Exciting day today – I helped organize this phenomenal direct action…

“This morning, homeless people and community allies took over a vacant building in El Barrio/East Harlem. The target was a beautiful two-story building at the corner of Madison Avenue and 116th that has been vacant for decades…”

Blog entry:

http://picturethehomeless.org/blog/node/84

Flickr photos:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/27985255@N05/

Article in the Indypendent:

http://www.indypendent.org/2009/03/19/east-harlem-residents-and-housing-advocates-rally/

All photographs are from the Flickr stream, and were taken by Camilo Rayo.

In the BSG episode “No Exit,” we got to spend our first bit of quality time with Number One, or Cavil, or John. Up to now we’ve just seen him be evil and manipulative in little fits and jerks – a cylon board meeting here, an interrogation there… we’ve never gotten an up-close look at who he is and what makes it tick.

The events of “No Exit” paint a picture of Cavil as far more evil and powerful than we ever suspected. He murdered the Final Five and blocked all access to their memories when they resurrected. He tortured them by giving them “front row seats” to the Fall of the Twelve Colonies. In fact, he is the closest thing we have to an “architect” of the Cylon Holocaust.

And yet… in this episode, I would argue that we finally see how human Cavil is. When he delivers his excellent soliloquoy about the limitations of the human body, its sense organs and its instruments of communication, his anger is utterly comprehensible. After all – what is more human than being frustrated with our own physical frailty and shortcomings? Men have always been angry that they can’t see x-rays or microscopic animals – that is WHY we created x-ray machines and microscopes! Man has always raged and wept about the fact that we must die, that our consciousnesses are so flimsy – that’s why we create great art, or hunt for technological means of extending and enhancing life! And in the universe of Battlestar Galactica, the human dissatisfaction with our own limits is what led to the creation of the cylons… to fight our wars, and dig our ditches, and bear our grudges, and want to grow up to be just like us… in all the worst ways.

Cavil’s complaints are very human, and the irony is that he can’t grasp the connection. He thinks he’s so different from the humans. He’s not. He’s scarily human. That doesn’t mean he won’t continue to pursue a genocidal course of action against the humans. Because the humans, also acting out of rage and fear, have a genocidal strategy of their own for the cylons.

And what’s more human than genocide?

Sometimes youre rushing for the train or the train is hustling past the local stops and you’re late but not ridiculously late and life feels like Nintendo, you’ve stepped into Castlevania 3, and the music’s pulsing fast, that urgent simple music when you’re so close to the end but everything’s moving too fast, gears are grinding and skeletons throw their bones and bats fly in their elliptical deceptively simple lines, even the slightest mistake will kill you, you’ve spent weeks and months crouched down on the cold carpeted basement floor fighting your way past endless monsters and over dizzying precipices and booby trapped bridges, to arrive here, in this place, and you belong here, you are equal to this world, its horrors will not overwhelm you and its herculean challenges won’t stop you, and now you’re back on the train, and the city is dirty and your apartment is too expensive, and miserable people are all around you, and bombs are going off in gaza, but you are not overwhelmed, you will not be crushed, you’ve spent a long time practicing for this moment and the music thrumming in your head says you can master this world just like that other one, the 8-bit brightly colored digital one, the place you started from.

My favorite literary meditation on turning thirty is this one, from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

—

After a moment Tom got up and began wrapping the unopened bottle of whiskey in the towel.

“Want any of this stuff? Jordan? . . . Nick?”

I didn’t answer.

“Nick?” He asked again.

“What?”

“Want any?”

“No . . . I just remembered that to-day’s my birthday.”

I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade.

It was seven o’clock when we got into the coupe with him and started for Long Island. Tom talked incessantly, exulting and laughing, but his voice was as remote from Jordan and me as the foreign clamor on the sidewalk or the tumult of the elevated overhead. Human sympathy has its limits, and we were content to let all their tragic arguments fade with the city lights behind. Thirty—the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair. But there was Jordan beside me, who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age. As we passed over the dark bridge her wan face fell lazily against my coat’s shoulder and the formidable stroke of thirty died away with the reassuring pressure of her hand.

So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.

Watching Lost last night, after the initial euphoria died down, I realize – I don’t trust these people. I love the show a ton, I really do, but there’s something about Lost that makes me feel like the producers are used car salesmen trying to rush me through a shiny showroom so I won’t notice how flimsy and cheap all the merchandise is.

Faraday says ‘we have to to the hatch,’ Sawyer etc follows him, the forward motion of it carries us through to the next act, Sawyer gets to scowl and be shirtless and say ‘you better tell me what’s going on,’ etc, but when they get to the hatch… nothing. Faraday does not learn anything he didn’t already know, there’s no supplies to be found, and it’s only as a major incidental afterthought that Faraday tries to confront Desmond. The whole thing was just a narrative tool to create some drama, and did not develop naturally out of the story and the characters.

I don’t mind being tricked, or sucker-punched, or shocked, or heartbroken, or spending a long time scratching my head going “wha????!?” …… as long as I trust that the writers & producers are treating me with respect and assuming I’m smart enough to scrutinize every little thing. I watch Lost for the big picture story, and the questions it raises about the meaning of life and identity, and the dilemmas each character faces, and even the characters themselves, although I generally think they’re ridiculous and unappealing. But watching the premiere of season five right after the premiere of BSG’s season 4.5 brought into stark relief the reasons I trust the BSG folks so much more. Even when Galactica sucker-punches me, it makes perfect sense. When the fifth cylon was revealed, it came out of left field in a way no one had ever imagined, but I trusted that the producers were going to make it all make perfect sense.

I’ve never felt like the creative team behind LOST had any endgame in mind, and that their overall goal has always been to keep the show going for as long as possible by making sh*t as complicated as possible, raising more questions than can ever be answered. BSG is so tight that it’s hard to find a wasted word, let alone a wasted episode or character or big-picture question.

Then again, it’s probably unfair for me to compare any show to BSG. There’s simply nothing else on television that comes close.

The phenomenal GALACTICA SITREP has published an original essay of mine, entitled “The Eyeglasses of Laura Roslin,” a silly rhapsody about the way the re-imagined BSG uses this simple prop to deepen our understanding of the character played by Mary McDonnell:

“The Eyeglasses of Laura Roslin”

WARNING – this is for hardcore Battlestar Galactica fans only! Other readers are likely to be bored senseless…