The Times Quotidian

Changi Airpoirt, Singapore
By Marla Apt

For a California girl any trip to India is accompanied by an egregious amount of travel. If you put your finger on the globe it becomes immediately clear that there is no short cut to getting half way around the world. Upon landing into the unwelcoming arms of LAX, after a trip that ushered me through seven airports, I am reminded of being carried through my journey in the gentler and far more public minded transit station of the Singapore airport.

The vast Changi terminal, Singapore, is designed to satisfy every desire of the weary traveler, mostly sleep. Upon stepping off the plane, you can sit in one of the free calf and foot massage chairs littered throughout the terminals to settle for 15 minutes of muscle squeezing and lymph drainage. Or head directly to one of the hands on massage or foot reflexology lounges. Whereas most airports provide chairs and benches with armrests to ensure that transit passenger remain vertical, there is no location in the Changi airport where it would be considered undignified to sleep. From long padded benches to couches and even reclining chaise lounges, spreading out and relaxing are encouraged. The dozens of TV lounges provide over-sized padded chairs circled around a large screen broadcasting (according to the lounge’s theme) international news channels, sports or the daytime talk shows. Those who prefer not to fall asleep in front of the Oprah Winfrey show can settle into one of the reclining chairs in a secluded resting lounge, a corridor facing a stone wall water fountain. Or for complete privacy the transit hotel rooms equipped with attached, bathroom are available for 6 hours. For a three-hour nap you can rent a small room with a bed and attached bath. For $10 you can use the gym (gym clothes and shoes available for rent) and showers.

Free internet computers are plentifully scattered throughout the airport as well as free wifi and charging stations.  You can stand on a bridge and watch the robust koi fed daily at specified times in the sleek back marble pond or experience the local climate in a screened-in butterfly garden. Hanging folded from trees, apparently butterflies also sleep at night. Waking entertainment includes shopping malls, a 24 hour free movie theater, local craft demonstrations, children’s playrooms, or a stroll through a fern or orchid garden. Food courts offer plenty of Southeast Asian dining as well as dim sum, Indian, Italian cuisine or the usual American fast food franchises. And to stay awake as you prepare to arrive in your next destination in the early morning, you can choose coffee from the American chains, Italian espresso, or sample the local kopi, a strong coffee concentrate mixed with hot water and condensed milk. Or to put you right back to sleep, have your kopi with its traditional Indonesian breakfast of soft poached eggs stirred with soy sauce into a brown soup served alongside wide toasted slices of fluffy white bread spread thick with butter and kaya (coconut custard).

Missoni, Milan RTW Fall 2010
By Nancy Cantwell

In a season filled with respectable, rational, dressed offerings, some of which I cannot resist myself (there is a white coat at Gucci that is formidable!), the show that I still return to with relish is Missoni. It was a passionate display of pattern, texture, color, and family fun. Prepped by the ad campaign that featured three generations of Missonis, bathed in zigzags, delighting in one another and mugging for photographer Jurgen Teller, one could not help but succumb to the ebullient clan atmosphere of the collection. The throw pieces pinned at various points of the body come down the runway with a defiant spirit as if to say “clean cut camel…not interested!” Those familiar with the Missoni brand color palettes will not be disappointed. The shades of pink, turquoise and green were all there and accounted for, but the surprising surplus of black was new. Intricate noir crocheted creations walked with ease and sex appeal. Fur, this years de rigueur medium, made a scant appearance, mostly as collars that balanced nicely with the blanketed knitwear. Another odd, but effective paring was the addition of shiny accessories, cuffs, sunglasses and neck pieces that supplied a thought provoking contrast to all that thread.

Meet the Missonis. Founding partners Rosita and Ottavio (called Tai) started the Missoni empire in 1953 opening a small knitwear workshop in Gallarate, Italy. Daughter Angela became principal designer 1996, her older brother Vittorio is the company’s marketing director, and Luca is the creative director of the menswear collections and Missoni Sport. Third generation Missonis include Francesco, Margherita (who debuted this year as designer of her first accessories line), Teresa and Marco all whom were on hand for the Fall 2010 Milan show. Each member of this handsome and enchanting family is enough to make one relinquish one’s own heritage to grab a chance to become Made in Italy. It is worth spending some time with the “history” section of the Missoni site to get acquainted with the vast accomplishments of this multi-talented family.

All of this brand madness led me to traipse on over to the newly opened 7,500 sq. ft. Missoni boutique in Beverly Hills. Angela Missoni teamed with architects Patrick Kinmonth and Antonio Monfreda to create a pristine, whitewashed environment to call home. This was the first complete building project for the architects whose previous achievements include Valentino’s retrospective in Rome at ARA PACIS. The building is sheathed with woven slats of white powder coated steel that echo the famous brand’s own knits. Each dress, bikini, men’s sweater, bag and pillow get a chance to be seen in its own right. So much of their work is suited for California casual luxe chic. When a sales associate unfurled a scarf/sarong for me to view, it was an intoxicating close brush with an impulse buy.

Hidden in Plain Sight
by Guy Zimmerman

Revolutionary Road is a film centered around the emotional state referred to in Buddhist literature as “lack.” Leonardo DiCaprio, working with Kate Winslet and director Sam Mendes, made Revolutionary Road as an homage to the novel of the same name by Richard Yates. Showing the same restraint the Coen brothers brought to the filming of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, the makers of Revolutionary Road get out of the way and let Yates’ text have it’s say. And, again like No Country, Revolutionary Road concludes in an enigmatic way that indicates the presence of a rich vein of meaning.

Set in the stratified social hierarchy of 1950s America, the story begins as Frank and April Wheeler move into a new home on Revolutionary Road in suburban Connecticut. Already the Wheelers are afflicted by a nameless malaise; behind the breezy, self-confidant banter, lack casts its corrosive shadow. Ready to seize the day, April pleads with her husband to move to Paris and pursue his literary calling. Frank agrees initially, then balks at the last minute, choosing instead to climb the corporate ladder at his firm, which is devoted to the selling of business machines. Cycling through episodes of rebellion and self denial, April spirals down until one day Frank arrives home to find medics out front and a pool of blood in the middle of his living room. On foot he races for the hospital, the camera tracking with him as he runs through the placid streets, arriving just in time to hear news of April’s death. We are given a glimpse of Frank  some months later sitting in mute incomprehension on a park bench in Manhattan where he has moved with his children. The film then veers off, returning to Revolutionary Road where the Wheeler’s realtor, Helen Giving (played by Kathy Bates), is showing their former home to a new pair of up-and-comers. Later that night, Helen gossips unmercifully about Frank and April to her husband Howard. The camera moves in slowly as Howard, a peripheral character up to now, reaches down and slowly turns the volume on his hearing aid down to zero. Through his eyes we watch as Helen’s lack-infused slander is slowly engulfed by the deep silence that underlies the false solidity of this world.

I happened to be reading David Loy’s A Buddhist History of the West when I saw Revolutionary Road and I realized that the novel’s central focus is the feeling of lack that Loy views as a defining feature of our collective life, the Rosetta Stone of Western history. You can think of lack as original sin if you want to be pre-modern about it; or you can adopt Marxist terminology and call it alienation; or free-floating anxiety if you’re a psycho-analytically inclined. In Loy’s view, this sense of lack is linked to our fundamental groundlessness in the world, and our inability to make peace with that groundlessness. Contact with other people only fuels the emotion. From the outside others seem so effortlessly rooted in the specific, so solid and grounded, that we fear we alone are deficient. For some the resultant feeling of lack is a nagging doubt, for others a consuming fire, but we all suffer from it to one degree or another, and our history of domination and social inequity can be viewed as an expression of lack.

Richard Yates, the author of Revolutionary Road, was no stranger to suffering. The product of a broken home, Yates struggled all his life with alcoholism, isolation and marital difficulties. His burnished, understated realism delivers knowledge earned the hard way, breath by breath, face pressed hard into the rough surfaces of experience. A Yates sentence feels as though it has been dragged shining out of a crucible where each moment has been reduced to molten silver searing to the touch. If you want to understand lack and what to do with it, read Trungpa, Pima Chodron or Stephen Batchelor. If you want to experience it directly, read Revolutionary Road, or, if time is short, rent the movie.

The image of poor Frank Wheeler on his blind run toward the hospital came to my mind a month ago. Driving home from delivering my daughter to school I got a call from my wife. The results of the fine needle aspirant, she told me, indicated that the lump beneath her ear was malignant rather than benign. Blood pounding in my ears I drove fast along side routes through the burnished, sunlit world to get home faster. I felt as if a large hand had taken hold of a branch of my nervous system and given it a good strong yank. Neurons entangled during the twenty years we have shared experience with each other were being pulled apart emitting bursts and tiny screams of light. All my self-centered ambitions, my trespasses and infidelities large and small, my many imagined glories, shames and failings seemed to trail behind my speeding mini-van – the meaningless streamers and confetti of the ego. There is no safety for us in this world.

In such times I give thanks for the various awareness and asana practices that help me stay open and present in the face of fear and despair. I’m fortunate to live in a time and place where the fruit of the great Asian wisdom traditions are readily available, often in a pragmatic, practice-based form that has been distilled by capable Western-born teachers. In January, for example, I was listening to a series of pod casts the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Ken McLeod gave recently as he worked out a new translation of the Ganges Mahamudra. This is the song the great 11th century renunciate Tilopa delivered to the scholar Naropa after suitable period of instructional abuse. One section of McLeod’s presentation in particular had a powerful impact on me, and the sense of stability and peace has continued to unfold through the stressful weeks since Jenny’s cancer was diagnosed.

But I also give thanks for a tradition that is equally transformational in its dogged way, an awareness lineage so secret it remains unrecognized even by itself. I’m talking about the tradition of modern art and literature as it has unfolded in protest against our prevailing materialism since the end of the 18th century. While the Ganges Mahamudra has been a source of strength in crisis, for example, the story Errand by Raymond Carver has also been coming to mind. The most beautiful description of dying I can think of, Errand recounts the final moments of Anton Chekhov’s death at the age of forty-two of tuberculosis. Carver wrote the story while he himself was dying of lung cancer. Like nothing else I know Errand captures the sense presence and ease in the face of whatever is arising that is the aim of mahamudra practice. To stay open and entirely present, at ease, even as death approaches is to give life its proper due.

It would not be so difficult for me to compose a list of eighty-four literary and artistic masters to hang alongside the traditional depictions of the eighty-four Mahasiddahs of the tantric traditions. Kafka and Beckett would be on that list, no doubt. Proust and Joyce would be included. Duchamp and Van Gogh. Dostoyevski, Tolstoy, Milosz and Celan. Rilke, certainly. Juan Rulfo, Harold Pinter, Isaac Babel, Flannery O’Connor and Thomas Bernhard. Raymond Carver, Richard Yates…I could go on (and on) and so, probably, could you. It’s easy to forget how radical the Romantics were, Byron and Keats in England, Holderlin and Novalis in Germany – these artists were filling a gap that had opened in the West when the Industrial Age began. Bereft of a viable means of engaging with Being via religion we developed a new mode of making art, a mode oriented toward forging new paths to the open ground of experience. Confronting an essential vulnerability, these pioneers opened new doorways into Being. There we can find timelessness and joy, which are the experiences lack can open into if worked with correctly.

There are times when I believe this movement reached its conclusion in the 1970s with Burroughs, Warhol and Ashberry. Now, as this new mode of Being percolates out into the population (we’re all artists today), the role of art itself moves around again in the Classical direction. In a world full of YouTube-auteurs simple skill – craft – becomes again a relief. Be that as it may, I want to close with the image of Frank Wheeler on his park bench in Manhattan. Devastated by the sudden loss of the familiar emotional coordinates of his life, he is unable to recognize himself in the luminosity that surrounds him. What he needs at that moment is an eloquent and convincing bodhisatva …or at least a good novel to point out where to look, how to stay open.

Holi, Festival of Colors
by Marla Apt

Hi Friends,
Only on the drive back to Rishikesh this afternoon from Haridwar did I recall that my horoscope in the newspaper yesterday (which I read before departing on my-cross country journey to Rishikesh from Pune via taxi, plane, train, and jeep) advised that I should be careful of long distance travel and take special precautions when traveling by car.

The International Yoga Festival at the Parmarth Niketan Ashram on the banks of the Ganges river in Rishikesh began this morning in true Indian form, with a change of schedule. As festival participants from around the globe arrived at the ashram, the infamous television yogi, Ramdev invited Swami Chidanand Saraswati (the spritual head of the ashram) to attend a celebration of the national holiday, Holi at a leper colony in the neighboring town of Haridwar. Haridwar also happens to be the host of the current Kumbha Mela, a religious festival that occurs when the planets align once every twelve years. Full of a who’s who of Hindu saints, mystics, and sadhus, Haridwar is pregnant with pilgrims and celebration. The trifecta of the yoga festival, Holi, and Kumbha Mela brought us (an international group of yoga festival teachers accompanying Swamiji) together with Ramdev, and Sri Sri Ravi Shankar (another famous figure who founded the global meditation program, the Art of Living).

The Holi celebration at the leper colony was mostly for the benefit of the children of the lepers who live separated from their parents to avoid contagion. The “play” of Holi involves smearing the people around you with brightly colored powders as well as showering them with colored liquids and rose petals. The game is not limited to children however. Adults (mostly men) take to the festivities with an enthusiasm that is fueled by the accompaniment of alcohol and the perhaps the opportunity to grope women when applying color to their body.

After being publicly doused on stage in front of television cameras by the honored guests, we drove in a caravan of spacious SUVs to the kumbha tent of Sri Sri Ravi Shanker to join his Holi celebration. I remember looking out the window at the scene of camps of endless pilgrim tents when the car jolted. Sitting in the middle of the backseat row with no seatbelt available and nothing in front of me to break my thrust, I flew forward and opened my eyes to discover them two inches away from the dashboard. The hood of our car crumpled into the SUV we rear-ended. Both cars however continued to drive without even stopping to review the damage, let alone discuss the notion of fault. The only issue of concern was whether or not the car was functional enough to reach the next destination. It is said that our karma cannot be avoided. If we are meant to be in an accident, it is destined. But the circumstances of our lives, the company we keep, and our sadhana (spiritual practice), can minimize the severity of the manifestation of karma. I’ll choose to regard it as a blessing that I managed to burn some due negative karma unscathed.

We dusted ourselves off and proceeded to the stage of Sri Sri Ravi Shankar where the guests of honor were greeted like rock stars by a packed audience. The three long haired, bearded, robed holy men smeared each other with colors, embraced, sang and danced like a group of schoolboys. They gave speeches and the famous percussionist that had been in our party roused the crowd while pounds of rose petals were tossed through the air. After returning to the ashram stained in bright green, yellow, fuschia, and red, we bathed (fully clothed) in the sacred Ganges. All in my first morning in Rishikesh.

Thinking of you all with love,

Marla

The Art of Pam DeLuco
by Naomi Pitcairn

On a recent foray to Michael’s – “The Arts and Crafts Store”, amidst a jungle of fake flowers and pre-assembled memories I had an “epiphany beside the wall of Easter Bunnies”. It would appear that hand made has not only lost its place in “art” but also its place in craft. It seems to have morphed into a ready-made elite pastime fashioned on figurines, stickers and plastic jewels. As we carefully decorate, glue and frame with pre-packaged stuff made in far away lands, are we not just supporting the art of mega industry? In our attempts to feel a feigned sense of loving hands of home are we not undermining the very politics of hand made?

The time honored politics of “hand made” are those of self-sufficiency; the practice of traditional craft an act of independence. Now in the face of an extinction trend, the skill and personal production of useful objects have become potent form of protest. The convention of the reactionary has produced a new kind of rebel. A post-modern protester whose work involves an intimate connection both to their materials and to the land.

The Bay Area has always been a petrie dish for all movements of protest and one such notable group of rebels is chronicled by Philip Leider, then editor of Artforum (June 1962–December 1971), who upon returing from a road trip to the West Coast in 1970, published “How I Spent My Summer Vacation… Or, Art and Politics in Nevada, Berkeley, San Fransisco and Utah.” Leider had become disillusioned with the political potential of art and looked to the pastoral craft ethos as a possible solution.* Leider argued the future of not only political radicalism, but art making itself, lies in an intimate connection to the land instead of New York art galleries. He found, in the separatist commune near Berkeley, named Canyon potential. [In Canyon] “it is worth your life to cut down a tree” as the inhabitants are determined to “effect no change in the natural ecology of the region.” Leider was particularly keen on the leader of the Canyon commune, David Lynn, a sculptor from Berkeley, who had rejected the avant-garde to become a house builder. “…it seemed pretty clear that as far as Lynn was concerned, every sculptural idea he ever had was in his building. The revolution in Lynn’s art, if there was one, was dictated by the terrain…”

Like the Bay Area innovators of Canyon, whose work involved an intimate connection both to their materials and to the land, so does current SF based artist Pam DeLuco practice her art. There is an ethos behind the work. Ethos defined as “morality, expertise and knowledge.” Her pieces are an exploration of their own provenance, investigating the origins of materials and techniques involved by the cultures where they are practiced. Years traveling and living with people in remote areas of Central and South America gave DeLuco the opportunity to study up close the Ngöbe women of western Panamá where the elaborately patterned Chácara bag is crafted and The Choco people of Panama where the fruit of the jagua tree is used to produce decorative pigments for body paint.

Back state side, she uses the deep crimson dye, carmine, extracted from the female cochineal larvae and indigos collected from the Indigofera tinctoria, a member of the pea family. Cochineal is one of the few water-soluble colorants that resist degradation with time while her Indigo is processed using the preindustrial method of reduction (chemical alteration), dissolving the indigo in stale urine. Not an easy system to put into routine practice.

Behind the innocent facade of a crocheted pillow cover lies a patient connection to the hand-spun, 6-strand, Tussah silk, cable yarn and end medallions from her hand-reared Bombyx mori silkworms. Over a period of 60 days she carefully charts the progress of the eggs as they hatch, eat their way through tasty Mulberry leaves, become fat juicy worms who then cocoon producing the silky fuzz that is spun into thread. Allowing the cycle to complete the moths emerge, mate, reproduce and the new eggs are stored until the following spring when the process will repeat.

When the fur of an animal required, DeLuco is unflappable in her sympathetic acquisition of raw materials. The hand-knit sweaters require only the hand-spun Angora from her house pet rabbit, Jambo. The braided horsehair tassels, belts, hatband, and stampede strings are procured from the horses under her care. When hand-spun Qiviut down is required for knitted gloves, Pam is there at the San Francisco Zoo collecting the precious material off the fence.

As newcomer to the Bay Area, where artists and craftsmen like DeLuco have migrated in order to be with like-minded thinkers and rebels, I, like Philip Leider and others before me, am humbled. These practitioners are our seed banks, protagonists in the technique of know-how and self-reliance. More than a self-conscious authenticity, or token tribute to ennoble the vernacular, DeLuco is prepared, indeed steeped in the politics of hand-made; not a backwards looking nostalgia, nor revivalist idealism, but a proactive pursuit to find equanimity within our time.