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Went to a friend’s, Ford Wheeler’s, new house in Mérida (Yucatán) on the 27th through the New Year. Mérida is now a sizable town, but a bit of a backwater, and therefore its colonial center is more or less intact and there are few tourists — they all head west towards Chichén Itzá, Tulum and Cancún instead. I’d been here a few years ago and there are two blog entries on the ruins that are all around the area, the Maya and the collapse of their civilization. Now I wondered about the collapse of the massive European-based civilization that flourished here.
Mérida used to be one of the wealthiest cities in the New World. “For a brief period, around the turn of the 20th century, Mérida was said to house more millionaires than any other city in the world” [Link]. Who’d a thunk it? The money came from henequen — an agave-type plant that, when processed, could be made into rope and other durable products. It is sometimes known as sisal, after the Caribbean port town nearby where it was shipped off in massive quantities. Green gold, it was called.
[Source]
I used to have a kind of carpet made of “sisal.” When nylon and other man-made products were created that could replace henequen, the Yucatán monopoly collapsed and the millions evaporated. This was the second collapse of a civilization in that peninsula, the first being the collapse of the Maya civilization, which had already begun, but proceeded more rapidly after the arrival of the Spanish, who claimed the city from the Maya in 1542. Because it was a pre-existing city, it is considered the oldest continually occupied city in the New World. That doesn’t mean there is an abundance of buildings that are 500 years old — but there are a few. Though the great Maya temples are now ruins, and their peninsula-spanning network of roads and cities has all but vanished, the people are still present, and much of their culture survives. The Spanish, like the English in North America, instigated a feudal system when they arrived that was based on race — with the Spanish at the top, people of Spanish descent (Creoles) next, mestizos (mixed race people) in the middle and the Maya as slaves at the bottom. The Spanish built massive haciendas — huge plantations that were like self-supporting towns unto themselves.
Mexican insurgents fought for independence from Spain — a movement that started around 1800, ending with independence in 1821 — though it was hardly democracy. Agustín de Iturbide declared himself Emperor after victory. But Mexico was not the Yucatán. With independence from Spain, some here hoped that the brutal caste system would come to an end — but what happened was the Creoles simply took over from the Spanish as rulers and nothing much changed. Besides, the Yucatán wasn’t considered a part of Mexico proper — it was a separate country. Eventually, and not surprisingly, a war erupted — the Caste War.
The Caste War was long coming — private interests had been usurping Maya lands for some time — and it was the execution of three Maya that triggered the uprising. It continued for decades and by 1848 the Europeans had been driven from the entire peninsula, except for the cities of Mérida and Campeche… and the port of Sisal. The Maya had almost won, but then something strange happened.
Swarms of flying ants appeared, which we might interpret as some Biblical omen, but the Maya realized this meant it was the perfect time to begin planting their crops — so they abandoned the battlefield and walked away, not realizing that victory was close at hand.
The Creole Yucatáns, still a separate nation, offered sovereignty — their country! — to anyone who would help them defeat the Maya. Mexico answered the call and the Maya were pushed back — well, halfway. The “European” Mexicans controlled the northwest (Mérida, etc.), while the Maya controlled the jungle and the southeastern portion of the peninsula.
The Talking Cross
In 1850, an apparition appeared to the Maya — a Talking Cross — that urged them to continue their struggle. This was in the area called Chan Santa Cruz, which Britain recognized at this time as an independent nation (it was close to British Honduras — present-day Belize — which was British-controlled, and they traded with one another). But as years went by the British began trading more with Mexico, and the balance of power eventually shifted; by 1893 they signed a treaty recognizing Mexican sovereignty over the Maya-controlled region — and stopped all trade between Honduras (still their colony) and Chan Santa Cruz. The “rebels” had been isolated.
[Source]
Logan Hawkes attempted to find the Talking Cross. Here is an excerpt from his account:
Deep in the jungle…at the tiny straw-hut Maya community of Tixcacal Guardia, village elders fiercely guard what they swear is the authentic cross and will let no outsider near it. Kept within a 'city within the city', much like the Vatican, the talking, or speaking cross, is safely hidden away from all eyes except the Cruzob spiritual leaders - the head Shaman and a circle of Elders. Down Highway 295 is the turnoff for Tixcacal Guardia, or Xcacal, religious and spiritual heart of the lower Maya world. It is home to the Maya who most fiercely defend their autonomy as keepers of the Cruz Parlante, or ‘talking cross’. The church in which the cross now rests is actually open to the public, but only on feast days, and even then the artifact is not on display – not even to the Maya themselves. It stands on an altar covered with veils in a blocked-off section of the church called La Gloria, and no one enters this inner sanctum. The cross is guarded day and night by armed Maya who hail from all across the region. [Source]
During the time when Chan Santa Cruz was an independent nation, non-Maya were forbidden to enter the region — they would be instantly killed — but after so many years of conflict, financial isolation, and the arrival of the Wrigley’s company looking for chicle (the sap that forms the basis of chewing gum!), the war was declared over in 1915. By then the world of the henequen barons was already collapsing.
So, that’s the story of what was once one of the wealthiest parts of the New World — and not so long ago either! Kind of puts things in perspective. There are decaying haciendas all over the peninsula, like this one with a chimney built to vent off the processing of the henequen, and many of them have been renovated as luxury resorts with swimming pools added. 
I was told that a powerful rabbi based in Williamsburg objected strongly to the bike lanes that run alongside their ghetto on Bedford Ave. We were informed that the sight of hipster girls, their heads uncovered and sometimes their lower legs as well, is just too much to bear — though it’s winter now, and surely the gals are bundled up this time of year? Well, that was what, we were told, was the problem initially.
Photo from Streetsblog
So, the powerful rabbi insisted to the DOT that the lanes had to go — and shortly thereafter they did.
Sure enough, some (Jewish) hipsters repainted the lane by hand, and the rabbi’s wrath was aroused once again — his neighborhood watch (vigilante) group detained the hipsters until the cops came. After no subsequent action against the perps was taken by the city, he demanded that the kids be re-apprehended, which they were — they voluntarily turned themselves in.
OK, on the face of it this is all pretty silly if you live in NY. Hasidic men are not supposed to see scantily clad women. (The man in the photo above has turned his head, but the gal is having a good long look.) In the past they’ve also complained about sexy billboards (ads for Sex and the City) on the BQE and elsewhere. How do they manage when they travel to Manhattan to deal diamonds and cameras? Are they blindfolded until they enter B&H? In addition, that corridor alongside the Hasidic ghetto is just about the only way to cycle from Williamsburg to Dumbo, Vinegar Hill or Brooklyn Heights. The stream of sexy cyclists will therefore continue, though at greater risk to their own safety. Maybe there could be a service offering wigs and wraps for cyclists passing through the No Skin zone.
Some on the blogosphere claim it’s actually not about immodest dress at all — that it’s a ruse, and the real idea is to keep the number of car lanes in the ghetto intact, and to reinstate parking spaces that were cannibalized for the bike lane. The need for plenty of parking is due to the fact that the Hasidim often don’t travel with the rest of us on subways and buses, but in their own vans and bus services — and local transport (food shopping, etc.) is mostly done by private car as well. School kids are dropped off in buses that park in what were, until recently, the bike lanes. This lifestyle requires plenty of parking — more than most other folks need. And I suspect that yes, at times some hipsters probably zoom a bit too carelessly and too close to the school kids. Well, bike lanes or no bike lanes, parking is scarce and getting scarcer in NY, so there may have to be some adjustments eventually. In Antwerp, the European center for Hasidic diamond dealing, the Hasidic kids ride bikes around town.
Although I might be expected to champion anything bike related, I think my problem with this situation is more general — how much do we allow ethnic and religious groups to not blend in and to not become part of the general social fabric, especially in a major metropolis? (We’re not talking about rural communes, where folks can wear what they like and be as freaky as they like on their own.) Multiculturalism, I gather, is the idea that we shouldn’t force outside cultures and immigrants to conform to the culture of the dominant ethnic group — we should respect the integrity of their beliefs and customs. More than just allowing halal or kosher butchers to move in, this idea implies that we might start to see things from the other’s point of view — and sometimes accommodate their wishes, even if they don’t conform to those of the majority. This idea has met its match since 9/11 — Europe, previously a bastion of Muslim enclaves and ghettos of various types and ethnicities, has in recent years pushed back against multiculturalism, and a more nuanced idea is taking hold — sometimes. Other times intolerance rears its ugly head.
Likewise, cyclists, thus far a minority, might be seen in the same light — as a fringe culture that mainstream culture accommodates and tolerates as long as the cyclists don’t insist that the dominant culture bend to their specific wishes. This, in a nutshell, is the argument that some NY communities have made when Janette Sadik-Kahn throws a bike lane in their hood. The argument might be valid, though often the local businesses discover that, for example, bike parking by their shop fronts brings in more customers, and there’s less of a chance that a van or truck will block the view of their windows. And in many cases, the complainers were outvoted by the rest of their own community.
Plus, in NYC, drivers and car owners might be in the minority — most of my friends who live here don’t own cars.
In Holland, the most tolerant place on the planet, it is becoming accepted that tolerance has to go both ways. In other words, the Muslim immigrants are increasingly expected, even by fellow Muslims in Amsterdam, to become “Dutch” in some respects. Which means they must accept that there is a long tradition of tolerance in Holland, especially in Amsterdam, and if one is to move to Holland one should expect to accept this typically Dutch way of thinking. The Muslim community, for example, has to get used to the fact that there is a district with sex shops and scantily dressed women in the windows, same-sex couples might kiss in public, and coffee shops selling hash are a common sight. The implicit agreement is that living in Holland means you accept such things, as tasteless as you may find them. The Dutch, of course, allow the local Muslim population to maintain their own customs as well — as long as they fit in and don’t make lots of demands.
This is a change from a provocative attitude that, a few years ago, resulted in the death of Theo van Gogh. He had made a film, one that deliberately goaded and incited the Dutch Muslim population, in collaboration with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who received death threats and is now protected by the government — and is involved with the American Enterprise Institute, a right wing US think tank. Their 10 minute film features a naked woman in a see-through chador, with Koranic verses justifying the submission of women written on her body. Like the Danish cartoons, this was viewed by Muslims as a deliberate provocation… and a crude one at that. One might view it as liberal fascism.
 
An image from the film — and van Gogh dead on the street.
Not that van Gogh deserved to die. The Dutch rallied and demonstrated after his death, and saw the killing as an attempt to stifle free speech — to imply that public expression and criticism has limits. Some free speech advocates insist that one be allowed to say and express anything, barring the encouragement of violence. Others saw the film as being offensively provocative — in a way, they viewed the incident as if the filmmakers were asking for it. Free speech advocates feel that it’s an absolute, and that people should be allowed to say anything, as it’s “only words.”
Ian Buruma, a writer of Dutch background, has written about this incident and the issues that arise from it. He argues that freedom of speech should not be considered absolute — and that thinking in absolutes always leads to disaster. He says we limit our own freedom of speech all the time — around family and relatives over the holidays, I am reminded — and we do it to get along, to allow society to function, for our own happiness and the happiness of others. It’s not necessarily a lie to not blurt out the ugly truth whenever you think it. During the holidays we don’t tease Uncle Harry about his comb-over because we know it would just make the get together more tense than it already is — and who would gain from such insensitive honesty? Stifling free speech just a little, with some subtle self-censorship, makes life pleasanter for everyone.
A few years ago, Mamie Manneh, a Staten Island woman, was arrested for importing 720 pounds of monkey meat, including limbs, skulls and torsos, from baboons and green monkeys in boxes labeled “African dresses and smoked fish” [Link]. She argued it was her Constitutional right to bring monkey meat into the United States. Her lawyers claimed she needed to eat monkey during certain religious ceremonies for her syncretic faith, which merges Christian and African traditions [Source].
In my opinion, besides being disgusting, eating bush meat isn’t actually linked to deep traditions — it emerged as a food source fairly recently, out of hunger and dire necessity. And yes, it crossed the line among some people and was considered an element of ritual. I would argue that it’s not actually a healthy or acceptable food source in Africa, and if you immigrate to Staten Island that might be one of the things you compromise in the move.
Then, on the other side, there’s the recent Swiss minaret ban. Unbelievable! — Zurich has decided to ban new construction of minarets. I foresee other countries banning steeples typical of Christian churches in retaliation. Tit for tat. The Swiss right wing reasoning, if you can call it reasoning, is that mosques are not Swiss, and when in Switzerland one must be Swiss. McDonald’s isn’t Swiss either, and neither are a lot of other easily recognizable branded forms of architecture and décor. Who knows, maybe they even have a panel of guys in funny alpine clothes who decide if contemporary buildings are “Swiss” or not. Presumably, all banks are Swiss — except the ones with Arabic decoration.
Historically, erasing the culture of immigrants or ethnic groups within one’s borders has been attempted over and over. The Soviet Union tried to make all the groups within its massive borders Russian. Stalin shipped ethnic groups from one side of the continent to the other, to thwart any future ethnic unity and uprising. I’ve seen pockets of distinctly Asian-looking Kazakhs in the part of Russia that borders Finland!
In Tajikistan they banned the Persian alphabet, erasing Tajiks’ literary history, and outlawed Islam. This intolerance often only partly succeeds — in many of those former republics, now no longer part of Russia, Islam and local pride have reasserted themselves with a vengeance. Ripping out people’s identities has frightening consequences. When Tajikistan became independent in 1991, the country soon became immersed in a bloody civil war.
One wishes for some kind of common sense to prevail. What harm does a minaret do to the neighborhood? Well, I guess some have a sense of Swiss purity — and purity seeking of any kind always raises a red flag. Some small Italian towns have banned new kebab shops — again, claiming they are not Italian. Hello? Neither were tomatoes! To me, this is all just as silly as the rabbi in Brooklyn claiming that the hipster babes must be discouraged from passing through his neighborhood. Prohibition would probably be preferable — though he doesn’t want to build a wall just yet…
When foreigners visit religious shrines, temples, mosques and churches in other lands, we — if we’re at all sensitive — abide by the local customs. And people from those lands can be expected to reciprocate when they are within our borders.
From a New York Times advice column:
“My husband was at Starbucks enjoying a coffee and reading the paper when about eight people sat down, opened their Bibles and held a group prayer. Then one of them began a loud sermon that my husband found offensive for its content as well as its sheer volume. I say the group was within its rights. My husband says they made inappropriate use of the location. What do you say?”
(The advice columnist said the evangelicals were within their legal rights, but their lack of social empathy was disgusting.)
Like Rodney King said — Can we all just get along? Can we tolerate difference, without taking toleration to the extreme, where everyone is expected to accept insults and provocations? Tolerance shouldn’t mean we have to let anyone with a different lifestyle boss the rest of us around. It seems maybe there’s no absolute dividing line between what we tolerate and what we insist is unacceptable. The measure of how much we should tolerate is: does it help us get along? If it divides us further, then maybe it’s not a good idea. Granted we don’t want to have to compromise our own beliefs or ways of life — resentment will lie buried, festering, and will reassert itself in some form, later, maybe somewhere else seemingly completely unrelated. I don’t want to compromise my own activities, safety and way of life more than is reasonably necessary — but I can still accommodate somewhat. Where the line is might shift from time to time — it’s not fixed, or unchangeable forever. Adaptability and accommodation make us human. Absolutes are for machines and vengeful Gods. What we sometimes call common sense — not going by the book, whether that be the law or the Bible — might be how we survive. But being an ever-changing thing, it’s hard to define. It is learnt, I imagine, by living together, improvising, and innovating, not from a rulebook.
I read a review of the book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human in the NYRB. As usual the article summarized much of the book’s ideas. The author, Richard Wrangham, argues that the eating of cooked food by early protohumans was, to a large and unacknowledged extent, what enabled them to walk upright, get brainier, become more social and even to verbalize. In a nutshell, he says that since cooked food allows a more efficient transfer and absorption of nutrients than raw food does, the digestive track could evolve into a smaller-sized part of the animal (raw foods require large stomachs and long digestion), which then allowed the little guys to begin to stand up more, as their bellies were smaller. It also enabled the brain to evolve into a larger organ, as large brains require a lot of nutrition only available to hominids by eating cooked food. I’m beginning to see how some of these factors converged in ways that were lucky for us. Cooking, Wrangham claims, necessitated that some part of the household guard the hearth (and children), and it also meant that groups larger than a single family were more practical. It’s been argued by others that the increased social interactions of early humans were what formed many of the brain’s pathways that determine how we behave and get along, or don’t get along. These new complex social structures also required larger brain capacities, as others have suggested… and both allowed and demanded the evolution of language to help mediate some of that social drama. Wrangham also says that once we started eating cooked food, our mouths and jaws no longer had to be equipped mainly for tearing, ripping and intense prolonged grinding… which left early mouths available for other purposes — vocalizing… and maybe singing, too? It’s an amazing argument — to tie all these crucial protohuman attributes to cooking. And equally interesting is how each attribute facilitated the others — all seemed to be interdependent. Needless to say, Wrangham doesn’t buy into the relatively recent raw food movement — which claims that we humans are more naturally engineered for eating uncooked food, which is therefore presumed by adherents of this movement to be better for us. The assumption there is that early man and woman didn’t cook. Wrangham says that if they didn’t cook they wouldn’t have survived, and could never have evolved into us, as cooked food is so much more efficient at delivering nutrients. He says that standing and talking would never have happened on a diet of raw foods.
We are staying in a large hotel that is very design-heavy — like a scene from 2001, the movie. We’ve stayed in boutique hotels before, and they typically feature dark hallways and clubby lounge music in the cafés and elevators, which are often also dimly lit. Philippe Starck and others have a lot to answer for, having been responsible for the top of the line and premier versions of this trend. This hotel puts the receptionists inside a kind of pod. 
The pod is less substantial than it seems — on approaching it one notices that it is a plywood shell wrapped in translucent fabric, stretched over a wire frame. If you leaned on it you’d sink into it. There are curving walkways outside the lobby and some chairs and ottomans that are oversized and bulbous like some weird Matthew Barney props. In the rooms, the built-in furniture is all white and a speckled shag rug completes the mid-century view of what the future will be like. The floors are padded rubber (!)… which is actually nice and cushiony on your feet, and practical in other ways we will eventually discover. A single black (!) moderne chair sits on the rug, and if you sat in it you’d find it would collapse on one side; we soon find out that like most things in this version of the future, a sleek, cool appearance belies a broken-down substance. 
The window blinds open via small motors, and they squeak loudly. So far, it’s all hilarious. We’re reminded of the Jacques Tati movie Mr. Hulot’s Holiday, in which the eponymous lead character visits his relatives who are living in a modern house with all the mod cons — and they all squeak, clank and gurgle. The door in this room bleats like a lamb in pain, and after leaving the room, I return to find that after numerous failed attempts at opening the door normally, the electronic keys don’t work — or, to be precise, one has to heave oneself at the door, at exactly the precise moment, to achieve entry. I guess the latch mechanism is in disrepair. The nice large bed floats in the middle of the room, and strangely, its wooden frame also encloses the bathtub! The frame is slim and must be made of teak or some other water-resistant wood as one is sure to splash water out of the tub occasionally. It is so slim, however, that there is nowhere to put bedside items like a book, newspaper or a glass of water… they have to be placed on the rubber floor or behind the bed, on the rim of the tub. A design that initially seems cool and inviting turns out to be somewhat ill considered and often impractical — besides being in disrepair. I don’t think the construction or maintenance here would pass muster with Mr. Starck. I plan to check my email etc. as I usually do upon arrival… but there is nowhere to sit at the “desk,” which doubles as the mini bar and TV stand. I clear a space near the edge and pull out a cube-shaped cushion to use as a chair. It sort of works. On the second day, the hot water turned brown. There are street works up the road, so maybe the ancient Roman plumbing was shaken, rust and sediment were loosened, and that explains the sudden brownness? No, that can’t be right, as it’s only the hot water that’s affected — so it must be something inside the hotel. It doesn’t stink — so it’s not sewage backing up, thank God… but it’s pretty disgusting. Here’s what a full tub of it looks like: 
You think that is disgusting? Here’s what was left after the water drained: 
It reminded me of one theory regarding the fall of the Roman Empire: that because their elaborate and innovative plumbing system was made of lead pipes, the entire population that lived within the exclusive precincts of the city therefore poisoned themselves and slowly went mad. I was told by some locals that when this hotel opened a couple of years ago, it was a sensation. The idea of a hip hotel/lounge hangout chic-spot was intriguing, and sure enough, on Sunday afternoon after we all arrive, the pool/bar on the roof is packed with handsome boys/men and lovely Italian beauties. It’s an Armani ad come to life, and we are scared off, as we are not familiar with the ways of their planet. On a bike trip to the Vatican to purchase kitschy gift items (e.g. a Popener — a beer bottle opener with the Pope on it), I was surprised to see some very non-religious merchandise. Here are the typical Davids as seen all over Firenze: 
In Roma there were many mosaics, framed and for sale, of Jesus, Mary, and the Pope — but also of Al Pacino, Obama and The Gladiator, Russell Crowe. 
Of course, there are ruins all over Roma — massive structures like the Coliseum or Hadrian’s tomb, walls, columns and bits of aqueducts. But there is a much larger number of minor ruins. If construction begins on a building and ruins are discovered while digging the foundation, one is by law obliged to stop and either revamp the building plans or somehow protect the ruins. Our 22nd century hotel has a glassed-in area, just to the left of the entrance, that looks like a diorama of a barely begun building site — there are wheelbarrows, plywood ramps and piles of dirt and rubble. They are, of course, ruins, so the hotel was built over them — and we never saw a single worker doing excavation in the time we were there. Like unopened time capsules, these things are all over the city, seen and unseen. The venue we played — an outdoor theater in the center of a cluster of pod-shaped concert halls designed by Renzo Piano — had to be rethought while the foundations were being dug. Construction ceased, and the whole design was revamped. Eventually the halls ended up being built on raised platforms rather than sleekly laid out on a piazza as originally planned. So, tucked behind the central auditorium around which the pods loom is what looks like a vacant, abandoned lot — but one can see that the weeds and grass have grown over a grid of partial excavations. Another time capsule. Most of the ruins around town are unremarkable, though plenty of tourists pose for photos in front of them, and they are rigorously protected. I wonder to myself what archaeologists and the rest of us hope to get out of these numerous crumbly bits. They’re everywhere — and while they might inform us of the size or hierarchy of former rooms, they can’t possibly offer us much else. The more substantial ruins of temples, sports palaces and circuses tell us quite a bit about how the Empire lived, governed, entertained and thought of itself — and how the more contemporary entertaining and infantile antics of Il Duce, Berlusconi and his ilk are therefore no surprise. Here’s Altare della Patria (altar of the nation), a temple built by the King of Italy (Vittorio Emanuele II) in the early 1900s more or less for himself — and designed stylistically to align himself with the glory of the Empire. I suspect most tourists think that this monument is as old as the other Roman temples nearby. (Thank you, Rosy G!) 
But what about all this other stuff — the crumbly bits? Do we have to respect every piece of rubble? What can we really hope to learn from these pathetic foundations and remaining stumpy bits of wall? Have the Italians sacrificed some part of their future in honoring and maintaining their glorious past? Am I being cynical? (I would certainly rather see ruins than block after block of ugly, concrete apartments!) The Italians must, I imagine, feel hamstrung by their past, which must justify in their minds the escape from the past represented by the ugly apartment and office buildings that fill these cities outside their historic zones. 
My office was tipped by a local named Eva that the thing to see in Ostrava is the Vítkovice Iron Works… a massive former steel foundry/coal mine complex that fed the needs of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the Nazis and later the Soviet Empire (the last “heat” from the blast furnaces was in 1998). With the fall of that symbiotic/parasitic organism, the giant complex was broken up, passed to various owners, and only parts of it still function (Vítkovice Heavy Machinery is one). Like Pittsburgh, Bethlehem Steel and the giant complexes in the Ruhr Valley — Essen and Bochum — this industrial dragon made the town and fucked it over at the same time. Here’s a picture from the World Wide Web: 
[Source]
This area was earlier referred to as Moravia, and the whole region was incredibly rich in mineral wealth. History was, like in those other towns, written in advance by the lucky confluence of resources — the iron was here, the coal was nearby, and there was a river to carry stuff (end products and effluvia) in and out. The Witkowitz Mines and Iron Works, as it was called, really got going in 1828… and was co-owned by the Rothschilds, who were based in Austria. Oddly, it was a Scotsman who had the initial idea to build the complex here. John Baildon started it in 1810; the Rothschilds and others came in later, having leased the business. In the beginning, rails for future train lines were produced, enabling the expansion of the empire. By the mid-1800s the Rothschilds’ partners, the Gutmann brothers, also "supplied coal for all the railroads, for all the great factories throughout the empire, and for the cities of Vienna, Budapest, and Brünn." Here is one of the spots where the Earth gave up her riches — giving copiously so that other industries and empires could flourish. Although these areas were usually ugly and polluted, they made the glorious palaces and opera houses possible. "In 1887, a new plant for cast steel was built and arms production was expanded", as it was in the Krupp-owned plants that dotted the German Ruhr Valley. All was not hunky dory. In the 1870s Engels and others were influenced in their revolutionary writings by the workers’ conditions here, and their strike movements. The strikes were long and widespread, and the workers movement was gaining traction. However, many of the strikes were violently suppressed, as they were in the US and elsewhere. "Interference by troops and police compelled them to end a strike that commenced in early 1882." [Source] The ironworks became involved in the entire community. Shortly after the construction of the works, the face of Vítkovice began to change dramatically. From the very beginning, the rapidly growing population was catered for by the construction of company housing in the immediate vicinity of the works. A plan for the construction of ‘New Vítkovice’ was drawn up and gradually implemented. The aim was to build a modern housing complex that would not only provide easy access to the works, but would also offer a high standard of architecture and civic amenities making it truly ahead of its time. The owners of the works soon realized that besides providing accommodation, the company would also benefit if it paid attention to the health, education and cultural life of its employees and their families. [Source] From birth to death — the company owned you and “looked after” you. This “enlightened patronage” seemed to be going on at the same time as the strikes and their violent suppression… hmmm. Dr. Plener, the leader of the German Opposition, traced a sinister
parallel between events and the initial stages of the French
Revolution. This by no means exaggerated the situation in the mining
and industrial districts of Bohemia and Silesia. At one place in the
latter province, the center of a section producing half of the total
output of coal in the empire, there were 40,000 strikers encamped in an
open stretch of fields flanked by thick woods, whence raiding parties
went out in force to pillage the surrounding country, bringing in
cattle and supplies, quite often after bloody encounters with the
military. The whole district was being filled with troops to protect
the mines and factories, and there had been fatal collisions in half a
dozen different villages.
One of the most painful phases of this outbreak of disorder was that
the rabble of Czechs, Poles, and Socialist refugees from Germany who
were leading it were striving hard to turn it into an anti-Jewish
crusade. Many mill and mine owners in this locality were Jews, the
biggest iron and steel works at Witkowitz being the property of the
Rothschilds, which made it easy to mix up the Judenhetze with the
strikes. Throughout these provinces there was scarcely a town where, during the
last fortnight of April, Jewish shops had not been broken open and
looted, and on May Day there threatened to be a universal attack made
on the Hebrew.
[What can one say about this sad turn of events that presaged later horrors? Were the Rothschilds and others distant and heartless exploiters of the local workers? I suspect so, in which case they sadly may have set themselves up as inevitable targets, who became the “cause” of every injustice and misery. That the rising of the workers, a Romantic and noble cause as we view it from 100 years later, was also linked with anti-Semitism is a great tragedy.] [In the early 20th century] the boiler shop produced gas holders, equipment for coke cooling with
dry cooling towers, high pressure Löffler boilers and boiler units for
hydroelectric stations. The bridge building works realized deliveries
for high-rise constructions, bridges (in 1932, the largest European
bridge of that time was made, two stories tall over the Old Dnepr near Kiev, Ukraine) [who today could have imagined that Ukraine was leading the infrastructure of Europa under the Soviets!], an exhibition hall for the World Exhibition in Paris, as well as a railway station hall in Teheran.
Witkowitz was only 25 miles from the pre 1938 German/Czeck border. Marshal Göring had
advised State Secretary Weizsäcker that the territory beyond Teschen,
along the southeastern German Silesian frontier, should not go to
Poland unless Poland agreed to support the return of Danzig to Germany... It was decided to make
an effort to keep the Poles out of the industrial center of Witkowitz. While the Nazi officials were threatening and intimidating the
representatives of the Czech government, the Wehrmacht had in some
areas already crossed the Czech border. The Czech industrial centres of
Maehrisch-Ostrau and Witkowitz, close to the Silesian and Polish
borders, were occupied by German troops and SS units during the early
evening of 14 March 1939. At dawn on 15 March German troops poured into
Czechoslovakia from all sides. The owner of this company was the Viennese banker Baron Louis Nathaniel Rothschild (1882-1955). After the annexation of Austria, he received a visit: The Nazis wanted Witkowitzer to sell his works. Although the Nazis held him for a year in detention, where he remained with the explanation that he could not sell, it must be reviewed by London's Rothschild family branch - Alliance Assurance Co., Ltd., a London insurance company.
At the end the Germans paid the price demanded: 2 million pounds in cash and the release of Louis Nathaniel Rothschild. [Why didn’t they just take it by force and kill the Jews? That’s what we would expect in this story. What bit of information is missing that made the Nazis pay a Jew for his steel works?] When it was time for him to be released from prison, he asked for the time. "A little after 20 clock, Mr Baron." And he replied: "So! That's too late to disturb my friends. I go tomorrow. Good night, gentlemen."
After the end of the Second World War, the Baron Witkowitz did not return. The communists were in property matters rather less flexible than the Nazis… [ Source] 
Materials were then produced for the Soviet Empire — fulfilling their industrial, military and infrastructure needs — and in the ’70s, materials for the nuclear power industry were produced as well… and the wealth of this area was critical in keeping yet another bloated Empire afloat. 
In 2002 the entire premises were declared a site of National Cultural Heritage. In Essen many of the foundries were dismantled in the last few decades and shipped to China. In that enterprise, the Chinese sent over thousands of workers, built a temporary town for them, numbered all the parts and then took the entire factory apart — all the massive machines and buildings — and reassembled it in China. Voila! Instant steel industry! For some reason that hasn’t happened here. The Germans saved one complex from the Chinese scavengers as a reminder of their past, but here it seems everything remains. [Link to Journal from 2006] We biked over and were given a sort of “tour” — though our “guide” didn’t speak English and had little to say beyond “You can’t go in there!” There was a little bit of a holdup getting past the gatehouse. Our escort said, “Some elements of the communist era still persist — and this guard is one of them.” We were all issued hard hats and in we went. The place is awesome in its terrible beauty — similar to the works in Essen I visited a couple of years ago. Some of the turbine parts looked like aliens or the statues of Easter Island: 
Now rusted and overgrown with vegetation, the site is the ruins of our own civilization — as emotional for us to wander through and take in as viewing the ruins of Roma and Athens must have been for the Romantics of the late 19th century. How the mighty have fallen; what glorious and monstrous things they built. What strange Gods they worshipped. 
Not so far away is the Ostrava haunted house — the other side of the once mighty industrial region seen as in some weird distorted mirror — and another side of life and the local mindset floats into view like a strange dream. It’s a beautiful Mike Kelley-type installation — not scary in the intended way, but frightening in lots of other ways. 
Included is a trip into the belly of the “whale”: 
In Santa Fe we biked past what Robert Farris Thompson calls a “yard show” — and quite an amazing show it was. The part with naked figurines was hidden from the road/view by a hedge. I believe the street was called Agua Fria. 
While in NYC on a couple of days off, I saw a work by a Chinese artist named Song Dong at MoMA. He had saved all the crap that his mom had hoarded in her house and then displayed it all on the floor (as well as the wooden supports of the house). If many of us are dismayed at our parents’ pack rat tendencies we can get a little perspective from viewing this trove of useless, worn out stuff that Granny collected. Truly horrific and strangely beautiful — she saved old toothpaste tubes, shopping bags (oops, I do that too), Styrofoam and cardboard containers… how did she stash it all??!!
Also in NYC I popped in to see the Meth Lab at Deitch on Wooster St. A variation on this exhibition was shown previously in Marfa, Texas: Land O’Judd. I remember friends in Austin and elsewhere pointing out houses in their neighborhoods that were rumored to be meth labs — some of which would suddenly explode if the “chemists” weren’t careful, which they often aren’t. 
In Athens I went to three museums on my bike, despite the heat. The Cycladic Museum has a lovely collection of those alien-looking, proto-modern figures. We were reminded that the link to modern Brancusi-like sculptures is deceptive, since like many ancient figures, these were originally brightly colored; maybe now, at least conceptually, they’re more closely linked to less austere, post-modern, colorful sensibilities.
Of course, at the new Acropolis Museum and the massive, overwhelming National Archaeological Museum there are hundreds of more classical Greek figures that had been polychromed — painted in bright colors and who knows what else. (Were they dressed? Oiled and anointed, as sculptures in shrines often are?) I didn’t keep count, but it seemed like an awful lot of the male statues had had their penises whacked off… not that they were massive to begin with. One wonders if later cultures thought those appendices offensive — maybe the Christian and Orthodox went around whacking off dicks — and I wonder if somewhere on Mt. Athos some monk oversees a box full of “lost” classical penises. (Mt. Athos also maintains a significant seed bank, and houses the first photography archive of images taken in Greece and its surroundings.) 
I loved seeing the rooms in these museums where only bits (heh) of sculptures survive — and the fragments are displayed on sticks and metal rods, effectively floating in space: a part of a face, an elbow or some toes are all that remain. I wish they’d go one step further in their reimagining of these classical works — that there might be just one or two re-creations painted and polychromed as they would have been. (There are still bits of paint on some of the statues indicating their original colors.) Of course, they might run the risk of looking tacky and bizarre — like a waxworks museum full of naked people. Here is a fairly intact Siren — one of the creatures who almost lured Ulysses and his crew to his death with their strange and haunting singing. Freaky. 
I bike down past the avenue of banks here in Frankfurt, the banking capital of Germany, towards the center of town. One wonders how the guys I see moving in and out of these antiseptic lobbies are doing these days. I pass about a km of just banks, one after another, in almost identical buildings — many I’ve never heard of. I arrive at the old town square, which, like much of this town, was bombed out — so, though it looks to be centuries old, at least in style, it’s not — it’s a re-creation. The old square was rebuilt from scratch. Nonetheless, it has some charm and the tourists throng here, and some sit outside and drink a pilsner even though it’s still chilly. In Hannover, where we’ll be in a few days, there is a town hall building that displays a huge model of the city at the end of the war. 
It’s a beautiful and meticulous model; a lovingly made and maybe also a slightly peculiar memory aide; a meticulous miniature re-creation of destruction. There is no editorializing — no “Did we deserve this?” or “This is what we got for being so bad” — just the fact of the matter says plenty.
There wasn’t much left — that’s obvious. Almost every building — most of no military value — was at least partly destroyed. Therefore there are very few old buildings in the centers of these towns — though further out, a couple of kms from the center of Hannover, there are streets lined with frilly old mansions. I find the museum, the SCHIRN KUNSTHALLE FRANKFURT, that I’ve been to on a previous visit. (At the time, it was presenting the results of a local archeological dig — displayed as if it were contemporary art.) Now it has a show about the effect of Darwin on art. It’s an incredible show that includes reactions to evolutionary theory at the time his books came out, and less directly obvious influences in the arts as his ideas filtered down over decades. It made me realize that curators can indeed pull together shows that tell a story, and are both surprising and emotionally engaging. I was becoming cynically resigned to thinking they were mere adjuncts to galleries and collectors — helpful in those folks’ marketing schemes, and many of them are just that — but this venue, if indeed the show originated here, seems to encourage loftier and more creative thinking. Naturally, many found Darwin’s suggestion — that humans were descended from apes, and that the world had not been as it is since God created it — hard to swallow. Frederic Church, a Hudson River painter of majestic landscapes, was one example. His paintings of awe-inspiring landscapes — one of his massive and detailed tropical manifestoes in visual form was exhibited here — were claimed as evidence that Edens such as these couldn’t possibly have arisen out of mere chaotic forces, as Darwin proposed. His wildly popular blockbusters were viewed as proof of creationism. Here is one (not by Church) that depicts the Divine emergence of humans from some kind of protoplasmic matter. It’s all a bit sci fi — but sci fi located in the distant past. 
Further on the exhibit presents work by artists, illustrators and biologists, all as equals. Scientific illustration and fine art were both affected by Darwin’s ideas. There are some giant, sexy and dramatic paintings of imaginary caveman life: here’s one by Léon-Maxime Faivre done in 1888 called “Two Mothers.” The intruder mother is a wild beast — a dark shape near the cave entrance — and I guess the painting shows us that as rough as our ancestors might have been, their mothering instincts and sexy bods were just like ours. 
Not quite Raquel Welch in One Million Years BC, but seems like a similar idea at work here. A man named František Kupka did this one, called “Antropoides,” in 1902. Here it seems we see the boyfriend of a proto-human fighting what appears to be a chimpanzee for the hand of his lady, who watches the fate of her possible future mate dispassionately, as ladies sometimes do. 
Why would a chimpanzee want a woman who’s not a chimpanzee? Maybe proto-human gals were irresistible to all creatures? Anyway, caveman art seems to have been an entire genre — tastefully left out of most art history books. Too bad. Another of these caveman paintings also represents a struggle — survival of the fittest being an (inaccurate) summation of Darwin’s theory. It seems the artists began to see the world as one fast field of competition. Life as struggle. Chance and accident figure in too, as genetic mutations are sometimes random — the idea that the world arrived by chance is inspiring and frightening. An artist named Martin Johnson Heade went to South America, inspired by Church’s example, and did a series of amazing paintings of Passion Flowers and Hummingbirds (ca. 1870-1883). There was a whole room of them here. To me, they are typical of a kind of alien eroticism that is still pretty damn seductive — as it must have been for him. 
Around this time (1886) Harvard was commissioning the Blaschka brothers to do their glass versions of plants and sea creatures. Ostensibly these were made for practical, not artistic reasons — so that students could study specimens that couldn’t be easily preserved. These glass pieces, like the flower/bird paintings, consistently have a strangely erotic vibe. Other biological drawings in the show were the famous microscopic sea creature drawings by Ernst Haeckel, which are maybe ever so slightly less erotic, but equally alien. It’s a little hard to pin down the effect these drawings have: maybe they show how amazing it is that all this peculiar stuff evolved, or maybe some of these artists were of a more creationist bent, and are in fact saying that only a strange and distant (and slightly pervy) God could have come up with such a menagerie. 
Haeckel, at least, believed in evolution — though he was a Lamarckian. Unlike Darwin, he believed that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” as one would have on a license plate — that organisms and their genes evolve new characteristics in their own lifetimes, and pass those traits on to their babies. From a review in the Financial Times of the show’s catalogue (Darwin, Art and the Search for Origins): “Haeckel was a promising zoologist whose life was devastated when his wife Anna Sethe died, leading him to abandon religion in favour of Darwinian theory. Trying to recover by the Mediterranean, he walked along the seashore and noticed a jellyfish in a tidal pool. Its delicate yellow tendrils reminded him of his wife’s braids; he sketched it, named it ‘annasethe’ after her, and begun the detailed drawings of marine life that were to revolutionise 19th-century understanding of the microcosmos.”
(One wonders how much his late wife’s hair resembled the tendrils of jellyfish?)
“It was such images, adapted and developed into monumental canvases that scandalised Vienna at the turn of the century. Klimt’s 1899 mural ‘Philosophy’, with its endless cycle of birth and decay, proposed humanity as a mere tool of nature for the mindless, unchanging purpose of reproduction.” [ Link]
All these ideas spread rapidly. Very potent memes, one might say. The idea of evolution may have arisen earlier; but now, this was its moment.
People with hairy faces were seen as a living link to our remote past — weird remnants of prehistoric life that had suddenly erupted into the present: 
Similarly, monkeys were now borderline human: 
There was a whole genre of monkey art — monkeys as judges, as politicians, as Darwin, you name it. This painting is called “The Studio Visit”… maybe there’s a similar one of music critics? Equally inspiring to artists was the idea that weird, fantastic creatures sprang into being to fill evolutionary niches. Work began to feature imaginary specimens, many of them mythological and surreal, and many now within the realm of possibility. Here’s a large bronze sculpture by Jean Carriès of a cross between a frog and a rabbit — why not? 
Giant salamander-like creatures loom over tiny humans in a work by Alfred Kubin. 
Monsters, formerly creatures of the unconscious or the id, were no longer just figments of the imagination. Jules Verne, Conan Doyle and HG Wells imagined whole worlds hidden in the jungle, undersea or deep in the Earth. Nature has produced creatures as strange as anything we can imagine, so why limit ourselves? The show takes us into the 20th century — surrealists and others are creating their own monsters and hybrid beasts. Max Ernst has a room of frottages (rubbings) with titles that imply imaginary plant life. Lastly, the show asks, “Where are we going?” If we evolved from tiny, strange and sexy things into what we are now, then what could the world become in the future? The curators responded with some Ernst paintings of apocalyptic landscapes. Hmmm. Some of his technique does derive from random blots, smudges and smears — so along with many others, he might be saying that like genetic selection, sometimes randomness or change might be as good a generator of material as anything — and then the artist (or the environment, in the case of evolution) decides if that image or mutation is worthy. 
Well, this line of reasoning might be a little convoluted, but who knows? It’s not a completely unreasonable leap. The show’s other conclusion was that for many 20th century artists, desolation might seem as likely a future as anything else — which I believe they linked to evolutionary theory and its randomness. In this case, though, that feeling might be more related to WWI and its devastating effect on optimism, at least temporarily.
Our hotel is in Wan Chai, close to central Hong Kong. The rooms have amazing views looking towards Kowloon and the New Territories. Everywhere, except on the steepest hills, there are almost identical tall condos and office buildings. A forest. We passed one such grouping on the way in from the airport that was like Co-op City in the Bronx times two. Most are unremarkable; though the new convention center on the waterfront looks like a giant sea turtle, and across the water I can see the distinctive curve of a performing arts center. In central HK, the Norman Foster bank building that looks like a vertical Beaubourg is dwarfed by the higher office buildings around it. Ferries and merchant ships move back and forth across the water; as the day advances the haze builds up. 
The evening of our arrival, a group of us walk to a nearby restaurant — an unremarkable place specializing in local (Cantonese) food. 12 of us sit around a table and gobble down veggies, dumplings, abalone, crab and delicious shrimp. The place is a bit like the brightly lit joints in NY’s Chinatown — nothing to get too excited about. Daria, an acquaintance of Paul and Mauro’s from our previous trip to Perth, lives here now, and she offers to take us to a more interesting place the next evening. C and I walk back to the hotel along the main street of the neighborhood. Beautiful old neon signs advertise hostess bars, seafood restaurants, rock and roll discos and Irish bars — where soldiers serving in Nam would sometimes get their R&R. It’s a pretty sleazy area, and it’s surprising that only a few blocks away is the sterile and lifeless zone of hotels, mirrored office buildings and the convention center. 
The next morning C and I decide to try our luck sightseeing on bikes. A pretty crazy idea for this town, but we decide to see how hard it really is. Turns out to be pretty hard; not only are there no bike lanes — which is not a big deal, as lots of cities don’t have bike lanes — but sometimes there aren’t even sidewalks, not to mention parks, promenades or public amenities. We negotiate a road crossing under a flyover (underpass), and encounter a group of women gathered in the shade under a concrete column, huddled together singing hymns. We ride mostly on the sidewalks when we can find them — most of which are not crowded, until we get to Central where the shoppers are out in force. Near the HSBC bank building and the ferry terminal we use an underground passageway to cross the street — there is no other way to get across. In the shade and semi-darkness under the street, hundreds of women are arranged, most on tarpaulins, sitting with bags of food, picnic-style, talking to each other and to distant friends and family on phones. When we reach the concrete plaza at the base of the bank building, there are hundreds more. They don’t look destitute — they’re passing snacks around and smiling as they chat — but what are they doing here? They don’t look Chinese, though they’re Asian — Malaysian maybe? Indonesian? Later it’s revealed that they’re all Filipino maids, and today (Sunday) is their one day off. They gather to exchange news of home and socialize, but HK being HK, there are no shady parks, esplanades or plazas where the public can mingle and hang out. I’m not talking about a Central Park, Tiergarten or Hyde Park— here in HK there is nothing at all. They have nowhere to meet but in the shade of an underground passageway or around the entrance plaza for the HSBC bank, which of course is closed today. It presents the strange sight of citizenry improvising when their city government doesn’t provide for them. C and I bike — slowly, carefully — along the glitzy shopping crowds in Central. I’ve heard that there may be a wet market open today; they’re “wet” because the stall owners regularly hose down their fish and vegetables. First, we check out a discount clothing market where the stalls are squeezed into the space between two high rises. There’s barely space to walk, but everyone makes room. With the good real estate around here in the hands of big corporations and brand name chain stores, the local merchants improvise and squeeze themselves into the cracks where they can. 
Further down the road we lock up and head into the Graham St Market, still somewhat busy even though it’s Sunday and already early afternoon — and too late for the really fresh fish. The market is elongated, the stalls strung out in a long line between taller buildings. There are vegetables we’ve never seen, fruits arranged especially for the upcoming New Year celebrations, and Styrofoam containers of shrimp and fish swimming about. A system of hoses pouring into the containers keeps their water fresh. At one point we see a fish successfully flop right out of its Styrofoam tank and land on the concrete sidewalk right in front of us. The poor thing began to slither along the ground pretty rapidly, using its front fins for propulsion — as if the sea might be just a few feet away. 
We run into my friend Andrew Corner, who lives here — I’d tried to contact him earlier, so this is fortuitous. Andrew is doing some vegetable shopping at his wife’s favorite stall. He says this market is due to be vacated (torn down) soon. At present it’s hemmed in by six-story old-style apartment buildings with clothing lines strung outside the balconies, but the local real estate developers (and the government) see financial opportunities, and plan to tear down the funky buildings on either side and erect much higher condos to squeeze the vendors out. Like many other places, the old, the handmade, the social, are all vanishing quickly — this is the last wet market in all of Hong Kong Island. Old colonial or deco buildings — many pre-air conditioning, with verandas and window vents — are almost a memory. Andrew shows us a charming street nearby. Balconies and birdcages. He volunteers that traditional Chinese society doesn’t have a place for what he refers to as civics. He suggests that traditional Chinese social decisions came from two sources — the top down, via the legendary Confucian beauracracy, and from within one’s extended family. Any sense of community was therefore non-existent. You obeyed the Emperor and took care of your own, and the rest was none of your concern. His implication is that those attitudes are deep-rooted, and the Communists simply inherited those social structures — which is a way of explaining both the general lack of public amenities and lack of a sense of community or of neighborhoods here. This city is truly all about business. Yes, there are undeveloped areas along the steep hillsides where one could conceivably enjoy fresh air (if you can get high enough above the smog) or take a walk or picnic with some friends, but those hard to reach areas aren’t much use in anyone’s daily life. They’re useless to the Filipino maids. It does seem that the idea of community-oriented institutions and events — like culture, for example— is simply not on the Chinese radar. Andrew says some small groups are becoming active in trying to preserve green spaces, old buildings, places that have some charm — but it’s a new idea, and runs counter to the “It’s Glorious to Make Money” ideology that has overrun China for the last few decades. If that attitude, the disdain for civic life, seems rampant to me here in Hong Kong — where the British influence is still slightly felt — I can only imagine how it must be in Shanghai and Beijing. The future, as represented by the Chinese powerhouse, will be merciless, tasteless and heartless, but the food will be tasty if you can afford it. It’s fitting that the US Republicans and the Chinese Communists — sworn enemies in the past — actually have a lot in common that way. They both could care less about public amenities and public good. Houston, Texas, a town dominated by oil money and the good old boys that profit from it, is in some ways like Hong Kong — a merciless machine for making money, but not a very good place to live if you’re not already rich or obsessed with scrambling up the ladder. There don’t seem to be many cultural institutions here either. Not that Asian cities should necessarily be like European cities, with opera houses, art museums, theaters and symphony halls announcing their membership in the culture club. But some equivalent maybe? Someplace where people can get together besides a big round restaurant dinner table? Maybe someplace where issues are gently aired, social mores symbolically examined, or cathartic humor or common humanity let loose? Aren’t social institutions how we discover who we are as people? I’ve seen one performing arts center here and one in Kowloon, across the bay — and as far as I can see, that’s it. Our concert is in a sectioned off area of the convention center. It’s a beautiful and weird modern place — and the acoustics weren’t even that bad — but it’s typically cold and businesslike. Maybe shopping and haggling at the traditional markets fulfilled that social role here at one time, but they’re rapidly disappearing. I’ve never seen a society (except in Houston or LA) so hell-bent on erasing every vestige of culture or history as this one. There’s a fury and determination to it. They can’t wipe the slate clean fast enough. C and I take our bikes on the Star Ferry over to Kowloon. Besides the wet market, I suggested that she see a temple, and if we’re lucky, the shops that make paper funerary items. Having been here a couple of times before, that’s my itinerary for her. On the Kowloon side, we ride along the water until a gated apartment complex halts our progress. We retreat and head inland, past another forest of towering condos — each one simply numbered so you know when you’re home. There is no street life in this zone, but at least there are sidewalks. We could be in some big Middle American city with similarly vaporized street life, but here it’s more concentrated, with more towers — denser and more vertical. Eventually we turn onto a street with shops and street-level activity — and luckily, the funeral supplies are there right in front of us. We see coffins and wreaths — but more interesting are the paper objects created to be burnt with the deceased. Symbolically, the burning sends the objects to the deceased wherever they are. There is money — Bank of Hell notes usually, but also more symbolic currency that is simply a blob of orange and gold leaf on a piece of paper (kind of like miniature Rothkos) — and material goods that the deceased might covet. There are mansions (below) filled with paper furniture, full-size paper refrigerators, soccer balls, Adidas shoes and paper Rolexes. Paper boom boxes and neatly folded paper dress shirts. On the sidewalk, a paper Mercedes, turned on its side. 
In the above picture, there are paper Louis Vuitton shoes in a bag, a full-size aqua-colored refrigerator and a few other luxury items you might need when you’re dead. Beautiful stuff, eh?
So, that's it. We keep riding in Kowloon, get on an expressway ramp, and eventually make it to the ferry back to Hong Kong. It was a real struggle. I would like to congratulate Hong Kong for being the worst city for cyclists that I have encountered in the whole world. That's saying a lot. Worse than Napoli, worse than Istanbul. Worse than Manila! Hong Kong takes the prize.
A restaurant where we have a moquequa (a seafood stew with coconut milk and dende-palm oil — Mauro refers to this area as Moquequaland) has a TV on playing music DVDs. One is a live show by Lucky Dube, the African singer, another is a compilation of local MTV unplugged shows featuring some artists I know and many I don’t. Among the familiar ones are Rita Lee, Gal Costa and Paralamas — but the rest (they excerpt one song each) I don’t know. The visual format (and to some extent the music as well) is repetitive. The colors and patterns of the sets change with each act, but the singers and guitar players always sit – either on a stool or on a chair — and there are lots of steel string acoustic guitars around them being strummed. I say to C that I think the seated gag is meant to reference a casual get together amongst musicians in someone’s living room or at a corner bar among friends — as often does happen here in Brasil. It’s meant to signify “informality” — though in this context it's anything but informal. Informality formalized.
I’ve seen some of these acts as shows where one artist does a whole set — Gilberto Gil’s and Zeca Pagodinho’s for example — that are funny (in Pagodinho’s case), moving and great-sounding. Sometimes the forced abandonment of full-on production and duplication of the recorded instrumentation lets the essence of some songs be better heard. Sometimes some artists' songs sound even better stripped bare, but for some of the more standard pop artists, it’s more like they simply don’t have any clothes on.
The owners of our pousada tell us that there is a lovely small terreiro (Candomblé temple) in a small town located inland. They all come out for the February 2nd water offerings to Yemanja — when drums accompany boatloads of adherents out into the sea where offerings are placed into the sea for that Goddess. There are often folks going into trance states as well.
A couple of weeks ago an archeological discovery was made between that village and an extremely isolated one on the southern end of the island. There had been interminably slow and incremental progress on putting in a fresh water pipe to that distant town when the diggers hit a large ceramic urn that contained a skeleton. The urn was broken, but not too badly. The owner of our pousada saw it and realized it was probably of archeaological value — and was possibly pre-Tupi (the tribal group that controlled most of the Brazilian coast when the Portuguese arrived). It was too substantial, he reasoned, for the Tupi, who kept small villages and didn’t accumulate stuff.
He put the pieces together and went off in search of professional help, which I can’t imagine would be anywhere local. Sadly, by the time he got back to the site the digging had continued and both the urn and its contents had disappeared.
There’s been a lot of buzz in the last week or two surrounding some scientists’ claims that, with about $10 million, they could bring a woolly mammoth back to life. DNA from the mammoth’s hair samples could be used to fertilize an elephant egg, if a modification allowed the egg to accept DNA with a few mismatched genes. Then the fertilized egg would come to term inside an elephant, and whoosh — mama would have a surprisingly hairy baby. Whether this Jurassic Park scenario is followed through now or later (when further developments might make it easier), it does seem fairly inevitable. Another article lists, somewhat facetiously, some of the other extinct critters that could be brought back — among them a 6-foot marine scorpion that lived in shallow waters. Imagine treading on one of those when you go to the beach. And, of course, people have wondered whether or not our own ancestors, like the Neanderthal man, might be resurrected from hair and other samples belonging to the proto-human. (To be accurate, some believe Neanderthals are NOT our direct ancestors, but a distinct line of proto-humans that fizzled out.) They probably could be revived, as could the “Hobbit” people who used to live on the island of Flores in the Pacific, though convincing a person, obviously a woman, to volunteer to bring a caveman to term in her belly might be a bit much to ask. But who knows? Imagine the publicity! 
This notion brings an interesting scenario to mind. I seem to remember reading some years ago that Neanderthals had larger brain capacities than we do. (This is debatable, but let’s accept it for now.) Maybe it was relative to their body mass, but at any rate, judging by brain size alone they must have been pretty smart. Most likely, they were smarter than us. Maybe not smarter in ways that we would instantly recognize — say, sitting down and taking an SAT test. But definitely intelligent in ways that would have given them the needed survival skills for life in a harsh environment, featuring encroaching ice (due to climate change), saber-toothed tigers, and our woolly friends. These guys may have been quick-on-their-feet thinkers, and WAY more street smart and cunning than we are now. Could it be that over eons, as the world warmed up and societies formed and grew, the world may have become a somewhat cushier place, in which all of the skills that Neanderthals possessed are no longer needed in such abundance? In nature as in life, why try harder? So, as I imagine it, evolution would eliminate — select against — this animal with the oversized brain, as it would any other animal with some superfluous organ or appendage. Brains require a lot of blood and care, so reducing its size to just what was needed would give a definite advantage. Most people will find this idea hard to believe — that evolution would dumb us down. But why not? We wrongly, I think, persist in believing that evolution is some kind of “progress” — a series of more or less linear improvements in each species — and that animals alive today, including us, are therefore “better” than what came before. Xenophobic thinking, seems to me. Critters that came before, and stayed around way longer than we did, were extremely evolutionarily successful in that they had adapted beautifully to the environment that existed around them. For example, if present-day animals were somehow transported back millions of years, we might find ourselves less suited for survival than our hairy pals. We’d be the ones that would go extinct. Evolution is not absolute. So then what happens if we bring Mr. Smarty Pants back to life? If he were joined by some of his mates, wouldn’t they eventually realize that they were smarter than us? Would they bide their time, hiding their agenda, and ultimately sabotage our world, taking charge of our pathetic unintelligent mobs? Cornelius may indeed have been smarter than Charlton Heston; those movies might not be as far-fetched as we thought. This does seem like an interesting basis for a film — done somewhat differently than “Planet of the Apes” or “Caveman” — in which a frozen guy is thawed out. It’s often portrayed that we’ll build machines that will become our betters, that will eventually dominate us. But wouldn’t it be a curious twist if it were our own past that came to dominate us? Consider a prequel to “Planet of The Apes”: if Neanderthal dude lived in our world, perfectly adapted for hunting and other survival skills, with heightened senses and quick reflexes, wouldn’t it make sense that he’d have no use for cushy bachelor pads, molecular gastronomy, universities, books, computers or money? No doubt he could master that stuff, but he might find it all boring and unnecessary. Our super-smart new rulers would let our infrastructure and institutions slowly crumble, having no need for them. We ignorant mobs may cling to our money, comfortable suburban houses and celebrity culture, which soon might wither from lack of support from the new hairy bosses. We'd be back to the Planet of the Apes scenario, with dust and dried leaves blowing through Redmond and Cupertino. We might fight and struggle, for a while, and strike back with our bulky, inefficient WMDs, but the infinitely wilier and cleverer proto-versions of ourselves would outsmart us every time.
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