never forget some of it
I took myself to yet another movie last night, choosing last night since Shobhit had a Braeburn Condos Board meeting to attend at 6:30. My movie didn't start until 7:30, but whatever. I saw Searching, and as it happens, I liked it a lot less than I expected it to. Giving it a C+ felt generous, although I had to concede it had good editing and, at least, okay acting on the part of some of the cast.
It was at the Regal Meridian 16. It was the first time in several weeks I used my MoviePass rather than the AMC A-List membership. It's one of the rare movies not playing at the AMC theatre, and is only at Regal. And it's been out a couple of weeks, and not a major blockbuster studio release, so it did not have the typical MoviePass restrictions. In fact it was the first time I used the MoviePass since all that bullshit with them nearly crashing and burning at the end of July, and since before I started paying for the AMC membership. I even has trouble with one of the kiosks, telling me I had been charged but they were having a printer error. I was waiting in the line to deal with a live person when a lady went and fixed the ticket printer on that kiosk, and I could see my ticket was actually printed on the strip she had torn out of it. So I asked her if that was my ticket, and when I confirmed what movie it was for she gave it to me.
The forecast changed midday yesterday, so I had not taken my bike to work when I really could have. With no more rain in the forecast for the evening, I went ahead and rode to the theatre and back.
Should I say anything about 9/11? Back in the day, I used to write something about it every year on its anniversary. It only lasted a few years, but the first anniversary of it was during the first year I started my LiveJournal, in 2002. I started it in February of that year, when 9/11 was all of five months in the past. Now it's 17 years in the past. Only three years until its twentieth anniversary. We really have much more pressing matters to be concerned about at the moment, but my Google Homepage is sure packed with links to memorial news pieces on it.
Here are some random things I remember about 9/11:
*I had never been to New York City and would still not get there for another nine years. I had always wanted to visit the observation deck of the World Trade Center one day, and obviously never made it to the Twin Towers. The reconstructed One World Trade Center wasn't even topped out until 2013, about a year and a half after Shobhit moved from New York to Los Angeles.
*I'll never forget Barbara shouting my name as soon as I walked in the door at the Seattle Gay Standard that day, her telling me the World Trade Center collapsed, and my refusal to believe that could possibly be true until I found confirmation at the Washington Post website.
*I sang in the Seattle Lesbian and Gay Chorus at the time, and back then, as it was well before social media as we know it now, we were all connected via LiveJournal. I had a lot of choristers as LiveJournal friends, and one of them, Rafe, had a birthday on September 11. It pretty well ruined his birthday for many years.
*Tori Amos released her first overt concept album, Strange Little Girls, exactly one week later, on September 18. Everything still felt sort of surreal even by that point, and although she obviously had no idea 9/11 was coming, the stark darkness of many of the tracks on that album felt like a surprisingly appropriate soundtrack to the time.
Here is a line I am now rather struck by from my written accounting of that day (written nine months later, but that still makes it far fresher a memory than 17 years later): By the time a television was brought into the office, I got rather sick of seeing the repeated clips of the collapsing buildings. I saw them over and over again so many times, not even my fucked up memory can get rid of the images. I see that now, and I'm like ...Huh. Even though footage of the towers collapsing gets shown at pretty regular intervals even now, they are far from relentless the way they were in the immediate aftermath, and I can barely conjure the images now. Which is fine, really.
[posted 12:35 pm]
[older september 11 posts]