So we had a tropical storm here yesterday night, which made me happy (despite the discovery of a leaking roof) because it really cooled this place down a lot. The housemate says, though, that this won’t last and we will be sweating our butts of again in no time, but for now I’m just enjoying the breeze. The amount of rain was crazy, though – torrential! It was kinda scary.
And despite the storm we went to a house-warming party of a German woman who managed to find an apartment right in the middle of the ghetto. It turned out to be fun, though, but I was surprised by the amount of hard liquor and lack of beer. I was offered a Jack & Coke and kept that glass for the entire evening, because I’m really not big on drinking and definitely not big on the hard stuff. And I haven’t had Coke and whiskey since I was sixteen-years-old and it was weird to taste it again. However, we had fun and the people were nice and the house is indeed very beautiful. One of the neighbors came over and rapped about dating women over the internet and jerking off. And it was a long rap – is this what you call it? Oh, and he also thought something – I don’t remember what it was – would be the ‘most best’ thing ever. Now, I’m a foreigner, but even I know that doesn’t really work. But enough of that.
*****
As some of you might remember, one of my short- to intermediate goals is to plant a garden or at least start growing some of my own food. This is turning out to be a little more complicated here than I thought it would be, which is partly due to our landlady’s restrictions and a manic lawnmowerman who apparently can’t tell the difference between a rose bush and weeds and mows over both of them without a second thought. Now, this can be circumvented by using pots, right, but this town being what it is it is insanely difficult to get these things without a car. Yep, you guessed right: Car? I don’t haz it. So I have to figure out a way to get around this. There is also a patch right next to the porch that could be used, but it is insanely dry and gets way too much sun (I think) so the first steps would involve soil improvement, maybe using mulch and woodchips. Again, a logistical problem. I’ll keep you updated how that project will develop, maybe I’ll end up ordering this stuff, which is not my first choice, but…well, what can you do? In the meantime, I’m reading this book on gardening by Steven Solomon and see what I can come up with.
Okay, I’d have to admit that I have that romantic (probably German) streak that kind of gets a kick out of the idea of getting off the grid. Sadly, I’m not too much of a handyman, so I guess that possibility is somewhat far fetched, but still. The documentary linked to above is about and by Les Stroud (see here for his official website), building a house and self-sufficient system in order to get ‘off the grid’ and on the – well on what? It’s a great docu anyway, so try to catch it as long as its available.
Look out the window while you’re driving through the rural American Southwest. You’ll see the stark beauty of the landscape, but what you won’t see is the underground community a few miles in the distance. They inhabit this stunning, yet unfriendly territory. The Mesa has no access to the electricity grid and it’s not patrolled by a police force. There is no official rule of law. However, many residents are extremely patriotic and believe in the basic tenants of the U.S. Constitution. This post-modern wild west is a haven for American Veterans suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and Gulf War Syndrome. Teenage runaways are also drawn here for the sense of anarchy, anonymity and freedom. Fueled by the growth and distribution of Marijuana, the Mesa has developed an underground economy all its own. But marijuana’s legal status has brought increasing government surveillance. A recent police raid solidified anti-government sentiment. Anti-establishment beliefs are tested when a group of rebel runaways called “the nowhere kids” begins to stockpile weapons and steal food from neighboring residents. The community is challenged to find common ground in order to protect themselves against this dangerous faction. Residents form a council, and hold a hearing to deal with the thieves. This self-imposed government is the very thing they have come to the Mesa to escape.
I’ll try to watch it, but chances that it’ll come out here are slim… ‘Off the Grid’ also has a MySpace page, so you can get more info and watch some trailers there. For more info on ‘Survivalism,’ the Wikipedia entry seems to be a good starting point.
As I said before, I’m not much of a spelunker, but reading this article and looking at these pictures I’m definitely reconsidering my options. BLDGBLOG posted a long interview with Michael Cook, a Canadian writer, photographer, and urban explorer. Sadly, his website, Vanishing Point, seems to be offline, offers plenty of info, but the interview is a very interesting read and is definitely recommended. Plus, the pictures are beautiful. Here’s an interview snip:
BLDGBLOG: A lot of these places look like surreal, concrete versions of all the streams and rivers that used to flow through the city. The drains are like a manmade replacement, or prosthetic landscape, that’s been installed inside the old one. Does the relationship between these tunnels and the natural waterways that they’ve replaced interest you at all?
Michael Cook: Oh, definitely – ever since I got into this through exploring creeks. At their root, most drains are just an abstract version of the watershed that existed before the city. It’s sort of this alternate dimension that you pass into, when you step from the aboveground creek, through the inlet, into the drain – especially once you walk out of the reach of daylight. Even sanitary sewers often follow the paths of existing or former watersheds, because the grade of the land is already ideal for water flow – fast enough, but not so fast that it erodes the pipe prematurely – and because the floodplains are often unsuitable for other uses.
If you google ‘urban exploration’ you’ll get a number of results, so getting general info (and ogle some great pictures) is not hard at all. Urban Explorers, Sub-Urban, and Infiltration seem to be good places to start, if only for pictures. The latter also offers a section on ‘ethics’. But be careful, you might discover rivers of red slime, like the guys in Ghostbusters 2!!!
I came across this amazing blog/website called The Proceedings of the Athanius Kircher Society the other day and, I’d have to tell you, was blown away by its awesomeness. I’d never heard of Athanius Kircher before, but it turns out, he was a 17th-century German Jesuit scholar who published around 40 works, most notably in the fields of ‘oriental studies’, geology and medicine. He was compared to Leonardo Da Vinci and seems to have been a ’scientific star’ in his life-time, which spanned 1602-1680.
So, the Kircher Society was, according to their website,
chartered to perpetuate the spirit and sensibilities of the late Athanasius Kircher, SJ. Our interests extend to the wondrous, the curious, the singular, the esoteric, and the sometimes hazy frontier between the plausible and the implausible — anything that Father Kircher might find inspiring if he were alive today. Records of our proceedings are maintained for the public’s edification.
Now, all of this Renaissance references might make you think that the Proceedings are kind of boring, but believe me: they aren’t. Where else could you find an entry on Galileo’s Middle Finger, which had been propped up in a glass sphere as a relic?
The finger was removed by one Anton Francesco Gori on March 12, 1737, 95 years after Galileo’s death. Passed around for a couple hundred years it finally came to rest in the Florence History of Science Museum. Today is sits among lodestones and telescopes, the only human fragment in a museum devoted entirely to scientific instruments. It is hard to know how Galileo would have felt about the final resting place of his finger. Whether the finger points upwards to the sky, where Galileo glimpsed the glory of the universe and saw God in mathematics, or if it sits eternally defiant to the church that condemned him, is for the viewer to decide.
But this is only one of the wonderful things you are going to find browsing the entries. I was especially fascinated by an older post concerning Arborsculpture, which can be found here.
Weisman describes how millions of gallons of water under New York City, unchecked by pumps, would flood the subways. “Within 20 years, the water-soaked steel columns that support the street above the East Side’s 4,5 and 6 trains corrode and buckle. As Lexington Avenue caves in, it becomes a river.” Meanwhile, pavements would be breaking apart as ice expands in cracks. Weeds and potent invaders like ailanthus, with no city maintenance crews to stop them, would wreak havoc. Lightning fires would start, and gas mains ignite. As skyscrapers’ windows break, water would corrode even concrete floors. Subbasements would weaken. High winds from hurricanes, more powerful in the future, would topple giant buildings. Bridges, their unpainted joints cracking as they expand, would collapse. The strongest, like arch railroad bridges, could last 1,000 years, although earthquakes could bring them down. Even the gigantic garbage fills on Staten Island would finally disappear, when the next Glacier Age returned.
Interested? The above snip comes from a review at Salon of Alan Weisman’s book “The World Without us.” At first I was a little sceptica, but on the second page of the review it kind of got me. After describing what would happen to all our artifacts – houses, cities, etc. – he goes on to describe the changes in nature. Imported plant species would die out or revert to more primitive forms and wolves, bear, and coyotes would return. But the book is apparently not simply apocalyptic pornography, but develops an intellectual mindgame about, well, what would happen if we would all just disappear. And he asks some fundamental questions:
Why did humans appear? Was it inevitable that they did? And if we vanished, could we reappear again? The crucial element here is ice: It was an ice age, Weisman argues, that led certain apes to leave the forest and venture onto the savannah, where eventually they became hominids. There was nothing inevitable about this, he implies, and nothing inevitable about it ever being repeated. If humans disappear, he writes, baboons stand as good a chance as any species of making the evolutionary leap — and it’ll take another ice age to drive them into the open.
So history could repeat itself, huh? That’s a creepy idea and makes me think instantly of the Planet of the Apes. But the biggest freak-out concerns plastic and I won’t give it away, so you have to go ahead and read the review for yourself.
The image at the beginning of this post is by a Japanese artist named Motoda Hisaharu, more of whose work you can find here. There is not that much info on his website, but here’s a snip:
In his Neo-Ruins series Motoda depicts a post-apocalyptic Tokyo, where familiar landscapes in the central districts of Ginza, Shibuya, and Asakusa are reduced to ruins and the streets eerily devoid of humans. The weeds that have sprouted from the fissures in the ground seem to be the only living organisms. “In Neo-Ruins I wanted to capture both a sense of the world’s past and of the world’s future,” he explains.
This blog is updated more or less frequently, but not daily, and I post more personal stuff here. There is also an additional incarnation of this blog on Tumblr, called Bearded Dave @ Tumblr, which I'm using to post little notes, pictures, etc. that I come across and think are neat. You can also follow the Grumpy German on Twitter or Friendfeed. Go nuts!
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