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Naturally, I was curious about the music here. The Costa Rican radio played mainly stuff from surrounding areas — some good stuff — Carlos Vives, Juan Louis Guerra, and lots of dopey cumbias (well, the lyrics are dopey.) Not much local stuff. We saw a live cumbia band in Liberia’s town square on New Year's Eve and the horns were so out of tune it seemed like it had to be a prank, or some kind of biological aberration — as if they couldn't physically hear how out of tune they were. It was painful, and loud too. No one was dancing. Maybe they would later. It seemed to be more an evening to parade and be seen.
So we went off the square to eat at a restaurant which had a large video screen playing Animal Planet. The show that was on featured cheetahs and leopards making kills. The next program was about the good dog catchers in NYC — they are a division of the ASPCA — who rescue abused and abandoned pets. It was sad and a gruesome subject, and a bizarre accompaniment to a meal.
Why hasn't Costa Rica produced more of its own music, art, literature? As maybe the most stable nation in the region one wonders once again if there is any truth to the adage that creativity is born out of repression, strife and suffering. Nicaragua, to the immediate north, produced its own music — I remember a lot of Nueva Trova coming out of there, naturally enough — it being the "protest music" of that generation. Nicaragua also produced famous poets and writers, and of course was also the site of a revolution and a bloody endless war, partly funded and extended by the U.S. (Oliver North, Bush 1, Iran-Contra.)
Panama, to the immediate south, boasts Ruben Blades as a musical, and sometimes political, son. Panama was created and "run" by the U.S. as a vehicle to protect the all-important canal, a strategic waterway that had to be controlled at all costs. Repressive and corrupt regimes were installed (Noriega was ousted when he stood up to the U.S.) and the appropriate people were paid off, and the canal remains secure. Hardly a forward thinking place, though, compared to Costa Rica.
Costa Rica famously abandoned their army many years ago — adding to the funds that could be channeled to education and social services — there is, it seems to me, less abject poverty than in their neighboring countries. And the tourism is, for the most part, small-scale, reasonable. There are few if any mega beach strips such as in Vedado, Cancun or Acapulco. Tourism has permeated the country, but it's not a lot of hulking behemoth hotels, at least. There are a few exclusive resorts tucked away here and there, but they don't dominate the landscape.
So, the country is a model in the region — but what about the arts? Does there have to be suffering and pain to produce art and music? Does one personally have to experience pain to feel driven to drive it out by creative means? Isn't this such a cliché that it's laughable?
I often wonder, though, if this is true personally as well. Hope not. Do we have to be unhappy, fucked up, out of balance, to be forced to deal with our demons through creative outlets? Isn't that an old idea?
Maybe it has something to do with history and geography. There were no big Spanish colonial cities in Costa Rica, and there was no node in the slave trade here, as far as I know. So the mixing or African, European and indigenous cultures never really happened here in the way it did in, say, Cuba or the Caribbean coastal towns of Cartajena or in Salvador do Bahia. The place didn’t have the massive Mesoamerican civilizations, either — there are no pyramids, temples and cities buried in the Costa Rican jungles. Those civilizations end to the north and south of the isthmus — it is as if the land bridge between continents that is Panama and Costa Rica formed after the big cultures were established.
 Here is a frog on glass. It looks like it's been cut in half, but it's not. Those are its sucker toes — the little whitish blobs tucked under its blobby body.
Other frogs, called glass frogs in English, were tiny and semi translucent (no photo). They are so delicate that the guide said "they could be killed by a raindrop." This seems an exaggeration, but the frogs do shelter on the underside of leaves or the place where leaves join a branch, so who knows? And we think our lives are precarious.
Near Arenal Volcano there are two hot springs visible from the road. One has tour busses parked out front and a massive walled edifice. It is obviously connected with the luxury Tabacon lodge up the road. Through a gap in the wall one can see swimming pools. The other is down in a hollow and seems to be avoided by the tour groups — it's for the locals. It costs about 1/5 what the upscale one charges. We went there at night and though it doesn't have the rumored bar at the side of the hot pool we snuck in some beers. The upscale area also has a view of the volcano — and when it erupts, which it does regularly, they say one can see hot lava pouring from the summit as one relaxes with a drink.
The downscale springs are marvelously unsupervised, especially at night. The hot water cascades over little waterfalls and slippery jagged rocks — one woman slipped and really hurt herself. Further down there are rough concrete and rock artificial pools that Costa Rican families gravitate to.
Having watched the Tico dudes prove their manhood by disappearing under a waterfall of hot spring water in one area we did the same. You crouch, clamber in, grab onto some wet rocks and the waterfall goes over your head. Surprisingly you can breathe. It was like a sauna that was incredibly noisy.
Went to Costa Rica for an eco holiday (as it is referred to) with Tracy. That means a lot of hiking and some snorkeling, but not much culture. In the past I would go to places like Brasil, Cuba or Andalusia for the culture and music — but having just amassed many boxes of CDs after a year touring I suggested maybe a respite from that might be in order. In the picture below I am on one of the zip line canopy tours. It's a fun ride, not scary at all, though one doesn't really see much of the canopy, and it’s chilly and it’s very wet. It isn't called a rainforest for nothing.
[pic by Tracy Seeger]
I am looking with all my might. It's hard to see anything. It's drizzling, and to someone unaccustomed to it the forest is chaotic. We look this way and that, occasionally a weird plant or an animal or insect becomes apparent, separates itself out from the green mess, but mostly not. Most of them are so well camouflaged that it all blends together. When one thing does become apparent it's almost like a semantic distinction — the outlines of its body shape are hazy and indistinct, looking away and glancing back the thing might be once again impossible to see. Like words their outlines and meaning change from minute to minute.
A magazine article on PowerPoint claims that "all life is a presentation". Well, maybe for some of us. Sort of like saying everything in our lives is about salesmanship too, which maybe takes the dog-eat-dog survival of the fittest idea a little too literally. We know more, instinctually, than to merely "always be closing".
From New Scientist magazine: The Pentagon considered developing a host of non-lethal chemical weapons that would disrupt discipline and morale among enemy troops, newly declassified documents reveal.
Most bizarre among the plans was one for the development of an "aphrodisiac" chemical weapon that would make enemy soldiers sexually irresistible to each other. Provoking widespread homosexual behavior among troops would cause a "distasteful but completely non-lethal" blow to morale, the proposal says.
The proposals, from the U.S. Air Force Wright Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio, date from 1994. The lab sought Pentagon funding for research into what it called "harassing, annoying and 'bad guy'-identifying chemicals". The plans have been posted online by the Sunshine Project, an organization that exposes research into chemical and biological weapons.
Although the above is absurd and funny — there must be plenty more bio and chemical weapons programs the U.S. is engaged in that are illegal, and scary serious.
Politicians are masters of the intellectual disconnect. Here's a scary picture:
I read a research paper entitled "Do Animals Have Culture?"
The answer seems to be — well, it depends on what you mean by culture. Oh.
They define culture as behavior learned socially, i.e. not purely instinctual or a result of the pressure of environmental contingencies. From this they conclude, unexpectedly, that fish have more culture than most primates. We tend to look at other primates as being the most likely candidates for possessing culture because of our bias — being one of them ourselves. There's also a bias in attributing culture to beings with larger brains.
Turns out that's just not the case. Fish adapt to social situations and learn in new social environments much more than many primates do. You don't have to have much brains to be cultured.
So then, what ARE our large brains for?
Went to a Christmas extravaganza in Williamsburg put on by a pal of the Fischerspooner crowd. It was a campy sloppy version of a Radio City Christmas spectacle — dancing Cossacks, a karaoke disco version of the Messiah (very funny), girls doing gymnastic choreography on ropes suspended from the ceiling. In between acts a man in a rented costume and crown narrated a slide show about the history of St. Nick.
(the following from various web sites): Every comic book hero worth his salt has an archenemy. Batman has theJoker, James Bond has Dr. No, Luke Skywalker has Darth Vader, and Santa Claus has Krampus.
...Wait a minute, Santa has an archenemy? Krampus is one of those quirky survivals of a pagan tradition that preceded Christianity. Much like Santa himself. Or Jesus. Oops, did I say Jesus? Never mind.
Santa Claus is a Christianization of a handful of traditional winter solstice figures, who morphed into St. Nicholas after the Catholics swarmed into Austria. Santa was most heavily influenced by the Norse Thor, who had a long white beard and cheerfully rode a flying chariot. The enemy of good in Norse mythology was Loki, a figure usually depicted as falling somewhere in the range between Satan himself and Carrot Top.
Here's St. Nick with Krampus Klaus (yes!) hovering in the background:
In Bavaria St. Nikolaus may be followed by the hideous Klaubauf, a shaggy monster with horns. In Lower Austria the saint is followed by a similar horned creature, called Krampus, covered with bells and dragging chains; in Styria this attendant is named Bartel.
The lingering afterimage of Loki became part of the template for Krampus.
Here are some Austian Krampus pix:
 
One of the relative benefits of paganism over Christianity is that paganism usually has holidays devoted to wild orgiastic excess. The Celts indulged in this behavior around Easter, which led to the adoption of the Easter bunny as mascot for the Christian version. Austrians liked to keep warm during those cold winter months, if you catch my drift.
Once the Christians criminalized orgiastic excess, the Krampus-fertility nexus evolved into more of a taboo-stalker kind of scenario, in which the devilish figure, traditionally depicted with a swollen foot-long red tongue, malevolently thrusts himself on nubile women who are eternally "protesting" his advances. But not protesting too much. After all, he had a foot-long red tongue.
As a warm up there were folks dressed in fuzzy versions of Christmas animals wandering around. They referred to it as a human petting zoo. Some of them were holding drinks. Furry reindeer, mice and penguins. A woman asked if I knew about plushies. I replied I knew about the people who dressed up as animals at football games and other sports events. Why, I asked, is there another kind of plushy?
It turns out there are conventions of people who are "into" plushiness. It definitely has a sexual side, and how silly or kinky that gets is anyone's guess. I said this sounded like one of those sexual areas I don't want to know about. As a college acquaintance once said, when informed about some of the more unusual practices in the big cities, "I'm going back to Sheboygan!"
From a website: A plushophile is someone who loves plushies. This can be for any reason and ranges anywhere from those who love to collect them to those who like to cuddle, sleep with or who become sexually involved with their plushies. Many, probably most, plushophiles are also furries. It is never safe to assume that particular plushophiles are sexually active with plushies, nor that they are inactive with people because of their plushophilia. Each individual is different.
In an interview in WIRED Magazine, Noreen Noonan, in charge of NASA's Planetary Advisory Committee, mentions that certain extremophiles, by which she means fringe bacteria, microorganisms and viruses, thrive on highly radioactive environments. One would have thought that radiation in high doses would kill off anything, but just like some extremophiles can survive the high temperatures around deep sea thermal vents, others derive energy from radiation.
This is all relevant to Noonan, who is both aware of organisms that might be brought back to earth and survive in hostile environments but also of Earthly organisms that won't be killed by being exposed to the extremes of space travel — and thus would contaminate other worlds.
It seems all life was previously thought to fall into two categories. Bacteria, and everything else. Now there is a third category into which these weird organisms fall.
Archea are cells that don't have a nucleus. Their DNA is somewhat free-floating. The extremophiles fall into this category. (Eukaryotes includes us, plants, algae and bunny rabbits — it's a big category.)
So, organisms that thrive on radiation — wow. We're talking Godzilla here. Or more likely some weird slime that emerges from a nuclear reactor and/or suddenly multiplies like crazy in the wake of atomic tests explosions. This is 50s sci fi stuff, but now it seems awfully close to being realistic.
A good thing might be if this stuff could "eat" nuclear waste. Probably not — more likely it just absorbs the heat and energy and can tolerate the radiation.
Drove to Ford's place in the Catskills to pick up a log which will be cast for one of my arty chair designs. Didn't get home till 7PM. Driving almost the whole time.
The X-mas shopping traffic in NJ and NYC is horrendous. The driving is vicious, absent-minded, driven. The tempers are short. Lots of 5th Ave. stores have decorative car bomb protectors in front of them — usually disguised as massive potted plants in huge concrete containers. These are plunked on the sidewalks, further narrowing them, in front of Tiffany's, the Trump Tower and an HSBC bank, amongst others. This, according to someone, marks high-end retail stores as among this nation's prime targets — and therefore as national symbols, like the World Trade Center and the Pentagon are symbols known around the world, so are Tiffany's and the Trump Tower — though I wouldn't put it past Trump to have nominated his building himself. He would LIKE his building to be in danger, because it puts him in good company.
Up north in Scotland, Santa has confronted bigger problems. Every year for decades Santa Claus has ridden down every single street in Clackmannanshire, collecting money for charity. Two years ago, though, he and his elves were set upon by an expletive-shouting gang of 40 teenage thugs who hurled stones, some as big as potatoes.
"We had to kill the lights and music and speed out of the area," Douglas Richmond, one of the elves, told the BBC. "We had to get away as fast as we could. Someone could have had an eye out."
Went to the Pixies show at Hammerstein Ballroom. They've sold out the place for at least 5 nights. Amazing. They sounded... well, beautiful. Not the expected word for the volume, intensity and clamor on stage, but the songs were lovely, mysterious and carefully worked out.
Afterwards Charles claimed there were problems, that it wasn't their best show, that he threw a shit fit (he disappeared from the stage early on). But I thought it sounded great. The NY audience were their common reserved selves — at least Charles' brother said everywhere else — "even Montreal!", he said, amazed — the audiences had generally been a lot more energetic.
Charles had on some black eyeliner which I couldn't see from my seat. (Michael Stipe does this too, is this something I should know about?) From the audience I thought it made him look like an Aztec or Mayan God, calmly but loudly issuing baffling cosmic pronouncements mixed with pain and rage.
I also wondered, being a Boston area band, if this is a Protestant band in spirit. Emotion is kept in check — rage and pain appear suddenly, like periodic explosions. The band eschews stage costumes, patter, dance and any pandering to the crowd. This is part of their staying power, I suspect — it makes it all more timeless — but it's also part of that Protestant reserve. I wonder if THAT'S what the show is about. If it's a ceremony in celebration of that — and of the tensions and conflicts that come with it.
No alcohol backstage... and probably no drugs either. This is a very clean band, maybe a little excessively clean — but given their history it might be a wise move.
Today I am going up to the Catskills to have lunch with Ford and look for log sections to use as molds for one of my nutty chair designs. There are fallen trees on his property, so I might get lucky. Sam and his wife Sandy join me.
On the drive up to the Catskills Sam, who has an agrigenetics company, discusses his business and his recent trip to Uzbekistan. He went there on business, to see if he could find a market for some genetically modified cotton seed. But he also was curious about that whole region. As a primer I recommended the book The Great Game as a history of that region — I hadn't started reading yet. Having both now read the book (I'm not quite finished) we're both amazed at the parallels with current events:
The British (and sometimes Russian) assumptions that they will be welcomed with open arms, the continuous installing of compliant rulers, often with complete disregard for the opinion of the people... the resort to military force and bribery to win the acquiescence of local Khans and tribal leaders — which in the end usually ended in betrayal and outright failure. We wonder if anyone in the Bush administration is aware of or has read this book (it's THE historical primer on the region.) I think their reading is like their "intelligence" — it's essentially data mining, a way of confirming and supporting what you already believe.
We discuss the dilemma that agrigenetics has to deal with. Farmers in many 3rd world countries, who would love to use fewer insecticides — to save money and to prevent their land from becoming more inundated with chemicals than it already is — and to have higher yields, are very attracted to modified seeds. These farmers are used to keeping a portion of their seed each year for planting the next growing season.
Yet the companies, like Sam's, prefer to sell seeds that are altered to genetically prevent the expression of genetically modified traits, such as insect resistance — by incorporating what are called gene protection technologies (the infamous Terminator genes are of this type) and the like so that the seeds of the plants don’t inundate surrounding fields, possibly wiping our some biodiversity.
At least that's what they say. The other effect of using sterile seeds is that the farmers have to purchase new seeds every growing season. They become addicted to the value of the product — the farmer can always still plant the original, unengineered product at no cost.
I mention that I'd heard that sterile seeds were not 100% sterile, that some small percentage can and do escape and mingle with crops in the surrounding fields. Sam says he's never heard of this happening, and hadn't heard of sterile seeds being used by farmers, so I guess I'll have to back up my suspicions and rumors. Sam said that "it is statistically probable that pollen will travel and cross breed with other plants of the species and mutants will occur, as well, once a plant variety is introduced into nature, so that escape will occur — the question is the severity of the consequence of this once it occurs."
When told that the Americans would have to let their product be vetted through local government channels the Uzbekis seemed nonplussed — they said, in effect, "we'll take care of our government permissions etc." — which sounded suspicious to Sam, whereupon they insisted that the right thing be done legal-wise.
Sam also insisted that they establish a regulatory system, which prompted one government official to say "...well, that's not what we want, and we can just buy from the Chinese."
At any rate, Sam's seeds were of no use to the Uzbekis — their growing season is too short for the North American bred seeds, which I guess need a longer growing time. So he said he decided to make the best of the situation, realizing that the seeds the Uzbekis were using grew faster than the NA versions — there might be a profit in buying seeds from the Uzbekis instead of selling seeds to them.
Apart from the issue of the relative safety, danger and globalization issues surrounding GM seeds is the whole issue of legal contracts and recourse. We see a contract as binding, one is more or less honor bound to abide by it and there are built in recourses if it is broken.
Sam maintains that this attitude just doesn't exist in many other parts of the world. He and his partners bought an existing seed company in India, and the seller seemed pleased, almost ecstatic at their windfall and monetary gains. Sam and Co were happy too, until they discovered that the folks they bought the company from had now started a new company that was almost identical to the one they'd just sold. To Sam this wasn't playing fair, but they soon found out that despite clauses in the contract of sale that forbade such enterprises there was pragmatically not much they could do.
I mentioned that although I would like to believe that the law is an integral part of the society and government in any democracy, it often is more flexible that one might like.
To my advantage the initial Talking Heads record contract, which wasn't all that good for us, was renegotiated very soon after it appeared the band was going to succeed. The contract had not expired, but the idea of keeping all the partners and parties happy outweighed sticking to the letter of the law. In this case the flexibility worked to my advantage.
To many folks' disadvantage we often discover that should you have a disagreement with a large company there is not much you can do about it, given the high cost of legal affairs in this country. In effect might makes right, though one would hope that word eventually gets around and eventually the bad guys get their comeuppance — but that's wishful thinking on many cases... and it's usually too late to be of much use to many of aggrieved.
So where is justice?
Maybe the law is not the a hard and fast thing it appears to be, maybe it's more like quantum physics —a statistical probability that a thing will exist in a certain form and state, but one can never predict for certain the existence of a specific thing or state at a specific time. The law functions more or less as it's supposed to and people behave as if there are laws and structures governing their relationships, but only a given percentage of these are actually adhered to — enough to keep a society and state in line in many cases, in others, not.
I wonder if the behavior of the Indians is not much different than the behavior of lots of American companies — it's just more overt. Though one wonders how much more overt one could be than the various Tycos, Enrons and other companies who defrauded the public of billions and for the most part have gotten away with it, in fact some of them are rewarded with political office!
Pablo Carbonell, a friend from Madrid, is in town to show his directorial debut, Tuna and Chocolate, at the Spanish Film Now! Festival at Lincoln Center. He's a TV personality in Spain and used to be in punk rock band, Los Toreros Muertos — the dead bullfighters — a name that left a nasty taste on many Spaniards' tongues. The film takes place in Zahara de los Atunes, the fishing village on the south Atlantic coast where Pablo years ago invited me to join him and his friends during the summer.
Surprising myself, I eventually took him up on the offer and became close with him and his friends and I returned again one summer for a few weeks to write a good part of the tunes that would become my Look Into The Eyeball CD. The town’s name means "the flower of the tuna fish"— though we wonder exactly what part of the fish that is... the chocolate of the film's title refers to hash, which the Moroccans, who can be seen from the beach on a clear day, smuggle into Spain in that region.
The film uses a mix of trained and untrained actors — the pharmacist in the movie is the local pharmacist, the Moroccan a street vendor from Seville. It was a huge critical success in Spain, winning a Goya, their Academy award.
After the screening Pablo takes a few questions from the audience, during which people comment that the portrayal of the townspeople could easily have tipped over to making fun of them, but Pablo maintains a balance — a sweetness and appreciation that is part of his nature. When talking about good and evil he says "...there is no such thing, I think it is all in the head." "Everyone is innocent," he claims, and for him it is true — he sees evil as a human response to being cornered, trapped, pressured, not as a natural choice for behavior.
I don't know that I could be so optimistic — but I am inspired by his outlook. I wonder if it partly comes from Spain's fairly recent emergence from beneath a dictatorship, which must have given everyone there a sense that under all the repression there was always a joyous and slightly and beautifully insane nature just waiting to be set free.
A man in a leather jacket strides down the street punching the various movie posters as he goes. "I'll watch that one," he barks to himself.
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