I am so looking forward to the new Star Wars…

December 16, 2015FilmSteve Stern

which is a little surprising because I don’t consider myself a Star Wars fan. Don’t get me wrong, I stood in line for the first Star Wars pretty early in the cycle and I was glad I did. The opening sequence was worth the price of admission alone: that little Bambi spaceship going by at full throttle followed by a huge spaceship, that went on and on, gliding by with a low rumble. I had never seen anything like that, it was breathtaking. Still, I thought the The Empire Strikes Back was only OK, and the third movie was the first movie all over again, only way not as good. I did see one prequel in a theater and one more on TV but I am not sure that I even saw the end, by then I was bored.

But there is something about Star Wars, the first Star Wars, that is unexplainable. The movie opened in a small number of theaters with very little fanfare, and instantly lines formed. We went to San Francisco to see it at the Coronet on Geary – I think that may have been the closest place, to the South Bay, that we could see it – and we waited in line for over three hours for a one o’clock showing. Recognizing that R2D2 was looking for Obi-Wan Kenobi in Golden Canyon, Death Valley, was icing on the cake. Years later, while watching the sunset from Pyramid Four at Tikal, I realized that we were at the Rebel Home Base on Yavin 4. Now, almost forty years later, Star Wars has long been taken over by the collective and has, somehow, transcended George Lucas. I hope and expect that will be a very good thing.

I liked the reboot of Star Trek by J. J. Abrams, the new director, who I have read is a huge Star Wars fan and wants to keep the original flavor. Part of that is the use of real locations and actual sets rather than C.G.I., part of it is the use of film, and part of the flavor was the use of comparatively unknown actors. Like most science fiction, Star Wars has a rightist sensibility – watch Jay explain it in Clerks II – in which the deposed Royalty take back their rightful control of the galaxy. This movie promises to be much Liberaler.

In the first trailer, the first line is “Who are you?” asked by a disembodied voice of a nameless scavenger who is repelling down a wall inside a crashed Imperial cruiser, “I’m no one” is the answer. The scavenger is played by Daisy Ridley and she is as close to no one as anybody could hope for. According to her interviews, she was nobody “working in a beer and ale house” while trying to get acting gigs, when she read for Star Wars not even knowing what the movie or part was. By next month, Daisy Ridley will be one of the most recognizable people on the planet. I like that.

I suspect that this will be a very good Star Wars, I hope so.

Carol

December 13, 2015FilmSteve Stern

I think that Carol is the best movie we have seen this year, even better than my beloved Mad Max, Fury Road (but not by much). It is a love story that takes place in the fifties and, unlike Bridge of Spies, it feels like the fifties more than a movie about the fifties. The movie moves along slow and deep – for lack of a better way to describe it – rather than flitting along the top of the action. Carol stars Rooney Mara as a young naif temping in the toy department, of what used to be called a Department Store, during the Christmas rush and Cate Blanchett is Carol, a wealthy, suburban, mother. They are both terrific.

As the movie went on, Blanchett increasingly reminded me of my mother which was both disconcerting and distancing. At one point, a gesture of no consequences, putting on a clip-on earing after a phone call, almost took my breath away with its familiarity. A big part of that is the look and feel that Carol exudes. The colors and textures – of everything, of the wallpaper, the furniture, the cars – feels so familiar. The core of the movie, the lover’s attraction, permeates everything; so does the feeling of dread, of repression, of the danger and risk brought on by that attraction. As an aside, this was a time when women had the vote but, usually, no real agency. My parents got divorced about five years after this story and my mother had her credit cards – which were only for gas as I recall, stores having their in-house cardless credit – taken away. It being assumed that, without being married, a woman couldn’t have credit. End aside.

Embarrassingly, I didn’t know the director, Todd Haynes. I say embarrassingly, because the movie seems so personal. Each frame the work of an artist not a committee. Lush and minimalist at the same time, every frame, every scene is perfect in its composition and contribution to the story. If you like moving pictures, you will like this moving picture.

Fear mongering

December 9, 2015Americana, Politics, Psychological MusingsSteve Stern

More Americans had their backgrounds checked while buying guns on Black Friday than on any other day on record, according to F.B.I. statistics, New york Times.

A week or so ago, right after the San Bernardino shooting, I started to do a post on guns and fear mongering but I kept getting distracted by Trump’s rhetoric escalations. Guns are a big problem in the United States, but I don’t think that guns are our biggest problem, maybe they are a distant third. Not counting Global Climate Change, our biggest problem is the growing toxic environment of fear. Increasingly, we are unable to see reality because our fear induced anger in clouding our vision. While I think the biggest offenders are on the right, it is not just the right that seems to be blind with rage.

In what seems like months ago, I couldn’t imagine how ISIS could be an existential threat to the United States. Now I am starting to think that I was wrong. Roosevelt famously said “We have nothing to fear but fear itself”, I learned that in school, maybe in some Civics class, maybe in a High School History class, I don’t know, but I do know that I really didn’t understand the moral importance of that quote. I knew what the words meant intellectually, but not the emotional urgency. Now I am beginning to better understand the corrosiveness of fear as I am starting to see it play out in front of me.

For about six months, starting in late 1973, the Symbionese Liberation Army, a left wing terrorist organization, ran wild in California. They said the purpose of the mayhem was to get the police to over react turning the general population against what they saw as corrupt authority. The police did over react, in a way, with 400 police officers shooting about 9,000 bullets into a house where the SLA – as they were known, almost none of us knowing what symbionese meant – was holed up, but the populus never followed suit. To me at the time, getting the population to turn on the government, to, in effect, turn on itself seemed, fortunately, like an impossible goal. In the early seventies, the left was similar to the right of today except, of course, 180° out of sync. The SLA, however, was just too small a lever to move the country in any measurable way. I am worried that in our more polarized nation, a right wing terrorist organization, ISIS, may be a big enough lever.

When Trump says “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re sending people that have lots of problems. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” it is not only an idiotic misstating of reality, it is bad for America because it excites fear. People are already afraid, for their jobs, for their kid’s job prospects, and I think, in the back of everybody’s mind is the spectre of Climate Change, so fanning that fear, finding and blaming scapegoats, as a way to get votes smacks of being ungentlemanly at the very least.

While it may seem unAmerican, in that way Trump is not any different than classic American fascists like the proNazi Father Charles Coughlin in the 1930s. The problem is that hate mongering breeds conviction and self-righteousness, not only in the gullible listener but the cynical liars become believers, believing their own vile bullshit, stoking their own fire. When somebody of Trump’s stature and fame says bigotry is OK, that it moves the bar of acceptable behavior, Jeb! seems benign when he suggests almost the same thing in a more acceptable way.

But when Trump says he wants “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” and when a governor, like Bobby Jindal or John Kasich issues an unenforceable executive order preventing Syrian refugees from coming to their state, it is worse than unAmerican, it is antiAmerican. It is aiding and abetting the enemy and I don’t say that lightly. Trump et al are are smart enough to know that what they say they want, would create the same segregated and isolated conditions that are causing Europe so much trouble. What we do better than anybody, is assimilate our immigrants – although it is a low bar – and it is in our best interest to keep doing so. What Trump et al say they want are more the conditions that make jihadis in the first place. That hurts more than our liberal sensibilities, it makes our world more dangerous.

We started watching the Warriors and ended up watching basketball

December 4, 2015AmericanaSteve Stern

I’ve watched a lot more Football than Basketball. I even had season tickets to the Raider’s during the Madden Era. Football is our National Sport and, as a good American, I still kept track of the local teams and, then, the playoff teams. But football has lost much of it’s charm. The violence has started to make me uncomfortable. I know, football has always been violent – I played football in highschool because it seemed obligatory for a kid my size – and I could run fast. although I didn’t particularly like hitting people and I liked getting hit even less – but the players are much bigger and much faster and the violence has amped way up.

Last year, Michele and I caught the end of the Warriors season and we – speaking for me- are falling for basketball. It is intimate and improvisational – two things good football isn’t – and, at times, it approaches ballet. Of course it helps that the Warriors are on a twenty game winning streak.

Running up the fault (sort of) and thinking about science and ignorance

November 29, 2015UncategorizedSteve Stern

When we drove home from Paso about a month ago, we went through Parkfield hoping to follow the San Andreas Fault north to Hollister. We followed a wide valley north for a while, thinking we were following the San Andreas Fault when the fault really went through the mountains to our left.

We knew that the San Andreas Fault ran through both places but we really ~~had~~ have no idea where the fault is on the ground between those two points. But, while we were driving up the Parkfield-Coalinga Road and then up Highway 25, we kept thinking we were near the fault and we would each point out landscape features that we were sure was the handwork of the fault. We were interpreting data to match our preconceived answers. The problem with knowing the answer is that it is always easy to find data to support it.

It is easy to think that Science is the child of knowledge, but it really isn’t. Science is the child of ignorance. Before Galileo, the official doctrine of the Catholic Church was that the Bible told us all that needed to be known, and the Catholic Church was the arbitrator of knowledge for all of Christendom; in Europe, at least. If it was in the Bible, that was the answer, if it wasn’t in the Bible, it wasn’t worth knowing, and even worse, it might show that someone was influenced by the Devil. Galileo put a crack in that wall of Total Knowledge and then Isaac Newton put a hole in it big enough to run a buggy through. With increasing knowledge, even more questions could be seen, and the wall of Total Knowledge that hides the questions came down still faster.

I like to think that now we are living in the Golden Age of science – when you think about it, we live in the Golden Age of almost everything, except Democracy and World Peace – but that is misleading. Just because we are living in the Golden Age of science, doesn’t mean that everybody is. In much of the world, the wall of Total Knowledge still stands. Much of the world is still living smug, sure that they know everything that needs to be known. Not just in the Middle East, the wilds of Afghanistan, or Africa, but here too. A large number of people in the United States, pretend – or believe and I am not quite sure where the dividing line is – that they know everything that there is to know. Some of them are uneducated and not worldly, but some are educated and seemly are proud of their ignorance, and a couple are even running for president of the United States.

As we climbed out of the valley, going north on the Parkfield-Coalinga Road, three things happened almost simultaneously. The paved road turn to graded gravel with a sign that said Impassable When Wet, it started to drizzle, and Michele realized we were nowhere near the San Andreas Fault. We were in Michele’s TT with four-wheel drive and all-weather tires and she suggested we put the top up and give it a try. BTW, I was driving and Michele took most – but not all – of the pictures. Two minutes later, we drove out of the drizzle and put the top back down. Just after crossing over the summit at about 3500 feet, we pulled over to enjoy the view and eat a couple of leftover braised pork belly taquitos and a braised short rib tacos from the night before. The road turned to pavement and we followed it north to 198 and then Highway 25.