Heaven and Earth

I think that there is a little slice of heaven here on earth for all of us. It's a different place for everyone, all your own, discovered or revealed to each in different ways. It might be a park bench or a mountaintop or a kitchen table, but whatever it is, I hope that everyone finds their own place like that. I know I've found mine and it's called Point Reyes. Point Reyes is a triangular chunk of land that, on a map, appears as if it is being torn off the coast of California by the great San Andreas Fault. It's so other-worldly and beautiful that it seems that the entire weight of a continent can't hold on to it. I think of the word cleave. In one sense, cleave means to separate, to split, but in another sense, cleave may also mean to cling. I think of fingers futilely entwined--in someone's hands, in a handful of fabric of the clothing of someone who can not stay. It's a sad word, a pulling in opposite directions. It is the way the sound of a mournful song sounds beautiful, and the particular way beauty can be mournful. Maybe beauty is a form of mourning, loving that thing that is transient, fleeting, moving away.

But lucky for me, since I am a mere mortal, plate tectonics and geology are slow forces, and that bit of land I love so much will take several millennia to finally rip away and float off into the ocean, lost to the continent but born anew as an island, surrounded by vast black water that glints blindingly in the sun, a lonely place visited only by sea-birds and the occasional seal. The submerged lighthouse will exist only as a trick of light and shadow beneath the crashing waves. The roads that once criss-crossed her soft belly will be faint scars visible only from above, so that, in the slanted sunlight of an afternoon, the sky will caress and trace those faint lines on the naked flesh of the land and ask, how?, and the land may reply, distracted, her eyes looking off in the distance from where she came, Oh that? I couldn't say, it happened so long ago I can't even remember.Saturday morning we awoke early. We dressed in layers to be peeled off one by one and put back on again at the whimsy of the sun. I packed a few simple things I could find in my kitchen: a packet of crackers, cheese, a long forgotten apple that I sliced into quarter moons, a bag of trail mix. Along with dear friend Coke, we got in my car and headed off, out of the city, over the Richmond Bridge, through the small towns that dot the way to the coast.

At Point Reyes, most people stop at the visitor center, a big red barn staffed by people who love what they do. They have a little gift shop that I find completely irresistible. Yes, if heaven had a gift shop, you wouldn't be able to resist either: art prints, guidebooks, patches, bandannas, histories--all on the topic that interested you most. We stopped mainly to get a map, but I couldn't resist a slim volume on the common wildflowers of the area. With our trusty map in hand, we set off, down the road, left at the intersection, another left a little ways further. Our destination: Limantour Beach. If you want to continue with the triangle metaphor, then the base of Point Reyes lies along California's coast, tilts down a bit at a jaunty angle, and the apex reaches out into the Pacific, acrobatically balancing the famed lighthouse on its chin. Limantour lies on the southern side of the triangle. You drive through a brief forest of pine trees. At this time of year the trees were putting out their candles of new growth--one long finger sprouting up, surrounded by a couple of shorter fingers on either side. Coke said all the trees looked like they were flipping us the bird. A whole forest of them.
Limantour beach is a wide swath of sand lapped by the sea and naked save for tufts of grass in the dunes that line the shore. It was a bright day, but the air was cool, and a strong breeze blew in from the sea. Grains of sand hopped and danced, the grasses leaned, reaching and reaching, and whitecaps appeared here and there in the distance. We headed down the beach, the sand making a funny squeaking sound as we walked on it. We stopped to look at the washed up things, the shells of crabs, a glint of half-buried color. Every once in a while the wind would kick up and sting our hands and faces and try to steal our scarves away. Coke ducked into the dunes and found us a nice little spot, protected from the wind, bathed in light. It was like our own little room, grass for walls, heaven for a ceiling.

And it was heavenly, truly. The noon sun ran its fingers through the water, lighting it up all shades of blue and green. We saw something very large and very black rise up and disappear beneath the waves, twice. High above the clouds drifted lazily by, sometimes obscuring the sun long enough to reconsider a sweater that had already been shed, but not quite. We sat for a long time, enjoying the light and the ease. We breathed in the air, watched the shadows of the birds soar across the sand.

After a while, we remembered that we had left our picnic in the car, and our thoughts turned to where we should explore next and how long it would take to get there. I told Coke I didn't want to ever leave, was ready to leave my entire life behind and begin anew right there on the beach. But our bellies betray the best of our intentions, and we returned to the car where we sat in the warmth and devoured our picnic as the wind rattled and shook the car and tossed the seagulls skyward. We pulled the map out again, and I half-heartedly suggested a couple places. Part of me felt that since we had made it all the way out here that we ought to see as much as we could. Point Reyes has so much to offer, so many places to explore, but there was a tugging in my heart that wanted to stay. I suggested as much, and after little deliberation, we decided that staying would be just as nice as going somewhere else.

So, we set out again, more prepared this time, bringing the extra food and a towel and blanket. We found our way back to our little place in the dunes and spent the rest of the afternoon taking in the sunshine and enjoying this little slice of heaven. I can't wait to get back.

Thanksgiving in LA and the Way Back

I just got back from the annual Thanksgiving trip to LA. It was a good time to see family and contribute to the big Turkey Dinner. As usual I'm photo-blogging.

Here are the things I was in charge of: candied yams, pumpkin pie, mashed potatoes--the mushy stuff. I forgot to add sugar to my pumpkin pie (yuck!). I marketed it as diabetic pie and the the old folks LOVED it. Spread a bit of ice-cream and cool whip on it and it actually didn't taste half bad.

I also got to see my niece, Jellybean, who of course loved Thanksgiving dinner so much she got it all over her face. She's my kind of people!

Here she is with her Dad, my little bro, who I still can't quite grasp as being a Papa, but he's a good one! She has her father's, uh, teeth!

Also found a pic of my Mom in her wedding gown. She's pretty.

And NO trip to LA would be complete without a piping hot bowl of menudo and my Mexican side:

Or biore with the bro(?):

A highlight of the trip was actually making my way back. I caught a flight down, but the trip back up was with dear friend Coke in her car, Meeps. We took our time on the great Highway 101. I usually jet back up the 5, but 101 meanders by the seaside part of the way. We found our own secret beach, after winding through suburban neighborhoods. This place wasn't even on the iphone map, which made it even better!! We spotted an unmarked staircase on the way to getting lost:

It was deliriously beautiful down there.

There was a tree that had fallen off the cliff that we wove our way into for funny pics:

And a rock I did my best to pose mermaid-like upon:

Coke just wanted to see where I came from:

Pretty, light-filled day:

And then long hours in the rain, listening to roadtrip music, and a stop at Starbucks and that M-place for french fries. All to get back to this guy, who I'm sure missed me, but isn't spilling a bean about his adventures. He just wanted to know where I'd been:

OMG! Immi is a Genius!

OMG! I was able to catch bits of Imogen Heap's webcast from her Royal Albert Hall show this week and I just can't resist the urge to share a video of her showcasing her absolute genius. The way she creates loops and layers is just jaw-dropping. She is so amazing. My electronic music hero!!

PS

And a postscript to the last post: We got a really great review for the Yoshi's show!! Read about it here.

Hell Week

Ok, maybe calling it "Hell Week" is a little extreme, especially since what I'm calling "Hell" here wasn't anything particularly hellacious--intense, ghostly and otherworldly--maybe. In the space of one week I played 3 gigs for Ghosts and Jazz, and on the other side of that was an extreme amount of work and studying that needed to be done for my horticulture classes. Two take-home exams + two in-class practicals (exams) + giant flower project all needed to be completed in the space of 3 days. I needed to put off all thoughts of horticulture to practice for the gigs, and the gigs came in between intense study of horticulture. Boy, it makes my brain tired just trying to lay all that out for you.

Preset for Matcha Night at the Asian Art Museum

First off was "Matcha" night at the Asian Art Museum. We were in a particularly large and boomy hall (I think the whole room was composed entirely out of marble or stone), pulling off our first incarnation of the show. I had to learn a batch of new versions of songs and storytelling and put it all together in time for the show with only 3 rehearsals. It was good that I've worked with that team before, but that doesn't mean it was necessarily easy. Plus it's JAZZ, which means enormous amounts of improvisation. You have to know how to just "go with it," or "feel it," which were terms that were thrown around a lot on the musical side of things. Most taiko stuff is entirely pre-conceived and staged and entirely thought out. There's not much room for "going with it" except during solos or when someone drops a bachi. Matcha night was challenging not only with the presentation of this new material, but with sound issues (we used more electricity than they were used to, which meant our monitors and sometimes Brenda's mic kept going out), and I had to rely on visuals. Janet just kept telling me: Watch Mark's foot! Just watch his foot! Which meant that I had to kind of play like a deaf person because I couldn't hear what he was playing. It was good learning experience.

Preset for 142 Throckmorton

Next was 142 Throckmorton in Marin. Did I tell you the theme of the shows was ghosts? While sound was way better at Throckmorton, we encountered technical issues DURING the show, namely, the battery pack that powered Brenda's mic flipped open at the absolute peak of the story, and she she lost power and was scrambling to find her battery and us musicians were left in the lurch. Mark was fabulous and just took a solo, and I tried to hold groove (that's where the improvisation and going with it comes in handy!!), and Janet tried to look in Brenda's costume for the battery, and all the while the rest of us just kinda looked at each other and kept the music going. Afterward Brenda spoke to "The Old Man Who Lives Upstairs" a.k.a. the set designer, and he told her there were spirits on stage who were responsible for those sorts of things. That explains a lot! Ghosts!

Preset for Yoshi's

The next day was our gig at Yoshi's. Yeah, Yoshi's San Francisco!! World-famous jazz club and host to all the greats! That was our best performance. Of course sound was not an issue here. It was just a little tight for space, but otherwise it was the best performance of the series. It was also Halloween, and we passed a yard sale on the way over. Janet couldn't resist the opportunity to get a hat for the gangster-related bingo show coming up at RCW:

Janet hitting the Halloween yard sale on the way to Yoshi's

Janet posing with yard sale treasure and demon mask

And as soon as I got home from Yoshi's, I hit the books. I was actually overwhelmed. I'd been putting it off, but the full brunt of what I had to do kind of knocked me down. At certain points in this whole process there were, yes I admit, tears and a fit of crying on the kitchen floor. (Thank you dear, sweet Coke for being there and offering your compassion and dishpan hands to the process) If cramming for taiko has taught me anything, it's learning how to completely focus and break down what feels like it would be entirely overwhelming and chewing it off into more manageable pieces. Yes, I crammed. Actually I crammed harder and was prepared to answer questions that were even more difficult than were actually asked. But darn, that horticulture is some tricky stuff, and though I did the best that I could, I didn't score any A-plusses or anything. Maybe A-territory, but eh, I did my best. Here is a picture of some fruits I gathered for floral project:

But now that it's over, it feels oh so good to be reading pleasurably and listening to music for enjoyment. Hell weeks, while feeling totally overwhelming and consuming while they are happening, are totally worth it. Can't ask more much more from life.

Ghosts & Jazz 2010 Halloween Weekend

I'm going to be performing taiko in THREE shows this week! They all feature jazz music and storytelling. Here is a description:

GHOSTS & JAZZ

This Halloween, get spooked by dramatic and haunting Japanese ghost tales performed by Brenda Wong Aoki with Emmy Award-winning Jazz composer Mark Izu, the taiko drums of Janet Koike & Kathryn Cabunoc, Anthony Brown on multiple percussion, Shoko Hikage on Koto, and Mas Koga on Saxophone and Shakuhachi.

In Japanese Noh theatre, the dead are more important than the living because the actions of the dead brought us to where we are today. Ghosts are usually upset females who won't go peacefully into the night. The Japanese believe ghosts are people who have died with an unpaid debt. An unpaid debt is passed down for generations and grows like a snowball into an avalanche. Whole families, villages, countries live under the dark cloud of an unpaid debt, because by then, nobody knows how to fix it.

Storytellers help people remember the past, and ghost stories remind us that what remains after we are dead are the consequences of our actions.

Our first show is this Thursday October 28th for the Asian Art Museum's "Matcha" series. We'll be performing 3 sets beginning at 5:30.

Next we take the show up to Marin on Saturday October 30th to perform at Throckmorton Theatre:

Ghosts and Jazz

Brenda Wong Aoki and Mark Izu & Friends
Dramatic performance with Award-Winning Jazz

Saturday, October 30 8:00pm

$20 General Admission $15 Adult with Child, $5 Children
$23 General Day of Show

Buy tickets or call 415.383.9600

Then we come back to San Francisco to perform at Yoshi's Jazz Club. Yep, I said, Yoshi's! Yee ha, that's quite a gig! Here's the details for that:

Brenda Wong Aoki and Mark Izu present: Ghosts & Jazz

October 31, 2010

7PM Show

$5 kids (not recommended for children under 9)

$15 adults with kids

$20 adults

» BUY TICKETS » SEND TO A FRIEND

Since you're reading my blog, you must be a friend, so you can get a discount for the Throckmorton and Yoshi's performances by using the code word "OHANA" (all caps) when purchasing tickets. I've heard that this isn't working for the Throckmorton online site, so you may want to try calling them.

Ok, and if you're not excited already, here is a video sneak peek of what we'll be doing. It's going to be awesome. Please come!

Intro to Horticulture!

Ever since I was a kid I've been interested in plants. I liked to grow stuff. When I was in high school I had a really great garden. I'd be in it for hours and hours, all weekend long, every morning before school, every evening after. And it's not like I knew what I was doing. I would just plant everything and anything. It was so alive and everything was wonderous. There was order and then there was chaos and I just remember long afternoons, listening to the radio, digging, weeding, grooming, planting, pruning.

After I left for college, I didn't have a garden any more. I pursued literature and writing. I lived in apartment complexes. I had deadlines and finals and then later a day job, life experiences, all worthwhile and not regrettable. But there's always been this smoldering interest in plants that never went away. And then one day, dear friend Coke enthusiastically approached me with a fistful of printed out course offerings from Merritt College (5 minutes from my day job). Some classes were underlined and others were asterisked and others had little drawings around them. It was thanks to her that I finally said to myself, hey, I should DO this!

So I enrolled in a couple of horticulture classes this semester! Merritt's horticulture program is absolutely amazing, particularly for being a community college. They offer courses that some 4-year universities don't even offer. I originally wanted to take the Intro 101 class and start from the basics, but it was an all-day class, and there was just no way I could swing it with my job. They've got a night version of the class that I managed to get into. I'm also taking Plant Terminology, which teaches us how to identify features about plants so that later when they actually let me touch real live plants, I will be able to know what they're talking about. I haven't really been able to dig in the dirt or prune or whatever it is they do with plants. I've just been filling my brain. It's been feeling really sponge-like lately. I am really interested and curious and still have that wet-behind-the-ears enthusiasm so I'm sure that helps. I keep putting stuff in there, and I seem to be retaining all this info, and it's not like things are getting crowded in my brain, not yet. Just fill, fill, fill. Study, memorize, read.

This whole science field is very peculiar to an English major like me. Writing and critique is so fuzzy and amorphous and perspective-driven. But science? Uh-uh. There's no arguing my way out of the corners in this field. There's a whole lot of black and white and even the grey areas come into sharp focus if you point your microscope hard enough at things. And that's something I love about it. The specificity. My terminology class is really challenging. I just got back my first exam. I scored 98.5% and I'm not happy about it. I know that most of the points and half-points (there was extra credit too) I got docked were for my carelessness. One question was to identify the surface of a leaf. There were many leaves and I just felt one, but I would have gotten the question right if I had felt the others.

But that is learning experience. I think one of the good things about learning all that other life stuff, is that you learn how to learn. Learn where you make mistakes, and to recognize them as mistakes so that you can correct them later. Take lessons from your experience. I may be answer a question incorrectly, but instead of self flagellation, I just realize, oh I was wrong because I need to take the time to observe, or to not repeat a pattern of assumption, or that with patience you'll come to understand something more deeply.

Tonight I was dissecting flowers. I've actually been dreading this. A couple weeks ago we were studying leaves, which are pretty easy compared to the complexity of flowers (not to say that leaves are simple things. Really! Go out and look at all the leaves you come across and pretty soon you will see an amazing diversity of shape and form. I never realized how many different kinds of leaves there were until I actually looked at them). I was actually scared. Yeah, that's it, now that I've said it out loud. I mean, there is so much going on in a flower, what if I can't see all the pieces? What if I come across a great expanse of unknown territory? What if I don't know what I'm looking at? What if I get it wrong? And I dissected my first flower tonight. I just said, eh, what the heck, and started hacking away at it. Our project is to dissect 16 flowers and I wanted to get an early start. When I was done with my first flower, I said to myself, well, I've got these other ones. I wasn't using them for my project, so why not just cut them all up for the heck of it without the pressure of having to document every stamen and ovary? And I did. And it was so much fun. There was flower carnage everywhere:

It was liberating.

Study and focus again. Exams and project due-dates loom. It is so weird to be a student again. But I am having a blast!

Best Birthday Ever Part II

Ok, so it's mid-September and I'm still trying to blog my best-birthday ever. I've been busy! Oh well, better late than never, right?

The weekend after my birthday, me and KB decided to go to Angel Island, a chunk of land in the San Francisco Bay. We wanted to rent bikes and explore the island. Turned out to be quite an adventure!

The adventure actually began before we got to the island. Since you need to take a ferry to get there, we decided to leave on the one ferry out of Alameda, my town, and incidentally, an island itself (though artificially so, tidal canal, my ass, cheaters). But apparently, and this I learned the hard way, there are TWO ferry stations on Alameda, a seemingly small town. The ferry terminals are on opposite sides of the island, and it was the other one that the ferry we wanted departed from. Eh, live and learn. There is more than one ferry that goes to Angel Island, and in order to catch that one, we had to drive clear up to Tiburon, where we caught the hourly, 10-minute ferry.

Once there, we immediately found the bike place, donned helmets, and were off!

Boy oh, boy were we surrounded by beauty and great weather! I'd assumed that the path would be relatively flat, but it wasn't, and good thing too, because our hard-pedaling was rewarded by breathtaking views. There were views of San Francisco and the East Bay and of the lovely Golden Gate Bridge:

The landscape on the actual island was amazing as well. There is nothing like the Bay Area in the summer. All the natives fall into dormancy, turning all golden and luscious while the trees and the deeply-rooted hold on somehow in the heat:Here I am, hamming it up, looking all bad-ass between panting and nearly dying on the uphills:There were interesting, semi-dilapidated buildings to explore. We weren't paying much attention to much besides beauty, so my facts on island history are vague. Apparently it was a military base as well as an immigration station (but I'm not sure which came first). I love old buildings, especially the falling-down kinds. Here is me thru a hole-in-the-wall:And here is more ham-age on a corroding staircase:

Ultimately, we found our way to the seashore. I wouldn't normally go bathing in the SF Bay, but we just had to stick our aching pigs in the sea:

Especially when it looked all emerald-sparkling like this:And here is a shot with the rest of the world behind me:

And of course, all good things come to an end, and let me tell you, at the end of the world there are CHEESEBURGERS! And beer. Ah, what a great day!

Best Birthday Ever Part 1

I recently celebrated my 35th birthday. Jeez, writing that out just now made me feel really OLD. I'm halfway through my 30's and if you round up, that makes me practically 40! Plus, that puts me in an entirely new age bracket for online surveys. But to make up for that, I went and celebrated my birthday over 2 weekends and enjoyed what has been the most beautiful birthday ever. I'm just gonna photo-blog. Pictures are worth a thousand words, right?

Woke up on my birthday and went out to breakfast with sweet friend KB and ordered a giganto waffle with strawberries and bananas and whip cream and syrup and a side of--yeah, that's right--bacon! It was decadent, breakfast heaven. Welcome home, diabetes!

Then, my dear friend Coke invited me to join her up at a retreat center in Philo to celebrate the big day. She was finishing up with her retreating, and I got to tag along at the tail end for the beauty and wonder of the unmatched Northern California forest. As soon as I got there we went for a walk along a river. It was a warm day, sun shining down, no one in sight, water all jade-sparkly and oh-so-inviting in that late August heat. I pointed to a swirling pool and said, oh, doesn't that look like a nice place to jump into? And then Coke suggested that since it was my birthday, and since I was practically 40, that I ought to take a dip to baptize myself into middle age. I was reluctant, she was persistent, and my god it was a hot day and I'd driven 3 hours to get there! And, well, to make a long story short, baptisms in Philo are undertaken in the bathing suit you were born in, so we dove in, screaming like little girls and, hallelujah, I'm ready for middle age!

That evening she made us the cutest, most delicious mini-burgers I've ever had. They were actually the first mini-burgers I've ever had, but hands-down belly-up oh my-my were they tasty! You don't get birthday dinners made for you like that very often. Ono-licious!

Since Philo is so close to Mendocino and Fort Bragg, I suggested that for the next day, we cross over to the coast and saunter on over to a place called "Glass Beach." It's been one of those places to see on my bucket list. Apparently the place used to be a public dump. People would just drive up to the edge of the sea and dump all their junk and trash into the ocean. Hard to imagine now, but they did! They cleaned up most of the junk but what got left behind was all the glass. Now, decades later, the glass had been worn down into little jewels. I'm sure that all the best pieces have been picked over but it's still beautiful, in its own way.We spent a long time, searching high and low,

until we found the best ones:

And then we left them on a rock for the sea to reclaim them again:On the way back home, we stopped at one of those inconspicuous pullouts on the side of the road. It was a botanical wonderland. Perched high on a cliff overlooking the sea was a beautiful garden of plants. Mother nature herself must have spent a millenia figuring out how to arrange the most beautiful, wind-swept landscape here. Succulents and grasses and teeny tiny flowers, all in bloom--in late August!! I don't think I've ever seen anything as amazing as this. Not in a botanical garden or a magazine or even on the nature channel. It was truly breathtaking.I didn't want to go home. I didn't. No I don't wanna! I think there was whining and a little bit of temper tantrum rising up in the car. The road was so beautiful though:

And my iphone takes groovy pictures. Here is a gem. Coke never lets me willingly take pics of her, but I caught this one. Kind of sums up the spirit of the whole trip. Thank you Coke for a wonderful birthday!To be continued . . .