by the light of the pronghorn

Listen. Mel Brooks is not without his critics, and has never been without his critics, and in fact the reason he made so many movies was literally because of his critics. There are things that he's made that didn't age well, jokes that he could have left out or reworked, and definitely a lot of things that I thought were funnier when I was a kid.

And Blazing Saddles in particular is not above that kind of criticism. There are some jokes that I could have done without, there are scenes that could have been redone. But overall, I can still enjoy this movie, despite its shortcomings, because the overall point of the movie is a Bugs Bunny slapstick making fun of westerns, a film genre that I also generally enjoy despite its shortcomings... many of those shortcomings which are the point of Blazing Saddles.

It is neither the perfect paragon of of film exempt from criticism, nor is it a disgusting example of unfettered reckless screenwriting. (I have seen... so much worse.)

It's just a film, guys.

When a person looks at a piece of media that didn't age well, we have to accept that it didn't age well. Or that some things were never okay to begin with and we look at them with better knowledge and it makes us feel uneasy now that we know better.

And every time a person writes a personal account of their nostalgia lost, there's some goddamn reaction piece about 'Ace Ventura is offensive now.' (It is, it always was. It makes it difficult to enjoy it as an adult even though I was able to quote the movie from memory as a child.)

It's okay to look at something that you used to love and say 'I didn't know this at the time, but this film hated me.' And I think it's important that we talk about nostalgia, and getting older in this way without someone with a 'content writer' contract turning it into a statement piece about the decline of society where the first comment, the very FIRST comment, is always about Blazing Fucking Saddles- a film that gets 85% of its charm from the chemistry between Gene Wilder and Cleavon Little while they pull a fast one on every single racist in the wild west.

When the target is the hypocrisy of Hollywood or racism itself, a lot of the punches are going to land. I mean, look at Tropic Thunder. I'd call it a successor to Blazing Saddles in many ways. You have real transgressive acts, but they are used to make a point as well as a vehicle for jokes. Robert Downey Jr. Is in blackface, but it's in the context of a clout-chasing actor stealing roles from actual minorities and misrepresenting marginalized groups in general. You get an examination of what it's like to be gay and black in the entertainment world, which for the time wasn't something that got talked about. You get a look at how shallow and heartless the process is to make the things we love. Hell, they even lampshade how much of a bastard Harvey Weinstein was, though not in the "sexual predator" context that I can recall.

One of the criticisms is the casting of non-natives as natives and your take is absolutely an interpretation to be made. However, I am not Mel Brooks, I'm not Jewish, and I'm not Indigenous, so I dont have a horse in the race. It's not my call to make.

Some of the bits are very much products of it's time, and that's important to discuss. And if they make you uncomfortable it's fine to say so. Even with the jokes that make me uncomfortable, the movie is still one of my favorites, and they're written in a way that you can just skip over them and enjoy the rest of the film.

But the meat of the problem, I think, is that someone occasionally writes about films like these and will say 'this made me uncomfortable' in an honest way, and some dude with a blog will choose to interpret something like that 'Gen Z is cancelling (Ace Ventura, og Ghostbusters, Revenge of the Nerds) over woke politics' even if the person who initially spoke about it is in their 30s-40s, as if giving negative press to movies that already made their millions has any impact.

And this summons a chorus of people invoking Blazing Saddles as the MOST offensive movie, when it's mostly offensive to racists and Hollywood executives. Like... have you... seen it? Did you watch it?

Like it's some kinda gotcha that satire exists.

It's trying to shut down the conversation that we should be looking at films, even films of the past, critically. And its so.

Fucking.

Ironic.

All of Mel Brooks’ lines are in Yiddish. Totally ordinary, intelligible Yiddish, not changed in any way to sound like it could plausibly be any Native American language.

So far, I have never met a single gentile who noticed, until I point it out.

they're killing wildlife for profit. who cares if they get shot out there? it's what they deserve.

Okay, so I don't want to go too deeply into this because this is just meant to be an animal media blog.

Poaching seems to conjure an image of a greedy villain, profiteering off of $90 000 per kilo of rhino horn*. Poaching is not *just* rhinos and leopards and tigers being killed - poaching is *any* illegal hunting or catching of animals or plants.

If your children are starving you aren't going to think 'oh but what about the poor animal it might go extinct', you're going to go and kill that giant sable antelope because it contains enough meat to feed your entire family for weeks. You will kill that rhino for $5 000 per kilo of horn* in order to send your kids to school so they at least have a chance of a better life than you. If you're living in a rural village and the nearest clinic is *several hours away*, for which there is only ONE doctor who tends to the ENTIRE AREA and the waiting line is SEVERAL DAYS LONG so you go to the local witch doctor who tells you that they can cure your dying spouse with crushed pangolin scales you will kill that pangolin. If your community relies on mealies for food but the elephants keep on trampling them, you and your village are going to do whatever you need to to drive off those elephants - even kill them.

If you can't find it in yourself to have sympathy for people in difficult situations with few options, then what about the people caught in the crossfire? What of that seven year old child the article mentioned, shot in the leg because they wandered too close? What of that disabled man shot dead because he didn't know he was in a restricted area? What of people who's communities are forcefully relocated several times over?

Sure, there are people who involved in poaching only because they are rich and greedy but those are not the people shoot to kill will affect (and even then, death penalty is inefficient in that it will cost more than a life imprisonment.) Shoot to kill also affects ability to find other poachers — if you shot five poachers, you've just shot five poachers. Arrest five poachers and you might uncover information on ten more — and perhaps even get enough information to dismantle an entire operation.

If the reason many people kill animals are because they are starving then the solution is simple: give them food. Give them housing. Give them clean water and education. Give them jobs.

You'll notice how the articles mention that shoot to kill doesn't reduce poaching. You know what does? Ecotourism.

'During the five years that the project was externally funded the community experienced a significant improvement in their standard of living. During each year of the project, more than 2,000 Japanese tourists visited the community generating sufficient income for the families involved to enable them to meet their monthly cost of food, and when operating at capacity the project employed a significant number of community members as drivers, cooks, gardeners, housekeepers, and in a few instances in managerial roles such as temporary wildlife rangers managing the forest around the villages.

Correspondingly, there was a decline in poaching. The community generally understood animals were a major tourism drawcard and needed to be protected to continue attracting tourists. This view was common throughout the kampongs (villages)... Noting that some members of the community continued to play an active role in many wildlife and forest conservation programs within the adjacent reserve ' (unfortunately this project did fail because the funding for professional managers was withdrawn and the people of the village were not taught adequately how to manage everything by themselves, which lead to a steep decline in visitors and thus they had to go back to poaching to survive.)

Ecotourism is wonderful and is a great help towards both people and animals.

Obviously, these are complex issues that need way more investigation and perspectives than I have the time for or can offer but I’m going to close it here; you can read the articles and hopefully they can give more information and a broader starting point to this issue.

This is all I'm going to be saying on this to anons. If anyone wants to discuss this further, you are welcome to message me, leave a comment in the notes or send an ask off anon. Anon hate will be blocked.

I’m having a sale in my art store!

I’ll be moving apartments soon and I’m looking to clear out some stuff, so from now until Sunday, August 22 everything in my store is 15% off! Take a look and grab some cool art, zines, and pins!

cannot stop thinking abt the paris review’s essay series on the history of significance of certain colours, hue’s hue:

Periwinkle, the Color of Poison, Modernism, and Dusk

Eau de Nil, the Light-Green Color of Egypt-Obsessed Europe

Marian Blue, the Color of Angels, Virgins, and Other Untouchable Things

Incarnadine, the Bloody Red of Fashionable Cosmetics and Shakespearean Poetics

Jonquil, the Light Yellow of Early Flowers, Mad Painters, and Dust Bowl–Era Pottery

Scheele’s Green, the Color of Fake Foliage and Death

Lilac, the Color of Half Mourning, Doomed Hotels, and Fashionable Feelings

Hooker’s Green: The Color of Apple Trees and Envy

Blaze Orange, the Color of Fear, Warnings, and the Artificial

Chartreuse, the Color of Elixirs, Flappers, and Alternate Realities

Living Coral, the Brutal Hue of Climate Change and Brand New iPhones

Mustard, the Color of Millennial Candidates, Problematic Lattes, and Aboriginal Paintings

Russet, the Color of Peasants, Fox Fur, and Penance

the tamaulipas crow is found in a relatively small range of northeastern mexico and parts of southern texas. this medium-sized crow is easily distinguishable from most other crows by their plumage; while it’s common for crows to have somewhat iridescent feathers, the tamaulipas crow has noticeable purple & blue coloration in the right light.

Corn production today uses more natural resources than any other crop. Around 90 million acres are planted in corn, and the last remaining remnants of native prairie and grassland are being plowed under for corn every year. Corn is a hungry crop and a thirsty one. Vast amounts of water are consumed, and a staggering amount of fertilizer. Corn not only consumes a great deal—it produces a huge amount of waste. Much of that fertilizer never even makes it into the plant, instead it is washed downstream, producing toxic algal blooms in waters everywhere along the way and ultimately creating the growing dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. Dead rivers, lost biodiversity, say farewell to prairies and bobolinks and meadowlarks, to say nothing of precious topsoil leaving the fields and silting the rivers. The economic pressure behind this ongoing expansion of cornfields has little to do with filling empty bellies. In today’s agribusiness, we feed more cars than people.

I don’t blame my farmer neighbor for industrial agriculture. He’s been harnessed to a system that treats him like a cog, too. His family has farmed this valley well for generations and had to adapt to changing pressures in order to stay on the land. The honorable calling of farming is being dishonored by a worldview and economic institutions that relentlessly demand taking more without regard for giving back. He’s been colonized, too.

Watching train cars of golden yellow kernels unload into ethanol factories creates a gnawing pain in my gut; it’s the pain of betrayal. The Mother of All Things, the Wonderful Seed, did not agree to this. It’s a long, long way from seeing her as a sacred being to an industrial commodity. How did we get here?

Colonization is the process by which an invading people seeks to replace the original lifeways with their own, erasing the evidence of prior claims to place. Its tools are many: military and political power, assimilative education, economic pressure, ecological transformation, religion—and language.

Colonists take what they want and attempt to erase the rest. Conceiving of plants and land as objects, not subjects—as things instead of beings—provides the moral distance that enables exploitation. Valuing the productive potential of the physical body but denying the personhood of the being, reducing a person to a thing for sale—this too is a manifestation of colonialism.

…

… Agribusiness is quick to point out that we cannot feed a world of nearly eight billion people with gardens alone. This is true but omits the reality that most of the corn we grow is not going to hungry people: it is feeding cars. There is another kind of hunger in our affluent society, a hunger for justice and meaning and community, a hunger to remember what industrial agriculture has asked us to forget, but the seed remembers. Good farming should feed that hunger, too.

I’m thinking of the way that grandfather Teosinte mingles with corn at the edge of a traditional cornfield, welcomed as a source of guidance and diversity. Might we invite ancestral knowledge into our fields for these same virtues? Unsustainable industrial agriculture needs philosophical gene flow from indigenous knowledge, a cross-pollination of respectful relationship to breed a new agriculture that honors the plants as well as the people. Together we can remember our covenant with corn, that she will care for the people, if we will care for her.