All posts by Steve Stern

Happy Birthday Michele Part II

Around home, Local events, Photography

Napa Winetrain-1-3Michele’s birthday, this year, turned into a season that – sort of – bled into Super Sunday (not so super here on the left coast, however). On the day after Michele’s actual birthday, we went on the Napa WineTrain with Michele’s sister, Claudia, her stepdad, Jim, and her Mom. Like any train ride that doesn’t actually go anywhere, it is more of an  amusement park activity than a ride. In this case, the train runs the mid-Napa Valley from the City of Napa to somewhere near St. Helena at about 15 miles per hour. And then returns at 15 miles per hour. Inside, we tasted wine on the way out and had a very nice lunch on the way back.

From the time we arrive at the departure station, done in a sort of old-timey brothel  station temporary-building-decorated-for-New Years style, every effort is made to make sure we are having a memorable experience.

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And, by and large, they succeed.

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The train goes up the center of the valley and it is a nice way to get a general lay of the land.

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For me it was a way to stake out some buildings that I would like to come back and photograph. The Opus One Winery, for example, which seems to be half buried in an artificial hill and the original Mondavi Winery building designed by Cliff May in 1966 (Cliff May is the designer credited with designing the California Ranch House). For all of us, it was a chance to watch the valley pass by.

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This being Napa – the same Napa that is becoming as much about food as wine – we finished the Napa part of the day at the nearby Fatted Calf. The Fatted Calf is an ordinary looking suburban butcher shop – well, maybe not ordinary any more because most butcher shops are in supermarkets and, then, only ordinary looking from the outside – that sells way upscale, organic, pasture raised, meat.

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The cost is very high, but Michele sort of works around that by getting stew meat or pork scraps for stir fry. In this case she bought a marinaded pork shoulder for phase III of her birthday season. Then it was home, watching the sunset as we headed south.

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An amazing comparison (atleast to me)

Korea

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A picture – taken by me – of the main drag of Nam Yang Korea in  1964

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A picture – from about the same place of Namyang, Korea now (lifted from Google Maps).

It turns out that a Korean who was stationed at the same place in 1979 ran into my post and was able to send me the Google map – uh? I guess that is really any map – coordinates which allowed me to find Namyang (I have been spelling it wrong, but I did have the name right). Then it was a matter of opening the picture gizmos and there was Namyang as it is today. To me, the change is staggering.

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Near our old Compound, is a new hotel, The Hotel Rolling Hills which seems much more deluxe than my old digs.

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Even the local Buddhist Temple has been updated,  from this

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to this

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I am sure that there are places in the United States that have changed this much but none where I have lived.

 

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” William Faulkner

Around home

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A funny thing thing happened to me last night, I lost sight in my right eye for about five minutes. I think that it was about five minutes, it is hard to tell exactly in the middle of a panic. I was sitting at my pseudo desk watching the computer monitor when I got a little light headed and everything got dark and grey. After a couple of minutes of panicked fiddling around, I figured out that I could see out of my left eye just fine but I could only see grey with my right eye. After five minutes, the grey was only the bottom two thirds, then one third, and then it was gone and I could see fine with only an emotional hangover.

I went through all of five of the Kübler-Ross’ stages, starting with denial – this can’t be happening – and five minutes later, as it disappeared, ending where I started with this must have been my imagination. Except I knew it wasn’t.

When Michele got home, I told her about the funny thing that happened and she went into mama bear mode insisting that I go to Emergency at Sequoia. On was pretty reluctant on the theory that there was nothing that could be done. We were both right. At the ER, I was photographed by Michele on her iPhone,  tested, CAT scanned, checked out by an Opthamologist – who, as luck would have it is my regular eye doctor and lives close to us –    and, eventually sent home because I could now see and there was nothing they could do. But the ER visit has now triggered a series of doctor appointments including an carotid arteries ultra sound scan appointment tomorrow.

I seem to be fine now, but everybody – especially me – wants to find out what caused it. The current theory is that a tiny particle from my atrial fibrillation ablation that I had on January 4th broke off and went up an artery into my eye where it was trapped until it melted in my heavily thinned and treated blood. I hope so because that means that, eventually, when everything is thoroughly rinsed, it will stop happening.

In turn, the thinking is that the atrial fibrillation was caused by a thickening of my heart muscle because it had to work so hard before I had my aorta valve replaced by a cow valve in 2002.

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Zero Dark Thirty

Americana, Film, War

Michele and I saw Zero Dark Thirty Sunday night and we liked it alot. I was prepared to not like it, because of the torture controversy, and my general lack of enthusiasm for Hurt Locker (which won six Academy Awards including Best Picture, so what do I know). The best way I can describe the picture is that it is gritty and dense. I have never been to Pakistan – and, apparently, the picture hasn’t either having been filmed in  Jordan and India, which pissed off both the Pakistanis and Indians – but the movie fit my imagined picture of Pakistan exactly.

Driving through the streets of Lahore, it seemed like they were either using thousands of extras or they really were there. I loved Django Unchained  and Argo but, compared to Zero Dark Thirty, they seemed like cartoons shot on a set. Zero Dark Thirty seemed like the real deal. It was thrilling and, at the end, the audience cheered the winning team. Our Team! And I think that may be a problem.

The movie, sort of, presents itself as a documentary or fictionized documentary like Truman Capote’s True Blood. But it is not the real deal. It is not an objective look at what happened and today I am a little hung over from feeling so good while I watched the movie. There are several people who say it better than me, Jane Mayer and Matt Taibbi for example, and I think that I can best serve my point by giving a couple of quotes.

From Jane Mayer: In addition to providing false advertising for waterboarding, “Zero Dark Thirty” endorses torture in several other subtle ways. At one point, the film’s chief C.I.A. interrogator claims, without being challenged, that “everyone breaks in the end,” adding, “it’s biology.” Maybe that’s what they think in Hollywood, but experts on the history of torture disagree. Indeed, many prisoners have been tortured to death without ever revealing secrets, while many others—including some of those who were brutalized during the Bush years—have fabricated disinformation while being tortured. Some of the disinformation provided under duress during those years, in fact, helped to lead the U.S. into the war in Iraq under false premises.

From Matt Taibbi: Mohammed Al-Qatani, the so-called “20th hijacker,” who may have been some part of the inspiration for the “Ammar” character who was tortured in the opening scene, might have been the first detainee to mention the name of bin Laden’s courier. But as Gibney points out, al-Qatani gave that information up to the FBI, in legit, torture-free interrogations, before he was whisked away to Gitmo for 49 days of torture that included such insanities as forcing him to urinate on himself (by force-feeding him liquids while in restraints), making him watch a puppet show of him and bin Laden having sex, making him take dance lessons, making him wear panties on his head, and making him wear a “smiley-face” mask, along with the usual sleep and sensory deprivation, arm-hanging, etc. In other words, the key info may have come before they chucked our supposed standards for human decency.

In the end, nursing my post movie hangover, the, movie makes me a little sad.

and one quote…From Jane Mayer: Knowing the real facts—the ones that led the European Court of Human Rights to condemn America for torture this week—I had trouble enjoying the movie. I’ve interviewed Khaled El-Masri, the German citizen whose suit the E.C.H.R. adjudicated. He turned out to be a case of mistaken identity, an innocent car salesman whom the C.I.A. kidnapped and held in a black-site prison for four months, and who was “severely beaten, sodomized, shackled, and hooded.” What Masri lived through was so harrowing that, when I had a cup of coffee with him, a few years ago, he couldn’t describe it to me without crying. Maybe I care too much about all of this to enjoy it with popcorn. But maybe the creators of “Zero Dark Thirty” should care a little bit more.