I recently read an article about a group of Swedish neuroscientists: Björn van der Hoort, Arvid Guterstam and Professor H. Henrik Ehrsson, who conducted an experiment called, “Being Barbie.” Their findings explain how our perception of our bodies determines our perception of the world. Here’s a summary of what they did:
They built a rig that allows them to substitute other body images for your own. Their experiment was based on two models—a tiny sized Barbie (or Ken) and a 16-foot tall giant sized model. You lie on a table, wear a video helmet and when you look down at “yourself," you see not your own torso and legs but these models as if they were your own body. They encourage this belief by having a stick touch your leg while another stick touches your virtual body. You see the padded stick touch the Barbie body and at the same time you feel something—another padded stick—touching your own leg. This really locks the illusion into place.
So far, this might seem merely like a nifty parlor trick—albeit one I’d love to participate in. But there’s more to it than simply fooling the eye.
What the scientists point out is that their “trick” emphasizes that your perception of the whole world is affected by the size of your body image. If you perceive your body as Barbie size then the chair across the room now seems both giant and incredibly far away. That hand that touches your leg, in that instance, appears to be that of a giant. Like Alice after she drank from the vial, you believe that you have shrunken (or grown in the case of the giant body model they built).
What you see in the room doesn’t change. Your eyes, with their stereoscopic vision and depth perception, should tell you that the room and its furniture are normal. Wouldn’t one think that our eyes would at least tell us the “truth”—that the chair is still where it was and is a normal size chair? Wouldn’t you think that our eyes would counteract this trickery? That we’d instinctively realize that the doll body was a Barbie torso and that the chair is not miles away and giant? We assume that it is our eyes that transmit to us a kind of objective visual truth—but it seems these other factors can and do influence how we interpret what we see. They can override that “objective” truth. It seems that our “vision,” or at least how we interpret it, is quite malleable, and our body image has an unexpectedly huge influence on how we see the rest of the world. One can only imagine what an anorexic or bulimic young woman sees! Maybe these women would benefit, or at least get a measure or relief, from wearing the rig and experiencing their body image in the form of little Barbies?
This experiment is evidence that our vision, our image of the world around us, is even more subjective than we might have thought it was. What we believe is our “true” version of the world around us, a vision we assume matches that of everyone else, is merely the one (among many) that accommodates and is modified by our particular body image. Who knows how many other factors might similarly affect our image of the world?
It was then a small leap from discussing this experiment with some friends to a conversation regarding our current situation in which we are continually confronted with unreal body images in magazines and ads. Surgically enhanced, photoshopped and artificially tanned bodies are nothing new. For decades, Playboy centerfolds have been a mash up of drawings and cartoons aimed at men and photographs of what are purported to be real women. The visual clues that trigger a man’s lust, along with other factors that would make a woman desirable, seemed, in these images, fairly easy to exaggerate and emphasize. With digital and other image manipulation techniques, combined with surgical modification, we now have a whole race or super people parading in front of our eyeballs. Not just in centerfolds, but on TV, newspapers, tabloids, fashion magazines and yes… in real life. I recall sitting at on outdoor café in West LA marveling at the new heightened version of the female species that paraded in front of me. Now, the poor male who has evolved over millennia to respond instinctively to such clues is continually manipulated and completely helpless. For example, one might “know” that what they are looking at is photoshopped but, as in the Swedish experiment, one’s gut responds, as it will, despite any rational cognitive dissonance.
Likewise, women who view similar types of images—for example, the surgically and digitally enhanced images of celebrities and models—are also subject to succumbing to the power of these new bodies. Maybe not necessarily as objects of lust (as some men might instinctively to the centerfolds), but as body images they might emulate and aspire to. They too believe that what they are seeing is “real,” despite intellectually knowing that a picture has been doctored or an actress, reality star or celebrity wife surgically enhanced. These visual buttons and triggers that are being pressed are deeply ingrained in us as a species—mere rational thinking is powerless as a way of discounting them. Ordinary women (and men) naturally then hold up these doctored images of an ideal humanity as something to be strived for. Despite knowing better, they believe that this look can (and should) be achieved through a mostly simple and prolonged effort. Stick to one’s exercise regimen and maintain one’s diet and then, you too will look like the folks in the magazines. Sure, some surgery wouldn’t hurt either. This, we know, is a recipe for heartbreak… or even worse, a kind of insanity—as no amount of exercise and diet will ever make a human being look like the images being dangled in front of us.
We instinctively want to believe that a merit-based world exists—that with some hard work, focus, time, effort and perseverance, you too will be rewarded with the body you see on the billboard. The same also applies to our notions of economic well-being. As a result, you have Bill O’Reilly and Newt Gingrich (among many others) implying that poor people are poor simply because they aren’t trying hard enough (note the clever segue from Barbie to politics and economics). The implication is that poor people, or anyone who isn’t successful, just aren’t applying themselves or trying hard enough. Also, that less than fabulously attractive people similarly aren’t going to the gym enough. The corollary is that Bill and Newt are as wealthy as they are because they worked hard. This, excuse me, is bullshit. Donald Trump definitely received a few handouts from his father.
Sadly, this dissonance between what is possible image wise, and what is being aimed for by many normal women, is making many of them nutso. They exercise like crazy but still don’t quite match the girl on the red carpet. What gives? Must one need eat even less or switch to a new exercise regimen?
I was told recently that fashion designers and retailers now have to alter the cut of women’s garments to accommodate the extreme diets and surgically enhanced bodies that prevail among certain classes and in specific regions of the US. This swath of enhanced and altered bods runs from southern California across the southwest to Florida and Georgia. The silicone belt, one might say. Clothes cut to fit unenhanced, naturally evolved women’s bodies don’t fit these gals anymore… or at least they tend to look weird in them because they need clothing that accommodates a disproportionately bigger top and a smaller bottom.
Spent author and evolutionary psychologist, Geoffrey Miller suggests that these new body images are short-circuiting the criteria of evaluation for mate selection that has evolved over eons. Sexual selection is the other aspect of Darwin’s theory. Darwin proposes that how and with whom we mate with is at least equally as important to our “survival” and determines the course of evolution. For example, it used to be that a woman with perky breasts probably indicated that she is under a certain age. The same could be said for indicators such as lack of wrinkles, thin waists and non-grey hair. From a Darwinian point of view, these clues point to these women as prime candidates for mates—they appear both healthy and of prime child bearing and rearing age. According to Miller, these, along with similar markers, no longer can be guaranteed to signify what they have for eons. These days our rational sense might tell us that a woman or man is of a certain age, but now quite often the visual cues don’t match—there is a weird conflict between what we see and what we “know.” Which are we to believe? Will we be like the participants in the Being Barbie experiments and the men ogling centerfolds? Will our instincts override our “knowledge?” It seems they usually do. Advertisers and fashion magazines know this, and use it to their advantage.
One might read all this as a criticism (and probably some of it is) of these increasingly ubiquitous body modifications and enhancements. Although, one could equally say that if God didn’t want us to use the tools at our disposal—be they scalpels or pixels—then he wouldn’t have invented plastic surgery or Photoshop. Like “dressing to impress,” maybe these tools are just medical and digital extensions of our natural tendencies to put our best foot forward. In which case, we’ll collectively just have to adapt to this new wrinkle (sorry for the pun).
I was recently asked to do a conversation/talk with Janette Sadik-Kahn, our commissioner of transportation, at the AIA New York Center for Architecture Center (American Institute of Architects). Since I imagined there might be some architects or designers in the audience, I took some time to share some of my notes and photographs from my summer Latin American bikes and cities tour. I also took this opportunity to finally organize some of the notes I had taken and post them. So here it is, many months late.
Flashback to July 23, 2011—Oscar Diaz is my host here in Bogota. He worked closely with Enrique Peñalosa, the former mayor of the city (from 1998-2001 and currently running this year with the Green Party), on various projects to improve Bogota’s system of parks, bike paths, road construction, and mass transit system. He suggested we take a field trip so he could show some of the projects they had initiated. A few of us piled in a van in the morning and headed towards the outskirts of town, to the Kennedy District. In this district there are several small neighborhoods like El Tintal, Bellavista, and El Recreo. Bellavista is a small community that was formerly illegal. It was a place of dirt streets, no sewage, no water, or electricity. There was no property ownership or the various rights that go along with that. Much of that has changed, for the better, since that administration implemented a number of interrelated schemes.
There are lots of these illegal communities around Bogota and other cities here. Invasiones ilegales or piratas (illegal or pirate invasions) are what these communities are called when they begin forming—as they’re completely illegal. They’re called favelas in Brazil, townships in South Africa. They don’t hook up to city water, sewage, or electricity (not legally anyway), but there are still entrepreneurs who will develop real estate in these settlements, if you can call it that.
This is the way they used to look (Oscar took this in 1997):
One might call this old view of this community an example of crowd-sourced architecture—as there are no regulations or governmental guides. The patterns—streets and basic infrastructure—that comes into being could be considered to be emergent. But without sewage or water it’s pretty sad. Maybe that crowd principal can’t really be applied in all areas? Or maybe it needs a framework and set of principals and then it can form and grow around those?
This is the way it looks now (I took this July 2011):
We biked along these bike/ped paths that have been built here. We passed many improvised bike repair stations that have sprung up—a guy with a set of flat fix gear and other tools sets himself up as a pop-up business. Little shops have appeared on the ground floors of many of the buildings since the paths have been built. Needless to say in the intervening years this area got electricity and sewage, streetlights and schools.
Unfortunately, because of the current administration, the neighborhood has gone back to being a tough and dangerous area though it didn’t look it—I was advised to slip my big camera into my bag rather than letting it hang on my neck. Whenever I went off a little on my own, someone from the group would appear close to me, watching out. But now, at least there are possibilities for the residents—the local schools, the library and other centers provide educational services, and the TransMilenio buses that now reach here can connect these folks to employment in town—all of which didn't exist until the bus system (BRT) was created under Peñalosa’s administration.
The bike and pedestrian passages that former Mayor Peñalosa and Oscar instigated go through these communities and provide a network—they give the communities a street-type focus. Also, the “roads” serve as a link to other communities and to the TransMilenio—the rapid bus network that goes to, among other places, the center of the city.
The TransMilenio system, was begun some years ago as a cheaper and less socially and ecologically damaging alternative to the 600 million dollar highway scheme that was ready to go. The buses run really fast and, because you buy the tickets before getting on, there is no time wasted doing ticket business after you board the buses—which pull up to specially built stations along the existing highways as well as inside the city. They pull up, exchange passengers, and then zoom off. Only a masochist would decide to drive his or her own car to work... but there are plenty of those.
In the Americas terminal the station has indoor bike parking, as the inhabitants of that zone get around mainly by bike or by walking.
Would this kind of bus system work in some place like Atlanta, Georgia, where people spend hours and hours stuck in their cars getting from one side of the sprawl to the other?
It was pointed out that the improvements in Kennedy (schools and the bike/ped paths), and those in other barrios, were funded by the savings that accrued after the decision to build the TransMilenio system—a much more cost-effective solution than building the massive highway that had previously been proposed. There are 84km of exclusive corridors in the TransMilenio system. 1.7 million people are transported every day. 7 million people live in Bogota.
Many of the inhabitants of these squatter towns had never been outside of those places. These bike/ped "roads" coupled with the bus system allowed them to get out, get jobs in town, go to school, university etc. The storefront businesses that sprung up along the paths changed the communities in other ways, not only by creating jobs—people began to be more motivated, feel better about their situation, and about the future chances for their kids. My point to the architects was that here were fairly cheap and simple improvements that (coupled with some other changes described below) radically transformed people’s lives.
In order for these "townships" to receive basic city services—sewage, city water, electricity, schools, etc.—the settlements had to be legalized. Usually, previous city administrations would legalize about 12 of them a year but under Peñalosa and Oscar, they legalized 600. To kick the process off, the city would buy some of the vacant land and sell it to developers, as well as putting in some infrastructure such as the bike paths, pedestrian walkways, and public parks—all the stuff the “developers” in those zones would not ordinarily put in but made the areas attractive and more livable. The developers, seeing that clients were drawn to those amenities, began to advertise their future developments as having those features. Here is a developers’ billboard—their advertising features apartments with public spaces and green zones:
The public education in these areas was terrible. According to Oscar, that was partly due to the unions, who were mainly interested in holding onto their positions and increasing their benefits. The city took an initiative and began to build schools and then open them up to bids for private management at the same cost allocated per kid in a public school. In other words, if a kid were allocated $500 a year for a normal public school education, that was what the bidders would receive—but often under private management they could accomplish a lot more for the same amount of money.
It was a way of getting around the unions, and it was very successful. Some of the management of these schools was by Catholic schools that do not really aim to make a profit on their schools the way others might—breaking even is considered OK by the religious schools. The grade results and SAT scores are now equal those in the established private schools.
Critics say this system is privatizing education—a dangerous precedent, but Oscar counters that the parents don't have to pay tuition as they would in a real private school. It has brought a vast improvement in the quality of education to these poor neighborhoods. My friend Sally wrote me: “The education stuff sounds dangerously close to arguments made here for charter schools and the evils of the teachers' unions; I would say [to you] to be careful and be specific, but then again I am wary of such semi-private endeavors in education and you may not be...” I too am wary of the privatizing of education—it could turn into something driven by profits, like prisons are in the US. Can you imagine if a basic service like water were privatized—as is being discussed in some places? Scary. However, Oscar claims in this situation it worked because the education remains public for the children and the city pays the same per student. What changes is the administration, teachers and program—all managed by the private schools and universities that won the public bid.
Next we toured Biblioteca El Tintal—which is a library, auditorium, meeting rooms and cafeteria complex that was built on the site of former garbage dump. In the past, the trucks would go up the ramp and dump their loads, and the resulting heap was eventually carried off to the distant landfill. It was an unsightly dump, and certainly didn’t make the area attractive. These new library complexes—and quite a few were built based on this model—are usually located near a bus transit hub and surrounded by green. They were built by respected local architects and were the sort of eye-catching buildings any city would be happy to have downtown, but here, they were being built in the poorest neighborhoods. Needless to say, besides being a social, educational and cultural center, these places became sources of pride.
Here is an aerial view—the library complex has now been there for a while, and as a result the shanties that used to sprawl out in the area have been replaced by apartment blocks and row houses—all still linked by bike paths and pedestrian walkways:
(Image Source: Oscar Diaz)
Peñalosa fought to keep the former garbage truck ramp as a reminder of what it once was. When it was built there was not much around here—the illegal communities were springing up all around in a kind of squatter anarchy. The parents in those days would plop their kids in front of the TV. Now, the kids are going to schools and can use computers at this center—and teach their parents how to use computers as well.
Here’s an inside view:
Here is one of the other libraries in another outlying area:
This concept of the library as community hub, and as a transformative catalyst in a community was also picked up by the former Mayor of Medellín, Sergio Fajardo. His realized version was even more spectacular looking, though the effect was similar.
He brought in Giancarlo Mazzantito as an architect to build Biblioteca España on the edge of a hill, as part of a funky barrio, Santo Domingo, that had been dangerous and was considered a sort of dead-end for its citizens. The newly created plaza soon became a place for folks to meet, mingle and shop in the kiosks that sprung up—a focal point the barrio didn't previously have. The library became both a local and international architectural landmark, and is an example of both how architecture can transform a community, as well as being an example of serious architecture being introduced into a poor neighborhood, as opposed to where it usually is—in city centers where the well-to-do are entertained.
Fajardo did something similar to the BRT bus system connection as well—he linked this formerly isolated community to the main city by public transportation. Though in this case, it wasn’t possible to tag a bus line onto existing roads because the way up that hill is too twisty. So, instead, they made a gondola that takes folks to and from town.
Fajardo managed to transform Medellin from a place of squalor and despair into a liveable open city. He resorted to architects and urbanists, many of them Colombian (Rogelio Salmona, Giancarlo Mazzanti who designed the Parque Biblioteca Espana, Alejandro Echeverri who was responsible for the spatial development strategy, Sergio Gomez for the Botanial Garden), to realise “our most beautiful buildings in our poorest areas.”
His strategy was to begin in the most deprived areas, gain the trust of the poorest with the lowest chances of succeeding in life. Santo Domingo Savio which houses some 170,000 people was the starting point of the regeneration of Medellin from where it has spread elsewhere. Places for learning, schools, a library were deliberately designed as landmarks to signal a brighter future. Parks (of Wishes, of Bare Feet), internet facilities, an art gallery and a day care centre form part of the public realm open to all, together with new connections to the city at large. Converting dilapidated spaces into places where people can meet without fear and the very young population can play triggered improvements to the precarious abodes.
Openness and, most importantly, beauty was brought to these areas, for which the inhabitants started to feel civic pride.
The locals participated actively in these transformations. Youngsters and the unemployed were given the opportunity to learn building trades. Not only were they able to improve their own abodes, but their skills provided them with jobs and a new lifestyle.
Oscar and I had lunch with Alexandra Rojas, former Deputy Secretary of Finance, who is involved in a program of national accident prevention. She was also involved in a big campaign (Fondo de Prevención Vial—FPV) to reduce road, pedestrian, bike and car accidents. She said that the prevailing attitude is that accidents are destiny—that they come upon us at random and unexpectedly—black swan events that we can’t predict. There is a feeling that you, therefore, can’t do anything about them. Their program, fronted by a very well known TV presenter, was called Epidemic of Excuses. Interesting that when they tested they found that this presenter had a credibility rating of 80%—so she was perfect for getting this difficult message across.
Rojas says all studies show the opposite to the prevailing perception of accidents as random or fate—it showed that traffic accidents, and especially those involving pedestrians, are indeed mostly avoidable, and therefore preventable. However, to prevent them, there would need to be some compromises for drivers such as driving slower (which may mean more traffic jams, though), along with additional crossing stations, more lights, etc. The number of lives that would be saved is not random—it’s completely predictable. Janette Sadik-Khan is figuring out how to do a similar program here in NY to get drivers to slow down. In Colombia, as in the US, it’s an uphill battle. In Colombia, 80% of the population does not have cars, but, as in the US, most of the infrastructure budget goes to accommodate the other 20% who do own cars. As Peñalosa and others have pointed out, these fiscal policies are counter democratic—they privilege a minority, a wealthy minority, of course, over the bulk of citizens. It would be as if sections of public parks were lopped off to create helipads for wealthy businessmen, or as if hire cars were allowed to stop and park wherever they wish. As in many parts of the U.S., lots of roads in Colombia have no place for pedestrians—there is no sidewalk. If you don’t have a car, tough luck. When the largest part of a nations funds go to accommodate a small, wealthy portion of citizens (the drivers, in the case of Columbia), democracy and the rights of the citizens are being subverted in the most profound way—at the level of the pocketbook.
Back in the U.S.A.
In a similar effort to those that Peñalosa, Salas, and Fajardo have done, an organization named Studio H has been active in North Carolina. I read a piece the other day that Alice Rawsthorn wrote for the NY Times in which the organizers were quoted as saying that, similar to Fajardo’s scheme, they focused on young folks becoming involved in the building effort. Many of these folks were around 17 years old and had never made anything in their lives—never held a hammer or sawed wood. So this was a big step that not all of them wanted to take, but for those who did their sense of self was radically changed.
Pretty amazing! Not only is she not a big pop artist, she's Afro-Peruvian—so even further out of the mainstream. When Luaka Bop began putting out her records, she was pretty much unknown, even in Peru.
Bernardo and I arrived Sunday night and were met by Scott Muller, who works for the Clinton Foundation here. They’re involved in projects that combat global warming. Part of that effort involves advocating for more efficient and sustainable transportation (that’s where I come in) and for use alternative energy sources (geothermal and methane from landfills are 2 possibilities there).
We checked into the hotel in Miraflores, the upscale district overlooking the beach and then we headed out to a local restaurant on some folding Dahon bikes we were leant. Chilean wine and local ceviche—one almost can’t go wrong food-wise in Lima.
One major strand of Scott’s lunch conversation was that Lima is in a real pickle. A former president allowed the importation of a lot of cheap used cars and combis to be used as taxis and buses to combat unemployment -also a kind of populist vote-garnering move—they now have one of the largest per capita taxi fleets in the world! All of these vehicles ran on diesel—really low-grade diesel. The emissions from these vehicles with their super low-grade fuel are 100 times higher than anywhere else. That combined with a few other factors—the extent of the sprawl here, the lack of transportation alternatives (like bikes), and more BRT bus lanes or rail—has resulted in a huge amount of particulate pollution. The pollution rose up, blew east and landed on the glaciers in the Peruvian Andes. One glacier in particular melted super fast as a result—it is now nearly gone due to rapid melting, and that particular glacier was the principal source of Lima's water supply. It took 200,000 years for the glacier to form— a generation to lose. They're now looking at plans to recycle wastewater for irrigation. I'll drink to that.
These places are being forced to take climate change and energy and water issues really seriously, if they don't they are totally fucked—if they aren’t already.
Peru also semi-privatized their water—under Fujimori or his successor, I'm not sure. This didn't raise any flags among the public here, until a Chilean consortium tried to buy the privatized part. Only then did the Lima folks suddenly realize their lives would be at the mercy of a gaggle of Chilean investors whose primary interest would be to see a profit on their investment. 1.5 million residents of Lima don’t have access to piped water.
In reference to the incredibly rapid melting glaciers in this area of the Andes, I was sent a paper detailing the issue. It's from some heavy-duty glaciologist, Lonnie Thompson, in Ohio. Having this stuff made concrete in a place like this makes your skin go all funny.
That, and some other similarly tragic stories, and one can see that places like this—rapidly expanding or already expanded urban regions in countries without deep pockets—are going to get hit by these environmental changes really hard and fast. It's going to happen way sooner than most of us think, and it's going to be more tragic than we can imagine. Lima is home to 8.5 million people. Can you imagine if a city that size that you know—Tokyo, NYC, Mexico City—were suddenly faced with having no water? The Peruvians have therefore been forced to initiate a lot of fairly innovative programs—more on that later. Many of the places on this tour don’t have the financial resources that the U.S., for example, used to have (the U.S., as we know, doesn’t have those resources either, not any more). In New York, we used to build massive and very expensive highway systems, tunnels, underground trains and Tunnel No. 3 to bring water from upstate. Europe and China are spending, or have spent, the cash to upgrade their rail and other systems, but I suspect the U.S. doesn’t yet have the political will to do that. War spending has taken precedence.
Anyway, many of these countries, not having funds to draw on, are forced to find cheaper alternatives, and to be somewhat more innovative and imaginative. Here is their relatively new BRT system-the Metropolitano, the high-speed bus line that goes from Miraflores and other districts into the center city—very quickly. We took it once—it’s fast and it runs on time. As in other cities, it eats up two lanes of an existing highway and the median strip, but runs as fast and efficiently as a train or subway—and is many, many times cheaper to install. The Metropolitano runs on 100% domestic source CNG (natural gas).
OK, one more bit from Scott’s lunchtime download—due to this same rampant use of low-grade diesel, the asthma and lung disease rate here is astronomical. As pointed out by the Mayor, three kids die daily from air pollution or some horrible figure like that. The fog + pollution combo is atrocious, and the new president, Ollanta Humala, is the first one to stand up to the various lobbies and say, “Look, this is happening—we need to respond to it and not just accept it as the price of rapid expansion.”
The car that Scott used to pick us up from the airport runs on compressed gas. They're trying to get a methane extraction system working here, as the piles of garbage on the outskirts of town generate tons of it. At a later dinner we met Matt Evans, a garbage expert from HDR Engineering in Minnesota. He stuck a tube into the landfill and lit it with a lighter and it burned. Needless to say, that same methane is currently leaking into the atmosphere, so tapping it is a great option. Not every landfill is a good candidate for methane extraction—some are too dry (no fermentation/breakdown) and some too wet (in danger of suddenly slipping and shifting), but the climate here seems to be suitable. It doesn’t pour rain very much in Lima, but the sky is light gray and overcast for many months of the year (a look that is referred to as “donkey’s belly”), and there is sufficient dampness to keep the breakdown of waste going.
Scott was an Olympic kayak guy, and later on he used to lead kayak tours in northern Greenland (!) for enthusiastic adventurers. Apparently there are Nazi weather stations up there that are completely intact.
The next day we agreed to go surfing—or have lessons, more accurately. The beach is right next to Miraflores. It’s below a crumbly cliff that runs along the coast—exactly as in Santa Monica.
There is a nice park and bike path that runs along the top of the cliffs, which is not of much use as a mode of transportation, but it is safe and scenic. We rode along it for a few miles to a lunch spot after surfing. There’s the beginning of a similar park n’ path down below, along the beach, but much of that awaits development. As with Santa Monica, much of that area was given over to a narrow highway that runs along the water.
It gets choked with traffic a few times a day, so occasionally there are murmurs about the road being widened. This, of course, would not solve anything, as it would cost a fortune and usurp public land from the beachfront. The few existing developed areas are hugely popular—people hang out, bring picnics and up above there’s a lovers park, too. In a country like this one where a minority own cars, usurping public spaces for cars is in effect privileging a minority of the population over all the others. It’s stealing from the lower larger portion to allocate the smaller wealthier group of car owners.
As we drove along a road coming in from the airport, Scott pointed out the streetlights, saying there’s a huge opportunity to switch out the sodium for LED lights. Then, further on, spying a clump of LED traffic lights, highlighted that they use 90% less energy than incandescent, and won’t burn out for +10 yrs. Here’s a quote from the C40 (a group of large cities committed to addressing climate change) website:
If all 220 million street lights around the world were retrofitted to more energy efficient technologies, we could reduce their energy consumption by 50 percent; cut carbon emissions by more than 40 million metric tons each year; and save approximately $8 billion dollars annually in energy costs.
The surfing was fun! It’s winter down here, so I’m happy to report that the wet suits worked. The “beach” is stony, so getting to the water was painful without booties. Surfing uses a whole different set of muscles and breathing than jogging, so after about 1/2 hour I was totally winded. This time, I managed to get one leg all the way up and the other part way—caught a couple of long rides, so I did a little better than my first attempt in Oz when a group of us went surfing on the last tour.
On the way back to our hotel (we biked to the beach), it was pointed out how far the water receded after the Santiago earthquake—about 1/2 kilometer, I think—and it stayed out for about 20 minutes. The expected tsunami never arrived (there are tsunami evacuation routes posted here). The crazy locals rushed out, scampering over the rocks to gather the fish that had been left flopping on the seabed.
Later, we got onto the ingredients in Inca Cola (which is foul, bright yellow, and tastes like bubblegum), and then ayahuasca and other hallucinogens found here. I was told that that one, at least, is bound to the culture—the preparation is elaborate and requires combining two substances derived from roots and vines—so it unlikely it was travel or be easily exported (though it will probably be synthesized). The name means “spirit vine” or “vine of the souls.” (I like that second translation better—it’s way creepier.) Speaking of synthesized, there was talk of other drugs that are sold as incense (K-2, it is called) in the U.S. and it’s catching on with teenagers in the meth belt. You can buy it legally. There’s also another substance being imbibed in the U.S. sold as “bath salts,” though the users and sellers know it’s not for getting yourself clean.
Bernardo and I rode off along the malecon on Tuesday morning, as I was scheduled to do a TV interview overlooking the water. The new mayor, Susana Villaran, dropped out of doing the intro at our presentation—which is a shame, as she's great and has initiated a lot of good projects, but my guess is she had to make an appearance at some football-related event, as the whole country was waving flags with Peru in the Copa America semi-finals. Even if they don't win, they'll be thrilled they made it this far. The “big” Latin American teams have all been knocked out—Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela— and Peru, Paraguay and Uruguay are left standing. It’s rumored that the superstar players on the other teams have forgotten it’s a team sport.
We rode back along the malecon to an early lunch at restaurant named Sonia—a little family owned place (Sonia is sitting a table near the entrance).
It’s in Chorillos—a less upscale neighborhood than Miraflores (which is nice, but Miraflores does feature mysterious casinos that we all think are mainly for money laundering) or more bohemian Barranco.
A street in Barranco, almost a Peruvian Greenwich village:
The place is all about seafood, of course. It seems the big chef in town—Gaston, who has several restaurants in Lima, two in Bogota and one in San Francisco (hint)—also has a cooking show here, in which he visits small family-run restaurants all over the country, highlighting unique dishes that each one features. Naturally, these places immediately become hugely popular. We had an early lunch so hardly anyone was there at first, though some North Americans arrived, so this place must be in the guidebooks or food blogs or something. Nothing spectacular, but really nice and totally unpretentious—they let us bring our bikes into the restaurant, and I don't mean into a back room—into the restaurant proper.
The meal was (as was typical with most meals in Lima), some assorted ceviches and then some cooked fish and shellfish.
Here is how the coffee is served.
You get a cup of hot water, and of course you immediately think "Uh-oh, here comes Nescafe," but, then comes this from the Peruvian science lab—super duper strong brewed coffee. You just pour a little in your hot water, and you've got a cup as strong or weak as you want it to be. It tasted great. Milk was not offered.
Sonia was not as good as the place the singer Susana Baca and her husband, Ricardo Perriera, took us to on Tuesday night. It’s called Rafael. It was described as "fusion," though what that meant no one could say, but you could sense Japanese influences (Fujimori, right?) with the local fish, ceviches and seasonings. Really amazing food, one of the best meals I’ve ever had. Apparently Rafael is a protégé of the well known chef mentioned above—Gaston, who put Peruvian cuisine on the world map not too long ago. Roberto, a local graphic designer who is also involved with all this transport stuff, said his kid, and many of the others his age, have two ambitions—to be a skater or a chef. Those are the only cool options here.
After dinner we stopped by Susana and Ricardo’s house and had a discussion that began with mention of the current generation of youthful protesters in Chile—kids whose parents were either too timid or too beaten down to rise up publicly. It’s a special moment. Ricardo asked me, “What happened in the U.S.?” He was referring to post 9/11, the Afghan and Iraq invasions and now the financial meltdown.
Wow, I thought—was that the last time I saw them? Susana was in New York, at a studio in what is now the meatpacking district recording a record, when the planes hit. I lived nearby, and after sorting out some family matters, I biked over (there were no cabs downtown) to see if they were all right. Did they want to go home and recommence recording at a later date? No, was the answer. “We’ve lived with Shining Path for decades. This is not enough to stop us.” They finished a beautiful record that week. I rode home and saw people sitting in a sidewalk café—oblivious to the cloud of asbestos and human remains that I could see drifting their way across a lovely blue sky.
I told Ricardo that since then there is a lot of wonderful work being done musically, though much of it isn’t massively popular. There is a lot of art being made too, though much of that world has to be taken with a grain of salt, as there is a lot of money and posturing there. I said that a generation of talented and creative graduates got seduced by the quick power and riches of the financial sector. A smart kid could make a fortune overnight and not have to really make or create anything. It was a waste of a generations’ talent, I told him. But there is still great stuff being made, sung, written, danced and created.
A few days after leaving Peru, I got an email from Scott notifying me that Susana was just named minister of culture for Peru.
There have been a lot of huge demonstrations in Santiago recently. Most of them are focused on education—the government wants to begin charging for public secondary school and universities. Public education, higher education in particular, is often very cheap in much of Latin America. As a result, there are at least a few generations of very well educated folks. One piece of graffiti I saw on the street said, in rough translation, “If we had the copper, we wouldn’t have to pay.” I had to ask what this meant. Minerals in Chile are big business—part of the reason President Salvador Allende was toppled by the U.S. decades ago was because he nationalized the mines. And don’t forget the trapped Chilean miners from a few months ago. Anyway, the copper mines have been at least partially privatized after the Coldelco Law was passed in 1992, so the profits from them don’t go to the government. Much of those profits don’t even stay in Chile—they go to multinationals, as in many other parts of the world. Hence the wording of the graffiti, which ties together the privatization of the mines with the lack of a budget for education.
The demonstrators are incredibly creative here. They don’t just shout, make speeches and wave banners. One group organized thousands of people to dress as zombies and learn the choreography to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video. The zombie image links to the education system, since they view it as dying and rotten. Here's a zombie/thriller demonstration link:
Local TV reported that there were three thousand students dancing. In the news clip below one can see a few of the ubiquitous Santiago dogs, lolling about as the zombies dance around them. The city seems to be filled with feral dogs. In India and elsewhere such dogs are usually small and fairly emaciated, but here they’re large Mastiff and German Shepherd blends. It’s a frightening sight if one is used to aggressive and crazy street dogs—crazy with hunger or abuse. However, these seem gentle—most simply lie around, peacefully. One tailed us for a bit. I saw a man in a black cape, a gaucho hat and ponytail reach down and pet one—something I’d never risk doing with a street dog, but maybe these have learned to be docile, and the locals treat them accordingly.
The other things the demonstrators do are what is called a ‘besaton’— a kissing marathon. Here’s a photo set. And they do a jogging thing, where they run circles around the palace.
Sally and I went out in the evening to a local fish restaurant. There is fairly abundant seafood in the Pacific coast of Chile, and the seafood menu is like a wine list. The fish are listed according to whether they are deepwater, shallow water, river fish or caught around a group of nearby islands.
The next morning we decided to go find out what a local breakfast is. Seems we picked the wrong time—Saturday morning. We made it all the way into the old city center and nothing was open, except a funky diner on Plaza des Armas. So that’s where we went. The waiter asked us which we wanted—brewed coffee or Nescafé. As we headed back to the hotel, and I to my tech check, a few places were beginning to put out chairs on the sidewalks for a brunch or lunch crowd.
The event was held in a spanking new cultural center called Centro Gabriela Mistral or GAM for short.
It has a story behind it—a political story, naturally. On this site was once a cafeteria that also served as a small cultural meeting place. When Allende took office, he made that cultural element official, and it was outfitted to be more accommodating as a cultural center for all classes of people. After he was overthrown by General Pinochet and the Americans, it was remade as a headquarters for Pinochet. Then, after a return to democracy, it burned down. Now, it has been returned to its previous incarnation, but much improved. A well known architect, Christian Fernandez, designed this new incarnation that houses multiple theaters, cinemas, rehearsal rooms, art exhibits (a show of photos of Neruda and his circle was up) and, of course, a cafeteria. The ministry of defense towers above and behind the cultural center—a not so subtle reminder.
The event was early, as it occurred on a Saturday. I got some laughs (good), and I have begun to incorporate more images of local initiatives that have transformed various Latin American cities. The incredible library that former mayor Sergio Fajardo had built in a poor barrio of Medellín, the super graphics that Hass & Hahn, the Dutch artists, did in some favelas in Rio (both of these were featured in the New Museum’s Festival of Ideas for the New City earlier this year). I plan to add more as I visit other cities along the tour—the rapid bus system in Quito, the libraries in Bogota (the inspiration for Fajardo’s initiatives) and other projects that generally improve the quality of life in various districts.
Patricio Fernández, a writer who is one of the founders of the magazine The Clinic spoke last, and both Bernardo and I found him very eloquent. The Clinic is a satirical magazine that began publication when Pinochet was captured—at a clinic in London, hence the title. It’s a cross between The Onion and Private Eye maybe—more on The Clinic later.
After the event, we took the metro (very clean and quiet) to a bike shop run by Claudio Olivares, one of the panel participants, to pick up loaners and find a place to have lunch. In the metro we saw a diorama of the first encounter between the Spanish and the indigenous Chileans.
Their last minutes of innocence:
A few minutes after picking up the bikes, we were off. I couldn't help thinking—are there bike lanes? How hard is it to ride here? I didn’t remember any lanes networking though the town proper from previous visits, though there are some that border the park alongside the river. There is a BRT (bus rapid transit system) here, which Loreto Araya, the organizer here, complained about—though it seems to be busy and there are lots of busses. We stopped for lunch in the Recoleta neighborhood—an area of low buildings that used to be a red light district, but is now filled with cool restaurants and sidewalk cafes. My lunch was a giant seafood stew, and Sally’s, a massive chicken strew. Delicious, but could have done with just one order and shared. A highway threatened this neighborhood not too long ago, but there was resistance from the residents and others. In the end, the big highway that runs through town is now buried and runs in tunnels alongside the river. Grassy lawns cover much of the top of it—FDR drive, take note.
After lunch, Sally and I took off on our own, roaming aimlessly though other parts of this neighborhood and past lots of Bavarian looking houses, but with tin roofs.
Then we wandered into another mostly residential neighborhood—Conchalí—that features other architectural styles that I can’t identify. How would one describe this style? Hobbit deco cottage?
Mental Maps No, not loony maps, or maps of how our brains function, but maps we construct in our heads as we become familiar with a place.
The Bavarian homes above might seem slightly incongruous looking here, and slightly puzzling, unless you know the immigration history. The Law of Selective Immigration of 1845 encouraged middle class Germans (and some Austrians and Swiss) to settle and colonize the ‘undeveloped’ southern parts of the country. They blended in after all those years, and many of the leading artists, musicians, business people and tennis players were of German descent. The British settled a little earlier, around Valparaíso, and one of the big avenues here is called O’Higgins. They got involved in saltpeter (used for gunpowder) and the Atacama mines.
Some of the Austrians who settled in Chile were fleeing Prussian persecution. Later, waves of German Jews were fleeing the Nazis, and only a year ago Paul Shaefer (not the Letterman guy) passed away. A former Nazi accused multiple times of child abuse, Shaefer founded a religious utopian community (Colonia Dignidad) with the blessing of Jorge Alessandri who was then president of Chile (1961). Shafer had abused two children at another religious ‘charity’ organization he founded in Germany. He disappeared from Colonia Diginidad after twenty-six kids accused him of abuse. He died in prison.
On a wall were plastered a grid of collages, like the ones that might be seen in a young person’s bedroom. But there they were, proudly displayed, someone’s private loves and obsessions, made totally public.
It was nice to have a chance to ride on the side streets and through the neighborhoods, as my past experiences of this city were almost exclusively of office buildings and generic, almost North American, looking edifices. The only structures I saw then that retained some character were downtown. I’m seeing more this time—even though it’s another quick visit. As was the case in Sao Paulo, I’m unconsciously forming a mental map of this place that is very different than what existed in my head previously—an expanded and more complete version than it was previously. The bikes help with that. Walking or cycling gives one a sense of the physical, visual and other relationships between the neighborhoods—how the river runs through the city and where the landmarks are. It’s amazing how fast that mapping process happens—how quickly one develops a sense of where neighborhoods and landmarks are, and how they connect to one another. After just two days I could almost get around Santiago without a physical map and just rely on the one that has appeared in my head.
Sally flew back to NY on Sunday morning and that night there was a dinner for the event participants and others at The Clinic. Not the magazine offices, (though that may be here too), but at a lounge, bar, and now a restaurant that has spun off from the magazine and is like nothing I’ve ever seen anywhere else in the world. It’s a really interesting mix of an obviously hip or fashionable club (no one dressed like what we might imagine as overly fashion oriented, though they did seem to all be wearing black), combined with the intellectual and political satire that the magazine is known for.
The walls are painted black, with blow ups of wittily captioned old B&W photos on the walls (a giant one of Allende), as well as humorous statements and collections of quotes from politicians and others painted in white type—a Joseph Kosuth installation turned into a bar, but funnier. Where else would one find this mixture?
Outside there was a blackboard with a 'quote of the day' scrawled across it.
When I left around 11pm, to walk back to the hotel, there was a line outside waiting to get in to the lounge on the ground floor. If it isn’t clear yet, it should be—politics is very much alive here. The trauma of the years of dictatorship, combined with the now relatively successful economy and high levels of education make for a potent mix. It’s manifested in the humor and politics of The Clinic and the Thriller dance as a creative form of protest. There’s an optimism and hope here that won’t be squashed—it keeps resurfacing over and over.
Speaking of creative protests, Chile isn’t alone there—the protesters in Belarus, one of the last truly repressive Eastern bloc dictatorships, have resorted to standing still (!), spontaneous clapping, strolling or arranging for their cell phone alarms to go off simultaneously. The government there has adopted new measures to enable them to throw folks in jail for protesting in this way.
Monday Morning I ate breakfast in the hotel and then went off for a quick ride around before my flight to Lima. Sally’s friend, Daniel, emailed her a list of spots in Santiago that he checked out when he came down for Lollapalooza here earlier this year. Maybe The Clinic hadn’t opened yet—as it was significantly absent from the list.
There’s a great farmers market alongside the river and the park adjacent to it. Look at the size of those stalks of celery!!
I rode on, through a relatively upscale neighborhood, with houses that could have been lifted from any North American suburb.
On to another zone of high-rise offices, with more of them on the way, and the Andes in the distance—a rare view, given the usual amount of pollution here.
The mountains are close to Santiago. There was a tremor the morning we arrived, somewhere near Valparaiso, on the coast. It registered around .6, so no one here paid any attention. Part of the protests concerns a proposal for a hydroelectric damn in a pristine area. Chileans are proud of their amazing countryside—the Andes, the Atacama Desert, the beaches. So, a giant damn with high-tension wires strung across the pristine landscape is a hot and very symbolic issue. It fucks with people’s image of what their country is, what it represents—even if they only see those pristine areas rarely and sporadically. In the U.S. it might be likened to building a damn in the Grand Canyon that caused the canyon to disappear, or building a lucrative casino around Old Faithful.
I biked back to the center of town, to Bellas Artes—the Beaux-arts style museum here (the contemporary museum is behind it). Free entrance. Some rooms of contemporary Latin artists and others filled with colonial portraits. Hardly anyone here (so I can take pictures!). A silent temple for contemplation. Here are some of those immigrants mentioned earlier:
Needless to say, this Japanese situation is causing a lot of countries to both examine the safety of their own reactors, and question the wisdom of nuclear power as an energy source. Germany shut their plant down in order to do full inspections. However, no matter what our local power companies or government representatives tell us, we know that our nuclear plants (though not actually manned by Homer Simpson) are probably not as tightly maintained as the those of the Japanese. Anyone who’s been to Japan can tell you that although there are a lot of communication quirks, things generally run well and incredibly smoothly. We look pretty backwards in comparison. So when they can’t get their nuclear plant under control, you know we definitely couldn’t under similar conditions.
As a recent NY Times article points out, more deaths occur yearly due to coal than to nuclear energy, including Chernobyl. That’s one way of measuring things—body counts. The other way of measuring cost was brought up in another article in that paper focusing on the cracked and leaking “sarcophagus” that encloses what’s left of Chernobyl, and how “the contaminated area is around the size of Switzerland,” and “will be affected for more than 300 years.” That doesn’t mean it will be clean in 300 years, but that it will be manageable. The 200 tons of melted nuclear stuff that has burned down into the earth inside the sarcophagus won’t be approachable for the foreseeable future. We don’t usually make things without a shelf life.
As that article says “the death of a nuclear reactor has a beginning… but it doesn’t have an end.” The comparison to the contaminated area being the size of Switzerland is sobering. Can you imagine suddenly Switzerland is gone? Contaminated? Off limits? Can you imagine lots of contaminated Switzerlands dotting the globe? Huge swaths of the oceans and lakes also off limits?
We know just enough to light these fires, but we don’t yet know how to put them out. Would you set something on fire in your house if you had no idea how to really, really put it out (you’re not allowed to toss it out the window in this analogy)? That mind-boggling scope of contamination and long timeframe is the difference between nuclear and coal. Though, realistically, coal is not the answer. It has been responsible for much of the climate change we are experiencing, and it is not a viable energy option going forward. Besides, it will run out. Quite a few environmentally aware folks have advocated re-approaching nuclear power, as it won’t cause the same kind of climate change that we know for certain coal is causing. I saw Bill Gates at TED last year make a presentation about small nuclear plants that re-use spent fuel. The idea of dealing with the fuel disposal issue seemed very smart, but now, after Japan, does any reactor seem like a safe, secure and viable way forward? There are just no guarantees with this stuff.
Some places are looking at alternatives, and some of them are working! Not just theories either. Portugal—little Portugal!—45% of its electricity will come from renewable sources this year (that’s up from 17% five years ago)! To get some perspective on that, Obama’s goal for the U.S. is to run on 20-25% renewable energy sources by 2025. Those renewable sources in Portugal are wind, hydropower, solar and ocean waves. Not all of those are right for everywhere in the U.S., I admit, but some of them are (the U.S. has geothermal as an option, as well).
This amazing change meant a big outlay for Portugal and her people—they pay plenty for electricity (though maybe that will level out after the initial capital outlays have been paid back). They were laughed at by Berlusconi, amongst others. Something tells me Berlusconi won’t be having the last laugh on much of anything these days. But Portugal’s case proves it CAN be done, and in a short time—five years! And they’re not exactly the richest country in Europe either.
The Swedish city of Kristainstad took a little longer—a decade, but they’ve made even more impressive progress. That city of 800,000 (the size of present day Detroit) uses NO fossil fuels to heat their homes, offices and businesses. No oil, no coal, no gas. 20 years ago all their heat came from fossil fuels (nuclear wasn’t an option, I guess). As it’s a farming region, they went for bio fuels, as opposed to wind or solar. Even many of the local cars run on fuel produced from bio fuels. All the city vehicles do.
This is a combined fuel and heating plant in that town. It was built with the help of a company, Fallon Consultants, in Victoria, British Columbia.
What do they use? Potato peelings, wood scraps, manure, used cooking oil, stale cookies and pig guts. Ugh—but it works. Truth be told, not every single amp and bit of fuel is produced this way in town (though all the heat is). But everything connected with the city itself uses this fuel, and the city is also trying to convince locals to convert their private cars to use this fuel as well. So, though they are not quite at zero carbon footprint, they are getting there.
Even the pretty conservative town of Salina, Kansas is converting to geothermal and other technologies and unplugging when they can. The government didn’t mandate those changes—they just want to save money.
Small African villages are using power sources that result in not being reliant on the national grid. The local sources are renewable and cheaper than the grid, too.
So, before we throw up our hands and say nuclear is our only option, maybe we should look at what these other places have already done. These are not just ideas and schemes that some pie-in-the-sky-green-advocate is pontificating about. This is what some practical-minded communities have already accomplished.
Maybe the Japanese tragedy will cause more folks to give these options a second glance.
Another Arab nation’s corrupt leadership is being toppled—first Tunisia, now Egypt, Yemen and Jordan are rising up as well. Though thousands have been beaten and arrested and probably tortured by those states’ security forces (the ruler of Yemen immediately offered a pay raise to the police—way to deal with your people’s problems!), what is heartening is that all-out civil war has not broken out in these countries. It has been peaceful, relatively speaking. The ouster of the Tunisian despot was done without the country descending into all-out civil war. Tell that to the folks who were beaten and tortured, I know, but compare it to El Salvador or Nicaragua, where the U.S. financed and supported wars to reinstall friendly dictators—instigating decades of massacres and armed conflict. So, though not exactly a Velvet Revolution (Czechoslovakia), or even People Power (Philippines), it’s not as bad as it could be—as far as bloodshed.
Wisely, the U.S. is at least refraining from continuing to back the bad guys in most of these uprisings—or so it seems (at least so far). The U.S. isn’t exactly supporting the protesters though; we espouse democracy, but let others make it happen. As some of the protesters said in an interview on Al Jazeera—they don’t need the U.S., they can do this themselves.
This from one of the demonstrators in Cairo—via Huffington Post:
The military made no attempt to disperse some 5,000 protesters gathered at Tahrir Square, a plaza in the heart of downtown that protesters have occupied since Friday afternoon. They have violated the curfew to call for the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak's regime, which they blame for poverty, unemployment, widespread corruption and police brutality.
Nobel Peace laureate Mohamed ElBaradei appeared in the square around 7 p.m.
"You are the owners of this revolution. You are the future," he told the cheering crowd. "Our essential demand is the departure of the regime and the beginning of a new Egypt in which each Egyptian lives in virtue, freedom and dignity."
This guy’s sign says, “Game over.”
What is mentioned in every story over the last couple of weeks, is that the U.S. has been supporting and propping up these criminal dictators for decades (most of them have been in power for at least 30 years). The rationale for support is that these dictators are our allies in the battle against Islamic fundamentalism. The Egyptian president encourages fear regarding the Islamic Brotherhood and insures backing from the US as a result. The Islamic Brotherhood is not a terrorist organization, but given its name it is easily portrayed as one in the West.
In decades past, we backed monsters because they professed to be anti-Communist. Now the slightest lip service that they are anti-terrorist and they get weapons and excuses from Hillary Clinton (the latest in a very long line of excuse makers). This is truly counterproductive. Supporting repressive regimes is what gives rise not only to young advocates for reform, but also to the very organizations that are planting bombs and teaching hatred. Both the reformists and the radicals share a distrust for the U.S.—unfortunately a common bond. The people in those countries know that their rulers have been supported by the U.S.—they’re not ignorant, they know way more about it that most Americans.
Needless to say, Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran aren’t in love with the U.S. either—the dominoes are falling. The whole region is changing political shape, and we should be encouraging reform, not funding its repression anymore. The principal oil states—Saudi Arabia, Russia and Nigeria—speak for themselves: corrupt oligarchies, monarchies or just plain corrupt. Even W knew we had to get off the oil tit ASAP. Instead of wasting billions making enemies, we should be investing those billions in our children’s future (education) and funding alternative energy models. Whole towns in Sweden have reduced their carbon footprint to zero—it can be done, it’s not a utopian pipe dream.
The amounts being spent for no positive results in Afghanistan and Iraq are mind-boggling—to believe that there is no connection between a nation with a growing level of mostly financial-based unrest (that’s the U.S.), and the money spent on illegal wars without end, is to not see history being remade. These U.S.-led wars are financed by money borrowed from China (who holds much of the U.S. debt)—any wonder the Chinese are zooming ahead? I suspect the Chinese will begin some serious arm twisting soon, as they’ll want to be sure their debts can be paid back. And if they see a nation in financial disarray that can’t pay its bills, the Chinese may start dictating how we get our house in order—as any bank would do to a loan holder in danger or default.
Anyway—exciting, thrilling days. Who would have expected all this to grow from a single street vendor who refused to pay bribes?
They have an art biennale here — doesn’t everyplace? Cindy has one of her new wallpaper pieces in the show, so we took advantage of the opportunity and came over and stayed a few extra days. The biennale, curated by Massimiliano Gioni, who has done other big surveys, featured, besides some well-known names, lots of stuff that some might not call art — period Korean advertising photos, minus text, by Hanyong Kim, and a promo film commissioned by a Japanese bicycle company done by an avant-garde film collective in the ’50s. There were pieces by Asian artists we’d never heard of (a Korean artist did paintings in an old Buddhist style, one of which was about women who’d had abortions suffering in hell), healing drawings by Swiss healer Emma Kunz (who died in 1963), and some vaguely outsiderish pieces (including incredible drawings by Chinese healer Guo Fengyi that she originally started doing to heal herself of ailments contracted due to factory work, and now does to “heal” others). Here’s one of her drawings:
It was great to see one of these biennale things loosen up a bit on their criteria regarding what to include. Too often they seem like sales conventions for successful galleries, with an idea tacked on to add a veneer of intellectual substance — a puppet government run by the lobbyists. This one actually seemed to be about a gathering of great stuff, no matter where it came from — some of which is shown in commercial galleries, and much that is not.
Here is a sample page from one of Shinro Ohtake’s books. He’s a musician/artist who is now in a band called JUKE/19 with Yamantaka Eye, of the more well-known Boredoms. An entire room was filled with these scrapbooks, opened to random pages. They seemed to be made of ephemera and then drawn and painted over — most pages were even more messy than this spread:
Not too many of the name artists were in attendance — I saw Maurizio Cattelan and Ai Weiwei at a lunch, but not a whole bunch of others. Other curators attended — Okwui Enwezor and Francesco Bonami showed up, checking out their co-curators’ work. It’s a long way to come for Americans and Europeans, though some westerners were making this part of an itinerary that included Beijing and other new art centers.
At the same time, almost next door to the biennale, which shows in two purpose-built buildings, there was the Gwangju art fair opening in the massive convention center. This was more of a hodgepodge — some kitschy stuff and some contemporary art from an alternative universe. Art has become a “thing” here, as it seems to be in China. It’s apparently something you have to have — every town should support it, and there are weird little galleries everywhere. Gwangju is proud of their biennale, as they should be, but what a choice for a town that on the surface seems fairly nondescript.
Gwangju, we were told, is a cultural town, and it is famous for being politically uppity too — there was a rebellion that the whole country remembers and celebrates. In 1980 the citizens of Gwangju rose up against the dictatorship that ruled Korea at that time (another that was aided and supported by the US), and were fired upon by the army. Citizens raided armories and essentially took control of the town before the uprising was brutally suppressed. On the face of things it’s a little hard to imagine — the town seems to be largely made of identical tower block apartments and love hotels. Chris Wiley, who wrote a lot about the artists in the biennale catalogue, called the apartments dystopian, but he added that the middle class here loves them. They prefer them to the funkier homes that used to fill this town. The tower blocks have gyms, pools and other mod cons, so the trade off might be understandable from a pragmatic point of view. When we arrived, I saw row after row and mile after mile of them and sort of began to get depressed, but then I was reminded that my reaction was based on the legacy, history and reputation of US and European housing projects, which is generally a story of vast neglect and of dangerous warrens for the urban poor. These, apparently, have none of that connotation, though it’s hard for us to shake our western biases and presumptions.
Here is what much of the town used to look like:
And here are some typical tower blocks. They stretch from one end of town to the other. You can identify your block by a number.
Most young folks don’t live alone before they’re married, so love hotels abound to fulfill the need of a private place to smooch. Typically the parking is indoors, and designed so that no one sees you coming or going, or sees your car parked out front. Here’s one that mixes the Statue of Liberty with neoclassical soft core — because that’s what liberty is all about.
A typhoon hit Seoul while we were in Gwangju, which may have affected biennale and art fair attendance — all flights from the capitol were suspended, trees were uprooted in Seoul and there were power outages.
We went for a walk to the old market, Yangdong. There are two markets split by a street — one side is for clothes and curtains and such, the other for food. Korean food is wonderful — spicy, pungent and mainly vegetarian. Fish and meat are used as flavorings more so than massive portions. Typical meals are accompanied by a host of pickled vegetable dishes, and few dishes are fried.
In the market there were lots of dried and fresh fish dealers, hundreds of kinds of kimchee, and beans and legumes galore. Here is a kind of pizza with greens, crab and sausage on a bean pancake. It makes a nice composition.
A vendor told us that the older folks continue to enjoy silkworm larvae, but the young folks don’t go for it so much now.
On the clothes-side of the market there were, aside from Nike and Adidas knock offs, aisle after aisle of traditional formal wear. It was hot that day, and by the time we arrived it was mid afternoon, so some of the sales personnel took advantage of the slowness and napped. We saw booth after booth of incredible, brightly-colored, formal clothes — with here and there a sleeping beauty fallen down among them.
Jeju Island
The island was recommended to us by a Korean American friend. It’s a volcanic island (though not active) about the size of Puerto Rico and lies off the southern coast of Korea. One large volcanic mountain dominates and there are hundreds of smaller cones scattered about the lush green landscape. An organization called Jeju Olle initiated the establishment of a series of trails that lie along the southern coast. The trails are divided into numbered sections, each about a 5-hour hike. Eventually they hope to have trails surrounding the whole island. This one used to be a honeymoon resort, but no longer — for a while tourism languished a bit, but now these trails have stimulated a kind of ecotourism as visitors collect hikes and compare experiences. It’s an admirable project in a place that has some local culture left (they speak a unique dialect). Unlike the theme parks and resorts that often get built in places like this, the trails are free — they foster an appreciation of the land and place (of a sort, see below) and leave no carbon footprint. The hotel suggested we try Number 7.
The first part of Number 7 is fairly mediated and built up. Along the path there are signs that show the exact locations used in historical TV dramas. There are also special tours of the island that focus entirely on former movie and TV locations — a different way of viewing a landscape. It’s landscape as a set — with accompanying nostalgic and emotional connections, if you happen to have seen the TV series.
Further on there is a baffling sign/billboard that depicts, in heightened colors, what lies directly behind the sign. Maybe it’s there to help you recognize the landscape as the real manifestation of a more iconic and familiar image: “Ah yes, that’s where we are! I’ve seen this image before.”
Further on the trail becomes more primitive, the signs are no more and one has to scamper over rocks at the base of some basalt cliffs that are honeycombed with indentations.
Then the trail leads along volcanic black rock beaches typical of this place, where women are bent over gathering seaweed that they dry on bushes or on the bike lane at the side of the road.
Koreans eat some seaweed with almost every meal — either in soup, dried as a garnish or pickled as a kind of kimchee. It’s delicious, healthy and judging by the huge piles of it these women accumulate all over the island, I assumed that Jeju might be a major seaweed source for all of Korea. I was told that no, what is gathered here is pretty much consumed here — the Korean peninsula is surrounded by water on 3 sides, so lots of seaweed is needed and it’s gathered everywhere.
Nearby these pungent piles are loads of tiny fish farms. There is abundant fresh water that pours down from the interior, which feeds these farms and is then dumped into the ocean, along with some fish that manage to escape.
We stop for a meal of fishtail stew and an amazing iced soup that is made of ground red pepper, sesame, cucumber, garlic and raw squid slices — and ice cubes. Nearby the local fishermen are bathing, naked, in a rocky pool where a river pours into the sea. Later some of them are having lunch in the restaurant, and they sprinkle a kind of acid on their dishes. It’s like super vinegar concentrate — 30% as opposed to the 5% in European vinegars — and the odor is like smelling salts or amyl nitrate. We were warned not to even smell it.
However, they do also make low acid vinegars — pomegranate, persimmon, garlic, apple and pepper — that are for drinking.
Lava Tubes
When the volcanoes in this island were erupting, the lava flowed down towards the sea, creating huge underground tubes as the outer layers of lava cooled and hardened. Subsequent lava flows took the same readymade routes, and we visited one where you can walk 1 km in. It goes on much further, 17 km I think. They’re not like limestone caves with stalagmites and stalactites, but more like a road, an abandoned subway tunnel. Water drips down everywhere and one imagines there are significant aquifers deep underground.
There are lava tubes elsewhere in the world — I went into one out west, in Utah I think it was. Those are more on the surface — one can see the overgrown snaking mounds stretching across a lava field that betray their presence, and fairly often a roof collapse allows one to clamber down into them. The tubes in Utah are smaller than those in Jeju, and in the one I climbed into there was no one around. I went in a ways, but without good lights I stopped and turned around, thinking one of the branching tributaries might be a perfect hibernating spot for a bear.
We’ve seen way too many articles recently about newspapers in financial trouble: closing bureaus, cutting back on commissioned pieces that require in-depth reporting, and erecting paywalls for their online editions in an attempt to reverse the exodus of subscribers expecting to get all their news for free. While the physical print model of news journals might disappear relatively soon — which will instantly eliminate any such news source from the 1/5 of Americans who rarely use or have access to the Internet, and don’t use smart phones — it doesn’t mean that what they do also needs to end. As the future of these institutions seems increasingly in peril, I recently began to notice some of the incredibly important things they do and have done.
In the midst of further research for Here Lies Love (someday it will see the light of day as a performance!), I read that it was the San Jose Mercury News that exposed the Marcoses’ ill-gotten wealth. (This would have been in the ’80s.) The Philippine press was, of course, heavily censored at the time, so they couldn’t research or write about such things. This story, which of course filtered back to the Philippines, wasn’t the straw that broke the camel’s back over there, but it was significant in opening the eyes of the Philippine populace to what was going on behind the curtain of the New Society.
In July there was a massive series in The Washington Post called “Top Secret America” (it sounds like a Team America sequel, but it’s real) detailing the massive spending and expansion of a big-beyond-belief series of agencies and outside contractors all engaged in “anti terrorist” activities. It’s hugely expensive, out of control and unaccountable. Also ineffective. It’s a huge exposé, and all the information was already public knowledge, though it required years of digging and organization to assemble a collection of coherent articles.
Just today The New York Times ran a piece about little Portugal managing to power 45% of its grid using sustainable energy after only 5 years of work (on solar, wind arrays and restructuring state utility companies). The obvious implication, to me — from the almost editorial-like nature of the article — was, “Why can’t we, the richest nation on earth, do this?” (Sustainable energy use in the US is barely 5%, and at present rate and with present policies might not catch up to Portugal in our lifetimes.) The article, as I see it, is a goad, a prod, a provocation — and proof that yes, it can be done. But not when you give oil companies massive tax breaks and offer them huge financial incentive programs; not when you don’t enforce the off shore drilling regulations that exist; and certainly not when oil guys were running the government.
These are just three examples. None of this information — or rather, the organized presentation of this information — would have come through other institutions. They simply don’t have the resources that print or TV have.
So, as we watch print media and the press struggle financially, I wonder what is to become of this segment of our democracy that is sometimes referred to as the fourth estate. This country and many others were founded on the idea that a free and open press constitutes, effectively, a separate wing of the government — keeping the other branches honest, and exposing stuff that the government, lobbyists, the military or large corporations would prefer to keep hidden. Checks and balances.
Not everyone agrees that the fourth estate is a positive force. Sometimes it’s likened to a mob, sometimes to a pack of gossips, muckrakers and scandal mongers who simply stir things up for their own pleasure, and throw their critical weight around as a way of exorcising personal psychological demons. As a performing artist I’ve had moments of agreeing with this latter assessment. But what if no one, no agency or medium, had enough popularity, readership or weight to expose situations or inform the public about some of this stuff? — never mind biased music writers. An ignorant public is a gullible public, a bunch of suckers, ripe for plucking.
The broadcast press — radio and TV — who could have picked up the slack have mostly imploded as far as serving this function. (NPR and PBS don’t have the budgets, and PBS was also under politically motivated attack.) The provocations and lies of Fox, and the celebrity focus and lack of investigation of most of the rest, render what could have been a real alternative to print invalid.
Where there used to be the occasional in-depth series on TV news shows, now there is rumormongering, inciting fear and outright lies. Most Americans get their news from TV, so we shouldn’t be surprised that they think all Muslims are somehow guilty for 9/11 or that Saddam Hussein was connected to al Qaeda.
Although we emphasize freedom of the press, shout about it and hold it up as something worth fighting for, that freedom is worthless and irrelevant if it’s rendered nearly invisible and virtually inaudible. As they used to say in Soviet Russia: when nothing was permitted, everything was important, and now that everything is permitted, nothing is important. In the Soviet days of samizdat pamphlets, “news” carried weight, and people met and talked about what they’d heard or read. But with Russia approaching Italy’s standing as a land of media awash in bimbos, game shows and corruption, most serious news that isn’t propaganda is next to invisible in the capitalist fog of anything for entertainment.
It’s not exactly true that everything is permitted anymore, what with Putin’s crew assassinating any dissenting politician or critical journalist, but you get the point: freedom of the press approaches meaninglessness as any serious work increasingly becomes discouraged because it doesn’t sell, and the lowest common denominator of journalism takes over. Dictators don’t need to take repressive measures to silence criticism, they just need to be more entertaining.
What about the Internet? Are there web institutions or investigative sites that will step in when print journalism can’t afford to fund years of investigation and research anymore? Drudge Report? The Smoking Gun? Wikileaks? Huffington? It’s a running joke to think that you might threaten someone who had wronged you or who was harming others by saying, “Beware the power of the blogosphere!” — though we know the blogosphere has indeed righted some wrongs and uncovered injustices. But it’s not as powerful and doesn’t have the resources that the press once had.
I’m glad these online institutions exist, and the Wikileak of the Afghan material will speed the end of an invasion whose plan and purpose was never thought out in the first place. But sometimes it’s not enough to leak, cull and aggregate. Research and analysis that takes time (and money) can have a larger effect on the public and their representatives than the biggest mountains of data.
Once again though, if 1/5 of the country doesn’t or can’t or won’t use the Internet, then when and if these online alternatives become the main source for news, those people will instantly be completely disenfranchised. They will be like serfs who aren’t taught to read because, well, why bother?
If one accepts that a democracy without an informed citizenry isn’t a democracy and shouldn’t refer to itself as one, then do we need to rethink how a democracy can work in our culture the near future? Some think the hive mind and self-regulating social networks are a model — that when everyone can speak and everyone is connected then the intelligence and the checks and balances will emerge all by themselves — but I’m not sure I’m ready to believe that millions of people with very little insight and almost no information can somehow magically turn into one smart collective entity.
That said, our cells don’t know what we (think we) know — individual cells don’t all “know” how to make a whole person, for example — but in a structural sense, actually, they do. The DNA for a whole person is contained in every cell, but it’s maybe less a complete blueprint than a small (relatively, for what it accomplishes) set of rules. Like swooping, flocking birds, fish or thousands of other creatures, the behavior of some groups appears to be intelligent, but it’s not. Not in the sense of being self-aware. Is that the model for a future society of “idiots” — a kind of emergent evolutionary structure? Everyone would be given a few basic rules to follow — as if instinctively — and then a whole society eventually emerges from that? It’s more like an ant colony than what we have now. It works for them. Do we want to be more like the ants?
A while back a friend told me that the Republican Governor of Florida, Charlie Crist, was using the Talking Heads song “Road to Nowhere” in a campaign ad. He’s running for Senate.
Well, using a recording of a song, or even just using that song and not the original recording, in an advertisement without permission is illegal, unless the composition has gone into the public domain. It’s not just illegal because one is supposed to pay for such use and not paying is, well, theft — it’s also illegal because one has to ask permission, and that permission can be turned down.
Besides being theft, use of the song and my voice in a campaign ad implies that I, as writer and singer of the song, might have granted Crist permission to use it, and that I therefore endorse him and/or the Republican Party, of which he was a member until very, very recently. The general public might also think I simply license the use of my songs to anyone who will pay the going rate, but that’s not true either, as I have never licensed a song for use in an ad. I do license songs to commercial films and TV shows (if they pay the going rate), and to dance companies and student filmmakers mostly for free. But not to ads.
I’m a bit of a throwback that way, as I still believe songs occasionally mean something to people — they obviously mean something personal to the writer, and often to the listener as well. A personal and social meaning is diluted when that same song is used to sell a product (or a politician). If Crist and his campaign folks had asked to use the song, I would have said no — even if they had offered a lot of money, such as I have been offered in the past for ad use (though I’ve always turned these offers down).
I believe my audience is aware of this no-ad use policy of mine, and part of the respect I am accorded as an artist is due to my maintaining this policy. Needless to say, if they thought I’d licensed a song to a political campaign they might not respect me as much in the morning.
It might be pointed out that Republican campaign organizations have done this kind of thing before. John McCain’s campaign used the Jackson Browne song “Running on Empty” and Reagan’s folks used Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” Both were used illegally without permission, and in the case of the Jackson Browne song a lawsuit was brought. After the Republicans lost several motions attempting to dismiss Browne’s complaint, they settled with him. Part of the settlement said that the Republican National Committee promised to respect artists’ rights and to obtain licenses for the use of copyrighted works in the future. So, it’s not like they weren’t warned, or hadn’t been burned before.
Now, there is such a thing as fair use. Typically the type of free use that doesn’t require a permission might be a student quoting a passage in a book to make a point in a graduate paper, or someone using part (not all) of “Road to Nowhere” to identify, say, the marching groove in that song as a metaphor for the inexorable forward momentum of time, or some such notion. These uses are typically exempt from licensing, permission and fees. In this case, however, the use was not to comment on or explain something about “Road to Nowhere,” ’80s music in general, Talking Heads or Cajun accordion riffs — it was used solely to further Governor Crist’s advertising strategy in his Senate primary campaign… a campaign that has nothing to do with me or my music.
Another tactic the Republicans have used to justify this kind of thing is the right to political free speech. Their argument is that the song is integral to making a political point, and therefore falls under free speech. Well, that’s just crazy talk — the song has nothing to do with Crist’s political views. It simply has a title that is a handy catchphrase, as does the Jackson Browne song — but the content of the song itself doesn’t have any connection with the politician’s campaign or agenda.
So, my lawyers and I have filed a lawsuit — and we also hope the Republicans might not engage (again) in this kind of illegal behavior in the future.
