fine whine

Any future we have now will be its future's past.

That line just came to me, bringing with it a rhythm as though detached otherwise intact from a song or chant. Whatever that means. I'd meant to write about The Future for this entry but find myself needing to address the past. Namely, 1997, the year that Donnie Brasco premiered, just before the month of March. I was in High school then, wrapping up what was a pretty decent senior year, complete with angst-y relationships and college decisions. The extent of my exposure to sophisticated film culture was a fanatical devotion to all things Monty Python and the knowledge that a number of movies about The Godfather had been made and I should probably see them. The idea of DVDs had not occurred to me, let alone laserdiscs, and I owned a mere hundred and twenty CDs. And I missed Donnie Brasco completely—had no clue it had come out or anything like that. I probably knew only of The empire strikes back's special edition which also played that weekend. Knowing this really only helps me in my personal quest to determine exactly when the current version of my personality solidified, and it bears no meaning on the rest of you or the rest of this entry.

As I mentioned, I was thinking about the future recently. Wasting two dollars on an old widescreen laserdisc of Demolition man I watched the movie in all its letterboxed glory, and I can't say I was any more excited or disappointed from the last time I watched it, even with the additional visuals. I want to like that movie because the ideas underlying it (at least on the futurist side, not the meatheaded action) are pretty interesting and some even original. What gets me, though, is that all of the doors open themselves. Is energy so abundant that they can spare power to open every door, every time? Clearly we're not dealing with non-renewable resources here; though nobody ever mentions what makes San Angeles tick. Likewise the city in Blade runner and scads of other near future visions. I'd like to think that the future lies in clean nuclear power, but I doubt most filmmakers share my optimism. Is it so rare to find a Gene Roddenberry, who, in the course of creating a virtually completely original periodic table, invented a vastly powerful new power source such that ships hurtling through space would not only have doors that opened themselves but artificial gravity to boot? Lucas tackled the problem pretty feebly by mentioning power converters and widget generators and never showing how they work, though I am sure that in the books or comics the engineering is explained in great detail. I just don't read those books, sorry.

What books I do read are pretty varied. I'm working my way through Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn and it thoroughly impresses me. Not since The curious incident of the dog in the night-time have I read a book so convincingly portraying a detective with a disorder, this time Tourette's syndrome. Of course all that I know about Tourette's is that which I've seen on TV, but the tics and compulsions as he presents them certainly have the ring of authenticity if not outright truth. Lethem's Gun, with occasional music was one of the best books I read last year and though this one's subject matter and setting differ, the hooks still pull me in just as much.

And I'd just like to settle the coolest house cat name debate now with Lethem's mention of a feline named Shelf.