keep the wild inside - ABOUT OUR MOTHER: Escaping Urban Traps

Weird Polar Reactions

Fri, 16 Nov 2007 06:28:14 CST

Of all the odd things to have happened during the yearlong presence of BadTV on youtube, perhaps nothing is stranger than the weird responses we got to our vid on drowning polar bears. In the vid our actress Mia Honeymoon starts to tear up as she performs her lines; it's a genuine and heartfelt show of emotion. We love her for it, and that's why we hired her for the part; she feels.

But the comments on the vid turned out to be viciously nasty. People questioning her sincerity, the lines, just hammering at us. Why? Is the concept of polar bears without ice too difficult to swallow? The apologists for global warming come out in force with their defenses of the status quo, and some of the respondents simply don't give a shit for the animal: Let it drown. Even the hunter, even the hummer driver, even the oil user . . . no compassion for a magnificent animal down on its luck? Whew, sometimes the redneck factor in American can give you a serious pause of discouragement.

But we press on, and will have versions of the vid and its lines on Spanish TV and German TV as well as Mandarin TV, so we're not cowed. More resolute than ever!

Amoeba Time: Watch Your Brain

Fri, 28 Sep 2007 23:08:06 CDT

Hard to believe the revolt of the planet against its consuming parasite is not going to end. We're making a hell out of paradise. Just finished reading about the teenager who splashed around this summer in Laka Havasu, only to have amoeba travel up his nose and start eating his brain. He was dead in two weeks, dying in his father's arms. In Lebanon this summer: algae, blooming. Lake Winnebago in September: algae blooming. Everything is too hot, boiling into an accidental poison. Or is it accidental?

The story is here.

Cry for the Drowning Bear

Fri, 12 Jan 2007 23:57:46 CST

In Minneapolis and in Oshkosh and then in the Imperial City over the course of about a week I hear three people lament about polar bears drowning in the Arctic ocean as they look for a floe to stand on. Forget David Beckham and his ex-Spice mate and their attendance at the ultra-weird Cruise-Holmes wedding; the people I know are outraged about these beautiful animals swimming to death looking for a place to land. The image is a stark one. I cannot help thinking about it as i take pix of two polar bears at the Como Park Zoo; a sister and a brother, with the brother repeatedly, insanely, surfacing, dancing and falling back into his grimy hole while his sis paces in a small well and looks up at him as if he's another planet. the animals are crazy. And now they're sinking below the waves with a bellyful of saltwater. This is the world I live in? My mother, meanwhile, thinks the weather is just fine in the Twin Cities; she cashed a quarterly dividend check from Exxon for two thousand seven hundred dollars, and I have to write her to warn her that I will burn that money if she puts any of it in my name. Not a penny, Mom.

Bye Bye Goddess of the Yangtze

Sun, 17 Dec 2006 03:32:41 CST

On December 13, 2006, three days ago, the Chinese government declared the Chinese River Dolphin to be extinct. The first marine mammal to be closed out of existence by humans. Too many boats, too many fishing nets, too much human excrement floating down the Yangtze River. And this particular dolphin is a pretty animal, with a bulbous head and piercing snout. It's not just another dolphin with similar lines to other subspecies. This animal is its own thing. Captured several times, each prisoner died fairly quickly. I wonder what the last few specimens were thinking, as they coursed the murky river looking for partners? When was the last baby born?

Pretty Monsters Threaten Civilization

Fri, 17 Nov 2006 09:47:34 CST

How long can television suck?

What are the cable execs thinking as they watch the Internet explode with terrible and tiny morsels of programming to which millions flock? Isn't youtube exactly what cable TV should be? By floating along with the sitcom bloat, the networks are lurching to their graves; 700 people got canned by NBC a few weeks ago, and more dismissals are coming.

So why do I fly toward TV, a moth flirting with oblivion?

Pretty Monster, my ecocide video, briefly touched on hit status on youtube last weekend, and the story and format are suddenly so current, even if the piece was designed for a 42-inch LCD screen, and not the 320x240 scratchy QT display on your computer. (UPDATE: Pretty Monster was banned from Utoob because of the nudity it contained. We will send you a copy if you send us an address -- check out the link.)

But I'd be happy to have you check it out even on such a puny stage!

The image above links to the superfabulous Jonelle Vette, who as Johnnie Venus will show her talented self as BadTV's Nashville correspondent.

Screenplay Sickness Kills Hollywood; Vaccine Announced

Tue, 31 Oct 2006 02:08:24 CST

You come out here to build cabinets, and you end up writing a screenplay. Car salesmen, busboys, hairdressers, parking valets, pretty people, all of them writig screenplays. Even in Indiana and Arkansas everyone is writing a screenplay. They are easy to write. The people who read them are practically illiterate, and the formatting of a screenplay would get you censored in your third-grade English class. It is a sickness. And I cannot simply drive out toward Nevada to escape the insanity: two million screenplays looking for a home, and 28 sold last month in Hollywood.

So the time is ripe to hatch a plan. BadTV. Simmering for almost a decade, the shows could be a channel, self-surfing 24/7, offering nothing but relief from all the other shit on TV. Nudity, a sort of dreamcatcher for fratboys, and science, a salve for eco-yuppies, mixed just right in bite-size pieces to knock out the commercials for acid gas reflux relief and erectile dysfunction in the mainstream, which you have just abandoned to come here.

BadTV is almost open. If you're on our mailing lists, you'll get all of our episodes, forever, free.

Click here to go to BadTV.

Howls in a Canopy

Tue, 24 Oct 2006 04:46:35 CDT

She nods toward the branches above, and a single howler growls back. Blue realizes the monkeys are waiting for her to speak. They are her audience here in the jungle, among the ruined Mayan gods, stone faces long with the loss of entire civilizations, of intricate literatures of dreaming and despair. Charlie feels the moment electric on her skin, and Blue sees her stroke her arms with her fingertips, another gentle reminder to herself that she is living and breathing. She speaks softly to the howler above her who has growled:

"I wonder about the power of love. Can a kiss echo beyond the clouds, behind the sky, past Mars and Saturn, to the skin of existence, to the edge of being, where the first heat still travels away from the beginning of everything? Can the memory of such a kiss touch a faraway heart the way a star twinkles in the sky? Who can kiss me like this?"

Blue keeps the camera on her face, but cannot bring himself to look into her eyes. This is a new person, a new being he has not met before. He stays silent.

"The lips I need," whispers Charlie, and Blue gets closer to catch her faint words, "The lips I need must come with eyes in which I can see the whole universe, and I must see these eyes no matter where I look in the world, and these eyes, everywhere, will beg me for a kiss."

Charlie jumps to her feet, and the monkeys are startled. The howls, furious, begin. Charlie shouts at the leaves, at the faces hidden behind them. She has ambushed the howlers and they scream at her in protest at her trick. Where is the rest of her sermon on love? Why this attack?

"Who begs me for a kiss!" screams Charlie.

Autistic Intentions on the Edge of My Desert

Thu, 24 Aug 2006 02:55:58 CDT

I am going to the flatlands of Oregon, to Bend, to shoot a movie. I write the director the following note when she writes to ask me about the creative process and how conscious one is of "building" a piece rather than simply allowing it to come to life on its own. It is a funny question, since it comes in the midst of two weeks of solid writing, none of which is "built." I feel rather autistic, scrambling for structure, and I write the director with my cautious advice:

"A movie such as the piece you are making seems to be very self-analytical, unless you try hard to make your story and images represent a reality (or a fantasy) in which other people are invited to participate. What makes this a difficult proposition is that it takes incredible concentration to distill your impulses into something comprehensible to other people.

"How many people will "understand" your movie? I doubt very many! But how many people might "appreciate" your movie? Quite a few, I think, especially people trying to formulate their own aesthetic identity. Certainly a lot of your viewers will appreciate this attempt, and will thus give you the courage and enthusiasm to make another movie, and then another movie or artwork, until the autistic urge you feel for self-expression sounds like the simplest concept possible to utter strangers. But you can't expect to be an autistic Yeats! The process of emergence is critical. You can document your own emergence, or you can objectify the process impersonally. I think art happens when strangers recognize something about themselves in your struggle. If a stranger sees nothing in your effort or is not moved by it, then it’s safe to say your piece is an autistic scribble: What you would like to express cannot be translated.

"I wouldn’t think about your movie any more. Neither about your intentions nor about the technical process. Let the movie define you and not the other way around. This is a great reward for trying to be an author of anything."

To read something from Blue's "two weeks of solid writing", click here.

Huxley's Orbit Loses Its Pull

Thu, 10 Aug 2006 03:35:42 CDT

The airplane screeches all of 50 feet down the runway before it stops. The Captain tells us we need to wait for a minute or two. For what? We take off and I swear I'll never get on another one of these metal coffins again. In the galley by the toilets I see a fishbowl view of the scars lacing New Mexico. Red, orange, white, tantalizing. I am in the fishbowl, trapped and limited, looking out. Escape is there beneath me. I must leave the Angels, get out there with the coyotes.

I write my sonic pal in Santa Fe, and propose a project in an absurd way. And then I research milk and how wicked it is to drink, and remember that I promised myself to set up this Ecocide link, to balance all the prettiness of the world with the sobering ruin brought by our needs for creature comfort.

My quilt in Lalaland is delicious. We are 65 degrees at night, while the rest of the country bakes in a shockwave. The desert is cooling me as well as calling me. How can I live with this tear of my mind: comfort for the skin and tongue, at the cost of what pain for whose soul and bones? I have to get closer to natural phenomena. Cactus collections in Laurel Canyon do not cut it. Taos continues its tug, unseen. I am already a hermit among angels. Can I possibly withdraw more?

Building Jungles

Fri, 28 Jul 2006 19:36:41 CDT

I can sell a property on January 1st next year and not have to pay any taxes on the profit, and this windfall would mean Borneo, a return to the Kalahari, and possibly my long-threatened move out of Lalalandia to Taos and the drought. I am stuck waiting for a movie executive's schedule to clear in Manhattan, and then I can fly back to the coast and grapple my destiny. So I do what I always do when Forward looms, and that's to look back. What is this piece, tucked away in my journals?

"She’s got wings, huge gossamer dreams designed to lift her into the sky, and she’s got a dragon’s mouth, each tooth a cool story and a tongue full of imagination; what is she going to say? She does an agonizing dance, and I see her foot is caught and scratched. Her wings beat against the trees and bushes, and I watch her, fascinated, because I know she wants to break free to play, the way her body is designed to and the way her limbs try to deny gravity and the cozy comforts of a flat Earth."

Hmm. The winds push me, magnets pull me. Taos. The Arctic. And now the Amazon. Of course the Amazon, as my niece sends me this picture from outside Manaus:

Sandie Black shakes her head at every destination, but nods when I say the Amazon. Nicole told me to buy a piece of land in Alter do Chao if I still felt the need to exercise my yuppie disease, and perhaps I should explore this little town outside Santarem.

Now?

see the preview pictures from the Amazon gallery