Cool Things In Random Places

Moko Jumbies first protected believers from evildoers. Originally a West African tradition, men and women on gigantic stilts would dress in long gowns and masquerade as gods. Gods can look down on humanity from above, and foresee danger better than mere mortals. The stilt-walkers would collect donations, from revelers and onlookers on second-story balconies.

They now dance in the streets of Trinidad and Tobago for every Carnival. ‘Moko’ is the name of the an old African god, ‘the diviner.’ ‘Jumbies’ – ‘ghosts’ – was added by the emancipated slaves. After decades of decline, a man by the name of ‘Dragon’ Glen de Souza actually revived the Moko Jumbie tradition in the early 1990s, in an effort to teach children how to dance.

There is now one premier school for Moko Jumbies in all the world: the Keylemanjahro School of Art & Culture. It is open six days a week, has about one hundred and fifty students, and takes its name from Key (to open doors), le (the first two letters of ‘leader’), man (as in ‘mankind’), jah (the Rastafarian word for God), and ro, for the roar of the crowd as the Moko Jumbies come down the street.

This school keeps children off the streets. They often practice long after sunset, enjoying the cool night air in the midst of their exertion: each stilt can weigh up to twenty-five pounds. The youngest student was Dragon’s own son: he was two.

Chinese zombies devour life force. George Romero’s zombies only eat brains. That’s the difference.

‘Zombie’ isn’t actually the word. The literal translation of Jiang Shi comes out as ’stiff corpse.’ But in English, the best translation reads, ‘Hopping Vampire.’ They hop, because Chinese undead suffer from rigor mortis. They are also blind, and depend on their sense of smell.

The origins of Jiang Shi might stem from the old tradition of carrying dead bodies on bamboo poles. The resulting bounce, up and down along the long road home, gave them the appearance of hopping. And as vampires, these poor folks need your life energy, your qi.

According to the movies – of which there were plenty, in 1980s Hong Kong – Chinese hopping vampires have long tongues and fingernails, and dress in Qing Dynasty clothing. They can be battled with spells (written with chicken’s blood on thin yellow paper), an eight-sided Baqua Mirror, a sword made of lucky Chinese coins powered by the light of a full moon, blood (which freezes them in place), and sticky rice. The sticky rice is lethal.

Funerals are an opportunity to go out with some style. When Josephine Baker died in France, Paris came to a standstill. Jim Henson banned people from wearing black, and had a chorus of Muppets sing the send-off. Hunter S. Thompson had his ashes shot into space, because let’s be honest: he really, really loved guns.

In Ghana, they might bury you in a giant shoe.

In a suburb outside of Accra, the fantasy coffin industry is booming. Many of these hand-crafted creations reflect the trades of those who have passed: shoes for the cobblers, hammers for the carpenters – perhaps a Coca-Cola bottle for the street salesman.

Hens are particularly popular for young mothers, to symbolize maternal love. Occasionally an unrepentant drinker will partake of one last gigantic bottle of Heineken. A gynaecologist once ordered a six-foot uterus. The idea is to leave with dignity, and pride in a life well lived.

If in doubt, a gigantic Bible remains a popular option. And Cadillacs.

This is a fairly new idea. Sometime in the first half of the twentieth century, a village chief commissioned a famous carver for a gigantic cocoa bean, then a major crop in Ghana. The chief soon died – but why let all that hard work go to waste?

And so a tradition was born.

In order to commune with God, some people dance with poisonous snakes.

And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover. —Mark 16:17-18

The verse above serves as the inspiration for serpent handling, a religious movement which sprang up in 1920s Appalachia. The robber barons of the coal industry had decimated the fabric of the community, and many Appalachians felt compelled to turn to something more reliable: “the word of God.” And God, as it turned out, said a lot of interesting things.

Illegal in many states, sometimes since the 1940s, many practitioners hold services in their homes. They also speak in tongues, practice faith healing, and sometimes ‘drink any deadly thing,’ including battery acid. Getting bit by a stray water moccasin is taken as evidence of lack of faith. They prefer the term ’serpents,’ not ’snakes’ – snakes aren’t always poisonous. Many God-fearing serpent-handlers wear their beliefs on their sleeve: many are missing fingers, and their limbs are now distorted from the effects of venomous bites.

Nearly a century old, serpent handling does not seem to be going anywhere. A church opened up in Alberta, Canada in 2004.

“The Amish have the best parties.”

This boy was very drunk, and totally serious. He was just one of hundreds of Pennsylvania teenagers who were captured on camera during the filming of Devil’s Playground, a film about the Amish period of rumspringa. Starting around the age of sixteen, Amish children are allowed, if they so desire, to explore life among ‘the English’ – non-Amish North Americans.

Rumspringa literally means ‘running around.’ It isn’t so much a tradition, per se, as it is the concept of Amish adolescence. During the years of rumspringa, Amish children can drive cars, wear makeup, and apparently, throw wicked shindigs out on the farm. This is especially true for those in larger communities like in Pennsylvania, while smaller Amish populations tend to have far less of a wild streak: small-town life is pretty boring the world over.

The deal in Amish culture is that the children can experience the outside world to their heart’s content, and get it out of their system, before returning to the community of their own will. Occasionally, a few newly adventurous youths will stay away, and strike out on their own in the ‘English’ world. But most come back, accept baptism into adulthood, and allow the dangers and deviance of rumspringa to become mere memory.

But that doesn’t mean that people forget. In Devil’s Highway, one grizzled old farmer confessed that he was truly happy, as an Amish man in an Amish town. But he did miss one thing from rumspringa: his car.

Chittagong is where supertankers go to die.

One supertanker can carry about two million barrels of oil, which is about as much crude as Hong Kong consumes in a week. At the end of their life, half of these behemoths – provided they don’t go out with more of a bang, like the Exxon Valdez – eventually wind up here, on this beach in Bangladesh. They charge towards land at full steam during high tide, and ground themselves into the mud.

Thousands of impoverished Bangladeshis proceed to tear them apart with their bare hands. Gut the insides, drain the tank, and cart off every piece of metal you can carry, from the main deck down to the doorknobs. Eighty percent of the country’s steel comes from these ship-breaking yards.

Hard hats and goggles don’t exist here. This is Bangladesh: one immense labor pool, near-zero labor or environmental laws, and no records of how many people get hurt or killed. All told, oil tanker disassembly both directly and indirectly employs around 200,000 people. Women and children work until sundown and through the night sifting through the sand for the last scraps to sell to local merchants. Most workers manage to earn around two dollars a day.

It is both beautiful and terrifying, like Mad Max come to life.

Guinness turned a rural Argentine village into a gigantic game of dominoes.

The final sequence used 6,000 dominoes, 10,000 books, 400 tires, 75 mirrors, 50 fridges, 45 wardrobes and 6 cars. The chain wound from inside a darkened room, out a window, down and across any number of streets, and at one point involved bales of flaming hay. The grand finale was that of a giant glass of Guinness, whose foam was made up of open books.

They did it for the advertising. For the purpose, Guinness hired the same director who once filmed 250,000 superballs bouncing down a San Francisco hillside for Sony. That ad on the bay only took a few takes, because superballs don’t need acting coaches. Here in Argentina, a full twenty-four hours of film was shot for a final cut that lasts a minute and a half.

It cost $10 million. That’s a lot of money anywhere, but especially in a country where the average monthly income clocks in at around $200. No one has said how much the villagers were paid.

A former Russian gangster has built a log cabin half the size of Big Ben.

He says it was an accident. Nikolai Sutyagin began to build his dacha – the traditional Russian summer house – in 1992. He hoped to make it two stories, so his neighbors would know that he was the richest man in town. After a visit to Japan and Norway, he was inspired to add an addition onto his roof, but decided that it looked ‘ungainly, like a mushroom.’ So, mostly by himself, he added some more.

It grew to thirteen stories. It used to house the eighteen executives of his construction company, and included a five-story bathhouse in which they could have private time with their girlfriends. All of Sutyagin’s associates left after he went to prison for the third time in the 1990s. He says he was betrayed – like most of Russia’s rich at the time – and his equipment destroyed, his money stolen, and his five cars chucked into the river. Sutyagin now lives in four badly heated rooms on the first of his thirteen stories.

In Russian folklore, a hag called Baba Yaga lived in a log house that traveled on dancing chicken legs. Sutyagin’s neighbors call his house a fire hazard and a monstrosity. But he still takes visitors on tours, walking over icy and rotting planks, explaining which rooms would have been fantastic for making love.

In 2005, an amateur photo from Lagos, Nigeria took the world by storm.

It showed men with baboons and hyenas on leashes. In various media reports, these men were identified as drug dealers, debt collectors, street toughs or bodyguards. They are known by locals as Gadawan Kuru, which means ‘hyena handers, guides.’

They are actually a family of minstrels. This group wanders the towns of Nigeria, putting on shows and selling traditional medicines, and passing on their profession from generation to generation. Not long after the first picture hit the web, a South African photographer named Pieter Hugo tracked them down, befriended them, and joined their tour: a group of men, a little girl, four monkeys, three hyenas, and a few rock pythons.

The photographer was fascinated more by the men themselves than their performances. Over eight days – and again two years later, when he returned – he took portraits of the handlers whenever an opportunity presented himself. Once, they all hid in the bushes while one performer secured a cab, and then all piled in at once before the taxi driver could escape.

The first response of many people in the West is to ask about the animals. This concern confuses Nigerians. Here, people do what they must to survive. In the sixth largest exporter of oil in the world, you’re on your own.

Parkour cannot be stopped. That, in fact, is the entire point: parkour is the French martial art of escape, of surmounting every obstacle in your path in the case of an emergency. It is also known as l’art du déplacement, ‘the art of displacement.’

Get from Point A to Point B as quickly and as effortlessly as you can. This is the philosophy of traceuces, the hardscrabble, postmodern gymnasts that make up the ranks of parkour. Parkour was partly inspired by parcours du combatant, the classic obstacle course used in military training. In 1997, a group of friends in France founded a group called Yamakasi, a Congolese word that means ‘strong body, strong spirit, strong person.’ Parkour quickly spread beyond French borders – especially with the help of internet videos, which showed traceuces leaping from building to building like jungle cats.

Parkour is also action movie gold. It made a significant splash in District 13, a dystopian French film that stared parkour co-founder David Belle and famous stuntman Cyril Raffaelli racing through Parisian slums as fast and as effectively as possible. David Belle, parkour’s de facto spokesman, once said this about his art:

“Our aim is to take our art to the world, and make people understand what it is to move.”