Japan

I have had a very hard time (who hasn't?) wrapping thoughts around the horrors in Japan over the last week or so. It's been difficult enough to understand what happened in Haiti, Chile, New Zealand (twice), Indonesia and Thailand. Of all of them, Japan, as the world's third largest economy and a very technologically advanced country, is easily the best prepared to recover economically.  Its one-two punches were bad enough without the third and probably most serious punch of nuclear meltdown and the looming potential for persistent environmental radiation. On top of that are the multiplying effects of massive long-term loss of power generating capacity; think of what that means for heating, cooling, industry, schools, hospitals, the arts and sciences...All of this on top of appalling loss of life. 

This is too much to internalize. To help me in my contemplation, I looked back to a notebook from my one and only visit to Japan, in September of 1983. This trip followed the second of two academic sojourns through the People's Republic of China with my then husband, a physicist much in demand as a speaker at Asian universities (see The China Diaries and They say, but she saw, for example). My first diary entry compared 1983 Japan to China, which was still, though increasingly rapidly, crawling out from under the end of Maoist government and the Cultural Revolution:

The contrast between Japan and China is almost incomparable. This is a country of things that work, of good design, of neatness and cleanness, of riches and abundance, of cleverness and great practicality. The international terminal of Narita [airport] is easy to cope with, highly automated, simplified, and every announcement, written or verbal, appears in English as well as Japanese. Except for our plethora of heavy luggage, getting from the airport by shuttle bus to the Keisei train for a one hour smooth-as-silk ride to Ueno Station, was really easy and amazingly convenient. 

The next day I wrote:

Japan continues to charm us with its convenience, cleanness, and the ease with which we can get around here. This morning we took the famous Bullet Train (Shin Kan Sen line) from Tokyo Station, with one two-minute stop at Nagura, to Kyoto.... The hotel here is classier [than the one in Tokyo], and thus our room is a little bigger. And our little red Hitachi color T.V. is free here—in Tokyo it was “coin-op.” We have the same kind of bathroom, a practical little metal box that looks like it came off a ship and was installed as a water-proof and fire-proof unit in one corner of our room. Here we are also each provided with a toothbrush in a sealed plastic container—also included is a tiny plastic tube of super minty “Happy White Dental Creme” with each. We also once again got a long kimono [printed cotton  yukata] each, plus one short men’s kimono meant to be used as a kind of Japanese equivalent to a British “smoking jacket.  

And in spite of yawning cultural and linguistic gulfs, I noted:

We’ve found that it is easy to communicate by gesture here. Sometimes in China we had more trouble doing so, but the Japanese always seem to understand what we are up to in no time.

Obviously, we were delighted. That night:

We had dinner at a little Japanese-style restaurant in the hotel. We decided to try real tempura, and while waiting for our entrees were brought a bowl of a clear and good-smelling liquid with it. In Chicago tempura is customarily served with a clear soup [miso] and a small bowl of dark-colored strongly flavored salty dipping sauce. Since we weren’t sure whether this lovely liquid was soup or sauce, I volunteered to sip a little while my husband, who was sitting in clear view of the waitresses standing in front of the sushi bar, kept a watch to see if anyone was looking at the American hicks. I sipped a little and (sincerely) declared it to be a delicious soup. Whereupon Bob picked up his bowl to take a gulp—he was instantly spotted by a cook and the waitresses, one of whom came over, amidst her colleagues’ obviously stifled giggles, to straighten us out—the liquid, she demonstrated, was for dipping, not for drinking! It was very funny. In China nobody ever has bad manners, but here we feel like we’re all elbows half the time. 

It was a beautiful country of happy people. What will it be now?       

       

Saying good-bye to winter

 I know a lot of people would tell me I need a psychiatric referral when I say this, but I love winter (there! I said it!) and I'm sorry to see it go. And going it is, no doubt about it, the days are quickly getting longer (though my early morning constitutional, now amply light before I return home, will be in the dark again as of tomorrow, because it's time for the clocks to spring forward tonight--another sign, be it socio-political, that the season is changing). A friend says crocus leaves are already peeping up in the sunny parts of her back yard. The average daily high in Chicago is in the high 30s or low 40s. I looked up at some bare branches yesterday morning and I'm sure they've got telltale swellings hinting that leaves will be bursting forth momentarily (well, in Chicago, I'm pretty sure they have a full month to go before they do, if they have any sense at all). Oh, yeah, Ma Nature could still do it again, she's been known to dump a foot of snow on us in April, and it's still only mid-March. But I'm going to miss winter. I loved the beauty our February blizzard bestowed. I watch webcams on top of high Yellowstone and Grand Teton peaks all the time. This one is at the fire lookout on top of Mount Washburn in Yellowstone, a great hike in clement weather, but unoccupied in winter. The cam slipped its mooring and instead of gazing out over the mountain's shoulder, the grand canyon of the Yellowstone River, and beyond like it's supposed to, it's neatly focused on the railing outside the lookout. How about those fanstastic crystal formations? Winter, I look forward to spring, summer and fall, and to seeing you again in full cold force next year!

A lot going on in a little space

Noticed this very busy vignette at the bus stop this morning. There's a lot going on. For starters, the white box holds an emergency telephone that goes to the University of Chicago police, which is the biggest force, second only to the Chicago Police Department, in the city, and which takes the concerns of community safety very seriously. Click on the photo to enlarge it to contemplate all the details. The call box has obviously been in place for a while but the pink-and-yellow urban "folk-art" item is new. Be sure to check out the background as well. 

As it happened, or as staged?

Turn on your sound for a big clue.

What's real, and what's not, and does it really matter?

Captive or wild? *

Wildlife lovers, do yourselves a favor and read this article, What's Real And What's Not Behind Reality TV's Nature Shows? For some time I have been aware of the ethical issues presented in the article, for example, recently there was lively discussion on the matter among the letters to the editor of Wyoming Wildlife. There really are two sides to the story, in the sense that if the purpose of wildlife filming/photography is to educate, then it seems justifiable to use game farm animals or "rent-a-wildlife" like Bart the Bear actor, as long as the animals are treated properly, although I also think it is reasonable for the viewers to be notified.
I personally know several superb wildlife photographers, including Doug Dance (still photography), who works extremely hard to capture un-manipulated natural reality in all its exquisiteness, and Bob Landis, film-maker/videographer par excellence, who likewise works night and day, every day of the year, at his craft, and who never, ever uses captive animals no matter how expeditious it might be to achieve results. But neither Doug nor Bob works under the thumb of the corporate media and their schedules can attune to that of the natural world they portray so well. For the moment, I will not chime in on the reality, or not, of the human wilderness survival "reality" shows, nor on that of any other "reality" TV.

Please leave your comments, this issue is not straightforward and bears more, much more, discussion. 

*Taken at West Yellowstone's wonderful Grizzly and Wolf Discovery Center. Is it 100% obvious these wolves are captive?

Musings on Bloggings

Like most bloggers I think, I enjoy and appreciate comments, even those from the rare troll; I eventually edited the comments from Fiddledeedee, deleting all of my own responses – which I tried to couch calmly and rationally–and a few of his/her less-than-diplomatic answers. As  is frequently so in such cases, Fiddledeedee’s topic quickly turned from asserting the apparently inviolable value of cultural relativity to the failings of my character. Nonetheless, I decided to leave a few choice remarks in situ for posterity.  [Sorry about the dead links on that post, it’s a hazard of long-term blogging.]

Sometimes, though, my posts elicit comments emailed rather than appended. Two particularly wonderful ones rolled in last month.

The first was from the affable Fem Bromley, a Netherlands ex-pat living in Canada. She wrote about my 2009 post on the lovely work of the Dutch naturalist  H.J. Slijper, about whom I knew almost nothing. She said [lightly edited for clarity]:

“I saw your postcard pictures of Henk Slijper. I'm Dutch and thought you would like to know a little about him. He passed away in 2007 after he had a few strokes. I knew him very well I took care of his mother for 9 years, and he came often home with his falcon on his shoulder. He was a very nice man and a very good painter. He spent some time in jail as he was involved during the second world war with the  resistance, and got caught.”

She was able to go on to give me more information about his career and reputation:

“He had expositions in AMERICA in 1981,1982,1983,1987,1989 (Birds in Art) at Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum.  Also there are a few books out with his drawings. Henk also painted for the laboratory in water colour for illness in plants and bulbs, painted for catalogues for the companies of tulip bulbs. Henk worked together with Prince Bernhard for the nature foundation. He was awarded by the Royal Horticultural Society in London with the Silver Gilt Grenfell Medal. ALSO WAS AWARDED with the Silver Anjer in the Netherlands.”

With these details, and especially with the knowledge of his first name Henk (the postcards are attributed only to H.J. Slijper) Google turned up more interesting information about the artist whom I feared was obscure, underappreciated, and unknown outside of Holland. Among his enduring legacies are his designs for falconry hoods, as it happens, another interest of mine.

The second email came from a relation of the family that owned the children's German language camp, Landheim von Specht, that I wrote a little about over the Thanksgiving weekend last year. In that case, I provided her with entirely new information about her family's story, something I found very gratifying and hope someday someone will do for me about mine.

 Her initial inquiry was:

“I'm a relative of the ‘von Specht’ family in Starnberger See, but have never heard about the ‘Landheim von Specht.’ Was it run by someone with the family name ‘von Specht’? I'd be curious if you could tell me more about it.”

The next day I answered, “...as I was only 13 years old at the time, I don't believe I could now recall (if I ever knew) the first names of ‘Frau und Herr von Specht’ but they seemed to me to be very elderly at the time they were running the international children's German language camp. Herr was bedridden, Frau was vigorous. They had a kennel of several Afghan hounds, all of whom...were named Rahu. As you can tell from the photo, the estate was right by the lake, directly across the road from it as I remember. The reference to Landheim von Specht came from the back of one of my photographs, in my childish handwriting....”

She responded “...So the Landheim was definitely run by a Herr and Frau ‘von Specht’ or possibly just a couple by the name of ‘Specht’? ... At the time my relative Joachim von Specht born 1894 lived with this wife in Ambach am Starnberger See. We only know him as an ‘author’, but maybe this family was running the Landheim?”

So it seems even my distant childhood memories have added substantively to her efforts to reconstruct her personal past. What an unexpected reward of blogging!

Niña, a red-tailed hawk at the 2006 SOAR (Save Our American Raptors) Lady Hawkers fund raiser, Earlville, Illinois

Aftermath

Just a few random shots, post Taken by Storm...the Storm started the afternoon of Tuesday, February 1, and ended the afternoon of Wednesday, February 2. The first three photos were taken the morning of Thursday, February 3, when the city started to come back to life. The fourth pic was from that evening; the storm had scrubbed the sky clean. The last photo is from today, Saturday February 5. There are massive piles of snow everywhere the plows have been, causing especially large vehicles like city buses untold misery coming around corners and the like. 

Digging out, the morning after it was all over

A little pathway

Stuck in a berm (two more days before that car in the middle of the road got out)

Gorgeous evening...snow on top of the ice, Lake Michigan (and still no traffic on Lake Shore Drive)

After the snow plows...those two cars are lucky, with a little digging they might actually get out of their spaces.

Taken by storm

There are only two things being reported on the Chicago area news: the revolution in Egypt, and the Storm of The Century in Chicago.
It was not a tempest in a teacup. It was a TEMPEST. Was? Is. It's still carrying on outside, though from my 11th floor condo perspective, things have settled down extraordinarily since last night, when it peaked. Well, I'm not sure I would say it peaked, in the usual sense of a point on a line graph at the top between steep upward and downward slopes. It plateaued, raging unchanged for hours and hours and hours.

We can't say we weren't warned. For the last 48 hours all radio and TV channels trumpeted warnings: The Storm of the Century is coming! The sky is falling! Sixteen to 24 inches of snow! Dangerous gale-force winds! How often this kind of anticipatory hyperbole is deflated when in actuality we manage to pile up 4 or 5 inches of snow. This time, they were right, and the prediction has so far been phenomenally accurate. The winter storm warning went into effect at 3:00 p.m. yesterday, just about the time I arrived home. The president of the organization I work for had sent around an email with subject, "Winter storm event" (so that's it's called!) suggesting people leave while the going was good, and announcing that we are to work from home today, so here I am, signing off the blog momentarily to carry on the good fight.

But before I go, I have to say, I've never experienced anything like last night's storm. The wind coming unimpeded off of Lake Michigan seemed to blast right through my (modern, industrial-strength, double-paned, heavy aluminum-framed) windows at high velocity, making it uncomfortably cold and creepily noisy to sit anywhere near them. Somewhere deep inside my building, a 15-story mid-century mid-rise, something set to vibrating at about the same frequency of a jet flying within hearing range overhead, the oddest, steadiest background hum I've ever heard in the the 23 years I've lived here. The view outside was so whited-out that it wasn't possible to see snow, only occasional long cloud-like streams of scintillating moisture shooting past horizontally against the background glowing gray from the city lights.  I kept thinking of the early Arctic explorers, imagining homesteaders in their sod houses on the Dakota plains, stray kittens huddling in alleyways, and above all, Chicago's homeless unwilling to go to shelters. Soon we'll know how many did not survive Chicago's Storm of the Century.

I'm sorry, but I really don't find it charming or funny

Yesterday afternoon I attended Lyric Opera of Chicago’s La Fanciulla del West (The Girl of the Golden West), Puccini’s classical opera, his only (among Madama Butterfly, La Boehme, Tosca, and others) with a physically and morally strong female lead, many amusing touches, and with a happy ending.  Like that of many operas, the plot is light duty: it takes place during the gold rush of California’s Sierra Nevada, and, to make a long story short, involves the sole woman at the mining camp, the good-hearted Minnie, finding true love with a bandit that her golden devotion is sure to reform. As a fellow audience member quipped about this light drama, sung in Italian and written from the remove of early 20^th century Europe, “It’s the original spaghetti western!”

The lively production was directed by the renowned Harold Prince, with stage direction by Vincent Liotta; the evocative sets were designed by Eugene Lee, and the exquisite and convincing costumes were by Franne Lee. The vocal star was Deborah Voight, beautiful and believable in spite of her real-life maturity, among other well and lesser known performers, nearly all male. I also enjoyed the music–not just Puccini’s yummy score, but Lyric Opera orchestra’s performance, reliably and beautifully directed by Sir Andrew Davis.

There was, however, a blot on the afternoon’s fantasy, and one that might have been avoided. A minor character (though he stuck out for me like a sore thumb), Billy Jackrabbit, is described by Puccini as “a red Indian,” meaning, of course, a Native American. The first act takes place in the Polka, the bar and, and, as it were, community center of the mining camp. There, Billy’s role is to behave like a stereotypical drunken Indian, trying endlessly to swipe some whiskey, by the glass or by the bottle, for a little comic action; in a later setting, he has one more opportunity to celebrate alcohol, when he gives in to Minnie’s plea that he marry the Indian woman with whom he has a baby, and announces loudly, “After marrying, we get beads and whiskey!” He’s presented as a morally deficient drunk with laughably (literally) simplistic values.

The plot requires the miners to regularly voice their appreciation for whiskey as well, but alcohol addiction was not quite the problem for the miners of European heritage (“Anglos”) and their descendants, that it was, and still is, for those of American Indian ethnicity. Of all the stereotypes required to successfully mount an opera (or any stage drama for that matter), I wish the producers had had a bit more sensitivity to this particularly painful and destructive one. Alcohol use and abuse has devastated more than one Indian family, sometimes taking whole communities with it, and is a plague that was intentionally wreaked by the Anglos from the earliest colonial times to control the troublesome “redskins”who, it seems, may have widespread genetic susceptibility to alcohol addiction.

The producers of this opera could easily have played down the buffoonish portrayal of what is truly a sad, sick and unfunny stereotype without betraying Puccini’s plot or libretto. I rather wish they hadn’t missed the chance.

Full disclosure: One very old friend, of pure American Indian heritage, died in 2005 after a long, wasted life addicted to alcohol. And he is not the only one among friends I held dear who has died from drinking. Maybe my sensitivity is tuned too high. But it’s also the reason I understand how hellish an affliction alcoholism is.

I love coffee

And so did Johan Sebastian Bach, listen to his charming rendition of the last chorus of his Kaffee Kantata:

Bach's lyrics are so silly as to be nearly incomprehensible (especially when translated into English), but for the intrepid, here they are, in part.  

And if you like your coffee wonderfully sweetened, just listen to Natalie Cole singing a little bit of Coffee Time:

Free music - Coffee Time

Here are the lyrics:

Coffee time
My dreamy friend
It's coffee time
Let's sing
This silly
Little rhyme
And have
A cup of coffee

Java time
My happy chum
Let's have a time
We'll celebrate
For just a dime
And have
A cup of coffee

Greetin' time
The music box
Is beatin' time
It's good
Old-fashioned
Meetin' time
We're in the pink
So come and clink
And let's drink
A cup of coffee

Coffee time
My dreamy friend
It's coffee time
Let's sing
This silly
Little rhyme
And have
A cup of coffee

Coffee time
My dreamy friend
It's coffee time
Let's sing
This silly
Little rhyme
And have
A cup of coffee
And have
A cup of coffee
And have
A cup of coffee

All of this makes me thirsty for my ritual morning brew: Starbucks Espresso Roast, made in my ancient-falling-apart-dearly-treasured macchinetta, poured into a cuppa hot milk for a real Puerto Rican-style café con leche. Not just a great way to start the day: it's the only way!

Sea life meets human life

As much as I love beautiful scenery, mountains and water, geological wonders and amazing plant life (think minuscule flowering flora clinging for dear life flat to the ground at 10,000 feet and their distant cousins, the grandest sequoias) for me, nothing rewards the spirit  like watching "charismatic megafauna" (as referred to by those charged with managing both the wildlife and the humanlife that comes in droves to view, and sometimes get in trouble with it). At the top my list are the grizzly and black bears, wolves, and cats when I'm in the mountain west. At the top when I'm in Sanibel, Florida, are the Atlantic bottlenose dolphins. Like many other top-of-the-list, top-of-the-food-chain predators, they can be very difficult to view, because their element is not our element. Fortunately, though, like just a few other predators (e.g., bears and our garbage, wolves and our livestock) they are attracted by certain human activities. But unlike other wildlife, dolphins exhibit apparent curiosity about us and our water-going contraptions. In Sanibel this December, we took the best dolphin-viewing boat tour ever. Not that it's necessary to be out in a boat to view them--they're not hard to spot from shore for those who watch. A fellow beach-comber told me she was once very startled to see one slide up on the sand and then back into the water. This one was only, who knows, maybe 50 yards from the beach at lighthouse. 

 

This one was a bit farther out. I hope all those people on the beach below the lighthouse were enjoying the show!

As the tour operators know, there are certain speeds at which the churning propellers attract the dolphins if they're not busy feeding (though that is also very fun to watch as they splash and roil around in a school of confused and terrified mullet, sometimes tossing a fish into the air before consuming it). As frequently depicted through history, dolphins around the world have always been interested in the disturbance humans and their vessels make in their watery world:

Depiction of Dionysus among the dolphins by Exekias, c. 530 B.C.

How could we believe otherwise than that this one was checking us out?

Why, exactly, they engage in such entertaining acrobatics in the presence of a foaming wake is not clear, even to experts.  It seems possible these intelligent mammals do it for joy. Note the one on the left is completely upside down:

If you're built to withstand enormous belly flops, then this is for you:

They even teach their children what do when the tour boats come through:

May its passing be not unremarked

Fish market Hong Kong 1980

Guangondese (Cantonese) folk dance demonstration 1983

Wisconsin 1982

Wisconsin 1982

Kinkaku Temple Kyoto 1983

Tourism at the Grand Canyon 1985

The waters of Puerto Rico 1979

I used to go through it like candy: Kodachrome 64, best slide film ever made. Now that it's no longer possible to get it developed anywhere on earth, many are sadly bemoaning its passing. And many would agree with me, that the colors and vibrancy of the images it captured were unparalleled: accurate skin tones, reds and blues, such sharpness and liveliness. Above are just a few scanned slides, muddied a little by age and repeated showings in front of a hot projector lamp, tweaked a smidgen with PhotoShop to bring back some of their original vigor. Click to enlarge and fully enjoy them. The camera  was a (very rare) split-focal screen Nikormat FTN, with 50 mm f2, 28 mm f2.8, and most wonderful of all, 135 mm f 2.8 Nikkor lenses (long before you could do all that with a single zoom).

Oh yes, I do love digital photography. If nothing else, it's surely easier to organize my photos, and God willing, the images will falter less with time. The image below is among the very first I ever took with my digital camera, a Nikon D70, in 2004.