Category Archives for Hyper-Essay

» NEW MEXICO NOTES #1: Santa Fe Differs

On by far my most memorable winter stroll around the then-deserted College of Santa Fe, on visits to the Santa Fe Art Institute, I peered around a corner into a courtyard, looking for some mundane scene to exoticize with my camera when I heard what sounded like a theremin being played. Perhaps some artist was noodling around with one? Then a low-pitched thrum and bright light settled overhead and seemed to move closer.

Just prior to the unfortunate alien incident while visiting SFAI. - (c) 2012 Brian Awehali

Just prior to the unfortunate incident in the courtyard of the Santa Fe Art Institute (SFAI). – (c) 2012 Brian Awehali

When the hatch opened, I heard music that sounded a lot like the cantina music from the first “Star Wars” movie. Despite associations with the needless bloodshed of that scene, where Han Solo kills a business associate with his blaster, I was excited. Stories of alien visitation are common in New Mexico, especially around Roswell, but I didn’t take them very seriously, and I definitely didn’t imagine I’d be having any such experiences first-hand. I imagined, mostly because of the music, that there was a grand party going on inside, and that I’d soon be dancing, knocking back shots of oddly-colored liqueurs, or smoking alien herbs through exotic pipes with new friends.

Unfortunately, the visitors had traveled all these light years merely for the purpose of collecting stool samples.

* * *

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» OF BICYCLES, BIRDS & SPICES: A photo walk around Chengdu, Sichuan

Pedal-powered creative re-use artist in Chengdu - (c) 2012 Brian Awehali

Pedal-powered creative re-use artist in Chengdu – photo (c) 2012 Brian Awehali

The scale of things in China - (c) 2012 Brian AwehaliCar ownership is on the rise, but bicycle culture in Chengdu, and China generally, remains amazing. Many, perhaps most, main roads have dedicated bike lanes, and it’s really common to see things like hard-working (and exhausted) trash recyclers carting Seussian-levels of stuff around on pedal-powered vehicles (above), or a lone cyclist pedaling calmly through a terrifyingly busy intersection (left).

Fan of Babeel, former striker for Liverpoot? (Chengdu) - (c) 2012 Brian Awehali

I’m sure lots of the Chinese (Mandarin) lettering on t-shirts I see in the U.S. is mangled or just downright wrong, but since I can’t read traditional or simplified Mandarin, that’s nowhere near as funny to me as the botched English translations I saw everywhere in Chengdu. There’s quite a lot of emulation and outright copying of Western culture — especially consumer culture. This teenager stalking into an underpass near the Chengdu bus station might be expressing his esteem for striker/winger Ryan Babel (not Babeel), the Dutch football player who used to play for… Liverpool (not Liverpoot)… but it’s just as likely that the kid just liked the way this looked.

At Chengdu International Airport, the wheelchair-accessible stalls in the men’s bathroom have the pictograph you might expect, with Mandarin lettering and then, below that, in English translation: “Deformed Man End Place.” Picture after the jump:

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» CHINESE PIGEON RACING & CONFINEMENT IN CHENGDU

Kitebird at People's Park, Chengdu, (c) 2012, Brian Awehali

Kitebird flown at People’s Park, Chengdu in 2010. – (c) 2012, Brian Awehali

Seemingly querulous racing pigeons in a Chengdu rooftop coop - (c) 2012, Brian Awehali“I’m very worried,” said Mr. C., our interpreter and guide, as our driver pulled into the courtyard. His eyes were wet. “Only two of my pigeons have returned from the race two days ago.”

Mr. C., a thin man with a sweet face, had arranged through a friend for us to make a weekend visit to a Chengdu suburb for a tour of a pigeon racing club and one racer’s private coop.

“How many pigeons did you release?” I asked.

“Ten,” he said mournfully. As we piled out of the sedan into a courtyard, he ran ahead.

Orderly pigeons in a Chengdu rooftop coop - (c) 2012, Brian Awehali

Orderly pigeons in a Chengdu rooftop coop – (c) 2012, Brian Awehali

The owner of this private coop, who was meeting us inside, was the editor of a newspaper, and also a prominent local member of the Communist Party. Most officials of any substantial-sized business in China probably are, and one might consider it an occupational hazard.

I’ll be writing longer pieces about various aspects of China, the Communist Party and pigeon racing, but wanted to cobble together this short photo essay for LOUDCANARY readers.

Ah, sweet release:

Photo-of-a-photo on the wall of a suburban Chengu pigeon racing club - (c) 2012, Brian Awehali

Photo-of-a-photo on the wall of a suburban Chengdu pigeon racing club – (c) 2012, Brian Awehali

» THE WINGED SIN-EATERS: Vultures & the Vital Importance of Scavengers

Tlazolteotl, the Aztec goddess of earth, motherhood and fertility, played a redemptive role in the religious practices of Meso-American civilization: At the end of life, an individual was allowed to confess hir misdeeds to this deity, and according to legend she would cleanse the supplicant’s soul by “eating the filth”…

As they ride the wind, vultures seek dead things, not dying things, using a sense of smell far more highly developed than any other bird’s. They can detect a dead mouse under leaves from 200 feet up. They are discriminating, preferring corpses between two and four days dead….Vultures, whose name comes from vellere, Latin for to tear, begin their eating at vulnerable spots on the carcass—the anus and eyes. All that being said, you really wouldn’t want to live in a world without them.

A truly fascinating article in the Virginia Quarterly Review, by Meera Subramian, and with gorgeous photos like the one below, by Ami Vitale, goes into a lot of detail about the vital role of vultures and scavengers, and the alarming decline of their species on the Indian subcontinent.

Vultures scavenging human remains left at the burning ghats on the banks of rivers in India – Ami Vitale / Corbis

As the article explains,

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» EXPERIMENTS IN NON-REACTIONARY VEGANISM & ADVANCED BIPEDALISM (with recipes)

http://www.builtlean.com/2011/11/17/barefoot-running-research/

On a long road trip several years ago, when I was still eating even very bad roadside food, I listened to the book Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen, by Christopher McDougall, and I found myself delaying gas and bathroom breaks because I was too interested in what would happen next. McDougall told a wildly entertaining story about traditional and modern competitive “ultra”-runners that managed to also be a sort of ethnography and a treatise on a significant aspect of human evolution: our unequaled long-distance running ability and our related unique ability to sweat from every part of our body, instead of just from our tongues, as basically all other land mammals do.

Why is this significant? As an October 2012 article, “The Running Man Revisited,” from Seed magazine explains:

“…[R]oughly 2 million years ago, Australopithecus, with its tiny brain, hefty jaw and diet of rough, fibrous plants, evolved into Homo erectus, our slim, long-legged ancestor with a big brain and small teeth suited for tearing into animal and fruit flesh. Such a transformation almost certainly involved a reliable supply of calorie-laden meat, yet according to the fossil record, spear points have been in use for 200,000 years at most, and the bow and arrow for only 50,000 years, leaving an enormous stretch of time when early humans were consuming meat without the use of tools. [...] A deer and a decently fit man … trot at almost an identical pace, but in order to accelerate, a deer goes anaerobic, while the man remains in an oxygenated jogging zone. The same is true for horses, antelopes, and a slew of other four-legged creatures … and because quadrupeds can’t pant while they run, they also quickly overheat.”

Humans can’t outrun a cheetah or an antelope over short distances, but those animals can only run at their faster speeds for short distances compared to humans. Organized human “persistence” hunters can run an animal until it literally drops of heatstroke, as illustrated by the BBC documentary clip below (hard not to feel bad for the prey):

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» CHAOS: OF STRANGE ATTRACTORS & THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT

When Edward Lorenz gave a talk in 1972 entitled “Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?,” he distilled the main essence of his thoughts on predictability, interdependence and “chaos theory” in one pithy question.

Lorenz was a mathemetician and a meteorologist who, in the early 1960s, discovered that weather simulation models he was developing were exhibiting chaotic, non-predictive behavior, despite a fixed set of variables and no apparent equipment malfunction. Two identical weather simulation machines, side-by-side, given the same variables to process. Wildly different results. How?

Lorenz eventually concluded that it was a “dependence on initial conditions” — in this case, the fact of computers rounding variables to decimal points: 3.12879 expressed as 3.13, etc. Even extending the number of decimal points in the simulators did not produce matching results from the weather machines. Minute variations gave rise to wildly different chains of events.

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» CHINA’s 21st CENTURY HEYDAY OVER BEFORE IT TRULY BEGINS?

photo (c) Howard French - http://www.howardwfrench.net/

photo (c) Howard French – http://www.howardwfrench.net/

For the past few years, the U.S. mediascape has been filled with equal measures of fear and celebration of China as it ascends to its presumptive position as the Next Great Superpower. It’s huge, and its people are workaholics ideally suited (socially conditioned) to an authoritarian form of state capitalism that will kick all kinds of ass over our soft freedom-lovin’ version, goes the line, and it will take the U.S. decades to pay off “our” debt to China. Not long ago, Time magazine ran a cover story entitled “Five Things the U.S. Can Learn from the Chinese.” Some prominent journalists, like Thomas Friedman, have ballyhooed China’s ability, via an authoritarian alternative to U.S. gridlock, to enact broad environmental and energy policies on a scale unfathomable in the U.S.

I started thinking about all of the “China is the Next Superpower” rhetoric and what holes might logically be punched in it. I recalled how many people were predicting Japan’s rise to global dominance not so long ago. I also wondered about just how propagandistic coverage of China is — what purpose the fear of Big Bad China would serve. It would be a good stick with which to frighten U.S. citizens and help drive down living standards and wages in the interest of remaining “competitive,” wouldn’t it?

And lo, thanks to various online resources, I found some reasoned and informed critiques of this narrative that may give comfort to those who fear China’s foregone rise to global dominance, at the same time that I found troubling news of how “China” (it’s decision-making and agenda-setting apparatus; not its people) is adapting to global economic realities in part through massive investment in Africa.

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» HERE COMES THE OCEAN (and the Triumph of Slime)

Climate change is causing the sea to rise far faster than scientists once expected, a meter or more by 2100. Perhaps that doesn’t seem so dire to you. Perhaps you read that sentence and think: “Pity; there go some beaches and beach-front real estate.” Maybe you think: “You know, I’ve always liked the ocean more than New York City anyway…” If so, you may not be getting the picture, because a rise of just one meter will literally drown cities and towns across the globe, displacing millions of people, creating food shortages, epic political conflicts and disease epidemics.

It is not just the amount of overall rise that is of concern. That may well be the least concerning aspect. Storm surges will increase dramatically in strength if baseline sea level is higher. Hurricanes and typhoons have already increased significantly in strength and duration, an effect scientists attribute to climate change, and this is expected to continue. More than 10,000 people have been killed in storm surges in the Bay of Bengal alone in the last 300 years, and such surges could increase exponentially in the coming years. This means that the watery ends of Miami, Tokyo, New York, Mumbai, Shanghai, Jakarta, and Dhaka are not just possible, but actually likely.

Their ends might come from the sea, something like this:

…or from the sky, like this:

(The already disappearing island of Kiribati is, of course, already f–ked.)

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» THE BUG IS THE SYSTEM: A Freewheeling Romp Through the Natural and Social Implications of Chaos Theory


by Clare Lacy (from the extended online release of Tipping the Sacred Cow – The Best of LiP: Informed Revolt)

Human civilization supposedly thrives on order and predictability; it means that people will obey traffic laws and pay their taxes, show up to work on time, and keep their word. Predictability gives us a sense of order, and order lends itself in varying degrees to unity, to nationalism, to legality, and to community. Whether we like it or not, much of our lives are governed by these ideas of order and predictability, and by our assumptions that these ideals are universal and natural. And indeed, nature does follow its own order with periodic population swells, predictable animal behavior, and food chains, but in attempting to mimic or find equilibrium with natural conditions, humans never seem to be able to get it quite right.

With all variables seemingly accounted for, chaos often predominates over predictive systems, and we are left wondering what clue we are missing in our search for order in natural systems. In every field of inquiry, scientists have come up against certain problems that until the advent of chaos theory were written off as unsolvable.

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» BIRDS ATTACK!: Navigation, Personality & Aggression in the Aviary Kingdom


Crow on California Pacific Coastline (c) Brian Awehali

Birds, who once were dinosaurs, could take over the world (again) if they wanted to. And not just in the movies, a la Hitchcock’s 1963 terror, The Birds. (If you haven’t seen the movie, check out this well-edited one-and-a-half-minute version of it.)

Not long ago, in Kagoshima, a city on the southern island of Kyushu, in Japan, a booming crow population went on the offensive: destroying power lines and fiber optic cable, being markedly more aggressive with people, and outwitting human “crow patrols” by building decoy nests. In recent years, crows have been filmed using tools in sequence and exhibiting complex reasoning as well.

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