open up your mind, and [ku ku ku, baby]

[intertribal]

I've taken to spending my mornings watching the crisis shows on NatGeo - Seconds From Disaster, Critical Situation, Final Report, and of course, Air Emergency (which is what the Brits call Air Crash Investigation).  By the time the lame-o historical shows come on in the afternoon, there's Law & Order on TNT.  I have to say, I've learned a lot.  I think they're genuinely useful programs.  The Air France Hijack episode has a lot to say about counter-terrorism - what works (negotiation, concession), and what doesn't (refusal to compromise, refusal to accept international help) - and the avalanche in Galteur, well, changed conceptions about the existence of safe zones.  I can't say there's much to learn from the Columbia disaster, sadly - I think the lesson the U.S. has taken home from that disaster is "abandon the space program, the deaths are too dramatic". 

I bought the soundtrack to Sunshine.  It's good, but very creepy - creepier than I remember the movie being.  I also bought "Ku Ku Ku," "This Golden Wedding of Sorrow," and "Bring In The Night."    God I love Death in June.  

New layout inspired by both Death in June and Air Crash Investigation is now complete! 

Comments

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

does the wolf have any special importance/reason for being?

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

not really, other than I really love wolves and as a living/wild contrast to the engine-warehouse in the background.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

i never knew this about you...

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

that I love wolves? it only started with Never Cry Wolf by Farley Mowat... (sophomore year), so I'm not surprised.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

yeah. also i've never read that.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

lol appropriate icon. Mowat was hired by the Canadian government to document wolves slaughtering masses of caribou in the far north (so the government could justify extermination of the wolves, and the hunting lobby would get free access to the caribou). It features recipes for mouse stew, a wolf vs. helicopter battle, Russian spies living on icebergs, getting drunk off anti-freeze, plane crashes, and of course wolf kinship and communication (and it's non-fiction). It was assigned in Environmental Science and it changed my life, but I'm not sure if it would be your type of thing.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

but they're notebooks! like almost exactly the kind i have. i <3 them.

getting drunk off anti-freeze

sounds unpleasant.

but I'm not sure if it would be your type of thing.

maybe. sounds more like a me-as-a-kid type of thing. i had endless books about surviving in the wilderness/arctic/far north (mostly fiction, but i also read a lot of non-fiction stuff on other topics, so i doubt a combination of the two would have upset me). ...maybe endless is an exaggeration.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

yeah, the antifreeze was a desperation thing. they mixed it with other things.

it's not really so much a survival book as it is an ecological argument, and my favorite part of the book was the wolves, which were awesome. I still remember the name Mowat gave the female wolf, Angeline. The book is dedicated to her.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

antifreeze is poison :)

not all of the books i read were about survival, either. esp. the non-fiction. i used to want to be a biologist.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

nor does having a fiction book about somebody surviving in the wilderness necessitate that the book is about survival...rather than ecology, or coming-of-age, or family, or nature/culture, or whatever.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

what I'm saying is this guy had a house and food (mice) and tech equipment. survival was not a plot point - the survival of the wolves was the plot point.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

he ate mice?

all i'm saying is that i didn't mean to imply that my chief interest was in survival, and nothing else, such that a book where 'ecology' was the chief interest would not have been grouped by me into exactly the same category just now, whether survival was a plot point or not.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

yes, he ate mice. there were many, many mice. even the wolves ate mice (that was what they ate when the caribou herd was elsewhere).

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

yeah, I remember when you wanted to be in physics too.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

i still kinda like physics... i s'pose i remember what attracted me to all of these things, but i still like where i am now better.

because i didn't want to buy a new razor when my luggage went away, i now have armpit hair for the first time in years. it's entertaining to me. also apparently i've stopped half of my leg hair from growing at all. it just grows in splotches. ew.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

years? good lord.

that is weird about the splotches though.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

i let my legs go often, but i shower almost every single day (because i am greasy and smelly), and occasionally i forget to shave my armpits, but rarely long enough that anything significant grows back.

yeah, i dunno.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

ecological argument pertaining to people's prejudice against wolves, or interference, or lobbying/govt., or all of these things, or something else?

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

all of those things. because the hunters are trying to argue that the wolves are the ones that massacred like lake-fuls of caribou and just left their bloody carcasses in a pit, when actually it was the hunters that did this (shooting caribou with machine guns from helicopters is the latest technique). also ecological argument about the natural balance, because the wolves pick out the sick and the old in the caribou herd and keep it trim.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

yup, but sometimes nature gets out of balance even when humans don't fuck it up. 'course, then overpopulation ends up being bad for the overpopulated group, and they run out of resources, and die off, and balance is restored. damn humans and their ability to circumvent this. we need mass death. :)

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

exactly. balance is always restored somehow.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

but not necessarily w/o the loss of species.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

true. but I feel like there's a difference between the kind of extinction humans are responsible for and the kind of extinction that the ecosystem sort of needs/chooses. it might just be a moral thing, though.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

we're part of the ecosystem ;)

i agree that there are distinctions to be made (hunting for sport/game vs. for food/materials is one of the simpler ones, for me), but i think the matter of the morality of humanity's place/involvement in their ecosystem is rather complex...

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

theoretically we're a part of the ecosystem. we don't act like it, some people don't think we're primates, and we have a way disproportionate amount of power. (however, we do not have god-like intelligence or perception and we seriously misuse our power. we don't deserve the title of "stewards" - we are too stupid to be stewards. to quote Akira, we are like amoebas with the ability to build bridges... we don't build bridges, we eat everything)

yeah, that's the distinction I make with hunting too. I don't think barely any hunting these days is legitimate unless you are actually living where there are no grocery stores (to hell with your native culture, I don't give a shit). I think are brains are too large and the earth is better off without us, and I think earth is subtly trying to kill us off. I honestly don't value humans above other animals, so... *shrug*. it's complex for me as it applies to public policy and achievable measures/goals, like the MDGs and various other things that humans could actually do to make things better - it's complex there. but in my heart, it's not complex at all, if that makes any sense.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

*our

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

we have a disproportionate amount of power precisely due to the self-awareness that allows us to recognize that. all life eats everything. every species eats and expands till something else destroys it. nature is a harsh mistress. the difference with humans is that we have the ability to store goods, proportion out labor, organize, distribute, and even create moral systems, etc. this does not mean that humans necessarily create systems that contribute to this ever-growing sort of monstrosity. i seriously doubt an egalitarian society would ever get there. anyway, not everyone has, for various reasons, lived like that. i don't hate humanity. i used to, maybe. overpopulation is a problem few will attempt to solve, because like any good self-interested species, we say life is good, death is bad. (unlike any self-interested species, we also sometimes say, your religious rights allow you to avoid birth control.) ultimately, maybe it's in the best interest of the ecosystem to let us overpopulate until we kill everything off, just like an 'invasive' species. that may be all nature can do, but i say, perhaps, humans are better than that. perhaps, unlike every other species, we ought to attempt some self-control--of our own abilities, our own history, our own organization. shrug. but we'll probably just die like animals.

i don't value humans over other animals either. but that's a very unnatural point of view.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

I hate our self-awareness - it's so minimal. I know that all life eats everything - that's why we're still amoeba, in effect, because spiritually and mentally we're nothing (or at any rate, a lot less than we think we are), we just have the tech to get results without thinking about the results - and we need to think about the results because we've outsmarted our natural predators. no species should be allowed to outsmart malthusian pressure, but that's exactly what we've been able to do.

I don't hate humanity per se but I definitely don't think we should just throw up our hands and say this is the way it is, so who the hell cares - but that's just my own moral/spiritual position. Some people do think we'll eventually serve as a plague to wipe the earth clean (like what's-his-name in The Lost World... Levine?) but I don't think so. I think we'll eat ourselves - overpopulation doesn't need to kill off everything in the ecosystem, sometimes it just means an overextended species, Roman Empire style. Ideally the apocalypse would come and kill us all via natural disasters, and I think earth is trying to do that, but so far all it's getting are the poor people in the equator. I don't know if we're capable of self-control that means anything worthwhile, but I think we ought to try. We're coming up to another bottleneck period and there's a chance of course that a lot of us won't make it - but of course the people who won't make it, in such an event, will be the starving, sick, and poor. Just like the caribou that get eaten by wolves, so maybe that's just the way things will go. What will be interesting is how the global society responds to the mass death that a bottleneck would cause, because then we'd really see if capitalism requires a class of poor people.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

yeah, and i think the current economic and political system is geared toward not thinking about the results. i don't think it's a flaw of humanity so much as a flaw of dominant social systems.

I don't think we should throw up our hands either, but that's the thing--I mean that only the most human elements of humanity can 'save it from itself.' I dunno enough about global warming to predict our doom, lol. What do you mean about really seeing if capitalism requires a class of poor people?

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

I hope that it's a flaw of the dominant social systems and not humanity. For everybody's sake, I hope that's true.

I also agree that the most human elements of society can save us from ourselves. I hold onto that to keep myself from following the advice in "Bring in the Night", which otherwise makes too much sense to me. Sigh. Well, global warming will eat poor people, I will tell you that, because it's poor people (and by people, I mean countries, and the poor people within those countries usually) that live in the most unstable and vulnerable zones. there's a word for those zones but I've forgotten them. Science of Sustainable Development ftw.

My mom thinks that capitalism requires a class of poor people, and that's why she hates capitalism. the Barnard Economics department would rather not say that, so, if all the poor people in the equator die off from typhoons and earthquakes and volcanoes, then will some of the survivors become poorer to accommodate the capitalist system? Or will we all happily dance around in our money shoes now that all the poor people are gone?

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

What is "Bring in the Night"? I understand about global warming affecting poor countries/people, but I just mean, I don't know about restoring the balance in the environment. Are we capable of permanently fucking things up? Oh my god, i just realized what "ftw" is. I think.

Okay, I get it now. But...what if it's the capitalist system that changes, not the survivor's wealth? Is that possible?

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

"Bring in the Night"'s a Death in June song about destroying the world. I don't think we're capable of permanently fucking things up, personally... that would take some serious fucking up. it would probably take us somehow pushing the earth out of its orbit or something. yeah, who knows what global warming will do.

ftw = for the win.

well, if it's the capitalist system that changes that would be pretty damn amazing. anything's possible.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

i like to pretend it stands for "fuck the what"

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

probably not.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

oh, i know. but while we're in pretend-land...

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

so, why was it life-changing?

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

well, for one it affected me emotionally. the end is extremely sad (the father and uncle wolf go off hunting and in the meanwhile a helicopter comes and throws grenades at the wolf den, with the mother and baby wolves inside). the author goes into the den in a manic need to see if they're ok and they're alive, but at first he sees the eyes glowing in the dark and is afraid, even though he knows the wolves. and meanwhile the other two wolves are running across the plains howling, trying to find the rest of the family. and even if they all survived that time it's likely that they died soon thereafter because the Canadian government decided to run a huge extermination campaign regardless of what Mowat reported.

it was sort of the beginning of my back-to-nature sort of quest. I think it helped with the depression I felt of being in New York City, at Barnard. I really don't do well in environments where I can't be around nature. and this book was like a reminder that there is a larger world than the intensely human world of New York, that humans haven't completely destroyed life, that there's still wilderness, that people still believe in magic, just a little. the value of being lost. etc.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

magic! one of the basics of human society! just had to be annoying there... steve just worked out the semiotics of a certain sort of magical thinking.

yeah, i like being around nature too.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

I think magic is a basic of human society, if that means what I think it means (and that's rarely true).

I wish I did witchcraft.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

i dunno, it basically means logical fallacies.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

logical fallacy = basic of human society?

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

for as long as we've had logic ;)

what aspect of magic are you thinking of?

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

hmmm... I don't think I understand that, but magical thinking is definitely a logical fallacy by def.

oh, you know, the whole shabang. I basically wished I lived in a world that was a combination of Charmed and Xena, so there you go. First and foremost, divination. I love divination (although necromancy's too icky and dangerous in my opinion). The only problem with witchcraft is that so much of it is geared towards like "the goddess" or whatever, and I would just be like, fuck that. Same problem with voodoo, although I'm not attracted to the idea of sympathetic magic and hexes anyway, although voodoo and santeria can do some pretty cool things. I think I like alchemy more than that authority-oriented shit. That and demonology. Man, I am so into that, but that's just a research field, not an actual type of magic. I like the idea of mana (and ki! lol lol lol) - equal opportunity magic. Shamans are cool. But for me it definitely should be about an individual connection to either subconscious parts of yourself or subsurface parts of the world, and doesn't involve a whole lot of things that turn me off mainstream religion (i.e., worship and rules and blah blah blah). I love the idea of walkabouts and "spirit quests", to use a cliche.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

sorry, i'm in a weird mood this morning...