Saturday, January 5, 2013
New York - looking at Manhattan from Brooklyn
More than any other city, New York is the metropolis we like to see destroyed. It's been inundated by rising seas, subsumed in snowstorms, shaken in earthquakes, blown up by aliens, savaged by giants, flooded with ghosts, and been the very battle ground of good versus evil. It's expected that whatever the lineup of next summer's thrillers, in at least one of them, New York will sustain some hefty damage.
But really there could be more diversity of destruction, not just in location but method. Perhaps if there were an exit poll of movie goers, and you were asked 'if you enjoyed this cataclysm, would you mind taking a few minutes to answer some questions?'
What was most satisfying about seeing New York destroyed?
Would you like to see New York destroyed again?
How would you like to see New York destroyed?
If you could suggest another city to be destroyed on film, which would you choose?
In what ways could we show a more multi-cultural, global perspective?
For myself, I think I enjoyed most New York when it was bombarded with meteors in the movie Armageddon. Oh, mind you, it wasn't a good film, just enjoyable to watch the beloved and bally-hooed cap of the Chrysler building get lopped off by space debris. Though, in honesty, Vancouver is the city I'd most like to see hit by asteroids. All that glass...
However, I would enjoy seeing San Francisco entirely and simultaneously dissolve into atoms and settle into a shroud of colored fog on the hills. And I would like it very much if every edifice in Saint Louis sprouted legs and scurried away, the famed arch last seen high-stepping the prairie, cozying up to a flock of Dakota windmills. The residents of Chicago could wake up to find themselves in a pinwheel-fitted paper city which blew over onto cornfields, while Toronto became overnight stacks of fruit and jelled aspic.
Abroad, Paris maybe could undergo a series of severe hauntings, because isn't that what we expect from Old World architecture? Maybe its statuary comes to life and starts carving sculpted paramours from the tamer marble, bringing down impressive collonades of the beaux-arts. Rome just sinks into itself, collapsing like a pudding. London took the hint and became fixed onto postcards and dispersed itself via the post before it could be levelled, bits of its paper shrapnel stuck to refrigerators and cork boards the world over.
The European cities are not only full of people, but cultural fountains and historic repositories. It is more emotionally engaging to fret over the destruction of artistic masterpieces than the collapse of wall street high rises. And, for Americans, there is the worry too for a hero. Will Bruce Willis even try to save the Trevi Fountain?
I still think it could work, though when these cities have been shown in film in moments of trial, they've largely been historic ones because they've actually undergone the sort of ugly chaotic upheaval we assign to fictive monsters for our own cities, even though New York has weathered unrest from within (the draft riots of 1863) and without (2001)
Further and further. Lest we confine attentions to the glittery urban areas of the world and deny the third world its chance at onscreen fame, there are plenty of cities of in developing countries which could be destroyed - Delhi, Cairo, Shenzhen, Bogota - but to see these metropoles undergo the sort of stern emotional demolitions regularly foisted upon New York seems cruel and unnecessary. We might laugh or cringe to see Miami done away with, but to see the same done to Mumbai would be sorrowful. We would shake our heads as the flames or floods licked up the slums. Those poor people, we would say. No, there couldn't be much satisfaction in that.
But New York could take the blows, rebuilding every time from the rubble, its too-big-to-fail, candy-apple, trashy self rising up from the debris. It will just have to go on being hollywood's king martyr, getting smashed, wrecked, crumbled, folded, stomped on, torn apart, burned, swallowed, and sunk over and over and over.
But really there could be more diversity of destruction, not just in location but method. Perhaps if there were an exit poll of movie goers, and you were asked 'if you enjoyed this cataclysm, would you mind taking a few minutes to answer some questions?'
What was most satisfying about seeing New York destroyed?
Would you like to see New York destroyed again?
How would you like to see New York destroyed?
If you could suggest another city to be destroyed on film, which would you choose?
In what ways could we show a more multi-cultural, global perspective?
For myself, I think I enjoyed most New York when it was bombarded with meteors in the movie Armageddon. Oh, mind you, it wasn't a good film, just enjoyable to watch the beloved and bally-hooed cap of the Chrysler building get lopped off by space debris. Though, in honesty, Vancouver is the city I'd most like to see hit by asteroids. All that glass...
However, I would enjoy seeing San Francisco entirely and simultaneously dissolve into atoms and settle into a shroud of colored fog on the hills. And I would like it very much if every edifice in Saint Louis sprouted legs and scurried away, the famed arch last seen high-stepping the prairie, cozying up to a flock of Dakota windmills. The residents of Chicago could wake up to find themselves in a pinwheel-fitted paper city which blew over onto cornfields, while Toronto became overnight stacks of fruit and jelled aspic.
Abroad, Paris maybe could undergo a series of severe hauntings, because isn't that what we expect from Old World architecture? Maybe its statuary comes to life and starts carving sculpted paramours from the tamer marble, bringing down impressive collonades of the beaux-arts. Rome just sinks into itself, collapsing like a pudding. London took the hint and became fixed onto postcards and dispersed itself via the post before it could be levelled, bits of its paper shrapnel stuck to refrigerators and cork boards the world over.
The European cities are not only full of people, but cultural fountains and historic repositories. It is more emotionally engaging to fret over the destruction of artistic masterpieces than the collapse of wall street high rises. And, for Americans, there is the worry too for a hero. Will Bruce Willis even try to save the Trevi Fountain?
I still think it could work, though when these cities have been shown in film in moments of trial, they've largely been historic ones because they've actually undergone the sort of ugly chaotic upheaval we assign to fictive monsters for our own cities, even though New York has weathered unrest from within (the draft riots of 1863) and without (2001)
Further and further. Lest we confine attentions to the glittery urban areas of the world and deny the third world its chance at onscreen fame, there are plenty of cities of in developing countries which could be destroyed - Delhi, Cairo, Shenzhen, Bogota - but to see these metropoles undergo the sort of stern emotional demolitions regularly foisted upon New York seems cruel and unnecessary. We might laugh or cringe to see Miami done away with, but to see the same done to Mumbai would be sorrowful. We would shake our heads as the flames or floods licked up the slums. Those poor people, we would say. No, there couldn't be much satisfaction in that.
But New York could take the blows, rebuilding every time from the rubble, its too-big-to-fail, candy-apple, trashy self rising up from the debris. It will just have to go on being hollywood's king martyr, getting smashed, wrecked, crumbled, folded, stomped on, torn apart, burned, swallowed, and sunk over and over and over.
Friday, January 4, 2013
Seatac
My credit card expired a few days before, I spent the last of my cash to get some film processed into prints, and I had a few hundred dollars in my bank account, total. I hadn't even taken the bus back from the developer because I didn't have enough change to take two buses that evening and I had to be at Seatac by 8.
I had been thinking as I walked back to Wallingford that maybe I shouldn't spend so much money during the next month. But what exactly did I spend money on? Mainly rent, groceries, and bus fare. I couldn't really cut that stuff out. So the three remaining items which made the dollars in my wallet flutter hastily away were film, coffee, and books. I got a windfall of books from a roommate, so with a little will power, and a well-used library card should be able to avoid any more literary expenditure till February, maybe even March.
Then there's coffee. I like the good stuff. If I just enjoyed drip I could make it at home, but I like a latte, just one, just a little one, 8 oz, single shot, whole milk, with a well-poured leaf. I won't go just anywhere, either. I've got standards, and there are few places that have met the measure of what I like. I don't just mean flavor, but presentation. Whoever is whipping up that drink, well it doesn't hurt if they've got nice eyes and good skin. I think it's perfectly justifiable to prefer one coffeeshop over another based solely on how ogle-able you find the waitstaff. And I probably spend, over the course of a year, something around 7, 8 hundred dollars on fancy, frou-frou drinks. I could just stay home and have drip, if I liked drip, or just drink more tea. I like tea. I have about a half-gallon of it a day. There's only so much caffeine the brain can take. But this petty luxury, why not keep it? What great adventurous joy can I even afford? Why not keep this modest extravagance, this $4 peep show?
There's the barista at Zoka who has impeccably nice teeth and fastidiously shaped eyebrows. The upside-down peace sign tattoo on the neck is a bit much, but the neck itself is exquisite. Svelte, muscular, slightly translucent. Maybe that's why the tattoo, to draw attention or else uglify that natural bit of beauty and consequently make it more attractive. The way some men feel about legs and mini-skirts, well, that's how I feel about necks and low collars.
Then there's the crew at the Ugly Mug, every one of which could be a model for a shampoo commercial. Long, ebony tresses or sculpted locks and blemishless skin. The baristas at Miro, who also have quite smooth skin, perhaps because Miro is a tea house and they take in less saturated fat. And Trabant, which has a staff which is professional, mature, and hirsute. Trabant is the only coffee place I go to because I like their drinks.
And the atmosphere of ideas, everyone ticking away at their private chunk of rough granite, hoping to make that soaring draft, that shining poem, that transcendent song, that excellent translation of the sutras. This company of toiling artists. That's the good stuff. I would hate to give that up.
But...film. Yes, I could cut back. It costs about $45 to buy film, get it processed, scanned, and printed. I could just not buy any of that stuff, but that seems crass. I can't imagine Michelangelo saying to his admirers, 'sorry fellas, no more painting. It's gotten rather pricey,' or Shakespeare telling his patrons 'the new folios will have to wait. I don't feel like buying any more ink.'
I walked past the friend I have who sells the street papers. I write friend, but she is, of course, a friend of a friend, and even that position may be tenuous, to judge from the response I received when I mentioned to our circle that I had seen her selling the Real Change.
"Oh, her, yes she's been down on her luck. It's a bad situation and that's really all I can say about it."
"Drugs?"
"Yes, but that's nothing new. I don't really know what's happened to her. It's been more than a year since I've seen her anywhere besides outside the QFC."
A friend twice removed, perhaps. I friend to the second degree, or third. A facebook friend. She waved at me and greeted me by name as I came up.
"I haven't read this one," I said. It was a new edition, printed the day before.
"It's got a good story on Ari Shapiro," she said.
"The White House correspondent for NPR, right?"
"Yeah, that's right. It's a really good interview. He's seen some stuff."
I pulled out a dollar for the issue while we bantered. I could barely afford to keep my head above water, and here I was giving money away. But there are limits to thrift.
As I got on the bus for the airport, the city became suddenly, startlingly distant. The skyline just a paper cutout, the windows lit but uninhabited, the cookiecutter, paint-by-number shops all closed. Everything so sweepingly monotonized, so completely shorn of individuality to a conglomerate shopping mall, a rambling Ikea, a colossal Starbucks. I remember Boston looking just that way when I left it, like it had turned its back. Do all cities swiftly turn so mundanely hostile just before you're about to leave?
Stow the bag, line up for security, take off the shoes, adjust the time, turn off the phone, put on the shoes, walk to the gate, get on board....
The flight attendant passes me a packet as I go thru the door. A snooze kit, the lettering says, "everything you need to help you doze off faster." I open it and find a pair of earplugs and a sleeping mask but no suicide pill. I jam the earplugs in and marvel how they dampen the sound of the engines and nearly block the banal familiarity of the flight attendants - enunciate the consonants, smile at the vowels - but in no way diminish the screams of the pouting infant several rows behind me. I check the package again, but no, this is it. Jet Blue does not believe in assisted death even for the comfort and convenience of its passengers.
I looked out the window as we taxied to the runway. It was snowing. Well, technically it would be classed as 'wintry mix' which is about as close as Seattle ever gets to snow. But 'wintry mixing' sounds like what the Romneys do at Aspen. What's the word for that? Après ski? Well anyway, when i looked onto the wing i didn't see Mitt & Liz shaking cocktails with the Kennedys. So let's say it was snowing.
The screaming baby continues to register its indignation and I go thru my preflight panic, wondering how this origami crane of folded aluminum foil is going to get me to New York, and why the stewardesses always refuse to give me a drink before takeoff, and how this time I will try harder to not feel like a failure when I sleep in my childhood bed - my only New Years resolution.
I suck air hurriedly, shoddily into my lungs with the enthusiasm of a swimmer recovering from a near-drowning, trying to get myself high on something before this hermetically sealed tube foists me onto the sky.
I had been thinking as I walked back to Wallingford that maybe I shouldn't spend so much money during the next month. But what exactly did I spend money on? Mainly rent, groceries, and bus fare. I couldn't really cut that stuff out. So the three remaining items which made the dollars in my wallet flutter hastily away were film, coffee, and books. I got a windfall of books from a roommate, so with a little will power, and a well-used library card should be able to avoid any more literary expenditure till February, maybe even March.
Then there's coffee. I like the good stuff. If I just enjoyed drip I could make it at home, but I like a latte, just one, just a little one, 8 oz, single shot, whole milk, with a well-poured leaf. I won't go just anywhere, either. I've got standards, and there are few places that have met the measure of what I like. I don't just mean flavor, but presentation. Whoever is whipping up that drink, well it doesn't hurt if they've got nice eyes and good skin. I think it's perfectly justifiable to prefer one coffeeshop over another based solely on how ogle-able you find the waitstaff. And I probably spend, over the course of a year, something around 7, 8 hundred dollars on fancy, frou-frou drinks. I could just stay home and have drip, if I liked drip, or just drink more tea. I like tea. I have about a half-gallon of it a day. There's only so much caffeine the brain can take. But this petty luxury, why not keep it? What great adventurous joy can I even afford? Why not keep this modest extravagance, this $4 peep show?
There's the barista at Zoka who has impeccably nice teeth and fastidiously shaped eyebrows. The upside-down peace sign tattoo on the neck is a bit much, but the neck itself is exquisite. Svelte, muscular, slightly translucent. Maybe that's why the tattoo, to draw attention or else uglify that natural bit of beauty and consequently make it more attractive. The way some men feel about legs and mini-skirts, well, that's how I feel about necks and low collars.
Then there's the crew at the Ugly Mug, every one of which could be a model for a shampoo commercial. Long, ebony tresses or sculpted locks and blemishless skin. The baristas at Miro, who also have quite smooth skin, perhaps because Miro is a tea house and they take in less saturated fat. And Trabant, which has a staff which is professional, mature, and hirsute. Trabant is the only coffee place I go to because I like their drinks.
And the atmosphere of ideas, everyone ticking away at their private chunk of rough granite, hoping to make that soaring draft, that shining poem, that transcendent song, that excellent translation of the sutras. This company of toiling artists. That's the good stuff. I would hate to give that up.
But...film. Yes, I could cut back. It costs about $45 to buy film, get it processed, scanned, and printed. I could just not buy any of that stuff, but that seems crass. I can't imagine Michelangelo saying to his admirers, 'sorry fellas, no more painting. It's gotten rather pricey,' or Shakespeare telling his patrons 'the new folios will have to wait. I don't feel like buying any more ink.'
I walked past the friend I have who sells the street papers. I write friend, but she is, of course, a friend of a friend, and even that position may be tenuous, to judge from the response I received when I mentioned to our circle that I had seen her selling the Real Change.
"Oh, her, yes she's been down on her luck. It's a bad situation and that's really all I can say about it."
"Drugs?"
"Yes, but that's nothing new. I don't really know what's happened to her. It's been more than a year since I've seen her anywhere besides outside the QFC."
A friend twice removed, perhaps. I friend to the second degree, or third. A facebook friend. She waved at me and greeted me by name as I came up.
"I haven't read this one," I said. It was a new edition, printed the day before.
"It's got a good story on Ari Shapiro," she said.
"The White House correspondent for NPR, right?"
"Yeah, that's right. It's a really good interview. He's seen some stuff."
I pulled out a dollar for the issue while we bantered. I could barely afford to keep my head above water, and here I was giving money away. But there are limits to thrift.
As I got on the bus for the airport, the city became suddenly, startlingly distant. The skyline just a paper cutout, the windows lit but uninhabited, the cookiecutter, paint-by-number shops all closed. Everything so sweepingly monotonized, so completely shorn of individuality to a conglomerate shopping mall, a rambling Ikea, a colossal Starbucks. I remember Boston looking just that way when I left it, like it had turned its back. Do all cities swiftly turn so mundanely hostile just before you're about to leave?
Stow the bag, line up for security, take off the shoes, adjust the time, turn off the phone, put on the shoes, walk to the gate, get on board....
The flight attendant passes me a packet as I go thru the door. A snooze kit, the lettering says, "everything you need to help you doze off faster." I open it and find a pair of earplugs and a sleeping mask but no suicide pill. I jam the earplugs in and marvel how they dampen the sound of the engines and nearly block the banal familiarity of the flight attendants - enunciate the consonants, smile at the vowels - but in no way diminish the screams of the pouting infant several rows behind me. I check the package again, but no, this is it. Jet Blue does not believe in assisted death even for the comfort and convenience of its passengers.
I looked out the window as we taxied to the runway. It was snowing. Well, technically it would be classed as 'wintry mix' which is about as close as Seattle ever gets to snow. But 'wintry mixing' sounds like what the Romneys do at Aspen. What's the word for that? Après ski? Well anyway, when i looked onto the wing i didn't see Mitt & Liz shaking cocktails with the Kennedys. So let's say it was snowing.
The screaming baby continues to register its indignation and I go thru my preflight panic, wondering how this origami crane of folded aluminum foil is going to get me to New York, and why the stewardesses always refuse to give me a drink before takeoff, and how this time I will try harder to not feel like a failure when I sleep in my childhood bed - my only New Years resolution.
I suck air hurriedly, shoddily into my lungs with the enthusiasm of a swimmer recovering from a near-drowning, trying to get myself high on something before this hermetically sealed tube foists me onto the sky.
Sunday, December 16, 2012
Friday, November 30, 2012
Nonfiction - Wallingford, Seattle - Real Change
Outside the grocery store, the woman was huddling under a pink umbrella holding out her cardboard sign. I didn't read it. I don't need to, to know what it says. Seattle is a hell of a place to be homeless. Your socks are never dry and your clothes rot off you.
"I don't have cash on me," I say to her. This is a lie. I have twenty-two dollars and change, but since I just barely squeaked into being able to pay December's rent I'm not feeling generous to passing out cash. A twenty is insincerely generous, I think, and I need the two dollars for the bus. "Could I buy you something on a card?"
"I've already had dinner," she says.
"Well, maybe something else," I offer. "Toiletries? Cleaning products?"
"They sell gift cards in there," she says. "You can even use them at Starbucks. The minimum amount you can put on it is $1.50. Any amount would be fine."
I think I can do that for her, and make to go into the store when someone shouts my name. I look over by the trash can where a girl puts down a bag of cheetos she was picking out of on the rim, and then offers out her left hand for a shake.
"I forgot how to say your name. Did I say it right?"
She hadn't, but I think it's considerate she asked. She's not a friend. Well, she's close enough to be a facebook friend, but not someone I have been hanging out with. A few years ago we often bumped into each other at the same parties, then drifted into different cirlces for awhile. I've only recently drifted back, so I ask if she lives around here.
"I live over in Shoreline," she says. She has a stack of newspapers under her arm. "The vendor who's usually here texted me today to say that he couldn't make it so I could have his spot for the day. I got here this morning around 9."
I look at the newspaper she's selling. It's one of my favorite in Seattle, and I haven't bought this week's copy yet, but I don't buy one since I told the other woman I don't have cash. But I'm surprised. She's selling Real Change, the regional street sheet put out by homeless. While I'm not sure if one has to be homelessto sell it, it's generally the second to the last step down to destitution, or the first one up depending on direction.
I look at the paper but am too confused to take in the cover or what she's telling me. All I can think about is that she's been out here since 9 in a hoodie, it's been raining since noon, and it's now almost 5:30.
"Do you have an umbrella?" I say. Do you have a dry place to sleep tonight is really what I want to ask, but in one of those daily acts of cowardice, I leave this unsaid.
"Yeah, I gave it to her," she says, pointing at the other woman, "and I got another one that's kinda busted." She looks next to the trash to a black umbrella with a bent spoke.
We make some slight pleasant talk, just enough for me to hear when and if she'll be back there so I won't be so emotionally unprepared next time. I did have to leave, not just to buy a gift card, but also to meet with the renter I would be subletting from for December. When I came out of the grocery store with a gift card for the woman with the pink umbrella, the girl was still there, though I didn't buy a newspaper. I didn't want my concern to come across as the pity it really was.
You don't think you'll see your friends on the streets, even your facebook friends.
"I don't have cash on me," I say to her. This is a lie. I have twenty-two dollars and change, but since I just barely squeaked into being able to pay December's rent I'm not feeling generous to passing out cash. A twenty is insincerely generous, I think, and I need the two dollars for the bus. "Could I buy you something on a card?"
"I've already had dinner," she says.
"Well, maybe something else," I offer. "Toiletries? Cleaning products?"
"They sell gift cards in there," she says. "You can even use them at Starbucks. The minimum amount you can put on it is $1.50. Any amount would be fine."
I think I can do that for her, and make to go into the store when someone shouts my name. I look over by the trash can where a girl puts down a bag of cheetos she was picking out of on the rim, and then offers out her left hand for a shake.
"I forgot how to say your name. Did I say it right?"
She hadn't, but I think it's considerate she asked. She's not a friend. Well, she's close enough to be a facebook friend, but not someone I have been hanging out with. A few years ago we often bumped into each other at the same parties, then drifted into different cirlces for awhile. I've only recently drifted back, so I ask if she lives around here.
"I live over in Shoreline," she says. She has a stack of newspapers under her arm. "The vendor who's usually here texted me today to say that he couldn't make it so I could have his spot for the day. I got here this morning around 9."
I look at the newspaper she's selling. It's one of my favorite in Seattle, and I haven't bought this week's copy yet, but I don't buy one since I told the other woman I don't have cash. But I'm surprised. She's selling Real Change, the regional street sheet put out by homeless. While I'm not sure if one has to be homelessto sell it, it's generally the second to the last step down to destitution, or the first one up depending on direction.
I look at the paper but am too confused to take in the cover or what she's telling me. All I can think about is that she's been out here since 9 in a hoodie, it's been raining since noon, and it's now almost 5:30.
"Do you have an umbrella?" I say. Do you have a dry place to sleep tonight is really what I want to ask, but in one of those daily acts of cowardice, I leave this unsaid.
"Yeah, I gave it to her," she says, pointing at the other woman, "and I got another one that's kinda busted." She looks next to the trash to a black umbrella with a bent spoke.
We make some slight pleasant talk, just enough for me to hear when and if she'll be back there so I won't be so emotionally unprepared next time. I did have to leave, not just to buy a gift card, but also to meet with the renter I would be subletting from for December. When I came out of the grocery store with a gift card for the woman with the pink umbrella, the girl was still there, though I didn't buy a newspaper. I didn't want my concern to come across as the pity it really was.
You don't think you'll see your friends on the streets, even your facebook friends.
Sunday, November 11, 2012
Portland, OR - Fiction - 500 Words or Less
The morning after, the bartender sweeps dust out the doorstep. He looks at me as I open my umbrella in passing, just as the rain starts. The sidewalk is covered with leaves and the ghosts of leaves. Marks like little brown hands ground into the pavement. The door shuts and some object slick with new rain turns a leathery wetness. A wallet forgotten from the night before. I pick it up, open it.
Some bills and change, plus shopper's club card, bank card, credit card, trojan, and a Pennsylvania driver's license for a pimply-faced college kid with a last name I'm too Anglo to pronounce. Joshua K-something.
I look around, experiencing finder's guilt, the suspicion I'm being tested to do the right thing before I can even figure out what it is I want. I count out the money. Seventeen dollars and twenty-three cents. Three fives, two ones - both minted in Chicago - three nickels and eight pennies. I put the money back. I try the bar but the door is locked. I could hold onto it and bring it back at three when the bar opens, or turn it into the police, but there's only so much loyalty I feel towards Joshua K.
I open the wallet again, take out the credit and bank card, and throw the rest of the wallet back in the leaf pile. Let someone find it who is more desperate for the money than me, or who has an excuse to use the condom, or some samaritan in need of the satisfaction of a good deed, or Joshua K himself, who after mentally retracing his steps of the night previous, rises from bed in panic, searches the walkway, then crawls on hands and knees outside the bar, praying and believing in a protective mystery if not God as he finds his own pimply self. My soul has done enough good. I slip the cards in my jeans and go on with the day.
That night, I light the woodstove and burn them one by one. Black smoke rises from the spitting plastic and the DNA code of Joshua K's finances bubbles, melts, and is forgotten and the karma fllows on.
Some bills and change, plus shopper's club card, bank card, credit card, trojan, and a Pennsylvania driver's license for a pimply-faced college kid with a last name I'm too Anglo to pronounce. Joshua K-something.
I look around, experiencing finder's guilt, the suspicion I'm being tested to do the right thing before I can even figure out what it is I want. I count out the money. Seventeen dollars and twenty-three cents. Three fives, two ones - both minted in Chicago - three nickels and eight pennies. I put the money back. I try the bar but the door is locked. I could hold onto it and bring it back at three when the bar opens, or turn it into the police, but there's only so much loyalty I feel towards Joshua K.
I open the wallet again, take out the credit and bank card, and throw the rest of the wallet back in the leaf pile. Let someone find it who is more desperate for the money than me, or who has an excuse to use the condom, or some samaritan in need of the satisfaction of a good deed, or Joshua K himself, who after mentally retracing his steps of the night previous, rises from bed in panic, searches the walkway, then crawls on hands and knees outside the bar, praying and believing in a protective mystery if not God as he finds his own pimply self. My soul has done enough good. I slip the cards in my jeans and go on with the day.
That night, I light the woodstove and burn them one by one. Black smoke rises from the spitting plastic and the DNA code of Joshua K's finances bubbles, melts, and is forgotten and the karma fllows on.
Friday, November 9, 2012
Seattle : Industrial Musculature
There are plenty of people who call Seattle a beautiful city. I think they're mistaken if they are considering it as itself, especially if it's being measured against San Francisco or Chicago, cities where architects actually made an effort at intentional structural beauty. As for Seattle, all the really good architecture is outside of it. The Olympic mountains, the volcanic cascades, the islands of Puget Sound, Mount Baker fleeing fugitively behind the downtown as you draw north.That's the best stuff.
The next best stuff is the shipping yards. This is the element that San Fran pushed across the bay to Oakland, that New York forced upon Jersey. But in Seattle, if you're approaching from any route but the north, you see the rows of containers, a corridor of hydraulic cranes lined up like heiroglyphs at attention on either side of canals, the freight yards which cuts deeply and visibly into the city. This is the part that I love, the musculative of cable and steel tressles lifted for tug-boats belching diesel fumes up the Duwamish waterway and the cap of Rainier 60 miles away but still present as moonrise behind it all. It puts me in mind of Hiroshige's woodblock prints of Edo.
Then for the city itself, all the best views are from overpasses - the West Seattle Bridge, Alaska Way viaduct, the 45th street overpass of the I-5 - with a few good ones from former industrial areas turned public parks - Gasworks. But it's still not a particularly inspiring view. Sights of colorless buildings rising as though cut from blocks of obsidian and galena. Shiny, but indistinguishable from the mass of North American structural achievement. Nothing that when traced in outline would suggest to an outsider anything of the city of Seattle. Well, there is the Space Needle, I suppose, though that doesn't mean very much. It's a show-trophy, a vanity piece, ballhoo. It's hard to form a city-identity off an elevated restaurant, unless you're Paris. The body of Seattle is all simple grey boxes with a few greyer boxes which are a tad pointier than the others.
I'm still trying to convince myself I want there to be more color in my life, and every so often will put on a bright shirt, or buy a pretty candy at a service station to admire it, but the fact is I'm a drab bird, and I like my nest to be feathered in my own muted palate of various shades of charcoal and soft blue. So I like Seattle, and cities like it. Northern ones of rust and grit and soot. Anthracite metropoles that seem pressed between a slate grey sky and slate blue water that parallel one another so far into the distance so they merge into one. Coming back feels each time like coming home.
Sometimes, having moved, and so frequently moved back, wherever I left off in the narrative of my own life is exactly the place where I pick back up, so that I come to feel that I have led multiple lives. As though there were volumes I opened and replaced for all the towns, who keep separate titles but still leak parts of themselves to each other, like authors across ages. It feels like time travel, that I'm coming and going and crossing paths with myself, and I come to wonder if I really ever left anywhere, if I am living someplace else simultaneously, and do I fall in love each time from scratch, or is it always with the same person and only the face which changes.
The next best stuff is the shipping yards. This is the element that San Fran pushed across the bay to Oakland, that New York forced upon Jersey. But in Seattle, if you're approaching from any route but the north, you see the rows of containers, a corridor of hydraulic cranes lined up like heiroglyphs at attention on either side of canals, the freight yards which cuts deeply and visibly into the city. This is the part that I love, the musculative of cable and steel tressles lifted for tug-boats belching diesel fumes up the Duwamish waterway and the cap of Rainier 60 miles away but still present as moonrise behind it all. It puts me in mind of Hiroshige's woodblock prints of Edo.
Then for the city itself, all the best views are from overpasses - the West Seattle Bridge, Alaska Way viaduct, the 45th street overpass of the I-5 - with a few good ones from former industrial areas turned public parks - Gasworks. But it's still not a particularly inspiring view. Sights of colorless buildings rising as though cut from blocks of obsidian and galena. Shiny, but indistinguishable from the mass of North American structural achievement. Nothing that when traced in outline would suggest to an outsider anything of the city of Seattle. Well, there is the Space Needle, I suppose, though that doesn't mean very much. It's a show-trophy, a vanity piece, ballhoo. It's hard to form a city-identity off an elevated restaurant, unless you're Paris. The body of Seattle is all simple grey boxes with a few greyer boxes which are a tad pointier than the others.
I'm still trying to convince myself I want there to be more color in my life, and every so often will put on a bright shirt, or buy a pretty candy at a service station to admire it, but the fact is I'm a drab bird, and I like my nest to be feathered in my own muted palate of various shades of charcoal and soft blue. So I like Seattle, and cities like it. Northern ones of rust and grit and soot. Anthracite metropoles that seem pressed between a slate grey sky and slate blue water that parallel one another so far into the distance so they merge into one. Coming back feels each time like coming home.
Sometimes, having moved, and so frequently moved back, wherever I left off in the narrative of my own life is exactly the place where I pick back up, so that I come to feel that I have led multiple lives. As though there were volumes I opened and replaced for all the towns, who keep separate titles but still leak parts of themselves to each other, like authors across ages. It feels like time travel, that I'm coming and going and crossing paths with myself, and I come to wonder if I really ever left anywhere, if I am living someplace else simultaneously, and do I fall in love each time from scratch, or is it always with the same person and only the face which changes.
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