Pretty in Print

Two recent publications that can’t be read online: the first in Gray’s Sporting Journal’s fortieth anniversary issue, the next in Songs of Ourselves, from Blue Heron Book Works.

If you can’t get to a newsstand, here’s what the opening spread of the Gray’s story looks like on an iPad.

 

The painting is by Alberto Rey and—in case you were hoping to add it to your collection—is already owned by the University of Virginia.

The story itself is set in Mexico and Montana. Although it’s absolutely fiction, the narrative roughly chronicles the puzzlement I feel both when stalking bonefish on the flats and trying to understand the so-called new economy. (Remember Touch America?)

My contribution to Songs of Ourselves, on the other hand, feels like a big departure from my usual work. Subtitled America’s Interior Landscape, the book wants to identify an idea that I’ve been searching for from Morocco to Mongolia: “the thing that makes us American.” As I was telling my sister today, my bit—which I called “The Journal of Infectious Diseases”—is “basically a memoir in the form of a collage.”

According to the Journal of Infectious Diseases, the most common reason for travel among tourists who contract cholera is—you guessed it—a visit with the relatives.

Annals of American Hegemony

How can you tell when your brand has achieved market saturation? Consider this pocket-sized candy tin in Mumbai, India.

Onward and Upward with the Arts

Don't know who coined the phrase but I like it at least as much as The New Yorker.

I admit here that it's time to leave Mumbai as a setting and return to Shanghai. Anything approaching coherence in that narrative would require the time for a thoughtful revision. Considering my workload and our imminent departure from China, that luxury is unavailable at the moment.

Although I have been enjoying Shanghai in a way unknown to longer-term residents, and was detained briefly by the traffic police last week. At the corner of Nanjing Road and the Bund, by a cop with dark glasses who had perhaps watched one too many Clint Eastwood movies. He closed his fingers around my wrist and kept asking me what I'd expect if I'd broken the law in America.

The peak of his cap came up short of my chin but by the time I thought to break away we had attracted an encircling crowd of onlookers. I made the cowardly bid of pretending that I knew no Mandarin, but a saintly woman stepped in and interpreted for us, preventing an international incident and convincing him, somehow, not only to let me go without a fine, but to pretend as if he had never seen me before.

And that's the end of the Mumbai story, for now.

One Sentence after Another

Note: This story began on April 25.

To misquote Marlon Brando, I am neither my brother’s keeper nor his executioner.

I don’t know how the Mumbai story swerved from fashion to immigration but I think it does, in the end, have something to do with the coincidences of birth.

When traveling in Asia, I am sometimes struck by the union of blue and brown: blue American passport, tanned brown skin. Their convergence on my person allows me to cross borders with relative ease, to mingle in crowds like a distant cousin.

Living in close proximity with millions of striving people, you can’t help but entertain the old questions of resemblance, advantage, and inequity. What if you were born to a family of peasant farmers? Or migrant laborers? To a mother who sells bootleg DVDS on a dusty bridge and a father who scavenges cardboard and Styrofoam in his bicycle cart?

Favored with the benefits of the American systems of economy, justice, and education, what have I made of myself? A bewildered onlooker.

Excuses Come to an End, Almost

Note: This story began on April 25.

I haven't been able to log on for several days, thanks to the Chinese censors. Wish I could use that as an excuse, but that would be dishonest. What with guidebook research and other duties and distractions, I’ve neglected to cobble even a counterfeit ending for the Mumbai story.

I wanted to focus somehow on that feeling of continuity and wonder that Cliff and I felt walking late one night in the Bhindi Bazaar, an ancient and predominantly Muslim quarter, drifting and surging with the tides of shoppers and shopkeepers.

There were men pushing wooden carts laden with crates and boxes, porters bearing woven baskets atop their heads, teenagers murmuring into cell phones, smaller children crowded around stone basins of fish, a merchant demonstrating a wind-up Victrola to a crowd of men in dusty robes.

I felt like I could hear the sounds of centuries overlapping.

I've traveled alone and with family but this moment was different somehow, maybe because Cliff asked if I could ever have imagined that we would be walking together in this strange place and I had to say no, this was beyond imagining on any sort of personal level.



No individual mind could have imagined that we would find ourselves at Decent Corner, two Chinese-American brothers who last shared a bedroom in a town best known, if known at all, as the childhood home of Chester A. Arthur.

The 21st president of the United States, nicknamed the Gentleman Boss, succeeded from his elected post of vice-president after James Garfield’s assassination. By most accounts, he was a better statesman than anyone had the right to expect. Even the deservedly cynical Mark Twain admitted that, “It would be hard indeed to better President Arthur’s administration.” It was during his term that Congress first passed the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882). Immigrants of Chinese descent would remain ineligible for U.S. citizenship until 1943.

Have Faith?

For anyone who has been following these posts, I promise to bring the Mumbai story to a close. I don't promise the last words on luxury, fashion, Bombay, or brotherhood, but I do want to end that narrative and move on to something else.

Just agreed to write a chapter for Explorer Publishing's guide to Shanghai, so I have incentive.

Relativity

Note: This story began on April 25 and has no foreseeable end.

In Mumbai, Cliff and I shared a room at the Grand Hyatt which—if you ignored the central air-conditioning, television, minibar, shower and bath—was somehow reminiscent of our family home at the corner of Lake and Center streets. Maybe it was the two single beds, but more likely it was the two of us.

While my attention was elsewhere, Cliff has become the most successful of our siblings. And I’m not thinking in terms of wealth or celebrity. Instead, I am measuring by the admittedly subjective standard of dreams. Cliff, among the four of us, is closest to making satisfactory use of his talents.

Watching him and Sandy work together—the nods and murmurs, the pins and tape, the continuous small adjustments and readjustments—I experience a jealous thrill. Here is something he can do better than almost anyone: the mysterious and judicious application of creativity and connoisseurship.

Cliff knows more than I will ever learn about any number of subjects—modernist furniture and architectural pottery, for example—but, by that strange calculus of time and family, I am still his older brother, still in possession of a few mysteries myself.

“So,” he asks, as we drift side by side on the Hyatt’s twin boxsprings, 7000 miles from our former bedroom, “what happened that night the police brought you home?”

But What Does It Mean?

Note: This story began on April 25.

Here’s one regret: during my week in Mumbai, I did not try the street food. I did stop once before a chaat walla as he prepared pani puri for an impatient crowd. The sweet sharp scents of lime and tamarind held me for a few minutes, and then I drifted timidly away. If you have access to the New York Times’ archive, both Somini Sengupta and Julia Moskin have written temptingly about these little snacks.

For a working lunch, Sandy and Cliff often order north Indian food for delivery (Caravanserai
 Golden Orchid, Waterfield Road, Bandra, phone: 26411802). I can say with conviction that I would gladly taste any of these again: tandoori chicken, pomfret koliwada, mutton biryani, or palak paneer.

At one such meal, I paged through a lustrous stack of fashion magazines, searching for something like enlightenment. Julie, Sandy, and Cliff are all manifestly beautiful people, so maybe I was feeling a bit insecure. After all, I’d been watching them try on clothes for days, samples that they’d be taking to Paris to show.

In looking at these samples, I recognized the impoverishment of my critical vocabulary. Nothing in my closet has flared sleeves or three-button cuffs. I might be able to comprehend a cashmere T-shirt, but these other details were communicating in a foreign language. As Cliff remarked, their stuff is a little more “directional.” In its intimations of the future, directional implies that the clothes will look even more fashionable months from now.

From my readings, I contracted the impression that designers speak cryptically as a rule. In the luxury issue of GQ Style, for instance, Rick Owens explains that what he does is “try not to make people look like fools.”

An admirable goal, for certain, but there’s obviously more to it than that. Otherwise, how does he explain the fall 2007 season’s fuzzy slippers?

Chatav Ectabit

Sandy, his wife Julie, and their son Satya sleep across the stairwell from their second-floor atelier, housed in an otherwise nondescript concrete structure in Mumbai’s Santa Cruz district. The lane teems with the life of the suburbs: curbside hairdressers, betel vendors, short-haired dogs, children in their school uniforms.

The ironwork displays multiple representations of the Sanskrit om. The balconies are shaded by a tamarind tree, indifferently festooned with wayward kites. The building across the way bears the shingles of an advocate of the high court and a “maternity surgical home.”

Through the open windows, I can hear music, horns, shouts, the accelerating rasp of two-cycle engines, the raucous calls of crows. It is the end of January, and the air vibrates with falling leaves.

Sandy paces in and out of the room, on and off the balcony. Even when his feet pause in a doorway, his hands are in motion. He and Cliff are talking about details—buttons and zippers, invitations and order sheets—but they don’t shy away from philosophy.

Instead of communicating status by brand or emblem, they want their clothes to generate an inner sense of confidence and composure. Although Cliff says “I just like the idea of wearable,” I can tell that his notion of wearable incorporates hints of subversion as well as comfort.

At first, Cliff and Sandy resisted the idea of a brand name at all. Just a piece of red thread would be enough, they thought.

Enough for art, perhaps, but not enough for sales. If you don’t give people a name, how can they ask for your clothes?

So now the collection has a name, although it still isn’t sewn onto a traditional label. Instead, the words have been hand-carved onto a polished oblong of bone, a hefty bauble designed to be cut loose after purchase.

Housekeeping

You might be wondering where I'm headed with this story. To tell the truth, I'm curious too. I went to Mumbai without assignment or outline, and I'm still looking for an opening, that first sentence on the journey to coherence.

If you'd like to read the posts in chronological order, begin on April 25.

If you'd rather read about fishing than fashion, try Scratching the Surface in Borneo, on the travel networking site matadortravel.com.

If you're a fan of Marilynne Robinson's 1981 novel, Housekeeping, then buy Gilead, winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

"They Are Best Dressed . . .

. . . whose dress no one observes." —Anthony Trollope


Before that week in Mumbai, the word fashion occupied the same page in my personal dictionary as trend, style, or celebrity. (A back page, unread.) My everyday attire hasn’t changed much since high school: buttoned-down shirts and straight-legged jeans. My father-in-law graciously shares the same sleeve length, collar size, and color preference. He wears the shirts until the cotton is sufficiently frayed and comfortable, then he presents them to me.

I know how lucky I am to be on the receiving end of this arrangement. I also know that I’m purposefully oversimplifying the extent of my wardrobe. In what no doubt constitutes a surfeit of good fortune, Cliff has given me some clothes too: suits by Gucci and Dior and Romeo Gigli. They fit well after some minor alterations and, when the occasion arises, I enjoy feeling appropriately dressed.

So there you have it: I am subject to that common desire for camouflage, the urge to blend in, a sparrow among sparrows, a crow amidst crows.

The Beginning of a Long Story

At the end of January, I fell asleep in the biggest city on the continent and awoke in the biggest city on the subcontinent. The miracle of the red-eye, as performed by Air India. The true populations of both Shanghai and Mumbai are hard to count, but it's not the figures that impress, or the rankings. Either place contains more than enough individuals to overwhelm all sense of proportion.

Although I know nothing about fashion, I went to Mumbai to watch two American designers prepare their collection for Paris. (More on that in posts to come.)

I also walked around a bit, sometimes with a destination in mind, sometimes without. The crowds in Mumbai seemed very different from those in Shanghai: more dense, more vivid, more intractable.

On a Sunday afternoon, the causeway to the Haji Ali shrine seethed with a relentless parade of humanity: babies with Kohl-rimmed eyes, frail men leaning on their middle-aged sons, black-veiled women, and women in bright scarves—saffron or pomegranate or lime—each new color turning your head like a greeting.




Built in 1431, the white-domed mosque occupies the rocky islet where Haji Ali distributed his worldly wealth to the poor. Or where he drowned on his way to Mecca. Or possibly where his casket washed ashore after drifting all the way from what is now Pakistan. I don't know the real story, but I do know that the causeway is submerged at high tide, and at the hour I visited, it was dry.

One group of maimed men had linked themselves together in a sort of collapsed circle. They chanted, faces pressed to the stone, stumps in the air, waving in unison like some ruined troupe of synchronized swimmers, bereft even of water.