Sapa Theatre

Greetings,

 All the tears, rivers of loss. Introspection.

 Now here below mist mountain market. Java. The Vietnamese tourists pulling around their weekend rolling suitcase carts. They are here to eat, gamble, sing, dance with  strangers, and buy cheap Chinese plastic products. 

They are an army in high heels, floppy hats, sunglasses, shiny belts, and lost eyes.

They run to stand in front of the Catholic Church to have their photo snapped off. Most ignore the local girls. A woman slows down in her long march toward consumerism to look at a H’mong girl’s offerings; a handmade belt, a think colorful wrist wearable, a thin wallet. The wallet is thinner than the girl.

Once the the woman slows down she is surrounded.

A chorus of voices, “Buy From Me! Buy From Me!”

The woman faints. Another buyer takes her place near blue tarp patchwork junk dealers. Watches, cheap imitations, pants, shirts, knickknacks. 

The eyes of youth scanning 6:05 a.m. Elements - elaborate colors and fabrics. Threads. Threads.

Street theatre.

Red tied school kids in uniformed mass hysteria, deprived of sleep stagger uphill to a bright yellow school building where a young boy pounds out a rhythm on a ceremonial drum. Come all yea faithful, joyful and trumpet.

Two big brown dogs dogs hump on the street in front of the stoned church where tourists gather for a photo shoot. Local Vietnamese women selling this market are armed with camera bags poke and prod the women, husbands, boys and girls, lost and found into manageable groups for the moment. The moment they will remember forever. The moment framed on their family alternative votive candle flaming, this moment. Caught in time. Frozen alive! 

Here we are, she said to her friends later. Look. A church. I am in front of it.

A blond European tourist wearing rubber flip flops walks past the scene. Her t-shirt says, “Love My Bones.” I wonder if she is a specialist in marrow transplants.

I am smiling at every stranger along life’s magical story time inside the heavy forested, along steep stone trails. Yellow wildflowers fill the fields where water buffalo graze.

So there I was at 6:16 a.m. as the V tourists poured into Sapa. They poured off the bus, wearing red cotton baseball hats designed for the Great Union Hotel. It sprawls across green hills above the church. A fore lorn bunch of exotic creatures. They travel in bunches, like bananas. 

The economy class of style, luxury, and pizzazz-a-lama and the H’mong were already hard at work - pushing their handicrafts. These ebony, black spinning colors, all the hand made rainbows, skirts, aprons, blue-black tribes, flowering ethnology. Derivations. 

Metta.

Black & White

Greetings,

I began learning and experimenting with black and white photography. It was about varieties of film, Tri-X, and later Ilford. Grain. Film speed or ISO in photog talk.

Then the learning process of working in the darkroom; developing, making contact sheets, selecting negatives to print, grades and quality of paper, using various chemicals. Developer, fixer, stop-bath, water. Emulsion. A negative holder, enlarger, light management, f/stops, and a timer. Expose and process the paper through the chemicals. 

Like magic, an image slowly appears. Looking for the contrast between shadows. Adjust the variables of time and exposure and play. Experiment. 

It's easy to fall into the trap of using color, or does color use us? The eye is easily fooled because it is passive. Cut through the colorful clutter and express yourself through shades of gray.

As Picasso said, "I just want to know one thing. What is color?" A pigment of our retina cone imagination.

After finishing the Sapa galleries I decided to do a project documenting my neighborhood here in Ha Noi using the small brilliant laser-like Leica in the B&W mode. 

No expectations, no logic. Keeping my blind eye open to light, movement and how they play. Do they play well with each other? That's a relationship question.

Some results were straight from the hip, the point-and-shoot-chance-is-all approach. No digital manipulation. Delightful. A dream dance.

A writer is lucky to get words down and try and make sense of them later. Same with making images. Here's to NOT making sense. Our brains have evolved to predict, establish meaning and detect patterns. Disorientation begets creative thinking. 

Here's the gallery.

Metta.

Life > Logic

Greetings,

Lover of numbers, mathematics, and logical contradictions. Life is a paradox. We are a metaphor. How's it feel to be a metaphor, contemplating perception and sensation? Are we overwhelmed by the perceptual data flow?

Look around. You'll see, observe many humans completely insane with their perceptual overload. Their hard wired receivers are overloaded with INCOMING data. It's scary, downright frightening. Pure fear.

Zombies and automatons. Willing slaves to their personally created hell on earth. Their want. Their perpetual state of being distracted. It's all they know, this life of distractions. 

I'm having coffee yesterday with a very intelligent friend. We hadn't seen each other for six weeks. She kept pulling her cell out of her pocket. Reading the screen. Texting someone. Out there. I didn't say a word. I stopped talking when she did this. I just observed her behavior. She never said, "Excuse me." 

Must be really important I figured.

Can you imagine how she may have felt if, during our short time together I said, "Excuse me but you are really boring me. I can't stand it. I need to text someone. I need to use my phone to connect with someone who is not here but I really wish they were because you are boring me."

Text me baby. Tell me about your situation. Your sweet distraction. Text me your insecurity and loneliness. 

Speaking of scary, what's scary is seeing all the crazy Ha Noi motorcycle drivers texting while they zoom along narrow crowded streets in heavy traffic. Talk about a logical death wish. 

Text this: Meditate on the complete cessation of your perception. Of your sensation. Poof! You disappear into bliss. No time, no boundaries.

Maybe it's not the answers we need to ask but the questions we need to know. All this.

"If you don’t know much about infinity, for instance, you are invited to check in to “Hilbert’s Hotel” — which, with its infinite number of rooms, can miraculously accommodate additional guests even when it’s completely full."

LOGICOMIX

Written by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H. Papadimitriou. 

Illustrated by Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna

Read more...

It all adds up.

Metta.

Out of Ha Noi train station

Now that I am back I begin at the beginning. A good place to start. I'm not one of those travelers running into guesthouses or hotels to get ON LINE! to post daily. I slow down. I make notes and art in my Moleskine. I doodle. Computers are useless. They only give you answers. I make images. I spend quality time with people I meet along the way. Everyone is an artist.

After returning to my base, I sift through notes, upload images and create a minor masterpiece. So it goes.

I left on the 9th. At the train station near tracks I passed the "Free W.C. House," yes, a free W.C. With WiFi? Electronic crap-a-rama. Go with the flow. Delete from system.

It felt great to put on the pack, walk through the narrow lanes (a la China) get to the street, get a bike, get to the station early, get some green tea, get to platform #7 between trains, get a sleeping berth in a room for four. Riding the rails, this rhythm. Comfortable mid-week - no humanity crush. 

Yes, this pack, the weight and these steps in old Timberland walking shoes bought in Ankara in the fall of 2007. Since then plenty of terrain in comfort; Turkey, Indonesia, Vietnam; Ha Noi, Hue, Hoi An and now destined for Sapa, mountains, trails, rocks, water and good dirt leaving footprints on Earth's surface.

It's a walking meditation. All this rapturous joy. This synthesis of love.

Metta. 

Walking home through the maze. She's had along day. Selling.

Riding the rails

Thanks for your patience. The 2015 Lao Cai express to Ha Noi pulled in at 0430. I rested in an crammed narrow upper sleeping berth.

A boisterous group of Thailand tourists on a quick four-day "buy and see," from Elephant Town wrestled impossible suitcases and cheap Chinese appliances into the passageway. Their young leader works for Herbal Life and freelances as a tour guide. He leaned over and with unmitigated glee displayed his lapel pin with the company logo and heart. 

"Wow!" I exclaimed, "It's all natural!"

After brushing aside the Ha Noi taxi touts my dream sweeper collected dreams from the sleeping monkeys.

Sapa was magnificent, just what this little explorer needed for a peaceful, awesome, fresh aired human and nature connection. Bliss. Mountains, fog, mist, clouds, rain, sun, valleys, rivers. Beautiful people. You know you're in the zone when 10 days feels like 10 aeons. 

Armed with my trusty Moleskine, camera tools and an open heart-mind I ventured forth. I will create galleries for your visual enjoyment and share Sapa stories along the way.

Metta.