Fire At Will

Sometimes I believe I should blog more, not less. Shorter subjects, more frequently. This is probably the effect of some low-level bipolarism in my chemical makeup, or an intractable impulse to shirk at my job mixed with the occasional decision to remember that expression, artistic expression especially, cares not what you think about it. But whatev. Point is, for no known reason as I sat here working too hard on the details of a procedural definition no one will follow, the movie THX 1138 suddenly came to mind. Despite the Wiki's pronouncement that the film "was released to theaters on March 11, 1971 and failed to reach an audience," I saw it when it came out, and have wanted to have my own copy ever since (I just forgot for most of three and a half decades). In other words, it did not fail to reach me. The main reason I wanted to see it, of course, was I knew part of it was filmed in the yet-to-be-completed Transbay Tube and, being twelve, anything to do with BART, under construction and not yet running, fascinated me.

(I used to ride my bike down to the construction site where the elevated BART tracks dove underground at the Berkeley city limits. The people of Berkeley had voted to pay extra to put the tracks underground so as not to leave part of the city on the "wrong" side of the tracks. I can still picture the earth-moving equipment, the vast structures of rebar, the great open maw of the tunnel leading into a dark and mysterious underworld.)