Earth Day for Cowboys

 

Poison Ivy helps us celebrate Earth Day 2024

 

Embrace Nature

 

Staring into the Year End Campfire

When I set out to find the perfect Western, Biden was a Vice-President, Putin was a Prime Minister, Ukraine was a Russian client-state, Trump was a game show host, I had a heart that was 100% natural, and had never heard of the eight limbs of ashtanga yoga.  A lot has changed since then.

In those days, and the couple of years that followed, I spent a lot of meandering mental energy thinking about man in nature, the folly of civilization, completely ignored Hobbes, and longed for some kind of Tyler Durden-esque collapse of the status quo that would certainly have killed me within days.

(Side note: you know how life expectancies were so low back in ye olden days?  It wasn’t because everyone died at 35, it was because so many people died of things that we can prevent or manage today.  If I were born 50 years earlier I would not have lived past 40, and probably would have had trouble making it to my 20’s.  A friend asked me mid-pandemic why I was so cranky and depressed all the time and that it was bringing down all my co-workers.  I said that if the Qanon-MAGA hat crowd decides they don’t like the election results and start a civil war I’ve got 60 days max before a disrupted pharma supply chain kills me.  He thought that was ridiculous, then we had Jan 6.  He also occasionally read this blog.  Hi RC!)

In the decade since the allure of the return to primal has faded… a little.  I mean, I did save the picture above from The Last Book You’ll Ever Read, a graphic novel by Cullen Bunn about that exact re-wilding of civilization.  A lot of my non-western hiatus was spent reading Edgar Rice Burroughs, time travel hunting books, pulp safaris, Hemmingway’s hunting stories, etc.  I think that with a lot of yoga study I saw that there is a happy hunting ground between civilization and the wilderness.

Several times I’ve set out to make a Dungeons and Dragons character that felt like a Saddhu, the ascetic wandering yogis that still exist today.  My buddies assume that I’d make a monk, but the times where I’ve done it I’ve always made some kind of Druid. 

Yoga, particularly Shaivist Tantra yoga I study, is pretty primal.  You can’t really experience it unless you can experience it in your body first.  Not that you’ve got to be a super athlete; I started my study without a sternum, not a lot of complicated yoga postures happening at that time.  The quintessential yogi for me is Shiva- one of the three faces of God, Lord of Yoga, sitting on a mountain, meditating and surrounded by animals.

There is also some evidence that Cernunnos (the Celtic & Gaulic god that is a precursor to Herne, the Wild Hunt, and the Green Man) is Shiva.  So yeah, the druids were yogis.

That ascetic, austere seeker going to the mountains to meditate always appealed to me.  Why do people go to find enlightenment on top of a mountain?  Because you are never the same person at the top that you were at the start.  I even wrote about that way back in 2013.  Just this week I got thinking about this chain:

The Saddhu, seeking a quiet perch on a mountaintop to meditate.

The Druid, wandering the expansive forests and mountains of Britain getting list in vision of the Otherworld.

The Mountain Man, leaving the civilization that defined him to live apart from societal binds and expectations.

The Saddhu, the Druid, the Mountain Man, all connected.

Happy New Year.  Time for one last hike.

 

The Fine Cinema of Mad Max: Fury Road

The Australian Outback after a nuclear and biological disaster is dominated by three city-states, each of which controls one vital resource- food, fuel, or ammunition.  As part of a periodic exchange of goods one of these city-states, the Citadel, manages a heavily guarded merchant caravan that connects the three city-states.  Despite being the best source of water (via a well-pressured underground spring) and food, the Citadel struggles with radiation and birth defects among its population.  The leader of the Citadel manages the social tensions generated by these birth defects in three ways.  First, by enslaving healthy men and using them as living blood banks. Second, by enslaving healthy women to act as brood mothers in hopes of birthing a generation of fit children.  Finally, by creating a Norse-inspired cult that reveres death in combat before succumbing to radiation-linked diseases.

Enter the film’s main conflict- the Citadel’s best warrior and caravan leader is a woman kidnapped from a distant matriarchal city-state as a child, who wants to free the brood mother sex slaves and with them return to her homeland across the desert.  As an experienced caravan leader she is familiar with terrain, the unusual weather hazards, and has made deals with the scattered bandits and tribes along the way for protection.  When the caravan leader makes her break for her homeland we see start to see the importance of healthy potential mothers to the new society and the strong connections between the city-states as all three bring their warriors together to recapture and re-enslave the brood mothers.  This sets up the film’s ominous question: what is more important, the continuation of a stable society, or the personal freedom of individuals?  In the finest tradition of the Western films, a lone silent gunslinger enters the plot to challenge the assumptions of the main characters and drive them to greater levels of personal understanding and introspection.

That’s Mad Max: Fury Road in a nutshell.  Or, it’s a two hour car chase with almost no dialogue.

Honestly, it’s both.  There is a rich story going on in Mad Max: Fury Road, and it’s right there for any viewer to note.  But you can also completely ignore that story and go right for the constant rev of engines and beautifully choreographed mayhem (Cirque du Solei did some of the stunts in the big fights).  If director George Miller did a film of nothing but two hours of motorcyclists in the Namib desert I would pay to see that, but have them jumping over trucks on fire?  Awesome.

My favorite part of Mad Max: Fury Road came about 2/3 of the way through, in a brief pause in the action, as Max Rockatansky himself spoke his first full line of dialogue: “Hope is a mistake.  If you don’t fix what’s broke, you’ll go insane”.

This film is brilliant.

Alex Mercer, Tyler Durden, and Post-Urbanism

image by Phil Noto

For those of you who read this blog looking for hints on good cowboy books to read, this one is going to stray pretty far from that objective.  If you read this because you like the occasional environmentalist or political wanderings, this post may be up your alley.  If this is your first time here and found the blog by plugging “Alex Mercer” or “Tyler Durden” into a search engine, welcome and enjoy.

“Think of everything we've accomplished, man. Out these windows, we will view the collapse of financial history. One step closer to economic equilibrium.”

Like a lot of formerly angsty Gen-Xers I absolutely love Fight Club.  The movie is something to behold, but to really get the full impact of the story you have to read Chuck Palahniuk’s original book, which is where I got started.  You are probably already familiar with the storyline- Average Joe develops a split personality with an anti-corporate, anti-consumerist attitude and forms a secret society of disenchanted men who look for personal meaning in seemingly random violence, leading up to massive attack of anarchic terrorism against the credit card companies.  Okay, maybe you didn’t know that, since most viewers probably just remember the half naked guys punching each other. But trust me, that’s what the story is about. 

(Well, there’s also the theory that the narrator is really a grown-up Calvin and that Tyler Durden is Hobbes.  And the theory following Palahniuk’s outing that half naked fights in basements were actually big man-orgies.  Also, the movie Old School is Fight Club re-written as a comedy.  Fight Club stirs up lots of theories.  That’s why it’s important to follow the first rule of Fight Club- Do Not Talk About Fight Club.  Which is also the second rule.)

What was missing from the movie version of Fight Club is a sense of where the Fight Club / Project Mayhem / Space Monkey movement is heading- an elimination of the modern industrialized world and a returning humanity to some kind of post-urban, post-industrial hunter gatherer society.  The book is strewn with neo-primitivist passages like this one:

"Imagine," Tyler said, "stalking elk past department store windows and stinking racks of beautiful rotting dresses and tuxedos on hangers; you'll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life, and you'll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. Jack and the beanstalk, you'll climb up through the dripping forest canopy and the air will be so clean you'll see tiny figures pounding corn and laying strips of venison to dry in the empty car pool lane of an abandoned superhighway stretching eight-lanes-wide and August-hot for a thousand miles.”

I admit there are days where this vision sounds pretty attractive to me, such as the day that I received one work e-mail on average every 7.5 minutes over the course of the work day.  Then there are days where a little voice inside my head says “look, bionic man, you walk around with a Dacron aorta and a carbon fiber aortic valve- who are you to complain about progress and technology?”  It is all very confusing.  Still, one can fantasize…

So just how did New York City turn into this post-urban landscape reclaimed by nature?  Surely it was something more than the destruction of the credit card companies at the end of the novel, right?  That question always lurked in the back of my mind.  That is, until I played a console game called Prototype, and saw how the main character systematically wrecks an electronic Manhattan in the middle of a zombie apocalypse.  I sure wouldn’t want to live there. At least not until the zombies move out.

Warning: Here There Be Spoilers

In a story told through a mix of flashbacks, intense action sequences, and eating people’s brains (yes, you read that right) you learn that there is a secret government program to develop bioweapons that somehow goes wrong.  Their biggest and best virus, Blacklight, somehow gets loose, and eats its creator.  That is you, Alex Mercer.  Or was you.  It is entirely possible that you spend the entire game as an evolving virus that is a roughly six foot tall shapeshifter which spends most of its time looking like the first guy that it ate and defaulting to those memories.  You also spend part of the game growing claws and whips out of your arms, running up and down the sides of building, karate-kicking attack helicopters, and slashing apart both the zombie hordes that you may have inadvertently created and the vast military force arrayed to stop both the zombies and you.  Also, as I mentioned before, eating brains. That’s just what walking viruses do. Between the zombies, the kill-crazy military, and quite frankly your own manic action, Manhattan slowly gets wrecked around you. 

"My name is Alex Mercer. I'm the reason for all of this. They call me a killer, a monster, a terrorist. I'm all of these things.”

The thing that was Alex Mercer in action

Let me just say that it takes some big hairy nuts in a post 9/11 world to set a game in Manhattan where the protagonist (I won’t even touch the word “hero”) is a self-described terrorist who racks up a body count like an al-Qaeda wet dream.  I’m about 2/3 of the way through and the KIA list is already north of 3,000.  Despite all the bloodshed, though, there are strange moments of calm.  In later parts of the game when you’ve dodged the attack helicopters, the UAVs are out of sight, and you are hanging off of the antenna of a skyscraper like Jack on his beanstalk, you see Manhattan laid out before you.  Entire neighborhoods are given over to the zombies, civilians streaming across the bridges looking safety.  The city’s urban landscape is getting reshaped one block at a time, and you suspect that this place will never be the same again.  It is a tragedy, played up in the game, but sometimes I had moments where I looked out and thought, “dang, Tyler, nice job.”

And since you asked nicely, here’s a cowboy.

A Dry and Dusty Place

I haven’t written in the blog for a while, largely because my usual writing time has been taken up with reading.  After a year of trying everything under the sun, I stumbled almost by accident on what may be my perfect western.  It is a three book series, and I am closing in on the end of book two.  I am holding off writing about it until I am done reading the series, but in the mean time here’s a hint- it takes place in an exotic wilderness, with the tallest mountains, deepest canyons, and most towering cliffs every seen.

Television’s Best Western: Terra Nova & The Promise of a New Tomorrow

Lately I have been satisfying my western urges via trips to the sci-fi shelf.  Terra Nova, Fox’s flawed by fun time travel series, is the reason why I have strayed from the traditional western shelf.  As I have stated in past posts, I like westerns for the sense of exploring a new, potentially hostile, but also potentially rejuvenating land.  When I read about the trials of the early western explorers there is a sense of mystery in their journey as they ride or raft into terra incognita, the blank spaces on the map.  I know, of course, what is in those places on the map, and what will happen to the people there.  To some extent that prescience of observing from a future state takes away some of the allure of reading or watching these stories.  In science fiction, though, the future is often unknown (presuming you haven’t read spoilers or see the sequels first).  In science fiction that involves far flung colony worlds, you have the same appeal of the western frontier stories without the annoyance of knowing that the site of the story’s climax will one day be home to a Wal-Mart.  

Terra Nova is just this kind of story.  Instead of a far flung colony world, Terra Nova is the location of a city 85 million years in the past, where the good folks of Chicago in the 22^nd century are hurling pilgrims as fast as possible before the Earth becomes uninhabitable because of environmental decay (please recycle and turn off lights when not in the room; also, compost).  Terra Nova is literally sitting on the edge of world, a lonely town / fort tucked away in an inhospitable environment filled with strange wildlife, with contact back home only available in brief patches every six months.  Sounds a bit like the western frontier, doesn’t it?  In the pilot the town even picks up a sheriff, a lawman / political refugee from the 22^nd century’s population control laws, come back in time with his three kids (one over the legal limit) and his doctor wife. 

Mix a frontier town with family drama, eco-politics, and a dash of conspiracy, sprinkle liberally with dinosaurs, and you get Terra Nova.  Much of the story really is a rehash of Avatar, right down to some of the actors.  Avatar itself owes much to westerns, so much that for weeks after seeing it I called the movie “Dances with Wolves 2: Electric Boogaloo”.  Sure, the whole thing is a bit over acted, and the background music is more distracting than anything else, but it is a heck of a ride.  And unlike conventional Westerns, I don’t know what the end of the story is going to be.

Unless it is cancelled, of course.  The show’s costs are exorbitant, and it is only doing mediocre in the ratings.  The 13 episode run ends on Monday, December 12 (i.e. soon if you are reading this right after I post) and it’s still iffy as to whether it will get picked up for another 13 episodes.  Steven Spielberg may be the exec producer, but the show runner is Brandon Bragga.  You know, the guy who crashed 24, FlashForward, and the entire Star Trek television franchise.  Tune in for the season ender while the show is still on; who can say what will happen next?

(Oh, you thought this was about Hell on Wheels?  I just can't get into it.  Hopefully that will be a post for another day.)