Passing Through The Res

JWise Photo of the Day, Travels

Sunset north of Kayenta, Arizona on the Navajo Reservation

It’s getting late in the day by the time we are passing through the Navajo Reservation. Tuba City is the first town that, in a few moments, is a distant memory seen in the rearview mirror. The wide-open dusty desert turns those magenta and golden hues that are commonplace up here. Shadows of the mountains and dim outlines of the landscape will soon blur against the darkening sky, but for now, we are being treated to a sunset that is as monumental as the land around us.

Sunset at Monument Valley on the Navajo Reservation in northern Arizona

Change is dramatic in the few minutes before the sun bids adieu and retires for another night. The colors of the sky rapidly morph from golden warmth to hot pink and burning orange, casting the towers of Monument Valley into stark relief before they shrink into the darkness below the horizon. The stars await their emergence to remind the people of their tiny place in this vast universe.

The local band knocking out some tunes for the visitors of Mexican Hat Lodge and the Home of the Swinging Steak in Mexican Hat, Utah

The ritual of nature over her sacred lands soon leaves our attention for the more tenebrous carnal pleasures taken from the lubricous merriment brought on by music, drink, and stuffing of the gullet at the Mexican Hat Lodge in the aptly named Valley of the Gods here in Mexican Hat, Utah. Couples take to the dance floor, beers are sallied forth for the next round, and another steak is thrown on the grill as visitors continue to wander into this tiny enclave next to the San Juan River.

A bottle of Polygamy Porter beer with the swinging grill from the Mexican Hat Lodge in the background

Blending in with the vibe, Caroline opts for a bottle of Polygamy Porter beer while I cast my vote for the biggest steak on the menu.

Grill duties at the Home of the Swinging Steak - Mexican Hat Lodge in Utah

My hunk of flesh will sway on the swinging grill over a roaring mesquite fire for the next 20 minutes. Mexican Hat Lodge is the world-famous home of the “Swinging Steak” – probably one of the best-kept secrets of the travel world. The band plays on, more folks find their way to the dance floor and others are yet to show up as the festivities will continue into the middle of the early summer night.

Teepee room at the Mexican Hat Lodge in Mexican Hat, Utah

For us, the Dionysian spirit is quickly put to sleep in the lone teepee room of the lodge, happy and contented after the feast for eyes, ears, taste, and spirit.

The Last Supper

JWise Food, Photo of the Day

Burmese bean soup with somasa, a fried crunchy veggie thing and condiments from Little Rangoon restaurant in Scottsdale, Arizona

Tonight was the last time Caroline and I will eat dinner at our favorite restaurant – Little Rangoon. In two days Elizabeth and Alfred are closing up shop after two and a half years trying to make a go of bringing just a handful of people from Arizona around to trying this wonderful food. Their efforts were not wasted on us, we have eaten everything on the menu and many a dish that wasn’t available to the casual diner. From the pig’s ear salad to jack fruit curry, durian, and the super spicy onion salad, Elizabeth took great care of us the past ten months or so that we have been the “most” regular customers they have had. I can make this claim as all were certain that no one ate there more than us, between lunch and dinner it wasn’t beyond Caroline and me to eat five or six meals a week here.

Tonight’s menu was one of those special off-menu treats made by Elizabeth with me helping. Burmese bean soup with garbanzo beans served with chopped samosa, ba-yar gyaw (pronounced BeeYar Joe), and condiments, including tamarind juice, green chilies in fish sauce, roasted chili sauce, lemon juice, shredded cabbage, sliced onion, cilantro, and roasted chili flakes. We will miss this place, all of Arizona should mourn this great loss.

Burmese Refugees

JWise Photo of the Day

Yin Min and Mai Yu, two Burmese refugees who were working at Arizona's only Burmese restaurant

The first half of this year has seen Caroline and I eating frequently, very frequently at Little Rangoon, a Burmese restaurant in Scottsdale, Arizona. During this time it has not been uncommon for me to find myself in the kitchen looking over the shoulder of the cooks trying to learn a thing or two about how they made my meals and what went into them. For the past two weeks, I’ve been to the restaurant every day except Mondays when they are closed. The owner Elizabeth allowed me to come in and write down the recipes. During these visits, I had the chance to learn just a little about the lives of refugees. These two Burmese refugees who worked in the kitchen of Little Rangoon are Yin Min and Mai Yu. The two, while not related, are like sisters now. Escaping absolute poverty from a hostile regime in what is today known as Myanmar, the two lived in a refugee camp in Thailand. Between the United Nations and the U.S. government, these young women were able to escape the refugee camp and come to America. First stop, Phoenix, Arizona.

Neither speaks much English and there is almost no contact with Americans. Some of the neighbors at the apartments they were moved to are other Burmese refugees which gives them a small community they can feel a part of. Their children are learning English but that isn’t helping the parents. In over two years in Phoenix, neither of them have ever left the city, somehow I don’t think they really know-how. Government assistance helps most of the refugees eke out a meager and isolated life. While there are those who would demand they learn our language and integrate themselves with our American way of life, I don’t believe most of us can comprehend what it may have felt like for young women to grow up more or less in a jungle, afraid of a raping and marauding dictatorial military dictatorship where food, any kind of food is a luxury. And then you are transported free of charge on your first-ever flight to a desert city with grocery stores stacked full with 100s of thousands of neon-colored packages with more cars seen in an hour than you may have seen in a month driven by giants who are loud, rotund, and in a hurry. How would this extreme culture shock affect the average human? Well, imagine that you were abducted from your home, stripped of your clothes, given furs and leather clothes before being dropped off in a village of Inuits in the Arctic Circle. Your next meal will be a raw seal, you don’t speak the language, and it’s cold real cold. How quickly would you feel at home?

Our present hostility to cultural differences, our non-participation with things foreign, our disdain for Muslims, Hispanics, and those who don’t speak in our tongue are an embarrassment. When our ancestors came to America they didn’t bother to learn Athabaskan or Hopi, nope, we created Indian schools and kidnapped children off of the reservations that we were imprisoning their parents on and forced them to learn English. Today our compassion has changed little. Every Vietnamese, Burmese, Laotian, Afghani, Guyanese, Nigerian, Mexican, and other people of various ethnic backgrounds who are adding to our population that Caroline and I speak with have loved being asked about their homes, their culture, their food, and their family. It is my good fortune that I enjoy taking the time to introduce myself to these folks who maybe need us to approach them with a kind act of breaking the ice as they try to find their footing in our alien culture.

CS5 Has Arrived

JWise Photo of the Day

Photo of my monitor while installing Adobe CS5 Production Premium

Like the proverbial kid in the candy store or like the child squirming in anticipation on Christmas eve awaiting Santa’s arrival – my happy emotions are spilling over into ecstatic giddiness following the arrival of the FedEx sleigh which delivered my brand spanking new upgrade of Adobe’s CS5 Production Premium. CS5 is Creative Suite version 5 and the production premium version has been bundled with multi-media artists in mind.

Over the previous 20 years I have puttered about in Photoshop and up until late 1994, I was also working with Adobe Premiere video editing software. With my recent acquisition of the Canon Rebel T2i that shoots Hi-Def 1080p video, I found a renewed interest in expressing myself once again with moving pictures. Hence I needed an upgrade to my dated software.

Last week, armed with a 15% off coupon from the Arizona Cold Fusion Users Group, of which my wife Caroline is a member, I took the plunge and upgraded my license of Premiere Pro to this new suite of image and video tools. Installing the 16GB behemoth had me on pins and needles and,  when the install status read 100% complete, beaming at my monitor with a gleeful smile waiting for nirvana. But before it would install even 1%, I had to enter the requisite serial numbers and sign in with Adobe Live. Signing in I am presented with another gift, Adobe Story beta. The story is a browser-based and desktop-based script writing an application that looks awesome.

I can’t help but think back to my first computer, the VIC 20 with software on cartridges and printed in the back of magazines. When I upgraded to the Commodore 64 in 1982 with a cassette tape drive, I was duly thrilled to be one of the first people in Los Angeles to own this technological marvel. With a 1Mhz CPU made by Motorola, an impressive 64KB of memory, and a screen resolution of 320×200 pixels featuring 16 colors, who could have imagined where we would be today?

Today my software arrived on 4 DVDs and was installed on a PC that runs a CPU with two cores running not at one million Hertz, but at two billion eight-hundred million Hertz. Memory shot up from those sixty-four thousand bytes to my present eight billion bytes. Likewise, the display has moved beyond 320×200 pixels showing 16 colors to one displaying 1920×1200 pixels capable of showing off 16 million colors.

Atop all of this, we have moved away from 8-bit operating systems to 64-bit systems and the tools this bandwidth opens up should never be taken for granted. The stories I craft on my word processor are easily published on my blog to be shared with the world. Google Translate can offer them up in 58 different languages. Through YouTube, I can broadcast video that was previously the domain of television broadcasters but today I have a capability beyond what was state-of-the-art just 15 years ago – my video can be seen instantaneously and on-demand, globally. With a free application, I can publish and self distribute a novel, a cookbook, a coffee table photo album or I can choose to sell my work in ebook form from a number of websites without ever requiring a publisher or acceptance by a corporate bookseller. The same applies to magazines now, thanks to HP’s new print-on-demand service called Mag Cloud. A programmer no longer waits for a publisher to pick up his or her work, or for a magazine to publish the code to be entered by hand by the end-user, it is packed up and uploaded to the App Store where the buyer grabs it for a few dollars and downloads wirelessly from their phone or via WiFi.

The opportunity for us humans to express ourselves and share our worlds with one another is just as alive and well today as it was back in the heyday of 1999 when the internet gold rush was on. The difference is that many people are not seeing this incredible new opportunity where we have moved away from postage stamp video and dial-up to broadband, multi-media, high definition, self-contained production studio where the finished product will be indistinguishable from professional studios. There is no more dividing line between consumer and creator besides the limitations of those who would rather watch the parade go by instead of being a part of the parade. I’m still working on my multi-dimensional holographic 5.1 surround immersive augmentation of reality – stay tuned.

A Visit To The Farm Stand

JWise Photo of the Day

A bouquet of flowers from Tonopah Rob's Vegetable Farm

Sure the peppers, potatoes, onions, and garlic all look great. And yes, they are reminders that for local Arizona desert farms, summer is here. But it was the flowers on display that demanded my attention. After July 1st the flowers will be few and far between out at Tonopah Rob’s Vegetable Farm, a matter of fact, the farm will fall into a dormant state of brown until those first green shoots reappear come late September. During the winter months, while lettuce, spinach, beets, and carrots riddle the plots with salady wonderfulness, there is nary a flower to be found. Come around May and the explosion of color is hard to miss. With love-lies-bleeding, amaranth, carrot flower, sunflower, millet, cockscomb, freesia, and a host of vegetables that have bolted to seed, the local bee population is abuzz in delight as were my eyes this Sunday at Tonopah Rob’s Farm Stand.

Spiritual Fair

JWise Photo of the Day

Some of the participating vendors at the Spiritual Fair held twice yearly at the Scottsdale Promenade in Arizona

Today I visited a Spiritual Fair held twice yearly at the Scottsdale Promenade hosted by A Peace Of The Universe. Judith has been organizing this event for more than 14 years now and has assembled a wide range of spiritualists, healers, and authors to compliment the festivities. As I made the rounds I met Patty Sanchez of Quintessential Inspirations and Brenda Pulice of Be Your Greatness who were sharing a booth offering affirmations to adorn the mirrors of your home, inspiring you to “See your Greatness”. Patty also displayed jewelry that likewise inspires affirmative thinking and being. Next up was Carol Costa, coauthor of a book titled Happiness Awaits You! Author Jade Lauryne was offering her book “Life By Design” but following the fair I have not been able to find her book online, you might check Judith’s shop A Peace Of The Universe – almost forgot to tell you about that. As for the toe reader, the palm readers, the holistic health practitioners, a portrait artist, tarot readers, and channelers who were all pretty busy, the only other folks I spend some time talking with were husband and wife authors Jerry and Donna Govan. This couple wrote a book titled, Take The E Out Of Ego & Go! They were kind enough to pass on a copy of their book to me for free, which I am yet to crack open. The three of us had a nice conversation about our potential and the need to dissolve our negative baggage.

Agate from FascinationMinerals dot com

This is not a usual type of event that I might normally attend, but my friend Alfred Chan, co-owner of my favorite Burmese restaurant in Arizona called Little Rangoon had asked if I would help set up and watch his booth at the fair. Earlier this year Alfred took a big-time liking to gems and minerals. By now the owner of an ever-growing collection of some truly beautiful pieces, he thought it might be a good idea to put some on sale and so we put on display a couple hundred of his favorites. He didn’t bring the giant celestine – my personal fave, but he did bring a bunch of rose quartz, smokey quartz, agates, amethysts, and a gorgeous ocean jasper that was quickly sold. Alfred is developing a new website called Fascinating Minerals where he plans to sell pieces from his collection in the near future.