Rose of the North (1)

((Chiang Mai area in the North of Thailand, 1986.))

June 2

I whiled away the rest of yesterday avoiding the extreme heat, reading in the shade, planning excursions, finally venturing out as cooler evening came on. Had a glass of wine in a bar run by a Thai woman just back from two years of social work in Nicaragua. She dislikes the Sandanistas now, says the revolution has gone sour. (Some of her comments remind me of Jean Genet's play The Balcony, where the whorehouse revolutionaries become beasts and dictators themselves, once in power.)

A fruit smoothie slurped in a Euro-tourist cafe later let me observe other Thai women putting the make on Western travellers. No one approached me--not that I was looking for company, but one does feel somehow slighted... Actually the women of Chiang Mai are renowned throughout Thailand (and pictured in books and airline adverts all over the world) as the most beautiful in this graceful kingdom and any husband's most-prized "possession." And they are striking in appearance: paler skinned than the southern Thai, and presenting a more knowing, even arrogant, look on their lovely features. Yet not offensive; just confident of their special privilege.

Today I walked a few miles visiting various local wats. Given that each of them must have support buildings, stupas, chedi pagodas housing holy ashes, glass/porcelain/gold decorations, Thai serpents, and sometimes Chinese lion-like watch-dogs, somehow each still manages to look distinct. Ditto the Buddha images. While there are a dozen favored poses, each face has its own breadth and taper, or glint in the eyes, or set of the mouth--even when you examine a dozen Buddhas of the same pose side by side. All are serene, but some seem to smirk, others to leer; some have eyes open, others downcast or closed. But nearly all of the statues have a rather demure, sensuous, almost hermaphroditic shape. Except for the Starving Buddha/bones image, all are soft and fleshy, exhibiting graceful, rather feminine gestures. What does this signify?

I took most pleasure, however, in talking for an hour with a cheerful young monk anxious to practice his halting English. Pranong (pronounced Ba-non) comes from the northeast, near the Laotian border--where the armed clashes and shelling of refugee camps go on regularly. When Pranong learned that I'm a "writer," he scurried off to get the journal he's been keeping, in English, of his stay at this Chiang Mai wat. (I noticed several references to the city's good-looking women, the young sly boots!)

June 3

The weather brought hot sun in and out of clouds until 5 p.m. Now it's thundering and threatening to storm again. But I did get out on a rental bicycle this morning, pedalling 'roundabout some 25 kilometers of countryside. The core of Chiang Mai is a square-walled city, though without the towers and crenellations of European or Moorish castles. There are gates through each wall and a broad, quite beautiful moat/park around it (on three sides only, I think); and the confident, friendly air of the people confirms the area's reputation as a haven of education and cultured wealth. Many successful Thais maintain "summer" homes up in this region (the city's name or nickname in Thai meaning "Rose of the North"), where they come to escape the heat and oppressive urban confusion of Bangkok.

Once out the North Gate, however, and past the surrounding commercial-residential strip, I found farms galore, a couple of golf courses, little food-and-drink stalls along the roads, even a major Thai Army installation. Asked a few soldiers, in fact, where to find what I had actually ridden out to see: two stoneware factories making what's called "Thai Celadon," a pottery style and process imported from China about 1100 years ago, and used to produce lovely cracked-glaze pots and plates ever since. Had a tour, some cold water, and bought a small plate for $2, then rumbled back toward the city, sweating like a hog in the sweltering heat. The monsoon season is clearly upon us.

More wats en route, a fiery-hot lunch at a vegetarian restaurant, then home to collapse.

June 5

I purposely set yesterday and today aside for writing postcards, letters, and recalcitrant poems. But in take-a-break strolls I managed to find a small antique "Sukhothai" bowl (the Thai Celadon style of a hundred years ago), a collection of Hemingway stories, and a superior Indian restaurant in a spacious, sculptured garden setting. Otherwise I sat under the swirling fans of the Galare's ((guest-house I was staying in)) breezeway-styled dining area, conversing with the Thai help, some Canadian women, and Patrick, a microbiologist from Seattle ((further proof of the world's shrinking)). The two of us will stroll to the city's night market this evening, where I intend to learn by observing Patrick; here for a year, he's become an old hand at shopping and bartering...

June 7

The monsoons have arrived in full force with drenching storms these last two days. I ventured out early yesterday, however, on a bustling tour to outlying areas, me the only taker and my substitute guide speaking no English! But we got on--up many kilometers of climbing mountain road, to one of the King's alternate palaces, a seasonal retreat no doubt, where I saw shady gardens, long sweeping views of the surrounding plains, and posh marble buildings visitors are not admitted into. Then higher up, to the venerable monastery of Wat Doi Suthep, where a 300-step ascent leads to the mountainside-perched platform, which houses one of the Buddha's holy bones. Many worshippers, a few Western gawkers, but only one man and his son doing the traditional freeing of caged birds for good fortune, blessings on the person, and so on. ((This visit I expanded on in a poem which will appear next time.))

Back down the mountain and around Chiang Mai's perimeter to opposite-side craft villages: Baw Sang, where I saw the making of famed regional painted parasols (shipped a pair of them home), and Sam Kamphaeng, where I admired silkworms in various stages of larvae and labors, along with raw silk, weavers and sewers at work, and numerous bolts of colorful silk--even broke down and spent $60 on enough from one bolt to have a suit made someday... ((and I did too, the suit I got married in nearly two years later.))

A fixed price, unlike night-market shopping. There, you mingle with hundreds, locals and hilltribesmen, hunger-inducing food stalls and aggressive vendors (want a phoney "LaCoste" shirt for a buck?), shops upstairs, downstairs, and sprawling along several blocks and side-streets, teeming and raucous but, in Chiang Mai anyway, impeccably clean. And, as in other markets elsewhere, except for those like Patrick who speak the local lingo, the bartering proceeds by headshakes and hand signals, raised eyebrows and expressive shrugs, pigeon English mixed with scrambled Thai. Only a foolish farang tourist pays the asked-for price; the mutually enjoyed game is to "talk" the amount down by a third or more--a lot of work, of course, for something that already costs only a few dollars, but the proper course nonetheless.

Had trouble sleeping last night, woke today with the blind spots in vision that presage one of my rare migraine headaches, and soon got a doozy that left me sick and groaning near the guest-house telephone, awaiting a callback from Sandie... Then spent the rest of the day flat on my back, listening to the rain and feeling sorry for myself, racking my pain-wracked brain-pan for some solution to the anguish my travels are causing among my various loved ones. None of them really understands why I persist in this, my stubborn solitary sojourn in the world. Hell, I don't really know why myself; only that I must go on...

This Gift Reversed

Now that I'm a wise old...er man of 65, all this looking back almost begins to make sense. One does need to take stock now and then, and writing an autobiography slightly disguised as a pop culture blog seems a more palatable (and possible) solution for my somewhat short attention span.

I do much prefer making new discoveries, hearing new music, reading new books, visiting new (as well as much-missed) places foreign and domestic. I've just returned from a whirlwind visit to Vancouver, Canada, occasioned by the amazing invitation of my pal, animator Marv Newland (introduced in blog chapter Newland of Animation, dated 8/20/07), to come use his spare ticket to experience sax giant Ornette Coleman--who in the event did so much more than simply blow Free Jazz. His three-bass band was crisp and tight, and funky when necessary, leaving the quintet's frail but phenomenal frontman to blow his heart out, from a Bach visitation to wild new stuff to the beautiful encore of Lonely Woman!

Anyway, the past is always with us, late and soon, getting and spending, sometimes allowing us to lay waste to our very future, whether personal or species wide. And here's one view of what's past...

In His Dream


He is me, yet he can watch me act.

Things move backward, but matter-of-fact:
Older, then younger, he un-ages;

His marriage removes its bandages,
Revealing faces lovelier once.

He gives away accumulations;
The less he has, the more he is him-

Self, the man he dreams I was in time.
He turns the book’s pages left to right,

But this gift, reversed, of second sight
Leads him briefly into misery,

Discovering his story, when re-
Viewed, as choices made in ignorance,

Lived on the pulses, lacking science.
Yet he is happier, freed of “I,”

All that case-hardened identity—
Circumscribed possibilities reeled

Back up the line, present loss re-called.
Younger than this now, he lives his days

Forgetting who he finally is.

Garuda Birds and Flowing Fire (2)

((Back to Bali and 1986.))

May 18

Night. Rick and I have just returned from a long, hot, and harrowing day spent driving much of the island with three young women, our neighbors from across the garden. (Pleasant enough, I suppose, but truly spoiled daughters of the upper middle-class: too much money, leisure, and "social" drugs.) We repeated whole chunks of the Besakih tour, but this time the mountain was enveloped in clouds: peak hidden, views conscribed, the experience less magical.

But I did get to watch old women and tiny girls piling heavy rocks atop their heads and then balancing these up the slopes for repairs to a part of the temple. And I spent a good half hour talking with some gamelan players and temple guards; though the complex stays empty, the area around it serves as a kind of community-hall gathering place for area villagers.

Later we prowled among ornery bearded monkeys worshipped in a nutmeg forest: tumbledown ruins, creeper vines, nutmeg seeds scattered. Rick and one of the women got nipped trying to cuddle up with the little beggars; I used a stick and kept them honest. Had more trouble, in fact, with a persistent guy at the parking area who wanted my shirt in exchange for a keris knife with a carved-wood handle.

Then we drove back down to the southern coast, to a much-favored temple beside the sea, to watch the Bali sunset come on; scores of curious schoolchildren and older believers were in attendance too, but the clouds never parted.

(Earlier on, we had passed a village where a Hindu cremation ceremony was about to begin. We saw the flower-bedecked procession route, the waiting platform, and the happy family and friends, but didn't stay for the burning--which I think we'd have been welcome to attend. Worth observing someday, I guess, but a bit ghoulish just to sit there as curiosity seekers. At any rate, Bali is still buzzing with talk of the festive cremation day a few weeks back: some regional prince, a venerated, almost holy ruler, died at last, and 500 of his followers, people already dead and buried, that is, were dug up and burned along with the prince. There were flowers and funeral pyres, parades and pyromaniacs, all over the island!)

The "harrowing" part of the trip came after dark, driving back to Kuta. It was my shift in the four-wheel-drive rental, and I quickly discovered that the headlamps didn't work at all! So there we were with no car lights, no streetlights along the way, the moon obscured by clouds, and 45 kilometers of pitted road to navigate. With five pairs of eyes staring and five different voices shouting warnings, I sped along, weaving in and out among the nearly invisible pedestrians and bicyclists, pounding on the horn--which beeped only intermittently--perspiring frantically, riding the brakes but also trying to keep our speed at about 35 m.p.h. so we could get the car back before the agency's closing time and thus avoid paying a whole second-day's rental fee.

I hit branches, spun the tires in rocks off the side of the road, and drove down a one-way street the wrong way at the end, but we made it. Drenched, gibbering like one of those damned monkeys, I got the car part-way into a cramped slot and then the engine killed. "Fuck it," I said, and walked away.

I haven't spoken to any of the others since. Whatever else happened, I've just been finishing my South of Bali poem, riding on the adrenalin, burning out...


Sunset at Kuta Beach

The sky breathes red and gold, a Balinese dragon
consuming the dregs of the sun.
To the west, Java seethes with volcanic change;
each night, chaos remains.
But at Kuta, the last Australian surfer drags
his board past the beach flags,
the multitudinous native masseuses and stubborn
sun-worshippers who yearn
for a few more hours of fragrant oil. Baked
bodies are rewrapped, naked
caramel breasts tucked reluctantly in sarongs.
The South of Bali belongs
these days to tourists and jet-setters, a president
whose posh, rent-out residence
goes for more per night than one Indonesian
can make in four seasons
of farming, and locals who've become most adept
at chivvying rupiahs kept
loose in these travellers' well-padded pockets.
Kuta's sky late at sunset
cools into shapes of garuda birds and flowing fire,
as sun-drugged desire
reawakens to evenings of more fleshly pleasures,
and lager-Fostering tours
of the flash, Aussie-catering watering holes.
The sky's glowing coals
are scattered thin, dyeing through twilight's batik
into indigo and black.
The evening kecak dance, staged for paying
customers only, rings
out in percussive rhythm and chanted monkey cries.
That trance may be a lie,
but part-way up Mt. Agung, where lava still rumbles,
above the Mother Temple--
the island's beating heart--a scimitar of moon
has hung by a thread since noon.
And now it falls. But no one bothers to notice,
neither hedonist nor Balinese.

((It occurs to me now that my chastising and moralizing tone, and the imagery chosen, isn't all that far removed from the words of our terrorist enemies today... But it's only a poem, folks, really.))

Back to Bali (1)

((Lately at times I've been transcribing sections from my 1986 around-the-world travel journal. Today some impressions and experiences from Bali, Indonesia's beautiful Hindu island, sadly the site of terrorist bombings, the last few years, in places I visited safely and happily back then.))

May 15

Clusters of swaying palmtrees, bush-covered volcanic hills, step-terrace rice paddies rising up and up, as many as 30 levels. Hindu temples by the thousands, in every village and field, one of them standing beside a power pole in a shimmering paddy. Surfers at Kuta Beach vainly flailing at low waves. Beach bungalows ranged around lush tropical gardens. Balinese vendors swarming like sandflies, clinging tenaciously to the near-naked sun-worshippers; thus my first Balinese words: Tarima kasih--approximately, "Buzz off, I don't need anything!"

Woke to the cheering sound of roosters and dawn birds, tea and toast on the porch of the small bungalow Rick ((Swiss traveler I had met on the long busride from Jakarta)) and I are sharing for about $3.50 each per night. His German guide to Indonesia recommended this place among the hundreds along this southern wedge of the island; and the room is adequate, with ceiling fan and flush toilet, on a nice garden near the white-sand beach.

Which is where I am now, fighting off the vendors, watching the surfers, trying not to stare at the bare-breasted non-natives. At least I feel clean and relaxed again. Nothing like the ocean to rinse away your cares and woes...

May 16

Sunshine flickering among the hibiscus flowers, booming surf and rhythmic gamelan music pulsing in the distance. It was beach bum-around time, though I did wander the Kuta-Legian commercial strip, miles long, boutiques and bars, cafes and cassette shops, where I suppressed my gadget-dislike long enough to spend $35 on a paperback-sized deck and a stack of tapes, pirated duplicates of Springsteen, Dire Straits, Tina Turner, and others selling for about a dollar.

More impressions: tiny shrines can be found outside each home or store; these are filled each day with floral bouquets and little leaf-boxes of food bits--gifts to the gods. And the little boxes show up on sidewalks and tidelands too, wherever the Balinese congregate. Also, a silly example of hedonism at the beach: most women, and some men as well, pay to lie on their towels or mats and be massaged, fed food or drink, even have their hair braided and beaded. This looks like a scene from some Roman Empire decadence flick like Caligula or Fellini's Satyricon. Harmless diversion, or insult to Balinese pride? Anything to make a few rupiahs, i guess.

Tomorrow I take a grand tour up to Bali's most holy temple, Besakih...

May 18

The journey proved too tiring to transcribe any notes last night, but here's the jist of the day:

Heading out on the small bus-van, we could immediately see the contrast between Kuta's crap-consumer congestion (it's Australia's equivalent of Hawaii, after all) and the palm-drenched plush spaciousness of expensive hotels and their park-like surroundings, in the area called Samur. There we picked up so many wealthier tourists that the van skipped a promised barong dance exhibition in order to fritter away two hours in craft-specialty villages, where we could learn about, and buy samples of: silver-smithing in Celuk, waist-sash weaving (for temple wear) in Batuan, and cloth weaving in Gianyar. The pressure to buy irritated me, but the Gianyar factory with its hundred-some women spinning wheels and old wooden looms was quite a sight.

Next came Klungkung where a no-longer-used royal enclosure and hall of justice offered fantastical ceiling paintings depicting both marital bliss and evildoers scourged by demons! (The souvenir sellers tugging at us so tenaciously seemed the demons secular cousins.) And the horror motif continued at the next stop, a reeking, truly disgusting, sacred cave of bats, with a filth-encrusted temple in the foreyard. Mondo Cane stuff.

After a tourist-ripoff lunch that cost me a whole day's meal money, we drove on into hills and then up a winding mountain road to reach Besakih, Bali's "Mother Temple," used only once a year, in April, for a full day of processions and ceremonies. Although only Hindus were allowed inside into the separate areas for Siva, Vishnu, and Brahma worship, we pagans could circle the walls, climbing higher and higher, viewing gold decorations, stone stupas (sort of free-standing steeples), wooden platforms awaiting cremations, and Besakih's extraordinary setting. Halfway up the island's most imposing volcano, Mt. Agung--which last erupted in 1963 on the actual ceremony day, killing thousands but doing no damage to the temple!--Besakih looks straight up to to the top of the mountain, to the full moon lingering above it today. One turns back to discover a vista of most of south Bali--hills, paddies, and fields stretching all the way to the beaches and the sea.

I was haunted by the experience all the way back to Kuta and during the night. It's clearly what triggered the poem I'm working on today...

((More from exotic Bali, and the completed poem, next chapter.))

Grad School Days (2)

((I turned 65 yesterday, which is the main reason I've been thinking so much about the old days of school and otherwise. So please forgive the ego stuff--I'll be better soon, honest!))

The first thing a newly graduated male, 18 or older, had to think about in 1964 was military service. Vietnam was starting to heat up, bodies were being called up... There really was a draft back then, and within a couple of years, as some may remember, it became a huge issue--vocal resistance, draftcard burnings, young men fleeing to Canada or using their parents' clout to get exempted somehow (hmmm, sounds like a President or two I've heard about).

I didn't have much to worry about, actually. I had gotten married as a Senior, and my then-wife was pregnant, so I had that solid bit of protection. And if I moved straight on into grad school, that too would serve as a shield of sorts. I had already signed up to continue on at the UW and had proved myself sufficiently as a serious Senior that I received another scholarship and a part-time Teaching Assistant job. (I worked at Safeway stores too. Yeah, those were the days: a 32-hours-a-week job as grocery clerk, a teaching schedule to fulfill, graduate English classes to wrestle into submission, creative writing that drove me to pen and paper, and a fledgling marriage and pregnant wife to worry about.)

What I really hadn't settled for sure, and this drifted in and out of our lives for a few years, was what career I wanted. Working on a Master's Degree, I was in line to become a college professor and publishing poet, but I quickly learned that academia was--sadly? luckily?--not for me. I disliked the over-zealous, competitive grad students, I found many professors arrogant and mean-spirited and boring, I still got A's but foolishly resented the drudgery of lengthy footnoted papers and such. But, really, it was down to me. Back at Northwestern, I had joined and then quickly dropped out of ROTC; and the same stubborn resistance to order-taking I'd felt then seemed to influence my attitude toward academia. I could do the work and often beat out other grads for honors, but I didn't want the results, or the pressure, or... I don't know.

So I was casting about for what to do next. Safeway store clerk didn't seem the answer. A side note for a moment. One of the customers where I worked as stocker and cashier was an ex-wife of country singer Tex Ritter; she would come in from time to time with their preteen daughter. She looked at me one evening and said, deadpan, "There is no safe way," then walked out. (I've split the store name in her sentence, because I believe that's how she meant the layered pun, with which I belatedly agreed.)

Here's where one's snap, or even considered, decisions can affect a lifetime... I'd have a Master's in Lit by summer 1966, trained to do only one sort of thing, teach Lit or write. So I applied for various teaching jobs, and was offered positions at regional community colleges, even at Pacific Lutheran University (where I would be a sort of guest poet teaching creative writing), but turned them all down--in the case of PLU because I didn't want any religious stuff hanging over my head. (Would I have found things that onerous, really? I was desperate for excuses.)

I applied to New York University's famous film school (one of very few existing back in those distant days) and was offered a slot but no scholarship money. Then-wife and I had already agreed that she would be an at-home Mom, so I would have had to work full-time in NYC as well as go to school. (I was too unsure of costs and my stamina and resolve--basically chicken. Another opportunity wasted.)

I applied to a university in the Sussex area of England where I would supposedly continue on towards a Doctorate in English Lit, imagining that the slightly exotic locale might inspire me onwards--was welcomed too, but passed on the opportunity again, still convinced that the money problems couldn't be overcome. (No Thomas Hardy or Jane Austen environments on our horizon.)

Clearly, I just wasn't brave enough to tackle the challenges each opportunity offered.

Finally, lazily, desultorily, I settled for becoming a writer-editor for the University Relations Office at the UW, initially preparing press releases and alumni news for the campus Alumnus Magazine. And I did all right at the small stuff, and soon was writing full-length magazine pieces, and then I moved on to Seattle Magazine, where... but I've already covered that experience in an earlier posting. (See chapter titled A Whale of a Tale, from May 27 last year.)

The point is this: I finally, for better or worse, was off on a full-time writing career--which would carry me into film work, and then advertising and production, in and out of poetry and plays, and eventually around the world and back again, to become a semi-retired bookseller.

But I coulda been a contender. I had my chance at academia, and campus literary lion, and New York magazine stardom, and successful Hollywood screenwriter on strike, and who-knows-what-all might have been... but passed on them all.

Rightly or wrongly, here I sit, blogging. School days do part-shape one's life.

School Days (1)

"Good old golden rule days..."--what does that mean anyway? Nuns rapping your knuckles with a ruler? Schoolyard bullies stealing your lunch money? Some sort of Athenian democracy of equals working usefully together? Hard to see how anyone's school experience fits some fine Golden Rule.

And I write as one who pretty much had it easy. We changed schools often (Air Force family), but I knew how to keep quiet among my peers and keep my head down, focussed on homework or tests. I had a quick intelligence, evidently, and a good memory, so doing the work was never a problem. I always made straight A's, only had a couple of fights, played sports with minor success by hustling harder than my skills allowed for, survived a couple of unrequited crushes, etc.

But my lasting school memories are limited, really. I remember my Third/Fourth grade teacher encouraged me to start creative writing. (My first stories were about a Chinese boy so inept with chopsticks he had to invent the fork, and a dumb science fiction parody of television's Dragnet I called "Pla-net"!) And I remember walking home one day through fields where I found a fire starting to spread and, rather than running off to get help, I just brashly beat it out with my quickly-ruined, Davy Crockett fringed leather jacket. That small moment of feeling heroic may have been the highlight of my gradeschool days.

But we kept moving on, so I got to experience the preteen dating mores and general racial attitudes of Montgomery, Alabama, 1955-56, making for a difficult Seventh grade year (see the blog chapter called Two Kings). And then we shipped out to Izmir, Turkey--where my grades were so solid and the school so small that the teachers decided to skip me from Eighth into Ninth instead. I went from being somewhat older for Eighth to being younger than most of the other students. But aside from another fight or two, things and I adapted.

The most interesting events were hints of hard drugs circa 1957--at least one senior, an aspiring Jazz drummer, was toying with marijuana and maybe even heroin--and having to play Turkish highschool teams in soccer and basketball. A local "highschool" guy might mean a 35-year-old, a huge and definitely hardened worker or mechanic, even ex-Army maybe. Us American kids routinely got our shins and asses kicked!

When we moved to Tacoma for my Junior and Senior years, I managed to sidle back into the structure; played intermural sports, held minor student government and/or dance committee jobs, and kept getting good grades. In fact, by the end of school, because Clover Park HS offered some college-level courses worth extra credit, I managed to graduate with a 4.02 grade point. But for some reason, I have blanked out on graduation itself; I think I was number one in the graduating class of 1200 seniors, but I don't remember delivering any valedictorian speech, nor indeed the big event itself...

I'd played the plan-for-college game, so I was accepted to a few spots across the country (even tried for the recently-opened Air Force Academy; didn't make it), but picked Northwestern, in Evanston right by Chicago, because my parents were off to another duty tour elsewhere, and I had relatives nearby in Illinois, in case of any problems. Between a healthy scholarship, family support, student loans, and part-time jobs ranging from kitchen clean-up at a popular campus hangout to an excellent assistant slot with Northwestern's offical events impresario (I got to read/press-clip the New York Times every day and be a "gopher" at all the campus drama and musical events), I managed to last there for the first two, very expensive years (1960-1962).

Then I transferred west to the considerably cheaper University of Washington. At Northwestern I had started with the idea of majoring in Mathematics and Computers (Fortran machine-language and punchcards were the order of business in those days), but quickly found the programming boring and the math daunting. So then I was a general Liberal Arts guy, sort of toying with Languages and Linguistics, until I reached the UW and had to get serious. First it was Political Science with a Latin American focus (I was imagining a career in the diplomatic service), but the gathering storm against America's interference around the world--Guatemala, Chile, the beginnings of Vietnam--coupled with my own lefty-populist ideals, convinced me I couldn't blithely support my government as an embassy worker somewhere.

Also, one rotten PoliSci professor gave me the only C I got in six years of college (B's a couple of times), because I didn't do the extra-credit scrapbook we had been told would NOT count against us, but would instead only boost our grades; well, I had B's at worst on tests, including the final, but wound up with that damned C grade. I was too foolishly proud to do more than squawk to the T.A., but it cost me in the long run, because my final college grade point was one tiny percentage away from Summa cum Laude, and a B would have put me in. (On the other hand, aside from pride, I really never did put much stock in grades or I.Q. numbers; so I got A's, was 139 or something, did great on College Boards--did any of it make me a better man or someone better able to cope with the changes/problems in life? I don't think so.)

So I switched to a major in Spanish for a couple of quarters, for no good reason except the courses I had taken, until I realized I really didn't want to teach Spanish somewhere--which was the only job I could imagine in my naive, anti-entrepreneurial way... "Go into business? Never." Suddenly I was facing the Senior year with no plan or major. The only thing I could think to do was fall back on what I had always enjoyed doing, reading and writing. I shifted straight into English Literature, took solid English courses for the next four quarters, and graduated with a B.A. in Lit in August of 1964.

"Now what?" I thought.

((The answer comes next time.))

A Local Habitation

"A picture is worth a thousand words"; a typical cliche with much truth beneath the gloss. As one who has made his living as a writer, I have to agree that the attempt to describe something accurately--rather than partially evoking it, let's say--is a tricky business; what empirical details are needed? can the words actually match the image? how much needs to be said (written, that is)? a thousand words, really?

What I have always valued is the idea that "less is more," fewer but right words, and one's individual imagination, believing that our internal images are stronger than the actual visualization. I cherish the listening experience, for example, be that music, information on the radio, or people conversing, whether to me or to someone else--eavesdropping, yes. Yet I do love movies, and seeing the world, and a beautiful face or body. (This blog is called "I Witness" for a reason. It's not only eyes doing the witnessing.)

And so we come back to pictures, whether great art or simple snapshot photography. From early master Jacques Henri Lartigue to Life Magazine's David Douglas Duncan, from the many W.P.A. photogs to, yes, Ansel Adams and Diane Arbus, from Robert Capa to Henri Cartier-Bresson and Andre Kertesz and scores more, I have found pleasure and fascination in, mostly, black-and-white photography.

Yet I am a word man. Only rarely do I ever place my own hand on a camera, depending instead on powers of observation and memory and description to do the job. During that 19-month trip around the world, for example, I took no camera, vowing instead to recount the experiences in a journal and poems instead. Well, you win some, you lose some, and some get rained out... as another cliche puts it. Much of the journal bogs down in insignificant details, not to mention the occasional banalities. And the poems? Well, just be glad I'm posting--slowly, please note--only a dozen or so drawn from those two years of travel.

Like most poets, a verbal test I have enjoyed occasionally is the attempt to render some striking painting or photograph in words. English poet Charles Tomlinson is one master at that (he was a painter as well), and W.H. Auden and Elizabeth Bishop were others who succeeded. This posting today presents a pair of my own attempts linked to favorite photos by Kertesz (begging the question slightly, I am showing his photos too).

Kertesz loved unexpected perceptions: architectural details, patterns found, people in odd moments, often viewed from skewed angles (from a hotal room looking out and down was a favorite). His photos are art; my poems are mere pastiche, but possibly amusing. See how many of my words it takes to "give to airy nothing/ A local habitation and a name..."

Kertesz: Two Photos

I. “Disappearing Act”

See where the partial man ascends to nowhere,
Bare legs and baggy shorts cut off in mid-air
By massive beams, broad horizontal stripes.
Vertical bar-like wires, supporting steps
Dangling in space, enclose him in a prison,
Sentenced to higher climbs. Whatever season
He’s risen in, the background verge shows scrub
And sand, tideland and piers beyond, a drab
Seaside community in haze; he could be
In Queensland, the Camargue, or close to Kitty
Hawk. That it’s “New York, 1955”
Seems apt, a site no harder to believe
Than this image magique, with printed contrast
So bright the air and house above are one vast
Field of off-white, with lines precisely squared:
Magritte reworked by Mondrian. But where
His head should be, a block of mirror, window,
Or trick exposure renders man a Hindu
Fakir vanishing up his rope of stairs
To graphic truth: in time, one disappears.


II. “Rainy Day”

“Tokyo, 1968”: umbrellas,
from above, across
a gray curve of street as mirror-dull as
a river embossed
by flooding; twelve well-suited businessmen
on parade, in rain,
herded, hurrying, reflecting but un-
thinking--a dozen
open brollies obviously no more
au courant than one,
here in the land of the rising water.
Oblivious, thus,
to the yen for P.T. Barnum’s patter,
these damp gentlemen
yet follow a bright-painted, quite non-Zen-
sical white arrow:
“This way to, not Progress, but the Egress.”

Martin Luther King

Honoring today's celebration of Martin Luther King and all that he and the other Civil Rights heroes stood for, I commend to your attention my early blog postings dated 5/18/07 (Two Kings) and 6/23/07 (A Road the Dust Blows Over). I'd rather offer musical riffs than political posturing.

Venus Reborn

Feeling the pressure of new year necessities, so today I've decided to return to the saga of Down Under, 1986 (see two previous entries)...

When I got back to Sydney from the West of Australia, my love and soon-to-be-fiancee Sandie arrived for a two-week reunion as we sought to determine whether we were a couple that could survive lengthy separations (yes, we were) and whether we could travel together (we could and did, with Sandie rejoining me in Europe a few months later, for another lucky 13 months of adventures).

But first we experienced some other parts of Australia. We explored Sydney's galleries and nightlife, for example, flew into the Outback to climb Ayers Rock, and dodged the bats flitting nightly about the town of Cairns--where I bought a brilliant and brilliantly colored t-shirt showing a sort-of swinging bachelor wombat lazing in a hammock, with pen and postcard in hand, and caption reading, "Weather is here. Wish you were beautiful!"

Prior to Cairns, heading northward on the continent's Eastern coast, we had some lovely and solitary days on the beaches of Queensland. The following poem dates from that time, as we enjoyed both weather and our beautiful, reunited selves...

Botticellian Song

Languidly my lady goes,
Accepting what the sea
Bestows, froth of waves
Lapping at her heels, surf
Slapping at the rocks beyond.

The ocean is the bond
Between us here, forgiving
All that we bring each other
For cleansing. Lithe still,
She leans looking down:

The sucking sand absorbs
Each splash of tidal wash,
Reflects her peering face
And the flash of naked
Limbs scissoring across

Liquid space—a treasure
Of radiance, and grace
Beyond measuring. She bends,
Hesitating, where the foam
Ends, her hand reaching

Down to mirrored hand
To pluck a scallop shell
Tossed to sand by the roil
And ruck of tumbling water.
O Aphrodite’s daughter,

Child of sea and earth,
I see you rise holding
Out your prize to me,
Birth of Venus reversed.
In your eyes I see myself

Revised: handsomer: a lad
Of golden summer again—
The magic of this beach
After squalling rains
Linking us now, each

To the other, and removing
Age’s stains, here where
The land’s reach falters
And drains, as a woman
Alters, spent after loving.

Blasted Outback

((Returning on the Indian-Pacific train, heading back from Perth (this time to dip south for visits to Melbourne and Adelaide), we again had to cross the Nullarbor Plain, again much of it during the night. On the first trip, the train had stopped at a waterhole/non-town named Cook for 40 minutes, but the train cars had been locked tight, so I couldn't get out to view the stars and Halley's Comet. On the return, when we stopped in Cook the second time, I found a door unlocked, so I climbed down and headed away from the lights to look skyward.

I walked out a couple of hundred yards and stared up at the heavens... After several silent minutes I decided I wanted binoculars; I was about to go back for them when I heard... the train already pulling away! Panic-stricken I ran over to and along the moving train, pounding on locked doors and car sides, convinced I was about to be abandoned in the wasteland Outback, just another fool tourist caught short...

The rest of my bonehead experience and what I made of it can be read in the following poem. The Nullarbor piece I had started and put away suddenly had a reason to exist and a, sort of, resolution.))

Nullarbor Plain Song

All day we drive deeper, wheel-shafts
muscling the Outback’s Long Straight
of steel-rail track. Granite disappears,
and red-ochre dirt gives way,
till west of the road north to Alice,
the Indian-Pacific skims limestone
dust like ash: decayed salt-flats
of a Cretaceous seabed upraised.

The annihilated fastness grows
no trees—five hundred miles
of Nullarbor desolation. Yet life
holds hard here, living parched:
scrub grasses grip scorched ground;
salt-bush, myall, and mulga breed
hordes of insects, that lizards may feed
on this sun’s anvil; and predator hawks

hunt gallah and shrike, hammering
day down into night… Past midnight.
Roused by the train’s rude couplings,
I come awake at some battered
watering station—no town, a rough
cluster of tin roofs; most buildings
deserted, but a few housing mates,
Bruces and Sheilas coupled or un-.

The train cools down, waiting. I walk out,
restless, away from the work-lights,
to gaze up at myriad flickerings,
the patterned grid of translucent dark:
unknown creatures, strange constellations;
aboriginals Dreaming their ancestral trails
through nightmares of whitefella creation…
Kangaroos made radioactive. Goannas

that glow in the dark. Wombats mutated
by decades-old bomb-tests… No moon
and no sound. Yet night’s unseen motion.
And somewhere overhead, flashing
fire and ice, Halley’s veiled face. In this
cold, burning universe, where is the omen?
where the heaven-breaking response?
What sense can track the comet

through all its hard foretellings,
or prepare us for some radiant dawn,
past the terror wastes of Maralinga,
in a world of Nullarbor Plains?
Where lies the way out or back…?
No answer. Nothing. I am unused,
the still clapper in this silent,
arching bell of cosmic blackout…

Yet, almost imperceptibly, a faint form
stirs on the horizon of consciousness:
possible… immanent… shimmering…
Shattered by hissing, by the sudden
clack-clack of steel wheels slipping;
and I am panic-running, chasing
the stuttering sleepers, their doors
locked, train rolling faster and

faster, last car passing, going,
and I’m collapsing by the track,
but… a crewman’s hand grabs me—
boosted up and in, adrenalin
jumping, synapses overloaded,
rocketing with the car… as all
the lights go out: rail system
shutdown; braking, to, a… halt.

Perspiring here in starless black,
stalled in Australia’s blasted Outback
on a gone-dead train to nowhere,
now and for the rest of my journey
through these ashes, as terrified
as any ancestor who looked
to the heavens, transfixed
by mystery—and was answered.

Train Time

((The sad demise of American railroads and current sorry state of AmTrak versus some embarrassingly excellent trains still zipping and chugging their way around the world... well, that's a topic on my mind as the year 2008 begins. Everyone complains about airport delays, but friends of mine had passenger train screwups and stuck-on-the-track delays this past year lasting eight and thirteen hours.

True, I've ridden some hellbound trains (more loco than motive) in Southeastern Europe and Burma, but I can also remember wonderful trips I experienced in decades past--across the Midwest, around New York State, from Chicago to Seattle several times, up and down the West Coast, and so on. These days I wouldn't ride a U.S. long-distance train even if someone else was paying. But line me up with a Eurail Pass, and I am yours for life (or at least the month); what a brilliant way to zip back and forth across the Continent! And that's pretty much a separate matter from the bullet-trains operating with great success in Japan and France. Where would Britain be without the Flying Scotsman and The Great Train Robbery? or France minus the Orient Express and that exciting WWII adventure film simply called The Train (definitely one of Burt Lancaster's best roles)?

Considering our own railroads' significant history--from construction of the Trans-Continental Railway to hobos riding the rods; from beautiful Art Deco travel posters to blues songs like "The Panama Limited" and "Love in Vain"; from the Chattanooga Choo-Choo, the City of New Orleans, and the Yellow Dog, to the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe; from North by Northwest and Once Upon a Time in the West to Strangers on a Train and Sunset Limited; from the sad trains transporting Lincoln's body (or the Kennedys more recently) to the victory expresses filled with happy politicos or football fans; from Singing Brakeman Jimmie Rodgers somewhere "Waiting for a Train" to the tragic heroics of John Henry and the engineer of Old No.9; from Gravy Trains and Midnight Specials and certain others "bound for glory," to the "A" Train and "The Golden Rocket" and Elvis riding his "Mystery Train"... well, almost anyone over 30 could list page after page of train lore.

Anyway, I wanted to celebrate trains past and present this time. They used to, and maybe some still do, take you to faraway places and strange folks. There's a famous and remarkable railway that rolls straight across the Outback of Australia, from Sydney to Perth. It's a train I was glad to board; and here's the relevant section from my 1986 around-the-world journal, with most details likely still similar today.))

******
April 6

The steel wheels are rolling, and the steel rails humming, as the famed "Indian-Pacific" hurtles west. I decided I had to see Perth--and this train--even though it means a three-day trip across the full width of the continent. And even though I'm sharing this roomette with a young virologist from Edmonton, Alberta, who seems a combination of nerd and know-it-all. (He probably dislikes my grumpy taciternity too.)

Spent the morning and early p.m. wandering Sydney's main museum and rambling expanse of park. I learned about the Aboriginals, peculiar flora and fauna Down Under (dangerous spiders, for example), the continent's geological history. Most fun was a film and exhibit on the dubious duck-billed platypus, which I hope to coax into a poem sometime.

So far we've chugged up and over the Blue Mountains, which feature 3000-foot peaks, winding valleys, sharp escarpments, and lots of bush, with the population of Aussies getting scarcer by the mile.

April 7

Dawn. My lands, what we are seeing: burning sky, a lake of dead trees, sheep and cattle stations in flat scrub-growth stretching for miles, a flock of flamingo-like birds in flight (some kind of heron maybe), a herd of kangaroos bouncing away from the onrushing train, and a pack of panicky, bobbing emus. The other early risers around me are burning off camera film at a fierce rate.

Later... We stopped for an hour at Broken Hill, a major mining town (silver, zinc and lead) on the border between Aussie states New South Wales and South Australia. I trudged around in the surprisingly chilly air, admired some interesting turn-of-the-century architecture, little else.

Then on across mostly wasteland, with even the animals tucked away somewhere else. And this was the easy part--the desolate Nullarbor Plain still lies ahead. Another late-afternoon stop gave us a quick taste of Port Pirie, a slightly sleazy seaport a few notches up the southern coast from Adelaide. Otherwise, on and on, into the night. No lights or sign of what's out there, but we'll hit the Nullarbor about 3:30 this morning.

April 8

In the heat of mid-day the Nullarbor seems little more than a dreadful desert plateau--not sand, but rock scrabble, with minimal bits of grass, a few 'roos and emus (seen early morning only), and nothing else. Certainly no trees; thus its Latin-derived name. The plain features one stretch of perfectly straight train-track 478 kilometers long!

Anyway, you look out, see nothing but dusty white plain--no land features; a patch of moisture mirage perhaps. Go 20 kilometers on, look again: exactly the same. Perversely beautiful.

I started a poem during the night. Brief stops and side-shuntlings kept waking me up, so then I tried to sneak outside in mid-Outback to see Halley's Comet. But every door was locked tight. Frustrated, I picked up the pen again.

Later... Ten hours after rolling into the Nullarbor, we finally begin to see taller vegetation and then a few trees again. Some huge hawks, birds called gallahs, scrawny cattle, scrawnier weather-hardened Aussies. Braked to a stop about 6 p.m., in Kalgoorlie, in the gold mining region of Western Australia. With a couple of hours to wait, I walked out "downtown" with my meal-mates, a mother and her two children, bound home to Perth from Melbourne.

But only three kinds of places were open: pubs catering to locals and passers-through; the single still-in-operation gold mine, which runs organized tours timed for this train break; and Kalgoorlie's infamous Egan Street, which offers still-functioning bordellos--quasi-legal, or at least ignored by the authorities. Unfortunately (or do I mean fortunately?) not in walking distance.

I've shelved the Nullarbor poem for now--too gloomy. More useful might be a belated description of some of the characters I've been "training" with: roomie Hans and his sister Marguerite, he thin and with a silly gigolo mustache, she stout and aggressive, both of them staking out the club car, holding forth for hours on end. Another peculiar pair, Arthur and his Mum, are too amazing to ignore--hirsute and stout, a bit bandicoot-like; him shy and lonely and awkward, her whining after him, again and again, "Arthur, Arthur..." More charming, but in a gruff way, are "Athos," "Porthos," and "Aramis," our three Kiwi musketeers, country boys heading for farm jobs near Perth: one skinny, one rock-like, one rotund, and all three spending endless hours guzzling beer and telling incomprehensible jokes.

The Aussie capacity for drink has been well-documented, but in person it is truly, shall we say, staggering. Red-faced men, tiny old ladies, young hellraisers, rowdy "sheilas," all with can after can pyramiding up around them--Foster's and Swan, Emu Export and "XXXX," and "Another round here, mate. No worries!" The train toilets, which flush directly onto the tracks, have left a rather wet trail across the, er, wastes.

April 9 and after

Continuing yesterday's brew-haha, I neglected to mention the outlandish number of pubs and pub-hotels, t-shirts extolling beer-swilling, and even best-selling books that picture drunken Aussies partying, puking, and passing out.

I had a sampling of all those cultural wonders as I wandered the streets of Perth today. A happier city than Sydney, I think--smaller but still quite international in its ethnic mix, its shops and restaurants and arts on display. Located on the edge of the Indian Ocean, Perth is actually closer to Singapore than to many of the cities in Oz... full of stately homes, well-tended parks, burgeoning skyscrapers, lovely suburbs arrayed around the sprawling Swan River Estuary, white-sand beaches leading up and down the coast, sparkling sunshine and bustling energy. Its lively spirit derives from strong regional growth, booming oil fields, the America's Cup Challenge going on at nearby Fremantle, and the land's western vantage looking out on a watery frontier. I could live here for sure: the size is still manageable, the folks' outlook confident.

Everything here feels charged up, like Chicago in the days when Sandburg called it "City of Big Shoulders"--a buzzing, brawling, beautiful chunk of urban excitement. The bus driver yesterday could be both cynical and nostalgic for the old days, the Western Australia of farms and towns he grew up in. But to a newcomer, Perth feels like the future.

This is the edge--the edge of a huge continent, of a wide-open ocean, and of a dangerous blade called Progress. Sydney with its sprawl and Metro trains and busy ferry system runs like a well-oiled machine, a New York not yet out of control, while Perth still struggles, experiments, makes mistakes. But is going for it!

((The train trip back across Australia delivered a strange, one could even say mystical, post-midnight moment, which I'll regale you with next time.))

Of Harvests and Rivers

In the late Thirties, a few U.S. composers moved on from Modernism (or maybe they backed away), revisiting sounds more native to America. Aaron Copland wrote El Salon Mexico, then Virgil Thomson was tapped to create folksong/hymn-based soundtracks for a couple of documentary films, the scores for which in turn persuaded Copland to go further, creating his so-called "Americana" sound, lovely and expansive, evoking the wide open spaces of America, to be memorably and most melodically found in Fanfare for the Common Man, the Billy the Kid and Rodeo ballets, and then his ineffable Appalachian Spring.

Others followed along too, each in his own fashion--Roy Harris, Lou Harrison, William Schuman, et al, plus Charles Ives, rediscovered and increasingly studied. I admire the music of all these composers, but Copland remains my favorite, his triad simplicity practically the total antithesis of complex, world-in-each-symphony Gustav Mahler, whose massive, brooding works are my other personal touchstones. Think The Tender Land Suite vs. Mahler's Symphony No.4, or Copland's Old American Songs against Das Lied von der Erde. Apples and oranges? I'd say more like grapes up against watermelons!

But what matter if the music pleases, if it captures the imagination and soothes the soul? And those documentary scores by Thomson too are delectable green grapes (so to speak)--The Plow That Broke the Plains (from 1936) and The River (1937), Pare Lorenz's famous visual essays in support of President Roosevelt's New Deal projects.

I first heard Thomson's scores on a Vanguard record 40 years ago, conducted I believe by Leopold Stokowski. In the years since, that disc disappeared, was replaced, and then newer recordings added--I remember especially an Eighties album including a third Thomson suite with the others, Neville Mariner conducting one of the esteemed Los Angeles ensembles. But I never had the good fortune actually to see the films themselves. They had become historical landmarks lost to public view...

Until recently, when enterprising Classical label Naxos not only recorded new versions of the two suites (Angel Gil-Ordonez leading a group called the Post-Classical Ensemble), but synched them up against new prints of both documentaries, which were then at last made available once more, late in 2007, on Naxos DVD 2.110521, complete with informed commentary by era survivors. And viewing The Plow a week ago immediately reminded me that I had forgotten to list (in blog posts from the end of August) one film I proposed back when I was writing for King Screen Productions--a poetry-and-music documentary on Washington State's wheat harvest.

Using a few poems written by my now-deceased friend Robert Sund (from his book Bunch Grass, I think; this was over 35 years ago), I scripted--meaning roughed-out for a cinema verite approach to the filming--a series of shots that would recreate "A Day in the Wheatfields": elegant color footage flowing from dawn beauty through heat-of-day harvesting (the big machines moving row on row), then a midday slower break from the hot sun, then a return for more harvesting, the shadows growing longer, and transport of the wheat to silos, and finally the sunset coming on across newly sheared fields--and all these elements set to Americana-styled music and straightforward harvest-scene poems.

Something like that, anyway; I have no copy of the script on file, it seems. Sadly this one too was nixed by the King Screen bosses, even though the only competing film we could find was a short produced by the federal government's Agency for International Development for viewing overseas only (no domestic screenings allowed!) in those libraries we used to sponsor in foreign countries.

I was really proud of that idea and script; I imagined myself (and the production crew) following in the footsteps of Flaherty, Lorenz, and the other documentary giants. But it was not to be. Still, decades later, now I can finally see what Lorenz at least had in mind, how the visuals, music, and poetic narration worked together, to Presidential praise, international acclaim, and a place in the history books...

Well, actually both films are very much of the Thirties, sort of American Eisenstein, or (lately) John Edwards-styled populism, with some hokey staged visuals, some inadequate framing or coverage utilizing stock footage, and with Thomson's music definitely smoothing over the rough spots and finally carrying the day. Yet they are compelling "message" films even so, and The Plow a likely influence on John Ford's soon-to-come Grapes of Wrath. (Another posting I wrote several months back included my Dorothea Lange poem, very much in the same tradition, and I shamelessly opened that poem with the homage line "The plow that broke the plains/ broke on dust and drouth..." And anyone who read the recent New Zealand post with poem about communities flooded by reservoir construction will know what I discovered viewing The River--which wrongheadedly extols just such manmade (mis)management of Nature. Look how well that T.V.A./Corps of Engineers approach worked with Katrina...)

Living on the planet is never easy, and getting more complex and fraught with unforeseen dangers all the time. The politics of Lorenz's films may now seem simplistic, but the music of Thomson and Copland and the other Americana-influenced composers still resonates, both in recent interpretive recordings and in soundtracks created for a variety of new films today.

EnZed Revisited

'Tis the season of other demands, so today I say:

Merry Christmas to all
Readers, and y'all
Who've stopped by chance:
Enjoy the fanc-
Iful mixture of stuff.
Stay safe. Now... enough
Of me for a while;
Come back soon, and smile.


((Before we move on from New Zealand (see the previous post), I decided to offer my mid-visit journal observations, betting that things are still pretty much the same 20 years later. After all, looking around our own backyard, especially in this time of anti-immigrant paranoia, we know that nations sadly don't change radically even when they need too...))

March 19

"Why are Aussies like kiwi fruit?... They're rough on the outside, green on the inside, and too many of 'em give you the shits..." (joke transcribed from the bathroom wall of a tearoom in Murchison, en route to Greymouth).

More of the same excellent scenery, excessive sheep, farm towns and friendly folk. Is New Zealand boring or just peaceful? I can't decide. ((Twenty years later, I vote for the latter.)) So here are some accumulated observations, in no particular order:

These islands seem not to have been occupied at all until circa 1400 A.D. when waves of Polynesians sailed in from... somewhere, arguments still raging as to whether Peru or Hawaii or Asia. But these proto-Maoris settled right in and held firm through various European explorations. Then the Brits came and claimed the islands and signed treaties. Today the total population nudges three million in people, but six times that in farm animals, especially sheep--all 19 varieties, ones to eat and ones to shear, and all you ever see are sheep butts aloft and wooly heads down nibbling the grass: perpetual eating machines. (The old Army phrase about "assholes and elbows" almost applies.)

Something like 80% of EnZed's income is agricultural, and U.S. or French boycotts can hurt them quickly; they "farm" sheep and deer as they do tobacco and kiwi fruit. And the farmers are a real political force, unlike ours at home who sadly seem like voices leftover from another era, with only their congressmen willing to listen. Well, you can get tasty lamb and delicious ice cream hereabouts, but the cheeses are a disappointment. And with all the fresh fruit grown, the juices sold (except fresh-squeezed orange) all taste like sugar-water blends.

Kiwis eat so much animal fat and drink so much beer that the nation suffers from both weight and heart problems--even though, I swear, 99% of the population hikes, sails, swims, plays rugby or tennis or whatever. They are exercise crazy--the men regularly wearing shorts to work even--especially fond of their "tracks" (hiking trails), which New Zealanders recite by name as though chanting holy mantras: "Heaphy Track, Milford Track, Abel Tasman, The Routeburn..." And all the tourists go right along, taking the hikes, naming the huts they stayed at, bragging about ghastly weather. (Everyone stares at me aghast for only tromping the beaches and cities--so far, that is; I'll be in the woods soon too.) But these same outdoorsy youths ride the buses and hitch in cars and even hike the tracks ignoring their surroundings, talking only to each other or plugged in to their omnipresent Walkman decks. Yes, rock music rules the woods as well as the streets.

Meanwhile, South Island highways, the main-road links back and forth across this land of mountains and valleys, stand empty for minutes at a time. (Debate goes on: is hitching good here or not? Some have no trouble; others wait literally days for a ride.) But the distance bus drivers seem to be culture heroes--sort of the bards of the tribe, keeping oral history alive with their stories, tossing newspapers out at 40 m.p.h., grabbing mailbags from fences without coming to a complete stop. I keep imagining farm kids standing at the side of the road dreaming of driving a bus when they grow up...

The drivers talk history, local color, flirt with the women, argue with the men--and like almost all Kiwis, speaking in an accent that alters English vowel sounds shamelessly: "Yiss, thet's riiight, tuh dullers. Theah we ah." Greymouth becomes "Grehmith," just as Rotorua was "Rotarah." And it's not just the whites; Maoris are equally guilty, or inventive, depending on one's view. But the old Maori pronunciations and the language itself are dying out; the response seems to be that of the local wit who named his house in pseudo-Maori: "Wai Wurri?"

Yet racial tension is building too as the government lets in more and more Pacific Islanders, who have trouble adjusting to city life, who run up the welfare rolls, who battle the Maoris--youth gangs, that is--and so on. New Zealand's world-class rugby team, nicknamed the "All-Blacks," has none. Melanesian Fijians are about as "Black" as New Zealand will accept.

What else? Oh, the vegetation. The greenery comes in a dozen distinct shades, plus grey tones and numerous browns. Forests and ordinary "bush" are a treat, fascinating mixtures of pines and palms, tree ferns and succulents, poplars viewed as weeds and Kauri gum trees held sacred--with so much sap dripping that the amber-like, dried-up or fossilized gum clumps are collected, cut and polished as gemstones.

Finally, one of the most beautiful things I've found on either island is the painting on a building wall seen as one heads south from Nelson. Painted to seem a giant window, it looks out on a gorgeous mountain and lake/sea scape with cumulus clouds strung out above. Called "Ao Tea Roa" (for the original Maori name for New Zealand, "Land of the Long White Cloud"), the painting inveigles and teases, because there are clouds and shadows of clouds inside with the viewer as well, like a Magritte painting or some trompe l'oeil trick, I guess. But it shines and glistens and opens new vistas into and on New Zealand...

March 20

Greymouth was a nothing sort of town; Hokitika, further south, interesting as the source of New Zealand jade, called "greenstone," which one finds carved in traditional tiki charms on sale everywhere. (Think Kon-tiki book, and tiki bars.)

Here at Franz Josef Glacier the rain is pouring down. But with the hostel about to close for the day, I must brave the hiking trails regardless...

******

11 p.m. The facts are these: I tramped for five hours in rain and overcast. Missed one trail switchback (didn't see the fallen "Blocked Path" sign), so I wasted a half hour clambering high up and skulking low down along a high-cliff riverbank looking for the non-trail. Also, because I wore a hat to keep the drops from splattering my bald pate, I cleverly clonked into branches instead. But I hiked! I did see rain and rain forest and, yes, the blue-white glacier. (I just wish living in Washington State didn't dilute the novelty and beauty of New Zealand's scenic wonders.)

Then I returned to the hostel long enough to claim my pack, and set out to hitch the mere 24 kilometers to the next glacier. Well, three hours later I was still standing there, wet clothes steaming in the sun, slapping at the pesky stinging flies. The squat little rental car that finally stopped and opened a door for me looked a doubtful proposition, but inside were Bob and Esther, Yanks--I mean Rebels--from Georgia, him entering medical residency, her a nurse, both of them witty, generous, and animated. We rode for four hours gabbing, singing, reciting poetry, sharing food, all the way to Wanaka, two-thirds of the way down to Queenstown, tourist central for the southern part of the island.

This thought: it's the remarkable joy of meeting people like Esther and Bob, having a great afternoon after a drippy morning, that makes all this rambling worthwhile. Every day is a surprise, and likely an adventure in some small way.

((Looking back from 2007, I would only add that most of the charming people I met and even became friends with on that long trip were natives of the host countries, or tourists from lands other than the U.S. That particular rainy day my unexpected benefactors just happened to be Americans. Also, I had a grand time all around New Zealand (six weeks) and would recommend a trip Down Under, there and on to Australia, to anyone. Get out there!))

Sinking Down Under

In 1985, I decided I'd had enough--I'd experienced college/grad school and/or working steady since 1959, a marriage ended badly, two kids living with me in the family house who were pretty much grown, and a job that had been loads of fun and hard work (mostly Rainier Beer ads) for 12 years but seemed to be heading south...

A military brat, I'd grown up without one particular place to call home, and after more than 25 years stuck in one place, I was ready to hit the road again. I announced to my kids and the ex- and other family members and the bossman that I'd be leaving the country early in '86, probably for a couple of years, and everyone needed to start getting used to the idea.

Various unforeseen factors arose, of course (like meeting and falling in love with the woman who eventually became my second wife), but I still did succeed in escaping at the end of January 1986, flying southwest through Hawaii to Fiji and Tonga, crossing the dateline and so losing my birthday en route, then a few weeks later heading on to New Zealand and Australia, all of them the initial stops on what became my around-the-world adventure. (I had decided earlier that I would carry no camera, but would instead see and hear and write. And so for the next 19 months I kept a journal and wrote poems and did my best to document the adventure in words only.)

Midway in the adventure, I optimistically imagined that my prose was so wonderful the world would want to read a book combining my travel writing and related poetry. (As a certain rooster used to say, "That's a joke, son.") But looking back later on going-on-two-years out in the world, always backpacking it, living mostly on the cheap, staying in hovels and hostels and pensiones, meeting native inhabitants and other travellers, discovering the history and culture and arts, the money and language and local transport in each new place... all of it did prove to be an amazing, truly once-in-a-lifetime experience.

I believe a few sights and events might be worth reviving for this eclectic, keep-'em-guessing blog. And first on my short list is the day I happened to be travelling by bus across the south end of New Zealand's south island (almost two decades before the Lord of the Rings movie makers)--and discovered I had entered an eerie place of abandoned farms and buildings harking back to construction of the great Grand Coulee Dam or power plays of the Tennessee Valley Authority. I tried to capture it in a poem...


The Death of Cromwell

The bus slows sinking, rolling
down the grade, road dropping
lower and lower as the walls
of the chopped gorge rise over us.
Simply called “The Junction”
back in its glory years,
Cromwell’s spent hoard of days
now can be plainly numbered…
just six remain, in fact.

Platted by miners who long
panned here for placer gold
where two major rivers meet,
now the town must die
before its time, while its descendents
still pluck golden-nugget
apricots from four banks of orchards
drowning in cold anticipation.
A new-risen dam some miles below

now blocks that joined flow;
and the deepening reservoir's
glacial blue won’t exempt any
who linger here testing tides of chance.
The "Roundhead"’s nominal statue
is headed elsewhere by truck,
with some few structures dismantled
for hauling to the new Cromwell
a-building just up the way.

Only crumbling foundations await
the late stay of execution
that now can't come. Frame houses
abandoned to the currents
gather the different dust
falling from bleached canyon walls.
Broken windows overlook
one last brilliant crop of roses
crimson red; lank sweetpeas dozing;

and prickly fluff from some
unknown weed gone to seed,
drifting among us like pieces
of Cromwell’s quickly disappearing
past. History claims the town,
its destiny to join ancient strata
we can almost read up there
where the rivers once wound...
But for now the future is fluid,

brightly foretold in blue acrylic
painted on those few buildings
left, perched precariously
half-way down the main incline,
too late taking their stand:
“Here and no higher, by God!”
By accident we have taken
one of the last buses to be
routed through Cromwell-That-Was.

We pause just long enough
to take on troubled expressions
and three of the local gentry
looking lost, but leaving
before the flood keeps its promise.
Then our diesel ark departs,
low-gearing the old road
up to Cromwell Redivivus,
carrying the rest of us too

to a questionable future.
A last neck-craning look back
lets us read the weathered message
stenciled along a cracked wall
of the town’s long-vacant hotel:
“Cromwell Lodge—your ‘home’
away from home…” More homeless
now, we ride bemused. But ahead,
a double rainbow arches

over the new California-styled mall,
belying the doom we feel
and dazzling us all.

Encounters in Store

Sandie and I owned a bookstore in Seattle's busy tourist-draw, the Pike Place Market, for 10 years (1992-2002). Business was fine for the first half-decade, but then the big discounters and on-line megastores started to gnaw away at our livelihood. Plus I developed arthritus in both knees and found all-day standing very difficult. So when we received an offer to sell, well... now I work happily at home, selling books and LP records on line only.

During our ten store years, mostly due to the walk-through location, many authors and celebrities chose to stop in to look around. I thought it might be interesting to revisit some of those near-close encounters (oh look, he's namedropping again).

The store was called MisterE Books and Records, so of course one of our specialties was Mysteries. A great many popular mystery writers dropped by once or twice--Bill Pronzini, James Lee Burke, Lawrence Block, Sue Grafton, James W. Hall, Barbara Seranella among them--just to be friendly. But the crowded tourist location and enforced hours made book-signings impossible. So when Seattle's own series bigwig, J.A. Jance, came in to set up a publicity signing for her novels, I politely demurred, which caused her to sneer and never show up again. However, others like Alaskan authors Dana Stabenow and John Straley liked the store's collector contents, so each would drop by whenever she (or he) flew south to the Lower 48. (Dana usually bought a couple of books too.)

The biggest celebrity sale I made was to Bette Midler. She was in town to perform a concert, beginning a long tour. She strode in one afternoon, took a quick look 'round, and then asked me to help her pick some good books she could take on the road. We had a great time browsing the store and building a stack of a dozen or so, mostly modern fiction as I recall. I confessed to Bette that I'd had a hand in her decades-earlier Seattle appearance on stage in Pete Townshend's rock-opera Tommy (I'd given a copy of the record album, the year it came out, to the Seattle Opera's impresario-producer, suggesting he might think about staging it). She told me she'd hated that gig, but forgave me anyway.

Another theatrical drop-in was great comic playwright Neil Simon, in Seattle to try out a new play--he complimented the store and gave me an autograph but I think his purchases were tourist stuff only. Other actors wandered through too, including Tom Skerritt and gray-bearded gentleman Bill... Bill who? My mind draws a blank, but he's the familiar black character actor who gets hired when the production can't afford Morgan Freeman! (All apologies to Bill, who was a great guy to talk to.)

One afternoon the staff and I were amazed to see Melanie Griffith and Antonio Banderas walk in--or maybe I should say they danced in, because this was when the two had first become a couple, and they were both clearly smitten with, er, love. They were completely enraptured, and wrapped around each other, hugging and kissing while they tangoed down the aisles, not really looking at any books at all. But their smiles were brilliant and infectious, and the arm-in-arm duo effortlessly charmed us ordinary mortals anyway.

Wynona Rider was another unexpected guest. Wearing a Navy pea jacket and knit cap pulled down over her ears (a disguise, I suppose), she and a very tall female pal showed up in search of a gift for Rider's boyfriend. We discussed illustrated books, which her boyfriend collected, and I eventually sold her some nice $50-$75 item from our glass showcase. (Her public problems a year or two later were a shock; she'd been sweet and shy that day, and I know she bought rather than shoplifted!)

The one woman who didn't come in, that I always fantasized would show up, was Emmy Lou Harris. Her Nineties-on gigs were often in the downtown venues just a block or two from our store, and I thought sure she'd wander by one afternoon between soundcheck and performance. After all, we had our military brat background, Southern upbringing, and Gram Parsons all in common... but no such cosmic luck.

Instead I got to visit (briefly) with various other musicians--among them David Hidalgo, Taj Mahal, Graham Nash, Martina MacBride, Michael Feinstein, even Itzhak Perlman one amazing afternoon. And Seattle's own came by occasionally; Krist Novoselic of Nirvana, for example, shopped for Christmas books for his wife (she collected old kids books) two or three times. And Mike McCready of Pearl Jam (long before some health problems got to him) was another who visited and then artistically defaced (or do I mean enhanced?) the jacket centerspread of one of the group's albums when I asked him to sign it.

But mention of Nirvana brings me to the last person I'd like to talk about--Kurt Cobain. Grunge music's main man only ever came in the store once (that I know of), but the occasion turned out to be tragically memorable. Some time around the end of March or the first of April 1994, into the store ambled a scruffy-looking blond-haired dude carrying a toddler on his shoulders, accompanied by a male chum in a hat. The three wandered around a bit... and I was thinking everything from shoplifters to rock stars I didn't quite recognize. And then I did; it was Cobain.

He passed the child on to his friend, then came to the front, complimented me on having a Leadbelly album for sale in the front winbow, and asked if I had a copy of William Burroughs' Naked Lunch--no collector thing, just a paperback to read. I checked the shelves and said no, but we started talking about Beat Generation novels, and for no good reason, I asked if he'd read Alexander Trocchi's harrowing novel of drug addiction, Cain's Book (an uncommon item which I did have). He said no, but elected to buy it after I gave a capsule review.

At the cash register, then, I asked him to autograph a note card for me (no albums in the store), which he signed as by "Curdt Kobane." I shrugged at that, figuring I'd become un-cool, infringing on his privacy; and the three of them left.

Less than a week later, supposed drug addict Kurt killed himself--so said the coroner, as opposed to the conspiracy fans and Courtney Love haters, who believe she offed him somehow. I wondered then, and am still a bit haunted now, if the Trocchi book (and I) somehow contributed to his decision to commit suicide.

As one member of a family that experiences symptoms of mild depression, I do know how black and unforgiving the world can appear. Some days it really is too much, all of it. I'm just glad that sunshine and music and love help keep me sane, and I wish Cobain had experienced more than the chaos of too much stardom and, maybe, parenting he wasn't prepared for.

Our old Pike Market store had its problems, but some days it sure did lift my spirits...

The Nights Escape Without Us

When I started this blog, it was really aimed at telling my life story a bit at a time, because I knew I was too lazy to write some sort of autobiography. I've witnessed a lot of major scenes and moments in almost 65 years, still have more tales to tell, and hope to see and hear lots more wonders before me and this thing are done!

One aspect that readers (there must be one or two of you) will have noticed is my shameless posting of the best poems I've written over the years, many of them published individually but no book ever compiled--Ed's Greatest Non-Hits, I guess. Today I present another grouping, several short, sort-of love poems joined together in one longer, multi-part suite I call...


Language of Night

I. Defining Evening

Evening comes down, and in, conjugating day
and night, separating the halves, the light left over
from the dark arriving, the planet turning away
as twilight--dual light--evens out, like lovers
meeting each other half-way, touching lips, then limbs,
clasping their opposites close in purples of descent,
shedding the light clothes of summer, easing them-
selves down, wondering where the close of day went
but not caring much now they are wearing night,
the black of the easy deaths of sex and sleep
put on as hours are, the blank in day’s despite
impossible to fill before morning keeps
its appointment in tomorrow as today,
and evening becomes a memory on the way.

II. Afterhours

Riffs of fire
split the molten skies,
pulsing through layers,
running the changes,
charring to black.

Night’s new arrangements
cool and slowly
harden. Streetlights come on
to anyone. Now
the moon blows sax,

a Pres-redential solo
floating butter-cream
over the grays: cat
can play. Lady whispers
her dream chorus—

sixteen bars of gone
reds, bone whites,
silent black-and-blue
notes. We are jazzed,
every one of us.

III. The Sending

Rise up, elusive woman,
on the limbs of my absence;
walk through the city
clothed in the shadow of my longing;
sleep each night
adrift on the dark waters of my desire…
while I lie here,
a thousand likelihoods from you,
with the scent of your shoulders
dreaming in my veins
and the pale dust of your nipples
weighing my eyelids down,
teasing my lips into speech.

IV. A Matter of Silence

The silences of the night go deep,
and deeper still, extending
to become ecstasies of the ordinary:
a whispering high up in the sycamore,
the bone-marrow buzz in the wiring,
the sibilant hairs along your mound
lifting one by one as they dry.
There are fricatives and plosives
pent-up in these minutes that I
dare not release before dawn;
the world’s geologic history retold
night after night in a dusty glass;
randy molecules of carbon and oxygen
jostling each other for space
with each whirled breath you take.
I believe in walls, in words,
in momentary lapses of memory.
Otherwise, how could I never
break down the barriers between us,
open myself to your nightly absence,
hold your heart in my deepening silence?
This is my plan so far:
I will lie here awake
for two days and most of three nights,
and then live again in your dreams.

V. In Sleep

We turn and circulate
through the regions of the dark.
All the faces we always wear
rise up as reclaimants,
surrounding this fragrant space
rich with wishes. Something tender
whispers in your breath: Open now.
Put on tomorrow, that you
waken clothed in plenitude.
Skin to skin, calf to hand,
we congregate after separation,
we wade through dawnlight
to the other side of language.
You bend me, I sleep you,
the nights escape without us.

VI. The Bends

She had gone deep,
fallen to grace
currents of sleep,
to drift in place

and dream among
fronds of desire,
nitrogen sung
in the blood’s fire,

the undertow
of ocean night.
Surfacing slow,
she bubbles light…

rises through floor
and silver sheets
to sprawl ashore,
her spaced heartbeats

declaring dawn:
the dark swim ends,
ecstasy gone
as sleep unbends.

Last Time Around (Part 2)

((Continuing with the Rick Nelson piece, we resume after the release of Nelson in Concert...))

During the next year, Rick and the Stone Canyon Band took to touring (with Tim Cetera in for Randy Meisner), even making it north to Seattle for a week's stay, at a suburban tavern/club called The Impact, which turned out to be a smash engagement with turnaway crowds for almost every performance--a major occurrence considering the Impact's size and setting. Located at the far fringe of Bellevue, that so-called "bedroom of Seattle," and populated mostly by car lots, out-of-work Boeing workers, and rising young executives ((no Microsoft millionaires yet!)), the tavern (which eventually failed) from without looked like a bowling alley or Army warehouse. I mean huge! and seating maybe a thousand inside.

Anyhow, here came Rick Nelson, and suddenly the place was doing sold-out business night after night. And the crowd's makeup was essentially the same for each performance, a freaky, fascinating array of curious college kids, scurvy c&w fans, oldsters drawn by their leftover Ozzie & Harriet memories, and--especially--legions of Ricky rockers clinging to the last vestiges of their fast-fading youth. (I plead guilty to the last charge.) The show the audience put on was almost as good as the group's high-falutin', hill-filtered rock: beehive-haired, pantsuited, giddy and giggling married women indulging their fantasies on the dance floor (and backstage); balding but sideburned husbands measuring themselves against a star image; bluecollar truckdriver types wondering "What in the hell am I doin' here listenin' to these longhaired punks?"; and all those faithful fanatics muttering aloud, "Why doesn't he sing 'Poor Little Fool' and 'Lonesome Town'?"

((I don't claim any prescience, but this reaction must have met Rick and the band everywhere they played, and it eventually led to him penning his amazing, frustrated, last great hit, "Garden Party," a year or so later.))

Nostalgia filled the air those nights like the chicken feathers around Alice Cooper. In fact, the applause for Rick's excellent new material, including several of his own songs from the still-forthcoming second album, was decidedly desultory when compared to the explosive outbursts that greeted each old hit redone. The group accepted that situation graciously, though enjoying much joking among themselves whenever called upon to deliver any past Nelson glory they hadn't already refinished, polished to a country gloss. Good humor carried the night, however, with Rick even waiting offstage to talk to the inane gaggles of (mostly) female fans.

My observations during those painful moments, plus a pair of interviews with the man himself--during which he reminisced openly and humorously about some distinctly un-Ozzie-and-Harrietish adventures--convinced me of his quiet individuality and innate goodness. (No scoffing, you cynical bastards!) After about twenty-five years in the entertainment world, fifteen of those as a star of some import, after all the changes and bullshit the music and film worlds put their people through, Rick Nelson really is--still is--a gentle man, the perfect image, nay, reality, of the decent, level-headed, All-American boy-next-door. Strange to find such a man still extant, but a pleasure.

As was his second new album, Rick Sings Nelson, which proved his prowess as producer and songwriter. ((I'll skip the full review to get to the best:)) "Sweet Mary" mixed droning and chilling electrics, driving steel, and on-rushing rhythm into a rock wall of sound excitement, while "Look at Mary" buried Rick's lead, added echoing harmonies, and then turned the bass and drums loose, heading down the highway straight east towards the Memphis Sun. ((I wonder who that Mary was...))

My particular favorite was and is "Down Along the Bayou," a swamp rocker as good as any of Creedence's forays in that area. In a quick two minutes, Rick's lyrics run the gamut from happiness to tragedy in his mock-traditional saga of a Southern kid who fell in with bad companions. Meanwhile, the band was just all-out getting off, loose and goosey, good and juicy, with a guitar blend that should have been bottled and bonded and given away free to anyone lost in the pop doldrums. Could have been a top single ((I still believe that)) but nothing ever came of it, nor of the whole album (in the U.S. anyway--Europe took some notice). Rick and the guys just rocked on, making people dance and smile and feel good, for another year.

And then came album three, Rudy the Fifth (Decca 75297), supposedly named for a brand of cheap champagne. Well, there's nothing cheap about the music within. Eclecticism is the watchword this time, with everything from baroque to gospel, Dylan to pop. I just keep puttin' it on and gettin' it on. ((skipping the details, to focus on some last observations again:)) ... Or the strings-and-flute-sweetened farewell of "The Last Time Around"--Rick's in impeccable voice, Pat's drums are prodding casually, Tom's solo wafts upwards on the subtle strings: "I know you don't believe in my philosophy/ But I thank you for the love you've given me/ This is my last time around/ And I don't know where I'm bound... (spoken) See you later, baby." Elegant shades of Tom Rush!

((One might consider this the song that summed up his life, given the eventual fatal plane crash... And the song next mentioned is another possible candidate:))

But outdone by the last track of all. Every once in a while a number comes along that has that instant shock/flash of recognition--it gets in your head and in your bones and promises to last as long as music itself. That's how I hear, and feel, "Gypsy Pilot." The arrangement leaves me numb and dumb--it's like the great-granddaddy of all electrical storms, shrieking and streaking and screaming, the steel zooming and crashing, the rhythm booming and bashing, and Rick's autobiographical lyrics ringing in your ears, building from cliche to philosophical stance:

When I was a young boy, my mama told me, "Son,
You got to keep it together, you're the only one,"
So I tried to see the sunshine and I tried to feel the rain,
But I just couldn't get it together, I was feelin' too much pain,
So I got myself a gittar when I was just a kid,
I played rock 'n roll music and I'm so glad I did,
'Cause now I see the sunshine, now I feel the rain,
And I just want to keep it together and I hope you feel the same...
When they claim my body, they won't have much to say,
"Except that he lived a good life, he lived every day,
I know he saw the sunshine, I know he felt the rain,
He loved everybody and he hopes you do the same."

Rick Nelson, folks. Still here, still rocking--rocking harder and better than ever, country steel or not. He's an original and he'll always be one. If you can't escape whatever prejudices may remain to you from Rick's old days of TV and such, then I pity you. You're missing some of the best music being put down anywhere.

So, be-bop baby, it's late but I can't help it--teenage idol Ricky-Rick-Eric is still for me just a little too much. That's all.

((One last memory: after the hit success of "Garden Party," Rick was guest host on Saturday Night Live, and the writers came up with a brilliant sketch; Rick keeps coming into some suburban kitchen back door, saying, "Hi Mom, I'm home..." just as he did on the Nelson TV show. But this time each kitchen turns out to belong to a different and unrelated Fifties family sit-com like Father Knows Best or whatever, and each wrong Mom reacts with dismay, forcing him to leave. Yeah, that pretty much summed up Nelson's place in the world by then...))