Crumpler's packed.

Crumpler's packed.
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

Tetanus' injected. Chloroquine's quaffed.

Dumpling Man will probably stay behind for safekeeping. (OMG whadya mean you don't know the Dumpling Man of the East Village? Many thanks forever to Rahul, who introduced us.)

Posting by cameraphone from home where I'm packing for Chiapas and the Petén.

the persistence of memory

It is a situation that persists.

Mayanist Michael D. Coe, in the concluding chapter of The Maya, capping off the following paragraph:

This last period was marked by the emergence of a new cross to be borne by the Maya: the invasion of their lands, villages, and towns by a class of ladinos. Hispanics or hispanicized citizens who occupied all the lucrative and politically powerful positions in largely Maya territories; they were the shopkeepers, the labor majordomos, the schoolteachers, the judiciary, the Catholic priests. They spoke Spanish rather than the Indian "dialects" (as the Maya languages were pejoratively thought of), they dressed in Western clothes, and they generally held themselves to be superior to the native peoples.

virgin bush

Map: Google Earth, showing the border that the Usumacinta River cuts through Mexico and Guatemala

The Zapatista Rebellion in 1994 and 1995, and the Guatemalan peace accords in 1996, reshaped the political lines in the watershed. As a direct consequence, and with the dramatic fall of the peso, bandits began robbing raft trips, ending wilderness travel in the corridor. One of the most promising tourist activities, with the least potential impact and the most possibility for helping conservation, archaeology, and cultural preservation, ended. Illegal activity of all types took over the corridor.

While I'm not sure I agree with Wikipedia's interpretation of the cascade of events, this is their penultimate word on the Usumacinta River, where I'll be heading next week in the company of a guide who has only recently started taking groups back to the Piedras Negras site after a whole lotta years during which it was considered largely unreceptive (read: populated with men with guns and drugs hanging out in the jungle).

Leaving Friday. This will be my first trip to Piedras Negras. I visited its rival polity, Yaxchilan, a few years back, but at the time Piedras was considered off limits.

Will post as the signal allows. Have also queued up some posts to fire automatically with my intended whereabouts. We'll see how that goes.

"Virgin bush" was how the Guatemalan side of a satellite image of the Usumacinta (like the one shown above) was described by an archaeologist at the Maya Meetings a few years back (at which my sweetie sniggered and I said "what?"). Guatemala to the right; Mexico to the left where deforestation reigns.

The river itself is under renewed threat: for years there's been talk about damming the Usumacinta and putting Mayan sites, known and unknown, under water. So far activists have been able to stave off the threat. I'm relaying word of mouth from the Maya Meetings for that news too -- I'll pull up some references as time allows for those who might be curious.

back door man

A while back b1-66er threw me a meme about books, and I fudged a little when I answered “a book that changed your life.” I couldn’t think of just one that made such an impact on me that it changed the way I move through the world.

But it occurred to me as I was packing up for the river trip I’m taking next week that there is one.

I picked up a dogeared copy of Rick Steves’ Europe Through the Back Door when I was in college, on a friend’s recommendation, at the Trident bookstore in Boulder.

It changed my life.

For “when I was in college” read: “busted broke and lucky to find a place that rented out for $190 a month because I was only making $450 a month and somehow managing to pay my way through college. Loans helped. So did all that oatmeal. And the gig at the Trident which let me tap into the caffeine pipeline for free.”

There’s not a lot of cash left over for traveling when you’re living on just about nothing. But Steves’ book taught me that travel is a choice you make -- you can do it for cheap, and if you want to do it badly enough you’ll do it instead of doing some of the other stuff that costs money. Like buying furniture or clothes. Or food.

From Steves’ I learned how to pack a bag (LIGHT. and roll things so they don’t wrinkle. load up your suitcase then cut it in half, then cut it in half again. and never pack anything that you won’t wear at least three times. AND be done packing for the big trips at least two days before, so you can just chill before you go.), how to picnic on the road to save money on food, how to bring just the pages that matter (“rip out appropriate chapters from guidebooks and staple them together”), how to pack a universal sink stopper and Dr. Bronner’s soap in order to wash out my clothes in my room and not to be afraid to wear my jeans wet the next day (paraphrasing: “you’ll be amazed at how fast they dry!”).

How to pack pictures of home and small gifts for the friends you’ll meet on the road. Which, importantly, I read as: expect to make friends.

I learned from Steves that you can never do it all but you can always come back, and I learned from him something that I only much later formalized in language but lives at the core of all the choices I make, the good ones and the bad, and it’s this: There are two kinds of wealth, Experiential and Material. Choosing one often excludes the other. Choose wisely.

belfries & heads of state

a found poem

In the closet
where the vacuum cleaner is kept
there also lives a bat

How to get rid of it?

The light bulb
has been unscrewed
so as not to wake it

and
upset it

Found in this morning's Financial Times' citation of a diary entry from To the Castle and Back, Vaclav Havel's memoir of his presidency.

postdated

The manuscript written on vellum, dated July 4, 1776, now displayed in a baroque case at the National Archives, where it is protected by bulletproof glass, argon gas and the 55-ton underground vault it is lowered into every night ... was not written on July 4; it was a handwritten copy that Congress ordered later that summer and post-dated. The version that was in the room as the vote was taken has never been seen since then.

Ted Widmer writing in Looking for Liberty (in this morning's New York Times) about the extant copies of the Declaration of Independence, which was spirited away for printing and distribution shortly after it was signed, and then misplaced.

Caught my attention because I was once sternly advised by the legal department of the organization I worked for that it was NOT okay to sign and postdate documents -- if we all wanted to stay out of jail.

This also caught my attention when I pulled out the replica of the Declaration that I picked up at the Library of Congress on its fake crinkly parchment (that yes makes me cry every time I read it -- how many ways can you spell g.e.e.k.?):

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people. He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & Perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

Just sayin'.



& p.s. The Declaration in "American" as translated by H.L. Mencken and run just recently in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch »

trial run

trial run
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

Having spotted my cameraphone shots on Flickr, Nokia was kind enough to loan me the N95 to play with for a three week run. The phone arrived almost two weeks ago, but I've been on the run myself and only able to play with it this AM. Loaded in an old SIM card from a Nokia that I used once upon a time before I recalled I used it with an AT&T account -- my current account is with TMobile, so no phone for me for this trial, but I'm able to browse the web via the wireless at home. (Nice option.)

Early thoughts: Web browsing is lovely, but the idea of having a cameraphone pull focus? Unnerving. That grainy crazy pixelated quality is what I love about cameraphone photography -- at 5 megapixels this baby may be too uptown for me.

(I recently had dinner with a fellow who works on the camera for the Sidekick (aka strippers' phone of choice. my v is the 3) -- he showed me a prototype with all kinds of megapixel action for an upcoming release -- I begged him no. Please. I don't want to lose the low-fi effect. He was a sweetheart and said maybe he'd build a low-fi option into the software.)

Also lonely for my full-size keyboard -- the Nokia N95 has a traditional phone keypad, which means a lot of cycling through characters before you get where you want to go.

But not ready to write it off just yet -- I'll play awhile first. Don't want to let the good folks at Nokia down after they were so generous.

Next up: Video.

getting out of the way

Photo: Jacques-Henri Lartigue

Another reason I wanted to do this movie was I’d get to shave my head. I always wanted to do that.

Photographer and actor Jeff Bridges captioning one of his stills from Making Iron Man, a book of photographs that he compiled for his colleagues on the film shoot.


Premiere Magazine ran a spread of Bridges’ photography years ago. Reminded of it tonight through a random association I googled to see what was out there and was rewarded with:

• The artist’s maddening to navigate but delightful to explore site, jeffbridges.com, which details all kinds of great stuff that he’s cooking on


• A site section dedicated to his photography along with some insight into the Widelux camera that he shoots with


• An introduction to the photographer Jacques-Henri Lartigue, whom Bridges cites as an influence and who is really quite marvelous »

And then there's this, in which he says something my dad is always telling me about getting anything worthwhile done -- see: get out of the way:

The Wide-Lux is a fickle mistress; its viewfinder isn't accurate, and there's no manual focus, so it has an arbitrariness to it, a capricious quality. I like that. It's something I aspire to in all my work --- a lack of preciousness that makes things more human and honest, a willingness to receive what's there in the moment, and to let go of the result. Getting out of the way seems to be one of the main tasks for me as an artist.

exit 127

exit 127
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

Posting by cameraphone just
off I-94, headed west.

biofuel

biofuel
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

Posting by cameraphone
on the road home.

roadside attraction

roadside attraction
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

Stopped at Zingerman's Bakehouse & Creamery on my way out of Ann Arbor. Loaded up on ginger cookies, cinnamon rolls, an olive oil cake (at 30% off!) and a couple loaves of bread.

Because I don't bake. But Zingerman's does.

Some buffalo mozzerella and a salami too. And gelato. (The chocolate was unbelievable; the coffee could use a kick in the pants.)

Posting by cameraphone from the road home.

some kind of blue outside of kalamazoo

some kind of blue outside
of kalamazoo
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

(Did the blue on blue hand dryers even come out? Or did the fluorescent lights cancel them out?)

Posting by cameraphone at a rest stop off I-94, inbound for Ann Arbor, MI

Update: Picnik to the rescue -- got some of that blue on blue back.

speaking of the magnificent things man has made

a found poem

Everything here
seems bound
for someplace else

The grain goes down
the river
the trains speed through
the little towns
the interstate highway
is full of long-haulers
and out-of-state
license plates

I can hear
the soft chatter
of a kingfisher

I can hear
the bushes rustle
where a marmot roots
near the water's edge

I can hear
the cars plying
the bridge between
Engineer's Town
and the reservation

But except
for the slightest swish
coming from a thin
strand of water
that emerges from
halfway down
the dam's
otherwise
dry spillway

The night is devoid
of the sound of water


Found in Matt Rasmussen's Pastures of Plenty in Orion, a piece about Woody Guthrie's involvement as a songwriter hired to shill for the Columbia River Dam project in the 1930s.

Rasmussen's piece is elegiac and heartbreaking, beautifully capturing the tension between power of place and our pursuit of that thing called Progress and how it stilled the teeming Colombia where the salmon have now gone missing.

My Bompa would burst into Guthrie's Roll On Columbia when we crossed the bridge that spans the great river. He loved the Pacific Northwest with a passion, but he was also of the generation that believed it could be harnessed for our use, at no detriment to its nature.

I don't know what he would say to hear the salmon aren't running: I remember the first time he took me to the Ballard Locks to watch the fish run, how he was nearly giddy then. How in subsequent years, as the run grew smaller, the fish more demure, he seemed disquieted but inconclusive, unsettled as if he were unsure how such magnificent engineering could produce something some puny and small.

I know if he were still alive his heart would break to hear the news of this season's salmon run, and I suspect he would noodle it in silence, his head bent low over the paper, his face pursed with the quiet rage and worry of a broken promise revealed.

the science of 350

At the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco last December [climatologist James Hansen] named a number: 350 parts per million carbon dioxide.

That, he said, was the absolute upper bound of anything like safety — above it and the planet would be unraveling. Is unraveling, because we're already at 385 parts per million.

Bill McKibben writing about the 350 climate change campaign in the July | August 2008 issue of Orion Magazine.


Video: 350.org: Because the world needs to know

i've got sunshine

My kitchen table. A few days back.

tipping point

tipping point
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

Showed my 5-yr old nephew Chicago this afternoon. His first "tall building" city -- Washington D.C. was his first big city, but there the buildings are only so tall.

Approaching the Sears Tower R clung to his dad's arm and refused to look up until he was stopped and still on the street corner. "How come?" I wanted to know. "Cause I don't want to tip over," he said squinting into the towering distance, staggering a little.

The force of the building's height on his little boy frame -- the way he devoured it with his eyes, the way he looked dizzy and drunk from it, the way he worried (just a little) that it might fall over on him until his mom reassured him it wouldn't -- I needed to see that. I needed to be reminded how magnificent these things man makes can be.

Posting by cameraphone.

the art of war

Photo: Reuters

"Remember, I came out of Silicon Valley, where if you had a six-month lead on your competition, you win. You deprive them of cash, you have more cash . . . you get an installed base that's bigger, you take their installed base away," he says, using the financial term for operating system users.

"That's thematically what I'm thinking about, you know," he says, now jabbing his fingers at Pakistanis screaming on the cover of a news magazine. "How do I get this installed base to turn?"

Former Silicon Valley business man Major General Douglas Stone speaking to his responsibilities at the U.S. detention Camp Bucca in Iraq, in today's Financial Times.

fuwa of fury

Major calamities, earthquakes in particular, were viewed in imperial China as a sign that a dynasty had lost the mandate of Heaven.

Lucy Hornby and Alfred Cang reporting on the Chinese Curse of the Fuwa fulfilled in a 19 June Reuters wire story.

The Reuters' story recaps the Chinese government's efforts to suppress Chinese bloggers who are floating the theory that the five cuddly Beijing Olympic mascots, the Fuwa, each represents a disaster to be visited upon China in recent months.

Blogadilla recaps the force of the Fuwa in full. They include:

• Huanhuan - The Olympic Flame - “The Bearer of Incendiary Strife”


• Jingjing - The Giant Panda - “The Lord of Angry Earth”


• Yíngying - The Tibetan Antelope - “The Creature of Righteous Unrest”


• Nini - The Swallow/Shayan Kite - “The Bearer of Unfortunate Wind”


• Bèibei - The Chinese Sturgeon - “The Bringer of Torrent and Flood”

Via Neatorama

make.

a found poem


Draw fear.
You can.

Make night your studio,
the cloth you embroider
with needs and dreams.

The obsession
you can neither embrace
nor release?

Make an image of obsession,
any image will do.


Found in Raw Materials of a Life, Revealed by Sculpture, a piece on the work of sculptor Louise Bourgeois, who has a retrospective on at the Guggenheim in NY.

The future has my fingerprint.