Notes From Nowhere

I never occurred to me that huge commercial jets have windshield wipers on the cockpit windows. To me, these look just about as flimsy as the ones I had on my first car. The wheels are decidedly bigger though.

It’s that time of the year again: planning trips for the summer. I have taken up a side-project of photographing archaeological sites in the Mediterranean. But where to stay? This must be one of the most powerful hotel websites ever, almost a kind of existentialist opera: Le Grotte Della Civita. Then there are more quiet glimpses into the condition of the modern nomad. Southern Italy strikes me as still harboring some of the forlorn places that I love. It also strikes me as a land of passionate hotel owners. When some traveler posts a truly bad review, owners sometimes talk back at length. I tend to find myself siding with the owner, and wonder whether some encounters should rather be resolved before the guest’s departure, in the parking lot? Finally there is the sort of painstaking travel journal that lists every instant of an utterly unremarkable stay and culminates in gems that would have made Beckett proud: “We decided to go to the beach but when we got there it appeared to be quite dirty. We found a dead rat.” Buon viaggio!

My favorite L.A. detective story remains Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye. That’s the movie, the ingenious hippie-adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s book. Chandler, I read on Wikipedia, worked his way up to authorship in the genre: “Having started in 1922 as a bookkeeper and auditor, Chandler was by 1931 a highly paid vice-president of the Dabney Oil Syndicate but a year later, his alcoholism, absenteeism, promiscuity with female employees and threatened suicides contributed to his being fired.” Fast forward to Charles Bukowski. His private detective in Pulp counts space aliens, a dead writer, and Lady Death among his clients. “Dedicated to bad writing” and making good on it, Pulp (Bukowski wrote it dying) is a spirited goodbye of its own. Quote: “You talk big for a man whose talents hover near the zero mark…”