Gordon Parks

Photography, Politics

The New York Times has a slide show of some unusual Gordon Parks photographs that I would like to recommend. To go out on a limb – a little – Gordon Parks was the most important, black, visual, artist of the 1950s and 60s. He became famous – and, therefore, influential – during the disgusting Jim Crow era. It was a time when everything was segregated – at least in the south all the way north to Washington D.C. – everything, not just public schools and parks and public transportation, but restaurants and restrooms. Even drinking fountains.

Black people were kept out of sight and Parks’ photos helped change that. He started out photographing for the the Farm Security Administration where he took the powerful picture above, and eventually became a fashion photographer for Vogue where he published the pictures below. 

But it was his work published in Life Magazine – the premier photo-magazine of the day – where I first saw him and his seemingly naive photographs. They seem so straight forward, and they pack such a powerful punch. Check out the slide show and you will not be disappointed.

 

 

Death Valley Ultra Marathon

Sports

Today is the start of the Death Valley Ultra Marathon.

I love all things Death Valley, well, almost everything. Maybe the Death Valley Ultra Marathon is an exception. The Death Valley Ultra Marathon is a foot race that starts at Badwater – in Death Valley at about 280 feet below sea level – and ends, 135 road miles away, at Whitney Portal (about 8360 feet above sea level)…pause…in July!  In the process, the runners cross two passes, the first one, Towne Pass is at 4960 some odd feet, and then – after going down to 1550 feet – the next one, maybe named Darwin Pass, is at about 5300 feet. That just seems nuts.

Last year, the winning time was 23 hours and 41 minutes; doing the math, I come up with a pace of over 5.7 miles per hour, almost ten minute miles. Oh! And it is hot in Death Valley in July: 120 in the shade – and there is no…. – last year. Last Thursday, Death Valley experienced a record – high – overnight low at 107º, but this week will be cooler, with a high of under 110 and overnight lows in the 80s.

Strangely enough, this race seems to be an old person’s game. Almost all of the runners are over 40. Last year there were 27 runners over 50 and two under 30! Probably proof that people don’t always get smarter with age.

It is astounding what humans can do.

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.”