X-Volcano-Files

I mentioned in an earlier post that I'm currently watching X-Files. I am not rewatching it as part of some nostalgia trip, I've never watched it before so it's all very exciting, people always tell me to watch cool new programmes but I'm like "I'm only just getting round to watching X-Files, I hadn't watched Buffy until this year, I'm not gonna watch fucking House of Cards'. This post however is not just about what 90s TV shows I have and haven't watched, which would really fucking interesting. I have known for some time that there was likely to be a volcano X-Files episode. It's called Firewalker and it was actually a really good episode, its in the mould of some of my favourite episodes which are monster of the week ones in some remote and claustrophobia inducing setting where everyone goes mad and no one is sure who is sane/alien/trying to kill everyone. It was also notable as it's the first episode Scully's in for a while, obviously I knew that she was coming back as there are shitloads more series but it was good to have her straight talking and impeccable suit wearing back. This is all in the settling of one of the lovely cascade volcanoes with some silicon based life form and people going mental. What more could you want? Here is a totally legal way to watch it.

See inside a volcano.

Volcano Top Trumps

One of the things I said I would write about is Volcano Top Trumps which are pretty amazing and my only volcano related Christmas present and therefore the best (thanks Paul!). As you may know/have guessed/deduced I am a massive top trump lover. Football top trumps were previously my favourite because of the great stats, I think I have 7 packs; Arsenal, Man Utd, Liverpool, Chelsea, World Stars, European Stars and Legends (if you're interested). I actually have a top trump card where 2014 Ballon D'or winner Christiano Ronaldo (to use his full title) has no Utd goals or int. caps, probably a great collectors item that's now worth a lot of fucking money. What is really fun with the football top trumps is you can combine packs so either have a really really massive game or people start with different teams which is a bit like a football match, if football was judged purely on facts like height and the year of birth. Lord of the Rings Top Trumps are also great, the main object here was obviously to keep Aragorn for as long as possible/ get all 3 Aragorn cards from all 3 films (and say "they have a cave-troll" as much as possible). I also used to collect the pop trumps cards on the back of Smash Hits which were really good as they were top trump cards with lyrics on the back, amazing I know (also probably now collectors items). The take home message from this paragraph is basically I LIKE TOP TRUMPS and I am incredibly cool. I like top trump so much and am so cool that once I made my friend a pack of Nigella chocolate cake top trumps, obviously there are enough recipes for 30 cards.

This is the card, someone has actually put it on ebay, no bids yet amazingly.

I also like volcanoes, so something that combines the two such as volcano top trumps is fucking heaven. I've only actually had one game with them so far, which was a large game with about 6 people. I think I was the first person out (which has nothing to do with my volcano knowledge) but it was very exciting. I'm sure I'll win all the other games I play, there will be lots. I'm not sure what my favourite volcano top trump card is, some famous volcanoes like Eyjafjallajökull are shit cards so that also sways your opinion. Also I haven't got the pack with me so it's hard to say but Vesuvius is always a goodun.  The project is made by STREVA with actual volcanologists from the University of East Anglia and the University of Plymouth. The website is pretty great and informative too, you can see that the selecting of categories was taken very seriously which is something we applaud here at volcano club. The categories are height, unpredictability, wow! factor, deadliness (best one), explosivity and devastation potential. I know wow! factor seems like an unscientific, vague category but you're wrong it's very scientific. It was done using paired comparisons (you see science) but all this is on the website where you can also order a pack of volcano top trumps. I'll let you know how my future games go.

I'm in Print!

At the weekend I bought this book which is very exciting as it's about volcanoes, it's by the curator of the Volcano: From Turner to Warhol exhibition which was at Compton Verney last year and was very good. But I think the best thing about the book has to be that I'm referenced in it! Not to say that it isn't otherwise a great book but everyone likes to feel important (and what makes you feel more important than seeing your name in print?)

I haven't really started reading it yet as I'm still recovering from the Eurovision at the weekend at which there were no volcano references- Come on Italy and Iceland, pull your fingers out. I know Russia also has lots of volcanoes but their entry could not have been improved on in any way. Back to volcanoes as sadly this isn't a eurovision blog. Anyway when I've read the book I'm sure I will have lots more stuff to blog about, as it opens with a quote from The Volcano Lover, it's bound to be great. It's part of the Reaktion Earth Series, of which the series editor Daniel Allen says.

The Earth series traces the historical significance and cultural history of natural phenomena. Written by experts who are passionate about their subject, title in the series bring together science, art, literature, mythology, religion and popular culture, exploring and explaining the planet we inhabit in new and exciting ways. 

The book is also full of lovely pictures such as these.

 Bernhard Picart, Enceladus buried beneath Mount Etna

 Brynjolfur Thordarson, Hekla

 Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, La Geria, Lanzarote

 Athanasius Kircher, Mundus Subterraneus

 Joseph Wright of Derby, Eruption of Vesuvius

 JMW Turner, Naples: Vesuvius from Naples: Rome

 Karl Briullov, Last Day of Pompeii

 Dieter Roth, Surtsey 

If anything will ever make you want to go anywhere

I've just watched this programme Julia Bradbury's Icelandic Walk where she walks up to Eyjafjallajokull and sees lots of beautiful volcanic landscape, hot springs, sulphur vents, nice huts and lovely Icelandic people with jumpers. I really enjoyed the simple explanations of geology which are made easier to understand by seeing the stunning effects they have on the landscape. Another thing that was significant was the recentness of the landscape which means it is quite barren so this not only fascinating from a geological point of view but also a biological one as you will actually be able to see the vegetation and life forming. I just think I'm going to have live in Iceland, be a hut warden and paint volcanoes every day, going to Sweden should bring me a step closer. The lunar like landscape slightly reminded me of the Outer Hebrides which have a similar barren bleakness, geographically they are fairly close too I suppose. I also watched this video which has a nice culinary slant on the guardian website. It's really great for me to see so much about Eyjafjallokull as its eruption was really what restarted the Volcano Club and while I do love all volcanoes, there is something really magical about Iceland; maybe it is the new landscape, the contrast of fire and ice or just the fact that it's like no where else in the world. If you're not an Icelandophile (it's a real term) then here are some more pretty pictures of volcanoes, having said this if you're not an Icelandophile you really need to look at your life. I just did a Google image search for Iceland and literally every picture was amazing so I just picked the first one.

Now I have to find a costume for Fake Christmas- which is tomorrow incase you were unaware, I can dress up as anyone from history, ever. Which is a harder theme than you may think. 

Semiconductor

Last Wednesday I went to the Semiconductor exhibition at FACT in Liverpool, semiconductor are a Brighton based duo who do volcanic video installations, needless to say I have been wanting to go to one of their exhibitions for a while. They did a residency in Ecuador studying volcanoes and also the practices involved in studying volcanoes, the methods used and the people who do it. The videos from Ecuador really showed how much the volcano is part of daily life, workers were playing football in the foreground of the volcano and there were also pictures of it drawn onto the windows. There were also images of volcanoes in beautifully untouched landscapes which gave a sense of timelessness and absence of the man made which was juxtaposed with images inside laboratories reminding me how modern science compels us to understand and research everything. While I do find beauty in scientific findings there is also great beauty in mystery and bizzare yet logical interpretations of it. Other videos were the formation of crystals which were created from sounds, this is so like Bjork's single, which isn't a criticism as similar things often happened around the same time like convergent evolution which is one of the coolest things in the world. And I if could convergently evolve to be like Bjork I'd be pretty happy. 

While Bjork and convergent evolution are of course incredibly relevant, they weren't actually what the exhibition was about. There was however a room which looked like a junkyard of discarded TVs which showed archive videos of people studying volcanoes. Again one on hand it showed how much a volcano becomes part of life, while monitoring people were eating sandwiches and drinking coffee, but it also showed the wide range of completely mental ways people study volcanoes such as running up to lava lakes with massive sticks and ramming them in and then using whatever is on the end of the stick to light cigarettes. But I can really understand how people do become that obsessive (especially about volcanoes) and I always love to see it probably because I can see myself becoming one of them. There was also a room where you could make your own volcano, by make I mean pour some bicarb, vinegar and washing up liquid down a papier mache volcano, but it was amazing. Sadly it has now finished so you can't go and make your own volcano but I suppose you could actually make your own volcano.

Biophilia

Isaac and I went to Bjork's Biophilia on Saturday which was as predicted absolutely amazing it was her last show in Manchester so the encore was slightly more 'hooligan' than all the other nights (which was a lot of fun). Biophilia is about the extremities of nature; from the cellular and microscopic to the galactic and planetary, I have always found these aspects of biology a lot more interesting than the organismal and ecological. But I think this is because I find comfort in the fact that we are insignificant; that life in both the tiny and massive scale is much more advanced and complicated than humanity. Because while we will eventually fade and disappear, life will exist in some tiny molecule and there will still be some habitat in space for it to survive in. In the words of Rick Blaine "it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world" I think that my childhood love of Casablanca has led to my bleak view of the world.

Anyway back to Bjork (I will need to do stuff to my mushroom ragout soon so tangents will be at a minimum), so many of the songs in biophilia were about my favourite things such as the moon, DNA, solstices and cells there was of course a song on plate tectonics. If only she had done a song on photosynthesis it would have been perfect. Every song had some video to accompany it which are all going to be iPad apps and I think the idea is that you can alter the song by playing with the app (which is pretty cool). The plate tectonics one showed magma moving around under the earth's surface and the breaks in continental plates; this was very useful for me as volcanoes tend to be formed around the spaces between these plates. The volcanic ring of fire marks the edge of a tectonic plate; I say it was useful for me as I find it very interesting but don't really know where the plates are and the video showed this. The song didn't have an eruption and seemed to be constantly building up to one but never quite reaching it and was more about the events leading up to it. There was a female Icelandic choir who were fantastic, the other best new songs were the moon one, crystalline and the virus one. However some slight critisms would be that it was half way between a concert and an art installation but not quite either therefore the delivery wasn't quite right so you couldn't really see the stage. Also pretty much all of her old songs sounded better than the new ones, Isaac was particularly happy as she did Mouth's Cradle which is his fav but I loved the time lapse fungi growth to Isobel. But it was absolutely amazing and I might have to buy an iPad so I can play with the Bjork apps.

Sorry this has been very rambling; maybe Casablanca isn't really that relevant so in the words of Bjork 'thank you' (really its funny when she says it as she has a great accent)

And of Clay We Are Created

When this is the second paragraph in a story,

First a subterranean sob rocked the cotton fields, curling them like waves of foam. Geologists had set their seismographs weeks before, and they knew that the mountain had awakened again. For some time they had predicted that the heat of the eruption could detach the the eternal from the slopes of the volcano, but no one headed their; warnings; they sounded like the tales of frightened old women. 

you know it's going to be good.  It's pretty much guaranteed that everything good in life will somehow (however tenuously) be linked to volcanoes, the theory has now been proven for Isabel Allende. This is an extract from The Stories of Eva Luna, which is a follow up to the novel 'Eva Luna'. It's a book of short stories told by Eva so it's stories within stories which is always nice. Many of the stories contain the same characters as Eva Luna, this one concerns Rolf Carle who ends up as Eva's lover (don't worry this isn't a spoiler). Rolf is reporting on the volcano erpution and encounters a girl, Azucena, trapped in the rubble as they both struggle for her survival and suffering he is reminded of the forgotten suffering of his childhood.

This was probably my favourite story in the book, but I am slightly volcano biased so the others are all also probably worth reading.

Green Volcano Man

I went to Green Man festival at the weekend and it was so awesome, that I decided to make some volcano links (as all awesome things are somehow linked to volcanoes). I have four (maybe slightly tenuous) links, I'll start with the least linked and work upwards to an amazing volcanic climax.

1. Beirut (New-Mexican Balkan folk band) who played on Friday and are pretty great have an E.P called Pompeii which was a town destroyed by a volcano.
2. Pompeii am Götterdämmerung is song by Flaming Lips, which I think was the penultimate one (it's all a bit of a glorious blur) and involved Wayne running around and hitting a big light up gong which was amazing. Götterdämmerung (twilight of the gods) is the last opera of Wagner's ring cycle and therefore pretty mental.

3. Ingrid Bergman a song originally by Woody Guthrie (I think) and covered by Billy Bragg on Saturday Night. It's about when Ingrid Bergman made the film Stromboli directed by Roberto Rossellini (which therefore produced Isabella- brilliant). The song uses the volcano as a symbol to metaphorically show their love. While she is one of the most beautiful women that ever lived, I'm not sure I could ever see her as volcanic (but I've never seen the film so what do I know?)

4 Last one, before I said this is the best links but actually it's probably the worst. Apparently the landscape around Abergavenny and Crickhowell, the site of the festival was crafted by a volcano in a prehistoric times. I can believe it as it was amazingly beautiful but I was told this by a boy who thinks a stoke is an animal.

Basically a pretty perfect weekend

Earthquakes in London

I know this isn't actually about volcanoes but it's all plate tectonics so I think I can bend the rules a little.



Earthquakes in London was an excellent play that I saw at the national theatre at the weekend, amongst other things it was about social breakdown, climate change and a massive earthquake in the capital. Like many people said about the recent Eyjafjallajoekull eruption this earthquake was seen as a punishment in result of our abuse to the world. Showing us how weak and insignificant we are compared to nature, which is either a very comforting or depressing thought. I'm personally quite reassured by the fact that nature can continue on without humanity and will grow and evolve to probably produce much more beautiful and interesting things. That to ecosystems we are insignificant and could just be wiped out by a massive earthquake, volcano or other natural disaster but life will continue. However I can kinda see how others find this depressing.

Anyway the play was absolutely brilliant had loads of really interesting issues and themes, brilliant performances and a killer soundtrack. Also while it was insanely sad, it did give me an uplifting feeling that everything was gonna be alright (but then I'd probably always think that if Do You Realize? by The Flaming Lips is the exit music)