All posts by Steve Stern

Tattoos and F1

Americana, Art

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Of all the things that I didn’t see coming down the pike from the future, I think that tattoos are at the top of the list. Much higher on the list than, say, hamburger meat manufactured in a lab – OK, we all knew that was coming – or truck farmers making a comeback, or smart phones. As an aside, to very loosely paraphrase Che Guevara, Computers are not revolutionary, they are bourgeois. Smart phones are revolutionary! End aside.

I so didn’t see tattoos coming, that they just sort of snuck up on me. I don’t watch much football on TV,  so that didn’t tip me off.  Sure, I read about Anglia Jolie and Billy Bob Thornton getting matching tattoos, still that seemed like an hyper-hip exception. By the time I saw the adorable Ana Pascal in Stranger Than Fiction, 

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with her tattoo being a big part of her charm – even though she was played by a tattooless Maggie Gyllenhaal – I knew something was up. Nevertheless, Ana was a nonconformist. What I didn’t expect was for Formula 1 drivers to sport tattoos.

They are, after all, ambassadors for the multi-billion dollar companies, such as Mercedes-Benz, that are often pretty conservative.

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When they are working, they even disappear into the car itself.

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The two best driver in Formula 1 right now are probably Fernando Alonso from Spain and Lewis Hamilton from England. Alonso drives for Ferrari which is famous for putting the car before the driver – I reminded everyone, including the drivers, that Ferrari comes before everything, the priority is the team. Rather like a family father pointing out the need to respect some family rules. Ferrari president Luca Di Montezemolo explained, after he tweaked the ear of Alonso who had the audacity to complain about his car – so I was surprised to see that he has a tattoo of a samurai on his back. Not so much that it is a samurai, but that it is there at all.

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But, when I saw Mercedes’ Hamilton’s tattoo, I knew it was a new world.

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Religion and violence

Psychological Musings, Religion

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Maj. Gen. Eric T. Olson, 25th Inf. Div. (L) commander, addresses some soldiers in Iraq, before their departure to Mosul, where they will conduct combat operations for the upcoming Iraqi elections (Jan 05).

If god exists or not is a question I have given up asking. I live my life without a god and, with the possible exception of Sunday morning, the way I live my life doesn’t seem to be any different from the way most Christians do. I do live my life with a sense of Wonder; a sense that there is more to life than what we see and I like to call that Unknowable, the Divine.

I admire people who believe in a god…as long as they hold that belief lightly. I also admire people who do not believe in god and hold that belief lightly. What I do not admire is people who think they know god and know what god wants; people who know how god wants us to have sex or who know that god wants us to fly jets into buildings. But I also don’t admire people who want to blame everything on religion and believe the world would be peachy keen if we all lived like secular Americans with a separation of  church and state  (interestingly enough, it always seems to be somebody else’s belief that is the problem). I don’t admire people who think that life in the United States is the only right way of life and are willing to kill for it. Not kill to defend themselves when attacked like we were in WWII, mind you; but to go out and kill somebody because they don’t have our values of capitalism or the sanctity of life.

These thoughts were rekindled on this bright and sunny Sunday when I was directed to an article in The National Catholic Review through a post in The Dish by Andrew Sullivan & Co. The article said what I have been thinking and I want to pass it on because it says it much better than I can. Here are a couple of tidbits that catch a little of the flavor of the article but the entire article is very much worth reading (if you ever think about these sort of things).

Westerners are fascinated by the nexus of “religion and violence.” War on behalf of nationalism and freedom and oil and other such mundane secular matters hardly counts as violence at all. At the U.S.-Islamic World Forum in Qatar in 2007, nearly four years into the U.S. occupation of Iraq, David Satterfield, senior adviser and coordinator for Iraq in the office of the U.S. Secretary of State, gave a speech condemning those in Iraq “who try to achieve their goals through the use of violence.” As the journalist Rami Khouri sardonically commented, “As if the U.S. had not used weapons when invading Iraq!”

What is important for our present purposes is to see how the religious/secular divide functions in our public discourse about violence. It serves to draw our attention toward certain types of practices—Islam, for example—and away from other types of practices, such as nationalism. Religion is the bogeyman for secular society, that against which we define ourselves. We have learned to tame religion, to put it in its proper, private place; they (Muslims, primarily) have not. We live in a publicly secular and therefore rational society; they have not learned to separate secular matters like politics from religion, and so they are prone to irrationality. We hope they will come to their senses and be more like us. In the meantime, we reserve the right periodically to bomb them into being more rational.

Check it out.

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)