All posts by Steve Stern

The Peenemünde effect

Psychological Musings

In the early 50’s – the long gone 1950’s when everything was possible – I became obsessed with rockets and space travel. My favorite author was Wernher von Braun who, at the time had written several articles – with lots of great pictures – in a, now-defunct, magazine called Colliers. Then I devoured several well illustrated books that came out of those articles, and, eventually, that lead me to a book about the German V-2 project. I totally missed that the V-2 was a Nazi killing machine – a sort of random killing machine at that – and got caught up in wonder of the whole thing.

Much of the testing was done at a place on the Baltic Sea called Peenemünde and one story I remember was about a night launch. It burned an indelible image in my mind. I can still conjure up the launch: the rocket ignition almost impossibly bright on the dark launching pad, the engine coming up to full thrust with the roar drowning out all other noise, the rocket slowly – at first – lifting, levitating really, off the ground; pushing itself into the sky on a tail of flame. Then, engine cut-off as the missile goes ballistic and is lost in the silence and darkness. Only moments later to reappear as it passes above the shadow of the earth and enters sunlight again.

Almost every warm, summer, night, I see a mini-version of this as we sit in the twilight on our deck and see airplanes turning to land at San Francisco airport, thirty miles away.  We are sitting in the gloaming light and, above us, the airplanes turn orange in the sunset. The air is warm and soft, nobody will be killed, there is no roar, only the groan of the plane’s landing flaps opening; but I still think of it as the Peenemünde effect.

Pulp Fiction redux

Art, Film

Michele and I watched Pulp Fiction Thursday night and then we re-watched about 90% of it Friday night. What a masterpiece! It makes me want to watch Inglorious Basterds again, and Kill Bill (1 & 2). They are B Movies elevated to Art.

Quentin Tarantino movies are the opposite of action movies, they are all talk movies. Talk movies in which the talk seems to be wandering around aimlessly – the quarter pounder is a Royale with Cheese is maybe the most famous line, but there are dozens of great lines – only to circle back to connect in some improbable way.  There are even more great bits –

Vincent: Want some bacon?
Jules: No man, I don’t eat pork.
Vincent: Are you Jewish?
Jules: Nah, I ain’t Jewish, I just don’t dig on swine, that’s all.
Vincent: Why not?
Jules: Pigs are filthy animals. I don’t eat filthy animals.
Vincent: Bacon tastes gooood. Pork chops taste gooood.
Jules: Hey, sewer rat may taste like pumpkin pie, but I’d never know ’cause I wouldn’t eat the filthy motherfucker. Pigs sleep and root in shit. That’s a filthy animal. I ain’t eat nothin’ that ain’t got sense enough to disregard its own feces.
Vincent: How about a dog? Dogs eats its own feces.
Jules: I don’t eat dog either.
Vincent: Yeah, but do you consider a dog to be a filthy animal?
Jules: I wouldn’t go so far as to call a dog filthy but they’re definitely dirty. But, a dog’s got personality. Personality goes a long way.
Vincent: Ah, so by that rationale, if a pig had a better personality, he would cease to be a filthy animal. Is that true?
Jules: Well we’d have to be talkin’ about one charming motherfuckin’ pig. I mean he’d have to be ten times more charmin’ than that Arnold on Green Acres, you know what I’m sayin’?

this is a conversation between two killers, between two people who make the living killing people and, somehow, the conversation is also about  people who make their living killing people – and great scenes that are like mini-plays.  Tarantino movies are collections of scenes with very little connecting them but the scenes are so good, they don’t need the connection.

Think Inglorious Basterds, there is a scene in which Michael Fassbender, as Archie Hicox, is briefed in England

and, in the next scene they are in France and he is disguised as a Nazi sitting with the inglorious basters themselves.

There are no transition scenes, no shots of them jumping out of an airplane in the dark, or meeting up with the Americans. All the transitions are covered by dialog.

Pulp Fiction is the same way. It is really a collection of set scenes that have an overriding arc. The scenes seem to be out of chronological order but the arc of the dialog is in order. Each scene sets up the following scene, so that, at the end, when we end up at breakfast in the coffeeshop, we know we are where Tim Roth and Amanda Plummer are waiting. Pulp Fiction seems to be a violent movie about violent people and – I guess – that turns alot of people off but the violence is mostly offstage, just being talked about and the violent people are doing the talking.

As Roger Ebert says, “Immediately after “Pulp Fiction” played at Cannes, QT asked me what I thought. “It’s either the best film of the year or the worst film,” I said. I hardly knew what the hell had happened to me. The answer was: the best film. Tarantino films have a way of growing on you. It’s not enough to see them once.”

Sorkin and nostalgia

Americana, Television

I want to be clear at the start by saying that almost everything I think about Aaron Sorkin is probably colored by the movie, The Social Network, which is an hatchet job on Mark Zuckerberg.  In defending  The Social Network Sorkin said “I don’t want my fidelity to be to the truth; I want it to be to storytelling”. I do want to acknowledge that it was good story telling, but it was fraudulent storytelling. Worse, it was fraudulent story telling about a real person – many real people, actually, especially Priscilla Chan who Zuckerberg is now married to – who is still alive.

As a liberal, I very much enjoyed The West Wing. Everybody was so right, as in correct, and so brilliant – especially President Josiah Bartlett – and they were so busy and quick witted. It all seemed so real. Of course it wasn’t, we didn’t have President Bartlett, we had President George Bush the Younger. When Studio 60 came on the air, I expected it to be great and I was very disappointed. It was pretty much the same fast talking gang but I was no longer particularly interested in them.

I saw some bad reviews of The Newsroom, but I still was looking forward to seeing it for all the reasons I liked The West Wing (and we have a subscription to HBO, so What the hell). The Pilot was very Sorkinesque – including the fraudulent part of Sorkin – with quick talking, witty, brainy people and maybe I should have loved it, but I didn’t. It replayed the BP Gulf oil spill and then played it in the same over the top way the press actually did play it, all the while inferring that the real news people didn’t cover it right. He is right, they didn’t cover it right because they covered it in the same breathless way that Sorkin pretends to.

Like Sorkin, they covered the oil spill as the worst ecological disaster in the history of mankind. And it wasn’t. But there is a real ecological disaster going on here and that is the degradation of the Louisiana coastline. The real newspeople aren’t covering that very much because it is not dramatic enough and Sorkin doesn’t even pretend to cover it.

But my biggest complaint is Sorkin’s nostalgia for the old timey news guys. Supposedly, they  were better at covering the news. One character – the wise old man, I guess – says We just decided to referring to covering the news with integrity which becomes the title of the episode, We Just Decided To. These are the newpeople who didn’t cover the deplorable conditions for blacks in the south for almost 100 years. They didn’t cover the lynchings, the reign of terror, until it was jammed down their collective throats. They didn’t cover President John Kennedy banging every woman in sight including many underage girls. Yes, they did cover the disintegration of the Vietnam War, but not as well as the disintegration of the Iraq war was covered.

The old timey newsmen were company men and the company was the white establishment. There is more information available, to even the most casual observer, today than ever before. More news and more real facts. In many areas, like the BP oil spill, the cable news channels probably dwell too much. Sure, it is harder to get information on the ecological disaster of the Louisiana coastline degradation than it should be, but nobody covered that 50 years ago at all. And this was when the Army Corps of Engineers was actively hurting it. My personal anger is that nobody covered the destruction of Glenn Canyon, one of the most beautiful places on earth, except to exalt Lake Powell. People who knew the area were screaming and the press ignored them while writing fawning articles about the Army Corps of Engineers.

I suspect that Sorkin didn’t set out to do  a hatchet job on Zuckerberg, he was just collateral damage in Sorkin trying to go after the web in his haste to glorify the good old days.

Henry Hill died

Around home, Film, Psychological Musings

Henry Hill was a low level Mafioso in the Lucchese crime family. He became famous because, when he ratted out his buddies to the FBI, he ended up having two movies tell his story. Both Goodfellas and My Blue Heaven were roughly based on his life (My Blue Heaven more roughly). Goodfellas was Michele and my first date.

I once heard Pauline Kael  say that she would never date anybody who didn’t like the same movies that she did. At the time, it seemed like a good idea, and it still does. Our second movie was La Femme Nikita. 

A year or so later, still together and still enjoying the same movies, we went to see a revival of  The Wild Bunch at the Castro in San Francisco. Standing in line, we noticed two acquaintances we had met in Temenos workshops, Peter Kuhlman and Ophelia Ramirez, and we knew we would become friends.