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The Nature of Wabi-Sabi I

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“In the Perfected Mahayana – everything, every speck of dust even, can be seen as conditioned arising. Thus even in a hair there are innumerable golden lions.”- Tractate of the Golden Lion — Fazang

My friend Tomohiro once asked me why I was living in Japan, “You not married, don’t have girlfriend, not getting paid shit-ton cash like finance assholes, have no real prospects, kind of smell bad…so why you come to Japan…for the sushi?”

“Tomo, I’m seeking satori…duh.”

“You drink too much beer for satori. Even you run bar you drink all the profit, so why you wanna be Buddhist?”

Actually I get this question a lot. Japanese people are curious about an outsider’s views on what makes Japan attractive. Occasionally whomever it is I’m talking to continues the conversation with another whopper of a mystical/metaphysical/meaning-of-life type of question like, “Can you use chopsticks?” or “Wow, you sure are good at using chopsticks!”

I nod imbecilically and smile, saying, “Chinese food everywhere in America!” while adding, “Oscar Wilde said that when given a choice between going to heaven and attending a lecture on heaven, an American would attend the lecture. Because quoting Oscar Wilde to people, especially in Japanese, gets awkward quickly, the subject changes rather quickly as well.

being in a different country can always be described in terms of psychotropic drug adjectives:… Click To Tweet

The Nature of Wabi-Sabi I

The Nature of Wabi-Sabi I
A sweeping look at Lake Suwa in Matsumoto from a far-off mountaintop, but get a little closer and you see why no one swims there…

Living in Japan for me is akin to the American attending the lecture. In some ways modern Japanese society is nothing if not stultifyingly dense and uniformly micro-managed, with what is said and unsaid, done and not done, suggested and implied plastered like thousands of impenetrable pieces of papier-mâché one atop another over that raw heart of natural truth. This in turn is deceptively mysterious to many western eyes, which perceive one thing yet rarely grasp the subtlety with which the underlying meaning is insinuated, and was more or less over my head when I moved to the hilly countryside of Nagano in 2001. Ooh, ooh, I thought, living like a hermit on a hilltop, going from misty mountain shrine to temple, embracing the local Zen monk’s practices while embalming myself in study of the more ancient pagan rituals of Shintō, the glue that binds the two together, making Japan one of the only countries where almost the entire population is embracing not one, but two religions, while denying that they are at all religious. Hilarious! That and, yes Tomo was right, the sushi. I couldn’t wait.

The first few days and weeks of being in a different country can always be described in terms of psychotropic drug adjectives: Eye-opening, Mind-altering, Consciousness-expanding, Confusing, Ecstatic, Terrifying, Blissful and so on. Upon arriving to my town via well-heeled train from Nagoya, a large industrial center boasting Toyota HQ, a disappointing port, massive humidity and a thriving S&M scene, but not much else on th esurface, I experienced the largest conception-breaking sense of blah thus far, like a massive fur ball you just can’t hack out. The town, situated on a lake nestled in a crevice of a mountain range hugging the Matsumoto plateau, was less than spectacular. Nagoya, full of grays and browns, too had been less than stellar, but you figure well, it’s an urban Toyota production center, the water should be polluted and the skyline full of smoke, trash everywhere and the people rude, call it Cleveland, and move on. Get me to the countryside with green pastures and pristine lakes abutting picturesque mountain ranges off in the not too far distance. Say it to yourself: Japanese countryside. What images come to mind? It’s tough to know what to expect when bred on the ethnocentric western view that samurai and geisha, among other long dead notions of the chivalrous and bloody bygone eras, still hold sway here. Of course these things, ideas, images, are still celebrated as symbols of a great culture in local festivals, holidays, television and movies, much as any country tends to glorify the good of the past while relegating the racism, civil war, genocide, and sheer malevolent human tendencies toward bloodshed, to their proper, poorly-lit corner of history. That is all well and good, but what I, California City Boy, wanted was the pastoral simplicity of centuries ago mixed with a kind of revelatory mystical experience high on an Asian hilltop with crusty old sages and their singly clapping hands, or at least that’s what I thought I wanted, or what I thought I envisioned being so. Not the polluted Suwa Lake ringed by ugly industrial buildings spewing smoke into the greasy sky peppered with a few man-made “photo opportunities” complete with patches of dead and dying grass for depressing roadside picnicking and watching the ubiquitous mobile phone towers replace swaths of trees on the nearby foothills approaching the Japan Alps. I’d rather sit on my electronically heated toilet and listen to the simulacra rushing river sounds meant to cover the embarrassment visitors (probably the Brazilian Mormons again…) would inevitably face by noises caused by my bowel movements. Can you blame me?

The Nature of Wabi-Sabi I
Man’s Clandestine Nature Policy – The Salton Sea from Joshua Tree

Growing up in crowded southern California my family and I would take occasional trips to the desert — to Indio, Joshua Tree, Palm Springs, Las Vegas, Lake Havasu — to camp and fish, get on a houseboat and laze in the lakes created by damming the west’s river arteries or occasionally just sit by the hotel pool in the dry empty 110 degree expanse. Despite not always coming home with a huge catch of fresh trout for dinner or getting massively dehydrated and sunburnt, the key to any kind of enjoyment of the desert was water. It’s a primordial instinct out of which we are born: a stream of life in the vast expanse of death. Without even the notion of water in some form — stream, river, lake, pool, slip and slide, etc. — on the horizon even as a child I knew not to expect much. This was before beer and sex had been introduced in my life, so swimming and fishing in lakes and rivers was almost all I had. Riding in the backseat of my grandparent’s gas-guzzling Ford Granada as we rolled east down Interstate 10 and the cacti started to appear, the landscape shifting from the stacked traffic and houses of the Imperial Valley to a gradually sparser and ten shades browner back country of flat mile after mile desert and mountains in the distance, I never thought about the fact that cities and lakes and everything else were made by man for a reason, nor did I imagine what those reasons might have been. Alternately dumb and curious as most children are, I always had a vision of the desert as the gateway to China and that if only I could dune dig deep enough, I would end up meeting my Chinese doppelgänger halfway and we could, I don’t know, trade shitty plastic toys. Despite the fact that digging through the earth from Death Valley would most likely land you in Great White feeding grounds off the coast of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean this notion got stuck somewhere in the ever-growing collection of unexpunged synapses clogging up my head throughout adolescence on into early manhood and, as tends to happen in life under the hallucination-inducing desert sun, got warped. Backward and wrong as it was, my vision of China — and by extension all of Asia — was that of an inverse function of my Mojave desert: raw, verdant green power, growing up and out, full of lakes and unclogged rivers, unstoppable and dangerous, untouched by man’s egotistical manifest destiny sense of entitlement due to nature’s unsurpassed tenacity and perseverance. To me, ignorant of Mao’s Great Leap Forward / Cultural Revolution, the rape of Nanjing, & the 38th Parallel, China / Japan / Korea represented the untouchable preserve, a vast swath of natural resources that as long as it remained intact would always symbolize a cushion to fall back on should we lose sight of whatever it was that drove us onward in our unquenchable search for fuel, that and to provide strength against the harsh realities of life on earth, ha ha, that one again. Yeah, at 8 years-old, I was a strange kid. All-American, but still a bit off in the head.

The fact is today, there just aren’t that many untouched territories out there anymore, even in desertifying China and as well in mountainous Japan. What we, programmed by Reagan’s 80’s network nightly news team, tended to think of as the onetime imperialist’s third world exotic Asian getaway, or rather hoped would be, our “natural” backyard of free and easy resources, has become an experiment in pork barrel construction based upon ease of stripping away vital sources of energy to power our karaoke, latte and ATM machines. Nowhere is this more sadly visible than in the middlingly developed consumer centers of Japan, from Nagano to the north, and Osaka to the south. With the cities, like smelly, sweaty and humid Nagoya, we get the armpit we expect, peopled to the brim, overheated and far too gone to do anything about (or so we think), but with Nagano we get to see an area of onetime vast wilderness in mid-metamorphosis. The strip-mining, dynamiting, clear-cutting, river-damming, concreting, tetrapodding, hillside gridding, mountain-topping is going on right now and continues to justify the existence of the overfed construction industry, itself a propped up jobs program for mafioso swindlers. As an outsider it’s an interesting thing to watch occur all around you as your elderly neighbors in their sardine-packed apartments regularly boast of Japan as a country of natural beauty. I don’t disagree, I just wonder what they mean by “natural”.

The term wabi-sabi is often dropped by people when describing Japan or something Japanese. Despite it being a Japanese phrase, many Japanese people I’ve talked to have little or no understanding of the concept at all and sum it up like my friend Tomo, “In order to understand Japanese wabi-sabi, you need foreigners to explain to you.”

“Why Tomo, why?”

“This shit old Buddha concept man, modern Jap work 12 hours, wear suit, eat hamburger, drink Starbucks, buy fucking Gucci and Louis Vuitton, you know Asian-American? It’s you white people, Richard Gere-san, love this old Buddhist shit.”

The Nature of Wabi-Sabi I
The Observation Platform at Okochi Sanso was used to contemplate ephemeral beauty in Arashiyama, Kyoto

If it weren’t negated by speaking of it, as in any basic Buddhist tenet, simply put, wabi-sabi is an aesthetic appreciation of the understated asymmetric beauty of the ephemeral. Wabi and Sabi are actually separate words, rooted in both Shintō and Zen aesthetics. Wabi (侘), coming from Wa (meaning harmony), refers to a poetic kind of simplicity or distilledness, while Sabi (寂) refers to a declining elegance. The word for rust, also Sabi (though using the character 錆) has a similar nuance: the slow and inevitable erosion of time. In a word: impermanence. I have come to understand it from pestering my friends (who never know) and any older people I meet at the neighborhood sake bar (which always elicits a friendly laugh) as being a kind of interplay between “nature” and “society”, the ubiquitous plant vines spreading across the facades of old buildings, the muted flaws of handmade ceramic ware, a karesansui rock garden. Whereas I have always seen wabi-sabi as space and time, respectively, and exemplified in nature itself as the growth of moss on a tree, the intricate and imperfect patterning of wild mushrooms, the way waves crest and trough in the sea. Whichever is correct, the fact remains that man’s perceived dominance over nature is at the root of the discussion and the Japanese are at the center of any debate of how the culture which gave rise to the wabi-sabi aesthetic (though not necessarily directly) has gone on to irrevocably waste precious resources and help alter the world’s natural landscape. The earth, despite being the giver of life, is an admittedly tough place to eke out an existence and this archipelago of roughly 2000 islands, while blessed with some of the most beautiful forests and mountain ranges in the world — Nagano’s Japan Alps being one of them — is especially wild and unforgiving. From the ubiquitous Japanese gardener in Hollywood films to the national obsession with bonsai trees and the relentless manipulation of all aspects of nature in general, a proper look into wabi-sabi required me to start looking at a cursory examination of the ascendancy of Buddhism in Japan in relation to nature and society. So I started asking questions. Then it got weird.

*

The Nature of Wabi-Sabi I
Sekibutsu or Buddhist image made of stone from the 7th to 13th centuries

Libraries in rural Japan may have an English language section, filled with Tom Clancy and Curious George and, much like a liquor stores selection of bourbons you have never heard of, offer dubious harlequin pulp full of pulsating members and heaving breasts. This begs the question, “Is this crap published with a large red stamp “Export Only”…?” Fun for a laugh, but just as useless as thumbing through any text on Buddhism, should you even be able to find one, if your kanji literacy rate wallows below 400 characters: an effort in futility. Coupled with the recent internet bubble just having burst worse than Japanese venture capital conglomerates attempts at buying Pebble Beach and 30 Rock in the 80s, online education portals were pretty sparse in the early 2000s and desperately in need of Web 2.0 design aesthetics, what with their scrolling Comic Sans typeface outlined in day-glo edging across flashing headers, images of a pixelated Buddha spinning in GIF ecstasy, mile-long URLs with nonsensical alphanumeric combinations, as if encoded to hide the divine knowledge they offered, but only to a select few…

So with a bottle of the affordable yet tasty Black Nikka Whisky as my partner in crime I stayed home and took advantage of Buddhism via airmail and early Amazon Japan discounts on shipping, and sought out a two-pronged attack of Alan Watts Buddhism: The Religion of No-Religion and Joseph Campbell’s Sake & Satori. Hitting just the right balance with Watts’ beery enlightenment and Campbell’s erudite scholasticism made for entertaining education, especially on something so intimate as personal theological development, and by way of books written by outsiders, no less. It has always seemed to me that when I am most in tune with the divine nature of the world I have been outdoors: hiking in the Sierra Nevada or swimming in the Gulf of Siam. It has always felt antithetical to me the discovery of reading of the wonders of the world rather than racing around and finding one’s own. That said, I have read my fair share on the marvels of nature, and it has led me to blossom out of my Californian desert cocoon.

In a nutshell, Buddhism can in some sense be seen as exported Hinduism. Whereas Hinduism was more than just a religion — largely a culture featuring more than just religious practices but also social castes and institutions — Buddhism came about as a way to the teachings of the Buddha for the non-Hindu world. The first type we see is Theravada (Doctrine of the Saints), a mostly monastic form closely related to Jainism, stressing the teaching of analysis, where Nirvana is achieved by experience, investigation and insight. Another form of this is Hīnayāna (Lesser Vessel) whereby Nirvana is achieved by abandoning society and embracing ascetic hardships. At this point in history (around 500 BCE) all Buddhist art is not of the Buddha himself but of the idea of the Buddha, his symbology (i.e. the Lotus) and bigfoot-esque Buddha footprints, etc. This is because of the heavy reliance on the early depiction of the Buddha as disengaged from his body, disengaged from time. He was Nonentity, Buddha Consciousness, God not in the world.

The Nature of Wabi-Sabi I
The Daibutsu of Todaiji in Nara – his other hand is touching the earth…

The Buddha’s hand touching the earth is called Akshobya — to not be moved — imperturbable. This is the original form of Buddhism, disengaged from the field of time, a difficult path largely undertaken by the Hīnayānic monks of India, but not meant for regular joes. The next form would be merely to realize that it is possible to be engaged in the field of time while not being moved. Understanding that life amidst the seeming infinite number of opposites which are actually poles of one another and coexist in a necessary harmony is the Mahayāna, one could arguably say the most popular form of Buddhism in north-east Asia (China, Korea, Japan). As opposed to the attempts by the few to throw off life, to discard the impure body, to free the mind, eventually around 100 CE many people came to realize that this was not necessary, that one could, and does, exist in both realms. This is Buddhism for the masses.

Circa 1st century CE, the Buddha in the form of Man began to be represented in art of all kinds. This art signaled the next phase in Buddhism called Mahāyāna (Greater Vessel). The ethos shifted toward a sense of the Buddha who, while being disengaged from Time, is also engaged in it, as God in the world – a kindly superhero Jesus. People are getting the idea of the oneness of everything, Yin and Yang, space and time, and key in this is the Buddha’s teaching of the “joyful participation in the sorrows of the world”. We — you, me, everything — can possess both Buddha consciousness and be present in the world, simultaneously disengaged and engaged from time. Once the Buddha achieves Nirvana, that is to say realizes the Om oneness of everything, he knows that he is not here, yet also realizes there is nowhere but here. There is no distinction. Nirvana, therefore, is everywhere. One need not submit to ascetic monasticism to achieve enlightenment, but rather delve into the world around, and inside, us. Phew, that was close.

In my search for the path toward understanding what the connection between enlightenment and nature, a friend tossed me a bone, in the form of On the Golden Lion, an obscure essay by the Central Asian Buddhist Fa-tsang which dates to around 700 CE. He was a practitioner of Flower Garland Buddhism, which states that the nature of the infinite can be seen in the infinitesimal. He illustrates this using a statuette of a golden lion. The carving of each aspect of the lion — the teeth, the mane, the tail, et al — represents the various phenomena of the universe — stars, planets, black holes, et al — all different in appearance. Yet their unifying characteristic is that they are made of the same material: gold. “Conditioned arising” refers to the seemingly separate nature of everything in the universe: contrived, opposite, unattached: sushi is sushi and planets are planets, but both are made of stardust. Yet in reality, since the universe is composed of in this case gold — gold ears, gold teeth, gold scrotum — all is one, be it gold or sushi. The Avatamsaka (Flower Garland) Sutra says that the differences are all superficial, and that I should accept that the polluted lake is as sacred as the sushi I so love. Thinking is the problem. But like Tomo always said, “Stop thinking so much man, just enjoy the view!”

The Nature of Wabi-Sabi I
Nigiri-zushi is perhaps the pinnacle of world cuisine & Zen Buddhism

Citations:

– Campbell, Joseph & Kudler, David (2002). Sake & Satori. New World Library
– Carter, Robert Edgar (2007). The Japanese arts and self-cultivation. Suny Press
– Fa-tsang (700CE), On the Golden Lion
– Johnson, Norris Brock (1991). Zuisen Temple and Garden, Kamakura, Japan: Design Form and Phylogenetic Meaning. Journal of Garden History
– Koren, Leonard (1994). Wabi Sabi for artists, designers, poets and philosophers. Berkley, CA: Stone Bridge Press
– McCormack, Gavan (1996). The Emptiness of Japanese Affluence. M.E. Sharpe
– Plutschow, Herbert (1999). An Anthropological Perspective on the Japanese Tea Ceremony. Anthropoetics 5, no. 1
– Sasaki, Genjun (1992) Linguistic Approach to Buddhist Thought. Motilal Banarsidass Publishers
– Tachibana, Toshitsunawe (Ca. 1000CE) Sakuteiki
– Watts, Alan (1999) Buddhism: The Religion of No-Religion. Tuttle Publishing
– Young David & Michiko, (2005) The Art of the Japanese Garden. Tuttle Publishing
– Dig to China – http://map.talleye.com/bighole.php
– Jōdo shū – http://www.jodo.org/teachings/nembutsu.html
– Shogoin Temple, Kyoto, Japan – http://www.shugendo.fr/
– Taylor, Jiro The Waribashi Conundrum – http://www.japanvisitor.com/index.php?cID=361&pID=375
– TED Case Studies – http://www1.american.edu/TED/chopstik.htm
– Web Japan (Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs) – http://web-japan.org/

Spanish Food Road Trip – The Good The Bad The Ugly

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Spanish Food Road Trip – The Good The Bad  The Ugly

Day 1­-2 – Driving through Spain, not Portugal yet, so not the fastest way to get there, but still rushing, go figure…So the whole idea about the first part of the trip is to get to the south of Portugal as fast as possible. Then go up slowly and then get to France via Bilbao or so, then rush back. Therefore (and this is funny, you’ll see), I’m going to go north of Madrid via Contreras, which is a very very very small and lost village close by Barbadillo del Mercado, already far away from it all… You see, it’s to go to a fake cemetery. You don’t see? Alright, first things first, a recollection on how we got there, where we slept and, of course, what we ate.

Spanish Food Road Trip - The Good, The Bad, The Ugly
Spanish Clouds Overhead…

The first day started at my parents’, in Fitou, France and it was a mad dash towards Soria, passing through Catalonia (but avoiding carefully Barcelona, been there, done that…) and then the Aragon autonomous community (something like the aggregation of three provinces, with some sort of capital in Zaragosa). We did not care much for food or drinks in that part of the trip, to the point of taking a lunch and picnicking somewhere unmemorable. The point was to find a hotel as close to Contreras (with still good aperitif, yes, and dinner, yes) to go to the cemetery in the morning. There is nothing much to say for the landscape except that we saw an incredible amount of pigsties. I never saw so many pigsties in my entire life. Granted there were decent amount of cows and oxen and sheep around, grazing and all… But pigsties, large ones, were everywhere.

One thing leading to another I found myself in a small bar for una cerveza de barril while the Moms is “descansando” in the room of a nice hotel, small to the point of tininess. However they did have a restaurant and we were given the choice for three primeros and three segundos, not to mention at least four or five dulces. I’m fairly certain we were the only people in the place. The menu was as follows:

  • Menestra de verduras (The Moms, some sort of vegetable stew with lard in it, delicious I was led to believe it was…)
  • Esparragos a la plancha con jamon (Yours truly, asparagus on that typical grill they have which is basically a flattop grill… with some local ham thrown in for good measure, nice)
  • Carrillera iberica a la plancha con pimientos de Piquillo (both, some pork bits, also on the flattop grill with fries and a grilled red bell pepper that even I, who really hate bell pepper with all my heart, ate. Go figure)
  • Flan de huevo con nata (The Moms, egg flan, typical, delicious…)
  • Espuma de chocolate (Yours truly, chocolate mousse, perfect.)
  • All that with a tinto de la casa, a Rioja. Needless to say I did not finish the bottle… I am not a big fan of Rioja wine usually but this one was obviously a local favourite as the waiter almost drooled when describing it. It was very potent but not too much. It went well with the little bits of jamon with a drop of very very strong olive oil on top that appeared out of nowhere when we were waiting for the primeros.

I wanted to go out after and get a beer, as I did before dinner but I was not in any shape to do anything. Shame though, as the town square sported no less than seven (7!) bars, for such a small town, my Frenchnessness was pleased. Yes, that is a thing.

I will dream of colts and cowboy hats, cigars and nooses, horses and graves... Click To Tweet
Espuma de chocolate – chocolate mousse
Esparragos a la plancha con jamon – Grilled Asparagus & Thinly Sliced Cured Ham
Sardines and the ever lovely Cuttlefish, man do I love that thing…
Tortillas!
Fries!
Carrillera iberica a la plancha con pimientos de Piquillo – Iberica Pork bits with Piquillo Peppers

The next day I almost cried because the weather was so grey and foggy I couldn’t see the houses on the other side of the street, and I do not think that two cars could cross. My dream of Sad Hill Cementario was going down the drain…

My mood was a bit lifted by the brief encounter with some ciconias (white storks), a personal favourite, possibly from the good old La Fontaine’s tales… One of these birds flew over the car for a while, I was a bit scared for my hood’s paint but it was overall a nice experience. And to be honest I do not really care about my hood. We took off, following the maps blindly, even when it seemed to lead us to literally nowhere. Contreras, as previously mentioned, is a hole. And when you get there there is still some 5km of dirt road to drive on until you reach the sign: “Sad Hill Cementario”. I think I was in a trance the whole half-­hour we spent there: me shooting some insane amount of pictures with at least five (5!) different cameras and the Moms trying not to freeze. For those of you lacking the proper culture (shame on you little grasshopper) and who did not do the standard googling, this place is the set for the amazing Sergio Leone film, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo, 1966), particularly the über-­famous final scene when there is a three-way duel (triel?) in this very Sad Hill Cementario. I had to go there on a pilgrimage. Period. It was worth it. I think a large print of a picture I shot that day will adorn my living room, when I have a living room.

The rest of the day I couldn’t care less. We drove. A lot.

We had Tortillas Francesas, (meaning plain for some reason) and con jamon in a cafeteria in a gas station.

We drove, a lot more.

We left the autovia (free highway) around Zafra (some hundreds km north of Sevilla) to go once again in the countryside and ended in Fregenal de la Sierra. We found a cheapo hotel, as usual. We went around town for a cervecita and dug a small place for tapas and, for a wee bunch of euros (A few dollars more?), we had two kinds of seafood (sardines and the ever lovely cuttlefish, man do I love that thing) and three kinds of meat (mostly pork though, probably in relation to the insane amount of pigsties we kept on seeing on the road), and some local wine… I was content anyhow. I will dream of colts and cowboy hats, cigars and nooses, horses and graves…

And tomorrow we cross the border and get to Portugal, where the real trip begins.

The set for the amazing Sergio Leone movie The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo, 1966), particularly the über-famous last scene when they duel by three
Spanish Small town shutdown
A brief encounter with some Ciconias (white storks), a personal favourite, possibly from the good old La Fontaine’s tales…
Sad Hill Cementario – The Good, The Bad, The Ugly
Big Bull Tailgating on the Road
Spanish Clouds Overhead…

Sleater-Kinney – No Cities To Love

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The Beard – EP 109 – Sleater-Kinney by Beard Radio on Mixcloud

Sleater-Kinney – No Cities To Love

Sleater-Kinney - No Cities to Love
Sleater-Kinney – No Cities to Love – Deluxe Edition Cover

Publishing this feels like something that is so hard to do for so many reasons. The album came out 6 months ago. Every major site has already reviewed it. It’s old news. Who gives a shit what I say? Etc. The truth is it has taken me six months to think of anything to say. Why? Because this album, like all of their other albums, hits so hard it leaves one speechless. There are no words to express the way these ladies get together and make music. It’s best to hear it and then experience whatever it is that comes. But do yourself a favor — hear it in the appropriate fashion: live in concert. Or if you can’t make a show, get the vinyl and some great headphones. Or with friends and family. Only listen to my radio show if you are driving somewhere, or at worse you’re on a train. Movement is key. Wind. Water. Better yet, here’s some stuff the ladies themselves have to say about the first album out in a decade.

“Creativity is about where you want your blood to flow, because in order to do something meaningful and powerful there has to be life inside of it,” says Brownstein. “Sleater-Kinney isn’t something you can do half-assed or half-heartedly. We have to really want it. This band requires a certain desperation, a direness. We have to be willing to push because the entity that is this band will push right back.”

“The core of this record is our relationship to each other, to the music, and how all of us still felt strongly enough about those to sweat it out in the basement and to try and reinvent our band,” says Tucker.

Kyoto Jazz Massive Turns 20

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Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple.

–Charles Mingus

Kyoto Jazz Massive on a Blue Note Mission by Beard Radio on Mixcloud

Inventions & Dimensions - Herbie Hancock
Inventions & Dimensions (1964) is the third album by Herbie Hancock, featuring Herbie Hancock – piano, Paul Chambers – bass, Willie Bobo – drums, timbales, and Osvaldo “Chihuahua” Martinez – percussion (not on track 5).
In order to define the new album Mission by Kyoto Jazz Sextet (Blue Note Japan, 2015), and the renaissance of Crossover Jazz in Japan one needs to step back into the past. Specifically into the back catalogues of Blue Note Records. Started by Francis Wolff and Alfred Lion in the 30s, the jazz label became known for producing some of the most infamous hard-bop albums of the 60s. Wolff was known for taking photos of artists during studio sessions, sometimes obtrusively, and getting great work in the process. His iconic photos fill the album covers of the Blue Note Discography. Which begs the question, what are the roots of Shuya Okino’s Crossover Jazz empire? Where did it come from? How is it coming to define 21st-century Tokyo and the world beyond?

Jazz transformed from Ragtime to Swing to Bebop before it entered the pivotal era of the 50s and 60s. Miles Davis Birth of the Cool Modal revolution and its West Coast and Bossa Nova tendencies spread from the east coast of the US, across the country and throughout the world. Along with Cecil Taylor, John Coltrane, Charles Mingus and Pharaoh Sanders, Ornette Coleman pioneered the improvisational brand of Free Jazz that led to Soul, Fusion and Funk. The instrumental basis of swing had already been wildly popularized abroad, and its ability to cross into lands across the globe without passport made it one of the quickest music genres to evolve into a music any country could call their own. While jazz may have been an exclusively American invention, by the late 60s it truly had become the world music.

Jazz has been big in Japan for a century. Fumio Nanri, Ryoichi Hattori, Toshiko Akiyoshi, Yosuke Yamshita, Tadao Watanabe, to name a few, were all stellar musicians in their own right who sought to overcome criticisms of being derivative. Anyone can play a horn, pluck a bass, strum a guitar or pound a snaredrum, and a vast majority of Japanese jazz musicians were able to do so, finding themselves to be almost freakishly good at technical playing, but were missing the intangible touch of flair that was new and exciting, the j’ai ne sais quoi still good enough to remind fans of the masters from before. Music thirsts for artistry beyond mere musical ability. Jazz needs soul.

Kyoto Jazz Massive - Spirit of the Sun
Spirit of the Sun (2004) by Kyoto Jazz Massive features Shuya Okino, Yoshihiro Okino, Yasushi Kurobane, and Hajime Yoshizawa
Enter Shuya and Yoshi Okino. Looking backward has never been the Okino brothers forte. They are too forward facing to do so. Yet unable to escape the grand sounds coming out of the past, they have opted for their own special brand of break beat jazz. DJing, composing, arranging, supervising and producing music, they are not a group in the traditional sense. They don’t put out albums the way the music industry wants artists to do. They work at their own pace with numerous talented people across the vast panopoly of the musicsphere, like pianist and producer Hajime Yoshizawa and composer and saxophonist Naruyoshi Kikuchi. Seriously, these guys love to play live. They DJ. They run a record label / music shop. They come to get down. Releasing studio albums can wait.

They formed Kyoto Jazz Massive as a DJ unit in the early 90s, releasing the compilation Kyoto Jazz Massive V.A.. But between running a Tokyo nightclub (Shuya Okino is the owner of The Room, the influential Club Jazz/Crossover music club in Shibuya), and a record label Especial Records (Yoshi Okino operates Especial in Osaka, putting out albums by Root Soul, Sleep Walker, and Hajime Yoshizawa, Dj Kawasaki), the brothers came to the attention of a worldwide audience in a prime moment just before the release of Kyoto Jazz Massive’s first single, “Eclipse” and the release of the subsequent album Spirit of the Sun (Compost Records, 2002), when they were popularized (and named) by the BBC Radio 1 DJ Gilles Peterson in 2001. They began to tour, bringing the best Crossover Jazz to the Americas, Europe and Asia in a soulful effort to bridge musical as well as cultural divides. You can get a sense of how audiences might feel while seeing a slickly dressed DJ revving up the turntables opposite trumpeters and trombonists tuning up. It’s a bit befuddling. But once the warbles turn to warm notes and the band begins to lock in step it is easy to see how the scene has grown to encapsulate an eclectic ensemble of the best live jazz musicians in conjunction with mad beat architecture: two of the things Shuya Okino holds dear.

In our interview with Shuya he recalls a live show he played in France more than a decade ago:

We played Hiphop, Jazz, House, Techno, Brazil, Latin, Africa, Disco, Boogie, Drum n’ Bass, Break beats, Soul, Funk, Arabian & so on. But in France I’d heard that Club Jazz is a difficult thing. I guess what left an impression on me was when I visited in 2000 thinking that nobody would come. What I can’t forget to this day is the rush of the packed venue and the open-minded audience.

Kyoto Jazz Massive Turns 20

Much like the ethos of Free Jazz, Shuya’s Crossover Jazz places the emphasis on improvisation via new technology. Yet that the technology does not define the music is what is so masterful. The latest package, called Kyoto Jazz Sextet, was created to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the formation of Kyoto Jazz Massive. Mission features seven songs selected from 1963 to 1966 to reflect the distinct Blue Note sound of the period. Herbie Hancock, Waybe Shorter, Lee Morgan, Freddie Hubbard, Joe Henderson and Hank Mobley were all prominent musicians for Blue Note and the nature of these times and songs not only allows for improvisation, it begs for it. Yusuke Hirado (Piano – Quasimode), Ruike Shinpei (Trumpet – DCPRG), Takeshi Kurihara (Tenor Sax – Mountain Mocha Kilimanjaro), Koizumi “P” Yoshihito (Bass – Matsuura Toshio presents HEX) and Masanori Amakura (Drums) (joined by Kikuchi Naruyoshi on “Speak No Evil” and “Eclipse”) play vintage musical instruments throughout the recording. Eventually mastering and editing the results using analog methods, the band takes the homage to trad jazz to the next level, crossing-over with samples, loops, mash-ups and improvisation, all by the musicians themselves without post-production digital input. Complicated yet sounding so simple, it’s gorgeous. Closing out this tribute to mid-60s Blue Note era is the Kyoto Jazz Massive track ‘Eclipse’, featuring acclaimed saxophonist Kikuchi Naruyoshi (also plays on “Speak No Evil”). Apart from his usual arranging and production duties, Shuya actually plays as a member of the live band, which is at the heart of Crossover. During live shows at The Room in Shibuya members of the sextet frequently change, often giving more intimate versions of big band live shows.

Track List

Kyoto Jazz Massive Turns 20
Kyoto Jazz Sextet – Mission

1. Search for the New Land (Lee Morgan)
2. Speak No Evil (Wayne Shorter)
3. The Melting Pot (Freddie Hubbard)
4. Succotash (Herbie Hancock)
5. Mr. Jin (Wayne Shorter)
6 Jinrikisha (Joe Henderson)
7. Up a Step (Hank Mobley)
8. Eclipse (Kyoto Jazz Massive)

Produced by Shuya Okino
Co-produced by Kenichi Ikeda (Root Soul)
Supervised by Yoshihiro Okino

All songs arranged by Shuya Okino & Kenichi Ikeda, except
2 by Shuya Okino, Kenichi Ikeda & Takeshi Kurihara
4 by Shuya Okino, Kenichi Ikeda & Yusuke Hirado

Shuya adds, “As for the next album, because it depends on my brother as well, I can’t really say, but isn’t it amusing we only put one out every 10 years?”

If you’re not in Japan, and nowhere near KJM’s next tour, you should get the album (from Especial Records) now.

Indestructible (1965) by drummer Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, featuring Lee Morgan — trumpet, Curtis Fuller — trombone, Wayne Shorter — tenor saxophone, Cedar Walton — piano, Reggie Workman — bass, and Art Blakey — drums
Blue Spirits (1965) is the tenth album by trumpeter Freddie Hubbard released on the Blue Note label. Freddie Hubbard – trumpet, James Spaulding – alto saxophone, Joe Henderson – tenor saxophone, Hank Mobley – tenor saxophone, Hosea Taylor – alto saxophone, Harold Mabern – piano, Herbie Hancock – piano, McCoy Tyner – piano, Bob Cranshaw – bass, Reggie Workman – bass, Larry Ridley – bass, Big Black – congas, Kiane Zawadi – euphonium, Clifford Jarvis – drums, Pete LaRoca – drums, Elvin Jones – drums
Kyoto Jazz Sextet – Mission
Speak No Evil (1964) by Wayne Shorter shows a photo of his first wife, Teruka (Irene) Nakagami, was released on Blue Note in 196 featuring Wayne Shorter — tenor saxophone, Freddie Hubbard — trumpet, Herbie Hancock — piano, Ron Carter — double bass, and Elvin Jones — drums
Page One (1963) is the debut release by American jazz tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson, featuring Kenny Dorham – trumpet, Joe Henderson – tenor saxophone, Pete La Roca – drums, McCoy Tyner – piano, and Butch Warren – double bass
Search for the New Land (1964) is a hard-bop album by jazz trumpeter Lee Morgan, recorded in 1964 with Herbie Hancock – piano, Grant Green – guitar, Reggie Workman – bass, Billy Higgins – drums and, Wayne Shorter – tenor sax.
Inventions & Dimensions (1964) is the third album by Herbie Hancock, featuring Herbie Hancock – piano, Paul Chambers – bass, Willie Bobo – drums, timbales, and Osvaldo “Chihuahua” Martinez – percussion (not on track 5).
Spirit of the Sun (2004) by Kyoto Jazz Massive features Shuya Okino, Yoshihiro Okino, Yasushi Kurobane, and Hajime Yoshizawa
No Room For Squares by Hank Mobley (1963) features Hank Mobley – tenor saxophone, Lee Morgan – trumpet, Donald Byrd – trumpet, Andrew Hill – piano, Herbie Hancock – piano, John Ore – bass, Butch Warren – bass, Philly Joe Jones – drums

Bridging Science and Photography in Madagascar

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Bridging Science and Photography in Madagascar
One of the best thing in the countryside are the encounters with ladies carrying around an amazing amount of stuff (often on their head), some of them do it with very curious and beautiful (if not totally outdated fashion wise) outfits. She had a smile to warm up a dead body
What is race? How does it work? For example, what does humanity’s racist tendencies of the past have to do with current economic world order? Ethnology assumes that race and racism are extremely powerful social and cultural forces at work everywhere in the world. And that we, as humans, seek lessons for generalizing about modern society and the contemporary global order. But specific questions need to be asked too: what are the structural dimensions of race and racism (social, political, and economic inequality) and what are the cultural dimensions (artistic forms of humanistic expression, as well as politics)? How do they differ from country to country? If one were to take two island nations–Japan and Madagascar–and compare their societies, it would seem that the Malagasy would come in a far second to one of the most powerful economies as rich in cultural history as the Japanese. But why? Unfortunately the answers are never easy. But with effort and experience we hope to gain insight. Though the following article is not a comparison nor a study of two separate, unrelated countries, but rather about research and communication, we place a special focus on an old practice with a new name: ethno-photography. It will be described as an analog and digital bridge for science and communication; as a platform for resource users to showcase their points of view; and as an amplifier to research for development.

Bridging Science and Photography in Madagascar

–by Arnaud De Grave & Patrick O. Waeber

A brief glance at Madagascar

Bridging Science and Photography in Madagascar
This little dude is a Gentle lemur (also known locally as bandro, or under his scientific name Hapalemur alaotrensis) from Lake Alaotra; it seems not so sure whether to enjoy the sun and breeze while softly rocking on the top of a reed stem, or rather be concerned about the pirogue lurking in closest vicinity.
Madagascar, renowned for its unique flora and fauna, one of the hottest biodiversity hotspots on earth, has a lot to carry in terms of suffering. The nation has been through five years of a transitional administration under the leadership of a former DJ, during which economic disorder and international isolation has weighed heavily on its people. Presidential and legislative elections finally took place in Madagascar in December 2013. Hery Rajaonarimampianina, according to the New York Times the president with the longest surname in history, assumed his role on 25 January 2013. Immediately thereafter, the African Union and Southern African Development Community lifted their suspensions, followed by the European Union’s development program; monetary institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund reinstated their development funds. Hope for better times?

According to some, the power shift was merely a cosmetic make-over. The political situation remains fragile, and the new government has to deal with a lot of “challenges”, to say the least, which have been ongoing for long times, and will likely and unfortunately continue to carry on: Highest poverty rates, highest birth rates, highest school drop-outs, increasing in-transparency in governance, increasing illegal exportations of precious natural resources. Nevertheless, the new government started to take action by creating more presence in previously neglected regions in Madagascar, and according to Rajaonarimampianina’s speech on 25 September 2014 in front of the UN General Assembly in New York, declared that “Our primary goal is to bring our people out of their precarious situation” (…) “the aim…is to transform Madagascar into a food hub in the region” referring to increased investments into agriculture.

Inside Madagascar’s Bread Basket: Alaotra

Bridging Science and Photography in Madagascar
Local marshlands are at risk to be all converted into rice fields: you burn it, you claim it, and you farm it

In terms of rice and inland-fish production the Alaotra-Mangoro region, one of 22 in Madagascar, is the country’s current food hub. Constituting the largest wetland system, the Lake Alaotra wetland’s surrounding marshlands deliver crucial cultural and ecosystem services such as water, medicinal plants, fish stock, while hosting unique wildlife such as the Alaotra gentle lemur, a primate species living constantly in marshlands. The wetland is the third out of currently nine Ramsar sites in Madagascar since 2003 (The Ramsar Convention, is an intergovernmental treaty that provides the framework for national action and international cooperation for the conservation and wise use of wetlands and their resources). The Malagasy government added further importance to the conservation and biodiversity values of the region by inscribing the system as new Protected Area in 2007. To be ratified as a Protected Area (the marshlands are risking to be all converted into rice fields: you burn it, you claim it, and you farm it…), a management plan, currently in the making, is badly needed.

Forests? Of course, there are also some beautiful forests full of biodiversity (more than 80% of all described animal species in Madagascar depend on forests), but they are largely locked up in parks and reserves. The rest of the landscape is dominated by agricultural production (a significant portion is also for self-subsistence, with a majority of the 550,000+ people engaging in small-scale farming), and a vast extant of open grasslands, which are low in nutrients and hence difficult to use for farming production.

Stakeholders can be the fishermen who fish in the lakes and marshes, the farmer growing fruit or… Click To Tweet

Governing the complexity

So, we have mentioned forests. Check. Outside protected areas, there are still ‘forests’, but many are degraded (or actually burned in order to be used for agriculture), and either have been transformed into something like ‘agro-forestry’ (though generally rare, and more on the ‘agro’ side than ‘forestry’), dominated by a few species such as fruit trees, or plantations. Besides being the rice granary of the island, the Alaotra is also leader in terms of plantations (with the usual suspects: acacia, eucalyptus, pine) for wood production but a lot is used also for energy consumption. Wood charcoal is still the number one energy source in Madagascar.

There are a impressive number of institutions responsible for governing the various dimensions of this complex human-environmental system: Ministry of Agriculture, Ministry of Water and Forests, Ministry of Fisheries, Ministry of Livestock, Ministry of Mining. There are remarkable overlaps of responsibilities requiring some coordinated planning, a challenging thing, …and you’ll also understand that communication, i.e., the receiving and delivering of information, between these institutions (but also between the decision makers and resource users on the ground) becomes a key part in this governance undertaking.

Research in the Alaotra

Bridging Science and Photography in Madagascar
The AlaReLa logo represents 3 main ecosystems: in yellow the open grasslands, in blue the wetlands, and in green the forests.
Given we are working in the realms of NRM (natural resources management), we first started creating an acronym (technocrats are very fond of acronyms; not that we would label ourselves as such, but we are, as said in NRM realms): “AlaReLa”, the name of our research for development project, stands for Alaotra Resilience Landscapes. In brief, this research aims to provide tools to the various stakeholders of the Alaotra human-environment system to strike a balance in the governance between development (or agricultural production thereof) and conservation (there are crucial ecosystems for biodiversity and people). Stakeholders can be the fishermen who fish in the lakes and marshes, the farmer growing fruit or cattle on the open range, as well as the any one of the heads of the Ministries deciding on regulations regarding fisheries and agriculture. This sounds very ambitious, and it probably is! Nonetheless, we, a consortium of several research and conservation institutions use a three-prong approach: understanding, exploring, communicating– with the latter being ongoing throughout the duration of the project, and beyond.

How do we do it?

Well, we talk and we listen. Sounds simple, right? To tackle the understanding portion of this research, we use a variety of disciplinary approaches (e.g., ecology, sociology, remote sensing) to create a picture of this complex human-environmental system. The exploration consists of collectively developing models (in our case role playing games and board games such as Settlers of Catan©) to test collectively agreed scenarios. For this, we sit together with the various resource users and decision makers to describe the challenges of NRM, to identify and link the key actors and resources of the system which may be prone to change (such as environmental, economic, political, etc.). In applying this participatory modeling approach, the underpinning philosophy is communication. By gaming various NRM situations, we bring together key stakeholders of the system; we listen, we (the researchers) and they (the stakeholders from the Alaotra) both learn, and we reformulate questions. During this process new questions and surprises can emerge which were not evident from the start of the project. To sum up, we all gain a better understanding of how processes or dynamics work (this is our overarching assumption).

But let’s elaborate on the term “communication” a bit further; here we explore and present a rather new avenue of communication in research. We decided to ask a photographer to be part of the AlaReLa project, here is what he has to say…Arnaud! Your turn.

In a way locals are also researchers of their own lives. Click To Tweet

An innovative approach to dissemination of research

Bridging Science and Photography in Madagascar
Shooting from a moving pirogue is no picnic! I had to do it while standing [Note from Patrick: almost 20 minutes!] to be able to get a shot of a baby bandro. I earned the respect of the fishermen that day, and got the picture of the beast.
There is a need to be innovative in environmental sciences, involving locals and the approach described in the former paragraph explains one of the ways the AlaReLa project is doing this. However, there is also a lack of communication for all this science to actually mean something! Having been an academic myself (in various unrelated fields, do not ask on which fields, I still have some sense of decency) I do think that there is a conundrum in the way research and particularly the publication/reference/quotes system performs and sometimes clutter the way knowledge is produced. Writings by scientists for other scientists is needed, the peer review system is sound. But maybe there is a need to reach further and with more tangible effects for a more perennial outcome; so one has to find other ways to enter people’s field of view. Art could be this entrance. Or rather art could be the metaphorical foot blocking said-door. The AlaReLa team decided to continue being innovative and incorporate a photographer in the project, from start to finish, not only for pure documentation… Somebody who could invest more than a couple of weeks to go on site and maybe sleep on the floor and get bitten by bugs and almost killed a couple of times for being too noisy in shady bars. I was happy to oblige.

I decided to call this activity Ethno-photography. How does it work? The “ethno-” means a humanistic approach and long stays, with local involvement through iteration in the picture selection (and shooting) process and through potential collaboration with local photographers. We should be able to use photography as support for the project research results, or even provide more information, a different point of view, visual narration for data… That is where my (second) academic background came in handy. Let’s spill the beans: I re-educated myself in Forest Ecosystems management recently.

It is not all fun and games though… One of my biggest fear was (and still is) to depict the locals throughout the lens of Neo-Colonialism or Post-Colonialism or Neo-Post-Colonialism, et al. I am a Caucasian male of 40, born and raised in a “rich” country (France, of all places, has a, er, rich and complex history with Madagascar). Whether I like it or not, my views are tainted. By overthinking it sometimes, as well. So I had to find a way to make sure this vision I was to bring back was a vision shared with the depicted people, as real a picture as possible. Of course, paradigms, lenses, etc. Here is the way the AlaReLa team and I tried to overcome this issue. The project was separated in three distinct phases:

Bridging Science and Photography in Madagascar
The modus-operandi was simple: wander around, pick some good one, negotiate (sometimes with the help of an interpreter – phd student, local project manager, etc.) and shoot. While the picture was self-developing, write “AlaReLa project 2014” on it and make a scene of drying it and all… give it to the model and try to escape the hordes of people wanting to get one as well. Repeat later, farther… I tried to get a wide variety of models: kids, teenagers, workers, old folks, both genders. I then asked them to be pictured with their instant-photo by joking that my boss wouldn’t believe me that I worked if he had no proof! There is nothing better than the common enemy of “the big boss” to make friends…
1. Discovery – I followed two Malagasy PhD students during their field work and, without previous knowledge (i.e., without having done my homework and read a lot about the country and its history), took a first harvest of pictures…

2. Iteration – With the first batch of pictures it is possible to identify some gaps in the stories we want to narrate and complete the set. However, the most important for me is to go back to the same spots (and more of course) and to show a selection of these pictures to the locals, asking them what is missing. For instance, let’s say I was dumb enough not to take any pictures of Zebus, there is a strong chance people will ask me something like “Dude, where are the zebus!” Zebus are an important element of local life, from social prestige to more economical reasons, which is of course linked. It is my belief that, by combining my view and theirs through this iteration, an accurate picture of the life in this socio-ecological-economical system can be achieved. I do hope that something beyond the obvious will emerge from this ping-pong with the locals. Nonetheless, we already know that I need more pictures of people working and a more varied selection of activities: fishing, cooking and farming, but also charcoal making, hunting, illegal alcohol making, etc.

3. Display / Outreach – The final outcome for the photography part of this project is a transdisciplinary exhibition, coupling photography and environmental sciences, in various locations. A first formal collaborative exhibition at a cultural institution in the capital Antananarivo with a local photographer (I am in negotiation with the French Cultural Center, the only way to have good wine at the opening…) will be organized. Then we will bring a selection of the pictures, printed on tarp, to each village where I was staying when doing, er, let’s call that field work, that sounds like science. Each time we will try to have a party and create a cultural event. Following these, the exhibition will constitute a package that will be proposed at scientific conferences as a support for the presentations of AlaReLa researchers’ work. First results were shown with a presentation and an exhibition in April (2015) at the GTOe conference in Zurich. This is aimed at bridging the gap between art and science or, to get back to our metaphor, put the shoulder in the door-frame previously blocked by the metaphorical foot.

The photography in itself has also been thought/designed to be multidisciplinary (within reason and within photography techniques) and serves different purposes. Digital colour photography is used to document the work of the AlaReLa researchers; it can be used rather quickly for Internet visibility (even during the stay, as shown on my flickr Madagascar set) and later by the researchers for their publications, reports, etc, all using creative-commons licensing. For the “art” part I use mostly black and white analogue film photography. It is beyond the scope of this article to debate of the pros and cons of film photography or to inflame any church wars, though let me just say this is a personal choice and modus operandi, not any kind of statement. The selection of which type of camera(s) to use and why is also beyond the scope of this article but to satisfy the photography-freaks amongst the readers here is my setup: I used two Voigtlander Bessas (R3M and R4A) with 3 lenses: 21mm, 35mm and 50mm, shooting Ilford HP5 and FP4 film, depending on the wind direction and my moods. The use of rangefinders helped me to get quickly close to people and be rather unobtrusive, but this set-up is limited for portraiture or details such as hands, etc. I will undoubtedly change this for the second phase. In addition to that I carried around with me a Fuji Instax camera and gave away about 70 to 80 portraits. This helped me connect with people and led to a lot of memorable encounters. Moreover it left behind a trace of my passage (each instant picture I labeled “AlaReLa project 2014”) and a tacit promise of return.

That is all good but what is the gain for the locals? Obviously they get the opportunity and the ability to bring their own point of view through the process and through the collaboration with local photographers during the final exhibitions. We’ll see how that goes. In a way locals are also researchers of their own lives. In addition, as the stays are long there are possibilities for me to share some of what I do: photography, self-publication, association creation, etc. During the first phase I gave a workshop on how to run a small photography association (BOP – the infamous “Bricolages Ondulatoires & Particulaires” collective) and try to publish artifacts to a group of photographers from Antananarivo.

This is of course still a work in progress. My second stay is planned for the end of 2015 and the AlaReLa team and I already have some ideas to go beyond what was done in phase one. However, the results from phase one are very encouraging and some of the objectives have already been reached.

I shouldn’t probably tell you this but we were negotiating for some, er, unofficial rum. I tried it while he was filling our water bottles with it from huge jerrycans; it got me under for the rest of the morning, to my excuse it was 8am.
Zebu and Pirogue, two emblematic sights of Lake Alaotra…
Bridging Science and Photography in Madagascar
Mr Paillette! He is a mayor of a small village and we were here in his house to invite him to come to a workshop about watershed/landscape management. The light and the small windows makes for a Wermer painting atmosphere, at least I think it does…
Bridging Science and Photography in Madagascar
Bridging Science and Photography in Madagascar
We met this man while biking from Camp Bandro to Ambatondrazaka and stopping here and there to shoot some instant pictures and drink beer of course… This “bar” had a collection of characters who were ever so happy to have their portrait taken.
I spent a significant amount of time at food markets in all the villages I stayed at. Going every day to the same place, 3 or 4 times a day, for coffee or beer is the best way to be known and then forgotten. I love market places anyway…
Bridging Science and Photography in Madagascar
Food is one important thing in the life of people, in some places it is gastronomy, in others it is a large part of the household “incomes” if not all of it. This lady was preparing our (the PhD student and I, and her family of course) lunch. We were staying at their place: a one room flat of about 5x6m where the pride of the family was a small battery operated radio (no electricity in that village, no running water either). A lot of the activities are done outside of the house.
This man was mad, as in crazy… He nonetheless was beating the hell out of all the youngsters in Chinese Chess
Bridging Science and Photography in Madagascar

Bios:

POW: from Zoology (behavior of monkeys) via forestry (behavior of trees under changing climate and disturbance regimes), to complexity (monkeys, trees, non-tree environments, and people). Co-founder of Madagascar Wildlife Conservation; Madagascar Conservation & Development scientific journal (MCD) editor. Currently post-doc-ing at ForDev ETH Zurich and coordinating the AlaReLa project.

ADG: from manufacturing engineering and design (sociology of metrology, integrated design of MEMS) to forestry (sociology of forest management around ski resorts) to innovative eco-technology (Mycoremediation with Polypop Industries) and ethnophotography of sciences… BOP president and co-founder, editor and designer of the BOP Photo Analogies magazine; MCD layouter.

Hitchhiking Japan – Hitting the Tokaido Road

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Hitchhiking Japan – Hitting the Tokaido Road
Hitchhiking Japan – Hitting the Tokaido Road is easier with cardboard signs
It has to be said that spring is one of the best times to travel in Japan. April and May when the trees are in bloom and the weather is fine, hitting the road is like a dream come true. Setting out on a trip, everyone has high hopes for what will come. Why else would you go? But hitchhiking is not your average trip. And as the sun so surely sets in the west, the most concrete of plans is sure to change. Truth is, like a Woody Allen comedy of errors, after a while you’re ready for the unexpected. Expectations lower as they are thwarted time and again by numerous unforeseen obstructions: the weather, foreign language mishaps, untimely construction delays. Once you step outside the strictly regulated system society has put in place in the best interest of all, you become an anomaly, a joke– a circus freak. On average you will be laughed, stared and pointed at, and arbitrarily discounted, turned away and possibly even injured at worst. Best case scenario — you get a ride from a kindly stranger for a little while. The unexpected becomes the norm, the best you can hope to expect. The person or people who help you along the way are the exception rather than the rule, and in doing so are themselves living vicariously through you. But that’s where the fun lays: being the one with nothing to lose and everything to gain.

Day One:

Hitchhiking Japan – Hitting the Tokaido Road
Hitchhiking is about resilience, resourcefulness and rebounding from failure
It starts with failure, quicker than usual. Woke up late…Missed the first train…Got off at the wrong stop…Couldn’t find the Parking Area…Wandered around a shitty little nowhere town in sweltering heat wasting the day. This time the attitude is wrong from the beginning and it’s easy to see early on that it’ll take a massive ego blow to balance the weight of immediate miscalculation. Worse even, this is hubris. Why am I missing the point of the trip – which is that The Trip is the Journey, not the Destination. This is whatever power that is – Siva comes to mind – laughing and smashing the D.I.Y. arrogance of malappropriate certitude. But at least this too, as with all things, will dull with time, albeit with a fatter asterisk than usual. It must be noted that, though it does count toward character building, this does not feel like an auspicious beginning. Thank the gods I am unemployed.

As it turned out, it was the wandering of the outskirts of a lonely little outlet mall (Japan, stop carbon-copying America!) in ex-urban Tokyo for two hours vainly trying to penetrate the military grade fencing surrounding the Highway Interchange onramp toll area, that convinced me I was actually on the right track. Maybe not literally the right road, but I had the right idea: I gave up. Giving up the physical reality of my psychological projections made me realize that my expectations needed to be adjusted way down. Why beat myself up myself over nothing? Why all the crazy made-up monologues in my head driving me onward? Empty the head and be free to get truly lost.

I turned and padded my way back the two kilometers to the train station in the late afternoon Saturday sunlight ignoring all the imaginary tssking from the indifferent drivers and their would be disappointment. Not this day. I decided that would punish myself by alternating exercise and beer until the next day’s dawn when I would drop the images of myself a fully fanned peacock, a stag in rut, a panther in the Jacaranda trees at sunrise, undeniable, ineffable, impeccable to the future, naysayers powerless to dissuade my mounting of the road, my hunt of covering more than the 1000 kilometers from Tokyo to Kyoto and from Kyoto to beyond, hopefully some of it actually along the old Tokaido road.

But that's where the fun lays: being the one with nothing to lose and everything to gain. Click To Tweet

Hitchhiking Japan – Hitting the Tokaido Road

Hitchhiking Japan – Hitting the Road
It is almost impossible to leave Tokyo – so brightly does the night sparkle with distractions
Pre-dawn Tokyo. The last shambles of drunk office workers fall out of shuttering bars in rumpled suits as the first trains of the day begin to rumble out of their caves. It is a magical gravity that keeps the bowlegged drunks from toppling from platform to tracks. Early as it is the Tokyu Den-en-toshi line from Shibuya is not so crowded and I find a seat as it rises southwesterly from the subterranean depths to run through the city surface. Movement makes the passing buildings more interesting, but the first smattering of light does little for the colorless avenues populated by more than the standard allotment of ill-lit grey Tokyo suburbia and banal corrugated office space. The dreary facades, like the ear-splitting mosquito buzz slicing apart the neon-tinged silence of the early morning, do serve a purpose, I still have no idea as to what.

As the crowd thins from business people and school children to shopping cart grannies and bored retirees a silence pervades and sleepy heads sway in time with the lurching of the train. I laugh to myself that the quickest way to hitchhike out of Tokyo is to take the train. The best place to catch a ride is where the drivers are, and that is Service Areas (サービスエリア, SA) or Parking Areas (PA) on the large toll expressways or Kōsokudōro (高速道路). As it is almost impossible to get a ride to these parking areas, so you take a train to the station closest to a PA, walk from the bustling station area along the busy streets which eventually give way to hills of suburban homes and flats of pastoral rice paddies. The walk–silently informing you on basic Japanese civic planning– is otherwise peaceful if you let it be. Pay no mind to the oversize vehicles speeding along undersize roadways, nor the huge electrical transformers overhead, they mean you no harm.

Transferring at Nagatsuta to the Yokohama line and arriving at Takaichiba Station, set out northeast and eventually you have to cross a river and go under the Tomei Expressway overpass. You will end up walking along the north side of the expressway which abuts a neighborhood that seems to come to a deadend just before reaching a pedestrian staircase that crosses over the expressway. Continuing in the same direction the road winds right as Kitahassaku Park rises along the rear parking / delivery area for the large Family Mart shopping / dining mall. Though there is a fence, there should be an gate, which if not open, is easily traversed and leads to the sidewalk toward the shopping center and voila you are on the PA!

Grab some goodies and supplies at the Family Mart (if you haven’t already brought enough to see you through) and start making your sign. Did you bring a your copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance? What about a map? A big permanent marker? If not, buy one here and ask the clerk for a sizable piece of cardboard, which might draw questionable stares, but most will point you toward a large pile on the side of the store. Putting a far off final destination may land you a lucky ride but will more than likely exclude you from the majority of the drivers that are only going part of the way toward Kyoto, Osaka, Kobe and beyond Kansai. Unless you are an expert in Japanese calligraphy, asking the convenience store clerk to aid you in kindly writing the kanji for your final destination will likely be the easiest way to accomplish the task of attracting attention to your journey’s desires. In order to get the highest number of rides possible (thus increasing opportunity for great experiences), it’s a good idea to write something like “日本語できます!” “Can Speak Japanese!” This will cause a lot of curious drivers to pull up and ask you where you’re going, as well as giving you an opportunity to approve the ride from outside the car. It’s a long ride to Kyoto, but if you start early, it can be fun to break up the day with multiple drivers. Keeping in mind that success is only partially measured in reaching the final destination, as well as how the ride goes along the way, can play a large part in determining where you land.

Resources:

Hitchwiki – International Hitchhiking Information Hub
Hyperdia – National Train Schedule
The Temple Guy’s Walk on the Tokaido

Part of the Hitchhiking Japan Series. Read more here:

Hitchhiking in Japan – Beautiful Strangers

Life and Death on Mount Everest

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“…the highest of mountains is capable of severity, a severity so awful sand so fatal that the wiser sort of men do well to think and tremble even on the threshhold of their high endeavor.”

— George Mallory

Life and Death on Mount Everest
The path to Everest in 1921 and 2006

No matter how immovable the many mountains may seem, the recent earthquakes in Nepal have illuminated to the world how fragile the ground beneath our feet truly is. Epicentered between Pokhara and Kathmandu in central Nepal, the 7.8-magnitude earthquake has killed and wounded thousands, left homeless many hundreds of thousands more, and decimated the infrastructure of the mountainous country. Many more casualties are expected as aftershocks continue to set life on edge. And while officials slowly respond to the isolated communities of villages dotting the Nepali countryside, locals do what they can to help on their own. Climbers in the Himalayan mountains have felt firsthand a small portion of what the creation of the globe’s youngest mountain range may have felt like when the Indian Plate collided with the Eurasian plate. That collision is still happening. The earthquake triggered several avalanches, one of which poured through Everest Base Camp like a 20-story tall tidal wave of snow, killing 18 in the process.

Apart from the tragic loss of life, the damage of cultural capital is devastating. Irreplaceable sites of archaeological significance have been obliterated. It will take years and billions to recover from the disaster (unless we forgive their debt). Unqualified aid workers streaming into the country (ala the 2010 Haiti earthquake) are not what the Nepali need. Claire Bennett suggests handouts in the short term and rebuilding sustainably in the long term. Perhaps it is too early to comment, but this horrible event may provide an opportunity for just that kind of change. The Nepali disaster seems similar to many other Asian countries that have suffered earthquakes in that an abnormally high number of deaths occur where poor infrastructure and high poverty are the norm. The average Nepali salary is roughly equivalent to $750. The most lucrative job belong to the Sherpa who are the designated guide to the Himalaya, earning several thousands of dollars per climbing season. With the advent of adventure mountaineering, climbing Mt. Everest has become a reality for people whose only qualification is the thousands of dollars for a permit, especially since the government slashed the permit price in order to attract more climbers, most of whom have no business climbing the Santa Monica Mountains let alone the most dangerous mountain range in the world.

But to what end? Merely to be the first western men to stand atop a mountain that the Nepalese and… Click To Tweet

The Siege on Everest

The British Empire 1921 By Vadac., via Wikimedia Commons
The Geology of Everest region map used by the team in 1921
While it seems idiotic to say that karma has anything to do with the recent tragedies on Everest, there are surely some who have thought about it. Many believe that Miyolangsangma, a Tibetan Buddhist “Goddess of Inexhaustible Giving”, once lived at the top of what the Nepali call Sagarmāthā, Mt. Everest. According to Broughton Coburn in his article on Sherpas for National Geographic “to Sherpa Buddhist monks, Mt. Everest is Miyolangsangma’s palace and playground, and all climbers are only partially welcome guests, having arrived without invitation.” The mountain may be a playground for the gods, but it remains a dangerous and dirty reality for all parties involved in the new economy coming to Nepal.

In his book Into The Silence – The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest, Wade Davis reveals the reticence of the Tibetans and the outright denial of the Nepalese to allow the British into their country. Decades of failed attempts involving stealth, subterfuge, and the cold-blooded slaughter of monks by the British finally saw the door to Everest open. But to what end? Merely to be the first western men to stand atop a mountain that the Nepalese and Tibetans hold sacred? Perhaps that ultimate quest, so nobly started, has since been taken too far. Our World, the UN University’s online magazine published a story in 2013 concerning Vanity, Pollution and Death on Mt. Everest and National Geographic offers 6 ways to repair Everest. But more than the pollution that the western world brings with it, recently the mountain has been taking tribute back. Outside Online looks at 2014, Everest’s Darkest Year, in which 16 Sherpa died when a 31 million pound serac broke off of the western shoulder and plummeted onto the Popcorn Field of the Khumbu Icefall. Little did the author know that just one season later, in 2015, would his title need to be revised to Everest’s 2nd Darkest Year.

Alongside being an award-winning anthropologist, the author of fifteen books, Wade Davis, is National Geographic’s Explorer In Residence. In Into The Silence, he shows the British expeditions of the Himalayan Range—and much of the conquest of the third world—are characterized by the dualism of Britain: the manifest destiny of a deserving upper class to deliver the world from savagery and the romantic notions of misanthropic lower-middle class dreamers to be useful. The rest are just more cannon fodder for the colonies. Somewhere in the quagmire of imperialistic desires and day-to-day reality there is argument that despite the massive culling of the “savages” in the process, that there is a kind of noble sentiment, much as the Japanese continue to argue about their erstwhile Asian colonies, in the British mapping, modernizing and laying the framework for much of the modern world. In the decades leading up to the first world war, the British Empire was continuing very much in a business as usual manner in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Singapore, New Guinea, much of Africa, and of course, India.

Mercantile zeal, severe military reprisals and the subversion of the local elites all played a role in the maintenance of the Raj. But what really held it together was the audacity of the venture, the sheer gall of a small island nation that had never set out to rule the world but did so with such flair.

–Wade Davis

As George Mallory and the Everest Reconnaissance Expedition searched for a route to the summit from the North Col of Mt. Everest late in 1921, T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land, was waiting for publication. Central to The Waste Land is the medieval Grail adventure of Parsifal, and the Fisher King, “he who is too ill to live but not ill enough to die”. The tale of the knight who seeks his own path on the pilgrimmage for wholeness mirrors on a minor scale Mallory’s own Himalayan quest, and on a major scale the search of a continent for meaning in a post-war world. Eliot was able to synthesize the hopes and fears of the western world—a world of people living inauthentic lives—in a beautiful and esoteric 64 page poem. Mallory was able to do this by pulling himself and a team of ragtag amateurs, so close to the top of the world, he became what the world needed most, a new Arthurian legend.

Life & Death on Mount Everest
Wade Davis – Into The Silence The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest
A part of this subconscious desire to conquer and yet be the benevolent rulers, for the British, was to discover the unknown. For more than one hundred years the cartographers of the Survey of India had triangulated and established every measurement of the subcontinent, save the youngest and tallest set of mountains in the world, the Himalaya. The biggest difference between the initial forays into the Himalaya frontier with those of today were that they began in Darjeeling rather than Nepal, a country that remained closed off to the British until after the second world war. In fact, the largest initial obstacles, other than getting to the remote northeast corner of India and acclimatizing to the severe altitude of the mountains themselves, were political considerations. Tibet wanted nothing to do with the British, and Nepal, a more established state at this time, was completely unwilling to to allow a survey team carte blanche to roam its valleys and peaks. Still, somehow the British made inroads into Tibet, with Brigadier-General Cecil Rawling, the Brit that had first explored the Himalaya and the foothills of Everest in 1903, who along with more than 500,000 others died at the Battle of Paschendaelle in 1917. There is the infamous Lieutenant Colonel Sir Francis Younghusband, who led a de facto invasion of the country and massacred hundreds of the monk militia at Guru. Despite this unspeakable act (which helped lead to Chinese control), Younghusband had become mystically entranced by the beauty of the country and wrote eloquently about it for the rest of his life. He became the president of the Royal Geographical Society in 1919 and, together with the Alpine Club, championed the reconnaissance of the Himalaya as the Chairman of the newly created Mount Everest Committee. When permission was finally granted by the 13th Dalai Lama for the 1921 expedition, it was an extremely unpopular decision with the other highly placed monks, who thought the British partly crazy for uselessly seeking to climb into such a dangerous scenario, and partly believed them to be a gang of spies. This paranoid belief eventually barred any member of the Survey of India from future inclusion on the climbing team, which with their surfeit of expert mountaineers became one of the reasons why the first campaigns resulted in at least some kind of failure.

Just having emerged from World War I, the career militarists who led the expeditions favored a militaristic siege style of expedition. This was to be an assault on the mountain and they needed a plan of attack. Almost the entirety of the team involved had miraculously survived the hell of the Great War and as such most were searching for some kind of meaning to make out of all the death. Davis calls conquering the tallest mountain in the world (and mapping yet another the unknown frontier to boot), a “gesture of imperial redemption” for a country that, despite it leading to no tangible result, except as Mallory famously put it when asked while on tour in the U.S., “because it is there,” could be what both the men involved and the British public at large very much needed to revive the old English pluck.

Yet ignorant of the impending danger lurking at every cruelly beautiful rise and somehow flailing through the journey without completely destroying themselves, the first campaigns led by General Bruce could be likened to infants toddling about in a minefield. The naïveté of the ingenue Brits, who didn’t know that they should all be failing horribly and so actually merited a measure of success, even as the bureaucracy of the Everest Committee committed mistake after mistake, turns out to be something of an asset, and is exemplified by the absent-minded dreamer George Mallory, an idiot-savant of a mountain climber who almost single-handedly pioneered the northern route to the summit. It was only the lack of understanding the nature of the Himalaya connection with the subcontinent’s summer monsoon season, and the onset of winter, that prevented a serious attempt. So blinded by their own westernized hubris the team thought merely missing the winter snows would be sufficient and so didn’t depart for Darjeeling from England by steamer until early April 1921, and didn’t begin the arduous trek through the Chumbi Valley until May, spent June and July stumbling around the Rongbuk valley and its glaciers, were stalled by the monsoon in August and September, finally reaching the path to Everest, deranged and bedraggled, sometime in October.

Life and Death on Mount Everest
Everest Panoramas by Howard-Bury, C.K. The Mount Everest Expedition.
Yet it was not Mallory who found that path, but Edward Oliver Wheeler, Canadian surveyor, who in stealing away on his own to photograph found passage through the East Rongbuk glacier below the Lhakpa La pass. It wasn’t until September that Mallory, Bullock & Wheeler used the Lhakpa La pass to become the first westerners to reach the North Col of Everest and set the modern route to the mountain. Though considered a mere surveyor by many, Wheeler was an accomplished climber, having grown up ascending the Canadian Rockies, as well the chief photographer of that first expedition. Apart from the capturing the minds of subsequent climbers and the British public, his photographic efforts may have more rapidly brought about the development of the modern portable camera:

He carried the camera, a supply of eleven glass plates, as well as notebooks and pencils in a stout leather case in a knapsack that weighed some thirty pounds. The theolodite broke down into to parts, each stored in a protective wooden box. Together with the tripod, this added another twenty-seven pounds. The leveling base for the camera, spare plate holders, measuring tapes, three-cornered canvas bags to fill with dirt or stones to steady the tripod, and other miscellaneous items brought the total field kit to nearly 100 pounds. In addition, there was the supply of glass negatives, which Wheeler had packed himself, wrapping each plate in dry botanical paper, then placing them individually in one-inch protective sleeves in tin-lined boxes, which he personally sealed with solder. Each of these boxes weighed thirty-two pounds. He would secure and develop 240 images.

Having reached the North Col and been turned away, yet still miraculously alive (save for Keller) the team, defeated but not dismayed, through the Everest Committee, quickly geared up for a second expedition in the spring of 1922. Though they were much earlier than in 1921 the group were still disadvantaged by several key factors:

Life and Death on Mount Everest
Self portrait of John Noel, filming the ascent from Chang La, the North Col in 1922
E.O. Wheeler, the Canadian surveyor who found the path to the North Col, was discluded due to politics rather than talent. The team would miss his variety of skill. The 48-year-old Colonel Strutt, was made new “climbing leader” by General Bruce largely due to him being a highly decorated military commander. The team still had little idea of the true route to the North Face and wasted precious time between the end of winter and the oncoming Monsoon Season searching various paths. Though they had the use of oxygen tanks, this was the first time a human had climbed above 8,000 m (26,247 ft), and all involved had little idea how lack of oxygen affected humans at high altitude. Many preferred to go without, to their detriment. The attitude of “real men don’t use bottle air” likely still holds some kind sway to this day. All this in addition to insufficient equipment (clothing, tents, food) and equipment failure (those damn oxygen tanks), as well as the lack of any decent idea about how the monsoon rains affect weather at the top of the world. They would not make the peak. The wishy-washy method of finding a route in time plus the unpredictability of the monsoon made ascent impossible and put the climbing team in more unpredictable and dangerous situations where making life and death decisions too casually caused the death of seven porters in an avalanche on the descent from the North col.

Despite the unrealistic pressures of the militarists for success at all cost versus the mountaineers more realistic view yet equally deranged undertaking, the addition of the photographer John Noel was crucial to the future of the mythical Mount Everest in the eyes of the western world. He would go on to make two documentaries about his experiences in the Himalaya and be key in fundraising to get the team back to the mountain in 1924.

There is a way to remove the perversion from our once honorable acts of exploration--to cease the… Click To Tweet

Life and Death on Mount Everest

Life & Death on Mount Everest
Mallory’s Route up the North Face
While the remainder of 1922 was reserved for soul-searching the Everest Committee was committed to another shot at Everest. Despite bankruptcy that delayed them an entire year and a continued military style leadership that was more political than practical, it had become abundantly clear that Mallory was the only one who could attempt and truly have a shot at the peak, but he needed more than just an adequate team, he needed to believe. The mountain had changed Mallory in ways he had never suspected possible. Despite all of his newfound fame at home he was almost destitute, still away from his family for the most part, having to work as a teacher for disagreeable men, yet enjoying no sense of the exhilaration of exploring such a place as the Himalaya, where men dared not go. After having been so close to the top, one can only imagine the solitude he felt at the bottom, where he was just another regular joe amongst the rest of the lowly rabble of society. It was for his wife that the decision cost him any sleep, for soon enough he was neck deep in preparations for the 1924 British Mount Everest expedition.

The elderly head of the expedition Charles Bruce was soon struck down with malaria and succeeded by Edward Norton, an officer and a capable climber. On finding the route and establishing camps higher and higher along the way to the North Col, Captain Geoffrey Bruce (the brother of the General) along with Mallory made the first summit attempt. Abandoned by their porters and having to set up camp themselves in torrents of icy wind without the use of oxygen, they soon descended to a lower camp and met Norton and Dr. T. Howard Somervell on their way up. It was here that Norton set the confirmed world record climbing altitude of 8570 m which was not surpassed for another 28 years until the 1952 Swiss Mount Everest Expedition. But he too was turned away due to climbing difficulty and lack of oxygen, while his partner Somervell nearly died on top. On the way down, he passed Mallory and the engineering student Andrew Irvine, who had decided to give it one last attempt, this time with oxygen.

Mallory and Irvine disappeared from the visibility of John Noel’s cameras a mere 800 feet from the summit. A sudden storm rolled in and they were never seen alive again. Could they have made summit—exhausted and with little oxygen left—in the whipping wind and stinging snow? Separating them from the peak at a height of 8,610 meters (28,250 ft) was the Second Step, a prominent upwelling of rock jutting 40 meters into the air–a very difficult, if not impossible free climb. Since a Chinese climbing team attached a ladder in 1975 this step has not had the significance it would have had to a team climbing without modern technology in the midst of a sudden storm, such as Mallory could have faced.

Mallory’s wife Ruth was waiting patiently in England for her husband to conquer the mountain and come home to her. That never happened. What did happen is up for supposition. The central question to The Wildest Dream (Anthony Geffen, 2010), the story of Conrad Anker going back to Everest 8 years after discovering George Mallory’s body in 1999, to revisit the 1924 expedition undertaken by Mallory and his climbing partner Sandy Irvine: was George Mallory the first to summit Mt. Everest? Anker is a compelling protagonist and an expert mountaineer, who drags a youthful and adept climber Leo Houlding along with him to retrace the steps of the infamous pair—often employing the same clothing, shoes and equipment—in their trailblazing ascent. We learn that when Anker found Mallory’s body he did not find the picture of his wife Mallory had promised to place atop the summit should he make it. It was also not among his papers in his breast pocket, yet a recently penned letter to Ruth was. So where did the photo go? Did Mallory achieve summit and place the photo where he reported he would, or did the well-known absent-minded mountaineer merely lose it while shuffling last-minute through his papers?

It is an understandable passion, to see a mountain and want to scale it, for good or ill, we will never stop the quest to explore our world. Whether it be the honorable act of mountain climbing corrupted or one of profitable oil drilling gone bad, the world will not wait for permission. Come what may, we act now and beg for forgiveness later. In the rush to outpace death we often invite it to our own–and those less advantaged’s–doorstep. But what is the alternative? To wait for life to snuff itself out, whittling away at a lump of wood on the porch, or to seek it out, even to the extremes and damned be the costs, for the glory of humankind? There is a way to remove the perversion from our once honorable acts of exploration–to cease the destruction of the natural world to our financial profit and physical and spiritual deficit. Beyond whether man’s desire to attain the peak of Everest (or any other absurd activity) at any cost merely “because it is there” is right or wrong, should we not rather look toward the plight of the many and spend our precious time and limited energy on fixing our homes and neighborhoods? Or as Sogyal Rinpoche says:

All too often people come to meditation in the hope of extraordinary results, like visions, lights, or some supernatural miracle. When no such thing occurs, they feel extremely disappointed. But the real miracle of meditation is more ordinary and much more useful.

Sources:

Mount Everest the Reconnaissance, 1921, by Charles Kenneth Howard-Bury and George H. Leigh-Mallory and A. F. R. Wollaston
Climbing Mount Everest, 1922, The Epic of Everest, 1924, by John Noel
Into The Silence – The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest, 2011, by Wade Davis, Knopf Doubleday Publishing
Mount Everest Fight Raises Questions About Sherpas Broughton Coburn, National Geographic (magazine).

Watts Towers – Nuestro Pueblo

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A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.

                                       — John Augustus Shedd (1859 – ?), Salt from My Attic (1928)

Cities, more and more, represent waste, inefficiency and indentured servitude within an unnatural and unhealthful setting that is inhospitable to humans. But what can you do? You were likely born in one, raised and currently live and work in one, and probably see no problem at all with this situation. You have been brainwashed by police dramas on cable television and fashion magazines and 24-hour news cycles that need and fear are the primary human emotions. Indeed you most definitely enjoy being surrounded by the Energy of the City, the buzz of traffic and hum of electrical lines criss-crossing the grid, beneath which strangers just like you search out on their smart phones the newest restaurants and bars, go to 3D movies and shop at miniature stores in shopping malls nested atop concrete parking lots, where you chomp on foodlike substances and slurp down overly sugared coffee drinks before getting into whatever vehicle the carsalesman convinced you you couldn’t live another day without to drive back to the apartment/condo/townhouse/duplex/highrise/brownstone you live in to unpack your new gear before adding another nth of unbiodegradable rubbish to the invisible pile of garbage on which our foundations founder.

But this is a must for most. We don’t know any better. And if we do it doesn’t matter. We have to work to survive, to pay the bills, to afford some little comforts and conveniences in otherwise unexciting stomp to the grave. As Emily Haines of Metric disdainfully sings in Handshakes, “Buy This Car To Drive To Work / Drive To Work To Pay For This Car.”

Start a farm and grow your own vegetables? Impossible! Buy a boat and sail around the world – HA – Pipedream!

Watts Towers – Nuestro Pueblo

Andy Warhol may have asserted that everything has been done and there is nothing original left, and all of life’s new days are full of government regulation and legalese, but within the life of duty to work and family and country and local football team and softdrink, there are chances to aspire to more. Between each breath there is the specter of death, driving us to grasp the manic and surreal images from within our dreams and blow life into them. The effort to create something from nothing but your only slightly intelligible mindscape is called visualization and one of the things that make humans special.

Simon Rodia, the diminutive Italian immigrant who constructed the Watts Towers by hand —alone— out of steel rods looped with spoked circular hoops rising to over 100 feet, who had no formal architectural training, once said, “I had it in mind to do something big and I did it.” Yet the towers, under construction from 1921 until 1954 and often the target of civic demolition campaign, have been proven more structurally sound than many modern edifices. The towers are more than the sum of their structurally sound steel reinforced rods. Artistically composed of a mosaic of blue and green glass bottles, various kinds of seashells, shards of pottery, multicolored tile and other locally found materials, remarkably, they are not merely towers at all. Viewed from within, one can see that the towers that poke into the often blue sky of south central Los Angeles are instead the masts that stem from the hull of an unsailable ship, one supposedly pointing toward Rodia’s homeland. in a way the towers represent both a dream come to fruition as well as a dream unfulfilled. From the mind of one man sprang one of the only culturally profound sites in the southland (other than the La Brea Tar Pits, which perhaps represent the yin to Rodia’s yang–the inward breath of life rather than outward aspiration–the sucking in rather than the blowing out), and yet it’s very shape and meaning are one that will never come to pass for Mr. Rodia, who passed away in the mid-60s. It is symbolic that to get to Watts Towers, the brave traveler must venture through some unsavory and potentially dangerous terrain, but what trip that means anything is not fraught with peril? What ship is meant to stay in harbor?