art and travel

Transit

damonlk — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 05:12:00 GMT

The last stage in any journey is, typically, transit. A day spent, or lost, in the maze of airport security queues, check-in counters and passenger lounges. Some of which were curiously free of clocks. As if the no-time of international flight began here, on the ground, well below the clouds.

There are many who dislike flying. I am not one of them. Not even now, after 18 flights in five months, across all continents, seas and oceans. It is for me a time outside of time, suspended in a thin metal tube. Non-descript meals and the slow passage of the earth far below.

A break from the endless decision making of travel, the absorption of all that is so endlessly new.

Instead you have interiors in industrial beige, movies and meals alike modified for content and taste, and the white noise of jet engines to make conversation less likely. A friend, flying north from Santiago in the week following the Air France loss remarked to his fellow passenger [as he inserted earplugs against the noise] 'I don't like water to get in my ears'.

Sometimes you see another plane, miles off and visible only by the white streaks of its exhaust, but more often than not it is you alone. On this last flight we were chasing the sun west. We could not win – the earth spins much faster than any passenger plane can fly – but the dusk was long, the slow colouring of sky through pink to grey and black.

I look between the window and my screen, where some or other Hollywood star is paused, suspended by an announcement from the cabin, as we are all here suspended, above the earth, above the clouds, below the first twinkle of stars.

Southern Lands

damonlk — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 05:21:00 GMT

After the fortified, post industrial desert that is California New Zealand seems neat and lush and almost impossibly tidy. The flyovers are discrete, parks numerous, streets clean, and cities mercifully free of homeless people, crackheads and whores.

There is also that peculiar mirror world quality that comes from being in a place so similar to home, but never quite exactly the same. A Japanese roboticist calls this gap ‘the uncanny valley’. The gulf that yawns when you stop anthropomorphosing the headlights and grill of a car into a smiley face and see instead how not quite human that android really is.

Luckily here across the Tasman the differences seem trivial in comparison to the warmth and hospitality of the locals. No-one would write home because they say jersey instead of sweater/ jumper, or cell instead of handy. Though it would probably be only Germans who might notice that difference.

In my time here I have visited three cities, each with the subtle differences and minor rivalries that may be found among brothers. Auckland the commercial hub and clear member of the trans-Pacific rim. Politically charged and culturally rich Wellington. University town Dunedin, bisected by the River Leith and filled with students and their haphazard dwellings. Of these there is a local pride in their decrepitude, and posters of ‘scarfie’ houses with beer bottles and broken sofas in the yards can be seen in offices and shops.

And so nearly ends these five months of travel. New Zealand is of course the last stop, and a transition, both climatic and cultural, from all the countries I have seen into that one small place to which I always return.

Home.

Los Angeles

damonlk — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 20:03:00 GMT

Many people, but especially Calvino, have written of the formlessness of Los Angeles; the endless centreless sprawling web of streets and roads and sub suburban housing. And indeed at many levels this is true. There is no single plaza train station or park to which you could say ‘meet me there’ and it be a central point. Instead there are many points, strung like cowrie shells on a Polynesian navigation chart. Many centres, many thoughts, many ways of living. Or this is what G___ said when we met in Pasadena, that old money suburb of eucalypts, green lawns and salt water pools. She spoke of the rhythm of flyovers and concrete rivers, a not quite established downtown, high rise towers and uninhabited loft apartments. At walking pace the city is absurd, though never empty. As you head down Wilshire or Venice - vast streets whose numbering begins at zero and ends at the ocean in the tens of thousands - you pass clothing stores and textile factories, taquerias and graveyards, federal buildings and small cafes. The parks are full of the not quite employed, a soup kitchen in one corner serving vegetables and rice on polystyrene plates. By car the distances compress, become practicable. The signage and street facades, vulgar at slower speeds, become glossy and bright. Palm trees punctuate the sky, the radio plays and traffic weaves and flows. The bus is different again, social class at work to divide those who drive from those who are driven. As a consequence fares are cheap, routes vast, and services regular throughout the day and night. Though it is frequently said that public transport is bad in this city so in thrall to the motor car there seemed few places I could not go by bus. And so it was the bus that finally delivered me of this city. The blue number three rapid from Santa Monica down Lincoln and Sepulveda to LAX. To another kind of public transport, one whose vestiges of exclusivity are matched only by the tension of the security apparatus that surrounds it. The ferocious roar of jet engines hurls us all into the sky. Looking down you see the tangled grid of the city stretch endlessly on, blinking lights from cars and the fixed points of street lamps. The plane banks above the city’s orange glow and we disappear over the dark waters of the Pacific, land sliding out of view behind us.

Bay City

damonlk — Sat, 4 Jul 2009 13:33:00 GMT

In San Francisco you reach finally the Pacific, that vast unquiet ocean whose waves hammer also on my next and then final destinations, New Zealand and Australia. The water is cold, and wreaths the land in layers of fog and mist that separate the mainland from the north pointing isthmus. On Tuesday from Oakland nothing is visible, on Friday the top of the Golden Gate is lost in cloud.

The city itself sits mostly away from open water, on a bay linked to the mainland by the graceful sweep of two bridges and the subterranean plunge of the metro system. The Embarcadero, the road that winds along the coast, hosts numerous piers, relics from the days of the city's role as an entrepot and trading nexus. So it is possible, even so close to the urban centre, to step out over the blankness of water and look back at the a downtown that builds in a central mound and descends to single stories at both left and right extremities.

Everywhere visible is the high needle of the TransAmerica pyramid, a building whose symbol is its own silhouette. No modernist box, it tapers from massively triangulated base to sharp tip in singular, clean lines. There is no flat roof and then the final jut of radio masts, just this upward sweep. In defiance, perhaps, of the fault lines that cross the city and threaten always to bring it down.

It is this fear of quakes that will soon undo the less famous of the bridges, the grey triple span of the Bay Bridge. What will replace it is unclear. Rumours circulate of partial recycles, temporary bridges built at impossible cost, the despair of city finances. It is of course the other bridge that tourists cross, high and orange and linking Marin County in the north with parklands and the converted bulk of a former military base and airfield. You brace against the wind and traffic noise and look out across the bay and over Alcatraz, the former prison, the shining gold dome of the Palace of Fine Arts, the city skyline in the distance.

Up close life in the city is more prosaic. Unlike most American cities, who have over the last decade chased their homeless away, SF not only allows their presence but hosts extensive missions and outreach programs. So the city, during the day, is full of clusters of beggars and the urine soaked rags of sleepers sprawled across the pavement, a pink jut of ankle the only sign of the flesh within. At night, safe behind the walls of your hotel, you hear only cries and yelps and the distant wail of sirens.

Twin Towers

damonlk — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 14:19:00 GMT

Chicago has two tall buildings. Actually it has many, for its downtown rivals only Manhattan for density, but two stand above the rest in their efforts to thrust up into the sky.

One, the Sears Tower, was for many years the tallest in the world. Now ousted by buildings in Kuala Lumpa, Taipei, Shanghai, and Dubai it still claims title as the tallest in the western hemisphere. Or if this is too vague a concept, the tallest in North America.

The other, the John Hancock Centre, tops out at 100 floors. Rumour has it that at design stage the director of this venerable insurance company resisted suggestions to build the tallest building in the world. "We must be able to say that we built the most efficient and economical building possible" he declared, "not merely the tallest".

So a moment of [ir]resolution becomes fact. At the time it must have seemed a worthy motive, and one easily explained to boardrooms and shareholders. Now it is less so, and what was once sensible is perhaps churlish. In part this is because super tall buildings are so vain, so impractical except as grand gestures of engineering prowess that to quibble over a handful of floors, hundreds of metres above the ground, seems absurd. Given the hubris of going up you might as well go all the way.

The Emiratis for one have no such doubts. The Burj al Dubai, once complete, will stand 800 metres above the rolling desert plain that stretches from the Persian Gulf to Red Sea.

You might have noticed that none of this discussion concerns the appearance of these two towers. Certainly neither is impressive at street level. The Sears is hidden behind a blank granite podium, and Hancock is accessed only through a sunken central courtyard and atrium. In fact, apart from the often obscured and definitely proletarian views afforded on the shores of Lake Michigan, looking back, the best place to observe either of these giants is from the observation deck of its rival.

So there you have it. The buildings exist mainly to observe each other, to stand at the northern and southern ends of the downtown, looking first down and then out. Over the lake for Hancock, rail yards and dormitory suburbs for Sears.

In recognition of this true function both have observation decks, fast elevators to the top, coin operated binoculars, and gift shops selling t-shirts and Lego models of the towers.

Hancock, being the shorter of the two, sells also coffee and sandwiches. I sit during a break from drawing the city below and enjoy iced tea in a frosted glass. Here, in the USA, even the smallest beverages are described as tall.

Philadelphia

damonlk — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 14:45:00 GMT

In the 1950s Philadelphia was one of the largest cities in the USA, and in the previous century had even briefly eclipsed New York as the largest in the country.

Then began a slow, catastrophic decline that saw its population contract by 40% from 2.5 million to today’s one and a half. Loss of heavy industry, white flight, and the burgeoning south and west all contributed to the decline.

Of course there is in the centre of town no evidence of this exodus. The downtown is active, a charming mix of 19^th century Neoclassical and cut glass Modernism. There are people and shops, neatly planted gardens and an enormous, richly endowed art museum.

The loss becomes clearer as you radiate out, heading north in or case past J____’s home on 27th St. The transition from downtown to gentrified to under repair to poorly to bowed walls and crumbling brick happens block by block. The restoration is happening along the same lines as the contraction – slowly, incrementally, street by street and house by house. This one rings each day with air compressors and circular saws.

Only five km north, with the high-rise core of the city clearly visible in the early evening light, are clusters of abandoned factories. Windows gape, saw tooth roofs slowly collapse, tin and tar and cement sheet press down on the levels below.

We enter one and wander around its ruined workspaces and loading docks. On the second floor the wood paneled offices and two empty safes, doors swung open, too heavy now to loot or remove.

Through the window and across the street is another factory. Abandoned now though once a storage facility for household goods, before those households themselves were lost. On the roof is a strange structure, delicate like a summer pavilion, that once supported a wooden water tank. I joke to J____ that this was where, in another country and time, Shah Jahan and his beautiful wife Jahanara stood to watch the elephants parade below them.

New York

damonlk — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 12:35:00 GMT

New York, while not infinite, at least aspires to that condition, and the narrow island of Manhattan is filled with regular rectangular iterations of crystalline concrete growth, rhomboid and enormous at the northern and southern ends, and dipping to a mere four stories in the middle. The streets, except of course Broadway, run north south east west, and so you can stand on 6^th, say, and look up and down a vast canyon of stone and brick and steel.

But if the buildings possess slight material similarity then the people are nowhere the same. Every face is different, brought here down who knows how tortuous paths, from the heavily carved features of a man whose ancestors crossed the Bering Strait in the last Ice Age, to fresh migrants arguing enthusiastically in their approximation of American English, Eastern European accents peppered with the twang of idiomatic loan words.

It is a city that is never still, except perhaps now, early on a Saturday morning. The shops in the street below have hardly opened, the smell of bacon from the deli across the road has not reached up to my window, and the sounds of birdsong have not yet been erased by traffic and the howl of sirens and alarms.

For the first time in a week the temperature is rising, and with it the layers of cloud that have blanketed the island in a dense, gritty fog. Instead we have a sticky heat, and later in the day the hipsters of this hipper than thou section of Williamsburg will stand on street corners, tattooed arms and legs projecting from short skirts and torn jeans, condensation beading on the iced drinks they sip through the spaces afforded between piercings, studs and labrettes.

Madrid

damonlk — Sat, 30 May 2009 08:10:00 GMT

Madrid is an imperial city, built by royal decree when the old capital of Toledo, defensive atop a hill and wrapped on three sides by the Tagus river, was found too polyglot, too constricted, too linked to the centuries old Moorish presence on the peninsula.

So, from the mid 16^th Century, when Phillip II moved his court here, it was to Madrid that the riches of empire returned. Following the conquest of the New World the city was paved in grand boulevards and palaces of grey stone. Some tiny fraction of all the gold and silver that must have been melted down and sold to pay for war and colonial expansion remains. Jewellery and sculpture behind the thick glass of the Museo de America. Trinkets really, compared to the loot that was taken.

These days the city bustles. My street, the Grand Via, runs six lanes deep in a never-ending shuffle of cars and buses. At its eastern edge are the cluster of former palaces – now museums - of which the Prado, with its endlessly multiplying rooms of oil paintings and sculptures, is only the best known.

Heading west. One block north of the Retiro, the ribbon-like park inaugurated by the same Phillip II who moved his court here. Past department stores, El Museo Jamon, a local food chain. Coffee shops, clothing stores, the kerb side boxes of the lottery sellers.

Just before the urban development gives way to parkways and flyovers are two buildings, staring at each other across the road from windows cut in granite. Fascist architecture really – bronze eagles and stone sculptures of a woman with broad shoulders and strong thighs. The left-hand building belongs to the Spanish Air Force, the Ejercito del Aire, and just above the letters announcing this is a smaller plaque dedicated to Francisco Franco, Caudillo of Spain, 1954.

Alhambra

damonlk — Sat, 23 May 2009 07:38:00 GMT

To reach the Alhambra, that paradise of fortified palaces and gardens, you walk uphill. First along winding streets and twisted lanes, through an arched stone doorway, and then up a broad path that cuts through trees growing with tropical fury. On either side are the silver lines of running water, and their splash blocks any noise from the town below.

There are a series of switchbacks – the road ascends continuously – signs and maps, the cinderblock structure of the tourist office, guards with ticket scanners and an occasional truncheon, and then you are there, walking through an avenue of topiary toward the Nasrid Palace, the Alcazabar, and the gardens that surround them.

Built at the height of Moorish Spain's power, and taken over after their expulsion and defeat in 1492, the buildings are remarkably intact. Tourist numbers are high – the entire site is UNESCO listed – and so your ticket is marked with a staggered entry time that provides a half hour window in which to enter the palace. Of course once inside you are free to remain as long as you please, wandering through gardens filled with rose bushes, rectangular ponds with coloured carp, courtyards and balconies.

The palace itself is a series of great and small rooms, decorated on every surface with tiles, plaster, stone and timber carving. In the larger rooms these carvings reach the domed ceilings in an infinite geometry of text and pattern and motif.

Because of the heat of the Andalusian summer the windows are large, though shielded from the worst of it by marble lattices. On the hottest days you sit in alcoves on the cool marble floor.

At one such window, looking out over terracotta rooftops toward Albayzin, the old Moorish quarter, you see the tourists gathering in the Mirador de San Nicolas, looking back across the same buildings to the palace in which you stand.

Andres

damonlk — Sat, 16 May 2009 07:35:00 GMT

Andres lives just north of the Gothic Quarter in the 19th Century district of Eixample, or enlargement, that surround the old city of Barcelona. The flat he shares with students from Chile and Argentina is on the roof or sixth floor, though because the numbering of levels in Spain begins with primero [before una, segundo etc] there are seven flights to climb, each twist of the staircase slightly tighter than the level below.

At ground level, in a tiny flat – not much larger than a single room – is the caretaker or puertadora, and old lady with tight blonde curls and an ever-present smile. She stops to gossip with whoever is on the stairs, and watches the street through the granite and marble lobby and heavy door.

From the roof terrace you look out over a courtyard formed by the spaces between the surrounding buildings and an old stone church. At the top of the spire is a collection of bells that chime the hours, quarters, halves, and three-quarters. The chiming of the hour is announced with a smaller bell rung four times, and then repeated a minute or two later, in case you had lost tally of the number of rings.

The bells ring day and night, not as loud as the muezzins call in the Middle East, but just as present a reminder of the civility of the city, its shared places and interconnected lives.

The sun bakes the terraces in summer and so neighbours on the floors below grow cacti and succulents in terracotta pots that match the colour of roof and tile. Two enormous cats sleep in the shade of an umbrella, occasionally staring up as I look down, and then across the chimney'd rooftops, where sparrows fly their energetic, darting flight, tracking paths across the sky not marked by wire or rope or map.

Museu Picasso

damonlk — Sat, 9 May 2009 02:57:00 GMT

There are many remarkable things about the Picasso Museum, Barcelona - a fact that is in itself unremarkable given the central role Picasso played in so much art of the 20th Century.

This being Barcelona the museum is full of tourists, but somehow here, in the churchlike hush of its rooms, they are better behaved, more tentative than at Parc Güell or on the long tree lined street of La Rambla.

The museum begins with early works, figure studies from the 1890s, and moves sequentially through to his last paintings, made as a very old man, nearly 100 years later. Picasso's longevity is one of the remarkable things. In photos from the 1950s he is already 75, stout and bald. Yet at this time he had nearly 25 years left to paint, another lifetime, a whole new career in art.

And another remarkable thing. His prodigious output. Most of the works in the museum, from sketches on napkins to enormous canvases, are donations from the artist's collection. Which inclines you to think of how much Picasso must have made if he could give away a museum's worth.

The tourists mostly cluster in the first rooms. Portraits, blue and rose period, posters and design. There is an exquisite sketch of some goats, and next to it caricatures of fat men in top hats and waistcoats. Landscapes, pastorals, domestic interiors. It is all here, every genre available to the painter of the late 19th and early 20th Century.

The last room, ceramics from the collection of his lover Jacqueline aside, are paintings made after Velasquez. The Las Meninas series. A studio painter's paintings of the painting of an artist's studio, transposed across time and reinvented in bold flat colours. These rooms are less crowded, though it could just be that the tourist rush has passed.

Tourist

damonlk — Fri, 1 May 2009 17:18:00 GMT

Barcelona has its share of tourists. Actually it has the share of other cities as well, for the crowds that gather around the main Gaudi monuments –La Pedrera, the Familia Sagrada, Parc Güell – do so in numbers that would seem more appropriate to airports in South-East Asia or the central railway stations of large European cities. At 10am on any given day the queues are 200 deep. You can only imagine how they might be mid summer.

Of course the architecture is amazing. It is animate, grotesque and organic in a way that somehow spans the gap between Art Noveau and the paranoid excesses of H.R. Giger. On the façade of Casa Batllo the balconies are stylised skulls, the roof tiled like a dragon's skin in shades of blue and green.

But the tourists are everywhere, and so too the ever-present remora of touts and souvenir stalls. So I walk south into the gothic quarter with its narrow streets, paved alleyways, and tall, shuttered buildings.

Just before the end of the quarter, two streets from the wide corniche, is an alley lined with Chinese shops, local bars, and smelling of urine. You follow it across La Rambla, with its circus performers and acrobats, past houses with bricked-in windows, rubbish and graffiti. On the street corners stand prostitutes in absurd, pastel coloured clothing, their pimps keeping guard at close range.

Between the whores and hashish sellers are small Pakistani grocers, travel agents advertising cheap flights to Lahore in Spanish and Urdu, and a photocopy booth with signs in four languages.

Needless to say there are no tourists here, in the hustle and drive of Drassanes. A quarter noted only on the map for the Metro station of the same name, and Richard Meier's MACBA building, its white forms ascending cleanly into the blue sky.

Can Serrat

damonlk — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 06:34:00 GMT

In the 1970s a group of Norwegian artists bought an abandoned and near derelict farmhouse in the Monserrat region of southern Spain. Over the next four years they restored and repaired and now, 30 years later, it is a thriving community of international and local artists.

The house sits in the bottom of a valley on the old road to Barcelona. The new road runs along the escarpment 100 meters south. So while it is only a five minute walk up the hill to the town of El Bruc with its complement of shops and cafes, the house itself is an island, and the only other signs of human intervention in the landscape are the almond orchards, recently in bloom, and now full of the green furred fruit that the Syrians eat unripe with lemon and salt.

The artists are a mix of painters, drawers, sculptors, printmakers and illustrators. P____ is working on a graphic novel about Picasso's Guernica, M___ embroiders death's heads onto folk art fabrics, W___ walks in the valleys and low hills and draws the spectacular, many fingered ridge of the mountain range.

Because the studios are large I have begun work on a series of charcoal drawings of cities from my travels. A small piece of Cairo is reforming itself here in the stillness and quiet of southern Spain. I joke with J______ that it would have been good to make a recording of the sounds of the Darb al Ahmar, so that now the studio would be full of the noise of schoolchildren, band saws in the woodworking district, taxis, delivery men and, five times a day, the roar from the mosques.

Or not, and this other Cairo is quiet in ways the original is only rarely. Emptied of people, the stoves of the kitchens no longer smoking, the streets no longer full of traffic. In one window of the endless apartment buildings a rug is being aired in the spring sunshine.

Rally

damonlk — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 10:50:00 GMT

There was a rally at the Blue Mosque Istanbul yesterday. It was political – commemorating the death of former Prime Minister Turgut Özal, who died in office in 1993 - with crowds of people, television cameras, stages, and huge, truck mounted screens to broadcast to the assembled crowd.

But it was also people gathering to sit in the sun. The organisers were handing out bottled water and Turkish delight with the image of Özal printed on the side. I took some with me, courtesy of the Turgut Özal Association for Thoughts and Action. It was much enjoyed, later, sitting at a bus stop in the Plaça Maria Christina.

It is spring here, and the tulips are everywhere in bloom. The parks between the Blue Mosque and Hagia Sofia, the two buildings that dominate the skyline of the Sultanahmet district, are full of the sensual flowers that are so prevalent in the art of Turkey, Iran and the Subcontinent. Tourist and locals step over the low white fences to be photographed among their bright colours and green foliage.

Of course the rally put paid to plans to visit the mosque that morning. One of the things the television screens showed was the large crowd gathered inside the mosque.

So I sat in the garden and enjoyed the sunshine before returning to my hotel to begin the journey to Spain, and the next part of this adventure – a one month studio residency at Can Serrat in El Bruc, a 45 minutes drive from Barcelona, and set among the hills and mountains of the Monserrat National Park.

Arwad

damonlk — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 15:20:00 GMT

Three kilometres from Tartus, the southernmost city of Syria's brief Mediterranean coast, is the island of Arwad. It is small – only 500 metres end to end and even less across – and has been inhabited by Canaanites, Egyptians, Phoenicians, Romans, and finally, in 1302, was the last Frankish outpost to fall to the armies of the east. Some traces remain. On the far western edge of the island are stacks of enormous limestone blocks; part of an early fortification. In the centre of town are two medieval forts. One is closed, the other now a museum.

Otherwise the town is a mix of old and new. Limestone houses with arched windows are built directly onto rock and concrete apartments stand with open balconies and white walls. The streets are narrow – too narrow for cars – and are filled with children playing and merchants selling fresh produce, food, and tourist kitsch.

The town survives on a mixture of tourism, fishing, and ship building. On both sides of the harbour are the yards where wooden vessels are assembled in a process once described by Milorad Pavic as 'almost the exact opposite of eating fish'. Everywhere are men hammering caulk into wooden joints and boys painting the broad keeled white and pale blue boats. There was a project to sail one of these ships around Africa, recreating the voyage of a long ago trading expedition.

Because it is Friday the island is full of local families on day trips from the mainland. Restaurants on the harbour compete for business and serve great piles of freshly cooked fish, flat bread, hot chips and plates of meze and salad.

I ordered fish, and thinking about both the boat builders and fishermen with rods on every pier and rocky outcrop of the island, tore it apart with glee. It was delicious.

Sarouj

damonlk — Fri, 3 Apr 2009 15:13:00 GMT

65 km north-east of Hama, on the road that leads from the fertile valley of the Orontes river to the stony plains beyond, are the bee-hive houses of Sarouj and Twalid Dabaghein. Though few now remain these two villages contain enough of the dwellings, storehouses and granaries that it is possible to imagine how once they housed the sparse population of the district. It is hot here in summer, and cold on winter nights, so the mud brick walls are thick and ceilings high. Like old fashioned bee-hives - or the borg al-hamam of rural Egypt – they taper upwards, four or five metres, and tower above sheep and goats and modern buildings.

Inevitably the traditional designs are being replaced by breeze block and reinforced cement. But the children of the villages know it is the old houses that tourists come to see, and so maybe it is possible that in this way they will survive. The dozen or so still standing seem in good repair, with modern traces like steel pipe chimneys and glass windows attesting to their continued habitation.

The children are eager to escort you around or say hello or ask 'what is your name'. When they see me drawing they ask for portraits, and so I sit and draw Abdal, Aola, Haleema, Joahu, Mohamed, and arm in arm Ahmad and Oahl. Some write their names in English and Arabic, others in Arabic only. An older girls steps in when the children are too young or cannot write at all.

When it is time to leave they wave good bye, and I walk off into that dusty plain. They call after for just a little while, then a passing motorcyclist stops and offers a ride back to town, and all is lost in the rush and roar of air and engine noise.

Arabic

damonlk — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 16:33:00 GMT

My Arabic is mishkweis[1], but enough words have crept in that aiwa and la have replaced the regular yes and no of English. So it was automatic, one morning while drinking tea in the roof garden of the Dahab[2] Hotel, to reply in Arabic when asked if I was Australian. Aiwa – yes!

The conversation moved on. The joys and perils of living in Cairo. How to practice Tibetan Buddhism in a city so obviously devoted to a different god. The rate of Egyptian import duties on prayer flags and stupas[3]. Sociology, history, religion, politics. All the things that pepper conversation in this part of the world.

M, the Buddhist, teaches English to local students and tests the limits of his calmness in a city that is never that. Easy, he says, to be Buddhist in the mountains of Nepal when all around you are marching, or rather sitting lotus position, in step. Much harder to do the same in a city that is drowned in a sea of noise, and where mention of the absence of god sits uneasily with the profusion of mosques and churches.

D, in Egypt for the first time to visit his friend, was not coping. The traffic and pollution, though positively benign compared to Delhi and Lahore, is still remarkable by the standards of European cities. He was hiding upstairs, drinking tea, and waiting for the flight home.

It was a shame, for while it is certainly busy on the street, the chaos is handled with good humour and a certain balletic grace. Walking is also the only way to discover the treasures of the city, the mosques with garden courtyards that sit as islands of peace and calm, the more precious for the surrounding din.

Tea finished, I said goodbye and began to head downstairs. Just a question, D asked: which part of Iowa are you from?

[1] not good

[2] gold

[3] un-translated [not an Arabic word]

The Blue Mosque

damonlk — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 08:53:00 GMT

The Blue Mosque is named for the tiles, imported from Istanbul during the days of Ottoman rule, that decorate its interior walls. Every surface is covered with flowers and floral motifs and the simple but elegant exterior contrasts markedly with the baroque patternings inside.

But my interest is above, in the view from the single minaret with its curled and coiled internal staircase that rises through patches of light and dark to a point far above the rooflines of the neighbouring houses. From here you can see south to the Citadel and Sultan Hasan, east to the city of the dead and Muqqatam, north to Bab Zuweila, west to the high-rise of downtown and sometimes, on a very clear day, the three bright shapes of the pyramids at Giza.

The surrounding district, the Darb al Ahmar, is currently being restored and redeveloped by the Aga Khan Development Network. While rich in monuments the district is also one of Cairo's poorest. Efforts to improve sanitation, repair crumbling apartments and provide employment and training have gone hand in hand with the larger work of restoring historic mosques, shrines, palaces and madrasas.

Dina Bakhoum, programme manager for the district, tells me that the Blue Mosque will take three years to stabilise and restore. Time enough to repair the damages of the last six centuries, and to remove the steel and wood buttressing that supports the arches that divide the open courtyard from the building's interior.

From up above the street noise fades. Competing sounds – children playing, the buzz of a band saw, the honk of taxis and sharper beeps of motorcycles, the rattle of gas cylinders on cobbled surfaces – are carried on the shifting wind. I look out over a landscape old and new, beautiful and forgotten, sacred and profane. I lift my pen, and draw.

Giza

damonlk — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 05:58:00 GMT

At the south-eastern edge of the Giza plateau, not exactly in the shadow of the pyramids but certainly close enough for the sky to be dominated by their impossibly massive forms, are the remains of the city that once housed the 60,000 odd workers who built the pyramids stone by stone.

The current excavation site is wedged between a modern village and a soccer field, and covers only an estimated 10 percent of the city's original boundaries. This weekend is the 20^th anniversary of excavations, years that have seen the removal of thousands of cubic metres of sand and rubbish, and the slow accumulation of information on the physical and administrative functions of the city.

I visited the site on Thursday and Saturday. Will Schenk from AERA conducts a field school to train Egyptian archaeological illustrators and was keen for me to meet his students. They are currently notating the tomb of a king's daughter, tracing the outlines of carvings onto sheets of plastic. These sheets will later be reduced in size and copied with pen and ink or on computer. It may be the ancient world, but technology is never far away.

The tomb was first recorded in the 1930s by a German team. At the end of the project Will intends to compare the two sets of drawings – historical and modern – to show how the standards of illustration have changed over time, and how those standards were first established by pioneers in the field.

The students, Inspectors with the Supreme Council of Antiquities, have come from sites all over Egypt. Their enthusiasm is enormous. It was a pleasure to watch them work and talk about their projects and studies, and also about the overlaps between their practices and mine, about the drawing of things and the precise gathering of information for future use.

Old Cairo

damonlk — Sat, 7 Mar 2009 07:34:00 GMT

Old, or rather historic, or rather Fatimid, or rather Islamic Cairo has changed its name almost as often as rulers have come and gone over the centuries. The most recent of the names [old and historic] are designed to reduce the emphasis on precisely what makes this part of the city so endlessly fascinating – its rich heritage of Islamic art and architecture.

For the past week I have wandered its lanes and alleys. Everywhere there is a jumble of modern apartments, Ottoman villas, and Mamluk and Fatimid domes. Because Cairo is a living city there is no limit to the intermingling. Windows are cut into the walls of a 9^th Century fortress. The arched façade of a hospital remains, but not its once domed roof. A Turkish barrack, taken over by the British during their time here, lies abandoned, mortar crumbling down sandstone walls.

From the roofs of buildings, or indeed any high place, the city stretches out in greys and browns. The horizon is not visible – dust and pollution put paid to that - but minarets and domes push up between habitations and steadily recede into the distance.

The best of all the high places is the minaret of the mosque of Ibn Tulun. One of the oldest, and certainly the largest mosque in Cairo, its architecture is unique in the region. Its closest cousin is the Great Mosque of Samarra, Iraq on which it was based. The minaret has an external spiral staircase, and from the top there is no end to the dizzying views over old and new quarters of the city.

At the eastern end of the mosque is the Beit al-Kritliyya, or 'House of the Cretan Woman', now the Gayer-Anderson Museum after its final resident, a retired Major and collector of Asian and Middle Eastern art and artefacts. The second floor of its central hall is ringed with wooden screens, and from here the women of the household looked down on intrigues and plots in the room below.