October 2011
16 posts
:/
Currently reading about how a few scenes of Titanic were shot in a small Mexican town called Popotla. Evidently the filmmakers erected an enormous cement wall that cut the village off from its own beach and then chemically-destroyed a crop of sea urchins, which the Popotla people had fished.
…and then a few years later James Cameron made a really terribly-written movie about why you shouldn’t fuck with the environment and the people who actually live with it. The irony, it kills me.
The second date
It is not winter, but spring in the Wasatch mountains. The young man and woman have been hiking amid the trees and wildflowers all day, and they have hardly said a word since they left the car.
It will be a while before either gets up the nerve to confess this to the other, but each of them had the same realization the previous evening on their first date. That realization, its truth hard and crystal clear as set diamond, is this: Each knows they have just met the person with whom they are going to spend the rest of their lives.
A prolonged silence with others they have know would have felt uncomfortable, would have demanded unimportant words to fill the awkward spaces. For some reason, though, this silence feels right. Everything, everywhere suddenly feels right.
The young woman reaches out to hold the young man’s right hand, and knows immediately that she has transgressed. For one thing, the hand feels wrong. Somehow the muscles in it don’t react in the precise way muscles in a hand should. She doesn’t know this empirically, of course. Her knowledge is instantaneous and born of instinct; besides, there is no way she could know that his right hand was a victim of childhood polio, or that he has spent a lifetime cultivating ways to use it that make it impossible for an observer to tell it lacks full functionality.
Worse than the lame muscles, however, is his reaction. She somehow knows, in the same way she had known that his hand was wrong, that he is ashamed and wants her to let go. Wants her to forget whatever she might or might not have felt. Wants to leave. She feels him trying to pull away, shaking off her touch.
And then the young woman does something unexpected, something that no one has ever done with the young man. She doesn’t let go. In fact, she strengthens her grip. She will later remember pouring everything into that grip, willing him to know without her speaking that she knows his secret, and that she doesn’t care. That even if she still lacks the courage to say it out loud, her feelings for him have already taken root.
It is their second date, and already she loves his imperfect hand.
And after a panicky minute he seems to know this. She feels his hand slowly relax, and then grip back just as tightly. He says nothing out loud, but she hears him nonetheless: “If you’ll really take me as I am, then I am yours for as long as you might have me.”
It will be years before they ever discuss or even acknowledge these events to one another out loud. But it will always be the defining moment of each of their lives.
Emptyage: Generation X Doesn't Want to Hear It →
emptyage.com
Earlier generations have weathered recessions, of course; this stall we’re in has the look of something nastier. Social Security and Medicare are going to be diminished, at best. Hours worked are up even as hiring staggers along: Blood from a stone looks to be the normal order of things “going…
The sociological impact of growing up in the 90s is yet to be fully understood for our generation.
Radio Romanticism in the iTunes Era
….The corollary to all this is that when you take all the stations in your area and consider all the different possible shows that one could listen to, the process of actually ferreting out the good stuff becomes daunting, so (unlike with television, where critics preview and analyze what is worthwhile and what isn’t in a way that becomes a part of the pop cultural conversation) an element of exploration enters the picture, and each show (that weird community-thing) exists as a sort of oasis of like-minded folks in the geographic vastness of the radio ether. We’re getting carried away with that analogy, but the point remains, and directs us to our line of inquiry for the day: if radio exists as a form of invisible community/a way of spreading new music to the masses, what does it mean that nobody listens to radio any more?
Reblogging solely because EVERYONE SHOULD READ THIS, IT’S AWESOME. Also Juju, Professor Nolan might assign this in his tech class if you send it to him.
