Durian

It's doubtful that any of my Manhattan friends reading this blog have smelled a skunk. In LA, your first experience of eau de skunk happens at night in a car in one of the many canyons connecting the main city to the Valley. Polecats have poor eyesight so their road kill version is what lingers in the car a while later---unless you roll the windows down immediately. The actual smell burns your nostrils=it's acrid and aggressive to the point of driving The Smeller to a sopping washcloth and a bar of soap.

My first experience with durian was different but somewhat familiar. I was walking through a Chinatown alley amidst a handful of green grocers. With Leica in left hand, I was determined to shoot whatever groceries I saw before buying. The thought was knocked right out of my head as my nostrils were assaulted by THE foulest smell EVER. I checked the bottom of my shoes--twice--then tentatively crinkled my nose for a small sniff. "Whoa!" was all I could manage. A broad-faced Malaysian woman with a toothy grin cackled and pointed. My eyes full of 'onion tears' scanned the area where her rough hands indicated. Nothing registered. She spritely bounded over to this small pile of large, spiny, oval, green landmines as I winced and finally made the connection. In broken Engrish she innocently asked, "Some taste? Want some taste?" I probably said something like, "Fuck no", because all I really wanted to do was stick my head into the silver mound of fish I seemed to be involuntarily diving into at that moment. Yes, durian described by afficionados in Indonesia and Malaysia as the 'King of Fruits', had introduced itself to me in a big way. [At this point, the camera somehow made its way back into my pocket---hence, no photo essay.]

Since then, I've tagged the general concept of the stench in my mind as "NYC August garbage strike" to make it more understandable. But I still wince when I catch a whiff of it. Its ivory-colored, eggroll sized nuggets of fleshy meat are not only eaten as raw delicacies, but it's also made into ice cream pops! Recently I bought a box of 6 pops: Mango, Corn and Durian after circling the frozen foods section three times. I couldn't tell you what they do to beat the skunk-ass foulness out of it, but the durian pops weren't too terribly bad. My rationale was tempered by my eventually liking the objectionable taste of Limburger cheese and also certain romantic operas/or any music by ABBA. So, I figured: if I'm gonna do this journey thing right, I'd better not shut down the sensors just yet. After all, this funky fruit has captured this culture enough to have influenced its architecture---when you consider it, that's quite a powerful legacy.

check out this link:

http://architecture-buildingconstruction.blogspot.com/2007/11/esplanade-by-night-singapore.html

Zhuhai

The images of the Calligrapher posted in my first entry were taken in Zhuhai, China.
I was there with a small work group to review scenery built by one of our contractors for my area of the themepark. This small industrial/resort city sits on the south coast along the balmy South China Sea, west of Hongkong, and north of Macau. The first of our two nights there, we chatted with a pilot at a local club about landing in Hongkong on the old airport runways.
Apparently, the old entry approach was literally through the city--tips of the plane wings barely touched the highrise buildings on either side. Imagine white-knuckling a commercial airliner down Park Avenue in Manhattan?! The great thing about the new airport are the direct connections to islands like Kowloon and Macau by high speed ferry
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The images in this post were taken during a walk from our contractor's office to our hotel just before magic hour. I'll be returning to Zhuhai late February.

Feet First

"Life must be lived forward but can only be understood backwards."---Soren Kirkegaard

I ripped this quote off from one of the first few pages of a Rizzoli published book recently mailed to me by the Academy of Arts and Sciences [no less]. This is a perk voting Art Directors receive while pre-Academy Award clouds are gathering in the steely winter skies over greater Los Angeles. By the way, the book is "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button"--- testament to the power of campaigning for a vote and the enormous hubris of Hollywood. I'll stop with that here.

This blog isn't about bashing the film industry, it's about sharing the next 12 to 18 months with friends.

Mark Quinlan, longtime friend and playwright, encouraged me to do this [write a blog] before I relocated to Swingapore in early December 2008. It's taken a month to quit pacing along the edge of a weakly imagined fear and take the plunge. So, here I am once again not able to touch bottom and in some perverse way loving it. My creativity is expressed through a driving restlessness. Lately, image-making or writing have acted as an effective tag-team for expression. Although I haven't quite found "my voice"--real or imagined--at 56 as an artist, my work in the world has always pointed me towards entertainment of one type or another. I guess this journal now exists to help me figure out why I'm really in Singapore. This statement isn't as muddleheaded as it sounds: I've noticed that many of the projects I've participated in have only been a backdrop for the more significant issues at hand. If you're willing to take this journey with me, we might see or understand something together while staring at a lot of photos.