Truth Needs No Ally

Standing in Place

2010-05-11T09:56:00.000-07:00

As I continue to contemplate life after cancer (that is, after my Dad is finally well, which we hope will be in the next few months), I am pulled in two directions.

On the one hand, I find myself being drawn to traveling abroad again, working for an NGO, doing research on my story ideas, etc etc etc. And on the other, I am drawn to staying put (wherever I am, which has been changing a lot). Maybe even spending 6 months or a year doing a work/trade at a retreat center or house of hospitality where I clean/cook/farm in exchange for quiet, prayer, service.

This morning I came across an article that SO speaks to me, I feel compelled to share it. The author, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, reflects on his earlier habit of moving and traveling, of seeking out meaning and purpose abroad, doing service work, in looking after the OTHER, and of how he has come to realize that standing still, looking around at the world in which you are currently, and planting roots HERE, is sometimes a better way to find meaning and stability within and without.

Funny, even the idea of seeking "stability" seems so foreign to me. It's a word I don't think of much, at least not in the more traditional/American sense (partner, money, career, house); but I am not deceived into thinking I lack a desire for stability. We all do.

Rather than looking for stability in what I have, I seek stability in who I am and how I live. The stability I hunger for is satiated by moments, little epiphanies, that affirm who/how/where I am. YES! What an amazing conversation. YES! Thank God I was able to be here for this friend in the hospital. YES! I loved smelling the eucalyptus and feeling the dirt underfoot on my run. YES! I have time to hear your story. YES! I want to walk with you and make photographs and be consumed by the power of live music.

Stability comes for me when I feel I am where I "should" be, doing what feels right, being in the world in a way that I feel called to be. The ground might be moving below me as I travel back and forth across the country to be present to my father and family, but the continuity, the stability comes in feeling that I'm fully present wherever I am, to whomever I'm with.

Wilson-Hartgrove's reflection is informed by what he's read from the mystics to Barbara Kingsolver, many of whom I've been reading with greater interest of late, and there is much here that resonates with what I'm contemplating these days.

Standing in Place is published in Conspire Magazine, a publication of a grass-roots organization called The Simple Way, which Marcy told me about (thanks...they are way cool!). The Simple Way is somewhat like Elizabeth House, and the Catholic Worker model, working in a poor section of Durham, North Carolina, guided by a call to go out into the world in love. Simple as that. They're feeding the homeless, greening the neighborhood, partnering with a hospital in Iraq... but, of course, it's not about what they're doing but how they are being that inspires and speaks to me.

Today I seek to remain in the moments I am most Myself. Not the ego-self, but the self that is the same as all other selves. The mystery that is within me and within you. More accurately, it's the self that knows no distinction between within and without. In that place, in this Me/You/We I find stability and security and meaning. The where-what-when answers will come in time. For now, I remain standing in place.

Runners High Documentary

2010-01-11T20:47:00.001-08:00

Runners High Film Screening
Thursday, 21 January 2010
400 Hawthorne Ave on Pill Hill, Oakland

Students Run Oakland, a non-profit youth development program promoting health (physical fitness, mentoring and nutrition ed) among Oakland public school students, is hosting a screening of their documentary, Runners High.

The award-winning film follows low-income Oakland kids training for the L.A. Marathon. Some of us in the Touchstone Running Club are training for the upcoming Oakland Marathon and Half. Let's all rally to support the next group of students who will be running with us on 28 March!

Check out the trailer below.

The screening will take place at 400 Hawthorne Ave., in the Bechtel Room, of Samuel Merritt University near the Alta Bates/Summit Medical Center (aka "Pill Hill") off Broadway in Oakland. It will be followed by a student/mentor panel for Q&A. Tickets are $25 and go to support Students Run Oakland. You can buy tix at the door or by emailing Christine Chapon [ christinechapon AT yahoo DOT com].

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Cowgirls of Montclair

2009-12-19T18:39:00.001-08:00

Read about a mother-daughter duo who are selling ranch-inspired clothing, accessories and household goods to support animal rescue.

I wrote/shot this assignment last week, and it was published in the Contra Costa Times on Friday, 17 December 2009.

Running in Ramadan

2009-10-21T11:20:00.000-07:00

A story I wrote and shot for Running Times magazine is now available online here.

It will print in the December issue of Running Times, which will hit the magazine rack in the next week or two. Check it out...the layout is great!

The article features Moroccan Olympian Abderrahim Goumri, who recently took second at the Chicago Marathon.

Remembering the Dead

2009-09-14T11:30:00.000-07:00

It's been a few years since I visited Boston's Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market, Paul Revere's House, Old North Church and the Copps Hill Burial Grounds. I first visited the cemetery as a grade-schooler on a field trip from New York. We made etchings by rubbing butcher paper on the centuries-old tombstones, and I remember being in awe thinking of the families who had stood where I knelt, burying their loved ones.

Death has brushed close many times since that first encounter: I've lost friends to the ravages of AIDS and the painful march of cancer. All four grandparents have died, two of them while very much a part of my daily life. I've stood helplessly by as friends have buried husbands and sons, and just a few months ago photographed my cousin's burial with full military honors (color guard, playing of Taps, 21-gun salute) at Arlington National Cemetery.

I do not fear death, although I have a strong, albeit futile, sense of how I'd like to pass, knowing from all that I've seen how unlikely it is that I'll get control over that outcome. I do, however, fear allowing my life to pass without making a mark on the world. This burning desire to have a positive impact (less than leaving a legacy, as motivates some) has been recently fueled by a less-than fulfilling work life and by reading too many books about those who have done so much. Three Cups of Tea, Mountains Beyond Mountains, even Into the Wild with it's less than inspiring ending have intensified my sense that life is passing too quickly and I must hurry and make something of it all.

It was in this frame of mind that I happened upon the New England Holocaust Memorial just after exiting the T at the Haymarket stop. Traveling as I was the day before 9/11, and being a New Yorker, I suppose it's not surprising that when I approached the tall glass towers of the memorial I immediately thought it must be a tribute to the terrorist attack of 2001.

Even the steam vents blowing up smoke in the midday heat and humidity made me think of Ground Zero. But as soon as I entered the memorial by stepping on the black granite stone path, across carvings of names like "Auschwitz," I realized I was entering sacred ground and the recollection of terror of another era.

Six glass towers, each 54-feet tall, bear six-million numbers to recall those tattooed onto the arms of those who died in the Nazi death camps.

Personal statements by survivors and witnesses also testify to the horror of what took place. I've included one here, to the right, and a photo of it below.

Writing in my notebook as I rode the subway to the airport, my simple response was this:

Glass standing tall, reflecting the financial towers nearby. I start to walk through, wondering why there is steam coming up from the ground, through the grates in each section. Poor planning? Warmth for winter tourists? Reminds me of Ground Zero.

Looking more closely I see digits etched into the glass. In white. Then words, a memory, etched in black. A woman remembers seeing her sister shot and killed. Faces of other visitors, like me, with tears in their eyes are also reflected on top of the words, on top of the numbers, on top of the reflected buildings all in this tall glass.

No, it's not a memorial for the World Trade Centers collapse eight years ago.

Those memorials, breathing the grief that is still so fresh, will be re-visited tomorrow, Friday, 9/11/09.

No, it's a reminder of the six-million who died during the Holocaust many decades before. And the grief of that memory suddenly feels as personal, as close, as the loss of DJ and Marian, Tommy and Hazel, Carl and Pop and Aunch and Corrado and so many in my life.

May I take life and run, fly, L I V E fully. Anything less is tragic and wasteful. Forgive me. Inspire me.

Published in SF Examiner

2009-08-17T10:41:00.000-07:00

Sustainable Raised-Bed Gardening at Alameda Point
Written by David Howard for the San Francisco Examiner
illustrated with my photographs taken while doing a marketing job for Rock Wall Wines, the subject of the article.

Check out the story here.

Meet Michael Schmidt, the Young Times Writer Who Exposes Baseball's Worst

2009-08-11T14:00:00.001-07:00

Read Meet Michael Schmidt, the Young Times Writer Who Exposes Baseball's Worst to learn how one sports writer worked his way up from pizza delivery boy to the big leagues...

I'm interested to hear who among you joins me in being inspired by Schmidt's rise while also saddened that he climbed on the backs of supposedly anonymous players to get to his perch?

Tempest-Tost

2009-07-04T11:03:00.000-07:00

On this 4th of July, New York City celebrates the re-opening of the crown of Lady Liberty, closed in the wake of the 9/11 attack.

The Statue of Liberty's face was created to look like the French sculptor's mother. A chain that represents oppression lies broken at her feet.

How ironic that women, many of whom are mothers, are often barred from our country? Women who face violence at home, violence along their journey to our border, violence when they are captured, criminalized and deported?

Some words from the poem, "The New Colossus," written by Emma Lazarus in 1883 speak to Lady Liberty's intended message of hope for people seeking freedom:

Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

A beautiful message for many immigrants -- which is most of us who now call ourselves American. My own family came from Ireland and Poland, Italy and Germany.

But for those who come from countries less popular than that of my ancestors, Lazarus' poem doesn't ring true.

Women and men detained in federal or local prisons are often denied access to their American citizen children, to legal representation, to sufficient medical care or protection from felons.

Few feel the compassion nor recognize the justice our country offers others when they're tossed back into the teeming shore that was their life back home - an existence so dire, so frightening, so deadly that they risked their lives to come to America in the first place.

What I witnessed, and the first-hand accounts I recently recorded while traveling across the border into Mexico woke me up to the cycles and layers of violence inflicted on migrant women - not just those coming from our Spanish-speaking neighbors to the south, but to women who flee, and those who are unwittingly trafficked into the U.S. from European, Asian, South American and Middle Eastern countries.

Images and testimony to be published at a later time. For now, I sit with this knowledge, hearing the voices of the women migrants I met, praying for their deliverance to safety.

Relay for Life

2009-05-27T12:54:00.000-07:00

When our fearless captain, Marc Trotz, announced that we were going to call our merry band of lawless runners "We're Keepin' R's," I should have known we'd be in for trouble.

Better stated, I knew we'd BE trouble.

The Relay benefited Organs 'R' Us, and here we were announcing we planned to hold onto ours. Just think of our poor volunteers, shame-faced and blushing, feigning amnesia when asked by the event organizers what team they were supporting.

Of course, at some level not too far below the surface I knew all too well just how in-your-face, bold and boisterous we were bound to be, which is why I readily jumped in the van to head to Calistoga for a two-day running adventure of blood, sweat and tears.

I'll post a longer story of our adventure down the road, but for now, here's a teaser:

199 miles, give or take a few based on road blocks, detours and missteps. 12 runners, 3 legs each, almost 30 hours of continuous running from 1-2 May.

Numbers can't begin to quantify the magnificent challenge, nor can mere words on a page or monitor begin to speak of the transformation we lived as individuals and as team.

We're Keepin' R's, Touchstone-Berkeley rocked the house and lived to tell the story. Stay tuned...

photo credit of me running goes to teammate Aaron Steele. Check out more of his awesome shots on his picasa album. Not bad for a dude with a camera phone!

Windows on a World

2009-04-02T05:27:00.000-07:00

Windows on a World is an audio slideshow of Sam Paino, a street-level window washer working in Queens, New York, that I started while a grad student at the International Center of Photography in 2006. I finished my last interview with Sam when I returned from Africa in November. You can view it now on my website.

Large sheets of glass trace the line of a skyscraper ever upwards, offering a heroic backdrop to the work of a big-city window washer.
Sam Paino remembers working that line, but has spent most of his past thirty years closer to the ground than to the sky. After serving in Korea he sold shoes before buying the window washing route he still works today. He’s earned enough to buy a pleasant home on Staten Island and to put his two daughters through college and graduate school.
The sole employee of Fieldstone Cleaning, Sam works an often invisible trade along the streets of Queens. Throughout his mornings, he stops for “coffee or bullshit” with long-time customers who have become his closest friends.
Cancer took twelve long years to drain the life out of his wife, Yolanda, who passed away in the middle of the year I photographed him. In her absence, Sam leaves home before 4AM to get on with life rather than linger in the silence left behind.

Chocolicious Fun in San Francisco

2009-03-21T22:17:00.001-07:00

A sweet few hours were spent elbowing children, pregnant women, connoisseurs and other thousands wanting to get the most for their $25 tickets at the San Francisco Chocolate Salon today at Fort Mason. Met up with Dizzy D (Andrew Rogers) and we tag-teamed on interviewing and photographing some characters there.

We are hoping to publish a story, so I won't give it all away here. However, a few photos of the folks we met today I'll let you peak at below.

I was most impressed with two sisters, one the baker and the other the entrepreneur, who stand behind Socola (Vietnamese for chocolate).

Cookbook author Barbara Passino (Chocolate for Breakfast) opened our eyes to the politics of wine and chocolate pairings while hovering over the table for Omnivore Books on Food.

Jack Epstein, purveyor of decorated boxes and other people's chocolates ("they have a synergy," he told us more than once), runs a Noe Valley shop called Chocolates Covered.

Back in my 'hood, turns out there is a chocolatier (which is not a chocolate maker; go to wiki if you want to know the difference) artisan and teacher named Philippe Lewis who sells truffles in Berkeley at Edible Love.

There were even young things painted in chocolate - not selling themselves but their cacao body frosting made by Chocoholics Divine Desserts.
And, lest I forget, the very tasty shots of Vermeer dutch chocolate cream liqueur. A number of us were caught licking the sides of the tumblers to get every last drop as we walked away, forlorn. While others looked perplexed at the idea of chocolate makeup...

Time Trial Three-peat

2009-02-20T18:49:00.001-08:00

Levi Leipheimer won the Solvang Time Trial for the third year in a row, beating out Dave Zabriskie of Garmin-Slipstream by just 8 seconds. Australia's champion, Michael Rogers, came in third, seventeen seconds back from Leipheimer.

Check my FLICKR page for more images of the 2009 Amgen Tour of California Time Trial.

The Wet and Green of CA Farmland

2009-02-17T18:44:00.001-08:00

The 2009 Amgen Tour of California wound its way from San Jose to Modesto on Tuesday, 17 February.
The race started in relative sunshine, which broke into a sprinkle as the riders signed-in at the start line in front of Adobe in San Jose. By the time they hit the farmlands outside Modesto, it was a full-on downpour.

My favorite moment of the day? Catching the riders in a dry spell along Patterson Pass, image above.

Check out additional images on my FLICKR page.

Women Rock

2009-02-16T18:31:00.001-08:00

Brooke Miller (USA) and Ina Tutenberg (GER) at the start line of the 2009 Amgen Tour of California Women's Criterium in Santa Rosa on Sunday, 15 February.

Miller, the current US Road Race Champion and Tutenberg were considered the race favorites. However, neither landed on the podium after the hour-long stage in a torrential downpour, but their teammates did. Columbia-Highroad's Emilia Fahlin, the Swiss National Champion won the race, and Lauren Tamayo (USA), on Miller's Team TIBCO placed second.

See the article I photographed and contributed to in the New York Times about the uber-educated and professional women cyclists racing today.

Tour of California Prologue

2009-02-15T06:17:00.001-08:00

Lance Armstrong back on the bike and in California for the opening Prologue in Sacramento of the 2009 Amgen Tour of California, Saturday, 14 February.

I will post more photos on my FLICKR page before the end of the Tour.

Columbia-Highroad Schwag & World Class Women

2009-02-14T07:15:00.001-08:00

Ahh, to be back again in the Bay Area. Sweet.

I drove up to the state's capitol from San Francisco yesterday to pick-up my press credential, meet some of the riders and soak in the excitement buzzing the day before the start of the fourth-annual Amgen Tour of California.

Team Columbia-Highroad was holding a breakfast meet-and-greet at the DoubleTree in Sacramento, featuring their riders and their home-brew coffee from San Louis Obispo. The company's PR guys made sure to point out that carrying their travel coffee mug on the course entitles you to free coffee on what is an often chilly and wet week of riding.

Lots of great "schwag" was distributed, but most important, I enjoyed a private audience with the women's team and staff.

You won't find much news about the women's criterium being held in conjunction with male-dominated Tour. The women were originally going to race three stages, from Sacramento to Santa Cruz, but that got turned into just one stage - a criterium race - to be held at the finish line of the men's race on Sunday in Santa Rosa.
Mara Abbott (American National Champion), Kim Anderson, Ina Tutenberg, Emilia Fahlin (Swedish National Champion) and Alex Wrubleski (Canadian National Champion) were great to interview, and I plan to follow-up with them and other women's teams in the coming days.

By the way, if you're unfamiliar with the terms of bike racing, including schwag or criterium, check out the handy online glossary the Tour organizers have posted.

Boston Indoor Games

2009-02-08T07:35:00.001-08:00

Check out RunningTimes.com for my race recap and photos of the Reebok Boston Indoor Games held at the Reggie Lewis Track Center in Roxbury, MA on Saturday, 7 February 2009.
A few extra photos, below, and also on my FLICKR photo page:

Jenn Stuczynski sets a new American Record in the women's pole vault, 15 feet 9 inches.
She collected $25,000 for the record, as did Shalane Flanagan for trouncing Marla Runyan's 2001 record by 20 seconds in the women's 5,000-meters with a time of 14 minutes 47.62 seconds.
American Record Holder in the mile, Alan Webb, stumbled with 600 meters to go. The men's mile came down to the final 20 meters, with NZ Olympican Nick Willis pulling out a 3:53.54, followed by Mexican Olympian Pablo Solares in 3:54.52 and American Chris Lukezic holding for third in 3:56.04. Webb finished fourth, four seconds behind Willis.

Passing the Torch: Ireland to Kenya via NYC

2009-02-02T11:05:00.001-08:00

An assignment on the Millrose Games that I covered (photo and writing) for Running Times is now available online. Here's an excerpt:

Perhaps he's a prophet or just an expert in the field, but the Irish running legend Eamonn Coghlan had predicted two-time world champion Bernard Lagat's win at the 102nd Millrose Games on Friday night at Madison Square Garden.

He wasn't the only one, as Lagat himself had proposed as much last year. After winning the famous Wanamaker Mile for the sixth time in 2008, Lagat announced he would come back in 2009 to take a stab at Coghlan's meet-record seven wins.

Born in Kenya, the 34-year-old American fought a strategic race against New Zealand's Nick Willis to finish in 3:58.44 for his seventh win, tying the record of the earlier favored son of Millrose.

And some additional images of mine to what is posted online:

Traveling with Obama

2009-01-20T18:38:00.001-08:00

Inauguration Day. A day we will all remember. A day our children and our children's children will prompt the question, "where were you when Barack Obama was sworn-in as..."

the 44th President of the U.S.

the first African American President of the U.S.

the first bi-racial President of the U.S.

Or the day Bush flew over the Potomac no longer the President of the U.S.

Tomorrow I will post images and audio, hopefully a slideshow, of some of the amazing people I met today while marking this historic day in my personal storyline. I will tell my children, or your children - someone's children - that I spent this great day in the way that means the most to me: hearing people tell their stories, sharing their dreams, and collecting a photographic memory of their stories to add to my own.

I am ending my day in Jersey City - an enclave just west of the World Trade Center site - with a Kenyan community galvanized by the election of a man who's father was Kenyan. President Obama, in one of the highpoints of his inaugural speech earlier today, suggested people might open their fists when an open hand is extended to them. As one man I interviewed, David Asige, said, "[Obama's] Kenyan father and his white mother held hands together to make the man that became this dream." This is only part of what makes this day so historic for everyone around the world.

I got to watch election history being made in November from the flat of my friends Rich and Hannah in Dublin, Ireland. Rich has been active in the Democrats Abroad contingent (check out his hilarious tongue-in-cheek piece in The Dubliner Magazine) and was glued to his laptop most of the night. Well, when I wasn't stealing it out from under him to track stats, predictions, commentaries and returns on my favorite sites. A room full of Irish and stomachs full of homemade pizza (way to go, Hannah!), we were a happy and overtired group by 5:30AM when I cried in delight as the new first family, a beautiful black family, walked onto the stage.

Today, back in my country of birth and near family I was born into and family I have come to adopt as my own after my trip to Africa, I raise a hand, sing an "Amen!" and kneel in gratitude for this new day that has dawned.

United

2009-01-19T18:08:00.001-08:00

U N I T E D

In consensus?
No, almost half the country that voted dimpled a chad or pulled a lever for someone other than Barack Obama.

In crisis?
Perhaps.
Our economy is hemorrhaging, our jobs are failing, we're in acknowledged war in two countries (and who knows what we're waging in the shadow of the unknown).

But is it consensus or crisis that unites us, that transcends, in President-Elect Obama's words, blue states and red states to re-create the United States?

Maybe I'm fooling myself and we're not united, nor are we transcending that which divides us, like race, gender, faith, economic status, education level, geography, etc. etc. etc. But as I observe the build-up to the Inauguration tomorrow, I am intoxicated by the enthusiasm and energy that is swelling across the country - indeed, across the world.

Perhaps if nothing else, the global population is united in this regard: we're ready for change. And even if we disagree with what that change should be, when it should happen, the tools that, morally, the Commander in Chief of arguably the most-influential country in the world has the right to wield, we agree that the world is bleeding and needs healing.

We are united at our core, I believe, in wanting to create a more sane world, however we individually and collectively define it.

The problem: we too often get in the way of our own vision by perpetuating ignorance, intolerance, violence and injustice and calling it Truth, Democracy, Freedom and Liberty. I walk into tomorrow praying that this time, in this administration, we get it right more often than we get it wrong.

Dain Bramage

2009-01-11T15:12:00.001-08:00

It's a joke, how my friends and I refer to my head injuries as "dain bramage."

Or how my sis and I say "funny business" for when my brain does things it shouldn't. Sometimes I'm wondering in the pages of a Dr. Seuss book, lost among the silly words that sound right but make no sense, sure that I am communicating something but not sure what, exactly.

And we laugh, and it is funny, especially since here I am, alive, thinking, writing.

Those brain-shaken-not-stirred accidents over too many years in competitive sports had their impact, but in a transient sort of way.

Sure, there was a time I couldn't find my way between my apartment and my job -- even though they were two blocks apart, and I'd walked the same route many times a day over many years. And there were those bad, bad days dealing with migraines, nausea, confusion. At its worst, I'd crawl from couch to toilet, unable to stand in a spinning world (vertigo, not vodka).

Okay, I take it back. My brain was shaken AND stirred.

Overall, fingers-crossed, I came out okay especially if I use tools to accomplish tasks that used to happen seamlessly and unconsciously.

I can tell a story, even one I just witnessed, but I need to write down the details if I'm going to get it right. I can multi-task like the best of my old, over-achieving self, as long as I've gotten enough sleep and have eaten in the last few hours.

I'll remember your face, even if we meet only briefly or I see you on the subway one time, as long as there is something visually interesting about you (or I take your photo). The visual memory is, praise the Photographer God, still pretty strong.

In case you hadn't noticed, head trauma is all the rage -- it's being talked about in every forum. Among buddies pounding beer in front of the NFL playoffs; on public radio's review of the most popular interviews in 2008; in magazines and books by doctors who have faced traumatic brain injuries firsthand.

As usual, and as in my own story, it's the American love of sport that continues to bring TBI to the forefront of our minds.

In case you missed it, Ben Roethlisberger, the quarterback for the Pittsburgh Steelers, sustained his third concussion in as many years two weeks ago tonight. After almost fifteen minutes he was carried off in a stretcher. Perhaps the artifical turf of Heniz Field softened the blow of his head being jammed into the ground because his concussion was deemed "mild" by the Steelers' concussion-management-team. It's great that football has the most advanced brain buckets of any sport, and a brain-damage-specific team of doctors as well. But it begs the question: why do we pour billions of dollars into a sport that necessitates such trauma management to protect our most critical organ?

Go ahead and beg (I can hear you), but that's not a question I plan to entertain, any more than the question of why I keep climbing back on my bike or skis, or why I drive in cars and fly in planes. It's all about calculating risk and deciding on an individual basis just how much risk we're willing to live with to entertain our interests or meet our needs.

And, yes, playing sports is necessary for me.

While spinning on a stationary bike to the blasting tune of Pearl Jam, AC/DC or Creed may be safer than riding on the road (concussions, cracked jaw, broken wrist, fractured collarbone) or trail (dislocated shoulder), one could argue it's not good for my hearing at the levels I need to play that music to be as pumped as I am after riding outdoors without music.

Running on a treadmill helps my speed and pacing, but I'm wasting electricity (how many watts does it take to power one of those beasts, anyway?). And don't make me compare the benefits of using a Precor machine versus gliding through trails of snow or climbing over and sliding down peaks in Tahoe. There simply is no comparison.

While I project a go-for-broke attitude toward the sports I love, there is the tiny voice that I sometimes admit to hearing -- but never to psychiatrists, who perk-up when they hear you hear voices of any kind, even the guardian angel type -- that suggests maybe I shouldn't go for that ride/run down the mountain. Or when the feeling in my gut says just maybe today you can scale back, go slow, cut it short.

Ultimately, though, "giving in" is just not true to me, and in the end, I only have myself to blame or applaud. At least I still recognize myself when I look in the mirror. Except on the worst days.

Gives Me the Chills

2008-12-09T12:13:00.001-08:00

Okay, it helped that the temperature outside had dropped to the low-20s and the wind was whipping through the valley like a Hare Krishna at O'Hare. Yet even inside the warm UMass-Amherst theatre on Wednesday night I had a good-bad case of chills that only enthusiastic clapping and swaying helped me shake.

The Soweto Gospel Choir was in town and they rocked the house. All 25 musicians over 22 songs, dancing and singing, drumming and strumming for the better part of two hours. From the heights of traditional South African music (sung in Zulu, Sotho or English) to the dig-down-deep of Dylan's I'll Remember You, the ensemble kept the mostly-white audience enthralled.

Personal favorites:

For the Fun of It - the "Canteen Segment" in which the men gathered around a long folding table and played forks, knives, plates and glasses. Campy, inspired, playful. Left me hoping to replicate the event at my next dinner party. Better than food.

For the Power of It - the "Amazing Grace" rendition which started as soloists taking on each verse, from soprano to a rich baritone, but ended in a full-fledged chorus of tongues. Closed my eyes and I was back in Sarasota, Florida at the Pentecostal Church that used to excite me and scare me in equal parts.

For the Ecstasy of It - the seamless blending of Afro Gospel, Afro Jazz, disco and rap that tingled my every sense and left me wanting more - even after three encores. O Happy Day, indeed.

Quiet Men They Were Not

2008-11-15T19:02:00.001-08:00

So much for The Quiet Man, the movie Hilda's sister-in-law, Ann Daly, sat me down to watch wrapped in a blanket by a splendid fire one cold night near Cork. I had walked the same bridge John Wayne crossed; I dove off the coast where he raced his horse in the film.

No, quiet men they were not.

As the hostel manager told me the next morning, "it's an unspoken rule among hostels in Ireland: never allow groups of more than two Irish, men or women, to stay at one time. It's almost always a hag or stag party, and even when it's not, they're going to come back causing trouble."

Yeah, the lads have arrived, open bottles in hand and shouts of "oyyyyy-heyyyyy" or some posse-tribal-celtic-football bellow eminating from deep in their bowels straight through their foul mouths. Reminds me how happy I am to be a long way out of college dorm life.

Good thing here at the Old Mill Holiday Hostel I opted for the 7-room women's room instead of the mixed-18. Me and the boys, I'm now thinking, would have quickly become a rowdy hell, in contrast to my day of near solitude.

Earlier on the road out of Galway at 6AM, I watched the clouds and rain pelt the coast and, as I turned inland, the fog began to lift with the calling of the sun. Undeterred by the low temps and moist air, I stopped often to pray, photograph, hike and meet cattle and sheep up close and personal. Connemara is gorgeous, inspiring and peaceful.

Rolling into Clifden, one of the most western towns in Ireland, I followed the only pedestrians I saw. They ably guided me to the only shop open in what is usually a bustling tourist town. Lucky me, the one shop open is my favorite kind of shop: a bakery, one with the usual varieties of soda bread but also spelt cakes and flaky scones. Pleasing the eye as well, it offered a bay window with a view of a ring of lakes, mountains and farms to boot. Down the street I could see the sun glowing on the town's two church steeples as I warmed up with a decaf and slice of moist ginger cake.

15 kilometers further north and east along the shore stands the Quaker-founded Letterfrack, one of those blink-and-you'll-miss-it villages. Later in the day I will come back here to tramp through Connemara National Park in the driving rain. For now, though, I do blink and pass it by in pursuit of another adventure, an even wetter one than hiking in a November storm on the west coast of Ireland.

On what is considered Ireland's only fjord (although scientists debate whether it was ever glaciated), Killary Harbour's Glassilaun Beach offers year-round SCUBA diving. The surrounding mountains (the tallest, Mt. Mweelvea stands at 819 meters) and orientation of the bay and harbour provide a protected micro-climate with calmer water than much of the Atlantic coast.

While my dive master enjoyed a drysuit, for which I am not yet certified, I squeezed into 12 millimeters of neoprene - 7 mil longjohn with a 5 mil shortie on top - and hood/gloves/booties. Breffni Gray treated me to a VIP (Victim of Insane Planning or Visionary and Intrepid Photojournalist, maybe Very Idiotic Person?) dive with Scubadive west. He and his brother Cillian are the sons of an Irish pioneer, Shane Gray, the first to open a dive center back in the 60's in Dublin. They run a great program and spent hours with me afterwards reviewing what we saw and giving tips on local hikes, pints and grub. Rather than meeting them dead on a dinner plate, I came within inches of lobster and prawn, crab and scallop, thriving in the cold, clear waters of the Atlantic. Potential food sources were fascinating, but my favorite moment underwater was the last of the hour and not a fish but a bird: a cormorant dive-bombed us in search of its next meal, checked us out and then headed back toward the light. Magnificient.

The pleasures of hot shower, coffee and good company notwithstanding, I bitched to myself as my fingers and toes throbbed in their transition from blue numb nubs to stinging appendages. The rain that had started in the last minutes of the dive let up long enough to give me an hour of damp and windy trekking. Slogging through bog and along gravel trails, finishing in a drizzle, made me wish for:

1. waterproof boots. I am still wearing the Brooks trail running shoes I bought at Transports in Oakland back in August).
2. waterproof housing for my Canon 5D, although I've become adept at shooting through plastic bags in rain. No tools yet for shooting surfers or divers, though.
3. waterproof jacket. Gortex, where are you when I need you? Ania's fuzzy fleece pullover just couldn't compete with the unleashing of the sky.

I stopped at the Acora outlet where I discovered that the wool scarf I bought at a thrift store in County Cork for 3 Euro was selling new for 25. I also dropped in at the Kylemore Abbey only because I happened to be passing by, anyway. More than a century ago a couple visited the area on their honeymoon and fell in love with the mountains and lakes, building a castle on the site in the late 1800s. The wife died soon thereafter and the grieving groom couldn't bear to stay without her. It has since served as a boarding school and Benedictine monastery. Now it's a museum with gorgeous gardens. I skipped the entrance fee and just strolled the gardens, no other guests in sight, through the downpour.

Landing in Westport I headed straight to the health store even before looking for a bed to crash for the night. Speaking of crashing, did I mention I fell, hard, three times on rocks in Lahinch while photographing surfers there yesterday? Yeah, well the images I got weren't worth the bruising on the slick black rocks. On the other hand, turning my ankle (sniper attack again!) on the moonscape of rocks in the Burren was totally worth it.

Staying upright isn't my strength even on dry surfaces, but all the falling I've done over the years has taught me one thing: how to hold onto that camera like a receiver in the Super Bowl.

As I reviewed my old-lady-litany in my head (still feeling the pull of my left hamstring from the Dublin marathon, the tightness in my back from thin mattresses on hostel bunk beds and the injection in my arse at the clinic in Ethiopia three weeks ago, believe it or not) I couldn't wait to rub down with some homeopathic ointment.

Across the street, wouldn't you know it, there was a cool, old stone mill, its rock face glowing in the street lamps. Caught my eye and after photographing it, I realized it is now a hostel. Not bad. Had the dorm room to myself, hung the wet clothes on the furnace and headed to O'Malley's for my first (yes, first, and if you know me you know this is remarkable in the land of fish and chips) order of Irish wedges. Nothing like salty, hot french fries, a bowl of sweet potato-ginger soup and a good draft. Yum.

I drifted easily into sleep only to find that my "private" dorm room was now occupied by my favorite chanting posse of pubsence, fond of visiting my floor and vacuuming my room, flipping on and off lights between three and five in the morning. No locks on the doors, and the hostel manager and other guests were in the second building across the courtyard. They ran each time I threatened them, so I was pretty lucky all in all given the ratio of 14 drunk, young men to one sober, creeky woman.

-7 November 2008

Studs Terkel Dies

2008-11-10T12:06:00.001-08:00

Chicago Tribune, November 1, 2008
An excerpt from a story in the Chicago Tribune

The author-radio host-actor-activist and Chicago symbol has died. "My epitaph? My epitaph will be 'Curiosity did not kill this cat,'" he once said.

By RICK KOGAN

Louis Terkel arrived here as a child from New York City and in Chicago found not only a new name but a place that perfectly matched -- in its energy, its swagger, its charms, its heart -- his own personality. They made a perfect and enduring pair.

Author-radio host-actor-activist and Chicago symbol Louis "Studs" Terkel died Friday afternoon in his home on the North Side. At his bedside was a copy of his latest book, "P.S. Further Thoughts From a Lifetime of Listening," scheduled for release this month. He was 96 years old."

Studs Terkel was part of a great Chicago literary tradition that stretched from Theodore Dreiser to Richard Wright to Nelson Algren to Mike Royko," Mayor Richard M. Daley said Friday. "In his many books, Studs captured the eloquence of the common men and women whose hard work and strong values built the America we enjoy today. He was also an excellent interviewer, and his WFMT radio show was an important part of Chicago's cultural landscape for more than 40 years."

Beset in recent years by a variety of ailments and the woes of age, which included being virtually deaf, Terkel's health took a turn for the worse when he suffered a fall in his home a few weeks ago."My father lived a long, satisfying and fulfilling but tempestuous life," his son, Dan Terkel, said Friday. "It was a life well lived."

It is hard to imagine a fuller life.

--Go to Democracy Now! for interviews with Studs Terkel in 2007 and 2003.

Gravedigging and Flower Grazing

2008-11-04T11:02:00.001-08:00

Old iron foot bridges cross tranquil paths. The gold and red of autumn reflects in the lake below. Groves of pine dotted with a giant sequoia serving as backdrop for the Chinese tourist photos, smell grand in the crisp breeze.

The arboretum and greenhouses offer ancient orchids, ferns, English geranium, even coffee plants from Ethiopia on a botanical world tour of steamy beauty.

The stray cat at my feet meows for attention, sorely lacking in this, the somewhat off-season, at the National Botanic Gardens in Dublin.

It is the day after the Feast of All Souls and the limestone wall encircling Glasnevin Cemetery next door beckons to be climbed. As the sun descends behind the clouds, I crawl among three- and four-meter tall monuments to the dead and over moss, around headstones tipping over from the weight of two-hundred years.

Where the loved ones of the O'Donovans, O'Malleys, O'Briens and Others once stood, I now close my eyes and lift in prayer the names of all the souls I've loved who have gone before me. Marion and Hazel, Larry and Corrado, Silas and Tommy, Carl, my grandparents... And, ever present in my prayers and on my mind, DJ.

Being Ireland, there is always a pub nearby to drown one's sorrows. Immediately to the left of the cemetery gate I find the Gravediggers Pub (properly referred to as John Kavanagh), built in 1833. Lifting a glass of Guinness to all the Souls, saints and sinners alike, I again thank God for the journey.

From Beijing to Bekoji

2008-10-05T13:22:00.001-07:00

Haile Gebrselassie set a new world record on Sunday at the Berlin Marathon, and three days later his hometown was throwing him a party. Damned if I wasn't going to be there...it's not everyday I find myself in the heart of African distance running and with the opportunity to be the only western correspondent within reach of the world's greatest distance runner moments after an epic event.

So, balking all the advice by locals not to go (thieves, breakdowns, accidents, bad water and risk of malaria), I headed south out of Addis.

The road to Asela is one of the best in the whole of Ethiopia. Newly paved and with fewer bandits waiting for stranded passengers (although the full-body frisk by the military at various points feels almost as dangerous), the road south is, amazingly enough, easily traversed.

After only four hours, including transfer in Nazaret from one rickety minibus to another, my pursuit of Ethiopian distance runners carried me to the Oromo region, birthplace of all but one of its best athletes. Gebrselassie, Derartu Tulu, Kenenisa Bekele, Tirunesh and Ejigayehu Dibaba - all of this year's Olympians and the great Abebe Bikila, in fact, were born here or in nearby Bekoji.

While my contacts in Addis were more concerened with my travel between Addis and Asela, it was the ceremony, itself that proved to be my greatest challenge. Although what happened to my body later in my stay may have been the worst I've ever felt, especially while staying in a mud house.

The Oromo people were hosting a program to honor their Olympians. In addition to bestowing flower wreaths and local handicrafts on the athletes, they also gave them land grants with the hope that the current trend of successful athletes investing in the commercial life of the area would continue. Already, there is Haile's restaurant and Tirunesh's hotel. Derartu's was being built while I was there.

At the stadium (a large field with cinder track and seating for, perhaps, 100 dignitaries) quickly became overrun with many, many thousands of people who traversed rutted dirt roads from further in the countryside primarily by foot, but also horse, bus and taxi to catch a glimpse of the country's heroes.

The swarming crowds were pushed up the hillsides and down into the center of the field by baton-wielding militia. Amazingly, no one seemed to get hurt in the melee and all settled down temporarily for the parade of school children, a marching band and a procession of local hopefuls.

The latter got their chance to run in a 5,000m race, with the men's winner running barefoot and most others running in shoes so worn their toes stuck out in all directions.

Men rode bareback in a brief and wild horse race, followed by their friends dressed in a blend of western clothing and animal skins topped off with flowing wigs of monkey hair. After the races, hundreds of children danced in the greens, yellow and reds of the Ethiopian flag. Teenagers performed martial arts moves, scouts waved and sang, adults cheered.

The crowd went wild each time the athletes stepped on the track - to start the races, to had out awards to the local runners, to shake hands with the Mayor. The brief concert by three of the most popular musicians, including Getachew Hail Mariam, was like a non-event in comparison to the athletes' reception. In Ethiopia, runners ARE the rock stars.

Tirunesh Dibaba, the first professional athlete in all of Ethiopia to have her own website, recently wed fellow Olympian Sileshi Sihine. Their late October wedding was hailed as the "wedding of the millennium" throughout the country.

Dibaba is a four-time world champion, a current world record holder and recently added two Olympic gold medals to her collection. She is pictured here in the green and black shirt, her future husband in the black and white striped shirt to her left (photo right). Haile is behind her in the gray suit and red tie. A man heavy in gold medals, Keninisa Bekele (often spelled Kenenisa in the western press) is pictured in red t-shirt and black jacket. The Tiger Woods of Ethiopia these days, Bekele defended his Olympic 10,000m title and set a new Olympic record in the 5,000m in Beijing this summer.

Runners I met in the Bronx, including Abiyot Endale, connected me with their families here. They gave me food, a place to sleep and shared generously with me.

While my contacts in Addis were more concerned with my travel between Addis and Asela, it was the stampede at the ceremony, itself, followed by the intestinal torture that may be related to the food I ate, the water I drank or the fact that on my first morning I woke with my left eye swollen shut from a mosquito bite. Good thing I shoot with my right eye...

Just when they began applauding me for my adaptability to Ethiopian living, I came apart in every direction. Typical American, afterall.

They nursed me to health with "traditional medicine" and rest.

I now believe in the power of tsabel - holy water. More specifically, I saw the power of belief in its curative properties. The locals told me stories of brain damaged children learning to speak again, of crippled men walking, of those with HIV being cured. All from bathing in and drinking the holy water. I'll leave this story for another time...when I have the stomach to tell you all the gory details!

Diving Dahab

2008-09-30T22:52:00.001-07:00

Dateline: 19 September 2008

Traveling across the African continent...from Morocco to Egypt to Ethiopia. A few images to go with my last post...

In order to interview and photograph a former professional runner who now manages a hotel, I took the train about four hours south from Casablanca to Marrakesh. Meriem (a new friend, Siham's sister) and I shared the train cabin with a new mother and her baby, an endless source of fascination for my young friend.

Marrakesh, formally the capital of Morocco, is a Berber enclave and tourist trap - but seen arm-in-arm with my Moroccan mate we avoided the traps and enjoyed the charm of this desert oasis. Boasting one of the largest outdoor markets (sooqs) in Africa, the city is bustling with vendors and buyers by day. At night the market square becomes a huge, rollicking restaurant-party with thousands of people eating at the hundreds of food stalls, encircling the street performers (jugglers, acrobats, fortune-tellers, Arab-style-break dancers) and negotiating prices on cheap goods.

Diving the Red Sea off the coast of the Sinai Peninsula in Dahab, Egypt.

After we returned from Marrakesh, I had just a couple of days before leaving for Ethiopia by way of Egypt. Yes, after difficult communication between me and the only travel agent I could find who spoke even minimal English (mostly we communicated in French, and, no, I don't speak French) I booked a stopover in Egypt for three days. It was cheaper than flying directly to Ethiopia and, well, I've been thinking of diving in the Red Sea since Doug first told me about it a few years ago.

Muhammed and Siham put me on a train to Casablanca, and Meriem's family fed me my last Ramadan meal in Morocco before ushering me off to the train to the airport. This time around I could read the signs, knew the stops and had no difficulty navigating the system - a far cry from my initial discombobulation when I arrived ten days earlier.

Flying Egypt Air to Cairo overnight, I woke to a view of the sun rising over the pyramids. Worth the price of the air ticket, alone!

With only 50 minutes between landing and my connection to Sharm el-Sheik, and in response to my pleas for quick assistance, the Egyptian military flew me through customs.

Outside I immediately had to fend off a horde of men trying to sell me their tour packages. Rushing with my bags to the bus shelter, I again fell on the mercy of the military for help getting to the terminal in the absence of the bus. Not having had time to stop and exchange my Moroccan dirham for Egyptian pounds, the men with the guns hailed a taxi for me, instructing the driver not to charge me. I tipped the driver with a few US dollars and made my connection on time. Whew!

Sharm el-Sheik is located on the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula, the land situated between mainland Egypt/Africa and Saudi Arabia. The Red Sea forms its western border, and the Gulf of Aqaba its eastern definition. Many tourists travel there to visit Mt. Sinai and St. Catherine's Monastery. As early as the third century AD, sans archaeological evidence, Christians have identified the 7,500-foot peak as the place where Moses received the 10 Commandments and witnessed the burning bush. Watching the sun rise over St. Catherine's Monastery, just below the mountain, is a popular tourist experience. The idea of hiking up during the night appealed to me. But after reading the tourist forums I opted out, realizing that the way down would be a mob scene. Reminiscent of riding up Haleakala in Maui to watch the sunrise there, I'd be fighting the crowds on the way down. So, with only two days before flying back to Cairo, I looked for a taxi to take me 85KM north to Dahab; mecca of another sort.

Diving in Dahab - or in many other places along the coast of the Sinai Peninsula, is a unique experience without even stepping foot in the water. Imagine being surrounded by gusty, brown, hot sand on all sides except for the water; local Bedouin men - short, faces dark from the sun, wearing traditional clothing hauling oxygen tanks and driving pasty (or sunburned) Europeans in jeeps as skeletal as the bedouin's skinny body - and you know you're diving in a land like no other.

Booking online in Morocco I found a great deal at the Daniela Hotel and Diving Center. After nearly coming to blows with the taxi driver at the Sharm airport when he tried to hassle me out of an extra 150 Egyptian pounds, we made it through all of the military checkpoints and to the hotel in about an hour. When giving me my change, the driver further tried to swindle me out of 30 more pounds to compensate for the speeding ticket he got along the way. But the sight of the blue water and the gleaming white hotel more than made up for the hassle of getting there.

The staff met me at the door with a glass of fresh-squeezed mango juice and a rundown on the local diving scene. After dropping off my bag and getting set-up with gear rental, I did what every sane traveler does in hot weather on holiday (since I was now officially on holiday for a bit!)...I went to the pool. Ahhh.

Not five minutes after plunking down on my cot I hear the hotel's dog barking and look to see a lone camel strolling along the 10m-wide strip of sand between the pool and the sea. I grabbed my camera and headed over in time to meet the Bedouin boy riding camelback who next came trotting through to harness his stray camel. Dorothy, I am not in Kansas anymore.

Turns out the bedouin, the desert nomads of the Sinai, have found ways to engage in tourism as well, selling rides on camels where no cars yet go. Locals I interviewed shared mixed reviews of this modernization of the local culture, some decrying the loss of traditions and others applauding this typically impoverished tribe for their entrepreneurship. It's the usual story and debate...

After snorkeling for hours just off the resort's shore, I showered and headed into town on the hotel's free shuttle (runs every night, head in at 20:00 and back at 23:00). Walking around with the manager of the hotel, we visited with his friends at various establishments along the pier. I blended in oh-so-well as the only woman at the outdoor cafe specializing in pipes, coffee and backgammon.

The moon was gorgeous and the outline of Saudi Arabia was lit and visible about 20km across the water. We stopped for tea - sweeter and less minty than in Morocco - with his pals and talked about his days as a sharpshooter, a talent that helped him move quickly through military rank and, in the end, saved him from the misery of a bad post during mandatory service.

Having mentioned earlier at the hotel's restaurant that I was practicing Ramadan, I returned to the hotel to discover the staff had delivered a Ramadan feast to my room, including fresh and dried dates, plump figs, yogurt, falafel, pita, slices of cheese and hummus. And, the Egyptian specialty: a fava bean soup ("foul" in Arabic). Their generosity towards me extended to the next day, when the cleaning staff decorated my bed with flower petals surrounding my English-version Qur'an I'd been given in Morocco.

The diving was great - I won't say spectacular, as I would have liked to have done some cave diving as well and been around fewer divers (our group was small, but we were often jostled by other dive groups in the heavily-trafficked waters). The coral reefs were beautiful in the Canyon and Garden dive sites and I fell in love with lionfish, and saw glassfish, eels, barracuda, frogfish and a huge, gorgeous variety of anemone. Good visibility and warm water temperatures added to the pleasure.

Rising after just three hours' sleep determined to catch the sunrise over the sea, I slogged through the sand along the coast, running under the distant watch of Egyptian military (ever-present in the country, but particularly in and around Dahab, the site of a three-bomb attack on tourist areas in April 2006). I was asked a lot more intrusive questions when alone than with the locals, of course, but besides being faced with five men wielding rifles, it was a quiet and peaceful run. And, just as I returned to the hotel to grab my camera, a bedouin man crossed my path, leading a camel back to his village.

Driving back to Sharm I sang along with my driver to the now-familiar Arabic music (I'd heard the same on the TV in Morocco) jamming from his CD player. After the short flight from Sharm back to Cairo, I hopped on a bus into the city center and checked my bag at Ramses train station for a less than a dollar.

The station, built in the 1800s, is an Arab version of Grand Central - Greek columns out front, swarming with passengers hurrying to a multitude of platforms for trains and buses. The sound of their arrival and departure mixes with the constant din of Muslim prayer invoked over loudspeakers. There are public toilets (but, as usual in Africa, you're expected to drop some coins in the outstretched hand of the lady who gave you a sheet of toilet paper on the way in) and a huge section of the marble floor is taken up with men bowing on prayer rugs. Classic Cairo - the western and modern mixed with the eastern and traditional.

Unfettered with baggage, I went out into the streets, climbed a fence (like the locals) to bypass the nastiest traffic circle I've ever witnessed and then pushed my way to the teller's window at the mouth of the subway. No ticket machines or lines, just one mass of sweaty people wedged against each other, fighting to buy a token.

Blessedly, the subway system is well-diagrammed and easy to navigate and in no time I was standing in the area formally known as Babylon.

While I skipped out on some Christian tourism by avoiding Mt. Sinai the day before, I did get to spend many hours exploring the Coptic section of Cairo, also known as Old Cairo, parts of which date back to the 6th Century AD. I also saw Egypt's oldest synagogue and first mosque. Besides having to, as usual, fend off the unwanted "assistance" of the military who were there to guard the treasures and, apparently, hassle tourists for baksheesh, I couldn't have asked for a better afternoon in Cairo.

Before heading back toward Ramses I hiked across the Nile to the Cairo Tower and its panoramic views of the city. The elevator man stops at each floor trying to convince passengers to get out and spend money at the restaurants, but once he understood I was practicing Ramadan his tone with me changed and insisted I come back after sunset to enjoy a free meal with the staff.

Instead, I headed across the Nile to confirm my flight to Addis that evening and broke fast with new friends at an internet cafe. While the chicken kebabs and bean soup were offered gratis, I paid for the meal later, barely making it to the toilet outside of the customs booth later that night.

Between the meal and the toilet run one of the internet workers got me to Ramses in breakneck speed, teaching me how to dodge the crazed drivers by walking - NEVER running - in front of them. He instructed me that all the locals know if you run the driver can't predict your speed as well as if you run and they are more likely to hit you (as they did him when he was ten-years old). After Ramses he hailed a taxi for me and negotiated a local rate, handing me a bottle of coca-cola for the trip. Amazing hospitality for having met him and the others at the shop only thirty minutes earlier. Sometimes it helps to be a woman traveling alone.

Adrift in Addis Ababa

2008-09-26T04:43:00.001-07:00

It’s been awhile since I posted due to conditions here in the birthplace of humanity.

After traveling by train with my new mate Meriem to Marrakech in the south Morocco and surviving the Ramadan fast in 108-degree heat, I flew overnight to Cairo.

With a 40-minute window to catch the next flight to Sharm El-Sheik, the Egyptian military went above and beyond to usher me through customs, and given I had no local currency yet, they hailed down a taxi and commanded the driver not to charge me for the rush service to the next terminal. Impressive. Once I landed on the Sinai Peninsula at the foot of Mt. Sinai, the military were much less accommodating and I almost came to blows with the taxi driver when negotiating the price to Dahab, about 100km north of Sharm.

Good thing I didn’t try to rent a car…getting through the armed checkpoints was harrowing enough even with a local speaking Arabic on my behalf. Encountering the gorgeous blue of the Red Sea and the white building of my hotel in this spit of paradise, I finally breathed easily again about 18 hours after leaving Morocco.

Although a short stay, two nights in Dahab were the recharge I needed before heading into the horn of Africa. Diving off Sinai was incredible, all that I had hoped for and worth the extra travel. I also got in an interview with a former sharp-shooter and celebrated Ramadan with the hotel staff who were intrigued by my interest in their faith and decorated my room with flowers and the Koran on my last morning.

Flying back to Cairo for a 9-hour layover and whirlwind through the capital was chaotic but great. Made my way by bus and a lot of walking to the Coptic Christian area of the city, then to the Muslim neighborhood (I left my pack at a luggage room in the main train terminal, Ramses, for pennies and it was still there at the end of the day. Not bad). Also sat by the Nile and then went to the highest point in the city, the Tower of Cairo, where I enjoyed panoramic views in the hot afternoon sun.

I have been in Addis Ababa now for almost a week and this leg of the journey deserves a full entry all its own, so for now I’ll say that conditions are extreme, the athletes are incredible, and the food is constant and filling! It is all that I hoped for and more, but also much more challenging than I anticipated.

The highlight: 36 hours of Ethiopian Orthodox wedding. Wow.

As I continue to make my way through rural living in a big city amidst a sea of taxis, mud and generous people, I will get online again when I can. More to come…

Sooq and Soot

2008-09-11T05:23:00.001-07:00

It is good I learned to jaywalk in Manhattan, because every pedestrian - geriatric, handicapped or toddler - takes their lives into their hands when crossing the street in Rabat.

And this is not a comment on Moroccan taxi drivers wielding dilapidated Mercedes from the year I was born across double-lines (where they exist) down four-lane roads through the country's capital city. No, I'm talking about my friend Asmaa, a pretty blonde with two little boys in a Honda SUV purchased with her husband's race earnings driving like a cabbie during rush hour in Times Square - while sending an SMS message - on the way to the market in her residential neighborhood.

Having survived many crossings of Rue Mohammed V in Temera, running across train tracks (no crossing lights or gate to warn of incoming freight) and traveling in a packed-so-tight minibus that it can't close it's doors (at 4 Dirham a ride, you get what you pay for in public transit), I'm beginning to wonder what I might encounter on this continent the further I get from Europe.

If the politically correct and pampered of my adopted city - Berkeley - could experience the commute to the center of Rabat, they might find less to complain about. Here, the bus doesn't even stop to allow passengers to on- or off-board, no matter their state of health or agility. They sure as hell aren't going to announce stops or answer questions.

Yesterday I suffered. The other runners warned me against this foolishness...but I've always been a proponent of "seeing is believing". First, running early in the morning and, second, going with Meriem and Rashid to the great sooq in Rabat. Nothing like being pushed and shoved in hot sun for hours after running in the morning during Ramadan (no food, and worse, no drink, until 7pm). Hours spent fighting crowds, hagglers, and the and smell of every food you are starving for and even more you can't bear the sight of.

I now know a version of torture - mint; dates, figs, cow's heads (uh, yes, really) dangling in front of me at every turn in a open-air market that makes the streets of Chinatown look quiet and empty.

I dared not let out so much as a whimper - well, perhaps I let loose a barely audible whisper of complaint - given that every one of the billion people pusing into me was just as thirsty as I.

We left with swollen feet, throbbing heads and, for me, a lovely jilbab to wear later that evening. I would be meeting Abderrahim Goumri (who came in second at the London marathon last year and holds the Moroccan national record of 2:05.30) and other members of the National Federation over coffee, after Iftar (the breaking of the fast at sunset, also refered to as breakfast, imagine that). While western dress would have been acceptable, it seemed to please my hosts for me to dress as they do. Siham, Mohammed's wife, kept saying my black and red jilbab was beautiful ("zwina") on me. I felt a bit like a pear in a potato sack but, hey, I'll take 'beautiful' in her eyes.

For a good primer on the traditions of Ramadan, see this link.

After the evening's breakfast the men went to the mosque to pray while I napped and the women joked about the usual things women discuss all over the world (need I say more...) The men came back and took me to the coffee house where Abderrahim Gourmi would meet me for an interview.

We had run together the day before when I kept pace for about a mile as he, Hassan Lahsini and two other elite runners warmed up on the trails. Eventually they hit stride and I was left choking dust only slightly less toxic than the soot I have been inhaling since I arrived on Sunday. I kept wishing for water, counting down the minutes until sunset and the break of the fast.

Last night was much more pleasant of an encounter with Goumri as we sat in the cool evening breeze drinking coffee and, for me, good ol' junky sweet orange Fanta. Yummy. Great interview and end to the day.

Ramadan in Rabat

2008-09-08T09:09:00.001-07:00

Arriving in the midst of a quiet, hot summer afternoon at Casablanca Airport, I wondered around with a sign I had fashioned in Paris reading MOHAMMED AMYN. In my first hours on the great continent of Africa I could not find my local contact, a mobile connection, nor a scrap of toilet paper.

By 18:00 I found all three and landed happily in the company of Mohammed, his wife Siham, and their friends Fatiha, Asmaa and her 5-year old son Aymam. Soothed by the sweetest, mintiest pot of tea (quintessential Morocco I have come to learn) and more plates of breads (is this heaven or what?!), chick peas, lentil soup, fromage and various sesame and honey desserts than I could even taste in one sitting, we broke the Ramadan fast together in their home.

Mohammed speaks decent English so he translated for all of us. That is, until he went to the mosque for prayer, at which point we women did our best through a combination of the five languages we spoke between us. For example, when asking to use their shower I said in a barbaric combination of French, Spanish and Arabic -

S'il vous plaît, necesito maa' (water) por mi cuerpo, shokuran (thank you) - all as I gestured a spigget of water falling above my head onto my body.

Later, during our Arabic and English lessons, little Ayman got in the spirit of thinigs and began practicing his handwriting in a Spiderman composition book (see photo). An eager student with just 6 days into school, this was the only time he seemed interested in something beside turning cartwheels and falling out of handstands around us!

After about 24 hours of travel since I said goodbye to Hilda at SFO, I fought sleep in order to drive into town to attend an impromptu gathering in the parking lot of the central market (outside what can only be described as a K-Mart crossed with a gourmet food store...Barbie backpacks hung near cookbooks in French, 12-inch wide open wooden bowls overflowing with spices the color of the desert rested near jugs of Tide detergent and fresh fish fillets on ice).

Young women in flowing cloaks and older men with children on their laps sat under a large white tent (think revival meeting in the old south) while teenage boys and twenty-somethings in billabongs and football/soccer jerseys competed in out-tricking each other(think Péle meets the globetrotters) under the bright lights of the parking lot. Music of Algeria and the Moroccan Berbers played behind the cheers of the one-hundred or so gathered.

Back in Temera, the neighborhood outside of Rabat where my gracious host live, we climbed into our pajamas (a universally understood word, it seems) and before going to sleep, I asked the former Olympian where he recommended I run in the morning, hoping he wouldn't offer to run with me at my slow pace. As he generously drove me to the beach and the forest, to show me a route he likes to run, he apologized that he would not be running during my visit - Ramadan is his only vacation from training because of the fast from food and water. Relief for my pride! He said all Muslim runners finish their season for these holy days and I would have the streets, beach and trail to myself in the morning.

Indeed, the city slept off their late night (last meal served at 2AM and prayers at 4) and the only people I saw (not counting the raggedy pups wandering around at the beach) as the sun rose were the national guardsmen stationed outside the walls of the royal palace.

Next dispatch most likely from Marrakech. Ciao

View from the apartment in Temera near Rabat...Atlantic in the distance

War Surgery in Afghanistan and Iraq

2008-08-12T17:13:00.001-07:00

While the U.S. government has tried its best to censor a textbook of military medicine as experienced in Afghanistan and Iraq, authors Dr. David Lounsbury, Dr. Stephen P. Hetz and Dr. Shawn C. Nessen have succeeded in bringing it to bookshelves, at least virtual ones like Amazon.com or the Government Printing Office.

In a New York Times Article on 5 August, journalist Donald G. McNeil, Jr. discusses what it took to get the book published by the U.S. Army, of all outfits. With the help of surgeon generals, the authors were able to present the book with the photos and captions they intended, acquiescing only on the issue of covering the eyes of the wounded who did not give written permission to be included.

“War Surgery in Afghanistan and Iraq: A Series of Cases, 2003-2007,” is not for the faint of heart. With sometimes gruesome photos of missing limbs, bomber's ribs sticking out of injured soldiers, blood, guts and gore, the authors have pulled together a handbook of the latest findings of battlefield surgeons in our most current conflict. Their hope: medics will hit the ground with a more realistic and accurate understanding of what to expect and will benefit from the knowledge learned by others on the front lines of how to best treat the injured. Often, the old ways are no longer the best ways, at least not with the kinds of injuries and resources available under a medical tent in the middle of Kabul or Baghdad.

I first learned of the book's publication from an email I received from Dr. Lounsbury (who contacted me based on a connection we made when I worked for conflict photographer James Nachtwey). A retired colonel, Dr. Lounsbury took part in both invasions of Iraq in the past two decades, and edited military medicine textbooks at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. According to Lounsbury, the book has garnered attention not only in the New York Times, but also NPR and the BBC. In response to the article in the Science Times section of the NYT, Lounsbury says that he agrees, "with the tenor of the article that 'Americans who choose to do so have the right to see ...the human cost of war'."

I haven't put my hands on the book as of yet, although I plan to. And to share it with as many of you as can stomach it. It's as important a tome as Philip Jones Griffiths' Vietnam Inc., if not more important, given that the warfare it depicts rages on and the book could possibly impact how the wounded - soldiers and civilians, allies and enemies - are cared for. Even better, it could prevent greater loss in the future by bringing our troops home.

Marching to Zion

2008-08-08T16:53:00.001-07:00

Well, it doesn't get much more beautiful than this...on a bike, on foot, in a car. No matter how I took this turn, I was awe-struck each and every time.

While some of us had our reservations about heading to Mormon country in southwestern Utah on the annual Black Sheep Adventures "Epic" bike tour, we all returned to the Bay Area as Zion converts. Bryce and Grand Canyons were pretty gorgeous as well, but neither was as majestic as Zion.

Day One: Flew Oakland to Las Vegas. Laura made a new friend with the Southwest flight attendant who wore my helmet while giving safety instructions. I wore it the rest of the flight to make Bubba feel more secure for our inevitable crash landing. Drove from Vegas to Brian Head, a ski resort town at over 10,000 feet in Utah. Reluctantly saddled up to ride a 6-13% grade up to Cedar Breaks National Monument. Great wake-up for the legs (and lungs!) at altitude.

Day Two: Back up the pitch only this time at the top I managed to fall off my bike while looking back for Wendy. Proceeded to vomit. Lovely. Then we went down hill for most of the rest of the way toward Bryce Canyon National Park. Spent a number of miles on a rolling bike path below Hoodoos and red rock, past natural stone arches and beautiful cliffs.

Only interruptions to an otherwise pleasant ride: a sheep crossing (actually, that was a highlight) and an electric storm during the 18 mile climb up to Rainbow Point (okay, that was a highlight too). Nothing like riding uphill through a lightning and hail-size rain storm to feel invincible and kick ass. The nasty hot chocolate recovery drink which Becky, Pat and Laura stirred using Nutter Butters almost made me vomit a second time.

Praise the local non-Mormons at Wasatch Brewery for their Polygamy Porter and Evolution Amber. Washed down the day in style.

Day Three: You'll never guess. Back up the 6-13% grade past Cedar Breaks National Monument for another series of lovely descents to Zion National Park. Easiest riding day of the trip, with easy descent down a not-too-busy State Road 89 and the most lovely ending of any day. See this YouTube video of the road into Zion from West to East. Riding 12 miles along gently inclined road into the park was rewarded with the majestic and monolithic walls of rock surrounding us. Even the 1-mile ride through the tunnel (finished in the 1930s, amazingly) was a superlative experience. Finished up poolside at the Majestic Lodge 2-miles on the other side of Zion in Springdale, UT.

Day Four: A rest day, if so chosen. None of us did, though, with Zion in our backyard there was no way we could stay at the lodge and rest on a few days' riding. Three of us rode the 18-miles roundtrip back up State Road 9 (Zion Mt. Carmel Highway) to the entrance of the tunnel, through which bikes may not pass. Our pre-dawn ride (thanks for the company, John!) was a great start to the day.

After joining the rest of the crew for a cup of coffee, I caught the free shuttle that takes visitors back into the park and disembarked at the entrance to the Emerald Pools trail. Sometimes steep, sometimes shaded, the short 2-mile trail looped me past rocks that wept water, with "hanging gardens" of green vines and flowers thriving along the rock face. Wow. Such life in the middle of the desert.

From Emerald Pools I ran a couple more miles to the trailhead of Angel's Landing, knowing my compatriots would soon come along the same way. Slugging up 21 steep switchbacks known as Walter's Wiggles (some had to be at least 18% gradient), I got to Scout's Landing breathing hard, sweaty and dusty with disposable (!) camera in hand.

Realizing I had arrived far ahead of the hikers in the group, I took a detour and explored the 5 or more miles of the West Rim trail, looping back to Scout's Landing and getting further encouragement from the many foreign (mostly German, French and Italian) tourists who had cheered me on as I ran up the endless switchbacks earlier. Together we made the final .5-mile ascent up the cliff to Angel's Landing, proper.

Traversing a rock face with large-gauge chain bolted into its sides for hoisting only the most intrepid traveler past its sheer drop-offs to the left and right, the sheer ridge brought me, out of water but full of excitement, to a most beautiful panoramic view totally worth the work it took to get there. Topping out at almost 5,800-feet with an elevation gain of almost 1,500-feet over 2.5-miles, the trail is considered the most challenging of all in Zion, although, amazingly, one of the most popular. A couple of strangers re-hydrated me and took my photo (see here...doesn't even look real, does it?!).

As I slowly climbed/slid/shuffled back down the ridge to the landing, I passed my buddies from Black Sheep and choked down a Gu. Replenished, I ran the rest of the way back down to the valley and along the Virgin River to the visitor's center at the eastern entrance to the park near Springdale. I had time to buy some lime tortilla chips and local salsa and diet coke, and make a stop in at the photo museum. Hopping back on the free shuttle, I made one more stop - at the Human History Museum - where I found a pack of my favorite Trident gum on the floor of the theater (yummy for a dry mouth after a 15-mile run!) and watched a 20-minute video of Zion.

The crew met me back at the pool at Majestic Lodge in the early afternoon but only Fana showed for supposed water polo match. She gave me a long lesson in the sport, instead, which was fine by me! She played at Cal, has coached in California at the collegiate level, and played for a few years in Australia on their National Team. Now I can watch water polo in the Olympics and have a chance of understanding!

We ended the day with a Barbara-64th-birthday-surprise (brownie sundae) at Oscar's, a Mexican restaurant in town. Check out our series of hat photos (link below) we took while at the Majestic. The beer or the views must have gone to our heads!

Day Five: Bummer, time to put that sore butt back on the saddle and climb back up to the tunnel in Zion. We unanimously decided to start our day earlier than usual to beat any traffic riding through Zion. The plan worked and we saw only a handful of cars in our first 30 miles of the day. Kath kept me entertained on the road out, Mark came by with his usual witty remarks and nice push from behind as we made our first real climb of the day toward Kanab and Fredonia (which, BTW, is the name the group decided to give to Fred/Becky/Frecky's unborn child).

The 30-mile slow incline along 89A to Jacob Lake (elevation just below 8,000-feet) in Arizona's Kaibab National Forest. After crying on the climb from the pain that started in my left gluteus and rand down to my toes, I was beyond consolation even at the end of the ride. The rooms at the one inn in town (which also served as gas station, restaurant and convenience store) weren't ready for us, so I took a nap next to Barbara on an old sofa-chair.

Once we got settled in, the majority of us caravanned out to Marble Canyon, the Vermilion Cliffs near Lee's Ferry and the Colorado River. Rapid brown water was a bit daunting, so we drove further in and found a damned portion to wade in before chasing another electric storm (see the rainbow shot) out of the canyon and back to Jacob Lake.

Day Six: Our last full day on the bike started with a lovely climb (thanks, Mark, for making my glute capable of enjoying another climb) and sweet time-trial-worth stretches through aspen forests and green meadows. A straight-shot on State Road 67, 45 miles to the north rim of the Grand Canyon. Once there, all but Wendy decided we wanted to explore/hike/photograph and so hung-up our bikes on Fred's truck and went to play.

I couldn't leave Bubba alone for too long, so after about an hour, I climbed back into the Suburban with Fana and we became the Bubbster's personal support vehicle. She booked back to Jacob Lake, covering the 45-miles in under three hours. We all survived a stinky/sweaty/hot ride to St. George near Vegas where we spent our last night at the new La Quinta there. Opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics, a local beer and a filling dinner delivered by the local Pizza Hut put us nicely to sleep.

Day Seven: Having to leave the hotel by 9am to catch our flight at the Vegas airport, a few of us went for runs (I was nearly run over by semis in the dark of the morning, but joyously discovered ATV trails across sand dunes to run on once light came up) or short rides, met for continental breakfast and packed up. I slipped in my daily dunk in the pool and then away we all went. Sad!!!

Poor Fred and Fana drove the van back to Berkeley while we flew home and all took long afternoon naps before retrieving our bikes and gear from our fearless leaders. Another Epic week with Black Sheep ... until next year!
Photos of trip available on my Flickr page under the Black Sheep Adventures Collection of albums. And our Fearless Fred the Leader posted a fun video on YouTube.

For The Good of the Neighborhood

2008-07-26T11:08:00.001-07:00

This is a photo from a story I recently reported on Coach Tyrone Green. Mr. Green founded a non-profit, For the Good of the Neighborhood, utilizing basketball to develop strong moral and academic values for kids of all backgrounds living in the NYC metro area. Here his daughter Ashley holds a locket with a photo of her mother, Cookie, as she tells me about life with her dad since her mom passed in April.

My debut in a NYC publication...Queens Tribune...came out on Friday, 18 July 2008:
link is here.

Standard Operating Procedure

2008-07-17T05:08:00.001-07:00

Former Attorney General John Ashcroft will testify today before Congress about the Bush Administration's policies on interrogation of the prisoners of war it refers to as "enemy combatants," a title that has given carte blanche to White House representatives - from CIA operatives to foot soldiers - to abuse, torture and kill those accused of terrorism. In prior comments, Ashcroft defended the Bush administration counterterrorism policies and maintained that harsh forms of interrogation -- including waterboarding -- are not torture.

As the torture debate comes again to the forefront of the public mind (or at least of those paying any attention) I am reminded of a film that was aired in the spring, a documentary of the administration's interrogation protocols and imprisonment of Iraqis as seen through the lens of U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib.

In Standard Operating Procedure Academy Award-winning director Errol Morris focuses his camera on the soldiers behind the notorious photographs of prisoner abuse at the American-run prison in Iraq, Abu Ghraib. The documentary aired in Manhattan on the opening night of the TriBeCa Film Festival in April; after the showing, we got to hear from the filmmaker, who was present for a Q&A discussion.

Founded in 2002 by Robert De Niro and Jane Rosenthal as a response to the economic impact on the TriBeCa arts industry in the wake of September 11, the Festival's origins coincide nicely with the intent of Morris' film, namely to address the power of an image to affect the world.

The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon are indelibly branded into the minds of all who have seen either the footage on television or the images that have been reprinted the world over. The same can be said of the photos documenting the abuse and torture of terror suspects by military men and women which first became public in 2004.

The film is not about Washington politics, Donald Rumsfeld or President Bush, except indirectly: no one above the rank of sergeant has been brought to trial, and the higher you go up the chain of command the fewer those punished. Instead, through extensive interviews that become monologues in the film, along with re-enactments of what took place in the photographs to fill-in the back-story, the film's concern is less about politicians than about the power of a photograph to conceal and reveal simultaneously.

Take for instance the photograph of the detainee the soldiers nicknamed Gilligan.

On 5 November 2003, an Iraqi citizen who had been accused of killing an agent from the US Army's Criminal Investigative Division (CID) arrived at Abu Ghraib. Refusing to give his name, the prisoner was handed over to Specialist Charles "Chuck" Graner, an army reservist and corrections officer in civilian life who had no training (or clearance) as a military interrogator.

Graner took a photograph of "Gilligan" standing on a small box, wearing a black poncho and pointed black hood, arms outstretched in a crucifixion-like pose, fingers attached to wires. After already having been stripped of his clothes, forced to crawl on the floor and deprived of sleep, the weary prisoner was told he would die of electric shock if he budged. As it turns out, the wires were not live, it was all a show, and later the prisoner not only survived, but became one of the soldiers' buddies the way a kid once bullied on the schoolyard becomes a buddy of his former abuser when another poor sap becomes the picked-upon. Only in this desert schoolyard, the bullying sometimes ended in death, and being a buddy translated only to a few more scraps of food and freedom from physical defilement.

The sinister-looking picture, along with a number of others, when published first in the New Yorker magazine became a symbol of all that was wrong with the American invasion and occupation of Iraq.

It was the embarrassment to the military of what the photo seemed to portray (officially deemed "abuse" as opposed to "torture" and classified as "standard operating procedure") that prompted President Bush to publicly apologize for "the humiliation suffered by the Iraqi prisoners, and the humiliation suffered by their families."

In comparison to the what other Abu Ghraib prisoners experienced, including men who disappeared in back rooms and body bags, innocent children and petty thieves who were held together with the more threatening general population, all living in horrendous conditions (even the soldiers slept in the same prison cells that were once used by Saddam Hussein's henchman to torture and kill dissidents) and were exposed to daily mortar attacks—compared to that, the photograph of Gilligan was a joke in the eyes of the soldiers playing the game.

According to Specialist Sabrina Hartman who was later sentenced to six months in prison, a demotion, loss of pay and benefits and a bad-conduct discharge for her role in what many of the photographs documented, Gilligan wasn't really hurt--it not only wasn't torture, it wasn't even abuse; it was a harmless game.

Hartman speaks extensively in Morris' film, both in person and through what she left behind - through her photographs and via the letters she sent home to her girlfriend. While at times clearly disgusted with the acts she was witnessing and photographing, she also participated willingly in many of them. Fellow soldiers interviewed in the film describe her as abhorrent to violence, including Sergeant Hydrue Joyner, who said Hartman "would not hurt a fly. If there's a fly on the floor and you go to step on it, she will stop you." What to make, then, of the photos capturing her grinning and giving a thumbs-up sign over dead and mutilated bodies, holding leashes around prisoner's necks, laughing as prisoners were forced to masturbate? Was it just fun? Did laughing at and photographing (making war trophies of) the activities normalize indecent behavior?

Some of the photographs back-up her claim that she was more interested in the forensic investigation of how a prisoner died, or as evidence she could use later to let someone know what was wrong with the situation. But with regard to the notorious photo of her grinning, thumbs-up over the face of a man, bandaged, bloated and bleeding in a body bag of ice her morality and innocence are more suspect. Of this series of photos, including the grinning-thumbs-up one, she says, "I just wanted to document everything I saw. That was the reason I took photos. It was to prove to pretty much anybody who looked at this guy, Hey, I was just lied to." She went back later, alone, removed the bandages from the corpse and made a series of photographs that could be considered forensic in nature, but the one of her grinning for the camera taken by her buddy? There's more to the story than she is letting on.

One of the ironies of the photographs and of the punishment that came as a result of their being published is that in many cases the atrocities they depicted were deemed less criminal than the act of photographing them.

For removing the bandages and taking pictures of the dead guy in the body bag, Hartman was originally charged with the crime of tampering with evidence. Of course, the "evidence" was of a murder by a CIA operative of a prisoner who should have been protected by the Geneva Conventions. The charge against Hartman was dropped only because the government couldn't afford to pursue the death that was evidenced by the photograph. The CIA agents and civilian contractors who dragged prisoners into back rooms without logging them in, who beat this guy to death and then covered up their abuse by bandaging the prisoner and leading him out on a gurney with an I.V. as though he were still alive - for that offense, no one was ever prosecuted.

The pornographic photo-ops of naked men wearing women's panties, forced to masturbate for the camera while hooded and chained, stacked in pyramids or posed in pseudo acts of fornication, became the focus of the administration's outcry (outrage would be too strong a word choice for how the military brass and politicians responded), and served as an easy scapegoat to distract from the more appalling and morbid reality of what went down in Abu Ghraib.

Morris' extensive interviews with his characters manage to provoke revelation and confession. In the discussion after the showing of the film, Morris responded to criticism of his paying people to sit for interviews. His claim: they wouldn't have done it otherwise especially given how successful his documentaries have become - if he's making money, so should they the thinking goes.

"It is difficult to ask people for such an investment of time without taking care of them in some way — and that may involve paying them, " Morris said in defense. "I paid the 'bad apples' because they asked to be paid, and they would not have been interviewed otherwise. Without these extensive interviews, no one would ever know their stories. I can live with it."

Would Hartman or any of the other soldiers and civilian consultants said or done anything different had they gone unpaid by Morris? I doubt it. And, more importantly, the story needed to be told. If earning a day's pay for talking in front of a camera means we are all exposed to the complexities of what went on at Abu Ghraib, then so be it.

The bigger question is what have we learned from the photographs and the photographers who took them? What did the photographs reveal about what really happened there, or of what went on in the minds of the soldiers who participated?

And how, in the end of the film, could the abuse captured in the photographs be defined as Standard Operating Procedure (SOP)? Where official military doctrine exists, SOPs will usually adhere to the official doctrine - and in a war managed from a distance by the likes of Rumsfeld, Cheney and Ashcroft who explicitly accept interrogation "by any means," official doctrine translates to approval of abuse and torture. Among a group of reservists with little military experience and no military police or interrogation training, SOPs and official doctrine were defined by a combination of what they saw anonymous interrogators from the CIA and private contractors perform mixed with their own base instincts in a screwed-up, nasty hovel of a prison-home-base camp in the middle of the desert.

The film also touches, then, on the question of the complicity of officers and administrators high-up in the Bush Administration in the acts of prisoner abuse and torture when the foot soldiers were told to make a prisoner's life miserable, and when prisoners held by highly-trained operatives left the prison in body bags. Will a war crimes tribunal one day bring the men in suits to justice?

At it's most profound and haunting level, the film asks the question of what in the American psyche allowed the women and men at Abu Ghraib to pull the stunts they did, and what's more, to make photo trophies of it all?

The late Susan Sontag, writing in The New York Times Magazine, saw the Abu Ghraib events as evidence of the pervasive sickness of American culture where pornography, violence and an obsession to document and publicize our most personal - even deviant - lives. "Soldiers now pose, thumbs up, before the atrocities they commit," Sontag wrote, "and send the pictures to their buddies. Secrets of private life that, formerly, you would have given anything to conceal, you now clamor to be invited on a television show to reveal."

When violence, pornography, humiliation and killing are acceptable in mainstream culture, whether perpetrated against "enemy combatants" in the Middle East or as urban gang members, addicts or immigrant workers trying to "sneak" into America, we will continue to sell television series like 24 and video games like Grand Theft Auto; we will see more Abu Ghraibs and Gitmos - if soldiers are foolish enough to keep taking the pictures.

And if Ashcroft in his testimony before Congress continues to defend the atrocities at Abu Ghraib, Guantanomo and countless other secret interrogation and prison cells around the world, then we know that the sickness in the popular culture of America extends to the highest reaches or lowest depths of our political culture, as well.

Tour de France: A Band New Start?

2008-07-06T07:07:00.001-07:00

Tour de France - Brand New Start

As we wake to the first day of this year's Tour de France, the epic three weeks commence amid a mix of excitement, mystery and for the corporate sponsors who make professional cycling possible, at least a bit of anxiety.

The banks, watchmakers, national lotteries, car manufacturers, GPS-makers and restaurants that provide cycling's financial backing in the absence of the ticket sales of other sports have been abandoning their riders in ever-greater numbers in the wake of drug scandals played out on the very public stage of the most prominent cycling event on the calendar. As if to pre-empt or mute the constant buzz, Versus, the sole U.S. television station airing daily coverage of this year's Tour, has created its own buzz, tapping British rock artist Paul Weller to provide a new background tune.

The station's campaign dubbed "Take Back the Tour" includes a commercial spot pairing Weller's tune, "Brand New Start," with footage of past Tour riders played in reverse. All of those included in the advertisement have been associated with the scandal if not implicated, and some who have since returned to the roads after multi-year bans.

David Millar, Alexandre Vinokourov, Ivan Basso, Bjarne Riis, Jan Ullrich, Marco Pantani, Micahel Rasmussen, all of whom have either retired or been stripped of their greatest palmarès, ride back up time trial ramps, step down off winner's podiums and, in the case of the American Floyd Landis, is stripped of his maillot jaune in the commercial's wiping clean the slate.

Cycling is associated with doping scandals more than any other international sport, not necessarily because more cyclists use performance-enhancing drugs than other athletes, but perhaps due to their being one of the first group of athletes to be identified with the habit.

Beginning with the death of Danish cyclist Knud Enemark Jensen at the Olympics in Rome in 1960 (an autopsy later identified amphetamine use as the cause) and burned into the memory of Tour de France spectators when British ace Tom Simpson died on the slopes of Mt. Ventoux in 1967, cycling has endured an unfortunately tragic history with drugs.

No American TV commercial can erase the drug scandals from the memories of fans; only a clean Tour can accomplish that goal. And for the cyclists to ride clean, the race needs to not only get better at detecting doping than the cyclists are at masking it, but also create a more manageable Tour - shorter stages, fewere hors catégorie climbs, and more humane conditions that don't beg riders to dope to survive. The founder, Henri Desgrange, said after the first race in 1903 that his ideal competition would be one in which only one competitor “survived” to finish. The physical demands are excessive in the extreme and the race has always been intended to test man to the limit – this year the course is 3,500km (2,175 miles) with the usual two days only of rest thrown into a three-week onslaught.

When Tour organizers provide less extreme conditions, perhaps then we will witness a clean Tour. And while I'm sickened by the reality that athletes around the globe and across disciplines feel compelled to harm their bodies in order to win, I can't help but be thrilled by this summer's lineup from the Tour to the Olympics even as I hold my breadth in awe and dread. British commentator Phil Liggett speaks for me when he says "There is no place I'd rather be in July than on the roads of the Tour de France."

Real Pictures for Real People: No Bullshit

2008-06-18T16:43:00.001-07:00

New York, NY. 18 June 2008
Long moments of respectful silence were punctuated with soulful reflection, confessions, dreams laughter and even some arguing: Philip Jones Griffith’s memorial at Aperture on a recent night was as anarchic and enjoyable as the man himself.

The 72 year old photojournalist and warrior of peace died in March after an eight year battle with cancer. He was no stranger to death, having photographed its ravages in Vietnam, Cambodia and in other conflict zones around the world since he began working as a full-time freelance photographer in 1961.

In the course of his career he accumulated many thousands of negatives, some of which were reproduced into books as epic as the tragedies they depicted. Perhaps his most famous is Vietnam, Inc., published in 1971, exposed a reality that has existed in times of war for centuries, yet in his singular way, Jones Griffiths framed the ravages of war in such a way that helped turn the tide of American public opinion regarding the war.

Through Jones Griffiths’ subtle but poignant black and white images, he draws the viewer in rather than repulses with the vulgarity typical to images of war. A pacifist and fierce opponent of the war, Jones Griffiths never considered himself a traditional reporter or war photographer.

The photograph of the Vietnamese woman cradling a babe in her arms while a US soldier stands behind watching her, cradling his machine gun; or of the young boy who lay on a bare mattress, contorted, chained to the metal post of his bed with his pants pulled down below his knees (he lost his mind when he lost his mother to the war), are just two such images on view the other night.

The memorial at Aperture opened with documentary photographer Donna Ferrato asking the one hundred or so gathered to embrace silence, even during moments of tempted hilarity, as we embarked on a journey of remembrance on screen. In typical fashion, Ferrato had gathered up whomever happened to be around when it came time to interview Jones Griffiths’ pals for the film she was making as memorial to her past lover, and managed to pull together a splendidly intimate and fittingly offbeat portrait of Jones Griffiths from his images, his words, and the responses to both by friends and colleagues.

Although I never met him, I learned from the film that Jones Griffiths was the kind of man you want on your side in the worst situations because it would ensure: (1) his methodical nature would get you out alive; (2) his argumentative nature would distract you and keep you thinking; and (3) his comedic delivery of even the worst news would leave you uplifted no matter the circumstance.

While he lost pints of blood from a constant nose bleed in the final days, suffering paralysis in the hand that he forced to sign hundreds of his photographs as he lay dying, Jones Griffiths asks his and Donna’s daughter, Fanny, to hand him a collection of Welsh poems. Jones Griffiths, who was born in Wales in 1936, in the film lies in what appears to be a hospital bed with a Wales-London rugby match (his beloved Welshman win) playing on the television. From the book Fanny retrieves him, Jones Griffiths reads an ode to rugby that includes the line, “Sing no song of rugby when the match is over they’re at the bar in throngs.”

In the movie he says he will start from the beginning, as if to say, “Here: listen. This is what I want you to remember.”

With grave tone he begins, “Good orgasms are hard to find. This is something we should care about.” As the audience erupts in laughter, Jones Griffiths waxes on about how fidelity is for the weak-willed who have fallen victim to the mores of a society that, “is all fucked up – it’s all done to make us feel insecure…love is always something you give, never something you take…love yourself first and have faith in yourself.” Throughout, Jones Griffiths comes off as deeply funny and deeply serious. Simultaneously.

In the film he is described by photographer Elliott Erwitt (think black and white photos of little dogs on the streets of New York) as a “moral compass” of how photography should be done (straight, unadulterated), and by Eugene Richards (a photojournalist known for his portraits of drugs, gangs and other gritty experiences) as a “forensic scientist” of history.

A contemporary of Jones Griffiths, the respected war photographer Don McCullin, perhaps considering his own legacy, sums up that of his deceased friend in terms of how people will continue to respond to his work. To the sound of the shutter release click-clicking as Donna takes Philip and Don’s last photos together, McCullin intones, “He tried to make a difference. Generations to come will be holding Philip’s hands and saying, ‘thank you’.”

After the credits roll and the lights get turned on (and then quickly turned off after Ferrato grabs the mike and shouts, “Lights off! Lights off! You jumped the gun, lights off!”) Alex Webb, an American photojournalist, offers the wisdom given to him by Jones Griffiths when Webb was first applying for membership in Magnum. At meetings of Magnum when you’re a nominee, he’s told, you say nothing. When you’ve become an associate member, you say nothing. Once you are a full member, then you say (and Webb pantomimes the appropriate arm motions to go with the phrase), “‘Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!’.”

Jones Griffiths pissed off a lot of people in his years. He could also take apart a Leica and put it back together. He also built his own industrial-size enlarger and, according to David Burnett, installed the landing light from nothing less than a 707 airplane as his light source. Everything with Jones Griffiths was larger than life, and not surprisingly, left unforgettable impressions on the people he knew.

Bring a group of passionate photographers and powerful women together and you’re bound to create a little friction. The night did not disappoint in this regard, with one particularly tense exchange between Ferrato and a woman named Alberta who stood up in protest after one of Jones Griffiths’ past assistants, Lila Lee, told of a dream she had in which a bed full of women (a theme running throughout the night was that Jones Griffiths loved to surround himself with women who are easy on the eye) were fighting in the deceased’s apartment on West 36th Street.

Alberta pleaded with the sound of disbelief mixed with disgust, “Can’t we have some boundaries? This is out of hand,” to which some snickered, others nodded their heads in agreement and Ferrato, who held the mic at the time, responded that Lee’s comments were beautiful and desirable, and others were welcome to follow suit.

Perhaps the most memorable commentary, for me, came from Tom Keller, a former director of Magnum, the picture agency where Jones Griffiths also served as director from 1980 through 1985.

Referring to the Biblical creation story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, wherein Adam eats the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge and is thus banished from Paradise, Keller suggests what remains for me, days later, the defining reflection on Jones Griffiths.

Through the lens of Milton’s version of the Fall in Paradise Lost, Keller describes how Jones Griffiths lived and moved and made choices. Without Eve Adam does not want to stay in paradise and so consciously chooses to eat, chooses to see, chooses to leave Paradise. Keller chokes back tears as he speaks:

“Philip spent his life eating from the tree of knowledge and knew an awful lot. I’m pissed off he left us here.” Keller pauses, and then adds, “And this isn’t Paradise.”

I still feel the lump in my throat that I felt when I heard his words, maybe because I hope to leave a legacy that stimulates and challenges, that brings Truth, or at least begs others to question what is Truth, where is Meaning, to the table.

As if in response, a young man and aspiring photojournalist who did not know Jones Griffiths personally, stood up to speak and offered, simply, “How can we live up to it? How can we not try? [Looking at Jones Griffiths’ work] inspires me to try a little harder because he did it so well.”

When Jones Griffiths stopped breathing the clock read 10 to 2. No more debates, no more soliloquies. No more poetry. No more photography. His daughters, Fanny and Katherine, lay in bed beside him not wanting to let go. In Donna’s words, “Philip believed being a photographer was an honor and that there’s no room for bullshit. Real pictures for real people. With Philip you got as good as you gave, and he always gave more.”

Proud in Jackson Heights, Queens

2008-06-01T19:44:00.001-07:00

In its 16th year, the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Pride parade and festival brilliantly tramped down the streets of Jackson Heights in Queens earlier today. Demonstrating the great diversity of this neighborhood of more than 100 languages, parade participants, festival vendors, performers and spectators hailed from a multitude of countries and New York City neighborhoods.

Queens native and Italian-American Vinnie Barone said he, “must be famous somewhere,” given the number of times his photo has been taken over the many years he has been selling his shop’s wares at street fairs in the City. The yellow tent of his and wife Selma’s Ipanema Girl cast a soothing shadow in the early morning sun as they stocked their tables with green and yellow soccer jerseys, orange flip-flops and other brightly colored items one could imagine teenagers flocking to. Referring to his store in Astoria, Barone quipped, “everything’s imported, including my wife!”

Many of the crews setting-up on Sunday morning were family affairs – including a Colombian couple selling grilled corn on the cob and “fresh” lemonade (juicy lemons accompanied by ample amounts of boxed corn syrup). Father and son duo John and Michael Chan were expecting Mrs. Chan at any moment to help with the display of what Mr. Chan called “authentic gem stone” sculptures. The elder Chans were born in China and are raising Michael in Flushing.

Another father-son team have been hauling equipment from their large Islamic community in Ozone Park to this parade as well as many others for over a quarter century. NY Chair Rentals proprietor Waheed Khan, who was on hand to direct his son, Omar, and a crew that included an Osama, an Antonio and a Fernando. They had the main-stage tent up by 9am.

Russ and Paul Feddern, brothers in more ways than one, were on hand to assist with the first booth their group had staged at the event. Members of Chapter 32 of the Vietnam Veterans of America, the Feddern brothers did tours from 1966-1967 and 1967-1968, respectively. At the festival to educate and fundraise for their group, the veterans laid out $10 ball caps, an assortment of trinkets and kept busy sweeping their area. “We’re a place where vets can go for help – vets helping vets,” said first vice president Paul Narson.

Brothers and family of another sort were excitedly unpacking their car of give-aways. 2008 marks the 25th anniversary of the LGBT Community Center in Manhattan where, “300 groups meet monthly and 6,000 people are served weekly,” according to Rob Zukowski, pride coordinator for the Center. When asked if they look forward to the day or if it’s one long drain in the sun, intern Sterling Taylor responded that the pride season, which runs from June through August, is a great time. Arriving at a big day like the Queens event is like Christmas in June; “this is the easy part, like unwrapping the present,” said Taylor who also called Zukowski the “coordinator of all things prideful.”

Speaking of gifts, non-alcoholic drinks were being freely distributed and eagerly snatched up at the Englewood Cliffs-based Fuze Beverages booth. In a small attempt to “go green,” (or more likely meet the non-green demands of a grab and go culture) Fuze is transitioning from glass to PET plastic, the easiest plastic bottles to recycle. Marketing rep Joey Hodges was on hand to coordinate his team of Fuze-enthusiasts promoting "Plastic on the Outside, All Natural Inside" campaign, many of whom were eagerly looking for somewhere to relieve themselves of all the Fuze they’d drunk in the almost-80-degree weather.

In addition to the usual restaurants of Little India, a multitude of food vendors heated up 37th Road between 73rd and 77th streets. Cheesey corncakes were frying at Mozzarepas where Brian Leon and Ed Gonzalez were flipping the popular twist on a Colombian mainstay. The scent of Italian sausage, onions, peppers and fries cooking under the able supervision of John Thornton and Wess Charles at the Brooklyn-based Ned’s booth drew a large collection of NYPD officers, pregnant women pushing strollers and multi-tattooed and pierced women and men carrying rainbow flags.

A mix of parade and community party, the day also made room for the usual politicking of the local elect and candidates. Congressman Anthony Weiner (D-New York), State Assemblyman José Peralta (D-Corona) and City Councilwoman Rosie Mendez (D-District 2) were among the many politicians who shook hands, shouted into blow-horns and, in the case of Mendez who is an out lesbian and one of the grand marshals of the event, rode in an old convertible while waving to the crowd.

District 24 representative Rosemary Parker and other marchers from the United Federation of Teachers spoke out against what they are calling, “decades of chronic under-funding” of New York City schools. Claiming that Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration has taken $450 million promised to the schools out of $600 million from the New York Senate, they chanted to spectators to call the Mayor and demand he, “keep his promise.”

Danny Dromm, the event’s founder, who is also a public school teacher and a candidate for City Council, detoured off the purple-marked parade route to embrace the parents of a young man who was beaten to death in August of 2001 after leaving a gay bar in the neighborhood. Leonor and Armando Garzon carried a large photograph of their son Edgar Garzon, joining the parade at the corner marked with his name and remembered as the place where he was slain. The grief over a similar hate crime that took place one block away but eleven years earlier, when Julio Rivera was beaten and killed in a schoolyard, is considered to be the original battle cry that rallied the local gay community to action.

Since 1993 when the parade was first staged, it has continued to grow, reaching an estimated crowd of 30,000 in 2007. This year, more than 75 vendors and some 100 parade participants, according to Harry Roach of Clearview Festival Productions, who puts on the event, offered something for everyone. Kids shrieked and parents cheered approval of the folk dancers from Raices de Mexico, male baton-twirlers and cartwheel-turners, and the award-winning music by the Lesbian and Gay Big Apple Corps marching band.

For a day that started before 7am with members of the traffic division relocating cars illegally parked on the parade route along 37th Avenue and ended with the Sanitation Department’s street sweeping machines making the rounds as police officers removed the street barricades after 7pm, it was a good, long, hot, proud, peaceful addition to the history of Jackson Heights.

Additional photographs with captions can be found on my Pride'08 Flickr page.

A Quiet Rest for Cornell Capa

2008-05-27T18:49:00.001-07:00

Photojournalist Cornell Capa, founder of the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York City, passed away in his sleep on Friday, 23 May 2008 after a battle with Parkinson's Disease. His death came just two days shy of his brother's death 54 years ago, when Robert Capa was killed instantaneously after stepping on a landmine while photographing in Vietnam. The older brother was the more famous photographer, perhaps in part due to his tragic, early death (much like how JFK carries a mystique his brother, Robert, almost approached). Yet Cornell, who lived into his 90th year, spent decades pursuing the "concerned photography" (a term he coined) to which both he and his brother were dedicated.

Cornell Capa, born Cornel Friedmann in Budapest, Hungary, in 1918, was a Life Photographer and then a photographer for Magnum Photo Agency, an association that his brother had founded in 1947 along with David "Chim" Seymour, and Henri Cartier-Bresson. According to the National Press Photographer Association's website, "Capa said he was motivated 20 years later to found ICP at a time when photojournalism seemed to be taking a back seat to television and film, and over his concern about how to 'keep alive' the work of photojournalists after their death (a personal experience for the photographer in light of his famous brother's work)."

Robert, a non-practicing Jew and a pacifist who covered wars and died while covering one, was buried at a Quaker cemetery north of Manhattan. Since then, Cornell's wife Edie, the Capa boys' mother Julia and the family biographer Richard Whelan have all been buried together. The Friend's Meeting House in Amawalk, less than two miles from my childhood home in Yorktown Heights, will welcome Cornell to his final resting place with a private ceremony on Wednesday.

I'd driven here yesterday, on a warm and sunny Memorial Day afternoon, with my sister and father. We did not, at that time, see where the family plot was located. The cemetery was empty of the living except for us, although a number of American flags placed at various tombstones throughout this small cemetery indicated others had been walking through recently. We made a somewhat perfunctory attempt at locating stones with "Capa" or "Friedmann," unsure of which name the family had been buried under.

When I went for my morning run, I headed to the cemetery. This time, I couldn't enter even though I enjoy being in cemeteries - I feel protected in them, somehow. Today, though, I simply stood on the threshold of the driveway, unable to go further. I wanted to return showered and quiet. That time came this afternoon.

Pops and I stopped in on my way to the Metro North train station in Croton Harmon before I headed back to Queens. Just as we were about to leave, unable to find the grave, I spotted a large mound of dirt covered in a green mesh tarp on the downward slope of the cemetery, in a spot on the edge of the grounds. The undertakers had just prepared his grave when a light drizzle began to fall.

Surrounded by woods, the four markers stood two feet tall: Robert, Edie, Julia and Richard from right to left. In between Julia and Edie's tombstones lay the wood planks covering the whole in the ground that will receive Cornell's remains tomorrow. The sound of thunder ushered in a heavy downpour.

At first I felt a rush of energy and pleasure at the discovery of this treasure practically in my backyard. But as I stood there, then knelt, sheltered from the rain by the boughs of the trees above, I felt awe, respect, and the profound quiet of those woods around, and those lives before me. These men, and the women who loved them, are a significant part of the legacy I have inherited as a woman who wants in my deepest desire to live: as a concerned photographer and journalist. So I did what came naturally - I made photographs to capture the moment in time, to collect in some small way the experience of being in the presence of the greatness of their lives. Before walking back up the hill to where my father was waiting, I touched the ground and thanked the earth for giving them life and giving them rest.

The Little Flower of East Orange

2008-04-27T19:54:00.001-07:00

Stephen Adly Guirgis writes with an emotional intensity that bursts forth in anger, sorrow and biting humor. Well-known for his work Jesus Hopped the A Train, Gurgis' characters alternately cover themselves with street-harsh words and reveal their desperate agony to create a roller-coaster ride that is often loud and cathartic.

In The Little Flower of East Orange, a co-production by the LAByrinth Theater Company and the Public Theater, where the show is staged, Guirgis presents the relationship between an addicted son and his passive-aggressive, partially paralyzed and suicidal mother. Under the direction of LAB co-artistic director Philip Seymour Hoffman, Michael Shannon plays Danny, who narrates Little Flower as a series of flashbacks as he sits in jail after another relapse. When his mother goes missing, Shannon's Danny, alternately loving and bitter, abandons rehab with his perpetually high companion (played by Gillian Jacobs), to reunite with his mother.

Danny and his sister Justina, ably portrayed by Elizabeth Canavan who calls herself "the cold bitchy hysterical one who is also known as the only one who gets things done," find Therese Marie in a Bronx hospital after she tries to roll herself off a cliff in the Cloisters one night. While begging for scotch to ease her pain, Therese fakes amnesia so as not to bring her children to her bedside, wishing she were dead, or hoping to drink herself to death. When they finally find her, Justina panics at the thought her mother has died, but then screams what a bitch Therese is for trying to kill herself the one night Justina couldn't look after her. All three play the martyr to each other, all three jostling for the title of Greatest Victim, all seeking redemption from their anguished and co-dependent existence.

While never fully explored or explained, demons haunt mother, son and daughter all of whom feel they haven't measured up somehow - and never will. Their psychic turmoil throws them into strained interactions indicating undying love and utter misunderstanding. Danny taunts his mother in their final scene together, ultimately forcing her to admit that her deaf father's abuse caused her paralysis, but never revealing the causes of his own self-abuse.

From the vantage point of his jail cell from which he tells the story, Danny finds, at the end, his beginning and states, "let the state of incarceration do for me what I could not do for myself." And in this dead-end, where he cannot choose to leave like he did time and again when in rehab, and now after his mother's death finally sees "there is no precipice, no stopping point, no deluxe accommodations for martyrs. The only thing that stops you is death. Grace does not reveal itself to anyone who isn't looking for it...Grace is like the next breadth, it's always there."

Grace offers them acceptance - of themselves, of the ones they love, of the ones who have beat them down. It's theirs to accept, or go to their graves denying.

Recycling in the Pink

2008-04-05T16:43:00.001-07:00

Did you know you can take your old running shoes (or any soft-soled sneaker by any brand) to your local Nike Town store and they will use it to create athletic surfaces like tracks and basketball courts and children's playgrounds? You can learn more on their Let Me Play Reuse A Shoe website.

Or that Clif Bar, based in Berkeley, CA, has partnered with TerraCycle to reuse its energy bar wrappers? Their joint initiative, called the Wrapper Brigade, is one of many that TerraCylce has created to reuse recyclable materials and, in the process, donate to charities.

Here's how it works:

Charities go to www.terracycle.net/brigades and apply to become one of the recipient organizations. Once approved, the charity receives collection bags that, once filled and returned to terracycle free of charge, receive .02 for each item recycled. In addition to collecting Clif Bar wrappers, TerraCycle collects Capri Sun and Kool Aid drink pouches, 20oz plastic soda bottles and Stonyfield Farm yogurt containers, among others.

See this video of Soyeon Lee, pianist, wearing a dress fashioned by TerraCycle. She performed in the recycled pink pouch dress at Carnegie Hall on 19 February in what her site calls an Eco Concert.

TerraCycle has limited the number of collection sites it will partner with, but the good news is that some of the companies gladly accept their used containers...like Stonyfield and Brown Cow who's number-5 containers are not recyclable by most municipalities.

Unfortunately, the organic yogurt makers, Clif, Capri Sun, TerraCycle and all the others promoting reuse are still only offering an in-between solution to the issue of using plastic, petroleum and other eco-unfriendly resources to service our food needs (mine included...I love my energy bars and handy yogurt servings). In Clif Bar's newsletter, they noted this less-than-ideal solution as well:

"We're not psyched about the fact that our wrappers end up in the garbage. We've been working hard to come up with a more sustainable solution; since we haven't found the answer just yet, we've partnered with TerraCycle to launch the Energy Bar Wrapper Brigade. Get this: TerraCycle will convert all of the energy bar wrappers they receive into handy accessories and will donate two cents for every wrapper to the charity of your choice. Sign up for free and become a shepherd for the program."

Related to this, I came across a great blog called Fake Plastic Fish by a woman named Beth Terry based in Oakland, CA that tackles this and other sustainability issues. I am impressed by her knowledge and dedication. And my friends think I'm an eco-nutso. Go, woman! Fake Plastic Fish, "They're cute, and if we don't solve our plastic problem, they could be the only kind we have left."

Cuba's Long Black Spring

2008-03-25T18:57:00.001-07:00

If you don't know them, change that today: Citizens for the Protection of Journalists, a professional organization and non-profit I joined almost a year ago when I first came across one of their reports on human rights abuses.

Today's focus at their monthly luncheon was on Cuba's policy on independent journalists. In March 2003, the government went after and arrested 75 dissidents, 29 of whom were journalists, and 20 of whom remain behind bars in sub-human conditions five years later.

While the Spanish government has worked to release many of them, the American government remains mostly silent on the topic. While it is better to get them released, the speakers at today's luncheon suggested that neither the Spanish policy of engagement with Cuba (which on the one hand encourages Cuba's employment of dissidents as human bargaining chips) nor America's economic embargo serves as a model response to Cuba's human rights violations.

For more details on what CPJ has uncovered and recommends, see their report, Cuba's Long Black Spring, available on their website, at CPJ.org.

An Evening with Akram Zaatari

2008-03-18T17:45:00.001-07:00

Akram Zaatari was an adolescent, a teenager, a bored observer of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Or so he tells us on March 17th as we gather at a theater of the Museum of Modern Art for the US premiere of his latest documentary.

Excavating his journals, audio recordings (on audio cassettes), photos and knickknacks of that time, Zaatari (born in 1966 in Saida, Lebanon) desires to see with the eyes of other men, his peers in age and nationality, who experienced the occupation differently. On this night, we were treated to excerpts of four of the more than thirty films in Zaatari's oeuvre: All Is Well on the Border (1997), This Day (2003), In This House (2005) and Nature Morte (2008).

An anthropologist of sorts, Zaatari literally unearths the story of one of his peers, Ali Hashishu, now a foreign correspondent with Agence France Presse, who served in the resistance army; his communist ties and experience on the front continue to serve him in his role as journalist. "Following the Israeli withdrawal from Ain el Mir in 1985, the village became the frontline. The Dagher family was displaced from their home, which was occupied by a radical resistant group for seven years. When the war ended in 1991, Ali Hashisho, a member of the Lebanese resistance stationed in the Dagher family house, wrote a letter to the Dagher's family justifying his occupation of their house, and welcoming them back home. He placed the letter inside an empty case of a B-10, 82 mm mortar, and buried it in the garden." In November 2002, Akram Zaatari headed to Ain el Mir to excavate Ali's letter and outsprang the film, In This House.

In another film, Neruda (a nickname given to him by another soldier because of his romantic and poetic sensibility) learned how to dismantle an AK47 at the age of ten. Once he could successfully make his target in seven of ten shots, he was promoted to RPGs at the age of 13. By 16, Neruda was caught during a bombing mission and held in detention-pseudo-jail by the Israeli army until he could legally be tried and imprisoned at 18. Neruda spent ten years in captivity. His story, shared primarily through the letters he exchanged with his devoted mother, and through interviews Zaatari held with other Lebanese prisoners in Israel, provide the context of the film, All is Well on the Border, completed in 1997.

In the artist's desire to relate his peers' experience of the invasion, Zaatari, the founder of the Arab Image Foundation, comes to understand that, "the story of resistances is really tied to mediation." In the attempt to tell a story of in-betweens, of ambiguity, of individuality, forces weigh against the storyteller leaving binaries of victim and victimizer, soldier and civilian, good and bad. Zaatari strives to get beyond these dualities, but feels hampered at every turn, with the characters in his stories, the audience, the government, all pushing toward black and white understandings and oversimplifications.

In the fourth film excerpted at MOMA, Nature Morte is a self-described, "poetic document that is not a fiction, but not documentary either." Commissioned by the Centre Georges Pomipidou in France, the film excerpt we see at MOMA is bare bones: no dialogue, one room, two characters who interact by mostly not interacting.

An older man wears a black nit cap, his dark eyebrows offset by a graying beard and few days' beard growth. Working under a kerosene lamp he hunches over a table low to the ground, where he is sitting and methodically assembling an explosive device. Behind him a younger man dresses in winter outer clothing, also seated, silent and methodical. He concentrates on sewing - mending a torn clothing article. He wears muted colors of army green with dark mustache and beard against a white-washed wall. After a number of minutes of this silent preparation, the older man loads a gun, the two stand facing each other, silent, inches apart. Who will go? Both? I assume the younger...isn't it always the young that we send to fight our wars? We break to the outside, flash from one man to the other, still unsure who will leave. And one finally does begin to climb up the hillside bordered by a low rock wall as birds chirp in the wintry low light heralding the almost-dawn of spring.

Zaatari's exploration of war, of objects, of experience over the decades appears to herald the dawn of spring, as well - both for him and for the world in the grip of wars worldwide.

From the MOMA catalogue:
An Evening with Akram Zaatari
Lebanese artist Akram Zaatari interweaves documentary and personal narrative to examine the complicated social, political, and cultural issues of a country shaped by extended territorial conflict. His videos and installations speak of the contradictions of everyday life within regions of conflict further fragmented by media. Al Yaoum (This Day) chronicles thirty years of Lebanon, and in How I Love You, five Lebanese men speak about their passions and relationships. Presented in conjunction with Asian Contemporary Art Week. 90min. Monday, March 17, 7:00pm.

Death and Life in Jersey City

2008-03-15T08:57:00.001-07:00

The calling cards, homemade organic whole wheat fig bars and the journey to and from are some of the most memorable parts of last night.

Melissa McAlpin’s little brown envelopes with a replica in miniature of one of her hand-drawn images tucked inside hint at the sweet sadness of her sister's story. The lovely round coaster printed with a lemon so yellow it makes me pucker just looking at it, once flipped over reveals Amanda Thackray’s work described in an ancient yet futuristic language, the piece signed and numbered; a work of art in itself – printed at Sesame Letterpress in Brooklyn. And my friend, Maya Joseph-Goteiner’s modern interpretation of an almost obsolete item: the paper library catalog card, printed on heavy water-color board in courier font as though hand-typed on the Corona in her installation on war in literature.

These give-aways accompany the artwork at last night’s opening of WWIII: A Wonder Women Project presented by _gaia and hosted by the Mana Fine Arts Exhibition Space* in Jersey City, NJ. Calling-card art in miniature, and yours for the taking, now through April 12th.

The whitewashed cinderblock walls and gray cement floor of the gallery seemed perfectly fitting to both the neighborhood immediately outside the large steel doors as well as to the theme of the show, which examines the artists’ understanding of and relationship to war. Ten women were chosen to participate in a residency at _gaia in Hoboken. Over the course of six-weeks, they talked, wrote, shared and executed creative projects related to the theme of war. This collection, organized and curated by Joanna White (whom I know from my time at ICP) and Doris Cacoilo, shows the inconsistency of its participants - for some, it seems to be a summary of an experience, for others a work in progress.

My journey to the show begins at the World Trade Center site NJ PATH terminal in lower Manhattan, an appropriate jumping-off point given that for so many in America, the war most affecting our lives exploded here on this soil. For me, the Iraq War started in the White House, with our dependence upon oil, and with our arming of Saddam Hussein decades ago when the US government assisted in hoisting him to power before toppling him after 9/11. Political beliefs notwithstanding, I experience the symbolic depth of this place that when peering down into the p;it it feels as though I am looking half a mile into the core of the earth and into what has gone wrong in our world.

The bright white taut canvas canopy and swaying flags herald the entrance to the terminal, in contrast with the basement-like station at the bottom of the escalators. Cement, leaking pipes and an abundance of harsh fluorescent lighting overhead and on booms could confuse a visitor into believing they've walked into movie sound set where an interrogation scene is about to take place. Surrounded by chain-linked fencing and views of the monstrously large excavation of what was once skyscrapers foreshadow the war-zone to come in Jersey. Like the gallery, the WTC PATH terminal feels clean but harsh – like an emergency room operating out of a mammoth garage. Cold, intense, sterile -- but not in the sense that when you drop your brie and grapes on the floor, as I will later do at the gallery, you would still want to eat them, unless you’re in the midst of a war zone and some food off the floor is the least of your worries.

After a less than 10-minute train ride, I exit at Grove Street in Jersey and am greeted by a moist-wind-swept plaza (it’s only a short distance to the shore with rear-facing views of the Statue of Liberty). Using the Dunkin-Donuts as a marker, I am told to go left down its street, which is Newark Avenue. Starbucks is opening on the plaza as well: a sign that Jersey City has either arrived or has gone to hell, depending whom you talk to.

Turning right onto Coles, walking through a neighborhood that seems to change with each of the twelve blocks I walk, a mix of rundown and renovated, single family clapboard and elegant brownstones, divey bars and more upscale restaurants, clearly a neighborhood in the process of the big bad word: gentrification. Just as Coles seems to Dead End, a handwritten sign beckons the traveler through a construction site under an overpass that ushers autos in and out of the City via the Lincoln Tunnel. Oh, so this is where we are. I’ve seen this neighborhood from a car window thinking it looked like it was either decaying or just being built. Now that I’m on the ground, walking through broken pavement, mounds of dirt, around piles of beams in the almost opaque darkness of evening, I realize that both observations are true: Jersey City is dying one death and coming to new life simultaneously. In that way, gentrification could be thought of like Easter for a neighborhood. Hmmm. If only we could all believe in its promises of development as resurrection. Starbucks doesn’t feel good in my own neighborhood of Jackson Heights, which just this morning I noticed has opened in amidst the bodegas and Colombian, Thai, Japanese, Chinese, El Salvadoran and Italian restaurants. But, I digress.

Following more hand-written signs “this way, don’t be scared!” illuminated by the blue light of my mobile phone, I stumble over one last bit of debris (or was that the start of a sidewalk?) into the exhibition space. It’s large enough to comfortably hold the ten installations as well as at least one hundred people without feeling cramped or hot. There’s none of that standing on tiptoes or brushing past and subtly nudging others to get closer to a display card to read what the work is about. And this is one of those shows where you want to read what the artist intends if, like me, you like to know those sorts of things. I’ll take a first impression, stand back (which there was also room to do) get up close, think about it, feel it, but, ultimately I don’t want to walk away scratching my head, which would have been the case with a number of these less-than-straightforward pieces.

Take the lemon-coaster woman’s work, as example. Amanda Thackray set-up plywood boards with a tree’s worth of lemons attached by electrical wire that then connects to a pulley running though a yellow-painted bicycle suspended from the ceiling and from which hangs a cinder block over a plate with more lemons. Next to the plate of lemons, on a table lined with a delicately embroidered cloth and above which hangs more old school looking needle-point works of lemons as though you've just entered your grandmother’s kitchen in Europe, limoncello-spiked lemonade is being served out of a glass decanter. Huh? I don’t get it. After reading Thackray’s statement – the one in English, not the one in Esperanto, the constructed “universal language” meant to foster peace and understanding across cultures – I understand that her intention is for me to consider the power of the lemon: its acidity can, in this fantastic creation, manufacture sufficient power to crush other lemons so that I can drink the lemon nectar. Come the apocalypse, lemons can kill themselves to nourish me. Oh, okay. I get it now. I think.

Another artist hung a traditional wood medicine cabinet on the wall and on the rung below an army-green hand towel that reads “look inside.” Swinging the door open, which is lined on the inside with a mirror, shows a video projection of a green hill, the number 3009 on a large sign and row upon row of white crosses. Above the video stands a shelf filled with prescription pill bottles, face creams and toiletries. The common, everyday items we see and use juxtaposed with the death of soldiers that has become all too-common in our lives and the lives of people around the world. On the day in January when the film was shot in Lafayette, CA, 3009 Americans had lost their lives in Iraq. Today on public radio I heard that as we approach the five-year anniversary of this war we’ve lost over 3,700 American lives and anywhere from 40,000 to 100.000 Iraqis.

The exhibition also includes a video accompanied by sand spread on the floor (I didn’t read the description on that one…), portraits of Protestant and Catholic women organizing for peace in Northern Island accompanied by the artist’s journal of the same; a discombobulated map hand drawn and mis-assembled; homage to the water crisis fueled, in part, by the unnecessary dependence in first world countries on plastic bottled water, 1/5th of which does not get recycled; a wedding dress fashioned out of 400 used dryer sheets; and a woman promoting a candidate for the presidency who doesn’t exist except in her imagination. Or, at least, I think that’s her shtick. I have to admit, I’m already so sick of the presidential campaign that I couldn’t bring myself to get close enough to her table of leaflets and buttons and “Die Harder,” a play on the Bruce Willis movie, posters to really understand. Fortunately, the food table beckoned only a few steps away so I bee-lined in that direction.

One of the more impressive, elegant yet profound works is Melissa McCalpin’s Phone Call, in which she relates the story of how her sister, a marine serving in Iraq, lost a close friend when his helicopter was shot down. In a quilt of three-dimensional boxes on the wall laid out in a 9 by 4 grid, McCalpin succinctly tells her sister’s story in word and drawing. Each group of sentences is framed and flush with the wall; on either side, the accompanying squares further frame the sentences raised just an inch or so from the wall. Pinned only at the top, McCalpin's transparent tracing paper sketches flutter as if a feather falling from the sky – or a man rappelling from a helicopter. She has carefully tinted the drawings wiithin a palette of perhaps three colors. McCalpin is, perhaps, making order out of the chaos of her sister’s experience, juxtaposing the solidity of the facts of the story, "In scarves and hats they mingle learning how to smoke cigarettes" with the tragic whimsy of the illustrated details like the image of the soldier's arms or the naive teenager's boom box - a young man who today plays Man on the street corner and could be recruited a year or two from now to serve and die on the streets of Baghdad. The work provides a powerful juxtaposition both in content and mood.

My dear friend, Maya Joseph-Goteiner, prepared a room whose walls are books with war in their title, perhaps two hundred of the more than 20,000 titles ever published in English. You will find the classics like Tolstoy's War and Peace as well as little known titles translated from other languages at the turn of the 20th Century. War Library is lit by brass lamps that remind me of the New York Public Library, with over-sized and plush green pillows for sitting in the center, Joseph-Goteiner invites us into the space to reflect in silence or in discussion on our understanding of war. Stacks of blank manila card catologue index cards call for reflection; clothespins hang longingly on invisible wire suspended from the ceiling, waiting for cards to fill in as wall paper and, as the wires are decorated with cards, the library’s walls increase in height.

Nine o’clock arrives quickly, and the host switches the lights on and off to signal that opening night is coming to a close. Eight friends head out into the soft drizzle to brave the war zone underpass as a battalion looking for a dry, warm place and a cold beer. After a quick stop at Maya and Mike’s apartment on fourth, we slip past a few drunk, heavyset men into one of those dive bars just blocks from where Starbucks is due to open. After paprika fries and Guinness, shouting over and singing with Ozzie, Thoroughgood and AC/DC blasting from the juke box, I feel resurrected and grateful to be able to push thoughts of war to the back of my psyche for another night.

* Artist Talk and Closing– April 12th 4-9pm
Gallery Hours M-F 10-6 pm or by appointment
Mana Fine Arts Exhibition Space, 227 Coles Street, Jersey City, NJ 07310 (800) 330-9659White

King Arthur - Surely You Jest?

2008-03-05T19:12:00.001-08:00

Tattered point shoes, cardigan paired with a long blue tulle tutu; metal folding chairs, ladders, a refrigerator and a man inside covered in fake frost. "King Arthur is not a dance, it's a show," director and choreographer Mark Morris boasts in the notes to his dramatick-opera, King Arthur.

The original version, with music by Henry Purcell and text by John Dryden, when first performed in 1691 at the Queen’s Theater, Dorset Garden, London ran about four hours. Morris' version weighs in at just under two.

While the semi-opera has never had a "traditional" interpretation, Morris' version takes it to its outermost examination. This Baroque-contemporary updating jettisons the spoken text - all of it - substituting the movement of Mark Morris' dance group for words, accompaned by seven solo New York City Opera singers flowing in and out of the troupe.

The humorous and joyful result is almost vaudevillian, a let's make a play and dress-up revel that on the one hand is campy and fantatic and on the other at times left me with my head tilted to the side saying, "huh?" While many scenes rocked and popped with pleasure, others were equally tiresome, the artifice distracting rather than entertaining.

If you take opera or dance seriously, the good-times of Morris' performance at Lincoln Center may provide less formality than what you care for. Yet even those dressed in ball gowns were caught smiling and laughing during the glorious final scene that included a Chinese-ribboned maypole dance and paper airplanes being tossed overhead.

"I couldn't have real airplanes," Morris bemoaned in the theatre notes. "I didn't have any money to hire the Blue Angels for a giant festival with a flyover." Perhaps not, but his
jovial production still manages to soar and delight.

Improvising with McCoy Tyner and Savion Glover: Bring it On!

2008-03-04T12:31:00.001-08:00

At times whimsical, alive, thoughtful, competitive, paternal and prayerful, tonight's performance by the McCoy Tyner Trio and Savion Glover at Peekskill's historic Paramount Center for the Arts* sent me spinning and dancing.

The audience leapt from our seats begging for an encore (which was granted). Rarely have I heard four musicians more connected with each other or so enjoying making music together. Never before have I heard a man's feet become an instrument quite like Glover's did tonight.

The floorboards and the keyboards were ablaze with the blues of Tyner's West Phillie upbringing, the jazz of Coltrane and Savion's Newark funk-i-fied feet. As a wannabe disciple of the church of John Coltrane, I know the Spirit moving when I see, hear and feel it.

Glover's sheer joy shone through his almost ever-present smile, poured out of his lanky, agile, ever-moving frame as he tapped on his toes, his heels, the sides of his shoes, sliding, stepping, shuffling across the stage on risers just inches above the other guys. Dreads tossed into a loose bunch on the lower part of his head, a few raucous strands jutting out in various directions, dancing along with his skinny legs and gangly fingers, Glover played his feet like a second percussionist to drummer Eric Kamau Gravatt.

Most of the night he faced Tyner who was stage right, like a son looking to his father for direction, for acceptance, for partnership. Occasionally Tyner glanced up from the keyboard, all the while tappin' his left heel on the floor while his right toes pressed the pads of the Steinway, and a satisfied smile would cross his face immediately reinvigorating Glover like a child who's parent had just given him a "nice dive, son" and thumbs up poolside. As the musicians took turns soloing, Glover would begin to hear the subtle shift either to his left and engage the drummer, or behind, and engage bassist Gerald Cannon. No matter the musician, Glover's feet could accompany.

The 30-something year-old woman beside me, who has been taking tap classes for many years including recently studying with a student of Savion's, remarked that it's not just his speed that is impressive, or that he never stops moving. It is the clarity of each and every ba bah BAH bah BAH swish, ba bah bah BAH of metal on wood like the precision of a violinist's fingers on strings or a skater's double somersault landing on ice. There is nothing more impressive or inspiring than that kind of precision, especially when offered with such joy, such elegance and such apparent ease.

In the second to last piece, Glover and the drummer took center stage entering into a duel of cymbals depending on what they struck and how they landed. Their boxing match of music entailed one taking lead and the next responding - and then taking it one step further. After a good few minutes and a few subtle, then less subtle key strokes, the almost-70-year old Pappa Tyner would reign in his fighters to harness their abundant energy into a cohesive ensemble again. As Turner pulled the posse together, Glover would tap and turn himself unconsciously back toward the father. Okay, we're all here now. We know who's in charge. And the call and response would begin anew.

In the finale before we called Encore!, Glover had been wiping the sweat from his brow with a white towel when the music consumed him and next thing he was dancing with the towel in his hand. Where his hands had been loose and free all night, now one clenched the towel and the other became fisted with one finger pointing. As his hands shifted, so too his legs and arms; what had seemed to be constantly flexing and lengthening had now become stiff like a new skier on a steep slope. What had flown freely like his baggy pants and t-shirt became rigid with anticipation. His tap tap tap became STOMP STOMP STOMP and his smile disappeared as a look of squinted concentration consumed his face, a face now turned upward as if his whole body were saying Bring it On, YES YES YES. Or maybe it was Amen! or who knows where he was going but he was flying and we were flying with him. We came out the other side, drained and thrilled and on our feet, but falling over with pleasure.

It's nights like tonight that I am reminded we each have something we are meant to be doing. What a ride. Thanks, guys.

*From the Paramount Theater press release:
Grammy Award winning jazz pianist McCoy Tyner performs a groundbreaking evening of music and dance with the critically acclaimed, world renowned tap dancer Savion Glover. Tyner's blues-based, percussive piano playing (formulated while a key member of John Coltrane's legendary quartet) has transcended conventional styles to become one of the most identifiable sounds in improvised music. Glover's phenomenal tap repertoire first exploded on the scene with the award winning Broadway show, Bring in Da Noise, Bring in Da Funk. Since that time, he has amazed audiences through appearances in film (including his tapping in the animated film Happy Feet), other plays, and touring performances with his own group.

13.5 on the Treadmill

2007-12-21T16:35:00.001-08:00

20 December 2007. Bronx, New York.

On this cold and wet night before Christmas, six members of the Westchester Track Club gathered, as they do most winter nights, at their local Bally's Total Fitness club on West 231st Street in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx.

This was their second workout of the day; earlier, they met at Central Park to run long. They were here to run fast, and to find an alternative to pounding it out in the snow for their daily double workout.

Genna Ketebo is preparing for his next marathon in January in Carlsbad, California. Abiyot Endale and Kassahun Kabiso areplanning on taking a road trip to Boston over the next weekend to run a 5K and half-marathon, respectively.

If you've ever been intimidated while running on a treadmill, you can imagine how the other locals might feel when these sub-5-minute milers are training next to them. In case you wondered, they're doing above a grade 13 on the treadmill (as in, 13 or more miles per hour!), and they do it for a l-o-n-g time. Remembering my spin class earlier in the day, it dawned on me how that would be a warm-up for these guys. Let's just say I was glad to have my photographic responsibilities to tend to when they asked me to jump on a treadmill too.

Before they could finish their workout, a heavyset guy in one of those latex "fat suits" that help you sweat more came over, stared at the guys for a few minutes, and then used his fist to hit the "stop" button on one of the Ethiopian's treadmills, in the middle of a 4:38 mile. He simultaneously shouted that it was his right because the African runner hadn't signed up for the equipment...even though there were at least ten other treadmills open. The guys, without so much as a word, simply moved on to weights and bikes at that point. Again, good thing I had something else to be doing or I would have pulled the plug on that guys run in no time. Jerk.

More photos can be found on my flickr page.

Andy LaVerne at the Kitano

2007-12-02T06:25:00.001-08:00

Andy LaVerne's Piano/Organ Trio played at the Kitano Hotel in New York City on Saturday, 1 December 2007. Joining Andy were Anthony Pinciatti on percussion and Gary Versace on organ. It was a great night in an intimate setting. If you've not been, you've got to go. It's owned by a Japanese firm, as reflected in its style and sensibility. Elegant, clean, lines with a mix of marble and mahogany in its lobby and bar. I haven't been to one of its guest rooms yet, but they've received high praise from what I've read. The jazz series run throughout the year, with shows Wednesday through Saturday nights. 66 Park Avenue, Murray Hill (just downtown of midtown and within walking distance of Grand Central Terminal). More photos on my flickr page.

A Lesson in Humility

2007-11-18T13:20:00.001-08:00

Bringing it Into Perspective With the Help of Olympic Runners

Like the student who graduates valedictorian yet finds herself as simply average once she arrives at Harvard, if you’ve ever run a marathon the size and prestige of the annual race in New York City, you know firsthand the contrast between the months of training and marking of personal achievements, and the humbling experience of race day among 38,000 runners just like, or even better, than you.

At your job as a nurse, a trader on Wall Street or math teacher in the public schools, among a circle of non-running friends and family, you stand out. People who know you are impressed by your discipline and commitment to fitness. On those dark, pre-dawn runs in rain and cold or after a long day of work facing the heat and humidity of summer in the city, you feel strong and proud, invincible even; you're a running warrior. You feel powerful and on top of the food chain.

But on race day, among the herd of other runners – men and women (even the occasional adolescent), of various shapes, sizes and walks of life, all of whom have run long miles and faced the same weather and suffering as you - suddenly you are not so singular or warrior-like.

You console yourself with the thought that you’ll finish hours before some of them, especially the ones who do more walking than running, but that consolation is, you realize, limited and embarrassing in its effort to soothe your ego when another large group of runners not only matches you but surges past before you’ve covered the 26.2 miles of the race. Face it: you are what the running community calls a middle of the pack runner. Not humiliating, but certainly not your proudest acknowledgment.

For those who run for a living, literally paying their bills off the quick pace of their steps, a race of the caliber of the New York City Marathon reinforces the experience of their countless hours of training. Unlike middle of the packers, the fleet-footed get a week’s stay in the official race hotel, the New York Hilton. The elite receive free meals, private tours of the Museum of Modern Art, free massage and personalized services.

Lest jealousy creeps in, feel assured that you too can share in this prize. You just have to be fast. Very fast.

If you can average sub-five-minute miles over the course of 26, you too can be shuttled on chartered bus to the race start and enjoy a ratio of 1 port-a-john to every five runners (as opposed to the rest of the pack, who suffer a ratio closer to 1:300 in the cold, anxious hours on Staten Island). If an elite woman, you get to start the race 35 minutes before everyone else, and if male, you line up at the front, separate from the general population, and actually race when the start gun fires.

Go ahead, log 125-plus mile weeks, all year long, make running the highest priority of your life, more important than obligations to family and friends, with the definition of “party” meaning going to bed at 10pm instead of 8. Then you can run on a course lined with hundreds of thousands of spectators cheering “Paula” or “Go Meb!” When you're a pro, your singularity extends to the name emblazoned on your race bib, replacing the five-digit numbers the anonymous thousands wear.

And when you break the tape in 2:09 or, if a woman, 2:23, you, too, can take a victory job back across the finish line cloaked in the flag of your country that has been draped across your shoulders by admiring fans.

Even if you place second and your name is Gete Wami, you can celebrate in the knowledge that in clinching the inaugural World Marathon Majors you have a cool half-million to take back home with you. Mayor Bloomberg will meet you at the winner’s podium where you’ll be handed keys to your latest prize of German engineering (Benz, BMW) or a Prius while wearing a crown of ivy and Tiffany trophy held high you smile for the one hundred reporters and photographers.

The shimmering space-blanket, distributed to keep runners warm after their race, is one of the few things you share in common with the other 38,000; only yours is perfunctory as you quickly re-suit in your sponsor’s (Nike, Adidas, Brooks, Asics) branded uniform, are handed a snack bag and quickly chauffeured back to the Hilton.

You have no time to catch a chill or stiffen up, for the next few hours include a shower, nap and massage. If not elite, you and the other 38,000 hug your space blanket close to your shivering body as you shuffle through yet more corrals to find your New York Road Runner-supplied plastic drawstring bags labeled with that same anonymous number that matches your bib. If you’re lucky, you’ll not have stiffened so much that you can still navigate the stairs at Columbus Circle down to your subway track, where hundreds of other pedestrians are also wearing a medal necklace and silver blanket, equally exultant.

Those who have traveled from various states or points on the globe (this is one of the most international fields in the entire sport, with runners representing more than 50 countries) will gratefully order room service when they finally get in from the cold. Locals might find a home-cooked meal waiting for them back in Brooklyn or Queens, prepared by their adoring I-could-never-have-done-what-you-did fan club.

Meanwhile, the elite, many of whom were not only invited but were also paid to show up on the start line, will attend a private award ceremony (more Tiffany plates in the iconic blue boxes) and then be chauffeured, yet again, to the VIP dinner on the waterfront in Chelsea.

At table with fellow Olympians, dining on caviar (try explaining the appeal and expense of caviar to an African) and filet mignon, a handful of marathoners with body fat percentages lower than the number of fingers on one hand, take a few sips of wine and a few bites of chocolate cake to celebrate another day on the job.

In the flickering light of candles around an elegantly laid table, a mere eight hours after racing through the streets of the five boroughs, the elite have one thought in common: “Tomorrow I’ll jog easy for a couple of hours, and maybe the next day too, but then it’s back to work. I’ve got another marathon to do.” And so continues the humble but gifted life of an elite long-distance runner.

Street Art in Long Island City

2007-11-09T19:14:00.001-08:00

"Mine is the largest art project in the world - bigger than Christo and the Gates in Central Park," Richard tells me on a street corner in Long Island City.

Unlike the 7,500 orange flags hung in Central Park in 2005 that Richard is referring to, his canvas is the City's streets, his broom his brush, his palette the color of people's lives.

A transplant from Brooklyn, Richard derives his inspiratin from a friend, a woman he couldn't help who died at the hands of her abusive boyfriend.

Speaking of the tears he shed over her death, he laments, "I could have filled the East River three more inches." Out of that loss, he decided a few years ago to create and man a telephone hotline for women who might be ready to leave violent situations.

The Sky Blue Foundation, as he's taken to calling his project, has a staff of one without an office, promoting a hotline that doesn't always have a phone connected to the number. The last time it was disconnected, Richard was laid up in a hospital bed for injuries sustained during a fall while working as a window washer.

While the lawsuit is pending, Richard sweeps the streets of this industrial neighborhood sandwiched between the East River and Newtown Creek, which separates the area from Greenpoint, Brooklyn. In an effort to beautify the neighborhood and draw attention to his domestic violence project, he sweeps, cleans windows, even paints the parking meters bright, decorative colors. This last artistic act rewards him with fines from the Department of Transportation, which cites him for defacing public property.

The streets are his urban garden and the work, he says, "fuels my spiritual growth" while helping him maintain his sobriety. He's entered into a symbiotic relationship with the owners of the local bodegas, mom-and-pop bakeries and gas station who in exchange for his cleaning-up the streets and beautifying their neighborhood provide him with windows, walls and fences to hang his hand-lettered posters advertising his hotline. They also give him hot meals, a couch to sleep on and, most importantly, a phone to go with the domestic violence call-in number.

In the past two years, Richard has fielded a handful of phone calls, often from the same women, one of whom has successfully left her abusive partner. He hopes to continue the trend, and believes that if he had a larger pallette to work from (more publicity and larger bilboards), he'd help save even more women. He says it's the least he could do for his friend who didn't make it out alive.

Perfect Day for a Marathon

2007-11-05T18:39:00.001-08:00

The 2007 ING New York City Marathon
[note: these and more photographs by Courtenay Morgan Redis can be found on my flickr page]

It is a morning that runners call perfect: crisp autumn air smelling of bengay under sun-filled skies. It must be the first Sunday of November in New York City, as there are more than 38,000 of them lined up on the entrance to the Verrazano Narrows Bridge in Staten Island.

First run as laps around Central Park in 1970, the now famous race spread out from Manhattan's center stage to wind its way through all five boroughs beginning in 1976. While the claim is ubiquitous in the race's promotion, it's a bit of a stretch to say the ING New York City Marathon travels through all five boroughs considering the visit to Staten Island is really all in the pre-race. Here the army of runners, volunteers and sprinkling of spectators stretch, wait to go to the bathroom, get chilled, get anxious, wait to get bagels and coffee, pace, go to big-tent church services, and then wait some more (even after the start gun fires) before finally stepping across the start line. Very little marathon running goes on in Staten Island, but the longest time in the marathon is spent there, it's true. Time spent waiting to just get on with it.

Some of the most famous photographs of this great race are taken from helicopters and other high vantage points as the mass of runners fill the Verrazano left to right, front to back. When was the last time you saw over a mile of runners, six-lanes wide, crossing a river at once? It's a grand spectacle, and one I've only seen from the runner's perspective...one day I'll make sure to shoot from the bird's eye view.

This year, I skipped the early morning bus ride to Staten Island, skipped the long warm-up along 4th Avenue in Brooklyn, toyed with the idea of catching the elite runners in Williamsburg (which reminds me of that great ad Asics created of the marathoner getting his cup of water from Orthodox Jews...see a blog I found that contains a photo of this "NYC is my running partner" ad) and joined the race in my beloved Queens. Exiting the 7 train at Hunter's Point at around 9am, I catch the majority of the wheelchair and handcycle racers (a division of the race that was introduced in 2000) come through at about the 14 mile mark.

While there hunting for a good vantage point, I record an interview with a local who, while pulling his own life together, has a mission of helping women in domestic violence situations. His method: he cleans the streets. Claiming that his is the largest work of art in the world, "bigger than Christo's," referring to self-financed artist millionaires Christo and Jean-Claude who in 2005 staged a public exhibition in Central Park called The Gates. By sweeping and hosing down, and decorating parking meters, Richard makes friends with local merchants who then allow him to advertise a domestic violence support telephone hotline (which he mans and a local grocer pays for). Look for a future post about Richard on this blog.

It is working to photograph the wheelchair and handcycle racers as they rolled by the subway entrance, since both the subject and the context work close to the ground, but I know I wanted something else for the elite runners. Something quintessential Queens. There isn't a ton of diverse-looking people on the sidewalks since there aren't a whole lot of people on the sidewalks in that part of Queens, period. I get a few shots of runners approaching the Citicorp building in Long Island City (the tallest building in this county), and a few with the Con Edison powerplant smoke stacks in the background. All in all, though, I am disappointed not to have a better idea of how to capture the marathon in my favorite borough.

Before long, an entourage of flashing lights and sirens on both two and four wheels blasts through and soon the unmistakable sound of a helicopter overhead alerts that the women's race leaders are fast approaching. My heart begins to race with excitement and suddenly I am second-guessing everything: did I pick the right spot? should I go shallow to blur the background or deep to capture some of this industrial neighborhood? shoot from the street or find a high platform? I can vaguely hear the band playing in the distance, so the women must be practically around the corner. No time for indecision. I kneel down, focus into a shady part of the street and choose an aperture of F4.

The women's professional field, which starts 35 minutes before the rest of the pack, includes two-time defending champion Jelena Prokopcuka of Latvia, and her nearest rival for the inaugural World Marathon Majors title (and a prize purse of a cool half-million), Gete Wami of Ethiopia.

It is thrilling to be within a foot of Olympians like world marathon record holder Paula Radcliffe, and close on her heels the great Gete Wami, who blaze past me on 44th Road where I am the sole spectator. Following close behind come a pack of three including two-time defending champion Jelena Prokopcuka of Latvia, World champion Catherine Ndereba of Kenya, and two-time Russian Olympian Lidiya Grigoryeva.

In my love of the sport and admiration of the women, I almost miss out on the photography side I am so busy cheering and clapping! Since I am making confessions here already, I'll admit that I greedily pocket the discarded arm warmer of Grigoryeva and glove of Ndereba. I may not wash these...ever.

Radcliffe, in her f irst race since giving birth to daughter Isla in January, finally shook off Wami in the final 500 meters when, after attempting a number of surges broke free after Wami made one attempt to surge and faltered. Radcliffe earned $130,000 for winning, plus another $40,000 for a time bonus. Wami won $65,000 for second place plus a $35,000 time bonus.

Wami's loss today is cushioned by her clinch of the premier of the World Marathon Majors, for which she earns an additional $500,000. [The World Marathon Majors is a championship racing series that is points-based, awarded every two years and includes marathons in Boston, London, Berlin, Chicago and New York (and the World Championships an the Olympics, depending on the year.]

After the professional women pass through, I know I have a short while to find a new vantage point before the elite men will come by. Walking just a few blocks further up course towards the Queensboro Bridge, which marks miles 15-16 more or less, I find a mailbox to stand on and a view of the smoke stacks in the background.

This Sunday is no different than the previous 36 years of the race except for one mark of distinction: the nation's top distance runners raced the day before in the U.S. Olympic Trials - Men's Marathon from Rockefeller Plaza through Times Square and five times around Central Park. The field does not lack for talent, however, both local and international.

Kenyan Martin Lel would later outkick Abderrahim Goumri of Morocco, 2:09:04 to 2:09:16. Lel and Goumri had dueled similarly in April at London, when Lel sprinted past Goumri (in his first-ever marathon) to win by three seconds.

But at the time they speed past me (at a pace of about 4:25/mile) they are still surrounded by a group of about 15 runners that includes Kenyan Rogers Rop, South African Hendrick Ramaala plus New York first-timer Kenyan James Kwamba. Olympic and World Marathon Champion Stefano Baldini of Italy, also in the pack, would later place fourth in the day's race. The defending champion, Marilson Gomes dos Santos (Brazil), hangs on to the back of this prestigious pack who go by so quickly I only know what I've seen when I later review the images stored in my camera.

I catch the first pack of men here, and then climb down (as difficult as climbing up given that my left foot is stuck in a boot cast while my fractured heal heals) and clumped across the street to a clear-view corner. I kneel down on the curb just in time to see the chase group of four Ethiopian runners who train with the Westchester Track Club, including Demesse Teferea, Genna Tufa, Kassahun Kabiso, Worku Beyi and Derese Deniboba.

Close to 11:20am and I've already seen the best of the best fly through Queens. At the rate they're running, I may not catch them again if I try to make it to the Bronx, which was my rough plan going into the day.

Hopping on an E train into Manhattan, and waiting an interminably long time for a 6 train uptown, I decide to cut my losses. By the time I head out of the subway at 86th Street, I know I've missed the leaders running on the east side and, instead, head west to Central Park so I can have time to limp over and maybe even find a clear shot at around mile 24. To the Aussie I meet on the subway, hats off. Your encouragement allowed me to make the right choice and I only missed Paul and Gete by the time I made it to the park.

I most want to cheer on Ethiopian Atalelech Ketema, running her first marathon, and in contention to be the day's fastest female New Yorker (she lives in the Bronx with her husband Fitsum and 20-month old Nathaniel). She ended up the second local female in a time of 2:45 and change. Not bad for a first timer!

In addition to Ketema, I caught all of the lead men and my pals from the Westchester Track Club who placed 1-4 among locals. Tefera, Tufa and Kabiso won some decent wages for their high showing. With their top placing, the men defended their club title; and the women's Westchester Track Club placed third in their club competition with the help of Ketema, Brooke Garden and Cindy Pomeroy.

A perfect day for a marathon, indeed.

"Triumph and Tragedy" at the Men's Olympic Martahon Trials, NYC

2007-11-03T14:49:00.001-07:00

Hall's Trials record marred by death of friend Shay

By Joe Battaglia, NBCOlympics.com

These and more photographs by Courtenay Morgan Redis

He has been called the next great U.S. marathoner. Now he can be called an Olympian.

After running with the pack for 17 miles, Ryan Hall pulled away en route to winning the U.S. Olympic Team Trials marathon in a record 2:09:02. The time by Hall, who had never run a marathon before April, shattered the previous Trials record by one minute and 17 seconds.

Dathan Ritzenhein, a 2004 Olympic in the 10,000m, finished comfortably in second in 2:11:07, a personal best by over three minutes. Brian Sell placed third in 2:11:40 to grab the final qualifying spot for Beijing. It will be the first Olympic marathon for all three.

Their jubilation was soon replaced by sadness when it was announced that Ryan Shay, 28, had died. Shay, a 2002 Notre Dame graduate running in his second U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials, collapsed just 30-minutes into the race, and was taken by ambulance to Lenox Hill Hospital where he was pronounced dead at 8:46 a.m.

"Today was a dream come true for me," Hall said. "I've been dreaming about this moment for 10 years. But as great as the moment is, my heart and my thoughts are with Ryan Shay and his family."

Shay collapsed on the second lap near East 75^th St. on the East side of Central Park, about 5 1/2 miles into the race. At the 5k mark (3.1 miles), he was in 21st place, part of a large pack between 16:44 and 17:02.

"We have absolutely tragic news confirmed that Ryan Shay passed away today," Mary Wittenberg, CEO of the New York Road Runners Club said. "We ask you to join us in extending our very deepest condolences to Alicia, to Ryan's family and the Notre Dame running community. It's certainly not the way we expected any part of the race to go."

According to Runner’s Gazette photographer Clay Shaw, who was nearby, emergency medical personnel responded swiftly, using a defibrillator to try to revive him.

"He just hit the ground," Shaw said.

Wittenberg said Shay received immediate medical attention.

"There were several layers of medical response," she said. "It was very quick."

A recreational runner died during last month's Chicago Marathon. This death, however, was especially startling considering Shay was an elite athlete.

USA Track and Field CEO Craig Masback called Shay's death a "tremendous loss for the sport"

"We all are devastated over Ryan's death," he said. "He was a tremendous champion who was here today to pursue his dreams. We are heartbroken."

Shay, a native of Ypsilanti, Mich., won the 2001 NCAA 10,000m title at Notre Dame, the first national individual title won at the school. He was a favorite going into the 2004 trials but was hampered by a hamstring strain and finished 23rd. He was the 2003 U.S. marathon champion and was third at this year's U.S. 25K championships. He also won the U.S. half marathon in 2003 and 2004, and took the 2004 U.S. 20K road racing title, making him a four-time national champion.

It was in New York two years ago while watching the marathon that Shay met his future wife, Alicia Craig, also an elite distance runner. Alicia was a two-time NCAA champion and the collegiate 10,000-meter record-holder during her days at Stanford, and was hoping to make it to Beijing in the women's 10,000m.

Shay and Craig were married on July 7. Sara Hall, Ryan Hall's wife, was a college teammate at Stanford with Craig and was a bridesmaid in their wedding.

"He had an incredible ability to push himself to the limit," Sara Hall said of Shay, with whom she and her husband used to train.

"It's a big loss for the running community," said 2004 women's marathon Olympic bronze medalist Deena Kastor, who once trained with Shay. "It's a day we should be celebrating. It has cast a pall. The distance running community is very close."

"If you probably asked him if there was any way he wanted to go, it was out on the race course," said Terrence Mahon, who coached Shay in Mammoth Lakes, Calif.

Shay had high hopes entering these Trials. In 2004, he ran a personal best of 2:14:08 while finishing ninth at the ING New York City Marathon, and was looking forward to running in blustery conditions.

"The heat and I do not get along," Shay said. "Now if it’s cold that day, then that works to my benefit. I know a lot of runners who don’t like the cold, but I love the cold. Hopefully, the weather will be beneficial. If it’s weather that I can run well in, 2:11 or 2:12 is not out of my range."

Hall, 25, had no problem getting under that time range. Hall broke away from the leading pack of five runners with a 4:32 18th mile, believed to be the fastest ever run in Central Park. Hall continued to run sub-five minute splits the remainder of the race. He looked relaxed and fresh the entire race, pumping his fists, high-fiving spectators, and bellowing as he drew closer to the finish.

"I'm just thrilled with the day the Lord gave me and thrilled to be part of this Olympic team," Hall said. "I was thinking about the Olympics when I was out there on that last lap and the fitness it will take. The last mile, I knew I was going to be OK. I know I can run considerably faster. There's definitely more gears in there. I'll get to test those in Beijing."

When Hall made his move, none of the other five runners was able to go with him. Although he couldn't keep Hall's blistering pace, Ritzenhein was able to separate himself from the remaining runners over the final eight miles, building a 30-second lead over the third-place contenders.

"My hat's off to Ryan," Ritzenhein said. "That time is amazing on this course."

Brian Sell was unable to keep up with the race leaders early in the race and it appeared his hopes of making the Olympic team were slim. But Sell, who said before the race that he would quit competitive distance running if he did not qualify for Beijing, surged passed Daniel Browne with about six miles to go to punch his Olympic ticket.

"The original plan was to let the field determine the pace for the first couple of miles," Sell said. "When we were out in 11 flat for two miles, I knew I Had to keep it honest to have a chance at all. Honestly, I was trying to run around 5 flat [per mile]. I didn't have too many miles above 5 flat. That tells you how fast these guys were up front. I was just fortunate to pick up the carnage from (Hall and Ritzenhein)."

Khalid Khannouchi, the 35-year-old former world-record-holder who has never made an Olympic team, finished fourth in 2:12:34, nearly a minute behind Sell. Khannouchi, who has battled injuries, could still earn a spot on the squad if Ritzenhein later qualifies in the 10,000 meters and chooses to compete in that race instead in Beijing.

Meb Keflezighi, who won silver at the 2004 Olympics in Athens, was in contention for the third and final qualifying spot for more than half of the race, but faded late and finished eighth in 2:15:09.

"It was rough," Keflezighi said. "I would like to have made the team. At about 1:19, both of my calves cramped up. My breathing was great, but I couldn't go on."

Alan Culpepper, the 2004 Olympic Trials marathon winner, was forced to pull out of the race with cramping in both hamstrings.

"Within the first four miles, both of my hamstrings had the same sensation I usually get with 4 miles to go," Culpepper said. "I was baffled. I kept trying to work through it, but I just never felt right."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

More Than One Winner at the 5th Avenue Mile

2007-10-29T16:07:00.001-07:00

On Saturday, 29 September more than 4,500 runners competed in the 27th Annual 5th Avenue Mile in Manhattan. While the men's winner was the fastest miler in the world this year, Alan Webb (who also happens to be the American record holder at this distance) fast times were recorded by people of all ages and abilities.

The oldest runner, Abraham Weintraub of Greater New York, finished the mile in 18:49 at a mere 98 years old. He beat out a younger man, David Gerli, 96, of Manhattan, by almost two and a half minutes!

Joan Rowland, 81 finished in ten minutes and change...faster than many women half her age. Was she happy? Well, according to the New York Times, Rowland said, "''I feel O.K.'

She added: 'I’ve run this almost every year except when they didn’t give out awards to people my age. Next year, if I’m alive, I’ll run it again.'

Rowland said running had been a tonic.

'I’ve had heart disease, cancer of the arm and several ministrokes,' she said. 'I started running when I was 71 to help me recover from cancer. Running is my medicine.'"

After the age-group races finished, the championship and invitational events were run with great fanfare and superb talent.

Coach Mike Barnow's Westchester Track Club fielded some of the best local talent, if you consider local to be Ethiopia and Kenya by way of the Bronx, where man of the club's African runners live and train.

In the women's New York Road Runners Championship, WTC runner Atalelech Ketema (Ethiopia) finished second in 4:42.8 after leading for the first part of the race. This was a great run for Ketema, having spent the better part of the year coming back from having her first child, Nathaniel, in 2006.

In the men's race, WTC teammates Stephen Chemlany (Kenya) and Demesse Tefera (Ethiopia) lead the final kick to finish first in 4:05.6 and third, respectively. They were separated by Plattsburgh, NY resident Matt Deshane (US).

In the men's invitational, Webb, 24, beat the defending champion, Kevin Sullivan, in a time of 3:52.7.

The women's race was exciting all the way from the start at 80th Street to the finish at 60th, with the lead changing hands multiple times in the four-plus minutes it took to run the mile. Meskerem Legesse (Ethiopia) and Molly Huddle (Providence, RI) battled it out from the start, with New Zealander Kim Smith taking over at the half-way mark. In the final stretch, the 2005 winner, Canadian Carmen Douma-Hussar, 30, won in 4:22.8 - the fastest time on the course since 1998. After the Canadian broke the tape yet another dramatic change of hands in the final yards resulted in defending champion Sara Hall (Big Bear Lake, CA) and Amy Mortimer (Providence, RI) placing second and third, respectively.

Donna Ferrato LIVE Online

2007-10-13T08:48:00.001-07:00

Check it out...Donna Ferrato has a fabulous new website live and ready for your viewing! Having briefly interned with Donna almost a year ago, I know firsthand what a labor of love (and trial!) this baby was, and I have to say I'm really impressed.

The site, donnaferrato.com, totally speaks to who Donna is as a photographer, a woman, a documentarian, an observer. It highlights her humor, her grittiness, her love of the raunchy and the beautiful.

I'll be eager to hear more about her Ironbound Workshop in Newark with Philip Jones Griffiths. The two will be living and photographing with their students for the week, 17 - 21 October, out of Donna's warehouse loft in the neighborhood of Newark, a working class neighborhood featured in the New York Times in 2004.

Donna Ferrato has spent the past 30+ years showing us close-encounters with domestic violence, love, sex and intimate views few other photographers have captured. Her books include: Living with the Enemy; Love and Lust; Amore; and Honeymoon Killers. Donna's books are available through many bookstores, as well as at Amazon.com

Philip Jones Griffiths has been a member the Magnum photo agency since 1966, where he was also President for five. Griffiths is best known for his images of Vietnam, images that showed the trauma of war experienced by the Vietnamese - a perspective overlooked by many photojournalists and, certainly, publications during and immediately after the war.

Epic Bike Tour with Black Sheep Adventures

2007-08-16T07:46:00.001-07:00

Imagine a travel agent advertising the following:

"Climb over 35,000 feet in elevation and scream down another 40,000 in elevation loss over six days in Northern California! Plan to eat a lot of Gu, Cliff Bars and bags of peanuts and M&Ms. Blister in the hot sun, soak in yellow-colored hot springs, and spend countless hours fighting your inner demons through the Sierras!"

I admit, spending a week grinding gears over intimidating terrain, and paying for it (even flying me and my bike all the way to California...) wouldn't have been my first choice for a vacation. I'm nearly broke and coming off a four-month stint in a difficult work situation. But, it's the year that Bubba turns 50 (and I turn 35!), and I agreed that this, the 3rd Annual Epic Bike Tour of California, hosted by Black Sheep Adventures, would be our joint birthday celebration. Truth be told, I'm more of a runner than a rider, and I was a bit anxious I wouldn't enjoy all that time in the saddle.
Let it be known, however, that the week was fabulous and far exceeded my wildest dreams. Albeit physically and psychologically challenging at times, but sooooo worth it. Some nights I went to bed so tired I couldn't hold up my "bobblehead" at dinner, or skipped dinner completely. But that was my loss, because dinner was a great time to reconnect with the other 17 members of the Tour, recount the glories (perceived or real) of that day's stage, replenish the tank for the next, and simply enjoy the company of new friends.

DAY 1: Davis to Oroville (89 miles, minimal elevation change)
After a short drive from Berkeley to Davis, during which I get to spend time with Morgan (hey, that's my middle name!) who is a writer in job transition (yeah, me too), we get our "rules o f the road" speech, fill up our bottles and head out for Day One.

Traveling from the flatlands and headwinds of Davis (a great, bicycle-friendly college town that even has a bicycle in it's city logo, and is located just outside of Sacramento) up to the gold-rush town of Oroville (which is known as The City of Gold) on the first day, the mantra of the group is, "oh, no, not another right turn!" Every left translates to a tailwind, as in, "ahhhhh, push me along mighty wind!" and every right turn the opposite. Except, a headwind feels unequivocally harder than the simple opposite of a gentle push - more like riding into a wall. I am always dead last, barely able to hold the wheel of a generous rider, Andrea, looking out for me.

I am so excited to be done with the wind on this first day that I head straight to the pool in full cycling kit. Okay, I remove my helmet before diving in. This antic will become both my nightly reward for finishing and an easy way to rinse the salt and sweat out of my clothes, shoes and bike gloves. Chlorine = sanitation = clean laundry, right?

We finish the evening with a trip to one of two dining choices in Oroville. If you've seen the 1976 western, The Outlaw Josey Wales, which is filmed here in Oroville, then you have a good sense of the slim pickings in this quaint, but quiet town. At one point in time, there was a population of 10,000 Chinese living here; by 2007 the choices are more reflective of its wild west roots. We were lucky, then, to steer toward a small Thai restaurant in a strip mall.

The Thai buffet is a hilarious and tasty decision, and a profitable one for the owners given our numbers. Speaking of numbers, they instruct us to order our entrees by number, but they then deliver them by name (which, more often than not, does not correspond to the entree we had actually ordered). This mishap works in favor of Fred (our fearless Tour Leader, and founder of Black Sheep Adventures), who manages to gobble down all of the misplaced meals and then some. At 6'7", his voracious appetite can be forgiven.

DAY 2: Oroville to Quincy (73 miles, 10,300 ft gained, 7,100 ft lost)
I wake on the second day eager to run. It is in the low 50s and there is a park with two lakes just steps out of our hotel. I discover the park after running in circles trying to lead a kitten back home (it's 4:30am and I can't even see what house the cat has come from). The kitty finally tires out, and I find the park. It is a glorious reminder that my body can do what I want it to (unlike day one!). After changing into my cycling shorts, refilling the tires and refueling my inner tank, I am content to jump back on the bike a bit before 7am.

Running on the morning of what turns out to be the hardest day is not the wisest choice, perhaps, but ignorance can be bliss. My bliss, though, diminishes significantly as we climb out of Oroville along logging roads that seem to only go upwards toward Quincy. My only time in Quincy before this trip was back in 1997 when I suffered at a triathlon in the cold of nearby (alpine) Lake Almanor. I'm hoping for better memories this time around.

The drive (and ride) to Quincy is gorgeous, but filled with a lot of climbing and few places to stop and replenish. Good thing for the sag vehicles...we need the water and the food on this hot, hilly day. Whether we eat out of the back of Fred's van, or the rented Jeep Commander driven by our Counselor-In-Training (as it did feel a bit like an S&M Summer Camp), Mike Logsdon, we are grateful for the food! Although his expression lies, Himgan never tasted a better power bar. The crew is super supportive, even reapplying sunscreen to the blistered back of poor Sarah.

I thank God that when we finish a refreshing descent into Quincy (with a surprising and F-L-A-S-H-Y show of hospitality by Mike the C.I.T.), the great organic, locally-grown food and multitude of draft local beers awaits us at the Pangea Cafe and Pub.

For a population of just around 2,000, Quincy boasts a selection of high-quality restaurants and a lovely bed and breakfast, appropriately called The Sporting Inn. My week-long roomie, Laura, and I share the Kokopelli-themed room. One of Laura's favorite memories of the trip is, I think, the plush terry robes waiting for us here. They're nice robes, but come on, we've got to get this woman out more.

After a shower and nap, we move on to dinner and a much entertaining story of bear evasion and other antics experienced on Mike's 13.5-month fundraising cycling trip from Alaska to Argentina (16,000 miles over the length of the Americas). Mike and his brother, John, have a great site called Spinning Southward, where you can learn more about the trip, their mission, the need for greater brain tumor research (the loss of their mother, Jean, to a brain tumor was the inspiration of this journey) and the National Brain Tumor Foundation, where Mike now works.

We all hit our lovely beds good and tired while the proprietor of the B&B gets busy preparing a sumptuous breakfast for the next morning.

DAY 3: Quincy to Tahoe City (87 miles, 7,400 ft gained, 4,600 ft lost)
Not knowing the worst is behind me, I admittedly wake in, to quote Phil Liggett the famous cycling commentator, “a spot of bother” wondering how I will fare on this, our third day. (I grew up in a neurotic family. Sorry.) The day ends up being one of the most glorious. Still challenging, but my legs are finally adjusting to the terrain, my sit-bones seem to be responding to the ibuprofren more readily, and the alpine vistas up Highway 89 are absolutely breathtaking.

Bubba and I experience our first above-the-tree-line ride as a team, creating switch-backs (which she likes to call figure-8s). Lucky for us, the roads are mostly empty and we can meander across the double yellow (when there is one). While the riders at the front of the pack just hit the hill straight-on and make faster time, our switchbacking method saves our knees, backs and spirits. Theoretically, anyway. You wouldn't know from my whining...and I'm the younger one of us two. Pathetic.

Mark (a masseuse, swim coach and all-around great guy) and Himgan (you'll meet him later) play a most insane game of tag while ascending the hills today. You've got to be kidding me, chasing each other up the mountains trying to tag other riders. Glad someone is enjoying the climb!!!

Overall, day three is a gorgeous and pleasant day in the saddle. Coming into Tahoe City, I feel strong and excited knowing the next day is our "play" day to do with as we will. My reverie is temporarily hampered by a merciless headwind that makes the final miles on Highway 50 past Squaw seem like the longest, sloggiest miles of the day.

But we survive (you already knew that) with a bit of cursing and grunting (that may come as a surprise unless you know my penchant for the f-bomb) and are rewarded with a smooth four miles on bike path along the Truckee River to our hotel just off the west shore of Lake Tahoe. That jump into the pool post-ride is by far the best yet. And Judy's (Wendy's partner, who is a medical doctor with great hands) massage is too decadent. Life is, indeed, good.

A little background here for those who are not familiar with Lake Tahoe and the Tahoe Basin region that straddles northern California and the Reno area of Nevada:

The area was formed by a combination of earthquakes (two major fault lines run north/south underground), volcanic eruptions and glacial formation millions of years ago. There is an abundance of fascinating geologic history of Tahoe online.

Lake Tahoe is 22 miles long and l2 miles wide with 72 miles of shoreline. It is the third-deepest lake in North America, tenth-deepest in the world, and has an average depth of 1,645 feet. In the summer, parts of the lake warm to about 70 degrees farenheit, but at depth, the lake is a constant 39 degrees! It is surrounded by pristine wilderness and a multitude of ski resorts that are great for hiking and mountain biking in the warmer temps.

DAY 4: Tahoe City Play Day!
Good morning happy day! You know that feeling you have after a really grueling experience…whether from exercise, an arduous day at work, or a day spent with someone that drives you nuts…and you finally get to rest, to breathe, to be free? That’s how I feel waking on day four. Don’t get me wrong, the previous days of riding were not to be missed and I would do them all over again in a heartbeat. Yes, I’d pay to do them all over again! But there is something so extra sweet in the joy of the day after a hard-won accomplishment.

Waking early on Wednesday with an instant awareness of what I want to do with my rest day, I head out into the mid-40-degree morning to find it. My wish: to conquer Squaw. On foot, in the summer. No skis, no chair lifts, no downhills until the end.

Taking that lovely four-mile stretch of smooth bike path along the Truckee River back to the base of Squaw, my cycling legs become running legs once again, finding their old-familiar groove and stride. At first my lungs strain a bit under the assault of the altitude (or maybe it is the cold), but even they soon adjust. This is my rest day and all, how dare they complain?

Squaw is a ski resort where the winter Olympics were held in 1960. Considered one of the more gorgeous and challenging of the Tahoe peaks, Squaw tops out at just under 9,000 feet. The famous Western States 100 Mile Endurance Trail Run starts at its base each summer, taking some of the fittest and most inspiring and inspired athletes south to Auburn, California. One day I hope to claim to have run the full Western States race, but for now I am hoping to settle for the peak that rises above it.

Without a map, I simply follow what looks to be the right trails. The deer seem to like the path I am on, and it is certainly going in the right direction longitudinally. After more than an hour of vertical climbing that at times requires me to squat down and hold onto the hillside lest I fall backwards from the dizzying altitude gain and loose-dirt terrain, I reach some peak. What peak? Turns out I’ve run up Red Dog Face and along Red Dog Ridge to the top of KT-22 at 8,200 feet. I learn this after straining to read the Squaw ski map standing at least 15 feet overhead (normally closer to eye level, but I lack all those feet of packed snow to serve as raised platform).

Hey, this is pretty cool, me and the top of the chair lifts that didn't carry me to this height. I’ve always wanted to navigate KT-22, but as a novice skier I know I'd likely not come up here on skis anytime soon.

Bad news: there is no obvious lateral path to my Squaw Peak destination. It may be only 700 feet higher than where I’m at but, Damn! I’ll need to go back down some before I can ascend my goal.

After much sliding down on my butt (to save turned ankles on the falling dirt and rocks beneath me), and climbing back up another, longer, steeper slope, I overshoot Squaw by going too far east. How the heck did that happen? I mean, how does one miss the highest peak? Leave it to me. For a really cool 360 degree view from on top of the mountain, go to Squaw’s map page.

Damn twice! Now out of fluids and without much desire left to slide down the mountain two more times, I decide to cut my losses and head toward high camp. Yes, on my ass, but at least it’s for the last time today.

At high camp in the winter I’ve enjoyed the beauty of an alpine Olympic ice pavilion and the views of snow-covered peaks for miles around. On this trip, I’m the only person not paid to be there, and either because they want to keep a close eye on me or because they take pity on me, the cable car operators offer me a free lift down the mountain along with the park police and their bomb-sniffing shepherds. This is America today - even the ski slopes in winter are bomb-patrolled, but the guys are friendly to the dust-covered running girl.

At the ski village below, I’m rewarded with stares and pointing of fingers by the well-heeled (also a comment on the American non-appreciation of the outdoors-type) who can afford to stay at (or, even more impressively, own) a Squaw property.

More my speed is Jake the shuttle driver who strikes up conversation while I’m refilling my water bottle. Born and raised in Brooklyn, we fall instantly into easy report, trading insights of life near Manhattan versus life in northern California. Not surprisingly we come to similar conclusions – the City is great to visit, and we’re proud to say we’re “from there,” but California is paradise.

Just a bit over five miles back to the hotel, my tightened chest and legs relax a bit on the rolling terrain home, glad to have claimed I ran Squaw, and equally glad to know the rest day will now be doubly sweet.

Back at home, most of the gang has by now left for lunch and/or a long hike along the west coast of Tahoe (Rubicon Trail to Emerald Bay). The few of us who are left behind decide to drive over to Incline Village and check out a dining spot Doug and I have been to on a few occasions. The Lone Eagle Grille at the Hyatt Regency Lake Tahoe sits right on Crystal Bay, with cathedral ceilings and multi-story windows. The menu is diverse enough to meet most needs and the ambiance is warm and romantic on a winter evening with the indoor fireplace or outdoor beach fire pit aflame. (The photo below is from the Hyatt's website.)

On this summer day, the sun bounces off the water outside, with the wood beams of the dining rooms glowing to create an altogether different but singularly pleasant experience.

Our lunch crew includes: Mike, our trusty C.I.T.; Himgan, the group’s light and quick King of the Mountains (had we bestowed such a title, it would be all his), is a creative guy who designs the consumer interface for technology companies like Sony; and Andrea, his girlfriend, who offered me her draft on day-one and who, when not on her bike, is pursuing a PhD in biophysics at UC Berkeley studying the immune response to the Herpes virus; and Becky, a massage therapist specializing in eastern practices like acupressure (who met Fred on the previous year’s Black Sheep Adventures epic tour and they have been dating ever since).

Becky is training to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro over New Years 2008. The trip is being organized by Alice Hiatt, who created a non-profit organization called Hope Through Opportunity that will be sending its 5th 40ft container to the Huruma Hospital in Tanzania, East Africa. The money and material items raised by Becky and the climbing team will help the hospital serve the sick, injured, and dying as well as provide for about 400 orphans. To find out more about the effort and what you can do to help, go to Becky’s donation page.

After lunch, we head back along the north shore to Kings Beach, where we eat gelato and take naps under the redwoods by the beach. I receive an extra creamy blessing from a bird that decides to plant one on my forehead. This makes for a lot of laughs, most especially by me. I am disappointed it isn’t messier in the photos. It felt messier, let me tell you.

We briefly consider renting one of the beach/water "tricycles" just so we can claim we've ridden bikes even on our rest day, but the inspiration is fleeting (and pricey).

As the day comes to an end, the crew gathers out in the parking lot to perform some basic maintenance many of us have neglected (like cleaning and re-greasing the chain, dealing with derailleur issues), while we review the next day’s adventure. Each night (and often again at breakfast), Fred leads us through the directions and ride profile so that we can minimize as many navigational challenges as possible. Also, for those not riding (like Bubba’s partner, Judy), it’s an opportunity to check out the hiking options and make plans for when and where to meet up with the Tour staff.
What’s a rest day without a lot of food? So we finish it all off with a community meal at a Tahoe City Mexican joint called the Blue Agave. Fun and festive, we eat heartily knowing that we head higher into the Sierras tomorrow.

DAY 5: Tahoe City to Markleeville (64 miles, 5,100 ft gained, 5,800 ft lost)
Heading south on an extension of the bike path paralleling Highway 89 we skirt the western rim of Lake Tahoe. With the sparkling blue water, moored boats and private beaches sometimes just 10 feet to our left, and under gently undulating path canopied by redwoods, it’s like nowhere I’ve ridden before. By far the most pleasant and easy start we’ve had yet, this is a good re-introduction to the bike after our day of rest.

The climbing eventually starts up again as we near the southern tip of the Tahoe, climbing up above Emerald Lake to an incredible vista that floats above the water. On one side, hundreds of feet below we see Emerald Bay and the expanse of Lake Tahoe, to our right another drop-off to Cascade Lake. Riding on this ridge between the two bodies of water, the road - narrow but wide-open under a blue sky - becomes one of the most awe-inspiring and memorable aspects of the week’s journey. The descent on smooth road with mostly-visible turns is fast and steep – thrilling, to say the least.

Bubba, Jerry (who works for NASA and loves to ride motorcyles, but owns more REAL bikes than a small-town bike shop) and I stop in South Lake Tahoe at a coffee shop and Internet café so I can finalize my negotiations with my new job back in Manhattan at Meredith Corporation, a magazine publisher. Jerry disdainfully rejects his mocha (hello, we are not in Berkeley anymore, Dorothy) and we soon cross the state line into Nevada. My Nevada welcome present comes in the form of a staple through my rear tire, but I've got a spare tube so no big. Of course, I initially put the rear wheel on backwards and wonder why my chain won't catch. I've now admitted it to the world (or that part of the world actually reading this). Don't worry, I got my wits about me and put the wheel on properly.

Heading east on Route 207, we climb out of the congested and casino-laden, high-traffic downtown and begin our climb into the Eastern Sierra Nevada foothills. Fred has warned us that there is some steep climbing ahead made further challenging by the lack of shoulder and activve road construction to come. Fearing we may need a lift in sections where the narrow road would inhibit our switch-backing (Bubba’s “figure 8s”), we are pleasantly surprised to climb without issue and reach Daggett Summit (7,334 feet) unassisted and in great spirits.

After an 8-mile descent lays Carson City, Nevada and a mostly-flat finish into Markleeville after crossing back into California. A shorter day in the saddle of just 64 miles and not too many hours, today’s ride feels to many of us like an extension of the rest day prior (how soon we forget that while climbing to Daggett Summit, it didn’t feel very restful).

Unless you’ve ridden the infamous Death Ride you probably have never visited Markleeville. A town of under 100 households, founded during the silver-rush in the mid-1800s, it is a one-block town, quaint and far removed from cell and Internet service. What a blessing! We are further rewarded with a trip to Grover Hot Springs State Park, just a few miles from our very lovely cabins at Creekside Lodge.

After soaking in the hot springs (oscillating between the truly-hot tub to the more moderately-warm pool), Fred and Mike usher us back to Markleeville, where many of us gather for a pre-dinner story-telling session in the breezeway between our rooms. We eventually meander all of ten feet to the only restaurant in town, the Wolfcreek Restaurant and Cutthroat Saloon next door to our lodge. Fred’s dad, a former park ranger who lives in nearby Carson City, joins us for dinner and we all shower him with praise for raising such a great kid. Laura loves the mashed potatoes. I have to say, I ate portions of the spuds off multiple plates.
The only downer to this great day is, for me, the discovery that my bike can go no further without serious surgery. The shifters have broken and although Fred valiantly drives it to various far-off mechanics, it needs more attention than we can give it overnight. Before heading to bed, I resolve to turn bike despair into running glory and face the devil of Ebbett’s Pass on foot Friday morning.

DAY 6: Markleeville to Murphys (74 miles, 7,100 ft gained, 10,400 ft lost)
First off, if you haven’t visited Alpine County, add it to your list. According to one website, "Alpine County has no high schools, fast food restaurants, convenience stores, or theaters; no hospitals, no dentists, no resident physicians, no supermarket, no malls, no automobile service stations, and no traffic lights." It has the smallest population of all counties in California and is as gorgeous as its Alpine name would suggest. With snow-covered high peaks for a good half of every year, Alpine County is rugged and remote – an oasis from what many of us face in our day-to-day lives. On Friday, day six, we are going to reach for some of its highest peaks and make our way through Bear Valley (another popular ski community, although much smaller than Tahoe) toward Murphy's.

Today’s plan: head up State Route 4 from Markleeville at 5,550 ft to the top of Ebbett's Pass of Death Ride fame at 8,732 ft. Just a few thousand feet, no big deal, except that we’re already at altitude and we have nineteen miles between here and there. Fortunately for me, this is the only pass I’m climbing today. My cyclist compadres, after a fun descent into Hermit Valley, are continuing on up the even steeper Pacific Grade (which tops out at lower elevation than Ebbett’s, but has a steeper gradient over a shorter distance). Seems to me that by running, I’m getting off easy.

I’m so restless with anticipation of today’s big run I catch only glimpses of sleep, woken from dreams of running with animals and swimming in rivers. A bit of anxiety weighs on me, as well – wondering what I’ve forgotten to plan for, wondering if the ever-aggravating plantar fascitis in my left foot will become debilitating. Anything I haven’t thought of before going to bed, oh well. It’s too early to wake up the crew for Gatorade at 3:30am and, oh yeah, I didn’t think of needing a flashlight.

I grew up in the suburbs of New York City and thought I knew what a summer night in the country meant: the sound of crickets, a starry sky and warm, moist air. A summer night in Alpine County, California is darker, more mysterious and certainly not as warm or moist as I anticipated. Without any street lights within an hour’s drive, at least, it is dark. It’s so dark that I can’t even make out the double yellow down the center of State Route 4. The sound of the creek running to my right keeps me from falling off the side of the road, and as I get within a few feet of the boulders to my left I manage to find a path running against traffic (as if there were any). The sounds of my feet thuck, thuck, thucking (flapping from my heavy footfalls and altitude-ascending effort) drown out the crickets and any other wildlife I might hear. Having seen a bear and its cub in town the evening before, I am reminded that it’s best to make a lot of noise and seem big when encountering such animals. Being that it’s so dark, I am hoping that my thucking footsteps, the sloshing of water in my hydration pack and my labored attempt to sing scare off whomever is out there watching me.

Within a couple of miles, I become lost in my own world and stop singing, stop thinking about the bears or the drop-off. The darkness of the night is a gift, really. I am transported to an inner quiet without conscious thought or effort. My body just moves, and my breathing and running carry on without me. Feelings of gratitude, sadness, joy, doubt, pride all pass through. Prayers for my friend, Marian, who lays dying in Oakland, pass through my mind.

Logistically, my immediate plan is to get as far up the pass as possible before C.I.T. Mike and Judy (heading out for her hike) come driving by. For I know that once they pass me, it’s after 7am and the cyclists will begin heading out from breakfast. I figure it will take me at least three hours to climb to the top, but the cyclists can do it in an hour and a half. I want to reach the top either just before them (so my sweat doesn’t begin to chill me while waiting) or just after them, so that the support crew (Fred and Mike) don’t have to wait for me.

Did I mention I don’t have a watch with me? Yeah, I own this great Suunto Advisor with the standard capabilities like time (what will they think of next?) and stopwatch, but it also has an altimeter with descent and ascent rates, a barometer, compass and heart rate monitor. I forgot to bring a replacement battery and the watch has been dead since day one in Davis. Mike and Judy passing me by in the Jeep Commander will have to serve as my guide.

My second goal is to let my riding partner Bubba know I’m with her all the way, even though we’re not riding together today. The fallen granite at the side of the road serves as an imperfect writing tool to mark up the road like on all great mountain passes cyclists traverse. I estimate that I can give away two ten-minute stops toward writing my encouragement on the road as long as I squat, not bend over. My blood pressure tends to run low as it is, and I don’t need to add the dizzying effect of bending over and standing up repeatedly to my potential for fainting.

After passing the intersection with Highway 89, I know that I’ve gone about 5 miles and it’s still pitch-black, so I must be making decent time. Once light comes, I can afford my first sign-making venture.

As the morning’s dawn begins to light my way, it's time for the first rock-writing session. The writing is harder than I think – both not to keep from getting dizzy and to use the stones as chalk. By the end, my hands are raw, my knees are mottled from leaning on the gravel road and I’m not even sure the "BUBBA” is legible. Oh, well. I tried.*

By the time I begin running again, I slowly regain my stride and soon I can see the faint outline of the white line on the side of the road. Not long after, I can see the towering granite outcroppings, volcanic peaks and giant sequoias pass by. I realize what beauty I am running beside and wonder wistfully what I have missed by heading out so early.

The first car of the day drives by and I notice a sparsely occupied campsite to my right. I pass by a sign marking the 7,000 foot elevation mark and I still feel really good. This is going better than I anticipated! Of course, just when you think that way, the universe bites into your pride and I hit a humbling switchback up which I am tempted to walk. The sun is now above the horizon and I can see the glory of the peaks and woods all around me. Wow. This is incredible. I’m grateful I’m on my feet, going slowly, so I can really enjoy the view.

Fortunately it’s during one of these highs that I hear the Jeep Commander following behind me, which I turn to greet and run up backwards for a few steps smiling and waving. Mike and Judy slow down long enough to see if I need anything (“new legs?” I ask) and for me to ask how far up we are. “About 13 miles,” Mike replies. I’m happy and sad at the same time. Grateful to be almost three quarters done because it means I’m running the pace I had hoped, but sad because it means it will soon be over. I warn them that the next time Mike comes by, as he drives back to the start to support the cyclists, he may find me walking. I say this to give myself permission to walk if necessary, but also as incentive not to walk. I'm a bit crazy that way. Later when Mike drives back down, luckily for my psyche, I'm not walking.

My run has now shifted back into more familiar territory. No longer a solitary, into-the-dark-night-of-the-soul journey, it is now of bright sunlight, hunger and sweat as the miles start to take their toll. My focus becomes less interior and more on how my camelback is rubbing my shoulder and my left foot is throbbing. The miles become more laborious and I start to doubt I’ll make it to the top before the crew arrives.

Just when the questions begin to infiltrate, I pass by a lake to my right and know this is my sign it’s only a mile or two to go. Amazing how this knowledge shifts everything – doubts fade and my legs pick-up pace. I become aware of how far I was leaning forward and regain a more upright posture. My feet shuffle less and actually completely leave the ground at times.

Before I know it, I see the Ebbett’s Pass Summit sign. Wow! That wasn’t bad at all!

Now, if only I knew what time it is. I better get going on that second road sign for Bubba. “Go, Fat Ass!” seems to take forever to write, but it’s on the last climb so I’m sure she’ll be going slowly enough to read it.* I have more time than I think, and since no one has yet come riding up, I head over to a sunny spot to stretch and drink the last of my water. (*Note: I found out later that Wendy did not see either of my signs. Oh, well, it's the thought that counts!)

A few hikers approach me from one of the Pacific Crest Trailheads and inform me it is only 8:15am. I have been at the top for at least fifteen minutes, and I’m not expecting the first rider until 8:30, probably. I made great time, that's the good news. However, I’m already starting to shiver from the sweat on my clothes freezing on my skin. So much for the high-tech wicking fabric I’m wearing.

In time I hear, “hey, Courtenay,” shouted out by an image in the sun that I can’t quite make out but I take to be the voice of Himgan cresting the hill. Yeaaaaaaaah! And good ol’ Bubba is not far behind. We’re usually the last riders on every day, but today we’re happy to be at the front, albeit one of us on foot with a significant head start. As I run behind Wendy to give her a big hug, I misstep in the cattle guard (see photo) and twist my ankle. Great. Himgan heroically picks me up from the side of the road and takes me to a rock outcropping, then carries over a small boulder on which to rest my aching foot. He even wraps my ankle in his arm warmer. Andrea, he's a keeper!

C.I.T. Mike and his high school crew buddy, Chris, pull up and throw some warm fleece and blankets around me, ply me with Nutter Butter cookies, Advil and water. Fred, too, arrives with good cheer and praise. Other than the ache of my ankle, I’m thrilled to be with my pals again and, now for the first time all week, have the chance to ride on the other side, participate in the behind-the-scenes efforts of the support crew and photograph everyone while they’re riding. These are the perks of having a bummed bike and ankle…you've got to look on the bright side.

Pacific Grade chews up and spits out a few of our riders on the next and (probably) toughest section of climbing we’d seen all week. My roomie Laura swears she was “going to arrest” while climbing and took away from the experience that “oxygen is overrated.” She survives, they all do. At the top, we enjoy majestic Mosquito Lake (which Fred suggests got that name to scare off all the tourists, as though the high Sierras are ridden with tourists…). Wendy's pal Marc is jolly as usual, the only one not to use an expletive in describing the gradient just conquered. He works for San Francisco's Department of Public Health - you'd think he would be a little jaded. But no, he's just jolly. The n-oyve!
The ride continues to Bear Valley and down into the little town of Murphy’s, which is one of my favorite places to eat ice cream in all of California. You’ve got to eat at the mini-50s-esque Peppermint Stick Ice Cream Parlour on Main Street. More importantly to us Black Sheep Adventures campers, our namesake winery is right in town. I bail to nurse my ankle, but from the looks of it, the gang has a great time tasting the Black Sheep wine and posing in compromising positions with the mascot sheep outside. I must point out here that some images in this blog were not taken by yours truly, but by the budding photographer and roommate Laura Walpert who likes to claim she takes better images than me. Ha! I think it's all the fairy dust I've left on my camera that she's absorbed.

We finish out our evening, the last one together as a team, with dinner at Firewood followed by more ice cream at the Peppermint Stick. A few of us stay out talking (good to begin getting to know you, Mike!) and enjoying the warm evening while others collapse back in their rooms at the Old Murphy’s Historic Hotel.

And evening cones on the sixth day.

DAY 7: Murphys to Davis (change in plans...you'll see why)
Boy am I glad my bike pooped out on me when I begin following in Fred’s van the final morning of our ride. Crossing the street out of the hotel in Murphy’s, they immediately begin an ascent up a damaged, narrow, winding road. Jackets and arm warmers immediately peel off as the riders twist and turn, rattle and shake their way out of Murphy’s.

A flat tire sidelines Bubba temporarily, while the flies that were supposed to be at Mosquito Lake the day before have flocked to the faces of our riders today. We’re not talking an annoying bug here or there – we’re talking swarms of gnats surrounding their faces, flying in their noses and mouths. I have newfound appreciation for what farm animals put up with day in and day out. Poor, sweet Bambi lay (no, not asleep, Fred) on the side of the road, and at another spot I have to hike up my pants in haste as a local farmer comes out of his house to greet us. It's a nastily hot and sticky day with trouble in many directions...

There is already much cursing and gnashing of teeth on this day, a day that becomes only more wild and hairy as Fred’s fifteen-passenger van falls ill behind the majority of riders at about the fifty-mile mark. It’s only about 100 degrees and AAA takes its sweet time (a few hours) to come to Fred and Sarah's (one of the riders who happens to be near Fred when they go down) aid. A local guy helps tow the van off the road, and, long story short, it turns out a bee has flown into and expired in the van’s air filter, throwing off its electronic sensor. I’m telling you, it’s a wild world out there.

The crew hunkers down at a roadside gas station, huddled in the shade we can find on the asphalt under the front awning. What a site. Us and the bike (as in motorcycle, not spandex-wearing) club and ski-boat towing locals drinking beer and eating watermelon to pass the time.
The proprietor attempts to soothe my aching foot by vigorously rubbing an herbal balm from his country (India) on my ankle, I revert back to icing and whimpering. The "campers" do what any smart cyclists would do - buy beer, peanuts, velveeta and other junk and start playing card games and arm wrestle. Their good humor helps distract me and passes the time rather well.

While the day's ride is cut short by the bee's attack on the van, it is in some ways the most fun for many of the riders. Cards, Coronas and watermellon; nothing to do but get to know each other and make the best of the situation. Fred, Mike and Sarah take care of the van and of us, and the drive back to Berkeley is quiet only in that we're all sad for our trip to come to an end. Until next year, then...thank you all for a great week that went beyond expectation!

Wynton Marsalis at the Paramount

2007-02-18T08:04:00.001-08:00

My Pops, who has taken to calling himself, "cool papa bell" of late, is a member of the board of directors of the Paramount Center for the Arts in Peekskill, NY. This historic theatre, built in 1930 as a 1500-seat movie house, today provides live performances, arts-in-education programs, films, and visual art exhibitions to the mid-Hudson region.

On Saturday, 27 January Wynton Marsalis headlined an incredible although too-short benefit performance at the Paramount. Marsalis' quintet, included Walter Blanding on tenor sax, Ali Jackson on drums, Dan Nimmer on piano and Carlos Henriquez on bass. They were accompanied by Joe Lovano and a delightful 21-year old woman, alto singer Jennifer Sanon. Playing before a sold-out house.

One of my favorite pieces was composed by Marsalis, titled "The Magic Hour," in reference to the time in which parents prepare their children for sleep. The composition, in four parts, followed the child's frenetic energy, to bath and brushing of teeth, to reading of bedtime stories, and finally to lights-out and falling asleep. The decrescendo over the four pieces echoed the (hoped for!) descending energy of children at bedtime. Casting a wide grin, Marsalis intoned that after hearing this section, we would be treated to the "adult's magic hour," leaving us to our own imagination of what the four parts (with an apex and denouement) would entail. What a treat.
If you're not familiar with Marsalis' work, or history as an artist, composer and organizer, check out Jazz at Lincoln Center, an organization and performance space for which Marsalis continues to be the driving force.

Blood Diamond: Kadir van Lohuizen Photography

2007-02-15T06:40:00.001-08:00

As a graduate student at the International Center of Photography (ICP), I often benefit from access to an impressive network of photographers, educators, editors and intellectuals in the media world (and what world is not the media world, these days?)

This past Tuesday, at our weekly photojournalism studies seminar, Kadir van Lohuizen and Stanley Greene, who were members of Agence VU in Paris, visited our class and shared their work, their thoughts and their experiences. If you are not familiar with them as photographers, you should check out their work (click on their names below).

Kadir van Lohuizen is most recognized for his work following the trail of diamonds from Sierra Leone to Saks Fifth Avenue. Working with NGOs (non-governmental organizations), which were the only source of funding he was able to procure in advance of embarking upon his journey, he was able to spend the better part of a year traveling the world in an attempt to stay on the trail of diamonds.

One of the NGOs with whom he has worked closely is Global Witness. You can read their UN reports and more about the situation by going to their "combating conflict diamonds" page.

If you haven't already seen the movie, Blood Diamond, (read and listen to a discussion on NPR) with Leonardo DiCaprio, you might check that out, as well. I haven't seen the film, but van Lohuizen indicated that, putting the Hollywood-isms aside, it's a pretty accurate portrayal of how bloody the diamond industry is.

You can learn more about van Lohuizen's experience, and background on the terms "blood diamond" and "conflict diamond" by reading his exhibition artist statement on the Soros Foundation's Open Society Institute website. Here is an excerpt:

"In the 1990s, I covered the fighting in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), Sierra Leone, and Angola, conflicts that were often dismissed as tribal wars, the final convulsions of the Cold War. By degrees, however, these conflicts turned into struggles over diamonds.
The diamond deposits, for the most part, were controlled by the Angolan and Sierra Leonean rebels, who used the gems as a means to buy weapons. Governments got in on the act, and the terms "blood diamond" and "conflict diamond" were born."

Stanley Greene was also on hand to talk about his work, offering the students gathered at ICP a moving and vulnerable testimony. Greene and van Louhizen have been colleagues while they worked with Agence VU, and more recently as co-grantees with the support of the Soros Foundation to document both the damage in Mississippi and Louisiana, as well as post-Katrina responses by the government. You'll find this online about Greene:

Stanley Greene (US. B. 1949) was born in Harlem, and as a teenager was a member of the Black Panthers and an anti-Vietnam War activist. An encounter with W. Eugene Smith turned his energies to photography. By chance he was on hand to record the fall of the Berlin Wall, which made him a much-sought-after photojournalist. He has photographed wars and poverty in Sudan, Croatia and India, and made a great impression with the photo book Open Wound: Chechnya 1994-2000. Greene is represented by Agence Vu, and won the W. Eugene Smith Award in 2004.

Stanley's most recent work, at least that was shared with us, is with regard to a new website he is finalizing. I don't have the URL at this time, but will update in a future post so that you can read his words and hear his voice, personally. Meanwhile, check out images he took in Chad and in Katrina (an excerpt of images from Louisiana, An Unnatural Disaster,
can be seen online).

The Future of the News Media

2007-02-12T06:00:00.001-08:00

Check out this report on National Public Radio's website:

Investigative reporter Lowell Bergman is the producer of the new documentary, News War: Secrets, Spin and the Future of the News. The series is about the mainstream news media and the political, legal and economic forces at play. Aired on Fresh Air, WHYY. 12 February 2007.

Discipline and Hard Work at the Armory

2007-02-02T22:26:00.001-08:00

The New Balance Collegiate Invitational is being held today and tomorrow, 2-3 February 2007. If you've never been, as I had not prior to today, you're missing out. I was overwhelmed by the amount of talent and energy in the arena. In fact, just walking up to the building (it's one block west of the 168th Street subway station), there were more runners than taxis; more team colors than I could keep track of. I had goose bumps before walking in the door.
Here are some photos of the event...the collegiate athletes as well as of the Westchester Track Club .