happy st. patrick's day!

above is another picture i took of the wtc memorial, from just outside the holland tunnel, on the nyc side. i like this photo. it's kind of painting-like.

i read an article in the local newspaper today about the parade yesterday in new york, and about how the police persons in the parade carried one flag for every police person killed in the wtc...340 in all i think. or perhaps it was firemen.

well...ok i can't remember. but the article brought me to tears. there was a picture of them carrying all the flags, and a closeup of one of the men carrying, and he was a brown haired, blue eyed irish guy. he was complexioned so like myself that for the first time probably ever i felt some sort of connection to the people who share my heritage.

there was also a quote from our man rudy g. saying that so many people gave their lives at the wtc, and no one gave as much as the irish. i wonder if that is statistically true. even if it's not, it was still nice of him to acknowledge the tradition of the irish nyc cop and make it *not* sound like a joke.

i am going to get the article tomorrow (read it in the paper at work) and clear up my above questionable misstatements of fact.

anyhoo. um, holy crap people, it's *snowing*.

(the view from nj)



after leaving work on monday afternoon i drove around to scope out a decent vantage point where i could watch the lights of the World Trade Center memorial come up. i found a street in lyndhurst that wasn't too bad; went home for a while, ate some tortilla chips and salsa, watched Big Wolf on Campus ('Ghandi was not the saint you think he was! he was a notorious flirt, and a horribly messy eater!' hee hee), then headed back to that street. when i got there i discovered another street, a block over, right on the edge of a little cliff and affording a full view of the skyline. and there was already a crowd of people outside, i imagined people who lived on the street. there was a high wire fence (with barbs at the top...why?) to one side of the road, and along a stretch of it, the residents had strung white lights and put up posters and pictures and flowers. it was september all over again. how many such memorials did i see along the river that month, notes stuck in wire mesh, people pouring out their hearts in ink and candles wherever there was a view of the blankness that was the WTC? but now, the memorials seemed less sad somehow. they seemed more...happy. thankful. rejoiceful and bittersweet and proud. they were no longer people's souls torn out and smeared onto paper and left to wash away in the rain. they were gigantic signs that said God Bless America and red-white-and-blue everywhere. it almost made me love the human race all over again.

i was going to sit in the car--it was very cold out--but then i thought, other people are out. i should be too. so i stepped outside and over to the fence. then i went and sat on the trunk of my car. i considered going over to join the crowd, thought maybe this of all nights would make people a little neighborly, but then i thought, if i bust out weeping, i'd rather do it alone. this was something i sort of wanted to see alone. so i leaned on the car and just waited.

while i waited i tried to think about what happened on september 11th, i remembered some of what i saw, i thought (as i always do) about how terrified the people in those buildings must have been. dying is one thing; dying while panicked and scared is entirely another. thinking about that just makes my whole body feel sick. so i tried talking to god. i tried to tell him that somehow i still believe, i think, that there is a purpose for things that happen, though i don't know what the meaning of all this mess has been. i told him that i'm so sorry for letting my own petty problems consume my life, but that right now i don't know how to think of them as not petty. that in the big picture, i know that there are people who have much bigger reasons to grieve than i do; that after september 11th i realized that if i ever let myself get depressed again, it would be a slap in the face to everyone who died that day. because how dare i waste my life like that.

but here i am. depressed. i thought about the vicious circle of this illness--feeling bad, feeling bad about feeling bad, feeling unable to make the cycle stop, the futility of it all--and i remembered something a pastor said at a church service i went to in december, a service for, basically, depressed people, geared toward those who'd lost people in the WTC:

'those who sit in darkness are the ones who see the stars.'

and i looked up at the sky and thought about the truth of that statement, and the horrifying unfairness of it. and how i would give up the stars forever to never be in darkness again. and about the exponential number of people who now sit there with me because they loved one of the almost 3000 people who are dead.

i waited for the lights for about 20 minutes. then, at a moment of course when i'd turned my head for some reason, i heard someone in the crowd say, 'there they are!' and i looked up, and the mother of all searchlights was beaming from the end of manhattan into the clouds. the irony struck me immediately: i'd missed seeing the towers collapse because i'd been turning a corner in my car (both times--for both buildings) and only knew it was happening because of someone on the radio saying that it did. i missed them going down, i missed the lights coming up.

so i just stood and stared at them for a while. just stared. like i'd stared at the gaping hole and the weeks' worth of billowing smoke last fall. then someone, in a house or a car i don't know, turned up their radio--Jessye Norman singing America the Beautiful. and that made me cry. and i got back in my car while people started wandering down the middle of the street, and i stared at the lights, and i sobbed. and i don't know if i was crying for the towers, or the people in them, or for new york, or the world, or just for myself.

on the way home, i turned on the radio and people were calling in from different areas, reporting on how well they could see the lights. and the consensus seemed to be that the memorial was a good thing. more than one reporter on 1010Wins offered that this is a sign that despite tragedy, life goes on. and i feel that. and i'm trying to remember how i felt toward the end of september, after i pried myself away from the television, and stopped sifting through the photos on Yahoo five times a day, and had to start a job, and started really thinking about the bigger picture. i remember being at a stoplight somewhere near hoboken, i think on my way to do a wedding video with my sister, and i know i was putting on my favorite berry-flavored lip gloss and listening to a robbie williams cd. and just for a second, i felt happy and careless. and then i felt guilty. but eventually i figured out that i had to be thankful for every single little thing--for my lip gloss, for my stupid pop music, for my crappy car. for being alive. that feeling is harder to find these days, but i should try to find it more often. because i could have been there. and i wasn't. and maybe there's a reason for that. and if there's not...well, it's still quite something, isn't it.

ahh...Merton.

<pic from bigwolfoncampus.org...a site i have taken quite a liking to. in the past hour or so anyway. ok, maybe two hours. no more, i swear. um, sounds that are linked to below are from that site as well.>

yes Big Wolf on Campus is a cheeZZZZZZy teen show. like, the cheeziest of the cheezy. but, damn if it ain't funny. and a goth character! on a cheezy teen show! yeah ok he's a dork and the only real evidence that he is at all goth is the mostly black clothing, sort of the hair, and his semi-frequent self-proclamations of gothdom (that sound clip is from an episode where he finds this portal into his werewolf friend's head...in the school's janitor closet...and he's talking to said werewolf friend's ex-girlfriend...that is, it's his voice coming out of the werewolf boy's mouth...etc. etc. ). oh and he is also the president of the Gothic Fantasy Guild. hee.

ok maybe the character's making fun of goths. but we all know, i'm not above that.

but he *is* a buffy fan!

anyhoo, here's a link to a picture of Stuart Townsend as Lestat wherein he looks a little less like creepy Angelina Jolie than he does in the last picture i linked to: you can also get a better idea of the leather pants factor.

all this, of course, leads us to the moral of the story: i need to get a fucking life.

The Queen of the Damned Movie Cast Site

saw this movie today. and you know, i sort of liked it. perhaps it was because my expectations were so incredibly low--we know it was set to go straight-to-video until Aaliyah died, guaranteeing box office success, right? but i mean, if i could forget that i ever read the book (which isn't difficult, as i read it a good 13 years ago...THIRTEEN YEARS AGO. sheesh) then the movie really wasn't half bad.

but only *half* not bad. because, even though there's a good deal of distance between myself and the literary version, there are still some big incongruities:

--the movie says Marius made Lestat. in the book, Lestat was kidnapped by a creepy old vampire who took him to a castle in the middle of nowhere, turned him, then jumped into a pyre to off himself, leaving Lestat to figure things out alone. he didn't meet Marius until much later.

--Marius somehow morphed from a Scandinavian sort of fellow (in the book) to...Vincent Perez? nice to see they're keeping up with the Banderas-esque miscasting of Interview with the Vampire. Vincent Perez was good, though--i loved his little gay mannerisms throughout the movie, especially his golf-clap at Lestat's kung-fu-ing of a pack of vamps trying to kill him at his Big Rock Concert.

--the whole Mekare and Maharet storyline was gone. Maharet wasn't even in it--unless she was one of the Mekare's unnamed vampire posse, one of whom i think was supposed to be Armand...if it was him, they're getting closer to the teenaged, red-haired Russian he's supposed to be than Antonio ever got.

--David Talbot miraculously regressed about 30 years. in the book he's an elderly, scholarly man. in the movie, he's a swank yuppie-ish type. no point in that, really.

--Louis? who? he was nowhere to be found in the movie, either. which was too bad, because his little poignant reunion with Lestat was one of my favorite parts in the book. there was a really nice line in that scene, something about how their meeting was like 'looking at a portrait from across a room, and you think it's a portrait of your ancestors but as you get closer you realize it's us' or something like that. it was much more eloquent in the book.

there are probably others that i just can't remember right now.

but there are good things, too:

--Stuart Townsend was SO much better than Tom Cruise as Lestat. SO much better. he has it down. he could have been blonder, but boy, oh boy, does he look good in leather pants.

--the makeup folx really did good on the marble-like skin whiteness factor that the book talked about so much. Lestat was beyond pasty, and it looked real. i did miss the veiny complexions of Interview. but there was also a neat new effect in this one--when the vampires drank blood, their eyes got all dark and blood-filled. creepy and good. also, good fight scenes. always a plus.

--i liked Aaliyah. yes, it is a shame that she died. she was such a pretty young woman. and not a terrible actress. i'm sure her fans who thought of her as a nice girl were a little shocked to see her ripping out a man's heart and eating it. tee hee.

--Goths galore! lots and lots of them. made me miss my technicolor hair very badly. the music was pretty good as well.

so i'm already looking forward to when it comes out on dvd. is that really wrong?