Originally the diary of 4 months spent in Antarctica working as a documentary film sound recordist, this blog has evolved into an online repository for the thoughts, travels and trivia of the writer Richard Fleming. For McMurdo Station, Antarctica, and polar exploration, see August through December of '06. Currently you are likely to find in these pages chronicles of my actual and literary meanderings, as well as notes on my many other passions. Also, did I mention I wrote a book?
One man army of electoral fraud: Robert "Bob" Mugabe, voting and voting and voting and voting.
Zimbabwe is trapped in post-electoral paralysis as the Zanu PF forces of Robert Mugabe appear incapable of believing that they will successfully steal the latest elections from Morgan Tsvangirai's MDC. Our Zimbabwe correspondent writes:
MDC declares victory, time goes by as official results trickle out. Bob to announce victory soon.
Ironically MDC [opposition party Movement for Democratic Change] appear to have landslide win according to independent observers and number crunchers based on results posted outside polling stations despite massive gerrymandering. However, being the MDC, they have no strategy or plan B and seem unable to mobilize. At the rate state media are going it will take 4 days to announce Bob the winner.
But the rumours are excellent. Grace [Mrs. Bob] is in Malaysia with the kids. Bob is in South Africa. Bob is busy with security chiefs planning to crush any defiance. People are driving to the border. Military on high alert. Military divided. Military about to plan a coup. Military united behind Bob. Enough to make one eat pizza and drink.
(Images of Bob voting courtesy Google image search, shamelessly stolen from AP, the BBC and other major media. If you feel your copyright has been unfairly infringed pick up the phone now and give us a call with your cease and desist order. Operators are standing by, eagerly waiting to hear from you at 1-800-LITIGATE. Call now to take advantage of this one-time-only offer!)
UPDATE: Late on the evening of the day of fools our correspondent, usually irrepressible but now sounding to us rather battered and beaten down, sends these further words:
It's enough now. Running around to press conferences that never happen, swamped by rumors, watching the state machinery gain ground as we all somehow imagine that some sense will prevail. I think Bob will declare himself the winner and say 'fuck you all.' I still harbor some hope but it is dwindling fast into the cynicism of previous election defeats. I was black listed -aka white listed - from covering the elections, for a byzantine number of reasons that left me in a state of enraged defeat. A good meal would not go amiss, along with a proper night's sleep.
Much as we would like to bring our correspondent in for some much needed R & R, the story is still unfolding.
Some future brain-surgeon from Finland was so impressed with the majestic Moai of Easter Island that he decided to take an ear home with him. The Guardian quotes the Finnish consul in Chile, who we imagine usually has a pretty relaxed time of it. One pictures a difficult day spent sucking down pisco sours, while pondering the fundamentals of Finno-Chilean solidarity. She suggests that "it was a sudden, impulsive crazy idea. He is sorry and surprised that it has caused such a stir. He really regrets his actions." Sorry and surprised that it has caused such a stir? I'm sorry and surprised that she didn't try to claim that it was not really such a big deal since, after all, there are 799 ears left.
Okay, you thought we were stern-faced before? Now we're really pissed
I'm currently swinging my boom pole in sunny New Mexico, where the canyons passing beneath Interstate 25 have a tendency to act like wind-funnels, concentrating the gusts into a force that threatens to blow eighteen-wheel rigs right off the overpass. To try and determine how best to warn motorists of this potentially dangerous condition, the state highway planners, armchair philosophers all, got together and talked things through. I would have liked to have been a fly on the wall at the meetings during which their painful democratic process yielded this result:
"The United States demanded open economies with free access to resources, favorable market conditions, a docile working class, a compliant political elite, and a friendly climate of investment that included minimum competition, maximum protection, and political stability."
I know, you are probably thinking these are the words of some particularly forthcoming spokesperson for the current administration, trying to explain why we went into Iraq in the first place, but actually this is Louis Pérez, describing US foreign policy in the Caribbean almost exactly one hundred years ago, in his aptly titled book, Cuba Under the Platt Amendment.
One night, almost exactly seventeen years ago, if I calculate correctly, I was deejaying at a global freakout of a one-nighter Mark Kamins had going for a while, where he fused Turkish belly-dancing tunes with Amazonian riverboat songs and house beats and who knows what else. In came my late friend Fran Duffy, with this gangly British dude I hadn't met before, Jason Mayall. Duffy and Mayall were fresh off the plane from Cartagena, Colombia, and the Caribbean Music Festival, organized by my buddy Paco. For all I know, he was with them, but I'm fairly certain we hadn't even met yet. Duffy had been filming the festival, and Jason had been buying records, crate-digging in a warren of dusty roll-front shops in the chaos of Cartagena's sprawling outdoor market. Duffy was calling him "the cumbia kid." I was like, "WTF is cumbia?" And Duffy goes, "Nixon, dude, you gotta let him get on the set so you can hear these beats." (They used to call me Nixon, back in the day.)
So Mayall dives into his paper bag of crusty treasures and starts pulling out singles and weird one-off pressings on unheard-of Colombian record labels, slapping them on the turntables and wiping them free of the last gritty sand of the Caribbean's southernmost shores, with my Discwasher. He starts playing shiznit I never heard before: gaitas, named for the bizarre, almost Persian-snake-charmer-sounding cactus-wood flute they feature, and porros, almost maniacally uptempo tunes awash in the sound of a massive metal grater, like the güira of Dominican merengue. The basic rhythm, the cumbia, I recognized from a catchy Nescafé commercial that ran for months in movie theaters when I lived in Paris in the mid-Eighties, but Mayall had countless backwoods versions of this beat, crunchy, raw tunes that, when you heard them, conjured up an image of a bunch of musicians ill-at-ease in the studio, gathered together from working out in the fields somewhere to come stand in front of a microphone, probably barefoot. Thus began my love affair with the cumbia.
The author, filling in for Steve Blush at the legendary Lite Lounge at Carmelita's, circa 1988. Forensic analysis reveals that I'm rocking an original 12" of "Good Times," by Chic. (Not a cumbia). If you look very closely (click image to enlarge) you'll note that I am wearing a 'dookie rope chain,' albeit a teensy one. Photographer unknown, possibly Alison Mayer, aka Ali177, or AK718.
In the intervening generation, (yes, I'm old enough now that I can actually speak in all seriousness of an 'intervening generation') the cumbia, always a music of the lower classes, the impoverished and the marginalized, has spread far afield from its Colombian roots. The infectious rhythm first seems to have taken Mexico by storm, where it became fundamental to the booming Mexi-sound-system music known as Sonidero, easily heard by anyone taking a stroll down Fifth Avenue (in Sunset Park, Brooklyn), where it booms out of cars and shops alike. Peru developed its own tradition.
Only recently, however, has cumbia crossed over from the Sunset Park world of its humble but faithful immigrant clientele into the realm of hipsterdom. I'm going out a limb here, since I scarcely go out to nightclubs any more, but at least to judge by the corner of the world-wide-web sandbox I've found myself playing in lately, cumbia has suddenly become the hottest thing on the international club scene. Deejays from San Franciso are bringing back Argentine dub-plates to rock dancefloors in the Bay Area, and the hottest one-nighter in the world right now is a weekly electro-cumbia jam in Buenos Aires, Zizek, named after the uber-hip Slovenian cultural critic, Slavoj Zizek, who happens to be married to an Argentine supermodel-turned-philosopher. (It doesn't seem to be there today, but a recent google search for Zizek yielded a sponsored link to Cabinet Magazine.) At Zizek, the one-nighter, cumbias are slowed down, remixed, mashed up with hit rap records, tortured with dub effects, fused with reggaeton, and otherwise integrated into the deejay repertory.
This being the internet, however, you don't have to imagine what this music sounds like from my tortured descriptions. A brilliant example of the mash-up genre is "El Bombon en el Club," featuring Mr. Fiddy Cent himself being given the maximum cumbia treatment. Listen online, or download. If that doesn't give you enough to go on, download one-time Mark Kamins girlfriend and Danceteria coatcheck girl Madonna singing about music bringing together the rebels and the bourgeoisie over accordion rhythms laid down by the supreme maestro, godfather of the cumbia, the late Andres Landero, from San Jacinto pueblo in Colombia's coastal littoral, here. (Links Dead.) I've met them both, but you'd be more likely to find Landero sitting next to you at my fantasy dinner party. The bottom line in this post-post-modern, post-global music is that any sort of source material is fair game for remixation into a nova-Cumbia. Even footage of Barack Obama:
First spotted at Negrophonic, to whom I say "big up!," this is one of the most spectacular pieces of political propaganda to have yet emerged from the presidential race. Put on your dancing shoes and get out your Spanish-English dictionary.
UPDATE: If you are reading this before 10PM on March 17th, 2008, get on over to SOB's on Varick St. in New York City, where Zizek, the globetrotting party, not the Slovenian philosopher, is putting on their mobile show for one night only.
...this island's historical mission is always to be starting afresh, to make a new beginning every thirty or forty years, and oblivion is usually the ointment for all the wounds which are still open....
---Alberto "the Marquess" Marqués
There's nothing much better than a good detective novel to ease the pain when you are wallowing in bed, befuddled by Cepacol and Motrin and drowning in chicken noodle soup, as I have been for the last three days. My tonsils are as red as the crimson-washed cover of the book I'm holding in my hands, which depicts the deceased, transvestite face of Alexis Arayán, alienated fruitcake son of a leading Cuban diplomat, found in the Havana woods, strangled, wearing a long silk gown. And that's without sharing the more sordid details.
Arayán's creator, Leonardo Padura Fuentes (Bitter Lemon Press, his publisher in English, has inexplicably opted to drop his maternal Spanish surname, as well as making other questionable, presumably marketing-driven decisions, such as renaming the four novels of his Havana Quartet after colors) is arguably Cuba's most interesting contemporary writer. The success of his work at home and abroad gives one hope that the writing environment in Havana is not as closed down and closed off as one might imagine from perusing the headlines of Granma, Cuba's leading daily dose of regime cheerleading. Padura is not a writer who praises the revolution; instead he takes as his subject matter the daily compromises and contradictions encountered by anyone attempting a contemporary Cuban livelihood, and many of his characters and situations can only be seen as oblique and not so oblique criticisms of the status quo.
Padura's detective, Lieutenant Mario Conde, holds his own with the greatest of the genre. A perennially single, frustrated writer, perhaps a version of Padura himself had Padura taken a different path, he swears constantly, smokes vile Cuban cigarettes, and drinks too much. At work he and his partner cruise the scorching hot streets, from the crumbling ruins of Centro Habana to the mansions of Miramar. He spends most of his free time with an obese, ruined and wheelchair-bound Angola veteran named Skinny, a metaphorical personification of the waste and anguish of Cuba's African military adventures. Skinny's mom cooks for them an incredible array of culinary delights unheard of in contemporary Cuba, constantly manage to wangle pork chops here or a steak there. She roasts entire turkeys. Conde, despite his sleuthing skills, can never comprehend how she gets her hands on such ingredients.
In Havana Red, originally published as Mascaras [Masks], Conde's collaborator is the geriatric Alberto Marqués. Proud to call himself queer, once a famous theater director, he was purged in the notorious 1971 crackdown on homosexuals. (That this shameful episode was one of the first to demonstrate the moral failings of the revolution, alienating supporters around the globe, is by no means irrelevant in this story). Marginalized ever since, he is a bitter and wasted figure who invokes Artaud and leans heavily on his memories of hanging out with Sartre in Paris in the late sixties. Conde leaves his cop partner sitting in the car while he goes in to have long chats in the Marquess' dank lair, all the while asking himself if he is letting things get icky. I could go on, and tell you who the killer turns out to be, thereby providing yet another illustration of Padura's dextrous social criticism, but that would spoil things. It is, after all, a detective story.
The redemption of those marginalized in one way or another by excessive revolutionary fervor is a theme running through both Padura's fiction and nonfiction writing. For instance he is one of the few (perhaps the only) Cuban writers to have come to New York to follow the path of salsa, the latin music rooted deeply in Cuban musical tradition but so often politically opposed to, or at least estranged from, Castro's Cuba. In Faces of Salsa, he interviews, among other luminaries, Mario Bauzá, a figure of tremendous importance who essentially invented latin jazz, but who, by virtue of never having been back to Cuba after the revolution, was almost forgotten on the island. Left for dead, one might say.
I owe my introduction to the Havana Quartet (when it was only a trilogy) to my good friend Alex, who left a mangy and well-thumbed Cuban volume in his house in the mountains of Puerto Rico, where I found it while living there and digesting my own Cuban experience. After reading it in one go I called to say 'please send the rest,' and I remember us wondering at the time why nobody had yet discovered Mario "the Count" Conde and brought him to America. While it is unfortunate that the English title ignores the themes of theater, Greek tragedy, Artaud and the deceptive public face of more than one of the book's characters that are made explicit in the word Mascaras, this is still a translation I'm happy to see.
Apologies to regular readers for the tedium of visiting day after day and finding the same old tired Sri Lankan pun. Blog posts have been thin, as I've been "Totally Focused" on the final edit of my forthcoming book, Walking to Guantánamo. "Total Focus" is something rare enough around here that we must seize it by the throat whenever it visits, in the hope of throttling it into submission. In any case, the book is coming along nicely, and the publishers even seem to have publicly admitted that they are going to publish it. A little bit disconcerting to note that at the moment it is available at absolutely no charge, but it is, after all, only my first book.
New York City is of course well known for being the crucible, as it were, of the American melting pot, the city in which the world's many diverse peoples meet to mingle and meld. One thinks of the Spanish-speaking Bronx, or Queens, a borough said to contain more than sixty identifiable ethnic enclaves. Manhattan's Harlem, lately home to expats from countless nations across the vast African continent, springs to mind. So does Brooklyn, with its miniature Russia in Brighton Beach, its petite Puebla in Sunset Park, and its lesser-known Chinatown, spread out along much of Eighth Avenue. Of the five boroughs, only Staten Island fails conjure up an image of the new arrival scrambling to make his way in the new world. Most of us think of Staten Island as a quasi-suburban enclave inhabited by retired policemen, the Wu-tang Clan, and third generation Sicilians in the carting industry. It is a place where The Sopranos might have been set had the producers not been frightened of ruffling too many local feathers, and therefore turned to New Jersey.
But one growing group of immigrants has claimed the borough as its own. Where Victory Boulevard, Staten Island's unofficial main drag, begins its descent down a steep hill toward New York harbor, a dense cluster of Ceylonese have taken up residence. Why the Sri Lankans should have settled here is a mystery to me, but when I was a child, growing up in Princeton, New Jersey, immigrants from Italy were still arriving there. Many promptly went into the gardening business. All, invariably, were from the island of Ischia, in the Bay of Naples. The explanation I was given for this was simply that one Italian from that island had made his way to Princeton, flourished in gardening, and written home to friends and cousins that the living was easy. In one way or another Staten Island now apparently plays a similar role in some Sri Lankan community, and we are the richer for it.
The New Asha, at 322 Victory Blvd., reported on Chowhound to be the best of the community's restaurants. It is a small room with glass-fronted cabinets protecting a steam-table, and it has all the ambiance of a joint selling pizza by the slice. Nonetheless, the friendly proprietress, wearing pink and saffron, took one look and said "you've never been here before, let me make you some plates." Extraordinarily spicy chicken and fish in an almost orange curry, sauteed jackfruit slices in Colombo sauce, crisp and crunchy deep-fried chickpea fritters, delicate fingers of roti wrapping a meat filling: nothing was a disappointment.
At 353 Victory Blvd., a superette with a sense of humor. We loaded up on spicy and delicious Sri-Lankan style mango chutney and black mustard seed, unavailable at Fairway, for making our own Colombo powder. The glass deli fridges, used at the local bodega for sodas and 40-ouncers, here held crisp, fresh okra, sprigs of curry leaf, and a box full of big, strange purple sprouts. These looked vaguely familiar from my travels, but out of context, collected together in a box in a fridge on Staten Island, I couldn't place them. "Excuse me, what is this, please?" I asked, bringing one to the cash register. "It's a banana flower," replied the cashier. "How does one cook it?" "Sauteed, with butter." "Perhaps a bit of curry, if you like it," added a customer, putting her provisions into a bag. "Peel off the tough purple outer leaves, and then slice it," she went on. She was an attractive woman with the typical dark complexion of south Indians. A lively discussion followed, which included various recipes. "They say it is very good for the action of the colon," concluded the woman. It was all I had been waiting to hear, and I added the bulbous purple bud to my pile of purchases.
In a move that will tragically diminish the expressive character of the Italian soul and weaken the very fabric of the country's grand and ancient culture, a high court in Rome has ruled that it is no longer permissible for men to grasp the jewels in public. No word yet on whether this pernicious new law will be enforced in the Italian diaspora of Brooklyn.
Barack Obama visits Somali refugees in northern Kenya in 2006 and is dressed as a village elder as a sign of respect.
The author visits Brooklyn refugees in southern Germany in 2007 and wishes he hadn't left the apartment without a hat.
In the death throes of the Clinton bid for the Democratic nomination, campaign tactics are spiraling downward like the whirlpool in a flushing toilet. According to the Drudge report, Clinton staffers were emailing the above Obama image around this weekend under a header suggesting their campaign ought to be trying to exploit it to smear Barack. An intra-Clinton email "obtained by the Drudge report" allegedly asked: "Wouldn't we be seeing this on the cover of every magazine if it were HRC?" Now the Clinton camp is trying to suggest that, of course there is nothing wrong with the picture, and visiting dignitaries including Hillary play dress-up all the time, but if the Obama campaign thinks they are being smeared then there must be something suspect about the way they view people wearing towels on their heads. What we really need to do is choose a candidate, put all this absurd sort of acrimony to bed, and start looking for pictures of John McCain in a bikini.
Some weeks ago I got an email from Carolina Salguero informing me that she was hoping to resurrect her once-excellent but lately dormant blog about efforts to refurbish the Mary Whalen, the 172 foot long rust-bucket of a tanker that she has adopted like a stray kitten. She mentioned that she would momentarily be moving the Mary Whalen from her most recent home in the Red Hook container port, to a new, but also temporary berth in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, that vast pocket of crumbling industry wedged between Williamsburg and Vinegar Hill. "Ooh," I said. "I'd love to come along on that journey."
Weeks passed, and when I did think of Carolina and the Mary Whalen I was forced to conclude that I had been forgotten. I was sure I had literally missed the boat. Then, last week, to the in-box came the message that the much-postponed towing of the Whalen to her new home was to happen on Sunday. What's more, in recognition and thanks for the many countless hours of voluntary toil that friends of the Mary Whalen had put in, scraping up buckets of rust chips, we were all invited to voyage on her decks as she traveled to her new home.
In my case this was a bit of a charade, since the sum total of my work aboard amounted to a couple of hours of painless schlepping, many months ago, on a warm and sunny day at the end of spring. After that morning I managed to let an entire summer and fall season of volunteer days slide by without another visit.
Last Sunday was a chilly one, but we try never to let an opportunity to get out onto the waters of New York harbor go unseized, so, bundled up and fortified with bagels, we trudged down Van Brunt street to the container port. The tug Nathan Stewart, lashed tight to the Mary Whalen in the container port.
The irrepressible John Weaver prepares to hoist the gangway on deck. In every picture in which Weaver appears he wears this broad, warm grin, perhaps delighting in the fact that, even if only under tug power, the Mary Whalen is once again setting out to sea. In a moment of idle Googling, Weaver and his wife, the daughter of a long-serving captain of the Mary Whalen back in her days of active duty, discovered Carolina and her attempts to save the ship. Since then he has become deeply involved in the project.
Under way at last, lower Manhattan sliding by on the port side.
In a particularly inspired moment, Carolina contracted with a motley crew of musicians known as the Hungry March Band to provide a live soundtrack, as it were, for the move. As the ship prepared to get under way, the musicians got themselves ready to play, strapping on portable drums, lounging on the decks with trombones and firing sample volleys from trumpets. Most had never been on board before, and some had tremendous difficulty finding the ship, hidden away deep inside the vast container port. At the very last moment a Japanese player arrived, rushing up the gangplank just before it was hauled on to the deck and, half out of breath, whipped out his saxophone. Their music sounds like a military band gone to seed, or even to pot, or perhaps an impromptu jam session turned parade, and it lent a glorious aspect of triumph and conquest to our outing. It was cold out on the water, and the music kept our spirits up. I thought of the Russians on the eastern front, and how cheered they might have been to have the Hungry Marchers urging them on. They reminded me, too, of the weirdly joyful clash of instruments I once heard accompanying a funeral procession in rural Haiti, and when I asked one of the band what other sorts of gigs they play besides ship relocations she said "all kinds, really; recently we played a New Orleans style funeral on the Upper East Side."
Raise the Roof! As the wicked winds of winter came whistling in over the waves, many danced to stave off the chill, shaking their groove things to the funky brass band sounds of the Hungry March Band.
I counted at least six video cameras on board filming the historic event, from the palm-sized to the professional. It is starting to feel as though everyone is making a documentary about something. However, despite all the cameras, there were no working soundmen participating in this media frenzy, which may explain why I don't have any gigs at the moment. This dude, from Channel 12, was doing his own sound the hard way. I would have thought having to hold a hand mic for the interview you are filming would seriously limit your ability to choose and hold a nice frame. In the business, this is known as the "one-man band," or "one-man banding it," and we sound brethren frown on this sort of behavior, for obvious reasons. I'm going to complain to my union, if I can get anyone on the phone over there.
Carolina, wearing some sort of Uzbeki yak-herders hat, supervises the docking from her new front yard.
Home, sweet ghetto. The new digs in the Brooklyn Navy Yard seemed a bit on the decrepit side, after the immaculate stacks of containers and tidy blue warehouses of the container port. But it is only temporary. So far, the next stop is unknown, TBD. Do you have a home for the Mary Whalen? An underused two hundred feet of New York City waterfront is all that's needed. All suggestions are welcome. If you see something, say something!
Adieu Red Hook: The Mary Whalen at her new berth in the Navy Yard. I know this picture looks as if it had been taken from on board the tug as it heads back south, the day's work done, but that would only be possible if the Nathan Stewart had kindly offered us a lift back to the neighborhood, which they couldn't have, because their insurance and other policies wouldn't permit it. So, in short, I have no idea how this picture came into existence.
When things are slow here at antarcticiana we like to fill the rare gaps between thrills by presenting for your delectation real life honest-to-God Google searches that helped new and lucky readers to land on these pages. What do we mean? (Many people have expressed confusion about how this works).
To be clear, what we mean is that at some point someone, somewhere, typed each of these search strings into their Google search box. We can't imagine what they were looking for, but what they found was us: Antarcticiana, this webblog, was in every case among the top ten resulting searches, and they then clicked on the Google link to these pages that they found before them. Had they not clicked, they would not have visited, and we would never have known of them. However, in clicking and arriving here, they activated our internet surveillance software, provided by Statcounter, telling us which page they came to us from, along with other useless information like their IP address and vague location. (If you feel threatened or invaded by this, you should know that almost all websites collect such information, and more, each and every time you visit, and most of them know what to do with it rather better than we do.)
As has been the case in our more recent installments of these lists, we like to think of the whole, made up in this case of twelve distinct searches, as a sort of free-associative poem. Like all poems, it should be read out loud, perhaps to a loved one, in order to best appreciate the unexpected linkages between these seemingly random, disparate quests for information. (For those who are new to this and can't get enough of the hilarity, previous examples of this exciting literary experiment are to be found here,here,here and here.)
Room for improvement: Eucalyptus suicide scooter, Rwanda
The always excellent Afrigadget is a blog devoted to African ingenuity and invention that has posted about many spectacular creations made from abandoned parts and scrap most northern-hemisphere dwellers would doubtless chuck in the trash. They have a post up now combining two of my passions, bicycling, and bamboo, with a link to this project, which pairs the sustainable (and in many places in Africa, free) plant resource with cutting edge bicycle design.
In Rwanda bicycles are used for transporting almost anything that can conceivably be loaded onto them, and being able to manufacture one out of the weeds growing in the gully would be most helpful
These gents doubtless dropped off a load of cargo in Kigali and are headed back up the mountain the easy way
UPDATE: I've been hanging around over at Atlas HQ most of the week, repairing the world's most beautiful pasta machine, about which more later. (What this really means is that I have been watching Joseph lathe, mill, weld, buff, sand and polish a part I needed to replace on the world's most beautiful pasta machine, but if you come over to dinner and are subjected to my long, explanatory lecture about the pasta machine, its glories, and the long struggle to restore its functionality, I will most likely by then have convinced myself that I did all the work and therefore take all the credit.) Today when I turned up Joseph had a book to show me that his ex-employee Matthew had rescued from the dumpster at Cooper-Hewitt, Matthew's new employer. He had then thoughtfully brought it by as a gift. Turning at random the pages of what looks to be a most interesting and informative look at bicycles and their physics, I stumbled on this page, concerned with alternative bicycle frame materials. It seemed too grand a coincidence to ignore. (Click the image to load it in a readable size)
Scan courtesy of Atlas; permission neither requested of nor granted by the publisher. Please do contact us if you feel the use of this reproduction here is not in your best interest.
Went down to the polls after bagels and lox. Just around the corner on Van Brunt and Lorraine. I was glad to see they are still using the old-school voting machines in the old school gymnasium. These require you to pull down mechanical metal switches next to the name of the candidate of your choice and then yank across a massive lever sticking out of the floor, as if you were a lineman diverting a train. They are solid, antique devices from the pre-computer era that make satisfying clicking and clanking noises, the sound of democracy expressed, in response to one's performing one's functions as a voter. Manufactured in an era when this country actually manufactured things. None of this absurd nonsense of flawed and hackable software and the notion, already introduced in far too many states, that we are somehow better off e-voting.
The northern tip of the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, in Queens, at the southern tip of the bridge that brings Cross Bay Boulevard traffic from Howard Beach out to the Rockaways, is a sandy spit dedicated to public recreation. A couple of parking lots, some wind-whipped pine trees, and the odd fishermen walking the rocky bayside coastline seem an improbable scene for a major Hindu religious ceremony. Howard Beach, on the far side of the bridge, is a firmly working class white enclave, an Italian stronghold still notorious for, and perhaps even synonymous with, urban racial intolerance. Further south, the bizarre bay-island community of Broad Channel is little different. Said to be the home of a great density of New York City policeman and firemen, its postage-stamp front gardens are exuberantly and permanently decorated with scenes of dancing gnomes and other outdoors kitsch.
But the refuse scattered along the tideline here tells a different story. There is simply too much of it; worshippers, and many of them, have come here to make offerings. I sent some images to my brother's girlfriend, Melanie Dean, who is currently doing her field work in Tamil-speaking south India. She writes:
From the looks of the photos I would say there was some sort of procession related to Shiva and some sort of ritual bathing in the ocean took place. When people do these baths in the ocean/rivers to cleanse themselves of ritual pollution they often leave all their old clothing behind in the water and on the shore. I went to a river in Tamil Nadu recently where everyone goes to bathe 30 days after a family member dies and the banks were covered with discarded clothing. (One of your pictures) is of a discarded sari. (Another) is of the goddess Durga, but one is the god Shiva and another is a big Shiva lingam. The Shiva lingam is an aniconic representation of Shiva and is basically a penis sitting in a vagina (but most worshippers don't think of it this way when they are praying to it!). Shiva meditated in a cremation ground and was an ascetic, so he is often represented in lingam form - especially in the South.
Probably this group of people did an immersion of some idol in the water there and this is what is left behind. My guess is that this is trash that is several months old and probably from Durga Puja which was in late October or early November. This is a pretty impressive puja that people in Calcutta do up really big. They immerse humongous idols of the Goddess Durga in the ocean.
One possible problem. These photographs were taken in early January, and unless the tidal action is remarkably gentle, and the fabrics extraordinarily resilient, I would if pressed find it difficult to believe that these relics are two or three months old. Bathing, whether ritual or otherwise would have been a most chilling experience since, one would imagine, at least late September. Any further illumination readers might leave in the comments would be most appreciated.
An empty can of Ghee, well above the high-tide line.
Countless yardage of saffron fabric, some decorated with tassels and sequins, lie twisted and tangled amongst the slimy rocks
A scene of post-celebration textile carnage litters the sand underneath the bridge
Could this refuse possibly be several months old?
Flags, affixed to bamboo poles, litter the ground
Across the water, on the Howard Beach side, a flag, still stuck firmly in the sand. Perhaps it was replanted by a passerby.
A lingam for your admiration
A shattered wedding cake? To the north of nearby JFK airport is Richmond Hill, the largest Guyanan enclave in New York, home to thousands of both afro and indo-Guyanese expats. Among the indo-Guyanese are many hindus. Could this Guyanese population, descendants of indentured workers imported from India in the 19th century, be involved?
The ever-popular Florida Water, once a cheap cologne, now an indispensable ritual perfume from Haitian vodoun all the way to hinduism
Looking off the back deck a couple of weeks ago, which is to say smack dab in the middle of January, I was shocked to spot cavorting in the neighbor's garden a spectacular male Baltimore Oriole. Brilliantly plumaged in orange and black, this bird is an occasional but never common springtime migrant through the grit of Red Hook. It is entirely unexpected in winter. Even the hardiest representatives of its clan should be found passing the season no further north than North Carolina. Global warming? Perhaps.
Unlikely winter visitor; in January it should be far to the south of Baltimore. (I know, my fence needs a little work; luckily spring will soon be upon us)
Then, this week's religious Friday telephone call to the New York Rare Bird alert, 212-979-3070, often transcribed on the web, brought exciting news of a putative first state record for Scott's Oriole, a yellower relative of the Baltimore. This particular individual is so confused we can scarcely blame climate change; it normally resides in the south-western deserts of New Mexico and Arizona. Having arrived somewhat addled in the New York area, its motives unknown, this bird, a first year male, apparently confused Union Square Park with the arid bluffs and canyonlands of its place of birth, taking up residence amongst the starlings, pigeons and restauranteurs.
That thing must be around here somewhere
Once having established that the famous Union Square Greenmarket does indeed operate on Fridays, so that we would be able to purchase organic vegetables and local grassfed beef between bouts of ornithology, therefore metaphorically killing two birds with one stone, we set off for the city in an adrenaline rush. As I've noted before in these pages, it has historically been the kiss of death whenever I go on one of these local rarity hunts, as my presence all but guarantees the permanent disappearance of the sought-after specie. But last August, that curse was lifted.
"What are all you people looking at?" was the most common question innocent passersby asked of the entranced cult of birders
At the southwestern corner of the park, already known, the scuttlebutt had it, as the preferred hangout for the oriole, clumps of binocular-toting birdos stood chatting, but without intensity. There was none of the unified, focussed pointing of high caliber optics that indicates, even from far off, that the bird has been spotted and is under observation. We abandoned this placid scene, delving into the denser foliage at the heart of the urban square, tripping over tourists and pushing old ladies out of the way. Still no bird.
The scene in front of Staples, Union Square, last Friday
We forged on, undeterred by the winos and businessmen braving the cold to slurp lunch-time soup on park benches. There, up ahead, half-way to the greenmarket where the organic turnips were waiting, about even with 16th st., stood another dense knot of birders. This time all had their binoculars clamped to their faces in an almost military synchrony. Necks cocked back as one, the group was staring skyward into a tree, eying a dismal, yellow feathered blob. Scott's Oriole! Or at least so they are saying. Hunched over amongst the backlit twigs at the top of a tall tree, it was impossible to say for sure. It was a yellow and black bird, that was certain.
Dude, I came all the way from Brooklyn, do you mind coming down out of that tree?
No wonder, perhaps, that this alien visitor, adrift in the great city, was almost ignored for more than a month. First seen in early December, it was misidentified for weeks as an Orchard Oriole, a regular summer visitor to the north-east. Although even less likely to be seen in New York in January than my Baltimore, the sighting of a winter Orchard Oriole was not so fabulously thrilling that this bird received sufficient attention for its true identity to be revealed. Perhaps it spent some time hidden in the confines of the elitest, private and key-protected Gramercy Park, just uptown, or perhaps those who visited it were happy to call it an Orchard and move on. In any event it was only last week that expert examination of photographs finally inspired a horde of birding visitors to visit Union Square.
One of the great things about life in New York is that the same guy who will walk by Madonna or George Clooney on the sidewalks of lower Broadway without batting an eye happily leaps into action as a kind of self-anointed tour guide to such obscure events as the appearance of a vagrant Oriole in a city park, marshaling foot traffic and giving the newcomers the latest updates. How else to account for a friendly binocularless man in an enormous orange parka, altogether unfamiliar with the unwritten etiquette of the bird-obsessed, simply swept away in the communal excitement, jumping up and down, gesturing to the crowd that he had found a superior vantage point? And the curious, who perhaps had never shown any interest in a bird before in all their city lives, amazed to see so many freakish and apparently unemployed citizens pointing their expensive optics at a bland dot in a tree, and therefore waiting around, chatting, learning about the weird ways of the bird folk and hoping like the rest of us that the bird would come lower in the trees to offer a view worth telling friends and family about later in the day: the story of meeting the birders incomplete without the punchline of getting a good look at the bird.
March of the zombies? Or the Scott's Oriole (2858), finally on the ground, offering crippling looks?
At last, following, it seemed, a swirl of Starlings, the Oriole took flight in the direction of its beloved southwest. Rushing back towards the intersection of University and 14th St., we arrived at the favored corner in time to find the bird pecking away at some mandarin segments thoughtfully left on the ground in a tiny fenced off corner of the park, just across the street from the Staples superstore. Perhaps not everyone's idea of a wilderness experience, but very satisfying all the same.
Note the dark face with almost black cheeks and the olive-streaked quality to the upper back, both important field marks. This bird was apparently first spotted in early December and was only conclusively identified this week. Superior images are here.
One man army of electoral fraud: Robert "Bob" Mugabe, voting and voting and voting and voting.
