Pick Your Apocalypse

This weekend I took in a film: Battle: LA. I will pretty much see any spectacular disaster movie, whether good or bad. I'd put Battle: LA in the good camp - it was an enjoyable romp with explosions abounding.

My husband and I bond over a shared love of the imagined apocalypse. While its depictions range from eye-rollingly ridiculous to thought provoking, there's something fascinating about the end of the world as we know it. In Buffyverse, though not one of my favorite character's, Riley Finn delivered one of the best lines of the series: "I find myself needing to know the plural of apocalypse."

Pop culture has indeed dreamed up a plethora of means by which the world might end and I tend to enjoy society's demise in all its forms. The Ides of March seem an appropriate day to examine a foreboding subject. Let's have a look see:

Alien apocalypse
Since I started out with Battle: LA I might as well continue in this vein. The alien apocalypse can be zany (Mars Attacks), insidious (Invasion of the Body Snatchers, X-Files), or bombastic (Independence Day, Battle: LA). It's interesting to see what our extraterrestrial neighbors look like, covet their superior technology, and wonder how humans will manage to prevail.

Viral ApocalypseMaybe more frightening because of its plausibility, the supervirus apocalypse (The Stand, Survivors) gets popular play though not as often as other armageddons. Sometimes it wipes out the population, sometimes it makes people into vampires (Daybreakers).

And in case you were worried that all this world-ending mayhem was mutually exclusive, sometimes viruses even bring...

Zombie apocalypseA perennial favorite, the zombie apocalypse comes in many forms. Whether wrought by the slow moving undead (George Romero's oeuvre) or the hyper-charged rage-diseased variety (28 Days Later), zombies spell bad news for society but give us lots of tips for survival. Double tap.

In fact, I'm not that frightened by the onset of zombie apocalypse because I think a good portion of the population is living in a zombie-apocalypse-ready state.

Climate apocalypse
A relative newcomer to the end of the world scenarios, you'll find a few blockbusters (The Day After Tomorrow) but mostly made-for-tv fare (Category 7: The End of the World is pretty awesome). To get serious for a moment, the climate apocalypse scenario hits pretty close to home when horrible disasters (and yes, I know tectonics isn't climate, but still) are affecting sites around the globe. If you aren't already donating to the Red Cross, please consider doing so.

Nuclear apocalypse

Like viral and climate apocalypses, nuclear apocalypse is plausible enough to be truly unsettling. But saw its popularity (Dr. Strangelove, The Day After, Reds, On the Beach) wane in the 21st century. I think "too close for comfort" is part of the we don't see more films of this variety. Also because the Cold War ended. Duh.

Biblical apocalypse
Classic. Who doesn't love a good angels vs. demons battle for the fate of the world? And the four horsemen: pretty hard to top. Whether the anti-Christ is being born (The Omen, Constantine) or Lucifer's running rampant (End of Days), this type of apocalypse is chock full of supernatural goodness.

Though I'd hope none of us are rooting for the end of the world, I'd still wager that we all favor a particular armageddon. My husband is a devoted nuclear apocalypse fan, I'm torn between zombie and biblical, which makes sense given that science fiction and fantasy are my favorite genres.

What's your apocalypse of choice?

It's the End of the World As We Know It...and I Feel Fine?

The apocalypse has been on my mind lately, and not just because I watch Buffy every day and she's always busy stopping them.
Mostly it's because I've been reading Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games and Catching Fire. I cannot stop thinking about them. These books are amazing and deserve their own posts (which will soon be coming).

But it's also because last night I went to see 2012. My husband and I are rabid fans of disaster movies, particularly apocalyptic, nuclear, zombie, there will be few humans will be left variety. The over-the-top, lacking good acting and feasible plots content of these films always makes me giddy. But last night as I was watching human race scramble to save itself, I began to wonder - why is the apocalypse so popular (I mean, how many disaster movies do we get in an average year? Plenty. And that number only goes up when we're nearing some possible date of "real" apocalypse danger - i.e. 2000, 2012). What is it about watching cities leveled and nature becoming predatory that draws viewers to the big screen?

Because, hey, "morbid much"?

I have two knee-jerk responses to this query:

1) Disaster movies make us feel safe. In the context of real disasters that happen each year - tornadoes, hurricanes, fires - this security is obviously misplaced, but still I think seeing mass destruction somehow reassures us that this crazy scenario surely is so far-fetched that we must be safe, that could never really happen.
2) Disaster movies make us treasure the world that we do have. The one moment in 2012 where I choked up a little (um...yes, I'm serious) was the brief shot of animals being air lifted onto the arks. In that single clip the film made survival not just about the silly, stupid-decision-making actors on the screen, but about the the world as we know it. Suddenly disaster wasn't just about 'us' it was about this little blue planet and how precious and fragile it is.

So what do you think about disaster movies? Do they have anything of value to offer other than spectacle?

Hope & Recycling

A story featured on the radio this morning captured my attention. California scientists are working on an early alert system for earthquakes. As someone whose major natural disaster home environment was pretty much limited to blizzards, I've always found earthquakes both exotic and scary.
But my life now brings earthquakes much closer to home. I married a man from San Francisco, who was right in the middle of the '89 earthquake, and my brother lives in Los Angeles. Earthquakes have gone from frightening and far off to something I actually worry about. An early warning system sounds fantastic to me.

What intrigued me about this story, however, wasn't the system itself but where it was being implemented. The scientists were using equipment from a Cold War bunker that tracked seismic activity produced by nuclear detonations in testing that occurred across the globe.

They say the best thing to do in the event of an earthquake is get under a table. During the Cold War students were drilled to 'duck and cover' during a nuclear attack. While the former actually works, the latter was obviously akin to using Swiss cheese for armor.

Still, this radio essay left me hopeful about the human condition. We may not have achieved nuclear disarmament, but we're a lot closer than we were in the age of duck and cover. And if a Cold War bunker can be transformed into a site that saves lives, who knows what other transformations we might be capable of. History is not without its own sweet sense of irony.

The Kids Are Alright

Since we started Banned Books Week with a discussion of picture books I wanted to continue in the vein of children's lit.

Here's a big shout out to The Kids' Right to Read Project (KRRP). This group is on the front lines of the book banning war and they do amazing things. The best of which is advocating for the validity of children's brains - yes, indeed, kids read, kids think, kids learn!!! Let's help them!

KRRP offers wonderful resources on readers' rights and book censorship. I found this list particularly interesting and thought it would serve as a good segue into this week's posts:

Types of Objections against Books

Profanity. Books are often challenged for the language they contain, even though profanity is often used in literature to convey social or historical context, local dialect or simply to better depict reactions to real-life situations. Books such as Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck and Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut have been challenged or banned due to objections to profanity.

Sex. Books as varied as Judy Blume’s Forever, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, and Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, among many others, have been challenged by parents and school boards who deem certain sexual passages inappropriate for young people. Works such as It’s Perfectly Normal by Robie Harris and Heather Has Two Mommies by Leslea Newman, among others, face demands for removal for their frank discussion and focus on gay/lesbian issues.

Violence. Objections to violent content are often based on the idea that these works trivialize violence or desensitize readers to its effects. Books challenged on these grounds include One Fat Summer by Robert Lypsyte and Native Son by Richard Wright.

Religion. Religious grounds have long been cited as reasons for censoring books. Reading translations of the Bible was once forbidden. Today, parents and ministers often object to works which discuss topics such as sex, evolution, or witchcraft or occult themes.

I guess that means Profanity, Sex, Violence, and Religion are the four horsemen of the book apocalypse.

Kitty Mea Culpa

Oh noez! I've made kitty sad :(

Thanks for all the support for Dandelion. He seems to be settling into a happy routine well (sleeping in the day, eating at night). I have now become a forager, taking the dogs out to gather wild greens for our little housemate.

I want to apologize to my cat-folk friends (who are many and lovely) for slandering all felines re: rabbit stalking. When I ranted about the cat attack I was still very much caught up in the surreal, post-rescue mindset. Despite the vitriol of my previous post, I am not an anti-cat person. I've spent time with some very nice cats, and have enjoyed many hours of being a kitty "auntie" as a cat-sitter. I enjoy kitty antics and have immense respect for kitties' independence and cunning. As Alan Weisman points out in The World Without Us, it's cats that would survive an apocalypse whereas dogs are likely to go the way of their doomed owners.