Emerging!

Here I am in the land where you can access blogger and facebook, i.e. Japan. I couldn't get to them in China, which blocks such instant-commentary sites as best it can. In spite of such reminders of totalitarianism, I loved China and found it unbelievably interesting and surprisingly modern, full of paradox and development and Michael Jordan ads. The first three days there were an orgy of tourism and eating such as I have rarely managed before on jetlag – more on those later.

They were then made up for by the next three days at a conference center out in the boondocks next to a petrochemical plant and nothing else. Not a shop nor restaurant nor anything else within sight or a half hour's drive, and a serious lack of bottled water. I boiled like nobody's business, but on the second day found white particulate matter in my mug, and sure enough my stomach rebelled about six hours later. God only knows what it was – I really don't like to think. My traveling partner and I escaped on Sunday morning, heading first for an expat clinic for medical treatment for me and then to Dashanzi 798, the artist and craft area that's kind of like a pedestrian converted-warehouses version of, say, Greenwich Village twenty years ago? I don't even know if that's a fair comparison, but it was obvious that this is where cool young Beijing hangs out. After another fraught stomachic night, here I am in Japan, quietly drinking my hotel's free bottled water.

I had a great time talking to the Chinese graduate students, so cool and aware and curious and all completely untraveled outside China. So young-looking for their ages. I bestowed my Glamour magazine on one girl who had a Coach knockoff purse, and she was so delighted she couldn't even express it. She said they can't get the American fashion mags there – I wonder if that's true, but maybe they don't try shopping the Peninsula hotel newsstands. Another girl expressed great love for Kobe Bryant and Nicholas Cage, and inquired if there was a real Central Perk (the coffeeshop in Friends). A lot of the girls were very into the Twilight books -- can you imagine? Worldwide phenomenon. They wanted to know what Seattle and the Pacific Northwest were like (which is where the books were set and movie was filmed, apparently). Some few had extremely good and idiomatic English, some were very halting. They all have English names for speaking to foreigners (a practice I hope they get rid of ASAP), and one couldn't even pronounce hers: Nadine. The only two Nadines I have ever encountered are Gordimer and Fran's sister on "The Nanny."

Over the North Pole

Off I go tomorrow morning, folks. Flying to Beijing via Tokyo for three days of jetlag/tourism and then a conference. Return to Tokyo for a week+ of tourism (will need to work, also, while I'm there), including three nights in the Fuji Five Lake region and a possible day trip to Kamakura or Kawagoe. Will try to keep you posted -- I'm taking the netbook, god's gift to weary travelers, or in my case, the gift of Asus and a Best Buy sale.

Deeply disturbing

Back in Chicago, frantically unpacking and repacking, but taking a break to mention a nice visit to the Chelsea Museum of Art. Combine it with a walk on the new High Line Park, and you'll have a fun afternoon in one of Manhattan's fanciest but fun neighborhoods. The museum is a nice small space, and right now they (I think still) have an exhibition of modern Iranian art. If you can judge a country by its modern artists, you wouldn't have to know anything about the political situation there to see that this is a deeply disturbed and rifted society. Some of the video installations were just brutal. One featured a couple watching that movie where Deborah Kerr is supposed to meet Cary Grant on top of the Empire State building and happily sobbing while a young blond woman is raped by a band of dark-haired young delinquents outside their window. On the lighter side was a room imagining what the world might look like if consumer goods were centered on the Arabic world -- sneakers with lots of Arabic lettering and designs, reoutfitted Chanel purses, etc.

Seeing the Gugg

It isn't the Guggenheim when the main galleries with their famous windy ramps up inside the circular structure are CLOSED. I paid the reduced entrance to get in anyway -- if you ask me, it wasn't reduced enough -- and fought through the crowds to see some Picassos, Pollock, Renoir, Van Gogh, Kandinskys, Chagalls, etc. There were also some quite large Frank Lloyd Wright rooms with video projections, models, and architectural plans, many of them never built but fascinating structures very different from his famous Prairie houses. Too bad.

As always, I say that audio tours are the scourge of museums, because it causes infinite clumping, especially in a space as small as the Guggenheim's side galleries. If anyone's thinking of going right now, I'd wait till they finish the main installation and reopen the whole thing.

I owe him

Without Ted Kennedy, my parents would never have come to America.

This is probably the best and most unshakable tribute I can give him. He was one of the chief movers and shakers of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 that, contrary to his own rhetoric, did do quite a bit to reshape the ethnic makeup of immigrants to this country, my own two parents among them in the early 1970s. My mother came in as a medical worker (a nutritionist), my father as a student (and, I suppose, stayed on after school as spouse).

Was his career, or rather the post-1969 part of his career, worth a woman's life? I can't answer that question, but I also never voted in Massachusetts during an election for him. I also don't come of a region or generation that has much use for the Kennedy mystique -- that odd combination of machismo, public service, politics, and privilege -- and I recognize that he paid a pretty high price for his, burying one soldier brother and two assassinated brothers. Teddy did a fairly good job overall of living up to both the best and worst that was ever said about the Kennedys. But I know that because of him, I am here.

Alive!

Just haven't been posting. Expect a long post soon with my slightly aggrieved thoughts about the Twilight series. My Brooklyn friends own them, so I've been reading them at the gym, slightly embarrassed to be carrying them.

Tried to go to the Guggenheim today; I've actually never been. But there was a massive line that curved around the corner of the museum, this at 4:30 (it's open late today). I said hail no and walked down Fifth Ave to the Met, which luckily was open late as well. I had already taken my parents there, but I visited my favorite Van Gogh and other old hotspots. More importantly, I saw the special Treasures of Afghanistan exhibit, which includes items that simply weren't known to have been preserved during recent chaotic events till, uh, more recent chaotic events turned them up. The gold artifacts from the burial mound of Tillya Tepe are on display, the highlight of the collection. It's like the Sutton Hoo of Afghanistan. Exactly what tribe or kingdom these are from is not known; it's speculated that the male buried in the center is a king or ranking chief of some kind, with women possibly sacrificed around him. It's often referred to as Bactrian, which is an adjective you don't hear anymore except to refer to camels.

Life of leisure

I have always thought that in order to live in NYC, or at any rate to enjoy it, you have to have either money or energy. Ideally both. One of the things that requires mostly energy is boating on Central Park Lake. (It's $12 for the first hour and $2.50/15min after, as low a boating rate as I've ever seen in any reasonably sized town .)

Here's a view of the lake from the boat after we had made it away from the boathouse into the main area. You can see one of the tiny islands in the lake, and the pretty bridge.



I rowed my parents around on Saturday, not always an easy task in a rowboat, which travels backwards. Lots of people on the lake had never rowed before, plainly, not least the two toddlers with a mom who was letting them try to handle one oar. I did greatly enjoy our exchange with the boatman when we were embarking.

Boatman: "Ladies, both on the back seat, please."
Me (firmly): "Oh no. I'm doing the rowing. I appreciate the thought, though."
Dad (to the boatman): "This is for you young folks, you know."