Location:

The Strangest Sameness [Fresno, CA]

2007-10-08T17:41:00.000-07:00

At the end of July, I left Hawaii, on my way to southern California via Philadelphia, New York, and Pittsburgh. Like all my new beginnings, it's been disorienting. I have an apartment in Long Beach, a partner in Irvine, and somehow for the last week I've found myself in Fresno and Stockton for my new job. Traveling for work, it turns out, isn't all that glamorous -- particularly when my new 'home' is mainly a storage space for suitcases and boxes. I'm most confused, though, by the lack of change that's come with changing places. The hotels are the same, give or take a kitchenette or a bathtub, and so, it seems, are the towns. The double beds all have the same cheap bedspread that implies but refuses to provide warmth; the endless strip malls offer me the same Denny's and P.F. Chang's, the same Target and Wal-Mart, the same 21-screen cineplex with the same 15 blockbusters; the sky serves up the same indifferent shade of blue; the temperature rises and falls a negligible amount. Driving back from work at the end of the day, I marvel at how well I fit into this pattern. Business casual, aging cup of Starbucks, microwave dinner and Law & Order waiting on the TV. I feel a great and irritating sympathy for contemporary photographers whose body of work is made up of large, richly colored prints of office buildings, freeway on-ramps and parking lots. Somewhere, an artist is waiting to make an 18-minute film entitled 'White cupboards on a beige wall'.

Perfect timing, then, to read some melancholy tales of the supernatural written by Isak Dinesen, known in life as Karen Blixen, a Danish aristocrat with more than a little standard-issue Scandinavian morbidity. Her Seven Gothic Tales run the gamut from a prioress who turns into a monkey, a street prostitute who is most beautiful as a skeleton, and two sisters who return to their house in Elsinore for a long-overdue reunion dinner with their dead brother. A duel and cross-dressing in Tuscany; murderous identity theft amidst a great flood in a seaside town; give them to me with a little cheese and pumpkin ale and I can flavor my studio suite enough to imagine some history into its durable patterned carpet.

How to be a tourist [Maui]

2007-01-17T11:27:00.000-08:00

This past Thanksgiving, I decided to celebrate my close proximity to that Hawaii (the one many of you still - mistakenly - think I inhabit) by spending the holiday weekend on Maui. When I'm a tourist, I always try to play 'tourist' and put some ironic distance between myself and my pat cliche vacation activities. That's why, when I booked my plane tickets and the deal-finder website offered me tickets to some lu'au, I found the idea hilarious. What better way to acknowledge the sham that is the Thanksgiving holiday than to attend a show full of greedy white folks shoving food in their face and watching 'the natives' dance? I considered it an anthropological expedition.

To the tourist, Maui is like every movie, poster and postcard representation of Hawaii. It's gorgeous and soothing. There are the palm trees, there are the white, white beaches, there's all that green lounging comfortably on the hills' mild curves, with Haleakala behind them like a raised eyebrow. Over on the west side of the island are some cliffs, if you'd like a slightly more dramatic vista; they look quite luxurious in the late afternoon sun. Maui is a great place for a holiday; the island's landscape is a soporific.

Perhaps this is the explanation for the zombie-like hordes attending the Royal Lahaina Luau on Ka'anapali Beach. When I arrived at the Royal Lahaina Resort I found myself toward the back of a very long line of people droning away and taking photos next to every palm tree and orchid - 700 people long, to be precise. I certainly wasn't expecting an intimate evening with the firedancers, but I also wasn't prepared for a night of assembly-line spectacle. Once inside the seating area, made up of long tables covered in tarp, the night's possibilities grew more discouraging; anyone who's eaten in a cafeteria knows what food prepared for 700 tastes like, but can you imagine Mai Tais for 700? After picking over my plate and downing three nameless blue beverages in quick succession, the entertainment began. The people around me went back for third and fourth helpings while nudging each other, laughing and whistling at the men and women performing onstage. Our host was a gorgeous, charismatic woman who sang, taught the children a hula, and introduced each of the 'Polynesian' performances. She did all of it with such charming contempt that halfway through the show, I was thoroughly convinced of my own smug arrogance. Drop the quotation marks, I was a tourist, and the worst kind. I left early.

The next day I woke up in the dark and headed back in the same direction for a morning snorkel at the Molokini Marine Preserve with the Pacific Whale Foundation. Out on the water, I watched Maui's western coast curve itself around me as we set off for this tiny island reserve. Several other tour operations had boats there as well, and while I always enjoy the thrill of swimming in the open ocean, and still experience that ripple of shock as the first bright colors dart below me, I couldn't shake my uneasiness from the previous night's event, and was somehow reminded of it every time a poor swimmer using various floatation devices bumped into me. What are our obligations, as visitors, to our destinations? Should we learn the culture's stories, respect them enough to expect more than a smorgasbord of coconut bras and ukuleles? Hell, should we even learn to swim? Is it really any better to take a tour with a non-profit such as the Pacific Whale Foundation, which conducts research and activist campaigns for marine life?

I was jarred out of my sense of familiarity, my notion of almost-belonging that the past year in Hilo has given me. Even as a resident, I encounter so many people who move to Hawaii for escape, for some utopian ideal, for a drastic attempt at a 'fresh start'. And there we are, at the root of my discomfort; in all of these people I encounter that part of myself.

As the morning wore on, our boat left the others and went closer to Maui's southern coast and anchored by a lava outcropping. There were maybe 30 of us in the water now, instead of 200. Paddling around, I turned my head and found a sea turtle not three feet away, swimming up to the surface for air. I looked around and soon found five more, coasting up or down, settling onto the ocean floor, elegantly tilting their fins just slightly to change direction; and I was reminded, then, of the poem 'Listen' by W.S. Merwin, who happens to live on Maui.

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridge to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water looking out
in different directions
back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you
in a culture up to its chin in shame
living in the stench it has chosen we are saying thank you
over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the back door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks that use us we are saying thank you
with the crooks in office with the rich and fashionable
unchanged we go on saying thank you thank you
with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster and faster then the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us like the earth
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is

At home on the island

2006-11-07T11:01:00.000-08:00

Hilo is a quiet town for the most part, in the sleepy island style. For the typical tourist hustle, you have to go to the western side of the Big Island, to Kona. About a week ago, I did just that with my friend K. Entering Kailua (you're forgiven for not knowing what to call this town -- Kailua, Kona, Kailua-Kona are finally all acceptable), I saw the familiar overpriced kitsch-and-sarong shops, restaurants and hotels all cramped together. And people! Suddenly I remembered words like 'throng', 'congestion'... but as much as I do miss a crowded sidewalk, that day we had another mission, to play tourists at Pu'uhonua o Honaunau, several miles south of Kailua. Pu'uhonua means 'place of refuge', and this site once offered sanctuary to criminals sentenced to death. The great wall dates back to the 1500s, and the sea turtles basking in the cove and abundance of coconut trees are lovely, but frankly the reconstructed elements -- the Hale o Keawe, which housed the bones of ali'i (chiefs) and concentrated their mana (power), and the ki'i, carved figures, seem tailored for photo opps more than any cultural edification. That said, it's a lovely park, and only $5 a vehicle, and I'm told it's the image of paradise at sunset.

The real attraction, though, doesn't cost a thing, except the price of snorkel equipment. When I snorkeled in Honaunau Bay it was the first time in over three years, and by far the best snorkeling I've ever had. When I first went underwater, I sputtered up immediately with surprise at a green sea turtle not five feet away from me. Angelfish, eels, so many other fish I couldn't identify, sea urchins punctuating the coral -- I have never been so aware of life and movement and color. All of this several feet from the beach! Right there! I'd forgotten, too, how the fish and sea life move rhythmically with the waves, and how one starts to do the same after a few minutes, unconsciously. The literal submersion lent itself to a more visceral feeling of connection than I'd found in the state park next door, as did, in a different way, the laid-back, local visitors. Visors and fanny packs were conspicously absent, as was the ubiquitous Hawaiian shirt -- just families hanging out in the shade, chatting, drinking and watching their keiki fool around on the sand. I felt like a participant in the scene rather than an observer. After nine months living here, I'm ready for the balance to tip that way.

This past weekend I did some adventuring closer to home, in the district of Puna, not even half an hour from Hilo. First up, more snorkeling in a tide pond or 'champagne pond' in Kapoho; many private properties in this area have their own geothermally heated ponds, which are crystal clear and quite calm. The pond couldn't have been more of a contrast to my Little Mermaid adventure the week before; while fish and crabs went about their business, there was no bulbous coral or dramatic colors. Instead, looking towards the bottom, I felt a deep, alert stillness. Spiked vines slipped into the water from the unmanicured land, and old palm fronds, stripped of leaves, rested like skeletons on the pond floor. The detritus revealed a green, mossy sheen when the sun rippled through the water. After the activity of my last venture into the water, the quiet felt eerie.

Driving around Puna on route 137, the coastal road, the watchful feeling remained with me. Vines roped themselves heavily around trees, weighing their branches, while larger trees towered overhead, spreading out in a canopy that shaded the bush. In many places, particularly around the former town of Kalapana (destroyed by a lava flow in 1990), the foliage has grown over lava rock. The reality of the volcanoes is unavoidable on this island; I'd had to swim around similar rocks in Honaunau Bay. Here, they frame the island -- they are its very edges -- as I saw to dramatic effect in MacKenzie State Park, where dark blue water churned itself into aquamarine as it crashed repeatedly against the black seacliffs. I've read somewhere that there are no rivers and streams in Puna, despite its lush rainforest climate, because the land is simply too new -- all the water is absorbed into the porous rock. Perhaps this is the source of the ephemeral presence that haunted me as we traveled farther down the road. I'll admit it, I was spooked. K. told me that apparently the back roads of Puna are haunted by night marchers, the ghosts of Hawaiian warriors who walk through ancient battle fields on the night of Huaka'ipo, or the 27th phase of the moon. I'm not about to endorse a ghost story, but I'm led to wonder if the youth of the land here somehow exaggerates its presence in the mind. Or perhaps my mind was preoccupied by my own ghost stories, my own origins on this island, how far away that seems now.

Double Vision

2006-06-23T21:38:00.000-07:00

I recently had my very first visitor here in Hawaii. Just about a year ago, my barrage of visitors to London was already in full swing, and I found myself a giddy tour guide and self-proclaimed 'cultural expert' as my friends and I roamed around to different theaters, exhibitions, and restaurants (you may hate British food, but there's a restaurant for everyone in London).

A visitor to Hilo, though, would be quite a different story. Although my life here has coalesced into a collection of unique and interesting people and activities, it's taken time for this city girl to get her small-town legs. Moreover, without a car, I haven't become quite the 'expert' (cultural or otherwise) I might have been after four months elsewhere. So while I was excited to show N., my best college girlfriend, my new home, I also revelled in the chance to be a tourist with her, to see the Big Island through my still-adjusting eyes. I even took a couple of days off from work for the occasion.

We revisited some places I'd been before. The lava field at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park is a completely different experience in the daytime, not only because it's much less terrifying to walk on potentially unstable lava rock formations when one has a clearly illuminated view. The many different shades of black and gray still dominated, but everywhere I saw more brilliant, unusual colors -- bright green or orange around cracks where lava had come to the surface, rust stains from iron deposits, and often a deep, shimmering blue that seemed to disappear once I fixed my eyes directly where I'd seen it peripherally a moment before. The contrast with the rich, living green of the hills just beyond the field made the terrain feel more alien, but also more bearable. The ocean stopping, or rather slowing the flow (the field grows a bit each year -- 230 hectares since 1983) on its other side was that ever-changing blue that I find equally enthralling. Watching the steam rise (and form smoke rings!) where the lava hit the water -- and then to see a perfect rainbow frame the scene, I felt as though I'd somehow led my friend into a video advertisement for Hawaii, rather than the place itself.

A couple of days before we'd gone up to Mauna Kea, the mountain where the largest ground-based telescopes are maintained, where S. works at the Visitor's Center, and where I have occasionally volunteered (mainly as an excuse to receive astronomy lessons from S.). N. and I climbed a nearby cinder cone and looked across the Saddle (as the area between Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa is known), to Mauna Loa, its long peak just rising above a blanket of clouds one usually only sees from airplanes. Nearby another cinder cone glowed a fierce red in the setting sun. Behind us Mauna Kea continued to rise to its summit, 14,000 feet above sea level. As we walked back to the Visitor's Center, we agreed (bibliophiles always) that there might not be a better place to relax for hours with a good book.

The next day N. and I drove southward, to have a look at some of Hawaii's more exotic beaches -- the rather famous Punalu'u black sand beach, home to an idyllic line of coconut trees and an equally charming tribe of sunbathing sea turtles, and the green sand beach at Ka'u, at the southernmost tip of the Big Island (and the United States, for that matter). Our walk along the southern coast turned out to be just as dramatic as our trip to the lava fields the next day. The ocean pounded the cliffs so that clumps of foam, resembling snowballs, would fly fifty feet straight into our path; the wind blew relentlessly, until N. and I both felt rather too well-acquainted with the green sand we'd been so eager to see. Opposite the ocean the landscape resembled lush farmland or, the farther we walked, some untouched savannah. I wish I could convey the way in which colors forcefully impose themselves on one's sight so often here. I can only compare it to that often-imitated moment in the 'Wizard of Oz' when Dorothy leaves the black-and-white of Kansas behind.

On the final day of N.'s visit, we decided to truly test whether we'd earned our outdoor badges, and hike the Kahaualea trail, which winds through over four miles (so about 8.5 miles roundtrip) of rainforest and opens out onto a clear view of the Pu'u O'o vent, the source of the current eruption for the past twenty-three years. I have tried to resist a constant comparison between Hawaii and New Zealand; there are many reasons it's tempting (culturally, geographically, politically) but as always I'm trying to 'make it new'. However, on this trail the comparison was overwhelming and unavoidable. Ferns and fern-trees everywhere; those lush, lacy fingers are always so calming to me, particularly when I found they were brushing my arms rather than another spider web. (I fear I may have drastically, though inadvertently, reduced the spider population of that portion of the forest.) Once we arrived in the clearing, we watched smoke rise from the vent while munching on a simple lunch of bread, cheese and oranges -- bleu cheese and pepper jack, with garlic bread, if you must know -- which seemed so much tastier if only because we'd for once really worked up the appetite.

As we made our way back through the forest, I felt so pleased to share yet another adventure with my friend. N. and I have quite literally been all over the world together (Ireland, New Zealand, France, various places in the U.S.) and it's lovely to have a friend with whom one can travel, get into uncomfortable situations, and come out with sore legs and a smile.

Well, not quite. When we returned to the parking lot we found our rental car broken into, the front windows and a back taillight broken, and most crucially, N.'s wallet and cellphone gone. Her I.D. had been in her wallet, so this posed a bit of a problem for her boarding a plane later in the day. By sheer force of will (and a few expletives) (and my cellphone), we managed to sort out the situation as best we could, and N. made her plane, thank goodness. However, our video advertisement had turned into some sort of local news expose -- 'Local hooligans scam tourists yet again'. Our naivete, our arrogance -- We're the first ones to truly see this place, and appreciate its awesome beauty! -- was snatched away. This is not just a tourist destination, it's also a place where people live perfectly ordinary lives. The Big Island is home not just to some of the most varied attractions Hawaii has to offer, it's also home to the highest poverty rate (nearly 16 percent) in the state, which itself is burdened by a cost of living about 30 percent above the national average. N. and I both work, in different ways, to ease inequality. For all I know our unwelcome guests are perfectly well off, just greedy or bored or sick of haole (white) tourists in their backyard. Either way, I've been reminded of the rosy edge my perceptions added to our adventures; how narrow that vision can be, what an incomplete picture of a place it will give. Convenient for the visitor (and I'm sorry N. lost that edge during her short stay), but if I want to call this my home, I'd better not let my island fantasies get the best of me.

For more on locations mentioned in this post:
US Geological Survey Hawaiian Volcano Observatory
Mauna Kea Observatories
Punalu'u Black Sand Beach
Green Sand Beach (A lovely anecdotal account, this one)
... And the Kahaualea trail is a bit of an open secret, so check out the guide book 'Big Island Revealed' if you want to know more. However, according to the police officer we spoke with, our experience happens there quite regularly, so keep that in mind and keep your valuables with you!

Water, water everywhere

2006-03-21T11:38:00.000-08:00

Without quite realizing it, I'm well into my second month living in Hilo. I'm still job-hunting, although I've just found out I'll be teaching a poetry workshop at the East Hawaii Cultural Center starting mid-April, which eases queasy feelings about taking less savory jobs to make ends meet. I'm proud to say that I have yet to enter the local Wal-mart, although that may change as I need to purchase a bike helmet in the near future. But people look for jobs and go or do not go to Wal-mart all over the U.S., so allow me to, as usual, rush over the minutiae of my daily life and go straight to more strange and marvelous little adventures.

A few weeks back, S. and I ventured out to Kaumana Caves with J., our future housemate. These caves are actually old lava tubes, so our hike provided the chance to survey the patterns and variations in the rock a bit more closely than I did on the lava field itself, when the main focus was to get to the red stuff. As we made our way through large and then smaller passageways, around streams and mini-waterfalls pouring through cracks in the rock (due to heavy rain), I let the boys scamper ahead to choose our path and shone my flashlight over the walls and floor.

In some places the lava was impossibly smooth, forming curved balustrades to run my hands along for balance. Often the roof of the cave was covered with thousands of tiny stone droplets, some of which grew long and curled around themselves in the manner of trimming on old Victorian houses. In case this reads like some geological pleasure-stroll, I should add that just as much, if not more, of the cave was the same jagged, razor-sharp rock I'd already encountered. By the end of the hike I sported a big gash on one leg and a fair number of lava paper-cuts on my hands, from trying to balance on the edge of the cave floor to avoid water, or squeeze through narrow spaces. Early on in the walk we encountered a 'skylight', a place where the roof of the tube had caved in or eroded, and found the inanimate black, gray, white and red covered with a coating of green -- moss, ferns, and other small plants. We followed the tubes on a seemingly random route, only to find, in what felt like a deep part of the caves, several children's toys. Peering around the corner we found an opening out to a street. We crouched and shimmied and tip-toed for nearly two hours, only to find ourselves about a ten-minute walk around the corner from the parking lot. We celebrated our good luck by spending the evening with a couple of other friends in the steam vents near Puna, not half an hour away from Hilo.

Shortly after that nighttime excursion I whisked myself off to Texas to visit my friend N., and to attend the annual AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) conference in Austin. If anything that's another post, one with a lot of exclamation points and excerpts from newly-purchased books of poetry, but when I came back from that big, flat, dry place I wanted to see water. So this past weekend, J. kindly took me on a tour of some local waterfalls. I'll just preface this by saying that it is hard to impress me with waterfalls. My boat-trip around Milford Sound occurred in the pouring rain, and I'll never forget the dozens of sheets of water, from thin streams to truly massive falls, rushing over the cliffs and trailing off into the wind. That being said, it's been raining in Hilo mostly nonstop for a couple of weeks now, and I couldn't believe the power of the water in these falls. Most of them were tea-colored from runoff, but the spray and the violent churning of the pools were impressive enough, even on a rainy day. Rainbow Falls is the best-known, or maybe just the most-visited, because it's not even ten minutes outside of Hilo, but my favorite was Akaka Falls, about a half-hour away, at the end of a drive that dives into dense, green ravines. Walking to Akaka on the short trail, I noticed a kind of fern-moss I'd never seen before covering the roots of larger fern-trees; I looked up at one point and noticed giant swaths of bamboo bowing to form a kind of dome over my head. The falls, when we reached them, were nearly invisible behind a giant drifting cloud of fog and spray -- the white water itself nearly a shadow, its sound became the focus of attention, that urgent and constant roar.

When I left New Zealand, I was terrified that I'd never feel emotionally connected to a place in the same way again. Not the people, the museums, the restaurants, but the place itself, its raw beauty that humans can never really access, only witness, because we are fundamentally irrelevant to its coming into being. It's wonderful to experience nature with a sense of privilege again, and to feel my favorite frustration: how much of this world can never be said.

Lava, or Local Color [Hilo]

2006-03-02T13:36:00.000-08:00

Is it possible to be travel-jaded? Have I burnt myself out roaming from city to country to continent over the past three years? Hawaii is strange. Hilo is even stranger. It's a small town carved out of the rainforest, which means ugly split-level houses with fences made from volcanic rock, dogs chained outside, bored out of their minds and barking at everything that moves. It also means there's a pineapple growing in my yard, right under the tangerine tree. At night the undeveloped plot of jungle next to my house seems to pulse with the rhythmic chirps of frogs -- and perhaps I'm not so jaded, as I find the sound endearing, soothing even, rather than a nuisance.

It's a small town, and has kept some small-town charm in spite of the encroaching monolith chains on its outskirts. By luck my partner S. and I found a small Thai restaurant, the Garden Snack Cafe, which definitively tops any Thai food I've ever had in my life; and huge portions to boot. And nobody was lying about the pineapple. It's great. A big charm, to this city girl, is the clean, even fragrant smell of the town. In cities, when it rains (especially in summer), the true, deep smell of the city wafts up from the pavement, and you realize how many people and their trash are living and working so close to each other. Here, when it rains -- and it rains for days and days in the winter -- I'm reminded that it's actually water falling from the sky. The ground and the air seem to breathe deeply and easily.

I'm fairly certain nobody moves to Hawaii because it's a great cultural outpost of the world. Hawaiian culture is around, and it's respected, although I've noticed that the integration of Hawaiian language into English on a daily basis appears mainly when one (white person) wants to appear as a savant or as kitsch. Looking back, I'm sure I did the same learning a few Maori words while in New Zealand, but now it seems jarring. Anyway, the reason people are here is because it's a chain of tropical islands in the middle of the Pacific -- the Great Lonely Outdoors.

My first weekend in Hilo I went on a night hike with a few people in the Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. I'd seen photos from previous hikes S. had made, but in any event I had no idea what I was in for. Old (i.e. not molten) lava is quite gorgeous -- the minerals all manifest themselves in different colors, loops and ribbons of white and silver shot through rusty gray -- and anything but easy to walk on. Essentially it's boulder-climbing, with the constant sound of crunching glass -- the lava's sharp -- and the chatting of companions to distract one from the big, silent darkness all around. Approaching the 'living' lava is a humbling experience, not just because of the workout: the terrain and the air become very hot, and a red glow appears through the cracks of the cooled rocks. Up close the lava forms alien, red-orange blobs, and makes equally alien sounds as it makes it slow progress over whats come before. It's beautiful. It's terrifying, in part because it almost seems like an extremely lazy life form, a liquid sloth, with the extreme heat emanating from it as its only warning.

To leave that place, and return to this little town which seems just perched on top of and in-between raw wilderness, is nearly as surreal as the experience of the hike itself. In a way, too, it's comforting -- we are all outsiders here; some of us have just had more time to adjust.

Adieu to Friendly Ghosts

2006-02-08T11:22:00.000-08:00

The days before I leave a place are always quiet ones, even if I'm roaming about town, taking last looks at people and places. My final few weeks in London were a bombardment of social activity, an attempt to fit in as many friends and neighborhoods and exhibitions as possible. At the same time, though, I read constantly, trying to fix my memory with books as much as experiences, and in the process forming the idea for this blog. I suppose the time of changing locations is my personal equivalent of those holidays that call for reflection and resolution.

Yesterday, despite the return of a wintry disposition to Philadelphia, I spent a good three or four hours walking around Center City, looking with that 'tourist's view' that I'd set out to explore with four months ago. What I discovered: that kind of distance is impossible for me; a context is always present. Instead of seeing the steely, indifferent high rises around City Hall; the upscale furniture stores nestled into my favorite brick row houses on Pine Street; the garish, leering grin of the sex shops on South Street, as some sort of sociological markers indicating a particular atmosphere (cosmpolitan; gritty; angry; friendly), I found myself on some kind of childhood ghost tour. Each sandwich shop and corner park called up a host of people I've lost touch with, as well as my own awkwardness standing at the fringe of their circles. I was walking, pacing the city as I used to, seemingly in the same gray light. For an hour or two it seemed possible that in fact I am the same self-conscious teenager I was when I left five years ago. I took myself to the movies at one of the Ritz cinemas, curled up on the plush seats and relished my manufactured loneliness as I watched Philip Seymour Hoffman ace the role of the selfish and troubled Truman Capote writing In Cold Blood. Nothing like the 'tortured artist' cliche to help a writer lick her wounds.

It was all terribly self-indulgent, in short, but probably a necessary part of my preparations to board yet another plane in several days and whisk myself off to a life I've planned vaguely, at best. I suppose that's what I crave, the indeterminate: that's the difference between what I used to know, and am learning to know again here in my hometown, and what I can imagine poorly and invent as I find it. At lunch today with a friend (at a place I'd never been before, incidentally, a falafel shop on 20th), I felt the temptation to 'make it new', find new ways to connect with my old self. But all this context, this history -- it makes me awkward, and uncertain. I'd rather be the sure center of a changing landscape, not just another bundled ghost-chaser wandering the brick walkways around Independence Mall.

The Spontaneous Moment [Miami]

2006-01-25T09:28:00.000-08:00

It's hard for me to find an angle from which to approach my recent visit to Miami -- not only because I can't imagine a city more different from Philadelphia, or even London, but because the contrast extended to my time spent there, my own private/public divide. The sprawling highways, the neon and Art Deco high rises, the constant presence of luxury cars never felt palpable, even when viewed from the street and not through the windshield of my friend's Thunderbird. And yet back at her apartment complex, I felt myself imposing the other side of the cliche, a sort of Southern hospitality in the casual formality of neighbors' greetings ('Hello ladies, y'all have a good day'), and a hazy resignation in the willows bending over the canal behind the building.

This is what happens when you visit a city for not even three days; it becomes the living version of your preconceptions. This was the case for Amsterdam as well, which I remember as the cold still water of its brick-lined canals and the velvet air of its coffee shops, with a few museums thrown in for good measure. In the end Rotterdam gave me a more personal view of the Netherlands, because of my limited conception of its landscape before I arrived. I imagine another city or town in Florida would have the same effect, balancing the mind's postcard-picture that Miami helped me to build.

In a hostel somewhere near Canberra, Australia, I picked up a book called The Intelligent Tourist -- I have long since put it down, somewhere equally random, and so my recollection of it is vague at best. The author, a highly educated academe of some sort, wrote with the purpose of opening the reader's eyes to the 'proper' way to travel: research an area before you arrive, learn about the local history and politics, become familiar with the literature (and the language, even in a basic sense). This knowledge should allow the educated traveler to veer off the highways of tourist traffic and explore some 'little-known gems', thus bolstering the cultural value of the journey. To varying degrees I've tried to follow his directions, as they're easy enough for any bookworm, even if in some ways they impose another kind of tunnel vision, preventing spontaneity and surprise -- but in fact most of the time I travel with an able guide, and often allow their interests to frame my view.

So, I could easily list an inventory of objects/experiences accrued during my brief stay:

~1 banana margarita
~1 hour browsing at independent bookstore (Books and Books in Coral Gables)
~1 museum visit (MOCA)
~1 bathroom stop at a swanky hotel (The Biltmore)

Etc. But that's what diaries are for. Instead I'd rather focus on that spontaneous moment that, happily, closed my visit. Having a last beer in the mild weather on J.'s balcony, I was startled out of my lethargy when she jumped out of her chair, shouting about manatees. We'd heard they made appearances in the canal, but in five months she'd never seen any, so I hadn't counted on it. But as we peered into the still, brackish water we could make out a grayish shape moseying its way into view.

This is that tricky moment -- the moment when cliche beckons again, in phrases like 'childlike wonder', 'magic creature'. Perhaps I can take a lesson from William Carlos Williams and state it plainly: We ran down to the dock after calling another friend, who joined us. We fed the manatee freshwater from a hose left there for that purpose, with some help from a more experienced neighbor who directed us in a housedress from her balcony. We threw bagged lettuce into the water, which the manatee nosed without much interest. Its mouth was like the mouth of a cow, big nostrils (and skin flaps, like eyelids, to cover them!) and whiskers. You could feel the pressure in the hose as it sucked down the water. My friend J. snapped a photo. I finished my beer and went to the airport.

Above and Below

2006-01-09T09:31:00.000-08:00

Growing up, I always thought of my city as a kind of delightful mish-mash of religious, ethnic, even socio-economic groups. This is mainly due to my attending public school, which, because of integrative busing at the elementary level, and the presence of 'magnet' schools (competitive schools which teens from all over the city could attend) at the secondary level, allowed me the privilege of asking a lot of potentially obnoxious questions (i.e., 'What's that scarf on your head?') at an age when other people are more inclined to answer one's questions than get offended by curiosity.

Living in Pittsburgh was a very different affair; my university was/is a mainly white campus, and although minority groups were active and there was no outright hostility, the 'separate lunch table' self-segregation definitely operated on the social scene. After four years there, London's diversity felt invigorating. I found myself living in a neighborhood with large Middle Eastern and Polish populations, and a short Tube ride away from any number of excellent exhibitions, retrospectives of the Great Masters alongside intelligent and informed surveys of the art and history of so-called developing countries. (This is not to say the selection process cannot itself be problematic -- take the Tate Modern's retrospective this past summer of Frida Kahlo, for example, whose renown over other Mexican artists stems as much from her sensational life and recent titillating biopic, as for her deft and unique mixture of folkloric and 'classical' techniques. Yet for those interested in alternative traditions within art, such a large and well-known space as the Tate provides a starting point, a place for awareness to begin.)

After three months back in my hometown, I see clearly that I'd mistaken my small, friendly 'melting pot' years at public school for the attitude of a city at large. These days I work in a predominantly Latino neighborhood at the edge of North Philadelphia, an area I knew only by name in childhood, and not for anything particularly desirable. And while I may stick to the main thoroughfares walking to the subway every night, I feel as much -- if not more -- of a sense of community as I do in my own neighborhood, a decidedly well-off area in the northwest part of the city. On the blocks where I self-consciously walk alone, families wander in and out of each other's houses, say hello to everyone who walks by, and on each block gather for conversation on a chosen stoop any time the winter temperatures rise a few degrees. Just before the holidays, I left the building where I work only to see two young teens egging on their adolescent pit bulls in a fight, letting the dogs grab hold of each other and then wrenching them apart, laughing at the animals' frenzied reaction. Shaken, I turned the corner -- only to see two elderly women, next door neighbors, helping each other to put up their Christmas lights.

By sharing this contrast I don't intend to imply anything other than my own blindness to a whole area of the city that I apparently 'knew by heart'. After all, why would people who don't live in this neighborhood bother to come here? They'll only find a handful of restaurants, many of which charge extortionist prices for a sit-down meal; check-cashing joints; auto repair shops; and vacant lots and condemned buildings. Not until the young and educated (known as 'hipsters' these days, not nearly as ironically as they'd like to imagine) exhaust their gentrification of the neighborhood Fishtown, farther south, will Philadelphia take a second look at this neighborhood. Until then, it doesn't really exist except on the news.

These realizations and frustrations are typical -- anyone coming from a relatively privileged background upon their initiation into social work must have them at one point or another. But with the federal holiday in honor of Dr. King next Monday, and Black History Month and Presidents' Day in February, I can't stop thinking about the boundaries that are in place -- the invisible lines we don't cross, which make the self-assigned segregation of a lunchroom seem both paltry and a sad indication of a pattern. And the city won't let me stop thinking about it. On Saturday I attended a function at the Union League, a 'patriotic social society' formed in 1862 that occupies an elegant brick and brownstone building on Broad Street near City Hall. Upon entry, I was held in the foyer by a security guard, a middle-aged Nigerian immigrant who insisted that I couldn't go further due to my 'improper attire' -- a pair of jeans. As my invitation had failed to indicate a dress code, and as my knowledge of high-society Philadelphia is in fact quite limited, I had no idea that my 'dressy jeans' would cause offense to elderly gentlemen gathered for brandy and cigars. It took the 'okay' of three managers before the guard felt sure his position wouldn't be jeopardized by making an exception, which leads me to believed that he's seen others fired for much less. Once upstairs in the Grand Ballroom, I found myself reading the Gettysburg Address, carved into one of the high oak walls, while a fellow guest gossipped that in fact women, blacks and Jews had not been allowed in the Union League until the 1980s. And this in a society 'founded to support the policies of President Lincoln'.

The next day, in a train station two blocks away from that stately instituion, I found myself gazing blankly at the neon advertisements for a new biography of Lincolnsoon to be aired on the History Channel. 'He freed four million people. But he could never free himself', read one of the slogans. Pop psychology strikes again, shrinking a monumental historical event down to one man's neuroses. Above or below the streets of Philly, our history, our awareness is always being shaped around a delicate periphery. It's easier to skirt the edges of a comfort zone than to ever truly leave it. I am amazed to find this city cold to me, fossilized, a sharp veneer surface draped artfully over so many assumptions. I have been discouraged following de Maistre's footsteps. It's time for this chapter of 'home travel' to end.

The Once and Future Past

2005-12-19T14:20:00.000-08:00

Down in caves another time, down a musée-like cavern
walls of blank rock behind panes of glass
this is supposed to be the tour of our loss
but we've forgotten, now, what animals looked like
can't see our loss. -- Alice Notley

Around the holidays and the New Year, the already constant human temptation to reflect on life and manufacture patterns and meanings tends to kick into high gear. This past weekend, I watched what seemed to me a cinematic meditation on the human attachment to the cyclical, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring, the 2003 film by Korean director Kim Ki Duk. With few words but a large, lush visual vocabulary, Spring, Summer seems to invite the detached meditation that its main character, a monk whose life we see in four stages (or seasons), strives to attain. For this alone it's worth viewing, particularly at this time of year -- the winter scenes are both the most stark and the most serene, and the monk's transformation in this 'chapter' is far more subtle. In taking the (very) long view towards self-improvement, it might also provide a welcome respite to those with a certain exasperation for New Year's resolutions. There is a temptation for my inner critic to focus on the film's narrative weaknesses (particularly the overblown, almost cartoonish aggression that frames the 'Fall sequence'), but instead I think I should treat Spring, Summer like a painting, a work of art that poses a question: How do we manufacture our own loss? And how do we address it?

I also made my second trip to the PMA since returning to Philadelphia this weekend. Making my way through the Asian art galleries, I found myself drawn to two stone panels that once decorated a tomb from about 200 AD. The carvings on these panels were simple, a few white lines on gray background -- horses chasing the wind, dragons chasing horses. As I stepped carefully on the stone paths of the Sunkaraku Tea House, I remembered many Sunday afternoons as a child when the modest architecture of the house appealed to me more than the intricate brushstrokes of the Impressionist art downstairs. How many people had visited this teahouse, how many moments had faded into the cedar, pine, and bamboo? I still experience this reverence when I come upon the unexpected sanctuary of a teahouse in a busy museum, but it's bittersweet. Perhaps, in such a place, we occasionally experience the fullness of time, how its cycles are not in fact human cycles, how places and objects endure outside of us. And if we share that experience with someone we love, it may be the most eloquent way to express our own desires for longevity, for that elusive lasting moment that doesn't fade.

We Carry Worlds Inside Us [Royal Academy of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art]

2005-10-10T12:28:00.000-07:00

During my last days in London, I attempted a sort of last-dash series of visits to some of the standard 'cultural institutions' I was sure I'd miss once I changed my status from metropolis- to just city-dweller. On one of my visits I viewed the Royal Academy of Art's newly opened exhibition on the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch, Munch By Himself. It's a solid afternoon's undertaking, filling all of the main gallery as well as the Sackler Wing upstairs, and a thorough, if fairly conventional, introduction to this man's work. The rooms ached with an innovative approach to color and line, which made the autobiographical bent of the commentary seem naive and limiting. When I exited the gallery and found myself back out in the almost overwhelming self-absorption of Piccadilly, I wandered the side streets of the area for awhile. I needed the quiet, smug dignity of the small art dealers and specialty shops, to help shake the feeling that at any moment a black taxicab might smear its color along the street as it sped by, like the flowing, engulfing hair of Munch's femme fatales.

Munch is often appreciated for his ability as a printmaker and lithographer as much as, if not more than, his skill as a painter, and in fact the images which crept into my mind again the next day, and the day after, were not the fiery women of 'Vampire' or 'The Death of Marat', but the eerie ecstacy of 'Madonna' or the bluntness of 'Self-Portrait with a Skeleton Arm', a chilling example of memento mori. These solemn images, recurring at idle moments in my memory, were happily counterbalanced by a flurry of busy, cheerful goodbyes with my friends.

I suppose it's true -- if you've lived in a Big City, and enjoyed it, smaller cities can seem a bit quaint. Driving home from Philadelphia International Airport, I felt myself slide into the person I am here, who is not so different from the person I might be elsewhere, only with a wider range of memories and local knowledge than I can claim in any other place. The familiar skyline felt like a security blanket -- a feeling I experienced again the next day when I came upon a pile of soft pretzels in my neighborhood's mom-and-pop grocery store. Instead of the stark skeleton arm, the comfortably browned pretzel. Preferably with French's mustard.

Until Friday evening, when my mother and I attended a late-night lecture at this city's premiere 'cultural institution', the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The subject? Edvard Munch, of course -- or more specifically, his painting 'The Mermaid', originally a private commission for the house of a wealthy Norwegian, which the museum has recently acquired. The accompanying one-room exhibition of several paintings and prints by Munch, chosen to highlight the development of the 'mysterious feminine' in his work, felt more careful, more attentive to the artist's oeuvre, and less to the details of his life. Among the other works hung the images which had been haunting me -- Munch's disembodied head floating over the skeleton arm, and the 'Madonna' -- ironically titled, as the woman of the painting is framed by wriggling spermatazoa and watched from a corner by a terrified fetus. The ecstacy of her pose is made ridiculous, her mythic sensuality is undermined, by Munch's calculated framing.

When I left the museum I sought out my own familiar frame, my cozy city. Instead I saw the lights of so many buildings whose names I don't know, and tried to remember what it was I thought 'mere' city-dwellers were missing.

Welcome Aboard [London]

2005-10-05T11:32:00.000-07:00

In his book The Art of Travel, Alain de Botton describes the unique approach to travel taken by an eighteenth-century French writer, Xavier de Maistre. De Maistre, who wrote two books -- Journey around My Bedroom and Nocturnal Expedition around My Bedroom -- had, De Botton suggests, 'a profound and suggestive insight': 'that the pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to'. He continues:

What, then, is a travelling mindset? Receptivity might be said to be its chief characteristic. We approach new places with humility. We carry with us no rigid ideas about what is interesting. We irritate locals because we stand on traffic islands and in narrow streets and admire what they take to be strange small details. We risk getting run over because we are intrigued by the roof of a government building or an inscription on a wall. We find a supermarket or hairdresser's unusually fascinating. We dwell at length on the layout of a menu or the clothes of the presenters on the evening news. We are alive to the layers of history beneather the present and take notes and photographs.
Home, on the other hand, finds us more settled in our expectations. We feel assured that we have discovered everything interesting about a neighborhood, primarily by virtue of having lived there a long time. It seems inconceivable that there could be anything new to find in a place which we have been living in for a decade or more. We have become habituated and therefore blind.

If, then, De Maistre and in turn, De Botton try 'to shake us from our passivity', during the next year I intend to take up their challenge. Later today I will fly to Philadelphia, returning home after living abroad for the past year. However in my case Home is a place where I haven't really lived for the past five years -- so I have a slight edge on boredom over, say, De Maistre, who after all possessed a fairly intimate knowledge of his bedroom before his adventures in 'room-travel' began.
I also don't intend to limit myself to my room, my house, or even my neighborhood, although I may undertake a few 'journeys' in those limited spaces. Instead I will focus my traveler's eye on the various curiosities, atmospheres, official and unofficial monuments throughout the city, as carefully as I have combed the streets of London this year with the idea of claiming some of it as mine. Occasionally I might write on other trips I will take or have taken in the past, to widen the view from time to time in hopes of minimizing blind spots.
In the meantime, though, I have to catch a plane.