Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Homesick, for the first time . . . ever?

I'm not sure what that just was. An interesting take on flour tortillas, something made with black beans, tortilla chips, sour cream, awful but not unintelligible guacamole . . . what else? Some sort of Chinese-style rice, unseasoned cubed beef, chicken of the consistency of jerky drowned in oil, lime and orange juice with some vinegar, some sort of chinese inspired carrot, squash and onion stir fry . . . the list could go on.

It went under the name of Mexican food. And there were sour cream and tortilla chips and some hybrid between a tortilla and something else. But I'm just not sure exactly how these dishes were translated on their way to Singapore--or how to aptly describe them. Especially the salsa--of which there were 4 or five very mild, very vinegar-heavy versions--that, in one case at least, looked like salsa mexicana.

Maybe it's because I spent the morning booking a ticket to Hawaii and rearranging another ticket back to California. But, I blame it squarely on the bad Mexican food ordered for the meeting just now. Now I'm not the only Californian in the office--but I think that Chicago or Arkansas is probably the next closest home. Maybe no one else noticed: the Australians and English certainly didn't.

after the desert, a reminder

of who i am--and who you probably are too, whoever you are. (no, i don't mean that we're all 'house').



and btw, the 'chard--glad you found me. i killed the other blog w/o much notice. it was fun catching up on yours today. maybe i'll see you back in socal soon.

Out on the desert now

Some Josh Ritter


Radio waves are coming miles and miles
Bringing only empty boats
Whatever feeling they had when they sailed
Somehow slipped out between the notes



Out on the desert now and feeling lost
The bonnet wears a wire albatross
Monster ballads and the stations of the cross
Sighing just a little bit
Sighing just a little bit



And I was thinking 'bout what Katy done
Thinking 'bout what Katy did
The fairest daughter of the Pharaoh's son
Dressed in gold 'neath pyramids



Out on the desert now and feeling lost
The bonnet wears a wire albatross
Monster ballads and the stations of the cross
Sighing just a little bit
Sighing just a little bit



Ones and zeroes bleeding mesa noise
And when you're empty there's so much space for them
You turn it off but then a still small voice
Comes in blazing from some vast horizon



And I was thinking 'bout my river days
I was thinking 'bout me and Jim
Passing Cairo on a getaway
With every steamboat like a hymn



Out on the desert now I'm feeling lost
The bonnet wears a wire albatross
Monster ballads and the stations of the cross
Sighing just a little bit
Smiling just a little bit



Today the words have been floating through my head. Nothing religious, nothing meaningful. Just words. Out on the desert now and I'm feeling lost . . . monster ballads and the stations of the cross. When I do make it home, I may take a longer route back to Southern California. Nothing like long drives through the desert to rest your mind. Palm Desert? Monument Valley? Not sure which way I'd go. But gas prices be damned. I'll drive through the desert till I find the floods if I have to.


(a worthy cover, not quite on par with the original or joe burton's)

He evokes interesting image with this song, some dry desert longing--that image, and a long drive toward a flat horizon, juxtaposes nicely against a second sudden thought, the flooding upper missouri that currently would be the end of a desert drive over the high plains--that is right now the first thing that comes to mind when he reaches his memories of river days.

Somewhere in looking for desert photos of the stations of the cross, I found this one too:

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Shirts vs. Skins

What is the longing running game of shirts vs. skins in history? This article offers some insight into the (not-so-)age-old divide. I locates the origin of Shirts-skins in the 40s, but I think that Skins have been around since Adam, and Eve may have been first Shirt (in the ideological sense, since behaviorally the Shirts/Skins divide is really only something that plays out amongst men).

So what am I? It depends. If I must adopt the Author's linear view of history to be a Shirt, then count me as a Skin, please. At least ideologically.

Monday, June 16, 2008

Starkfield

When I go to New Zealand, I'm going to visit this guy.



Someday I will write a story that will become a movie and in the movie there will be a girl who will hear this song sung by this guy and say "When he sings, I feel like my heart is talking."

Monday, June 9, 2008

. . .

Some Cormac stolen:
In two days they began to come upon bones and cast-off apparel. They saw halfburied skeletons of mules with the bones so white and polished they seemed incandescent even in that blazing heat and they saw panniers and packsaddles and the bones of men and they saw a mule entire, the dried and blackened carcass hard as iron. They rode on. The white noon saw them through the waste like a ghost army, so pale they were with dust, like shades of figures erased upon a board. The wolves loped paler yet and grouped and skittered and lifted their lean snouts on the air. At night the horses were fed by hand from sacks of meal and watered from buckets. There was no more sickness. The survivors lay quietly in that cratered void and watched the whitehot stars go rifling down the dark. Or slept with their alien hearts beating in the sand like pilgrims exhausted upon the face of the planet Anareta, clutched to a namelessness wheeling in the night. They moved on and the iron of the wagon-tires grew polished bright as chrome in the pumice. To the south the blue cordilleras stood footed in their paler image on the sand like reflections in a lake and there were no wolves now.

They took to riding by night, silent jornadas save for the trundling of the wagons and the wheeze of the animals. Under the moonlight a strange party of elders with the white dust thick on their moustaches and their eyebrows. They moved on and the stars jostled and arced across the firmament and died beyond the inkblack mountains. They came to know the nightskies well. Western eyes that read more geometric constructions than those names given by the ancients. Tethered to the polestar they rode the Dipper round while Orion rose in the southwest like a great electric kite. The sand lay blue in the moonlight and the iron tires of the wagons rolled among the shapes of the riders in gleaming hoops that veered and wheeled woundedly and vaguely navigational like slender astrolabes and the polished shoes of the horses kept hasping up like a myriad of eyes winking across the desert floor. They watched storms out there so distant they could not be heard, the silent lightning flaring sheetwise and the thin black spine of the mountain chain fluttering and sucked away again in the dark. They saw wild horses racing on the plain, pounding their shadows down the night and leaving in the moonlight a vaporous dust like the palest stain of their passing.

All night the wind blew and the fine dust set their teeth on edge. Sand in everything, grit in all they ate. In the morning a urinecolored sun rose blearily through panes of dust on a dim world and without feature. The animals were failing. They halted and made a dry camp without wood or water and the wretched ponies huddled and whimpered like dogs.

That night they rode through a region electric and wild where strange shapes of soft blue fire ran over the metal of the horses' trappings and the wagonwheels rolled in hoops of fire and little shapes of pale blue light came to perch in the ears of the horses and in the beards of the men. All night sheetlighning quaked sourceless to the west beyond the midnight thunder-heads, making a bluish day of the distant desert, the mountains on the sudden skyline stark and black and livid like a land of some other order out there whose true geology was not stone but fear. The thunder moved up from the southwest and lightning lit the desert all about them, blue and barren, great clanging reaches ordered out of the absolute night like some demon kingdom summoned up or changeling land that come the day would leave them neither trace nor smoke nor ruin more than any troubling dream.

Sunday, June 8, 2008

This time I took a camera

The weekend trip to Malacca (Melaka), Malaysia was a great adventure.

Pineapple tarts. Mango with sticky rice. Ice cream cones. Dry curry crab, sweet and sour fish and butter garlic prawns at the Portuguese settlement. More mango with sticky rice. And we even saw the sights. Pictures to come.