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What Hurricane? Just another surfing day.

2011-09-18T11:25:00.000-07:00

Ditch Plains, Montauk, NY
Friday August 26, 2011

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Irene Hits

2011-09-18T11:24:00.000-07:00

Southport, CT

Sunday August 28, 2011 9am

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The Aftermath

2011-09-18T08:24:00.001-07:00

Southport, CT
Monday August 29, 2011

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Baja Surf Trip

2011-08-20T03:52:00.000-07:00

Fall 2010

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Going Low - A Journey into the Heart of South Carolina's Low Country; Spring 2010

2011-08-19T00:30:00.000-07:00

Right after you pass the steaming Volcano, the one with kids running around on it, waving putters above their heads like little Lords of the Flies. Right after the window full of beach balls and boogie boards that looks like an oversized gumball machine and the giant, neon crab blinking his claws at you… Route 17 South suddenly goes dark. This is the beginning of Brookgreen Gardens State Park - nine thousand acres of forest, meadows and gardens that act as a buffer - a sort of demilitarized zone - between the tacky, plastic free-for-all of Myrtle Beach and the quiet, natural magic of the South Carolina Low Country.

The Low Country - a sportsman’s, history buff’s, nature lover’s and culinary enthusiast’s paradise - gets its name both from its geographical location at the bottom of South Carolina, and the fact that, at zero elevation, it can barely keep its chin above water. Here the continental shelf extends offshore for eighty miles and as the deep waters of the Atlantic flow in over that shallow plateau they just keep going… inland for fifty miles in some places, creating vast waterways and tidal marshes. All of this open water and shoreline makes it difficult to identify exactly what constitutes the South Carolina Coast. It is truly easier to think of it as one big coastal area or, literally, a low country - South Carolina’s version of the Bayou.

The area is rich with Civil War and pre-Civil War history - namely forts, battlefields and plantations and just past Brookgreen Gardens, on a meandering, side road in Pawley’s Island, is Litchfield Plantation. Litchfield (1754) is remarkable not only for its beautiful restoration, but also the fact that you can stay in it. There are four rooms in the main house and many smaller houses and cottages spread throughout the property making it ideal for both romantic couples and groups of golfers. Being among the latter, I was immediately in awe of Litchfield for its Augusta National-like entry drive. I arrived at night and the white columns and huge front steps of the main house were glowing at the end of a tunnel of interwoven oaks. Bobby Jones and Clifford Roberts might roll over in their graves when I say this, but I was more impressed with Litchfield Plantation’s Avenue of Live Oaks than Augusta National’s Magnolia Lane.

In addition to its rare historic accommodations, Litchfield also has an elegant, highly-regarded restaurant, the Carriage House, but as it was late and I was alone I opted for a more boisterous, social option just down the street. Frank’s is a Pawley’s Island institution. The main restaurant was originally a grocery store run by the current owner’s grandparents. The garden and carriage house in the back have also been transformed - into an outdoor patio bar and restaurant that serves great steaks and seafood accompanied by live music and a roaring fire. I arrived alone but by the end of an exceptional gorgonzola stuffed filet and a couple of impressive glasses of Fire Truck meritage I’d made some new friends.

After Frank’s closed at midnight we headed across the street to another local favorite - the Pawley’s Island Tavern. The PIT, as it is affectionately known, is an old wooden house at the end of a sandy lane. They regularly feature live music inside, but that night there was an even more impressive act playing in the parking lot. A young fellow was sitting in the back of his pick-up truck with a lap steel guitar known as a dobro. He played so well - his metal slide flashing across the strings to keep up with his lightning fast fingers - that a crowd gathered and two other fellows grabbed their guitars and hopped up onto the truck to join him. We all raised our beers and sang along.

The next day came a little early and I got pleasantly lost trying to find my way out of Litchfield’s sprawling grounds - a kind woman painting under a bearded oak pointed her brush in the right direction. I’d come here for golf and the options are many (courses literally surround Litchfield Plantation), but I’d made a tee time at the nearby Pawley’s Plantation because I knew the back nine ran out along the marsh and I wanted to see it up close and personal. Pawley’s front nine is a very good, traditional (if somewhat uninspiring) test. A typical Jack Nicklaus design, it requires very accurate driving. But at number 13 the back nine opens up onto the marsh in spectacular fashion - a short par three with a tiny island green and views across the inland waterway to the barrier island where beach houses on stilts are silhouetted against the soft Atlantic light. From there in it is one marshy hole after another with snowy egrets and blue herons standing like statues on stick legs in the razor grass. And at seventeen you are forced to carry the marsh - from the back tees, over two hundred yards - presumably you are ready for the challenge by then. If not, there’s always the consolation of the cold, vodka-spiked iced tea called Firefly that awaits on the terrace behind the 18th green.

It’s only two hours to Charleston and once you cross over the river into Georgetown all pretension of tourism evaporates. When the road descends from the bridge it passes right between a paper mill and an iron foundry. A huge sixteen wheeler loaded with freshly hewn trees made a slow, wide right turn in front of me. From there on it is just a windows down, pine-scented cruise. Women sell handwoven baskets - a low country specialty - along the roadside as farm fields and general stores flow past in slow glory. And when they say general store here… they mean general. I stopped at the Seewee Outpost near Bull Island and was tempted to buy an ice-cream cone, a beach ball, a jug of kerosene and a box of ammo just to see the expression on the cashier’s face. But something tells me he wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow… that’s just an average daily purchase here. More than anything I wanted to buy a trucker’s hat that said, “Seewee Outpost” on it, because that’s exactly the kind of authentic local accessory that is coveted these days in hipster places like Austin and LA. I settled for a sandwich and an iced-tea (the non-alcoholic kind.)

With the Seewee Outpost barely out of my rearview mirror, Charleston arrived in surprising millennial style, its new, gleaming white Cooper River bridge rising skyward - the towers and cable stays like a modern sculpture of two hands playing cat’s cradle. It’s an interesting landmark for a town so steeped in history - this is where the first shots of the Civil War were fired. And as you drive over the bridge you can see Fort Sumpter way out at the mouth of the harbor to prove it.

I met my mother in Charleston so it was all garden and house tours for us, which might’ve been less interesting except for the fact that every house here is a living museum. We even unexpectedly found ourselves in a house in the fictional Catfish Row (really Cabbage Row) where DuBose Heyward wrote Porgy which later, with Gershwin’s help, became Porgy and Bess. As a writer, this pleased me very much and it wasn’t hard to imagine how these beautiful inner courtyards and gardens could inspire a play or a novel… they remind me of tidier versions of the houses in New Orleans’ French Quarter.

Finding a good place to eat in Charleston is difficult only because there are so many fine restaurants and everyone will recommend something different. Let me just say that my mother and I loved The Peninsula Grill in the Planter’s Inn (also one of the best places to stay) so much that we went back for a second time on our last night. The place is super fine dining with prices to match, but it is worth every penny (if you accidentally drop a crumb, its gone before it hits the table…I tried it just for fun.) The decor is European, with portraits of historic Charleston figures, white table cloths and upholstered banquettes, but it is anything but stuffy. The food is consistently well prepared - everything is seasonal so it’s hard to recommend specific dishes, but if you are lucky enough to be there when soft-shelled crabs are in season you might want to return every night for them (we had them elsewhere and they couldn’t compare.)

Of all the other places we ate I recommend High Cotton for dinner - especially the buttermilk oysters - and if it’s just two of you, request table 28 in the corner by the window where they filmed a scene from The Notebook. For a daytime snack with a view of the city go to the rooftop at the Market Pavillion Hotel (shrimp salad), for an evening drink with an even more stunning view go to the very tippy top of the Vendue Lounge and for breakfast try Toast on Meeting Street. As for my favorite Inn - stay at Two Meeting Street, a gorgeous historic mansion with nine rooms, gardens and a veranda overlooking the water out on the South Battery.

We decided to go Plantation hopping and there are three in a row about 45 minutes south of town: Drayton Hall, Magnolia and Middleton. Drayton is unique in that the plantation house itself is completely unfurnished and offers a barebones, authentic look at the modest early American version of Palladian architecture. In contrast, Boone Plantation to the north of the city goes for the full Williamsburg-style reenactment. The other two down by Drayton are known more for their gardens, azaleas in particular, and feature crowded, over-explanatory wagon tours that some people love. You know who you are. To me at least one or two of these are worth visiting just for the experience of walking around among the oaks and along the marshes - to smell the air and feel the brittle Bermuda grass beneath your feet - to get a visceral sense of where you are, something driving or walking around the city simply can’t provide.

Charleston is a peninsula - shaped a little like Manhattan with the Cooper and Ashley Rivers on either side. The two barrier islands that form the mouth of the harbor, Isle of Palms and Folly Beach, each have their own individual character. Isle of Palms in particular is worthy of a day trip - there are lots of great places to eat on the water and Sullivan’s Island is a very nice beach. But if you want to be flat out wowed, head a couple of islands further south to Kiawah Island. The drive alone is worth it - running through miles of marshes and horse farms and Oak groves. And just after you turn left off of Maybank Highway onto the road to Kiawah, you will find a dirt road on the right that leads to Angel Oak, a sprawling dinosaur of a tree whose thick wooden tentacles look like one of those fantastical old drawings of a giant squid taking down a whaling ship. The actual age of the tree is a topic of debate, but the rumors of 1500 years seem completely plausible. It is that big.

Kiawah itself is known for two things, the beach and golf, and both are in a league of their own. Kiawah is a hush-hush, super wealthy enclave of golf courses and housing communities spread out over many, many miles of islands and marsh. It is massive. If you’re driving to the Ocean Course and think you missed it, you didn’t. Keep going and try not to drive off the road as you gawk at the vistas of open water, razor grass, winging herons and little wooded islets and bleached skeletons of deadwood. The place is like an oil painting.

I discovered two ways to enjoy the beach here. One is to play the Ocean Course - an extremely sophisticated, difficult and beautiful Pete Dye design that runs right along the beach. Your (astronomical) greens fee entitles you access to the locker room (with showers) so bring a beach bag, stroll right across the practice green in front of the clubhouse to the beach after the round and if you have any legs left, hike north out to the point beyond the 5th tee. The powder white dunes, seabirds, clashing currents and solitude will erase any care (even the memory of the dozen balls you just lost in the marsh.) The other way is to have lunch by the pool at the Sanctuary Hotel. This doesn’t gain you access to the pool itself or any of the terry cloth covered lounge chairs around it, but nothing is stopping you from walking right off the pool deck onto the beach. So again, just pack a little beach bag, enjoy the day, and rinse off afterwards under the outdoor shower by the stairs that lead back to the pool. Or pay $500 for a room and join the beautiful people sunning themselves everywhere in self-confident repose.

After Kiawah I headed another two hours south to Beaufort, a town that is historically significant for being where the southern states signed the Declaration of Secession to begin the War Between the States. It is also historically significant because Sherman in his victorious and destructive march south did not burn the town so it has one of the finest collections of pre-Civil War houses in the south. It is thirdly famous for being the site of the movie The Prince of Tides, in particular the opening scene where the young boy runs and jumps off of the wooden dock into the water… that was shot on Lady’s Island just across the drawbridge from downtown.

When I drove into Beaufort in the late afternoon the tide was out in the gigantic marsh alongside Boundary Road and it was actually a frightening sight. It looked like I imagine the seabed looks right before a Tsunami strikes - an unnatural draining that reveals to the air parts of the world that are meant to remain submerged. This is the bottom of the earth. The heart of the Low Country.

This is the place to get down and dirty so I passed on Plum’s, an airy, pleasant waterfront cafe on Bay Street (highly recommended) and opted instead for Steamer Oyster and Steakhouse just over the drawbridge - a grey wooden shed of a building with picnic tables inside where they serve buckets of steaming local oysters with the mud still on them and heaping plates of Frogmore Stew - mouth popping local shrimp mixed with sausage, potatoes, green peppers and onions.

Then instead of staying in a nice guest house like the Beaufort Inn, I kept driving out towards the coast through the little town Frogmore itself (where you will find the lovely little Red Piano Too art gallery) past the fleets of Shrimp boats moored in the marsh, past the fried shrimp and oyster stands and dilapidated buildings that are being slowly reclaimed by the humidity and salt, all the way out to Hunting Island State Park where I camped right on the beach in the shadows of a dense, dark oak forest. When the surf is up here, the waves actually crash right into the forest and there are jagged, water-logged stumps sticking out of the sand where trees once stood. There is a lighthouse here to climb and miles of walking trails which are especially beautiful at night when the moonlight filters down through the dense canopy.

You can go further south and still be in South Carolina, but then you will be in Hilton Head among hundreds of golf courses and gated retirement communities and chain restaurants. If you are looking for the soul of the Low Country stop here. As much as I love to play golf, I decided not to spoil the moment. I took one last deep breath of the salt and Spanish moss and primordial marsh. Then I turned around and headed back north.

Topanga Canyon Pictures

2011-08-18T23:12:00.001-07:00

Los Angeles, Fall 2010

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One in 8 Million

2010-07-29T20:35:00.000-07:00

The New York Times has created an incredible online feature called One in 8 Million. It's a collection of photo essays that look into the lives of individual New Yorkers. The photos are accompanied by audio recordings of each of these people describing their life and their city as they see them. It is as beautiful and touching as it is fascinating and illuminating. I've chosen the story of Patrick Harris "The Boat Dweller" - a captain of sailboat in New York Harbor - to link to, but every one of the stories is special and each of you will undoubtedly have your own favorites. This is just a good place to start to get a feel for the site. Enjoy.

Click here or on the image to see New York through Patrick Harris' eyes

Cross Country Road Trip Pictures

2010-06-30T19:36:00.000-07:00

Summer 2010Click picture to see photo gallery

LA Love Letter

2010-06-29T22:01:00.000-07:00

I’ve heard it said that people who move to LA hate it for the first six months before falling in love. I think there is a lot of truth to that and I also think that loving LA is like riding a bicycle – once you learn to love it, you never forget. But I will admit that upon my most recent return after being away for a year, there was a brief moment – a couple of hours or so – when I saw LA again through fresh eyes and was shocked by what I saw.

I arrive via Virgin America Airlines –Richard Branson’s self-styled nightclub on wings. Smooth techno jazz beats and purple “mood lighting” greet us, the slow moving, mellowly hungover passengers on the 1130 am flight from New York to LA – the flight of choice for people who don’t have anywhere to be on a weekday morning. Our group is definitely better looking than those found at most night clubs – there are even two bona fide “stars” in the mix, Jeff Goldblum and Smokey Robinson, as well as several others who look like they could be someone. And the general nonchalance suggests that everyone is used to this kind of scene. I’m the only one craning my neck marveling at all the perfectly sculpted bed heads, meticulously maintained facial scruff and designer dirt bag couture (one kick ass chick is wearing a vintage 70’s “The Who Tour” T-shirt emblazoned with a Union Jack and $300 jeans that are factory-frayed and stained with patches of faux grime.) By comparison, I feel like a suburbanite poser in my Patagonia pullover, Banana Republic jeans and generic Reef flip-flops – an imposter who’s snuck over from Continental.

But it only takes a tap of my personal Virgin America touch screen to feel hip again – I fire up a hilarious Brett Dennen video and order an Absinthe that is delivered to me in seconds with a smile. Later I email all of my friends from 35, 000 ft. Richard Branson Rules! And when I reach the curb outside the baggage claim at LAX, the tables have turned and I’m the one receiving the respectful nods and smiles of admiration. Even the 6’5” blonde haired stud who looks like an NFL quarterback (but only turns out to be an ex-college basketball player) raises his eyebrows at me as he hugs his six foot blonde model wife beside their black Mercedes. This is because my ride comes roaring up to the curb – a giant, boxy 1980’s Toyota Landcruiser with surfboards piled on the roof - piloted by my friend Linnea, a twenty three year old green-eyed, blonde-haired hippie/surfer girl in billowing, rainbow-colored jodphur pants she bought in Paris (apparently the next big thing) and an equally colorful silk headband and tank top she designed herself. Take that Jeff Goldblum!

We bounce down Imperial Avenue into North Manhattan Beach and the first thing out of my mouth is, “God this place is a shithole!” Smogstacks belch brown clouds into the air, chemical tanks crowd the shore next to the beach and tankers deposit fluids into mysterious pipes just offshore. But the surfers and sun tanners are oblivious to it all and soon I feel the soft glimmer of sunlight on the Pacific begin to work its magic (or is it the cold Coronas?) and I’m mellowing into LA mode – becoming one with the grunge, embracing my inner dirt surfer. The Mexican family swimming in their blue jeans and blasting mariachi trip hop next to us and the ultimate fighter training for his next bout by beating an old tire with a weighted sledgehammer begin to feel less like acts in a bizarro circus and more like members of my long lost LA family.

Later, we’re back on the road heading north up Lincoln Blvd through the Marina into Venice and I’m thinking this place is like Nicaragua or Mexico City. Its “Third World LA,” a giant refugee camp where most of the refugees just happen to have money, a war zone of pawnshops, check cashing parlors and fast food chicken joints. I see two tanned, fit cyclists pedal past a stumbling homeless dude with hair and clothes so greasy he looks like he’s been camping in the drain at Jiffy Lube. But without skipping a beat he steps politely aside and waves the cyclists past because they inhabit the same world, they probably even go to the same parties. I’m betting he has a greasy wadded up headshot somewhere on his person. Wait... didn’t that guy play Jamie Foxx’s buddy in The Soloist?

But before I can be sure he’s lost in the crush as Linnea muscles the Landcrusier across six lanes of bumper-to-bumper traffic onto Pico and then merges onto the Pacific Coast Highway where we are greeted again by that soft hypnotic glimmer spreading out towards Japan like a silk kimono with the purple silhouette of the Santa Monica Mountains dyed onto it. I smile and say, “I love this place.”

Our destination for the night is Topanga canyon – LA’s version of “the country.” Topanga is a steep, sparsely populated valley on the backside of Pacific Pallisades, a yuppified hippie enclave where rusted El Camino’s share driveways with shiny new Volvos and tin lean-tos share oak shaded hillsides with ornate multistoried treehouses that look like they’ve just been helicoptered in from Laurel Canyon. We stop for dinner in “town” at a cute little Mexican restaurant called Abuelita’s. There is a posse of distinctly local looking dudes (tattooed arms, Dickies clam diggers, trucker’s hats, Vans, wallets chained to their belts) ponied up to the bar drinking Tecates. They turn in unison and look us up and down. Their blank stares give no clue as to what they think of us, but its my guess that we’re nothing special, just two more LA mutts who’ve temporarily escaped from the concrete kennel.

The food is good – there is so much good Mexican food in LA that “excellent” is not a word one tosses around lightly and sometimes the best is found in a roadside burrito truck in East LA, but Abuelitas will not disappoint. The portions are huge (Linnea’s burrito looks like a football), the salsa is spicy and delicious, and the atmosphere is second to none. The outdoor patio sits in a dry arroyo (creekbed) under a canopy of thick, snaking California live oaks.

As we sip Margheritas a little dark shape darts across the deck and I see the unmistakable bald tail of a rat sticking out from behind the waitress station. Then Mr. Rat is joined by Mrs. Rat and they happily share a corner of tortilla. I ask our waitress if the rat’s have names and she says, “No, but you’re welcome to name them.” Then she adds, “I can’t figure out if they’re mice or rats.”

I give her one of those “What you talkin’ bout Willis?” expressions. I’ll grant her, they are small rats, but I’ve never seen a long, lean, eight-inch mouse before. To be diplomatic, we decide they are “micerats” a special, cute Topanga breed that is unlikely to be carrying the bubonic plague. And in the spirit of “Ratatouille” we call them Mole and Tinga (though I have a sneaking suspicion that Chimichanga, Flauta and Empanada and the rest of the gang are right around the corner.)

Topanga’s roads are hard enough to navigate in the daylight. Now we’re powering the Landcrusier up Old Topanga Rd in the margherita tinted darkness with an impatient Mercedes tailgating us relentlessly like he’s trying to get to the party before the coke runs out. We’re looking for number two thousand something and after rounding a sharp bend it suddenly appears, the numbers painted on an old, weather beaten surfboard nailed to a tree. The steep gravel drive brings us up onto a saddle overlooking an expansive mountain valley terraced with little private gardens. The peak above us is crowned with exposed granite spires that exude silent druidic energy in the soft moonlight. A far cry from the glass condo towers of Santa Monica.

Our home for the night is a silver Airstream trailer that my friend Dewitt is in the process of transforming into his home away from home (it’s an LA thing to have a second “beach” or “mountain” house minutes away from your primary “city” residence.) For now it’s a primitive dwelling, the lone amenities a beautiful deck overlooking the valley and a clay chiminea we’ve been instructed not to use because of fire hazard. Instead I hammer out a blues tune on an old nylon stringed guitar and we dance under the stars, the distinct glow of LA emanating from behind the steep mountains to the south. Its no wonder this place is the movie capital of the world. Here we are minutes from Studio City, Hollywood and Santa Monica and I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if a surly Clint Eastwood stalked down the hillside with poor bedraggled Sister Sarah and her mule in tow.

The rooster next door needs hypno-therapy, his inner rooster clock is all messed up. I don’t know if it’s a bunch of drunk teenagers racing past with their high beams on or the glow of the city over the ridge, but at 3am he’s convinced its dawn and crows every ten minutes until the actual dawn 3 hrs later. I might’ve have dozed off then but a herd of goats has wandered into the garden and is being shooed loudly away by our barefoot neighbor and her dingo-looking herd dog. I give up and take a freezing “sunshower” (a black rubber bag hanging from a tree with a hose attached to it) in the fog.

By noon the sun has kindly beaten back the June gloom and I’m back in Venice Beach where the Saturday crowds are out in full force (What is it with Mexicans swimming in jeans?) My friend Dewitt and I are coasting down Speedway (the alley behind the boardwalk) on beach cruisers and being the gracious host (cough) he’s hogged the bike with the surfboard rack so I’m holding onto my nine foot longboard for dear life, nearly mowing down tourists and taking the mirrors off of cars at every turn.

The water is surprisingly warm, seventy plus degrees, and everybody is “trunking” it (their wetsuits retired for the summer.) The two-to-three foot surf is just enough to keep us all happy and we are in and out of the water for session after session – Dewitt’s friends are a group of cocky Venice surf cowboys clowning around riding fin first and hanging ten on the tiny, crumbling waves. On the way home I manage to snake the bike with the rack and feel that old tingle of local pride as people turn and smile as I pedal past. They are so focused on the unusual sight of a nine-foot board attached to the side of a bicycle that they don’t notice the blinding white, Connecticut golfer’s tan I’m trying desperately to get rid of.

I’m trying to make up for a lost year in less than a week so I’m switching friends faster than substitutions at a roller derby. Now I’m with Nicole and we’re pedaling down Abbot Kinney (Venice’s bohemian chic main drag) towards the absolute hottest new restaurant on the West Side: Gjelina. Part of Gjelina’s appeal is its secluded outdoor patio (surprisingly a rarity on the west side), but the food is also fantastic by any standard. Its one of those modern fusiony places that mixes far-flung ingredients to great effect, like Escarole, sunchokes (a radichey kind of thing), smoked almonds and fresh lemon juice (as in the “Escarole and Sunchoke Salad) and squid, potato, shaved celery and salsa verde (as in the “Grilled Monterrey Bay Squid.”) We also have Lamb Sausage Pizza and Prince Edward Island Mussels in a somewhat traditional tomato and white whine broth.

This kind of menu can either be really bad or really good. Gjelina is inspired, earning them a quick fanatic following that results in a dining first for me: Nicole and I are asked mid-meal if we wouldn’t mind moving. I don’t think we really have a choice, but it’s nice of them to “ask.” Apparently our two-top in the center of the patio by the fire is an especially desirable table and we’re not really bothered since we’re now anxious to see who’s usurped us. Dennis Hopper? Julia Roberts? Susan Sarandon? (all west side locals.)

When it turns out to be two twenty-something guys in overstarched dress shirts who sit in nervous silence like they’re on a first date, I give Nicole (who runs a big deal graphic design firm right around the corner) a dirty look and say, “You got moved for them?”

She shrugs and smiles, “You never know, they could be somebody.”

We’re still in our beach clothes and on the bikes again, our sand wedgies soothed by three glasses of Cabernet. We race to catch the sunset at a loud, mixed bag of a beach bar, an airy second story glassed-in patio called “The Whaler” right above the boardwalk. Its one of the few places where you can see the sun go down in all its glory – they even ring a bell when the last solar flare disappears into the sea (in the winter) or mountains (in the summer.) But LA can’t decide what season it is today and a slight purpley gloom has crept back in. The gloom is beautiful in its own stark way, casting everything in shades of grey and turning the water into molten silver beyond the silent, shuttered lifeguard towers.

The people watching in LA is flat out second to none. People come here just to people watch and the Whaler is like an executive box overlooking the action at the junction of Washington and the boardwalk. This is not the Ivey at lunchtime, if there’s any olive chomping or name-dropping going on its lost in the beer soaked din. Venice Beach is full of up-and-comers, down-and-outers, behind-the-scenesters – it’s a college town for people who aren’t in college anymore or never were.

A pack of sorority girls who’ve traded their Greek letters for some hyphen-named Ad agency come bounding around the corner. They’re probably thirty-something, but their indie-designer dress and buoyant gait, the way they flip their hair and smoke cigarettes after spending an hour at the gym screams youthful defiance. And what the hell... thirty’s the new twenty, right? They think nothing of stopping to dole out a smoke to a tattooed, dreadlocked beach rat who hops Starsky-style out of a jacked up convertible Bronco. And the Chinaman sweeping the stoop of his Beach Bauble Emporium in the background thinks nothing of the whole crazy, colorful scene unfolding around him. He’s sold enough Lakers’ hats and superhero beach towels for one day and now he’s pulling the metal, graffiti-covered security door down on the darkened racks of two-for-one t-shirts and rubber flip-flops.

Venice is hovering in that wonderful bohemian half-light between destitution and gentrification, that fragile fusion of originality and consumerism where the soul still flickers in the fabric even as it hangs in the window with a price tag on it. Venice has emerged from the Dogtown days with a skateboard tucked under its arm, only now instead of poaching empty swimming pools and terrorizing Main Street in cut off jean shorts, the new generation of helmeted, knee-padded groms will be grinding a multi- million dollar skate park all decked out in Quicksilver and Vans. Likewise the surf scene has grown from territorial gangs of dare devil short boarders to include an equal amount of Patagonia-clad newbie longboarders. But the rollerskaters still boogie to disco down on the boardwalk, muscle beach comes to life every now and then in full oiled, Arnold- style spectacle and the nightly drum circle brings out every dumpster-diving soul leftover from the last Grateful Dead Tour.

The meeting of these two worlds unfolds operatically right before our eyes when a swarm of yellow Lifeguard rescue vehicles descend on the drum circle to resuscitate a drunk, homeless guy who’s passed out in the sand. The young tanned, square-jawed lifeguards lift him carefully into the back of a truck, take his pulse and shine a pen light into his eyes. All the while, hundreds of drummers continue to create their neo-tribal cacophony – a fevered syncopation of leather, wood and metal. On the edge of the swaying mob, the red lights of the emergency vehicles turn silently and the hobo nods solemnly to the lifeguards’ questions. I can’t hear them but I imagine the conversation going something like this:

“Have you swallowed anything suspicious or potentially poisonous in the last couple of hours?”

“Just a bottle of Southern Comfort.”

“An entire bottle of Southern Comfort?”

“Yes.”

“That’s a potentially lethal dose.”

“Good. I want to die.”

“Nobody’s dying today buddy. The ambulance is on the way.”

I’ve only been back in LA for a couple of days and my mind is already working like a copywriter. I’m seeing the whole thing as a Republican attack ad that ends with the single punchline: “Your tax dollars hard at work.”

And then I’m thinking, why would a homeless guy want to kill himself in LA anyway? This place is like the homeless Club Med. There are showers every couple of hundred yards along the beach and the grassy, palm tree shaded bluff overlooking the ocean in Santa Monica is a perfect place to park your shopping cart and sleep off a hangover. Plus there are bazillion gullible tourists to fleece for dollars and a sympathetic police and medical force. In fact, with the price of west side hotels rivaling a month’s rent in most places, I’m considering the homeless option myself. But there’s really no need to find a place to sleep tonight because there are dance parties or “raves” happening all over downtown.

Downtown LA is bit of a misnomer in a city that’s really a collection of small towns, each with its own town center (Brentwood, Pacific Pallisades, Venice, Santa Monica, Hollywood, Los Feliz, Culver City, etc.) and most of the people I know don’t even work anywhere near downtown and only go there to see the Lakers or Dodgers. But the character of downtown (originally El Pueblo de la Reina de Los Angeles: The Town of the Queen of Angels) is well suited to a city with an identity crisis. Situated at the nexus of the 10, 5 and 101 freeways, it’s odd mixture of government, business and culture is manifested in a mishmash of architectural styles – the stone edifice of City Hall, the gleaming glass and steel towers of Bank of America and Wells Fargo, Frank Gehry’s Picasso-esque Walt Disney Concert Hall and miles of warehouses in the huge fashion and jewelry Districts. City officials and real-estate developers apparently see downtown as a crucible for utopian urban planning and are nurturing a sort of bohemian resurrection, converting warehouses to residential and retail space and planning a huge park on Grand Avenue modeled after the Champs-Elysee. In seeming self-mockery downtown is also home to the world’s shortest railway: the Angel’s Flight – a one minute ride from Bunker Hill down to the business district. All of the other tracks that once criss-crossed the city were torn up to make way for the automobile and eventually bestow LA with it’s one unifying trait: horrible traffic.

But it’s past midnight and the highways are empty. We zoom from one swooping highway ramp to another and eventually exit into a non-descript commercial district somewhere east of downtown. Utopia is still on the drawing board and there is plenty of warehouse space available for BIG parties and I know of at least four going on tonight featuring world class DJs including our friend Harvey who is spinning the latest version of his famous “Sarcastic Disco.” Given recent events, it’s billed as a quasi Michael Jackson tribute, but ends up being more like Studio Fifty Four in its heyday. The hipsters gathered on the sidewalk look totally out of place in these generic surroundings, but a steep narrow staircase delivers us up into a series of creatively lit rooms – the dark dance floor is splashed with swirling droplets of silver light reflected from a disco ball and the bar glows a deep sensual red. Labyrinthine green hallways lead to bathrooms and quiet corners where young couples escape to “make out.”

There is a festive communal vibe to the whole thing, Dewitt knows half the people in the room and as the hours pass and the music deepens – throbbing funk bass lines, clattering techno backbeats and uptempo disco melodies – we become a single harmonious mass flowing in the strobing darkness, tethered to the lights of Harvey’s three turntables. The party continues uninterrupted right through the night and it’s quite a shock when we stumble out of the dark, windowless space into the sunlit street sometime after dawn.

Dewitt owns two luxury motor homes that he rents out to fashion photographers for photo shoots. They are decked out with every conceivable amenity: flat screen TVs, wireless internet, hot showers and foldout couches upholstered in leather that’s so soft it feels like veal. They’re parked in a commercial back lot east of Lincoln Blvd in Venice and Dewitt deposits me in one of them to get a couple hours of sleep before hitting the beach for another day of surfing. There is a residential neighborhood bordering the lot and when I’m trying to revive myself under the motor home’s outdoor shower a few hours later, a woman waves to me from a second story balcony like its nothing to see a strange man showering in the parking lot next to her house. I smile and wave back – all of my East Coast presumptions and personal boundaries washed away like the suds on the tarmac.

Before I’m even dry, Dewitt arrives in a station wagon with surfboards piled on the roof and we’re off to Surfrider Beach in Malibu, a world class right hand point break that faces almost due south and is therefore protected from the west winds that blow out the waves at the city beaches most afternoons. This means the surf is good all day and, making the most of it, Malibu is pure theater. The best surfers in the world hotdog for an audience of fellow surfers, photographers and surf groupies. There’s no swimming at Surfrider, but the sunbathing beauties don’t seem to mind, they just mist themselves with thirty-dollar bottles of designer “Sea Spray” instead.

On a big day it’s not uncommon to see the sports biggest names (Kelly Slater, Joel Tudor) out there slashing impossibly sharp cutbacks and hanging ten for an eternity. Even though the line-up is always packed the top guys get to pick their waves. For the rest of us mere mortals it’s like a demolition derby. But once again Dewitt knows half the people here (he knows so many people everywhere that I’ve dubbed him the unofficial “Pope of Venice”) and he surfs with such skill and authority that he too is able to take waves uncontested. My strategy is to wait for Dewitt to catch one and then drop in front of him and pretend I can’t hear him when he yells, “Behind you moron!”

I spend my last night in LA visiting an old east coast friend who married a girl from Palos Verdes. They live with their adorable, two-year-old, tow-headed daughter Charlotte in Redondo Beach in the South Bay. Tonight they’ve invited me to Anna’s parents’ house in Palos Verdes which means I get to experience an altoghether different aspect of this crazy, diverse city. PV’s quiet, winding streets are shaded by giant, old, deciduous trees and the houses have big grassy yards. Anna’s parents’ yard is so spacious that she and George got married under a big old oak tree in the back by the pool and then had the reception on the lawn in the front. Walking up the slate walkway to the white clapboard house with paned glass windows and wooden shutters I feel like I’ve been transported back to Connecticut and when Charlotte greets me at the door, I see a reflection of my own idyllic childhood in her sweet, blue-eyed smile.

But it’s not this staid, green residential oasis that I will miss when I leave in the morning. There’s plenty of that back in Connecticut. It’s the mad democracy. The goat herders in Topanga, the Mexicans swimming in blue jeans, the ultimate fighter training at the beach. Its a game of snakes and ladders where everybody is somebody and there’s always that chance that you’ll roll the dice and end up in the right place at the right time, even if that just means rubbing shoulders with someone famous or getting invited to an amazing party. Hope springs eternal in LA and the lucky ones are aware that the snakes can take you down as fast as the ladders bring you up. This fact has a way of punching holes in presumptions and class distinctions. There is always the awareness that wherever you and I stand today we could switch places tomorrow.

As the plane rises off the runaway in LAX and banks out over the Pacific, I’m glued to the window staring down at the long wide stretch of sand connecting the Venice and Santa Monica Piers and the steep Mountains of Malibu beyond.

The guy sitting next to me asks, “New York or LA?”

Not quite sure what he means, I say, “LA.”

He nods and says, “You know what the difference between the East Coast and the West Coast is?”

I shrug.

He answers, “On the East Coast the people are fake at being real and out here they’re real at being fake.”

After a pause he says, “I’ll take real at being fake any day.”

I mull over this unusual comparison. I’m thinking in stereotypes of course... like the lock-jawed woman with a glass of Chardonnay who cornered me at an art opening in New York to tell me about her collection of De Koonings and the charitable foundation her husband is on the board of. And I decide he’s right, I’d much rather share a drink and a story with the bleached blonde with huge fake boobs who dresses up as Marilyn Monroe on Hollywood Boulevard.

Bandon, Oregon Pictures

2010-06-28T02:57:00.000-07:00

Summer 2010Click picture to see photo gallery

2010-06-07T11:45:00.000-07:00

Haiku by Denice Cacace
from Spirit Fish - Voices of the South Coast

choppy lines
pulse across the water -
wind writing

through the window crack
a chickadee calls
light is coming, is coming

on easy curl of wind
a black hawk floats
counting salmon

*I found these Haiku in a collection of essays and poems by writers from Oregon's South Coast. The thing that immediately struck me about these Haiku was how the third or "punch" line added so much color and meaning to the first two lines and what a thrill it was to read these lines in order and discover their full meaning sequentially.

For example, we've all seen hawks floating on the wind, but the words "counting salmon" suddenly paint the entire picture... they add a river and trees, they give the bird's flight focus and posture, they link the bird to its environment and even suggest our link to the greater environment. The chickadees's voice comes to life lyrically in the words "light is coming, is coming" and those words also paint the predawn outside the window, morning chill and all. And the choppy lines in the first Haiku could have been from a boat, they could have been ocean surf, but the word's "wind writing" turn them into ripples on a lake. Beautiful.

Impressions of The Badlands, Black Hills and Little Bighorn; Summer 2010

2010-06-07T11:33:00.000-07:00

I began the day exploring Badlands National Park - climbing up among the red and grey spires and eroded buttes and hiking through the grasslands. The Badlands are basically a less vivid, less mind bending version of Utah's Canyonlands. My cousin Jim tried to explain the geological difference to me and my understanding is that the sandstone of the Utah Canyonlands is much older and harder than the sedimentary rock of the Badlands. The young, less compact rock of the Badlands crumbles beneath your feet and turns, in places, to mud in the rain. It erodes faster and is unable to sustain the incredible shapes - the natural bridges, slot canyons and drip-castle hoodoos - of the Canyonlands. But it has some of these shapes - a few windows and mushroom-topped spires and jagged, dragon-toothed walls that look like mythical fortresses.

The Canyonlands may be more vast and startling - more exotic - but the Badlands have a beauty all their own and it is my impression that this beauty lies as much in the spaces in between the rocks - the grasslands - as in the rocks themselves. The Badlands are spread out the way the mountains in Montana are - eroded ridges rising here and there across the sunken plain. The Canyonlands feel more crowded - like the Colorado Rockies - a chaotic jumble of shapes and voids.

In the Badlands it’s easy to imagine the plains Indians riding horses and chasing Buffalo and setting up great tented camps in the valleys between the mountains. This is Sioux Country - Crazy Horse country. I might be over romanticizing the place, but I swear I can feel the Native spirits here. Thankfully, the National Park Service hasn't gone hog wild with paved roads and visitor centers. There are two small campgrounds, one paved loop road and a couple of long, meandering dirt roads. The rest is open space. Once off the road, you can walk for miles until you see nothing but grass and sky and distant ranges.

I was lucky to be here in the spring after a long, wet winter and the grass was vivid green sprinkled with yellow and purple wildflowers. A girl I met who grew up in the small town of Interior between the north and south sections of the park, told me that everything is usually brown by this time of year. And when I drove up out of the plains into the dark, wooded creases of the Black Hills to see Mount Rushmore, the wet spring was evident in the water rushing down in muddy torrents, sweeping branches and logs along with it.

Someone told me the Black Hills are the oldest Mountain Range in North America and, true or not, they are certainly far more impressive than their name suggests. They are definitely not hills, but mountains capped with crowns of granite and seams of silver and gold. Again, like the Badlands below, you can feel the history up here… that is until you turn the corner and enter Keystone, the tourist trap of a town below Mount Rushmore.

Keystone tries to capitalize on this history, literally… as in “capitalism.” It is a faux-frontier theme-town - a row of wooden, Hollywood-style western buildings inhabited by cheap motels and chain stores - Super 8, Subway, Dairy Queen - and t-shirt and bauble shops hawking plastic George Washington heads and fake mining memorabilia. Everything has terrible cartoony names like “Pick-axe Jack’s” and “Goldrush Trading Post” and is splashed with sensational slogans and advertisements - “stop here," “all you can eat,” “last chance,” “world famous.”

As I drove up the hill to the Mount Rushmore National Monument, I rolled up my windows to keep out the exhaust fumes from a line of tour buses.

I’ll admit that all of this may have predisposed me to be disappointed by the monument, but I’ve been to enough historic sites in this country and abroad to appreciate something for what it is. At the pyramids of Egypt I was mobbed by camel jockeys and hordes of children screaming “baksheesh! Backsheesh!” but the majesty of the pyramids outshone everything - they commanded my attention and pushed all of the sideshows and distractions into the background. Sadly I can’t say the same thing about Mount Rushmore.

I turned the corner near the top of the hill where the monument first comes into view. There were a couple of cars pulled to the side, to snap photos from this first vantage point. I pulled over too, but rather than hop out and take pictures, I just leaned on the steering wheel and stared and thought, “That’s it?”

I’m not oblivious to the technical challenges of creating a sculpture on such a large scale, especially in the 1930s, but, as would be expected, the renderings are a far cry from, say, Michaelangelo’s David. They look simplistic even slightly cartoonish - they are not awe inspiring. And they are not as large as I expected either - or at least not from a distance. I’m sure if you climb up on top of them, as some people do, they look much more impressive.

But this is the perspective they are intended to be seen from and they just don’t seem a fitting tribute to the men they represent. And in my mind the only man that even remotely has any kinship with the piece of land onto which they are carved is Teddy Roosevelt because he traveled throughout the west, founded the National Park System and was instrumental in the preservation of many of these lands. Even so, I wonder what he would think of the tasteless, unapologetic materialism of Keystone. I’m sure he’d identify much more with the open spaces of the Badlands or the untouched granite of the Cathedral Spires just a few miles away near Sylan Lake.

When I think of a fitting tribute to Washington, I think of the Potomac or the famous portrait that Dolly Madison rescued from White House when the British sacked the Capitol in 1812. When I think of Lincoln I think of Ford's Theater or Gettysburg and Jefferson, Monticello... certainly not a remote mountain in South Dakota.

Rather than inspire me, Mount Rushmore made me sad. Ninety-nine percent of the tourists who flock here will never hike up in these hills or fish these rivers or even stop to smell the birch, cottonwood and pine. They will arrive by bus or car, eat at Dairy Queen, snap a few photos and race down to Deadwood to play the slots. This place reminds me of a superhighway truck stop… only its worse because it brings superhighway culture into a place that wants nothing to do with it. It’s like painting an American flag on Yosemite’s Half Dome and building a Macdonald’s and Burger King at its base.

South Dakota State historian Doane Robinson conceived of the project to increase tourism to South Dakota and this he achieved spectacularly. Originally, he wanted to carve the nearby Cathedral Spires in the Needles (one of the Black Hills most stunning natural sites) into regional heroes including, ironically, Sioux Chief Red Cloud. Fortunately sculptor Gutzon Borglum found that site unsuitable and chose Rushmore instead (known as Six Grandfathers to the Sioux.) Borghum, a member of the Klu Klux Klan, also vetoed the Chief Red Cloud idea and chose the four presidents himself.

I challenge anyone to visit Rushmore and then immediately afterward drive the Needles Highway and hike up into the Cathedral Spires and tell me you are not grateful that these granite megaliths were spared.

The majesty and real history of this place speaks loudly enough for itself and there’s not a t-shirt, bauble or bumper sticker in the world that even comes close to conveying it.

After Mount Rushmore, I was prepared to be equally disappointed by Crazy Horse Mountain, but as I’d already driven this far and was less than a half hour away, I decided to go anyway. I’m glad I did.

First of all, the motivation behind Crazy Horse Mountain was not tourism, but genuine pride or as Chief Standing Bear wrote, so the white man knows that "the red man has heroes too." Secondly, Crazy Horse Mountain dwarves Mount Rushmore - the entire Rushmore Monument would fit easily into Crazy Horse’s hair - and, most importantly, Crazy Horse was a Lakota Sioux. He was from here. He was of this earth, literally, and a monument to him carved out of this earth is as fitting as Rushmore is odd.

When the polish engineer Korczak Ziolkowski, who was hired by local chiefs to build the monument, broke ground in 1948 there were actually nine Native Americans present who fought in the Battle of Little Bighorn and knew Crazy Horse. It was these people who helped Ziolkowski create a picture of Crazy Horse’s face because Crazy Horse never allowed anyone to photograph him.

The monument became Ziolkowski’s life’s work, but when he died in 1982 only a rough shape had been carved from the mountain. His wife Ruth still lives on the property and has carried on his vision. Crazy Horse’s face was finally completed in 1998.

The slow progress of the monument has been a source of disappointment and derision over the years, but now that the face is complete, I would argue that the rough shape of his torso atop a horse is even more effective than the ultimate goal of a perfect, smooth sculpture. It is the roughness of Crazy Horse that gives it authenticity. He looks like he is emerging from the mountain… part mountain and part man.

I don’t want to give the impression here that I am a revisionist or Native American sympathizer. I am aware of the nuance of history and the inevitability of the European westward expansion. It is naive to think that Native American tribes could have or even, given the chance, would have remained in their traditional state. But no one can deny that their defeat was bloody and humiliating. We decimated their long, proud culture in a matter of years. I truly feel they are a people to be admired and respected, just as I believe the European culture from which I come is to be admired and respected.

I am also aware that some Native Americans find Crazy Horse Monument offensive because a mountain was destroyed to create the image of a man - an act that is antithetical to Native beliefs.

My overall impression is mixed, but there is no doubt the monument is a huge, powerful accomplishment that exponentially outshines Rushmore. And in the end that’s the point really. We can’t rewrite history. We can’t purify a bloody past. But we can try to be as aware of our country’s true history as possible - from multiple perspectives - and, if nothing else, Crazy Horse Mountain forces us to think and remember. That is what it was intended to do. In those terms, it is a great success.

My next stop was a site even more massive and impressive than Crazy Horse and also a site sacred to Native Americans. But it was not shaped by the hands of men even if it seems impossible that it was created by nature. It is so unnatural looking that its easy to see how Europeans twisted its Native American name (Bear Lodge) into Devils Tower. But I climbed up to its vertical walls and laid against its ribs and I promise you there is nothing devlish about it. It emanates a deep penetrating calm - the primordial violence that formed it captured in suspended animation like the earth's beating heart has been stilled and laid bare.

And that really isn't far from the truth. The Devils Tower formed underground, lava pushing upwards in tubes, cooling and forming a plug. Over thousands of years the earth around the plug eroded away leaving it exposed as the tower we see today.

The best way to approach the tower is through the small town of Hulett on Rte 24. (See the slideshow below.) If you are on Interstate 90, exit in Spearfish and take the 85 North to Belle Fourche. Then take the 34 West into Wyoming. It eventually turns into the 24. This is beautiful country - crumbling terraces of red rock, stands of pine and cottonwood along the rivers and hillsides, dirt roads disappearing into meadows... it is a windows down, breath of fresh air.

After hiking up to the tower, I drove back into Hulett and went north on 112 and then west on 212. The Montana border is only thirty miles north of Hulett and there is no denying this is Big Sky Country. The intimacy and small scale of the river valley along the 24 is replaced with great grassy expanses and rock escarpments. The cows here are spread so far and wide they look like crows standing in the grass.

The day had one last surprise for me. Just before sunset, in a light drizzle, I arrived at the junction of the 212 and the I-90 and found myself next to the Little Bighorn Battlefield where, on June 25-26, 1876 Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull and others chiefs of the Lakota-Cheyenne alliance defeated and killed General George Custer. It was a decisive and bloody victory for the Native Americans, but a pyrhic victory... and they knew it. The US Cavalry soon reinforced itself and mounted another offensive against the tribes. Crazy Horse Surrendered a year later and Sitting Bull fled to Canada. The battle was part of a larger conflict called the Sioux or Black Hills War - the final, full scale Native resistance to US westward expansion.

Understandably, for a United States National Monument, the battlefield is sympathetic to Custer and the hundreds of US Cavalrymen who died at Little Bighorn. There is a monument to Custer on the hill where his famous Last Stand took place and smaller gravestones marking the spots where his men fell. Custer's Hill overlooks the entire battlefield and river where the Sioux-Cheyenne camp was located. It is not hard to imagine a great battle raging here and especially standing alone there in the misty dusk it left me feeling awe-inspired and sad.

I can only describe my feelings as that of someone who loves the western United States very much - who has spent decades hiking, camping and skiing here. I like to think that I belong here.... I feel that I belong here, but I am aware that my presence is the result of a very violent history and that there are others who might regard my presence as intrusive. I respect this opinion, but, again, I believe the world was headed towards an inevitable change and the Americas had no chance of remaining isolated. They were going to be absorbed into the global community one way or another. The United States is not, in a longshot, the worst possible outcome for North America. Native peoples have been treated poorly around the world. We are not exceptional in this way. I can only hope going forward that we continue to preserve the beautiful natural landscapes and resources that make this country and continent so special and diverse and that one day we will share a common, proud legacy.

For now there are still the ghosts of Little Bighorn and Wounded Knee to be reckoned with.

Approaching Devils Tower on Wyoming Rte 24

2010-06-06T03:37:00.000-07:00

Click on picture to see photo gallery

What's in an Image?

2010-04-02T09:31:00.000-07:00

I love looking at an image and not knowing what it is at first, then discovering what it is and marveling at the details, the components and mechanics, that comprise the thing itself but seem so odd when seen from a different perspective, like this picture of...

...the under side of a wave photographed by Clark Little - all the funnels and bubbles rising as it barrels over. One of the many reasons we surf is to experience the natural world in this way and few have captured the actual experience of it as vividly as Clark Little. Others have captured the aesthetic of it, the mood, but if you really want to know what it looks like to get "shacked".... why it's called "the green room"....well here it is (of course, the thrill of actually being in the green room on a board at speed with a hand tracing along the face, feeling the roar and misty breath of the wave... now that's something a picture simply can't capture.)

This is how he does it... swims in the surf zone, holds up his waterproof camera on a little monopod with a trigger and fires off 50 frame per second blasts. Wonder how many cameras he's broken?

See more Clark Little Photography

2010-04-02T07:50:00.001-07:00

Fifteen Unforgettable Movie Moments
(a collection of essays from Salon)

"The Thing," 1982
Theater unknown (Times Square), New York City

I'm only guessing in saying that the evening began with Popeye's fried chicken and Budweiser, but it's a good guess. In the long-gone days when Times Square was decrepit, dangerous and ringed with cockroach-infested, odoriferous theaters showing all grades of violent or pornographic cinema, my best friend and I made numerous opening-night pilgrimages there, mostly for horror films. The degree of talk-back and the atmosphere of incipient danger made almost every Times Square viewing experience memorable, but none stands out as clearly as watching John Carpenter's "The Thing," which was both an early-'80s special-effects landmark and also one of the tensest, most electrified horror movies of that era.

If the original 1951 "Thing From Another World" is largely understood as Cold War allegory, it'd be stretching a point to sense a political motivation in Carpenter's remake (despite his clear leftist leanings in other films). But it's ominous, claustrophobic, wintry and scary as shit — all leading up to that incredibly tense scene when the trapped Antarctic scientists agree to undergo blood tests with a live electric wire, to determine which of them is the eponymous shape-shifting alien. The packed, rowdy, half-drunken audience had fallen dead silent as the test moved from one blood sample to another, until a big guy in the last row stood up, pointed at the screen, and announced in a booming voice: "That dude is the motherfuckin' Thing! I bet you a million dollars!"

Well, he was right, of course, and we all fell apart laughing and it was some time before order was restored. I'm not saying I want that level of interactivity at every movie, but somehow the guy hadn't ruined the movie or the scene or the whole experience, not at all. He had just kicked it up to another level. We can talk a lot about the communal moviegoing experience and the emotional and psychological effect of cinema and the way people become immersed in it while maintaining a critical or analytical distance. But for me that moment is like Zen lightning — it explains it all, without explaining anything.

— Andrew O'Hehir

Read more Unforgettable Movie Moments at Salon

2010-04-02T07:50:00.000-07:00

Book Excerpt: from Edward Abbey, Manhattan Twilight, Hoboken Night

Eward Abbey could be called a naturalist, but I don't think that's a rough enough sounding description for him. I don't think he ever pressed a flower into his journal. I doubt he ever collected rocks. He was content to explore the earth and leave it as he found it. And if he found it paved he was content to throw a beer can out his car window because, as he'd say, it's already ruined.

He fantasized about blowing up the Glen Canyon Dam, the massive piece of industrial violence that caused the flooding of the Colorado river, forming what is now known as Lake Powell - a misnomer if there ever was one because Mr. Powell loved that river and would surely have been as appalled by the dam as Mr. Abbey. Abbey was one of the last people to raft the now flooded section of river, tread its sandbars and wooded side canyons before they were drowned, entombed in the gathering silt. He wrote about it in Desert Solitaire and he vented his ecoterrorist impulses in the hilarious novel The Monkey Wrench Gang.

He lived most of his life in Moab, Utah and became identified with desert southwest, but like many western Americans he had eastern roots and lived for a while in New York City. He was as keen an observer of urbanity as he was of nature and though he ultimately reviled the city's toxic vitality, he also found beauty in it. In the rust and oil. In the crumbling bricks. In the sprigs of dirty spring growth pushing up through the pavement. The story this excerpt is taken from is a rare glimpse of his time in the city and it is so keen and lyrical, so Kerouacian in its lithe and rhythmic execution that it makes one wish Mr Abbey had turned his lens more often on the world of men.

For two years I lived in Hoboken, far from my natural habitat. The bitter bread of exile. Two years in the gray light of the sulfur dioxide and the smell of burning coffee beans from the Maxwell House plant at the end of Hudson Street. In a dark, dank, decaying apartment house where the cockroaches - shell-backed, glossy, insolent Blatella germanica - festered and spawned under the linoleum on the sagging floors, behind the rippled wallpaper on the sweating walls, among the teacups in the cupboard. Everywhere. While the rats raced in ferocious packs, like wolves, inside the walls and up and down the cobblestone alleyways that always glistened, night and day, in any kind of weather, with a thin chill greasy patina of poisonous dew. The fly ash everywhere, falling softly and perpetually from the pregnant sky. We watched the seasons come and go in a small rectangle of walled-in space we called our yard: in spring and summer the black grass; in fall and winter the black snow. Overhead and in our hearts a black sun.

Down in the cellar and up in the attic of that fantastic house - four stories high, brownstone, a stoop, wide, polished banisters, brass fittings on the street entrance, a half-sunken apartment for the superintendent, high ceilings, high windows and a grand stairway on the main floor, all quite decently middle class and in the better part of town, near the parks, near the Stevens Institute of Technology - hung draperies of dust and cobweb that had not been seen in the light of day or touched by the hand of man since the time of the assassination of President William McKinley.

In the sunless attic the spiders had long since given up, for all their prey had turned to dust; but the rats roamed freely. Down in the basement, built like a dungeon with ceiling too low to permit a man of normal stature to stand erect, there were more rats, of course - they loved the heat of the furnace in winter - and dampish stains on the wall and floor where the great waterbugs, like cockroaches out of Kafka, crawled sluggishly from darkness into darkness. One might notice here, at times, the odor of sewer gas.

The infinite richness. The ecology, the natural history of it all. An excellent workshop for the philosopher, for who would venture out into that gray miasma of perpetual smoke and fog that filled the streets if he might remain walled up with books, sipping black coffee, smoking black Russian cigarettes, thinking long, black, inky thoughts? To be sure. but there were the streets. The call of the streets.

We lived one block from the waterfront. The same waterfront where Marlon Brando once played Marlon Brando, where the rust-covered tramp steamers, black freighters, derelict Dutchmen, death ships came to call under Liberian flags to unload their bananas, baled hemp, teakwood, sacks of coffee beans, cowhides, Argentine beef, to take on kegs of nails, jeep trucks, Cadillacs and crated machine guns. Abandoned by the Holland-American Line in '65, at least for passenger service, the Hoboken docks - like Hoboken bars and Hoboken tenements - were sinking into an ever deepening state of decay. The longshoremen were lucky to get two days' work a week. Some of the Great warehouses had been empty for years; the kids played Mafia in them.

The moment I stepped out the front door I was faced again with Manhattan. There it was, oh splendid ship of concrete and steel, aluminum, glass and electricity, forging forever up the dark river. (The Hudson - like a river of oil, filthy and rich, gleaming with silver lights.) Manhattan at twilight: floating gardens of tender neon, the lavender towers where each window glittered at sundown with reflected incandescence, where each crosstown street became at evening a gash of golden fire, and the endless flow of the endless traffic on the West Side Highway resembled a luminous necklace strung round the island's shoulders.

Derek Paravicini - Musical Genius

2010-03-30T17:23:00.000-07:00

Extremely disabled Derek Paravicini doesn't even know how old he is and can't execute simple tasks like holding up three fingers, but he can play the piano on a level few, if any, humans ever achieve… bringing into question the very definition of "disability" and the mysterious nature of the savant.

Click on Image to see video

Essay: Mississippi Drift by Matt Power

2010-03-30T17:22:00.000-07:00

River Vagrants in the Age of Wal-Mart (from Harper's)

As if to augur my own psychological dissolution, the raft itself was falling apart. The heavy oak transom to which the 200-pound engine had been bolted was pulling out from the raft’s wooden frame. A little more torque from the engine and it would rip itself right off, sinking to the bottom of the channel like an anvil. Thrown up against the shore by wakes, we tied up to a tree outside the town of Hastings, Minnesota, where Matt told us we would need to stay for several days to fix the broken frame. He ordered me to find a Wal-Mart and return with a little electric trolling motor, which could help steer the drifting raft or pull it out of the way of a tow. I walked up through Hastings, down the main street of curio shops and antiques stores, past the end of the town sidewalks, and out along the highway.

One can bemoan the death of the American downtown at the hands of exurban big-box stores, but to truly understand the phenomenon, try reaching one without a car. It was a triple-digit day, the heat shimmering up from the softened blacktop, the breeze hot as a hair dryer. I tried to hitchhike, sticking my thumb out as I stumbled backward down the road. Cars flew by, their drivers craning to look or studiously avoiding eye contact. I wasn’t a very appealing passenger: I hadn’t showered or shaved in the week since we’d left Minneapolis, and had worn the same clothes throughout. I had a permanent “dirt tan,” a thick layer of grime that no amount of swimming in the river could fully remove. My black T-shirt had been torn by brambles and faded by the sun, and a camouflage trucker’s hat covered my matted hair as I trudged for miles along the grassy shoulder. Shame eroded; I didn’t mind if I was seen peering into dumpsters behind convenience stores, looking for cardboard to make a hitchhiking sign. But still no one stopped.

After walking for almost an hour, I reached the edge of a wide sea of blacktop, and walked across to the vast shed of a building that wavered on its edge like a mirage. Enormous doors slid open, and arctic air engulfed me, pulling me into the glorious air-conditioned acreage of the largest Wal-Mart I had ever seen. I pushed a cart through the aisles, picking out a trolling motor and a deep-cycle marine battery to run it. No one paid me much mind, not the too-young couples arguing in Housewares, not the carbuncular stock boys tallying inventory on the vast shelves. As I rolled up to the counter, the checkout girl offered some scripted pleasantries, asked if I had a club card. She rang up the trolling motor, a large oblong box sticking out of the cart, but didn’t notice the $70 battery lying under it.

All I had to do was keep smiling and push the cart straight out the door, across the parking lot, back to the river, and the battery would be mine. Who would miss it—my seventy dollars, from Wal-Mart’s billions? Matt would have walked out proudly, or bluffed his way out if confronted by security. He would certainly have called me a coward for passing up the chance. I told the girl about the battery, and she rang it up, and I struggled back across the sea of asphalt in the blazing sun.

When I returned to the raft, which was tied up amid bleached driftwood and plastic flotsam on the shoreline, I found Matt waist-deep in the water, rebuilding the transom, and Cody, drunk on malt liquor, busying himself by stuffing his gear into his backpack. I asked him where he was going.

“I don’t really feel like going half a mile an hour along the river with people I don’t really get along with. I’d rather go fast as hell on the train. Go work the beet harvest, make four grand, and go to India with my girlfriend.” On the far side of the raft, Matt said nothing, only scowled and hammered on the boat. “Matt’s a fascist,” he whispered to me. “If I stay on the boat, I won’t be able to be his friend anymore.” The raft, which for Huck and Jim supplied the only space where they could be friends, had wrought quite the opposite effect on our crew.

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More Travel Pictures

2010-03-29T21:00:00.000-07:00

Click picture to see photo gallery

Original Music

2010-03-29T20:37:00.000-07:00

1. Best Friend
2. Apology
3. By Your Side (dedicated to my dad)

Songs were recorded using a Blue Bluebird microphone, Apogee Duet audio interface, Garageband and a Breedlove Atlas Retro D/ER guitar with an I.R. Baggs Stage Pro Pickup and D'Addario light strings.

Poetry - Three that I Like

2010-03-29T20:30:00.000-07:00

How do we find poetry? In English classes? In the New Yorker? Chiseled onto the back of a public bathroom door? Read over a loud speaker once every four years at the Presidential inauguration? It doesn't seem to be a prevalent craft in our popular culture anymore. It doesn't serve to inform, inspire and guide us the way it once did. We have a Poet Laureate... but can you name her? One of the poets below, Billy Collins, was Poet Laureate from 2001-2003. But that's not how I found out about him. He gave a reading at an elementary school in the town where I grew up. My mother attended, bought two of his books and asked him to sign them to me for my birthday. I loved them so much I read one of his poems at my father's funeral. Thanks, Mom.

I know of John Updike mainly because he loved golf and wrote many funny short stories and essays on the game that have appeared in the collections of golf stories that everyone gives me for Christmas. But I never thought of him as a poet until the day he died and Jim Lehrer gave him a nice fifteen minute tribute on PBS including a reading of a poem he wrote called "A Rescue." They also aired a ten minute interview with him from 2003 in which he described his own writing as "Bright and hopeful attempts to bottle some small portion of the truth." In a forward to one of his books he wrote, "My duty was to describe reality as it had come to me, to give the mundane its beautiful due."

I studied literature in college and have a book of Keats' collected poems on my bookshelf, but it wasn't until I saw Jane Campion's beautiful movie "Bright Star" that I was touched by the full force of his poetry. In a New York Times review of the movie, A.O. Scott writes, "The lives of poets have been, in general, badly served on film, either neglected altogether or puffed up with sentiment and solemnity and there are times in Bright Star when Keats, played by the pale and skinny British actor Ben Whishaw, trembles on the edge of caricature. He broods, he looks dreamily at flowers and trees and rocks, but these moments, rather than feeling studied or obvious, arrive with startling keenness and disarming beauty, much in the way that Keats' own lyrics do. His verses can at first seem ornate and sentimental, but on repeated readings, they have a way of gaining in force and freshness. And while no film can hope to take you inside the process by which these poems were made, Ms. Campion allows you to hear them spoken aloud as if for the first time. You will want to stay until the very last bit of the end credits, not necessarily to read the name of each gaffer and grip, but rather to savor every syllable of Mr. Whishaw's recitation of Ode to a Nightingale."

It is true. Seeing the creation of his poems and hearing them recited within the context of his life moved me in a way that reading them never did.

In each of these examples, my life has been made richer by the experience of poetry - feeling its truth and its power to unify us and awaken in us an appreciation of every precious breath of life. This seems especially important within the increasing din of superficiality and cynicism. I hope each of us is blessed with an opportunity to find true moments of silence and reflection when the words of the poet can strip back the layers that shield us from the passionate brilliance of our souls.

Bright Star
by John Keats

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art---
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite*,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors---
No---yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillowed upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever---or else swoon in death.

*Origin of the English word hermit from eremos (Greek adj.) - empty, desolate; eremia (n.) - desert; eremite (n.) - someone who lives alone in the desert. The reference here is to an unidentified star which, like a hermit, sits apart from the world.

A Rescue
by John Updike

Today I wrote some words that will see print.
Maybe they will last "forever," in that
someone will read them, their ink making
a light scratch on his mind, or hers.
I think back with greater satisfaction
upon a yellow bird--a goldfinch?--
that had flown into the garden shed
and could not get out,
battering its wings on the deceptive light
of the dusty, warped-shut window.

Without much reflection, for once, I stepped
to where its panicked heart
was making commotion, the flared wings drumming,
and with clumsy soft hands
pinned it against a pane,
held loosely cupped
this agitated essence of the air,
and through the open door released it,
like a self-flung ball,
to all that lovely perishing outdoors.

Thesaurus
by Billy Collins

It could be the name of a prehistoric beast  
that roamed the Paleozoic earth, rising up  
on its hind legs to show off its large vocabulary,  
or some lover in a myth who is metamorphosed into a book.

It means treasury, but it is just a place  
where words congregate with their relatives,
a big park where hundreds of family reunions  
are always being held,  
house, home, abode, dwelling, lodgings, and digs,
all sharing the same picnic basket and thermos;  
hairy, hirsute, woolly, furry, fleecy, and shaggy  
all running a sack race or throwing horseshoes,
inert, static, motionless, fixed and immobile  
standing and kneeling in rows for a group photograph.   

Here father is next to sire and brother close  
to sibling, separated only by fine shades of meaning.  
And every group has its odd cousin, the one  
who traveled the farthest to be here:
astereognosis, polydipsia, or some eleven
syllable, unpronounceable substitute for the word tool.  
Even their own relatives have to squint at their name tags.   

I can see my own copy up on a high shelf.
I rarely open it, because I know there is no  
such thing as a synonym and because I get nervous  
around people who always assemble with their own kind,
forming clubs and nailing signs to closed front doors
while others huddle alone in the dark streets.   

I would rather see words out on their own, away  
from their families and the warehouse of Roget,  
wandering the world where they sometimes fall  
in love with a completely different word.  
Surely, you have seen pairs of them standing forever  
next to each other on the same line inside a poem,
a small chapel where weddings like these,
between perfect strangers, can take place.

2010-03-29T20:29:00.000-07:00

Bright Star
by John Keats

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art---
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite*,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors---
No---yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillowed upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever---or else swoon in death.

*Origin of the English word hermit from eremos (Greek adj.) - empty, desolate; eremia (n.) - desert; eremite (n.) - someone who lives alone in the desert. The reference here is to an unidentified star which, like a hermit, sits apart from the world.

2010-03-29T20:28:00.000-07:00

A Rescue
by John Updike

Today I wrote some words that will see print.
Maybe they will last "forever," in that
someone will read them, their ink making
a light scratch on his mind, or hers.
I think back with greater satisfaction
upon a yellow bird--a goldfinch?--
that had flown into the garden shed
and could not get out,
battering its wings on the deceptive light
of the dusty, warped-shut window.

Without much reflection, for once, I stepped
to where its panicked heart
was making commotion, the flared wings drumming,
and with clumsy soft hands
pinned it against a pane,
held loosely cupped
this agitated essence of the air,
and through the open door released it,
like a self-flung ball,
to all that lovely perishing outdoors.

2010-03-29T20:27:00.000-07:00

Thesaurus
by Billy Collins

It could be the name of a prehistoric beast  
that roamed the Paleozoic earth, rising up  
on its hind legs to show off its large vocabulary,  
or some lover in a myth who is metamorphosed into a book.

It means treasury, but it is just a place  
where words congregate with their relatives,
a big park where hundreds of family reunions  
are always being held,  
house, home, abode, dwelling, lodgings, and digs,
all sharing the same picnic basket and thermos;  
hairy, hirsute, woolly, furry, fleecy, and shaggy  
all running a sack race or throwing horseshoes,
inert, static, motionless, fixed and immobile  
standing and kneeling in rows for a group photograph.

Here father is next to sire and brother close  
to sibling, separated only by fine shades of meaning.  
And every group has its odd cousin, the one  
who traveled the farthest to be here:
astereognosis, polydipsia, or some eleven
syllable, unpronounceable substitute for the word tool.  
Even their own relatives have to squint at their name tags.   

I can see my own copy up on a high shelf.
I rarely open it, because I know there is no  
such thing as a synonym and because I get nervous  
around people who always assemble with their own kind,
forming clubs and nailing signs to closed front doors
while others huddle alone in the dark streets.   

I would rather see words out on their own, away  
from their families and the warehouse of Roget,  
wandering the world where they sometimes fall  
in love with a completely different word.  
Surely, you have seen pairs of them standing forever  
next to each other on the same line inside a poem,
a small chapel where weddings like these,
between perfect strangers, can take place.

Poetry - Two of my own

2010-03-29T20:20:00.000-07:00

Handwritten Letter

Be gone blinking cursor, dead white light.
Give me the glow of filament or flame,
The scratching of wind whipped boughs
On the darkened pane.

Give me a blank sheet and a bottle of ink.
A moment of silence to think.

What small essence of the truth
Might I discover then,
From the whisper of thought
and the scratch of the pen?

What aspect of self will take to the whole,
What inner secrets unfold

In the choice
Of words I make,
In those markings, now there
Upon the page?

Alone in my thoughts, but
Not my thoughts alone.
Just an open hand and heart
to hold, this gift.

And I give it to you.

The sugar sweet stamp and seal,
Metal box, mail bag and hand.
Arriving in real time
So you may feel

That same page
By your own light,
In your own silence,
Next to your own dark pane.

Gettin’ All Poetiky

Everyone tries to get all poetiky
Choosing words that clove and heave
And hang in awkward silence -
Metaphors, cryptic allusions,
Confounding phrases that sound suspiciously like
The creaking of an engine that needs a shot of oil.

But having stopped by these snowy woods
And fearful of feeling stupid for
Missing something sharp and prophetic
Hidden among the shadows and shifting boughs,
I turn a pine cone over in my hands,
Breathe in the bark and frozen earth,
Listen to the hushed conversation
Between wispy needle and groaning limb.

I study chipmunk tracks that disappear
Into the darkness and wonder
Are they really chipmunk tracks?
Or do they belong to some
Rough beast slouching?
Or a fire-fangled bird?
Or perhaps they are not tracks at all
But just the stirring of memory and
Desire in the dull roots?

Alas, I’ve many miles to go before I sleep
And whose ever woods these are,
Hung with chandeliers and prisms
And populated by flora and fauna with long Latin names…
They are better left to someone else.

Preferably someone with a PHD in the Classics
And a copy of the OED in their sled.

2010-03-29T20:19:00.000-07:00

Gettin’ All Poetiky

Everyone tries to get all poetiky
Choosing words that clove and heave
And hang in awkward silence -
Metaphors, cryptic allusions,
Confounding phrases that sound suspiciously like
The creaking of an engine that needs a shot of oil.

But having stopped by these snowy woods
And fearful of feeling stupid for
Missing something sharp and prophetic
Hidden among the shadows and shifting boughs,
I turn a pine cone over in my hands,
Breathe in the bark and frozen earth,
Listen to the hushed conversation
Between wispy needle and groaning limb.

I study chipmunk tracks that disappear
Into the darkness and wonder
Are they really chipmunk tracks?
Or do they belong to some
Rough beast slouching?
Or a fire-fangled bird?
Or perhaps they are not tracks at all
But just the stirring of memory and
Desire in the dull roots?

Alas, I’ve many miles to go before I sleep
And whose ever woods these are,
Hung with chandeliers and prisms
And populated by flora and fauna with long Latin names…
They are better left to someone else.

Preferably someone with a PHD in the Classics
And a copy of the OED in their sled.

Video: M Ward - Chinese Translation

2010-03-29T20:11:00.000-07:00

A beautiful song with a little Buddhist gem of a story

Essay: High in Hell by Kevin Fedarko

2010-03-29T20:10:00.001-07:00

Chewing Psychotropic Foliage in the Worst Place on Earth (from Esquire)

So if you ever happen to find yourself skimming through the troposphere high above the Horn of Africa, the engines of your cargo jet clawing at the currents of sub-Saharan air rolling off the lip of the Ethiopian plateau and down toward the Red Sea, there will come a moment when you'll have to admit that the cockpit of an aging DC-8 with a broken oil-pressure gauge and a washed-out picture of a Ugandan mountain gorilla emblazoned on the tail offers a damn fine view of the most wretched place on the planet.

Off to the right, down along the borderlands extending out toward the very easternmost tip of Africa, stretch the desolate coastal plains that the British used to call the Furthest Shag of the Never-Never Land, and that the Somali camel herders and half-starved bands of refugees refer to as the Guban, which simply means "burnt." Off to the left, up against the back end of Eritrea, lurks the Danakil Depression, a salt-encrusted sore on a wrinkled fold of the earth's hide. The Danakil boasts the lowest point on the continent (more than five hundred feet below sea level) and summer temperatures that frequently hit 120 degrees. Jagged shards of volcanic rock stab through the skin of this land like giant, shattered ribs.

You won't have long to contemplate this bonescape, though, and that's because this is only a twenty-minute flight. So ten minutes after the wheels have lifted from the dusty Ethiopian town of Dire Dawa, your crew of five -- a Nigerian captain and a Nigerian loadmaster, a Rwandan copilot, a Congolese purser, and Vincent, your Rhode Island-based Nigerian navigator -- will already be making preparations to touch down at the far edge of what L.M. Nesbitt, the British explorer who conducted the first successful traverse of the Danakil in 1927, fittingly christened the "hellhole of Creation."
In fact, there it is now.

Huddling on the southwest corner of the Bab el-Mandeb, or Gate of Tears, the strait separating Africa from the coast of Yemen, sits the tiny nation of Djibouti: horrific climate, endless sand, almost no fresh water, but a strategic cynosure of the first order. Nearly three million barrels of oil pass by this place every day. It also plays host to about fifteen hundred U.S. troops at Camp Lemonier, a former French Foreign Legion post that is now America's sub-Saharan spearhead in the global war on terror. This explains the HC-130 turboprop jets and attack helicopters lining the tarmac of Ambouli Airport -- a vaguely unsettling sight, given your payload.

Stacked on the deck of the fuselage on the other side of a thick metal door just behind Vincent's navigation desk sits a mountain of white bags, each the size of a stuffed pillowcase. This is the afternoon's shipment of khat, a psychotropic shrub that provides the overwhelming majority of Djiboutian men with their daily drug fix. Which means that having just vaulted over the Furthest Shag of the Never Whatever, you're seconds away from landing next to a war base bristling with irritable jarheads, accompanied by twenty-two thousand pounds of a Schedule 1 amphetamine that, back in the U.S., carries the same penalties for large-scale trafficking -- up to life in prison -- as heroin, meth, or cocaine.

Jesus, you wonder, Could anything be weirder than this?

Why, yes. And damned if it isn't unfolding on the tarmac right now, where a mob of ragged-looking dudes wearing sarongs is sprinting across the runway toward the plane. The good news is that these men seem to be unarmed. The bad news is that they look really pissed off.

Read Full Aritcle

2010-03-29T20:10:00.000-07:00

Book Excerpt: from Don Delillo, Underworld

I don't remember how I discovered this book, but I do remember that reading the first chapter was one of the most revelatory reading experiences of my life. Since then I have reread it over and over again and it remains one of my favorite pieces of writing.

Sadly the book as a whole does not live up to those first thirty pages. There are inspired moments throughout, but it's very long and it loses the sharpness and agility of the opening salvo. The impression I get is that the rest of the book doesn't know itself as well as the first chapter does. It doesn't move with the same grace and confidence, with the same purpose and direction.

I've heard that Don Delillo originally published the first chapter as a stand alone piece in a magazine, so maybe he wrote the book as a continuation of that and not something he originally saw it in its entirety. It was never a David in a block marble. But the opening chapter is its own David and honestly I can't imagine an entire book written at that level. It's like a no-hitter or the Mona Lisa. It's a once in a career peak performance. The rest of the book was bound to be a disappointment following on its heels.

Here is the beginning:

He speaks in your voice, American, and there's a shine in his eye that's halfway hopeful.

It's a school day, sure, but he's nowhere near the classroom. He wants to be here instead, standing in the shadow of this old rust-hulk of a structure, and it's hard to blame him - this metropolis of steel and concrete and flaky paint and cropped grass and enormous Chesterfield packs aslant on the scoreboards, a couple of cigarettes jutting from each.

Longing on a large scale is what makes history. This is just a kid with a local yearning but he is part of an assembling crowd, anonymous thousands off the buses and trains, people in narrow columns tramping over the swing bridge above the river, and even if they are not a migration or a revolution, some vast shaking of the soul, they bring with them the body heat of a great city and their own small reveries and desperations, the unseen something that haunts the day - men in fedoras and sailors on shore leave, the stray tumble of their thoughts, going to a game.

The sky is low and gray, the roily gray of sliding surf.

He stands at the curbstone with the others. He is the youngest, at fourteen, and you know he's flat broke by the edgy leaning look he hangs on his body. He has never done this before and he doesn't know any of the others and only two or three of them seem to know each other but they can't do this thing singly or in pairs so they have found one another by means of slidy looks that detect the fellow foolhardy and here they stand, black kids and white kids up from the subways or off the local Harlem streets, lean shadows, bandidos, fifteen in all, and according to topical legend maybe four will get through for every one that's caught.

They are waiting nervously for the ticket holders to clear the turnstiles, the last loose cluster of fans, the stragglers and loiterers. They watch the late-arriving taxis from downtown and the brilliantined men stepping dapper to the windows, policy bankers and supper club swells and Broadway hotshots, high aura'd, picking lint off their mohair sleeves. they stand at the curb and watch without seeming to look, wearing the sourish air of corner hangouts. All the hubbub has died down, the pregame babble and swirl, vendors working the jammed sidewalks waving scorecards and pennants and calling out in ancient singsong, scraggy men hustling buttons and caps, all dispersed now, gone to their roomlets in the beaten streets.

They are at the curbstone, waiting. their eyes are going grim, sending out less light. Somebody takes his hands out of his pockets. They are waiting and then they go, one of them goes, a mick who shouts Geronimo.

There are four turnstiles just beyond the pair of ticket booths. The youngest boy is also the scrawniest, Cotter Martin by name, scrawny tall in a polo shirt and dungarees and trying not to feel doom-struck -- he's located near the tail of the rush, running and shouting with the others. You shout because it makes you brave or you want to announce your recklessness. They have made their faces into scream masks, tight-eyed, with stretchable mouths, and they are running hard, trying to funnel themselves through the lanes between the booths, and they bump hips and elbows and keep the shout going. The faces of the ticket sellers hang behind the windows like onions on strings.

Cotter sees the first jumpers go over the bars. Two of them jostle in the air and come down twisted and asprawl. A ticket taker puts a head-lock on one of them and his cap comes loose and skims down his back and he reaches for it with a blind swipe and at the same time - everything's at the same time - he eyes the other hurdlers to keep from getting stepped on. They are running and hurdling. It's a witless form of flight with bodies packed in close and the gate-crashing becoming real. They are jumping too soon or too late and hitting the posts and radial bars, doing cartoon climbs up each other's back, and what kind of stupes must they look like to people at the hot dog stand on the other side of the turnstiles, what kind of awful screwups -- a line of mostly men beginning to glance this way, jaws working at the sweaty meat and grease bubbles flurrying on their tongues, the gent at the far end going dead-still except for a hand that produces automatic movement, swabbing on mustard with a brush.

The shout of the motley boys comes banging off the deep concrete.

Cotter thinks he sees a path to the turnstile on the right. He drains himself of everything he does not need to make the jump. Some are still jumping, some are thinking about it, some need a haircut, some have girlfriends in wooly sweaters and the rest have landed in the ruck and are trying to get up and scatter. A couple of cops are rumbling down the ramp. Cotter sheds these elements as they appear, sheds a thousand waves of information hitting on his skin. His gaze is trained on the iron bars projected from the post. He picks up speed and seems to lose his gangliness, the slouchy funk of hormones and unbelonging and all the stammering things that seal his adolescence. He is just a running boy, a half-seen figure from the streets, but the way running reveals some clue to being, the way a runner bares himself to consciousness, this is how the dark-skinned kid seems to open to the world, how the bloodrush of a dozen strides bring him into eloquence.

Then he leaves his feet and is in the air, feeling sleek and unused and sort of businesslike, flying in from Kansas City with a briefcase full of bank drafts. His head is tucked, his left leg is clearing the bars. And in one prolonged and aloof and discontinuous instant he sees precisely where he'll land and which way he'll run and even though he knows they will be after him the second he touches ground, even though he'll be in danger for the next several hours - watching left and right - there is less fear in him now.

He comes down lightly and goes easy-gaiting past the ticket taker groping for his fallen cap and he knows absolutely - knows it all the way, deep as knowing goes, he feels the knowledge start to hammer in his runner's heart - that he is uncatchable.

Here comes a cop in municipal bulk with a gun and cuffs and a flashlight and a billy club all jigging on his belt and a summons pad wadded in his pocket. Cotter gives him a juke step that sends him nearly to his knees and the hot dog eaters bend from the waist to watch the kid veer away in soft acceleration, showing the cop a little finger-wag bye-bye.

He surprises himself this way every so often, doing some gaudy thing that whistles up out of unsuspected whim.

He runs up a shadowed ramp and into a crossweave of girders and pillars and spilling light. He hears the crescendoing last chords of the national anthem and sees the great open horseshoe of the grandstand and that unfolding vision of the grass that always seems to mean he has stepped outside his life - the rubbed shine that sweeps and bends from the raked dirt of the infield out to the high green fences. It is the excitement of a revealed thing. He runs at quarter speed craning to see the rows of seats, looking for an inconspicuous wedge behind a pillar. He cuts into an aisle in section 35 and walks down into the heat and smell of the massed fans, he walks into the smoke that hangs from the underside of the second deck, he hears the talk, he enters the deep buzz, he hears the warm-up pitches crack into the catcher's mitt, a series of reports that carry a comet's tail of secondary sound.

Then you lose him in the crowd.

Video: When Languages Die

2010-03-29T20:05:00.000-07:00

There are known to be roughly 7000 distinct languages spoken worldwide, half of those will be "dead" (have no living speakers and no written record) within this century (a rate of one language every two weeks.) This is an interview with linguist David Harrison about his incredible efforts to save dying languages around the world - to embed himself in cultures to learn and preserve their languages before they vanish.

Slowing Time Down - Trying to Stop the Bullets

2010-03-29T19:20:00.000-07:00

Book Excerpt: Jorge Luis Borges, The Secret Miracle (from Labyrinths)

Does time really speed up as we get older or do we just perceive it to? If it's a matter of perception then it should also be possible to slow time down. Maybe even way down like the main character in Jorge Luis Borges' short story The Secret Miracle...

"From behind the door, Hladik had visualized a labyrinth of passageways, stairs, and connecting blocks. Reality was less rewarding: the party descended to an inner courtyard by a single iron stairway. Some soldiers - uniforms unbuttoned - were testing a motorcycle and disputing their conclusions. The sergeant looked at his watch: it was 8:44 am. They must wait until nine. Hladik, more insignificant than pitiful, sat down on a pile of firewood. He noticed that the soldiers' eyes avoided his. To make his wait easier, the sergeant offered him a cigarette. Hladik did not smoke. He accepted the cigarette out of politeness or humility. As he lit it, he saw that his hands shook. The day was clouding over. The soldiers spoke in low tones, as though he were already dead. Vainly, he strove to recall the woman of whom Julia de Weidenau was the symbol…

The firing squad fell in and was brought to attention. Hladik, standing against the barracks wall, waited for the volley. Someone expressed fear the wall would be splashed with blood. The condemned man was ordered to step forward a few paces. Hladik recalled, absurdly, the preliminary maneuvers of a photographer. A heavy drop of rain grazed one of Hladik's temples and slowly rolled down his cheek. The sergeant barked the final command.

The physical universe stood still.

The rifles converged upon Hladik, but the men assigned to pull the triggers were immobile. The sergeant's arm eternalized an inconclusive gesture. Upon a courtyard flagstone a bee cast a stationary shadow. The wind had halted, as in a painted picture. Hladik began a shriek, a syllable, a twist of the hand. He realized he was paralyzed. Not a sound reached him from the stricken world.

He thought: I'm in hell, I'm dead.

He thought: I've gone mad.

Then he reflected that in that case, his thought, too, would have come to a halt. He was anxious to test this possibility: he repeated (without moving his lips) the mysterious Fourth Eclogue of Virgil. He imagined that the already remote soldiers shared his anxiety; he longed to communicate with them. He was astonished that he felt no fatigue, no vertigo from his protracted immobility. After an indeterminate length of time he fell asleep. On awakening he found the world still motionless and numb. The drop of water still clung to his cheek; the shadow of the bee still did not shift in the courtyard; the smoke from the cigarette he had thrown down did not blow away. Another "day" passed before Hladik understood.

He had asked God for an entire year in which to finish his work: His omnipotence had granted him the time. For his sake, God projected a secret miracle: German lead would kill him, at the determined hour, but in his mind a year would elapse between the command to fire and its execution. From perplexity he passed to stupor, from stupor to resignation, from resignation to sudden gratitude.

He disposed of no document but his own memory; the mastering of each hexameter as he added it, had imposed upon him a kind of fortunate discipline not imagined by those amateurs who forget their vague, ephemeral paragraphs. He did not work for posterity, nor even for God, of whose literary preferences he possessed scant knowledge. Meticulous, unmoving, secretive, he wove his lofty invisible labyrinth in time. He worked the third act over twice. He eliminated some rather too-obvious symbols: the repeated striking of the hour, the music. There were no circumstances to constrain him. He omitted, condensed, amplified; occasionally, he chose the primitive version. He grew to love the courtyard, the barracks; one of the faces endlessly confronting him made him modify his conception of Roemerstadt's character. He discovered that the hard cacophonies which so distressed Flaubert are mere visual superstitions: debilities and annoyances of the written word, not of the sonorous, the sounding one… He brought his drama to a conclusion: he lacked only a single epithet. He found it: the drop of water slid down his cheek. He began a wild cry, moved his face aside. A quadruple blast brought him down.

Jaromir Hladik died on March 29, at 9:02 in the morning."

I find this story fascinating not only for exploring the subjective nature of time, but also the intangible value of human endeavor and experience. Why was it satisfying or worthwhile for the playwright to finish a play that no one would ever read? When he prayed for the opportunity to finish his play surely he meant the opportunity to write it down and leave it for posterity. But, in his reprieve from death he grew to love the act of creativity in and of itself and to appreciate the beauty of all the details around him that he wouldn't even have noticed in the normal flow of time.

This story takes the idea that life's challenges offer its greatest rewards and turns the screw one rotation further - giving actual shape to a man's answered prayers. We throw around many vague notions of fulfillment and the steps we think we must take to get there, but if each of us were granted our own secret miracle, what form would it take and would we immediately recognize it?

This reminds me of the many times I didn't have a camera handy to capture a vista or sunset or a tape recorder or pen to record an inspirational song or story idea that later slipped away - even worse - when my camera was stolen in Baja with a full roll of undeveloped film in it and when a bad memory card obliterated a journey up the California Coast. I was obviously very disappointed, but faced with no other remedy, I decided to try to make the best of what appeared to be a bad situation by paying extra attention to every detail - taking vivid mental pictures that only I would ever see.

This acceptance of my predicament, this letting go, was such a gratifying experience that it made me wonder how many times in my excitement to capture or share the perfect moment I'd diminished it by rushing to grab the camera or to tell a friend, "Look, look at how beautiful it is!" Perhaps, the playwright in Borge's story enjoyed the creation of that final play more than any of his previous plays precisely because he knew it was his alone.

Is this the secret to slowing time down? Was it truly a God given miracle or did the playwright freeze time of his own will? I've heard of stranger things. Like black holes smaller than the head of a pin and invisible fourth and fifth dimensions curled up all around us. Maybe the fountain of youth is not a drink at all, but a state of mind and some monk in the Himalayas has lived a millennium in the last fifty years.

We all have our own bullets. They were locked and loaded the day we were born. When they will be fired is impossible to know, but regardless of how much time we have remaining, it is ours to use as we choose and it may even be ours to bend.

"Golf Bro" Will Mackenzie by John Bradley (from Outside)

2010-03-03T14:02:00.000-08:00

He goes surfing between rounds. He's a class v kayaker. He once bummed heli-rides in ALASKA while living in a snow cave—for a month. And thanks to the strangest personal history on the PGA Tour (step aside John Daly), Will MacKenzie has even made it cool to watch golf.

WILL MACKENZIE IS LINING UP an eight-foot birdie putt halfway through the first round of the Zurich Classic, a low-key April tournament held in New Orleans the week after the Masters. Per PGA regulations, he has the form-fitting, deep-pink polo shirt from his Swedish clothing sponsor, J. Lindeberg, tucked neatly into his gray slacks, and a white golf hat from Bridgestone holding back his thick, sun-bleached brown hair. The 32-year-old buries the putt to quiet applause from the handful of spectators fanning themselves in the Louisiana heat, grabs his ball, and slowly walks off to the next tee. Standard uniform, standard procedure. In other words, if you were to find yourself watching Will "Willy Mac" MacKenzie play golf on a Sunday afternoon, you might think, This is the most unusual player on the PGA Tour? But dig just a little—scratch the surface, really—and the picture gets much scruffier.

Start by looking at MacKenzie's player profile on the official PGA Web site. His stats this past June won't tell you much—his standing on the money list (58th), his rank among players in scoring average (53rd), his tournament victories (one, the 2006 Reno Open)—but the first of the two photos in his "player gallery" will provide a clue. Rather than a shot of MacKenzie playing golf, you see him backstage with hip-hop stars the Black Eyed Peas (that's him in the blue blazer, one spot away from Fergie). Now scour the news reports about January's season-opening Mercedes-Benz Championship in Hawaii. MacKenzie took fourth place and earned a $260,000 paycheck. But while his competitors logged extra time on the practice tee, MacKenzie spent his time between rounds surfing. At a break called Shitty's. "Hey, man, I was getting my work done," he'll tell you. "But I'm not going to Hawaii and not surfing."

Finally, search "Will MacKenzie" on Wikipedia. Here's what you'll find:

MacKenzie was born and raised in Greenville, North Carolina. He was a golfing prodigy growing up but burned out on golf at age 14 and completely quit the game after high school. He then spent five years snowboarding, kayaking, and climbing rocks while living out of a van in Montana. At one point, he spent 30 days in Alaska without showering, smoking blunts every day, living in a cave, and ending up with frostbite ... A glimpse on television of his boyhood idol, Payne Stewart, winning the 1999 U.S. Open rekindled his love affair with the game, and he decided to play professionally. He turned pro in 2000.

All of which is true. Well, most of it, anyway.

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Getting MySpaced

2010-03-03T13:20:00.000-08:00

Self Discovery Through Social Networking

I just joined myspace the other day and was really busy trying to get my profile "just right." I kept checking it and smiling at all the cool colors I'd used to personalize it and the way I'd expressed myself so that people could really get to know me. I was thinking really hard about all of my favorite movies and books and TV shows and I thought "Isn't it funny how you can't remember your favorite movies when you try to think of them?!"

And then all of a sudden I got THREE new messages! And they were all from hot chicks. I thought, "Man, my friend Bobby wasn't kidding, anyone can get laid on MySpace!" Plus they seemed like really nice girls with interests like roller blading and walking on the beach and "anything creative" and they seemed genuinely interested in me because they all wrote "I loved your profile." Amazingly the three of them were from the same nearby town! What are the chances?! So I thought maybe I could do like one of those speed-dating things and meet them in one night (separately of course). Maybe I'd "click" with one of them. The only weird thing was that they were all using friends' myspace accounts so they wanted me to contact them through different websites. Huh? Well I guess that's understandable because if you were over at a friend's house you might use her MySpace… but can't you just log onto your own MySpace even if you're at your friend's house? I'll have to make a post about that one in the "profile editor" forum. Anyway, it was just nice to make some new friends.

Then I went browsing and I found this really interesting 19yr old girl from Portland, OR whose interests are tattoos, butterflies and broken glass and whose quote reads: "I'm going to eat your brain and gain your knowledge." Not quite my "type", but I thought myspace might be a good place to expand my horizons and make some different types of friends so I sent her a message. I wrote: "cool profile." I was sooo excited the next day when there was a return message from her in my inbox. But when I opened the message my heart sank. It read: "Nice profile creep. What are you a stalker perv trolling myspace for fetish whores? Fuck off" ---

That made me feel really insecure about my profile so I looked at it really hard and realized it wasn't as "cool" or "irreverent" or "edgy" as most of the ones I'd seen. My quote was optimistic and life affirming and I'd written a really long honest blurb and listed all of my interests like golf, fantasy baseball, rowing, ping-pong, dog shows, astronomy, etc… I even put some chick flicks in my movie section so that girls would know that I'm into cuddling on the couch and not one of those guys that hogs the remote all night. I listed Kate and Leopold, Girl Interrupted, Erin Brokovich, About a Boy, Shopgirl, Notting Hill, etc.. But it just wasn't working out the way I'd hoped and I was thinking maybe I should set my profile to private, but I only have one friend and I thought nobody would want to be my friend if my profile was set to private because I'd skipped all of those people when I was browsing.

I was very, very depressed and started to think seriously about switching to facebook. But then I came to my senses and I said, "You know what? Fuck it! I'm edgy! I'm bad ass! I'm artsy!" I decided to pay attention to all the cool myspace pages I came across and pick up hints on how to make mine cool too. And you know what? I've learned a lot about myself through this process. I am not such a conservative pussy afterall! Screw dog shows and astronomy! Screw Kate and Leopold! The truth is I never liked that movie anyway! Hugh Jackman was soooo much cooler as Wolverine! Hell, I'm even thinking about getting a tattoo! I feel liberated! And you know what? My new page has already gotten a comment from a cool dude who hooked me up with a link to where I can score legal bud and pills that will make my dick bigger. Look out ladies! And thanks myspace! Here's my new page. Hope you enjoy it

ABOUT ME:

"I'm not nocturnal the sun is just in the wrong time zone."

Age: 99 yrs
From: A State of Dysphoria
Mood: quixotic

INTERESTS:

Rockin all night/sleepin all day. Pants you can get on and off without removing your shoes. Walking, running, Bathing, not bathing. Things that end with the letter "a", drinking, cussing, loud rampant rages and taking care of foster children

WHO I'D LIKE TO MEET:

Somebody who will shoot rats with me at the dump. A witch – a real witch, not one of those Wiccan posers. A vampire – a real vampire, not one of those Des Moines meth energy fucks. Rad people who like to get drunk and sing Journey songs.

STATUS: swinger
ORIENTATION: no answer, no preference, not sure, bi

MUSIC: Italian wedding metal, mariachi trip hop, Tokyo Shinto karaoke, medieval Benedictine trance

MOVIES: Good Ones.
TV: I watch it.
BOOKS: I read 'em

HEROES: maybe you

GROUPS: war against emo, part time ninjas, pale is the new tan, because we're fuking awesome, bitch! Gangsta!