Here is a video from the Makuna, an indigenous group in the Amazon basin. It's very appropriate to what I'm working on right now, because they talk about traditional knowledge and ways of managing their environment. This is the type of information we're studying with peasant farmers in our region through the Muisca Garden project. Also, there are some cool shots of rock art around minute 7 of the video, which is another theme I've been working on recently.
Apparently the ensemble of this ethnic group's knowledge has been declared a cultural heritage treasure of humanity by UNESCO.
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Homeless Youth in Chicago
Here is a recent article from the New York Times about being a homeless youth in Chicago. There's also a version from the Chicago News Cooperative. The article mentions the Night Ministry and the Crib, groups my mother works with in our neighborhood, which is a hub for LGBT homeless youth.
Here is an older article that's explicitly focused on the Night Ministry and other service providers for the homeless.
Here is an older article that's explicitly focused on the Night Ministry and other service providers for the homeless.
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
Sensationalist tourism in Colombia
Last week my cousin sent me a link to a tour of Colombia entitled Coffee, Coca, and Gold. It is offered by Excursionist, a high-priced members-only tour agency. The trip takes visitors to the Gold Museum in Bogota, coffee farms in Quindio, and the coral islands of Cartagena. The highlight is a visit to late druglord Pablo Escobar's sprawling, tacky ranch, Hacienda Napoles, and a personal conversation with Escobar's brother in Medellin. I assume this latter activity is the justification for the $16000US price tag.
The tour kind of pisses me off. No, not because of its offensive, sensationalist, cliched insistence on Colombia's reputation as being little more than a haven of druglords. What irritates me is that I have offered essentially the same tour (at an eighth of the price!), and have difficulty finding takers. My tour takes visitors to the Gold Museum with a personalized tour, to the sights of urbane Medellin, to a quaint, authentic coffee farm, and through Cartagena. Lodging is exclusively in boutique hotels, just as the Excursionist tour offers. I expose visitors to a wide range of Colombian history, culture, and current events. Missing from my tour is the stay on a private Caribbean houseboat, the visit to a gold mine (though I offer a lecture with emerald experts), and of course the personal contact with an Escobar. However, knowing the prices of features and accommodations (in fact, my visitors stay in the same hotel in Medellin as on the Excursionist tour, the lovely, avant-garde Art Hotel), I think the Coca, Coffee, and Gold tour is way overpriced, even taking into account the exclusive Escobar visit and houseboat lodging. I don't spite them for their high price; if they can find people willing to pay $16000 for their tour, then more the power to them. I just feel bitter that I have such trouble scrounging up tour groups when I'm offering a similar (and perhaps superior) product!
The tour kind of pisses me off. No, not because of its offensive, sensationalist, cliched insistence on Colombia's reputation as being little more than a haven of druglords. What irritates me is that I have offered essentially the same tour (at an eighth of the price!), and have difficulty finding takers. My tour takes visitors to the Gold Museum with a personalized tour, to the sights of urbane Medellin, to a quaint, authentic coffee farm, and through Cartagena. Lodging is exclusively in boutique hotels, just as the Excursionist tour offers. I expose visitors to a wide range of Colombian history, culture, and current events. Missing from my tour is the stay on a private Caribbean houseboat, the visit to a gold mine (though I offer a lecture with emerald experts), and of course the personal contact with an Escobar. However, knowing the prices of features and accommodations (in fact, my visitors stay in the same hotel in Medellin as on the Excursionist tour, the lovely, avant-garde Art Hotel), I think the Coca, Coffee, and Gold tour is way overpriced, even taking into account the exclusive Escobar visit and houseboat lodging. I don't spite them for their high price; if they can find people willing to pay $16000 for their tour, then more the power to them. I just feel bitter that I have such trouble scrounging up tour groups when I'm offering a similar (and perhaps superior) product!
Sunday, November 27, 2011
A farm in Arcabuco
Recently my family and I went to get fresh trout at a friend's farm in Arcabuco, Boyaca. It's a really lovely, well-organized farm, and I wanted to share it with my readers.
Our friend's main product has traditionally been blackberry. That's how we met him; he was the supplier of fruit for our small company's jams. However, lately he's been working a lot as a tour guide at the nearby national park (Iguaque, a high-altitude lake where the Muiscas say humanity was born of a goddess and her son that emerged from the lake, bore children together, and returned to the lake as snakes). So the blackberry business is not his main focus right now. But the rest of the farm is a good example of a thriving, diverse peasant microfarm.
Behind Libardo's house there's a typical field planted to corn, beans, squash, fava, and even some young fruit trees that he's hoping will come to fruition.
We also spotted some malanga, an elephant-ear-shaped plant that produces a starchy tuber.
This tuber is grated and fried to make akra, Haitian fritters. Here in the high mountains of Colombia though, I think it's mainly cooked in soups, like a potato. I was surprised to see malanga in such a cool climate.
Around the farm's crop fields there are low electric fences.
I wonder what they're keeping out?
Guinea pigs! Our friend keeps a few of these Andean natives under a shed on his farm. They're free to roam about, and they graze just like cows.
You would think that being rodents, they would scamper off and escape, or get around the electric fence. But guinea pigs are really docile homebodies. They don't stray far or even move that much, though when they're scared they can dart off quickly like their other rodent cousins.
Speaking of rodent cousins, here's a free-range bunny. He's gotten past the electric fence somehow and into Libardo's brother's field of mar alfalfa (elephant grass), a forage grass that he cuts to feed his dairy cattle.
Here is a jolly pig in her pen.
The farm also has chickens and some regal turkeys.
Here's a good bunny that hasn't escaped anywhere. He's just grazing by a water sluice.
This sluice captures and channels a natural mountain spring on its way down to the major river. Libardo has widened two ponds in the spring, where he raises his trout.
Here is Don Libardo catching us some fish. First he throws the weighted net into the pond (pardon the sideways video, I can't correct it).
Then he hauls his catch onto shore.
Next he takes the fish from the net and puts them in a mesh bag.
Now we return to the washing shed to wash the slime off the fish. It comes out in bubbles, like soap.
The fish are dead by now; trout are fragile, and die after only a few minutes of handling out of water (unlike carp or tilapia, which can survive a lot of abuse and a fair amount of time out of water). Even so, Libardo gives the trout a final knock on the head with the back of his knife, just to make sure they're dead before he guts them.
Next he cuts a slit down the belly and removes all the entrails from the fish.
The guts go in a bucket and become a tasty treat for the dogs, cats, and pigs of the farm.
Even after removing the entrails, there's a bit of blood and gunk left in the fish. Libardo scrapes this out by hand.
Here is the finished product, beautiful trout that we'll roast the next day.
Our friend's just got to weigh it so we can pay him.
I close this post with a video overview of the farm.
Our friend's main product has traditionally been blackberry. That's how we met him; he was the supplier of fruit for our small company's jams. However, lately he's been working a lot as a tour guide at the nearby national park (Iguaque, a high-altitude lake where the Muiscas say humanity was born of a goddess and her son that emerged from the lake, bore children together, and returned to the lake as snakes). So the blackberry business is not his main focus right now. But the rest of the farm is a good example of a thriving, diverse peasant microfarm.
Behind Libardo's house there's a typical field planted to corn, beans, squash, fava, and even some young fruit trees that he's hoping will come to fruition.
We also spotted some malanga, an elephant-ear-shaped plant that produces a starchy tuber.
This tuber is grated and fried to make akra, Haitian fritters. Here in the high mountains of Colombia though, I think it's mainly cooked in soups, like a potato. I was surprised to see malanga in such a cool climate.
Around the farm's crop fields there are low electric fences.
I wonder what they're keeping out?
Guinea pigs! Our friend keeps a few of these Andean natives under a shed on his farm. They're free to roam about, and they graze just like cows.
You would think that being rodents, they would scamper off and escape, or get around the electric fence. But guinea pigs are really docile homebodies. They don't stray far or even move that much, though when they're scared they can dart off quickly like their other rodent cousins.
Speaking of rodent cousins, here's a free-range bunny. He's gotten past the electric fence somehow and into Libardo's brother's field of mar alfalfa (elephant grass), a forage grass that he cuts to feed his dairy cattle.
Here is a jolly pig in her pen.
The farm also has chickens and some regal turkeys.
Here's a good bunny that hasn't escaped anywhere. He's just grazing by a water sluice.
This sluice captures and channels a natural mountain spring on its way down to the major river. Libardo has widened two ponds in the spring, where he raises his trout.
Here is Don Libardo catching us some fish. First he throws the weighted net into the pond (pardon the sideways video, I can't correct it).
Then he hauls his catch onto shore.
Next he takes the fish from the net and puts them in a mesh bag.
Now we return to the washing shed to wash the slime off the fish. It comes out in bubbles, like soap.
The fish are dead by now; trout are fragile, and die after only a few minutes of handling out of water (unlike carp or tilapia, which can survive a lot of abuse and a fair amount of time out of water). Even so, Libardo gives the trout a final knock on the head with the back of his knife, just to make sure they're dead before he guts them.
Next he cuts a slit down the belly and removes all the entrails from the fish.
The guts go in a bucket and become a tasty treat for the dogs, cats, and pigs of the farm.
Even after removing the entrails, there's a bit of blood and gunk left in the fish. Libardo scrapes this out by hand.
Here is the finished product, beautiful trout that we'll roast the next day.
Our friend's just got to weigh it so we can pay him.
I close this post with a video overview of the farm.
The boy in the striped pajamas
Recently on a bus trip from my town to Bogota, I saw the movie "The boy in the striped pajamas". For bus movie fare, it's certainly a step up from Bad Boys 2, Old Dogs, and mediocre Kevin James/Adam Sandler efforts. But I still wanted to comment on how trite and bad the film was.
The boy in the striped pajamas follows the story of an SS official's family in Nazi Germany. The official is promoted and sent (with his family) to serve as commandant of a death camp. His family is to remain within a residential compound, but his son wanders off and befriends (through an electric fence) a young boy his age interned in the camp. After various trials and travails of a German family torn between Nazi loyalty and horror at the Nazi death machine, the movie culminates with the German commandant's son entering the camp through a hole dug under the fence, dressing up as an inmate, and getting gassed with Zyklon B.
There are a number of what seem to me to be historical inaccuracies in the film, and in the end they offend me. First off, I doubt that an SS officer sent to run a death camp in a forward post like Poland (where all the death camps were) would be accompanied by his family. Secondly, I doubt that it would be so easy to dig a hole under a death camp fence that an eight-year-old boy could do it unnoticed. If it were, everyone in the camps would have escaped. I'm no expert in these things, so maybe I am mistaken my sense of how inaccurate they are. But the two things I've noted above seem pretty damn implausible.
Movies are fiction, so normally it's not a big deal if a movie has historical inaccuracies. But in this case, the creators base the entire premise of the plot on things that couldn't have been. And for what? To send a trite message that the Holocaust was bad? That the death camps dehumanized people? We already know this, and we've seen it reflected upon and treated in a million different, more artful ways than this film achieves, and without taking liberties with the facts. If you'd like good, well-informed accounts of how horrid and dehumanizing the Holocaust was for all involved, read Primo Levi, Eli Wiesel, even those Maus comic books.
Again, normally it's not too grave if a movie is inaccurate, or even trite. But the filmmakers of The boy in striped pajamas (which is based on a book written in a few days by an Irishman with apparently little sense of German language or history) took the Holocaust and used it to deliver a trite message. The millions of victims of the Holocaust (the camp inmates, the subjects living in a hellish dictatorship, the soldiers on all sides who died defending or assailing the Nazi war machine, even the architects of the Holocaust who are now surely suffering eternal torment) were and are real. The Holocaust was a real, concrete event in history that happened in a certain way, and not in any other way. To fictionalize and twist the facts of the Holocaust to deliver a filmmaker's trite message is an insult to humanity, to all of us whose present world was shaped by the Second World War (which is to say, to everyone alive today).
The boy in the striped pajamas follows the story of an SS official's family in Nazi Germany. The official is promoted and sent (with his family) to serve as commandant of a death camp. His family is to remain within a residential compound, but his son wanders off and befriends (through an electric fence) a young boy his age interned in the camp. After various trials and travails of a German family torn between Nazi loyalty and horror at the Nazi death machine, the movie culminates with the German commandant's son entering the camp through a hole dug under the fence, dressing up as an inmate, and getting gassed with Zyklon B.
There are a number of what seem to me to be historical inaccuracies in the film, and in the end they offend me. First off, I doubt that an SS officer sent to run a death camp in a forward post like Poland (where all the death camps were) would be accompanied by his family. Secondly, I doubt that it would be so easy to dig a hole under a death camp fence that an eight-year-old boy could do it unnoticed. If it were, everyone in the camps would have escaped. I'm no expert in these things, so maybe I am mistaken my sense of how inaccurate they are. But the two things I've noted above seem pretty damn implausible.
Movies are fiction, so normally it's not a big deal if a movie has historical inaccuracies. But in this case, the creators base the entire premise of the plot on things that couldn't have been. And for what? To send a trite message that the Holocaust was bad? That the death camps dehumanized people? We already know this, and we've seen it reflected upon and treated in a million different, more artful ways than this film achieves, and without taking liberties with the facts. If you'd like good, well-informed accounts of how horrid and dehumanizing the Holocaust was for all involved, read Primo Levi, Eli Wiesel, even those Maus comic books.
Again, normally it's not too grave if a movie is inaccurate, or even trite. But the filmmakers of The boy in striped pajamas (which is based on a book written in a few days by an Irishman with apparently little sense of German language or history) took the Holocaust and used it to deliver a trite message. The millions of victims of the Holocaust (the camp inmates, the subjects living in a hellish dictatorship, the soldiers on all sides who died defending or assailing the Nazi war machine, even the architects of the Holocaust who are now surely suffering eternal torment) were and are real. The Holocaust was a real, concrete event in history that happened in a certain way, and not in any other way. To fictionalize and twist the facts of the Holocaust to deliver a filmmaker's trite message is an insult to humanity, to all of us whose present world was shaped by the Second World War (which is to say, to everyone alive today).
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
Exploration and metropoli in the Amazon
This is a really cool video of Wade Davis, an ethnobotanist who has worked a lot in Colombia. He tells about the 16th-century Orellana expedition down the Amazon river, and the dense agricultural populations they encountered living in the forest. Davis is a foremost expert on the Amazon and the Andes, which makes it sort of surprising to hear how bad his Spanish pronunciation is!
Anyway, Davis tells about the post-Conquest change in Amazonian population patterns from dense farming villages to sparse slash-and-burn farmers and hunters. This is a field that is being investigated more and more, and we are thus reversing the old common storyline that the Amazon rainforest is and has always been a deserted, fragile area unable to support human settlement. National Geographic did a good special on the lost cities of the Amazon a while ago. That said, I feel like both Wade Davis and National Geographic sometimes get caught up in swashbuckling adventure centered on heroic explorers, as opposed to the nuanced, complex treatments of culture that they also often treat us to.
It turns out that I am currently reading a book called The Country of Cinnamon, by William Ospina, that gives a fictionalized account of the Orellana expedition. It seems to hew pretty closely to what's known of the historical facts, but it's also a great read. I feel it captures the mood of what it is to be American, to be caught between rooting for the European conqueror-heroes (our fathers?) at the same time as we lament the destruction of our maternal indigenous civilizations, and yearn for a reckoning in which the Indians will rise again. The book reads a lot like Heart of Darkness, and explores the same theme: the descent into madness of Europeans plunged into a strange new setting, with none of the rules of home to guide and bind their behavior. However, The Country of Cinnamon doesn't make the fatal flaw of assuming this is how man acts when he is alone in a place where society doesn't exist--Ospina makes it clear that the Spanish expeditionaires go mad and become barbaric not in the absence of civilized society, but because they are uncapable or unwilling to recognize the humanity and the validity of the new society they are traveling through. That is to say that unlike Conrad, who uses the Africans merely as a mystical, animal prop serving as a backdrop to Kurtz's barbarity and madness, Ospina subtly switches between (or at least recognizes the existence of) the viewpoints of the scared, brutal Spaniards, the perplexed mountain Indians accompanying the expedition, and even the scary, mysterious Amazonians who are new and unknown to Spaniard and Andean alike.
Anyway, Davis tells about the post-Conquest change in Amazonian population patterns from dense farming villages to sparse slash-and-burn farmers and hunters. This is a field that is being investigated more and more, and we are thus reversing the old common storyline that the Amazon rainforest is and has always been a deserted, fragile area unable to support human settlement. National Geographic did a good special on the lost cities of the Amazon a while ago. That said, I feel like both Wade Davis and National Geographic sometimes get caught up in swashbuckling adventure centered on heroic explorers, as opposed to the nuanced, complex treatments of culture that they also often treat us to.
It turns out that I am currently reading a book called The Country of Cinnamon, by William Ospina, that gives a fictionalized account of the Orellana expedition. It seems to hew pretty closely to what's known of the historical facts, but it's also a great read. I feel it captures the mood of what it is to be American, to be caught between rooting for the European conqueror-heroes (our fathers?) at the same time as we lament the destruction of our maternal indigenous civilizations, and yearn for a reckoning in which the Indians will rise again. The book reads a lot like Heart of Darkness, and explores the same theme: the descent into madness of Europeans plunged into a strange new setting, with none of the rules of home to guide and bind their behavior. However, The Country of Cinnamon doesn't make the fatal flaw of assuming this is how man acts when he is alone in a place where society doesn't exist--Ospina makes it clear that the Spanish expeditionaires go mad and become barbaric not in the absence of civilized society, but because they are uncapable or unwilling to recognize the humanity and the validity of the new society they are traveling through. That is to say that unlike Conrad, who uses the Africans merely as a mystical, animal prop serving as a backdrop to Kurtz's barbarity and madness, Ospina subtly switches between (or at least recognizes the existence of) the viewpoints of the scared, brutal Spaniards, the perplexed mountain Indians accompanying the expedition, and even the scary, mysterious Amazonians who are new and unknown to Spaniard and Andean alike.
Sunday, November 20, 2011
Recent cultural consumption
Amidst a pretty hectic work schedule, I've been taking in a lot of culture recently. In my weekday evenings alone after work, I've been reading, watching movies from my father-in-law's impressive film collection, and generally exposing myself to lots of ideas and artistic creations.
Right now I'm reading a number of books. "The Coming Famine" by Julian Cribb is a well-researched account of the different issues that put in peril the future security of our food supply. It is pretty comprehensive, touching on limited supply of mined fertilizers, dwindling oil reserves, food wastage, lack of financing for agronomic research, increasingly scarce freshwater, and climate change, among other things. The scope is wide-reaching, and it's a good introduction for the layperson, though some (not many) of the facts and sources he quotes have more to do with talking points that have been made "real" by incessant repetition in the news, as opposed to pressing issues based on reality. I like a few aspects of his treatment in particular--his repeated insistence that people eat more plants and less meat as a way of reducing demand for grains, energy, and fertilizer; his recognition that both large-scale mechanized farming and small-scale intensive land use have important places in our world's future food supply; and his equanimous, nonradical way of dealing with the issues. If this latter is at times overly generous to certain viewpoints without much factual backing (like the 15-year-old claim that within a few years genetic modification will produce crops resistant to drought, salinity, and the like), it does enable him to make reasonable, common-sense claims without sounding like a radical (for instance his insistence on increasingly basing our diets on plants as opposed to animal products).
Another, very different book I'm reading is The Crusades through Arab Eyes, by Amin Maalouf. It's a fascinating, comprehensive historical account of the first centuries of the second millennium, with lots of intrigue, battles, atrocities, and noble behavior. It gives a complex understanding of all the actors involved in the Crusades, from Western European Crusaders and their Middle-Easternized descendants, to Turkish warlords, to decadent Byzantine rulers, to Arab subjects caught in the crossfire. There are lots of surprising alliances and betrayals among all parties, with no simple Muslim vs. Christian storyline to be found anywhere!
A book I finished recently is You and Your Adolescent, by Laurence Steinberg. As its title suggests, it talks about raising adolescents. My dad bought the book maybe twenty years ago, and I figured I'd read it to prepare for my son's teenage years, as well as for input on the two adolescents currently living with me. It's fascinating too to see what sections my dad highlighted. It seems he wanted to know how to deal with my sexual activity. If only he'd known how little success I had with the ladies as a teenager, he'd have been much less preoccupied! I notice that the new edition of the book advertised on the website covers up to 25 years of age. I realize that times are changing, but I'd like to think that by the time I was engaged to my now-wife I wasn't still an adolescent!
Another childrearing book I'm reading is called Raising Adopted Children by Lois Ruskai Melina. I am interested in adopting children, because I want a big family, but I don't feel that it's responsible to conceive lots of kids in an age when we're really pushing the limits of what our natural environment can withstand. This is another book from my dad's collection, when he and my mother were considering adopting a sibling for me. Again, it's interesting to see what information Dad highlighted in his reading. It's also funny to read about certain preoccupations that, due to my wife's and my particular living situation, don't seem like they'll be as big a problem for us. Especially "foreign" babies' looking different from the adoptive parents wouldn't be a huge problem here in Colombia, where any given family has members that look European, Asian, African, and Native American. Hell, right now my son looks like a little rosy-cheeked German baby amidst his Latino family members! Perhaps this is related to another point the book makes, that children adopted from Colombia find as much acceptance from extended family members in the US as Caucasian babies born in the States.
If you follow the links I've posted for these books, you'll notice I'm no longer linking to Amazon.com. I don't like their business model of lowering prices at the expense of worker dignity. It's not only incorrect ethically, but there's no way the US can reinforce a healthy economy if the main "growth" in productivity is achieved by making jobs intolerable and insecure and thus impoverishing our nation's consumer base. I'd rather pay a bit more for my books, and even have them arrive in two days instead of one, if it means my country will have more well-paid workers who might in turn purchase other products and services that I offer, or simply to be my neighbors in a flourishing, dignified community.
On the movie front, I've had a varied diet, too. I recently watched Elia Kazan's "On the Waterfront" for the first time. I knew the "I coulda been a contender" sequence from my dad and other cultural allusions to it, but I had no idea what the rest of the film was about. It touches on the complex relations between union, mafia, and Church, with the most noble character being a fiery progressive priest urging dockworkers to stand up for their rights. Would that we saw more of that these days in the US Catholic Church!
I also watched Scorcese's Mean Streets for the first time in a long time. I remembered its bleak, lonely aesthetic, but I'd forgotten how unique and accurate that mood and the portrayal of city life is. Unlike Scorcese's other mobster flicks, Mean Streets isn't at all glamorous. It's about a group of small-change hustler friends trying to live well and live good in a decadent, decaying neighborhood. The movie's depiction of the postindustrial, post-European-immigrant urban landscape (albeit at the front end of postindustrial decline) corresponds more to the timbre of my youth in such an environment than perhaps any other film I've seen. City life for me in 1990s Chicago was neither glamorously gritty nor glamorously comfortable. The city in those days often felt like a forgotten landscape, no longer relevant in a shiny, suburban USA. Likewise the Catholic Church, which in Scorcese's 1972 New York and in the materialistic, self-centered milieu of the 1990s USA seemed like an antiquated, forgotten institution, kept alive only by a few true believers in old, empty churches, who themselves were struggling to reconcile the noble ideals of a medieval Church with the amoralism of their everyday surroundings. It's that passed-over, faded quality that Mean Streets captures so well.
A film I did not like very much was Pi, by Darren Aronofsky. The premise is that a number theorist genius comes close to discovering some magic number that can explain the stock market, and perhaps secret meanings in the Jewish Torah. First off, it's from 1998, when people still idiotically revered the stock market as some omniscient indicator of value, as opposed to the arbitrary, zero-sum scam driven by irrational behavior and fraudulent manipulation that the stock market has proven to be. As such, the film has us admiring the protagonist and his computer for their ability to "decipher" the stock market's daily fluctuations, as if this could create value as opposed to merely concentrating it in the hands of a few lucky gamblers. But beyond this idiosyncracy of the film's era, I disliked the frenetic, epileptic pacing and cinematography of the movie. Aronofsky has become famous for his depictions of mental breakdown, but this early effort is clumsy and over-the-top, to the point of being almost unwatchable. The filming is very deliberate, as if to say, "Look at me, I'm rapidly splicing together a lot of chaotic images and dreamlike non sequiturs. Give me the film school first prize!" Anyway, I'm glad I'm done watching it, and glad Aronofsky has refined his craft.
A much better black-and-white film with rapid-fire editing is The Battleship Potemkin, by Sergei Eisenstein. It was filmed in 1925, and is silent, with interspersed dialogue cards amidst the filmed action. But my version has a jumping musical score by Shostakovich that goes along well with the modern-style montage sequences. The film follows the mutiny of a naval crew in Tsarist Russia, and the aftermath of the mutiny and popular uprising. Apparently Eisenstein was the first to make widespread use of montage, as a way of assaulting the viewer's emotions with sensory stimuli. If propaganda were all done this gracefully and artfully, I might not mind so much living under a propagandistic regime!
Two Japanese-themed movies I've seen recently are The Last Samurai, a beautiful but ultimately incoherent homage to the warrior ethic, and Throne of Blood, by Akira Kurosawa. I am culturally literate enough to have picked up that T2hrone of Blood was a Macbeth remake, but only about 40 minutes into the film, when the lady of the manor starts trying to wash her hands of imaginary blood. The two films represent samurai warriors on their best (Last Samurai) and worst (Throne of Blood) behavior, but neither makes clear that the samurai were a class of feudal overlords whose leisure and whose battle were based on the subjection of an industrious, honest peasantry to their extortion of tribute.
My wife and I have also watched Blue and White, directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski. Blue captures a depressive, cold vision of life. The protagonist is devastated by the loss of her husband and daughter in a car accident, but she and everyone else in the film is so emotionless that I can't imagine she actually liked her family that much to begin with. The film ends with a senseless montage of different characters looking wistful in blue light. White, on the other hand, is a lively, dark look at getting ahead and getting revenge, in this case on a cruel ex-wife that forces her Polish husband to flee France. It is much more plot-driven than Blue. My wife and I have yet to see Red.
One last film I want to mention is a documentary put out by National Geographic's Genographic Project. This project aims to reconstruct the history of ancient human migrations across the globe, through DNA samples from people throughout the world, especially indigenous groups that have lived in the same place for millennia. I signed up and sent in a DNA sample from my cheeks, and am waiting for the results. But in the meantime, they sent me a documentary about the project. It follows lead scientist Spencer Wells around the world as he traces mankind's earliest footsteps. In typical National Geographic style, the film oscillates between serious science and sensational adventurism, but it's a good watch.
Aside from film, I've been listening to music for the first time in a long time. On a recent night I digested a CD from Marvin Gaye's Last Concert Tour. I always love his artful tightrope walk between the carnal and the sacred. At the end of the CD, he remarks that it may be his last tour, as he's considering joining the clergy. What he didn't know is that it would be his father, the father he lauds at various moments in the concert, who would end his touring career with a gunshot to the face. I also listened to The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, which for me represents one of the high points of commercial hiphop music. The instrumental tracks are complex and organic, the rhymes are intelligent, and the singing is top-notch. At the same time, hearing her makes me think of my disillusion with her Fugees counterparts, Wyclef Jean and Prakazrel, whose progressive lyrics in favor of oppressed minorities in the US are diametrically opposed to their public statements in favor of the most depraved oppressors in Haiti. Odd how a left-wing person in one context becomes the most reactionary in another. I don't know Lauryn Hill's stance on Haitian politics, and I probably don't want to know it.
That's it for my culture reviews. Soon I'll also post on a few unique cultural experiences I've had lately.
Right now I'm reading a number of books. "The Coming Famine" by Julian Cribb is a well-researched account of the different issues that put in peril the future security of our food supply. It is pretty comprehensive, touching on limited supply of mined fertilizers, dwindling oil reserves, food wastage, lack of financing for agronomic research, increasingly scarce freshwater, and climate change, among other things. The scope is wide-reaching, and it's a good introduction for the layperson, though some (not many) of the facts and sources he quotes have more to do with talking points that have been made "real" by incessant repetition in the news, as opposed to pressing issues based on reality. I like a few aspects of his treatment in particular--his repeated insistence that people eat more plants and less meat as a way of reducing demand for grains, energy, and fertilizer; his recognition that both large-scale mechanized farming and small-scale intensive land use have important places in our world's future food supply; and his equanimous, nonradical way of dealing with the issues. If this latter is at times overly generous to certain viewpoints without much factual backing (like the 15-year-old claim that within a few years genetic modification will produce crops resistant to drought, salinity, and the like), it does enable him to make reasonable, common-sense claims without sounding like a radical (for instance his insistence on increasingly basing our diets on plants as opposed to animal products).
Another, very different book I'm reading is The Crusades through Arab Eyes, by Amin Maalouf. It's a fascinating, comprehensive historical account of the first centuries of the second millennium, with lots of intrigue, battles, atrocities, and noble behavior. It gives a complex understanding of all the actors involved in the Crusades, from Western European Crusaders and their Middle-Easternized descendants, to Turkish warlords, to decadent Byzantine rulers, to Arab subjects caught in the crossfire. There are lots of surprising alliances and betrayals among all parties, with no simple Muslim vs. Christian storyline to be found anywhere!
A book I finished recently is You and Your Adolescent, by Laurence Steinberg. As its title suggests, it talks about raising adolescents. My dad bought the book maybe twenty years ago, and I figured I'd read it to prepare for my son's teenage years, as well as for input on the two adolescents currently living with me. It's fascinating too to see what sections my dad highlighted. It seems he wanted to know how to deal with my sexual activity. If only he'd known how little success I had with the ladies as a teenager, he'd have been much less preoccupied! I notice that the new edition of the book advertised on the website covers up to 25 years of age. I realize that times are changing, but I'd like to think that by the time I was engaged to my now-wife I wasn't still an adolescent!
Another childrearing book I'm reading is called Raising Adopted Children by Lois Ruskai Melina. I am interested in adopting children, because I want a big family, but I don't feel that it's responsible to conceive lots of kids in an age when we're really pushing the limits of what our natural environment can withstand. This is another book from my dad's collection, when he and my mother were considering adopting a sibling for me. Again, it's interesting to see what information Dad highlighted in his reading. It's also funny to read about certain preoccupations that, due to my wife's and my particular living situation, don't seem like they'll be as big a problem for us. Especially "foreign" babies' looking different from the adoptive parents wouldn't be a huge problem here in Colombia, where any given family has members that look European, Asian, African, and Native American. Hell, right now my son looks like a little rosy-cheeked German baby amidst his Latino family members! Perhaps this is related to another point the book makes, that children adopted from Colombia find as much acceptance from extended family members in the US as Caucasian babies born in the States.
If you follow the links I've posted for these books, you'll notice I'm no longer linking to Amazon.com. I don't like their business model of lowering prices at the expense of worker dignity. It's not only incorrect ethically, but there's no way the US can reinforce a healthy economy if the main "growth" in productivity is achieved by making jobs intolerable and insecure and thus impoverishing our nation's consumer base. I'd rather pay a bit more for my books, and even have them arrive in two days instead of one, if it means my country will have more well-paid workers who might in turn purchase other products and services that I offer, or simply to be my neighbors in a flourishing, dignified community.
On the movie front, I've had a varied diet, too. I recently watched Elia Kazan's "On the Waterfront" for the first time. I knew the "I coulda been a contender" sequence from my dad and other cultural allusions to it, but I had no idea what the rest of the film was about. It touches on the complex relations between union, mafia, and Church, with the most noble character being a fiery progressive priest urging dockworkers to stand up for their rights. Would that we saw more of that these days in the US Catholic Church!
I also watched Scorcese's Mean Streets for the first time in a long time. I remembered its bleak, lonely aesthetic, but I'd forgotten how unique and accurate that mood and the portrayal of city life is. Unlike Scorcese's other mobster flicks, Mean Streets isn't at all glamorous. It's about a group of small-change hustler friends trying to live well and live good in a decadent, decaying neighborhood. The movie's depiction of the postindustrial, post-European-immigrant urban landscape (albeit at the front end of postindustrial decline) corresponds more to the timbre of my youth in such an environment than perhaps any other film I've seen. City life for me in 1990s Chicago was neither glamorously gritty nor glamorously comfortable. The city in those days often felt like a forgotten landscape, no longer relevant in a shiny, suburban USA. Likewise the Catholic Church, which in Scorcese's 1972 New York and in the materialistic, self-centered milieu of the 1990s USA seemed like an antiquated, forgotten institution, kept alive only by a few true believers in old, empty churches, who themselves were struggling to reconcile the noble ideals of a medieval Church with the amoralism of their everyday surroundings. It's that passed-over, faded quality that Mean Streets captures so well.
A film I did not like very much was Pi, by Darren Aronofsky. The premise is that a number theorist genius comes close to discovering some magic number that can explain the stock market, and perhaps secret meanings in the Jewish Torah. First off, it's from 1998, when people still idiotically revered the stock market as some omniscient indicator of value, as opposed to the arbitrary, zero-sum scam driven by irrational behavior and fraudulent manipulation that the stock market has proven to be. As such, the film has us admiring the protagonist and his computer for their ability to "decipher" the stock market's daily fluctuations, as if this could create value as opposed to merely concentrating it in the hands of a few lucky gamblers. But beyond this idiosyncracy of the film's era, I disliked the frenetic, epileptic pacing and cinematography of the movie. Aronofsky has become famous for his depictions of mental breakdown, but this early effort is clumsy and over-the-top, to the point of being almost unwatchable. The filming is very deliberate, as if to say, "Look at me, I'm rapidly splicing together a lot of chaotic images and dreamlike non sequiturs. Give me the film school first prize!" Anyway, I'm glad I'm done watching it, and glad Aronofsky has refined his craft.
A much better black-and-white film with rapid-fire editing is The Battleship Potemkin, by Sergei Eisenstein. It was filmed in 1925, and is silent, with interspersed dialogue cards amidst the filmed action. But my version has a jumping musical score by Shostakovich that goes along well with the modern-style montage sequences. The film follows the mutiny of a naval crew in Tsarist Russia, and the aftermath of the mutiny and popular uprising. Apparently Eisenstein was the first to make widespread use of montage, as a way of assaulting the viewer's emotions with sensory stimuli. If propaganda were all done this gracefully and artfully, I might not mind so much living under a propagandistic regime!
Two Japanese-themed movies I've seen recently are The Last Samurai, a beautiful but ultimately incoherent homage to the warrior ethic, and Throne of Blood, by Akira Kurosawa. I am culturally literate enough to have picked up that T2hrone of Blood was a Macbeth remake, but only about 40 minutes into the film, when the lady of the manor starts trying to wash her hands of imaginary blood. The two films represent samurai warriors on their best (Last Samurai) and worst (Throne of Blood) behavior, but neither makes clear that the samurai were a class of feudal overlords whose leisure and whose battle were based on the subjection of an industrious, honest peasantry to their extortion of tribute.
My wife and I have also watched Blue and White, directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski. Blue captures a depressive, cold vision of life. The protagonist is devastated by the loss of her husband and daughter in a car accident, but she and everyone else in the film is so emotionless that I can't imagine she actually liked her family that much to begin with. The film ends with a senseless montage of different characters looking wistful in blue light. White, on the other hand, is a lively, dark look at getting ahead and getting revenge, in this case on a cruel ex-wife that forces her Polish husband to flee France. It is much more plot-driven than Blue. My wife and I have yet to see Red.
One last film I want to mention is a documentary put out by National Geographic's Genographic Project. This project aims to reconstruct the history of ancient human migrations across the globe, through DNA samples from people throughout the world, especially indigenous groups that have lived in the same place for millennia. I signed up and sent in a DNA sample from my cheeks, and am waiting for the results. But in the meantime, they sent me a documentary about the project. It follows lead scientist Spencer Wells around the world as he traces mankind's earliest footsteps. In typical National Geographic style, the film oscillates between serious science and sensational adventurism, but it's a good watch.
Aside from film, I've been listening to music for the first time in a long time. On a recent night I digested a CD from Marvin Gaye's Last Concert Tour. I always love his artful tightrope walk between the carnal and the sacred. At the end of the CD, he remarks that it may be his last tour, as he's considering joining the clergy. What he didn't know is that it would be his father, the father he lauds at various moments in the concert, who would end his touring career with a gunshot to the face. I also listened to The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, which for me represents one of the high points of commercial hiphop music. The instrumental tracks are complex and organic, the rhymes are intelligent, and the singing is top-notch. At the same time, hearing her makes me think of my disillusion with her Fugees counterparts, Wyclef Jean and Prakazrel, whose progressive lyrics in favor of oppressed minorities in the US are diametrically opposed to their public statements in favor of the most depraved oppressors in Haiti. Odd how a left-wing person in one context becomes the most reactionary in another. I don't know Lauryn Hill's stance on Haitian politics, and I probably don't want to know it.
That's it for my culture reviews. Soon I'll also post on a few unique cultural experiences I've had lately.
Sunday, November 13, 2011
Third World Green Daddy 24: our dog
We have a dog, and it actually lives in our apartment in Bogota. This was not exactly a free decision on our part--a family tragedy left us with a relative's dog, and we've been taking care of it since. It is a nice dog--a golden retriever that is relatively well-behaved. Nevertheless, I don't think animals belong inside houses. It would be different if we had a farm or a yard he could live in, but we don't, so basically we've all got to deal with his copious hair everywhere. It's especially tough on my allergies, though it seems I'm becoming resistant to them.
My son loves the dog. He yanks its fur, chases it around, gives it food from the table. I guess the dog is a good companion for him, and for the other members of our household, too. This household now includes my wife, my son, me, two teenagers, the dog, and for part of every week a live-in babysitter (which I'll discuss in another post).
Anyway, for the foreseeable future the dog will be staying with us. We hire a guy to walk it early in the morning. This guy and his siblings have a dog training school. They're really serious about it, with a well-designed website and everything. I think they aspire to be a Colombian version of the Dog Whisperer.
Here is a video they posted on their website of their well-behaved charges eating Christmas dinner. It's pretty ridiculous. Our dog is the golden retriever at the lower right-hand corner.
My son loves the dog. He yanks its fur, chases it around, gives it food from the table. I guess the dog is a good companion for him, and for the other members of our household, too. This household now includes my wife, my son, me, two teenagers, the dog, and for part of every week a live-in babysitter (which I'll discuss in another post).
Anyway, for the foreseeable future the dog will be staying with us. We hire a guy to walk it early in the morning. This guy and his siblings have a dog training school. They're really serious about it, with a well-designed website and everything. I think they aspire to be a Colombian version of the Dog Whisperer.
Here is a video they posted on their website of their well-behaved charges eating Christmas dinner. It's pretty ridiculous. Our dog is the golden retriever at the lower right-hand corner.
Friday, November 4, 2011
A seed fair in Garagoa
About a year ago, when my wife was still working on the ecotourism project in the Tenza Valley (I'm linking here to its snazzy finished website), we had the privilege of attending a seed fair set up by a local NGO that tries to promote local, ancestral crops in the region.
We stayed in the lovely El Encanto rural lodge, just outside of the town of Garagoa.
Upon entering the visitor is greeted by a number of traveler's palms. These are not actually palms but rather in the strelitzia family, like birds of paradise. Both are native to southern Africa, but have been spread throughout the tropics as ornamentals. I believe the traveler's palm got its name because it collects water in the leaf axils (like armpits, where the leaf stem meets the main stem), so a thirsty traveler can cut a branch and drink from it.
Another African resident of the hotel is a herd of guinea fowl. These are domestic birds that are eaten for meat. They are very territorial and protective, squawking and menacing whenever a potential threat shows up. This makes them good companions to stupid, defenseless chickens. We have our African forebears to thank for bringing this bird to the Americas.
Here is a smaller companion on the lodge grounds.
And here's a bird of paradise flower sheltered by elephant ears (neither are native to Colombia, though a variety of elephant ear has become a widespread domesticated staple for feeding pigs).
These are ginger flowers called "King's Scepter", also non-native, I'm pretty sure.
A comfortable house for the chicken flock.
Here is a specialized grill for making arepas. One arepa per little hole.
As in many mid-altitude tropical areas in Colombia, this farm is crisscrossed by small, rushing streams, with colorful bridges spanning them.
Here is a court for tejo, a classic central Colombian game. It's like horseshoes, except you throw a puck instead of a horseshoe, and the target is a metal ring in the center with a small envelope of gunpowder that explodes when you hit it.
Here is a view of the creek through a guadua bamboo grove.
The El Encanto lodge has communal areas and open cooking setups for holding big barbecues.
The goats keep the grass down.
A banana grove.
The pool
One of the independent cabins you can rent.
An evening snack of bread, cheese, and panela (molasses) water.
Not everything at the lodge is in great taste.
Anyway, aside from serving as an advertisement for the El Encanto lodge, the point of this post was to show the seed fair. The civic groups that organize these fairs set up a common theme for each one. This time the theme was corn, so everything on offer (for free!) at the fair was made from a corn base. There were cookies, fermented drinks, bread, toasted corn, arepas, and even dolls and clothing made from corn.
People from different towns and villages prepared typical dishes, and each locality had a stand with its name on a sign.
The fair took place on a rural schoolgrounds. The path leading to the place was bordered by old sisal bushes.
Who knows if they're still used to make fiber, or just cut back so they don't block the path? The school playground overlooks the amazingly beautiful landscape around the Chivor dam reservoir.
It appears that the international Slow Food movement somehow patronized the event, and there were lots of interesting informative panels to be looked at.
The above close-up makes the point that crops native to the Andean-Amazonian region (potatoes, cassava, beans, etc.) provide over a third of the world's food supply today.
A local authority from the indigenous movement made a dedication of the event, reciting prayers, singing, and offering chicha to the four directions and the earth.
After the seed fair (which this time didn't seem to have much seed exchanging going on), we passed through the main plaza of the town of Garagoa. It's not one of the more beautiful towns in the Tenza Valley, but the plaza is nice. It is home to a few massive ceiba trees. These trees are native to Africa and the Americas, and are considered sacred in both places. To this day many warm-climate towns in Colombia have hundred-year-old ceibas in their central plazas.
In the next photo you can see the scale of one of these trees compared to the sitting woman.
The Garagoa plaza is also home to the flowery ocobo trees typical of the Tenza Valley.
There is also a relatively recent statue of Pachamama, the goddess of the earth. It's an indigenous legend, and there is a highland moor in the area called the Paramo of Pachamama, but the sculpture is very Euro-styled. Even the little mohans, local spirits that live in nature, look more like European elves or something. A good example of Colombia's unique mix of European and indigenous influences.
And here's a closing image showing another cultural mix, this time between the modern plastic jug and the ancestral clay pot, both holding chicha, fermented corn beer.
