#17 Notes From Table 30 Is Back
Enter
Hello again. How’s the mini-apocalypse treating you? It’s taken me roughly three weeks to get used to this new normal. I’ve gone through a LOT of emotions over this time and I’m finally in a headspace where I can write and function again.
I spent a lot of time gaming out the possibilities. For a while there I was concerned that though it was clear this wasn’t going to kill off humanity, it might very well end any sort of world I have any interest in living in. But eventually I came out of that and realized that humans are gonna human.
I also spent a fair amount of time kicking myself for being so unprepared for this. We always think we’ll have time to prepare later and then the thing we should have prepared for happens. But it turns out I was more prepared than I had thought. I didn’t have a paying job to lose. I already cut my expenses down to as close to zero as I could go. And my low residency Masters program is mostly online anyway. My biggest expenses are my cellphone and my storage unit and I’m in the process of getting rid of my storage unit. I already don’t spend a lot of time in public places and see maybe half a dozen people. In a lot of ways, I was social distancing before it was cool.
Anyway, I hope you’re staying safe out there. I hope that if you are unlucky enough to get this virus that it’s a mild case and that your loved ones are also safe. I genuinely do want to know how you’re doing, so drop me a line and let me know.
COVID Corner
I know that everything is all pandemic, all the time now. I’m going to try to make this newsletter NOT like that. I will share links regarding the pandemic that I find useful or interesting in this new section I’m calling COVID Corner. But other than that, from here on out, I’m going to keep the Coronavirus talk to a minimum. You get enough of that everywhere else.
The Coronavirus Counter gives you a real time count of those infected, those recovered, and those who have died.
Chris Cuomo, who is infected with the virus tells us how to kick its butt. This isn’t an illness where you get better laying around.
Did you know that they’ve stopped issuing US Passports? (Mine’s expired so I’m stuck here.)
Too bad Trump got rid of the Pandemic Early Warning System. He’s not the reason for the pandemic. He is the reason we’ve got the highest death count on the planet.
Everybody is using Zoom for school and work these days. Maybe they shouldn’t.
Yuval Noah Harari, the man who has spent the past decade or so studying the history of humanity tells us what the post-Coronavirus world may look like.
The Bookshelf
Ta-Nehisi Coates is probably best known for Between the World and Me, a powerful book about being a young black man in America. He’s also written well regarded essays and other books, but The Water Dancer is his first novel.
The Water Dancer follows the story of Hyram Walker, a young black man in 1850s Virginia. There are few who have done the level of research on slavery that Ta-Nehisi Coates has and that research pays off with a narrative that is as fully realized as it is brutal.
Because it is Coates writing, he can’t help but give his readers history lessons while he’s telling the story, but he manages to weave them into the narrative and lets it add to the protagonist’s awareness:
“I had, by then, done my share of reading on Philadelphia, so I knew that, in another time, when the Task was here in Pennsylvania, the city had fallen victim to a wave of fever. And among the men who combatted this fever was Benjamin Rush, a famous doctor, which is hard to countenance given the theory he put forth in defense of the city. Colored people were immune to the fever, he told Philadelphia, and more than immune, their very presence could already the air itself, sucking up the scourge and holding it captive in our fetid black bodies. And so tasking men were brought in by the hundreds on the alleged black magic of our bodies. They all died. And when the city began to fill with their copses, its masters searched for a space far from the whites who were felled by the disease. And they chose a patch of land where no one lived, and tossed us into pits. Years later, after the fever had been forgotten, after the war had birthed this new country, they built rows and rows of well-appointed houses right on top of those people, and named a square for their liberating general. It struck me that even here, in the free North, the luxuries of this world were build right on top of us.”- 236-237
In a lot of ways, The Water Dancer reminded me of Kindred by Octavia Butler, another slave-era fantasy novel. Where Kindred played with traveling through time, The Water Dancer plays with traveling through space (not outer space). To say more would be to spoil it. While I’m not sure that the fantasy elements were necessary for The Water Dancer they are also some of the most powerful scenes in the whole book.
I look forward to whatever Coates writes next, but his next work I’m going to read is his epic and almost complete run on the Black Panther comic book.
Screening Room
I have been a fan of Christopher Nolan since I took a bus up to Seattle to a theater in the U District to see a black and white movie a friend had told me about called Memento twenty years ago. He has a deliberateness to his work that I really appreciate. There are few, if any, major mistakes in his movies.
The one movie of his that I never really appreciated was The Dark Knight Rises. The last time I watched The Dark Knight Trilogy a few years ago, I actually stopped after The Dark Knight. My memory of the third installment was that Batman spent way too long in the pit and the whole forced takeover of the city of Gotham seemed a bit farfetched for a set of movies traditionally grounded in reality.
I honestly don’t know how long it’s been since I last saw The Dark Knight Rises, but one night while doing a deep dive into YouTube Land, I came across this video and I decided to take another look.
I couldn’t just watch part three of a trilogy. So I got my Dark Knight Trilogy set on Blu Ray and watched Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and The Dark Knight Rises over the course of a week. And found it to be an incredibly enjoyable experience.
Batman Begins is a pitch perfect superhero origin. We get to know his motivations, his training, and where he gets his wonderful toys. We also get a Bruce Wayne who is relatable because he spends the first half of the movie not wearing a mask or dressing up like a bat.
It helps that the endlessly adaptable Christian Bale plays the best live-action onscreen Batman. Bale’s Batman is a tortured soul. He’s not just some billionaire out fighting crime in a fetish outfit. He’s working through his anger and his compulsions and he’s doing the one thing he can’t do much in comic books: He’s changing. Watching Bale’s Wayne transform over the course of these three movies is really something.
The supporting cast is every bit as impressive as Bale. Michael Caine, Katie Holmes, Liam Neeson, Morgan Freeman, Rutger Hauer, Cillian Murphy, Gary Oldman, and Tom Wilkinson round out the cast. It’s a cast dense with extraordinary talent.
And most of the talent came back for The Dark Knight. The one superficial blemish on The Dark Knight trilogy is the recasting of Rachel Dawes. Katie Holmes did not reprise her role and so it went to Maggie Gyllenhaal, who does a better job, but the recasting still takes a moment to adjust to like the recasting of Rhodes between Iron Man 1 & 2.
The Dark Knight also added its new villains. Aaron Eckhart as Harvey Dent/Two-Face and of course, Heath Ledger in his legendary role as the Joker. It’s easy to ignore how good Eckhart is in this because Ledger just knocks it out of the park with his interpretation of the Joker. For my money, he’s my favorite portrayal of the character hands down.
The Dark Knight takes everything built in Batman Begins and runs with it. Everything is bigger and better. It has a relentless pacing to it that just propels you through the story. The themes built up in the first film come to explosive conclusions in this one.
The ending of The Dark Knight wraps up a lot of threads. It leaves the Batman a tarnished legend that people can see as hero or villain depending on their point of view. It is a pyrrhic victory, but a solid end to a sequel that is even better than the original.
The Dark Knight Rises takes place eight years after the end of The Dark Knight. So I waited a few days before watching it after watching the first two on consecutive nights. It occurred to me that perhaps watching a movie in which an entire city is essentially locked down right now might be very good or very bad for my enjoyment of the film.
One of the things that makes The Dark Knight work so well is the fact that you could watch it on its own and feel like you got a complete story. This is true of Batman Begins as well. The Dark Knight Rises doesn’t work well as a movie on its own. I don’t know if there’s a way around that in the third part of a trilogy. Off the top of my head the only Part 3 I think works well on its own as a movie is The Rise of Skywalker and that’s just because it paid no attention to anything that happened in any other Star Wars movies. So it’s kind of on its own anyway. (Don’t get me started on that.)
While The Dark Knight Rises doesn’t work well on its own, it actually makes a solid ending to a trilogy. Without having the first two movies fresh in one’s mind, there are themes and character moments that simply fail to resonate, but if one watches them in quick succession (or has a much better memory than I do), there are moments that really pay off from events in the first two movies.
Tom Hardy is one of the few actors who can do more with his eyes than most actors can do with their entire body. His portrayal of Bane isn’t as legendary as Ledger’s of Joker, but that’s only because Bane’s character simply isn’t as interesting.
As a trilogy, The Dark Knight Trilogy may be the most consistently solid trilogy since The Godfather Trilogy. It tells a complete story of a man overcoming trauma in one the most expensive, outlandish, and entertaining ways possible. I’m glad I revisited The Dark Knight Rises. It is a worthy end to a seven-year journey.
Exit
Despite literally all of life not being on a regular schedule, I’m going to do my best to get this going out weekly again.
Next week I’m going to restart a project I was doing in the last iteration of my newsletter where I look at every film from a particular director.
This week will be like last week and the week before. And while there’s no real comparison between this and prison, let me paraphrase The Wire and say we’re only doing two days of this lockdown. The day we went into lockdown and the day we get out of lockdown. Day Two is coming soon.
See you next week. And seriously, tell me how you’re doing with all this.