The New Neo Primitive

I’m a Caveman / Your modern ways frighten and confuse me
I watch your spirit box with the blinking lights and think
Are those little people trapped in that box? (No, Caveman)

- El-P, “Deep Space 9mm“

1877. Dr. Richard Gatling writes to a friend of his new invention: “a machine … which could by rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that would, to a great extent, supersede the necessity of large armies, and consequently, exposure to battle and disease be greatly diminished.”

1910. Nicholas Roerich recounts to Igor Stravinsky his vision of a pagan ritual in which a young girl dances herself to death before a circle of elders who offer her as a sacrifice to the god of Spring.

1882. The Gatling Gun is used at the Bombardment of Alexandria. The British Royal Navy successfully quashes the Urabi Revolt. A century later, Charles Taylor paraphrases Hilaire Belloc: “Whatever happens / we have got the Gatling gun / and they have not.”

May 29, 1913. The Rite of Spring, composed by Stravinsky, choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky, and performed by Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, premieres at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees. The audience riots.

1914. Egypt is officially designated a British Protectorate.

March 1, 1954.    The U.S. military detonates a dry fuel thermonuclear hydrogen bomb (code name Castle Bravo) at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. It forms a fireball roughly four and a half miles wide within a second.  The bomb is 1,200 times more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

September 23, 1954. Aikichi Kuboyama, radio operator of a tuna-fishing boat that fell victim to the fallout of Castle Bravo, dies from radiation poisoning at the age of 40. He reportedly leaves behind the words: “I pray that I am the last victim of an atomic or hydrogen bomb.”  50 years later, the Washington Post covers the anniversary of the detonation; reports that the Bikini people continued dying of cancer:

With only a few doctors, the hospital on Majuro, the capital of the Marshall Islands, is repeatedly overwhelmed. Hundreds of people line up to wait for appointments with the understaffed medical team. Niedenthal says the long-term effect of radiation is only one of the health hurdles the Marshallese face. The introduction of processed foods to people who had once subsisted solely on fish and fruits has created unwanted medical conditions: diabetes, high blood pressure and obesity.

1955.  Jack Kerouac meets Gary Snyder at a poetry reading in San Francisco. Kerouac joins him at his cabin outside Mill Valley, California, which Snyder has named Marin-an: Japanese for “Horse Grove Hermitage.”

1958. Kerouac publishes Dharma Bums, an account of his time “mountaineering” with Snyder. Ruth Fuller Sasaki later writes to Snyder, remarking of Kerouac,  ”His Buddhism is the most garbled and mistaken I have read in many a day . . ..”

1969. Dow Chemical begins manufacturing Napalm for use by the U.S. Military.

1969. Dian Fossey retreats to the Virunga Mountains to study gorilla society. To reassure the gorillas, she mimicks their actions, grunting and eating the local celery plant. She becomes known by locals as Nyirmachabelli, roughly translated as “The woman who lives alone on the mountain.” Jane Goodall publishes her book about living in chimpanzee society: My Friends the Wild Chimpanzees.

1972. Vietnam War. Nine-year-old Kim Phuc’s village is bombed with napalm. She runs naked from the bombing and is caught on camera in one of the most iconic images of the war. Decades later, Phuc reflects, “Napalm is the most terrible pain you can imagine. Water boils at 100 degrees Celsius. Napalm generates temperatures of 800 to 1,200 degrees Celsius.”

March 16–17, 1988.  Iran-Iraq War. Iraqi aircraft drop chemical bombs on Kurdish residential areas in Halabja. Survivors later say the gas smelled like sweet apples. People die in a number of ways — some of the victims “just drop dead” while others “die of laughing”. More than 7000 people die that day. An Iranian journalist walks into the aftermath, later describes the scene, “It was a new kind of death to me.”

1990. Dances with Wolves wins 7 Academy Awards. Kevin Costner plays John Dunbar, an American soldier who flees from war and finds himself drawn to the lifestyle and customs of a Sioux tribe. Dunbar becomes a hero among the Sioux and is accepted as an honored guest after he locates a migrating herd of buffalo. 17 years later the film is selected for preservation in the Library of Congress.

March 21, 2003. Coalition forces begin a “shock and awe” strike on Iraq. They plan to launch 800 missiles at major cities in Iraq during the first few days of the invasion.  During the first attack on Baghdad, the U.S. military fires 320 Tomahawk cruise missiles from battleships in the Gulf and the Red Sea. They move the MOAB (nickname: Mother Of All Bombs), the largest conventional explosive in the world, to Iraq.

December 5, 2003.  Warner Brothers releases The Last Samurai, a movie about a Civil War veteran who is recruited to train the Japanese army in the use of “modern weapons,” but is changed when he is captured by the samurai and learns about their traditions.

2004. Dennis Lehane publishes Shutter Island, a novel about a pair of U.S. Marshals investigating an island asylum-prison in the year 1954:

March 2006. Mel Gibson releases Apocalypto. “Set in the waning days of the Mayan civilization, the picture provides a trip to a place one’s never been before, offering hitherto unseen sights of exceptional vividness and power … Cast largely with indigenous nonpros speaking the prevailing surviving dialect of the Mesoamericans, Apocalypto is exotic, wild, ferocious …” A good third of the movie centers on the idyllic village life of protagonist Jaguar Paw, a milieu that is presented in hyper-detail. The rest of the movie focuses on Jaguar Paw’s efforts to avoid being the subject of human sacrifice.

2008. MGMT releases the album Oracular Spectacular, which includes its single “Electric Feel” (see below). Pitchfork gives the album a 6.8.

Jan 2009. Israeli forces drop a 2000 lb. bomb on a building in Gaza. The Associated Press reports:

The hit on Rayan’s home obliterated the four-story apartment building and peeled off the walls of others around it, creating a field of rubble in the crowded town of Jebaliya in the northern Gaza Strip. Mounds of debris thrown up by the blast swallowed up cars.

2009. The Obama administration pursues a practice of targeted international killings using Predator drones. In one incident, drones kill dozens of villagers attending a funeral service, including several children. Jane Mayer (The New Yorker) reports that people living in targeted areas refer to Predator drones as machay (“wasps”), due to the buzzing noise the drones make when they hover over someone.

December 10, 2009. Avatar, a $300 million+ cinematic production, premieres in London. The film tells a story about the Na’vi, an alien race who live in harmony with nature in a “Home Tree” and worship an Earth Goddess called Eywa.

In reference to the use of the phrase “shock and awe” in the film, director James Cameron says, “We know what it feels like to launch the missiles. We don’t know what it feels like for them to land on our home soil, not in America.”

January 10, 2010. The New York Times publishes an article on the New York “cavemen”: “a subculture whose members seek good health through a selective return to the habits of their Paleolithic ancestors.”

The caveman lifestyle, in Mr. Durant’s interpretation, involves eating large quantities of meat and then fasting between meals to approximate the lean times that his distant ancestors faced between hunts. Vegetables and fruit are fine, but he avoids foods like bread that were unavailable before the invention of agriculture. Mr. Durant believes the human body evolved for a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and his goal is to wean himself off what he sees as many millenniums of bad habits.

These urban cavemen also choose exercise routines focused on sprinting and jumping, to replicate how a prehistoric person might have fled from a mastodon.

February 12, 2010. A Texas congressman calls for the federal government to use Predator drone patrols along the U.S.-Mexico border to combat narcotics trafficking and terrorism along the Rio Grande.

February 16, 2010. Martin Scorcese’s feature-length adaptation of Lehane’s novel premieres in theaters. At the end of the film, DiCaprio’s “Teddy” walks towards a lobotomy, says, “Is it better to live like a monster or die a good man?”

2010. Fitzsu, an online store specializing in luxury gifts for the modern home, office and person, sells an item called the “Mono tools Table Fork.” The fork

is dedicated to the Neanderthal whose remains were found very close to the mono factory in Mettmann, Germany. Tools used by cavemen, the hand axe inspired the knife, the elongated fork is reminiscent of early skewing tools, and the spoon recalls a cupping hand. This is how eating becomes a primal experience.