north ham towne is nice and my vacation thus far, which is to say reading comic books and watching z movies and pinballing around, has been splendid and not without its lessons. two days ago i was a little going crazy from too much idleness, and chomping at the bit to get to providence and start setting up my room and my arrangements. but then that night and the next a feeling of clarity and resolve and actual useful ideas and even some song items (which i don’t need to tell you have been in severe drought). so the chief lesson is in for a penny, in for a pound, or in the words of the poet, If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.
yesterday i made a good sport of pinballin’– putting myself out in the world and bouncing around from situation to situation. at the bookstore i saw ben hersey and had nice conversations and ideas as is natural around such charitable and engaging sorts. usually when i write about someone on the website i write not their real name, because it’s stressfull to be a searchable index for people’s bosses to be like “who do they give the free sodas to” with. ben hersey is an exception i’ll make because his name is so rich in plausible aspects of his person and character as a poet and writer (from comical to horrible), that i can’t decide! ben hearse-y, ben heresy, ben horsey, ben hershey, ben hear-see, ben hear-say, ben RC, ben whore seed, ben horror scene, ben hair sheen, ben hur z.
me and the cat went to see the new terminator movie, terminator salvation, which was curious for being the third consecutive movie (after wolverine and the new star trek) we had seen together (in the theatre) featuring Characters You Known But Before The Time You Met Them (aka muppet babies). we both agreed that TS was “a failure”. the first two had cool characters whose traits were revealed in tense “i’m being hunted” situations. this was just a messy futurescape where the good guy and the chaotic good guy looked too similar for a shakey battle scene to be even operable. problem the first: we already have a fairly interesting and playable construct for post-singularity consciousness vs remaining humanity warfare, in the form of battlestar galactica. in the earthbound setting of TS, watching robots trying to eradicate humanity is frustratingly clumsy. if skynet really wanted to squash the bugs, why not just flood the earth in a poison they (skynet) can’t even breathe? problem the second: the future was frustratingly mechanical– fire and gears and shit. this is great in the first two, when it’s essentially a metaphor, and provided in scary five-second flash-forward nitemare sequences, but as an actual view of the future? i mean, aren’t we already on the cusp of having computers design our autonomous weaponized motorbikes, and don’t they already look way more far out IRL? finally, problem the third: time travel movies often offer up convoluted attitudes towards determinism and quantum blahblahblah, and at their best, probe these gaps in reasoning in compelling open ended ways. this is how the first two roll– not cohesive but thought provoking. terminator salvation is just a muddy puddle that unfortunately can be resolved, but only in a way that corrupts the hero’s manic heroism with a secret and driving and world-creating cowardice. hmm. actually maybe i liked it.
the most valuable lesson of these recent origin / preamble movies is, it can be more fun to want to know an answer than to actually learn what that answer is. nonetheless, i will always pick knowing over not knowing. in this way movies of this sort will remain profitable but get only worse. huh!
