Soundscape, Indonesia

There is a constant rolling wave of sound in Jogjakarta that is like nothing I have ever heard.

It is not the hum of machines, that varying Bb of refrigerators and idling cars. It is not the vague or imagined buzz of wifi hotspots and cell phones and data shooting through the air. It isn’t even the uniform honking of city traffic or background music or people talking, laughing, living.

There is a baseline that isn’t sound at all, but the thickness of equatorial air and the wingsounds of insects. To breathe is to walk in water even without rain, and the this slight heaviness touches your lungs, your heartbeat, the sound and mass of the liquid moving through your ears to keep you steady.

Above this is a rolling, non-percussive overlay of a singing language, motorbikes that have never imagined mufflers, middle-ringing rickshaw bells and the echo of all of this through unimaginable mazes of walled residential roads between main two-lane thoroughfares.

The first night I spent in here was the first night I spent in Indonesia. After over 26+ hours of travel and the crossing of multiple time zones, I didn’t sleep deeply. I drifted in and out, in the heat, with the insects and my confused body. I finally woke up for good at 4:30, when a few buildings away in the inner sanctum of the neighborhood of my guesthouse, men were being called to prayer.

While I had heard Muslim call to prayer before, it had never been so pervasive. In the week I spent in Indonesia I would become almost used to it, and I imagine it becomes like a reminder of passage of time, but lying in my bed beneath a single cool sheet, the room entirely dark, and the waves of amplified and acoustic call and organic response transported me from my hazy no-place state to right where I was. Prayer continues for quite some time, and I lay and listened to it coming from nearby and then farther away, mixed in with the sounds of roosters crowing and of water falling somewhere, before the motorbikes started to carry people away.

Every city, every country and culture, has a soundscape. Indonesia and Jogja’s are natural, effortless, in my experience singularly unaffected by extra-developed sound of background music and advertisement. The music I heard in the country was acoustic, the call to sale in the market like the call to prayer. No absence of sound, but rather a unified roll of it, held together by warmth and patient air.

Travel time

There is something funny about the time we take to travel. Not the destination part, but time taken to get there, to move about, to go from point A to B. This time is difficult to count, moving across and over international zones, leaving us to live in the moment and away from the tick tick of a minutehand. Outside of our agendas. Not quite in our plans.

I love getting lost in time.

This lady gets things done in an airport A&W

Mostly, on-the-plane time is for secret asides. Watching as many idiotic movies as possible. Drinking altitude-reinforced whiskey or bloody marys. Sometimes it is for writing. On some sordid occasions it has been time for working, but let’s forget those. Because this time should be sacred. It doesn’t count and so is a bonus, a privilege of extra, at least for someone from a culture of too much.

Because there are no real rules in travel time, habits and traditions are ours to invent. I almost never eat Dunkin Donuts outside of an airport, but I’ve now done it in a dozen states and countries and over three continents. My secret Dunkin travel addiction. In Indonesia, they have red bean and green tea donuts. Who am I to turn that down? It would be a cultural affront.

In Tokyo a day ago on a stopover, I walked the insides of the airport, an extra-time traveler in her own particular non-space. I’ll be in Tokyo proper in not too long, but this was already a sense overload. The amount of duty-free chaos in Narita is overwhelming. So many colors, so many smiling Japanese characters peering from every adspace, so many samurai boutiques. And the cleanest toilets- with and without bidets- I have every seen. All with the overarching neutrality of in-between. The line for McDonalds wrapped around the corridor. The line for ramen decidedly did not. Everything expressed in dollars and yen, translations and generics. An over-cartoonish group of fake traditional musicians walked around and played, posing for pictures. Why? Why advertise their local performance to the detached dwellers of the airport food court? It was amazingly surreal.

Narita airport performers.

If you are keeping track of the places you have visited, stopovers accrued during travel don’t count. You aren’t really there, you don’t really exist. I can’t really say I’ve been to Jakarta, though I’m typing now waiting in a Jakarta terminal. I slept last night in a hotel inside the Jakarta airport. I walked the outside drop-off area this morning and sat at a Jakarta fountain overlooking the Jakarta parking lot and a lawn of forbidden Jakarta grass and palm trees.

Jakarta 1am shuttle-bus view.

It doesn’t count because for me and my fellow travelers- unlike the airport itself, its workers, its amenities and its plantlife- real life doesn’t happen at any of these places. I am in Jakarta but I am not. This is in-between for me and so I am also in-between. Quintessentially, I took a shuttle bus last night from my arrival terminal to the terminal my hotel was in. I mentioned my destination to the driver, who told me to get in. I found, after a period of time that could as easily have been ten or thirty minutes, that I had been brought to the same place I had been originally. A round trip in non-space and outside of time. It’s such an appealing wormhole, assuming you’re not really that worried about actually getting anywhere.

Someone told me once that jetlag is your soul catching up with your body. I really like this idea. That there is a part of you that just can’t travel as fast as a tin can hurtling through space and that you have to live like a partial zombie for a bit while it finds you. If this is the case with jet lag, I like to think of this extra secret lost time as recuperation for the mind, slowing down after too much mundane regular action and buzzing activity. Your mind catching up with your body after too much everyday, and before or after the stimulation and expectation upon arrival.

Perhaps getting lost in time is another built-in catch-up with yourself, your everyday self catching up with the moment.

In any case, it is delicious.

Return

It has been two and a half years since my last post, with time taken up by life and a heavy job.
I'm back now, traveling the world and thinking about things again. Apologies for the long silence. Here we go again.

BananaNA.

Banana. Bane of my existence.

I have long fought the good fight against the banana. It’s a slick fruit, just too large in size to be ignored. Pungent-smelling, invasive-tasting, terrible-joke-inducing banana.

It really has no business hanging around, anyway, getting in my way in fruit salads and smoothies. It is political, and probably perfectly enjoyable in its natural habitat. This habitat is, incidentally, far, far away from me.

In any case, the banana is unavoidable.

In working at the French school, I try to turn a blind nostril to the revolting specimens I have to unpeel for children in the lunchroom. I try to remain professional when they spit and cry over some kind of dispute on the playground, their mouths full of that horrifically textured fruit. I look the other way when they bring out those obscene plastic banana cases, which I originally thought to be some kind of crass adult joke but apparently actually serve to protect the insufficiently-wrapped-by-nature growths.

These last couple of weeks I proctored extended-time exams for 4^th and 5^th grade. These are the first few years of introduction to the lifelong skill of bubble-filling, and so the little French natives and the attention-challenged and the variously blocked got to hang out in a little room with me and all the time in the world.

There was, in my room, a wooden fruit basket.

This fruit basket was the inexplicable source of mirth and hilarity for the boys I was testing. The bananas came out. They fake-ate them and fake shot each other with them and sneaked them when my back was turned, placing them in their desks or on their answer sheets. They bee-lined towards them during breaks, refusing to take a short walk or draw or play hangman in favor of peals of wooden-banana fueled laughter that disrupted the surrounding classrooms and shamed me in front of my colleagues. “Get a hold of your students, woman! They're just bananas!” Just bananas indeed.

I got through that week. And the next, when one of the girls brought in specimen after specimen to reek up my tiny classroom, only to be broken on the final day when she brought in… banana bread. I persisted though, I refused to be broken. I continued my shift and eventually went down into the playground to watch over the kidlings and extract as many jokes as possible in exchange for drawing-paper.

Knock Knock.

Who’s there

Banana.

Banana who?

Knock Knock…

Why do bananas wear suntan lotion?

Because they peel.

Why are bananas never lonely?

Because they hang out in bunches.

What was Beethoven’s favorite fruit?

BananaNA.

…

One day, banana, one day I will best you.

Pocket Contents after...

Someone Else's Christmas Party 2012 (Black Wool Winter Coat)

- photobooth pictures

- one empty cigarette packet

- keys (not mine)

- half a cookie

- a bolt

Someone Else's Christmas Parties* 2013 (brown leather jacket)

- two Lindt truffles: dark chocolate and peanut butter

- one business card

- three bobby pins

- one small composition book, last page scrawl: "Vincent, bass. looking for soul singer (number)" 

Christmas Eve 2013 (brown leather jacket)

- three paper towels, folded

- one new telephone

- one pair athletic socks

- one recipe for phylo dough-blue cheese-mushroom tart

- one receipt for phylo dough, blue cheese, mushrooms

New Year's Eve 2013/4 (blue bathrobe from Santa on Christmas Day costume for All-Holiday costume party)

- one champagne cork

- one pair sunglasses, found in street on walk from 26th and South Van Ness to Page and Haight.

- keys (mine)

- two halves of yellow plastic easter egg

- one red Hershey's Kiss wrapper

Tonight (beige wool and leather jacket)

- one bobby pin

- one tab from grocery store flyer "I'll bring two friends $10 yoga · Sunday@8:30pm 350 Divis@Oak"

- candy cane wrapper

- lint

*three, in fact. Also of interest: arrived at house arms full of tiny potted poinsettias, exact details of procurement unknown, later used as Christmas gifts.

Road Trip

Road Trips. How I love them.

I still don't have a licence, but I totally and completely buy into the dream of the American open road. Manifest Destiny! Capital F Freedom! I used to be surprised at the sameness of the views from the highways- long wide stretches, plains and hills, shades of green and gold and brown, occasional livestock...- but when you spend hours, really hours, looking out the windows you realize that it's not a sameness, but a slow creeping change. It's the middle. The in-between. Not quite all-the-way change, but a range of shades. I think that this is what makes it different from driving for hours on end in France or Spain or England or Germany. Eventually, in Europe, you hit a border. Here, our interstate misses the distinction that different countries can lend. I mean, when you cross the border into Switzerland, you know it. There are places you have to stop and talk to people in official-looking hats and suddenly all the houses look different. On US highways, difference is couched in similarity. Maybe what I like isn't the idea of discovering a new world, but some secret inside expanse of an existing one. One with rest stops.

Granziella's

I love rest stops. I love the weird non-space you find in the square-mile indoors of Granziella's and the freeway-side taco stands. I love the people at rest stops who linger because they want to be where they're going but they really want an excuse to stand and roam freely through olive bars and plastic-molded picnic tables and surprise regional specialties. 

I got the opportunity to go North with the band I've been singing with. Hernandez Hideaway took two cars for its six members, and we headed from El Cerrito to Eugene early morningish after a Tuesday night rehearsal. Hit the road around 9 and rolled at least a good 20 minutes before stopping for gas. It was, of course, only the beginning.

One thing I dig about road trips is that the non-space gets filled by all this frivolous and sometimes sneakily important stuff. You get to consume things you wouldn't touch otherwise. It's like everywhere you stop is that island Pinnochio goes to where everything is deliciously sinful and you know you have to leave before you get too drawn in. Our violin player bought at least two bags of  Pork Skins. A liter of Huckleberry milkshake did it for our bassist, whose temple-bodied organic farmer hands gripped that styrofoam monolith so smoothly, so lovingly. Fritos and Original flavor Corn Nuts for our trombonist. Egg-cheese-sausage biscuits for our saxophonist and accordionist. I don't remember where we were when I saw the Pop Tarts Ice Cream Sandwich. Washington? I only regret that it was breakfast time. Taste America.

We hit the Dairy Queen, Subway, a roadside taco stand, a diner with a picture of Not The Biggest Dog but Close on the register and an EAT sign out on the road, and a decent handful of truckstops equipped with showers and car-maintenance aisles and, inexplicably, display cases of blown-glass collectibles. These were not the highlights of the trip. Of course. We made a fire in the dark in Oregon and drank beer and roasted marshmallows. We dipped our wiggling toes in the river and our naked bodies in the boiled-egg smelling hot springs. We greeted people in Portland and Seattle and a lovely spot called Gig Harbor and played music in bars and danced and celebrated a wedding and ran amuck in new venues and with old friends. That was great, lovely, the REAL point of the trip. But for me, it was during those shared moments in the cars and booths and gas pumps that I felt like we were growing together. Girl talk in the gear-stuffed but so much more comfy 4x4. Conversations in the front seat of the sedan about family and music and choices and directions and bug corpses on the windshield. Pillow organization in the backseat, the naming and slow consuming of Mister Cabbagehead, who rode all the way up but only  part of the way back down.

Mister Cabbagehead. In memoriam.

And all that bonding between important moments gets stored like so much LSD in the fat cells generously provided by the wonderfully nutritionless stuff we put in our bellies. She may forget the conversation about surprise adulthood and life changes, but it will live on in the 5 pounds she gained on the six day trip. Just like you can build memory into muscle, I think road trips whip up a special kind of padding that shapes the way you see things, or at least the way you will hold yourself for a little while. Like some physical memory. A souvenir. I wonder if, when we burn off these calories, we'll tap into the same feeling of scenery flying by and similarity morphing into difference while the faces and profiles of our companions stay the same. 

Le temps qui passe.

The first time I came to France as a cognizant being I was fourteen, fresh out of my first year in high school, not at all ready for the jet lag that awaited me.

Nice. Promenade des Anglais.

I flew alone, from San Francisco to Nice. My uncle Michel picked me up, all rosy cheeks, bisous and curly brown hair, he looked enough like my father to put me at ease. Michel whisked me from the airport in a tiny white sedan to the apartment Mamie shared with Raymond. Here things get fuzzy. I know she had been preparing a big Mediterranean meal, with pissaladière and tomates mozzarella and salade niçoise and probably those fried zucchini flowers I haven’t found done right anywhere else. But all I remember now is silhouettes from her 5^th floor balcony, the cascading view from high up on the hill, on the city and way out there the water. There were all kinds of relatives there. I have an idea now who they were, but at the time I was reeling from nine hours in a plane and uninterrupted fast Niçois French, and it didn’t take long for me to check out malgré moi.

Beyond that, and this I was totally unprepared for, there I was fourteen and suddenly in a strange place with people who I didn’t know but was supposed to have this undeniable tie to. We weren’t close to my father’s family. He wasn’t close to them either, as far as I knew. My brother and I had gone to French school and could talk to the Dufforts once or twice a year when they called, and one of my uncles had visited years before with his two kids and my grandmother, but aside from that my associations were all big yellow AirMail packages and vague photos I couldn’t really identify.

That day I crashed fast, and I crashed hard. I started speaking nonsense that wasn’t just linked to the language or the speed of native family-slang, I was talking jet fuel fumes. My speech leveled out, but that’s more or less how the narrative continued inside my head, during the month I spent as an adolescent playing at Prodigal Daughter.

For me, that month was a big deal. I met everyone, including Mémé, my ailing great-grandmother. I spent a week with my uncle Jean François and my older cousins Stephan and Fabien. They were so cool. Fabien brought me to little get-togethers with his friends and I tried to show them how hip I was, smoking hash out of bongs they made themselves from orange soda bottles, doing dishes because I thought that was what a French Girl would do. Being too cool for things and overjoyed at watching movies like La Femme Nikita and Les Bronzés with them, convinced that our matching toes were simultaneous-wiggling to some kind of genetic program. I spent another week with my uncle Michel and his wife Marie in her crazy Italian family compound between Nice and Cannes. He had his two kids, Vanessa and Maxime, the youngest in the family, so proud and shy and confused by my funny accent. The trip was confusing and wonderful, and I realize now it was a major turning point. A coming of age. A realization of this whole other life. Of this whole other world.

It would be the only time I would ever meet Mémé. The only time I would ever spend time with Michel, who passed away not too many years later from lung cancer and left a wound in the family that would never really heal. I lived in France for almost nine years, but the value of that initial trip never hit me as hard as it did on this last one. My first trip back since returning to San Francisco. There are a lot of other things to talk about, but first I want to talk a little bit about the south, about family and time and everything.

This time back, I planned my trip around Vanessa’s wedding. That knock-kneed girl all grown up.

Tat. Nice.

The day before the ceremony, JF and Mireille (his partner) and I went to visit Tat, Mamie’s sister, in Nice. Tat’s place smelled like Mamie’s. Her stairway smelled like Roquebillière, the mountain village they grew up in, and her furniture and knick knacks were of that same old, heavy, curling varnished style loved by those over 60, especially those coming from the countryside into the Big City. She looked like Mamie, a younger version, less Oh Mais, more Ah Bon, but still. She is her sister, after all. And we stole her away from her husband Francis, who wanted to save his energy for the wedding, and JF brought us all to a sumptuous rooftop on the water, with a view of the Negresco and the Mediterannean and the red-clay rooftops stretching up and away. Afterwards, we walked through the old town and I was floored by nostalgia. Floored by the sameness of it, from all those visits over all those years I'd spent living in Paris. Floored even by the tourist trap pizza terraces and the ice cream stands and the throngs of overdressed, glittering and brightly colored visitors in flip flops. Floored by the parallels of place and the divergence of context.

Grasse. Cathedral.

The next day, Vanessa was gorgeous. She wore this crazy dress I can’t imagine anyone else pulling off- with a see-through bodice and huge flurry princess skirt. She had little cousins dressed in white pulling her train on her way into the cathedral in Grasse. Maxime walked her in, so proud and adult in a beautiful tailored suit and rockabilly bouffante.

menu.

The party was amazing, the food was insane, but when it came time for the slideshow, memories of their childhood and the people who were no longer here, I was hit by this wave of unexpected emotion. Seeing pictures of Michel holding his daughter, seeing pictures of Mamie with her grandkids, realizing just how much 21-year-old Maxime resembled his dad, in personality and physique, thinking of my father and this double-separation, it took the wind out of me. I had to go outside. A woman approached me out by the hydrangea.

-Are you OK?

- Yeah. I’m just a little emotional. The pictures reminded me of a lot of things.

- Oh, I understand. They often have that effect.

And she touched my arm and left me alone. I guess that that moment, that private, hyper-sensitive moment, was somehow universal. Recognizeable even to a stranger.

 all grown up.

And, that moment, that crystalline bit of time and taking stock, I was totally unprepared for it. There I was, thirty-two and suddenly in this place I knew all too well, surrounded by people I had come to know and love, seeing their lives in relief. My cousins Fabien and Stéphan and now their wives and gorgeous kids, laughing in the background in formalwear. JF and Mireille quietly holding hands at the table. Vanessa and now Ludovic and Marie and Maxime, hugging and being loud and Italian and smiling that same smile I had seen a thousand times on them, on my father, on myself.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, I was probably aided a bit to tears by the open bar. But it’s rare to be overcome by a moment and what it represents, to see so much of life in one event. Rare for me at least.

So now I sit in a café in San Francisco, typing and re-writing. I’ve received the emails from family urging me to not lose touch. And I’ve gone through the conversations with dear friends that seemed so similar and yet so suddenly urgent. And I’ve passed that first landmark moment, of returning to a France that is no longer home, and then returning to a Californian home that seems so much more feasible than it did through a veil of empty uncertainty a year ago. And you know what? I feel ok. In some ways, cultivating multi-culturalism is a choice to house one’s heart in more than one place, and the benefits for me far outweigh the costs.