A paleontologist's discovery of the fossil of an ostrich-like dinosaur with tail feathers and skin in the legs is stirring up excitement in the scientific world, in case you hadn't noticed. Other discoveries pointing toward that evolutionary path have been made before -- in China, for example, as I remember. However, this new one adds importantly to the accumulating mass of related finds, from which it also benefits, I think, in terms of the internet chatter we're witnessing.
READ/SEE: Dinosaur With Feathers
Next time you eat chicken -- or ingokho to many Kenyans -- just remember it's a living dinosaur. Give it the respect it deserves.
Showing posts with label Ostrich. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ostrich. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 03, 2015
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
On Music Video
In the heyday of the radio, music was all about listening. Music video has changed all that. Far more than the musical, it has forced dance upon the song – and then pushed song to the back row. It pays more attention to body movement than to sound. The song would indeed disappear if the dance could continue alone, but it can’t. Things didn’t use to be like that. Now, we spend more than half the time hearing the dance.
And yet, I think, video was meant to reunite what radio had put asunder. That is, to put a face to the song – to make the singer, howsoever far away in body, sing in spirit before our very own wide eyes. It was the means by which our eyes could feast upon the singer’s virtual, spirited presence. And it so happens that the thrill, the emotion, of co-presence sparks motion, which fires up even more emotion – till, that is, we tire. Thus did the singer begin to strut – and likewise the band, and the back-up singers. We joined in, mirror reflections of the very stage-act which reflected our spirit. Strut called in the services of choreography, and the camera. Which is how this history is writ.
Is a time not coming, in humankind’s uncertain future, when we will agree that we have seen enough, and had enough, of music video’s dance routines? I think the time, such as it is, cometh. Soon enough, the youth will run out of dance ideas, so that each new routine, however fine-tuned, will smack of the last. So that, more and more, everyone will, against their will, dance clips of just the same extended dance.
And then what? Tradition. Traditions are extended routines. They are routines which have become too routine. They are habits we do not think much about; habits which, in fact, inhabit us.
Such routines suggest how traditional performative art forms were born. How they were borne, place to place – time before time. Why people occupied them with a singularity of mind which allowed them to ask where you went wrong if you didn’t go along. That is how sure-footed cultural envoys, complete with ostrich feathers and all-too-familiar drumbeats and garb, come to journey among the un-initiated with fancy footwork. And to sing songs which only the dance enables us to truly hear.
That is how the new melts into the vast terrain of what we call heritage – and sometimes kultur. What we call yesterday. That vast, tiresome landscape from which the youth, who must people another era (and other places), will as surely as tomorrow’s sun will rise, and with a certain slyness of purpose – with a certain meekness of means – seek to distance themselves; but from which they cannot, in form (as opposed, perhaps, to content), entirely escape.
You see, it is just that, if you are deep inside the thing, you will never see (you will really never know) how not-so-very-far in time your actions have in effect drifted – even as the bell loudly tolls for another way of turning, curving, bouncing the supple body. The earth-coloured body. The not so certain – not always – body. The some-time bounty-less body. You will never escape the fact that all dance is in the end routine; and the body has just so many possibilities. As routine, dance is a closed system, subject to entropy, music an open one. Music transcends routine.
Another time and place, another sort of leather and feather, another kind of garb – another sound, even. That is how life always was, until the emergence of mass communication and travel. But today’s technology hybridizes and homogenizes, even as it creates new traditions. Being less localized, being more regional and global in its effects, it can only create them on a grander scale than witnessed in the receding past. What sort of popular dance will there be 500 years from now; and how will they regard Thriller, whose 25th anniversary is now?
And yet, I think, video was meant to reunite what radio had put asunder. That is, to put a face to the song – to make the singer, howsoever far away in body, sing in spirit before our very own wide eyes. It was the means by which our eyes could feast upon the singer’s virtual, spirited presence. And it so happens that the thrill, the emotion, of co-presence sparks motion, which fires up even more emotion – till, that is, we tire. Thus did the singer begin to strut – and likewise the band, and the back-up singers. We joined in, mirror reflections of the very stage-act which reflected our spirit. Strut called in the services of choreography, and the camera. Which is how this history is writ.
Is a time not coming, in humankind’s uncertain future, when we will agree that we have seen enough, and had enough, of music video’s dance routines? I think the time, such as it is, cometh. Soon enough, the youth will run out of dance ideas, so that each new routine, however fine-tuned, will smack of the last. So that, more and more, everyone will, against their will, dance clips of just the same extended dance.
And then what? Tradition. Traditions are extended routines. They are routines which have become too routine. They are habits we do not think much about; habits which, in fact, inhabit us.
Such routines suggest how traditional performative art forms were born. How they were borne, place to place – time before time. Why people occupied them with a singularity of mind which allowed them to ask where you went wrong if you didn’t go along. That is how sure-footed cultural envoys, complete with ostrich feathers and all-too-familiar drumbeats and garb, come to journey among the un-initiated with fancy footwork. And to sing songs which only the dance enables us to truly hear.
That is how the new melts into the vast terrain of what we call heritage – and sometimes kultur. What we call yesterday. That vast, tiresome landscape from which the youth, who must people another era (and other places), will as surely as tomorrow’s sun will rise, and with a certain slyness of purpose – with a certain meekness of means – seek to distance themselves; but from which they cannot, in form (as opposed, perhaps, to content), entirely escape.
You see, it is just that, if you are deep inside the thing, you will never see (you will really never know) how not-so-very-far in time your actions have in effect drifted – even as the bell loudly tolls for another way of turning, curving, bouncing the supple body. The earth-coloured body. The not so certain – not always – body. The some-time bounty-less body. You will never escape the fact that all dance is in the end routine; and the body has just so many possibilities. As routine, dance is a closed system, subject to entropy, music an open one. Music transcends routine.
Another time and place, another sort of leather and feather, another kind of garb – another sound, even. That is how life always was, until the emergence of mass communication and travel. But today’s technology hybridizes and homogenizes, even as it creates new traditions. Being less localized, being more regional and global in its effects, it can only create them on a grander scale than witnessed in the receding past. What sort of popular dance will there be 500 years from now; and how will they regard Thriller, whose 25th anniversary is now?
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