it's a vain pursuit but it helps me to sleep

12:01 am - Obligatory occasional photo post

Life has been slipping past rapidly for the past couple of months, but a few moments were captured:


Beach mandala.


Hallowe'ening.


The Bay.


The Pacific.


Yours truly.


I seem to have written a new book.


More brooms, at the Dickens Fair.

09:48 am - Yosemite

I did Yosemite wrong the other time I went there, lo these many years ago. Yesterday I did it better:



























(Last shot not actually in Yosemite but from a Vista Point on Highway 120 on the way out.)

11:01 am - black rock city 2015

I took fewer pictures this year, and the ones I took were generally not as good; one can attribute this either to the dust storms that ravaged Black Rock City (I counted five pretty significant ones during the course of the week) or to the fact that I was just too busy having a fantastic time.

Still, here's what I got:


Towards the gate.


Stop and smell the flower.


BE OK.


Flamethrowers are extremely numerous at Burning Man, but this was the most impressive one.


Everyone needs a Blunderwood.


Temple arches.


Giant dance-camp sphere.


Third in a trilogy.


Playa scars.


Soup and crackers.


Mazu lanterns.


Welcome to the freak show.


The Harlequin Man himself.


Out in the burbs.


Table dancer.


Shoulder surfer.


Triptych.


Watching the medusa.


Panda man.


Esplanade.


Dust rider.


Fractal radiance.


Comfort and joy.


The legendary El Pulpo Mecanico.


Infernal clown.

10:00 pm - Levantine pix

A few highlights:


Brief British stopover.


Grand mosque, Beirut.


Love, Beirut-style.


The Corniche, Beirut.


Downtown.


In the suburbs where Hezbollah reigns.


Somewhere over Syria. I think that conurbation might be Homs.


The road into Petra is kind of ridiculous.


I mean, really.


Its entrance is famously cinematic.


Guides wait for customers.


City carved from stone.


The monastery.


The road out.


Wadi Rum. My standard photo pose.


My not-so-standard photo pose.


Khaled, my Bedouin guide.


Random camels.


Wadi Rum is ridiculously gorgeous, in that stark bleak desert way.


"We've taken Aqaba."


Old city, Jerusalem.


Golden Dome and Western Wall.


Orthodox chillin'.


Muslims only beyond this point.


The Mount of Olives.


Apparently this is the real deal.


Don't forget the struggle.


Checkpoint 300.


Dead Sea blues.


Illicit photo of licit mummy.


Pyramid golf.


I don't even like camels. Um. Look, it's a long story, OK?


Last-day-in-the-country blues.

Full set here.

06:51 pm - levantine days

I've been thinking a lot about Rafik Hariri today. He was the former Prime Minister of Lebanon who was assassinated in a massive car bombing ten years ago. Other car bombs followed in its wake, like echoes, murdering those who would investigate Hariri's death. Wissam Eid, who performed remarkable cell-phone metadata analysis to tie the assassination to Hezbollah, survived a 2006 car bomb but not a 2008 follow-up. Brigadier General Wissam al-Hassan, Hariri's former chief of protocol, was killed three years ago by another huge car bomb in downtown Beirut that killed eight and wounded 120.

Both the Hariri and al-Hassan assassinations happened within a kilometer of where I sit and type, the Saifi Urban Gardens in downtown Beirut, a rather nice modern hostel with rooms for $50/night. Large swathes of Beirut are rather nice and modern. No, that's too half-hearted; extremely nice and ultramodern. There is, very apparently, a ton of money in this city. A Ferrari dealership is a few blocks away. Beyond lies an entire district which is largely a high-end open-air upscale shopping mall. Further yet is a marina seething with expensive yachts. Everywhere you look, downtown, there seems to be yet another crane throwing up yet another gargantuan new steel-and-glass tower.

But that's downtown. Go for a long walk, or simply drive from the airports to the suburbs, and see the other reality--dense warrens of concrete high-rises, drained of colour by decades of baking Mediterranean sun, cracked and fading and/or scarred by the shrapnel and snipers of the not-so-long-ago Lebanese Civil War that killed an estimated 120,000 people, densely peopled with the poor. Power shortages mean Beirut's residents go without grid electricity for three hours every day. The rich switch seamlessly to generators; the very poor just go without. I don't know what Lebanon's Gini coefficient is offhand but I'd guess in Beirut at least it's fairly spectacular.

This is a city with a long, long history of tumult. It is older than the Pyramids and has been a center of trade for most of that time. (That doesn't make it especially old, in these parts. Byblos, probably the oldest continuously inhabited city on the planet, is a bit north of here; Tyr, as in "Nineveh and Tyre," a little ways south.) Beirut has been conquered by the Egyptians, the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Arabs (following a massive earthquake and tidal wave in 551 AD that almost depeopled the city), the Crusaders, the Arabs again, the Ottoman Empire, the French, the English, the Syrians, and the Israelis. Today it is trilingual: English, French, Arabic.

It's a remarkably pretty city. Hills rise steeply up from Beirut, a ridge along the Mediterranean coast populated by seemingly endless clusters of apartment towers, climbing up to mountains that, I'm told, are snow-capped in winter; if you time it just right, you can famously ski in the morning and surf in the afternoon. The climate seems even more perfect than San Francisco's. The wine and cheese and olives are all excellent. Its law school was pre-eminent in the Eastern Roman Empire, and it still boasts the finest university in the Middle East, the American University in Beirut. Such a shame about the politics, and the neighbours.

If I got up and rented a car right now, it'd be about an 80-km drive to the Syrian border, and another 20 to Damascus -- a land wracked by civil war and the Islamic State, where hundreds of thousands have died, and millions more have been injured or rendered homeless. Lebanon's four million citizens are currently hosting more than a million Syrian refugees, and counting. (Damascus itself has gone largely untouched. So far.) South is Israel, whose eruptive relationship to Lebanon requires no introduction. It's odd and disconcerting to be in a non-island nation that one cannot leave by land.

Wandering the streets of Beirut, passing ancient mansions and countless cafes, along winding little streets and staircases lined by doors and iron grates, being honked at by countless SUVs with tinted windows en route to valet parking and five-star hotels, it's hard not to imagine it as a city full of secret places, steeped in hidden currents. Which of course it is, quite starkly and literally.

I don't want to try to unpick the bloody fractal jigsaw puzzle that is the modern Middle East in this post, but for instance: those scarred suburbs south of the city are Hezbollah territory. Hezbollah, the "Party of God," was midwifed by the Syrians some decades ago, and are now repaying them by aiding the Syrian government against the rebels, with assistance from fellow-Shiites Iran. Arrayed against them are Lebanon's Sunni muslims, and Sunni governments such as Saudi Arabia, who further south are launching airstrikes against the Shiite Houthis, who are battling Sunni Al-Qaeda. And that's without even getting into the fear and hatred of Israel throughout the region, and/or the complicated role played by Lebanon's many Christians. (There are churches everywhere in Beirut.)

Hence my contemplation of the assassination of Rafik Hariri, and the densely baroque nature of the net of conspiracy that drew in around him, one that would make John Le Carré blush. From this magisterial New York Times article on the subject:

The green group consisted of 18 Alfa phones, purchased with fake identification from two shops in South Beirut ... the blue group originally worked according to the same rules as the green group, but its active membership increased from three phones to 15, with seven connected to Alfa and eight to MTC Touch ... Eventually, the yellow group was added, and its 13 members seemed to share surveillance duties with the blue group ... it was the purple group, the prosecution says, that handled the cover operation ... The last cellphone group to go into action was the red group. These phones, investigators believe, belonged to the inner circle of the Hariri surveillance team in the days before the attack — and to the actual suicide bomber.

09:17 am - saint francis to saint lucas

What can I say, we live in a visual era.


Sutro sunset.


The other direction.


The Peninsula.


Peninsular and Oriental.


Happy couple.


Cabo marina.


Fishing.


The channel.


Dock X.


Tropic shade.

02:58 pm - 2014 in pictures

January


February


March


April


May


June


July


August


September


October


November


December.

03:37 pm - Some European photos

I brought a Real Camera, but all of these were taken with my new phone, with which I am pleased.


The English Channel.


World War I gas mask.


My goddaughter towers over Southeast England.


Twin towers in Berlin.


In the Luxembourg Gardens.


Paris wall.


Ferris wheel at Place de la Concorde.

Full albums here and here.

10:37 am - Californiaing

Folks at Decompression SF.





The edge of "The Jungle," San Jose's largest homeless encampment, home to hundreds.



In a tree above The Jungle.



Sailing away across the Bay.



Golden Gate Bridge.



Towers of power.



Note badass kiteboarder surfing under the bridge and into the Pacific.

05:51 pm - Pictures of trees

OK, I haven't only taken pictures of trees of late, but they're well-represented.


Redwoods at a California highway rest stop.


Non-redwoods at a California highway rest stop.


Non-redwoods at an Oregon highway rest stop.


On a hill trail overlooking Portland (OR)


Last forest before the Oregon badlands.


Some of those badlands.


Back in the Bay Area, hiking the Dipsea Trail.

...OK, fine, some non-trees too:


Disgruntled Bigfoot.


The California coast, far north.


The California coast, right at San Francisco.