J____

J____ is a third generation Japanese Korean. His grandparents left Seoul at some unspecified point in the past – perhaps during the time of colonial rule – and he, like his siblings and parents, was born in Tokyo.

He speaks no Korean. He has both Japanese, Korean and English names, the latter of which he is thinking to change when he applies for US citizenship next year. Is J___ a name on its own, or a shortening he asks.

J____ carries a Korean passport. Until recently it was almost impossible to apply for Japanese citizenship. In any case he has now been away too long for this to happen. 10 years in fact.

He studied in Portland, Oregon. A place picked because it was somewhere he knew almost nothing about and certainly knew no one from. College, undergraduate studies, work in the finance sector in Boston. Now New York. This is home, he says. Could not think of living anyplace else.

Through some irony the company he works for is Japanese. Insurance products for Japanese firms. Multinationals. Not that he is expected to speak the language or translate for others into his mildly accented English. But there it is, a fragment of the past carried into his life in the new world.

Last year he visited Australia. Sydney and Melbourne. Chasing a long distance relationship that foundered almost as soon as he arrived. J____ reports that Sydney was nice but that Melbourne made him feel lonely. What time of year I ask. The winter months can be bleak.

I can't remember the response. J____ talks some more about how he needed help to fill in a passport application at the local Korean consulate. It being presumed that a citizen of that country would have no need for forms in English or any other language.

Boston

Boston was cold. After the relative warmth of the first few days in New York this city, only four hours drive north, was a plunge back into icy winter. 75 down to 40, in the old numbers.

As a result much of what I saw in Boston was inside or underground. There was a Common, sure, because the metro passed beneath it. Harvard had a yard, rushed through on the way to one of the nearby museums.

I was in town to visit U___, a colleague from Lahore. She is studying at MassArts and is one of the many graduate students from Pakistan on Fulbright scholarships. She has almost finished her first year here, a year she found difficult and thrilling in almost equal measure.

The thrill comes from the access to research, to stuff. On Tuesday we visited the MIT Media Lab, where bright sparks and pranksters condense the future down into a physical presence. Strips of hanging paper pulse and contract as tiny electrical charges tense the single strand of bright metal that runs down their centres. Muscle wire.

There are eight legged walking machines, intelligent fabrics, ceramics as thin as tissue. Not all is bleeding edge. On the second floor is propped a lenticular panel, positioned so that as the elevator ascends the image changes. 1, 2, 3, 4. No haptic feedback, no touch screen interactivity. Just light and carefully thought out geometry.

I would like to stay longer, see more, but class is beginning and U___ must go. Outside, across a courtyard, is the titanium skinned inflorescence of a Gehry building.

MOTAT

In a building near the centre of Auckland's Museum of Transport and Technology is a maze. Quite while it should be there is not clear. The rest of the building is devoted to a history of New Zealand manufacturing – boot polish and dairy products among them. There is a sign saying the floor of the maze is made of local timber, and not to run. That is all.

MOTAT is a strange collection of steam engines, trams, buses, butter churns, retired fighter aircraft and Catalina flying boats. Some are outside and can be climbed on, surreptitiously at least. Others are behind glass and perspex or cordoned off by rope. One local volunteer tips sacks of coal into the open maw of a boiler for the steam room. Another drives a trolley car around the perimeter of the nearby park, joining the old and new parts of the museum in a rickety trail.

I go there partly because it is close to J___'s house in Grey Lynne, but mainly because retired technology suits a certain otaku bent of mine. The museum does not disappoint. It is exactly the right mix of preservation, rust and engine grease. Some of the displays are absurd. The first diesel tractor in New Zealand. Others heartbreaking. Jean Batten's heroic efforts as one of the fastest female pilots of the 1920s. Her desperate attempts to claw back fame in later life, and death in isolation and obscurity in 1982.

The maze though, and this is the thing, is made entirely of mirrors. So wherever you turn you are met by hundreds of repeated versions of yourself, each iteration slightly decayed as distortion and the pale green of the glass multiplies.

It is uncanny to see your image approach and retreat in such numbers. But compelling, and both J___ and the other cousins well remember visits to the labyrinth of glass as children, more than three decades ago.

Night Flight

In 'Night Flight from Houston' Laurie Anderson talks of a woman who, looking out, confuses up from down, and sees below her not 'the lights of little towns' but stars and constellations. 'Big Dipper, Little Dipper'.

The sky on the evening flight from JFK was dark and perfectly clear. We took off as the sun was setting and rose in a white noise silence into the night.

The woman two seats along was heading to California. Compliance and strategy in the renewable energy business. A new job, after graduating in engineering and IT and working in the petrochemical industry. Her first time away from her son, five, since he was born. We talked, and in the gaps between conversations looked out the windows.

If Anderson, travelling over the ranches and deserts of Texas has seen below her pin pricks of light, sometimes on a grid, sometimes not, then the land below this flight path was of a different order of density.

Globular clusters. Supernova intensities. Galaxies with spiral arms. Ribbon like nebulae along the banks of rivers. Black holes at the ruined hearts of industrial towns.

New York. Jersey City. Baltimore. Philadelphia. Pittsburgh. St Louis. All the cities of the built up East.

Then abruptly we are away from what William Gibson saw as a single vast conurbation. The Boston Atlanta Metropolitan Axis. BAMA. The Sprawl. Where gritty rains fall in the spaces between polycarbonate towers and corporate archologies.

But there is none of that, yet. Instead we pass over the silence of dark mountains into plains where farmsteads post the beacon of a single light. A car traces a comet's eccentric path between suns. The red dwarf flicker of a gas refinery.

I look out, and see constellations below. Leo, Sagittarius. Orion. His belt and knife, arms drawn up to the tensile bow.

Old Travel Blog

Older entries in the Art and Travel blog can be found here