[Photo: Tyler Stiem, UN election inspector outside a polling station in Monrovia, Liberia, 2005]

Check out BA contributor Tyler Stiem’s awesome essay on Liberia, “Goodbye, Babylon King”, in the current issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review.

Oh, what the broken-hearted will do:

Robber relies on ‘bangers’

A Chinese robber threatened to blow up a restaurant with sausages, disguised as explosives, strapped to his body.

The 23-year-old man ate a meal at the restaurant, in Benxi, Heilongjang province, before grabbing the owner’s daughter. He put a knife to her neck and demanded cash from the till – but the restaurateur and other diners overpowered him.

They called the police – but when officers arrived the man, named He, jumped to his feet and revealed his ‘explosive’ belt. Police managed to restrain He and took him outside to an open space – and called bomb disposal experts, reports the Huashang Morning Post.

“When they experts arrived, they laughed out loud as they quickly realised the explosives were actually sausages,” said a police spokesman. He said he staged the robbery because he was depressed after splitting up with his girlfriend. He told police he had been “inspired” by the shape of the sausages.

[Photo: Speigel Online]

Got a notion for a business and need a foreign partner? Looking to out-source production to a country where the wages are cheap and the workers so compliant they’ll break into choreographed flag-waving teams?

Consider North Korea. That’s what three enterprising, albeit drunken, Swedes did. On a lark. Now they’re hawking a brand new line of jeans in their own Stockholm boutique. They even got an exclusive look inside the Hermit Kingdom during their search for a factory.

…They spent the next 10 days visiting textile factories, but without success. They did manage to fit in a trip to the terrarium at the Pyongyang zoo, to which a Swedish TV star had once donated used equipment and a few wild animals. The three Swedes thought that even the crocodiles looked sad.

On their last day in North Korea, they finally met the director of a mining operation that included both a zinc processing and a textile division. The deal was sealed with a handshake, a group photo and Swedish vodka. They decided on black jeans. The Swedes had discovered that the North Koreans were hesitant to produce blue jeans, apparently because they were perceived as an American symbol. On the other hand, the director was very interested in the possibility of the young foreigners perhaps creating a Web page for his business.

[La Sagrada Família, Barcelona]

By Craille Maguire Gillies

Unable to stand the crowds after spending several days in Barcelona over the holidays, I scoped out another vantage of La Sagrada Família, Gaudí’s enormous, yet-to-be-completed church. Lines of people waiting to enter snaked around one corner and, turning that corner, I discovered that they snaked around the next, too. I found a clearer panorama at the entrance to a KFC, where the lines were also long and spilled out the door. I tripped over a pigeon eating a French fry as I staked out my spot.

You can’t seem to walk three blocks in Barcelona without running into a Gaudí masterpiece — though by masterpiece I am referring to scale. In architecture, as in cities, grand has more than one meaning. This premise was challenged a week earlier in Vienna when I came upon the marble façade of Alfred Loos magnificent, but relatively diminutive Loos-Haus, directly opposite the grand palace, the Hopfburg, where Hitler declared Austria part of Germany in 1938.

[Loos-Haus, Vienna]

Despite the striking façade, Loos-Haus is unornamented and spare, a few flower boxes are the architect’s sole concession to then-emperor Franz Joseph, who is said to have called the building the “house without eyebrows.” One hundred years after the Loos building went up, after modernism and post-modernism, Loos’ iconoclasm is difficult to reconcile — until you realize that the plain façade of Loos Haas with the neo-Baroque apartments across the street were built at the same period. Masterpieces are often, but not always, large.

When seeking out suggestions on what to see in Barcelona, almost everyone I spoke with gave a list that included a few sights by the Spanish architect, prefaced with, “If you like Gaudí, you might visit…” In Paris, no one would suggest you visit the Eiffel Tower “if you like hideous, tall buildings.” Even Frank Gehry, an architect prone to odd shapes and a nearly monolithic style, doesn’t provoke the same response. As in, “If you like shiny, amorphous buildings that look like they were crafted from aluminum foil you might stop by the Guggenheim.” Gaudí, though, Gaudí is different. Which made me wonder, what do locals think of Gaudí? Do they think of Gaudí? Is he not simply there in the way that a birthmark is there, irrevocable, unnoticeable?

And yet his legacy is so recent. Few European cities have such a large catalogue of work by one architect who worked not so long ago.

Cranes and scaffolding are seemingly permanent fixtures along one side of Sagrada Família. Take or leave the buildings, but this is the most transparent metaphor for cities that I’ve seen these last few weeks in Europe: a city always in progress, never finished, crafted from layers of concrete and stone and glass. I like the idea of a city that is more of a collage than one person’s artistic statement, and this is where, during my outsider’s archi-tour of Barcelona, I find Gaudí’s iconoclasm difficult to square.

Alfred Loos is said to have proclaimed something along the lines of, “Ornament is crime.” The only ornament should come from the materials, he believed. This sentiment came to mind I stood in front of the KFC in a territorial battle for “view” with tourists and that lone pigeon. For Gaudí, the ornament was also in the materials. His buildings look like they were carved from enormous hoodoos by a violent wind, like the one that whipped gravel into my eyes when I jogged along Platja de la Nova Icària.

With some shame and embarrassment, I’ll admit that I prefer “pretty” buildings and would give up waiting in line for hours to see the inside of Sagrada Família to instead wander the barrios of Barcelona. I do not always find what I am looking for, but it never seems to matter.

[Bryce Canyon, Utah]

The UK has Susan Boyle, Brazil has Andressa Soares, AKA “The Watermelon Woman.” It’s just that singing isn’t the first thing that made her famous.

Craille Maguire Gillies reports from the recent Resilient Cities confab in Vancouver.

Maybe it’s because I’ve been hanging around environmentalists, urban planners, academics and other “change agents” lately, but the phrase “effect change” — often followed by a nebulous but inspiring call to action — seems to be on the tips of everyone’s tongues.

“We in this room have our hands on the levers to effect change,” Rob Abbott told the 600-odd ecological economists, environmentalists, urban planners, academics, politicians and the like who gathered recently at the Gaining Ground/Resilient Cities conference in Vancouver. Abbott, the moderator and official morale booster, continued: “We are a hinge point in history” and we need to “fully embrace the hands of transformation.”

Everyone in the audience was eager to embrace the hands of transformation. We congregated like ecological worshippers under the green-roofed chapel of the Vancouver Convention Centre, with the shipyards extending east like industrial props in an Edward Burtynsky photograph and the Coastal Mountains visible from across Burrard Inlet. We were ready to be inspired. We were ready to effect change!

Abbott introduced Gregor Robertson, the folksy, handsome mayor of Vancouver — a would-be Barack Obama of municipal politics in a city that is, like the U.S., looking to have its faith in itself restored. (His 2008 election campaign was called Change Everything.) Robertson was an organic farmer who started the fruit smoothie company Happy Planet. In any other city, he might make an unlikely candidate for mayor. Not in Vancouver.

He had come to Resilient Cities to preview his Action Plan 2020, an attempt to make Vancouver the greenest in North America within a decade. The plan proposes to:

- create 20,000 green jobs
- reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 33 percent from 2007 levels (something British Columbia as a whole has instituted)
- make all new construction carbon neutral
- start curbside compost pick-up
- reduce the carbon footprint of food production

When Robertson mentioned expanding Vancouver’s urban forest, applause rippled through the audience. “I don’t think every part of the city is going to be like Stanley Park, but you know what I mean,” he said.

Once a city’s cultural aspirations manifested in high-profile architectural masterpieces; now they aim to be beacons of ecological integrity. On the West Coast, there is a kind of competitive environmentalism between Portland and Vancouver. It’s a friendly contest though: Portland plans to be “the most resilient city”, while Vancouver aims for the title “greenest.” Robertson met later that day with Portland’s mayor, Sam Adams, and a delegation of a dozen or so to talk about, among other things, a high-speed rail line between the two cities. In his speech at Resilient Cities, he described Vancouver’s 2020 plan as a 10-year decathlon.

The rhetoric at such events can seem as artificial as astro turf, trafficking in ambitious, wide-ranging goals but achieving little action. Cities are, however, the places where signs of climate change will be most tangible to the average westerner, where a country’s “resilience” or lack thereof will be most apparent. Cities will be the interpreters, the worker bees and, in many cases, the leaders of the climate change policies that trickle out of international political get-togethers like COP15 in Copenhagen next month. But maybe they are also signs of the emotional, as well as political, state of a place.

Robertson was off the next day to fly to Greece, where, along with B.C. premier Gordon Campbell, he would attend the lighting of the Olympic torch, a symbol of the city’s other great aspiration.

Ed.: Tyler Stiem is just back in London after forays to Turkey and Syria.

With William Dalrymple’s From the Holy Mountain as my on-again, off-again guide, I spent the past couple of weeks seeking out the points of intersection between Islam and Christianity in Turkey and Syria. While southern Anatolia bore few obvious traces of its rich and complicated religious history, Syria was a revelation. Especially Aleppo, with its still-thriving Armenian, Maronite, and Greek Orthodox communities and its Dead Cities with their splendid Byzantine churches. So, too, the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus. Like the Aya Sofia, another magnificent house of worship from late antiquity, the mosque doubled, for a time, as a site of worship for both Christians and Muslims. Pictured above is a scene from inside.

During my travels I also managed to add a few more calls to prayer to my collection:

Ankara, Turkey (3:30). Broadcast over the p.a. system at the central bus station. The noise and neuroses of travellers hurrying onto buses probably explains its urgency. Very few people obliged.

Antakya, Turkey (3:08). I awoke to this on a black September morning. Dig the reverb. Haunting, lovely, maybe a little over-the-top.

Aleppo, Syria (1:45). The midday call to prayer from one of the mosques in the Old City. Very stern.

Aleppo, Syria (4:40). An Armenian marching band thrown in for good measure. We stayed in the Christian Quarter near the city’s main Armenian Cathedral. The band practiced their instruments by torchlight, jostling against the walls of the smoking alleyway as they passed beneath our window.

Ada Aden Hussein lives in the Mental Health Ward of Hargeisa Hospital, where she has worked for five years as an attendant. Ada took the job so she could take care of her daughter, who suffers from bipolar disorder, and her granddaughter. Hargeisa, Somalia. 2007.

Akaiyu, twenty-one, on a visit to a health clinic. Her infant son needed medicine for an eye infection. Her people, the Turkana, are nomads who migrate across the arid plains of northern Kenya in search of water and pasture. Akaiyu belongs to one of the settled communities near the Sudanese border. 2008.

Agness Nyirandibanzi lives on a government reserve in the hills above Gisenyi, Rwanda. Her people, the Twa, face discrimination because of their short stature, which distinguishes them from other Rwandans. They were murdered in great numbers during the 1994 genocide — a tragedy sometimes overlooked in historical accounts. The government moved Agness’s community from their forest home because it was designated as part of a national park. 2009.

Name unknown, a resident of Conneh Internally Displaced Persons Camp near Kakata, Liberia. The camp took its name from warlord Sekou Conneh. His rebels forced many of the people here to flee their homes during the civil war. 2005.

Dancing chicken sequence at end of Werner Herzog’s Stroszek

Now reading Herzog on Herzog. When asked whether he’s obsessed with chickens, filmmaker Werner answers yes, that for him “They are the most horrifying, cannibalistic and nightmarish creatures in the world.” He goes on to share the following story…

Years ago I was searching for the biggest rooster I could find and heard about a guy in Petaluma, California, who had owned a rooster called Weirdo that weighed thirty pounds. Sadly Weirdo had passed away, but his offspring were alive, and guess what? They were even bigger. I went out there and found Ralph, son of Weirdo, who weighed an amazing thirty-two pounds! Then I found Frank, a special breed of miniature horse that stood less than two feet high. I told Frank’s owner I wanted to film Ralph chasing Frank — with a midget riding him — around the biggest sequoia tree in the world, thirty metres in circumference. It would have been amazing because the horse and the midget together were still smaller than Ralph, the rooster. But unfortunately Frank’s owner refused. He said it would make Frank look stupid.

After a lengthy (foreign) absence, contributor Andrew Gregg returns…

I’m not a car guy so when my friends who are car guys started going on about BBC’s program Top Gear, I didn’t pay much attention. And then I was on a British Airways flight and I watched an entire season of Top Gear on the telly. It was easy to get hooked. The hosts didn’t hesitate to trash cars they didn’t like (they have been blamed for ruining Rover) and they have cooked up amazing bits—like when they challenged some Germans to a contest on the tarmac of an old Belgian aerodrome (explaining that with Germans you have to choose neutral territory) and arrived in a squadron of Spitfires—the fighter planes, not the cars.

The main host is Jeremy Clarkson, who disregards any concern that fast, powerful, noisy cars might be bad for the planet. He is outspoken and his politics are completely the opposite of mine, and yet I can’t get enough of him. He hates bicyclists (actually, I hate a lot of bicyclists), environmentalists (he calls Greenpeace “eco-mentalists”) and Labour Prime Ministers (he called Gordon Brown “a one-eyed Scottish idiot” and a liar).

The production values are ridiculously lush and complex. The wit is razor. I make documentaries and I see most reality programming as the coming end of days. But this show is one of the best on TV—one of the best I’ve ever seen.

You can see Top Gear on BBC Canada or by searching YouTube. In the link at the head the Top Gear crew tries to kill a Toyota Hi-Lux and below Clarkson takes us for a spin in his favourite car ever:

And following their failure to destroy the Toyota Hi-Lux, they give it a second go.

“So the moment of truth. Will it be buried under thousands of tonnes of public housing?”