Meeting Korean Traditional Culture at Temples

08Feb10

During March of 2009 I spent some time traveling in Korea.  I had an especially great time in Pusan, where I spent a few days walking up and down the coastline and visiting several mountain temples, including Beomeosa, a Buddhist temple that was founded in 678.  Beomeosa has an incredibly poetic sounding name when translated into English — “Temple of the Nirvana Fish” — and Wikipedia gives a pretty good breakdown of the possible readings and interpretations involved with the name:

Beom(범;梵) = nirvana – eo(어;魚) = fish – sa(사;寺) = temple.  Thus the name of the temple came to be “Heavenly Fish.” It is also claimed that the fish came from Nirvana, the Buddhist state of non-suffering. Therefore the temple also became known as “The temple where fish from Nirvana Play.”

Beomeosa was an incredible place to visit and I took a ton of photographs while I was there.  Unfortunately, a funny thing happened on the ferry ride back to Osaka and I managed to misplace the bag that I was carrying my film in.  Aside from the few shots that were still in the camera, I lost every last bit of film that I took on my trip to Korea.  Luckily, I had my Ricoh GRD2 with me as well, so at least I was able to bring a few images back from my trip.

In fact, I ended up getting contacted by a Korean publisher about using a couple of my Beomeosa photographs in an upcoming book designed as a young person’s introduction to Buddhist temples in Korea.  I received the book (only available in Korean) last week and I totally love it.  Soojin, my contact at the publishing company, has translated the title of the book as Meeting Korean Traditional Culture at Temples.  Here’s what Soojin has to say about it:

Although Korea had been a Buddhist country for more than 1600 years, there are few people who can find it interesting to look around ancient temples.  This title helps children as well as adults to understand Korean culture and history through various Buddhistic heritages.  The author Park Sang-yong guides readers to a temple, from the First Gate to mural paintings.  As an expert in Korean culture, he easily explains the meaning of each gate until reaching a main building with Buddhistic statues, history of pagodas, stupas and so on.  Splendid photos of Korean temples attract the attention, with cute cartoon images that go along with them.

You can find out more about this fantastic book here (as long as you can read Korean), and have a bit more of a glimpse at what’s inside the covers.

And if you click here you can view the full set of those photos of mine that somehow actually did manage to find their way out of Korea.


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the morning cup

06Feb10

1. Eerie, the ghosts in my haunted coffee.  Corpsey hands push through the grave-dirt, an exhalation, the spirits of grass snakes and killer whales.

2. I was kind of shocked when I first came across the bums, huddled around their barrel-fire in the bottom of my coffee cup.  The guy wearing the blue bandanna and missing his eye tooth keeps yelling at the other two that they’ve got to “Peel the skin off of the marshmallow and make me a goddamn hat right now!”

3. Krakatoa.  Vesuvius.  Pinatubo.  Oshima.  Cotopaxi.  Mount Saint Helens.  Kīlauea. Mauna Loa.  Sakurajima.  Mount Nyiragongo.

4. It was across moors like this that the Wolf Man came walking.

Even a man who is pure in heart
and says his prayers by night
may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms
and the autumn moon is bright.

5. “The idea of using boiling water to produce mechanical motion has a long history, going back about 2,000 years. Early devices were not practical power producers, but more advanced designs producing usable power have become a major source of mechanical power over the last 300 years, enabling the Industrial Revolution, beginning with applications for mine water removal using vacuum engines.”

6. When I woke up in the morning, there were a dozen snow monkeys in my coffee cup.  They were exceedingly friendly and I found myself becoming fond of their red faces and the bits of frost hanging off of their bearded chins.  Still, the coffee tasted a little bit funny.

7. 霧が来ました。香りは森の海の星の。あの夜で僕の夢は弓の形に成った。

8. I was awakened by cannon fire and surprised to find two armies, lined up against one another, facing off inside my coffee cup.  The one army was clothed in a chartreuse uniform, almost precisely the color of an old Mepps Saltwater Timber Doodle.  The other army wore an orange so shocking that even Chester Cheetah blushed.  What the war was about, I’ll never know.

9.  Cirrocumulus.  Nimbostratus.  Cumulonimbus.  Cirrus duplicatus.  Cirrus floccus.  Iwashigumo.  Cirrostratus undulatus.  Altostratus lenticularis.  The mackerel sky.


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7 portraits

04Feb10

I had inordinately good luck with my Bessa-T and this roll of Kodak 400TMY when I was back in the U.S. this summer.  Lens effect fineness courtesy of Voigtlander’s massively wonderful 50mm Nokton.


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Denver to San Francisco on the California Zephyr

04Feb10

The crown jewel in long-distance Amtrak travel is the California Zephyr (also called “The Silver Lady”), which runs from the Great Lakes to the Pacific Ocean, crossing both the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevadas in the process.   I picked up the Zephyr at Denver’s historic Union Station, which opened in 1881.

Unfortunately, the Zephyr wouldn’t be traveling through the Rockies on this trip because the tracks through the mountains were being repaired.  Instead the train traveled north through Wyoming, entering Salt Lake City from the east and then resuming it’s normal course.  The neat thing about this route is that at least some of the section through Wyoming uses the original Union Pacific tracks that formed the eastern leg of the First Transcontinental Railroad.  We were going to be spending a good stretch of time on some deeply historical rails.

One of the most interesting things about riding trains is the fact that they always travel through the metaphorical backyards of cities,  a view that reveals what’s going on behind the facades that have been erected with the gazing eye of the automobile in mind.  Here’s a bit from the notebook that I carried with me on the Zephyr:

Leaving Denver we pass long lines of trains filled with scrap metal parked at one of the train yards.  Perhaps going to the recyclers to be melted down so it can take a new shape?  Taking the train reveals unseen routes of production — areas of the U.S. where things are made, scrapped, stored, and moved around, not simply sold as idealized objects that come out of nowhere.  These back trackways also reveal traces of the history of production and the signs of the passing of older economic regimes.  Also, you can see the squat and small housing of workers and the urban poor, located far from the newly manufactured suburban zones that popped up during the housing boom.  These homes are small and minimal, and yet somehow also a rejoinder to the super-sized plainness that everyone seems to be buying into these days.

Just passed some sort of refinery plant, all silver stacks and pipes.  And then a scrapyard full of junk metal, all in heaps, being stirred around by someone driving a backhoe.  In fact, the five piles of metal each have their own individual backhoe operator and the whole think kind of ends up looking like deep-sea lobsters or crabs, clawing through piles of food.  Then the train passes a steelworks where giant pipes are being welded together, and then a gravel yard heaped with mountains of pebbles.

It’s a bit unfortunate, really — we just passed through Greeley, Colorado, and out into farmland, but the haze from the Southern California wildfires is so thick that it’s impossible to see the horizon.  This must be what the so-called “yellow season” in Korea is like.  As my grandmother quipped about the fires when we first began hearing about them, “It’s a wonder they have any plants at all left to burn down there.”

10:00 a.m. — Not sure if we’re still in Colorado, or in Wyoming.  Out the window there are low hills and golden prairies, some scrub, and groups of buffalo off to the right.

12:00 p.m. — This part of Wyoming truly is land that is empty of all people.  We’ve been riding the train for hours, and there’s virtually no sign of inhabitation.  Many of the towns that we do pass through have fewer than 100 buildings.  Crispian, a fellow passenger, says, “You know how you know it’s actually a town?  It’s got a water tower.”  The Wyoming prairies are full of color.  Utterly beautiful.  Clouds too, forming a kind of vapor landscape that acts as a compliment to the actual landscape.

3:00 — The layered sandstone mesas in Wyoming (or are we in Utah now?) are absolutely beautiful.  Their pink and grey striation combines with the blue sky and the cotton clouds so that it feels strangely like traveling through one of Wayne Thiebaud’s pastel-hued cake paintings.

This is the viewing car, located somewhere near the middle of the train.  There were only 33 passengers on the entire train for this trip, so there was more than enough room to lounge around, sit with a cup of coffee, and relax and enjoy the view.  It’s easy to sit for hours and hours, just watching the landscape change shape outside the window.  As Ross, a fellow passenger who had been on the train since Philadelphia, put it, “I’ve been on the train for three days now, but everything is so interesting that it feels like it’s taking no time at all.  If I was on an eight-hour flight from coast to coast I think it almost might feel longer than this train trip has.”

If you’re a smoker riding the Zephyr, you’re pretty much doomed.  There’s absolutely no smoking allowed on the train and there’s a hefty fine if you’re caught (there’s also some vague threat of being let off the train in the middle of nowhere if you’re causing truly serious problems).  Smoke breaks only happen once every four hours or so, when the train halts for ten or fifteen minutes at one of the stations along the route.  I don’t smoke, but I like to get out of the train and stretch my legs when I get a chance.  I’m glad I did, because it gave me the chance to get a shot of these amazing cotton-candy clouds.

When I was younger, I always used to wonder why Brigham Young chose the Salt Lake area as the site for the recently founded Mormon religious community and why anyone took him seriously when he suggested it.  The Salt Lake is, after all, an enormous body of undrinkable water — not exactly hospitable to human habitation (or so ran my line of deductive reasoning).  The ‘correctness’ of my way of thinking was further verified for me when I took a cross-country trip with my family and we spent hours and hours driving through a desert populated by tumbleweeds, and then several more hours driving through the beautiful, but lifeless, salt flats before arriving at Salt Lake City.  This truly seemed to be a city in the middle of a horribly benighted patch of nowhere.

But this point of view was based on the experience of traveling from west to east, and then turning south at Salt Lake City to head for Denver.  I had never spent time on the other side of the mountains to the east of Salt Lake City, and this area is positively beautiful.  The rolling hills that the train passes through as it heads west to the Salt Lake area are covered with gold-green grasses; it’s an ideal area for grazing animals, and even at the end of summer there seems to be more than enough water in the rivers and streams running down from the mountains.  Crossing through the mountains and down toward the Great Salt Lake itself, the rivers become even more powerful.  As it turns out, there’s plenty of fresh water in the Salt Lake area — it just needs to be accessed before it reaches the lake itself, that great endorheic body of saltier-than-seawater water.

Now it makes perfect sense to me why Brigham Young chose this as his whistle stop.

The train is early to Salt Lake City, so we have a chance to deboard and explore for a few hours.  A group of us decide to walk up to the Salt Lake Temple and the Temple Square area, where the headquarters of the Church of Latter Day Saints is located.  The temple building itself was finished in 1893 and is considered sacred by Mormons, so there are no public tours.  The grounds around the Temple are entirely accessible though.

Although my great-grandmother was a Mormon (a smoking, cussing, caffeine-drinking Mormon), and although I used to spend time with Mormon friends when I was younger, I’ve always had a major problem with the views of the church toward homosexuality and I was downright disgusted with the role that Mormons played in the passing of Proposition 8, California’s bigoted interdiction on same-sex marriage.  I’m also pretty prone to a pro-libertine stance when it comes to personal lifestyle choices, so the culture of Mormonism was never likely to sit comfortably with me.  In any case, I found walking around the temple grounds at night to be, personally, both a fascinating and a slightly eerie experience — as if I were a Capulet among the Montagues.

The Salt Lake Temple is eerie and gothic-looking at night, as if it has stepped straight out of The Castle of Otranto.  Ross says it looks a bit like Disneyland — not something that feels imbued with history, but something that’s already strangely a simulation of itself.  Off in the distance at the North Visitors’ Center the whiter than whiteness (whiter than the salt flats, even) replica of The Christus floats among the planets.  The fountain smells of chlorine, and everything is a bit too clean.  The only real signs of life come from the Mormon Tabernacle, where the choir is practicing.  It’s a strange thing to walk through the night and then come across the choir, singing in high voice.  It’s almost like stepping unseen into another person’s life.

Unfortunately, the train passes through the magnificent salt flats at night, so our view of them is mostly lost, although there is enough moon in the sky to get some sort of glimpse as we travel by:

Before sleep, looking out the window, the salt flats are illuminated by the moon like fields of snow.

There’s plenty of flat desert scrub to see the next day as the train travels through Nevada, however.  There are wispy clouds in the skies and the desert flatness is always impressive.  Never let anyone tell you that there is ‘nothing there’ in a desert view.

As the train finally starts its ascent through the Sierra Nevadas, it’s impossible for me to get Zeppelin’s “Going to California” out of my head.

Spend my days with a woman unkind
Smoked my stuff and drank all my wine
Made up my mind, make a new start
Goin’ to California with an achin’ in my heart
Someone told me there’s a girl out there
With love in her eyes and flowers in her hair

Took my chances on a big jet-plane
Never let ‘em tell ya that they’re aw-ooh-all the same
Hoh, the sea was red and the sky was grey
I wonder how tomorrow could ever follow today-hee
Mountains and the canyons start to tremble and shake
The children of the sun begin to awake
Now
Watch out

It seems that the wrath of the gods got a punch on the nose
And it’s startin’ to flow, I think I might be sinkin’
Throw me a line, if I reach it in time
Meet you up there where the path runs straight and high

Find a queen without a king
They say she plays guitar and cries and sings, la-la-la-la
Ride a white mare in the footsteps of dawn
Tryin’ to find a woman who’s never, never, never been born
Standin’ on a hill in the mountain of dreams
Tellin’ myself it’s not as hard, hard, hard as it seems

On the stretch between Reno, Nevada, and San Francisco a pair of volunteer historians in the observation car narrate an account of early Sierra Nevada history and point out sites of interest.   It’s an incredibly interesting account, although I find the bit about the Donner Party to be a bit disappointing.  As the train makes it’s way around Donner Lake (stunning views) the volunteers explain that the Donner Party was a group of emigrants bound for California who got caught in the winter snows, leading to the deaths of close to half of the original party of 87.  This is all true, of course, but the speakers have left out the most important part; as every California schoolchild knows, the important thing about the Donner Party is that some of the survivors resorted to cannibalism.  I suppose the Zephyr is just a bit too gentile for these kinds of cold, hard facts.

Finally, as the train rolls into the San Francisco Bay Area, the conductor tells us to take to our seats for the last hour or so of the trip.  This is fine since there are really fine views of San Pablo Bay as the train makes its way past the C&H Sugar plant in Crockett, and then past the dozens of oil and gas refineries that dot Contra Costa County.  It’s strange knowing that the trip is coming to an end soon, after being on the train for so long.  It’s almost hard to get used to the idea of physically moving through space rather than, as it feels like while riding the train, having space move around you while you remain relatively still.

As the train nears the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge, we’re greeted with this incredible sky.  Something straight out of a Whistler painting.


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L.A. to Denver on the Southwest Chief

01Feb10

After spending some time with family and friends in Los Angeles this summer, I headed for Denver and Boulder to visit more family and more friends.  I decided to take the Southwest Chief, an Amtrak line that runs from Los Angeles to Chicago via Albuquerque and Kansas City.  There’s no direct route to Denver on the Chief, but you can transfer to a bus in Raton, New Mexico, that will take you all the way to Denver’s historic Union Station.  Since the Southwest Chief departs from Union Station in L.A., there’s something that feels weirdly self-contained about the whole trip, like getting off the merry-go-round at the exact place you got on, except now you’re in an entirely different city.

Union Station in L.A. is one of the last great rail stations in the United States, a monument to a once-thriving culture of rail travel that has now almost entirely vanished.  The building opened in 1939 and was designed by John and Donald Parkinson, the architects who designed Los Angeles City Hall.  Wikipedia gives a fantastic and baroque description of Union Station’s architectural provenance:

The structure combines Dutch Colonial Revival Style architecture (the suggestion of the Dutch born Jan van der Linden), Mission Revival, and Streamline Moderne style, with architectural details such as eight-pointed stars.

It’s all true, of course, but one of the most interesting aspects of Union Station is how positively Californian it feels.  The palm trees outside help, as do the Mission elements, but there’s also something incredibly cinematic about this station; it feels almost as if it belongs in a classic film noir, or perhaps a romantic comedy involving missed trains and chance meetings.  To my mind, most classic train stations seem to have this sort of cinematic quality about them, which probably has as much to do with the visual dramatics of monumental social architecture as it does with the sound of hundreds of pairs of clicking heels maneuvering rapidly through the stations to meet their trains.  But sadly, most of the magnificent train stations in the United States have been destroyed and replaced with highways, parking lots, and postal sorting stations.  Over at The Infrastructurist you can read an amazing post about eleven great train stations that have been reduced to rubble (with photographs!).

Sleeping cars on Amtrak trains are pretty expensive, so I decided to rough it by going coach.  If you decide to sleep in the coach-class seats, there are a couple of things you need to know: 1) The seats are fairly large (much larger than airplane seats) and there’s tons of legroom.  If you can sleep easily on a plane or a bus, you’ll be set.  2) You’ll need to bring earplugs because the train makes stops throughout the night and there are often people moving around the car.  I need earplugs on airplanes too, so maybe I’m just an earplug kind of guy, but I would strongly recommend bringing a pair.  3) You’ve got to provide your own blanket.  The Southwest Chief can get pretty cold as it travels through the desert at night and if you don’t bring a blanket or a sleeping bag, you’re not going to get much sleep.  4) There is no Wi-Fi.

The Southwest Chief vaguely parallels the famous Route 66 as it makes its way through California, Arizona, and New Mexico.  I myself followed Route 66 as closely as possible on a cross-country motorcycle trip that I took after graduating from university, so the course of the train through the desert felt familiar in a dreamlike way.  Here’s a bit from the notebook that I was carrying with me on the Chief:

The Chief leaves L.A. in the evening and right away I meet Melvin, who is Navajo and works as a caterer.  He grew up in Gallup, New Mexico, and takes the train home because it’s the most convenient way to get there (the nearest airport is a five-hour drive from Gallup, so it doesn’t make sense to fly).  He grew up on the reservation and says he needed to get out for some adventure, though he loves the familiarity of the land when he comes home.  In the morning, just into New Mexico, the earth is red and the mesas begin to crop up and then we hit the desert proper, absolutely stunning in form and color.  It’s too bad that the Southwest ’style’ had to get exported and expropriated  because it’s so appropriate and right for the desert, but so intensely ugly and cliché when it finds its way into suburban cul-de-sacs.  The train passes the red cliffs, tepees, and “Indian Jewelry” signs on Route 66 (actually I-40 now) that I rode past when I took a Suzuki GS400 cross country.

One of the most interesting Fourth of July celebrations that I ever attended took place during the desert leg of my motorcycle trip.  I had a friend who was working as a park ranger in Chaco Canyon at the time, and I had decided to visit her for a few days.  This friend also happened to be an anthropologist and I figured she would be the perfect guide to the Anasazi kiva sites at Chaco Canyon.  I wasn’t wrong about this; over the course of several days we visited most of the major kiva sites in the region, including Pueblo Bonito, Nuevo Alto, and Kin Kletso.  As we walked we came across several well-known sites where pottery shards are collected, and we visited some of the important petroglyph sites including a stunning depiction of a comet that’s painted onto the side of a cliff.  One of the most interesting things we came across, however, was a depiction of a submarine carved into one of the stone walls at one of the lesser-known kiva sites.  This carving is most likely a record of Navajo military service during WWII — some 44,000 Native American soldiers served during WWII, including the famous Navajo code talkers — and it reveals the connection that many Navajo feel with a past that they consider themselves to be a living part of.  Anthropologists and the park service, on the other hand, claim that the Anasazi are not, in fact, historically connected to the Navajo people and they tend to look on these contemporary petroglyphs as a kind of defacement of important historical sites.  Because of the conflicting claims that surround this historical site, there’s not a little tension between local Navajos — one of the Navajo reservations butts up against the federally-managed Chaco Canyon — and the officials, anthropologists, and park rangers who are in charge of preserving the kivas.  With this in mind, on to the Fourth of July story.

Because Chaco Canyon is a national park, there are absolutely no fireworks allowed; however, a local Navajo land owner was willing to donate the use of one of his fields for a Fourth of July party.  The rangers at Chaco had loaded themselves up with a huge supply of every type of firework that you can imagine, and an equally huge supply of booze.    The day of the fourth came and went, however, but the party never happened because the winds were too strong to set off fireworks safely.  So on the night of the fifth we drove several miles outside the perimeter of Chaco Canyon national park, out along a dirt road, and finally into the middle of a field where there was nothing else in sight other than a large storage tank of some sort.  The rangers had brought the local firetruck with them and parked it in the middle of the field, just in case things got out of hand.  A bunch of Navajo parents had brought their children out to see the fireworks display, which turned out to be an almost violently incendiary event.  There was a lot of drunkenness going around when the fireworks were set off, and by the time the bags of explosives were empty several bits of the field and at least one ranger had caught on fire.  There was a festive air about the event, and the Navajo children ran around in the midst of the party enjoying themselves immensely, but as the party began to get louder and more chaotic I began to wonder what all the Navajo parents, lined up along the road and watching with expressionless faces, must be thinking.  Here we were, interlopers on Navajo land, celebrating an Independence Day that had ultimately resulted in the stripping of freedom, land, and liberty from Native Americans across the entire continent.  After the party was over and the last of the fireworks burned out there were thanks given to the owner of the land and then everyone moved off into the night.  Given the structural context it was almost impossible for me not to think of Frederick Douglass’s great speech, “What to the Slave is the 4th of July?”:

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?  I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.  To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.  There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.

On the same cross-country motorcycle trip, I also visited the petroglyphs just outside of Albuquerque at Petroglyph National Monument.  These petroglyphs are different than the ones at Chaco Canyon in that they are inscribed with a more complicated and layered history of the peoples who have passed through the region, including Pueblo, Apache, and Navajo people, and later, early Spanish explorers and settlers.  Sadly, suburban settlers from the rapidly expanding city of Albuquerque have also begun to leave their marks and the incredible rock drawings in the area are in constant danger of being defaced.  The drawings on the rocks include images of spirals, birds, hands, serpents, crosses, and cosmic beings.  There are more than 20,000 petroglyphs in all.

Here’s a bit more from the journal that I kept while riding the Southwest Chief:

When the train stops in Albuquerque, I step off to pick up some Native-American jewelry as a present — a small silver pendant with a turquoise inlay.  I think about my great-grandmother, Nora, and all the time I used to spend with her in Albuquerque when I was young.  Then the train moves north, and I think about Placitas, where I saw the first snow that I can ever remember.  I was so excited that I ran outside with bare feet and ended up accidentally stepping on a cactus leaf that was buried in a drift of snow.  Later the train moves through Las Vegas, the first time I’ve ever seen the town where a relative of mine spent several years stuck in a mental institution.

From the train window I can see a fox standing by the edge of a fence, watching the train as it goes by.  For some reason this makes me think about the famous Bugs Bunny line, “I knew I should have made a left turn at Albuquerque.”

But the funny thing is, the Southwest Chief does take a left at Albuquerque and ends up paralleling I-25 as it heads north toward Colorado.  All through the afternoon the clouds had been growing thicker and thicker and finally, as we began to move up alongside I-25, we entered into real storm-cloud territory.  The New Mexico landscape is some of the most spectacular in the world, but the cloudscapes in the desert can be equally incredible.  The area along I-25 is an area of lightning and mesas, of thunderclouds and arroyos and the potential of flash floods.  And mostly, horizon, as far as can be seen.


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Oakland to L.A. on the Coast Starlight

23Jan10

This summer on my quasi-annual return trip to the United States I decided that I wanted to travel by train, rather than flying.  This decision was partially to do with the fact that flying is one of the most carbon-unfriendly activities around, but equally due to the fact that I’ve come to despise air travel for a variety of reasons.  As I wrote in another post,

I ended up flying a lot during my trip back to the States [in 2006]. Since I have family members all over the country, and friends that I hadn’t seen in a long time as well, I ended up flying from LA to Portland, from Portland to Oakland, from Oakland to Boulder, and then finally back to LA. I used to love flying when I was a kid, but flying has lost practically all its glamor, as far as I’m concerned — especially with the length of time one has to spend in security lines these days.

In fact, I seriously thought of using the train to get from destination to destination while I was back in the States, even after taking my abysmal Amtrak Coast Starlight experience into account. I like the idea of slow traveling, of letting the process of travel play itself out across time so that there is actually an experience of distance and difference. I also much prefer trains to planes because you can get up and walk around on a train, and people tend to be more social as well. (Airplane seating is the apotheosis of cramped isolation.) A boat trip might even be better — allowing you time to read and watch waves and weather patterns, and realize that there is a vastness between places.

My first experience of taking Amtrak’s Coast Starlight train really was a disaster and I vowed never to use Amtrak again.  On the Oakland to L.A. leg there was an accident on the tracks  and we had to deboard the train at Oxnard, wait for an hour in the freezing cold, and then take a bus (which subsequently got lost in Glendale) the rest of the way.  The delay was caused when an L.A. commuter train that used the same rails as the Coast Starlight ended up running through a delivery truck that had gotten stuck on the tracks.  Strangely, about ten years after this event, I found myself lying on my sofa in Japan watching that very accident played back on video in slow motion on the Discovery Channel.  It was, to be sure, deeply uncanny.  The return trip wasn’t nearly as traumatic, but the train was still delayed when part of the electrical system stopped working just outside of L.A. and we had to suffer with no air conditioning (trains get hot in the summer sun, you know) and no lights in the bathrooms (no windows in those bathrooms, you know) until we reached Santa Barbara several hours later.

But time heals all wounds, as they say, and I decided to give the Starlight another try.

The image at the top of this entry looks like an advertisement for a cruise on some sort of luxury liner, though that’s really mostly an illusion caused by nice lighting and a good exposure.   Probably one of the main reasons that so many people are disappointed with long-distance trips on Amtrak trains is that they board the train carrying the misapprehension that their trip is going to resemble the kind of high-class sophistication that’s so often associated with the Romantically-tinged glory days of passenger rail travel, a type of experience that’s probably never really existed anywhere except on film.  The real beauty of riding Amtrak isn’t the possibility of a nostalgic return to ersatz classiness, but rather the fact that most of the rails used by Amtrak west of the Mississippi follow routes that precede the rise of the Interstate Highway System.  As Momus has said, “The penny finally drops: people who drive cars just end up seeing a lot of roads.”  The best thing about Amtrak is that it bypasses the roads — and the ugly infrastructure of sameness that has been built up to service those roads — simply by taking you to places where the roads aren’t.  Some of this, of course, involves gorgeously stunning scenery of the sort that you might expect to see in an Amtrak commercial.

But more often than not the most exciting things that you get to see are exactly those things that have been excised from the everyday — sites of industrial production, homeless encampments, prisons hidden away in the most painterly landscapes, launch pads for U.S. military missile tests, and small towns that have been largely forgotten now that the interstate has passed them by.

The Cargill salt ponds have got to be one of my favorite parts of the San Francisco Bay area, and they’re a perfect example of the kind of forgotten or vanishing sites of industrial production that used to be central to American identity but which are becoming more and more peripheral as all that is solid continues to melt into air.  The salt ponds, which have been bought by the state of California and are slowly being transformed into wetland habitat, look absolutely incredible from the air.  I’m not sure whether or not the industrial salt production pictured in the photo above is a part of the Cargill empire that’s still producing a limited amount of salt, or whether it’s part of a complex run by a smaller company that hasn’t yet been slated for wetlands conversion.  In any case, the train rolls right by it, as you can see from this satellite image of the  area.  Make sure to zoom out for a proper view of the salt ponds in all of their technicolor glory.

One of the most beautiful portions of the trip is the stretch of track that passes directly through the middle of the Elkhorn Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve and the Moss Landing Wildlife Area, both located in Monterey County.  The vista of wetland islets that you can see from the train is fantastic — almost like some kind of abstract modernist painting — and there are often seals lounging in the water as well.  On this particular trip the fog crept in like a cat, cupping the estuary in its paws.

Here’s a scrap from the notebook that I took along with me on this trip:

The most impressive site in the Bay Area is the old Cargill salt ponds.  The white sense of mineral richness  is intense here, and the color that has seeped up from the earth is as lush as paint.

Then down through the Salinas and Monterey areas.  Here the landscape becomes golden California hills, but also the fields begin and you can see the campesinos picking strawberries or harvesting lettuce, working hard in the hot summer sun.  When you pass the areas where the campesinos live it becomes clear how little money they ultimately make, these people who are the backbone of California’s agricultural economy.

As Alison Luterman has written in “What They Came For,” originally published in The Sun,

Strawberries are too delicate to be picked by machine. The perfectly ripe ones even bruise at too heavy a human touch. It hit her then that every strawberry she had ever eaten — every piece of fruit — had been picked by calloused human hands. Every piece of toast with jelly represented someone’s knees, someone’s aching back and hips, someone with a bandanna on her wrist to wipe away the sweat.

Grapes are one of the most famous of California’s crops, of course, and the Coast Starlight travels through plenty of vineyard acreage.   The UFW grape boycott was probably one of the most effective boycott actions in history, though unfortunately the early successes of the boycott strategy were rolled back as the forces of reaction decided that high profits were more important than the rights and living standards of the very workers who make that profit possible.

In any case, grapes are inextricably associated with California (and Oregon as well), so it’s not surprising that there’s a wine tasting available as part of the Starlight tour.  The wine tasting takes place in the lounge car, and it’s great fun to sit with a few people that you’ve just met with a few good bottles of wine in front of you and watch the countryside go by while you drink.

Here’s more from the notebook:

In the dining car I end up meeting J. and D., a couple who are both Bikram Yoga instructors.  They want to start their own studio in Hawaii, but in the meantime J. is studying language acquisition and D. is an EMT.  She reveals, at one point, that CPR actually has an incredibly low success rate — something like 20% or less — and that of the seven people she’s tried to revive only one person ended up making it.  Defibrillators are apparently just as unreliable and are basically a last-ditch attempt at recovery with something like a 3% success rate.  She also tells a really horrible story about showing up at a house where a baby had been slit open with a knife, but the mother had waited until the baby started turning blue before calling 911.

Later we end up in the lounge car for the wine tasting.  Vali, who has a thick Indian accent, introduces the wines by reading descriptions off of an instruction sheet.  We end up buying a bottle of Columbia Crest.  Valli makes jokes while he introduces the wines, and he especially pokes fun at a guy who’s brought in his can of Bud Light and just wants to hang around during the tasting without actually drinking any wine.

Near Lompoc, the train circles around a state penitentiary, all white and clean and committed to razor wire.  We also pass through the Air Force missile testing range, moving right past the giant launch pads and towers.  I remember the stories that my friend Geoff — who lived in Lompoc for a while —  used to tell me about the missile launches gone wrong and the fires that would sometimes end up burning up and down the beaches.

One of the final stretches of the trip takes you right along the coast as the train moves along toward Santa Barbara.  It’s a really beautiful stretch of the trip, and you can look straight out to the horizon, while closer to shore you can see the tops of California’s kelp forests moving back and forth with the waves.  In the far distance is the occasional oil rig (beautiful to see at night, when they’re all lit up), but these don’t really distract from the view, as long as you’re expecting them.  On this particular trip there was a band of fog forming an almost perfect horizontal layer just above the surface of the ocean.  And then, above it, the open blue sky.


Filed under: culture, daily life, drinking, economy, history, nature, personal, society, travel   |  3 Comments
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solid potato salad

17Jan10

“Solid Potato Salad” — a perennial YouTube favorite — is a 1944 dance and contortion routine featuring the splendtastic harmony singing of the Ross sisters, who went by the stage names Aggie Ross, Elmira Ross, and Maggie Ross even though they were — apparently — actually named Veda Victoria, Dixie Jewel and Betsy Ann Ross.  In a recent entry at Click Opera, Nick Currie complains about what he calls the “aggressive normality” of contemporary commercial culture, a sentiment that I completely agree with.  I don’t know when the last time was that I even thought about switching on any of the music video channels, all of which seem to be regurgitating image sequences that first made their appearances almost 20 years or so ago, during the ‘heroic period’ of the commercial consolidation of music videos.  I like the “Solid Potato Salad” clip a lot because — aside from the fact that the wholesomeness of its vertiginous surreality almost verges on the pornographic — historical distance has moved it so far outside of the commercial norms in which it originated that it’s almost been transformed into a kind of avant-gardist slapstick.

And just when you thought there was nothing left to be done with this clip, since it seems to have already said everything it needs to say about itself, someone comes along and cuts it up to the tune of Powermad’s “Slaughterhouse.”


Filed under: culture, funs, music, television, video   |  2 Comments
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three from Shitennoji

11Jan10

I’ve written about Shitennoji temple before, but these three photographs form such a nice set on their own that I decided to add a separate post.  Osaka’s Shitennoji, founded in 593 CE by the ubiquitous Prince Shotoku, is the oldest state-sanctioned Buddhist temple in Japan.  Shitennoji is dedicated to the Four Heavenly Kings — the guardians of the four compass directions — who Prince Shotoku implored for help before a major battle from which he emerged victorious.  Near the torii entrance gate is a stone post that’s carved with the words “Buddhism arrived here for the first time in Japan.”

All photographs were taken using a Holga 120CFN loaded with Kodak TMY400.


Filed under: Japan, Kansai, Osaka, culture, history, photography, religion   |  Leave a Comment
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nightwalk in Minoh

09Jan10

These shots were taken on the way back from a night walk up to Minoh Falls.  Somehow these shots all remind me of the kinds of dreams that I sometimes have after I’ve eaten a few too many slices of pizza or downed just a little bit too much nihonshu.  All shots taken using a Holga 120CFN loaded with Kodak 400VC.

Other Minoh posts:

Illuminations in Minoh

A day in Minoh with Yumiko

Monkeys in Minoh


Filed under: Japan, Kansai, photography, scraps and bones   |  2 Comments
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hatsumode at Sumiyoshi-taisha

06Jan10

Hatsumode — the year’s first visit to a shrine or temple —  is generally celebrated in Japan between January 1st and January 3rd and typically involves making your wishes for the new year known to the kami (the shrine gods); buying new omamori (good luck charms) and burning your old ones since they’re full of bad luck now; purchasing a new year fortune (omikuji), most of which say things like “If you make great effort your year will not be so bad”; and drinking a bit of amazake, a sweet and very mild form of nihonshu.  In 2006 I had a lovely hatsumode at Kasuga-jinja (春日神社), the shrine that’s right around the corner from my house; in 2007 I had a wild hatsumode at Senso-ji temple (金龍山浅草寺); and in 2008 I spent New Year’s Eve at a local bar and then after midnight walked up to a nearby zen temple for the ritual ringing of the bell.  But sometimes it’s nice to take your hatsumode celebrations to a few different locations, so in 2008 I also visited Osaka’s Sumiyoshi-taisha (住吉大社) with Ikko, who decided to wear a kimono even though “Every time I wear a kimono, it always rains.”  And it did rain a little bit too, but not enough to be bothersome.

Sumiyoshi-taisha enshrines the Sumiyoshi Sanjin — a trio of gods believed to protect fishermen and sailors — and is considered one of the oldest examples of the sumiyoshi-zukuri (住吉掌造り) style of shrine architecture.  Here’s a quick description from the venerable japan-guide.com:

Osaka’s Sumiyoshi Taisha is one of Japan’s oldest shrines. Founded in the 3rd century, before the influx of Buddhist architecture from the Asian mainland started, Sumiyoshi Taisha is one of the few shrines displaying a purely Japanese shrine architecture prototype (sumiyoshi-zukuri).

Osaka’s Sumiyoshi Taisha is the most famous of over two thousand Sumiyoshi shrines in Japan. Enshrining kami (Shinto gods) believed to protect travelers, fishermen and sailors on the sea, Sumiyoshi shrines are usually found close to harbors.

Sumiyoshi-taishi may be landlocked now, but at one time it was right near the shore and it was a famous place to watch the sun set over Osaka Bay.  Now that Osaka’s landfill-bloated waistline has expanded considerably, there’s no longer even a hint of a nearby shore — though somewhere in the vicinity is a stone lighthouse that, somewhat ironically, now serves the purpose of being interesting by posing as an object that no longer serves any purpose.

This year I had an especially propitious hatsumode that included not only a visit to Mizumadera temple (水間寺) where young men in traditional Japanese clothing made mochi with wooden cudgels while Buddhist monks chanted their blessings over those of us who sat in the main hall, but also a trip to a small shinto shrine in the mountains that houses a kami that is specifically devoted to curing leg ailments, a trip to a shrine in the mountains in Nara that has a 1,200 year-old deified ginkgo tree on the grounds, and a sunset view from the mountains of the reddest, most perfectly round sun that I’ve ever seen.

So why didn’t I write about that instead of a shrine visit that happened in 2008?  Because, as usual, I don’t have my film back from the developer yet.  Film may be beautiful, but it’s not necessarily timely.


Filed under: Japan, Kansai, Osaka, architecture, culture, festival, history, religion   |  Leave a Comment
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