Info update on...
EDWARD ABBY from WTS
Mr. Abby still influences the USA based environmental movements as a solid foundation to inspire other activists in the field. Now these days his actions have been reduced to faint ripples on the public consciousness since his death. Those that hold his ideals have picked him his torch effectively giving his memory, however changed into more a general "Save the earth" without smaller specific ideals like very small family sizes. Which is probably better off for his memory and the political movement he is now the "Patron saint" of sorts of.
Monday, December 7, 2015
Sunday, December 6, 2015
ZACK PASCAL
ENG220-036 MEMOIR
ASSIGNMENT
source MorgueFile.com http://mrg.bz/BwVDTJ
Nature’s
Vendetta
Back in yesteryear of 1991, March 10, I was the first
born to my parents, born into the Clark Air Base hospital in the Philippines.
The grand achievement of technology allowing my birth in the evening to be sent
across the sea, and over the nebulous day line, this allowed my grandparents to
brag at Church that I was born THIS evening THAT morning. But little did my
family know the very earth beneath our feet sought our destruction.
The first of nature’s campaign to strike out at me was
swift on geological terms, through March of 1991 into early June magma rose
towards the surface from inside Mount Pinatubo eventually causing three steam
craters on the north flank of the volcano to be blown out sending great volumes
of Sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere. This took place far from the base but
all in one terrifying go…The world shook and the people of the Philippines
watched the end of the world happen as everything they lived for was blanketed
in suffocating ash for the next 24 hours, black rain flowed through the
pyroclastic and rang with thunder. The stone and fire coated the Philippines.
When the sun finally graced the sundered earth it was coated
in 2 feet of ejecta or what normal people call rocks and ash. This prevented
all local services from functioning until the roads themselves were cleared. It
was like if nature couldn’t kill me outright, it would starve me and the locals
through infrastructure damage. With the first of nature’s attempts to take my
life over my mother took me to the U.S Naval Base Subic Bay to take part in Operation Fiery Vigil which was clearly
created to save me specifically from Mt. Pinatubo’s onslaught. Well that and 15,000 others of course. We were
sent off on on the USS Mirrill, because the USS Abraham Lincoln which was a
destroyer class ship. The boat was filled with pregnant women and children less
than a year old.
The young navy sailors suffered by sleeping at their
stations as evacuated mothers and their children used their cramped but
comparatively welcoming bunks for two days. The volcano wasn’t done and
response to my successful escape let loose and damaged the US navy base so much
that the USA didn’t reinstate the lease they had with the Philippine
government. Me and my mother escaped from the looming shadow from the volcanic
ash by stopping in Guam and being taken to Hawaii over the international date
line leaving my mom without proper account of what happened there beyond a huge
transport plane called a STAR LIFTER which is pretty cool by name alone.
I have survived the most powerful of nature’s tools of
destruction what was left to try and destroy me? Well true to form that was
about the most dangerous nature could attempt to do to me. Nature started with
a huge bang and seemingly couldn’t follow up the grand military operation to
extract specifically me and fifteen
thousand others. It took three months before my father was able to return and
be with me and my mother.
Now though? Years later there have been a few clear
attempts on my life I just know it. The most insidious was the horses… In the
small clearly representative sample of
horses I have ridden all about 5, 2 have decided to sit down while I was on
them, quickly after I was given a new horse to ride instead of being done.
Though the 8 year old example of this event was probably close to a properly panicked
child I would have ever personally have been.
More recent accurate things I can say have all happened
while I have lived here, in New Mexico. Nature’s tactics just have become more
attrition based. Slowly our house is whittled down with hail and washed away
with water run off that shouldn’t be happening. I have seen fire on the horizon
with proper worries about maybe evacuating. And the slow and miserable allergy
seasons that make me miserable even if it’s nowhere near lethal.
The only active attempt in my teenaged years was mostly a
bloodletting event, simple addition brings this grave event to light, I was
riding my bike, plus going too fast, plus transitioning from pavement to
gravel, and going downhill. I was left scared from the event…I mean literally I
have a pretty nasty looking scar on my hip from where I got torn up the most
from the fall. Seeing my own blood simply doesn’t faze me but seeing flesh torn
is entirely new to a person who is frequented by nose bleeds in their youth
During this last July I traveled with my mother and two
siblings still living at home we went to witness and celebrate my brother and
new brother in law in their marriage. This took place way in Minnesota and we
drove there suffering the two days drive. The last leg of the drive I was in
the driving seat and we saw this huge cloud front on the horizon for the last 2
hours. We constantly watched the leading edge of the storm looking for funnel
clouds as our phones constantly gave us storm warnings. The storm poured hard
enough that it flooded the roads and sent rain steeper than 45 degrees, great
golf ball sized hail threatened the windshield and my siblings panicked.
Thinking quickly we found refuge under the edge of a gravel transport truck.
Due to the angle of the hail the truck completely protected us. We waited for
the storm to pass and then carried on with the storm exhausted it was safe to
continue. Clearly this exhausted nature’s attempts to take me out once more,
but nature had one more trick to try and pull. On the way back still on the
first day of the drive it was twilight and I was constantly watching the edges
of the sprawling farm land and then I saw a deer. It was running parallel to
us. I calmly declared “Deer, right side.” When it suddenly gained a death wish
and darted in front of us. Thanks to my warning we managed to evade slaying the
deer or and vehicle damage. We only had to use the actually good breaks of the
car to give everyone in the vehicle a good stressful shock of the day to not
kill the deer. The rest of the trip home was very uneventful.
Nature despite its clear anti-social tendencies at trying
to take make me isolationist. It won’t be nature doing it, it’ll be other
people, and none of this nature stuff makes me panic as much as poor drivers.
Signal lights, headlights simply not being used, or people drifting into my
lane. I have had drivers syncing their movement while hanging out in my blind
spot even when I deliberately shift speed to shove them out. The worse though
that genuinely makes me worry are people changing lanes without checking blind
spots which I deliberately try to stay out of.
However even if I’ll never be fearful of nature it’s done
its best with what it has left. After such a great opening act it is a bit
disappointing the attempts now a days. A week ago it was a non-poisonous snake
poised to startle me more than anything when it bolted away from me near the
front door of home. It couldn’t have done more than startle me into tripping or
something of that nature. But literally today nature one for clear originality
tried the storm angle again and did indeed make me miserable. There is that
point when water over saturates the pant legs and start to flow into your shoes
that you just know you are in for a bad time.
Now a days I respect nature but I fear it not. First on
my birth on volcanic lands I now live among the dormant tombs of metamorphic
stones secure in the idea that it cannot do me in…But that guy without
headlights behind me while it was very much dark at night on the freeway?! That…That stuff is nuts.
Research Paper! About Cow farts or something
Zack Pascal
Ana June
ENG 220-036
11/5/2015
source : Morgue file http://mrg.bz/kwyrDZ
MEAT INDUSTRY IMPACTS OF FARTS AND INDUSTRY
Livestock
is massive industry which greatly impacts the USA in behaviors, expectations
and more far reaching effects. I have the impression of the, ever expanding,
food industry growing in unsustainable direction which focuses far too much on
livestock production. So this paper introduces economic concepts of good types,
how big the livestock market is, what livestock does to people in the USA and
external impacts, and what good alternatives exist to livestock in the food
industry.
2.
Market Concepts
A
few relevant economics terms need to be mentioned and explained for this paper,
they are all very straight forward so don’t panic. The first term is market; this can be as broad or
specific as needed. In this case the market
includes every food item available for purchase. Looking at the food market in this way allows us to get a
grand overall perspective of what types of foods are purchased.
The
next concept is frequently presented as three terms, they are: inferior good, normal good and luxury good. These are immediately
straight forward concepts. Inferior good
is, with in this context, a food you buy when objectively short on money. This
is your grains and rice, the super basic food stuffs that would be considered
bland by its self, but it beats starving. However the food market is a
non-disposable good, you cannot simply stop eating when you can’t afford it,
instead shifting to extremes of the cheapest possible food.
Normal goods,
are the majority bulk of products in existence. When a person has more money
the growth these foods are very directly predictable. More money means more normal goods are purchased, however in
the case of food products saturation is a real thing that prevent infinite
scaling without pre-set assumptions beyond this paper.
Luxury goods
are products are purely unneeded to get by. In the case of the food market luxury goods are your prime steaks,
wines and, yes, organic food. Luxury
goods grow at a very slow rate in comparison to normal goods, and typically
do not co-exist with inferior goods outside of extreme cases of opportunity
cost.
Opportunity cost
is a bread and butter basic of economic concept, which can be reduced to a
“This or That” type description, but is not used in a “This, AND that”, the allowance for more is
normally a function of time or money, and the act of picking is which someone
rather have over another good. This can be changed by seemly any number of
external forces, so for example “I have had too many burgers lately” could be a
food market relevant factor into its self. These self-examinations of worth of
goods exists in a permament state of what was given up.
And
to round this out because this is relevant for the end of the paper, substitute goods in this case are foods
that can be immediately replaced with no loss of benefit so the choice boils
down to what is cheaper.
3.
Perspective of meat as a good
Fairly straight forward
livestock have economically been a luxury
good even in barter systems. Intuitively meat takes more resources than
plants grown to feed them. The reason why livestock and herd based shepherds
used animals is because they would allow them to use more resources of the
land. As far as herbs went, grasses were otherwise impossible for humans to
digest without the livestock as a medium. Back before the great cultivation of
land this livestock eating feed and pasture the owners could not themselves
digest. Now with the extreme modernization and efficiency of farms it’s much
easier to create farms specifically with food that can be, without another
consumer to turn it to meat, be consumed. Instead meat presents more clearly
inefficient uses of farm land which is exemplified NPR’s illustration of the
resources used to make a 1/4th pound of ham burger: 6.7 pounds of
grain and forage, 52.8 water for the cattle and crops, 74.5 square feet of
simple land for grazing and 1036 Btus for all the industry in that space, which
is far harder to relate.
4.
How large is the Meat Market
Now
that we have some basic concepts laid out it’ll be much easier to lay out how
huge the market is. Even with the previously held impressions, the real world
statistics are interesting. Let us start with the most fowl of industries, boiler
chicken. Boiler chicken refers specifically to chickens bred to mature
extremely quickly in 6 weeks to then be immediately slaughtered. The current projected
by the USDA consumption rate of boiler chickens is a staggering 88.8 pounds per
person in the USA. This statistic is year 2015. Likewise the USDA projected
statistic for total red meat in the USA in 105.2 pounds per person in 2015. The
USA’s total projected meat in pounds per person including red meat, all birds;
Turky, non-boiler chickens, at 210.8 pounds of meat which when put on yearly
scale is slightly less than two thirds of a pound every day, which is straight
up staggering. Given the common stat of 318.9 million people in the USA, as of
2014, results in a hard to grasp value of 6.706467e10 which pulled out of
scientific notation is 67,064,670,000 pounds of meat. Thankfully per capita
statistics are far easier to grasp.
Using
strictly per capita data between nations the USA is still the consumer leader but
with a couple nations biting the USA’s heels in this market. The following top
5 is from data 2009 : 120.2 Kg, USA. 119.2 kg, Kuwait. 111.5 kg, Australia.
109.5 kg, Bahamas. And Luxembourg at 107.9 kg.
Just from this data set at least we can take from this that the USA
isn’t the only country that loves its meat. Kuwait’s consumption makes a great
deal of sense from a luxury good perspective being an extremely wealthy small
nation on the Middle Eastern oil market.
5.
What has happened to the goods type of
meat?
Unfortunately
instead of becoming a luxury good
meat strangely, if we look at fast food, became an inferior good. This is representative of the difficulty to get
decent food that doesn’t depend on a meat patty from the fast food market. For
the USA it is fairly difficult to get good food without meat in it ready made.
6.
What is the Opportunity Cost of this huge livestock market?
The
meat market consumes a huge amount of resources that could instead be spent on
less feed and more grains fit for human consumption. To pretend that grain
doesn’t have its own cost of production is naïve but it’s immediately apparent
that directly grown for food is clear. Eating first consumers; herbivores, is
always at fraction of the nutritional value of the input feed. The larger
livestock the worse this ratio is that could instead be spent directly on
people.
7.
What does having so much livestock do to the earth?
“Globally, over 60% of total CH4 emissions
come from human activities. [1] Methane is emitted from industry, agriculture,
and waste management activities…”(EPA para. 2)
Right
now livestock contributes a significant of methane to atmosphere which the EPA
or Environmental Protection Agency tracks. While on the provided scale graphic,
Manure Management is 10% of the methane contribution to the atmosphere. While
manure is the one of the lesser methane producers it is only this huge because
of the 67 billion pounds of meat that the USA consumes. Currently with the huge
feed lots that we maintain as a nation, they are a potential breeding ground
for horrible company scale destroying disease so they are flooded with a
terrifying amount of antibiotics. This is a greater issue than the greenhouse
gases, a non-necessary use antibiotic is to prop up an overly large market that
both wastes resources and indirectly enables sickness to strengthen and
possibly kill human beings. The alleged need of antibiotics of feed lots is
only out of the sheer density of the animals kept there. This density wouldn’t
be needed if the meat market in the USA was much smaller and treated like the
luxury meat should be.
The EPA states that:
“Methane (CH4)
emissions in the United States decreased by almost 15% between 1990 and 2013.
During this time period, emissions increased from sources associated with
agricultural activities, while emissions decreased from sources associated with
the exploration and production of natural gas and petroleum products.”(EPA para
8.)
Which means that literally cow poop is the only
thing not improving as far as methane emissions go. Which is a real problem even though it’s hard
to take the idea that poop contributing such a global system as global warming
seriously. However with solid data like “Pound for pound, the comparative
impact of CH4 on
climate change is more than 25 times greater than CO2 over a 100-year period.”(EPA para 1),
it becomes extremely hard to ignore.
8.
What could we do with the replaced crops with
food stuffs instead of livestock feed?
Straight
up feed people. There is so much farm land put into relatively wasteful food
supplies of livestock. There is really no sugar coating this.
This is not to say one hundred percent outmode every bit
of livestock in the country but a healthy reduction of 50 pounds per person
probably would enrich our cultural pallet and maybe force fast food restaurants
to have better tasting bulk products to sell, instead of just more burgers.
Currently the future replacements to that protein, which
will turn the stomachs of a few, are bugs. Crickets present an amazing amount
of protein for investment of resources. Now granted we would have to get over
the food taboo that is eating bugs. Crickets with a helping of legitimate
effort allows crunchy protein filled food that has none of the issues of huge
giant livestock lots and antibiotic issues. Bugs like crickets could be cared
for on site without really any resource drain. They provide a mixture of
texture and indeed the protein that would be lost on giving up other meats.
Despite the positives presented the taboo attached to the cricket and other
bugs is difficult to throw off, not that we are not trying right now. Kate
Taylor presents in an article that
“As food makers seek to make insects the
new "it" food, their biggest hurdle won't be publicity or production;
it will be convincing consumers that eating bugs is something they want to do. And while unraveling
age-old perceptions about bugs is no easy feat, the process has already
begun.”(Taylor, pars. 5)
This article goes into great depth in the subject
outlining the whole America eating bugs situation.
The article goes on to outline a large number of vectors to attempt to get the
USA to consume crickets, however some of them do undermine the mainstream goal
that would subsume the greater livestock market. But it still could be
functional displaying them as special exotic food to get them started on the
road to main stream as stated again by the articles author.
“Insects don't have to appeal to everyone
just yet. They just need to appeal to a certain section of the population that
values adventure and worldliness, eager to try new things. Fortunately for
bug-lovers, that proportion of the population is present and growing. “(Taylor,
pars 20)
Immediate
replacement of any market simply isn’t a possibility in the USA. Hopefully it
will be seen for what it is and supplement all levels of the American diet.
9.
Conclusion
The research provided is not frequently put in this
context, even though this perspective is most definitely needed. The overall
trend of meat becoming an inferior good is disastrous in economies, yet this
only appears to be properly a thing in the USA. Each element contributing to a
problem that puts the entire world at risk of added methane and anti-biotic
resistant sicknesses.
Solutions are not painless, but it almost completely
leans on the change of diet which while sounding simple is ultimately extremely
hard to shift and influence. But if desirable replacements could be placed into
the average person’s mind in this nation and that bulk food retailers would
sell them I am confident there would be a general flow away from so many meat
products. At the very least having more options to diversify from the seemingly
one dimensional market of the meat patty would relieve stress from the
atmosphere and the arms race medicine plays with anti-biotic resistant
sickness.
And maybe we will be met with the chirps of crickets in
kitchens rather than that of apathy. With expectations met with some exceeding
hard to grasp numbers, such as 67 billion pounds of meat consumed in the USA. While
I like my beef patties the extremes of this market reality is staggering. To
improve this situation is to turn a glacier but ultimately it is doable.
CITATIONS
1.
"Per Capita Consumption of Poultry and Livestock, 1965
to Estimated 2016, in Pounds - The National Chicken Council." The National Chicken Council.
USDA, 10 July 2015. Web. 4 Nov. 2015.
2.
"Per Capita Consumption of Poultry and Livestock, 1965
to Estimated 2016, in Pounds - The National Chicken Council." The National Chicken Council.
USDA, 10 July 2015. Web. 4 Nov. 2015.
http://www.nationalchickencouncil.org/about-the-industry/statistics/per-capita-consumption-of-poultry-and-livestock-1965-to-estimated-2012-in-pounds/
(actual cited websight link)
3.
"Per Capita Consumption of Poultry and Livestock, 1965
to Estimated 2016, in Pounds - The National Chicken Council." The National Chicken Council.
USDA, 10 July 2015. Web. 4 Nov. 2015.
http://chartsbin.com/view/12730
http://chartsbin.com/view/12730
4.
"Overview of Greenhouse Gases." Methane Emissions. EPA. Web. 5
Nov. 2015.
5.
Davis, John. "Environmental Scientists Find
Antibiotics, Bacteria, Resistance Genes in Feedlot Dust." Environmental Scientists Find
Antibiotics, Bacteria, Resistance Genes in Feedlot Dust. Texas Tech
University, 22 Jan. 2015. Web. 5 Nov. 2015.
6.
Taylor, Kate. “How Food
Makers Are Convincing America to Eat Bugs” Entrepreneur, Oct. 8. 2014 : Web
November 5, 2015
Reflection
Alright because I don’t see instructions
on what form beyond formatting on the reflection I need to do, such as separate
file or not, but from what I can tell it’s supposed to be within the same
document? So that is my guess and I am totally going with it.
I chose this subject because I knew
enough of economic theory to outline some of the underlining concepts with
personal knowledge. For the longest time I have been aware of the over
industrialization of livestock to clearly sustained by artificial processes
that would immediately die out if catastrophe happened in the area.
I sectioned stuff off with bulleted
points to make it a little bit easier to follow, as I have trouble with longer
papers like this, because I literally think I run out of things to say. I
always tell people I like my brevity in my writing, for good writing makes the
complex understandable rather than making the simple impenetrable.
I very straight forwardly bring up these
concepts, though I do feel like I dropped some of the train of thought.
Unfortunately I can only take the blame for the rushed time table that this
paper took, getting written effectively in four days between other obligations
that either was met or fell through.
Not too much pathos was invoked on the
grounds that topic at hand is not a problem of opinion; it is a problem that is
a matter of fact. Pathos is more of a tool of subjective or political stances.
Though I do admit I had to do the terrible pun about the boil chicken industry,
but I am not sure if that counts as pathos. Rather than invoking the rhetoric
to get people to do things, I rather press direct awareness with a fairly fast
paced paper, instead of hanging on one topic for ages.
I also found out that it’s harder than
you’d expect to be able to pull some statistics out of google.
Hmm…yeah… I don’t have too much more to
put here. I am happy with what I managed to do but I know it’s not the best
paper but I wouldn’t feel bad presenting it to people.
"The Road" Review
Zack
Pascal
Ana
June
ENG-220-036
11/19/2015
LINKED MATERIAL http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000OI0G1Q/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?ie=UTF8&btkr=1
The Road Review
“The Road” by
Cormac McCarthy is a well-known novel which is known at a mainstream level as a
post-apocalypse setting in which a story of survival takes place. Before
reading the book I had the nebulous impression from the main stream that it was
an extremely depressing doom and gloom type story. Instead this novel was far
more defiant survival story, which was full of depressing doom and gloom.
The raw summery of the book is fairly simple. Father
and son travel through a looted and rotting world for the smallest embers of
hope of hidden stores of supplies, heading south seeking warmer weather and
maybe a real solution to their situation. This post-apocalypse has your
mainstays of the setting type, your cannibals and burnt hell scape of a world.
Less common but associated concepts for the cynical side of the setting is
starving and dis-empowerment. Now the freezing due to weather is honestly the
first instance that I have experienced in a post-apocalypse setting type, most
authors default to the desert wasteland style. Throughout the book the reader
is presented scenes of desperation brought by starvation and apparent finality
of the suffocating dark. Punctuated with bone soaking rain and frozen ash
covered landscapes. Between these scenes are small moments of respite, the
highs on these extreme lows, if it wasn’t for these moments the book would be
straight up unpalatable.
The
story is indeed fairly positive as a written work. But a few elements were lost
on first reading. These elements were: Time frame, Setting visibility, and some
not as critical but mostly strange until you learn how the author writes:
Dialog. The time frame presented in the book is totally nebulous which I know
is intentional but many elements simply couldn’t work without at least some
time set aside for these elements to take place. Namely time wise it is the
duration into the current apocalypse and the age of the child, with the
descriptions of the father giving up on keeping a calendar and the child being
old enough to read and speak well but having no knowledge of the pre-apocalypse
would maybe place the child at age 6 at most which makes some of the imagery
hard to take with mechanical erosion (Expanding ice) type damage hard to ignore
as being the main entropic force in the area. Unless the case was that the area
was normally significantly warmer so that the extremes of weather presented is
very new which is not well presented beyond winters getting harsher early in
the book as why they were traveling south. The other issue I had was as a
reader I was unable to get a decent sense of overall visibility which was
presented only a couple times, very clearly the sky is life strangling overcast
and persistent but horizontal visibility is only presented as a part of the
landscape as limited in the last forth of the book which leaves the landscape
under presented until that point. And finally the author doesn’t use quotation
marks for dialog, this is surprisingly off putting and took me out of the book,
however in best case this pulls the reader farther away from the story to an
observer position…but this could just be me making up a reason.
As
far as environmental messages go, there isn’t much there beyond a tapestry
presented as what person would do to survive within the apocalyptic wasteland
where society wanes in the wake of the presumably nuclear sun which graced the
land.
The
audience I would recommend it towards would be writers wanting to present a
doom and gloom setting. However the book was probably intended towards the
general populace to ward off the appeal of the nuke as a weapon, otherwise the
story is extremely agnostic to the cause effects and why I would instead tell
contemporaries about how to present a landscape.
The
Road is not a flawless book. This book is sometimes janky in its presentation
of interaction of characters to the world but creates impressive scenery and
feel of the world. This book leads me to recommend the book to other writers
interested in improving their landscape writing. Otherwise I jokingly boil this
book down to this grossly inaccurate phrase “The Road is like the later Mad Max
films except less people and car chasing, but far more starving and freezing to
death.” This is mostly joking but after this over all depressing book I’ll be
taking a couple more scraps of positivity I can reach for.
Entertaining the concept of ART
Is Nature Art. Is life and death Art?
Simple answer…no.
Medium answer…It can be pretty but art is typically designed
or assigned. As such…
the expression or
application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form
such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for
their beauty or emotional power.
"the
art of the Renaissance"
(Copied from the “Define Art” result on google.)
LONG ANSWER…
Art is a social construct. As such
anything can be ASSIGNED as art by anyone.
This is not to say Nature, Life or
death cannot be aesthetically pleasing, but this is not the same as “ART”. What
becomes art is completely up to the people around it who call it art.
And this is simply fine art instead
of applied arts.
Fine art is a strange field.
Obsessed with message or meaning until it is buried under so much symbolism
that it is lost, or even worse the artist stops trying to improve and nothing
original comes from it anymore. Right now it is a running joke that Banksy, the
graffiti artist is saying the same thing forever in less and less interesting
ways. The more focused fine artists don’t bury their message and can actually
get things across, however the time of the “Fine artist” is a bit gone and
past. It also feels like fine art praises “Classical” works.
Applied arts, is far more
interested in how to create impact
desired. What does each color incite? How do shapes and composition change
things? Jagged vs smooth, and so on. Tone and tempo effects everything. Within
the strange duality of Fine arts and Applied arts, applied arts…applies way
more to fine art than the other way around, especially if trying to make a
living off it is important.
Thus presentations of life, death
and nature when presented as art is art, but not automatically.
Not 100% sure I stayed on topic.
Freewrite on Koyaanisqatsi
The Film Koyaanisqatsi is…
I also totally guessed 80s from
music type and video quality. Take THAT films from before my birth!
Having
heard that the film makers wanted the viewers to “Come to their own conclusion”
is disgustingly disingenuous of where ever it originated from. Creation of a
voice of opinion within an art piece is constructed of the elements presented
of theme and story. Especially with the ending quote which is very clearly
designed to shape what the viewer feels. Something what Koyaanisqatsi actually
directly means about crying out for change…after showing all of humanity as the
subject matter to that.
I am
personally interested in applied arts, art to an intended effect. To
intentionally invoke the result from the elements of the medium in use. As a
film without named characters the subjects BECOME the characters, this being
“EARTH” and “HUMANITY”. Pretty much all shots related to humanity in the first
3/4ths of the movie leave very little in personal space to “Decide myself”
instead showing humanity and uncaring and very “Flash in the pan” in
presentation. While the EARTH is presented as strong and immortal.
I am
100% up for showing the earth is relatively ageless but the presentation used
felt incredibly one sided against humanity. Leaving it very Ludite in tone.
Other observations…
The could only get one factory to let them in to film, a
meat packing place which was stupid distracting to me because I kept seeing it
and going “And we are back!” when there was about 5 scenes with the factory?
Granted to call them scenes would be disingenuous as if I am
implying that the film as anywhere near a typical story structure. Which is
both to it’s “Artsy Fartsy” benefit and detriment.
I guess what I am trying to say, Art films without clear
direction or pacing just make me get disinterested.
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