THE SHOW SO FAR

Dachau (picture taken 1983)

Guantanamo (via BBC)

Sir Ian McKellen recently gave an absolutely endearing interview on the BBC’s HardTalk, in which, in addition to discussing his role as the Lord of the Ring’s Gandalf, he spoke extensively about his activism for gay rights. Says McKellen:

“The world is a much more interesting place than fundamentalists allow it to be (and) The President of the United States is inexperienced in this way. It hurts me to imagine that the constitution of this great country thinks it’s unsuitable for me to have a relationship that is on par with that of Mr. and Mrs. Bush.”

Now there’s a wizard I can believe in!

One the most intriguing parts of the LOR trilogy was Gandalf’s transformation from Gandalf the Grey into Gandalf the White, after having plummeted to a flaming abyss in a mortal struggle with the Balrog, in the Mines of Moria. According to Wikipedia’s entry on Gandalf: the change of color is significant, for he has come to replace the corrupted Saruman as the chief of the Wizards. In a sense he has become Saruman, or rather what Saruman should have been.
In his transformation to whiteness and thereby to a higher level of wizardry , Gandalf exhibits a kind of protean quality; a fluidity of personality which quite often exists even in mere mortals. Proteanism is about self-reinvention as an adaptation to changing conditions. The psychohistorian Robert Jay Lifton explores this phenomenon in his 1993 book, The Protean Self- Human Resilience in an Age of Fragmentation The book is a relatively uplifting work which presents a number of case studies of people who have completely reinvented themselves as a response to changing parameters in their lives. But there is a dark side to this and Lifton is perhaps one of the world’s foremost authorities on the nature of intrinsic evil. I first ran into Lifton’s work several years ago when I got a job skimming through his archive of research notes and correspondences at the New York Public Library. I was developing background for a Japanese television documentary. Because of my somewhat rudimentary command of German, I was asked to go through the transcripts of the interviews that Lifton did for his seminal book Nazi Doctors. The book explores the peculiar phenomenon of “doubling” in which seemingly unremarkable, middle-class German professionals were able to perform appalling medical experiments on living concentration camp inmates, as a matter of routine and then at the end of the day, go home to their wives and children – as if nothing unusual had ever happened. Lifton theorizes that we carry within us the ability to *compartmentalize* and to literally develop another personality that becomes comfortable with performing activities previously abhorrent to our quotidian sense of morality. The frightening thing is that this means that genocide is carried out, not by a few lone psychopaths, but by many, compliant outwardly normal individuals, eager to gain approval from power structures that have become demented. It really is about unquestioningly buying into the *new normal.*
The Globe and Mail recently published an insightful review on Lifton’s new book Superpower Syndrome: America’s Apocalyptic Confrontation with the World – a psychohistorical analysis of the United States’ foreign policy since 9/11 in which Lifton examines the Bush administration’s reactionary and apocalypticism and fundamentalist sense of righteousness and mission.
The warning from Lifton is that hegemony can become normalized pretty quickly, especially when a culture perceives itself to be under some kind of threat. We now live in an age where (at least in the US) the detention of hundreds of “illegal enemy combatants” without charges, lawyers or any public scrutiny has become routine and that even *publishing* works by writers from certain countries such as Iran will incur “grave legal consequences “ if, (according to the New York Times) illustrations are added, grammer and syntax corrected or paragraphs are reordered. The Times quotes Nahid Mozaffari, a scholar and editor specializing in literature from Iran, who calls the implications staggering. “A story, a poem, an article on history, archaeology, linguistics, engineering, physics, mathematics, or any other area of knowledge cannot be translated, and even if submitted in English, cannot be edited in the U.S.,” she said. When hearing about the rapidly deteriorating human rights climate under the Bush administration, I am haunted by recollections of my own parents’ accounts of experiencing the rise of the Nazis, as children growing up in Germany. It began with patriotic fervour and the trains running on time and then suddenly- the neighbours began to disappear. . . The road to totalitarianism is paved in increments.
And while I’m on the topic of information control, I was flipping through a recent Vanity Fair (which doesn’t appear to be archived on-line) and between pictures of Gwyneth Paltrow and a Versace ad, I noticed a beguiling (if somewhat incongruously placed) photograph by Subhankar Banarjee. It featured a loon nesting on the shore of a pristine tundra lake, in the middle of the vast landscape of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. It turns out that officials in the Smithsonian Institution, under pressure from Congress, had a show of Banargee’s photos moved from a prominant location to a marginal basement gallery, after the controversial Boxer-Chafee amendment was passed. They also ordered the removal of the descriptive passages from the photographs and demanded that Banerjee’s publisher take out references to the Smithsonian from a book containing the pictures. It seems that the photographs depicting the fragile beauty of the arctic Alaskan ecosystems were deemed too political to serve up uncensored, to an American public being primed to accept the incursion of oil rigs into one of the last pristine wildernesses on the continent.
Laura made a rather elegiac post a little while ago about ‘lighting the beacons‘, inspired by the magnificent scene in The Return of the King of a chain of beacons being lit, one by one, on snow-capped mountain peaks, in order to summon the Rohirrim to come to the aid of Gondor. We watched this film over New Years, together with Ruth and we all agreed that lighting the beacons was a powerful trope for how we saw ourselves as activists, writers and bloggers. Despite the gathering clouds of hegemony, we can take heart from the efforts of such disparate individuals as Sir Ian McKellen, Robert Jay Lifton and Subhankar Banarjee, to shine light on the darkness that threatens to engulf us.
Of course the way net culture facilitates the dissemination of ideas and the organization of dissent is one of the very brightest beacons of hope against increasingly repressive. political and corporate institutions. There has been a lot of hype lately about social networking software such as Orkut and Friendster which (although the marketing seems to focus too much on the facilitation of *dating*) have the potential to be used as powerful tools for community building. I was particularly pleased to see a link to a discussion on wikis as social networking software, via the many2many weblog. This posting (on Darwin) was the best description I’ve seen of the anarchic, *swarminess* of wikis, which always feel like they might at any time implode but are ultimately utterly stable. My plone site is set up for wikis (actually zwikis) which anyone who becomes a member can add and use. ( I am in the middle of a messy migration to Plone 2.0 though, so please be patient with any glitches) The structured text (STX) syntax that zwiki utilizes is a powerful yet simple shorthand for linking to other posts and is painless to learn. *And* you can edit other people’s stuff !

Gene map- American Museum of Natural History

Veggie Art- Courtenay BC, Fall Fair

After reading my last post, Derek sent this useful link to a PDF of Raoul Robinson’s brilliant work on self-organizing agricultural systems. which, in addition to describing the theory of “horizontal resistance” in plant breeding, serves as a great little primer on the principles of emergence and complexity theory, as applied to ecological systems. Robinson’s idea of allowing the natural chaos extant in the genetics of plants to generate dynamic resistance to pathogens, is revolutionary and the exact opposite of contemporary agribusiness’s tunnel-vision focus on (patentable) single genes. It is so *zen* to realize that complex living systems can respond to ever-changing stresses, if only they are allowed to maximize diversity and left to *self-organize*. And the engine driving this is *chaos* – the seething emergence of adaptation enabled by embodied genetic diversity. The more diverse the genetics, the greater the variety of resistance strategies available. There are definitely some larger lessons to be learned here. And best of all, this brilliant publication is *free*
My pal Sascha Scatter (also a big Raoul Robinson fan) and inveterate peripatetic guerilla gardener, reports on the Icarus Project. I love the post; “Head like a funnel and the world pouring in”
In a recent chat, Laura told me how cool the computer language, python is, and pointed me to another *free* and very useful download entitled “How to think like a Computer Scientist -Learning with Python. This is an absolutely amazing tutorial that helps the novice make the conceptual leaps necessary to *get* programming and (from what I can tell), python, seems to be a very sensible, very understandable language at least syntactically- yet is extremely powerful. One of my favourite tools, plone, is written in python, so I can’t wait to start learning it.
Iceland is apparently home to a disproportionate number of clairvoyants who freely communicate with *invisible beings*. The strangely beautiful 2002 film- “Investigation into the Invisible World” details this peculiar phenomenon as well as the Tolkeinesque cast of parallel beings such as elves, trolls, light-fairies and mountain spirits reputed to inhabit Iceland’s windswept volcanic landscape. Belief in “hidden folk” seems to permeate all walks of life in Iceland, and there are interviews in the film with a highways department bureaucrat, the former Prime Minister and a police officer, all of whom matter-of-factly concur with this notion. Oh, BTW, the elves *live inside rocks*
I was so pleased to find this story about a new species of jellyfish just discovered off the California coast, which endearingly has only *four* little arms. Up here around Cortes Island, the ocean just teems with jellyfish at certain times of the year, which is why I used one for the logo of my plone site. There is nothing like skimming across a mirror black sea in a kayak and looking over the side and seeing millions of purple and chartreuse jellyfish pullulating in the inky depths. You feel kind of weightless and, well, *free*, like floating in a vast holographic rendering of an early Kraftwerk record label. But, I have to confess, the little specimen depicted in my logo was actually photographed in an aquarium deep in the vast Takashimaya department store, far from the limpid lagoons of Cortes Island, in the metastasized techno-landscape of Shinjuku, Tokyo. It seems that jellyfish were the *it* pet that year and this little creature had rather photogenically positioned itself opposite someone leaning against the tank, wearing a t-shirt covered in Greek letters. Well, I just had to photograph it. . .

The BBC World series Capitalism, presented an interesting discussion of what *freedom* means in its last episode on Globalization. In reference to Frances Fukuyama’s deeply flawed “End of History” thesis, one of the panelists (the former chief economist for British Airways) reduced contemporary globalized capitalism down to “the economic dimension of freedom” and democracy to “the political dimension of freedom.” She was vigorously rebutted (fortunately), and then I nearly fell out of my chair when the panelists started to then discuss the relevance of Marx’s theory of alienation in the contemporary globalized economy. The fact that they were having the debate *at all* was refreshing, given the fact that Marx has been more or less completely expunged from North American cultural memory, or relegated to the status of historical boogy man. This discussion was my first exposure to the term term “politics of scale” to describe the immense power and political influence wielded by multi-national corporations over government policy.

George W. Bush’s pious, platitudinous torrent of rhetoric on “the enemies of freedom” made me think back to the seminal 1969 film Easy Rider. George, the drunken ACLU lawyer (played by Jack Nicholson) has this memorable exchange around the campfire with Billy, (Dennis Hopper), before being beaten to death in his sleep, by vindicitive, xenophobic southern ‘bubbas.’

Billy: Hey man. All we represent to them, man, is somebody needs a haircut.
George: Oh no. What you represent to them is freedom.
Billy: What the hell’s wrong with freedom, man? That’s what it’s all about.
George: Oh yeah, that’s right, that’s what it’s all about, all right. But talkin’ about it and bein’ it – that’s two different things. I mean, it’s real hard to be free when you are bought and sold in the marketplace. ‘Course, don’t ever tell anybody that they’re not free ’cause then they’re gonna get real busy killin’ and maimin’ to prove to you that they are. Oh yeah, they’re gonna talk to you, and talk to you, and talk to you about individual freedom, but they see a free individual, it’s gonna scare ’em.
Billy: Mmmm, well, that don’t make ’em runnin’ scared.
George: No, it makes ’em dangerous.

Of course Easy Rider is full of Fetish:Footage and I’ll close with a couple of screen snaps that I grabbed with my trusty digital Elph . . .

wild kale

Kale seems to be one of the most vigorous food plants in the world. It’s tremendously good for you and it kind of just grows itself. Once it’s planted it keeps seeding itself out. Here on the west coast, it provides people with fresh green vegetables all winter long. Kale tastes better in the winter because the leaves concentrate sugars which also serve as a natural antifreeze. Former students of mine have been scattering kale seed from Cortes Island, all over the Lower East Side of New York which is now growing into kale that people can eat. I found the wild specimen in the picture, growing beside a parking lot in Victoria BC. Kale is a wonderful vegetable symbiot. The kale varieties in my backyard are constantly cross-breeding and seem to self organize and *evolve* to deal with drought, pests and exposure to cold. Raoul Robinson in his radical book Return to Resistance, promotes this kind of anarchic botanical promiscuity as a way of inducing *horizontal resistance* in agricultural crops. Robinson’s breeding technique of *recurrent mass selection* creates a high degree of genetic variability from a large gene pool within the crop to allow it to adapt to continually changing conditions of pests and disease. This is the exact opposite of traditional plant breeding, which aims to create uniform genetics, and characteristics. There is a vigorous movement of plant hackers who are busy working against the *great homogenization* of our food supply being instigated by multi-national agro-business. One of the foremost of these is “open source” seedsman J.L Hudson (aka David Theodoropoulos). His catalog features amazing seeds but also his fascinating and insightful writings on biodiversity, for example his manifesto:

We recognize that the biological diversity of the Earth and the diversity of all cultivated species are the common heritage of all humanity and we REJECT the theft of the biological commons by individuals, corporations and governments through plant patenting, gene patenting, Plant Breeder’s Rights (PBR), Plant Variety Protection (PVP), or any other form of intellectual property applied to living things. We reject life patenting in any form . . .

The parallel to the Open Source software movement is striking here and it would seem reasonable that botanical otaku and computer hackers form alliances against the privatization of the genetic and intellectual commons. (More on this to come . . .) Hudson’s explicitly “uncopyrighted, all rights released” catalog reflects his attitude towards open source botanical germplasm. Maybe he should put a Creative Commons license on it. It’s worth sending away for his catalog just for the narrative! Here is a sample entry:

‘POMEGRANATE’ Spectacular brilliant deep orange-red flowers 1-2″ across, sometimes reaching 4″, from succulent scarlet buds. satiny crinkled petals surround gold-tipped stamens. The apple to grapefruit-sized red fruits are filled with seeds, each surrounded by red, juicy pulp resembling a mass of rubies when the fruit splits open. Tree or shrub 6 -25 feet, with attractive glossy narrow foliage, bronze when young. W. Asia. Grown for its delicious fruit since ancient times, it is mentioned in the Ebers Papyrus, and by Homer, Pliny and Theophrastus. Wine was made from the juice in Ancient Egypt, and used to make ‘Grenadine’ today. The Greeks believed it to have been brought by Aphrodite, and the fruit is to have kept Proserpina from returning to earth, hence the origin of winter. The Phoenicians and Syrians used the fruit and bark for tanning. It was grown in the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, and it is the national emblem of Spain. Black ink can be made from the rind, and red cloth dye from the flowers. The wood is hard. Can live several hundred years. The rind and bark are well known as vermifuges, and used against dysentery.

Perhaps most endearingly, Hudson (like me) hates telephones, warning potential callers that: “I HAVE NO BUSINESS OR PERSONAL TELEPHONE . . . If your ‘phone doesn’t ring, its me!”
While on the topic of the politics of food, Richard Manning has written an insightful article The Oil We Eat – Following the Food Chain back to Iraq in the February 2004 edition of Harper’s Magazine. In it, Manning does a damning energy audit of the effect of grain agriculture throughout the ages and describes how our reliance on petro-chemical based nitrogen fertilizers is pushing us toward the precipice of environmental and geopolitical catastrophe.

Forget the polysyllabic organics. It is nitrogen -the wellspring of fertility relied upon by every Eden-obsessed backyard gardener and suburban groundskeeper -that we should fear most

Tofu comes across as looking pretty bad in his analysis and Manning winds up making a good case for bagging the occasional venison.
Maybe it’s because of the New Year but I’m becoming more and more obsessed with how to *find my stuff* and then to see *how it’s all connected.* Surfing the net has yielded some interesting approaches:
Geisha asobi recently posted this interesting link to the home page of the Japanese design firm, Intentionallies. The page is a simple flash animation that scatters little picture cards of the firm’s many projects, at random on the screen. It gives the appearance of the way letters get scattered on a floor beside a mail slot in a door. Every time you log onto the page, the cards are scattered in a different way, revealing new ones and covering old ones -some completely, some partially-drawing one’s attention to different cards every time. Click the card and you’re learning about the project. It’s a simple trick, but extremely beguiling. The Intentionallies site is one of the closest approximations I have seen, to the way my own brain works. I only stay interested in things if I can keep shuffling the deck. Of course for the left-brain types, there are conventional sorting options available on the site also.
Geek artist, Beverly Tang uses Movable Type’s *categories* and *related entries* features in a very efficacious way. Check out her tree art section for some interesting links, particularly arborsculptor Richard Reames’s work, who grows his own furniture from grafted trees.
While on the topic of trees and the sustainable use thereof, BBC World’s ultra-cool design show, Dreamspaces, recently did a little item on gridshell buildings, made of sustainably harvested timber. The featured building -the Weald and Downland Open Air Museum in Sussex England- is constructed of an intricate, computer designed grid (made of eco-harvested oak strips), that is assembled flat on top of a mass of scaffolds. Upon completion, the scaffolds are removed and the building just kind of magically *slumps* into shape. This deceptively simple technique can enclose large spaces with structures that are light, airy and *organic*. I’d *love* to live in a gridshell structure . . . Gridshells can even be made out of stiffened paper tubes. The presenter, architect Charlie Luxton, advocates the development of gridshell constructed shopping malls, as an ecologically sustainable alternative to the ultra-tedious big box units that now dominate the field. It might take a while before we start seeing gridshell structures in the wastelands of North American suburbia but Britain seems to be well on its way.

I’ve been driving due south, straight as an arrow for hours, through an endless, landscape of clear-cut rainforest, the sky the colour of lead, the highway slick with rain. Giant logging trucks send up huge rooster tails of slimy spray that settles on my windshield. The frenetic slapping of my hapless wiper blades can barely keep up. Most of the trucks carry loads of spindly second-growth fir, but I am shocked to be passed by one carrying logs from ancient, old-growth trees, probably over 300 years in age. Such loads are becoming rarer now that most of British Columbia’s ancient coastal forest has been liquidated, much of it in my own lifetime. It is hard to believe that the monotonous and ravaged landscape through which I have been driving was once completely covered with such giant trees, among the tallest on earth. Occasionally a ragged eagle flaps up from the broken-off snag of some ancient conifer, somehow left behind in the initial logging frenzy. It amazes me that eagles can still survive here. These enormous raptors seem like they are from another age. Maybe they’ve learned how to eat garbage. . . The highway is lined on both sides by a 3 metre tall fence, an impenetrable barrier to keep terrestrial wildlife off the road. It must be a powerful deterent. I’ve driven down this desolate highway dozens of times and have never seen a deer or one of Vancouver Island’s disappearing elk, anywhere near it. There is even a band of fine wire mesh at the fence’s base to keep out inquisitive rabbits. The old Subaru’s engine reeks of burning oil and carbon monoxide as it strains to maintain the 120 kph cruising speed.
Finally, pulling into Victoria, I slow down enough to see the snowdrops blooming, incongrously white in the dun metallic light of the late January afternoon. The pink flowers of Viburnum bodnantense, the colour of Barbie flesh and the spidery yellow little firework explosions of Chinese witchhazel glint out from behind the glossy green hedges of this surreal, faux England. I come to the end of the road, park the car and walk down to a limpid gray sea. In the distance, past the bobbing beds of kelp, past the invisible shipping lanes plied by endless convoys of container ships stuffing the maw of a million Wal Marts, looms the darkness of the Olympic peninsula. The sullen mass of America. Above it floats a faint, lens-shaped orange glow of what, were it not for the all-pervasive gloom, might pass for a sunset. The eye of Sauron?

Chinese witch hazel

I’ve come to Victoria to attend Phillip Glass’s piano recital. Now, I’ve always thought that Mr. Glass was kind of a one trick pony. But what a magnificent trick! The mesmerizing tinkling, the mesmerizing tinkling, the mesmerising tinkling . . . . woven in and out by what can only be described as sonic musings. The notes develop the consistency of October rain falling on the Pacific. A scintillating pitter patter modulated by rolling, swell-like undulations. I am carried away by Witchita Vortex Sutra, written by Glass as an accompaniment to the words of Allan Ginsberg in 1973, during which Ginsberg declared the end of the Vietnam War while standing at the exact geographic centre of the United States of America. The war didn’t end with the utterance of this poem but maybe it helped spin the vortex of opposition a little faster. William Burroughs lived in Lawrence Kansas and died there in 1997. Glass talked about visiting him. I wonder if Burroughs clicked the heels of his ruby loafers when his number finally came up. There’s no place like home, even for Bill Burroughs. Somewhere in my boxes of junk, I think I have a silent super 8mm film of Burroughs giving a reading in Toronto, sometime in the early 1980’s. I’ll have to watch it again to see if it is *boring* or Fetish::Footage. Burroughs wasn’t exactly physically animated, even in life. I remember that he seemed to be in an oddly embalmed state, pickled perhaps by his own sardonicism. It was like he could live on its fuel forever.
Also in Glass’s program was an accompaniment he wrote for a performance of Jean Genet’s The Screens as well as a haunting piece Mad Rush, composed in honour of the Dalai Lama’s visit to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York. The piece has no set ending and was written to be more or less played indefinitely because, as Glass recounted: it wasn’t clear as to when His Holiness was actually going to *show up.*
On January 21st, a couple of days after the concert, The New York Times reports in its ‘On this Day’ section, the 80th anniversary of the death of Lenin. His eternal question of “What is to be done?” still rings in my ears. Never before have the progressive aspects of socialism seemed so far from our grasp. Even liberalism has become a dirty word. Of course Lenin’s revolution failed in a multiplicity of ways. It more or less had to. But what talk is there now of a replacement for capitalism? We are left with neither baby nor bathwater. Perhaps we should replace our governments with the disembodied neurons of rats? Maybe that *is* what’s running the world. Only we don’t know it yet. . . Currently there is a robot located in Perth Australia, that is being controlled by a rat brain in a petri dish in Atlanta USA. The rat brain is telling the robot to make art. Check out slashdot’s lively discussion on this subject
An article in the always frighteningly interesting Defense Horizons, urges the Pentagon to continue the work of Cold War era Soviet scientists on protein-based electronics which use genetically engineered bacteriorhodopsin from an extremely old bacterium Halobacterium halobium to create *pattern recognition* devices. Bacteriorhodopsin has holographic properties which can be used to create biological, three-dimensional memory and *situation awareness* devices. Defense Horizons reports:

One such prototype device, using bacteriorhodopsin, can store 7 to10 gigabytes of digital data in a 1-centimeter (cm)-by-1-cm-by-3-cm polymer vial, capable of withstanding virtually any environmental abuse, including extended submersion in water. (By comparison, a typical personal computer comes with a storage capacity of 20 to 40 gigabytes.)

The article also describes hybrid biomolecular diodes that operate via photosynthesis, to make extremely efficient photo-voltaic converters. Such a protein-based photovoltaic coating on a soldier’s Kevlar helmet could produce enough power to run a laptop computer. It’s too bad that all of this amazing technology gets developed just to facilitate human slaughter. I’d love to be able to slap some of that protein-based photovoltaic coating on a bike helmet for example, and charge up my laptop as I rode down the street. (Of course that would be s-o-o geeky . . .)
And from the geek, (er) *meek* shall inherit the earth department: a microbe called Strain 121 has been identified which can survive exposure to 121 degrees Celsius, (250 Fahrenheit), well above the temperature used to sterilize hospital equipment, (or to boil water). These microbes belong in a family called archaea, single-celled microbes similar to, but not quite, bacteria. Archaea literally means “ancient,” and apparently these microbes can use iron in the same way that aerobic animals use oxygen, i.e. *they don’t need air to live* Given the horrific news that I reported on in my last posting, regarding the collapse of our planet’s biodiversity due to human-induced global warming, I somehow find the discovery of Strain 121 reassuring. Once we have left the scene, Strain 121 and its cohort of archaea will be waiting in the wings to re-start the process of evolution on the scorched earth we have left behind.

At this time of year, many people suffer from the blues. I seem to suffering from an annoying case of the ‘oranges’ (er, maybe the ‘reddish oranges’) Jim Bell of Cornell University and member of NASA’s Mars probe team told a press conference he was “in shock and awe” over the quality of the images delivered by Spirit’s panoramic camera. The orange tinted picture, shows a desolate plain full of small boulders and dust. It was eerily reminiscent of another kind of picture that we have been seeing a lot of lately. It seems sad, while humanity mounts its most determined effort ever to see if life once existed on the planet named for the god of war, that back here on earth life has never been cheaper. The picture on the right appeared on the ElectronicIraq.net site last March 27 and shows the aftermath of American cluster bombs dropped on a farm, just outside Baghdad. Four people were killed and many others gravely injured. The journalist recounted:

“Even the farm animals were killed. We were told that yellow cylinders landed in their yard, and when they and the animals crept closer to investigate, the bombs detonated.”

One eyewitness describes the aftermath:

“The sky took on colors I’ve never seen before in my 43 years. Every Iraqi I’ve talked to says they’ve never seen anything like it.”

Amidst all of the excitement about the search for life on the red planet, the journal Nature reports that our own earth is rapidly becoming a *dead* planet, with a staggering one million species of animals and plants predicted to go extinct within the next 50 years, due to habitat diminishment caused by global warming. Sadly, even species residing in protected areas will go extinct, as the climate changes around them. This happened recently to Costa Rica’s exquisite Golden Toad which vanished forever, after an unprecedented drought made its breeding impossible.

Golden toad: extinct 1991

Well at least we can look forward to Chinese New Year. January 22nd ushers in the Year of the Monkey. Orange trees are considered lucky by many Chinese, symbolizing good fortune and prosperity and hence are often displayed around the New Year. I snapped this pic of a beautiful pet orange tree in New York’s Chinatown.

“Happy New Year to all my dear readers”

suburban baroque

We’re driving around the confused fractal street scapes of a night-time suburbia when we came across an eerie aura glowing above a neighbouring cul-de-sac. We pull in and join a procession of cars solemnly crawling past split-level houses completely encrusted with seemingly trillions of multicoloured lights in a kind of Jack Smith meets Thomas Edison, American, kitsch rococco kind of landscape of the insane. Simulacrum snowmen flash-frozen while playing hockey. Did they look at the distant mall and get turned to pillars of plastic? An animatronic, bulb festooned, wire frame deer cocks its head at 30 second intervals, a thousand blinding and strobing incandescent bulbs exhort anonymous idling vehicles to have a *Merry Christmas* I become oddly nostalgic, as I remember my own father long ago, driving our family through similarly phantasmagoric displays of conspicuous uberwattage, on bleak pre-Christmas nights, deep within the vast street-maze of Toronto’s bedroom suburbs. As a child, I felt deeply comforted by the familiarity of schlock. I guess that is the allure of Disney. Like a motel toilet seat, reality has been ‘sanitized for your protection.’ And in suburban North America, the landscape itself has become a theme park. Micheal Sorkin edited an intriguing series of essays on this topic in his (1992) Variations on a Theme Park.
I guess we want to keep out the darkness at this time of year, which is always around the corner. But darkness can also be a great comfort, a kind of buffer against the shrillness of existence. Junichiro Tanizaki expounds on this in his exquisite extended (1933) essay, In Praise of Shadows Back in the 1930’s, Tanizaki was lamenting the aesthetic impact of the onslaught of an electrified modernity, but of course these days, Japan is anything but dark. Nuclear power took care of that.
Shohei Imamura is the filmmaker that for me best captures Japan’s uneasy post-war lurch into modernity, in particular the films Insect Woman, The Pornographers and especially his (1961) Pigs and Battleships otherwise known as The Flesh is Hot
And speaking of *flesh*, Mad Cow has finally been detected in the USA, despite having been there all along if, like me, you ascribe to the theory that John Stauber promulgates in his (1997) Mad Cow USA (now, incidentally available as a free download). Stauber has been keeping us well appraised of the developments. For example, he sent us a copy of an e-mail he received from organic dairy farmers Jim and Rebecca Goodman in Wisconsin, who were recently visited by a salesman selling blood-based cattle feed, which of course is a perfect vector for spreading more Mad Cow disease. Things in the American (and Canadian) food production systems have been systemically rotten for years and one can only hope that the shit will finally hit the fan over agribusiness-induced mad cow disease and its incurable human variant: Creutzfeld-Jacob. But hey, “the American system was never intended to keep sick animals from reaching the public’s refrigerators”, said Dr. Ron DeHaven, the Agriculture Department’s chief veterinarian in the New York Times. Stauber includes an image of the feed flyer which I am reproducing here. Note the plasma and serum ingredients. One way or another, a lot of beef-eating North Americans should be getting pretty *mad* this Christmas.

Once again I am technological meltdown mode. My I-book crashed and is off in the shop. . .
It turns out that some of Apple’s I-books have a design flaw, which causes the video chip to short out against the inside of the case, when the laptop gets *moved*.
Aren’t laptops supposed to get moved? Anyway, I’m reduced to blogging on the communal computer without (sigh) my bookmarks, or files.
So, I get to watch way more TV, and grow increasingly more apoplectic.
A case in point:
BBC World reported last week that gangsters in the Russian Far East are directing and producing big budget gangster movies starring- *themselves* AND, they use real bullets. I guess there is a lot of respect for the institution of authenticity in contemporary Russian film. Not even Godard could have come up with this interesting twist on Kino, but BBC World’s web site is so impenetrable and Byzantine, I couldn’t snag the link. .
PBS’s NOW reports that the National Rifle Association is mobilizing to buy up radio and television stations to get its “political message across” and to escape new rules, preventing groups that take corporate or union money from buying certain types of political ads on radio or TV 30 days before a primary or 60 days before a general election. It’s so much easier to buy a whole TV station than just some little old ad. Maybe those guys from the Russian Mafia could find a market for their films on “NRA TV.” Russia and America have so much more in common now that the Cold War is over. The NRA is even prepared to launch *pirate* radio stations from ships at sea to make Americans buy more guns. (I wonder if they’ll fly the skull and crossbones flag?)
Blogger has developed a weird new bug which *vaporizes postings* that I have been working on in draft mode. (Time to jump to Moveable Type !) I hope they get it fixed soon or I will really truly bail. I’m sure glad I’m composing in BBEdit . . .
I was pleasantly surprised to receive a few copies of the new Walrus magazine. I’m embarrassed to say that I stopped reading most Canadian magazines because they became so parochial and preachy, but Walrus is great ! The inaugural issue features a wonderful review by Lewis Lapham of the film McLuhan Reloaded, an homage to garbage by Douglas Coupland, an article on Tel Aviv becoming a Bauhaus World Heritage Site, and tons of other interesting stuff. I’m subscribing! So far, Walrus stacks up pretty nicely against the New Yorker and Harpers and it even has an easy to navigate website. And it’s *Canadian*
The folks over at travelersdiagram have been kind enough to link to my blog. Travelersdiagram links to a lot of amazing blogs. One of my favourites is geisha asobi who always has some very *whacked* links. This week she links (among many others) to J-Walk’s blog, who in turn links to the Connected Thesaurus which is extremely useful. Check out his links to an amazing image gallery called colofinder in which
aerial views of nuclear weapon storage areas caught my eye, as did the heavily visited messy cables.

Tent city in Vancouver 2003

It is of course abundantly obvious, that the much vaunted ‘market mechanism’ of late capitalism can’t or won’t provide even basic shelter for many living in our urban areas, regardless of the supposed employment rate or the “health of the economy.” I only need think back to 30 or so years ago, to when I was a kid growing up near Toronto. Visible homelessness then was more or less limited to a narrow demographic consisting of elderly substance-abusing men. Last time I visited Toronto, I saw entire families with children camped out over the hot air grates of the ultimate *cold city.* Vancouver is no better and tent cities have sprung up all over. The new economic brutalism is marginalizing an ever increasing portion of our population and there seems to be very little resolve by governments to do anything about it. In fact, visible homelessness has become a great tool for scaring the working poor into compliance with the Walmart economy. A case in point is British Columbia’s recent decision to cut 80,000 people off of the welfare roles by 2004, which the CBC predicts will result in 6,000 to 8,000 more people on the streets.
Let’s face it. It’s not impossible for most of us to imagine being homeless. What – with a bit of bad luck, and without a support network of family and friends, it might be closer than you think!
So, what to do? How can housing be constructed cheaply enough so that it can be *owned* by the rapidly increasing segment of our population that constitutes the *domestic third world*.
There has been some interesting thinking about this problem among architects lately, and a group working in Tokyo has come up with a very cool modular dwelling made completely out of polycarbonate plastic i.e, the cheap corrugated stuff that (ironically) real estate signs are often made of. While they quote a price of 350.000 yen (about $4300 CAN) to build one, I am sure it could be done much more cheaply in North America, as the Japanese prices for materials tend to be high. For less money than it costs for the government to subsidize slum landlords, the homeless could be given the materials and instructions on how to build these houses and be offered a safe place put them. What a radical idea! Home ownership for the homeless! These plastic houses can be built with just a box cutter, a saw and a screwdriver *and* they are completely portable.
Of course you need to be able to cook. Last summer, a student of mine, (A.K.A. Windy Day), showed me how to construct these lovely and highly efficient little rocket stoves out of discarded tin cans. The larger model burns sticks and pieces of paper extremely efficiently, and it is possible to boil water quickly with a minimum use of fuel. The smaller “pocket rocket” is made out of the bottom of a tomato paste can, jammed inside an aluminum beer can, which is crimped over and has tiny holes poked through it with a pin (see pictures). This little stove burns methyl hydrate (a common solvent) and can heat water in just a few minutes. The whole thing can fit in coat pocket:

“rocket” stove (burns sticks and scrap paper)

“pocket rocket” (burns methyl hydrate)

If your stuck in an economic refugee camp, why not start your own pirate FM radio station? Tetsuo Kogawa shows you how to build a neat little low power pirate transmitter for just a few dollars. I built one some years ago and it is so-o-o fun! The transmissions can be picked up on any conventional FM radio, (car, clock radio, whatever) and the range seems to be about 2 km. *Networks* of these little transmitters can be created, by connecting the earphone ‘out’ signal of a receiver (tuned to the pirate station), to the audio input of another pirate transmitter – thereby increasing the range indefinitely. This has classic bootstrapping potential !
“L’anarchie ! . . . .

I came face to face with a red-tailed hawk yesterday, that had just killed one of my chickens and had inadvertantly snagged itself in the net fence surrounding the coop. A magnificent bird, it gave me the most piercing stare as I struggled to free it from its entanglement, *carefully* avoiding its rapier-like talons and snapping, razor sharp beak. That purposeful and unflinching pair of eyes momentarily connected me with a much older and deeper level of cognition, that of “bird mind”. Birds of course are what the dinosaurs evolved into, and yet they are capable of astonishing feets of cognition, governed by a neural chassis utterly alien to our own.
James Blish imagined what a world would be like if bird cognition evolved into a planet’s dominant culture, in his (1972) Midsummer Century:

The next day they saw three more of the sparrow-like birds, and the next day, five. And the morning after that, they emerged from their sleeping burrow to find a smoke-black thing like an enormous crow looking down upon them, just out of club’s reach, its head bent, its neck extended until it seemed almost snakelike; its eyes glassy and unblinking. . . . For very disparate reasons, neither of the two minds was surprised when the bird’s beak parted, its throat ruffled and pulsed, and it said in a voice like fingernails on a blackboard:
“GO HOME.”

Upon being released, the red-tailed hawk flapped lazily up to the nearest tree and continued to stare down hungrily at the panic-stricken flock of silkies, not having been distracted in the least from its original mission. Oh to have even a *fraction* of the focus of a red-tailed hawk. Of course they don’t get distracted by blogging . . .
The fat little chicken that the hawk was after, was indeed an attractive target. Bred and morphed by our species for millenia, chickens are the ultimate symbiots, originally sharing the tropical forest edge habitats we lived in, when they were first domesticated over 8,000 years ago, in southeast Asia. Ever since, chickens have provided us with eggs, meat, fertilizer, wake up service and garbage disposal, in return for our protection and a few handfuls of grain. This arrangement has proven to be pretty good for humans, although not always for individual chickens, especially if they wind up in cock-fights or factory farms. Still, properly looked after, chickens are supremely useful, portable and fun and keeping them makes you feel, well *self-sufficient* You don’t have to kill them to benefit because they lay EGGS. Chickens are a particularly useful creature in urban contexts, literally providing the *means of production* to turn garbage into protein, though keeping them is frowned upon by many municipalities.
When I was living in New York’s Lower East Side, I was elated to come across some fellow hardcore poultry zealots, in the form of these Puerto Rican men, with whom I could talk a little chicken. I loved hearing the crowing of roosters over the din of the Manhattan traffic, knowing that the chicken men were in their own small way, committing an act of revolution.

Loisida Chicken men

I suppose blogging is kind of like fishing – you never know who will nibble. I was so-o-o excited to be linked to by a website on underwater sound; specifically in their underwater *sound fixing and ranging * (SOFAR) pages. Check out the high speed videos of snapping shrimp, which document how shrimps make snapping sounds through *cavitation bubbles*
And speaking of *snapping*, what is *up* with consensual cannibalism? Is it just me or is this the weirdest thing to come down the BBC news pipe for a long time? There’s something about the *juxtaposition* of those two words. Apparently, Armin Meiwes, the German who is standing trial for eating an acquaintance, has advised others not to follow his example. Well . . . . All right then!
The Austrian artist Ervin Wurm frequently riffs on these strangely Germanic notions of engulfing and bloating. I caught a show of his last year at MassMoCA and snapped this pic of one of his installations.

Erwin Wurm installation

One of my great pleasures (when I occasionally get off of my *tiny windswept island*) is to be able to power-watch piles of DVD’s of films that I missed, when they were theatrically released. To do this, I have to travel to Victoria. Most of the other towns between here and there are grim industrial sorts of places, which look like they’ve been ‘twinned’ with Vladivostock (say) or Novosibirsk. Their skylines consist of enormous pulp mills, spewing vast plumes of carcinogenic smoke into the local airsheds, surrounded by mountains that look like they are coming out of chemotherapy- their forests torn off in huge patches of clearcut logging.
Victoria on the other hand is affectionately known as “the tweed curtain” due to to its oddly endemicized anglophilia. More like Torquay than BeeCee, Victoria boasts a peculiarly temperate microclimate, replete with palms and eucalyptus trees, which look rather dissonant within the context of the outwardly nordic landscape.
This virtual England also has double-decker buses and an enormous population of retirees.

Chinese fan palm in Victoria BC

A trip to the local independent video store yielded a couple of gems: Agnes Varda’s (2000) documentary paean to food recycling called ‘The Gleaners’ as well as Wang Xiaoshua’s (1998) bleak Chinese noir film, ‘So Close to Paradise’. Varda of course is the doyenne of the French nouvelle vague and ‘The Gleaners’ represents a later stage work, which is both sentimental and fascinatingly tangential. For example, Varda works a narrative about Etiene-Jules Marey, the French father of chronophotography (predating Edvard Muybridge) into a story about finding discarded heart-shaped potatos at a dump. Varda comes across as a kinder, gentler more humanistic Chris Marker but she shares his overt intimacy with the camera (which almost becomes a character in their films) and they both track discursive narratives relentlessly and unapologetically. Varda (like Marker) is truly a blog filmmaker. And they both like cats . . . .
Wang Xiaoshua (one of the PRC’s so called ‘sixth generation’ filmmakers) has produced, in ‘So Close to Paradise’ (and later, ‘Beijing Bicycle’), films that ‘out noir’ NOIR, yet don’t lapse into the stultifyingly puerile hystrionics of Quentin Tarantino and his ilk. Tarantino’s work can’t hold a candle to that of Xiaoshua’s or Hong Kong’s Wong Kar-Wai (who made Chungking Express, Fallen Angels etc.) – and what is even *more* amazing is that Xiaoshua was able to make his films in a climate of strict censorship and repression. ‘So Close to Paradise’ was banned by Chinese censors for 3 years because of its portrayal of the problems facing modern China, yet Xiaoshua still managed to move doggedly forward, making films under a pseudonym. The film scene in China is full of such fascinating, hard-core auteurs and I vowed to waste no more time watching the lame and bloated offerings of an increasingly irrelevant Hollywood.
I recall seeing a panel discussion at the Hawaii International Film Festival in 1995, where Zhang Yimou, Hou Hsiao-Hsien and several other PRC filmmakers were being pressed by sycophantic American journalists to admit ‘how hard it must be to work under state censorship’ without the ‘freedom’ enjoyed by American filmmakers. The filmmakers replied (and I’m paraphrasing here) that, while their situation in China was not without enormous challenges, at least they weren’t burdened by the censorship of the North American marketplace, where it has become nearly impossible to raise money for any major project that isn’t completely banal and formulaic.
And speaking of formulas: the BBC’s Earth Report ran a story recently which examined the correlation between environmental degradation and genocide in Rwanda and elsewhere. In the program, Mark Halle (Project Coordinator of Environment and Security at the International Institute of Sustainable Development) said:

“We did a very interesting case study in Rwanda, looking at the origins of the genocide in 1994 and in fact we found that there was a perfect correlation those parts of the country that were most degraded and the areas where the conflict originated. Now that’s not to say that environment was the cause of the Rwandan genocide. But it’s certainly a contributing factor.”

Earthwatch goes on to say:

The link between environmental degradation and global security has become such a pressing issue that the United Nations Environment Programme and the United Nations Development Programme are working on a joint project with two bastions of international security: the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and NATO. The result of this partnership is the Environment and Security Initiative, known as ENVSEC. Its working on a pilot project in Central Asia and South Eastern Europe – a region where resource scarcity, ethnic tension and weak civil society have combined all too frequently to spark off conflict.

Earth Report closes with some footage of abandoned fishing boats resting on the dry bed of the now vanished Aral Sea. From this *single biggest environmental catastrophe on the planet*, blow clouds of pesticide contaminated dust, causing an epidemic of anemia, liver and thyroid disease as well as cancer, giving the area the highest child mortality rate in Russia. The image of sick and impoverished Cental Asian children playing among stranded fleets of rusting fishing vessels, in the middle of this vast, man-made desert, is for me one of the defining icons of the failure of modernity.