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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.
On the plane to Salvador, Brasil, with Cindy. It takes us a full 24 hours of straight travel to reach this remote place that Mauro had recommended. An island at the mouth of a river a few hours' drive south of the Bay of All Saints. It’s worth the long travel day. There are no cars on this island — just two small fishing villages, the larger of which mainly caters to local tourists at this time of year. After a 4+ hour taxi and ferry trip we arrive at a tiny settlement at the end of a dirt road, and from there we head by speedboat with our bags to the smaller of the two island villages. The boat lurches over the waves and swells, heaving up, and then slamming down as it passes through a narrow gap in the reef. We arrive during high tide, and at this hour the boat can get relatively close to the shore. There is no dock, so the pilot gets as close as he can, and then we and the pilot’s assistant carry our bags and backpacks to the shore by hand, wading through the thigh-high water. I've been traveling from New York in long pants and shoes which I quickly remove and stuff in a bag, jumping into the water in my briefs and a shirt. The pilot watches and comments, "Preparado!" ("You were prepared!")
Manguebeat — from the mud to chaos (a translation of the title of the 1st Naçao Zumbi record)
From the water the mangroves look completely forbidding and impenetrable — their spidery legs make passage all but impossible. The ground that supports these trees, being flooded with every high tide, is almost completely composed of thick gooey mud that can suck hikers' shoes off. The mud swarms with crabs that also scamper and cling to the endless network of spidery mangrove legs. There are no visible openings in these thickets, at least none I could see from the boat. So, when Simona at our pousada suggests that Marco, a young man, might show us the way through the mangrove forest to an isolated beach on the southern tip of the island we said, “Yes, of course.”
We have to leave in the morning, when the tide is approaching its low point, as passage through the mangroves — and across a river that separates them from that faraway beach — is only possible at low tide. Return by the way we came will be impossible, so Simona has arranged that Antonio will bring his boat around to meet us at the beach in several hours.
After passing alongside some farms, ending with the one where Marco’s dad lives, we cross a kind of small desert that leads to the mangrove forest.
[Link to video]
A couple who had been walking 40 paces behind us now catches up, and the guy says, in English, “Do you mind if we join you?” He had recognized me but says he didn’t want to say anything because that would be “boring”. I invite them to join us and assure them that we will find room for them on the boat back to the village. He looks like a taller Sean Lennon — dark hair held up in a clasp and dark-rimmed glasses. She is pale and quite pretty. A somewhat unlikely couple, I think to myself, as he seems fairly nerdy. He says he’s a big Tom Zé fan (which is a nice surprise) and that he's seen Zé perform a few times, the latest in this guy’s home town — Acaju. The two of them traveled to the island mostly in a series of bus trips from that town in Bahia, which took them 15 hours. They are camping. We are grateful for the translator, as Marco doesn’t speak any English and my Portuguese is pathetic.
In the mangrove forest Marco finds the narrow winding track and hundreds of crabs scurry to hide ahead of us. The path begins to follow a muddy stream bed that I guess drains part of the mangrove at low tide. We have to take off our jellies and flip-flops (Marco doesn’t wear any footwear) as the mud is now deep enough that it will suck them off.
Needless to say, for some people this would be a vision of hell — the mud, the impenetrable forest and the scurrying crabs. Marco slices into the muddy stream bank with his machete and yanks out a clam (lambreta, it is called)…a minute later he produces a few more, and I happen to have a plastic deli bag in my backpack, so he tosses them in there and says we can eat them later.
He grabs a male crab (leo, or lion, it is appropriately called, as the male has yellow-golden markings on its upper shell) and that goes in another bag. A female crab, carrying eggs, gets tossed back. Later, we are told that the crabs here used to be much much larger. The local villages could live on them easily and sell some as well. Why the crabs have diminished in size is slightly hard to pinpoint — it’s not simply over-fishing. There are industries upriver and other changes in the water ecology that might be too subtle for us to notice at first, but the crabs, though still numerous as a nightmare, are getting smaller.
Likewise, the local fishermen are returning with smaller and fewer fish. Octopi used to be plentiful and large, and the smaller ones would always get thrown back. More recently they started keeping the small ones, as that was all there was, but that meant that there were no octopi around to grow into larger ones.
Larger fishing boats, some from the town of Valença, use drag nets, which scoop up everything on the bottom. Besides denuding that area of the sea of edible fish, that method scoops up all the babies and most of the rest of the food chain. An unsustainable way of fishing, they are now slowly coming to realize as the stocks have dwindled quickly.
The mangrove path gets progressively muddier and deeper. When the tide comes in the water level will rise to the tops of the mangrove “roots” — we’d be up to our necks at least.
Now there’s a little creek that we walk in, squish squish, and eventually, after a couple of hours of all of this, the path empties into a wider muddy area and then into a river — a river we will need to cross if we are to get to the beach and Antonio’s boat.
I’d been given the impression that the river (or estuary) would be lower at this time of day and that we might wade across — but that doesn’t seem possible now. Marco tries to holler to any boats or folks on the distant beach. No luck. He wades to the left and tries to signal with his yellow shirt — but no one sees him. I ask if it’s possible to swim across and he’s not sure...he tries it and soon disappears in the forest that leads to the beach on the other shore. Presumably he’ll return with a boat. C and I decide to try swimming it ourselves...we leave our bags and sandals with our new friends from Acaju. The first half is pretty muddy and it does get deep enough to require swimming — but the current isn’t strong as the tide has yet to really begin coming in earnest, so we make it across and follow in Marco’s footsteps.
A few minutes later he appears on a boat and we are all picked up and carried to a sandy area at the mouth of the river where there is a beach and a couple of makeshift shacks, one of which is floating and has a little kitchen where they offer fresh fish. It’s delicious. We share some with a family from Sao Paulo who soon arrive on Antonio’s boat. After a bit some Brazilian tourists arrive by boat and head for the other thatched hut, where they hang out and drink cervejas. There’s no town here — no electricity either, of course. It’s a pretty isolated and idyllic spot. The beach is quiet and some of the Brazilians stroll out to a sandy spit and lie in the shallow tepid water with their girlfriends.
That night the lights in our cabana flicker a few times and then go out. Electricity arrived at this village about 5 years ago, and it is never a sure thing — especially if a bunch of locals or pousada guests take showers at the same time (the on-demand water warmers use a lot of electricity).
It’s totally black out. The moon hasn’t risen yet. C improvises a wind guard for a candle out of a cut-in-half water bottle. The bottoms of other water bottles serve as glasses. We sit in front of our cabana and wait to see if the electricity will come back on.
The next day we are taken out to a “pool” where it’s possible to snorkel and see some fish. These “pools” — shallow areas protected by the reefs — are accessible at low tide. It’s so shallow around them that we can only get there by dugout canoe, the kind used by Indians and others around the world for thousands of years. The dugout navigates the swells and waves with less aggravation than the speedboat. This one has two tiny sails made of the fabric also used for bags all over the third world.
A lackadaisical breeze carries us out around the point and towards the reef at a relaxed Bahian pace. So relaxed that the owner of the dugout opts to paddle now and again.
Returning to the village in the dugout in the early afternoon we see there is now a floating bar anchored offshore in the shallow bay. It’s made of some oil drums strapped under boards with a rudimentary thatched hut on one side. There are some plastic tables and chairs on the tilting platform and a few burly guys hoist cervejas. We continue to drift towards shore past a steady stream of men and women either wading out to the bar or simply standing in the waist high water in bunches with friends, some with drinks in hand, chatting as if at a huge cocktail party. “Ciao, Alberto!” someone calls out to our fellow passenger on the dugout. We continue to drift shore-wards. It’s like a Fellini movie, a long dolly shot of partygoers scattered in a landscape. In this case they’re all waist-deep in warm water. We pass a group of ladies in wide-brimmed hats, a couple necking and a fat woman stretched out with some foam rod-shaped floats sticking up around her, their centers suppressed by her girth, the ends poking up on either side.
Tractor to Town
We take the only means of land transport — a tractor that pulls a cart outfitted with benches — to the larger town on the north end of the island for dinner. The tractor lurches and heaves over the sandy track, following the higher land in the center of the island. Occasionally at this hour one can sense a valley to the left or a swamp to the right, but mostly we struggle on through the forest/jungle. Some of the steeper hills on the track are strewn with coconut husks, as these give a little more traction. A car, even a 4x4, obviously wouldn’t make it through this “road”.
We arrive in the dark and walk through this tiny town’s favela. It's a part of town consisting of tiny unpainted brick houses or others made of sticks and thatch, though sometimes even these had strands of random hanging Christmas lights — completely incongruous and out of place.
When we visited during the day this town seemed fairly quiet and sleepy...
(albeit with some pousadas on the beaches that were filled with Brazilian tourists nursing drinks). However at night it was, as C said, like the vision of Bedford Falls gone bad in “It’s A Wonderful Life.” Stalls had appeared selling cheap jewelry, T-shirts and snack foods, and bars were cranking up the music or had a TV blasting with a music program on, or both.
We pass by a small house, two rooms by the look of it, and Simona points to three large bones lying by the door — “balena” (whale) a man says. They look like hefty biomorphic boulders, hardly recognizable as bones.
She says we have to see inside, do we want to? Some don’t want to disturb the owner, but she persists and knocks at his door and shouts through the crack in the door. I hear the lock turning and the door opens and Simona says a warm familiar "boa noite" to a man with a crazy lopsided Afro. Behind him his front room is filled, floor to ceiling, with fish bones of all types — some even dangle on fishing wire from the roof. All of it found on the beaches. There are giant whale ribs, a dolphin skull (oddly human-shaped except for the jutting “beak”), necklaces of fish vertebra and a giant dried blowfish.
The room behind, also filled to the roof (but not with bones) is obviously where he lives.
Flesh and Peter Pan
Further down the road we pass another tiny 2-room house, this one, like many of the others at this hour, with lights on and windows and doors wide open to the street. In many houses there is a chair of some sort and a television blaring, a picture of Jesus adorns the wall of many and sometimes the inhabitants sit on the doorstep facing the street, saying “Oi” or “boa noite” as people pass by.
One house — a two-room shack really — has a painted mural that completely fills one wall — a naked reclining women, with fairly light skin and protruding breasts, floating against a blue background. Below her a live naked dark-skinned body lies asleep, turned to the wall, on a small mattress on the floor, shiny smooth flesh only partially covered by a sheet. In the other room I first catch a glimpse of a fragment of a large painted boot that turns out, as we pass the window, to belong to Captain Hook. Another wall-sized mural fills the second room of the house, this one depicting Peter Pan and Captain Hook sword-fighting. It’s the sort of thing one might expect to see in a crèche or on the wall of a day care center, but juxtaposed with the Playboy Goddess in the other room it makes for a surreal combination. That’s one of the things I like about Brazil.
The ride back to our village is in a sort of truck with a wooden exterior — wooden radiator grill and wooden engine housing. One of our party says this is not quite legal, as cars are not allowed on the island, and this is not a tractor — there is some kind of pickup truck chassis underneath the wood.
We head back in the dark, more lurching and gear grinding. This vehicle doesn’t have the power or massive grooved wheels that the tractors do, so the driver has trouble with some of the steeper hills. At one point the vehicle stops with a loud nasty sounding clank, and we’re off again. The driver's assistant rides shotgun and holds what looks like a vacuum cleaner pipe which he points out the right side of the vehicle — it’s the exhaust, which explains that smell.
The man who rescued Tom Zé
Last night C and I were sitting on the little patio of our cabana and out of the darkness, somewhere nearer the beach, we could hear the bass line of "Psycho Killer" booming. I guess they know I’m here. Earlier at dinner a young man approached me and asked if I was DB — he then thanked me for “resurrecting” Tom Zé. Others have said the same thing here; I seem to be known as the man who revived Tom Zé’s career as much as for my own work. That’s fine — Tom Zé certainly deserves to be recognized and one young guy (Zé’s new fans tend to be younger than I) said that Tom Zé always mentions me as the guy who brought him back out of obscurity at all of his live shows. It’s a good thing to be known for.
C and I bike along the bike path that runs along the Charles River to the Harvard Museum of Natural History. It’s a gorgeous fall day and the leaves are just beginning to turn here. We’re going to see the famous collection of glass flowers made by father and son Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, who were based near Dresden and worked from 1886 to 1936. For the time being, some of their glass sea creatures are on loan here as well. I’ve heard about these for ages but have never seen them, and they don’t disappoint. They’re entirely made of glass, though there are, sometimes, invisible wire supporting structures. Even the coloring is made of glass and they aren’t transparent or translucent as one might expect. The brothers used a kind of painted enamel of colored glass powders which was then fused with the models. One might also expect exclusively flowers, as that is what the collection is called, and one might imagine vaguely pretty copies of lilies, roses and orchids. Well, those are there, but most of the specimens — they were commissioned by a Harvard professor for teaching biology — are much more mundane, and all the more spectacular for it. Some look like common weeds, ripped out of the garden with a tangled bundle of roots dangling from the bottom. And here they are, made entirely out of glass. 
Here’s a tangle of leaves, tendrils and the traps of a pitcher plant:
It’s all glass. Just amazing. Sort of crazy too. But when one imagines that there was no color photography to speak of then, and this would have been an imaginative way for the professor to have “specimens” available for his classes all year round…add to that that it would have been a lifelong commission for the Blaschkas, and the obsessiveness makes a little more sense. The father and son team took their secrets to the grave. Here’s a sea slug made of glass:
This wonderful little museum is located right in the middle of Harvard University. We rode through the yard to reach it. The nicely mowed lawns, hidden from the surrounding streets, the august halls and weight of history and reputation — well, one can easily see why students here might come to feel separate from the world, and slightly superior to it as well. Cambridge, in England, has a similar vibe, a feeling that here is where the masters are handed their instruction manuals. After that we biked to the relatively new Institute of Contemporary Art building to catch Tara Donovan’s show there. The ICA is located in a sea of parking lots just south of downtown Boston. It’s an odd area, but they do at least have a spectacular view of the bay. Donovan’s show was just amazing. Her work usually consists of installations of ordinary materials, lots and lots of them, arranged on a wall or on a floor in a way that, hey, reminds me of coral reefs or weird sea creatures. Photography was not allowed, but I snuck a snap of a ceiling piece made of Styrofoam cups. Sometimes these pieces are not even glued together. There was a spectacular wall of drinking straws that, we were told, collapsed during installation, and so tiny bits of glue were needed to prevent another disaster. 
As you can imagine, these pieces can’t be picked up and plopped down just anywhere. Transportation is impossible for many of them. They have to be, most of them, re-made every time. The local biologists, evolutionary scientists and similar folks at Harvard and MIT are, we were told, enthralled. You can see why.
Mauro, Natalie, and I went for a bike ride around the chain of lakes that extends out from one side of this town — 5 of them, one after another. Strollers we passed pointed out a bald eagle circling above. 
Natalie bailed after a while to go check out the Walker Art Center. So, Mauro and I continued on, connecting to a bike path along Minnehaha Creek that eventually led across Lake Hiawatha to another path that runs alongside the Mississippi. Fall colors hitting pretty intensely here. 
© Mauro Refosco, 2008
I did the entire show with my fly open! Jenni whispered informing me as we were taking our bows. Luckily we all were wearing white undies under our white outfits so don’t think too many folks noticed.
Went for another hike in Marin County; this time down Tennessee Valley on the way up north to our show in Santa Rosa. It’s a lovely easy hike through coastal hills to a secluded beach. There were maybe a half dozen folks on the beach. Up on the cliffs were the remnants of bunkers to defend against the Japanese invasion. This is maybe 15 minutes and a 45-minute hike outside of downtown San Francisco, which never fails to amaze. 
© Jenni Muldaur, 2008
Jenni asked the others on the walk about their divorces. I didn’t even know that Mauro has been married. It was only a few months before he and his bride realized it was not going to work. C described hers and I did mine. Jenni then told us an amazing story about a car crash she was in when she was younger. She was in a coma, and her mom, the singer Maria Muldaur, suddenly became born again while Jenni was out. Well, she said, everyone was doing it in those days — Bob Dylan (famously), T Bone Burnett and a bunch of others. So, when Jenni came to, she opened her eyes and saw Bob Dylan’s gospel background singers surrounding her hospital bed, praying and singing with her mom. Jenni thought maybe she’d really gone to heaven and Bob’s band was there. Her head was swathed in bandages, stitches were all over her face, and she had a plate in her head. Someone cautiously asked her if there was anything she wanted (partly just to see if she could hear and respond). She answered, “Blistex.” Some rode the bus on the long drive to Park City, Utah, and some rode there with boyfriends. And some, like C and I, returned to the city and opted to fly to Utah after a day off in San Francisco. We met John Waters for lunch the next day and went gallery hopping. Jack Hanley Gallery in the Mission and then Paule Anglim, Fraenkel and Rena Branston near Union Square. Fraenkel is sort of an old school photo gallery and they had a show of Garry Winograd, Lee Friedlander, and other 60s and early 70s street photographers. I wonder if that kind of photo taking is even possible anymore. In some of the pictures GW had obviously planted himself in the middle of a busy city sidewalk and must have been snapping off shots right in people’s faces. Wonder if folks wouldn’t get upset about that now. John’s apartment in SF isn’t as chock-a-block with items as his other places, at least not yet. There was a lovely embroidered pillow that his mom did of a burning police car. He’d given her a photo from the Dan White “riots” (Dan White is famous for, among other things, his lawyer’s “Twinkie” defense.) On the way to the galleries, we stopped at a used book store that specializes in pulp and porno paperbacks organized into arcane categories: stewardesses; prison; cold war; A-bomb themes; nurses; soldiers; teens; etc. I got presents for the band but no one wanted the book titled Rock Group Roadie. John tipped me to one that I got for C, Girl Artist. Later, we rode the loaner bikes to catch Ron Sexsmith and band at the lovely and ornate Great American Music Hall. Wow, what a songwriter! I got choked up a couple of times. His songs are sad but dangle a line of hope and beauty; they almost revel in their sadness. He’s a little nerdy and chubby, not a typical rock star or even singer-songwriter by any means, but man can he write (and sing). The room was sadly not full, and the management there initially gave us the royal treatment, but we quickly opted to pull some unused chairs onto the floor. The sound was better there than in the VIP section. Ron, it seems, is going out with Colleen, who used to babysit and look after Malu sometimes! Colleen’s great — I hope it works out and they are happy.
Phoenix
At 10 a.m., a group of six of us left on bikes to hike up nearby Camelback Mountain and the climb was strenuous, fun, and exhilarating. After a while, the Echo Canyon Trail we took got rockier and steeper; we had to use installed railings to help pull ourselves up some parts, and then other parts were a long scramble up towards the summit.
© Lily Baldwin, 2008
A man named Claude came up behind us when we were not quite halfway up and asked if we needed water. This guy was going to offer us his own water!? It seems Claude is a self-appointed Good Samaritan on this trail. He has gone up and down every other day for 20 years now! He said we really needed more water than we had with us (one small bottle each) so he topped us up and directed us when to bear right or left.
At the summit there was a lovely breeze and one could see the immense sprawl of Phoenix, Scottsdale, Paradise Valley, and the many extravagantly green golf courses scattered here and there.
Mark, Mauro and I © Jenni Muldaur, 2008
When I commented on how much water it must take to keep those yards and golf courses green, Claude offered that the golf courses at least use gray water — recycled from toilets — but it’s still water that’s got to come from somewhere, and those somewheres are drying up fast.
We arrived in Albuquerque around 11 a.m. after a bathroom stop in Roswell, the town that has aliens in all their shop windows. Around here, the highway interchanges are painted to look like adobe.
© Lily Baldwin, 2008
A group of us biked down along Central Avenue — past tempting looking Mexican restaurants and thrift stores and a wedding in progress in Old Town — to a park that runs along the banks of the Rio Grande. A well-maintained gravel road runs on top of a levee, but I, possibly (and in retrospect, very) unwisely, steered everyone to a primitive trail that runs along the riverbank. (You can barely see the river from the levee trail.) After biking through some scrub and scratchy bushes, we arrived at a kind of little beach. I slipped in, keeping my jellies on. The banks were of squishy clay and the water was muddy but seemed clean. The current wasn’t too strong and as we waded out, the bottom turned to sand and the depth was only about up to our knees most of the time. Little by little, we all made our way to the opposite riverbank. A kind of baptism of sorts. Had this been a little further downstream we would have found ourselves in Mexico.
More biking through itchy scratchy sunflowers and brush. Though we were still on a path, it was barely a path, and eventually we headed up to the road along the ridge of the levee. By this time, due to the goat’s head burrs that clung to tires and pant legs and socks, 3 of us had gotten flat tires. More will happen to others as more goat’s head thorns worm their way into some tires. Apparently the locals know to coat their tires with some kind of slime that helps prevent these flats, but we didn’t know about it. I biked by a bike store later and got some replacement inner tubes. A generous helpful customer at a gas station assisted in repairing Natalie’s pedal that had fallen off.
Austin
Biked out to Barton Springs pool with Graham, Lily, Natalie, Kaïssa, Jenni, Mark and Steven. What a wonderful place! Have been to Austin many times but had yet to go swimming here. A natural spring has been used to create a massive pool in a city park. Surrounding the pool are walls of natural rock, some man-made walls and fish swim in the deeper areas. The water is chilly, but you get used to it. Other towns should do this if they can — if they cleaned up their rivers, they could create secure walled-in areas of river water or even ocean water, as they do in Australian cities.
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C and I had booked a dinner at a place called the Pine Creek Cookhouse. A friend had told me it’s a thing to do here, as it’s up in the hills and can only be accessed by cross country skis or by sleigh — you drive to a certain point, after which you must switch to a more humble form of transport. It’s dark as we head up the mountain road and we notice that there aren’t many other cars headed this way. And the snow and wind starts to increase the higher we go. Hmmm.
A few miles further and the road is completely white — it twists and turns in the dark along what looks like a river created canyon on our right. The wind occasionally blows the snow from the surrounding fields and hills obscuring the road, and then we have to drive slower, as it’s hard, almost impossible, to see. After a few more miles we spot a small pickup tilted at a 45º angle into the snow bank on the ravine side of the road. A few more feet and it would have tumbled down. I stop and suggest that Cindy walk over and see if anyone is in there and if they need a ride or help. She returns trembling, and with a slight quiver in her voice says, “The truck seems empty…let’s turn around and get out of here.”
The road here is too narrow to turn around, so I continue slowly up the mountain. The blowing snow increases and we see either a couple of grey foxes or small wolves crossing in front of our headlights, but there is still no safe place to do a U-turn. By now C is really panicking, and I agree that if this weather continues, it could be really unsafe to drive back down after a meal and some wine.
Eventually I see a road branching off on the left and I use that area to turn around. We head back down and before we even reach the abandoned truck we see another vehicle — an SUV — dangling over the edge in a very similar way, it’s hazard lights flashing. I get out this time, but no one is in the car. So we drive on down.
When we reach the valley floor the clouds have lightened and the snow has stopped, but we both reason that given the weather pattern here thus far, the snow could begin to fall again in a minute — so tonight might not be the best night for cross country skiing to a fancy restaurant.
C is more of a skier than I am — I’ve only tried it twice — but this seems the ideal place for it. We decide to rent couple pairs of cross-country skies and some booties for the week. First, we attempt the trail that passes right behind our guest-house. I panic whenever we approached a descent, and I fall into the deep snow about four or five times, but we make it around the course.
Over the course of the week, we venture out on various trails about three or four more times, an hour or so at a stretch. On the very last day, during a few hours of sunshine, I begin to get the hang of it. I can glide along like I am skating or rollerblading, and it’s a nice workout and pretty exhilarating. Maybe it was the little grooves carved into these prepped trails that kept me on track, or maybe it was just my increased confidence — but at any rate, I get it, finally.
A recent issue of New Scientist magazine (8 December 2007) included an article in which two scientists, Tony Martin and Vera da Silva, claim that behaviors they identified in Amazon River dolphins are clear examples of dolphins having culture. What kind of behavior is it? Square dancing? Art exhibits? Pottery?
It seems some males in a few populations of dolphins carry objects — bits of weed, a stick, a lump of clay. The carriers turn out to be among the guys most successful in mating and in prompting aggression within their group. So, the “wearing” of these cool accessories must make you somewhat sexier than the other less dressed up guys. Or they are offered as “gifts" to the gals. Females and the kids don’t carry this stuff, which they claim rules out the rationale that the carrying is simply a form of play — if that were the case everyone would join in.
Lest we think that it’s only the boys who have culture, Geoffrey Miller proposes that this kind of sexually selective behavior requires that the object of affection — the females mostly — be culturally literate in order to determine whose weeds are the coolest, most sophisticated, and the sexiest. No good getting all dressed up if no one notices. I would assume that some fine distinctions have evolved as well — that a clump of weeds say, carried a certain way identifies the dolphin as one of the cutting edge weedies as distinct from the tired stick clique.
The phenomenon has been spotted amongst geographically separate groups of dolphins. And they’re not sure if the behavior is ancestral (taught by elders or by the previous generation), or if it has evolved independently over and over in different areas, the way humans scattered across the globe sometimes develop similar buildings, rituals and behaviors. Either way, these guys claim it can be considered culture. Previously, scientists had only allowed chimps and humans into that club, but now maybe the rabble will be storming the velvet ropes.
What is culture? In the NS article it’s described as a complex skill (or behavior) that is spread and maintained by social learning rather than being a genetically fostered behavior, or one that the local environment might simply encourage. This description defines by exclusion: culture isn’t the making of things or a certain set of behaviors, but depends on how those behaviors are learned and transmitted. You could have the best table manners in the world, but if they’re merely instinctual, then you’re not cultured. Others define culture as using things or behaviors symbolically — and by that definition these dolphins seem to qualify too. When applied to people, this umbrella definition of symbolic behavior includes codes and prescribed manners of dress, language, religion, rituals, etiquette, morality, cuisine, and on and on. Inevitably, some of those products of culture in dolphins will be invisible to us; we won’t be able to know their religion, if they have one — not now anyway.
Using the definition put forth in NS — the one that excludes genetic environmentally prompted behaviors — would be, I think, to claim that to a large extent people don’t have culture either. I would say this is the case because our culture is maybe less learned than we’d like to think. I tend to agree with Miller and some others that what we call culture is essentially a very complicated and elaborate form of sexual display, some of which is learned and some of which is emergent, that is, strongly encouraged through genetic selection. This is different than a peacock’s tail display, which is sexual, but not a behavior — the peacock is born with his fancy outfit, whereas the dolphins, like people, have to do a little work to look their best.
I suspect these cultural and symbolic behaviors are mostly emergent in both people as well as dolphins and chimps. Maybe there aren’t specific genes that specify witty raconteur, financial dealmaker or rock star (though maybe there are?), but instead genes that encourage those types of display to evolve and emerge during one’s lifetime. Propensities for behavior are passed on genetically in people, just as they are in animals. These behaviors are not as clear-cut as instinctual behaviors — there’s more learning and skill mastering involved. But DNA might play a larger role than we would like to think, and our distance and segregation from our animal pals might not be as great as we presume. Moreover, our cultural manifestations might be parallel from society to society, with more similarities across geographically disparate peoples than we’d like to think too.
So, if this is true, then people don’t have nearly as much of what they define as culture as is commonly held. We have truckloads of what we call cultural behaviors, but if we only count the ones that are exclusively and entirely learned, there might not be too many left. If we subtracted all the parallel behaviors across human cultures on the basis of genetic influence then what are we left with?
In the past, another way of excluding members from the culture club was tool use — for a long time it was assumed that only humans used or fashioned tools. Then chimps were seen carefully choosing thin sticks and fashioning them into tools for extracting delicious honey ants. After that, more and more examples of animal tool use were spotted and acknowledged. Even in dolphins, it turns out. In an inlet called Useless Loop (Useless Loop!!), dolphins pluck specifically shaped sea sponges and use them as protective gear when probing the ocean floor. Some of the scientists who have spotted the sponging behaviors claim it is learned socially — the dolphins teach their kids how to sponge — which qualifies this kind of tool use as a form of culture.
PNAS/Photos by Janet Mann
Liz Hawkins, a scientist in New South Whales, Australia, also claims to have identified two hundred distinct dolphin whistles so far, all of which are contextual, qualifying them as comprising a language. The scientists don’t know what they all mean yet. “Bob’s got a nice wad of weeds there” might be one sentence.
If we broaden the definition a little bit we can still call ourselves and our societies cultured, but we might have to admit some new members.
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