beautiful, funny, sad & true

Last summer, I jumped out of a plane.

It was fun, and scary, and it’s definitely the craziest thing I’ve ever done in my life, up to this point.  I did it partly because I wanted the experience, and partly for solidarity with GhostBand.  SingerDanielle made a vow as part of our KickStarter campaign that if we reached our goal, she would conquer one of her phobias and go skydiving.  We did reach our goal, and when the time came, there was a group of us who thought it would be much more fun to do together.  So we did.  In addition to the aspect of moral support, it gave us a discount on the price.  One has to be frugal, times being the way they are.

The business of skydiving is a strange one.  The first time you go, you have to take a short class, and you have to sign a huge waiver that says (in no uncertain terms) that if you are injured or killed, you or your family will not hold the company liable and sue them.  The waiver is insanely detailed.  There’s a little box after the end of each sentence that you have to check, in order to show that you’ve read and understood every last bit of the document, and that you have no recourse.  It can take half an hour to fill out the thing; it’s crazy.

Once we finished the paperwork, we stood around and waited for our class.   We filed into the little room, and they told us what position to be in for our jump—lie on our stomachs with our arms and feet raised behind us—and we each had to demonstrate the position so they knew we understood.  They also stressed the importance of doing exactly what the instructors, to whom we would be bound by an elaborate harness, tell us to do.  If we struggle, or go against what they say, we could have problems, and that could make the instructor’s job of controlling the landing much more difficult.

When the class was over, we stood around outside and watched a number of other skydivers land, gently and effortlessly, and our nervousness abated.  I actually wasn’t nervous about the skydive, surprisingly.  I just thought it sounded amazing, and was looking forward to it.  Certainly, once I’d seen a bunch of other neophytes land without incident, I knew we were in good hands.  Finally, our turn came, and we each joined our respective instructors.  We put on jumpsuits and were assigned helmets and goggles.  We followed the guys to the airplane, climbed aboard, and got into position.  There were six of us in the group, each with his or her own instructor, and one experienced skydiver who was jumping solo.

As the plane ascended to the requisite thirteen thousand feet, our instructors set to work harnessing us to them, so that we were essentially attached, and we could move as a single aerodynamic body.  They even gave us last-minute chances to chicken out.  They tapped us on the shoulder and yelled (since the plane is extremely loud), “Are you ready to jump?” to which the acceptable answers are either, “Yes,” or “No.”  They have to be absolutely clear that we’re giving them permission to take us on the jump.

Suddenly, the plane came to altitude, the door slid open, and there was the sky.  Right there.  The experienced solo guy jumped first, followed by SingerDanielle, followed by the rest of us.  Since I had been the first to board the plane, that meant I was the last to jump.  My instructor tapped me on the shoulder, as all the others had to their assignees, and asked if I was ready to jump.  I said yes, and we scooted awkwardly down the length of the otherwise empty bench seat until I was sitting on the edge of the open doorway.  Before I could even formulate a thought, my instructor said, “GO,” and he launched us out of the plane and into free fall.

When you first jump out, you flip onto your back (like scuba divers do) and look up toward the plane, which disappears from view surprisingly quickly.  You stay on your back for a short time, and then flip over and assume the arms-and-feet-raised position you’ve been taught in the class.  Meanwhile, the wind is pummeling you, and the ground is rushing up at great speed.  If the instructor’s parachute doesn’t open, he or she will go ahead and deploy the one on your back, which is the backup, and they won’t tell you they’re doing that, since you would almost certainly freak out up there and make the situation much worse.  You know how you are.

Falling through the sky at a hundred and twenty miles an hour is not something the human body was ever designed to do, and the feeling is like no other.  Every muscle in your body tenses, and you can feel a bit nauseous, but you also feel more alive than you ever have before.  It takes about one minute to plummet from thirteen thousand feet down to two thousand, when the rip cord is pulled and the parachute presumably opens.  One minute is a really long time to fall, and your body doesn’t really get used to it, at least if it’s your first jump.  I imagine it gets easier once you’ve done it two or three times, but the first time is. . .well, it seems so ridiculously cliché to say a ‘rush’, but that’s really what it is.  You’re completely outside of human experience, and you’d better believe that your body knows it.

Near the end of my free fall, I had a bit of difficulty with my goggles, since I wore them over my glasses, and nobody told me I shouldn’t do that.  [NOTE:  If you wear glasses, take them off and just wear the goggles by themselves.  Trust me.]  My instructor could see that I was having difficulty, so he pulled the ripcord on his parachute and reined us in, while I could see the rest of the group far below me as their parachutes deployed a few seconds later.  I felt a huge but not entirely uncomfortable jolt as we quickly slowed to the normal drop speed, and our bodies swayed forwards and back, a bit sickeningly (if I’m honest), as we moved into an upright sitting position, and after we settled down I was able to adjust my goggles.  Since there had been a small air gap along the bottom edge, my right eye got scratched pretty badly, and I had to struggle to keep it open.  I didn’t want to miss any of the experience.  My instructor showed me how to turn, by having me reach up and grab the ropes on either side of us.  I pulled one, and we lunged to one side.  I pulled the other, and we lunged to the other side.  Then it was all gentle curves and beautiful views, as we flew over the lovely Oregon countryside and headed back to the tiny airport.  The instructor and I had done a quick practice landing in the air, and I had watched enough other people land that it totally made sense.  I kept my legs stretched straight out in front of us, and the instructor  landed us on his legs and ran us out.  Easy breezy.  It all went off without incident, and we were safely back on terra firma.

Our group, uh, regrouped and compared our experiences.  We were all exhilerated.  SingerDanielle was pretty nauseous.  I was the worst for wear with the scratched eye, and I felt a bit nauseous an hour or so later, back at home.  Skydiving is pretty hard on your body, but it’s an incredible experience, and I might actually do it again, especially now that I know what to expect.

FrenchSinger has also been skydiving once, and we were discussing it and wondering how often people get sick in the air.  It seems like the kind of thing that would happen pretty often.  We cracked up as we imagined some unsuspecting guy working in his garden or whatever, when suddenly, out of the clear blue sky—BOOSH. . .he’s drenched from above by projectile vomit.

I would recommend that you try skydiving, at least once in your life.  It’s not for the faint of heart, as I like to say (usually when describing movies), but it’s an absolutely unforgettable experience.  The free fall is scary, but when you’re floating gently in the air after that, it’s just sublime.  The instructors are totally professional, too, and despite what the litigious waivers may say, it seems safe enough.  I never felt unsafe, let’s put it that way.  I felt like I was in good hands, and that we were totally in control.

Since then, I’ve heard a couple of crazy stories of mishaps, but those are definitely the exception rather than the rule.  One person told us about a long-time instructor who decided to randomly go on a solo jump.  He was completely in the moment, and feeling great.  The only problem was that in his excitement, he’d forgotten to strap on his parachute, and no one noticed until he’d jumped out.  He’d jumped so many times before that it never occurred to anyone that he wouldn’t be prepared.  Whoops.

My friend’s dad jumped once, back in the days before instructors were required to go down with you on your first time.  He hit his head on the foot bar on the side of the plane and knocked himself out.  He came to, luckily, during free fall, and once he realized where he was and what was happening, he was able to pull the ripcord and parachute normally.  But holy crap; what a story.

These days, there are lots of checks and double-checks that instructors do, and they don’t leave anything to chance.  Well, except for pure excitement, I suppose, like the guy who forgot his own chute.  But, I mean, come on.  If I can do it, you can certainly do it.  It’s awesome, and crazy, and unlike any other experience.  I don’t think I’ll ever bungee-jump off a bridge, though.  That’s where I draw the line.

If you’ve jumped too, what was your experience like?

Last night, my friend and I went to see a movie called Holy Motors.  We were intrigued by the preview, and thought it looked interesting and very stylish, but we had no way of knowing what a wild ride we were in for.  Here’s the trailer.

This is not a review.  This is a plea for you to watch the movie so that we can discuss it.  It’s not for the faint of heart.  It’s dark, and shocking, and lovely, and melancholy, and mysterious, and joyous, and occasionally hysterical, and it’s a myriad of surprises from beginning to end.  I don’t even want to say anything about the story, because I want you to have the same experience I (and everyone else in the theater) did.  I feel like I’ve already said too much.  Worth mentioning is the fact that I almost titled this entry, “Holy crap!  Holy Motors!”

More shocking than the movie, however, was what happened after.  It happened at the Living Room here in downtown Portland, at the early showing.  The film had just finished, but instead of getting up to leave, everyone stayed in their seats, talking quietly.  The guy sitting next to my friend and me said that he’d gotten up to take a five-minute bathroom break, and asked what he’d missed.  Another guy chimed in that he’d missed a bit on a bathroom break as well.  We did our best to remember, and we told him.  Then other people started to chime in and ask about what the group thought a scene meant, or how various elements tied together (or didn’t).  Before long, everyone was jumping into spontaneous conversation about the film, and comparing it to other films, and suddenly it became Movie Club.  The staff had to tell us first politely, and then a bit more pointedly, that they did have a lobby, and we were welcome to go out there, but that they had to clean the theater, and we had to vacate.  The group congregated in the hallway and continued the discussion for another fifteen minutes.  Everyone who was in that little theater stayed and participated in the discussion.  I’ve been going to movies for decades now, and that has never happened before.  It was fantastic, and it made me wonder why it doesn’t happen more often.

I want so badly to post pictures and scenes from the movie on here, but I’m not going to.  You can seek them out if you want, but I would encourage you not to, and to see it with no prior knowledge of the story.  Also, I recommend that you see it on the biggest screen available to you.  I imagine that it’s still playing in some arthouse theaters, but if it’s not, it’s out on DVD.

What are you waiting for?  Go!  See this film!

“Long before we’ve had the chance to become familiar with our loved one, we may be filled with the curious sense that we know them already.  It seems as though we’ve met them before, in a previous life perhaps, or in our dreams.  In Plato’s Symposium, Aristophanes explains this feeling of familiarity with the claim that the loved one was our long-lost “other half” whose body we had originally been stuck to.  In the beginning, all human beings were hermaphrodites with double backs and flanks, four arms and four legs, and two faces turned in opposite directions on the same head.  These hermaphrodites were so powerful and their pride so overweening that Zeus was forced to cut them in two, into a male and a female half—and from that day, each man and each woman has yearned to rejoin the half from which he or she has been severed.”

from “On Love,” by Alain de Botton

When you’re visiting New York City and your friend sends you a text message that says, “Meet me at 23rd Street and 8th Avenue right now, if you’re game—I’ll show you the coolest place in the city,” the answer should always be a resounding yes.  I texted back, “I’m in!” and walked the few blocks to the nearest subway station and headed down to the Chelsea neighborhood to meet her.

I wasn’t at all prepared for what she showed me.  It was a former elevated railroad called the Highline.  Built in the 1930′s, it had long since outlived its usefulness as trucks replaced trains as the prevalent form of freight transportation.  As recently as a few short years ago, it was still a dilapidated eyesore that many people hoped would be demolished, but it was also a pipe dream for people who wanted to see it repaired and possibly used as a public space of some sort.  Luckily, the latter idea won, and today the Highline is an elevated park that is now regarded as many peoples’ favorite place in all of New York City.

It’s designed with sustainable, native plants, and birds even have nests in the bushes and trees that line the edges of the busy pathway.  Rents in buildings near the park have increased significantly.  It’s a very romantic place, and there are lots of couples walking hand in hand and admiring the views of the city while remaining safely above the whirling traffic below.   My friend, who has lived in NYC for two or three years now, was made aware of the park when she went on a first date with a guy who took her there.  It was about this point that she had to bid me adieu, since she had an appointment to keep, but she told me where to go to see the best stretches of the park.  It’s much more than just a walkway, and there are a number of wide areas to sit, or to watch people, or to look at the city, or even to busk on the cello.

This guy was playing Bach’s sixth Cello Suite, which is extraordinarily difficult.  The Cello Suites get progressively more advanced as they go along, so the First (which is one of the most famous in all of classical music) is in the repertoire of almost every cellist, but the mark of a true professional is their ability to play the Suites in their entirety.  This guy was definitely at the professional level, since not only was he playing the sixth Suite, he was playing it flawlessly.  I had wandered in near the beginning of it, and sat across from him as unobtrusively as possible while I watched the remainder of his performance.  When he finished playing for his audience of one, I said, “Bravo,” and walked over to patronize the arts by leaving a couple of bills in his cello case.  He began to play another piece that I didn’t recognize, and I decided to continue walking and exploring some more.

A bit further along, I saw a small group of people doing what appeared to be acting.  I love the Theatah, as those of you who have spent any kind of time on this blog already know, and I used to be a member (and eventually the leader) of a play-reading group, so I sauntered over to give them a listen.  They were rehearsing Shakespeare—his style is unmistakable—and while I love his works, there are only a few that I’m familiar enough with to recognize by tuning in at a random moment.  Luckily, this happened to be one of them, and I believe they were rehearsing a scene from the Scottish Play.

I stayed long enough to figure out which play they were performing, then clicked this picture and continued on my way, since even though they were rehearsing in a public place, it didn’t seem like they wanted to be closely watched.  Plus, I wanted to explore more of the walkway and it was beginning to get dark outside.  I came to a section that was closed off and in the process of being pressure-cleaned, possibly so that a movie scene could be filmed there.

From there I took the detour path, which led to a cute little restaurant area.  I would have loved to stop and enjoy some food and wine—I’ll have to save that for my next trip!—but I was on a mission to get off the platform and explore more of the Chelsea neighborhood.  Suddenly, I heard the sound of a harmonica, followed by a horrific metallic crash.  I headed over to investigate.

It was indeed a harmonica player, and he looked as if he was looking for a specific place to sit.  He was blowing on the harmonica and throwing metal chairs around.  Hoo-ga hoo-ga hoo-ga hoo-ga CRASH—hoo-ga hoo-ga hoo-ga hoo-ga CRASH.  The guy sitting there next to him, in the foreground of the picture, never so much as batted an eye.

I took a whole bunch more pictures after that, but the vast majority of them were too blurry to be worth sharing.  Here’s ONE good one of a nearby building. . .

. . .and I even took a picture on the way down, but it’s extremely blurry.  I’m only sharing it because I couldn’t find another picture of the yellowish-green elevator doors, and I wanted them to be represented too, so here you go.

This is only the second installment of the myriad of pictures and stories to come from my time in New York and Massachusetts.  To be continued. . .

I don’t quite know where to start.

There have been a number of things happening recently, the biggest of which was a musical trip to New England, which included my first trip to New York City, which seems to have changed something in me.  If you’ve never been there before (or even if you have—ha ha), the scale of everything is enormous.  There are people everywhere, from everywhere.  Every place you go is crowded.  You can stand on one street corner for just a few short minutes and you may very well hear people speaking ten or fifteen different languages within that time.  Most impressive of all, however, is the scale of the architecture and infrastructure.  It’s staggeringly huge.  You can start in one part of the city, get on a subway train and ride for an hour, and when you get back up to street level, you find that the buildings are still crammed together as far as the eye can see.  Parts of San Francisco are built up densely like that, but not nearly as tall, and only in small parts of town.  New York goes on and on for miles in all directions.  Somehow it manages not to be overwhelming, though, and I actually found myself energized by the bustle.  Every street seemed to be associated with a song title, or a movie scene.  Here’s a picture from the beautiful West Village.

My goal for NYC was to see as many of the various neighborhoods as I could.  Obviously we spent the majority of our time in Brooklyn, but I had a few days to get out and explore, either on my own or with the help of one of my long-time blogging friends.  A lifelong Brooklynite, she was very familiar with the city, and she was a fantastic tour guide and host.

At some point, I’m going to want to recount the stories and pictures from the rest of the trip, but my head is still buzzing from it all and trying to make sense of everything I saw, and all of the interesting and lovely people I met, so for now you’ll have to settle for some pictures.  You can click on them to make them higher resolution.

I happened to be underneath the Brooklyn Bridge at the same time as this yacht (I think it’s a yacht; I have to confess that I don’t know much about boats, but I DO know that it’s one of the racing ones) was passing by, and another photographer and I were taking full advantage of the situation.  I love this picture, and it’s probably my favorite one from the entire trip.

From there, I walked across the bridge to lower Manhattan, all around the Financial District and to the site of Ground Zero and the new World Trade Center.  Here’s one of the new towers, in a late stage of construction.  I love pictures like this, because once the thing is built, you never get to see it ‘in progress’ ever again.  I feel lucky to have been there to see it and take this picture before it was finished.

This was a sticker I saw on a traffic signal pole in Greenwich Village near the Village Vanguard.  It may be blurry, but the message is clear.  I spent the whole trip with my camera—and indeed my entire brain—in ‘record’ mode.

After going full speed ahead for so long—and I haven’t even started writing about the Louisiana or Bay Area trips yet—I’ve found it a bit difficult to transition back into the ‘normal’ pace of life, whatever that is.  You could call this feeling the Post-Travel Blues.  Joseph Campbell might call these feelings ‘peak experiences’, which is to say that when people are operating at their highest levels of consciousness, the things they experience gain a certain amount of gravitas and significance, and settling into everyday life after times like those can be difficult.  I daresay that Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs would support this theory.

I think—and this is me thinking—that when you’re in the upper levels of Self-Actualization and Esteem, it’s hard to be excited about everyday things like homeostasis and excrement.  When you’re traveling, you’re pulled out of the lower realities and pitched into the higher ones, which is what makes travel so exciting.

Incidentally, I just knew that I’d have to mention excrement at some point.  I had to drag this conversation down to my level, didn’t I?  Abraham Maslow, Joseph Campbell, and excrement.  I really should have named this blog High and Low.

Anyway.

There’s more to come on the blogging front, and while I was coming back from the beach this weekend, I thought of a few stories from back in the day that I think will be worth your while, so stay tuned.  Don’t touch that dial or whatever.  We’ll be right back after this important commercial message, courtesy of someone I photographed in Central Park.