Ultimate Thule

Lake Yamanaka

2007-05-11T21:06:00.000-07:00

LAKE YAMANAKA: Five Lakes of Mount Fuji

Japan’s highest mountain, Mount Fuji, presents incredible scenic variety in the region of the five lakes, including untouched nature, hot springs (onsen), heavily built amusement parks and many other, some quite unusual, attractions. The popular Fuji Five Lakes region is appropriately rich in spectacular natural scenery, with a number of the approach routes giving astonishing views of the great mountain itself. Certainly it is one of life’s great moments to first lay eyes on Fuji San, its noble white summit wind-whipped and pale with snow.

In keeping with an apparent Japanese penchant, themes rule the roost around the lakes: on Yamanaka the first thing I noticed was a colossal swan (then I realized it was the tour boat—or, more properly, ferry--- shaped like a swan with the slender, curved neck looming ahead of the broad-beamed vessel). Soon enough I caught sight of other birds, fish, and various lakeworthy houseware. All over the lake shore visitors are amused by this curious, themed stuff – kitsch it’s often called, a little brutally. Kitsch “a German term,” an on-line dictionary says, “that has been used to categorize art that is considered an inferior copy of an existing style.”

Well, the kitschy paddle boats and other rides aren’t really art, but they have been created in that charming, out-of-scale Disney-associated way. According to the web, “the term is also used more loosely in referring to [art or objects that are] pretentious or in bad taste,” (and you gotta wonder whose bad taste) it also refers to “commercially produced items that are considered trite or crass because the word was brought into use as a response to a large amount of art in the 19th century where the aesthetic of art work was confused with a sense of exaggerated sentimentality or melodrama.” Anyway, reminiscent of a carnival or the circus, many of the ride able or rentable objects here are colorful renderings of animals, fish, or household objects.

These 5 lakes so well known to the Japanese, Lake Yamanaka, Lake Kawaguchi, Lake Sai, Lake Motosu and Lake Shoji which seem to slumber so peacefully on the gentlest slopes of Mount Fuji’s base, get very little travel coverage in the popular media so are little known off the island. Each lake’s shore is pretty well developed as a commercial resort environment and all the trimmings -- for many travelers this means both good and bad. There’s lots of accommodation, and the already mentioned enjoyment of kitsch guarantees that there is a plethora of paddle boats and such in the shape of fish, fowl, and tea-cups. If you get a kick out out that sort of thing, it’s heaven; if not, you’re out of luck. [In general terms, it’s about 2 hours from Tokyo by express bus service to the lakes area; visitors can also take a bus from Gotemba or Hakone.]

Hakone Park

2007-02-26T01:00:00.000-08:00

Hakone Park

Less than a hundred kilometers from teeming Tokyo, Fuji-Hakone-Izu National Park, internationally famous for hot springs (including Owakudani), hiking and outdoor activities, majestic natural beauty and fabulous views of nearby Mount Fuji is deservedly one of the most popular destinations for visitors and Japanese alike. Well served with and by mass transit, including on Lake Ashi, the big park offers tourists a range of choices in addition to scenic outlooks, including the opportunity of lengthening their lives by seven years!

According to legend, consuming eggs cooked in the restorative waters of bubbling, malodorous Owakudani, situated in the area around a crater made during in the last eruption of Mount Hakone perhaps 3000 years ago, has wonderful result. Smelly, sulfurous odors pervade the place where the special eggs, boiled in the geo-hot water (reputed to prolong one's life by approximately seven years, bus accidents aside) are for sale. The hot, mineral-rich water turns the eggs matt black (a pretty unusual look for eggs: “have a Gothic Easter”) but the taste is fine and the color doesn’t even go through the shell, much less to the food matter.

With a good guidebook in hand or a cabled-up laptop Goggled to any of the numerous sites offering diagrams of Hakone’s lavish transportation grid, visitors can trace access from, typically, Tokyo, to the park. Driving is, naturally, one way to scoot around the scenic curves cut into the landscape, driving around vast arcs gaining altitude and curling out again and again for seemingly every time more spectacular views of Mount Fuji. The sprawling place offers—aside from longevity, no mean benefit in itself—biking, hiking, and rope ways or gondolas. It’s served by rail and a funicular. Water taxi and tour boats cruise Lake Ashi (with busses dropping folks at stops, to connect with the rail head).

Indeed, there seems to be a clear difference in cosmology or “world view” between the United States and some other nation’s notion of park space and Hakone. One way to view park space is to reduce or avoid the evidence of the “hand of man.” In Hakone it’s as though engineers have fanned out to wrestle that rascal nature to the ground: it’s under control with rail, and pavement, and cast concrete and strung cable; parking lots, and sluice ways, and hard packed outlooks. It all really makes it extraordinarily easy to access the place.

Board Games

2007-02-07T19:48:00.000-08:00

Beijing Board Game Players

Board Games

Board games, that is, rule-bound games played on table tops or floors, and involving role-playing, chance outcome, or skill, evolved very differently in the United States than elsewhere. When we traveled in China and Tibet, it was easy to see folks enjoying the traditional games which formed the foundation of some of these pastimes. Today, such games may be said to be central to American leisure and political culture.

In part all of that is because of the unique origins of the United Stated as a nation. Immigrant patterns and labor demands created a setting in which many of the globe’s wide variety of game styles—contributed from Africa, Asia, and Europe—arrived fully formed and at almost the same time. In part it’s because this presentation of all the world’s game forms itself took place in the midst of a quickly changing epoch of technological innovation and social evolution. Throughout China, Tibet, and Japan it’s easy to see enormously well beautiful, expensive, and of course well crafted board sets for sale. You can also watch people on the street, given a spare moment, fashion a game from a bit of discarded cardboard and bottle caps and set-to for an impromptu competition.

Leisure Studies scholars and Gaming Specialists understand that in spite of the enormous apparent variety in board games, just a few basic principles underlie all of them. Some games involve creation of a role-playing environment, some involve skills (and, thus, some play can be “skillful”), and some involve various mechanisms approximating random number generation. In the last sort, players “play” against the unknown future outcome of that device – often a die, a pattern of cards, or mechanical instrument of some kind.

In order for a “game” to exist, these basic features, ordered in some way, are then bound by rules of greater or lesser complexity. Games can then be made to model “real life,” after a fashion, by carefully combining elements of role-playing, skill requirement, and chance outcome components. In the New World, Go, Mah Jong and Chess, various European card-based games, African games such as Awele, Bao, Dakon, and others of the Mancala group, and games enjoyed by Native Americans were played in traditional forms by new groups of players, and were also hybridized. New, variant forms were then played.

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Chinese Drawings

2007-02-06T17:19:00.000-08:00

Chinese Drawings at Bangkok’s National Museum

During our visit, the Bangkok National Museum, which is generally dedicated to preserving Thailand’s cultural heritage through its varied collections of art, anthropological, archaeological, cultural, and ethnographic material displayed in the Palace of Wang Na (near the Grand Palace, which itself hosts the remarkable Green Buddha), we enjoyed a wonderful traveling exhibit of contemporary Chinese drawings. Bangkok’s little visited museum is a quiet, rewarding break from the hubbub of a great city. It features 2-d art, traveling shows, a small sculpture garden and studio, and a café.

The Gallery of Thai History is located in the Sivamokhaphiman Hall, the Prehistory Galley at the rear of the building, the museum’s History of Art collection is in the south and north wings while the minor arts, including such interesting objects as the Royal Cremation Chariots and various ceremonial objects are on display in other buildings within the compound. Importantly, the center also hosts traveling exhibits and other work. On our visit a charming display of local portraits celebrating the monarch was there, as was the collection of Chinese drawings.

Contemporary Chinese Work

Several large, tranquil, and entirely suitable spaces were set aside for the suite of Chinese drawings on display some time back at the Bangkok National Art Museum. These included a selection of large works, such as a set from Chen Xinmao’s “Historic Book Series,” (2001), as well as drawings by Li Huasheng (1999) 197X196 cm; Bai Ming (2003) “permeating-corresponding-overlapping,” 140X267; and Shen Quin’s “mountain” (1986) 150X130cm. Although a thorough critique of this moving and excellent is far beyond the scope of this brief article, perhaps the most obvious element communicated was the powerful negotiation taking place between deeply traditional ways of “dealing” with paper, especially with pigment and with ink, the emerging and dynamic political situation of the Pacific setting, and the extraordinary vitality of creative forces available. Perhaps it’s easy to imagine that all creative energy is flowing toward the technical edge of the methods envelope – digital imaging and electronic reproduction of various kinds. These artists are handling utterly basic materials and entirely formal and elemental questions with astonishing creative resolve.

Wang Huang Shen’s multiple media “Civilization Sacrifice” does involve more than just the traditional media (as do some other of the show’s drawings). And, indeed, I found it to be the most impressive construction-assemblage in the presentation among many strong representative pieces. Other objects may very well be more suitable for particular spaces, especially smaller environments or long term exhibit. Civilization Sacrifice, which involved debris, found articles, drawings, electronic media, and performance, as well a music, in part focused on the terrorist act which destroyed the twin towers in New York. However, as is always the case, Wang Huang Shen’s large assembly spoke to larger issues as well.

The museum is open Wednesday-Sunday 9.00am.- 4.00pm. with an admission fee of 40 bahts; the telephone numbers are: 66 -2- 224-1404 , 224-1333 , 221-1842; fax. 224-1404 , 224-9911
It is located near the Phramane Grounds, the Thammasat University, and National Theatre
Use bus # 3,6, or 39

All The Dead Brollys!

2007-01-30T01:01:00.000-08:00

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

2007-01-29T18:33:00.000-08:00

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

2007-01-22T16:28:00.000-08:00

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

2007-01-22T15:57:00.000-08:00

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

2007-01-21T17:01:00.000-08:00

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

2007-01-16T03:59:00.000-08:00

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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XXX XXX XXX

New Year's On Samui Island

2007-01-15T18:13:00.000-08:00

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

2007-01-05T18:42:00.000-08:00

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.

[Five Paragraph Sample]

Hearn Kept an Eye on All Things Japanese

2006-12-15T01:21:00.000-08:00

Hearn Kept an Eye on All Things Japanese

Lafcadio Hearn, great explainer of Japan to the West and well known for his narratives about New Orleans, soulful descriptions of that sultry city on the Big Muddy, said that "in order to comprehend the beauty of a Japanese garden, it is necessary to understand -- or at least to learn to understand -- the beauty of stones.” Hearn was writing at a time when Japan had only been widely opened to visitors for decades. And Europe and the US was in thrall to a “Japonais” rampage of fashion. Yet few were absorbing the great foundation philosophy underpinning much of the design flowing onto Impressionists canvases from Asia.

The writer went on to explain that the importance he was describing was “not of stones quarried by the hand of man, but of stones shaped by nature only. Until you can feel, and keenly feel, that stones have character, that stones have tones and values, the whole artistic meaning of a Japanese garden cannot be revealed to you. Not only is every stone chosen with a view to its particular expressiveness of form, but every stone in the garden or about the premises has its separate and individual name, indicating its purpose or its decorative duty."

Hearn was perhaps most famous for his collection of lectures entitled Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation (1904), the eccentric writer is well known for other books on Japan including, Exotics and Retrospective (1898), In Ghostly Japan (1899), Shadowings (1900), A Japanese Miscellany (1901), and Kwaidan (1904). Born on Lefkas, a Greek island in 1850, son of an Anglo-Irish surgeon major in the British army and a Greek mother in what was apparently an embarrassing liaison, his parents quickly enough divorced when he was six. Brought up in an unwelcoming house by a great-aunt in Ireland, Hearn lost sight in one eye at 16; then, his father died, and, soon, with a family in bankruptcy, was forced to stop school. By 19 he was on his way to Cincinnati and by 24 had begun his newspaper career; by 1877 Hearn was well into his decade in New Orleans devoted to writing his important series of ground breaking articles; by 1890 Hearn was in Japan, a friend of Basil Hall Chamberlain of Tokyo Imperial University. The writer was very prolific in Asia, teaching at various institutions and publishing consistently until he died of a heart attack in 1904 at 54.

His comments about the formal gardens of Japan were directly on the mark. Karesansui, often called rock gardens or “dry landscape” gardens, are usually associated with Zen Buddhism, and, by extension, with the residences of Zen abbots, or with Zazen schools or monasteries. As dry landscape, Karesansui gardens feature rocks and sand (or gravel) the sea being symbolized or represented not by a small water feature (as it might be in other garden styles) but by raking this sand into patterns. The patterns, in turn, suggest rippling surfaces or waves in water.

Ryoanji Temple and Daitokuji Temple, both in Kyoto, are internationally well-known examples of the Karesansui form of dry landscape garden. The first-ever Zen landscape garden in Japan, however, is credited to Kenchoji Temple in Kamakura, founded in 1251 (the temple was head of the five great Zen monasteries, 1185-1333).

Contrasted to Karesansui, the Chaniwa, or tea garden attached to the tea house, began to appear in Japan along with the introduction and spread of the tea ceremony in the 14th century. Although these varied enormously, in very many cases the Chaniwa form was actually a treatment or, it could be said, a section of the overall garden. Rather than a full-fledged garden, the Chaniwa was likely a carefully designed, prepared, and maintained path—generally stepping stones—leading up to the Chasitsu or main tea room.

[Five Paragraph Sample]

Kyoto-Part 1 - MANIS CAFE

2006-11-06T05:41:00.000-08:00

Kyoto-Part 1- Manis Cafe

Intellectually, visitors know Japan is an ancient culture, its crafts of elegant textiles and fabulous hand-made objects, its cuisine apparently insanely elaborated, its religions impossibly attenuated. Yet that weight of the ages is not clear in the briskly run efficiency of the rapid transit system – especially if you are waiting for a “fast train” and enjoy several others shoot through the station to points unknown—or in the conversation of one’s bilingual students planning global careers. The young men wear international motley, the young women knee-high needle-heeled boots, part of the so-called “slut look” popular this month. Or, everyone is swathed in sports gear which largely effaces ethnicity or sexuality.

Yet, hop on what outsiders call the “bullet train” (Shinkansen), from the soaring, modern girders and Manga of Tokyo, and about two hours later [Japan’s train side is “useful” so you can pretty much forget quaint vistas of the kind from a steam train in Southern Africa, or the rural trains in Italy or France or England. Of course, the US has too few trains to count, preferring to squander its 300 billion dollar investment in Iraq rather than to shore up the failing Social Security fund or support rapid transit infrastructure – I suppose that’s what you call “pathetic arrogant decadence” a symptom of decline of a great civilization: the rich first change the tax law so they don’t have to pick up the tab, and the not-rich are “proud” to pick up their soap; and we are lucky enough to be the generation to see it in progress] you could be in Kyoto.

Kyoto, established more that a 1000 years ago as capital of what today we call the nation of Japan (long since transferred to Tokyo) is redolent in history and tradition. The “Inextinguishable Dharma Light,” dharma being the law or the word, in Sanskrit, has been burning, they say, since lit by the founder, Saicho, at Enryaku-ju temple 1,200 years ago.

This still beautiful urban center was created as "Heian-kyo" in the year 794. Alex Kerr savagely attacks the city fathers for their failure to protect many of Kyoto’s treasures and especially its traditional architecture in his social history, “Dogs and Demons- The Fall of Modern Japan,” written with the concern of a true lover. Yet, for a first time visitor, the place still winds up being put in positive comparison with the helter skelter of Tokyo. No doubt long-time residents see the many changes wrought by time as do, I feel confident, residents of Berlin, Manhattan, and Paris. I, for one, kind of miss the honest hookers working the French Quarter and don’t find their replacement in rack after rack of Taiwanese junk baubles for genteel Midwestern day tourists a fair trade, even if it is easier to attach a sales tax to the trinkets and crudely, witlessly bawdy t-shirts.

One description of this engaging Japanese city put it this way, “although many transformations have taken place over the years, Kyoto has always adopted the most advanced standards of the times. It has greatly contributed to the nation's industrial, economic and cultural development and strength. The dauntless and leading spirit of Kyoto's past as a capital city is still felt here today.” Kyoto, for all its being a modern city, and possessing any of the shortcomings that entails, honestly stated, is populated with a very welcoming population and a convenient, efficient transportation system. We adored our visit and plan to return.

Manis Café
Not mentioned in our guide book, but highly recommended by our experience, is the Manis Café, run by a tri-lingual couple (speaking Indonesian, Japanese, and English) who provide very good, reasonably priced food, including a range of pasta dishes. Manis Café is open for breakfast, lunch and dinner (we never tried breakfast since we “granola in” most days on vacation) but the scallops in wine and butter, the couple of pastas, and the pizzas we did try were all decidedly “moreish.”

Manis Café [manis_cafe@ybb.ne.jp] was central to our wants: we enjoy walking along rivers, and have enjoyed the Guadalquivir in Seville, the Mississippi in New Orleans, the Thames in London, the Seine in Paris and so on and now the Kamo River in Kyoto. Travel writer V. A. Riccardi recalls how her grandmother described how “sunsets over the Tatsumi Bridge [crossing the Kamo] into the Gion created a fairyland of kimonos, hushed voices, and geometric shadows of dark and gold” in her “Untangling My Chopsticks: A Culinary Sojourn in Kyoto.” Now, that never unpeopled Gion, always busy because of its innate activity, like New Orlean’s French Quarter of old, is flashed with limelight because of the book, “Memoirs of a Geisha” by Arthor Golden and the resulting lushly shot if disappointing movie.

Of course we wanted to see historic Gion and its wonderful wood-lattice fronted narrow lanes, weathered to richly varied shades of umber and sepia, decorated with figures of vividly costumed geishas padding into its dark, secluded dens suggesting exhausting sessions of expensive, arcane, lovemaking---the fruit of long years of opium lashed tutorials under cruel, knarled mama sans; we wanted to wander down traditional, tiny Pontocho Dori (parallel and across the river), and saunter the food market just above. We wanted to see about haggling for a small piece of Kyoto ware (“haggling” in Japan means getting the vendor to take a card in lieu of cash), and to visit the house of Kawai Kankiro, “father” of the folk craft movement. His place, now a living museum, was just south of the Gion.

Ryoan-ji, with its garden of 15 well placed stones, was way out to one end of the city – that was a special but necessary trip.

Anyway, Manis Café was a perfect place for us to “tie on the food bag.” It was central to many of the places we wanted to see, multi-lingual, with very friendly folks in charge. And, always important to us, the food was savory, perfectly prepared, and attractively presented.

To get to Manis Cafe (look for the cat on the sign) -- if you are in the Gion main street (the sidewalk is apt to be crowded, as the rue de Rivoli, or Bourbon St., or the street outside the Pudding Shop in Istanbul are always crowded,) the flow one way takes you to the bridge over the Kamo. The opposite direction, away from the river, is toward Yasaka Shrine. Going toward the Kamo and the bridge, turn left on Yamoto Oji Dori. Walk briskly 10 minutes, Manis Cafe is on the right. If you reach Go Jo Dori walking down Yamoto Oji Dori, you have gone too far. If you were walking toward the river, Yamoto Oji is about a block before you reach the river; so, if you see the Kamo looking for your street, you’ve gone too far. After enjoying the view from the bridge, turn around, now headed toward the Yasaka Shrine, but turn very soon off the main road to your right on Yamoto Oji Dori, a very much smaller road.

Or, if you are at that bridge in the Gion, pop down the Shijo Station; it’s right there. Travel to Go Jo Station, one stop; fare is 150 yen. In the station you will see one machine in the row of several with a button on the right, upper right, “English.” Press that and all commands will change to English; select what you need and feed in the coins. Sometimes you have to press again for the tickets to discharge, sometimes they just come out. I don’t understand, either. [Once moving on the train, if you arrive at Sanjo Station, you are going in the wrong direction, debouch and cross over, go past Shijo, get out at Go Jo Station].

You could taxi from anywhere and use Go Jo Station as your way point, hopping out there and walking – it’s just a few more blocks but hard to describe if neither you nor the driver are bi-lingual. There is a taxi stand next to Go Jo Station to re-cab.

When you exit the station, the river should be right behind you. Also, immediately at the exit of the station, in the sidewalk at your feet, there should be a metal compass rose. North should point to your left. Walk several blocks forward. At your turn, on your left, on the corner, the shop is a wood carver who fabricates large pieces, worth a gander in the window. On the right is one of the large metal cross walks which would allow you to climb the stairs and cross the main street. Turn here at Yamato Oji Dori, left, and walk up Yamato Oji Dori, away from the main street; the pedestrian area is on the right of the narrow road. Manis Café is perhaps a minute up Yamato Oji Dori, on your left—keep and eye out for the cat.

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Blame the Young'Uns

2006-10-27T18:44:00.000-07:00

In October 2006, my home town tab a harrowing feature story dealing with “binge drinking” (a phenomenon often associated with teens). Because in civil society it is proper for all human beings to exhibit concern for all other members of society, this feature had many elements of appropriate coverage. On the other hand, it also bore markers of special interest. I submitted a letter – which turned out to be too long to fit the length protocol for The Independent, the town’s superb local newspaper—pointing out ways to put this issue into context, at least from my perspective.

I have since sent a much shorter letter to that newspaper. The original text is below.

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Letter to the Editor, The Independent, Lafayette, Louisiana

Kudos for Leslie Turk’s wonderful coverage warning parents about the problems of alcohol abuse, and other binge behavior, especially among young people. Abuse of alcohol can cause predictable, well-defined, and profound health problems costing individuals and the community millions of dollars each year. The Independent has performed a timely public service alerting the public to the painful minority effects of our boon companion, alcohol. Still, I do think a few extending comments might be made.

While no one could continence abuse, readers should know that the overwhelming majority of drinkers actively benefit from the consumption of alcohol in their lives & diet. Most of the time, for most people, alcohol contributes strongly to a healthy and happy lifestyle.

Keep in mind that while about 400 people a year do die from alcohol poisoning, about 20,000 die from the common, every-day flu, over 40,000 die in vehicular accidents—any many, many more are badly hurt. Indeed we so love our cars that in 1981 when a presidential task force totaled damage from different crimes, vehicular manslaughter (in fact responsible for perhaps 13,000 deaths) wasn’t even on the list. Cigarettes, the real stalking horse, slays a staggering 300,000 to 500,000 human beings, all dieing from tobacco related illnesses or complications.

From a numbers point of view, if you let your teen smoke, or drive, why worry about drinking? In fact, maybe we should worry about what worries us: while communities struggle to find pennies to fund basic preventative health care facilities or domestic abuse centers, the nation spends billions “defending” us from terrorists, yet it’s more likely that an American will be hit by lighting or die from a bad peanut than be killed by a terrorist.

Maybe Lafayette is down to dealing with the quite tiny risk factor of alcohol poisoning? Perhaps sound anti-smoking regulations are in place, parents don’t let kids drive frivolously, the advice of Dr. Thibodeaux has been followed about the benefits of smaller classrooms –in this case lowering the chance of vectoring flu pathogens—and so on. I’d hate to think folks are carping on alcohol just to give voice to religious extremists.

Indeed, we even know that “participation in eight common types of recreational activities leads annually to more than 2 million medically treated musculoskeletal injuries in children aged 5 to 14 years. Many of these injuries could have been prevented if current safety guidelines and protective equipment had been used.” Adults perhaps should prioritize risk intervention based on reason, and avoid motivations toward social control by special interest groups.

It is important to remember that many millions of Americans receive the well-documented positive health benefits, in addition to social enjoyment, of routine moderate addition of alcohol in the diet, most especially red wine. Regular drinking is not just acceptable; it makes a positive contribution to health.

Although the data is not in yet on how chemistry (including alcohol) works on the developing brain, we do absolutely know that the way to “train” young people into moderation is by learning in a family setting. Few family meals involve “binge” drinking.

Importantly, the claims repeated in text: “teens who drink are more likely to be sexually active and have unsafe, unprotected sex; that half the drowning deaths among teens are alcohol related; how alcohol use increases the chance of them being involved in a homicide. Or committing suicide” are very, very deeply contested or even misleading. I believe the people who use such “motivating spin” are sincere, but I don’t think these “factoids” could stand much rigour. The claims may indeed be false.

Put another, more important way, have young people generally been unimpeachably informed about human sexuality in school? Or, more appropriately, by parents? Do young people have the information necessary to make good decisions about drink and sexual and other activity?

Or have they been kept in some magnitude of ignorance? Are condoms easily and plentifully available to young folks? If not, drunk or sober how can they have “protected” sex? We know at least 25% of 15 year old women ARE having sex. Do Lafayette area schools, public and private, offer the new vaccine against human papillomavirus (the main cause of genital warts and cervical cancer)? Vaccines for Children, the Federal program which offers it cheaply, cuts off funding after 18.

So, if the schools don’t offer good sex education, if means of “protected sex” are not available, if opportunities for vaccines are not offered, it’s fatuous for “experts” to rattle on about “binge” drinking being the boogie man, is it not? Adults have access to all of that; they make the “rational” decision to make it available or withhold it. That decision process places young people in or out of jeopardy, prior to any action taken by the young folks themselves.

Again, thank you for a fine article, especially when the focus was on the appropriately narrow problem of alcohol abuse.

Please do keep up the very good work of a locally owned newspaper.

Thank you

XXX XXX XXX

Snow Country Like Japan

2006-10-22T16:14:00.000-07:00

We had been visiting Suziki Bokushi’s snow country; the region in present Niigata Prefecture which receives the moist Siberian current’s wind and, when slid up the spine of jagged mountains, converts it to snow—a dozen or more feet of it. Bokushi’s charming narrative of the local’s stories and means of living in this white world, Hokuetsu Seppu, was translated as “Snow Country Tales” (and was source material for Yasunari Kawabata’s much more widely known novel, “Snow country,” which mostly uses the folk lore as back drop for intrigue and a love story.

Now, the roads are modern, with rows of disks down the center to squirt snow removing warm water in the winter and the farmer’s once prized oxen have given way to squat, tough tractors. But the small, carefully cultivated stepped paddies still produce rice reputed to be “the best in the world.” In the old days, the tiny fields were repeatedly flooded to keep the snow off. So, as the adjacent areas were layered, again and again with snowfall, the farmers could be seen going to work with ladders, necessary to climb down ten or 12 or 14 feet to the prepared seed beds below.

Long winter months fostered indoor craft, as you might imagine. While in the prefecture, we spent some time examining the design and setting of Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples—shrines are always Shinto and temples are always Buddhist. The shrines we visited were also usually smaller, simpler, set in a copse of trees, through a dignified usually red post & lintel “gate,” or torii with an arrow-straight approach—none of this “meandering curves to increase visual interest” stuff for these folks. Our hosts for our holiday, friends and colleagues with a “cottage” in the mountains, noticed our interest. We are all interested in what the Japanese call “mingae” or folk crafts.

Jocelyn and I had described earlier work we’d done, reporting on Louisiana’s program to collect alligator eggs, distribute them to commercial ‘gator farms, and monitor the eventual release of a portion of the healthy young back into the wild. This work guarantees a better fit with the optimum carry capacity of available habitat and supports the regional economy, since the skin is a valuable export product. We “followed” a Louisiana alligator skin through the process to a tannery in rural France, an international sales fair in gay Paree, distribution depots in a couple of places in Italy and then, perhaps most interesting for us, to a wonderful fine craft cottage industry shoe maker who brought into being the designs of Manolo Blahnik.
Prior to that experience, even watching Sarah’s gams on “Sex In The City”—as Carrie Bradshaw-- it was hard to see how a shoe—each shoe—could be worth $500 (or a grand a pair). Blahnik, from Santa de La Palma in the Canary Islands, makes a solid line of dependables, a little less avant guard, for $300 a pair, too. He does it all, from sketching the idea in swift strokes of his Tombo Japanese Brush pen (a favorite of Manga artists) to cutting the heel.

However, driving with Geraldo, a suave skin merchant in North Italy to the “shoe town” near by and hearing about the level of craftsmanship and the cost at each step, so to speak, and then watching the torturous process as each tiny bit of alligator hide was gently persuaded, tapped, glued, bradded, stitched, or caressed into its place—all without surface blemish--made us believers.

In Japan, we’d seen beautiful kimono, often displayed on a wood rod after the fashion of fine art. They can be very expensive; finely tailored and created in elegant fabric. Suzuki Bokushi’s home town has also been known for making silk kimono textiles. (In Kawabata’s novel the woman about to become a geisha lives in a former silkworm loft when she is having the fatal affair.) Like the superb luxury of fine alligator shoes, once you appreciate the enormous complexity of the process of creating a traditional silk kimono, the asking price no longer seems remarkable—a thing to remark upon.

Just a few blocks from a fine little museum which celebrates the scribe’s life we stopped to visit a silk weaving center. On one table at the silk kimono cottage factory, as examples, we saw a plate of marshmallow-sized silk bolls, spun by that unique caterpillar, specially fed on mulberry leaves; a bug whose husbandry goes back into dim antiquity. Best known for fine fashion wear today, silk was widely used as early armor (a feature unmentioned at the cottage factory). The fibers are so tough that “stand off weapons” such as arrows, darts, or fleshetts, would push the tightly woven cloth into the wound rather than cut through. This fact made it much easier to remove the projectile and very much reduced infection. The only “slings and arrows” most of us face now are of mere outrageous fortune of dumb luck, and neither fine silk nor ice-cream colored polyester leisure suits guarantee much protection.

The hair-tiny worm filaments are combed into threads, and threads twisted into yarn. In the small factory, we could watch a row of “spools” (paper rolls about as big as one’s calf wrapped with yarn) being uncoiled onto a long wooden frame. The yarn mistress placed a tea saucer on top of each spool, very much like the bail of a spinning reel, to control and “open” its loops as the stuff came off the roll. Back and fourth she walked, to bundle the gathered bunch collected from 20 or so spools, each managed by its own saucer, the thread sliding gracefully around the slick, glossy edge.

The weaving of the textile is done with a machine having the same attributes of a hand loom but, if you imagine, for example, the Turkish kilim loom (or other rug looms) being massively built, squarish, tall and reminiscent of an upright piano (though, of course, bigger), the Japanese silk kimono loom is much more lightly constructed, narrow and long, reminiscent of the bowling game in an arcade---it has a very long bed. As is typically the case, a bullet-shaped cock is shot one way and then back as the long yarns or threads are raised and lowered, usually with a foot treadle; it trails the horizontal threads in its wake.

In short, this is a great deal of hand work, by skilled, attentive crafts folk, exactly as was the case with the production of the luxury goods we saw in Italy. Indeed, chatting with a designer handbag maker in Milan he showed us a loom there perhaps 10% the size of the silk kimono fabric one: it created the special gold material for his purses. There is essentially no way to reduce the process or simplify the procedure and maintain the integrity of the creative moment of these truly luxurious goods.

Field Notes: Weaver Birds

2006-10-22T05:00:00.000-07:00

Eyeballing The Birds

2006-10-22T00:27:00.000-07:00

Japan, as you almost certainly know, is a long archipelago located in the northwest Pacific Ocean. Being longitudinally elongated, the island matrix covers a reasonably varied climatic range; from the boreal, or coniferous, to a kind of sub-tropical type. There are also considered to be two ecological lines dividing the country’s flora and fauna, its plants and animals: the Blakiston Line (between Hokkaido and Honshu) and the Watase Line lancing through southern Japan.

As a result, Japan’s “avifauna,” or birdlife, is incredibly rich—although this is in comparison with Europe not necessarily with, say, the Atchafalaya Basin – which alone hosts perhaps 200 species. Thus, about 600 species have been recorded to date in all Japan (it is unclear how many may have been lost or will be lost to heavy industrialization and the incredible concretization of habitat in the nation, an ongoing concern). Because most of these species are migratory (more than 60%), with about 60 endemic or sub-regionally endemic, including the internationally famous Okinawa Rail, Blakiston's Fish-owl, Japanese Murrelet, Red-crowned Crane, Prier’s Woodpecker and Width’s Jay, flyway habitat is vitally important.

The largest nature conservation NGO (non-government organization), the Wild Bird Society of Japan, claims a membership above 50,000 and there are of course birders who don’t belong to any organized group. If you are curious, as of 2005 the number of species formally listed in Japan was 623, with endemics enumerated as the:
Copper Pheasant Syrmaticus soemmerringii Japanese Woodpecker Picus awokera Okinawa Woodpecker Sapheopipo noguchii Japanese Scops Owl Otus semitorques Okinawa Rail Gallirallus okinawae Amami Woodcock Scolopax mira Ryu Kyu Serpent-eagle Spilornis perplexus Lidth`s Jay Garrulus lidthi Ryukyu Minivet Pericrocotus tegimae Amami Thrush Zoothera major Izu Thrush Turdus celaenops Bonin Honeyeater Apalopteron familiare Japanese Skylark Alauda japonica.

South Louisiana is blessed with an enormous wetlands area, the Atchafalaya Basin, an extraordinarily verdant region and flyway for avifauna, home to those 200 species of endemics, including playing host to ½ of America’s migratory birds. It has been a long-time struggle to save the Basin from ruination, but some of the best of Louisiana’s folks have been putting up the good fight.
Aside from the feathered bi-peds of Japan and in the United States, I’ve seen some of the most interesting birds of my life thus far in Southern Africa. Suspended from the tiny tip of a twig way at the end of a yarn-thin branch, extending from an itself slender limb of a bristling thorn tree, I spent hours watching weaver’s nests bob—the nests, not me.
"No uninvited guest, ‘dinner’ guest at that, much bigger than a butterfly is likely to lite on that nest," I’d think, marking a quick entry in my notebook.

Africa, I read later, is home to more than fifty types of weaver birds, and India hosts a dozen or so more. I don’t know yet if there are any weavers in Japan. In spite of frequent similarities, the weaver birds are prone to fascinating variety. They tend to be active "anters," for one thing. They will clutch up an ant and apply it vigorously to their plumage. No one is exactly sure why.

Still, as a group, they are probably most famous for weaving their chicks a good, solid nest. I watched a bright yellow, black-faced Masked weaver, Ploceus velatus, swoop in, with a flick, to cling upside down to the woven nest I'd been keeping an eye on near a foot path not that far from down town Habarone, capital of Botswana. Near by, a handful of other small nests, all about the size of large grapefruit, were similarly sited with offspring security in mind.

For five dollars (US) I could pay one of the beautiful Zimbabwe hookers to model nude for me in the scrub, and practice my drawing. Or, for free, I could take field notes of the weaver birds. Life is always full of such difficult decisions.

In any event, I did often choose to take notes. One creature landed, immediately his caterwauling began: an insistent call, demanding the attention of females. Distinctive parts of the call sound to my ear like the rapid metal-to-metal tapping of a tack hammer on the end of a dangling steel rod. Although sometimes they just hang while calling or perhaps sway a bit, the suitors also frequently snap their black and yellow, narrow wings open and shut adding visuals to their audio display.

As is general with his clan, this weaver knits up a lavish home for his potential spouse, carefully building a tough yet airy nest by skilfully "weaving" fresh, flexible grass or palm fibres. At first bright green, his construction dries, like a sphere of tiny steam-bent canoe ribs, into a resilient yet wonderfully light habitation.

Some weaver birds choose to create their baskety nests above standing water to thwart predators, others set up housekeeping near protective neighbours: wasp nests or nests of bigger, aggressive birds. Really nervy weavers have taken up residence dangling beneath eagle eyries.

In Botswana, and indeed all around in Southern Africa, the weavers often have a place analogous to cardinals or robins in the United States. Their presence is enjoyed by many members of the regular population, entirely outside organized birders and biologists. Home owners try to attract them, and conversation may be about the changing locations of the remarkable, basket-like nests.

Not all nominal weavers--cone-billed, generally seed eating birds including sparrows and their allies in the family Ploceidae--are welcome, certainly. The so-called red billed weaver or dread quelea have been a scourge in East Africa. When food is fairly plentiful, usually from well into until the end of the rainy season, the attractive little birds travel in large flocks. In times of scarcity, these communities coalesce into cities on the wing with populations sometimes, terrifyingly for the farmers, into the millions.

And, just as the benefit of agriculture, with its routinized cultivation and its irrigation practices, is the maximization of food productivity for human consumers, this benefit exists for the quelea to the farmer's detriment. Quelea, settling like smoke on millet and sorghum fields, can denude them of food in an hour. Such ruthless avian reaping has stimulated the human victims of quelea infestation to reply equally ruthlessly. The pest species has been fire bombed, air assaulted with powerful toxins, net trapped, and suffered roost after roost put to the torch. None of these brutal methods serve the desired end: the vast hordes still arrive to chow down on hundreds of tons of agricultural produce.

Buffalo weavers of East Africa use press-gang tactics, adolescent non-breeding males helping build group nests from thorny acacia twigs. Each member of the dominant bird's harem gets an individual brood chamber. In Kenya, the communal nests of the white-browed weaver are fashioned with two openings in order to frustrate would-be predators.

Obviously, among many weavers, nests have taken on deeply social and physiological implications. Once the male masked weaver has selected a site--and unlike some cold climes when the short breeding season demands quick action, the climate in Botswana allows great indulgence--he turns out a nest. Then he literally hangs around whistling at the girls.

It's generally assumed that females, who certainly scope out the guys in the fashion of teenagers around a poolside, use the colour of the nest as an indicator of competence. Young males must devote a meaningful period to practising nest construction before entering the mating fray. In any event, a complete nest finished and still green may signal quickness, health, and dexterity--to say nothing of enthusiasm. Golden brown, drying nests are scorned.

Written sources sometimes say the female weavers will unweave nests they particularly don't like (because these things are tight, this is a real chore, involving undoing the labour which went into the original weaving). I never saw this among the many Masked Weavers and far fewer Spottedbacked Weavers, Ploceus cucullatus, I observed. But nests were certainly torn up, abandoned, or apparently duplicated. Some weavers did seem to strip leaves from the twigs they intended to use, and perhaps just stripped leaves as a nervous habit—maybe this is the bird parallel of smoking at the night club?

With so many species in Africa it’s easy enough to find the nests. Often sociable, weavers frequently cluster in colonies making the nests yet more prominent. Within the nominal weavers, there's lots of variation in method, strategy, and behaviour. For example, if the Masked Weavers lean toward architecture to impress mates, the exotic Red Bishop, Euplectes orix, relies on what looks like a fuzzy, bright-red balaclava and distinctive, attention-getting fancy flights. Its unforgettable seeing the vividly red-headed Bishop flying that bobbing, up-an-down mating drill.

Although forming in colonies might be viewed as risky, advertising the bird's presence to predators, some benefits are clear. Once the hen is brooding, the nest entry may be extended, tube-like. Then, if a wily serpent stops in for a bite, its dangerous fore end is sheathed in woven grass while its end hindermost is all too vulnerable to colony-strong pecking. Usually it gets the mob's message and heads off for a less troublesome repast.

Also, the general brouhaha of a colonial group helps vivify reproduction while the many adults provide excellent role models for chicks. The sites I visited in Botswana routinely ranged from a handful of nests, some of which were invariably disused, to many dozens. In South Africa colonies of many hundreds are fairly common.

My enjoyment watching nature puts me in pretty good company. Observing, recording, and commenting on nature has been the pastime of the elite and the intellectual—as well as the goof-- since the dimmest antiquity. The entire arcade and later the whole pantheon of Greek and Roman philosophers relied on the natural world for anecdotal support, example, and metaphor. Pliny, in his famous treatise, called by wags an "ancient storehouse of error," claimed that Moose lacked knees, so were best hunted by chopping away the tree against which they slept. Aristotle relied on our general understanding of birds to define human beings as "the featherless biped."

Later, the 19th century brought about what can only be called the great, Golden Age of amateur naturalists. Almost magically, a host of factors accidentally came together to stimulate this wonderful blooming. An explosive increase in public education, buttressed by the burgeoning Sunday School movement rolled unprecedented waves of readers into being right as printing innovation brought cheap books to market.

Meanwhile labor reform reduced the work week hand in glove as the expanding rail system crept over the rural landscape like mold veining on the crust of a discarded loaf. Reliable, economical bicycles became available and hiking as a pastime gained popularity. It was easy and cheap for day trippers to shuck the urban coil and spend the day frolicking in God's wonderland--and to bring samples of it back in presses, zinc cases, and bail-topped jars. Darwin was in the air.

In the heady days of the mid and late 1800s hardly a community existed without its Geography Union, its Naturalist's Lyceum and its occasional nights hosting scientists, adventurers, and notable travellers on the lecture circuit. Best of all, even the tiny burg's natural scientists were doing, often enough, meaningful work.

Impressive collections were developed, and massive taxonomies of all sorts were compiled. With a ruthless zeal which would be wholly unacceptable today, astonishingly full sets of representative examples of rocks and minerals, mammals, fossils, birds, reptiles, plants and herbs--you name it (and back then, so did they)--were developed with which to settle or ignite countless debates spinning off from the new fangled idea of natural selection.

Today amateur naturalism is just a spectre of its former self, a shade of its halcyon past. Perhaps only bird watching maintains that rich legacy. It would be idle speculation why bird watching has continued its hold on the popular imagination, and, indeed, expanded its niche among leisure pursuits while rodent tagging and grass pressing has fallen into desuetude.

Yet, speculate we might as well.

For one thing, leisure scholars will point out that (there are scholars to study everything, and leisure is no exception), bird watching has what laymen might call "leg." Specialist call it vertical and horizontal cohesion, but it means the same.

It is supposed that human beings travel through a "life course," and that various behaviour is acceptable or unacceptable, becomes easy or difficult, is considered proper or improver at different stages in life. The vast majority of leisure options are horizontal. That is, most are closely associated with one or another place in the life course.

In addition, most leisure is vertically limited. By this the scholars mean that participation is resistant to enrichment. One can usually easily participate in more of the same, but not easily with more depth. A relative handful of leisure options do exhibit great vertical depth and horizontal robustness. Common ones are military modelling, philately, reading, walking, and of course bird watching.

WHY BIRD WATCHING?

We don't know why watching birds is as likely to enthral an individual Boy Scout on a day hike at the community reservoir as a 60 year old captain of industry with resources enough to charter an Otter in order to reach an isolated rookery. Some participants come to bird watching in youth, some later, and some at the autumn of life. All seem to be ensnared by some ineffable fascination.

The most obvious part of bird watching is watching birds; but for many, perhaps most, that's by no means all of it. Birding as a hobby is supported by a colossal text foundation and a huge social infrastructure. Even actual observation, with its quaint emphasis on counting, identifying, and listing is richly textured. Some bird watchers are primarily collectors, chitting off species. Some are engaged in understanding behaviour and thus focus perhaps on a single nest or a small section of real estate. A great many simply set up a feeding table and informally watch the antics of birds while quaffing sundowners.

Birding's text foundation, like that of philately and military modelling, is lushly rich. Birders can choose among big, beautiful coffee table books filled with heavily clayed illustrated pages, facile, basic field manuals and intimidating, thorough ornithological tombs, memoirs of lifelong field naturalists, and slender belles-lettres of sappy ain't birds grand essays. Monographs, "The Barn Owl," "Hawks," and "Weavers," are available in both narrowly scientific and broadly general, for us regular folk, species.

Many glossy magazines, in many languages, serve the birder while both university and scientific society journals, and journals by strong regional bird clubs, chink what few cracks may exist in the wall of avian oriented print matter.

At home, birders may well join the local club so that when not off on an outing, they can still ogle vivid slides, hear or discuss bird related topics, and later cool their heels during the social free for all. As a further extension, many bird clubs also foster a forward thinking, pro active policy of advocacy activity.

During holidays or vacations, birders can easily integrate their at home leisure into a new or novel setting. In fact, many birders plan holidays around birding opportunities or, for example on a business trip, enjoy an early morning birding jaunt prior to work. Bird watching is so popular that many natural settings now host professional guides explicitly shaping their offerings in concordance with the desire of bird watching visitors. Commercial bird tours are now commonplace world wide.

While golf may be described as a good walk ruined, birding, or indeed any interest in amateur natural history, is one of the very few ways that a stroll out of doors might likely be improved. Birding offers participants indoor and outdoor, local and exotic, aesthetic and practical options.

As suggested above, it's impossible for us to say just why birds are interesting to so many human beings. It's much easier for us to examine the features associated with "bird watching," and understand its success. As a leisure pursuit it is both solitary and social, it may be frivolously simple or engagingly complex, it lends itself to extreme frugality or to consumption of costly professional support, and participation is possible virtually throughout the life course.

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All The Dead Brollys

2006-10-17T18:51:00.000-07:00

2006-10-17T18:45:00.000-07:00

All The Dead Brollys!

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 wind.

Unfortunately, although because I’ve lived through hurricanes, including Katrina in Louisiana last year, and I know that 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 pretty and fairly substantial tree uprooted. Velcro alone didn’t do the job and the wind lashed rain saturated my shirt and pants 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.

It’s been amusing to me, sometimes, seeing how quickly umbrellas sprout during rain. Especially apparently after some invention or other a decade or two ago of a super-cheap manufacturing method which made the 3-dollar umbrella common place. Years ago we were with friends in Manhattan. We rendezvoused with them, in from Paris, us in from New Orleans. It began to rain. The merchantile-ishly astute guy said, “where are the umbrella sellers?” Back then, at first, I wasn’t sure what he meant.

Then, boom, from nowhere, hawkers were selling cheap plastic umbrellas. I don’t know where they came from nor where they went. But now they are a fixture of cities much like the Norway rat, except more useful – I don’t know how useful the Norway rat is, actually, to make that comparison meaningfully at this time. “They” tell me all God’s creatures have a purpose; if anyone knows the purpose the Norway rat serves in a bistro in Manhattan, let me know.

Anyway, a few years later my partner and I were in London, lost again, looking at a map book. We glanced around, surprised to see her surname on the classic umbrella store we had accidentally stopped in front of. Because I’d admired a so-called “shooting stick umbrella,” design in the past, I went in to check on prices (about $200 – I still don’t have a shooting stick umbrella). These brollys were very much handmade, luxury items: strong wooden or fiber-glass shafts and cloth covers, cast brass stirrups, folded heavy leather seats. Still, $200 for something that I’d probably wind up forgetting on a bus was a bit over the top. If it had had a concealed sword . . .

Some time later, by odd coincidence and accident we happened on to a French equivalence of the handmade umbrella shop in Paris. But, while most of the bumbershoots in the hoary confides of England’s redoubt were redolent in masculinity—with an obvious anal retentive quality suggested by the tightly rolled and strapped devices---the French shop was filled with padded handles, lacy edges, and frills. I’d hazard a description that it took a more feminine approach.

I suppose umbrella-like contraptions have three functions, with blurry edges some times: they communicate some social meaning, they repel water, they turn back the sun. Properly, a “parasol” involves the sun, a “parapluie” or umbrella the rain. We grew up seeing New Orleans’ Jazz funerals slinking through the streets, a handful of the, what, revelers (?) sporting lavishly decorated parasols. Perhaps such fancy brollys hailed from Africa, legacy of Portuguese days when European ladies shielded the sun with big black cloth parasols.

Certainly when I worked and traveled in Botswana it was still the custom for blacks and whites alike to cast their own shadows with wide commercial umbrellas. Hikers would lash the furled brollys into the tie-points usually reserved for ice axes, the “J” handles extending up above the back-packs behind their heads as they trekked. When I mentioned this to a Japanese student during a “brown bag,” quick as a bunny he commented that, “we could not do that here; we bow. Bowing would be uncomfortable with the umbrella tied up like that.” That was a perceptive and quickly identified cultural point.

Louisiana is a wet state. So, when in Bill Murray’s Stripe’s, that profoundly patriotic movie, during his early scene with the recruits clad in ponchos standing in a driving rain, he intones, “It is the cold and flu season,” it always gets a laugh. Ponchos were popular in Boy Scouts. Men also wore, and still wear, traditional garb like trench coats (which, by the way, must be able to button right-to-left and left –to-right, and must have “D” rings on the left hip, and buttonable binocular epaulettes to be “trench coats.” Developed by Thomas Burberry in 1901 and used in the First World War -- Burberry also invented gabardine -- the “D” rings were there to attach the heavy bags of “OOO” buck for the American 12 gauge pump guns and the hand grenades used by special “storm” or “shock” troops sent in to clear the trenches; thus “trench coats”). Today these long, heavy, exquisitely made coats cost a thousand dollars.

My wet wear preference was for a long time micro-pore breathable parkas and I’ve used the same one for a few hundred thousand miles of travel. A “parka” is literally a pretty heavy coat for cold climates, same as an anorak, but “better living through chemistry” made mine just about tissue thin and perhaps big as a book when zipped into it’s pouch. I don’t dislike umbrellas, and have owned a French wood-shafted umbrella, with a woven tip-to-grip lanyard (the French have the wonderful habit of slinging the things around your shoulder) since living in France in the 80’s.

Helen Ruggieri (through the site Hackwriters.com) spoke to the question of “Umbrella Etiquette” at some length, and it’s worth quoting – the site is also well worth a look, too, for its other groovy penetrations into cultural stuff and to read her unexpurgated essay on umbrellas.

”As with all things Japanese there is an art to using umbrellas and during the long rainy season you have time to learn it,” Ruggieri says. Then, she launches into a couple of thousand well chosen words about the Japanese, the weather, and sticks with ribs and covers.

The Japanese archipelago has a pretty well defined rainy season corresponding to summer in the States. When tsuyu baiu (rainy season) arrives in Japan, the likely choice is to grab a brolly and tough it out. The chain of islands is long and narrow which means lots of climate variety, and the conditions are not identical for urban megalopolis and rural flyspeck, but generalities can be made.

In Ruggieri’s Japan world, “given the assurance of rain (it makes the rice grow those chipper sorts squeal), you never travel without an umbrella. You always know you’ll need one. Folding umbrellas are not popular although I do see folks taking them out of their backpacks quite often. You have to fold them up and stuff them in a plastic bag. The pop-up umbrellas are favored. They pop open at the touch of a button. Quicker operation and valued for ease of use upon entering and exiting busses or taxis or other types of transportation which call for rapid movement.” Well, being from the American South, and maybe chipper, too, I just say, “great weather for the ducks,” when it rains although I don’t know if our foul, feathered bi-peds like the rain, either, on point of fact.

My partner and I live in a much smaller dwelling node than Tokyo, near a university. So, I see a disproportionate number of young people. Our human circus is filled with brolly-free runners and cycling pairs: one person peddles the bicycle, a second sits on the back holding an umbrella for the both of them – one of my very favorite sights in Japan.

But Ruggieri, apparently a denizen of Tokyo, speaks to the urban reality saying that “as with all things Japanese there is an art to using umbrellas and during the long rainy season you have time to learn it. As you walk the crowded streets of Tokyo umbrellas bob up and down as those approaching gauge the rhythm of your walk and the pace of your approach multiplied by your height. The umbrellas pass without collision as eye contact reveals our intentions. Up, down, up down. We march along in a great rhythmic bobbing stream. The dance.” She continues on to compare and contrast the difference in behavior (we both think it probably more gentle and civilized) between umbrella wielders in Japan and the US.

Still, our opinions and experiences in Asia are not always the same. I’ve seen and would describe for others the same racks, umbrella bags, and hanging railings that Ruggieri has, and noticed what I take to be similar civil behavior in the rain. But that travel memoirist says that “no one ever takes your umbrella by accident. You gain an intimate knowledge of the characteristics of your umbrellas so you can pick it out of a crowd of others – all black pop-ups.” Perhaps umbrellas are not taken by accident, but mine has been stolen to avoid being rained on – I suppose that’s taken with intent. And I’ve had umbrellas just handed to me by strangers when I’ve been walking, getting wet in the rain, and caught out brolly-less. Also, in my neck-o-the woods, while many umbrellas are indeed black, I’d venture that the cheap, see-through clear model is the most common.

”At the new Opera House in Tokyo there is an umbrella rack in the lobby to hold the thousands of umbrellas that the audience members have deposited,” Ruggieri goes on to describe. “You twist in your umbrella and lock the lever. Each one has a chit with a number on it. This isn’t to prevent umbrella thieves from making off with your parasol, but to prevent endless sorting upon exiting. You have the number so it is easy (and no charge either) to find the correct umbrella.” Well, maybe. On the other hand, maybe a rougher sort of hombre hangs out at the Tokyo opera house, lurking about ready to upgrade to a classier kind of bumbershoot!

After a couple more well turned paragraphs Ruggieri closes by describing the carnage wreaked on poor brollys by Japan’s high winds. “On gomi pick up days discarded umbrellas perch from the lips of black plastic bags, rest on the curb, in the gutter. The most creative recycling of discarded umbrellas I saw during my visit to Japan was on a small strip of land between the highway and an exit ramp. A homeless person had constructed a huge shelter of umbrellas – more like a sculpture, a work of art, a great congregation of umbrellas billowing out like a geodesic dome.” The essayist, Helen Ruggieri, wrote these comments in 2002 when her new book of haibun—haiku and prose--, Character for Women, was being released by Foothills Publishing.

Certainly more could be said about umbrellas – and why folks struggle to use the things in a fierce head wind. Or, it would be curious to know the details of umbrella use in Africa, or how the object itself was invented and then how manufacturing changed over time. For now, however, I get a kick trying to figure out how that beat up, broken umbrella got there when I see one in some odd or unusual place as I sit zipping along on the train or as I walk to work on a fine, not-rain filled day. My partner is heading to Oaxaca, Mexico in a few weeks, for some narratology field work and will stop for a couple of days at our alternate “home base” in South Louisiana. We’ve used a small tailoring shop there from time to time, including to repair my heavy horse leather king-of-the-road motorcycle jacket, replacing a brass zipper that seemed to weigh five pounds. I’ll see about having a new PPK nylon zipper put into my shell parka and get another few hundred thousand miles out of it.

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Octicreepiness

2006-10-15T04:01:00.000-07:00

We stayed with friends in South Louisiana for a while on our last expedition to collect field notes and images for classroom use and to go galumphing and visiting. Each night we would park our expensive rented car on their drive, swing open the wooden gate to their leafy, well-treed back yard and creep under the taut strands of a huge web strung by a palm-sized, yellow-and-black “banana” spider. The tremendous, spooky thing with a body as big as the first joint of your pinky and long, long spindly legs stretched out its intricate, golden web right over the walk every night. But it was a shy, or wise, character and would secret itself away from the human hub-bub during the day.

We grew up calling these fast, frighteningly large but apparently not too dangerous creatures banana spiders, probably because of their jazzy color scheme; maybe because folks thought they were shipped in on the speedy fruit boats which used to race over the Caribbean. When time ran out and we, our own selves, raced back to Japan to get back down to business, I was delighted to see the edges of light poles, bushes along the sidewalks, & the space between the uprights of road signs filled with what looked like a slightly down-sized cousin of our Louisiana friend.
The filament thin silk of their webs catches the morning and evening sun when I make my work commute a’foot. Not being a real “bugologist,” I have no idea if these are examples of the orb spinning nephila clavata, or the argiope, both descriptions seemed close on the world wide web. The clavata are common through China, Korea, and Japan and are alternatively called “mudang gumi” which in Korean means “fortune teller” for their utility in predicting certain future outcomes based on birth circumstances.

The fruit nick name, as I read on the electronic web, may be less useful than determining success of a proposed marriage, and is actually applied to two very different species of spiders. One, the argiope of North America, is pretty passive and benign, while the phoneutria of Central and South America, same by name only, can be deadly.

Much more aggressive, the South American banana spider, or phoneutria, has a large body--typically about 1.3" (3 cm). As a rule, this one makes its home in the rain forests. However, it is fairly adaptable and can also be found in cities. As a result, between 1970 and 1980 it was reportedly responsible for the hospitalization of some 7,000 people in southeastern Brazil.

If the Louisiana banana spider’s bite has been compared to a bee sting, the South American banana spider's injection is a neurotoxin similar to the venom produced by redback or black widow spiders. One specialist noted that “a phoneutria banana spider's bite will cause immediate pain, a cold sweat and irregular heartbeat.” The spiders here on Japan spin their webs all over the bushes, paths, and sidewalks. Unlike the critters in the US, they don’t seem to hide in the day. And, many Japanese could stroll under a head-high web before I’d walk face-full into the tiny nets which are surprisingly robust---the fibers are stronger than steel or Kevlar. Even without the venom, I suspect a face full of surprised spider would give me an “irregular heartbeat” for at least a little while. Some of these things are weirdly high, way up at the roof gables of two story houses. Then, it looks as if the huge creepy thing is just floating a few meters up in the air, levitating.
The regular argiope or so-called banana spider does have venom a lot like the toxin of the black widow, but it is apparently quite harmless to humans being a weaker, less potent concoction.

You probably know that males have it rough in the insect kingdom (and it’s not exactly a skate in the mammal world, either).

Anyway, according to a couple of Canadian biologists, some spiders have about the total nadir: they have sex then die. As a recent press release, devoid of any humor, noted, "the female doesn't have to do anything," said biology Prof. Daphne Fairbairn of the University of California Riverside. "He just dies spontaneously, he curls up his legs and he just hangs there."

Here in Japan the webs are plentiful. Its very easy to see the enormous female, colorful and prominent in the big sloping construction (spiders virtually always slope their webs in order to be able to sling themselves from below with the help of hooks at the tips of their long legs thus avoiding the stickiness of the silk material) with one or occasionally two or more much smaller males near by. As the news release explains, “the male orb-weaving spider, Argiope aurantia, is a quarter the length and about one-tenth the weight of the female. The male courts by waving his legs around, approaches the female and waits until she allows him to copulate. From our perspective, the copulation is unusual in that the male's sperm-carrying organ, which is called a pedipalp, is found in its legs.” This critter, observed on Australia, inserts his first pedipalp and releases some sperm. When he inserts the second one it swells and lodges in the orifice. At that point, as the report carried in the university press release puts it, “immediately the male becomes unresponsive, his heartbeat ceases and he dies.”

To get him out, the female actually has to break off the end of his pedipalp. Other males aren't strong enough to do it. What a way to go. Fairbairn and graduate student Matthias Foellmer of Concordia University in Montreal studied 115 matings to document what happens. "He's really acting as a whole body mating plug if you will, or a chastity belt," Fairbairn told CBC Radio's As It Happens. That’s pretty straight forward, after all, since you can see the benefit DNA wise. But over the week end we took a hike in the hill side near Tokyo and the foliage was alive with the vivid yellow and black spiders, with the reddish torso. Colorful plumage may help attract mates yet in this case the mate is about 5 body lengths away. He’s pretty much already attracted.

“Like the glitter and glare of Las Vegas beckoning tourists to the gambling tables, the orb-weaving spiny spider flashes its colorful back to lure unsuspecting quarry into its web. The discovery of this lethal use of color runs contrary to the long-held belief that in the animal kingdom color is used generally to attract mates rather than to entice prey,” says a Cornell University animal behavior researcher. Ah, that’s what I was wondering about. You’d really think most prey would more or less skedaddle at the sight of yellow and black.

"Attraction is all casinos are about. They lure you; they want to get you there. They lure people with bright lights, cheap plane tickets, inexpensive hotel rooms, great shows and great meals," says Mark E. Hauber of Cornell's Department of Neurobiology and Behavior. "The spiny spiders work the same way." Straight forward logic might suggest that “bright colors and contrasting patterns should be rare in predators that use traps, since conspicuous body color is scientifically counter-intuitive in stationary predators, says Hauber. Generally, he says, animals use "sit-and-wait" tactics in their concealed traps to capture prey, and colors and patterns only alert potential prey. Yet orb-weaving arachnids, such as the spiny spiders of Australia, are brightly colored and have contrasting patterns on their bodies. Hauber found that the more colorful their backs, the greater their chances of catching prey.

"It goes against what most scientists would have thought. Color is an attracting feature," says Hauber. "While color on animals like parrots allows them to blend into the colorful rain forest, other animals use color to attract mates. In this case, the color lures prey to the web. Perhaps the color itself may look like flowers to the insects that eventually become entrapped in the web," he says.
This scientist did not look at the same arachnids that I’ve been pausing to gander at, use as examples in my classes, and bother my students with questions about folk tales about. And it’s not safe to imagine that one animal defines behavior for another. But it is interesting that these spiders acted this way. Hauber observed spiny spiders (Gasteracantha fornicata ) in northeastern Australia. As a kind of test, he covered the yellow-black striped dorsal surface on the spiders' backs with ink from a black felt-tip pen. When he went over the data that slowly accumulated, he saw that the spiders with the black dorsal surface caught less prey than spiders with their normal colorful stripes. The implication was clear. A “treatment” was paired with a condition, and that condition was associated with the experimental circumstance. He did that “experiment” several times. (We can also say this is why “science” is not, as some pinheads imagine, a “religion.”) Anyway, the results gave him a pattern. Repeatedly he found that the blackened spiny spider always attracted and caught less prey.

"Perhaps the colors and patterns of their dorsal surface mimic the color of food -- such as flowers -- for visually oriented prey. It is also possible that the dorsal surface of the spiny spider is highly reflective in the ultraviolet part of the spectrum," he says. "Many flies, mosquitoes and gnats are attracted to bright light, and the kind of light rich in ultraviolet spectra, because these indicate the presence of field clearings adjacent to dense forests."

Hauber also learned that spiny spiders set their webs at an angle and that they sit on the underside of their webs with their backs to the ground. This suggests, says Hauber, that sun and nearby vegetation offer camouflage for the web. "Daytime web-building and hunting, along with the web placement and orientation, is consistent with behavior that attracts prey traveling from darker areas to lighter ones," says Hauber. Of course it’s well beyond my ken to speculate on the motivation of the many spiders we saw while hiking on that hillside an hour from one of the world’s biggest cities, rank upon rank of the webs seeming to have been sited to catch the sun more than to snag a meal. Is there any aesthetic notion to it? Or some great gearing to the chain of life?

XXX XXX XXX

Found Horizons

2006-10-07T00:59:00.000-07:00

Lhasa Adventures

2006-10-07T00:30:00.000-07:00

Although we still consider having our emotional and professional roots in South Louisiana as a creative team, we’ve shifted work emphasis to Asia recently. Then, pretty well settled after about a semester in Japan, we spent two months circumnavigating the globe. I can’t say it was the very best time to do it, but looking at the long range calendar there wasn’t going to be a more convenient time, any time, soon.

It would have been better to take six months or more to do this, because there is a lot to see on the old girl, spinning as she is on her cold, lonely orbit. And because just crossing the lines costs so much. But time’s winged chariot hurries near, and there’s nothing to be gained by waiting for a shinier penny to fall from heaven no matter how loudly we rock it with our bootless cries.

Google says the circumference of the earth is perhaps 24 or 25 thousand miles. And although we didn’t go round those humid, plump equatorial hips, we hardly cut a bee-line. We zig zagged from Hadano to Tokyo, to Beijing to Lhasha, back to China. Beijing to Moscow, down to London and around there, over the pond to Boston then here and there around bean town. I’ve no idea how far we went. In the end we criss-crossed the US between Dallas, New Orleans, Orlando, and Chicago on business and pleasure before heading west to arrive back in Tokyo.

Because we specialize in cultural analysis and hang with Scientists and Futurists and Artists and “ists” of all ilk, we could conceive of this whole journey—the business, such as delivering an academic paper at a conference in China, and the pleasure of touching base in Louisiana -- as so-called professional development. And thus justify our hemorrhage of cash and the delay in paying that bit of our still outstanding school loans. Still, this kind of thing does take a lot of what is euphemistically called “resources,” -- time and money. But nothing ventured, nothing gained.

That said, it’s popular among the pinheads today to quote Danton, hero of the French Revolution, about the benefits of audacity. He had told Frenchmen "Il faut de l'audace, encore de l'audace, toujours de l'audace" (You must dare, dare, and dare again). Yet, unlike the creeps too likely to appropriate that advice because the phrase sounds good, Danton really was a hero. He really did struggle to protect the moderate voice, and to shield the innocent. Perhaps that’s why on 5 April 1794, he and his peeps -- the people with courage enough to support him --were killed by the radical element in the Revolution.

Danton and his circle were the last defenders of humanity and moderation. After them, the Terror bloomed in full spate. In spite of calling for bold action, Danton wanted moderation and peace between the victors of the Revolution and the also rans. He wanted to set the stage for the future by a show of pity for those who had been “conquered;” a display of compassion by the winners for the losers. Audacity is, at times, just the right word. At other times it’s the lighting bug instead of the lightinin’.

The misappropriation of Danton’s word’s were on my mind as we began our travel, because we had been reading about the new train in China. I thought it was a fantastic, bold engineering feat. At the same time, much of my professional life has been spent working with “indigenous groups,” helping them understand principles of sustainable tourism growth. Or, writing for these groups. The new train from China was a potential engine for economic growth, but, at the same time, it could be thought of as a conduit of social change for Tibet. On the whole, would the change be good?

I’ve been reading, and maybe you could say, dreaming about, Tibet since Boy Scouts. Pouring over those books about the ancient East. Over the years I added to that youthful reading – of course Harrer’s Seven Years in Tibet and David-Neel’s gripping stuff and history about the Younghusband violent entry – more academic texts. And I moved into the study of travel and tourism. You never really know what kind of post hoc ergo proctor hoc thing is going on. What sort of situation exists such that because you do one thing, the next thing follows. I got interested in Buddhism and quest or journey literature reading the Beats in high school. Those characters went to Japan, and now I have.

The American infatuation with Tibet probably festers from the publication of James Hamilton’s Lost Horizons, the apogee of escapist reading. Not only did it introduce readers to this fantasy world, it has the distinction of being the first contemporary paperback book. Published in the thick of the depression, a time when the rich, having ruined the world economy, fought to avoid aid programs to the unemployed in the US, and helped finance men like Adolph Hitler and Mussolini in Europe.

The disenfranchised were turning to community action in their repellence with capitalism, and the capitalists were, as a response, supporting leaders who promised strong central governments: putting the unruly poor in jail where they belonged. Today self-serving pols like Donald Rumsfeld lie to the great unwashed (because too often they know they can get away with it) American voter majority, referring to the “appeasement” of Hitler. But the lie is leaving out that Hitler was in power because the rich of the US and England financed his thuggery early on, hoping that he would be a foil against communism.

In any event, Hilton’s novel, Lost Horizon, failed to gain much traction until it was boosted on radio by Alexander Woollcott. Intriguingly, according to this biography, “Woollcott was born in an eighty-five room house, a vast ramshackle building that had once been a commune. It was called The Phalanx, and was in Phalanx, New Jersey. There were many social experiments in the mid-1800's, some more successful than others. When the Phalanx fell apart, due to internecine squabbles, it was taken over by the Bucklin family, Woollcott's maternal grandparents. There, amid his extended family, Woollcott spent large portions of his childhood. His father was a ne'er-do-well, a supposed Cockney, who drifted through various jobs, sometimes spending long periods away from his wife and children. Poverty was always close at hand.” Did this life experience make the famous wag more or less empathetic to the plight of the victim?

Woollcott, a member of the famous “Charmed Circle” of wits, including Dorothy Parker, which met routinely at the Algonquin Hotel, lauded the novel, originally published in October 1933. The cover showed a contemporary aircraft crashed landed on a snowy landscape, text calling: “welcome to Shangri-La.” For a vast reading audience—no TV back then—and apparently left behind by the well-to-do and government, the promise of the better life beyond the far horizon was a tempting sell. There was already a kind of rough, indeterminate focus on the region due to the slow kindle of interest in peak bagging.

Climbing of Mount Everest was, of course, the news maker. When Andrew Irvine and George Mallory were killed on a climb in 1924, the Himalayas were welded into the popular culture fore brain. (Perhaps ironically, that expedition was organized by Francis Younghusband, by then head of the RGS) Tibet, essentially a closed country, was forever more in the spotlight. Now, it seems anybody with a kettle of cash and a cell phone can walk the roof of the world. But things were different back then.

On July 15, 2006 Richard Gere (who has been a practicing Buddhist for many years and is a long time supporter of the Dalai Lama) authored a long piece in the Op-ed section of the New York Times. For Gere, there are apparently no complexities in the situation existing in China with its relationship with Tibet. He seems pretty certain of “who” is right and wrong. Certain indeed that right and wrong exist.
As Gere put it, “The opening this month of the final segment of the world’s highest railway, from Beijing to Lhasa, Tibet, is a staggering engineering achievement and a testimony to the developing greatness of China. But it is also the most serious threat by the Chinese yet to the survival of Tibet’s unique religious, cultural and linguistic identity. In the words of a well-known Tibetan religious teacher who died after many years in a Chinese prison, the railway heralds ‘a time of emergency and darkness’ for Tibet.” The well known actor and activist for a particular Tibetan agenda then paints in, by broad strokes, the other hazards of modernized rail carriage: easier transport of the military, of the civilian population, of natural resources. Of course, if one views the military as protection, that’s good. If one views tourism as an economic engine, growing tourism is good.

There is no question that the Tibetans represent a small part of the colossal Chinese population. Even if you think of all the varied minorities as a block, they represent a trivial number compared to the monolith of China – if you are willing to imagine that China is a homogenous monolith. And Gere along with most of what might be called the Hollywood Tibetests does seem willing to make that kind of division.
Gere, chairman of the International Campaign for Tibet, concludes his heartfelt opinion writing that, “Tibet’s precious culture and religion, with its principles of wisdom and compassion and its message of interdependence and nonviolence, are rooted in the Tibetan landscape and Tibetan hearts. The survival of Tibetan Buddhist knowledge in its own land is vital for the world, as well as the Tibetan people. China’s journey toward greatness must not include the further destruction of this heritage.”

The zeal with which Richard Gere writes is well explained in Orvell Schell’s Virtual Tibet: Searching for Shangri-La from the Himalayas to Hollywood, a rich, insightful book full of history and social narrative. For the Chinese claim a connection to Tibet from at least back when America was fighting its Revolutionary War (and Tibetans asked the Chinese authorities for “protection” from expansionist Nepal rumbling to the West.) The violence of the fifties might be a reaffirmation of that historical connection in the eyes of the Chinese. Dates are only numbers to history’s victims.

Still, Hollywood is a great one for re-writing the ending.

While the preferred narrative of American and many European fans of the Tibetans is peace and calm, only a few weeks before, the New York times carried a related story, “Arms and Armor From Tibet at the Metropolitan Museum” by Grace Glueck, May 13, 2006. Just as Orvelle Schell spends over 300 pages in his Virtual Tibet carefully explaining how much of the West’s “vision” of Tibet is a fatuous invention of longing and desire, Glueck is right on point putting the kibosh on the notion of peaceful Tibetans.

“It's unusual to think of the Tibetans as warriors,” the art critic explains. She notes that, “this mostly Buddhist people, now ruled by China, is better known today as a deeply spiritual culture devoted to peace. But they were once fierce and, like others with turf to defend, held a vital stake in battles and weapons. Tibetan history includes long periods of heavy military activity, beginning in the seventh century. Tibet's early protector gods were worshiped as warriors, equipped with battle gear.” When we finally did travel to Tibet, not by the train after all, and we did get to examine the great monasteries, these fearful “protector gods” stuck out. Dervish like and repellent, the big statues were hardly the kind of thing to fill one with calm and feelings of peaceful quietude.

According to Glueck, the superb battle skills of traditional Tibetans were made “abundantly evident” in the then mounted exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, "Warriors of the Himalayas: Rediscovering the Arms and Armor of Tibet." In what the writer describes as “a dazzling display of Tibetan war equipment from the 13th to 20th century” the show was filled with edged weapons, tack, firearms, and armor for horse and rider.

According to Donald LaRocca, curator of the Met's department of arms and armor, who organized this show and catalog, “many objects here were still being produced and used into the 20th century.” Moreover, weapons, if not in current use, are fully integrated into the culture in spite of the pop-cult image cultivated by Hollywood. Today, the center section of Lhasha is set aside for ethnic minority Tibetan dealers (you could say, in trash and not be far wrong) in tourist souvenirs. Perhaps the most common object being sold is the ubiquitous handled prayer wheel. But very, very common are cheap copies of the weird, evil looking Tibetan edged weapons.

The Met’s show explained that “older examples were kept for ceremonial use, particularly in the Great Prayer Festival held in Lhasa, Tibet's capital, at the start of each year. Votive weapons were also placed in monasteries and temples, housed in special chapels dedicated to Buddhism's guardian deities.” We might prefer to think of Tibetans as curiously “peaceful” or “childlike,” but, perhaps unfortunately, they seem to be “normal.” Realistically, if we imagine that the Tibetans are “coerced” by the Chinese army; need they be inherently peaceful to expect to lose? On the other hand, is it necessarily the case that the investment of that kind of cash – and engineering skill—to bring into being a modern rain system is done in malice?

Anyway, the new train seemed a fantastic idea. Imagine curling up, up, up over the passes that that wacky plane in Lost Horizons crossed! Instead of seeing only the tops of cottony clouds passengers could actually see the landscape.
According to coverage on web BBC “the line boasts high-tech engineering to stabilize tracks over permafrost and oxygen pumped into cabins to help passengers cope with the high altitude.” The Chinese authorities claim that the 1,140km (710-mile) line will create major opportunities to a traditionally underdeveloped region. The BBC coverage quoted “critics [who] fear it will be used by China to assert its control over a contested border region.” In addition, they say the “railway line threatens not only the delicate Himalayan environment, but also the ancient Tibetan culture.” The fantastic train climbed to 5,072m (16,000 feet), before beginning the descent to Lhasa, the Tibetan capital. Although passengers were in special pressurized carriages, some reported being sick with altitude. Toothpaste squirted from tubes, stuff exploded.

The BBC coverage said that “the train carriages have windows with ultra-violet filters to keep out the sun's glare, as well as carefully regulated oxygen levels with spare supplies to combat the thin air.” It also quoted exiled Tibetan Lhadon Tethong who said that the railway was "engineered to destroy the very fabric of Tibetan identity." I was not sure if the train could destroy a social fabric more quickly than a plane (and Lhasa has and has had a very active airport for decades). Indeed, many Tibetans left Tibet for fully industrialized regions with better or other forms of education, economic opportunity, and medical care. I did not want to jump to conclusions. But. It did seem that a shift of people into the region, perhaps by train, would have a cultural effect. Then again, the shift of people out of the region, motivated by a similar desire to improve their own circumstances, might also have some effect on local area dynamics. I suppose we are not to notice if Tibetans move from Lhasa to India or London. But we are supposed to be alarmed if Chinese move to Lhasa.

For us, however, to begin to do actual field work it was necessary to make a number of visits first to Tokyo, to begin the process of applying for entry visas for China and the Autonomous Region of Tibet.

I Could See Her Again, But Probably Not Any More

2006-09-24T02:39:00.000-07:00

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 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.

In fact, she seemed to be absolutely inside the bell-curve: no mile-tall semi-anorexic model this. Nor was she a Linsey Dawn McKensie with her "cartoon-like 34GG breasts," back then in the press for having an affair with Premier League soccer-star Dean Holdsworth. She wore the tightest, shortest dress I'd ever to that moment interacted with, except of course when eyeballing videos from this very shop, and semi-glossy black very high heeled pumps. All exposed skin, and there was an astonishing amount of it, was tanned to a lush, nut brown. Hose free, her legs were powerful as a figure skater's, shapely, and absolutely smooth and absent of nick and blemish.

"I was in California," she told me, "and I liked to show it off, you know? I was about 17 and a girl friend asked me to fill in for her partner at a call out--that's when strippers go to parties. So I got into the business doing girl-girl acts. I liked it. The money was great. It was like no work and the guys would want to take you out and buy you stuff. Too much. I began my own act when I was 19, and liked it really wild. One guy said he wanted to make a movie with me; I figured he just wanted me to suck his cock. Which of course he did, but he also did make the first video with me in it."

Her bodyguard/driver came over, a young pup apparently as tough, and certainly as personable, as a fireplug. A few customers were ready. Pardoning herself, Ms. Lynn walked to the first guy (all the clients wore the rural Illinois, USA, costume: non-logoed sky-style or bomber jacket, ironed 501s, trainers). Just before sitting down on the couch in front of him, between his legs, she snapped the hem of her tissue-thin dress up to her throat. The driver popped off a Polaroid while the guy was still in a species of shock.

I noted that Krystal was cleanly shaven, her mons as bare and cute as a fresh peach.

Pop, pop, pop in ninety-seconds the guys paid their 50 bucks, clutched their instant-prints, and wandered off. Completely poised, Krystal smoothed her hem in place two-thirds up her oval, muscular thighs, and explained, "Fifty for instant beaver with me, for $20 I sign one of the 8X10s--you wouldn't believe how many Sharpies I go through--and I've got hats, posters, and stuff."

"So, anyway," she continued telling me the obviously well worn story of her life, "after two or three fuck/suck roles, I sorta specialized in anal sex films. I'm most known for my anal sex. The most popular, you know, what sells the most overall is money shots [facial or oral ejaculation images], but every girl in the valley does then. And I've got what they call “in the business,” and here she giggled very endearingly, "a bubble butt."

Turning, she looked over her shoulder and nodded her chin down. And, indeed, her foundation was of a robustly hemispheroid profile.

"A lot of the girls get boob jobs, but they still have satchel ass--firm but flat. Anyway, I like anal sex. I made a lot of money just letting myself be taped doing what I like. But, like a told you on the phone, it’s stripping that really pays. Even the best butt-bonk film doesn't get reruns, you know?"

Kristal then went off to deal with a group of 8 or 10 guys. A couple want Polaroids, but most want print or poster. She signs them, squeaking out her name with felt-tip on a glossy poster of herself on all fours, looking back at the viewer, with smaller images framing it. She sits at the folding table nude, signing, chatting with the guys. Those nose-bleed CFM heels are, I notice, functional accessories for this mercantile activity: they present her legs perfectly taut and pedestalled, pelvic plane tilted forward, her bottom fully bubbled.

Pulling down her dress, which had been like a ruffled collar at her tanned throat, she answers my question, "Yeah, if I can, I try to show as much skin as I can get away with. I figure, I'm making out like a bandit at this, and it doesn't cost a thing to show a bit of tit. It’s kinda like advertising, too, for tonight."

In spite of an established track record, and her experience stripping all over the United States, when I'm ready to go Krystal asks me a worried question, "are the other girls very good?" Local clubs rely on local talent and supplement this with headliners, today Krystal Lynn. I was, its true, a bit moved by the evidence of this human, all too human exhibition of anxiety. "This flyspeck town hosts one of the country's biggest universities," I told her, "and 51% of that 40,000 is female--some of them dance at the club. But, no, Krystal, I can't imagine that they have more poise than you do. I don't think you have a thing to worry about."

Now, although it has been a few years since my last visit – I wanted to do a little research in that great library, this time for a feature on the development of table games in the United States --- the campus is surprisingly the same. There are more sport facilities. More buildings. But the student body still mills about in that wacky orange. And, on the drive up to Chicago, the road side is still a spectacular landscape of variegated plant life in verities of greens, golds, and browns.

Sometimes A Good Cigar is Just A Smoke

2006-09-22T22:39:00.000-07:00

In our guise—or is that “disguise,” as professionals---we do quite a lot of work in tourism. Much of it is focused on cultural and heritage tourism, the perspective embracing the lived, human experience. But naturally the field involves a large orbit and one does what is necessary to feed the hungry and clothe the naked (especially if they be one’s self and since I’ve seen myself in the mirror). In any event, recently my life and business partner (in Donlon & Donlon Consultants – I’m Donlon and she’s Donlon – not our wittiest prose work) and I flew round-the-world. This was largely a professional gig. But we also “hooked up” a few spiritual and private nodes. The undertaking took two months, a wheel-barrow of cash, & its own roll-on of specialized guide books. But then, it left us with 10 years of notes spread over 3 illlustrated bound journals, and a Seagate packed with images for future use.

I was curious how far we travelled in total but it beats me. The furthest around the globe is something like 25,000 miles. But we bounced from Tokyo to Beijing to Lhasa back to Beijing and on to Moscow and London then rattled around England hither and yon before larking on for Boston, Cape Cod, and New Orleans. Because of the merchandizing of air routes, we got to Baton Rouge via Dallas, and again to Orlando by first going west to Dallas, then north for Chicago and back South for some research in New Orleans (we have to deliver research in Thailand in a few months). Tokyo did involve generally going toward Japan, thank God.

Years ago, I recorded a narrative of other travellers in New Orleans. Our own “crooked” route puts me in mind of them and that fast and loose sort of life which once, and may in the future, give the Crescent City its attractive colour.

Bob still looked worn out. He slouched in his metal twisted-bar outdoor chair on the terrace at Cafe Du Monde, between New Orleans’s French Quarter and the mighty, muddy Mississippi. His face was deeply tanned, but his nose was splotched with red and white, bits of sun burnt skin still sloughing off. His sweaty Red Stripe t-shirt was liberal with confectioner's sugar in a wide white band down the front, the trio of beignets gone from his plate.

"Even a half dozen boxes," Mike, his friend (also a false name), was explaining, "and you can make do; if not a profit you get a free trip out of the thing. Some guys go down every two months just to have the trouser snake looked after properly and keep the tan in condition." Bob, Mike, and absent Steve were smugglers--smuggling, they claimed, Havana cigars through Can Cun.

"Oh, man!" Mike, the loud one, was whining, "there's like nothing in the pharmacies--if you need sunscreen," he said without irony, "you gotta bring it in. But the honeys! Two more cafe' au lait" he waved his cup around in the air for emphasis, attracting the Viet Namese waitress. "Nineteen, 20 year old babes for $25 US a night. They do it all, man, they do it all." Mike was a bigger man though still young, wearing a gaudy new Party Gras t-shirt and black Wayfarer Ray Ban sunglasses.

Bob and Mike claimed to be from Chicago, and Bob certainly had the tinny, flat Mid-west accent. They met Steve, who apparently also hailed from the Windy City, in Mexico and, confreres, had "partied-hearty!" in Havana for several days.
Both trade with and travel to Cuba are heavily restricted for American citizens. So, of course, many Americans busy themselves with methods of finessing travel, and with profiteering from the ridiculous embargo.

"Oh, yeah," Sal D'Amotto, buyer for Caesar's, a premier cigar emporium said, "a good Cuban is a great cigar. But there just aren't that many good Cuban cigars. It's like them frogs. Now, with the Nazis dead, every one of them was a member of the underground resistance. Fuck me! Most cigars you'll run into from Cuba are ok to just bad; made for the jerks who don't know better. You think Juan is gonna cut frat-boy on holiday a break? They may be Havanas, but they're way too young, no slow curing, way, way too much ammonia."

Sal was smoking a "Fighting Cock" cigar from the Caribbean: a short, blunt, dark stogey girded by a wildly exuberant band displaying a pair of cockerels rampant. Not a Cuban. "Now this," he took it out to admire it, "is a hell of a decent smoke for five and a half bucks."

The harried Vietnamese waitress brought more beignets piled sky-high with powdered sugar, more coffee, and more pony glasses of chilled water.

"Steve was crazy, you know? I mean, you can do just about anything there in Havana, long as you do it out of sight. Don't rub their noses in it. But that guy, he'd pick up a sweet little babe, and have his hands all over her walking down the street."

"He liked `em young —- 18, 19. So," Bob looked sincerely worried though it might just have been hangover, "I don't know if he's polishing some teenager's tonsils about now or is all bruised in some cell, belly down, taking Spanish with a couple more hombres waiting in line to give him their ‘lessons’."

If someone has to get rich Chicago lawyers bad Cuban cigars full of too much ammonia, it might as well be Bob and Mike, I thought. Mike said, "we'd go down once a year, three times in two years--I first went when I was in school downstate--you know? [Presumably downstate Illinois, meaning not in Chicago] We could party for a week, stay in a hotel, screw if we wanted to, surf, eat like pigs, and then give away all our t-shirts and pack the spare duffle with boxes."

"It's not like drugs," Bob lied, "we don't make money. But it can be kinda exciting, and Havana, even run down and with everything the hell broken, is a great city. And the women are fantastic, cheap, and very accommodating. The saying about sucking the chrome off a trailer hitch aint just a saying with the pros down there. But last time, it freaked me out. First, we lose Steve, gone without a trace. Then, I begin to get paranoid that our supplier was a cop plant, setting us up. He had so many boxes, I was sure it was bogus."

Fortunately for the pair, it apparently wasn't.

"We get 12 or 15 or 16 boxes each. That's a lot of money to put out," Bob continues, "and it's a lot to walk around Havana with, to say nothing of going into a decrepit building with some no-neck greaser with a lump at the waist of his grimy, counterfeit Tommy Hillfiger."

"But," in the end, "it was all fine. The guy is twice as honest as we are, and just as worried that w’gonna bop him on the bean." Sort of. "Got the merchandise, hit the bricks for the airport--got a ride there in a huge classic Buick with those jet ports on the side. But Christ's trousers if the little Mexican shitheels don't simply take both the duffels! ‘Contraband?’ the guy says, then Paco tosses `em behind the counter. Meanwhile I'm shittin' like a goose in gravy. It’s not even against the law, I don’t think, in Mexico, but they saw we were Americans, I guess.”

He pointed out that sometimes a good cigar is a smoke, and sometimes it’s a great way to get into a ton of hassle.

"I'm a lot happier a little light in the back pocket than in some lousy Mexican jail. No cafe au lait there, you can bet your sweet ass," Mike opined with gusto.

Part of New Orleans’ charm has been the frisson of perceived naughtiness wafting from its humid odours, carried along on its sultry breezes. I don’t know if these goofs – but then, who can say? – would be discoursing with the same élan amongst the Miros at the coffee bar at the Chicago Art Institute.

XXX XXX XXX

Drawing Beats Painting

2006-07-27T07:35:00.000-07:00

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). 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.

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.

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. 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 and red bound ones I buy from a shop near Shakespeare and Co. in Paris). I do a few domestic scale drawings using complex media—graphite, colored pencils, washes, ink, all that.

I transitioned from traditional photography to digital and archived my negatives and transparencies in cool (of course) storage. Mostly I shoot for photo-illustration now, not having had a photo show in some time. But for a year or two just before moving to Japan I worked on a set of very large paintings on canvas. These are huge things. The last exhibit, at Dante’s Inferno in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, involved tapping a row of holes in a concrete and brick wall well more than 20 feet from the floor. Then, I caulked in plastic inserts. Once set, I screwed in stainless steel eyes, and then clipped a row of karabiners to the eyes to hold the big canvas. Setting and striking that show was the hardest in my career, of my own or helping other artists. It’s easier to roll in a crate slotted with eighteen museum-mounted, 16 X 20 inch photographic prints, believe me.

However, a wall of canvas and rope and fittings, once up, is pretty impressive.

Many naive viewers immediately associate those surfaces with expressionism and, especially after the release of his bio-pic, with Jackson Pollock. He was justly famous for his contribution to “action painting” but hardly the only artist to resist the tyranny of composition and painterly tradition. However, like all good contemporary artists I figure I just stole every decent idea I have from the French Impressionists. In the case of these big 16 X 20 foot paintings, when using large numbers of familiar, repeated forms I also heavily referenced England’s Bridget Riley who in 1964 noted that "...the uncertainties of a drawn structure increase when it is composed of similar, repeated elements.” She was speaking about her own work, which was very popular at the time.

It’s generally understood that Riley painted and extended Seurat’s color wheel and copied his Bridge of Courbevoie to learn more about his technique of complementary colors. I admired that research, that is, her work, and with these big paintings I in my turn tried to extend from it -- I don’t think it necessary to replicate forms exactly or play around with optical illusion.

Obviously, color perception always depends on the other colors around. For these monumental, architectural scale works, I carefully orchestrated the colors of the nominally repeated forms. Then, I splashed and spilled and dripped and poured as direct, tension inducing counterpoint. The effect of proximal color was noted by Chevreul and called simultaneous contrast; described in the 1839 book, De la Loi du contraste Simultané des Couleurs, a book that was praised by those rascally Impressionists from whom I learned [stole] so much.

Several years ago Jim Delahoussaye introduced Jolly and me to a small group of commercial fishermen who had been working in the Atchafalaya Basin (formerly living in campboat communities). In the intervening time Jolly and I made some supportive efforts toward museum representation for them and the material culture associated with that orbit. Another result was the series of variegated surfaces of the big paintings, which are festooned with lines and pierced with grometted holes, clad with hardware and I hope reminding viewers of the fishing industry and the light falling through the leafy bowers of the Atchafalaya Basin.

Thus, I believe there is an almost irristable confluence of inputs coming together which I can identify, as if I was a bystander watching events unfold from some remote location. As the participant, however, it’s a lot more fun, and a lot more fulfilling, than mere observation. Moving to Japan was, in some ways, the shoe dropping. I began sundering up the ramp, becoming curious about Eastern religion, in high school, reading Jack Kerouac like a cotillion other goofs.

His discourse about “Highways of the Night” helped establish a 30 year, and ongoing, series of night photography-- prints of which have been exhibited in US and European shows over the decades.

I began Kerouac reading On the Road, then The Subterraneans, The Dharma Bums which seemed to me under appreciated but was always my favorite, Doctor Sax which I felt was most representative of his “jazz” style writing, Mexico City Blues: 242 Choruses his mandatory but, for me, uninspired poetry, Maggie Cassidy, and Tristessa. By the time I read Lonesome Traveler which, with DB, got me thinking about journey texts and travel narratives, a latent curiosity which emerged in graduate school, then Book of Dreams, recordings of his dreams. Pull My Daisy was a collaboration with a photographer (as a teenager I had no idea of the sexual implications of this film), then Big Sur , which should be seen as emerging travel exploration, Visions of Gerard. Both of these, Desolation Angels and Satori in Paris rounded off my entry into being curious about why people are fascinated about leaving home – adult “Toot and Puddle” books.

Kerouac did a half dozen more releases, plays, poetry collections, and letter sets but you always wonder how much of that is author generated and how much publisher churn. No matter. I put it all in my library next to a dozen or so biographies as the Beat industry grew. My best bud David even got me a “Kerouac” hat at one point.

Kerouac called Alan Ansen, “Rollo Greb” and William Burroughs, “Bull Hubbard” in On the Road; he called Burroughs “Frank Carmody” and Alan Ansen, “Austin Bromberg” in The Subterraneans. That book deals with the for its time edgy world of a white sub-culture character in love with a pithy black woman. Hollywood bought the rights and, on screen, the affair is between a white guy and a French woman. Pretty much the same dynamic, don’t you think? Right now, decades later, Hollywood’s darling is Tibet, and they are conveying the subtleties of that political situation with exactly the same finesse.

Neal Cassady, who turns up, as Tom Wolfe recounts for us, years later driving the bus for the Kesey Acid tests, is “Leroy” in The Subterraneans; “Cody Pomeray” in The Dharma Bums and Desolation Angels. It was the facile discussion of Buddhism in these books applied to my soft teen noggin that got me started thinking about Eastern religion. First nature poet Gary Snyder (the Big Sur’s Jarry Wagner, the Dharma Bums’ Japhy Ryder) is portrayed living “the good life” in Aristotelian terms—if that included porking coeds—in a tiny shed-like cottage. That chimed my personal gong in favor of the simple life well before reading the good Dr. Shi. Then these mountain galumting poets scoot off to Japan, in text pictured to be stuck more or less in Lafcadio Hernish aspic.

Delighted with arrival in Japan, it’s taken us a few months to find our footing, and learn how to get about. Now, I get to scoot up to China to discuss ideas about the Japan-French Impressionist connection. There has been a historic appropriation of aesthetic and design elements from Asia into Western art, particularly with the French Impressionists.

Because of this borrowing, this can be seen as a mediating device for visitors to Asia. Being a little familiar with some of the design elements of Asia, even through the round-about way of routed through Impressionism, ameliorates anxiety associated with presentation of the exotic, it seems to me. Usually, travelers as faced with the unusual (and, indeed, that’s why we, many of us, bother to travel).

Very briefly, beginning in the early 1600s, the Tokugawa family or clan ruled Japan, following a period of marginally welcome Portuguese and Dutch missionary activity and trade. The Tokugawa period was marked by closure to foreigners during the approximately 265 years of this Shogunate rule. With the death of Tokugawa Leyasu in about 1616 and the elevation of Tokugawa Hidetada, the presence of foreign missionaries was forcefully expunged.

In short, a period of European presence in Japan was followed by an extended period of closure to the West. A period of relative unrest and divisiveness was followed by relative and relatively extended unity and peace. Japan remained isolated. During this period—until the early 19th century—Japan was ruled by the Shogunate. The Emperor was an absolute monarch who delegated authority to the Shogun.

In Edo, Kabuki emerged as one of the most important modes of entertainment during the Tokugawa Shogunate. Its plays and actors then went on to influence the content of the printmakers. Many Kabuki plays embraced themes of heroism, tragedy and loyalty, as might be predicted. They were performed upon spacious stages involving clever uses of theatrical illusion, special lighting, movable scenery, and the incorporation of music and dance in support of drama.

Life in the burgeoning cities was used by Ukiyo-e printmakers, who also drew from the Japanese landscape, bringing urban and rural environments together – not necessarily in the same piece, but within the genre. Scenes of sensual delight began to compose a certain portion of the Japanese block print out put, often drawing from the “Yoshiwara” or pleasure sections of towns. These regions not only represented a kind of domestic exotica, the women involved were likely to be very beautiful and therefore useful as ideal models.

Ukiyo-e wood block prints, or “floating world,” became increasingly commonplace from 1660 to the mid-19c. Nominally, the floating world involves a sense of the worldly, carnal, or temporal reality, as opposed to the orbit of Buddhist bliss. It’s more particular meaning often refers to what Americans would call “tenderloin” or the French “petit monde,” that social environment including opportunity to or suggestion of commercial sexuality and its immediate infrastructure.

The Japanese wood block approach to representation under discussion (which incorporates a good deal of design method based on Chinese illustration) is vastly different from what might be called the “Western” or Renaissance arts approach to creating a draftsmanship like space. While Western art historians discuss as “breakthroughs” such techniques as atmospheric and linear perspective, both designed to foster the illusion of a three dimensional literal setting, the Japanese print contains many design elements earnestly resisting this very illusion.

The space in a properly constructed print of this style is flat, meant to be unframed, viewed close up (in conditions similar to and perhaps related to the viewing of fine handwriting) with no visual illusion of depth. Formally, the bottom of the block print represents the point nearest the viewer, the top more distal. Lines grow wider as they recede into the “distance.” Smooth, opaque, flat fields of colour are applied (shadow is generally not used). Finally, a system of complicated iconography (birds, fish) conveys emotions.

Then after Matthew Perry’s dubiously titled “Diplomatic Missions” to Japan in the mid-1800s, Asian art from the archipelago nation flowed much more quickly to Europe. Artists, especially avant guard members of the tribe in France such as Edgar Degas and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec (both of whom, it should be said, might predictably be touched by these examples of ukiyo-e prints, given their interest in color and line.)

While we may often speak of Japan becoming “Westernized,” in many respects Europe and the United States were also becoming “Japanized.” John La Farge wrote the first compelling and important essay on Japanese art in the US right after the American Civil war – well before the ground swell of the French Impressionists “picking up” those well publicized prints but after the prints became popular.

Somewhat ironically as the great age of block print making was winding down in Japan, the prints themselves contributed very directly to the enormous invention taking place in the fine arts in Europe. Apparently, one of the earliest enthusiasts of all things Japanese in the mid-19th century was French printmaker Félix Bracquemond. It’s recorded that he worked with the first important representatives of Japanese prints (Hokusai’s Manga album) in 1856. Bracquemond immediately saw an affinity for the curvilinear work of the Japanese draftsmanship. His enthusiasm helped introduce others to the block prints. Eventually a so-called secret society, the Société du Jing-lar was put together in France for the purpose of the study of Japanese art. The Impressionists were gelling their future vision, and the bright, vivid colors, applied in a looser style; the use of truncated composition, of silhouette, of a black line (related to that of stained glass, but not exactly an extension), and the use of flat space common to Japanese block prints all later turned up in the eventual result. Think, for example, of Edgar Degas, Mary Cassatt, Paul Gauguin, Vincent Van Gogh, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

By the end of the 1800s Asia had become a borough of the advertising world. It was wonderfully “exotic” in the sense that a particularly lovely flower was more exotic than the foliage, and it was more marketable in exactly the same way that the bouquet was more marketable than the leaves were. “Japonisme” was alleged to be in love with all things from Japan, but didn’t scruple too much if it captured in its aesthetic embrace other things Asian in the meantime.

In 1889 Oscar Wilde could say that “the whole of Japan [is a] pure invention, simply a mode of style and an exquisite fancy of art.” Of course, Wilde was an “Aesthete,” who believed that having the right kind of wallpaper in the home could prevent a youth from growing up to be a juvenile delinquent (he didn’t understand it was really the right song on the CD player). What he meant was, however, that Asia was no longer a geographic place. It was instead by that time an intellectual conceptualization of the West.

It’s instructive to compare and contrast the approach to the arts and crafts taken, East and West. Japan embraces the need for skilled work and sets aside a category of “National Treasure” for those experts in particular fields. Undertakings such as flower arranging have extraordinary preparatory conditions. In the United States, how do we prepare for a career in the Fine Arts? Well, not by Classical Instruction, it seems.

According to Michael Kimmelman in The Times, “a century ago it was possible for a Philadelphia educator named J. Liberty Tadd to instruct young women to stand in pigsties to learn to draw animals directly from nature.” But that would imply working to achieve a quality of draftsmanship.

Back in 2005 Pete Panse, a tenured, talented, motivated art teacher in Middletown NY mentioned to his students—merely mentioned—that the best of them might benefit from taking life drawing classes.

He was suspended from his job pending the eventual hearing with a threat of being fired if it turned out badly. The charge? Well, to be clear, he is not being charged with actually doing anything. No claim of any unsavory action of any kind. Actually being guilty of something in order to be Salemed today would be so outré.

But he felt that his very best students might flourish with exposure to life drawing classes. They planned to go on to art school, to seek scholarships, and for that to be submitting portfolios. The mention of the idea was enough to spur the school board into action. According to ARC (a conservative website devoted to traditional art) Mr. Panse was charged with making “comments that students could construe as being of a sexual or personal nature...or using [his] position as a teacher to put students into any situation reasonably likely to make them feel uncomfortable because of the injection of sexuality into...the substance of [his] comments”. Yes. I know. They actually tried to regulate comments teenagers might be able to “construe as being of a sexual or personal nature.” Christ! You can’t say the word “Duty” in a classroom without half the students snickering.

The squib raises a number of interesting issues. It underscores the lack of fit between the insulated administrators and the students (and especially the realistic academic needs of their charges); it highlights the everyday cowardice of typical school boards; it chits up yet another good teacher punished for showing the least glimmer of initiative. Where the administrators should be providing leadership, or at least blocking when teachers go for a goal, they instead function as obstructionists. And, because I’ve devoted so much of my professional life to research into Controversial Leisure (almost introducing the area as a field within Leisure Studies) I was drawn to the conflict between the arts and the vulgar, unlettered school board members.

Although deeply conservative, ARC, a non-profit organization devoted to support of traditional art education and antagonistic to Modern art, was supportive of Panse because drawing is at the center of a formal art curriculum. Moreover, no parents complained, nor was any traditional notion of probity blemished. Panse seemed to be legitimately interested in the welfare of his students while the administration was, it seemed, motivated by job preservation.

xxx xxx xxx

Atchafalaya (detail)

2006-07-26T21:19:00.000-07:00

Cutters

2006-06-27T05:39:00.000-07:00

Men seem to be spending money on themselves reminiscent of the Gilded Age, with fat cigars, old liquors, fast horses, and young women. Glossy men’s mags are getting short on old fashioned visual porn and long on fashionable consumables. But I'm not looking for a high maintenance babe who can suck a golf ball through six meters of garden hose or expensive deluxe bijoux--overpriced sweat-shop produced clothing with some other guy’s initials on them or complicated toys. I just want to find a good cutter.

This was no problem for the decade or so during which I didn't cut my hair. Back then I just pulled it back and snapped a rubber band with coloured plastic balls around it. But, one day, in Spain, I thought it would be cool to visit the barber of Seville.

He would cut it, the young barber in a white lab coat said, but after lunch.

Jolly and I returned, paella laden, to find that a dozen or fifteen carefully oiled and coifed Spanish men had gathered to witness the event, and render the auto de Fe seal of approval. When the barber snipped off my thick ponytail, and finished the cut, they each solemnly rose and shook my hand. I was no longer a goofy hippie. Well, no longer a hippie.

Cut once, I found hair had to be cut again every now and then.

When we moved to Japan recently I became acquainted with its wonderfully arcane methods of organization. For my first hair cut here I wandered to the train station for a trim at the franchise. They spoke little English and I spoke less Japanese. But it was easy enough for the barber to gesture toward a machine into which I fed a 1000 yen note and from which a printed receipt curled. The barber took this, sat me in a padded chair with a pair of painted foot prints on the floor in front of it. Where else would I put my feet I had to wonder? He swung open the mirror I faced once seated. It revealed a shallow closet for coat, bag, and other personal belongings. All very efficient. Well organized.

The Japanese cutter held out a special, narrow case for my classes. Then he swathed me in paper neck tape and traditional bib. Of course without a common language it’s impossible to say “short,” “long,” or “fashionable.” But I could show the guy my Louisiana driver’s license. That thing carries a then current cut. I could and did make a fingers-close-together sign hoping to convey the idea that I wanted a short trim – and hope that I’d not conveyed the idea that I wanted him to shrink my noggin down to two inches like a Borneo head-hunter’s trophy. (That’s so outré this season.)

Although cheap at the price, the thousand yen cut was pretty good.

He did a preliminary cutting with the power machine and then a lot of clipping with shears. Done, a vacuum hose dropped from the ceiling, accoutred with a stiff upholstery brush on the end. It sucked up stray bits from his work exactly like I clean up after the cat. The haircut was quick if not dirty, although there was none of the detail work you get at a full service barber. In Japan, a colleague tells me over expensive imported Irish bitter, that means shaving the forehead, too. Errant eyebrow fibres and stray ear infill are things to be removed at the home sink if one scruples to use the economy barber.

It is curious how many ways this simple task, cutting your hair, can be handled.

For some time I was working just south of Chicago, "city of the broad shoulders, . . . meatpacker to the world" in the vast repository library at the University of Illinois. Back then I went to a Brazilian women who would gently wash my hair and chatter away in a wonderful syrupy accent about her father's horse farm in South America.

After the trim, she'd stand behind me, hold my head in her small hot hands, centered between her teacup breasts, and we'd both look straight ahead into the mirror. She would think about my haircut. All done, she'd pull away the white apron, bend forward, purse her carmine lips and blow stray trimmings out of my collar with her tropical breath.

But I finished my work in the heartland and had to leave library, Brazilian bust, warm exotic puffs and all.

My next cutter, an African-American in the Deep South, gave a wonderfully stylish haircut but was apparently homophobic and frightened of touching another man or at least another man's head: odd for a barber. He'd sort of fix my shaggy bean with a fingertip and go to town with power clippers and then a pint-sized red vacuum cleaner. I would be shorn and free of trimmings in a jiffy as a room full of black women relaxed their locks all around us.

On Gibraltar once doing a story on Rock Buster, the Victorian 100-ton gun at Rosaria cove, I stopped in for a cut by an Irish barber. He spun a tale while he snip, snip, snipped away with glittering rat-tail stainless-steel scissors. I was entertained but wound up with a high-on-one-side reprise of Michael Caine's hair from his first film, Zulu.

When Jolly, my travelling companion said, "What did you do!?" while snuffling like an asthmatic yet not totally amused goose, I knew I had to go back. Unsurprised, the fellow Donkey worked on me again, saying "aye, but it does look to be lacking in symmetry, don't you know."

In Baton Rouge, Louisiana, an acquaintance recommended a Cuban émigré operating from a shop fitted out in a domestic garage. It was a sublime experience.

The barber was clearly deeply macho, confirmed in his manliness and willing to display. His slacks and shirt were ironed smooth as plate glass, a gold ring shown on his pinkie, gold watch on his wrist, and chain on his neck. Here was a real cutter.

An innovator, too, he'd plumbed the small barber shop with yellow plastic pneumatic line terminating in one of those bronze nozzles manufactured to be used in machine shops to clear away the iron filings during grinding and lathing. The Cuban cutter would hold my head, turn it, tilt it, twist it like a burned out light bulb and otherwise present my cranium for his careful work. From time to time he'd blast away the trimmed hair with a terrific chilled hiss from the industrial air-tap. This man knew his craft.

First, he picked up a shaker bottle and liberally sprinkled an astringent on my hirsute coconut, working the cool fluid into the scalp by massaging my noggin--his hands were like a pair of steroidal arachnids doing push-ups on a golf green. Next, he combed my anaemic mane straight back, then ran wildly buzzing electric clippers quickly and deftly here and there. Buzz, buzz, clip, clip, clip, blast, blast and the air was filled with scented hair.

For the final shaping, he used a series of different scissors to complete the work and to probe, pathologist like, into my ears to trim away those awful sprouts.

Then, cut complete I thought, he began to shape my moustache and use a tiny pair of scissors to deal with the hair forward of my ear. Still going on, he ran a small yet menacingly loud machine of indeterminate age and origin to generate a wad of hot foam, which he edged, with a sudden well-trained series of flicks, along my sideburns and the edge of my moustache.

Flipping open a straight razor with a thought provoking snap, he oh so carefully drew it along the now laser-straight frontier of those highly visible yet troublesome to trim zones.

Pulling a hot, wet white towel from a covered metal tray, this wonderful cutter wiped the remaining foam traces away and completed the job, finally, by firmly rubbing an antiquated, but cold and pleasant, floral cologne into my satisfied pate.

In all, it was a performance. Unfortunately, deep in the doldrums about circumstances in his earstwhile homeland he blew his capable brains out on a visit to Miami, his last earthly move being to place the cool, blunt muzzle of a small-frame .38 above his ear, nestled in his perfectly cut hairline.

I moved from that community, and that cutter, and landed in Botswana's sunny clime.

Then, if the larder was low and my skull was getting bushy, I'd pedal down the dusty road a bit to get a net sack of South African oranges and to catch a trim at "Booboos Rocket Styles." Booboo (not his real name) opened for business by wheel barrowing his sign, big piece of broken mirror, three home-market clippers, and small red Honda generator into work.

Although Booboo's sign offers fully a half-dozen styles from which to choose, I always opted for the basic buzz cut.

I’d slice open juicy oranges for all the bon vivants larking about the premises, sit back in the white plastic lawn chair and ask Booboo as he fires up the Honda, if we should discuss literature, politics, or soccer as we chatted beneath the prickly thorn bush branches, electric cutter a’ vibrating in the African afternoon.

The barber in the Sirkeci station in Istanbul usefully brackets my experience at the Japanese train station. Turkish barbers can only be described as wonderful. The cut itself may vary in quality depending on the skill of the cutter, but the experience is always top notch. It involves getting tea. It involves getting a shoulder message, a hand message, and a facial in a hot towel. You’re nuts if you don’t get shaved at the same time you get trimmed. Indeed, if you have not had a close, straight razor shave from an experience barber, you probably have not had a close shave.

Be ready. If you visit a Turkish barber with ear hair, here is the methodology. Twist up a ball of cotton at the end of a bit of wire. Dip the utensil in antiseptic. Set this aflame. Bounce said utensil carefully against the ear hair.

It works fine. However, if you are uninformed of the procedure and catch sight of a flaming cotton ball headed for your eardrum out of the corner of your eye, that can be disconcerting.

Many things make visiting Turkish barbers a joyful experience, and not less so the particular shop in the ornate Istanbul rail station. This cutter enjoyed the company of a charming pet bird which climbed about on his back as he worked. From time to time the companionable creature would creep up his sweater and perch on the barber’s shoulder, cooing and making comments in his ear. The barber would pause, smile, and make small talk with his feathered pet. Such moments make going to a barber better than just getting a good haircut.

XXX XXX XXX

In Hot Water Again

2006-06-20T16:46:00.000-07:00

On the flight over from the United States to Japan I began reading Alexia Brue’s (2003) Cathedrals of the Flesh: My Search for the Perfect Bath. Anyone who knows me knows that I, too, have traveled the globe seeking out bath options of various kinds. You will immediately understand my affection for this small, witty book. Hot water? Hey, I’m in it.

Maybe my own quest began as long ago as high school, when we would cut class to go up to the thermal seeps in the rocky gorges above Palm Springs. Sitting in a beat-up claw footed tub wedged in the sandstone with nekkid girls is good Zen training, I recall.

In fact speaking of useful things from the bath, after pretty fair field trials, George Trumper’s “traveler’s shaving brush” is definitely a find. It’s a badger bristle thing which screws apart in the grandest Victorian fashion. While on the move, you can protect the brush part by sliding it into the heavy handle. Trumper’s small shop filled with men’s bath gear is on Curzon Street in the London theatre district. If you do a “twofer” play, it’s easy to stop in before curtain time and get a few gizmos with the cash you save. If you want a decent shaving kit but with minimum weight and bulk, this is a useful item.

Anyway, Alexia Brue wrote about visiting cavernous banya’s in Moscow, hamam in Istanbul, sauna in Finland and so on finishing her book talking about the hot baths in Japan.

Public baths used to be popular in Japan. Onsen (regulated by the government according to mineral content and temperature) are natural springs and generally rural. Sento, which do not involve spring water, are set in the city. Urban onsen do exist and I suppose rural sento may exist, as well. But today individual bathing has become more common with public baths in decline.

Our small apartment has a cast concrete, tile, and painted plaster room. This bathroom is almost a cube with ½ the floor space, once you enter a glassed door, devoted to a tiled shower area. Parallel to this, about ½ the room is filled by a short, blue, very deep, almost vertical sided tub. Asian faucets often are configured as a bar with the hot & cold feeds entering the back. The temperature adjustment is on the end, and the volume knob is, as I’d expect it, in the middle front. Because of these 2 knobs, it’s easy to set a temperature and then get about that each time you a turn the volume knob in the center. This is almost like the rigs in expensive darkroom setups I’ve seen in the States (not as precise, but as convenient). The shower head is on a flex tube with two cradles on the wall, one low and one high.

Bathing’s “ideal” protocol demands are very thorough. They include soapy cleaning on the duck boards away from the tub, in public or in private. Some folks like to stand at a shower and some like to sit on a plastic stool, usually provided, and pour water over themselves with a plastic basin. If you talk about baths, there is always talk about clean water sluicing, and plenty of it.

Then, into the tub, the hot water unsullied by soap. No further soaping allowed.

But every place has its “real” and its “ideal.” I’ll rely on Donald Richie and his inches thick diary of life in Japan here. In his years of observation this, too, seems more of a “do what I say, not what I do” situation. In that habit the Japanese would be joining, if not good company, at least copious company—probably every other nation on the globe. That doan mean the maid won’t break into a crazy dance like a Wild Tchapatoulas if a foreigner soaps up the soak tub.

Years ago, Sally and Mike invited me as a guest to the New Orleans Athletic Club, at the time a kind of labor of love by the owner to maintain a traditional setting with marble slabs, steam bath, and swimming pool nested in old world columned architecture. It was well before I’d traveled in Cyprus and Turkey, and I didn’t get the Classical bath references. I don’t know what happed to the NOAC, especially after Katrina, but I hope it’s still steaming along. Here in Hadano we love our individual bath, which is the modern, home version of the public tradition.

And Onsen are still going strong in Japan. The urban species, as is the case of hamams in most areas of Turkey and the baths in Russia, are slowly being phased out. Some commercial baths in Japan are hanging on by the expedient of adding karaoke pubs and the like.

Our first hot bath was far from Tokyo, on the opposite side of the archipelago. Friends of the owners, Jolly and I had the tank to ourselves when we tried out that first surprisingly hot soak. The place was way up the mountains near the setting for Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow Country, the Nobel Prize winning novel about a country geisha at a hot springs resort. No coy geishas and only fast melting snow when we were par boiling.

In the Japanese bath, otokoburo marks the male side and onnaburo the female side of almost invariably gender separate pools. Turkish hamams may be either exclusive to gender or wig and wag by days of the week. Country by country, each bathing style deals with gender in its way.

It wasn’t always separate in Japan. Brue, always an amusing writer in each chapter of her book, out does herself describing when she was fundamentally mislead by her careful research. Finding one of the last onsen in which men and women bathe together, way, way up in the outback, she and the Belgian art dealer with whom she’d hooked up on the plane (her long-time relationship in recent shambles) visit as a romantic opener. She steps from the shower area holding her furoshiki, the small square of cloth in which one’s loufa and shampoo are tied, but otherwise blissfully unencumbered by earthly concerns or possessions.

As you might predict, almost immediately, in her towering European pinkness, she quickly accesses the reality that she is not simply the only non-Asian. That would explain the immediate silence. But she is also the only woman of any flavor among a tank of nude men. Importantly, she knows immediately that the tiny square furoshiki has little or no tactical use, regardless of coverage choice.

For his part, the Belgian is fully as useful as any male companion would be at such times. He is doubled up, as she notes, in a gale of laughter at the spectacle. Unfortunately, during the chapter discussing Moscow, Brue had given a full précis on the “Mohawk” waxing habits of the New Russian women compared to the natural look sported by aficionados at the sauna in Finland. The author underwent the painful cosmetic procedure, all in the name of participant observation, in Moscow, but we have no idea if the Asian men at the rustic mountain onsen were greeted by an American Mohawk or its au natural brethren.

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The Yen for Dollars

2006-06-18T03:16:00.000-07:00

© 2006 Donlon

Everyone knows the story. Japan’s economy was going great guns and then hit some sort of wall. It seemed sluggish and lethargic for years, in spite of sometimes raffish attempts to kick start it. Now, things seem to be on the upswing. The central bank, this enormous monstrosity, in an effort to quell inflation, has been steadily pulling cash out of its money markets. One result has been a bit of a global market pullback. In some ways right now it’s the Bank of Japan that’s calling the shots in terms of the World’s equity markets.

Forbes and The Economist magazines, among others, have run articles detailing the results of the tax re-writes in the United States under the Bush regime, with the very rich receiving access to enormous windfall investment capital. Of course, this was exported from the US and a lot of it went to China. Much of that went to bricks-and-mortar construction of factories with the resultant surge in demand for electricity and the predictable spike in energy costs – seen most vividly in America at the gas pump. Pundits truthfully tell American consumers that the price of oil goes up reflecting the demand. Less truthfully, by omission they often don’t mention that the demand was actively created by that extraordinary building spurt financed by the “gift” of a 9 trillion dollar US debt. It was the combination of spending like teens with dad’s credit card and the evisceration of the revenue stream that did the trick. Then, in mid-May the Dow Jones tumbled a couple hundred points with big worries of US inflation going on a roller coaster ride. If the inflation index the Federal Reserve keeps its eye on goes too high, they may adjust interest rates. Woof!

The Bank of Japan has been vacuuming up enormous amounts of cash from the world’s markets. In the past, the Bank had been valiantly flowing billions into Japan’s general economy (conduited through the banking system according to the BBC), trying to re-inflate the flaccid thing. Now the flow direction has changed.

In one article, financial writer Jim Jubak claimed that, “in the last two months, the bank [of Japan] has taken almost 16 trillion yen, or about $140 billion, in cash deposits out of the country's banks. The country's money supply has fallen by almost 10%. The Bank of Japan isn't finished pumping out the liquidity that it had pumped in. That should take a few more months. And when it is finished, the Bank of Japan is expected to start raising short-term interest rates.”

Right on the web site for the bank that noble institution explains what “The Bank of Japan's missions are.” And they are two fold. Both involve keeping things on an even keel. Or, as the web site puts it, “to maintain price stability and to ensure the stability of the financial system, thereby laying the foundations for sound economic development.”

The paternalistic tone of the Bank of Japan’s text is unmistakable:

“What if the prices of your daily necessities and food were to rise continuously? You would need to spend more money to buy the same basket of goods. In other words, the purchasing power of your money would go down. If the prices of various goods rose, people would naturally have a harder time making a living.

On the other hand, what if the prices of goods were to decline continuously? A decline in prices appears to be favorable to consumers as they can buy the same basket of goods more cheaply. But if prices were to decline continuously, both the sales and profits of firms that produce or sell goods would decrease. As a result, the salaries of workers at those firms would decrease and the number of unemployed persons might increase.

A continuous rise in the prices of goods and services is generally referred to as ‘inflation,’ and a continuous decline in prices is referred to as ‘, deflation.’ As you can see from the above, both inflation and deflation are a threat to our daily lives.

When the economy enters a period of inflation in which the purchasing power of money is gradually eroded, people's confidence in money will diminish. If many people considered that the prices of goods and services would continue to rise in the future, they would rush to buy goods and services before prices rose even further. This would create upward pressure on prices, thus increasing the likelihood that the anticipated rise in prices would actually take place. In contrast, if people considered that prices would continue to decline in the future, they would wait to make their purchases until prices had declined further. Thus, they would spend less and save more and economic activity might eventually be across the economy, and disrupt financial transactions, which involve the lending or borrowing of money.

The Bank of Japan's mission is to pursue price stability, in other words to maintain an economic environment in which there is neither inflation nor deflation.”

Now, you gotta love it. That may have been the Bank’s intentions, but thuggish speculators made out like bandits borrowing cheap money in Japan at about 1%, rolling and leveraging to turn 1 dollar into 2 or 3 or 4 dollars of borrowed cash, according to economic reportage from the likes of Jubak. Weep for them, Argentina, only making 12 or 15 percent on the almost riskless turnaround. With that kind of sweet heart deal and in the US Bush trimming back the tax burden for his golf buddies, it’s easy to see why America’s richest 10% is in its highest clover in 60 years.

Anyway, all that effort by the Bank of Japan does indeed seem to be having that stabilizing effect and the cheap money may not be so available – at least from the Japanese font. As May came to a close speculators rushed to find the best harbor for their resources and widespread adjustment took place – ranging from me doing my laundry to the Bank of Iceland changing its prime interest rate.

Japan had, as you may recall, experienced spectacular growth at the end of the last century. But that meteoric economic activity flattened out and for a decade business was in the doldrums. So these last few pages are only like lines in a long chapter of a big book.

Japan entered the last century like a lion, fighting and winning a war with Russia including the now-famous fleet action when Tojo engaged his heroic “J” maneuver. Many historians point to this as the turning point: world powers ganged up on the winner, refusing proper spoils to Japan and setting the stage for its later Imperial expansion and ultimately the Second World War.

When Japan did surrender after WW II in August 1945 the archipelago was occupied with the purpose of demilitarization and democratization. Hoping to reduce the political problems of the transition, the US opted to maintain some Japanese social institutions such as the emperor (who was, none the less, no longer considered divine). Other measures, such as dissolution of the so-called “zaibatsu” (or financial combines) and the granting of women’s suffrage were taken. Generally, attempts were made to decentralize structures which were seen to grant too much power to government, such as education and the police. At first, building the Japanese economy was not a great concern of the American occupying forces.

However, with the beginning of the Cold War, cooler heads did not prevail. The Nationalists failed in their bid for control of China. By the late forties the Communists Chinese were in total control and American capitalists were virtually insane with fear that their privileged positions would be in jeopardy. This lead to a fundamental reversal of policy in Japan.

It was lawful to be a Communist in Japan—the place was a democracy -- yet the Americans pushed for a crackdown. They reversed policy in regards to the zaibatsu (seen as the bag men for the military) and returned support for a strong centralized police force. All this was driven by fear of the specter of communism. In addition, the US government relinquished their claim to war reparations – and with that, of course, any pay back to American tax payers. Rather than pay war reparations to Britain and most Asian countries, American agents began to hustle to arrange commercial treaties linking Japan with countries like the Philippines.

To avoid a fertile Communist breeding ground, the US committed to the economy of Japan. A trio of draconian measures were engaged to help bring prosperity about: the budget would be balanced, state loans to industry would be fundamentally suspended, and a de facto and general abolition of state subsidies would be followed, at least for the time being. These harsh guidelines, with their predictably tremendous stress, almost drew the nation into a depression.

“Luckily” some might say, “right on schedule” a more callus and cynical historian could also put it, at that point the opening of the Korean War flooded Japan with cash. Not only was the enormous surge in military procurement orders to Japanese industry an economic Godsend—cash flow in this category from the US between 1951 and 1953 was in the neighborhood of two billion dollars—it was a huge overall portion (60% of its exports) and involved a high ratio of heavy industry. This boon, of course, positioned Japan to excel in automobile manufacturing at the expense of US competitors as this factory power came on line. All because of the fear of communism. It’s a fitting irony that decades later George Bush Jr.’s tax give away to the very rich – which as mentioned flowed to Communist China to finance a staggering array of factories with the predictable huge increase in demand for electricity and the just as predictable rise in cost of gas at the pump in the US blablabla—has similar pebble in the pond ripples in the water effects.

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2006-06-09T02:39:00.000-07:00

We had been visiting Suziki Bokushi’s snow country; the region in present Niigata Prefecture which receives the moist Siberian current’s wind and, when slid up the spine of jagged mountains, converts it to snow—a dozen or more feet of it. Bokushi’s charming narrative of the local’s stories and means of living in this white world, Hokuetsu Seppu, was translated as “Snow Country Tales” (and was source material for Yasunari Kawabata’s much more widely known novel, “Snow country,” which mostly uses the folk lore as back drop for intrigue and a love story.

Now, the roads are modern, with rows of disks down the center to squirt snow removing warm water in the winter and the farmer’s once prized oxen have given way to squat, tough tractors. But the small, carefully cultivated stepped paddies still produce rice reputed to be “the best in the world.” In the old days, the tiny fields were repeatedly flooded to keep the snow off. So, as the adjacent areas were layered, again and again with snowfall, the farmers could be seen going to work with ladders, necessary to climb down ten or 12 or 14 feet to the prepared seed beds below.

Long winter months fostered indoor craft, as you might imagine. While in the prefecture, we spent some time examining the design and setting of Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples—shrines are always Shinto and temples are always Buddhist. The shrines we visited were also usually smaller, simpler, set in a copse of trees, through a dignified usually red post & lintel “gate,” or torii with an arrow-straight approach—none of this “meandering curves to increase visual interest” stuff for these folks. Our hosts for our holiday, friends and colleagues with a “cottage” in the mountains, noticed our interest. We are all interested in what the Japanese call “mingae” or folk crafts.

Jocelyn and I had described earlier work we’d done, reporting on Louisiana’s program to collect alligator eggs, distribute them to commercial ‘gator farms, and monitor the eventual release of a portion of the healthy young back into the wild. This work guarantees a better fit with the optimum carry capacity of available habitat and supports the regional economy, since the skin is a valuable export product. We “followed” a Louisiana alligator skin through the process to a tannery in rural France, an international sales fair in gay Paree, distribution depots in a couple of places in Italy and then, perhaps most interesting for us, to a wonderful fine craft cottage industry shoe maker who brought into being the designs of Manolo Blahnik.

Prior to that experience, even watching Sarah’s gams on “Sex In The City”—as Carrie Bradshaw-- it was hard to see how a shoe—each shoe—could be worth $500 (or a grand a pair). Blahnik, from Santa de La Palma in the Canary Islands, makes a solid line of dependables, a little less avant guard, for $300 a pair, too. He does it all, from sketching the idea in swift strokes of his Tombo Japanese Brush pen (a favorite of Manga artists) to cutting the heel.

However, driving with Geraldo, a suave skin merchant in North Italy to the “shoe town” near by and hearing about the level of craftsmanship and the cost at each step, so to speak, and then watching the torturous process as each tiny bit of alligator hide was gently persuaded, tapped, glued, bradded, stitched, or caressed into its place—all without surface blemish--made us believers.

In Japan, we’d seen beautiful kimono, often displayed on a wood rod after the fashion of fine art. They can be very expensive; finely tailored and created in elegant fabric. Suzuki Bokushi’s home town has also been known for making silk kimono textiles. (In Kawabata’s novel the woman about to become a geisha lives in a former silkworm loft when she is having the fatal affair.) Like the superb luxury of fine alligator shoes, once you appreciate the enormous complexity of the process of creating a traditional silk kimono, the asking price no longer seems remarkable—a thing to remark upon.

Just a few blocks from a fine little museum which celebrates the scribe’s life we stopped to visit a silk weaving center. On one table at the silk kimono cottage factory, as examples, we saw a plate of marshmallow-sized silk bolls, spun by that unique caterpillar, specially fed on mulberry leaves; a bug whose husbandry goes back into dim antiquity. Best known for fine fashion wear today, silk was widely used as early armor (a feature unmentioned at the cottage factory). The fibers are so tough that “stand off weapons” such as arrows, darts, or fleshetts, would push the tightly woven cloth into the wound rather than cut through. This fact made it much easier to remove the projectile and very much reduced infection. The only “slings and arrows” most of us face now are of mere outrageous fortune of dumb luck, and neither fine silk nor ice-cream colored polyester leisure suits guarantee much protection.

The hair-tiny worm filaments are combed into threads, and threads twisted into yarn. In the small factory, we could watch a row of “spools” (paper rolls about as big as one’s calf wrapped with yarn) being uncoiled onto a long wooden frame. The yarn mistress placed a tea saucer on top of each spool, very much like the bail of a spinning reel, to control and “open” its loops as the stuff came off the roll. Back and fourth she walked, to bundle the gathered bunch collected from 20 or so spools, each managed by its own saucer, the thread sliding gracefully around the slick, glossy edge.

The weaving of the textile is done with a machine having the same attributes of a hand loom but, if you imagine, for example, the Turkish kilim loom (or other rug looms) being massively built, squarish, tall and reminiscent of an upright piano (though, of course, bigger), the Japanese silk kimono loom is much more lightly constructed, narrow and long, reminiscent of the bowling game in an arcade---it has a very long bed. As is typically the case, a bullet-shaped cock is shot one way and then back as the long yarns or threads are raised and lowered, usually with a foot treadle; it trails the horizontal threads in its wake.

In short, this is a great deal of hand work, by skilled, attentive crafts folk, exactly as was the case with the production of the luxury goods we saw in Italy. Indeed, chatting with a designer handbag maker in Milan he showed us a loom there perhaps 10% the size of the silk kimono fabric one: it created the special gold material for his purses. There is essentially no way to reduce the process or simplify the procedure and maintain the integrity of the creative moment of these truly luxurious goods.

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2006-06-04T23:30:00.000-07:00

Anybody that does much work in tourism is familiar with the “transit” associated with travel in another culture: at first everything is exotic. Then, after a little experience, you come to grips with how the new systems work. Next, at last, you get fed up with things being different from “home” or what’s familiar. At least, that’s a fairly typical pattern.

And then, in the language of so many wise bartenders, there are two kinds of travelers: one sort, confronted with, say, a squat “terlet” is willing to give it a go, or at least a shot, even generating sound effects for “bombers over Berlin.” The other, maybe less adventurous, perhaps just more realistic, tries to will away “that” feeling by force of character until a “regular” commode hoves into view.

Some folks enjoy the challenge of the new, while others are discomforted by change. Indeed it’s curious the place of plumbing in travel anxiety and peoples hearts, so to speak. Donald Richie, later to become so important for his analysis of Japanese cinema, explaining and introducing it to the West, wrote in his Japan Journals entry of 1954 “the Japanese toilet is supposed difficult for Westerns to manage. Strange that these people who willingly relinquish traditional underwear and phallic worship cling to their toilets.” It is perhaps predictable that the Japanese manufacture the Ur commode with power controls including such dubious pleasures as sound effects I gently mocked above.

Well, Japan is thoroughly industrialized and we’ve traveled too much to really get into the “transit,” pattern although we do tend to rank some things we see or experience as innovative, and some things as peculiar, and, always, we simply can’t figure out a few things. If we fail to understand, we just go along: like, aside from an entire slipper grammar to learn, it’s really an issue that shoes are not only taken off, but positioned “right,” as in “properly,” by the door way.

Taking off shoes makes a great deal of sense, and is an idea that deserves being carried ‘cross the sea. No matter how much you are used to the filthy habit there isn’t a very good reason to continue to wear dirty, outdoor shoes into a clean, indoor space after you think about it. You will certainly take your shoes off, eventually, inside. Why not do so before you contaminate your domestic quarters? Once upon a time the practice saved tatami floor surfaces. These inches thick rice matts weren’t even trod upon with slippers, however. And precious few living spaces today are real tatami, though living spaces are likely to be measured by their 3 X 6 dimensions (with folks living for years in a 6 tatami flat in Tokyo, for example).

But we do go along with shoe positioning, “facing,” them out, right, or left, on faith alone.

When we lived in France we immediately saw the wisdom of the morning coffee bowl and the French breakfast. Well, we tasted the wisdom of it at least. Bakers made fresh baguettes which were like enormous yeasty cigars with spidery tissues of white bread under a crusty, brown, edible exoskeleton. Breaking the night’s fast involved troweling butter and jam into these flakey “tubes” and washing it all down with a gold-fish globe sized trough of thick milk and coffee from a ceramic bowl designed for the purpose. Soon after getting to France we saw a Hotel Chenier in Paris (located near St Dennis, in the liminal zone on the edge of the garment & hooker districts – we would see young Moroccans push racks of designer clothes through the street in front of rows of bored tarts dressed up like secretaries) and, of course, because of Clifton Chenier this hotel became our favorite one. It was cheap, and it served this wonderful breakfast. In all about a half-million calories and the closest thing to healthy food was, maybe, the milk in the coffee. But it did stick to your ribs for a half hour or so. We loved those big coffee bowls and brought some home.

Even though we have been in Japan a very short time, we have noticed a number of things apparently worth our admiration, especially an economical use of space—though it does not seem useful to mention the small cars and related vehicles, for example. My own experience with Asian gardens was limited, and within that pretty much limited to the formal species. I seem to recall that most American lawns devolve from when Christopher Wren and his ilk reformatted the angular English garden into the “natural look,” even forgoing fences, using the “ha ha” a deep ditch to control livestock (funny, I suppose, unless you are a field hand walking home in the dark). England, and by extension, America, were looking for a very different feel.

I had seen from time to time those stone lanterns in Asian space and as we slowly learn more about Japanese gardens, they become more interesting to us. If the English ideal is a “natural field,” the sense desired by many Asian gardeners is tranquility, it seems to me. This can be compared to Islamic images of gardens which is largely sensual: many images from Middle Eastern poetry involve the garden as a place filled with productive fruit trees, water sources, cool breezes and, moreover, a place to meet one’s lover, human or spiritual.

But, back to the lanterns. In addition to being a focus, which they no doubt are, they provide illumination. Part of their role may be, if a passing conversation is correct, lingering from garden design as old as 1000 years: tubo gardens were created as 1.8 meters (of course not meters then, the French inventing both that great gift to humanity and the modern pencil, with which to write nutty letters to the editor about why the US should not adopt the metric system, only in the 1700s) or around the glow of the lamps.

Our apartment is about a 25 minute walk from my office – a walk I take most mornings and evenings now. One day I stopped short to notice that, on the edge of a sort of parking lot, someone was and is maintaining a “tubo” garden, about a meter and a half or 2 meters cluster of stacked water or earth filled pots. Some are big as bushel baskets, others as buckets, a few 1-quart containers, and one or two as big as your closed fist. There are also bits of drift wood and bamboo pieces. Tall, grassy greenery shoots up, weedy stuff sprouts, water plants float, vines coils about, a number of different, but small, flowers were blooming when I saw the garden last. The whole thing is very small but very carefully composed and a strange mix of “smooth” and “shaggy.” Certainly this “tubo” garden, if indeed that is what it is, is worthy of my admiration established on the corner of essentially waste ground, and maintained consciously with no particular goal for praise or to achieve acclaim.

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2006-06-04T05:26:00.000-07:00

LEAVING ON A JET PLANE

Leaving Baton Rouge was fraught with emotions but, by unusual circumstance, was wonderfully easy for us in the physical sense. After hour upon hour spent turning a small, flat, hill of folded brown cartons we bought at the box store into a mass of filled, taped, labeled, carted, stacked, and “climate controlled” stored chattel it seemed as if we would never reach the end of our preparations to leave home and actually get on the road, or, more precisely, into the air. But we eventually did shake the bayou mud off our cuffs and brush the Baton Rouge petro-chemical residue from our hair.

Stuffing our enormous bags into the little rental car (nearly every piece would prove to be overweight) we scooted to Baton Rouge’s signage-lite airport. We didn’t have to pull my “harpoon from my dirty red bandanna,” like Bobby McGee but we did have a hoot joking with the Thai-American check-in guy, talking about how he taught English in Paris for a while before he wound up down in Red Stick. “Just luck!” he guessed.

I know that travelers delight in tales of woe, in much the same way that sailors prefer to discuss bad weather and fisher folk the big’un that got away, but our flights went off pretty much without hitch. Indeed, the connection in Texas debouched, or barfed, I could say more colorfully and graphically, us out almost at the toe of the waiting deck for our next flight.

Interestingly, it cost 20 bucks to have those enormous bags brought from the curb in Baton Rouge to the desk inside the terminal. Once in Tokyo, it was convenient to have the biggest bags sent from the City to the small town in which we reside (a common service provided from the airport). They arrived at our door, delivered next day for $30+-. It was ten dollars more and it did take a day longer, but otherwise I’d say the delivery from Tokyo was a value. After being here for just a few weeks, and still debating the purchase of a vehicle, renting or leasing, or forgoing the honor of pumping up the global fat-cat industrialist economy in that particular way at all, we have found out that a wonderful network of delivery services exist in Japan. You can go into Tokyo to shop, leaving a trail of wine, cheese, and other purchases in your wake, and a day or so later the bags just arrive.

The first delivery service we used (the one from the airport) had a logo which, to me, oddly, seemed to be a cat with two heads. Of course one does not really question a new culture too closely initially and, if a two headed cat signified cartage for the Japanese, who am I to doubt it? I mean, I’ve eaten a Tombstone Pizza for Christ sake—what’s the symbolism there? Then, on the road to a mountain holiday, I caught another gander of the banana yellow logo on a long-haul truck filling its fuel tanks slung under the long chassis: the image is really a mama cat with a kitten in its mouth—not a two-headed beast. For a delivery company, that seems to make more sense!

But back to the flight. Once we made the connection in Dallas, it was about a 13 or so hour flight toward Japan, and I suppose they fly an “arc,” or “rhomb,” line in what must be the straightest way accommodating the prevailing winds and yaddayadda, but in any event in several hours we were, with a low sun and few clouds, over the gypsum whites, vivid roses, and metallic sunny edges of the mountainous Alaskan landscape at 30,000 feet. I’m guessing that this view is often obscured by mist, but for a long time we could see the dramatic, broken fields of mountains, ice, and snow and perhaps, in what looked like sooty valleys, glaciers. I’ll risk a charge of cliché to say the relatively horizontal snow really did bring to mind vast heaps of the whitest sugar, while the sunward sides of the crazily rough places were hosed down with bronze, silver, and canary yellow. The sun-lee-side of the mountain surfaces were pale lead, pewter, lavender—purple, just like the song says—blue, and even black (although art teachers always say shadows are never black). Every now and then a movie comes out about people stranded in that kind of “outback,” and the plot always seems a little tortured. Now, seeing the scale of the landscape roll on and on until, finally, it was covered over by thick layers of mist, has made me more of a believer.

The flawless transit continued into Tokyo, with our paperwork all in place (“tourist visas” are more colloquially called “landing permits” now, it seems) and helpful folks from Tokai University picked us up in the grey, cold, rainy afternoon. Our back-door exit from Tokyo to our town of Hadano was accomplished like a scene from Blade Runner, our eyes glued to a very sophisticated in-dash GPS as we ball-bearinged down twisty, narrow thruways in the gloom. From time to time we would turn into a toll lane, the red and white ringed poles popping open at seemingly the last moment, having scanned a sensor in the car’s bumper.

Hadano is not much like Tokyo, of course not much at all like Old Japan (raked pea gravel around a single well-situated boulder, sliding paper doors into Zen-bare spaces), but if anything is redolent of the architectural glamour of chock-a-block row houses in Baltimore or a bedroom community in New Jersey. It’s just a contemporary town with lots of commuters who train into Tokyo: mostly housing, food markets, convenience stores for the necessities. Things do seem very orderly and there is generally much less litter. Of course the language is thus far absolutely opaque.

Newly arrived, and having read what we could about Japan and talked with folks about their own experiences, we find that we are uncertain exactly which, and how much of, our expectations we want to pan out. Nathanial Hawthorne once advised a young writer ready to travel to note “every peculiarity” no matter how small. We intend to. Sayonara y’all.

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