sounds like princip

It is a damned place. It sends shivers down my spine. First the flower of the Second Polish Republic is murdered in the forests around Smolensk, now the intellectual elite of the Third Polish Republic die in this tragic plane crash when approaching Smolensk airport.

Former Polish president Aleksander Kwasniewski remarking on the early morning crash in Russia that killed everyone on board -- including "Polish president, Lech Kaczynski, and dozens of the country’s top political and military leaders", according to the New York Times.

The dignitaries "had been due in western Russia to commemorate the anniversary of the murder of thousands of Polish officers by the Soviet Union at the beginning of World War II.

"The ceremonies were to be held at a site in the Katyn forest close to Smolensk, where 70 years ago members of the Soviet secret police executed more than 20,000 Polish officers captured after the Soviet Army invaded Poland in 1939."


I smell trouble.

speaking of lumbering apes

Film: Eadweard Muybridge
There’s a brief piece in Science this week about bouncy legs -- how the calculus predicts that locomotion on stiff legs is most efficient and yet all of us -- and small critters especially -- bounce about when we move.

A new computer model nails the reason why:

Integrative physiologist Monica Daley of the Royal Veterinary College (RVC) in Hatfield, U.K., had observed how adeptly the guinea fowl, an African bird known for its running skill, negotiated sudden drops and other obstacles. She wondered how the shape of an animal's body and the nature of the terrain -- details left out of earlier simulations because they're difficult to model -- would alter the models' predictions.

So she and RVC colleague James Usherwood devised a computer model that didn't sidestep the complexities of animal motion. Instead of attaching legs to an idealized point with a certain mass, the new model linked them to a bouncing body -- the seesawing guts and other tissue an animal carries as it moves -- and set them on an uneven course.

As Daley expected, the less-idealized runners fared better on compliant legs. The spring in their step offset the bounce of their bodies, resulting in a smaller energy cost. "That's interesting and quite novel," says biomechanist Manoj Srinivasan of OhioStateUniversity in Columbus, who was not involved with the research. [1]

This is a lovely nod to the impact of terrain on our evolutionary development and only adds fuel to my long simmering theory that we are born and made and shaped by place; that each of us carries our own terroir and inherits some from those who came before us.

That, like wine, we are seasoned by our soil.

It also reminds me of a conversation I had with my dad when I was small and we were navigating the precarious paths of Mesa Verde. I was terrified. “Walk like an Indian,” he told me. “Bounce a little bit.”

I don’t know where he received this intelligence (it well could have been while he was rambling through the desert with Native American friends in search of peyote buds; it may have come to him after they were consumed; it was probably from the pages of a book) but it turns out it works. I deployed it at Mesa Verde -- with success -- and I've found whenever I’m uncertain about my footing on rough trails that exaggerating the spring in my step gets me through the worst of it (with some adjustments in the presence of scree).

Works on mountain bikes, too.

It’s counter intuitive, because when fear settles in while walking the cliff’s edge the instinct is to go rigid and inch your way along in terror. But it's also old news, isn't it: like the drunk who emerges unscathed from the crash with the upright toppled and dying around him, or the reed that bends in the wind.

It's the pliable who survive.


[1] Gisela Telis, Why Bouncy Legs Work Better, Science 23 March 2010

p.s. the apes are still lumbering for a little while longer yet »

locavore

That’s why I haven’t had a cheese steak.

My brother, who’s been living in Philly for the last eight months and will most likely leave as soon as he wraps up his graduate program, when I saw him over the weekend and related to him something I had just heard from Allen Christiansen at the U Penn Maya Weekend.

Namely that, tangled up within contemporary Mayan conceptions of ancestry, is the very potent possibility that we come to know the things that matter -- histories, remedies, right ways of being -- because the blood of the ancestors resides in our blood and helps us remember these things.

But unlike the euro-centric idea of ancestry which is top heavy with begats and begottens, in the Mayan world view one isn’t born into ancestry -- ancestry is tethered to place.

Nine months is usually what it takes to make the ancestors of a place your own: a period of gestation in which you live there, eat the local food[1] and contribute to the community.

After that you are of that place and the ancestors are your ancestors -- and once the ancestors have got your back, baby: you're golden. (Provided, of course, you do your part with the prayers and the flowers and the offerings and stuff.)


[1] Corn tortilla is the food that matters most to the Maya -- it bears a powerful resemblance to the Catholic Host in their world view.

eager for the treat

Like wine, oysters take on characteristics of the terroir, so to speak, in which they are raised; the wildly different tastes result not from biology but from the variant diets, temperatures and salinity offered by the water in which the individual oysters spend their lives.

From Gem of the Ocean in the 20 December issue of the Economist.

Not too long ago I was in the Bay Area and joined a friend for dinner at an unremarkable French something or other in San Jose. He was tasked with reviewing the restaurant: dinner was on the house and the company was stellar so I happily complied.

I can't remember my entree. Duck maybe? I do remember the oysters that came before. They were from Hood Canal on the Olympic Peninsula, where my Aunt has a place, and where the beach is thick with oyster shells thrown back to the beach post-consumption where they then act as wedding beds for future generations of their kin.

I dressed my half-shell and slid it down. I was unprepared for the tears that followed: Brief and salty, like the oyster's own liquor.

The oyster tasted of home; the home I left for Chicago that for a confluence of reasons I was just then acutely missing. Like my own Madeleine the oyster contained all of that: the chill mist, the briny smell of the Puget Sound, the table surrounded by family. Surrounded by friends.

When I was living in Seattle, in the winter months, I would pick up fresh Olympias at the Pike Place Market and serve them up per Patricia Wells' direction for a simple Bordeaux fisherman's meal: oysters on the half-shell, accompanied by hand-seasoned sausage, a green salad, a crunchy loaf of bread, and a humble wine.

I served this meal to my dad once, when he was passing through town, and it may have been that we finished two humble bottles of wine but, whatever the reason, when he pushed back from the table the man who has dined with Jim Morrison at Chicago's Playboy Mansion and devoured ribs with Muddy Waters on Nob Hill said: "That was the best meal I've ever had."

And so I've posted it here for you.

Huîtres et Saucisses
From Patricia Wells' Bistro Cooking

1 dozen oysters, shells well scrubbed under cold running water, shucked
Crushed ice
8 ounces (250 g) bulk pork sausage meat
1 tablespoon fresh thyme leaves or 1 teaspoon dried
1 teaspoon crushed hot red pepper flakes
1/4 teaspoon sea salt

Place the oysters on a plate of crushed ice. Arrange the oysters balancing them so they do not lose any of their liquid. Cover loosely with aluminum foil and refrigerate. Remove the oysters 10 minutes before serving.

Ed: This would be a good time to prep that salad. Toss just before serving.

In a medium-size bowl, blend the sausage meat with the thyme (herbes de provence is also nice), pepper flakes, and salt. Mix well with your hands to blend thoroughly.

Shape the pork mixture into 4 equal-size round patties about 1/2 inch (1.5 cm) thick.

In a medium-size skillet, cook the patties over medium-high heat until golden brown on the outside and cooked all the way through, about 5 minutes on each side. Drain on paper towels.

Serve the sausages immediately, accompanied by the oysters, slices of buttered, crisp-crusted bread, and chilled white wine Or red. Per your druthers. And don't forget your choice of dressing for the oysters. I dig horseradish, cocktail sauce and Tabasco.

Serves 4.

p.s. title from the walrus and the carpenter, of course »

the mango tree

solitary mango tree across the valley
Originally uploaded by joaobambu

a found poem

her children insist
so she takes them back

there’s our house
there’s the mango tree

they shout

there is nothing to see
only an ocean of mud

Found in A Corner of Indonesia, Sinking in a Sea of Mud in this morning's New York Times.

Lilik Kamina and her family lost their village to a mud volcano that was created during exploratory oil drilling by PT Lapindo Brantas on their island of Renokenongo in Indonesia over two and a half years ago.

The land is becoming uninhabitable, inch by inch, and the air is increasingly carcinogenic. Many people of Renokenongo have lost their livelihoods; many have no where to go.

even cowgirls get the blues

Daffodils from a Kite
Originally uploaded by GoodMolecules.

In the summer of my freshman year my uncle generously gave me a job in the Skagit Valley -- a curvy waistline of landscape that lies halfway between Seattle and Vancouver, about an hour and a half distant from either.

My plan had been to spend the summer in Seattle, stay with my grandparents, and work somewhere nearby, but nobody wanted someone who’d be leaving at summer’s end and I was too lousy at lying to pretend that I’d be sticking around, so my uncle (at my aunt’s gentle suggestion) gave me an administrative job in a cable office that he was just opening up in LaConner. I needed to work: nobody was paying my college tuition but me. So I took it.

The office occupied the first two floors of an old three-story house; I lived that summer in the top floor which had a bathroom of its own, but the kitchen of course was on the main level so I always felt like I was still at the office while I was making my dinner. Or sneaking down in my PJs to make a pot of coffee before everyone else arrived.

I spent the weekends in Seattle, but the weeknights were long and quiet and mostly lonely. The noise and busy friendships of school were subsumed to silence under a single ribbon that I used to tie up the letters, so many letters, that we all wrote back and forth. (Internets being not so big back then.)

But the memories from then are sharp and vivid; loneliness has a way of doing that. After the office closed I’d ride my borrowed bike through the unending fields, that sometimes grew tulips and daffodils and often grew every other kind of wonderful produce. Once I stupidly raced a crop duster that was lowering its poison dust across the field. (yeah. check in on me in another ten years. by then the cancer should have me.)

In the long twilit nights (Pacific Northwest summer nights have a way of stretching on past 10PM) I dutifully read the Englishman Somerset Maugham (wanting to love him. hating him so much.) and guiltily, greedily read LaConner local Tom Robbins.

I was embarrassed to love Robbins as much as I did -- his stuff was so earthy and juicy and vernacular. His proximity was palpable: he lived in town, was one of our cable customers even, calling the office to complain about his service; and, as a contemporary American writer -- not someone dead and dry and removed -- I didn’t know how to squeeze him into my idea of “great literature” as a college freshman who felt like I was already running out of time to read all the “important” stuff.

Thank god for growing up and learning how true it is that even cowgirls get the blues.

Robbins wrote a lovely description of the dawn kissing that valley in one of those books which I have utterly failed to find online (I’m lazy, and I reach my limit after half a dozen misguided queries -- plus I was distracted by a sweet snippet about belly buttons).

But all of this is to say that I received in the mail yesterday a tender view to that valley, a catalog for a exhibition of photography called Harvesting Light: Images of Contemporary Skagit Farm Life, produced by the Skagit County Historical Museum and curated by a friend, Karen Marshall, who is now Director of the museum.



The book catalogs a project that was born of photographer Vince Streano’s idea to have local photographers document a year in the life of Skagit Valley Farms. Eleven photographers participated and 4,000 images were produced; a selection of these were then curated by Marshall for the show.

The results are poetic -- large sweeping landscapes, laboring hands, and the product their labor produces.

But it’s also nearly elegiac -- Skagit County farmland is disappearing, of course. The earth that we need to sustain us is being eaten up by real estate development, like it is across much of America. And without much thought. As David Hedlin, one of the local voices that pepper this volume says: “We’re basically a society whose idea of long-range thinking is buying green bananas.”

I’ll be filing a friendly complaint with Karen regarding the impossibility of buying this volume online -- it doesn’t appear to be listed with Amazon or on the Skagit County Historical Museum’s website. In the meantime I can put you in touch with her for your own copy -- or you can stop by for that cup of tea and take a look at mine while the water boils.


p.s. You can also browse the Skagit County Flickr Pool »

The pool doesn’t include shots from the show, but it will give you a sense of that beautiful place.

asbestos gelos

asbestos gelos: A term used by Homer actually. It literally means “Fireproof laughter.”

Unquenchable laughter. Invincible laughter.

And the Cretans say that he who laughs, lasts.

And they have been around a long, long time.

Robert Fulghum in Sketches of Crete, an online excerpt of his new book What on Earth Have I Done? in which he tells a great story about jogging nearly naked and unwittingly making an ass of himself in a small town on Crete.

I understand Mr. Fulghum wrote a book about Kindergarten or something a while back. Heard it sold pretty well. I don’t know much about that, but I do know I’m a fan now that I know he feels for Crete the way I do -- that there’s something about the folks who populate that island in the Mediterranean that makes it unlike many other places in the world.

I’ve only visited Crete once, and then too briefly, but every day of the journey I was met with unexpected acts of generousity -- pitchers of rosé sent to my table by smiling waving strangers in tavernas, candy bars handed to me in a firm handshake and a “welcome to Crete” from the owner behind the shop counter; good company and conversation long into the night with new friends. A little while back I was swapping stories via email with a friend of mine, and I sent him this one, about just one example of the way people operate on Crete:

so about that car on crete -- we went to crete to research a tv pilot project (never did get sold [project dried up during the divorce], but I still think it was a good idea: all about how the myths and stories of a culture are tied to the landscape. we were thinking about spinning it with a food angle too -- food of the place where the stories were told; how food guest stars in many of the stories); anyway, we were traveling with another gal, a producer, who shared my interest in Arthur Evans and the dig at Knossos -- unfortunately B had an interest in the gal -- and I was stupid enough not to figure it out until much later. (idiot.)

we rented a car in Chania with the idea that we'd cross the island -- we had the Lassithi plains in our sights because of the Diktian cave (zeus, baby-popping chronos, the whole nine yards). on one of these mornings we stopped for an early lunch at a little slip of a town, and parked the car in what, we later found out, was a no parking zone. but really: the signs were in some kind of funky greek iconography -- and if I remember it right the sign in question was orange or blue, not red like you might expect. I suppose if any of us had read up on greek road signs we would have been in a little bit better shape -- but none of us had.



when we got back to the car after having our "toast" (the ubiquitous croque monsieur of greece -- a grilled cheese and ham sandwich) there was a ticket on the windshield, from which we figured out we were probably parked somewhere we shouldn't be.

no biggie: we figured we would just mail the fee in (or maybe just forget it ever happened <sheAdmitsSheepishly/>), and we started to get into the car to go. a couple of guys hanging out at a sidewalk café waved us down at that point, and managed to explain to us -- through gestures and exclamations -- that our license plates were missing.



clearly the police were used to dealing with tourists with rental cars, and they had figured out a way to make sure the ticket was paid sooner than later. something else was becoming clear at this point: the odds of finding someone who spoke english in this little town were pretty slim.

later I would learn a little greek, but at that time all I knew was how to say "thank you", "cheese pie", and "come here, come here!" -- which I had learned just the day before from a sweet old guy who invited us into his home and showed us the scrap book of all the folks whom he had led up to this little local acropolis -- which was our destination when he called out to us: "ella, ella!" from the doorway of his home. he couldn't lead us up there because he was too old, and too lame, and it was clear that it was breaking his heart. but that's another story.

the thing about crete is that the folks are a little bit different than they are everywhere else that I've been to in greece. they think of themselves as a people apart -- they're not entirely greek; the whole Minoan ancestry influences this way of thinking, and there are also a cool ancient ties to the Balkans, and an occupation by the Venetians and then the Turks -- all of which ties together to make them a fierce little band who are ready to fight at the drop of a hat -- but it also seems to contribute to the fact that they are hugely compassionate, kind and generous. (I could back this point up with hours worth of stories; I'll save you the digression.)

all of these characteristics would soon become very important in the incident with the license plates. before long we were surrounded by a press of people who were concerned with our predicament. there was one among them who spoke some english. a young guy, without a whole lot of get up and go of his own, but who became an important liason between us and the key player -- a wirey old grandfather who pushed his way to the center of the circle and demanded to know what was going on.

the guy who spoke english explained that we were in a bit of a bind -- we certainly needed to go the police station, but he expected that no one would be there to help us out. the town was small, with only a few officers, and he expected they would be out patrolling. besides: it was nearly lunch time.

my heart sank. I had seen greek men do lunch. they start around 10, at one of the tavernas, and they wrap up around 2.30, 3 o'clock. often in groups of 5 or 6, never fewer than groups of 3. The dishes are served tapas style -- so they'll munch on a plate of little fried fish for awhile, then some calamari, then some spanokopita, maybe a little moussaka; ouzo or a rosé is an important accompaniment. in athens, for several days running, I saw a group of older guys spend the whole day at the same taverna, downing plate after plate and glass after glass. nice work if you can get it.

(just remembered I have an illustration handy -- these aren't the same guys, but they'll do:)



well, the wirey old guy figured out that we weren't about to wait -- neither did he think we should have to. he exchanged some animated words with the young guy who tried to argue with him before he finally gave up, turned to me resignedly, and said: "he'll take you".

so we loaded the guy into the car -- he got into the back seat and I can still see him leaning forward animatedly, gesturing to me where to go, where to turn, leaning out the window and shouting with exasperation to other drivers "ella, ella!" -- which I now realized had the double meaning of "get off the road, asshole!"

we parked at the police station and he took me into the station, where we found out that we were lucky -- the policeman who had our plates were there -- but they were not about to do a thing about it. they had a schedule in mind -- and they'd get back to us tomorrow. well the wirey old guy wasn't going to allow that, and he ripped them a new one, all in greek of course. I just stood there smiling, batting my eyes, and trying to look like the kind of silly american girl who they might take pity on. we were at it for a good 45 minutes. there were discussions behind closed doors. and this old guy just kept swinging for us.



finally, he prevailed. I paid a fee and the officer handed over the plates. he managed to scare up enough english to explain to me that this was highly unusual. the old guy was really pleased with himself, but also thanked the officers with a dignity and courtesy that ensured no one lost face. down on the street, after the whole thing wrapped up, I showered him with thanks and tried to offer him some money -- which he waved off -- he wouldn't even take a ride back to spot where we picked him up. he shook my hand, bowed graciously and waved goodbye. he was such a gentleman; so regal; so kind.

coming soon

Flickr Places »

Trying not to pee myself.

Yes, I'm that excited.