I’m looking forward to this. The dark brooding city has always been a character in its own right in the Batman comics, and deserves its own story. I read a description once that I thought was right on target: Superman’s city Metropolis is midtown Manhattan, while Gotham is the rest of NYC.
It’s been done before. In Destroyer, Batman concludes that assigning spiritual meaning to an architectural style is insane.
I’m sick with the cold that Mrs__B and Mini__B had last week. So I’m obsessed with body parts…like this arm someone left in Madison Square Park:
First, looking east from our living room at sunset. The building with the copper pyramid roof is 40 Wall, nicely lit by the setting sun and with some dark cloud behind.
Second, Darth Vader trying to avoid a ticket:
My father, for reasons I’ve never fully understood, fell in love with Irish folk music before I was born. I had the strange experience of growing up talking to my grandparents about life undor the tsars and then listening at home to LPs of songs about the 1798 rebellion.* I’d read comics books where the heroes always won in the end, and listen to songs where the heroes almost always lost. Hell, in The Minstrel Boy, the protagonist is dead in the second line of lyrics. The one that got to me was Boolavogue.** It’s got a beautiful slow melody, and the description of the rebellion builds step by step towards inevitable disaster. The image of that disaster – men fighting while standing back to back because they were being overwhelmed by superior numbers – showed up in the comic books, but somehow it didn’t end the same way.
The word “hero” has been abused to the edge of meaninglessness. For me, heroism has to include two aspects of behavior: the act has to require courage and it has to help someone other than the person performing it. The first means that actions on a sports field are excluded, since I don’t believe that being called a bad name on the back page of the New York Post is a fate that requires courage to avoid. The second excludes daredevils. These exclusions don’t mean that examples are hard to find: parents who work themselves to death to make life better for their children all qualify, in my opinion. If that’s too pedestrian for tastes that prefer war, Irish farmers armed with pikes going up against soldiers armed with muskets might do. It irks a lot of people in the U.S. today, but Goliath is never a hero, while David sometimes is. Of course, it also helps if your cause is just, but whether or not that is so is always open to debate.
It’s some 40 years since I first picked up a comic book and I still read them now and again. Some of the recent movies have been worth watching, with Nolan’s Batman movies near the top of my ranking. Traditional comic book protagonists almost by definition meet my two criteria for heroic action…except when they don’t. There is reason to believe that two of the main characters in The Avengers*** – Thor and the Hulk – cannot be killed by the enemy they fight. That seems to me to remove the courage aspect of it. The other superhuman characters – Captain America and Iron Man – are definitely killable, but not easily so. That leaves the two spy/assassins, Hawkeye and Black Widow. They may be well armed and well trained, but they are fully human. There’s a lot of build up that Hawkeye is fighting, at least in part, for revenge, while it is made quite clear that Black Widow is fighting because she believes it’s the right thing to do. Of six “heroes” only one fully meets my criteria and, Joss Whedon being Joss Whedon, it’s the only woman. Amusingly enough, one scene in the movie, which was used for a promo poster, has the six of them standing in circle facing outwards – i.e., standing back to back. And sure enough, they end up fighting an enemy immensely superior in number. Black Widow is the only one who seems to understand a personal fear of death.
A trailer for the last of Nolan’s Batman trilogy showed before the movie. In it, Catwoman says to Batman something like “You don’t owe these people any more. You’ve already given them everything.” His response: “Not yet.” I assume this is an intentional paraphrase of the Gettysburg Address, where Lincoln says that the dead soldiers had given the last full measure of devotion. It’s something that no sane person sets out to do, but quite a few sane people have ended up doing. I wish more fiction portrayed it well.
*Note that every war has heroes on its side. I’m not speaking to the issues that stem from English colonialism in Ireland, but rather how those issues are perceived.
**Given that Mini__B is the only person in the world who wants to hear me sing, I’ve been trying to find songs he likes. To date, he prefers me to go with Irish folksongs and Gilbert & Sullivan rather than rock or pop.
*** Good flick. Enjoyable and amusing.
To start with, the East River isn’t a river. It’s a tidal straight connecting the Long Island Sound and the upper bay; when the tide changes, the entire Atlantic tries to pour through. The current gets up to about 7 mph and changes direction at each slack tide. Fun times if you’re in a sailboat.
The straight stretch of the East River north of Corlears Hook is divided into two channels by a long narrow island. It was originally called Blackwell’s Island after the damned soul who thought that putting a farm on an island surrounded by salt water and with limited spring water was a good idea. It became the municipal dumping ground in the nineteenth century, starting with a poorhouse, an insane asylum, a jail, and a smallpox hospital, and eventually was renamed Welfare Island as a result.
When urban renewal came along, the island was renamed Roosevelt after FDR, although given what it was in his lifetime, I don’t know that he would have appreciated the gesture. It’s now a pleasant if excruciatingly boring place to live, with its own subway stop and an elevated tram to Manhattan. The reality of it was pegged nicely in the opening scene of Dark Water: as a mother and daughter take the tram to go look at an apartment on the island, the little girl says, in an accusing tone of voice, “This isn’t Manhattan.”
Mayor Mike’s latest grand project, a new engineering school, will be located on the south end of the island, where presumably the ghosts of the dead lunatics will serve as teaching assistants.
Island Hospital – the hospital for indigents – after twenty years of abandonment in 1989:
What is beautiful is in the eye of the beholder, except that my taste is always right. This is the Queensboro Bridge in the final stages of construction: the steel is all in place and the roadway is the only thing missing. You’ve got the portal frames that connect the main trusses overhead, the main trusses on the sides, and the deck girders and their wind bracing at the bottom.
Mrs__B has a bad cold, Mini__B still stumbles over the rules of poker, and I’m too tired to read, so I’ve got the tube on. They’re showing both parts of a two-part Criminal Minds back to back and, as usual, the plot ranges from ridiculous to laughable. But that’s not what I want to talk about.
The episode supposedly takes place in downtown Washington and was obviously filmed on a back lot in L.A. The set looks nothing like any american city I know – and I know what a fair number of them look like – and certainly nothing like DC. The streets are too narrow, there are too many T intersections, there are too many romanesque commercial buildings, and it’s overall too dense. It does’t look like any part of New York either: the streets are too too narrow for midtown or uptown and too straight and parallel for downtown, and the buildings are too low for the downtown commercial district and really anywhere in Manhattan but western Greenwich Village. Why do I bring up New York? Because the camera passes over street signs that say Barclay, Murray, and Dey Streets, all of which are in the downtown financial district, within half a mile of my office. They actually show Barclay and Murray intersecting, when in real life they’re parallel.
Of course sets get reused. They represent a huge sunk cost and this set filled in for lower Manhattan on some other TV show, or in some movie. But would it have been so hard to remove the fake street signs that have nothing to do with the show at hand? Has no one told them that being barely competent is in the details?
