--Fitzcarraldo
With wealth from rubber trees accessed through aria, he will build an opera house in the bleakly luscious Peruvian rainforest. As the wild blond man's steamship chugs up the Amazon, a Pathe gramaphone perched on top projects Caruso's mud-cleansed torrent of grief, sinking in the bubbling greenness that surrounds, clarifying the operatic cruelty of colonialism.
L.A.'s Amazon--the 405--passing through the impenetrable savagery of Brentwood and Bel Air, carries streams of leather seated super-powered canoes projecting interior stirrings of the latest Syd Barrett/Nick Drake inflected voice to hit the Morning Becomes Eclectic playlist. The high fidelity components for this wall of sound are now being manufactured in China. Delphi corporation, a leading maker of car stereos and the now de rigeur GPS systems, has 26 locations there, including a plant in the enormous Suzhou Industrial Park.
According to a 2004 article in E Magazine: 'To the west and east of the city, where two industrial parks are growing by nine miles a year, centuries-old villages are being bulldozed to make room for 20-story apartment buildings, foreign-owned mega-corporations, landscaped parks and western-style subdivisions. "Development," reads a Suzhou billboard, "is an Immutable Truth."'
Suzhou is one of China's ten "model environmental cities," but its canals remain polluted along with adjacent Tai Lake. In June an algae bloom on the lake forced officials to cut off water to the city of Wuxi. Environmental activist Wu Lihong had warned of this danger but was arrested in April and remains in jail.
Tai lake is a pond in the sprawling Yangzi delta, endplace of arterial gift to China's rice basket, now clogged by the largest hydroelectric project in the world. After 13 years of construction, the Three Gorges Dam nears completion ahead of schedule and under budget, promising to keep the economic bonfire burning. The 1.13 million displaced persons will have dreams of the Baiji's soft screaming song to remember.
Image from The Nature Conservancy
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