Castles made of sand

“And so castles made of sand slips into the sea, eventually” Jimi Hendrix

Saturday morning I met a man who makes sand castles for a living. His name was Mark and I saw him when he was setting up the perimeter of his latest creation on Huntington Beach. He’d been hired by the hotel that we were staying at, and he told me that in the summer he was out there almost every weekend. He asked if we were from California and when I told him that we weren’t, that we were visiting from Montreal, he said that we could help him if we wanted. He gave both my daughter and my son a plastic chisel and he put them to work carving a passageway into one of the four towers of the perimeter.

Sand castle

Mark was very serious about his job but extremely patient and gentle when it came to explaining the finer points of his art. We were the first people there that morning and he said that he liked the way my kids worked. “You know,” he told me, “with the economic problems we’re having now we get a lot more foreign tourists than Americans at the hotel and I’ve noticed that the foreign kids are more independent and not as aggressive as the Americans.”

I tried to make light of the situation and told him that my children were far from being little angels, but he insisted and said “I don’t know, maybe we’re doing something wrong.”

I didn’t know what to tell him. I could only speak for my own children. I hadn’t lived in the U.S. since 1985, but I suspected that he was probably right. Aggression has become an American trademark. We are the hoodlums of the planet and I asked him what the people in Huntington Beach thought about the war in Iraq. He said that he and his friends were against it and looking at him I could tell that he felt the same way that I did. That we were both helpless to change anything, and that voting for one candidate or the other in the next election wouldn’t stop the war or our country’s imperial arrogance. The system was rigged and anyone in favor of peace and creating a different world would never get close to the presidency. It was a fact and you didn’t have to be a genius to see how far our democracy had deteriorated. With our “war on terror” and the hundreds of thousands that we’ve killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, we had permanently disgraced ourselves. The American Empire would have to fall, as all empires eventually do, before we could even begin to make up for the damage that we’d done.

The only consolation, I thought to myself, was that not everyone had fallen for the regime’s propaganda and that creative people like Mark would be there to pick up the pieces when the time came.

Grazie

Twenty-three years ago today my girlfriend and I arrived in San Diego with very little money and a stolen red Subaru that belonged to my father. We’d left Missoula two days before and after having driven through the Mojave Desert in the middle of August we were hot, sunburned and happy to have finally made it to the west coast. We stayed at my friend’s house on Crown Point Drive and now that I’m back in California again, this time with my family, I just wanted to thank Henry for his incredible generosity and kindness. A truer friend would be hard to find.

Chalk's

There’s a lot to be said for flying on a new airplane. Generally they’re more fuel efficient and quieter, more comfortable, and excluding acts of God and pilot error, a guarantee that you will get to where you’re going in one piece. Still, being fresh off the assembly line isn’t everything.

Up until recently, anyone who wanted to fly the old-fashioned way, with lots of noise, popping ears and serious jolts when the weather got bad, could take a Chalk’s seaplane from Miami to Bimini in the Bahamas. These were vintage Grummans, most of them built in 1947, and they took off and landed in the shipping channel of the city. Chalk’s had been around forever and when I first climbed aboard one in the early 1960’s the airline had already been in service for over thirty years. The owner and founder, Arthur “Pappy” Chalk, was an ex-aviator from the First World War and when I was a boy he was almost always at the ticket counter in the hut next to the water that doubled as a terminal for the tiny airline. My father, Gregory, knew him well, as did my great-uncle Les, and whenever we went to Bimini for a weekend of fishing Pappy would help us with our bags and close the rear door of the Grumman when we were all on board.

My grandmother Pauline and father Gregory leaving a Chalk's seaplane in Bimini harbor, 1930's

I don’t know how many times I flew to Bimini, hundreds perhaps, but I never got tired of it. There was nothing quite like the sensation of being in a plane that could float into a channel, turn to the left and then soar out over the Gulf Stream. In some of the earlier Grummans there were only seven or eight seats and I remember the view from the small windows, that were actually more like the portholes of a boat, turning white for a minute or two with all the water from the wind and the speed and wondering if we would ever make it.

My father had learned to fly when he lived in Africa in the 1950’s and sometimes when we were airborne and had reached our cruising altitude the co-pilot would let him sit in his seat and take the controls of the plane for a couple of minutes. It was the kind of thing that you weren’t supposed to do and that in today’s post 9/11 world would definitely cost a pilot his job, or worse, but that back then was possible. My dad knew everyone who worked for Chalk’s and even though he had his own fishing boat that he took from Miami to Alice Town on North Bimini he liked to fly and liked the Grumman Mallards in particular.

These planes were incredibly sturdy and would fly in almost any kind of weather. Once in December of 1973, when my parents were divorced and my father had taken the three of us to the island for the weekend, we were getting ready to go back to Miami but a bad storm was approaching and we didn’t know if the plane that was scheduled to land would make it. I remember that it seemed to bounce over the heavy chop in the bay between the north and the south island and when it was still in the shipping channel and where it would have to turn ramp next to the customs house the wind was so strong that the tip of the right wing was under water and one of the engines was flaming from the strain. In the end it made it up the ramp and the pilot didn’t seem to think that it was anything unusual. My dad asked him if he was still going to fly back to Miami that afternoon and he told us that it wouldn't be a problem.

A Grumman leaving Bimini a few days before the December 2005 crash

So, we climbed up the stairs and took our seats and once airborne we found out that there would be another, unscheduled, stop at a Cat Kay, an island to the south of Bimini. The landing there was smooth enough, but the take off was hellish. The Grumman was heading straight into the wind and the waves were enormous. We smashed into about ten crests until finally we were airborne, and even my father was impressed by the pilot’s ability and the plane’s strength.

That was the kind of outfit that Pappy Chalk ran, but nothing lasts forever and when he sold the airline in 1975 it passed from one financial group to another. The old Grummans continued to fly in the thirty years that followed but in this age of deregulation and cost cutting, maintenance is often overlooked, sometimes with tragic consequences. On December 19th, 2005 one of the Mallards crashed just off the coast of Miami Beach when its right wing separated from the fuselage due to metal fatigue. All 20 people aboard perished. It was Chalk’s first and only fatal crash.

Heart to heart and heavy artillery

Don’t you love it? Don’t you love the supreme irony of it all? Just as the Olympic Games are opening in Beijing, the pro-western, US backed government of Georgia decides to launch an offensive against its in-everything-but-name independent “province” of South Ossetia. Claiming that its troops were shelling the Ossetian capital city to “restore constitutional order” the Georgian Army killed over 1,500 people and essentially leveled Tskhinvali. Among those who died as the world watched a British soprano in Beijing sing “you and me, from one world, heart to heart, we are one family” were ten Russian soldiers manning a “peace observation” post in the breakaway province.

Opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics

Moscow was not amused and columns of tanks and heavy artillery were soon rolling across the border in defense of the largely Russian population. Georgia has now declared war against Russia and is begging the USA and the European Union to intervene in some way. The Georgian president declared that his country was “looking with hope” to the US. The armed confrontation with Russia, he claimed, “is not about Georgia anymore. It’s about America, its values... America stands up for those freedom-loving nations and supports them. That’s what America is all about.” But it’s unlikely that anyone will come to their aid. Apart from the usual calls for a cease-fire, the Georgians can expect little else from their NATO friends.

Opening salvos of the Russian-Georgian war

In America’s new cold war against Russia, Georgia and its army are but pawns in the Great Game. Since the break-up of the Soviet Union in the 1990’s, US administrations have fostered regional tensions in the Caucasus and beyond in an effort to gain control of the area’s strategic petroleum resources. Promoting Georgia’s admission as a full member of the NATO alliance was a part of this plan. Just as encouraging and then recognizing the unilateral declaration of Kosovo’s independence from Serbia sent a very clear message to the world and especially to Russia. “We’re still the rulers of the world”, the Neocons seem to be saying to Putin, “and we can surround you with client states like Georgia or create ‘independent protectorates’ in Kosovo and Afghanistan and there isn’t a damn thing that you can do about it.”

The risk, of course, is that the Russians would eventually strike back. Everyone has their limits and while it’s easy to start a war, once the killing begins, you never know where it will end.

Yoshi

Yoshi Nagasaka is a talented artist and a good friend of mine, and I thought that today, as a way of introducing him, I’d reprint the piece that I wrote in 2005 for the catalog of one of his exhibitions.

Nagasaka and Hemingway

I met Yoshi in the summer of 2001. He was living in the center of Milan not too far from the Duomo in a two-bedroom apartment that was literally packed with his paintings.

An uncle of mine had 'discovered' him while vacationing on Lago Maggiore. He was so impressed with the work of this Japanese expatriate that he gave me his number and said that I should scout him out in Milan and find out if he would be interested in doing the poster for the Ernest Hemingway Society's bi-annual meeting in Stresa. He was convinced that Yoshi's minimalist portrayals of the landscape surrounding the lake and the own of Stresa would be perfect.

Lago Maggiore Isola Bella nel blu, Yoshi Nagasaka

And indeed they were. They captured perfectly the romanticism and essential beauty of an area that my grandfather had once defined as one of the most beautiful places on the planet.

In one painting you could almost imagine Frederick Henry rowing silently across the waters towards Switzerland. In the twilight of a summer evening the mist was obscuring the mountain range in the distance beyond Isola Bella.

Tarda Primavera al Parco Sempione Milano, Yoshi Nagasaka

Many other paintings were of Milan. People sitting on the steps of the Duomo or passing through the Galleria not far from the hospital where shrapnel was removed from my grandfather's legs. Intimate views of a city that Yoshi knew well and that had been fundamental in Ernest's life.

After leaving his house I kept thinking how amazing it was to find this kind of talent hidden so carefully in a run-down building in the center of postindustrial Milan. The Milanese, it's true, have a habit of thinking of their city as the cultural capital of the country and yet here was a jewel in the midst that they'd virtually ignored. An ignorance, I was sure, that wouldn't last forever.

The Big Lie

When Robert Stevens became the first confirmed death in the American Anthrax attacks of 2001, I was still in Miami attending my father’s funeral. Stevens had worked at the National Enquirer’s offices in Boca Raton, just up the coast from where I was staying, and my wife, back in Italy, thought that that was a little too close for comfort. Talking to her over the phone I told her that I didn’t think that I was in any danger, but she wanted me home and the sooner the better.

Cleaning up Capital Hill after the attacks

The anthrax letters, which had been mailed to two high ranking Democratic senators, a prominent TV journalist and the National Enquirer, were spooking a lot of people in the States. Coming just two weeks after September 11th, they seemed to confirm the idea terrorism was in America to stay. Indeed, as Glenn Greenwald convincingly writes in his blog on Salon.com, the Anthrax attacks were perhaps even more important in securing popular support for the Bush Administration’s “War on terror” and its eventual invasion of Iraq than the suicide attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon had been.

Soon after Steven’s death, sources inside the US government were leaking information to ABC news about a probable connection between the attacks and the government of Iraq, saying that “initial tests on the anthrax by the US Army at Fort Detrick, Maryland, have detected trace amounts of the chemical additives bentonite and silica.” Betonite was a signature element closely associated with the Iraqi bio-weapons program and the kind of “smoking gun” that according to the late ABC anchorman Peter Jennings the Bush administration was looking for, in part, he explained “because there's been a lot of pressure on the Bush administration inside and out to go after Saddam Hussein.”

Which is exactly, as everyone knows, what the Neocons did. They went after Saddam, killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians and effectively destroying the country. Searching for Hussein’s biological “weapons of mass destruction” was one of the primary reasons given for our preventive blitzkreig. The weapons, of course, were never found, but it didn’t matter, the claim that the Iraqi dictator was behind the anthrax letters and that he still had enormous stockpiles of chemical and biological horrors that were just waiting to be used on other innocent Americans was more than enough.

What many people didn’t know at the time, and are probably still unaware of, is that there were never any tests done at Ft. Detrick showing the presence of betonite in the anthrax letters. ABC News finally admitted as much in 2007, but they won't budge when it comes to naming those in the government who had given them the false information in the first place. They say they are “protecting their sources” but in fact are just continuing their cover-up of one of the many lies floated by this administration over an extremely gullible American public.

Worse still, the recent suicide on Tuesday of Bruce E. Ivins, a top anthrax researcher at Ft. Detrick, confirms what many have suspected for a long time, that not only did the anthrax letters have nothing to do with Islamic terrorism, but that they came from the Army’s own bio-weapons research facility. Ivins killed himself soon after he was told by the FBI that he would be indicted on five accounts of murder stemming from the anthrax attacks. The FBI was sure, albeit after seven years, that they had found their man.

Greenwald in his blog connects the dots: the letters were sent by a top government anthrax researcher, there was a clear intent in the letters to link the attacks to Islamic fundamentalism, ABC News was given false information by government sources linking the anthrax used in the letters to Saddam Hussein, the Bush administration repeatedly used this “link” to ramp up public support for its invasion of Iraq in the months prior to March, 2003.

I’d say the facts speak for themselves.

Photograph from 1924 Encierro in Pamplona

Here’s the photo that inspired the film being made about my grandfather by Sergio Oksman and Carlos Muguiro.


The photograph, as I mention in my post El Doble, was taken on the 13th of July, 1924 in Calle Estafeta in Pamplona, just a few moments before Estaban Domeño was mortally wounded, the first ever recorded death in an encierro. The man lying on the corner of the street, Pablo Guerendiain, was also wounded by one of the bulls. My grandfather would have been on the opposite side of the street, further ahead, looking down at the dying and injured runners from the balcony of his room at the Hotel La Perla.

Special thanks to Sergio Muguiro for sending me this photograph!