It’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel like eating…everything

Dana Goodyear, the editor/poet/reporter (for The New Yorker) has focused in the last couple of years on the weird edges of foodie culture of today. At least from a traditonalist's perspective, the foodie culure of today has evolved from deliciousness, to hipness, to eating what others haven't — and decadence. 

Anything that Moves is an intensely, alarmingly sensual book, but it's thoughtful as well.

In an NPR interview, Goodyear wondered:

"What does it mean that the richest people in the world are starting to eat like the survivors of a catastrophe?"

Meaning not just odd foods from traditional European cultures, such as snails and squid ink, but insects, fallopian tubes from frogs, everything up to and including bat wings and newt eyes.

Example of decadence? Goodyear mentions the annual Head to Tail at a San Francisco restaurant called Incanto, which features an appetizer of "whipped calves brains on toast, and entrees that include shaved tripe salad, pig's brain prosciutto, and lamb heart. The final savory course before dessert would be braised pig head with grilled liver and large intestine." 

Thebutchershop

[The Butcher Shop, by Joachin Beuckalaer, 1568]

Jason Epstein in this month's New York Review of Books focuses on what drives this desire to consume. He quotes Goodyear:

I see anxiety behind the hedonism…After centuries of perfecting the ritual of "civilized" dining, there is a curious backpedaling, a wilding…a post-apocalyptic free-for-all of crudity and refinement, technology and artlessness, an unimaginable future and a forgotten past. 

For an example of the anxiety, the craziness, see this great story of hers about an underground moveable kitchen called Wolvesmouth. You have to read it to believe it. 

It's disturbing, frankly, but like the on-coming car crash, you can't take your eyes off it.

From above, the food—smeared, brushed, and spattered with sauces in safety orange, violet, yolk yellow, acid green—is as vivid as a Kandinsky; from the table’s edge, it forms eerie landscapes of hand-torn meat, loamy crumbles, and strewn blossoms. Being presented with a plate of Thornton’s food often feels like stumbling upon a crime scene while running through the woods. 

If Goodyear is right, we are expressing our guilt about the apocalypse in a desire to eat — everything.

SoCal 2014 water year forecast: Dryness, but…

For California, the Department of Water Resources releases an "experimental" long-term forecast, based on ocean indices. Lead forecaster Dr. Klaus Wolter of NOAA predicts — as he did last year — dryness, but opens the door to the possibility of an El Nino developing in spring.

The forecast's three central predictions for the 2014 water year:

► Mostly dry conditions for most of California, with dry conditions being especially likely in Southern
California.
► Near-normal to drier than normal for the Colorado River Basin, an important source of water supply for Southern California, although not as dry as in water year 2013.
►A small chance of a spring shift to El Niño conditions that could bring wetter weather for Southern
California late in the season.

However, a look at a suite of projections appears a bit more promising for El Nino:

ENSOSSTtable

The forecasters write:

Most of the set of dynamical and statistical model predictions issued during late October and early November 2013 predict neutral ENSO conditions through the rest of 2013 and into early 2014, with a warming tendency during northern spring and summer 2014. Development of weak El Nino conditions appears possible by the middle of 2014. In the most recent week, the SST anomaly in the Nino3.4 region was 0.0C. Based on the multi-model mean predictions, and the expected skill of the models by start time and lead time, the probabilities (X100) for La Nina, neutral and El Nino conditions (using -0.5C and 0.5C thresholds) over the coming 9 seasons are:

Season La Ni�a Neutral El Ni�o
NDJ 2014 1% 99% ~0%
DJF 2014 3% 96% 1%
JFM 2014 4% 92% 4%
FMA 2014 5% 84% 11%
MAM 2014 5% 74% 21%
AMJ 2014 7% 59% 34%
MJJ 2014 10% 48% 42%
JJA 2014 8% 44% 48%
JAS 2014 9% 43% 48%

Another way to look at it might be — we have a substantially better chance of El Nino (which tends to mean a warmer, wetter spell) than a La Nina (which tends to mean a drier, colder conditions). 

“Beware of any endeavor that requires new clothes”: Patagonia

Yvon Chouinard, the founder of the outdoor clothing company Patagonia, quotes Thoreau in a new promotional film extolling WornWear.

He speaks of the wisdom of keeping old clothes, and not buying new ones, and gets the quote almost perfectly. To be precise, [from chapter one in Walden] the quote reads: 

I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes. All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be.

The irony is a little on the nose, but the film that profiles a number of Patagonia users, and their aged garments do support Thoreau's larger point, that clothes should serve the wearer, and not the other way around. The surfers, riders, hikers, farmers, climbers, skiers seen in the well-made little film proudly display ancient garments, often purchased at yard sales, and focus on the patches, rips, duct tape — enjoying the stories that go with the scars in their habadashery.

They don't need new clothes to become new people, as Thoreau said. 

This month's Backpacker magazine [not yet on-line] tells a similar story with a survey of users, asking which manufacturer made the best outdoor apparel — Patagonia came in at 23%, far ahead of any other maker. By holding seminars at Patagonia shops this "Black Friday" and encouraging people to bring worn gear in and learn how to repair it, as well as making really durable apparel, one has to say the company is walking the walk as well as talking the talk. 

I bring this up to introduce a really startling example of Patagonia's willingness to go the distance — an essay by one of their climbing ambassadors, Kelly Cordes, about an awful night he and a climbing buddy spent on a horrifyingly steep slope in Patagonia itself, called The Dark Hours. 

Fog swirls up from below, signaling the incoming storm. Hail taps the ultralight tarp we’ve rigged to our anchor, and we huddle closer. We rearrange the sleeping bag in a futile fight against wind that nips at us through tiny, ever-shifting openings. Our ropes snake down to the edge of the snowfield where I dangled on our last rappel, swinging across snow, ice and rock, searching for cracks, searching for anchors, as the beam of my headlamp disappeared into a terrifying darkness broken only by gentle wisps of clouds rising upward.

Cannot help but admire a climbing "ambassador" who admits his own stupidity and mistakes, and a clothing company that tries to encourage buyers not to buy new clothes.

Here's Kelly Cordes, on that terrifyingly steep slope.

Darkhours_essay_f13
 

Oddly moving to find such an example of fear and regret in a clothes catalogue. 

A great essay on a great writer: Messud on Camus

A great review will not only change your mind, but make you see — and feel — afresh.

Such is Claire Messud's essay on Albert Camus' Algerian Chronicles, in the 50th anniversary issue of the New York Review of Books. Must read!

But if you don't, here are some reasons — from Camus — why you should.

On violence for the sake of overthrowning one's oppressors:

“I merely say that we must refuse all legitimacy to violence, whether it comes from raison d’état or totalitarian philosophy. Violence is both unavoidable and unjustifiable.”

On intellectuals who justify violence:

Each side thus justifies its own actions by pointing to the crimes of its adversaries. This is a casuistry of blood with which intellectuals should, I think, have nothing to do, unless they are prepared to take up arms themselves.

On violence in politics:

“I am not made for politics,” he wrote in his notebooks in November 1945, “because I am incapable of wanting or accepting the death of the adversary.”

On the eroticism of nature:

There is only one love in this world. To embrace the body of a woman is also to hold to oneself this strange joy that descends from the sky toward the sea.

[Camus with his publisher Gallimard, not long before his death]

Camus and gallidmard 1958

Must. Read. Camus. 

Related articles

Camus will always be the outsider – and I'm proud of that, says writer's daughter
Albert Camus and the Universal Quality of Human Dignity (Column)
Camus At 100
My hero: Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer

Justice for teen killers in the U.S…and Mexico

In Ventura County in Southern California, Alex Medina, found guilty by a jury of killing another Ojai teenager, Seth Scarminach,for the benefit of a street gang, was sentenced to twenty-six years to life this week.  

Eighteen-year-old Alex Medina received the maximum sentence today for the murder of an Ojai teen in 2009. Medina was sentenced to 26 years to life in prison, with the possibility of parole, by Superior Court Judge James Cloninger.

To a full courtroom, Cloninger expressed hope that if Medina ever applies for parole, the agents take careful consideration.

"I think the defendant is a psychopath and doesn't feel one bit of remorse for the crime or the people he's burdened," Cloninger stated just before pronouncing sentence.

Medina was fourteen at the time he killed a putative rival, slashing his throat, but was tried as an adult. 

In Mexico, a teen who worked as an assassin for a drug cartel, was released after serving the maximum sentence for a juvenile — three years. From the LA Times:

MEXICO CITY — He admitted being a salaried killer for a drug cartel, the kind of assassin who preferred slashing his victims' throats.

On Tuesday, after serving three years behind bars, he was released from a Mexican detention center and was on his way to the United States — where he would soon live as a free man. 

Or, rather, a free boy.

The killer, Edgar Jimenez Lugo, known to Mexican crime reporters as "El Ponchis," is 17 years old. He was 11 when he killed his first victim, and he was 14 when he was arrested, in December 2010, at the Cuernavaca airport, along with luggage containing two handguns and packets of cocaine.

The AP version detailed his crimes a little more fully:

In 2011, at age 14, Jimenez confessed to killing four people whose beheaded bodies were found suspended from a bridge.

He was born in San Diego, California, but was raised in Mexico by his grandmother. Authorities quoted Jimenez as saying he had been forcibly recruited by drug traffickers when he was 11 and confessing to working for the South Pacific drug cartel, led by reputed drug lord Hector Beltran Leyva.

But the LA TImes version delved into the political aspect, and the changing attitudes in Mexico:

Jimenez's release is likely to rekindle the debate about the justice system's treatment of minors who commit serious crimes. In 2005, the Mexican Constitution mandated the creation of separate justice systems at the state and federal levels for offenders younger than 18.

More recently, there has been a push to take a harsher stance, exacerbated in part by the drug cartels' habit of drawing from the country's vast pool of poverty-stricken, poorly educated children to form their ranks.

In March, Morelos lawmakers increased the maximum sanction for children who commit serious crimes so that a suspect like Jimenez would serve five years, not three, behind bars, a change that came about as a result of his case. In July, the state of Veracruz went further, raising the maximum penalty for 14- to 16-year-olds from four years to 10 years of incarceration, with 16- to 18-year-olds now facing the possibility of 15 years.

Such changes have concerned some children's rights groups, but the clamor is not likely to die down. Javier Lozano, a senator with the conservative National Action Party, or PAN, sent a series of Twitter messages on Tuesday asking Mexicans to consider lowering the minimum age for trying children as adults.

"The liberation of 'Ponchis' speaks of a perverse system in which under the pretext of being a minor, one can be an assassin, but not a criminal," he wrote.

In the trial of Medina [which I covered] the focus was on his psychology: Was he a victim of abuse, as the defense tried to show, or a psychopath, as the prosecution alleged?

The answer from the judge and jury: Psychopath.

In the case of Jiminez, the boy's psychology — judging from the reporting — seems to have been besides the point. Although evidence suggested that Lugo's parents fought, neither story said he had been abused himself, and with a million underage youths at risk of being recruited to work for drug cartels, amidst much poverty, perhaps psychology doesn't matter so much.  

Not sure which nation has a better grip on the question of how to handle boys who kill. But I can't imagine freeing after a short sentence anyone who confessed to beheading four people.

[Here's a file photo of Edgar "El Ponchis" Lugo in custody.]

El Ponchis

 

Global warming conference in Geneva “fizzles”: LA Times

Sometimes a picture is enough:

Climate-debate-rich-poor-nations-2013-001

The AP photo depicts the French president, the Japanese Prime Minister, the American President, and the German Chancellor unable to agree. 

An LA Times story tells of how the conference "fizzled to an inconclusive end," but allowed the conferees to avoid the embarrassment of total failure. 

Nice puppets, tho. 

The “monstering” of tamarisk: How the government “found” water for a big copper producer in wartime by vilifying a plant

In her recently published book, The Rambunctious Garden, Emma Marris blithely whirled readers through a whole new world of ideas about conservation. 

She wants us to give up on the notion of a pristine world untouched by man, and accept nature's half-wild state today — as long as we are half-wild ourselves. 

Along the way, she introduces all sorts of fascinating people, New Conservationists one might call them, and plenty of startling new ideas. 

An example: Tamarisk, or salt cedar, widely accounted a villain today, according to scientists and government bureaucrats, but scientists working for the government introduced this plant to the Southwest in the 19th century, and advocated for its propagation for three quarters of a century, before abruptly changing their minds for a particular reason involving the Phelps-Dodge Corporation. Marris points out the irony — and the hypocrisy — and suggests maybe tamarisk deserves compassion.   

And she points out a paper, The Monstering of Tamarisk: How scientists made a plant into a problem, by Matthew Chew of the Center for Biology and Society at Arizona State University. 

This paper turns out to challenge a central tenet around which a wilderness group of which I am a member has been organized — the journeying into the wilderness to remove and eradicate by violent but non-chemical means the plant tamarisk. 

So I read the paper, and it changes my mind. This is the rarest sort of scientifc paper; more than readable, it's startling. Data, history, facts, sources — this paper has all the academic credentials. 

And it's well-written. Examples? Glad you asked….

The story of tamarisk (Tamarix spp.), flowering trees and shrubs imported to New England sometime before 1818, provides an example of scientific "monstering" and shows how slaying the monster, rather than allaying its impacts, became a goal in itself. 

This is an account of scientists creating a monster; not by asesmbling and reanimating one as envisioned by Mary Shelley, but by declaring that an organism one presumed tractable was flouting human intentions, and recasting it as malevolent. 

Today when unhappy outcomes arise [from the re-dispersal of biota] we are used to specialists blaming the biota by labeling them "alien" and "invasive," declaring that taxa refusing to defer to putative prior claims are unbelonging and even morally defective, reconfiguring both the discourse and objectives of science. 

My purpose is to iluminate episodes in the process by which a plant taxon once valued for particular inherent qualities was subsequently devauled and disparaged for very nearly the same reasons. 

Thousans of acres of tamarisk had to be using lots of water, so eliminating them had to yield some benefits, however hard to predict. Pecos personnel knew of some ways to kill tamarisk, and their knowledge was visible and measurable in acres of dead vegetation. A water pumping, water-wasting monster was attacking the Pecos River. In some minds, confidence was high that it could literally be slain. However, confidence was lower that the water it was stealing could actually be recovered. as a result. 

[Turns out, Chew says, that tamarisk colonized the Pecos River, and it turned out that the Phelps-Dodge Corporation wanted to develop a huge copper mine on the river in the l930's that needed water…which they "found," with the government's active assistance, by destroying tamarisk, using flame-throwers. Not to mention 2.4.5-T, aka Agent Orange. ]

The monstering of tamarisk required the kinds of organizaiton and impetus that only the federal government could provide in that era. 

Tamarisk was a convenient scapegoat for the complex problems encountered by government water managers, be they true believers in the monster or otherwise. Even so, it does not seem to have mattered strongly to the principals whether suppressing tamarisk ever made more actual "wet water" available. They could demonstrate productivity in acres of vegetation laid waste, again and again, while suppressing or simply ignoring the substantial doubts lingering over their theories, methods, and mandate. Monstering tamarisk was far from a superstitious exercise. It was an effective way to perpetuate a program. 

Tamchi1624020

Hard to believe a plant so beautiful could be so evil. 

Sexy “rock art” in the Sespe wilderness: 2013

While I'm working up a post on "invasion biology," the monstering of tamarisk, and what it means for us to care for our local wilderness in the 21st century, I cannot resist posting this daring "rock art" photographed just this week in the Sespe Wilderness….

Rockartsespe

I wonder who the anonymous rock artist is — I took this picture on Monday in a canyon above Fillmore, so he or she or they live amongst us, almost certainly, right here in Ventura County.