roozle

I'm back home now after a month in Berlin. 

The main thing I wanted to do was to have an every day, ordinary connection with our 21 month old granddaughter - and get to enjoy this rapid exploration of the world and development of language that is part of almost-2-years-old. And I did that.  Jacob and Henriette, and Henriette's parents Ralf and Hao, were wonderfully hospitable and welcoming.  

I did less exploring Berlin than I hoped, so I guess I'll have to go back. (grin)  I made less progress on German than I hoped - but some, by the end of the trip I was starting to be able to follow casual conversations if I knew what the subject was.  

I tried to write up what New Years in Berlin was like, and failed to find the words but maybe I'll still do that. 
 

Mid April for me was all about a road trip from Phoenix to Las Vegas with @totient.    I'm not going to write much about the Grand Canyon except to say that, as impossible as I thought it was to be more impressive in person than in pictures, pictures do not do it justice.  I was surprised with how much beauty I found in the desert landscape - getting to Red Rock Canyon in spring while the desert plants were in fascinating bloom was an experience I'm deeply grateful to have had.  And I can't say much about Las Vegas, though I'd never been there before.  The quick glimpses I got of its "too much is never enough" spirit were somewhat overwhelming.    

Two of our stops were at Arcosanti and Hoover Dam, and this was just such a study in contrasts. 

Arcosanti is an "archology" - a word made up by Paola Soleri to describe an urban architecture designed to be in harmony with its ecological environment.  Soleri designed dozens of these, but Arcosanti is the only one that has been even partially constructed. Over the course of the last 50 years, the construction has been done by volunteers, in stages, out of slipcast concrete, to create densely filled multi-use structures that support art and residence and community gathering spaces intermingled, to fit harmoniously into the desert around them.  Arcosanti is built with great attention to passive heating and cooling, orienting to the sun to fit with the seasons.  I was surprised that it was not completely solar powered, but the technology that would support that was not around when it was originally designed.   Arcosanti is intended to be a densely populated space that facilitates interaction among the people there, thereby being a laboratory of sorts for new kinds of urban environments, and it is intended, when fully built out and populated, to be largely self-sustaining through locally based intensive agricultural methods.  But the Arcosanti we saw is a long way from the utopian dream. Arcosanti today survives through tourism and through making and selling bronze and ceramic wind chimes.   It is unfinished, still on the grid, only growing a small percentage of its food.  It holds, today, 85 people rather than the 500 that Soleri's design called for.  Since Paolo Soleri's death a decade ago, it's not clear what drives the future vision of the site.  Arcosanti is hauntingly beautiful and a unique place in the world; the tour touched more on architecture than what it was like to live and work in that environment, and left me with a lot of questions.  

Hoover Dam is also built by humans out of concrete, but the resemblances end about there.  Arcosanti is meant to blend with nature, Hoover Dam dominates.  The speed and scale and intensity of its construction, the way it shapes the landscape, and the impact it has on the landscape  of the entire Southwest through flood control, water supplies, and powers supplies are mind-boggling.  But what I noticed most of all was the oblivious self-congratulatory triumphalism with which all of this was described.  None of the problematic aspects of Hoover Dam are mentioned in the tour or in the exhibit hall on site.  Here are some of the missing words:  ecology, race (a few dozen of the 21,000 who built the dams were Black, but you'd not know that from the exhibit), indigenous people (the exhibit text still talks about American Indians, in one sentence), water conservation, and, of all things, climate change.   You look out from the dam into the basin of Lake Mead, with the water level hundreds of feet below the edge of the basin, and the problem of the moment is staring you in the face.  How low can the water go and Hoover Dam still operate?   What happens when the turbines stop?  None of this existed in the ahistorical world of the Hoover Dam tour.   What a missed opportunity to convince an audience full of people who already think there is something special and interesting at Hoover Dam that there's work to do for it to  survive over the next decades. 

So in the end, both Hoover Dam and Arcosanti had me thinking thoughts about sustainability.  On the scale of how small is too small for a community to keep going, and what happens when you are too tightly tied to the vision of one man, on one end.  And on the other end, on the scale of the entire watershed of the Colorado River, of the lives and livelihoods of millions of people downstream from the dam, who have because of Hoover Dam been able to temporarily forget the harsh water limitations of the Southwest.  

 

Hmm, last time I posted to Dreamwidth was to do this meme last year.  Wonder if I'll do any more blogging this year? 

Well here goes.  Not sure this is perfectly in order. 

Melrose MA
Somerville MA
Boston MA 
Paterson NJ 
Wilmington MA 
Portland ME 
Madison WI 
Chicago IL 
Arlington VA
So. Burlington VT
Chestertown NY 
Berlin Ger
London UK 
Durham UK 
Newark DE 
Morristown NJ 
Fort Lauderdale FL 

Not exactly the year of sitting in one place, some very good memories in 2014. 

I've enjoyed this meme the last few years, and got reminded of it earlier today.  Places slept in 2013: 

Melrose MA
Somerville MA
Boston MA
San Francisco CA
Walnut Creek CA
Paterson NJ
Arlington VA
Belfast UK
Dover NH
Chestertown NY
edited to add: New Lebanon NY
Wilmington MA 
Christiana DE
Chicago IL

I feel like I'm forgetting something but checking the calendar isn't revealing.

Last night, for the first time in a long time, I dreamed about my grandfather. Not as he actually was when he died, bed-ridden and lost in dementia, but an idealized version of his old age, frail and shaky but still funny and sharp and kind. I dreamed that it was the morning after a visit with him in which we played cards and joked around, and I'd gotten the news he had died. In the dream, my mother and aunt were talking about how he had left no will but I said to them, "well, I know what he would want to do."

Leaving aside how unlikely it is that we can actually know another's unspoken wishes -- dreams, after all -- there's something in my head this morning about how shared temperament and affinities can run in families. I see a lot of him in my mother, a lot of my mother in myself, time will tell how much of those traits are passed even further down the generations. In the interplay of genetics and environment, some things seem uncanny in their repetition.

Today I am remembering what were perhaps not my grandfather's best features. He wasn't much for accumulating wealth at his best; as I understand it, money flowed out of his fingers as fast as he came in. He was forgiving to a fault -- until one crossed the invisible line after which that person was dead to him. I think he was often restless, certainly pig-headedly stubborn, capable of turning his kindliness to a flash of temper at times. I don't want to idolize him. I'm a little more discerning than the child who thought he was the smartest man in the world and should be elected president, which gives you some idea of my childhood hero-worship of Grandpa. Still I miss him, as long as its been, and that's ok with me. As long as we remember, they live on.