Square America: The Beach

LA has been hit with a heat wave, so let's go to the beach!

I like this photo a lot. I like the bluntness with which the pair of shoes draw attention to the absence of their owner - assumedly the photographer. We are rarely this aware that we are peering over the shoulder of someone when we look at a photo.

The collector of found photographs does not just pick up anything at random. It's a deliberate, meticulous search for the accidental art. What makes the collector salivate can be a number of things; an artlessly artful composition, odd subject matter, unintended social commentary, an innocently staged cliche.

These square format color - and sometime BW - photos were common in the 1960's, but disappeared in the early 1970's. Some have date stamps, some don't. They must have been connected to a certain type of process or equipment, but I have not been able to find out anything about it.

If anyone can enlighten me on the subject, it would be greatly appreciated.

Scenic Route

I have a map and I know how to use it. Well... not entirely. I have a tendency to make wrong turns, map or no map. Fortunately iPhone GPS is there to save my directionally challenged arse. Though, good things might come out of bad turns. I would have never found this field across the llama farm if I didn't go down the wrong road. By the way, can you really make a living llama farming? Who buys llamas? For what purpose?

Living in The Valley the quickest way for me to get out of town is going North, to the San Gabriel Mountains, through Angeles National Forest. I usually just look at my Thomas Guide and pick a road. Yesterday it was Lake Hughes Road. There are several lakes up there, Castaic, Hughes and Elizabeth.

There are odd little settlements along the roads. Some, like Green Valley, are actual towns, others are just clusters of houses along two-lane highways. Same as when I drive along Old Topange Canyon Road to the coast, I wonder what do the people living there do? Do they commute two hours a day into the city? There don't seem to be a whole lot of job opportunities locally. There definitely seem to be a contingent of artist types.

This is the Bouquet Canyon Reservoir. No people allowed.

A few weeks ago I took a long meandering trip with a friend to Acton and thereabouts. We were driving down on Soledad Canyon Rd. when we spotted this crazy miniature western town. It is like a shabby Hollywood set for kids in the middle of nowhere.

There were also some horses, two teepees, gallows, and a gumball machine at the premises. This is what I like about Southern California: The most unusual is totally normal here.

Right next door there is Tippi Hedren's Shambala Preserve. It deserves a little explanation. You might remember Tippi Hedren from Hitchcock's Birds, or as the mother of Melanie Griffith. In the 70's Tippi and her husband at the time, Noel Marshall, produced, filmed a movie called Roar. The film took 11 years to finish, cost $17 million, and made only $2 million worldwide - it's been called "the most expensive home movie ever made." The movie is about a family living in Africa (?) with a couple of elephants and dozens of big cats - lions, tigers, leopards, cheetahs. During filming several cast and crew members were attacked by the big cats, but miraculously nobody died. After filming Tippi Hedren set up the Roar Foundation which now cares for abandoned and rescued big cats.

By the way, next to the mini Deadwood, there is a camp ground. We chatted up the lady in the office and she told us that at night they can hear the lions roar.

PS. According to the L.A. Times Tippi had a hand in (nyuk-nyuk) the nail salon business being dominated by Vietnamese Americans.

Take a Hike

I figured I should check out the Malibu Creek State Park before it gets shut down. The entrance is by the intersection of Mulholland Hwy and Las Virgenes Rd. Mulholland is one of my favorite drives whenever I start to feel too claustrophobic in the city.

It took me a while to get oriented. To be honest, I never did. I simply just picked a trail that looked promising and kept going. It ended up being a nice six-mile hike, or rather walk.

The park has a little bit of everything; grasslands, high peaks, streams, small lakes, forest. I saw a couple of large eagles of some sort, a few rabbits and a bunch of lizards.

According to wikipedia:

"Malibu Creek State Park is a California state park near Malibu, in Calabasas. It opened to the public in 1976, This majority of the park is made up of land donated by Bob Hope and Ronald Reagan. Other parts of the ranch added later were owned by paramount studios and fox studios. Most recently an area formerly used by Soka university was annexed to the park. It is known as gillete ranch because the buildings were build by the original owner Gillete the razor manufacturer."

I had no idea. I did find the place where they once shot MASH. Some rusty old vehicles are still there.

There was also a shed with a sign on it, saying that due to repeated break-ins, the shed is now unlocked, and please respect the display inside and close the door once you are done. So I did. There were a couple of display signs and the road marker with the distance to places from Seoul to Boston, but I doubt that it was the original one. (What the heck is that called anyway?)


I think that mountain in the background might be the one over which the helicopters fly in, during the opening credits of MASH.

By the way, Robert Altman's movies are hit and miss for me. He is universally hailed for Nashville, but I could never stand it. Maybe because it doesn't have a single likable character. MASH on the other hand is one of my favorites, despite of its intermittent undercurrent of misogyny. At the time I first arrived to the US I had no idea that MASH was also made into a tv show, and was very confused seeing it in the tv guide scheduled in half an hour increments Monday through Friday. When I tuned in just got more flummoxed; it kinda looked like the movie, but it was not. I would have felt like I was on an episode of the Twilight Zone - if only I wasn't completely ignorant of that show too. I had similar experience with Beauty and the Beast - which I knew only as an old French film, directed by Jean Cocteau.

PS. Did you know that the lyrics of theme song for MASH ("Suicide Is Painless") were written by Robert Altman's then 14-year old son Mike, who made more money on royalties than his father did for directing the movie?

(Photos taken with iPhone 3GS)

Fireworks

The kids' reaction is the best part.

First Sheep, Then Dogs, Next Grandma

So I read the news that 9/11 search-and-rescue hero dog Trakr was cloned 5 times. Couldn't have happened to a nicer dog. He is not the only dog cloned either. If you have the dough a South Korean bio company will be more than happy to deliver you another Sparky, or five.

You know that human cloning will happen eventually. Not because it should, but because we are human, and we can't stop ourselves. It was unfair to give Pandora the gift of curiosity and a closed box.

I feel vaguely apprehensive about all this. There are of course all the moral and ethical concerns, and the legal ramifications should be interesting. But my source of unease is more of ruminative kind.

I've been wrecking my brain - and the internet - for movies involving clones, that are at all worth mentioning, I found them to be a mixed bag, from the woefully bad to wickedly good. Multiplicity with Michael Keaton turned out to be a lukewarm romantic comedy. The Island is an unimaginative mess of chase scenes, special effects and soggy plot directed by the dependably dreadful Michael Bay. Alien Resurrection was probably the most regrettable installment of the Alien(s) franchise. A huge disappointment considering that it was directed Jean-Pierre Jeunet - half of the French director duo of such wacky fun movies as Amélie and Delicatessen. On the other hand, the two of them made the darkly comic City of Lost Children, featuring several misshapen copies of Dominique Pinon. Definitely one of the good ones. So is the recent Moon. The 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers is by now regarded as Cold War era horror/scifi classic, and even its 1978 remake got a 97% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Probably the most interesting treatment of the relationship of clones were in Moon, where the two did not get along right away. Who said that you are compatible with your own self? Could your internal struggles become external if there were two of you?

What all those movies, good and bad, share is that their clones are always the same age as their originals. That's all fine and well for fiction, but that would require biotechnology to be able to accelerate growth/aging then slow it to normal speed at will. I don't think we are anywhere close to achieving that. Dogs of course reach maturity in a couple of years, but with humans it takes a couple of decades. That opens a whole another can of worms.


What if you decided to raise your own clone as your child? Maybe you'd think that you could protect your younger self from all the mistakes and missteps you made in life, and impart all the wisdom you learned from them. Would it work? I'm somehow doubtful. I don't think there is any guarantee that you would even get along with your own younger self. Would it be poetic justice having to be mother to your own teenage self?

I could go on, but my head hurts.

Wear Green - For Our Parks

While half a world away a nation is struggling to resolve whether it'll have its old conservative, autocratic government or a new(ish), slightly less conservative and autocratic one, we have some problems over here on our own shores.

Everyone knows California is in deep doo-doo. We ran out of money, in the hole for, oh, about $24 billion. There will be big budget cuts and they will all hurt, but there is at least one that doesn't make any sense at all: Legislators plant to shut down 220 out of 279 of California's state parks. Which would account for a whopping 0.62% of that budget gap. Even less if you count in that it would also cut the income that the state parks directly generate. Also hurt would be numerous local economies that would lose income from tourists attracted by and to state parks. Overall the loss to the California economy is likely to be bigger than the savings to the budget. It's nonsensical.

Additionally, the closure promised to be temporary (I would sure hope so), but reopening, restarting parks that have been without maintenance for some time could prove far more costly than maintaining them. There is another aspect to this that is hard to put a price tag on. Our parks are our treasures. The closure would mean that iconic places, like the big redwood forests, beaches, camp grounds, deserts and all sorts of wilderness areas we take for granted would become off-limits to all of us.

There have been one proposal to cover the cost of park maintenance: A once-a-year $15 charge added to license fees of non-commercial vehicles in California. To me that seems like a great deal.

If you care at all what happens to our park you might want to visit the California State Parks Foundation website or facebook page.

A few articles to read:

State Parks on Chopping Block - video - Wall Street Journal

Closing California State Parks: Is this the answer to the budget crisis?

Proposed California state parks closure list includes Calaveras Big Trees: Locals anxious

Proposed state parks closure list is not for the faint of heart - LA Times

State parks access pass might be key to preventing their closure - LA Times

Slice of Time

"...photos have always been the Model T of the arts. The man who wants to be buried with his five hundred-dollar Ford because it has pulled him out of every hole so far also wants a five-dollar photo of his wife so that when she passes, he can pull her out of her hole and place her firmly on the dresser."
(Richard Powers, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance)

At the end of grad school we all had to write a lengthy thesis paper. I was quite happy with mine, I thought it came out quite well. I talked about the functions of photography, memory, history, narrative and fictional landscapes, quoted Baudrillar, John Berger, Richard Powers, Wim Wenders, Salman Rushdie, Susan Sontag.

When I showed my first draft to my professor, he had hard time believing I wrote it. It's understandable, I was never very forthcoming or articulate at our regular critiques. Truth to be told, I never liked talking about my work. It made me feel like a giant phony. I'm also just not intellectual enough to get a handle on all the (post-)post-modernist art talk.

In grad school there were a few students who could talk the talk, and make the art. The majority though was just talking. However, it carried more weight with the faculty than their actual work.

I still don't know if going to grad school was a good thing or a big mistake. On one hand, not going would have been three years less of eating ramen soup and baked beens, and selling plasma to buy art supplies. On the other hand, I got to try my hand in print making, actually learned a number of things, and became more articulate, even if only in writing.

On the definitely positive side, it cured me from all my naive ideals of being an artist.

Ha!

One of these days...

There are days that are... well, just irregular. I went to the movies yesterday to see Moon. As I took my seat, some self-important type was extolling his own virtues in the row behind me, but thankfully turned quiet before the trailers were over. The Scarecrow to the left of me couldn't sit still. Fatty, two seats to my right walked out 5 minutes into the movie, then back and started talking to his companion. He made no effort to whisper, nor was he bothered by the shushing sounds from behind. He finally shut up, but then his phone rang. Not only that, but he answered it! At which point I audibly remarked: "For goodness sake!" He hang up. Twenty minutes into the movie Young Punk - apparently friend of Fatty - walked in and sat down in the one empty seat to my right. He proceeded to unwrap a sandwich of some sort, douse it with some stinky dressing from a plastic cup. He munched, slurped his soda and laughed at the movie at all the wrong places. I felt like an extra in a bad sitcom, minus the laugh track (not counting Young Punk).


Fortunately I was sitting in row 3, with the walkway in front of me and could just stand up, and pick an unoccupied seat at the far end of the row, and finally enjoy the movie. Moon is a small, but thoughtfully crafted movie directed by Duncan Jones - formerly Zowie Bowie, son of David Bowie. The main character(s) in the movie is played by Sam Rockwell, and the voice of the computer, Gerty, is Kevin Spacey. It is a science fiction of sorts. At the beginning there are flavors of Silent Running and Solaris, but it ends up being a more conventional story, and I don't mean that in a bad way. There is a touch of mystery, suspense, drama. It's a fine film, I'm glad I went to see it despite all the bedlam.

Visions of the Future

Sometimes I need to let my inner nerd out for a romp. Recently I have been musing - in my head - about science fiction movie archetypes - visual and thematic. So I wrote it down. It's a little messy, but that's ok. Here it goes...

Cowboys and Indians, Starfleet and Romulans, Light and Dark, Logic and Emotion, Man and Nature

There are two distinct and contrasting visual styles of the future; one bright, technological, modern, optimistic, another dark, decaying, organic, ominous. Simply put: Bright and shiny vs dark and grimy. Blade Runner and Star Trek are probably the most iconic examples of each. Another, more crucial distinction between the two is where they take place: One in densely populated city, another in the vast frontiers of space. Frontier stories more likely to feature a group of heroes facing off with fearsome foes, while the in the city it is all about the lone hero searching for answers.


Ridley Scott's 1982 masterpiece Blade Runner stands as one of the cornerstones of modern science fiction movies. It has defined a visual and narrative style that has became a major part of the science fiction cinema language. However Blade Runner did not invent this language, but translated it directly from the Film Noir style of the the 40's and 50's. These films were shot in moody black and white, full of grit, grime, and moral ambiguity. These films themselves were influenced by the hardboiled detective novels of their time, works of Dashiell Hammet, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler. Not only the most iconic ones were directly based on their novels, like The Postman Always Rings Twice (Cain), The Big Sleep (Chandler), but Chandler also worked as scrip writer for many of these now classic movies (Double Indemnity, Strangers on a Train).

One very intriguing aspect of these films is that while most of them take place in perpetually sunny California, their visual style is defined by their darkness - most of the action happens in dark alleys, dive bars, seedy motel rooms. As if they were nature documentaries of the ground level of a thick urban jungle where the sunlight doesn't penetrate any more, and the denizens mostly come out at night.

"Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor. He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness." (Raymond Chandler)

Double Indemnity and Blade Runner

The heroes of these stories are usually private eyes, who have problems with authority, they walk more or less on the right side of law, but have an antagonistic, distrustful relationship with the cops. Decard in Blade Runner is full embodiment of this character. He is as likely to be squaring off with a dubious dame as licking his wounds with a glass of scotch in hand as Philip Marlow is. He walks the streets of a Los Angeles that is wrapped in a perpetual night. Maybe the smog has gotten so bad that the sunlight can't penetrate it any more. It's also always raining, and even indoors there is water drizzling from above. This inexplicable wetness has come to represent danger in science fiction movies - a dark cave of our subconscious, with unimaginable horrors lurking in its moist recesses. A perfect example of it is the scene from Alien when we first encounter the fully grown creature: It's a large dark room, with chains hanging from the ceiling, and water dripping everywhere. What is all that excess moisture doing dripping inside a space ship is anyone's guess.

Wet interior from Blade Runner

The wet ship from the alien's point of view

The hero of the Noir style does not necessary have to be an actual detective, it's the element of mystery, a search for answers what's relevant. Dark City is a good example.

The private dick is close relation to the lone gunman of the westerns - another genre that scifi has heavily borrowed from. The most enduring theme that scifi appropriated from westerns is the idea of entering dangerous uncharted territories, "To boldly go where no man has gone before." Many scifi films and shows are westerns in space. Joss Whedon very consciously referenced this theme in his sadly short lived tv series Firefly, and the following movie Serenity. Beyond classic westerns, Whedon's creations have roots in the less idealized, more sweat and dust covered, morally ambiguous world of spaghetti westerns. A not so deliberate, and far more optimistically Utopian iteration of the space western was the original Star Trek and its many follow-ups. Its heroes are the law, their ship is clean, brightly lit, full of crisp uniforms. It's also uplifting, optimistic, a world where law and order prevails. Firefly and Star Trek not only have different visual styles, but represent contrary point of views of basically the same societal structures. Both worlds are tightly controlled alliance/federation of planets, outwardly represented by a strong military, but in one the heroes are the military, in the other they are the outlaws, barely getting by at the edge of known space.

Space Cowboys of Firefly and the original Star Trek tv series

If Captain Kirk and crew are John Wayne and the cavalry marching into the wild vastness of space, Captain Malcolm Reynolds and crew are the cowboys and misfits. The "Indians," i.e. the "other" that they both have to fight and beat are however very similar. In Serenity it is the "reavers," a band of humans driven to extreme madness by a chemical compound. In the immensely enjoyable 2009 Star Trek movie it is a rogue band of Romulans, driven mad by grief and anger. Both are propelled by raw emotion, can't be reasoned with, inaccessible to logic, and bent on destruction. Simply put they are pure manifestations of the Id. The creature from Alien and Aliens can be put in the same category. While we don't really know much of its "emotions," its single-minded drive to breed and kill make it the same type of primal force.

The primal foes and their environments share the same visual language. It's all dark, jagged, wet, sinisterly organic. Not surprisingly, the Romulan ship, the Narada and the reaver armada all resemble deep sea monsters. The dark deepness of space and the ocean are very similar; they both fascinate and frighten at the same time. "Space is disease and danger wrapped in darkness and silence." (Leonard 'Bones' McCoy).

Narada on the left, reaver ship on the right and an angler fish in the middle.

Star Trek XI contains within it both the bright and the dark visual styles, but they are firmly devided between the two opposing forces of the narrative. In sharp contrast to the brightly lit, ordered corridors of the Enterprise, the Narada's interiors are dark, tangled. In one scene we can see pipes sneaking on the floor, in several baffling inches of water. The Enterprise is shiny plastic and chrome, with a crew in dressed in bright primary colors. The Narada is jaggy, corroding metal, subdued dark greenish grays and browns, it's tattooed crew dressed in worn leather. Similar tones, but even more organic are many interiors where the creatures of the Alien franchise dwell. By nature they take over spaces that are not their own, yet dark and cavernous, obscuring their angular shapes with their own creations. Water here is replaced with sticky goo.

The Narada

The Enterprise

Like Native Americans did in classic westerns, Romulans, acid-blooded aliens, even reavers, come to represent the primal force that you can fight or run from, but can't reason with. Ultimately, they are mother nature in many disguises. Our plucky heroes triumph over their much stronger foe, using cunning and bravado - brains and balls against brute force. And that's what conquering frontiers is all about. Despite of their ideological differences Serenity and Star Trek have this in common. Not Blade Runner however; Deckard hunts down and kills all the replicants, but there is no triumph. Perhaps because he is not on the frontier, but in the city jungle where there are no good guys and bad guys, just different rungs on the food chain.

The lines between the hunter and hunted blur