Take Two Aspirin and See Me in the Morning

That post i wrote about "that Damon's" just keeps needing addenda, it seems.

Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away there was this cine-plex not far from my house. It always showed movies that had been out for a month or two already, but at a discounted price. I wouldn't develop a feel for the cinematic zeitgeist until much later in life, so my parents would take me to this "Super Cinemas" as it was called to save a few dollars, which was fine by me.

About the time i started developing an idea of the world beyond my backyard, the Super Cinemas closed down. There are two important points to take away from that statement. First, that while i might gleefully while away hours playing, say, SimCity 2000, a game which is entirely devoted to city planning, i had not yet developed any sort of sense of how my own city was laid out. That knowledge wouldn't truly develop until after i got my driver's license, but at least until middle school i had no concept of what lay out of sight of the property my parents owned.

Interestingly, men and women develop this knowledge in markedly different ways. The best link i could find at 4am though is this one. As i understand it, men tend to envision themselves as points on a map from which they might interpolate directions. Women, by contrast, find landmarks that they will necessarily follow to stay on path. Thus, a woman might take the long path from A to B to C (a known route) whereas a man might attempt to go directly from A to C believing that a shorter route exists. It might, or he might get lost; i'm not trying to claim one strategy is superior -- or even that the model is always accurate.

Secondly (remember when i mentioned two points?), i find it intensely poignant that the Super Cinemas closed around this point in my life. It had become something of a personal landmark, a place where movies happened. There were other movie theaters around, but until two modern cineplexes opened up i don't think i really "went out to the movies" nearly so often. It was an arbitrary, yet very concrete shift in my movie-paradigm. There was something mysterious about the Super Cinemas to me...behind the parking lot there lingered the remnants of what movie-going had been before me -- drive in movie screens(!). I had always hoped a movie might be shown on them at some point so that i could have the experience of this bygone cultural touchstone, but that wasn't in the cards for me.

I have since then attended a showing of a drive-in movie, don't worry.

My timeline might be off, but i think this all happened around the time my family moved houses to another side of the city. There's an odd coincidence.

Fast forward a dozen years. One of my close friends moved outside the city limits. I have by this time developed a fairly strong idea of WHERE STUFF IS around town, but since the Super Cinemas closed down i haven't ever been there, nor seen it on the way to anything. It was, after all, outside the city limits! Imagine my surprise, then, when the landmark to find the road to my friend's house IS the Super Cinemas!

Pretty cool, right? Ok, maybe not...but get this: A few days ago i was visiting with another friend from here at home. We call up and invite my above friend over, but he doesn't have a car he can take, so we jump on the road and start driving over. It's late at night and there aren't many lights on the road, but the Super Cinemas building is pretty big, so you can see it by the light reflected off the water tower just a bit further down the road. Much too far down the road, i realize we've passed the road i was supposed to turn on. Why, you ask?

The Super Cinemas, tenant-less for almost a dozen years, had finally been torn down.

Just like that Damon's that told me i had arrived, this Super Cinemas told me i had gone far enough. There are plenty of other landmarks i might use instead, but as chance would have it i had chosen THAT one. With it gone i had no idea where i was. That's some pretty powerful phenomenology, and by a building whose blueprint was probably photocopied for a hundred other locations across the States. So don't ever be superficial about your work. Who knows what effect on some little kid's life you might effect.

Strife

This is a topic i have to approach cautiously; i'll begin with a condemnation. I believe that harming civilians is an unacceptable method of advancing your political agenda.

A few years back i saw this chalk writing on the side of a building on campus. It said "Students Against Cancer" -- nothing else. This got me to wondering: are there students FOR cancer? Are they running around campus exposing us to deadly radiation, or spreading carcinogens in the ventilation systems of campus buildings? These people need to be stopped!

But i don't think Students Against Cancer are taking a wide enough view. Why stop there? We need to take in the whole picture. Cancer kills, right? That must be why they oppose it. After all, i don't see any groups like "Students Against the Common Cold" or "Students Against Halitosis". I guess what they're trying to say is that they oppose suffering and death, of which one notable cause is cancer. I can get behind that.

But...what would that accomplish?
Maybe it's not necessary to be vocal about some topics. I'm talking about terrorism, if you didn't click on the link above.

There's a candlelight vigil being held downtown tonight to "honor and remember the victims of the terrorist attacks on Mumbai, and to stand in solidarity with those who mourn their loved ones, irrespective of nation and religion." I find myself awkwardly impartial to this gathering. I'm not against it, but at the same time it strikes me as profoundly unnecessary. It serves as a reminder that other people care about similar issues as yourself, i suppose (if you go), but i would be very surprised if you told someone you were afraid for friends/family/people in a terrorist-threatened area and that confidant turned out to be SUPPORTING THE TERRORISTS.

Anti-terrorist sentiment, i think, doesn't need to be organized the way a school bond proposal might be hyped, or even the way Students Against Cancer might try to raise money for research. That's the crux of my argument.

And after reading this, i'm inclined to take that argument half a step further. Maybe -- just maybe -- our anti-terrorist fervor is inciting more terrorism, this time by the guys wearing uniforms.

Does this man Azam deserve to die? Maybe. Death penalties are another matter entirely, and it's not my place to make that kind of judgment anyway.

BUT! Does this man deserve to be tortured?
Does this man deserve to be terrorized?
I contend that no one deserves that.

You might say, and i considered this at length as well, that torture and terror caused this desperate man to reveal information that saved innocent lives. It might have. But from his perspective, he found it acceptable to use terror to "save" the lives of innocent, oppressed members of his particular group who were being just as terrorized by a regime which disenfranchised his voice.

I honestly don't see the difference, so i can't support the use of scare tactics, even to save lives.

Let me close with a statement i think we can all agree upon, by Professor Martin Rudner, director of the Canadian Centre of Intelligence and Security Studies at Ottawa's Carleton University.
"There is the famous statement: 'One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.' But that is grossly leading. It assesses the validity of the cause when terrorism is an act. One can have a perfectly beautiful cause and yet if one commits terrorist acts, it is terrorism regardless."
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When drafting this post, i had high hopes of keeping it on an architectural topic. That...didn't happen.

The connection i wanted to make was what i perceive to be a connection between media coverage and visible destruction (i.e., demolished architecture). I don't follow worldwide terrorism very closely, but of that hundreds-of-pages-long list linked, the ones i recognize are all closely associated with a structure. The attacks on the World Trade Center Towers (Sep. 11, 2001), the Madrid train bombings (Mar. 11, 2004), the London Underground bombings (Jul. 7, 2005), and now these attacks in Mumbai at the Taj Mahal hotel and the Chabad House. I wonder if the media chooses to show these more often than other terrorist stories because of the symbolic aspect of striking at the heart of "civilized" urban centers, or because it makes for better television? Some of both, perhaps. I'm not trying to make a point here, i just wanted to share what was on my mind regarding the topics at hand.