Metz, late January 2026

We travelled by train from Zurich to the French provincial city of Metz on a cold Monday morning in late January forewarned with knowledge that the journey might not be easy. We couldn’t buy a ticket beyond Luxemburg which meant a quick sprint to a ticket office to buy new ones in order to meet the tight connection. An inefficiency that felt out of character for the Swiss, a little absurd the ticket officer agreed with me but resigned to matters outside his control, to make matters worse the train stopped mysteriously outside of Luxemburg for several minutes adding to a growing sense of anxiety. Up until this moment we had been both amused by the precise nature of the Swiss Railways and alarmed at its steep cost; a day trip to Bern for example took about an hour on the train and cost three hundred dollars for two.

We crept out of town, gliding past the shiny corporate offices surrounding Zurich’s station then humming by factories with unfamiliar brand names and the low lying, drab suburban towns, depressing in any society, melancholic places which would make anyone question their existence. Paradoxically the more prosperous the suburbs the more vacuous they feel, the new cars and spotless buildings, the lack of vandalism and trash making it less rather than more human, the dispiriting newness and cleanliness of it all, I had to stop looking, to stop imagining the ponderous lives within those boxes.

Travelling by train in Switzerland is clearly a serious business, not the nostalgic, sometimes charming (and regularly frustrating) experience found in most places in the world. I sensed an air of purpose in the other passengers, laptop cases, business casual attire and, for a fleeting moment, I felt a pang of jealousy until I remembered the code napoleon and all the expert-comptables at the core of their bureaucracy, it was soon forgotten. If we felt the need to speak, we did so in whispers, it all felt very professional and hushed for just a train journey and I was a little embarrassed by the bags we had managed to accumulate and store amateurishly, luggage that had started the journey in Philadelphia as regulation Carry Ons but had now mysteriously grown to include several plastic shopping bags marking out our role as undisciplined tourists.

It’s a strange landscape between Switzerland and South Eastern France. Largely flat and industrialized, on the surface it has little going for it other than its location in the very physical center of Europe sitting on the vulnerable edges of Germany, Luxemburg and France. I guessed that many of these self-important people on the train were civil servants going onto meetings in Luxemburg, Strasburg or Metz, places regularly fought over, changing hands for centuries with alarming fluidity; traded in deals, absorbed by wars now uncomfortably sitting on or close to the borders of their aggressors. Borders that still exist I suspect now more to provide tax domiciles for companies and individuals than to define the region by its various historical cultural identities.

Metz isn’t the obvious place to vacation in late January. It is a handsome rather than beautiful city, it has several crown jewels including the cathedral with its extraordinary stained glass and the winding streets of the old town all of which was surely worth fighting for. One senses humor in its character, or a detached irony, surely necessary for a place that has changed hands between Rome, Germany and France, a little like the detachment that you sometimes find in orphaned children who had travelled between surrogate parents, a coping mechanism that deals with life but without excessive passion or optimism. France apparently recognizes this and to boost its confidence has both expanded its admirably cared for, sometime grand, administrative offices and its culture presence thanks to the outpost of the Pompidou Center build in 2010 by the architect’s Shigeru Ban and Jean de Gastines. We are here partly to see this museum and the happy coincidence of a Maurizio Cattelan show. The main reason however was to stay at a new hotel designed by Philippe Stark called Maison Heler which is a drab nine story block having the surreal addition of a typical nineteenth century house on its roof, I had read about it and wanted to see it myself.

Stark occupies an unusual position in the design world. Finding his stride in the 1980’s was a fruitful time in this sector of the arts, design coming late to post modernism, about two decades on the heels of literature, art, dance and architecture. Its oversimplistic to state that post-modern design had a fixed start date, even lazier to claim that the December 1980 meeting hosted by Ettore Sottsass and Barbara Radie, inviting several of their colleagues to form a collective named Memphis, was its birthplace. Never the less the products when shown at the Milan Fair was a moment of anarchy in a formal and dry world that needed an injection of fun and frivolity, challenging our notions of good taste. Modernism was slick, minimal and functional, technically advanced but cold. A new group of designers which included the members of Memphis as well as Ron Arad, in the UK and Philippe Starck in France began to seen, argued about and sometimes ridiculed by the press. It was thrilling to see the hand of the designers in the work, the weld marks, the improvisation and imperfections, reminded us that great design is not an outcome of flawless manufacturing but something more vital and urgent; by participating in it, supporting it, owning thoughtfully constructed objects you become part of a cultural moment, you choose to have a stake in our civilization. I was one of the handful of fans who would hang around Arad’s Neal Street studio in the early 1980’s on a Sunday evening to watch generic products like lamps and turntables being deconstructed and then remade with poured concrete, absolutely fascinated by what I was seeing.

Some of the derision was justified. Designers from the very beginning have claimed to want their work to be inexpensive, simple and enjoyed by everyone, a mantra heard in the corridors of the Bauhaus, in the cottage industries of William Morris, in the boardroom of Habitat and is one of the avowed aims of Starck who claims the term “democratic” design. It’s laughable, in almost all cases there is (and perhaps should be) a premium for quality design and arguably only a few businesses have occasionally come close to this ideal such as Muji and IKEA. When Arad was making his revolutionary work it was unaffordable, it was much later in life when I could actually own it. A young designer today might look at the products made in the 1980’s as being vulgar and ridiculous, there is a return to the ideals of modernism, or at least rational design frequently seen through the lens of sustainability.

Starck has continued his creative journey working on the fringes of interior decoration, industrial design, applied and contemporary art and even literature. His is a restless spirit valuing creativity above all, constantly crossing the boundaries of design disciplines. The hotel in Metz is apparently based upon a novel he had written about a young imaginative boy whose life was transformed when the monolithic hotel structure rose from the earth and lifted his home onto the roof. Absurdity or poetry? The hotel carries on this fiction, decorated with examples of the young creative Manfred Heler’s inventions, photographs which were in fact taken from the center for scientific research in Paris and models of his imaginary experiments. It’s easy to dismiss this all as nonscience until you witness the quality of the execution and the sincerity behind it. The details are everything, both God and the Devil are in them, they add up in this instance to an unmistakable work of conceptual art, one that can be occupied and which functions effectively, it was reassuring for example to see the restaurant spaces occupied and being busy and enjoyed. If he is guilty of anything it is his overt displays of wit, charm, engineering skill and elegance, distinctly French characteristics, that seems to run through anything he touches, from yacht design, to architecture, motorcycles and the best known household furniture and products he places his stamp on. We had a civilized dinner in his restaurant on our first evening, local food and wine from Lorriane, happy to see other guests who had dressed for the occasion despite the cold winter’s night, living comfortably within this piece of modern surrealism.

After a few days we took the train to Cologne, staying in a former Nunery. The further north we travelled the more disruptive and free the people seemed to become. By the time we reached Bonn it was almost refreshingly unruly on the train and when I heard a deranged homeless man scream in the station, his voice harrowing in the echoing hallways, I almost wanted to shout back in encouragement, such was the relief to be out of the perfection of Switzerland and bourgeoise France. When left the station under the crushing presence of the cathedral it felt like being at home rather than a foreign country, the urbanity of Cologne has echoes of New York and London while keeping its own cultural history alive.

We chose traditional eating houses many of which were linked to breweries when we dined out and I relished the familiar heartiness of the German cuisine. We then drove with Mary’s long term friend Claudia down to the Eifel region where her family keeps a cabin in the woods. Here I spend my time feeding the woodburning stove and watching the two friends (“like a Lord” I was reminded of from time to time) but in truth helpless in the face of such domestic competence. Some of the time reflecting on the nature of long term friendships and regret at those of my own that I had lost touch with or let down. At others times watching the chaos of birds at the feeder at the window, swooping and swerving, moments of consideration for others of their species and the occasional malevolent appearance of a much larger woodpecker aware of its clear superiority.

On the return to Cologne several days later we took a detour to visit an architectural wonder that Claudia wanted to show us. There was a family connection that I didn’t completely follow but the jist was that a highly religious female distant relative wanted a place to pray in the countryside. The commission was won by the Swiss architect Peter Zumther whose creation, known as the Bruder Klaus Feldkepelle, was a collaborative project with local farmers and members of the community. It required 112 trees to be placed together in the shape of a wig-wam, then a brutalist structure was formed by pouring concrete over the it before setting the tree’s alight. This created a burned core which allowed light in from the top and exposed the tree’s charred outline. The structure was remarkable to walk into, rough and still blackened, some claim it still smells of burnt wood, water had formed a pool from the opening and the light rested on the stone work in places forcing you to contemplate periodically the sometimes course beauty of nature. We saw it on a perfect day, wet and opaque, a wide tonality of green and grey, a landscape of occasional lonely tree’s friendless and bare, if you ever felt the need to get close to your God, this might be a good place to do so.

Switzerland, January 2026

We arrived in Zurich a few days ago, thrust into this mid-winter monochrome landscape where you might be forgiven for thinking you had stepped unwittingly into a 1940s movie. The city’s sound has not changed in decades; the protest from the trams as they squeeze through its narrow streets and the dull, mournful church bells which cast the city in a somber light as today they were ringing to acknowledge the deaths a week ago of forty, mainly young, people in a resort in Crans-Montana, three hours away. Since arriving, it has snowed every day with varying degrees of enthusiasm; now was the most aggressive, with winds that tore across the Zurichsee, bending the willows and scattering the seagulls, leaving only myself and a few other hardy locals to witness the stark beauty of the moment. The small sailboats added to the mournful soundtrack drifting across the icy water, their pale, hollow bells provoking an unreliable moment of nostalgia; one that might lazily be called déjà vu, a moment that was either truly remembered or perhaps one that existed in some celluloid version of the past, a film or a photograph; it’s hard now to tell, but distinctly and unmistakably northern European in winter time.

Across the lake, the buildings came in and out of focus thanks to the blankets of snow, ghostlike in their lack of definition, so were the young families who momentarily appeared through the haze, children in their arctic spacesuits while their wary parents looked on, across to the north where the city’s ornate churches continued with their melancholic message, not convincingly one of either spirituality or poetry but certainly obedience.

It is this Swiss characteristic that I always forget until I am here. The agonizing wait at pedestrian traffic lights with others, watching passively an empty road but not crossing until we are told to by the green light. It’s to keep order, it’s for the children to learn, it’s to protect ourselves from ourselves; more than that, it is perhaps key to understanding the Swiss character, one of pragmatism, one that is a little grim and overly analytical but with a deep appreciation of order and control. It’s hardly surprising that there are so many direct flights to Asia, to Thailand in particular, where a certain chaos, a certain discord is guaranteed. In the past when I worked closely with Swiss businessmen and had long nights drinking beers with them, I heard stories.

Alongside this sense of safety and comfort is a staggering opulence. Because our trip is funded by a weak dollar, eating out is rarely an option. However, on our first evening, tired from a flight from Heathrow, we went to a charming local restaurant where the bill, when it finally arrived after a sparse dinner of starters and wine, was alarming. One cannot fault the kindness and hospitality, but we were left reeling, wondering how anyone could afford to eat out. But they do, we noticed during our evening walks, restaurants full of prosperous-looking people. The same feeling of disbelief was with me while walking through our local neighborhood, which is populated with large villas, many of which are now offices for companies that seem to offer global financial, consultancy, and management services, each driveway tightly parked with large Mercedes SUVs and Porsches.

The casual visitor asks how did this small, landlocked nation become so wealthy. The official answer: a nation of hardworking, serious, and well-educated people, many multilingual; a nation without enemies and hence the lack of a massive defense budget; one with a history that doesn’t take sides or have territorial ambitions; one that didn’t fall into the trap of colonization like the UK, Holland, Portugal, and Spain. Its long-term political strategy of being agnostic to world events has protected its economy from boom and busts and from massive financial outpourings; instead, it has benefited (some might say cynically) from other nations’ wars and conflicts, its banking sector seen as a safe, discreet place to secure money and goods. Surely a vast amount of wealth has risen from interest and storage charges from the world’s assets parked here. Its manufacturing sector has focused on quality, and its tourist industry has capitalized on the beauty of its landscape. Yet this self-containment, its insularity, has both admirers and detractors; it bothers some, this history of turning its back on the world’s conflicts, its agnostic worldview.

I have a little firsthand experience of how business is conducted in Switzerland. Many years ago, the American company I worked for was “merged” with a Swiss business; that was the official story. In fact, the Swiss company had been acquired by a much larger German organization, which gave it the authority to buy the company I worked for and integrate the two businesses. The inevitable culture clashes provided both grim comedy and countless examples of Stockholm syndrome. There was a crude joke circulating at the time; the gist of which was that the American company couldn’t accurately account for the profits that it was making while the Swiss company could tell you to the penny how many losses it was incurring. It spoke to the self-absorption and bureaucracy of the European entity, one whose primary focus was apparently on administration as opposed to innovation and enterprise.

During that time of upheaval, strict rules on organization and roles were a little shocking for us in the USA, and the general observation was that the Swiss saw the business like a clock, with each individual completing small, clearly defined tasks and punishing those who wanted to do something better or different; perhaps illustrating both a stilted understanding of humanity and a cultural misunderstanding over the nature of conflict and dissent within groups, probably the most valuable asset any organization can have. There is nothing new to this thinking; travel back six hundred years to this part of the world and you would find the notion of being “individualistic” abhorrent and likely fatal. Everyone had to be defined by trade or family and usually both; who you reported to, who owned you and made decisions for you was unambiguous. Stepping out of this bondage would incur serious punishment, even death, and so it was easiest to conform, to accept your role no matter how mundane.

It is a country with deep folk art and cultural beliefs. Walking around any of the cities, there are examples of local myths and legends painted on walls and found in public statues. They are a little frightening to children and adults who had not been raised on these stories, for us, there is an alarming cruelty and violence in their message. Yet perhaps the most potent of all myths about Switzerland is its natural protection from its sometimes aggressive neighbors thanks to its topography, the formidable mountain ranges that over the past few centuries have prevented hostile invasion. Today, believing this is surely the greatest risk, technology has moved on in this atomic age. There is a healthy oblivion to all this in the character of the Swiss. We took a day trip with a guide to a local mountain resort where we donned snow boots and walked vigorously up a mountain for an hour or so until, out of breath, we suggested finding the local restaurant. The landscape was beautiful enough to feel unreal, an artificiality to the snow-covered mountains and strangely in the recent animal markings in the pure snow; unreasonably, it seemed hard to believe they existed within such perfection. Our trail was also shared with skiers, on this day teenage children in bright, spotless outfits, fearless as they sped down the slopes at alarming velocity, apparently deeply content in this safe European home.

LA, Utah

Then it was almost all over, a twelve hour delayed flight to Los Angeles placing us back firmly on the North American landmass, the lip of the western world. We could almost immediately sense its energy and anxiety. An Uber to our hotel in Hollywood, a comfortable bed, familiar television stations, our cell phones working just as they had five months ago prompting conflicting emotions on being back home. But strange also to have a sense of comfort in a city like this, one that thrives on a cocktail of contradictions, ambition and danger. On our travels we had watched the city on fire, it had been headline news in different parts of the world and this created confusion in some places and occasionally unwarranted sympathy when people heard we were from the USA clearly finding it hard to imagine its scale.

We had some activities preplanned, a trip to a Frank Lloyd Wright house nearby, a meeting with the adult children of old friends who now live in Mexico and with some Angelinos we know but it was the unplanned ones that made me happiest; long walks around the hotel and into West Hollywood, something a resident would never do in order to exhaust ourselves in an attempt to purge the jet lag that was still with us.

There are two Hollywood’s, the rather grim fortress-like Movie Studios occupying entire blocks looking exactly as they function; industrial units generating a product exported globally, anti-romantic factories. They generate billions of dollars, make fame and fortune for the leading people, they industrialize themes of love, war, fantasy that repeat a predictable narrative; a dream of America. Meanwhile I watched from my air conditioned and rather sterile hotel room the homeless without shoes limping as they sheltered from the heat. Yet another Hollywood is revealed at night from a car window, now it’s too dark to see the dirt on the sidewalks, the “For Rent” signs and the mess of cables and air-conditioning units, instead we see the houses lite up with fairy lights like a magical kingdom and the dim windows revealing lives we will never know. It is a domesticated enclave, suburban to its core, there are Home Depot’s and McDonalds next to multimillion dollar homes, it’s impossible not to be surprised at its high and low nature. The modest houses that looked unremarkable, like any other western suburb by day, are now a fantasy at night and will likely contain dentists, real Estate agents as well as actors and rock stars.

If you were a fearless and ambitious walker you could take the surface roads from these absurdly expensive homes to downtown LA where there are entire encampments of homeless people, tent cities whose permanence is illustrated by the ingeniously powered TV’s and stoves. Bravely walk further and you are in another city altogether, a place of chain linked fences and angry dogs ruled by gangs and one where you and I are not welcome. Strangely the wealthy and the poor cohabitate without conflict, until some event happens and stores are looted and police arrive in militarized vehicles and things go back to normal.

For some of us it begs the question, why do so many creative people choose to live here? A partial answer comes from the film director Werner Herzog. He is quoted as saying “Wherever you look in LA there is an immense depth, a tumult that resonates with me. New York is more concerned with finance than anything else. It doesn’t create culture, only consumes it; most of what you find in New York comes from elsewhere. Things actually get done in LA. Look beyond the glitz and glamour of Hollywood and a wild excitement of dreams opens up; it has more horizons than any other place. There is a great deal of industry in the city and a real working class; I also appreciate the vibrant presence of the Mexicans”.

Ambition and reinvention drive this culture. For an American the city feels like the edge of the planet, and staring out into the Pacific it’s not difficult to understand why. I would be wary of taking a west bound plane from here, there is a sense that there is nowhere to go but backwards if you are not successful. People still flock here to find its magic to take on a new persona or form, to get a lucky break and achieve the fame, lifestyle or wealth they crave; to be the person they dreamt of being. You meet them serving you in restaurants and bars, driving your Uber.

It’s an easier, more livable, city now compared to how it was thirty years ago when GPS and Cell Phones didn’t exist and taxis were expensive and hard to get. In those days I would drive around with a city map covering the steering wheel, or memorizing the surface road names and that would also frequently be at night when we would go out for dinner and I, the designated driver, couldn’t drink, or relax, as the knowledge of a complicated drive home haunted the meal. Now we have self-driving cars, we have cell phones, we are in control of our plans and its fun to go around without a rental car and this lack of this responsibility offers an almost childish sense of freedom.

Los Angeles is an interior city. If you arrive from Europe or cities on the East Coast where walking and sightseeing is handed to you then you will come away disappointed. For many tourists I know have left angry and perplexed at what seemed to them an ugly suburban mess on the side of a dirty, un-swimmable toxic Ocean. It’s a place that changes with the right amount of due diligence, research and a handful of contacts, even eating in the right place is helpful, whether it is an authentic Mexican restaurant on a sidewalk where you sit on flimsy stools and get served fiercely spicy Tacos’ or a garden on the back of an upscale place in Venice. Many years ago it was a place just like that where we had arranged to meet a friend whose life had taken on the predictable arc of a LA resident. Originally from Philadelphia, she had won a prize for a film project and moved to the city at a time when you could still get a place with a reasonable rent and a vague idea of being a stand up comedian. Now she teaches children with disabilities, a much more challenging but rewarding profession. As we waited for her I saw a large table with one occupant, a familiar face that I couldn’t place and then a few moments later when the other guests arrived several that I could, including the actor Tom Hanks and his wife. Mary had been quicker than me and had already whispered that it was Martin Short. How do celebrities behave when they socialize? As badly as the rest of use, loudly telling stories and drawing attention to themselves.

On this trip we had arranged to meet friends in a highly rated, difficult to get into, Pizza restaurant. We took a fifteen minute Uber to the neighborhood just off West Hollywood which was surprisingly quiet, we later found out that it was due to a Jewish holiday. The Pizza was fine but not as amazing as the reviews on line had suggested, so we extended our evening by moving to a local bar. Here there was a mix of American entrepreneurialism mixed with Korean cuisine which summed up the city, two young multiracial people making just enough money to keep the place afloat. It seemed like hard work to me but they had a passion for what they were doing, they were the center of a local community and happy enough. This quality is perhaps the most perplexing to those of us who have never lived here; let’s consider the risks for a moment, the San Andreas fault provides a few earthquakes from time to time as an amuse bouche to the final reckoning, there are the fires, the floods and the occasional civil uprisings and tensions from the predictable gentrification of once exclusively ethnic neighborhoods, not to mention the price of property and the taxes. Yet for many it is the center of the universe. It manufactures the fantasies and the dramas of the world which have massive global reach, much of the American propaganda we watch is created in the studios or in backyard offices by enthusiastic people who are thrilled to be part of something important even with the knowledge that ultimately it is perhaps just another industry with the goal of making money.

I’ve often fantasized about living in LA for a while but Mary is against it. Perhaps I have the same concerns but they are better hidden, I recall seeing an exhibition of the quintessential LA artist Ed Rusha in New York where some of my prejudices surfaced. It was strange to see the retrospective in New York, a city where the melancholy ghosts of Edward Hopper and Jasper Johns haunt his work as does the influence of Laurence Wiener’s text-based practice. I could also add improbably the early Californian paintings of Hockney being made around the same time, a parallel career yet in some ways his opposite, who shared a love of flatly painted midcentury homes and pools, and even Warhol who relished the unabashed glorification of commerce and glamour, elevating LA’s midcentury vernacular architecture onto the white walls of a gallery. Rusha’s celebration of materiality, of language and unremarkable architecture is regurgitated in repetition sometimes also using gun powder and chocolate to provide a veneer of conceptualism to break free of the categorization of “pop”, already dated as he approached early middle age. What was immediately clear was the rejection of the serious nature of abstract expressionism, and its already dated preciousness, and embrace of the agnostic world of irony and emotional detachment. How much politics at this time influenced him is unclear and he offers no clues, but Vietnam was happening as was the rise of student rebellion around the world which was frequently targeting the prosperity, commerce and empire building from the US government and its large corporations, so some critics warn us not to demand too many answers of this work.

I saw the show on an unlucky day, Friday 13, and that might account for my hesitancy to buy into his greatness, but in truth my ambivalence is a little deeper than that. For as long as I can remember his name has been banded around, normally in my experience from women of a certain age, who regarded him as an art world heart throb. I heard from friends in Los Angeles that he was the personification of an art world “star”, handsome, white, male, rich and heterosexual, he dated intelligent actresses like Diane Keaton, but was still somehow optimistically thought to be available. He was more than just an art world star, he was an insider; he had achieved the goal of a contemporary artist by creating his own brand, he selected some specific imagery, ironically that of commercial brands themselves, repeated it enough times to make it unmistakable his own, cementing this in the world through the supporting infrastructure of the right collectors, curators, museums and publishers. He had the perfect backup, the Ferus Gallery in LA, Leo Castelli in New York, the Venice Biannual, the timing was right for him.

The visual language Rusha adopted was at his doorstep, or at least a short drive from it; Gas Stations, Billboards, Apartment Blocks, Municipal buildings all more striking because of the absence of human beings and of nature with the exception of an occasional ornamental palm tree, garish sunsets, mountains and on a single occasion in the MoMA show a bird, painted with such deliberate artifice than it looked wholly unnatural. They look like screen savers now overridden with text which we are expected to laugh at or at least celebrate the dry wit. Often there is a fire attacking the buildings, a punk impulse to offset his jazz persona, the same casual dismissive brush stokes as Hockney used who painted a splash to animate his flat roofed homes and their pools.

He used a camera with the same discipline. From the mid-sixties he took repetitive photographs of buildings on Sunset strip moving on to other similar rigorous studies of local building or pools, always dehumanized, the cameras as conceptual tool, not capturing beauty or visually remarkable images, the kind of work being promoted at that time by Bernd and Hilla Becher in Dusseldorf. But of course, the same central ambiguity exists with this work, we can never be sure if he ridiculing formalism or participating in it.

It has been pointed out before that he is one of the few artists who straddles film culture in LA and its contemporary art scene and that strong parallels exist between the two. The major film studios certainly held, and continues to hold, global influence over the portrayal of American culture globally, much of the romance and visual deceit of the movie industry lies in its language and when I grew up the words Sunset Boulevard, Beverly Hills, Pacific Palisades, Malibu all possessed romantic and exotic connotations long before I actually saw how shabby they are in real life. The art world also mirrors the film world with its hierarchies and A lists mainly because the two industries share the same problem, there are few legitimate entry qualifications instead success is defined by luck, determination and willingness to understand and play the necessary games. It’s not hard to imagine the bedside conversations between the artist and the Hollywood actresses he dated. But let’s not forget that the art world embrace is a tentative one. In an interview in Gagosian magazine the artist Maurizio Cattelan shared his vulnerability within the art world and reminded his interviewer that “art world names are written in pencil”. He also expressed his worst fear; “it took me a long time to where I am and I’m still terrified of being kicked out”.

It was not far from me to walk from my home on second and 57s street to MoMA which is just off 5^th avenue at 53 street. It was under an airbrushed blue sky, more LA than NY, and a day of autumnal freshness despite the heaviness of the political situation on the middle east where medieval atrocities were taking place. Serious political problems have to be dismissed, so what if the world is on fire? particularly in light of the cool, detached feather weighted lightness of show I was walking to, as the artist said, “he would have painted the river Seine if he lived in Paris” and so he simply painted gas stations and billboards, an agonizing admission. Perhaps the joke is on us, foolishly we seek answers from artists, expect them to explore what they see, what they desire and what they fear but it’s asking too much, maybe we should accept this nihilism, be helpless and detached after all why wouldn’t an artist’s work that personified coolness leave you cold?

We had one last stop before going back to the East Coast, a short trip to Salt Lake City to see the Spiral Jetty an art work by the late Robert Smithson. The image of a spiral was omnipresent during our trip, in Polynesian culture it symbolizes immortality and specifically for Mauri’s it symbolizes new beginnings, growth and the interconnectedness of life. And so this Koru felt like the perfect place to end our trip.

The flight to Salt Lake City in Utah was a short one and we spent the evening walking into the city, which was surrounded by snowcapped mountains. It’s a prosperous place thanks to being the head offices, and in some cases the back offices, of some large corporations and so could sustain good restaurants, convention centers and hotels. We hired a car and drove out to the Salt Flats the next day and were surprised to find the site empty and it was rather miraculous to have the place to ourselves, one of complete emptiness save for the occasional horse or photogenic groupings of cattle, and the salt of course which we could taste on our lips and in the tightness of our skin already burning a little from the sun.

Robert Smithson was a land artist and this work probably his most famous. It was completed in April 1970 and has come to represent a major landmark in his career and in the history of this genre. It is smaller and more elegant than photographs suggest, and my initial feelings about the arrogance of making an art work that is only truly visible from the sky, an almost unattainable view point, was soon dispelled as it is clearly seen after a steep climb up a nearby hill. But that’s not really the point, it’s better to be a participant; to walk through its channel of mud, salt crystals and basalt to its center. Its flat, empty surroundings are remarkable to those of us from the Eastern side of the USA and can be regarded as anti-pastoral, the opposite of a conventional idea of beauty. There is a sad postscript, Smithson died three years later in a light aircraft, imspecting another work in Amarillo Texas along with the pilot who was also a photographer and although the work was finished after his death it has subsequently become overgrown and eroded.

Later that day we walked back into the City, ate in a great Sushi restaurant, found a lovely ice cream Parler and smiled smugly at each other, very much aware of our good fortune and the promise of new beginnings, the knowledge that we would be boarding a plane the next day to Philadelphia, the place where we had started from five months earlier.

Late January 2025, Chiang Mai

The flight north from Bangkok was unremarkable, taking less than two hours over a landscape bruised by Thailand’s relatively recent industrial transformation. There was little certainty around this visit other than two hotels booked several months ago by Mary in a moment of enthusiasm driven by a romantic ideal of the East. For a while she had been talking about the reclaimed old buildings that were the center piece of our hotel in Chiang Mai, not a new phenomena in Asia, we had stayed some years ago in Langkawi in Malaysia in a group of buildings that had been saved when developers came to bull dose down most of KL, but a desirable alternative to some of the new sterile hotels we saw online. Each brick, each beam had been numbered, categorized and placed in container ships to be rebuild as a boutique hotel and for me at least the joy is in the joinery; the precise cuts of wood, the excellence in construction and skill of the craftsmen. It is also in the warm feeling of domesticity such structures provide, they demand something of its occupants, to step over raised floor boards, to glimpse daylight through them and have a brief sense of what the past was like without any of the risks.

We found a driver would was happy to answer our WhatsApp calls and he stuck with us loyally the entire time we had in Thailand. On one occasion we walked through the streets to find a highly recommended local resturant that did not accept reservations and so like everyone else we wrote our name in a book and waited for a muffled (and imaginative interpretation of our western names) microphoned call to a free table. I had to accept my own lack of connersership with the food, which was delicious but hard to understand the accolades and that is because I think of Thai food as being fiery and not this more subtle and comforting Northern variant. But this city is not about food, rather it is a center of culture and religion and to discover that I found requires boundless energy. The temples are built as close to God as they can be, both physically and metaphorically, which frequently demanded steep walks up mountains. And at the summit my lack of comprehension at religion is complete as we are faced with garish gold monuments and people praying towards figurines of buddhas and other holy symbols that held little meaning to me as well as real monks who were deeply engaged with their worshippers.

From Chiang Mai we travelled to a smaller town, Lampong, about an hour away, again because the hotel booking had been made several months ago which needed to be fulfilled. As with our previous accommodation, it was made up of locally sourced materials and traditional architectural techniques, and again made because of aesthetic rather than practical goals, it was far from the center of the small city leaving us dependent upon taxi’s and therefore at the mercy of a ride share application that we eventually and reluctantly downloaded onto my phone. The town itself had some charm and much fewer tourists giving itself a pleasing air of self sufficiency. There is an older quarter of elegant and traditional houses which was pleasant to walk around and occasionally a horse drawn carriage would speed past us in the empty streets. Each evening there was a night market that began at around 6.00 pm and provided some theatre at the end of the day, a place where we picked up Pork Satay and ate a stick each before getting some deliciousy delicate Pho from a sidewalk vendor and watched the world pass by before settling the bill which came to about four dollars.

The next day our driver from Chiang Mai was waiting for us at 8.00pm to take us to the airport, where we flew the two and a half hours into Singapore, where we had our first delay in the trip circulating around the airport where I hoped to look down on Chinese junks that I witnessed all those years ago, but instead saw the slug like forms of shipping vessels full of containers. I was still searching for my youth after that night when I took Mary to the Long Bar in Raffles and later to the Tiffin Room for an Indian Meal where we sat near a lovely couple who must have been in their eighties, he in a traditional pale linen suit, and she wearing a diamond neckless – one might assume a meaningful possession – a rare sighting of old Singapore, but then to bring us back to 2025, an eye watering bill that reflected the modern one. We used this stop over to do practical tasks, to wash clothes, to return our warm weather clothes back to the USA, to find new sneakers for Mary and to explore some lesser known pockets and in truth we were both happy to leave the next day to Bali.