Evan J. Zimmer, MD

My name is Evan James Zimmer. I was born in 1950, in Brooklyn, New York to a Welsh mother and Austrian father. I had an enriched early life and had parents who instilled a strong educational ethic. By the time I was 13, I had traveled across the U.S., Canada and Western Europe.

I was a teenager in the 60's and enjoyed the intense and textured social culture of those years. From Kerouac to Ginsberg, I regularly journeyed with my friends to Greenwich Village to hear the Beatnik poets recite their wares in the cafes. Dylan and Baez were regulars. Soon Huxley and Casteneda made the scene. The Jefferson Airplane and Jimi Hendricks landed at Woodstock. I was there. I'm not going to lie. I dove in. I was already a scientist and the mind was truly the final frontier. Sometimes I can swear I still have some mud from that field left in what remains of my hair.

I have always loved mechanical things and spent a great deal of my early years in Brooklyn, New York, building model planes and cars. Back in the 50's and early 60's that meant I never got bored. Thanks to the Cold War, there was never a shortage of jets and rockets to put together. While most of my friends were busy collecting baseball cards, I was collecting cards that depicted the cars of the world. From Fords to Ferraris, with performance specs and prices on the back, I would collect these icons and dream of saving enough to buy them.

I am a tremendous film buff and have been for all of my life. I love the cinema as an art form and as the celluloid/digital manifestation of Jungian archetypes, collective unconscious and universal mythos (I still think 'Bladerunner', 'Clockwork Orange', 'Young Frankenstein' should have been sent into outer space on Voyager). I enjoy looking at films and making psychological connections to many of the themes and characters in the film. I'm particularly fascinated with the afterlife as a concept, and analyze the psychological implications of "zombie-ism" from the zombie's perspective (they do have perspectives despite being characterized as mindless creatures), and from the perspective of the living in the film's universe. I particularly enjoy the show The Walking Dead because it really complicates the concept of a post-apocalyptic zombie world where there are both the walking dead, and the living. The show fascinates me mostly because it's nothing like a zombie horror film, because a film ends. A series, may not.