All The Dead Brollys!

All The Dead Brollys!
(c) 2007 Jon Donlon

A few weeks ago a wind and rain storm lashed our town here in Japan. Of course, for the twenty-five minute walk into work I grabbed my worn, worker’s-yellow poly-sylab-space-age-micro-pore-breathable-raintight parka that has traveled with me now for years, round-and-round the world. I slipped it on and then the zipper ran a’ fowl. Fortunately, it also has long narrow rectangles of velcro to seal the storm flap, so I was able to use that to hold the thing closed in the gusting wind.

Unfortunately, although because I’ve lived through hurricanes, including Katrina in Louisiana last year, and I knew that this particular blow was no typhoon, the storm was indeed a savage one. It left limbs down, debris liberally strewn about, and at our apartment complex a formerly quite leafy and fairly substantial tree uprooted. Velcro alone didn’t do the job and the wind lashed rain saturated my shirt and dungarees by the time I got to my office desk. If I hadn’t noticed that obvious damp reality, pretty much each of my students kindly pointed the fact out.

None the less, as I looked around during my walk, the Japanese had been doing battle with not only the wind, tormenting them with its whipping and curling, snapping and pounding, but with the umbrellas they insisted on trying to use. Perhaps needless to say – though I’ll say so regardless – many a brolly bit the dust (although every molecule of dust had of course been scoured away by the pitiless, driving rain) that morning. For days their spindly silver ribs glinted in the unusually clear sunlight, stuck in the weirdest places.

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Drawing Beats Painting

Sumo notes, Tokyo, graphte, ink, watercolor wash

Drawing Beats Painting

Jon Donlon


My upright Episcopal aunt enrolled me in a summer art enrichment class as a boy. By extraordinary good luck it was taught by Elmore Morgan Jr. in Lafayette, Louisiana. He was young in his own career and it was decades before he was acknowledged as one of America’s finest artists. He exposed us children to his ideas of color and line and marking with the same mix of kindness and discipline I found again, eight or ten years later, when I enjoyed his instruction in drawing class at the University of Southwestern Louisiana.

Last summer the New York Times had a wonderful review by Michael Kimmelman, “An Exhibition about Drawing Conjures a Time When Amateurs Roamed the Earth” (July 19, 2006). I enjoyed it because of my interests in old travel narratives and memoirs, some done back when the diarists did their own illustrations. And I enjoyed it because I have a special fondness for the great age of amateurism, the Victorian period with its explosion of Henry Higginsises collecting syllables or shells or whatnot. And it brought back such lodged memories of my own efforts to learn how to draw.

Now I reflect on the great good luck evidenced by those events in my life. As Kimmelman says, used to be that “drawing was a civilized thing to do, like reading and writing. It was taught in elementary schools. It was democratic. It was a boon to happiness,” Michael Kimmelman goes on in The Times review, “From 1820 to 1860, more than 145,000 drawing manuals circulated, now souvenirs of our bygone cultural aspirations... Before box cameras became universal a century or so ago, people drew for pleasure but also because it was the best way to preserve a cherished sight, a memory, just as people played an instrument or sang if they wanted to hear music at home because there were no record players or radios. Amateurism was a virtue, and the time and effort entailed in learning to draw, as with playing the piano, enhanced its desirability.” Matthew Perry, who had close ties to the Slidell’s for whom the New Orleans’s suburb is named, is most famous for “opening” Japan. But he was a great one for education. He helped develop America’s naval academy, recommending a curriculum including such practical subjects as “drawing, mapping, and gunnery tactics…” according to his biographer John Schroeder.

For decades, like Jack Kerouac, I lugged about cheap notebooks, writing notes and making little illustrations in whatever pen or pencil was handy. In fact, the very first day the Louisiana government offices were opened again in Baton Rouge after Katrina, I was chewing on a bureaucrat’s ear, suggesting we get a few cases of note books to hand out to the displaced and at the various shelters. Let people write and draw about their experiences. “It’s self-directed,” I pointed out, “and it’s quiet” a special benefit of journalizing. That ear was tin. I ran into folks with the tourism section, and suggested that narratives from journals filled as they were with heart and bravery would be an antidote to the news coverage of “toxic soup.” There was no traction there for handing out note books for journalizing and recuperative drawing, either. Now, of course, there are wonderful Post-Katrina books and photo projects and the State has come fully aboard collecting personal narratives and archiving them for the future. I’m still disappointed that I wasn’t able to get some journalizing and drawing sessions going way back there in the breach.

I don’t ape Kerouac’s nickel notebooks and bic pens anymore. His notebooks are, after all, important cultural artifacts while mine are merely repositories of information for my later use. Most of what I do, now, most of the time, are small, palm-sized water colors or India ink pen renderings in an ongoing series of bound, illustrated journals with thick acid-free paper (black ones I order from San Francisco, red bound ones I buy from a shop near Shakespeare and Co. in Paris, accordion-pleated page ones I get in Kyoto). I do a few domestic scale drawings using complex media—graphite, colored pencils, washes, ink, all that.

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Kyoto - Kawai Kankiro

Kyoto - Kawai Kankiro

(c) Jon Donlon 2007
Kyoto, established more that a 1000 years ago as capital of the Japanese archipelago, remains a thriving commercial center, humming with activity. This still beautiful urban center was established as "Heian-kyo" in the year 794.

For us, the place was a city of sights: we wanted to see Gion and its narrow lanes, we wanted to wander down traditional Pontocho dori with its many fine restaurants and the food market with that fantastic knife store – do I have a $1000 to buy cutlery for the $3000 stove I want? Maybe in my dreams, along with the “tea house” configured as a guest cottage—the one with the deep soak tub covered in mosaics I’ve been wanting to commission my Louisiana mosaic artist friend to do. Hummm…will it fit in the “tea house” or the rehabbed airstream I keep bugging Jolly would be suitable for us to snuggle up in?

Anyway, we wanted to see about a small piece of bricky red Kyoto ware, wanted to ramble around the “used” kimono fairs, and to visit the traditional house of Kawai Kankiro, “father” of the mingei craft movement. Proprietors of Wortman Potters, the increasingly trendy and collectable outfit on the Gulf Coast had carefully explained Bernard Leach’s connection, and our English/Welsh pals had taken us to Cornwall to show us the Japan-England pottery connection.

Kawai Kankiro’s place, now a living museum, is just south of the Gion. Ryoan-ji, with its 15 well placed stones, was way out in another section of the city – that was a day itself to take photographs, gander, and sketch images into my notebook. Indeed, the entire orbit of Zen gardens exerts a strong pull on us, though we are hardly aficionados.

Of course Gion, and of the book, “Memoirs of a Geisha” by Arthor Golden and the resulting, disappointing movie of the same name, as well as Yasunari Kawabata’s “Snow Country,” which presents geisha life from a different, if not too different, perspective, informed our curiosity about Kyoto.

Now, a bit out of the blue, I recalled our painful feelings of elaborate romance when we visited Seville years ago, where the general architecture is much more beguiling than that in Kyoto --- which features only islands of the extraordinary. What is it that calls to the human spirit or soul? Anthrony Trollop, having complained that his Spanish was poor since he’d been with “Maria” for but two months, hardly time enough for loving let along language lessons as he ably put it, adventures in Seville.

He wrote in “John Bull on the Guadalquivir,” wondering: “So felt I then, pining for something to make me unhappy. Ah, me! Iknow all about it now, and am content. But I wish that some learned pundit would give us a good definition of romance, would describe in words that feeling with which our hearts are so pestered when we are young, which makes us sigh for we know not what, and forbids us to be contented with what God sends us. We invest female beauty with impossible attributes, and are angry because our women have not the spiritualized souls of angels, anxious as we are that they should also be human in the flesh. A man looks at her he would love as at a distant landscape in a mountainous land. The peaks are glorious with more than the beauty of earth and rock and vegetation. He dreams of some mysterious grandeur of design which tempts him on under the hot sun, and over the sharp rock, till he has reached the mountain goal which he had set before him. But when there, he finds that the beauty is well-nigh gone, and as for that delicious mystery on which his soul had fed, it has vanished for ever.” (Trollop).

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I Could See Her Again, But Probably Not Any More

I Could See Her Again, But Probably Not Any More

(c) 2007 Jon Donlon
I recently spent a little time reconnoitring the Disney layout in Orlando. The scuttlebutt is that that outfit runs a tight ship, but it’s always a good idea to dot the “i”s and cross “t”s in terms of checking things for one’s self. We plan to bring in a cart load, or more properly, a bus load, of students next year. First we went to see Disney Sport, than on to get a gander, first hand, at how a great American university organizes its intramural sporting options.

After Florida it was necessary to fly up to Chicago and drive down to the vast, sprawling corn fields of “down state,” to the enormous campus of the University of Illinois. Two of us visiting from a prestigious private Japanese school would be beating the bushes, chatting up the faculty, and checking into local accommodation. The U of I campus is a costly complex, dense with resources. At one point an information specialist (librarian) mentioned in passing that the school’s library was “no longer the third largest in the country,” meaning that counting books was hardly meaningful in today’s world of electronic media. Yet, to be in the top five is not that shabby after all.

For all its egg-head trappings, C-U is still down to earth. I was able to do bed rock research when breaking ground in Controversial Leisure (the field I carved out in Leisure Studies). Previously, Leisure Studies, the scholarly pursuit of the understanding of the phenomena of human leisure, tended to be sunshine and apple pie. “What about what people really do?” I wondered. Before I settled into my current curiosity about travel and travel narratives, and cultural tourism, I codified lots of areas of “purple” leisure. I talked to cock fighters, coke dealers, and strippers, for example. Eventually I wrote publications informed by field research on areas including cock fighting, fads, and prostitution.

I talked to one stalwart of an unsavoury yet popular genre in C-U. Krystal Lynn, star of stage and screen. She was dancing the night I taped our interview at the town's finest, and only, strip club, and had at that time featured in more than 15 hard-core pornography videos.

She arrived late.

She told me earlier on the phone that she was "making the circuit," performing for just a few nights each along a vast series of clubs throughout North America and in Canada. "You might not know it," she giggled into the mouthpiece, "but that's where the money is." Then, thinking a moment, she said, "in cash." Of course I have no idea why being in cash would be better.

But in broad daylight, far from the hoochi-coochi pole and the sticky bar littered with change, cigarette packs, half-filled glasses and empty hopes, yet fully pickled men, she was scheduled for an interview with the local radio station and then a "signing." I'd never been to a stripper's signing before but, since I was working on research about strippers and their impact on the local economy [example eventual publication: “Attraction of the Naughty - Gentleman’s Clubs as a Tourism Resource,” with J. Agrusa] I thought I should find out what such a thing was.

The bookstore, in reality, was an adult video shop with a small, though selective, array of so-called sex toys and broadly humorous gag gifts. It also hosted a rotating kiosk of "patch pocket books," expensive paperback books cheaply produced and apparently not spell-checked or proofread. This is one area where the computer did kill print media.

Novelty was not a virtue of these novels, I soon found, flipping through them as I cooled my heels. They eschewed variance from a boiler-plate formula, each focused closely on a particular category of audience and offered a sequence of minutely described scenarios. After a moment I began to wonder just how many different ways oral sex could be described.

My Victorian curiosity and marginal academic interest was extinguished by the unmistakable sounds of stiletto heels tap-tap-tapping across concrete. I’d worked my way through undergraduate school, partly as a bartender. As a result, my autonomic nervous system had long ago been taught to slip into a perfect balance between fight-or-flight at the noise. Few women would be in such a shop, fewer still in heels. Krystal Lynn, at that moment, rounded the end of an aisle and rapidly closed the gap between us. Except for being obviously very fit--she must work out all the time I guessed--and very sexily dressed, the actress was almost peculiarly normal in shape, height, and weight. The name was obviously a thin fiction.

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Nothings More Fun Than Fooling Around On a Boat

Nothings More Fun Than Fooling Around On a Boat
Jon Donlon

Years ago my partner and I rented a live-aboard vessel and motored the French waterways. Traveling on the Sarthe, we slid past romantic villages with elegant, ancient stone churches always on the best riverside vista, given prominence on the landscape, the spikes of the steeples punctuating the horizon line well before any village became visible to us.

Back then, we’d perched on the fiberglass lids of the boat’s built-in stowage, sipping wine and nibbling cheese as the steady throb of the small, powerful Swedish engine chuffed us past springtime flooded meadows and fields. Now, jotting the notes for this text, I was taking the luxury train back from Tokyo and had snagged a section of the NYT from the bin; it carried a feature describing one couple’s life afloat on the canals of France. In between these events, my partner and I’d done a story on the “Campboats of the Atchafalaya Basin,” describing the fast being forgotten life ways of commercial fisher folk in that vast Louisiana wetland area.

Going in-bound from Tokyo, the regular express is fine, but outbound the cars tend to be packed, as the hackneyed but vivid expression puts it, like sardines. So the friend I was with and I got tickets for the ‘Romance Car,’ the luxury commuter, by paying a supplement. Then, like jackasses, we contrived to miss that train by jabbering over coffee. On a second attempt we’d had to get even more expensive coupons for the super duper Green Car with seats like papa’s Barka-lounger.

Finally, having carried aboard my single-serving container of Sake and my section of the Good Grey Paper, I settled back into a padded chair roughly the size of many entire apartments in Tokyo. I began to read the NYT story on a couple who “bought a century-old converted barge and set out to cover some of the thousands of kilometers of canals and rivers around France.” The feature, “On the Seine, Houseboat Dwelling” by Ariane Bernard, December 6, 2006 NYT, wonderfully written, immediately caught my interest.

As a teenager and young adult I’d read a series of books by Roger Pilkington, an Englishman who traveled by small boat here and there. I had a copy of “Small Boat to Skagarrak” in my backpack when I hitchhiked around the US, and over the years I read what seemed like a half dozen more of Pilkington’s books, which were always part travel narrative, part arcane history, part folklore, and part weird political screed. Then, interested in European canals, I found the several books of Tom Rolt and especially “Narrow Boat.”

Rolt had helped invent contemporary interest in leisure travel by water in England and save the failing canals, forming the Inland Waterways Association. In France, the transit is more riverine, more wild. In the evening as we went along we could “tie up” by tossing a simple anchor on the turf and hike into an inviting auberge redolent, in that region, with the luscious aroma of fatty rillettes du Mans, ready to trowel plaque onto my internal tubes and ducts. Later, the river would rock the boat and, while it was at it, rock us gently to sleep.

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James Bond Wants Some Glue and Some Milk

James Bond Wants Some Glue and Some Milk
© Jon Donlon 2007

I’ve always liked martinis; never thought there was much philosophical difference between a martini and a vodka martini ‘aside from it being made with vodka and the obvious ramifications of flavor. But, then, I never really thought that those flavored, multi-ingredient concoctions were martinis. After all, what would a cocktail be in that case?

If a martini is gin and vermouth, and a vodka martini is a martini made with vodka instead of gin, that is clear enough. Then, cocktails are the various mixed drinks. Why should there be confusion? Though this should be “clear” for obvious reasons, the terrain is in fact a gray area. David, my virtually life-long boon companion and frequent advisor of food and beverage, usually tips me to things of a distilled lineage, but I got a good deal of vodka info during my undergrad days from a Persian pal.

Not only did my Iranian colleague carefully explain the benefit of branded drink for neat use (then, and now, Stalachnaya seems a benchmark) he was a stickler for keeping everything icy cold: glassware, stirrer or shaker, and bottle. The several times we larked about together we kept a special ice chest just for the vodka and accoutrement.

From the experience I’ve learned to keep the martini glasses and the bottle in the freezer. Indeed, since those halcyon days of yore [a wonderful reminder of which are the wry "art" wit cards I get from another pal, but that's another tale]. I’ve even come to find out that all that bleating about the role of anal sex in Islam was not the merely normal discourse of a perverted petroleum engineer nor the chemical dementia induced by super-cooled potato distillates. Religion does have a profound effect on public health, including the ways in which people try to finesse the regular social mores while “bending” the rules.

Although I like my clear liquor with vermouth, in its home range most folks throw it down the hatch with wild abandon, unadulterated. Culture is, of course, learned; so I suppose I saw the Bond films before I visited Moscow. The martini method stuck.

It would be nice to imagine I was aping that famous spy, ordering my martini “shaken, not stirred.” And remember that Bond is drinking a ‘vodka’ martini, my preferred variant. Well, sort of. If you bother to look up the text (and that’s just the kind of thing I do, scooting around the internet or roaming the dusty library shelves). Bond’s creator and Jamaican resident, now long dead, Ian Fleming gives a recipe for the agent’s weird drink in chapter 7 of Casino Royale, first published in 1953:

"A dry martini," he said. "One. In a deep champagne goblet."
"Oui, monsieur."
"Just a moment. Three measures of Gordon's, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it's ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon-peel. Got it?"

They used to use white wine in martinis, now it’s usually vermouth, a sort of white wine, and Kina Lillet is a brand of vermouth. In text the suave (but not as suave as he winds up being on screen, I’d say) spy calls this thing a ‘vesper,’ perhaps an homage to a beautiful double agent.

Always keenly aware of his health, Bond generally orders his martinis shaken not stirred.

Many, many mixed drinks exist but the transition from martini to another mixed drink is very easy to make: add any thing else. Put chocolate or apple juice in a martini and its not a “chocolate martini” or “apple martini,” but rather a new mixed drink. Of course, I suppose we could call that new mixed drink a chocolate martini in the sense we use the term “monopoly money” knowing it’s neither a legitimate monopoly nor actual money.

And now we get down to cases, because there are at least three main differences between being stirred or being shaken. First, a shaken martini is typically colder. That’s because the ice has had more chance to circulate in the solution. Next, shaking the drink dissolves ambient air into the martini. You may have heard about "bruising" the gin? This is it, and it makes a shaken martini taste "sharp." Last, a shaken martini dissolves the vermouth, or that’s the claim. The affect is to give a less “oily” feel in the mouth.

As my Persian friend taught me so well, so many years ago, especially for vodka martinis, cold is king. You’d think cold would anesthetize taste buds. I wonder how that works? At least one opinion holds that “the experience of a traditional martini is more dependent on it being smooth and on not ruining the delicate flavors of the gin.” From that perspective, stirring, not shaking, would be the best option, how could Bond, James Bond, be wrong?

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New Year's On Samui Island

New Year’s On Samui Island
© Jon Donlon 2007

By air, it’s only fifty minutes or so to Samui’s sun-washed beaches from Bangkok, but the popular tourist island is a world away from the urban hustle of Thailand’s capital city. While there is little variance in many of the commercial services provided for travelers —the chock-a-block discounters, the economy tailors, and the small Thai cafés, restaurants, and especially the astonishing number of bars—the laid back tone is entirely different. And New Year’s on the island featured a memorable show of glowing paper lanterns, floating out over the Gulf of Siam in elegant, illuminated dots of slowly diminishing size.









Like much of the Asian tourism boom, Samui Island is marked by apparent lack of planning and an exuberance of growth and organic development. Greener than might be expected, based on the kind of “carry capacity” (numbers of visitors) these locations are asked to deal with, Samui exhibits the curious combo of spoilation and glamour commonplace in today’s nature hot spots. In short, it’s a long while since Samui’s been an untrammeled island paradise. Still, the place is clad with swaying palms, and the water is inviting.

A week before New Year’s we found the island filled with vacationers and the shops bibelot-packed after the fashion you’d expect in the warren around the duomo, on the road to mount St. Michel, or in the French Quarter in New Orleans. And tasty Thai food was easy to find, anywhere. The roads were abuzz with a bewildering array of rental scooters, zipping about in the sunshine.

Years ago we were lollygagging in a café on the narrow roadway up to Mont St. Michel (companion to St. Michael’s Mount across the channel in England, home of childhood’s “Jack in the Beanstalk” tale), complaining that the beautiful timber-fronted buildings around us were filled with awful tourists trinkets. “They always have been,” said a guy at the neighboring table.

More knowledgeable about local history than I was, he pointed out, quite rightly, that Mont St. Michel had been on the tourist trek for a few hundred years, and for those few hundred years the merchants sold people what they wanted. Today is no different. Newer to the tourist trade, perhaps, but no less willing to cater to prevailing taste, Samui Island’s cyber cafes, bottle shops, bars, and occasional “Thai Massage” storefronts were jumbled cheek-to-jowl in pockets of dense commercial sprawl. I bought a t-shirt of a Samui “gecko,” hoping to be reminded of the charming creature’s nocturnal chirping when I wore it in the future. On Samui, merchants, as everywhere, try to give people what they want.

Some Like It Hot

Some Like it Hot!

Jon Donlon

According to Vichit Mukura, chef of Sala Rim Naam in The Oriental Bangkok, foreign visitors are slowly acquiring a taste for the famously hot cuisine of what has become one of the world’s prime tourist destinations. Food authority Victor Borg speculates that the growing adoration for the hot and spicy may be because the burn triggers “a flush of endorphins.” The continued confidence in health benefits inherent in succulent chilies and savory hot sauces – to say nothing of lingering belief in their efficacy as tasty aphrodisiacs – hardly puts a damper on sales.

Whether introduced to hot chili laden delights amidst a groaning table of Hunan or Sichuan offerings, or given the wonderful opportunity to choose from Thai curries (or the spectacularly hot yam salads), or in the habit of shaking the diamond-labeled Tabasco bottle over your vittles, you have the Portuguese to thank for waking the world to this viticulture. Chilies grow easily in tropical regions – such as Thailand or South Louisiana – but are native to Bolivia and Brazil.

Portuguese travelers carried the plants to Southeast Asia in the 16th century. Similar if more potent than peppercorns and galangal, the flavor and aroma immediately clicked. One popular pepper, pri kee noos, is literally translated as “mouse dropping chillies.” A chef noted that for yam salads and som tam, notoriously hot Thai dishes, the traditional fare is perhaps 5 to 10 chillies; the adjustment for foreigners: 2 to 3 pri kee noos. Still, there has been an enormous change in the way people eat over the last few decades.

Several factors have lead to rapid change is food ways. In the United States and elsewhere, a proliferation of cable channels has lead to wide-spread availability of specialty programming. Documentaries about other cultures and travel programming has helped to inform consumers and to challenge providers. At the same time, economic competition has worked to compel recent immigrants to open ethnic restaurants in ever smaller communities, allowing consumers to sample some versions of novel foods prior to having a travel experience. And, last, cut-throat competition in the travel industry has driven a remorseless search for new destinations and engaging settings.

Thailand, with a welcoming reputation and a sound infrastructure, is fast becoming this year's destination of choice. Thai restaurants have been well established in the chief donor nations, so travelers are eager to try the “authentic” cuisine. Bellying up to a table spread with red or green curries, hot salads, and chilled beer, burnished the education started with those cable television documentaries and teaches the traveler to love it in the heat.

Meanwhile, Tabasco, South Louisiana’s long-time bad boy of fermented hot sauces, and Panola, North Louisiana’s relative newcomer, have been joined in a burgeoning American and international marketplace with dozens, or perhaps hundreds, of other peppery products. In some ways, this diffuse range of offerings underscores Louisiana’s role as compass rose to all things hot and splashable on food.

Often recipes call for a particular brand of Louisiana hot sauce; other times it’s simple enough to direct consumers to any Louisiana hot sauce. Indeed, screen writer Peter Viertel writes in his memoir of Hemingway describing success in the culinary arts, "First,” he’d say, “you take Tabasco sauce . . .” Sometimes, it was the only bright spot on a relentlessly dreary meal in a Soviet InTourist restaurant, other times, the bow on the box, sitting on starched white tablecloths on elegant steam train dining cars, cutting smoothly across the veldt in Southern Africa.

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