Andy Goldsworthy's Spire: San Francisco Presidio (c)2010 Russell Johnson

Took a walk through San Francisco’s Presidio a couple of weeks ago and saw how artist Andy Goldsworthy managed to create beauty out of destruction. Cypress bark beetles made a feast of some 150 Monterey Cypress trees and Goldsworthy built The Spire from those felled trees to celebrate the history and future of the forest.  Young trees will grow up to meet the sculpture, which will eventually disappear into the forest. Even the beetle damage had the look of some ancient cave painting.

Cypress Bark (c) 2010 Russell Johnson

The trust that runs the national park is replanting some 1,200 trees along the Bay Area Ridge Trail over the next few years.

I hate monkeys. Maybe it is just envy. Although there is ample evidence that our evolutionary stem has developed a superior brain, deep down at the coccyx of my psyche there may still exist the tail stub of an ape. Maybe I still have a repressed urge to play with myself in public, fling my feces and steal every shiny object that isn’t nailed down. Last month at the Uluwatu temple in Bali, Indonesia I got stuck in a tourist trap, a narrow passageway facing a phalanx of not-so-great apes. Luckily I had been warned to remove my glasses and shiny objects and clutch my camera. But a woman in front of me was not so cautious. She let out a scream as a marauding macaque snatched her earring and taunted her to return it in exchange for a banana. Come to think of it, this hairy extortionist might consider an alternate career in banking.

But monkeys are untouchable in this Hindu temple perched on a cliff above the Indian Ocean. Every night, in a performance of the Kecak, or Monkey Dance, the monkey-like Varana helps a prince fight off an evil king while 100 men chatter like macaques. It is based on the Ramayana story mashed up with an unrelated exorcism dance during which participants get worked up into a trance, with a fire dance thrown in for good measure. It is a unabashedly a tourist show, created by German artist Walter Spies and dancer Wayan Limbak in the 1930s so there is really nothing sacred about it even though it is performed in temples. In fact, some Balinese villages designate a portion of the proceeds from tourist shows to support traditional rituals and education in the arts. The Kecak is a choreographed show, not a cheap, watered down version of an ancient ritual, and as many times as I have seen it, I still find it haunting, hypnotic, entertaining and downright weird.

I condensed a performance of the Kecak into a short video, ending in a fire dance, during which a storm hit. The wind flew fire into the audience, but no one was hurt. Just a little added drama to an impressive performance. Thankfully the real monkeys kept their distance.

Step Right Up Folks! See Amazing California Redwoods in 3D!
red-cyan 3D glasses required – double click on video for HD

Regardless of what you thought of Avatar, the movie has moved 3D from the sideshow tent to the  Big Top. Even though some of the live action shots have the hyper-stereo look of  old Viewmaster frames, the characters and virtual worlds are stunning and natural looking, a huge advance from the creepy fake skin world of Polar Express or the flying daggers of 50s B movies. The new 3D TV sets are expensive, but ten years from now they will be ubiquitous. I will probably not buy one, but wait for decent projector. We have had a home theater for many years and couldn’t conceive of watching 3D on anything less than a seven foot screen.

Movie makers have always tried to give a flat screen depth by layering scenes from the foreground to the background along what they call the Z-axis. One of my favorite over-produced examples of this is CSI Miami, where cameras constantly crane past fluorescent beakers and testubes as actors and extras cross in several directions on several layers in the background. In 3D, this will drive me nuts, but they will do it…guarantee you, along with flying body parts. The biggest challenge of 3D is restraint.

I took advantage of a gorgeous Sunday afternoon to walk to a waterfall in the canyon below our house. Redwood forests are notoriously hard to photograph. They are mostly green and brown with little contrast. You can’t shoot tall trees vertically, for obvious reasons. Shooting their bottoms usually doesn’t show their massiveness unless you stick a little kid with a red hat in front. But 3D can do it.  I grabbed a few shots with my 3D rig.  Grant, my 3D is a bit hyper. That is because the distance between the eyes of my two cameras is a bit far, about 4 inches instead of the average 2.6 inches of human eyes. Which brings be the the conclusion that this is the way the Na’vi probably see as they have enormous heads. I am off the hardware store this afternoon to get the parts for a new rig to move my eyes closer together and correct my Na’vivision.

A happy 90th birthday to K. Chattu Kuttan, the doorman at Sri Lanka’s Galle Face Hotel. He has worked there since 1942 when he witnessed a Japanese Zero crash land on the hotel grounds. I have stayed in the grand but musty old hotel a couple of times. In its days of  glory The Galle Face hosted kings, presidents, movie stars and assorted high-profile scoundrels. Kuttan posed for me a couple of years ago. The hotel may be a bit tired, but K. Chattu Kuttan assuredly is not.