to handle the matter of my passport, the official who’d detained me—a congenial, heavy-set bald guy with wire-frame glasses who sweated profusely despite incessantly waving a plastic Japanese fan for the entire hour I sat in his office—pulled a sheet of paper from his desk and began breaking down for my benefit the grim economics that forced a nice guy like him to harass a nice guy like me.

“Do you know what I make in salary each month?” the official asked me.

When I said I hadn’t the foggiest, he shook his head plaintively, scribbled something on the paper and turned it around for me to read: “Par roi 22,000 FRC = $45.”

“That’s not much of a salary,” I said.

“It is a crime that a man in a position as revered as yours is not remunerated more fittingly,” added Henri, my local traveling companion and invaluable assistant during these negotiations.

“I am forty-five years old,” the official continued morosely. “Do you know how many children I have?”

I shook my head. Like a coroner filling out a death certificate, he scratched another line on the page: “Pere de 10 enfant.”

“Ten kids?” I said. “Wow!”

“Oh, monsieur, it is a terrible burden,” added Henri. “Life is truly unfair to the Africans.”

Next, the official jotted down his monthly rent: $120. Then figures covering other expenses. School for the younger children. University for the older ones. Food. Electricity. Gasoline and car maintenance. All told the guy needed about $250 a month just to keep his head above water.

“So,” I asked, the guileless lamb being led into the room where they shoot the pneumatic bolt between your eyes, “how does a man in your position make up the difference between such a tiny salary and such massive monthly expenses?”

“My friend,” the official replied, spreading his arms and smiling in a rueful way that suggested a recent viewing of Braveheart being stretched on the rack.

Ten dollars later, my passport came back across the desk, and Henri and I were out the door. But I’d gotten something for my money. While the official had been looking wistfully out the window, no doubt ruminating over textbooks for his under-funded spawn, I’d discreetly slid his ad hoc budget into my pocket. As soon as I get completely unpacked, go through my photos, and finish my laundry, I’m getting a little frame for that scrap of evidence attesting to the Congo’s endemic corruption. I’m not big on T-shirts or carved knick-knacks—some keepsakes, however, are almost worth trouble you go through to get them. —CT