Two Dishes But To One Table

Sakura

When I was in Harrisburg last week,
My sister and I took lawnchairs and sketchpads to pay tribute to a tree.
Its transient blossoms were even then dropping and
Their pinkness was so pale I thought them white.

Sitting there and sketching was really just an excuse to sit still,
To spend quality time with my sister
And admit the tree to our communion
(Communion is easier if you have an excuse).

Our excuse was clutching pens,
Applying the downward pressure
The tree guiding our hands on the sketch pads
The way a ghost would steer a pair of Ouija pointers.   

Amy's sketch:

My Sketch:

Historical footnote
The tree we sketched sits on the remains of Fort Couch, really just a hilltop trench dug in the same year as the nearby Battle of Gettysburg.

Cold War Tourism Attraction I Visited in Arizona

How to visit a nuclear missile:
If the silo still has liquid fuel in it you will need to wear an airtight rubber suit but if it is 2007, the silo was decommissioned during Reagan’s SALT II treaty so, the silo will having no fuel, you can probably just show up for the tour in your flip flops and a hardhat (many steel girders and low spaces are inside).

If you are the youngest member of the tour group, you will probably be given the questionable honor of helping end the First and Second Worlds as we know them.  You will perform this duty at the climax of the one hour walk, underground in the concrete reinforced control bunker.  When the tour docent turns his control panel key, you will be allowed to turn your key.  Those redundant triggers will then send the largest ballistic hydrogen bomb ever made, on its merry way to vaporize a city of Soviets. 

The tour guide says that this particular missile was calibrated to fly to one of three targets, depending on what punch card stack was fed into the computer. Even today, 20 years after de-commissioning, it is not general knowledge what destination the punchcards aimed the missile at.  And yes, the mightiest weapon was indeed aimed by a punchcard.   It's primitive but there's certainly no possibility of an internet virus there!  This is the actual punchcard reader.

Being on the tour, seeing an 8 year old boy turn the actual warhead launching key was probably disturbing for most of the adults present.   When the 7 year old turned his key the pit kind of fell out of my stomach.   I felt like I was on a tour of Golgotha and they asked a child to hammer a nail or two into Christ’s cross. 

The boy was completely enthusiastic of course.  He loved it.  The sober tour guide reminded all present that “The Titan II was meant as only a deterrent – it would be launched in an act of ” (and here the child’s ears perked up) “RETALIATION.”  The child yelled “Yeaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!” and punched his little Bobby Brady fist into the air.

This is the actual instruction manual for launching the missile.

This is where you would put your hand as you pulled open the code drawer to see whether the phone call was legit.

The guys on the tour (and believe me, it was all guys) wanted to see the rocket motors.   Luckily the tour docent had lots of great details.  I had wrongly assumed the motors burned hydrogen and oxygen.  That would be hard to keep fueled, probably.   Turns out the oxidizer was nitrogen tetroxide, the fuel was asymmetrical dimethyl something (azide?  can't remember...).  The nozzle has two beautiful sets of perforations for injecting these liquids, which then react spontaneously, vigorously inside the engine cone.   

One weird detail about the fuel: it is such an exotic substance, it solidifies at something like 40 degrees F but boils at room temperature, so it was critical to chill the entire 100 foot silo to the temperature of British ale all the time or else the entire setup would boil/freeze. 

Believe it or not, there is at least one hour worth of interesting things to see there.  After the tour,  you may choose from many AWESOME souvenirs at the gift shop.  These gift items were really much more inspired stuff than I am used to.  Want any of the following?

• sawed up  bits of re-rod from a similar nearby missile silo
• blueprints and electrical schematics
• DVDs of Bikini Atoll, Nevada, and (rare) nuclear space detonations
• working Geiger counters from 1950s, $49
• uranium sulfate-stained pigmented glass marbles
• warning signs from the perimeter

Credit for making the gift shop so awesome goes to
Yvonne Morris, Director.

Official site of the Arizona Titan II Missile Museum.

A Walk in the Desert

Walking around in the desert.
Planning a hike with Google Earth is like playing a game of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, with you as the tail and the whole county as a giant donkey..

Rivers in the desert are open for business intermittently. The rest of the time they are tempting trails.

Walking along a dry wash.


Horses and wild pigs use these trails too.

In a sense the area is like a stand of virgin forest: nothing has altered it since the time of the Indians.
Although Saguaro cacti are a sort of icon of deserts, the plant itself only grows here in Tucson.  It is as localized as a California Sequoia


The Saguaro lives hundreds of years and then dies, leaving its strong wooden ribs.

Lichen do well in the desert.

The final goal of my walk was some Indian petroglyphs I had heard about.  Snake motif visible at the top.

I am in Tucson until Friday.

Rebels Save Mountain From Their Own Nation's Army

A wartime poster from Yugoslavia.
I like the design of the entire poster.
I like the emphasis of images over words.
I like the unique style of the truck's disintegration.
I love that the town of Tuzla ("salt") here is symbolized by a tiny but stubborn goat.

Daoud Sarhandi explains what the poster commemorates:

"On May 15, 1992, JNA soldiers attempted to leave their garrison near the center of Tuzla with their weapons.  Their plan was to encircle the town before shelling it into submission, as they had done throughout Bosnia.  Unlike in many other towns, however, Tuzla had prepared for likely Serb aggression and there were snipers placed on high buildings along the JNA’s route.  The JNA opened fire before they left town, but the snipers managed to pick off drivers in the leading trucks, blocking the convoy’s forward movement.  Before long the entire convoy was in flames.  This was the JNA’s first defeat in Bosnia, and it undoubtedly saved Tuzla from being ethnically cleansed and occupied by the Serbs."

Though I completely support the heroism of the Bosniaks, before we reflexively toe the NPR party line here,  one way to consider the weirdness of all this is to imagine America using artillery to remove an ethnic group and then imagine that a local ragtag militia, led by a Timothy McVeigh (Patriot?  Murderous nut?  Returning war-hero turned mental?) wins.   Can we even imagine it?  Could Mayor Bloomberg bring the US Army to shell downtown Harlem to clear the way for another Magic Johnson Shopping Center on 125th Street?  And if he did but the Black Panthers miraculously fended off the official US Army, guys in blue jeans defeating guys in Kevlar vests, how would we feel?  What if there were a version of M.O.V.E. in Philadelphia that weren’t nuts?  It’s a really really weird idea.   This poster then might just as well say, Harlem, 2009 or something.  If it did, whom would you support?  I’m getting a little (okay, way) far out here. Back to reality.

Americans should study the post-Tito breakup of Yugoslavia and its CRAZY 1990s aftermath.  We could wrestle with all kinds of really meaningful questions that could be then extended to 2007 and US foreign policy.  What were the contradictions in choosing who we supported?  Why did the Christians, Commies, and Bosniaks do what they did?
What does “patriotism” mean, who was patriotic?  Is anyone who joins any army on any side patriotic?  Again, was Timothy McVeigh a patriot ? (I’m just trying to be provocative there.)   Who are “the Muslims”?   All of these questions were stood on their head and turned inside out in any history of the late 20th Century Yugoslavia.   
Learning this we could move beyond WWII as the only thing anyone seems to use as an example.  It would sure elevate discussions of foreign policy if Joe Six Pack / The New York Post could make a point without bringing up Der Fuhrer, a completely overworked, hyperbolic example of … of nothing.  The Third Reich is not a nuanced illustration of ANYTHING.  Nazis are a tired, cliché example misapplied and misleading, a lazy argument, our anti-Nazi righteousness a dangerous comfort.

The poster image and caption were taken  from a 200 page catalog of wartime Yugo posters, "Evil Doesn't Live Here" (ISBN 1-56898-268-2, Princeton Architectural Press)

Overcast Day

All in a 5 minute walk from Lisa’s front door:

The resinous smell  from rubbing the leaves of a 75 foot Eucalyptus tree.

The slimy feeling underheel from crushing a ( already-collapsed) cactus near the creek.

The licorice taste from chewing a 10 foot anise weed.

The bitter taste of a handful of windfall sidewalk olives. Lisa says olives can’t be eaten until they’ve been processed in lye. These were SO RIPE that, lye or not I could almost enjoy one or two, in the same way you might enjoy chewing a sliver of aromatic soap.

The weird squidlike rubbery feel of a large white mushroom.

The vivid green on a dragonfly’s bulging eyes as he sat eating a living morsel.

The sound of silence.

A Week in the Bay Area

Debarking, how do I know this airport is SFO, not JFK?

1. The floor-as-furniture option is completely acceptable in Northern California: many terminal idlers sit on the carpet, indian style, like they're at a yoga class.  You don't really see that in New York. 
2. On caps and shirts, logos of Billabong and REI replace NY Yankees and North Face.
3. The white people look different here, their complexion is less Mediterrenean, more Prairie Home Companion, their hair color more natural-appearing, blondes are a sandyhue, not metallic.
4. Environmentalism is up a notch: the sticker on an airport paper towel dispenser admonishes "Please take only what you need."   

Bosnia Trip (VII)

Towards the end of the trip I was befriended when a Bosnian offered to host me.  I got a bed and a homecooked meal (although I had trouble putting it down—I was SO sick of cevap and spinach-feta borek by this point in the trip).  And I got to see apartment life in post-war, post-money ex-Yugoslavia.   My host took me to a sixth floor walk up in a depressing concrete housing project.  It was unheated.  The weather is same as NYC in Sarajevo, so we had to build a trash fire in a metal box on legs.  Some might call it a stove but it wasn’t that pretty; it was kind of junkpicked looking.  In any case, burning the smashed up orange crate and torn cardboard scraps made the room very comfy in no time and, as an unreformed pyromaniac, I found it fun.   

Many days I stopped by the best hangout in Sarajevo, a café annexed to the town’s mostly English bookstore, BuyBooks.   The crew there was befitting of a small European capitol, educated, lively conversing.   I managed to loiter at the BuyBooks cafe five times in four days.   This is a goal of my slow visits, build up familiarity.  The staff were all interesting to talk to.  They were pretty, outgoing, and a good source of info on life in Sarajevo.

The oldest thing I saw in Bosnia-Herzegovina was the Bogomil cemetery in Radimlja, near Stolac.   Here I hung out, sketched the carvings, and even stretched out on one of the flat stone tombs for a leisurely catnap, catching some luxurious rays and thinking about how this is as good as a Caribbean vacation except instead of sand I am reposing on priceless art, stuff that would make the guard at the Metropolitan say “please, don’t touch.”   The medieval cemetery had about 110 of these large stone slabs, carved with various Bogomil motifs. 

The most common figure on the gravestones is the big hand guy.   He is carved with a crossbow behind one cocked arm and with a ring floating Tolkein-like over a grotesquely exaggerated upheld hand.  His wears the gear of an armored knight. 

The Bogomils (also called “Patarenes”) were the original all-Bosnian, indigenous high civilization. (More on the Bogomil Heresy).  Consequently, current 21st Century Bosnian nationalism uses them as a symbol.   Religiously the Bogamil culture is interesting.  They were heretics persecuted by Rome.  Pressure from the Catholic Church eventually aggravated the Bogomils to the point where they either capitulated to Catholicsim, or,more often, were so turned off by Catholicism that they left Christianity and converted in large quantities to Islam when the Ottomans came, forming the backbone today of who we think of as “The Bosnian Muslims”.  Whatever.  I just know I like their tomb carvings. 

Bosnia Trip (VII)

FROM HERZEGOVINA
We spent pretty much a whole day going to see the old Tekki.  [“Tekki” = dervish monastary]  This touristic site COULD have been "efficiently" consumed in a couple hours but less consumption and less efficiency are what I want lately and luckily my two Milanese companions were of the same mode.  And Bosnia in general seems to discourage rapid consumptive experiences anyway, both from lack of post-war infrastructure and from a lack of urgency about things in general.   

Barbara and Giuseppe, whom I met the previous week up at the Sarajevo pension had now rejoined me down here in the south.   With them, a walk down the Tekki road was (happily) not very fixated on "getting there".  We played a lot, lingering by a broken bus, watching local kids fighting over a small motorcycle, slipping behind some no trespassing signs (indeed, climbing a few ladders too) to get inside the trout farm and watch the trout farmers.  We found a dripping cave that looked like a good setting for mythological tales.  We filed through a very old flour mill ruin, the first mill I'd ever seen that featured HORIZONTAL water wheels (four in all, though only the grindstones remained).  We sat quietly near a Bosnian teen with his creel of 4 modest sized trout.  He was still angling for one more and gave us the briefest of smiles. 

The Tekki road followed one of those extremely cold, clean rivers that are common here.  For much of the way a strange stone fortress was visible above the cliffs.  It was unattainable by direct climbing (inadvisable anyway to off road it like that in a former war zone) but intriguing to look at.  Arriving at the tekki we all enjoyed a simple experience:  an elaborately embossed tin cup on a chain sat  there at the spring, a source of a mighty river.   Rivers in this country emerge full blown from the bottoms of mountains, millions of gallons a minute erupting from a boat worthy flooded cave in the cliffside.  It’s really something.
And the water in Bosnia-Herzegovina tastes delicous. 
"Wow, and I thought all water came from bottles!" noted Giuseppe.  He produced a Volvic bottle and emptied it on the ground "This," he joked in English, "this is shit."  We filled bottles and drank many times from the tin cup on its chain.  Later we further experienced the river contents as we ate some trout at a small restaurant.

The Tekki at Blagaj was appropriately austere.  Barbara was assigned a headscarf by the guard to wear.  We were the only people there on this January day and we idled there quite a bit, seperately and together, passing among the upstairs rooms of this wooden house, looking at holy objects, closing eyes and trying to conjure images of who'd been there during the Ottoman times.  The gift shop had excellent eastern music (I bought none), books about the conflict in Palestine, books of general spirituality, calendars with daily spiritual thoughts to meditate on, postcards, prayer mat keychains, and the primitive toothbrushes that seem to be in all the mosque giftshops.  Are these toothbrushes Arab?   They are a finger-wide twig that one whittles and soaks in water to obtain a stiff fibrous teeth cleaning tool.  They come vacuum packed to ensure sterility.

Part of the lengthiness of our tekki daytrip was from our roundabout travel logistics.  The Mostar city bus # 16 supposedly goes out there but nobody in Mostar knew much about any of their buses (this was the opposite of New York, where vigorous arguments arise on the relative merits of different public transit options).  Later, finished at the Tekki, we were pretty stranded.  the city bus wasn't going back to Mostar until after dark.  Hmmph!  But a remedy: Barbara impulsively tapped a man on the shoulder as he was getting into his Black VW Golf (the favorite car here).  His face lit up, he gestured the three of us in, and soon we were flying along on the twenty minute trip back to town.  Speaking no English whatsoever, our host entertained us with stories and jokes, communicated with body language and a bit of German.  He had a trick horn that was a police siren and he'd blow it at everyone we passed.  The twenty minute conversation was a strain but his enthusiasm and the Italians comprehension of German (as well as a generalized European attitude to contextually guess what someone is saying) carried the day.  We were all to be guests at his house it turned out. 

Initially his wife was a little confused as he brought us all in.  "My Dad brings home foriegners all the time," explained his teen son, Elvis.  Around here, the young generation speaks English, so it put Elvis (that is a nice name) in charge of the entire dinner conversation, a position of authority he enjoyed, although the urgency of the speakers (esp his dad) overwhelmed him at times. "Excuse me; I must step outdoors for a moment and clear my head.  It's a little confusing for me."
Coffee was poured (Turkish) and some beers were opened so each of us had a cold beer and a steaming coffee in front of us.  Sugar wafer cookies were offered and eventually the wife heated up some spinach borek (the filo dough was excellent).  When it got chilly his wife, Blagina, knelt down to split some birch sections with a tiny hatchet, against the concrete floor, throwing them into what looked exactly like the stove at my home in Brooklyn.  She just put the kindling into the broiler drawer and slammed it shut.  I forgot to look closer at the stove because we had a spontaneous dance party next, first our host, then me, then everybody jumping around however they felt like. I'm no coneiseur of this region's tunes so all I can report is that the music sounded Turkic to my ears. 

The couple keeps a TV tuned to Deutsche Welle cable.  They lived in Frankfort for 12 years and Elvis was born there ("My German is probably better than my English", noted Elvis.  "I play CounterStrike online with my Frankfort cousins still and we chat the whole time while we play."  The news of the stroke of Ariel Sharon came on the TV and the room got attentive to the newscast.  Our conversation then turned political.

The dad started telling us, via the son's translation, about a strategic Balkan island that Nixon wanted and that Tito drove a hard bargain for.  "Tito was going to make the US President trade California and Texas for this little island," at which point the son apologized, noting "The history is getting a little mixed up-- my dad is drunk a little so the story doesn't make sense." 

The son had a respect for his parents that a Western teen would not have.  I found it heartwarming.  The boy was 18 and looked absolutely "new generation" head to toe and was very fast with jokes and grasping a point.  His parents had the slowness of older generations and his dad was certainly silly (and absolutely kind).  But the boy showed enormous respect for his dad, no impatience at all.  The dad in turn radiated kindness and pride toward his son.  We exchanged addresses when leaving.  I was commenting on a box of potatoes and the dad impulsively shoved one potato into my hand as a gift.  I carried it until the next day and left it near the train station on someone's hood I think.   

The whole day had been pretty slow and satisfying. 

As a final note on national temperaments and how some people really appreciate taking things slow, I offer an observation by Barbara the Italian about how the local dialect word for “work” changes as you move south in Italy:
1.  In the north, “Lavoro” – a job to do.
2.  In Napoli, “Tatica (fatica? I can’t read her writing now)” – a painful thing
3.  In Sicilia, “Travaglio”  - birthing a child.

Bosnia Trip (VI)

On my third day I woke up stranded in a village on the mountain plateau near Mostar.

There was absolutely nothing to do there. 
Got up to the plateau at night on a completely unimproved road using a taxi ($30US).  If that road were a Disneyland ride it would be too scary for small children.  The driver knew the way, a definite plus on such a moonless cloudy night since the road was unmarked, had no guard rails on the two dozen switchbacks.  The road  was just plain dirt and mud and the car careened, in a persistant uphill slalom, winding higher and higher away from the twinkling lights of Mostar.
Arriving at the village I checked in my gear at the inn and I went out in the dark for a walk on the featureless  road but the clouds hid the stars and due to landmines, I couldn't really meander with abandon anywhere so there was nothing to explore.

The inn owner and his wife had been watching a Croatian ski race on the TV for several hours.  I joined them long enough to conclude that noone was going to beat any of the three Austrian race leaders.  No Yugos were in the top twenty.   I went up to my room and read. 
Then slept. 
I came down to the lobby and the owner, for breakfast, gave me a nice assortment of local jam, cheese, and day old homemade bread.  A stray pony was eating the flowers in the garden. Men on tractors were arriving at the inn, large  men taking off multiple layers of coats and wind shells to come in for a hot coffee and a smoke and to chat to each other.  Near the inn I saw a  large monument commemorating dead villagers from the recent war.  Facing the monument there was  a mosque with a minaret.  There was a post office (shack) but it had closed before I even got up (daily hours 8AM to 10AM only).

I went back to my room and meditated.  Did some pushups.  I decided this day could be a chillout, a Sedona spa trip.
Went out and jogged, careful to stay on the roads.   Managed to run to the next village over.  Talked to some shy tiny kids. 
Came back and ate more delicious homemade local food for lunch: lamb, potatos, boiled carrots, some soup. 
Got the schedule for when the local bus would come.   
Went to room and had a shower.  Read some more. 
Just as I was waiting for the bus, a rich Italian guy and girlfriend, packing up their hunting dogs and rifles, offered me a lift back to town.  Along the way we passed an old castle.  The truck smelled like dogs but the conversation was good.  The man had hunted in the Balkans every couple of months for  years.  He  entertained us with stories about hunting for pheasent in Albania.  "Albanians stole my dog.  They ransomed him for $400."

The mountain plateau, a desolate exile. 

The region is Podvelezje, the village is Smajkici, the hotel is Hotel Sunce.

Yugo Books

There are two very enjoyable books about recent Bosnian/Yugoslavian history, both of them well-written, easy reads but at the same time full of cultural info.

The first is a novel, Nowhere Man by Aleksandar Hemon, Picador: 2002.  With a skill and style reminiscent of John Irving (e.g. Hotel New Hampshire), this ex Sarajevan has written a novel with  local flavor, giving  anecdotes of two boys who come of age around the time of Tito’s death and later are seperated during the war years.  Early in the story the two characters, Ponek and Mirza, form a Beatles band in junior high.  Passing over the possible band names “Gospoda” (the Gentlemen), and "KGB" (wouldn’t do well in the West they think), they settle on naming the band with a literal translation of beetle: "Bube".  The boys eventually gig on the university campus at “the overcrowded Dental Students Club, called predictably, ‘Zub’ (the Tooth) and the Medical Students Club, called, a little less predictably, ‘Kuk’ (the Hip) to an audience of drunken students, horny and uninterested, eager to forget bleeding gums, jars full of fetuses, and spongy hearts.”  Nowhere Man is a page-turner but with considerable substance and relates the feelings of a certain class of Sarajevan.

A heavier piece of reportage is Safe Area Gorazde, by Joe Sacco (Fantagraphics: 2000. ISBN 1-56097-470-2).    This is Sacco’s accounting of the weeks he spent around Gorazde, right on the front lines of the ethnic cleansing in 1992-1995 in the Drina river valley, near the border with Serbia.  Safe Area Gorazde is actually a thick, black and white comic book.  Its 225 heavily illustrated pages  relate stories from that benighted city using comics in a way that  words or pictures alone cannot.

This book is a high water mark in both war reportage and the use of comics as a communication device.  It cost $20 but I would willingly pay $60 if I had to buy it again.