All posts by Steve Stern
Is it just me or is this picture creepy?
Defense Secretary Gates is in Chile doing something and promoting the new START treaty. I do not know why he is in Chile – which as far as I know is not involved with START – but while he was there, he visited a military academy where this picture was taken.
The guy in the background, looks a little too Nazi for my taste.
In the early 1960s – after the Beatles song I Want to Hold Your Hand came out, but before Why Don't We Do It in the Road? which I always thought pretty much covered the arc of the 60s, but that is another story – I taught continuous wave radar to Germans at Fort Bliss, Texas. Because of the heat, classes started at 6am and the Germans would march in – in the morning twilight wearing grey uniforms and jackboots – singing Deutschland über alles.
I thought that was a little too much, but, at least, they had the common decency to not wear helmets. Now even we are wearing a sort of old German helmet.
It is really hard to make a good movie
And it is nearly impossible to make a great movie. That is just a fact. Making a movie, especially a big budget movie – and I don't mean a $300,000,000 big budget movie, just a $30,000,000 – is incredibly complex. If the script isn't almost perfect, the movie doesn't work; if one of the main characters is mis-cast, the movie doesn't work; if the music is wrong, the movie doesn't work; if the cinematography doesn't fit, the movie doesn't work.
Maybe I have read too much Pauline Kael, but I used to think that good movies weren't made because people weren't trying or that they were selling out. There is plenty of that, but making a good movie is really, really hard.
I was reminded of this after seeing Morning Glory late Sunday afternoon. Both Michele and I were feeling punk Saturday, so we stayed home, built a fire, watched it rain, let the cat out when it stopped raining for a few minutes and let her back in when it started again, and watched three movies. Waiting to Exhale, It's Complicated, and Invictus (for the second time).
All four had aspirations to be very good movies. To be intertaining and say something meaningful. Each of them came close. For me, Morning Glory was the most entertaining, but they were all good. Not great, but good. I am sure that each of the directors, each of the actors, was trying to make a great movie – or, at least, a very good movie, a better movie than the end result – and fell short. Because it is hard.
A Saturday pilgrimage
Last Saturday, Malcolm Pearson and I drove to Southern California to visit a car museum. What we found was a sacred site. Socal style. In an industrial park, of course, accross the street from a very big church.
It is the Mullin Automotive Museum, where, inside, surrounded by supplicants, is a shrine dedicated to the Art Deco Movement. Although there is furnature and sculpture; the main show is pre-WWII french cars. I read somewhere that the French Impressionists, especially Monet’s haystacks, came as a reaction to the ass-kicking the French took in the Franco-Prussian War. If that is true, maybe this flash of preposterous creativity in the period leading up to the second World War was in reaction to the growing colossus to the north. A sort of We have to be bold – and very French – now; we aren’t going to have another chance.
The cars are luscious to the point of being decadent.
If you only think of cars as transportation appliances, then these cars may not be for you. These cars are artifacts that reflect an age as well as self-conscience Art. Through the vision of one person. In my opinion, Art has to be the vision of one person; art by committee is not Art. That is why the UN building doesn’t work; why there are no great novels by two authors. And no great cars.
But, here, there is one great car after another with their names being the names of the people who designed the chassis: Delahayes – by Emile Delahaye – Lagos – by Anthony Lago – and, the most sacred of them all, Bugattis – by Le Patron himself, Ettori Bugatti. With bodies designed by Figoni et Falaschi, Chapron, Saoutchik, and Ettori’s son, Jean Bugatti. These cars were not always good transportation devices – although they often were – they were not, even, always good cars; but they were always interesting. Interesting in form and interesting in their lovingly done detail.
Notice the door handle buried in the chrome trim on this Delahaye with a body by Figoni et Falaschi. Or the way the headlights stick out ahead of the car on this one by the same team, and the subtle tailfin, and the detail on the wood door trim.
The engines are like jewelry (double click to blow up).
And just the general deco-ness of these beauties.
To be continued…
Strange bedfellows department
Because of a dead battery, I had to abandon my old Range Rover at a Park and Ride, in San Jose, last Saturday night. Michele said she would give me a ride back down to the Park and Ride and a jump start for a xlb lunch – xiaolong bao Shanghai dumplings – on the way. We decided to try a new place that had great reviews – Shanghai Dim Sum 19066 Stevens Creek Boulevard in Cupertino.
As we got close, Michele realized that it was next door to a Muslim grocery store that she liked. Among other things, they have halal meat. We are trying to be more conscience about eating meat by – among other things – eating meat that has been humanely raised. To be halal, meat has to come from humanely-handled halal animals so it is a good fit for us. And – big bonus – they have goat which is not that easy to find, even in Mexican groceries.
They also have halal chicken. Raised by – and this is the punchline - Amish farmers.
As an after comment: as per one of my favorite recipes, we salted a couple of chicken legs and thighs, dusted them with paprika, added a little lemon, put them in the oven on top of a bed of quartered potatoes , and roasted them. They tasted much better than your average free range, organic chicken.