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Jul. 23rd, 2009

Papua New Guinea

A country with no cities, Papua New Guinea (or PNG as the locals call it) is the most rural place I've ever been. Even the capital, Port Moresby, has just a quarter million people and instead of the standard chokingly-filthy concrete wasteland that most third-world capitals are, it's lush jungle suburbs all the way. (Though high-enough crime that you don't go out at night.) PNG'ers are too serious about gardening to go urban; the other towns I've been to so far (Goroka and Madang) are just a few blocks wide, and then houses gradually turn to grass huts in the bush. The vast majority of the country feeds themselves from their gardens rather than having a job and buying food. In Madang, a local told me the unemployment rate is 98%, at which point it becomes kind of meaningless and you should measure something else. Oddly, this level of poverty makes it very expensive to visit here, because the only people here that do are white missionaries, anthropologists, and oil & gas workers; for us, everything needs to be shipped in. So I'm paying San Francisco prices for Honduras quality.

Fun facts, for context: PNG is the size of California, with fewer people than the bay area, fewer miles of roads than half the bay area, and fewer miles of paved roads than half of San Francisco. Yet despite this, it has the most languages of any country on Earth (10-12% of all the languages in the world), and some of the most biodiversity of anyplace on Earth (for instance, over 1000 species of orchid, kangaroos that climb trees, and nearly all the Birds of Paradise). The country is younger than I am, and many tribes had first contact with Europeans in the 1930's (one place 1988, apparently). Land of cargo cults, phallocrypts, and former cannibals, where people are still killed for practicing sorcery. This is what people mean when they say the ends of the Earth. And yet, most of the time it feels like the rest of the world--people drive cars and walk around in t-shirts and there are billboards of Jesus (most everyone here is Christian). As progress marches on worldwide, you have to look closer and closer, or go to further and further ends of the Earth, to find people's uniqueness. In another generation, the only way you'll be able to tell one culture from another is during holidays and festivals, when people dig past the ever-deepening layers of blue jeans and iPhones into what they really define themselves with.

I first decided to come here because I fell in love with the art at Stanford's PNG sculpture garden. Then, reading up on it, came across the tidbits above, and more. By sheer luck, I found out a week before leaving that a friend from back at Reed (who I hadn't been in touch with since graduating 14 years ago) has been doing anthropology field work here for over a decade. Even more luckily, he's in the country now, and met me at the Port Moresby airport to show me around the whole first day! We drove up to Varirata National Park on the jungle-covered cliffs outside town, its hillsides mumped with dark volcanic aggregate here and there among the grasses and trees. There we saw the Best Treehouse Ever. A reproduction of traditional ones, it was an eight-by-ten-foot hut of thatch and woven leaves, with door and window and pitched roof just like an American schoolkid would draw to mean "home", but FORTY FEET IN THE AIR in the crook of a tree.



You might think that a place so undeveloped, so recently hit by the juggernaut of modernity, would be a living time-capsule. But you'd be wrong. According to Alex, the culture here--the languages, the arts, the dances, the body-paint, etc.--is a constant improvisation. The original remix culture, in fact possibly one of the first places in the world to have the concept of intellectual property. Tribes here will buy and sell a language, a tradition, whatever. And they'll take bits from here and there and make something new out of it. Hence the 700 languages and as many styles of tattoos, face-paint, wigs, piercings, scarification, carving, painting, etc.; they like to mix it up, and take new things as they roll. (And yet, they don't have a sense of authorship, every idea comes from somewhere else--dreams, ancestors, etc.; their IP fees are just a distributor's markup.) They also don't define themselves by roles much, like many modern cultures (both East and West), they define themselves by their kin and connections. And they're very sweet and generous, going out of their way to help someone who they feel sorry for. Not a nation of hucksters or beggars, they do stuff just to be nice. The lady running one guest house told me a story of "raskols" (thieves) holding up a bus full of tourists, taking all their money and bags and cameras and stuff, even took their shoes. But then the bus driver said hey, you can have my money, but can you give back my driver's license? I'll get fined for not having it. So they said sure, and gave him back his wallet and credit cards too. Then one of the white tourists made friends by saying hey, can you give back my camera? I'll take your picture if you all line up and pose. So they did! He got a picture of them all smiling, brandishing their guns with pride; everyone had a laugh and he got to keep his camera. There aren't much in the way of police here--it's like the Wild West, where your best defense is good manners and good relationships.

An example of the remix is the Asaro "Mud Men". The small highlands village of Asaro, outside Goroka, is famous for the tribal show they put on. Men cover themselves in white mud and wear clay masks to commemorate an event lost in the mists of time, where they were pursued in retreat by a warring tribe, and hid in the muddy banks of a river; when they got up covered in mud, the other tribe freaked out, thinking they were spirits, and fled, so the Asaro won their village back. But according to Alex, it was all made up for a Cultural Show in the 60's; it was such a hit that they've been doing it ever since. I actually went to the village and saw them perform it; they cut very striking figures, black skin transformed by the pale grey mud, their heavy clay masks caricaturing boars and other faces, carrying bows and arrows, clubs, or flicking leaves. They moved in a sinister slow-motion that holds your eye in anticipation, feeling that at any moment they could spring into attack. The process of having the show performed was amazingly socially awkward--five minutes of show was preceded by over an hour of waiting around the village in faltering silence (my pidgin is fine for getting around, but useless for conversation), being stared at by everyone because as the only white person they'd seen in weeks if not months, I was the show. And the race relations kept smacking me in the face; at moments I felt like a colonial massa saying "dance, monkey, dance!" except then I thought about it from their point of view, and I'd much rather make money by doing occasional theater than by gardening or working in lumber, oil, or mining. (Of the locals I've talked to who aren't in tourism, that's what they do.) Also, it'd be the best thing for this country's ecosystem if those industries could be replaced by something less despoiling like tourism.) Seeing the Mud Men's show wasn't seeing the "real" life of an untouched premodern village; the real village experience was the socially awkward standing around with a handful of barefoot or naked kids playing with knives in the garbage-strewn dirt. But the show was a piece of theater that transformed a banal afternoon into art for all of us. Lots of other people from the village turned out to watch it, too.



A stupidly high percentage of my time has been spent in transit, to see so much, but the transit itself has been relaxing. Sure, fourteen hours in an economy airline seat is a lesson in limb-origami, and it's downright luxurious compared to chicken-bus chiropracty, but however uncomfortable and tedious, these are hours where I have no demands, where it's impossible to get work done, so I could relax. My normal life these days requires constant pushing, so even pleasures can become burdens. Every minute of every day I'm aware of all the other things I'm not doing because of what I am doing: opportunity-cost oppression. I've been mostly single for most of the last six years because going out with one person means I'm not going out with countless other people who might be a better match if I could only find them. Ironically, there comes a point where commitment frees you--frees you from wasting time weighing tradeoffs so you actually get stuff done; frees you from worry and doubt as well. It's easy enough to overcome it for a vacation (both temporary and unimportant); how to overcome it in real life? …Anyway, this time spent in transit has been entertaining, too. One chicken bus I was on had an actual chicken on board, and in the darkness high over the Pacific I had the most vivid lucid dream I've ever had.



So, what's PNG like? Breathtakingly lush, of course. Highland forest has wild poinsettias, bougainvilleas, eucalyptus, angels trumpet, and bamboo tufts thick as redwood trunks; there are sweeping golden grasslands and rain trees; some lowland trees are whole ecosystems unto themselves, growing mosses, grasses, orchids, and staghorn ferns five feet wide. And everywhere there are bananas, coconuts, and tongue-lolling hibiscus. In Madang, hundreds of bats up to a meter in wingspan own both the night and the day. The food here ranges from boring to unpalatable. Religion is everywhere--the race between the missionaries and anthropologists was won by a long shot. But context is everything, and here in PNG, even fundamentalist Christianity means feminism and education (in the villages, women are still often traded as goods and most people can't read), and there're plenty of non-fundamentalist missionaries, too.

Many of the tribal languages are dying out. A friend of mine (you know who you are) once asked "How many languages does the world need?" How many poems does the world need? How many paintings? But languages are more than that--each one is an ontology of human knowledge. As linguists point out, each language is also a classification of flora and fauna, containing their niches in the ecosystem, medicinal or technical uses, and other things modern science would love to know. Languages are actually going extinct at an even faster rate than plants and animals are, and both their poetry and science is dying with them.

But some new languages are being created. Despite the original colonists being German, the main language is a pidgin English, Tok Pisin. Pidgin is a funny phenomenon--it's when you want to speak the colonizer's language well enough to do business with them, but poorly enough that no one will mistake you for friends. Reading it, it seems like English through a fun-house mirror: "hamas krismas bilong yu?" means "how old are you?" But it really is a different language--80% of the conversations I overhear are unintelligible to me. There are words from German ("raus!"), Portuguese ("save"), and a few local languages; some of it came from missionaries ("woman" is "meri"), some of it came from sailors ("bagarap" is a verb). Its limited vocabulary makes you do grammatical backflips sometimes ("my beard" is "gras bilong fes bilong mi"), and other times you just have to describe things because there is no word (like for "allergy"); the trickiest parts are thing that still sounds like English words but whose meaning has shifted ("long" is every preposition except ownership: above, below, near, far, at, towards, etc.) My favorite snippet from the phrasebook: "bisnis i op" = "the cargo cult activity can proceed". Really?

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Dec. 14th, 2008

Buenos Aires and Iguazu

 

Thanksgiving for me was a week in Argentina. It's silly to go 6 time zones for one week of fun, but I'll take what I can get. I think we need a new term for the dizziness and wooziness that you feel as part of jet-lag, when you're not actually feeling sleepy per se, you just feel like your body arrived but its control systems are still in transit. I call it "jet-legs", like having sea-legs after stepping off a boat onto solid land.

I didn't have time to research or plan the trip in advance, so my guidebook was a torn-off scrap of menu with notes from an Argentine friend on where to go. It was perfect--nice to not overthink things sometimes. And for the first time, instead of being off on my own I actually had a travel guide--my other friend Patricia, who makes her living doing tango tours in Buenos Aires. She was great, making all the mundane stuff easy while not suffocating me with a set schedule or a large group of people. More guides need to figure out that niche.

You might expect that Buenos Aires would be full of tango, and you'd be right beyond your wildest dreams; more full than I've seen any city of any dance. It's surprising, considering how hard the dance is--not for the faint of footwork. But maybe that just makes it more obsession-worthy. Tango's history coincidentally seems to line up with swing's: the music and dance for each had their heyday from the 30's to the 50's, receding after to the realm of unhip and "old people", but both have undergone a renaissance where new composers and dancers are making everything fresh and new and hip again. The swing renaissance was a bit earlier and its spike narrower, while the tango renaissance is still rising; I wonder if it's because tango's difficulty means it couldn't rise any quicker, and will last that much longer. In any case, it's like the spike, crash, and later gain of product-adoption curves, but on a generational scale.

What you might not expect of Buenos Aires is the scads of hippies around town. Selling macrame in craft markets, doing contact-improv dance in the street, and just lounging about in dreadlocks and yoga pants. One tango lesson I was at had more long-haired men than some whole cities I've been in. You might expect some hardcore political activism from still-open wounds of past violent regimes, which is absolutely there. But you might also expect that would translate to tight security, and you'd be wrong. One of the highlights of the trip was wandering into the nation's capitol building (well, the congress), off the street, with no security. No guard at the door, no metal detector, nothing. Just walked in a wide-open door, up wide marble stairs, through its hallways, even the congressional chamber--a gorgeous wooden opera house with a podium instead of a stage. I even went out onto the roof between the square office halls and the huge rotunda, hoping a fire-escape I saw would get us there, but no dice. Still, what are the odds of be getting onto the roof of the US capitol building?? (Although I have been to a rave in San Francisco's city hall.) More illustrative was that when I flew from Buenos Aires to Iguazu, I was a moron and forgot my passport at Patricia's, but they let me through airport security with just my spare photocopy of it for ID. No "threat level orange" over there, lemme tell you.

Buenos Aires is surprisingly European--in fact, genetically speaking, it seems more European than Europe. Major cities there have lots of Middle Easterners and Africans, and a fair number of Asians, but in Buenos Aires the vast majority are white. Not even very mestizo, but white--Italians, Spanish, even plenty of blondes and some orthodox Jews. I swear there're more Latinos in San Francisco than B.A. It's not at all like Central America--there're no American school buses reincarnated into city buses, no indigenous food or clothes or music, the local Spanish is more different from Mexican Spanish than Castilian is. The only things that made it feel Latin American were the smell of unfiltered diesel and the holes in the sidewalks. Even the trees weren't the same--it was all purple-blossomed jacarandas, rosewood whose blossoms snowed like school bus flakes in the wind, and stunning rubber trees whose body-thick branches covered half a city block in their loping shade, and whose roots rippled up from the ground like tentacle fortresses. Argentine schedules are European, too--dinner 'till eleven and dancing until 4 or 6 in the morning, like civilized people. All the noticeable buildings were European: neoclassical, French second empire, art deco, art nouveau. A lot of stuff was falling apart, but hey, so is Portugal. You'd think all the government buildings were flown in from Rome, and all the hotels, apartments, and shops shipped over from France 100 years ago. It wasn't until we got up on top of a high-rise that I experienced it as a developing country megacity--twelve million people's worth of unbroken sprawl as far as the eye can see. No slums, I have to give them credit, but a vast cubist seascape of eggshell boxes and rain-stained concrete blocks, wave upon wave rolling across the land, sliced through by the geometric veins of streets with their pulse of people. The only landmarks were the punctuation of radio towers or skyscraper clumps, or little peeks of the Rio de la Plata between piled concrete stacks. It was entirely different from the view on the street, where the world is all people and shop signs, all sweet balconies and shading trees above, garbage and cracked sidewalks below. Sure, now and then you look up to towering windowless walls cold-shouldering each other, but because it's featureless it evaporates from your mind as your eyes pause on the elegant cupola next door, or the wrought-iron balconies and doorways below. The city's surprisingly well humanized for the size that it is; crowded and loud, yes, but human on the ground.

Contrary to what I was told before going there, steak is not the only thing to eat in Argentina. There's also pizza. And pastry shops. And empanadas (a Spanish calzone), which are actually the best of the three. In fact, I only had steak once. It was excellent steak, make no mistake, I'm just not a big red meat kinda guy. The ubiquitous yerba mate drink is an acquired taste, somewhat like tea with mud, but the pastries are heavy and delicious. These, and music and dance, are what there is to do in Buenos Aires. It's a lifestyle city--not so much a city of grand monuments and museums as a city of great cafes, dance halls, and restaurants. More like Portland or Seattle (great places to live) than San Francisco (great to show off, but a mixed bag for living). In B.A. you might not have an Eiffel Tower or Louvre, but you might actually live in a place with a wrought iron art nouveau door and balcony, where you use last-century Italian keys to get in; you might actually dance in a place with marble corinthian columns and gilded mirrors inside; you might actually be walking down the street and hear a tango duet playing from a cafe without electricity from the storm the day before, and sit and listen to them for an hour because you can. We had all those things. Beauty on the human scale.



Every day in Argentina, I was wet. Either sweating in the heat & humidity, getting caught in monsoon-level downpours, or boating under waterfalls.  The latter two were great, and the heat was a fair price to pay for 3 1/2 extra hours of daylight per day. Buenos Aires happens to be exactly as far south as San Francisco is north (34°), so I got to take a vacation in time as well as space, getting June in December. The monsoon had visible sheets of water pushed through the air, sidewalks turned into rivers four inches deep, fountains spouted a foot or two out of the ground, rain pools made vendor tarps into great heavy paunches which they'd push into waterfalls so the tarp frames didn't collapse under the weight. Being drenched was the most comfortable I'd been. And the waterfalls of Iguazu were amazing.

Cataratas Iguazú is up at the Brazilian border, and is the second-largest waterfalls in the world. Twice as tall and four times as wide as Niagra Falls, they are undoubtedly one of the most spectacular things I've ever seen. Standing atop the Garganta Del Diablo (the Devil's Throat), you can't even see halfway down, the spray from crashing water is so thick. So thick, in fact, that a plume of mist rises high enough in the air that I saw it from the airplane before landing, miles away from the park. And when you take a motorboat ride around the base of the falls, you can't even get within twenty feet before the spray is shooting into your eyes so hard you can't look, and the water-pulled wind is so strong it pushes the breath right back into your mouth, leaving you gasping. 

Any one of the falls there would be a monument in most countries; but dozens of them line the crenelated fall in the Rio Iguazú, crashing together in towers of water that go from falling diamonds to tangled sheets to misty geysers thrown back up almost as high as they fell. Roaring chasms with permanent rainbows, gentle cascades through moss and grass, tumbles down glossy rock, milky pools and broad river islands. The other great thing about Iguazú national park is that it's in the jungle. Not just tropical forest, but proper jungle. It seethed. Air buzzing like thrown hematite balls, greenery so thick you couldn't see the ground, and animals aplenty--I saw coatimundi and lizards and turtles and shiny birds and huge bugs and butterflies and monkeys! Even baby monkeys! Scores of butterflies in all different colors formed an epileptically flashing cloud, both paparazzi and movie stars simultaneously. A couple spent several minutes proboscing salt off the skin of my hands so resolutely I eventually had to shake them off. Out there felt more like Central America--palm and banana and pine trees, brick-red earth, smelling a mix of fresh trees and earth, distant burning husks, and a hint of sickly-sweet putrescence that reminds you you're not in a world of glass and metal but a place where things live and die in the heat. After the endless boxy eggshell and grey that was the city, walking along a dirt road in the country was like someone turned up the saturation knob on the world.

Up in Iguazu (and somewhat in B.A.), I also got to see the stars--undoubtedly the strangest part of the trip. The crescent moon sat on the wrong side of the sunset! Orion was upside-down!! That was when I could feel how far away I was, the dome of the heavens tilted almost halfway over. Out in the clear night sky of Iguazu, I couldn't recognize anything but Orion, Sirius, and the Pleiades. Nothing else. One of the things that I love about the stars is that everyplace I've ever been, even the opposite side of the world, the stars are always there, like old friends. No matter how alien the place, you can look up at night and wave to Cassiopeia or Leo to feel like you know someone here; you can find Polaris to anchor your directions; you can see Cygnus to guess what time it is. But in Argentina Polaris is gone, half the sky is unreadable hieroglyphics, and what few I did know were head over heels. With the help of a stargazing program on my phone I found more familiars, but also found I'm not missing much in the encrypted tablet of the southern sky--the Western constellations there are just lame. Things like "telescope", "sails", and "microscope". Picked in the 1600's by sailors who had more awe for their technology than for the murmured symbolism of myth. It's like naming them "MRI Machine" or "GPS Chip". And now just 400 years later they look dopey and quaint, while the 6,000-year-old constellations we got from the Romans from the Greeks from the Egyptians from the Babylonians still ring true enough you can pick up on someone by saying "what's your sign?" without irony. (I suppose you could pick up on someone by saying "what's your GPS chip?" without irony, but anyone who does is a lost cause. Arguably so are people who really believe in astrology, but I'm not touching that one...) Technology by its very nature obsolesces, but the murky wiring of the human subconscious is still the foundation for all of us, no matter how educated, civilized, and technophilic we may be. There were a few good-sounding southern constellations, like "bird of paradise", but they didn't look like much of anything when actually seen in the sky. Duds. I was roundly disappointed by the lot. Next time I go to that hemisphere, I'll have to learn some other stellar storyline, from indigenous South Americans or peoples of the South Pacific, something that will actually have enough story and symbol to be worth it. In Honduras I learned some of the Mayan constellations, and they were actually even better than the standard Western ones, because they all fit into the same cosmology rather than our patchwork of hand-me-downs, and told a more coherent set of stories--in fact, I've read that the whole story of Mayan creation is told in the sky, gradually, over the course of a year. Imagine reading our history in the stars like that.

 

 

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Apr. 24th, 2008

Design Overload in Milan

Hello from beautiful Milan!
I'm out here for a gathering of O2, a network of green designers celebrating its 20th anniversary this year (!), so I'm not doing much sightseeing; but definitely some.

The time and place was chosen to piggyback on an enormous event, the Salone Internazionale de Mobile--probably the world's biggest design exhibition, with thousands of furniture, housewares, and other designers showing their wares; some entire neighborhoods have become design showrooms. Going to the main exhibition hall of 2000+ vendors, the subway in that direction was Tokyo and the opposite way was North Dakota. Over a third of a million people have descended on the city, filling every hotel, hostel, and spare couch in the city (I know, because even three months ago it was impossible to get a hotel for less than $400 a night. I'm sharing a lumpy fold-a-bed with another guy in some random couple's apartment for $130 a night, and only because it was hooked up for us by the woman from O2 Finland. But they're nice folks, and aside from the bed the apartment is hip and classy. Even faintly scented with vanilla.) And when I say 2K+ exhibitors, I don't mean booths, I mean each of these places has a showroom the size of a small store, all in one massive exhibition complex the size of about ten warehouses. They've got everything from "classical" to modern to avant-garde; kids' furniture, office, kitchen, bath, even chinchilla-fur blankets (which are unbelievably soft). In the hipper design neighborhoods, there are even full-on art installations by these companies, with lasers and fog, walls of moss, Olafur Eliason-esque rooms of black with waterfalls of hanging gauze, Victorian-style robots and peacock decanters for the weddings of sheiks. Some things are done better than others. The main exhibition's classical stuff was all trashy-classy, the Vegas version of Versailles; the modern stuff looks like all modern stuff has for seventy years. Some is new and good; even a lot of that is predictable, though: the Italian stuff is red and black and swoopy-sleek, or silly shapes in bright colors; the Nordic stuff is all clean lines and pale wood; the Japanese is sci-fi ovals of chrome and glass. Orange is very popular here too, which is funny, because orange peaked at burning Man two or three years ago; I guess we're fashion leaders. Honestly a lot of what's here is what annoys me about design: "high design" is mostly vapid narcissistic pretension, and low design is mostly mediocrity and derivation. But now and then there'll be gems, playful and original--inspired objects that grab you from across the room, or elegant solutions to ordinary problems that you've somehow never seen before, or clever mechanisms that you wish your closets, desks, or appliances used. There's a lot of good drawer action, and a lot of swoop. And some things that may be useless but just make you smile. Despite the annoyances, the design show does end up sucking you in, through the casino of random reinforcement, and if I had time to build any of my own stuff, I'd probably use some of the inspirations found here. If I were ludicrously wealthy, I might even buy stuff.

Green design is also clearly getting hype here like it is everywhere else--but just like everywhere else, it's still mostly hype. They had a whole pavilion called "green energy design", with hoi-polloi people like Philippe Starck, and it was utter crap--not merely irrelevant to green energy, but irrelevant to design--just art, and ugly art, too. It had one piece by Ross Lovegrove that was green, pretty, and useful, and a couple other things that were at least pretty, but the majority was total BS. A little green technology popped up in normal designs elsewhere, though--mostly LED's in lighting, which people have only begun to scratch the surface of finding forms with.

It's funny, the last time I was in Italy--almost ten years ago now (yowch!)--I was blown away at how beautiful everyone was; now, not so much. It makes me appreciate San Francisco, which is fabulous and flashy without being plastic (usually), a riot of variety (everyone here is white), and where people get both chic and freak at the same time. The Milanos are beautiful, to be sure, and the men here are better-kept and less slackery than San Franciscans; but San Francisco women are amazingly beautiful. The problem is that Milan's one of the world capitals of the fashion industry, and just as a vehicle industry kills walking and neighborhoods, the fashion industry kills self-expression. Fashion in Milan these days is a little too LA, a few too many over-tanned people wearing Ugly Bockers and bling. Of course it helps that everyone here is thin, because they walk all the time. And the Salone is full of Beautiful People, but there the ratio is way skewed because of all the trade show bunnies whose job it is to be pretty (and maybe know something about the product.) And, let's be honest, the bunnies are effective--seeing the eight-hundredth modernist chair makes me never want to see another, but the eight-hundredth pretty woman still catches my eye as quickly as the first. As grumpy as I am at SF after a harsh 2007, there's a lot to like about the city. Besides beautiful people, SF also has excellent food; Italian food is great, of course, and we've gone out to a couple very fancy places for the O2 gathering, but it's all the same: dinner is pasta with meat or cheese or meat and cheese, and all your street meals are panini or pizza. It's all the same. Vegetables are a rare and precious sight, appearing sparingly as side dishes (only if you order them). But then, Italians don't think of Milan as a city of culture, they think of it as a city of industry, so maybe in Rome I'd do better. Oddly enough, the best meal I've had on the trip (and, in fact, in years) was in Austin--a classy Cajun place, heavy on the French, where I had a saucy chicken so rich it could afford a home in San Francisco, and the best creme brulee I've ever eaten. Its surface cracked like a candy turtle shell, for a meaty scoop of sweetness that was both deep and light at the same time, the flavor soaking into you like a warm bath, relaxing and enlivening each part of you that it hits as it goes down. Yum.

What was I doing in Austin, you ask? Being one of the jurors for Dell's green computing competition. Which was great fun. The entries were disappointing--my favorite dufus move was one that said they'd make their computer out of "herbal plastic". Does that mean the computer will soothe you with aromatherapy as you type, or does it mean the contestant was hoping to smoke the computer at the end of its life? But there were enough good entries to feel good about the winners, and the other people involved and the process were both great. Working through the big ideas, weighing strategies, talking about future possibilities, and such. That's the stuff that's both really fun and that I'm really good at. Why can't I find jobs doing that? Anyway, I was just lucky that the timing worked out so the two trips piggybacked each other. And Austin was beautiful--super-green, and because it's still spring, not disgustingly hot.

Back to Italians. They're hip, which was clear from the start of my trip; the Alitalia plane played Portishead instead of muzak, and the woman sitting next to me was a model. (I managed to ask her in a tactful way whether model culture / lifestyle was as shallow as I think it is, and she said yes. I didn't ask about the poisoning of authenticity and self-expression, though.) Once in the country, the first thing I did was take a train to Milan, and it was the swoopiest sleek-design train I've ever seen. Once in town, half the trams are avant-modern and the other half are vintage 1800's (though San Francisco has these too, since Milan gave them some ages ago, and SF's are in better repair). And the final measure of hipness--many people's idea of a nice evening is sitting outside on the steps of the Duomo, just hanging out and chatting, not needing to go buy things (like drinks or food), not needing to pay to be entertained (by TV or movies), just hanging out with each other. Our hosts have all been super-friendly, too; Italians're the most gregarious people on Earth (though Texans give them a real run for their money). And I've been able to communicate really well--I'd had no time to brush up on my Italian before coming, but miraculously it snapped back instantly when I got here. And although last time it contaminated my Spanish for years afterwards, I feel like I've got them straight this time. Maybe what I remembered wasn't the words themselves so much as the mapping algorithm from one language to the next, which is actually more useful.

Tourist-wise, I popped by the Duomo--a magnificent cathedral that was my only real memory of the previous trip here--and although the inside was closed for renovation, the roof was still open, so I wandered around among the flying buttresses and gargoyles, wondering at the level of detail spent on areas most people would never see. There's something almost zenlike about that, creating beauty not for the admiration of it, but for its own sake. Also hit the castle in the middle of downtown, with a lovely park behind it, and now I'm in another park, the Public Gardens. There're trees all over this town. Milan is a bit more scuffed-up now than it should be, with graffiti all over, but it definitely has more green space than most European cities. Probably because it's a relatively young city--mostly flourishing in the past 200 years, where the industrial age was becoming strong enough for people to start appreciating green space. (In fact, the O2 gathering was in the "Steam Factory", a former 19th-century power plant.) Even some of the tram-ways, when separated from the car parts of the street, are tree-lined lanes of grass which just happen to have railroad tracks running down them. Nicely done.

But the highlight was the Cimiterio Monumentale, the monumental cemetery. It's the best art gallery in town. There aren't as many famous people buried there as Pere Lachaise in Paris, but there's a wild variety of styles, from classical to 30's fascist to 60's modern, even with a couple 80's+ po-mo pieces; marble and bronze also commingled with glass, copper, and photographs. Graves are a conservative medium, yet there was a lot of experimentation and flair, and often an intimacy that you don't see in gallery art. These pieces weren't made for an art market, nor were they made for an institution like a church; each one was made for an actual person, or family. Each one tried to vault the ethos or the pathos of the person in the ground out into the air for the people of the future, strangers and descendants alike.


Pictures (click photo to go):



 

 

Posted at 07:06 pm | | Leave a comment | 1 comment | Add to Memories | Share

May. 16th, 2007

Lingering or Rushing the In-Between

   Hello from San Francisco again, where I've been for a couple weeks now, and where I actually plan to stay for a while, if the gods of job-hunting are kind to me.  I took a shorter route back (only 2800 miles), and this trip was as much about the people as the places I saw.
 
  Wisconsin, with my folks, was almost the definition of comfort.  Not just because of my folks, but also because Wisconsin in general is all about comfort: even the Chinese restaurants serve cheese sticks and apple pie.  I should've stayed a couple days longer to hit Earth Day there, since that's where it started, but there was a particular date that I thought I had to be back for.  (Turns out I was wrong, but so it goes.)
 
  Visiting my brother again outside Minneapolis, I went to the Guthrie Theater and saw an excellent production of Merchant of Venice (which may not be the most racially enlightened play, but is quite feminist).  On my way out of the Minneapolis exurbs, I was surprised how fast people drove.  Speeding up to 85, I was still getting passed, and slowly noticed that all these speed demons were Volkswagons, most of them Golfs like my car--twenty or thirty of them, at the very least.  Then the passenger in the Golf ahead of me started leaning out the window taking photos of other Golfs and their drivers as they passed by (at 90 or more), so I had to pull up next to them, roll down my window, and ask what the deal was.  He shouted that they were having a party, and that I should come along.  Unfortunately it's hard to carry on a conversation in 85 mile per hour winds from six feet away, otherwise I would've asked more details.  If I didn't have places to be, I would've considered it.  Mostly just to find out who the heck would have VW Golfs for a hot-rod club.  (They're one of the frumpiest cars on the road, the only reason I have one is to run biodiesel.)  Still, pretty wacky way to start your day.
 
  That wasn't the real excitement for the day, though.  The real excitement of that day was that I arguably could be said to have sort of broken into a nuclear missile silo.  ...But it's not what it sounds like.  See, on the way out of the Badlands last time, I'd noticed Minuteman Missile National Historic Site (www.nps.gov/mimi -- check out the video there), a new park that's still getting set up.  It'd been closed then, which bummed me out, so on the trip back I'd tried to make it there while it was open.  No dice.  If I'd gone in summer, when it has longer hours and weekends, I would've been fine, but it's still off season.  The visitor's center tells you where to go to find the two sites, though--turns out the missile silo is in clear view of I-90, just a half-mile off the road. I was planning to just take pictures from outside whatever fence was around it, but when I got there, the gate was so pathetically secured--just a loose padlocked chain, with a gaping space between the doors of the gate, positively shouting "no one really cares about security here".  Trust me, the people who run nuclear missile silos know how to make things secure if they want to; this is just a park now.  And all I wanted to do was the same exact things park-goers do when supervised (look around and take photos), which I would've been able to do then if it were summer.  So I got a foot up on the chain and slipped through the gap (if a guy my size can just slip through the gap, nobody cares about security), and did the after-hours self-guided tour.  That's my rationalization, anyway.  And it was really interesting.  I'm not usually one for military history, but I grew up in the Cold War, and remember the shadow of global thermonuclear war murking about in the background of life sometimes.  It was in the fiction of the time--movies, books, and TV abounded with post-apocalyptic tales.  Politicians talk about the world being a dangerous place today, but really it's vastly safer than it was.  Our politics just won't catch up until the next generation.  The site's also interesting because you see war memorials everywhere--Seattle has multiple memorials for the Spanish-American War, which is so irrelevant to the place that you might as well memorialize Luke Skywalker fighting Darth Vader (more people would relate to it)--but this was a memorial to a war not fought.  You look down into the silo at the shell of an ICBM designed to deliver Armageddon to the other side of the planet within half an hour, and breathe a sigh of relief that none of them were ever used.  In a sense, it's a memorial to the good sense people had not to fight that kind of war.
 
  After that day, the excitement level went way down--I went to Nebraska.  Not just through Nebraska, though, I had a destination--Carhenge.  It's exactly what you'd expect it to be--a whimsical ramshackle version of the ancient English temple/observatory, but made out of cars.  Dug into the ground and welded together and painted grey.  Not attempting accuracy, not even attempting craftsmanship, it sat warding off the loneliness of the plains with a cockeyed whistle.  A very American kind of folk-art.
 
  Leaving the wide open plains behind, I went to Boulder to visit people, and had a great time.  Getting to Snowmass was a bit grisly, because I happened to cross the highest mountain passes during a huge blizzard, but again had a wonderful time with the people there (RMI folks).  And I was reminded what a good place it is to get away from it all.  From there it was off to the teensy town of Dinosaur, Colorado.  I couldn't get a room there--every room in every hotel, motel, what have you, within a hundred miles is booked for months on end, because there's such an oil, coal, and gas boom in the region.  Hundreds of workers have come in, and hundreds more jobs still need filling.  There's energy in them thar hills.  So I ended up sleeping in my car in an RV park, where they had showers.  (If my skin weren't so angry with eczema recently, I would've camped on my road trips instead of using hotels.)
 
  Dinosaur National Monument was at first terribly disappointing, because the fossil quarry is closed, and that's basically the whole point of the park.  But the ranger told me about a dinosaur museum in nearby Vernal, Utah, which was good, and once you remove your expectation of seeing dinosaurs (which is hard--they're dinosaurs!!), the park actually does have a lot to offer.  Beautiful geology, a lazy river, box canyons, and petroglyphs by the Fremont people (often called the most artistic of the ancient Southwest Indians.  Of course!  They're Fremontsters!)
 
  Outside of Moab and Arches National Park, I followed the Colorado river in its broad burbling peace.  The comforting smells of midwestern farms had long ago faded, and now I was in the buzzy whiff of dry juniper and sagebrush.  Here I went to Fisher Towers.  It's spectacular--the ruins of a fairy tale giant's castle.  Picture red sandstone walls and towers, about 50 feet thick but 900 feet high, with such straight dead vertical faces that Galileo would come back from the dead just to drop things from them.  And in places it seems to have bastions like a castle would, to shoot arrows at people scaling the walls. ...Clearly they didn't, though, because there was a group of half a dozen climbers going up when I was there.  I wanted to climb, too, but thought I didn't have time.
 
  This is one of the hardest things in travel, just like in life--trying to decide where to linger.  Sure, the spot that you're at is wonderful, but what if the next spot down the road is even better?  Or the one after that?  The mystery keeps pushing you forward, fighting with the present moment and whatever bounties it offers.  At some point you just have to guess that it doesn't get any better than this (or not enough better to care), and let your mind rest.  ...Of course, in travel you have the advantage that once you've done a trip you can go on the same trip again, lingering at your favorite parts and passing by the rest; geography will still be there.  Life, not so much.  
 
 
  From there, it was time for the loneliest road.  Highway 50 through Nevada was once called that as an insult, but they took it as a compliment.  Either way, it's accurate--the road is _utterly_ deserted.  You could take a nap laid across the yellow line without fear.  On a weekend afternoon, no doubt peak traffic, I'd go half an hour without seeing another car in either direction, and only a couple times was there a car in front of or behind me.  At one point I'd stopped and gotten out of the car to take a photo and a policeman happened to be coming the other way in his car; he stopped to wish me a nice day, and suggested a shot that you could see from his direction but not mine.  That guy's got time on his hands.  Unlike I-80 through south Wyoming, though, Highway 50 is beautiful.  On 50 in Utah, green pastures sit with sand dunes; distant blue mountains peer across plains so flat a stack of hay bales is the tallest thing for miles.  In Nevada this continues until the plains become playas, dry flats of cracked clay and dust, once the bottom of prehistoric Lake Lahontan.  (Which includes the Black Rock Desert to the north.)  Power lines stretch infinitely from nowhere to nowhere like sutures stitching up the empty basins as the road slices through them.  The very desertedness of the deserts and basins is what makes them so nice.  No distractions, no demands, just space.  Wide open.  Your mind finally has elbow room, and opens up into that space.
 
  Along the highway are some great sights, too.  Great Basin National Park is there, the least-visited of all the national parks, which is silly, because it has a fabulous cave, bursting with beautiful formations--a jungle in melted limestone.  Some of it was like walking through the stomach of some giant beast, even colored the pinks and blues of organs.  It was an intimate cave, too--often we had to duck or turn sideways to get through a passage, and a whole hundred feet of it was barely wider than I am.  Although it kills me to not be able to touch anything.
 
  I also stopped by the Liberty pit mine near Ely, Nevada, one of the largest copper mines in the world.  Seen from satellite, it's twice as big as nearby Ely (which has a population of 4,000.)  A bumper sticker I saw said, "if it can't be grown, it must be mined."  We often forget that; if it's out of sight, it must be out of mind.  There's also Sand Mountain, a 600-foot-high sand dune incongruously sitting in the middle of mountains and scrub.  And there's the Shoe Tree.  It's just an ordinary tree, in an ordinary spot in the Absolute Middle of Nowhere, but it's covered in shoes.  You know how people will take old shoes, tie their shoelaces together, and fling them to hang from telephone wires?  Well, that's what people've done with this tree.  HUNDREDS of times.  The tree is overgrown to bursting with the fruits of footwear.  I got a couple pictures and was about to move on, shaking my head at the randomness of humanity, when another car pulled up, and the woman pulled out a pair of shoes tied together at the laces, obviously in preparation for flinging.  So I had to go over and ask her what the story is here.  She didn't know either.  She'd just heard about it, and was on her way back to Colorado from San Francisco, having no job and no home, and was bitter about losing her job in California and wanting to get rid of the shoes that reminded her of it.  Gosh, I wonder what that's like.  
 
  Eventually I came back into California around Tahoe, where the shade, tranquil smell, and lushness of the pine forests was welcoming.  After visiting my aunt & uncle in Nevada City, and another friend in Sacramento, I was finally back in the bay area, and the job-hunting commenced.  Right now I'm at a lighthouse on the ocean, though.  It's important to get out of the city now and then, to remember that under the city, under the concrete, is the land that stretches for a hundred horizons out to the desert, out to the mountains, out to the fields of Wisconsin.  And past that, all the way to another lighthouse on the far eastern coast.

 
 
Here're the pictures for this trip:  
http://faludidesign.com/photography/SFtoWI2/_SFtoWI2_index.html
(see if you can find the easter egg.)
 

Posted at 04:41 pm | | Leave a comment | Add to Memories | Share

Apr. 15th, 2007

2 road-trips and 10,000 years

The second road-trip.  My folks wanted me to come out and visit them in Wisconsin, and there's tons of great stuff  between SF and there.  I hit Death Valley, Las Vegas, the Hoover Dam, bits of Grand Staircase - Escalante, the Mormon temple in Salt Lake City, Devil's Tower, Mt. Rushmore, the Badlands, and some roadside attractions.  January's road trip (which it's too late to write about) was all sea, snow, and green; this road trip was all desert, stone, and sun.
 
  Death Valley, as a park, was a little bit of everything--part Black Rock Desert, part sand dunes, part Joshua Tree, part Tattooine.  The badlands at Zabriskie Point were gorgeous--great hundred-legged shambling beasts, just too tired and hot to move, so we think they're geology.  Artist's Drive was the aftermath of a mountain's Holi party, and at the bottom of North America is Badwater, a great salt boulevard to nowhere.  
 
  From there it's a short hop to Las Vegas, trading empty land for empty soul.  Their record-breaking housing boom is no joke--entering town I passed through six or seven miles of JUST housing developments.  Without so much as a strip mall to go with them, just Levittown McMansions for miles.  Eeugh.  But then The Strip is surprisingly pedestrian-friendly.  Or I should say less pedestrian-hostile than car-hostile.  It's a nightmare to get anywhere, because every casino-hotel-mega-theme-complex is carefully engineered to suck you into its plastic and neon bowels and not let you out.    Vegas is sort of like Burning Man gone horribly wrong.  It's a fishing lure.  Its blinky lights attract me, its preposterously avid dedication to hedonism turns my head; but on closer inspection it's just plastic and sharp metal hooks.  No one's there to really make you happy or connect with you--they're there to make a buck, and will show you just a good enough time to get that buck. You're merely the vehicle for the buck.  
  So why was I there?  To see Cirque du Soleil.  Twice.  (Because hey, why not?)  Both had more shtick/theme and less hardcore acrobatics than normal shows, but both were still great fun.  Zumanity, their erotic one, was actually kinky enough that I wondered what Ms. Suburban Soccer Mom sitting next to me felt about the show.  But several parts were normal circus stuff, just with the performers wearing little to no clothing.  And let's be honest, that's what you want in a normal show too, since these people always have such amazing bodies and do such beautiful things.  Also, it had more audience interaction than any other Cirque show (and, I'll bet, any other burlesque show), which made it more human than exhibitionist.  "O", their water one (no doubt named for the pun on 'eau'), had such an over-the-top set that you sometimes forget there were actual performers doing things on it.  Again, no truly superlative feats, but adding water to a circus makes it a whole new world.  Trapezists at the end of their acts just leap off; aerialists sailing through the air skim their feet through the water; there's much more to play with.  And where else have synchronized swimmers appeared outside the Olympics since 1960's movie musicals?
 
  Hoover Dam was as big and impressive as you'd expect for something taller and wider than the Great Pyramid of Khufu, which irrigates three states.  It's engineering with a capital E.  That wears off after a while, though, especially if you consider the dubious environmental impact of creating the hemisphere's largest artificial lake.  The thing that still impressed me days later was the monument there, or rather the monument's floor.  Its floor is a star map for its location on the date the dam was finished.  They did that because this structure was so monumental they planned it to last thousands of years.  Not hundreds, but THOUSANDS--longer than our country, our civilization, even longer than our language lasts.  They wanted to leave something readable by whatever future civilization came along.  (And they have an explanation with it, whose text is so long future archaeologists could probably decrypt English from it.)  Nobody outside of The Long Now thinks that way these days.  And speaking of art on the dam, the two big towers on the dam have inscriptions on them; one reads "Since primordial times American Indian tribes and nations lifted their hands to the Great Spirit.  From these ranges and plains we now with them in peace buildeth again a nation."  Name for me a federal monument anywhere else in the country that pays respects to someone else's god.  
 
  Now in the red-rocked desert lands, I headed to Antelope Canyon in Grand Staircase - Escalante.  It's a "slot canyon", and is unbelievably beautiful.  Forget the Grand Canyon.  It's too big, you can't touch it.  Slot canyons are intimate--long and deep but just a few feet wide, you look up forty feet to glimpses of sky while running your hands along the curves of cool smooth walls.  You get a new sculpture in swirled stone around every corner, weaving your body around the dipping and bulging walls, sometimes ducking or sidestepping or leaning onto the abstract hips of stone to make your way through.  And the colors...  They go from dusty magenta to terra cotta to sunrise orange, and it changes minute-to-minute because it's not the Navajo sandstone that's different colors, it's the light, bouncing and glowing from the interlocking angles.  When a sunbeam shoots in, it's like a spirit touching down in the underworld.  Amazing! Upper Antelope Canyon is so popular with photographers that I felt we were paparazzi on a celebrity, but lower Antelope Canyon is both less crowded and a much more fun hike, with the sandy canyon floor only a few inches wide in spots, where you'll duck and lean and use your body.  
 
 
 
  The Mormon temple in Salt Lake City was quite an experience.  The Temple Square is a whole complex in the 0,0 of Salt Lake City's coordinate-system of roads.  The temple itself is unimpressive from the outside (and they don't let you go inside), but the missionaries who swoop down on you constantly (all young women, all in pairs) are a trip.  The last time I was descended on that voraciously it was by street beggars in India.  In the south visitor's center (there are two!), I couldn't go five yards without being accosted.  While looking at their genealogy station, which proudly displays a family tree connecting Joseph Smith with George W. Bush, I asked the missionaries currently working me to explain the temple's mistaken moon carvings.  (The temple has suns and moons carved into the walls, but the moons are out of order--they go full moon, waxing crescent, new moon, waning crescent, full moon, etc.  And I'm pretty sure Mormons don't read right-to-left.)  Neither of them had noticed it, and the explanation offered was "I dunno.  Maybe it was a mistake, maybe the pioneers who built the temple didn't know that much about the moon.  Are you an astronomist?"  Um, no, I'm not an astronomist.  Not even an astronomer.  She continued to say, "the temple was a huge project for the pioneers.  it was very hard for the woodcarvers, because the whole temple is granite."  Um, yes, I can see how woodcarvers would have a hard time with that.  Maybe try stonemasons next time.  ...I try to give other religions the benefit of the doubt, even when I've got pre-formed biases; but people, throw me a bone.  Wouldn't you want the missionaries at the main temple to be the best & brightest salespeople?  I won't even get into the other conversations I had.  And the name of the angel in gold at the top of all the temples, the one blowing the trumpet--its name is Moroni.  Angel Moroni?  Is that a way of testing people's faith, by seeing whether you snicker when you say it?
  The thing that DID impress me about the Temple Square was that next door to the temple is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints Office Building, which is twice as tall as the temple, and half again as wide.  With big relief maps of the globe on its massive granite face.  Says something, doesn't it?  Like "be afraid, be very afraid."  But actually, I got that Stepford Wives Go Global vibe from the whole place.  The visitor's centers worked you even harder than the Iskcon temple in Delhi (home of the Hare Krishnas).  The difference was that Iskcon tried to inspire you with a Fabu-Dazzalous Psychedelic Sound & Light Show, while the Mormons tried to inspire you by giving a museum-esque show of their legitimacy and class--that airbrush-the-family-portraits kind of class.  Time to hit the road again.
 
  The drive from Salt Lake City to Devil's Tower was perhaps the most mind-numbing drive I've ever done.  Ten hours of nothing.  And when I say nothing, I don't just mean sites that don't tickle my snobby fancy, I mean NOTHING--no parks, no cities, not even nice scenery, just flat, dusty pea-soup scrublands and a few pronghorn.  Just Little America, a glorified gas station (though granted, it is the only gas station I know with marble countertops and a hotel.)
 
  Devil's Tower was wonderful.  Just the smell of ponderosa pines heated by the sun took me back to childhood road trips, and I scrambled up the talus to climb the base of the tower, until it started to go vertical.  Had to stop and enjoy the prairie dogs on the way in, squeaking and twitching like wind-up toys.  They're SO CUTE!!  Apparently there's been an effort to rename Devil's Tower (or additionally name it) "Bear Lodge Mountain" because that's what many Native American tribes call it.  I like that idea, because the tower feels more like that--majestically powerful--than it does like a Devil's place.  Have you ever noticed that the European (Christian) explorers named everything dramatic and impressive "Devil's [Something]"?  (Devil's Lake, Devil's Rock, Devil's Postpile, etc.)  And how often do you see God's Tower, God's Lake, etc.?  Never.  What's up with that?  Were they all Satanists?  Why would they think everything breathtaking and awe-inspiring is evil?  Anyway, the tower--whatever you call it--is truly a supernatural formation.  A single crystal of its bear-clawed porphyry walls is the width of a redwood and a thousand feet tall.  It does look like the lodge or castle of some magnificent being.
 
  Mt. Rushmore was impressive, though very flag-wavy.  I suppose it has to be, though, given the subject matter.  Even if you're staunchly anti-patriotic, though, I still think the monument is cool because first of all, it's art the size of a mountain.  (Made _out_of_ a mountain, in fact.  You can't help but be impressed.  There are times when art is more important than environmental impact.)  Secondly, like Hoover Dam, it was designed to be a monument that would last 10,000 years.  That's literally what the artist said, 10,000 years.  He wanted it to be like the Pyramids, lasting long after our country, even our race of people, is gone.  Who thinks like this anymore?  The only thing we're building like that is Yucca Mountain.  I've usually thought of the 1930's as an unpleasant time to be alive (the Depression and WWII), but if the Pulgas Water Temple, Hoover Dam, and Mt. Rushmore are any indication, it had heady and progressive times as well.  ...Oh, I forgot to mention: I didn't have much time to enjoy the bay area when I was there, but I did take a few moments to relax.  My favorite was driving up from Silicon Valley one day, taking the scenic route out in the foothills of the Santa Cruz mountains, and stumbling upon the Pulgas Water Temple, a pseudo-Grecian temple to water erected by the City of San Francisco Water Department in 1934.  No kidding.  What other city's public utilities would build a Greek temple?  Much less a temple to water?  Okay, back to the road trip...
 
  The Badlands were less pretty than I remember from childhood, but just as much an alien planet.  Miles of dry mud, cracked like an elephant's skin; it crumbles beneath each footstep, washes away in every rain, simultaneously reminding you that life is only temporary but that the elements can beat you for an eternity before you give way.  The plains just collapse there, and matterhorned-castle hillsides are just piles of mud being washed away. Of course, I had to stop in Wall Drug, that most famous of all roadside attractions. It's a lot smaller than I remember it as a kid, but just as silly and cute as ever.  And, since I'm a sucker for shtick, I also stopped at the Corn Palace in Mitchell (basically the world's largest bird feeder) and the Spam museum in Austin, Minnesota (closed, sadly).  After a quick visit with my brother in the Minneapolis exurbs, it was the final leg home.
 
  I could tell I was coming home from the gradual multiplying of farmers fields, interspersed with limestone bluffs and woods. Paralleling the Mississippi river made it a little more familiar (yes, the Mississippi starts all the way up here, it's the border between Minnesota and Wisconsin), but it wasn't until I came through the last town into familiar fields that it started to feel real.  When I popped over a hill and actually saw my folks' house on its little gravel road, it was sort of like Columbus seeing land--I theoretically knew that the world I've lived in for the last sixteen years was connected to this world, but this was the first time I actually proved it.  Usually I just step into a magic silver tube with wings and step out in Madison, but this time I covered every inch of ground in the flesh.  Then once I was back in the house, it seemed like any other visit.
 
Pictures later this week, maybe.
 

Posted at 04:37 pm | | Leave a comment | Add to Memories | Share

Mar. 20th, 2007

Booted from the Bay

2007 is the year for road trips. Back in January, I road-tripped from Seattle to San Francisco with Michelle, taking four days instead of one, and recently I took an eleven-day trip from SF to Wisconsin.

The purpose of the first trip was to move back to the bay area for a job doing green design / engineering for a small startup, an offshoot of SquidLabs. Unfortunately, though, I thought the job would be more of a design job than it actually was, and the CEO thought I was more of a builder than I actually am, so the gig didn't work out. ...Meaning that after six weeks of mis-fitting job stress, plus house-hunting hatred (a full-time job by itself, on top of my official one), I got fired. It was devastating. I've never been fired before (except from a temp job over a dozen years ago where the crazy boss thought he was allergic to me. True story.) and I'd been really excited about this gig. The timing was good, though--the very day I was let go was the day I was supposed to sign the lease & start moving in to the place I'd finally found. Being unemployed now, it seemed dumb to commit to a city with exorbitant rent, but living in the office of a job you've just lost isn't the feel-good movie of the year, so it seemed a good time to get away. After all, I had no obligations now, and had several weeks of pay that hadn't been laid out to a landlord. Thus, the second road trip. (Which I'll write about later.)



The first trip was all water and green. Michelle & I took Highway 1 along the Oregon coast, then swept through the redwoods over to 101 and the Golden Gate. And all the way from Seattle to Arcata, there was snow. For those who know the area, you know how utterly weird this is; but it was great. Particularly the road from Portland out to the coast was just a winter wonderland, the trees so plump with snow you just wanted to squeeze them. The undersides of their branches were like a layer of black lace on an otherwise pure white dress from ground to sky.

We stopped at the Tillamook factory to see more cheese packaged every second than even I could eat. (Nor was it that tempting to try--things look less like food when they're on conveyor belts. It was neat, though.) Then we moseyed down the coast, stopping for the Devil's Churn and Cape Perpetua, the Oregon Dunes, lighthouses, and small towns with fancy restaurants or cute snack shops. The coolest place, without a doubt, was the Sea Lion Cave, which is just what it sounds like--a cave maybe two hundred feet high by a hundred feet wide, always partly underwater and partly in air, filled with _hundreds_ of sea lions. The cave was like a giant anemone, the rocks were so thick with the writhing tubby beasts. Sure smelled like sea lion, though. Whoof. The wildest thing about the place was the noise--the loud constant drone of the bulls was a cross between Buddhist monks throat-chanting and lawnmowers fighting.

Then a day in the redwood forests, which deserve their reputation as one of the most magnificent places on Earth. They're not as lush as pacific northwest rainforests or tropical jungles, but they're the most cathedral-like forests anywhere--clear empty floor and massive pillars to the canopy, so quiet you can hear for miles. In addition to doing the goofy tourist stuff like driving the van through the middle of a tree and touring the "one-log cabin" (exactly what it sounds like), we did a bit of hiking and saw what used to be the tallest tree in the world before it fell ten years ago. The funny thing is, it's _more_ impressive fallen than it would've been standing, because you can actually see the whole thing. Upright, you'd just stand at the base and say "yep, tall tree", but lying down you can walk from the bottom end (where the torn-out root ball is larger than the apartment I almost rented in SF) to the top end (which is shattered into chunks bigger than people). Contemplate for a moment the amount of force it takes to shatter a tree trunk six feet thick. Step aside, Karate Kid.

I was nervous about moving back to the bay area, for some reason, but when we finally got to the northern side of the Golden Gate bridge the last night of the trip and went up to the viewpoint to look out over the city, it looked beautiful. And I saw a shooting star over the city, which worried me at first, but which I decided must be a good omen. Shows you what I know. But I'll probably go back. I didn't have much time to enjoy it this round, but I did take a few moments to relax. My favorite was driving up from Silicon Valley one day, taking the scenic route out in the foothills of the Santa Cruz mountains, and stumbling upon the Pulgas Water Temple, a pseudo-Grecian temple to water erected by the City of San Francisco Water Department in 1934. No kidding. What other city's public utilities would build a Greek temple? San Francisco definitely has style.


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Nov. 15th, 2006

Bits of the Book Tour

So, you may or may not know that we at Worldchanging wrote a book (called, unsurprisingly, "Worldchanging: a user's guide for the 21st century".)  Alex (the founder) and his assistants organized a book tour across North America, and I thought it sounded like a good excuse to go to visit friends, particularly the dear ones on the east coast that I never see.  So I went along to a few of the book parties: Seattle, Portland, New York, and Vancouver (and will do SF in December), and visited folks in Boston and Northampton along the way, hitting five cities in seven days.  Woo-hoo!

Here in Seattle the book party had Alex on stage with Bruce Sterling, which is the first time I saw what a total freak Sterling is. Brilliant and creative, not afraid to gallop wantonly into left field and never come back.  I guess that's a useful skill in a science fiction writer, I just didn't expect it to be so... pronounced.  Just about my whole Seattle family came to the event, which was awesome, and afterwards I still had time to hit a huge Halloween party with hundreds of Burners in a former elementary school.  The part of the Seattle party that fried my brain was the first time someone asked me to sign his book.  I thought it'd be like signing a friend's yearbook, but it's more like someone shoving you on stage to accept a surprise honor.  As if I don't already have a big enough ego.  Although it hadn't really occurred to me that that would happen--I'm just one of sixty authors of the book.  (Secretly I want someone to do a scavenger hunt to get the signatures of every author in the book--they're scattered across dozens of cities in several countries on a couple different continents, and most of them have never met each other.)

  In Portland the event was in the "World Forestry Center", which I couldn't quite figure out if it was a museum to promote sustainable forestry or a museum for lumber industry propaganda.  (For instance, they had a videogame of you in a tree cutting vehicle, where you maneuver the machine's arm around to chop trees down and slice them into bits on the spot.  But it was to show minimal-impact forestry techniques.)  I think the place was legit, though.  It was great hanging around with my friends Darius, Eric, and Larry.  Geting out of Portland looked dicey for a minute, though--the flight out was delayed by a bird sucked through the plane's engine on its previous flight.  ...which sounds bad at first (and of course was for the bird), but really, you know that must happen all the time, so I was impressed by their honesty in telling us.  After an hour and a half of de-fowling, we were on our way to the east coast.

  Northampton's hotel rates were ludicrous because it's apparently the height of "Leaf Season", their big tourist draw.  Leaf Season.  At first I snickered at the idea that their greatest attraction is decaying plant matter, but actually this is really cool--people go there to enjoy the changing of the seasons, commune with Nature, all that.  I was there to see Chara, my ex, who's going back to school at Smith, and we had a wonderful time with her showing me around.  Being the home of small liberal arts colleges like Smith, Northampton is a cute little crunchy intellectual town with at least one fantastic coffeehouse.  The town feels like a neighborhood of Portland, except with granite slab curbs and fancy English Colonial brick buildings that're probably ludicrously old.  It's apparently such a nice place that when I was arriving, the airport shuttle driver and both other passengers (who were keen on chatting it up, and I mean keen) were all disappointed when they heard I was only going to be there for one day; they insisted I come back some time.  ...I made a mental note to be wary of Northamptonites bearing Kool-Aid.  Smith College has a lovely wooded arboretum, with geese in its pond and big enthusiastic squirrels.  Later in New York I thought how it's funny that people think of squirrels as being cute and rats being horrible--are a fluffy tail and a bouncy gait are all that separates the wildlife from the vermin?  Will rats start wearing tail wigs and hopping, in order to climb the social ladder?

  Boston was great because it was the conjunction of people from four distinct periods of my life--high school, Reed, Seattle, and family.  And everybody hit it off, which was beautiful to see.  The first night my friend Sarah from high school hosted me and Coryn (from Reed) and Sunshine (from Seattle).  The next day, the hostel I was supposed to stay in was suddenly booked, so I had to go to a different one across town; stepping out of the subway station for the new place, I saw... someone familiar... who recognized me, too... my cousin Susan who I've only met twice since she was six years old!  How bizarre is that?  And what's more, she had nothing urgent to do, so she hung out with me & Coryn & Sunshine for the whole rest of the day, and we all had a great time!  I'm not woo-woo enough to say that everything happens for a reason, but I'm apparently woo-woo enough to cause things to happen.

  The one really notable thing we did was going to the "Mapparium", which I'd never heard of.  It's a stained-glass globe, 36 feet across, that you walk through the middle of.  Made in the 1930's for Mary Baker Eddy (a tough and smart lady who founded the respectable but oxymoronically named Christian Science Monitor), it was updated for decades to match current geopolitics, but stopped being redrawn in the 1960's.  So it's now historical, with all sorts of artifacts like Siam, French West Africa, Italian East Africa, Tibet, and the USSR.  It's amazing how much the world's nations have churned in just 40 years.  (And even more amazing that most of Africa was still colonies just 40 years ago.)  I wish someone would make a globe like the Mapparium where the surface is a big projection display, where you can see countries being redrawn over time.  But the equally fun thing was the acoustics of the place--stand in the center and your voice is reflected back to you so perfectly you think you're being mic'ed into your own ears; stand elsewhere with another person talking to you as they walk, and they sound like they're right in your ear, then inside your head, then speaking normally in front of you.  And wherever you are, the high frequencies that make crisp consonants and susurrant sibilants, which are normally lost to the world, are bright as summer sun.  It's like someone tweaked your nervous system's graphic equalizer.

  The last big thing in Boston was that at one point we were waiting around, so we decided to pop into a bookstore; it hadn't occurred to me to look for it, but on the way out, I glanced back and saw THE BOOK!!!  On a shelf in the bookstore!  Right next to all the other books!!  It was in two places, even--one was a shelf away from Decorative Toilets of the World, but the other one was next to a big book on Nelson Mandela.  I'd had a copy of the book in my hands a few weeks before, and that was great, but there've been many prototypes I've built that I could hold in my hands that never saw the outside world.  To see something you've helped make sitting on the shelf in stores is entirely another matter.  It makes you feel like you're actually having an effect on the world, in a way that website statistics on number of visitors per month just can't match.  Those are just numbers, not real people in physical places that you can go to.

  New York was fun, too--both the book parties went well.  The funny part of New York was that my friend Michelle (my "um.. friend" Michelle, here in Seattle) is a photographer and recently wrote a book of her own, on doing real photography with plastic toy cameras; she had a couple book release parties of her own, and the one she had scheduled for New York, by sheer woo-woo coincidence, happened to be on the same day as a Worldchanging book party.  So we both went to each others' parties, and stayed at the house of one of the Flying Karamazov Brothers (a juggling troupe which you should see if you haven't), and kicked around New York afterwards.  (Managing to find both our books in the same bookstore, which was fun.)  I have to say, though, other times I've been to New York I've really enjoyed the energy of it--the buzz, the pulse, of all those people in the mile-high steel and concrete cliffs; this time, the buzz didn't catch me, and I just saw the dirt, grime, and filth that the buzz rides on top of.  The world of New York is graffiti-splattered brick and stone, steel in right angles, a wholly synthetic environment way off of human scale.  The first night, when I saw the moon shining in between buildings, my first thought was that it looked out of place there.

  It was fun in new York, but when I flew in to Vancouver, the first thing I noticed was how clean and nice everything was, and how GREEN.  There were trees everywhere, and until downtown they were the biggest things around, just like Seattle.  Quite the opposite of the urban jungle.  I could feel myself relaxing and breathing.  Sure, it was raining (like it still is here), but that's what makes it so green and beautiful.  So, of course, I was very happy to flop back into Seattle, while the rest of the Worldchanging crew went on.

It was great fun, but I'm glad I did it to see friends, not to further my career.  The hob-nobbing was okay, definitely met some important people and some interesting people (sometimes they were even the same people); but you can't really relax when networking, even when the people you're with are trying to impress you as much as you're trying to impress them.  Only when you're with peers, or people who don't care what you do, can you get past that.  (Well, okay, and sometimes when you're geeking.)  The most fun I had at all the book parties was with people I already knew.


Posted at 04:21 pm | | Leave a comment | Add to Memories | Share

Feb. 14th, 2006

It's Still Broken

You may have heard that the gulf coast is still broken from hurricane Katrina five months ago. It's definitely true--I know because I'm here, doing relief stuff with Hands On USA. I'm not writing to advertise anything, this is just another travelogue of my latest adventures. If nothing else, it's been nice to see the sun--not Seattle's wussy winter sun that taps clouds on the shoulder once a month saying "excuse me, can I peep through for a moment?" but a tropical sun that says "step aside clouds, I'll be handling the sky today." I'd wanted to work in New Orleans, but apparently things are such an utter mess there due to political problems, that almost nothing is happening. Biloxi, by contrast, is getting things done and rebuilding.

I've spent a week out here, and have to leave soon, but I feel like I'm just getting started. The experience is a lot like camp, but with hard work during the day. Sometimes exhausting work, sometimes dirty work, sometimes both. It's a good bonding experience, it feels good to spend all day swinging a hammer, hauling plywood, etc., when you're used to just sitting in front of a computer all day long. And then there's plenty of hang-out time at night, which is when it feels like camp. Plus my friend Terri's been here for a month already, so there's camaraderie galore. I can see why people stay here for months and months. It's also neat because I'm hanging out with people I'd never otherwise meet and who'd never meet each other--we'll have a 40-something Mennonite guy working next to a young black East Coast college kid next to a Lutheran grandmother next to a barely-GED rednecky guy next to a Jewish bioscientist. (Although I'm happy to say there're multiple Seattleites & Wisconsinites here, and other places I've lived.) There are times when some of the young men are annoying due to testosterone poisoning, but mostly the presence of women on the crews keeps them in line, and I have to remember most young American males are like that, I'm just lucky to have great friends back home.

Another thing that struck me about the people out here: most of the organizations doing reconstruction, handing out food, and doing other support work, are Christian groups. Hands On USA is one of just a couple that aren't. Most of the time we Left-Coast Godless Commie Pinkos (TM) scoff at really devout Christians (not ordinary church-every-Sunday types, but going-on-a-mission types), see them as the nightly news's portrait of wackball control freaks living in anger and fear, but you come out here, and you see they're almost the only ones who care enough to help. And it's not just because they're nice people, it's because of their faith, getting them up off the couch and making things happen for people. I have to really hand it to them.
 


There are a lot of different things that the folks here do. I spent my first three days looting a casino barge. Phreeow! ...It hadn't run aground, but had smashed into a pier and was completely totaled, so it'll be demolished, but it had a lot of perfectly good salvageable stuff on board--we were pulling industrial kitchen wares off to donate to soup-kitchens (which many residents still need), and other miscellany will get sold to raise funds for rebuilding houses. It was a lot of fun. First, because the barge was momentously destroyed--stuck about twenty degrees off of level, torn so much to hell that the first floor is gone; the second floor is *shredded*, and partly underwater; the third floor has a chandelier hanging askew surrounded by a balcony of dead slot-machines; and from a doorway on the fourth floor we had a zip-line running booty down to the dock. It was like touring the Titanic, frozen halfway through sinking. The strangest part was once when I popped into the hotel that ran the barge, which is now also the casino--everything that was dead wreckage in the barge was here, live and working, full of people. It was like a scene from a horror movie where you flash back and forth between the real world and the ghost world, or from the present time to the carnage that's about to come; even complete with the eerily muffled music that's should sound happy and bouncy but just sounds creepy instead.

There are a ton of different tasks to do: I've done roofing, tree planting at an elementary school (we let the kids do most of the work, and they named the trees Dana, Fatima, and Charlie), a beach cleanup (different from a normal one--mostly digging big hunks of metal out of the sand for a front-end loader to pick up); there's also humane society dog-walking, cutting dead trees, distributing food & building supplies, getting people's FEMA paperwork sorted out, and mostly, above all else, ripping out houses' interiors and killing the mold so the houses can be rebuilt. (Though I've avoided this because of my lungs.) Our group isn't always the most competent or efficient, but none of them are; FEMA is talked about by everyone as little more than a horrible joke, the military are called lazy by the locals, and the myriad religious groups spend half their time arguing over who should do what. But in the end, a lot gets done. Towns are being rebuilt, house by house. And a lot more needs to be done--there'll be enough for hundreds of people for a year; hopefully the coming hurricane season will be mild.

When I first arrived, Biloxi didn't look too bad. A lot of it is pretty intact, houses still livable or newly-rebuilt, even fences in yards. But then I saw the beach highway, and everything was broken. Casino barges the size of large hotels were not only washed up on the beach, but washed over to the other side of the highway and smashed into buildings; now slowly being eaten by heavy machinery for conversion into bales of scrap metal and landfill. Many buildings were nothing but foundation slabs with the names of what they used to be spray-painted on them. Other places were mere roofs, or were ragged doll-house cutaways, or high-rise hotels with the first two stories ripped out and ocean gaping through. New Orleans was the same but more so. Uptown areas are mostly fine; the French Quarter is in business except for a few (even though the streets are deserted). But the Ninth Ward is wholesale destruction. The entire neighborhood, the entire suburb, is destroyed. For blocks and blocks and blocks in all directions, there is nothing but wreckage. Houses picked up and dropped on cars, or washed into the neighbor's house; trucks smashed sideways through porches and each other; piles of debris so random and jumbled as to make the constituent parts unidentifiable. Your material life in a blender. It's amazing how much stuff a house holds. At least in Biloxi, the trashed properties have mostly been gutted or demolished, but in the Ninth Ward everything was just left to rot. Cracked dried mud laying an inch deep in car interiors, air conditioner parts hanging from telephone wires. At first I felt guilty about being a tourist there in the ghost town, just wandering the desolation and taking photos as screen doors creaked open or closed, but then I noticed that the ONLY people there (of which there were few) were also doing the same thing. Which was that much weirder. Although Terri said she talked to one woman who was looking for her house. ...She'd found the lot where her house used to be, so the house itself was probably no more than a block or so away.

There's clearly a big cultural difference between New Orleans and Biloxi. In each, some houses have spray-painted messages on them; but in Biloxi, they say things like "if you loot, we will shoot", or "we are home, we shoot to kill." In the big easy, they say things like "we are coming back", "don't bulldoze", or "love" or "Jesus". The only threatening one was a joke (and a hilarious one): "Don't try. I am sleeping inside with a big dog, an ugly woman, two shotguns and a claw hammer", then, dated later, "Still here. Woman left fri. Cooking a pot of dog gumbo." The people I've seen in Biloxi are not attractive, while the folks in NOLA are fine (what few are around). A few nights ago, some of us went to see a play by Biloxi's local community theater, and one of the actors chatted with us for just a second after the show; he was clearly gay (not flaming, but obvious), and in the course of talking about something else, he mentioned getting pulled over by a cop who was "getting all hate-crimey on me", just thrown in there in the middle of the sentence aside from the point, like you would any common-but-annoying phenomenon. I personally have only had good interactions with the few locals that I've talked to, but it's always been in the context of a work crew helping them with something, so who knows how I'd get along here under normal circumstances. But that's part of the point of coming, because helping folks in need breaks down barriers that would otherwise be there for both of us.

I wish I'd been to New Orleans before this, and I hope it recovers so I can go and see the town when it's alive and singing. The French Quarter, while undoubtedly a tourist trap, seems one of the more genuine and unique tourist traps in the US. Damned by faint praise, sure, but it's not all plastic and Disney, it's got style, with the buildings' gorgeous balcony-rails wrought in Regency style, and the elegant details of the buildings. And real fire in the buildings' oil lamps! Nowhere else in the US would do that. Maybe it feels more authentic because it's empty of people right now, but I think in a good party it'd be a hell of a place to go. They're having Mardi Gras despite everything (or TO spite everything); coming to party and staying to work might be a great vacation. Other parts of town look like good places to live. There's a lot of character here, and it'd take some time to get to know the place.

Photos will be up in a few days. I've tried for some art in the midst of wreckage, but, well, most of it's just wreckage, which you could see just as well on CNN. We'll see what I end up with.
 

- - -


2006-02-19  photos from the gulf
 
Okay, folks, here are photos from the gulf.  The more artsy/interesting ones first:
 
http://faludidesign.com/photography/Gulf/_Gulf_index.html 
 
followed by others that were still interesting, but didn't quite make the cut:
 
http://faludidesign.com/photography/Gulf2/_Gulf2_index.html
 
 
  Now I'm back in Seattle, sort of (back for real next week), and oddly enough, the biggest impact of my trip was not when I was out there, but when I got home.  The perfection of everything was a little jarring, like it is when returning from the third world.  Riding an escalator in the airport gave me a flashback to the destroyed escalator on the casino barge, where shattered safety glass piled like drifting snow in the stairs, and that set off a cascade of other memories.  I wish I'd been able to spend another week or two there, but I haven't had the experience others down there described: coming back home and feeling like normal life is somehow less real, and no one understands, so you have to go back to rebuild again.  Back to the emotional springtime, pushing buds of order and hope through the hard earth of disaster.
 
  People out there talk about the experience changing their lives.  It's certainly a vibrant group of people, a social Temporary Autonomous Zone where the walls of normal society don't exist.  I was apparently changed a bit, because on the way home strangers randomly started conversations with me both in the airport and on the flight, which normally never happens.  And I've woken up shining with energy like I haven't all winter.  But I'm glad to be back home.
 
  Time to go outside and enjoy the sunshine and cherry blossoms!  Hello, springtime!
 

Posted at 04:10 pm | | Leave a comment | Add to Memories | Share

Jul. 6th, 2005

Only the Street Names

  Down in LA for a couple days for Borealis stuff.  The ride from the airport took me all the way up the 405, through all the cities I lived in here, and I was looking forward to seeing something familiar from that time, some building or store or geographical feature to spark a trip down amnesia lane.  Nothing.  I think I got a glimpse of the Chevron oil refinery, but barely (freeway noise-walls blocked it out), and the only other buildings/stores were either unfamiliar or the same chain stores you’d see anywhere else.  The one thing that sparked memories was the street names on the freeway exits.  And that, my friend, is the most telling sign that I’m glad I don’t live here anymore.




 p.s.  Spent a week at a conference in San Antonio recently, land of great Mexican food and bad architecture; where the streets are wider than the buildings, but you don't have to look either way before crossing them. A cute little town for Texas, and the local swing-dance bar is also the local fire-spinner ghetto.  If you go, you can forget the Alamo but see Our Lady of the Lake University--they've got a little lake whose trees throng with _hundreds_ of white egrets, filling the air with graceful swoops and glides; when spooked, an entire tree explodes into white wings.   And did I mention the great Mexican food?  Mmmm...

Posted at 04:07 pm | | Leave a comment | Add to Memories | Share

Apr. 18th, 2005

Sex and Death

India has no sunrises or sunsets. At least where & when I’ve been, there’s such a thick constant haze in the air (of humidity and dust, and in the cities smog) that dawn is solidly day before the sun coalesces out of the haze, and likewise at dusk the sun fades into obscurity long before reaching the horizon. Though sometimes it will hang blunted by the haze as a pink disk you can stare right at. What India does have is children, everywhere. Partly this is demographics (the population bomb is not slowing down here), partly it’s economics (kids begging on the streets, or working, instead of being in school. I’ve even seen eight-year-olds working on construction sites), partly it’s culture (people often take their kids to work with them, whether they be streetcorner vendors or guards at an archaeological site.)

The last places I visited were Varanasi--city of Shiva, and Khajuraho--the ruins of ancient temples.

Varanasi lives up to its dedication like no holy city I’ve ever been to. City of Shiva, it is where the devout come to die, and somehow death has managed to permeate the entire place. Built on one bank of the Ganga [Ganges] river, most of the city is a maze of tight corridors, sometimes hardly wider than my shoulders. All but the busiest are so spattered with cow and goat manure (as well as trash) fermenting in the heat that there is a constant cloud of flies to wade through. You feel like you shouldn’t breathe the air, it smells diseased. Indeed, I did get sick there (a bad cold that’s still in my lungs, plus mild food poisoning), and nearly every traveler I talked to there was either sick or just recovering. Even the animals were sickly. All of Varanasi is on one bank of the Ganga; the far bank of the river is a sandy floodplain. During the day this means that you can escape the claustrophobia of the city and breathe, but at night, the empty blackness of the far side gives the impression of nothingness, that crossing the river would take you to the Great Beyond. The Ganga itself here is a river of death: so polluted that it’s septic (meaning no dissolved oxygen--nothing above bacteria can live in it), and it doesn’t have a visible current, so it appears to lie stagnant. Having your body put in the Ganga here means no more turns around the wheel of reincarnation, you go right to Nirvana; as a result, the main burning ghat [platform with stairs to the river], has six funeral pyres all burning continually, 24 hours a day. After cremation the bones get thrown into the river, and those who were already pure (holy men, babies, cobra victims, etc.) don’t need cremation so they’re sent down the river whole. On a boat ride to the burning ghat, I saw a few small bits of ex-human floating in the water, and walking on the beach of the far bank, saw a skull lying there calm as any shell. Full of religion but very matter-of-fact, the city has several shrines per block, often just thrown together in a little niche. Holy men sit on the ghats alongside bathers, launderers, and pellets of goat poo. The funerals have ritual but no silence, and the ashes are sifted through afterwards for jewelry.

Varanasi is also the most pre-industrial city I’ve seen in India. Some things you see all over in India, like women pumping well water by hand to carry home, people ironing clothes with coal-heated irons, men hauling cargo on hand-pushed wooden carts, people using balance-scales to weigh things (even freight in the railway stations), the occasional baboon being chased off by hotel staff, cows and goats roaming the streets (or here, the ghats. First time I’ve seen cattle climb stairs.) Varanasi goes further, though. In the river outside my hotel, people bathed alongside cows (the little boys used the cows as floating playground equipment, which was fun to watch). Only a couple actual city streets exist to feed all the alleyways, and they’re mostly crammed with people; just the occasional bicycle rickshaw or moped, almost no cars or auto-rickshaws, and certainly no buses; intersections are done by traffic cops. The electrical grid shuts off between ten a.m. and two p.m. every day intentionally, and falters several times a night unintentionally. ...All that doesn’t seem too remarkable, until you realize the city has a population of 1.3 million people. Non-modernization gives its night market some exoticness. Darkness punctuated by candles and movement, generator-thrums and music heard through a hundred conversations, scores of smells even more unidentifiable than during daytime. A silhouette passes with a tray of tea balanced on his head, faster shadows are children scampering around, and the occasional lightbulb shows off piles of garlands, food, or brass cups and figurines (and lots of cheap plastic crap).

Afterwards I went to Khajuraho, which was an opposite extreme. Off in the middle of nowhere, among land that wants to be jungle if only enough rain and a lack of cultivation would let it, the town has just six or seven thousand people. It’s peaceful and rural, and pretty clean. A thousand years ago, it was the capitol of a kingdom which left it some of the most amazing temples in the entire world. Khajuraho’s temples aren’t big like the Pyramids or the cathedrals of Europe; but its temples are covered with hallucinogenically intricate sculptures that make the whole place explode with life. Forget the Taj Mahal--it’s a dollop of soft-serve on a box. Khajuraho’s temple roofs bubbled up from the depths of the Earth and hardened into fractal similes of mountains, and every inch of the temple walls and interiors are sculpted into reliefs. Not the dour gothic reliefs of cathedrals, or even the stiff formal reliefs of Egyptian or Mayan temples, but sinuous curving figures. With lots of sex. Graphic sex, acrobatic sex that requires assistants to hold people up, orgies (even a little sex with animals) and hundreds of sumptuous nudes. To be fair, erotic sculptures are just a small percentage of the gods, animals, hunting scenes, and battle scenes depicted on the temples; but it’s more than you’ll see anywhere else, and it really does define the character of them. And there’s a purpose, even a grammar, to it all. It tells stories, refers to poetry still extant today, gives lessons in love, and is part of the process of worship. I took about ten pages of notes there, but I’ll keep it brief. When you go to temple, you walk clockwise around the platform the temple rests on, then up around the temple itself, before actually entering. You should enter the temple with a pure mind, so if you’re distracted or preoccupied by the various sculptures along the way, you should either go back home or at least get it all out of your system there, before you go in. The scenes all have their places in a hierarchy of spiritual levels: from bottom to top it goes from abstract-organic patterns to animals to daily-life scenes to divine people / divine acts interspersed with gods, back to abstract-organic in the mountain-roofs. They really do believe in cycles. And the scores of the roof’s smaller mountain peaks all unite into the one top peak (to show all paths to enlightenment reach the same end) which is directly above the altar inside, making the temple an axis connecting earth and sky. At the statues on the altars, of course, people offer the deities flowers, lit incense, coins, or pourings of local lake-water; and this is done one person or family at a time, not in a mass-service led by a priest. (Lucky for me, I happened to be there during a holy period for Parvati, so at dawn there were droves of people going in to worship.) Though these offerings lack the theater that large-congregation church services have, they create a beautifully individual, tangible relationship to the gods--devotion you can touch, smell, and feel.

Khajuraho was the nicest place I went in all of India (though Jaipur’s Jantar Mantar still wins for conceptually coolest), but it was also the most difficult to get to and from. We’re talking comically bad--a zombie bus which I swear had died, been forgotten to rot for thirty years, but then was resurrected by some unholy miracle of mechanical hackery (on roads that were half rutted dirt). Oh, and at the front of the bus the driver had a little shrine to Shiva, who’s about the LAST god I want up there. What was the decision process on that? “Hey, who should I have looking after my bus, to make sure I don’t kill myself and everyone on board? Maybe Ganesha, for overcoming obstacles? Or Vishnu, for protection and preservation? Naah, let’s go for The Destroyer! That’ll be perfect!”

On the way back to Delhi I stopped off in Allahabad, hoping to spend a couple days at an ashram whose American branch I have a friend in. Unfortunately that didn’t work out, but Allahabad was the only place in India I’ve been that didn’t have a tourist industry, which was refreshing--nobody spoke English, but you could walk along the streets without getting hassled all the time. Balm to the soul. People continue to be the most intense thing about India, sometimes in a beautiful way, but often hard to deal with. The relentless hustlers pry at you night and day--I’ve even been hustled by priests in a temple (three times, actually). The only way you’re safe is to ignore their existence, but then you’re not treating them like people, you’re treating them like urban furniture. This doesn’t even include the rickshaw drivers who try to charge you double, or occasionally drop you off at a tourist-market five kilometers from where you’re actually trying to go. You end up not trusting anyone except other travelers. If you’re immune to annoyance, sorrow may get you--so many beggars there need more help than you could ever give. Many of them are cripples missing limbs or born malformed; one man who still haunts me had no face, just a healed-over burn scar with raw red reminders of where his eyes had been. Nothing here is hidden for the sake of decorum. There are too many people and too much need. All this, plug getting sick and not being able to eat the food, has worn me down to the point that I’m happy to be finishing the trip and going home soon. But the same openness that allows the hustling has also given some gems of interaction, like chatting with kids in a small village, hearing details of their lives and aspirations; or like a flower vendor who I asked permission to photograph: he was a mild-mannered forty-something guy who, when I turned the camera around to show him the photo (the joy of digital), was so delighted and surprised it transformed him into a little kid. He even gave me a spare blossom as a present. ...Visiting the two other Worldchanging folks in Bombay was what really saved my opinion of the people here, though--they were great, and that’s no doubt more what it’s like to live here. Other travelers have had different experiences of India. A pair of Brits fresh out of high school had a very Peace-Corps experience teaching English in a tiny remote village on the Nepali border. A guy from the conference went up to Dharamsala [where the Tibetan government-in-exile is] and stumbled into a ten-day Buddhist retreat--saw the Dalai Lama speak, had an experience of peace, reflection, and spiritual journey. But that was among other westerners--even the teachers were western. ...I have to say, I’ve found coming to India for spiritual depth is a total stereotype--it’s like going to Germany and expecting everyone to wear lederhosen. The populations of ashrams and Buddhist retreats here are mostly all white (and I’ve heard this from someone who runs an ashram, not just from travelers)--the actual Indians are more concerned with making a living, just like people everywhere. Apparently several yoga/meditation schools are giving up on their home country, setting up shop in America or Europe. At first this made me cynical about it, but it doesn’t really undermine the legitimacy of the practices at all--it just means the memes’ branches have long outgrown their roots. After all, Christianity hasn’t been a middle-eastern religion for at least a thousand years, but some Christians still go to Jerusalem today. And it’s probably still worth it for pilgrims to come here, because outer journeys are a great way to prime the pump for inner journeys; especially if you actually think the way people live where you are is normal and makes sense. The world asks you different questions. (Even for me, India pushed my boundaries.) But at the end of the day you can find enlightenment in a tree in your back yard as well as you can in a holy city. It’s more important to be able to trust, than to be in a certain location (as I found out when getting hustled in a temple that was for locals.)

 
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Back in Seattle now, and OH is it nice to not be in ninety- to hundred-degree heat. And to be where green is green, everything’s not covered with a thick layer of dust. But I’m happy to have experienced so many amazing things out there, and wish I’d had time to see more (far north into the mountains or far south to the beaches, where the cultures are so much mellower). And like I was saying before, other people had very different experiences. India’s a big place--it contradicts itself, it contains multitudes. Plus, different people seek out different things; I wanted to see what made India different from anywhere else I’ve been, to plumb the contours of its character. Though huge amounts of ground were left uncovered, I feel like I tasted many of the “real” Indias that overlap each other. It’s an intense place.




2005-05-24

photos from India, finally! Okay, so these are long overdue, but I finally finished getting the India photos together. Here they are:
http://www.faludidesign.com/photography/India/_India_index.html
 
The hardcore travel-wistful among you can click the link at the bottom for a second page of photos; those are less artsy, but have fun cultural tidbits (e.g. cows as playground equipment, bicycle freight, Hare Krishna sound & light show.)
 
Enjoy!
 
 

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