Salvador Dali and his pet anteater

It is, of course, Salvador Dali, one of my least Twentieth Century artists, walking his “pet” anteater. I really never cared much for his paintings (they just show up too often as dorm room posters, like his compatriot in camp, M. C. Escher) but photos of Dali are really interesting. Always perfectly posed, always aware of the camera, Dali is his own artwork. Notice how perfectly aware he is of the composition he’s posing into, with his cane and the taut leash of the anteater– it’s the kind of arrangement you’d see in one of his paintings, and it can’t be accidental. It’s commonly regarded as a truism that Andy Warhol started the “artist as celebrity as art” meme, but Dali kind of has to be in there too.

As for having a pet anteater, well, I can’t imagine you could do it without hired help. They pretty much only eat ants and termites, not exactly the thing you can pop down to Petco and pick up. I heard somewhere that they could get by on hamburger, and that’s how some zoos do it, but it can’t be nutritionally good for them. I can only imagine that unless Dali really, really loved his anteater enough to cater financially to its odd diet, it’s got to be one unhappy critter. Of course, how would we even know– how do you tell if an anteater is smiling?

Update, 8 August. My friend Joy, who is a zookeeper at the Houston zoo, tells me that anteaters do, in fact, eat other foods in captivity besides ants and termites. Apparently their staple diet in captivity is dog chow, pounded into a kind of mash, which they lap up with their sticky tongues the way they’d eat their normal diet. They also eat some kinds of produce, although she didn’t say what (cole slaw and pesto, perhaps?)

Pieter Hugo, Mallam Galadima Ahmadu with Jamis, Nigeria 2005

From a haunting series of photographs by South African photographer Pieter Hugo, who has shown quite a bit in Johannesburg and in Europe, but whom I hadn’t heard of until now. These images are like my dreams- barren, haunting, unforgettable. It’s not only the immediate, gut-wrenching juxtaposition of wild animals that we usually associate with safaris with blasted urban wastelands on the edge of Third World cities, but the juxtaposition of the “threatening” black African male with his brutal hyena sidekicks. These are like gangster rappers without the bling.

But the truth of the situation is rather surprising. Hugo explains how he found out about these men:

These photographs came about after a friend emailed me an image taken on a cellphone through a car window in Lagos, Nigeria, which depicted a group of men walking down the street with a hyena in chains. A few days later I saw the image reproduced in a South African newspaper with the caption ‘The Streets of Lagos’. Nigerian newspapers reported that these men were bank robbers, bodyguards, drug dealers, debt collectors. Myths surrounded them. The image captivated me.

He travelled to Nigeria and tracked them down. Not only weren’t these men gangsters, they are actually a sanctioned part of Nigerian society:

It turned out that they were a group of itinerant minstrels, performers who used the animals to entertain crowds and sell traditional medicines. The animal handlers were all related to each other and were practising a tradition passed down from generation to generation. I spent eight days travelling with them.

It turns out that the men even have government licenses for the animals. Even so, as fascinating as these images are, I feel sorry for the hyenas. Even though hyenas are almost universally reviled, and they have a deserved reputation for brutality (unlike big cats, which kill their prey quickly, hyenas often eat their prey alive), they’re still animals.

I went to Cape Alawa with my friend Alan, who is visiting from Thailand. It’s a long drive out there, to the very end of the Olympic Peninsula, not too far from Forks. I kept thinking about the recent good fortune the little town of Forks has had in the Twilight series of teen vampire novels. Of all the things to save the town from disappearing after the end of logging…

But walking along the beach on a cloudy, misty day, one can see the appeal of the landscape has to the gothic mind. With that in mind, I snapped a bunch of photos with my iPhone and the Shake-It photo app, that creates fake polaroids. I love the way all the colors turn out oversaturated and the images are all vignetted. They make every moment seem nostalgic, pregnant with import that is just beyond fathoming.

Click here for the full slideshow.

The Anachronism (Full Film) from Anachronism Pictures on Vimeo.

Just so you know– I was steampunk before steampunk had a name. Below is an old sculpture of mine, from Lost Naturalists of the Pacific:

Eugene Parnell, artifact from Lost Naturalists of the Pacific, 1997

Eugene Parnell, artifact from Lost Naturalists of the Pacific (detail), 1997

The doggie butthole cover. No, it's not a joke.

If you flip through the slideshow, what’s interesting is that half the products infantilize pets (the high chair), and the other half of them enable adult vices (like Bowser Beer and the doggie sex toy). My guess is that the former are aimed at female pet owners, the latter at male pet owners (with male dogs, apparently– are you gonna give Fifi a “bowser beer”?). So for women, dogs seem to serve as surrogate children, or extensions of your dolls when you were a kid, for men they are kind of like your “wing man.” Just sayin.

My other favorite: people crackers. I swear I had this same idea for a product, years ago in college, but never thought it would catch on.

It’s this big, soft, fluffy, lugubrious bird. It’s forgotten how to fly. Sadly it’s also forgotten that it’s forgotten how to fly… So, a seriously worried kakapo has been known to run up a tree and jump out of it… Opinion is divided on what happens next. Some people say it’s developed a rudimentary parachuting ability. Other people say it flies a bit like a brick.

He’s referring throughout that video to his adventures researching one of his best books, Last Chance to See, co-authored with Mark Carwardine, nearly twenty years ago. The BBC have made this book into a new documentary, in which Carwardine returns to re-visit many of the animals from the original book, and I have found at least one clip from it, below.

This is one of the funniest animal videos I have seen in a long time, I won’t spoil it for you.  But bear in mind Adams’ lengthy description of the kakapo mating ritual, from the video:

It turns out that the mating habits of the kakapo are incredibly long and drawn out, and fantastically complicated, and almost entirely ineffective. Some people will tell you that the mating call of the male kakapo actively repels the female kakapo.

For about 100 night of the year it goes through its mating ritual, and it finds some rocky outcrop on which to perform its mating call… It sits there night after night, performing the opening bars of “Dark Side of the Moon”. It’s a very deep bass sound… You more feel it, like a wobble in the pit of your stomach, rather than hear it. These deep bass sounds have two important characteristics: one is they travel great distances: great long, deep bass sound waves fill these great long valleys of the south island of New Zealand. And that’s good. But the other characteristic of bass sounds, which you may be familiar with, if you’ve have a subwoofer you know you can put it anywhere in the room you like, because the other characteristic of bass sounds, and remember we’re talking about a mating call here, is that you can’t tell where it’s coming from.

So just imagine if you will a male kakapo, making all this booming noise, and if there’s a female out there, which there probably isn’t, and she likes the sound, which she probably doesn’t, she can’t find the person who’s making it. And then, even if she finds him, she will only consent to mate if the podokuk tree is in fruit.

Now we’ve all had relationships like that…

All the lightheartedness aside, the kakapo is seriously endangered, even after a hundred years of conservation efforts. Only 123 individuals remain alive. (This is actually an improvement from their lowest point of about 40). The introduction of cats, rats, and stoats to New Zealand, animals which eat the birds and their eggs, has decimated their numbers. Two small islands just off the coast of New Zealand are maintained as predator-free zones  expressly for the purpose of keeping the kakapo refugees safe. Fortunately there’s good dedication in New Zealand to their preservation, and little black market demand for kakapo products, so they may just survive a bit longer.

He begins by telling a long and very story about a visit to Madagascar to search for a highly endangered species of lemur called the aye aye. I have been to Madagascar, and seen a variety of lemurs, but not the aye aye, which is found only on Nosy Mangabey off the north coast of the main island. But for those of you who haven’t seen photos of an aye aye, they’re worth seeing– easily one of the oddest looking animals in the world.  (From National Geographic, here):

Baby aye aye

Below is another photo, which shows a bit more context (from here):

Baby aye aye in the Bristol zoo

The most interesting thing about the aye aye is the curious shape of its fingers, and in the photo below you can see how specialized they are. The middle finger is especially long and slender, surprisingly so:

George Lucas never thought of anything half this weird.

This long finger is used to pull grubs out from holes in dead trees; it apparently skewers them much as you’d spear a cocktail sausage with a toothpick.  The only other animal to perform this feat to feed itself is a kind of striped possum from New Guinea– and the one thing both these animals have in common is that they live in environments that lack woodpeckers. In the absence of these birds, they exploit the same environmental niche.

All the photos above are from the lovably ugly baby aye ayes. The adults are only slightly less odd looking. Here is a taxidermied specimen from the Field Museum in Chicago:

Taxidermied Aye Aye, Field Museum, Chicago

The superstitions surrounding this animal are particularly interesting. From wikipedia:

The Aye-aye is often viewed as a harbinger of evil and killed on sight. Others believe that should one point its long middle finger at you, you were condemned to death. Some say the appearance of an Aye-aye in a village predicts the death of a villager, and the only way to prevent this is to kill the Aye-aye. The Sakalava people go so far as to claim Aye-ayes sneak into houses through the thatched roofs and murder the sleeping occupants by using their middle finger to puncture the victim’s aorta.

The aye aye, other lemurs, and Gondwana are all figuring prominently in something new and very, very different I am working on these days. It’s a bit of a secret at the moment. But it’s coming.

Somehow I don’t think that a global ethernet network or hordes of flying blue pterosaurs are going to save them from the evil mining company. But the Dongria Kondh think that James Cameron just might:

Survival International's appeal to James Cameron in UK's Variety magazine

Fortunately, there is something you can do. Details here at Survival International.

The other day, I came across  this link from the local paper in Manitowoc, Wisconsin:

An Asiatic black bear at Lincoln Park Zoo bit off all or parts of four fingers from the hand of a 47-year-old woman Friday after she went past barriers and was trying to feed the animal, a Manitowoc police captain said. “It appears that she suffered loss of some fingers,” specifically, all of her thumb and forefinger and parts of her middle and ring fingers, said Capt. Scott Luchterhand.

Stories like this pop up every once in a while– a few years ago, I think some very foolhardy zoo visitor in Europe was killed by a polar bear when he swam the moat and entered its enclosure. But I find this one particularly funny, because I lived for a couple years in Oshkosh, just down the road from Manitowoc. I can see this happening to any number of the intellectually challenged individuals I had to deal with 0n a daily basis (I am really hoping she was that woman from the testing center at UWO– yeah you know who you are). The schadenfreude is delicious and irresistable.

And the kicker?

In a similar incident, a wolf at the zoo chewed off the right arm of Jared Mraz of Manitowoc, then 2, on Dec. 20, 1994.

What the hell is wrong with people in Wisconsin?