cows.

a la Mexicana

no safety

Feeling safe kills.

From Mary Roach's review of Tom Vanderbilt's Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says About Us) in last Sunday's New York Review of Books.

In which I learned that 80 percent of auto accidents happen because a driver was distracted for only three seconds.

Re feeling safe: Vanderbilt indicates that S.U.V.s are more dangerous than cars because they confer "a sense of safety — they invite careless behavior."

No indication in Roache's review of whether Vanderbilt tackles one of my pet wildass theories: That the increase of S.U.V.s on the road has contributed markedly to the slowing of traffic in recent years, because they reduce visibility for smaller cars. (Can't tell you how many times I had to wait for a big ass vehicle to move through their left turn so I could make my right turn.)

he arrived early. she came late.

not for sale

Growing up, we were different.

When you’re a kid, different isn’t a good thing.

We moved a lot, driftwood in the steady sea of normalcy that was whatever suburb or city outskirt we touched down in. Each landing meant recognizance: Who are these people? What do they wear? What do they care about? Followed by some serious fitting-in.

My sister was the master: she used Nice like a tactical weapon. She could fold herself into any new social situation and own it with her smile.

I wasn’t so good at it, but I got along. Mostly through subterfuge and deception. I hid myself behind a screen of what I determined -- through astute observation -- was normal. I left the awkward lunches that my mother packed for me in my locker (course homemade wheat bread smeared with strange combinations of avocados and sprouts or peanut butter and banana; raw fruit juices; the occasional disastrous and stinky split pea soup with tofu subbed in for ham) and got by on the change that I scrounged off my parents’ dresser. For years I survived on 60 cent lunches of 10 cent milk cartons and packages of hostess powdered donuts, because I didn’t want to pull out my strange sandwiches at a table full of white bread wonder and bologna. (We didn’t eat much meat, either.)

My radar was always up; I was always scanning for difference and working hard to conform to the norm.

One of the things that made us different from the rest of our normal block was the mass and scale of my father’s record album collection. He had shelves made especially for the vinyl that he received in the course of his trade: deep massive shelves that accommodated big blocks of records and smaller portions for the amp and turntable and reel to reel that siphoned music like fuel through a mass of wires to his big orange waffle grid JBL speakers. The shelves were made of one inch pine which wasn’t enough: they bowed under the weight.

This was a different that I didn’t mind. Home was church when the music was on. I didn’t learn until much later, from a high school boyfriend, that my speech was peppered with expressions that marked me as different without my knowing: I said things like “flip side” and “give it a spin” as easy as breathing.

I had my own albums that were gifts from my dad, starting with when I received my first turntable on my 8th birthday. It came with a pile of records that must have weighed at least 25 pounds: A crazy mashup of the Beatles and Fantasia and the Brady Kids singing “Ben”. Ragtime, bad pop, symphony and rock and roll.

Many of the albums that I played full tilt in the privacy of my room were stamped with “Promotional Copy Only: Not for Sale”.

Different.

It was a long time before I learned that albums cost money: Up to ten dollars a friend told me, when she was talking about how expensive they were. I was amazed. Records just arrived at our house: packages at the door several times a week. I never saw money change hands, although I had a sense that something was going on at that big Peaches record store that my dad would frequently schlep us to. (I want to say it was on Colfax -- this was Denver -- but I’m sure I’m wrong about that.)

I felt vaguely ashamed of the Promo Copy stamps on so many of our album covers, and of their notched corners. I hid them from my friends, pulling out only the pristine covers that appeared “paid for” when they came over to play.

In junior high I sucked up my shame on the afternoon we were all invited to bring albums to music class. I brought in two Commodore albums, when the Commodores were cool, and I figured I would be careful and hide the promo stamps from view.

The discovery was made of course, by one of those loud boys who always uncover the awkward and untoward and announce it to everyone within shouting distance. How did I get these? Theft was implied. My face flushed red with shame as I stuttered and explained: “Yeah. My dad gets those from work.”

Silence. More shame. More fierce blushing fire.

Then his face softened, almost amazed. “What does your dad do?”

Unlike when we lived a long time before in New York and LA, very few suburban kids had parents in the music industry. It was hard to explain promotions and production to a room full of kids who only knew about the folks singing the songs, but I tried. And they listened. Eagerly and interested.

Which is when it first dawned on me that different could be good.

I was reminded of the Promo stamp, and my shame, when I picked up a bin of cheap vinyl recently, and then in a matter of days received a couple of promo copies of my own that I wanted to pass along. I’ve only given each of these a quick listen, but it was good enough on the first pass to share.



The first came from my dad, who’s still pimping tunes even though he’s no longer on the payroll: Cowboy Fandango by Michael Hurwitz and the Aimless Drifters. Hurwitz is a cowboy and songwriter whose true western lyrics include references to old green trucks and UFOs over Wyoming. The CD cover features a naked lady astride a centaur who looks remarkably like Hurwitz. Quirky and classic and so worth a listen.



There’s also two-time Latin Grammy nominee Jovino Santos Neto’s latest release, Alma do Nordeste (soul of the northeast), which his lovely wife Luzia delivered to me over lunch when I saw her in Seattle.

Jovino and Luzia and their kids are family to me, ever since we met in the cherry blossomed strewn courtyard of the cheap shotgun shacks that we rented at the end of Broadway in Seattle, so I’ve course I’m going to plug Jovino’s newest CD. But also because it was inspired by the trip they took through the Northeast of Brazil recording indigenous music, and because he invokes the legacy and influence of Hermeto Pascoal, whom Jovino played with for years, and who, like Jovino, makes music that’s remarkably different.

In a really good way.

two stacked nudes

Radiohead's Nude.


Radiohead's Nude remixed on machinery.

fail, comrade.

via

shhh.

The Web is not just a way to shout, it is a way to listen, one that can lead to deeper, more effective journalism.

David Carr paraphrasing Jeff Jarvis in All of Us, The Arbiters of News in this morning's New York Times.

new beginning

Yaxchilan, Mexico

más ruinas

There's something strangely sexy about the Mayan site of Yaxchilan, forgetting that when you're there you're dripping with sweat and constantly swatting at mosquitoes.

I blame Lady Xoc.

Shield Jaguar's Queen is depicted in Lintel 24 on her knees before her King, threading a rope spiked with thorns through her tongue in the female version of penis perforation. She captures her blood on a paper offering that will be burned to invoke a crazy serpent vision like the one depicted on Lintel 25. [1]

Lady Xoc’s sultry spirit is all over this place.



The site is considerably more groomed than Piedras Negras, but has none of the tightly trimmed pathways of Palenque. It's somewhat remote and requires that you put in by boat, but still brings in a respectable tourist trade -- enough traffic that when our friend and guide Alfonso set up a picnic for us all and was mashing up a bucket of guacamole to top the banana leaf wrapped tamales that he hauled in from afar, the tide of tourists would stop to ask him ¿cuánto? (Fortunately he didn't relent and we had more than enough to wash down with a cane sugar Coca -- one of the best meals ever.)

At Yaxchilan there's a deep dark labyrinth of passageways that meander through an interlocking series of excavated structures. The ceilings frequently peak in that classic attenuated Mayan triangle, and are studded with a concentration of sleeping bats -- blind sleeping bats, you remind yourself fervently, as you sweep your flashlight over them.



Stepping around the dark corners and up unexpected steps soon you find yourself in a colonnade that spills into a wide open grassy plaza studded with a dance platform and a ball court and an abundance of free standing structures -- many of them with carved lintels, still intact in their door frames, and an occasional stucco.

I’ve never received a satisfactory answer to my question: Why did the Maya exert so much effort into carving a surface that no one saw? Lintels are installed in that place in the door jamb just over head -- to see them at all requires the indignity of cranking your neck back hard; to shoot them requires lying flat on your back in something of a sprawl. I shot almost a dozen lintels on this last trip and each time I felt like perv peeking up a girl’s skirt.



I’ve been told by several scholars that the subjected saw them when they were lying prostrate before the king, but I’m not buying it: prostrate implies nose to the dirt, and lintel requires some serious head twisting to look up and absorb the intricate stories that they tell.

Something else is going on with the lintels, and I’m reminded of the Thai belief that spirits live in door jambs (which is why you never want to step on the wood that frames the bottom of a door in a Thai house) and wonder whether it was thought that something sleeps here too; something that looks after the stories and ensures they’re remembered.

It's a complete bullshit theory, but it's mine.


Stairways vie with lintels for predominance at Yaxchilan. The central feature of the site is a big ass stairway that ascends to remarkable Temple 33 that’s graced with an estella carved from a stalactite.



Arriving, huffing, at the top you realize you still haven't gone far enough -- there are two more acropolis that lie behind a slippery hike through twisted trails, over rock faces and thick roots.

Three of us hiked it together in silence. It was a little like hiking one of the steeper trails at Yosemite, back in the wilderness areas during the early spring when it's misty and wet. But ratch up the heat and humidity by about 95%, and then drop a 3,000 year old structure on the summit. Better yet: drop three structures. And populate them with cryptic carvings.

It was something like that.



And then like jimmies on ice cream the monkeys stopped by -- at least half a dozen howlers with a baby among them, taking their time over lunch, swinging through the trees.



p.s. There was a furry tarantula too, who, near the end of the day as we ascended what would be our last temple steps of the trip, ducked into his hidey-hole just as my foot found its grip on his step, three of his eight legs protruding as he sat perfectly still, pretending to be invisible, waiting for me to move on.




[1] Both lintels -- two of the most extraordinary examples of Mayan art -- now hang in the British Museum.

omphalos

I'm pretty sure that's a belly button on that pot.

Just sayin'.

398

Oakland, CA

black stones

Had hoped to write something compelling and endlessly fascinating about Piedras Negras, because the Mayan site on the Usamacinta River was, after all, the whole reason I soaked myself in deet and took cloroquin only to be bitten ANYWAY by disease bearing mosquitoes (although bearing something else probably, because the malaria smear turned up negative. west nile’s the head runner, followed by dengue fever. still waiting for results on those.)

But because my brain is taking odd holidays at random moments I’ll stick to the basics and simply upload a handful of shots and prattle on a bit.



Piedras Negras doesn’t see a lot of visitors -- it’s not like the well-groomed sites of Tikal and Palenque or even the mildly groomed jungle site of Yaxchilan (pics from there to follow soon) -- Piedras Negras today is only a few narrow trails cut into a series of steep slopes.



Very few of the ruins are revealed to what little light makes it through the thick rainforest canopy: much has never been excavated and the little that has has been overtaken again by the jungle in the time it lay fallow between excavations and when it was home to guerillas and drug runners.

The real treasures (and they’re astonishing, the estella and thrones and other bas-relief of Piedras) have been spirited away to the National Gallery in Guatemala City (Piedras lies on the Guatemalan side of the river). What’s left on the site has mostly been overtaken by moss.



Piedras Negras matters because Tatiana Proskouriakoff did some of her most important work here -- as an artist developing reconstructive drawings of what the site looked like in its prime she puzzled out the obvious: that the estella -- stone monuments erected in front of the temples and structures of the site -- recorded histories. Not mythologies, as previously believed. Actual chronicles of the kings.

Her insight led to the subsequent rapid tumble decipherment of Mayan hieroglyphics. Well, maybe not that rapid, but something of a tumble, and still underway today.



The approach to Piedras Negras isn’t easy. For us it was an hour and half in the bed of a pick up truck, a slick descent down a muddy bank (well traveled by pollo -- the Usumacinta is a main thoroughfare on the underground highway into the U.S.) into metal skiffs that would ferry us for the next 45 minutes along the river, and then a sandy ascent up another steep bank to the site.



All of which contributed to the wholly giddy feeling that I had on the approach, and the scramble through the bush, through the green soaked sunlight and the thick under story and the muddled mossy edifices. Yeah. Could hardly see a thing. And it was heaven.

Even the indignity of squatting in the woods (there are no port-a-potties at Piedras) couldn’t shake off the feeling that comes from finally touching down at a place where so much history happened.



Tatiana’s ashes are interred on the acropolis -- a steep ascent up yet another mound that’s part hillside part structure part city beneath your feet. She’s surrounded by the whirring sounds of the jungle -- howler monkeys and tiny cicadas that sound like weed whackers and add a surreal edge that makes being in the middle of nowhere sound a little like being in the middle of the suburbs.

the far horizon

Staying home sick and moping around is dangerous.

I just picked up one of these off eBay -- the homely Soviet made Horizon 202 panoramic camera (cheap cousin to the Widelux) -- with the fond hope that I might be able to take shots like these »

But that may just be the fever dreams talking.

speaking of bugs

Yaxchilan, Mexico

why did no one mention this?

Had I known about the preventive powers of the unicorn, I would have packed better.

Feeling funky and suspecting at least one of those 103 mosquito bites. Getting checked out for malaria tomorrow. At worst I'm thinking I might have a mild case, given that I'm already taking meds.

Best case: It's just the flu.

Source: 10 Reasons it Would Rule to Date a Unicorn
via jenw

home.

View from my grandparents' place.

miss you.

miss you.
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

I took some brief snapshots of Grama at her birthday party. Looking at them last night I wished I hadn't.

She looks so lost and small and far away. The laughter and the light in her eyes are gone. That big explosion of love that comes when we meet and that I expect as a matter of course -- accompanied by loud exclamations and hugs and giggling chatter -- none of that happened when I saw her this last time. How could it? She didn't know me.

But this one I'm glad for. It's hanging in my aunt's master bedroom, which is why the contents of her closet are reflected in the glass. J said Grama hated this shot -- maybe she didn't like her hair, her dress. Who knows.

I love it because I can see the light in her eyes.


Update: Dug up this old YouTube clip for the same reason. For some reason it won't fire from YouTube proper but seems to play here just fine. And so I've been looping it too much: to see my Grama sentient again, to see her eyes on me, knowing that she's loved.

The story of how this clip came to be is here »

homeward bound

SEA to ORD

embiggen on black

walking the locks

When I was a kid my sister and I spent frequent weekends at my grandparents' place on Three Tree Point in their "Princess Suite" -- the Mother-in-Law apartment over the garage that they renovated after my Great Gram passed away.

It was a crazy mash up of Danish modern furnishings and flocked wallpaper, my Bompa's idea of high style.

Weekends meant waffles and classic movies (Zorro or Shane or the Sound of Music which would send my grandmother into her own trilling rendition of Climb Every Mountain) -- and field trips. The University of Washington when the cherry trees bloomed in the Quad. Long drives through my Bompa's old neighborhood or around the Peninsula. The Garden Room at Frederick and Nelson's to lunch on chicken pot pie.

Field trips in the spring when the salmon were running meant a drive to the Ballard Locks to see Bompa's Fish.

Which bored me to tears.

Fish. Swimming. Upstream.

Got it.

But I never said that out loud. And although Bompa may have guessed that I was barely interested he never tried to win me over. We just walked the locks. And watched the fish. And monitored the tedious passage of boats and ships from fresh to salt water and back again.

So I guess I shouldn't be surprised at how that gentle meditation worked its way into my bones. How the muscle memory is triggered every time I go back to that place, like I did this last weekend, to walk the locks, and watch the fish, and the passage of ships.

How it summons up the memory of his brisk walk beside me, his gentle gestures, the swell of his chest as he breathed in the excitement and watched his fish run.

Got it.

jetcity

jetcity
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

SeaTac, WA

This one's atop a motel on HWY 99 near SeaTac International that's boarded up for demolition. It won't be around much longer.