Terror in Siberia.

Valentine, one of my three kupe-mates from Vladivostok to Irkutsk, with a smoked fish.

Last night I finally got a chance to watch Transsiberian, the 2008 thriller/noir by Brad Anderson starring Woody Harrelson, Emily Mortimer and Ben Kingsley. I stay away from horror films usually; I'm too susceptible to fear and anxiety on the screen because I've stayed away from the medium of moving image - to my detriment - for so long. I am not properly anestecized to it. But because of my own trip across Russia, from Vladivostok to Moscow in the spring of 2006, I had an interest in seeing how the train and the Russian culture and environment are depicted.

Anderson gets a lot right: the isolation of being alone in a foreign country; the difficulties of not speaking the language or understanding custom; the harshness of Russian faces and seeming hostility toward foreigners, particularly Americans; the confinement and discomfort of the train; the vastness of Siberia; and the lawlessness and corruption of Russia.

In the two main characters, Roy and Jesse, Anderson paints the divergent approaches to a foreign environment. Roy is carefree and joyful, bounding with enthusiasm for the train, the landscape, the food and the people. He has no sense of self-consciousness, suspicion or danger. Their cabin mates tell him that he is obviously an American. Jesse, who has more worldly experience, finds it difficult to trust those on the train who try to befriend them. She is not as naive as Roy and is made apprehensive by her observations of others.

When their cabin mates ask to see their passports, Roy offers his up with nothing to hide. Jesse is suspicious of their cabin mates' intentions. Her suspicions are clear in her expression and this in turn causes the cabin mates to watch her more closely, a cycle of inhibitions and suspiscions that escalates to fear.

In the dining car, a neighbor tells them the story of a traveler who did not have the proper Visa for Russia and was detained for 28 days, interrogated, tortured with knives and the removal of two toes, and forced to pay $5000 for release. After the story, he tells them to take care and limps off through the car. Jesse and Roy try to laugh it off as a story meant to scare them, choosing to not believe it.

Later, an old man joins in a show-and-tell of scars by flashing a tattoo on his right forearm. "What did you do?" Jesse asks. "He wrote poetry," another Russian explains.

As Americans, our understanding of lawlessness is remote and cursory. We see photos of war-torn countries in the newspaper, we read of authoritarianism in books or see government and criminal violence in movies, but we can't conceive of the world as a place where the police or government can't be relied on to uphold individual rights. Yes, there is plenty of police brutality, government fraud, drug dealing and theft in the U.S. but ours is basically a civil, orderly society where laws protect injustice.

One can't move through Russia, particularly Eastern Russia and particularly alone, without facing the terror of a country where people disappear, where the justice system has no credibility, where those appointed to protect citizens are corrupt. This realization can be terrifying.

I'm floundering on chapter 2 of my book because I am yet unable to capture my own terror in the face of lawlessness. I too struggled against the isolation of being alone, without language and cultural understanding, in a place far more vast and more notorious for disappearance than any other. I didn't know who to trust, how to read faces, what to believe. After some questionable decisions and finding myself in a situation I could not understand, I became unhinged and fled back to Japan. It took me two weeks to come down. If you've never feared for your life at the hands of someone ruthless and practiced enough to take it, that fear in others is easy to dismiss.

Indeed, the movie has been criticized for being over the top, fantastical, unrealistic. The sequence of events in Transsiberian is fictional, their nature is non-fictional.

At one point in the movie, Roy says, "We're Americans!" His torturer laughs at him with jealousy, mocking, and defiance. Saying that you're American - either to yourself or to someone you fear - is a plea for justice, an assertion that a government somewhere cares about your well-being. It is also, in Russia, an admittance that you are a stranger to the more raw aspects of human nature, naive, helpless, a victim in a strange land. It is a statement of either defiance or surrender, depending on who you're talking to.

Texas Turkey.

Matthias, who took most of these photos, almost catching me with my pants down.


The Prada Store on Route 90, just outside Valentine.


For spying on the illegals.


The Rio Grand.


We hiked into this canyon, despite warnings that the path was closed. We survived.


The explorers: Douglas, Andrea, Matthias.


Getting ready for the hot springs, two hours and a rutted dirt road outside Marfa.


Tomas and the hungry cat.


Birthday paparazzi.


Making 40 wishes.


Bettina and Andrea surveying the breakfast table.


The courthouse on Marfa's main street.


Bettina reflected in one of Judd's 4 squares.


Judd's tidy downtown work space, as he left it when he died in 1994.


At the block, Judd's home near downtown, the adobe brick is weathering faster than the concrete joints.


At Chinati.


Paula and Robert at afternoon coffee.


Tomas skyping with the cat. Meow Slovakia.


Robert making a place to nap.


Paula getting sun.


Bernd and Matthias.


My favorite Chamberlain.


More of Judd's 4 squares in the downtown Chamberlain building.


Chinati event building.


Some of Judd's 100 stainless boxes at Chinati.


Bernd and boxes.


More.


Douglas and Chinati graffiti, in German.


Douglas.


Carving the 18 pound bird.


Our Thanksgiving table.


Marfa's water tower.


Big Texas clouds.


On the range.


Tomas, shutterbug.


Matthias, closer than he appears.


Lone Star sky.

Some months ago I realized that the travel bug wouldn't let me ride out an entire 12 months in New York City. The confluence of my 40th birthday and Thanksgiving created the perfect excuse to follow up on an old plan, first hatched by Mark Verzosa some 7 years ago, to visit Marfa, Texas. In 1974, Donald Judd, with the help of Dia, bought up much of the town and an old army base outside.

I had originally wanted to get us all to chip in for an RV to drive across to Texas, but limited time led to flying. I put the word out to all my friends, far and wide, and came up with a group of 8 willing to make the trip, three from Germany. All but three of us were German (two Americans and a Slovak) and all but two of us were architects (an installation artist and a writer). Some of us met up at Wal Mart in El Paso, where I was told a turkey could be had; some of us met up on Route 10 outside El Paso; some met us in Marfa. Bernd, Paula and Robert, the Texas Trio from Germany, made a two week swing out of the trip, driving a loop through the American Southwest. We stayed in a salmon-beige four room house in the "suburbs" of Marfa and explored the surroundings for a week.

Our visit included a tour of the Chinati Foundation, the army base where works by Roni Horn, Carl Andre, Dan Flavin and others is exhibited. We also had a tour with the Judd Foundation of Judd's downtown home, The Block, and the others buildings he purchased during his time in Marfa.

We had a traditional Thanksgiving dinner on the back patio under a thick and close blanket of stars, Venus and Jupiter hugging the crescent moon. And on Saturday, I was presented with the most amazing Texas-sized breakfast - and presents! Oh the presents!

We soaked in the Chinati Hot Springs after a rumbling, wild ride through deserted Texas range, and solved each other's greatest problems. We explored the plateaus and canyons of Big Bend National Park where the Rio Grand sweeps through rock and desert, first south and west then north and west, along the Mexican-American border.

We stopped for pictures at the oddball Prada Store, set alone and out of place along Route 90 outside of Valentine.

Thanks to Douglas and Andrea, Bettina, Tomas, Matthias, Robert and Paula, and Bernd for making the trip, spending the time, cooking the food, presenting books, talking around the fire, and generally making life so damn worth it.

And a special thanks to Elizabeth for setting the table.

Around the hot springs on the night of my birthday, we delved into a discussion, since I was one of the first to hit 40, of what each wished to accomplish by their big 4-0. It was one of the most interesting and frank conversations I've had in a long time. I'll be following up with each one of you individually.

A closing Ode: Robert Creeley died in Marfa in 2005 while a resident at Lannan. We paid our proper respects after Thanksgiving dinner with a few poems under all that star-heavy sky.

If ever there is
if ever, if ever
there is, if ever there is

from John's Song, for John Taggart

On This Day Last Year...

After a cold night in Swakopmund on the coast of Namibia, I drove into the desert at the suggestion of a local white man. I have to go see the black people in this remote area. They don't buy into the begging that so many other black people come to town for. In fact they don't come to town but to sell their lifestock once a year, he told me. They live on their own, he said with approval.

Clustered out on a stretch of grey sand with the backdrop of a ribbon of emerald green and towering red velvet sand dunes, the houses looked to me at first like quilts strung on an invisible wash line, hung out to air. Or Bearden collages.

I parked my little white car and wandered across to the houses where young men gathered around me to ask questions and maybe answer a few, and old women sat in doorways, their elbows on their knees. One old woman took my wrist, like my grandfather used to, and led me to her bedroom inside one of the houses. There was no roof, just a series of scraps flung across the uprights over a tattered, ubiquitous blue tarp. She owned few items, each hung from a nail in the wall. Her bed was off the dirt floor and draped with cartoon sheets, undoubtedly once donated by some western country like the nearby school, water pump and outhouse. She pointed at the vivid blue sky from her bed. I wondered how often it rained there. I wondered how many stars she knew the names of.
Behind some of the houses, more women gathered to cook in a round enclosure made of unfinished logs driven into the sand in a 10 foot diameter circle. Half circles of bark had been nailed on the wind side to protect the fire within. The interior's dark edges hid a bare shelf of three sections of plank nailed together like an upside down U, a few cups and tin plates on top. The women sat on stumps set near the fire and looked at me without expression.


Rusted car frames without Chamberlain's angle.

Theroux Retracing Theroux.

Sunday's NYT book review includes Robert Macfarlane's unkind review of Paul Theroux's newest travel book, "Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: On the Tracks of the Great Railway Bazaar."

An excerpt:

Throughout “Ghost Train,” great bubbles of egotism gout to the surface of the prose. One of Theroux’s first thoughts on meeting the Nobel Prize-winning writer Orhan Pamuk is “that he reminded me of myself.” When Theroux gives a talk in Ankara, he notes that “400 people were already in their seats” by the time he arrived. On a train in Thailand he spends “a pleasant hour” watching a fellow traveler reading one of his books, “rapt — or nearly so — chewing her lips as she read.” Theroux humbly remarks of “The Great Railway Bazaar” that it “had done what the written word sometimes accidentally does, worked a kind of magic.” In Moscow, he finds “bookstores with my own books in them, in Russian and English”; and “in one of those stores,” he writes, “I was chatting up a Russian woman, telling her my travels. I told only half of what I’d seen, because she would never have believed me.”

In the book, Theroux retraces the travels of his career-making "The Great Railway Bazaar" from 1975 where he chronicles a four month train trip from London to Japan.

Some months ago, I wrote about how disappointing Theroux's "Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town" was. I read the book because it roughly covers the route that I took through Africa, with some distinctions. I don't know the leader of Uganda and I didn't get a visa for Sudan. Sadly, if I hadn't covered much of the book's territory on my own, and if I weren't writing a travel book myself, I don't think I would have finished reading it. Oh it's a dry slog.

Now, because I did come along some of Theroux's track in the new book, I guess I'll have to read this one and the original. It's hard to find the enthusiasm.

My favorite quote from the review:

Certain writers have a style that can be best likened to body odor: irresistible to some, obnoxious to many and apparently imperceptible to the writer himself. Theroux’s lack of self-awareness, his failure to observe the basic hygiene of modesty, is compelling in its way. How can anyone be this narcissistic, you wonder in disbelief, in appalled fascination.

Mcfarlane closes his review with a comment on Theroux's question to himself at the end of the journey and the book, "What's the big difference between then and now? I knew it wasn't all the changes, big and small, in Turkey or India or Singapore or Vietnam. It wasn't computers of the Internet or high-speed trains, not fast food or cheap wristwatches or everyone wearing blue jeans. The greatest difference was in me. I had survived the long road that led to the present."

Macfarlane writes, "Lucky you, Paul Theroux. It's an exemplary moment in a book defined and driven by egotism. After reading the autohagiography of the Turkmen leader Niyazov, Theroux summarizes it as 'pages and pages ... most of it self-reverential.' He could be writing a press release for his own book."

Note to self: When writing a travel book that is also sort of a memoir, better check the ego somewhere more distant than Siberia.

Travel writers naturally find themselves as the thread, the common theme that holds the tale together. And I can imagine, with all of the adjusting I have faced in the past months since my return, it takes a while to shift the self lens to a healthy level. But I have to agree with Macfarlane, Theroux is a bit of a self-centered sop. How old is he? I wonder if the self-centeredness is evident in the first Railway Bazaar or if the great traveler is now thinking about his many years.

Unfortunatley, I have found little more to love in Theroux's great nemesis, V.S. Naipaul. A good travel writer is hard to find!

If you have any favorite travel writers, besides Heroditus, let me know. I would benefit from reading them.

On This Day Last Year...

When we arrived in Cape Town, we spent some days visiting with friends and then I took the rental car down to Cape Point while Matthias worked. To see the tip of the great big continent I had been traipsing around on. There it was, windswept, pointy, infested with tourists and monkeys.

Quick History.

Here's a video that shows the empires that have imperialized the Middle East since 3000 BCE. It's only 90 seconds long but worth each. Found via gawker.com.

This reminds me of the creepy taxi driver in Albania who told me that his country's woes came from its location. "Everybody imperializes Albania. Now Europe imperializes Albania. They have to have a country to launder their money and sell their drugs in."

It also reminds me of the extraordinarily ancient and eclectic history of Alexandria, Egypt, where churches, mosques, and synagogues all dot the city.

It is easy to admire the cultural richness that such a long imperialized history brings to these cities and places, that is until you encounter the armoured trucks outside Alexandria's synagogues or spot the domed, circular bomb shelters that intermittently cover Albania's countryside like the pox. Some of these shelters still serve as homes to Albania's poor.

On This Day Last Year...

We left Johannesburg to drive to Cape Town, following a map that Peter Rich, a friend at Witwatersrand University, gave us.

Through dusty little villages, around townships and over great plains, we made our way for the karoo, eating ostrich burgers or springbok steaks wherever we could.

In Nieu Bethesda, we found the Owl House, an overwhelming example of what is billed as South Africa's finest example of outsider art.

Helen Martins, most likely depressed, most certainly eccentric, decided to add some color to her life. Starting with the inside of the house, she adhered crushed glass and paint to the walls, floors and ceilings. Then she filled all available space, including the sizable back yard, with concrete sculptures.

Her themes were many: ancient Egypt, the three wise men, stylish women and animals, glass and yes, owls.

It was a delight to first enter the place. Her simple productivity was stunning. But further into the visit, I felt the sad knowledge that we were looking at the small, however rich, world of a very lonely woman.

I think of the Owl House as a personal lesson. I'll never be a cat lady, the sort of shut-in who only talks to her 15 animals. But putzing around the house, making whatever I want from found materials for the rest of my life, yeah, that could suck me in. Shut-ins have so much time! Forgo the awkwardness of social life and the disappointments of personal relationships. Make your own world, be self-contained!

Recently someone told me that our objective here, with this living thing, is not to be happy. Helen Martins was not happy.

Unfortunately, many of the concrete sculptures are beginning to suffer damage. In some places the wire supports are showing; in others, rust bleeds out over the porous concrete surfaces. An effort is being made to restore them but no one really knows the best approach to preventing these hundreds of figures from crumbling.

A bird bath.

I don't know where she slept; the house must have had 5 beds in it and yet she lived alone. Every structural surface had been covered with crushed glass. How she applied it without losing the skin on her hands and knees is a mystery.

This bathroom, with a hand-poured concrete tub and a full view of the back yard, had a ceiling that I could could barely walk under and a glass-tiled floor.