Notes on "Romance and Cigarettes"

The movie Romance and Cigarettes, directed by John Turturro, is about a working class couple in Jersey with marital problems. Done as a musical. James Gandolfini is kicked out of his home for infidelities. He begins to sing. Pretty soon he is dancing in the street with the garbage men. Depressing topic. Fun movie.

- J

Washing the Car

I washed the car this afternoon, which I rarely do. I wash the car when it needs it, when the accumulation of crud and debris threatens its aerodynamic characteristics. I sometimes joke that I wash it every year, "whether it needs it or not." This is a true description of frequency, but not motive. If it didn't need it, I wouldn't wash it.

While I was engaged in this work it occurred to me that it is quite possible that, since we are in a drought year, someone could be driving by might become indignant about my wasting of water. They might make the assumption that I do this every weekend, as some do. They might wag a finger of approbation.

The thing I was thinking about as I scraped a years worth of bugs from the front grill is that this hypothetical finger wagger is right in the general case. I would agree with him or her. One should not waste water if you live in the semi-desert that is California. You should not do so, especially in a drought year. Its socially irresponsible. Its bad for the environment. Washing cars is one of the ways people waste water. Its just that the wagger's finger might be misdirected in my case.

People make errors of particularization all the time, of course. It probably happens more these days. Our technology permits more and more context free encounters. George W. S. Trow wrote about it in the sixties in Within the Context of No Context. We curse each other on the freeway because of a too sudden stop or a missing signal. This is an example of a great sin: people don't signal as they should. We shake our fist because we have found a sinner. The sinner. But we have never met the person in this car in front of. We don't know what kind of day they are having. We don't know if failure to signal is a chronic problem or an aberration. We have a moral makeup meant to protect the cohesiveness of a tribal village. It loses its bearings in the anonymity of modern life.

- J

Notes on "The Kite Runner"

The movie, The Kite Runner, is true to the book upon which it is based. Plot details are followed in sequence, more so than in most movies. It is perhaps too true. Cinematically, it feels a little flat, at least by modern expectations. On the other hand, the story has a lot of authenticity. I think this is what attracted people to the book. It would be difficult to make the story more cinematic without losing the authenticity.

- J

Notes on "Very Annie Mary"

The film Very Annie Mary is a wonderful movie. It heartwarming piece of surrealism starring Rachel Griffiths. It takes place in a rural valley in Wales and is about a woman's efforts to find her way out from under her father's all consuming shadow. It borrows from the surreal Australian films of Griffiths's earlier career and the English underdog from the midland's makes good. Every plot twist is contrary to the conventions of modern films, yet entirely predictable and consistent with the characters involved. Rent it.

- J

The old preacher

On my morning walk today I saw a male great blue heron in full matrimonial regalia. Great blues grow amazing long feathers down their backs during the mating season. He looked like an elderly preacher in a worn old shawl. Imagine a species for which looking like an elderly preacher is sexy.

It was a beautiful clear morning. In addition to my old preacher, I saw a night heron, many smaller egrets, some excited mergansers(not common around here), and, still, the school of salmon or steelhead.

- J

Doors

My workplace in San Mateo is near a small neighborhood of Eichler homes (the 19th Avenue Development). Eichler was a builder of ultra-modern homes in California in the 1950's. They are also known as flattops and are quite distinctive in their street appearance. In the 90's in Palo Alto Eichlers became rather fashionable and sold in the million dollar range. These are definitely not fashionable, though some have been well cared for have settled into a comfortable middle age.

I often walk in the Eichler neighborhood and began to notice something that strangely I never noticed about Eichlers before: they have no visible front doors. The entrances to the houses are almost always on the side, and frequently concealed. There will be a gate that matches the house siding.

I don't know why this is. Eichler interiors are known for their openness, but their exteriors typically reveal nothing. Was it a sign of the times? This was the era of back yard bomb shelters. Did home buyers of that era just want to barricade themselves from the dangers of the world?

Since I noticed this, I have been attentive to doors as I walk around Niles. There do seem to be periods when doors were deemphasized or concealed and periods where doors are prominent features and stand boldly in the middle of the frame. I wonder if these correspond to periods of national insecurity and of national confidence.

- J

Niles Wildflower Festival

Yesterday was the Wildflower Festival in Niles. The main fund raiser for this event is a Garden Tour of neighborhood gardens. Over the years, my wife and I have acquired a strong aversion to designer gardens in garden shows. Although these may be creative and may have interesting botanical specimens, the gardens don't feel inhabited. We tend to prefer the slightly scruffy (or very scruffy) evolving gardens of old Niles. Usually we just walk or drive on by the designer gardens. This year, though, we visited a couple of gardens that obviously had been designer gardens, but had been lived in enough years that the edge had worn off and were beginning to have a personality.

On Linda Drive we visited an entry with a lovely rose garden on the side of the house and a large vegetable garden and orchard in back. A lot of love has been poured into that space.

- J

Notes on "Sweeney Todd"

The recent movie Sweeney Todd, starring Johnny Depp, is more theatrical than cinematic. The interest is more in the grace and flair the actors demonstrate in their roles than in the characters in their world. Special effects are used a great deal to conceal this, but mainly it is talented actors hamming it up. In this it is not unlike The Pirates of the Caribbean series, in which Johnny Depp also stars.

- J

More on the Fire

There are some pretty good pictures of last night's fire at the Henkel factory here.

- J

Fire

At about six tonight my wife spotted black smoke billowing over the trees. Something was on fire. The smoke was too dark to be a brush fire. There was too much to be a house fire. From the direction location it must have been the old factory at the end of Niles Blvd most recently owned by the Swiss knife maker, home and beauty products maker, Henkel. At one time agent orange was allegedly made there. The building has been neglected recently, although the owner had spent some money to have the warehouse behind torn down. There had been a plan to turn the lot into condos but that died (we hear it is a super-fund site.)

I watched the smoke from our back door. The sirens blared and then grew quiet. The smoke turned from deep black to white. Probably steam from the water they were pouring on the flames. At our distance the billowing smoke was still formidable, but we could not hear the any of the crackling of the flame or the clamor and yelling. We could just hear the evening bird song away in the trees.

- J

Notes on "Pan's Labyrinth"

The Spanish movie Pan's Labyrinth takes place in Spain in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. It concerns a bookish and imaginative girl who's mother, a widow, has married a cruel captain in the Franco's army. He is engaged in mopping up remaining republicans in a small village. There are two stories that run in parallel: the story of the small band of rebels and their struggles with the cruel captain, and the story of the girl's inner life of fantasy. As the barbaric world comes closer to the girl, so the inner fantasies become more intense and dangerous.

For me, the "real world" story was not very real. It was as much a product of the CGI shop as the fantasy story, only with an element of sado-masochism. The "real world" story was as much a fantasy.

The movie felt to me a lot like the Matrix series. For all their mythologizing, it felt like there were no humans involved in the filmmaking.

- J

What Happened to Litter?

When I was growing up in the sixties, litter on the highways was a topic of national policy. Lady Bird Johnson campaigned against it. Signs on all roads threatened big fines for littering. Yet, shoulders were covered with trash.

Today one will occasionally encounter a "no littering" sign. Occasionally you will see trashy shoulders. But, rarely is litter a subject of public discussion let along political campaigns.

What happened? I don't think the highway maintenance sponsorship programs are responsible. Litter was largely gone before these programs began. If anything, Americans generate more trash while in their cars than in the sixties. When Lady Bird was on the case, McDonald's and KFC had yet to spread across the country. There are orders of magnitude more cars on the roads.

I wonder if air conditioning can account for the change. Americans do not drive with open windows any more, especially on highways. Tossing something carelessly out the window is no longer possible.

Often, technological changes cause changes that cannot be foreseen. Sometimes they are not even seen at the time the changes are taking place, and can only be observed in hindsight.

- J

Notes on "The Cooler"

The Cooler is a movie starring William H. Macy about a man with such bad luck that he is employed in a Las Vegas casino to "cool" the luck of gamblers. He falls in love, his luck changes, and hilarity ensues. Well, hilarity and a good deal of extreme violence.

- J

The fish are still there

I check on the fish in Alameda Creek below the BART tracks now almost every day on my morning walk. I am now convinced they are salmon. They are still there. They have not been as easily seen, the light is poorer in the morning and the water is back to its usual murkiness, but now I know the form to look for and I can clearly make them out. Usually they are swimming in place facing into the current. They have distinctly V-shaped tails.

- J


View Larger Map

TV Friends

In a recent This American Life episode, David Rackoff told a story of a man found to have been dead a year in his lounge chair with the television still on. He said that recent studies have shown that television is capable of having the same emotional and physiological effects as friendship. But, he said, at a minimum a friend should be able to reach over and say, "How are you doing, buddy. You're not looking so good, in fact you are looking a little ..., dead!"

Its true that a lot is missing from the emotional connection that people seem to have with people on television, but it is hard to underestimate its power. Political campaigns these days are built around trivia aspects of appearance or behavior while monstrous defects go unremarked. What goes largely unnoticed is that television news, mainly under the influence of the 24 hour cable news channels, has become more informal and conversational. The way people relate to any medium is by correlation to real world social forms. The transition from Walter Cronkite to Chris Matthews is the transition from a professor in a lecture hall to a guy in a bar. A guy in a bar demonstrates his understanding of the world by inferring broad generalizations from small details that others might not notice: a missing flag in a lapel or quirky turn of phrase. In a bar, a guy who has command of facts and statistics is a know-it-all and must have hidden motivations. A guy who can spin a narrative from whether someone wears a flag in his lapel is a regular guy.

- J

Notes on "Letters from Iwo Jima"

The Clint Eastwood film, Letters from Iwo Jima, is a companion to his earlier film, Flags of our Fathers. This one is about the Battle of Iwo Jima from the Japanese perspective. Like many later Eastwood films, this one centers around violence, but neither romanticizes nor moralizes it. Not to say that it avoids mythologizing. Eastwood is all about the mythic. In this case, it is about the honor system of Japan and the cult of suicide. The narrative makes a distinction between the uses of the honor system to promote authoritarianism and conformity and the truely honorable death.

- J

Salmon or Steelhead?

I walked this afternoon on Alameda Creek. A strong cold wind was blowing from the Northwest, so generally up the creek. Alameda Creek, like many waterways in California, is heavily managed. There are a number of inflatable dams where the creek flows through Niles to divert water into nearby quarry ponds and to thereby recharge the water table. This time of year there is usually a lot of water backed up behind a dam where the creek flows under the BART tracks and only a trickle below the dam. Later the stream below the dam will dry up completely.

Because of, I imagine, the cold upstream wind, the creek was unusually clear this afternoon. As I was admiring this clarity, I began to notice forms moving in the stream. Large forms. Fish, in fact. Quite a number of them , in fact. I counted one congregation to be more than thirty, but most were swimming along in columns of four or five, so all in all there were probably more than a hundred. I was quite astonished. I have seen one or two large fish, floundering in the margins of the creek before, but never this many.

As far as I could tell this was the end of the line for these fish. Since they were mature fish I am assuming they were attempting to swim upstream. There was no way they could cross the dam in its inflated state. I don't know whether they were salmon or steelhead. From my experience, they resembled salmon quite a lot, but I have no point of reference for steelhead. Whatever they were, would that there were more of them.

- J

Notes on "June Bug"

The movie, June Bug, is a very American movie, but had the feel of a French film. It was quiet and static with an ambiguous ending.

This is a city mouse/country mouse story. A sophisticated art dealer from the city is trying to sign a primitivist painter from the deep south. Since this is near her new husband's family home he comes along. The art dealer bumbles along, not understanding her newly acquired family's country ways. Her husband is divided between the two worlds.

The protagonist is clearly the art dealer. Her husband is out of focus for most of the movie. But in the end, it is he that is changed by the experience.

A strange, fastinating, out-of-place, out-of-time piece of filmmaking.

- J

Notes on "Charlie Wilson's War"

The film Charlie Wilson's War is about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the role of Congressman Charlie Wilson in providing funding for the resistance. It stars Tom Hanks, Julie Roberts and Phillip Seymore Hoffman, was written by Aaron Sorkin of West Wing, and directed by Mike Nichols. These are such very competent people and we are so used to seeing their work that we are swept along. It is an entertaining couple of hours. Only afterwards did I stop and realize that there was so little there. This is a political procedural, like a TV cop show or hospital drama. Things happen that appear to have great moral weight but no one changes fundamentally.

The story is based on real world events. Just as in the real world Charlie Wilson had a reputation as a rake, became obsessed with Afghanistan, coerced a reluctant CIA to become involved in the effort to resist the Soviets. Some people have said that the defeat of the Soviet Army there brought down the Soviet Union, though it is of course a bit more complicated than that. But the movie is not very interested in the war in Afghanistan. This is depicted in a couple of montages, the movie is not very interested in the politics, not interested in the refugees. It seems mostly interested in the irony of the assertion that it was a libertine Democrat, and
not the moralistic Reagan that brought the Soviets to their knees.

- J

One Art

I heard Elizabeth Bishop's poem One Art on Fresh Air today. I really liked it. Light and breezy with a punch to the gut (at least for me) at the end. Would that I had it in my back pocket in recent months as my mother was dying from Alzheimer's.

- J

One Art

by Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.