caravan – Page 2 – somebody else's paradise

porch 3

… sahar just arrived and what a joy and in between brackets the public transportation from santa cruz to san jose airport and back a bus a tram a shuttle worked like a well-oiled machine so now nobody will believe my stories about public transport here and sahar brought two big bags of the very best bagels from new york and pig and buffulo just love each other so much and we laugh a lot and i told sahar some cynthia stories on the bus just that she would not be too shocked and in between brackets sahar asked me on the bus if people in santa cruz are into spirituality and that made me laugh a lot and sahar’s arrival to the house is an immediate initiation to santa cruz life as we take a hot tub and at some point mihui needs to go for acupuncture and giulia, marÃa and i have our michael massage appointments today and leta needs to do stuff for her clinic integrating eastern and western medicine and everybody takes lots of time to hang in the kitchen and talk talk talk and susan doesn’t look like your typical professor and there are more dogs in santa cruz than people and the attic room like you read in novels makes sahar happy…

goodbye berna

oh this makes me so sad. after Feza now also Berna is leaving.
santa cruz will be even more empty. there really aren’t many
people in this place i feel a deeper connection with.
i will miss these new friends tremendously.
a party at Berna’s place, with “good luck Berna” cake and all,
and a collective salsa dancing session.

This morning there was a the service for the Chanchellor, some people at the party attended. Speeches emphazising the good work that the Chanchellor had started, mainly her program for diversity, without however disguising that it didn’t went all that far. Especially Angela Davis’ words seemed to have been impressive. more here

porch 2

ed arrivata…

bellacasa

oh, marÃa moved in today. and didier.
and berna (only for this weekend though,
she’ll need some more convincing, so darling when you read this,
i won’t repeat what i’ve been saying, you know,…).
our house is so beautiful these days.

porch 1

breakfast on our porch

queens of the desert

Got back from Washington (with a sleepy zombie head, but so many stories waiting to be shared…) just in time to catch the girls in Santa Cruz, before they embark on their Californian On the Road journey, which Maria and i, if our brilliant meeting up plan works out, will join at some point next week. Necessary shopping for all one needs to confront deserts and bears and (cold! rainy!) Californian nights in fragile light tents… You might get the impression that we got stuck in Santa Cruz second hand clothes shops, but you should not underestimate how wigs and accessoires might be of good use in the desert, the forest, or Las Vegas and L.A. Do you recognise any of these women? (A hint: all their names start with the same letter…) They are merely the warming-up show for the great metamorphosis of the absent one on these two snapshots, a metamorphosis in need of full exposure one of these days…

feminist mafias

Quelle bonheur hier soir, sheer happiness, the dinner with our new friends Berna and Feza. He’s a maths professor at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, she’s a graduate student in Sociology at UC Santa Cruz writing her dissertation on Nurcu (in Turkey). Good food and good music (Kardes Turkuler, Aynur, Crossing the Brigde…) and much more to share, including the feeling (at least for three of us, pauvre Maria…) of not “earthing” (a literal translation of the beautiful flemish expression “aarden”) in this place. The way the public sphere is done (or rather not done, undone, broken, eaten away…), the reign of individualism… A grand theory in the making: it’s all the fault of protestantism (remember how they are to blame for capitalism as well?). And by coincidence this slightly crude and perhaps not totally fair hypothesis maps precisely on the fault-line between the places where i’ve managed to make homes thus far and where not… Oh well, what a relief to laugh it all away in good company. Which holds the promise of another kind of home, with a shared laughing away of what makes a space so difficult to inhabit.

All of this embedded in another coincidence which isn’t one. The Connections, la famille, la Cosa Nostra – feminist style. Berna found the beautiful house near the ocean through meeting Bettina in Santa Cruz and realising that they had been together at IFU. In the information project area, meaning we had some friends in common (Isabel, Seda,… ). Soon after that we elaborated on the Amargi connection (Pinar, Yesim,… ). Then came the NOISE summerschool connection (Meyda…). Feminist mafias of some kind. To new friendships and old connections.