I have started production on a short film (details to come) and found myself in need of 16 thousand Minotaurs tearing up the street. While researching, the scenes of the Spanish bull runs became my primary inspiration.
The Minotaur, appears briefly in Dante‘s Inferno, where Dante and his guide Virgil find themselves picking their way among boulders dislodged on the slope and preparing to enter into the seventh circle of hell. Dante and Virgil encounter the beast first among the “men of blood”, those damned for their violent natures.
On my occasion scrolls through Instagram videos, I am shocked by the number of videos being posted of fist fights in public. After three years of the pandemic, people are violently mingling in public. They have lost sigh of how to be civilized and care about people other than themselves. Fights break out in airplanes, busses, and public events. Humanity as a whole seems to have become more primal, driven by fear and a hatred fueled by a virus they can not control, and do not understand.
Hate crimes against Asian Americans had been on a steep incline. Domestic violence has also been on a steep incline. It is as if the hoards need someone to blame. The virus is invisible and therefor easy to ignore as it spreads among the masses that have no idea that it is airborne and can cause infection from much further than six feet.
The simple act of wearing a mask has become a heated source of violence. A fight over masks led to gunfire outside a Los Angeles grocery store, according to authorities, and a rapper named Jerry Lewis was killed. When workers in a Michigan pizzeria told a customer that she had to wear a mask, the costumer flashed a middle finger, and kicked someone in the restaurant.
The wearing of masks has become a catalyst for political conflict, an arena where scientific evidence is often interpreted through a partisan lens. While I was wearing a mask while walking the streets of Charleston, I was accosted by a drunkard and my politics were called into account. I ignored the drunk trying to impress his buddies and a fight didn’t follow. We went about the rest of the evening outside learning about the ghosts of the city from a guide. I don’t care if I am the only person wearing a mask. I know too much to risk the infection.
Some idiot on a crowded plane tried to convince a woman seated near him to take off her mask by offering her 100,000. Besides being a smarmy gesture, the price was far too low. I would need an offer of 4 million dollars in cash to even consider taking my N-95 off in a crowded plane. Even then it is not really worth it.