Dennis Hollingsworth

A Toast for Zagunis

I love fencing. I fenced before (I bought my first gear in Singapore when I was a kid sailor), during and after college... but I can't claim any great skills here any more than an ocassional tennis player can fluff up over Wimbledon. But a tip of the hat is in order for this daughter of Olympians who trained for her Gold medal from the crib and came into Athens at the last minute to surge to the top.

Zagunis makes fencing history with sabre gold By Ted Brock, NBCOlympics.com

ATHENS -- American fencer Mariel Zagunis defeated China's Tan Xue 15-9 for the gold medal in women's individual sabre Tuesday evening at the Helliniko Olympic Complex.

Zagunis will go down as the first gold medalist in the history of Olympic women's individual sabre, which made its debut in these Games.

Tuesday marked the first time the U.S. has won a medal in the 80-year history of Olympic women's fencing. Sada Jacobson's 15-7 bronze medal victory over Catalina Gheorghitoaia of Romania preceded Zagunis' gold and made the achievement that much sweeter...

Isler and Isler

Yesterday, the paintings were shipped off to Zürich early in the morning. The once packed studio is empty and as usual I have mixed feelings. Happy to have the studio for new work, apprehensive that others may not see what I saw when I finished the paintings. Normal.

Sorry to not have captured Marcel's visage in this pic. He's the co-owner of Isler and Isler, brothers who started their own company after many years of working too many hours for nothing in the biggest art handling company in Zürich. He's very amiable. Although wired. At the time of this shot (Wednesday morning), Marcel has had no sleep since Monday. I offer him coffee but no, he's been eating caffine pills for days. Very humid, we sweat, dripping beads onto the crates. He and his brother are swamped with work, good news. Zürich will be having many openings soon, a frenzy, my show will be in the middle of it. (A butterfly flutters its' wings in my gut.) Marcel will deadhead to Switzerland with the work.

Ten paintings, five traveling crates built like fine furniture. Marcel parked illegally nearby, asking the policeman along the way if it's ok to leave the van there whilst we load it. The van was new, and the interior was outfitted perfectly for handling art, it looked like an ambulance.

Señor Policia wasn't happy about the answer, begrudging. Marcel smiles to me on the way back: "In Spain fifteen minutes means an hour." I wince at the stereotype, wanting to remind him that this is Catalonia. But I figure he knows Europe better than I.

An hour and a half later, we finish securing the paintings into the crates, double screwing them, a good job. We do this in the ground floor, hauling the paintings from the studio above. I begin to feel good about it. We load up the dollies and hail the crates to the van... where the policeman has his tow guy there, affixing the yellow boot onto the front wheel. Castelleno ensues, Marcel speaks well. Shrugs, apologies, reassurances. A fine. I am barely hanging on, understanding what's going on. Marcel pulls out his wallet and out pops a crisp 500 Euro note. My eyes widen. No, the fine is less (I wonder if the police wants a bribe?) and Marcel looks for a ready teller, he needs change. Antsy minutes pass and Marcel finds his hundred dollar notes and the policeman is getting uncomfortable. It wasn't two hundred Euro fine, it was twenty two. The policeman was cool, he didn't want the appearance of graft. Marcel, flush with relief, begins to plan for a two hundred Euro drinking party once he returns home.

I hope he makes it back ok.

UnderWater

I wish I had a digital underwater camera to show you all the amazing sights off the coast. Not many people from Tossa partake of the submariner experience here. There are many scuba divers, some tourist snorkelers... but not many locals don the mask and fins. Why? I haven't the slightest.

But the water here is fabulous. Imagine a kid's idea of the perfect aquarium: fishes in schools of several types (sardines, and flat reef fishes, and angel fish kind of silouettes and many others beyond my ability to describe) and rocks and undersea hillsides studded with shellfish (mussels for one) and sea urchins tucked into crevices with the litter of shellfish carapaces they somehow break apart and little reef fish who guard their territory jealously with tails curled up defiantly, and sea grasses and algea and little fans and sponges and the ocassional octopus deep inside rocky grottos, eyes blinking.

I would kick down, equalizing the sinus pressure four or five times as I reached the bottom, as deep as I can stand, the pressure smashing the mask to my face. I would upright myself on the bottom and try to hang out as long possible, like a hardhat diver dan ornament in a kids aquarium, in what looked like thirty feet or so of water, the hillside of the Costa Brava to oneside, the wall of immense blue (words fail now) of the Mediterranean to the other. And the fish were all around in schools, hundreds of them maybe thousands, many types beyond my ability to catalog, small as your fingers as large as two palms, not travelling anywhere but just floating, hanging out, suspended in the briney blue matrix, cerulean blue, emerald hue, aquamarine glowing lens of the sea.