Io Parlo Italiano

As I prepare for an upcoming trip to China, the NYTimes Cocuy story has made the rounds, including a melodious translation into Italian:

I ramponi scricchiolano sulla neve. Grossi ghiaccioli color acquamarina sembrano pendere dalle bocche di un profondo crepaccio. Più in basso, le nuvole coprono il bacino del fiume Orinoco come una morbida coperta. Il paesaggio si distende lungo decine e decine di vette ricoperte di neve e profondi circhi glaciali. I laghi morenici risplendono nella luce tersa...

Va bene!

In the spirit, why not

Bikes in Disgrace

Los Angeles Times, 1895. Stuff that gets churned up in research. Read the rest here. 

Monkey do.

I've gone twitter. I am a monkey. You should follow me.




You'll learn about new stuff in media, neuroscience, colombiannesshood and sundry gems from my days mining info, reporting and writing. If blogs are a writer's slagheap, then twitter is a 47th-street diamond store: all glitter, no coal.



.

Colombianidad II

Thanks to Felipe, again.

Marcos's Cocuy photos on PDN's Photo of the Day

Marcos's work in the Cocuy is featured on PDN's Photo of the Day. Take a look.

El Cocuy in the Times

On the Ritak U'Wa Blanco. photo: Marcos Roda

I report from El Cocuy National Park in this week's travel section.

Above the Clouds in a Secret Colombia

AS crampons crunched ice, our guide, Rubará, raised his traditional woven sisal-thread handbag by his face and asked me to snap a photo. We were climbing above 17,000 feet, just shy of the summit of the Ritacuba Blanco, a glaciated peak shaped like a soft-serve ice cream cone, at El Cocuy National Park in Colombia. Aquamarine-hued icicles hung from the maw of a crevasse and, far below, clouds blanketed the Orinoco Basin.

The landscape stretched across dozens of ice-capped peaks and deep cirque valleys. Moraine lakes, formed by the natural erosion from glaciers’ unhurried flow and retreat, shimmered in mineral hues. Nearly 30 miles away, we could just make out the telltale church spire of the town of Soatá. Save for a photographer friend and one other guide on the ice field, no other people were in view. The February day was bright. I’d finally caught my breath.

Read on here. And please check out Dennis Drenner's excellent photos in the slide show as well.


More photos, from Marcos Roda and myself, with the voice of Miguel Herrera; 2:08 in all:


Thanks to mucholoquito for creative commons use of his music, off Jamendo.
.

Park Street Remembered

Window views, Park Street, June, 2009

Some ideas about home, explored in this video of the house where I grew up, in Charlottesville. A rough cut; low res; just playing around. Photos mine, from June, 2009.

Or, pay a visit of your own:

View Larger Map

ktbnik

I've taken on a pro bono role over at Killing the Buddha, as contributing editor [whom, as Patrick Symmes once pointed out to me, neither contributes nor edits]. I'll be trying to bring audio and multimedia to the site, even though in the area I complete the three "unders-": under-qualified, under-achieving and under-paid. I'm hoping to convince this capable ITP grad to share some expertise. At any rate, stay tuned over there.

Saint Radovan of Karadzic; or, Jack Hitt does it again

This is the story of the Multi-Zap Zapper, "Mina Minic’s New Radiesthesia With Two Pendulums," and one of the bloodiest warlords of the late twentieth century. If you haven't already, please, please read Jack Hitt's soul-divining short epic, "Radovan Karadzic’s New-Age Adventure," in this week's NY Times Magazine.

And, when in trouble, remember this escape clause: "I am a Herzegovinian woman, and this insults my honor!"

And don't miss the slide show, either.

Believer Beware launch party

See you there...

A special invitation from
KILLING THE BUDDHA

What do you get when a Buddhist raconteur, a junior high Jewish messiah, and a transsexual cowboy for Christ walk into a bar?

Find out at Le Poisson Rouge in New York City on June 29th when Killing the Buddha, the award-winning online magazine of god for the godless, releases its new anthology, Believer, Beware: First-Person Dispatches from the Margins of Faith.

The evening will feature an open bar, door prizes, and stories by Paul Morris of BOMB Magazine, Irina Reyn, author of What Happened to Anna K., and horse wrangler Quince Mountain.

Drawn from the website created by Jeff Sharlet and Peter Manseau in 2000, Believer, Beware is a collection of true confessions, skeptical testimonies, and personal revelations of religion lost, found and then lost again. Library Journal in a starred review, says Believer, Beware is "shocking, exhilarating, and never dull.... Highly recommended." Publishers Weekly describes it as "smart, candid, and insightful.... The voices are refreshingly honest."

Just the facts, ma'am...

Where: Le Poisson Rouge, 158 Bleecker St., New York City [Google map link]
When: Monday, June 29, 2009
Time: 6:00 - 9:00 pm
Cost: Free, with open bar

- The KtBniks
contact@killingthebuddha.com
http://www.killingthebuddha.com

Shameless self-promotion

The Brooklyn Rail hosts another Rant/Rhapsody at Freddy's this Sunday. Hope to see you there.

How we got here

Fraternity from Richard Mosse.

Here's how Mosse describes the 5 min work:

Fraternity was shot at Yale University's infamous DKE frat house in under an hour. The men were happy to participate in the project in exchange for a keg of beer. They compete against each other to shout or scream the loudest and for the longest time. When they cannot scream any longer they must stop, and cannot begin again. DKE (pronounced Deke) stands for Delta Kappa Epsilon, and counts five US presidents in its alumni, including George Bush Jr, George Bush Sr, Gerald Ford and Theodore Roosevelt. Other famous Dekes include three Justices of the US Supreme Court, one Vice President, and countless State Governors, Senators and Speakers.

For me, Mosse's images of palatial ruins in Iraq match:

Mufti on Pakistan

Colleague Shahan Mufti (left) going toe-to-toe with Bill Moyers and Juan Cole, on Bill Moyers Journal. Watch here, and find out what's really happening in Pakistan.

Just a damn amazing picture, that's all.

Transiting the Sun

In this tightly cropped image, the NASA space shuttle Atlantis is seen in silhouette during solar transit, Tuesday, May 12, 2009, from Florida. This image was made before Atlantis and the crew of STS-125 had grappled the Hubble Space Telescope.

The phtographer made this image using a solar-filtered Takahashi 5-inch refracting telescope and a Canon 5D Mark II digital camera.

Image Credit: NASA/Thierry Legault

Our deepest data set is sport

Sure, smart men can't jump, but they sure can blow the cover on rampant stupidity (or, euphemistically, "lack of innovation") in professional sports. This exchange between Bill Simmons and Malcolm Gladwell on ESPN is delightfully all over the map, but prompted in part by Gladwell's recent study of the full court press.

Add to this the pleasure of watching recent Michael Lewis profile subjects Shane Battier and Michael Oher perform, and you have yourself a veritable sport-think jamboree.

What we need next is a Gladwell-Lewis-John Lee Anderson hybrid to launch out beyond the American sporting landscape into the third world, to tell us about sport and society there. Someone besides Evan Osnos, that is.

All I Ever Wanted

Killing the Buddha has a second installment of work on my extended family, this time from the sucrose-beached confines of Club Med Punta Cana.

The downturn means I’m broke, not that I’m supposed to stop living. So when my Uncle Carl announced that he’d sign the bottom line for an all-inclusive in the Dominican Republic, in January, my self-employed, 37-year-old pride did not get in the way. In other words, I decided to take him up on it, even though I’m hardly a believer in things all-inclusive. List me as still single, still adventurous, you might even say a skeptical vacationer. But, in this economy, you take the holiday you can get.

Flying alone to Club Med–especially the family-friendly, circus-themed, sucrose-beach resort at Punta Cana–felt like being shipped off as a teenager to Jew Camp in the Poconos, only warmer. Somebody was going to try to get me on a dance floor. There’d be communal singing. I’d get cornered by a horsey, aggressive girl, and–why not?–kiss her. The lack of context invited abandon. Similarly, at Club Med, faith in a god (of leisure) and full devotion to it promised celestial dividends. Want to know what heaven’s like? sang the Mediterranean prophets. Then give yourself over to us.

Read on, here.

More on those wacky Jersey Jews here, and to come.

.

Colombianness

Thanks again, Felipe. No idea who to thank for collecting the photos.

How Jell-O bounces

After the dart comes the fascination.



Follow links for HD versions, and more footage from a 2500 fps camera.

My Haggadah

Fantastic web upstart Killing the Buddha published my meditation on Passover at sundown last night. Read it here.

Seder, after all, means order. More from the Tepman family gatherings coming soon, with exercises in portraiture and storytelling.

The End of Ice – and the Beginning of a New Kind of Literary Journalism

Come on down April 16 to 20 Cooper Square, my old NYU stomping grounds, and meet some smart folks championing the VQR, including Lawrence Weschler, Ted Conover, William Finnegan, and editor Ted Genoways. (Read Ted's Batman story from the February Outside Magazine here, and Weschler and Conover's contributions to the current VQR here and here.)

Considering the illustrious company, I won't be saying much, but I will have a chance to talk about reporting and writing my story on the exhumation of victims of paramilitary violence in Colombia, published by VQR this winter.

More event info here:

• WHAT:The End of Ice – and the Beginning of a New Kind of Literary Journalism
• WHEN: Thursday, April 16th , 7pm to 9pm
• WHERE: 20 Cooper Square, 7th floor commons

Hope to see you there.

Poor Kid

In the New York Times this Sunday:

The Goat That Got Away

By MATTHEW FISHBANE

A FEW Sundays ago, between 2:53 and 2:56 a.m., a young man was seen loitering outside Cabrito, a Mexican bar and restaurant on Carmine Street in Greenwich Village.

Security video showed the man walking, looking around and then climbing a railing. Soon after, a night watchman noticed that the restaurant’s signature sign, which had hung above the railing, was gone. Whether the man in the video took it is not clear — he disappears from the video frame after he climbs the railing — but someone surely did.

“It stuck out like a pink goat,” David Schuttenberg, the restaurant’s chef, said jokingly the other day. “It was begging to be stolen.”

Read the rest here.

Lion Loose in Bogota

Ok, I have no idea where this comes from, and I have Felipe to thank back in Bogota for passing it along. But whoever owns this animal is a genius.

A foul-tasting brown sludge...

Glad to see John Otis and Scott Dalton out in the jungle -- always something interesting they come back with. This time, it's yajé:


Read the story over at GlobalPost.

I'd say that the idea is ripe for South Park, except that they already did it:

Wires II

Nathan Harger is one of PDN's 30 new photographers to watch, and he also works the same high-contrast black on white of things strung and structural:


Untitled (Powerlines), Elizabeth, NJ 2008

Harger's working in a long tradition, maybe none more influential in this category than the documentary work of the FSA from 1935 to 1945, like this image of West Virgina telephone wires by John Vachon:



I'm certain there's something to the upward angle on these shots (and the celestial background) that gives them their reverent tone. Here's Alfred T. Palmer, 1942:


Enough to suggest even a Weschleresque convergence between John Vachon and Enrique Metinides:

As if laying the grid were ominous of an inevitable future.

Wire: The Power Tokyo Project

(click to enlarge)

Ok, so I said I had a thing for wires, and my site shows it. See Christopher Griffith's Power Tokyo project here (let the promo run for 5 secs, then the slideshow will appear). Meantime, we'll assume that somewhere a grad student is at work on a thesis called "The Grid: Power Lines and the Collectivist Art Naif." Until it's published, I'll keep looking up to admire what electricity has wrought.

Chances are the view's just as good in your own home town, unless you live in New York or Paris, where most of the slinging happens underground. We've lost the novelty and wonder of the extent of the wiring of our lives. That's why the wires on my site are intended as more than an exercise in compositional geometry: they should be an exhortation to look up, to look.


(Robert W. Kelley for Life, May 1962)

The grid, after all, courses with instant death:



This is what Mexican photographer Enrique Metinides figured out. He takes the same formal approach to the geometry of the network, but adds dynamism to the graphic composition. Here the human element does more than just provide scale and perspective. It literally charges the grid:



More on Metinides here and here.


(Hat tip to A Photo Editor, Rob Haggart.)

With the first kidnapping, it all falls apart

Interesting argument from Elizabeth Dickinson over at FP on post-conflict tourism. I'm preparing a travel piece now about a remote region of Colombia and grappling with the problem of how to describe the risk. For years, a friend of mine talked about the suggestion of visiting Colombia in this way: "I'd go, but I'd never take responsibility for anyone else going." Has that changed now? Like I said about emeralds a long time ago, it all holds up until the first bad deal.

There's a big idea behind all this about "travel-warning lists" and the responsibilities of the tourist. But also about the politics of opening up a country that has remained largely isolated. Topics Naipaul exposed in The Middle Passage, but that remain unresolved in places like Colombia, and Iraq.


photo: Suba, Bogota, Colombia

Photo page update

I've updated my photo page. Please give it a visit.

The Art of the As Told To: DIY

In the March issue of Outside, a series of interviews I did with do-it-yourself innovators. It's a five-page spread that explores the mentality of people who just did it, from an urban farmer to treehouse makers to a bike-frame-builder who specializes in women.

One thing they all had in common: sticking with it. I hope this comes through in the interviews. At first, they are just people doing their own thing. Like, "I don't know, this is what I love to do, so I do it." And eventually everyone else realizes that they aren't going to stop doing what they're doing. So, gradually, somehow, people start to take them seriously. And they eventually win MacArthur grants and show up in the pages of glossy magazines.

Toros, Bogotá

Sound and photos are my own.

.

It just doesn't end

Sony Releases New Stupid Piece Of Shit That Doesn't Fucking Work

Yes, it is too bad, really.

SONIA. You love no one?

ASTROFF. Not a soul. I only feel a sort of tenderness for your old nurse
for old-times' sake. The peasants are all alike; they are stupid and
live in dirt, and the educated people are hard to get along with. One
gets tired of them. All our good friends are petty and shallow and see
no farther than their own noses; in one word, they are dull. Those that
have brains are hysterical, devoured with a mania for self-analysis.
They whine, they hate, they pick faults everywhere with unhealthy
sharpness. They sneak up to me sideways, look at me out of a corner of
the eye, and say: "That man is a lunatic," "That man is a wind-bag." Or,
if they don't know what else to label me with, they say I am strange. I
like the woods; that is strange. I don't eat meat; that is strange, too.
Simple, natural relations between man and man or man and nature do not
exist.

Austin Pendleton, your theater license is revoked. Keep your grubby paws off of Chekhov. Man is forgetful, but God remembers... a really badly-directed play.

make do

Yeah, but an architect costs money.

(thanks to Felipe for the tip.)

There's ya problem right the-ah

New Jersey Turnpike. Going 65. Snowing. Someone cut me off. I took evasive action. Lost control. Rammed into the rail. Spun around. Hit a guy in the next lane. Sat trembling for a while, out of cold and out of fear. Cops came, wearing baby blue. Asked me if I'd fallen asleep. "No," I said. "I lost control." Got a summons for careless driving. Tow truck arrived. Hauled me and my car off the Turnpike. Said he'd had another dead guy just yesterday. Uncle came to pick me up. Took a bath. Popped a vicodin. Pled not guilty. Rode in to the city for the title. Rode back out. Signed the title over to the wrecker. Checked the box saying "has been wrecked." Took the plates and one last look. And walked away.

how to fit a 20 piece band on a 10 foot stage

The Winter Jazzfest, January 2009

(Thanks, memend, for the happy new gear.)

The Bones of Mendihuaca, in Winter VQR

Colombian military escort the forensic team in the Sierra Nevada of Santa Marta.

In its Winter 2009 issue, the Virginia Quarterly Review publishes my report on the exhumation of victims of paramilitary violence in Colombia. Complex, gruesome and under-reported, the injustices of Colombia's vast paramilitary power remain unresolved. Here's what happens when the trappings of order are cynically deployed in a lawless land.

Maira Alejandra Martínez Suarez is sweeping away another layer of dirt when the bullets come flying overhead. She’s twenty-six years old, and with her French braid tucked under a brand-new baseball cap, she looks more like a rec-league softball pitcher than a forensic anthropologist under fire. She grabs her shovel, paintbrush, and dustpan and, standing in an open grave, peeks over the ledge of moist earth. She scans for incoming fire across the clearing dotted with body-sized rectangular pits. Her Colombian army bodyguards, belly-down, shoot out into the surrounding brush. A ranch corral is too far for escape. She crouches, comes eye to eye with a silver tooth in a half-buried skull and starts to pray, lying in a grave she’s digging.

Subscription required to read the full story. Better yet, support VQR with a newsstand purchase.

Jasper the friendly ghost

NYC, December 2008

Jacob's Ladder NYC

Jacob's Ladder, NYC