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paullicino · 4 years

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Hindsight is 2020

Just one of many posts taken from and funded by my Patreon.

This is a piece of writing about some things that I do know and some things that I do not know. It also is a piece of writing about another piece of writing which no longer exists, a sort of obituary for a document. It is also a confession.

I wonder where it is that good drafts go to die. Those half-finished pieces of work that are simultaneously salvageable and yet also surplus. There are times when words come easy and, if a writer isn’t careful, those words grow like a jungle, sprouting energetically in every direction until they destroy the view, ruin the perspective and reduce those caught amongst them to a sweaty, flustered mess.

I don’t want you to wade into my work to find yourself a sweaty, flustered mess. Otherwise, I’d be in the sauna business.

I throw things out. That’s good. Not everything we make or do will be up to our standards and it’s a wise idea to aggressively cull that which doesn’t work. It’s brutal, sure, but the fact is every writer you know is regularly hurling paragraphs down a secret trapdoor in their home, which they occasionally flip open empty their machine gun into. You have to kill your darlings.

And it's a luxury to be able to murder your mistakes.

But sometimes there’s one that you rescue. There’s one that comes back. There’s one that is pulled from the brink, thrown on the gurney and shocked back into being. "It’s alive," the writer screams, as it twitches once again. Watch it stagger out into the world, walking as if for the first time. Look at its cute little hyphens.

This piece of writing is one of those. It began, more than a month ago, as an attempt to reflect on December. It started like this:

“It’s difficult for me to write about December without also writing some kind of a retrospective for an entire decade. This month has been a hugely reflective one for me and it’s been impossible not to get swept up in the general trend of looking back and taking stock, something that I initially resisted but which has become a positive, enriching exercise. The past has been on my mind in part because it’s infinitely more concrete than the present or the future. It’s so much easier to hold on to. Hopefully it will also be something solid to leap forward from.”

I hope that you feel this way. That your past is something to leap forward from.

I wonder, too, where it is that good drafts are born. I’m not quite sure exactly how much control I have over what I write and I don’t know where the words come from. I know that I don’t wait for inspiration. I chase it. I chase it and I’m armed. It’s not a pretty sight and I’m neither glamorous nor gainly in my pursuit. Sometimes I catch it in lofty places, at the shining peak of a million-year-old mountain. Other times I pull it from a dumpster at three in the morning, scraping off the gunk. But I never understand quite how this catching happens and what the process is that follows. I seem to mostly just stumble into accidents. Just after writing that paragraph that I showed you above, everything went kind of off the rails. It all veered sideways. I wrote this:

“The 2010s were a period of almost constant change and now I’m looking at the possibility of a far more settled future. That feels very unusual indeed. I can’t get my head around it. Even before I gained residency here, my life in Canada offered me so much more stability than anything in a long time and I’m not sure quite what to do with that. While there might be some things I have to worry about going into 2020, there are so many others that have melted away into the past.”

And as I tried to find a way to document and describe some of the transience of that last decade, I began pouring over maps. I'm a very visual thinker and I find that sights and spaces spark my imagination, but the task got away from me very quickly, transforming from something that I was doing to something that was happening. I tried to find something in north London and, by chance, Google Maps dropped me right by a bus stop I could easily have been waiting at ten years ago today, way up Holloway Road and close to an ex-partner’s place.

I don’t know what the logic or whimsy is behind this behaviour, but sometimes Google Maps shows you a place as it looks in summer or in winter, right now or three years past. There’s usually a slider you can drag which pulls you through time and, as I wasn't looking at the Holloway Road of today, I went to try to pull myself back into the present. But it was then that I found I could also jump back almost exactly a decade and see how things looked on any of so many winter mornings or afternoons, as I stood waiting to travel home or to work. With one click, I could hurl myself back almost exactly a decade.

I can’t tell you how powerful that single click was. It demolished a nearby building, it switched out all the road signs, it reopened the old café. It summoned a bold, red 43 bus which loomed nearby and who’s driver would have no patience if I wasn’t about to climb on. I hated that damn bus. The 271, too. They lurched and retched their way north and south, never on a reliable schedule. There was no way of knowing when the next one would come. I’d better get on board.

But I didn’t. I turned on my heel and retraced my steps, winding and squirming my way down routes that weren't just streets I hadn't seen for a decade or more, but often streets that no longer looked this way. Estates have been built, businesses have moved, and while one thing in London can look the same after a hundred and fifty years, whatever sits next to it might change three times in a decade.

I wonder what Google will do when routes themselves change. When they have not only old images, but old layouts that no longer correspond to streets and paths and places that exist. I wonder if we'll still be able to walk through them. I wonder where they’ll go.

It wasn’t difficult to retrace my steps all around each of my old London neighbourhoods, recreating journeys I'd taken countless times. I walked streets just as they looked at the time, took the same shortcuts, remarked at the same details I would've noticed at the time. There was one neighbour's stroller outside their house. There was the same front door, faded before they repainted it. I roamed and I roamed until I found myself looking straight at the face of a building I might easily have been inside at the very same moment that imagery was taken. Like any other, its windows were black holes, its walls were blank, its doorway was featureless. Yet some past version of me could be just beyond. Right then. Right now.

What am I doing in there, I asked myself, and what am I doing in any of these other places I now revisit? The people there aren’t ghosts or memories, they’re living their lives at this moment while this phantom from the future glides back toward them, unable to reach out or to communicate or to leave even the tiniest trace. I could circle these places and their people infinitely. It had never before occurred to me to try to visit the past in this way.

And then I wondered this: If I could step inside, if I could pass through those black windows and blank walls to meet the me of a decade ago, and if I could speak to him, what would I say?

I know the answer.

“Stop being so stupid,” probably.

And also “Keep going and get ready to do an awful lot of things.”

It occurs to me now, as I write this, that the me of a decade ago had a lot going on. He had a lot to juggle. He was sometimes having a much tougher time than the lazy literary bum who types out these words with one foot on the floor and one foot hanging on the sofa. I don't know if he'd appreciate the perspective of someone like me. "Stop being so stupid," he might say. And also: "I hope you've kept going and that you're still trying to do an awful lot of things." The younger me never wanted to waste opportunity.

Other things I wrote in my abandoned draft included this paragraph:

“I’m really bad at relaxing. Really bad. There is always something to be done or something that *can* be done. Most of the last decade I’ve lived paycheck to paycheck, earning enough to get by but rarely to save. I think this has created a constant sense of urgency and an ever-present feeling that I should be doing something. I also think I wasted too much of my teenage years or early twenties and should’ve achieved much more, much sooner. I should be making up for lost time.”

I think now that the me of 2010 would agree we have to find some way to go back further, to the me of 2000, and kick this person into shape. I think we would say "Stop being so stupid," and, particularly "Oh my GOD be more grateful toward your friends, your family and the people you date," which would help us pretend that we don't still need to listen to that advice ourselves. But we do. I know this.

Through most of my life I've watched a British science fiction show called Doctor Who, which tells the story of an eccentric alien who travels through time, going on adventures and solving mysteries. In the course of those travels, the Doctor sometimes meets a past version of themselves and inevitably clashes with them, ending up somewhere between baffled and irritated. But that bit sure doesn't sound like science fiction to me.

I first watched Doctor Who when I was very, very young, at just about the same time when several British organisations worked together on a famous educational undertaking called the Domesday Project, a digital documentation of Britain that existed on collections of enormous laserdiscs, fed into the school computers of the time. They showed you pictures and videos of places all over the nation, letting you take virtual tours around cities or wander in the countryside. My strongest memory of it was of a friend and I getting lost in a field after walking through the most painfully generic and nondescript landscape. We couldn't get out because everything looked the same. To the adult me writing this now, that feels like an apt metaphor for how I felt about much of England, a country I found stagnant and sterile.

The technology used to create the Domesday Project was soon out of date. The media it was stored on was soon out of date. Its images of a country that clearly wasn't always stagnant and sterile were soon out of date. Where is it all now? I don't know. I do know that this makes it very obvious Britain did change, even if to me it didn't, and I can't deny that.

Now come all the coincidences. They start with one more paragraph that I wrote, but then discarded. It is the hardest one to share. It is the confession.

"I will be forty years old soon and I am embarrassed by my age. I know people older who feel so much fresher and people younger who are more capable and more mature. My life is not the way I imagined it would be at forty and I cannot reconcile the reality of who I am with the half-formed expectations that I had. There were things that I wanted to do and things that I meant to do and then an awful lot of other stuff happened along the way. I handled some of that with varying degrees of readiness, resilience and regret, while failing the rest."

I left this paragraph to gain dust and now, by coincidence, I am forty years old at this very moment. Who let this happen? This is unacceptable. Who's fault is this and who can I blame?

And in another act of ridiculous randomness, on the same day I began redrafting all this, a note almost exactly one year old and that I thought I had lost fell out of my notebook. The note pulled me back into the past with all the power of a black hole. HERE YOU ARE AGAIN, said the note, with words that deafened my ears, blinded my eyes and plugged my nose. IT IS 2019 ONCE MORE. I couldn't see or hear or smell anything except for the past, but this time I was armed with all the tools of perspective and perspicacity. I was better equipped to understand everything while also able to change nothing.

I flailed at the past with all the effectiveness of the phantom I had become.

In the third moment of curious concordance, just a few days ago I found myself walking past the first place I lived in Vancouver. It was late. It was cold. I could've decided to head straight home. The night bus was about to come. I’d better get on board.

But I didn’t. I turned on my heel and retraced my steps, winding and squirming my way down routes that weren't just streets I hadn't walked in years, but also streets that no longer looked quite the same. New houses had been built, businesses had moved. This wasn't unusual. While one or two things in Vancouver still look the same after a hundred and fifty years, it's a shockingly young city to a person like me and it regularly rebuilds so much.

It wasn’t difficult to retrace my steps all around my old neighbourhood, recreating journeys I'd taken countless times. I walked streets just as they looked at the time, took the same shortcuts, remarked at the same details I would've noticed at the time. There was one neighbour's bike left on their balcony. There was the same front door, furnished with a new intercom. I roamed and I roamed until I found myself looking straight at the same first apartment I'd rented. Like any other, its windows were black holes, its walls were blank, its doorway was featureless. Someone else lived there now, but someone else had also lived there in the past.

Everything that night was both so familiar and yet also so forgotten. So much had fallen out of my memory so soon and I rushed to gather it all once more. It was then that I realised what true nostalgia really is: It isn't just revisiting the past, it's rediscovering it. It's finding the things that surprise us again even after they've already happened. I know this now.

It brings a very particular kind of feeling. A kind of joy. A kind of reminder. A kind of reinforcement. And I think that's important.

I think it's important to be that phantom from the future, gliding occasionally through the past, because we can forever rediscover and reevaluate that which has already happened. I'm not sure there are many pasts more important than our own and it serves us well to reappraise them sometimes. History is an open book, not a closed one, one which academics continue to re-write, and our lives are the same.

The eternal lesson has always been not to dwell on the past, not to fixate on what has already happened and not to be dominated by what cannot be undone. I don't disagree and I think it's essential that I tell the present version of myself things like “Stop being so stupid,” and also “Keep going and get ready to do an awful lot of things,” and also "Keep chasing inspiration and make sure that you're armed" and a lot more personal, private and emphatic maxims. But it's vital to me to look back from the fresh perspectives I constantly give myself. Our past does not disappear; it is not a draft that we can throw away. It instead forms the ever-growing foundations of what we are and, whether those bricks are made from hope or anger or pride or guilt, we must at times acknowledge them all.

I know this: As we inspect it, we see where it is solid, where it best serves us. That is how it becomes the foundation that we leap forward from.

#Patreon #Domesday Project #Vancouver #the past #Doctor Who

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truthbeetoldmedia · 6 years

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Doctor Who 11x01 “The Woman Who Fell to Earth” Review

Finally, after what seemed like an eternity of waiting and watching whiny white boys make Reddit threads about a female Doctor ruining the entire genre of science fiction, we have a new season of Doctor Who! And, to be honest, it feels like a whole new show compared to the recent dark and moody seasons that were much too interested in their own perceived cleverness than making television that’s actually enjoyable. We have a new Doctor, three new companions, and a new showrunner; the possibilities are endless. I’ll jump right in by dividing my review into two sections: what I enjoyed and what I didn’t.

What I Enjoyed

Jodie Whittaker

My first impression of Jodie Whittaker as the Doctor is a good one: she’s funny, quick witted, and she already seems comfortable playing this new character. Fans of Doctor Who know that first impressions are crucial for a new version of the Doctor, and the nature of the show doesn’t make it easy. The Doctor has just regenerated, not quite her old self but not yet fully transformed into her new self, either. Whittaker has to play an established character and a new one all at the same time, with the added pressure of being the first woman to do so. She has to transform from an echo of Peter Capaldi’s twelfth Doctor into her own, which she does masterfully.

And, personally, I’m looking forward to a young Doctor. At age 36, Whittaker is the third youngest to play the Doctor after Matt Smith at 26 and Peter Davison at 29. There’s something really effective about a two-thousand-year-old time lord staring at you from the eyes of someone in their 30s, and if we’re lucky enough to have a great actor in the Doctor’s shoes, that will shine through in more dramatic scenes and add real depth to the show. Matt Smith did this better than anyone, and you can fight me on that.

The most recent seasons of Doctor Who have been quite dark, with the Doctor being played by a shouty, fed up British white man in a constant state of angst. Peter Capaldi did a good job playing the Doctor during the past three seasons, but it can definitely be argued that this three season long trend was a bit too long for this kind of Doctor. Every season had at least five moments that all were framed as “the Doctor’s darkest hour,” trying to add depth to the story which instead was interpreted by many as the show being too obsessed with it’s own “cleverness.” Steven Moffat’s show Sherlock is guilty of the same thing, and it’s easy to see how Doctor Who was able to join Sherlock in the way of being a little too pretentious; a little too dark for the sake of attempting to be clever, and the show suffered for it.

Now, with Whittaker (and new showrunner Chris Chibnall), echoes of a more balanced Doctor Who are once again the core of the show. This new Doctor is cheerful in the face of danger, quick to defend her friends (or anyone, really), with the ability to be stern when the moment calls for it. This episode also allows Whittaker to shine through as the Doctor without a grand story or circumstance: she has no TARDIS, no sonic screwdriver (until she fashions one herself), and there is no travel in time or space. It’s just the Doctor on her own with a group of unassuming humans, trying to save lives.

It can be difficult for the audience when someone new plays the Doctor; there’s always a bit of a transition from the version of the Doctor that we’ve learned to appreciate and have grown used to. It’s a testament to Jodie Whittaker and Chris Chibnall that when she finally declared, “I know EXACTLY who I am. I’m the Doctor,” I not only believed it, I was already cheering for her.

The Companions

As with a new Doctor, new companions sometimes need getting used to, especially if the previous companion was a fan favorite. In this episode we’re introduced to Ryan (Tosin Cole), Yaz (Mandip Gill), and Graham (Bradley Walsh). We learn that Ryan and Yaz know each other from school, and Graham is Ryan’s step-grandfather.

We’re introduced to our new companions when they’re struggling; a classic introduction and a perfect way to introduce the Doctor into their lives. Ryan is struggling with a disorder that affects his coordination and is working a dead end job, knowing he’s not satisfied with his current circumstance but not knowing what to do to fix it. Yaz seems like she’s the most successful of the bunch, working as a police officer, but we learn early on that she’s been assigned to working traffic disputes and is met with refusal when she asks her superior to put her on more interesting cases. Graham, who has been married to Ryan’s Nan, Grace, for only three years, is finding it hard to connect with Ryan.

These three (and Grace) all work surprisingly well together in this first episode, and I’m already excited for their dynamic. We learned the most about Ryan this week, but I’m ready to learn about the others as the season progresses. I’m especially intrigued by Yaz; she’s extremely clever and I can’t wait to see that translate into adventures with the Doctor.

Choosing When to Address a Female Doctor

We all know that Jodie Whittaker’s turn as the Doctor is a historic one, marking the first time in over fifty years that the Doctor won’t be a British white man (she’s still British and white, mind you). Immediately following the announcement that the Doctor will be played by a woman, hoards of distraught men threw what can only be described as a tantrum. We all know what white men throwing a tantrum via the internet looks like, so I won’t go into detail. I will say that I’m THRILLED at the treatment that this historical casting got in the season premiere.

The Doctor’s gender is only mentioned once, quickly, and then immediately pushed to the side in favor of the actual substance of the episode. The Doctor hasn’t seen herself since regenerating, and when Yaz refers to her as “Madam” her response is a simple “Am I? Does it suit me? An hour ago I was a white haired Scotsman,” and then moves RIGHT on. Yes, The Doctor is a woman. Women belong in science fiction. A woman INVENTED science fiction, and there won’t be any kind of justification needed for a female Doctor.

The only other time the controversy surrounding Whittaker’s casting was addressed was later on in the episode, indirectly, and by the Doctor herself while giving a signature uplifting speech during the climax of the episode. She says that “We are all capable of the most incredible change. We can evolve while still staying true to who we are. We can honor who we’ve been, and choose who we want to be next.” Honestly, I was waiting for her to pull a Jim Halpert and stare right into the camera.

Back to the True Essence of Doctor Who

I mentioned this earlier on in my review, but it is such a relief to watch an episode of Doctor Who that actually feels like Doctor Who. The show has definitely gotten away from what made it special in the first place: extraordinary events in a perfectly unassuming location with ordinary people, and an alien that happens to have two hearts.

When I’m trying to explain Doctor Who to someone who hasn’t watched it (a tough job, I know), I always feel like I have to include that line from Season 1 when the Ninth Doctor (played by Chris Eccleston) says, “Nine hundred years of time and space and I’ve never met anyone who wasn’t important.”

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the best part about Doctor Who is the notion that the ordinary is extraordinary. Doctor Who is best when it’s simple, when it uplifts everyday people, and when it doesn’t try to be some grand display of cleverness. The Doctor makes her new sonic screwdriver out of Sheffield steel. She calls herself “just a traveler.” We haven’t seen this show like this in awhile, and I’m grateful.

What I Could Have Done Without

As you can tell from the first part of this review, there wasn’t a lot that I didn’t like. There is, however, one major event I take issue with, and that’s the death of Ryan’s Nan, Grace.

Grace is a part of the group that joins the Doctor early on in the episode, and she ends up dying while fighting the “monster of the week,” an alien dubbed “Tim Shaw.” It seemed so unnecessary, especially for a season premiere with a new Doctor, a new showrunner… something like that sets the tone for a new season and a new era, so it’s an odd choice to put in this episode. Fans of Doctor Who know that the show is no stranger to soul crushing sadness, but that’s usually reserved for the exit of a companion or a season finale. They even went so far as to show the funeral, touching upon death in a way that the show hasn’t done before.

We all know that good people die, but this seemed like an odd choice. It’s also pretty evident that Grace’s early demise was a way to push her husband, Graham, into being a better person, but it’s never a good choice to sacrifice a woman to insert meaning into a man’s emotional journey, especially since we only just met Grace and she didn’t have a chance to do anything else. Her relationship with Ryan seemed much more important, but we were robbed of that as well.

Overall, I really loved this episode. I’m genuinely looking forward to the new season, something that hasn’t happened for me since Matt Smith left the show. Here’s to hoping this season is Doctor Who as it should be.

Alyssa's episode rating: 🐝🐝🐝🐝

#Doctor Who #The Woman Who Fell to Earth #Jodie Whittaker

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