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wild animal proximity
Wednesday, July 7 2004
I started benefitting from Fahrenheit 9/11 well before I actually went to see it. For the past week or so I've been scarfing down every review of the movie I could find. So, while watching the movie, I was well prepared when a mention of Bush missing his National Guard physical (during the Vietnam war) was accompanied by a guitar lick from Eric Clapton's "Cocaine." I'd even told Gretchen about it, so she was prepared too. It's a very clever joke, but evidently it was too subtle to get in the absence of preparation, because only Gretchen and I burst out laughing when that moment came.
The thing I heard about the movie that moved me the most, that actually managed to change a fundamental feeling I had about the world, concerned music. Evidently the tanks and fighting vehicles deployed in Iraq have speaker systems to which troops can hook their stereo equipment. And it's apparently become common for troops to fight battles to music of their choosing. I'd never imagined this aspect of warfare even existed, but why not? So now, having heard this, it's impossible for me to drive around in my truck and not think about how the music I'm enjoying could just as easily be a soundtrack for murder and mayhem. I don't think I'll ever forget the music I enjoyed listening to when I read the Fahrenheit 9/11 review that talked about troops plugging their music into tank soundsystems. It will always be Red Telephone, particularly these three songs: "Pennsylvania," "On the Railroad," and "The Possibility Shop."
Seeing Fahrenheit 9/11, I found the bit about tank sound systems somewhat anticlimactically. The tanks don't actually have speakers; the troops wear headphones and it's possible for them to add secondary audio sources to the communication audio normally piped into those headphones. It's probably a clever hack to a system that was never designed to be the least bit entertaining. I also found their preferred battle music to be anticlimactic. No, it's not the Backstreet Boys doing "Donde Quieras Yo Iré," it's The Bloodhound Gang doing "The Roof is on Fire," a song whose meaning is a lost homunculus buried at the center of an onion's worth of harmlessly ironic layers. You can't even tape "kick me" on the back of the class loser to this music, let alone kill people in a country you've preemptively invaded. But our boys somehow do.
I was in the woods today and saw something tawny and brown behind a tree some 50 feet away. At first I found myself thinking, "Wait, is that Clarence the Cat?" But then I saw that it was a deer and it was looking directly at me. I figured perhaps it was injured and that was why it wasn't running away from me and my still-oblivious dogs. But then I saw it had a little fawn nearby. I predicted they'd just chill out until we passed, but then the baby lost its nerve and started running away. Sally and Eleanor gave chase, but, as always, the deer were far too fast to catch.
In other news, we've set up a hummingbird feeder just outside one of our windows. It's a gift that one of our neighbors gave us at the Red House Party. This afternoon I saw a male hummingbird stop in for a drink, but he only stayed a couple seconds and then vanished. So I opened the window and went to poke the feeder with a stick to see if sugar water could actually be obtained from it. That was when a female hummingbird landed on the feeder only two feet from my face. She was there for four or five seconds, sipping fake nectar while looking directly into my eyes. She was so tiny and had such inconsequential inertia that she could have flitted away and completely disappeared into the sky in the time it would take me to blink my eye. She seemed well aware of the physical limitations of my much greater mass, that anything I could possibly do would come with plenty of warning, and so she didn't seem the least bit concerned. I studied her miniature face and could see every glistening feather. I've never been so close to a completely free, completely wild bird for such a long period of time in my life.
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