Run Through the Jungle
“Jungle”, the word, became somewhat suspect sometime back in the late Eighties when the words “tropical rainforest” seemed destined to replace that old, dark, colonial, savage infested, Tarzanian tract of lovable, nurturing, sustainable ecosystem that is indeed at risk of being clear cut. Jungles should be hacked through; tropical rainforests should be saved. Of course, the vast majority of those who get weepy-eyed about tropical rainforests would soon perish if left stranded in one. And they would rediscover the definition that older word, jungle, pronto.
Jungle is too useful a word to really ever get replaced. It comes from the old Hindi word for forest jangal and from a similar Sanskrit word before that. Jungle is a tactile word that awakens almost atavistic fears of dank, overgrown, insect and snake filled, dampness. It suggests a feverish confusion and profusion of plant, swamp and life. And there most certainly are places like this left on earth, approximately 10% of the planet. They have hardly all been cannibalized for their lumber yet. There are certainly vast tracts of jungle in South America, Africa, the Malay Archipelago, Southeast Asia and other zones still as ferociously wild as they ever have been. This is not to minimize the danger to these zones from reckless despoliation. Nor do I wish to romanticize either.
From The Sky Above the Mud Below - the ultimate jungle documentary
Yes jungle as a word always carries a hint of real danger to it. Even its foreign origin paints it as other. This is especially true to those of European or Northern origin, whose forests are quite different. There are no jungles in Europe. When the European explorer landed in the Caribbean or the central western coast of Africa they were confronted landscapes so utterly alien that they became repositories for many of the darker fears of the explorers and later the traders and colonists. Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness is the literary masterpiece here. Jonestown in Guyana is the reality of the situation. I can imagine that the opposite would be true as well. Had Amazonian tribes discovered the poles these bleak forbidding realms certainly would have likewise played upon their snowless psyches with mythic intensity. And so later the concept of the jungle morphed into a metaphor for our trackless urban confusions back in the concrete territories of Manhattan or Chicago in the early 20th Century. But I want to go back to those primitive rainforests in darkest Africa and beyond, back to the jungle as it plays on our dreams and fears.
A Tribe in New Guinea
First, a confession: I have never been to a jungle. The closest I have ever been is to live on the island of Oahu in Hawaii as a boy for a few years. There are a few junglelike areas there. (Lost was filmed there.) But that Hawaiian island doesn’t have much left that would be construed as jungle. The big island does and was used for several films as a stand in for jungles in other locales. Nor am I itching to go to one. My interest in the jungle is almost purely as a symbol of the imagination. Not that I wouldn’t mind going to any number of jungles, perhaps New Guinea garnering most of my interest. But on a list of personal travel priorities no jungle is near at the top of my list. In other words, I am not obsessed by jungles, (nor tropical places at all for that matter). I don’t have many books on the subject. But I do have a few key pieces of literature, many more films and quite a few ethnographic musical recordings of various tribes from the jungles of the world. In other words I certainly wouldn’t claim to be an expert on the subject. Yet over the years I’ve noticed a curiosity growing towards the subject. Maybe someday jungles may indeed interest me enough to start visiting them. But for now it is the mythic resonance that captivates me.
Never Get Out of the Boat
I am just as fascinated by what we imagine based on our notions of the jungle as I am by what is actually there. The tribe that worships at the ancient gate of the original 1933 King Kong, completely false as a real depiction of tribal life anywhere on earth, nevertheless stands for something quite strange in the interiority of our dream worlds. In one of the few improvements on the original, Peter Jackson’s 2005 vision of this degraded tribe is so striking the film that follows can scarcely bear the weight of the suggestions left behind. His King Kong is interesting, if over the top, and seems to be more about the look in Naomi Watt’s eyes towards her huge cuddly, erratic pet. But the jungle tribe he presents at the beginning is so stark that I wished he’d gone back and told exactly what in tarnation was going on. Or consider Francis Ford Coppola’s tribe of primitive souls at the end of Apocalypse Now: a mixture of Asians, renegade soldiers, aboriginal tribes all having experienced a return of the primitive, of “pagan idolatry”.
Cult Visions from Apocalypse Now 1979
In the late Seventies and early Eighties some of the bleakest films ever made were lensed by strange Italian filmmakers like Ruggero Deodato with titles like Slave of the Cannibal God. In these exploitation films cynical Europeans or “Americans” (always dubbed Italian actors) inevitably find a cannibal tribe who guard secrets of some sort. Then our white emissaries make some genuinely boneheaded moves prompting the natives to track them and “Make them die slowly”. The only way to fight these savages is to ape them. (Pun certainly intended.) And usually no matter where the films are shot (the Philippines, Malaysia, South America) the natives always look exactly the same. Inexorably some living animal is carved open and consumed raw. (I guess you can say these films are not exactly animal friendly.) And there are strange sexual rites. These films would be pretty much worthless if they did not tap in to some darkness in human nature that the filmmakers themselves seem to have fallen prey to in jungle. And by exposing that primordial sin they reveal something within us that is uncovered in the impenetrable realms of the jungle.
The Festering Jungle in Slave of the Cannibal God
That came home to me recently after reading Ingrid Betancourt’s remarkable book, Even Silence Has an End, her account of spending more than six years in the Columbian jungle as hostage of the FARC guerrillas. This is a book I highly recommend as testament to the cruelty of humanity in its proximity to the jungle. She is held along with several others as political bargaining chips. The book practically sweats as you read it. You itch as the bugs crawl through. You fester as the foliage scrapes and bruises your dirty skin. Wounds become infected. Diseases weaken your mind and bowels. The guards, leftist peasants with little hope but the demeaning work of drug runners and slave masters, change before your eyes in the jungle heat from sympathetic to brutal with sad regularity as newer recruits replace them. And the hostages are no saints. Even Ingrid seems tainted by the sweltering stew of petty and venal humanity. The guerrillas keep everyone else ensnared in their own limited views of their situation as a means of dividing and poisoning the minds of the hostages against each other. Escape attempts lead straight into the jungle, into the anaconda filled Amazon tributaries, into a land of killer ants, into inevitable failures. The escapees are then punished. Ingrid Betancourt seemed to spend several years chained with a leather strap around her neck. And every time the Columbian helicopters or soldiers seem to get closer to the makeshift concentration camps the guerrillas pack up would move further and further into the endless green hell. And the rain of the rainforest is no friend.
This is one of the "Proof of Life" photos taken in Ingrid Betancourt During Her SIx Years of Captivity in the Columbian Jungle
But if cruelty, both of nature and humanity, were the only message of the book I would not tell you to hunt it down and read it. But the jungle did something for Ingrid Betancourt similar to what the gulags did for Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. It started the process of redemption and the purification of the heart. Ingrid begins to read the Bible and to find the meaning of faith even as her life, at one point, is draining away. She writes:
“I had made my peace with God. I felt there was a sort of lull in my suffering, because I’d accepted what had happened to me. … Because I had already accepted that I could die. My entire life I had believed I was eternal. My eternity had stopped here, in this rotten hole, and the presence of imminent death filled me with a peace of mind that I savored. I no longer needed anything; there was nothing I desired. My soul was stripped bare. I was no longer afraid…
“Having lost all my freedom and, with it, everything that mattered to me—my children, my mom, my life and my dreams—with my neck chained to a tree—not able to move around, to talk, to eat and to drink, to carry out my most basic bodily needs—subjected to constant humiliation, I still had the most important freedom of all. No one could take it away from me. That was the freedom to choose what kind of person I wanted to be.”
And that gives me hope.
In the darkness of the jungle, and it’s fearful revelations of the human heart, with which Ingrid Betancourt’s story abounds, one can choose: not craven survival, but the courage to be who God meant us to be.
Ingrid Betancourt's Book "Even Silence Has an End" 2010
(There is much more to be said about the jungle and its meanings.)
Byrne Power
Haines, Alaska
2/15/11
Diminishing Into the Twee
I am back working at the local radio station. I’ve been out of the music loop for five years, not that I had no idea what was going on; I just wasn’t fully plugged in. I was off investigating the music that actually engaged my attention; like Eastern European folk punk or baroque dance music. (Hint: Jordi Savall – La Folia!) Not to mention less musical interests like puppetry. And so now I’m taking a crash course in the kind of music that is on someone’s radar for the cutting edge in the present moment.
Carsten Hyatt warned me about this. He said things had gotten fairly spineless amongst the endless musical flotsam and jetsam of his generation, in that young twenties college aged world. My rather lackadaisical musical sonar had been guessing something like this. It had seemed back in ’05 that repetition was the order of the day. He told me he’d gotten fairly tired of the general played out music of various Indie microgenres. I tried to make up for it by passing on to him music that had more substance and passion: Sixties Garage Rock, the neglected oeuvre of Holly Beth Vincent and more recently the late great Russian folk punker Yanka Dyagileva. Then I reinserted myself back into radio work a couple of months ago as Music Director with a backlog of hundreds of CD’s in tubs from the last few years to go through. And what he had been saying struck me with the force of a truckload of hogs sideswiping a beer truck.
Or should I say, with the placidity of a marshmallow feather duster.
Twee! It’s just all so twee, so precious, so limp, so fainthearted, emotionally vague and just out and out wishy-washy. I kind of noticed this from a distance when I would hear certain DJs, intelligent people in their mid-twenties, spinning discs. The music seemed to have no definite emotion, no solid major or minor chords, and lots of smirk, ironic gestures. I chalked it up to the various tastes of the DJs. I went on listening to the Ukrainians, Gogol Bordello, Françoiz Breut, Radúza and the Warsaw Village Band. Astounding stuff was coming through a modified, punkified European sensibility.
The Assembly Line of Pop 'non'-Conformity
And yeah there have been great bands beaming through the American Tower of Internet Babel on occasion: White Stripes was a stand out and now they’re history. The Decemberists aren’t too shabby. In England Imogen Heap has only gone from strength to strength. And, thanks to the likes of Lady Gaga or Die Antwoordt, the dance world seems to be becoming even more artificial and alien, which has it’s own repulsion/fascination as new anti-definitions of humanity are generated like a Twinkies conveyor belt in a post-Britney meltdown world. (Don’t think about that too long.)
Meanwhile the people responsible for being at the cutting edge seem to have disposable plastic forks. As I have sampled album after album, I keep waiting for something to hit me: the Zeitgeist, new forms of rebellion, cries from the heart, good music. Well musically these people can play. Suddenly it’s the 60’s, 70’s. 80’s, 90’s again. A beat might engage me, a nice bass line, the guitar comes in … then comes the vocals. And it’s pretty much over. It all feels so empty to me.
I was debating making a list of the names of the groups I’ve listened to… but why? Why prod folks to waste their time looking for this stuff to see if I’m right in my assessment. Occasionally I’ll hit something that engages me, yesterday it was the Twilight Singers, but even the more popular bands of the day like the Decemberists or the Black Keys have a kind of anemia to them, even at their best.
Maybe it’s because I’ve been listening to Alina Simone or Yanka Dyagileva lately and I get tired of hearing people sing without actual passion after getting a straight injection of the real thing. No wonder Eugene Hutz’ Gogol Bordello is one of the bigger concert draws these days. I don’t agree with the libertine side of his ideas, but I know I could sit down and have a real freewheeling intelligent non-politically correct discussion with him. And he puts his guts out there on the line in his shows. The danger is that he becomes merely a symbol for that sort of thing over time. But so far he’s in no danger of doing so.
A worthy photo of Eugene Hütz pushing the limits by Rafael Sieber.
Meanwhile back in America we have a generation that I believe is afraid to really to think, to believe, to show courage. The history of music in the 20th Century helped bring us to the place. The various musical conflagrations of the last 50 years were truly a kind of war. Music helped to turn peoples perceptions inside out. And in many cultures it is still doing so. The Arabs are discovering rock as one incentive to the new thoughts inspiring pro-Democracy upheavals. Rap music has been adopted by nearly every group that sees itself as oppressed in some manner. But back in the west it all is a burned out zone.
Dissonant and Atonal Classical Music, Modern Jazz, Free Jazz, Rock and Roll, Folk Rock, Psychedelic Rock, Metal, Punk, New Wave, Funk, Rap, Disco, Techno, Electronica, Grunge, Alternative, Goth, Industrial, Noise the list goes on and on: These styles all contain varying degrees of modernist alienation and ironically a cri du coeur against it at the same time.
But after the desperate failure of the Sixties, then later Punk, and the deaths of so many musicians to drugs and despair, culminating in the shattering shotgun blast of Kurt Cobain’s desolation and the commodification of every ounce of rebellious noise imaginable, the reaction in the late 90’s was twofold.
The most obvious late 90’s track was to commercialize the angst of the early part of the decade; see “Alternative”, see Marilyn Manson, who is nothing if not a compendium of underground spite being sold on the largest record company on earth, see Nu-Metal (the style) or Insane Clown Posse (the act).
But the other track is what we call ‘Indie’, which no longer meant something put out independently. Indie became a sort of familial reaction to both commercialization of the early part of the 90’s and reaction to the loud howl of sound and fury signifying nothing much. And so bands in this line turned inward, while retaining certain aspects of the Alternative scene. So bands still played with noise, but now it was washes of spectral sound rather than and all out assault. Some instrumental bands were even dubbed Post-rock: Tortoise is a prime example. The line from Pavement, Guided By Voices, Slint, Neutral Milk Hotel, Palace (Will Oldham), Elliott Smith, Pedro the Lion, Eels, Iron and Wine, Sigur Ros, all vital music, eventually lead to the mood that pervades the music world today. What seemed almost like an elegy for the hopes of the 20th Century has slowly mutated into something that just seems like cowardice and resignation. It has diminished into the twee.
I know that is not the end of the story. But one thing is clear to me. The concept of rock as a force for societal change, for some oft dreamed revolution (Hutz not withstanding), as a spearhead to a new world is dead and buried. The next wave will have to come from another source. And hopefully without the same cargo of ideas that lead us to this destination.
Byrne Power
Haines, Alaska
2/3/11
Non-Random Thoughts