A Quick Bit of Staistics

Sept 10, 2009
Johnson, VT

I am slightly obsessive about certain things and I have quietly hid these little obsessions over the years. I have decided to embrace them as I approach the end of my 30 years.

30 gigs of data / digital images were created on this last trip
63 rolls of film shot which equals 1032 frames of images. 451 frames made it through the first edit and have been scanned. 43.7% of film shot made it through the initial edit to move on to the second round. Not a bad shooting average at all.

Logic vs Gut Instinct in hand to hand combat in an all White Room

Aug 31, 209
Johnson, Vermont
Elevation 157m

I am sitting in my all white studio space with a window looking out into the parking lot with a perfect view of the construction workers using the porter potty. I know that photography is on the low end of the totem pole in the art world, but did that need to be made so obvious with a view of the shit house? (I am certain that my studio assignment does not reflect anything other than what is practical and convenient).

I am editing through 63 rolls of film from Mexico and Central America. I shot markets in 13 different cities and 4 countries. I can usually look at the proof sheet and tell you which town that market is as no two markets are a like. I am looking at 3 proof sheets of meat isles and meat stalls and I cannot tell you which country it was in, much less what town. I remember being at that particular market, I remember shooting the images, I remember each of the isles, but I cannot remember anything else. By the process of elimination, logic tells me that this mystery market is not in El Salvador or Nicaragua, but my gut instinct tells me that I shot these images late in the trip which means that it is El Salvador or Nicaragua. OMG! I feel like I am going crazy. My gut is certain, but logic dictates otherwise.

Maybe its not good for me to be in an all white room. Maybe I should staples some pads to the walls....

Guide Books, Men with Guns and Women Guerrillas

Aug 6, 2009
San Salvador, El Salvador to Leon, Nicaragua

I have spent the last couple of day at the beaches of El Salvador where the surf is supposed to be amazing. I don't know what I was thinking but wanting to learn how to surf at a place with world class point breaks is really not a good idea.

All fellow travelers can a test to the importance of a guide book (the bible as some call it) as part of one's journey. It determines where you go, where you stay and how to get from town A to B. Now there are times in which the guide books are right on with the advice given and you can't imagine not following it, then there are times where you do a double take and wonder if the authors were even in the country described at all.

There is this little town called Ataco in El Salvador, on the Route de Flores, where the book described it as having a strong indigenous influence and is what Antigua, Guatemala was like before tourism hit. We went there one day. Let's just say that the guide book authors needed a way to describe the town and that was the best BS they could come up with. One down for LP guide for El Salvador.

After a few days at the beach, 4 of us heads into San Salvador so we can all head out to our next destination via Tica Bus. The guide book lists 2 departure points for the Tica Bus, one of which is said to have a hotel as part of it, making it convent for early morning departures. Sounds perfect as our bus to Nicaragua leaves at 5am. When the cab pulls up to the hotel, there are men with guns standing outside of it and it is clear that we are in a very sketchy part of town, I begin to doubt my El Salvador guide book for the second time. There have been plenty of men with guns all through Mexico and Central America, for the most part they have made me feel slightly safer. However, given the looks of part of town we are in, and then there are men with guns outside guarding the hotel/bus stop?! Ok, don't feel safe at all. Time to re consult the book and see what other options there are. Oh look, there is another terminal listed in a better part of town, let's go there. Oh look, there is a hotel attached to it as well, why the hell didn't the guide book tell me about this option? Tica bus terminal in city center is only for those who wish to be robbed in order to have a complete Central America experience while Tica bus terminal in Zona Rosa is for those who would like to sleep in a clean bed with a hot shower.

In one of the "Boxed Text" for my guide book, it talks about women guerrilla fighters as part of the FMLN. Women made up over 40% of the guerrilla fighters and after the end of the civil war some did not want to re-enter into the traditional role of women and home maker. The hostel we stayed at in Playa El Sunzal is run by a women in her 40's. She has two small children, one with some sort of developmental problem. I don't know if there is a husband as we did not see anyone else in the three days that we were there. She is always nice, always pleasant, never in your face or invading your space, yet when it came to time to tally our tab, it is immediately clear that she has keep an eye on you this entire time. Her ledger is impeccable and charged us down to the last cent for everything we had to eat, drink, used and slept in. I was impressed to say the least. This woman manages to run a 5 room hostel and raise two children with such efficiency that I wondered if she was once a guerrilla fighter or was raised by one.

Condition of Absorption

Aug 3, 2009
Juayua, El Salvador

This is the first morning since June 30th have I had the chance to read the paper with coffee. Some rituals just feel so good and so right.

I come across the following piece in today's New York Times.

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Averted Vision
By Tim KreiderIn
1996 I rode the circus train to Mexico City where I lived for a month, pretending to be someone's husband. (Don't even ask.) I remember my time there as we remember most of our travels — vivid and thrilling, everything new and strange. My ex-fake-wife Carolyn and I often reminisce nostalgically about our honeymoon there: ordering un balde hielo from room service to cool our Coronas every afternoon, the black-velvet painting of the devil on the toilet that she made me buy, our shared hilarious terror of kidnapping and murder, the giant pork rind I wrangled through customs. Which is funny, since, if I think back honestly, while I was actually there I did not feel "happy." In fact, as mi esposa did not hesitate to point out to me at the time, I griped incessantly about the noise and stink of the city — the car horns playing shrill, uptempo versions of the theme from "The Godfather" or "La Cucaracha" every second, the noxious mix of diesel fumes and urine, the air so filthy we'd been there a week before I learned we had a view of the mountains.

I was similarly miserable throughout the happiest summer I ever spent in New York City. I was recovering from an affair that had ended badly, and during my convalescence I was subletting a cool, airy apartment a block from Tompkins Square Park, with a kitchen window that looked out on a community garden. A theater troupe was rehearsing a production of "The Tempest" out there, and I got used to the warped rattling crash of sheet-metal thunder in the evenings. I happened to catch "The Passion of St. Joan of Arc" on cable for the first time late one night, a film I knew nothing about — it was grotesque and beautiful, astonishing. One of the happiest memories of my life is of sitting on top of the little knoll in the park with my friend Ellen, eating a sweet Hawaiian pizza and waiting to see what movie would play on the outdoor screen that was being inflated in front of us. (It turned out to be "Raiders of the Lost Ark.") Even though this whole time I was preoccupied with thoughts of the woman I'd lost and torturing myself with jealousy and insane fantasies of vengeance, in retrospect it's obvious now that the main thing I was doing that summer was falling in love.

I wonder, sometimes, whether it is a perversity peculiar to my own mind or just the common lot of humanity to experience happiness mainly in retrospect. I have of course considered the theory that I am an idiot who fails to appreciate anything when he actually has it and only loves what he's lost. Or perhaps this is all just what Michael Chabon called "the ruinous work of nostalgia, which obliterates the past." But I think I recall that summer with such clarity and affection for much the same reason that I remember my month in Mexico City so fondly. The fresh heartbreak was, in a sense, like being in a foreign country; everything seemed alien, brilliant and glinting. It was as if I'd been flayed, so that even the air hurt. When you're that unhappy, any glimmer of beauty or consolation feels like running into an old friend abroad, or seeing mountaintops through smog. Maybe we mistakenly think we want "happiness," which we tend to picture in very vague, soft-focus terms, when what we really crave is the harder-edged intensity of experience.

We do each have a handful of those moments, the ones we only take out to treasure rarely, like jewels, when we looked up from our lives and realized: "I'm happy." One of the last times this happened to me, inexplicably, I was driving on Maryland's unsublime Route 40 with the window down, looking at a peeling Burger King billboard while Van Halen played on the radio. But this kind of intense and present happiness is heartbreakingly ephemeral; as soon as you notice it you dispel it, like blocking yourself from remembering a word by trying too hard to retrieve it. And our attempts to contrive this feeling through any kind of replicable method — with drinking or drugs or sexual seduction, buying new stuff, listening to the same old songs that reliably give us shivers — never quite recapture the spontaneous, profligate joy of the real thing. In other words be advised that Burger King billboards and Van Halen are not a sure-fire combination, any more than are scotch and cigars.

I didn't always enjoy being a cartoonist. During the 12 years of my career, if I can call it that, I bored my friends and colleagues by complaining bitterly about the insulting pay, the lack of recognition, the short half-life of political cartoons as art. And yet, if I'm allowed any final accounting of my days, I may find, to my surprise, that I reckon those Fridays when I woke up without an idea in my head and only started drawing around noon, calling friends at work for emergency humor consultations, doing frantic Google image searches for "Scott McClellan" or "chacmool," eating whatever crud was in the fridge, laughing out loud at my own jokes, and somehow ended up getting a finished cartoon in by deadline, feeling like an evil genius, to have been among my best. But during the time I was actually focused on drawing — whipping out a perfect line, spontaneous but precise, or gauging the exact cant of an eyelid to evoke an expression, or immersed in the microscopic universe of cross-hatching — I wasn't conscious of feeling "happy," or of feeling anything at all. I was in the closest approximation to happiness that we can consistently achieve by any kind of deliberate effort: the condition of absorption. My senses were so integrated that, on those occasions when I had to re-draw something entirely, I often found that I would spontaneously recall the same measure of music or line of dialog I'd been listening to when I'd drawn it the first time; the memory had become inextricably encoded in the line. It is this state that rock-climbers and pinball players and libertines are all seeking: an absorption in the immediate so intense and complete that the idiot chatter of your brain shuts up for once and you temporarily lose yourself, to your relief. I suspect there is something inherently misguided and self-defeating and hopeless about any deliberate campaign to achieve happiness. Perhaps the reason we so often experience happiness only in hindsight, and that chasing it is such a fool's errand, is that happiness isn't a goal in itself but is only an aftereffect. It's the consequence of having lived in the way that we're supposed to — by which I don't mean ethically correctly so much as just consciously, fully engaged in the business of living. In this respect it resembles averted vision, a phenomena familiar to backyard astronomers whereby, in order to pick out a very faint star, you have to let your gaze drift casually to the space just next to it; if you look directly at it, it vanishes. And it's also true, come to think of it, that the only stars we ever see are not the "real" stars, those cataclysms taking place in the present, but always only the light of the untouchable past.

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This last month of traveling has been good to me. This last month on the road has made me very happy. Whether be it caused by the "condition of absorption" or just simply that being out here has eliminated all things that was causing me pain previously, its been good. Any other time, I would agree with Mr Tim KreiderIn that our happiness is often us nostalgically reminiscing on the lights of the faded glory, but I must say my current state of being has nothing to do with that. Everyday, every morning, every cup of coffee, every smoke, every bus ride, I am happy. Let's just credit it to the "condition of absorption" so we can tone down the gloating a little. Wishing all of you the same.

Charlie Grosso

www.charliegrosso.com

310-592-0895

Adventures in Boarder Crossing

July 31, 2009
Antigua, Guatemala to Juayua, El Salvador

I now have a travel friend and we decided to head south into El Salvador. After a quick breakfast, after me insisting on picking up an AMAZING brownie made by JP, a bar owner in Antigua from New Orleans, we head over to get on a chicken bus for Guatemala City. This is my first chicken bus and I am sad to report that there were no chickens on this particular bus.

A bumpy hour later, we arrive at the biggest city in Central America, Guatemala city. Now, I have been told that Guatemala city is a dump and very sketchy, I have to admit that there was a part of me that thought about coming in for the day (this was pre- El Salvador) just see what kind of cluster fuck it really is. Well, let's just say that there really is no need to see it. A dirty, messy, charm less city, much like many I have been through.

A taxi to another bus terminal for another chicken bus to the boarder. The chicken bus are old yellow school bus that used to drive children to and from school in the US, after X number of years, they get retired and they get send down here in Central America. Some guy buys it, paint it multicolored, and they will cram as many passengers on to it as possible. What I am most impressed by is the guy who is in charged of the fare on a chicken bus. People come on and off all the time, including from the door that opens straight back from the bus. Sometimes people jump on through the back door while the bus is in motion. How does the ticket taker keep track of who has paid and who needs to pay is a kill beyond my imagination.

Its the raining season here in Central America, afternoon thunder storms is the norm. I have been lucky enough that it has not affected my travel much and also have managed to just duck indoors to wait out the rain. Well, the rain started here in Guatemala around 4pm, a torrential down pour. Its stops for a bit here and there, but by the time we arrive at the El Salvador boarder, it is a massive down pour. I had to tread through ankle deep water to get to the front door of immigration.

After that, its another collectivo that is supposed to take us to the bus which will take us to the biggest town in the region where we have to catch a different bus for our final destination. The collectivo passes through water that must be 6 inches deep, thank you for visiting Guatemala, welcome to El Salvador, then meters into El Salvador, the collectivo stops short. The collectivo can't go any further as there is a major land slide ahead. Boulders the size of small dining room tables are falling down the hill. The other collectivo that we need is on the other side of this mud slide. We put our packs back on and starts walking very quickly but carefully down the road, across the land slide. There is no going back into Guatemala as there is nothing at the boarder. Forward is the only choice.

We get across the mud and giant boulders, get on the collectivo, only to have it sit right by the land slide, making us nervous. Alright, back out on to the road again. It would be safer if we keep on walking than to sit in a non-moving car taking the chance that the land slide would get worst. We get further down the road and clearly there is nothing else coming this way. The collectivo has now collected enough passengers and are coming our way. Thank god!

The El Salvadorians are all super nice and we make some conversation with them about where we are from and where we are going. We get to town, find a bathroom, get 5 conflicting opinions as to if there is still a bus to Juayua and we set off to find the chicken bus station. We were told by 6 different people that it is just around the corner, well, its actually just around about 4 corners, many corners were turned before we finally find the chicken bus that we need.

Wet but excited, it took us 7 hours, 3 chicken buses, 2 collectivos, 1 taxi, 6 inch deep of rain water, a major down pour and a land slide but we have arrived at Juayua at last.

Charlie Grosso

www.charliegrosso.com

310-592-0895