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TravelogueVisiting Rash in CaliforniaDAY FOUR
Rash made sure I knew where to go to catch my bus to the airport, and we made our farewells. After he'd departed, I packed and spent a couple of hours finishing up the kusudama, which I left hanging above his table. I caught my bus and made the airport shuttle transfer without incident (chatted briefly with a woman on the bus who'd just arrived from Virginia), and wistfully looked out at the Silicon Valley streets one last time. Oh, a funny thing about the busses: bicycle riders can attach their bicycles to racks on the front of the bus, and board to travel to their destination. I witnessed this with one passenger, who racked his bike, got on, rode a whole block, got off, and unracked his bike. Weird. On the plane, I read some more of Eno's Diary1 as we waited to taxi down the runway. I was feeling okay until the moment of liftoff, at which, to my honest surprise, I found I had a few tears. What was that all about? It had been an amazing trip in an amazing state (arigato, Rash). I realized that when I'd remarked the first day that New Mexico was my favorite state for it's physical beauty (but not for its culture), I was foreshadowing the fact that the San Francisco Bay area was going to take its place in my esteem. I want to move to San Francisco. [Days: One, Two A and B, Three A and B, Four] [Back to Travelogue Home] 1 - A Year with Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno's Diary (Faber and Faber, 1996). This is the most intelligent book I've read to date, and it was a gift from Rash in 1996 or 1997. I tried to purchase copies for a couple of friends recently, but found Amazon couldn't get ahold of it (after listing it as available on their site and making me wait three weeks ... figures). I'll treat you to a few quotes from early in the book: "Spending lots of money is often an admission of lack of research, preparation and imagination." "Working with greater leisure, my ideas become more 'reasonable' and surprise me less." "The acceptability of various solutions depends on our tolerance of strange collisions, emotional mixtures we don't expect ever to see. Perhaps postmodernism is a good rehearsal for this." Of David Bowie: "Perhaps I should accept that he's the hunter to my pastoralist—he hangs round for a long time and then springs for the kill, whereas I get results by slower, semi-agricultural processes." "After all other talents have been shown to be irrelevant to whether someone makes important paintings or not [...] the one thing that is left is confidence—just like with paper money. The question of intrinsic value is not even in it [...] All the value, as with any piece of paper currency, is what has been conferred by the artist and viewer. The artist's job becomes that of getting the viewer to agree to co-confer value—which is to say, to extend confidence." "Dreamed I was a song. Disappointing to wake and find myself a man in a hole." "If all I ever wanted to do was make money, I'd probably be really poor by now." [back] Credits: The flower kusudama origami image is from the paper package (by Grimmhobby). |
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