I returned to Japan for the second time this fall during what should have been the leaf-watching season, when the hotels in Kyoto are booked solid for months in advance. People arrive in groups of 30 and upwards to visit the temples and admire the local maple trees, which sport tiny leaves like the one on the Canadian flag, only about the size of a postage stamp. I happen to know the typical group size because it is only over 30 that the group rate kicks in at the temples. It was unseasonably warm this year, so only a few of the trees had turned, but they were a vivid red. I can well believe that the effect of the entire woods turning this colour is worth the trip, and I only wish I had arrived a week later to see more of it.
Spirited Away
Fans of the cartoonist Hayao Miyazaki will be delighted to know of the existence of an entire shop dedicated to his work. You can buy Totoro and his friends in a dozen forms, from ash trays to pocket mirrors, back packs and key chains. Okay, I was only joking about the ash trays, because of course there is a certain element of reverence even in this crass commercialism. The range of creatures was however astonishing when you see them together all in one place. In typical Japanese fashion, the form of the building also seemed appropriate to the subject matter. After entering along a corridor lined with other shops, you come to a spot with some wooden benches and natural stone steps, where the roofs of the buildings on all sides end to make a little patch of open sky. The shop is off this tiny courtyard, quietly playing soundtracks from the various movies.
A Keen Sense of Liminality
As my colleague Susan pointed out, the fact in Miyazaki’s movies of a different world being just around the corner is based on the exquisite use of even the smallest actual spaces in Japan to transport you to a new experience. It is not uncommon, for example, to walk from a congested street to a wide open area for bus transfers, only to step aside into a rock garden where all the traffic noise is gone and you are suddenly listening to a small stream while sitting on a wooden bench beside a grove of bamboo, with old moss thick on every side. It is amazing, astonishing, and charming, and I wish everyone on Earth could adopt local forms of this way of thinking.
With Bells On
You can’t throw a stone in Kyoto, a local saying goes, without hitting a monk. There are over 1600 shrines and temples in the city, and we visited all of them, walking generally through mixed woods, often accompanied by waist-deep crowds of school children. It is not uncommon for one of them to muster enough courage to say hello, then burst into fits of shy giggles when you answer. The temples themselves vary significantly, and the grounds are typically beautiful, so that a few steps in any direction gives you another enchanting view of a bit of water, an ancient tree, and part of a roofline. What many of them also have in common are bells. Some are tiny, hanging in strings from the eaves to guide the water into a terminal small cup. Others are about the size of your head, hanging decoratively from the corners of roofs. The premium versions, however, are old green bronze and bell-shaped, except they have no clappers. Instead, they are rung with a swinging beam. I wasn’t fortunate enough to hear any of them being rung, although I was told of the biggest bell, rung only at New Years and other significant occasions, that it takes half a dozen men pulling at the ropes of the striking beam, while one of the young monks rides on the wrappings near the front, so that after each stroke he can push off from the bell with his feet. I can only imagine that the right to be that monk is highly prized.
Tanuki
With a bottle of saki in one hand, a bag of money in the other, and exaggeratedly enormous testicles (often hanging far enough to rest on the ground), these ubiquitous fat little creatures are symbols of the good life. In some cases they resemble western raccoons, while in others they are closer to red pandas. There is even on rare occasions a missus Tanuki -- a bit, as someone pointed out, like a missus pacman, distinguished by her lack of balls and the colourful bow on her head. Tanuki himself wears a straw hat pushed back, the better, one supposes, to get a good look at this pleasant world.
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
Friday, November 4, 2011
Clinton
I arrived in this small town in upstate NY after an instructive hour-long ride with a local driver who was roughly the age and temperament of my older brother. We talked about politics (bad), the economy (worse), and education (terrible), as well as the aptitude of the people responsible for everything (disastrously poor). Along the way, we narrowly missed hitting one of the largest does I had personally ever seen. She was standing in shadow on the other lane of a two-lane highway, and only the quick reactions of the driver saved us from a messy and complicated interaction that the deer herself seemed to be interested in producing. When I told people about it subsequently, they explained that the area is heavily populated with deer, so that you often see them in or around your yard.
Poetry Slam
I had never been to a spoken word event before, and it was a lively and somehow cathartic experience. I have sometimes wondered if poetry is a dead art form, but it is alive and well with these young people, who were full of loud music, mutual encouragement, and charming conceits. Some people read their poems, some recited them from heart, and a few sang songs. At times I felt that I had been transported to a beatnik gathering from the 1950s, I think in part because to avoid applauding so loudly as to drown out the performer, the convention is to snap your fingers to make a sound like rain. Crying out encouragement or commentary was also not uncommon. One of my favourites was the single word “preach.”
A King-Sized Bed
I know it seems a somewhat trivial reason, but I generally avoid the bed and breakfast as though it were vexed, because I have never been in one where the picturesque and antique qualities that are so admired in the genre accommodate the fact that I am six foot two and two hundred pounds. I also do like a bit of sleep when I can get it, and I enjoy eating breakfast when I do manage to get up. Both are mitigated against in their various ways in the typical B&B, the one by the charming tiny beds, no bigger than your thumb, and the other by the tendency to serve breakfast between the hours of 6:15 and 6:17, after my hosts have been up and doing for hours, usually on the other side of the paper screen that serves as my bedroom wall. All of which to say that none of these restrictions applied to the B&B I stayed at in Clinton, where there was an unprecedented king-sized bed, a separate building containing my room, and breakfast at 9:30.
Poetry Slam
I had never been to a spoken word event before, and it was a lively and somehow cathartic experience. I have sometimes wondered if poetry is a dead art form, but it is alive and well with these young people, who were full of loud music, mutual encouragement, and charming conceits. Some people read their poems, some recited them from heart, and a few sang songs. At times I felt that I had been transported to a beatnik gathering from the 1950s, I think in part because to avoid applauding so loudly as to drown out the performer, the convention is to snap your fingers to make a sound like rain. Crying out encouragement or commentary was also not uncommon. One of my favourites was the single word “preach.”
A King-Sized Bed
I know it seems a somewhat trivial reason, but I generally avoid the bed and breakfast as though it were vexed, because I have never been in one where the picturesque and antique qualities that are so admired in the genre accommodate the fact that I am six foot two and two hundred pounds. I also do like a bit of sleep when I can get it, and I enjoy eating breakfast when I do manage to get up. Both are mitigated against in their various ways in the typical B&B, the one by the charming tiny beds, no bigger than your thumb, and the other by the tendency to serve breakfast between the hours of 6:15 and 6:17, after my hosts have been up and doing for hours, usually on the other side of the paper screen that serves as my bedroom wall. All of which to say that none of these restrictions applied to the B&B I stayed at in Clinton, where there was an unprecedented king-sized bed, a separate building containing my room, and breakfast at 9:30.
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
Osaka
I took a 14-hour flight from Chicago to Tokyo, then a 1-hour commuter jet to Osaka. On the overseas flight, despite having work stockpiled, I mostly slept and watched movies (/X-Men First Class/ and /Pirates in Strange Waters/). When I got to Tokyo, my original itinerary had me changing not just planes but also airports, from Narita to Haneda. However, after I consulted with a few people about the hour and a half bus ride, I arranged to get that changed, which was a good thing because the customs lineup took a while.
I had a few observations about the Tokyo Narita airport, largely dealing with how they manage to keep it feeling like a small and somewhat soothing place when in fact it is huge. For one thing, the ceilings are quite low for an international airport. Then there are the conveyor belts, which you normally expect to stretch for miles. Only here, they are short belts lined up, so it is quite easy to get off the system if you change your mind. Similarly with escalators, which take you for a short ride, a small walk, then the next ride, and so on. The chairs in the lounge area all face the same direction—toward the gates—and there is plenty of room to walk between rows of seats, and a ton of room in the stretch directly facing the gate, where they have a printed sign on a stand that tells you the status (e.g. “servicing” or “priority boarding”).
The customs area was also well managed, with polite people to show you where to stand and make sure you’ve filled out both sides of your form before you go and meet the teenager at the desk. Plus all the public announcements are made by impersonators of Hello Kitty.
The Green Rich Hotel
I am staying at a small designer hotel near the domestic Osaka airport, one of a cluster that includes the Hotel Nice, Hotel First, and somewhat confusing Hotel To. I seem to be getting along nicely myself, although as I had previously been warned, there is no English signage and no one outside the university seems to speak more than a word or two of English. Fortunately, I’d printed out my reservation in Japanese, so I can point to the part that I’ve been led to believe says I’ve paid for my breakfasts, and to the line that gives the name and address of the hotel, and so on. One of my colleagues, who travels quite a bit and is a vegetarian, carries a handy little card that says in Japanese “I don’t eat meat.” Features of the Green Rich Hotel include a “shower toilet” that “rinses your posterior” with either water or a deodorizing spray. It isn’t a separate bidet, but is built right in. They had something similar at the airport, only it seemed sufficiently technical that I elected not to try it—it looked like there were moving parts, perhaps designed to swipe across the toilet seat like a photocopier. The hotel also has public baths (one each for men and women), where you have a little shower on a stool off to the side, then climb in with your towel wrapped modestly around your waist (bathing suits are not, apparently, an option). Other delightful features of the hotel include a heating pad behind the bathroom mirror, so a rectangle of it never fogs over, your selection of additional robes, pillows, and dehumidifiers in an open case on each floor, and a talking elevator (featuring, of course, the voice of Hello Kitty).
Buffet Breakfast
I enjoyed peering under all the lids and opening the electronic gadgets that contained, respectively, rice, soup, and gravy. There was the kind of egg you get on tamago, next to pickled slips of something delicious and a plate of dried black shredded seaweed. The pineapple slices came from tiny baby pineapples and the orange slices came in your choice of orange or bright yellow. I had a fountain drink that I hoped would be carbonated apple but turned out to be carbonated water that glowed green in the dark. The bacon is not to be described, although later in the grocery store I saw that it comes already packaged in those neat rectangles and apparently just requires steaming for a minute or two once you get it home.
Outdoor Vending Machines
They are ubiquitous, standing wherever in North American cities you’d expect to see a newspaper machine or mailbox. Many of them are Boss brand, which is a can of cold coffee, although there are also various teas and Pepsi Nex Zero (I think the Nex means that it serves as a mild malaria medicine), as well as more recognizable Coke products. There are separate machines for cigarettes, which must be popular given the size of the machines and the range of choices. The restaurant last night had an ash tray at the table. I noticed it because one of my Japanese colleagues asked me to hand it to him, then went and sat in the doorway of the tatami room to smoke. He is fluent in something like eight languages, studies international Buddhism, wears Buddy Holly glasses, and is a Toshiro Mifune lookalike contest winner. The vending machine motif also carries forward into the student cafeteria, where you enter next to a glass display case of plastic dishes, make your selection on a large panel full of buttons that also takes your money, vending machine style, and gives you a ticket. You present the ticket to the cook and get your meal. It seems foolproof enough except that I was going by price rather than by Japanese characters, and ended up with curry on rice instead of vegetables on noodles.
I had a few observations about the Tokyo Narita airport, largely dealing with how they manage to keep it feeling like a small and somewhat soothing place when in fact it is huge. For one thing, the ceilings are quite low for an international airport. Then there are the conveyor belts, which you normally expect to stretch for miles. Only here, they are short belts lined up, so it is quite easy to get off the system if you change your mind. Similarly with escalators, which take you for a short ride, a small walk, then the next ride, and so on. The chairs in the lounge area all face the same direction—toward the gates—and there is plenty of room to walk between rows of seats, and a ton of room in the stretch directly facing the gate, where they have a printed sign on a stand that tells you the status (e.g. “servicing” or “priority boarding”).
The customs area was also well managed, with polite people to show you where to stand and make sure you’ve filled out both sides of your form before you go and meet the teenager at the desk. Plus all the public announcements are made by impersonators of Hello Kitty.
The Green Rich Hotel
I am staying at a small designer hotel near the domestic Osaka airport, one of a cluster that includes the Hotel Nice, Hotel First, and somewhat confusing Hotel To. I seem to be getting along nicely myself, although as I had previously been warned, there is no English signage and no one outside the university seems to speak more than a word or two of English. Fortunately, I’d printed out my reservation in Japanese, so I can point to the part that I’ve been led to believe says I’ve paid for my breakfasts, and to the line that gives the name and address of the hotel, and so on. One of my colleagues, who travels quite a bit and is a vegetarian, carries a handy little card that says in Japanese “I don’t eat meat.” Features of the Green Rich Hotel include a “shower toilet” that “rinses your posterior” with either water or a deodorizing spray. It isn’t a separate bidet, but is built right in. They had something similar at the airport, only it seemed sufficiently technical that I elected not to try it—it looked like there were moving parts, perhaps designed to swipe across the toilet seat like a photocopier. The hotel also has public baths (one each for men and women), where you have a little shower on a stool off to the side, then climb in with your towel wrapped modestly around your waist (bathing suits are not, apparently, an option). Other delightful features of the hotel include a heating pad behind the bathroom mirror, so a rectangle of it never fogs over, your selection of additional robes, pillows, and dehumidifiers in an open case on each floor, and a talking elevator (featuring, of course, the voice of Hello Kitty).
Buffet Breakfast
I enjoyed peering under all the lids and opening the electronic gadgets that contained, respectively, rice, soup, and gravy. There was the kind of egg you get on tamago, next to pickled slips of something delicious and a plate of dried black shredded seaweed. The pineapple slices came from tiny baby pineapples and the orange slices came in your choice of orange or bright yellow. I had a fountain drink that I hoped would be carbonated apple but turned out to be carbonated water that glowed green in the dark. The bacon is not to be described, although later in the grocery store I saw that it comes already packaged in those neat rectangles and apparently just requires steaming for a minute or two once you get it home.
Outdoor Vending Machines
They are ubiquitous, standing wherever in North American cities you’d expect to see a newspaper machine or mailbox. Many of them are Boss brand, which is a can of cold coffee, although there are also various teas and Pepsi Nex Zero (I think the Nex means that it serves as a mild malaria medicine), as well as more recognizable Coke products. There are separate machines for cigarettes, which must be popular given the size of the machines and the range of choices. The restaurant last night had an ash tray at the table. I noticed it because one of my Japanese colleagues asked me to hand it to him, then went and sat in the doorway of the tatami room to smoke. He is fluent in something like eight languages, studies international Buddhism, wears Buddy Holly glasses, and is a Toshiro Mifune lookalike contest winner. The vending machine motif also carries forward into the student cafeteria, where you enter next to a glass display case of plastic dishes, make your selection on a large panel full of buttons that also takes your money, vending machine style, and gives you a ticket. You present the ticket to the cook and get your meal. It seems foolproof enough except that I was going by price rather than by Japanese characters, and ended up with curry on rice instead of vegetables on noodles.
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Nerja
Marlene’s son Ezra had rented a car to drive us through the mountains to the absolutely beautiful southern coastal resort of Nerja. Ezra is a good driver, but the very curvy mountain roads provided me with an experience I haven’t had since Cape Town, where I needed enough gravol that the trip consisted of a series of snapshots taken between naps.
Wind Turbines
One of our stops took place at a set of giant wind turbines placed on the edge of a mountain. We were able to get out of the car and walk right out underneath the blades. From a distance, they look leisurely, even elegant. Standing underneath them, on the other hand, you expect to hear the voice of Blofeld saying: “And so, Mr. Bond, we meet at last.”
Tiny Lizards
They live on the cliff face and go like the dickens, especially when you are terrorizing the poor things by trying to capture them on video. Each one is a little brown/green jewel, about the length of your finger.
Wind Turbines
One of our stops took place at a set of giant wind turbines placed on the edge of a mountain. We were able to get out of the car and walk right out underneath the blades. From a distance, they look leisurely, even elegant. Standing underneath them, on the other hand, you expect to hear the voice of Blofeld saying: “And so, Mr. Bond, we meet at last.”
Tiny Lizards
They live on the cliff face and go like the dickens, especially when you are terrorizing the poor things by trying to capture them on video. Each one is a little brown/green jewel, about the length of your finger.
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Granada
A flight of just over an hour will get you from Barcelona in the north to Granada in the south, and you have really flown to a different world. This is the Spain I had been expecting to see, with a strong Moorish influence in the architecture and a more powerful Catholic presence in the streets.
A Pearl Set in Emeralds
That’s a phrase Wikipedia mentions in describing the Alhambra, originally a 14th-century Moorish fortress and now a UNESCO world heritage site. Certainly there are some gorgeous buildings and some lovely gardens in this massive complex, which was sufficiently abandoned by the 19th century that Washington Irving could squat there with some gypsies. In fact, the modern curators have used him as the fictional tour guide in the little wii remotes you can rent to explain the place. Unfortunately, he doesn’t come with a reverence filter, with the result that you get to hear more poetry than facts. Luckily, you aren’t required to listen, so you can set it aside or take it in small doses. An amazing feature of the place is the intricate carving on the walls, ceilings, doorways and windows. As Irving puts it: "everywhere the same and yet each piece different." There are also silent pools for reflecting the architecture, and noisy fountains for cheering you up, all of them with goldfish swimming in their depths. One of my favourite uses of water is in the stone balustrades to one of the staircases, which have channels cut into their surfaces so that the water runs down under your hands.
Serrano Ham
Legend has it that the ubiquitous, deliciously cured Serrano ham was originally a test devised by Catholics to make sure they weren’t inadvertently feasting with people from religions where pork is forbidden. If it is true, from these ignominious beginnings has arisen the tradition of having plates of cured shaved ham available for every meal. Tostado with jambon for breakast, a plate of jambon for second breakfast, jambon on the tapas for both first and second lunch—it is hard to avoid it in Spain. I can’t, of course, speak from first-hand knowledge of its presence at dinner.
A Pearl Set in Emeralds
That’s a phrase Wikipedia mentions in describing the Alhambra, originally a 14th-century Moorish fortress and now a UNESCO world heritage site. Certainly there are some gorgeous buildings and some lovely gardens in this massive complex, which was sufficiently abandoned by the 19th century that Washington Irving could squat there with some gypsies. In fact, the modern curators have used him as the fictional tour guide in the little wii remotes you can rent to explain the place. Unfortunately, he doesn’t come with a reverence filter, with the result that you get to hear more poetry than facts. Luckily, you aren’t required to listen, so you can set it aside or take it in small doses. An amazing feature of the place is the intricate carving on the walls, ceilings, doorways and windows. As Irving puts it: "everywhere the same and yet each piece different." There are also silent pools for reflecting the architecture, and noisy fountains for cheering you up, all of them with goldfish swimming in their depths. One of my favourite uses of water is in the stone balustrades to one of the staircases, which have channels cut into their surfaces so that the water runs down under your hands.
Serrano Ham
Legend has it that the ubiquitous, deliciously cured Serrano ham was originally a test devised by Catholics to make sure they weren’t inadvertently feasting with people from religions where pork is forbidden. If it is true, from these ignominious beginnings has arisen the tradition of having plates of cured shaved ham available for every meal. Tostado with jambon for breakast, a plate of jambon for second breakfast, jambon on the tapas for both first and second lunch—it is hard to avoid it in Spain. I can’t, of course, speak from first-hand knowledge of its presence at dinner.
Saturday, March 12, 2011
Barcelona
The three-hour train trip from Valencia to Barcelona passed without incident through some rather stunning landscapes. One thing that caught my attention is that the Spanish trains have a security checkpoint that scans your luggage. They don’t do anything else, like looking at your passport or metal-detecting your body, or even talking to you, really. There is just a guy watching a screen beside a luggage scanner and you put your bag down on one side and pick it up on the other. I don’t recall having experienced that before.
A Place Without Street Corners
A unique architectural trope in Barcelona consists of the absence of corners where streets meet. Instead, nearly all the buildings have faces on the diagonal, so that there aren’t two walls forming a corner, but rather an additional short wall. This has several desirable effects, such as making more room for pedestrians and improving the lines of sight for drivers, which is good because the drivers here have a bad habit of treating a red light as a stock car starting line. In fact, the motorcycles will routinely creep up between the cars, so that just before the light changes, there is a burst of a couple of dozen motorcycles leaping forward, and heaven help the hindmost pedestrian.
City of Nudes
One of the striking features of some areas of Barcelona is that they are chock-a-block with marble statues of ladies who forgot to wear their clothes. They are kneeling in the park, sitting beside fountains, wearing wings but no heads, and in at least one case getting up to no good with a bull. One of my favourites is an odalisque lying on a pedestal in the median of a major street, eating an ice cream cone.
Gaudi
You can’t spend any time in Barcelona without becoming aware that the architect Antoni Gaudi (1852-1926) lived here, and created some iconic buildings such as his 6-storey apartments, an extensive park, and a cathedral, for which he was apparently still trying to raise funds at age 74 by going door-to-door, when he was hit and killed by a tram. This is not the land of Don Quixote for nothing. The buildings are variously called art nouveau or modernism, but to my way of thinking they are not so easy to classify except to say they have a lot of at least potentially disturbing influence of the organic. Take for instance the glass case in the top floor of the apartment block, where there is the skeleton of a snake as a reference for the way the internal brick arches have been built. As Teresa said, “I’m not sure I want to think of myself as walking around in the belly of a snake.” You can always exit the snake, however, and go up on the roof, to be greeted by rows of penises with faces.
San Jordi
Just as Valencia celebrates St. Joseph by blowing shit up, the Barcelonians celebrate the attributes of their patron saint by giving symbolic gifts. San Jordi, or in English St. George, is not only known for slaying dragons, but is also associated with books and roses. Accordingly, on April 24 the city is filled with temporary stalls that sell these items so that people can exchange them, as the tour guide phrased it, as tokens of love.
Stacks of Fashion Models
I first noted a peculiar behaviour at the 1992 Olympic park, where we’d gone to see the absolutely fabulous futuristic telecom tower by Santiago Calatrava. As we exited the grounds, there was a pile of people sleeping in the sunny corner of the wall. I thought to myself: “That’s quite a few more derelicts than I’m used to seeing together,” but as we got closer, it became clear that they were in fact lovely young women, very fashionably dressed, just taking a little communal nap. At first I assumed this was some anomalous event, like perhaps the break between photos at a fashion shoot. But then I saw a couple of other similar stacks in a completely different part of the city, in fact down on the pier.
Ironic Spanish Guitarists
One rainy night, we went to the little brick chapel off to one side of a cathedral to see a couple of Spanish guitarists named Ksenia Axelroud and Joan Benejam. They played up a storm, including a lot of what I have now begun to think of as the characteristic irony of Spain. For instance, in the signature section of the concert, they played four movements of Bizet’s Carmen, reverse-engineered from the symphony score to Spanish guitar, which Bizet had claimed as his inspiration. The second encore was what they introduced as “a little musical joke.” It was a version of Mozart’s Turkish March with one performer standing behind the seated other so that they could play at the same time on the same guitar.
He Never Got a Dinner
This was a comic line from the celebrity roasts that were fashionable in the 1980s. The comedian would list famous historical figures, which in contrast to the current roast victim had some genuinely remarkable achievements, but had never been honored with a public dinner. I’ve been having a somewhat similar experience throughout Spain, where they eat five meals a day: two breakfasts, a 2:00 lunch, tapas at 7:00, and dinner at midnight. Despite my inability to survive a day long enough to actually get to dinner, I couldn’t be happier with Spain in this respect, since it often happens, even in relatively cosmopolitan world centres, that there is nowhere to eat by 10:00 in the evening. In Spain, they aren’t even getting started eating by 10:00 in the evening.
Sing Coo Coo
Spain is, apparently, the land of green parakeets. We had the chance to sit under a palm tree and watch a pair of them making a nest. They would fly in with a beakful of string, then chatter away while they wove it into a bundle they had set into the crease of a palm leaf.
A Place Without Street Corners
A unique architectural trope in Barcelona consists of the absence of corners where streets meet. Instead, nearly all the buildings have faces on the diagonal, so that there aren’t two walls forming a corner, but rather an additional short wall. This has several desirable effects, such as making more room for pedestrians and improving the lines of sight for drivers, which is good because the drivers here have a bad habit of treating a red light as a stock car starting line. In fact, the motorcycles will routinely creep up between the cars, so that just before the light changes, there is a burst of a couple of dozen motorcycles leaping forward, and heaven help the hindmost pedestrian.
City of Nudes
One of the striking features of some areas of Barcelona is that they are chock-a-block with marble statues of ladies who forgot to wear their clothes. They are kneeling in the park, sitting beside fountains, wearing wings but no heads, and in at least one case getting up to no good with a bull. One of my favourites is an odalisque lying on a pedestal in the median of a major street, eating an ice cream cone.
Gaudi
You can’t spend any time in Barcelona without becoming aware that the architect Antoni Gaudi (1852-1926) lived here, and created some iconic buildings such as his 6-storey apartments, an extensive park, and a cathedral, for which he was apparently still trying to raise funds at age 74 by going door-to-door, when he was hit and killed by a tram. This is not the land of Don Quixote for nothing. The buildings are variously called art nouveau or modernism, but to my way of thinking they are not so easy to classify except to say they have a lot of at least potentially disturbing influence of the organic. Take for instance the glass case in the top floor of the apartment block, where there is the skeleton of a snake as a reference for the way the internal brick arches have been built. As Teresa said, “I’m not sure I want to think of myself as walking around in the belly of a snake.” You can always exit the snake, however, and go up on the roof, to be greeted by rows of penises with faces.
San Jordi
Just as Valencia celebrates St. Joseph by blowing shit up, the Barcelonians celebrate the attributes of their patron saint by giving symbolic gifts. San Jordi, or in English St. George, is not only known for slaying dragons, but is also associated with books and roses. Accordingly, on April 24 the city is filled with temporary stalls that sell these items so that people can exchange them, as the tour guide phrased it, as tokens of love.
Stacks of Fashion Models
I first noted a peculiar behaviour at the 1992 Olympic park, where we’d gone to see the absolutely fabulous futuristic telecom tower by Santiago Calatrava. As we exited the grounds, there was a pile of people sleeping in the sunny corner of the wall. I thought to myself: “That’s quite a few more derelicts than I’m used to seeing together,” but as we got closer, it became clear that they were in fact lovely young women, very fashionably dressed, just taking a little communal nap. At first I assumed this was some anomalous event, like perhaps the break between photos at a fashion shoot. But then I saw a couple of other similar stacks in a completely different part of the city, in fact down on the pier.
Ironic Spanish Guitarists
One rainy night, we went to the little brick chapel off to one side of a cathedral to see a couple of Spanish guitarists named Ksenia Axelroud and Joan Benejam. They played up a storm, including a lot of what I have now begun to think of as the characteristic irony of Spain. For instance, in the signature section of the concert, they played four movements of Bizet’s Carmen, reverse-engineered from the symphony score to Spanish guitar, which Bizet had claimed as his inspiration. The second encore was what they introduced as “a little musical joke.” It was a version of Mozart’s Turkish March with one performer standing behind the seated other so that they could play at the same time on the same guitar.
He Never Got a Dinner
This was a comic line from the celebrity roasts that were fashionable in the 1980s. The comedian would list famous historical figures, which in contrast to the current roast victim had some genuinely remarkable achievements, but had never been honored with a public dinner. I’ve been having a somewhat similar experience throughout Spain, where they eat five meals a day: two breakfasts, a 2:00 lunch, tapas at 7:00, and dinner at midnight. Despite my inability to survive a day long enough to actually get to dinner, I couldn’t be happier with Spain in this respect, since it often happens, even in relatively cosmopolitan world centres, that there is nowhere to eat by 10:00 in the evening. In Spain, they aren’t even getting started eating by 10:00 in the evening.
Sing Coo Coo
Spain is, apparently, the land of green parakeets. We had the chance to sit under a palm tree and watch a pair of them making a nest. They would fly in with a beakful of string, then chatter away while they wove it into a bundle they had set into the crease of a palm leaf.
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
Valencia
I stepped through the looking glass into this unbelievable Spanish port city with two colleagues, after 19 hours in the air. We descended through some of the blackest clouds I have ever seen—as-black-as-the-keys-on-my-laptop black—and I began to wonder if I would be able to breathe after we landed. On the contrary, the air seems fresh and beautiful down here, perhaps because it is being cleansed by the breeze off the ocean. It wasn’t long, however, before I began to develop theories about where the smoke might be coming from.
The Nineteen Days of Burning
The patron saint of Valencia is St. Joseph the carpenter. You see statues of him in the cathedrals and churches, which are easy to identify because he is carrying a two-by-four. From the connection to carpentry comes a local tradition, dating to the middle ages, that prior to the feast of St. Joseph on March 19, you should burn any scraps of wood you happen to have around the house. The next phase involved the logical step of saying why stop with scraps of wood, when you could equally well take the opportunity to burn any old furniture you had kicking around. I’m not sure what the other steps might have been, but in its present incarnation, the Fallas in Valencia consists of thousands of people building hundreds of giant wooden sculptures, “dolls” people said “as large as buildings” then setting fire to them all on the same night—March 19. The designs are too large to move, and have to be shipped in pieces to the places in the city where they will eventually be assembled, displayed, judged, and burned. I have heard estimates ranging from 400 to 1000 of these objects will appear all over the city beginning March 15, at a total annual cost of something like 300,000 euros.
Mascleta—“a symphony in gunpowder”
Prior to March 19, there are 19 days of explosions. Everyone gathers in a particular square at 2 pm. We went on the Sunday, and the crowd of tens of thousands of people of all ages was so thick that I had something happen to me that has never happened before. I was following a string of people moving through a heavy crowd on both sides. Suddenly the line stopped moving, and I realized that as far as I could see ahead, for blocks in fact, no one was walking anymore. So I looked back, and no one was walking there either. I was immobile in the middle of a packed crowd. What we were all waiting for was a series of about 5 minutes of continuous explosions, like a fireworks display, except it is only sound. The windows rattle in the buildings nearby. You can feel it vibrating in your body. There is a steady orchestration of small explosions, punctuated by larger ones, until the climax which is almost unbearably powerful but consists of just an overwhelming number of small explosions. The air fills with the gunpowder smoke. It is like nothing I have ever experienced.
Firecrackers
A city that spends 19 days exploding things in preparation for setting fire to a thousand public sculptures is a city that appreciates loud and unexpected noises, and the kids seem to enthusiastically embrace this ethos. Boys and girls of all ages carry boxes of firecrackers, usually 100 to a box, and can be seen in all the parks and streets, with either lighters or matches or else borrowing their parents’ burning cigarettes to light them. And these aren’t the mild little snappy firecrackers that I remember from my youth. These ones pack a punch. I’m not sure if my nerves will ever recover.
Churros
Nearly as ubiquitous as firecrackers are doughnuts. Made fresh on the not-infrequent stands that sell them, they are available in a traditional doughnut shape, but more common are these long stringy loops, textured with straight ridges that run the entire length, delicious and sprinkled with sugar.
The Palace of the Arts and Sciences
One of the words that appears occasionally in the city collateral is “irony,” and I think the writers might be on to something. As an example, take the postmodern architecture of Santiago Calatrava at the Palace of the Arts and Sciences, where you have a conquistador’s helmet, a giant eyeball, somebody’s spine, and a harp. They respectively house concerts, an iMax theatre, a science museum, and I’m not sure what. On the far end there is also an aquarium. The path leading to the complex is lined with giant photos enriched with pop quotations from song lyrics and the Dalai Lama and so on. The path leading from the complex has cheerful, colourful cubist sculptures by Juan Ripollés of people with giant heads, wearing suns, clocks, and their hearts on their sleeves. As Teresa pointed out, everyone walking along the lane of sculptures was smiling and laughing.
A River Used to Run Through It
Until the 1950s, when they experienced a series of devastating floods, there was a river running through the middle of Valencia. Then they moved it outside the city, and converted the entire course of the old river into a long, serpentine green space, with parks and playing fields and ornamental orange groves bearing the sourest oranges imaginable. All the bridges are also still in place, making it simple and easy to cross from one side of the park to the other. The bridge outside our hotel is loaded on both side with flowers, and there are palm trees that grow from the river bed up through the surface of the bridge to provide shade.
Children in Disguise
As if the firecrackers weren’t evidence enough that the Valencians love their children, there is the further observation that the children are often seen running around in costume. I first noticed it on the plane, when a five year old in a wizard’s hat as big as he was exited just ahead of me. I thought it might be exceptional until I spotted two or three other costumes in the crowd. What finally cinched it was the Sunday morning sight of two formally dressed parents being accompanied into the cathedral by a two-and-a-half-foot tall version of Zorro, the desert fox.
The Nineteen Days of Burning
The patron saint of Valencia is St. Joseph the carpenter. You see statues of him in the cathedrals and churches, which are easy to identify because he is carrying a two-by-four. From the connection to carpentry comes a local tradition, dating to the middle ages, that prior to the feast of St. Joseph on March 19, you should burn any scraps of wood you happen to have around the house. The next phase involved the logical step of saying why stop with scraps of wood, when you could equally well take the opportunity to burn any old furniture you had kicking around. I’m not sure what the other steps might have been, but in its present incarnation, the Fallas in Valencia consists of thousands of people building hundreds of giant wooden sculptures, “dolls” people said “as large as buildings” then setting fire to them all on the same night—March 19. The designs are too large to move, and have to be shipped in pieces to the places in the city where they will eventually be assembled, displayed, judged, and burned. I have heard estimates ranging from 400 to 1000 of these objects will appear all over the city beginning March 15, at a total annual cost of something like 300,000 euros.
Mascleta—“a symphony in gunpowder”
Prior to March 19, there are 19 days of explosions. Everyone gathers in a particular square at 2 pm. We went on the Sunday, and the crowd of tens of thousands of people of all ages was so thick that I had something happen to me that has never happened before. I was following a string of people moving through a heavy crowd on both sides. Suddenly the line stopped moving, and I realized that as far as I could see ahead, for blocks in fact, no one was walking anymore. So I looked back, and no one was walking there either. I was immobile in the middle of a packed crowd. What we were all waiting for was a series of about 5 minutes of continuous explosions, like a fireworks display, except it is only sound. The windows rattle in the buildings nearby. You can feel it vibrating in your body. There is a steady orchestration of small explosions, punctuated by larger ones, until the climax which is almost unbearably powerful but consists of just an overwhelming number of small explosions. The air fills with the gunpowder smoke. It is like nothing I have ever experienced.
Firecrackers
A city that spends 19 days exploding things in preparation for setting fire to a thousand public sculptures is a city that appreciates loud and unexpected noises, and the kids seem to enthusiastically embrace this ethos. Boys and girls of all ages carry boxes of firecrackers, usually 100 to a box, and can be seen in all the parks and streets, with either lighters or matches or else borrowing their parents’ burning cigarettes to light them. And these aren’t the mild little snappy firecrackers that I remember from my youth. These ones pack a punch. I’m not sure if my nerves will ever recover.
Churros
Nearly as ubiquitous as firecrackers are doughnuts. Made fresh on the not-infrequent stands that sell them, they are available in a traditional doughnut shape, but more common are these long stringy loops, textured with straight ridges that run the entire length, delicious and sprinkled with sugar.
The Palace of the Arts and Sciences
One of the words that appears occasionally in the city collateral is “irony,” and I think the writers might be on to something. As an example, take the postmodern architecture of Santiago Calatrava at the Palace of the Arts and Sciences, where you have a conquistador’s helmet, a giant eyeball, somebody’s spine, and a harp. They respectively house concerts, an iMax theatre, a science museum, and I’m not sure what. On the far end there is also an aquarium. The path leading to the complex is lined with giant photos enriched with pop quotations from song lyrics and the Dalai Lama and so on. The path leading from the complex has cheerful, colourful cubist sculptures by Juan Ripollés of people with giant heads, wearing suns, clocks, and their hearts on their sleeves. As Teresa pointed out, everyone walking along the lane of sculptures was smiling and laughing.
A River Used to Run Through It
Until the 1950s, when they experienced a series of devastating floods, there was a river running through the middle of Valencia. Then they moved it outside the city, and converted the entire course of the old river into a long, serpentine green space, with parks and playing fields and ornamental orange groves bearing the sourest oranges imaginable. All the bridges are also still in place, making it simple and easy to cross from one side of the park to the other. The bridge outside our hotel is loaded on both side with flowers, and there are palm trees that grow from the river bed up through the surface of the bridge to provide shade.
Children in Disguise
As if the firecrackers weren’t evidence enough that the Valencians love their children, there is the further observation that the children are often seen running around in costume. I first noticed it on the plane, when a five year old in a wizard’s hat as big as he was exited just ahead of me. I thought it might be exceptional until I spotted two or three other costumes in the crowd. What finally cinched it was the Sunday morning sight of two formally dressed parents being accompanied into the cathedral by a two-and-a-half-foot tall version of Zorro, the desert fox.
Sunday, January 9, 2011
Los Angeles
I first visited LA in 1991, when I was sent by the consulting company I worked for to get some specialized training in systems maintenance environments. I spent the time instead by roaring around the city in convertibles, going out to fancy restaurants, and sitting in outdoor hot tubs, firmly sharing the conviction of my hosts that a fistful of smuggled config files would meet the technical brief when I got back home. It didn’t, of course, but I have had ever since a soft spot for the easygoing life in the big city on the California coast.
L.A. LIVE
On this trip, I stayed at a luxurious conference venue right in the heart of the downtown. I don’t typically manage to convince myself to stay in the conference hotel, but I was sufficiently nervous about my first visit to a notoriously large and complicated event that I decided to break the bank and stay where the action was. And action it is, with about a million English professors and graduate students plunked down in the middle of a sort of social hotspot called L.A. LIVE. The stadium where the Lakers play is across the street, and a block away is the city’s main convention center, so the area in between is lined with bars and restaurants, large scale video displays about the size of the side of a barn, ten-storey towers that seem to exist just to broadcast light, and a dozen searchlights playing against the cloudcover. There is even a bronze statue of Wayne Gretzke. Everything is artificial, including the grey plastic rocks that line the path between the bars. The crowd it draws is in some cases wildly enthusiastic in matters of sartorial expression, so it wasn’t clear to me if I was seeing citizens or performers from the cast of Cirque Berzerk, which is currently playing at the Nokia theatre. They may have alternatively, of course, just been English professors letting their hair down.
Hot tubbing on the roof
Sitting in whirlpools outdoors continues to be a California staple. I spent some pleasant hours that way in San Diego in the spring, and I couldn’t resist it here, although in this case the lower temperatures (only around 60 degrees f) meant there weren’t very many of us out on the roof. I did, however, have a moment of dega vu when I realized the bird I was watching circle was a vulture.
LA is a Great Big Freeway
It was true when Burt Bacharach wrote it in 1968 and it is still true today, so I put a hundred down and took a taxi out to the Getty Museum, which Richard had advised me was not to be missed. It is unfortunately half an hour from LA LIVE, down a highway with more lanes than I bothered to count, but eventually I was deposited on a concrete slab outside a car park, and began to follow the signs that led me through a maze of nondescript concrete until I got to the tram that is necessary to carry you up to the Museum proper. Not really a walking city, LA.
The Getty Complex
Sprawling all over the top of a large hill, the J. Paul Getty Museum is well worth the trouble it takes to get there. The weather is sufficiently clement that a visitor can spend a lot of time outdoors, walking between the fountains and the massive rocks out to a variety of promontories, where the views of the city are amazing. The collection is as heterogenous as you like, packed into a kind of maze of relatively small rooms, which gives the illusion that the whole thing is at a human scale. There are also plenty of exits through glass doors taking you temporarily back out into the hilltop air. I think the principle of collection may have been “something for everyone,” an effect that is enhanced by the various instructional exhibits.
L.A. LIVE
On this trip, I stayed at a luxurious conference venue right in the heart of the downtown. I don’t typically manage to convince myself to stay in the conference hotel, but I was sufficiently nervous about my first visit to a notoriously large and complicated event that I decided to break the bank and stay where the action was. And action it is, with about a million English professors and graduate students plunked down in the middle of a sort of social hotspot called L.A. LIVE. The stadium where the Lakers play is across the street, and a block away is the city’s main convention center, so the area in between is lined with bars and restaurants, large scale video displays about the size of the side of a barn, ten-storey towers that seem to exist just to broadcast light, and a dozen searchlights playing against the cloudcover. There is even a bronze statue of Wayne Gretzke. Everything is artificial, including the grey plastic rocks that line the path between the bars. The crowd it draws is in some cases wildly enthusiastic in matters of sartorial expression, so it wasn’t clear to me if I was seeing citizens or performers from the cast of Cirque Berzerk, which is currently playing at the Nokia theatre. They may have alternatively, of course, just been English professors letting their hair down.
Hot tubbing on the roof
Sitting in whirlpools outdoors continues to be a California staple. I spent some pleasant hours that way in San Diego in the spring, and I couldn’t resist it here, although in this case the lower temperatures (only around 60 degrees f) meant there weren’t very many of us out on the roof. I did, however, have a moment of dega vu when I realized the bird I was watching circle was a vulture.
LA is a Great Big Freeway
It was true when Burt Bacharach wrote it in 1968 and it is still true today, so I put a hundred down and took a taxi out to the Getty Museum, which Richard had advised me was not to be missed. It is unfortunately half an hour from LA LIVE, down a highway with more lanes than I bothered to count, but eventually I was deposited on a concrete slab outside a car park, and began to follow the signs that led me through a maze of nondescript concrete until I got to the tram that is necessary to carry you up to the Museum proper. Not really a walking city, LA.
The Getty Complex
Sprawling all over the top of a large hill, the J. Paul Getty Museum is well worth the trouble it takes to get there. The weather is sufficiently clement that a visitor can spend a lot of time outdoors, walking between the fountains and the massive rocks out to a variety of promontories, where the views of the city are amazing. The collection is as heterogenous as you like, packed into a kind of maze of relatively small rooms, which gives the illusion that the whole thing is at a human scale. There are also plenty of exits through glass doors taking you temporarily back out into the hilltop air. I think the principle of collection may have been “something for everyone,” an effect that is enhanced by the various instructional exhibits.
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