Elena Hiatt Houlihan
© 12/2005
Backstory:
As a mixed-media artist with a studio in Pittsburgh, I have lived my life creatively for the past 20 years, designing sculpture for public places, exhibiting, and conducting Artist-in-Residency projects. Fascinating, but financially tenuous, my lifestyle concerns those who care about me. In December of 2004, I was advised that despite my hard work, for me to keep believing that I could support myself as an artist was “simply unrealistic.” Once again I was urged to “get a real job.” After absorbing this, I decided that if my life was unrealistic, there must be other people in the world also creating unique lifestyles outside the 9-5 “system,” and my book concept was born. Instead of moving toward security, I went further out on a limb. In fact, I’m hanging by my fingernails onto the end of the branch, but oh, what a view!
In February I interviewed Daniela & Armando, Argentinians now living in New Jersey, who dance and teach tango all over the world. Additional interviews include Eddy L. Harris, a Blackamerican writer, known for his solo canoe trip down the Mississippi River, but now based in Paris, and Rhoda Lurie, who has traveled to 60 countries while importing exotic artifacts. I spent August on the West Coast collecting more stories, then began planning a trip to Europe to continue work on my book.
Unrealistically, my current travels and research are being funded by private grants.
Periodically, heightened anxiety intrudes on the excitement of discovering and recording these unique lives. My artistic budget will cover travel, but how can I pay hotel bills from November through March? Miraculously, people in various parts of France have lent me their apartments, temporarily empty because serendipity or bizarre coincidences have delayed tenants or the appearance of guests. The puzzle of my agenda has been filled in by the order of these vacancies, which is why after 16 days in Paris, I am now writing this on a balcony overlooking the Mediterranean on the Cote d’Azur.
An Unrealistic Life: Notes from the Wandering Artist
Chapter One: London
After a great rush of hectic activity in the fall, I left Pittsburgh for the next stage of travel to collect interviews for my book, An Unrealistic Life. Some people nonchalantly toss a few things in a bag and walk out the door. I become compulsively consumed with attending to every detail. Besides storing clothes and ridding my studio of artistic clutter, I managed to prune raspberries and plant lily bulbs sent from my grandfather’s farm, not to mention finding the cheapest flights, and organizing ways to pay my bills for the four and a half months I will be gone. On October 29th, I turned over my house to my young tenant who will intern at the University of Pittsburgh for several months, and headed for Indianapolis to visit my family before flying to London on November 8.
It was a sunny week of golden leaves and ripe persimmons in Indiana, perfect for a family gathering. We held babies, told stories, and had bounteous dinners of curried chicken and cherry cobbler, savoring each other’s company since we would not all be together for the holidays. My departure was made more poignant when my dad, now 92, remarked “I hope I’ll still be around when your book comes out.”
I said, “I hope so, too, Dad, since you promised to buy one!”
“I’ll work on it one day at a time,” he said. And off I flew.
~
Always on the lookout for interesting characters, especially if they fit my criteria for the book, I met my first one on the plane. Trevor, an intelligently cocky young black who lives outside London and has property in Miami, described his businesses: a cell phone operation, mail services, and a new venture which will import minerals from Africa. He was obviously well off, and showed off his purchase of $100 cognac in its artistic bottle. Since my book focuses on people who live unique lives doing what they love outside the system, I perked up when I heard that he had become an entrepreneur at an early age, knowing that a regular job would stifle him. Intrigued, I asked for more details about his mail services, because my brother Tom’s venture capital fund had backed a small packaging business in the Midwest.
At that point, he and his companion, a buxom brunette in a white mini-skirt, totally cracked up. They nearly rolled out of their seats laughing, a difficult feat on an airplane. Turned out his “male services” consisted of providing beautiful women as companions for lonely men!
You know I wanted to ask him more questions, but I bit my tongue.
Once in London, I maneuvered my suitcase and rolling backpack (my mini-office on the road) up from the train station and around a few too many blocks to the hotel. London streets are also called squares, mews, and lanes. Every few blocks a sign indicates that another village or neighborhood is beginning and sometimes the street name changes too, even though it’s still the same street. In my benumbed traveler’s state, I was totally confused. I probably walked eight blocks when I only had to walk three. Once checked in, I wandered the neighborhood searching for an internet café, and then lunched on flavorless quiche and limp lettuce with a blob of mayo. Of course I got turned around returning to my hotel, but was guided back by a friendly Syrian who turned out to be a private taxi driver, in hopes of new business.
(Here I insert a photo of Norfolk Square, where my hotel, the Norfolk Plaza is located. It’s the texture of European architecture that constantly intrigues me.)
After all this I was thinking of the folks back home who enviously hunger for the adventure of my life, and I thought, ”This is not adventure!” But then I slept for an hour, and hustled through several tube lines from Paddington to Tottenham Court to meet Beina under the marquee of the Queens Theater, and my spirit perked up.
Beina Xu, 19, is my nephew Brady’s girlfriend, studying journalism in London on an NYU program. I had met her last Thanksgiving, and wanted to catch up on her international travels. On the phone, Beina and I had mutually panned English food, totally in sync about our distaste for bland mayonnaise-covered salads, so we headed for a Thai restaurant. Ambling through something-or-other square, we never found the restaurant she had researched. Instead we were beseeched to partake of several Thai/Asian buffets, colorfully tempting, but how long had that food been sitting there? We were headed toward Chinatown when we paused by an elaborately carved door, and peered into a Moroccan restaurant, adorned with antique carved wood, cast brass birds and pillowed benches. On entering Maison Touaregue, we felt instantly welcomed in what seemed like another country. Wall sconces cast patterned shadows onto the ceiling. Tiled tables held multipatterned blue, white and yellow dishes. Candlelight flickered. A feast for the senses, and the food hadn’t even arrived!
The owner hovered, as we chose mujadara, pastillah, couscous, and mint tea. The mujadara came as a puree to be eaten with bread, not as the lentils and bulgar with caramelized onion that I had tasted in Pittsburgh. But we liked it anyway. Pastillah, sometimes called pistallah, with its crispy layers of phyllo enclosing tender chicken, cinnamon and almonds is a dish I have only tasted three times in my life. This version was superb, and our mutual appreciation of its subtle flavors approached reverence. When Beina closed her eyes and asked if she could meditate on the taste for a moment, I asked if we were related. The couscous with its occasional raisins, and caramelized onions was slightly sweet and a great contrast to the surprisingly peppery olives. As for the mint tea, served in a juice glass and sweetened with honey, one sip, and I was transported back to my student days in Paris where I had first tasted Tunisian food.
Over this exotic combination, which also included cucumber slices dusted with cinnamon, our conversation ranged from her birth in China to my adventures writing the book. We discovered a mutual adoration of shoes, travel and the stories of peoples’ lives.
It was exhilarating conversing with this striking beauty, her silken black hair contrasting with opalescent skin, who was named for her father’s favorite places: Beijing and Louisiana, where he once taught at Tulane. Fluent in Chinese, she worked one summer for a newspaper in Shanghai, and has already won prizes for her journalistic talents. She is one of (to borrow my brother Tom’s book title) The Young Internationals, or what I would call The New Nomads, young people who have traveled so freely that they feel at home anywhere, and see no lure in a house in the suburbs, or even a permanent location.
Though her father originally hoped she would pursue a career in business and finance, he has now realized that her true love is journalism. His own story reminds me of the film Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, which I was fortunate enough to see at the Pittsburgh Film Festival. Banished to a remote village as a student during the Cultural Revolution, her father raised himself to the position of a renowned economist by saving every penny, and of course, wants financial security for his daughter. (As my family does for me, I might add!) An internship at a Wall Street firm this summer only crystallized Beina’s desire to write about China, especially after she visited the village where her father was exiled for 3 years. She slept on a brick bed in a cave-like dwelling carved into the hillside and picked tomatoes with the villagers. This lovely girl who, along with Brady, could step instantly into a Benetton or Abercrombie and Fitch ad, who has had a privileged private education at Exeter and traveled to places like Goa, India for spring break, attempted carrying water with the twin buckets suspended on a pole in this remote village. She was forever moved by the green purity of the mountains, and her father’s experience there. I picture Beina as being both bridge and translator between Eastern and Western cultures, and I look forward to what she will write as she moves effortlessly between them.
~
After only sporadic sleep for 36 hours, exhaustion struck. Despite sleeping until 2 PM on Thursday, I woke feeling like my eyes had been stitched shut, but I had to learn more about my new digital camera. My long-awaited interview with Angela Fisher and Carol Beckwith, whose work has appeared in National Geographic, as well as in numerous coffee table books, was in a few hours. How humiliating it would be if I bungled my photos of them!
In a near panic, I called my photographic expert, Terry Lester, to get his advice. The camera has so many possibilities and menus that are encoded in minute letters, that despite shooting about 20 good shots in Indianapolis, I had no idea what I was doing. Terry was out tramping around, taking pictures in his piece of the Maine woods and had to be summoned by his assistant, who gulped when he heard I was calling from London. Over the phone, Terry patiently instructed me in how to shoot RAW, so I captured all the megapixels, and made sure I knew which icon meant I was trusting the camera to choose the settings. (It was P for Program. Who knew?) I had studied the instruction book a bit Wednesday while having lunch, but frankly forgot about it in my sleep-deprived state.
While I was on the phone with Terry, Carol Beckwith called. I then discovered that Angela had a serious eye infection and had an emergency doctor’s appointment, so the interview was postponed till Friday morning. Oh, please don’t cancel the interview, I prayed. It took 6 months of correspondence to coordinate our schedules, and I flew to London especially for this. I knew time was critical because they were leaving for Kenya on Sunday.
Having dressed and not wanting all that primping to go to waste, I left a message for Dr. Adrian Ness, whom I had met in the lobby before my dinner with Beina. Adrian looks like a cross between a Jewish rabbi, and a diminutive Santa Claus, with the mischievous appetites of the Greek god, Pan. He has silver hair and a long full, almost grizzled beard. He is quite short with a belly from eating too much Middle-Eastern food. In yet another nearly surreal connection, after hearing that I was from Pittsburgh, he said that he had previously lived north of there in a small town called Sharon. Sharon, Pennsylvania?! The place I lived for, what, 20 years? This doctor in the hotel lobby in London used to live in Sharon? Yes, it turned out that he had worked for Protected Life Insurance Company, across the bridge from my former studio.
Adrian and I walked up to his favorite Arabic restaurant, Rotana, where I had lamb shish kebab, tabouli, and hummus, preceded by a pizza-type construction of onions, a bit of tomato and mysterious spices on thin, crispy pita. It was marvelous. Adrian spiced up the dinner with stories of his escapades. He has eleven children and has been married ten times! (Did I say Pan? Surely it’s Don Juan he reminds me of!) Despite his early escapades, he has been married to the same woman for 45 years, so he’s either several hundred years old, or his first nine marriages only lasted a few months each. How did he and Elizabeth Taylor miss each other?
~
Friday morning, I headed out to Carol and Angela’s in Belsize Park. Though the outside of the house is purely English with its neat white walls and climbing ivy, the inside is adorned with artifacts from their thirty years in Africa. Handwoven fabrics cover pillows, and curtain off work areas, small sculptures and beadworks fill alcoves, inlaid chests exude mystery.
As I sat at their table with a cup of tea, they each told me how they had come to work in Africa. After art school in Boston, Carol won a traveling fellowship to study painting in Japan, then went to Mount Hagen in New Guinea for a gathering of 90,000 tribesmen, where she was struck by the artistry of their costumes and customs. This was art integrated with life, not enshrined in a museum. Angela, who grew up in Australia, made jewelry from an early age, but was encouraged to major in social work by her mother. She too went to New Guinea on an internship where she helped establish a school, then returned to Australia where she worked with aboriginines and other ethnic groups. Frustrated with social work, she took off for Africa when she was 21 and didn’t go home for seventeen years. Both evolved separately, but each fell in love with the Masai and the Serengheti, which was still untouched by “civilization” in the late 70’s. As I listened to Carol tell how she lived with the Masai for two years while photographing them for a book, and Angela explaining how she began by collecting tribal jewelry, which resulted in her first book, Africa Adorned, my mind reeled with the knowledge that some people just do more on this planet than others. They each published a major book while still in their twenties, and within a week of meeting, introduced by Angela’s brother, they shared a dream of recording tribal ceremonies and wisdom before it is lost to the modern world. It is a passionate mission from which they have never wavered. As a team, they have since traveled 270,000 miles, written 10 books, produced films, and had numerous photographic exhibitions on the tribal life of over 150 cultures in 36 countries. One time while waiting to photograph a festival, they lived with the Wodaabe for six weeks, drinking only milk for nourishment. Nothing else was available, except for a tiny packet of French mustard Angela had saved from an airplane. They hoarded this and shared tastes occasionally, seeking a contrast from the blandness of milk. And I, a traveling wimp by comparison, was miffed about not finding my hotel, when in her early twenties, Angela had driven across country so rough that the door handles of the car vibrated off.
I had the strange sensation that my own book was being stretched into a different shape by their stories. These remarkable women cannot be contained in a brief chapter. I had only heard the beginning when our time was up. They had an editing session for a film they were finishing. We will continue in March, after they return from Kenya and before I fly to the States. We have agreed that I should photograph them in Africa. My heart beats faster at the prospect.
~
After the intensity of the interview, I felt a bit untethered in London, uninterested in the usual tourist sights. I dressed and went off to dance tango that night, only to discover that the tango club was closed. In the interim, Adrian continued to entertain me and his business partner, Armando, with stories about his previous life as a general, his study of ballet in Spain with a Russian ballerina, and his wife (Number 2, I think) and daughters in Japan. All this in a rolling tenor voice with a melodic Spanish accent. One night Adrian revealed a previous operatic career by singing several arias in the hotel bar. A few guests clustered in the lobby to listen. I have this on tape, so I know I didn’t imagine it. Of course, deprived of tango, I had to dance a few steps of flamenco to relieve tension.
Because he and Armando had been in London for four months raising money for charitable foundations, they knew where to eat, and introduced me to Riyath, a popular Indian restaurant, where I had Passanda Lamb, special fried rice, and a sweet Indian bread, like chapattis with a mysterious paste inside. The Passanda Lamb came in a creamy sauce of coconut milk and curry which was so good that to leave a drop would have been a sin. The lamb was not as tender as the shish kebab I had eaten at Rotana, but on another evening I ordered Passanda Chicken, which was superb. Previously Indian food had been my least favorite, but these meals converted me.
~
On Saturday, I wandered through Portobello Street, famous since the Sixties for mod clothing. Now the site of a long market, it was a great opportunity for photography, and I was as intrigued by the street performers as the items for sale. I have little trouble resisting the baubles in the stalls, because my mission is to acquire experience, not possessions; and anyway, my suitcase won’t hold one more thing. But the collectors among you might have been sucked in by the antique English silver, Chinese jade, old watches, and beads from many countries.
LIVING STATUE TAKES A BREAK, PORTOBELLO STREET, LONDON
BANGLES, BAUBLES & BEADS: PORTOBELLO MARKET
One of the more fascinating sights was a small coffee shop and bakery which offered Real American Desserts. The shop was crowded with people consuming iced chocolate cupcakes in frilled paper cups and snickerdoodles that could have come from Kansas. I was stunned that the pecan pie went for about $7 a slice. Mom, I told you to raise your prices when you take your pies to the church bazaar!
Toward 6 o’clock, on Carol and Angela’s recommendation, I headed for Tribal Gathering, a gallery of African art owned by Behroux Behnejad, their longtime friend. Once again, I was immersed in African carvings, masks, and pottery. Angela and Carol frequently visit on a Saturday evening, and I had hopes of another encounter. They could not interrupt their packing to come, but Behroux, another guest and I chatted while I admired his collection. Before my departure, he gave me a 300 year old red glass bead on a slender leather cord, an amulet for my journey. He too was headed for Africa on a buying trip, so we will all reunite in the spring.
~
My last day in London was “artful.” I sashayed off to see the Saatchi Collection, famous for its contemporary art; but alas, after walking through the cold and damp, I learned that it had been moved. By chance, I discovered an exhibit at the Hayward Gallery that meshes with my current theme: Universal Experience: Art, Life and the Tourist’s Eye. My photographic montages of Southeast Asia would have fit right in, but obviously the organizers have never heard of the wandering artist from Pennsylvania. The huge exhibit included a complex installation on the war in Iraq, unflattering videos of Europeans haggling over the price of masks with tribespeople in New Guinea, and a series of photographs depicting the German fascination with Native Americans. Some of them have created elaborate chief costumes which they wear while encamping in imitation Indian villages. It’s not unlike those Americans who dress up for Renaissance Faires, but it’s certainly odd to see long blonde braids worn with beads and fringe.
Outdoors, London was getting gray and cold. Time to go to Paris.
Details:
To eat well on a budget in London, head for ethnic restaurants. Marlena Spieler, food writer par excellence, whom I began corresponding with while there, recommends Sofra, a Turkish restaurant, and Vietnamese pho, to be found on Liverpool Street. I never got there, but it’s on my list.
Maison Touaregue
23-24 Greek Street
London WID 4DZ
020 7439 1063
(walkable from Tottenham Court tube stop)
Rotana
11 Sale Place
London W2 1PX
020 7706 0022
(walkable from Paddington Station)
Ryath Tandoori Restaurant
32 Norfolk Place
Paddington, London W2 1QH
(walkable from Paddington Station)
Terry Lester’s work can be seen in his book, Maine: The Seasons, and at
www..tlesterphotography.com/
For photos and books by Carol Beckwith and Angela Fisher, go to
www.africanceremonies.com
Tribal Gathering
1 Westbourne Grove Mews
Notting Hill
London W11 2RU
Tel: 020 7221 6650
www.tribalgatheringlondon.com
