Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill
Where did the weekend go? How can it be Tuesday already?
Last night I watched The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill. I had mixed feelings about the film. All the Grateful Dead-ish country-ish music actively hurt me, for one thing. In a brilliant movie I could set that aside, but this one had enough other issues that it bothered me. Really my main issue was the way the filmmaker glossed over the parrot man's homelessness and squatting. She kept showing him doing laundry or sorting clean clothing, so it was clear to me that she was trying to point out that he was not some dirty homeless man, but then why never tackle the subject head on? Is being homeless/squatting just a common enough thing in San Francisco for it to be a normal part of the social fabric of life? Maybe I am too much a Yankee Puritan at heart, but I'm not sure that this is something that ought to be celebrated or glamorized or even normalized, particularly when I know from M's work that on this coast at least homeless people are that way only because of extremely bad luck, mental health issues, substance abuse issues or a borderline sociopathic sense of entitlement that makes one think society owes one everything, that jobs are for other people because you are too enlightened to buy into the capitalist paradigm. With this guy I felt like it was the lattermost.
I was also really bothered when he put Mingus outdoors where the poor bird was terrified, just because Mingus was acting like a parrot and defending his nest. You let animals take up residence in your house on their own terms--staking out under the fridge as a nest, for example--and you have to accept that some of their own terms are not going to be terribly convenient from the human's standpoint. You can't punish them for simply being what they are, let alone expect them to understand what that punishment means. He seemed so sensitive towards the parrots on so many other levels, but to me that interaction with Mingus said all this parrot stuff was more about feeling good about himself, and when it wasn't all beautiful and groovy and peaceable he reacted poorly and not in the parrot's best interest.
At the same time, many of his observations about the parrots were astute and interesting, and I think he did provide a public service by talking about the parrots to people and raising awareness of them. The section about Tupelo, the first parrot he took care of who died while in his care, really moved me, because I knew the feelings he was talking about all too well. And although I frequently had issues with the way the filmmaker was presenting information (saying that the only enemy that the parrots had besides hawks was humans, and then showing fighter planes over SF? the entire military-industrial complex is out to get the parrots? please.), I did walk away from the film with a real sense of the marvelousness of these parrots. That these birds who were mostly born in the wild so far away, underwent traumatic journeys to get to SF and then had to adapt to a totally new climate is a testament to their intelligence, to their intensely social nature and to the determination of nature. I would love to see/read a real study about these birds. A bird specialist interviewed briefly in the film noted that studying social relationships among parrots is very difficult in the wild, as flocks are always moving and individual birds are hard to see, so this represented a wonderful opportunity to do some genuinely new research. That's the movie I'd really like to see.
At any rate despite my criticisms it's well worth seeing, if just for the parrots alone.
Dance class tonight, yay!
Last night I watched The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill. I had mixed feelings about the film. All the Grateful Dead-ish country-ish music actively hurt me, for one thing. In a brilliant movie I could set that aside, but this one had enough other issues that it bothered me. Really my main issue was the way the filmmaker glossed over the parrot man's homelessness and squatting. She kept showing him doing laundry or sorting clean clothing, so it was clear to me that she was trying to point out that he was not some dirty homeless man, but then why never tackle the subject head on? Is being homeless/squatting just a common enough thing in San Francisco for it to be a normal part of the social fabric of life? Maybe I am too much a Yankee Puritan at heart, but I'm not sure that this is something that ought to be celebrated or glamorized or even normalized, particularly when I know from M's work that on this coast at least homeless people are that way only because of extremely bad luck, mental health issues, substance abuse issues or a borderline sociopathic sense of entitlement that makes one think society owes one everything, that jobs are for other people because you are too enlightened to buy into the capitalist paradigm. With this guy I felt like it was the lattermost.
I was also really bothered when he put Mingus outdoors where the poor bird was terrified, just because Mingus was acting like a parrot and defending his nest. You let animals take up residence in your house on their own terms--staking out under the fridge as a nest, for example--and you have to accept that some of their own terms are not going to be terribly convenient from the human's standpoint. You can't punish them for simply being what they are, let alone expect them to understand what that punishment means. He seemed so sensitive towards the parrots on so many other levels, but to me that interaction with Mingus said all this parrot stuff was more about feeling good about himself, and when it wasn't all beautiful and groovy and peaceable he reacted poorly and not in the parrot's best interest.
At the same time, many of his observations about the parrots were astute and interesting, and I think he did provide a public service by talking about the parrots to people and raising awareness of them. The section about Tupelo, the first parrot he took care of who died while in his care, really moved me, because I knew the feelings he was talking about all too well. And although I frequently had issues with the way the filmmaker was presenting information (saying that the only enemy that the parrots had besides hawks was humans, and then showing fighter planes over SF? the entire military-industrial complex is out to get the parrots? please.), I did walk away from the film with a real sense of the marvelousness of these parrots. That these birds who were mostly born in the wild so far away, underwent traumatic journeys to get to SF and then had to adapt to a totally new climate is a testament to their intelligence, to their intensely social nature and to the determination of nature. I would love to see/read a real study about these birds. A bird specialist interviewed briefly in the film noted that studying social relationships among parrots is very difficult in the wild, as flocks are always moving and individual birds are hard to see, so this represented a wonderful opportunity to do some genuinely new research. That's the movie I'd really like to see.
At any rate despite my criticisms it's well worth seeing, if just for the parrots alone.
Dance class tonight, yay!