Her mother, in the shade of the van's tailgate: "It's the same with me: I'm a city-country person like you, Robert. My parents had a farm, horses. It's hard. I'm, like, you know that neighbor who inspires everyone else to plant something. Yeah, that's always me. I'm just digging in the littlest space and planting things. So when I heard about this I'm like Yeah! Sign me up."
...
Behind the empty lot, piles of construction trash rise like hump-backed, flotsam-crusted sea monsters surfacing from the hot blacktop. A dessicated bus drags its wheelless rear, its windows smashed, its siding hammered and twisted into Gehry-esque wing-shapes. A pickup, a mere shell of rust, rides one of the waves of trash.
"They must think Lynn is one giant dumpster," Destiny's mother is saying. "Everywhere they go, they just leave trash, trash, trash."
The film is called "Surrogates." This heaving trashscape is how the makers have envisioned the city, fifty years into the future. Spandexed humanoid robots have walked the streets for weeks prior to my arrival on the North Shore. One of the many storefronts advertising used electronics bought, and a slew of oft-questionable computer services, became a robot upgrade shop. We hear this from one of the earnest onlookers who clog the streetcorners as fictitious motorcycles scream through the streets, chased by choppers and obstructing the business district for days on end. For 20 minutes, we are trapped inside Flava'z, the local tag-themed scoop shop, while the chase unwinds and rewinds, the background traffic backing into place, then rolling when the camera rolls, and repeating, as bike and cop cars weave and screech through it. The business district is a gaping hole in reality, the fictitious violently keeping the quotidian at bay, with microphoned guards and cooperative local cops herding pedestrians and traffic, so that the future-dystopian theme feels not entirely distant.
...
On the Harvard bridge at sunset, later, an old friend and I spin our own fantasies of the future. Full of Syrah, soft tacos, and our long history of fantasizing together. Ours has always been the friendship of eager young boys. "Man, I been watching the news lately," he's saying. "It's all going down. I'm telling you. Well, going up actually. The gas prices, the sea level..."
The world's been ending for thousands of years. No reason it should stop now.
But with the wine and his high spirits, and the sailboats like snippets of wings on the sunset-bruised Charles, I play along, and I believe what I'm imagining. "There'll be rooftop gardens," I'm saying. "You'll look down on the city and no cars will be moving. All the fuel's used up. Everyone's an immigrant, come here from worse places in the South. People are selling things on the empty highways. Food's growing everywhere. You can't hear an engine or an automated voice. Just shouts in a hundred languages."
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Now playing: M.I.A. - Bird Flu
via FoxyTunes
...
On the Harvard bridge at sunset, later, an old friend and I spin our own fantasies of the future. Full of Syrah, soft tacos, and our long history of fantasizing together. Ours has always been the friendship of eager young boys. "Man, I been watching the news lately," he's saying. "It's all going down. I'm telling you. Well, going up actually. The gas prices, the sea level..."
The world's been ending for thousands of years. No reason it should stop now.
But with the wine and his high spirits, and the sailboats like snippets of wings on the sunset-bruised Charles, I play along, and I believe what I'm imagining. "There'll be rooftop gardens," I'm saying. "You'll look down on the city and no cars will be moving. All the fuel's used up. Everyone's an immigrant, come here from worse places in the South. People are selling things on the empty highways. Food's growing everywhere. You can't hear an engine or an automated voice. Just shouts in a hundred languages."
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Now playing: M.I.A. - Bird Flu
via FoxyTunes
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