Talking about the Des Almado Parrots (Patreon)

I wanted to talk about the parrot motif in Barber Westchester and how it came about..

I remember I was reading the Zoobooks Parrots issue as a little kid, I found out that parrots in South America eat poison berries all day long, and to neutralize the poison in their diet they go and scrape raw clay off of cliff sides and eat it 

(an image from the zoobook about parrots. I remember obsessing over this page, the art is so visceral to me. I can't remember exactly where I got it, maybe the library? I remember I was very little, probably around 4-5 years old, and I was reading it in a bunch of different places and carrying it around with me. I remember being really excited that I had it, like almost proud of myself)

Excerpt from a documentary about this phenomenon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_Cl6uIrMVI

For some reason this "parrots eating clay" thing really captured my imagination and I would think about it all the time, like just randomly popping into my mind for the rest of my life, and it would make me really happy to think about for some reason

Separately, in Southern California, where I grew up, there's this thing where a bunch of wild non-native parrots suddenly appeared one day in the 80's, with their family getting bigger every year, flying around and living in random trees. Nobody really knows for sure how they got there or where they came from. Here's a pretty funny article about it: https://www.theocyoudontsee.com/2019/07/the-orange-county-parrots.html

My friend Jennifer Nie (who is helping write/animate The Cone Layer) actually made a film also with the SoCal parrots as a motif: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bg4r1h24jTk

When I started writing the clay people element of SALIATOS, it was always a part of it that they were made out of the same type of clay the parrots in South America eat- It would make me laugh whenever I'd think about it. When I was making Barber, I remembered that during one of the worst parts of my life in high school, some of the wild parrots moved into our backyard, and everyday I'd wake up to parrots screaming outside my window. I remember around this time I was being forced to sleep in the dining room with a room divider, sharing it with a racist Christian guy I hated, who lived in our house basically rent-free for no reason. Around this time, I was about 16 or 17, the mental issues I had been dealing with for most of my life were getting even worse. I had been intensely dissociating for most of my life (the mind island parts of Barber are meant to try and express how that feels). My sister also had a pet bird that would screech really loudly a lot as a kid, and was a source of a lot of loud screaming in my house from my dad, and I was always on edge when I would hear birds as a result, and I think because of what was going on at the time, I started to associate parrots with what I was going through, and was scared of them for a long time.

As I started writing, I felt that the parrots worked as a pretty interesting symbol in the movie. The mayor starts replacing people in the town with the amorphous clay people, around when Barber's disassociating is getting worse, so while they're a literal plot element, they also end up working as an expression of Barber's disassociation. As the mayor enacts their plan, the parrots also come to eat the clay people, to neutralize the poison in their digestive system. 

In the movie, pretty much as a rule, everything that torments Barber is man-made and imposed on them, and it gets worse when Barber tries to ignore it. What sets Barber free, both in this movie, and in the upcoming installments, is just paying attention, and starting to mindfully live in the world around them. 

Both the clay and the parrots are things that terrify Barber, but what's happening is completely unrelated to anything Barber is going through. The parrots don't know about the mayor's plot or anything that's happening, they're just coming to eat the clay, which neutralizes toxins in their body. They don't even have a thought process about it, they're not doing it for any altruistic or anarchic reason, they just do it instinctively. They basically foil the mayor's plan without even knowing about it, and to them the clay people are this positive thing that saves their lives from dying of poison 

I felt really passionate about ending the movie by focusing on the parrots and giving them their own song. As I've gotten older, I've started to have an incredible fondness for birds and parrots. I get a lot of comfort from watching videos of birds, going birdwatching, and reading/thinking about bird behavior. I've grown to have a new positive association with birds. What I'm learning recently, when I evaluate my memories and the symbols that populate my mind, instead of lumping every individual element together to reflect the traumatic events, I can separate all the elements, looking at them individually, and appreciate the eternal complexity of my surroundings 

When Dylan and I wrote the song that ends the movie, he came to my apartment and we had a super long conversation that lasted like 3 or 4 hours, going over every thematic element of the movie, what the parrots meant to me. We went back and forth trying to figure out what a song that "encapsulates the life of a parrot" would be like. I had all these weird emotions and concepts I wanted the song to reflect, and we wrote a bunch of long lyrics that we scrapped, until Dylan just went "What if it was like, 'we sing, we fly, we land, we eat'" and we settled on that - he added the introduction bit later to basically summarize what we talked about lol

"Now that we find ourselves in the violent energy that lies behind words
There will be something to do with the promised land now
The languid yet impermanent fluttering wings of souls
For unspecified increments of unknowable time
As it is
As it was
And as it will be

We sing
We fly
We land
We eat"