Ladies and Gentlemen, the New World Trade Center
The proposals for the new World Trade Center have been unveiled. Yes, that giant waffle thing pictured above is one of them. And yes, it's not only breathtakingly ridiculous, it's also completely unbuildable, both structurally and financially. Judging by what I can see in the article, the others aren't much better; there's nary one in the bunch that's not either aesthetically vomitous or inherently unstable or both. Considering the original buildings, which were marvels of economical and practical structural engineering, it's somewhat bewildering that respected architects proposed to replace them with designs so completely uneconomical, both in terms of cost and use of space. It's even more bewildering that each design team got $40,000 for their unusable results.
Is this the future of skyscraper design? Thankfully, probably not. But I'd be curious to see what is.
Merry Christmas
It's cold in Cleveland, but it started snowing an hour ago, which makes up for it. I can take the cold if it comes with snow. Wasn't expecting a white Christmas, but here it is anyway, sneaking in just under the wire. Just before midnight, I went out for a walk, enjoying the quiet of night snow, the cold sparkling on my face, the flakes catching the reflection of the streetlights and spiraling down like falling stars in slow motion. It's times like those when I could convince myself to move to Vermont, or Colorado, someplace with long winters of snow and silences, where you just hole up with a warm fire and watch it all come down.
Tomorrow, I'll be shovelling the stuff and wishing I was back in Florida. But that's tomorrow. For tonight, I'll enjoy it for what it is.
Merry Christmas, everyone.
I Am Engaged.
Yes, I have actually found a beautiful woman who is so out-of-her-head crazy that she wants to spend the rest of her life with me. Legally. Of her own free will. Without the aid of mind-altering substances.
Way to go, me!
"Santa got hit with a lawsuit. I got my ass handed to me."
The Internet is Blowing Up My Head
I honestly don't spend a lot of time online. Ironically, I don't have regular access at my day job, and when I get home, I've got plenty of other things I want to do more than stare at another screen. But as a result, I tend to forget just how much cool stuff is out there.
In fifteen minutes last night, I downloaded a supremely useful tool for compiling and browsing online news articles, sampled an innovative drag-and-drop desktop interface, and discovered a clever application that uses Trackback (itself a clever peer-to-peer communications framework that allows a preview of your latest entry on your weblog to be automatically posted to other sites) and RSS (Really Simple Syndication) to search through other weblogs for similar entries to what you just posted.
Then, when I was in the middle of compiling a clever post about it all, my browser crashed.
It works like that sometimes.
Half-Hour Fiction
[Call it a writing exercise...]
Miles had just about finished digging up the fifteen-foot by thirty-five-foot shallow trench the plans for the driveway called for when he came across something he hadn't expected. A hand, to be exact. And while finding a hand buried in his front yard was certainly enough to give a man pause, the hand had two definitive characteristics that sent Miles for a spin.
The first: the hand, a left, sticking up nearly perpendicular to the ground, it's fingers dirt-caked and curled with rigormortis, was definitely attached to something else further beneath the surface. Something that was most likely an arm, and God knew what beyond that.
The second: it was wearing his wedding ring.
Miles glanced at his own hand , forgotten for the moment and tightly gripping the shovel, and confirmed that he was still wearing the silver, oddly twisted band that his wife had forged and shaped herself during her apprenticeship to a metalsmith who kept a shop in downtown Portland. Seeing the ring on his finger, he raised his eyes to its facsimile on the dead body part stuck where his driveway was supposed to be, looking as though it was either seeking assistance ("Hey Mister! Give a fella a HAND?") or gesturing for a halt to the forthcoming construction.
If it was the latter the hand wished to convey, it had certainly succeeded.
...
"Damn," said Dave, kneeling a safe distance away from the dead left hand, still clad in his bathrobe and slippers and clutching his newspaper, his Sunday brunch with the Courier having been interruped by the appearance of his neighbor on his front porch. "Have you touched it yet?"
"Of course not." Miles was on the verge of losing his own breakfast, having noticed a few minutes ago that, beneath the dark particles of Oregon dirt, the knuckle of the little finger of the object (was a hand a member or a limb, or neither? He wasn't sure) bore the same scar of a childhood encounter with a barbed-wire fence as his own.
"Damn," Dave said again. He began to reach out himself, as if to return the post-mortem offer for a handshake, then thought better of it. "Is it real?"
"I'm thinking it is." He was sure of it, in fact.
"How'd it end up in your yard?"
"I don't know," said Miles. He hesitated for a moment. "But I do believe it's mine."
...
Dave had brought out the lawn chair from Miles' garage and sat and watched carefully as Miles carefully dug a deeper circle roughly six feet in diameter around the protrusion in his yard, gently probing with the shovel before transferring the dirt in neat piles just beyond the circumference.
"You know," Dave said thoughtfully, "I'll bet it IS yours. It's on your land, after all, right? You own, right? No mortgage."
Miles kept digging, ignoring both his neighbor's misinterpretation of his earlier statement and his more subtle pry into his personal finances. But Dave was right: he did own, having paid the cash for the land and the house from the somber windfall that had resulted from his wife's untimely demise.
His excavation had resulted in a shallow cone of soil that peaked with the dead hand, and as he gingerly scraped the dirt away from it, he revealed something else that made him finally drop the shovel and sink to a seat on the soft turned ground.
The damn thing was wearing his watch.
Downtown
After a tasty, if overpriced, brunch at Bubby's with friends to kill the remnants of my post-holiday-party hangover, I headed down to United Artists's neglected movie theatre in Battery Park to see STAR TREK: NEMESIS. My nearly forgotten fondness for the television show's been revived by the reruns I've caught recently on TNN, so I'm forced to admit that I was actually looking forward to this one.
How was it? Not bad. Pretty decent, really, with some good bits, although they gave away far too many of them in the trailer. On the whole, it was entertaining, but after watching the stalwart Captain Picard charge off on his half-dozenth incredibly perilous adventure (leaving the rest of his command staff, and the entirety of the Enterprise's crew, to putz around aimlessly in his absence), I was struck by a particular inanity of the series: why is this guy, the captain of a massive ship staffed by what must be hundreds, if not thousands of loyal subordinates, doing all this shit himself? Doesn't he have people to do this kind of thing for him? This is a man who has entrusted to him what must be a billion-dollar vessel and the lives of all its crew, and he's flying himself down to random planets to investigate scientific anomalies, tool around in his new Land Rover, and shoot it out with the Sand-People natives. Where is the Federation's equivalent of the Navy Seals or Delta Force, the highly trained commandos who can grit their knives in their teeth and pull on their night-vision goggles (or the 24th Century equivalent) and get down to the dirty business of infiltrating these forboding alien spacecraft and toppling their owners' evil regimes? I understand a captain's needs to take action and protect the lives under his charge and all that, but at some point, someone needs to take him aside and point out that he's not exactly doing his crew, or himself, a favor by running off and beaming onto that big bad alien ship to shoot it out with all the dastardly space Nosferatus singlehandedly. Somewhat irresponsible, isn't it?
After leaving the theatre, I took a couple of random escalators in my search for the exit to the street and found myself instead in the towering, deserted lobby of the Embassy Suites hotel. Another escalator, and I was outside on the equally deserted streets, facing the brilliantly lit World Trade Center site. New York is not a city known for its silences, but the one I walked into was so pervasive, so eerie and still, that it felt haunted. And remembering where I was, as I started to walk for the subway, I realized that made perfect sense.
"Haunted" is an adjective usually applied to empty houses. But cities of ten million people can also be haunted, can also have their share and more of restless ghosts. If you don't believe me, just take a walk through lower Manhattan on a Sunday night in winter.
Japanding
Yes, I was more than a little saddened to find ol' Indiana Jones himself shilling for Japanese beer. Tyler Durden, meanwhile, has renounced his rampant anticomercialism and decided instead to make a killing on blue jeans.
Hail Jebus!
He was a great guy and all, but I still don't think we need a thousand-foot-tall statue of Jesus looming over the New York skyline.
I don't know what scares me more: the picture, or the brain of the guy who came up with it.
Why, HE'S nothing but a raggedy man!"
A raggedy man worth $25 million, apparently. Sure, it's a bit bizarre that 20th Century Fox is spending $104 million to make a sequel to a series that was last seen in theatres fifteen years ago and grossed a total of $69 million for the entire trilogy, but really, who am I to question the movie gods? George Miller is directing it, from a script he's been writing for the last three years, and really, that's all that matters.
Now, if only the movie gods would see fit to bring back Tina Turner...
Today Is My Birthday, Continued
My good friend Pete sent me
the best Flash birthday card ever.
Well, maybe that's overdoing it, but, damn, it made me laugh.
SOLARIS
Okay, so SOLARIS was a bit disappointing. Thought-provoking, yes, but coming from director Steven Soderbergh and producer James Cameron, I expected something a bit more...stimulating, for lack of a better word. They're two extremely creative fellows, Steven and James, and science fiction is one genre where a creative fellow can really let his imagination run wild. But with SOLARIS, they willfully snub expectations (something Soderbergh excels at) and create a film devoid of any sense of the fantastic, or of wonder, or indeed of any emotion save regret and despair. What they end up with is a sort of EYES WIDE SHUT in space: two lovers, unable to emotionally connect, reduced to stilted conversation and questions they're unwilling to answer, on an unreal journey to an ambiguous conclusion. And I'm left wondering what could have been, if the two filmmakers had played to their strengths and used the connotations of the genre to their advantage, instead of deliberately working against them.
Still, it's worth seeing for Jeremy Davies' and Viola Davis' excellent performances, Soderbergh's spot-on-as-always cinematography, and most of all for Cliff Martinez's hauntingly beautiful score.
Television
So I watched BOOMTOWN the other day, my curiosity having been aroused by a four-star review for this particular episode in that paragon of McJournalism, USA TODAY, and other bits I've read. And I must admit, I was interested to see what sort of cop show might spring from the minds of the writer of SPEED and the producer of TANGO & CASH.
How was it? Pretty good. Not great, but pretty good. I think a lot of television critics, having been Rodney-King'd into submission by the nearly endless parade of police shows, are so thrilled to see a new take on the genre ("It jumps around and plays with time and stuff! It shows things from different points of view!") that they're cutting BOOMTOWN a lot of slack in other areas. Particularly writing. The acting was good, even if Neal McDonough's depiction of the hulking David McNorris' progression into near-psychotic breakdown seemed a bit forced. The writing, however, needed work; particularly the dialogue, which at times was so overly melodramatic it reached soap-operatic crescendos. Still, BOOMTOWN shows promise, especially with the always-excellent Mykelti Williamson on board, and the whole time- and POV-shifting thing, while gimmicky, does give it a little extra kick, even if it doesn't always work.
What does work is ROBBERY HOMICIDE DIVISION. Created by Michael Mann, who's been writing cops since POLICE STORY and could make salad dressing look cinematically stylish. Starring Tom Sizemore in full bad-ass mode. Perfect theme song by Dan the Automator. Dialogue so sharp it'll make your ears bleed. Michael Paul Chan. The result is brilliance, a cop show that comes at you like a freight train and looks as beautiful as it sounds. My only regret is that Mykelti Williamson, having worked with Mann in the past, didn't pass up BOOMTOWN to work on this one instead.
Tree!
The first Christmas tree my girlfriend and I have ever bought for ourselves. We spent the day hanging lights, hanging ornaments, sweeping up needles, smelling evergreen. It's gorgeous. I love it. Love the smell. Love the way the lights reflect off the wood floors. Love the shape, the crooked top, everything. I've named it Elmer.
I love Christmas.
"You know what I'd like to do to you? I would like to take you on the subway."
Why, for the love of God, have I not seen this movie before?