Been meaning to write about the trip to Florence, Italy, so here it is. In the central three weeks of April, my parents came to Europe to visit me, E, and the great Renaissance painters my father happens to be on a first-name basis with. They flew to Budapest the first weekend, spent the middle 10 days in Italy, then returned to BP for their final weekend. We wanted to spend some more time with them, and anyhow were in need of an escape from the last winter sluggishness in the city, so we agreed to let them take us to Florence for a three day weekend.

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As Earth Day is coming up on Sunday, there have been a lot of articles written lately, not least of which in Budapest Fuzine, that discuss the effect of climate change and what we can do to slow it, adapt to it, and profit from it. I was passed a recent issue of Time Magazine with the morosely simplistic cover story “Global Warming Survival Guide: 51 Things You Can do to Make a Difference”, accompanied by one of those sinfully cute emperor penguins. I wouldn’t mind having one stuffed in the same pose on my bedside table, but since I don’t have one (a bedside table) I guess I’ll have to pass. But skipping over the fact that humanity’s single most disastrous challenge in recent history is hanging over our heads and the title makes it look like a Cosmo guide on “51 Ways to Make him love your toe nail clippings”, I must say that Time magazine is written as if it’s audience hadn’t graduated 4th grade. As a part of the “things you can do” piece, the authors helpfully included a scale with such important measurements as “feel good factor”, which complemented the various made-up words and distracting references to popular television quite well. If I didn’t care so much I would have been insulted. Haven’t Pulitzer Prize winners written for this magazine? The photographs, on the other hand, were terrific. Thank God they tell a thousand words, because the writers sure didn’t bother to.

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I recently read the novel Saturday, by Ian McEwan. Set in London in 2002, on the day of the largest international protest against the upcoming Iraq war, the story takes place over an unusually long and eventful Saturday for a neurosurgeon named Henry Perowne and his family. Upon the stage of a world at a turning point, Perowne, who is approaching middle age, goes on extended episodes of self-examination, comparing his life with that of his two children, his demented mother and his unruly father-in-law, while going about his normal routine for the day. This includes making love to his wife, playing squash with his colleague, going grocery shopping, visiting his mother at the old-folks’ home, arguing politics with his budding star of a poet daughter, seeing his son, an also-ambitious blues musician, practice a new song, and so on. Along the way, shaping much of the focus of his musings on conflict and resolution, is a minor car accident with a wannabe thug named Baxter, who later shows up at Perowne’s house and terrorizes his family. Using his neurosurgeon’s spidey sense, Perowne knows that Baxter will soon succumb to a disease of rapid degeneration, perhaps Huntington’s, and thus, framed against the debate of going to war against an agreeably vile dictator for also agreeably sketchy pretexts, Perowne weighs the decision of how to combat his various assailants, real and immediate or long-term and just beyond his grasp.

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Made it a point this evening, the first free Monday I’ve had in a month, to do something symbolically related to thinking about what happened five years ago this day. So E and I went to the Palace Kossuth cinema to check out United 93, about the last of the four hijacked planes of September 11th, 2001. This post may be old news for those of you in first-world countries who get movies delivered on time, but here in Budapest things move at their own pace.

Anyway, I had skimmed a couple of reviews of the film, mainly to certify that it would not be an “America – F yeah!” rah rah go get ‘em type, which in these cynical days of wasted good will I could honestly imagine. Satisfied to that regard that it was a serious portrayal of the events of that day, I decided to forgo further research and see the thing for myself. I was not ready for what I saw.

About fifteen minutes into the film, I wanted to leave. I think that over these five years we’ve wanted to just forget what happened. It’s hard – damn near impossible – to watch the events unfold, knowing in the back of our minds the inevitable, terrible ending. Although the hijacking itself takes place relatively late in the film, the tension builds at a constant rate, based on our collective knowledge and memory of the sound-bites, images, and unfocused thoughts of that sunny morning. I stayed, biting my tongue and trying to steel myself for the questions that would be addressed as the film went on. As crushing as the ending inevitably was, I emerged knowing that it was important to have seen this film, if only to have one more image of the horror of humanity burned into my conciousness, reminding me that, victims or terrorists, we are still all human.

To their credit, the filmmakers put together an amazing work. No shortcuts were taken, and a careful balance is maintained between sympathy, fear, heroism and faith. We are given just the slightest chance to see the terrorists both as sympathetic and also monstrous, filled with their own fear and clearly driven by it to commit their act. The confusion of the day is also well-demonstrated, by all the flight numbers of what was, is, could be and isn’t a hijacked plane being thrown around by air traffic controllers, military personel and so on. The politics of the film, as well, are played close to its chest; there are no statements or references to the President, for example, that are outrightly supportive or critical, but they could be (and likely are) debated in many a chat-room or editorial space.

Perhaps the only thinning of the plot was in the reconstruction of the events on board the airplane. The question of if, how, and to what extent a struggle occurred to regain control is no doubt timeless, and to tell the truth is pointless to argue. Surely any attempt to fight their captors was heroic – but does this make those on the other flights, who likely and reasonably thought they were being taken hostage and that their safety would be negotiated for, less heroic?

Just as pressing is the question we must ask ourselves: in the same situation, would we have acted differently than any of the passengers portrayed or not, on any of the flights? United 93 deserves credit for tapping our collective subconcious to construct what I at least had already constructed for myself in terms of what really happened. In the end, the details are less important. The horror is what remains.

The other day I watched a Chris Rock stand-up comedy show. One of the bits was about reading – I won’t repeat it verbatim here – but it made the point that books are like kryptonite for the ignorant. So in the pursuit of ejumacation, I have torn through the following reads, all of which come highly recommended.

Nickel and Dimed, by Barbara Ehrenreich. A classic account of investigative journalism, in this case into the sub-classes of low-wage workers in the United States. Why should you care? Because without these people, who must work 2 jobs if they intend to sleep indoors and eat from a convenience store if they can afford to eat at all, are the pillars of the nation’s economy. If they disappeared, we’d be toast.

Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck. If you haven’t read this, stop everything you’re doing and get it. If you have, read it again. Although short, the tale of friendship and honor is timeless. If life could imitate literature, this would be it.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, by Hunter S. Thompson. Although the craziness of this “gonzo” journalist is largely due to the simultaneous consumption of several mind-altering substances at any given time, the truth is between the white lines – there is a very dark, very different side to the American dream.

Understanding Comics, by Scott McCloud. This is NOT a book about comics. It’s about how we perceive all visual things, especially art and literature. By brilliantly analyzing how we interact with “a series of juxtaposed pictoral images”, McCloud makes some profound conclusions about how our minds work.

I am currently in the middle of another book, Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig, and am finding it equally intriguing. It’s a Stanford Law Professor’s analysis (in layman’s terms, thank God) of the ways in which technological advancements (from FM radio to inexpensive photography to the internet and P2P) enable a revolution in terms of creative potential, and the corporations who try to stifle it, defying what Lessing calls “our tradition of free culture”. Definitely worth a look if you care about media.

Not to be outdone by their higher-society brethren, I have also seen several quite interesting, bizarre and moving films of late. Maybe I just don’t see as much crap anymore, but it seems like there are two distinct shifts occurring in the film world. We’re seeing the rise of a large crop of intensely focused, artistically challenging and thought-provoking works on one hand, and the grasping for straws of emotional content in the absurdly expensive blockbusters. I’d like to think that the democratization of distribution that we’ve seen as a result of the internet (see Free Culture above) is spurring a creative shift geared towards niche markets. Anyway, dig out your Blockbuster card (irony noted, thanks) and rental yourself up some of these prime cuts.

Pi [the symbol, like 3.14 . . .] - A captivating mindbender about a mathematician descending into madness as he trys to find a pattern in the NY stock exchange. He is further antagonized by a government agency and a religious cult [Note: aren't they one in the same? - Ed.]. It’s kind of like an auteur DaVinci Code, I think.

Brazil – Terry Gilliam’s (of Monty Python fame) epic exercise in abstraction manages to both confuse the hell out of us and still make serious comments on friendship, love, and the future of air conditioning repair. With Robert DeNiro in a brilliant bit part.

The Motorcycle Diaries – Inspiring film about Ernesto Guevara’s, well, inspiration- a 3500km odyssey through South America, partly on a motorcycle. If nothing else, it makes you want to take a road trip and learn Spanish.

The Corporation – A fast paced and information-heavy tour of the history of the corporate entity, from humble “servants of the public interest” to nation-rivaling power mongers. If markets are to be trusted, the pursuit of profit comes second to nothing short of self-destruction. We should be very afraid.

Hotel Rwanda, The Constant Gardener, and The Manchurian Candidate. True stories or just entirely possible, these three drama/thriller vehicles raise very pointed questions as to what the hell we’re doing in the rest of the world.

King Kong (the new one) – Dizzying and hyperactive but touching remake of the classic story. Could have done without 50% of the action sequences (especially the giant bugs attack scene – eew!) and the intensely old-fashioned “natives” scenes, the main subjects of which look suspiciously like orcs from LOTR. Computer animation has come so far and is truly spectacular, but one gets the sense that it’s a bunch of techies sitting around smoking pot and saying “Yeah! And after the brontosaurus stampede scene we’ll have Kong fight THREE t-rexes! On a web of vines! While he’s juggling the woman around in the air!”. Chivalry has surely reached the limits of absurdity. At least they don’t kiss.