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I like to camp. But I’m living in DC, without a car to get me out to the Shenandoah on the weekends. And I’ve always wanted to go on a safari. But my pocket isn’t so deep. So I figured I’d try the next best thing—urban camping in the mock wild, at the Smithsonian National Zoo. Does that sound a bit desperate? A city slicker’s 14-hour Walden.

Maybe a bit creepy? My thoughts went all “Blair Witch Project” on me that night as I anticipated waking to odd snorts and warbles. Or just plain adventurous? You be the judge.

Snore and Roar invites families, adults and scouts to stay the night on the zoo’s lion and tiger hill. There’s an evening tour through an animal house or one of the exhibit areas—from Amazonia to the Asia Trail, Sumatran tigers and African lions to octopus and lobsters. Note to the squeamish: zookeepers feed dead rats to the Komodo dragon and American alligator. It culminates with an eery flashlight tour of the grounds, before lights out at 10 p.m.

(Video by Megan Gambino and Ryan Reese)

This week, the Sackler begins its “Video Art from Asia” series with two short films by Chinese makers: Yang Fudong’s “Liu Lan” and Cao Fei and Ou Ning’s “San Yuan Li.” Both films were made in 2003.

“Liu Lan” is a rustic love story. At the start, a man in an all-white suit meets his girlfriend by the river. Nothing too hot or heavy on this date: the couple share a meal of fish aboard her boat. Then he sits respectfully at her side while she embroiders a piece of lace. It all goes down in black and white, and birds croon in the (imagined) distance. The lovers don’t even talk. As the film ends and the boy steps back on shore, a female singer asks “why are people in love always apart?” On the heels of Fudong’s lovely display, the question leaps out as both physical and metaphysical. How can one unpack the symbolism of the shore, the boat, the swaying reeds, the boy’s fancy suit and the girl’s old-fashioned veil? Perhaps it’s better to leave the film as it is, a stolen moment between a city boy and the girl who reminds him of home.

Meanwhile next door, there’s a whole different show going on. The museum’s other offering, filmed to beat-heavy, fast music is “San Yuan Li,” a video portrait of a town set on the doorstep of upheaval (click for a Youtube preview). The town of San Yuan Li became famous when its residents took up arms against British expeditionary forces in 1841. Now, the village is a relic of the past, existing under the shadow of China’s fast-developing Gangzhou province. The filmmakers play with speed, showing a montage of Gangzhou residents’ morning calisthenics in humorous fast-forward. But they slow down on group shots of San Yuan Li-ites as they laugh, make food and talk on the phone. Whether San Yuan Li will get buoyed up or destroyed by the modernization sweeping the neighboring lands remains a big question at the end.

In a sense, both these films show the rough in-between places where the old and the new rub up against each other. The theme makes sense for China, which has undergone shocking change in just the past decade.

The curators put the films in dark rooms next to each other, setting up a contrast area in advance, a gray zone where the two films’ sound and ethos come together. It’s strange to sit in “Liu Lan,” spellbound by the lovers’ silent drama, while the sound of car horns intrudes from next door. But that’s the point, isn’t it?

Still from “Liu Lan” courtesy of Yang Fudong and the Sackler Gallery of Art. Films on view until November 30, 2008, as part of “Moving Perspectives: Video Art from Asia.”

The most exciting thing about discovering a new species, I always thought, was choosing the name.

In fourth grade I sketched out possible names for new species, on the off-chance that I’d recognize a new breed of worm on my walk home and, unprepared, name it something lame. Anikus Guptus, a rare species of something-or-other, could guarantee my immortality in the world of academia.

The team that found the Olive-backed Forest Robin in the tropical backwoods of Gabon, Africa, might have had less self-aggrandizing goals when they named their newly-discovered species Stiphrornis pyrrholaemus.

According to a study published in the journal Zootaxa, Brian Schmidt, an ornithologist with the National Zoo’s Monitoring and Assessment of Biodiversity Program in Gabon, first brought samples of this bird to the United States in 2003. Genetic testing revealed that the 4.5-inch-long forest robins were different from the four species scientists already knew about.

Then the naming. Schmidt adopted the genus name Stiphrornis, common among the four—now five!—species of forest robin. Pyrrholaemus, according to the study, came from the Greek pyrrho, which means “orange-colored” and laemus, meaning “throat.” The English common name, Olive-backed Forest Robin, emphasized the bird’s “distinctive olive back and rump.”

It’s no Aha ha (a wasp), Calponia harrisonfordi (a spider) or Oedipus complex (a snake), but it definitely gets the point across.

Image courtesy of Brian Schmidt