Class Distinction

It’s a process that few would understand. Certainly not the realtor who sat under the chandelier and proclaimed that the house and property we rent could sell for over $300,000 as it is now (in need of much renovation and central air) if the empty side yard is big enough to build another house on.

Sitting with a more understanding friend under that same chandelier, I explained it thusly: We keep four of the bulbs in it loose enough to not shine, and the fifth tightened until it does shine. That is a bright enough light for that room, though being a point-source, it casts stagey horror-flick shadows. When that light burns out, we tighten another, making it glow until it burns out.

“How many housemates do you have here?” said my friend.

I told him five.

“So each housemate could be responsible for one,” he said.

Yes, I said. And when all five have burned out, then it’s time to change the filter in the Brita pitcher, I said.

It’s a beautiful process. And yet, like the realtor, whatever sucker buys this heap of bricks for $300,000 certainly would not understand.

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Why Did She Do It?

I had simply taken 6 months to complete my registration on Freecycle, a process drawn out partly by the numerous obstacles established by the group’s proprietor, who is quite the net-nanny when it comes to keeping scammers off her site. I swear, you could let your pre-schoolers on there talking about free toilet seats or hernia belts, and they really would be talking about just those exact things, with people not lying about their age or gender.

To register on Freecycle, you have to send an email saying you will follow the rules. And then, to post, you have to follow the rules. Which I didn’t on two attempts each to offer two items, a washer and a dryer, which have been out-of-service for years and probably don’t work. My last rejection was back in May, and I didn’t follow up on it for months. But this past Monday we got the bad news that our landlord was sending a realtor to check out or property with an eye toward deciding whether to sell it in the next year. This means we better be purging. So I took a deep breath and my ADD pills and set out to follow the rules exactly this time.

Within hours of posting, someone responded. She wanted the washer. We worked it out. She would rent a Home Despot pickup truck and come get it after work.

I worried. I had envisioned two guys in overalls from Habitat or something, with ownership of a truck and skills at repair presumed -- not some single woman having to rent a pickup.

I wrote back, “You understand these have not been used for years, right, and might not work?”

She didn’t respond to that, and I thought she might not show up.

I was heading out to clip my nails in the dark front yard around 6pm when a stranger came up the walkway toward me, her feet shushing through the leaves. She was the type who refused to raise her voice, and thus, didn’t respond to my calling out, “Hello?” as she approached. She was in handshaking distance when she said her name. Her truck was down the street -- she was walking house-to-house so she could read numbers.

I directed her to drive around back and I opened the cellar door. Her pickup had come with a handtruck but no straps or ramps. We dusted off the washer, and I said again, “Are you sure you want this,” reminding her that it had not been used for years.

She said she didn’t mind tinkering with it, and did I know what a new washer cost these days?

I reminded myself that these were free. But still, it seemed, since she had paid for truck rental, that she was paying too much.

Housemates came out and gathered ‘round, and we hoisted the washer on to the back of her pickup.

She had not asked about the dryer, but I pointed that out to her. “Sure, I’ll take it,” she said. So we wheeled that out and lifted it onto the truck.

Then we went about the basement gathering up old boxes and styrofoam packing material to put in the spaces in the truck bed to keep the washer and dryer from clanking against each other.

I offered her all the rest of the contents of the basement, but she declined. Indeed, taking the old unused washer and dryer was aid enough for us. We had been talking for years about cleaning out the basement. We had had a yard sale and barely sold anything (and had been unable to sell this washer and dryer); we had talked about taking them to the landfill where we would probably have to pay a fee for dumping them; we had cleaned out a few other things around them. Still, these appliances had remained unyielding in their spots, essentially natural rocky outcroppings, immovable in our basement, a burden persisting.

Now, just because I had managed to send a few emails correctly, someone else had rented a truck and taken them. It’s like a void opened where a bad feeling had been; like being absolved of guilt. Some of our persisting roots have been uprooted. I can see to a day when we might actually float free.

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Being Counted

The podcaster asked me if I thought it was a cluster fuck. I said, to describe it that way would be to disavow our newly cultivated caution against hyperbole. I said, instead, I would just call it . . . crowded.

During the drive up, Svetx had asked what would be most important to me about the rally. I said the important thing was to be counted. I had learned that phrase from a friend who was in a civil rights march one time. She got arrested, and said later that it was important to her to be counted with respect to that issue.

This was my time to be counted. I wanted attendance at this rally to beat that of Glenn Beck’s. On the phone the night before, my step-father had assured me it would NOT surpass the Beck rally, and I needed to prove him wrong.

Svetx said she was going to restore sanity. She said that, in any discourse, that was the first thing that should always be restored.

We woke on Saturday in friend G’s apartment right across the street from the College Park metro station. We took our time and ventured into the chilly morning around 9:30.

At the metro station, the ticket line unfolded before us, laying dismay upon dismay, like some awful vista of a mob trying to fit itself into a few dinghies to escape the land-roving aliens in War of the Worlds. The crowd filled the large sheltered space before the ticket machines; it went 4-persons wide up the steps, around the corner, along the parking lot and into the parking deck. And it was not moving very fast, as if everyone were figuring out the ticket machines for the first time.

I had not prepared properly. I should have had us purchase tickets the night before. This was not sane.

I texted that sentiment to friends who were driving up from NC that morning. They texted back that they were at the station in Springfield and having the same trouble.

One woman in line front of us said the line was worse than the line for Obama’s inauguration. A guy behind us said to bear in mind that this was a college stop and would draw an inordinately large crowd for a Stewart/Colbert event.

This was my second strike. Not only should I have bought Metro tickets the night before, I should have thought that this might be a bad place to board the Metro. Svetx and I talked about driving to another station, or even driving downtown. But we figured, countryfolks like us shouldn’t try to drive in the city on a day like this. We stayed in the line. And, an hour later, we were buying tickets and heading to the platform where, thankfully, the distribution of people allowed us decent positioning to get on the train.

We College Parkers did fill the train though, so that from the next stop onward, virtually no more were able to get on. Crowds on the platforms would look at us in disbelief as our doors opened and our ranks swelled outward a little, taking a breath, before retracting so that the doors could slam again. One rider yelled to waiting passengers, “Go to Greenbelt,” meaning, ride out of town to a station not crowded, then get on an empty train coming in.

We had seen our first sign at College Park. It read, “Fear Through the Ages” and gave examples like “Satan” and “Fallen Women.” On the train we saw a woman with “I Could Be Working.” I was glad I had not executed my own sign idea, “Algae Oil -- The Sanest Transportation Fuel,” because now it seemed bland compared to these others.

Folks pressed against us on the train said we should get off at the Archives. Sailing into that station, we saw hordes of people, shadowy through the train’s tinted glass. We wondered why this platform, the Metro exit point for rally-goers, was even more packed than those we had passed. Then, stepping out, of the train, we saw why. The exit escalator and gates were simply clogged.

But this crowd was moving steadily, if slowly. We would get out. As long as nobody set off a bomb or something and caused a panic.

Ahead someone held a tall sign on a stake, like a military standard, leading the way. The Metro ceiling was high enough to allow this sign to tower above the rest of us, broadcasting its message even to this underground audience before emerging to its intended venue of daylight on the mall.

For the Metro’s part, it doesn’t help that you have to run your ticket as you LEAVE the station, not just as you enter. Why on earth does DC require this?

Upstairs in daylight, everyone walked with long strides on streets, sidewalks, low walls bordering sidewalks, heading south toward sunlight, toward the wide open space lined with grand marble buildings, toward shimmering glints in windows. We ignored regulatory walk signs and simply crossed, giving cars no chance. We passed hucksters selling activist buttons and signs -- the pink booby awareness people, the abortion people, some Guantanamo people -- groups I’ve only seen, heretofore, on TV -- and one guy advertising “Generic Signs” holding my favorite for the day: “My Balls Itch No Matter Who’s In Charge.”

Clearly, this was the big time.

Ahead of us bobbed other signs advancing toward the Mall, including “God Hates Figs: Mark 11:12-14”


We were on 7th, which was supposed to be the back of the Rally. Entering the Mall, though, it seemed the crowd stretched equally far toward the Capitol and toward the Washington Monument.

I’ve been tuned to crowd murmurs since, as a child, my Dad would listen to the Metropolitan Opera on the radio. He once told me that as soon as we heard the crowd noise on the radio broadcast, that would be the top of the hour, and I could set my watch.

I would do this every Saturday. I learned to spot that audience murmur as soon as I heard it. Now, entering the Mall, we became enveloped in a crowd murmur far more substantive. The 200,000+ voices sounded hushed under the big bright sky, with no concert hall to lend its reverberation. But like the South Dakota grass, there was power in the numbers.

And, like the South Dakota grass, there were waves. We would hear a roar coming and, country boy that I am, I would experience slight panic -- was there a terrorist attack going on ahead where we couldn’t see? The roar would come closer and we would hear the strength in those voices, the mid-range growing, alarming; and then there would be the hands in the air and we would raise our hands too, and the wave would pass on.

It probably took us half an hour to cross the Mall on 7th. Then we spent another half-hour crossing back. Like hardening concrete, the mob was getting denser, and we needed to quickly pick the spot we would be cemented to. So we stood at the back of 7th sort of behind and to the side of the TV trucks.


We could barely see a jumbotron and hear a stand of speakers; then an ambulance parked in our line-of-sight, and obscured both of these. We essentially saw and heard nothing through the entire rally.

In front of us, on 7th, the concrete never fully hardened. People oozed past in both directions, pressing each other. And, strangely, immediately to my left, there was a constant single-person thick trickle of people going both in to, and out of, the grass behind us. It was like when you take a decongestant, and you can’t believe how relentlessly your snot flows out. This line of people flowed through the whole rally. A grumpy northeasterner just to the other side of this trickle kept griping at the people. “We’re going to cut this off. There’s no room back there. Why are you heading there?”

Expressing counter sentiment, one passing mom said, “Cut it off after me. My son just went through.”

When the Rally was over, we just stayed where we were. The crowd thinned slowly. A set of signs went by, each held by a different person: “How Do We Get Out Of Here?” “I Don’t Know.” “How ‘Bout That Way?” “Okay.”

Svetx and I laid down in the grass and rested our backs. The late October sun was still bright, but angled low in the sky. It would be a long time before anyone could freely walk wherever one wanted. I later heard that, into the night on blocks surrounding the mall, people could be seen still wandering or just sitting on the sidewalks in their folding lawn chairs, with no idea what to do for the night. Hotels and transportation were probably booked, leaving them with no options.

Text messages had been impossible during the rally, but when they finally started again, friends said that they were at the Archives steps. We met up there, and wandered to view the WWII Memorial.

The WWII Memorial does make great use of spacial divisions, with upper layers of flat pools giving way to waterfalls which spill to lower layers; and curving ramps that draw the visitor down to its bottom layer. But what’s with the columns depicting names of states and territories? Arkansas, Alabama . . . these words alone do not represent soldiers fallen in war. If I had not known this was a WWII memorial, I would have thought it was simply a monument commemorating the states, as stamps and quarters do.

The Vietnam Memorial, on the other hand, is a truer memorial in my view. There is no confusion about what the names listed there mean, and no way not to be conscious of the death. Every visit there, I have seen people making rubbings from the names of the dead, and volunteers helping them and answering questions. This is what a memorial is for -- place to address the pain. I’ve known no one who died in that war, but it is hard even for me to go there without being moved to tears. Svetx’s father was in the war and surely he knows lots of names on the wall. I think about how I’m so glad he survived, and I think about the others coming here who know a name on the wall, and for whom the only explanation I can give is that a president did not want to appear soft on communism.

Friend S pointed out that the list of names for memorial for an Iraq and Afghanistan war would have a distinction from the Vietnam list: Many would be Latin American.

We moved on to the Lincoln Memorial, which now stood on its hill in the setting sun. Inside are the words of a president who served during war and claimed responsibility for his decisions about that war, vocally questioned his own wisdom, and observed the correlation between the slashes of the swords and the lashes of the whips in slavery. How refreshing this is compared to today’s politicians who never seem to question themselves, and never acknowledge how our nations past actions may have contributed to present strife.

The Lincoln Memorial has been the site of past rallies of people who really needed to rally. They were oppressed, or protesting a war, for instance. In my lifetime, I have also seen rallies of laborers, people seeking abortion rights, women’s rights. I have not felt moved to attend any of these. Why, of all rallies, did I come to the Rally to Restore Sanity/Fear?

Because it struck a chord. Because I get it -- at least, I hope I can claim to be one of the “It Getters” that Colbert identified as the viewers of his first show back in 2005. It was a rally about rallies, with signs mostly mocking or referencing slogans from past rallies, and Stewart invoking the criteria on which past rallies have been judged -- the size and composition of the crowd -- and declaring the rally to have some exaggerated number of people, just as past rally organizers have done.

We were not desperate people fighting for civil rights, as many Americans rightfully have done; and we do not perceive ourselves to be living under a socialist or Muslim president. We are the more middle-ground folks, the “million moderates,” in Stewart’s words.

Probably, we can afford to be moderate because we are just lucky. But surely it is a good sign that our rally was more than double the size of the teabaggers’.

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Ideas for Signs for the Rally to Restore Sanity

Here's all I have so far:

"Hitler . . . Was a 'Ho!"

"Once you steep loose tea, you can't go back to bags."

"Hey Teabaggers, you're not grassroots. Everybody knows Fox News and Dick Armey sencha!"

"The best way to steep tea . . . is in a French press!"

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Just Another Farming Industry

I’ve been reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and the way I see it, it’s like this:

If you looked at Iowa in the ’50’s and saw the diverse farms with their cows, pigs, chickens, varied rotating crops, orchards, and someone told you that one day, nearly the entire state would be stripped to nothing except corn (during the growing season) or empty dirt (the rest of the year), you would have thought that to be ridiculous.

If you looked at pigs growing on that farm in the '50's, and someone told you that one day they would be raised in barns with slotted floors so that their urine and feces could mostly drop down into a pool beneath the floor, with maybe 10 hogs to a pen and maybe 100 pens to a barn (a barn can contain 1000 pigs), coexisting with the cloud of ammonia just above the pool of their own excrement, and their skin coated with the excrement that has not been kicked down between the slats, you’d say I was crazy.

If you looked at the cows grazing in the fields, and someone told you that one day they would be raised on feedlots, eating not grass but corn, standing in their own concentrated manure, being administered preemptive antibiotics because of the high likelihood of disease, you’d also say I was crazy.

As Michael Pollan says, the logic of industry has replaced the logic of nature in farming. So I’m telling you now. We might as well let the logic of industry take on algae farming to grow fuel oil. It’s not the strangest thing we’ve done as humans.

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Algae Fuel Progress

For newcomers to the algae biofuel scene, here's the algae pitch in brief: Some strains of algae are the best oil-producing plant. Unlike other biofuel sources, algae does not need to be grown on farm land or use fresh water -- it can be grown on non-arable land in ponds, tanks, vertically hanging sacks in greenhouses, or other apparatuses. Freshwater is not necessarily needed because many strains of algae can grow in salt water. But, regardless of the kind of water used, if the algae growing system is enclosed (not open to air), the water in which the algae grows is not lost to evaporation and can be recycled. Some algae proponents claim that enough fuel oil to power all the United States' transportation needs could be grown in 15,000 square miles, which, if this landmass were a square, would have only 122 miles per side.

Challenges in growing algae are finding or engineering strains that produce the most oil; designing the growing apparatus that uses space and energy most efficiently; and separating the oil from the algae.

While algae biofuel production may sound too strange, or too good, to be true, there are regular advancements that indicate the field is moving forward.

The month of June saw air-show flights of a small twin-engine Diamond DA42NG running on 100% biofuel made from algae oil. There have been past demonstrations of airplanes running on biofuel, but the concentration has not been 100%. That article reports that the fuel burns more cleanly and also more efficiently than standard Jet A-1.

In New Mexico, there is now the world's first fully integrated biofuel refinery. Nearly a year ago, I wrote about CEHMM's large-scale demonstration algae farm, composed of open-air ponds growing a native species of algae in brine water. Now this 501(c)(3) company, located in Carlsbad, NM, has announced completion of companion facilities for oil extraction and conversion to fuel. The operation can produce 1000 gallons of fuel oil per day -- nothing when compared to our nations current fuel needs, but enough perhaps to lead to further upward-scaling of algae production by this company and others. CEHMM's work is also important for drawing attention to the use of salty water and the non-arable land of Southwestern U.S., showing that algae production does not compete with food production for land and fresh water.

While the CEHMM project uses a native species of algae, lots of algae companies view genetic engineering as the key to cost-effective algae fuel production. The leader on this front is Crag Venter of Synthetic Genomics, which has been in partnership with Exxon with nearly a year. (Exxon's $600 million investment in algae makes it the world's largest algae company-- and algae is Exxon's only significant investment in alternative energy.) Before joining with Exxon, Venter had already genetically engineered algae to secrete its oil, thereby circumventing the expensive process of extracting oil from the algae cells. Now he has announced the creation of a fully synthetic living cell. While this synthetic cell is not an algae cell intended for fuel production, he has stated that he will turn his attention toward engineering algae cells optimally suited for producing fuel oil quickly, in high volume. The blogger at Oilgae.com opines on this matter, summarizing the challenges algae oil producers face and speculating on what Venter's work could do for it.

One might be concerned that Exxon will keep its research tightly under wraps and unavailable for public use. But be assured that there are many algae companies vying to be the first to revolutionize the fuel industry. Scroll down the left-side menu column on this page to see a list of such companies. Most of these companies aim to be algae fuel producers -- but one company, OriginOil, intends not to actually produce fuel, but to provide the machinery for algae oil production and be, effectively, the John Deere of algae oil production.

Recently, OriginOil released a new production model for growing algae based on the fact that a single layer of algae, such as what naturally grows on the surface of a pond, uses only a small percent of the sun's energy striking it. This model, called a Multireactor, grows algae in channels arranged in vertically-stacked layers. Between the channels are lenses that collect sunlight and distribute it to the next layer beneath, where more channels contain growing algae, and more lenses further collect and distribute sunlight to the next layer. By efficiently using sunlight in this way, Origin can maximize the algae produced per acre of land used.

Origin has also done extensive work on how to most efficiently deliver CO2 and other nutrients to a growing mass of algae; and, the company claims to have greatly reduced the costs of extracting oil from algae by using low-energy radiation and ultrasound to break algae cells, thereby reducing the need for Craig Venter's algae with pores and giving the Exxon/Venter collaboration a run for its money. Such competition will be crucial in preventing Exxon from withholding its research until the timing suits them. We need algae farming as soon as we can get it.

In its quest to become the John Deere of algae oil production, OriginOil is taking steps to make its products readily demonstrable and deliverable to customers. A miniature, mobile version of its oil extraction apparatus travels the country, visiting prospective investors and algae growers, showing how Origin's technology can benefit them; and its new Multireactor can be shipped in modules in shipping containers for easy scalability on-site. In July of this year, OriginOil shipped a Multireactor to its first paying customer, MBD Energy in Australia, and in September followed-up with a shipment of oil-extraction facilities. MBD is using algae to capture carbon from power plants and convert it to usable fuel oil.

I’ll be watching for news on how Origin Oil’s equipment fares in Australia. Algae enthusiasts have said that algae farming will make its first impact in the realm of carbon capture. If all goes will with MBD Energy in Australia, this could be an important step.

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The Grass

Reprinted from the Road to Rushmore 2010 blog about a road trip I took with two friends earlier this July. I write there as whitecrispprotectivecap.

It’s like going into one of those specialty stores in New York City that sells only one thing, like candy for instance. You have seen candy throughout your life and never paid it much heed. But here are aisles upon aisles, shelves upon shelves, of candy. Mundane candy even -- regular old Skittles and Reeses and whatnot. Nothing special. But when there is really that much of it, it becomes profound. You can’t believe someone mounted such an effort.

In South Dakota, it’s all about grass. Not even varieties of grass -- pretty much just one kind, I think. And that one kind they do very well. This grass is noble. Several times, glancing at a grass field, I mistook it for young corn. Just like everything else out in South Dakota -- the dandelions, stairwells, hotel rooms, main streets, Mahler symphonies -- the grass has room to be bigger, and it is. It has large blades. It grows tall. And its stems are spaced farther apart so that you can look down between them and see the ground like cracked, white scalp. If you pull too much grass, you’ll leave that scalp unfastened to flake away and start a new patch of Badlands.

The wind causes the grass to shimmer. It chases flashing, silvery patches like speeding dolphins breaching a water’s surface from horizon to horizon, prairie power running wild.

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Stürmish Bewegt: A Tornado Story

Reprinted from the Road to Rushmore 2010 blog about a road trip I took with two friends earlier this July. I write there as whitecrispprotectivecap.

Blazing across southern South Dakota on I-90, I wanted to summarize, for posterior’s sake on my Tascam audio recorder, our mid-day thoughts on listening to Mahler's 9th -- and Mahler's everything else too. With the Tascam in my one hand, we talked. But there was also this awesome storm ahead. I had already video-recorded, while riding toward Memphis, a lightning bolt on K-Os's flip-cam. So I picked that up in my other hand and started shooting the storm too.

The rain smacked the windshield sharply, startlingly, a sign that hail was mixed in. I checked the windshield for cracks.

In the back seat, Dr. Data observed that in each field we passed, the cows were all clustered against the fence in one corner. They had moved as far as the barbed wire would let them from the oncoming storm. What fear lurks behind their dull eyes when they are unable to flee and take cover according to their instincts' desire? But at least these cows are on large grasslands and not in feed lots where rain no doubt boosts the pestilence festering in the feces in which they spend their lives wading.

I would be foolish to try to reproduce K-Os’s expert technical analysis of Mahler. But his more general observation about the composer’s loose structure is very useful to me. He pointed out that Mahler’s first movements lack a clear sequence of exposition-development-recapitulation. It seems that the main theme often contains a sense of development from its first statement at the beginning; and it reappears many times throughout the movement, alternating with other material, played a differently every time so that you can't tell which time was supposed to be the actual development, and which the recapitulation, if any. It’s as if Mahler doesn’t want the listener to keep track of the structure -- he wants us to instead be lost in his drama, or whimsy.

This sheds some light on why I like Mahler so much, and why some dislike him. His liberal departure from familiar structure deprives his music of succinctness -- and lots of good, honest working folk like succinctness. They don’t have time for a thirty-minute first movement that sounds like three movements, and a second movement that sounds a lot like the first movement. (Indeed, Dr. Data, listening in the back seat most of the trip, could never tell when the movement had changed. And I, familiar with all Mahler’s symphonies, still can’t tell the changes between movements from the 3rd movement to the end in the 2nd symphony.)

But I was never good honest working folk. It’s not that I don’t work hard when I have a job -- it’s that wise choices for a lucrative career have not been my primary guide in my life decision making. When I started listening to Mahler, I had just graduated from college with a B.S. in physics. But I had known for half my college years that I was not cut out for that field. I didn’t want to work in a job that physics might have trained me for and I didn’t want further schooling in it. I was living with K-Os, ShakeThatCat, and some other folks, for $60.00/month plus utilities, in a mildewey basement; working at Kinko’s; and following a whim of trying to get some of the weirdest work I could think of, which was to work in the film and video business.

In the music of Mahler, I identified with the lack of adherence to form, the whimsy, the intrusion of flippancy into profundity. And when I did start to get work in film and video and gave up full-time work, there were lots of idle weekdays providing even more time for Mahler. His long symphonies must have been intended for the un- and under-employed, an alternative to beer or self-help.

We drove through that rain fairly quickly, and then spied what we thought would be a great grass-field shot for our photo essay. We exited the interstate, parked on a side road, and stepped out of the car into the stürmish bewegt. We had not realized how windy it was. Our ears filled with the its rumble; the grass bowed and rippled like hair under a blowdryer. We were still beneath the dark overhang of clouds, and with that wind, it seemed the rain and lightning were not done with us.

We were well rehearsed in our photo process. K-Os and I would grab three lawn chairs from the back of our vehicle and plunk them down in front of our desired background; Dr. Data would plant the camera, level it, then holler instructions to refine the composition. Then he would start the timer and jog to his seat, pushing his hair back to keep it out of his face for the shot.

During this setup, two large Diesel pickups drove past, accelerating with no regard for us. One cut pretty close to Dr. Data while he was still at the camera; the other came after Data had sat, and nearly sideswiped the camera.

We got our grassfield picture. Then I wanted to record my beloved grass blowing in the wind. I’ll write some other time about the grass. At that moment, it sounded like all the NFL cheerleaders' pom-poms in a cardboard box being shaken. I knelt next to it and tried to shield my Tascam from the wind using my body and my hat, but this was futile. The audio has distortion and other afflictions. I’m not proud of it. But you can hear a little if you want.

Our vehicle, Entropy, was parked by an intersection of gravel roads amid the fields. We saw another shot we could take in a different direction from the intersection, so we walked about 20 yards and started setting it up.

A minivan approached us. This was the third vehicle to encounter us, and I was thinking that this time, we’d be asked to leave. Its window came down and a woman called from the drivers’ seat.

“Are you taking pictures of anything particular?” she asked me.

I wondered what secrets this land held that she might not want us to photograph. Signs from aliens hidden in the grass? Minuteman missiles? (I’ll get to those in another entry.) I explained that we were taking pictures of ourselves for a photo series, and we liked the scenery. I was ready to be completely diplomatic if she were to accuse us of trespassing or something.

She looked at Dr. Data and K-Os on the road ahead. She seemed to be thinking over what to say next, as if my response had any authority, any weight worthy of consideration.

“Well . . .” she hesitated, as if I might not want my time wasted by what she had to offer. “There’s a tornado back there.” She pointed back through the intersection toward a hilltop where some other cars were parked, and some people standing around.

Several things went through my head.

1. She doesn’t own this land. She’s just a gawker like me.
2. K-Os once had a close-call with a tornado and might not want to dally with this one.

I looked at Dr. Data and K-Os who were looking at me. Data might have actually said “Tornado?” before I said, “Guys, there’s a --”

3. “TORNADO!!”

K-Os said, “We’re outta here.”

I struggled to voice a thought. Something had been left out of this woman’s information, and I needed to know it. After an agonizing second for formulate my words, I blurted it out.

“Is it going away from us?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Guys, tornadoes have been known to change directions,” said K-Os. Chaotic in nature, he should know.

He and Dr. Data had grabbed the chairs and were walking toward the intersection. I grabbed the tripod and camera and walked just ahead of them. I didn’t know if we were headed toward the car or toward the hilltop where we could see the tornado too. I asked K-Os if I could run while carrying his camera.

“Long as you don’t trip,” he said.

So I jogged up the hill. At its top was a small car with some kids sitting on its back trunk, looking over its roof. Upon my approach, a young mother got out, frowning, and ordered the kids to get inside the car. The father, in the drivers’ seat with his window down, was a dreadlocked white hippy. He pointed across the blowing grass. Beneath much of the cloud was a solid mass of rain, but to the right of the rain I could maybe see some points extending from the cloud to the ground.

“It was touched down, but it’s not right now,” he said. The status of being touched-down or not seemed important throughout the conversation of these native South Dakotans.

I couldn’t tell it was a tornado, really. It was like looking at distant celestial objects through a telescope. I had to take the expert’s word that I was seeing it. But the cloud ceiling between us and the tornado did appear to have concentric “rings,” like overhead ripples, centered on what he was pointing at. Something “circular” was definitely going on. And the wind was unnaturally fierce, whereas, in NC, once a storm has passed, the wind is over.

I think it was Dr. Data who first suggested we take a photo essay picture in front of the tornado.

K-Os spoke against it. “Come on guys. It’s a tornado.”

“It’s a tornado!” said Data. He set down his lawn chair. I gave him the camera and took the other chairs from K-Os and positioned them in the grass. I feared the wind would blow the camera over on the tripod, but it held. Resigned, K-Os took his seat next to me. Data framed up the shot and we got it.

(Days later, on the way home, we looked over our Bison series photos and decided that the tornado photo was not worthy of the series. You can hardly see the tornado, and without that, there’s no apparent point to the picture. Plus, our hat and hair are messed up, and we’re angled funny. K-Os said the photo should never appear anywhere at all, but I insisted that it was valuable as documentation of this tornado experience. So he said I could show it here if I emblazoned on it “Not In Bison Series.”)



We packed our chairs up and headed back to the car. Dr. Data wondered out loud if we should chase the tornado.

"NO," said K-Os. "We're the lawn chair guys. We're not the storm chasing guys."

That night, in our hotel room, K-Os happened to look over the footage I had taken while approaching the storm and talking about Mahler and cows. Centered, in the frame, was the gray mass of rain and cloud where the lightning was; but to the left of this storm center, there were some peculiar conical clouds. In the video, we could hear that he had actually commented on these clouds. The whole scene, with the main gray mass on the right, and the conical clouds on the left, was a mirror-image of what we saw from the hilltop at a greater distance after passing through the storm.

So basically, we had driven straight into a storm that included a tornado, though the tornado was not directly in our path. And I had videotaped the tornado purely by accident, while blithely talking about Mahler and cows and whatnot. At the time of this writing, if we weren’t already safely wrapped in the humidity, allergens, and insect-noise of home, I’d say we’re totally toast out in the Wild West -- we’d step right on a rattlesnake thinking it was a throw rug, or get our heads bitten off by a mountain lion while trying to feed it beef-jerky.

K-Os selected for us the best footage of the tornado. This accidental shooting of it was far better than what we saw from the hilltop. I’m so glad we have it. Honestly, it might be the highlight natural wonder from our whole trip.

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Suggestion for Tea Baggers:

Start your own currency. Call it the Camellia. Create a national directory of businesses and consumers who deal in the Camellia. Buy and sell as much of your goods and services as you can with it. Start your own banks with it. Heck, start a health-care plan with it. Show the rest of us how healthy a back-to-basics economy would be. Best of all, it could not be taxed.

Act fast, or the liberals will beat you to it.

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Tchaikovsky Concerto in Chatham

Last night before the concert, a tall high-school girl in an evening gown spoke to her dad in the front row of the audience, asking him to make sure he would remember to do something. I was sitting in the second row directly behind him, so I could hear her tone. She seemed very even-tempered despite her gown. Maybe there was some of that good-humored concern in her voice, the sort you get from people who have been through some screw-ups and know they'll survive -- like maybe she's experienced her dad not pressing "record" on the camera while she accepted her diploma -- but none of the excited fluttering that goes on with most teenagers in evening gowns. This teenager had more to think about than just getting her picture taken. She had work to do in her gown. Her fingers needed to fly, in tune.

Later in the concert, after the Durham Symphony had played the mutually antagonistic overtures to Nabuco and Rienzi, she walked out, the tallest person on stage, this year's winner of this orchestra's concerto competition, to play Tchaikovsky's violin concerto.

She toyed with the first statement of the first theme in a way I like. The piece soon engulfs the audience in a sweet tidal wave of melody, but at the start, it's appropriate that the soloist just toy with it, as if assembling it by accident, like a little kid pushing matchbox cars around on the rug.

She had that singing quality that shows she is paying attention on a very musical level, not just dealing with the notes. She seemed to purposefully hit some notes a little flat and draw them up to pitch, the way a soulful singer would. She slid around the phrases, making her stringed instrument feel as though it were breathing. Sometimes the technically hard passages had her stiffly sawing through, but mostly, through the difficult stuff, she kept up her expressiveness; and when that first tidal wave of orchestra did hit (a mark of Tchaikovsky that folks could cynically criticize, though we must acknowledge how few composers could rely so extensively on melody), ushered in by her series of arpeggiation gymnastics so impressive live, and framed expertly in the LCD screen of the dad's camera in front of me as if the camera were in its own TV commercial, she took half a step back from her spot on stage and cast her eyes down, hardly in shame, but more to suppress the little smile of satisfaction tweaking her mouth, indicating that she knew she had pretty much banged it.



(In that recording was Pinchas Zuckerman with the Israeli Philharmonic showing a much better side of Israel than settling the West bank)

The soloist with the Durham Symphony in Chatham is a student at Jordan High School and takes lessons from Eric Pritchard. Expect great things to come from her.

Thanks to the Chatham Arts Council for putting on such a great event. In addition to the wonderful Tchaikovsky, the excerpts from Gershwin's Porgy and Bess were a Durham Symphony highlight. According to some, this was the first symphony concert ever in Chatham county. I suppose this could be true if none of the schools in Chatham have student orchestras (just bands instead), and the NC Symphony has never traveled there. As conductor William Henry Curry said to the audience, let's hope this starts an ongoing collaboration, continuing with, perhaps a Christmas concert.

(This blogger thinks maybe the world does not need yet another Christmas concert. But he understands that the Durham Symphony can only learn so much music; and if their fall rehearsals are focusing on the holidays, then that's the kind of music they'll be able to play next fall.)

One problem is the acoustics in the concert hall at Northwoods High School. When a musical group plays on stage, much sound is lost among the curtains hanging overhead in the small flyway. On the other hand, there is a wide "pit" in front of the first audience row which is large enough for a small orchestra, and is not really a pit at all since the floor is on level with the audience floor. So why not put the orchestra there, where more of its sound will reach the audience directly? And if the pit is not big enough for the orchestra, then some orchestra members could sit on the front portion of the stage. This would bring the whole orchestra forward, out from under the flyway, and probably improve acoustics for orchestra concerts.

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It's Too Bad . . .

. . . that the bastion of morals, the Catholic Church, has done so much to protect the pedophiles in its ranks.

. . . that while we were supposed to be experiencing the economic growth that comes from cutting taxes on the rich, we have an economic collapse caused, in part, by the rich who most directly benefitted from the tax cuts.

. . . that just two years after Republicans at their convention chanted "Drill Baby Drill" in support of offshore drilling, an offshore oil rig explodes and creates one of our nations worst environmental disasters.

It's not that we should wholly condemn the Catholic church or never cut taxes or never drill for oil offshore. It's that we should give up mantras and lines of absolute thinking. Wise regulation on all fronts would be good. Of course, a politician can never campaign on a platform of "wise regulation."

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A Brunch Crunch

What is the deal with Foster’s Market? Parking is like perpetual festival parking, the sort of parking you do twice a year at Shakori or the county fair -- but here it’s every day. At least the festivals have volunteers with colored arrows and vests to help you make your way. There is no such service here. You just have to make your own space in the dust and gravel. And the people leaving Fosters don’t go straight back to their cars and vacate their spots. They linger, talking, finishing up that conversation about how Republicans are selling our country out to big business and big oil, all the while clogging the lot and hindering us new customers trying to come to this small business, our engines burning fuel, our turn signals desperately flashing our intent to use their parking spaces until the filaments go numb.

Inside, there’s a line of people waiting to order. Except they are not really waiting to order, they are just waiting to get to where they can see to figure out how to order. From this line you can’t see the chalk-written menus; you can’t see the process whereby you order hot food from the workers and forage on your own baked food and drink. In order to learn this, you have to take a chance and leave your place in line to go around to the front of the counter. This requires pushing yourself through thickets of wandering customers all holding small plates and saucers with teacups at about the eye level of a short person. These folks don’t know how hungry you are. They don’t understand your need for certain information to connect you with your food. What is with their soulless gazes, their needing to be told several times “Excuse me please” before they shuffle a little to the side?

At Moe’s Southwest Grill, you can view the menu while you wait in line, and all your food is ordered in the same place at the end of that line. Now, isn’t that a grand idea?

You steal a glance at the menu and rush back to the line before you lose much ground. Now you have to remember what you saw on the menu. If you do forget, you can’t see it until you are about to order at the head of the line. At that moment, faced with a clerk ready to take your order, you have mere seconds to tilt your head way back and re-read the menu and make your decision. But you realize that now, and during your previous glance, you only saw the breakfast menu. There is a lunch menu hanging a few feet away -- but you can’t read that now because of the glare. So you have to leave your front place in line and go look at that, then come back and make an instant decision, all the while holding up the whole line behind you.

The workers there should be commended for their patience with beleaguered customers. They take your order as if nothing’s wrong, and you feel a little chilled out, even when they tell you there will be a 20 minute wait on “all breakfast orders.”

Umm, okay. 20 minute wait. Now what? There is only one thing to do. Join the ranks of the soulless wanderers you had to push through earlier. You’re in limbo with them now, walking the rough-hewn creaky wooden floor back in forth in front of the counter, getting in the way of those other customers who, like you once did, sought direction and sense in their quest to order food.

This is a health-conscious grocery store, you think. Shouldn’t there be high quality coffee and tea somewhere? You spy it way back in a corner, and you get some. There is juice in a fridge case next to it, so you get one of those too. Now you’ve got a cup and saucer in one hand, and a bottle in the other, and you’re holding them at the eye level of short people.

You overhear a father bringing tea to his family at a table. “Took me a while to get this,” he said, and you’re glad someone else has given voice to the disorder.

You wander back along the counter area because you think you saw muffins somewhere. You had not thought you’d get one, but now, with this wait, you figure, you might as well spend the extra money to have something to nibble on. But you realize the muffins are behind glass and you need to signal counter help to get them -- and the counter help is busy dealing with the folks in line. To get someone's attention you would have to holler as if you were at a crowded bar, and you hate doing that. So you stay mired in your limbo, and Foster’s loses a small sale. How many times a day does this happen? You turn to head back across the counter area again, and nearly bump into an old guy behind you.

“I’m following you,” he says. Which is sad for him, given all you’ve accomplished here.

At Bruegger’s, all the food is in on place. You get it in a single line as your bagel is prepared. You pay and you are free to go.

You have a ticket that was stuck in your hand when you ordered that breakfast. The clerk told you they would bring it to you. You figure, you might as well sit down. You don’t know how they are going to find you, but somehow, there must be a reasonable end to all this. So you get in the cash register line. Now, finally, there is some sense of progress. You pay for the items in your hands -- the tea and the juice, and for what is on the ticket which will be brought to you later. You wish you had it all with you now, but whatever. At least you get to sit down.

Behind you in the register line, a teenager needs to worm her way up past people to get to some chocolate on the shelf. “Excuse me,” she says repeatedly. She snags the chocolate and retreats, only to rejoin the line later and pass the chocolate shelf again on her way to check out.

Customers sit at picnic tables distributed through several interior rooms, a porch, and the lawn. When your food is ready, the counter workers have to go all through the place calling out your name until you raise your hand. You can hardly hear what they are saying. Surely this wears on the nerves of the poor staff. And how many people wander off the street, sit down, and just raise their hands when a clerk is passing with an order?

One member of your party of friends had arranged for you all to meet at Foster’s this Sunday. You had warned them, saying, “It’s like a chaotic web page where you can’t figure out where to log in.” Another friend says, “I hate this place.” None of you will be coming back.

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Algae Wastewater Treatment Development

Half a year ago I was looking around for larger projects making fuel oil from algae. As you can see from reading my entries on energy, there are plenty of small-scale demonstration facilities, but none big enough to show that algae can really make an impact on the world's fuel supply,

But here is another step toward practical utilization of algae for fuel. The city of Hopewell, VA has started cleaning nitrogen from its wastewater using algae in a demonstration facility. Formerly, nitrogen had not been targeted by the town's wastewater treatment, and the Chesapeake Bay, into which drains the wastewater from Hopewell and the rest of the greater Richmond area, has been notorious for its algae blooms. If this test, which is planned to run through September, is successful, then Hopewell hopes to enlarge the facility and sell the fuel oil grown in the algae. This project was made possible, in part, by stimulus package money.

Watching the video of the project, I see a lot of churning of water in open ponds. Origin Oil says that stirring the water causes the algae to grow more slowly; and in open ponds, specialized genetic strains that produce oil the fastest may not survive. So, I'm not sure Hopewell has implemented the best algae growing facility here. But, what they have implemented might be viewed as an inexpensive first-step. Perhaps they can install better facilities if they scale up. I think they should enter a partnership with Origin Oil, which has publicized an algae wastewater treatment model (that's a pdf).

I suppose the biggest source of algae in the Chesapeake Bay is agricultural runoff, and this would not be treated by any municipal wastewater treatment facility. But still, if the cities can remove their own contribution of nitrogen to the bay while offsetting costs by selling the fuel, then what's not to like?

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There Goes By the Neighborhood

Once it was about pot. People were out for their routine walks on the streets or the forest trail, and when they would meet, they would exchange the information like ants transferring food: someone had some really good pot down by the river. The news worked its way off the streets and into people’s homes, and as the afternoon wore on and people finished chores, they came out as if answering a summons. The random walking of earlier in the day became a coherent migration toward the river, toward that set of rocks where the good pot was said to be.

This time it was about ice. Svetx and I met Debbie on the river and she told us. She had seen Jack that morning hurtling past her house on the street at 90 mph, his boot heel dug in and his gloved hand dragging, trying to turn that toboggan in the curve before smacking the curb. After the curb it was Larry’s truck, parked on the street because his drive was impassable, that had to be avoided -- but Jack missed this and managed a sharp turn the other direction, onto the access road for one final plunge before the long flat coast on the parking lot for the old mill. Later, Micah had gone under Larry’s truck and hit the curb, but apparently she was okay -- she was back sledding a few minutes later. Anyway, everyone would be at it again that night, because the temperature was going to drop again to 19 degrees. Black Ice Sliding. 8 pm. The winter answer to summer’s Full Moon Tubing.

Svetx and I had missed the day’s sliding, but this would be our chance. We took a nap. We made sure we started on dinner early enough to eat it in time. We drank coconut rum to help conceal the potential pain. We had no toboggan, but we were hoping for a loaner.

Soon after 8 pm we heard screams of delight, so we put on the boots again and walked to the sliding party. People we had seen in daytime now had faces in shadow under hats and hoods. Others came up from the dark run and dropped plastic toboggans onto the ice and said, breathlessly, “Who’s next?”

It was us. I climbed in, and the toboggan wanted to start its slide before Svetx could get in between my legs. Then we were off with the barest shove. Good speed came right away, the gouged ice beneath us giving a hard Moroccan massage to our butts.

Passing the first house on each side, already, it felt too fast. I tried to jam my outstretched heels into the ice, but they hardly made a difference. It would be a brake early, brake often situation.

We passed the house where once lived May who worked at a biodiesel plant but told me that a huge room full of algae would only generate a teaspoon of oil in a day. I told her it depends on the strain of algae and the growing conditions, but she didn’t seem to believe me.

The road steepened and I felt, for the first time, that I should not be dong this. We had angled toward the curb, too, and my heels weren’t helping. I leaned to the right, and that helped a little. I told Svetx to lean right, and this did turn us better. “Straight,” I said, trying not to turn us past center toward the other curb.

We passed the tiny house on stilts, hardly bigger than a deer blind, half of it a screened porch, the other half probably one room, which was built by the artist who lives in it and whom nobody ever sees. It’s high up the bank from the river so I don’t know why it’s on stilts, unless she was worried about snakes getting in, a concern I would have too.

Then was the house where lives the woman who has a PhD. in carnivorous cats and says that the ones at the Carnivore Preservation Land Trust could easily climb the fences and get out, but stay in because they don’t know this. Her husband had tried to get his Scion out earlier that day, but once it left the bare patch of gravel where it had been parked, it’s front drive wheels could not climb up onto the top of the ice layer. So he drove it back to the bare patch and declared he wasn’t going to work the next day.

We were veering too far right, so I had us lean left briefly. We passed close to cars parked along the right, and we were set up poorly for the coming curve. I jammed both heels down harder, thinking again that we should not be doing this.

There came the house Svetx used to live in, with its mildew which activates and blossoms, invisibly, all summer, in closets, behind walls, in shoes; and where, this time of year, the tiny wood stove must be run nearly constantly to barely keep one room warm. Svetx, working late hours, would come home and head directly for the electric blanket, hardly bothering to heat the house. The current residents stay home all day and keep that stove fed.

There came the area of road where we had seen Rascal tearing up a fresh, glistening carcass earlier that day. The frozen remains could have been one of the myriad of bumps rubbing our butts.

The curve was approaching, with the next neighbor laughing from the safety of her dark front porch. Earlier that day she had gouged a bare patch in the ice just in front of her front walkway, nonsensically. This was next to the curb, not really a hindrance to sledders, but still, why had she bothered?

We were close to the right and would be inside on the curve. I would have preferred to have been on the left and then aim for the inside as we entered it, but this was not to happen. A dark wall of trees loomed ahead on the outside of the curve, with that hard curb somewhere at its base. I thought again that I should not be doing this. I could break my arm, and then I would not be able to work. To avoid crashing, we would need to lean hard, but without knowing how much the toboggan would skid, how would we know when exactly?

Just lean. We did, sideways, all the way, with our shoulders dragging ice, practically bailed out of the toboggan altogether. We slowed a lot, more than I wanted, but coming up straight again, we had made the curve and just missed a truck parked on the right. (Later a member of the Paperhand Puppet Intervention complimented us on making a graceful turn. Coming from one of those folks, that means a lot.) We leaned again, straightened, bottomed-out, and did not try to turn into the access road to the mill parking lot. Instead we coasted up toward the left and crunched to a stop behind another pickup truck there. Our blood recollected itself toward our heads because we were reclined backwards now, and as long as the folks on the next run had enough control to not crash into us, it would be easiest to simply lie back the rest of the way and stay for a while.

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This Gives me Peace

I think about this past slow year and I panic. Going into it, I knew I would not be making much money, and I accept that. The problem is, I fear I have not developed myself enough personally in the extra leisure time. Sure, I write, but I know I could be doing more and better stuff, and I don’t focus nearly as well as I should; and even if I do think I make momentary accomplishments in writing, overall, that endeavor will remain a daunting, yawning pit for my time and self-esteem.

In ballroom, my partner and I have received some valuable coaching which has really opened us up to more intensive, better-styled moving; but dancing feels like a side-show in my life, something I can progress fairly well in, but which is not so distinctive to me.

Then I remember this other thing I’ve done this year, and I feel some peace. Southland of the Heart.




This independent feature movie was made piecemeal on weekends, about half of all weekend days since August; was captured mostly on my Sanken CS-1, run through cables in my hands and under pots beneath my fingers, stored on flash memory in the camera along with Ken’s footage, which always blows me away when I get a chance to see it long after it's been shot. I learned the dialogue and swung the boom with it, kneeling on gravel or standing on two desks if I had to, dodging the curveballs of accidental and intentional improvisation as best I could, and getting burned occasionally. I griped about background noises, I asked diner owners to shut down their giant freezers and their computers, I bitched about electrical cables running through doors from the outside and necessitating letting noise in. Sometimes I held up production to find a better mic position, or asked for another (and another) take to have a chance to boom boom it better. Sometimes they gave it to me, and sometimes they said “tough shit.” But the director and actors have been genuinely appreciative and complimentary of the audio. This strokes my ego. I need a community of people stroking my ego from time to time. This is what gives me peace.

And the movie is coming out pretty well, if I may say so.



I had known Southland’s director Todd since January of 2008 when he shot another director’s, Nic’s, Nightlife, for which I did the audio. (On Vimeo, the video has a sound/video synch problem which seems to be the fault of the website). Both Todd and Nic make several movies a year on weekends, and they are getting good at it. Over a year later, in April of 2009 I had purchased my own sound equipment package and was not working enough to really break it in -- or to break myself in on it, as they say. So one day I happened to be in the car with Todd while driving to work at a conference for this conservative think-tank, and I asked him if he had any projects coming up. He said yes, in two weeks, he would be shooting a short, Mary and Jennifer, which is currently not available for viewing.

While shooting that short, there was a moment when, kneeling on the tile floor of the kitchen, I noticed the hard set of Jennifer's face in my peripheral vision past the tip of the microphone, and I thought, “damn, she’s on time.”

In the following weeks I was thinking Todd could do a lot more with those characters. And I was thinking that I liked his style of directing, in which he would go to the actors and have a short conversation in a low voice, like, “You know how when you’ve had an argument and you’re close to apologizing, but you still are holding back, not giving it up yet . . . .” He would speak quietly with them, then go back behind camera and leave the actors to make it sing.

In June of this recession year, he called me and told me what I was thinking he should do. He was going to make a feature movie with the two characters, and asked if I could work on it for no pay. I had few prospects for paying audio engagement, so I said I certainly could, as long as I could dump him at the last minute if paying work were to come up.

It only came up on two days, and one of those days, I raced back from shooting an ACC PSA with the basketball coaches in Greensboro to work late into the night on Southland.



Now it’s January 2010, and people keep asking me, “Isn’t that free movie done yet?” I say it’s the never-ending story. No, it’s still not quite done. We have a couple serious dialogue scenes to do, and this coming Monday, MLK day, we are doing a light-dialogue day. But it will get there. And it will be good, if I may say so.

I hope I will always be able to experience times when the actors really nail it -- when they cry and act like they are experiencing the biggest kick in the gut of their life, and they pretty much convince me of this -- and I have the mic right in position, not a little off-axis but right in there, to not just hear it well but make a little extra tickle of immediacy in my headphones -- and the noise from outside is at a lull, and nobody’s stomach growls, and I look over at the director and assistant director and gaffer standing at the monitor and see tears brimming in their eyes too, and know that a lot of things are working out at once -- and feel peace.

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Toward a Better District 10

Avatar might be the movie James Cameron has wanted to make since he was a boy, but District 9 is the sci-fi movie I have wanted to see since I was disappointed by E.T. when I was 14. District follows the notion presented in Philip K. Dick’s statement, paraphrased here (I can’t find it online right now): You could be broke, and your wife could leave you, and still . . . aliens could come through the roof and get you. In a general sense, I take this to mean that aliens can come and become part of the messy milieu of life. They don’t have to be lithe, exotic creatures in silver suits. They don’t have to have a meaningful message for humanity. They don’t have to be here to conquer. Maybe we don’t even have to know why they are here. And what happens between the humans and aliens can be just as ordinarily degenerate as what happens between humans.

In District 9, aliens have come to earth -- Johannesburg, South Africa to be exact -- and become part of the social problems that plague this and many other parts of the world: overcrowding, slums, refugees, crime. The aliens are the new base on the pecking order of racism, with all races of humans speaking against the alien presence, using arguments we’ve heard and still hear from separatists -- that “It is for their own good,” that “they don’t belong here.”

The South African government wants to move the aliens from their current shanty town in Soweto to a refugee camp farther outside the city. The movie focuses on one obsequious bureaucrat, Wikus van de Merwe, who heads the process of going door-to-door and serving the aliens their notices.

What I see as the power of this movie is its raw and “realistic” presentation. Living in the shanty town, aliens are repeatedly shown digging through garbage, hacking animals to pieces for food, drinking and eating out of discarded containers. There are language and cultural barriers (though, remarkably, Wikus and some humans understand the aliens, and vice-versa) and misunderstandings ensue that lead to violence. When aliens don’t comply immediately with the humans’ demands, they are forced to their knees with hands behind their heads, forced to sign documents acquiescing to their eviction; and, when an alien does sometimes retaliate and throw a human aside, that alien gets blown away by the humans. One can not help but sense the parallels to our door-to-door operations early in the Iraq war; and a friend commented that these scenes from District 9 looked like a documentary he had seen on vigilante groups that patrol our border with Mexico and harass Latin Americans, apparently trying to provoke reactions against which the vigilantes can retaliate.

One wonders why the aliens let themselves get pushed around as much as they do, and this leads to some of the deeper issues in the movie. The aliens do have, after all, powerful weapons. Why not use them against the humans, when clearly their own self-defense is justified?

What the aliens do use the weapons for is currency. With their weapons, they buy, on a black market set up by a Nigerian criminal gang, cat food. The aliens are addicted to this cat food and hand over weapons readily in exchange for it while the humans are fascinated with the weapons and acquire them greedily.

We all know humans love weapons. Weapons provide the quickest way to power here on Earth. But the aliens loving cat food? This is incredible to me. Does this mean the aliens are not power-hungry? Is it that weapons are so commonplace for them, and easy to build, that they view them as a basic commodity, as we view the cat food that we trade to them?

(The aliens may feel safe selling the weapons to the humans since the humans can’t use the weapons. Governments and corporations and the Nigerian gang all hope for the day when they can make the weapons work; but for now, all they can do is acquire them and study them.)

Through the entire movie, nothing more than a desire for cat food is revealed of the alien population’s motives. We never learn why they came or if they even want to leave. I question whether they even know they are living in a slum. I mean, if they don’t know that weapons are awesome, and that cat food is nothing special, would they even know to prefer Spoleto to Soweto?

(Svetx suggests that the aliens were lost on the way to Spoleto and ended up in Soweto. Maybe they typed it into their Garmin wrong.)


Since I saw District 9 last spring, I have held it in nearly the highest esteem I have for any movie. I raved about it to my friend who, just the other night, called us over to watch it on Blu-Ray, the second viewing for myself and Svetx.

Here’s a bit of advice: If you love a movie, maybe you don’t want to hear the director’s commentary. We only listened to part of it, but in his commentary, director Neill Blomkamp reveals the insensitive way he constructed the Nigerian gang.

On my first viewing, I could have deemed the portrayal of the Nigerians as racist. But given the level of detail throughout the movie, and given the fact that all the humans in the movie are self-centered opportunists -- not even our accidental hero Wikus is admirable -- I accepted the Nigerians as a reasonably accurate portrayal of an aspect of human condition that would occur in an alien slum.

Lots of people do think the portrayal of the Nigerians is racist, as a quick Google search will tell you. In the movie, the Nigerians believe in witchcraft and eat aliens’ bodies on the presumption that this will enable them to use the aliens’ weapons. There is also mention that they run a prostitution operation for the aliens. This is definitely a negative image of the Nigerians. But the white South African government officials and their business and science cohorts are essentially doing the same thing -- using and abusing the aliens to get command of their weapons. I say this could be one of the valuable themes in the movie.

But then there’s this: in his commentary, the director admits that he could find no Nigerian actors to play those roles. And, he says, none of the non-Nigerians playing Nigerians could speak a Nigerian language. So, the gang leader, the witch doctor, and other gang members are all speaking whatever native African languages those actors know, and they are not actually understanding each other. Subtitles solve the problem for the viewer, telling us whatever the director actually wants us to hear. I’ll guess that most people in the world watching the movie can not tell the difference. But as my friend who bought the Blu-Ray said, “Surely they could have found some Nigerians to portray the Nigerians.” And then, as Svetx said, “Then they would have had someone who knows the culture and what it’s really like.”

In a movie that I want to celebrate for its “realistic” portrayal of race and alien relations, and human motives, this sloppy treatment of the Nigerians is a serious disappointment.


So how could the director have done better, or do better when the time comes to make District 10?

First, the prostitution could easily have been tossed out of the movie. This was, as I said, a brief mention; and given the vast differences between human and alien anatomy, I doubt that there would be enough interest to keep a prostitution racket going.

Second, the witchcraft was not even necessary for the plot. As it stands, the Nigerians capture Wikus, who is growing an alien arm because of an accidental encounter with alien DNA, and attempt to eat his alien arm. This drives Wikus to escape using the fancy alien weapons that only he among humans can use. Essentially the same scenario could have been achieved if the Nigerians, instead of trying to eat him, were to confine him and force him with torture to use the weapons on their behalf. (Torture is still a negative portrayal, you say? Sure, but in this scenario they’d be on par with the United States of America.)

In his director’s commentary, Neill Blomkamp says that he portrayed the Nigerians this way as a joke, and he apologizes to them (all Nigerians?) and anyone else who is offended by it.

Here is what I say. Neill, meet me at camera three. For District 10, there’s no need to joke like this. We are all humans together in your story. Your movie is not afraid to show us humans the bad news about ourselves. We are all power-hungry, lying, cowardly bitches -- with aliens thrown in. So, show us like we are, and be reasonably authentic, so that if anyone complains that you show Nigerians or anyone else as crooks at all, you can more honestly say that you are holding up the mirror, and it’s up to us what gets reflected in it.

I’ll finish off with a little more praise for your movie.

I love the faux documentary style. I love how the camera floats like my uncle shot it, and the acting is largely improvised (as you explain in your commentary), and somehow you “painted” in alien creatures while keeping it all spontaneous.

I love how you portray many layers of character in some of the interviews. Wikus wife, for instance, shows us a little bowl he had made for her. She says she sat on it (implying some disregard for Wikus’ feelings) and then says that all Wikus’ presents for her were taken away for the investigation . . . but then she made them bring them back (meaning she may have newfound respect for her husband given what she suspects he is going through).

I love that we never learn what the aliens were doing here. I love that, when the humans first blowtorched their way into the alien spaceship, the aliens were huddled in there, covered with feces perhaps, striking a parallel to factory farm animals.

Basically, I love your movie, But you can, and should, be more thorough, when you are trying to portray serious subject matter and make serious points.

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