Birds And Bon Iver And Bonnie Prince Billy

“If females can hear all song types equally well, they will go for the sexy ones, but if they cannot hear the sexy ones well anymore, then they might just go for the songs they can still hear. It could very well be that noise pollution is interfering with reproductive decisions by females.”
 — Wouter Halfwerk, a behavioral ecologist at Leiden University in the Netherlands, on his study that indicates male birds are increasing the pitch of their singing to distinguish their songs from man-made sounds. Which is maybe what Bon Iver did when he went out to that cabin after he broke up with his saxophonist girlfriend?

I love that “Holocene” video, but, man it makes me itchy watching that kid put on that fuzzy wool sweater with no shirt underneath. And then I get all bothered in later scenes, when he DOES have a shirt underneath, but sometimes it’s a white shirt and sometimes a black one. (Wardrobe! Who’s the script supervisor on this project?!) And I call BULLSHIT!!! when he skips what must be the most unskippable-looking rock in the history of rock skipping like twenty skips across that pond. But then he throws that other rock and it turns into a sea eagle, and then the cliffs he’s climbing on start morphing geologically like we’re watching thousands of years of tectonic forces unfold before our eyes in a matter of seconds and I realize that perhaps the video is not meant to be taken as a literal factual account. And I relax some and let my myself enjoy it’s stunning beauty. I’ve been watching it a lot lately.

Also, on the subject of people being like birds, do you know this song from Bonnie Prince Billy?

It’s one the most beautiful songs I know in the world. And the chorus, which begins “So tweet with me…” is hard not to think of every time you use the Twitter machine.