Archive for the ‘Musings’ Category

Cloud Creche.

Monday, November 29th, 2010

The next few postings will attempt to capture the visual flotsam and jetsam left by the most recent few days In Brasil. This is not the naive scribble from a first trip fueled by sun, samba and caipirinhas. Rather this is a pen trying to come to grips with one of the more complicated places to write stories about just now in a world that morphs from month to month. Brasil engenders wild swings in mood, thought and sentiments. It is often difficult to do it justice and all too easy to do it an injustice when I feel so caught between lauding and lambasting. Here goes, and be patient as a few days there pack an almighty  sensory punch;

Google Earth can makes this all appear to be as easy as pie and in all fairness to those gone long before, It is. It just doesn’t quite feel like it at this very moment, sitting passively, inertly, much as Vern & Larry, the crash test dummies might, perched up here at the shiny sharp end of some very long con trails that I helped pay to spray across the world’s skies today. Delta providing some small measure of space from PDX to JFK and then as far as Sao Paulo from where the upstart Webjet took over for the milk run to Brasilia, to Fortaleza and onto Natal. Brasilians flying to the nations capital and beyond can only be viewed as “little people” if the dearth of space between seats on these aircraft is anything to judge by. An absurdly charitable sentence re the clean and punctual Webjet would end in the words ” a bit of a tight squeeze”.

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It is while up here on the milk run and in particular the leg ( stretch would carry connotations of comfort) between Brasilia and Fortaleza that I spend some time gazing out of a window that I am wedged tight against… and the view is spectacular. It has the beauty to take a mind and its imaginings outside of the craft and for it to forget what the previous thirty hours have done to move a body ever closer to a DVT. I look from on high on vast, empty swaths of the states of Bahia & Ceara with just a sliver of territory at one point beneath, that I imagine rather than knowledgeably identify as the boundary between Piaui & Pernambuco. From up here it is an empty landmass, empty that is of roads, of visible infrastructure and the scars of progress. It gives off that wild and reckless feeling of having no boundaries at all. It reeks of opportunity and adventure, there is nothing to stop the wind, the heat, a person… and for all I know at this point there is nothing to make a person stop there at all.

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Looking outward rather than downwards there are some of the most exquisite cloud formations imaginable and for some reason up comes the ‘cloud creche’ in my mind. The clouds have a hint of that “mackerel” sky to them as they scale off across the whole western horizon. They are beautifully back lit with a sun being gently extinguished in the Mato Grosso. Is it perhaps because of their small sizes, the infinite variety of height and color and in how they whisper in a shadow language to each other and to the land beneath? This arid landscape surely cannot be their birth place as where on earth would all that moisture come from to form and nourish… No, this must surely be the nursery. Where they come to grow and to form and  then reform…  and then take the directives that will see them float and spin throughout a continent, it’s reefy edge and then an ocean itself…  all before dissipating, heaven knows where.

Ms.Malibu

Friday, August 13th, 2010

Seriously now, I think the executive along with the rank and file of the UAW should rise up and be reliably counted upon to use Flowerbud.com as their one and only source of fresh cut flowers in all seasons and for any, all and no particular reason at all. I am after all about to weave yet another fine product from General Motors into a hectic day and a story of approval that at one time would have ranked as quite out of character for me. In ‘Vase Runner’ I lauded their behemoth Suburban on a marathon run and now I find myself waxing on about a plain vanilla sedan that seems to have entered the market place to little fanfare, perhaps because it coincided with “The General” slipping into “Government Motors” and their over reaching, overdrive gear.

Whatever. It’s comfortable seat and serenely quiet interior still lie a thousand miles south of a warm bed and another 4 am PDX trek. My car parks ( it knows its own way ) at blue R7, the Rosetta Stone experiment that is the bus from economy parking to the terminal is as punctual as ever and of course my considerable monetary infusion to Alaska Airlines goes a long way in aiding all the free flying enjoyed by airline staff and families, not to mention allowing just the odd day of work for those with inordinate seniority. Numerous days away from the job being essential to the storing up of sufficient surliness and bile that qualifies one to be cabin crew, and whoo hoo, even the beer in hand emergency slide operator on more than a few of today’s airlines. Just this week I was chatting with a Delta Platinum passenger who in three months of enthusiastic looking over some 60,000 miles had yet to find a cabin crew member who had earned one of the accolades that Delta HQ wants their premium passengers to award to staff for simply doing their job with pleasant and helpful demeanor. You would not accept that of your pizza delivery person and yet after dropping hundreds and perhaps thousands for a plane fare you get to take it from any number of personnel attached to the aircraft… and keep mute.

I manage a fairly cheery and donation free pass through the TSA while trying hard not to envision enhanced and enlarged images of athletes foot fungus, as shoes off , I work my way to the point where we all hitch up our pants or skirts and look either embarrassed, relieved, guilty or feign being too cool for school. Bear in mind this is PDX and there are an awful lot of Birkis, Danskos, Tevas and Keens alighting from Light Rail or the latest hybrid vehicle combusting soy lattes, switch grass ethanol or ( coming soon & no doubt with a tax subsidy ) methane, from the plentiful by product of dogs eating holistic dog food and being pushed in strollers to “doggy parks”… to then be shed by the barefoot on the grubby carpet. Few in the pudgy, white and tatted throngs look very athletic. So maybe there is a measure of  safety in that? I am fervently and perhaps visibly praying that my ‘Smart Wool’ socks are at least smart enough to stave off any such floor level malignancies. I proceed on to the gate and discover I am blessed with a most opportune upgrade to the comfy seats up front and the day takes on a far sunnier disposition, John Wayne Airport here I come.

Hertz has been abandoned by me for this trip, as they reveal themselves as shameless robber barons in the SoCal market while the merry men at Alamo are only to happy to rob from them and re distribute fine cars to the more parsimonious of us road warriors. The gleaming white beauty that is Ms.Malibu, awaits for me just one floor below, with blindingly chromed wheels and a cloth cool black interior. (more…)

Panettone

Thursday, October 29th, 2009

I just happen to be back in Sao Paulo by way of a few “off the grid” days in Fortaleza spent gazing out onto a warm and gusty Atlantic Ocean way up there in the state of Ceara, the land of the beach, the Cashew nut tree, the Donkey, no small mount of plastic trash and the billion and one wind turbines turning endless miles of remarkable coastal dunescape into a wind farm. (A tale for later) It is all part of a week  that somehow started with pitching Flowerbud.com at a “Sustainable/Green Living” convention in NYC, where I spend a day wedged between a cooperative of Organic Goat’s Cheese & Ice Cream vendors from northern California. A couple of hilarious holistic medicine woman from Michigan, selling cremes/rubs and other curiously scented juju and medicaments with names like the “I’m Wounded Creme”. Opposite me, a rather striking lady promotes Zestra, an essential arousal oil for topical application by women to enhance “deep pleasurable sensations” It acts within minutes and lasts for 45. Ah, the power of botanicals, clinically proven of course. What spin might TV’s Madmen place on this? My guess is that of  all assembled… goats, cremes, flowers, aspirin holders, exercise monitors and so on, the rather striking lady has the most to gain from the sometimes hard and sometimes not so hard to grasp concept of “sustainable arousal”.

But I am getting blown off course here and I have a few hours in the middle of the day to learn something new and interesting and great good fortune has a recent acquaintance of mine, a young and indecently prosperous graphic designer taking me to a client for lunch and a ‘field trip’ all in one location deep in the endless megalopolis that is Sao Paulo. (more…)

Cooking, at Macy’s ?

Wednesday, October 21st, 2009

Life is ‘nowt but queer’ I think, as I find myself standing in a lengthy queue of people snaking through the housewares section of a Macy’s department store in Portland, OR. Taken there one recent early evening by my assistant Marcy, who apparently thinks I am at a loss for something to do and just perhaps am sorely needing to learn how to pitch product while being entertaining. Trust me when I say I have never been in a Macy’s before. Heck, I think I have been in a shopping mall less than a handful of times in my life and here I am now shuffling slowly forwards through the bed linens in order to see a ‘celebrity chef’ by the name of Tyler Florence. Too weird.

The mood in the queue is jovial and patient, not at all like being at the airport and we are not at the back of the line for very long at all, as its tail keeps growing. Hundreds of people are showing up and all are expected to fit into a pretty small space between pots and pans and the bed linens. (more…)

The Vase Runner

Tuesday, September 15th, 2009

Barely off Delta’s Nice/Amsterdam/Portland flight (vacated by Northwest post ticket purchase and now code shared with KLM and Air France… really! ) when handed a ticket to Long Beach, CA along with instructions to disburse among a half dozen farms, a container load of Flowerbud’s acrylic vases that are painfully late in from China. The approach into Long Beach takes us above the billowing smoke from the still rampant blaze that is the Station Fire,  an arson caused conflagration in some foothills east of LA. Of all the LA area airports used by me this past decade, Long Beach has never counted among them, until now. To say the least it is small, quaint almost. Eminently manageable and as far from what one might imagine an airport in Los Angeles to be as possible. No frill, no flash and quite some number of trailers operating as peoples offices. California continues showing us that the 31st state is in a state of penury… the first of many such glimpses I catch through the dried up and weedy landscaping, the endless trash blowing roadside, and for the next 1975 miles, feel… as I bounce through potholes and thump over misaligned bridge expansion joints and collapsed concrete in freeway lanes. (more…)