Local action
As of last night's screening of Nashville, I'm behind Kate, fifteen movies to seventeen, and she's killing me on money. I think I'll pull ahead this weekend, since I won't be spending a whole Saturday in front of the computer(s) trying to buy Red Sox tickets like I did five days ago.

We ran into Amy at just about every one of the Altman films The Brattle ran this week. It's an experiment, she says, to see whether she remembers the having seen the movies, or even if she's old enough to have seen them theatrically. She figures that's unlikely; they're all films from the 1970s, and why would someone with options go from being nineteen to being in their fifties? Even if Korpin really disliked being a girl, or Japanese-American, or short, it didn't seem to make much sense to age thirty-five years instantly.

The experiment wasn't a huge success; Nashville seemed kind of familiar, and she said she was able to tell they'd changed the end of The Long Goodbye despite the shitty print, so she'd probably read the book at some point in her life. That was actually encouraging; knowing she'd liked Raymond Chandler was knowing something about her old life, and while it wasn't as useful as a name, it was something. Her head-shrinker is encouraging her to get some Chandler out of the library - maybe there's some association with events that can let her jump from knowledge to memory.

Anyway, we split a pizza and an argument afterward. In case you missed the news or are reading this later, the Boston area got turned upside down Wednesday when someone mistook a bit of outdoor advertising for Aqua Teen Hunger Force for a bomb and called the police, which set off a chain reaction that led to bridges and roads being shut down, the mayor calling for the heads of the people responsible, and, as Kate put it, a whole lot of unnecessary panic over some jury-rigged Lite-Brites. Amy took the opposite view, that it's almost impossible to overreact to a potential terrorist threat, because the consequences of doing too little are too severe and there's things like what happened to her and me that most people don't even know about. Kate argues that this will have a chilling effect on public art, and that incidents like this are likely orchestrated by the Republicans in order to maintain a climate of fear.

I don't know that I necessarily disagree with either position. The world is a stranger and potentially more dangerous place than many people know, but on the other hand, I don't think it's a healthy situation if a false alarm - and that's all this was, no matter how much the papers may put the word "hoax" on the front page - can cause this amount of panic and inconvenience.
- posted 1:18 PM - (2) comments - (archive use only)