I guess it actually started sometime yesterday afternoon though, during my "Friday off," when I watched the movie Voyagers. This is not the Star Trek TV show, this was a movie about a near future voyage of post pubescent teenagers on what is intended to be a multi-generational journey to seed a planet in another solar system with the survivors of a dying Earth. Not a really new concept in science fiction, of course, but I thought this one did it pretty well. One of the main concepts of the film was very evocative of Lord of the Flies. We watch as within a relatively small number of scenes this group of teenagers shuns a blue fluid which would tamp down their emotions, including sexuality, a faction arises that distrusts the one adult among them, and murder is their solution to rectify their feeling, and before you know it, the group of 30-odd kids have divided into two camps, won a war like band of crazies dreaming up fictitious alien villains, and another can't-we-all-get-along Rodney Kings that are targeted as if fish in a barrel. Devolution from civilization to primal beasts was almost as rapid as the hilarious SNL skit hinted at in this screen cap:
This all got me thinking about our primordial mind and how very thin the layer is between primal instincts and executive function and my thoughts wandered back to the day before, listening, all day long, to the incessant stimming of the Monkey Girl in the Intensive Room.
But this all got me thinking the generational spaceship, cool space-orgy-bloodlust, and the Battlefield Earth, thankfully without John Travolta and his Scientology, yet very connected on several levels with a good old dose of the Catholic Satan. What's it all about Alfie?
How far along evolutionarily do we really think we are if we can have interstellar spacecraft filled with monkey girls and monkey boys and on the other hand get handed our hat and told the party's over, by a bunch of devil aliens elevating part of our humanity to a formless hivemind whilst (yeah, I used the British "whilst," it felt proper) condemning the rest of humanity to die out like a dried up chrysalis case on a soon to be dusted Earth. What's it all about Alfie? Indeed.
Fast forward to my dreams last night. Slept really well, so I know I had plenty of them. Finally got out of that line in that hotel lobby and on to something more substantial. What? I don't really remember, but I knew it was meaty. And likely connecting last night's existential movie mind fuckathon and today's coffee-fueled chelathon Michael to Michael talk show that has brought us to now the twilight of Saturday.
I'm chuckling because I'm composing this entire post by way of speech to text. I have a Google Chrome extension that lets me do this. It's fairly good. I hardly have to make any corrections but some of the odd mistakes it occasionally makes have to make me pause. I think I might keep some of them in but frankly since the product of this is kind is devoid of punctuation, I guess because I have to actually verbalize that, yet I tried verbalizing period and it wouldn't give me a period it gave me what you see the word period. Kind of weird, because if I say, See what it did there? It gave me a comma.
Shortly after my second cup this morning, I'm heavily chelating and flitting between one thought after another, sometimes in a linear succession, but as usual for a chelating session, not always. The tangents were real to say the least. From logging my breakfast choices in MFP to thinking about when Lorne Michaels first showed his face on SNL when he offered $3000 if the Beatles would reunite on his show, to the ranking of the banks I do business with, and worrying about the humongous banks that would have me do no business forever, if you know what I mean, then somehow I got into the train of thought of when my original childhood friend John C. and I did our little frottage fest behind his mother's couch and the subsequent almost psychic accusation that my mother had regarding what we'd done based on the only evidence being me wearing a pair of his bathing suit trunks. I got a little teary thinking about how I felt that day. I thought that I committed a sin against my family and God.
Why was John and I alone? I think his mother assigned John's older brother to babysit, yet his older brother, being an actual hippie in the age of hippies, was probably off smoking a bone or two with his buds, since he wasn't home. We'd checked out his room filled with all manner of black-light posters. One I succinctly remember, with a funky dude, and the saying Keep on Truckin'. We listened to his brother's recording of Cheech and Chong, and gazed at his brother's waterbed headboard shelf festooned with multiple objects; we had no clue what they were. Of course I now recognize they were various shapes and sizes of bongs. Yeah, John C.'s brother was the epitome of a 17 or 18 year old boy in 1971 suburbia. But did he diddle with John? Was it his porno stash we found in the woods? Was it him and his buddies that made me get the Straw Cure up my ass?
In the movie, there's a courtroom scene, as actually there's a lot of them, it's mostly in the courtroom, and we know from the dialogue that this courtroom is within the court system of the County of New York, which is, of course, the administrative jurisdiction for Manhattan, and out of the windows of the courtroom we clearly see the recognizable domed tower of the New York City Government Office Building (Now named the David Dinkins Building) and out of a hallway window we see the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center...and, for a quick 3-second view, we see out of another window in the courtroom, that we hadn't seen before, where on the left hand side we see the North Tower of the World Trade Center and just to the right of that the girders of an under-construction building that look to be roughly about 50 or 60 stories tall. Could that be World Trade Center #7?
I asked Alexa about WTC7 and she tried to deflect me, faking like she didn't understand me. Like maybe I was asking too many sensitive questions, and peaked the attention of the authorities at the Central Listening Station that controls all the Alexas around the world, similar to the little station that analyzed all the printed books from around the world that Robert Redford's character worked at through his position with the NSA in Three Days of the Condor.
Eventually Alexa relented, since I clarified in very plain, well-spoken English what I needed, and she told me that Number 7 World Trade Center was built in 1985. Looking on Wikipedia, after the movie was over though, I found out that yes, that building had commenced construction in 1984 so 1985 was during its construction, but in actuality, it had not been completed until 1987. Now I don't believe at all that the movie was filmed in an actual building in lower Manhattan in what is called the City Hall area, but I do believe that the still images that were depicting what was outside those windows were probably taken pretty much contemporaneously with the filming of the movie, that is sometime in 1986 or so. Well, this is exactly the time frame of when one would have seen the under-construction number 7 World Trade Center.
Now here's our morning mindfuck number one. I specifically remember, even before the full day was done, and certainly before the dust had settled on that fateful evening of September 11th, there were several reporters during and after the WTC 7 collapse that were in utter disbelief they didn't know at all, firstly, that the building had been damaged to that extent, until just before it collapsed, then, after it collapsed, you heard many newscasters vocally questioning: WTF? Fast forward to the age of YouTube, almost a decade later, and we have tons, and I mean tons, of now archive footage, questioning the collapse of that building. If I remember correctly, the collapse of World Trade Center 7 was really, for many people, the catalyst that started them on their poppy-fumed stumble down the yellow brick road to the 9-11 conspiracy theory Emerald City.
So I've never heard, or seen of the connection before, but here's the thing that makes me go hmmm. In that 3-second shot, out the window of the courtroom, in the movie Nuts, I see a traditional girder system of a very large building. I do not see a central core. I do not see a loose façade being erected around the central core as a shell. I see an under-construction building, which should have had equalized supports throughout the entire building. The plans that I see, blueprints that is, of this building, in a Wikipedia page focusing on its fate on September 11th, don't match what I saw in the movie at all.
This all made me think...What little throwaway shots from older movies perhaps lend evidence to events that could never have been predicted at the time that these scenes were filmed of a future event? Like the construction of a building in 1986 that would be destroyed so violently 15 years later. For the fuck of it, I thought of one of the most iconic scenes in cinematic history, and checked it out, and there, I saw another morning mind fuck. I guess this one's number two? In it, the torch looked solid. The torch I'm talking about is none other than the torch being held up high in the right hand of the Statue of Liberty, and the movie scene is none other than the final shot in the Planet of the Apes.
Here's the rub... Planet of the Apes was filmed in 1967. At that time, the Statue of Liberty's torch had a glass and wrought iron surface. It wasn't until the statue's well-celebrated refurbishment that the torch was changed to a solid gold leaf plated one. Wait a minute, I just realized. That refurbishment of the Statue of Liberty was none other than 1986 which means that night of the major fireworks display when a drunken Brittany and I were stumbling our way back to Penn Station, with me causing her to roll her eyes while I ran up to the doors of the North Tower and tried to open them, I could have looked to the side and saw the shiny steel girders of World Trade Center 7 under construction. What's it all about Alfie? Yet again and again and again.
I think I'll end my chelatathon here as it's almost 7:00 p.m. And suddenly I'm having a big craving to get fucked up. What if it's all like in Battlestar Galactica, where history not only repeats itself metaphorically but literally, because we're in an endless cycle?
Cue the sounds of ocean waves and the endless chill of an omnipresent wind...and my mind blowing.
