come away with me

Hotel Plaza, Venice/Mestra (113mm x 91mm)
Originally uploaded by davidgeorgepearson

A collection of hotel luggage labels curated by the inimitable David Pearson, mentioned here before, whom AbeBooks recently hailed as a "design genius". (Their statement of fact saves me the trouble.)

like traffic signs

driveby #2. blurred.
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

Punctuation, he said, was like traffic signs, too much of it distracted you from the road on which you travelled, and if you wondered, Wouldn’t writing be rather confusing without it, he would say No, it was like the constant wash and turn of the sea, sounding even more sibilant in Portuguese than in English, or like a journey taken by a traveller, every step linked to the next and every end to a beginning, or like the press of time, no sooner coming than going, never stopping in the present, which consequently never existed.

From the Economists' obituary for José Saramago, Portugal’s Nobel laureate in literature.

ruby shoes, take two

Tomorrow I hang up my wings and leave the road I've been traveling for the last four years, if you count the time I've been working this gig; or ten years, if you count the time I've spent in this place.

Within a week I'll be schlepping a U-Haul to Boulder, Colorado to start something entirely new in a place that's utterly familiar, and yet wholly changed.

Or maybe that's me.

Either way: I'm going home.



Related: ruby shoes, the first »

soba gone

We went to Nara during the New Year, which everyone told us not to do. It would be too crowded, they predicted, with people attending to the last rites of the dying year, and it was.

Which is not to say we were sorry we went.

Nara is a great Shinto center, and we fell directly in with the crowds as they worked their way up the mountain, passing shrines and countless lanterns, pushing through people who were pressing against others. Near the top we broke away and wandered the trails, pausing to peer at the faithful in their administrations before the colorful Kagami Mochi -- rice cake and tangerine treats offered up to the gods in exchange for divine favor.

The farther we pressed into the forest the thinner the crowds became until at last we were walking alone -- and feared we might we lost.

As we debated whether we should double back the trees thinned and the trail descended to a public road. There was nothing to the left or to the right, but directly before us there was a small restaurant, with a sign scratched out in English, for lost English speaking tourists like ourselves.

We stepped out of the January chill and into the warmth. I sat on a cushion before the low tea table and ordered cold soba, which I suspect I had had before and knew to be delicious, or else I wouldn’t have ordered cold food on a cold day after a long walk.



The buckwheat noodles were served on a bamboo matt suspended over a plate. The boiled soba had been shocked in a cold water bath just prior to serving, and the design was meant to allow the last of the water to drain off. I dunked the noodles bite by bite into the fish-rich sauce, and knew to wait once the soba was gone for the waitress to come with the cooking water, which she poured into the remnants of the sauce and expected me to drink.

I can’t recall if I did, but I do remember that chocolate cake and the coffee came next. Incongruous, all of it, and absolutely perfect.

speaking of Kansas (before the Twister hit)

This really would have been a lovely shot if I had had color film loaded.

Austin, TX
holga.

inconvenienced by the president

inconvenienced by the president
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

It's not every day that the President's weekend plans mean I get to spend a couple more hours than I planned nestled between a gentleman with a nasty, wet respiratory infection who keeps kicking my seat and a couple who touch each other in ways that are not suitable for public display.

Thanks, man.

Posting by cameraphone from the tarmac at O'Hare. Just in from Wichita. Waiting for an available gate.

pass for new

pass for new
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

Wherever I go I find something in this new world I am acquainted with; it is all as I imagined -- and yet new.

And the same can be said of my observations, my thoughts. I have had no entirely new thought, have found nothing entirely unfamiliar, but the old thoughts have become so precise, so alive, so coherent that they can pass for new.

Goethe, Italian Journey

Halfway into a travel bender that will touch Boston, D.C., Seattle, Wichita, Ann Arbor, Boulder, Fort Wayne and Boston again within the span of a month.

Some work, some fun, some new horizons.

Trying to stay open to the road.

Posting by cameraphone enroute to Seattle.
Image from some time back -- Detroit, I think.

smile.

smile.
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

National Portrait Gallery.
Dinner across the street at Proof.

Vina Boscania Rioja
& catching up.

Posting by cameraphone from
Washington D.C.

still not as bad as krakatoa

Via: Online MBA

Related: GDS Digital's Flickr Stream is an Infographic Wonderland »

ember

ember
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

I love flying at this time of day, nose pointed West, just as the sun's going down. With a good tailwind you can ride the sunset for hours.

Or three, like we did tonight.

Posting by cameraphone on the descent into O'Hare.

no coffee; pepsi.

no coffee; pepsi.
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

Congratulations, Boston: You've joined the percentage of the world's population without reasonable access to clean drinking water.

It's not the exclusive group you might think »

Posting by cameraphone from Logan International Airport, Boston.

landline

ORD, Terminal 3 (I think).

holga.

magic carpet ride

Eyjafjallajökull Volcano, Iceland acquired April 15, 2010
Originally uploaded by NASA Goddard Photo and Video

We are its passengers rather than its masters.

A woman identified as Ms. Sandweiss, wife of Professor Eric Sandweiss, by the New York Times.

Ms. Sandweiss was referring to the forces of Nature in light of the unexpected extension of her family's Italian holiday due to the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull.

corn.

Grinnell, IA

holga.

blown

Air Traffic over Britain, courtesy of the BBC. Except when it isn't, courtesy of Eyjafjallajökull.

Looks like I'll be rescheduling that London trip again, given that, according to the Times:

The perfect combination of calm atmospheric conditions and unrelenting activity of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano means that the cloud could loom over Britain until late next week.

While there could be brief spells when the plume clears parts of the airspace, it is not certain that these will be long enough for airlines to resume flights.

This would be the same trip that I rescheduled in September when I came down with the flu, and picked April 22nd at random, because April seemed like a good time to go to London.

Except when volcanoes blow.

being & nothingness

Took a brief and lovely walk through the Bald Cyprus and Slash Pines of the Audubon Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary just outside of Naples, Florida yesterday morning. Just after dawn became day.

I had an hour before I had to hit the road to the airport, so I listened to the admonishments of the signposts that urged 2.5 hours to do the whole route and took the shortcut back. Which meant I missed over half of the boardwalk. Which I regret.

With a little leg I could have pulled of the whole stroll in the time I had, although admittedly I would have had less time to hang out with the pileated woodpecker who burrowed the bark just off the trail (shoulder height. could have touched him if I tried.). And I may not have paused long enough to see the nesting Swallow Tailed Kite through the scope that the folks at the interpretive center had left on the trail, sited to the tip top of the tree tops.

I most certainly would have missed the endangered Wood Stork (the second of the trip) glide low and slow over a boggy spot where I was gazing at a Limpkin.

It's a beautiful, brilliant, rare kind of place, that in just an hour put right a good share of what I had broken in my soul through over work and too much fuss about things that just don't matter all that much.

I hope to get back.

Posting by cameraphone.

an update.

an update.
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

And what did she do with a month of soul numbing deadlines behind her, to find herself prone on the warm talcum sands of this Atlantic Beach while the terns (I think they're terns) darted along the edge of that melody the sea makes when it collides at last with earth?

Dear Reader, she napped.


p.s. also with me here: dragonflies that hover and whir; sandflies that nip at my fleshy bits; a massive hawk that I thought at first was a buzzard who prowled and stuttered along the water's edge until he dove and nailed his prey; and what might have been a solitary flamingo, looking for his clan. (Or a heron. But that beak wasn't quite right for a heron.)

Posting by cameraphone from Naples, FL and almost in love with the world again.

Update: It was an endangered wood stork -- not a flamingo -- something I figured out this morning when I visited the Audubon Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary. (Told you the beak wasn't quite right.) And they were sandpipers, not terns.

and another update: Ramones Karaoke has correctly identified my hawk as an Osprey. here's more on that »

serve warm

This will never be
the same simple pie

one gets
for about a thousand drachmas
in Kikitsa's little stone taverna
in Monodendri

up in the Zagohoria
the northwest reaches of Epirus

The flour is different;
the cheese, homemade,
certainly is different;

and the result here
is my humble attempt
to reproduce

perfection.

Diane Kochilas, prefacing her recipe for Tiganopitta Epirou, or Skillet Pie from Epirus, in her cookbook: The Food and Wine of Greece.

I had a pie like the one Kochilas describes, but it was on Crete, not in Epirus, in a little hard-scrabble mountain town called Kato Afrata, a short drive from Chania, which is where it had been recommended to me and my traveling companions.



Or rather: where She had been recommended to us. "She" was Roxani, and she was reputed to make the best cheese pies on the island of Crete.

They were delicious, and fresh, and hot from the skillet. There were spinach pies too, but the cheese were exemplary.

But what I remember about the stop in that little out of the way place where it surprised me anyone could make a living at all running a restaurant, was her Alexander, who ran the restaurant with her. The kindness that coursed between them as they conducted their business and welcomed these American travelers (the only guests just then) and fed them well and smiled to be recommended by their friend in Chania.

The way they endearingly and enduringly (in a way that made me ache) loved one another.



Here's Kochilas' recipe for that cheese pie:

1 cup sifted all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup warm water
1/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons olive oil
1/2 cup grated feta cheese

1. In a medium-sized bowl, sift together flour and salt. Make a well in center and add warm water and 2 tablespoons olive oil. Mix until a dough forms and knead in bowl for 5 to 7 minutes, or slightly longer, until dough is smooth and silky to the touch.

2. Divide dough into several balls, and roll out each on a lightly floured surface to a 1/2-inch-thick circle a little smaller than the base of the skillet. Dot with feta, fold into a crescent, and flatten with rolling pin or fingertips to a circle about as large as the base of the skillet. Heat remaining 1/4 cup olive oil in a large heavy skillet. Fry until golden brown, flipping to cook on both sides. Repeat with remaining dough.

3. Serve warm.

magnificent kitsch

In Elmhurst, Illinois, there is a small museum dedicated to the lapidary arts. According to Google there’s another one in Hendersonville, North Carolina and a third in Ghent among the ruins of St. Bavo’s Abbey. (Among other things, St. Bavo was the patron saint of falconry.)

The second page of Google search results (but who ever looks at the second page?) reveals another within easy reach of the Isenheim Altarpiece and its pustulent Christ; and yet another in North Cyprus, in the small town of Nicosia, in an ecclesiastical structure left behind by the Venetians when they blew through the Mediterranean and lit the fire that gave us El Greco and other bits of beauty.

But back to the rocks of Elmhurst, cut and polished and fashioned by hand. The Lizzadro Museum is full of them, as Mr. Hoo and I discovered late last summer entirely by accident when we crossed the park after taking in an exhibit at the Elmhurst Art Museum (which has the dubious distinction of salvaging and transplanting a complete Mies structure to the site and appropriating its rooms for administrative offices).



It’s my fault we went in. The ragged unfinished hunk of Jade mounted near the front door drew me through the doors; and it’s my fault that we stayed longer than Mr. Hoo would have liked.

The room, you have to understand, was filled with Jade. And yes: Intaglios and intarsias and faceted gemstones -- but the Jade! Carved into vessels and scepters and screens, worked so thin as to be translucent, it breathed the same green of regeneration that led the Maya to revere it.

Rimmed around the room, however, was the greater curiosity: frame after frame of lapidary dioramas. Mother birds feeding their young. Dinosaurs roaming the earth. Vast herds of buffalo bringing steam trains to a full stop as they migrated across the vast open prairie. Jasper seemed to be the stone of choice, but obsidian and quartz and tiger’s eye and lapis lazuli also put in an appearance; as did agate and aquamarine.

Magnificent kitsch.

The twelve year old in me kicked in and I took an eternity to circle the room while Mr. Hoo waited patiently near the snuff bottles carved out of stone.



This weekend I returned with my camera. The room was smaller than I remembered (isn’t it always) which means it didn’t take me long at all to get my shots (photography is allowed at the Lizzadro Museum), which is a good thing, because a cold bug was settling into my sinuses and I didn’t have the endurance for much more than that.

I’ve posted them here for you. You may be intrigued, or you may be indifferent. This is how people generally are about rocks.

It's all or nothing, really, when it comes to the lapidary arts.


Flickr slideshow: Lizzadro Museum of Lapidary Art »

The Lizzadro Museum of Lapidary Art
In Wilder Park
220 Cottage Hill
Elmhurst, Illinois, 60126
(630) 833-1616

the backside of hell's kitchen

Stayed at Ink48 back in January. It's snugged into the backside of Hell's Kitchen along 11th Avenue, which is just a nudge too far off 9th Avenue -- that wonderful street of shops and restaurants -- to feel like you're still in Midtown, even.

But the rooms are massive, for Manhattan, and it has a lovely view of the Hudson.

The sky starts to open up as you near the hotel, walking along 48th towards 11th. The skyscrapers of Midtown are just a memory and the sun has more opportunity to seek out surfaces and shine them up, resplendent -- which you think would be a good thing, and your evolved brain that digs beauty says *yes,* but your animal brain that has taken safety in the canyons feels tiny and nervous and exposed.

Like a creature crawling out from under a rock after a hard rain.