All posts by Steve Stern

Star Trek Into Darkness

Film

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We saw Star Trek Into Darkness Sunday night. I thought it was a mess – a constantly engaging mess in which I was never bored – but a mess that never seemed to have a coherent plot arc. I enjoyed the first rebranding of the franchise in 2009, so I was a surprised that this seemed so generic. The movie starts with a set piece that has no relationship with what will become the major part of the movie which, I guess, has become standard fare for Adventure movies. The first time I noticed this was in James Bond movies but, as I think about it, the first Indiana Jones movie started that way.

For me, the set piece went on a little too long, but, on the plus side, the special effects were spectacular. Even on a huge screen, the Enterprise seemed real. After the credits, Benedict Cumberbatch – who I have a major man-crush on – shows up as a sort of Jason Borne gone bad. His blue eyes glow, but not as much as Captain Kirk’s, and all I could think of was how much post production work was done on every frame of the digital film.

It was heartening that, in the future, only bad guys use drones and torture. It was also heartening that the Startreck family squabbling is still there so that this would not be mistaken for a Starwars movie which – I read – will be directed by the same J.J. Abrams. Maybe the problem is that it is the middle movie of a trilogy. Maybe the problem is that I am not really a Trekkie.

BTW, did I mention that the spectacular special effects were great?

 

Friday night at the Oakland Museum

Around home, Local events

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Friday night, we went over to the Oakland Museum for the reopening of the refurbished Natural History Gallery. I lived in Oakland from the mid 60’s to the early 70’s, during the time when the Oakland Museum first opened. I loved living in Oakland, I loved the diversity, I loved the Raiders,  and I – especially – loved the Oakland Museum. I still love the museum, it was and still is the only Bay Area museum about California and California art.

Even then, the San Francisco museums were trying to become national or world museums, trading in their excellent examples of local artist’s work – such as Nathan Oliveira – for mediocre examples of  works by more famous New York artists like Jasper Johns. I like Jasper Johns, but I would much rather see local artists when I go to a local museum; Roy Lichtenstein in New York and Robert Arneson when I go to a California museum. The Arnesons are in storage at SFMOMA and – one of them atleast – are on display in Oakland.

Our night started out in an empty BART car in Daily City that filled as we went through downtown SF.

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We got out at Lake Merritt and walked a block to the Museum and a Friday night Food Truck Jamboree. As I understand it, the Food Truck thing is the museum’s idea in an effort to get more people to visit, and – I guess – the City of Oakland has blocked off the nearby space. The museum provides music, sells wine and beer, and has made Friday admission half price. I hope it is working.

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Inside, the newly refurbished and reopened Natural History Gallery was packed. And it should be: it is brilliant. But, then, I also liked the old gallery which had the various California econiches in different parts of the room. The problem with the old system is that it was static. Somebody, we have no idea who, decided what was important and we – the museum goer – passively went along. Year after year, it remained the same and, after wandering trough a couple of times, the museum goer – now presumably a better person for being better informed – wandered off to a new place. Hopefully, the new place was one of the actual econiches itself, say Yosemite, but – usually – not. Usually the passive spectator just got bored and quit coming back. I did both.

The new Gallery is much more interactive and the main econiche is Oakland, both – I am guessing – in an effort to build traffic.

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There is also an emphasis on the streams and creeks that flow through Oakland from the surrounding hills. Most of these streams and creeks have been buried in pipes and channelized but some are – also – newly reopened and refurbished (reminding me of the refurbished and reopened Los Angeles River that Will Taylor has been talking about on facebook).

Another change that I like and I hope works – but I am not so sure that it is – is adding some California art to the Natural History Gallery in an effort – I presume – to drive traffic to the California Art Gallery upstairs.

Oak Museum-0392But, this Friday, atleast, the art gallery was pretty empty (but it did have an Robert Arneson).

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The good news on the art side of things is that the main gallery that had an powerful show of paintings by Hung Liu, the Professor of Painting at nearby Mills College, was packed (no pictures allowed).   The other good thing was that Gina Matesic and I were able to get a couple of self portraits reflected in a very nice Larry Bell.

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Every picture has a story except when it doesn’t

Photography

Salt Flats-0005Way back in the olden days, in the film era, I was driving home – across the Dumbarton Bridge – at sunset. It was a rare, warm summer day, with no wind and no fog peaking over the hills. The light was magical and I pulled over and took a couple of pictures.

I have dozens of Carousels of slides and even more binders filled with slides (maybe more binders than Romney). Right now, they are hidden in their Kodak boxes, doing nothing to enrich my life. I have not looked at them or shown a slide show in over ten years. To make room, and in an effort to actually make the slides accessible, I am slowly going through them, throwing alot away and converting some to digital. At Kirk Moore’s recommendation, I am using the ScanCafe and they are doing a super job.

One Carousel is a group of pictures from Japan in the 60’s and another, a trip down Coyote Gulch, that Michele and I first took in the early 90’s. There were also a couple of odds and ends that I tossed in the scan pile. One of them was the picture above.

Another sunset was from Russian Ridge. I have been to Russian Ridge  – probably – fifty times. Michele and I watched the Transit of Venus from there, I have watched the fog come in from there, and I have watched dozens of sunsets. None were even close to being as spectacular as this one from the film era when everything turned orange.

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A third sunset, this time in Arizona during a silence and fasting period of a week long spiritual retreat. It was a crummy, overcast, day that turned magic as the sun dropped below the cloud layer.

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Driving back from the same retreat, I drove by what seemed like miles of yellow flowers. Lisl Dennis talks about inertia in photography – not photography? – and I remember driving along and thinking This is gorgeous;  I should stop and take a picture. and continuing to drive. It is always a conflict, while driving someplace, between trying to actually get there and stopping to take a couple of pictures, and then a couple more pictures, especially if it requires any setup. This didn’t, the clouds, the flowers, the junipers, were just there, mile after mile.

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Before he had a studio in The Smoke Creek Desert, Mike Moore had a place on/in an old Air Force Radar Station south of Winnemucca, Nevada. It was a concrete block building, on top of a mountain,  and he called it Radar Ranch. Walking up from the building to a view point, we could see all the way to the edge of the earth in three out of the four directions. I think this was the view south.

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After a very crowded day at Machu Picchu, the tourist train left, leaving just three of us in the empty ruin. We were all photographers – a good friend with whom I often traveled, a photographer from Brooklyn, and myself – and we were all chewing coco leaves. I ended up shooting three roles of film of – basically – stone walls. Surprisingly, I liked them all. This stray shot showed up and, somewhere in a binder, there are another hundred shots just like this as well as more conventional shots.

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Of course, there are lots of odds and ends from various trips to Death Valley. I am almost positive that I didn’t take either of the next two shots. The first, a wedding picture of Michele and me. I have no idea where or how I got this wedding picture, we were married the afternoon before and the Wedding Photographer suggested that we get a picture the next morning from Zabriskie Point. What I had forgotten and the photographer never knew, because he had never been to Death Valley before, was that sunrise at Zabriskie is probably, photographically, the most popular sunrise place in California (atleast, that doesn’t involve water). There were dozens of photographers and Michele and me, all dressed up. Our wedding album has lots of pictures that are better than this but, still, this does have an enigmatic charm.

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Michele pointed out that the final shot, below, is close to the odds end of the odds and ends scale. I know that both our names are Steve and I am pretty sure that it was taken in greater Death Valley in the 60’s. Other than that, I have no idea what the story is, what we were doing, or what I was – apparently – trying to explain with my arms.

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Romeo + Juliet

Film, Uncategorized

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In preparation for The Great Gatsby, Michele and I saw Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet the other night. I fell in love with it all over again. In my humble opinion, it is – by far – the best Romeo and Juliet movie. As a play, Romeo and Juliet works great but as a movie, it often doesn’t. Movies are usually too real for Shakespeare.

West Side Story, one of the great Romeo and Juliet‘s, is one of my favorite plays. It is stunning on stage. How could it not be, with lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, music by Leonard Bernstein, and choreography by the great Jerome Robbins. When Tony kills Bernardo, it is a shock. Every time. The music and choreography highlight the shock. But, in the movie, everything looks and feels fake. The sets, the gritty background, make everything else look and feel like Who are you kidding? For me, the movie was a bust.

Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet gets around that by going overboard. The star crossed lovers become real because of it. The movie opens with the usual, Two households, both alike in dignity, In fair Verona, where we lay our scene, From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean. on a TV screen. And then the movie repeats it, and again. One of my problems with Shakespeare is that by the time I get used to the language, I am not sure what I missed. By repeating the opening in several different way, I get the language in time to understand the set-up.

As an aside, after watching this R & J, with all its religious iconography, Michele noticed that it was probably an allegory for Catholic verses Protestant conflict going on in England at the time. This especially makes sense given that Shakespeare’s family was Catholic when it was against the law. End aside.

What the movie shows even better than most play adaptations I have seen, is that this battle, between the Capulets and  Montagues, has been passed down to the younger generation. The cause is no loner important, the fighting, the war, has taken on a life of its own. It is senseless but the movie implies that nobody cares any more.

Clare Danes is a perfect Juliet. She was sixteen when the movie was made and could easily be fourteen. In the movie, she has a certain craziness that makes her very believable.  Leonardo DiCaprio is lost until he finds his Juliet and then he believably fall in love. Pete Postlethwaite is super as the priest with just enough menace to leave me worried for all the young boys he has hanging around. Both Paul Sorvino and Brian Dennehy, as the family patriarchs, are saddened as their feud spins out of control and they can’t do anything about it.

What makes this movie seem so powerful to me is that we all know what is coming and there seems to be no way to stop it.  .

PTSD and the American West

Americana, Psychological Musings

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The American West has lots of abandoned buildings. By the American West, I don’t mean the western part of the United States. The western part of the United States has cities and towns, by The American West, I mean the parts in between. The iconic empty West where only cowboys and homesteaders live.

The abandoned buildings are remnants of somebody’s dream that they could carve a living out of a piece of marginal land. The settlement of the West and the dream of making a living on new land started before the Civil War – even Grant tried his hand at it in the 1850’s, facetiously calling the farm Hardscrabble, according to his wife, Julia – but, with the Railroads pushing west and The Homestead Act setting the stage, the pace picked up after the war.

In the Great Plains, most of these settlers were immigrant families from northern Europe. In the Nevada West, many of these immigrants were Basque. I wonder if many of these settlers were Civil War vets with PTSD. I know the Civil War was violent, unbelievable so compared to war now -although not compared to WWI or parts of WWII – and it is hard to believe that many of those battle wrecked veterans, especially Southerns, didn’t go West.

Driving out to the Smoke Creek with Claudia, however, I noticed that some of the abandoned homesteads are being reclaimed. I think that there are several reasons for this. Obviously, it is easier to Live off the grid than it ever has been before. Also, there are more people with two or three homes and one of them might be out in the boonies. But I think that there is another reason, one similar to the post Civil War period. We have been at war for the last decade and, today, there are more people with PTSD than 30 years ago.
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I would be very surprised if the guy who lives in the house above also has an apartment in Manhattan. I would be much less surprised if he – or she, but probably he – was a veteran of, say  Fallujah, trying to get away from the chaos of modern America. Moreover, like today’s pot, today’s PTSD is much stronger, with, I think, a component of Moral Injury that WWII vets usually didn’t have.

That why Drone Pilots really do get PTSD even though they they are never in physical danger. Without the draft, the people fighting our wars are easier to hide – or worship from afar – making what what they are doing also easier to hide, but it is no easier for them to hide from themselves. I think that alot of people who have PTSD really have Moral Injures. Killing an unarmed little boy and his, equally unarmed, mother goes against all our moral teaching. The fact that many – if not most – of the Americans doing the killing are conservative Christians only aggravates that Moral Injury.

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As I drive by an abandoned farm with a new conex replacing an abandoned barn, I think how tough it must be to try to make a living on land so far away from everything. Then, I think, maybe that is the point.