Category Archives: Americana

Living the Good Life in the rain

Americana, Around home, Film, General U.S. Grant

hidden-figuresWe got hit by the big storm over last weekend and, as often happens in our neighborhood, a tree was blown over, taking out the power to three homes. But, to safely work on the power outage, PG&E shut down the whole neighborhood. Sitting in the dark, with no heat, did not seem like the best way to pass a Sunday, even though it was in the 50s outside, so we decamped and went out to a late lunch at La Viga, my favorite upscale Mexican restaurant.

After the distraction of a seafood stew for lunch, we still had a Christmas tree to take down and wanted to go home and get busy. In our new interconnected world, all we had to do was check the PG&E website to get all the details of the power outage and its repair which is handy and would have been even handier if they said we had power. But we still didn’t (although it was on the schedule). We decided to go see a movie because…what else are you going to do on a rainy Sunday. Hidden Figures was on our short list and was just at the right time, so Hidden Figures is was. We were not disappointed.

Hidden Figures is sort of an old-fashioned movie, the kind with a happy ending – wherein the white bosses redeem themselves – that you know is coming. Getting to the ending, however, is a rough journey. The movie centers on three black woman Katherine G. Johnson played by Taraji P. Henson, Dorothy Vaughan, played by Octavia Spencer, and Mary Jackson played by Janelle Monae, who worked for NASA  as computers in an era when engineers often did the conceptional engineering but the complex and tedious math was done by people called “computers”.

This happy ending is one of those happy endings that leave the audience teary-eyed and it left me a little ashamed and embarrassed as a white privileged male. While this is an uplifting movie about three “colored” women, like any movie about people of color in the 50s and 60s, it is really about race, prejudice, institutionalized segregation, and our ugly past that has only somewhat been diluted in the ensuing years. There are very few white heroes in this movie – duh! – with the notable exception of John Glenn, and the story the movie tells about the interaction between Glenn and “the smart one” is, according to all accounts I can find online, true.

The opening sequence is about the fear that every black person has of the very police whose sworn duty is to protect them. This is 1961 or 1962 in the Jim Crow South and prejudice is institutionalized but that fear of the police, if one is black, sadly is still just common sense anywhere in the United States. Towards the end of the film, one of the white women supervisors, in talking to a black woman who should be a supervisor, says “I have nothing against you” and the black woman answers, “And I believe you believe that”. If all this makes Hidden Figures seem like a downer, it isn’t. The movie is fun, interesting, and touching while feeling very real. I highly recommend it, it is one of the best movies we have seen in the last year.

After the movie, the rain continued and we still had no power so we had a light dinner and returned to the multiplex to see Passengers with Chris Pratt and Jeniffer Lawrence. Passengers is gorgeous, a couple of the special effects are especially good, and Jennifer Lawrence is transcendent but, in the end, it was not what I had hoped.

As an aside, Michele says that I always think Jenifer Lawrence is transcendent which is pretty true, but, in Passengers, her acting is luminous, even for her. End aside.

After Passengers we still didn’t have power so we just went home and climbed into bed. We woke the next morning to a warm house with power, only slightly inconvenienced.

Star Wars & The Empire

Americana, Film

rogue-oneWe saw Rogue One: A Star Wars Story over Christmas and I was disappointed. Not that it wasn’t pretty good, it is just that I expected more. Part of the problem is that the photography was so good – both beautiful and real feeling – along with most of the acting, that the silly plot and outlandish killing looked fake. I was reminded of the first time I saw Westside Story on screen. I had seen Westside Story several times on stage and loved it but all that great Jerome Robbins choreography seemed fake on the streets of the actual New York.

This movie fits in the Star Wars universe, although the hero’s journey trappings are still there, the emphasis is more on fighting a rebellion against the Evil Empire. Speaking of fighting the Evil Empire, in the Star Wars universe, we identify with the brave Rebels, but, in real life, we are the Empire and the rebels are, for example, ISIS.

This made me feel better

Americana, Politics
rational
Portrait of a glacier on Highway 66, near Amboy.

By way of a background aside, a couple of years ago, Michele’s stepfather, Jim, gave us a subscription to Forbes. I am an avid magazine reader, almost any magazine, like People in a dentist’s office for example, but Forbes is probably the one magazine that doesn’t resonate with me, even in the slightest. It is a celebration of rich people only because they are rich and we often take it from the mailbox and throw it directly into the recycling.  But, because we were getting Forbes, I think, we got a complimentary issue of Bloomberg Business, which is a different and, to my sensibilities, much better magazine. End aside.

If you read the same papers that I do – the New York Times, The Atlantic, or The New Yorker, for example – it is hard to think of Trump as a rational player. It seems like it will be a win for us all if he just doesn’t get in a pissing match with Putin and start WWIIl. But after reading this fascinating article, Inside the Trump Bunker, With Days to Go, in the aforementioned Bloomberg Business, Trump seems very rational. The article was obviously written before the election and takes the general attitude that Trump is going to lose – for lack of a better word – but it still makes the case that Trump’s campaign was not just randomly different, but different in a calculated way.

Like Obama and his team eight years ago, Trump and his team changed the game.  Before the article, I had sort of held the position that Hillary lost because she ran a lousy campaign – I had joked that, in a year of change, Hillary’s campaign was Vote for me for more of the same – but, with new information, I’ve changed my mind. Now I think Trump won because he ran a brilliant campaign. The article is well worth reading, here is a sample:

Parscale was building his own list of Trump supporters, beyond the RNC’s reach. Cambridge Analytica’s statistical models isolated likely supporters whom Parscale bombarded with ads on Facebook, while the campaign bought up e-mail lists from the likes of Gingrich and Tea Party groups to prospect for others. Some of the ads linked directly to a payment page, others—with buttons marked “Stand with Trump” or “Support Trump”—to a sign-up page that asked for a name, address, and online contact information. While his team at Giles-Parscale designed the ads, Parscale invited a variety of companies to set up shop in San Antonio to help determine which social media ads were most effective. Those companies test ad variations against one another—the campaign has ultimately generated 100,000 distinct pieces of creative content—and then roll out the strongest performers to broader audiences. At the same time, Parscale made the vendors, tech companies with names such as Sprinklr and Kenshoo, compete  Apprentice-style; those whose algorithms fared worst in drumming up donors lost their contracts.

The Development business rewards people like Trump

Americana

developer-handss

In the early 70s, I was working for a large, Southern California developer. They had bought a huge tract of land, zoned for more than a thousand houses, from Boise Cascade which who was getting out of the development business because it had almost ruined them. The property was purchased with a small down payment and we would take ownership in stages paying for each stage separately, but once we took down a stage and pulled building permits we had to start paying interest on all the property.

Because payments were only triggered by the pulling of house permits, we were able to work on putting in streets and other public improvements without paying for the land. The company CEO wanted us to start construction on the models and I said that would trigger the payments. He said, “No there was an exception for the models,” and he directed me to the paragraph with the exception. I was a young Director of Operations for Northern California and, while I was high enough in the company to talk to the CEO and had been to his house for company parties, I was low enough in the company to be scared shitless. But I was also cocky and the paragraph actually made it clear that there were no exceptions. I read the paragraph out loud to him.

There was a long silence and then he said, “Somebody is lying, either you are a liar or I am, which is it?”  I think I blanked about then because I don’t remember what either one of us said next, but I do remember we pulled the permits for the models the next day.

The point I want to make is that this guy, this CEO was very smart, he came out of Auschwitz broke and he left an estate worth about $1.6 billion dollars. This is the environment that Trump comes from, these are the kind of people he has worked with. It is a mistake to think Trump is stupid or crazy and, so far, the people who underestimated him have not done well.