Ted, Ted, Ted

My cousin Ian, on his way from Austin to Osaka for some super-brainiac post-doctoral type thing, was stuck on a plane for six hours at San Francisco last Friday night, courtesy of a storm we were having. We brought him home and made him eat some of Mary’s chicken pot pie. The weather cleared the next morning and he was gone before we woke up.

My dad’s dad passed away in November at 95. He became a Lutheran minister in 1935 and served in about 10 churches, ending up in Madison, Wisconsin. Laura and I joined the family for the funeral in Minneapolis, where Opa had lived in retirement. Then we all drove to Madison and had another service at the church where Opa had served his longest tenure. It was good to see everybody, and it was good to know Opa went out a pretty satisfied guy. He was a connoisseur of church music — he booked the organist for his funeral himself, a couple of years ago, and the man was indeed the best organist I’ve ever heard live. I was picturing Opa lying there listening with that sly little smile he used to get when he heard something he really liked.

We’d been thinking about moving across town to the Mission for a long time. Closer to both our jobs, Lilly’s school (and Laura’s too, as of this year), better weather, more diversity, decent coffee. This summer we finally went ahead and got an agent (Steve Davis, who is married to Cassandra Mettling-Davis, the architect who helped wiht our remodel a few years ago) and from there things went very fast. It was of course a big project, and it inevitably oozed on into the school semester, which increased the stress level, but finally we were out of there.

Next chapter: A short-term lease in Bernal Heights while we shop for our new place.

Wow, Kauai. What a place. We just got back from a week there with Mary’s parents. We had a gas. Even the occasional rain shower was better weather than we get at home.

This is the view from the back deck of our apartment.

Lilly spent more time in the water than out. She preferred the pool (salt water, no chlorine) but liked the ocean just fine too. Both Laura and Lilly were willing to snorkel with me in water quite a bit deeper than they go in at home. (Lilly was in swimming lessons for the three weeks before the trip, expressly to get ready to go look at some colorful fish.) Next time I hope we’ll spend even more time on the reefs.

Hied me to the ancestral homeland for a week to attend a professional conference and see friends and family. My first day here I got to see my mom (right) and my sister Jo (left) perform with a flute choir called Flute Cocktail, accompanied by my brother Nathaniel on the Andean quena and related tubular things. The next day my brother threw a fairly raucous brunch, partly in my honor. I also got a tour of my brother-in-law Luther’s dauntingly large collection of solar cooking equipment, all of it fully functional — I witnessed him making a batch of darn good custard pudding with the parabolic reflector stove. Later on my dad showed off his most recent model railroading achievements.

For Spring break we went to the Grand Canyon with Grandpa Ted, Grandma Helga, and Karen and Al and their four kids. We stayed in Sedona, a couple of hours from the Canyon. We did two day trips to the Canyon and several hikes around the Sedona vicinity, which is very different from the Grand Canyon but pretty spectacular in its own way.

On the way back to Guatemala City from San Marcos, we stopped at the spectacular Lago Atitlan for lunch and a bit of scenery-viewing. From there we took the old road to Antigua, the one that was replaced by the Pan-American highway in the 1960s. It was slower, but more rewarding, the way those things so often are. We got to Antigua in time to wander around for a couple of hours, and spent the night in a very nice hotel for cheap. The flight back the next day was as routine as the flight down had been eventful.

More imagery from Guatemala. This is a fabulous little cascade that you pretty much have to hack your own trail to, in a back corner of a coffee plantation. It’s always suprising to find a place like this without so much as a snack stand to exploit it.

So here we are in Guatemala. The trip was a little grueling, but it’s great to be here. Hopefully United will manage not to lose our luggage on the way home.

Here’s Paul diving off the 5-meter plank at the local spring-fed swimming place. We spent the morning there and had some home-fried donuts from a vendor.

Here’s a place to keep track of gas mileage online. We are temporarily (we hope) the owners of a three-car fleet, so knowing what each car can do becomes even more important than usual.

I spent Thursday evening, my last full evening in Chennai, seeing a movie. And I really mean full evening. The movie went a little over three hours, counting the 15-minute intermission. I can only say that I have never seen anything like it. I kept thinking of that scene late in Blazing Saddles when the whole cast busts into a studio where some Busby Berkeley extravaganza is being shot, and the two movies get all mixed up. Except it would have been Jet Li breaking in instead of Mel Brooks.

I know this stuff has been available around here for a long time, but I’d never really paid any attention. I’m going to start now. It is magical. But it didn’t finish until after 9:30, too late to get dinner. I was ready to take my work friends out to an expense-account joint, but it was late and raining, so we all just went home.

This particular movie was a police thriller about an innocent boy from the Bombay slums who is somehow blackmailed into impersonating a crime capo. Both of them are played by the dashing Shah Rukh Khan. (Warning: spoilers ahead. If you think you might see this movie, stop reading now.) Doubles and impersonations are among the most standard of the standard Bollywood devices, I’m told. So is the presence of not one, not two, but three leading ladies, one of them killed off in the first reel but not before starring in her own production number, for which the term “elaborate” is entirely inadequate.

The way it seems to work is, Indian movies are rated for lewdity (not for violence) by something like a much stricter MPAA board. They put up a certificate on the screen before every trailer with the signatures and credentials of two or more clergy, to attest that what follows is just as squeaky clean as it could be. Everyone’s clothes stay on at all times. At any point in the story where you might expect a sex scene in an American movie, you get a dance routine instead. Also, all party scenes and disco scenes are automatic candidates for a mass dance routine. The friends I was with said the standard is to have an outburst of song and dance every half hour, which means six on average. The plot twists came at a rhythm of about one every 15 minutes, I thought. I’m not that literate in the policier vocabulary, but all the usual twists I could think of were checked off: the police inspector who turns out to be a bad guy, the child hostage (twice), the escape from the doomed getaway car, all that stuff.

The acting was broad enough so that I could pretty much understand everything without subtitles, but it was professional. The bad guys were quite unmistakably evil, but a little ambiguity was allowed for a while as to the good guys. This was resolved by a sort of double-twist at the end in which the crime boss turns out to have been impersonating his impersonator all along, having switched hospital beds way back in the second reel. Some throwaway business, involving a CD that may or may not contain valuable information, is made to string together most of the central subplot. I kept thinking John Sayles could learn something about subplots from these guys.

In the office the next day, talking it over with the local elite, I sensed some discomfort with Bollywood. For anyone who went to school where I did after the 70s it’s a matter of course that The Wizard of Oz is as fine a map to the underlying social relations of its time as The Jungle, if you want to work with it. Does it portray something different from “real life?” OK, how different? In what ways? Why in those ways and not others? Anyway, what is “real life,” or, more interestingly, who gets to say what it is? But to my colleagues there, the distance between Bollywood and “real” India was an embarrassment, an indictment of a culture industry gone bad. When I raved about the dance routines, the costumes, the cast of thousands, all the stuff that I loved about it, they just squirmed and looked away. One more in my series of lessons on when to just shut up.

It’s Friday. We are leaving tonight at 10:30 p.m., which is 10:00 Thursday morning at home. Change planes in Singapore again, a rest stop in Hong Kong (no time for any joy rides outside the airport this time), and then about 13 hours to San Francisco. But I’ll get home at 1:30 Saturday afternoon, not Sunday, because we cross the international date line. I’m not going to try to understand that right now.

American foreign correspondents have traditionally employed a labor-saving device called “taxi journalism,” in which the reporter arriving at a colorful destination closely questions the driver on the way from the airport to the luxury hotel and then phones in the results as good solid hard-earned man-in-the-street wisdom. As a result, even though I’m not a reporter any more, I still make a practice of never asking a cab driver about anything except his health. On this trip, however, I have not scrupled to stick my camera out the window and let the video camera roll. You could call this my entry in the “taxi photography” genre.

Near the elephant farm we met a tour group of women from the Sree Narayana College, which is in Kerala. They were singing and clapping to pass the time. We joined in as best we could.

I got six clips of this before my battery burned out, of which this one is the silliest. You can see the rest here.

Tonight I went with my colleague Kavitha and her two kids (boy 11, girl 5) to the giant Rasi’s sari shop. Kavitha really knew her way around the fabrics, which helped make my benighted choices a little less benighted, I hope. I dropped somewhat more than I should have but got away with some amazing stuff, some colors that I have only seen in dreams. Sometimes when we are wrapping a present for a kid’s birthday party Lilly will decide that she likes it and we must keep it, and only a lengthy negotiation gets the thing finally into the wrapping. I’m sure the same thing will happen with me when it’s time to give these things away for Christmas. They are spectacular.

Last Friday we flew to Bangalore, where a driver was waiting to take us to a resort in the high coffee country at the other end of a 200-mile dirt track. On Saturday we hiked around, saw elephants, sampled the local nightlife. On the way back to Bangalore the following day, we got lost in some of the most beautiful farmland I have ever seen and I found myself wondering how bad it would be if we missed our return flight, really.

The high point of the trip, for me, was a chance encounter with a tour group from a women’s college in Kerala. They were sitting under a tree singing and clapping and carrying on, and they graciously let us catch some of it on video, which I’ll post here as soon as I figure out how.

I’m in India for the second half of October, working with my team of intrepid tech writers. The Divali holiday is coming up, which in scale and importance is kind of like Christmas and Thanksgiving put together, and it seems that people start preparing for it pretty early, because the traffic this week hasn’t been nearly as mad as it was when I was here last March. But it’s still pretty scary. I went for a stroll the other night with my colleague Jeff and we ended up just walking around the block our hotel was on, because we were too prudent to cross a main road.

Here’s the view from the hotel we stayed at first. (We only lasted two nights there due to a kind of musty odor that pervaded the place. But it was pretty nice other than that.) Chennai is a graceful city full of palm trees and shaded verandas. Fruit trees are everywhere, although you don’t see any fruit growing on them because hungry people pick it all. Some days the smog reminds you of Mexico City, but when the air is clear it’s very beautiful here.

Catching up on some of the summer activities: In the middle of August, on an impulse, we grabbed the last empty spot at the Henry Cowell campground up in the hills above Santa Cruz. We spent the weekend there hiking and goofing off, and then descended on the beach boardwalk on Monday for some intensive gut-wrenching. My cast-iron stomach has corroded badly in my old age, but I was able to keep up with Laura almost ride-for-ride.

On the way to the boardwalk, we stopped for a stroll on the UC Santa Cruz campus, which turns out to be just downhill from the campground. We saw a young deer browsing with its mom in the beautiful outdoor ampitheater there. I’m hoping this will have helped dispose the girls favorably toward going to school there, when the time comes.

We got a much earlier start this morning — left the house a little after 9:30 to meet my aunt Anna and cousins Maija and Max. Anna and Max were dropping Maija at the bus station to go back to Boston. We met them on 54th St. (near the Red Parrot, the first salsa club I haunted when I came to New York in 87; scene of my first weapons frisk, at an immortal double bill with El Gran Combo and Oscar de Leon) and walked together down to Port Authority, stopping at a coffee shop to warm up on the way. Lilly looked a little dazed, as if she could’t believe it really was this cold. Laura and Mary took it OK, though. I had expected it to be a lot colder, so it didn’t seem that bad to me. It couldn’t have been under 30.After a lunch of bad pizza in the bowels of the Port Authority (I told Laura this is how the colorful locals eat, which is true), we took the crosstown train to the Central Park Zoo. It was a perfect day for winter animals, and the polar bears, penguins and sea lions were duly putting on shows. Laura, bone-tired, had her second real meltdown of the trip as we were leaving, so we came back to Mary and Diogenes’ place in a taxi and took a rest. Then Laura and Lilly and I took the train to Ethan and Mary’s place in Park Slope. (Mary, our Mary, was feeling fluish, so she stayed home with Mary and Diogenes and a hot water bottle.) Laura found that she shared both a Harry Potter obsession and a certain taste for the scatological with E & M’s twins Adam and Charlie, so they had a fine time. Lilly found the vast array of plastic toys irresistible. If you ever get to be a kid again, make sure you get a dad who is crazy about comics and action figures.

Mary and Diogenes are just back in New York from Taiwan, where Diogenes picked up a prize in the Taipei print and drawing biennial. Now he is clearing out his studio on Lexington and 103rd for a push to finish new material for a show in San Francisco in the spring. I went with them to the studio last night, every step bringing back things I’d forgotten or just not thought about for years. East Harlem looks tighter, a little more gentrified, a little less chaotic. Giuliani’s police terror strategy has quieted the streets as designed, but not that many yuppies are confident venturing into this neighborhood, the place even the Alphabet City developers were afraid to touch ten years ago. I remember being stitched up by an intern at Mount Sinai hospital nearby after a skating accident in the Park on my way home from work one night. The intern asked where I lived, checking for a concussion I suppose, and when I pointed east she looked surprised and said, “I didn’t know anybody lived over there.” I did not have a comeback to that, and I still don’t.At his studio on 106th and Lexington, Diogenes laid out some of his newer drawings and prints on the floor and I stood on a chair to look at them from an adequate distance. Diogenes always seems to want me to see what he’s been up to, and I always end up loving what he is doing. Lately he has taken a sharp turn away from the dark, foreboding, highly tactile stuff he was doing when I met him, in favor of a more explicitly representational thing with a lot of very accessible icons and totems held up at an almost ironic distance, with surfaces playing a smaller role than drawn images, at least to my eye. The two silkscreen prints I liked the best turned out to be the ones he’d planned to give me. This wasn’t the first time that’s happened. I remember seeing a show of his somewhere on the Upper West Side around 1990. I looked around for a while, and then when I had determined my favorite I looked at the tag to see the title, and it said, “Euphoria. Collection of Ted Kuster.” After that we took a stroll down to 3d Ave., where I used to live. We could see Christmas tree lights in the window of my old apartment. It’s nice to know someone is living there. I hope they kept the loft I built out of stolen police barricades, and I hope they figured out a better way to cover up that three-inch knothole in the kitchen floor that was the roaches’ foyer. I stayed in that tunnel-like apartment for five years, only half the amount of time I’ve lived in San Francisco, but they were big years and I get a lot of pleasure out of thinking about them now.

When in New York do as New Yorkers do. So today we walked down Central Park from Mary and Diogenes’ place in East Harlem, stopping to marvel at the rocks shouldering up out of the ground, the Alice in Wonderland sculpture, the pond where Stuart raced, the promenade of poets, until we reached Wollman rink and stood in line for two hours to circle with a hundred thousand others, elbow to elbow, staring up at the lights appearing on 5th Ave. and 59th St.After that we strolled down 5th, giving the Bergdorf windows a close inspection and oohing and aahing at the lights and the traffic with the rest of the bumpkins. We joined a huge crowd doing the Hajj to the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree, then made our way over to Lexington and came back Uptown. I’ve missed this place a lot. I’ve been vaguely aware of the feeling since September, , but being here on the crowded, raucous sidewalks and the clanking subway and the Park in its crisp, starchy winter look, those things have really brought it back.