The Conference

Well, we're off to a good start at the First Annual Buddhist Conference. I had a dreadful drive in rush hour traffic out to the tiny camps of the University of the West in Rosemead--a great opportunity to remember the dharma. And, at registration, right away ran into Clyde Grossman of "Do No Harm," an organization that gives away free stuff reminding us of that most basic of all Buddhist principles. Until I traded in my old Prius for a new Prius last year, I had one of his bumper stickers on my car, and posted a picture of it on The Buddha Diaries. I was particularly chuffed because Clyde told me that he had read the entry in my blog that very morning, and that I had managed to put his own feelings about attending the conference precisely into words.

I hung with Clyde for a while, finding a shady spot from which to observe the geeks tribe assemble--over a hundred of us in all, including a good number of young people. Staved off the pangs of hunger with a handful of carrot sticks and a couple of broccoli spears, and had the good fortune to meet up with Ken McLeod, of Unfettered Mind, on the way into the lecture by Shinzen Young. A good, brief opportunity to compare paths, his leading him more than ever into writing; I interested more than ever before in teaching.

Shinzen spoke about his "happiest thought"--the idea, if I have it right, that science and religion will finally put their heads together to create an exponential growth curve in human consciousness, speeding us ever upward into a better world. As readers of The Buddha Diaries may recall from a recent entry, his thinking jibes more with my sister's than my own. I tend to be more pessimistic about human nature. I liked Shinzen's metaphor of the chicken and the egg. It's not the usual conundrum, "which came first?" Shinzen sees the chicken as the teacher, the egg's shell as the delusions of the ego that constrain the student, who pecks away from within to break out into freedom, while the mother hen helps by pecking from the outside. Outside the egg is the world of pure potential. Expanding on this metaphor, he sees not just the student, but humanity itself confined, as yet, inside the shell. The Buddha, then, is perhaps the teacher who will help us escape from the imprisonment in our delusions.

It's a nice thought. There's a good number of us pecking away as best we can, and I suppose that the Buddhist Geeks Conference, as much as anything, is about how we can make the most of the amazing technological power at our disposal to accelerate the action. But it's a tough shell to crack. I drove back home to hear the latest news about the current Washington fiasco, and I regret to say that my hopes are not so high as Shinzen's. Mindfulness and compassion seem to be in pitifully short supply still in our country--as they are, indeed, in the world beyond our borders.

Buddhist Geeks

Today I go a-geeking. I signed up months ago for the first annual Buddhist Geeks conference in Rosemead, California, dreamed up, as you might imagine, by Buddhist Geeks. I woke this morning without the usual flutter of excitement about attending such events; on the contrary, the truth is that I'd rather be in my own little retreat down in Laguna Beach, enjoying a summer off. I don't feel like much of a Buddhist, still less a geek. My technological skills are limited pretty much to doing my blog and answering the endless flood of email. Geeks, I judge, are made of far more computer-literate stuff.

I do have a regular meditation practice, though. And I write The Buddha Diaries--which fact perhaps led me to imagine when I signed up that I might qualify as a Buddhist geek. I sometimes worry that it's impertinent of me to invoke the Buddha's name when my blog is certainly far from preaching the religion. What I try to do--what I hope the blog does--is to explore the vagaries of my mind, following its journeys as a way to live a life examined; and a life, insofar as possible, lived in accordance with what I understand of the teachings of the dharma. With what little I have managed to gather of wisdom along the way, I believe them to be the wisest and most fully human instructions that exist for a life well lived.

So I ask myself what might be playing out in my mind, that I so lack enthusiasm for this worthwhile and interesting event. There is, I think, a genuine fatigue factor. This past week--what with helping our daughter to get moved to her new home and the sadness caused by the death of my friend, Magu--has been filled with activity and fraught with emotion. Then, too, I look back--gratefully, be it said--on a year filled with travel and speaking activities, along with a good deal of writing. My body-mind, a creature of habit, has been looking forward to the annual retreat that normally begins in mid-July, but this year has been postponed until a few days into August.

There's also an absurdly unjustified fear factor that eats away at me somewhere below the level of consciousness. I learned the habit of hiding myself away as a handy means of self-protection as a child, and have never completely unlearned that habit. I do not find it easy to step out into a crowd of strangers--all of whom, I imagine, are much smarter and better informed than I. Better Buddhists. Better geeks. I should "know better" at my age. Ken McLeod, who will be speaking at the conference, writes of these "reactive patterns" that stand between us and the happiness and clarity we seek. I find it helpful to bring them into conscious view by writing them out, as I am doing now.

So I'm headed out this afternoon to attend the first evening's keynote speech by Shinzen Young. I did a couple of my earliest retreats with this excellent teacher, and it will be good to hear him speak again. His topic is "Towards a Science of Enlightenment." I'm sure there is a lot to learn. I wish I could take all of you with me...

REBELS IN PARADISE:

The Los Angeles Art Scene and the 1960s

by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp

I arrived in Southern California in the summer of 1968, in time for the last year of the 1960s decade. A poet, newly appointed to teach Comparative Literature at USC, I'd had little contact with the world of contemporary art--and therefore no idea at all that I had arrived here on the cusp of the transformation of Los Angeles from hick town at the opposite end of the country from the serious center of post-war art (New York) into a contestant for an estimable place in the international art scene. It was not until after the seminal Ferus Gallery had closed that I slipped sideways into this effervescent action as a writer in the early 1970s.

So I missed the 1960s, at least the years that Hunter Drohojowska-Philp writes about in her new book. Since my wife and her family were much involved, however, I soon caught on to the excitement of the recent past and the hopes for a thriving future. I sat down at the family dining table with Ed Kienholz and Claes Oldenburg, and met many of the charismatic leading characters from the pages of this book. Many of them (us!) are still around and still active on the scene--some of them, at this point, septa- and octogenarians. Hard to believe! In Drohojowska-Philp's narrative, they all seem so young--as indeed they were.

Those were heady times, and the author captures them in a swift-paced, cheerful romp as she guides us through the decade, pausing long enough to make her entertaining story at once human and informative; she fleshes out the often cocky, combative personalities of her major players, evoking their friendships and their sometimes intense rivalries. The artists, some native to Southern California, others attracted by the promise of beaches, gorgeous girls (or, in David Hockney's case, the boys!) and, principally, of freedom from all the old ways of doing things, are at the center of everything. We know them through their work: the Eds--Moses, Kienholz and Ruscha--Robert Irwin, Craig Kauffman, Billy Al Bengston, Joe Goode, John Altoon, Wallace Berman, George Herms, Lloyd Hamrol and many others, including, later, John Baldessari, whose influence has been more powerful than theirs in succeeding generations; and through the generally familiar lore of the Ferus Gallery, Barney's Beanery, Artforum, the Pasadena Art Museum, Chouinard and Otis, and so on. So far as contemporary art was concerned, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art was barely past its birth throes.

Drohojowska-Philp highlights the L.A. artists' drive for independence, from each other and, importantly, from the New York establishment and East Coast artists like Oldenburg, Johns and Rauschenberg, and also Andy Warhol, whose career was effectively launched by the efforts of Irving Blum at Ferus. While there was some early interface between galleries here and there, it seems true that even the most important of Los Angeles artists have received scant attention from New York, and instead have more successfully leap-frogged "the pond" for more friendly reception on the European continent. A motif of Drohojowska-Philp's narrative is the macho posturing of "the studs", and the struggle of women like Judy Chicago, Miriam Shapiro and Helen Pashgian against the tide of powerful masculine energy.

The other players are the curators and the gallery dealers: Walter "Chico" Hopps and Henry Hopkins, Irving Blum, Virginia Dwan, Nicholas Wilder--again, the names are familiar. And the handful of pioneer collectors, among them Fred and Marcia Weisman, Stanley and Elyse Grinstein, Ed Janss, and my own in-laws, Dorothy and Michael Blankfort, whose excellent adventure with the Yves Klein "Immaterial" is accurately recorded in Drohojowska-Philp's book.

The author's research is meticulous, even exhaustive. Even for one familiar with much of the material, there's plenty here that's new, refreshing, and often titillating, particularly when it comes to shifting personal relationships and slightly scurrilous detail. Still, she does manage to balance out the purely entertaining "who slept with whom" scuttlebutt with a useful chronology of biographical and other factual information. She establishes the context of a cultural scene in which rock music--and its musicians--and entertainment industry notables like Dennis Hopper freely intermingle with the city's artists. We learn about the when and where and how of key art works like Kienholz's "Back Seat Dodge" and those famous soup cans, much of the information gleaned from the author's numerous first-hand interviews with key players. How much of the latter is colored by nostalgia, self-interest or simple forgetfulness is anybody's guess, but it certainly makes for a lively read.

Since the 1960s, of course, things have not been a smooth progression from those halcyon days in the Los Angeles art community. The promise seemingly established by the roaring sixties has been only sporadically fulfilled. Important galleries have come and gone--some of them to New York. Think Gagosian. Collectors have teased our institutions with the gift of their collections, only to withdraw them. Artists have experienced the frustration of neglect by major national galleries and art publications. The hegemony of the New York art machine has proven hard to shake.

And yet the legacy of the pioneers Drohojowska-Philp writes about is an enduring one. Their cheerful rebellion against all things authoritarian opened the door for the wonderfully diverse and constantly shifting art scene that thrives in Southern California today and is recognized throughout the world as perhaps the most important center for innovative artists and their work. This book does us all a favor in recalling that history with a panache that matches its own.

NORWAY--AND THE FATE OF THE HUMAN SPECIES

I have been thinking about those dreadful events in Norway and following their aftermath with the same kind of horror I felt when the World Trade Center was attacked, now nearly ten years ago. When you think of it, proportionate to the population, the death toll was even greater for that country than ours. From this distance, those small Scandinavian countries have seemed like peaceful Edens, protected from the turmoil taking place in the rest of the world. Now that illusion has been shattered, TOO, even for those of us so far removed from that corner of the world.

The poison of extreme right-wing conservatism, it seems, is seeping into every part of the global body. We have seen its effects here in the U.S., not only in the mass-murderous bombing in Oklahoma City 1995, but also in more recent acts of violence, like the attacks on doctors at abortion clinics. On a less murderous though still inordinately destructive scale, it now pervades the US Congress and threatens to mindlessly destroy the country's already fragile economy. The right, of course, has no monopoly on violent or other extremist tactics, but it does seem that the current manifestations come from that direction. Even the religiously-inspired fanaticism originates in fundamentalist rather than progressive thought.

But the phenomenon runs deeper than its political or religious pretexts. The toxicity of extremism is produced, as I see it, by human fear. We fear the Other, just as we fear what we don't know. For this self-appointed Norwegian executioner, it was the fear of immigrants, fear of Islam, fear of multi-culturalism--a fear that morphed easily, it seems, into its dark side, hatred. We have been hearing and reading about the spread of this particular poison on the European continent in recent years, and about the alarming return of right-wing conservatism. "Return" is perhaps not the right word, because this is something different from the territorial nationalism the produced the scourge of Nazism; this conservatism is pan-national. It is sadly as rife in my own "old country", England, as it is in France, Germany, the Netherlands and other European nations. And it is inspired chiefly--if I have it right--by the rising tide of immigration from the south and east, from Africa, and the Middle East, from Pakistan and South East Asia.

I'm no expert in the migration of populations, but I believe that our species is witnessing a major, millennial evolutionary shift in this regard. To support the exponential growth in our human population, we have exploited the planet, its climates and its resources to the point where the inhabitants of vast areas of the globe can no longer find the means for survival in their ancestral location. In desperation--and, interestingly, as in ancient times--many are forced to migrate in order to ensure their own survival, and in increasingly alarming numbers. There is a seemingly unstoppable population shift under way; people with different mores, different religions, different cultures, different dietary habits are moving in mass into areas that do not understand or welcome them. The resultant friction can turn, as it did in Norway, into a volatile explosive force.

Is it possible for us to turn an instinctive fear into tolerance and acceptance soon enough for the species as a whole to survive? Do we have that wisdom and that will? This is a serious--well, a deadly serious--question. On this score, my sister is more of an optimist than I am. In our past conversations--she in England, I in distant California--she has expressed her belief that we're in the midst of a great, paradigmatic shift in human consciousness which might lead--and here I extrapolate--to a more spiritual orientation and a more mutually tolerant world. If she is right, we could envision a world where wealth and health, material well-being and the resources to support it would be more equitably shared.

I tend to be less of an optimist. It's clear that, if it is to survive, humanity will have to re-think itself and the systems it has developed for its safety and survival. Capitalism, as a financial system, is creaking at the joints and shows signs of collapsing in unmanageable national debts and deficits and no longer "fair" but wildly unbalanced trade; and communism is all but dead. Traditional political systems are likewise failing under pressure: the distinction between liberal and conservative has become, depending on how you look at it, either non-existent or so vast as to be unbridgeable. Social systems are similarly no longer as functional as they once were in organizing societies and providing a network of security; the definition of "classes" is blurred beyond recognition, and what once were sturdy barriers no longer hold. Even the concept of "family" is changing, with divorce now as commonplace as the extended and, more recently, the non-traditional marriage.

No wonder there are those of us who are clinging desperately to the past and seeking its reinstatement. But there's no going back. These changes--good or bad, no matter--have taken place, are taking place before our eyes. To deny them is to deny reality, which is unhelpful. When I say we need to re-think ourselves, I'm envisioning the need for adaptive changes so radical as to be almost unthinkable. The current stalemate in "the greatest country in the world" suggests to me that we are approaching a no-exit situation; that we shall all, increasingly, find ourselves at loggerheads, unable to find our way around our own prejudices and certainties. I have to say that given what I know about human nature, I see no good outcome short of wars and famines, climatic disasters, and other thus far unimaginable catastrophes.

The planet, of course, will survive with or without us. It may be better off without our troubled and meddlesome species. It would be a shame, however, to squander all the extraordinary achievements we have made in our arts, our science and technology, just because we have failed to learn how to manage our small selves a little better. It's past time for us to look our fear in the face and acknowledge that it is capable of bringing about our imminent destruction.

HONORING MAGU...

I learned yesterday morning that my friend Magu had died. It's only a week since I posted a tribute that I wrote at the request of his family, as a part of their effort to raise funds from the sale of his work--in part to help defray mounting medical costs, in part to assure the safe-keeping of his legacy. I was saddened, of course, but not surprised by the news. When I visited him last week in hospital he was in palliative care and, at one point announced with a deep, heartfelt sigh that he wished only for it to be over.

Magu chose his own way, maintaining his dignity and his integrity to the end. Curiously, we did not know each other very well in any normal sense. We met only infrequently along the way, and never spent a great deal of time together. It was about six months before his death that we re-connected; I drove over to his studio in Pomona and we spent several hours pondering his art and mutual thoughts about the art world in a conversation I recorded, thinking perhaps to use it for an "Art of Outrage" segment. Afterwards, he treated me generously to lunch at his favorite Mexican restaurant in the neighborhood, where he was well known, and greeted as though he were the mayor.

I've been trying to come up with an explanation of the bond I know we both felt, despite our very obvious differences: he from East Los Angeles, proud of his Mexican heritage, Latin to his core and I, Anglo-Saxon both by birth and upbringing, much more contained in everything I think and do... I hate to admit it, but I don't even speak Spanish. Absurdly, for one who lives in Southern California, I speak fluent French and German. I should have started to learn the language when I arrived in these parts, still young enough to learn fairly easily. But I didn't. Spending time with Magu, I wished I had and felt somehow disrespectful for the neglect.

Writing briefly yesterday to Magu's son, I came up with the word "recognition." Our common ground was that feeling when you look into another person's eyes and think, "I know you and you know me." Way beyond our superficial differences, I saw the integrity and the humanity in him, and I like to think that he saw mine in me. It's a rare feeling in my experience, and one to be treasured for its rarity. I am sad that we did not spend more time together, and sad that we have lost him at too young an age--he was only seventy at the time of his death. But I feel like a better person to have known him.

I spent the day yesterday on the task of converting my tribute into an obituary. I'm not sure, yet, where it will appear, but you'll certainly find it in due course at Magulandia. Please join me, as and how you can, in honoring the memory of this man and his gifts to the community of artists everywhere.

We are losing artists. Just a couple of days ago I learned of the death of Lucian Freud. And a short while ago, there was Cy Twombley...

THE TOUR

The Tour de France came to its familiar conclusion on the Champs Elysees yesterday, and I was delighted that Cadel Evans won. Happy, too, for his compatriots down under. Australia must be hopping like a kangaroo. (Odd that I should hear from an Australian reader of The Buddha Diaries that same day.) It was a well-deserved one, and one this rider has been working for these many years. It was nice, too, to see the two brothers Schleck share the podium with him, in second and third place. I was rooting for them over the dour Spaniard, Alberto Contador, who has already walked away with the Tour three times.

So, yes, I did watch. I had some hesitation about watching this year, after all the doping scandals that have undermined the sport and tainted so many of its great champions. The jury is still out on some of them--including Contador and, sadly, Lance Armstrong. But like a good addict, I allowed myself to get hooked again and watched every grueling stage from start to finish, twenty one of them in all. Thanks to the marvels of modern TV technology, I did speed through the commercials and the boring parts--which consists, usually, of the first couple of hours, when a breakaway group speeds up ahead of the main peloton without, usually, much expectation of still leading at the end. The peloton is a curious, shift-shaping, amoebic creature, a hundred and more cyclists in a meandering but somehow purposeful bunch, and more often than not they swallow up their prey before the finish line. It's the last few minutes of each stage that are gripping, with individual riders vying desperately for the glory of winning a stage.

It's all rather complicated, but fascinating to watch the strengths and weaknesses of men emerge when they are put to the test. You have to admire the grit that takes them up long, steep mountainsides, sometimes between dangerously pressing ranks of cheering spectators. (What is it, I wonder, that compels men with pot bellies to shed most of their clothes at the top of icy mountains and run alongside the riders shrieking wildly? Is it the beer?) There is no other sporting event, I think, that demands so much of its athletes. They need every last ounce of their energy each day, simply to survive.

I was glad, too, that the American team of Garmin-Cervelo turned in the best team performance. They had made much of their strict, exemplary anti-doping policy, and proved a point when they finished with three riders in the top twenty, even though they had lost their team leader, Dave Zabriskie, to an earlier crash. The New York Times published an article yesterday, "A Doping-Free Tour de France?"--with a question mark at the end of the title. At least one rider was disqualified for breaking the rules on this score.

It did seem that efforts to control this problem have paid off. Still, if only because of the past history, I watched the most astounding feats of strength and stamina this year with a regretful touch of skepticism. The spectacle of Alberto Contador, a champion whose performance had been frankly indifferent thus far this year, streaking up ahead of the pack on the infamous Alpe d'Huez, left me unhappily suspicious. The same, even more sadly, with the incredible time-trail performance of Cadel Evans, which won him the Tour. The pleasure is tainted with the edge of suspicion: did they or didn't they?

It all comes down to a matter of trust. And professional cycling is not alone in having undermined our trust in the fairness of the playing field. Nor, indeed, are sports in general, despite the particular attention they receive. Can we really take the good faith of business on trust any more? Can we trust the media, responsible for providing us with the information that we need? Can we trust the fairness of the political election process? I fear that as we humans continue to overpopulate the world and find ourselves in increasingly vicious and competitive battle for survival, we become more ready to cheat others in our struggle for primacy. It's a matter of doing whatever it takes to win. In this, the Tour de France is not some deplorable exception, but rather simply a mirror of our culture.

Leave the House? Oh, no!

I smiled, of course, when I read MandT's cheerful response to my "cobwebs in the attic" post yesterday. "Don't clean out the attic...," it read. "Just leave the house... :)"

But I have to admit it bugged me a bit, too. It lodged uncomfortably in one of those odd crannies in the brain and kept nagging at me all day. When I thought about it, I realized what my problem was. The only "house" my mind has is this body that I walk around in--and I have no intention of leaving it just yet if I can help it. Yes, it creaks and groans a bit, but it's still serviceable enough, and I have things I still want to do.

Besides, I know there's real value in the work of cleaning out the attic. It's good to discover what I'm storing away in all those old boxes and steamer trunks, because then I'm in a good place to let it go. I'm much more likely to hold on to it if it's hidden away, because then I have an excellent excuse: after all, I wouldn't want to trash stuff that might turn out to be valuable--like my grandfather's mint copy of Martin Chuzzlewit or that stamp album from my boyhood replete with Victorian penny blacks. And I hope it's obvious that I'm not talking about the material stuff and its monetary value; like the attic itself, I mean this as no more than a metaphor for things of deeper and more lasting significance.

There are things packed away in there, too, that could have a hold on me without my even knowing it--that old emotional baggage that tends to get stuck in often ignored corners of the mind and gum up its smooth operation. It behooves me to bring them out into the light and examine them before I trash them, because otherwise who knows what messy remnants I might leave behind.

So, no. Assuming that I'm going to hang out on this planet a bit longer, better to keep working on the only house I have. And I do realize that this is not exactly what MandT had in mind when offering that kindly, presumably tongue-in-cheek advice! For which, and for these further thoughts, I thank them...

IN THE ATTIC

Ellie returns from up north today, and George and I will both be happy to see her. George has been very subdued these past few days, mostly hanging around by the door as though awaiting her return. He looks at me questioningly sometimes, and sleeps close at night. Don't try telling me that dogs are less intelligent than we humans are. It's just intelligence of a different kind. In some respects, they are way ahead of us.

He had to spend a good deal of the day yesterday on his own, while I was out helping our daughter, Sarah, with the packing to get ready for her move on Sunday. It's amazing how much junk we manage to accumulate in our lives. I found myself wishing that she'd just throw a lot of it away, or at least have a giant garage sale when she gets to the new house. It's a lot more spacious, but it can still get cluttered really quickly if she doesn't take care.

Not my business, I remind myself. But it reminds me of all the clutter in my own life; and not only the material stuff, but the clutter in my mind. This morning, as I sat in meditation, I could not help but notice how full it was, like an old attic nobody has visited for years, where I have simply thrown the stuff I was too lazy to take care of and chose, instead, to store away somewhere where I wouldn't have to see it. It's all now covered with layers of dust and draped with stringy cobwebs. I try to pick my way through it, appalled at all the boxes that I dread to open and the stacks of ancient and decaying books.

Have I mentioned that I have returned to working on the book that I shelved a few months ago, in favor of something more like a sequel to Persist? It is called, tentatively, This Is Not Me, from my favorite mantra, "This is not me, this is not mine, this is not who I am"; and the subtitle might be "Shedding Delusions." It's about, precisely, clearing out that attic I'm talking about--clearing out those old parts of myself that I no longer need, but insist on clinging onto like that clutter in the attic. It's about looking for clarity, for that clear, bright mind that I hear spoken of, but have never quite managed to find.

FOOD

I'm actually rather pleased with myself. I stepped on the bathroom scale this morning and confirmed that I have lost ten pounds of excess weight since returning from the Midwest a couple of weeks ago. I came back five pounds heavier than my already unacceptable high, so this is progress.

The why? I suppose there's an element of vanity in it. I have not been happy with what I see when I happen to glance into a mirror--that growing protrusion below the rib cage. I have caught myself looking at men of my age, or younger, and wondering whether they are doing better in this department, or worse than I. I have taken heart when I judge them to be girthier than myself, thinking, well, I'm not yet that bad. I have envied those who do not seem to share my problem at all, whose bellies are flat and whose shirts fit tightly over them.

Then there's the comfort factor. It's measured in part by the way I fit--or sometimes no longer fit--into my clothes. The pants are noticeably tighter at the waist. I have a row of perfectly good shirts in my closet that I no longer wear because they button too tight around the middle. More important, though, is the discomfort I register when I wake up in the morning and feel weighted down by those extra, unneeded pounds; or, walking--my favorite exercise--with the heavy awareness that I'm stressing my body with the addition of one of those ten pound weights I toy with in the gym. Even when I sit in meditation, I am aware of the downward pull of gravity, and it distracts me with self-deprecating thoughts.

Besides appearance and comfort, there's the health consideration. I do not think of myself as obese. Far from it. I have always presented as a rather lean man, and have thought of myself as such. The weight has accumulated very gradually, pound by pound, over twenty years without my being motivated to do much about it. It has crept up on me. Now, as I approach my seventy-fifth birthday next week, I can ignore it no longer. If I wish to live in reasonably good health for my latter years, however many--or few!--they be, it behooves me to cast off some of this heavy burden. I have done well these past couple of weeks, and am motivated to continue the good work.

The how? No special "diet." I have been consciously eating less. I have been limiting my bread intake to one item per day--an English muffin or a single slice. I have been avoiding such things as potatoes and pasta. I have avoided wine: a glass of the stuff seems to add immediately to the bloat. (An evening shot of vodka does not seem to have the same effect.) Most of all, however, it's simple consciousness. I think about what I eat before I eat it, as I eat it, and again after. I make better choices. Last night, for example, with Ellie out of town (she's working with artists up in Portland, Oregon) George and I went out to a local restaurant--one where I could find a table outside so that George could sit with me--and I studied the menu much more carefully than I might have done before. I chose a tabouleh salad with grilled salmon on the side and, as a treat, a glass of chardonnay.

I left feeling virtuous. My bill was $14.14, and my step was light as I walked back to the car. And was rewarded, this morning when I stepped on the scale, with another pound swept away.

MAGU

I have a friend in need of help. You can read about him below. He's a man who has made an important contribution to the world through his art, his personal inspiration and his service to the common good; and who now finds himself caught up in the pernicious web of our national health disgrace. You can find out more about the effort to preserve Gilbert "Magu" Lujan's legacy at Magulandia; and see a selection of his artwork here. In the meantime, here's the piece I wrote to support that effort at the request of family and friends.

Not many men are given to be notable cultural pioneers as well as prolific and endlessly inventive artists in their own right. Count this one man, Gilbert “Magu” Lujan, among them. He is first and foremost an artist. Visit his studio, and you’ll be witness to the spectacle of a teeming, vibrant output of art works in a stunning variety of media—from assemblages of sticks and twigs to whimsical ceramic sculptural objects and a plethora of prints and canvases. This is the heart of Magulandia.

What’s remarkable about this work is the energy with which it gathers a rich texture of cultural history and intensely personal symbol in its extravagantly colorful embrace. It’s a feast for the eye—but especially also for the mind. Magu’s wealth of imagery merges the traditions of art brut and folk art, Meso-American mythology and ritual, the Chicano culture of low-riders, murals and graffiti, the religious imagery of New World Catholicism and the political and sociological imperatives of socialism—along with the savvy self-awareness of contemporary American art since World War II. And if that’s a mouthful, so be it. Such is the range of Magu’s vision and creative reach.

All this, for the artist, is living tradition, genetic information as vital and fluid as the bloodstream. So let it be clear that this merger is embodied first and foremost in the actuality of each discreet object of Magu’s creation, whose seductive, often humorous, sometimes bawdy, always joyful allure is just the doorway into a complex of deeply human meanings and emotions. As with all good artworks, though, once we have exhausted those meanings we always return to that point where we look at them and just say, Yes.

The pioneering social work for which Magu is widely known proceeds from his creative energy, the art work. His efforts as an emerging artist and student in the master’s program at the University of California, Irvine in 1960s and the early 1970s changed the course of art history. Famously, at that time, he brought together Los Four—along with himself, the artists Carlos Almaraz, Frank Romero and Beto de la Rocha—who breached the sober, Euro-centric walls of academia and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art with the exuberant artistic energy that had been gathering on the streets—and particularly the walls—of East Los Angeles. A fervent, dedicated theorist and organizer, Magu was soon recognized as the fulcrum for burgeoning chicanismo, tirelessly promoting an alternative view to the dominant Western aesthetic and re-invigorating it with both a renewed social conscience and Latin passion.

Meet Magu in person and you’ll find him endlessly garrulous, spirited in his arguments, as eager to share his own ideas as he is to hear those of others. A born educator, he has the gift of inspiring those with whom he comes in contact. It is this quality, surely, that has made of him a leader in his own community of artists—a mantle that he nonetheless wears with modesty and circumspection.

In the constellation of our contemporary culture, Gilbert “Magu” Lujan occupies a unique and vitally important place.

For Your Sunday...

I know I haven't been very attentive to The Buddha Diaries in recent days. All kinds of things going on, including our annual move down to Laguna Beach for the summer weeks. We're down here now, but I still have to return to Los Angeles for a couple of days next week, to help our daughter move into her new house; and then again the following week, for the first annual Buddhist Geeks conference. So... I am distracted.

But anyway, here for your Sunday delight are some pictures of a kind of line-drawing sculpture created by our friend the artist Valerie Wilcox.

She brought it to our group meeting last Tuesday, and the pictures arrived today at my request. It's table-top size, kind of human scale--if you think of a rib cage. And it quivers at the touch. It's kind of bendy and squeezy, too, with a slightly eerie life of its own. I like the way it works with its own shadow, which becomes the two-dimensional drawing that the line no longer is, since it found its third dimension. I like its delicate, white, bony quality, which takes my mind back through eons of time to the dinosaurs, making something very big and mythical and ancient out of something quite small and new. I like the spontaneity and whimsy with which the line meanders from its one end to the other, a squiggle brought to life. I like its lack of sculptural pretension and its humorous creature-liness. I hope you like it, too--and for many different reasons than my own. Which is after all what art is all about.

Metta to all! Have a happy Sunday!

FOR TODAY...

... I have a couple of new posts on my Vote Obama 2012 site, which will undoubtedly get me into trouble with my friends. Please check them out.

HAWKS...

I believe we must have a hawk’s nest somewhere nearby, in our Los Angeles neighborhood. We have been hearing their strange, brief whistling calls for days now, and we spot them often, perched atop a telephone pole or in one of our tall eucalyptus trees or swooping in long arcs over the garden. This one...

... spotted the other evening toward sunset, had the fluffy look of a fledgling. To judge by the different sources of their calls, I’d say there are three or four of them out there, and that they have been busy these past few days with their preliminary flying lessons. All guesswork, really. Or fantasy. But it’s a delight to have them around.

I wonder if they’ll be disturbed by the work that’s starting today in our yard. It’s a noisy annual two-day job, to trim the trees and cut back the tall hedges on either side of our long garden...

... and the guys arrived this morning early to get started. They work hard and cheerfully, these men, in the hot sun all day, clambering up their ladders with clippers and noisy chain saws and trimmers...

... and carting away the debris up the steep steps at the side of the house to the machine that chews it all up and spits it out.

It’s a (slightly perverse?) pleasure to watch them. A sedentary character myself, I marvel at the strength and grace and energy that goes into their work, and the spirit that they bring to it. We have good reason to be grateful to such men, who readily go about the kind of labor that no longer much appeals to their more privileged brothers in this country, where the expansion of the “middle class” since the end of World War II has left the concept of a “working class” behind—a phenomenon related, surely, to the disrepute into which the word “socialism” has fallen. Forgotten, it seems to me sometimes, are the values and the dedication to social justice that went into the great cultural changes of the past century—many of which are the result precisely of the socialism that is so much despised by those who have benefited from it.

The whole notion of social “classes” is a quaint one in today’s infinitely complex world. It belongs more appropriately to earlier times, when the socially or, later, the financially privileged held the reins of power, for a long time unquestioned by those beneath them in rank or fortune. Now that our precursors have fought so successfully, in many ways, for equality of rights, it is time for us to radically re-evaluate the way in which we establish our relationships. On the economic front, in this shrunken globe (the “flat world” that Thomas L. Friedman writes about) neither capitalism nor socialism is working very well for humankind. Just as we need to evolve toward some more equitable and functional economic system, so also do we need, at the same time, to be ready to make far-reaching changes in the hierarchies and ideologies that divide us culturally.

In short, we’re going to have to find better ways for us to “all get along” as global fellow-travelers. It’s pretty clear by now that the old models are no longer working. Divisions by wealth, class, race, sex, religion—these do not help, but rather endanger us further, along with our already endangered home. If our species is to survive, we still have a good deal of adaptation to accomplish. We are merely foolish if we insist on clinging to our old ways when they are past their usefulness. And yet the more the way of life to which we have become accustomed is threatened, the more resistant we become to change.

Change will happen, of course, whether we want it to or not. My guess is that a millennial shift will have taken place in human consciousness by the end of the current century, if we manage to survive that long. It would be nice to think that I’d be around to see what our world looks like in the year 2200; but I’m not betting on it. In the meantime, there's this...

Those Smooth Young Men in Business Suits

I know the old cliche that looks don't tell the whole story, and understand that it's risky to make judgments based exclusively on face value, but...

I look askance at the clean-cut appearance and the earnest, fresh young faces of these (mostly) men--people like David Cameron, in England, James Murdoch and Andy Coulson, implicated currently in the News Corporation scandal; our own Eric Cantor, Rand Paul and Paul Ryan, guiding spirits in the Republican assault on compassionate government in this country; the current crop of tax-and employee-cutting governors; the Grover Norquists, the Jack Abramoffs--and the Rex Reeds of the pulpit. George W. Bush? It seems to me that they are not intentionally evil, but rather true believers in themselves, their policies, their own rectitude--which makes them doubly scary. They apparently skipped the basic ethics class at college... or perhaps it's just that they were brought up in a culture in which ethical values were routinely trumped by expediency in every aspect of their lives. Their vision is narrowed to the immediate win; it fails to encompass anyone who does not share their social, economic or--dare I say it?--racial status.

I'm coming to believe that such people simply know no better. What is truly worrisome is that they have come to wield so much influence on the lives of virtually every person on this planet. Their bland self-assurance invites no question or discussion, and they are willing to do no matter what to assure their ascendance. For them, it seems, the end always justifies the means, and they believe unfalteringly in the ends that they propose. Reason is not what guides or drives them; indeed, they are impervious to reason when it conflicts with their assumptions. Even science is subordinated to dogma and conviction.

They appear to be entirely unobjectionable, in some cases even charming. To say they are well-spoken is to concede the glibness of their argument, but not its content. If there's an innocent air about them, it's because they are actually guileless; they surely believe that they are toiling for the benefit of humankind because they are blind to the bigger picture of human suffering. Perhaps--is this paternalistic on my part?--they are just too young; perhaps they have been spoiled by the material comfort and the protectedness of the culture in which they were raised. I find it hard to believe that anyone who has experienced or witnessed real suffering at first hand could share their views and policies as ardently as they.

I'm sure they think of themselves as hard-headed realists, in a world that is hungry for their tough, uncompromising discipline. I see them as hard-hearted ideologues. When I write down this indictment, I find myself wondering if to call someone "hard-hearted" is to transgress the Buddhist value of Right Speech; but then I'm surely not far off the mark when I decide that Right Speech requires reasoned judgment, thoughtful deliberation, and the telling of the truth as I am given to see it. What's important is is not to forget the key element of compassion. I suspect that these young men would probably be unimpressed to know that they receive wishes for true happiness from me in my metta practice every day: no matter, may their hearts be softened toward all living beings.

IT'S MY OWN FAULT...

Well, partly... I was innocently googling a wonderful prose poem by Charles Baudelaire (I won't link to it here because the same thing might happen to you, but it's called "L'Etranger") and got this wildly blinking thing that informed me that I was the "millionth visitor" and that I had "won" a $1,000 gift certificate to Walmart. Well, I'm not so naive as to believe this nonsense, but I could literally find no way out of the manic page without clicking on the "click here" tab. I promise, I tried every which way. In desperation, I clicked to proceed and found myself immediately in this maze of pages asking me for all kinds of information. I'll admit it, it was in part the promise of a $1,000 gift certificate, but I persevered for a while. It was only once we got to the sales pitches that I decided, enough of this, and simply quit my browser.

I should have known to do this sooner. A half hour later, the telephone calls started coming in. Insurance companies. Several, in quick succession. I was, I regret to say, a little angrier with each caller. Then I came down to my office and found a dozen emails, all wanting to persuade me to change my car insurance plan. I responded to each with a curt note, requesting removal from their email lists; but I have to say I have little confidence in their compliance with my request. I'm anticipating a further squall, and perhaps weeks or months of spam.

My fault, okay. A bit of greed involved, honestly, which got me just hooked enough to lower my defenses. Checking back on the page, however (hours later, now, I discover not greatly to my surprise that I'm still the "millionth visitor") I can still find no way out of the trap without shutting down the browser. This sales tactic is dishonest to say the least, if not outright abusive.

This is the second time something similar has happened to me. The first, as I recall, a while ago, came with the offer of a free I-Pad. What a chump! I bought into it, and brought well-deserved misery upon myself. And, needless to add, no I-Pad. It should have been adequate warning. But no, I got suckered in again. There's something to be learned here about my instinctive, human greed. It's not that I'm unaware of it: I watch it coming up, I know in my heart that I'm about to make a fool of myself and that I'll have to pay for it. (This is called "karma", no?) But then I go right ahead and chase after my illusory desire. Next time, I tell myself, take a breath... and head for the exit button before it's too late.

There may be a Santa Claus, Veronica. But there's no free lunch.

THE NEWS OF THE WORLD

The News of the World was known already as a scurrilous rag long before the days when I grew up in England. Even so, I'm sure that the 1950s issues, scandalous though they appeared at the time, would seem like paragons of journalistic restraint when compared to today's tabloids. Those were relatively innocent times.

That said, Rupert Murdoch's abrupt termination of this long-time media cash cow is another piece of cynical self-serving on the part of a man who wields far too great an influence on both sides of the Atlantic--both in the minds of those who eagerly consume his tendentious drivel, from The Wall Street Journal to Fox News, and in our political and economic life. In keeping with Murdoch's intemperately rapacious history, this action was clearly profit-driven, motivated by his move on British Sky Broadcasting and the prospect of expanding the scope of his equally deplorable alternative rag, The Sun. The News of the World--along with its entire crew (except for his protegee, the editor)--had apparently become an expendable embarrassment.

I suppose in part because the reach of my own influence is so small, I find it hard to understand the power- and money-hungry mind. Is building an empire comparable to, say, building a readership? I can boast my own little empire of blogs--three of them, currently, more or less active. I know my ego would not be averse to having a few more readers. Well, a lot more. But it's not something I need enough to change what I'm doing, let alone cater to the proven tastes of others. I also lack that tenacious, purpose-driven gene that leads to a certain kind of success. Persistence is a little different from unalloyed ambition. A man like Rupert Murdoch, it seems to me, is prepared to do literally anything to get his way--an attitude that gives permission to those who serve his interests to follow his example.

The current scandal surrounding the tactics of The News of the World can surely come as no surprise. The politicians who are currently throwing up their hands in horror have for the most part benefited from the Murdoch machine, whether directly or indirectly. On the political front, famously, he giveth... and he taketh away. The media, both print and broadcast, are almost universally infected by his example of bias and sensationalism. It's what sells. We love dirt. We are addicted to tales of violence and exploitation. We love to see the mighty brought low. We are delighted when we see those we have elevated to celebrity status dragged down into the mud with the rest of us. It's all human stuff.

But what's also human is the restraint that serves to hold us back from the worst of our inclinations. Call it conscience. Call it shame. Call it fear of consequences. Call it, at its best, compassion. That's the gene that seems to be lacking in Rupert Murdoch and his ilk. The lust for power and--notably, today--for money seems to recognize no boundaries, no legitimacy for the rights of others. It has reached the point where the rest of us simply allow ourselves not only to be governed by these people, but to be seduced by their example. We are inclined, in certain aspects of our lives (taxes, people?) to do not what we know to be right, but what we can get away with. We do what's expedient to serve our own narrow interests.

So... if "getting the story"--and selling newspapers--means hacking into the cell phone of 13-year old murder victim, so be it. If re-election means voting to cut off funds for cancer research while lining the already well-lined pockets of the super-rich, so be it. Because this, friends, is the "news of the world." And I'm sad to have become so cynical.

(Un)reasonable Doubt?

I have not followed the sensational Casey Anthony trial in any detail. I have been aware of it, of course, through the annoyingly salacious tidbits they love to show on morning television news programs, and the generally tendentious commentary. I was aware of my own prejudices: from the photographs and videos, the young woman did not seem like someone I would want to spend much time with, a generally unsympathetic sort. What I heard of her behavior--odd, at best; and reprehensible, at worst--did not encourage me to believe in her innocence. I suppose I shared the same widely broadcast "information" as any average news watcher. And the same surprise when the verdict was announced yesterday.

So, quite obviously, I am in no position to evaluate the verdict, whether it was a good and fair one or, as many seem to believe, a travesty of justice. I have heard it said, repeatedly, that she "got away with murder." The verdict in the O. J. Simpson trial produced the same kind of response. It was generally agreed that the man was guilty--and I confess I agreed with that conclusion, even though I was only a little better informed in that case than in this one.

It does occur to me, though, that the standard of "reasonable doubt" may have shifted over the past few decades, to a place where it is now an extremely high bar for a prosecuting attorney to leap. Perhaps it is, in some ways, for the good. I think we are more skeptical of the information that reaches us than we were, say, five decades ago. We demand more in the way of "proof" to substantiate our belief. We have learned to distrust authority of all kinds, including the courts, and to have a greater faith in our personal judgment. Through a succession of wars, scandals and crises of all kinds (including the recent economic crisis) we have unlearned the quality of suspending disbelief. In the larger context, a great number of us have no God to provide us with clear answers or absolute judgments. We are thrown back on our own resources, whose limitations we are only too aware of.

Those who decry the verdict in the Casey Anthony trial must be convinced that the jury's doubts were unreasonable. They were not sitting in the courtroom day after day, confronted with reams of conflicting evidence, but nonetheless allow themselves the privilege of absolute certainty. Yet I know of at least one person who was glued to the proceedings on television for a great deal of time and--no matter how tendentious the stream of adverse commentary--came to share the jury's doubt.

The "truth," clearly, is hard to find, even in the most mundane of events and no matter the circumstances. What may seem like purely physical evidence is open to interpretation, and is eventually no more reliable than eyewitness reports have been shown to be. We each have a different view of what is happening before our eyes at this very moment, the "reality" we convince ourselves we perceive. How much more so, then, of the "facts" that are reported to us by others, who infect them with their own personal perceptions, prejudices and convictions?

Doubt, in the modern age, is endemic to our very nature. Which must make things extremely difficult for the prosecuting attorney--and very much easier for the defense. I guess we can only hope they got it right. We can be sure only that we will never know the "truth."

HOPE

I found myself thinking about hope at the beginning of my hour-long sit in our Laguna Beach sangha this past Sunday. My mind was churning specifically around the great hope that Barack Obama managed to inspire in the course of his presidential campaign, and the way in which many of his supporters seem to have lost that hope. I was thinking further that the fulfillment of any hope is really the responsibility of the one who hopes, rather than of the one who inspires it, and that it is therefore unjust, if we have lost our hope, to heap all the blame on Obama's graying head.

When I brought this up in discussion after our sit, one of our sangha members made reference to a remark she had heard from Maya Angelou, to the effect that Obama has not abandoned us; but rather we have abandoned Obama. I think there is truth to that, but I have been unable to source the quotation online, and wonder if anyone can direct me to its origin?

In a more general way, I have become intrigued by the idea of hope, and what the Buddha might have had to say about it. "Metta" is perhaps a kind of hope: "I hope to find happiness, I hope that all living beings might find happiness..." But I see this as more of a wish, sent out as a kind of energy from the mind into the world out-there, a practical effort to make it happen--which is different, I think, from hope.

Hoping (!) to be more informed on this subject, I tried searching Access to Insight--without, I have to say, finding anything particularly useful. Should we think of hope as simply another delusion? From the Christian tradition in which I was raised, I recall the quotation from Paul's first "Epistle to the Corinthians": "And now abideth faith, hope and charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity." (King James version.) I could easily equate "charity" with "compassion," which is surely also the greatest value of the Buddha's teachings. So far, so good.

But "faith" and "hope" are something else entirely. I equate the former with "belief"--not a necessary value, as I understand the Buddhist practice. But what about the latter? If hope is the desire for a positive outcome, it needs to be realized through effort rather than simply experienced as a kind of aspiration. Good results come from "right effort", not just from good intentions. I cannot cling to an abstract "hope" that my mind creates, or that some other person might seem to be offering me. For it to be of value, I need to work it out, and work it through...

Midwest Tour

(Apologies for the ridiculously long entry. It will be moved to the Travel Logs section of "The Buddha Diaires" in due course.)

Thursday, June 23

I think the hardest part of leaving on a trip is not the packing or the logistics, but saying goodbye to George! We left him in the house early in the morning, having arranged for Lisa, his dog-sitter, to pick him up a little later. He had been watching us pack with suspicious eyes, and was looking thoroughly mournful when we closed the door behind us.

The Jet Blue flight from Long Beach to Chicago was a relative breeze. The small airport at Long Beach was jam-packed with travelers, but security was less of a nightmare than at bigger airports like LAX. The hard part of the first day out was the drive from O’Hare to our first overnight stop in Galena—much further than I had anticipated, and endless road construction slowed the heavy traffic out of town and well into the country. After the four-hour flight, it felt interminable.

Still, we did arrive intact in Galena, where we were booked into a comfortable room at the Farmer’s Guest House. Arriving late, however, we found almost every restaurant closed—except for one, a pleasant stroll across the river near the old railroad station, where our nice waitress came back with the news that the kitchen was fresh out of all the main course choices. All that was left was eggs, so we ordered a 10:30PM breakfast.

Friday, June 24

Breakfast, too, the next morning at our B&B. I must report at some point on B&B breakfasts. These good people were kind enough to scramble up a simple egg for us, but I think there must somewhere be a school for B&B breakfast makers, where they are trained to do dreadful things with eggs to make them a) unrecognizable and b) inedible. They bake them or concoct them with various foreign ingredients into something that looks more like a cake or dessert dish than an honest egg. Call me conventional, I like my eggs to look and taste like eggs, preferably alongside a couple of strips of bacon or a tasty sausage. Is that too much to ask?

We had chosen Galena as a stop-over because my son, Jason, with whom we were to spend our weekend in Iowa City, had recommended it as a wonderful mecca for antiques and collectables. There were, indeed, some beautiful old houses...

... but we were surprised—as Jason was, later, when we told him—that the main street...

... was a solid row of gift shoppes and boutiques, with nary an antique in sight. (We have actually not “collected” anything for years now: it has been a while since everybody and his sister discovered that their mother’s old kitchen junk was “worth something,” and stuck a big price on it for the garage sale or swap meet. No bargains any more, and it was the treasure hunt that made it such fun.)

The one remaining antique shop in Galena recommended a detour to Cuba City, where we did find a genuine junk shop or two, plus a sandwich for lunch, on our way into Iowa, via Dubuque and, further south, Mount Vernon. The latter is a pleasant little town that was, in my Iowa days, a favored place for Writers’ Workshop faculty to live—close enough for a reasonable commute to Iowa City, and far enough to find some peace and quiet. I do remember driving out to parties there, with such luminaries as Kurt Vonnegut in attendance.

It was nostalgia time in Iowa City. I went there in the early sixties to attend the Writers’ Workshop as a poet, and was inveigled into doing a PhD in Comparative Literature along the way. I was promised two years; it took me four, plus an extra year as an ABD (“all but dissertation”) when I moved on to Southern California for a teaching job. The best part was being in a place with more poets per square block than anywhere else in the world. The bad part was still being young enough to believe that I was the center of the universe, and behave accordingly. I’ll spare you the details.

It was, though, a great joy to be reunited with my son—now… um, growing into middle age—who was born and has spent the better part of his life in Iowa; and his Mom, Elizabeth, who moved back here from Southern California in the early 1970s. It has been a couple of years since we last saw them, here on the West Coast. We got together, first, at Jason’s house in adjacent Coralville, and were delighted to find so many pieces from Ellie’s parents’ art collection—some of them rescued from neglect in the basement—nicely framed and hung, and obviously loved in their new home. Jason has also recently added a new garage behind the house, and a fine new deck in front, where were greeted with great enthusiasm by Jason’s rescue dog, Louis, a sweet creature...

... but young enough not to be much aware of his own size and strength!

We gathered again for dinner at a fine downtown Italian restaurant, and returned in decent time to our B&B.


Saturday, June 25

First thing was a room change, graciously agreed to by our hosts. Our original room was quite tiny, with no space to unpack or put the contents of our bags. At breakfast (don’t get me started!) we requested “boiled eggs” over the proprietor’s concoction, and were surprised when they arrive hard-boiled and cold. Clearly, we had miscommunicated out intention. After breakfast, Elizabeth drove around to guide us down to the local farmer’s market...

...sheltered, thankfully, from a steady downpour of Midwestern rain. It rained on and off for most of our time in Iowa, in fact, though this did little to spoil our long weekend.

We met up with Jason again at the farmer’s market, and spent the rest of the day in town with him. Here are Ellie and Jason near the Old Capitol, at the center of the campus...

We had heard of the devastating effects of the floods, two years ago, on what had been a fine art museum building down by the Iowa River, and were interested to see the museum’s temporary location in a top-floor wing of the student union. First, though, a nostalgic walk through the natural history displays in McBride Hall, where we used to take the boys to marvel at the stuffed animals in their dioramas. It is more elaborate now than I remember it, with an upper level devoted to the early Iowan cultures, as well as the native flora and fauna. All nicely displayed. We could have spent more time there…

There is only a small part of the museum’s impressive collection on exhibition in the single gallery they now occupy. Much of it—including an important pre-drip Jackson Pollock painting—is on loan to the Figge Muesum in Davenport, Iowa, while decisions are made as to how and where the university museum will find a new home. A great deal of the collection, we hear, is in storage. A shame, because I do remember the great gallery in the old building, severely flooded and now apparently just empty and decaying, a home to birds and rodents. Sounds like a great movie set! Still, the curators have made the most of their small space, particularly for the collections of African art and modern and contemporary ceramics.

Time out for a break back in our (mow more spacious!) B&B room, and off to Elizabeth’s house for the best dinner of our tour. Jason and Louis in attendance...

(Jason here seen with Elizabeth's dog, Rosalind Russell) ... along with an old friend of Jason’s, Melissa...

... who has spent time with us in California and who has for some years now worked for Planned Parenthood. Much talk about the disastrous budget cuts and hostility from those many aggressively misinformed Americans who seek to put an end to its much-needed services. We have good reason to be thankful for people like Melissa, who are determined to stick it out.


Sunday, June 26

Oatmeal for breakfast! Excellent!

We drove out to Jason’s, where Louis jumped on me while I was juggling a cup of hot coffee on the front deck, requiring a quick rinse of clothes and the loan of a pair of shorts. No rain this morning...

Elizabeth arrived for a light breakfast outside...

... but chose not to join us for a late-morning walk. Jason had planned to take us out across the Coralville strip to a hike he had recently discovered out into the country and through the woods, but unhappily we found the access closed for construction of some kind. Instead, we took a walk through the civic center and around the duck pond, then along the tree-shaded residential streets before leaving Jason to prepare for an evening gig with his band at a bar in neighboring Cedar Rapids.

Time enough for a taco lunch in Iowa City and a nap at our B&B before heading out, ourselves, to Cedar Rapids. Jason, though now gainfully employed in a day job with an educational testing company, started out his adult life as a serious, well-educated and dedicated musician. After a few years’ absence, it was good to see him back playing music: he is a fine R&B singer and guitarist, and it was a special pleasure to see him now in great form, very much at ease to be performing with skilled fellow-musicians, and for people who obviously appreciated their songs. It’s so important for creative people of all kinds to keep the flame alive, and I’m happy to know that Jason is doing just that.

The biker bar, though, was not exactly the best environment to hear the music. Nor, obviously, great light for a picture. Jason is in the background.) There were continual conversations going on, and the usual bar activity, so we drank our beer contentedly for an hour or so, then said our goodbyes to Jason before heading out through the country-side...

... to the Amana Colonies for dinner. At seven o’clock on a Sunday evening, the tidy little village of Amana...

... seemed pretty much deserted—until we walked into the restaurant and found almost every table busy with mostly rather large people enjoying the traditional German fare.

We knew what we were in for and chose, with circumspection, “small” dishes—Sauerbraten for me, pork sausages for Ellie, both with generous heapings of mashed potatoes. Not for every day.

Back to our B&B for a last night there. We were watching an episode of Poirot on PBS when the first warning came—a beep beep beep on the televison, followed by a weather map showing severe weather with tornado warnings at the far west end of the state. Outside the window, there were already occasional flashes of lightning and bursts of thunder, with heavy rain showers passing through. At intervals throughout the evening, the weather warnings appeared on the TV screen, edging eastward, each time a little closer to Iowa City. Really quite exciting—and unnerving. At about ten o’clock—drama outpacing Poirot by far!—our room exploded with a sudden, intense burst of light, as though the lightning had struck directly outside our window, followed instantaneously by the most deafening thunderclap I have ever heard. We trembled, awaiting worse…

But after that, the storm abated. The weather maps showed the severe weather moving to the north and east of Iowa City, leaving us much relieved and able to get comfortably to sleep.


Monday, June 27

We left Iowa City in good time in the morning, driving north again through Mount Vernon and Dubuque, this time into Wisconsin, where we were booked for the night in Spring Green at the Usonian Inn—a motel designed either by an associate or by Frank Lloyd Wright himself, whose Taliesin East community was our objective. We were intrigued, close to our destination, to pass signs to “The House on the Rock,” and detoured off the highway to find it to be the delightful pinnacle of kitsch...

... designed and built as the extravagant fantasy of one Alex Jordan. The place is a veritable rabbit warren of crazy corridors, dark rooms and projections over the void...

...all perched on a rocky hilltop overlooking the glorious countryside of the Driftless area (more of this in a moment). Aside from the obsession with this architectural oddity, Jordan was the fanatical collector of obscure, mostly mechanical musical devices, circus and fairground memorabilia, and other grand guignol kitsch. Since his death, the place has been turned into a tourist mecca, attracting great crowds despite the outrageous cost of the various tours. We did the basic, and were more than satisfied.

I wondered what Frank Lloyd Wright might have thought of all this, so close—geographically, I mean—to his own architectural monument. Would he have been intrigued by the monomania (not, incidentally, much unlike his own!) or appalled by its undisciplined expression?

We found the village of Spring Green clearly suffering from the bad economy, with several restaurants and B&Bs closed down, and a rather desultory air about the place. Since we were by this time hungry, however, we were grateful to find a delightful bookshop which also served sandwiches for lunch, and enjoyed a good chat with the owner—who promised to order a few copies of “Persist,” which he said sounded just right for the creative community thereabouts. We asked about “Driftless,” by David Rhodes—one of our all-time favorite books—and were pleased to find that our enthusiasm was shared. The “driftless” area, mentioned above, is a slice of landscape that was somehow missed by the last great glacial shift and retained its millennia-old geological characteristics—not to mention the quiet beauty of its verdant, rolling hills...

... and wandering waterways. No wonder Frank Lloyd Wright, whose Welsh immigrant family had moved to this valley before his birth, considered it his Eden.

A few more stops in Spring Green, notably at the friendly local department store and the Catholic church, designed in the Wright tradition by his son-in-law—a fine-looking piece of architecture from the outside...

... but unfortunately closed that particular day for “carpet cleaning.” Then on to the Usonian to find our room and rest up a while before heading out for a walk in the park—the Tower Hill State Park, which we found totally deserted but for one unoccupied campsite.

No visitors, not a single car parked in the huge parking lot, and a kind of spooky feeling to the place. Perhaps the gnats and mosquitoes were to blame… One remarkable sighting, however: I spotted a large furry creature snuffling around near a picnic table and thought, at first, it had to be a raccoon. No. A little closer, we recognized it as a beaver. When we got too close, he trotted off back down toward the river, but I was surprised to find one of these creatures so far from its natural habitat. As usual, at such moments, I forgot all about the camera…

For dinner, we headed down the road to a town with the improbably name of Mazomanie, where enterprising folk had turned an old flour mill into a spacious restaurant. The food was pretty good and the place was pleasantly quiet, perfect for the evening. After dinner, we took a constitutional across the railroad tracks and into town, where we found the great, wide streets as vacant as the park had been. It had the feel, at eight o’clock at night, of an exceptionally well-tended ghost town. We walked along between the houses, expecting curtains to part and eyes to be peering out at us. But no. Silence, emptiness. Very strange.


Tuesday, June 28

Breakfast—you guessed it—in an empty restaurant. Well, virtually empty. The place was a huge converted barn, with windows affording views through the ceiling, up to the old raftered roof. There were, we noticed, a couple of other customers at a distant bar, clearly locals. Otherwise we were the only two breakfasters in this vast, echoing space. (It’s the economy, stupid!)

Booked into the four-hour tour of the Frank Lloyd Wright estates at 9:30, we arrived promptly, as instructed, and signed in at the visitor center...

The Lloyd-Wright family immigrated from Wales in the 19th century, and soon took over the valley with their progeny. The family chapel...

... and graveyard...

... proved to be the first stop for our bus, and we wandered between grave markers for the various wives, mistresses, parents and siblings of the great man. Initially buried here himself...

...he was secretly abducted long after his death by the last of his wives, who stole his body away in the dark of night to be cremated and inurned along with her. Our guide made nice work of the story—as she did, indeed, with the entire tour.

Next stop was the school Wright designed...

... originally, for his sister, and redesigned at intervals thereafter, following fires and whatever personal whims caught his fancy. The school eventually became the working center for his “fellowship” of apprentices, who were expected to till the soil and perform a variety of other tasks at the behest of the master. It remains an educational center to this day, as witnessed by the impressive studio we visited along the way. Wright’s love of music was such that he regarded it as adequate qualification for admission to the fellowship of architectural students and, in addition to the studio, we visited the theater he designed for performances and concerts—and the dining and other community areas set aside for their use.

The rest of the tour was on foot. (Our camera’s battery gave up on us at this point, and we had forgotten to bring along a spare. Curses!) We climbed a hill through a meadow of tall, silvery grasses and wildflowers to the “Romeo and Juliet Wind Tower”—an elegant, embracing twin set of tall, narrow buildings designed as a windmill to pump water for the facility. The concept—though not the architecture, of course—made me think of that other Frank (Gehry’s) Fred and Ginger building in Prague. I wonder if he gave a thought to the master as he designed it?

A long walk, next, through more meadows and neat fields of crops...

... past the house designed for Wright’s sister, and past the Wright farm with its long, low red barn ...

... to the house he built, modified, and rebuilt for himself, Taliesin...

... Welsh for the “shining brow” of the hillside he had loved since childhood. Along with Falling Water, which we saw last year in Pennsylvania, it has to count amongst Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpieces, where everything, from the nestled position in the landscape to interior detail, was a matter of his aesthetic choice. He was, by all accounts, not the nicest of men, but you can’t walk through a place like this without acknowledging his genius. Our guide was full of information about both his personal life and his architectural philosophy and practice. We visited, of course, the infamous spot where one of the house servants went amok with an axe, attacking Wright’s long-time mistress and her company before nailing the doors shut and setting fire to the house.

We were glad to have chosen the long tour, arriving back at the visitor center for a pleasant lunch in the dining room there...

... overlooking the lovely Wisconsin River...

... before returning to the car for the penultimate leg of our journey, this time to Madison. Ellie started her undergraduate studies at the University of Wisconsin in the early 1960s and had not returned since, so it was another nostalgic visit, this time for her. Warmly greeted at the B&B we had reserved for our two nights here, we unpacked with plenty of the day left to drive downtown for a stroll around the campus.

Well, I had imagined a stroll. It turned out to be a good, long hike, starting with the rooming house...

... near the student Union, where Ellie had spent her first year; then through the union and out along the lakeshore path...

... in search of the dormitory where she had spent the next, and last of her two years at UW. The lake shore was busy with summer activities...

...sailboats and canoes, wind-surfing craft, speedboats and sleek competitive rowing shells. Thousands of students everywhere, whose youth and energy left me feeling somewhat creaky at the joints. Doubling back a couple of times in the course of our search—and enjoying a detour through a beautifully tended botanical garden...

... we finally found the Place Itself...

... Cole Hall, triggering many memories for Ellie of long time gone…

Back at the Union, somewhat fatigued by a long day on our feet, we found a place amongst the crowded tables to sit down for a shared glass of beer...

A multitude of young people clearly enjoying their relaxation at the end of a day of warm sunshine, anticipating the arrival of a band for an evening of music. We, though, chose to go looking for a restaurant on State Street and, finding nothing to our taste, headed back toward our B&B to seek out a restaurant that had been recommended. Jac’s provided us with excellent (Tuesday night) two-for-one hamburgers and more fries than we could possibly eat.


Wednesday, June 29

The last full day of our Midwestern tour. Breakfast—I hesitate to mention—was another strange experience. You would think that toast—no?—would be a not outrageous thing to ask for. It did seem so, however. I was asked if the donuts provided were not satisfactory, and was met with something approaching disbelief when I said that, no, I did actually prefer toast. I’m not hot on sweet buns for breakfast. A good deal of searching in the kitchen, it seemed, resulted in the eventual discovery of an English muffin.

We soon found congenial company with our fellow-breakfasters—Maryanne turned out to be one of the many dedicated teachers subjected to the state’s massive budget cuts—and sat for a long while in sympathetic talk. We set out late-ish, enjoying a cup of coffee with the brother of one of Ellie's old college friends, who directed us to the house where the family had lived...

... and where Ellie had been made to feel at home at a lonely time. The area is filled with architectural gems, like this Prairie style house by Frank Lloyd Wright himself...

Here's a detail from a neighboring architect-designed house of the same period...

We enjoyed our walk in the neighborhood before moving on, with no particular goal in mind, heading downtown to the Capitol area...

... where we found a place to leave the car for the day. After our breakfast discussion—and having watched the demonstrations against the Governor’s austerity plans from afar, on television, for the past few weeks—we were not surprised to find a handful of hardy protestors still making their presence known, with signs demanding his resignation or recall. Our sympathies, of course, lie with them; we are appalled by what is happening in the states, as well as on the national political scene, and Wisconsin has seemed like weather vane for the rest of the country.

After a quick lunch at a local hangout, we decided on a visit to the Museum of Contemporary Art and spent a while in the several exhibitions there. I wish I could report on some excitement there, but truthfully I found the shows kind of pedestrian. I suspect that they, too, reflected a paucity of discretionary funds. A nice gift shop, though...

... where Ellie found some small gifts to take along with us when we cross the pond to visit the grandchildren, this September.

Rather uninspired and—I speak for myself—rather travel fatigued, we wandered down to the Convention Center, just a couple of blocks from the Capitol, which we had seen in model form on our Frank Lloyd Wright tour. He had designed it years before, but died before seeing his plan approved and brought to fruition.

It’s an impressive building which plays delightfully between interior and exterior and welcomes the visitor with its spaciousness and repeated circular patterns—echoes, as the architect saw it, of the Capitol a short way up the hill. While substantially modified from his original plans, it has all the appeal of a Frank Lloyd Wright design, nestling comfortably between the man-made city and the natural lake and incorporating the energy of both. Up on the open air top level, overlooking the wide stretch of water, we were chuffed to find a memorial to Otis Redding, who died in a foul weather plane crash in the lake nearby, having insisted on the attempt to make a landing in time to get to a concert for his fans. We have always loved his mournfully sensual “Dock of the Bay”—one of “our songs.”

In the growing, increasingly muggy heat, we headed back toward the university campus on a final search for another of Ellie’s undergraduate haunts, a complex of lecture halls, to satisfy the last of her nostalgic wishes; and stopped to enjoy an ice blended mocha before heading back to the Capitol for a Wednesday evening “Concert on the Square.” We were surprised by the great throngs of people gathered for the event, with blankets spread out under the trees, beach chairs and elaborate picnics. Each one of the quadrants surrounding the building was crowded...

... even those well out of sight of the stage where the orchestra was playing, but where the music was piped in through loudspeaker systems. After listening to the music for a while (pop selections from Mendelssohn, Elgar, Aaron Copeland) we were lucky to find a nice corner table at an outdoor café...

... where we enjoyed a glass of wine and a decent, final dinner for our tour.

Thursday, June 30

Breakfast. Don’t ask. Soft-boiled eggs, okay, nice. But still no toast. Good conversation. We packed and checked out of our B&B in good time for a visit to the UW Arboretum on our way out of town. A lovely walk through the prairie meadows…

... and then on down the Interstates to O’Hare, car rental return, a long wait at the airport, and Jet Blue back to Long Beach. And, of course, George, returned to the cottage by his dog-sitter in anticipation of our arrival, not knowing that we’d soon be home… but delighted when we were.