The other week, I went to the Natural History Museum for the first time since I was a kid. Back then, I had two great loves: dinosaurs and attention. I’ve obviously gone down the other path, but for a while I was convinced I was going to become a palaeontologist. Jurassic Park was too scary for me but Walking with Dinosaurs rocked my world. I got way into it. Dinosaur books, dinosaur facts, dinosaur knobs on my bedside table. The relative dearth of age-appropriate dinosaur videogames was a problem. The older brother of my Norwegian friend Fillip had a copy of Turok: Dinosaur Hunter we would surreptitiously play, although the real pleasure there was the transgression of, as we understood it, theft.

Oh, before I dilute the brand too much, the piece I performed in the Ukrainian Drama Showcase the other week was streamed and archived. You can click here to take a gander, if you’re interested.

Zero Protocol wrapped yesterday; that’s the very big feature where I had a very small part as a freaky lil’ not-zombie infected horror creature type guy (guys, plural, really). I’ll have more to share about that experience once I’ve slept a bit—16-hour days in monster mode are taxing.

Also: New podcast episode with the icons Caden Rodems-Boyd and Tris Arthur, talking about the movie we made together last year and other fun things. Working title for the film is Last Train Home, where I also played a freaky lil’ guy! Movie’s in post-production but the podcast is available right now.

Also-also: Go Habs!

Where was I? Dinosaurs! Theft. I still have some fossils. Childhood gifts, in frames dinged and scratched from a couple of decades of shuffling between shelves in various homes and apartments: a little trilobite, a shrimp of some sort, a fish, an ammonite. A megalodon tooth.

These items almost certainly entered the commercial market illegally.¹ Taken from somewhere by somebody, maybe given a certificate of authenticity to boost the price by somebody somewhere else. It’s tradition; the history of palaeontology is rich with cads and con artists. And it’s not like a fossil stolen from public land or smuggled from abroad is metaphysically different than a fossil purchased from a landowner or donated by the Koch family. They look the same, sitting on the shelf. They’re just rocks, at the end of the day.

If it feels tenuous to assign property rights to the bones of an animal roughly 125,000 times older than common law, something that doesn’t predate our nations so much as our continents, I think it’s because doing so renders visible the ever-present gulf between material and conceptual reality within which we make our lives. It’s like witnessing a citizenship ceremony, or a marriage. A magistrate says some words, some papers are signed, and lo, you’re something totally new (despite in another sense not having changed at all). In these moments, law is revealed to be a spell, a social fiction that only works if we all believe in it and play along, which we do because the benefits are enormous and the costs of opting out are even greater.

This is a good thing, to be clear—big fan of society over here. But it can be uncomfortable and startling to be reminded that we live suspended in a web of stories, very few of which we weave ourselves. It can be scary to look down and suddenly find the ground to be 100 million years below you. It’s reasonable to not want to think too hard about that.

Mind you, none of this matters much to the child with her fossil and her joyful dreams of ancient beasties; or, frankly, to the guy with the pick and the bag. So much in life is like this.

Take any glittering surface, any great gift and advancement, any of the glorious engines of our society of riches, well-lubricated and wrapped in plastic; open them, unroll the edges: out seeps slavery, poison, blood, oil. The meagre moral problems of the fossil trade can’t quite compete with its brother, given that the outcome of our civilization running down the clock on fossil fuels is the end of everything and everyone. It’s worth remembering that hydrocarbons are the concentrated remains of ancient life: there’s a certain poetry to the overwhelming necrotic influence of their extraction and consumption that would be easier to appreciate if it weren’t such a manifold jumble of big fucking problems.

One of these problems, and a reason the whole setup persists, is that the riches and wonders are material, but if you’re not within or attentive to the margins, the moral and ecological and economic and social and political and personal costs remain largely conceptual (which also makes it easier to enjoy the riches). On the other hand, if you are aware of and bearing those costs, well, then you’ve got that to deal with. A certain kind of person won’t believe they’re falling until they see the floor rushing up at them. A certain kind of person won’t believe it even after they hit the ground.

I still have my fossils. Dinosaurs are cool and they remind me of the nice parts of childhood. The costs, such as they are, remain comfortably external to me. The implications are so small, and so far away, and it’s so very easy to cut that string loose and not think about it at all.

But have you seen the price of gas lately? It’s downright theft!

Love,

C

// New Stuff

// New Mountain Goats

// New Jim Crow

// New Jim Crow 2

// New Theatre Manifesto

// New Jess DeFino

// New Citation

1. https://web.archive.org/web/20120227170051/http://science.nationalgeographic.com/science/prehistoric-world/fossil-wars.html