art and travel

Roosevelt Island

damonlk — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 00:30:00 GMT

Roosevelt Island only gained its current name in 1973. Before that this sometime prison, infectious disease hospital and lunatic asylum was known as Blackwell's, then Welfare Island. A shunned place, in other words.

It made sense. The island is a narrow strip of land in the East River between Manhattan and Queens. For many years the only access was by boat or an elevator up one of the massive pylons of the Queensboro Bridge. For the deranged, diseased, depraved it was a place apart. For their guards and administrators it was only 100 metres from the rest of the New York.

It also made no sense. The views from the shoreline to the south and west are spectacular. The city bristles with spear like buildings. The UN tower, Empire State and Chrysler Buildings are clearly visible. Not so far as Brooklyn that they are smudged by distance. Not so close that you are lost among the canyons.

Instead of a purgatory I can also see the island as a playground for the rich. Luxurious condos. Waterside mansions. Piers and yachts. Manicured gardens and stately homes.

Today the prison and asylum have gone, replaced by public housing in relentless shades of grey concrete. There is access by subway and cable car to Manhattan, and road bridge back to Queens. The cable car rises high above the river on slender wires. For a minute or two you are flying over the city, the glass bubble of the gondola hovering like a helicopter without the pressure of heat and noise.

A few tourists come to walk along newly constructed pathways and photograph the city. There is a coffee shop and old fashioned diner for when they are done.

I arrive underground and leave through the sky. Thumb through stock in the well worn thrift shop. Eat at the diner and walk around. Draw in-between.

Turnpike

damonlk — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 05:33:00 GMT

The New Jersey Turnpike is twelve lanes wide and runs 200km north south between Fort Lee and Carneys Point. While not the busiest highway in the USA it is still heavy with traffic. Cars and buses, vans and trucks hug its gently engineered curves and lanes of concrete and asphalt.

I travel it twice. Heading south from NY to Philadelphia and then returning from DC a week later. On both occasions the road is dense but not packed, and the traffic roars along just above the legal limit of 65.

Going there is morning. It is cold but the sky is clear. It is an ugly road, carved through a more or less rotting industrial landscape. The first overpasses clear old warehouses and shipping containers, skirt tankers and refineries and grey, rubble strewn estuaries.

How different from the parkway that connects Philadelphia with DC. Broad shoulders of cut grass, central islands of spruce and birch forest. All stripped bare of leaves. It is winter after all. Brown signs announce large and small waterfalls, historic sites, proving grounds, ordnance facilities.

Not so in the north. Instead there are big box malls and flyovers.

Coming home is no different. Dusk approaches and lights from the refineries and co-generation plants blink above their maze like extrusions of pipes and towers. The traffic if anything is heavier. No more aggressive, but made to feel so by the diminishing light.

One thing strikes me. The highway is not six lanes north and six south but three three three three. As if in expanding the road the engineers simply built a new one next to it, and realigned the bridges that had previously fed the dual carriageway.

Above me are two signs for exit 12. Two bridges describing graceful arcs to the right. Two ramps to funnel cross traffic down onto the road.

Air and Space

damonlk — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 05:32:00 GMT

Much has been said of the United State's militarism. Robert Fisk writes of the necessity of any empire – be it Roman or British – to exert power abroad. For domestic political consumption as much as to provide access to raw materials and resources.

The United States is in many ways a martial society. The eagle on the presidential crest clutches arrows as well as an olive branch. The National Museum has an entire wing devoted to war. There are signs and monuments everywhere. Especially here in the capital, Washington DC. Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, The Civil War. WWII. Love our troops. Hate our troops. Support our troops.

The senate recently approved a $662 billion defence bill. In a country where the seats on the Long Island Railroad from JFK Airport to New York City are patched with duct tape and recycled advertising posters.

What is said less often is the state of grace such spending produces. An irresponsible word, grace, when the general outcome of war is death and destruction. But it is there nonetheless, in that handmaiden to the technological war, design.

You see this clearly in the two divisions of the Air and Space Museum, on the Mall and near Dulles Airport. And to a lesser extent at the NRA Firearms Museum near Fair Oaks Mall Virginia

Because they must be efficient and functional in extreme conditions weapons and warplanes are sleekly beautiful and perfectly proportioned. Like seashells or birds in flight. There is nothing out of place in a Heckler & Koch submachine gun. The trigger like a pointed tongue. The safety switch like a nipple or the lobe of an ear.

So too the SR71, X15, Predator Drone. Brancusi comes close with his stretched and elegant forms. Outside, the monumental sculptures by Calder are leaden, flat footed by comparison.

I turn back inside. Towards death and art and science all wrapped in one tight and indivisible bundle.

Metropolitan

damonlk — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 05:30:00 GMT

In the opening passage of Rudyard Kipling's Kim the Lahore Museum is described as "the old Ajaib-Gher - the Wonder House". Which is true, as this museum contains many a forgotten treasure. Dusty, yes. Neglected, somewhat. But that is easily part of its charm.

The question then becomes how to describe the Metropolitan Museum of Art New York, whose treasures are so astonishingly large as to render quite inadequate words like mansion or even palace.

The collection is overwhelming. There are objects from Crete and Persia, Japan and Africa, Meso America and the South Pacific. Everything made by man, from the earliest days to immediate present.

Everyone finds it daunting. Friends say it is possible only in small doses, that you must go to see just one small part and then escape before the weight of all that history buries you.

I disagree. Yes, the Museum is encyclopaedic in its breadth. Yes, there is too much to see in one or even several days. But my time here is limited, so I gorge before the feast. Stock up on sights and drawings to be digested later, perhaps on the long slow journey home in January.

I draw armour and musical instruments, antique weapons and Nabataean ceramics from the 1st Century AD. There are samurai helmets and bronze ends for walking sticks. Roman glass and Etruscan figurines.

And then there are the images. Indian miniatures, late gothic panels and Tiffany stained glass all have their galleries and exemplars. Several rooms, clearly once the private collections of modern oligarchs of one kind or another, are filled with Picasso and Matisse. Klee, Kelly and Kapoor.

But the museum is not about lists. Is not about seeing this or that specific thing. It is instead a vast repository of examples of all that can be seen and made. A 'wonder house' indeed.

Osaka

damonlk — Sat, 24 Sep 2011 18:32:00 GMT

To say that Kyoto and Osaka are not much like says not much at all. Kyoto is a neat and compact city no more than a few hours walk in any direction and bordered on the north by rolling hills.

Osaka sprawls.

It is a port city, and the port itself is cut through by multiple islands. Some are natural. Others, like that which hosts the main airport at Kansai, were dredged out of the bay at almost inconceivable expense.

I went riding today through some of these islands. As elsewhere in urban Japan space is at a premium. The cities do not necessarily build up [this is no New York] but consist mainly of three to five story buildings wedged close together.

Likewise the bridges. To reach the 39 metre clearance needed for shipping traffic first performs three spiral ascensions then shoots out over the harbour, only to descend in a clockwise swirl on the other side. It is a engineering solution familiar to pedestrian overpasses on freeways – those slow ramps that turn the simple crossing of a street into a ten minute expedition at the weakest of gradients.

Of course the scale is enormous. The turning circles and height clearances of trucks means that each spiral rises eight or nine metres. The pylons and support beams are similarly massive, engineered both for the weight of traffic and the redundancies necessary in this earthquake prone region.

Although there is a pedestrian lane only the hardiest of joggers use it. The rest of us queue for the ferry that shuttles forwards and back across the water.

Osaka is not the prettiest of cities. Industry, the port and heavy traffic all combine to give it a grittiness unseen in genteel Kyoto or affluent Tokyo. The supermarket in Dobutseunmae has bargain bins by the front doors, and stacks of ready to eat noodles. The shops in the nearby arcade have seen better days. One sells, or at least displays, walkmans and minidisc players. New. In box.

Outside, by the entrance to the metro, sits a man selling pirated discs to play in these once so fashionable machines.

Kyoto

damonlk — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 20:06:00 GMT

Kyoto, that 'glorious city of temples and palaces', is in the rain. This is welcome relief. For the last two weeks Tokyo has sweated under a blanket of heat, humidity, and still air.

Instead today locals extend umbrellas when crossing the street and the hills surrounding the city are covered in fog. There is a typhoon passing through. Up the road in Nagoya they have evacuated one million people. Here they walk more quickly from covered arcade to shop, that is all.

Kyoto is a gem. Unlike Tokyo which was bombed and burned to the ground with phosphorous and those two other cities destroyed by substances even more exotic [and well known] Kyoto was spared.

Stimson's diaries tell us it was because of the temples and shrines, and fears their destruction might push the Japanese into the arms of the waiting Soviets. As if the war against Russia in 1905 could so easily have been forgotten.

In any case religion and culture have never been impediments to aerial bombardment. Coventry and Dresden are proof enough of that.

So maybe the city was lucky. If so it is our luck too. Between the new buildings of the downtown there remain the wood and paper houses and temples that once filled the old capital. Pagodas in gilded or painted cedar, gardens of raked gravel and pine.

At Sanjūsangen-dō the central hall is filled with a thousand Buddhas. This temple was built in the 11th Century but destroyed by fire in 1249. All but 124 of the statues were saved. The rest were carved again, sometimes by the sons and grandsons of those who had carved them the first time.

It is possible to see, in the serried rows of otherwise identical faces, the differences that mark the many hands that carved them over the years.

Tokyo

damonlk — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 20:37:00 GMT

Tokyo felt hardly strange. This makes no sense. The population of the city alone exceeds that of Australia. It is crowded, densely packed, perpetually on the go.

Shop signs and hoardings are written in mix of three impenetrable alphabets. This, after years of travel in countries where the script [Arabic, Greek, Persian, Cyrillic] yielded more or less, more or less quickly. Here even the numbering was not necessarily the same.

And the faces!

It is said that Japan, through its island status and long political isolation, has a singularly cohesive society and culture. Hardly any migration, at least in comparison to the great waves that have swept across the rest of the world. The country was barely colonised, never the hub of some European trading concession.

But each face I saw – and there are many faces to see in a city that depends so heavily on public transport – was different. There would occasionally be a face that seemed iconic, like something from a print by Hiroshige or Hokusai. Maybe gnarled, maybe smooth. Male, female, delicately or crassly indeterminate. Seen once, and never again.

There were no repeats. K____ looked nothing like her sister, her father. K______ and M____ could as easily have been brother and sister as man and wife. There was no way to tell.

Names repeated. Colleagues were known as senior or junior depending. Hair was mostly dark, eyes black. How such variety was achieved within such constraints was like some prodigious feat of legerdemain. I am still watching to see where the magician puts his hands.

[See the] faces in the crowd
Petals on a wet, black bough.

— Ezra Pound

Leiden

damonlk — Thu, 9 Jun 2011 12:32:00 GMT

Like so many Dutch cities Leiden is built around the series of canals that link the river with the farming, mercantile and manufacturing interests of the town. Everywhere you walk there are low bridges, clear waterways, and flat bottomed boats moored or simply making their way around.

It is a tranquil life. The streets each side of the canals are too narrow for cars to park so the locals go everywhere by bike. They have dedicated lanes and undercover parking at the central train station. It is nothing unusual for parents to ride with children stacked three deep in an assortment of stands, seats, and specially constructed barrows.

Of course this idyll probably only applies to the older parts of town. On trains in and out of the city you see flashing by newer suburbs, banks of grey apartment blocks, motorways.

On Sunday we travel to Rotterdam. Once the busiest port in the world, and still the biggest in Europe, the city was flattened in WWII and then rebuilt. As a result not much remains of its historic core, and the streets bristle with new buildings and high rise.

But there are some. Just over the Erasmus Bridge is a single warehouse left from the days of the Dutch East India Company. A brick building, almost black with age and deposited soot. Just below the roofline the names of places once part of Empire. Java. Borneo. Celebes.

The Pakhuismeesteren sits below the new terminal of the Holland America Line, this building itself dwarfed by the enormous liner that is berthed and awaiting passengers. Both J_______ and D_____ say how terrible it would be to be trapped on a boat for seven days across the Atlantic. Only a week I reply, and so much less the month and a half journey that brought M_____'s family, and my own, to Australia, so long ago.

Amman

damonlk — Tue, 31 May 2011 03:08:00 GMT

Unlike Cairo and Damascus, which were built on plains and count their lives in millennia, Amman wraps around a series of valleys and hills. It is also only a handful of decades old.

Consequently Amman is utterly different from the other two cities. In the downtown nothing is higher than three or four stories. The older buildings are faced with white limestone, the newer ones in pale rendered cement. Between the buildings are trees, so despite the bright skies and reflected light there are moments of lushness. Mulberry trees that hang down over lanes, pavements smudged with the colours of crushed fruit.

The steep terrain and density of population means that the buildings, though individually not that tall, are stacked one on top of another to the top of the ridge. There are narrow streets, precipitous switchbacks, and rock cut stairs. I watch a car's tyres lock, its rear wheels fish tailing as the driver negotiates a parking space. It is lucky that it hardly rains in this, the third driest country on earth.

Unfortunate in so many other regards though. This is a dry region and the Jordan river contested by the countries that lie along its borders. The Dead Sea shrinks, year after year.

For now Jordan drinks water from an aquifer in the south. But this resource is not renewable, and there are few plans for when the water runs out.

There were thoughts to pump water in from the Red Sea to refill the Dead, and desalinate along the way. Possible, if expensive. In any case the funding [from Libya] has, following that counties descent into chaos, dried up, and Israel objects on environmental and security grounds.

How different Egypt with its massive river, and open canals snaking silver through the surrounding land.

Railway

damonlk — Wed, 18 May 2011 17:27:00 GMT

The Kadem Train Museum opened in 2008 to house the rolling stock of the old Hejaz Railway. A narrow gauge line – the tracks are only a metre wide - it once snaked its way from Damascus to Medina, carrying pilgrims from across the Ottoman Empire to Haj.

The last passenger service, to Amman in Jordan, ran in 2007. Even then there was a change of trains at the border and the journey took 12 or so hours. But speed was hardly the point. There cannot be that many scheduled steam train journeys left in the world. This was one of them.

The engines were built in Chemnitz in 1898 and Wintherthur in 1908 and boasted top speeds of 35 km/h. The black hulled boilers, now spotted with rust, ran originally on coal and were converted to burn oil later in their careers.

The museum is in three parts. After the rolling stock is a large room filled with ticket printing machines, telephones, French survey maps from 1943, timetables for the Palestine Railways [services to Acre], uniforms, medals, dials, gauges, switches, oil cans and spanners.

The third part is the workshop where men are slowly restoring the engines and carriages. Slowly indeed, for none of the machines were in use when I visited. Two newly cast wheels were suspended in a massive lathe, the cutting tool alone nearly a foot long. But it was not switched on.

The plan is to run a Friday service to Der'aa. The Turkish government talks about restoring the whole line, though it is unclear if steam is to be part of this service.

In any case it might be a while. The carriages still have signs in French and Arabic, hard wooden benches and narrow racks above to store your luggage. I do not remember if there were fans on board.

Behind the museum is the abandoned rolling stock for the railways proper. A Romanian engine with wheels removed and wiring exposed. Rows of carriages gone grey with dust and faded by sunlight.

There is also a new train, Chinese, with gleaming paint and shining metal, moving slowly down the track. Ready for the journey to Aleppo and beyond.

Mathaf al Zar'i al A'lamy

damonlk — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 19:22:00 GMT

The Egyptian Museum of Agriculture* - Mathaf al Za'ri al Masri – was built in 1934 and has ever descended thereafter into a twilight gloom of dust and neglect. These days it is a museum piece in itself. Display cases emptied by the slow actions of insects. Models, built in Cologne before the Second World War, hidden behind smudged glass. Signage made incomplete by blossoms of mould. Rooms increasingly locked and closed.

It is this perfect artefact, this cabinet of wonders, that the Spanish artist Asunción Molinos Gordo has rebuilt – restaged even – on the third floor of a Downtown apartment block. While updating some of the data [nothing much in the original museum dates past the 1950s] the aesthetics are precisely transposed. Once again the dark wood panels, the wax model fruits, the jars of badly labelled seeds. Between each rooms are signs painted with the same superb calligraphy, the same cack handed paintings of peasants tilling fields. Mothballs, dust, and ersatz decay.

But whereas the first museum celebrates an age of agricultural plenty that never arrived its facsimile is darker indeed. Excerpts [in Arabic and English] from contracts governing the use of patented plant material. The likelihood of the Norwegian seed bank, built below frozen ground on the edge of the North Pole, surviving a nuclear strike. Percentages of African territory given over to agrifuel. Charts notating the declining levels of agricultural diversity and the reasons for the fall. Number one: substitution of local varieties. Number two: urbanisation.

One horrific room shows the foods exported by Haiti. Colourful wax models of watermelon, oranges, sweet potato, maize. All the bounty of an island in the fertile tropics. Behind smudged glass in the corner is something else. A bottle of oil. A handful of salt. Lumps of clay. On the shelf below are flat cakes made from the mixture of these ingredients. Hardly visible the label 'what Haiti eats'.

As with the other museum half the rooms are locked, signs pointing optimistically towards answers that are never given. There is fury here, but so well marshalled, so tightly contained within the precise aesthetic of sign and label and jar. Held as a thin high scream between charts showing hunger, production, and distribution.

Asunción Molinos Gordo
World Agriculture Musuem
13 December 2010 to 25 January 2011
22 Abdel Khalek Tharwat St Downtown Cairo
www.asuncionmolinos.com

* see also 'United Republic' http://journals.worldnomads.com/damonlk/story/66486/Egypt/United-Republic

Tibah

damonlk — Wed, 8 Dec 2010 20:27:00 GMT

Although he does not live there M______ stays with his friend A____ in Tibah, 15 km east of Luxor. A____ studies at the nearby Faculty of Art. His paintings are easily the best thing in the college, though staff and students alike disparage his work. 'Drawing is not the only thing' they say. Indeed.

M______, though still at secondary school, draws constantly, filling sketchbooks with cars, monsters, warriors and weapons. All the things a modern comic book hero might need. I urge him to draw what he sees outside as well. M'omil, he says. Boring. But then asks for a drawing of a particular tree, to use in his work.

A____ draws everything. Boats, villages, girls from his class. Younger siblings, animals, architecture, satellite dishes. Pots and jars. Lamps, carpets, cloth, water. All with an astonishing technical grace.

Tibah itself is a dormitory suburb for university students and workers from Luxor. It is a riot of concrete formwork, freshly laid lawns, wide and empty streets. There are plentiful parks, or at least the spaces where they should be. Walking around with M______ I comment that this town is either the future or the very distant and abandoned past. There is no way to tell which from current appearances.

Although there are a handful of established blocks, with flame trees that reach past the fourth storey, most of the dwellings are either brand new or in various stages of construction. Unlike Luxor with its plentiful amenities, both open and convert, there is only one tea shop, housed in the central bus station. There is nowhere to buy credit for your mobile phone, and bread is only available in the morning.

Quite how this will change as the city fills with residents moved to make way for Luxor's open air museum is not known. Perhaps buildings will accrete in the spaces between the tidily organised apartments. Footpath vendors and street stalls. Coffee shops and fruit sellers. All that makes it possible to live, everyday, in any city around the world.

Resort

damonlk — Wed, 1 Dec 2010 15:01:00 GMT

The tourist trade describes three paths through the commercial and social landscape of Luxor. The first, the ruins of the Middle Kingdom capital of Thebes, are what brought European travellers here in the 18th and 19th centuries, and made the fortunes of Thomas Cook and others. The temples of Karnak and Hatshepsut. Valleys of Kings, Queens and Nobles. Monuments once buried by sand and neglect and now restored. In contemporary lithographs – David Roberts being the prime example – you can see the desert sands pushing against the chins of colossal statues and rows of broken columns. At Luxor Temple these columns now stand 20, 30 metres tall. As broad as the stacks of an industrial chemical plant. Massive lintels like bridge girders high above.

The second, though dependent on the first, are those Europeans who come not only for archaeology but to escape the worst months of the northern winter. On CNN today the forecasts were bleak. Snowfalls throughout France, and negative temperatures across the continent. So when your tour has ended for the day, or perhaps even instead of it, there is the choice of pools and deckchairs. Middle class and middle aged, doused in oil, pink under the bright blue sky. Reading books with too many 'k's and 'g's and 'o's on their covers for them to be English titles.

The last is more insidious, and follows from the second's piles of strained and sagging flesh. A young man with a clipboard and laminated chart showing prices for various degrees of massage. Stares from withered queens by the pool. A German woman with too many rings, too many scarves, too many chins, clucking over Gamal on her mobile phone. Nods and whispers. Offers to follow men to the river, boys on feluccas. Whatever you like as long as it is young and male and Egyptian, and you are old and white and paying.

Eid

damonlk — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 10:17:00 GMT

Cairo was closed last week for the Eid Holiday. Eid al-Adha, or as it is known in Pakistan, Bakra Eid. Bakra. The goat.

For the holiday celebrates the intended sacrifice, at God's behest, of Abraham's son Isaac. A sacrifice averted by the substitution, in the final moment, of a ram caught in nearby thickets. These days goat, sheep, cow or camel will do. The animal is slaughtered, if possible at home, and the meat divided between families and donated to the poor.

In any case Cairo was closed. This never quiet city of twenty odd million simply shut down. The shops did not open, the bakeries remained cold, the streets empty. For the first time it was possible to sit at street level and draw - unencumbered by traffic, the air unburdened by its usual fog of dust and smoke and diesel fumes.

In the old city the buildings were shuttered. The bazaars were closed. Those that could left Cairo for Alexandria or Sharm el Sheikh. Those that remained visited family and friends and were visited in turn.

Until evening that is. Then the crowds come out, to walk along the Corniche or take over a Downtown closed to traffic by a combination of traffic barricades and the crush of bodies. Along the Nile the disco ferries tout their wares in a din of competing music. There are popcorn sellers and boys offering single roses wrapped in cellophane to passing couples.

It is like this for five days. Officially the holiday is only three, but Friday is half a holiday anyway and Monday too close to the festivities to merit serious work.

Then it is done. People and traffic return to the streets. The shops reopen. With a lurch and a roar Cairo returns to life.

United Republic

damonlk — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 08:09:00 GMT

Although the United Arab Republic – Nasser's vision of a pan Arab state - is long since dead, having only briefly bound Egypt and Syria in uneasy union, an echo remains of that ill starred dream. It is found, in all places, in an annex to the Cairo Agriculture Museum.

The museum itself is a relic. Across two buildings it details Egypt's contributions to plant and animal sciences. The life cycle of the chicken. Local and foreign duck physiognomy. Maize production, circa 1935.

The desire to update the exhibits seems to falter in the 1950s. Tins of jam [fruit preservation] with faded labels. Wool production from when Australia led the world, ahead even of the USSR. Wheat starch products. Wax models of the staple foods of each Egyptian governate. One hundred and twenty varieties of mango.

There are hunting trophies mounted on walls, African fauna with their dates of death in the local zoo, preserved chameleons from the Belgian Congo and Ruanda. Upstairs glass displays are filled with birds, their feathers mostly dull with age but occasionally bright. Poisonous snakes, empty ampoules of serum, fish of the Nile.

The UAR display is none of this. Instead there are paintings of the historic places of Syria. The waterwheels of the Orontes in Hama. Now silent or destroyed. Manikins in a local dress that is more or less absent from the modern state. Handicrafts, leather work, fluted vessels of hand blown glass.

This part of the museum is now closed. Half the exhibits are wrapped in newsprint. The lights are out. Finished, khalas, says the man outside the door. Five minutes I ask. He waves me through. I pick my way through the exhibition's darkened halls.

Platskartny

damonlk — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 01:17:00 GMT

There are two kinds of train in Uzbekistan – the old, slow Russian, and the newer Chinese. The network is extensive, a product both of Soviet planning and Uzbekistan's status as one of the very few doubly landlocked countries on earth.

While the Chinese trains are generally express and cover distances in half the time of their Russian cousins they are also ill suited to long journeys, having only seated carriages. For overnight trains you really need a bed.

The longest journeys are east west and we make them in both directions – Samarkand to Khiva and Urgench to Tashkent. We take a cabin with four berths and a samovar down the hall next to the guard's office.

The first journey is uneventful. We share space but little else with a German couple of very few words. The train detours around the enormous Kyzylkum Desert and arrives promptly at 1.30pm.

The next one is different. We help a woman with enormous bags into the cabin. It is hot, the first hints of summer being amplified by the curved metal roof of the train. We sweat, drink iced water and hot tea, sweat some more, and begin to talk.

About everything. The climate in Khorezm region. Cherry season. Preserving tomatoes. Pickling cucumbers in brine. Her children. Their children. Her education in the late 60s in St Petersburg ['a wonderful time to be in the Soviet Union']. The farm she shares with her husband and father. Dried apricots. National breads.

Her work as an electronic engineer, teacher and then development officer with the ministry of education. Her travels to Melbourne to visit TAFE colleges on an official delegation. Less official; speaking Uzbek to Turkish stallholders at Victoria Market and Russian with anyone on Balaclava Road.

'The water is bad in Khorezm and Karakalpak region. In summer we drink only tea, sweetened with cherries preserved the season before.'

She spoons some wrinkled fruit and syrup into our cups. We drink. The journey goes much faster than its scheduled 19 hours.

Savitsky Musuem

damonlk — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 23:26:00 GMT

In Soviet times Nukus was a closed city. Home to a chemical weapons lab and the capital of the semi-autonomous Republic of Karakalpakstan it is 20 hours from Tashkent by train and 200 km south of the Aral Sea. Surrounded by desert and scrub it is the perfect place to hide - in this case a collection of art by dissident painters.

Which is exactly what Igor Savitsky did in the 30 years between arriving in the 1950s and his death in 1984. During this time he amassed more than 90,000 works, many of which were smuggled in from Moscow at a time when artists were imprisoned for deviating from the norms of Socialist Realism.

It was a risky business. Not only was the art proscribed and the artists banned but collecting them could get you labelled an enemy of the people. But Nukus was a backwater, and what was forbidden in the centre might be easily overlooked in the provinces.

These days the collection is housed on two floors of a new marble building. The paintings are labelled in three languages. Some have toured the world.

But none of this describes the real significance of the place. Not all the art is good. Some is exceptional, others ordinary. The museum is clearly the product of a single collector; his passions, vices, fancies and shortcomings.

The real power comes instead from two things. One is that all the works are pictures. No room here for the spastic palsy of abstract expressionism, the stripped down emptiness of minimalism or the fads and jerks of conceptualism. The paintings tell you as much about the world outside as they do about art.

The other is that the works exist in a universe that is neither pre nor post but simply outside Duchamp. You can see the influences – late Cezanne, Matissse, early Picasso – but then there is no further contact. The artists were isolated and followed their own paths. A cul de sac, to be sure, but how interesting a vision of what might have been. And was, far out here in the desert.

www.savitskycollection.org

Turkmenistan

damonlk — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 18:33:00 GMT

Without doubt Turkmenistan is an orderly place. In Ashgabat police and security staff outnumber citizens, and certainly tourists, of whom we saw none during our five day stay. Everything is clean. The grass around the monuments is even and very green, the marble surfaces kept spotless by teams of women in orange overalls and bright headscarves, the streets swept by constantly patrolling machines.

The construction goes on. New hotels and boulevards, offices and apartment buildings. The domes of the parliament and presidential palace are like something from a new Atlantis, gold and blue tiles and acres of imported white marble.

Of course behind this new city are the remains of the Soviet one. Rows of apartments and older dwellings built around courtyards. Our hotel, one of the latter, has sprawling grapevines and a pigeon coop full of white and fancy birds.

At the break up of the USSR the leaders of Turkmenistan found themselves in a fortunate position. A small, mostly rural population. A centralised power and security apparatus. No real enemies nor any desire to engage in the kind of revolutionary struggle taken up by Iran. Enormous gas reserves only a pipeline away from Europe. It is these reserves that have fuelled the growth.

Billions have been spent on trains and roads and the new city of Ashgabat. Water is cheap, gas and electricity almost free. Needless to say the security situation is very tight indeed, and dissent strictly proscribed. Despite this the people seem relaxed, the restaurant at the train station always full.

So here is the question. Given the things an authoritarian country where the rulers have almost unlimited wealth and power might spend their money on - pointless wars, a nuclear weapons program, armaments – building a green and white city in the desert seems not so bad. Ashgabat's copy of Istanbul's Blue Mosque is very fine indeed.

Mashhad

damonlk — Sun, 4 Apr 2010 17:40:00 GMT

Mashhad, like Karbala and Najaf in Iraq, is one of the holy cities of Shi'a Islam. As the resting place of the eighth Imam, Reza, its golden domed shrine and adjacent courtyards spread over several city blocks. There is underground parking, a museum, circular ramps for the considerable traffic, souvenir sellers of every kind, and most of all pilgrims.

The attraction of this place and the impact of the visitors is enormous. I have heard estimates that five million – the population of a largish city – pass through each year. Consequently Mashhad is full of hotels and the sky constantly disturbed by Tupolevs straining upward from the nearby airport.

As a tourist there is very little of the shrine you can see. Docents meet you at any of the many perimeter gates and quickly escort you to the office of external relations. Here they note your nationality and religion – for statistical purposes – and offer to screen a video of the many places it is forbidden non-Muslims to go. This sounds like a poor choice so we ask instead to visit those parts of the shrine it is possible to see.

The guide is a retired school teacher, one of the 20,000 volunteers at the shrine. He is quick to offer uncontroversial religious trivia ['man is made from clay'], much slower to talk about the 30 year building project that has replaced the tight scrum of covered bazaars with these vast and empty plazas. The building work goes on. Most of the facades are rough concrete and steel mesh. The tile work is prefabricated and installed in sheets.

I interrupt a speech on the return of all the prophets [Jesus, Moses, Abraham] at Judgement Day and ask about his family. A wife, also a retired teacher. Two children, the daughter trained as a lawyer, the son an engineer. He loses interest, leaves us at the museum, and departs.

Tehran

damonlk — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 23:56:00 GMT

Tehran is a sprawling, muscular city of concrete and wide boulevards, manicured parks, palaces, mosques, ruined cinemas and expressway flyovers. It is home to 15 million people, and rising. Apartment buildings stretch from the southern slums to luxury penthouses that mark the city's northern boundary on the lower slopes of the Alborz Mountains.

The rate of growth, like that of the entire country, has been prodigious. In A__'s childhood in the 1970s the city was a fifth the size, his parent's house surrounded by fruit orchards. Even their summer villa, 35 km outside the city, is now linked to town by a thin sprawl of construction. Nothing has kept pace. Traffic regularly grinds to a halt in hour long jams. The recently completed metro struggles to accommodate the million odd daily passengers. Air pollution kills 10,000 a year, and on its worse days in winter closes schools and keeps the elderly indoors.

But because of No Ruz the city is empty. Our hotel, on the edge of the auto parts district, has few guests. The air is clean and metro uncrowded. The few people that have not escaped to the Caspian, to Isfahan, Mashhad, Shiraz or the Persian Gulf are in holiday mode. The museums are full of local sightseers.

On Thursday we travel north to visit the palaces of the former Shah. While the gardens have grown the buildings are preserved as they were 30 years ago. Enormous carpets and gilded doors. The head of a tiger, its pelt stretched across the floor at the foot of a bed. Billiard tables and furniture with turned legs. Malachite vases and Japanese screens. A television on coasters. All the luxury of the day.

Strangely enough there is no sense of a moral lesson here. The objects, and the time they represent, are as remote to those born since the Revolution as the displaced royalty of Europe. Iranians crowd around the glass fronted doorways. Hold children aloft. Sneak photos with the cameras of their mobile phones.