Balls and Walnuts
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What passes for nature, here in Bako.
This weekend, Jake and I went exploring. First we went to the California Living Museum, a small but well maintained zoo that had raccoons and bald eagles and a couple of hungry brown bears, among other things. Despite the fact this was a Sunday and there’s precious little else to do in Bako, there were few people at the park. We were calling it a ghost zoo.
Here’s one of the neater inhabitants, a porcupine who had quite a jones for his zookeeper. He kept trying to get her attention because he wanted to be petted.
He was cuter in person.
Afterward, we drove up the 178 as far as Jake could tolerate. He gets carsick. The 178 is a narrow, curvy two-lane highway that skirts the Kern River on its way to Lake Isabella. Reminded me a lot of the 199, except that the scenery here is rather more Mars-like than it is in the Pacific Northwest.
Odd thing, I never noticed that power line when I snapped the picture. My brain edited it out.
Hot as hell Sunday . . . at least 100 . . . so hot we eventually gave up, turned around, and drove back to civilization, anyplace we could get a cold drink.
I miss redwoods. I miss ocean.
D.
Jerry Brown 2010
I finally got (get) to vote for Jerry Brown! That’s right, twice — once in the Democratic primary, and again in the general election. I wasn’t old enough to vote in his first gubernatorial election and I think I was just shy of 18 for the second gubernatorial election, too. I suspect I voted for him in one of his ill-fated presidential campaigns. But at last I get to vote for him in a race he can win.
You have to understand that Brown is something of a hero to progressives. Here’s a guy who once left the Democratic party because it wasn’t progressive enough. (He came back, of course, I suspect for pragmatic reasons.)
Here’s Brown’s announcement. Can you believe this guy is 72?
Here’s a bit from Wikipedia on his tenure as governor (1975-1983):
Opposed to the Vietnam War, Brown had a base of support from California’s young liberals. Upon election, he refused many of the privileges and trappings of the office, forgoing the newly constructed governor’s residence (which was sold in 1983) and instead renting a modest apartment at the corner of 14th and N Streets, adjacent to Capitol Park in downtown Sacramento. Instead of riding as a passenger in a chauffeured limousine as previous governors had done, Brown was driven to work in a compact sedan, a Plymouth Satellite.
During his two-term, eight-year governorship, Brown had a strong interest in environmental issues. Brown appointed J. Baldwin to work in the newly-created California Office of Appropriate Technology, Sim Van der Ryn as State Architect, and Stewart Brand as Special Advisor. He appointed John Bryson, later the CEO of Southern California Edison Electric Company and a founding member of the Natural Resources Defense Council, chairman of the California State Water Board in 1976. Brown reorganized the California Arts Council, boosting its funding by 1300 percent and appointing artists to the council.
In 1975, Brown obtained the repeal of the “depletion allowance”, a tax break for the state’s oil industry, despite the efforts of the lobbyist Joe Shell, a former intraparty rival to Richard M. Nixon . . . .
Brown appointed more women and minorities to office than any other previous California governor.
He’s liberal on social issues, but a fiscal conservative, so the Palinesque “tax and spend big government” smears are going to slide right off. Watch:
And here’s Brown’s interview with Diane Sawyer, commenting on the upcoming race against gazillionaire Meg Whitman:
We’ll be digging deep on this one to put back into office the last competent governor we had in California. Jerry Brown for Governor, 2010.
D.
Going mainstream
Sometimes it seems as though my favorite directors are going mainstream. When Tim Burton made it big with Batman and Batman Returns, I thought we had lost him for good; but in the midst of all that blockbusterishness, he also created Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood, and Mars Attacks!, and his recent movies continue his tradition of the weird. (Oooh, look! He’s working on a feature-length version of Frankenweenie, and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is in pre-production!)
But then there’s Sam Raimi, who gave us the brilliant Army of Darkness, the capstone of his Evil Dead trilogy. Raimi hit mainstream with the Spider-Man movies, and if Drag Me to Hell is any indication, his horror has gone mainstream, too. Raimi’s IMDB page indicates he has 20 projects under development. Is that humanly possible?
My latest sorrow is for David Cronenberg, a guy who was creating slipstream* movies before slipstream fiction even had a name, with gems like Videodrome and Dead Ringers, and later Naked Lunch and Crash pushing our comfort zone for what a movie should be.
But then in 2005 he teamed with Viggo Mortensen in A History of Violence, a solid thriller that I found fun to watch, but fun is not what I expect from a Cronenberg movie. Interesting, uncomfortable, surprising . . . and maybe fun is fourth on the list. And in 2007, apparently happy with the collaboration, Cronenberg gave us Mortensen-as-Russian-mafiose in Eastern Promises.
You get to see all this and so much more.
The premise: London midwife Anna (Naomi Watts) delivers the baby of a 14-year-old Russian prostitute, who does not survive the delivery. Among her effects is a diary written in Russian; fortunately for the plot, Anna is the child of Russian immigrants, and has an uncle who can translate. But Uncle is a bit of a dick, so she follows a lead provided by a business card buried in the diary: she goes to Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), a Russian restaurateur who seems like such a nice man, especially when he’s not trying to kick the virility out of his son Kirill (French actor Vincent Cassel).
Viggo Mortensen plays Nikolai, Kirill’s friend and driver. Nikolai is portrayed as ambitious, smart, and cool, the ice cube to Kirill’s blow torch, and he’s enough of a bad boy to intrigue and frighten Anna. At the risk of dropping a few spoilers, the lack of a love scene between Anna and Kirill was one of the movie’s few surprises. That Semyon is a right bastard and Nikolai is not all he seems to be were “twists” telegraphed miles in advance.
Cronenberg fans will appreciate the movie’s gore, which included the most realistic throat-cutting depiction I have ever seen. (No, really — it’s not that easy to slit a throat, and for once we get to see that you have to work at it. I mean there’s a reason our heads don’t just pop off. All that muscle and skin and gristle.) But if you were hoping for the Russian version of The Godfather, or even a gangster movie with the depth of, say, Miller’s Crossing, then you’re going to come away disappointed.
Chief among the film’s deficiencies were a lack of character development and inadequately developed motivation. Who is Nikolai and why is he taking these risks? For that matter, who is Semyon and why (other than the fact that he is a crime boss) does he have enemies back in Mother Russia? Even the movie’s central killing — of Soyka, son and made man from a rival Chechen family — receives only hints of an explanation. If well developed characters have six layers**, we are provided only the first one or two.
And some things are just plain inexcusable. There’s a vicious, bloody, nekkid-butt-waving and wiener-flopping fight scene in a steam bath, which Karen found objectionable for its poor choreography. I agree with her but I was more offended by the premise that the bad guys would mistake Nikolai for Kirill because of his star tattoos (sign of a made man). True, they’ve never met Kirill and don’t know what he looks like, but surely they would recognize tattoos that are less than two days old? And this is a pivotal moment, plot-wise.
Absent from Eastern Promises is that slipstream feeling of strangeness. No, I wasn’t expecting Nikolai’s hand to morph into a gun, nor did I expect him to pull a cup of borscht from the middle of his chest. But aside from some high stakes gore, the movie never takes chances.
Cronenberg is working on a sequel, which should come as no surprise to anyone who has seen the movie. By movie’s end (SPOILER), driver and dirty work guy Nikolai has risen to seat of power in this family, much as cadet James T. Kirk gloms onto the captain’s chair near the end of the recent Star Trek movie. (The ascension is every bit as unbelievable.) Will Nikolai and Anna meet again and relieve our sense of coitus interruptus? Count on it.
I enjoyed Eastern Promises, found it “fun,” especially Armin Mueller-Stahl’s sweet and sparkly Russian grandpa with a heart of bile. I’m just not so sure that “fun” is what I want from David Cronenberg.
D.
*From Sterling’s article:
Instead, this is a kind of writing which simply
makes you feel very strange; the way that living in
the late twentieth century makes you feel, if you are
a person of a certain sensibility. We could call this
kind of fiction Novels of Postmodern Sensibility, but
that looks pretty bad on a category rack, and requires
an acronym besides; so for the sake of convenience and
argument, we will call these books “slipstream.”
But Mr. Sterling, Novels of PMS does have a certain je ne sais quoi.
**I just made that up. But it sounds about right, doesn’t it?
A metaphor too far
Who was it who used to publish whiffies — examples of malodorously bad writing? I can’t recall. They were hilarious, those whiffies. Now if you google “whiffies” you get some sort of fried pie maker.
The spoken word won’t qualify as a whiffy, of course, since criminal English escapes all of our lips on a daily basis. But . . . Still . . . There are cases so heinous that they cannot be allowed to pass unnoticed.
On NPR yesterday, from a piece on Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan’s attitude toward military recruitment on the Harvard campus during her tenure as dean, here’s an unnamed person from the Student Veterans Association describing the cold response Kagan received from them when she came to talk:
“It was a tough room,” said one of those present. “She got more pushback than she was used to.”
“I was shocked that the request was made. The vast majority of us thought ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ was stupid,” the person continued. “But … getting us to carry her water on military recruitment through the back door was a bridge too far . . .”
Boo-yah!
D.
Vampires
Our gym sits right next to a pizza parlor, no doubt for the convenience of putting the fat back on after you’ve worked so hard to get it off. My son and I pulled into the parking lot a few minutes after nine, and the pizza parlor was dark. Plenty of cars in the parking lot — ours is a busy gym, and stays busy well past ten — and yet the restaurant had already closed.
One thing about going to Berkeley: you become accustomed to a city that never sleeps. If I remember correctly, I could (if I was so inclined) get a slice of Blondie’s pizza right up until midnight. Was Top Dog open that late? I don’t remember. Even back then, I wasn’t insane enough to eat a Polish sausage at midnight. But the coffee shops stayed open and so did the used book stores and record stores. That city is alive.
Not all college towns are this enlightened. I remember our shock when, one Sunday morning, Karen and I tried to find an open coffee shop in Palo Alto. This was not one of those, “I wonder if anything is open” adventures. We knew there would be an open coffee place probably one to every city block. And we were wrong. Or rather, we were right, but we were in the wrong city.
Berkeley is a town for vampires. (As I think I might have mentioned at one point, the grad student who had Karen’s tiny studio apartment before she did must have been a vampire. He had quite carefully covered every last window with foil. Needn’t have bothered, though, since the windows overlooked the apartment building’s hollow central space — sorry, there must be a word for that, but I don’t know it — and no, ATRIUM is all wrong because that implies something kinda nice, and this wasn’t. Anyway, precious little light penetrated down that far, even at noon.) It’s a town for vampires and insomniacs and students whose midnight oil miraculously burns Hanukkah-style until 3 or 4 in the morning. I walked or ran or skipped those streets because often they were quieter than the dorm. And often less depressing.
And so I’ve decided my son ought to go to his parents’ alma mater. Jake goes to bed after 2, sometimes well after 2. And while he’s not into eating Polish sausage at midnight now, I can’t help but think, Not yet.
Other kids go to college and experiment with drugs and alcohol. My prediction for Jake: he won’t do the drugs and he won’t do the alcohol. No, he’ll go the full vampire, completely inverting his schedule.
How he’ll manage to make it to his classes is a mystery to me, but fortunately, that’ll be his problem and not mine.
D.
Working on becoming the world’s youngest laryngectomy patient?
Toddler down to 15 cigarettes per day.
That links to a video of a rather chunky three-year-old (by my guess) puffing like a veteran. As docs, we regularly take a smoking history from our patients. Do you use tobacco? Smoke, chew . . . which? How much? When did you start?
This all translates into a metric, the “pack-years” logged by the patient. The earlier you start and the more you smoke, the higher your pack-years. All of us remember our record-holder. Mine was 120. How does a sixty-something guy log 120 pack-years? By starting at age five and averaging two to three packs per day.
How does this happen? Uncles, grandparents, sometimes even parents give the kid a cigarette — you know, because it’s cute. And we’re talking about nicotine, one of the most (if not THE most) addictive substance known to humankind, more addictive than heroin or cocaine. Doesn’t make much work to turn the kid into a coffin nail junkie.
These kids, they’d probably be doing themselves less damage swigging 40-ounce bottles of malt liquor. And they’d look much cuter doing it, too.
The things we do to our kids . . .
D.
Wherein I relent
Yes, there were awesome songs crafted in the 70s.
Of the various versions on YouTube (with Clapton, of course), I chose the one with the best sound. From Wikipedia,
“Layla” is a song by blues-rock band Derek and the Dominos and the thirteenth track from their album Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, released in December 1970. It is considered one of rock music’s definitive love songs, featuring an unmistakable guitar figure, played by Eric Clapton and Duane Allman, and a piano coda that comprises the second half of the song. Its famously contrasting movements were composed separately by Clapton and Jim Gordon.
Inspired by Clapton’s then unrequited love for Pattie Boyd, the wife of his friend and fellow musician George Harrison, “Layla” was unsuccessful on its initial release. The song has since experienced great critical and popular acclaim. It is often hailed as being among the greatest rock songs of all time. Two versions have achieved chart success, first in 1972 and again twenty years later as an acoustic abomination. In 2004, it was ranked #27 on Rolling Stone’s list of “The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time”, and the acoustic version won the 1993 Grammy Award for Best Rock Song.
Okay, okay, I added “abomination”. In my opinion.
D.
GREAT SF!
The wife and I just caught District 9 on TV, and wow. You have to see this movie.
Ordinarily, I dislike pseudo-documentary films (can’t watch Blair Witch Project, for example, since the camera work nauseates me) but the technique was so well executed, the film sucked me in within the first few minutes. In those few minutes, we learn about the arrival of an alien ship over Johannesburg, the sorry state of the ship’s occupants, and their subsequent ghetto-ization in District 9. Any superficial resemblance to Alien Nation quickly dissipates when we meet the ETs, who are most decidedly not cute humanoids plastered with a little silly putty and face paint. In a brilliant move, the movie’s creators made the aliens chitinous, segmented beasties whom the humans come to call Prawns. They’re hideous garbage-rifling, cat food-devouring creatures with more than a passing resemblance to cockroaches. They’re easy to hate, and the only thing that arouses our sympathies is that the humans in the movie are oh so much uglier.
The movie focuses on Wikus Van De Merwe, son-in-law to the CEO of Multi-National United, the corporation tasked with relocating over one million Prawns to District 10, a concentration camp located 200 km outside of Johannesburg. District 9 is too close to home, and the resident humans are tired of having aliens in their midst. MNU execs decide Wikus (portrayed by the movie’s producer, Sharlton Copley, who is kind of a good-looking Steve Carrell) is just the man to lead the relocation. As he makes the rounds of District 9 evicting Prawn after Prawn, military with guns drawn covering his back, Wikus proves to be an odious ambassador of humankind, lying to the aliens, perpetuating stereotypes, chuckling over the sound alien eggs make when they explode in the fire — “Just like popcorn! Do you hear it?”
Wikus is the hero.
Some historical background courtesy of Wikipedia:
Like Alive in Joburg, the short film on which the feature film is based, the setting of District 9 is inspired by historical events that took place in South Africa during the apartheid era, with the film’s title particularly referencing District Six. District Six, an inner-city residential area in Cape Town, was declared a “whites only” area by the government in 1966, with 60,000 people forcibly removed and relocated to Cape Flats, 25 km (15 mi) away.
District 9 surprised me several times; on many instances, it ran contrary to standard Hollywood tropes, but it didn’t so at every plot turn. It was unpredictably unpredictable. Does the relocation program end in genocide? Are the aliens planning some nasty surprise for their human oppressors? Ooh — they’ve made a getaway in a vehicle — now’s the obligatory chase scene, right? And will there be a happy ending? You gotta watch and see. And so I advise you not to read the IMDB entry or the Wikipedia article, but to view this one cold.
D.
Good heavens, music sucked back then*
I can’t figure out what I like more: the performers’ big hair or the $1.99 Walmart Special lighting effects in the background. Does everyone here remember what music was like in the 70s, or would you prefer to forget?
Thing is, I’m not sure what sucks so royally here. It’s a catchy tune. Maybe I just hate pop.
D.
*My wife, and it seems more than a few women before her, have criticized me for saying things like “Eminem is crap” or “OMFG Ordinary People is worthless.” Seems I should be saying, “Eminem is crap, in my opinion,” and “OMFG Ordinary People is worthless, in my opinion.” So: Good heavens, music sucked back then, in my opinion.