A
bit of drama in front of me yesterday, as I’d been doing some work. All morning I’d noticed a pair of small
birds outside with a white tuft of hair on the top of a brown body, looking
down from the second floor to the back yard. They were darting around in our back yard going from tree to
tree. I didn’t hear them making
any definitive call though I reckoned they weren’t the lonely four-note bird
I’d heard the other morning.
Later, sitting downstairs, I saw one land outside, and dramatically
pounce, pause and then pounce again.
We have some spiders out there in the back that start to get
pretty fat and happy around this time. They build webs between the conifers and
the side of the house and wait.
Looking on line for “Spiders in Beijing” you mostly find pictures or
references to people who have eaten them at the night market in Wang Fu Jing. I searched more broadly for “northern
china” and came across a few photos that seemed similar to what we always
see. The family is generally
referred to as the “Orb Weaver” spider and perhaps that is the long legged family, that occupies our shadow spaces out there.
A bird, with a white top, proved much easier to find than “a
bird that goes ‘doot, doot, doot, doot.”
I appear to have a pair of Chinese (Light-vented) Bulbuls darting about back there. Poeople who’ve been with us a while here
on DB understand that we drop down to chickadees and magpies only in the
winter. So it is good to have
these critters out there, filling out the ecosystem.
The Wiki page says their call is a “Cha Kou Lee” sound which is the
Chinese word for Chocolate. I’m
listening now but hear no such thing.
Check out the tenth picture down on this list:
And this clip for the bulbul tenderly feeding its young:
The bulbul that
dropped down in front of me on the porch yesterday, was not tender. He dropped down and took a step back,
leaving something on the ground that I surmised was a sizable Orb-Weaver
Spider. The spider, with a leg
reach broader than a silver dollar, was not doing well. He appeared to flip and try to walk and
then dropped and to clutch the air with his legs. The bulbul, watching from the ground about a foot away,
repositioned himself and pounced again, striking once and then twice till he
had the spider in his mouth. With
that he flew away. An
opportunistic eater, I saw them later up in the cherry tree, nipping at the
young fruit.
I can recall once when I was about eighteen, and I headed
off to college, my best mate from took a path in a different direction. There was a fascinating juncture, in
the New York hardcore scene wherein the Hare Krishnas, with their tireless
proselytization and free veggie food, managed to secure the fascination of a
segment of that otherwise rather hardened scene. I refer you to the cover of the Cro Mags second album "Best
Wishes", as evidence of this cross fertilization.
My friend began to find the allure of a 5000 year old philosophical
tradition, repackaged in New York in 1966 by A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami
Prabhupada, rather compelling. He
was quite smart and had been ignorned and unnoticed in the suburban high school
world, I’d left behind. I visited the temple in Brooklyn and other venues once or
twice at his request to hear the people he found compelling speak. And at one presentation there was a
very interesting metaphor expressed, that has stayed with me.
This must have been 1985 or so, and one of the key leaders
in the movement, an American in saffron, I surmised, whose name is lost to me,
was giving a lecture in Colombia University. I dutifully showed up and took my seat. His message was about
reincarnation. He was explaining a scene he’d witnessed out his window which he described in some detail, wherein
a spider had captured a caterpillar and set about to bind it, and then kill it,
draining the hapless creature of his life’s fluid. Hell, was not difficult to envision, he exhorted. This was the hell on earth. This was what awaited all of us, should
we come back as lower life forms. All
of us 互为因果[1]. Watching the demise of the Orb-Weaver spider
yesterday, which otherwise look so ferocious and confident, my mind flashed to
that lecture.
On a Happy-er note, my sister sent me an absolutely lovely
clip of young people from 40 years ago dancing on Soul Trane with Don
Cornelius, set to the Pharrell Williams song “Happy.” It’s funky and uplifting and melancholy when one considers
the challenges that lay ahead for many of those beautiful young dancers from
that innocent time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7Yu93s_WhY
And it was good timing because the NY Times had just
published a piece reporting a group of young people in Iran who, like people in
a hundred other places in the world, put up a homemade movie of themselves dancing
around to the song, were arrested, and subjected to a public interrogation on
TV wherein they apologized. As
Williams wrote:
“It is beyond sad that these kids
were arrested for trying to spread happiness.”
Perhaps its time for Iran’s president Hassan Rouhani to step
up more assertively to reign in the troglodytes, like the unhappy fellow
featured in the online interrogation.
Appearing to respond to the absurd incident, the President tweeted the
following
#Happiness is
our people's right. We shouldn't be too hard on behaviors caused by joy."
I first posted about the song back in March responding to
the video done for “Happy in Beijing” which I watched again this morning and
which endures as a remarkable kaleidoscopic view into wintery Beijing.
I’ve already featured “Happy” on this blog and I was never
really a big Cro Mags fan, though I have many old memories of engaging with
Harley Flannigan in that fledgling Lower East Side hardcore scene. (In honor of Harley I just threw on
“Before the Quarrel” a collection of their early hardcore tracks before their
first album. It sounds good, like
the men’s room at CBGBs.)
So I will share with you briefly a bit about the Brazilian
musician’s challenging creation “Isam” which I put on for the first time last
night. I had been searching
through “heavy rotation” on Rdio randomly checking new things out and frankly
was about 0 for 9 when I hit upon this 2011 creation. Sonically fascinating, if aurally
disturbing, it was, as I recall, the perfect music to orchestrate the
brainless, functionary task of preparing expense reports at 1:00AM last night.
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