east asian bittersweet rock & roll

east asian bittersweet rock & roll

14 Aug 2011 SUN @ home

maybe you don’t know about oriental bittersweet; it depends on where you live in this (US) country. but calastrus orbiculatus is a monster. the monster in your backyard you never know about until very late, and by then this invasive creeper’s taken over.

known locally as chinese bittersweet, maybe ‘cause the darn chinese has overtaken us even in the weeds...

jokes aside. you just about cannot get rid of this stuff, these twisting lianas that throw a wood vine upwards into the tree-tops, strangulating the trees, while meanwhilest grounding a yellow-reddish root 12' out into six different directions, and if you don’t pull every inch up then too bad for you, or else just as much pulling upwards'll be due in future years.

this east asian bittersweet has become kind of the kudzu of southern New England, and further into the geograpic afield.

once this stuff roots amid trees and along rock walls and fencing you can pretty much forget your life of ease, certainly for the time being.

worked for probably ten hours clearing maybe a hundred+ feet of pasture edge twenty feet wide; sweating the whole time. see choice video attached.

the catch is, oriental bittersweet can mingle its genes with american bittersweet, so just maybe this is a botanical parable for our times. or should be.

in any case, this twining liana is a regular nuisance that can take over the fringes of a property - that’s where it typically springs up - before you know it, it’s there. just another weed. and then...

a menace is what oriental bittersweet is.

even though a first reaction might be -- "well,, so what about invasive species?"

seemingly innocuous at first, but a short 5 years later the uppermost branches of the last surviving elm - or any other native shrub or tree - are basically taken over. because

talk about tough! you want tough? tough is what it takes? well then. settle in, because this stuff is seriously tough. like -- just guessing here! -- 75 million years of tough. 7,500.000 years of toughing it out here on earth. versus -- well, let's be generous -- 3 million years of sort-of-the-same anatomy, and about 7.5 thousand years (real roughly) of civilization. face reality: it's humanity vs. our own backyards.

in some places vines grew two dozen to the square meter, at least. although actually I never did count well...

started off

using a brush cutter - basically the nastiest circular saw blade ever, on a long handle. only, in the dense thicket of these vines, draped over both sides of the fencing - and you have to sever both sides if you mean to extract the stuff

because they are thoroughly intertwined with each other -

- the kickback from the hand-held tool was scary. yep, this shtuff calls for a goddarn John Deere type mechanism except

good luck trying to do that

while preserving the existing fence...too much for machines and

a serious test for robots.

humans not so much so except having to keep them watered, fed, and content. this last being a real issue.

so I ended up going at it with a chain saw.

f- it. no pandering around now, this is serious s-

worst of all is if the vines grow through wire fencing. because they corkscrew through like mutant DNA with a tough hide, and good luck uncoiling it.

plenty of hazard using a chainsaw in this manner too.

most likely on the “do not do” safety list that the chainsaw company lawyers craft. necessity dictates sometimes.

cutting the vines off doesn’t really do a number on them though.

they have to be pulled up by the roots.

every single vine.

if you want closure. because those roots extend 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, maybe (pythons in Florida! sized) 16 or 20 feet underground, depending on the vine and the tape. [apparently they disavow odd-numbers. -ed.]

and then, the granddaddys & grandmommys of all of them thicken up to to about 3 inches in diameter, hardrock woody, all contorted and helix-like, with no grain with a straight centimeter in one inch of it, and bark for bark versus a rhinoceros.

lopped those into 3 foot sections as couldn’t extract anything longer without whacking self by accident.

rough remembering when last so much fun working, though suspect war is lost.

tempest in a teapot

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“All agents are busy. This situation is beyond our control”.

-- Immigration Quebec

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I’ve [since mostly taken down] art on the Saatchi website. see:

http://www.saatchionline.com/JLKyd

(I labeled one of my Saatchi pieces - likely “amuser vous” - as adult content. then I had to modify my account settings so that I could view the piece. it's about my least favorite thing I ever did though, so with luck no sign of it's been left behind).

[instead here's an old drawing, 'cause it's black&white and twisted like the vines make me think of. if that's proper grammar. ed.]

Comments on the blind spot (not the one in the mirror - the one in our heads)

I hate it when I fail to properly reference a source. so I was especially p’o’ed because in my notes I didn’t reference the source of a quote of especial merit. finally I realized: I wrote that and since no one’s ever heard of me, no wonder Google’s falling flat.

Here’s my quote [that still needs editing. --ed.]:

“People tend to make decisions based upon the best known consequences of the time. Alas, much remains unknown, most importantly the little scientific factoids and their relationship with the whole rest of ‘the world’. Plus let us not forget about the little factor of human greed. Thus we have yesterday’s wonder coating become “lead (Pb) paint”, the “freedom of the road” become an addiction to petroleum, and “cheap power” becomes “coal”. All of those things with massive social detriments that are never incorporated into the expenses of the “wonder product’s” profit.”

I was adrift on this topic partly because I’ve been reading Bernard DeVoto’s The Course of Empire, and DeVoto comments again and again on the inability of the European mind to separate fact from fantasy when it came to the American geography, basically from about 1524 to 1806. DeVoto writes:

“De Soto and his company bequeathed to those who came after them a legacy of knowledge. It was of two kinds....

“...The other kind was formal knowledge. It began as the same stuff with the addition of what the chroniclers wrote about the expedition. It reached the learned, the scientists and literary scholars. Cosmographers, cartographers, and geographers took the mixed stuff and fitted it as well as they could, but by violence mainly, to their knowledge and theories of what the world was like. They too had knowledge, fantasy, and preconceptions, and the must be of deductive reasoning was even stronger. Hence their charts of the Atlantic, the South Sea, and presently the Western Sea, and world maps, maps of the Americas, maps of North America. They were made by minds that were among the best in Europe, and they represented the highest reach of knowledge. On them human intelligence pushes the line of the known outward into blank space. On the eastern coastline they began, not long after De Soto, to be tolerably good. But for the interior, long after empirical knowledge was making its way confidently from known place to known place, they were fantasy. In fact they were almost entirely fantasy for two hundred years. Suspended in the fantasy were grains of fact but no one know certainly what they were. Shapes could be glimpsed through a thick mist but men who had to act according to what was known had no way of telling whether they were truth or illusion.” (pgs 30-31 hardcover edition)

“The Florentine Giovanni Verrazano was not responsible for the belief that North America was just a hoot and a holler wide or that, at least, somewhere it narrowed to convenient thinness. No other idea was possible to the European mind, for the sum of human knowledge necessitated the conclusion that the North American land mass was narrow. This conclusion was reinforced by the tremendous power of reasoning from observed things and from hypothesis, and by the power of wish. Nevertheless Verrazano gave the idea fixation. Also, and this is more important, he gave it a shape that could be visualized and therefore elaborated.” (p 57 )

“Dobbs continued his agitation and pamphleteering for a water route to India. In 1744 he published An Account of the Countries Adjoining to Hudson’s Bay, a vigorous, absorbing book which assembled everything that was known, rumored, guessed, logically deduced, and imagined about the Northwest. It is a visionary's argument and perhaps the most shining eighteenth-century example of what the imagination can do when it has a blank map to work on and is handicapped by no empirical knowledge whatever.” (p 244)

In this case the blind spot turned out to be rather large: the Rocky Mountains. But our blind spots are all over, and it’s a major effort to reveal them. Some national blind spots have been Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan - just to touch the surface. And the belief that reducing taxes always correlates with economic growth is another. (Grover Norquist -- anti-tax ideological head honcho -- is one contemporary Arthur Dobbs).

There’s some recent writings that focus on our general inability to distinguish fantasy from reality. (One of which I failed to note at the time that I read it and a web search hasn’t helped, so I hope I have to revisit this passage when at last I stumble on that reference again). For instance The Theory That Would Not Die by Sharon Bertsch McGrayne (there’s an interesting analysis of McGrayne’s work in a Newsweek Daily Beast article, but I couldn’t find it on that f- web site, nor on any search engine, so f- it I’m moving on...), and Everything’s Obvious Once You Know the Answer by Duncan J. Watts.

In the early going I thought that DeVoto’s might make a perfect introductory text to the history of US western expansionism. because it is the case that in this book the various threads of Spanish, French, and (primarily) English incursion into the New World are masterly unwoven. But occasionally the text bogs down in minutiae that, say, would kill a freshman class on early American exploration. I found it insightful, but all those details about the tributaries of the upper Missouri are mainly of interest to those with some familiarity with the territory; otherwise I suspect it’s deadly dull in places. DeVoto’s quite capable of the lively turn-of-phrase though, as witness the Hemingway-esque finish to this passage about Lewis & Clark at the Missouri Breaks:

“It was nearly always the towrope now and the wind forever full of sand. At the end of the day fatigue felled a man like a club but dinner of buffalo ribs or bighorn chops or boiled beaver-tail was restorative. Driftwood fires bowed and flared to the high wind and Cruzatte would fiddle for dancing till the flames sank and only the glow of embers was reflected from the water...[ ]...They came out to plains country again and now the mountains were not so distant and wild roses had bloomed in the bottom and cactus on the banks...”

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8 Aug 2011 MON

Another Monday that doesn’t go as hoped. O but it could be worse.

So it’s a terrible loss that 30 soldiers died in a shot-down Chinook helicopter in Afghanistan, including 15 Navy Seals who had taken part in the raid on bin Laden. Don’t ask me, but maybe that bin Laden raid was the moment when we should have started a structured pull-out from this bloody war. Should have told the Afghanis: we’re done and we’re leaving now. If you ceasefire then we’ll leave as soon as we can. If you harass us it’ll take longer. And then these Navy Seals would be in a ticker parade on Broadway. But instead...

5 Aug 2011 FRI

Today’s musical selection - R.E.M. “Murmur”. Suitable for these days that have left an ashen taste in my mouth from the recent Congressional non-event on the debt crisis. Poising the US - and maybe the whole world - who knows? - stay tuned, news @ 10 - on the brink of disaster. And a whole lot of folks are thinking now’s the time to “start a new country up”. {REM, "Cuyahoga"}

Also Citizen Cope’s song “Penitentiary”.

Could have sworn it was Saturday by now. Munificent meal tonight: sort of a mex-american with oriental influenced dish. Leftover fajita fixings mixed with New England style (breaded) talapia, served on fried egg roll wrappers as we were out of tortillas.

Wish I had some laurels to rest on. A lot of people caution, “Don’t rest on your laurels.” But I wonder if you have some laurels if you may as well rest on them while they last.

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I’m not amazed enough at how little I know and how much less I understand.

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