Beef worthy of a Texas grill
Texas pride can be a little over the top sometimes, so when I saw a steak in the shape of Texas on the side of an H-E-B semi-trailer the other day, I had to get a photo of it. I was driving at the time, so I asked Stephanie to snap these out the window for me (with her original iPhone). It was only after passing the truck that we realized the entire ad was a barbecue-rific recreation of the Texas Flag, complete with “lone star” tongs. Absolutely brilliant!
Thinking to myself: man, what I wouldn’t give to see a Texas-shaped steak sizzlin’ on a Texas-shaped grill.
A QR Code for my wunderkammer
This time not mine, but I bought one partly to make sure!
Royal Dutch Mint 2011 Commemorative Fiver (obverse)
The photo above shows a commemorative, silver-plated 5€ coin issued by the Royal Dutch Mint in honor of their 100th anniversary. As a concession to modern technology, the reverse features a QR Code that encodes a URL—apparently the first of its kind. This is a bold move, as coins presumably last longer than URLs (not to mention QR Codes!), a reality that doesn’t seem to faze the designer, Juan José Sánchez Castaño:
Some people are worried about the fact that QR Codes will disappear in the future, or the coin will not be connected or linked any more to this webpage. [The] internet can also change or disappear in [a] few decades, and so [can] the coins, who knows? The Roman Empire disappeared centuries ago, but nowadays we still enjoy their coins and we know their meaning. As Marshall McLuhan said: “the medium is the message”. The QR Code is the message. The representation of the time we are living is the message, no matter what is encoded on it. The QR Code is a part of the design, part of the message and a beautiful way to close the circle of the one hundred years.
Ocre en Provence
I thought I had a pretty good feel for Provence (thanks in part to Peter Mayle). I did not expect to stumble upon, literally, ocher.
Northeast of Apt there’s this funny little area known as Colorado Provençal, just outside the village of Rustrel. Stephanie says she’s wanted to go for a while, but I don’t remember hearing about it until we flipped through a brochure in Loriol showing orange rocks jutting out of the green Provençal garrigue. A few weeks later, heading south from Auvergne, we sought out a campground in Rustrel to explore this Colorado-en-France.
If there’s a sign, then it must be for real
It wasn’t until we went hiking through the red, orange, yellow, and white rock of Colorado Provençal that we began to realize this place was more than just a pretty and unusual landscape: it was once a carrière d’ocre (ocher quarry). Thanks to an old map at the campground, we discovered it wasn’t the only one—a handful were scattered throughout the region. Another poster showcased several ocher-related sites in nearby Roussillon: a conservatory, a self-guided quarry trail, and an underground mine.
The red rocks of Colorado Provençal
I had heard the word “ocher” before, but I couldn’t tell you how to spell it (ocre, ochre, ocher?) let alone what it meant. I had the sense that it referred to an obscure color, but I didn’t know which: brown, yellow, orange? It was clear though that ocher was more than just a fancy name for autumnal fashions, it was something that existed in nature.
Shades of ocher
My curiosity was piqued. I wasn’t interested in the wine, the olive oil, or the fields of lavender that so many people come to Provence for. I wanted to know everything I could about ocher. Understanding it seemed to be a key to understanding something quintessentially Provençal: its color.
The Taj
Agra was an overnight train trip west of Varanasi, which seemed to be a sign that we should stop and visit the famed Taj Mahal.
My favorite shot: I took this out the open door of our moving train in the early hours of the morning as the steel girders of the bridge (at least 30 feet over the Yamuna River) flashed by
The tomb’s pristine whiteness stands in stark contrast to all that surrounds it, but all that surrounds it is bustling with energy, while the Taj is surprisingly lifeless. Fitting for a mausoleum, I suppose.
A woman does the laundry; the Taj hovers in the distance
A bustling Agra street scene: water buffaloes in traffic
The making of PANAMAX
Back in May of last year I stumbled upon a blog post about Twitter’s new office. What stood out for me the most were the paintings of San Francisco’s classic 49 Mile Drive sign. (Funny, I don’t think I originally noticed that they replaced “49″ with “140″, in homage to the 140 character limit of each tweet.)
Twitter’s 140 Mile Scenic Drive paintings (source: Troy Holden)
At the time I was into local street signs, so I looked up the artist: Annie Galvin of 3 Fish Studios. As much as I liked her street sign paintings, I also really dug the linocut prints done by her husband, Eric Rewitzer. I almost ordered some prints online right then, but I thought it’d be cooler to visit their studio in person, seeing as though they were located in San Francisco.
Yosemite Valley, a linocut print by Eric Rewitzer
Somehow I found time in the middle of packing up our apartment to stop by their studio and pick up a copy of Eric’s excellent Yosemite Valley linocut (a present for me later). I was also stoked to see some of the paintings of the container cranes around Oakland that he’d just recently had in a show. I would have loved to buy one, but we were supposed to be saving our money and downsizing—not acquiring new large works of art. Looking back, I really love that orange one.
Eric sitting with some of his Port Authority paintings
We chatted for a bit. I mentioned that I’d be taking a trip on a container ship in a few weeks, which he thought was pretty rad. I paid for the print and that was pretty much where we left things.
Once I’d found my stride blogging aboard the container ship, it occurred to me to send Eric an email with a link to my blog. If anyone would appreciate photos taken on a container ship, it’d be him. Plus I was giddy about emailing people from the middle of the ocean. The response I expected was “Wow, cool man,” but the response I got was: “Wow, cool man. Can I paint some of these?” My immediate reaction: “Of course!”
First view out the porthole in our container ship cabin
I didn’t hear anything for a few months, but in early January he wrote back asking for some high resolution versions of the photos to work off of. Since then he’s been paintblogging the works in progress. They are very big!
Panamax paintings with the images “chopped” in
Panamax paintings with undercolor painted in
Want to see the finished works up close? They’ll all be in a show this week aptly named PANAMAX (referring to the size of ships built to fit through the Pedro Miguel Locks of the Panama Canal). I’m bummed that I won’t be around to attend, but if anyone is curious to see some of my photographs rendered in paint and writ large, please stop by arc studios & gallery this Saturday, March 19th, from 6-10pm—and say hi to Eric for me.
PANAMAX: new paintings by Kimball and Rewitzer
A collage of the 5 paintings Eric made based on my photos for the show. Clockwise from left, they are: Departing, Panama, Looking Port, Portal, and Above the Bridge.
Update: I met up with Eric at 3 Fish Studios to see the paintings in person (at least those that hadn’t sold yet) after returning to San Francisco in September 2011.
The trees of Ta Prohm
Ta Prohm was the highlight of our third day at Angkor. Here’s where our guide’s services came in handy. We got off our tuktuk at one corner of the temple’s outer wall and started hiking along it. We walked for awhile before cutting through a gate, down into the first moat (now dry), over another wall, into the second moat (also dry), before we finally breached the temple.
Due to Ta Prohm’s popularity (spurred on thanks to the movies that have been filmed there: Tomb Raider and Two Brothers) as well as its structural instability, a boardwalk has been put in that walks people on a fixed route through the temple—complete with roped-off photo-taking platforms in front of some of the more dramatic trees. But we skipped most of this, taking an alternate route with few other people, giving us the space and quiet to enjoy these picturesque ruins and their giant trees by ourselves.
Stephanie is a treehugger
Standing between the humongous roots of a tree on the wall
Standing on some fallen stones next to a tree on the roof
Posing on the platform in front of the strangler fig
I stood amongst the roots of this tree during my first visit—now it has a photo platform that somewhat detracts from the allure
Standing within the massive base of a spung tree
An afternoon with Angkor Wat
We spent all afternoon on our second day with the guide at Angkor Wat—nearly until sunset. Compared to my first trip, the weather was gorgeous: rich blue skies with beautiful clouds.
The expansive Angkor Wat from across the moat
The central Angkor Wat towers seen from the library
Angkor Wat through a window in the library
Looking at the towers of Angkor Wat from the causeway
Tourists posing for photos in front of the reflecting pool
Redux of the original, “Angkor Wat, meet Justin Watt”
Return to Angkor
I have few memories of Siem Reap itself from 2003. Any that might have remained were likely overwhelmed by either my experience of Angkor or the frenetic pace of development that has seized the town (thanks to the unrelenting flow of tourists).
After a few days rest, we hired a guide and a tuktuk driver for three days to take us around Angkor. That’s about as much as any person can take before getting “templed out”. It’s easy to say we would have enjoyed Angkor more on our own, and at our own pace, but there are so many sites, and so much history, it helps to go with someone knowledgeable to make sense of it all, especially when that knowledge is coupled with experience in the art of finding spots less obscured by the throng of tourists (like us).
Traffic jam at the south gate of Angkor Thom
Smiling faces look out from the south gate of Angkor Thom
The itinerary for a three day guided tour of the temples is fairly well established. What we didn’t account for were some ill-chosen meals on the days preceding our tour that would wreak havoc on Stephanie’s digestive system. After passing through the south gate of Angkor Thom, some unpleasantness was passing through Stephanie, so we made a beeline to the toilets, and then worked our way in reverse, through the Leper King and Elephant Terraces and the under heavy renovation Baphuon.
