My Wish List
Yes, sportsfans, it's that time of year again. With my birthday less than a month away, and Christmas only a little more so, I've decided to make life easier on all of you who wish to smother me with gifts and present you with my Amazon Wish List. Get those clicking fingers ready!
On Travel
It's late, and I'm sitting here, for no particular reason, thinking that it's been far too long since I took a train.
I'm not talking about the subway, though it's been a while since I've taken the subway, or the 4:55 LIRR to Ronkonkoma. I'm talking about train travel, a journey taken by train, not a commute. There's something about train travel that fires my mind.
When I lived in Sydney, for the brief time when I lived in Sydney, there was a hill up the street from my house in Kingsford, and at night I often used to walk up to stand and stare down at the factories and refineries on the other side, an area that I never visited and rarely noticed during the day, but was continually drawn to once the sun went down . I called it the Silver City, months before I learned, through a film of the same name, that there WAS a "Silver City" in Australia, a shanty town of corrugated steel raised by migrant workers fleeing postwar Europe. Their Silver City was a place of chaotic change and paradigm shifts, of people struggling to adjust to a place far different from the one they had known, which pretty much sums up my time in Australia, so maybe I was on to something. The film "Silver City" was shown to me by a professor at University of New South Wales, and of it I remember very little; the professor, however, I remember distinctly, a Teutonic gentleman with a goatee and heavy glasses and heavy accent, who had the rare gift of being able to nonchalantly convey his opinion without raising his voice, yet at the same time, in the same voice, drive that opinion home with the force of a sledgehammer and the conviction of the Almighty. He was a terrific lecturer, and would have been my favorite professor abroad, if I had not had Sal. Sal was the creative and independent young woman, possibly one generation removed from a commune, if that, who taught my Philosophy of Travel class. And if you scoff at the very idea of Travel having a Philosophy, much less an entire class devoted to the subject (as I first did when I read the class synopsis), then let me say, as nicely as possible, that you haven't thought about it enough. It was in Sal's class that I learned of how train travel gave rise to the idea of cinema, and how the development of each went hand in hand. Train travel, for the first time, gave one the ability to view a large amount of still scenes--the view outside the passenger's train window--very quickly, in sequence. A train window is the frame through which a continually rolling horizontal landscape passes, as a loop of film passes vertically through the gate on a film projector. And so on, and so on. That was the kind of thing Philosophy of Travel tried to get your head around.
Which brings me back to trains. Plane travel is much like elevator travel: when you get in the metal box, you're in one place, and when you get off, you're in another. It's fast and relatively painless (though it seems to get less and less painless every time I go through an airport), but you're sacrificing the experience of the actual journey in the process. Walking seems the purest form, but isn't the most realistic of options. Train travel, on the other hand, gives you a visual connection with the world through which you're passing, and on a basic level, a physical connection as well: you pass through the tunnel in the mountain, you feel the rise and fall of the hill you're cresting. You're part of it, if not exactly OF it.
Quite a few years ago, I took a train from Poland to what was, at the time, the Soviet Union; the "midnight train to Moscow," because there really was such a thing. The trip was an experience into and of itself, but the moment that sticks out most clearly in my mind, and which I'm sure I'll remember until the day I die, is waking up in a dark train compartment to the faint sound of a voice over an old loudspeaker, and seeing, through the frost on my window and the fog beyond, searchlights and barbed wire, men in overcoats carrying machine guns on their shoulders and holding German shepherds straining against leashes. The bark of the dogs, the tinny sound of Russian echoing through the camp and through the thin glass of the train window, and everyone else in my compartment, and seemingly in the entire train, dead asleep. It was surreal in every sense of the word, and I sat and watched it all.
I later learned that the train had stopped on the border of Poland and the Soviet Union, so that the undercarriage of the train could be adjusted to accommodate the different width of the Soviet railroad tracks; the camp was a place of necessary transistion, so that the journey could continue, with the traveller fundamentally changed in the process.
Anyway, like I said, it's been too long since I took a train. And I've heard that view along the Coast Starlight route from Los Angeles to Oakland is really something to see.
PRIMER: a Primer
It's been far too long since I walked out of a movie in head-scratching, mind-racing wonderment, and I'd almost forgotten what it felt like. PRIMER is, in a nutshell, heavy. And you should really see it, if nothing else, to marvel in what can a guy can do with a camera, a skeleton crew, and an incredible amount of both imagination and style. It's one of the most beautifully photographed films I've seen in ages, and the fact that it was done by a cinematic newbie with nothing else under his belt is as much a cause for amazement as the film itself. I walked out of PRIMER wishing to hell that I'd done it.
That said, it's vague to the point of being obtuse, and nearly impossible to get your head around on the first viewing. What follows is my take on things--don't bother to read further until you've seen it, if you're planning on it, as I'd hate to spoil things.
That said, this is my summation of PRIMER:
Two men, Abe and Aaron, toil away in their garage attempting to create, out of whatever's available, a device that will change the gravitational field around a given object and change their financial straits by attracting venture capital cash up the wazoo. In a series of scenes that pretty much sums up the thrill of working for a guerrilla DIY startup, they tear apart everything from a refrigerator to Abe's car for material, ending up with a metal box that not only lessens the weight of a little toy Weeble, but also, they soon discover, sends said Weeble into a recursive time loop. Think of a street with a cul-de-sac at both ends, says Aaron, with one end being the present, and the other end being a point some number of hours ago, with the number of hours dependent on the length of time their gizmo's been running in the garage.
Now, says Aaron, imagine if the Weeble was smart enough to get out of the machine when it was in the other cul-de-sac. And soon they're building a larger machine. And soon they're building another.
PRIMER deals with the mechanics of time-travel like DAS BOOT dealt with daily life on a submarine: this is the nuts and bolts, here, where you've got to drive two cars to the place where you've stored your time machine, so that your future self doesn't have to catch a cab when he pops fifteen minutes after you've turned on the machine and left.
That probably doesn't make much sense: it didn't to me either. Think of it this way: Aaron goes and turns on the machine at 8 in the morning, then holes up in a hotel room until 5 so that he doesn't have a close encounter with an alternate self. At 5, he drives back to where the machine is, climbs in, and climbs out at 8:15, having travelled back several hours and missed himself by fifteen minutes. Now he needs a ride. You get it?
That's the ball that filmmaker Shane Carruth takes and runs with, and the level of thought he's put into it is both frightening and a dead-on imitation of what two intelligent amateur businessmen desperate for cash would come up with. They rule out the easy idea of lottery numbers, going for the long-term payoff of the stock market and betting March Madness games over a one-time cash windfall. And then they get deeper and deeper, as they go back to correct the past mistakes they've made, and their alternate selves go back further to correct the corrections. Soon other people are popping up who've somehow gotten in the machine sometime in the future, and Abe and Aaron are stuck trying to figure out where exactly they lost control. And somewhere along the way, I think someone comes up with the idea of building a time machine with a time machine, and from there it all REALLY goes sideways.
Like I said, it's heavy stuff, bewildering and deliriously entertaining at the same time. As one who's wasted delightful hours trying to figure out all the stuff about time-travel that BACK TO THE FUTURE missed, I dug the hell out of it.
The Five Stages of Coping
Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally, acceptance.