Our first morning in Tokyo: we wake up bagged, fragged and jet-lagged having spent the night in a fifteen square metre apartment with nothing but a futon the thickness of a panty liner between us and a cold wood floor. But it’s delightful. Because outside there are some *cute* cats sleeping on a Coke machine, bathed in the golden winter sun. That’s all that matters. What is it about Tokyo and cats? They seem to be everywhere, glowering from windows and bunched up like lost fur hats in the middle of the pavement of Ueno Park. Haruki Murakami used to run a jazz club in Tokyo called Peter Cat. Chris Marker always seemed to have a cat or two in his films. He described this city and its cats so beautifully in his (1982) Sans Soleil
He wrote me that in the suburbs of Tokyo, there’s a temple consecrated to cats. “I wish I could convey you the simplicity , the lack of affectation, of this couple who’d come to place an inscribed wooden slat in the cat cemetery so that their cat Tora would be protected. No she wasn’t dead, only run away. But on the day of her death, no one would know how to pray for her, how to intercede with death so that he would call her by her right name. So they had to come there, both of them, under the rain, to perform the rite that would repair the web of time where it had been broken.“
Jetée
In Marker’s honour, we stop in at Jetée, which the owner Kawai san has decorated with cat figurines. We chat with her for a while over drinks and she tells us about Marker’s most recent film; ‘Chats perchés,’ which, sadly, we haven’t yet seen. But time is out of joint. It is the coldest winter in years and I am telling the story out of sequence. It doesn’t really matter. I’ll rely on photography. Again I think of Marker:
“I remember that month of January in Tokyo, or rather, I remember the images I filmed of the month of January in Tokyo. They have substituted themselves for my memory. They are my memory.”
The Japanese have many words for cute. ‘Kawaii des ne?’ might cut it for cats but it isn’t the right flavour of cute to describe a Maid Café. So we head down to Akiba to investigate. Six stories above the street we join a queue, waiting for a tables in the At Home Café. The place is a seething madhouse of pink, with bevies of maids scurrying around, giggling and serving cupcakes and omelettes that have cartoon smiles drizzled onto them with ketchup. Every twenty minutes or so a floor show starts, where customers play games with the maids and have their pictures taken flanked by maids holding plates of cupcakes. This is the epitome of moe (mo-eh) cuteness, quite distinct from the kawaii. When she finishes pouring my tea, our maid shows me how to jiggle my arms and make a heart shape with my thumbs and forefingers, while I coo:
“o-o-o-o-h . . . . mo-e !” appreciatively at my cup.
“It makes it taste better,” she says.
How could I argue?
It’s hard to know just what to make of these artificial rain forest dioramas that have been put in beside YVR’s international arrival and departure gates. The sound of running water is certainly soothing and the humidity sure helps juice up one’s sinuses after a dry flight. But what is *up* with those fake vine maples, sword ferns and salal ? If the intention here was to do ’green’ design, then surely they would have used living plants. Live plants after all, would have helped clean the air by absorbing giga-litres of stressed-out passenger breath and turning it back into sweet, breathable oxygen. And hey, they’re alive!, which would have offered a nice balance to the sterility of the built environment. But BC salal and vine maples wouldn’t have survived long in the season-lessness of central heating and constant artificial light. Tropical plants would have been more suitable. But that would have been ’off message.’ And therein lies the rub. These displays aren’t about green design. They’re about theme park. At YVR, the temperate rain forest is part of a brand identity with which British Columbia gets marketed to international tourists. Never mind that the real forest continues to get logged, flogged and fragmented with many of its dependent species, like the mountain caribou, spotted owl and Vancouver Island marmot, on the fast track to extinction. None of this need trouble us as we enjoy our lattés under the plastic groves of this ecological simulacrum. While the synthetic brook babbles and the last school of rock cod roils inside the art-directed confines of its 100,000 litre aquarium, we can be sure that, at least at the airport, nature will always there for us. YVR: Your Virtual Rainforest.
Well I’m off to Japan for a couple of weeks. But before leaving, in honour of the Japanese tradition of cleaning house on New Year’s, I decided to change the swamp water in the aquarium that currently takes up most of our living room. This is the home of Cousteau, a fifteen-pound Florida softshell turtle, who has lived with us ever since she was a hatchling the size of an Oreo cookie.
“Well, if she gets too big you can always eat her,” was the kindly warning from the Chinese proprietor of the East Vancouver fish store where we bought her, over a dozen years ago. At that time we laughed it off. Now, I’m not so sure.
tank cleaning time
Cousteau is increasingly resembling a small dinosaur and if her growth rate doesn’t slow down she might start taking after her late Cretaceous cousin Archelon whose remains I once photographed at Yale’s Peabody Museum. Even some of Cousteau’s non- extinct relatives are known to reach enormous size. The highly endangered Asian species, Rafetus swinhoei, attains a weight of over 140 kg. There are only six individuals known still to be surviving. An enormous specimen inhabiting Hanoi’s Hoan Kiem Lake is regarded by the Vietnamese as a living god, reappearing from the murk from time to time, during periods of great import to the Vietnamese people. As for Cousteau, she has appeared again from the murk also. Now that her view, for the time being, is once again unobstructed, she is pressing her nose against the glass in the direction of the television whenever we watch the nightly news. While her sad reptilian eyes appear to be taking it all in, I wonder what she is thinking?
At times, walking around New York can make me feel like I’m a little piece of metal hovering in the air between two electrically charged plates– one labelled: ‘old’ and the other: ‘new.’ It is a delightful state of limbo that can, at any given moment, collapse into either direction.
The new New Museum is certainly about as ‘new’ as it gets, rising up over the Bowery’s facade of restaurant supply stores like a wobbly stack of supermarket cake boxes. Although undeniably imposing, the building somehow avoids the ‘stuck up’ materialistic feeling that so characterizes the new MoMA. The interior spaces are utilitarian to a fault and the building’s exterior skin plays peek-a-boo with the street through an expanded metal scrim that looks like its made from scaled up Home Depot plaster lathing. Though the building cost a ton of money, it was witty of the curators to fill the opening show, entitled ‘Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century,’ with an exhibition of creatively rearranged garbage. While some of these assemblages were quite delightful, for me the highlight of the visit was seeing the documentation of the Museum as Hub project, displayed on the building’s top floor. The work coming out of Seoul’s Insa Art Space was particularly intriguing. Sangdon Kim’s Discoplan is an amazing, interventionist piece where the artist collaborates with residents of a Korean neighbourhood to build home-made flying machines that deliver clover seeds into the fenced off grounds of a former American military base. During its period of operation, the base had a traumatic relationship with the surrounding population, especially after a soldier stationed there brutally murdered a local woman. The U.S. army left the base’s soil badly contaminated and the artist-inspired seed bombardment of its grounds will help phytoremediate it.
reading room
stacks
With the Disneyfication of Times Square and the obliteration of iconic cultural landmarks like CBGB’s, it can seem at times that old New York is disappearing. It’s still there though, if you know where to look, peeking out coyly through the palimpsest of more recent development. A case in point is the New York Society Library, which has been in operation since 1754. Our pal Larry gave us a tour of its cosseted reading rooms on East 79th St. The place has a mystical, out of timeness to it, small yet somehow limitless — reminiscent perhaps of Borges’ Library of Babel. I could easily imagine a secret sect of bibliophiles inhabiting this place, spending their nights on little cots folded out between the tightly spaced shelves, so they would never have to be separated from their beloved volumes. After the perusing the stacks we stumbled over to the Metropolitan Museum to marvel at the exquisitely lustrous panels of the Ghiberti Gates, each one sealed in its own nitrogen-filled vitrine to protect the fragile gold leaf from our corrosive twenty-first century atmosphere. We wound up the evening toasting Borges and eating our dinner under the motorized windmills and Sancho Panza statuettes of El Quijote on West 23rd St. Pierre Menard would have been proud.
With considerable alarm Ruth and I had to jump on a plane recently to tend to my father in Mississauga, who had suddenly grown gravely ill, after what was supposed to have been routine surgery. We sat with him for a week, as he lay unconscious in the ICU, viscous fluids bubbling in and out of him through a maze of clear plastic tubing, his life rhythms governed by an army microprocessors and chirping screens. He is recovering, albeit in the slowest of increments, having recently regained consciousness.
As one might expect, being around a critically ill parent brings up a lot of emotions around one’s own childhood and I found myself oddly nostalgic for the terrain vague of my youth. This rather unremarkable looking shopping plaza figured prominently in the psycho-geography of my family. I trekked across its windswept parking lot for seven years on my way to and from school. My mother and I each spent long hours working in its 24 hour grocery store; she for many years as an afternoon shift cashier and I, for a shorter stint, working nights as a meat room clean up attendant, pressure hosing blood off the white tiled walls and extracting balls of gristle from the clogged floor drains.
They weren’t the easiest of jobs but the money was good and they helped us survive. I spent a lot of time working by myself in the loading dock, where I would prepare yellow plastic buckets of offal to be sent to a pet food factory. Sometimes, with the corrugated steel doors rolled open and the residual rumbling of a Great Lakes thunderstorm still ricocheting off the nearby apartment towers, I’d look out onto the glistening tarmac of the parking lot and think that life was magic. Perhaps it really was.
Well OK. It’s been a long time in coming. And as usual life has been full of endless distractions, all of which have been convenient as excuses that have kept me from posting to THE SHOW SO FAR. Frankly, I had been thinking I would give the whole thing up. Then the e-mails started coming in. It seems that some people actually *read* this thing and want me to continue. Yet still I resisted. What ultimately brought me back here was the discovery of this winsome little tuber. The Japanese mountain yam had been a kind of holy grail for me, resisting all of my previous attempts at its cultivation, here on this damp, cold little Canadian island. But I just hadn’t been patient enough. I planted this one from a little sliver over three years ago and then completely forgot about it. One day in early October, I was weeding my cold frame–And there it was! Perfect. Wonderful. It had been growing underground all this time. The mountain yam or yama-imo is unusual among yams because it is traditionally eaten raw. We ate ours sliced with a little plum paste and shoyu. It tastes deliciously cool and a little slimy. If you click the above link you will no doubt be *amused* by its surprising non-food uses!
There have been so many things I wanted to share with you, dear readers from my various forays this year such as: the ethereal photographs of Taryn Simon’s American Index, the enigmatic, cut apart reverse architecture of Gordon Matta-Clark, and Tacita Dean’s haunting film about a film factory about to close forever. These things and many more besides have burned themselves into my visual cortex and are now resurfacing, as the cold winter rain starts to pelt my tin roof, here on this remote island outpost.
I have been on the road a lot, giving lectures at colleges on my ‘botanical interventions’ projects, starting with a gig at the Artists Urban Plans conference in Windsor Ontario, followed by NYU, Smith College and UBC’s Interdisciplinary Studies department. And it’s not over yet. Engagements in Japan and Florida are coming up in the New Year. It feels a little odd that there is such a sudden flurry of interest in my work, because, after all, I’ve been doing these things since the mid 1980’s. Still it’s great to be out there meeting other practitioners. The Green Corridor project, which co-hosted the Windsor conference is a particularly remarkable initiative. Organized by Ontario artists Noel Harding and Rod Strickland, Green Corridor is a large scale, multi-disciplinary attempt to integrate artists, planners, and technical people into the greening of the main thoroughfare that connects Windsor to adjoining Detroit, Michigan: the busiest border crossing in Canada.
As part of that project, I have proposed a plantation of hickory trees to be installed near the Ambassador Bridge; the conduit that funnels the immense traffic flow in and out of America, and all the attendant noise and pollution problems that go with it. The trees, which are native to the area, will help purify the air, act as a carbon sink and furnish the occasional crop of tool handles, which will be harvested using the ecologically sustainable technique of coppicing. The handles will be used for garden tools like shovels and picks, the business ends of which will be forged from scrap automobile parts using guerrilla blacksmithing techniques.
In case you missed it, Rebecca Solnit wrote a beautiful piece called Detroit Arcadia: Exploring the post-American Landscape in the July 2007 Harper’s. In it she describes the devolution/evolution of the Motor City from model American metropolis (and the the birthplace of Fordism) into its present state, where large parts of the former industrial heartland have become a post industrial, ruin ecology. Stephen Vogel, Dean of Architecture at University of Detroit Mercy painted a similar picture in his amazing presentation at the Windsor conference. He described Detroit neighbourhoods where the street lights don’t work anymore and 911 service is no longer available. Large areas of the downtown are reverting to savannah-like ruderal ecologies, inhabited by flocks of urban pheasants. Paradoxically, these ghetto pheasants are now being trapped by the crashed recently, threatening the area’s lucrative hunting economy. Apparently the inner city pheasants are doing fine in their new rural environs, a good deal cannier no doubt then their country-born predecessors.
Oh, and I’ve still been living the ‘writing life,’ only my stuff is starting to get published on (can you believe it?)—paper! Check out my short story ‘Overpass’ in the new issue of the Vancouver Review and a non-fiction thing called ‘I Love Turtles’ in the latest Knock Magazine.
Better late than never. This was supposed to be a Christmas posting. It’s been a long time, but I’m back for a moment from the murk.
Since November, this land of ferns and frogs has been beaten down by an endless conveyor belt of raging Pacific storms, keeping electricity and my attention span in rather short supply. When the wind stops howling, the sky hangs over the dripping forest like a grey flannel quilt and sunlight, on the rare occasions that it appears, comes as a shock, like a shard of glass on a dark sidewalk.
But another year has ended and another begun, so some stock-taking is in order and I will try to play a bit of catch-up for my readers in the next couple of postings.
Ruth and I spent the holiday worshipping paper and started to build what will become a bestiary of Japanese papercraft insects There are is a seemingly endless selection of PDF’s available online, enabling you to build anything from a laptop, to a yellow-footed tortoise to fully functioning cog and gear machines and even a V-8 engine. To get us in the mood, we sat down to a multi-day, marathon session of Read or Die-The T.V. that depicts the animated girl-on-girl exploits of a gang of paper masters who use their talents for superhero origami in a battle for global supremacy between a metastasized, technified incarnation of the British Library and a shadowy Chinese publishing conglomerate known as Dokusensha.
Despite my new found appreciation for the spirituality of paper, I haven’t given up on virgin birth or anything. I was delighted by the sensational pre Christmas announcement of parthenogenesis in a Komodo dragon, the largest lizard on earth. The dragoness, named Flora, had been hovering over her self-fertilized eggs since the end of May, at England’s Chester Zoo, and indications were that hatching was imminent. (I am still waiting for an update) Interestingly, due to the arcane Komodo dragon genetics, Flora’s offspring will all be male. Apparently, parthenogenesis is a survival strategy that allowed single female dragons to colonize remote Indonesian islands, where they eventually mated with their parthenogenic sons to further increase the population. The next generation, conceived sexually, would have the usual proportion of daughters, who, if they decided to swim over to the next uncolonized island could then repeat the process. With a trick like that it’s amazing the Komodo dragons haven’t taken over the entire South Pacific. Sadly, they have become quite rare.
Oedipal proclivities notwithstanding, Komodo Dragons are truly worthy of worship— great awe inspiring mounds of amygdala driven reptile flesh, who can take down a pig, a goat or even a human if they want to. Their powerful jaws are lined with backward pointing, serrated teeth, which infect the bites they inflict with a cocktail of lethal bacteria. If the prey isn’t brought down in the initial attack, the dragon continues to stalk it, biding its time until the victim drops dead of septicaemia. Perhaps there is already a cult forming to worship Flora— Virgin Queen of the Lizards. Sign me up!
In the deserts of the American southwest and northern Mexico, Flora has a little cousin, the Desert Whiptail Lizard which has a different approach to parthenogenesis. The whiptail has done away with males altogether, existing as an entirely unisexual population; mothers only giving birth to daughters. Yet there still is a lot of sex going on, or a what the biologists term pseudo sex. The whiptails alternate between male and female sex roles every 10-14 days The lizard temporarily adopting the male role, stimulates ovulation in its partner in an amorous embrace known as “the donut position.” With both parters capable of reproducing, whiptails seem to have a strategy for survival that almost unique among the vertebrates. I guess they haven’t got the word out yet to too many other species. If it catches on, males could be rendered (gulp) obsolete or perhaps relegated entirely to the function of entertainment. . . . .
I have always been fascinated by flesh eating plants, ever since the day when, as a small boy, I proudly came home with a little Venus Fly Trap I had bought with my allowance money at the Canadian National Exhibition. While this first specimen soon died as a result of my misguided ministrations of greasy hamburger meat and hyper-chlorinated Toronto tap water, I was already hooked.
For the past few years, I have kept a collection of pitcher plants of the Sarracenia and Nepenthes varieties, which drown hapless insects in liquid filled leaf traps before eventually digesting them. This adaptation has evolved as a way to help them survive in bogs, which have poor soils but a plethora of nutritious bugs. In fact, rich soil will quickly kill most carnivorous plants. I cultivate mine in pots of sphagnum moss mixed with chunks of fir bark.
During late summer afternoons, I often notice flies and wasps flitting around the gaping mouths of my Sarracenias, which are growing in pots submerged in an old steel tub that stores rainwater from our roof.
Curious to see how efficient these plants are at catching bugs, I sliced open one of the larger pitchers of a Sarracenia alata to have a look. The results were astonishing. As you can see, the pitcher is packed full of insects in various states of digestion.
digested insects in pitcher
wasp entering
But how does the pitcher plant actually *digest* the prey that it captures? The truth, as it turns out, is complicated and interesting. The New Scientist recently ran an article describing how the closely related Sarracenia purpurea (which I also grow) contains an entirely self-contained aquatic ecosystem in the fluid at the bottom of its pitchers. Here mosquito larvae act as top level carnivores that consume the plant’s prey insects after they fall into the pitchers and drown. The larvae of these Wyeomyia mosquitos can exist only within these tiny pools of fluid and have never been found anywhere else. Bacteria, rotifers and protozoans then feed on the larvae’s leftovers (as well as being themselves eaten by the larvae) before *their* wastes in turn are absorbed by the plant as its food. These little ecologies are being used by scientists at the University of Vermont to develop computer models to help understand the effects of disturbances, such as habitat loss and climate change, on larger ecosystems
Thinking about these minuscule aquatic universes and the complex relationships between the organisms that spend their entire existences inside them, made me wonder about our own sense of the universe as “that which is knowable.” To the Wyeomyia larva, all reality is contained inside a pool of fluid at the bottom of a hollow leaf. Our own species has a much more expanded view of what we think is the universe— a space-time continuum, full of dark matter and outwardly expanding galaxies— yet clearly this entity must also be somehow contained. Will we ever encounter its perimeter?
Perhaps old Billy Blake said it best:
To the delight of plant geeks everywhere, MAKE Magazine has put out a HACK YOUR PLANTS issue (Vol 7). I’ve been a phyto-hacker for years and reading this magazine made me feel all warm and fuzzy.
Here are the results of a cool inter-species plant hack I recently performed by grafting the scion from a medlar(Mespilus germanica) to a feral hawthorn tree (Crataegus monogyna)
Why? you might ask.
The Medlar has a fruit that tastes (to my mind) rather like sugar-frosted baby shit, (although I’ve been told by people who like it that I should give it a second try.) The medlar has historically been used as a kind of metaphor for prostitution or ‘premature destitution,’ a quality which makes it oddly endearing to me. And, I couldn’t resist trying an Inter-species graft, just to see what would happen. I haven’t been able (yet) to produce the elusive +Crataegomespilusgraft chimera, which I wrote about back in March 2005, but at least I now have what looks like a viable graft union, from which the chimera might one day sprout. I will just have to bide my time a little longer to see if this exquisite botanical monster eventually appears.
Our cat brought this beautiful little bat into the house. It was completely motionless but it didn’t seem to have a mark on it. After we put it in a jar for a few minutes, the bat stopped playing dead and came ‘to.’ It looked like a tiny fuzzy devil, complete with a miniscule mouth that emitted a high-pitched stream of screeches, some beyond my range of hearing. After we thought it had fully recuperated, we took it back outside and released it. It scrabbled along the wooden railing of the deck for a few minutes and cocked its little head at us, to utter a few more inaudible vocalizations. Suddenly, it took flight and swooped over our heads, making one last little chattering sound before disappearing into the darkness. Was it cursing us? Was it thanking us? Or was it simply echo-locating its next meal? We’ll never know.
