Ed is in Chicago

I am back in Mazar again, after a fairly uneventful few weeks in Kabul, marked by late evenings working at the office, and a smattering of the ubiquitous expat parties. Not thrilling reading – though I will have to lay down a description of the Kabul expat party for posterity at some point. They are marked chiefly by an interesting mix of nationalities (with a startling preponderance of French and Americans, and an extreme scarcity of Afghans) a marked resemblance to student parties, and a terrible gender ratio. One memorable evening that I have largely forgotten was spent in the notorious den of iniquity known as the Mustafa hotel, hangout of various seedy Kabul types, and the only bar in Kabul where you can fit a decent number of people together round a table at once to have a few beers. I had lead the party (including the Mild-Mannered American and some of his new media-related colleagues) to the Mustafa for a change, and was happy with the choice, but the atmosphere darkened somewhat when one of our French friends was reportedly rounded upon by the aggressive Washingtonian barman who declared that he hated the French. We were all scandalised by this, and tutted as we steadily drained our beers in our corner. After becoming disgusted with the Mild-Mannered One for a particularly egregious and unsubstantiated slur on my ablilty to get on with the shaven-headed clientele of the Mustafa (in fact, I love to play pool with private security workers, and chew the fat over the red-sox victory) I turned to my side to talk about aesthetics with the very Near-Midget of a Frenchman who had so disgusted the barman. Though I do not agree with the barman on the question of Frank-bashing, I did come some way in seeing eye-to-eye with him in his appraisal of this particular Frenchman. The Near-Midget tried to convince me that art could be judged by universal criteria, disconnected from cultural standards. He did not have much proof for this, however, other than that Kant said so, and I was too slurred by this time to have much to prove him wrong, other than the example that eastern musical scales include notes which are inbetween the notes of the classical western scale and therefore in tune in one culture, and out of tune in another, but the Near-Midget did not go for this, and said that he could not explain what he mean using English, but that Kant explained it very well. I got frustrated and started spluttering b-b-but that’s rubbish!’, at which he became offended and said ‘no! you can say you do not agree, but you cannot say I am talking rubbish. It is just that you have your opinion, and I have mine.’ Had I been more lucid, I would have said that this exactly proves my point – that the very existence of different opinions on the subject proves that there are no universal standards, as there is no one to guarantee that there is agreement. A Benignly Peculiar Teuton butted in saying that if you are a Kantian, you are a Kantian, then that is it, and you will never agree with… with whatever I am, and then added something incomprehensible about Heidegger.

At some stage in the proceedings, one of the clientele who was not spouting bad philosophy gave me the rules of the game which they were playing ‘UHU pool’ – a game apparently invented and exclusively played in the Mustafa hotel in Kabul which consists of knocking down a UHU stick in the centre of the pool table, but avoiding the dominoes set up around it, or something. The list of rules was extremely long, with special jargon for particular events that the game threw up. I did not get further than the first couple of sentences. The Near-Midget continued with his train of thought, asking me whether I considered Picasso a genius, and I said yes, but that I doubted that he emerged from the womb able to produce works of artistic genius, and where do you draw the line? At this point another Frenchman with burning eyes butted in to say that his grandfather had known Picasso, and he was a charlatan in almost everything he did, and the Benignly Peculiar Teuton agreed adding his own examples. I was boiling with frustration. We left a while later after several more beers and too much bad philosophy. The evening was lightened by the extreme strangeness of the Benign Teuton, a middle-aged German with the name of one of the great German film directors of the seventies who, when we walked out into the lobby of the hotel, pulled out a large disc of felt from beneath his arm and began to dust it off. I stood looking around chatting, waiting for people to file out, and as I did so, I eyed the disc of felt vaguely, wondering what he was going to do with it. No sooner had the thought passed through my mind, but with a swift movement the Benign Teuton confirmed his extreme peculiarity and placed the disc on his head at a jaunty angle – only at that moment did it become clear to me that I had been looking at the most enormous beret. Thus attired, the Teuton sallied out into the Kabul night.