The Fabulous Forager

I can never get into live albums. Or remixes, for that matter, or any alternate version of a song that I know. The few exceptions to this rule tend to be songs I heard first and/or exclusively as live versions (Nirvana’s “About a Girl,” for example) or songs unique to that live performance. But in every other case, multiple versions of the same song generally just irk me. At the very least, there’s always that one line that the singer changes a little, or that bass that doesn’t come in at the right moment, that pops out at me and sounds horribly, resoundingly wrong. As you can imagine, for this reason the recent tidal wave of “Hallelujah” covers has driven me completely insane.

A common concern among women who stumble upon primitivism (usually through their boyfriends or husbands) is that living primitively is necessarily anti-feminist, since there is no way for a woman to control when or if she gets pregnant without the help of latex condoms, pills, and so forth. But looking at the grand sweep of human history, this is patently untrue. All primitive peoples practice some form–usually multiple forms–of birth control. In a nomadic society, it’s essential to keep the population low because you can’t have more babies than you can carry from one camp to the next. (And when you practice attachment parenting and late weaning, that reduces the number of babies even lower than a number we Westerners might imagine.)