goneforeign

Rape of Nanking

2009-04-01T08:26:00.000-07:00

2001 - Star Wars etc.

2009-03-30T06:08:00.000-07:00

The Mighty Mitchell.

Tues. 26 Nov. 2002 - from an email to Bill Jones.

OK, here's a tale that evolves from an item in one of the Photoshop books that I'm currently reading. I was surprised to discover that Photoshop was initially created for movie special effects by two blokes at George Lucas's special effects shop: Industrial Light and Magic, it's close by here in Marin county. Once it was an operable piece of software it was bought and developed to it's current state by Adobe Corp.

Back in the late 60's I was teaching film and photography part time at Cal. State University, Long Beach and also going to UCLA film school. My interest in the following was because I was independently working to achieve similar results for my Masters thesis film. I used a darkroom in the art dept. and had lots of conversations there with an art student friend Jamie, who was a creative wiz plus he knew computers and electronic wiring circuits insideout. [an extreme rarity at that period]. He often described in detail how processes that were incredibly time consuming could be easily controlled by computers; much of it went over my head but I was always intrigued since it was what I was doing manually.

In 1971 Stanley Kubrick's movie 2001 was released and because, in part, of the psychedelic culture of the time plus the totally original special effects in the film it was an enormous success with the youth [plus me!] Douglas Trumbull got the Academy award for the effects and in the trade magazines he described how he'd developed a device he called a "slit scan projector" that was responsible for the unique effects, I learned everything I could about the design and worked to create something similar for my thesis film project at UCLA. Briefly, the effects were achieved by re-photographing every single frame of effects film through a moving slit-scanner and manipulating several parameters simultaneously, ie: camera travel, camera speed, f stops, light settings, apertures and the switching of cameras, lights and projectors on and off. It was all done manually and individual frames could take forever and remember we need 24 per second for movies. Mechanically it was similar to a huge lathe bed with three components, the projector, the slit-scan and the recording camera all synchronised and capable of moving independently along and across the bed. There's a not very good piece on the process at Wiki, the examples there are not very informative: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slit-scan_photography

My friend Jamie contacted Trumbull and they met whereupon Jamie laid out his ideas for using a computer to controll all of those parameters: the way he described it to me was that you could load the camera and the projector, write the program and plug everything in and switch it on and go home at 5 o'clock. Next morning the entire sequence would be finished and all that was necessary was to unload the exposed film, take it to the lab and prepare for the next evenings "shoot"! The means to achieve his ideas was based on using numerous very precise "stepping motors" - electric motors that were programmable to perform absolutely accurate and minute degrees of rotation that would controll component movements to very precise measurements: solenoid switches and timers that could trigger equipment on and off and a computer program, that he of course would write, which triggered everything. Trumball was sold on the idea and he and Jamie formed a partnership to produce motion picture special effects. This lasted for a couple of years and then they separated each forming independent special effects companies. I'm not totally sure of the chronology of this, but at some point there Jamie enticed his art student friend Wayne to join him, which he did.

Somewhere along about here my situation evolved: I went from teaching to a full time position as the director of Media Development for the university. This led in turn to my involvement in a film production, a co-production with WGBH -TV in Boston to produce a documentary about the development of liquid fueled rockets by the Germans prior to and during WW2: it was titled "Hitler's Secret Weapon" and was produced for the Nova series on Public Television, it was also shown on BBC and West German TV. When I was editing the film I needed some graphic illustrations of cross sections of V2's to show the interaction of the various components. The word was put out and resulted in a student named Joe Johnson joining us and creating not only the needed diagrams, but also an illustrated brochure of the history of the German rocket program, the rocket bug had bitten him also!

At about this point Douglas Trumbull, cashing in on his special FX Oscar, chose to write and direct a science fiction film that dealt with a huge space freighter hauling the eqivalent of Yosemite National Park in several enormous geodesic domes through space to preserve the animal and plant species after the earth became so poluted it could no longer sustain life. The film was "Silent Running." The sets for the interiors of the space freighter was the aircraft carrier "Valley Forge" which was mothballed in nearby Long Beach harbor: the spacecraft was also named the "Valley Forge." Re-enter Wayne Smith who was then involved with the special effects in the film.

I think this part is close to accurate but I'm not positive. Wayne needed all sorts of help so he started calling on his art student friends, the Design dept was rapidly depleted by students choosing high paying jobs making movies rather than sticking around to graduate. At some point thereafter when the Valley Forge sequences were finished, a student, John Dykstra, got into a heated argument with the professor in class and was promptly expelled from the University! The next thing I heard from John was when I went in to use the darkroom one Saturday night. He would sneak back on weekends to see his friends and I bumped into him when I took a break. He told me that he had got a job as the special effects superviser on a B grade science fiction movie. He, plus several former students, were working in a warehouse in the San Fernando valley and were doing some "real interesting stuff" - "I should come and see some of the FX they were creating!" Plus, he knew that I had a 35mm Mitchell movie camera [the industry standard] and could he borrow it? They needed something with that precision for the effects they were creating. So I loaned it to him. The next time I saw it it had been modified extensively: the lens plate now took Nikon lenses and the motors had been discarded for precise stepping motors! Somehow I'd never got around to accepting his invitation to come and see what they were up to and the next time I saw John it was on TV, he was accepting the Oscar for special effects for "Star Wars" - the B grade science fiction movie he was working on! It's not generally known that the core nucleus of Lucas's special effects dept were all art students with no prior knowledge of film of FX.

Star Wars was such a huge success that George Lucas chose to move the entire special effects unit to his Marin county HQ - Industrial Light and Magic and at some point thereafter I mentioned to a friend in the publications dept. at the university that I was visiting friends in Marin County that weekend.The friend was writing a piece for the university magazine on one of our alums who was working at Industrial Light and Magic: Joe Johnson! Could I see him and take some pics for the article? So of course I did and also got the guided tour of ILM and met several old friends there. When I asked Joe what he was up to these days, he told me that he had a screenplay that he was working on, no big deal, nothing much, just a childrens story. He wouldn't elabororate. About a year later I got a phone call at the university, it was Joe. He wanted to know if he could get some of the WW2 rocket footage that I'd used in the documentary plus some of the interview with Werner von Braun, I told him "Sure, he could have anything he wanted" He wasn't very forthcoming about what he needed it for and I didn't push it. The next time I saw his name was on a review of a just-released movie, he had writer/director credit, the film was "The Rocketeers!" a big enough success that Joe now has several more director credits to his name.

So here I am 30 years later and just down the road from ILM, persuing a longtime interest in learning how to use Photoshop to digitally do all those things that I spent hours struggling with in all those all-night darkroom sessions plus those eons spent modifying a lathe bed and endless hours trying to tune a 16 mm film processor and a 16 mm printer! And little did I know then that my Mitchell might have played some small roll in the establishment of the Lucas empire and the subsequent development of my current interest, Photoshop.

MY OLD MAN, GOD BLESS HIM.

2008-05-24T16:57:00.000-07:00

Jack Brennan: born Oct 27 1909 - died Dec 19, 1966.

My father died on Dec. 19th. 1966 of a heart attack at age 57. A heart attack at such an early age was attributed by the family doctor to a lifelong weakened heart as a result of the world-wide Spanish influenza epidemic of post WW1. When he died I was on a skiing vacation in Aspen Colorado and didn’t find out until I returned home to LA a couple of weeks later: the mail box was stuffed with telegrams and letters announcing the death and burial and querying why I hadn’t responded.

Over the interveningyears I’ve thought of him many times and wished that he were still here so he could visit and we could share what I enjoy in the US. The last anniversary, the 44th. caused me to reflect on him, his values, his interests, his abilities and to realise again what a unique individual he was. The word genius is tossed about very lightly these days, it no longer has the significance it once had. Webster’s defines it as: “One possessing exceptional intellectual and creative power.” Intellectual is defined as: “One having the capacity for understanding and knowledge with the ability to think abstractly and profoundly.”

My father was a bricklayer, a very hard, lowly paid and unappreciated job in post WW2 Britain. He was a lifelong member of the Building Trades Workers Union and was always the union representative on every job site he worked. On work days he looked like a scarecrow, wrapped against the weather in layers of clothing that were splattered with cement and usually ragged and torn. Even on weekends and holidays he never looked totally comfortable in his clothes, it seemed as though nothing ever fit him properly. Which was surprising since as a young man he was very handsome and very clothes conscious.

Genius I don’t claim, but 'intellectual' most definitely applies; by the standards of that day or this. This raggedy-assed bricklayer was the most well read and most thoughtful man I’ve ever known in my lifetime of university and academic environments! Most of his workmates were satisfied to read the sports page, keep up on the social gossip and to watch the telly. His interests included architecture, astronomy, literature, music and world affairs, all of which he could discuss eloquently and with considerable understanding. I remember, on many occasions as a child, being taken to visit the classic Gothic cathedrals in Britain; Canterbury, Lincoln, Norwich, Ely, Westminster, York Minster et al. He would explain their significant features and how and why they were built; he understood the principles and theory and frequently referred to plans and drawings in Bannister Fletcher’s book “The History of Architecture by the Comparative Method.” My architectural exposure was not limited to Britain: he also exposed me to the wonders of Hagia Sofia in Istanbul, the Taj Mahal, the Pantheon and the Parthenon, the heating and hydraulic systems of the Baths at Caracella and much of ancient Greek and Roman history.
During the night-time air-raids in WW2 we would leave the house and walk to the edge of the city and he would explain the various constellations, theories of cosmology and abstract concepts such as “time”, all the while asö we watched falling bombs and anti-aircraft gunfire and searchlights. Fred Hoyle, the author of “The Origins of the Universe” was a source that he frequently quoted.
Also during these walks he would explain what was happening re. the war: the causes of Germany’s actions; why “Uncle Joe” had signed a pact with Hitler and how the USSR was building a new society. Our house was the place that the local communist party met on what seemed like a weekly basis. There were regular gatherings, more like parties, of a dozen or more comrades, often with refugees from the Spanish civil war and they would sit around all evening talking, mostly political stuff and I would sit quietly on the sidelines taking it all in. His grasp of communism and world affairs was based on a thorough reading and understanding of Marx and Engles, both of whom he frequently quoted, and on continuous argument and discussion with the local party members and friends.
As I write this there is a photograph on the wall in front of me of the dozen or so core members of that group with me as a little lad of about 6 or 7 standing at the front. It was taken on one of our many Sunday afternoon rambles out into the Derbyshire moorland where the destination would always be a country pub. Since kids were not allowed inside I was always left outside with a bag of crisps and a lemonade and someone would pop out periodically to see that I was OK. He was also an ‘active’ member of the group, it wasn’t all beer and talk. I remember being out at midnight with a group, I carrying a bucket of whitewash, while they painted slogans on walls and on the roads at intersections, like “Open the second front now!” complete of course with the hammer and sickle. Other times we marched in demonstrations carrying party banners. And then then was MI6 knocking on the door asking ”Does Jack Brennan live here?
As a communist he had a funny attitude to America: he was very critical of some aspects of the country but he was also very interested, admiring and knowledgable: he had a sort of schizophrenic push/pull attitude and was probably responsible for my later decision to live here. Long before I came I was very familiar with the structural designs of the Golden Gate bridge, the Empire State building, Ford’s facility at Dearborn and Wilshire Blvd. I was also introduced to the works of John Steinbeck, Upton Sinclair, Paul Robeson and Joe Hill. I was also aware of the Scottsboro boys, the KKK and HUAC.
He loved Puccini and Verdi so much that he phonetically learned the lyrics of La Boheme and Madam Butterfly and would often burst into song with his favorite arias or would put our scratchy records on the gramaphone and sing along. I remember also that we had some classic American show tune records, Gershwin mostly. Humphrey Bogart was a favorite actor and I remember he liked “High Sierra” and “Call Northside 777” though going to films was never a high priority in our house.

He was a very basic working class bloke, all of his knowledge and ability was self taught since education in the slums of Sheffield in the early ‘20’s was minimal and ended at age 14; when one was then expected to get a job in a cutlery factory, which he did!

BOB MARLEY AND THE WAILERS AT THE ROXY - 1976.

2008-05-16T08:00:00.000-07:00

Back in May '76 I noticed a tiny item on the inner pages of the LA Times, Bob Marley and the Wailers were to play a gig at the Roxy in Hollywood on the Saturday followed by a show at Pauley Pavilion at UCLA on the Tuesday. I imediately called the Roxy, "Sorry this is a closed event, not open to the public" was the sorrowful news. Damn!
That afternoon I met my friend Ron and told him my tale of woe, "Hey no problem, you should speak with so and so, she's married to the guy who owns the Roxy, she used to be my room mate, I'll give her a call" About 5 minutes later my phone rang, it was she, calling from Spokane; "Hi, Ron tells me you want to see the Marley concert, how many tickets do you need?" Oh God, I almost fell off the chair, "Could I get two" I tentatively asked, "No problem, I'll have them put your name at the will-call window for all-access, and would you like tickets for Pauley as well? This was too much, "I'd love it you could do it" "No problem she said, "You'll have two on the guest list there with all access". I don't remember what I spluttered at that point, I was probably just babbling inanities.
The big day arrived, I drove to Hollywood and parked right across the street from the Roxy, there was a huge crowd totally blocking the sidewalk and access to the box office. In those days I carried my camera gear everywhere, a bag with at least a couple of Nikons and several lenses etc. When I finally got to the will-call window it was exactly as she'd said it would be, two all access passes, but when I got to the entrance a guy who looked like a professional football player said "No Cameras or recorders period, no exceptions" I showed him my passes, "Did you hear what I said, No Cameras!" Damn, now I had to go back through the crowd to the parking lot and stow my gear and when I returned the crowd was so big that I thought I might never reach that door again, but I finally did and when I entered there was space at a table about 10 ft from the stage. It's a small club and it was packed; I immediately saw why it was a closed event, everybody who was anybody in the music business in LA was there, I saw Lennon, Dylan, CSN, Joni, the entire audience were music personalities!
The lights went down and the band started playing behind closed curtains and this went on for several minutes with the crowd getting more excited and noisy by the minute: Tony G, Bob's local man in LA did the intro's, " Well Rastafari, peace and love in the South, I and I would like to introduce, direct from Trenchtown Jamaica, what we call the Rastaman Vibration, Bob Marley and the Wailing Wailers" and with that the band switched into Trenchtown Rock and it was underway! The crowd went nuts, the Wailers had never played so well. An amazing concert, definitely the best I was ever at and the bonus was being back stage in the dressing room afterwards!
At some point shortly thereafter Junior Marvin gave me a board check cassette of the show, I treasured it and played it constantly, every year on air I did a BMW special and it was always included. I had dozens of board tapes from lots of the live shows but that one was exceptional. And then in 2003, twentyseven years after the event Tuff Gong/Island records released it on CD, actually a double "Bob Marley & the Wailers Live at the Roxy.
The most amazing part of the concert was the encore, the Wailers came back on stage and did a 30 minute set that was unbelievable, they and Bob played Get up, Stand up, No more Trouble and War in a manner never heard before or since, they were transported. It was spectacular, here it is, it's a 24 minute cut, I suggest that you just hit play and turn the volume all the way up.

R.I.P. HUMPH.

2008-05-15T09:12:00.000-07:00

This afternoon I was googling Big Bill Broonzy prior to possibly doing a piece about him, many years ago I saw him twice, once in Ipswich with Josh White also on the bill and once in London where he was supported by the Humphrey Lyttleton band, Jimmy Rushing, and I believe the Chris Barber band. It was a benefit for Big Bill who'd been diagnosed with cancer and didn't have any medical insurance, his primary income came from the small farm he ran in Arkansas.
That event was initiated by Humph: a few moments ago I saw on the front page of the Guardian that he'd died. He was a very special influence on my life, he pointed me in a direction that I've appreciated throughout my life, not in a personal way but by his music. Immediately after WW2 I was just entering my teenage years and was living in Barnehurst, Kent; I'd somehow discovered jazz and the only place in England at that time to hear live jazz was a pub just down the road, it was the Red Barn and the George Webb band with Humphrey Lyttleton performed there every week. I was only about 14 so I couldn't go to a pub but I'd stand outside during the warm summer evenings and listen to the music coming through the open windows. I was able to get into the 100 club on Oxford street where he also played regularly so that's where much of the money I earned from my paper route went. That was where in defiance of a government edict against American musicians performing in England he hosted the great New Orleans musician, Sidney Bechet.

Initially I was obsessed with New Orleans jazz and Louis Armstrong was my idol, however over the years Humph's band evolved towards the Kansas City style and the Basie small groups and those have been my main interest in music throughout my life. He wrote quite prolifically and authored several books on his life in jazz and when I left England in 1958 I brought two of them with me, they're in the bookcase in my living room and three of his albums that I also brought with me are in my vinyl collection. By coincidence my stepmother, who was a teacher, had a girl in her class, Jill Richardson, who went on to marry Humph in 1952.

Whenever I've visited the UK over the years I've always tried to listen to his BBC radio program and have even recorded several which I still occasionally enjoy. He will definitely be missed, not just by me but by everyone who enjoys jazz in the UK, he's influenced every aspect of the music and has performed with many of the major musicians both British and American.

Here's three cuts by Humph from the early years:

1. Weary Blues from around 1948.
2. Beale Street Blues with Marie Knight from around 1952.
3. How Long Blues with Jimmy Rushing from the mid 50's.

THE BATHS AT ALMALONGA

2008-05-15T09:07:00.000-07:00

I was travelling in Guatemala with my friend John in a VW camper back in the late '70's, and as is often the case in such situations we'd met other travellers and someone had recommended the baths at ...., I've stretched my memory and stared at the map but the name won't come. It was a very small mountain village high on the side of a volcano. The towns and villages of Guatemala almost all have a Saints name attached, I'm looking at my map and literally 80%+ are thus. The name doesn't matter.
We were not going anywhere in particular and we suddenly saw the name on our map, it was close so we decided we'd go. If I say road, you'll think of road; Guatemala doesn't have roads in that manner, there are lines on maps but usually they represent trails more suited to donkeys than vehicles. As we neared the village with the baths the 'road' was all uphill since we were on a volcano, Guatemala has many volcanoes. Suddenly we came to a clearing in the trees, there was a large flat area, possibly as large as a football field and within it there was a huge bath, about half the size of a football field, it was dug below ground level and was about 2-3ft deep. It was full of hot steaming water and there were hundreds of Mayan Indian families taking their weekly Saturday bath. Everyone was naked, dozens of kids, parents, grandparents, all scrubbing each other, the place was packed. The reason there was a bath there and the reason it was full of hot water was the volcano, there was a mountain stream that ran downhill alongside the trail that was steaming, they'd diverted it into their communal bath. As far as we could see it was totally free, anyone could come and go as they pleased, there was nothing formal.
We'd been told to continue up the hill to where we'd find a more formal indoor baths, more suited to gringos; we eventually found it right next to the stream alongside the trail. It was a single story stone building about 100 ft long, when we entered there were about a dozen private cubicles along the length, each one had a stone lined 'tub' sunk into the floor that was about 5ft square and 3ft deep. An attendant appeared and we paid him 50c each, he removed a 6" wooden plug from the side of the tub and it instantly filled with hot water; there was no adjusting the temperature but that was OK, it was perfect. We'd brought our supplies, two towels, a half gallon bottle of rum, a bag of limes, several glasses and a large bottle of coca cola. We asked our new friend if he like a drink and of course he would. We sank into the tub each armed with a tall glass and lay there, every 30 minutes or so the attendant would check to see if we needed more water, we always did and we always rewarded him. We spent the rest of that Saturday afternoon in there, I have no memory of what came later.
I have no photographs of that day but there's a good selection from our travels in Guatemala at my Picasa site:
http://picasaweb.google.com/goneforeign

NINA SIMONE AT MONTREUX 1976

2008-05-15T08:32:00.001-07:00

Let me say right off the bat that I think Nina Simone was one of the great artists of the 20th century, I love her music, her singing and her piano playing; I'm saddened that she never recorded a 'Nina plays Piano' album, I'd love to have it. All that said I must admit to some severe reservations re. her DVD "Nina Simone at Montreux, 1976.
A few days ago Ejay initiated a conversation over on the side by posting a link to a youtube Nina performance he'd come upon, it was the 1976 Montreux concert. I'd never seen it nor her in this sort of performance and I was blown away by her intensity and emotional performance. I immediately ordered the DVD, It came today.
Back in the 80's I recall a conversation with a friend in LA, he was the host of 'the' R&B/Soul music program on 'the' top Jazz/R&B radio station in LA. We were chatting in the studio [off-air] . The conversation turned to Nina, I suggested that he should consider an 'in studio interview' with her. " Absolutely not, She's fucking crazy" he said, and then went on to relate several DJ's who'd done just that and what the results were. OK, perhaps he had a point. A few weeks later she did an interview at KRCB's 'Morning becomes Eclectic' show which I have on tape and she did break down in tears on-air and the host did have to go to an extended station break, it was a very awkward interview, she's not an easy subject to talk with, she's very emotional.

So when Ejay turned me on to the Montreux performance I was immediately intrigued and ordered it.
I've just looked at it twice and I think my friend was right, She's nuts! At least she's a very troubled woman, she's angry and confrontational with the audience several times, there's a thing with the mic placement for the first several minutes which really makes no sense, we're at the 13 minute point before that's resolved. She seems to be very stoned. There's so many items of her dialogue that would warrant 'discussion', several points where she's confrontational with audience members, several points where there's throwaway lines that could cause critics to be very negative. The audience bends over backwards to accommodate her, the MC goes out of his way several times to try to keep her onstage but even as early as at the 30 minute point she's walking off, she's done, but she does come back, for a total of five songs, the rest of the time, the introductions and personal comments are endless though I'm sure perfectly valid and justified from her perspective.
Don't get me wrong; I ordered this DVD because I thought that what I saw of Nina's performance was amazing and I was right, there's some wonderful music here but there's also an insight into her insecurities and her paranoia, yes, she's not a perfect person, she makes me think of Van Gogh, Gaugin, Sylvia Plath and Tolstoy. I think my friend in the studio was right, she's a wonderful artist and a marvellous musician but she's troubled and this video is an awkward and revealing means to discover that; I kept wishing that she's just get back to the music, to the piano but she insisted on revealing yet another layer.
Here's Ejay's initial link plus a couple of cuts that show her superlative musicianship, if you want the rest you must go to Amazon or wherever.

TAJ MAHAL AT THE WATTS FESTIVAL

2008-05-15T08:25:00.001-07:00

Watts, a black community in south central LA, famous for it's riot and it's towers, has a free music festival every year, it's not a big deal, basically it's just for the benefit of the community. It's held outdoors in the summer and there's always at least one headliner, one year it was Taj Mahal, a guy I've seen many times and I've always enjoyed his music.
It's a small event, the stage is only about 18" high and the audience is usually less than a couple of hundred. Taj came on and I was there with my camera, immediately in front of the stage there was an old drunken guy in the first row who started mumbling a request for Taj to play Corina, Corina right from the start and he kept it up throughout the entire performance mumbling his request at the end of every song. He wasn't disruptive, he was too drunk for that, he was just insistent. Taj ignored him and played the set he'd come to play.
When he finished and when the applause died down he set his guitar down and stepped off the stage and walked to the rear where there was a concession selling beer and drinks, he bought two beers and came back to where I was sitting on the edge of the stage, he went over to the old guy who was only about 10 feet from me and stuck one of the beers in his hand and then grabbed him by his lapel, "Alright motherfucker, you want to hear Corina? sit down and shut the fuck up" and with that he deposited him on the edge of the stage right next to me, he then sat down next to him, picked up his guitar and started to sing 'Corina': he gave the old guy not only a beer but an individual performance. From my point of view as a photographer it was unbelievable, I was within about 2 feet of Taj and I had my wide angle 24mm lens on, perfect! As he sang I kept shooting getting great stuff everytime, I think I shot a full roll of 36 on them.
When they were processed I was very pleased with the results, I had lots of very intimate shots of this unique performance. I had an artist friend Tony who was a wonderful painter and when he saw my shots he asked if he could borrow one, he'd like to copy it in a painting which he did and it was marvellous, an oil painting about 15" by 24" which he titled 'The Blues'. The woman in the painting is Randy Crawford who also performed that day.
A couple of years later Taj was in town again and he performed at McCabes Guitar center in Santa Monica, Tony and I went, taking the painting with us. We went backstage after the performance and I asked Taj if he remembered the incident at Watts, he did: Tony presented the painting to him and he was very touched by the gift.
And then many years later after I'd retired and moved to northern California I met a kindred spirit, another record collector, but he put me to shame, he had rooms FULL of music, I only had one, but his obsession had extended to video also. One day when chatting with him on the phone Taj's name came up and he mentioned that he'd shot a video of him many years earlier, I mentioned shooting at the Watts festival and he had the realisation that that was where he'd shot his video. He called me back a little later to tell me that he'd found it and had just watched it and realised that the guy sitting on the stage right next to Taj taking all the photographs was me! Small world, we'd both been at the same event and had become friends years later, he gave me a copy of the video on a DVD.

The second cut below has long been one of my favorite Taj song, it's with the Pointer Sisters from his 1972 album, 'Recycling the blues and other related stuff'- there's a nice picture of him on the cover with Mississippi John Hurt.

TIMOTHY WINTERS

2008-04-07T14:54:00.000-07:00

This is a first, I think, a verbal post on the Spill. Prompted by all that poetry going on over there I found myself reading a poem, and then reading out loud for the benefit of me and the cat, so I stuck a mic into my iPod and did it again and then loaded it into iTunes, unfortunately it was a wav file so it took a bit of processing through Audacity and Sound Studio to get it into MP3. Please don't judge my poetic ability, the cat was my only audience.
Thanks to TracyK for Timothy Winters.

THE KNIFE: TRAVELS IN JAMAICA

2008-03-19T08:25:00.000-07:00

Press the green triangle for audio and adjust your volume.

Early in 1982 I had the idea of travelling throughout Jamaica in my VW camper, I'd been there several times as a tourist and I'd done something similar years before travelling throughout Guatemala and Mexico for about 3 months; it's the only way to travel, you're self contained, you buy and cook your own food, you always have a place to sleep and best of all you easily get to places that would be otherwise inaccessible: I started planning the trip. Basically 'planning' meant writing to various Jamaican government agencies to ask what I needed to do to import a van to live in for about three months and contacting various shipping companies to enquire about their procedures. Finally I thought I had all the answers and I made specific arrangements re. dates and times etc. I had to have the van on the docks in Miami Beach before noon on the Friday to have it shipped to Kingston on that day's sailing so finally I left LA early on the Monday morning and began my drive across the United States.

At this point I should digress for a moment because there's an important element in the story. My VW camper was a rather drab maroon color, for quite some time I'd harboured thoughts of using all that sheet metal as a 'canvas' to make some sort of artistic statement, I should mention that years before I'd worked in the paint industry and had some minimal experience painting vehicles. The way I approached the problem was to photograph side and frontal shots of the van, these I scanned into my Mac and using a tracing program I created an outline of the vehicle; I printed a dozen copies of each and with a set of colored marker pens started doodling. Nothing was working until I created three horizontal stripes, each about 15" running around the the van, one red, one gold and one green, That started to look interesting. Where the the three colors converged at the front of the van I expanded the gold until it spread over front panel. Red Gold and Green were the 'national' colors of Jamaica.
I bought a quart each of red, gold and green and spent three evenings after work in the Engineering dept yard at the university where I worked masking and spraying the basic colors and then in the alley behind my apartment I did all the detail work. I had an album by the English reggae group Aswad that had a rampant heraldic lion on the cover, I photographed it as a slide and then projected the image onto a sheet of 3ft by 4 ft tracing paper, I outlined it with a black marker and then cut out the positive image. What I then had was a very fragile piece of tissue but I sprayed it with adhesive and finally managed to position it on the front of the van centered on that big gold panel. I sprayed that with black epoxy, let it dry and then peeled off the tissue and it looked fantastic! The result was wonderful to behold, a mobile living environment wrapped in the flag of Ethiopia, it opened doors for me that I could never have anticipated and it became my bond with the many wonderful Jamaican and Rasta friends that I made there.
I was ready to go, back to the story.

I remember that about half way across Texas on one of those endless straight highways I came to a stop sign, god only knows why and as I stopped a convertible stopped alongside me in the other lane, the occupants were an old black couple, maybe in their 70's, the old lady motioned me to wind down the window, "Me love your colours" she said, and her saying that in that location absolutely made my day! Prior to that I'd been asking myself "What the hell do you think you're up to, you're a middle aged white Englishman driving to Jamaica across Texas in a van that looks like the flag of Ethiopia? You're insane! I'd really started questioning what I was doing.

With a couple of diversions I made it into Miami Beach on the Thursday afternoon, I parked in a hotel parking lot right at the ocean. That night there was very loud reggae coming from the hotel, it was a regular weekly dance and they played a lot of Bob Marley as I lay there dozing in the van, it was a good omen. The next morning I awoke to a monsoon style deluge, it was raining buckets. I needed to get to the docks by mid morning so I headed there and once I'd parked the van and signed all the papers in the shipping company office I had to walk about a mile back to a point where I could get a bus to the airport, I wasn't just wet, I was saturated, absolutely soaking and struggling along with the baggage that I chose to carry rather than ship. As I stood in line at the airport in the Air Jamaica line I thought I recognised the back view of the bloke in front of me, he turned slightly and it was Junior Marvin, lead guitar with the Wailers, we'd met in LA some time before so we flew down together and it was my luck that he had his car at the airport, he dropped me at a motel right across the street from his house, the van was supposed to arrive on the Monday. It didn't, it arrived a week later missing the radio and lots more.

The business of actually taking delivery of my van at the docks had seemed in all prior conversations to be a simple routine procedure; the reality was a nightmare of beaurocracy, there were previously unmentioned costs and a huge cash bond. I was at an impasse, the harbor master was saying that he couldn't release the van without a $3000+ cash bond and I had nothing close to that and it had never been mentioned before. Apparently no one had ever challenged the system by importing and soon thereafter exporting a vehicle. Finally it was suggested that a call should be placed to the office of Tony Abrahams, the Minister of Tourism, since I had applied to visit Jamaica as a professional working photographer. I spoke with him and explained my dilemma and he finally agreed that he would personally cover the bond on the understanding that I had to absolutely swear that I would ship the van out again
at the end of my visit, which I did. The intervening week is a very interesting story in itself that includes my staying at the house of Basil Keene, who filmicly astute readers will recognise as Preacherman in the film 'The Harder they Come', but that's a whole separate and interesting story in itself.

Once I took possession I left Kingston immediately and headed for the North Coast, where within a few hours I'd found what was to become my home away from home in Jamaica; It was the beach at the west end of Ocho Rios where the fishermen lived, right next to Turtle Towers. I don't know what hand of providence took me to Fishermen's Beach, maybe it was the inscription "Jah Guide" that was lettered on my van door, but to whoever, I give thanks because it was the perfect spot for me to live between my numerous forays into the country and culture of Jamaica. My misgivings about the 'outrageous' appearance of the van were short lived, it became the key item that opened doors and made friends everywhere I went, I recall one specific incident when pulling up to a stop sign in a rural county place and there was a beautiful young woman sitting on a wall off to my left, as I came to a stop she sat there and applauded me, or rather she applauded the colors.

So when I found that beautiful spot at Fishermen's Beach, right next to a freshwater stream, and only fifty feet from a natural spring which bubbled out of the rocks providing both drinking and bathing water, and just a short walk from a thatched hut that sold Red Stripe and patties; I knew I was in heaven. Of course all of the fishermen who lived there were curious about the newcomer, but the colors plus the reggae music that was piped to my van's outside speakers broke the ice, so I rapidly made friends. We often sat around talking and listening to music, I had dozens of reggae cassettes with me, one in particular was repeatedly requested. It was a tape of the 'One Love' concert in Kingston where Bob Marley had brought Michael Manley and Eddie Seaga together on the stage, the second side however was Peter Tosh onstage with a huge spliff berating the two politicians and all the assembled police for harassing rastas over ganga, it was during his 'Legalise it' period and we got requests for that cassette everyday.

On my second day there, late in the afternoon, I was standing by the open sliding door of my van talking with a group of two or three fishermen who were curious to know who I was, what I did and why had I come to Jamaica. Years before (as a birthday present) I had treated myself to a handsome folding knife with a rosewood handle and a leather case, I'd carried it everywhere I'd ever travelled and it was a very treasured possession, it lay on the counter just inside the van as we stood there talking. From the corner of my eye I saw a hand reach in, pick it up, open it and and handle it admiringly. The hand belonged to a newcomer to the group, someone I didn't recognise. The conversation shifted momentarily to the knife, everyone admiring it and commenting and then the discussion returned to our previous subject; and just about then I realised that the knife and the newcomer were nowhere to be seen, I felt like a fool, it had disappeared from right under my nose in an instant. One of the fishermen suddenly took off running; he was a small, lithe, very black man, who's only dress was a very tattered pair of shorts, he quickly disappeared through the trees towards the highway, "Don't you worry mon, Blacka will get your knife back for you, you don't need to worry," said one of the fisherman whose name was Reggae. About two hours later Blacka returned, running to where we were waiting "I caught him," he said excitedly "But the policeman took him to the station, he's there now and you must come and claim your knife"

Together we walked into Ocho Rios to the police station, where I was introduced to a very gruff senior officer who's hat and shoulders were covered in gold braid. I explained the whole story to him as he sat across a desk from me seemingly doubting every word I said. When I'd finished he just stared at me as I sat there expecting him to hand over the knife. "Well that's not quite how I understand it at all" he said, "in fact I've been led to believe that you're a big time ganja dealer and you're here to organize a large shipment of herb and that you're up there making arrangements with those fishermen to transport it for you!" Well that took me totally off guard, I sure hadn't expected that response. My knife thief was a quick thinker with a creative imagination. I pulled out my wallet and dropped my business card identifying me as the Director of Media at a major American university on his desk. I also reached for my passport case where I had a letter from a senior Jamaican government official responding to my initial inquiry about importing my van, plus I mentioned that he could call Tony Abrahams, the Minister of Tourism, who had assisted me at the docks a week earlier. He grudgingly seemed to finally accept my story, he reached into a drawer, withdrew my knife and held it under the light. "Is this your knife? he asked When I told him that it was he handed it over, he told me to be careful and the meeting was obviously over.

As Blacka and I walked back to Fishermen's Beach together I told him about my plans to travel throughout the island, I told him that what I wanted to do was to follow my instincts, to go to those places on the map with interesting names and to have new adventures everyday, to meet Jamaican country people and learn about their culture and most of all I wanted to photograph every aspect of Jamaican life. I told him that there was plenty of room for two people and if he wanted to join me that he would be very welcome. Well he jumped at the opportunity and another lifelong friendship was born. The next day we set off together on the first of many trips throughout the island. We settled into a comfortable routine, Blacka had worked as a chef in a hotel so he was happy to handle the cooking, I did the driving and a typical day would begin after coffee with a search for a fisherman to buy dinner, then to locate a market for vegetables, thence to the ice factory which every community has to re-load the ice chest and finally to the local beer retailer to get a case of Red Stripe. Blacka was invaluable in knowing how to locate these places in every community we visited. As we travelled he would sometimes out of the blue say "Stop here mon, give me a dollar" and he'd jump out and walk to a total stranger and return within minutes with a bag of ganga; he had an eye for such things.

I didn't see our "knife friend" for several weeks, but when we did meet again he was intent on robbing me again, this time at the crack of dawn. I awoke to the sounds of shouting and feet running on gravel, he had been seen looking into the van through a side window, I was saved again by the combined efforts of the fishermen who chased him with the intent of shaving his head. He was a fake rasta with locks which they thought brought disgrace to rasta and many weeks later towards the end of my visit Blacka came running to the beach one day, he'd seen the thief nearby and wanted to show him to me. We quickly walked to where he was and as we approached he took off, Blacka had told me his name so I called out to him and for an instant he turned and I had my Nikon ready, I grabbed one clear shot of him, I don't know the circumstances but by then he'd lost his locks. The plan was to make a handbill and plaster the community with 'Beware of thief' posters but I think we let that one die.

THE KEY TO THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION.

2008-03-18T08:39:00.000-07:00

I met George Schaeffer or Schaffer in August 1976 in Panajachel Guatemala. He was a very odd character, he told me that he'd been a successful psychiatrist, I believe in Vienna but had given it all up to apprentice himself to a blind beggar in Guatemala; we didn't get into any details, I don't know how long that lasted but when I met him I was never sure who I was talking to, there always seemed to be more than one person and he never answered a question directly. If he was from Vienna he didn't speak with an accent, in fact his voice was totally without accent, it was impossible to detect whether he was Austrian, English or American from his voice.

We were walking down what almost seemed like an English country lane except it was about 100° and everything was covered in tropical flowers. I was with my friend Jennifer, a psychiatric nurse from Guyana who was living in Southern California: we had taken a vacation together, travelling by bus and train through Mexico and Guatemala. Panajachel is due west of the capital, Guatemala City and about 20 miles from the Pan American Highway which is how we'd arrived there the day before on a bus from Oaxaca Mexico. It's a beautiful area on the north shore of Lake Atitlan which is about 25 miles in diameter and is surrounded by active volcanoes.

As we walked down the country lane I saw ahead a sign on a post which said 'gallery', it pointed to an unusual large house that stood back from the road. It was unusual in that it looked architecturally designed rather than the typical concrete block or adobe structures. We entered and there was a well dressed young man seated at a desk, he welcomed us and gave a short description of the current works on display.

I was immediately intrigued by the art on the walls, it was all by the same person, it was signed by a woman and was very stylised; almost everything there contained very Mayan looking faces but they were often three dimensional. The artist had built up areas of the canvases prior to painting so that a nose for example would stand away from the face and this concept was carried throughout, it was present in most pieces but not just with the faces. Another feature was that there were pieces of Guatemalan Indian fabric embedded into the paint, the figure could have a real fabric huipile rather than a painted one. The paintings were extremely complex, there were dozens of details filling every canvas but what caught my attention throughout was that many had another common concept, they were symmetrical: left and right, up and down, black and white, positive and negative etc. We spent a good hour or more looking at everything in detail but throughout I'd noticed through the windows that there was a large garden and at the far end there were several more buildings; all of the buildings were painted in the same manner as the artwork on the walls.

I commented on this to the young man and asked if we might go back there and look at those buildings also, 'Of course' he said and he led the way to the outside path. We walked across the garden and suddenly noticed that there was a stream running through it, a small one about 6ft wide but there was a plank bridge so we crossed over. As we neared the first building I noticed that the concepts in the paintings were now life size, all the walls were covered with murals that were similar to the paintings, plus there were several sculptural structures that were also painted. Everything was a continuation of the art in the gallery, everything was painted.

Out of nowhere a silent figure appeared, he was a middle aged white man in peasant's clothes, he asked if we liked the art. I had so many questions, who was the artist? What was the significance of the symmetry? How long had all this taken/ and many more, he didn't answer any question directly, it was as though he was deaf or didn't understand the language, so that after many minutes of conversation I was none the wiser; he answered everything with obscure parables, he spoke of the 'Generals' implying those in power in Guatemala but went on to refer to General Electric, General Mills, General Motors etc. After listening and trying to ask questions I finally gave up, I wasn't going to get any answers, I still didn't know who the artist was except that he kept speaking of her and himself simultaneously. He gave us a guided tour explaining everything: besides the house there was a two story guest cottage and a Noh theater that he built to put on Noh plays for the Indians, everything was similarly decorated. We were about ready to give up on it and leave when he asked " Would you like to return this evening, we could talk some more, I could explain more and perhaps we could smoke some...., I never got what he was suggesting that we could smoke but given the times I was open to try anything. If I'd only known! So many questions were unanswered, so many fragments of conversation were unfinished and there was so much that was intriguing and interesting that we left it at that and promised that we would return that evening at about 8pm.

We take electric lights for granted, there were none in that town, there was no electricity, the only light we saw as we walked that evening were either dim candles or paraffin lamps in houses along the road; there was no moon so it was literally pitch black. And the blackness intensified as we turned at the 'gallery' sign, we could vaguely see the house but had no idea where the path leading to the back was but we finally found it and headed towards the rear of the garden. I re-discovered the stream when I stepped into it but that was OK, it was only about a foot or so deep. We arrived at the door of the building and knocked, it seemed like an eternity before it opened but when it did there was our host, he welcomed us in but he was in the middle of a deep but very quiet and private conversation with another man, he asked us to wait in the kitchen. There was a bench running along one wall, there were two tiny candles, the type used in churches, I think they're called votive candles; they flickered and provided absolutely minimal light. On the wall opposite ran a full length shelf at about 6ft height and along the entire length were life sized gruesome masks, dozens of them, they were barely perceptible in the dim flickering light but you were very conscious of their presence, it was a very eerie place.

After a while we heard the man in the next room taking his leave and George appeared in the doorway, he sat down and said "Perhaps you'll join me, I enjoy smoking this mixture, it's what the Mayan's have smoked for hundreds of years, it clears the mind and allows insights into other realms", he handed me a lit pipe and I took a deep hit and passed it to Jennifer. It was nothing like the Mexican weed that we were used to in California, I can't describe it more than to say that it hit instantly and was very strong and it almost immediately started images swirling in my mind, the sort of thing that one usually associates with LSD or Psylocybin mushrooms. A couple more hits were taken and then he said "We should go to the music room, it will be more comfortable there", whereupon he led us down a corridor and opened a door for us. That room was also lit with only two tiny candles though it was quite large, they were placed on the floor in front of a triptych screen that was painted with a variety of intriguing but very gruesome images. We sat cross legged on the floor, the door was immediately to my left, I could hear George shuffling around behind me moving things. My psychedelic visual light show continued as I looked back and saw in the very dim light George moving what appeared to be a good sized piece of a tree stump with what looked like cymbals fastened to it. At that moment George came towards me and closed the door and as he did I was absolutely positive that I saw him turn the key in the lock and drop the key in his pocket! Regardless of everything going on around us the only thing that I could deal with was that; why had he locked the door? I obsessed over it, I could think of nothing else even as this white devil faced gruesome image on the screen before kept drawing my eyes constantly, I tried to look away but it was always there drawing me back and I couldn't not think about the key and my personal light show wasn't helping.

Press the green triangle for audio and adjust your volume level.

George had returned to the tree stump and I saw him begin a very quiet rhythmic pattern on the cymbals, he appeared to have what sounded like a long horsehair brush that he was swishing across the various toned cymbals and a soft xylophone mallet. He began a very quiet almost inaudible chant that started to rise and fall with the swishing cymbals, chant is the wrong word, it was more like a sermon, but delivered very low key and quietly and punctuated with long periods of the swishing and rhythmic drumming.He developed a hypnotic pattern of sound that rose and fell and changed tempo and after what seemed like at least an hour I started anticipating a break in the proceedings where we might 'make our escape', but 'twas not to be, he went on and on and all the time the key was the only thing I could think of. There was another element in this performance that was very disconcerting, I knew where he was standing, I could turn and see him and hear him but throughout the performance suddenly there was another sound from a different part of the room, it was a single very clear 'ping' on a cymbal, and then minutes later another from a totally different place, and on and on.

It wasn't 'til the next day that I discovered the source of these sounds, he'd fastened containers of water at the ceiling with a wick hanging over the side which acted to syphon a single drop every several minutes that fell onto a cymbal directly below, it was purely random. In that dark room the effect was very unsettling since it suddenly seemed as though we were not alone and it compounded the unease that the key was causing. Finally as he reached a slow quiet section that came to an almost stop, I stood up and said "George, that was wonderful, really inspiring, but we should be going". I could see that he was disappointed but he came over to us and thanked us for coming etc and walked to the door and opened it, I watched him very closely but didn't see him use the key, in that light it was difficult and his body blocked the view. As we made our departure he suggested that we might like to return the next day so I asked if I could photograph the house and the art, he was more than delighted so we said we'd return in the afternoon.

I knew that it would be impossible in daylight to create the effect of those images in candlelight but I wanted to at least document them. He gave us a free hand to photograph anything and everything and though he never said it nor anything close I knew that he was very proud of everything there and he wanted others to share it. The first place I went to was the music room, I wanted to see the tree stump and that's exactly what it was but he'd made deep sawcuts into it in several places and wedged in various sized cymbals. And then I looked at the door, THERE WAS NO KEYHOLE IN IT! My mind had played halucinagenic tricks on me. I went methodically through the house and gardens and photographed everything and when we were ready to leave he handed me two cassettes which contained the sounds of the prior evening and asked if I would do him a favor. Would I have a second set of photographs made and deliver them to Krishnamurti, who lived in Ojai California, close to where we lived, I said I would and I did so.

Something as insignificant as the cassettes were also part of the image; the cases were decorated totally, inside and out in the same manner as the paintings plus they have appliqués of fabric and printed images from the paintings applied to the surfaces, each one has a piece of an Indian belt approx 15" long that terminates with threads that have beads, coins and bells! The cassettes themselves are similarly decorated. I can't imagine how long it took to create these, it must have been hours. It would have been pointless to ask George any questions about Krishnamurti but I had a vague idea of who he was but now I discover that there's a large piece about him at Wiki, not so with George Schaeffer, I've searched everywhere fully expecting to find a link but without avail. As we left him he told me that there was a book that was published in Europe the dealt exclusively with the art; when I returned to the University where I worked I had the library run a national search and sure enough, it did exist, they requested an inter-library loan and I had it a week later. It didn't help, all of the work was credited to the woman who's name was in the gallery and who's name unfortunately, 30 years after the fact continues to escape me. My search continues.

Over the past many years I've thought about this incident and about George specifically many times but I haven't been able to figure out what he was about and what it was that drove him. He had obviously devoted his life totally at that period to everything that I've described, the gallery, the house, all the paintings and sculpture: his entire lifestyle seemed to be to one end but I still can't explain what that was. The images were extremely significant, they all related to Mayan history in one manner or another but also included fragments of Hindu and other Indian religions. As I've stated many had themes of positive and negative in many forms, plus there were lots of images that can only be described as grotesque. Had he gone to such enormous trouble and expense on the off chance that a couple of tourists like us would wander in off the street, and if so for what purpose? He didn't communicate with us in the slightest even though I was genuinely very interested and tried throughout to conduct a conversation and to understand what it was all about.

This painting is in many ways typical; regarding the bilateral symmetry start in the lower left corner, there's the recurring wheel and above are two Buddha like figures with halos, one white, one black. Look immediately to the right and in the center there's a nose and a pair of lips with two circular images representing eyes, above the eyes is a representation of wavy hair but in the center there's another Buddha figure with another halo, this time he's in a mouth with pointed teeth. Above the mouth is another nose but this one is divided down the center, half black, half white and on either side there's a series of contrasting faces, white against black and black against white, above the nose two more eyes with another mouth with teeth above them and another Buddha figure surrounded by what could be flames. Below the eyes on either side are what look like intestines, two on each side symmetrical in shape and color; the two top ones have the letters d g d g d g d g running along their length and immediately outside those elements are two serpents, red on the right and green on the left each with a contrasting colored head protruding from the mouth. Below the serpent's mouths are two scenes which are physically symmetrical but are totally different, on the right is a tranquil residential scene whilst on the left, a crowded cityscape. What any of this signifies I have no idea but I'm impressed with the effort and the creative imagination and what amazes me above all else is the volume of work, this painting is only one of hundreds.

This is an example of the other style that was prevelent, all the faces, the mountains and the corn are all three dimensional, all of the pieces of fabric are typical Guatemalan Indian textiles. This has none of the Hindu elements nor any of the grotesque images, these faces are traditional Mayan. The difference between this and the foregoing is obvious, perhaps there were two artists.

AN AFTERTHOUGHT

I wrote all of the foregoing very quickly and on impulse, what amazes me were all the details that flooded back and how I could remember it all so very clearly, in contrast I tried to remember other details of that trip including where we stayed and ate and any other activities in Panajachel but I could remember none. When I'd finished it, ie, reached the end of the above paragraph, I felt that it needed more, it needed something to resolve the story. I Googled 'George Schaeffer' and got a 'not found' message, I couldn't quite believe that he'd disappeared without a trace, that there existed no mention of him anywhere, I tried again this time deleting the 'e' in his name, no difference. And all the while I tried to remember the woman's name that was on the paintings but that wouldn't come either and neither would the title of the book that he'd mentioned. I was stuck! It looked like that's how the story would end but I kept trying, I spent hours doing internet searches and sending emails to current artists living in Panajachel requesting help from anyone who knew him or knew of him, again without success. And then one day I was using the phone book to look up 'Sullivan' and as I flipped the pages an ad caught my eye, it was in a large bold font and the name was 'Schafer' and at that instant I asked myself "Could that be how he spelled it?". I googled it and got an instant response, numerous mentions! One stood out, Wikipedia, it had a full page biography that included much of what I knew but also lots of details that I didn't and it tied up lots of loose ends.

During all of this more fragments came to me, one was his telling me the story of how he'd been held by the nazis and each day asked the question "Do you want to die now or later?" and in the Wiki piece it states "As a young man during World War II, Shafer was part of the Danish resistance and later a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp. He was sentenced to death but the sentence was not carried out." The bio also reveals that he worked in Germany post WW2 as a journalist and in this capacity "his job allowed him to meet or correspond with such notables as Carl Jung, Albert Einstein, Albert Hoffman and Lama Anagarika Govinda. He not only interviewed Dr. Carl Jung but was Jung's personal psychiatrist for a period of time. The phrase, "So fast the light so slow the matter follows behind" was written in a letter to his life-long friend Albert Einstein and, according to Schafer, was reflected in Einstein's writings on relativity."
It goes on to relate his initial exposure to psychedelic drugs whilst working with Dr Albert Hoffman, the Swiss chemist who synthesized LSD "While working with Dr. Hoffman and experimenting with synthetic mescaline, Schafer recalled a traumatic event in his early life and this recollection eventually led to his various philosophical writings, in particular to his book "Im Reiche des Mescal", and to the visionary art he was known for in his later years."
"Im Reiche des Mescal" is an adult fairy tale based on Central American Indian folklore it was translated into English as "In the Kingdom of Mescal": I've just found and bought a copy. It's the story of the kind of journey described by Aldous Huxley in The Doors of Perception, which is where I got my title for this piece, it's about how the man who goes through the door in the wall never comes back the same. It's the story of a boy who longs to get behind the appearance of things. A magic drink given to him by a medicine man sends him on a wonderful journey to a place where "the tongue forms no more words," into the depths of himself and to the heights of sheer wonder at the brilliance of the absolute.
It all sounds familiar.
During the post war period in Germany he met and married a German woman of Guatemalan descent who went by the adopted name of Nan Cuz (sometimes misspelled as "Cruz"), who was working as an assistant photographer at Die Welt. They moved to
Guatemala in 1973. They created an art center in Panajachel and Schafer further developed his distinctive artistic style. He always claimed that the paintings in "Im Reiche des Mescal" were by his own hand but signed "Nan Cuz" in an effort to enhance their "ethnic" authenticity, which explains my confusion and suggestion that there were possibly two artists; I never met nor heard of Nan Cuz from him.
He separated from Nan Cuz in 1978 and they divorced. Nan Cuz continued to paint and is well respected today. In 1979 he met Sherry Munson of the Munson Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico who he called "Mani". They were married in 1979 and in 1989 Georg, Mani and their 3 children moved to America settling in Chatham, Massachusetts, where she had family. Eighteen months after settling in their new home he suffered his first heart attack; he suffered a second and final heart attack, January 11, 1991 just 2 weeks after the birth of a son he named after Lama Govinda.

Georg Shäfer, Anglicized as "Georg Schafer" and "Georg Schaefer" a.k.a. Oma Ziegenfuss, Oma Ling Pa and (occasionally) Georg Shepherd, was born in Leinfelde, Germany on March 25th. 1926. He died on Jan. 11th. 1991 in Chatham, Mass. USA.

Nan Cuz
Aliases: Nan Cuz-Schäfer, sometimes known as Nan Cruz.
Professions: Painter; Illustrator; Photographer
Editor's note: Nan Cuz is an internationally famous Guatemalan artist and she has an interesting artist's house in Panajachel.

The following are all the illustrations from the book "In the Kingdom of Mescal"

Jazz Photos

2008-02-29T15:42:00.000-08:00

Oh what a lovely war!

2008-01-07T15:48:00.001-08:00

I was asked to write my memories of WW2 for a book on the subject; it was to be a compilation of different people's memoirs. I can remember vividly many incidents from that period, here's what I wrote.

OH WHAT A LOVELY WAR.

The “we” referred to throughout the following is myself and my friend John Webster, we were inseparable. I lived with my grandparents at 49 Barber road, Walkley, Sheffield and he lived around the corner at 337 Crookesmoor Rd with his parents and his sister Christine. We went to the same school and he was ten days younger than me.

Well, from my point of view, that is that of an 8, 9, 10 year old lad growing up in Sheffield and living with his Granny, it was a wonderful time. It was so interesting and there was always so much happening: I feel sorry for the kids of today having to grow up in this paranoid fear ridden and controlled environment, what we had was freedom and excitement.

We had regular air raids with sirens and bombs and air raid shelters and rationing and gas masks etc. but we weren’t old enough to know anything other that, so it seemed quiet normal. We listened to the radio a lot, to ITMA with Mrs. Mopp and Mona Lott and to the 9 o’clock news read by Alvar Liddell or Chester Wilmott with news about what was happening where our fathers and uncles were and which German cities we’d bombed last night. There was also ‘In Town Tonight’ and ‘The Brains Trust’ and “The Radio Doctor” and they all drew huge audiences, they were what held us together. And then there were regular visits to the cinema, in my case the Scala or the Western where we would sneak in through the back door because we didn’t have any money. There we saw the forerunners of TV news, the weekly ‘Newsreel’ features that showed the war on the home front and abroad in addition to the regular films of the day, many of which I can still remember.

We had double daylight savings time, the clocks went ahead 2 hours, so that in the summer it was light until well after 10 o’clock, so we stayed out and played ‘til it was almost dark and I remember many times telling my granny who was worried sick since I’d probably been gone since early that morning, that “I didn’t know what time it was!” Chances are we’d been out on the moors, walking for miles: we’d take the bus or tram to the terminus at the edge of the city for half a penny and then hike for miles. Once we hiked to Castleton which is 16 miles from Sheffield and then had to beg for pennies to get the bus fare home before it got dark.

There were many events interesting to a kid, like one night I awoke at about 2 am and came downstairs, probably to go to the outside toilet, I heard a weird noise, like an aircraft with a 2 stroke motorbike engine, and then suddenly this thing with a flame shooting out behind it went overhead very low: the next day the paper said that the farthest north sighted V1 had passed over Sheffield and had crashed into farmland,normally they didn’t have the range to target cities as far north as Sheffield, I just happened to see the only one they fired at us! And then 30 odd years later I made a TV documentary about 'em.

One summer afternoon about 5 o’clock I was out playing with my mates when a B17 with only two of it’s four engines working flew over very low, it was badly shot up, trailing smoke and in obvious trouble. We knew immediately where it was heading: Endcliff Park! This was a park about 2-3 miles away that lay along the bottom of a valley in a heavily residential area: a river ran through the length of park, on one side of the river were soccer and cricket areas and on the other a heavily wooded steep bank. We jumped on a bus that was heading directly towards the park and within a few minutes we were there. The plane had crashed into the trees on the hillside and broken up over a very large area, there were trees on fire and already a police cordon along the river bank to prevent public access. In a glance we knew how to get to the wreckage: there was a row of houses along the top of the ridge whose back gardens looked down on the burning trees. We quickly ran out of the park and up the main road to the street where those houses were and then through their gardens and onto the wooded hillside. As we neared the wreckage we saw that we not alone, we recognised several kids from Mushroom lane, a street very close to where we lived and they were already flitting from behind the trees and gathering souvenirs: down at the bottom of the hillside we could see a crowd with the police holding them back. Gathering bomb and anti-aircraft shrapnel after air-raids was a normal procedure for all kids back then, so we picked up pieces of debris from the wreckage and knew it was time to leave when we saw fire engines pulling up below and firemen heading up towards the burning trees. As we scrambled back up the hill with our booty we passed the Mushroom lane gang, two of them were struggling to carry a pair of 50 cal. machine guns that must have weighed a ton! Next day we saw them again and they invited us to their house to see the guns, we were extremely envious, we’d never found anything like that!

And then there was the blitz. Thursday December the 12th. 1941. Being winter it was dark when the sirens went at about 7pm but that wasn’t uncommon, we often heard sirens: that night however we were in for something special. The Jerries had a policy of saturation bombing the large industrial cities and it was now our turn. I was at home with my Granny and Grandad and we’d just had dinner. Normally we didn’t bother about air raid sirens ‘cos they’d go even if it was just a single enemy plane but it was soon apparent that this was different. Bombs started falling everywhere, there were constant explosions and fires burning and the sound of our anti-aircraft guns firing with dozens of searchlights criss-crossing the sky looking for the bombers: as the night progressed it got worse. Finally we went down into the coal cellar, we went down and sat on the cellar steps. Cold, dark and dirty with only a flashlight or candles for light: I don’t remember the details but I’m sure we must have had cushions to sit on and blankets to keep warm. It went on all night with some bombs falling very close and shaking the house and at one point there was a huge crash of breaking glass as the windows in the living room right overhead shattered from a bomb blast across the street. I remember it being 3am but soon after that I must have dosed off and I awoke to the all-clear sirens going off at about 7am.

My dad, who still hadn’t been called up yet, came by that morning, it was very difficult to travel anywhere since there was no public transportation, many houses and buildings were on fire, gas mains in the streets were on fire and water was gushing out of ruptured mains, electric power lines were down and there were lots of shattered and burning buildings and people out in the streets looking at it all. About 200 yards up the road from us was a huge landmine that had come down on a parachute, but had not exploded. It was black, about 8 -10ft long and 2ft diameter and covered with very interesting, but totally unintelligable German writing: it was lying in the gutter outside someone’s house. The bomb disposal people took care of it and removed one end and all the explosives leaving the empty carcass there for weeks after, it became a plaything for us, we used to go inside it.

Just down the street from it was a huge vacant stone house behind a large wall, it was perhaps three stories and we often went to play in the large grounds that surrounded it. One day we were there and one of us threw a stone at something and missed, the stone hit one of the ground floor windows and it shattered. What a lovely sound! Someone picked up another stone and threw it and another window shattered: there were about 4-5 of us and we each started throwing stones trying to outdo each other in hitting window panes. Within a few minutes there wasn’t an intact window in the house, every pane was broken, now it looked just like all those other houses in the neighborhood with bomb damaged windows! We didn’t give it another thought and went off to find something else to do, that is until the next day when there was a loud knocking on my Grannies front door, it was a copper who’d come to ask about what I knew regarding some broken windows in a house on Crookesmoor Rd. He was let in and and he started asking me questions and saying that someone had seen me there and what did I have to say about it. I told him that I knew nothing about it but I’d heard the same stories and I’d been told that it was the Mushroom lane gang!

It used to be called ‘mischief’, today it would be called juvenile delinquency and you’d probably wind up in the nick for some of the things that we did. Another time we were right at the Walkley terminus where the city ends and the moorland begins: it was a quite abrupt transition and where we were playing it was a large flat open area but about 100 yards away there was a vertical cliff dropping down into a valley. Some workmen had been laying cable there, heavy stuff about 1” thick: They’d left a huge drum of it, it was about 6ft in diameter and sitting upright. Of course two mischievous lads would want to give it a push to see if it would roll and of course it did, right over the cliff laying cable out behind it as it crashed down the hillside. We left in a hurry!

There was another time when the same ‘we’ had to leave again in a hurry. Sheffield is a very hilly city, consequently there are lots of valleys running through it. Close to our house at the top of Crookesmoor rd. there was one that had a small dam across it, it was a favorite place to play and swim. One day after swimming there we were cold and wanted to dry off and get warm so we decided to light a fire. The hillsides around the dam were covered with what we called ‘gorse bushes’ sometimes called ‘furze’ in other parts of the country. It’s a scrubby bushlike plant with hard woody stems that gets up to about 4-5ft and it spreads laterally. When it dies it becomes sharp and brittle and dry as tinder. We lit our fire under a clump and it roared into flame instantly, totally out of control, and on top of that the whole hillside was covered with it and it was contigious, every plant touched another! Within minutes the hillside was engulfed in flames and we knew it was time for another hasty retreat. We fled and ran until we were on the road that looked down on the dam from the opposite side of the valley and found a spot with a view of the entire scene. There were several people watching the fire so we asked one of them what was happening “Bloody mischievous kids, that’s what’s happening” he said, another adult piped in and said she’d seen kids running away from the fire just minutes before. Bloody mischievous kids! Adults would probably have said “No parental supervision, no coppers, no men around to control all these kids, everybody’s off at war, that’s why all these kids are running wild: and that’s probably true, but it was wonderful from our point of view.

It wasn’t all mischief, I used to sit in class and whatever the subject I’d probably be drawing pictures of aircraft, mostly German in my exercise books and I became quite good at it. Every teacher’s report card said basically the same thing “Tony lacks the ability to concentrate, he doesn’t apply himself to the lessons in class”, and that might have been true from their narrow perspectives. But there were a couple of teachers, both women, who made a difference. Our classroom had a 36” blackboard around three sides, one teacher asked me if I would like to draw a panorama along the back wall, I probably said OK, but I had no idea what a panorama looked like. So I asked my Granny, she had no idea either so she told me to go to the local library and ask there. They were not much help except the librarian pointed me to an alcove where the dictionaries and encyclopedias were kept and that was a turning point, from then on I always had a library card and spent hours there poring through those interesting books. That led to my going to the main library in the city where there was a much larger selection: one day after class another teacher asked me about something and I told her that I was going to the main library to return some books. “Oh” she said, “I’m a member there also and I have some books to go back, could you take them for me?” Well that became our instant bond, we belonged to the same library and she trusted me to take her books back for her, I was walking on air. I found out what panoramas looked like and then created something that was based on that famous photograph of St. Pauls Cathedral in London during their blitz, I drew a panorama of a night-time skyline during a blitz with German bombers, Spitfires, searchlights and fire and smoke: it stayed on the back wall as long as I was at that school, which was 'til the end of the war.

Neither incident really means much but they’ve both stayed with me all these years and in later life “lacks the ability to concentrate” became meaningless as I took advanced degrees at universities and also taught at them. I’ve mentioned the importance of the radio to us during the war, we also had an old gramaphone and about a dozen 78’s, mostly American dance music, I don’t think that it’s insignificant that I now host a weekly radio music program where I play records. Plus, one of the few presents that I remember getting from that period was a toy film projector, it was battery operated and came with some short black & white Disney cartoons that I used to project over and over. In my 30’s I produced a documentary that was related to the war that was well received plus I had several one man photo exhibitions of my work around the world. All these things tie together and as I look back I realise that I got very little from “school” , about all that I can really remember is learning to read and my 12 times tables, not much else. My real education began when I chose to pursue subjects that interested me and were in part related to the experiences of my wartime childhood.

A couple more items come to mind: there were frequent events and programs designed to create public support for the war, posters everywhere urging us to ‘Dig for Victory’ or beware that ‘Careless talk costs lives’ but in addition there were displays set up on bomb sites around the city. One such was a real Lancaster bomber and a real tank! I don’t know what the adults thought but we thought it was wonderful, we’d only ever seen them in either books or films, we’d never seen the real thing up-close before. So we went, but unfortunately there was a catch, an admission cost that we couldn’t afford, one and sixpence. The way it was set up was that you had to buy a one and sixpence saving stamp, put it in your savings book, and then they’d let you in to go inside the Lancaster.
We looked mournful, we stood at the fence and drooled and finally the sergeant said “OK, I’ll let you in, I’ll even give you the saving stamp and the book, but you have to start buying saving stamps "OK” we willingly agreed. So he made out two books, one in each of our names and glued a one and six stamp in each, we were in! We spent the rest of the day ‘til they kicked us out going through the Lanc and talking to the ‘crew’. When we left we read the fine print in our savings books and discovered that we could cash them in at any time, suddenly we were rich, we’d never had one and six in cash ever before, so we went to the post office and closed our accounts! One and six was more money than I’d ever seen but I don’t remember what I did with it, probably gave it to my Granny.

Another time we were in the center of town and we found ourselves in the cathedral gardens, before you knew it we were in the cathedral and spying a door in a dark corner we tried it and it was open. There was a staircase leading down into the vaults, we went down. Lo and behold this was where they stored all the sacramental wines, bottles stacked everywhere. We had no idea what we’d found so we decided to find out, we opened a couple of bottles and it was quite nice. Not what we’d expected, it was sweet and fruity so we sat down and passed the bottle back and forth. We also would steal occasional cigarettes from our parents so we usually had one or at least a butte in our pockets, so we lit one up and shared it. No one disturbed/discovered us, we finished our drunken orgy in peace, but I’ve wondered since if the Lord/Lady looking down from above has some special punishment awaiting us on judgement day? You know, sacrilage and all that.

I lived with my Granny: my Father and Stepmother had a house about 3-4 miles away, I would often visit and spend weekends there, it was always interesting. Their house was the weekly meeting place for the local communist party, it seemed like every weekend there was a meeting that quickly degenerated into a party: a party being a good sized group of people sitting around drinking, smoking and discussing everything under the sun. I quickly understood who uncle Joe was, even though we didn’t have any family members by that name. Marx and Lenin were names as familiar to me as many of those on the BBC but I didn’t know much about them though I heard their names often enough. When the weather was nice on a Sunday, and sometimes even when it wasn’t, we’d all go for long hikes across the moors in Derbyshire which probably has something to do with why John Webster and I spent so much time out there also. These hikes comprised about a dozen adults and me, me in short pants and on one occasion with my boots on the wrong feet, this wasn’t discovered until we’d walked many miles! They always ended at a country pub where everyone except me went in to continue setting the world in order and strategically planning how we should fight the war to aid our Red Army allies. Kids not being allowed in pubs I got to sit outside on the steps with a bag of crisps and a lemonade and as I sit here writing this 60 odd years later there’s a photo of us all on one of our hikes pinned on the wall in front of me, I remember every one of them and all their names.

On other occasions when the air-raid sirens went off at night we’d go out walking in the city: it seems like all the raids were at night. We’d leave the house and walk towards the outskirts of the city where there were hills with clear views of parts of Sheffield and often as we sat there during the air raids we’d see the results of bombs with fires and explosions off in the distance and my father always knew which area it was, I remember him once saying “Attercliff’s getting a pasting tonight!” There would always be barrage balloons, search lights and ack-ack fire but I never saw an enemy bomber get hit, though any that did get shot down wound up on bomb sites for the public to see and that was always a treat for those of us fascinated by German planes. Other times when we’d walk during the raids we’d go from one air-raid shelter to the next, they were scattered all over the city and usually fairly close to each other. Some houses had their own Anderson shelters buried in the back garden, the public shelters that we visited were very strongly built, ie 18” brick walls with baffles at the entrance and no windows and very thick concrete slab roofs. There was no lighting or heating just a platform bench that ran around the walls. People would leave their houses and go into the shelters usually bringing blankets and candles and guitars and accordians: it seems like every shelter we visited had a sing-song going on, there was a long list of songs that everybody knew by heart: “We’ll meet again” “White Cliffs of Dover” “Seigfreid Line” “Bless ‘em All” etc.

One clear summer day I was out playing by myself when I looked up and saw a sight like nothing I’d ever seen before. There were hundreds of allied planes circling around and around and forming up into formations. They were all bombers or transports, lots of DC3 Dakotas and Lancasters, no fighters and each one had something I’d never seen before: they all had black and white stripes on the wings and the fuselages. I had no idea what that meant but I was very intrigued. That night on BBC 9 o’clock news the announcer said “Today the allied invasion of occupied Europe has begun....” D Day had started and everyday thereafter we listened to reports from correspondents with the troops as they advanced towards Berlin. I have no memory of VE day and I’m at a loss to understand why since I can remember in vivid detail the street party that we had for VJ day.

For almost everyone in Europe the war was a terrible time, a time of separation and losses, of terrible fear, of shortages and rationing and of emotional turmoil, but for kids, particularly boys of my age in my environment, it was the most exciting time to grow up.

Travels in Guatemala

2008-01-07T15:44:00.000-08:00

This story requires a prologue, so let’s call this bit “The Prologue”

Sometime back in the 1980’s three of us, Ron, John and I planned to travel together to Guatemala for an extended summer trip in Ron’s VW Westphalia camper. The idea was for about 12 weeks but I could only get 6, so it was decided that they would drive down and I would fly down and join them 6 weeks later. At the last minute Ron met Terri, a statuesque dark haired beauty, and so of course he invited her to join us; not a unanimous decision! So it was decided that she would join me flying down at the later date.

A slight side detail: Since they would pass through and stay in Mexico City, Ron offered to make reservations for us at their hotel for when we arrived. The big day came and Terri and I flew to Mexico City and then took the bus into town: it was mid Saturday afternoon when we arrived at the hotel and there were, of course no reservations and no rooms available! Except for the “honeymoon suite”, we had no choice, we took it!

Anyhow, back to the story: We’d made plans to fly on the Sunday to Tapachula, a small Pacific coast town on the Mexico/Guatemala border where Ron and John would meet us. When we exited customs there they were waiting and we quickly left the airport heading for the border. Ron produced a pre-prepared lunch and insisted that we eat before we crossed the border, it was important to him that the crucial component of the sandwiches, which turned out to be psylocybin mushrooms, have their effects as we passed through Guatemala’s border immigration! I’m still not sure why.

My first awareness of the mushrooms happened once we were underway in Guatemala, we were driving along a quiet country road when we came to a bridge over a deep canyon, it looked so intriguing that we stopped and walked back. It was absolutely spectacular: a deep, steep sided canyon with a fast flowing river about 200+ ft below. the canyon sides were covered with ferns, orchids and lichens with rivulets cascading down. Hundreds of brilliant small parrots were flashing in and out of the beams of sunlight and dozens of multicolored butterflies flitted from flower to flower. The vision was real, but the mushrooms made it a spectacular, vividly memorable image that has lasted for a lifetime.

From the fellow travelers that one meets on the road Ron and John had found a source for “hongos” - the Indian name for “mushrooms” and they had also been told of the “Shangri-La” of Psylocybin mushrooms: Santa Maria de Jesus, a small village miles off in the interior, in the state of Quezaltenango.

The trip evolved into a situation where Ron and Terri spent most of their time in de luxe country villas and hotels, and thus leaving John and I to our own devices and having the use of the VW. We had found a very beautiful spot in the village of Panajachel which was on the shore of Lake Atitlan, a large turquoise lake surrounded by several volcanoes: one was active and every day poured out plumes of smoke and huge chunks of pumice floated in the lake. We were having dinner in a small cafe one evening and discussing whether we should go looking for Santa Maria the next day: there was a young American woman alone at the next table and we invited her to join us which then led to our inviting her to join us in our quest.
We picked up Susan and left at dawn the next day driving a primitive road that ran around the lake for about 25 miles. Once we’d reached the far shore we headed west across a barren plateau on very rough and often unmade roads: on our map Santa Maria was still about 50+ miles ahead. At about 11am we arrived at the village which was just a small cluster of cottages along the main street; the heat was intense, it was probably around 110 degrees! We parked the van and got out and were immediately surrounded by lots of kids, Susan, who was fluent in Spanish told them we’d come to buy hongos and the price of 5 cents each was agreed to. Immediately all the kids raced off and within 10-15 minutes they returned all clutching handsfull of mushrooms, we paid them all off and then consolidated our booty; we had a fairly large paper bagfull, probably about 1-2 pounds!

As we drove back out of the village I recalled seeing on the way in a huge tree which covered an area just off the highway: since we hadn’t eaten, breakfast sounded appropriate so I pulled off the road into the cool shade of that tree. We had all the where-with-all to cook our meals so a mushroom omelet with a bottle of cold beer sounded like a great idea. I did the cooking: about 1/2lb of mushrooms between three should be enough, right? So I started washing the mushrooms and cracking the eggs. Within minutes breakfast was ready: our table was set up in the shade, three chairs, tablecloth, napkins and three cold beers and glasses and we were in paradise. In retrospect I realise that one mushroom each would have been more than adequate!
Immediately after breakfast I felt something happening to me, odd uncomfortable sensations that I’d never felt before, a shortness of breath, the inability to take a deep breath, hot, hot, hot; sweating like mad. John and Susan thought we should all take a walk, I declined, thinking instead to take a lie down ‘til this “thing” released me from it’s iron grip!
That’s the only way I remember those sensations: it was like being in the grip of ‘something’ that wouldn’t release me. When I lay down and closed my eyes it was even worse; added to all of the foregoing my body started cartwheeling backwards through a black void! The only way out was to open my eyes and stand up, or to sit in the open; very uncomfortable! This went on for about an hour at which point I thought I’d look for John, which meant walking to the edge of the road which was about 30ft away: “much too far in this heat, I’ll drive.” So I did, I got in the van and drove it forward 30ft and there they were, about 1/4mile away across a meadow sitting under a tree. I tooted the horn and John shouted for me to come, little did he know that walking 30ft was more than I could handle at that point. He started running towards me in extreme slow motion and when he reached the barbed wire fence at the edge of the field he sailed over it just like a hurdler: he came to the van and said “Come on, it’s great over there” and at that point all of my discomfort vanished as though by a magic wand! We walked back across the meadow, found a cool mountain stream and spent the next couple of hours skinnydipping and at that point all the joys of psylocybin kicked in and it was wonderful! So that’s the Prologue, that’s how we got the mushrooms.

As the summer and our adventures continued we traveled and camped in many wonderful and interesting places and met lots of interesting people. Ron and Terri continued their “honeymoon” and John and I took dozens of trips into the mountains always seeking remote villages where the descendants of the Mayan’s wove beautiful fabric designs into their everyday clothes; by the end of the trip all the spare space in the van was taken with Indian textiles!
Ron being the obsessive that he is had the idea that “if a little is good, then a lot more must be much better!” So based on this philosophy he made plans that we should visit the Mayan city of Tikal during the period of the full moon: in fact he planned that we should spend the night of the full moon on top of the most sacred of the Mayan temples reinforced with the finest French wine [transported there specifically for this], psylocybin mushrooms, Thai ganga, which I contributed plus any thing else appropriate that might turn up on our travels! Which is why we found ourselves in the middle of the jungle at Tikal at full moon.

Tikal is an amazing place; it was the main center of the Mayan culture which covered most of Central America from about 2000+ BC ‘til 900 AD, when for reasons still unknown, their civilization vanished! Much is still unknown, their hieroglyphics had not been decoded back then and large aspects of the culture were a mystery. Tikal is huge, comprising many temples, plazas, civic structures and pyramids that have been restored and endless miles still covered by the plants, trees and vines of the jungle. Back then it was a fairly unsophisticated operation; the only accommodation was a few thatched cottages alongside the airstrip and there was only one place to eat, similarly a small thatched structure that served the most basic meals at several outdoor tables. You could drive there, but it was about 12 - 14 hours from Guatemala city on an unpaved jungle road so we flew, leaving the VW at the airport.

Mid afternoon of the day before the full moon we were lazing around in the cottage we’d rented; we were drinking beer and John brought out the jar of peanut butter in which the mushrooms were buried. We were not sure of their legality there so we’d stored them covered in peanut butter in a jar. It was sort of like a lazy afternoon snack, salt crackers with peanut butter and some cold beers and not much incentive to do much else: so we just sat and nibbled and drank for a couple of hours. It was about an hours walk on a jungle trail to Temple IV, so John and I set out at about 6pm to get there before dark. Ron and Terri were going to follow on later. About half way there was another complex of pyramids so we rested there for a short while and noticed a young Indian guy, approx. 20-25 showing off for a young American woman who had a young boy with her. The pyramid was stepped, but the steps were about 24” tall and very steep. He was racing up and down the steps as though it was a residential staircase, we watched amused and wrote it off to youthful exuberance.

When we arrived at Temple IV it was sunset: the only way up to the top was by pulling yourself up using ropes that were permanently secured there. The temple, which is 212ft high had not been restored and was still covered with vegetation and vines. We got up to a level platform at about the 150ft point and from there to the top there was a steel ladder fastened into the vertical stone wall: the rungs on that ladder were about 24” apart and it was exhausting getting up the last few feet. Down at the ground level in the dense jungle it was almost dark and very hot and humid, up above the treetops there was a beautiful cool breeze and a spectacular sunset. We sat on a flat platform on the west side of the pyramid enjoying the cool air and the sunset and off to our left about 75 ft away were four young women talking heatedly in German.
Suddenly, as if on cue from a Disney director, two beautiful huge white storks came into our right peripheral field of vision flying in perfect synchronization, in slow motion and directly into the psychedelic color scheme that was the sunset. It was so perfect that it would have been a cliche in a film. The German conversation paused for a moment and then resumed as an almost inaudible babble, but in the midst of it I clearly heard the words “Royal Air Force”. I got up and went over to where they were sitting and introduced myself: they spoke English and when I asked them about the RAF reference one told me that there was an RAF station near to where she lived in Germany and she was telling her friends the storks were so perfect that they reminded her of the RAF aerobatic team!

As John and I sat there enjoying the twilight the German girls left and we were suddenly alone up there: I had twinges of mushroom paranoia and started wondering if I really wanted to spend the next 12 hours sitting in total darkness on this stone ledge high above the jungle. The answer was “no” and I told John that I really didn’t want to stay and given how fast the light was fading if I was going to leave I had to do it immediately. He was adamant, he was going to stay the night, so I reluctantly started down the ladder alone. I made it to the jungle floor and was suddenly surprised to find that it was totally, absolutely black down there: not a glimmer of daylight penetrated through the trees. I was lost, I had no idea where the trail was, all I could see was total blackness in all directions: that is total blackness decorated with psychedelic hallucinations courtesy of the mushrooms!
I called out to John that I couldn’t see a thing, could he come and help. At first he was reluctant to do so but finally he came down and together we started walking along the trail: I asked him how he could see in such darkness and all he could tell me was that the path was like a tunnel through the darkness and that the patterns were broken indicating where the tunnel was. Hard to explain but easy to visualize, rather like two superimposed moiré patterns.
This visit to Tikal was my first exposure to the jungle: everything about it was new and wonderful, but the sounds were something I hadn’t anticipated. By day the sounds that several million insects make when they all join in a colossal chorus is unimaginable: it’s maybe slightly like being at the center of a soccer field when 100,000 fans sing and the sound reverberates and runs around the stadium in waves, except that insects have a much greater range than mere mortals and their combined choruses verge on choral ecstasy. There was a period when pop musicians discovered the joys of manipulating sounds in the studio: one of the most basic was to fade effects from the left chanel to the right and then back again and so on so that to the listener it sounded as though the music was spinning around inside his head: that’s exactly what the insects do. As we walked along that trail in total darkness there was an entirely different chorus of sounds: the most chilling was something very large roaring just like the 20th Centuries lion and only a few feet off to our left. Howler monkeys make an enormous racket which also can be a bit disconcerting under the circumstances and there were thousands of birds, parrots, toucans and storks all adding to the soundtrack.
We finally caught up with the German girls and joined them at which point John chose to return to the pyramid and I continued with them back to the cottage where Ron and Terri were getting ready for a night on the jungle.

Ron was now ready to tackle Temple IV: he had bathed, shaved, dabbed his anti-perspirant on in all the right places and dressed for the occasion. He had on his short shorts, his skinny tanktop and running shoes: with all that skin exposed and all that aftershave fragrance he was the anticipated evening meal for several million mosquitoes that night, and each one left a small red itchy spot to prove it. The next day he looked as though he’d splattered with red paint from a spraygun from head to toe! But I digress.
At this point I was feeling very good; it had been several hours since we’d eaten the mushrooms and the initial effects had generally dissipated leaving a warm inner glow, I was ready to return to the Pyramid.

This time we were smart enough to bring a flashlight and as we neared the first restored temple we heard the sounds of a flute wafting through the night air. The temple was part of a huge complex of buildings that surrounded an open space; the full moon illuminated the entire complex and somewhere high in one of the buildings someone was playing, it was a magical moment. I thought immediately of Paul Horn who at that period was recording flute improvisations in similar environments, ie the Taj Mahal and at the Egyptian pyramids. We enjoyed this moment and then continued on to Temple IV where John was waiting. When we arrived we negotiated the first section up to the ladder and then all the way up into the moonlight that lit the tops of the jungle to the horizon and illuminated all the adjacent structures that poked up through the trees. It was a brilliant sight and well worth all the effort to be able to partake in it. The four of us sat there for 2-3 hours and then by unanimous consent agreed that we’d had enough ecstasy for that day and it was time to get back to the airstrip and our cottage.

When we descended the ladder sitting leaning against the wall of the pyramid was the young American woman that we’d seen earlier in the day, she had the young Mayan guy who we’d seen running up and down the steps cradled in her lap, apparently asleep. “Do any of you know anything about scorpion bites?” she asked. “My friend felt something fall down the back of his shirt and when he reached for it stung him and he’s been unconscious ever since” Well John, our hero, stepped forward and said that we would have to get him to a doctor! What a dreamer, a doctor, here? But he reached down and gathered up the Indian guy and slung him over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes.
We established a routine for descent which had John in the lead followed by Ron, Terri, the American woman and her son and me at the back with the flashlight shining it ahead so that everyone could see the ropes and stepping places. As soon as we started we saw that the entire area was alive with scorpions, dozens of them scurrying between the rocks that we were walking on, we had to step between them! We didn’t know at the time but they live in the crevices beween and under the stones that the pyramid was constructed with and they come out at night to feed! Amazingly we made it to the ground without mishap and John was the hero of that night coming down 150ft on ropes and vines with the guy over his shoulder. The first thing we saw when we got to the bottom was a VW Beetle with American plates just sitting there like it belonged; it was probably the only vehicle for miles around and it was sitting waiting for us. I reached in and sounded the horn several long loud blasts and within a couple of minutes two gringos just like ourselves emerged from the jungle. It was their car and when we explained the problem they loaded John and his invalid into the back seat and set off down the trail, the rest of us followed on foot.

The forces of good fortune continued to prevail. When the VW arrived back at the landing strip there was a communal fire ring with all of the visitors sitting around it swapping tales and drinking beer. As they lifted the guy out from the back seat two of the visitors came over to help. When John explained the problem they each identified themselves, both were doctors from Riverside, California: one was a snakebite specialist and the other a scorpion sting specialist! And they had medical kits for emergency procedures with them. They were two young doctors who loved to surf and had just been to El Salvador for a surfing vacation and had stopped over at Tikal en route home. By the time we who walked back arrived, everything was taken care of: the guy was sleeping in a tent and he awoke the next morning and went straight to work!

Nina Simone.

2008-01-07T15:40:00.001-08:00

Nina Simone:

One day back in the '80's Bob Andy, Jamaican musician was staying with us in Long Beach California. On the Saturday I noticed that there was a free reggae festival in a park in south central LA. We decided to go. We were standing around between sets, sort of backstage, though there wasn't any real backstage when I saw Nina Simone standing alone about 40ft away. I couldn't believe it, I'd been a huge fan for all of my adult life, I'd never seen her perform, but there she was. I knew that she had a gig at the Wiltern theater in LA the following Tuesday so I excused myself from my wife and Bob and walked over to her, I introduced myself and told her how much I'd appreciated her music over the years and how much she'd meant to me. She was very cordial and we chatted, then I said "Nina, I'd like you to meet my friend Bob and my wife"; we walked back to where they were and I said 'Nina, this is my friend Bob Andy'.

Everything changed at that moment, I'd not even remembered that Bob Andy and Marcia Griffith had had a world-wide hit single back in the 60's of Nina's song "To be Young, Gifted and Black". 'Bob Andy' she screamed 'you're that Bob Andy?' 'You god damn motherfucker, you ripped me off, I never got a penny for that song and you made millions!'
What had been a pleasant surprise encounter had suddenly taken a nose dive, all there was now was anger and embarrassment. I tried to smooth things over but she obviously wasn't having any so we gingerly backed off and I said something to the effect that I looked forward to her concert. 'You show your face at my fucking concert you bastard, and I'll have security throw you out!' Oops, nothing I could say was going to work so we beat an ignominious retreat, but as we left I was approached by a guy who said that he was managing Nina and did I have any influence with the mayors office, I told absolutely none, I wasn't at all involved with any of that.

On the way home I had a thought. Whenever there were high end celebrity visitors to LA I noticed that there were day's proclaimed in their honour and the mayors office would issue proclamations, in the form of very ornate heraldic hand lettered documents listing that person's contributions to society etc. The guys question made me think it might be appropriate to send a note to the mayors office and suggest this. I had an image of some flunky coming onstage before the show and making a bit of a fuss and then giving it to her so I sent a note and promptly forgot about it.
Regardless of Nina's threats we went to both shows, the 7 pm and the 9 pm, I had a press pass that got us into the Wiltern and we could always grab any empty seats; we had two right in the front row and I had all my camera gear with me. I shot her discretely throughout the first show and then sat back and enjoyed the second. I didn't even notice that there was no representative from the Mayors office.

The next day I went to work and when I came home at around 5pm I checked the mailbox as usual and there was a large 16" by 20" envelope screwed up and stuffed into it, I opened it and it was the proclamation for Nina! And there was a nasty note attached to the effect that if I requested a proclamation, then it was my responsibility to come and get it! Oh dear! Little did I understand the inner workings of LA politics. So what to do with it? The manager guy, who I later realised was the Ethiopian Orthodox minister who had conducted the ceremony for Bob Marley's funeral at the National Stadium, had given me his card, so we called him and explained the screw up. He asked if we would bring it to her since she was leaving for Paris early the next day; she was staying at a place in the San Fernando valley which was about 75 miles from us and given her reaction on the weekend I didn't really feel like 150 miles of LA rush hour traffic just to be Mr Niceguy. But we weakened, we found the address, her apartment door opened, he stood there, we gave it to him, he thanked us and closed the door. And that was how we met Nina Simone!

Jamaica's National Gallery

2008-01-07T15:27:00.000-08:00

I had a wonderful surprise this week: I got a call from the past. Back in '84 Gina and I were in Kingston Jamaica, we had a Rasta friend there who ask'd us to come to his community: Waterhouse, probably the roughest, toughest area in Kgn to meet his friend the local elder, Jah Vic, an old Rastaman. So we went and spent the first of several visits with him. At some point during the day a little girl, about 8, wandered into the garden where we were sitting, her name was Nicola: Gina started talking to her and I remember her telling the little girl that "we were going to the National Art Gallery" the next day. "Can I come?" she promptly asked and I remember Gina saying that she'd have to ask her mother: they left to go across the street to ask. Apparently when the mother said OK, the little girl said "Can my brother come also?" Of course! By the time they returned the group had grown to about 14 young neighborhood kids who all wanted to go with us! Jah Vic entered into the spirit of things and volunteered to take us all in his "new" car: This was 1984 and Jah Vic's car was an early 1950's Hillman that didn't have a trace of paint left on it, though there were several places with large ares of Bondo filler. There were, in several places, pieces of wire twisted around various parts just to keep them in place; the windows didn't raise or lower, there were no lights, there were holes in the floorboards where exhaust gasses flowed in and the seats were in pretty sad shape! It was such a "classic" that I shot half a roll of film on it. But it was Jah Vic's first car and he was righteously proud of it and also of his being involved in the trip to the National Gallery.
The next day we arrived early and every kid was ready and waiting. Three adults, Jah Vic, [driving] plus Gina and I got into the car and then we had to get the kids in: don't ask me how we did it but I have photos of us all standing next to the car outside the Gallery! My main concern as we departed was that the car wasn't capable of making the 4-5 mile journey regardless of the load, but it did and we finally entered the National Gallery. The administrators were very intrigued, they'd never seen anything like this before, they followed us around everywhere we went. We had to tell the kids about looking but not touching etc. and they all caught on immediately and were wonderfully behaved. What I remember more than anything about that day was how this bunch of ghetto kids all related so clearly to the art. Jamaican art is so interesting because it is directly related to the history of the people, the culture and the places, there's no European art there and the kids picked up on it immediately and I remember them talking animatedly amongst themselves as they stood looking at the paintings. I shot several rolls of slides of all this and afterwards we all went out and bought ice cream for everyone from a vendor along the waterfront and sat on the grass and had a good time.

Thursday morning the phone rang and a woman's voice said "I'm looking for Tony and Gina Brennan who used to live in Long Beach" "That's us" I said and she went on to tell me that we'd met some years ago in Jamaica! When I asked her where and she said Waterhouse and went on to tell me about going with us to the National Gallery I realised who it was: it was little Nicola! Except she's now 29 and lives in Connecticut! Apparently Gina had bought her a dress and some trinkets and had given the mother our address and phone number in LB. Nicola moved to the US 10 years ago and when her mother one day came across the paper with the address on it she sent it to Nicola. The story that she told us was that the trip to the National Gallery was the most important and memorable event of her young life; what she remembered most of all was that this couple of total strangers made such a fuss of her and turned her on to something she hadn't known existed! It changed her life and she'd thought about us for all those years so when she got the address she tried to contact us only to find we were no longer there. So she started searching for us online and suddenly there we were: in Sebastopol! So we've had two long and interesting conversations, catching up on all the details of the last 20 odd years and all our friends in JA. It's been a wonderful experience.

She's very smart, very politically aware, has a decent job and a steady boyfriend; she uses the internet for everything and visits NY regularly to go to the museums and galleries! We invited her to come for a visit and we have a tentative yes for this summer. You might recall that I mentioned some weeks back that I was trying to get some callalloo seeds [a Jamaican spinach] I tried online and had one suggestion that didn't lead anywhere. I mentioned this to Nicola and she said "You want callalloo? I've got lots of it growing in my garden, I'll send you some plants and seeds" So everything that goes around comes around, it's a small world!

Adventures in a foreign land.

2008-01-07T15:24:00.000-08:00

My wife Gina used to have nightmares which always involved her being threatened or followed or chased by some unknown, unseen figures. When we were first married she would sometimes jolt me from sleep into instant awareness by shooting upright in bed screaming! As time passed these incidents happened less and less until they were almost forgotten. So when this happened in Zambia within a few days of our arrival in Africa, I just held her and I reassured her that everything was OK; I told her that she was just having a nightmare and she should go back to sleep.

We were staying in a huge, 6000 sq. ft. ranch-style house on the outskirts of Lusaka, the capitol of Zambia. It had a 10 ft. high concrete perimeter wall topped with broken glass and covered with 3ft of barbed wire; all windows and doors were covered with steel grill bars; the outside area between the house and the wall was brightly floodlit; there were two huge guard dogs - a Great Dane and a Rottweiller loose in the garden; and there was a full time security guard who patrolled within the garden wall all night long. Of course we were OK, it was just a nightmare.

She had awakened with a scream in the darkened bedroom and said in a frantic whisper that there was somebody outside our bedroom window. I knew that there couldn't possibly be anyone there since the dogs were silent; apart from the nocturnal insect sounds it was totally quiet. We both lay back down, I closed my eyes and relaxed. Within a minute I felt her freeze rigid "There's someone there" she whispered frantically. I shot up and sure enough there were shadows cast by the floodlights moving on the window drapes. I leapt out of bed and ran to the window. When I pulled back the drapes my heart stopped, there was a group of 6-8 men; all armed with clubs, crowbars and machetes standing about 2 feet from me and looking directly at me. I let out an incoherent shriek which I think in retrospect was supposed to be like the audible weapon that the Maoris used in Robert Graves short story "The Shout." It didn't work, at least it only worked very temporarily. The gang fled to the gatehouse which was about 25 yds away, but then, clearly illuminated by the floodlights, they paused, re-grouped, and immediately started back towards us. I knew that we were in trouble.

We were alone and we were locked in the house. The owner, our hostess, was staying in an apartment in the city, the housekeeper who lived in a cottage on the grounds had the keys and he locked all the doors when we retired and re-opened them at dawn. There was no time to think, they were right outside and had immediately attacked the windows and the steel security bars that were welded over them. Glass flew, plaster and wood shattered, the noise was terrifying, but even more so was the image of this gang who were determined to smash their way into the bedroom with no thought for the bedlam that they were creating nor apparently were they concerned that we, the occupants, might be armed. They could not have known it, but we weren't, I didn't even have my pants on, I was standing there stark naked!

We fled from the bedroom down a corridor to a phone on a table in the hallway where there was a list of emergency numbers taped to the wall. Our hostess, the owner of the house, had explained what each one meant before she had left us. The first on the list was the universal emergency number 999, this was followed by four different police stations, the fire dept. etc. I began at the top, 999. It rang 30-40 times and no one responded, I couldn't believe it, was I in my frantic state mis-dialing? I tried again and still no response. I tried the first police station on the list, "Let it ring" I told myself, after about 30 rings I hung up. All the while there was this incredible pandemonium about 3ft. from my head as the attack continued on an adjacent window. Try the next one, "Oh God, it's busy, try another", this time it was the number of our hostess's apartment in the city.
Her phone must also have rung 30-40 times, and again with absolutely no response. All the while total bedlam. They were now attacking every window on that side of the house; the noise was horrendous and I was standing there stark naked trying to find one person who could help. I shouted to Gina to ask her to get me my pants and to lock all the doors as she returned; she went to our bedroom, grabbed the pants and then locked the door, similarly locking two corridor doors and pulling the keys. When she returned I was dialling the last number on the list, the Roma District police station.
After an eternity, someone, who was very obviously asleep, answered. He was befuddled and was not responding at all. Over and over I repeated, "There's a gang of robbers breaking into the house at 5557 Magoye Road, there's at least 6-8 of them, they're smashing their way in through the windows; the address is 5557 Magoye Road, do you understand me?" In film and fiction the policeman is instantly alert, his voice, his authority has a reassurance, you can imagine the radios crackling, patrol cars with lights and sirens speeding to your aid immediately. But in this case our man was still struggling with sleep or perhaps my unfamiliar accent was difficult for him to comprehend. He was my only hope. I kept asking him if he understood, did he have the address and could he send assistance and I wasn't getting anywhere. Finally he said that he thought that there might be a patrol somewhere and he would try! So much for fact and fiction. On that note of positive re-assurance I gave up on the phone, and from the level of the noise it sounded as though they must be almost through the wall. We fled. As we passed the kitchen Gina pressed the buzzer to Mr, Tembo's house several times to alert him, but at 5'3" and hardly 130 lbs. we knew that he wasn't going to be any help, we were on our own.

I mentioned that the house was large; one day for no particular reason I paced the distance from the master bedroom to the kitchen; It was 55 yds! And the house extended 2 more rooms beyond the kitchen, probably close to 200 ft. total. On another occasion I looked in every room in the house, seventeen in all, to determine the most secure place in the house in the event of whatever. I certainly didn't anticipate anything like this, I didn't anticipate anything, but I suppose our being there alone, being so far from anyone we knew, and being generally somewhat security conscious caused me to check it out "just in case." Well, here we were right in the middle of "just in case!"

I knew that the size of the house and the endless rooms would give us a small degree of security. The place was so large that we kept discovering "new" rooms even after we had been there several days. We ran to the far end of the house, through the kitchen to what seemed to be a servant's bedroom. Off that bedroom was a tiny steel grill enclosed patio that had a toilet and a shower, primarily for outside use. It was the shower that we'd been using, since for some unknown reason it was the only one of four in the house that had hot water. When we'd passed the main door of the house and Gina had buzzed Mr. Tambo I'd noticed the dogs, they were there, right outside the door and totally oblivious to the bedlam that was happening on the other side of the house! I couldn't believe what I was seeing! In the mythology of guard dogs Rottweillers were second only to lions in their ferocity and aggressive natures. Ours was standing there with a glazed look and wagging his tail. His Dane companion was similarly quite unconcerned. I screamed at them to try and get them excited, I stood there screaming through the closed door "Kill, Kill" over and over as loud as I could. I don't know why I chose to scream that specifically, but I just wanted to get them agitated, excited, involved! They both stood and looked at me, tails wagging, as though I was silly, not a tinge or a trace of guard-doggedness, just a canine blank happy stare.
When we reached the guest bedroom I asked Gina to wait there for me, I was going back. I had decided that it would be better to have the dogs in the house with us, so I was going to go back to get them. I had to unlock the main door and then unlock the two padlocks on the steel grill, which enclosed a tiny entrance patio. I seized the Dane by the collar and tried to pull him into the house. Years of conditioning had brainwashed him into believing that he wasn't allowed into the house. So when I tried to drag him in he just dug his heels in and it was an impasse. It was like trying to drag a donkey through a door that he didn't want to enter, but I succeded. I then seized the Rottweiller and dragged him, also protesting, into the house. I started to re-padlock the grill, but at that instant the robbers came running around the end of the house. They came straight for me swinging their clubs and machetes at my hands as I fumbled with the padlocks. For the first time I saw them very clearly in the floodlit doorway; the only word that comes to mind as I try to re-create that scene is "crazed." There was a frantic quality in their eyes as we stood for an instant staring at each other separated only by an unlocked gate. I retreated into the house and locked the door, why I'm not sure since it was surrounded by two floor to ceiling plate glass windows, which was all that now stood between us and them. I grabbed the Rottweiller and ran, dragging him back to the bedroom where I'd left Gina minutes before.
The bedroom had a clothes closet along one wall with a large storage cupboard above it. Gina was nowhere to be seen and then I heard her whispering frantically "Come up here" She was hiding in the cupboard which was about 6' wide, 3' high and 2'deep, and about 6' from the floor. It must have seemed like an ideal hiding place to her in her terrified state, except we couldn't lock the bedroom door that was between us and them, there was no key in the lock. I demanded her to "come down," but she was terrified and not about to vacate her hiding place. She pleaded with me to come to where she was, but I knew that there wasn't any security there and insisted that she come down, I didn't have the time to explain why. There must have been something in my voice that clinched it because she very unwillingly came down and we exited that bedroom with the Rotweiller in tow into the shower/toilet area. I locked the final door behind us. When I looked around, the area we were in was only 6' wide by 3'deep with a padlocked steel security grill between us and the garden. The bars were 1/2" steel and were spaced about 7"-8" apart. As I looked around assessing our situation, I suddenly realised that we were alone, the dog was gone! There was nowhere he could go but he certainly wasn't there! The only place he could have gone was through the bars! He must have weighed 150 lbs, built like a truck, but he must have gone through that grill as quietly and quickly as if he were a cat.

We were extremely quiet speaking only in whispers; If there were any of the robbers close by we didn't want to reveal our location. But at that instant I saw over the garden wall, about 25 yds away, the neighbor. He was standing on his patio with a light on and looking directly towards us. I threw caution to the wind and shouted to him as loud as I could "Help, call the police, we're being attacked by robbers." I repeated this at the top of my lungs over and over for at least 2 minutes. But he just stood in the shadows of his patio and stared at us, it was like shouting at a statue, there was no reaction, no recognition, and no acknowledgement. Finally he turned, walked into his house and the door closed behind him. It was a very depressing moment, his total neutrality left me feeling very alone, and now the robbers were in no doubt that we were still in the house and they must know pretty clearly, exactly where we were.

The shower stall was a typical shower stall 6'x3' with a shower at one end and an area 3x3 behind the door. The door was a flimsy wooden affair that wasn't lockable, but if I sat on the floor with my back braced against it I could wedge my feet against a step up to the shower. Gina sat at that end silently terrified. She had the foresight to grab 2 kitchen knives as we ran through, nothing that you'd want to stake your life on, but they were all we had and were better than nothing. I took them both, one in my hand and the other tucked into my belt behind my back. I knew that the robbers had 3-4ft. long steel re-bars and 2ft. machetes. If it came to it, our only advantage, if you can call it that, was that we were in an enclosure, in darkness, and they could only attack us one at a time. Prayer might have been appropriate but I'd never thought much in those terms prior to then, so it didn't occur to me. The only thing that did was how to react when the time came, which I was sure it would. I had visions of them attacking the door with me braced against it. They would realize immediately that it wasn't locked and that the resistance was me. Therefore the logical thing to do would be to smash through the lower door, I didn't reach any conclusions on how to deal with that possibility.
The night was silent; I could hear my breathing and thought that anyone else close by must also. Earlier we had heard sounds of activity but now there was no indication of anything. I assumed that it must be because they were at the far end of the house and were being very quiet. With the door closed on that tiny space it became suffocatingly hot. During the day the temperature was in the high 90's, at night, probably in the 75-80's. I remember that we had been sleeping with only a sheet and a mosquito net. It became stifling,

I couldn't breath, the humidity was horrendous and I was aware of sweat trickling down my back. I decided that I must open the door to get some air and I told Gina what I was going to do,"Please, please don't open the door, please", she beseeched me in a frantic whisper. Beseeched is not a frequently used word, but it's the only one that conveys her terror at the thought of the door being opened. But I felt that I had to open it, so I moved my position slightly and cracked the door about 2"; the cool draft of air was wonderful, delicious. In an effort to waft some air back to where Gina was I tried to open and close the door gently but rapidly a couple of times. The silence was shattered when I misjudged it and accidentally banged it closed with a loud noise. We were rigid, the noise sounded as though it must have reverberated through the entire house! But they still didn't come. I remember trying to estimate the passage of time but I didn't know what time it was or what time this nightmare had started. I realised that when your senses are deprived it's almost impossible to estimate time. I wondered how long until dawn, there were no clues, no lightness of the sky, no bird chorus, just our breathing.

At some point, after what seemed like an eternity I began to think that perhaps there was a possibilty that we were going to be ok, that perhaps the robbers would take what they could find and leave. We couldn't hear anything, maybe they'd already left? Then I started to think about the bedroom. It contained everything we had with us, all of our money, close to $2,000 in cash and unsigned travellers checks plus our camera gear-3 Nikons with motor drives plus half a dozen lenses, our passports, plane tickets, clothes, everything. Everything that we owned was in that room, and that was the room that they were smashing their way into when we'd fled. There was no doubt in my mind that we'd lost everything. Gina had on a pair of pants and a T shirt, I had a pair of cotton pants and that was it, that was all we had between us!.

I thought about the nightmare of dealing with the Zambian Government, Zambian Airlines, American Express, the US Embassy etc; and as I began to think that we might escape this nightmare ordeal, I realised that it might, by the light of day, seem like "out of the frying pan and into the fire."But for that moment we still had to deal with our current set of problems.
After what seemed like eternity I heard voices outside in the garden, I peered past the edge of the shower door and saw the silhouette of a figure against the first light of dawn as it walked past the grill. I didn't recognize him and thought for sure that it must be one of the robbers now coming to look for us. Two or three seconds later another figure walked past, it was Mr. Tembo our housekeeper. My most immediate thought was that they were holding him and forcing him to show them the house. I was reluctant to reveal our location but on impulse and perhaps without thinking I called his name and he came back towards where we were. He couldn't see us in the shadows, but he said "You can come out now, the police have arrived" I remember asking him to bring a policeman to the grill so that we could see him. He said something and a man with an automatic rifle walked back towards us and stood there, It was just beginning to get light, it was 5:30 am.

Mr. Tembo unlocked the grill and we walked out; as we walked around the house towards the main door, the one where I'd struggled with the dogs I saw a plainclothes white man and another uniformed officer with an automatic rifle, they were both standing ankle deep in broken glass just inside the front door. We were both barefoot so I gave the plainclothes man the various keys that I had in my pockets and asked him to fetch us some shoes from the second bedroom down the corridor on the right. He returned a couple of minutes later with two pair of shoes, both Gina's. She went to get me a pair and came running back a few seconds later shouting "They haven't taken anything, everything is intact!"

We couldn't believe it, they had stripped the center section of the house of everything removeable, furniture, TV's, VCR, drapes, food, utensils, carpets, everything. But because we had locked all the doors behind us as we had fled they hadn't gone into that end of the house. My opening the main door grill to get the dogs gave them easy access, they only had to smash the large plate glass windows at the front door and they were in. At that point they must have given up on trying to break in through our bedroom, though they had came very close. Two of the bars welded to the window frame were broken and it it wouldn't have taken very much to break one more. My grandmother always said that I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth! How liitle she knew.

It turned out that the "plainclothes man" was a visiting professor of Geology at the University of Lusaka, his name was Vaughn. Apparently there had been so much of this happening that he and a group of locals had formed, what he called a "vigilante" group. The problem was that the police didn't have cars, (Zambia is a very poor country) so the "vigilantes" would use their personal cars to transport the police. They would patrol the neighborhoods at night and communicate by walkie-talkie. Our "police dispatcher" had the address totally wrong, it turned out that there was no such address. They knew that something was happening somewhere but they didn't know where. While we were standing in the yard talking about all of this I noticed that the Great Dane was throwing up, I looked at the vomit and saw that it contained large chunks of what looked like pork fat, it didn't look like anything that he was regularly fed. Then the Rotweiller also began to vomit. The dogs had been poisoned which accounted for their unusual behavior. Apparently it was a common practice for thieves to throw poisoned meat over the wall an hour or so before they came over. Both dogs were rushed to the vet, the Rotweiller almost died but finally pulled through three days later. The Great Dane was ok.
We had to go to the police station to make a report at 9 A.M., our new-found geologist friend said that he would return and drive us there. We spent the intervening couple of hours packing our things and talking through the events of the night. We talked to the "security-guard" a man about 5'2", 110 lb. His job [for which he was paid almost nothing] was to walk around the property all night long and keep us safe from attack. To protect us he carried a stick. His story was that the robbers came over the wall, overpowered him by throwing a coat over his head and tying his hands. He said that he heard them talk about killing him, but one of them had said "Not now, later." He was left tied up in the guard shack. When they left they took his keys to open the gate, they were laden down with large "sacks," actually they were the drapes from each room which they tore down and used to create "swag" sacks.
When Vaughn returned he commented "That by now everything would be dispersed throughout the compound" "What do you mean" I asked, "Which compound, in fact , what is a compound? "You haven't seen the compound" he said, "I'll show you." Whenever we had left the house to go into Lusaka during the week that we'd been there we had always turned right outside the gate and walked to the highway, about a mile away and taken a bus into the city. That morning as we left in Vaughn's car, we instead made a left turn out of the gate. There was a bend in the road and as soon as we were around the curve I realized that we were in the midst of the most poverty ridden shanty town you could imagine. Nothing but rusty tin shacks, cardboard "houses", open sewers, not a trace of green anywhere, just dusty brown dirt. There are shantytowns in every country, but this was worse than anything I'd ever seen. There was nothing, no water, no electricity, no paths, no gardens, nothing, just poverty.

Suddenly it made sense, "our" 6,000 square feet mansion on the edge of this ghetto was too much, it was there everytime they had to walk into town, everyday they had to pass it with its lights, TV, music, gardens, privilage, everything. "They" decided to share the wealth and unfortunately for us they chose to do it the week that we were there.
We went to the police station and made our report, and then we went into town to find a hotel: there was nothing! Every room in the four hotels in town was full. It was about 10 am and we hadn't slept a wink all night, so we went through the InterContinental lobby, out to the poolside and ordered breakfast; then we dozed until mid-afternoon when a friendly Irish woman in a dripping bathing suit sat down next to me. "Well how's it going?" she asked, "Are you new here?"
I told her the story and she immediately offered to let us stay with her. Her name was Brigid O'Connor and she was the librarian at the British Council in town. What a lovely lady, we stayed with her for about 3-4 weeks and had a wonderful time and made a wonderful friend. All's well that ends well!