All posts by Steve Stern

On the hanging of former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s official portrait

Art, California

In the SF Chronicle, this morning, was an article with a second paragraph of All this raises a question about what may be the most anticipated ceremonial event yet to happen: the hanging of former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s official portrait. The  paragraph brought up all sorts of resonating thoughts starting with What? They are hanging Schwarzenegger? Oh, his portrait. and ending with He was a pretty good governor considering the circumstances. In between, among other thoughts such as the National Portrait Gallery being my favorite museum in Washington, I noticed that the paragraph was only one sentence long which I was taught not to do – I don’t know for sure but it must have been before the sixth grade – surly, the Chrony should know better.

Reading the short article – all articles are short in the Chrony – I noticed that Schwarzenegger’s picture was done by Gottfried Helnwein ( I used was because, apparently, the picture is already finished, if not hung, and done because the artist is a photographer and a water color and mixed media painter and I have no idea of the medium of this portrait). Gottfried Helnwein is not an artist that I know, but I feel I should after reading his Selected Collections page which includes the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the de Young Museum, the State Russian Museum, and the Smithsonian Institution, among many, many, others. I also read that Schwarzenegger had a picture by Helnwein, in his Governor’s office, of the Mojave and he has a photograph? watercolor? of Death Valley on his website, so I am predisposed to like this guy already.

His portraits – as shown below -look to be even more interesting.

California does have a long – if very narrow – history of interesting Governor’s portraits including this Portrait of Jerry Brown as a Young Man (sorry).

It is possible that I have now joined the legions in Sacramento who agree that the hanging of former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s official portrait is one of the most anticipated ceremonial events yet to happen. OK, that may be overstating it, but I am curious. (Oh, the portrait at the top was done by Andrew Wyeth and Brown’s portrait was by California artist Don Bachardy).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Happy Pearl Harbor Day…I don’t get it

Americana, Psychological Musings

I don’t understand why we celebrate Pearl Harbor Day. After all, we lost, we got bombed by surprise, we bungled it.

In the early nineties  when Kosovo was trying to get away from the yoke of the Serbs, much was made of the fact that a sacred Serbian battlefield was in Kosovo and the Serbs didn’t want to let that battlefield leave greater Serbia. Several newscasters, by way of showing how wrong the Serbs were, commented on how old grudges never die in Serbia and the Battle of Kosovo Field – lost by the Serbs over 600 years ago in June 1389 – was, stupidly, still a big deal.

But we do the same thing in celebrating Pearl Harbor (we even have Pearl Harbor license plates in California so, I guess, the car owner can remember – every time they go to their car – that 2400 sailors and soldiers were killed on December 7th). It is the same thing with The Alamo lost by a hearty group of volunteers fighting for their right to keep slaves which Mexico had outlawed. All three battles were loses.

Why don’t we celebrate April 18 when we killed – by surprise in semi-Pearl Harbor fashion – Isoroku Yamamoto, commander t of the Imperial Japanese Navy that launched that attack on Pearl Harbor? Or the Doolittle Raid when we bombed Tokyo on the same date one year earlier? Or some win in the Texas war against Mexico?

I have no idea. It seems we – humans – prefer to remember when we got our ass kicked sometime in the past. Anyway, Happy Pearl Harbor Day, and many more.

 

A stormy day at Point Reyes National Park

Americana

Over the weekend, the rainy, rainy, weekend, Michele and I went to Point Reyes National Seashore with Richard and Tracy and Gina and Courtney. The timing worked perfectly. It only rained at night, the weather during the day was just turbulent enough to be interesting, and it was much warmer and comfortable than it photographed. The best of all possible worlds. On Saturday afternoon, we into the Park and followed a small stream down to McClures Beach where the storm driven waves put on a show for us.

I love Point Reyes: the connection with Nature, the feeling of edge-of-the-world desolation. Like Death Valley or the Sierra Nevada mountains above timberline, it is a huge landscape – with almost infinite sight-lines – that work best for me when I am out in it; walking.

More years ago than I can remember, I read that the National Park Service was trying to incorporate some – for lack of a better descriptor – normal landscapes into the system. We think of the National Parks as saving the most spectacular parts of America, but, in reality, most of the National Parks are extreme areas because they are the areas that were left over. There are no National Parks in the Great Central Valley of California because it was filled with farms – very productive farms – pretty early in the western settlement cycle. (In May of 2010, on our way back from Death Valley National Park, we stopped at a small pocket of wilderness – Kern National Wildlife Refuge – that the Feds had reclaimed from the San Joaquin part of the Central Valley. It was spectacular – teaming with wildlife, mostly with birds laying over on their North-South migration – and a revelation. We consider the Central Valley the boring part of our trip when we go to the mountains or the desert and this little section of wild land was every bit as exciting as any National Park.)

Point Reyes is, in a way, reclaimed land but it was also only minimally used before it became a park. Yes, there were and still are farms, but they were always sort of hanging on farms with picturesque barns rather than rich working farms with industrial silos.

The barns seem more a part of Nature, a part of the Landscape, rather than cut off from it and, as the National Park Service lets more land revert to Wildness, the Wildness is taking center stage. With its walks and its views, with its openness and hidden intimacy, with its National Parkness, Point Reyes National Seashore has become a place to connect with Nature.

 

A year of great B Movies

Film, Uncategorized

OK, maybe B Movie is not the best way to describe movies that costs somewhere between $150,000,000 and $225,000,000. But this has been a great year for big, overblown, Hollywood-blockbuster, movies. Movies that pretend to have no ambition to being art but – of course – are hugely ambitious.

About twenty years ago, the late, great, Robert Altman made a movie about, death, power, taste, and fame in Hollywood. A subplot concerned a writer pitching a movie that sounds great but mutates as it goes through the movie making sausage machine. It goes from being an art film to being a vapid blockbuster (with an implication that vapid and blockbuster are redundant). One proposed scene is of a vigil outside of San Quentin with each person holding a candle under a small, backlit, umbrella: the glowing umbrellas floating in the dark.  Of course, in the Altman movie, it gets cut. Almost at the end of Apocalypse, Captain Willard is floating up river to Kurtz with burning torches on the sides of the river.

Somehow, in Skyfall – the latest James Bond movie – both images are combined as Bond goes to a casino: standing on a slowly floating boat as it exits a lit dragon mouth. The whole scene is seemingly lit by glowing lanterns that float – and reflect – on the still, ink-black, water. It is a stunning scene, but far from the only stunning scene in the movie (and Skyfall is far from the only blockbuster with great cinematography). Somehow, Skyfall And it does this while keeping all the James Bond cliches and re-setting the Bond story. In one of the early scenes, Bond meets the new Q – who seems to be a very young 21 – in front of a Turner painting depicting the Temeraire – a  famous British warship being tugged to the scrapyard. In one of the last scenes, Temeraire is shown helping win the Battle of  Trafalgar won – of course, against all odds – by British resourcefulness and unconventional tactics. It could be the outline of the movie.

But Skyfall isn’t the only far-from-vapid blockbuster this year. It really has been a year of great blockbuster movies. In the summer, we had Prometheus by Ridley Scott which was not for everybody but, scene after scene, image after image, Prometheus is a stunning art film. Then there is the conclusion to Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises, with its vision of a dark,  dystopian, Gotham rotting from the inside. My favorite line from Dark Knight  – and the most visible reference to today – whispered in Bruce Wayne’s ear by Anne Hathaway was There’s a storm coming, Mr. Wayne. You and your friends better batten down the hatches, because when it hits, you’re all gonna wonder how you ever thought you could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us. 

Out of nowhere – meaning they were not part of a series – came the engrossing and suspenseful Argo which was every bit as much a comment on Hollywood as The Player (except it was much more optimistic; I suspect the floating candles would have stayed in Argo). And Looper, a surprisingly moving science fiction movie, with no floating candles but a twisting plot with an unHollywood ending.

Then there was Cloud Atlas that I think was trying not to be a B Movie and seemed to succeed in not being a blockbuster and The Cabin In The Woods, directed by Drew Goddard but, really, writer Joss Whedon’s art film pretending to be a B Movie. The Avengers, Whedon’s B Movie that almost become an art movie (except for the end).

I know that I have left off some winners, but the point is, movies are just better than ever.

 

 

 

Some thoughts on the military

Americana, War

We Americans love our troops and especially the commanding generals. We always have. Washington was our first commanding general and our first President and the tradition has remained strong that a winning general could ride the adulation to the White House (even before it was the White House). Andrew Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, and Dwight D. Eisenhower all became Presidents and – if rumors are true – Obama was worried so much about David Petraeus running for President that he made him head of the CIA rather than head of the Joint Chiefs.

But I think we are starting to get carried away with our idolatry. Or, it may be more accurate to say, everybody, including the generals, are starting to believe the bullshit. During the Vietnam war, I read and heard lots of stories of civilians – maybe mostly college students – dissing and taunting Soldiers (and Marines, Sailors, and whatever Air Force GIs are called). As an aside; I do want to emphasize that I was not a recipient of hazing although I was in the Army during the run-up to the biggest part of the war in Vietnam and I was dating a woman who lived in the Haight-Ashbury. End aside.

I think the difference was that people were afraid of being drafted, of being sent to Vietnam, and took it out on everybody from President Johnson on down. Now nobody has to do military service and people feel guilty about sending those poor bastards – over, and over, and over  again – into the grinder, so they overcompensate with reverence. And, as the military has gotten smaller and more elite, the top officers, especially the generals, have become incredibly entitled.

During the Civil War, the commanding general, Ulysses S. Grant, had been a civilian just a couple of years before. Much of the time, he wore a privates uniform with his stars pinned on the shoulders, and – more to the point I am trying to make – he had a staff of only eight people and he didn’t wear his medals (he had lots of them). During World war II, Dwight D. Eisenhower wore a simple uniform and only wore his top three medals. Eisenhower had a civilian driver and a small military staff. At the end of my so-called military career, I was a driver for a three-star, General Andrew Lolly, and he had a total staff of three (me, the sergeant/driver, a Captain, and a Colonel). Now it is an entirely different story.

Former defense secretary, Robert Gates, complained I was often jealous because he had four enlisted people helping him all the time. Mullen’s got guys over there who are fixing meals for him, and I’m shoving something into the microwave. And I’m his boss. General Petraeus, who wears every medal he ever got – of which, by the way, only ONE is for bravery under fire – had a staff of fifty when he was the commanding general in Afghanistan.

When there was a draft, there was more exposure  of the average person to the military and more exposure to the average person by the military. The military priesthood was not as strong and isolated as it is now.

This lack of a draft has led to an isolation and the resulting arrogance that is hurting the military and our country.  I think we should bring back the draft and reading an article by Tom Ricks, sent to me by Richard Taylor, has only reinforced that belief. The thrust of the article which starts by quoting General McChrystal saying I think we ought to have a draft. I think if a nation goes to war, it shouldn’t be solely be represented by a professional force, because it gets to be unrepresentative of the population. I think if a nation goes to war, every town, every city needs to be at risk. You make that decision and everybody has skin in the game. is how it will help the country. (The article really promotes a two year National Service for everybody with only some people going into the military.) Ours is a time when almost nobody contributes to the National Collective and the sign of a good American is wearing a flag pin and paying as little taxes as possible and the article paints an alternative that I think would make us a better country. I suggest you read it.

But, maybe even more importantly, a Draft would also help end the isolation that is currently ruining the military. The Army hasn’t fired a general for not doing a good job in a long, long time.  General Petraeus, even with his staff of fifty, didn’t win the war in Afghanistan or anywhere else for that matter. The military has ceased to be accountable and guys like Petraeus keep getting less accountable.