We've been borrowing the Planet Earth series on DVD and are already on disk 3. Each segment is filled with so many incredible images and wondrous observations about the natural world I really can't begin to explain how amazing this series is to someone who hasn't seen it. The best parts are actually the diary segments at the end of each piece. They provide insight into what the crew members went through to get the shots and provide more in depth understanding about the nature of each ecosystem. Looking at the incredible imagery without the diary would give me the impression that everything we are seeing is easy to capture or accessible. It's always the stories behind things that interest me more than the thing itself.
I particularly loved The Plains, which is all about the grasslands of the world and how they sustain life. Over the last few years I've been experiencing a love affair with grasslands which explains my focus in a series overflowing with so many fascinating things. Oh how I love the grasses. And I particularly love them at this time of year when the colours really come alive. I've become enthralled with the idea of traveling west across Canada so we can see and photograph the Prairies, a surprise even to me given that there was a time when I thought flat land was dull. Oh how naive and dumb I was. I now know that so-called flat lands are not dull or homogeneous at all.
The segment on caves was pretty incredible as well but I will admit that caves scare the shit out of me. I could not do what the crew did to get those images and come out of it with my sanity intact.
Song: Young Americans David Bowie. Songs with a certain kind of sax playing usually make me cringe but I like the background singers and the lyrics. "We live for just these twenty years. Do we have to die for the fifty more?" This song isn't about glorifying youth although when I pull this bit out it probably seems like it. I was just thinking about the contrast between this song and my newest song obsession, Lover's Spit with the line, "You know it's time that we grow old and do some shit."
No surprise that I have these songs playing on repeat lately. I spent most of the past year thinking and talking about rebellion, complacency, tradition, and aging. We make choices throughout our lives about how we want to live it but when I look around it seems like the thirties are a time when people hit some kind of fork in the road. How do I want this part of my life to look and how will it shape my future is a massive question. My changing face and body have me aware, in a new way, of the fact that I am aging. And everywhere around me people in my age bracket are making choices that in our culture suggest "growing up." I don't know if I want to grow up in that way.
While I want a certain degree of security in my future, I do not want to make safe choices out of fear. Who I am, what I want, how to go about it, how to maintain my integrity and sense of self, and how all of these things intersect with the reality of life are what I grapple with most. I could probably just leave it at that and never write anything more here because it really all comes down to this.