Jia Lin’s Weblog

Lost in Santa Cruz

I love watching �curb your enthusiasm�. Life is filled with so many embarrassing moments, and you are guilty of innocent crime any moment. One of the biggest embarrassments, I find, is the �emperor�s gown�. We are forced to follow some inexplicable social norms and fashions, so we don�t look stupid. In one of the episodes, David Larry was dragged by his wife to beach front to spend the day. He was so reluctant and said �I feel anxious here because I don�t know what people are enjoying�. Well, this blog is not about the TV show; what David Larry said is just how I felt about Santa Cruz, though I do enjoy a walk on beach most of times.

The hotel for the weekend was sold out at some insanely high rate. The price we paid for this small inn can buy any a 4-star hotel in any big city, but the quality is outrageous poor (what about ragged and ropey blanket for $170 a night, and NO air conditioner). We assume the place outside hotel must be somewhere like heaven to level this price. Then we got really anxious when we drove around the little town looking for miracles. It was colder than LA�s winter, literally. Cliffy beach has tall pine-trees with long-reaching boughs. It is quite picturesque and has much more natural appeal than Santa Monica, but not as good as 17-mile drive at Monterey. Cloud was so thick at dawn that not only view of sunset on sea is not possible but the falling sun can not even paint a slight color on the clouds. That�s a big turnoff to us the sunset chasers. Bin joked that the hotel room here is like real estate in Los Angeles-any crappy room can be a hot buy because everyone buys for the fear of losing something big. And who knows what that �thing� is.

We are told by a local student (who looke hurt when we said, mistaking her as a conference attendee, we felt the city was overrated) that Santa Cruz is a city with natural wonder and steer of commercial vain. And we were told by the others that this city is like a home or resort for high brows in Silicon Valley. For those who hate the idea of home in San Jose and who are very rich, they buy a home here. For those who hate the idea of home in San Jose and who are not that rich, they come here for weekends as gateway from that hideous place(actually, we have felt hotels in San Jose are always best deals and incredibly comfortable). Santa Cruz is said to be a great place to get outdoorsy if you are outdoorsy type and good at those expensive recreations (golf, surfing�). When you get here, hopefully, you are automatically a member of the Yippie club who tried to escape from the hectic city life and stressful jobs with handsome pay. If you get that feeling, you get it and you will not feel Larry David�s anxiety, I guess.

UC Santa Cruz is hidden deep in the mountain. They say campus buildings are not allowed to be seen from the city; so when you drive onto the out ring of campus you see, on the one side, giant grassy plains with a couple of cows wandering and on the other side, a magnificent view of the town by the sea. When you drive really deep inside, you start to spot small industrialized-style architectures sitted in the woods. Behind the engineering building, there is a warning sign detailing tips about how to react when encountering violent animal such as lion: like raise your hands and make yourself look bigger and taller, or fight bravely. Certainly it is a very special campus.

From Seattle, with love

First, I do not travel as much as it appears in my blog. But, I just came back from Seattle. That�s the second time, and Seattle has never been overcast or gloomy to me. In the contrary, it�s been sunny, green and sweet-aired both times I was there. I stayed by the Lake Union this time. Daylight is so long at this time of the year. We sat in a sushi restaurant by the waterfront about 8:30 in the evening, and just in time to catch the sunset and its flowing colors on the water, very nice.

Downtown Seattle is warmly chic instead of threateningly cosmopolitan. White people is very white (compared to tanned Californian), yellow is not very yellow and black is not very black. I got a bottle of �water for peace� from a street vendor and its label instructs how to send a message in a bottle to White House. Later I took a bus to Capitol Hill and see a lot of coffee houses with people reading in front, a lot of colorful hair and a lot of men holding hands.

Public transportation is not the most convenient one, but luckily I got friendly locals for help. Just coming back NYC where everyone looks busy and focused, I was flattered when not only one people come up to offer help when I stood dazed at the middle of the road. While you are ordered to get out of bus for short of a dime in LA, the Seattle driver only wanted to accept one dollar even you paid him two. Both town car drivers (I should say graceful gentlemen) that drove us from and to the airport are both emigrating Seattle from the Northeast, and they talked like Seattle ambassadors, even to us two Californians who they say are responsible for the rising house price in Seattle these two years. Is it just me that feel the security check in Seattle is the friendliest and most thorough, however, consequently, the slowest one, among all these big cities? Well, being slow is better than being perfunctory and inhuman, I guess.

I love New York in spring

I had been to NYC 4 times before I moved to LA, none of the trips was as good as the one I took last week to attend ICA. I�m lucky to wrap up my presentations on the first two days, and I was a free bird for the rest of days . The weather is the best of the year. After long rainy and cloudy season, sunshine and breeze came back to town.I walked around the town and felt very reluctant to go underground for subway. I just discover the joy of traveling alone: no need to compromise to group interests and wait long line for those landmark sites, and I can take as much time as I liked in museums.

The trip is pretty much about museums, and it kindles my interests at modern art. My knowledge on fine arts had never gone over 1910, and most stayed in renaissance, impressionism, no more than cubism. I never knew it is so much fun in paintings from 20th-century avant-gardes such as Magritte, Munch, Klimt, Rousseau but I have not grown enough insight to appreciate Kandinsky and Pollock. I was very much captivated by Marc Chagall�s work, they are so imaginative and rich, with all the floating and upside downs that I can relate to my own dream scenarios. Hopper is another painter that I just knew and liked very much, and to my surprise, he is an American and had only one wife for 50 years. I like the way he conceived and portrayed America, silent and often static at an unexpected moment, leaving much space for imagination and speculations. Some of his painting reminds me a lot about Hitchcock�s movies, but with colors. I guess both Hopper and Chagall enthrall me for their abundant innuendos to Freudian notions that have universal appeal. Frick Collection is the only place I visited with classical works. A splendid Athenian white mansion facing east side of the Central park, with hundreds of paintings ranging from medieval age to Monet (only a few impressionisms, and no further), Frick has fiber collections than any museum I�ve seem in Los Angeles, including LACMA. There are Ingre�s Countess d�Haussonville, Vermeer’s Mistress and Maid, a whole bunch of Gainsborough, and a Rembrandt�s self-portrait. My personal favorite in Frick is Bellini�s St. Francis in the desert. The color, the scene and the gesture feel so theatrically transcendental. MOMA is just great great place that I will go back again and again, I believe. Sitting in the middle of the midtown skyscrapers, the building has the huge glass window all around through which visitors get magnificent views of the urban landscape. MOMA has wonderful collections of cubism, surrealism, expressionism, abstracim, so do Guggenheim and Whitney. Before my plane took off, I rushed to Pier 54 by the Hudson River for the �Ash and Snow� photo exhibit. Thanks to the almighty NYC metro, I was able to see these stunning pictures, hung in a intentionally-made crude and ragged hall enclosed by hundreds of shipping boxes, at the last moment of my stay.

After my last presentation in the Sheridan at Midtown, I walked two streets downto the half-price ticket stands at Time Square trying to get a ticket to see Monty Python�s Spamalot. It�s sold out, so I went to see Dirty Rotten Scoundrels instead. Not bad, very hilarious. Using pop culture to mock pop culture, the show feels like a good sitcom, a smooth slapstick with nice music numbers. The next day is the Memorial day, I went to St. Johns Cathedral to see a concert featuring Tchaikovsky and Korsakov. I was stunned by the sound of symphony reverberant in the huge church, totally surreal. No wonder early music were only dedicated to God.

East village is a new-found treasures in NYC. A lot like Adams� Morgan at DC, the village demonstrates wider variety on cuisines. My friend, Chi, works for a Peruvian client recently; so we went to a Peruvian restaurant at the corner of 2nd Ave. and 7th street. Tried Ceviche for the first time, even better than sashimi. We also had a lovely outdoor brunch at Caf� st. Bart�s by Saint Bartholomew�s dome. A trip to NYC without going to Chinatown sounds incomplete, but the city is definitely has much more to explore.