Mendocino photo journal

Last December Nancy and I traveled thru Northern Cal down to San Francisco, staying in Mendocino along the way. Ahhh. Heavenly Mendo. Rivals Provincetown as the best place in the world (in my little world, anyway).

Here are a few pictures I took. Enjoy.

On the road in Oregon, about 10 miles west from Grants Pass.

Sigh. That North Caly coast. Rain and fog and the thunder of surf.

Our cottage, from the back yard.

Looking out thru the front gate of the cottage. Mid December colors.

A Mendo high rise.

Another one.

Some interesting hardware, reinforcing a house.

 

A house on Heeser owned by some geezer. Nice yard, eh?

This is my dream house, or a close approximation.

Looking up to Main from the coastal headlands.

Among the shops and houses...

Down to the Mendo Hotel.

Old hippies don't die. They just keep on truckin'.

Now, THIS is a lumber yard!

The coastal headlands. Ocean is off to the right.

From Lansing and Main.

View from Headlands Park, lazing on a sunny afternoon.

That's all fokes.

Two Sketches from a Bungalow by the Sea

Koh Rong

From a cabin just west of paradise,
Where wine flows free, liquor freer,
And smoke, it clouds the air.
O how peaceful, how sensuous
The women dance their drunken way.
Romantic and astute, the conversation slurs.
The cocks the crows, the birds they cheep
Among the eucalyptus and the palm.
The fishing boats, they grind and putter.
This perfect native life, this retouched paradise.


Interlude in a Breaking Wave

First light and the grumble and slosh of the waves
Washing the sands with the breaking of days.
Some remaining footprints and some bleached bones
Of moments that roared, their echoes mumble.

Each wave changes the quality of light.
A memory brightens;
Other ones turn darker, or fainter
In this the first light in the rumble of surf,
In the tumbling selves
As night washes back into sea.

letter from Cambodia, #2

Phnom Penh:
Took a sardine can on wheels from Kompot in the south to Phnom Penh in the center of Cambodia. A remarkable drive full of striking images. I recorded 4 pages of notes about people, clothing, architecture, flora, commercial vehicles, and took a lot of video footage. Planning on constructing a video of moving and still images, sounds, text, and voice over, a follow up to the montage I'm writing of the first surreal days here.

What a drive. Traffic is insane. Whoa!

Checked into perhaps the most elegant hotel I've ever stayed in. Took some pix. Antiques in the halls, beautiful old lithographs in our room, and lovely teak furniture. A balcony stretching the length of 2 sides of our large room. Entrance to the room thru a large open exterior terrace. 12 rooms in the whole hotel.

We got settled, and set out for the Russian market, Cambodia’s version of Istanbul’s covered bazaar, tho the passages here are much narrower. Grabbed a bite to eat along the way, a fish omelette for me, a fish stew/soup for Cal, both very good, $3 total.

It was over 90, heat and humidity.  No doubt, it will be another 2-shower day.

Rested and read for an hr or so, then off to find the riverfront and street food, preferably grilled. Funny thing happened along the way. Passed so many interesting restaurants, all upscale. Phnom Penh is a foodie haven. Came to one, La Table Khmer with a sampler for 2 consisting of 2 raw spring rolls, 2 fried egg rolls, pumpkin soup, mango salad, pineapple beef, fish coconut curry,and chicken curry, plus dessert of the day (turned out to be a coconut, banana boba-noodle-like preparation; yow!). Cal was intrigued so we went for it! $18. Amazing; the interior really lovely, and a kitchen that they teach cooking classes in during the day. We photoed it all. So we went from street food to tres chic. Who'd a guessed?

We then continued on towards the river, made a wrong turn off one of the main, and most up-scale boulevards in the city, and 2 blocks later we saw a strange building that defies description. As we got closer it appeared to be an abandoned building, many blocks long, with walls collapsing out and vines or trees growing among the ruins. No. More bizarre than any movie set, it was the most squalid, horrifying 4-story tenement either of us had ever seen. You could look up into tiny decrepit rooms with no exterior front wall, and crumbling interior walls and see people lying in filth, or legs dangling out the front. Cal went up to look inside and a few men came up to confront him. They offered him drugs, then sex  with children. Seems it was one of the centers of child sex/slave trade in Cambodia! I shouted  'No!' when Cal wanted to go in and check the place out, and that generated a few course comments from the pimps. I expected knives to flash at any second. Cal reluctantly turned back. Remember, it had been dark for an hour or more already. We walked a narrow dark alley that fronted the tenement for about 3 blocks. It was lined with squalid shacks made of tin, rubble, and scrap lumber salvaged from the building behind. They were tiny, businesses mostly: sewing shops, vile restaurants, I can't remember what else. People working, eating. Prostitutes staring at us. We were both appalled and shaken. Cal conflicted, as well, about not going in. We turned around, still lost, walked a mile or more in the wrong direction from the river, thru thick crowds and snarled honking traffic, finally hailed a tuktuk who couldn't understand a word we said. Another tuktuk stopped; maybe he grasped where we wanted to go, maybe not. We couldn’t tell. Bargained the price, $2, got in, come what may. He was shitfaced drunk, jabbering non-stop, including an occasional English phrase, or so it seemed, but he got us to the river in a slow weaving motion. We walked the quay silently, trying to grasp the evening and what we saw. But we had/have no context. Dispirited. Everything looked ugly and stupid to me. Took a tuktuk home.

I worked on this email, while Cal wrote in his journal about the evening. There is lovely live Cambodian music drifting in the window from a chic club down the street. There are child sex slaves a mile down the road.

Cambodia.

So far from home.

Pix:
Russian market:

Tuktuk, shop, apartment:

Machine shop and young teenager:

La Table Khmer:

Sex-slave tenement, night:

Street food:

Dessert, a compote of fruit, boba-like noodles, condensed milk, who knows what else:

letter from Cambodia, #1

Kompot:
Today we woke after 8:30, our room so dark we had no idea the time (well, I was ignoring my clock). Headed out before 10 on our scooters and got back  about 2:30. In the mean we logged a good 100 klicks, including down roads that were 6 inches deep of dust, sand, rut and pothole, bikes slipping and swerving underneath us. Many other long stretches of road, gravel and dirt or gravel and tar. I had the troubling habit of turning the accelerator the wrong way, accelerating when i needed to slow down. Made for some hair raisers. Lunch at a village that had a certain neolithic feel. I hope my pix turn out. Remarkable place. Didn't really see the sights we were headed for, thanks to dreadful maps, our poor grasp of Khmer alphabet and vocab, no signage, and general confusion. Well, we didn't find the temple-caves, but drove thru pepper farms and the salt producing flats, and well, who knows what we were seeing, but it was entirely fascinating. Got absolutely roasted by the sun.

Back at the villa I spent an hour showering, trying to wash off the dust that was caked into every wrinkle and pore, and then wrote part, or maybe most of a short story that I outlined in the middle of my first night here. Will go well in my collection, Transmigrant Journals. Cal has been devowering Hemingway, writing tons, and doing great Hemingway imitations. Speaking of which, I am looking forward to watching Midnight in Paris, on Cal’s recommendation.


We grabbed some lunch in this rest stop, a plate of curry and a bowl of fish stew:

My bungalow on Koh Rong Island:

Out the front door of the bungalow:

Huts on Kompot River:

From the veranda of the Villa Vedici:

Announcing... Ottoman Beachcomber For Sale

Yes, it's official! Ottoman Beachcomber is available as an ebook for the modest price of $4.99. Simply click on the following link to preview or purchase:

http://vook.com/storefronts/book/ottoman-beachcomber.html#.UDJITqNrVTa

The link above accesses the Vook portal. Vook is the cloud software I use to build and market ebooks. But you can also find Ottoman Beachcomber on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and via iBooks.

It's a great read. Buy it today!

Ottoman Beachcomber ebook ready

A preview version of my ebook Ottoman Beachcomber is now available! Write to me if you want to download a free copy. Here's the cover image:

Old caravanserai in Beysehir, Turkey

Working on a fair copy of a poem in book 6 of The Song ov Elmallahz Kumming. The poem is fairly short, 36 lines, but because of some technical complexities, it has gone thru untold numbers of revisions. I'm closing in, and will publish it here, soon, with a peek behind the surface, to some of the discarded and unrevised lines. In the meantime...

I continue to work on digitizing and restoring slides of Turkey taken in 1983 and 1986. I intend to use some of them for my ebook, Ottoman Beachcomber. Yesterday I came across this image, which allowed for some surprising results. Here's the original, a shot of a ruins of a rather grand caravanserai (pre-industrial truck stop; caravan resting place) in Beyşehir (pronounced BAY-sha-heer), a small town in south central Turkey.

There wasn't much I could do with this to enhance it while remaining true to its realism. But then again, as I see it, realism is just the surface of things. With not much effort, I found a lot of color lurking behind the surface. First this:

Which quickly revealed this:

Then this:

And then finally, taking some color away, this:

Who knew there were all those gemstones in the matrix of stone and the mortar mix? In 1983 when we first came across this site, this last picture approximates what I saw. The image prior to the last one is what I speculate Nancy saw when she clicked the shutter.

Restoring the color of the past, 2

In late March of this year, I posted an image recovered from my wife's slide archive, showing the Sultan Beyazit Cami (mosque) in Amasya. I then showed my progressive restoration of the image. (Well, really, some may argue it was not restoration so much as transformation, re-creation.)

Below are a few more notable images recently digitized and then restored/transformed by me. Some or all of these will end up in my ebook, Ottoman Beachcomber (which has also been previewed in this blog)....

Food market in Bergama, original:

Bergama market, newly alive:

Divrigi, dawn, almost:

Divrigi, dawn, really:

This is a cool pic. Nancy climbed the minaret of the Uc Serefeli Cami (mosque) in Edirne, and took a picture across town of the Selimiye Cami. First the original long shot:

Here's the Selimiye close-up (cropped from the original):

Now, here's 3 more of the Selimiye, transformed (definitely NOT simply restored):

Way down yonder in southeast Turkey is Mardin, an ancient town high up on the plateau overlooking Syria. Here's the original, a shot of some people (almost) and the Syrian plain in the background:

Now we can see the people, too. HEY, that's me, with some pals!

Finally, a beautiful shot of the Ishak Pasha Saray (palace), which needs little or no attention:

Buuuut... I gave it some attention anyway. Here's 2 new ways to see Ishak Pasha:

Click on any image to zoom it, and/or to see a slide show of all the images in this post.