In is down, down is front

Move over, Seattle

2009-06-26T21:34:00.004-04:00

This has been one of the wettest Junes in New York City history. It rained twenty out of the first twenty-five days of the month. All those crazy storm clouds do make for some spectacular, otherwordly sunsets. If someone was out and about with an SLR this evening, he could give the Flickr Hivemind a run for its money.

BBG

2009-01-19T17:46:00.005-05:00

It finally warmed up enough for a bit of snow in Brooklyn. (The thermometer on the local grocery store registered -14 degrees Celsius this past week. Brr!) While screaming hordes of sledding children comandeered the Long Meadow at Prospect Park, I went for a much quieter walk in the Botanic Garden next door.Japanese Garden, Brooklyn Botanic GardenCherry Esplanade, Brooklyn Botanic Garden

The Village Petstore and Charcoal Grill

2008-11-15T21:26:00.003-05:00

I'm so glad I got to see this before it closed. (Thanks, Linda!) Banksy, the ubiquitous London street artist, tried his hand at animatronic irony. As he puts it, "New Yorkers don't care about art. They care about pets." The Independent has a better explanation. The Wooster Collective, an excellent blog devoted to street art, described it in October:

While New Yorkers have been consumed by the stock market meltdown, a tiny little pet store quietly opened four days ago at 89 7th Avenue between West 4th and Bleeker Street in the West Village of New York City.

There are no puppies or kittens in the windows here.

Instead, a live leopard lounges on a tree in the window.

Or is it?

In other windows, things get a bit more bizarre.

McDonald's Chicken McNuggets sip barbecue sauce. A rabbit puts on her makeup. A CCTV camera nurtures its young.

Italia

2008-10-17T18:21:00.014-04:00

I took my mother on a tour of Italy for her birthday. We saw so much of the countryside, I think I need a vacation from the vacation. :)An amazing view of the Alps on the plane ride over.The Sistine Chapel isn't the only beautifully painted part of the Vatican.Michelangelo's "Pieta" in St. Peter's Basilica was amazing. The guy was only 24 when he carved it. My photo-montage of the Colosseum. Impressive structure, no?Roman gladiators wandering the grounds.The Trevi Fountain in Rome (as seen in Roman Holiday and Three Coins in the Fountain), largest free standing fountain in Rome.The Isle of Capri, playground for the rich and famous (and home to fashion mavens and movie stars) sure was swanky. Lovely weather though, and perfectly blue water.Pompeii was probably my all time favorite part of the trip. Romans were unbelievably technologically advanced - running water, pedestrian crosswalks, fast food stalls, paved roads, spas, public toilets, sporting arenas... not a far cry from modern life. These were once gladiator barracks.Italians are very serious about their gelato. I tried some rosemary and raspberry gelato in San Gimignano at Pluripremiata Gelataria and it was superb. This year's Italian gelato champion, in fact.

Crash Bang

2008-09-28T09:52:00.002-04:00

At 5:20am I was woken by a huge crash followed by what sounded like a garbage can being knocked over. The noise had actually penetrated my closed window and the air conditioner, so it must have been loud enough to wake up the entire block. When I stuck my head out of the window I realized it had been.

The neighbors up and down the street were wandering out of their apartments in bathrobes and basketball shorts, sneakers untied, some sort of attempt at hair management. It looked like our little anthill had been disturbed, all the people milling around and more exiting their apartments to view the carnage, as seen from my third story vantage.

Directly in front of my building someone had run into a parked SUV so hard the back tire jumped the curb. The force was strong enough to pop the back hatch and the belongings of the poor owner had poured out onto the wet sidewalk. Swirls of the neighbors' conversations came from below

- He was drivin' the wrong way down the street.
- Must've swerved or something.
- Which one your car? This one here?

Someone called the police. The owner, some white kid with long I'm-in-a-heavy-metal-band hair, spent some time picking his stuff off the street. Either he had just moved in or was travelling from somewhere else because leaving that much visible stuff in your car is asking for a break-in. A firetruck arrived.

Say what you will about my neighborhood with its construction cranes and corner liquor stores, abandoned brownstones next to ones renovated for someones real estate portfolio. The people on the block who have been here the longest were the first on the scene. It will be a shame when the gentrification of our street is complete and the little community that watched it go from ghetto to fabulous can no longer afford it. What will happen to the black man with the pocked face, who bought a car and drove from Brooklyn to California back in the 70s? Or the one with the pageboy cap who shuffles religiously up and down the street on his daily constitutionals? Or the one with the dreads who wakes up at 4:30am every day and rides his Honda CBR to Queens for work, hair flying? What about the crack house at the end of the block? (Well, I guess that can go.)

Anyway, that was my morning. It's nice to see a neighborhood acting like a neighborhood - nosy, pushy, helpful, worried, being all of these adjectives as a group, held together only by an address.

9/11

2008-09-11T21:03:00.000-04:00

Blah blah... Freedom Tower... blah blah... Daniel Liebeskind... blah blah... iconic importance... I know that there is a prime chunk of unused real estate in the clogged downtown of Manhattan. Nonetheless I find the memorial of light more symbolic and beautiful than any useful building. Photo by kingfal

Hanna

2008-09-06T17:09:00.001-04:00

Tropical Storm Hanna is dumping all over NYC. What a mess.

Giant's Causeway

2008-08-08T10:22:00.019-04:00

August 8 - Bus tour of the Antrim Coast - Carrickfergus, Carrick-a-Rede, Bushmills, Giant's Causeway

As the day dawned gray and cloudy, Cheryl and I packed up our backpacks, put them in luggage storage, ate a massively filling egg and cheese on soda bread with a sad cup of instant coffee, and boarded a bus for a tour of the Antrim Coast. If we had an extra month I would spend it here. The north coast is ridiculously beautiful and varied, full of glacial valleys and waterfalls, seaside cliffs and ancient ruins.

We first stopped at Carrickfergus Castle just outside Belfast. When John de Courcy and the Anglo-Normans conquered Ulster in the twelfth century, the castle became an important military stronghold. Life-sized plastic figures depict medieval life and provide many opportunities for surreptitious molestation.From there the bus hurtled along the small coastal road toward Carrick-a-Rede. We rode through green fields dotted with sheep, clunky medieval bridges spanning rivers and canals, more castles, and a lough (lake) raised to the highest level our tour guide had ever seen due to the persistent rain. I managed to suffer my first bout of motion sickness exacerbated by the bus’ high center of gravity and the narrow twisty road. Luckily, we arrived at the Carrick-a-Rede rope bridge before things got out of hand and a beautiful day of blue skies and shining sun greeted us for the first time since our arrival.

The rope bridge is included in the tour as a bit of tourist excitement. A sturdy pine and rope bridge hangs thirty meters over open sea, connecting the mainland to a small island once used for salmon fishing. Apparently the original bridge was much more thrilling to walk over as the North Antrim website explains:

Spanning a chasm some eighty feet deep is the famous Carrick-a-Rede rope bridge, its construction once consisted of a single rope hand rail and widely spaced slats which the fishermen would traverse across with salmon caught off the island. The single handrail was subsequently replaced by a two hand railed bridge, the current, caged bridge was installed by the National Trust during Easter of 2000 as a further safety measure. Although no-one has ever been injured falling off the old bridge, there have been many instances of visitors being unable to face the return walk back across the bridge, resulting in them being taken off the island by boat. A collection of old photographs in Sheep Island View Hostel show a local man doing various stunts on the bridge which include riding a bicycle across it and performing handstands on a chair in the middle. Primarily a 'seasonal' working bridge for the fishermen, since the demise of salmon fishing along the coast, the bridge is nowadays more widely used by passing visitor's and marketed as a tourist attraction.

The National Trust now runs a tight ship. There are separate queues for entrance, crossing, and return crossing, controlled by young people in polo shirts with radios. The sea was splendid though and the air filled with wheeling gulls.From Carrick-a-Rede we stopped by Bushmill’s Distillery, a maker of Irish whiskey. Cheryl’s guidebook recommends the tour, as Bushmill’s is still a working plant while Jameson’s in Dublin is not. During the week visitors see men doing whatever it is they do to barley and yeast in complicated vats. You may even meet Colum, Bushmill’s Master Distiller. We settled for breathing in the sour yeasty air and watching folks sample the goods.

Finally we arrived around lunchtime at the Giant’s Causeway. As Wikipedia says, there are two conflicting reports of the geological formation:

During the Paleogene period, Antrim was subject to intense volcanic activity, when highly fluid molten basalt intruded through chalk beds to form an extensive lava plateau. As the lava cooled rapidly, contraction occurred. While contraction in the vertical direction reduced the flow thickness (without fracturing), horizontal contraction could only be accommodated by cracking throughout the flow. The extensive fracture network produced the distinctive columns seen today. The basalts were originally part of a great volcanic plateau called the Thulean Plateau which formed during the Paleogene period.

The basalt column nonsense is all well and good, but doesn’t explain how the site got its name, leading to an alternative theory of creation:

Legend has it that the Irish giant Fionn mac Cumhaill (Finn McCool) built the causeway to walk to Scotland to fight his Scottish counterpart Benandonner. One version of the legend tells that Fionn fell asleep before he got to Scotland. When he did not arrive, the much larger Benandonner crossed the bridge looking for him. To protect Fionn, his wife Oonagh laid a blanket over him so he could pretend that he was actually their baby son. When Benandonner saw the size of the 'infant', he assumed the alleged father, Fionn, must be gigantic indeed. Therefore, Benandonner fled home in terror, ripping up the Causeway in case he was followed by Fionn. The "causeway" legend corresponds with geological history in as much as there are similar basalt formations (a part of the same ancient lava flow) at the site of Fingal's Cave on the isle of Staffa in Scotland.

Whatever the cause of the Causeway, the place is a photographer’s dream. Basalt columns exist all over the world, and their unique structure boggles the mind everywhere.All in all, a wonderful day and especially lucky with the weather. My favorite part was meeting a group of nuns who had obviously bypassed a fence that said "Do Not Enter" to climb up to the pipe organ structure off the upper cliff path. Robed in red habits with sneakers, they took pictures by the basalt columns while pretending to fall off the rocks, miming "Save me, Gabriel!" Hysterical.

Kilmainham Gaol

2008-08-07T20:27:00.001-04:00

August 7 - Caught an afternoon bus to Belfast.

Our bus to Belfast didn't leave until the afternoon so we went on a particularly interesting tour of the Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin. The associated museum was also quite thorough, covering aspects of daily prison life as well as the political history of the prison's most famous inmates, the leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising who were held and executed there. The place was a bit depressing, particularly when they led us out to the work yard where prisoners broke rocks for hard labor. Two crosses in the yard marked the spots where the nationalist men were shot by a firing squad. Definitely a worthwhile hour and a half.Before we went to the bus station we picked up some fresh apples from the Moore Street Market where we also found some complicatedly dyed flowers. I still haven't figured out how they get them to look like that. Some poor person has to sit there with a needle and inject each petal individually?From there we took a rather long bus trip up to Belfast through yet more rain. We got our first glimpses of the Irish countryside, replete with content looking sheep lounging on damp grass and hundreds of miles of rock walls.

The Belfast International Youth Hostel felt a bit sterile - it looked like a college dormitory including acoutrements like a pool table and library. We did get our own room though, and just around the corner was Benedict's, a beautiful bar/restaurant that did a brilliant early bird special. From 5-7PM dinner costs as much as the time your ordered. Starving after our ride, we ate at 5:45 and paid less than £6 for a salmon dinner.

Howth

2008-08-06T11:38:00.002-04:00

August 6 - Day trip to Howth, on the peninsula north of Dublin. We woke to constant drizzle and, after failing to get a Wicklow tour that would take us from Dublin down to Glendalough and back, decided instead to go to Howth, a little fishing village only twenty minutes away by train. I, in my infinite wisdom, was convinced that the DART (Dublin Area Rapid Transit) rail and the Irish national rail couldn't possibly leave from the same station, and we spent a soggy half hour wandering around in a large circle trying to find an invisible second train station.

By the time we got to Howth, the rain had tapered off. We found some real coffee at a very cute cafe above a gourmet grocery store. The Irish seem quite fond of the instant stuff, which tastes vaguely like dishwater and has about as much caffeine as chamomile tea. Lunch was grilled bread with goat cheese, roasted peppers, and a variety of side salads.The walk along the Howth peninsula is supposed to be gorgeous, but the weather kept switching schizophrenically from black clouds to blue sky and getting caught in a rainstorm didn't seem particularly appealing. We went to the old Martello tower (old British defense against Napoleon, as well as marauding pirates) that now houses Ye Olde Hurdy Gurdy Musuem of Vintage Radio. From the hill we could see the rock walls of Howth Abbey and its associated graveyard, so we headed over for a look.After our fill of dead people we walked down to the harbor to ogle the boats and check out the lighthouse. A small island, Ireland's Eye, sits less than a mile away from Howth and has a Martello tower of its own. Shockingly, the weather began to clear up at this point and we had a brief spate of sunshine before heading back to pub crawl our way through Dublin. This is the River Liffey at night (back in Dublin), looking toward the Ha'penny Bridge.

Dublin

2008-08-05T11:05:00.003-04:00

Our flight arrived early in the morning on August 5th and, after a rough night where Aer Lingus left the fluorescent lights on the entire six hours, we fortified ourselves with scrambled egg and toast and hit the streets of Dublin. This is a detail from the monument to Daniel O'Connell on O'Connell Street, not far from our hostel. Please notice the rain on her arm. Constant precipitation seems to be a theme in Ireland.Across the River Liffey is something called the Royal Liver Assurance. Given how much the Irish drink, I found this sign apropos. We wandered our way over to Trinity College, keeper of the Book of Kells. This is the campanile.
And some other random building (possibly in the corridor by the Samuel Beckett Centre).Carroll's is a gift shop chain that sells some of the most obnoxiously Irish souvenirs I have ever seen in my life. They have several locations throughout the city if you need to get a plush green hat or forty-seven leprechauns of varying size. We accidentally found St. Patrick's Cathedral while trying to get to Dublin Castle. Their lovely gardens had marigolds and a small memorial to Samuel Beckett. Fiona Shaw's "Happy Days" had also been playing at the Abbey Theater. Stupid dead Beckett, following me around with his inscrutable existential drama. We finally found Dublin Castle (phew!) across the street from a fantastic little pastry shop, the Queen of Tarts. Our extremely well appointed tour guide (who had some great peep-toe saddle shoe pumps, not at all appropriate for walking around a castle all day) showed us some of the formal chambers and explained that the original castle was burned nearly to the ground in the 1600s. Crown jewels were also stolen from the castle in 1907 and are still at large. £1000 reward for the finder, in case you see it on Ebay.We finished off the night with our first pints of Guinness and fish and chips at Brazenhead Irish Pub, purportedly the oldest pub in Ireland. If you ever find yourself at the Globetrotter's Hostel by Busaras in Dublin, try to book yourself in Room 420 (and no, it's not what you're thinking). It's a six-bed female dorm that is actually part of the Townhouse Hotel next door. Although finding the room involves climbing through a little-used part of the building, the place is a lovely little garret apartment with a kitchenette, TV, couch, and closet. And nary a bunk bed in sight. And the Irish breakfast in the morning is a definite plus.

For Fun

2008-07-22T12:20:00.005-04:00

Full disclosure - I haven't filled out a survey since first year in college. This is for Jen (and for fun):

Four jobs I've had:

1. Radiological Procedure Scheduler
2. Assistant Set Designer
3. Ballet Teacher
4. Electrician

Four movies I've watched more than once:

1. The Fifth Element

2. Finding Nemo

3. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

4. South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut

Four places I've lived:

1. Orange County, CA

2. Los Angeles, CA

3. Telluride, CO

4. New York, NY

Four places I've been:

1. Budapest, Hungary

2. Berlin, Germany

3. Cuzco, Peru

4. Leiden, Holland

Four TV shows I watch:

1. The Colbert Report

2. Dexter

3. 30 Rock

4. Extras

Four people who email me regularly:

1. Cheryl

2. Damon

3. Linda

4. JKLD looking for more electricians

Four of my favorite foods:

1. Bacon, egg, and cheese sandwiches

2. Truffled potatoes from Lil Pig Market

3. Tom kha gai and curry puffs

4. Guacamole from La Taqueria

Four places I would like to visit:

1. Angkor Wat, Cambodia

2. Wherever they film Ninja Warrior, Japan

3. Mt. Roraimi, Venezuela

4. Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia (Salar '09! Who's in?)

Four things I'm looking forward to in the coming year:

1. Visiting Paul and Jenny in England

2. Pina Bausch coming back to BAM

3. My trip to Italy

4. The next Pub Night NY

People I've tagged (to do this too):
1. Sam
2. Josh

Upper Calf Creek Falls

2008-07-04T10:51:00.001-04:00

A turnoff from the Hogback on Hwy 12 brings you to the trailhead for Upper Calf Creek Falls. There's a lovely Lower Calf Creek Falls as well, but the campsite this summer was crawling with people and we wanted something a little less crowded. While not quite as spectacular, Upper Calf Creek was a fun way to cool off. The trail leads to the falls themselves, which at 90 feet is nothing to sneeze at. Above the falls are smaller cliffs, more suitable to jumping into the freezing water below.No 4th of July fireworks due to the wildfires, but I barely noticed.

Burr Trail

2008-07-02T10:36:00.001-04:00

We found this rabbit on a hike down Deer Creek. Supposedly if you follow the creek toward the Escalante River far enough, there are Indian petroglyphs in the cliffs by the water.

A giant tree of unknown species (a botanist I am not) loomed over the campsite across the way and its fallen branches provided our evening entertainment. We met a college kid named Sam from Northern California who, on his three week solo camping adventure, was starting to go a little lonely and crazy. He was the only other person in our campground for days, so he would come over with his ax and chop firewood and we would all sit around the fire until the stars came out. One afternoon we caught a brilliant sunset whose colors culminated behind the tree.Deer Creek is located off the Burr Trail, a partially paved fifty mile adventure that leads from Boulder, UT through the Waterpocket Fold of Capitol Reef and on to the Bullfrog Marina at Lake Powell. Tim and I took the motorcycles through their paces, including some extremely demanding switchbacks. We met some guys from Illinois on BMW 1200 GS's. One of them accidentally tipped his bike over and, though it didn't get far with all the luggage to hold it up, it was unbelievably heavy to pick up. The graded dirt part of the trail just seemed to go on and on, so we rode until it started to cloud over and came home under gray skies.

Boulder, UT

2008-06-30T10:10:00.000-04:00

From Capitol Reef, we went to Grand Staircase - Escalante National Monument, which is basically preserved wilderness under the protection of the Bureau of Land Management. Highway 12 cuts through the cliffs and plateaus between Boulder and Escalante, UT. A brief section called The Hogback switchbacks over a ridge with sheer drop-offs on either side. It was unbelievably beautiful and exhilarating. Who needs Six Flags? When we first passed through Boulder we ran into a variety of temporary signs with cryptic labels like Incident Command Post, Incident Site 2mi, and Incident Communication Center. It took us a minute to discount an alien landing and connect the signs to the fire department putting out some regional wildfires. We found a campsite at Deer Creek and spent a lot of our time at the Mesa Grill in Boulder, Utah, and even more at the coffee shop across the parking lot. Boulder is also home to the Anasazi State Park Museum, a largely unexcavated Anasazi village with pithousesand a six room, life-sized replica of a pueblo, complete with firepit. The cottonwoods were blooming at the time and it felt like we were wandering around the village in the snow. There is an amazing fine dining restaurant called the Hell's Backbone Grill in Boulder, which uses local organic vegetables and meat along with some indigenous ingredients. The food was fantastic and it was our waiter that evening who kindly gave us her campsite at Deer Creek the next day while she packed up to go back to Idaho. Good food, good coffee, good scenery and kind people. If it weren't for the hypocritical eco-Nazis spoiling the hippie vibe, I could definitely like this place.

Capitol Reef National Park

2008-06-29T11:38:00.000-04:00

After a week in Moab, we got back on the motorcycles and headed out to Capitol Reef National Park. The park protects the Waterpocket Fold, a 75 mile wrinkle in the surface of the earth. We did a couple of hikes, including one to the Hickman Bridge. We also discovered some ammonite fossils in the hike through the narrow canyon at Grand Wash. An unfortunate threating patch of clouds made us high-tail it out of there. Slot canyon + rain = flash flood. While I do want to witness a flash flood firsthand, I'd prefer to be on top of the canyon as opposed to in it. A lovely hike up the Fremont River Trail leads to a great overview of the river and surrounding park. Capitol Reef is also home to an adorable population of marmots. Unlike normal marmots, these live at a lower elevation and a non-alpine ecosystem, making their presence in the park a mystery. A park ranger theorized that someone brought them from a mountain range nearby (La Sal or Henry) as a food source or as pets.

San Rafael Swell

2008-06-27T11:24:00.000-04:00

An old river guide, who had lived in the area for ages, suggested some places to camp. As I recall, this was what he told us as we drove past the San Rafael Swell on the way back to Moab: "See that grove of cottonwoods down there? That oasis? You can reach that from the cattle road and set up camp there. Then, if you just hike back toward the notch three or four miles, you see that notch? In that notch in the rocks, there's a bunch of swimming holes. The water gets nice and warm, sitting in the sun all day." We looked out the window, frantically taking mental notes.

A few days later, we took the dirt road with the cattle guard out to a wash encrusted with some kind of white mineral. Sure enough, there was a little oasis of greenery in the middle of the yellow shrubbery that dominates the landscape. After setting up the tent and packing as much water as we could hold, we headed out for the Swell. The San Rafael Swell is an upthrust of rock 75 miles long, created 60 million years ago. The years of subsequent erosion have created a whole mess of canyons and potholes and washes that would take ages to explore. Despite the baking heat, we picked the closest notch in the rocks and headed for it. And what would you know? We found the swimming holes! We were probably two weeks too late to go swimming because even the larger pools were infested with mosquito larvae. But we found some strange looking creatures populating one of the smaller pools. They looked like tiny horseshoe crabs, with a swimming tail instead of a spike. Same carapace though, with eyes on the top of their heads. Very strange. We also found a bighorn sheep skull, almost picked clean and bleached white.

Indian Ruins

2008-06-24T11:00:00.001-04:00

Jim and Leigh run a shuttle service in town and Tim and I helped them run some trucks down to Lake Powell. On our first trip out, we stopped by a viewpoint that had a bunch of welded steel tubes that looked like T's with signs underneath. When you looked through the tube, voila! Gopher Rock!One my favorite parts about Utah is how unadulterated history remains. National parks are wonderful, and I fully support them, but you feel like a pioneer when you find an ancient pictograph that isn't being pointed out or protected. A million people drive by the rock wall where either A Boy And His Dog or A Princess And Her Goat (depending on who you ask) is painted without ever knowing of its existence. It's somewhere between Hanksville and Lake Powell on the right side of the road.After a quick drive through Natural Bridges National Monument, they remembered an unmarked ruin off to the side of the highway. So we parked the car in the middle of nowhere, got out, and started wandering around. And sure enough, there was an Indian ruin by a wash, under a cliff! The walls were crumbling, but people who had been by the site before cached some pottery and rope and thousand year old corn cobs.

Canyonlands National Park

2008-06-23T10:41:00.001-04:00

Canyonlands National Park is amazing. It actually looks out over the same canyons as Dead Horse Point. In fact, you can see Dead Horse from Island in the Sky, the only paved section of Canyonlands. (And the Island in the Sky road is great for a motorcycle - lots of twisties, hardly any cars.) It reminded me of the Grand Canyon with a 270 degree view. And nothing quite puts you in touch with your humanity like sitting on the edge of a cliff, knowing that a huge drop is mere feet away.We then attempted to take the Schafer Trail down into the canyon. My bike hit a patch of deep sand and down I went, taking off part of my brake lever in the process. So we scrapped the Schafer Trail idea for this trip. I don't know if I could have made it down all those switchbacks anyway. They're pretty steep. (Ha ha - now I have to do it next time, or I'm going to be a wuss for life.) And this is Monument Basin, as seen from the Grand Viewpoint. The National Park Service actually has some really nice interactive panoramas that capture the impressive splendor better than one measly photo.

Potash

2008-06-22T23:14:00.000-04:00

After Dead Horse, we headed over to Potash, which isn't actually a town but a place where they mine... potash. Of course. The road to Potash follows the Colorado River and passes through a section of sheer rock cliffs, nicknamed Wall Street. Indian petroglyphs survived on the red rock of the cliffs for hundreds of years, only to be scratched over by stupid kids who think "Morrison High 2006" is an important cultural statement. A lone pronghorn antelope barely stands a chance competing against all those adolescent couples who have long since broken up, school slogans and curse words.Past the potash plant, about a mile and half into the 4WD dirt road, a fossilized coral bed is a playground of ancient sea creatures turned to stone. We found fossilized shells, coral, agatized clam tubes, and tail sections from crinoids embedded en masse in sandstone. A scientist working for the US Geological Survey told us our fossils from Potash are over 300 million years old.
That evening, Jim and Leigh took us out for a barbecue at Ken's Lake. The weather was perfect, the mosquitoes actually left us alone (sort of), and the food tasted great after all that riding around.

Dead Horse Point State Park

2008-06-22T21:05:00.002-04:00

Dead Horse Point State Park derives its friendly name from an old cowboy legend. From Utah.com:

Before the turn of the century, mustang herds ran wild on the mesas near Dead Horse Point. The unique promontory provided a natural corral into which the horses were driven by cowboys. The only escape was through a narrow, 30-yard neck of land controlled by fencing. Mustangs were then roped and broken, with the better ones being kept for personal use or sold to eastern markets. Unwanted culls of "broomtails" were left behind to find their way off the Point.

According to one legend, a band of broomtails was left corralled on the Point. The gate was supposedly left open so the horses could return to the open range. For some unknown reason, the mustangs remained on the Point. There they died of thirst within sight of the Colorado River, 2,000 feet below.

Bummer!

These are potash evaporation ponds. I had originally thought they were tailings from uranium mines, leftover from the rush for nuclear material from the 1950s. Utah was full of military mystery. Unmarked flatbeds carrying uncovered tanks occasionally rolled down the highway. A missile testing ground used to fire rockets to White Sands, New Mexico. One misfired and landed in the nearby town of Green River where it now pokes phallically at the sky in the middle of town.

The impressively large Gemini Bridges. (Yes, there is a second one, just not in this picture.) You can barely see Tim trying to give me a heart attack by crawling toward the edge.

Castle Valley

2008-06-21T19:50:00.001-04:00

Highway 128, Castle Valley, UT

La Sal Mountain Loop Road (looking into Castle Valley), UT

Free-range cattle, La Sal Mountains, UT

La Sal Panorama, UT (looking west)

Ashcroft Ghost Town

2008-06-19T11:56:00.003-04:00

Loads of old mining towns dot the Colorado mountains, miniature paeans to human greed and ecological destruction done in charming clapboard and shingle. Ashcroft went bust around the turn of the century after the silver veins in the mine gave out. The Aspen Historical Society took the place under its wing in the 1970s and it is still open as a nice little reconstruction today.
The mountain pass eventually ends up in Crested Butte, but even in June there was too much snow to make the crossing.

Somewhere in Iowa

2008-06-16T11:42:00.000-04:00

... is The World's Largest Truckstop! Boasting a store the size of Costco brimming with chrome and mud flaps and those seven pitch air horns that play La Cucaracha, this roadside stop has its own website and is home to a Trucker's Jamboree. And all I wanted was a place to spend the night. Preferably with bunnies.

What I Did On My Summer Vacation

2008-06-15T11:53:00.000-04:00

Tim and I are summering in Utah. With motorcycles. Six thousand miles. One hundred and five degree heat. Death just may ensue.

Gregory Crewdson

2008-05-10T09:58:00.007-04:00

Untitled, 2004

Spencer and Trisha came to visit for a week and in between rain showers (and B&H camera shopping) we managed to get to the Chelsea galleries where Gregory Crewdson was having a solo show at the Luhrig Augustine. Only $75,000 per print which is a steal considering that each contains a whole story, complete with lighting and special effects. I love (loooooooove) his work. He captures the melancholy of suburban America in a hyper-stylized, eerie way and makes the viewer feel uncomfortable, fearful, and isolated in an ultimately mundane environment. (Bucolic these photos are not.) I was reading Harper's Bazaar at Marquet the other day and guess who collects Crewdson? Julianne Moore. Anyway, I poked around online and found this great interactive online article by Aperture, the photography organization and magazine. The website mixes details of several images with interviews by the models he uses, his DP (director of photography) and production manager etc. It's done quite well.

1 M3 Light, 1999

And Olafur Eliasson is back! MoMA and PS1's retrospective display an incredibly extensive collection of lights of all shapes and sizes (and intensities and interior gases), kaleidoscopes, cycloramas, and a wall made of reindeer moss. Personally I loved his sodium vapor hallway that sucked the color out of everything around and turned the museum-goers into sepia portraits of themselves. He also had a strobe catching the rain midstream but I've been spoiled by David Parson's "Caught" and find all strobe stuff a little trite now. Check out the New York Time's slideshow of images from Take Your Time, his current exhibit.

Sprung

2008-04-12T16:28:00.011-04:00

Break open a cherry tree and there are no flowers, but the spring breeze brings forth myriad blossoms.

- Ikkyu Sojun

Okay, so the Cherry Blossom Esplanade may not actually be in full bloom yet, but I've retired my winter jacket in hopes that it will ward off the chill until next October. I spent the morning at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden trying to catch the elusive cherry blossoms (some of which have finally ventured out). They even had a little bonsai cherry tree at the Steinhardt Conservatory.
And the Japanese Garden is freshly stocked with turtles and carp. Sure signs of spring!
Now I just have to plan my trip to Mexico...

Experimental Animation

2008-03-20T21:19:00.000-04:00

One of the unfortunate side effects of moving away from LA is losing touch with the weird and twisted world of UCLA's animation department (and its super talented graduates). I'm currently unemployed and have spent the past two days vegging out to the experimental stylings of Jan Svankmajer, Adam Jones and Fred Stuhr (of Tool fame), and the Brothers Quay. All have built on a general theme of despair and Gothic style decrepitude in the rather demanding medium of stop motion animation.

I wonder what psychological trait the creators of these broken worlds share. Masochism, obviously, for choosing an incredibly difficult form of self expression. But what else? A habit of consuming vast quantities of mind-altering drugs? Dysfunctional childhood? Too much Nietzsche? Or in Svankmajer's case, too much Communism?

Whatever the cause, I aesthetically appreciate the result. Like Tim Burton, only less tongue-in-cheek and way less commercial. Despite being nominated for an MTV music video award, Tool's "Prison Sex" video was taken off the MTV playlist for its disturbing references to child abuse. Svankmajer was banned by communist authorities in 1972 from making films entirely. The Brothers Quay live in London, so they can do whatever they want. (Ah, the moral laxity of the UK art scene, where graffiti (Banksy) and heroine use (Oasis) are hallmarks of artistic spirit.)

And speaking of the British Isles, the Macbeth cast was amusingly appalled at our celebration of St. Patrick's Day. They went to the parade in Manhattan and returned with memory cards filled with photos of leprechauns and shamrocks. Then they all trooped off to tell their Irish friends.

Fotoblogging NYC

2008-03-01T16:22:00.007-05:00

There are plenty of photobloggers on the island of Manhattan. Some of my favorites include:
Joe's NYC
Express Train
MDPNY
Bluejake

I lack (severely) the responsibility and self control to a) bring a camera everywhere, b) sense and/ or react to a photographically pleasing scene and c) do both of the above every single day. But I do take some pictures. Occasionally.

Chinese elders watching a dragon dance outside a church (though the lack of gaiety and presence of sunglasses imply more mafia than piety).And Mott Street, Chinatown, home of Joe's Shanghai and some of the best soup dumplings around.

Forecast: Wintry Mix

2008-02-22T10:40:00.009-05:00

The combined effects of global warming and New York City's urban heat island have decreased our annual snowfall from over two feet a year to the occasional flurry. Last year was particularly paltry, and the measly scattering we got this December was incapable of sticking past forty-eight hours. Today I woke up to a thick curtain of white and that strange silence that descends as the usual flurry of morning activity is dampened under a layer of snow. Hopefully we'll get a repeat of the 2006 snow bonanza. The picture above is my backyard. The two tall metal towers are leftovers from the era of handwashing. Each one is three stories high (as tall as the building), with two sheaves for laundry lines at the height of the second and third story windows. Antiquated? Maybe. Still strange and charming? Definitely.

Orange County Great Park

2008-02-10T22:55:00.000-05:00

The (now defunct) El Toro Marine Base is turning into a large scale ecological restoration project called the Orange County Great Park. For now though, it's a large lot of abandoned military hangars and a rather lonely giant helium balloon ride. I took some pictures over there this Christmas and apparently the LA Times recently ran an article in its California section with a cover photo from the very hangar Deena, Linda and I visited. Why is it that forgotten architecture always makes for the best photography?

More photos on my Picasa gallery.

July 12: Pisac

2007-07-12T21:13:00.000-04:00

On my final day in Cuzco, I took the bus out again and made it to the market town of Pisac. And market town it was, indeed. The trading post covers the main square of town with the ruins a short hike up above. A line of manual taxis were lined up at the bus stop, ready to tote people (or their goods) to the square.I started on the steep uphill climb and ran into surprisingly few tourists. Notably, however, a Peruvian was following me up the mountain and steadily gaining as my lungs began to flag. After a while I gave up trying to outpace him and met Michelangelo (no kidding, that was his name) who was basically a big ol’ Peruvian mystic. He was young, with an acne scarred face and shiny black hair, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt and carrying a panpipe. We chatted a bit about the town of Pisac. Michelangelo pointed out the farmers threshing quinoa down below and I asked how their agricultural commerce worked. Michelangelo said a ranchero owned most of the land and paid the townspeople’s wages but allowed the people several plots for communal work to feed themselves as well. He also pointed out a hillside riddled with holes and told me that the mountain had once been an Incan burial ground but huacaros had long since looted the artifacts.I asked him what he would do at the ruins and he said he would be a tour guide to the busloads of tourists arriving at the front side. (I apparently took the back way up. A long driveway also winds up the mountain for the bus tour hordes.)

Then he asked me if I wanted a tour. Now, I was all about spreading my comparative North American wealth to these enterprising young people on this trip, but I was flat broke this day. I had enough money for my bus ride home and my hostel back in town. And the closest ATM was miles away back in town. I apologized profusely and said I couldn’t pay him – I didn’t have enough. So Michelangelo took me on a tour for free. He said he had to go that way to get to the front entrance anyway, and why didn’t I just walk with him? So I did. He showed me the ruins of guinea pig storage rooms, grain storage rooms whose roofs were being rethatched, and another fountain that has worked for hundreds of years.He walked me up to a rock overlooking the ceremonial center of the site where we ate lunch together. His consisted of a banana and four tangerines. Mine consisted of bread, chocolate covered saltines (which are AWESOME. They’re called “Chokosoda” and they are muy tasty), and a pepito melon. He gave me a tangerine and I gave him my junk food and some bread. I thanked him for his kindness and then he asked me if he could let the mountain bless me. Um, excuse me? I hadn’t even sneezed. I asked him what he meant and he said his ancestors were Incas and he knew some Incan ceremony that would fill me with the mountain’s spirit (or maybe fill the mountain with my spirit – I never got very far with Spanish prepositions) and would make the walk back to town easy. How do you turn down the very surreal experience of being blessed by an Inca?

So Michelangelo touched my stomach and then did some fluttering motions with his hands, cupped them together and blew in the direction of the mountain. It was actually a bit more involved than that. He did the fluttering hand thing while walking around me in a circle, and sort of brushed me off a bit at the same time. Very strange. Nice kid but very strange. We air kissed cheeks like the French and then he proceeded to play his panpipe after me while I climbed out of sight. And he kept playing. I must have heard that music for a full five minutes while I made my way back toward town. I felt like that was a suitable way to end my stay in the heart of the Incan empire. Slightly odd with an air of theatrics in a setting older than time itself. Much like the Incan religion must have been. Tomorrow I fly to Lima.

Jully 11: Cuzco

2007-07-11T21:06:00.000-04:00

Nothing particularly exciting today, other than a citywide demonstration by SUTEP in Cuzco. Carolyn and I toured all the little museums that are on the boleto turistico (the tourist ticket you have to buy to visit the Incan sites of the Sacred Valley). Seventy soles (about $25) allow access to the nine archaeological sites of the Sacred Valley and seven regional museums in town. We saw a lot of hellfire and brimstone at the Catholic church museums. I also finally tried chicha, the fruit juice like beverage made from purple corn. I had the non-alcoholic version, but apparently the Peruvians ferment the stuff into proper corn beer as well. I also got suckered into taking a picture of the people in their fancy dress. I wanted to take one just of the girl with her baby goat, but then her sister came over and then her mom, and they all demanded tips after I took the pictures. *Sigh* Well, I get to make a few rookie mistakes, right?

July 10: Sacred Valley

2007-07-10T10:48:00.000-04:00

After hauling my gear from city to city for weeks, I had a strangely calm day of laundry and souvenir shopping in Cusco. This should be welcome respite to normal people who cherish things like relaxation and tranquility. I, however, was lonely and miserable. Helen had departed for Lima by bus in an attempt to make it through the ubiquitous blockades in time for her flight to Germany two days later. I wasn’t scheduled to meet up with Carolyn until the next evening. I spent the day browsing about a hundred look-alike souvenir stalls and losing badly at haggling with a ten year old girl for an “antique bronze” puma, which I eventually caved for at $8.

On the 10th I decided to attempt the trip to Pisac to see the ruins where I met, yet again, crushing defeat. The only other tourists on the bus were a pair of Frenchmen. On the ride out one of the passengers stood up shortly after departure and made his way to the middle of the bus carrying a very square brown suitcase. Sadly inured by the scare tactics of our country’s government, my first thought was “Bomb in suitcase. He’s a terrorist.” Instead, he puts down the suitcase, turns it on, and pulls out a microphone. There was a tiny portable sound system in there! Complete with crappy microphone! The first two hours of the ride were given over to this man’s spiel about magical healing jungle plants, their effectiveness as an anti-parasitical, and their fabulous digestive aiding qualities. All this could be yours for just $1 per packet of unidentified powdered substance! But wait! Because you are on this bus right now, I’ll give you a free one for every three packets you buy! His arguments were made all the more convincing by his associated booklet of pictures showing parasitic worms crawling out of just about every orifice of the human body. Yeesh.

About three hours into the trip we ran into the blockade. The union members were throwing rocks in the road and ripping up bushes and pushing them into the road as well. The exasperated passengers urged the bus driver to go around the parked cars blocking the way, but the driver refused. Everyone got off the bus and stood around trying to figure out what to do. About ten minutes of dithering later, the Frenchmen decided to make a run for it. Water bottles in hand, they walked right through the line of angry Peruvians on their way to Pisac. I saw them start off and couldn’t get up the gumption to follow. I don’t know – following two strangers past an angry group of people throwing rocks just didn’t strike me as the safest thing to do.

Sadly disappointed, I reboarded the bus with the rest of the muttering Peruvians and started the return trip to town. But! A silver lining! The turn offs for the four closest Incan sites were along this road! I spoke to the bus driver and he promised to let me off at Tambomachay, a five mile walk from Cusco.

Tambomachay (also called El Baño de Inca) is a ceremonial fountain spilling crystalline spring water into a small channel. Like the Nazca aqueducts, my guide Alex (who I picked up within five seconds of reaching the site – tour guides are like vultures in Peru) encouraged me to take a drink. Giardia be damned, it was some fine tasting water. Alex, like every other young tour guide I had, was a student studying English and tourism in Cusco. He asked me what have become the standard questions: “Where are you from? (The US) Why are you here alone? (My boyfriend hurt his knee) What do you do? (I’m an electrician) Why do you work like a man? (What is it with the machismo?)” I asked Alex about the Incan animals carved into every souvenir in Cusco – the puma, the snake, and the condor. He told me that the three animals represent the three levels of the earth: the snake for the underworld, the puma for the earth, and the condor for the heavens. Each animal is associated with a gender as well. The snake represents the female (for intelligence and mystery), the puma is man (for strength and aggression), and the condor is a conveyor to the spirit world. All right. I’ll buy that.

Alex walked me across the road to Pukapukara, the Red Fort, named for the pinkish colored rocks used in its construction. This was once a lookout post, storage silo, and a tax collection area for goods-laden Incas heading to Cusco. He also suggested that perhaps this was a school of architecture because one area had several different examples of wall building (ceremonial cut stone vs regular) and a large stone carved into the shape of Machu Picchu. That story seemed suspect, but here’s the picture anyway. You can see Wayna Picchu on the right and some rectangular shaped stuff in the middle representing the ruins.I bid farewell to Alex and headed off down the road toward Q’enqo. A bunch of houses that I passed had little clay cows on the roof, which I think are supposed to be house spirits to keep thieves away. Back in Nazca, Jose was telling a story about how his sister’s house doesn’t have a cow and was robbed, while his house has a cow and neighbors think Jose is home even when he’s not. At the time, I thought he was referring to a real cow or maybe a cow skull, but I think he was talking about the little clay ones. Anyway, I found them charming.

Here is what Lonely Planet has to say about Q’enqo: “The name of this small but fascinating ruin means ‘Zigzag.’ It’s a large limestone rock riddled with niches, steps, and extraordinary symbolic carvings, including the zigzagging channels that probably gave the site its name. These channels were likely used for the ritual sacrifice of chicha or, perhaps, blood. Scrambling up to the top, you’ll find a flat surface used for ceremonies and, if you look carefully, some laboriously etched representations of a puma, condor, and a llama. Back below you can explore a mysterious subterranean cave with altars hewn into the rock.” I surreptitiously followed two American girls and their tour guide, hearing stories about how the altars below were actually Incan surgical tables for trepanning (and supposedly they would fill the hole with gold, though none of the trepanned skulls in the museums had gold in them), and that a funny shaped rock on top casts the shadow of a giant puma on the equinox. I also paid a little kid a couple of soles to show me the “laboriously etched” animals. The llama definitely counts as etched. The condor and the puma seem like happy fortunes of rock erosion.LP also mentioned a “Temple of the Moon” out in the fields, so I made my way back to the tourist road and asked the first person I saw how far away it was, and how dangerous it was to go there. Surprise, surprise, the person was a tour guide. Juan, yet ANOTHER student, was armed with his textbook and good local knowledge of the area (he grew up in Pisac). He took me far afield, braving one snarling dog (which frightened me so much, he laughed at me after throwing rocks at it to make it go away), to show me the Temple of the Moon, the Devil’s Tower, and the Temple of the Serpent. The Temple of the Moon gets one line in LP, the other two aren’t mentioned at all.

The Temple of the Moon is a cave for women only. After entering a doorway “carved” with a serpent and a condor (which still look more accidental than human-planned), there is a small chamber, and then a second doorway with a vagina carved into the ceiling. An altar lies at the back of the second chamber with a small opening in the roof to let in light. On a full moon, women (still today) lay down on the altar and moonlight shines directly onto their uterus, enhancing fertilization.The Temple of the Serpent was quite cool. A large rock, snaked through with tunnels, and riddled with niches and altars, seemed like a playground more than a place of sacrifice or worship. Juan said that Incas used the area for learning about geology, testing the strength of different minerals and rocks for construction.

The Devil’s Tower is not much to look at anymore. Once a fortress standing on an impressively high bluff, nothing is left but the foundation. A small river runs underneath the bluff through a natural underground cavern, and Juan led me through it to the other side.

Through all of this, I had my most complicated Spanish discussion ever with Juan. He was so curious about everything. He asked if I believed in an afterlife, and told me that he thought the spirituality of the Incas was closer to the truth than the formalized Catholic religion of the country. He asked what I thought about the South America Free Trade Act, and what President Bush could do for Peru. (How on earth am I supposed to answer these questions when I can barely get a room for the night?!?) He told me that science and technology were the ways of the future, and that the presence of God could be detected in the intricacies of the mechanics of the world. It was one of the most enlightening moments I had on the trip. It also meant that by the time I got to Saqsaywamán, I was tired of deciphering Spanish.

Saqsaywamán was a huge fort with massive zigzagging walls. An Incan emperor made Cusco the shape of a puma, and the walls of its largest defensive structure were its teeth. The rocks used in its construction are enormous – far larger than even the largest ones at Machu Picchu.
After a quick wander around the ruins, I was happy to head back to Cusco for an alpaca burger meal at Sumaq Misky with Carolyn (home also to the most massive glass of jugo mixto I've ever seen.)

July 8: Chinchero, Moray, and Salinas

2007-07-08T15:22:00.000-04:00

Helen and I slept in while the other four people in our dorm woke up early for their trip to the ruins. We had tickets on the PeruRail back to Ollanytambo. The train ride was surreal, in keeping with the über-tourist theme of Machu Picchu. First, the train actually left almost on time, which is nothing short of a miracle in Peru. Then the train started playing a pre-recorded message about the jungle we were passing through and the destination town. Railway attendants dressed up like stewardesses served coffee and soft drinks. And THEN a man dressed up in a white shirt and vest with a white balaclava danced up and down the narrow aisle of the two train cars. Helen and I looked at each other with complete disbelief. But the show wasn’t over yet. The stewardesses then put on a fashion show of alpaca goods! Complete with bad techno music! They modeled various sweaters and ponchos then offered them to the passengers for purchase. It was SO weird.

Eventually we reached Ollanytambo and I was never so grateful to be off a train. I mean, I don’t know if working for the railway is considered a good job or not. It must be. The prices they charge are far more than any other system of transportation in Peru. But I wonder if the employees feel humiliated when they have to dance up and down the aisle of the train, day in and day out. It smacks vaguely of a minstrel show in that self mocking way. It certainly made me feel uncomfortable.

Anyway, Helen and I walked into town to catch a bus to Urubamba and on to the town of Pisac to check out the market. The view from the bus was beautiful - snow capped mountains in the distance surrounded by fields of dry grass.On the way we met an Italian couple who told us that the market in Pisac is far more touristed than the one in Chinchero and would we like to accompany them? So we decided to follow the Italian couple for the day. It turned out that the Italians had actually seen Helen and I back in the hot springs at Aguas Calientes – one more coincidence in a trip full of them! In Urubamba we all caught a combi (yet another minibus) to Chinchero where we bought some sweets and popcorn at the market and watched the hustle and bustle of trade. Although I never made it to Pisac, the people hawking their wares in Chinchero seemed authentic. I don’t mean authentic in that other Peruvians are disingenuous, but there is a certain population who dress in traditional clothing solely for the benefit of the tourist and in the expectation of tips. These women all wore their hair in the traditional two braids down the back with the black thick woolen skirts as if they wore these clothes every day, much like the islanders back in Lake Titicaca.

From Chinchero we were interested in checking out Moray and Salinas, two outlying smaller tourist sites, so we hired a cab for 40 soles to take us around. Moray consisted of several deep bowls carved with concentric agricultural terracing. All of the steps in the terracing were the flagstone-sticking-out-of-wall type.
The guidebook explained that the depth of each layer mimics a microclimate of the mountainous terrain of Peru. Incas may have used the site to perform agricultural experiments in the various environments.

Salinas is a massive salt pan used in the creation of cow licks. A heavily salinated hot spring discharges water, which is diverted to the various salt pans below. The taxi dropped us off by the top of the pans and we walked to the edge of a cliff to look below. It would have been wonderful to wander around down there. The various colors ranged from muddy brown to sparkling white. However the weather was bad (drizzly and depressing) and everyone was exhausted from the excitement of Machu Picchu. After a long afternoon we asked the taxi driver if he could just take us back to Cuzco.

Finally back in town, I switched hostels to La Pakcha Real and had a much needed hot shower. I wandered around the square to check out the statues that had been put up in my absence then met up with Carolyn from the Colca Canyon trek to eat fondue with her and her Welsh friend who had been staying in Argentina. I had a fantastic triple sandwich, which consists of a fried egg with tomato and avocado on a roll - the perfect end to an exhausting couple of days.

July 6-7: Machu Picchu

2007-07-07T10:22:00.000-04:00

The buses weren’t running to Quillabamba last night so Helen spent the night at my hostel and we both woke up early for the 8am bus. We weren’t actually going all the way to jungle-bound Quillabamba but planned instead to take the bus to Santa Maria, a small town along the way. The woman at the terminal said that although the road was open, there was a big pile of rocks and we would have to walk around. Or at least this is what I understood from the conversation. There was in fact a construction zone dividing the road into two parts and everyone had to get off the bus with their luggage and hike for half an hour through the jungle to meet up with a second set of buses on the other side. Entrepreneurial Peruvians had set up shop at the end of the hike and there were pots of rice and beans and chicken to greet folks emerging from the undergrowth.

It took us about six hours all told to reach Santa Maria. From there Lonely Planet recommends finding Lorenzo’s Lodge, hiring a guide, and catching the 3am collectivo to Santa Teresa. Instead a group of about eight intrepid backpackers had convened on the tiny Plaza De Armas in Santa Maria. We waited for hours for the collectivo to show up. The women in the bodegas across the street kept telling us “Yes, it’s coming. Soon.” Helen and I ate cream crackers and bread (which had pretty much been our diet all day) and drank the ubiquitous San Luis water (bottled by Coca Cola, who else?) that we had brought from Cuzco.

When the collectivo finally showed up at Santa Maria, they didn’t want to take us on the two hour ride up the mountain. It was too late at night, the driver said, and he wouldn’t be able to find a fare who wanted to go back to town. Instead the two Argentines in our little group hired the car for 20 soles apiece and we found three other extremely drunk Peruvian men who were also heading up that way. As sunset descended over quiet little Santa Maria, our Toyota minibus went hurtling up the mountain in what was rapidly becoming pitch blackness.

Any kind of taxi ride in Peru is an adventure of the hair-raising type. Only the especially lucky (or adventurous… or stupid) get ones over unpaved roads along the edges of cliffs. We sped through banana trees and bushy shrubbery covered in road dust, we forged streams fed by cliff waterfalls, and we clung desperately to the backs of the chairs in front of us for fear of going straight over the edge.
By the time we got to Santa Teresa it was only 8:30pm but it felt like midnight. Everyone was dirty and exhausted and starving. The collectivo dropped us off on the main street and we accepted the housing of the first woman who offered up her hostel. It was as basic as basic gets. One cold water shower (no thank you), and dorm beds for three women in a cinderblock room. (Helen, me, and a Korean girl we met at the Cuzco bus station). But it was by far the cheapest accommodation I used in Peru at just 7 soles a night. We immediately went out for a good lomo saltado dinner (beef and potatoes served over rice) with a palta (avocado) salad and limonada. The meal tasted like heaven.

Mario and Valerie (the Argentines we met in Santa Maria) met us at the restaurant and we all hired a cab (who was actually making the rounds at the restaurants in town) for the next morning to pick us up at 5:30am. I crashed out in the hostel immediately and before I knew it, Helen’s alarm was beeping in the morning.

The cab took us to the hydroelectric station where we would begin our walk to Aguas Calientes. It is possible to walk from Santa Teresa to the power station but it seemed a bit dodgy and Helen wanted to get to Machu Picchu as early as possible. So the cab took us through more jungle and over more rivers and eventually dropped us off where the Peru Rail train tracks end and where the six of us headed down the tracks. The instructions aren’t that specific in Lonely Planet for this roundabout way to Machu Picchu. You actually have to exit the train tracks from the power plant. There were some yellow signs that said “Train Exit” and some Peruvians by the railway told us that we had to walk up to a second set of tracks to actually get to Aguas Calientes. After a bit of a climb, we found the right set and headed off.It was actually quite peaceful as we walked along. The jungle surrounded us on all sides and we kept running into small huts and stores set up along the train tracks, even though the train doesn’t stop between the power plant and Aguas Calientes. At some point a dog rushed at us from someone’s house and growled menacingly. That felt like the most dangerous thing that happened to me in Peru, other than wandering around Lima. Finally we saw a tiny ruin up in the mountains and knew we must be getting close.

A little yellow train car, probably for maintenance or for track switching or something, passed us on its way to the power plant and a few hours later, on its return trip, the engineer stopped and offered us a ride to Aguas Calientes. Although it would probably only have taken another half hour of walking, we all jumped at the chance to ride this weird little car into town. He dropped us off a few hundred feet from the train station so he wouldn’t get in trouble for giving illegal rides.

Aguas Calientes is quite a shock to folks who have been bussing it through South America for the last one, six, or nine months. The town is set up as a vehicle for the thousands of people who come to see Machu Picchu and is named after the unappetizingly brown hot springs at the northern end of town. The infamous ruins themselves are but a short bus ride up the mountain, much to the chagrin of folks who spend four days walking the Inca Trail. I somehow expected the ruins to be remote and difficult to reach, like an actual Lost City of the Incas. Instead a tourist bus complete with plush seats and air-conditioning drives up the mountain where it drops you off at a Disneyland entrance complete with overpriced food and drinks.

Although we had woken up early and sped through Aguas Calientes as fast as we could, it was 10:30am by the time Helen and I reached Machu Picchu. The weather luckily was gorgeous. The sun beat down brutally on the mountaintop broken by puffy clouds in the blue sky. The guard at the gate told us that Wayna Picchu, a smaller mountain than Machu Picchu at the back end of the ruins with a good uphill hike and gorgeous panoramas, had already met its quota of 400 people for the day. But as we started wandering around the ruins we ran into a tour guide who told us that the gate guards always tell tourists that the mountain is closed, even if it’s not necessarily true. After a speed walk through the ruins, we reached the far end in about twenty minutes to discover that the guards actually let 430 people up in the high season. Unfotunately, they had already let 434 people up that day. It took a little bit of begging and pleading but Helen and I managed to be Number 435 and 436. It’s right there in the registry, under July 7, 2007. It was hot and sweaty work climbing up the mountain with its very steep stairs, but the views from the top were spectacular. We could see the Rio Urubamba and the train tracks we followed into town, along with the ruins themselves (supposedly in the shape of a condor, though I don’t see it at all).Speaking of 7/7/07, there was a worldwide internet vote for the New Seven Wonders of the World that day. While the voting practice itself might be a little suspect (think HotOrNot.com for the world traveler), Machu Picchu was officially voted in the day that I was on top of the mountain. We saw some newscast people at the ruins but the real party was down in Aguas Calientes, where we heard there was a big celebration in the Plaza with music and dancing. Back in Cuzco they put up giant paper mache statues and had newscasts declaring Peru’s great triumph.

The ruins themselves were lovely. Much of it was reconstruction, but there was plenty to explore. There was a large industrial/ residential sector, lots of agricultural terracing, and the more famous Sacred Plaza with several temples and an astronomical tower with an Intihuatana on top. The Intihuatana is a distinctive Incan stone carved a certain way with strange protrusions found in Incan temples. The Peruvians I met attributed a variety of magical powers to these odd stones, whose name translates to ‘Hitching Post of the Sun.’ One told me that on the equinoxes, the sun bounces off the stone is such a way that it casts three spots of light in the form of a triangle on the ground. When someone kneels in the triangle, a spot of light shines on his forehead and gives him great strength. Supposedly.

In the temple section the huge cut stones fit together with typically amazing masonry.There was also an Incan fountain, still running fresh water from an underground spring, and some rather frightening steps made of flagstones sticking straight out of a wall. Incans used this type of construction particularly in agricultural terracing to curtail erosion. When you use them you feel like you're stepping onto thin air.We also hiked out to the Incan Bridge (about twenty minutes away). Although you can’t actually cross the bridge because some tourist fell off it years ago, the walk was nice and took us through some agricultural terracing where llamas were grazing in the middle of the ruins. We tried to watch the sunset from the Intihuatana, but sunset happens too quickly in the mountains and doesn’t compare to the blaze of glory on Lake Titicaca.

We decided that after splurging on the bus ride up the mountain and the Peru Rail train ride to take us back to Ollanytambo, we should walk down to town. A steep and long set of stairs wends its way through the bus switchbacks from the entrance back to the museum at the base of the mountain. In the increasing darkness, we walked downhill until our feet ached and our knees shook while two Peruvian boys dressed as Incas raced down the steps to meet the tourist bus, letting out huge yells at each switchback and hoping for a few tourists to throw some soles out the window. By the time we limped to the line of buses sleeping at the bottom of the mountain, the boys had changed back into normal clothes and were waiting for someone with backpacks on their backs.

It was another twenty minute walk to town and when we got there, Helen and I were desperately ready for a dip in the thermal baths. Despite the unattractive brown stirred up from the gravel beds at the bottom of the pools, we found one with a bit of space to squeeze in between the locals and the other tourists fresh off the Inca Trail. Jesse from the Colca Canyon trek told us that they were pretty stingy with the alcohol in the drinks at the bar, so we left the hot springs for a proper dinner in town with Mario and Valerie and the two Koreans, who decided they were going to do Machu Picchu the next day. We split a big bottle of Cusqueña Negra and I slept incredibly well that night.

July 5: Cuzco

2007-07-06T19:43:00.000-04:00

The teachers’ union SUTEP held strikes on and off in Peru until I left, with the worst of the blockades concentrated around Puno. My bus was supposed to leave at 7pm from Puno to Cuzco, bypassing the blockade through a mountain road. The bus didn’t actually leave until 8pm and by 9pm I had fallen into one of those uncomfortable airplane sleeps because again there was no room to put my seat back.

At around 10pm I awoke to lights and shouting. A line of trucks with their headlights on were blocking the alternate route so we had no choice but to find a plan C. I was still half asleep when I noticed all the men getting off the bus and I was not about to join them in the freezing cold dark night. Until the bus started to turn around. On the mountainside. I looked fearfully out my window as the edge of the mountain got closer and closer until someone outside would smack the side of the bus and yell, and our vehicle would lurch to a stop. After a thirty-two point turn we were on the way back to Juliaca outside Puno to find an alternate to the alternate route. By midnight we seemed well on our way.

I woke up again at sunrise, around 6am, to find that all the windows inside the bus had turned into blocks of ice. The layers of moisture from our combined breath froze over the windows and mine was starting to melt all over my sleeping bag. Not to worry. The trip from Puno to Cuzco was only supposed to take 10 hours, so we must almost be there. And then I looked out the window. We were nowhere at all. We were driving through the mountains on a dirt road and no sign of habitation could be seen for miles.

And as if the bus ride hadn’t been long and uncomfortable enough, as we began to wend our way down the mountain, our bus got stuck. Coming around a switchback that was too steep, the back end dug into the dirt and the bus didn’t have enough traction to drag itself back out. So once again everyone was forced to get off the bus in the chilly morning sun and try to dig the back wheels out of the dirt (failure), use all the men to push the bus forward (failure), run the engine until white smoke poured from it (failure), and finally some Peruvians scrambled under the bus to shove rocks under the back wheels (success!).By this time a line of irritated traffic had built up behind us, from a second coach bus that had also succeeded in thwarting the picket lines to several tractor trailers laden with goods bound for Cuzco. We tentatively followed the bus down the mountain on foot for a turn or two to make sure our adventure wouldn’t repeat itself, then boarded again for the remaining six hours of our trip. By noon I was beginning to recognize some of the town names and knew we were getting close to Cuzco. It had been a very trying sixteen hours. And then the bus driver decided to stop for some lunch without consulting his weary passengers!

We had nothing to eat and nothing to drink since the night before, except for two women who came on the bus in the middle of nowhere selling Ziploc bags of mate (tea) and wheels of cheese. A plastic bag of warm liquid and a block of dairy product didn’t appeal to me so early in the morning and I passed, not thinking that the ride could possibly be another five hours. At noon the bus driver rolled to a stop in some town and through the window bought two bowls of noodle soup from a woman at the side of the road. On the second level we passengers were ready to riot. The woman in front of me smacked her hand on the window pane and others stomped their feet yelling “Vamos! Vamos!”

At long last we arrived. I hailed a cab to take me to the hilly neighborhood of San Blas where I booked a room at the Hostal Kuntur Wasi, threw my backpack on the bed, and headed out to get some much needed sustenance.

Cuzco is a beautiful city of Spanish colonial architecture atop Incan walls. Getting lost around the city, even a novice like me could identify the beautifully cut Incan walls against the brick and mortar ones. I had bistek (beef) from a pizzeria and practically a whole jug of limonada to quench what felt like an undying thirst. I didn’t want to drink on the bus for fear of having to use the awful bus baño.
From there I visited Qorikancha, the easiest-to-visit Incan ruins in the city. Surrounded by a Dominican church, the ruins inside were once an Incan temple to the sun and moon. This was my first encounter with the infamous Incan trapezoid and an up close look at the painstaking masonry needed to build such precise walls without the use of mortar. I followed some tour groups around and learned that the weight of the lintel stone helped preserve the building’s solidity at its weak points, making the trapezoidal doorways and niches earthquake-proof. Furthermore, the lack of mortar allowed for micromovements of the stone during seismic activity, also reducing damage. It seemed a little surreal for the pagan temple to be preserved among the trappings of Catholicism, but the ruins had been given over to the Dominicans after plundering most of it for gold and stones that built the first Spanish structures in Cuzco.Some pictures of the Plaza de Armas:I forgot to mention that right before I left for Isla Amantani, I ran into Helen, a girl I had shared a dorm room with for one night in Arequipa. She and I met up for dinner and, as her plans to go to Machu Picchu that evening were thwarted by the strike, we decided to go together the following morning.

July 2-4: Lake Titicaca

2007-07-05T16:25:00.000-04:00

Carolyn, Mike and I left for Puno and Lake Titicaca after a celebratory good-bye dinner with the Colca Canyon trek people. We ate at El Turko II, a fancy Peruvian restaurant with the best vanilla ice cream with ginger infused honey sauce I have ever tasted. I had alpaca chow mein and Eric (one of the Dutch guys) had guinea pig legs in chocolate mint sauce, which counts as one of the strangest dishes I saw in Peru.

It’s another eight hour bus ride from Arequipa to Puno, the jumping off point for visits to the floating reed islands in Lake Titicaca. This time I was lucky enough to have two traveling companions as the bus sped through a massive vicuña reserve where whole herds of the shy creatures grazed on inhospitable looking grasses. Vicuñas produce only 200 grams of wool each year and the garments created from it are considered some of the finest textiles in the world. The wool has a warmth-to-weight ratio like cashmere. Besides, vicuñas look much more graceful than the stocky alpaca or the clumsy llama. Vicuña = best camelid EVER.

In Puno we stayed at a hostel which touted a solar heated shower. However, I’ve found that twenty-four hour hot water is a tall order for Peru, and indeed we were terribly disappointed when we discovered that the electric showerhead did little to warm the near freezing flow after our dusty bus ride. Oh well. We booked a ticket down at the dock to the Islas Flotantes and Amantani Island and headed into town for a dinner of lovely fried trout, purportedly caught locally in the lake.

The Aymara people living on the reed islands off the shores of Lake Titicaca supposedly went out there to escape the constant aggression of the Incas. Their fascinating islands are made of totora reeds in shallow water twenty minutes by boat from Puno’s dock. The island is made by stacking reeds in alternating directions, and the mat has to be constantly refreshed as the ones on the bottom rot away. Stones are anchored into the island when it is created and then wooden stakes hold the island to the lake bed. A whole series of these islands still exist today, floating within easy swimming distance of each other. Walking on the stuff is like walking on foam, where the spongy reeds give way under your foot with every step.The island guide gave us a lecture about the island’s creation and passed out totora reeds for us to look at and eat. I was kind of curious because as I stepped off the boat, I noticed a child of about four wandering across the island chewing on the root end of one of these reeds and dragging the other six feet of plant along behind her tiny self. To eat them you peel off the outer layers and eat it like celery, although it tastes more like a cross between lettuce and cardboard.We only had thirty minutes to look around the island, which was plenty of time because the place was probably less than 100 feet long. The islanders put up with the tourists by selling jewelry and alpaca blankets and model totora boats. If we had done the full day Islas Flotantes tour, we would have been taken to several of the islands, probably taken a totora reed boat ride, and been forced to hear the sales pitches for many many souvenirs.We got back on the boat for the three hour ride out to Isla Amantani where we would stay overnight with a family. On our way out of the reeds, I actually saw a Seventh Day Adventist church perched atop a reed island and the thought of the ramifications of modernization depressed me a bit. The Aymara lived their peaceful existence since Incan times and then the tourists and Christian missionaries had to ruin their secret.

When we disembarked at Isla Amantani a group of families came down to the dock to meet us. We were put with Rosalia, a quiet Peruvian with two friendly children, Rosalinda and Diego, who were nine and eleven. They lived in a small concrete block house with their cousin Alex, who was also nine. After a lunch of roasted vegetables (including a strange grub-like tuber that tasted like a cross between a potato and a carrot), Rosalia led us up to the Plaza De Armas where we met our guide to watch the sunset at Pachatata, a temple to Father Earth at the island’s highest point. From our vantage we could see all the way to Bolivia and we enjoyed a spectacular (if rather chilly) sunset while eating picarrones, fried donuts with caramelized sugar. We did have to walk through an onslaught of woven goods for sale and endure the constant pleas of children to buy their friendship bracelets, but in a land where tourism earns far more money than agriculture, such trials are to be expected.

The Amantani overnight is not for people used to hotels. There is no running water and very little electricity. Our restroom was an outhouse with blocks to direct you where to put your feet and we had to wash up for bed out of a communal basin. But the family was friendly and accommodating. While waiting for dinner, Rosalinda, Diego, and Alex came upstairs with Andean panpipes, a charango (a ukulele-like Peruvian guitar with ten strings as exemplified by the guy who played on the boat ride to the island) and a drum and proceeded to play “music” for us for close to an hour. Although they were terrible at playing, they sang and danced and generally made us quite amused. Despite our suffering we couldn’t bring ourselves to make them stop. Eventually we told Diego he should have a hat for tips and we gave each kid 1 sole and asked them if they learned the instruments in school (they did), and which one was their favorite (Diego liked the charango). Rosalia eventually came upstairs with potato omelets over rice and we all sat down for a starchy dinner.

After dinner, Rosalia brought some of the islanders’ traditional dress upstairs for us to get into and took us to the super-touristy peña, a party where they play traditional music and dance around. I only noticed a few men (Rosalia’s husband was noticeably absent, if he even exists) and most of the women seemed to barely tolerate all the commotion. But the kids had a blast. Rosalinda would drag us out on the dance floor by turns and make us dance with her. A large group of British tourists got together to teach the Peruvians The Hoky Pokey and Head Shoulders Knees And Toes. It was quite a sight watching all the women with their bright woolen skirts and black shawls putting their left foot in and out. After about an hour, I was feeling a little sick from the forcedness of the event and luckily that was the time the whole thing was over. On our way back to the house through the moonlight we asked the kids if they had to dance every single night. “During tourist season, yes,” they said. And I asked if they didn’t ever get tired. “No!” cried Alex, who was skipping down the stone path, “Tengo adentro ochenta baterías de Duracell! (I have eighty Duracell batteries inside me!) Estoy SuperAlex.” Carolyn and I rolled our eyes. Branding had come all the way out here! But Mike said that even the Peruvians knew that Peruvian batteries were crap and don’t hold a charge.

The stars that night were amazing. There was no electricity to cause light pollution, we were at an elevation of 12,000 feet and the sky was crystal clear. The waves lapping through the lake sparkled not with moonlight but with planet light from some low hanging planet. It was gorgeous.

The next morning after a breakfast of a lonely pancake with jam (Peruvians make thin pancakes, more crepe-like than pancake-like), we bid adios to the family and found our boat again for the ride to Isla Taquile. We only had a couple hours on Taquile and much of it was spent huffing and puffing our way up five hundred steps to the Plaza De Armas at the top. The views of the intense blue of the lake again surprised us all. Unfortunately we had to shoo away wandering children with their fistfuls of bracelets, and pay 1 sole for the use of the bathroom. But we did walk around a little and saw a villager who had recently caught some fish from the lake as well as some girls herding sheep. There was a lovely photography exhibition in the town hall. Someone had given the islanders digital cameras to teach them the principals of photography as well as to record their daily life. I particularly liked this picture of the traditionally dressed men seeing their handiwork on an Apple computer. Very funny.I napped the whole way back to Puno and, as we neared the town, I looked out the window to a massive conflagration. Some of the totora reeds had caught fire after drying out in the particularly strong sun and were burning away in a surprisingly large blaze for sitting atop a body of water.

After my first hot shower in five days (we arrived to the hostel early enough that the solar heated hot water hadn’t given out yet), I called the bus depot to discover that a group of teachers was striking and the bus I was going to take in the morning had been cancelled. There was, however, a bus leaving tonight and if I wanted I could hurry up and take it. So I bid a very hasty farewell to Carolyn and Mike and went off to the bus station to endure the worst bus ride of my life.

July 1: Arequipa

2007-07-01T23:01:00.000-04:00

I had one more day in Arequipa to unwind (and finally shower) from my trip. Carolyn and I spent the morning at the museum that houses Juanita The Ice Princess, the mummy found in the Andes in the 1990s with most of her internal organs still intact. She was an Inca sacrifice from hundreds of years ago and her body is on display in an icy sarcophagus at the Museo Santuarios Andinos. The tour guide told us that the girl, after walking many miles up a volcano and imbibing both chicha (alcohol) and coca (drugs), was hit on the head with a star shaped stone. Deification can be kind of rough if you’re an Inca, huh? Apparently fifteen other child sacrifices have been found in Peru and Argentina and all the bodies are housed in the laboratories at the Museo. Though Juanita is the only one on display, Arequipa is apparently a premier research station for the Incan culture. This is a picture of Arequipa's Plaza de Armas:
Carolyn and I then walked to Yuanahara, a suburb of Arequipa that has a lovely view of the city with Mt. Misti towering over it. On the way we stopped at Sol de Mayo, a restaurant where I got to taste the infamous cuy. Yes, it's a guinea pig. And yes, I ate it. Some people seem to like it quite a lot but I found it greasy and difficult to get the tiny bits of meat off way too many little bones. But it does make for some great pictures.
I also took Carolyn to the market where I tried to find the frogs for the jugo de rana but, as it was Sunday and Peru is fervently Catholic, most of the merchants had closed up shop. We did buy a ton of fun fruit though, including lucuma, which has a dark green skin and orange meat surrounding a pit that tastes like dates. Back on the Colca Canyon hike, on the way to the hot spring in Chivay, Victor our guide got in an argument with the taxi cab driver about frog and toad juice. “I would never drink toad juice,” Victor said (en español), “Toads are big and ugly. They would make the juice black.” “It’s the same thing,” replied the driver, “They’re both good for you.” And in the backseat Carolyn broke in with “Either way, frogs or toads, eating them is terrible!” To which I heartily agree.

I also got to try some weird South American ice creams: queso (cheese) which was salty and weird and chirimoya (a green fruit with white meat) which also did not taste so great. But when in Rome...

Anyway, tomorrow Mike, Carolyn and I are off to Lake Titicaca and maybe a view of Bolivia!

June 29-30: Colca Canyon

2007-06-29T02:41:00.000-04:00

I had to wake up at 5:30am (!) because the guide for the Colca Canyon trek was picking me up at 6am (!). Victor, a twenty-two year old from Chivay studying tourism (surprise surprise) in Arequipa, collected the five travelers from our disparate hostels. Shockingly every single one of us was doing Peru solo. Victor shoved us into two tiny taxis (which is pretty much the only variety of taxi to be found in most of Peru) and shipped us to the bus station where we barely made the 6:30am bus to Cabanaconde. Off we went on a bumpy dirt road through some amazing mountainous countryside. The place looked like a topographical model because of the extensive terracing.

Colca Canyon is the second deepest canyon in the world (beaten by its sister canyon Cotohuasi which, it was recently discovered, is deeper). Because it is set in the mountainous region around Arequipa, it is deeper even than the Grand Canyon and every bit as spectacular. It is home to a large population of Andean condors who can be seen drifting through the canyon on strong thermals. After arriving in Cabanaconde, I met the group and enjoyed a typical Peruvian lunch of quinoa and vegetable soup and chicken with some kind of thick peanut mustard sauce over rice. Interestingly, the Peruvians don’t use the word “traditional” so much. Instead, you see women in “typical” dress and eat “typical” Peruvian food. And I met my fellow travelers – Carolyn from Britain on a one year South America journey, Mike from Canada on an eighteen month SA trip, Nogah from Israel on a nine month SA trip, and Michael from Sweden, also on an extended SA stay. I was the only one who hadn’t been living out of my backpack for more than six months. Although Cabanaconde is a miniscule town, it had a lovely Plaza de Armas with a statue of a condor under the insanely blue sky. So off we went. Day one consisted of a four hour downhill trek where we descended into the canyon, passing villagers with their mules and stopping occasionally for Victor to explain the medicinal qualities of various plants. We arrived in San Juan de Cuccho at a very basic eco-lodge where we ate more soup (potato this time) and chicken with rice. At night, after the sun sets, the moon does strange things to your depth perception of the mountain and it looks like tiny gnomes move the entire mountain a hundred yards closer to your sleeping huts. Very weird. We spent the night with Angel (another guide)’s group, which consisted of a pair of Dutch guys, an American couple, and a Brit who had been living in Columbia for the past two years.

The next day we hiked across the valley. Those tiny white specks hung in the canyon are actually two towns and beyond them, on the other side of the canyon, is the oasis called Sangalle where we spent our second night. Sangalle hosts a couple of sparkling natural pools and a set of bamboo huts whose walls don’t really offer much privacy (as you can see). But it did have some awesome furniture made out of palm trees! On the way from San Juan we bought some amazingly sour cactus fruit from a local who let us take pictures of her llama. It was Carolyn’s birthday that day and Nogah had given her a walking stick with two balloons tied to it and Carolyn donated her balloons to a little girl who had been hiding behind her mother’s skirts.

In Sangalle, Kevin (the Columbian Brit) taught us how to play Shithead, a card game that supposedly every South American backpacker knows and loves. It’s actually a kind of genius game because there are no winners, only a loser. While we were playing, two Peruvian kids (we think they belonged to the owner of our bamboo huts) joined us and we spent a merry couple of hours trying to play our game while keeping the kids entertained and trying to make conversation in our very bad Spanish. Carolyn, being fluent, seemed to have the best luck. “Tire este,” she would tell the kids and they would throw her cards into the pile.The next day we had to wake up at 3:30am(!!!!!) to make the long climb out of the canyon. I was tired from hiking the two days before so Carolyn and I opted for a mule ride in the moonlight. Our muleteer showed up with two animals and after we got the hang of holding on to the animals through the insanely steep switchbacks, off we went. The mules actually tired before the muleteer did. He powered up the mountain in no time at all. The Dutch guys from Angel’s group won the hike. They made it up 5000 feet in less than two hours. By 6am we were all having the best breakfast of hollow triangle bread and eggs I have ever eaten. One little hang up – Jessie, the other American girl, took a mule up the mountain but her muleteer abandoned her before getting into town and Jessie spent the wee hours of the morning getting unbelievably lost in Cabanaconde’s surrounding countryside! Luckily Angel found her after she found her way to the Plaza de Armas and brought her to the bus just in time for us to climb on with a thousand other Peruvians.We were on our way to Cruz Del Condor, one of the best spots for viewing the Andean condor and a mecca for the tourist buses on their two day Canyon Country tour. And where there are tourists, there are souvenirs. And where there are souvenirs, there are women in embroidered hats and skirts selling the souvenirs. And those women come from Cabanaconde. The hike through the canyon is much less popular than the bus to Cruz Del Condor so the dozen hikers on that early morning bus were crammed in among the short souvenir women with their thick woolen skirts, and whatever men were catching a ride to Chivay. The cargo hold and the roof were overflowing with the backpacker’s mochilas and the plastic Duane Reade bags crammed with knitted hats and woven blankets and other alpaca based detritus. We somehow managed to squeeze everyone waiting in line in Cabanaconde on board and then the bus continued to pick up passengers on the way to Cruz Del Condor! The additional people were forced to ride on the roof with the packed goods, or hang on to the ladder on the outside because there was absolutely no room inside. All the souvenirs in the picture below were on my bus. So was the little girl.After staying for an hour and watching many condors gracefully glide through the canyon and awkwardly land on rocky outcroppings, we then made our way back to Chivay for a soak in some much needed thermal springs. They were quite lovely too, crystal clear water that was boiling hot at the spring source and pleasantly warm further out. Then off to a tourist buffet lunch (well, I suppose you can't avoid all of them) where I got my first taste of grenadilla, quite possibly the best fruit in the world. It's an orange fruit with a soft gray membranous sac full of seeds inside. You eat the sac like frogs' eggs or something and it tastes absolutely wonderful. Fantastic stuff. Then back on the bus for the long ride back to Arequipa.

June 27: Arequipa

2007-06-27T01:04:00.000-04:00

After an overdose of pre-Incan culture, I took an overnight bus from Nazca to Arequipa. I used the bus company Cial but anyone else who does the trip should pay the extra bit for a proper Cruz Del Sur seat that you can actually lean back without ticking off the woman behind of you. Otherwise the ride feels like an airplane flight with your seat back in the full upright position and the worst turbulence possible for the entire ten or eleven hours.

Known as the White City for its primary construction material, a white volcanic rock called sillar, Arequipa has a reputation for being a bit ornery. As in the way that Quebec is ornery. The rest of Peru drinks Inca Cola, right? In Arequipa though, you drink Kola Escocesa because la bebida de Peru can't possibly be la bebida de Arequipa. And while the rest of the country enjoys Cusqueña beer (named after the city Cuzco, the Incan capital), the residents of the city drink Arequipeña instead. The attitude is so pervasive the souvenir shops actually sell a novelty Arequipan passport. So weird.
I stayed at the hostel Home Sweet Home. Although security in dorm rooms is a real issue, cramped quarters force travelers to interact and I felt lonely and sick of Spanish by now. I met a whole mess of friendly folks in my dorm room (there were five beds in one room, and none of them were bunks) who invited me to dinner where I got to try rocoto relleno, a hot pepper stuffed with alpaca meat and potatoes. Mucho gusto.

The first day, after booking a trek to Colca Canyon, I visited the Santa Catalina Monastery, a sprawling Dominican compound that once housed an order of nuns with the laxest possible policy of cloistered life. The had servants and threw parties and most were the daughters of rich families who paid handsome dowries to be admitted. It was reformed at some point and the later nuns were pious to the point of self mortification. One of the cells actually had a bed of nails used by some dedicated Mother Superior. The monastery was full of picturesque alleyways perfect for filling up my memory card.
After my fill of the monastery I wandered around the Plaza de Armas and ended up buying postcards from a university student in Arequipa. Many of the young guides I met on the trip are students of tourism at local universities eager to try out their English on anyone who will bother to talk to them. The guy (whose name I've unfortunately forgotten) told me that he used to work as a porter on the Inca Trail and he makes more money now selling postcards in the plaza than he did carrying heavy packs and running up and down mountains all day long. He then asked if I'd like to visit the market with him and, after establishing that I did not want some kind of city tour, he took me to see all the weird Peruvian food on display at the giant market. This is some of the grain available, including the Peruvian corn on steroids called choclo. The kernels are huge compared to the standard American ones.
And this is the black corn they use to make chicha morada, sweetened juice that tastes unlike anything I've ever had before. (It wasn't bad, but it wasn't good. It was just strange.) They also ferment it to make a corn beer called chicha, which I never actually found despite Lonely Planet's claim that it's frequently served is Cuzco.
And best of all, these little buggers are used to make jugo de rana. Yup, that's right, you can get liquefied frog in a cup mixed with other fresh fruits. Supposedly its good for your brain. I say it can't possibly be good for anything. My food bravery ends at blended amphibian.
Peruvian Guide Boy also took me to a bridge to check out Mt. Misti, a still active volcano that looms over Arequipa. People who climbed Misti attest that it does indeed still smoke and smells like sulphur.

June 25, 26: Nazca

2007-06-26T14:48:00.000-04:00

So it was back on the bus for another few hours to Nazca, which, like most of the southern coast of Peru, is basically a giant desert. A desert with MUMMIES... ooooooh, creepy. After the whole Islas Ballestas boat ride experience, I was not about to jump into an equally vomit inducing airplane ride to go over the famous Nazca lines. I've seen lots of pictures and from what I hear about the flight, even those with stomachs of steel have to brace themselves. Instead I spent two days with a guide named Jose who worked with the German scientist Maria Reiche back in the 70s. Maria Reiche studied the Nazca lines in Peru for close to fifty years and barely lived to see them named a UNESCO World Heritage site. Jose shares Reiche's passion for conservation and most of his tours consisted of some pretty elaborate arm waving that immeasurably helped me understand his Spanish. He was also probably the best enunciator I met in Peru. Despacio y claro, my favorite! All three of these sites can really suck if you don't have a good guide. They're not very flashy and Nazca is incredibly hot and dry. This is a panorama of the Plaza de Armas:
First stop: Cauchilla Cemetery. The Nazcas were a pre-Incan civilization with a huge burial site in the same region as the lines. Unfortunately, huacaros (grave robbers) have stolen most of the gold jewelry and fancy textiles from the tombs, but some bones, some broken pottery, and a lot of 1000 year old hair remains. Jose quite indignantly told us that Cauchilla receives no government protection, that a ticket collector at the entrance to the site pockets the money and doesn't use it for preservation, and that no one is there to guard the mummies at night or when it's not tourist season. It's interesting that Machu Picchu can get away with charging so much and civilizations even more ancient, albeit in less picturesque landscape, get such short shrift.
Second stop: Cauhauchi. I didn't intend to come here but I ended up with a couple from Lima, one of whom was the daughter of an artist who recreated the murals and friezes of the ruins in northern Peru. She was an amateur photographer preparing for an expo on the ruins of southern Peru. Cauhauchi is a city that is slowly being excavated by a team of Italian archaeologists. Originally buried in a massive flood, the city was home to another pre-Incan civilization. Due to rapid wind erosion the Italians are forced to cover up the ruins after excavation, so only a small part of the city is actually visible. I did find some 1000 year old painted pottery shards and bones here, just laying on the ground for anyone to pick up. This place could be incredible if it had the resources for a full excavation and restoration. But I suppose Peru is full of cities hidden by sand or jungle.
Third stop: Nazca aqueducts. These aqueducts are still in use today after 1500 years. Built by the Nazca for water storage and irrigation, there are a series of windows to the subterranean aqueduct which allow for airflow and cleaning. Farmers in the area clean the aqueducts once a year. I thought you could actually go inside the aqueduct from the spiraling staircases but you can't. Bummer. This is me drinking the Nazca water. (Giardia, anyone? Anyone?)
And this is the view of the inside of the aqueduct. The water was crystal clear.I also got to see one Nazca line from the ground. This one is called The Needle and it exemplifies the fragility of the lines. The pattern is made simply by clearing the darker rocks away from the surface, exposing the lighter dirt. No wonder why the construction of the Pan American Highway obliterated the lines in its way.
This is the close up:
Final impressions of Nazca: Hot, dry, dusty, marginally interesting, and for heaven's sake, don't stay at the Hotel Mirador there if you can possibly avoid it. The beds are terrible.

June 24: Islas Ballestas and Huacachina

2007-06-24T13:48:00.000-04:00

After a rather disappointing day in the Paracas National Reserve, I got up early and hopped on a boat to the Islas Ballestes, famous for sea lions, penguins, and lots and lots of poop.

A huge population of gulls produces vast amounts of (rather strong smelling) guano. Workers harvest the fermenting bird poo every five to seven years and by that time, the guano can be several feet deep. Yum. I unfortunately got terribly seasick on the ride. The seas were a little rough and once at the islands, you're not allowed off the boat so as not to disturb the rather profitable guano production going on. I didn't actually feed the fish over the side of the boat, but it was touch and go for a while there. On a happy note, we did see Humboldt penguins (aw, they're so cute!) try to waddle down the side of a rock, with their useless little arms flapping about.
We also saw cormorants
and sea lions
and more gulls than you can possibly imagine.
This part of Paracas was worth it, minus the revolting stomach churning (but that's just me). Dolphins came to play with the boat on the way back in to town, and on the way out the boat passes by a geoglyph called The Candelabra that looks like either a cactus or Neptune's trident. After the boat tour, Carlos ferried me the two miles to the Pan American Highway for the ungodly price of S/20 ($6, also counts as Rip Off #3) and put me on a S/8 ($2.50) Soyuz bus to Ica, two hours to the south.

Huacachina is a desert oasis about fifteen minutes from the larger town of Ica. A tourist mecca, the town consists of a rather murky lake and towering surrounding sand dunes. Really, it's completely surrounded. Once you drive over the first dune, the world looks like the Sahara - immense piles of warm sand as far as the eye can see.
The place is so picture perfect, it's featured on the back of the 50 sole bill. Best of all, you get to go sandboarding here! My few feeble attempts at snowboarding have resulted in intense pain, so I chose not to strap my feet to the rudimentary pieces of laminated plywood that pass for sandboards. But sandsledding on your stomach down the dunes is every bit as fun!
The dune buggy drivers are maniacs. The dune buggies themselves should give you a clue about the blatant lack of disregard for tush comfort - they're basically nothing but roll bars with a motor and nine seats. And riding them is like riding a rocket. Our driver would go flying over the huge hills, Dukes Of Hazzard style, catching air and landing like a ton of bricks on the downhill side. It was AWESOME. And because I went on the 4pm trip out to the dunes, I caught the most beautiful desert sunset before we made our way back to town.
I stayed at Casa de la Rocha in Huacachina, which was perfect. They serve up a great breakfast and their cat had given birth to the cutest, shyest kittens in the world. And they kept parrots in the backyard. Which had a bar. And a pool.
I could have stayed here for a week, but Nazca and Arequipa were waiting down the Pan America. I did meet a half-Peruvian, half-German tour guide at dinner who gave me some good advice about where to go in Arequipa. He has to do the Gringo Trail for bus loads of Germans five or six times a year and he said that by far his favorite stop is the one in Huacachina. I don't blame him.

June 23: Paracas

2007-06-23T12:56:00.000-04:00

So I got completely ripped off for the first week I was here in Peru. My Spanish consisted of about 19 lessons from "Barron's Vamos A Hablar Español" which I had picked up sometime in December and halfheartedly gave a couple stabs at in the intervening months. This means I could talk only in the present tense (to talk about something in the past, I would say the equivalent of "Before, I am walking in the park") and my list of adjectives was pretty much limited to sizes and whether something was pretty or not. I was in a strange country, alone, with a limited grasp of language and I was TERRIFIED.

Rip-Off Number One: Cruz Del Sur. Cruz Del Sur is a big bus company down here in Peru. They are renowned for their safety (they actually film all passengers as they board the bus, because a couple of their overnight buses were robbed some years ago), their comfortable seats, and their on-board entertainment. They are also hugely expensive. I ended up paying $18 for a four hour bus ride that should have cost me $8. Ten dollars may not seem like much, but the equivalent 30 soles can get you either a hotel room, three square meals, or two souvenir T-shirts. I highly recommend Cruz Del Sur for the agonizing overnight bus trips from Nazca to Arequipa or from Puno to Cuzco. I do NOT recommend them for small jaunts from Lima to Paracas. Although we did get to watch Stranger Than Fiction on the bus. And every bus ride also has a game of Bingo which awards a bottle of pisco (Peruvian brandy, quite strong, used in making a drink called pisco sour which tastes like margarita) and a free future ride. The Bingo game was good for numbers practice anyway.

The Weird Divide: Rich limeños (Lima people) often summer in the little seaside town of Paracas. Their mansions are kept secreted away behind a white wall with a gate and a guard. The bus dropped the tourists off inside the wall, and I had to walk back to the other section of town to my hostel. It was only half a mile, maybe a seven minute walk, but I with my rucksack was hounded by tour touts the whole way there. I started by refusing them but eventually gave in and booked a hostel and tour with the most persistent one, a guy named Carlos.

Rip-Off Number Two: The Paracas tour. Because I booked everything through the hostel, I ended up paying a hefty commission to Carlos and Refugio del Piratas, the hostel I chose. It's a much better deal to go directly to the dock to book the tour, where the boat captain's will end up seeing more of your money. And the Paracas National Reserve tour is rather dull, so unless you're really into sandy expanses of nothing and long ceviche lunches, you may want to skip it. I don't regret seeing the reserve but it certainly didn't make my top ten list. This is pretty much the view for miles:
And this is their big tourist draw, Cathedral Rock. Doesn't look like much of a cathedral, huh? And to think the tour guides call the Reserve "The Poor Man's Galapagos." By poor they mean completely destitute.
And this is where you're more than likely to have lunch. The ceviche really was fantastic, despite some cautionary tales about people catching hepatitis from raw fish in Mexico. I had the sea bass. And Carlos actually drank the lime broth like it was soup.
You'll see lots of pelicans and gulls and maybe a nice sunset.
While waiting for the sunset, I met a Shane from Ireland who was on a six month halfway-round-the-world trip. Although his tour was completely booked and mine was completely the opposite, we would continue to run into each randomly from Paracas to Arequipa, proving that every single gringo really does stick to the Gringo Trail.

June 22: Lima

2007-06-22T12:13:00.000-04:00

Peru: Ancient land of dead civilizations, master stone masons, indigenous people who eat guinea pigs and build boats from reeds. Also land of little infrastructure, constant anti-government crusades, and extraordinarily literal divides of wealth and poverty.

American Airlines (also known as The Worst Airline Known To Man) cancelled my lovely 12pm flight from New York to Lima, forcing me to depart three hours ahead of schedule and out of a different state. In my rush to get to the New Jersey airport before my plane took off, I forgot my camera tripod, all of my fleecy jackets, and the list of addresses I had printed out for handy postcard mailings. No matter - I was on my way to Peru!

Lima is a HUGE city, sprawling sprawl on top of sprawl. It has all the traffic of Los Angeles and all the total disregard for road signs of New York. 1 out of every 7 cars in Lima is some form of taxi, and the one that took me from the airport to my hotel at 11pm didn't stop for a single red light. It was like the streetlights were mere suggestions and lines on the road didn't exist.

In addition to the taxis, there's also a massive population of buses and minibuses, mostly of Japanese make and model. This is apparently a holdover from a president of Japanese descent, Fujimori, who came to power in the early 80s. And believe me, the Peruvian fleet of vehicles hasn't seen any kind of updating since then. Men, holding on to the door of the bus, lean out into the street and yell things like "Ovalo Ovalo Arequipa Miraflores Ovalo Arequipa Miraflores!" and, depending what they say, you can take a bus to either the city center or its surrounding neighborhoods for a mere S/1 (one sole, equivalent to about 30 cents). Quite convenient once you get over your fear of being robbed, mugged, raped, or murdered, none of which happened to me. I found Peruvians quite helpful, especially on the bus. Not quite so much on the street where men whistle or make comments at every single solo female. And I don't even have blond hair.

I stayed south of Exposition Park (or Parque de la Cultura, depending on who you ask) which was home to a bizarre population of birds that looked like turkeys with blue faces.
After a typical Peruvian breakfast of bread and jam with coffee, I went off to explore Lima's San Francisco Monastery, which houses a creepy ossuary in its catacombs. All of the church practitioners had been buried in the catacombs and, hundreds of years later when they finally exhumed them, the restorers neatly stacked the bones in grotesque piles according to bone type. So there were huge bins of femurs, of ribs, of pelvic bones, of skulls... And in some parts the bones had been arranged into lovely designs. Like a pile of skulls with ulnas radiating from it. Charming.

From my brief time in New York, I've learned one very important thing about city birds: DON'T FEED THE PIGEONS. When you do, they come together in giant flocks and take over public squares like the Red Army. This used to be the fountain in front of the San Francisco. Now it's a birdbath.
Also visited the main cathedral in the Plaza de Armas (the main square). Every Peruvian town has a Plaza de Armas and, no matter how small or poor the town is, their plaza is usually quite nice with flowers and benches and maybe a statue. The weather in Lima was crap though. Because it was winter in South America, the coastal fog just lingers over the city like a wet blanket. So no nice pictures of the outside, but Pizarro (the Spanish conquistador who conquered the Incas) is supposedly buried inside. There was quite a nice station of the cross with a gorgeously ornate Virgin Mary.
To be honest, I found Lima a bit depressing with its pollution and its constant even level of gray. The next day I left on a bus to Paracas National Reserve.

2007-04-11T15:20:00.000-04:00

Ha ha! Flickr at last! I broke down and got myself a Flickr account so you can check out the Hungarian pictures in all their organized glory here.

2007-04-05T23:31:00.000-04:00

There was a market outside Cafe Gerbeaud with lots of yummy (slash handy) Hungarian wares. The man playing the flute didn't sound particularly good but I guess it's tough to hawk musical wares.
On the last day we went to Castle Hill to sightsee and tour the president's offices. The president was out but we did meet his secretary and we got to sit on the gilt chairs and take pictures on the presidential terrace. When I'm rich and famous I too will paper every room in a different color damask.
There's lots of tourist folk art and paprika stalls up by Buda Palace. I went to the new "real" Hungary (aka the giant mall by the train station) and was sad to discover that every store was American or English. How time (and global corporatism) does change.

2007-03-27T20:04:00.000-04:00

I was in Budapest for a whirlwind three days for the Domjan 100 Symposium and my grandmother, Evelyn, must have been so excited. A member of Parliament came out in the cold and rain to affix a plaque in Köbánya to mark the house where my grandfather lived for twenty seven years.
And this is the roof of Szent László templom, the church where my (evidently very devout) great grandmother attended mass every single day. All kinds of buildings are decorated with the wonderfully colorful Zsolnay ceramic tile and László has a porcelain alter inside as well.
We had a birthday party for Evelyn that afternoon at the famous Cafe Gerbeaud and she told us how people used to sit all day in the cafe, drinking coffee and talking. She and her mother would eat pastries here on special occasions when she was a child.
Mmm, eszterházy torte. We also took a trip to Sárospatak, an adorable town outside of Budapest. There was a small church and a castle belonging to the family Rákóczi.

2007-03-03T11:10:00.000-05:00

www.KimStringfellow.com I went to see the International Center For Photography's Ectopia and Kim Stringfellow Greetings From The Salton Sea exhibit had a computer terminal displaying her web based project (linked here.) The place is a perfect wreck of abandonment and her website is a super fun romp through the irony of decay. This is what happens when suburbia goes terribly, terribly wrong.

2007-03-01T11:12:00.000-05:00

www.AnthonyMcCall.com This is his current exhibit the Sean Kelly Gallery. I'm dying to figure out how it works. It must be lasers and fog machines because you can't get a wall of light like that any other way. But a white laser? White isn't a wavelength in the visible spectrum... So confused yet so intrigued...

2007-02-28T21:48:00.002-05:00

www.DavidLaChapelle.com. Talk about prolific. David LaChapelle has done covers and photo spreads for every celebrity under the sun. Check out his unbelievably extensive portfolio.

2006-10-29T22:29:00.000-05:00

Top Ten Reasons Why You Should See Sankai Juku – KAGEMI: A Metaphor For Mirrors

10) They tour with rice cookers.
9) The technical director did the load-in wearing a leopard-print do-rag, tight black pants, and kung-fu shoes.
8) When Sankai Juku toured with HIBEKI they requested washed white beach sand. It arrived as wet sand and we had to turn our rehearsal room into a hotbox to dry several hundred pounds of sand by show time.
7) The dancers are on a huge world tour, perform every night, and still help load out the set.
6) When you buy a hammer in Japan, you only get the head. All the handles of the crew’s hammers are handmade. (And they’re weirdly straight.)
5) Butoh is a form of dance born from a nihilistic post-Hiroshima Japan. In fact, the word butoh means “dance of darkness” and the first ever butoh piece ended with the smothering of a live chicken between someone’s legs, which got the piece banned from the festival where it premiered.
4) White is the new white. And rice flour is the new Ben Nye.
3) Ushio Amagatu founded the company in 1975 and still dances.
2) Dancer Toshiuki Takada fell to his death in 1985 when he was hanging, head down, from six stories up the façade of Seattle’s Mutual Life Building in SHOLIBA.
1) Mmmm… meditative body control… totally hypnotizing…

Seriously, the show mesmerized me despite the tepid NYT review. They're coming to UCLA's Royce Hall in November before leaving for Koala Lumpur, so catch them in all their monasteristic, ritualistic, white-caked, lotus flower hovering glory while you can.

2006-10-10T13:27:00.000-04:00

More cousins getting married, this time on my mom's side. Congratulations, Theron and Elizabeth! (Damon and Linda, meet your new cousin. And guess what? Theron's opening a bar super close to my apartment in Brooklyn. Sweet.)

2006-10-09T08:27:00.000-04:00

Speaking of puppets... Hearsay has it that 1) you CAN in fact climb the arch of Grand Army Plaza on Farmer's Market Saturday and 2) when you get there, there is a puppet library inside! Musician David Byrne confirmed this fact on his blog. Sunken ships, abandoned tobacco warehouses... Brooklyn's a weird little place.

2006-09-30T22:16:00.000-04:00

Does it count as completely unprofessional if I occasionally gawk at my place of employment? I subbed for a day at Sesame Street and my little child-of-the-eighties heart was pattering like it was Christmas. It was a pick-up shoot for an Elmo DVD, just a couple producers sitting around discussing how Elmo best serves the emotional needs of children. Not the most exciting work on the planet but I got to sit on the steps where they sing the intro song ("sunny days, chasing the clouds a-way..."). Yup, I still remember the words. What of it? Snuffleupagus was hanging from the grid in one corner of the room and Big Bird's nest was shoved backstage with a mess of other props. The puppets were stowed in a rolling case painted with a mural of the set peopled with tiny Jim Hensons. The nostalgia was overwhelming, which is weird considering that as a child I was identifying with a glorified bathmat possessing Ping-Pong eyeballs. Entertainment can be so surreal.

Other news: Saw SubUrbia (trite... so trite... so cloyingly cliche...) and The Pain and the Itch which burned up the Steppenwolf in Chicago for good reason. A play poking fun at white bleeding heart liberals attended solely by... white bleeding heart liberals. Including me. I exhibit all those alarming characteristics - quoting PBS specials and New York Times articles, owning plenty of nice things but vehemently denying my materialism, appreciating the sanitized world of post-Giuliani New York. Ugh. I feel dirty inside.

2006-09-14T20:40:00.000-04:00

Okay, okay. All the naysaying stagehands turned out to be wrong. We deserve a designer's preemptory swat. Two good ideas that had potentially devastating consequences were carried off without a hitch and with aplomb in this year's Fashion Week.

As related to me by some fellow workers, the blue candy filling Marc Jacob's (insanely gorgeous) Armory show was poured out two (TWO!) days before showtime. We were convinced that the roaches and rats of New York would pour, pied piper style, into the venue and devour the mountain of sugar that was waiting to rot mouse molar. Instead not a single model tripped over a rodent, not a single audience member ran screaming from a roach infestation. The show looked great and got a seven photo spread in the NY Times metro section. Slap slap.

And over at Y3 the runway design called for several conveyer belts running at different speeds and in different directions. Now, models have a tough job. They have to walk into a new place that was built from something akin to very expensive spit and glue, figure out how the runway works and get through it several times without falling over, hurting the wardrobe, or looking anything less than stunning, possibly all while high on coke, heroin, or both. By adding moving pieces of machinery we stagehands had concoted this fantastic image of model pileups and blood smeared across the catwalk by the end of the show. "It'll be like the last scene of Carrie!" one stagehand predicted. When the lighting designer(s) came in to focus DK's show in the morning, everyone gathered around him asking "How'd Y3 go? Was it a total disaster?" Nope, total success. More falling happened when one unnamed fashion maven polished his catwalk with bowling alley wax. Slap slap.

I'm still waiting for the model trainwreck. Maybe next year...

2006-09-06T11:57:00.000-04:00

California rocked, as usual. Heather Carson's new lightHANGAR is enormous and daunting. It opens next week, so check it out if you can.

Cheesewhiz, burnt hamburgers, and brownies abounded at Jenny's bonfire. Sam took lots of pictures and I ate lots of food.
Jason and Yasmin were married in a wonderful, beautiful, small, non-fussy, totally perfect ceremony in Santa Cruz full of astonomers, fish biologists, and a person with no pants. Can I profess my love for the coastal region? The Santa Cruz waters were full of boats and surfers and children and the whole wonderful beach culture. Who cares about the pot-smoking, unemployed, flip-flop wearing, messy-haired, "yeah like totally man" stereotype? At least these people don't ever have to save up for winter... There is no winter in California.

2006-08-19T11:00:00.000-04:00

So you know a place is insanely gorgeous when, on your final day of vacation, as a blazing sun settles in a perfect sunset over the hills, you sarcastically remark "Oh great, another picturesque sunset. Why is there no trash on the ground in this place?" Nova Scotia was a ridiculous maritime pastoral (if such a thing exists). Rocky ocean bluffs, green rolling hills, crystal blue water... Think Hawaii, only thirty degrees cooler and 30 degrees of latitude norther. And crabs and scallops instead of coral reef. And Scottish and French people instead of Hawaiian natives. Okay fine, it's nothing like Hawaii. Here are some pictures anyway:

Bar Harbor, Maine gets quite a bit of marine fog. Huh, so that "enshrouded in mist" thing those authors talk about really does exist... This picture is of the surrounding islands taken from the top of Champlain Mountain on Mount Desert Island in Acadia National Park. The Precipice Trail to the summit is a super fun 1000 foot climb complete with iron handholds and footholds in the nesting grounds of the peregrine falcon. I'm sorry, did I mention mountains and bouldering and endangered falcons all in one sentence? Yup, Maine is just that fun.
The first of many perfect sunsets. This was from Cadillac Mountain, Acadia. From there we took the ferry to Yarmouth, Nova Scotia (pronounced in the Maine way "Yahmouth." You know, like the "lobstah" and the "chowdah") and drove to Digby, home of a large scallop fleet. Home also to some pretty severe rain, a beach where you can find jasper, bacon-wrapped scallops, donair pizza (that would be döner to anyone who's been to Europe), and Canadian McDonalds that sell McLobsters.
Part of the scallop fleet. The red boats are clearly at lower tide. You can see the high tide mark on the pier behind them. The Bay of Fundy, that strip of water between Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, is home to the highest recorded tides in the world. The tides are so extreme, the docks use combined ramp/ stair units. At low tide you use the stairs, and at high tide you walk across the ramp like a gangplank. In Digby we saw a boat go from completely beached to bobbing on the water in twelve hours.
Sunset in Digby (ooh, aaah). So we hung out for a couple of days and then headed out to Brier Island, Nova Scotia's westernmost point. We went on a whale cruise (four humpbacks and an Atlantic right whale) and camped out on a remote beach where we found one very dead seagull and one very dead seal.Um, did I neglect to mention that we drove to Nova Scotia on a giant scooter? The next day we stopped at the (very tourist-y) Balancing Rock before heading up to Cape Breton. Along the way we marvelled at the Bay of Fundy. The Minas Basin on the northern side of Nova Scotia completely drains and refills with the tides. When the tide comes in, the water is so heavy that the entire island of Nova Scotia actually tilts. The oncoming rush of high tide is enough to reverse the directions of the low-lying rivers. We didn't go tidal bore rafting, but we saw plenty of places that offered it. Pictures left to post: bald eagles, jellyfish, more sunsets, more boats, caterpillers, giant spiders, crazy fungi, and the ridiculously lovely Cape Breton.

2006-07-19T18:22:00.000-04:00

Yesterday was the hottest day this summer. It was 95 degrees but felt like 110. Then, at around 9:45pm, we had another infamous New York thunderstorm replete with torrential rain, hurricane-like wind, and terrific bolts of lightning. And guess what? I got to work outside with the New York Philharmonic's "Concerts in the Parks" series during all of the environmental hoopla. On the hottest day of summer, we had to lay down a plywood road for the semi-truck with the musician's instruments. And then pick it up. And then in the pouring rain, in a baseball infield that had turned to slightly sandy sludge, we had to put the plywood back down. And then pick it up AGAIN! Holy moly, was I ever pooped.

The program had John Adams (The Chairman Dances), Prokofiev (Violin Concerto No. 1), and Beethoven (Symphony No. 5). Before the concert began management started mumbling about cancelling the show due to bad weather on the way, but a little after 8pm the show started with a "we may still cancel" caveat.

During the first scheduled intermission the event organizers announced that the storm was going to hit at 9:40pm, so they were going to skip intermission and truncate the program.

After finishing the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth the musicians started looking apprehensive about the weather. The audience, apparently desperate for classical music, started yelling "Finish it! Finish it!" and the musicians dutifully finished the symphony.

And just in time too. As we stagehands started to clear the stage (and after most of the instruments had been stowed away in the truck), the storm broke. Watching 50,000 people scatter from the Great Lawn in Central Park in a panic, dropping bottles of wine and bits of brie, screaming and trying to cover up their little crepe summer dresses and running through the mud in high heels is HYSTERICAL! All we heard was a distant screaming (aaaaaaah!) as the storm started. And then when it really started pouring, everyone started really screaming (AAAAAAAH!) and running for the exit. 50,000 people. You couldn't even see the grass when the concert started. And the field was clear in five minutes flat. And that's the weather in New York. Next, the news.

2006-06-20T20:12:00.000-04:00

The glass artist Dale Chihuly had an extensive exhibit up at Pepperdine University while I was working in Malibu last year. Linda had to deal with the same artist at the Berkeley Art Museum. (Thank heavens I didn't have to assemble it. What a tedious and terrifying experience - "Oh no! I just dropped piece seven hundred and fifty A point two! Now the whole sculpture will fall over!") Starting this month Chihuly's beautifully wrought blown glass is coming to the New York Botanical Garden. I can't think of a better place to show off his organically inspired art. Lush garden setting + colorful textural glass = totally sweet.

2006-06-16T00:11:00.000-04:00

Tim took me to New Haven to tour the crazy Gothic Yale architecture, drink at the Yale-memorabilia adorned bars, and get absolutely drenched by the horrible weather on the way home. We had an excellent time. In true New Haven style, we ate at Sally's Apizza (because in New Haven "pizza" doesn't use enough letters), site of an infamous pizza turf war. Pepe's is right next door and BOY, do pizza freaks ever get into it about who makes a better slice. And on a nighttime tour of the campus we wandered into the enormous Yale library to marvel at the card catalogue that takes up the entire first floor. Yup, everyone one of those shelves in that picture is an apothecarian rat's nest of old skool Dewey Decimal. Awesome.

I bought a bike to enjoy the good weather that finally graced New York and three days ago, I crashed it. I was riding down a hill coming off the Brooklyn Bridge and went over some bumps and hit the front brake and went flying head first into the asphalt. I've got some awesome road rash and my bike seat got all bent from doing a lovely arcing 180 over my head and landing, seat first, on the ground at like 20 miles an hour. Oh yeah, I'm totally rocking the "I just got beat up by machinery" look right now.

Many celebrations are in order: Mike P made it through law school, Bonnie made it through med school, my sister made it through college, and Trisha is officially engaged to be married to Spencer! It's almost like we're growing up or something. :) Congratulations all around!

I just got back from a play that Doug from Colorado is workshopping in Tribeca right now called Game Boys. It's an excellent script, full of wit and charm and frighteningly sick, dark humor about a pair of boys who accidentally tick off the Russian mafia and end up betting on the Iraq War bodycount. Totally twisted and just may be coming to a Los Angeles theater near you.

2006-06-03T10:27:00.000-04:00

The BAM Rose Cinema is brimming with obscure festivals and I couldn't be happier that I stumbled across Japanese stop-motion animation by Kihachiro Kawamoto. They showed two days of shorts and I saw yesterday’s smorgasbord: An Anthropo-Cynical Farce, House of Flames, To Shoot Without Shooting, and Briar Rose or The Sleeping Beauty. With beautifully costumed puppets and charming little sets, he creates worlds in China, Japan, and whatever European utopia Fairytale Land comes from.

The one common factor? Every seemingly simple fable was extraordinarily dark and weird. In House of Flames, a woman trying to choose between two suitors solves the dilemma by killing herself. Unfortunately, the two men also kill themselves and she is damned to a House of Flames where an iron duck picks at her brain for five centuries. Even Sleeping Beauty got a twisted makeover. The viewers are told that the fairytale is false and no evil witch ever cast a spell. Instead, the Queen’s first love (who she thought was dead) shows up at little Rose’s christening. On her fifteenth birthday, the actually-not-doomed princess discovers her mother’s old beau in the forest. And proceeds to sleep with him. Fifteen. Mother’s ex-lover. WTF?!? (That love scene may have inspired Matt Stone and Trey Parker in Team America: World Police… oh, who am I kidding?) Yup, I will be running (not walking) to see his full-length The Book of the Dead this afternoon. Midnight Eye has a fascinating interview on Book of the Dead and a nice overview of Japanese experimental animation.

2006-05-31T22:33:00.000-04:00

Eric and I met this little toad while hiking at Breakneck Ridge last weekend. You know that saying about mountain weather - "If you don't like it, just wait fifteen minutes"? The same goes for the Hudson Valley. It was cloudy when we started our scramble up the rocks and by the time we hit the peak, it was in full monsoon mode. I mean pouring, torrential rain and gusting wind. I was soaked through. And an hour later while we were getting ourselves terribly misguided in the descent, it turned into a lovely golden afternoon. I learned some interesting things about the area - the KKK is in them thar hills, this season is going to be filthy with gypsy moth caterpillars, and Friendly's makes a mean sundae if you can put up with the screaming three year old at the booth across the way. Oh, and now I definitely know what I'm doing this summer.

2006-05-25T22:20:00.000-04:00

I went to the Olafur Eliasson exhibit at the Tanya Bonakdar gallery in Chelsea today. He was the artist who did the expansive Weather Project at the Tate Modern in London. And here in New York I was amazed by the beauty - both physically and conceptually - of his experimentation with light and wave forms and optics in general. "The inverted mirror sphere" was this amazing chandalier inspired by the geodisiac architect Buckminster Fuller made of steel tubes, and steel and mirror plates.

The other piece that practically made me wet myself was "your negotiable panorama," which sported a circular pool of water in a circular room. I have no idea how he managed to just get that thin line to reflect in a circle around the room, but when you step over the bridge to get into the space, it sets off a ripple in the pool, which then reflects on the wall panorama. *Drool*

2006-03-18T15:29:00.000-05:00

Needless to say, my primary response after exiting a 65 minute performance of plaid cellos, goths in tutus, extremely large lettered dice, giant eyeballs with Hebrew lettering, and a whole lot of donkey was "WTF?" The show was baffling and amusing and ridiculous and pretentious and inspiring all at once.

Line notes from the program of Zomboid! Film/ Performance Project #1 written, directed and designed by Richard Foreman:

Mostly--
--people are interested in 'events'. But I find more potent, the time between events, the oscillation of the field -- in this case that potent "staging area" in front of filmed tableaux, in which the archetypically 'blindfolded' hover like semi-visible Gods -- semi-controlling the wobble of 'blind' impulsive behavior on the stage below.

How to put this into action?

I PROPOSE
--that every compositional strategy (formalist, narrative, etc) is a distortion of reality, a relative lie -- a limitation of options. Every CHOICE closes down most of the world -- (all other alternatives).

Yet a certain amount of choice, and compositional procedure cannot be avoided. (But do try!) Of what remains -- make the lie evident as a lie. Radical choice: Make the stage event in a certain sense "unconvincing."

Then -- what is one left with? Phenomenon which, as it arises, must be "tossed away." This "tossing away" as the interesting aesthetic event. The fascinating new rhythm.

"Ah -- this moment starts to be interesting? -- Toss it away!" The "music" of that "toss it away" -- a kind of ecstasy, a stripping down that reveals -- what? Some strange, new oscillating "thing" under all other "things."

THE OTHER!

This "OTHER" ARISES AS THE STAGE EVENT IS PUNCTUATED BY THE REPEATED "TOSSING AWAY" OF THEATER AND EVENT AND NARRATIVE... THE FILM PROJECTED THROUGHOUT IS THE HOLDING ONTO THE NON-DEVELOPING "BLINDNESS" (Blindfolded) IN WHICH OUR HUMAN LIFE IS INDEED GROUNDED.

We humans understand, finally, only those illusionary systems that we "construct" for ourselves (the social contract). We are blind to the complex "whole" that operates outside (below and above) our consciousness.

The "radical space" of this performance is a "staging arena" that hovers in that "in between" space -- between projected image (the sustained archtype of blindness) and the live performance of our many impulse-grounded behavioral twitches.

Richard Foreman

Uh-huh. So obvious. Don-key.

2006-03-10T21:30:00.000-05:00

We also went to the Botanical Gardens in Leiden where they had a crazy carniverous plant exhibit on a catwalk above the tropical plant section. I decided that pitcher plants are completely creepy and the fact that you can see bits of digested whatever floating around in their bowls is mad gross. Venus flytraps, however, remain tidy yet fantastically dangerous looking.

2006-03-10T21:24:00.000-05:00

The Peace Palace in The Hague in Holland. We were guided there by some friendly resident who explained that The Hague has become more popular with the trials of well known war criminals (cough cough Milosevic). The Hague is also home to an awesome museum with nearly all of MC Escher's work in one place.

2006-03-10T21:21:00.000-05:00

My always charming little sister at the Burcht, the original "protection" for her adorable little Dutch town in Leiden, Holland. It was really just a giant circle and the citizens of Middle Ages Leiden would gather in it when they were under attack.

2006-03-10T21:16:00.000-05:00

The 300 foot tall Atomium is a model of an iron molecule (Fe, baby!) built for the 1958 World Fair. This puppy is big enough that each ball can comfortably hold an exhibit about a) the World Fair b) the construction of the gigantic molecule or c) any number of extremely strange art exhibits including a floating flourescent cloud of stringy things and a suspended bunch of water molecule beds meant for children. Dude, Belgians are weird.

2006-03-10T21:14:00.000-05:00

The impressive tower of Town Hall in the Grand Place central square of Brussels.

2006-03-10T21:10:00.000-05:00

Back from Europe already, more's the pity. I took a crapload of photos and a few actually turned out decently. This is the impressive Saint Michael cathedral that we passed on our daily walk to the city center of Brussels.

2006-02-08T20:00:00.000-05:00

So I can't resist... these past few weeks have just been too hysterical to not share.

Fashion week is always nuts. The Spring Collection show (which goes up in September) happened when I had been living in New York for less than a month and started with a knife fight at a diner at 3:30am. This one wasn't quite so bad. I got to see Donna Karan's DKNY collection (ew, ew, ick, ick! Schlumpy cardigans are back again!) and another designer named Luella Bartley. If you look up Luella's pictures, you'll see her fall 2006 collection was done in this green carpeted room thing, not a runway. The show was in a crazy Old Boy's club on the Upper East Side - all dark wood panelling and big leather chairs, very swanky, very old-men-in-smoking-jackets-drinking-brandy. And there were loads of big scary portraits of Republican presidents lining the walls. The media mob had been placed at one end of the room (and there are TONS of photographers and video people all crammed onto a tiny little platform - terribly amusing, watching them jockey for position) right up against a big portrait of George HW Bush. One of the photographers kept leaning against the picture and the lighting designer was FREAKING OUT. He was like "That picture is worth more than my entire company!! Stop touching it!!" Very exciting.

And back at the theater, we've been loading in an operatic version of Hercules with this huge, gargantuan concrete set and corkboard floor that's supposed to look like sand. The last time I unloaded a shipping container truck, I ended up in the hospital with a fleck of Styrofoam lodged firmly in my eyeball. This time, when we threw open the container doors, what was one of the first things off the truck? Yup, Styrofoam. I spent the day slightly paranoid. And the crew that came from France with the show had never put the set together before, so for the last forty-eight hours we've been trying to puzzle together this ginormous set. Many many many many pieces. Many many hours of French head scratching.

Off to Belgium in a few weeks, but first I've got to get through tonights all-nighter fashion fiasco. (Midnight calls, gotta love 'em).

2006-01-17T22:47:00.000-05:00

My posting has been so sporadic, this thing isn't really effective anymore. Rethinkination Process Has Begun. Stay tuned.