I was at an early spring party, a club on a deck overlooking the Hudson river, well north in Manhattan. We were talking about superhero movies, my friend whose son went to see the new Spider-Man movie. He liked it.
"I missed the Captain America movie. I liked the first one."
"Yeah. I heard it was good."
"New Godzilla movie out."
"Yeah, only this time he tears up the west coast, not New York."
"I think the last superhero movie I saw was the last Superman movie - "
"Man of Steel?"
"Yeah, it was good, good."
" I liked it, but it reminded me too much of 9/11."
"How so?"
"The dust, the destruction. The scenes where they attack the city."
"I though War of the Worlds was the first movie about 9/11."
I thought, despite its plot, it captured the fear, the inexplicable randomness of thousands of people, vaporized before our eyes, the sky filled with dust, so many fleeing in terror.
"Yeah, yeah I can see that."
"I'm not ready to go to the museum, the memorial downtown."
"Yeah, me neither."
"I don't need a reminder, I remember it."
"My niece asked me about it. She's ten, she was surprised it happened before she was born."
"Yeah?"
"She thought, 9/11 meant the year 2011."
Chuckling.
"She asked me what I was doing that day and, I'm OK talking about it, I told her, but I was surprised at how emotional I felt."
"Yeah."
Moments.
"So new new X-Men is coming out. I liked the last one."
"It's like, a prequel to the sequels."
"A se-pre-quel I guess."
"Yeah. "
"I'm gonna grab another beer."
Tuesday, May 20, 2014
Monday, April 21, 2014
Traveler
clack. clack. clack. New Jersey rolls by in the distance, the urban sprawl of Newark and Seacaucus giving way to the wider fields past Elizabeth, onwards to Metuchen and New Brunswick, until, at last, in the fields near Princeton, the Garden State resembles its sublime moniker.
Or, all the same, as I fly down 95 after a detour by my home, across the George Washington Bridge, the radio playing, left for this connection, right for the other, through the turnpike and into the express lane.
I've traveled a lot lately, sometimes for fun, sometimes for work. Though my office is in New York City, my company has another office in East Windsor, New Jersey, closer to Trenton. My boss lives in Pennsylvania, as does a former colleague. We have a huge project on hand, and the Windsor office has become the central command post in our campaign.
A couple of weeks ago, I flew to Tulsa for my brother's wedding, departing out of Newark, the smoking steel towers of the region giving way quickly to fields and streams before we climbed so high that we might have been anywhere.
Before that, I went with some friends to a paddlesport expo, driving through the Holland Tunnel, the air blowers of which form one of the corners of our kayaking area. I've driven under, and paddled over, the same spot in the river, and that seemed kind of surreal to me.
While I'm at it, every day I walk three blocks up a hill to take and escalator nearly as far down, to board a subway that whisks me to work, in a building that, curiously, is built immediately above the train station that would take me to New Jersey.
I applied for a job out there, and almost took it, before deciding my current job wasn't so bad, and I wasn't prepared to leave the city.
I wrote some years ago that I feel at home in a terminal; there are signs, there is order, there are goals and destinations, rest stops and a feeling of motion, sometimes paused. I'll say that is my life, though I have carved out a home, and the stability I crave. I have a home base, but I am an interloper, seeing all these places, from all these angles.
The wind whips through the fields. I've seen the same marshes around Seacaucus in spring, summer, winter, fall, in howling rain and driven snow, in sunshine and in darkness. Past Newark, where all the inexperienced travelers que because they think it's the airport, then past the airport, and onwards, away from sprawl, to suburbia, to exurbia, and eventually to the municipal haven of New Brunswick.
How much space does one man need? In the end, not a lot, at least not all at once. But to see it, experience it, traverse it all, there can never be too much.
Or, all the same, as I fly down 95 after a detour by my home, across the George Washington Bridge, the radio playing, left for this connection, right for the other, through the turnpike and into the express lane.
I've traveled a lot lately, sometimes for fun, sometimes for work. Though my office is in New York City, my company has another office in East Windsor, New Jersey, closer to Trenton. My boss lives in Pennsylvania, as does a former colleague. We have a huge project on hand, and the Windsor office has become the central command post in our campaign.
A couple of weeks ago, I flew to Tulsa for my brother's wedding, departing out of Newark, the smoking steel towers of the region giving way quickly to fields and streams before we climbed so high that we might have been anywhere.
Before that, I went with some friends to a paddlesport expo, driving through the Holland Tunnel, the air blowers of which form one of the corners of our kayaking area. I've driven under, and paddled over, the same spot in the river, and that seemed kind of surreal to me.
While I'm at it, every day I walk three blocks up a hill to take and escalator nearly as far down, to board a subway that whisks me to work, in a building that, curiously, is built immediately above the train station that would take me to New Jersey.
I applied for a job out there, and almost took it, before deciding my current job wasn't so bad, and I wasn't prepared to leave the city.
I wrote some years ago that I feel at home in a terminal; there are signs, there is order, there are goals and destinations, rest stops and a feeling of motion, sometimes paused. I'll say that is my life, though I have carved out a home, and the stability I crave. I have a home base, but I am an interloper, seeing all these places, from all these angles.
The wind whips through the fields. I've seen the same marshes around Seacaucus in spring, summer, winter, fall, in howling rain and driven snow, in sunshine and in darkness. Past Newark, where all the inexperienced travelers que because they think it's the airport, then past the airport, and onwards, away from sprawl, to suburbia, to exurbia, and eventually to the municipal haven of New Brunswick.
How much space does one man need? In the end, not a lot, at least not all at once. But to see it, experience it, traverse it all, there can never be too much.
Sunday, February 9, 2014
Walking After Midnight on the Doomsday Clock
The second half of the Walking Dead, season four, premiered tonight. I watch the show regularly, but I can't say I'm a zombie fan. It's more, I'm a post-apocalypse fan.
Being an eighties child, I grew up with the apocalypse. The threat of nuclear armageddon, and the movies that it spawned, was the main thread. Certainly, having a childhood in Oklahoma there was plenty of "Bible/Nostradamus" end of the world anticipation, not to mention having a father in the military, and later living in West Germany in the final years of the Cold War. I regularly saw tanks on the highway and attack helicopters on the ground near my high school. The prospect of global annihilation was very real to me.
Nowadays, with the threat of superpowers lobbing ICBMs at each other much less likely, other feast have taken hold. EMPs wiping out our modern technology, asteroids hitting the Earth, or plague films. These last seem to be the most common, from Outbreak to Steven Soderbergh's Contagion film. Modern zombie films seem to be variants of these.
A former boyfriend pointed this out when we were dating. He was an avowed zombie fan, not an infection fan. Perhaps it's best he joined my list of exes.
I have to say, though, he was right. When I was a kid, zombies were the undead, brought back to life. They were not demons, and they were not vampires (Robert Rodriguez seems to conflate all three). Culturally, they were placed under a course by a voodoo priest or witch doctor - the living dead were more or less human but with no minds of their own.
The Walking Dead, and other contemporary zombie shows, seem to use infection as a modern explanation of how this would work. Being a zombie is like being rabid, much like 28 Days (and eventually, Weeks) later. You get bit, you lose your mind, and attack the nearest non-rabid humans.
Except . . .the Walking Dead still acknowledges death. People die before they become zombies. They die of disease. They die of wounds and injuries. Early in the show, MRI scans are shown of the brain as it "reboots" into is zombie state. The zombie pathogen somehow rewires the brain to function after the brain has died.
OK, so far. But then, what about the rest of biology? Or, necrology rather. In the show, bodies appear to deteriorate. As the show has moved forward in time, zombies have gotten squishier and fall apart more easily. Yet, how are they able to move? What little knowledge I have of human necrology is that we tend to bloat until all those gasses come out. After that we dry up.
For that matter, how does regular sustenance work. Do zombies need water? Do they get dehydrated? How is protein being converted into muscle mass if their muscles have already deteriorated? For that matter how do they digest if there is not digestive tract? In the first episode, a little girl was show crawling . . .with no abdomen. How are these neurons firing? What is powering these things?
All little trifles to be overlooked, zombie fans assure me. Don't take it so seriously. And, I don't. Like I said, I watch for the post-apocalyptic aspect.Things like, the breakdown of civilization. Scavenging for food and fuel. Organizing into groups and attempting to rebuild civilization. I watch The Walking Dead for the same reason I watched a reboot of the British show Survivors - it's about a small group of people who survive a more conventional though severely lethal plague, and who then fight over he scraps.
It's insight into our base motivations, and the tribal conflicts that have been smoothed over by centuries of laws, customs, and agreements - and which still flare up today. I watch these shows because they remind me how fragile the whole system it - and how glad I am that it works at all.
Being an eighties child, I grew up with the apocalypse. The threat of nuclear armageddon, and the movies that it spawned, was the main thread. Certainly, having a childhood in Oklahoma there was plenty of "Bible/Nostradamus" end of the world anticipation, not to mention having a father in the military, and later living in West Germany in the final years of the Cold War. I regularly saw tanks on the highway and attack helicopters on the ground near my high school. The prospect of global annihilation was very real to me.
Nowadays, with the threat of superpowers lobbing ICBMs at each other much less likely, other feast have taken hold. EMPs wiping out our modern technology, asteroids hitting the Earth, or plague films. These last seem to be the most common, from Outbreak to Steven Soderbergh's Contagion film. Modern zombie films seem to be variants of these.
A former boyfriend pointed this out when we were dating. He was an avowed zombie fan, not an infection fan. Perhaps it's best he joined my list of exes.
I have to say, though, he was right. When I was a kid, zombies were the undead, brought back to life. They were not demons, and they were not vampires (Robert Rodriguez seems to conflate all three). Culturally, they were placed under a course by a voodoo priest or witch doctor - the living dead were more or less human but with no minds of their own.
The Walking Dead, and other contemporary zombie shows, seem to use infection as a modern explanation of how this would work. Being a zombie is like being rabid, much like 28 Days (and eventually, Weeks) later. You get bit, you lose your mind, and attack the nearest non-rabid humans.
Except . . .the Walking Dead still acknowledges death. People die before they become zombies. They die of disease. They die of wounds and injuries. Early in the show, MRI scans are shown of the brain as it "reboots" into is zombie state. The zombie pathogen somehow rewires the brain to function after the brain has died.
OK, so far. But then, what about the rest of biology? Or, necrology rather. In the show, bodies appear to deteriorate. As the show has moved forward in time, zombies have gotten squishier and fall apart more easily. Yet, how are they able to move? What little knowledge I have of human necrology is that we tend to bloat until all those gasses come out. After that we dry up.
For that matter, how does regular sustenance work. Do zombies need water? Do they get dehydrated? How is protein being converted into muscle mass if their muscles have already deteriorated? For that matter how do they digest if there is not digestive tract? In the first episode, a little girl was show crawling . . .with no abdomen. How are these neurons firing? What is powering these things?
All little trifles to be overlooked, zombie fans assure me. Don't take it so seriously. And, I don't. Like I said, I watch for the post-apocalyptic aspect.Things like, the breakdown of civilization. Scavenging for food and fuel. Organizing into groups and attempting to rebuild civilization. I watch The Walking Dead for the same reason I watched a reboot of the British show Survivors - it's about a small group of people who survive a more conventional though severely lethal plague, and who then fight over he scraps.
It's insight into our base motivations, and the tribal conflicts that have been smoothed over by centuries of laws, customs, and agreements - and which still flare up today. I watch these shows because they remind me how fragile the whole system it - and how glad I am that it works at all.
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