"Nature is utterly indifferent"

Werner Herzog on 60 Minutes.

The Corona Diaries Vol. 68: Ritual (Vi Er Af Sneen)

(mid-September 2022)

I was at the supermarket earlier this month and ran across a pallet of Frute Brute cereal. Although discontinued back in 1982, it has been resurrected as a limited release for the Halloween season or some such thing. I was thrown back to my childhood as I have a distinct memory of being told by a grocer back then that the cereal was no longer being made.

My memory is of hearing the sad news at a little store at Addison and Eddy or Cornelia. Do any Chicagoans reading this recall a little grocery store in that area? Or is my mind playing tricks on me?

On this same shopping trip I noticed that the coffee creamer cooler was full of pumpkin spice flavored things such as this:

 

 

I swear to you not even a full week later that stuff had been replaced by this:

 

 

It’s only mid-September but the Christmas product is on shelves already!

I found this last week on a shopping trip to an Asian market.

How could I not buy a bowl of spicy noodles when the label features a guy sweating bullets and crying in agony on it?! I ended up giving it to my youngest stepson along with a couple packets of instant pad thai noodles, a favorite food of his. I hope to hear back soon on how the deadly noodles tasted.

OK, last food related item here. Nothing too exciting on the culinary front lately but I did whip up a batch of Chicken Paprikash.

As always, I used a mix of smoked and unsmoked paprika and, for once, I got the amounts just right and it had just the perfect amount of paprika flavor. Even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while, right?

********

 

Earlier this week a couple friends and I went down to Chicago to see the Nordic band Heilung perform at Radius, a newer venue down there that opened in early 2020. It’s on the 600 block of W. Cermak.

“Heilung” is German for “healing” and the core members of the band hail from Denmark, Norway, and Germany and I think they are all neo-pagans/Wiccans who, as they say, follow a Nordic path. Their music is neo-/experimental folk, I guess you’d say. It involves a lot of thunderous bass drums and various other percussion instruments, sundry stringed instruments, and electronics. One guy does throat singing.

In concert, the members wear robes and don antlers.

 

 (Photo found here.)

 

The band advertise their shows as rituals as opposed to concerts and it’s easy to see why.

Things began with one of the band members coming out onstage clutching a small bundle of what I would guess is sage that was burning. He proceeded to perform a cleansing ritual. After the stage was properly prepared, the music began.

 

Off to stage left was a guy with a rather large array of large drums before him. On the opposite side of the stage was another percussionist. He was surrounded by a battery of big bass drums but also his own array of various other things to beat on. Three backup singers/dancers joined the core trio of the band who sang, played hand held instruments, and added electronic sounds to the mix.

At one point, a group of about 8 people walked onstage bearing shields and spears. These folks embrace their Viking ancestors! With the drums thundering away and these “warriors” pounding their spears on the stage, I felt like we should probably raid Lindisfarne or some such thing.

That’s Maria Franz and I think she’s playing an old Scandinavian instrument called the talharpa. And that glowing orb is a big drum that people took turns pounding on.

The warriors would wander off and on stage at various moments. During one song they wandered over to centerstage and I noticed that there were a couple women in the ranks. And they were bare-breasted. This was some hardcore ceremonial stuff! One of those women returned a song or 2 later bearing a couple antler racks with the points aflame.

The final song was the epic “Hamrer Hippyer”. It clocked in at around 15 minutes and, by the end of it, everyone in the band, all of the backing musicians & singers, and the warriors were all onstage dancing in an ecstatic frenzy to the insistent beat of those big drums. It was trance-like. One couldn’t help get swept away by the rhythm and those drums vibrating through your body.

Great stuff!

The best way to understand a Heilung show/ritual is to be there but, short of that, take a look at some video.

********

A group of us in Madison trekked down to West Chicago for a day of gaming at a friend’s place recently. First up were a couple rounds of 7 Wonders: Architects.

Neither I nor my friends from Madison had ever played it before. You each have a structure and you build storey by storey as you gain construction resources via those cards. Not overly complex but not too simplistic as to not present a challenge. The game goes fairly quickly once you get the hang of it so we played 2 rounds.

Next up was another game that we Madisonians had never played before – Wingspan.

 

 

Wingspan was a little more difficult than 7 Wonders. Essentially, you play birds and do things like gather food and lay eggs. The cards are of various birds from around the world and contain a little trivia about our feathered friends. I am told that the game was the idea of an ornithologist or, at least, a dedicated bird watcher.

The next day I spent some time with my youngest stepson. While he was waiting for his girlfriend to return from her parents’ house, he, my Frau, and I played a game of Scoville.

Scoville was designed by a fellow Madisonian named Ed Marriott. You play a farmer of chilies. In order to win points, you grow several varieties of chili peppers, cross breed them, enter chili cookoffs, et al.

The kid beat me by 1 point but the Frau was the winner by 15 points or so after a late game maneuver involving lots of ghost peppers and a massive chili cook-off victory.

 

 Piper got in on the game too. “If it fits, I sits!”

********

I recently watched Salt and Fire by one of my favorite directors, Werner Herzog.

It opens with 3 scientists affiliated with the U.N. traveling to Bolivia to investigate an environmental disaster. They are kidnapped by a corporate C.E.O. who is slightly unhinged and who has a henchman played by real life physicist Lawrence Krauss who is even more batty.

The story focuses on the travails of one of the scientists, Dr. Laura Sommerfeld. She is defiant and a real pain for her captors. At one point she is brought out to the Salar de Uyuni – the vast salt flats of Bolivia – and is thrown out of the car which speeds away. In a very Herzogian twist, she finds that she is not alone but has the company of 2 nearly blind children. They have been left with just a tarp and a week’s worth of provisions.

While it will certainly go down in cinema history as a minor Herzog work, I really enjoyed it. There were the requisite characters who were off their rocker and nature as an unfeeling source of peril for we humans. Michael Shannon may not have the full deranged menace of Klaus Kinski but he’s got his own more subdued way of being threatening.

 

********

Bonus photo: I recently discovered that a statue by local artist Sid Boyum that had been awaiting a home has found one. This piece has something of a Hieronymus Bosch kind of thing going on.

The Corona Diaries Vol. 43 - Introduction: Walking

I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least--and it is commonly more than that--sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements.

I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit. In my afternoon walk I would fain forget all my morning occupations, and my obligations to society. But it sometimes happens that I cannot easily shake off the village. The thought of some work will run in my head, and I am not where my body is; I am out of my senses. In my walks I would fain return to my senses. What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods?

"Walking", Henry David Thoreau

(Continue to the diary entry.)

Happy People: A Year in the Taiga

While I probably should have watched this in the summer as I got really cold during the winter scenes, this was a fantastic flick. (-33 was a warm day!) Werner Herzog co-directed and co-wrote it. Plus he does the narration. It's a look at life in a small Siberian village where trapping and fishing are how one earns a living/feeds one's family. The focus, however, is on the men who trap during the harsh winters. They're away from family for months on end, out in the taiga working hard everyday with only their loyal hounds and Mother Nature for company. The village may be remote but you still catch sight of a Pokémon shirt. 

 

Playing With Fire: Lessons of Darkness by Werner Herzog

Earlier this month Werner Herzog's Lessons of Darkness from 1992 screened as part of the Tales from Planet Earth film festival which aims to highlight environmental issues and promote awareness.

Clocking in a bit under an hour, Lessons of Darkness begins with an apocryphal quote credited to Blaise Pascal and is divided into 13 sections delineated by intertitles which show the aftermath of the first Gulf War. The first section is called "A Capital City" which is a long aerial shot of what I presume to be Kuwait City. Today we are used to Herzog's iconic voice describing his subject (and how pitifully small and unimportant humanity is) but voiceover narration is very sparse here and he gives us no context for what we see – no when, where, or how. It's an "abandon all hope ye who enter here" kind of moment as the city looks to be fine but, as the film continues, it's not unlike a decent into hell.

Set to a backdrop of Mahler, Wagner, and others, Herzog shows us what a war zone looks like after the war. With his camera in a vehicle, we see the desertscape go by littered with the burned out shells of tanks and trucks. Another tracking shot shows us the inside of a torture chamber. We can see the implements of torture scattered about but the victims and torturers are gone. Next up are aerial shots of the remains of Kuwaiti oil infrastructure. Pipes and storage tanks are twisted and collapsed almost beyond recognition – presumably they burned for days on end.

More aerial shots give us vast miles of desert sand soaked in oil, pot marked with lakes of crude, and cut by freshly plowed roads to reveal the white underneath. And in the background there are fires belching thick, black smoke that obscures the sky. These are the oil fields lit afire by the Iraqis as they retreated. These images truly look like a planet other than Earth. With feet planted on the ground Herzog and his crew use long lenses to capture the drama of men attempting to put out the oil well fires and affix new caps on the wellheads. No Wagner is needed here as the roaring flames, water hoses, and machinery create a din which, when combined with the hellish imagery, gives rise to an infernal gesamtkunstwerk.

I would imagine that the festival organizers were hoping that the audience responded to all that smoke and oil-soaked sand as an environmental disaster and perhaps take action to reduce the use of fossil fuels. While I don't feel that Herzog is indifferent to the disaster, I couldn't help but feel that he was also up to his old tricks in pointing out human folly. By not giving his audience much in the way of context, it feels like he's saying that this is just one in a long line of catastrophes that will continue into the future, that we will never learn. Also note that life seemed to be going on as normal in the capital city while the hell is off somewhere else as if it were someone else's problem. Like it's just a bump in the road for civilization that marches on to the next disaster never having learned it lesson.

And now something competely different from Werner Herzog

Werner Herzog doesn't want people to text and drive so he has made a 35-minute PSA called "From One Second To The Next". It starts out with a sad tale from right here in Wisconsin, Milwaukee to be exact.

Cell/smartphones are forged by Lucifer himself.

A Hobbesian View of the Universe

Last night I went with my roommate to see Grizzly Man. What attracted me to it was the film's director, Werner Herzog. Herzog makes films, whether they be fictional or documentary, about people who are crazy or go crazy or who just love engaging in staring matches with Nietzschean abysses. (As a side note, he shot part of his Stroszek here in Wisconsin - up in Plainfield, the home of Ed Gein.) Grizzly Man concerns Timothy Treadwell, a man who spent a baker's dozen consecutive summers up in Alaska living among grizzly bears to, in his mind, save the bears from civilization. Treadwell was quite a character and, as we learn, also quite a misanthrope. The film consists of footage shot by Treadwell himself as well as interviews with friends & associates and others who are familiar with bears and their ecology. Like pretty much any Herzog film, Grizzly Man is the story of a man's decent into madness and the director tries to find the kernal of beauty, of humanity in the maelstrom.

Fairly early on, we find out that Treadwell and his girlfriend were killed a couple years ago by a grizzly. In fact, their demises were recorded as they had a video camera running at the time. However, the lense cap was on so the violent scene was captured on audio only. There's a scene in the film where Herzog is listening to the tape which is in the possession of a close friend of Treadwell. Even though we the audience can't hear it and Herzog's face is turned away from the camera, we can see the reactions of Treadwell's friend and its a moving moment. The details of their deaths is told via an interview with the local coroner who had heard the tape and he reconstructs the scene for us with his descriptions of the events captured on the tape.

Treadwell was born into your average middle class family. As a child he shared a love of animals with his mother. After graduating from high school, he sought his fortunes as an actor in Hollywood. His failure at this coupled with drug & alcohol addictions, sent his life into a downward spiral. Treadwell then turned his life around and dedicated it to helping the grizzly. What the video footage he left portrays is a man who deeply loves nature, scorns civilization, and had a lot of inner conflict. There was some genuinely beautiful footage of him interacting with a skulk of foxes that "befriended" him. And then there was a scene of him fawning over of pile of bear shit. He touched it and commented that it was fresh and warm. He then professed his glee that he could touch it because it was a part of a bear that he adored. "It came out of her," he said.

The video footage was shot for videos that he would show to folks in order to drum up support for his organization, Grizzly People. Treadwell died with his then girlfriend, Amie Huguenard. Herzog reveals how she is shown only thrice in the 100 hours or so of footage that Treadwell shot. In fact, Treadwell often had company with him although he went to pains to make sure that his video footage concealed this fact and portrayed him as being alone with nature. This aside, there's some great footage of grizzlies in their natural habitat. We see them looking for food, fighting, and Treadwell is right next to them in several shots spewing his mantras of how he loves the bears and how he would die for them. Elsewhere there's a scene in which Treadwell is giving a summary of a summer he spent with the bears and he goes off on a vitrolic tirade against the federal park rangers (he spent his time on Katmai National Park and Reserve). Herzog makes a comment on how he's seen this before on a movie set which prompted my pal and I to look at one another and laugh. (Herzog's tempestous relationship with actor Klaus Kinski is chronicled in his My Best Fiend.)

Perhaps the most revealing moment was a scene in which Treadwell is kneeling beside the corpse of a fox and mourning its death, seemingly unable to reconcile his bucolic view of nature with its harsh reality. At this point Herzog chimes in. It's a wonderful moment in cinema. Documentaries usually have a dispassionate/objective narrator who merely chronicles events. But here Herzog comments on his ideological disagreement with his subject. He basically says that Treadwell viewed the universe as being harmonious whereas he - Herzog - thought that the universe was about chaos, conflict, and murder. It is a very revealing moment both about the subject and the filmmaker. It also provides a super-concise description of Herzog for anyone not familiar with his work.

The Return of the Conquistador of the Useless

Werner Herzog has a new film out called Grizzly Man. It's a documentary about Timothy Treadwell, a "manic but lovable whack-job who doggedly filmed and obsessively idealized the bears that would ultimately eat him (along with his poor girlfriend)." Stop giving your money to fucking Jerry Bruckheimer and go see it. And then rent some Herzog. Then some Fassbinder and Wenders.

New German Cinema!

New German Cinema!

New German Cinema!

New German Cinema!

New German Cinema!