Hedgehog in the Fog

Truly fine animation from the USSR, now part of Mini__B’s dinner-theater rotation:

The Meaning of Heroism and The Avengers

My father, for reasons I’ve never fully understood, fell in love with Irish folk music before I was born. I had the strange experience of growing up talking to my grandparents about life undor the tsars and then listening at home to LPs of songs about the 1798 rebellion.* I’d read comics books where the heroes always won in the end, and listen to songs where the heroes almost always lost. Hell, in The Minstrel Boy, the protagonist is dead in the second line of lyrics. The one that got to me was Boolavogue.** It’s got a beautiful slow melody, and the description of the rebellion builds step by step towards inevitable disaster. The image of that disaster – men fighting while standing back to back because they were being overwhelmed by superior numbers – showed up in the comic books, but somehow it didn’t end the same way.

The word “hero” has been abused to the edge of meaninglessness. For me, heroism has to include two aspects of behavior: the act has to require courage and it has to help someone other than the person performing it. The first means that actions on a sports field are excluded, since I don’t believe that being called a bad name on the back page of the New York Post is a fate that requires courage to avoid. The second excludes daredevils. These exclusions don’t mean that examples are hard to find: parents who work themselves to death to make life better for their children all qualify, in my opinion. If that’s too pedestrian for tastes that prefer war, Irish farmers armed with pikes going up against soldiers armed with muskets might do. It irks a lot of people in the U.S. today, but Goliath is never a hero, while David sometimes is. Of course, it also helps if your cause is just, but whether or not that is so is always open to debate.

It’s some 40 years since I first picked up a comic book and I still read them now and again. Some of the recent movies have been worth watching, with Nolan’s Batman movies near the top of my ranking. Traditional comic book protagonists almost by definition meet my two criteria for heroic action…except when they don’t. There is reason to believe that two of the main characters in The Avengers*** – Thor and the Hulk – cannot be killed by the enemy they fight. That seems to me to remove the courage aspect of it. The other superhuman characters – Captain America and Iron Man – are definitely killable, but not easily so. That leaves the two spy/assassins, Hawkeye and Black Widow. They may be well armed and well trained, but they are fully human. There’s a lot of build up that Hawkeye is fighting, at least in part, for revenge, while it is made quite clear that Black Widow is fighting because she believes it’s the right thing to do. Of six “heroes” only one fully meets my criteria and, Joss Whedon being Joss Whedon, it’s the only woman. Amusingly enough, one scene in the movie, which was used for a promo poster, has the six of them standing in circle facing outwards – i.e., standing back to back. And sure enough, they end up fighting an enemy immensely superior in number. Black Widow is the only one who seems to understand a personal fear of death.

A trailer for the last of Nolan’s Batman trilogy showed before the movie. In it, Catwoman says to Batman something like “You don’t owe these people any more. You’ve already given them everything.” His response: “Not yet.” I assume this is an intentional paraphrase of the Gettysburg Address, where Lincoln says that the dead soldiers had given the last full measure of devotion. It’s something that no sane person sets out to do, but quite a few sane people have ended up doing. I wish more fiction portrayed it well.

*Note that every war has heroes on its side. I’m not speaking to the issues that stem from English colonialism in Ireland, but rather how those issues are perceived.

**Given that Mini__B is the only person in the world who wants to hear me sing, I’ve been trying to find songs he likes. To date, he prefers me to go with Irish folksongs and Gilbert & Sullivan rather than rock or pop.

*** Good flick. Enjoyable and amusing.

Meta-Horror

As in a horrifying discussion of horror, not met-a-horror, which is a decent description of my dating life circa 1987.

I saw The Cabin in the Woods this afternoon in an empty theater. Co-written by Joss Whedon and some guy I’ve not heard of; repeats a lot of themes Whedon touched on in Angel, but with the freedom of not being network TV. A lot of spoilers after the jump if anyone plans on seeing the flick.

Pardon Me Boy, Is That The Interborough Choo Choo?

14th Street (Union Square) to Grand Central, the year the IRT subway opened. That Grand Central stop was abandoned when the IRT was expanded from the original lazy-Z plan to the H plan; the first stop we pass is 18th Street which was abandoned when the trains and stations were lengthened. The camera train and the train it’s following are on the local track, and the lighting train is on the express track.

It’s actually amazing: Edison took the still-new technology of a motion-picture camera, and the first non-trolley subway in the USA and managed to make them boring. The man was a genius.

A Different World

Objectively, 1898 isn’t that long ago. My paternal grandfather was already an apprentice bookbinder in Russia and my other grandparents were already born. New York had absorbed the city of Brooklyn and the towns making up the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island. A handful of buildings that I have worked on had been constructed. And Thomas Edison was running around filming stuff.

And then I see something like this. People – I’m guessing the wealthy, but I really don’t know – with horse-drawn sleighs in Central Park. Could the middle class rent a horse and sleigh for the day? Either way, I can’t reconcile this with my home town.

Redrum

Via Gothamist, some pretty creepiness from Tim Sessler:

BENDING SOUNDS – NYC SUBWAY from Tim Sessler on Vimeo.

Another Weird One: JCM

I saw John Carter in a nearly empty theater today. Putting aside the fact that it’s going to be one of the worst all-time flops in economic terms, I’m ambivalent about it.

The book A Princess of Mars and its sequels are, simply, terrible. They’re racist, badly plotted, and over-written; fantasy with a badly-glued veneer of sci-fi. I loved them when I was 8 or so and didn’t entirely understand them, but even then the descriptions of the Tharks bothered me. The movie attempts to make sense of Burroughs’s meandering but still leaves its characters with some fucking idiotic dialogue.

Besides the impressive use of CGI and nice on-site shooting in some desert somewhere, the thing that stands out for me is the modern interpretation of Burroughs’s interpretation of Percival Lowell‘s vision of Mars. It is utterly romantic: the technically advanced people of a dying world building longer and longer canals to use the dwindling resources of water, knowing the whole time that they will lose their fight. I suspect that Lowell’s bad astronomy lasted as long as it did because of the romance of it.

The two leads are unimpressive. Carter is played by a man named Kitsch, who should by virtue of not changing his name qualify for the self-awareness version of a Darwin Award. Dejah Thoris is played by a woman who can’t necessarily deliver her lines but, to her credit, has triceps that make her look almost realistic when holding a sword.

Finally, if you’re a fan of HBO’s Rome and The Wire and AMC’s Breaking Bad, there’s a strange feeling seeing Julius Caesar, Marc Anthony, Detective Jimmy McNulty, and Walt White rubbing elbows as secondary characters.

“History”

“The Gangs of New York” was interesting but far from Scorcese’s best. It had some good points – most, but not all, connected to Daniel Day-Lewis’s performance – but also mangled the reality of New York in the mid-nineteenth century.

The end of the movie has a montage of the future, after the action has ended: a graveyard in Brooklyn (one that does not exist, BTW), with a beautiful view of lower Manhattan, falls into decay as the city grows. The CGI was based on real photographs, which Gothamist has been nice enough to collect.

Personally, I like all of the views after it’s recognizably modern New York, which is to say after the Brooklyn Bridge was built, but I think the most romantic views are from the 30s, after the art deco skyscrapers were built and before the chunkier modern towers:

What do you call it when looking at the same thing gives you different results at different times?

Bad Technology x2

In a moment of weakness three years ago, I bought a Bluray player to replace our DVD player. The movies look good, but it’s been a pain in my ass from day one. At first it would randomly lock up (maybe once a month) to the point where the only solution was to pull the plug. So I went through some now-forgotten contortions, had Sony mail me a firmware upgrade in CD, and it got mostly better. The last year or so, we’ve had a problem when playing Blurays with fancy menus: they won’t play. We sat down yesterday to finally watch season 1 of Boardwalk Empire and we couldn’t even get the menu to show. Since I didn’t want to wait on Sony again, I decided to download the new firmware upgrade, burn it to CD and try again. Sony, in its infinite corporate-is-a-people-too wisdom, only provides the firmware in a Windows format. We’re a Mac house, but Mrs__B’s new job gave her a Dell laptop, so I got on that, grabbed the file, burned the CD, ran the upgrade, and we just watched the first episode.

1. Fuck Sony and everyone connected with Bluray. A player is nothing more than a computer dedicated to a single purpose, and the fact that it can be crashed by a badly-written Java menu applet tells me that it’s a poorly designed computer. Fuck the morons who think that I pay extra for a fancy menu rather than for the better picture and sound. Fuck the morons who misprogrammed the menu.

2. I haven’t used Windows regularly since 2002, and holy shit it sucks. The Dell took – and I timed it – three minutes to boot up. Every single control from XP has been moved or changed in Win 7, so my old and pretty damned thorough knowledge of how to get Win to actually do something is now meaningless. It’s not better, it doesn’t (to my eyes) look better, it’s just different. Fuck Microsoft and their need to churn upgrades for revenue, Fuck Dell and its shitty hardware. Fuck Apple for the “coolness” that has become a selling point rather than useability.

Hugo, I went

Hugo is a strange movie. It’s been sold as Scorcese’s first movie for kids, and it certainly is safe to take kids to see, although I wonder how many will enjoy it. (The theater I was in, there were a bunch of kids very much not paying attention.) Superficially, it’s an adventure movie about an orphan living by his wits, but the structure of the movie (much of the action is out of his hands, so he spends a fair amount of time frustrated by the unfairness of life – something that kids can certainly empathize with but might not find entertaining) and its theme work against the standards of that genre.

The movie’s theme is, simply, avocation. It’s a topic that Scorcese obviously feels strongly about, and one that resonates with me, but it’s not particularly realistic when talking about kids. A couple of pre-teens may discuss what they’ll do with their lives (as the protagonist and his only friend do at one point) but they are unlikely to worry that they’ll find the perfect place for them to fit because kids don’t think that way. Worrying about finding meaningful work is an adult’s problem; the kid version is wondering what you want to do. They’re not the same problem and having kids articulate the adult version leads to the strangeness.

That said, it’s beautiful, well acted*, and has a satisfying plot.

*Chloë Grace Moretz has barely hit puberty and she’s better at her profession than I am at mine. I’m depressed.

108 Years

A panorama of lower Manhattan, filmed from the top of the Brooklyn tower of the Brooklyn Bridge. This is another of Edison’s experimental films. A lot of chimneys and smoke, very few tall buildings, a lot of the Lower East Side (after the camera pans past the Manhattan tower of the bridge). One of my grandparents had made it the U.S. and was already living in the Bronx, one had left Russia and was living in Egypt, and the other two were still in the Russian Empire.

In personal terms it doesn’t seem that long, but you look at this movie and it seems longer than it is.

Manhatta

A relatively famous and experimental 1921 film apparently inspired by Walt Whitman:

Ratocalypse

Last week was POOP week, this is rat week:

I swear this is a cut scene from Half-Life 2.

The picture is from an examination of post-apocalyptic NYC in movies. I think they’ve got it wrong. Why would the rats be riding the barrel when the food is in the water?

The station shown, BTW, is Broadway-Nassau on the A/C, which lies underneath the Fulton Street stations on the 2/3/4/5/J. The Z has gone the way of all riderless trains and the M has been rerouted.

“The Civil War”

A month ago, we turned on the TV for background noise and the local PBS station was reshowing Ken Burns’s “The Civil War.” Since Mrs. __B moved to the U.S. in 1992, after the show had originally aired, and has never had the opportunity to formally study American history, she was fascinated, seeing the show for the first time. I bought the DVDs and we have just finished watching the entire thing, including the bonus material of extra interview footage with Shelby Foote.

It’s an interesting and flawed show. It runs about 12 hours, which is very long by TV standards, but is rather short to tell the full story. As a result, a lot of context and explanation is compressed to the point of sloganeering rather than analysis. Having seen it before, I was free to sit back and analyze it as a film rather than as history, and a few things jumped out at me. Whether the selection of pictures is simply limited by what exists or was limited by the archives that Burns had access to, a handful of pictures are shown several times, to the point of overuse. Of the interviewees, only one (Barbara Fields, a historian) is black. (Daisy Turner, a 104-year-old daughter of an escaped slave, is seen reciting poetry, but is not interviewed.) The sound effects of battle are extremely repetitive. Perhaps most glaring is that the real differences in tactics and strategy between successful generals (Lee, Jackson, Bedford Forrest, Grant, Sherman, Sheridan) and the far longer list of unsuccessful ones are not discussed at all. This is not simply an epaulet fetish on my part: the length and bloodiness of the war, the form of its outcome (and here I agree with Foote that a northern victory was inevitable as the content of the outcome long as there was no foreign intervention), and the aftermath all depended on the military action. Given the effect of the war on our society, changes in how it might have been fought might well have had huge effects on where we are today.

Ultimately, it’s a good film for someone in Mrs. __B’s position, learning about that era for the first time, but really too shallow for any other purpose but entertainment. And anyone who is truly entertained by the series of bloodbaths that made up the war needs to rethink their life.

Speed…

…is a hell of a drug.

Lookie here.

If only I were an inch tall

Fly, baby, fly.

La-Z-Boy

I’m going to pretend that posting a couple of videos counts as a post.

Thomas Edison, filing a BMT train crossing the Brooklyn Bridge in 1899:

Trains leaving the Corona Yard (7 line) for the morning rush:

Back before the Koch administration, there were no fences around the Corona yard, making it (1) a haven for graffitists and (2) my shortcut from home to Shea Stadium.

A Sick But Apt Comparison

As I recall the plot of Poltergeist, a suburban development built on a cemetery was haunted by the ghosts of the dead unhappy with the ugly houses and social conformity.

If ever there was a development that should by haunted by thousands of tormented souls, it’s the condos at 110 Livingston Street, a building that served for 63 years as the headquarters of the NYC Board of Education. Any teacher in the public school system, any student who has passed through it, any parent who dealt with can describe in detail the soulless monsters that roamed the halls of this building…and now people live there?

A Slow Death

There were three movie theaters within walking distance (in my family, defined as “under two miles”) of where I grew up. The Prospect was boring and mid-sized, the Quartet (one of the first multiple-screen theaters in NYC) had four living-room sized theaters that were never clean, but the RKO Keith was a palace. I can list the movies I saw there not because they were necessarily good but because going there was a treat in itself.

The outside was a plain box:

The theater was beautiful:

But the true genius was the lobby:

They split it into three theaters in the late 70s, which pretty much destroyed the theater interior, but the lobby remained. Then a developer bought it and decided that what downtown Flushing – one of the most active commercial areas in the city – really needed was a mall. And he destroyed most of the lobby. And now another developer is planning on finishing the job.

It was built beautiful in the 1920s for crass commercial reasons, and crass commercial logic has killed it. That’s not what gets me angry, although it obviously saddens. It’s the 24 years of slow torture that gets me angry. I have yet to meet the developer who could be trusted and I’m wracking my brain trying to think of one who was a reasonable facsimile of a human being.

Namedropping

I was at a meeting this morning at a middle-rank expensive apartment house in Manhattan. While standing in the lobby, James Earl Jones walked by. For a 79-year-old, he looked pretty good…other than being annoyed by people standing in his lobby discussing construction.