The Taj Mahal

Posted on March 18, 2025 by admin

Back in the planning stages for our recent trip, which was last fall, Yuriko wasn’t entirely persuaded that we should visit India. Not at least for any reason I might think it was a good one: because we would already be on that side of the world (more or less) by visiting Japan; because we’d never gotten around to India, even in ’94; or because as a modern state built on a long series of storied civilizations, it would surely would be an interesting place to visit.

No matter, I had an ace in the hole. “Of course, we’ll be able to see the Taj Mahal,” I said. That did it.

So, on February 22, we did.

From a number of vantages.

I sent the first image to a number of friends via email, since I didn’t expect to find many postcards in India, or if I did, I wouldn’t want to deal with a post office to mail them, especially considering that delivery would be uncertain anyway. The email message:

A physical postcard from India is unlikely, but here’s an image you aren’t likely to see in a card or Instagram. You are likely so see it, however, if you stand in front of the structure, as we did… Entirely worth the effort to get here. I didn’t mind the crowds that much — they are a happy crowd, after all, and you’re one of them.

Even in a crowd, assuming they aren’t jostling you, you can pause, stare and consider where you are. The Taj Mahal. A place only ever seen in pictures before, considered one of the top works of human beings. In person, your eyes are apt to agree.

The story of the Taj Mahal is too well known to relate here, as are descriptions of its beauty and architectural transcendence. But I will say this: What would the Indian tourism industry do if the Mughals hadn’t been so keen to build monumental structures? The Taj Mahal is just the crown jewel of a large collection that has survived to our time.

One can visit the terrace.

For closeups of the intricate marble work.

It is believed that an eventual total of 20,000+ masons, stone-cutters, inlayers, carvers, painters, calligraphers, dome builders and other artisans from throughout the realm, and probably beyond, worked more than two decades on the mausoleum and outbuildings.

Inlay, not painting. Twenty-eight kinds of stones, I’ve read.

Imagine the graceful lines of the Taj Mahal main dome without the companion minarets. That would be like Saturn without its rings.

You can also go inside the chamber where ornate slabs sit above the internment sites of the empress Mumtaz Mahal, and, almost as an afterthought, the emperor Shah Jahan, who ordered the Taj Mahal built in the 17th century. We joined the line.

The mausoleum faces away from the river, but it is back there. The view from the mausoleum of the wide Yamuna River, tributary of the Ganges.

A structure that doesn’t get enough love. The main gate of the grounds, through which you pass to see the mausoleum. It is outshone by the mausoleum, but wow.

Not everyone loves the Taj, however.

The Kamakura Daibutsu

Posted on March 17, 2025 by admin

Mere hours after I returned home on Friday evening, an intense burst of wind ’round midnight toppled the Wisconsin Buddha in my back yard, among other things, such as most of our back yard fence. Guess it’s better that I’m here to deal with the debris in the yard, calling our insurance company, etc.

Setting the Wisconsin Buddha upright was an easy part of cleaning up the back yard. Our little blue-green statue may serve as a reminder of the impermanence of things, but it hasn’t been completely destroyed by time. Yet.

You can also say the same for the much larger, much better known Kamakura Daibutsu, or the Big Buddha of Kamakura, a city on the edge of metro Tokyo-Yokohama. We visited on a cool and sunny, pleasant day in mid-February. It sure looks permanent, but you could say that’s illusion.

Something else to consider when you face a bronze of this heft: Does the size of a Buddha, or more exactly Buddharūpa (depictions of Buddha), matter when it comes to conveying Buddhist ideas?

I can’t call myself expert enough to answer that, but somehow I suspect not. When it comes to impermanence, my small Buddha would seem to have just as much to teach. Just not as many students.

The Big Buddha at Kamakura dates from a period in Japanese history known as the Kamakura period, which is all of our 13th century and more, and a time that, for a while anyway, this seaside town was the hub of government for the Japanese islands: an early shogunate, emerging from the winning side of a bloody war between clans, and in fact the moment in history when the samurai caste consolidated its power. How cool is that? We’re talking about a capital founded by samurai, for samurai.

Buddhist sects flowered under the new order, I think not coincidentally, and with enough vim to leave behind temples and memorials of all sorts in the region – such as the massive bronze Daibutsu. These days, it attracts tourists in numbers probably undreamed of by earlier centuries, when trickles of pilgrims or scholars or mystics came.

The seated Buddha, 43 feet or so to the top of his head, weighs about as much as seven and a half Mack trucks with trailers. It is an Amida Buddha that began as a large long-gone wooden statue, a structure much more impermanent than the bronze that came later (about AD 1252), its existence due to a vigorous new branch of Pure Land Buddhism in Japan in Kamakura times. Down the centuries since then, various halls built around the giant have burned down and been rebuilt (but ultimately not) and the statue itself has been damaged in earthquakes and floods and repaired and restored and listed as a special site, including part of a nomination as a World Heritage Site.

Nice peripheral details.

For ¥50 extra, about 50 cents, you can go inside. For a moment, I was giddy as a schoolboy. I get to go inside a giant, ancient Japanese statue?

The status shows its age – how susceptible it is to the passage of time – its impermanence – more in there.

Looking into the head of the Kamakura Daibutsu.

Outside again. How is it that the metal giant has such graceful lines?

It’s popular.

Having your photo made at a tourist site: near universal, isn’t it? It’s regarded as tinged with silliness, this custom. Some people think that, anyway.

No. Revel in it.

Around the World ’25

Posted on March 16, 2025 by admin

At times like this, in the funk that comes after a long trip, I ask myself, did I actually do that? An odd question, maybe, but long travels have that odd effect. Somehow such a trip seems less than real. Also more than real. Those are essential features of the intoxication of the road, and hangovers follow intoxication.

Ponder this: Over roughly the last five weeks, starting on February 8, in a series of eight airplane flights, a small number of intercity train trips on either side of the Eurasian land mass (including one of the fastest trains in existence), a large number of subway, streetcar and even monorail rides, a few taxi rides, other car rides provided by friends and relatives and a hired driver, a bicycle rickshaw ride — and you haven’t lived and almost died (or at least felt that way) till you’ve taken such a conveyance in Delhi — climbing a lot of stairs and using a lot of escalators and elevators, and taking more than a few long walks, and many short walks, on sidewalks and cobblestone streets and railway station platforms, I went around the world in a westward direction, from metro Chicago to metro Chicago, by way of Japan, India, the United Arab Emirates, Germany and the Czech Republic.

All that effort for what? To see the world, of course. That and skip out of much of winter in northern Illinois.

How did I have the energy for this, here at the gates of old age? How are the logistics possible?

But it really isn’t that hard. This is the 21st century, and travel is mostly by machine, and part of a mass industry, so even old men firmly from the middle class can go. Retired and semiretired old men, who find themselves with more free time than in previous decades. Moreover, the logistics were the least of it: all you need in our time is a computer to set things up.

I’m convinced that the hard part, for many people, would be finding the will to go. Luckily I have a practically bottomless supply. My always-eager-to-go attitude toward seeing point A and then points B, C and so forth also meant I was completely persuaded that buzzing around the world was a good idea. Tired as I am now — and boy am I tired — I haven’t changed my mind, though I need to rest up a bit at the moment.

Japan: my first visit in 25+ years.

It felt familiar — I did live there for four years — but the passage of time also infused the place with a feeling of the unfamiliar as well, a strange combo sensation indeed.

India: A major lacuna in my travels, now just a little less so.

A friend who goes to India sometimes on business told me last fall, “India makes me tired.” I might not have been on business, but I ended up feeling the same way.

And yet — a phantasmagoria unlike anything I’ve seen, especially the teeming city streets. Teem was never more an apt verb, in my experience. Yuriko came as far as India with me, after we visited Japan and her family and friends there. Then she headed back eastward to Illinois.

I went on alone from India to the UAE.

In an even less familiar part of the world, a city of towers somehow rises on the edge of the Arabian desert. Just that is astonishing in its own way, but there is plenty else.

Then to Germany: An old friend I hadn’t seen in a long time, since about five golden weeks in my youth. A long, long time ago: the last time I was there, there were two Germanies and two Berlins and a Wall and the Stassi and Trabbis and a firm living memory of the cataclysm only 40 years earlier.

Berlin was the focus this time, where I joined my brother Jay for the visit. We’d been kicking around the idea of traveling there together for a while, and ultimately didn’t want to wait till either of us got any older. He had not made it to Berlin in ’72.

A major side trip from Berlin was to Prague. Not quite as old a friend, but old enough.

Yuriko and I visited in ’94, but it was new territory for Jay, another slice of the former Astro-Hungarian Empire to go with his early ’70s visit to Vienna.

Actually, when you visit a place you haven’t seen in 40 or 30 years, it’s like you’ve never been there. I had that sensation in both Berlin and Prague. The old memories are packed away, only loosely connected to their setting any more, which has changed partly beyond recognition anyway.

Now I’m back. Unlike Phileas Fogg, I didn’t return a day earlier than I thought I did (we have a stronger awareness of the International Date Line). But I did manage to miss the no one-likes-it spring transition to daylight savings time, just another little bonus of the trip.

Winter Hiatus

Posted on February 6, 2025 by admin

Time to take the rest of the winter off. Not from living my life (I hope), but posting. Long enough to be a genuine hiatus: back in mid-March. Of course, it won’t really be spring in northern Illinois even then, but the odds of a blizzard will be low.

Where did that word come from, anyway? Hiatus, that is. Latin: opening, aperture, rupture, gap.

But I always like to go back a little further, if possible.

*ghieh-

Proto-Indo-European root meaning “to yawn, gape, be wide open.”

It forms all or part of: chaos; chasm; dehiscence; gap; gasp; gawp; hiatus; yawn.

Till then, a selection of items, in honor of the chaos and gawp of the next month or so.

I snipped this a few months ago when pricing a room. Maybe things have changed since then, though I doubt it.

Yea, a $90 room! Competitive with a motel. Wait, not so much. Why would I stay at a random peer-to-peer room unless it’s either competitive on price – the original deal with the tech, as I recall – or so interesting or well-located that it’s worth the extra fees? Talk about drifting away from what made the platform attractive, once upon a time.

A view from the Getty Center about 18 months ago. Wonder what I’d see now.

One more mid-century scan: my mother and brothers, before I was born, at the Colosseum in the mid-50s. Must have been a chilly day in Rome.

I stood there myself, maybe at that exact spot, but not till 1983. Call it the Flavian Amphitheater, my henna-haired high school Latin teacher Mrs. Quarles would have said.

Once upon a time, as recently as the early age of photography, it looks like you could wander right in. Those were the days.

Have a Nice Trip, Sucker

Posted on February 5, 2025 by admin

As scam text messages go, this one needs work. Mostly literate, but the tone is off.

I don’t think the tollway authority has a bit of girlishness in it. Or boyishness either, or any particle of human emotion. It functions as a machine: in its own small sphere, a calculating, persistent revenue-generating engine. Then again, I guess it’s fitting that the text message is likely machine produced.

That’s pretty heavy. Something a little lighter.

Floral studies by my father.

Mid-Century Slides

Posted on February 4, 2025 by admin

Some years ago, I scanned some of my father’s slides from the 1950s and posted them, including family pictures in London, one of the lost and lamented Penn Station in NYC, and on the Texas coast in 1958. I didn’t lose interest, exactly, I just never got around to doing any more.

This time around my nephew Robert, who also visited San Antonio when we were there, took some of the slides back to New York for scanning, and later shared the results. I hadn’t seen most of them. Such as at Jay’s fifth birthday party, which would put it in 1957.

You could call it Mid-Century Birthday Party. Next, my brothers playing with balloons.

And the two of them in cowboy getup.

By the time I could remember, cowboys were becoming old hat. Spacemen were the thing, though I never dressed up as one (but I could have). The Woody-Buzz dynamic originated in that changing taste.

Algorithm Goo

Posted on February 3, 2025 by admin

I could pay to ditch all the ads on YouTube, but for now I stop the them after five seconds – and leave pages that don’t offer that option, to teach the system not to do that. Sometimes I also marvel at just how wrong the algorithm seems to be in terms of pitching ads to me.

For some reason, for example, the bots are positive, completely positive (to anthropomorphize), that I’m going to open a restaurant soon. At least, that is my conclusion, since the same two ads for a restaurant supply store keep popping up again and again and again.

Also, some bot somewhere believes (to anthropomorphize again) that I’m in the market for a wife from one Slavic-language nation or another. Must be a guess based on the fact that I’m not young any more. But I’m not a fan of mail-order marriage, whatever the tech. Want a spouse from outside your cultural milieu? Go get her or him yourself, in person.

I haven’t seen an ad for this product, though I did see it on the shelf recently, which is about as random an appearance as many YouTube ads.

Another in the long list of things I will never buy.

P.D.Q. Bach 1980 (Not 1780)

Posted on February 2, 2025 by admin

Below is a poster I picked up among the debris in the closet of my former room in San Antonio, and brought back north last month. I probably originally liberated it from a wall at Vanderbilt, though I would have had the good manners to do so after the concert.

I remember going to see P.D.Q. Bach in Nashville in early 1980, but, maybe true to the spirit of the not-great composer himself, I don’t remember much about the concert. After all, Schickele.com says: “P.D.Q. was virtually unknown during his own lifetime; in fact, the more he wrote, the more unknown he became.”

It’s easy to believe that after 45 years, my memory of the concert is slight. I saw Bob Marley in concert in 1980 as well, and mostly I remember the various kinds of smoke at the venue, and Marley’s frequent cries of “All hail Jah!” and “Free Zimbabwe!”

Back to P.D.Q. Bach. I must have been amused by the concert. Not as much as if I’d actually known anything about classical music, but I’m sure Peter Schickele’s antics were amusing above and beyond mere music spoof. I’m also pretty sure I went by myself, since even the student price (more than $34 in current money) would have been a lot for an act no one else had ever heard of.

But I had. We had at least one record of his around when I was in high school, namely Report from Hoople: P. D. Q. Bach on the Air, which was in personal heavy rotation for a little while, along with all our Tom Lehrer records.

That reminds me: I need to get around to writing that short bio of that other non-famous musician, Irwin Hepplewhite, leader of Irwin Hepplewhite and the Terrifying Papoose Jockeys during the gold and silver age of American pop, since clearly no one else is going to do it.

Back to P.D.Q. Bach again. I didn’t note the passing of Peter Schickele last year, but I’m going to now. Here’s an interview he did only a few years after he came through Nashville. Everybody comes to Nashville, even Irwin Hepplewhite and the Terrifying Papoose Jockeys, who brought the house down – literally, a ceiling fixture fell on them – at the Ryman in ’69, one of the lesser-known events referenced in “American Pie.”

Texas ’25 Leftovers

Posted on January 30, 2025 by admin

Literal Texas leftovers might include barbecue brisket, chili and pecan pie. I don’t happen to have any of those on hand, unfortunately, though I’m glad to report I ate all of those and more while in Texas this month. On the other hand, I have some metaphorical leftovers.

Corpus Christi isn’t a large real estate market, but I did notice some development activity downtown. It has to be apartments with a spot of retail on the first floor.

Being new, they will surely rent for more than the Corpus average of $1,575 a month for the entire range of apartments (Zillow data). Even so, the city isn’t an expensive market by current standards. Austin hipsters, take note. Go make Corpus weird.

I didn’t drink any alcohol in Texas, though I did have a couple of 0.0 brews when Tom and I watched UT go down to ignominious defeat against Ohio State in the Cotton Bowl on January 10 (ridiculously called in full the College Football Playoff Semifinal at the 89th Goodyear Cotton Bowl Classic). We watched it on a big screen at an Austin bear bar – I was one of the few male patrons without a beard, and the patrons were about 90 percent male – and most of the rest of the crowd weren’t participating in dry January. If Texas had won, there might have been a jubilant sports riot on the streets of Austin that night, but it was not to be.

No beer for me, but plenty of beer neon.

Good old Shiner. As Texas a beer as you could ask for. Touring the brewery might be nice someday, but for $30? (I checked.) I don’t know about that, Shiner.

An aged Lone Star manhole cover in San Antonio.

Also in San Antonio, a church I’ve never been in, but have passed by countless times: Sunset Ridge Church of Christ. This time I stopped for a picture, since it’s a handsome church.

Alamo Heights Baptist Church.

Another one I’ve passed countless times, and decided to take a slightly longer look this time.

On the drive between San Antonio and Dallas, we went pretty much straight through on I-35, except for bypassing Austin by way of Texas 130, which costs extra but gives good value in that you don’t have to deal with the molasses that is traffic on I-35 through Austin. North of Austin, and back on the interstate, we stopped at the Bell County Safety Rest Area, which is fairly new, opened in 2008.

The interior.

TexDOT says that “the architectural design was inspired by the many grist mills that once stood along nearby Salado Creek.”

There are exhibits there about the Chisholm Trail — “the greatest migration of livestock in history,” the sign says — and the Jerrell Tornado strike of May 27, 1997, an F5 monster that killed 27 and destroyed much of the town of Jerrell, which isn’t far to the south of the rest stop. True to its designation as a safety rest area, there’s a tornado shelter inside the facility. Its door was propped open with a rock, so I went in for a look. On the wall was illustrated detail about the deadly tornado. May 27, 1997, was a good day to be somewhere else.

The day we visited was a windy, but fortunately not that windy.

Just enough to kick the half-mast flags into motion in the low afternoon sun.

Mission Burial Park, San Antonio

Posted on January 29, 2025 by admin

If a cemetery is going to have “park” in its name, “burial” is a refreshingly non-euphemistic adjective to go with it. Such as at Mission Burial Park, San Antonio, at least at the front entrance.

The place is also called Mission Burial Park South, because it is one of a number of cemeteries under the brand Mission Park, which is specific to San Antonio (where a lot of things are called “Mission”). The brand also includes local funeral homes and funeral chapels. I haven’t seen any of the other places, but South has to be the flagship and, in fact, it is very near both Mission San Jose and Mission San Juan Capistrano.

Replete with the kinds of names you’d expect in South Texas.

I knew a Zuehl in high school.

And maybe a name or two you wouldn’t expect. People get around.

A nice variety of sizes and angles when it comes to stones: one mark of an aesthetic cemetery. Even including flat stones. Just not too many.

That last one, Luby, has to be the restaurant family. Luby’s is owned by other investors these days. Once a sizeable chain, the company also owned other brands (for a while, Cheeseburger in Paradise). I had heard Luby’s was about to close all together a few years ago, but that didn’t happen, and there is still a fair residue of them in Texas. They’re probably not the cafeteria I remember from my youth, one of the mother’s go-to restaurants, but in the casual dining slot in our time.

Another notable South Texas family, the Steves.

They didn’t opt for a mausoleum, but others did.

What’s a mausoleum without stone Sphinx-like creatures guarding it?

An active cemetery still.

A particularly sad one, this.

We hadn’t planned to come to Mission Burial Park. After visiting Hot Wells, I fiddled with Google Maps and decided we needed to visit the nearby Espada Dam, an 18th-century relic of the Spanish presence in the area. Now part of the San Antonio Missions National Historical Park, “the dam diverted water from the San Antonio river and forced it into hand dug earthen ditches that carried the water to farms around the missions,” the NPS says. “Eventually emptying back into the San Antonio River [sic].”

The San Antonio River, which is the size of a largish creek in this part of Bexar County, flows near Hot Wells. Downstream maybe a half mile is the dam. But I made a wrong turn, and we found ourselves at the cemetery, which instantly looked intriguing.

The San Antonio River forms one boundary of the cemetery.

I think this is a back view of the dam from the cemetery.

Didn’t make it for a front view, which apparently can be seen from a small park across the river. Maybe next time. As for the excellent cemetery we got to see, that was another bit of serendipity on the road.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Author Archives: admin