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| author | luxagraf <sng@luxagraf.net> | 2019-05-06 09:10:11 -0500 |
|---|---|---|
| committer | luxagraf <sng@luxagraf.net> | 2019-05-06 09:10:11 -0500 |
| commit | 7f6fc23adcb42a6f25e8ab93fad9cbaac689a742 (patch) | |
| tree | 2cea2d93d9655983b13406647f6d62ac9bf291ba /published | |
| parent | 41d5367448cd69158a61cf4e022baf803b157af7 (diff) | |
added recent posts to archive and some edits of old posts
Diffstat (limited to 'published')
| -rw-r--r-- | published/2005-02-24-farewell-mr-hunter-s-thompson.txt | 34 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | published/2005-03-25-one-nation-under-groove.txt | 164 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | published/2010-07-16-comanche-national-grasslands.txt | 31 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | published/2011-06-19-temple-ceremony-ubud.txt | 51 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | published/2011-06-23-best-snorkeling-world.txt | 71 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | published/2019-03-03_cascarones.txt | 44 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | published/2019-03-17_around-san-miguel.txt | 44 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | published/2019-03-27_visa-run.txt | 42 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | published/2019-04-07_koyaanisqatsi.txt | 41 |
9 files changed, 344 insertions, 178 deletions
diff --git a/published/2005-02-24-farewell-mr-hunter-s-thompson.txt b/published/2005-02-24-farewell-mr-hunter-s-thompson.txt index ecba5f4..8e38b4b 100644 --- a/published/2005-02-24-farewell-mr-hunter-s-thompson.txt +++ b/published/2005-02-24-farewell-mr-hunter-s-thompson.txt @@ -1,28 +1,24 @@ ---- -template: single -point: 42.322635681187286,-72.62795447292216 -location: Northampton,Massachusetts,United States -image: 2008/thompson.jpg -desc: The savage journey to the heart of the America Dream comes to an end. -dek: Hunter S. Thompson departs on a journey to the western lands. Thompson's <em>Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas</em> delivered the penultimate eulogy for the dreams of the 1960's, one that mourned, but also tried to lay the empty idealism to rest. -pub_date: 2005-02-24T18:11:10 -slug: farewell-mr-hunter-s-thompson -title: Farewell Mr. Hunter S Thompson ---- +Hunter S. Thompson committed suicide this past weekend. Like many I am saddened by Thompson's decision to take his own life. I don't for a moment pretend to understand why he did it, but after thinking about it for a few days I have decided that, despite the loss for the rest of us, this was precisely the way Thompson should depart -- shocking, violent and utterly gonzo. -<span class="drop">I</span>'m sure everyone has heard by now that Hunter S. Thompson committed suicide this past weekend. Like many I am saddened by Thompson's decision to take his own life. I don't for a moment pretend to understand why he did it, but after thinking about it for a few days I have decided that, despite the loss for the rest of us, this was precisely the way Thompson should depart— shocking, violent and utterly gonzo. +Thompson is best known for the unapologetic drug use of *Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas*, but that's really selling Thompson very short. It seems to me Thompson was trying to shock a deeply jaded populace. America was at the end of an ideological civil war -- Civil Rights, Vietnam, Hippies, et al. Kerouac was dead. Ginsberg had failed to bring down the Pentagon with flowers. The optimism of the '60s was crashing and burning. -Unfortunately, Thompson is probably best known for the unapologetic drug use of **Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas**. But to understand the impact of that book we consider its moment in time. Originally published as an ongoing series in the November 1971 issues of Rolling Stone<sup id="fnr-1-10-20-04"><a href="#fn-1-10-20-04">1</a></sup>, **Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas** sought to shock a deeply jaded populace. America was deep in the throws of an ideological civil war—Civil Rights, Vietnam, Hippies, et al. The counter-culture was trying to gain ground by going legit. Kerouac was dead, Ginsberg had failed to bring down the Pentagon with flowers, the optimism of the '60s was crashing and burning. +Into this melee stepped Hunter S Thompson with a eulogy for the dreams of the 1960's, one that mourned, but also tried to lay the empty idealism to rest. The drug use in the novel, to me anyway, is a so-deranged-it's-sane reaction to a world that must certainly have seemed deranged. As they say, if everyone is insane, sanity looks insane. -Into this melee stepped Hunter S Thompson with a eulogy for the dreams of the 1960's, one that mourned, but also tried to lay the empty idealism to rest. The drug use in the novel, to me anyway, is simply a so-deranged-its-sane reaction to a world that must certainly have seemed deranged. As they say, if everyone is insane, only the sane appear insane. +Also missing in most writing about the book (on the web anyway) is the novel's subtitle, which is really a more accurate description of the book: *A savage journey to the heart of the America Dream*[^2]. -Also missing in most writing about the book (on the web anyway) is the novel's subtitle, which is really a more accurate description of the book: A savage journey to the heart of the America Dream<sup id="fnr-2-10-20-04"><a href="#fn-2-10-20-04">2</a></sup>. From **Fear and Loathing**:<blockquote>And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave....</blockquote><blockquote>So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right sort of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.</blockquote> +> And that, I think, was the handle -- that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting -- on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.... So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right sort of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark -- that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back. <cite>– Fear and Loathing</cite> -What saddens me most of all about Thompson's death is that, like William Burroughs (and probably DeQuincy in his day), he will probably be remember more for the **way** he wrote than **what** he wrote. Yes, perhaps he did ingest a good bit of drugs and yes, perhaps he did celebrate it (which differs from Burroughs), but Thompson was not just drugs, nor was he just a journalist. **Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas** is, and will remain, a scathing indictment of the corruption and failure of the 1960s version of the American Dream. It's Thompson's chronicling of the metamorphosis from dream to nightmare, not his outlandish drug intake, that makes Fear and Loathing a compelling piece of literature. +What saddens me most of all about Thompson's death is that, like William Burroughs (and probably DeQuincy in his day), he will probably be remember more for the *way* he wrote than *what* he wrote. Yes, perhaps he did ingest quite a few chemicals, and yes, perhaps he did celebrate it (which differs from Burroughs), but Thompson was not just chemicals, nor was he just a journalist. -Just as he stripped the glamor from drugs, he stripped the rhetoric and bullshit from politics. His self-described "gonzo" style of reporting is often characterized as the interjection of the reporter into the story. But Thompson knew as well of the rest of us that every writer interjects herself into the story. If anything, his "gonzo" style of journalism is less an injection of Hunter S. Thompson into the story that is was a removal of the mythical characteristic of his subjects. He stripped us all to our barest and yes sometimes basest parts. If the story still required myth then the fictionalized Thompson was there to step up, but never is there a moment in Thompson's political writings where politicians or leaders are any more than fellow fucked up passengers on voyage so grand that overshadows us all. A voyage on in which, as <a href="http://neutralmilkhotel.net/" title="Neutral Milk Hotel">Jeff Magnum</a> has said, "how strange it is to be anything at all." +*Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas* is, and will remain, a scathing indictment of the corruption and failure of the 1960s version of the American Dream. It's Thompson's chronicling of the metamorphosis from dream to nightmare, not his outlandish drug intake, that makes Fear and Loathing a compelling piece of literature. -And now Thompson has propelled himself beyond that voyage into yet another and so it is with sadness, but also with respect and admiration that I bid you fairwell Mr. Thompson and naively hope that the work you leave behind can grow to eclipse the shadow you cast in writing it.<p class="pic"><img src="[[base_url]]/2005/thompson.jpg" alt="Hunter S Thompson" align="center" width="360" height="230" /> +His self-described "gonzo" style of reporting is often characterized as the interjection of the reporter into the story, but Thompson knew as well of the rest of us that every writer interjects herself into the story. His "gonzo" style of writing is not an injection of Hunter S. Thompson into the story, but a removal of the mythical character of his subjects. Thompson killed our false heroes. -<ol class="footnote"><li id="fn-1-10-20-04"><p><span class="note1">1. Note to Rolling Stone, anytime you want to start publishing good fiction again, feel free...</span><a href="#fnr-1-10-20-04" class="footnoteBackLink" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text.">↩</a></p></li><li id="fn-2-10-20-04"><p class="note2">2. Interestingly enough the latest edition of *Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas* omits this subtitle in favor of "And Other American Stories," which is unfortunate.<a href="#fnr-2-10-20-04" class="footnoteBackLink" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text.">↩</a></p></li></ol> +He stripped us all to our barest and yes sometimes basest parts. If the story still required myth then the fictionalized Thompson was there to step up, but never is there a moment in Thompson's political writings where politicians or leaders are any more than fellow fucked up passengers on voyage so grand that overshadows us all. A voyage on in which, as <a href="http://neutralmilkhotel.net/" title="Neutral Milk Hotel">Jeff Magnum</a> has said, *how strange it is to be anything at all*. +And now Thompson has propelled himself beyond this voyage into another. I bid you farewell Mr. Thompson and naively hope that the work you leave behind can grow to eclipse the shadow you cast in writing it. + +<img src="https://luxagraf.net/images/2005/thompson.jpg" alt="Hunter S Thompson" /> + +[^1]: Note to Rolling Stone, anytime you want to start publishing good fiction again, feel free. +[^2]: Interestingly enough the latest edition of *Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas* omits this subtitle in favor of "And Other American Stories," which is unfortunate. diff --git a/published/2005-03-25-one-nation-under-groove.txt b/published/2005-03-25-one-nation-under-groove.txt index e2c3593..e013d9c 100644 --- a/published/2005-03-25-one-nation-under-groove.txt +++ b/published/2005-03-25-one-nation-under-groove.txt @@ -1,95 +1,153 @@ ---- -template: single -point: 42.32254049078504,-72.62804030361058 -location: Northampton,Massachusetts,United States -image: 2008/ipod.jpg -desc: The sky is falling! The iPod! It's ruining our culture! Or, uh, maybe it's just like the Walkman, but better. -dek: The sky is falling! The iPod! It's ruining our culture! Or, uh, maybe it's just like the Walkman, but better. And since, so far as I can tell, the world did not collapse with the introduction of the Walkman and headphones, it probably isn't going to fall apart just because the storage format for our music has changed. [Photo to the right via <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/rogpool/2960735485/">Flickr</a>] -pub_date: 2005-03-25T18:12:59 -slug: one-nation-under-groove -title: One Nation Under a Groove ---- +I wrote this in 2005, and in some ways it seems quaint, but in others, it remains a fairly effective critique of those who claim technology is the source of cultural problems. Technology can certainly contribute or exacerbate cultural problems, but there usually a much deeper issue at work, as there is in this case. -> On the meridian of time there is no justice, only the poetry of motion creating the illusion of truth and justice <cite> H. Miller</cite> +The sky is falling again. The man outside the liquor store seems unconcerned. The sky seems to fall a good bit. Perhaps the man didn't notice. Perhaps the sky has fallen too many times now. Perhaps it's been falling for quite some time and we're just now noticing it. Perhaps its always falling. Perhaps it never has and never will fall. Perhaps we just really like to say the sky is falling. -Paul Graham is apparently pretty widely read on the web, though I had never heard of him until I saw mention of the piece on Michael Tsai's blog. Since Graham's piece is a touch out of date by internet standards, rather than comment on Tsai or Graham's site I thought I'd write a little rebuttal/extrapolation here. +This latest chunk of sky hurling down at us is a brilliant little piece of circuitry known as the iPod. Andrew Sullivan, writing for The London Times claims "[society is dead, we have retreated into the iWorld](https://web.archive.org/web/20060113045721/http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,1-1501-1491500-1501,00.html)." A catchy headline no doubt, but it's basis in reality is questionable. -Generally speaking I prefer not to engage in the endless circular dialogue of the blog, but occasionally we all run into those writings which either, as in this case, irk us so badly or cheer us so warmly that we can't help but comment on them. The link from Tsai's site gave me hope that perhaps someone had something intelligent to say about what has to be the most common form of writing on the web — the essay — but, alas, several reads later I found Graham's essay ill-informed, poorly written, full of non-sequiturs and, to be blunt, an exercise in navel-gazing drivel. +Echoing this trend is John Naughton's recent article for The Guardian "[a generation lost in its personal space](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2005/jan/23/comment.business)." -After staying up late one night reading a bunch of his essays I had to conclude that Graham is not only a poor writer but that he makes an ass of himself every time he strays from the technological realm. I can't comment on his LISP and SmallTalk articles since I don't know either of those languages, but his "Things You Can't Say" ranks pretty high on my all time worst list. I would go ahead and say it's the worst thing I've ever read, but then I picked over some transcripts of the recent presidential debates and changed my mind. Nevertheless Grahams's writing is bad. +Joining these authors is Christine Rosen who has managed to parlay this topic into two separate articles, [The Age of Egocasting](http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-age-of-egocasting) and [Bad Connections](http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/20/magazine/20WWLN.html?ex=1268974800&en=fca8190266cc6b78&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt). -And yet it has potential. And potential is important. In fact, potential is the reason any of us are writing, but we'll get to that. First I think it's important that we start here at the beginning, with Graham's essay. +The underlying implication of all these articles is that the iPod (and the cellphone and TiVo and the remote control and...) narrow our perspectives and, in case of the first two, make us oblivious to and in public spaces. -### Mistakes +> The proportion of young people who never venture out in public without first putting on headphones is astonishing <cite>– John Naughten</cite> -> Remember the essays you had to write in high school? Topic sentence, introductory paragraph, supporting paragraphs, conclusion. The conclusion being, say, that Ahab in Moby Dick was a Christ-like figure. Oy. So I'm going to try to give the other side of the story: what an essay really is, and how you write one. Or at least, how I write one. +> Even without the white wires you can tell who they are. They walk down the street in their own mp3 cocoon, bumping into others, deaf to small social cues, shutting out anyone not in their bubble. <cite>– Andrew Sullivan</cite> -Graham's experience with the essay has already diverged from mine. Graham it seems, spent high school doing what was asked of him with no creative potential exercised on his part. That's fine, true to his experience, but not mine. not to say that my high school essays were works worthy of publication, but I do know I didn't crib my ideas out of Cliff's notes. +I have owned an iPod since 2001 and I really enjoy my bubble. It's not so much that I disagree with any of the authors cited above, it's that I think the iPod is less a destroyer of worlds (public space in this case) and more a *response* to the destruction of personal spaces, the origin of which lies far deeper and farther away than a pair of white headphones. -So, here at the beginning of Graham's essay we find ourselves given great potential only to have it snatched away again. We get an invitation to explore "what an essay really is, and how you write one." Now that is almost guaranteed to be interesting. But then the mock self-effacing ego intrudes: "Or at least, how I write one." Now why would I care how Paul Graham writes an essay? This is someone with a low opinion of creative arts whose primary interest and field of knowledge is computer programing. I don't care how Paul Graham writes an essay and assuming that I do is huge mistake on the author's part. +I was in a band a few years back and we were recording what would be our only production, a five song ep. For those that have never been in a recording studio and have this mistaken idea that it's all fun and games... well, it's not. Recording music is pretty boring actually. One evening the drummer and I were smoking cigarettes outside our studio and we got to talking about walkmans and the newfangled mp3 players that were just hitting the market. Nice we agreed, but what would be really cool I said, what I really want, is a way to put my entire collection of music in a device the size of a deck of cards. True story, 1995 or so. Buena Park California, sunset iridescent orange. High clouds lending a bit of purple. Swig of beer. Drag of cigarette. -One more little quote and then we'll set Graham and his anti-art leanings aside. +The first few iPods were too small, 5 gigs and then 10, if I recall correctly from a billboard in Redondo Beach stuck in traffic and thinking, holy shit, they're gonna do it. And they did. When the 20 gig version arrived it seemed like plenty of space so I bought one. Unfortunately when I got done ripping all my cds it was almost full. Now four years later I have almost 35 gigs worth of mp3s and I'm needing a new iPod (holding out for the 80 gig model, which again seems like plenty...). -> The other big difference between a real essay and the things they make you write in school is that a real essay doesn't take a position and then defend it. That principle, like the idea that we ought to be writing about literature, turns out to be another intellectual hangover of long forgotten origins. +I am far too much an audiophile however to settle for the cult of white ear buds and in fact have never used apple's provided headphones (too much time spent in the recording studio to trust my music to cheap speakers). No I am actually worse in Mr Sullivan's view, I use noise canceling earbuds from Sennheiser. Even if I turn off my iPod I am still deaf to your social cues Mr. Sullivan. -Paul Graham seems to have had a really wretched time in school. he has devoted a whole essay to scrutinizing the artificial social structure of high school. It's actually one of his better pieces on the site, but it makes me curious about Graham's school experience. I feel bad for him, I really do. Personally I hated the bizarrely pointless physics problems -- blocks sliding down inclined planes -- problems that my otherwise brilliant physics teacher forced us to work out on paper. Writing about literature was an exercise in creative independence after that sort of monotony. Anyway my big question is, who among us isn't aware that the essay is a multifaceted form that far exceeds the limited examples we are exposed to in high school? (For which there is a actually specific term *argumentative essay* rather than just essay.) +I will even confess that sometimes, when my iPod runs out of batteries, I leave the headphones in just to have an excuse to ignore social interaction. In fact, I find it really irritating when people fail to respect the message of headphones (don't talk to me) and insist that I remove them so they can ask me for a cigarette (no) or a donation (sorry, one step away from the breadline myself). -I am, for instance, aware that the realm of physics far exceeds the inclined planes I hated so much even though I have never pursued the subject beyond that childish introduction. Graham's patronizing of his readers' intellectual development is rude and, to me, pretty bizarre. Rest assured you will not be patronized here.[^1]. +### Space is the Place -### What Great Writing Does +At the same time, as a writer, overheard conversation and snippets of other lives caught accidentally or through purposeful audio voyeurism are very important to me, invaluable even. This is the sort of accidental material that can put you where you ought to be -- where you least expected to be. -Great writing, whether essay or story or poem or other form, is fundamentally the result of process. It is the confrontation with the unknown recorded and given over. The product itself often creates more questions than it does answers, but it is easy to tell whether or not the author had his/her life invested in the writing of it. The result is not on the petty plain that Graham would have it, whether "you got the right answers," but instead explores the troubling reality that there perhaps are no answers after all but only "the poetry of motion creating the illusion of truth." +But at the same time I never knew I would feel quite like *that* as the winter afternoon glare crystallized the spires at the top of the Sixth Avenue Library to the sound of Grant Lee Buffalo's lament of New Orleans. I got the same juxtaposition of the familiar and foreign that I might glean from an unexpected snippet of the overheard. -My girlfriend likes to say that if the experience of something is truly great it has in some way helped you prepare for death. And neither I nor she mean this as a kind of melodrama, but simply this is the process. If you do not have a heartfelt stake in what you write your writing will never be any good regardless of your intelligence, education or any other number of factors that we often mistakenly attribute to informing the creative process. +So maybe, while it doesn't fit the binary choice narrative of our age, just maybe it's possible that both wearing headphones and not wearing headphones have their place. -The essay then is a poetry of motion, a poetry of the mind turning over on itself and trying to get at the "the pure potential as potential."[^2] If we disregard the potential as potential in favor of the already known (another reexamination of high school?!), we confine ourselves to a world where everything that can be known is known. For instance: +I like to be able to choose whether or not to involve myself in the public space. But the elective to remove oneself from the public is troubling for our iPod critics. "Walk through any airport in the United States these days and you will see person after person gliding through the social ether as if on autopilot," writes Sullivan. -> In technical matters, you have to get the right answers. If your software miscalculates the path of a space probe, you can't finesse your way out of trouble by saying that your code is patriotic, or avant-garde, or any of the other dodges people use in nontechnical fields. <cite>from another of Graham's essays</cite> +Naughten even has the dystopia mapped out for us: "imagine the future: a crowded urban street, filled not with people interacting with one another, but with atomized individuals cocooned in their personalized sound-bubbles, moving from one retail opportunity to another. The only sounds are the shuffling of feet and the rock muzak blaring from the doorways of specialized leisurewear chains." -That may be good and well for software, but Graham is assuming that there are right answers in realms beyond software (even in the realm of software I would question that assertion, design choices yes, but right and wrong? equations within software can be wrong, but does that make the software wrong?) +It's funny to read this in 2019 and realize that in fact Naughten was close. I haven't been in a major American city in a few years, but last time I was his description would have fit perfectly. But are the "atomized individuals" the cause or the result? I'd argue they're the latter. -I for one do not wish to live in a world where there are right and wrong answers at every turn, where everything that can be known is already known. Nor do I want read essays that purport as much. If what Graham is railing against in his essay on essays is the formulaic nature of immature writing then certainly the answer does not lie in the formulaic nature of software. +It seems natural to me that people bombarded with advertising and the crass commercial commodification of public space at every turn would want an isolationist bubble to protect themselves. Naughten's vision, which turns out to be more or less the culture we have in the west in 2019, seems a perfectly logical extension of the culture we have created. -In a world where there is no potential to move beyond the known there would be no reason to write. The great essay (and contrary to Graham's assertions there are plenty of amazing essayists in this century, both those writing now, including on the web, and those whose work predates us) is the result of stepping beyond the comfortable, predictable results of the world already known into the pure potential as potential. The result then is the journey back. +It's perfectly logical to string together phrase that, in 2005, would have sounded like something out of Infinite Jest: Meet me down at the Blockbuster Pavilion where we can catch the Verizon Wireless Presents show tonight and maybe afterward we can head to the Trojan Condom presents DJ Circuit City spinning at Club Walmart. Come on down, we'll have a grand time ringing in the new Year of the Depend Undergarment. -### On Some Common Misconceptions About Writing/Art +What Mr. Naughten seems to ignore is the second to last sentence of his own nightmare, one that has nothing to do with headphones and everything to do with cultural changes that precede the iPod -- *moving from one retail opportunity to another*. -As cited above I have been reading a collection of essays called <cite>Art and Reality</cite>. Now generally speaking this is not the sort of book I gravitate toward, but my neighbor is a book dealer and he sold it to me for 25¢. Anyway, I had all but abandoned this article until I read the first essay in this book, entitled *The Elements of "Art"* (which, it's worth noting, was transcribed from Robert Irwin's's keynote address at a 1982 conference entitled *Art and Reality*). +This is the sum total of our public spaces. They are "retail opportunities". Our "public" space is not public at all, it's branded private space that views the public as little more than advertising targets. How long before we have advertisements beamed up into the night sky? -Now it was no accident that above I said the *experience* of something truly great should help you die. I could summarize Irwin's points on the interactive process of art, but it's better if I simply quote: +Rather than contributing to this sort of corporate co-opting of public spaces, the iPod allows us an escape into private worlds of the imagination. ->So what we have is a structure, a process. And I will identify that as being what is being talked about here: the elements of art, *the elements of the process*. I would like to say that these are really more positions or perspectives, rather than being a hierarchical which assumes there is "a art" and that everything else is somehow subservient to it. I propose that we have instead a process. The first step of the process is the action of inquiry: the idea of looking at that pure potential &mdash the artist as an individual seeking out or re-examining for himself at his moment in time and in relation to the whole body of knowledge up to that moment in time, what we mean by the term art. +Headphones are an attempt to avoid the homogenization of the "rock musak blaring from the doorways of specialized leisurewear chains". -Art is indeed a verb rather than a noun. The noun that we are accustomed to throwing about is but a historical artifact that is the result of an art-action, to borrow Irwin's nomenclature. Now that is not to pass any sort of value judgment on those artifacts, but rather to say the essay is not the art; the writing of the essay is the art. the essay I the reader experiences (by reading) is an object, what is important is not the object, but our experience with it. So we end up with a noun, the essay, preceded and followed by verbs, art and experience. +Is it not the desire to escape the vulgar commercialism of our advertising-polluted culture that drives us to block out it's monotony? To seek something meaningful in one of the most intimately and meaningful realms, music and interject back the danger that once lurked outside the burlesque theaters and dance halls that seem to have closed just after Henry and June sneaked out the back door. -This emphasis on parts of speech is not a splitting of hairs, a semantic game or a "dodge" employed by one in a non-technical field. It is the fundamental point of what art, in this case writing, is: interaction between individuals mediated by some object. +### The New (Old) Danger -It has long amused artists to hear technophiles and, for lack of a better term, suits, expounding on the wonderful interactive nature of the web and how this can revolutionize art (naturally here in its cultural baggage form as a noun) and society when in fact art is and always has been an interactive experience mediated by a static medium. The web remains every bit as static as a painting or an essay. That we describe our experience with it as interactive is a result of the obviousness, not the uniqueness, of its interaction. +The problem with the iPod for these authors, and for similar articles about phones in 2019, seems to lie in the shutting off of the public space in favor of the personal. -Interactivity on the web requires a gadget (a computer) which is perhaps what clues us in to the fact that our experience is interactive, whereas art in other forms is often not mediated by a gadget so its seems more remote (especially given the gadget fetishism of our times). Perhaps another reason the interactivity of the web is so obvious is because it comes directly into our living room. There is no need to travel to the museum or library, it's all right here at our fingertips. +As I've already pointed out we the public largely lost our collective spaces to more nefarious forces than the iPod. But, setting aside larger cultural issues like promiscuous advertising, what of the iPod's privatization of public space as these authors claim? -But I think it's important to note that the writing of an essay is not fundamentally an act of expression or communication, something that Irwin nicely illustrates by posing the question: "can you think of anything that is not expression?" If everything is expression and communication how then would we differentiate between good essays and bad ones? For that matter, what differentiates essays from email? What we need is some better means of qualitative judgment. +Neither author gives any kind of reason as to why this is bad. They both get abstract and use the iPod as jumping off point for larger concerns, starting with Mr Sullivan who sees in the iPod the loss of, call it respect for music. -### Why the Rote Essay is Rampant on the Web +"Music was once the preserve of the living room or the concert hall," writes Sullivan. "It was sometimes solitary but it was primarily a shared experience, something that brought people together, gave them the comfort of knowing that others too understood the pleasure of a Brahms symphony or that Beatles album." -So after picking on Paul Graham so extensively, let us salvage the gist of what I think he was trying to say. Essays on the web are often not very well written and lack the confrontation with the unknown that marks great writing/art. +I don't know about you, but the music I listen to was never welcome in the living room I grew up in. -Now many people would herein proceed to argue that this is because we lack filters (i.e. editors, publishers, etc) to catch the bad stuff before it is disseminated to the world. There is of course some merit to this argument. I find myself often linking to Salon because the quality of writing published there far exceeds the other nine Google hits I get. And it might be that Salon's quality of writing is higher because it employs editors, but there is another more optimistic way of looking at writing on the web. +For some reason, my parents failed to relate to or appreciate *License to Ill* or *Nothing's Shocking*. Mr. Sullivan seems to think 'once upon a time' music was confined to the space where we expect it and now, good god, now it's everywhere and no one is sharing or bonding over it. -With the disappearance of the filters that have shadowed writing for the last few centuries we finally have an opportunity for anyone to write about anything they please. Now this can have some serious downsides as we will explore in a a minute, but there is an upside. Universal exposure means that in simple terms of numbers there is a much greater possibility of finding great writing on the web than the new release table at your average bookstore. Even with my limited math I can process the law of averages. If a million people are publishing there is a much greater chance that there will be someone creating something great than when the poll of possibilities was limited to those with access to agents and publishers. +I for one would much rather everyone carried around a pair of speakers with their iPod and blasted them at 11 so music became a truly public space, but apparently I am alone in this desire and there are noise ordinances against this sort of thing. (If this notion intrigues you check out some of the Flaming Lips' experiments with hundreds of simultaneous playbacks to form textures of sound). -A friend of mind used to often say that at any given moment the best band in America is probably playing for two people in a garage. The same is very likely true of writing. +Typical of a lazy essayist, Sullivan is really just aping statements made a generation earlier in response to the iPod's predecessor, the Walkman. -But we have overlooked the fact that we do have filters on the web and it's very likely that if anything they're worse than those we left behind. Google is our filter and Google is but a collection of algorithms. At least with traditional publishers there were those few that staffed their offices with truly passionate human beings who really cared about writing. Can an algorithm care about writing? +Far more reasoned and persuasive is Christine Rosen's piece in The New Atlantis. As Rosen relates in her essay, "music columnist Norman Lebrecht argued, 'no invention in my lifetime has so changed an art and cheapened it as the Sony Walkman.' By removing music from its context -- in the performance hall or the private home -- and making it portable, the Walkman made music banal. It becomes a utility, undeserving of more attention than drinking water from a tap." -Much to my dismay if you type 'the essay' into google, Paul Graham's drivel comes up as the seventh link. This is precisely why there is no link for it here. +I suppose that's one way to look at it. But you could go back further. Swap "radio" for "Sony Walkman" and the argument still stands. Want to go further, gramophone works too. Yes, it's true, recorded music has never had a context. It has always existed in the abstract space of our heads more than any temporal location. We are not in the room as it as the music is played, we get only an abstracted representation of the music. -In a way the web is what our founding father's feared most — a tyranny of the majority. If the more sites point to it, a site gets the highest rank. In that sense it's our own fault that the drivel is prevalent. +This is where to whole thing collapses for me -- so what? The notion that music has to have a context in order to understand it is only one way of approaching it. I'm not saying it's a wrong way, I agree music is more powerful in person, but the abstraction, the ability to summon up the music you love whenever you want is indistinguishable from magic, to me anyway. -In closing let me leave you with some more thoughts from Irwin: +The notion that music has a natural space where it belongs is an extremely limiting definition of music. But even accepting that notion for a moment, applying it to recorded music makes no sense. If recorded music is located outside any temporal location, how can it have an appropriate place? ->Ideas don't just come into the world *ad hoc*, or they don't just come in a sort of idle or free way. They come first to be weighted and justified in terms of their relevance, in terms of their impact, and in terms of how they might thread themselves into that body of knowledge. The process of weighing is really made up of all those people who are interested in what we mean by the concept of art. I would like to define that as "culture" (rather than how the word has normally been used) — as really a practice, culture playing back on the society as something deeply threaded into the society in the critical sense that this body of knowledge is culture, is civilization. The first action, a critical aspect, of culture is the weighing of any new idea in the light of the body of knowledge and the examining of its relevance and whether or not it's a worthwhile idea, and whether or not we should make any commitment toward the character and potential of the idea. And then the dialogue has to do with how it is threaded into this body of knowledge. +So ultimately Rosen is arguing that personal space is invading public space, that is, headphones are narrowing our public cultural space, but also, that music (in said headphones) really ought to remain in a private performance space as well. At least I think that's what's she's saying, though it makes no sense. -[^1]: For those of you electing not to actually read Graham's essay allow me to continue his thoughts in this footnote. It turns out that the "intellectual hangover of long forgotten origins" mentioned in the quote is actually, according to Graham, the study of law. Apparently law was prevalent in medieval seminaries. I can't vouch for that but it sounds right. Medieval religious types did need to have some good rhetorical training to defend the contradictory-to-observation belief systems that they held. +I for one don't think music should be consigned to where we feel comfortable and safe with it. Music is not safe. It should not be relegated to the living room or the concert hall, it should be played in the streets at top volume until the sky really does shudder and crumble. But that option has already been taken away by noise ordinances. So we have gone internal, put the speaker directly in our ear. -[^2]: **The Elements of "Art"**, Art and Reality. ed. Robin Blaser and Robert Duncan, Talonbooks Vancouver, 1986 +If anything changes with headphones it's the attention devoted to the music. Music coming from speakers has a directional vector. It approaches you from some point and is blatantly external to the listener. Put on a decent pair of headphones and the music becomes omnidirectional and you are enveloped in it. Close your eyes and you can swim through it and pick out tiny bits of sound that you would never notice coming from an external speaker. For the listener on headphones the experience is both more intimate and more consuming than music from a living room stereo or even a concert hall stage. + +As for the loss of public culture to personal headphone cocoon, is not the mere recognition of white earbuds itself a form of cultural interaction? Even if it be only a nod and smile, is this not even closer to the truth of life, the mystery unfathomed but acknowledged? I know how you feel the nod says and it is good speaketh the smile. + +### Its All Around You + +Neither Sullivan nor Naughton is content with the iPod as harbinger of doom, the end of social space, the isolationist future of automatons. Yawn. No, it does not stop there, this is the slippery slope down which we all slide into communism and cannibalism and [them russians and them russians](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49305/america-56d22b41f119f) and them earbuds and them earbuds and them them, damnit the sky is falling why don't you see it? + +Rosen at least has a more reasoned argument that might actually be on to something. + +She believes that the personalization of media is leading to a narrowing of experience. That's a legitimate fear that the passing of time has shown to be very legitimate indeed. + +Mr. Naughton in the Guardian article sounds a bit like Wordsworth calling us all back to the countryside. He even goes so far as to stake his critique partly on recently uncovered Edwardian era documentary films. These movies he claims reveal a society where, "men raise their hats to women; people stop to talk; groups congregate at junctions and street corners." The clear implication is that, for Edwardians, being out in public meant being on display and being sociable. It meant paying attention to what was going on around you, and acknowledging the existence of others. + +Beware all calls for a return to past glories. Still, assuming for a moment that people act naturally in front of a camera, and that they weren't in fact congregating to discuss the weirdos at the end of street pointing lenses at everyone, the Edwardians were more self-consciously aware when out in public. Does that make them role models of public behavior? They were also more elitist, racist, and classist as well; should we emulate those behaviors too while we're out for a Sunday stroll? + +In researching this little piece I found several nice rebuttals to Sullivan's piece. The best of which is by a man named Jerry Stratton in an essay entitled [society never ends, it just fades away](http://www.hoboes.com/Mimsy/?ART=92). + +Stratton rightly cuts past the iPod intro of Sullivan's article and addresses what Sullivan really wants to talk about. "His most worthwhile observation was that iPod users sometimes accidentally break out into out-of-tune singing to whatever is on their pod," writes Stratton. "But [Sullivan] seems to think that it's bad, whereas I stand with Joni Mitchell that the more out-of-tune voices, the better. And that's the real point of Andrew's editorial. The proliferation of multiple viewpoints runs the risk of isolating individuals so that they hear only the viewpoints that they want to hear. We as individuals need more out-of-tune voices." + +This is also Rosen's concern in both of her essays, that our means of consuming information (for her the remote control, TiVo, and iPod) are narrowing our exposure to new ideas. By meticulously selecting content that we already know we like we are even less likely to discover the new stuff. Couple this with "smart" search algorithms that pick recommendations based on what we already like and our chances of encountering the shocking, the challenging or the potentially enlightening approach nil according to Rosen. + +Without these sorts of jarring, chance encounters with the unknown we cease to think outside ourselves. This may well be true, but it's always been true. Conservative viewers are more likely to tune into Fox news because it fits their pre-existing worldview. Liberals read the New York Times and watch Woody Allen movies. This is nothing new. It has always taken conscious effort to find viewpoints outside your own reality tunnel of beliefs. + +I fail to see anyway in which the iPod contributes to this trend. In fact it may well go against it if only by virtue of its ubiquity. On college campuses for instance many students swap headphones to see what the other is listening to. The iPod's ease of use and the easy availability of mp3s make exploring new music simple -- hear a band on someone's headphones, go home and fire up a torrent search, grab the album, slap it on your iPod and be enlightened. Illegal? Certainly. Potentially life enriching? Certainly. + +### No Alarms and No Surprises + +When you come down to it, how is the iPod any different from other music devices that use headphones? It's not. It's just the latest harbinger on the chopping block if we mash our metaphors for a moment. + +At the same time, the targeted nature of new modes of consumption do raise some issues for thought. Is algorithmic content, narrowly selected constricting our exposure to the unfamiliar? Maybe, but as illustrated earlier there has always been a tendency to seek the familiar, the safe, the comfortable, the expected. + +But even that doesn't always happen. The gravity of this potential danger, if we may call it that, that comes from targeted advertising depends greatly on the realm in which occurs. If we are talking about the realm of politics then this kind of marsupial burrowing is decidedly bad. If you bought Bill O'Reilly's book (presumably he has one) and the suggested "you might like..." stuff is more of the same, then yes your worldview remains narrow. But in the realm of art where the political statement is often less overt, less likely to be partisan, more likely to be complicated and often not there at all, then the suggestion might be welcome and can lead one far from the sources that suggested it. + +For example let's say you really like Jay-Z and so when the new album comes out you pre-order it on Amazon.com. The "you might like..." screen claims that people who like Jay-Z have also purchased Outkast. So you figure, what the hell I'll pick up this Outkast album. Turns out that those who purchased Outkast also bought both Stevie Wonder and Sun Ra. Hey, why not? You buy them too. If you're a fan of Jay-Z but have never ventured into Sun Ra territory, well, you're about to blow your mind. + +In my own experience, I find that I tend to read books that mention other books. So I read the other books and maybe they mention some other books and on it goes. I don't see a significant difference between that and the Amazon suggestions. Or potentially TiVo's suggestions or any other targeted marketing. In the realm of the arts nothing is so much the same that it cannot lead to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_separation" title="Theory of Six Degrees of Separation">something ever more different</a>. + +It seems that to a certain extent the authors in question here are specifically concerned with the potential narrowing of political capital, which is a concern given that democracy depend on the existence of a multitude of voices. Are we losing that? Well that's a larger question and one that does not necessarily relate to remote controls, TiVo or the iPod. + +### You Were Wrong When You Said Everything's Gonna Be All Right + +All three of these articles reveal more about their author's sentimentality for earlier times than anything else. If those kids took the headphones out of their ears, put down the remote, turned off the television and read a couple of books everything would be fine... + +In fact this notion of iPod=evil represents the same simplistic thinking that has landed us where we are in the first place. If easy prescriptions worked to solve our problems we wouldn't have the reactionary mess we have. And I don't mean that in partisan terms. I think we can all agree that America is somewhat of a mess right now. I don't think one political party or the other is as fault. We are all culpable. And we are all looking for solutions. + +I don't believe in the techno-utopist future of completely wired life and peace through blogging, but I also don't believe in the techno-dystopist future where we all end up like the overweight blobs in floating chaise lounges ala Wall-E. + +Reality is much more complex and to avoid it authors like Sullivan resort to cheap, easy sentimentality."What are we missing?" he asks, answer ever at the ready: "That hilarious shard of an overheard conversation that stays with you all day; the child whose chatter on the pavement takes you back to your early memories; birdsong; weather; accents; the laughter of others. + +A lovely piece of sentimentality, it almost makes me want to take out these headphones and listen to the silence of the house. But as Wallace Stevens' said "sentimentality is a failure of feeling.Sentimentality is false feeling, pseudo-feeling and affectation. Sullivan's quote is an embarrassing episode of mindless sentimentality, it fails to account for all kinds of complexity and depth ever-present in our lives. + +Sentimentality is the easy answer: the birds, the laughter, the children.... Real feeling involves complexity, it rejects the simple. To realize that there is more to it than unplugging, more to it than any technology, more to it than a sound bite you can pass off as heartfelt -- that is actually the very essence of the problem: the failure to engage your surroundings as anything other than a simplistic snapshot of what you wanted to see. + +Does Sullivan acknowledge the ugliness? Never. He skips right over it and tells you what you wanted to hear. Sullivan's sentimentality does the very thing he accuses the iPod of doing -- he narrows your reality. + +Never for a second does Sullivan acknowledge that the birds might be endangered, headed for extinction, that the weather might be worsening with global warming, that the laughter of others might well be cynical and cheap or that the children are living below the poverty line, abused etc, etc. This the same sort of narcissistic thinking that gave us romanticism, is it any wonder that these authors look too fondly at the Edwardians? + +Everything looks good from the lazy middle class intellectual point of view. Edit out the things you don't like and you too can narrow your reality to the point of irrelevancy. + +Please do not mistake me for a cynic though. I use this example merely to acknowledge that there are things below the surface that we can happily ignore if we are constructing the world to our own desires rather than recognizing the complexity that is inherent in it. + +### ...And I Feel Fine + +Perhaps the problem with the iPod is so ephemeral it's slipping through our fingers. Perhaps there is no problem with the iPod. No harm in headphones. No danger to run from save the desire to have a new danger to run from, a new evil to fight because the real one is just too big to tackle, a new threat to declare war on because the old one just bores us to death, a new something to rage against because the dying of the light seems inevitable and unvanquishable. Perhaps the new danger, same as the old, is our own failure, our own sentimentality that shows us the world not as it is but as we wish to see it. + +At the same time I encourage everyone, as Robert Anton Wilson put it, to change reality tunnels often. Find viewpoints you don't share, something outside your belief system, something you might even consider crazy. Listen to what these viewpoints are saying and think critically about why you do or don't agree with them. + +There has never (not even yesterday) been a day in the history of humankind when you have had so much information at your finger tips. Take advantage of that and see where it leads you -- hopefully where you least expected. And hey, listen to music while you think. diff --git a/published/2010-07-16-comanche-national-grasslands.txt b/published/2010-07-16-comanche-national-grasslands.txt index a117232..6922418 100644 --- a/published/2010-07-16-comanche-national-grasslands.txt +++ b/published/2010-07-16-comanche-national-grasslands.txt @@ -1,24 +1,12 @@ ---- -template: single -point: 37.14748995999048,-103.0095720147769 -location: Comanche National Grasslands,Colorado,United States -image: 2010/comanchenationalgrasslands.jpg -desc: Driving through the Comanche National Grasslands - no signs, no road names, just dirt paths crisscrossing a perfectly flat expanses of grass. -dek: To say the Comanche National Grasslands is off the grid would be an understatement. With the exception of Highway 50 in Nevada, I've never driven through such isolation and vast openness anywhere in the world. And it's easy to get lost. There are no signs, no road names even, just dirt paths crisscrossing a wide, perfectly flat expanses of grass. -pub_date: 2010-07-16T13:00:00 -slug: comanche-national-grasslands -title: Comanche National Grasslands ---- +From Amarillo I headed north, taking small county roads through the northern section of the Texas panhandle, into Oklahoma and on to Colorado, where I turned off on a dirt road that claimed it would take me to the Comanche National Grasslands. -<span class="drop">F</span>rom Amarillo I headed north, taking small county roads through the northern section of the Texas panhandle, into Oklahoma and on to Colorado, where I turned off on a dirt road that claimed it would take me to the Comanche National Grasslands. +<img src="https://images.luxagraf.net/2010/comanche_grasslands_wideopen.jpg" alt="Comanche National Grasslands" class="picfull" /> -<img src="[[base_url]]/2010/comanche_grasslands_wideopen.jpg" alt="Comanche National Grasslands" class="picfull" /> +To say the Comanche National Grasslands is off the grid would be an understatement. With the exception of Highway 50 in Nevada, I've never driven through such isolation and vast openness anywhere in the world. And it's easy to get lost. There are no signs, no road names even, just dirt paths crisscrossing a wide, perfectly flat expanses of grass. -To say the Comanche National Grasslands is off the grid would be an understatement. With the exception of Highway 50 in Nevada, I've never driven through such isolation and vast openness anywhere in the world. And it's easy to get lost. There are no signs, no road names even, just dirt paths crisscrossing a wide, perfectly flat expanses of grass. +I followed what I thought was the main dirt road through some ranch lands, wheat fields and open grasslands to a cattle grate and a fork in the road where a small sign noted that the Grasslands preserve had begun. -I followed what I thought was the main dirt road through some ranch lands, wheat fields and open grasslands to a cattle grate and a fork in the road where a small sign noted that the Grasslands preserve had begun. - -I had not seen another car since I turned off the main road. Nor would I for the rest of my time in the Comanche National Grasslands. +I had not seen another car since I turned off the main road. Nor would I for the rest of my time in the Comanche National Grasslands. Instead there was simply immense, wide open space. Space so big it begins to close in on you, the sky seems so endlessly massive and close that it's disconcerting. The only real limits to your field of vision are the curvature of the earth. You begin to get some sense of how small a thing you really are. If you spend too much time thinking about infinity, you can't help but feel incredibly finite. @@ -28,21 +16,20 @@ Few of the early settlers who wrote about crossing the plains failed to note the Eventually the road began to drop into some lowlands, small rolling depressions cut by the now dry streams that pass though the area. Eventually I came to the head of Chisolm Canyon (which is actually labeled with a small sign), a much larger gash carved by a still flowing river. On a crest just before the road dropped into the canyon proper I stopped and ate lunch. -As soon as I turned off the truck engine I was engulfed in silence. It was as utter quiet as anywhere I've been. Only the occasional chirping click of grasshoppers and the eerie moaning of the wind sweeping through the juniper bushes broke the stillness. The only other time I've been somewhere as quiet was in the backcountry of the Sierra Nevada during a snowstorm. +As soon as I turned off the truck engine I was engulfed in silence. It was as utter quiet as anywhere I've been. Only the occasional chirping click of grasshoppers and the eerie moaning of the wind sweeping through the juniper bushes broke the stillness. The only other time I've been somewhere as quiet was in the backcountry of the Sierra Nevada during a snowstorm. It was quiet enough that every footstep I took seemed like thunder, the crunch of the gravel giving me away to every other living thing. I could even hear myself chewing as I ate. But the silence was peaceful too, so, not having anywhere particular to be, I climbed on the hood of the truck, leaned back against the windshield and took a nap. -<img src="[[base_url]]/2010/comanche_grasslands_truck.jpg" alt="My 1969 Ford truck, Comanche National Grasslands" class="picfull" /> +<img src="[[base_url]]/2010/comanche_grasslands_truck.jpg" alt="My 1969 Ford truck, Comanche National Grasslands" class="picfull" /> -Later, rested and refreshed, I descended out of the limitless plain into Chisolm Canyon where a river has carved down some four or five hundred feet of red rock that is slowly crumbling into mesas and bluffs. Come back in a few million years and there may well be a Grand Canyon here. +Later, rested and refreshed, I descended out of the limitless plain into Chisolm Canyon where a river has carved down some four or five hundred feet of red rock that is slowly crumbling into mesas and bluffs. Come back in a few million years and there may well be a Grand Canyon here. I pulled off near the river and went down to have a swim and sit in the shade of the Cottonwood trees. The river proved too shallow for swimming, though I dipped my shirt in it to cool off. I sat in the shade for bit, letting the truck rest and watching the Cottonwood trees' seeds drift by, little tufts of white seed casing -- the Cottonwood's namesake -- floating in the air. I continued down the canyon until it opened up into another flatland and the road began to loop back around and head east again. Eventually I came to the same spot I had started at, but since I was half lost when I got there it wasn't much help. I hadn't intended to spend much time in the grasslands, but sometimes a place just grabs you and you have to stay a while. -<img src="[[base_url]]/2010/comanche_grasslands_endlessroad.jpg" alt="Endless Road, Comanche National Grasslands" class="postpicright" />Unfortunately I still had a good bit of ground to cover before I got to Great Sand Dunes National Park, where I was planning to stay for the night. The dirt roads around me were far too small to be on my atlas. With no cell signal I couldn't consult Google, and there were no signs to rely on. +<img src="[[base_url]]/2010/comanche_grasslands_endlessroad.jpg" alt="Endless Road, Comanche National Grasslands" class="postpicright" />Unfortunately I still had a good bit of ground to cover before I got to Great Sand Dunes National Park, where I was planning to stay for the night. The dirt roads around me were far too small to be on my atlas. With no cell signal I couldn't consult Google, and there were no signs to rely on. In the end I decided that, since Comanche National Grasslands is more or less a square block of land on the map, if I went in any one direction eventually I'd hit some tarmac. I picked north since that would most likely lead to highway 160, which eventually takes you to Great Sand Dunes. It proved a sound strategy. After half and hour or so I was back to a paved road, though there were still no signs indicating which way to go. Great Sand Dunes National Park was west, so I just pointed to truck toward the sun and started driving, figuring eventually I'd get somewhere. - diff --git a/published/2011-06-19-temple-ceremony-ubud.txt b/published/2011-06-19-temple-ceremony-ubud.txt index 13f57e8..8db2e43 100644 --- a/published/2011-06-19-temple-ceremony-ubud.txt +++ b/published/2011-06-19-temple-ceremony-ubud.txt @@ -1,52 +1,41 @@ ---- -template: double -point: -8.480557093648551,115.26582809308304 -location: Ubud, Bali,Bali,Indonesia -image: 2011/ubud-ceremony.jpg -desc: We were fortunate enough to be invited to a temple ceremony in Tegallantang, Bali and then followed the procession back into Ubud. By Scott Gilbertson -dek: While Balinese temples look partly like Hindu temples in India, there are other elements that come from older religions. Bali is what happens when Hindu beliefs collide with animism. The Balinese seem to embrace the basic tenants of traditional Hinduism, but then add plenty of their own animist flourishes to the mix -- like frequent and elaborate temple ceremonies. We were lucky enough to be invited to a temple ceremony in Tegallantang, Bali. -pub_date: 2011-06-19T10:25:00 -slug: temple-ceremony-ubud -title: The Balinese Temple Ceremony ---- +Everything in Bali is two hundred meters from here. The island itself may in fact only be two hundred meters wide and two hundred meters long. To get from here to wherever we are staying? Two hundred meters. To get from here to the temple ceremony we were supposed to be at twenty minutes ago? Just two hundred meters more. The Balinese are either really bad at judging distance or unclear on the English words for numbers larger than two hundred. -<div class="col"><p>Everything in Bali is two hundred meters from here. The island itself may in fact only be two hundred meters wide and two hundred meters long. To get from here to wherever we are staying? Two hundred meters. To get from here to the temple ceremony we were supposed to be at twenty minutes ago? Just two hundred meters more. The Balinese are either really bad at judging distance or unclear on the English words for numbers larger than two hundred.</p> +We've been walking up this hill for at least 2km and we still haven't caught sight of the temple, though now we can hear the drums, which is encouraging. One last local walks by, "Excuse me, it this the road to Tegallantang? Yes. How much farther is it? "Just up the road. Maybe two hundred meters." -<p>We've been walking up this hill for at least 2km and we still haven't caught sight of the temple, though now we can hear the drums, which is encouraging. One last local walks by, "Excuse me, it this the road to Tegallantang? Yes. How much farther is it? "Just up the road. Maybe two hundred meters."</p> +As it turns out, he's the only one to say two hundred meters and literally be right about it. -<p>As it turns out, he's the only one to say two hundred meters and literally be right about it.</p> +<img src="images/2011/110618_Jun_18_bali_069.jpg" id="image-1950" class="picwide" /> -</div> +Two days earlier we were out wandering the streets when it started to rain. We ducked into the nearest restaurant for lunch. Toward the end of the meal, as the rain was dying down and we were getting ready to leave, the owner came over and started talking to us about Ubud. We ordered another beer and in the end he invited us out to his temple to see the temple's anniversary ceremony and procession through the city. -<img class="picwide" src="[[base_url]]2011/ubud-elephant-caves.jpg" alt="Elephant Caves, Ubud, Bali" /> +At the time we were thinking of leaving for the islands east of Bali, but we decided to stick around for a couple of extra days to see the temple ceremony. -<p><span class="drop">T</span>wo days earlier we were out wandering the streets when it started to rain. We ducked into the nearest restaurant for lunch. Toward the end of the meal, as the rain was dying down and we were getting ready to leave, the owner came over and started talking to us about Ubud. We ordered another beer and in the end he invited us out to his temple to see the temple's anniversary ceremony and procession through the city.</p> +Ubud grows on you. Sure, it has a lot of traffic and touristy elements and most of the shops sell things at prices roughly equal to what you'd expect in the States, but despite all that there's something about the place. Maybe it's the way every morning the streets are littered with tiny offerings, small banana leaf trays filled with flowers, bits of rice and other food, along with a few sticks of burning incense. Maybe it's the immaculate, constantly tended gardens that grace the courtyards of every restaurant and guesthouse you enter. Maybe it's the really awful, overpriced beer. No. Probably not that, but it does grow on you. Ubud that is, not the beer. -<p>At the time we were thinking of leaving for the islands east of Bali, but we decided to stick around for a couple of extra days to see the temple ceremony. </p> +With a few extra days on our hands we ended up just wandering the city. We walked around the temples of the sacred monkey forest where we saw one of the namesake gray-haired Macaques (small monkeys) re-enact the opening scene of 2001 with a battered old aerosol can. Eventually it stopped banging the can on the ground and just turned it around, upside down, shook it, bit it, threw it and otherwise seemed to be saying, [how do you work this thing](http://www.zefrank.com/theshow/archives/2006/05/051106.html)? -<p>Ubud grows on you. Sure, it has a lot of traffic and touristy elements and most of the shops sell things at prices roughly equal to what you'd expect in the States, but despite all that there's something about the place. Maybe it's the way every morning the streets are littered with tiny offerings, small banana leaf trays filled with flowers, bits of rice and other food, along with a few sticks of burning incense. Maybe it's the immaculate, constantly tended gardens that grace the courtyards of every restaurant and guesthouse you enter. Maybe it's the really awful, overpriced beer. No. Probably not that, but it does grow on you. Ubud that is, not the beer.</p> +<img src="images/2011/110616_Jun_16_bali_047_kwrSJLi.jpg" id="image-1949" class="picfull" /> -<p><img class="postpicleft" src="[[base_url]]2011/ubud-monkey-forest.jpg" alt="Gray Macaques, Ubud, Bali" />With a few extra days on our hands <a href="http://luxagraf.net/2011/jun/16/motor-city-burning/" title="Riding a motorbike in Bali">we rode the motor bike</a> around some more. We also walked around the temples of the sacred monkey forest where we saw one of the namesake gray-haired Macaques (small monkeys) re-enact the opening scene of 2001 with a battered old aerosol can. Eventually it stopped banging the can on the ground and just turned it around, upside down, shook it, bit it, threw it and otherwise seemed to be saying, <a href="http://www.zefrank.com/theshow/archives/2006/05/051106.html" title="Ze Frank: How do you work this thing?">how do you work this thing</a>?</p> +I'll admit I wasn't expecting much when we walked a couple of kilometers out of Ubud to the village of Tegallantang where we, along with a couple friends we met a few days earlier, met up with our friend from the restaurant. -<p>After four and half days though I'll admit I wasn't expecting much when we walked a couple of kilometers out of Ubud to the village of Tegallantang where we, along with a couple friends we met a few days earlier, met up with our friend from the restaurant.</p> +I've been to [a lot of Hindu temples](/jrnl/2005/nov/30/around-udaipur). Enough in fact that I don't feel the need to see any more, but Balinese temples are considerably different from the Hindu temples of India. While Balinese temples look partly like Hindu temples in India, there are other elements that come from older religions. Bali is what happens when Hindu beliefs collide with animism. The Balinese seem to embrace the basic tenants of traditional Hinduism, but then add plenty of their own animist flourishes to the mix -- like frequent and elaborate temple ceremonies. -<p>I've been to <a href="http://luxagraf.net/2005/nov/30/around-udaipur/" title="Luxagraf in Udaipur">a lot of Hindu temples</a>. Enough in fact that I don't feel the need to see any more, but Balinese temples are considerably different than Hindu temples in India. While Balinese temples look partly like Hindu temples in India, there are other elements that come from older religions. Bali is what happens when Hindu beliefs collide with animism. The Balinese seem to embrace the basic tenants of traditional Hinduism, but then add plenty of their own animist flourishes to the mix -- like frequent and elaborate temple ceremonies.</p> +<img class="postpicright" src="/media/images/2011/ubud-ceremony-boys.jpg" alt="Boys waiting for ceremony procession, Tegallantang, Bali" /> -<p><img class="postpicright" src="[[base_url]]2011/ubud-ceremony-boys.jpg" alt="Boys waiting for ceremony procession, Tegallantang, Bali" />By the time we arrived the temple portion of the ceremony was already over, which is just as well because it felt vaguely intrusive to be the only white people standing outside the temple, and would have felt even more so if they had invited us in. And I have no doubt they would have, as we seemed to be the only people uneasy with our presence. I'm always wary of being <em>that guy</em>, the obnoxious tourist thrusting a camera in everyone's face. I even carry a long telephoto lens just so I can avoid being that guy.</p> +By the time we arrived the temple portion of the ceremony was already over, which is just as well because it felt vaguely intrusive to be the only white people standing outside the temple, and would have felt even more so if they had invited us in. And I have no doubt they would have, as we seemed to be the only people uneasy with our presence. But I'm always wary of being the obnoxious tourist thrusting a camera in everyone's face. -<p>However, despite the fact that the ceremony was not a public spectacle by any means, the procession most definitely was, since it was headed for the heart of Ubud, down to the meeting of the two rivers which is both a sacred sight for the locals and tourist central for the city. Perhaps that's why no one seemed to mind us standing around the temple.</p> +However, despite the fact that the ceremony was not a public spectacle by any means, the procession most definitely was, since it was headed for the heart of Ubud, down to the meeting of the two rivers which is both a sacred sight for the locals and tourist central for the city. Perhaps that's why no one seemed to mind us standing around the temple. -<p><img class="postpicright" src="[[base_url]]2011/ubud-effigies.jpg" alt="Effigies, ceremony procession, Tegallantang, Bali" />When we arrived only the men were at the temple. Most of them were turned out in immaculate white sarongs crisply tied without a fold out of place, topped with white shirts. Boys as young as five or six on up to teenagers were lined up to carry giant umbrellas, flags and various silk emblems which towered high above their heads on bamboo poles. The brigade of youngsters and the fluttering banners made up the front of the procession back to Ubud. The umbrellas and banners were used to shade the effigies of gods and demons that made up the middle of the procession.</p> +<img class="postpicright" src="[[base_url]]2011/ubud-effigies.jpg" alt="Effigies, ceremony procession, Tegallantang, Bali" />When we arrived only the men were at the temple. Most of them were turned out in immaculate white sarongs crisply tied without a fold out of place, topped with white shirts. Boys as young as five or six on up to teenagers were lined up to carry giant umbrellas, flags and various silk emblems which towered high above their heads on bamboo poles. The brigade of youngsters and the fluttering banners made up the front of the procession back to Ubud. The umbrellas and banners were used to shade the effigies of gods and demons that made up the middle of the procession. -<p>The older men came next split into two groups, those warming up on drums, flutes and other musical instruments, and those still inside the temple, loading up the various offerings and even stone shrines, all of which they carried in groups, the weight slung between two long bamboo poles that rested on the shoulders of eight and sometimes ten men.</p> +The older men came next split into two groups, those warming up on drums, flutes and other musical instruments, and those still inside the temple, loading up the various offerings and even stone shrines, all of which they carried in groups, the weight slung between two long bamboo poles that rested on the shoulders of eight and sometimes ten men. -<p>Once the men had all taken their places, as if on cue (though more likely via the walkie talkies some of the elders carried), the women arrived dressed in elaborate sarongs of rich gold and red silk. Most of the women, even the very young girls, wore thick coats of makeup on their faces, giving them a doll-like appearance reminiscent of Japanese geishas, though I'm pretty sure that wasn't the image they had in mind.</p> +Once the men had all taken their places, as if on cue (though more likely via the walkie talkies some of the elders carried), the women arrived dressed in elaborate sarongs of rich gold and red silk. Most of the women, even the very young girls, wore thick coats of makeup on their faces, giving them a doll-like appearance reminiscent of Japanese geishas, though I'm pretty sure that wasn't the image they had in mind. -<p><img class="picfull" src="[[base_url]]2011/ubud-procession-start.jpg" alt="Temple ceremony procession, Tegallantang, Bali" /></p> +<img class="picfull" src="[[base_url]]2011/ubud-procession-start.jpg" alt="Temple ceremony procession, Tegallantang, Bali" /> -<p>Then, as with any parade you've ever seen, the band struck up a song. The children moved out in front, the older women placed their baskets on their heads, the men picked up their offerings and shrines and the whole affair began the slow walking march through the hills down into Ubud. We brought up the rear, the token tourists trailing the procession through the rice paddies and down the hill, past shops and restaurants, houses and even a resort or two until the street widened and eventually reached the main road through Ubud. </p> +Then, as with any parade you've ever seen, the band struck up a song. The children moved out in front, the older women placed their baskets on their heads, the men picked up their offerings and shrines and the whole affair began the slow walking march through the hills down into Ubud. We brought up the rear, the token tourists trailing the procession through the rice paddies and down the hill, past shops and restaurants, houses and even a resort or two until the street widened and eventually reached the main road through Ubud. -<p>At that point we broke off and went up to a second story restaurant to have a beer and a bit of a snack, content to watch from a distance. As we sat upstairs in the fading light we watched as the river of white shirts hit the main road and flowed right, turning toward the city center, gradually growing smaller until the last white shirts disappeared down the hill.</p> +At that point we broke off and went up to a second story restaurant to have a beer and a bit of a snack, content to watch from a distance. As we sat upstairs in the fading light we watched as the river of white shirts hit the main road and flowed right, turning toward the city center, gradually growing smaller until the last white shirts disappeared down the hill. <img class="picfull" src="[[base_url]]2011/ubud-procession-end.jpg" alt="Temple ceremony procession, Tegallantang, Bali" /> - diff --git a/published/2011-06-23-best-snorkeling-world.txt b/published/2011-06-23-best-snorkeling-world.txt index 0bb5548..649cae8 100644 --- a/published/2011-06-23-best-snorkeling-world.txt +++ b/published/2011-06-23-best-snorkeling-world.txt @@ -1,26 +1,7 @@ ---- -template: single -point: -8.667603048330887,115.448325594412 -location: Nusa Lembongan, Bali,Bali,Indonesia -image: 2011/scuba_nusa_lembongan_ccFlickr.jpg -desc: Drift snorkeling is like watching fish float by the window of an underwater train. And Indonesia has more marine life than anywhere I've ever seen. by Scott Gilbertson -dek: Drift snorkeling is like watching fish float by the window of an underwater train. And Indonesia has more marine life than anywhere I've ever been. Fish I have previously seen perhaps two or three at a time are swimming in massive schools. The blue depths are filled with dozens of Moorish Idols, schools of deep purple tangs, so dark they look black until you get up close, parrotfish in clusters, munching on the coral, bright, powder blue tangs, yellow-masked angelfish, countless butterfly fish, wrasses, triggerfish, pufferfish and even bright blue starfish that crawl slowly over the reef. -pub_date: 2011-06-23T12:54:00 -slug: best-snorkeling-world -title: The Best Snorkeling in the World ---- +Nusa Lembongan is only a few miles off the southwestern coast of Bali, but it might as well be another universe. Here there are few people and no cars, only a few motorbikes that navigate the narrow dirt roads, none more than two meters wide, and your own feet are the dominant way to get around. There's still tourism, but there's also a local fishing and seaweed industry. -<span class="drop">N</span>usa Lembongan is only a few miles off the southwestern coast of Bali, but it might as well be another universe. Here there are few people and no cars, only a few motorbikes that navigate the narrow dirt roads, none more than two meters wide, and your own feet are the dominant way to get around. There's still tourism, but there's also a local fishing and seaweed industry. - -<img class="picwide" sizes="(max-width: 60em) 100vw" - -srcset="[[base_url]]2011/lembongan-boats-640.jpg 640w, - -[[base_url]]2011/lembongan-boats.jpg 1120w, - -[[base_url]]2011/lembongan-boats-2240.jpg 2280w" - -src="[[base_url]]2011/lembongan-boats.jpg" alt="Nusa Lembongan boats"> +<img src="images/2011/110623_Jun_23_nusa-lembongan_39.jpg" id="image-1910" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2011/110624_Jun_24_nusa-lembongan_49.jpg" id="image-1912" class="picwide" /> From Ubud we caught a bus south to Sanur, a beachside town where we thought we might spend a night or two. Unimpressed by the trash strewn beaches and overpriced resorts we went ahead and caught the afternoon boat out to Nusa Lembongan, one of three small islands off the coast of southwest Bali. @@ -28,49 +9,44 @@ The pace here is more my speed. Little seems to happen. People work. People fly Most of Lembongan's inhabitants are seaweed farmers. At low tide dozens of farmers make their way down to the shoreline where they load their partially dried seaweed in small outriggers and flat-bottomed boats which they pole out through the shallows to the seaweed fields that line the inland the edge of the reef half a mile from shore. At low tide the seaweed plots are often above the waterline, and even at high tide the expanse of water between the shore and reef is rarely more than a meter deep. -<img class="picwide960" sizes="(max-width: 60em) 100vw" - -srcset="[[base_url]]2011/lembongan-seaweedfarmers-640.jpg 640w, - -[[base_url]]2011/lembongan-seaweedfarmers.jpg 960w, - -[[base_url]]2011/lembongan-seaweedfarmers-1920.jpg 1920w" - -src="[[base_url]]2011/lembongan-boats.jpg" alt="Seaweed farmers at sunset, Nusa Lembongan, Indonesia"> +<img src="images/2011/110624_Jun_24_nusa-lembongan_51.jpg" id="image-1913" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2011/110624_Jun_24_nusa-lembongan_43.jpg" id="image-1911" class="picwide" /> While the farmers are out planting and harvesting seaweed (most of which I'm told ends up in Japan, used as a binding agent in various cosmetics), old women walk the shallows gathering up dropped bits of seaweed or prowl the shoreline plucking worms -- which are sold as fish bait back on Bali -- from the wet sand. -<img class="postpic" src="[[base_url]]2011/lembongan-kites.jpg" alt="Kites over Nusa Lembongan, Bali, Indonesia" />In the evenings, when the sun dips into the clouds and the air begins to cool, the villagers come down to the beach to fly kites in the evening breeze. Kites are something of an obsession for the Balinese, nearly everyone has a kite and you see dozens littering the sky from any vantage point on the island. There are fewer kites here on Lembongan, but only because there are fewer people here. +In the evenings, when the sun dips into the clouds and the air begins to cool, the villagers come down to the beach to fly kites in the evening breeze. Kites are something of an obsession for the Balinese, nearly everyone has a kite and you see dozens littering the sky from any vantage point on the island. There are fewer kites here on Lembongan, but only because there are fewer people here. -These are not the kites you grew up with, small triangular affairs with a bit of ribbon on the tail and a few meters of string. Balinese kites are massive, some with tails hundreds of meters long and they fly them so high the government had to ban them around the Denpasar airport for fear they would clog the engines of 747s. The Balinese are serious about their kites. +These are not the kites you grew up with, small triangular affairs with a bit of ribbon on the tail and a few meters of string. Balinese kites are massive, some with tails hundreds of meters long and they fly them so high the government had to ban them around the Denpasar airport for fear they would clog the engines of 747s. The Balinese are serious about their kites. -Of course flying kites is fun too, but there's also a religious aspect stemming from the belief that the Indian god Indra was a kite flying aficionado. Legend holds that Indra taught local farmers how to fly kites and today the Balinese believe the kites to be whispered prayers to the gods, which explains why they fly them so high (well, that and the fact that actually getting a kite 200-300 meters in the air is just cool). +Flying kites is fun too, but there's also a religious aspect stemming from the belief that the Indian god Indra was a kite flying aficionado. Legend holds that Indra taught local farmers how to fly kites and today the Balinese believe the kites to be whispered prayers to the gods, which explains why they fly them so high (well, that and the fact that actually getting a kite 200-300 meters in the air is just cool). While Lembongan is a relaxing place to pass a few days, or even weeks, the main appeal of the island for most visitors is either the surfing or the snorkeling (and diving, but I've never had the patience or desire to learn how to dive, the vast majority of what I find interesting in the ocean is in the first 3 meters of water anyway). I went on two snorkeling trips out of Lembongan, neither of which spent much time at Lembongan's reefs, opting for the far superior reefs around the two neighboring islands, tiny Nusa Ceningan and the much larger Nusa Penida. -The first stop was a mediocre reef just off the dense mangrove forests of Nusa Lembongan. The reef was okay, but the water was murky and crowded with a dozen other boats also dropping snorkelers. After maybe ten minutes in the water the two Australians also on the trip and I asked the boatman if there was anything better to be found. He kept saying drift snorkel, which left us scratching our heads, but we agreed and set off for another ten minute boat ride to the eastern coast of Nusa Penida. +The first stop was a mediocre reef off the dense mangrove forests of Nusa Lembongan. The reef was okay, but the water was murky and crowded with a dozen other boats also dropping snorkelers. After maybe ten minutes in the water the two Australians also on the trip and I asked the boatman if there was anything better to be found. He kept saying drift snorkel, which left us scratching our heads, but we agreed and set off for another ten minute boat ride to the eastern coast of Nusa Penida. -[<img class="picfull" src="[[base_url]]2011/scuba_nusa_lembongan_ccFlickr.jpg" alt="Fish and reef off Nusa Lembongan, Bali. Image by Ilse Reijs and Jan-Noud Hutten, Flickr" />][2] +<img src="images/2019/14194175448_8dda7e9fb3_o.jpg" id="image-1917" class="picwide" /> The backside of Nusa Penida is separated from its much smaller neighbor, Nusa Ceningan by a narrow swath of water maybe a kilometer across at its widest. To the south is the open ocean, to the north is the Lombok straight, a very strong current that moves between Bali and Lombok at speeds of up to eight knots. The shallow reef-covered shelfs just off Nusa Penida, have similar currents where the water is suddenly forced through the narrow channel between islands. Drift snorkeling is a bit like snorkeling in a river. The boat drops you off at one end of the current and you drift for a couple of kilometers down to the end of the current, where the island swings to the west and there's a small beach where the boat can pick you up again. -[<img class="picfull" src="[[base_url]]2011/starfishovercoral_by_Stephane_Bailliez_flickr.jpg" alt="Fish and reef off Nusa Lembongan, Bali. Image by Stephane Bailliez, Flickr" />][3] +<img src="images/2019/4826601501_371752a6ff_o.jpg" id="image-1920" class="picfull" /> + +In the mean time you drift, like tubing down a river. The shoreline is a limestone cliff, carved inward by the sea. Underwater a shelf slopes off sharply. The first tier is maybe two meters, the second more like four and then finally the shelf drops off into the unknown deep, a rich turquoise blue that is alive with fish. Fish I have previously seen perhaps two or three at a time are swimming in massive schools. Dozens of Moorish Idols, schools of deep purple tangs, so dark they look black until you get up close, parrotfish in clusters, munching on the coral, bright, powder blue tangs, yellow-masked angelfish, countless butterfly fish, wrasses, triggerfish, pufferfish and even bright blue starfish that crawl slowly over the reef. The deep blue depths are filled with myriad triggerfish, angelfish, clownfish and hundreds of others swimming slowly along in the current. There are huge schools of fish that I have only previously seen in books or aquariums back in the States. In fact there are so many fish that just last month a survey done not far from here [discovered eight new species of fish](https://phys.org/news/2011-05-reef-fish-indonesia-bali.htm://phys.org/news/2011-05-reef-fish-indonesia-bali.html). -In the mean time you drift, like tubing down a river. The shoreline is a limestone cliff, carved inward by the sea. Underwater a shelf slopes off sharply. The first tier is maybe two meters, the second more like four and then finally the shelf drops off into the unknown deep, a rich turquoise blue that is alive with fish. Fish I have previously seen perhaps two or three at a time are swimming in massive schools. Dozens of Moorish Idols, schools of deep purple tangs, so dark they look black until you get up close, parrotfish in clusters, munching on the coral, bright, powder blue tangs, yellow-masked angelfish, countless butterfly fish, wrasses, triggerfish, pufferfish and even bright blue starfish that crawl slowly over the reef. The deep blue depths are filled with myriad triggerfish, angelfish, clownfish and hundreds of others swimming slowly along in the current. There are huge schools of fish that I have only previously seen in books or aquariums back in the States. In fact there are so many fish that just last month a survey done not far from here [discovered eight new species of fish][1]. +<img src="images/2019/8085433850_02945f3746_o.jpg" id="image-1919" class="picfull" /> And I just drift along, occasionally kicking to slow down. Drift snorkeling is like watching fish float by the window of an underwater train. When something catches my eye, like a massive, meter-long lobster tucked back in a small cave of jagged limestone and red brown coral, I kick as hard as I can simply to stay in place and watch. -[<img class="postpicright" src="[[base_url]]2011/scuba_nusa_lembongan2_ccFlickr.jpg" alt="Fish and reef off Nusa Lembongan, Bali. Image by Ilse Reijs and Jan-Noud Hutten, Flickr" />][5]All too soon it is over. I am too amazed by what is without a doubt the best snorkeling I've ever done to even ask if we can do it again. Only some time later, as the boat rounds the corner of Lembongan and begins the treacherous journey back through the seaweed farm shallows, does it occur to me that perhaps we could have asked for another drift. But by then it is too late, and perhaps it would be too greedy, too much all at once, to do it twice in a row. +All too soon it is over. I am too amazed by what is without a doubt the best snorkeling I've ever done to even ask if we can do it again. Only some time later, as the boat rounds the corner of Lembongan and begins the treacherous journey back through the seaweed farm shallows, does it occur to me that perhaps we could have asked for another drift. But by then it is too late, and perhaps it would be too greedy, too much all at once, to do it twice in a row. I am, however, a greedy person, so the next day I signed on to another snorkeling trip, this time out to Manta Point to see the namesake Manta Rays. This time it's a much longer boat ride all the way around to the southern shores of Nusa Penida. Contrary to what you might think, the waters of Indonesia are not particularly warm, so long boat rides mean a lot of chilly salt spray, and, despite the name, I was not optimistic about our chances of seeing any Manta Rays. But I was wrong. -When we arrive there are a half a dozen of the huge creatures, with their massive rippling wings, circling around a cove, surrounded by shear limestone cliffs. The water is rough, three foot swells blow in from the south, breaking against the cliffs, but in spite of the slight murkiness, it's impossible to miss the Manta Rays. Mantas are massive things, more than a meter across and at least as long, they don't so much swim as fly, slowly flapping their wings through the water with a sense of timing and grace that few animals possess. There is something hypnotic about their movements. +When we arrive there are a half a dozen of the huge creatures, with their massive rippling wings, circling around a cove, surrounded by shear limestone cliffs. The water is rough, three foot swells blow in from the south, breaking against the cliffs, but in spite of the slight murkiness, it's impossible to miss the Manta Rays. Mantas are massive things, more than a meter across and at least as long, they don't so much swim as fly, slowly flapping their wings through the water with a sense of timing and grace that few animals possess. There is something hypnotic about their movements. Once again I simply floated, bobbing about on the surface of the sea, beaten around a bit by the swell, while the mantas rather gracefully swam through, under and around us, like some proud eagles investigating these curious new onlookers. The rays themselves are so massive, so foreign in shape that it takes some time to come to terms with them. You think at first that they have no eyes. Or no eyes where you might think there should be eyes. Their bodies are black and it is difficult to make out the eyes -- which are also black -- amidst the darkness of their skin, but then some ray of sunlight breaks through the choppy water and you see the unmistakable glint of a dark eyeball, not at all where you thought it might be and then it dawns on you that they have been watching you all this time, never doubting for a moment where your eyes are. And then the way they have been swimming, the curious pattern of back and forth, becomes clear and you realize these are not simply fish, but something else, something very curious, inquisitive even. They swim at you head on, slowing as they approach, as if they are perhaps near sighted and need a closer look at your floating form, and then they dive about three feet down and slide under you. Once they are clear of you they turn around and repeat the process. Sometimes I dive under them, watching from below as their vast white bellies move overhead, white wings beating slowly, rhythmically through the water. -[<img class="picfull" src="[[base_url]]2011/mantaray_by_Motoya_Kawasaki_Flickr.jpg" alt="Fish and reef off Nusa Lembongan, Bali. Image by Motoya Kawasaki, Flickr" />][4] +<img src="images/2019/131911626_e18dfa9045_o.jpg" id="image-1918" class="picfull" /> Mantas are creatures of great grace, they move with poise, like underwater dancers, slowly flapping their way through the depths. If you ever have opportunity to swim with mantas don't pass it up there is little else in the world like it. @@ -78,15 +54,4 @@ After a half hour or so with the Mantas we head back, stopping off at Crystal Ba We spent a mere four days on Lembongan, but in hindsight it was worth much more. In fact, we should probably still be there, since where we went afterward was truly awful, but that's traveling, you never know what's up around the corner -- sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, you never know until you arrive. I feel lucky to have enjoyed Nusa Lembongan and its neighbors while I had the chance. -<span style="font-size: 90%; clear: both; display: block; border-top: #333 1px dotted; padding-top: 8px;">Note: Sadly, I don't have a waterproof camera, so all the underwater images above were taken by others. The school fish along the shelf and the flish in the coral are both by [Ilse Reijs and Jan-Noud Hutten, Flickr][2]. The blue starfish image comes from [Stephane Bailliez, Flickr][3] and the manta ray image is by [Motoya Kawasaki, Flickr][4]. All are reproduced under the fair use provision of U.S. copyright law.</span> - -[1]: http://bit.ly/kTfvMS - -[2]: http://www.flickr.com/photos/39891373@N07/4163166033/ - -[3]: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sbailliez/4826601501/ - -[4]: http://www.flickr.com/photos/the_road_ahead/131911626/ - -[5]: http://www.flickr.com/photos/39891373@N07/4177198655/ - +<div class="footnote"><p>Note: Sadly, I don't have a waterproof camera, so all the underwater images above were taken by others and are credited beneath the image. Many thanks to those who share their images under a creative commons license.</p></div> diff --git a/published/2019-03-03_cascarones.txt b/published/2019-03-03_cascarones.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..e4caf41 --- /dev/null +++ b/published/2019-03-03_cascarones.txt @@ -0,0 +1,44 @@ +The weekend before Ash Wednesday is Carnival, marking (roughly) the beginning of Lent. Lent is an odd duck to me, but then all the various religions growing out of the Arabian deserts are odd ducks to me. + +When faced with deprivation, followers go on a spree of excess, which is considered a sin, but then you can "repent" and all is magically forgiven regardless of the consequences of these actions in this life. Never mind that this files in the face of the actual experiences of life, in which all actions most definitely have consequences. + +<div class="cluster"> +<span class="row-2"> +<img src="images/2019/2019-03-01_194955_around-sma.jpg" id="image-1883" class="cluster pic66" /> +<img src="images/2019/IMG_20190313_160556555.jpg" id="image-1882" class="cluster pic66" /> +</span> +</div> + +On one hand I think this idea that you can do whatever you want and later be absolved is the source of most of what's wrong with western culture. It's the source of our environmental and social problems and I think in hindsight will be seen as the bit of philosophy that landed us in history's dustbin way ahead of schedule. + +On the other hand, who doesn't love a big party in the streets? + +Unfortunately, just as Candelaria fades the further you go north, Carnival seems to fade the further north you get from Brazil. Which isn't to say Mexico doesn't celebrate at all -- by most accounts Mazatlan is the place to be for Carnival -- but here in San Miguel de Allende it's been reduced to día de los cascarones, or day of the confetti eggs. + +It's good fun for the kids anyway. + +Cascarones are eggs that have been drained and filled with confetti. Or glitter or flour. They're colorfully painted, cost less than 50 cents a dozen and exist primarily to smash on someone's head. What's not to love? + +<img src="images/2019/2019-03-03_132215_around-sma.jpg" id="image-1888" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2019/2019-03-03_131708_around-sma.jpg" id="image-1887" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2019/2019-03-03_131001_around-sma.jpg" id="image-1886" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2019/2019-03-03_130919_around-sma.jpg" id="image-1885" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2019/2019-03-03_130327-1_around-sma.jpg" id="image-1884" class="picwide" /> + +Aside from a few vendors hawking giant crepe paper flowers, some glittery masks, and various hand-made puppets to tourists, the only other sign of anything happening in relation to Carnival was the indigenous dancers. One night I took the girls up to the Jardin to watch the drumming and dancing. + +<img src="images/2019/2019-03-01_192918_around-sma.jpg" id="image-1889" class="picwide" /> + +Most of the dancing groups we've seen quite a few times at this point, but there was one that was new to me who had drumming punctuated by machetes clanking like cymbals, by far my favorites from a musical point of view. + +<img src="images/2019/2019-03-01_194357_around-sma.jpg" id="image-1890" class="picwide" /> + +The dancers all wore white outfits with red fringing and large feather head dresses. They would dance in a circle and then at some point in the rhythm, form up into two lines of four or five people all facing each other. The footwork moved with the drums, but the hands then clanged the flat side of the machete blade against that of the partner opposite them. The line then shifted and everyone lined up with a different person and the melody and rhythm repeated. When they reached the end of the line they broke into a circle again. + +<audio controls="" preload="auto"> + <source src="https://live.luxagraf.net/media/audio/2019/sma-dancers-cascarones-machetes.mp3"> + <source src="https://live.luxagraf.net/media/audio/2019/sma-dancers-cascarones-machetes.ogg"> + Sorry, your browser does not support audio in HTML +</audio> + +The kids loved everything about día de los cascarones so much they dragged me back up the next morning to see if there was anything still happening. There wasn't. No one's kidding about the "día" part, but we did get to see the entire square in the Jardin covered in flour, evidence that the night before had gotten considerably messier after we headed home. diff --git a/published/2019-03-17_around-san-miguel.txt b/published/2019-03-17_around-san-miguel.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..55fda94 --- /dev/null +++ b/published/2019-03-17_around-san-miguel.txt @@ -0,0 +1,44 @@ +Last week I was walking up from the bus station when I happened across my favorite of the indigenous dance groups that come into town, dancers luxagraf readers might recognize -- a group that turns out to be called La Sagrada Familia. There's no [machetes](/jrnl/2019/03/cascarones), but they have the best drummers, best costumes, and best dancing in my opinion. + +<img src="images/2019/2019-03-17_164530_random-parade.jpg" id="image-1894" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2019/2019-03-17_164550-1_random-parade.jpg" id="image-1895" class="picwide" /> + +They were on a narrow side street, dancing between a line of cars and the brick and plaster facades of houses. It was a tight space, not great for photos, but with no more than 20 or 30 people sitting around watching. This was the closest I'd been able to get to them. In the Jardin they're always surrounded by a crowd at least three people deep. + +Thanks to the concrete confines of the street the drums were more than sound, they hit me in the chest with vibrations I could feel from my ribcage to solar plexus. It was a more intimate and intense experience in the narrow street than anything I'd seen in the Jardin. + +Vibrations are an important part of many ceremonies. As anyone who's spent a good bit of time either vibrating with their voice or sitting in front of something that vibrates your whole body can tell you, it has profound effects after a while. + +This is probably best known as a negative thing, as in the PTSD many soldiers get from being too close to too many explosions. The shock waves have [permanent and lasting negative effects](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/10/us/ptsd-blast-waves-research.html). But there are more positive effects to vibration when it arrives in smaller, saner doses. The effect is similar, just lower dosage you might say. This is why rhythmic chanting and other ways of vibrating your own body are so often a part of religious ceremonies -- they are a quick and easy way to change brain states (among other things). + +<audio controls="" preload="auto"> + <source src="/media/audio/2019/drumming-san-miguel-la-sagrada-familia.mp3"> + <source src="/media/audio/2019/drumming-san-miguel-la-sagrada-familia.ogg"> + Sorry, your browser does not support audio in HTML +</audio> + +I sat in the middle of the street and watched them dance their way up and down in a slow looping ellipse, feeling the drums vibrate inside me while the dancers' foot work, with ankle rattles attached, filled the mid tone space, and hand held shakers hissed in at the high end of the rhythmic scale. It was a wall of percussion that all fit together, making something larger than the sum of the parts. + +<img src="images/2019/2019-03-17_164508-1_random-parade.jpg" id="image-1900" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2019/2019-03-17_164412-1_random-parade.jpg" id="image-1899" class="picwide" /> + +I'm still not sure what the occasion was, or why they were in town. It was the weekend of Benito Juarez's birthday, which could have been the reason. Earlier in the day there was a parade just up the street from our house, which also could have had something to do with Juarez's birthday, though it looked more like Halloween than anything. + +<img src="images/2019/2019-03-17_151248_random-parade.jpg" id="image-1897" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2019/2019-03-17_151224_random-parade.jpg" id="image-1896" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2019/2019-03-17_151351_random-parade_DJKtl9d.jpg" id="image-1898" class="picwide" /> + +Sometimes there's no discernible reason for a parade. Even the locals standing on the street around us seemed a little mystified by it all. Or perhaps that was annoyance since the parade held up all the buses headed out of town for a good hour or so. On the weekend many people just want to get the market, get their food for the week, and head home. Damn the parades. + +But they're Mexican, so they waited patiently, with almost no outward sign of irritation, certainly not anger, though, if Octavio Paz is correct, there might be plenty of irritation and anger behind the public mask. + +I'm not sure if Paz is right, sweeping general statements about an entire culture have severe rounding errors, nor an I sure that keeping everything behind a mask is a good thing. Anger has its place, it's a natural, common human emotion. Still, I do admire the Mexican ability to keep it in check, especially in one particular circumstance I encounter nearly every time I head out the door - northerners behaving badly. + +There's no shortage of bad behavior by northerners around here, but Mexicans never confront it. At least as far as I've seen. That is a choice after all -- confronting and complaining about the things you don't like. It's one I generally choose, but you can also choose, as my neighbors do, to ignore it all. Or, as I suspect, to store it up for gossip in the evenings, when everyone comes out into the streets to gather around the grills and cookers to eat, gossip, and laugh. My Spanish isn't good enough to say for sure, but I suspect some of this talk is all the crazy and annoying things that gringos did in the neighborhood that day. + +Or maybe I'm wrong. Maybe Paz is wrong too. It's impossible to know as an outsider, and even when you're an insider, part of the culture, can you speak for everyone? We like to sort the world, to group individuals together by common traits, behaviors, beliefs. Sometimes there do seem to be currents of thought and idea running common among us, the backbeat of our dreams perhaps. Other times though those who would speak for all of us are really speaking of themselves, for themselves. Sometimes I think we'd all be better off if more of spoke only of ourselves, for ourselves without assuming anyone else thinks, feels, or dreams the same. + +> Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide-awake. But this wide-awake thinking has led us into the maze of a nightmare in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason. When we emerge, perhaps we will realize that we have been dreaming with our eyes open, and that the dreams of reason are intolerable. And then, perhaps, we will begin to dream once more with our eyes closed. <cite>–Octavio Paz</cite> + + +I was walking up from the bus station when I happened across my favorite of the indigenous dance groups that come into town. There's no machetes but they have the best drummers, best costumes, and best dancing in my opinion. diff --git a/published/2019-03-27_visa-run.txt b/published/2019-03-27_visa-run.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..1ce566b --- /dev/null +++ b/published/2019-03-27_visa-run.txt @@ -0,0 +1,42 @@ +I'm not aware of another country with a tourist visa process that's as simple and generous as what Mexico offers. You show up at the border, you get six months in the country. Cross over the border, come back, another six months. I've met people who have been doing this for years, which is silly really because getting a resident card is about as simple as it gets too. + +We recently reached the end of our six month visa, and the end of bus storage situation, so we headed back to Dallas for a week to visit family and move the bus to a new storage location. + +Our travel day started about 5 AM. It was a strangely foggy morning, the world muted and blurry at the edges. We walked a mile or so down to the bus station in San Miguel and caught a bus to Mexico City. The age of the chicken bus is long past in Mexico, or at least the necessity for it, these are smooth sleek buses far nicer than the plane we'd be on later in the day. + +<img src="images/2019/2019-03-19_082151_visa-run.jpg" id="image-1891" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2019/2019-03-19_083132_visa-run_DFykicY.jpg" id="image-1929" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2019/2019-03-19_095109_visa-run_WeIB7P2.jpg" id="image-1930" class="picwide" /> + +We made it to Mexico City around noon and caught a cab across the city to the airport. We made an amateur mistake in not eating at the bus station and had to settle for some pretty awful airport food, but it passed the hours before our flight at least. + +<img src="images/2019/2019-03-19_165139_visa-run.jpg" id="image-1932" class="picwide caption" /> +<img src="images/2019/2019-03-19_161624_visa-run.jpg" id="image-1931" class="picwide" /> + +The flight up from Mexico City had probably a dozen kids on it, more than any flight I've ever been on which made it kind of fun because kids love everything about flying. It was a laughing, shrieking, happy kind of flight. And it was funny to watch the handful of people without kids frowning in their seats about the raucousness of their fellow passengers. + +<audio controls="" preload="auto"> + <source src="/media/audio/2019/plane-flight-to-dallas.mp3"> + <source src="/media/audio/2019/plane-flight-to-dallas.ogg"> + Sorry, your browser does not support audio in HTML +</audio> + +At first I barely even noticed it. I'm so used to kids being allowed to be, well, kids that I didn't even think about it. Mexico loves children. The only other place I've been that's as kid-friendly is India. Yesterday I was running some errands around town with the girls. We stopped to buy tortillas and the woman working at the tortilla shop gave them each a fresh warm tortilla. We went to the carnitas shop and the man working there gave them each a napkinful of carnitas to eat while he packaged up our order. And then, walking home, two random strangers handed the girls some beautiful paper flowers because... Mexico loves children. It wasn't until I got up and walked down the aisle to the bathroom that I noticed people, yes Americans, giving me dirty looks. Which was funny because our kids weren't the ones making noise. Guilt by association I guess. + +No one said anything though and we made it to Dallas, fourteen hours of travel later. It wasn't as bad as that probably sounds. + +Our kids were super excited to be back in Dallas, see their relatives and jump in the pool. No amount of warning would put them off the pool, it's going to be cold we told them. Didn't care. Until they got in the water. Then they cared. + +To their credit though they did get in. The water was 62 degrees. Both girls swam across the pool a couple times on two different days. I used to surf in the ocean in those temps (without a wetsuit) all the time when I was younger, but I've gone soft. I didn't even think about getting in. + +At one point the hot tub got turned on, which proved a much bigger hit. There was also the trampoline to jump around on and warm up. + +While we mostly played and worked, we did make a trip down to the bus to move it to it's new temporary home. + +Up until the moment we climbed in I think we were all pretty happy in Mexico. And then we got in the bus. Everything was as we left it. There was no one else around that day. We all sort of stood there looking at each other for a minute and then Corrinne said I miss our home. + +The kids ran back to their room and grabbed the toys and book and clothes they've been missing. I surveyed the batteries, crack the doghouse and looked the engine over. And then... it fired it right up. The wire fell of the ignition coil after about a minute and it died, which temporarily freaked me out until I opened the doghouse and immediately saw the problem. + +After that I had no problems driving the bus and Volvo down to a nearby RV park where we're storing them. It's not ideal, but it'll do for a few more months. The gas in the tank is near the end of its lifespan. I may have to siphon some out when we get back again. And I'll replace the plugs, filters,fluids and other bits. + +We'll give it lots of love when we get back later this year. We're considering an entirely new engine, probably a new transmission (or a rebuild of the current one), and a host of interior improvements. We might even go crazy get a refrigerator. Stay tuned. diff --git a/published/2019-04-07_koyaanisqatsi.txt b/published/2019-04-07_koyaanisqatsi.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0e7acf1 --- /dev/null +++ b/published/2019-04-07_koyaanisqatsi.txt @@ -0,0 +1,41 @@ +A twenty minute cab ride north of San Miguel, on the road to Atotonilco, there's a stand of towering mesquite trees set back up against several plowed fields. Sprawled out under the mesquite like an old hacienda is a restaurant that's at least partly aimed at kids. One of the huge mesquites plays host to a towering tree house and there's plenty of open space to let the kids roam. + +<div class="cluster"> +<img src="images/2019/2019-04-05_144501_mama-mia.jpg" id="image-1972" class="cluster picwide" /> +<span class="row-2"> +<img src="images/2019/2019-04-05_140325_mama-mia.jpg" id="image-1969" class="cluster pic66 caption" /> +<img src="images/2019/2019-04-05_152944_mama-mia.jpg" id="image-1971" class="cluster pic66" /> +</span> +<img src="images/2019/2019-04-05_144433_mama-mia.jpg" id="image-1970" class="cluster picwide" /> +</div> + +Prior to coming down here I thought of mesquite trees as smallish shrubs that occasionally, with the right blend of soil, water and light, sometimes make it to tree status. In the United States that's a fair characterization. Our mesquite are not big trees. Here they soar like oaks. + +I don't know if perhaps the trees here are a different species or if they just like it better down south. Whatever the case, the mesquite down here can grow into huge canopies of green that can shade you from even the intensity of the midday Mexican sun + +The midday Mexican sun has become more intense lately. The dry season stretches its legs and lays down across the land, pulling a blanket of dusty haze over it. I don't know where it comes from, I don't even know what it is, perhaps it's the wind out on the plains kicking up dust. Perhaps it's smog drifting up from Mexico City. Perhaps its the endless construction in town. Whatever the case it's bad enough to burn the eyes and lungs some days and anything we leave outside soon has a thin coat of dust on it. + +Between the dust, the sun, and work I've been spending more time around the house, indoors even, than I have in years. I don't like it. We get by, we have fun. Elliott and I try to get outside on the roof in the afternoons. + +<img src="images/2019/2019-03-27_172931_around-umaran.jpg" id="image-1973" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2019/2019-03-30_130141_around-umaran.jpg" id="image-1974" class="picwide caption" /> +<img src="images/2019/2019-04-26_080755_around-umaran.jpg" id="image-1976" class="picwide" /> + +Still, there have been days where I've felt like I was living in some taco-filled version of Plato's cave, watching the shadows on the walls all day. I go up to the roof sometimes after the kids are in bed and try to feel like I'm getting out into the light, but it's usually just leaving. + +<img src="images/2019/2019-04-08_194625_around-umaran.jpg" id="image-1975" class="picwide" /> + +I want open space, clear air, room to roam, a horizon to stare at, silence to listen in, rain to fall, but it never does, there will be no rain for at least another month, possibly more. + +Corrinne and the kids get out more than I do thankfully. I get to look at the pictures, just like you. One day they went to the toy museum in town. + +<img src="images/2019/IMG_20190312_114515766.jpg" id="image-1977" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2019/IMG_20190312_114705417.jpg" id="image-1978" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2019/IMG_20190312_115224249.jpg" id="image-1979" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2019/IMG_20190312_121253863.jpg" id="image-1980" class="picwide" /> + +It looked like fun, but what I enjoyed far more than I would have enjoyed the musem was seeing the kids come home and start making their own toys out of whatever we had lying around. One evening I walked down to the tienda and bought them corn husks which they used to build not just corn husk dolls but whole families with houses, canoes, tikinagans, birchbark houses, and more. + +<img src="images/2019/2019-03-07_144433_indoors.jpg" id="image-1981" class="picwide" /> + +Like all children, they're much better than us adults at playing enthusiastically with what the world has given them, regardless of what that may be. |