At Cafe Trieste I was introduced to Gunther, writer and map designer. Gunther knew all the cities and towns in the United States and pretty much everywhere in the world. My friend Steve and I tested him on a few and he was ready with an answer down to the proximity of the towns next to their major cities.
Every year around my birthday my partner Dore would renew the activity of finding me a map of the world. I had requested it as a birthday present many years ago. We had looked in map stores and travel stores a few years back. This year we looked on line but the world map that we are looking for still has not been born yet.
We are looking for a map that has Kyzyl, the capital city of the Tuva Republic, Russia. Kyzyl is important to us because of our friend Paul Pena, the blind bluesman in the film Genghis Blues, who learned overtone singing by listening to the short wave radio, traveled to Tuva and participated in their throat singing competition. So far, Kyzyl does not appear in any map of the world.
I was going to ask Gunther why Kyzyl is not included in the maps, but our conversation switched to Richard Feynman, the physicist and musician who had schemed to visit Kyzyl during the last years of his life. We went on to Oppenheimer and Einstein, the geniuses who were both scientists and artists, and didn’t look back.
