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red wine and binge
Friday, January 5 2018
Down in Manhattan today, Gretchen would be attending a Broadway play with her friend Kia, who is a playwright who gets to vote in the Tonys, and so can see Broadway productions for free. (Kia wrote an episode of the Wire, among other things.) Originally the plan was to drive there, but ultimately Gretchen took a bus from the New Paltz park & ride. She left at around 2:00pm. The weather forecast for Manhattan called for bitter cold and powerful winds leftover from bombogenesis.
Meanwhile, this afternoon after all my Friday meetings, I had a plan to take a break and drive out to the Tibetan Center in the bitter cold and look for thrift store treasure, and perhaps get some black caulk while I was at it. So I shoveled the snow off the Subaru and went to start it so it would be warm by the time I needed to drive it. But when I turned the key, exactly nothing happened. The battery in that car is only a couple months old, so my thinking is that some light or other circuit managed to drain the battery in the several weeks since I last drove it. So that was what became of my treasure hunting plans. I tried charging up an old car battery and starting the car with that, but even after an hour of charging from a computer power supply, the old battery could not get the car to crank.
As my workday wound down, I began my planned Black Mirror season four binge, which, sadly, would only be two episodes in length. I'd be watching "Metalhead" and "Black Museum." The first of these, "Metalhead," was a scant 41 minutes and shot in oppressive black and white. It depicted a post-apocalyptic world overrun with difficult-to-destroy robotic dogs that seem intent on killing any humans (and perhaps other animals; pigs are mentioned as prey as well) that they can find. As always, it was great teevee, though its premise was unusually simple. And what was the cautionary message, that robots would rise up and try to kill us? That seems a bit cliché for Black Mirror. Thankfully, Black Mirror returned to form with "Black Museum," a complex story involving three different flashbacks (similar to the brilliant non-season episode "White Christmas"). A young woman in an old car (retrofitted to run on electricity) stops in a dusty desert town and drops in a place called The Black Museum, where recognizable items from other Black Mirror episodes are on display, for example the tablet used by the helicopter mother in "Arkangel" to spy on her daughter. It's now a cracked and bloody, of course, because that daughter ultimately used it as a blunt weapon against her mother. The proprietor of the museum, we learn, was involved in the development of some of the technologies we've seen in other episodes, particularly those related to the digital copying and transference of human consciousness. In its more primitive form, this technology could only transmit live experiences, and, in the first of three flashbacks, we see the technology finding its way into the hands of a doctor who uses it to help with diagnostics. Inevitably, though, the doctor proves to be a masochist addicted to pain, and when he can't find patients to beam their suffering at him, he goes rogue and gets suffering from people who hadn't been suffering until he showed up. In the second flashback, we're shown a technology that allows a consciousness to be moved out of one body and placed as a second consciousness within someone else's brain. This seems like a great solution for the problem of a wife in a coma who wants to be able to see and hold her child again. But after ending up in her husband's brain, the negatives become apparent in the way they always do in an episode of Black Mirror. The husband gets a girlfriend, and the wife is there in his head for all of that too. In desperation, the husband has the wife's consciousness extracted in placed inside a consciousness receptacle that looks like a stuffed toy monkey. It has a camera, so she can see, and it has haptic feedback so she can feel physical sensations. But she can't do anything except make one of two pre-recorded sounds: "Monkey Loves You!" and "Monkey needs a hug!" In classic
Black Mirror fashion, it was both laugh-out-loud hilarious and deeply, heart-wrenchingly sad. In the final flashback, we're shown how a condemned prisoner is convinced to have his consciousness collected at the moment of execution, though the ultimate destination for that consciousness is The Black Museum, where sadists and racists can come and repeatedly torment a holographic projection of the consciousness with a holographic electric chair, collecting a souvenir at the end that amounts to a looped copy of the prisoner's consciousness at the moment of greatest agony, shrunken down to conveniently fit on a key chain. At that point we learn the true nature of the museum's young visitor, and she's there for justice. As in reality, justice is a rare thing in the Black Mirror universe.
I should mention that one thing that made this episode particularly great was the creepy soundtrack by Cristobal Tapia de Veer. I recognized it as his work immediately, and I was not wrong.
I'd been drinking red wine and smoking pot, which made the experience more intense and profound that it otherwise would've been. It helped that I was using a different pipe; the one I'd been using had such poor draw that smoking had become something of a chore, and rarely resulted in me getting stoned. Tonight, though, I managed to get a respectable (though not overwhelming) buzz going.
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