All posts by Steve Stern

Robert Rodriguez and Blackberry, coffee cups, and some summer movietts

Film

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I haven’t posted in awhile, I sort of got lost in Summer Chaos. The post below is one I started in May, so I do not remember how I was going to fit in coffee cups, however, it is still current – only because it isn’t really topical – and still fun (at least for me).

Yesterday, a Blackberry Ad showed up on a webpage I was looking at.

As an aside, I find it endlessly fascinating what shows up in the  for rent areas of a webpage I am looking at. Now that Canon has a new EOS 5D3, I want to see if I can get a EOS5D2 cheaper, so I go to Amazon – No! – but 5D2’s follow me around for a week. I click on a picture of a very young woman on the left side of The Telegraph F1 page and women in bikinis stalk me for weeks. End side.

Back at the Blackberry ad, I noticed that it was directed by Robert Rodriguez – who I have liked since I first saw El Mariachi in 1992 – and decided to watch it. It was too long IMHO and I moved on but it got me thinking about famous directors making ads. I knew that alot of directors started their careers by making ads, but it never occurred to me that they often went the other way. They do, however, and these mini-movies are a great way to sample different director’s styles.

After he made Blade Runner, Apple hired director Ridley Scott to help launch their new product – the Apple Macintosh – and it became one of the most famous ads, ever.

If you want, Quirkiness, hire Wes Anderson. Add Jason Schwartzman. Throw in a Wilson brother and an obscure indie track and you’ve got your next Wes Anderson movie.

Why anybody would hire famed cinematic nutjob Terry Gilliam to shoot an ad is another matter. The ad in question is typical Gilliam, a dystopian tourney aboard a disused tanker.

Lastly and one of the best, directed by Michael Mann, is Lucky Star. It is 150 seconds of fakery. Not unusual for a commercial, but this one purports to be something entirely different. Shot as a trailer, it stars Benicio Del Toro as a fellow for whom luck comes naturally. He quickly attracts the interest of the US government, which gives him ample opportunity to outrun them in his sexy new Mercedes SL500.

A pitch for walking in Tuolumne Meadows

Around home, California, Photography

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As many times as I have gone to Yosemite, I have only walked through Tuolumne Meadows to get somewhere else. When Richard Taylor suggested we go to Tuolumne Meadows, just to hike the Meadows, I was a little surprised. His pitch was that we could drive up from the Bay Area on Friday, walk down river that afternoon, walk up river on Saturday and be home that night. We would have two days of hiking Yosemite on a two-day mini-vacation.

Our trip started at 8:00 AM and we were at Oakdale in two hours. We got some lunch fixin’s at a Mexican market and got to Tuolumne about 2:45. But first, we stopped at Siesta Lake to stretch our legs and check out the meadow building process, Olmsted Point to check out the view, and Lake Tenaya for lunch.   We got to Siesta Lake just before 1:00. The first time I drove by Siesta Lake was probably 1956 but I probably didn’t stop until the 60’s. Now I try to stop every time I drive by. In the 60’s, it was an alpine lake but it is trying to become a meadow and slowly succeeding. As the lake meadowfies, the Park Service civilizes the turnoff. First there was no turn off, then use turned the shoulder to compacted dirt, then the shoulder got paved and signs added. Now, for the first time, I noticed a sign saying Siesta Lake letting me know, again for the first time, what to call it. I don’t think I will live long enough to call it Siesta Meadow.

Tuolumne Trip-1Tuolumne Meadows is in a glacial valley formed 10,000 years ago (so I’ve been told). Between then and now,  it must have been a lake or a series of lakes. Now it is a meadow starting to turn itself into a forest. It is still a series of gentle, sub-alpine, meadows with the Tuolumne River connecting and running through them but the trees are taking hold. It makes for an easy, varied, walk.

On Friday afternoon, our walk was downriver from Highway 120, starting at Pothole Dome.

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As we walked around the dome, following the edge, the view of the meadow was intermittent, often hidden by the colonizing trees and then opening up to fields of wildflowers.

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Looking back,  Unicorn Peak and Cockscomb started rising above the forest. They are classic horns, like the Matterhorn in the Alps (the thinking is that the horns were bit of the mountains sticking up above the glaciers as the glaciers scoured out the rocks below making the valleys).

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At this point, the meadow is almost level and the river running through it – the Lyle fork of the Tuolumne – is flat and lazy. The river soon starts dropping over and through a resistant granite layer. At one time, this resistant layer probably backed-up the water creating a lake until the insistent river, on its way to the Pacific cut through it.

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At the bottom of the cascades, just before the next meadow area, Richard took a swim

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while I wandered around looking at the rocks. The swimming looked suburb and I may have joined Richard if I had my Tevas like Richard , but I didn’t even bring them on the trip and the bottom looked way too rough for me.

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Looking at the rocks may not sound as interesting as swimming, on the other hand, we were walking through a glacial valley and – every once in a while – I could see the tracks the glacier left about 10,000 years ago: grinding down the valley, polishing the rock as it went.

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After Richard’s swim and my exploring, we wandered back towards the car with no aim except the enjoyment of the sun, the soft air, and the scenery. We watched deer crossing a stream and talked about past trips while watching our old friends, Unicorn Peak and the Cockscomb, come back into view.

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Our next stop would be Mono Lake for the night.

 

 

Nadia Popova R.I.P.

Current Affairs

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Nadia Popova is name you have probably never heard of unless you are Russian, were crazy about WWII airplanes as a kid, or are a woman military pilot (or, maybe, Peter Kuhlman). It is not a name that I remember although I read alot about World War II airplanes as a kid. What I do remember reading about were what the Germans called Nachthexen, or Night Witches. They were a group of Russian women pilots who terrorized the Germans.

We like to think that we won the war against the Germans, but the Russians did the heavy lifting. Three quarters of the German Army was on the Eastern Front, the first time the German Army was stopped was at Stalingrad, and most historians consider that the turning point of WW II in Europe. That was in late 1942. The Soviets had no material to speak of, just people to throw at the Germans – Stalin famously said Quantity has a quality all it’s own –  taking 1,150,000 causalities at Stalingrad alone. They had so few assault rifles, that, in the big push across the Volga, they attacked with two men for each assault rifle, when the guy with the rifle was shot, the other picked it up.

The Night Witches were equipped about as poorly. They flew at night in open, wooden, bi-planes with a top speed of 94 miles per hour against the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe – think about that for a second – in Belorussia, Poland and, finally, Germany. The women didn’t wear parachutes because they were too heavy. In four years, the Night Witches flew over 30,000 missions . The Atlantic points out that They were loathed. And they were feared. Any German pilot who downed a “witch” was automatically awarded an Iron Cross.

They were also amazing.

The most amazing was Nadia Popova. She was a girly-girl who loved to dance and wanted to be a teacher, and she flew 852 missions as a night bomber pilot. (The average crew of a B26, our most used medium bomber during WWII, flew just over 20 missions during their entire career.) After one mission, she returned with 42 bullet holes in her plane. In Poland, she reached her personal record of 18 sorties in one night. That means that she took off – in an open plane, in the dark, often in sub-zero weather – flew over German lines to dropped her bomb load, and returned to her base in the dark. Eighteen times in one night.

After all that, Nadia lived through the war, got married and had kids and grandkids. She died at 91 on July 8th of this year.

(If you are interested, more here and here)

 

The last of my pictures from Japan in the early 60’s – mostly people

Photography

Japan-0017The things that I remember the most from my one and only trip to Japan are the thoroughly weird stuff – weird being defined as being different from back home – people stripping down to their skivvies on the train to Kyoto, ice parlors that served scotch, a temple to penises – peni? – in the village of Komaki, fishhead soup for breakfast, fake pirate boats, hosing off before getting in a hot-tub to bathe, torii gates going nowhere or standing in the middle of the water, and an unbelievable number of people standing on the top of Fujisan. I would like to say that the people were the most memorable but that is not true (for example, I have no memory of the guy I am posing with, above, or where we were).

There were three very memorable groups of people, however, all women which should not be too surprising considering that we were two men in our early twenties with no access to datable women. We did see American Red Cross women who came by our Tac Site on the first Tuesday of each month to give us donuts, but they only dated officers and, really, only officers stationed in Seoul which is code for staff officers (which is code for officers with connections).

In our travels around Japan, at some point, we crossed Lake Biwa, the largest freshwater lake in Japan, on what looked like a pirate boat. I don’t remember where we were going, how we got there or what we did at the other side, but the ferry was bizare. On the way to the departure port, we passed a torii gate and like every sight, like every anything, there were Japanese taking souvenir pictures. Everywhere we went, there were Japanese tourists and all the tourists were either taking pictures or having their pictures taken.

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While we were waiting to get on the pirate boat to cross the lake, we saw two women waiting to get on. One was wearing shorts that would be short, even today; they were very short then. I am not going to say that we were hyper-ventilating but Terry did manage to get me to stand next to her to get my picture taken.

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At some point, I think when we were near Osaka, we ended up going on a pearl diving boat. I guess that they were not really pearl divers, they were oyster divers and the pearls were in the oysters. Either way, they were diving for what my mother then called cultivated pearls because the oysters were raised in a farm (I think the grain of sand to start the pearl was also planted in the shell). Much later when I showed her the pictures, my mother was rather dismissive saying Cultivated pearls were not as good as real  pearls. When I asked her how somebody could tell the difference, she didn’t know and I am convinced that nobody can.

Either way, why we went there or how we got on the boat is in the mists of the past. What isn’t a mystery is that all the divers were women.

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However, fifty years later the thing that I am happiest for having done in Japan, the thing that I remember the most, is hiking up Mt. Fuji. The Japanese call it Fujisan, san being an honorific. There are several different classic ways up Fujisan and I have no idea which one we took. What I do remember is that we took the bus to the base of the trail where there was a huge crowd.  Once there, we had no idea what to do and nobody seemed to know English. Happily, among the people in the crowd, were a group of young, international students, mostly girls, one of whom spoke English. They had come to watch some other students start their hikes but they were not making the climb themselves.

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The English speaker was a Thai woman named Xæppeil (which means apple and it pronounced just like apple with a very heavy Thai accent).  Xæppeil, the woman in the orange and pink dress, also spoke French and Chinese as well as, presumably, Thai. Both Terry and I feel in love immediately. We would ask Xæppeil a question which she would then ask the Chinese  student – the woman with her head hardly showing – who would then ask the Japanese woman (obviously the woman in the white dress with pink polka dots). The Chinese woman would frequently have to write the question for the Japanese woman to understand. Then the answer would come back in the other direction. It was sort of like the game telephone using three different languages.

Our plan was to spend the day hiking Fuji, however we soon found out that the usual method was to hike at night to see the sunrise from the top. We had no choice but to spend much of the day hanging out with the students. We started late in the afternoon and the trail was wall to wall people. Climbing Fuji is more like going to a huge event and parking way too far away than hiking, say, the John Muir Trail. There were thousands and thousands of people on the trail, many of them helping their old parents. I remember it being some sort of special ceremonial ancestors day, but I can’t find anything like that on the web, so I am probably wrong. There were however lots of climbers in white, ceremonial, dress carrying special climbing sticks – kongotsue – which we also carried.

Mt. Fuji is 12,388 feet high with all the trailheads being above 6,500 making the climb much easier than it might, at first, seem. Every so often on the trail – I don’t remember the interval, maybe every 250 vertical meters – an old man would be sitting by a habachi and we could get a cup of hot tea and get our kongotsue stamped with the altitude. Higher up there were mountain huts where we could stop for the night. How far one hikes before stopping at a rest hut is determined by when you want to start rehiking in the morning to get to the top by sunrise. I recall that we chose a hut at about 300 meters below the summit and paid something like a day’s budget for the night and a cup of tea.

We got up at 4 AM and made it to the top for sunrise. On top it was like a county fair with the crowds overwhelming us. This is, after all, the most climbed mountain on earth. Today, I would welcome the crowds. I would realize that the crowds were a big part of the experience but, then, we wanted it to be like summiting Whitney or  Mont Blanc. We did find an empty spot and I stood on a high mound while Terry took my picture.

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Three days later we were back in Korea and fifty years later I still have the picture and the memory it evokes.