Long, long ago, there used to be a small, downtown cafe in St. Pete that was decorated with year ’round Christmas tree lights strung around the ceiling. I could almost swear it was where the Central Coffee Shoppe is now, but not certain. That was more than 30 years ago.

This particular decoration, pictured above, is my favorite, even after all these years. Thank you, Nathan.

I think I may drag out my Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Easter Bunny decorations, too, while I’m at it.

Isn’t it great to know where your food comes from? The word, “community,” in that phrase really strikes a resonant chord with me. There’s something “right” about it being grown by real people, not a monolithic corporation in some distant state or country. This salad has got to be fresher than anything on earth.

I’m happy with this picture. Click on it and see the detail. Depending on your monitor, you may be able to click on the resulting picture to get in even closer. If you do, you’ll see capers, artichoke hearts, blue cheese dressing, green olives, cheddar cheese cubes, and sardines! Did I leave anything out?

My big sister, Lucy, in 1949 at Biloxi lighthouse

The Mississippi Gulf Coast figures prominently in my family’s history since my father’s relatives are in southern Mississippi and Alabama. Also, as a poor Methodist preacher’s family in Illinois, about the only vacation we could afford when I was a kid was to head south in our old Buick, camp out with relatives, and then spend a week at the campgrounds the Methodist church maintained on the coast.

The original Biloxi seawall, now hidden beneath sand

In those days, there was no beach in Biloxi. There was simply an enormous seawall consisting of steps that one could walk down to be closer to the water to fish. Which step one chose depended on the tides. As a child of 4 and 5 I remember that close, black water as frightening, but my father managed to coax me down the steps by showing me how to use crab-nets baited with bacon. Here is a post card from that era showing the wall; the bit of sand you see in that card was the Gulf floor and was seldom visible.

Huge manmade beach covering the original seawall

These days, that magnificent seawall is covered by countless tons of white sand as seen above. I suppose I prefer the beach, but it seems a shame that that seawall is history. The sand was pumped onto the seawall in 1951 (see MS History for background on this and other Mississippi public works).

Famous Biloxi lighthouse

An indelible memory of that childhood time is the famous Biloxi lighthouse. Here are several good links on it. I’ll let you read about it for yourself.

• Biloxi Lighthouse
• Web Lighthouses
• Through the years
• Drawing
• early photo
• good vintage MS vintage postcards
• Lighthouses of the United States: Mississippi

The OTHER Biloxi lighthouse

West of the historical lighthouse, on a small promontory jutting out from the shore, there is another lighthouse, pictured above. I can find no mention of it anywhere! It appears to be a functional lighthouse, but it’s not listed among the three lighthouses in Mississippi. If anyone knows something about this one, I would enjoy learning about it.

Shrimp boat (singular!) heads out for the day

In those days, shrimping was huge on the Gulf Coast. It still exists, but not like it used to exist. It was already in serious decline because of all the cheap shrimp shipped in from Asian shrimp farms, then the catastrophic BP oil spill damned near dealt it a death blow. I hope it recovers.

A considerable distance out from Biloxi are a series of barrier islands (see Barrier Islands of Mississippi). One of our family treats in those days was to take a commercial boat out to Ship Island–one of those islands. Halfway out, the boat would stop and haul up nets of live oysters. (Vegans hold your ears!) The shells were cracked open for us and we downed them while they were, literally, still quivering.

Piers that once reached far out into the Gulf remain demolished

The Mississippi Gulf Coast has a long history of recovering from assaults from nature. It’s always bounced back, although sometimes it takes longer than others. The trauma of Hurricane Katrina is still evident. These pictures were taken just this past year. Notice the devastation that still exists both on the coast and inland.

Scarred landscape of Biloxi remains–buildings once stood where those blank squares are

But they’re slowly rebuilding.

One rebuilt pier

Part of the economic engine for that rebuilding is casino money; they were rebuilt first, of course. I don’t know what I think about the casinos. The Biloxi of my youth was poor, poor, poor, poor, poor–a sleepy little town on the water. Now there are jobs. And, people should be allowed to gamble if they wish. I don’t believe in legislating “morality,” ever! But, I, myself, don’t enjoy the casinos in Biloxi. (Vegas is another matter! That can be fun…if one doesn’t gamble.) The Biloxi casinos are full of people my age (old) obsessively frittering away their social security checks. Few are smiling. Mainly, I see grim futility. Here are a couple of links that speak to the issue of casinos on the Gulf Coast: here and here).

One of many casinos

Whether you’re into the casinos or just a new place to visit that’s a (long) day’s drive, Biloxi is only 9 hours away from Tampa. That’s really not that far. The casinos make for cheaper rooms, so that’s good. I highly recommend the trip and the experience.

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There are places you miss more than you realize until you visit them again. The Southwest is one of those places.

Recently I visited a friend of 43 years. He’s only recently moved to Gallup. I’d never been there before, but I hope to go again.

The title of this post pretty much says it all in regard to the Southwest. It is so peaceful.

Don’t get me wrong. I love Florida. I park on the roof of the Tampa International Airport so I can walk out into our huge sky with towering clouds at night, overlooking vast stretches of water. But, when at ground level in Florida, there’s a claustrophobic shortness to the horizon; things are too close.

In the Southwest, they stretch for miles as if one were standing on a tall building. That space brings peace.

And the vegetation! It’s interplanetary. It’s not lush as it is here, but it is exotic in the extreme.

My friend asked me what I wanted to do. I said, “Nothing!” And nothing is what we did. We simply sat and talked and relaxed on this porch below for several days. What a treat.

Ashes of the Earth

Something new out of something old

There are many types of sleuths and mysteries beyond Mrs. Marple in Agatha Christie’s locked-room cozies or the hard-boiled private eye, Philip Marlowe, in Raymond Chandler’s yarns. One of the many types is the police procedural that’s become the tired mainstay of so much television fare. Yet, a master such as Isaac Asimov, in his Robot series, was able to transform that genre into something completely unique by his choice of context. Thus, Asimov created the science-fiction police procedural novel.

The author, Eliot Pattison, has, I believe, created his own mystery niche, mysteries within the context of the collision of cultures. These cultural collisions have taken several forms. What first got me hooked on Pattison, were his Inspector Shan novels (see inkwatu.com/2011/01/01/the-eliot-pattison-inspector-shan-series/). The cultural conflict in those books is the struggle between China and Tibet, a topic of personal significance for me as a Buddhist.

Finishing those, I moved on to his Bone Rattler series. The cultural conflict there is between that of the peoples of the new world (the Native-Americans and the European colonists who are in the process of transforming from Europeans into Americans) and the Europeans who exploit and manipulate the Native-Americans and American colonists.

As Robert Ludlum said in a Writer’s Digest article, “I think arresting fiction is written out of a sense of outrage.” That outrage is certainly there for Pattison in the Chinese/Tibetan conflict, in the pre-Revolutionary War America, and in the post-apocalyptic world of his newest novel, Ashes of the Earth: A Mystery of Post-Apocalyptic America.

However, for Pattison, this outrage is not the “thing” itself; it is merely the context. The “thing” itself is the mystery that must be solved within this context.

Ashes of the Earth: A Mystery of Post-Apocalyptic America

The cultural collision in Ashes of the Earth is on multiple levels. The most obvious is between the memories of the pre-apocalyptic world and the reality of a post-apocalyptic one. Another is between one outpost of survivors and the outcasts from that group. There are other cultural conflicts, but I will leave those for you to discover.

At first, an apocalyptic world novel might seem like a profound departure for such an established author. It’s not. Compare Pattison’s Ashes of the Earth to any of John Christopher’s post-apocalyptic world novels.

(John Christopher is a pseudonym of Samuel Youd. For a great article on his novels see www.colinbrockhurst.co.uk/the-shattered-worlds-of-john-christopher/422/. In the late 60s I read all of Youd’s John Christopher novels. I recommend them highly.)

The stakes are completely different for the two authors. For Christopher, the underlying theme is survival in a world of anarchy–that’s what’s at stake. For Pattison, survival is just the context, the mystery is the game.

Pattison’s Sleuths

Typically, Pattison’s sleuths all have a foot in both sides of the cultural conflict. Often he is a fallen and outcast hero of the culture of oppression who defends the oppressed culture as a side effect of his sleuthing. Here, too, is a feature of Pattison’s novels that set them apart from many mysteries.

Over the course of each series, and to a certain extent within each book, the hero is experiencing his own character arc, a change of perspective, loyalties, belief systems, and sense of purpose. This arc is built into the nature of the character himself. It is a journey of self-discovery for the sleuth. I find this aspect of Pattison’s novels particulary rewarding as a reader. Pattison’s sleuths are not static, two-dimensional characters. This makes for considerable interest and tension. Not only is there a crime to be solved, but the hero himself is a mystery, to us and to himself.

When I look back over the novels of Pattison that I’ve read, I remember many of the characters vividly, not just his heroes. This is not always the case with an author. Just taking the two authors mentioned above, both favorites of mine, Christopher and Ludlum, aside from the main character how many of their other characters do I remember? Not all that many. In Pattison’s novels, I remember quite a few.

A venerable tradition is maintained

Above all, Pattison’s books are mysteries–not political fiction, not intrigue, not thrillers, not sci-fi (although all those elements may be there), but mysteries. There is a crime to be solved. We try to solve it. The sleuth solves it and explains it. What more could a mystery junkie ask?

I highly recommend Ashes of the Earth: A Mystery of Post-Apocalyptic America. Once you read it, I suspect you’ll go back and read more of his novels.

Bornean orangutan (male) “Rango” Age 36. The only great ape from Asia, orangutans are among the most endangered animals on earth.

What a privilege: a private tour by the person I’m convinced is the world’s best docent of the zoo rated #1 in the United States by Parent’s Magazine. That zoo and that docent (Jane Rubin) are right here in Tampa Bay, at the Lowry Park Zoo (www.lowryparkzoo.com), 1101 W. Sligh Ave., Tampa, FL 33604, 813-935-8552.

As was mentioned in The Jackson, Mississippi, Zoo, where my cousin, Donna, is the veterinary technician, zoos have come a long, long, long way from the dismal, depressing dungeons of my youth.

Today’s zoo keepers are animal activists and preservationists whose purpose extends way beyond just keeping animals in captivity for the entertainment of human animals.

For instance, take a look at the Commitment to Conservation page of the Lowry Park Zoo’s website. This is where the zoo’s efforts to continually look “for ways to enhance the animals’ lives through behavioral enrichment, operant conditioning and exhibit improvements” are discussed. Also described are their significant contributions to animal conservation.

On that page are links to four important subpages:

• Conservation In The Zoo
• Conservation Regionally
• Conservation Around The World
• Conservation Recycling Program

On the first of those pages, Conservation in the Zoo, we learn of the zoo’s three goals of education, conservation and research. Their mission is to “Connect People with the Living Earth.”

They are a member of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA) which conserves wildlife through education, research, captive breeding for reintroduction, and fund-raising to support field conservation.

There are 40 animals at the Lowry Park Zoo that are part of the AZA Species Survival Plan® (SSP) program–they are listed on the Lowry Park Zoo’s Conservation In The Zoo page.

There’s so much to recommend this Tampa attraction. Anyone coming to a convention in Tampa should take an afternoon or morning and go. Any parent or grandparent living in the area should buy passes and spend time with their children and grandchildren there. I saw many photographers there and I learned that often they buy year passes and spend many hours there photographing the animals. For the kids, there’s a few rides, of course, but the main attraction are the animals.

All the pictures in this post were taken at the Lowry Park Zoo and Jane helped me identify the animals after I’d edited the pictures so I’d be sure to get everything properly labeled. (Any errors are mine!)

“Rango,” pictured at the beginning of the post is perhaps my favorite animal there; I relate to his sense of style. I learned from Jane that every year at holiday time, the volunteers bring the animals presents which the animals love to open. I’ll have to think of a suitable gift for Rango.

Support wildlife preservation and have a good time doing it: go to the Lowry Park Zoo.

Bornean orangutan (female) “Josie” age 25 & daughter, “Hadiah” age 5	Chimpanzee (female) “Rukiyah”
Colobus monkey – Angola	Siamang : female “Haddie” & male “Cyrus” & baby “Malu.”

Ringtailed lemur – Madagascar	Golden lion tamarin (Brazil)
Bolivian grey titi monkeys female “Leap” & male “Cleve”	Yellow-footed rock wallaby
emu	petting zoo goat
African penguin feeding session	Waterbuck (safari ride)

meerkat sentinel

Grevy’s zebra & white rhino	African elephant & Hartman mountain zebra
Reticulated giraffe male “Billy Bob” & Rothschild’s giraffe male “Randle”	Shoebill stork male “Mr. Zero”
Cheetah brothers “Chaka” & “Gaheeji”	Pygmy hippo Mother “ZzaZza” & daughter “Anakiya”
Maribou stork – sunning	Okapi female “Betty.” Okapis live only in the Ituri Forest in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and are so elusive that they only became known to the European world in 1901. It is the giraffes’ only relative.
Saddlebilled stork	Shoebill stork female “Binti” Hatched at Lowry Park Zoo 12/26/09. Binti is the ONLY shoebill hatched and reared by parents (without incubation or feeding intervention) anywhere in captivity in any accredited zoo.

Male giraffes (safari ride) “TangaTanga,” “Timmy” & “Benwa”

Tomorrow is the Super Bowl. Therein lies a tale:

Back in 1991, as usual, I was supplementing my income as a college prof by moonlighting as a church musician, playing organ and conducting a volunteer choir. That particular year, I happened to put on a variety show with the choir, doing a number of sets of pop tunes from different decades and different styles, ending with a political set that concluded with Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA,” complete with the church’s Boy Scout troop marching in with the American flag, which of course got the audience on its feet and insured a huge round of applause. Pure cornball!

Well, as chance would have it, the Executive Producer of the Super Bowl Pregame Show was in the audience because he was, completely unbeknownst to me, a member of that parish. Following the concert, he came up to me and said words to the effect of, “I’ve got a proposition for you…”

It seemed that the coming year’s Pregame Show (Super Bowl XXVI Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1992) showcased local Minnesota youth including the Metropolitan Boys Choir, the Twin Cities Youth Symphonies, and four local marching bands. He needed a musical arrangement that accommodated all of them at one time! He asked if I’d be the Music Director for that show, writing that arrangement as well as writing and recording the arrangements for the other acts in the show and supervising a bunch of production details associated with the game.

I said, “Sure!” Now, please understand. Although I have done a lot of commercial writing and arranging, I consider myself primarily a classical musician, with a special emphasis in church music, since most of my publications are in that area and my major instrument was pipe organ.

And that’s the point of the whole story: not in a million, million years would I ever have even considered that–starting with the 1992 game and continuing through Super Bowl XXXVI Pregame Show, New Orleans, Louisiana, 2002, for a total of 10 shows–I would be involved in pro athletic entertainment. Never! But, it happened, completely out of the blue.

But, when I look back, I realize that almost everything that has happened to me, good and bad, but especially good, was a surprise. Not just the Super Bowl gig, but new friends, new opportunities, new insights, new jobs…all surprises, all unsought.

Of course, I had to have done the work to have created the conditions that made those surprises even possible. For instance, it’s unlikely that I’ll be “surprised” to be asked to be a ballet dancer for a dance troop…unless they need someone in an elephant costume! My dietary habits and lack of exercise pretty well preclude that possibility.

And, once the opportunity arose, and I said Yes to the opportunity, I needed to have busted butt to earn being asked back year after year. (Every year that I was rehired, I was always, truthfully, surprised; every year I figured that that was the last time.)

A friend has pointed out that Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, German field marshal at the start of the First World War, said, “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.” You have to plan, you have to prepare, but when you make contact with life, it all changes and it’s all a surprise.

And, as another general, Dwight D. Eisenhower, said, “In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”

This is not just true in warfare, it’s also true in music: you practice, practice, practice…but, then you go out on stage and forget about all that. You just play.

Regardless what you think is going to happen, what happens and how it happens and when it happens, is always a surprise and different than you’d ever anticipated.

That’s a relief isn’t it? No amount of straining is going to “make” things happen. What happens is what happens and past a certain point, it’s out of your hands.

Relax and enjoy life’s surprises.

1. The Skull Mantra (1999)
2. Water Touching Stone (2001)
3. Bone Mountain (2002)
4. Beautiful Ghosts (2004)
5. Prayer of the Dragon (2007)
6. The Lord of Death (2009) [Wikipedia]

Just goes to prove “there’s no accountin’ far taste” (to be spoken in the Ozark accent into which I was born; down there, “for” rhymes with “far”).
 
I love the series and highly recommend it. It fits, squarely, within the niche defined in Mystery Series Set in Foreign Lands with one additional quirk: the protagonist is Han Chinese, a disgraced inspector from Beijing who, before he was sent to a labor camp in Tibet, was a highly placed political person in the government.
 
Lest one become too condescending toward China’s Tibetan policy, I think it’s good to remember that…

• our own country’s conquering, killing, subjugation, disenfranchisement, and internment in reservations of the native people of this land has been quite a bit less than humane–nor is there any sign that we intend to make any reparations or amends to them;
• ditto our treatment of the natives of Africa who were enslaved on American soil;
• theocracies of any sort–even Buddhist–are a disaster (even governments too much in the sway of any one religion, such as in Sri Lanka, can become dangerous);
• the media, including fiction but most certainly “news,” is never free from bias, so unless one is actually in the location in question, there is no way to know the real story and most historical theory would say that even then, one cannot know the whole, unbiased story, because one can only view circumstances from a single point in space and time and through a single personal bias;
• and, if one goes back into history to justify a point of view, it is always possible to go back even farther in time and support an opposing point of view–it is best to confront reality solely on the basis of the current situation.

That said…the Tibetan context of Pattison’s novels makes the heart break.
 
Inspector Shan’s heart broke too and he became acculturated to the Tibetan Buddhist sensibility through his contact with lamas in prison camp and, after his release, to the wider Tibetan society.
 
It’s worth taking a look at the Wikipedia article on acculturation. The examples given in the article are of native peoples being exposed to outside culture and gradually adopting and integrating their customs into their own. However, acculturation works both ways.
 
It happened when the Romans brought Greek slaves to teach their young; Greek thought and ideals infiltrated Roman culture. It happened when African slaves were brought to America; “southern cooking” is really African-American cooking and jazz and rock arise from African-American music. It happens time after time throughout history, the “conquering” force always seems to, eventually, absorb and “become” the very thing it conquers.
 
Personified by Inspector Shan, I think that is what Pattison’s books hold out as the eventual solution to the Tibetan future, that the acculturation will eventually go both ways. Perhaps it’s worth remembering that the Qing dynasty became Buddhist with a Tibetan lama as advisor to the Emperor. Might not that be the model for a possible future?

Long ago, I learned a secret that kept me writing and growing as a composer all my life: with each piece you’re learning something new about how to compose.

I was already doing this as a kid, but didn’t know it. However, as an undergraduate, I was fortunate enough to take one of the courses that a professor at the conservatory, Mr. Stanworth Beckler, offered that was a presentation of his analysis of the complete works of a specific composer–each and every piece that composer ever wrote. Those courses were obviously an effort of love on his part. Why else would someone analyze every piece someone composed?!

One semester he devoted to Igor Stravinsky, one of my very favorite composers since childhood, and I was lucky to have gotten to take that course. What a staggering quantity and variety of output Stravinsky had.

But I remember being struck about halfway through the Beckler’s course with what I imaged Stravinsky must have been thinking after each piece (and before he began the next): “No…maybe not that way. How about if I tried this!”

In other words, it dawned on me that his entire life, with each piece, Stravinsky–the undisputed master composer of the 20th Century–was learning something more about how to compose.

That thought stuck with me and I applied it to my own compositions. Alas, I wasn’t the historic talent Stravinsky was, but it did keep me composing and wanting to compose, right up to the present.

  

  

  

Digital photography has become the hobby I never really had. After a brief slump that I wrote about in I should have known better, I rekindled my enthusiasm for my hobby by applying the secret I learned long ago in the Stravinsky class: I began setting a specific learning goal for each new photography project.

The secret has worked its magic for me. It’s kept my attention directed toward the process, not the product; the intrinsic value, not some external evaluation.

This particular opportunity for learning was in photographing a new collection of jewelry by a friend whose work I’ve presented in earlier Inkwatu posts (see Arts and Crafts and Necklace on Black Velvet).

  

  

  

The primary challenge was increasing the depth of field so that parts of the necklace that were farther away from the camera were as much in focus as parts that were nearer (the necklaces were on black “necks” in front of a black velvet background so not all parts of the necklace were in the same plane).

Secondarily, I wanted to learn how to use a ring flash (a flash that is, literally, a ring around the lens) that avoids distracting shadows. The depth of field thing necessitated longer exposure times which, of course, were affected by the lighting. Plus, the color and reflections of the beads of each individual necklace photographed differently.

I learned a lot…which is to say I made a lot of mistakes. But, I kept correcting myself until I got things the way I wanted. In short, I had a lot of fun learning more about how to do my hobby.

  

  

  

Back to music and Stravinsky for a bit: a corollary of that principle that each piece was a learning experience, is that each piece is right at the edge of current proficiency. Not too far beyond that edge, or one is simply incompetent. But, not too far within it, either, or one is a hack. Walking that fine line of not quite knowing what you’re doing, taking chances, and learning the whole while, keeps your art–and your interest in it–alive.

If you’d like to see any of the necklaces close up, just click on any of the pictures in this post, or click on the following link to see a slide show of all 20 necklaces. Depending upon the resolution of your monitor, if you click on the closeup of any picture, you may be taken to an even larger closeup. I encourage you to do so; I’m proud of the detail you can see up close.

I want to learn more about taking photos with an incredibly deep depth of field. One of my absolute favorite photography sites–actually, one of my favorite sites of any sort–is Shorpy. I spend a lot of time there. Those old, old photos where everything, no matter how far away, is in perfect, razor sharp focus, just enthrall me. Take a look at this one for instance. I want to learn how to do that!

That’s the challenge for my next few (thousand?) hobby projects.