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The Rhizotron of Illinois:
(All photos by Howard Falcon-Lang, Bill DiMichele and Scott Elrick. Source.)

Over the summer we heard a lot about the Rhizotron and the Xstrata at London’s Kew Gardens. In published reports, these new attractions were always twinned together; in fact, on the official website, it’s the ‘Rhizotron & Xstrata Treetop Walkway.’ Since the Xstrata literally takes visitors up to the canopies, we naturally thought the Rhizotron was its subterranean equivalent and, in terms of scale, design and engineering, was just as spectacular.

Of course, this was before we saw photographs of the Rhizotron, when we couldn’t help but picture garden lovers navigating through damp and dimly lit passages, bumping their heads into gigantic (simulated) roots, watching all manners of animals burrowing and nesting in the soil (behind glass), and learning firsthand all the different soil horizons. (‘The soil has architecture?!?!’ the pasteurized denizens of the concrete jungle will cry out.)

It was also when we have already worked ourselves up into a frenzy by imagining and choreographing its spatial experience: first a descent into the abyss like Jules Verne, then all sense of geography gets lost — or you literally get lost — before emerging at the other end, squinting hard at the fullness of the British sun as you ascend up, up, up to the trees, the heaviness and claustrophobia of the earth replaced with buoyancy and vistas.

Alas, to the disappointment of our own making, we later learned that the Rhizotron is no more than a concrete bunker, not that extensive and probably not even wholly subterranean. Up against one wall is a bronze installation, a stylized root system inlaid with educational multimedia. On the floor is a strip of flashing lights. How all of these could engender a meaningful engagement with the hidden landscape is quite puzzling.

Consider, then, ‘the largest fossil forests found anywhere in the world at any point in geological time.’ The discovery was first reported by practically everyone the summer before, and it is finding its way through the wires again this week with the report that these ancient rainforests — one of the first to evolve on the planet — was wiped out by global warming 300 million years ago.

What has always fascinated us about these mineralized landscapes is that they were found in underground coal mines in Illinois. To see them, you would have to put on a hard hat and maybe pack an emergency oxygen canister, because here, the proverbial walking through a forest means spelunking through an extensive underground network of tunnels.

Let the U.S. Department of Interior declare the tunnels a national park open to the public, and you have the Rhizotron of Illinois.

There, while ducking low ceiling, getting soiled, fighting claustrophobia and coughing up pulverized coal, you get to survey the ecology of an extinct landscape. Up against one wall is a dense mat of ferns, and on another are some delicate fronds frozen in time. Look up, and you might see the grass-like leaves of the ‘giants of coal age forests,’ the lycopids, or the diamond patterns of their bark.

The walls, ceilings and floors are plastered with complex geometries in such a way that we are reminded of incomplete mosaic floorings of imperial Roman villas. Typical of Roman paintings, we have images of nature decorating an interior space. It’s a garden scene, in fact: a rainforest of the very distant past, a mythological age when the U.S. was straddling the equator, rendered with the tessarae of ‘ancient vegetation - now turned to rock.’

As splendid as the prehistoric cave paintings of Lascaux. As marvelous as the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, though this might have a truer version of the Creation story.

In the Archives:
Accessing the Wilderness, or: A Proposal for a National Park of Abandoned Gold Mines

(Via Pruned.)

Nuclear Nation: “Perhaps in the spirit of the Wonders of the World, the nuclear reactor in Hanford, Washington, has been declared a national historic site.

[Image: By Stuart Isett for The New York Times].

‘National Historic Landmarks,’ the Department of Energy explains, ‘can be nationally significant districts, sites, buildings, structures, and/or objects that possess exceptional value or quality in illustrating or interpreting the heritage of the United States.’
In a late-August news release (PDF) we read:

U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) Deputy Secretary Lynn Scarlett and U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Acting Deputy Secretary Jeffrey F. Kupfer today announced the designation of DOE’s B Reactor as a National Historic Landmark and unveiled DOE’s plan for a new public access program to enable American citizens to visit B Reactor during the 2009 tourist season. The B Reactor at DOE’s Hanford Site in southeast Washington State was the world’s first industrial-scale nuclear reactor and produced plutonium for the atomic weapon that was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan to end World War II (WWII).

As the New York Times pointed out yesterday, however, Hanford is but ‘one of five Manhattan Project facilities designated as historic landmarks, including the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in New Mexico and the X-10 Graphite Reactor at Oak Ridge, Tenn.’ Another site is the so-called Chicago Pile.
The atomic infrastructure of mid-century American warfare is thus slowly being converted into a distributed landscape of historic monuments.
Perhaps it’s dark tourism with a physics bent – the national memory of nuclear fission, a geography of Cold War nostalgia. They are places where the atom opened up – a series of small entryways into matter.”

(Via BLDGBLOG.)

20/20 Report on Music Video (1980):

(Via Rhizome.org.)

COUNTRY MUSICIANS CAN’T BE DEMOCRATS!:

Here are the Red State Update guys talking about Toby Keith being a Democrat:

It might be useful for starting a discussion about the way country music is so associated with conservative politics and the Republican party today, and why we would be surprised that a guy like Toby Keith (who has proudly acknowledged smoking pot-liberal!-but also wrote the song ‘Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue’-conservative!) would be a Democrat-what does that say about our ideas of what a Democrat (or Republican) must be or act like? You might contrast that with the number of country artists in the first half of the 20th century who were often progressive Democrats or (gasp!) even socialists. It’s pretty fascinating how much the politics associated with country music have changed, and how ‘obvious’ it seems to people today that country musicians would be conservative, to the point that country music has in many ways become a symbol of conservatism (as opposed to ‘alt country,’ which is often associated with a more liberal outlook*).

For an excellent discussion of the early political culture of the California country music scene, see Pete LaChapelle’s book Proud to Be an Okie: Cultural Politics, Country Music, and Migration to Southern California.

(Via Sociological Images.)

the prince:

more from the WSJ here.

(Via 3quarksdaily.)

whale shit and other important matters:

(Via 3quarksdaily.)

Originally from 3quarksdaily on March 11, 2007, 7:19am

Originally from 3quarksdaily on March 1, 2007, 6:05pm

Something culturally bizarre is going on in Hong Kong and from what I haven’t read in the western media (with the exception of a 2003 post on Boing Boing)… either the topic is still too taboo or most people aren’t paying attention. For times like these you can count on Asian Sex Gazette to cover the story (again).

To many Hong Kongers, Nazis represent the epitome of desirability. Their tanks were made by Mercedes and Porsche; their uniforms were original Hugo Boss.
Twenty years after the last British skinhead tired of the joke, it’s still not unusual to see a Hong Kong teen in an Adolph Hitler European Tour t-shirt.