GaraLog

Constitution Hill in Johannesburg

Spent a few hours this afternoon getting a tour of Constitution Hill in Johannesburg, a remarkable place.  It's the site of a terrible prison established by Premier Paul Kruger at the turn of the 19th century and housed thousands of prisoners in terrible conditions, including for a time Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi.  The new South African government decided to build the Constitutional Court there, while operating the prison as a memorial site.  The bricks from the prison line the courtroom where one of the world's most respected and visionary benches meet. The front of the court building gives its name in 11 South African languages:

The doors themselves are carved with provisions of the Bill of Rights, again in multiple languages, including sign language:

The courtroom is open and welcoming, and a narrow glass window to the street at the Justices' level is meant to connect their deliberations to the world outside:

We toured Mandela's cell, which he adorned with this picture cut out of the National Geographic:

It was, by the way, a beautiful day:

 

 

A little more of Cape Town

Started the week here -- resuming the more official work part, since I took a few days off after giving a speech on Tuesday and doing some meetings Wednesday and Thursday -- with a tour of the city of Cape Town.  The weather dramatically changed for the better just as we were boarding the bus, but that was shadowed by the casually racist tone of our white tour guide, who managed to give the Dutch props for importing their slaves, not shackling the locals, and ignore most of the history of apartheid and the struggle against it except for an extended and cockeyed account of the transformation in which Tutu and Mandela were cast as saintly and non-violent  -- and rare -- resisters to the generally violent nature of the black opposition to the regime.  The violence of the apartheid state went unmentioned.  I thought my head would explode.

I did, however, pick up an interesting historical tidbit, which is that the expulsion of the Protestant Huguenots from France in 1685, sending some of them as far as South Africa, was a pivotal event in the development of the South African wine industry.  So every human rights crisis has its silver lining for someone, I guess.

Here, however, is a nice shot of Table Mountain shrouded by clouds, seen from Camps Bay:

In the largely Muslim Bo-Kaap neighborhood, some rows of colorful houses:

 
 
And this sign, whose extra "l" -- or maybe that's what they call them here -- tickled me, tacked to the doors of a mosque:

An afternoon on Governors Island

The amazing dynamism of New York is such that it keeps inventing great destinations on top of the store of classics.  One such is the new High Line, which I wrote a bit about last week.  Another hot spot this summer is Governors Island, just a matter of yards away from the tip of Manhattan island.  It's always been there -- was a key fort/military facility for a few hundred years -- but is now in the process of being developed for alternative uses, and newly-frequent ferries from Manhattan, and a bit from Brooklyn, are bringing thousands of visitors each weekend.

We were among them yesterday.  Here is the view of Manhattan shortly after the ferry took off:

At the moment, various avant-garde artists sponsored by Creative Time seem to have taken over half the island, so in addition to a dreadful zombie-film spoof at the decaying island movie theater, there are opportunities for drumming:

And artist-designed miniature golf holes:

Not to mention a floating pod where all kinds of strange and interesting things are going on:

Apparently the island played some key role in early aviation, hence this monument:

You can walk much of the island and not realize you are within spitting distance of the financial center of the world (I think it still is:), but here a glimpse of skyline peeks through:

I like this tree:

Much of the island still has a Mayberry, RFD feel to it:

Worth returning to for picnics and biking.  I am eager to see how it develops over time.

Scenes from a morning walk in Rome

Typepad, my blogging service, is acting up, as it has a tendency to do lately -- I am either going to have to find time to complain to their tech people or switch to another service -- so after several failed attempts (in the Rome Fiumicino airport after a plate of spaghetti puttanesca and nursing a small bottle of Orvieto Classic0)  I am going to have to forgo my witty text and commentary and just show you the pictures.  Sorry.

 

48 Hours in Rome

I am here to take part in a European foundations conference, where I am speaking at a plenary tomorrow, but doing as much as I can to soak in the city, which was the first one outside the United States I visited, nearly thirty years ago, and which remains my favorite.  I have a wicked cold, which is cosmicaally unfortunate, since I haven't been here in eight years, but it is sunny and in the 80's and the city is working its restorative powers.

I am staying right off the Campo di Fiori, and here, too, as in Paris, there is a bike-sharing program -- there's a stall right outside the hotel door:

 

I thought about biking early this morning, but it just doesn't seem a Roman way to travel.  Imagine navigating the swarms of people in the narrow streets.  So I went, as usual, on foot.

There's something about the golden-brownness of Rome that I don't find anywhere else, as in this swatch of wall along the Via Giulia:

It's a magnificent crumbling quality that the fresher cities I've just come from, London and Paris, don't have. But of course here the ancient lives alongside the modern more comfortably, and you have definitely entered a southern, Mediterranean culture.

I love the fact that in Rome you can wander and turn any corner and find a quiet piazza or a decent meal.  Wandering into the Piazza Farnese, I came across St. Brigid's Church and was immediately transported to a moment in 1982 when I went in to find a vespers service going on, dozens of nuns chanting magically.  I think there is a cloistered order there.

On the other hand, this could be a borrowed image from a movie or a novel.  The older I get, the less sure I am of these things.  But it makes a nice memory.

Finally for today, I love the oval images of the Madonna that are set fifteen feet or so above the street on many building corners.  Is there a name for those, some special story about them?  Anyway, here are a few in my neighborhood:

Faces of the Louvre II: Painting

The no-flash rule makes it hard to capture paintings very well, but here are a few:

 

You can't get very close to the Mona Lisa anymore, though a twenty-foot perimeter seems a bit mch -- so I decided to shoot the shooter, as it were, in this case a black-hatted guy.  (The captions for all DaVinci's paintings say "Leonard," and it took me a while to realize that this was the French version of his first name, and not, say, a little-known brother who painted in his spare time while running a wedding-and-bar-mitzvah hall in Great Neck):

Faces of the Louvre

Always forget how much I like Greek and Roman sculpture until I find myself immersed in it, captivated by faces of centuries ago:

 

 

 

 

 

 

A few London sights

In walks, between meetings, in Mayfair and around St. Paul's:

Strange sculptures over Burberry's

Burlington Arcade

The Royal Academy

Behind St. Paul's

There don't seem to be any fewer phone booths in London, which is nice, as they are icons, but does anyone use them?

One of four heads set into the facade of a building opposite St. Paul's

Sunday in the wine country

Gorgeous vineyards and restaurants and hotels in the country not far from Cape Town, and we spent a Sunday morning breakfast at Jonkershuis Farm.  It's autumn here, and today was a gloriously sunny day.  After breakfast in the courtyard of the restaurant there -- here is the view up from my table:

 

We walked around a bit, to the vineyards:

 

And then to the various buildings on the property, which include, in addition to a hotel and restaurant, a wine museum.

A Saturday in Cape Town

Staying in Cape Town -- or rather, the nearby Newlands suburb -- at the Vineyard, a really lovely hotel at the foot of Table Mountain.  Here is the view from my room:

With some free time today, my old friend Mike Savage picked us up and gave us a tour of the District Six Museum, which I've always wanted to visit.  District Six was a part of Cape Town not far from the central business district which was a multi-racial neighborhood full of political types and artists and generally vibrant life.  The apartheid regime announced in 1966 that it was to be razed to make way for a whites-only neighborhood, and in a few years it was empty -- and remains so, except for a few churches and mosques, with much controversy about what should go up there, and how to make recompense to those displaced.

The District Six Museum, in an old church across from the police station, tells the story of this murdered neighborhood and is full of artifacts and recollections.  The center of the museum is a huge floor map on which former residents have written in notes about their former homes.  We found it occupied:

 

 

One small room of the museum is an art installation by a guy who was a cleaner at the University of Cape Town and is now an art professor:

 

 

Here's a detail from a terrific mural that surrounds the former church's stained glass window:

 

 

Here and there a stark reminder of the rigidity of segregation:

 

 

Another great mural running up the stairs at a nearby annex to the Museum, still under construction, but already being used for community meetings and educational activity:

 

A few doors away, an old Customs House being restored:

 

 

Leaving downtown, Mike drove us up Signal Hill for a few of foggy Cape Town and the harbor:

 

 

On the way back to Newlands, we stopped at the University of Cape Town, and I took this shot of a statue of its founder Cecil Rhodes.  Nearby is a sign refreshingly acknowleding his imperialist and racist attitudes, but also conceding that, hey, without him there might not be a UCT:

 

Since there were some fauna of KwaZulu Natal in my earlier post, here are some flora from the river walk near the Vineyard:

And now, on a more uplifting note, some final images of Paris

The flowers of Paris

Near the Petit Palais:

Near the Eiffel Tower:

Luxembourg Gardens:

Pere Lachaise:

Walk in Le Marais:

Faces of Paris

On the facade of the Grand Palais:

On the Pont Alexandre III:

At Le Petit Palais:

Near Les Invalides:

In Pere Lachaise:

At L'Orangerie:

On a walk of Le Marais:

At Musee D'Orsay:

36 minutes in Bethlehem

Pennsylvania, that is.

A bit more of Belfast

Sitting here in the Sky Lounge at Glasgow Airport, after a 7 am flight from Belfast City Airport on "FlyBe" airlines (don't ask), for a while because my flight to Newark is delayed over three hours.  Started my visit here, as noted below, with a visit to Stormont and the power-sharing duo, Paisley and McGuinness;  ended it at Hillsborough Castle, the Northern Ireland residence of the Queen and the home, when he is here, of the U.K. Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Shaun Woodward.  Woodward was running late, so my colleagues and I had a look around, courtesy of a running commentary from the head butler, who's been on the staff there for a quarter of a century.

It seems, from his account and this bit of evidence, that the Queen has a sense of humor;  one thing on display is a chess set which has a somewhat gruesome caricature of her:

There's a good deal of art around, including this somewhat risque portrait of a bygone society leader:

And this arresting blue bust by a contemporary artist who seems to have left it behind after an art exhibit at the castle:

I stayed at the Ten Square, a boutique-y hotel that started life as a linen warehouse in the early 1860's  The facade is arrayed with busts of famous and symbolic figures, including this one appropriate to the season:

Finally, across the street is the fantastic Belfast City Hall (I couldn't get a good picture this time of the imposing Queen Victoria statue in front of it, because the building is surrounded by temporary Christmas stalls) which is now flanked by a massive, London Eye-type ferris wheel:

Stormont

Is an imposing building, the Parliament of the Northern Ireland government, now in a power-sharing coalition between the UDP and Sinn Fein, in the persons of Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness, a duo that would have been unthinkable not long ago.  I met with them today in Belfast, and it is not for nothing that they have been dubbed "the Chuckle Brothers."  They seem to genuinely get along and model collegiality and good humor, and this example of longtime enemies working together in and of itself has a considerable impact on the Catholic and Protestant populace.

Here is a view from the drive approaching Stormont, with the statue of Lord Carson, the fiery opponent of home rule, shaking a fist (and what seemed to me like an upturned middle finger) toward all visitors.

A few shots from Down Under

I'm not getting around Australia too much on this business trip, my first to the continent.  Mostly I've been in Brisbane, and today spent a few hours in Melbourne -- really in the district of Parkville, never even got downtown.  So at this writing it seems there will be no reporting on the Great Barrier Reef, Tasmania, the Sydney Opera House...or any cute pictures of koalas, wallabees, kangaroos (by the way, many words besides kangaroo have double oo's, or multiple ones, all drawn from native languages).

I did manage to take an afternoon walk in Brisbane the other day, starting out in the Botanical Garden, where they have a rare mangrove preserve with a boardwalk running through it:

From the Goodwill Bridge to South Bank, here is a riot of red, including the ubiquitous Flame Tree:

Here's a shot of the Goodwill Bridge (a footbridge) itself, with a riverboat, one of the many vessels to be found in the Brisbane River:

In the park running along the South Bank, a Nepalese pagoda left over from one of the world's fairs:

Walked back to the center of Brisbane across the Victoria Bridge, and downtown (the British influence felt in the street names -- Albert, Queen, Edward, Mary, etc.)  at the foot of the bridge, two striking buildings from different eras facing one another, the Suncorp headquarters:

and the old Treasury Building, decorated, as almost everything else here is, for Christmas in the first half of November:

Two sights on a Saturday afternoon in Wicker Park

An evolving Chicago neighborhood.  First, a couple at Alliance Bakery, spending some time together but not quite:

And then this gem on a side street, a Russian Orthodox church designed by Louis Sullivan:

Union Station

While the few remaining great American train stations, like Grand Central, are half-shopping malls, they still make the spirit soar when you arrive in them.  I had this experience yesterday in Union Station, Washington, even though I've been there dozens of times before.  I just had to whip out my camera:

Sunday in Hanoi

Yesterday, Sunday (that is, TODAY if you are reading this in the U.S.; so confusing) was a day off from work, so naturally a few of my colleagues and I were in line at the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum, to beat the crowds, at 8 am sharp. 

There will be no photos of Ho's well-preserved corpse here -- they take your cameras and cellphones away quite aways from the actual mausoleum itself --  but I can report that it looks pretty good, though even in the hot and humid Hanoi weather the intensity of the air-conditioning (which I take to be a precaution for Ho) is a little overwhelming.  There are white-uniformed soldiers, most bearing bayonets, Buckingham Palace-style, all throughout the mausoleum, and just as I was about to enter the -- what? crypt? -- one pulled me aside and pointed to my right thigh, where there was a bulge in my jeans pocket.  I took out my wallet, stuffed with Vietnamese Dong (one dollar to about 16,000 of them), and he let me move on.  Though I don't know what kind of fool would whip out a camera and flash Ho with soldiers crawling all over the place.  Even if you didn't get a prison term, you surely wouldn't emerge with your photograph.

Here is what the mausoleum looks like from the outside:

And a nice view of Ho's museum -- a collection of photographs, untranslated letters, and inspirational sayings mixed in with extremely odd Soviet realist art installations -- with a fountain in the foreground.

Here is the current Vietnamese Presidential Palace:

It seems Ho lived more modestly, in this "house on stilts," which would certainly be my preference too.  Kind of Frank Lloyd Wrightian:

Here's a glimpse of Ho's study, with the Marx and Lenin iconography:

And my favorite, the "Garage of Ho's Used Cars" -- which sounds like something there would be an ad for on the Hanoi Fox 11 o'clock news:

Until this visit, I'd never seen a grapefruit tree, of which there are lots on the grounds:

After the Ho complex, we hit the 900-year old Temple of Literature, apparently an early university.  The tablet that the little boy is posing in front of is inscribed with the names of graduating students:

A lily pond on the grounds:

And a beautiful roof that seems to have endured the 900 years:

Which is a miracle, because everything else in Hanoi seems to fall apart after about 25.  This gives a flavor of the improvised nature of the buildings:

This on a walk in the old quarter, where we had lunch in a great little hole-in-the-wall grilled fish place, where they bring it out in a sizzling pan over a cauldron of coals, somewhat mitigating the effect of the few fans in the room.  I later learned that the New York Times says this family-style restaurant is one of the ten places you must eat before you die.  My favorite shot of the day is the wall downstairs in the restaurant, capturing something about this ancestor-revering country:

And also these girls, talking outside a Sunday-morning English language class:

Later lots of shopping, the Craft Link stores and 54 Traditions Gallery both specializing in beautiful, affordable things made by Viet Nam's 53 ethnic minorities (the King ethnic group comprising the majority).  Don't tell the estate of Keith Haring about this small rug I saw in one of the shops:

No time to get to the Zoo this time, but the lake in the middle of it (there are lakes all throughout the city of Hanoi, including the one in which John McCain's plane landed after it was shot down, ushering in his years in a P.O.W. camp) is always filled with swan boats:

Hanoi: a few second day thoughts

An amazing thing here, as suggested a bit by the last photo in the post below, is what people do on two wheels -- mostly motorbikes, but also regular bicycles, which are driven in traffic just like cars.  I'd have pictures, but it would risk my life to get them.  Along the road north yesterday, an early sight was a cyclist with a large dead, hairless dog strapped on the back of her bike.  (Yes, dogs, and occasionally cats, are consumed as food in some parts of the country.  Haven't had the pleasure yet, but I don't know why there's anything inherently more disturbing about eating a dog than, say, a cow or a pig.)  The balance of some of these cyclists is amazing -- sometimes you can hardly see the person steering or pedaling for the huge stacks of wares strapped on.

A bit more concerning is the almost complete absence of helmets, and the frequent sight of very young children among the multiple passengers on a single bike.  That, and the insanity of the traffic, is why injury is a leading public health problem in Viet Nam.

Many of my visits have been to government facilities, and the pictures of Ho Chi Minh are ubiquitous -- often three in the same room.  My favorite so far is this one, which I captured with a saintly halo-like effect:

Viet Nam

Arrived here late last night after crossing the international dateline and spending all of September 6 -- a lost day -- on airplanes.   Haven't seen much of Hanoi yet, where I am staying, but traveled north to the mountains in Thai Nguyen province most of today.  Verdant rice fields are all around, as above.  And in the north there is tea growing on hillsides:

Traffic hazards, Phuc Tan:

Traffic hazards, back in Hanoi:

More tomorrow.

A beautiful spot I somehow missed growing up in Southern New England

Is Harkness Memorial Park, on the shore in Waterford, Connecticut:

Right next to the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center, home to workshops for aspiring playwrights, but also a lovely spot for a wedding:

Big Sky Country

I am in Wyoming for the first time in my life on purpose.  Last time I was flying to Rapid City, South Dakota and about 20 minutes before landing the pilot told us there had been an "incident" at the airport (turned out, of course, to be a small plane crash) and we were being re-routed to Gillette, Wyoming, two hours away.  We got out and raced to the one car rental desk, and rented it with some other South Dakota-bound folks, and my meal in a diner along the way has up to now counted as my visit to Wyoming. 

I'm barely here longer this time, for a talk at a conference, but managed to get the camera out.  I'm more of an ocean person, but this, which is more or less the view from my cabin, is pretty nice:

They're a little crazy about antlers here -- antler lamps and chandeliers, etc. -- but this arc of antlers -- there are four of them, at each corner of the town square in downtown Jackson Hole -- takes the cake.  While I was assured by a fellow conferee that they are "shed" antlers,  they still have a creepy killing fields aura about them:

Cong and environs

For various lovely reasons, I ended up spending time in a 13th century castle in west central Ireland this weekend:

There's a great two-hour boat cruise on Lough (that's Lake to most of you) Corrib to Inchagoill Island, where St. Patrick was exiled for a while in the 4th century.  This isn't the island, but one of the other 364 in the lake, seen from the boat:

Here's some of what remains of the church St. Patrick (I guess he was just regular Patrick then) held mass in:

And, back on the mainland on the road to Cong, a monks' fishing hut.  There is a hole in the floor through which the lazy monks suspended their lines while warming themselves by the fire and chanting, or perhaps trading bawdy stories while quaffing some 6th century version of Guinness:

 

The village of Cong is immensely picturesque, and knows it.  Big event of the last century was the filming in town -- many locals were extras -- of The Quiet Man, the 1951 John Ford film with John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara.

And here's the poster from the film's release:

A Saturday afternoon drive a few hours northwest (not as the crow flies, but as the driver unaccustomed to navigating a stick shift on the left hand side of ridiculously narrow roads flies) of Cong revealed many glories of sky, land and animal life (sheep perfectly happy to plunk themselves down for a rest by the side of aforementioned ridiculously narrow roads).  Here is the view from the "Sky Road" at Clifden:

And some lovely -- heather? -- on the drive back.

South Beach

Although I did some time in Miami years back researching a report on the censorious and threatening ways of right-wing Cuban exiles, I don't think I'd ever been to the beach there until last weekend, courtesy of frequent flyer miles and a friend's generous offer of a condo a few blocks from the boardwalk.  It was a perfect short vacation.

Architecturally, Miami Beach is probably the leading concentration of Art Deco style -- mostly in what seem to be hundreds of small hotels, nicely restored in the renaissance of the last 25 years or so.  But it seems right to start with one of the few signs of the area's Spanish roots, in this church on Lincoln Road:

Across the street, more or less, is a former porn theatre where the amazing New World Symphony, led by Michael Tilson Thomas, performs:

There are at least two terrific museums in South Beach, the Bass Museum of Art -- here are some sculptures outside it, since it was closed on Presidents' Day --

--- the other museum is the Wolfsonian (named after the donor, whether in a straight-faced effort to ape the Smithsonian, I don't know), a design museum along the lines of Cooper-Hewitt, but with a great deal of stunning political posterage in its permanent collection.

Mainly, though, the art and design in South Beach is on the streets:

Whether in faux-deco efforts, like this Citibank --

or this classic post office:

Havana

Longish absence from posting partly due to a trip to Havana, not the epicenter of modern electronic communications.  I was there, legitimately, on a research trip pertaining to the Cuban health system.  Whatever else you may say about the Castro years, it's a magnificent accomplishment, a poor country that has faced unrelenting hostility from the U.S., and after the end of the Soviet Union, the loss of its larger patron, yet with health indicators in every sector that match or exceed those of the U.S.   But the insane, if not to say obscene, U.S. embargo turns what should be a three- hour flight from New York into an all-day plane and waiting marathon through three countries, so I am feeling a little worse for wear.  (My passage through Cuban immigration on the way out had no political hassles  -- unlike my previous trip, a dozen years ago, when my luggage was searched with minute thoroughness and my papers questioned and examined -- but was interrupted six times by blackouts.)

More on the Cuban health system, and other issues, another time.  For now, some photographs.

We stayed in the Parque Central hotel, right across from ... the Parque Central, which abuts the Capitol, the opera house and other landmarks.  The Capitol is now a museum, and the Parliament meets a few times a year in the Havana Convention Center some miles away.  Here's a view from the street:

And from the roof of the hotel:

Jose Marti is everywhere, almost as much as the beloved and ailing Fidel, who at one point seemed likedly to die while I was visiting Cuba.  Here is Marti in a statue in the park:

Alright, you can't make him out too well, but I wanted to get the palm trees in and give some sense of the park.  He's also in this mural, along with the ubiquitous Simon Bolivar, at the Latin American Medical School:

When I was last in Cuba, it seemed that every car, like the one below, dated to the 1950's.  This time there are many more recent ones, though the general air of the city is a slightly ruined one, thanks to Cuba's economic isolation.  At times you can look around and see exactly what you might have seen in 1959, untouched by Coca-Cola or the International Monetary Fund.

 

The aforementioned Latin American Medical School is an audacious Cuban experiment.  For years, the Cubans, with their own remarkable health gains fairly entrenched, have been sending doctors around the world to sites of natural disasters or woefully underserved populations in rural Africa.  (The U.S., shamefully, declined the offer of Cuban doctors after Katrina.)  A few years ago, the Castro government decommissioned a naval academy and turned it into what may be the world's largest medical school, with poor students admitted free from dozens of Latin American and African countries -- and, nominated by the Black and Hispanic Congressional Caucuses, a number from poor precincts of the United States -- if they promise to return to medically underserved communities for practice.  Here's the entrance to the school, with a hurricane-damaged sculpture by Yoko Ono's sister:

We walked through the school during a period when students were all over the place, in libraries, computer labs, and in nooks and crannies across the campus.  This is the view from the library:

I was moved and impressed by the enthusiasm and diligence of the students we spoke with.  For the Americans, it is not only a rare chance at access to a medical career, but a double challenge (at least for non-Latinos like an effervescent young Asian student we spoke with from Chicago):  learning the school's language of instruction, Spanish, then studying a complex subject in the new language, far from home and family.   I don't think I could do it, and I'm filled with admiration for those whose dedication to righting the world's medical inequities sets them on this arduous course.

And, of course, they deserve a break from time to time:

Charleston

I was in Charleston, South Carolina (as opposed to Charleston, Rhode Island, next town over from where I was born) the last few days at the annual meeting of The Philanthropy Roundtable, a gathering of largely conservative donors. I go every year or two not only because I am interested in what the other side is thinking and doing, but because I find the sessions useful -- there is almost always more ideological diversity than you find in a liberal gathering, and overall the quality of the discussions is higher and the more practically-focused sessions (how to evaluate public policy grants, how to be more strategic in grantmaking, etc.) more useful. 

I expected the mood to be glummer, given the developments of the week (the Senate was declared for the Democrats while I was there), but it wasn't noticeably so.  The general view on the right is that conservatism was not rejected, Bush and various Republicans were.  In other words, it's not possible that true conservatism is unpopular, since it's never really been tried.  I find this amusing, but it's a form of denial we have on our side, too -- every time the Democrats get thumped we can expect an editorial in The Nation declaring that they're not left enough, or true enough to populist principles.  Anyway, it's fun not to be having THAT kind of discussion in my usual precincts at the moment.

I'll write more about the Philanthropy Roundtable in the future, as the project I've staked out for my upcoming sabbatical is to live among the right for several months.  But here I wanted to say a few enthusiastic words about Charleston,  which has blocks and blocks of the most  beautifully preserved 18th and 19th century houses.  It's a peninsula, so it's a larger version of beautiful Stonington, Connecticut, except with the Daughters of the Confederacy instead of the Portuguese Holy Ghost Society, and the civil war cannons are those of the losing side.

There was no room for me in the conference hotel, so the inn I stayed at was a ten-minute walk away.  Inconvenient, except it forced me to see more of the city, which was a treat.  At the end of the block, Vendue Place, is a pier that begins a waterfront promenade where I ran this morning:

I didn't run with a camera, otherwise there would be more pictures.  Lots of beautiful old churches in Charleston, including this Huguenot one, with the ubiquitous palmetto tree:

And St. Philip's (both of these in the city's own French Quarter):

And the Round Church, with its beautiful cemetery:

Everything is so WHITE in Charleston:

Um, speaking of whiteness, it's strange to be surrounded by various monuments to pride in the Confederacy.  At the end of the City Market, right across from the conference hotel, is the museum of the Daughters of the Confederacy:

I didn't get in, but I'm curious to know how a culture deals with the shame of its past -- how to maintain some kind of regional or local pride, some reverence for one's ancestors, when what they stood for, the "faith" I saw cited on various monuments, is indefensible? 

Though the Civil War was much longer ago, the era of Jim Crow and strict segregation is more recent than, say, the Nazi regime in Germany, yet some of the issues faced by whites in the south -- those old enough to have engaged in immoral practices and their descendants, who bear no personal responsibility -- are similar.  I guess I was put in mind of all this by this sign in the French Quarter:

Charleston IS a quite friendly place -- and obviously has been for a long time.

A sunny weekend in Washington

I was in DC over last weekend in between various work-related commitments, and had some time to see friends in a more leisurely way than usually, and also play tourist.  I seem to like photographing statues, and scored TWO for my Presidential collection not far from the Capitol.

James A. Garfield, whose six-month Presidency in 1881 was ended by an assassin in Union Station:

And Ulysses S. Grant, in General mode.  Note the indignity of the pigeon on his head.

And on a walk back on Pennsylvania Avenue, another Civil War general, Meade, helped with his coat by young hottie:

Lots of hotties in bronze on the streets of DC.  If that Texas teacher who got fired for bringing her students to an art museum had chaperoned a class trip to DC, she would certainly have gotten in trouble for this statue, just steps from the Supreme Court:

The Supreme Court itself, and the two statues which flank it, are so white they could be a Crest commercial:

I shot many postcard views of the Capitol, but prefer this one, with a young man in the foreground pondering the chances that the Democrats will retake Congress:

On the way back to the hotel, I happened across a relatively new memorial about the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II.  Perhaps because I've been looking into it recently, in the course of writing a book review about the ACLU's history (which in the case of this historical atrocity, was far from perfect), I found myself quite moved, particularly by the apt starkness of these words:

Last post from my next-to-last state

For those of you fearing I am about to rename this blog “Alaskalog,” this is my final, though somewhat longer posting about my week far north.  There is much more to say, but I'll confine myself to a few random recollections and observations:

Money and Politics

During the course of my visit I met both of the state’s Senators – freshman Lisa Murkowski, who I wrote about earlier, and Ted Stevens, who at 83 seems to be Senator-for-Life. The day we arrived in Alaska the Wall Street Journal ran a highly critical editorial – a regular rant, I believe – portraying the state as a giant welfare cheat, through the combination of the annual “permanent fund” checks of $1,000 to every Alaskan, representing a cut of the state’s oil revenues, and the steady flow of federal largesse that Senator Stevens manages to steer to his constituents.  Throughout the week we visited an array of programs around the state focusing on the needs of Alaska’s native population -- medical and dental clinics, courts, hospitals, museums, schools, radio stations and the like, almost all run by indigenous Alaskans – and hardly an hour went by without some mention of bounty from a federal grant or earmark arranged by Senator Stevens like telemedicine facilities in a clinic or funding for the Native Heritage Center, or creative use of his power like forcing the FAA to make Alaskan air freight planes run passenger routes (much of the state is accessible only by airplane, and one of 58 adult residents has a pilot’s license) or arranging to have native corporations sell their losses to climb out of bankruptcy. 

The famous “bridges to nowhere” aside – and we heard a pretty good account from the Senator and others about how this has been distorted by the Journal and others – most of this seems quite appropriate and indeed a great demonstration of how the powers of government, and the revenues from tax dollars, can be used to advance social welfare.  Yet it comes from a Senator in a thoroughly Republican state who is part of a Congressional majority that trashes government at every turn and that has done its best, in partnership with the Bush Administration, to starve the government of revenue.  So if you want to study big-government Republicanism, come to Alaska. (Some of the state’s good fortune, of course, comes from Stevens’ seniority and his willingness to use the clout he has accumulated, often quite bluntly.  There is much anxiety in the state, as well there might be, about what will happen when he’s left the scene, or when, as seems possible, there’s a shift in the Senate that puts Stevens in the minority.)

This is all the more striking since every institution we visited gets the lion’s share of its revenue from government.  There’s a cost in dependency and in being hostage to shifts in the political winds, of course, but also in the bureaucracy that attends government funding. I sat open-jawed in the Bethel offices of the Tundra Women’s Coalition, a domestic violence organization, when the young executive director said she cut short a much-needed sabbatical so she could keep up with the immense amount of paperwork the government grants require.  It’s remarkable that conservatives haven’t made much of a dent on this problem in six years in office.

I have never been to a place where people more or less like me, who seem generally liberal, are comfortable with Republicans, even to the point of voting for them.  You could say it is the kind of adjustment that comes with living in a one-party state – not one of the statewide officials is a Democrat, and there are heavy Republican majorities in both chambers of the statehouse – but it doesn’t work that way in, say, Texas, where there is thorough Republican control and  high partisanship on the part of the marginalized Democrats.  (No one I’ve spoken to thinks Democratic gubernatorial candidate Chris Bell can win there in November even running against two Republicans.)

Judge Stephanie

One of the most remarkable experiences of the trip was a visit to the Anchorage courtroom of District Judge Stephanie Rhoades, who presides over a “mental health court” for defendants with mental impairment or challenges.  Such courts, along with drug courts (we visited one in Bethel) are relatively recent innovations that recognize that many who end up in the criminal justice system have many serious issues they need to deal with of which the crime they are charged with is but the most visible manifestation.  The idea is to take a more holistic view of the situation that recognizes the need for accountability but that also takes steps to deal with the underlying problems.  I'm sympathetic to this approach, although my civil libertarian hackles go up a bit when the state acts coercively to "help" you.

Whatever doubts I have about the general approach were swept aside by an hour watching Judge Rhoades (I’m tempted to call her Judge Stephanie – she could certainly go on television and give the other reality-tv judges a run for their money) in action.  She is a petite blonde bundle of energy, probably in her early forties.  Despite a serious bout of sciatica (she lifted up her robes to reveal an IV-drip she was taking for the pain), she ran her courtroom as a combination of stand-up comic and earth mother. The first man to appear before her, a gentle African-American in his fifties, agreed to provide restitution to his victims (a theft was involved, I think, but we never learned the charges that landed any of the defendants in court) at $5 a month until $150 was paid off.  The judge couldn’t have been more supportive and complimentary, and when that docket item was cleared, she smiled at the man and said, “Do you think we should have a hug?”  He beamed, she came down from the bench and embraced him, and he told her he loved her. 

Several of the defendants got date books from Judge Rhoades, in which she had written their next appointment – they seem to see her about once a week – and which they could use to keep track of their medications and treatments.  “Do you have a good system for keeping track of all this?” she asked one man, who seemed to be the kind of person who believes the CIA has secretly placed sensors in his fillings.  “Yes, ma’am, my central nervous system,” he replied.  She asked another, taking part in the proceeding by phone from the state mental hospital, if he understood what he needed to do upon release. “DON”T TOUCH PEOPLE!” he answered.

Fishing

I am the proud possessor of an Alaska Hunting and Fishing License, good through the end of the month.  (Apparently my handwriting on the application was so poor that it is made out to Philip G. Lamanents, so if there is anyone by that name planning to fish in Alaska before August 31, let me know):

I wrote earlier that fishing brings out my inner Woody Allen.  I can’t tell you how many times, despite the patient tutelage of my guides, I got the hook and lure caught up on the pole when trying to cast.  Fishing may be the outdoor version of ballroom dancing for me.  And the bears kept a constant flow of adrenalin going.  I was told that we would use the river side by side with the grizzlies and not care about it, since there were so many fish the bears would have their hands full catching them.  As it happens, the Park Service now tells people to leave the river when the bears come sauntering by – as they often did, per this picture of co-habitation –

So we got in and out of the water a lot.  No one caught any salmon, a first for the tour, which has been running for ten years.

I am glad I had the experience, but it was a bit like Jurassic Park for me.  I assure you no one used the outhouse that night.

We got to the Silver Salmon Fishing Camp by splitting up into small groups on small planes.  I am very comfortable flying in general, but I particularly love being in very small planes, though I realize the odds of dying in a plane crash are magnified by this mode of transportation.  There is a great intimacy to flying low in a small plane, and you notice things you never see above the clouds, like this lizard-like river.  (Yes, that is the wheel of the plane in the lower right-hand corner.)

The camp itself is quite rudimentary:  sleeping bags in bunkhouses, a one-seat outhouse serving everyone.   Here is the spectacular view from the outhouse (or rather, standing just next to it; there are limits to my multi-tasking tendencies):

Here's a view of the women's bunk from the beach.  (On which the small plane landed, by the way.)

Gara Gone Wild

is what my friend Michael Balaoing of the Entertainment Industry Foundation, who was also on the trip, suggests I call a final section of this post.  It would feature his shots of me wading in the river with a fishing rod, and straddling an ATV we used to travel up and down the beach.  But he hasn't sent them yet.

About as close as you would want to get to a grizzly bear

 

Or, quite a bit closer, in fact.  This was taken at the Silver Salmon Fishing Camp, up the Cook Inlet from Anchorage, where we flew (in a tiny plane that landed on the beach) for a day and a half at the end of our Alaska trip.  Taken by Kathy Gottlieb, actually, CEO of the native South  Central Corporation (and Alaska's only MacArthur Fellow).  I have lots of bear pictures, too, some of which I will post in a day or two, but my camera's zoom lens picked this time to stop working.

They always tell you that fishing is a very zen experience, and I'm glad to have given it a go, but when you are constantly on the watch for grizzlies -- and there were plenty who interrupted our time on the river -- it's just a little less than relaxing for me.  In fact, fly fishing in Alaska brought out my inner Woody Allen more than my inner John Wayne...

More to come.

In which I come to my senses and my readers are spared a swimsuit shot

I have much to write about this fascinating state, but they keep us so busy moving around that I don't have much time write now, so a few pictures will have to do.

Yesterday we flew to Prudhoe Bay, where BP just shut down the oil pipeline, then further north to Barrow, the northernmost town in the United States.  (When I wrote, mistakenly, that Bethel, where I was on Monday, was the westernmost, a comment corrected me, but I'm pretty sure I'm right about this.  After all, there's a sign!)

 

That's a bowhead whalebone next to it, by the way.  I learned a lot about the local subsistence culture.  Saw no actual whales, but during the course of the day a number of caribou, geese and a dead walrus.  There have been various polar bear sightings in Barrow, including one wandering around on the second floor of the middle school one morning.  The possibility one might emerge from the Arctic, the fact that the water was riddled with scary-looking jellyfish, and the additional fact that when I put my hand into the ocean at Barrow Point I had NO FEELING IN IT FOR THE NEXT HALF-HOUR caused me to COME TO MY F***ING SENSES and leave my clothes on, so I will not be joining the Polar Bear Club on this trip, anyway.

What was I thinking of?  Anyway, it's pretty, and here is a picture.  Still light out quite late at this point in the summer:

Though I didn't get into the Arctic Ocean, despite having created a lot of drama about it among my traveling companions, as a consolation prize I got to sit in the cockpit with the pilots, Julie and Larry, on takeoff back to Anchorage.  Here is a cockpit-visitor's-eye view:

They have an amazing number of controls, dials, digital displays, etc.  I was careful not to touch anything!  I think it might be kind of boring, if somewhat spiritual, to be a pilot.  All you see are clouds.

Soon after I went back to the cabin, we were flying over Mt. McKinley (which I believe, prospective commenters, is the highest mountain in the U.S.).  Here is is outside the window.

Earlier in the day, as I mentioned, we flew to Deadhorse and drove out with a Conoco representative (they share the pipeline with BP, and I should think would be pretty steamed at their rival's failure to maintain it properly) to see where the oil comes from.  Here is where it emerges from the tundra:

You will be happy to know I obeyed the warning not to climb on the pipeline.  A few days earlier, at the Anchorage Museum, I spapped a shot of a cutaway section:

o

While we were in Deadhorse -- the camp where the pipeline workers live is a bit like a space station outpost, with unlimited free food in the cafeteria and a much better gym than our hotel in Anchorage -- we had two first-time Alaska experiences within an hour.  First the sun came out, then it snowed:

A few facts about our (and my) 49th state

Courtesy, mostly, of Diane Kaplan, the Brooklyn-born dynamo who is Executive Director of the Rasmuson Foundation, which has a hand in every civic good in the state, it seems:

• Alaska has twice the amount of coastline as all the lower 48 states combined.
• 19% of the state's 650,000 people are Native Alaskans, though about twice that percentage are in the state's prisons. 40% are in Anchorage, which makes it in effect the largest native village in the state. Migration from remote villages to cities flows at the rate of about 5,000 people a year.
• Barrow, where we're going tomorrow, has two months in the summer with no sunset and two months in the winter with no sunrise.
• Alaska has no death penalty.
• Men outnumber women in the state by 52 to 48 percent, about the Lamont/Lieberman margin:)  There is a saying among single Alaskan women:  "Yes, the odds are good, but the goods are odd."
• There is a 30% higher cost of living in Alaska than in the lower 48, as evidenced by the costly box of Tide cited below.
• 90 languages are spoken in the Anchorage public school system.
• Among Native Alaskans, there are high rates of domestic violence, sexual abuse, accidental death and suicide.  (In fact, accidental injury vies with cancer as the leading cause of death; suicides are 13% and assaults 6%.)  Alcohol abuse threads through every health and social problem, enough to make a libertarian observer like me into Carrie Nation.
• The Alaska Highway, built in 1942, is an amazing feat of engineering and dedication, 1520 miles built in eight months.
• At least 70% of the state budget comes from oil revenue
• Every Alaskan receives a $1,000 check each year from the Permanent Fund, his or her share of oil revenues.
• 80% of the active volcanoes in the United States are in Alaska.
• There is an epidemic of tooth decay among Native children three years and under, but the American Dental Association continues to lobby successfully against the training of non-dentist preventive practitioners.

More to come.

On Top of the World -- or the United States, anyway

Hello from Alaska, where I have intermittent computer access and where my camera's memory card finally chose to die.  So no pictures of the Russian Orthodox onion domes on the church in the small native village of Napaskiak, where we visited yesterday, up the Kuskokwim River from Bethel, the westernmost settlement in the United States.  Or of the $37 box of Tide on sale in the village's only store.  I don't know how anyone affords it in a place of chronic un-and under-employment, where the third largest source of income is bingo.

But I do hope to have a new memory card later today, and to post photos from the train ride tonight down Turnagain Arm, where we'll be joined by three hundred prominent Alaskans; from Prudhoe Bay, closed to most visitors since last week's oil spill, but not to us; from Barrow, the northernmost town in the U.S., where I hope to take an Arctic dip; and from the Silver Salmon Camp at the foot of Mt. Iliamna, where there will surely be grizzly sightings.

More on all this tonight, probably.  I am here on the annual Educational Tour of Alaska sponsored by the Rasmuson Foundation, a terrific local philanthropy.  Yes, this is work.

Bellagio II: Boat Ride and Mark Twain

They took us on a boat ride yesterday afternoon, and here is where I am staying from the water's point of view.  We went up and down the lakeshore on both sides for ninety minutes or so, getting a look at fun-sounding villages like Tremezzo, Menaggio, Varenna, Fiumellate, Cadenabbia...

Here is a mountainside cemetery:

And a fortunate sailor:

And a typical harbor, stones sloping down to the lake:

This is the magnificent Villa Balbianello, which excited most of my fellow passengers to leap up, cameras in hand, since it was used as a location for one of the Star Wars movies.  (I haven't seen any since the first, with Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher, so I guess I have some catching up to do.)  It's spectacular, and one of the most alluring features of the ride was the opportunity to see some lavish private homes you would not even know about if you traveled by land.

When I was in Turkey a few weeks ago, my friend and colleague John Kowal was reading Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad, and he came across Chapter 20, which relates his trip to Bellagio in the 1860's (all this stuff is long in the public domain and completely available online, if you click on the link above.) 

Here is some of what he had to say:

Our hotel sits at the water's edge -- at least its front garden does -- and we walk among the shrubbery and smoke at twilight; we look afar off at Switzerland and the Alps, and feel an indolent willingness to look no closer; we go down the steps and swim in the lake; we take a shapely little boat and sail abroad among the reflections of the stars; lie on the thwarts and listen to the distant laughter, the singing, the soft melody of flutes and guitars that comes floating across the water from pleasuring gondolas; we close the evening with exasperating billiards on one of those same old execrable tables. A midnight luncheon in our ample bed-chamber; a final smoke in its contracted veranda facing the water, the gardens, and the mountains; a summing up of the day's events. Then to bed, with drowsy brains harassed with a mad panorama that mixes up pictures of France, of Italy, of the ship, of the ocean, of home, in grotesque and bewildering disorder. Then a melting away of familiar faces, of cities, and of tossing waves, into a great calm of forgetfulness and peace.

From my window here in Bellaggio, I have a view of the other side of the lake now, which is as beautiful as a picture. A scarred and wrinkled precipice rises to a height of eighteen hundred feet; on a tiny bench half way up its vast wall, sits a little snowflake of a church, no bigger than a martin-box, apparently; skirting the base of the cliff are a hundred orange groves and gardens, flecked with glimpses of the white dwellings that are buried in them; in front, three or four gondolas lie idle upon the water -- and in the burnished mirror of the lake, mountain, chapel, houses, groves and boats are counterfeited so brightly and so clearly that one scarce knows where the reality leaves off and the reflection begins!

The surroundings of this picture are fine. A mile away, a grove-plumed promontory juts far into the lake and glasses its palace in the blue depths; in midstream a boat is cutting the shining surface and leaving a long track behind, like a ray of light; the mountains beyond are veiled in a dreamy purple haze; far in the opposite direction a tumbled mass of domes and verdant slopes and valleys bars the lake, and here indeed does distance lend enchantment to the view -- for on this broad canvas, sun and clouds and the richest of atmospheres have blended a thousand tints together, and over its surface the filmy lights and shadows drift, hour after hour, and glorify it with a beauty that seems reflected out of Heaven itself. Beyond all question, this is the most voluptuous scene we have yet looked upon.

I think this man would agree.

Bellagio

I am toward the end of almost a week here at the walled retreat of Villa Serbelloni in Bellagio, operated by the Rockefeller Foundation.  It's a conference on migration,  which I happen to know a little bit about, but I would have come to Lake Como in Italy to talk about semiconductors, or the U.S-Uruguay trade imbalance, since I was eager to check the place out.

It is, indeed, gorgeous.  Here is the view from my room, in the corner of the Sfrondrata residence, right on the lake:

OK, not such a good picture.  That weird shimmery thing is the screen.  I have to keep it on to keep the little lizards that abound outside from crawling in my window.

Here's an outside view of the villa where I'm staying and a nearby tower residence, like something out of a P.D. James mystery ( "Murder at Bellagio" -- When Professor McTavish didn't appear for breakfast in the villa that splendid early summer morning, Nicola wondered if the copious amounts of grappa he consumed after the Nietzsche seminar had caused him to sleep through his alarm...):

Now I have been to a few fine conference centers in my foundation life.  Best are the resorts the right-wing foundations always meet in, always featuring some world-class golf course.  I've stayed at Sundance (the resort, in summer, not the festival in winter, in nearby Park City); at Aspen:

And Pocantico:

Pocantico, less than an hour north of New York City, was Nelson Rockefeller's home, and it is filled with art inside and out.  It is managed by another Rockefeller philanthropy, Rockefeller Brothers Foundation.  (If you want to get a sense of the reach of the Rockefellers over a hundred years or so in New York, take the Circle Line boat around Manhattan and listen to the tour guide point out Rockefeller Center, the Palisades, Riverside Church and other examples of their commercial and philanthropic impact.)

So I have been to all these places, and soon after I got the invitation to Bellagio I was having lunch with my boss, Aryeh Neier, and told him, half-facetiously, that  I was now prepared to write the definitive guidebook on luxurious conference centers.

"Have you been to Ditchley?" he asked.

"Um, no..." 

"Well, you can't write that guidebook, then." 

Seems Ditchley, in England, is some kind of grand manor where they dress for dinner, Gosford Park-style.  It's the one place, Aryeh says, where he has been the most underdressed person.  And if you know Aryeh, you know that's saying a lot.

Back to Bellagio, Aryeh says he once got a postcard from one now-Supreme Court Justice when..that person was resident at Bellagio for a month, exclaiming "Bellagio makes you want to write love poems to your lover!"  When you think about the sender and recipient of this message, you get a sense of how the place can make you lose your head.

Now here is a view of the lake just steps from where I'm staying:

One thing I associate with Italy, and of which I am very fond, are cypress trees:

There are some terraced gardens on the vast property, which winds up a mountain, that are beautifully maintained.  If you like "Where's Waldo" -type exercises, look for the butterfly:

And in this one, a bee.  (I may go to work for National Geographic :)

The gym can be seen behind this bust.  I spent twenty minutes climbing the hill to get there yesterday to find that the only equipment was a treadmill, a stationary bike, and an elliptical machine -- kind of beside the point when your heart is already pounding from the walk to get there.

At the top of the mountain, there is some kind of ruin and a panoramic view of the lakes, since Bellagio's setting is at the tip of a peninsula where Lago di Como and Lago di Lecco join:

Particularly fortunate scholars get to use this little roundhouse for writing:

Frisky animals abound:

Did I mention that the combination of mountains, sky, trees and water -- think of Cape Town, San Francisco and a few of the world's other most gorgeous places -- is almost indescribably exquisite?

And before we leave Turkey, the Ephesus Museum

The small museum in Ephesus housing its collection of antiquities is a very modest structure, some of the displays look like exhibits in a high-school science fair, and the red-brick backdrop for some of the treasures is a little distracting.  But there is one exquisite thing after another, and here is a gallery of some of my favorites.  Just as it was stunning to see how much energy and movement could be conveyed in stone in the figures adorning the sarcophagi at the National Archaeological Museum in Istanbul,  look at how much feeling is conveyed in so many of these:

 

By the way, above is the ubiquitous fertility queen.  So as not to run afoul of internet filters, I am sparing you images of Priapus, not just from the museum, but every sidewalk chachka stall -- let me just say that the smaller ones would do nicely for hanging keys...

 

Say, doesn't this like George Washington raising his hand for the oath?

Liev Schreiber?

Ephesus

In all candor, I have never been particularly attracted to ruins and antiquities.  Aside from roaming around the Forum in ... Rome (no pun intended), my first trip was to Machu Picchu, and it's hard to go up from there.

Ephesus, a Greco-Roman city that at one time went to the sea, encompassing present-day Selcuk, with a million people (the majority slaves), is remarkably well-preserved, and my colleagues and friends Nancy and John and I spent four hours there in the blazing sun under the tutelage of a guide hired by our hotel. Also named John.

Here are some images.  The "small"  ampitheater, with an exiting dog roused from sleep by one of the guards:

Entrance to the hospital:

The Library of Celsus, 114 A.D.:

Stately cypress trees:

Ancient backgammon board:

Ancient Trivial Pursuit?

An ad for the local brothel, with the shadow of our guide's hand explaining it to us.

Poppies:

Fresco at the hills of the Seven Sleepers (Rip van Winkle-like story), not far from the city ruins:

People tie rags to the trees there for good luck. The ancient citadel in the background.

Selcuk and St. John's Basilica

When my Istanbul conference ended on Monday, a few of my colleagues and I flew to Izmir (in ancient times, better known as Smyrna) and then to a sweet little pension, Hotel Bella, in Selcuk, not far from the Greco-Roman ruins of Ephesus, where we planned to spend the next day.

Selcuk is a pleasant little town of about 25,000, and is a tourist spot because it is about three miles from Ephesus -- in fact, Ephesus, which according to our guide was in ancient times a city of about a million people (250,000 free, with about three slaves each) contained what is now the town of Selcuk.  It is possible, if the ruins weren't around, that Selcuk would have a steady traffic of people coming to see its many storks.  Having a cup of tea on the rooftop restaurant of the hotel the afternoon we arrived, we were startled to find ourselves parallel with a large stork's nest  in which three babies were being fed regurgitated fish (just like March of the Penguins!), and counted ourselves quite fortunate.  But over the next few days we saw storks' nests everywhere in town, on specially-constructed poles.  Selcuk is the most stork-friendly place I've been.  Here are the original ones seen from our hotel, with the town's medieval fortress in the background:

Selcuk was a veritable wildlife zoo -- wandering around, we saw goats, a lizard, and in the ivy on the side of this hotel (right), two adorable kittens, just waiting to adorn a Hallmark card.  On the left (watch out when the kittens get older), more baby storks, just a few feet away.

Our hotel was right across the street from the town fortress -- closed in recent years, but impressive from a distance -- and the remains of a huge basilica named after St. John, who is said to be buried on its grounds.  His tomb is said to lie beneath this column-topped slab of marble, as a matter of fact:

With St. Paul allegedly buried in Ephesus (the citizens of whom his "Letter to the Ephesians" addressed), this short trip was rich in early Christian resting places.

Here are a few more images from St. John's:

And some automotive ones from an early-evening stroll through Selcuk:

On to Ephesus.

Sarcophagi, then a late night stroll

Closing dinner for the conference I'm at was in the courtyard of the National Archaeological Museum.  While a strings combo played a selection of American show tunes -- globalization on the march! -- some of us took advantage of the opportunity to inspect the collection, and found a fantastic hall of sarcophagi:

Some of my colleagues thought this centaur looked strangely familiar:

Here, by the way, in a glass case nearby, is a sample of what is/was in the sarcophagi:

A few of us skipped the bus ride back to the hotel and opted for a late-night stroll in Sultanahmet, where a number of Istanbulites (--ians?) were talking on the benches in the park between the Blue Mosque and Hagia Sophia.  This shot of the latter gives at least some sense of the magical quality of the latter, gulls circling it illuminated by the spotlights -- kind of a cross between Disney's Magic Kingdom and the winged monkey scene in the Wizard of Oz

13th Century Mosaics and a 5th Century Wall

Took about two hours out from the meeting today to hire a cab and go with my friend Ethan to see Kariye Muzesi (all these Turkish names have a few different alphabet letters than my keyboard here affords, by the way), an 11th century church off the beaten track in the western part of Istanbul.

It's celebrated, and justly so, for its fantastic, heavily intact mosaics, added in the 13th century:

 

The church is not far from the city walls built in the 5th century --

-- around which a bustling neighbhorhood (including a Flatiron district:) has grown up:

And, perhaps, a place for moments of reflection:

Bazaar sights

Some images, and wares, snapped on a morning stroll through the Grand Bazaar (the Byzantine era's Mall of America):

Night cruise on the Bosporus

Before I learned to set my camera properly for night shooting, I got some strobe-like effects in the pictures I took last night.  My vantage point was the deck of a dinner cruise (along the strait separating the European and Asian continents, it is said) that launched the OSI conference I am attending here:

Istanbul, initially

I am in Turkey for about a week for various OSI activities.  I've never been here before.  In the great debate about whether Turkey is part of Europe, whatever that is supposed to mean/imply, my initial impressions of this beautiful, cosmopolitan city are that it seems like other great European capitals, except with mosques.

I went out for drinks and dinner with colleagues last night after an afternoon nap.  Before meeting them at the Seven Hills Hotel's spectacular rooftop bar and restaurant, my friend Antonio and I walked over to Sultan Ahmet Camii, the famous Blue Mosque.

I haven't been in yet -- hope to get back during my stay -- but some of the tile and stone work outside is tantalizing:

Not far from the Blue Mosque is Hagia Sophia, the 6th Century Church of the Divine Wisdom, the greatest Christian church at least until St. Peter's was built a thousand years later in Rome.  Here it is behind one of the ubiquitous and oddly comforting (to a New Yorker) yellow "taksis":

Across the street from the Seven Hills, but too rich for our budgets, is the Istanbul Four Seasons, once a notorious prison:

Don't miss out on the roof of the Seven Hills if you find yourself in Istanbul.  The views are breathtaking.  Here is Hagia Sophia from a different vantage point, with some kind of excavation in the foreground:

And the Bosporus, a hub of maritime activity:

After dinner at Boncuk, a great fish place, a stroll through crowded market streets teeming with people after 11 pm.  I wondered, not for the first time, why we can't display fruit as beautifully in the U.S.  Fairway, take note:

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

I am here for the annual Council on Foundations meeting, and I have the same reaction most of the attendees have to the city:  it's a surprisingly lovely place.  Somehow Pittsburgh is about the last significant American city (other than Las Vegas, I guess) that I haven't made it to, though I've been to Philadelphia lots and even Harrisburg.  Was in sad decline, by all accounts -- a sooty, depopulating place -- until the last 15-20 years, but has made a resurgence.  Exactly what constitutes its post-industrial economic base now, I am not sure.  But the mix of nicely-maintained and restored historic buildings and structures (a series of remarkable, closely-spaced Allegheny River bridges) along with some striking, even playful, new architecture, give it a very vibrant feel.

So here are a few shots:

The Keystone Belle having come under the 11th Street railroad bridge.

The old Pennsylvania Railroad station, beautifully restored -- look at its vaulted ceiling:

Bad news, though, is that the grand waiting room is now the entrance to a luxury apartment building, and the actual train station is a sad little bus station-type waiting room with plastic seats and a vending machine behind and underneath the building.  Hard to argue with that when the one train to New York each day leaves at 7:45, but still, the privatization of a once-grand public space is sad.

Here are the Andy Warhol, Rachel Carson and Roberto Clemente bridges (good civic naming!), with PNC Park, where the Pirates play, in the background.

The David Lawrence Convention Center -- also in the inset above -- where the meetings are taking place is a very nice piece of architecture.  The blue lights are running some Jenny Holzer-like messages:

In San Francisco

I am not usually one for panoramic postcard shots, but this shot of Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill, on a lovely afternoon walk in Fort Mason (on a day when foot-high snow blankets the east), suggests why this city is the most gloriously-situated urban dwelling-place in the U.S.:

And here's Alcatraz Island in the distance:

At the center of a grassy circle in Fort Mason, the late Congressman Phil Burton is still talking:

Back to Oaxaca

The other day, while still in Mexico, I posted a few arty photos from my walk around the town center.  Here are a few more.

When I told people I was going to Oaxaca, several said:  "You MUST go have a drink at the Hotel Camino Real!"  I would reply, "Uh....I'm actually staying there..."  It's a fifteenth-century Dominican convent t hat, over time, was also a prison and a cinema.  (A New York Times article says it was also at one point a slaughterhouse, but they seem to have left this detail out of the promotional literature. )

All I know is,  my room was no nun's cell.  It must have at least been the Mother Superior's office.

The hotel is full of cloisters and other nooks and crannies, and some of the original frescoes have been restored:

I had a kind of express visit to Oaxaca, less than 48 hours, most of it occupied with the conference I was participating in.  So I can't say I acquired a highly nuanced appreciation for the various churches, but that didn't stop my from eyeing the statuary:

I passed a couple of seemingly political posters roaming the streets, but don't know what they mean.  Does anyone have a translation for this one?

As many of you have observed, none of my photographs have people in them.  Here's an exception, a very tourist-y shot of a street vendor:

The group I was with had a special tour of Monte Alban, an archaeological site at the ancient capital of the Zapotecs.  Very nice, but as the first such site I visited in my travels a few years ago was Macchu Picchu, everything else has a hard time living up to it:

Very art-y photo with the shadows.  The one with the camera is me:

I tried very hard to catch the heavenly rays in this shot, but it was much better in the original:

I couldn't understand very well the extremely Germanic -- and extremely authoritarian -- tour guide who whipped our delegation through Monte Alban in under an hour, but I take it these tablets depict various kinds of sacred animals and transcendental experiences.

A bit of Oaxaca

Wireless access is iffy here in Oaxaca, where -- believe it or not -- I am traveling on business.  But here are a few shots from yesterday morning's stroll around the center.  More to come.

Journey to the changing heartland or: 48 down, 2 to go

I spent two days in Nebraska last week as a guest of the Appleseed Foundation, a terrific public interest organization working for civil rights and economic justice.  I got there in the same way I got to Montana -- someone read on my blog that I was only four states away from my goal of visiting all fifty, and invited me to speak. (After I make it to Kentucky and Alaska, I’m going to try this trick with countries, and look forward to addressing the Palau Bar Association in 2009.)

I tried to prepare for my trip – which was chock-full of serious opportunities to educate myself about justice and economic issues in Nebraska, particularly those involving the burgeoning immigrant population, about which more later – as I do for all new places, by going to Borders or Barnes and Noble and buying a guidebook, and maybe a map. No luck in several places I tried.  Apparently Nebraska is not a big tourist destination.  I could have bought a telephone-book-sized “Let’s Go USA” and clipped the slim Nebraska pages, but decided instead to go unburdened by knowledge or many preconceptions. 

Met at the airport in Omaha by the engaging and savvy Nebraska Appleseed director, Milo Mumgaard, and Heather Thompson of the national Appleseed office in D.C, also incoming President of the National Native Bar Association. My plane was an hour late, so we missed our appointment for me to visit the Gerald Ford Birthplace. Born Leslie King there in 1913, Ford changed his name and moved to Michigan, which he eventually represented in Congress. So we drove by the Malcolm X birthplace, which many people (over some opposition) are trying to make into a tourist site.  Tough job, since the house burned down some years ago, and all there is is a corner lot with a fence around it. Malcolm Little changed his name, too, and we all know he didn’t live out his too-brief span in Omaha. It would be unfair, so I won’t do it, to suggest that the most famous people born in Nebraska assume new identities and leave the state. I mean, look at Senator Bob Kerrey! Oh, wait, he’s the President of a university in Manhattan...

On the way into town and on the next day, we crossed the Missouri River to Iowa, partly because for some reason that is what you do to get from the airport to downtown Omaha, and partly to indulge my desire to be able to say I have visited Iowa.  This "Welcome-to-Nebraska" sign should prove my point:

Many of my meetings in Omaha, and Lincoln, where we drove the next day, related to the growing Latino population in the state.  Legal and illegal immigration by Mexicans, Guatemalans, Salvadorans and other Central Americans is something we tend to associate with border states and the eastern seaboard.  But one of the most challenging social issues of the day is the reality of significant Latino presence in many parts of the country where until recently it has been quite small, particularly the Midwest, the Great Plains and the south.  (I discuss this a bit in my February talk, “Immigrant Communities in the Crossfire.”)  Meeting with Ollas, a University of Nebraska at Lincoln-based Latino studies center, JFON (Justice for Our Friends and Neighbors, a Methodist-backed legal advocacy and support group), and Omaha Together One Community, an Industrial Areas Foundation affiliate which organizes immigrant meatpackers, I learned that by 2030, Latinos may constitute a third of Nebraska’s population. (A combination of growing immigration and the decline of the Anglo population.)  Some Central Nebraska towns, like Schuyler, already have a majority Latino population. Latinos predominate in the meatpacking plants that once employed earlier waves of immigrants, and then African-Americans. It goes without saying that packing jobs are unskilled, dirty and dangerous. (My hosts tried to set up a visit for me to the Greater Omaha Packing plant, but its Jewish owners had closed it for Yom Kippur, the day of my visit. Who knew?)

Few of the communities that now have significant Latino populations – including many undocumented – are prepared for it, and of course the civil rights issues involving the Latino residents are myriad, from INS crackdowns to school attendance to police brutality and more. They constitute a critical mass for discrimination and scapegoating – I heard over and over that the state’s Democratic Senator, Ben Nelson wants to ride a tight race to re-election in this mostly-Red state on a tough-on-immigration platform – but far from a critical mass for political influence.   It occurred to me on this trip, and not for the first time, that having in having a large presence in many communities, in being depended upon for cheap, easily exploitable labor that the economy could not function without, and in being essentially voiceless, or at least without meaningful political representation, immigrant worker communities have much in common with African-American slaves of the 18th and 19th century, and with Blacks in apartheid South Africa.  Yes, slaves were brought here against their will, and today’s immigrants (save some who are literally in debt bondage) come “voluntarily,” fleeing abject poverty and misery at home. But it’s an uncomfortable parallel, nonetheless.

There are also 5,000 Sudanese in Nebraska, an interesting fact. A few other nuggets of social justice data:  here, as everywhere, people of color are overrepresented in the justice system.  I learned from the Supreme Court/Nebraska Bar Minority and Justice Task Force that there are only a handful of Blacks among hundreds of judges, but a 12 percent non-white statewide non-white population somehow becomes a 41 percent prison population. Under the draconian post-September 11 immigration laws, there are 2,500 immigrants awaiting “removal” to their home countries for technical immigration violations or legal transgressions, often quite minor. Nebraska, which has the only “unicameral” legislature in the country – some pictures to follow – is about to experience term limits, which will clear the body of many longterm members, including thirty-year veteran Ernie Chambers, who Milo and I encountered walking his dog in a t-shirt (Senator Chambers, not his dog) on the capitol grounds.  It is the conventional wisdom that the term limits movement was primarily motivated by a desire by the powers-that-be to get rid of Chambers, a social-justice champion who has been in the forefront of every progressive measure in the state for decades. Nebraska recently became one of the relatively few states so far whose legislature restored voting rights to former prisoners. Apparently the majority-Republican (though officially non-partisan) unicameral was so moved by the personal stories it heard that it even overrode the Republican Governor’s veto.

I was very impressed by the diligence and idealism – really, the highest adherence to professional ethics and standards – of the State Bar group I met with.  (Though their headquarters across the street from the Capitol is named for the late Senator Roman Hruska, whose enduring legacy is his assertion, in defense of one of the less impressive Nixon Supreme Court nominees, that mediocrity has a right to representation on the Supreme Court. )  This bar enlightenment is true in so many states, and it gives some slight hope about Harriet Miers, if the right doesn’t kill her off soon. And all across the country, churches are living the gospel by standing up for the most powerless – witness the Methodists’ investment in immigrant advocacy, and the Catholic parish which hosted my meeting with the meatpackers. Those who lament that the right owns religion are looking in the wrong places.

Here are some more photos from my visit.  I took an early morning walk  in the downtown Old Market district, not far from the Missouri River:

Omaha's very own flatiron building:

High point of the trip, architecturally, was a visit to the Nebraska Capitol about an hour's drive away in Lincoln, which is by local standards, and by the standards of other state capitols, a skyscraper -- the only other one to my knowledge being North Dakota's, which the state legislature bought from a Chicago developer in a Depression fire sale.

Lincoln himself greets those who enter the capitol by its front door:

This picture , of the statue "The Sower," which tops the dome, was VERY hard to take, but gives you a sense of the view from the top.  (Actually, this is the only one I didn't take,  but scanned from a nice thank-you card the Appleseed staff gave me.)

Beautiful tile and mosaic work throughout:

These are the doors to the old Senate Chamber before the legislature went unicameral:

There is a domed room of murals at the top of the building, most of which depict women in various leadership roles:

Well, I see this seems to be a nurse serving food to wounded soldiers -- kind of traditional -- but the others didn't come out as well.  On the ground floor are several corridors of busts of prominent Nebraskans,  including Willa Cather (who seems like she has a halo here, Buffalo Bill Cody, and, at right, Father Flanagan, founder of Boys Town.

One quite prominent Nebraskan I haven't mentioned so far is Williams Jennings Bryan, the prairie populist (and opponent of Darwin and Darrow) who ran and lost three times as the Democratic Presidential nominee.  Upon his death, Bryan left his house and property to a local hospital in Lincoln, and a big medical complex has grown up around the home, Fairview, which is said to have been bought with the proceeds from his writing and speaking tours.  All the same, I thought it was a pretty grand house for a "great commoner:"

 

Bryan had a tremendous gift for the florid turn of phrase that is missing from our public oratory these days, and let's hope these words of his, chiseled on the base of the statue that stands in front of Fairview, come to prove true for the immigrant meatpackers struggling to be included in the economic and political life of the U.S., in Nebraska and elsewhere:

London Musings

Since I arrived in London on Sunday, the city has been gripped by a heat wave.  It's been in the 90's each day.  There have been many quite hot days in each of the last several summers -- probably global warming coming to roost -- but the city is still quite unequipped for it.  Almost nothing is air-conditioned, and particularly sweltering is the Underground, which is further underground than in New York or most cities.  To take a crowded rush-hour train in those conditions, especially in a suit and tie, is to emerge as if from a sauna.  To make matters worse, the other day the elevators in a particularly far-underground station -- Covent Garden, I think -- were malfunctioning or so horrendously overcrowded that I joined the hundreds making their way to the surface by climbing 193 steps.  Try that for fun, sometime.

I've been coming to London for fifteen years or so pretty regularly, so have come to know the city fairly well and have some friends here.  It's steadily become, in many respects, more cosmopolitan and more international and multi-racial and -cultural in feel.  The news readers on the BBC and other stations seem to come from all over the globe, and the crowd last night listening to jazz in the Crypt Cafe at St. Martin-in-the-Fields was more integrated than one you might find in New York.  (I was there playing hooky from a worthy human rights event celebrating the 60th birthday of Aung San Suu Kyi with readings and a panel discussion; at one point I looked down during the jazz to find my foot resting on an actual crypt -- that of George Wheeler, "son of Samuel and Sarah Wheeler of this parish who departed this life on the 16th February 1824 aged 2 years 10 months and 24 days.")

Tonight I am joining friends for a production of Hedda Gabler in the West End.  A strange thing about London theater is that it seems you can walk into the box office the day before, or even the hour before the performance of a hit play and get tickets in any section, much cheaper than you could in New York -- where, of course, you have to book months in advance for the hottest shows.  Perhaps someone could explain that to me.

Yesterday morning I visited my friend Sayu Bhojwani, former Commissioner of Immigrant Affairs for New York City, who moved here with her husband after marrying last year and now works for Bloomberg's corporate philanthropy in London.  Visiting the Bloomberg offices -- something I've never done in N.Y. -- was a trip, like something out of the Wizard of Oz.  Lots of security -- they actually take a temporary photo i.d., so you have to wear a lousy picture of yourself around your neck -- but once you are inside, there are beautiful tropical fish tanks, and you are invited to hang out in a snazzy cafeteria where complimentary everything is available, much as you want.