Bananas

Together with some 2500 other people, I attended a lecture at the Christchurch Town Hall on Thursday evening by the celebrity atheist Richard Dawkins. His reception, which was described in the local newspaper as a "rock-star welcome," reminded me of that extended to another great iconoclast, Noam Chomsky, when he gave a talk here back in 1998. The difference was that while Chomsky spoke in front of an invited audience at Canterbury University, Dawkins lectured in front of a paying crowd, most of whom had bought tickets for $15 (although someone reportedly paid $132 for a ticket to the sold-out event on Trade Me).

People attending Thursday's lecture were greeted at the entrance to the Town Hall by a small group of Christians who were handing out free copies of Darwin's The Origin of Species. The catch was that this edition, published by Christian minister and evangelist Ray Comfort in 2009 after he discovered that the text was in the public domain and distributed at universities in the U.S., includes a "special introduction" penned by Comfort (although a section of it was alleged plagiarized from a text by Dr Stan Guffey, a biologist at the University of Tennessee) in which he seeks to discredit Darwin's work.

I haven't read the special introduction yet, but if Comfort's antics in this YouTube video are anything to go by, it's sure to be quite amusing. In the video, Comfort argues that the fact that bananas fit comfortably into our hands and mouths is proof that god designed them to be eaten by humans. There's so much wrong with this argument that it's hard to know where to begin in refuting it. But how about the fact that the modern banana depicted in the video is the result of years of human cultivation and propagation, one of the effects of which has been to remove the large seeds that once made the eating experience less enjoyable.

Incidentally, although he now lives in the U.S., Comfort was born in New Zealand, and began his preaching career in Christchurch.

The Fighting Fool

One of the advantages of growing up in an academic household was that the family home was always full of interesting books. This was especially true in my late teens after my mother went back to university to study and later teach Eastern religions and after my parents came back from a year teaching English in China, when the family library took on a real exotic flavour.

One day while perusing the bookshelf in the living room I came across a Tai Chi manual complete with photos and English instructions. I'd been interested in the martial arts for years (this was back in the days of Bruce Lee, whose movies I enjoyed) but I'd been too timid to actually go to classes and learn. With this book, I thought, I could study on my own at home. And so it was that I took my first tentative steps towards learning a martial art.

Many years later, while living in Japan, I took up Shorinji Kempo, which I stuck at long enough to gain a first-degree black belt. Sounds impressive, but a first-degree black belt is really just a learner's license. It means you've learned the basics and are ready to begin mastering the art. I have many pleasant memories of those years learning Shorinji Kempo, of my kind and generous teacher and his wife, also proficient in Shorinji Kempo, and of my fellow adult students, some of whom were learning with their sons and daughters. But by this time Mrs Fool and I had decided to return to New Zealand, and although I could have continued with Shorinji Kempo here, my enthusiasm had waned to the point where I was no longer willing to put up with the niggling injuries that are part and parcel of martial arts training like blisters and calluses on the soles of the feet, twisted ankles, and stubbed toes, and the inevitable not so niggling injuries, which in my case included a cracked wrist, sustained in a competition when I tried to block a kick with my lower arm. I lost that bout but was awarded a cup at the end of the day for my efforts. I had to pose with the cup for a photo, which I'm pretty sure aggravated my injury.

Walking Fool with cup (c. 1993)*

Which is all by way of introduction to the announcement that, something like thirty years after my first attempt, I've started learning Tai Chi again, this time properly with a teacher. I'm taking a course called Tai Chi for Health at the WEA. It's based on a variation of Sun style Tai Chi devised by Dr Paul Lam, a physician and arthritis sufferer who took up Tai Chi to help his own arthritis and has since established what seems to be a mini-empire with DVDs and books on everything from Tai Chi for Diabetes and Tai Chi for Back Pain to Tai Chi for Kidz (there's no Tai Chi for Cats yet, but I'm sure it's not far away).

The course I'm taking is aimed at older folks (I'm pretty sure I'm the youngest student), so it's very easy on the body. I've been to five classes so far and have been practicing a bit at home using one of the DVDs. Although I'm skeptical about the whole concept of chi (or ki as it's called in Japanese), I'm already noticing some benefits in that I feel really relaxed and in a heightened state of awareness after a Tai Chi session. I think this is due to the slowness of the movements, which as well as strengthening the joints and muscles seems to have an almost meditative effect.

*Both left-facing and right-facing swastikas have been associated with Buddhism for many centuries. Shorinji Kempo has links to a type of Buddhism called Kongo Zen, and the left-facing swastika (omote-manji in Japanese), which symbolizes compassion, was attached to Shorinji Kempo uniforms in Japan and was part of the Shorinji Kempo logo until 2005, when it was abandoned on the grounds that it was hindering the growth of Shorinji Kempo overseas.

Privilege

When I checked Tomasz Stanko's official website the other day and saw that he was due to play in San Francisco and New York next month as part of a U.S. tour to promote his new CD, Dark Eyes, I recalled a comment I made back in November last year about timing my proposed epic rail journey across North America to coincide with a concert by either the Polish trumpeter or my other musical hero, pianist Keith Jarrett, and ever so briefly considered flying over to see Stanko in San Francisco and then traveling by rail to New York to see him again at Birdland (and to eat grilled stuff with Erik).

I then remembered that I'm visiting Tokyo later this month and couldn't possibly afford to make another overseas trip so soon after that one. Also, the Keith Jarrett Trio is performing in Tokyo in September-October, and I've promised to take Mrs Fool to see them to celebrate our wedding anniversary. And while I'd dearly love to see Stanko perform live again, the prospect of seeing him with his new quintet doesn't excite me as much as that of seeing him with his old quartet (with Marcin Wasilewski on piano), which I had the pleasure of doing back in March 2009. It seems that that quartet is a thing of the past. It produced just three CDs, including the sublime Lontano, which took me a while to get into but is now one of my all time favourite albums. I consider it a privilege to have seen that quartet perform live.

As Jarrett himself confirmed to an Italian audience in 2007 during one of his infamous outbursts, seeing Keith Jarret perform is also a privilege. Unlike Stanko, however, Jarrett doesn't believe in changing the personnel in his groups much. In fact his current trio (with Gary Peacock on bass and Jack DeJohnette on drums) has been playing together for more than 25 years. And while I'm definitely looking forward to seeing the trio in Japan, if I had a time machine one of the first things I'd do, probably even before going back to Wellington on the night of 7 March 2009, would be to go back to the Village Vanguard in New York on the night in May 1979 when Jarrett's "European Quartet" (with Jan Garbarek on saxophone, Palle Danielsson on Bass, and Jon Christenson on drums) recorded the album Nude Ants. According to Ian Carr's Keith Jarrett: The Man and His Music, Garbarek was having an "off-night," but even that couldn't spoil the magic.

The Bridge

Flayed Bonito

The other night Mrs Fool and I went to a floor talk at the Canterbury Museum. The talk, by Dr Richard Bullen of the Art History and Theory programme at the University of Canterbury (who, according to his profile on the university website, was voted Lecturer of the Year by students in the College of Arts in 2008), was presented in conjunction with the museum's Pleasure and Play in Edo Japan exhibition.

I was aware that the museum had a huge number of Japanese dolls, pottery, and other artifacts that never go on display, but what I didn't know is that they also have a sizable collection of Japanese paintings and woodblock prints from the Edo period. Most of these are part of a collection assembled by shipping magnate Sir Joseph Kinsey and donated to the museum in the middle of the 20th century by his daughter, May Moore. Only recently have these works been properly identified, and many of them are being exhibited for the first time.

Flayed Bonito (c.1847-1849) is one of two works in the exhibition attributed to Katsushika Hokusai, who's probably most famous for his print Great Wave off Kanagawa. The exhibition catalogue informs us that the fish's "mass, and its delicate, moist surface are rendered through the overlay of colours to describe the subtly modulated variations of hue in the lightly glowing pink, red and apricot striations of the flesh, the dense, dark tones of the skin, and the dancing highlights on its surface", but I'm sure you already knew that, and that the "anthropomorphic smile of the bonito introduces an element of humour and playfulness into the composition".

The exhibition runs until 7 March.

Fire!

Just after nine o'clock last night there was a loud knock on the front door.
"You'd better get out," said a voice, "your neighbour's hedge is on fire!"
It took me a moment to realise that my neighbour didn't have a hedge. It was our hedge that was on fire!

It's the third time in about seven years that we've had a hedge fire. The first one nearly burnt the house down. And although this one was quite a distance from the house, the initial sense of panic was just the same. It didn't take long for the passerby who'd alerted me to the blaze to find the garden hose, but it seemed like an eternity before I managed to turn the water on (the gate to the courtyard where the tap was located was locked and so I had to go inside and get the keys and then go inside again to figure out which key was the right one as it was too dark to see outside).

The fire brigade arrived pretty quickly and we were reduced to the status of onlookers as they took over the firefighting duties. We joined, and were comforted by, the small crowd of neighbours who had gathered on the corner outside our house. If there's a silver lining to this particular cloud it's that we got to meet for the first time some neighbours who live in a nearby rental property and were reacquainted with quite a few others. And although this particular disaster wasn't exactly on the same scale as the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, Hurricane Katrina, or the other tragedies covered in Rebecca Solnit's A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster (which is still on my Amazon wishlist), last night I was reminded of the main finding of that book, which is that in disasters we are nearly all better people than we are in our everyday lives.

The White Man's Burden

In The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War, which I've just finished reading, James Bradley (author of Flags of Our Fathers) details the circumstances of the U.S. takeover of the Philippines just over a century ago, an event that inspired Rudyard Kipling to write the poem "The White Man's Burden". The U.S. had long eyed the Philippines, formerly a Spanish colony, as a potential gateway to Asia, enabling them to compete with the British and Russians for the riches of China. Hawaii had been annexed by the U.S. in 1896 following a coup instigated by local Euro-American business leaders, and the Spanish-American War of 1898 provided an opportunity for the U.S. to gain control not only of the Philippines but also of Guam, providing yet another stepping stone across the Pacific.

In May 1898, with the help of Filipino freedom fighters (who backed the Americans on the understanding that they would be given independence once the Spanish had been driven out), the U.S. invaded the Philippines and soon surrounded the capital, Manila. Resigned to defeat, the Spanish agreed to hand over Manila to U.S. forces. With the Spanish on the run, the Filipino resistance leader Emilio Aguinaldo proclaimed the independence of the Philippines and began setting up a government. However, the U.S. reneged on their agreement to grant independence, instead agreeing to purchase the Philippines from Spain for 20 million dollars. This sparked the Philippine-American War, otherwise known as the Philippine War of Independence.

U.S. troops administering "the water cure" to a Filipino captive in 1901

The Philippine-American War lasted for just over three years and left over 4,000 U.S. dead and nearly 34,000 wounded. Figures for the losses on the Filipino side vary, but conservative estimates are that the U.S. forces killed some 20,000 resistance fighters and 300,000 Filipino civilians. During this war the U.S. military experimented with a variety of torture techniques, one of which involved holding the victim down and pouring water over their face and down their throat and nose until they either submitted or lost consciousness. If they passed out they were rolled aside and allowed to come to, whereupon the procedure was repeated. This form of torture was dubbed the "water cure". It is still practiced today under the name waterboarding.

The Philippines remained a U.S. colony until 1946. Following independence, the U.S. continued to occupy two large military installations, the Subic Bay Naval Complex and Clark Air Base, as well as several smaller ones. These were eventually handed over to the Philippines in 1992. The U.S. military still have several hundred troops in the Philippines as part of a counterinsurgency operation known as the Joint Special Operations Task Force - Philippines.

Hawaii became a U.S. state in 1950 after the grip on power held by the Euro-American business leaders who had controlled the islands since the 1890s was finally broken. Guam is an unincorporated territory of the U.S. While its people are U.S. citizens, they have no right to vote in presidential elections and their representative in the U.S. Congress cannot vote on legislation.