time comes undone

I came home tonight to powwow with the parentals about recent current events and enjoy a meal I didn’t have to prepare myself. We ended up watching a documentary called Burning the Future: Coal In America. My dad had recorded it for me because he knows I like to shoot the shit about industrial excess and the energy apocalypse. I had already read a news story here or there about mountain top mining, so I agreed to keep eye on the program while attending to other things. As it turns out, those other things did not get attended to. The program was absolutely riveting.

The documentary studies the effects on the relatively new practice of mountain top mining on communities in West Virginia. It’s not a one-sided treehugger lovefest. But it’s not very hard to give the impression of impartiality–reality has a very anti-coal bias. If you did nothing more than show silent footage of before and after scenes of West Virginia 50 years ago and West Virginia now, that alone would play like a requiem of staggering loss.

The ironic upshot of watching this is that traditional mining methods end up looking like a non-invasive paragons of sustainable living–at least comparatively speaking. The truth is that mining was always ecologically and socially damaging. But now through the miracle of technology, coal mining has gone from merely damaging to utterly devastating. They invented bigger and better ways to extract more coal faster, and that bigger and better way is to bulldoze the whole mountain from the top down. What’s left at the site and in surrounding valleys is a humongous pile of rubble, burying all life that was there before.

Like all good documentaries though, the focus is on the stories of the people immediately affected. I thought the most moving scene was an interview with a local who poured a glass of tap water that was a brown-black viscous mess. He lives right on a stream, but is forced to drink and use this toxic water because he cannot afford to buy it imported. The ground water of the whole region is polluted by coal slurry runoff disposed of in nearby abandoned mines. The water analysis tests results said not only is the water unfit for drinking, it’s not safe to be touched. This man who has been drinking it for years and continues to do so has come to terms with the fact that he expects to die because of it, and is resigned to making arrangements for that occasion.

All I can think is that the people should sue the shit out of these coal companies. But when you think about it, everyone can claim damages, not just the people drinking toxic cocktails to their deaths. It’s not killing the rest of us — yet (see: global warming) — but there is another cost that is not being captured, and every human being has a stake. I can see it now, a class action lawsuit with 6.7 billion defendants worldwide. And hey, if we split it even, every one of us will a least get a buck.

Of course the international community cannot be moved to care about these complicated problems either. One of the heartwarming parts of the movie was the segment that followed these ordinary people taking time out of their ordinary responsibilities to organize. Community cohesion and grassroots activism in its finest incarnation. They were invited to present their case at the UN sustainable development committee. The feeling I get from the few scenes of how they were received brings to mind the phrase collateral damage. That their community and others will be violently smudged off the map through fatal poisoning and property flooding is considered a necessary and even trivial fact of providing coal-based electricity to the people lucky enough not to live next to the byproducts.

Another telling and memorable thing is that one of the coal propaganda videos said, triumphantly, “Clean coal can provide us with another 250 years of prosperity!” This wasn’t the point of the scene, but I just thought it so remarkable that the Appalachian mountains are being leveled, and the payoff that we’re supposed to be optimistic about is only 250 more years! That seems small to me, considering that human civilization has been going on for thousands of years. If you’re going to pull a nice round divisible-by-ten figure out of your ass like that, at least give us another 2500? Maybe they forgot a zero.

The proposition that 250 more years of electricity (give or take) is a tidy trade for converting several eastern states quite literally into total barren wastelands is deeply offensive to me. The coal industry likes to say, “well have you got a better idea?” They have a point. Renewable energy cannot replace the 50% of electricity that coal currently provides–it is physically impossible to scale that way, given the technology as it stands today. But there is a better idea; it’s just not very popular. It comes down to my two B’s: stop buying and stop breeding. Some people get very offended when I say these things. Good, be offended–those uncomfy feelings will help prepare you for the real uncomfortable work of moving towards sustainable living. In short, get used to disappointment!

I was forced to endure an absurd presentation skills training earlier this week as part of my required duties. I could go on and on about how idiotic this class is, but one good thing did come of it. For the first morning, we were supposed to have done some pre-work notes on a topic of our choosing. I came to the class unprepared, and was given 20 minutes to put together a 4 minute presentation to be given to the class. I spent the first 5 minutes deciding on a topic and the last 15 minutes trashing the curriculum rubric and instead writing the piece word for word. I told the instructor that I haven’t held a pen since grade school and I’m not about to start again now, fired up my laptop, and hammered this out:

All those UIL extemporaneous speaking exercises came back to me in a flash, and I was able to churn this out in 15 minutes. I’m mighty proud of this! This is blog-ready copy right here, and I didn’t even cheat and clean it up!

I pretty much said “fuck this, I’m leaving” to the presentation class after that.

Allow me to announce my first surefire top ten album of 2008, before ever announcing my favorites of 2007, and before even finishing my SXSW blog about discovering this band in the first place.

The band is Megafaun and the album is Bury the Square.

First let me just say, the degree to which the phrase 'old timey' is dissected on urban dictionary is adorable. And familiar. I especially like the exposition on the relative old-timeyness of facial hair configurations, and the compare and contrast between the distantly related concept of retro chic. One wonders how long you could explore the usage and shades of meaning of the phrase 'old timey' as the sole thesis of a serious grad school paper. But I digress.

Megafaun are an Akron/Family sister band, and themselves an offshoot of another interrelated project. I didn't know they existed until their performance on the tremendous Table of the Elements showcase at SXSW 2008. They moved me to tears with their plaintive set, full of wistful harmonizing. Now whenever I listen to their album, the memory of that emotion is pricked. And I've been listening to it frequently ever since.

I use the phrase old timey here loosely, and with apologies to the wordanistas over at the urban dictionary. It may not be a proper description of Megafaun in the specific musical genre sense, especially since the free-form, electrified bliss outs at the end of a couple of their songs have nothing old timey about them. But it does capture the mood of this and the Calexico/Iron & Wine song I blogged about just the other day. It is a direct descendant of vintage rural folk, and it evokes all the predictable imagery of and nostalgia for sepia-toned times predating my own.

I have an intense love for banjo and pedal steel, and will go to such great lengths to hear it as listening to country and bluegrass, when bands of those styles accidentally end up on stages I happen to be sitting near at the time. Megafaun has a song called Drains that features both, the tune of which has been on my tongue for some several weeks now. The blend of voices on this track so rich and resonant that it sinks into the throat and settles there, until the fullness of sound forces you to crack lips and sing along.

I do love Drains, but after debating it with myself for the amount of time I've been writing this post, I have decided to share the obvious standout track instead: Where We Belong. It is epic in every sense of the word: length, range, and majesty. It catapults out of the acoustic into a stormy, clipped electric climax, and back down to a fiddle led denouement sweeter than the best moments from the Dirty Three.

These Akron-cetera boys can do no wrong by me. It makes me want to buy up every volume of every related project out to six degrees of separation, in a mad fit of completionist abandon.