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oncearoundthegarrison-blog · 5 years ago

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London to Lundy Part 1

5 months sounds like a long time, but when you’ve started a new job in a completely different industry, it flies by. New colleagues, new commute, new schedule, new maze-like museum building that took at least a month to get used to. Even new vocabulary.

I felt like I was desperately treading water, slowly drowning in a sea of to-dos. It finally took the Christmas period, when the museum was closed, most colleagues and external contacts had taken holidays and my telephone and inbox fell quiet, that I had a moment to realise... I have 13 days of annual leave to use up before the end of the financial year.

My husband’s birthday is in March, so I thought we could go somewhere together to celebrate, as we had been doing the last few years. The thing is, my husband works in a small company, a team of 3, in fact. Unfortunately, the other 2 also have their birthdays in March, so, being the most junior, he felt he couldn’t take a week off, especially because they were planning a work trip around that time too.

“You should go on a yoga retreat by yourself.” he suggested. As if I wanted to pay hundreds of pounds to go and spend days stretching with strangers, some of whom were guaranteed to be a little too ‘woo-woo’ for my taste (no offence).

I decided I wanted to do something that was ‘worthwhile’ with my time. After hours researching expensive (and scammy) conservation holidays, scrolling through WorkAways and WWOOFing opportunities, I somehow landed on the jackpot; a National Trust working holiday on Lundy, a three mile long, half mile wide island off the coast of North Devon.

Having hastily signed up and gained a place, I set to work on the dreaded getting-there logistics. The first thing was already ticked off the list. The only way of getting from the Devon coast onto Lundy Island at that time of the year is by Helicopter. With that booked, I looked into getting from London to Devon and back.

The autumn before, I had bought my first car. It’s a fully electric Nissan Leaf. Using it largely for the weekly shop and commuting to work (15 minutes if the traffic is nice, 1 hour if it’s the usual), it’s the perfect car for pootling around the city and suburbs, where an electric charger is always close to hand. We’d done the odd 2 hour drives, but the route planning, and adding 30 mins per charge stop, the anxiety of ‘what if the charger we are heading towards is out of order’ was quite stressful, so a solo drive down to Devon seemed a foolhardy concept.

But, the more I tried to arrange the public transport, the more complicated things got. First off, the nearest train station is 25 miles away, and you need to get on a bus for an hour even to get close to the helipad. Not only that but you had to get there by 10am latest, so unless you wanted to leave London at crazy o’clock, you had to arrive the night before and find accommodation. On top of that, on the way back, you have no idea what time your helicopter flight is. “Sometime between 11 and 3pm, and it depends on the weather, you could be delayed to later in the afternoon or even the next day!” So booking a train for the way back was a gamble. Driving to Devon in my electric car started to look like a more attractive, at least simpler, concept.

I’m not what you call a confident driver, and some past long distance drives had been very stressful. It’s hard for me to forget that I could kill myself or anyone else by making a silly mistake. And I make plenty of those in my everyday life. What if I don’t plan well and I run out of charge on my car? The prospect of driving alone, for four hours, which would probably include at least 4 charges, was terrifying. Also, if I want to arrive at the heliport at 9:30am, then I would need to leave at 5:30am, but add on 4 x 30 minute charges is 3:30am, and maybe I should add an extra hour in case I take the wrong turning or there is traffic or a diversion... well that’s crazy o’clock. So I decided to break up the journey by stopping off at my uncle’s in Bristol.

The week before setting off, I made sure to check and double check the route on the Zap-Map app, which shows you the locations of all the EV chargers. I read reviews of each charger, making sure it was used recently and recorded as having a successful charge. I made sure I knew the locations of at least 2 other chargers near the one I actually planned to charge at, in case that one was occupied or faulty.

I wrote out the addresses of each charger, in case I lost my phone. I packed a portable power bank for my phone, in case it ran out of battery. I found out what numbers I need to call if I break down or run out of charge, or have an accident (yeah OK I should’ve known those already). Some chargers require you to start the charge using your mobile phone... but what if you didn’t have enough reception? I drove my husband crazy with my fretting and stressing. I made sure I had enough car snacks and a good playlist.

Then the day finally came. I left for Bristol around 9.00am. It was a bright sunny day and I left in high spirits, onto the M4. Forty minutes later, dirty black clouds appear and it starts to properly pour. The roads were not too busy but there was a ropey 15 minutes of very poor visibility, the spray from the other cars and lorries obscuring the road like a thick fog. My heart pumping, I was very glad to arrive at my first charge stop at a service station just after 10am.

There, I struck up a conversation with a fellow Nissan Leaf driver, and I asked him if he’d heard the rumour that you shouldn’t charge your car up to 100% on one of the rapid chargers (there are a few different charge speeds, you see). It’s something I was told by the customer services person when I rang up the helpline on a day a charger refused to stop charging (really reassuring). The man looked at me doubtingly and said that he hadn’t. When he left, I googled it and it really does seem to be the case that it damages your battery. I hope he looked it up later as well. I had a hot chocolate in the Starbucks, charged my phone and bought some gloves, as I forgot to pack mine. Feeling panicked about damaging the battery, I headed off at 82% charged.

Luckily, the closer I got to Bristol and my uncle’s flat, the lower the speed limit, the more traffic there was. I say lucky because driving in those circumstances uses up much less charge than going 70mph down the motorway. By 11:40 I have arrived at my final charge stop, a Bannatyne Health Club just round the corner from my final destination. I was even more happy to see that it was a simple plug in, tap your contactless card and charge jobby. You’d think that’s how all chargers are, but no. EV chargers are run by different providers, I have no less than 5 different apps on my phone plus a physical tap card, and there’s still some chargers where I have to spend ages registering on a website in order to start a charge. Mental.

I go into the health club and explain I’m not a member but would like to sit in the cafe while my car charges. I was a bit worried they would turn me away, but, just as my Zap-Map colleagues had reassured me, they asked me to sign in to a guest book and let me in. I order a tea and settle down for 20 minutes. In hindsight, during my journey to Devon and back, I think I spent almost the same amount of money on beverages and nibbles waiting for the car to charge as for the charge itself!

Anyway, all in all a smooth journey to Bristol, and I get to my uncle’s around 12:15, just in time for lunch. After a lovely afternoon taking in the sights of Bristol (managed to catch the excellent Wildlife Photography of The Year 2019 exhibition at M Shed, see below for the fun image of a shocked Himalayan marmot that won the Grand Title) and catching up with a friend over a quick drink in the evening, I go to bed early, ready for an early start in the morning.

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bfenvs3000-blog · 5 years ago

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Science and Motivations

My early experiences with science, mostly revolving around animals at that time, came from watching the TV show Zoboomafoo. I absolutely loved the show and would be fixated on what was happening that episode. I was really young when I started watching the show but the one thing I still remember so clearly is an episode about tigers. In this episode they were demonstrating how strong a tiger’s jaws were by showing it biting through objects. The last object they gave to tiger to bit was a basket ball, and my young self thought there was no way a tiger could pop a basket ball, and then the next second the tiger bit the ball and it popped. Zoboomafoo offered a way for kids to engage with science in such a fun and new way so that it would be memorable, and for me it really was. Tigers became a huge fascination for me a kid and I wanted to learn more whenever I could. Being young and not knowing very much about science or nature I feel like this is a really fun way for kids to be engaged in something new and possibly form a new interest, like I did.

Photo from: https://pbskids.fandom.com/wiki/Zoboomafoo

The thing that really got me interested in science more a place than one specific person. Science North is a huge facility for science education and exploration in Sudbury. Fun fact: the building is shaped like a snow flake. This was the place schools brought you for field trips or a place you would bring your kids on the weekend. The four floors of the building all have various theme and exhibits from natural sciences like animals, water systems, and insect life to engineering, chemistry and physics. The facility is built for all ages and going there in my 20s was still such a fantastic experience as when I went there as an 8-year-old. What I always found great about this place was how they tailored these experiences for kids. There were displays you could touch, insects to hold, and toy cars to build and race on the trace. Nearly everything was built to be interactive for kids in an entertaining way and informative for teens and adults without being dull. This really got me excited about science in elementary school and that carried over into high school, ultimately influencing what I would study in university. I feel that the way we are presented things at a young age, and even when you’re older, plays a big part in how we end up perceiving things later, so it shows how tailoring a presentation of knowledge can be so influential to someone.

Science North in the winter with skating on Ramsey Lake Photo from: http://entertainmentsudbury.com/events/festival-lights-launch/

Finally, I wanted to mention someone who helped me become more confident and motivated about my interests. A music teacher I had through high school. I was in a tiny strings class with only 6 students. Since the class was so small it became more one on one of a class and somewhere that my friends and I could have fun. As we continued the class for the next four years we started playing harder group and solo pieces. Throughout this whole time we had our teachers full support, there wasn’t a time when we were told we couldn’t do something because it was too much for us. It made me happy to go to the class and be in an environment that was that supportive and relaxed, since there was only 4 of us by my last year. That confidence that she had in me, made me feel more confident in myself and what I could do. I think that has really carried over to who I am now. I’m not doubting my abilities or worrying if I’ll look dumb while learning new procedures in lab or job. I can see the difference in myself and I think that experience in high school has motivated me to grow throughout my undergrad and in my involvement with science.

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la-leto · 6 years ago

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Alex Honnold, star of the Oscar-contending doc Free Solo, is perched precariously halfway up an 85-foot wall. The seemingly superhuman climber who scaled a 3,000-foot sheer vertical wall in Yosemite National Park without any safety equipment is wearing a harness and tied into one end of a rope. In the unlikely event that he falls, the man on the other end, Jared Leto, will catch him. The wall arcs up and out at a steep angle — what rock climbers call overhanging — so a climber's body is nearly horizontal to the ground. When it's his turn to ascend the wall, Leto, breathing hard, is undeterred. "Nice, Jared, c'mon dude," Honnold, 33, shouts, doling out lengths of slack in the rope. "Stay with it, I'm with you."

Unlike the many people in Hollywood who have reached out to Honnold since the release of Free Solo, Leto, who fronts the rock band 30 Seconds to Mars and won a best supporting actor Oscar for 2013's Dallas Buyers Club, has been climbing with him since 2015. Leto was working on The Great Wide Open, a series of five short films about national parks and the men and women exploring them, including Honnold. Shortly after they met, the pro climber took Leto up a classic mountain route called Matthes Crest northeast of Yosemite Valley. It was one of Leto's first climbs, and they stayed out into the night. "We were just so psyched," says Honnold. Leto, 47, remembers scrambling along a thin blade of granite toward the summit and nearly falling off. "There was one part where I grabbed on the end of a rope during one really slabby section," he says. Leto continued to climb, and his friendship with Honnold grew. "I'm getting my ass kicked," the actor says, "which is great."

Leto makes a stealth appearance in Free Solo. Early on, filmmaker Jimmy Chin's camera lingers on an unidentified man's back as a disembodied voice (both belonging to Leto) asks Honnold if he would ever consider free-soloing the 3,000-foot granite monolith that is El Capitan, the mecca of the rock-climbing world. Honnold, of course, goes on to do just that, his ascent of El Capitan's Freerider route without ropes or harnesses ranking as a nearly unparalleled feat of physical achievement. On Feb. 24, the National Geographic-sponsored team that captured the epic journey on film, including Chin and his co-director and wife, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, might be going home with an Oscar statuette.

Free Solo has brought a slew of opportunities to Honnold. "It's like a snowball going downhill," he says. "And the film hasn't even hit streaming yet." In November, Honnold struck a multiyear brand ambassador partnership with car company Rivian, which considers Honnold a "superuser" because he lived in a van for so long. Rivian, which markets itself as the manufacturer of the "world's first Electric Adventure Vehicles," consults with Honnold on design. On Oscar night, Honnold is expected to show up in a Rivian R1T All-Electric pickup truck — and sport a custom-made tuxedo that The North Face is having made just for the occasion. (Honnold still uses the van that appeared in Free Solo for overnight climbing trips with his girlfriend, Sanni McCandless.) He has another ambassadorship deal with Beyond Meat, a company that makes plant-based products that resemble meat. He also has shares in the company, which could yield dividends when it stages its IPO soon. His nonprofit, The Honnold Foundation, which works on solar energy and aid projects for impoverished communities in the U.S. and abroad, has seen an uptick in attention and partnerships as well.

Black Diamond and Maxim sponsor his climbing gear. A company called Stride provides him with health insurance. Italian climbing company La Sportiva offers shoes, and Utah-based Goal Zero works with him to market solar chargers for phones. He gets paid handsomely to speak to investors and corporations, often repurposing a Ted Talk he gave last year about "mastery." He'll soon become part-owner of a national chain of climbing gyms, a speculative bid on an expected uptick of interest in rock climbing. Though he's avoided the big-time exposure that comes with big-time sports brands, Honnold will almost certainly make seven figures this year and next. Says his manager at RXR Sports, Jonathan Retseck, "For rock climbing, that's pretty good."

***

One recent morning, before Leto arrived at the Sender One climbing gym in South L.A., Honnold reflected on this new phase as a half-dozen people snuck by to snap pictures of him. Hollywood, too, has shown intense interest: Honnold was game when Edward Norton's agent got in touch about the two going climbing. (They haven't yet.) He met Brie Larson, who also has climbed and was training for Captain Marvel, at an Antonio Banderas screening. "I loved Zorro as a kid, and [Banderas] was talking about one of the scenes where he was climbing on a beam and forgot to clip in, and he was like, 'It's like free soloing,' " recalls Honnold. "It was pretty classic!"

It may come as no surprise that the man who scaled El Cap without ropes is unfazed by the pressures of Hollywood. At the climbing gym, as Honnold completes a difficult boulder problem — just slightly harder than the famous karate-kick move shown in Free Solo— he says, "I don't think any of it is that surprising if you think about it rationally. The scheduled time, the interviews, the publicists, being handled and stuff — it doesn't feel like a healthy lifestyle, but that's fine."

Of the awards-season rush, "It's obviously not how I would choose to spend my life," he says, "and the idea that freakin' actors do this for their whole careers blows my mind because it's not that fun, you know? It's really cool to meet these people that you've been inspired by, but you don't actually hang out. It's not quality time." Leto, who walks into the gym wearing a Grateful Dead shirt and black pants, adds that he lent him a tux for the Producers Guild Awards. "He could barely move in the thing, and the shoes I think were probably too small as well," notes Leto.

Since their first meeting in Yosemite, Honnold and Leto have climbed in Colorado, Nevada and in other places in California. "For the amount of time he's been doing it, he's actually phenomenal," Chin says, bestowing on the Oscar winner an even greater honor: "He's a climber."

Later, Leto, who has put on 10 pounds since playing Dallas Buyers Club's transgender drug addict, shares that the physical change is part of preparation for his role as the archvillain in Morbius, the Marvel spinoff about the vampiric character. "The world's most fearsome predator," Leto quips. Warming up on a few moderately easy routes that snake up alongside Sender One's imposing overhang, Leto adds that he hopes to pack on 10 more pounds: "It's great because I go from being very sick and very infirm to being strong and monstrous" in the movie. The friends have climbed at indoor gyms whenever the Las Vegas-based pro climber has been in town to promote Free Solo, and Honnold has been careful not to push Leto too far out of respect for his actorly obligations. "Jared's climbing is not the most important thing for him, obviously," he says, adding: "I think it would be cool to do stunts — I want to wind up as Tom Cruise's stunt double, to do climbing in a movie. Don't you think that'd be fun?" One of his early climbing heroes, a well-known Yosemite legend named Ron Kauk, climbed for Sylvester Stallone in Cliffhanger and for Cruise in Mission: Impossible II.

Understandably, most people still want to talk about Honnold's ascent of Freerider, even though his climbing career has moved on in some ways, including a record speed ascent of another route on El Cap and an expedition to Antarctica. "But then I spend all day, every day, talking about the Freerider climb, so in some ways I haven't moved past it at all," he says. "It's the first time in my life I've had that kind of weird disconnect between what I'm working on versus what I'm talking about."

He hadn't climbed outside in more than a month, and yet now, as he moves from bouldering to a few rounds on the hang bar to the overhanging wall, he seems content. "I feel surprisingly strong for the fact that I live in hotels now," he says. Honnold and a friend have been toying with the idea of attempting a route somewhere on the Trango Towers, a massif of 20,000-feet-high granite peaks in northern Pakistan that has attracted top climbers for years. "I just want to get to the top of some of the most striking towers in the world," he says. "Honestly though, we'll see if it even happens because of scheduling."

In other ways, Honnold's life post-Free Solohas mellowed. He's happily ensconced with McCandless at the Vegas home they purchased during filming of the movie. They climb together often. Co-director Vasarhelyi points out that Honnold has successfully managed to scale this emotional challenge. "They found love," she says. "It's a Shakespearean story, the little engine that could." Honnold says the emotional drama of the documentary belies a more serene domesticity that he thoroughly enjoys. "You only see a few minutes onscreen, so it doesn't show that you're living together in harmony," he says. "It only shows the moments of tension around this big challenge." Still, it seems evident that conquering the solo climb has freed up something deeper in Honnold. Whereas in the movie Honnold was demonstrably uncomfortable when hugging his friend Tommy Caldwell's kids, now he struts around the gym proudly holding Chin and Chai Vasarhelyi's daughter, Marina, in his arms. They call him "Uncle Alex."

Later, as he belays Leto, who scrambles up another route, a friend stops by to chat. Honnold asks about the friend's romantic relationship. "It's casual," the friend says. "Is it consistent?" Honnold asks, and the friend nods. Honnold thinks on this for half a second. "Consistently casual is still consistent," Honnold says, smiling. "After three great years with Sanni, I feel qualified to give relationship advice." He says he wants a family and kids of his own one day. "Are you going to let them climb?" the friend asks. Honnold doesn't hesitate. "I'm sure my kids will grow up underneath the moonboard in my home." For someone who has explored the most extreme corners of what's physically and psychologically possible, Honnold seems keen to resume a life of normal pleasures. "As soon as the Oscars are over, he's going to be itching to get in a van with Sanni and go on a climbing trip and life as usual," says Retseck. Leto reaches the top of the wall. Honnold brings him down, they laugh, and move on to the next route.

#jared leto #alex honnold #free solo #bffs #interviews #morbius

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redrobinfection · 6 years ago

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(11) Stormy Night

SociallyAwkwardFox’s Spooktober - Day 11 “Stormy Night”

AN: this is set during Tim’s 90s Robin run, and the scene is set accordingly: This is a Gotham before the wide use of cellphones or cell networks. B and his cohort use early cell phones and satellite phones, but you better believe those were pretty unreliable in extreme weather conditions. This is the map of Gotham I refer to when I write.

~*~

"N-twing, this- Ag--t A. Do-- copy?"

"Hey, A, I can hear you but you're breaking up," Dick called back over the comms. "Hey, can you hear me? Interference from the storm is breaking you up."

For the moment Nightwing was huddled into the sheltered eave of a municipal building. The thunder and lightning that would have demanded he stay close to the ground and under cover had long since passed, but rain was still coming down in stinging sheets and the wind came in such strong gusts that made it hard on to swing from building to building. ‘Twas a dark and stormy night, indeed.

"I repeat, Ni---, do you--? This is --- A?"

Dick sighed and left cover in hopes of getting better signal out in the open. "I can hear you, Agent A. Go ahead."

"Thank heavens. I was start- to think I'd nev- reach you."

"Yeah, the storm is still causing a bit of interference, but I can hear you. What's up?"

"We've lost all contact wi-- Robin. It's been almost an ----- you check up on him? Last we heard, he was down in the Upper West Side, along the usual rou--"

Dick frowned. "Hey, lost you there for a second. How long did you say? On his usual route, you said?"

"An hour and yes," Alfred replied. Even through the crackling connection Dick could hear the elderly man's worry. An hour was a long time for one of them to fall out of contact on a night like this. Especially a 14-year-old Robin patrolling solo while Batman is in Europe. Now Dick was very glad he had agreed to come back to Gotham while Bruce was away.

"Have you or Oracle activated his tracers? Any clues as to where I should start looking?"

"Oracle and I lost contact aroun- ---time. We activated trackers in the suit and -- mask but--"

"I'm sorry, A, please repeat." Dick bit his lip. At this rate he was going to lose radio contact with the Cave too.

"No ping from any trackers. Oracle's surveillance grid partially knocked out. No eyes on Robin or clues to last location," Alfred enunciated slowly and loudly over the line to cut across the static and breakage.

Dick grimaced and began pulling his gear out in preparation to fly. "Copy that, Agent A. I'm on my way now."

"Th-nk --ness."

"We may lose contact as I enter Tim's area. If that happens I'll find a payphone and give you a call as soon as I find him," Dick reassured him.

"Very good. Good luck, Night--"

---

Twenty minutes later, Dick pulled the Batmobile into a shadowy corner of the Upper West Side. He was lucky that he'd almost made it back to where he'd left it that night---up by Gotham U--by the time the storm had peaked in intensity and forced him to take shelter. Remote call to bring the car was great, but only if you had the uninterrupted signal to make the call. It was also fortunate that Gotham U was just across the Finger River from the Upper West side.

Dick hopped out and began tracing Batman and Robin's patrol route, starting at the bridge on the north side. Tim would have been coming up from the South, so hopefully he'd find him somewhere in between and soon.

After thirty minutes of swinging with no sign of Robin anywhere, he was starting to worry. He'd lost contact with Alfred-- far off in the Cave at Wayne Manor to the northeast--but the Clocktower was just one burrough over, and they were having no trouble hearing each other. If Tim was in the area, then he should definitely be in range of Oracle, too. He was just about to ask Babs to try Tim's trackers or check her surveillance cameras one more time when a flash of green on a rooftop caught his eye.

He swooped down onto the rooftop and felt a matching swoop of relief in his gut as he confirmed that it was indeed Robin, partially tucked away between an air conditioning unit and a roof access stairway, but he felt a new zing of worry as he approached. Robin was slumped against the air conditioner, legs splayed, and seemingly oblivious to Nightwing's approach. Unconscious? Maybe worse?

Dick crouched down just out of kicking distance and called out to him while looking for obvious signs of injury or the telltale dark stains of blood pooling on the rooftop.

"Robin? Robin! If you're awake, answer me."

Dick breathed a sigh of relief as Tim groaned and shifted.

"D-dick? 'S-s-s about time."

Dick smiled. "Yeah, it's me. Names, T."

"S-s-sorry," Tim chattered back. Dick noted as he drew closer that Tim’s lips were starting to turn blue with the cold, and he began searching Tim’s body in earnest for injuries. He carefully tapped the side of Tim's face then slowly peeled off the mask.

"You hurt anywhere, T?"

Tim groaned and pulled himself up further against the wall. "Ankle. An’ m-my head."

Dick whipped out a mini pen light and shone it into Tim's eyes. The boy hissed and turned away. "Why'd you stop answering Oracle and Agent A's calls, T? Did you pass out?"

Tim shook his head, then groaned and lifted a gauntleted hand to his forehead. "No, and stop that! I have a minor concussion and I twisted my ankle, that's all."

"And you're turning blue with the cold, don't forget that," Dick reminded him cheekily.

"Yeah, well, this rain is freezing and my suit is soaked. You'd turn blue too, if you were me. More blue than you already are, at least," he teased weakly, shakily gesturing to the fingerstripes.

Dick chuckled and waggled his fingers playfully. "Okay, if that’s so, then why did you drop under the radar? Why didn't you activate your emergency beacon?"

Tim gaped at him. "Wh-wha-whaddyou mean why didn't I activate my beacon? I did!" He unlocked and removed his shuriken R to show that the LED indicator on the beacon sewn into his suit underneath was indeed lit up. "I've been waiting here for almost two hours hoping that someone would come along to give me a lift home!”

Tim paused to draw a breath then went on in a heated tone. "I dropped off comms because the guy that gave me my concussion literally broke my communicator! And then my spare shorted out in the rain. I managed to haul myself up here after I activated my beacon with the hope that eventually someone would get the message so I wouldn't be forced to limp my way through three blocks of gang territory--with a concussion--to the nearest functional payphone just to call for a ride!"

Dick grimaced and looked away, ashamed. "Oh. Sorry, T. The storm has been messing with our transmissions all night. I only knew to come down here because Agent A and Oracle lost touch with you and couldn't get a ping on your suit trackers."

The annoyance and frustration on Tim's face melted away, leaving only exhaustion. "Oh, jeez. I didn't realize it had gotten that bad. I could hear Oracle just fine before I lost my comm. That's weird that my beacon didn't get through to her receiver, at the very least."

Dick frowned. "Yeah, it is." He stood up and offered a hand to Tim. The younger boy gladly let Dick pull him to his feet. "Well, that's a mystery we'll have to work out later. For now, let's focus on getting out of this rain." Tim nodded and hobbled forward awkwardly, favoring his right ankle as his face twisted in discomfort. "Oh! Don’t forget the mask," Dick remembered at the last second, returning Tim’s domino.

Tim shoved it over his eyes with a shudder and leaned heavily into Dick. "Okay. Let's get out of here," he hissed in a tight voice.

Dick huffed a laugh. "Wow, T, you got banged up good, didn’t you? I'm glad you didn't actually try to walk to that payphone. The petty criminals around here would have eaten you alive."

Tim stuck out his tongue then gasped when his bad ankle gave out on him. Dick squatted down, took one of Tim's arms over his shoulder, and stopped him just before he fell onto his face. "T-thanks," Tim gritted out, his expression caught between relief and agony.

"No problem. Let's get out of here. We need to get you back ASAP so A can take a look at that ankle, not to mention your head," Dick admitted soberly. "It's a shame you didn't make it just a little further north; then you would have been able to limp back to the car on your own. Probably."

"Yeah, but I still would have had to cross the bridge, and I don't think that would have gone too well between my leg slowing me down and the world spinning like a top every time I move my head," Tim admitted wryly as Dick helped him hop along the rooftop.

Dick grinned down at him fondly, then paused. "Wait. So how did you roll your ankle? Was it in the fight with that guy or-?"

Tim made a sound of distress and shook his head minutely. He turned his gaze away, but Dick could swear he saw color rising on Tim's cheeks in the dim light.

“I, uhh, I… tripped over a bottle in the alleyway while I was trying to sneak up on him. He was trying to mug another guy, and I didn’t see the bottle, tripped over it, it rolled under my foot, and then when I stepped down on it, my ankle rolled. My ankle made this really awful popping sound that both guys totally heard. They both turned around and just stared for, like, ten seconds.”

Dick tried to stifle his laughter but it bubbled out. “Oh nooo, Timmy, that’s so… I’m so sorry, man.”

“Names,” Tim snapped quietly. He sighed. “At least the distraction gave the victim a chance to get away. I, uh… I almost ate it during the ensuing fight, and then when I stumbled, the guy managed to get pretty hard blow in. Knocked me silly. If I hadn’t gotten my bo out and between us in time, I might not have made it up to that rooftop at all,” Tim admitted grimly.

Dick gave him a gentle noogie. “Ah, don’t beat yourself up about it, T. You saved a guy, you got away from the other one, and everything worked out okay in the end.”

Tim grunted. “I’m just glad Batman wasn’t here to see any of that.”

“Haha, yeah…” Dick cringed in sympathetic embarrassment. “That was probably for the best.”

Tim’s one-legged hopping faltered and Dick pulled hard on Tim’s arm to keep him from falling forward. Tim’s masked face whipped up to look at him in alarm. “You won’t tell him, will you?”

Dick shook his head. “Of course not, T. What happens between Robins stays between Robins.

"Or Alfred?”

Dick chuckled nervously. “Ahhh, well, I won’t say anything to him, but you know how Alfred is: he’ll get the truth out of you one way or another.”

Tim blanched and nodded. Dick patted him on the shoulder consolingly. “But I know he won’t tell B, either,” he reassured. “We’ve got your back, T.”

Tim smiled up at him. “Thanks.”

—

The storm picked up around them as he drove them back, mostly in silence. He spent most of the drive considering the critical errors of that night’s patrol.

First, going out during a forecasted nor'easter was a pretty novice mistake; Tim could be excused for it, but Alfred and Dick should have known better.

Second, and more importantly, they needed to discuss the serious flaws in the emergency communication system. They got lucky tonight. Things could have played out very differently, say, if Alfred hadn’t been paying closle attention to the comms, if Nightwing hadn’t been nearby, or if the storm had been any worse than it had been. Any situation in which Robin’s comm malfunctions, or his beacon fails to transmit, or the suit trackers don’t ping--or some perfect storm of the three, which is what happened tonight--is a potential recipe for (another) tragedy. Dick shuddered to think about what could have happened. He didn’t want to think about the very real possibility of Robin bleeding out in some dark alley, waiting with full faith for help that would never come, just because they hadn’t taken due precautions with their communications grid.

Dick glanced over at the teenager in the passenger seat and sighed. Tim had nodded off, his mouth hanging open slightly, his mask discarded on the dash. His eyelashes fluttered softly in his sleep. Dick’s heart clenched at the sight. Tim could have died tonight, had his injuries been any worse - if he’d been shot, if he’d been stabbed, if the concussion had resulted in a brain bleed - or if help had never come and he’d succumbed to hypothermia.

Dick cranked up the heat a few more notches and pushed the car just a couple miles per hour faster, feeling a desperate urge to get them back to the safety of the Cave before any more dark and stormy misfortunes could prey upon them. He tapped the steering wheel thoughtfully for a few moments, then began laying out his plan of attack for when Bruce returned.

He and Bruce would have to have a talk. They needed backup comms, redundant trackers, multi-point relay stations, and, most importantly, two or more emergency beacons on each of them. That was just a start. They would need to discuss further measures to ensure that help would never be out of range for any Bat. For a man whose paranoia was legendary, one who had already lost so much, you would have thought that these precautions would already be in place, but when it came to Bruce...

Dick frowned. Bruce would bristle at these suggestions and they would argue, no doubt, but after tonight, after so many close calls--after Jason--considering everything they could stand to lose for something as small as a broken comm or inadequate emergency beacons, Dick could not afford not to convince Bruce to see reason. He glanced over at Tim once more and his expression hardened. Yes, Dick thought grimly, one way or another, he would get Batman to see sense. Hell or high water. That was, after all, a Robin’s job.

#my writing #christmasriverswrites #sociallyawkwardfoxwriter #saf's spooktober prompts #dick and tim #dick grayson #tim drake #gen #brotherly bonding #angst #fluff #barely edited #(who am i kidding - barely *written*; i whipped this out so fast i should have whiplash)#i've written a lot of jaytim already; had to get some other people in on the spooktober fun ;3 #edited: 2019.09.30 #only took a year 😅

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anne1066-blog · 6 years ago

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30th January 2019

This is a new idea that Jane suggested because I have various things niggling at the moment and I can’t quantify them. So this is a very private blog diary just monitoring how I’m feeling and where I’m at. I might share it with friends or I might not. Why put it on a public platform? Well pressing post makes you really feel you’ve set the feelings free and put it out there even if no one actually reads it. It worked for me before when I was getting a load of stuff out of my system regarding a failed engagement, cheating and a pretty intense relationship with a much older man who had 3 children.

Where am I at today? Bloody knackered. I’ve basically called in sick all week with a recurrence of a cold that didn’t have major symptoms but made me feel crappy and subhuman. I’ve fought through it a bit to work in extreme cold and also to go an a weekend with friends in York which of course I did enjoy but I also didn’t enjoy it as much as I should have. It felt way too short. I need a get away from my life at the moment. There are a lot of hard decisions to face and I know I’m not managing them all that well.

So to recap what got me to where we are today:

In 2014 I moved to Oxfordshire to set up a cheesemaking dairy. It was a brand new start for me and had the promise to be an exciting chapter in my life. I learned a lot from it - how to plan a new building specifically for a cheesemaking facility, how to find the site, plan the layout, source the milk, decide on a marketable recipe, build a brand (not the first time I’d been involved in branding to be fair) and not least but troubleshoot a recipe which ended up being the achilles heel. As it turned out the milk production standards weren’t really up to the recipe we wanted to make. After months of cheese we didn’t want to sell, I was made redundant. I don’t want to be bitter but I feel there were some bad commercial decisions made by my business partner who was meant to be in charge of sales. She charged ahead with full scale production when the cheese wasn’t good enough to sell at full price and she also gave away vast amounts of cheese which could have been sold for at least a price that covered costs. All of this lead to a financial crisis and that was it - I was gone.

Before that happened, I had what had was a life changing holiday around the world which happened just as the cheesemaking dairy was opening and needing to go into production - it was 6 months over schedule. It was a revelation though. I flew to countries I had never visited and had to negotiate them by myself. I had a couple of days in Dubai, flew through Singapore (never left the airport to be fair so it doesn’t really count), flew on to Australia and from there to New Zealand after a very brief overnight stay in a hotel near the airport and from there after driving solo around South Island to Sydney, the Cook Islands, Santa Monica, San Francisco and then home. It took 6 weeks and it really made me feel confident; not least because after years of being invisible to any guys out there but I got attention in every place I touched down in - some rather more meaningful than others to be fair. In Dubai, I connected with our desert tour guide who was a worker from Pakistan living in the UAE (not Dubai it’s far too expensive but the more restrictive Sharjah where women’s rights are quite seriously undermined). He was an outsider but loved the desert and remembering the way the Namib desert had made me feel many years ago, so did I. Our fellow travellers were good time tourists so there seemed a contrast between them enjoying the desert safari tourist activities and me just enjoying the culture of the country and the stillness of the desert. i know that makes me sound extremely up myself but I can’t think of another way to describe it. He asked me out on a date which never happened and in retrospect that was a good thing. I would never have realised that things like holding hands with a potential romantic partner are forbidden in Dubai nor would I have realised that normal activities like kissing a first date can actually get you taken to prison. After Dubai, I flew to New Zealand but happened to talk to my co passenger on the flight to Adelaide and have a very interesting conversation about colonialism and England’s position in Australia - not heavy - we joked about it - food for thought all the same which s the point of travel after all. In New Zealand, I met up again with lovely friends I hadn’t seen for years and also met up with my sister and her boyfriend and my friend Cathi’s family who welcomed us as part of their big, lovely family too. It was an amazing time to feel so incredibly accepted and welcomed. And again I connected with someone, my friend’s older brother (also the only other single person there - I may have decided unlike me to flirt a bit with him as we were the only singletons there). He was a lovely, funny, warm guy who as a chef was a great person to cook with and this was an area we had in common. After the wedding ended and we moved on to normal life (him) and the rest of my holiday (me) we stayed facebook friends and he often is one of the first people to like my posts even to this day because he’s a genuinely great person. In Sydney, i went out to dinner with my uber glamorous friend Cristiana and because she’s open, chatty and lovely we ended up on a communal table in a restaurant when we went out for a meal and she got involved in conversation with a noisy group of guys sat to our left. One of them was looking at me and when I went for a ‘comfort break’ he actually approached Cris to say I was lovely and ask who I was! From Sydney I flew to the Cook Islands where I met a lovely lady (not in thet way) who invited me to go swimming with her family after the kids got back from school and who took me down the road to my hostel to collect my swimming things on her motorbike. My first time on a motorbike and frankly a bit terrifying. I also get ogled which hadn’t happened in let’s say about 20 years in London. In San Francisco, a waiter who I had quizzed about local cheeses and wines slipped me his telephone number on my bill. I didn’t find it until I sorted my receipts back in the UK and hadn’t fancied him anyway so just as well but all helps the ego doesn’t it? Especially when you’re over 40 at the time and have resigned yourself to no one finding you attractive anymore.

Anyway so that’s my trip and there was so much more too that I don’t have time to write about. The key thing is that I came back feeling much more empowered and confident. I had travelled the world by myself and not only that but after years feeling invisible I had finally felt attractive again. Boosted by this, I decided to take action, try internet dating again and this time I actually met someone. I was a bit concerned about meeting him - he was openly into kink and sexual things I wasn’t experienced in but as well as that he was warm, made me laugh and I was interested. I wasn’t openly attracted to him when we met. There was certainly something there - we had been very open when messaging and honest and I fancied his personality but as usual on a first internet date, the nerves kicked in and it was difficult when we first said hello to feel anything much. I knew that would happen though so when I couldn’t think of anything to say to him and he moved in for a reassuring hug, I decided to turn it into a chemistry test and effectively snogged his face off for about 90 minutes until our table reservation was ready. That certainly broke the ice so conversation flowed more easily afterwards and I made moves to go back with him to his place after the meal where I could test the theory further. I was relieved and rather pleased to find that the attraction wasn’t just based on text messages and being a gentleman he also drove me home and stayed in touch afterwards. We met up a few times and eventually decided to get together. I would never have had the courage to do this if I hadn’t had my empowering holiday and since we’re still together despite the odds 4 years later it was definitely a good move.

However this was all very new when I was made redundant. He assured me he wouldn’t be going anywhere but it was too soon to move in together so I moved all my 3 bedroom house’s worth of belongings back to my parents’ house in Marple and looked for a job. I emailed anyone I could think of to explain I was looking for work and found somewhere in London that seemed a great match. It was with a Spanish importer looking to improve their cheese maturation and whose owner I had worked with before when setting up Borough Market in London.

Unfortunately although the interview went well, the owner wanted to work with me and my references thought it was a given, I failed their HR tests and I have to be honest it knocked my confidence extremely badly. I took another job that seemed exciting and had been a second choice due only to location - north Yorkshire, a long way away from the lovely new boyfriend.

I worked with them for 3 months before again, redundancy. This time, they great ideas they had had for expansion which I was a key part of, had to be put on hold because of a disastrous Christmas in which various storms flooded large parts of the north of England and cut into their sales. By this time, I had bought a house nearby and now had to find a new job and work out what to do with a house I had hoped to make a home.

Initially I had looked to resurrect the house which had at the time all the hallmarks of having been owned by an elderly couple who loved it and had also done nothing to it since probably the 1960s in a way i would live in. The plans changed to make it something that could be sold or rented and without wishing to be dramatic, with that a little bit of me died at losing my home.

I didn’t wallow though, there was work to be done. The house needed substantial work including rewiring, replastering, a new kitchen and new decorating and floors throughout. By the time it was finished it was actually rather lovely. I felt sad that i wasn’t going to live in the results of our work and sad that I wouldn’t be living in a beautiful part of the country. Actually I felt very sad not to be living in a house whose renovations I had initially begun with a view to making it my home. But again I had been looking around for another job although with a heavier heart this time. Being knocked back 3 times will do that to you. This time I had a message from a friend who makes cheese in Suffolk and her cheeses are extremely well regarded so helping her albeit on a basis that wouldn’t be full-time seemed like a great idea. We tried it out and she reckoned I could work 2-3 days a week although with some big changes to the recipe as she was currently making cheese at midnight and cat napping to accomodate the make schedule.

So I moved to Bungay in Suffolk. It was different - flat lands where I am used to seeing hills, but it had an artistic, musical community and I started to look at property prices again wondering about living there if the job worked out.

I had been there a month when Brexit happened.

My constituency was a big Brexit voting area. I saw people in my local co op looking afraid when their children spoke polis to them. I began to feel much less welcome myself. It seemed there was a big difference between the artistic fringe in the area and the locals who resented anyone who moved in whether they were Polish or just from Marple. I stopped feeling welcome. I actually felt observed, scrutinised and as though I didn’t belong. iI felt like Roystn Veasey. ‘You’re not local are you?’

The vote itself upset me more than I realised it could. I spent months watching the 2012 Olympics ceremony which was a celebration of multicultural Britain and crying my eyes out as racist hate crimes increased across the country and in he wake of right wing extremists killing the pro-Muslim MP Jo Cox. During the football in the Europe that preceded the vote as violance and yobbishness hit 1908s levels among chants of ‘We’re leaving the EU and we don’t care’, I could see what the results of the vote were going to be. An MP was murdered and my worst fears were confirmed. And yet 52% of the country still cast their votes with a racist ideology and Nigel Fargae’s openly racist campaigning. If I had been concerned about EU corruption and taking back control, his anti muslim poster and the rise of race crime before the referendum empowering racists to openly abuse people in public in a way they had not felt able to for over 30 years would have convinced me this vote was not going the way I hoped and I would have changed my mind. I respect anyone who did this and I can not forgive anyone who didn’t.

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benzilla80 · 6 years ago

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Waterous Trail on Foot 50 Miler – The Resurrection

The Backstory

The lead up to this race had been a pretty solid one by my standards. WTF 100 miler in 2015 was a qualifier race for another 100 miler on the Australian east coast. After nearly a year of waiting, I was accepted to race in the Great Southern Endurance Run (GSER) A 181km 10,000m vertical gain alpine race. Fast forward almost another year and the race is fast approaching this coming November.

I will try not to wander to far from this race, but it was all part of my preparation. My GSER training program involved nearly a year’s worth of ‘racing diet’ Both for financial and racing effort reasons. Since Australia Day Ultra in January until GSER in November, there was to be only one race, and that was a ‘test and tune’ event. WTF50 was perfect. Local, I knew the course and it was a chance to test out some things under race conditions.

Training involved a good base of 100km weeks before training even started. Bread and butter weeks including one interval session, one tempo session and one long run as the foundation. The first few weeks were 6 days a week with easy volume runs filling in between the harder workouts, then I swapped to 7 days a week and targeted at least 2,00m elevation gain. The training week of WTF was a 130k week with an extremely short 3-day taper.

What The Actual Race Day

I got as early a night as I could, and rose on the first alarm, quietly got ready and drove myself to the start line with an instant packet of porridge warming my belly. The drive was dark, wet and not exactly inspiring for what lay ahead.

I arrived at the meet point a bit early and was not sure of the new parking area, eventually, I found the toilets and parking area and Sergio was also wandering about in the rain looking for the start. A few moments later a stream of cars rolled in and it was on. I parked and walked behind my car to get my gear out and stood in a large puddle…. great.

Race director Dave Kennedy (DK) arrived in the big orange bus and we get through the drop bag process quick and easy then take the short walk through the early daw sunlight to the start line proper. It’s raining lightly and I am in two minds about keeping my hooded jacket on or not, I hate running in that thing, yet didn’t want to spend all day wet either, so it stayed on.

Race line brief, I hit my watch to get the location and it has an update waiting for me…. c’mon really? You need to do this now?! (I ended up starting the race without it tracking and got it sorted on the go, but that explains the minute difference between my watch time and gun time)

We set off and I’m about mid-pack and 50 meters into the race the lead guys run right by the first turn and take half the pack with them. I call out and everyone gets back on track among a few laughs. I find myself running with a person I didn’t recognise, Thomas with another lady I didn’t recognise Martina. Both looked springy and ready to go and as Chris and Andrew joined me they pulled ahead. The boys and I had agreed to run together for as long as it worked as a Runningworks Team, which I was happy for. The company was nice and I offered a few tips and laughs along the way. Both those guys had potential to win, and now there were two other factors I had not considered opening a gap ahead. I told the guys to be patient, 80k is a long way.

The first 5km is mostly downhill, so I tried to keep the pace comfortable but not silly. I said to Andrew “forget the split times and think of the split effort, consistent effort is more important than maintaining a specific number, some will be fast, some will be slow so think of the overall effort” I had planned my effort to be above training but stay below racing pace.

Things were going well, Martine came back to the group on one of the last big downhills before the river and Thomas opened the gap more and more. Our group of three crossed the river and began the next long 1.6km climb. I was happy to use my poles and run walk this, Chris seemed eager to run more and Andrew was happier to listen to his wife’s advice “winners walk the hills” Either way, we stayed pretty much together and were on the more runnable stuff into Kingsbury Drive Aid Station holding a nice pace and chatting away. Our average was pretty much 8 hours flat and Thomas was out of sight, a quick glance behind saw a few runners not far back, also in good spirits.

We round the last bend and I ask the guys if they were stopping and both said yes. I mentioned I needed to get my jacket off and have a pee so they might catch me then, but I avoid stopping at stations if I don’t have to. I had packed enough gear to not stop and ran right thought “307 in…307 out”

I would not see the boys again until Goldmine Hill’s out and back leg.

Running solo, I expected to slow down a bit, but managed to hold some pretty good pace on the hard-packed trail between the Kingsbury rd. crossing, around the plantation and into the ‘lil bitch’ (a term I use for my second most disliked part of the course, not an official name haha) the first of two rolling technical hills sections that can be tough in both directions, at least this year was a one way trip for me. A few hiking breaks and 6-7minute km’s saw me through to the Boyd Road section in pretty good shape. It was here my heart rate was elevated when I saw two rather large off leash Rottweilers running towards me with a small third dog in chase…. ALARM! The owner was close by and called the dogs and thankfully they had a great recall and decided against chewing on the skinny runner passing by! Just before leaving the road section I saw Chris’s wife Sandy and the rest of the support team at the junction. I appreciate the cheers guys. This was followed by a right turn and ‘big bitch’.

Part two of the rolling hill sections. It’s really not that bad, and many a runner would take it in their stride, but it’s enough to break your rhythm and technical enough to make you consider your footing and conserving the quad strength, it’s too soon to be burning them up. A few slower km’s and I took the chance to cram in some calories, after all the more you eat the less you have to carry! A couple of great single-track kilometres saw me popping out at the North Dandalup Dam Aid Station. 30km into the race and my first official stop. “307 in” and I was greeted by the lovely Kel, Harms and Jez at the table. “4 minutes behind the leader Ben” They took my rubbish and passed me my drop bag containing a kids sized packet of plain chips, a mini can of ginger ale and one Winners bar. I can’t remember if I had my bottles filled, I don’t think so?! I ate the chips, drank the drink and pocketed the bar “307 out” and was on my way. 30th kilometre was 7:15, so probably puts the total aid stop somewhere between 90 seconds and two minutes before setting out over the picturesque dam wall. 6 minutes behind Thomas.

As I crossed the wall in clear blue skies and tried to take in the views I reflected on two things, one was immediate and one was more philosophical. Firstly, was race related, Thomas was 6 minutes ahead, that’s a pretty solid kilometre gap and I figured I would see him in the next hour, or I would never see him again and the dark house effect had taken place once again like a Survivor blind side. Only time would tell. Secondly was a conversation I had with a hiker one day during training “runners see twice as much but only half as good” SO I made the effort to take in the views on the go, to really see twice as much

From the dam wall to the Out and Back Aid Station is my favourite part of the course. Even though it’s hilly it is still my favourite. Rolling single tracks, perfect for mountain bikers. Bermed banks and bush right up to the trail edge. I didn’t even mind the puddles or diversion around large fallen trees, plus I was almost halfway and the average pace was still sub 8-hour finish.

35.5km and I pop out at the Out and Back Aid Station, this year a full aid station and I cruise right through to complete the out and back leg before stopping. The volunteers cheer and I start the climb over Goldmine Hill, now officially on the local favourite 6 Inch Trail Marathon course heading towards it’s start. I break out the poles and run walk my way over the top and part way down to the 50 mile turn around. All the while wondering “Has Thomas opened the gap and run away, or will I see him any second?” Passing the Dodd’s sign, I see him on the return trip and we both look at our watches. As we crossed I gave him a cheer but I don’t think he heard me as he had headphones in, he was also climbing and probably doing the maths, as was I.

I hit the run and take two steps more, just to be sure and start my way back with that number locked in my mind, I pass the sign and #margiemaths has the gap back to 4 minutes, so I had clawed back the two-minute aid stop but at what cost? Hiking over the top with my poles clicking away I see SJ, it actually took at least 30 seconds for me to place the face and name but I got there in the end and smiled my way over the hill, stowed my poles and ran down the backside of Goldmine Hill towards resupply.

“307 in” and I find a bin to drop my rubbish and grab my drop bag. I pass on the chips and just drink the ginger ale. Helped by Elise and another lady I recognised but could not place a name, I’m bad with names until I hang out with them, sorry for not being able to thank you by name! I donate my ration of snake lollies to the aid station kitty as I still had a few left from the start of the race and stow my re-filled soft flask bottles. DK mentions I am looking in good shape and I feel pretty good at the halfway mark. In the parting seconds of the stop I cross paths with the leader of the 100 mile race, Nate. He is looking fresh as a daisy! With the roar of four people clapping it’s “307 out” and I’m starting the longest leg, 25km to the fabled Treasure Island at Oakley Dam.

The first half of this leg goes smoothly, I see the 100 pack coming past on their journey to Jarradale where I started and they all seem in good spirits and fairly spread out. I wish them all luck and they all cheer back, some saying “he’s right there” or similar but I was yet to see Thomas through he tree’s so I dismissed it as well meaning motivation but maybe not entirely accurate, #margiemaths really was a thing after all! It took until the sharp left turn across the rickety old wood bridge before I caught a glimpse of first place. I didn’t push or try to close the gap. I just maintained the same effort and let the cards fall where they may. At almost 48km we were should to should at the base of a long climb. We hiked for quite a long time (about 9 minutes!) and chatted about all sorts of things while we worked the hill. I took the chance to get some calories in knowing there was some runnable km’s coming up before the Del Park Road crossing. We crested the main climb and started running together, Thomas stayed with me for a while but seemed to drop off the back. Not sure if he stopped on purpose for a toilet break or just slowly slipped behind but the last I saw him at that stage was a cheer as we passed 50.1km, I called over my should “happy distance PB” we laughed and I turned my attention to my own effort and now had to make some decisions.

The section to the road crossing seemed to take a while and I tried my best to just run by feel and not try to run away from Thomas. I felt he had gone too hard too early and would now slip back in the pack as Chris and Andrew would be not far back, they were about 10-12 minutes back at Goldmine when I saw them there. From here I tried to dial the effort back a bit, this was a training run after all so I fell into the habit of looking back (which I always try not to do) and let myself hike more than I would if I was racing super hard. This had a weird effect on me and I hit my first low point of the race. My right wrist was getting sore when using the poles and I had to stop using them after the technical section from Del Park Rd and just ran the gentle climbs like Deadpool with my sticks strapped across my back. Hiking more than I wanted but I was also in a bit of a funk. Running past Tuner’s Hill (Aid 1 at 6 Inch) I berated myself for so many little hikes and committed to run to the Scrap Road crossing, “all the way, no walking, this is all runnable” I wanted to cruise slowly and consistently, but found I would run fast and get tired and the urge to walk was overwhelming. Weirdly, I felt exactly the same here at last year’s 100, and was passed in the exact same spot to slip from 2nd the 3rd (hat tip to Rob) I found the urge and saw a car coming which I think had a relay runner in it, he said “are you coming first?” and I replied “yes mate” trying to smile on the outside and “ gave me a cheer “that’s awesome, looking great” “thanks mate” as I passed by desperately trying to stay running. I knew the road was close now and was confident I was going to hold up my end of the deal and run all the way, before I hit a small rise and without permission my legs stopped running and I turned into a real life Jekyll and Hyde, right there out loud arguing with myself like a crazed lunatic “You f#$%ing P#$%y” “it is a training run, I don’t need to race that hard” “a deals a deal and you folded” Seriously, the weirdest conversation I have ever had and I was all alone. The rise was over and I was back running, chin up chest out in a bit of disbelief regards the last 30 seconds of my life.

I pass the start of the 3 Inch Trail Half Marathon course and begin the climb to the radio tower. I run the flatter stuff and hike the steeper parts, but walked almost a km solid to the top, eating what I can and drinking what I need to. Looking back, doing (now silent) deals with myself. As I pass the tower with the rumble of the conveyor belts to my left I feel the pull of Treasure Island and running down the other side I feel the funk passing. I see the relay guys again at the turn and they tell me I look fantastic and I confess “I’m not exactly feeling it” “I don’t think you are supposed to at 60km!” I cross the conveyor belt overpass thinking that he is right, I’m on target for a 8:30 finish and I had let my nutrition slip a bit that last long leg so of course I was feeling it. I ate another gel to be sure as I passed the ‘scarecrow’ and made the climb up towards Treasure Island.

I roll down the hill and can see signs posted for the runners, all pirate themed as the fabulous Treasure family embrace their name sake Aid Station. The road is lined with cars and there are people moving about. I hear a lady say to her daughters “her comes first place” and I smile. I don’t normally run this end of the field, only ever come first once before so it was a special feeling. I roll into Treasure Island to claps and cheers from a swarm of pirates. “307 in.”

I hand off one bottle to get me to the finish and leave one half full bottle in my vest. Blue is there with my drop bag, Frank fill my bottle and tried to give me a shot of rum, Ben and Shirley are right there packing my vest with my ‘to go’ bag and my other secret weapon, a small bottle of kids red fruit juice. That stuff sends kids crazy at parties, perfect for ultra-runners! I donate another small serve of chips and snakes to the aid station and finish my ginger ale. I mention that I really wanted to hit a sub 8:30 but I’m not so sure now and Blue does the maths for me “two hours to do 16 and a half kays’, no worries” (or to that effect) Going to be close but doable if I keep my head in the game. As I finish my drink Blue says, “don’t let us keep you” and two to three minutes later “307 out.”

Oakley Dam is a short 2km out and back that means you need to leave the marked Munda Biddi Trail. It also means you can once again see some of the field. I was expecting to see Chris or Andrew next, but was surprised it was Thomas, still holding on and still running. Kudo’s to him! Back to the scarecrow that is one of two danger points for navigation and has a history of runners missing the turn. As I was making the final turn back onto the trail I crossed paths with Aaron, but he was coming out of the trail and asked if he was going in the right direction. I confirmed the way to Oakley Dam and thought that was a good catch on his part in correcting the navigation mistake.

From here I was on the last leg, the final pull of the finish was there and the earlier pity party was wrapped up. The food was working and the mission was 16km in under 2 hours but to not destroy myself, maintain the faster than training, slower than race but should someone close the gap be prepared to run hard. The kilometres ticked by and I was happy with the effort. I drank my kids juice, tried to eat a bar but was over the dense food and only ate half of it. Not long later I ate two snakes, no point carrying them all the way and I continued to feel good.

Then it happened and for a moment I thought my race was done. As I neared the turn taken in the 6 Inch race that heads up to Aid 2, I began to cough. I had one almighty cough that was so violent my balls hurt and I doubled over and staggered to the side of the trail. Out of nowhere. I clutch my crotch and suppress the urge to cough again, I didn’t want the pain and I didn’t want to vomit. The urge passed and I got moving again, hesitant but moving. I had no idea where that came from and it worried me for a few seconds, but everything stayed down and the cough was a once off. I had a drink and decided to back off the eating for a little while. Pace came back and I was on my merry way, praying that didn’t happen again!

From here I hit a left turn onto the last of the notable climbs, mixed walk and run to get it done then steady pace, now alert for on coming mountain bikers heading out from Dwellingup. The effort is perfect, I do feel the miles but I’m not ‘running for my life’ Down the first powerline section and I have my final gel of the day and a drink. This section is open gravel road and I left the downhill flow, not even worried about looking back anymore. I feel if anyone catches me from here I can push it home. I just take in the trail, even saw a train! That’s a weird feeling seeing a steam train moving through the scrub where you had no idea there was train tracks! Now enjoying myself I sipped my water and did my best to avoid the run off puddles, one section of single track was impossible to avoid, it usually is so I just ploughed on through. Less than 10km with wet socks was fine, they had been wet most of the day anyway.

Second powerline section and into the Marrinup Maze. Five kilometres to home. One parkrun. Passing through the campground I have one last look back and can only see campers. I enjoy running the winding single track, taking in the berms and not caring about the puddles. Running well I think that this is what today was about. Not winning or leading or any of that stuff, but running well on tired legs. The training part of today. Manage the effort, be running well at the end and somewhere between 8 and 8.5 hours. A win was cream on the cake, or more accurately new shoes on my feet.

I pass the familiar farm with the hole in the shed and pigs, the dog barks at me as I run past, as Alexis predicted and now only 3km to go.

I pass some hikers and their border collie out for a casual walk, must be close now. I hear the noise of a country town and know in my bones it’s close and then I see a yellow trail marker. The original last turn to the finish. Now a four-way junction, and DK’s races have used all four in the past. There is no tape, I stand still in the junction and process my options and decide to follow the trail markers to the train tracks and see some tape at the upcoming road junction. I made the right choice and pop out once again on Del Park Road to a sign 50M to FINISH with an arrow.

I make the final turn and scan around looking for a finish line. The pub is busy, there are people in the park and I look both ways as I cross the train lines then ahead I see my youngest son running towards me, then comes my oldest into view and I choke back a sob. They had other plans that day and I didn’t expect to see them or my wife at the finish. I gathered them around my arms and jogged over the road to the group outside a small building. “where’s the finish line?” “you’re standing on it” and a wave of relief sweeps me as I pause my watch and look down.

It says 8:19.49, which was corrected to 8:20 and change considering my watch took a minute to sort itself out on the start line. Almost an hour faster than my 2014 race. I was pumped with the result, and stoked to have my family there to share it.

A word of warning to runners in DK’s events, if you have an issue with the course marking, be prepared to do something about it! Dave grabbed some tape and joked about sending me back out, but I also know he was recovering from a 200 mile race himself. So, I gathered the kids and Alicia and we took a slow stroll back to the four-way junction to put some tape down for the next runners. Thomas ended up holding second for the last 30km running sub 9 hours on his 50 mile debut.

A special thanks to DK and his wife Belle for putting on a great event, even getting us some sunshine during the day. To the aid station teams who put so much work, time, money and effort into helping us runners. Many are friends already and I can’t thank you enough.

Fast and Dirty Stats

Distance – 81.8km, 8 hours 20minutes, average pace 6:06/km

Calories consumed – Approx. 1,000 – 1,100, (7,000 burnt)

Water consumed – 2.5 litres, Kids Juices – 3, Mini Ginger ales – 3

Shoes – Altra Superior 3.0’s, Innov-8 mud sock with Stone Free Running Gaiters (also recommend Treasure Gaiters if you are in the market)

Shirt – TEAM RUNNINGWORKS tech shirt, Innov-8 Race shell when it was wet.

Poles - Carbon Fibre Z Poles

Vest, Salomon S/Lab 12 set

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themadameditor · 6 years ago

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This summer is a special one for me, because last summer I was in hospital for most of it and spent the rest of it on steroids and a host of there medications, swollen like a blowfish, and getting better. I am still in the course of treatment, but a long way away from where I was last year, feeling much, much, MUCH better, and planning to live every freaking moment of the summer and beyond. I am not a huge fan of the summer, the heat on my skin, the humidity; Britain has the most humid summers… but I vividly remember myself last year hoping and praying that if I make it out I would live that cliche of living my best life. And I’m trying y’all, I really am.

This summer has been glorious, actual sunshine and heat, hotter than an Indian summer if you’ll believe that and come the first of August we are counting down the days to Autumn zooming right past it to the thick of winter. By the end of August we are talking back to school and back to real life for parents and children and the grind of things. But we have now before then, so let’s plan to live the hell out of the summer and make some good memories that can keep us going till the next summer. As I type this, it is pouring down with rain outside my window, bang in the middle of this blazing summer we have torrential rain and thunder storms but I am not mad at the in the least, we need the rain, farmers need it for the soil to keep feeding us good food in season, we need the rain to clean all the humidity and gunk from the pollution the earth is suffering.

This list is a guideline, if you do one thing on it fabulous. Ten? Grand. All? Fantastic. the aim is to live your best life, (said in my best Oprah voice). So let’s get right on into it shall we?

1. Sleep In: August is heaven for everyone, everywhere, no school in session, family holidays, blissful commute into work because trains are not crowded…it is the perfect month to sleep in and catch up on the hours lost to sleeplessness, work and all nighters. Sleep in and get your energy right on balance, and catch up with your body and reacquaint yourself with her natural rhythm.

2. Let your body wake up naturally: see number 1. Get rid of your alarm clock and let your body wake up to the sound of birds and the rise of the sun. Even if it means going in late for work or missing our on the morning calls. Better still no calls until noon until the summer is over.

3. Read two books: something old and something new. For something old, if you have never read it, read Lucky Chances by Jackie Collins. For something new read an Italian Holiday; a book about four women getting away from the ish of their lives in London and holidaying in Italy. Bonus points; read my book. 😉

4. Have a Day-cation: binge watch some shows on Netflix and Amazon. A couple on Netflix: Luke Cage, Drug Lords, Chef, North & South; okay, more than a couple. Amazon: The Bold Type- I really like this show, it is set around three women working the fashion industry, publishing specifically, and yes the three girls can be annoying and atypical at times but it is a far cry from the Devil Wears Prada, which shows of this ilk tend to slant towards. My favourite character is the Editor In Chief. She’s cool and the type of person I would like to believe exists in the industry. Another show and one of Amazon’s best creation is Bosch- this is my absolute favourite show on Amazon, detective Hieronymous “Harry” Bosch, central character in the dark crime drama set in Los Angeles. Binge watch all four seasons in one day and thank me later.

5. Go to a music concert: I’ll admit I am not a huge fan of concerts, crowds make me anxious and the moment gets lost in the melee. Give me a couch and a big screen TV and I’m good, but its the summer and we are living it up so we are taking our fly selves to a concert, in the Park, or at the Albert Hall or maybe something more low key and free; the ever faithful underground busker… whatever floats your boat just go.

6. Plan a night in Paris: be impetuous, call your girlfriends or go SOLO for a night in Paris if you’re close enough.

7. Do something fun in Paris: a fancy meal at L’Orangerie @ George V perhaps, or afternoon tea @ Le Bristol. Go to a museum, forget the Louvre, D’Orsay is my favourite museum in all of Paris. Be a cliché and have expensive hot chocolate at Cafe de Flore. Walk around and marvel at the astounding beauty that is Jardin du Luxembourg; my favourite place to be in Paris.

8. Return from Paris: with pastries from Pierre Here and spend the evening drinking champagne before bed.

9. See a play in the west end: Its a shame that Baba Segi’s wives is not in theatres anymore, but there is always something on so scroll through timeout or art reviews, pick a small theatre, they normally have good plays and go see it, for the culture and for support. Or if you can get tickets, you should go see Hamilton. It is quite simply the greatest show on earth.

10. Go Clubbing: re-live your youth and party in heels that hurt, a dress that is too short, full face of makeup. Flirt with handsome men, exchange numbers for the night. Jump on the night bus home and stop by the kebab shop before you make it home at six in the morning.

11. Babysit your nieces, nephews and god-children: preferably not right after your wild night out in the club.

12. Throw a fabulous dinner party: for friends and catch up on the good times you had.

13. Get lost in London: it’s a beautiful city to get lost in and no matter how many times you roam it, every corner is a surprise.

14. Picnic in the Park: Hyde Park is so beautiful, so vast, so lovely all year round but nothing beats it in the summer. Grab a picnic basket, bottle of chilled champagne, meats and cheeses, fat strawberries and cream, salads and go chill in the park with your bestest

15. Call an old friend: we all have that one friend we have lost touch with, call them up, check in with an old relative, see how they are doing, and say a prayer for the world.

16. Clean your skirting boards: as a matter of fact, clean the whole house, organise your closet and take excess to charity or give them out to family or friends who want them. Live light and let light in.

17. Organise your christmas holiday plans: have a white Christmas or escape somewhere tropical. Do something fun and unusual this time.

18. Get your low maintenance beauty routine on point: the summer is no time to bother with too much make-up because the humidity will not let you be beautiful and great so fine-tune your best make up, no make up look that won’t be a victim of the humidity. Paint your nails, scrub your feet and moisturise them. I love this foot cream, from Burt’s Bees, 100% moisture all day. Don’t be ashy this summer.

19. Plan your wardrobe ahead: make this the summer you wear the prettiest dresses. If you can, and I know you can, plan all the dresses for the 31 days in August.

20. Spend some time being alone: check yourself into a hotel or stay indoors, order room service, go dine out alone or cook yourself a home-cooked meal… do something for you and all about you, get to know yourself better and enjoy being in your company.

21. Spend time with family: I have an awesome family and we are all scattered around the world but in each other’s lives through phone, texts etc. When you can, drop by your parents’, call your brother, sisters, aunts, uncles… get the barbecue going and enjoy being in the company of loved ones.

22. Go to a quiz night at your local… I know, I know but try it its so much fun

23. Spend a Monday by the sea: away from work and the hustle of every day life

24. Write a short story: it can be about anything you want at all, just carve out sometime and put words down to paper.

25. Take a leap of faith: If its a bad decision, learn from it and move on. Enjoy the rewards of a good decision, pay it forward pass on the good feeling

26. Take a day trip outside of London: a summer’s day punting on River Cam, taking a literary tour of Oxford, or walking the bucolic lanes of the Cotswolds… do something that takes you out of the big smoke.

27. Take a digital detox: nowadays, a lot of things on social media make me so damn mad and I find myself engaging with crazy people but I have cut back on my time online and it has done me a world of good. Social media is both good and dangerous for you, find sometime to be ignorant of the shit that can sometimes go down on there.

28. Go to bed late, wake up later.

29. Eat dessert as a whole meal.

30. Fall in love with your life all over again: Be intentional about this and make sure you love your life. We are all going through things, the world is a shitty place to be sometimes these days but here is the thing; you only have you at night when you look yourself in the mirror. Be intentional with loving yourself. Please.

31. Take it all in: Take care of yourself. Check your breasts, drink lots of water, eat well, eat in season, moisturise at night, exercise however you can, limit your meat consumption, use sunscreen, my sister, use sunscreen.

To the summer of our lives.

31 Days of Summer This summer is a special one for me, because last summer I was in hospital for most of it and spent the rest of it on steroids and a host of there medications, swollen like a blowfish, and getting better.

#31 Days of Summer #August #Bucket List #Featured #Summer

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remembermemorablememories · 6 years ago

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Sunday, July 1, 2018

post #174

main points:

- weird yellow tint in sky this morning

- lunch in SF with hugh and jwoos

- booling around in japantown and fillmore jazz festival

- head back home

- dim sum uber eats + the office

- yosemite trip planning

today i:

- woke up around 9:30am and chilled in bed watching youtube and such. i woke up this morning to a weird yellow color tint in the sky. it was like someone had color corrected real life. it was like this yellow ish tint. i took some pics on my phone and it’s kind of crazy... i later found out that this was cause there was a fire somewhere nearby and the ash blew into the bay area, giving us this yellow ish tint. it was honestly very surreal

this pic looks color corrected but it’s not...

- made some oatmeal for breakfast and watched the office “new boss” S5E20. I skipped a few episodes cause i remembered i had watched them v recently

- finalized plans with hugh and jwoos for lunch and then headed up around 11am, getting there around 12pm. the yellow ish tint was even worse up in SF. jwoos and i got seated inside this hot pot place. and then hugh arrived shortly after. however, we didn’t realize that all you can eat was gonna be $36... so before we ordered, we told the waitress we changed our minds and were going somewhere else. we wandered down the street to this famous ramen place, marufuku, but there were 77 parties waiting ahead of us according to yelp... jesus

so we went back to the area near shabusen (hot pot) and went upstairs to hinodeya ramen, which was like 10 parties instead. we waited for about 30-40 minutes, just chilling and chatting. then we got in around 1pm

we ordered the ramen and it was soooooooo good. and really heavy. i was so full afterwards

- we wandered around japantown east and west mall, stopping by random shops here and there. we stopped by kpop beauty, a samurai sword place, a convenience store, and an anime video store. there was a japan day festival going around the surrounding area so it was cool to see some of the performances. there were drums and this flute thing

- we walked down a couple blocks and went to fillmore jazz festival. it was pretty dope, there was dope jazz music being played every few blocks. we decided to go to boba guys first cause why not

- walked the whole length of fillmore jazz festival, stopping every so often to listen to some of the jazz bands perform. there was one like every other block, and it was fun dancing to their music. we walked the whole length from south to north, and at the top of the hill/end of the festival, there was this free spinal exam tent LOL

hugh decided to sign up for it. while we waited for them to give him an exam, jwoos took some dope pics of us. i’m gonna make one of them my pro pic cause it’s pretty candid. i wish my clothing were a little more symmetrical but oh well

- hugh did his spinal exam (he said he didn’t really learn much LOL). then we walked to alta plaza park to hang out for a bit. then jwoos and i went home. jwoos had a meeting and i just was kind of tired. hugh was gonna go to a dance thing later. we parted ways :’( i ubered home for about 50 min from 4:40pm to 5:30

- i just chilled at home for a bit, watching more david dobrik vlogs. i’ve just been going through all his old videos LOL. i’m at like july 2017 of last year, which is interesting cause it’s like a year ago from today

- ordered dim sum from uber eats and took a long shower. picked up my food around 8pm and then watched the office S5E21 “two weeks”. it’s when michael decides to start his own paper company to protest the new VP david wallace hired. i wanted dim sum cause it was light and ramen from lunch was still heavy sitting in my stomach

- played a few games of fortnite. i played a solo game and was lagging near the end. but i got 4 kills. it came down to me and the last guy, and i was like oh shit i could actually win this. he pushed me cause i had the circle and i tried to knock him down with a grenade launcher, slowing him in the process. he got a lucky snipe on me while pushing and then i started panicking cause i lost my shield. i drank a big shield pot as he built up to me, then we had a small build battle. i wasn’t doing too bad, getting the high ground. but then he got a hit on me with his shotty and i started panicking, so i started running away and heading down LOL. and then he hit me a few times more and i was down to like 20 HP. i was just trying to hide somewhere. i basically gave him even more high ground, i’m not sure what i was trying to do... i choked. then he killed me :/ i saw he only had 3 kills, including me. i realized i should’ve just been more confident and gone for it. i choked. gaaahh. i still haven’t won an actual solos match (i’ve won thanos mode and sniper only but not normal solos)

- met with jwoos, zac and lydia to discuss yosemite trip. we planned out our schedules, sights we wanted to see, logistics for getting there, and what to bring

- wrapped that up around 11:45pm. now it’s 12:35am and i’m typing this, ready to crash. i can’t keep my eyes open anymore. i was looking at jwoos’ picture of me from earlier and debating whether i should make it my pro pic or try to take a better one. i figured, i probably won’t be able to look that candid anymore and it’s still a pretty dope pic. sooo i’m gonna set it tomorrow morning :p (~social media~)

okay good night

today was a fun day in SF

#post #2018 #memorable #pictures #food #july

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swfanficbyjz · 7 years ago

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SW Rey Theory - Legacy of Light - Chapter 10

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Table of Contents - >

(15 years after Revenge of the Sith, during Rebels season 1)

“Uncle Nyx?” Ashla said from where she lounged on top of the wing, staring at the spaceships as they came and went. Mos Eisley was intriguing to her. There was so much diversity and life to the city. She blinked up towards the twin suns. It was too hot here though, for her taste. And there was so much sand.

They’d stayed with Han Solo and Chewbacca for nearly three years. Though captain Solo had never spoke of their first argument about whether she was a Jedi again, he did seem to appreciate the ways she helped fix up the ship. Chewie and her spent a lot of time together working on it and she enjoyed his company even though it took a long time to start understanding him. Life with them had been exciting, but eventually her uncle had decided it was time for them to go their own way after saving up enough to buy another ship. Traveling with them had opened up other job opportunities and contacts too, so now they were doing better than they had been before. By the end of their time together, she’d been sad to say goodbye and hoped they’d get to cross paths again someday.

“What is it, Ashla?” he said from under the hull of their junker ship.

“I can’t believe people would want to settle on a planet like this.”

“Not all of them came here by choice. Now get your head out of the clouds and make yourself useful,” he pointed to the bag of tools.

“What clouds?” she sassed and hopped down to rummage through the bag. "I don't think I've seen a cloud since we left Bespin.

“Socket wrench,” he ordered. She pulled out the tool and handed it to him. “We’re almost done, I just have to get this one piece… kriff!” She heard a zap and looked under the ship at him. He was nursing his hand and staring angrily at the sparking part he’d been working on as though the machine would fix itself.

“What happened?” she asked, shaking her head. He rolled out from under the ship and kicked it.

“We need a new alluvial damper or we’re not going anywhere. The one that Toydarian sold me was faulty!” he said in annoyance. “Here girl. Go find a dealer that has one. On the double.” He dropped some credits in her hand. ‘On the double’ usually meant she had plenty of time.

“What are you going to do?” she smirked at him. This always happened. He broke parts and she had to go fetch. It was a good thing she was good at that. Sometimes it felt like she had a nose for parts, she always found the right shop on her first pick.

“I’m going to go get a drink.,” he said smugly.

“Don’t gamble away our lunch money then.” She rolled her eyes. She watched him walk away talking to himself angrily. She just smiled to herself. It wouldn’t take long for her to find the part, so she decided to go explore the city first.

She headed out the north door, locking the hanger behind her. She wandered the busy streets for awhile, taking in all the sights and sounds. Her favorite part about traveling around the galaxy was seeing the differences between the planets and the people. She closed her eyes, reaching out with her senses; feeling the energy around her like her mom taught her. The things she felt when she opened up always fascinated her. It was like the city came to life, full of color and sound. She’d tried to explain it to Nyx before, but he didn’t understand. It made her miss her mom. She wished she was with them. As amazing as her experiences with the force were, she hated having no one to share them with. Her uncle tried to listen sometimes, but there was so much she couldn’t tell him. And everything she could do made him nervous.

He’d tell her to keep her head down and not do it in public. She knew why of course, the Empire was everywhere. It was dangerous to be like her. But using it to explore and feel new places wasn’t anything other people would notice. It felt safe enough.

She moved forward feeling her way around, losing herself in the energy and feeling connected to it. She was so distracted by the feeling she didn’t notice the person step out in front of her. She crashed into them and then fell backwards onto her butt. He’d tumbled forward dropping a handful of parts all around them. “I’m so sorry!” she rushed to help him pick them up.

“Don’t worry about it,” he looked up at her and blushed. He looked about her age, maybe a little younger. He had light blonde hair that was wavy like hers. And soft blue eyes, also like her. She looked at him confused for a moment. He felt kind of familiar. Did she have a long-lost twin somewhere?

"Are you building a power converter?" she asked after looking over the parts in her hands.

"You could tell that just by looking at the pieces?" he sounded surprised.

"Um... yeah..." she shifted nervously. "It's kind of a gift. I can see random pieces and in my mind, I know how they should go together. I know it sounds silly, but it's hard to explain."

"I don't think it's silly, I think it's amazing," he said in awe. She blushed and looked away.

"You've got the wrong fuses though. You need thirty AMP ones. Otherwise you'll end up frying the battery," she handed him back the parts.

"Really? I like tinkering but I don't know much about parts. Most of the time I'm just feeling my way through it. That's probably why I have to keep starting over." He sounded frustrated. "I spend all my allowance having to replace pieces. I never get anywhere."

"Do you have the rest of the parts nearby? I could help you, if you wanted," she shuffled her feet, feeling shy suddenly. He was cute.

"I don't live in town," he said disappointed. "Otherwise I'd gladly take you up on your offer. I've been working on this same converter for over a year."

"Why so long?" she watched him curiously.

"Well, I don't get to come into town very often. And when I do, I don't have much money for all the parts I need," he looked down ashamed. She wished she could help him out, he seemed so nice. "But hey, if you're up for a day trip you could follow the road that way to the Lars farm. Maybe we could work on stuff together some time?" he said hopefully. She didn't think she could get away with being gone from her uncle that long. But she was sorely tempted to go anyways. She felt a kind of odd connection to this boy. Almost as though he were a kindred spirit. She'd have to ask her mom about it later.

"I wish I could," she said sadly. "But once my uncle gets our ship fixed, we're heading back to Bespin."

"Bespin? The cloud city? Is that where you're from?" He tipped his head to his side studying her.

"No," she laughed. "I'm from Coruscant. But my uncle and I travel around the galaxy doing odd jobs for people. Why are you looking at me like that?"

"It's just... well it looks like you have, I don’t know... markings on your face or something."

"I'm half alien," she said with a mischievous grin. She wasn’t supposed to tell people that, but this boy seemed harmless. Besides, Tatooine was a haven for all types, was she suddenly going to be hunted down if she mentioned it? It was controlled by the Hutts, and there were no stormtroopers in sight. In a weird way, it felt like a breath of fresh air, even though the city didn’t smell that great. He smiled broadly, his eyes sparkled in the sunlight.

"Really? What kind?"

"Togruta," she said.

"Togruta? Don't they have horns and head tails?"

"Montrals and lekku. And yes, they do. I told you, I'm only half!"

"Interesting! I think you got the better half." He looked embarrassed. "I don't mean that as an insult to whichever parent is Togruta. I just meant... well... you're really pretty." He dropped a couple pieces on the ground again.

"None taken. And thank you. You're not so bad yourself," she teased, blushing a little.

"Luke! Luke!" a woman called from the distance.

"Oh, that's my aunt. I better go. It was nice to meet you... uh..."

"Ashla," she said. "My name is Ashla Okami."

He smiled again. "I’m Luke. Luke Skywalker." He dropped another couple parts reaching out to shake her hand. She was surprised to feel a little electricity in his touch. "If you're ever in the neighborhood, feel free to come visit!" he said after she picked up the parts and set them back in his arms.

"I'd like that," she waved goodbye as he hurried to the woman that had called his name. Her mind was buzzing. There was something about him, she couldn't put her finger on it.

Ashla found the damper part her uncle had requested and returned to the hanger, unable to stop thinking about the boy. Whatever her senses meant, she liked him. It was a shame they weren't staying here awhile longer.

She laid down on the cart and rolled under the wing. She took apart Nyx's sloppy patch work and worked out her tension on the metal pieces in front of her. She liked working with machines, they were simple, yet complex. She felt calmer when she worked with them, as though keeping her hands busy made thinking easier.

Luke Skywalker... everything about him seemed so familiar. Almost like a dream she'd once had, of someone she was supposed to know. He wasn't the one she'd dreamt about, she was sure of that. But for some reason, he felt like he was connected to the person she'd dreamt about. And his name... it felt almost like a memory. It felt like it was floating right there, just out of reach.

She finished patching the ship and sighed. Packing up all their gear. She went inside to start the engines, they fired correctly this time. She ran a diagnostic on the ship to make sure everything was in order.

"Hey doll," Nyx slurred stumbling up the ramp. "If you fixed the ship, let's get out of here." She could smell his breath from where she sat and waved a hand in front of her nose.

"Uncle Nyx, you shouldn't drink so much," she fussed. This was normal, she was used to it. But she didn't like it.

"Don't worry, your pretty head," he stuttered falling sideways into the seat as she punched the buttons to lift off. "I only had one bottle." She rolled her eyes, reaching past him to press the door hatch.

"How big was the bottle?" she asked stubbornly.

He moved his hands to show size, but then dropped them, passing out in the chair. She sighed deeply and took over control since her co-pilot was now unconscious. It was a good thing he allowed her to fly most of the time now. She knew the ins and outs of this ship far better than he did. Mainly because every time he got drunk, she had to fly it. She was only sixteen, but she loved the freedom. She thought of Luke's name again and half smiled. Maybe she was a walker of the skies too.

---

"Mom!" Ashla's voice came through clear tonight. Ahsoka smiled at how far she'd come in the force. "The craziest thing happened to me today!"

"Oh yeah?" Ahsoka asked. "What was that?"

"I met this boy who was just like me," she said dreamily. Ah yes, young love.

"Just like you? How so?" she wondered if she’d stumbled on another force user. She filed it away in her memory banks in case the Empire decided to invade yet another world. Ashla didn’t know it, but she found a lot of potential allies to the rebellion based solely on the things her daughter had reported to her over the years. That’s also how she’d known to send the Ghost crew after the Wookiees. But she’d resisted telling her about the rebellion so that she didn’t get any wild ideas to try to join it.

"Well he kind of looked like me, but I felt this connection with him. I don't know how to explain it. It was like he was familiar, as if I’d seen him or someone like him in a dream. I felt like I should know him."

"That is interesting," Ahsoka murmured thoughtfully. "Did this boy tell you his name?"

"Yeah. He said his name was Luke Skywalker." Ahsoka nearly fell off the stool she was meditating on. So it was true then... Padmé lived long enough to give birth to their child. She’d never fully been convinced by Bail’s words all those years ago, but she’d had too many other things to worry about to investigate further. Senator Organa had never told her exactly what happened around Padmé’s death, but she’d seen the funeral procession broadcast on the holonet later. Whatever her and Anakin had done, she had mourned the loss of senator Amidala as much as she had any others. And believing that their child hadn’t survived had made her death that much more tragic.

Her head was reeling, it was hard to focus on her daughter all of a sudden. She wondered briefly if Padmé was still alive too, but surely if she was, Ahsoka would have crossed paths with her. She was not the type to stay out of a rebellion that fought such oppression. Her whole life had been devoted to fighting for the people. Besides, if she had somehow survived, they’d gone to such elaborate lengths to fake her death. "Mom? Are you okay?" her daughter asked.

"Yes dear. I'm sorry. I got a little distracted. Tell me about him." Ashla went on to describe her interaction with her half-brother. Ahsoka kept wondering if she was ready to tell Ashla the truth. She wasn't. Not really. Thankfully her and Nyx traveled around a lot. So the likelihood of them crossing paths again was slim.

"What a nice young man," Ahsoka commented when Ashla told her about his invite. "Dear," she sighed heavily. "I'm really tired tonight. We'll talk more tomorrow. I love you."

"I love you too," Ashla said.

She blinked a few times, pulling herself out of the meditation. Anakin had another child out there. Why was that both exciting and painful? She swallowed hard, reminding herself that her, and consequently Ashla, had always been secondary in his life. What was she hoping? That Anakin would come back from the dead and profess his love only to her? She shook the thought off her. It was too heavy to bear. What were the odds that their daughter would meet him and Padmé's child? It was a huge galaxy. Yet... Ashla had felt a connection with him. Maybe she should have told her the truth about her father. No... she wasn't ready yet. Or maybe she was. Maybe she needed to talk about it.

There were so many pent-up emotions and lingering feelings revolving around Anakin. He’d been dead for fifteen years. Nothing had filled the empty space inside her where he’d been. She’d witnessed countless deaths, but none had stung as bad as his. Yes, she’d been close to him. Yes, she’d loved him. And she’d most certainly been attached to him, despite all the Jedi warnings. But she’d believed that time would heal the gaping wound in her soul and it had not. She’d simply learned to grit her teeth and keep moving.

But that was before she had learned the truth. He was still alive, if you could call it that. There was little she’d been able to discover about how he’d ended up where he was now; as something else entirely. Since the horrific revelation, the wound in her soul had started hurting all over again. Worse this time though, burning her as though it was on fire. She’d cried on Rex’s shoulder that night the Ghost crew had brought him to the rebellion. He’d been equally horrified both for what it meant to her and her child, but also for his own reasons. Had it not been for him that night though, the cavern of pain surely would have collapsed in on her. But Rex couldn’t be around all the time; he had valuable intel and expertise to offer the rebellion. And she was often left alone with her thoughts and fears.

Finding out there was another child of his out there… it felt like the wound was bleeding all over again. Luke Skywalker. How much was he like his father? If she found him would she be looking at a younger version of him? Or was he too, in danger of becoming something awful? Did it also put her daughter in danger as well? She didn’t know. Ashla deserved the truth, and maybe if she finally told her, maybe together they could heal it.

The last thing she needed though, was Ashla getting the wild idea that she had to go looking for her father. Darth Vader was even less likely to accept her than Anakin was. And if he found out the truth… surely she’d never be safe again. And she could not let that happen.

Next Chapter - >

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binsofchaos · 4 years ago

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Music’s first responder: How Yo-Yo Ma answered the pandemic’s call and consoled a reeling nation

After a lifetime of preparation, the iconic cellist is once more proving classical music’s power to honor grief, catalyze hope, and connect us across isolation.

In a way, while the pandemic’s disruptions have left many feeling plunged into completely unknown terrain, Ma had been preparing for this moment his entire life. “Art is not for art’s sake,” he says. “Well, it could be. But really, it’s for life’s sake.”

“I want to try this on you and ask what you think,” he says. He goes on to speak about the ethical vision in Beethoven’s music, a sense of “reaching out for something that was almost attainable,” the possibility for a more fair and just society that, in Beethoven’s day, still glittered beckoningly on the horizon. Two world wars, he continues, shattered that vision and showed us “that the veneer of civilization was really just a veneer.” These days, he says, the ethical striving and idealism still present in Beethoven’s music all too rarely find an echo in our contemporary world.

“But,” ever the optimist, Ma continues, “with the new tools and understanding we have, could there be a more hopeful humanistic philosophy, or a way of thinking that can unite us and propel us forward, maybe not to the same utopian ideal but at least toward being in balance between ourselves and our planet?”

This is not how most musicians typically begin an interview. Ma’s mind is a vast storehouse of ideas, associations, curiosities, streams of thought. “When you ask Yo-Yo a question, his brain comes up simultaneously with 100 different ways of answering,” says Sara Wolfensohn, an old friend.

“I need to be fed ideas,” Ma tells me, though he’s also got a lot of his own. He thinks knowledge is overly siloed in today’s world. He wants to put science back in conversation with the arts. He loves the concept in ecology of the “edge effect,” the notion that biodiversity is richest at the borderline between two ecosystems, and he frequently employs it as a metaphor. He also wants culture to play a more central role in society as a gateway to things our country appears to be decidedly lacking at the moment: trust, empathy, and humility. He views all three as critical to the world’s thriving into the future. And these days, he explains, he is often thinking generationally, both about the limits of his own and the birth of the next.

“I’m about to become a grandfather for the third time,” Ma says, his face widening into that smile that routinely warms the chilliest of concert halls. “And I know that while I’m not going to see the year 2100,” he continues, “someone very close to me probably will. But what is that world going to be like? What is my part in handing them whatever I’ve been responsible for, and what are they going to think about it? These are not abstract questions to me anymore. They’re real questions. Pre-pandemic, the big frustration was that we were spending the great majority of our time producing things,” he adds. “Now I think so much more about meaning and purpose.”

It’s also safe to say that Ma — before the pandemic, too — had thought about these topics once or twice. At-home viewers of the videos he has been creating from his living room can sometimes spot, behind Ma’s right shoulder, a picture of his hero, the legendary Catalan cellist Pablo Casals. The image is framed next to a quote from Casals that Ma has always prized: “I am a man first, an artist second. As a man, my first obligation is to the welfare of my fellow men. I will endeavor to meet this obligation through music — the means which God has given me — since it transcends language, politics and national boundaries. My contribution to world peace may be small, but at least I will have given all I can to an ideal I hold sacred.”

From the perspective of the classical music world today, Casals’s sentiment may sound decidedly old-fashioned. In their own era, men like Casals and Leonard Bernstein had political and social visions, and they spoke beyond classical audiences to address a wider public (John F. Kennedy once said that Bernstein was the only man he “would never run against for political office”). But as the field’s share of prestige in the culture at large has shrunk, so too has the ethical purview of its leading voices. These days, the field’s stars tend to traffic within a more circumscribed cultural sphere, even as they try, when possible, to expand the music’s reach.

Artistic paths rarely follow a straight line. In Ma’s case, one can’t say exactly what led to what, nor is he in a rush to tell you. But in the years following his trip to the Kalahari Desert, Ma began authoring new scripts for building a life of meaning in music. Genre demarcations, which had long been the guardrails of his path through music, suddenly seemed less relevant. While he continued his concerto appearances and solo work, Ma was also suddenly playing the tangos of Astor Piazzolla, and then recording a bluegrass-inflected album, Appalachia Waltz, with the fiddle player Mark O’Connor and bassist Edgar Meyer. Music-making was, in short, becoming less of “a formal thing.” And perhaps the San notion of an instrument being little more than a means to an end had also seeped in somewhere. Around this time, Ma absentmindedly left his $2.5 million Montagnana cello in the trunk of a New York City taxi. (It was recovered.)

Even as he ventured musically further afield, the Bach suites remained Ma’s magnetic north. But he no longer felt compelled to plumb their mystery as part of a solitary quest, choosing instead, in the late 1990s, to work with six directors to create a series of six films, each inspired by one of the suites. Then in 2000, Ma founded Silkroad, a global collective of musicians inspired by the cross-cultural connections that flourished in the lands along the ancient Silk Road trading route. The attacks of September 11, 2001, and the waves of xenophobia that followed, seemed only to reinforce the need for listening across cultures. Headquartered in Boston, Silkroad is still thriving some two decades later.

Three decades later, Ma is now well practiced at seeking out what’s needed. Over the course of the last year, in addition to the recorded videos, the live-streamed performances, and the tour on the flatbed truck, he has released a new album, Songs of Comfort and Hope, with pianist Kathryn Stott, and he has brought his ideas on music and healing directly to the source by performing over Zoom in hospitals. Among the communities Ma has played for privately several times are front-line health care workers at Massachusetts General Hospital.

“It was a time of tremendous anxiety and unbelievable stress,” says Dr. Kathy May Tran, a hospitalist at Mass. General who coordinated his first performance in May for roughly 200 health care workers. “But the chance to connect over music, together with Yo-Yo’s words of care and support, and just the priority of gratitude that he embodies, were restorative to our entire community and gave us the strength to continue. That sounds corny, but it’s completely true.”

Since the pandemic began, Ma has also become involved with a national nonprofit called Project: Music Heals Us, which arranges virtual private concerts for hospital patients. The group to date has connected 161 musicians from across the country with over 3,100 patients in 23 hospitals, many of whom are severely isolated from family and even from most hospital staff due to COVID protocols. The contributing musicians come from all corners of the profession, though it’s fair to say not many are internationally renowned soloists. At one point, project organizers say, a patient at Houston Methodist hospital told his physical therapist that later in the day he would be receiving a private performance from Yo-Yo Ma. The clinician responded by noting that the patient was apparently suffering from delusions, only to later enter the ICU and find that Yo-Yo Ma was indeed there on an iPad, giving a private performance of the Shaker hymn “Simple Gifts.”

“Musicians like Yo-Yo and many others could have taken the path of least resistance and easily avoided the pandemic altogether,” Dr. Tran says. “Instead, they chose to walk into it head on. In medicine and science, there is the concept of a catalyst, an entity or substance that creates a chemical reaction that can be lasting, permanent, transformative. During this pandemic, Yo-Yo has been a catalyst.”

Back in our Zoom interview, the hour has grown late and Ma has grown introspective. “We’re a country that was invented by a group of very smart people,” he says. “We’re living the American experiment, and we want the experiment to succeed and thrive. We want homo sapiens to thrive and survive. I ask myself, What does a 65-year-old do next? I want to be useful, I want to respond to need. I want to try, in whatever years I have, to do things with as much meaning and impact as possible.”

The questioning might imply that an answer would involve a departure from his recent roles, and it’s true that Ma has rarely stayed in one place, artistic or geographic, for long. But it also depends on one’s vantage point. Pull back the camera on his journey and one begins to see not wanderings but through-lines, as even Ma seems to concede. “My interests have always started with people,” he says. “Who they are, why they think and do what they do.”

That observation surely applies to Ma’s music as well. The most powerful performers have an almost mystical way of blurring the lines between interpreting and creating. They attempt to inhabit the composer’s way of seeing. To do so, Ma once said, “One must go out of oneself, finding empathy for another’s experience, forming another world.”

The key word here is empathy. It is what bridges Ma’s work as a musician and his social consciousness. Returning to the composer Leon Kirchner’s challenge, one might say empathy is the true center of Ma’s tone. And yes, he’s found it. And built on it his life.

https://www.cpr.org/2020/05/22/watch-live-on-sunday-yo-yo-ma-performs-bach-cello-suites-to-honor-lives-lost-to-coronavirus/

#music #music's first responder #yo yo ma #emmanuel axe #hope #comfort #music heals us #cpr.org

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coreytravelogue · 7 years ago

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Whitehorse, Yukon Territory - May 19, 2018

While I was Yukon I had full intention to post my journal entry before leaving but like me bringing my Jayne hat on this trip, it just didn’t happen. So this will be a mix me last week talking and me a week after reflecting. So lets begin.

(May 11)

Today is the first half of my first day of the city and I think I have already got most of the city now, maybe I am wrong but it is not a big fit. It is not a knock I expected it o be this way and wanted it to. I needed the quiet and the forest atmosphere. Could have done with less of the wind.

I forgot my Jayne hat which angers me to no end but it is a first world problem. I found I forgot it mid way to the airport. Got on the plane at 7 but it wasn’t until 8 when we got off the ground due to a broken toilet. We made it it to Kelowna 45 minutes later in what was supposed to be a in and out and instead it was another hour waiting for something else. I am assuming it was the same broken toilet.

We got off the ground again and it was a 150 min trip or so. One good thing was they fed us well, well better than westjet or air canada would on a trip less than 6 hours or so. We got a fruit and meat plate which was unexpected, a snack which was small but oh well followed by a warm cookie so I could not complain especially since I barely ate that day.

I finally got into Whitehorse at midnight to find the smallest airport I have been to in years that felt like it came out of the 80s w it hits warm colours but I liked that of course. It was just different coming from big or bigger airports elsewhere. Even St. John’s airport is twice the size of this one. I knew I needed a taxi. I normally don’t not trust or don’t like using taxis but given is as in a unknown place, it was midnight and I was tired it was required. I checked that it would be a 13 dollar fare and the route didn’t seem to of air of a drive but it still wound up being a 20 dollar fare. Thankfully I was prepared for that.

I arrived in my room and found it to be excellent, very nice and clean. That being said I didn’t wind UFO falling asleep till 2 am. I woke up at 6 am and dragged another hour of myself before I showered and met the owner of the house. The house itself is very new in a new neighbourhood. Apparently it was once full of kids but they are all but one gone and that one hopes to be d one soon. In a great form of irony he is trying to apply to work for the department I am working for. I couldn’t and wouldn’t tell much since I have no power to sway but the mother told me he really wants to work for us and I told her if her. Son really wants to work for my department and has the education then he has a good shot. She is a nice woman and house is very nice, would probably be a awesome place. To stay in the summer but it is not quite summer yet as I would soon find out.

I walked out into the 9am to a never ending gust of wind but I quickly got what Whitehorse was about. It truly is frontier city, that has always been its aesthetic and this city owns it as best it can while it does modernize. It felt like a fusion of the small towns patchiness of Bay Roberts with the industrial appeal of Edmonton.

I walked to the airport in 30 min from the house looking to go to the museums next door but they were both closed. I assume that this city is visited in the summer commonly and winter as well but not in fall or spring and it is still spring here. I then decided to walk tot he city centre because on the map it didn’t seem like that long of a walk. Well not long compared to other cities I have been to. 90 min later I finally reached the city Center after walking through sandy hills and beautiful made for hiking trails. I hoped to have a good breakfast but it was too late for that.

I went to the Main Street which it was literally, the city has one records tore in the area and it is a small one with records going for 50 bucks a shot, CDs for 20 bucks. Reminded me of the old days of Fort McMurray where all CDs cost 25 dollars while everywhere else south was at 20. That is the price of living north of regular civilization. The further away you are from civilization the more expensive things get.

I spent 30 dollars on fudge.......fudge! Not because it was expensive, I don’t know about fudge prices but I went into this Midnight Sun shop which seemed to have a makeshift amount of home madeish stuff, tourist stuff and.......fudge. They had a tray full of tasters and I had one, loved it.....tried another loved it and I think I tried all the different stuff. I am normally not a fudge guy, I cane at it but I guess it has only been until recently I have gotten into how creative many places are with it....so I bought 30 bucks in fudge.....so what....treat yo self!

A coworker recommended a cafe for me to go to but it is too late for breakfast food. As I am writing this I am on my 3rd beer at the Dirty Northern Bastard Public House. I had butter chicken fries and two Yukon made beers from a brewery that is good far from me to check out called Winterlong Brewery. The other I want to go to will have to wait till tomorrow. I could g o today but I want to go on the tour. I always wanted to go on a brewery tour but they were always expensive or not available. This seems doable but the tour starts in 20 min and it Isao 40 min walk from here, I know because I already walked it.

So Saturday the plan is to wake up and hit the two museums at the airport early then be in the brewery by 2pm for it’s tour then buy some beer and find somewhere to get writing. I knew I would be done exploring this city quick. The point was to find solitude or a portion of it to work on stuff.

Whitehorse has something that the others don’t and that is wilderness that surrounds and you are away from everything, something I can’t get in Vancouver or anywhere close. I don’t know if I will get that in Fort Mac 2 weeks from now but I know I won’t have time for writing in Fort Mac while I run a solo Corey This Is Your Life episode just for myself because I know only I am interested in my own past and preserving it because my greatest fear is forgetting things.

The day is still a child here but it is too early to get drunk so I want to hit the only museum open today then find another place to watch the hockey game. The traditional Canadian accent is very strong here, I feel like the Canada culture is stronger here than it is in places like Toronto, Edmonton and Vancouver. That is if you think in terms of the stereotypes; large wilderness, the accent, the sweet tooth, the hockey obsessed lifestyle and the beer.

May 12

Another day is done and in between those two days there was lots of walking that was done.

After I wrote the above I sent out to explore some more. I set out to find the paddlewheel boat and found I could not get it on it.

Walked back to the city center to go to the go to the city’s historical museum. Sadly it was under renovation but they still were open and changing 8 bucks.

After spending a hour there I went back to the bar to watch the Caps versus Bolts while I continued to dine on over priced bar food and beer but hey.....treat yo self! It was still good food.

By the time the game was over I felt it was time to head back to my room and figured hey it took 90 min to get here I should be able to get back no problem in the same time. I walked up the hill to where the airport was and figured well I already went one way, the other way don’t look too long....

3 hours later I finally got home with my legs completely shot, serves me right I think but thankfully a chat with a friend on my phone made the trek shorter plus I needed the alone time to talk to myself about the typical things.

I got off the bed today and immediately felt the effects of Friday’s walk around the airfield. Those effects I have felt all day. The plan was to go to the museum next to the airport then take a bus to the city center and do the brewery tour then head back to the house to watch the game. That didn’t happen.

The museum was awesome, it was the Beringia Interpretive Center and I think I was their only patron that day, they gave me the full tour and I got my full 6 bucks worth which was beyond worth it. I got to shoot a prehistoric arrow befor bows and arrows which make me want to try and build and shoot my own of it.

After that I had about 90 min to get to the brewery, so I went to the bus stop assuming that it should be around only to find it only runs once and hour. So I decided to do another stupid thing and that was to walk the way down there on basically one good foot. It did wind up being fun despite the fear of bears being around.

I finally got the brewery and drank my fill on a empty stomach, I think everyone knew my plight that day was to just get toasted. I went to wall mart to get my parents the rest of their Christmas presents because I like to get it early. I finally did take the bus which lead me back to at least ten min from the place I stayed but I needed food and was too lazy to cook so I wound up paying 50 dollars worth in fries and chicken finger just for nourishment and nearly passing. Out on their couch. I don’t think it was so much being drunk as it was exhaustion.

So here I am in bed and really to sleep at the early hour of 8 pm.

Tomorrow the plan is to check out and hit the last museum then sit in the airport and work on my writing till the plane gets in.

May 13 (written on May 19)

The original plan for May 13 was simple; have a decent breakfast for the first time since I had been there, go to the transportation museum then wait it out in the airport till I left at 4:30 and got home just in time to have a decent night’s sleep............that did not happen and no one ever really gave a good reason. It was just that kind of a day. The first big issue I had that day was that i had bought two bottles of beer that I hoped I could bring with me on the plane. I found out that I couldn’t so I went into the bush to drink it. Not only was it warm but it wasn’t that great so I only really drank half of one bottle and two shots of the other and poured them out.

I went to the transportation museum which found up being a bit of a waste of money to me. It had a few nice things in it but nothing that I really cared for. I did get a pin out of it. Even though I did try to stretch my time at the museum I still had 3 hours before i had to check in. I went into the airport assuming like every other airport I have been it to it would have wifi but it didn’t I was also hoping that the concession stand would be open as it normally is to the hilt in every other place to get a fridge magnet (one of the few tourist things I collect at places because its cheap and it makes my fridge look cooler). Concession stand was closed, apparently it is only open for maybe a few hours between whenever flights come because not very many flights come in and out of Whitehorse. So I had 3 hours to kill and decided to walk across the street to the motel/resteraunt/bar that looked like it came straight out of the Klondike which struck my interest and it did not disappoint. Once inside it did have the look of a log cabin with 1970s decor. I ordered chicken fingers and fries with some Yukon Brewing beer. Realized they didn’t have wifi either so there you go but the food was good and I was able to relax. After an hour and a half of relaxing I felt i may as well just check in and wait it out and went across the highway again to check in.

I went to the check in place to find out that the plane did not arrive and that the flight has been moved to 9:30.............fuck. So much for having a good nights sleep.

By this time the concession stand was open because I think even they assumed my flight would in and maybe buy shit like I did, the fridge magnet. So I figured well I guess I will just take the bus back downtown and have a few beer then bus back since it takes only about 20 min to do it. I walked to the bus station to find out the bus was closed on Sundays. That is a new one for me and suffice to say I wasn’t that happy about it but how I seen it as long as I could get home I didn’t care. So I went back to the truck stop motel/restaurant/bar to the surprise of the waitress wondering why I am back. I told her my flight was pushed back 6 hours so I am basically going to be here for 6 hours. She had no problem, I ordered and drank more beer and had some of the best roast beef I have had in a long time.

Yes I ate a lot of meat while I was here, the reason is that I couldn’t find any real vegetarian options in this city, it is a small city. I got to watch yet another hockey game and get sufficiently buzzed and got back to the airport ready to take the plane out and so was everyone else who looked like they got kicked in the balls by Air North.

The flight from Whitehorse to Kelowna was fine; got a sandwich, snack and a cookie, I wish Air Canada/WestJet would do this but then I also do wish all air lines would stop trying to fuck you to but that is wishful thinking. I was originally supposed to sit beside this woman whom looked a little bit older than me and seemed to have a serious thorn up her ass. One look at me I think and she wanted no part sitting with me. I know I am not a good looking or a well groomed person but I did wash that day, my hands were clean and I knew I didn’t smell. She did look like a bit of a snob having a bad day but since the plane to Kelowna was half full she was able to sit by herself. When we arrived in Kelowna the flight itself was gonna be full, full of young kids coming from a hockey game. One kid could not stop saying “that’s insane” for someone realizing they would only get 2 hours sleep that night it was getting beyond annoying. The most annoying part though is the same thing that happened crossing Kelowna happened again but for no reason. We were basically on the fucking plane for at least 90 min even though they said it was just going to be a in and out thing. It wasn’t

Even more annoying was the snobby lady had to sit beside me and she did not look happy about it. At the time I really didn’t care but I was also antsy because we were not allowed to have our tablets or phones out for some ungodly stupid reason. Anyone who knows me knows I don’t do well with sitting still doing nothing for long so my leg was bopping and the lady for some reason didn’t like it even though it was not making noise and as far as I knew it was not making anything else move but she told me to stop. So with the push back of the flight, the needless wait in Kelowna, the “that’s insane” kid, nothing do and the snobby girl telling me to stop moving my leg really made me irritated. Part of me wanted to say no deal with it, we all got to deal with what is going on tonight but I said nothing. We finally got off the ground and we arrived in Vancouver at 1am with no way to get home but to pay a 30 dollar cab ride home and get home at 2am with only a chance at 3 hours of sleep.

That was my Whitehorse trip.

The days prior to my trip I decided on trying to do a grading system for the cities I have been to because I like to grade things, I am weird like that but I couldn’t entirely nail down the grading scale in a way that would be fair to all places because not all places are built to serve the same person but I felt that as I grade them I would take into account certain things. Maybe at some point I will back grade previous cities but I felt why not grade Whitehorse first, Fort McMurray would be more appropriate but oh well it has to start somewhere.

I decided make this similar to my 1-5 C rating system that I use with movies, music and books but while I want to keep those fluid its with cities where every C means something if that makes sense. With music, movies or books I am only really spending at most a day (with books maybe more but accumulating time is a day or so) with what I was rating so the grade is very simple. With a city and so many moving parts plus I am spending more than a day there in most cases I want to be more in depth in my ratings. Hopefully you will get it once I start, again this is just a test anyways.

There are five categories (5 Cs) I grade a city or place on.

C - Transportation/Transit - How easy is it for someone who don’t live there to get around without having to get a taxi. Is there transit, is it easy to use? Can one bike there and is it easy to obtain a bike? Can one get around well enough just by walking?

The best example of a city that would get a full C on this would be Köln or Berlin. Both cities are very walkable if you want, both cities have a very robust transit system to where you can bus or train anywhere you want. Both cities are pretty bikeable to if you want to do that. Unless you are going around in the middle of the night you can get around without a car.

Worst example would be Toronto even though they would sit get a half C because it is still a very bikeable city, transit can take you anywhere you want to go and get you there fairly quickly it is just very confusing to use and expensive.

C - Vibe - What is the attitude like of the city. When you are a stranger of the city its pretty easy to look like a tourist or a stranger. First impressions still are everything and they are to me when I am in a new place. Whenever I meet a tourist in Vancouver I always try to treat it like I am representing my country and my city because in many ways you are. How you treat a new person is telling how others are and if you ruin it for them their opinion often ruins the city for them.

I could use examples but I think this one is pretty self explanatory.

C - Food - Originally it was going to be bread because normally every city at least in Europe does their own bread but North America basically just borrows from Europe so I decided to just make it food. This one is fairly fluid in one way its a grade of the distinct to local cuisine and in another way it is a grade on the food selection. I could still give a city a high grade if they only serve one kind of food as long as it is unique to their culture while I can give a high grade to another city not because they have a unique food style but because they have so many food options.

C - Things to do - Could be architecture, could be exploitability of the city. Basically how fun is it to get lost in the place. For a new comer would it be fun to just get lots and not have to worry about anything like boredom or getting mugged. How much fun can you have here is basically the grading here.

Best example of a god grade is Toronto, there is no way you can be bored there. There is just so much one can do and go and I spent almost 5 days there and I only scratched the surface. Example of a bad grading would be Cork, Ireland. Though to be fair I didn’t both really doing anything there because I was recovering from travel fatigue but looking into what the city had to offer there wasn’t very much.

C - Beer - Every city has their own beer in this day in any, either the city has their own or their country has their own unless we are in a 3rd world country or a very strict anti liquor country every city has their take on beer. One can have no brewery but if they have a great selection they helps, one could have a ton of excellent breweries but if none had great beer it may not mean anything. You want to win this grade have a great selection of good and affordable beer either by your own creation or by importing of other places. No beer, very little beer or expensive beer means bad grade.

So lets start with Whitehorse.

I give transportation a half C; while I was not a fan of how infrequent the transit was there coming around only once and hour and closed on Sundays but it does get you around if you know where you need to go and it gets you there no problem. This city is bikeable too as well as there are bike trails that get you to and from the city centre. Plus the city is small, you can walk from one end of the city to the other in around an hour, i am talking the main area not the separated areas but even then you could get from one end to the other walking. Transit is bare bones but you can get around if you need to.

Vibe I would give a full C; everyone I met here was nice and gracious to me. I did not meet one bad apple here (outside of that snob woman but I dont count here as a local). Given with how much of a mining city this place was and how being secluded from everyone else can often make you made or crazy Whitehorse people carry it extremely well, they carry it far better than Fort Mac people do/did that is for fucking sure. This is a easy grade to get from me, you would really have to have miserable people in your city to make me grade you low on this one.

For things to do I could give Whitehorse 2/3 of a C, I thought a half but it is not really fair. You can’t compare Whitehorse to Toronto, Paris, Berlin or so many other cities like that because those places are huge compared to Whitehorse. If I was to grade Whitehorse just on it as a city a half C would be me going soft on them because quite honestly you could do everything in Whitehorse in a day if you were just coming down for the museums, the city itself and the beer. A day would be enough to get the whole gist of it. I can see people getting bored out of their minds here if they had a city mentality. However Whitehorse brings something that those cities I mentioned don’t have; nature. Look at the landscape pictures I posted this city is surrounded by forest and hiking galore. Whitehorse was and I think will forever be a outpost type city where people come to get the stuff they need then head out to the wilderness to either unwinds or do whatever they wish. You can’t get that with many or any metropolitan cities. In Whitehorse it’s less than an hour away.

Food is where I would have to give it it’s lowest grade at 1/3. That does not mean there is bad food in Whitehorse, that is far from the truth because I had lots of good bar food in Whitehorse and the fudge was excellent. However there was not very many distinct choices for someone to eat. If I was a vegan eating here I would be hard pressed to find dishes I liked here, vegetarian it would be possible but still tricky to find places. There is some variety but compared to other places there is very little variety. But have fudge at Midnight Sun, it is fucking divine. Next I do come down I am definitely having the bison burger too.

Lastly is beer, I didn’t have high expectations because this city has 2 breweries and it is a small city again I thought of when I lived in Fort Mac which even then is probably not fair for them now since the beer industry has changed so drastically in Canada as a whole since I moved to BC (even Vancouver was nearly a Canadian or Kokanee place when i got here) but I was expecting not very much felt that the grading of this would depend on the beers of these two breweries. I would up being surprised; the liquor stores and bars for the most part (at least the Dirty Northerner Bar) had a great selection of beers. They had Toronto be dead to rights that for sure. I couldn’t go to the Winterlong brewery because that was too out of my way but I had most of their beers at the Dirty Northerner Bar and I liked them again better than Toronto. Yukon Brewery was no better, none of their beers really stood out to me though but their tour was great, service was great and for the most part all their beers were very drinkable. If they served that beer here I would feel more than comfortable suggesting a Yukon Gold or what not to a fellow beer fan to try. That is why I give it 3/4. A perfect grade would mean I would have to fall in love with their beer and while I had no problem flirting and having one night stands with their beer, that is as far as I go with them.

So in the end Whitehorse get 31/4 Cs on the Corey Scale which when compared to how I grade movies, music or books makes the city seem like it was ok but I don’t need to go there but in terms of how i grade cities I dunno I guess I think it makes it more harder for one to really have a perfect grade. To be honest I thought Whitehorse was a great city to visit to be honest. I would be more likely to go to Whitehorse than to Toronto or even Seattle and I didn’t mind Seattle. However there is not much for one like me to do there past two days unless I wanted to camp there but honesty I live in Vancouver which also has vibrant wilderness just an hour away so I would not need to go to Whitehorse for it. I would return for the beer, atmosphere, fudge and for what I feel the city brings best and that is an escape.

Its not your average tourist destination; if you come here a day or two is enough for the city, to get the most of the place it would be out in the forest. That is what operates this city and what it brings that other places don’t have. I would recommend this city, don’t let the weather scare you. Sure if you came in the winter time of course you are going to get the very cold weather but if that is your thing you will have just as much fun as you would coming in the summer like I sort of did. Whitehorse is cool and if you are looking for a place with a mix of city and wilderness with a whole lot of nice people and decent drink to be had then Whitehorse is worth checking out.

Next week will be my hometown which I haven’t seen in at least 10 years maybe more. It will be interesting to explore this city now as a man and not a boy or a teen. Shazbot nano nano

#Whitehorse #yukon territory

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mozgoderina · 7 years ago

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Yue Minjun: behind the painted smile (The Financial Times)

One of the art world’s most bankable stars, the Chinese artist talks about capitalism, democracy and the legacy of Tiananmen.

Pale and weary from an exhausting promotional campaign in Hong Kong, Yue Minjun looks nothing like the “laughing man” of his celebrated paintings. As he works his way through signing a stack of catalogues in the fiercely air-conditioned boardroom of his sponsor, it is hard to imagine him breaking into the guffaw of his pink-skinned caricature, eyes tight shut and white teeth bared, which he has described as both a self-portrait and an alter ego. But there is often bitterness behind the Pagliacci smile, and his character is portrayed as the fool who, for better or worse, has become inured to Yue’s bleak version of the modern world.

“My work is to do with the fundamental agony of being human and the sense of confusion that comes with living in our society,” he says, speaking in September at the start of his first solo show in Hong Kong, “The Tao of Laughter”. It is rather a weighty message for visitors to the crowded shopping mall where the exhibition is being staged. But Harbour City – the vast collection of luxury waterfront outlets frequented by mainland Chinese tourists on shopping trips to the tax-free haven – makes, he thinks, a perfect backdrop. “The shopping centre is the heart of human activities in today’s world,” he says. “I want people to look at my art and then pause for reflection as they look for luxury handbags.”

The 50-year-old former electrician is among the biggest stars in Chinese contemporary art today. He belongs to a generation of artists who grew up during the cultural revolution and have taken the world by storm as they track their country’s radical transformation, escaping the limits of socialist realism under which most of them were trained and coming up with their own distinct styles. Yue’s repeated use of the same motif since the early 1990s and his prolific output – there are several hundred paintings featuring the “laughing man” – make his work highly recognisable and now highly desirable to international collectors and curators.

Yue has become a fixture in any survey of contemporary Chinese art, such as the inaugural show at the new Saatchi Gallery in London in 2008, which attracted more than half-a-million visitors. The previous year “The Execution”, probably his most famous painting, sold at Sotheby’s in London for £2.9m, roughly the same price as Cézanne’s “Maisons dans la verdure” sold for in New York a month later.

“The Execution”, which Yue finished in 1995, is widely seen as his most political work. A row of men is lined up against a scarlet wall, laughing, but also looking vulnerable in nothing but grubby briefs. A number of fully clothed men are about to shoot them with imaginary rifles and they, too, think the whole thing is a game, judging by the expression of the one executioner who faces the viewer. It is difficult not to associate this image with the 1989 massacre in Beijing: the wall in the picture is a similar colour to the real Tiananmen Gate and those who died in the military crackdown on a peaceful demonstration were mostly unarmed young students and workers. It also has obvious art-historical references to Manet’s “The Execution of Maximilian” (1868-69), and Goya’s “The Third of May 1808”, both paintings made in response to the political events of their times.

Li Xianting, a well-known Chinese art critic, counts Yue, along with other artists such as the painter Fang Lijun, as members of the “cynical realism” movement, formed partly in reaction to the trauma of 1989. But Yue refuses to be labelled and has always avoided making direct comments on politics. The closest he ever came to saying something negative about the Tiananmen massacre was in an interview with Richard Bernstein of The New York Times in 2007. “My mood changed at that time,” he commented. “I was very down. I realised the gap between reality and the ideal.”

Speaking about the subject in Hong Kong, he remains elusive. “There are many people who want Chinese artists to speak out for them,” he says. “They always have this need to look at my art through a political lens. It’s restricting.”

He ventures a little further: “I think all conflicts are not one-sided but a reflection of current conditions. I’m not saying [Tiananmen] was not important but the main thing is for the two sides to move beyond the conflict and find resolution.”

Compromise, however, does not sit well with the convention that artists speak up for justice and freedom of expression, particularly when there are plenty in China who do exactly this, such as Ai Weiwei, persecuted for his criticism of China’s authoritarian rule, and the jailed Nobel peace laureate Liu Xiaobo, who inspired many around the world with his courage. But Yue remains unapologetic. “I paint about the universal experience. Why do I have to be explicit all the time?”

. . .

Born in 1962 to two oilfield workers in north-eastern China, Yue was a child during the cultural revolution, but grew up in a country where Chairman Mao was still idolised. He studied at the fine arts department of Hebei Normal University, and was inspired by the works of another Chinese painter, Geng Jianyi, whose faces are more grimacing than laughing, representing a deep, internal anguish. In the early 1990s, soon after graduating, Yue moved to Beijing when the country relaxed its rules on internal migration, and shared a studio in a derelict farmhouse with other poor artists including Yang Shaobin. Today, he has two full-time assistants working for him in a custom-built studio and lives in a luxurious Beijing mansion.

There is no doubt that Yue and his fellow artists have done well out of the art market’s China fever in a way that their Russian counterparts never did. The changes to Yue’s personal circumstance parallel the nation’s own transformation.

“To me, capitalism can mean democracy, fairness,” he says. “It’s not all bad. At the same time, it has become the new God. Instead of going to temples, people in China pay their tribute to Mammon in the shopping mall. Religion has been replaced by this vacant materialism.”

Hong Kong, one of the most capitalist cities in the world, is, for Yue, the new China. His show of a dozen paintings, all featuring the laughing man in a variety of situations, is hung in a room tucked away between the luxury outlets. Each work is accompanied by a poem, mostly despondent in tone. “All these fools will probably perish trodden down, pulverised by an unspeakable and awesome apocalypse of which menace they are not even aware,” reads one. But what most visitors see are the five giant bronze versions of “the fool” on display in the mall forecourt. These might be viewed as a post-modernist deconstruction of the classical statue but they also form a cutesy backdrop for holiday snaps. The sunny, cartoon-like appearance of the laughing man also makes him perfect for an accessory line. The shopping mall is offering limited-edition Yue Minjun umbrellas and make-up pouches to those who spend over a certain amount, and he has also produced teapot sets in partnership with two galleries in Taiwan and Beijing.

Yue says his ultimate goal is to make the laughing man a household icon. Critics have said that it’s a clever way of debunking the tradition of Communist party mythologising. He says he just wants to spur the unthinking crowd into adopting a more philosophical approach to life. If commercialisation is what it takes, then bring it on. “Some artists are totally market-driven. Others are so supercilious they don’t want anything to do with it. I am somewhere in the middle,” he says.

Yue’s painting portfolio is more diverse than many art critics give him credit for. A recent retrospective at China’s Chengdu Contemporary Art Centre showed works which hark back to the Chinese ink landscape tradition, and a range of other pieces will be on show at the Fondation Cartier in Paris, where his first major European retrospective opens this month. Marcello Kwan, a specialist in Asian contemporary art at Christie’s, puts Yue’s importance partly down to his arrival in the early 1990s “when Chinese artists wanted to bring in a new era which challenges the rigidity left behind by the previous decades. His laughing man is his answer to Mao Zedong, who used to be the idol. Using himself as the basis for a new idol is a very interesting subversion,” he says.

Yue comes closest to saying something subversive when he describes the role of laughter in his works. “If you are faced with a situation you cannot change, then laughter may be the only possible reaction,” he says. “But if many people start laughing, it can become a proactive force for change.” His creature might lack the wit and wisdom of a Shakespearean fool, and any wry comment on the human condition is hidden behind the laughter. But maybe that’s the point in a country whose critics are silenced.

Source: The Financial Times / Enid Tsui. Published: November 2, 2012. Link: Yue Minjun: behind the painted smile Illustration: Yue Minjun [China] (b 1962). 'Welcome', 2005. Oil on canvas (170 x 140 cm). Moderator: ART HuNTER.

#art #contemporary art #painting #brainslide bedrock great art talk #article #the financial times #yue minjun

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biofunmy · 5 years ago

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In a Year of Perpetual Motion, Moments That Stopped Time

The 52 Places Traveler

Looking back on a whirlwind journey around the world, the 52 Places Traveler revisits the experiences that offered lessons for travel — and life.

Jan. 6, 2020

On my second day back in New York I walked into my neighborhood bodega and the Yemeni man behind the counter did a double take.

“Damn, bro, what happened? I thought you were dead!” he said.

The following night, I went to pick up an order at the Indian restaurant two blocks from my apartment.

“Long time, no see,” said the Bangladeshi manager who, since I’ve been gone, has grown a bushy beard. “Where have you been?”

What happened? Where have I been? After nearly a year in perpetual transit, hopping between the far-flung spots on 2019’s 52 Places to Go list, these are not easy questions to answer. Maybe a more cohesive picture of a once-in-a-lifetime year will crystallize with time. For now, the best I can do is draw out the moments that float on the surface of my memory, the ones I’m most grateful for, as they taught me invaluable lessons not only about the world, but also about myself. And isn’t that why we travel?

1. When I said yes to goat-carcass games and urban lions

By the third hour in a field on the outskirts of Samarkand, Uzbekistan, my hair had taken on the hue of the dust that filled the air in roaming clouds. Every time I smiled, which was often, more dust poured into my mouth. Two hundred men on horseback galloped back and forth across the dry grass, in pursuit of their target: a goat carcass stuffed full of sand. Shouts from the riders, the whinnying of horses and the cheers of thousands of spectators filled the air. At one point, being the only foreigner — and so a guest of honor — I was invited to ride on the truck that drove onto the field to drop the goat and start each round of kopkari, a sport that originated with the nomadic herders who inhabited these steppes 1,000 years ago.

Six months later and 5,000 miles away, in a small suburb of Dakar, Senegal, “false lions” — men channeling the spirit of the animal — growled, leapt and twirled in elaborate costumes. Drums thundered at earsplitting volumes and children shrieked in delight as the lions chased them through the fluorescently lit streets.

There’s a natural tendency to plan our travels down to the minute: We want to make sure we’re getting the most out of a trip that uses up our valuable money and vacation time. Toward the beginning of the year, I spent hours planning each stop — going over notes on the plane ride and sketching out what each day might look like. By my final stop, I barely knew where I was going to stay until the day before I arrived. The sweet spot is probably somewhere in between, with enough planning to know where you’re going but enough flexibility to say yes to the unexpected. New friends and the currents of serendipity brought me to the horses and the lions — and gave me two experiences I’ll never forget.

2. When I became a member of the guild

Hanging from the zipper of my camera bag is a small, bronze key. It grants me access to the backdoor of the Christian IV’s Guild clubhouse in the Danish city of Aalborg. Over the past year, I’ve accumulated soccer jerseys, paintings and a handwritten poem about an Italian horse, but this key, a symbol of my membership in a Danish society with roots in World War II, has to be the oddest gift. How I got it is just one of many examples of how dropping your guard and letting strangers into your life can lead to experiences far outside the realm of conventional tourism.

It started with Kit Sorensen, a friend twice-removed, who I met on my first afternoon in Aalborg. By the evening, she had taken off work for the remainder of the week to show me around. She took me out for pickled fish and aquavit, the straight-to-your-head spirit that Danes insist on drinking with lunch. Together, we explored World War II bunkers and the city-within-a-city of Fjordbyen. Sensing that I craved a home-cooked meal, she invited me to her family’s house, where I made even more friends — and got invited by a stranger to join the Christian IV’s Guild because he felt that “I had what it takes.”

When traveling alone, it’s up to you how alone you really are. Sit at a bar and take a break from your phone and in minutes you’ll be getting a laundry list of things to do from a local — as I did in Munich, in Danang, in Tunis. You might be invited to their homes — as I was in Georgia, Puerto Rico, Bulgaria. In a quiet bar in the small Japanese city of Takamatsu you might find yourself the only customer, going on a deep dive into salsa and New Orleans jazz with a cat-loving bartender who you would have never known if you hadn’t smiled and said “hello.”

There are walls that as a man traveling alone I didn’t have to put up. Being ethnically ambiguous was also, it turns out, my superpower, blending into the streets of so many places around the world, walking home at night and not even getting a second glance from locals. One’s experience of the world so often depends on one’s identity, and I can only speak to mine. At the same time, I believe that, in general, travelers will encounter kindness far more often than hostility. An open mind, a willingness to learn and an acknowledgment of our own ignorance about a new place or culture flings the doors that separate us wide open. Just ask all my new pen pals.

3. When I became my own best friend on a Norwegian fjord

Before a six-hour solo hike in the fjords surrounding Bergen, Norway, I intentionally left my headphones at home. It was sunny — a rarity for one of Europe’s rainiest cities — and I wanted to be present. It worked. I felt the light, cold breeze; I could smell the dewy grass and feel the foamlike tundra giving way under my boots. Six hours is a lot of time to be walking with nothing but your thoughts, but not once did I feel bored.

When I started this trip, the thought of spending so much time alone was one of my biggest worries. I’m an extrovert by nature. By my third month on the move, I was getting used to it. By my ninth, I was having full-on conversations with myself — out loud.

There’s something beautiful about learning to be comfortable with yourself — especially on the road. I could zero in on moments more completely without worrying whether a companion was having a good time. I could create memories that would be mine and mine alone — building blocks for my development as a person.

I was lonely, too, of course. I cried on the side of a Wyoming highway because John Prine’s “Summer’s End” came on the radio (“Come on home, you don’t have to be alone”); during a nearly four-hour meal at a Michelin-starred restaurant on the Dutch island of Texel, I fell into the abyss of staring at my phone; more than once I dreamed about being on my couch at home, with my partner and cat. But over time, I learned to see those moments coming and lean into them. That threw the distinction between heart-wrenching loneliness and blissful solitude into relief; it made the moments of connection with strangers that much more magical. Solo travel is so many things, psychological roller coaster included.

4. When I crossed the risk line on a dark Chilean highway

It was stupid, plain and simple. After getting off a series of canceled, rerouted and delayed flights that took me from Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, to Santiago, Chile, over the course of about 40 hours, I stumbled into a rental car just after sunset and hit the road for the town of La Serena. I was heading 300 miles north to get closer to where I’d be viewing the solar eclipse in a few days. It was about 40 degrees Fahrenheit, but I drove with the windows down and wore a T-shirt, hoping the cold would keep me awake. I blared death metal as loud as the car speakers could handle. I drank coffee like water. One tollbooth worker, seeing my disheveled and wired state, asked me if I was okay. I pulled into La Serena well after midnight.

This year was full of risks; they come with the job when traveling at the pace I was, alone and looking for stories to tell. Within just a few days of traveling this year, it was clear that some risks are worth taking. Getting into a car with that nice stranger promising a plate of life-changing pork in Puerto Rico’s interior? I can handle that. Solo hiking through the snowy Tatra Mountains of Slovakia? Armed with a trail map, I’m good. Driving for five and a half hours in an unfamiliar country, at night, after a hellish flight and no sleep? Nope: That was stupid.

In talking to friends, it quickly became clear that my threshold for risk is different from others’ (“Are you nuts?” my partner asked, after I told her about my night in the woods outside Batumi, Georgia, drinking myself blind with a bunch of strangers). But travel is ultimately a game of choose-your-own-adventure and part of that choice is figuring out the risks you’re comfortable taking. It’s a learning process and there will be mistakes — there sure were for me this year.

By Land and Sea

48 boat rides, 45 train trips

5. When my plans went to hell and I survived

There was the late night in a hotel in Salvador, Brazil, booking a trip to Mexico that would start the following morning, after my plans to get to the Falkland Islands, also known as the Islas Malvinas, had imploded. A total meltdown at the airport had led to check-in lines that extended past the terminal’s entrance. Despite arriving four hours before my flight and checking in online, I missed my flight — and as a result the once-weekly flight to the Falklands.

There was that scorching hot morning at the port in Banjul, Gambia, where my brother and I had no choice but to wait the four hours until a ferry finally arrived. I sweated out every drop of moisture in my body; I downed two liters of water and sweated that out, too, until the also-shadeless ferry arrived.

There was the carefully arranged Airbnb in La Serena that my host canceled with no explanation, just days before my arrival to watch the solar eclipse. I spent most of a night in Mexico, on spotty Wi-Fi looking for alternatives in a city that would be tripling in population for the eclipse.

There was the moment, three months in, when we had to make the call to cut Iran from my travel plans. The geopolitical situation had grown tense and even if I were given a journalist visa (unlikely), we had security concerns. It made the regular messages I received from Iranians on Instagram welcoming me to their country and offering to be my hosts all the more heartbreaking.

Things go wrong when traveling. And there’s something about the places of travel — airports, ferry terminals, train stations, hotels — that magnify feelings of panic and sadness. It’s a powerlessness we’re not used to when we think we have every detail of a trip planned out.

I learned that there’s very little you can do when your plans fall apart. I learned to pinpoint the small actions I could take and leave everything else to play out without me. I started on a long, circuitous route to Mexico the next day and pushed my Falklands trip to later in the month. The ferry did arrive — and 24 hours later, my brother and I were on a boat floating feet away from wild chimpanzees. I found another Airbnb at the last minute, and so what if it was a little farther out of the city? I kept in touch with my new online Iranian friends, promising that one day I would make it there — and I will.

Traveling is an incredible privilege and it’s mind-boggling how easy it is these days to cross the planet. Reminding myself of that got me through many a moment this year that previously would have left me a weepy mess on an airport floor.

under the sea

11 total hours underwater

6. When “no one goes there now” became my time to go

Travel itself, regardless of destination, is taking its toll on the environment: The most frequent, and valid, criticism I’ve received this year is for my Sasquatch-size carbon footprint. While no one at the Times is encouraging everyone to go to 52 places in a year — I’d think again if you are planning on trying this yourself — I also don’t believe the answer is not to travel. To see the natural wonder that still abounds; to encounter the places that are on the verge of catastrophic change because of a warming planet; to meet the people who deal with its effects every day and forge real, profound, cross-cultural connections makes for a more informed, empathetic world. That doesn’t mean there aren’t steps we can take to be more responsible travelers. And part of that is realizing that sustainability goes beyond carbon emissions.

The Falklands in the dead of winter, when I had a colony of King penguins to myself; Mexico in the crushing heat of summer, when the beaches were empty; Senegal and Gambia during the most humid month of the year, when locals were actually excited to see visitors who had braved it; Siberia’s Lake Baikal, in neither the glorious summer nor the spectacularly frozen winter, but instead in autumn, when the trees burn bright yellow.

In planning my trip and limiting cross-continental treks as much as possible, it proved difficult to be everywhere at the “right” time to visit. But again and again, I found myself falling for low season, when it was far easier to blend into the fabric of daily life because I wasn’t just part of a horde of tourists changing the face of entire cities for months at a time.

Cities like Venice — or even Zadar, in Croatia, as I saw when I arrived in the summer — are buckling under the weight of overtourism. As travelers, we could make a difference by spreading the wealth, so to speak. That means, for the most adventurous, going to places that are still hard to get to; it took me two tries to get to the Falklands and three to get out, but that made it special. But it also means thinking outside the “Europe in summer” paradigm.

taking to the skies

40 airlines, 88 flights (only 1 missed flight)

7. When I really learned what a “place to go” is

There’s beauty, surprise and genuine wonder to be found everywhere — and I mean everywhere. A Vegas naysayer can have his mind changed through a chance encounter with a crew of rockabilly musicians. A half-Indian student of history can learn about a mighty Indian empire, of which he knew nothing, by coming face-to-face with its ruins. A traveler can come home after 11 grueling months of continuous travel and start dreaming of where he’s going next.

But first, some sleep.

Sahred From Source link Travel

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caveartfair · 6 years ago

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Why so Many Artists Have Been Drawn to New Mexico

Georgia O’Keeffe had an unexpected train detour to thank for her first encounter with New Mexico. Little did she know, it was the land that would free her—both artistically and emotionally.

Several months after photographer-gallerist Alfred Stieglitz presented O’Keeffe’s first New York solo show, in April 1917, the 29-year-old painter embarked on a trip across the American West with her youngest sister, Claudia. While they’d planned to head straight from Texas to Colorado, their train detoured to Santa Fe. New Mexico’s vast, mercurial skies and incandescent light mesmerized the artist. “I’m out here in New Mexico—going somewhere—I’m not positive where—but it’s great,” she gushed in a letter to Stieglitz, dated August 15th. “Not like anything I ever saw before.”

“There is so much more space between the ground and sky out here it is tremendous,” she continued. “I want to stay.” By 1949, O’Keeffe had made the New Mexican high desert her permanent home, indelibly tattooing its landscape to her work, identity, and legacy.

Portrait of Georgia O’Keeffe in Abiquiu, New Mexico, 1974. Photo by Joe Munroe/Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

Portrait of Bruce Nauman in New Mexico by Francois Le Diascorn/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images.

O’Keeffe is just one of countless modern and contemporary artists who’ve been drawn out of big-city art centers by New Mexico’s magnetic pull. They’ve been lured there by expansive vistas, quietude, and respite from social and market pressures. Other prominent New Mexico residents have included Marsden Hartley, Agnes Martin, Dennis Hopper, Ken Price, Larry Bell, Nancy Holt, Bruce Nauman, Richard Tuttle, Harmony Hammond, and Judy Chicago, among many others. Arts patrons, scholars, and writers—like Mabel Dodge Luhan, Willa Cather, D.H. Lawrence, and Lucy Lippard—have landed and stuck there, too. Long before them though, Native American artists started making art inspired by the transcendent, boundless landscape.

“New Mexico is a place where you—as a creative person, as an artist—can really work,” explained Lisa Le Feuvre, the director of the Holt/Smithson Foundation, from her office in Santa Fe. “A lot of the buzz in your peripheral vision that you get in bigger cities disappears, so it makes your thoughts and ideas much more intentional.”

Red Hills with Flowers, 1937. Georgia O’Keeffe Art Institute of Chicago

Untitled, 1977. Ken Price Tamarind Institute

Marie Antoinette 1973/2017, 2017. Judy Chicago Turner Carroll Gallery

About a year ago, Le Feuvre relocated from London to Santa Fe to run the Holt/Smithson Foundation, an organization set up to preserve the legacy of Holt and her husband Robert Smithson, both land artists. The couple, who married in 1963, lived itinerantly for most of their lives together, until Smithson died tragically in a 1973 plane crash. Holt moved to New Mexico in 1995 and stayed there until her death in 2014.

“From what I’ve learned, she felt it was a good place to live and to think,” Le Feuvre explained of Holt’s attraction to Galisteo, a small town with a population of around 250, which rises from a vast expanse of desert around 20 miles south of Santa Fe. “For Nancy Holt—like for Harmony Hammond, Bruce Nauman, and most artists [who relocate here]—New Mexico is a choice of somewhere to live and to work, rather than being a necessary place to live and to work.”

The early years: the Taos Society of Artists and Mabel Dodge’s grand entrance

Snow Covered Trail, ca. 1915. Oscar Berninghaus Caldwell Gallery Hudson

Eagles Nest, NM, . Ernest L. Blumenschein Rago

Autumn Landscape, N.M., ca. 1925. Ernest L. Blumenschein Montclair Art Museum

Joseph Henry Sharp, Making Sweet Grass Medicine, Blackfoot Ceremony, circa 1920. Courtesy of Smithsonian American Art Museum.

The history of artists choosing New Mexico over big cities and coastal states is long and rich. As early as 1898, Ernest Blumenschein and Bert Geer Phillips, two painters traveling from Denver, made the unexpected decision to live in Taos—one of several New Mexican towns (including Santa Fe, Galisteo, and Belen) that have since become artist havens.

Blumenschein and Phillips had a different destination in mind—Mexico—when they left Colorado on a sketching expedition. But when their wagon broke down 20 miles north of Taos, they fell for the desert town, and soon encouraged other artists to follow them.

By 1915, three years after New Mexico officially became a state, they’d established the Taos Society of Artists with fellow male painters Joseph Henry Sharp, E. Irving Couse, Oscar Berninghaus, and William Herbert Dunton. They made paintings in response to their new surroundings: sweeping landscapes and vigorous, expressive portraits of cowboys and Native Americans. The latter representations tend to read as uncomfortable exoticizations today, especially considering white settlers’ encroachment on Native American land and the bloody altercations that ensued at the time.

Portrait of Mabel Dodge Luhan (undated). Courtesy of Bettmann/Contributor via Getty.

Two years later, in December 1917, art patron Mabel Dodge landed in Taos. At the time, the town had a population of 2,000, compared to the 4 million–plus people living in New York City, where Dodge had been a prominent modern-art collector and salon host. In her 1987 memoir Edge of Taos Desert: An Escape to Reality, she described New Mexico’s allure like a panacea: “From the very first day, I found out that the sunshine in New Mexico could do almost anything with one: make one well if one felt ill, or change a dark mood and lighten it,” Dodge wrote. “It entered into one’s deepest places and melted the thick, slow densities. It made one feel good. That is, alive.”

By 1918, she’d fallen in love with Antonio “Tony” Luhan, a Native American of the Taos Pueblo. Not long after, the couple—who eventually married in 1923—purchased 12 acres of land and built a 17-room home. Named Los Gallos, the ranch became a retreat-cum-residency for countless artists, writers, and intellectuals of the day. Cather, Hartley, D.H. Lawrence, Andrew Dasburg, Ansel Adams, Martha Graham, and Carl Jung were all guests.

Ansel Adams, Church, Taos Pueblo National Historic Landmark, New Mexico, 1941. Courtesy of The National Archives.

As a patron and a cultural theorist, Dodge also supported the art of local Native American artists. Pueblo painters Ma-Pe-Wi, Pop Challee (Luhan’s niece), and Awa Tsireh were among Dodge and Luhan’s circle. Dodge commissioned Tsireh to create a sprawling mural in the entryway of Los Gallos. In the early 1920s, she also helped found the Indian Arts Fund, with a mission to “[educate] the people of the United States as to the value of America’s only surviving indigenous art.” In her writings, too, she praised traditional Pueblo paintings, weavings, and vessels, having been drawn to the way artists channeled the transcendental power of the New Mexican landscape into geometric patterns.

But like most white artists and patrons who’d settled in New Mexico, Dodge’s response to Native American artists was often reductive. She grouped their work together, rather than recognizing individual practices; she praised their creative instincts over their honed formal skills. In 1919, Dodge organized a New York exhibition of Native American artworks, which she labeled as “primitive,” while simultaneously positioning them within the Western modernist tradition. As Chelsea Weathers pointed out in Artforum, the decision to do so “points to [Dodge]’s—as well as many modernist artists’ and audiences’—difficulty accepting the art of non-Anglo cultures on its own terms.”

Autonomy in the desert: Georgia O’Keeffe and Agnes Martin go west

My Front Yard, Summer, 1941. Georgia O’Keeffe "Georgia O'Keeffe" at Tate Modern, London

It was also Dodge who encouraged O’Keeffe to make her second trip to New Mexico, in 1929. The two women had previously known each other in New York, where O’Keeffe had attended Dodge’s salons. “I like what Mabel has dug up out of the Earth here,” the painter wrote soon after arriving at Los Gallos, promptly making a connection between the environment and productivity. “It is just unbelievable—one perfect day after another—everyone going like mad after something.”

Even in her first months in Taos, O’Keeffe experienced newfound freedom, autonomy, and tranquility taking hold of her. “I chose coming away because here at least I feel good, and it makes me feel I am growing very tall and straight inside—and very still,” she wrote to Stieglitz, who was by then her husband, and rooted in New York.

Georgia O’Keeffe on the patio of her home in Abiquiu, New Mexico. Photo by Cecil Beaton/Condé Nast via Getty Images.

Almost instantaneously, Taos also influenced O’Keeffe’s work. “I made several little drawings,” she wrote again to Stieglitz in 1930. “It was wonderful sitting there alone watching the light and shadow over the desert and mountains.…It all interests me much more than people—they seem almost not to exist.” Later, O’Keeffe made homes on the remote lands of Ghost Ranch and Abiquiu—located east of Taos and Santa Fe. She’d speak of the desert with ownership, linking it directly to her paintings. “It’s my private mountain. It belongs to me,” she once said of the Cerro Pedernal mountain that rose up from the sandy expanse behind her home. “God told me if I painted it enough, I could have it.”

From the Faraway, Nearby , 1937. Georgia O’Keeffe "Georgia O'Keeffe" at Tate Modern, London

Pedernal, 1945. Georgia O’Keeffe "Georgia O'Keeffe" at Tate Modern, London

Black Mesa Landscape, New Mexico / Out Back of Marie's II, 1930. Georgia O’Keeffe "Georgia O'Keeffe" at Tate Modern, London

Black Cross with Stars and Blue , 1929. Georgia O’Keeffe "Georgia O'Keeffe" at Tate Modern, London

Ranchos Church, New Mexico, 1930-1931. Georgia O’Keeffe "Georgia O'Keeffe" at Tate Modern, London

Deer’s Skull with Pedernal, 1936. Georgia O’Keeffe Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Mountain at Bear Lake—Taos, 1930. Georgia O’Keeffe "This Art is Your Art" Competition: The White House Historical Association, Artsy, and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation

Abstract painter Agnes Martin stayed put in New Mexico for similar reasons, including to escape the pressures of New York. “At that time, I had quite a common complaint of artists—especially in America,” she told John Gruen in a 1976 profile in ARTnews. “It seemed to have been something that happens to all of us. From an overdeveloped sense of responsibility, we sort of cave in.” Martin had struggled with mental illness during her life, and settling in a place like rural New Mexico, where solitude was easier to find, calmed her and fueled her productivity.

Martin’s first introduction to the state came in 1946, after a period of itinerancy. The artist moved from Manhattan—where she’d been enrolled at Columbia Teachers College—to Delaware, Washington, and many places in between. Along the way, she made ends meet as a waitress, a dishwasher, and even a tennis coach.

When she set foot in New Mexico, though, Martin’s wandering stopped. She stayed put for more than 10 years, devoting her full attention to painting for the first time. There, she also made her first big stylistic leap: “decisively towards abstraction,” as Nancy Princenthal wrote in her 2015 biography of the artist.

Artists have equated the state’s wide-open spaces and remove with freedom—to experiment, to be themselves, and to veer boldly away from trends or norms.

Martin returned to New York in 1957 at the urging of art dealer Betty Parsons, who was looking out for the artist’s career. But Martin found herself back in New Mexico by 1968. “I drove around and drove around, and then I had a vision of an adobe brick,” she remembered somewhat mystically, in 1987. “So I thought that must be New Mexico so I went back.” She lived between the small towns of Cuba and Galisteo for the rest of her life. It was the longest she’d settled in any one place: 36 years.

Martin adored the pared-down New Mexican landscape, and she made her enthusiasm for the outdoors loudly known. In Princenthal’s biography, local photographer Mildred Tolbert remembered a hike with Martin up Wheeler Peak. As they descended past a stream, the painter yelled happily into the mountains: “I like your plumbing, Lord!”

Untitled #1, 2003. Agnes Martin "Agnes Martin" at Tate Modern, London (2015)

From the homes she built in Cuba and Galisteo, Martin could take in wide swathes of desert and sky. In New York, the urban grid had been her jumping-off point for hard-edged Minimalist abstractions. But the compositions she painted in New Mexico loosened, diffused, and became decidedly more atmospheric: filled with bands of hazy pink and soft, diaphanous yellows. Princenthal connects this shift to the desert landscape that surrounded Martin: “It could be said that the urban grid gave way, gradually but conclusively, to a rural vision of open expanses and to sunlit shades of desert, rock, and sky.” Importantly, she offered a caveat: “As always, [Martin] would resist such associations to the landscape.”

For Martin, New Mexico’s “Wild West” also offered a reprieve from overbearing social conventions. She lived in a community “where single women were not uncommon, where homosexuality was more acceptable than elsewhere, and where independent spirits were welcome,” Princenthal wrote. In this environment, the less-guarded Hartley was free to be openly gay, and Dodge and O’Keeffe had unabashed relationships with women.

Getting the hell out of L.A.: Dennis Hopper, Ken Price, and more escape to Taos

Many artists came to New Mexico to get away from the throngs of big-city artists, and the competition they came with. The tight-knit, liberal communities of Santa Fe, Taos, and Galisteo offered welcome support and creative exchange.

In 1970, the artist, actor, and filmmaker Dennis Hopper craved respite from Hollywood and looked to New Mexico—and to Dodge’s retreat-residency model. He didn’t want to completely relinquish his community, though. Rather, he hoped to transport it to a new context. That year, he bought Dodge’s compound from her granddaughter for $160,000. The goal was to resuscitate it as a “counterculture mecca,” according to Patricia Leigh Brown in her 1997 New York Times article “The Muse of Taos, Stirring Still.”

Dennis Hopper, New Mexico 1970, 1970. Douglas Kirkland Mouche Gallery

Hopper called his new hippie hideaway “Mud Palace.” He promptly invited creative types from around Los Angeles to nest and let loose—often with the aid of psychedelics—in its sprawling honeycomb of abode rooms. Jack Nicholson, Joni Mitchell, and Bob Dylan made the trip to Taos. So did a number of L.A.’s burgeoning cohort of Cool School and Light and Space artists, who’d convened around the legendary Ferus Gallery.

Ken Price, one of the radical artists in this group, first descended upon New Mexico at Hopper’s suggestion. In the early 1970s, he rambled to Mud Palace with sculptor Robert Irwin and painter Ed Moses. He downplayed the experience in a 1980 interview, saying: “[We] pooped around, and we came back again.” But it wasn’t long before Price and his wife, Happy, bought a home in Taos. “We ended up just coming on up here—and staying.”

Mountain Cult, 2008. Ken Price Xavier Hufkens

Imagination of Grandeur, 2008. Ken Price Xavier Hufkens

The year was 1971, and Price had begun feeling overwhelmed by the Los Angeles art scene. “I was just being bombarded with images all day long in L.A., and had no control over it,” he explained in the same interview. In Taos, he could clear his head and raise his family. “It provided a kind of solace—a safe place [to be with his family] and a nurturing place to create work,” said LACMA curator Stephanie Barron, who organized the 2012 retrospective of Price’s work and visited him several times in New Mexico before his 2012 death.

The time that Price lived full-time in Taos—from 1971 until the early 1990s, and from 2003 until his death—deeply affected his practice. “Coming to New Mexico influenced my work right away,” he recalled, in 2007, of his first stint in the state. The bulbous ceramic cups he’d been making prior became craggy and rough, as if hewn from desert rock or recently cooled lava.

Yellow, 2007. Ken Price Xavier Hufkens

Price’s use of color shifted, too, reflecting the vibrant New Mexico sunsets. Blazing pinks and fierce, sulfuric yellows began flooding his watercolors. “The sunsets aren’t pretty and sweet,” he said of the skies that shifted outside of his Taos home, “they are spectacular and amazing.” Barron linked the state’s landscape even more directly to Price’s work: “The richness of his palette was absolutely in sync with his environment. I don’t think those could have been done in an urban, New York studio.”

Like so many artists drawn to New Mexico, Price also relished the quiet. “I think [New Mexico] provides the same benefit for most of its artists: It leaves us alone and doesn’t prevent us from doing our work. It leaves us to control our activities and succeed or fail on our own,” he said in 2007.

“A lot of the buzz in your peripheral vision that you get in bigger cities disappears, so it makes your thoughts and ideas much more intentional.”

Still, Price wasn’t lacking a supportive community. Light and Space artist Larry Bell—Price’s dear friend and onetime studio mate in Los Angeles—relocated to New Mexico, too. “I just loved the place, and I fell in love with the people. And it was quiet. You could really control your distractions,” Bell told Galerie in 2018.

Setting a Good Corner (Allegory & Metaphor), 1999. Bruce Nauman Sperone Westwater

Bruce Nauman landed in New Mexico in 1979, drawn to that mix of Wild West remoteness—land stretching for miles, keeping neighbors at healthy distance—and relative proximity to like-minded artists. Nauman didn’t live far from Agnes Martin; their friendship developed over trips to the local racetrack to bet on horses. “She knew how to pick ’em,” Nauman told the New York Times last year.

Barron summed up this balance, where privacy and social interaction coexist: “[New Mexico] allowed [these artists] to be an individual, as well as part of a loosely knit community.”

Space for women: Harmony Hammond, Nancy Holt, and Judy Chicago

Harmony Hammond, a leader of the feminist art movement, “didn’t come [to New Mexico] for a community of artists at all,” as she insisted in a 2008 conversation with Julia Bryan-Wilson. But that didn’t stop several of her friends from joining her in Galisteo. Lippard—a feminist theorist and curator—and Holt—a land artist—both followed Hammond’s lead and settled in the small town. “I started staying with Harmony when I was out here,” Lippard told the Santa Fe New Mexican last year, “and suddenly the land across the creek was open, and I never looked at anything else.”

Portrait of Harmony Hammond by Clayton Porter.

For her part, Hammond connected her move to Galisteo to a longer lineage of female artists, like Martin and O’Keeffe, who settled in New Mexico before them. “There’s something about this big space that gives everybody room to be who they think they are. Historically that’s been true for women,” she told Bryan-Wilson. “If they didn’t fit into the social structures on the East Coast, and they didn’t have money to go to Europe, they went west. They could smoke cigarettes. They could wear pants. They could swear. They could do whatever. Many were bisexual or lesbian. The west—it’s outlaw territory. I’m just assuming that’s one reason I feel quite comfortable.” (Five decades of Hammond’s work is currently on view at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum through September 15th.)

Bandaged Grid #1, 2015. Harmony Hammond The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

Judy Chicago, another pioneering feminist artist, also described her attraction to New Mexico in terms of space—both physical and psychological. “The light, the quiet and the psychic space to pursue my own vision far from the pressures of the market-driven art world,” Chicago explained, drew her to Belen, a small town with a population of around 7,000, located 30 miles south of Albuquerque.

Chicago has lived in New Mexico full-time since 1985. In 1993, she and her husband, photographer Donald Woodman, bought a 7,000-square-foot derelict railroad hotel in Belen, transforming it into their home and studio space. More recently, it’s also become home to Chicago’s nonprofit art space, Flower, whose mission is to “counter the erasure of women’s achievement through art,” the artist explained.

“New Mexico is a choice of somewhere to live and to work, rather than being a necessary place to live and to work.”

Hammond and Chicago join a long line of artists who equate the state’s wide-open spaces and the remove from the pressures of urban art centers with freedom—to experiment, to be themselves, and to veer boldly away from trends or norms.

It’s no surprise that many of them installed massive windows in their homes and studios, so they could perceive the landscape’s expansiveness—and the sense of freedom it offered—even indoors. Price’s and Nauman’s homes both contain windows with sprawling desert views. Holt’s did, too. “Through [her windows] you can literally perceive time,” Le Feuvre explained. “You can see the light changing, you can see the conditions of the earth changing. And when you watch the light, something amazing happens: you become aware of your own physical presence—not just on the Earth, but in the universe.”

Portrait of Nancy Holt at her property in Galisteo, New Mexico, 2008. Photo by Alena Williams © Holt-Smithson Foundation, Licensed by VAGA/New York.

She continued: “And that’s something that is fundamental to Nancy Holt’s work: This sense of how we, as human beings, find our place in the universe.”

O’Keeffe also transformed a wall of her Abiquiu studio into a long picture window, creating a panorama of the Chama river valley and her beloved Pedernal mountain beyond. The landscape became the subject of over 20 of her paintings.

“I wish you could see what I see out the window,” O’Keeffe wrote to Arthur Dove in 1942. “The earth pink and yellow cliffs to the north…pink and purple hills in front and the scrubby fine dull green cedars—and a feeling of much space.” She continued, summarizing New Mexico’s impact with pure, unadulterated awe: “It is a very beautiful world.”

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