Just back from Fiji, where there was scant chance to upload my latest stories … but it was so  refreshing to be in a place where I couldn’t check my email! Anyhow, the dispatches are going up — there will be two of them — and you can find them, as ever, on the Seacology website.

Why is it so difficult to keep up with these entries? When does it become a chore, like flossing? And how do some of my friends, like monologist Mike Daisey, manage to write two, three, eight entries a DAY?? Go figure.

For six weeks, my inability to simply sit down and compose a blog, any blog, has weighed on me like … like … like a giant head. For a number of reasons, my mid-April trip to Rapa Nui – aka Easter Island – landed me in an existential funk. The moai, the famous stone heads, are everywhere; there are nearly 900 of them. And while some visitors are spellbound by their mystery and grandeur (which are hard to resist, even though we’ve seen a thousand pictures of them), I found that they, well, put me in MY head. The obsessive manufacture of the moai – enormous projects which exhausted a culture and its resources — were an uncomfortable metaphor for the pitfalls awaiting a solitary soul with artistic pretentions.  

But enough about me. It’s a lovely place, Rapa Nui, reminiscent at times of Point Reyes National Seashore (my favorite place in the world). Much of the island’s landscape (which was completely deforested, perhaps to build the moai) consists of broad, grassy hills, rolling from the crests of ancient volcanoes toward cliffs that tower over a cobalt-blue sea. The people are beautiful, the dances are wild, and the mangoes are the most luscious gold you’ll ever see.

My next port of call will be Fiji, on a final assignment for Seacology. I’ll be visiting two village projects – one on Vanua Levu, the other on Taveuni – and filing dispatches from June 22nd ‘til early July. You’ll be able to read them, as ever, on the Seacology website.

Another reading recommendation: Mockingbird, by Walter Tevis. Tevis may be the most famous writer you’ve never heard of; his books include The Hustler, The Color of Money, and his science fiction classic, The Man Who Fell to Earth. Mockingbird is also sci-fi, more along the lines of 1984 than 2001. (Hey, it’s an open secret that my real literary passion is not travel writing, but science fiction.) It’s a beautiful novel about a distant future when the world is run by caretaker robots, and people no longer know how to read – except for one man, who builds his vocabulary by watching an ancient cache of silent movies.

Tevis, who wrote and taught in Ohio and New York, died in 1984. I wish he were alive, so I could buy him a drink. The least I can do is launch a Tevis revival.

And so I wrap up this long-delayed blog, and slouch into June — always rough seas for me. My brother Jordan’s birthday was June 6th. He took his life in March, 1990, at 33, overwhelmed by the drama and despair within his own monumental head. This Summer I’m unusually focused on that event: a San Francisco filmmaker has asked me to work with him on a short film about suicide. It’s in the early stages, but I’ll provide details as they emerge.

And for those wondering about Strange Travel Suggestions – look for one-off performances late in the Summer and early Fall, at SF’s Mechanic’s Institute, and Berkeley’s Freight & Salvage.

It’s funny; I wrote the title line for this blog without thinking, then realized two things. First, it’s also the title of the late Paul Bowles’ autobiography. Second, it was exactly twelve years ago, during the epic journey described in my book  The Size of the World, that I spent Passover with Bowles at his home in Tangier, Morocco. I brought the bedridden Bowles raw honey from the local souk, which we ate with round matzohs (unleavened bread) I’d received from the Tangier Synagogue. Bowles and I raised our wineglasses, and I toasted “to liberation.” “Oh?” Bowles raised his eyebrows. “Do you believe it’s possible?”

In fact, I do. Maybe that’s why Passover has always been one of my favorite holidays – in any country, religion or culture. Recounting the tale of the Exodusfrom Egypt, the “Feast of Freedom” may well be the longest-running ritual in human history, having been observed every year for at least three millennia. The entire Passover Sedar, with its sweet apples and bitter herbs, is simply a vehicle for story-telling: something that has become more and more important in my own creative life. (more…)

Always so much to say when I’m traveling. From my journeys to Sulawesi and Bali emerged an ecstasy of expository epigrams, emitted from the environmental epicenters of some small but significant islands. (You can now find those dispatches in hoary archives of the Seacology Foundation; how quickly news fades into memory.)

It was a long, productive, but exhausting trip: six weeks in Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand and India, enjoying the separation from church and state but also aware, every day, of how much the world has changed—and how much I have changed—since my first Asian odyssey, many long years ago. On my final day in Nepal in 1984, I remember walking around a sacred ficus tree holding the hand of a little blind boy, offering prayers to Saraswati and fighting back tears; during my last day in Thailand, just a few weeks ago, I went to see King Kong (the new one, of course) at the Siam Center multiplex, where I had to wrap myself in broadsheets from the Bangkok Post to fight off the cryogenic blast of the air conditioning.

The ape is loose, all right. Learn to love it.  (more…)

…Smells a lot like Balinese incense these days. That’s what I’m immersed in, along with the bathyspheric strains of System 777’s Fire+Water CD, as I prepare for a November 10th departure to Indonesia and beyond. It’s the longest semi-open-ended trip I’ve taken in a while, and though it won’t compare with the 16-month odysseys that defined my younger days, it promises to be an amazing series of adventures.

The expedition will begin in Sulawesi, an Ichabod Crane-shaped island north of Bali and east of Singapore. I’ll be working with the Berkeley-based Seacology Foundation, writing about their ingenious environmental projects and sending dispatches back to Salon, Islands, and the Seacology site itself – not to mention my own party, Ethical Traveler. (Visit the Events section for web links.)

Among Seacology’s efforts in northern Sulawesi is a project to protect and rehabilitate the coral reefs around Bunaken Island, at Sulawesi’s northern tip. My story about diving that spectacular area (where Charles Wallace did his research) appears in the current issue of Outside Adventures. But words can’t do justice to the experience of diving in those warm, pristine waters, whose residents include the elusive and amazing ghost pipefish. Because the Bunaken reefs are above a sheer wall 10,00 feet deep, cool upwellings have prevented coral bleaching. In my opinion, Bunaken ties with Palau as the world’s best dive spot. (more…)

Honestly, cyberpals, I don’t know what kind of weird-ass art you’re into, but I saw a show today that amazed me – as I knew it would, after seeing the invitation. The work is by East Bay artist Susan Danis, and the show is called PLEASURE. There are 33 sculptures in the show (at the Berkeley Art Center), all assemblages. Danis’ materials include everything and anything she can find, wherever she can find it, from the floor of SuperCuts to the oral surgeon’s trash bin: human hair, socks, rubber snakes, locks, teeth, nets and chains, bull testicles, tails and manes, freeze-dried moles and anal plugs, cigar tips and natural pearls, giant gems and glass eyes…. (more…)

In the afterglow, it all seems like a dream.

And so much of it is utterly dreamlike. The steel ladder with 108 rungs, rising from the alkaline anvil of the Playa into the radiant sky; the giant Unicorn with its jeweled eye, breaking from the flat expanse of earth; the woman with a purple hat and giant tricycle, offering ice-cold milk and homemade cookies to the dust-covered vagabonds on the seemingly infinite plain.

So much has been said about Burning Man, and every experience is so unique,
that the thought of writing about it has never occurred to me. It’s like trying to draw a tesseract – a four-dimensional object – in two dimensions. My experience in Black Rock City is all about stories, conveyed not on the page but in urgent or sleepy tones, tinged with wonder or disbelief, told over gritty-eyed breakfasts or dinners by Coleman light, fingers tracing accidental semaphores through the fine layers of dust on coffee cups and tortilla chip bags…

My own stories from the Burn are as personal as dreams. It’s difficult enough to convey them on the Playa itself, let alone to all of you out in cyberspace. Let’s just say that one makes a lot of wishes, and says a lot of prayers – and the stories we tell are often about how those wishes come true, or how certain signs and symbols indicate that they may, someday, be fulfilled. Like the Tin Man from Oz, I left Black Rock City with a big rubber heart around my neck, its soft red valves pulsing with a rainbow of LEDs…. But scattered amongst the thicker themes are countless other encounters; some of them my own, others conveyed by my dusty pals. (After a while, it’s like the borderline between memory and imagination; you can’t really remember what you actually saw, what you heard about, or what you dreamed of. Writing that makes me think about Aboriginal dreamtime, which displays a similar alchemy.) A few examples:

The man who blindfolded his eyes with duct tape, and walked the Playa with a cane and a “Guide Me” sign. (To up the ante, he spent an afternoon manning the Kissing Booth.) The dominatrix with a whip, who led a giant insect across Black Rock City on a leash. The art car shaped like a giant giraffe. The camp where you made a big pizza, and “delivered” it to anyone you met on the playa. The big, boisterous ladies from Texas, serving goblets of wine from a convertible covered in glowing grapes. The fire-filled footsteps leading to an enormous steel sculpture of Mother and Child, a cascade of flame joining their hands. And the Grand Hotel Ashram Galactica: Black Rock City’s first “luxury hotel,” with an eager-to-please concierge poised in a gorgeous Moroccan tent where dried figs, vodka, and buckets of ice waited on the lobby tables.  (more…)

                               
The three or four of you familiar with my more obscure works may have picked up a copy of Future Perfect: How Star Trek Conquered Planet Earth. Written with great expectations, the book fizzled when my gleeful publicist at Viking – a huge Trek fan with posters of Kirk and Spock on his walls – quit in an unexplained huff a couple of months before the 1999 release date.

One of my favorite characters in that book was Ronald D. Moore, a Star Trek: The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine producer (he also co-wrote, with Brannon Braga, the Trek films Generations and First Contact). Moore added immeasurably to the Star Trek universe; he was, by popular estimation, the “Margaret Meade of the Klingon Empire.” But he left that world with a bad taste in his mouth, after running afoul of Braga on Voyager. I’d wondered what had become of Moore – until I read John Hodgman’s recent New York Times Magazine story about the new Battlestar Galactica series on the Sci-Fi channel. Somehow, the ship – and show – had slipped right under my radar.

Last night, my friend Mark Wagner (who painted the fabulous Wheel used in Strange Travel Suggestions) and I bought a LoCoco pizza, and watched the whole three-hour Battlestar Galactica mini-series in a marathon of edgy ethereal madness.

Even with my high expectations—I’m a huge fan of Moore’s work—the show is amazing. It’s dark, edgy, old-fashioned sci-fi, a cheeky blend of high- and low-tech with frequent nods to 2001 and Blade Runner, a subtle touch of Trek around the edges. (more…)