The Haze ~ More TK #8

The Odyssey, Hadestown, watching women's soccer take over Citi Field under a blanket of wildfire smoke, and other modern calamities.

luis, the king of crops @itsluisgomez.com

Aug 5, 20265 min read

t one point last week, just before a small storm cell dumped what felt like a billion gallons of water on the city, I had to figure out if a women’s soccer team was lying to me about the air quality. New York's emergency management system, typically relegated to traffic and weather updates, had spent the day pumping out increasingly-worried statements about just how bad it was to do basically anything outdoors, encouraging us to stay inside, hunched over our air purifiers.

Gotham FC, meanwhile, insisted that they were monitoring the situation, that everything was proceeding as expected, that they had carefully studied the appropriate wet bulb and AQI metrics and added extra hydration breaks and wouldn't you please stop asking and come have a good time?

This is the part where I sidebar about how often we need to consciously make this calculation with private enterprise now—sure, we have always, to some extent, made the bargain that someone inside corporate structures thought keeping the customer alive was a better idea than not, but now the lettuce is poison, and the FDA that should've caught it has been hollowed out, and the MAHA warriors in government might be lying about what company knew what when...but would Taco Bell lie to me for a buck? Would Chopt give me the shits just to avoid switching suppliers? Would Chipotle be okay if it got caught fibbing, considering the last time there was a lettuce plague it almost killed the burrito chain?

So, after we'd decided to trust the team's pronouncements and arrived at Citi Field and complained about the air and the train and the lines for merch and the food, under the columns of stadium light bursting through the haze, Rose Lavelle dribbled past one defender and then another, looping a fabulous arcing shot into the opposite corner of the net. It would've been a ridiculous goal under normal circumstances, but there were 42,175 other witnesses to its ridiculousness, and we all lost our minds (except the Spirit fans, I guess). They set off fireworks a few more times, just to give the air an extra hit of flavor, or something. It was great.

The haze lasted a few days, but dissipated enough to allow the World Cup final—a beautiful, glorious, incredible total-football performance from Spain—to proceed. It dissipated further still as Christopher Nolan's towering adaptation of The Odyssey blew into town, all bombast and sound and light and sand. The film blew the doors off of the box office, off of the IMAX 70mm screenings, now booked out through September, off of critical and social expectations. It's a towering, loud, immersive project, and it reinvigorated an audience’s connection to one of the cornerstones of modern storytelling. Matt Damon’s Odysseus is a version of the classic hero who is built for and by the haze—he’s at once forged in and tortured by the fog of war, using the din of war to perform history’s most famous trick on his Trojan enemies, breaking Zeus’s law of hospitality where he deems it suitable, only to return to a home where his actions have started a chain reaction of antisocial societal collapse.

And then, when the "Hadestown" pro-shot nestled into theatres for its (initially brief, then extended) run, the haze was gone entirely, replaced by another retelling of an ancient tale, taking a story of human fallibility in the face of godly might, and turning it into a fable about love and oil and hunger and songs. Its Hades, a suited-and-medical-booted Patrick Page (who, I think, is meant to resemble both Hades and the godly smith Hephaestus more often than not) builds walls and catacombs and railways, partly to keep himself busy, partly to keep his wife from disappearing into the warm haze of spring and never returning to his side.

There's something funny about locating meaning inside of these really old stories at a time of crisis. I don't need to do a vibecession rant, times being what they are—everything's more expensive, except for the stuff that isn't, which isn't really the stuff you need—but the bad feelings are all over, in the dirt and the air and the water and the haze. It feels odd that this, therefore, is the moment that a blockbuster adaptation three thousand year old poem gets released to wild critical and financial acclaim. There are wildfires and cyclospora and Reflecting Pool prosecutorial misconduct, and the present-most preëminent translator of said three thousand year old poem is starting beef with a bunch of film critics. There are contentious primaries and ICE camps and an endless supply of reactionary chuds, and a steampunk folk-bluegrass inspired Modern Musical TheatreTM adaptation of a two-and-a-half thousand year old myth about a fuckboy songwriter and his impulsive trashwife is in its Nth year on Broadway while also lighting up movie screens.

These are old songs, basically—maybe a little different, and maybe a little louder to drown out the noise of everything going on around us, but they're old tales from way back when, and we're going to sing them again, and again, and again.

The Watchlist

Because this is the first blog post I've done in a few weeks, the watchlist is much longer than it usually is, so I've decided to write my thoughts in haiku.