|
|
|
free as a bird
Tuesday, June 24 2003
On Gretchen's recommendation, this evening I went to see Winged Migration at Tinker Street, a small theatre in Woodstock. This was the first time I'd gone to a theatre to watch a movie all by myself since I was a teenager.
Tinker Street is housed in an old white clapboard church. I'm always delighted when I see churches recycled for secular purposes - this was one of the few things the old Soviet Union did effectively. (Only two years ago I was agnostic on the value of religion in society, but 9-11-01 and the irrational faith-based policies of the Bush administration have placed me decidedly in the anti-religious camp.) As expected, most of the people in the theatre were the typical Woodstockians - they tend to be orders of magnitude more fashionably-dressed and photogenic than the people one is likely to wade through at the Hudson Valley Mall.
For a movie that mostly featured film of birds flying from one place to another, Winged Migration had all the elements of a great movie. It had drama, twists, poignancy, heartbreak, comedy, and (especially) stunning visuals. There were many important (though brief) highlights, but my favorite parts delved into the more extended dramas of small groups of migrating birds finding themselves in hopelessly uninhabitable flyover country: the small band of Canada geese in the Great American Desert, the white storks touching down on the barren dunes of the Libyan Sahara, the geese napping on the deck of a naval destroyer, and (most moving of all) the Red-Breasted Geese cheerfully strolling through the toxic puddles of a sprawling factory in Eastern Europe. We humans have sprung up overnight like soon-to-be flaccid mushrooms, and still the birds have to migrate.
Winged Migration seemed to be about a larger story than the routine-but-amazing adventures of birds. More than that, it was about freedom, the kind Lynard Skynyrd touched up in their most popular song. In Winged Migration, being free to fly is portrayed as the highest form of experience. Throughout, the film inflicted its biggest emotional effects in the numerous places where this freedom is contrasted with what it means for a bird not to be able to fly. Further emphasizing the theme of freedom, we are shown birds flying in the context of not one but two Statues of Liberty (the first being the one in the Seine in western Paris).
That one scene of the pathetic tern on the beach in West Africa with a broken wing really got to me. The little guy would try to fly away from the ravenous crabs - just like he always flew - but his mysterious new pain-inducing asymmetry would just knock himself over every time. His predicament reminded me of a bat I found the other day in the grass near the north end of the house. It also had a broken wing and looked pretty fucking miserable. I didn't know what to do so I just left him to his fate, and felt guilty about later. Gretchen's empathy for everything defenseless in the Universe has started to rub off on me. (Empathy for animals is the opposite of a fascist impulse. In keeping with his character, George W. Bush is said to have tortured animals in his youth, just like Vlad Tepes.)
Like everyone else, I'd be fascinated to see how Winged Migration was filmed. How could-long range telephoto cameras be held so still when being operated from airplanes? Perhaps the unavoidable jitters were erased in post-production using some sort of fancy computer program.
As I returned home past the glassy Ashokan Reservoir, still glowing in the milky twilight after 9:00pm, for an instant I felt as if I was a bird and my 1988 Toyota pickup was my wings. No Red Bull necessary.
[REDACTED]
[REDACTED]
I stayed up late into the night changing the schema on some of my Vodkatea database tables.
I've been neglecting the once-thriving online community I'd started there, and as always happens with neglected gardens, it has been completely taken over by weeds. By weeds, I mean obnoxious right-wing racists who never have an opinion unless it comes as a gut reaction. Sometimes these weeds write interesting things, and there was a time when I thought they brought a refreshing new perspective or served as instructive self-parodies. But now that they've totally displaced everyone else, I can see that I need to change the rules a little. I'd love to make a community that was like some sort of Biosphere XX, entirely self-moderating and guaranteed to generate wonderful content, but that isn't proving possible, at least not under the present paradigm of algorithms. To maintain an attractive garden, you have to be prepared to weed. I intend to keep manual interference to a minimum, but I'm also devising a system that suppresses posts from low-rated posters until I manually give them a boost. The existing user rating system seems to be an excellent basis for determining the default rating of a post, although I will tweak it further to mitigate against the influence of trolls and other fly-by-night accounts. I used to think that there was elegance to naturally-evolved societies - that only a few basic rules were necessary for them to blossom. This might even be true on some scale, one larger perhaps than the tested-and-found-inclined-towards-fascism population of the United States.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?030624 feedback
previous | next |
