A great place to enjoy the sunset from (updated)

Sedona is extraordinary. We arrived mid-afternoon, driving up from Phoenix, and saw the light play with form and volume and colour, with the road some way below us and the rocks, that hopeless, inadequate word, above. Down to our left, roadworks were in progress, and other kinds of building, which will almost certainly transform the place for the worse, but it will take an awful lot of spiritual merchandising and motels and whatever else takes place here to destroy the absolute indifference of the geography. Photographs don’t do it justice, and neither do words.

Between one butte and the next, we stopped at a place that sold all kinds of local, and not so local, artefacts: skulls, native American jewellery, odd cast iron sculptures, cowboy hats, signs like the ones in the photograph, postcards, roughly made vases from China. While I was looking for a present for my sister, Tyla asked if there was some place we could go to enjoy the sunset. The colours of Sedona – ochre, orange, red – are sunset colours. What we wanted was a place above the valley, with Margaritas and Corona beer and silence. The woman who ran the shop knew exactly where to send us.

Maybe it was because I hadn’t bought anything and her retailer’s instinct told her I wasn’t going to. Maybe she didn’t like us, or was innately wicked, or didn’t understand what two foreign men were doing with one American woman and thought we needed some mild sort of punishment, nothing too taxing or permanent, a warning for future memory. Maybe she had a dark, sardonic sense of humour. Maybe she had no taste, or aesthetic sense, at all.

We followed her directions and ended up at Sedona airport. We ordered our drinks and waited, staring across the car park, and the wire fence, and the air field, with its clutter of tiny private planes. What we’d imagined was the whole inhuman splendour of the landscape in the dying light of day. What we got was the homely squalor of a small commercial airport, appalling service, the smell of fuel.

PS Tyla has posted this message below: “Oh the memories….Cold coffee, warm beer, weak margarita. But it was all worth the sexy image of Giuseppe silhouetted against the chain link fence, dressed in black, deep drag on his cigarette. The barbed wire coil on the top of the fence only added to the James Dean renegade-like feel of the moment.”

I thought you’d like to see the image she mentions, so here it is.

Tengo famiglia

Three short updates on Italy. (Spot the link.)

1. Salvatore Ferranti, jailed for presumed association with the Mafia, has been granted house arrest because he’s just too fat for his cell. The bed won’t take his weight, the door’s too narrow for his 210 kilos (that’s 452 lbs), he’s had to be helped, day and night, by a guard assigned to assist with his physiological needs (don’t even think about it). According to the judges who made this decision, none of the local jails was able to guarantee the prisoner a level of treatment that would protect and respect his human dignity. It isn’t clear how much human dignity a grossly obese Mafioso actually has, but, as the Pope would say, these things aren’t quantifiable. The divine flame burns in everyone, including Ferranti, though clearly not regularly enough to consume a few thousand calories.
2. Eight years after being sentenced to spells of 24 years in jail, two Mafia bosses have been released. Why? Because the judge presiding at the trial hasn’t found time to write the motivation of the sentences, without which they become invalid. Edi Pinatto, the judge responsible, says he’s been very busy. In the meantime, the Mafiosi walk the streets of Gela, Sicily, where it’s business as usual.
   
3. Clemente Mastella, the man who shopped the Prodi government for a promised role in the new government, has been dumped by pretty much everyone. Berlusconi isn’t answering his calls, his party ‘colleagues’ are scattering like hungry rats from the wreck of the UDEUR to seek refuge with anyone who’ll offer them a place in the next parliament, his brother-in-law is calling him names. Basically, the trough in which he’s been happily guzzling for the past few decades has blown up in his face. All is not lost, of course; he’ll still get millions of euros simply for participating in the elections. Plus, if he’s lucky, one of those cushy EU jobs too often used to reward the faithful and console the faithless. Still, in a country and political culture in which impunity is the general rule, it’s nice to see someone suffer as a direct result of his acts.
   

Wholesale

This is one of those photographs that tourists in the States can’t help but take, a glut of colours and brash cultural references that flatter the observer’s eye while confirming distance, as though we lived in some other universe. The reason I took it though, honestly, is that I was intrigued by the yellow sign at the centre: the one labelled Canyon portraying a champagne glass with a stem like Japanese love beads. What caught my eye wasn’t so much the glass as the writing beneath. PACKAGE GOODS and DANCING. Does the place double as a freighting agency of some kind? Or is the link more organic? I’m thinking white slave trade here; I’m imagining innocent jivers suddenly encased in bubble wrap and destined to foreign parts. The Turquoise Tepee may be involved. I’m anxious. Can anyone help?

Slot machine

Is this really that famous – indeed, iconic – portrait by Margaret Cameron of Virginia Woolf? (Click on the photo for a closer look.) If it is, and I’m pretty sure it is, what on earth is she doing on a risqué slot machine in the Museé Mechanique on Fisherman’s Wharf?

I put in a quarter and saw what every married woman must not avoid. I wasn’t impressed. Neither would Virginia have been. She may even, though I can’t be sure, have avoided it.

Steve Jobby

I would love to be able to credit the creators of this romper suit (if that’s what they’re called; I suspect it isn’t), but all I can say is that it was seen in the window of a shop in North Beach, San Francisco, at an ungodly hour of the morning. The shop was closed.

(Just in case you can’t read the writing on the bit below – it says CHANGE ME.)

And no, I have nothing against Apple. Honestly. I was actually thrilled to be able to email from their store in Market St, SF. I had that frisson of belonging, without it costing me a cent.

Village police

This photograph doesn’t even begin to capture the extent to which these two policemen, photographed in Sausalito, looked like refugees from one of those films with titles like Cop Shack or Hole Patrol.

Maybe they were between shots.

Big Daddy

It’s a truism that everything in America is larger than anywhere else, even though, in two cases at least – pigeons and stock cubes – it’s clearly false. Still, anyone who’s familiar only with the modestly sized deodorants in European urinals will certainly be impressed by this sweetly-scented monster, occupying most of the porcelain bowl in the lavatory of the San Xavier mission outside Tucson and bearing its name with pride. Big Daddy.

Hmm. A reference to Cat on a Hot Tin Roof? (Why Brick…!) A gesture of affection towards the manufacturer’s father? A less than subtle reminder that, however much worldly power we may possess, at the moment of urination, heads bowed, exposed, we are children of that great Big Daddy in the sky? A joke?

Who knows.

More holiday snaps

As welcome relief from the excitement of publication, let’s get back to our US trip. Here’s where we stayed in Williams, Arizona. It’s the oldest motel in Williams, dating back to 1936, and possibly the cheapest. We paid $32 plus tax for a double room. Bob, a civil and widely-travelled man, was our host. Below is the view from outside, complete with snow. (Hours earlier, at Pane Bianco in Phoenix, it was too hot to eat in the sun.)

Oh yes, the motel wasn’t just in Williams. It was on Route 66. Route 66. You may need to be me to understand how potent this is. You may need to have been a pre-adolescent in a farmhouse in middle England in the 1960s to understand exactly what Route 66, where you get your kicks, might represent. You may need to have imitated Mick Jagger to the anxious approval of adults, who aren’t quite sure if approval is the appropriate response as you pout and preen and wave an imaginary maraca at the sofa and would rather be anywhere than where you are. I have a photograph to prove that I was actually there, all these years – and kicks – later. Here it is. Once again, in an entirely different context – Wow.

Fame – elixir of youth

As you can see from this photograph, being published has had an oddly rejuvenating effect on me.

Courtesy of Mistress Montagiste (you know who you are!)

P Day

Well, P Day came and went without fanfare. (P, in case you haven’t guessed, stands for publication. And if you don’t know of what you simply haven’t been following.) I had a heartening text from Jutta, who was just out to search for a copy in London – I hope she found one. I dropped into my mother’s local Waterstone’s and didn’t find a copy, nor even a copy on order, which gave me a chance to launch into my new self-promotional mode, a mixture of aggression and cheesiness that, worryingly, no longer makes my innards cringe. I pointed out that I was a local author, which is partly true (i.e. one weekend a month and whole years of my childhood). I reminded her of the Lichfield Prize and the fact that I was short-listed a few years ago. I mentioned that I was about to be recommended by Good Housekeeping, which impressed her. She promised me she’d look into it. So if you live in or near Wolverhampton, or indeed within reasonable distance of any branch of Waterstone’s in the Midlands – or anywhere else – you know what to do. Regard it as creative harassment. Pester for art. For the word. For me.

I then popped into the offices of the Express and Star, where I said much the same as I had in Waterstone’s, to greater immediate effect. I’m now waiting for a press photographer to capture me with a copy of the book in hand. He’s due in half an hour. I’m also going to be interviewed. The last time anyone in the family made the pages of the E&S was when my father celebrated his 100th birthday, when the article contained three factual errors, so I’d better be careful what I say…