While in Ghana this summer, I spent a couple days reconnoitering a remarkable neighborhood of Kumasi called Magazine. It’s a district of the city given over entirely to car mechanics and their parts suppliers. I haven’t found an official tally but I was given estimates of between 10,000-15,000 people working in the area, which is far better organized, and less chaotic, than it first appears.

Enterprising brokers bring in wrecks and write-offs from all over the world (often taking the vehicles off the hands of insurance companies who recoup a few more bucks than if they’d sold them for scrap), and the mechanics of Magazine make them road-worthy once again. Stripping them down and starting all over again, recycling or repairing every stray part or component that can be salvaged.

The entire global auto industry flows through Magazine—from Indian Tatas and Korean Hyundais to Italian Fiats and German Volkswagens. One broker said it usually takes no more than six months for the latest model of any vehicle to find its way to Magazine. As long as it takes, basically, for one of them to wind up in an accident.

And here you will find every variety of vehicle, from the familiar Bluebird school buses and flatbed trucks to luxury sedans, long-haul rigs and mini-vans.

The cars rebuilt here wind up all over Africa, and it’s probably the largest assemblage of its kind on the continent. Many of Magazine’s “new” cars are Frankenstein contraptions, sometimes obviously so but often not, bearing parts of divergent provenance. That may look like a brand new Mercedes but who knows where every part inside came from?

There’s a long history behind the neighborhood. As Kumasi was the seat of the Ashanti kingdom, the city was divided into sectors according to skilled trades. Magazine was home to the blacksmiths and weapons-makers. And still today, it’s a poorly kept rumour that Magazine is where one goes to acquire a gun.

I’ll post more on Magazine soon, but I will say that many of the mechanics here have managed to make a very decent living for themselves. Several older gents I spoke with managed to put their kids through university, and buy shops to give their wives something to do. It’s a largely improvised, self-regulating neighborhood that demands further study, especially when we talk about local models of development that can work for Africa.

While in Ghana this summer, I spent a couple days reconnoitering a remarkable neighborhood of Kumasi called Magazine. It’s a district of the city given over entirely to car mechanics and their parts suppliers. I haven’t found an official tally but I was given estimates of between 10,000-15,000 people working in the area, which is far better organized, and less chaotic, than it first appears. [I’ve just posted a photo essay on Magazine, here].

Enterprising brokers bring in wrecks and write-offs from all over the world (often taking the vehicles off the hands of insurance companies who recoup a few more bucks than if they’d sold them for scrap), and the mechanics of Magazine make them road-worthy once again. Stripping them down and starting all over again, recycling or repairing every stray part or component that can be salvaged.

The entire global auto industry flows through Magazine—from Indian Tatas and Korean Hyundais to Italian Fiats and German Volkswagens. One broker said it usually takes no more than six months for the latest model of any vehicle to find its way to Magazine. As long as it takes, basically, for one of them to wind up in an accident.

And here you will find every variety of vehicle, from the familiar Bluebird school buses and flatbed trucks to luxury sedans, long-haul rigs and mini-vans.

The cars rebuilt here wind up all over Africa, and it’s probably the largest assemblage of its kind on the continent. Many of Magazine’s “new” cars are Frankenstein contraptions, sometimes obviously so but often not, bearing parts of divergent provenance. That may look like a brand new Mercedes but who knows where every part inside came from?

There’s a long history behind the neighborhood. As Kumasi was the seat of the Ashanti kingdom, the city was divided into sectors according to skilled trades. Magazine was home to the blacksmiths and weapons-makers. And still today, it’s a poorly kept rumour that Magazine is where one goes to acquire a gun.

I’ll post more on Magazine soon, but I will say that many of the mechanics here have managed to make a very decent living for themselves. Several older gents I spoke with managed to put their kids through university, and buy shops to give their wives something to do. It’s a largely improvised, self-regulating neighborhood that demands further study, especially when we talk about local models of development that can work for Africa.

My feature on Turkey’s recent turmoil appears in the current issue of The Walrus. You can read the entire text online here. Also check out Carolyn Drake’s accompanying photo essay on Hasankeyf, an historic, predominantly Kurdish town in Turkey’s southeast potentially living out its last days. The entire area is slated to be flooded when a dam on the Tigris River finally gets a green light. It’s possible, but not likely, Hasankeyf will be spared; foreign credit agencies who previously pledged monies for the dam are now reconsidering in light of growing resistance and protest in Europe. (That’s Carolyn’s image above.)

I also have a brief piece in Azure magazine, about Vladimir Arkhipov’s “Archive of material folklore”. This from my most recent trip to Russia. More about Vladimir another time.

Currently in Ghana, doing more research for the book and working at some magazine articles, mostly to do with food security and chieftaincy issues. Meanwhile, attending to final details on a Turkey feature I have upcoming in next issue of The Walrus.

The piece is based on research done last October and November, and then more follow up from afar. On the one hand I’m happy the article is coming out now, as the Western media has finally turned its attention to events in Turkey, although little of the coverage provides much context—a breach hopefully my article can fill. Things have been happening so fast & furious there of late, however, that developments I could only hint at in the article could be fait accompli by the time the article hits newsstands.

Legal proceedings to disband the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) are now underway, based on the dubious assertion that the party has been trying to institute sharia law by stealth. (The AKP took 47% of the popular vote in last year’s elections.) Meanwhile, a police investigation into a secular-nationalist “deep-state” network called Ergenekon has netted dozens of high profile suspects—including politicians, retired generals, journalists and university rectors. It is alleged that Ergenekon is responsible for several unsolved politically-motivated murders and plotting a coup for 2009.

Then Sunday, the day before the court began formally hearing the AKP case, two bombs exploded in the Güngören neighborhood of Istanbul, killing 17 and wounding more than a hundred. Istanbul’s governor has already suggested the PKK may be responsible, putting the Kurdish fighters firmly back at centre stage in the national soap opera, alongside the AKP (aka the Islamists) and the Kemalists (aka the secular-nationalists).

I find it very hard to fathom, however, that the PKK is behind the bombing. At this moment in time, with the court action and Ergenekon investigation, it doesn’t make any sense. There’s absolutely nothing for the PKK to gain from it, although the most common theory being reported is that the bombings were in reply to another air raid by Turkish forces on PKK positions in northern Iraq. Even if the motive was to further destabilize the Turkish state—the PKK need not have bothered as the bitter struggle between the AKP and the Kemalists was achieving that well enough on it’s own.

I’ve never felt so vulnerable to entertaining wild, crack-pot conspiracy theories as I have since wading into the murk of Turkish politics. Sure, the PKK could be responsible (although they’ve denied it so far, and typically they take credit for these kinds of things). But I find it equally plausible that some rogue faction of the secular-nationalists engineered this as a kind of black ops to push the nation ever further toward crisis, thus putting the military command back in the driver’s seat. Yes, it sounds whack. But it wouldn’t be the first time individuals connected to the security forces have killed Turkish civilians, making it look like the Kurds did it.

And here I’ll inch further along my lonely branch of this wingnut tree: the bombings could mark the return of Kurdish Hezbollah (no relation to the Lebanese version). The Islamist militants, enemies of the Marxist-inclined PKK, have been in the past proven useful to the Turkish military, as both a fellow combatant against the Kurdish separatists, and a convenient instrument for further muddying the country’s sectarian waters. After secretly upplying arms to Hezbollah in the early 1990s, the government cracked down on the militants in 1998 when they expanded their targets beyond the PKK. In 2001, Hezbollah assassinated the police chief of Diyarbakir; two years later, the organization claimed responsibility for bombings at two Istanbul synagogues.

The official line is that the organization is inactive. With a little help, however, it could surely mobilize again, especially given some incentive. Such as the government’s success brokering talks between Israel and Syria, and more recently the U.S. and Iran. Despite being an Islam-inspired political party, the AKP in government is perhaps not Islamic enough for Hezbollah’s liking.

The point in the end is to ask who has motive and who stands to benefit from the bombings. My gut says a renewed Kurdish Hezbollah assisted by elements of the military.

In parting, here are two Turkey-related stories that should be taken as further signs of the times. First, evidence that you can’t criticize the Turkish military for anything—even if you’re a superstar transsexual pop singer. And second, as though to illustrate one of the observations in my Walrus article, that Atatürk’s remains the last personality cult of the 20th century to still play a defining role in his nation’s affairs, there’s something strange happening in a town called Damal.

Presently in the preparatory stages of a research trip to China—journalist visa approved!—but I’m beginning to have second thoughts whether I should even bother. I can’t remember in my lifetime (post 1970, eh?) a country this wall-to-wall covered by Western media.

When has a single nation ever generated this scale of fascination and fear in the west? The USSR may have focused the anxieties of the west, but it wasn’t complimented by the sort of mass curiosity with which China is now treated. There wasn’t the same measure of media penetration and ubiquity then to make it possible. The China stuff now is kind of crazy obsessive-compulsive.

The closest comparison I can come up with is Japan—in the late 80s and early 90s Japan’s rising economic might stirred likewise fears in the West, while at the same time inviting all sorts of often daft pop anthropological probing. Then, as is the case with China now, it was predicted Japan would soon boast the largest economy in the world. Which isn’t to say China won’t soon possess the largest economy sometime around 2020-2025 as is usually predicted; I’m just not convinced it is the sure bet, or that it will happen as easily as it’s being prophesied.

As for the protests shadowing the Olympic flame, there’s something in their surprisingly violent tenor that suggests to me they’re about far more than just Tibet (leaving aside the demonstrators who are actually members of the Tibetan diaspora or directly connected to it). Where were all these people before? I can’t find any evidence to suggest the pro-Tibet movement was this large outside the exile community, even latently so? While Beijing’s hosting of the Olympics provides a convenient platform on which to raise the stakes, the shrill, simple-mindedness of the torch tantrums implies that they are not so much pro-Tibet, as anti-China.

There’s a familiar whiff of the more familiar anti-Americanism here: some ill-formed expression of emerging anxieties over China’s sudden relevance and power in world affairs. Which is not to say that the demonstrations are implicitly racist or illegitimate or a waste of time—China invited this scrutiny by turning the flame relay into the sort of propagandistic spectacle not seen since the 1936 Olympics in Berlin (the Nazis actually contrived this whole notion of a sacred flame being carried out of the ruins of ancient Greece… by fit and wholesome Aryans).

Having thus complained about the media saturation, I do have a few favourite bits on China. There’s this, from Jonathan Franzen in last week’s New Yorker (I can’t find the piece itself online, but here’s an audio companion):

“The week before, when I’d arrived in Shanghai, my first impression of China had been that it was one of the most advanced places I’d ever seen. The scale of Shanghai, which from the sky had presented a dead-flat vista of tens of thousands of neatly arrayed oblong houses—each of which, a closer look revealed, was in fact a large apartment block—and then, on the ground, the brutally new skyscrapers and the pedestrian-hostile streets and the artificial dusk of the smoke-filled winter sky: it was all thrilling. It was as if the gods of world history had asked, ‘Does somebody want to get into some really unprecedentedly deep shit?’ and this place had raised its hands and said ‘Yeah!’”

The Globe and Mail’s European correspondent Doug Saunders had a thoughtful piece last Saturday regarding his sudden, and it turns out, unwarranted media fame in China. He goes digging into the nuances of the ethnic Han nationalism being witnessed both within China, and outside among the diaspora, in reaction to the flame protests. I don’t know it’s entirely accurate to say, however, that the party leadership is now more nationalist than communist, as Saunders does. That would suggest that Beijing’s mindset is primarily a pragmatic one—using the uproar to tap into a well of ethnic pride and bolster its legitimacy. I think the leadership in China still has some very set ideas about how the country should be governed. This is merely a moment of opportunism, another tide Beijing seems able to channel and turn on/off at will, as it does whenever it has cause for anti-Japanese sentiment to spike.

National Geographic couldn’t help itself. The current issue is all China. I just bought it and can’t say much other than that there are lots of nice pretty (but smog-choked) pictures and the sort of breathless, banal and unoffensive prose NatGeo typically traffics in.

If you want a more unbridled, and let’s say offensive, opinion on China, take a dose of William Langewiesche in the April Vanity Fair. I’m a fan of Langewiesche’s magazine articles (”City of Fear” on Brazil’s prisons, VF) and books (The Atomic Bazaar, Sahara Unveiled), but I can’t recall him ever being as downright nasty and funny as he is in “Beijing’s Olympic Makeover”. I thought for a moment that I’d misread the byline, and it was actually from the opium-dipped pen of VF contributor Nick Tosches.

[Picture beneath the head: a portrait of Huang Qihou in front of one of his paintings; photo by Beijing artist Xing Danwen.]

Over at his New York Times blog, filmmaker Errol Morris (Thin Blue Line, Fog of War, Fast, Cheap and Out of Control) discusses the possibilities and perils of using dramatic re-enactments in his documentaries. Unlike Michael Moore, Morris holds his audience’s intellect in high regard, and thus feels compelled to meditate on the implications of recreating reality in this way.

Morris points out that re-enactments are generally unpopular with critics. We associate them with the kind of arch, unimaginative documentaries that are the bread and butter of cable channels like History. They feel too many steps removed from the truth they are intended to dramatize. They either feel deceptive or drained of all perspective. Perhaps it also has something to do with the truth-challenged nature of our televisual culture; we’re all too aware of how packaged and often compromised our news reporting has become. It’s a reality that has made the verité doc, progenitor of reality television, and the archival collage film (in which old clips are re-assembled to provide ironic commentary on the past; e.g. Ron Mann) the most common strategies employed by serious documentarians (a category which does not include your Micheal Moores or Morgan Spurlocks).

Morris is thoughtful, brave and adept enough to attempt navigating the many aesthetic and moral issues that the re-enactment presents. And he has good reason to do so: his most famous re-enactment, a scene at the heart of The Thin Blue Line, helped get a man off death row.

The point he makes here is that there is no inherent truth in any sort of documentary filmmaking. Even the verité director is making aesthetic and moral choices while engaged in the act of shooting present-time, and again later in the editing suite.

The engine of uncovering truth is not some special lens or even the unadorned human eye; it is unadorned human reason. It wasn’t a cinéma vérité documentary that got Randall Dale Adams out of prison. It was a film that re-enacted important details of the crime. It was an investigation – part of which was done with a camera. The re-enactments capture the important details of that investigation. It’s not re-enactments per se that are wrong or inappropriate. It’s the use of them. I use re-enactments to burrow underneath the surface of reality in an attempt to uncover some hidden truth.

Standard Operating Procedures, Morris’s latest film, arrives in theatres imminently. It’s about the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq. For more Morris, there’s an exchange between him and wild man Werner Herzog at The Believer, and if you search the iTunes store under “Errol Morris New Yorker” you’ll find a video podcast interview with him from last year’s New Yorker Festival.

In 1994, while living in Japan, I spent a few days in Hiroshima with old friend and then budding Tex-Mex troubadour Mike Takasaki. (My favourite Takasaki aphorism: “In the desert of grudges I am a camel.”) As required by any visit to the city we lingered around the Peace Park and its many memorials for the better part of an afternoon, which both Mike and I described as a strangely underwhelming experience.

Mike recently pointed me to this article by Ron Rosenbaum over at Slate (Welcome to the Hotel Hiroshima) which we agree jibes pretty well with our feelings about visiting Hiroshima. Looking back, I’m not sure what we expected—some serenely Zen, post-atomic fantasia, I suppose, rather than the fairly typical modern Japanese city that exists today. Regarding the park, Rosenbaum points out the ubiquitous “Peace Clutter”—74 different memorializing objects/installations and counting—that makes the strolling the landscaped riverside greenery a bizarrely kitschy if democratic encounter.

Being at Hiroshima also prompts Rosenbaum to think about 9/11 and the ego-fraught politics of memorializing what happened at the World Trade Center, which I hoped he’d pursued further. It will be interesting to see what does eventually cover over the wound in the earth and more importantly the story that it tells.

My recent piece about what’s in store for Guyana’s rainforest touched on the issue of carbon cap & trade markets and whether they can effectively reduce emissions globally. Especially when it comes to conserving the world’s remaining tropical forests. Here’s a piece in last week’s New Yorker worth reading, even if it glosses over the need to debate the efficacy of the carbon trading regime.

While the article contains lots of useful scientific information and analysis, it neglects to engage its subjects on some of their more controversial prescriptions. Half-way through the piece we encounter a reformed hyper-capitalist/former futures trader now in charge of a carbon (stock) exchange preaching the trade regime as the one solution we need to pursue. Unfortunately, the author takes it at face value when Richard Sandor says there’s no time to discuss whether carbon trading is actually the most efficacious or socially responsible approach. He complains we’re allowing morality to get in the way of science, which is a bit rich considering that he’s arguably allowing economics to once again get in the way of science and morality.

Sandor also seems to be saying that governments shouldn’t be punishing companies for “bad behaviour ” at all, merely granting them incentives to better their ways.  Holding these companies to account is a waste of time, he suggests, in the race to reduce emissions.

If the scientific merits of carbon trading are yet to be fully proven, and the potential implications could potentially exacerbate existing economic and social inequities, I’d say we should make time. But the problem is there’s already a consensus among the business and political elites that trading is the way to go. For governments, it’s expedient—they don’t have to set aside any new money. For business, it’s another means of avoiding carbon taxes that actually put a price on pollution and pursuing an economic model that sidelines the role of government. And a lot of people also stand to make money. Which is fine. But when crafting public policy of this magnitude we need to consider all the tools available to government and be honest about the motivations and behaviours of the various actors, otherwise the system is in danger of going awry.

Sandor basically suggests incentives are the only way to change human behaviour. Well, I was under the impression something as simple as laws and taxes do the same thing, but much more directly.

My feature on the future of Guyana’s rainforest appeared in Saturday’s Globe and Mail (Focus). Unfortunately, unless you’re a subscriber you’ll have to pay to read the article online—a practice which most other major North American dailies, including the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, have dropped. For those who can’t access the article, I’ll be posting a version of the story here later this week.