Rocking at the Guggenheim

Art unfamiliar to us we often dismiss, not so much out of ignorance but because it confounds the limits of what we’ve come to understand as defining Art. And what defines Art for us is the sum of our previous experiences with Art, beginning with straightforward realist representational landscapes because they often look “just like” the world as we’ve seen it straightforwardly whizzing by the car window. We also approach Art as passive consumers, not active critical questioners, unless we’re in a classroom being asked to work for an understanding—meaning a grade. Perhaps we’ve been lucky enough to engage in the Art History class, and learned something beyond uncomplicated landscape painting. Our limits of what define Art expand, then, but only so far.
We often come to Art at a museum holding “famous” works of Art with the same affable expectations we have for other tourist attractions or the beach: please delight me. The beach is easiest, for our participation takes the least thinking. We don’t have to do anything but go to sleep in the sun. Tourist attractions—statues, buildings, waterfalls—expect a little more attention paid, but we can still drift through taking snapshots, then check the places off your list of Things to See (why we have to see them is never asked). Art overlaps with tourist attractions, in that contained in a particular museum are famous works by artists whose names we know, so we pay money to see them so we can say we saw them. This approach requires the least effort: come to the work, take a minute or less discerning what it is, read the title and artist, nod in recognition. That works up through the Impressionists, maybe a Picasso when his figures were recognizable. Woe to anyone stumbling through the thicket of 20th century postwar contemporary Art. When representation fell away—or was hacked, shoved, or dreamed away—so did the attention span of the average museum tourist. Free audio guides have helped, surely, but when we hear curators airily suggesting that the artist is “questioning the traditional line between life and art” or “commenting on the meaning of movement and space in our post-industrial age” we tend to reel, letting the conceptual language whirl around like confetti, then move on to the next crazy installment involving melting ice and video of the artist consuming string.
The end of representation marked the end of the Old World, and that world was all we knew. Modern Art in the 20th century began questioning everything—the role of the artist, the tools used, the placement of the artistic work, the space it inhabits, the medium through which it communicates, whether it needs to communicate anything at all, whether it can communicate anything, the historical, social, political, psychological, and economic forces involved in the work and the creative process and where the work ends up, the role of the observer, the space between the observer and the work observed, whether that “space” is meaningful in any way, and if so, who decides? I could go on. In the same way we can’t know how a bridge is built by just looking at it, to appreciate Art we need to put the effort in: what is the artist trying to do, or say? What is s/he reacting against, breaking away from, reviving, honoring? What is the socio-political and/or historical context we can place the work, and does that have any bearing on our understanding? What has come before, what came after? Methods, colors, figures, space, light, shadow, movement, brushstroke. The first step in approaching Art is simply to shift the emphasis of this question: “How is this Art?” to “How is this Art?” and trusting not that what we are beholding in this side alley gallery a “great” work of Art, but simply an expression of the artist. Yes, all Art is quite useless, as Oscar Wilde famously quipped.

At the Guggenheim, an exhibition of the works from the 1960s to the present of South Korean born Lee Ufan snailed upwards in Gehry’s building, called "Marking Infinity". From the Guggenheim's website: charting his creation of a visual, conceptual, and theoretical terrain that has radically expanded the possibilities for painting and sculpture since the 1960s. Lee is acclaimed for an innovative body of work that revolves around the notion of encounter—seeing the bare existence of what is actually before us and focusing on "the world as it is."
Ufan’s works were initially unfamiliar to me; moreover, as instillations using common, working-industrial materials simply arranged in space didn’t appear as having the artist’s creative intentions upon them. One instillation from 1968 had stainless steel thin narrow strips strewn across one another but interwoven to make a soft grid like a magnified section of a wicker chair. Eleven strips by ten make up the threading design. Just beyond each side of this square weave on the floor lay piles of more stainless steel strips, unadorned, still, as though awaiting their chance to join the weaving. The piece seems both unfinished and fresh, inviting the viewer weaving. In this, Ufan achieves an “encounter” between work and audience looking upon the work. The stainless steel strips are manufactured for their sharp, strong, pliable, industrial usefulness. Here they give way to be threaded into a softer, woven texture that in itself could be useful, as woven textures like wicker chairs are. The Art is the invitation between unfinished design and the strips alongside awaiting their participation—as we stand alongside acknowledging the invitation to “finish” the work began. Relatum, which names many of the works in his exhibit, is a philosophical term denoting things or events between which a relation exists. So artwork is not “an” object as such but a network of relationships, shifting aesthetic experience to the art of encounter. Rather than objects representing and so standing apart, Art for Ufan is a process of mediation between self – other, nature – industry, being – nothing, presence – infinity.

Relatum – a Response from 2008 is a “pure distillation of materials,” an oval stone two feet high by two wide leaning toward at a distance of a few feet a large thick dark square slab of steel: an encounter of organic nature and processed industry. The two remain at a distance, but incline to one another, which is the invitation by the artist through his Art to contemplate their relationship, Their distance in space, framed as it is in contemplative proximity, symbolizes distance in time and in shared natures. Organic stone becomes over time (and place) processed or created into steel. Looking on from our distance as viewer, the oval stone appears ordinary, even dull beige in color; indeed it shares in its dull sheen the color of the steel slab, the latter only darker and richer in power. The steel slab lies in its finished but unused industrial state—yet it also is unfinished as it awaits industrial use: what good is a flat slab of steel? If we turn to the stone, we see its potential for the arts of sculpture, and to the artist’s eye it awaits its representational form. But slicing through our initial judgment, examining the stone qua stone, we can more readily appreciate the time compressed it contains, its mysterious ancient composite structure. What powers forged this heavy weighted thing? Beige soon gives way to intricate patterns and sparkling facets, pores and stains and moss dried to a burned green paste. An earth hovers there in space, minerals and spices packed within like planets and stars within a galaxy. If Art is intentional, Ufan arranged the rising angled oval stone to face toward the flat steel slab lying before it, but its slender end coming to meet the stone bends upward gently like a wave heralding the stony prow of a ship. One side of steel slab facing the stone is gouged slightly along its edge, trimmed half an inch in precise shaping to the presence and force of the stone, as though by inundation over time and proximity the stone has worn away the edge. This encounter, a gradual wearing away of the seemingly solid and timeless and enduring steel, is ironic in that the stone’s own minerals were worn and broken down and transferred across time and distance to form the steel slab itself.

Dialogue Series – Dialogue 2008: A large canvas is laid down flat. The artist bends over a pristine creamy white canvas, then makes a limited number of discreet strokes with a broad flat brush loaded with gray paint, a color vague and ephemeral. Gestures are minimal, his mind focused, and the resulting image is sort of a solid gray flat cup-shape, basically square but tapering slightly at the bottom. Through the process, the shape depicted is at once minimal and perfectly executed, yet because the image is not centered on the canvas; all the more does its painted shape call to its own presence. Although gray, there is a darkening on one side of the shape, grayness expressing its own depth and hollowness. The image is simple and precisely conveyed, as though the artist executed with absolute concentration a lithe gesture this moment in time and presence in space.

Relatum – Silence, 2008: a tall steel structure rises from the floor yet leans for support on the wall behind it. Steel, flat rectangle twelve feet high. Away from it stands a rock two feet high, found and placed there from nature, yet seeming at its head to incline toward the height of its blank, industrial formed distant brother. The wall holds the steel’s shadow, dark and solid at its host but only a nightly wisp of material in itself. The light, however, upon the rock casts a number of soft, inter- and overlapping shadows of its own. Shadows both cast by the light and the soft intermingling, as though ripples easing toward the steel. The steel’s industrial use intends its geometric, stable, forceful rectangle shape, yet removed from its industrial context, lending instead its presence to this aesthetic, “useless” encounter with its organic original self—again, the rock quarried to give the steel slab its mineral body and blood, indeed its very existence.
Funny story: the artist, who was then shuttling between Japan and France, was doing an exhibition in Paris. For some installments, he went searching for a particular kind of rocks he had in mind. Walked the city parks, and couldn’t find any. He became discouraged, then came upon piles of just these needed rocks. He used a wheelbarrow to haul rocks to the exhibition space. That afternoon he discovered outside the police, who wanted to speak to him. He needed to return the rocks immediately, as they were part of a Japanese garden. Ufan pleaded, and, as they were French, the police agreed that he could return them after the show. Ironic that he found in Paris the rocks he needed, in a garden whose cultural design he was ignorant of, but so close to his home.

Drifting Back to the Ocean

As far back as I can remember, and long into my early 20s, my family and I would spend three weeks of summer in Newport Beach, about an hour below Los Angeles, with my grandparents who lived right on the ocean. Since the early 1950s my grandparents had lived there; we have a photograph, unbelievable in its sparseness, taken from a Cessna of the Pacific coastline supporting only a few scattered houses, modestly built, a small road behind, iceplant-studded sand dunes rolling to a narrow railroad track, and an empty Pacific Coast highway in the background. My father would rouse us at three in the morning, we’d pack and pile into the Buick, and drive the eight hours from Sacramento down old highway 99 to arrive as my grandmother was clearing the lunch dishes. Newport Beach is one of the wealthiest enclaves in Southern California, but I didn’t know it then, too young to practice the arts of envy and disdain used to fashion my ego in college; indeed, the affluence that lined the beachfront and spread thinner and thinner further inland seemed sun-bleached and ephemeral, suburban and charmless. The ocean was real because it whispered and shouted and roared and pulsed and heaved and drenched the briny wind, hurled towering waves that cracked and curled and charged frothy and white like galaxies. And there were bikinis with tanned young women inside. I know now why I can’t leave the ocean, why I return to its razor horizon in imagination and dream and whenever I can get the time. The ocean drew me in like the vast reaches of the universe, silent, infinite, containing all the heavens and me—and I still wonder how and why. And the long summer days and nights beside her established finally that I was not and would never be one of the cool teens, and there was no getting around that.
Early memories on the seashore were of creation and discovery. Refortifying moist, ever melting sandcastle bulwarks against charging waves, finally watching with a mix of amusement and disappointment as a fierce swell overleaps and floods our poor residences, shanties mostly, to refortify again, a task hopeless and endless and therefore ready for renewal. Or we dug tremendous moats around as a first defense. But the seriousness of play was in the building, the creative act. Discovery became both motive and end. Worlds in tidepools, delicate and perfect communities replenished moment to moment with tidal splash; the froosh and hiss and hump of waves heaving under the black rock jetty; the racket and crowds of gulls surrounding my attempts to feed them dry bread.
Alternatively, we’d just dig holes, scooping out handful after soft, wet handful, piling up landfill, digging seemingly for the sake of the hole itself (Zen without the awareness). At the water’s edge we’d dig up meager sandcrabs that squirmed, scurried and burrowed in our palms, wriggled free with the dripping sand to reburrow until another generation wandered to the wave’s retreat. We buried each other in the sand, feeling soft warmth and pressure. These symbolic associations with the grave, digging holes, burial, I’m sure are coincidental, yet unsettling nevertheless.
Reflecting on why we are here—standing at the ocean’s edge as a metaphor for anchored down on a planet hurling through cold black space—occupied my thoughts only later in life, probably when I began having a somewhat regularly fulfilled sex life. Prior to that, I fumbled from one infatuation to another, hoping to be if not loved, then noticed. Handsome enough I suppose I was, as early photographs of my father in uniform offer favorable precedent, and photographs of my mother in her 20s show her to be quite beautiful, so the chemistry was there. I remember my father introducing his two very young sons to a Catholic priest at a local parish in Anaheim. The priest, Midwestern-seeming and balding, shook our hands heartily and bellowed, “Well, what two handsome young men!” He said it for my father’s approval, but I considered this a generous compliment. Coming from a priest, I reasoned, there must be some truth to it. But if pretty girls were not lavishing attention on me as they certainly did in my fantasies, endorsements from priests were worthless. Being conventionally handsome simply meant you don’t stand out in a crowd as a disfigured freak. It also means plain.
Southern California’s beaches have a well-deserved rarefied air of the shapely and beautiful. The supple, tanned skin of teenage girls, warmed from a day in the sun, glowed, radiated a honeyed aura as they lounged and laughed on their towels. They were my first experience with the ethereal nature of beauty, what rises from the world, passes through the world, yet remains indefinable. How to approach them, talk to them, for godsakes make friends with them (forget anything even remotely sexual; you may as well have asked me to fathom Space-Time), was daunting and mysterious. Yet for all that of course I was deliriously attracted to them. Advice from all sides would be as reasonable and empty as a truism: “You just go up to them and say hello,” as though the power of the priest’s conviction and my unexceptional but respectable enough ancestry should puff my chest and sparkle my delivery. Reader, you know what I’m talking about. I only honed my humble talent and acquired the wisdom when I couldn’t use and didn’t need them anymore. The way it goes, I guess.
I was content enough, at times, simply to look at these sunning maidens. But who actually met them, chatted them up, even (so I imagined) touched them? The surfers. Southern California surfers at that. Behold them, sitting on their boards, rising and falling with the swells, flashes of sunlight flickering on the water around them like paparazzi, waiting patiently as gods with their eyes resting on the shimmering horizon for the coming set. You couldn’t get up early enough to catch the ocean without them (I tried once). You lost sight of them as night finally flooded the waves, leaving only the muffled sound of heavy crashing. They were serious in their passion, but reserved. They spoke little, and not very often. They drifted in and drifted out like the tides they monitored. They were self-contained, necessary and sufficient, and that was their victory. I used to love to bodysurf and boogieboard—still do—but when I joined a pack of surfers they always regarded my presence with cordial yet guarded territorial suspicion, as noblemen must when an affable peasant strolls through the palace courtyard. Besides their inevitable bronze color they had the physique which these sunny maidens admired: shoulders and chests pumped with years of powering their boards under, in, over, and through waves, and a tanned physique, not the reptilian sheen of bodybuilders. Once more, their brawn didn’t look as if they worked at building muscle (more to their credit, you see, modest saints). They didn’t know what combs are used for, and their hair was always perfect. Reader, have you ever seen an unattractive surfer? Neither have I.
We couldn’t afford surfboards, and it wasn’t worth buying one just to use a few weeks in summer. I was also a little afraid of learning, faced with the failure that accompanies new endeavors. So I bodysurfed. Then my parents purchased boogieboards and swimfins for my brother and me, and my great love for the ocean began in earnest. In the ocean, within its cold, mineral, dark emerald fold, I felt borne up by forces greater than myself. Swimming, I was allowed buoyant play. I was also given moments of aesthetic joy: floating nearly alone in blue twilight waiting for waves, the orange sunset skimming the water to my right, moonlight whitening the water to my left; floating nearly alone during a light gray rain, the ocean turning jade green and soft as glass. In the ocean I encountered the wild. From my grandparent’s balcony one New Year’s morning I spied to the south a pod of porpoise trawling just beyond the wave break. I hustled on my wetsuit, grabbed my fins, and charged into the water. I swam hard, looking up to catch their distance, dug in and swam, then paused way out to find eight or ten large shiny dark gray beautiful porpoise gliding by on either side of me. As they rose and glided, their black eyes regarded me, and I trembled.
But after the night closed the swimming and tanning, there wasn’t much else to do after dinner, which was early and then lengthened with bottles of wine and conversation, which we wanted no part of. So my brother and I would launch our skateboards, rolling down the cement strand fronting beachhouse rentals crunched side by side all the way to the Balboa Pier a few miles south. Destination was the Balboa arcade, where hundreds of sun drenched youths gathered and wandered, see and were seen, flirt or fail, and hoof the long skate home. Those Newport summer nights at the arcade was the ever-recurring home to connect, and we’d remain ever vigilant to maintain cool as bevy after bevy of California girls drifted by (it occurs to me that my brother, three years younger, always did pretty well with women, and perhaps he may have had better success then without me tagging along, but whatever). I remember a few summers going where every single dude wore Izod shirts sporting the little green alligator. You swear you looked the coolest with yours, unique. One night we skateboarded down the promenade, met up with three other skaters, befriended a few more, more joined, until we reached the pier, a sunburned horde skidding to a stop. One of the guys, probably the oldest, took stock. “Okay,” he said, looking down the row of us sitting on a cement wall rounding the parking lot, “let’s see, we have to get pussy for one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen guys. I mean sixteen,” pointing to himself. We all forged on, our number whittling down as night dragged on. We scattered. Walked up and down and around. Attempted at eye contact with the lovelies. But Southern California girls just sailed by like nymphs, or sirens who, far from drawing you to the rocks, pay you no attention at all.
At one point my brother and I veered away, heading home, then paused, entertained by a water balloon fight. Up on a rental’s second floor balcony were three teenage girls still in bikinis. Besides a few balloons, they’d employed a hose to jet water over the strand and onto the sand, and plastic buckets. Down below on the beach were four guys, three well built and good-looking, shirtless, and one who was a little pudgy around the waist, but probably came in handy because he had a car and could drive the others around. The boys dashed between rentals to refill balloons to the size of small pigs. The girls whipped the hose around to fire in every direction. Civilian passersby would either duck and rush through, or give wide berth outside of the hose’s range. I noticed the pudgy kid duck with a full balloon behind a large trash can at the edge of the cement, peering around for his chance. But suddenly the strategy changed: evidently one of the boys found a door unlocked, and all three rushed up the stairs and ambushed the girls, pelting them on the balcony as they screamed. One of the boys grabbed the hose, cut the supply, and their battle was won. Gallant in victory, the boys found towels to wipe down the maidens, who accepted graciously. I don’t know if the boys knew the girls before, but they were in, and the night was still young. As they all stood on the balcony, the forgotten pudgy fourth one, outside and unpaired, emerged, hiding his filled balloon behind his back. This was his moment. Attention was on him. He wanted the game. But as he took another step, the others high on the balcony in unison waved him off, shouted discouragements—the game was, after all, finished—and at that point I saw him gently but firmly begin squeezing his balloon, tighter and tighter, until it burst and soaked into his shorts. The others didn’t know it, though. So with the attention riveted on him, he made a faltering show of throwing the flabby balloon. The balcony gasped, but the torn piece just floated, then dropped. The others immediately turned to drying off and getting along. The pudgy one remained alone, for he wasn’t invited up. Casting for sympathy, he turned to my brother and me, witnesses. But we turned away and rode off into the night, tired ankles angling us home to sleep with the soft ocean crowarsh and the wind feathering the salt-rusted window screen.

Angels in America

Within our midst, ever cheerful, is the American saint. Not the soft-voiced shuffling monks and nuns residing in isolated valleys and snowy caverns and hushed high rock. She whirls quickly past you, carafes of coffee sailing and sloshing over your head. Diminutive in size, but a commanding presence, she is ever attentive. You know her hairdo, timeless. Mention of her can be found in fragments from the Biblical era to the Bible-belt. Depending on the climates of translation, she is variously known as "Waitress of the American Diner" but you know her by Flo, or in our case here in Atlanta, Rhia. We've been in Georgia a few days for an International schools job fair, and found The White House diner, the real deal, unflashy, been here 60 years and hasn't changed a day. Why is Rhia and her bevy anointed with sainthood? For the simple but essential act: she's there with coffee refills before you have to flag a skinny airhead down to ask. Rhia was born at 55 years old and has remained and will remain to please and accommodate and call you "sweetie" long after you and I settle in soil and mingle with leaves and gnarled plums for a worm's banquet. Photos of presidents lined the walls of this venerable diner. After we sat down and immediately had coffee served, I lunged from the booth to find us a newspaper. A southern trucker with the Saturday edition piled on his table spied me searching. "Looking for a newspaper?" Scanning inside and out, I said yes. "You can have this one." You sure? "Yeah I'm done with it. Let me just check my horoscope..."

Blurbs O Burbs - Unexpected Exotic Travel!

The making of coffee in the early morning is a ritual for ordering your world. Sleep is Chaos: dreams and nightmares swoop down into our souls we know not whence (frighteningly, those nocturnal imaginings our fevered minds create, but the reason why that new guy in Payroll was flying over the backyard silver maple as your Junior High science teacher looks on, while you pile a wall of bricks around your ex-wife’s wedding dress simply escapes you). When we wake crawling into consciousness we immediately desire to reestablish control. I relish all the measured steps to build that first cup: grinding fresh beans into fine powder, the spit, hiss, and gurgle of brewing, and the machine’s final steaming exhaling to signal coffee is ready. You know, traveling to exotic places is worth writing about. But sometimes those places aren’t traditionally exotic. At present, sleep’s fantasia has evaporated, and I am sitting in a comfortable porch bench in a gated community called Rancho Murieta in the Sierra foothills of California, having arrived the day before to visit my brother and wife and two nephews. Some quiet reading time before the nephews stir (“Uncle Tim, you want to play catch with these darts?”) in the carefully tended neighborhood before the terrible heat of the day. Brother and family live on a cul de sac, and it’s not unpleasant sitting here, but I know if I lived here I would surely die. It occurs to me that the garish realism of Desperate Housewives and The Truman Show is less digital effects than documentary: my god, look at this place. Every trim and trimming is planned to adhere to a model of what a perfect neighborhood should look like. Each address is a small isolated complete minor kingdom, the homeowners strung together with shared understanding of the need to upkeep one’s own province while respecting the sovereignty of other kingdoms. From my vantage on the porch (and I must say on every visit I’ve never seen anyone else ever sitting on their porches) I’m pleased to see great oaks towering into the pale blue that the community planners blessedly allowed to remain, and the homes built around them. Beyond that small grace, the unruly spread of original wild nature is checked, and instead the august spirit of perfectibility that sustains the dream of the suburbs reigns—or I guess this is technically the exburbs, and I suppose what differentiates the original town from the frontier’s outlaying exburbs is the degree to which a center does or does not exist, a localized gathering area where all citizens come together (creatively, economically, politically, socially). I think my kingdom metaphor is not misplaced: nothing escapes royal attention to order. Like palace grounds, lawns are sculpted, carefully edged. Gardens are designed to rise and fall and flow as though natural, but instead appear obsessively tended. But I’ve never seen anyone gardening. The color you paint your house is ordered from a narrow spectrum, grays, beiges, milky salmons, ash blues. Ironically, though a kingdom in your own right, you are not to stand out. Conformity is the rule (and here’s the weirdest observation: every golf cart that hums by in this community is driven by guys that look dead-on like my brother, or my brother looks like them: it’s the stocky build, the close-cropped hair, the blank face of driving, the golf shirt, the sporty baseball hat…everyone the same)(and don’t get me started on the shiny muscle trucks these guys parade around in: the Dodge Rams, the Ford 1500s or whatever, you ride around on your bike and every other driveway has a behemoth stretching to the sidewalk, because, yeah, they need a huge truck to haul a carton of milk four blocks away, or they need to make sure we use up the available fossil fuels as quickly and inefficiently as possible, thereby ushering in all the quicker the Armageddon I suppose in their born-again hearts they thirst for). I don’t know this, but it wouldn’t surprise me if lawns were required, as model neighborhoods advertise them (irrelevant that they are unnatural, water-intensive, and require fertilizers which drain off into the environment). You couldn’t grow high stalks of corn in your front yard, say. And front yards are not given to use, it seems. These are family homes designed for Family in the strict cultural and politically specific sense of the term, but I rarely see actual families on their lawns. Growing up in the suburbs of Sacramento, on a summer morning like this with school out, we’d be outside running around, tossing footballs around, scrimmaging, over one lawn and across another. I look around: where are the children and their wild imaginations? We created great assemblies of adventures on summer mornings and evenings, but it seems these yards are for presentation, not play. And this sprawling rosemary bush to my left: does anyone clip a few stems to season their own tomato sauce? Not if Costco has a 25-lb. of dried rosemary on sale (it’s out in the garage on the shelf below the gallon jug on Mama Walmart’s “Homemade” tomato sauce). But wait! My quiet is disturbed: across the street a king has emerged. He’s wearing gray shorts, white socks, sandals, a T-shirt culturally referred to as “wife-beater”, and he is pushing a lawnmower. The grass seems to have grown overnight, and his Highness has come to quell the rebellion before the unrest spreads. I notice, as the mowing commences, that the homeowner chooses the outside-borders-first style, rather than the consecutive straight rows style. Halfway through his lawn, he turns off the engine to empty the trimmings. Just then I hear someone scream inside a house down the block. But like birds startled make for the sky then immediately float gently back down, the neighborhood returns to ordered silence. What goes on within each kingdom is the king’s business. Mowing accomplished, all is quiet, and I return to reading. Suddenly, a voice! The king speaks! He says good morning to his neighbor who has emerged. What ensues is the perfunctory exchange we all carry on. First, the weather is noted, and the king says he wanted to get the yard done before it got too hot. “Yes,” the other king replies, “the days are getting just too hot.” “Well, it’s all about enjoying life,” retorts the first king (I have to pause, but I guess he means enjoying life after work is done). “Oh yeah,” says the second king, “you gotta enjoy life." "What are your plans for the Fourth?” “Oh, you know, we’ll walk down to the parade (walk? Not drive his Dodge Ram the torturous three blocks?), then there’s a barbeque, then you know, we’ll have some friends over and then, yeah, we’ll go see the fireworks." “Hey that’s great,” says first king: “I notice you have a lot of flags in your yard there.” “Oh yeah, you know, it’s patriotic and kind of…fun…you coming to the barbeque?” (Here the first king pats his round belly) “Well, too much eating!” (In his defense, the second king pats his own belly, though he looks pretty fit) “Hey, none of us need to eat more!” (It’s worth noting here that through this whole exchange neither king has moved any closer to the other. Banal formalities occur across distant lawns, and not even kings would dare tread upon their own lawns let alone trespass on another’s) First king brings up the block party, says he might drop by for a drink. The second king pauses, then with mild enthusiasm encourages, “Oh yeah, come by for a drink, there’s gonna be LOTS of food” (Was the first king only formally included in the invitations? Was he not expected to show?). The first king acknowledges the abundance of food, pats his belly to demure. Sitting here, I’m getting uncomfortable, for the hot yellow foothills sun has found me, and I’m slowly warming, but I feel locked in place, the foreign observer. A column has blocked my whereabouts, and my presence if noticed might alarm them. Conversation is winding down. As we all experience, these exchanges have no natural end. Limping from one generalization to the other, finally someone offers a “Well, don’t work too hard!” which receives the easy forced laugh and the “Oh, I won’t!” The ceremony is now officially finished, and the kings withdraw. “Have a good day, Louis,” the second king offers. Louis! How perfect is that?

A Memory of Sri Lanka

A rambling rocky train ride to Hikkaduwa, Sri Lanka, a week before Christmas 2009, passing shanties tottering amidst ruins left by the 2004 tsunami, remnants of prior ruins, it seems, foundations of earlier shanties whose residents either moved on or were swept inland on great foaming currents. Same dogs, different day. Embarrassing to scratch prose while children fumble in the earth. 

Perfumed paradise is Sri Lanka’s beach resort, a gem glittering in dust shadowing the breath and laughter of poverty. Shacks nestled against one another, spilling into rain blue Indian Ocean. Our hotel smiles upon the beach: delicately arranged deck chairs, tables of flowers, white tablecloth. Sea winds dance. A thin, hatted dark man approaches shouldering a baby monkey. The narrow leash whips as monkey leaps and scales the nearest wide-eyed blinking tourist. Jumps shoulder to shoulder, scurries around your neck, amused and kindly nibbling your flesh with tiny rubbery teeth, harmless. The man asks to pause for a photo shoot. “It’s my job, sir” he pleads as you demure, withdrawing your eyes. 

Looking over the railing, I watch a man and woman lying on their stomachs on the sand, propped up on their elbows, murmuring to one another as the gentle ocean ascends their legs, then shyly retreats. From the woman’s tanned neck dangles a crucifix. With little effort my eyes drift over her shoulder to alight on her magnificently sculpted posterior, bikinied. I shift in my chair, then consider again the couple: they wile away the time like children in quiet tropical bliss, how reduced are our intentions. Vacations gild long empty hours, fulfillment attained just snuggling on coastline. If the breeze sweeping off the ocean is cool, you slowly bake until brown. If the winds cease, you overheat. The equilibrium is upset: you rise and dunk your body in the water…. 

Travel is strange. It’s imagined and anticipated to be stopping daily grind, stepping into a wondrously alternate universe. Familiar patterns are suspended midlife, and the journey begins: the world alights with magic. Contours are tinged with starry glow. You can cross through a large bustling city like Columbo clogged with traffic, dulled commuters, sneering shopkeepers, beggars’ outstretched dirty palms, but in your born again glee the city bursts with vibrancy. Your unforgettable experience is their daily grind. But travel isn’t passive: you have to do things and see things and pay money to visit things to insure your experience is meaningful, and the more exotic, the more memorable. To completely fulfill your travels you must experience anything and everything a city has to offer, you think. 

These words originally were penned in a notebook at six in the evening at an open window of our hotel in the village of Kegalla adjacent to the Pinnawela Elephant Orphanage. Carrie naps behind me. Directly below my window drifts a shallow brown river. Boulders span its width like submerged mountain ranges, gentle rapids swirling around them. The opposite bank is peopled with coconut palms, banana trees, mounds of thick lush grasses. Running dark green hills beyond are heavy with trees and darken as the sun quietly sails west across a damp sky. I move to our balcony where earlier in the day a gentle stampede of elephants rolled through the narrow street by our hotel. Crowds had gathered at the restaurant porch above where packs waddle into the river from the orphanage at the other end of the village. We had leaned over the railing and watched them saunter into the currents, and with lumbering grace the elephants submerge in the cool waters. Initially, the herds tightened, stand knee deep milling around. Their rhythms are measured like puffed astronauts strolling the moon. Then they relax, flap their ears gingerly, contentedly. 

At one point a small contingent of elephants, after deliberating a few minutes, breaks off and ventures toward the far steep muddy bank. Murmurs of concern rumble through the remaining herd, a mix of censure and admiration for these renegades. The breakaways rush the far shore with the spirit of Luther with hammer in hand. Ashore, each finds loose dirt to scoop up and spray the sky like orange rain, or they just plop and roll gloriously in muck. They’ve returned to the wild, coated in war-paint, and the rest of the herd knows it. A complete breakdown of order ensues: new converts, trumpets blowing, storm across. The original rebels parade victoriously across the far shore in shades of rich golden mother earth. Ears flap happily the same way I imagine the ears of Crusaders did returning from Jerusalem. But the second and third fronts go beyond: they’re up there rustling the tall grasses and carrying out surveys of jungle terrain. Most of the original herd has joined the new congregation, and only a few old stalwarts carry on the old faith by remaining in a deeper pool and shower and bathe. I glance down the river. A woman wading near shore slaps her laundry on boulders. One family of elephants, including a very small one, after finishing necessary explorations, make for the river. The rest of the family bounce down from the high bank through a gully cut out of the side. But the young one missed the exit. He frets back and forth along the high bank. Most of us closely follow the developing story, cautiously sipping our beer. The young one runs wildly, he can’t get down. Concerned, an older midsized elephant trots toward the high bank, catches the young one’s attention, then with a signal head nod sprints back toward the river, glancing back to see if the young one took the hint. The young one begins to worry, and so do we. He keeps rushing back and forth. So the older one again goes through the same ritual, head nod, jump turn and race for the river. Finally, the young one finds the gully, and rushes to join his family. Cheers erupt all around. 

As the afternoon wanes the handlers call out to the community to return home. Pleas are ignored. One large bull elephant is on the other side committed to ripping bark samples from a banana tree. Finally, resigned, the families begin booming up the path as we wave a fond farewell…. 

As I said, travel is strange. There’s something both welcome and troubling when the afternoon winds down, as these words are penned. You may or may not have slept well, may or may not have drank festively the night before, and so the giddy energy of coffee and new adventures pumped into your recovery starts to slump. Nap beckons. One thought is that this downtime is wasted; travel’s exotic spell dissolves under a dull grinding sun, but you aren’t doing anything, and you’re supposed to be (paying for) doing something. Nevertheless, if you nap, seeping into your rest is the gnawing suspicion that you’re not getting your money’s worth. You leap off the bed, grab the Lonely Planet, determined to find something to do which you wouldn’t ordinarily do back home, however mundane. So a crowded, muggy, smelly 40-minute bus ride later you’re buying a guided tour through a factory for handcrafted shoelaces made from dried coconut palms.... 

Isn’t it odd getting to a town, dropping your bags at the hotel, then wandering toward the center of whatever it is you expect to experience in the town? Like the “essence” of a city, for instance. Walking and walking believing that at some magical moment a flash of memorable experience will seal your commitment, time, and money’s worth. You head for the main square, say, and the beautiful architecture and cathedrals and outside café tables and people ring your soul’s bell. But still, it’s never the essence, whatever that may mean. I suppose it’s like walking into the center of a forest. After walking in awhile, you begin walking out the other side. Life is like this. I suppose death and the afterlife are too. Back on the river in Sri Lanka, standing at the railing with glasses of wine in hand, Carrie and I welcome the soft warm evening. There’s something strange upriver. We peer and wait. Thousands of dark large bats are fording the river. They spread across the twilight sky and swoop over our hotel for a solid fifteen minutes, silently. Cut out of night's black veil, they quietly sing the end of day. And the desert blue stars blink, recording their song.

Toilet Bowl Blues - Leaving Sri Lanka

Is there a respectable way to solve the horrific problem of a backed-up toilet in a hotel room? Last few hours in Colombo, frenetic and dreary capital of Sri Lanka, tail end of Christmas holiday. My wife, Carrie, was—newsflash—shopping. We chose as our last night in Sri Lanka the Gulle Face Hotel (re the name: don’t ask—I have no idea), which is a square U-shaped old hotel opened onto the Indian Ocean. Dark wood interiors, 19th century colonial detailed exterior painted proudly British white. Everybody’d stayed here, illustrious guests’ names inscribed on a plaque in the lobby—that kind of place. I remained during the morning at the hotel, preferring to read and sit in the shade and listen to the gentle Indian surf. But of course before relaxation gets underway one must relax the tension in one’s bowels: morning achievements, shall we say. I’d finished, folded up my New Yorker, flushed and…the gurgle and filling, the swirling and chilling. My question: is there any respectable way of dealing with this in a hotel? Meaning of course your backed up toilet in your room. What you first must establish at all costs in your own mind and also the world’s is that the back up is absolutely not your fault. You give to the toilet, the toilet receives and spirits away. But once in a while that reciprocal agreement is broken. Enthroned, you fulfill your end, so to speak, often exceeding expectations, wipe clean, flush and rise (or visa versa). But instead of sucking and swirling down, the terrible waters rise, wayward contents nudge each other lethargically, the waters continue rising to floodstage, the murky currents anticipating a joyful overflowing as they glimpse the bowl’s rim and break into song at only sky beyond, while you and any other mortal and even the very gods could only gaze on helplessly while holding your pants at the swirling happy waters hoping to rage onto the tile. If that strumpet Fortune kindly glances your way at that moment, the waters cease their rise; the murky swirling slows thank goodness but remains at floodstage. As you’re left wincing, biting your lip, you hear the toilet audaciously refilling itself to await the next appointment. And you realize you’re on your own now. The toilet actually believes it’s fulfilled its obligation and turns away unsmiling like your flight attendance at a hotel bar whom you begin chatting up because she seemed so nice on the flight over. Besides being alone, so very alone, you’re stuck: you don’t dare flush again, for the toilet possesses now twice normal capacity, though best of Irish luck getting the toilet to acknowledge this, let alone remedy the critical imbalance; let’s not mince words: the toilet doesn’t give a rat’s arse. So, there isn’t a plunger in the room, unfortunately. The gallant hotel staff is paid to serve you, cater to your whims, redress the tiniest grievance. But you do not want the hotel staff to fix this. You do not want the hotel staff to help. You do not want the staff or anyone else on the planet to know. Why? Because the floating shit, the drowned toilet paper, the fetid flotsam and jetsam of the morning and night before all reflect somehow on you. Inexplicably, it just does. Like a great artist his epic mural, you made this shit. A sudden vision of Hell crosses your mind: you need to remove the apocalyptic logs. But how? In the name of all that pukes and writhes, how? Quickly you realize the action would only compound the problem, and create dreadfully new ones. If you had committed any other heinous act in your hotel room, you wouldn’t hesitate to alert the hotel staff. Perhaps you very deliberately sailed an empty champagne bottle through your beautiful glass window overlooking a Spring meadow dancing with wildflowers: No problem, sir, we will replace the window and the champagne…will a 1998 Brut suffice? You may have slept with one of the bridesmaids at a co-workers wedding, and the next morning she’s dead: No problem sir, we will take care of the body. Ah, tis a pity when such a lovely young girl dies, isn’t it? But leave shit floating in your toilet and have the staff discover it? I shudder to think. I deliberated in my hotel room 105 (see, this “you” wasn’t hypothetical) whether to be present after I’d called the front desk and explained the dire situation. Instead, I decided to flee to the anonymity of the poolside lounge, floppy safari hat lowered over my face, reading until the coast was clear, hoping the staff never pasted a room number to a face. If I had remained in the room, I imagined the worst: the lowly cleaning guy would peer into the flooded bathroom, flinched, then slowly turn to fix a disgusted stare: “My god man [sneering with horror and pity]. You were so kind to when I greeted you in the hallway yesterday evening. You looked me in the eye, and I felt in your gaze acknowledgment of our common humanity. My heart swelled, and I was uplifted. And now…this. How could you…” He turns away embittered, bewildered. My imagination then flew to the front desk. Word would have reached the entire staff. We go through a cold ceremony of paying the bill in silence. The manager—someone tipped her off that “he” was checking out—would then flatly announce that, speaking for the entire hotel industry and all of Sri Lanka, I am no longer welcome. I then lose it. “But it was your toilet!” Unmoved, her growl measured and severe, “But it was your shit!” As though hit with mallet, I’d stumble a few steps back, turn and flee before the first tear quivers on eyelid. Yeah well nothing like that happened. I should hasten to add that when I did return after a few hours the problem was not solved; in fact, the bathroom floor was flooded! Detritus, toilet paper, a fetid film of water spreading. And perched dead, legs in the air, on the back rim of the toilet, was a cockroach. At first I wasn’t surprised. I mean, it’s like going to see an Elton John concert: with the lightshow and music and stage antics, you’re also paying for the tacky Dr. Seuss glasses. So there’s the cockroach. And I realized that earlier when I’d been sitting there calmly reading, I’d felt a tickling in my undergroin, and my initial response was that I was leaking somehow. I looked down and saw nothing, realizing, well, of course you’re not leaking. Now I know the tickling was the fated cockroach scaling the varied cliffs to escape. Ironically, the flood propelled him up, up, up and away. And now he lay, perished, upon the rim of the bowl, free at last.

Hiking Czech Republic Again

If in a fit of youthful enthusiasm you decide to backpack for three days straight, have a spa town at the end of the trail. This wasn’t quite how it worked out for us in the Czech Republic last summer, but we managed to find Marianske Lazne in West Bohemia eventually. When we awoke that morning in that small town on the Vltata River (where the last blog paused), we were southeast of Prague by about forty or fifty miles, having taken a train to Revnice and then hiked the day. Over beers the previous night (not those bunch of beers, another bunch of beers earlier in the evening) we’d spread our Czech map on the table and sort of traced a route. Oh how romance and idealism takes over when you’re gazing comfortably at a map. A finger glides easily upon the glossy surface: “Okay, we can hike down to here, cut over that range [!?] then head down to there for the first night…” “Yes, and from there we can just kind of swing east over to here [!!??] and stay the night near that river…” You would think we were generals sending our forces across Afghanistan for a spring offensive. A finger swoop across the map covered eight to ten inches. What were we thinking? But for three days we hefted our backpacks and made the journey as far as we could. As mentioned before, the trails spanned the country; some were hiking trails that turned into fire roads that poured into paved streets that dwindled into meadow paths. At the end of each day our feet really hurt, and progressively so such that after the third day we knew we didn’t have it in us to—oh, I don’t know—hike across the entire damn country! But flashing in memory are snapshots: a wheat field billowing lightly as the late afternoon sun fans the shadows, a small village tucked into a distant mountain; peering down from a cliff onto another village set against a forest; narrow country roads through apple and pear orchards; undulating hills across the landscape wherever we traveled; stopping along a fire road to pick plump blackberries; and the deep, profound delight taken at the sweaty finish on a patio at a beer garden, the crisp Czech pilsners like frosty nectar. Man, we worked for those beers. But it felt good knowing we could carry what we needed on our backs and hike a long sometimes burning hot day. Flowers danced in grasses all along the way. But it was at Novy Knin that we realized the end: through forest, meadow, crossing streams, orchards, villages, roads, trails, that our feet needed a long rest. But we realized from this small village there were no direct or even indirect trains to our destination. Eyes lowered in shame, we took a bus back to Prague to catch a train to the spa town of Marianske Lazne. This beautiful town is set in the Slavkov Forest in a protected region, and runs a long valley between mountains. Architecture boasts neoclassical and Art Nouveau and the buildings form an elegant horseshoe with lush parkland in its heart. There are thirty-nine springs, and you can shove your Nalgene in a fountain and fill up. We spent three days recovering, lounging, feasting, and we may have sipped more beer. The highlight was a two to three hour visit to a grand hotel spa. We paid fifteen dollars for hours of sauna, mineral spring floating in a beautifully blue tiled pool, clear cold mineral water waterfall splashes, warm mineral foot baths, around and around again. Love the body, and it will return your love. … We stayed the nights at a lovely hotel with views of rooftops of the town. Before we leave West Bohemia, a diversion: come with me for breakfast that first morning in Marianske Lazne. The hotel breakfast experience. That hesitant, slightly uncomfortably self-conscious way we shuffle into breakfasts at hotels or, God help us all, B&Bs. We drift into the banquet-square rooms like the infirm or mildly retarded. It’s not our kitchen. We don’t know where anything is. We are blindly fumbling for the handholds of their routine, the ones who run the establishment. And the infernal deliberations forced upon you before coffee: do I make eye contact with other fellow travelers? Do we nod at each other acknowledging our shared fate? “So, you slept here too?” I actually enjoy the B&B experience, as I fancy I’m indulging in the illusion of free breakfasts, and the food is usually plentiful and good. You’re not sentenced to the evil “Continental Breakfasts” of cellophane cardboard pastry and watery coffee. Regardless, the hotel breakfast is a dance you’re expected to know but you’ve forgotten the music. You try your best to move naturally, gracefully, conscious that the guy behind you wants to dig into the vat of scrambled eggs and you’re standing in front of it transfixed because you can’t choose between the little sausages and the undercooked bacon in the vats to your right. Everyone at a hotel breakfast eyes everyone else suspiciously. We all transgress on everyone else’s private morning routine (I mean, come on, think how you act around your spouse, and it’s just you two; the hotel breakfast experience is thirty people crammed into tables in your dining room). When you finally get your plate piled high with food, curtains close around you, and you’re blessedly alone. But getting there is slightly nerve-wracking. At any eatery, it’s best to waltz in with friends or loved ones simply mired in scintillating conversation, the kind where the person following the hostess to the table is throwing her lively and pointed remarks over her shoulder. The vibe you and your friends emit is one brimming with life; you are deigning to divert the stream of your erudite and witty moving salon into this chosen eatery, so, waiter, make it snappy, make it good. Of course, you are ever gracious with the wait staff, for you and company are neither above nor beneath them. But when the sultry university student pirouettes at your table with pen at the ready, nightly specials bubbling from her lips, you are not sitting there with your backs against the chairs looking wide-eyed at your place settings with blank smile awaiting the restaurant’s blessedness to wash over you. No. Each of you is leaning chest into the table nearly all talking at once, your conversation so germane to whatever cultural beast is currently spreading its wings downtown that week. This is, yes, next to impossible to achieve at a hotel breakfast. But if the hotel knows its game, it will provide your table with a thermos or silver carafe full of hot coffee. No dull-faced staff is going to want to return to your table seventeen times to refill your stumpy white coffee mug: just set the whole pot down, sweetie. I know people who despise the B&B experience: too much intimacy in too small a space with strange people too early in the morning. But I’ve elicited wondrous tips and travel insights from folks munching at adjoining tables. B&B patrons do seem a cut above the rest. They’re not weird. After a few hot slugs of coffee, spirit brightening, you might find yourself turning to the young couple at the next table and singing “So, where’re you folks from?”
From spa town Marianske Lazne we headed south to the Sumava Forest for a backpacking experience. It wasn’t really to be. As mentioned, I don’t think Czechs backpack as much as drive to a spot, set up camp, and start drinking. Furthermore, there really is no wilderness per se in the the border with Germany, and during the Communist era was off-limits; you could and people did get shot trying to flee across borders. So much of this corner is relatively untouched. Long inclines through dark and sunlight dappled woods, across grasses to come upon sloping countryside sprinkled with wildflowers—look in the distance and see thick forests running up hills. The most beautiful trails were trod were grassy ones: natural, gentle, animal and human feet seemed to tread with care. At the end of the day we always found ourselves searching for that auto-camp on the map; it always seemed right outside of town—and it was, by car. But after a day of hiking three kilometers is a brutal push. “Have we gone three kilometers? We must have by now.” “This sucks. Do you realize we’re the only backpackers?” “Where the hell is it?” “Let’s just go back to town and get a beer.” “I want to put this crap down first, I’m tired.” “Is this even the right road?” “Where’s the map?” “I just gave it to you!” “Don’t yell! I was just—“ “I WASN’T YELLING.” “Does that truck see us?” “Wait, what’s that sign say?” “I need a beer.” “It doesn’t say that—ooh, look at that flower.” “No, I’M saying that…” and so on. After a night at the camp outside of a nameless little village, we hiked the asphalt road out to a bus stop, sat at an outside table for lunch, had the waitress take a photo of sweaty us lifting frosty mugs of pilsner with forest and mountains in the background. Next stop, the city of Brno.