Ahhh what up bloggernauts monstronauts astronauts cosmonauts earth people from right to left town to town cap and gown, since I've been gone Pluto has gone the way of the Dodo, Croc hunter has died and I somehow got even more attractive. I have a few main points to make with the usual lack of what some would call "flow" and "cohesion" but I say you motherfuckers oughta be tried for rhyme and treason.
I read this article: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/09/15/BAG75L6BJK1.DTL and found it amazingly disturbing. Pretty much this is like what is fucked up with a lot of historical (and maybe current, these things take perspective, hindsight, etc.) U.S. foreign policy. Heralded to the tune of "scientific advancement" we have some invention that makes ants kill each other so they won't bother humans. That is like the US arming Iran, the Taliban, whoever to kill off its enemy del dia (sidenote: why is spanish never used to spice up sentences, it is always french or latin, fuck that) and then suddenly turn around some years later and battle those people with the newer round of weapons we haven't yet sold them.
Anyways, and this will actually have some semblance of a connection, I've recently been in the woods hiking for a long while and over the course of the journey some thoughts and realizations crossed my mind. One is that what we would probably all collectively deem "nature" is a very powerful force but in a weird sort of Jesus way. When I was hiking somewhere along the John Muir Trail I looked around and saw pretty much nothing but complete wild(er)ness around me. The only abberation to that was the thin slice of trail that wound its way through the terrain. That trail however, was to me a scar, a line marking a human cut beyond the slight impact that animal dwellers would make. A scar however might be the wrong term because scars are often looked at on the body as history and maybe something to learn from. You know, cat clawed half your face to shreds--->resolution not to make kissy faces in front of Fraulein any more. It seemed to me on this day on the trail though that nothing would really be learnt, maybe everything was backwards because from that scar, which actually now seemed more like an initial cut than a scar. From that initial cut I could see, just as I did as a young child in SimCity 2000 the towns and cities and industries and commerce building up from that initial plotting. And what does nature do? It turns the other cheek as it is encroached upon more and more. Finally, nature just peacefully walks off into the sunset when everything reaches a limit. The problem is that there is no way to know what the limit is, when you are nearing it or have reached it, I suppose you can learn to read signs, proverbial writings on the granite walls, but there's no science that can give you these answers my friend. Go to any big city and besides the created parks and corralled rivers, you will see no nature, nature has left. But then, yet again, another trick is waiting. Pretty much two years ago exactly I was in Washington D.C. interning two days a week at a magazine that I took the metro (underground subway) to each morning. To get onto the train at my stop I would ride an escalator more than 100 feet underground. Now Washington, D.C. would more than fit my criteria of a city that nature has run away from. But there, underground at the Tenleytown metro stop a ray of sunlight shown from far above and alit on a small patch of track. As I looked at the patch of light a tiny plant was growing out of the cement and very nearly winking at me.
Here is another thing that bugs me. All the time in school we'd read books. Fiction books, history books, politics books, etc. Now we are often asked to analyze these books in depth and encouraged by teachers or professors to take their words as holy. Now for the most part I am fine with that, reading a lot as a child is probably responsible for the vast majority of my reading/writing/intellectual abilities to this day. The things that irks me is that the books I have read are rarely put into perspective. By this I mean that if I am reading some political philosophy then I like to know something about the historical context it was written in, the author, what point in the author's life it was written, where it fits on a spectrum of popularity/ideology etc. What I often get is the expectation to read the book in a vacuum with the rationale that this is somehow more beneficial for me because then I can make my own judgements about it. Fuck that! I am not that fucking smart. The first (and only motherfucking) time I read Pride and Prejudice I didn't even know it was meant to be a farce or whatever and I was disgusted by it instead of wowed by its skill. Is that my fault? Maybe, but I am modern and suburban and liberal so I will pin the problem on others. I see nothing wrong in giving students or readers in general some hints as to how to read the book. I mean if you read Hobbes' "Leviathan" whilst knowing that Hobbes lived in a time of constant coups (Thailand anyone?) and instability it makes a whole lot of fucking sense and doesn't seem like the hard assed bad assed take no prisoners fubar philosophy that many might mistake it as. Learning about the 1960's as a kid in school without getting some basic understanding about how that (and it always blows my mind that for the most part these are our fucking parents) this was the first generation in America that had material and financial affluence in the country and a culture of plenty often leaves people spiritually deprived and seeking just leads to stupid ass misconceptions and stereotypes about protests and hippies and etc. Anyways, what got me thinking about this was this article I stumbled across today because I have been glued to my computer all day due to some intense back pain: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20060825.wxboat26/BNStory/National/ It's about the academic, author and other things dude Michael Ignatieff and it is pretty much an 18 page overview of his life, all the different parts of it and I found it so interesting because a) I think he spoke at the '04 Whitman graduation and b) I read one of his books in a politics class and I was realizing while reading this that it's so important to understand the context of a book because take all the bloggernauts for example, we have all changed a lot over four years and will continue to change deep into our lives. Just like Picasso's art has a blue period, cubism and so on we all go through phases and I sure as hell know that if I was writing a book every two to three years I would probably not agree or believe in half the shit I said in the past and that past version of myself would feel the same way about future work. Whatever, I've made my point, context is important.
Another thing that bugs me is that despite continually enforced massacres and genocides there is always a spider visible somewhere in my room before I go to bed each night. Maybe I need to re-engineer its brain chemistry so it kills the next day's spider and so on.
I'm gonna get 50% Jumago on you real quick: Bob Seger just dropped a new album, "Face the Promise" that is his first album in like 11 years. He is the fuckin shit. He sings like all he has been eating since 1995 is rocks, dirt and car parts washed down with Penzoil. Now this is mainly from reading other reviews but what is tight about the album is that he hasn't changed his style one bit to cater to more recent trends in rock and roll. He plays a classic kind of rock and roll that is very close to country music in some ways but the retardation factor comes in when critics lament that "Seger has gone country" since he is doing what he's done all along and goddamit, that is rock and roll.
movie time!
"Little Miss Sunshine" is a bomb ass movie, I may have noted that in an earlier post but it's the last movie I've seen in awhile. New movies on my list are "All the King's Men" "Flyboys" and NOVEMBER FUCKING THIRD is the date that "Borat" drops. This is going to be the film event of the year. Borat is such an amazing character, I know Jumago appreciates this and Borat's Wikipedia site is absolutely the best read of the year, move over Dan Brown.
It's still movie time!
My parents have Netflix and last night my mom and I watched "The Story of the Weeping Camel" which is a sweet film about a rural Mongolian family. Pretty much the only main plot that advances throughout the 1 hour and 27 minute film is that one of the family's camels gives birth to a colt it rejects and a musician needs to come to do a ritual to fix it. This only takes like half of the movie and the rest of it is just mundane family scenes with the fully Mongolian cast, the film is also in Mongolian and is filmed absolutely stunningly. At the end of the movie my mom commented, "That was good, just really slow" and she was right but she meant the latter part of that comment in kind of a negative way and it got me thinking that the movie was even tighter than I originally gave it credit for. Most movies assume you have the attention span you probably have, 3 minutes so something has to explode or squirt out of an orifice in that amount of time or you are done and won't pay attention to the product placements to follow. This movie paints a picture of the plodding rural lifestyle of this family and magically the pace of the movie seems to follow the pace of events that are being depicted even though that is obviously not true. Another subplot is that the youngest child wants a TV because he has seen them on excursions across the Gobi Desert into a small town. It was a good 1 hour and 27 minutes, didn't blow my mind, but instead implanted a foreign culture and lifestyle into that unexploded space.
Peace.
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