The Green Rush

night plane - blue I feel (when I'm feeling down)

After the Gold Rush, the Green Rush

In honor of Avatar's profound hues of true blue, here's a little night plane jam, its vocals clipped from a certain lost soul gem by the three degrees. You'll find it as well in the midst of my latest mix, "signs in the sky."

But although Cameron's epic may be steeped in blue, were you to puncture its gargantuan heart, green would be the color on your hands. Green, the color of cash in North America, and the color used as cultural short-hand for anything deemed remotely environmentally-conscious, is a fitting color to apply to Avatar, which will certainly see plenty of dollars as it disseminates its utopian eco-fairy tale.

While the value of Avatar may seem to lie largely in its contribution to digital cinema production, and not in its relatively heavy-handed narrative, there is actually a subtle plot point in the depiction of the indigenous Na'vi tribe. It's not a movie about technology versus nature, it's a movie about low-tech vs. high tech. And guess what? It's actually the stone-arrow firing Na'vi who are the high-tech team, not the missile-launching humans. Dr. Grace Augustine, played by Sigourney Weaver, points out that the planet Pandora functions on a biological level like a huge labyrinthine network, everything is connected to everything else. It's like if the internet were a whole biosphere. The name Pandora also refers not only to the Greek myth but to pandora.com, the online music portal which generates music stations based on your preferences.

The green valley of Pandora is also silicon valley. Advances in digital and nano technology will, in the near future, more and more resemble the kind of lessons taught by Gaia spirit-mother myths: everything is connected. Human technology will continue to infiltrate the biosphere on a cellular level. Very very high-tech will more and more resemble no-tech, that is, it will trend towards resembling nature.

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Included here is a live performance by Thom Yorke of Neil Young's "After the Gold Rush" at Electric Lady Studios in 2003. The lyrics of the final verse reflect a sci-fi eco-utopianism not dissimilar from Avatar's:

"Well, I dreamed I saw the silver spaceships flying

In the yellow haze of the sun
There were children crying and colors flying
All around the chosen ones
All in a dream, all in a dream
The loading had begun
Flyin' mother nature's silver seed
To a new home in the sun
Flyin' mother nature's silver seed
To a new home in the sun"

Fans of Neil will remember of course that the first verse contains the line "Look at mother nature on the run, in the nineteen seventies."

After the gold rush, the green rush. After the rush to tear precious elements out of the earth, the rush that possesses the villains of Avatar, the rush to immerse again in nature, like Avatar's protagonist.

The green rush is on for 2010: this means broader dissemination of environmental concerns and awarenesses. It's green for a second reason though, because of how capitalism works. The more that consumers and clients display concern for the environment, the more that businesses will mirror this concern for the sake of profit. The green rush is also a gold rush.

The green rush also means: the chance to profit off the increased de-criminalization of marijuana. This is the double green: the green dollar bill, and the green pot leaf. They will continue to befriend and get each other high. It is only a matter of time before you will have psychedelic suburbia: living rooms with gadgets and accessories more befitting the medicinal and recreational consumption of THC. Imagine the Skymall (tm) catalog of the near future, replete with unnecessarily inventive pot gadgets. Of all narcotics, pot is the easiest for capitalism to embrace, because not only is it comparatively harmless and friendly, but pot culture involves tons of cannabis device-making: everyone knows your stoner friend is by default also a great DIY carpenter.

Finally, green is also the color of the growing resistance movement in Iran. In 2010, green thus is the color for emergent democratic trends in the Muslim world and the Middle East, the color for eco-conscious capitalism, and for commercial developments in de-criminalized substances.

viva vena cava

sophie and lisa come correct! the vena cava blog. I already got overwhelmed digging through all these finds - the girls clearly live in their own cosmos of elegant arcana, including lists of peculiar brain disorders, the most beautiful burger king in the world, long-haired persian guinea pigs, the paraguan embassy in argentina, early 90s interview magazines, and life-size bill clinton cutouts from the flea market.

imo hafta step my game up!

of all the tracks we worked on for their last runway show, it was eloy's weirdo incantatory new-age disco ritual "horizons" that jazzed them the most - seemed to lock pretty well into their sexy crystal goth trip. enjoy.

eloy - horizons

when I grow up

(not me but looks like me as a lad, kind of rocking the same gear too.)

fever ray - when I grow up (d lissvik remix)

gorgeous island pop number from fever ray, side project by the knife's singer, Karin Andersson. Very "La Isla Bonita," wistful and daydreamy, great lyrics, such as "I'm very good with plants, when my friends are away they let me keep the soil moist." It's haunting and warm, I ride for it.

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I think I turned thirty. A bit pre-emptively given my 1980 birth year, but then I've always been somewhat precocious. There are some extenuating circumstances that may have brought about this transition a little early: perhaps radiation from the greenpoint oil spill has prematurely aged my cells. This would explain why all my friends my age who live in greenpoint do things like get married and have children. Actually the getting married thing is more likely a particularly american trait - when visiting the states my european friends often express surprise that everybody's so signed, sealed and delivered. Or in the case of several europeans I know, they got tricked into it as a means towards extended residency.

As for my transition, it was arguably facilitated by getting a blackberry and moving to a one-bedroom apartment off the Graham stop. But the seeds were there, I'm sure, waiting to blossom. Last night I had separate conversations with two acquaintances about the nature of the 20-30 transition: one who stood herself on the threshold, and another who viewed his own crossing as something laying rather in the past. Both viewed it positively: the clutter accumulated by a manifold of competing, undeveloped desires begins to fall away, the shape of one distinct path begins to coalesce out of the haze, one 'grows into one's own skin,' and begins to more ardently filter out the things of this world which are irrelevant or counter-productive. My own natural propensity to such filtering no doubt contributed to my early-onset thirties. 

There is a certain subset of my closest friends, predominantly european, who I'd describe as being ageless souls. Their open-mindedness, their deep-welled inquisitiveness and sense of spontaneous pleasure all act like preservatives, encasing their spirits against erosion and decay. One gentleman in particular, a certain friend from Vienna, has always seemed to me to be simultaneously 16 and 45, as if he living out his stretch on this earth like he's caught in timewarp, like he's not fully arrived in the time of the now. But because his arrival from the past isn't fully completed, he lives both as boy and man, tuned to the joys of a stranger in this world.