I Swear It Was Him

So, when the missus and I run out of coffee, we jump on the bikes and head over to our local beanery. Those are some of the perks of the Wasteland: pleasant weather, beach-side bicycle paths, and coffee bean roasters a jaunt down the way.

We rode to the spot and then turned left, heading into the crowded neighborhood that separates the fancy shopping drag with the sand and ocean. The road was one-way and dense. The ride lazy.

As we went along a man was heading to his car, saying something to his passenger. He looked over to me and the missus, gave a weird smile and said Heya or Hiya. Howdy, I called back with a smile. Maybe he thought we recognized him. The missus asked after we turned right down another one of the tight streets, Do we know that guy?

It was totally Steven Spielberg. I swear.

The car was dark and sleekly unassuming, like one of the suppository Benz's. The pair were kind of in a rush to get in the car and get going, but not frazzled by any means. The clothes this Spielberg doppelganger wore were the kind that look like a nice pair of jeans and nice sport coat, but on closer inspection you can tell that the jeans were probably five hundred bucks, and the coat three times that. The man was the right size and had the same facial features, the same look in his eye, the same hair and facial hair (but he had shaved recently) as the famed director. Who's to say that Spielberg couldn't know somebody who lives in that particular expensive neighborhood? Our little berg has its charms...

They way he said Heya or Hiya with his weird smirk led me to the conclusion that he felt we recognized him. At least the way both the missus and I responded to him--pleasantries in kind--made us the cool ones that afternoon.

We're all just so friendly down here in the Wasteland.

Literally: Part 1

"April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain."

Lines 1-4.

I like the irony anger that's right on and under the surface in calling "April the cruellest month", especially followed with the "breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land." That just smacks of horror imagery, and following it with "mixing/Memory and desire" sounds like the clarion call of the embittered.

Bitter zombie lilacs coming to bring cruel and chilly sunshine mixed with rain. Seeing April and the coming spring as cruel can only come from someone who is dead, or dying, or angry and bitter at all the life, and this is reinforced by the title of this section, "I. The Burial of the Dead".

I'm not a professional critic, but I like to play with things and let my imagination run wild, so let's see where else it goes. For me, Chef Gonzo, "stirring/Dull roots with spring rain." is like a commentary on family. Family--your "roots"--dull and boring, is only barely moved by the cruel machinations of the annual rebirth.

Bringing of life is annoying and cruel, but only when you're dead, or in a state that today we call "depressed."

What Some Folks Need...

Some folks might need a little excitement in their love lives, a spark maybe. This is true for real people and even works its way into art, if you can consider the following photos from a television show "art".

Even fictional characters need a break from their own lives in order to provide a spark:

I'd forgotten that I'd even taken these pictures. This episode was late in the run, but I couldn't tell you what the other storylines were, but Al and Peggy were out of the house.

(I mostly just wanted to share these pictures...)

Super Team

Down here in the Southland the pop-culture muses spent all night partying, celebrating the groping-leading-to-wedded-bliss marriage of Star Wars and Disney. Two billion straight cash for Lucas, as he hands over the Lucasfilms reins to Disney and starts his retirement, passing along the "goods" while he's still alive, gracefully?

Now we can expect to be inundated with Star Wars crap even more than already. Holy shit, hope you didn't think we were at a saturation point. New movies, toys, video games, television shows, amusement park rides, board games, radio teleplays, vaudeville acts, and new iambic pentameter Jedi poetry are all sure to show up very soon. They'll fit nicely along with the costumes, bed sheets, party cups and favors, throw rugs, decorative pillows, Yoda bath salts, Jamaican Greedo cigarettes, cool-looking-but-wholly-uncomfortable chairs, Indian-made compact and luxury automobiles, speed boats, yachts, airplanes of both the Cessna and jumbo-jet varieties, as well as hot air balloons emblazoned with the mouse logo on one side and the Rebel Alliance logo on the other.

Get. Prepared.

I guess it's super-fucking-cool if you're into all that.

A WTF Moment from a WTF Movie

Not all weird movies on Netflix's streaming list are created equal. One movie the missus was convinced by the synopsis to tuck n the instant queue was about contemporary Mongolia. "Dealing with traditions in modern Mongolia" or something similar.

I like Mongolia. It's one of the places that fascinated the hell out of me as a kid. So exotic in the arid, Asian steppe kind of way. Genghis Khan, people! He alone has got somewhere like thirty-million descendants.

And...then there's this movie, called Khadak.

Brief Notes Before I get into the Meat of this Post::

1) Khadak was a German production filmed on location in Mongolia with a Mongolian cast.

2) In the very funny Strong Bad Email "Independent", about the differences between "Independent Films" and "Indie Films", the character Strong Sad makes a joke that in film school he majored in holding on wide shots for too long. I'm betting this German director was the dean of that college.

3) Mongolian language sounds odd. It's not tonal, like Chinese, Thai, and Vietnamese. In fact, it sounds as close to a kid's gibberish language as anything I've ever heard. But it's real, so that makes it kind of interesting. But, from this movie, you could hardly tell since there may be fifty words spoken in the first hour of the movie. That may be generous.

The movie starts out on the steppe with a herding lad and his sheep. He's moving them along grazing lines. When he makes it back, he says that he needs to go back out, see, one of the sheep got lost. He lives in a really nice yurt with his mom and her her dad. Grandpa says go back out and get it. After the teenager leaves, mom says was that such a good idea. We viewers (besides wrongly believing that this will actually turn out to be a dialogue using kind of a movie) wonder why she's so overprotective.

Until Bagi, the boy, has a vision of the yurt on fire, and has a seizure right there on the step. If you've got an epileptic kid, maybe sending him out on his own isn't such a good idea. Mom knows this, and she's already out looking for him.

The next few scenes portray his being unconscious from the seizure as him being lost in a forest, while a shamaness screeches and dances in the yurt, tending to his condition, he sees her in his woodsy visions as a helper, trying to get him back to the camp. Eventually he comes to.

That was pretty cool. Artsy and mostly quiet, the scenes unfold like a early seventies convoluted plot, where as an audience member, you're expected to figure certain things out. And the damn Kraut director kept holding on his shots for too long. (Don't get me wrong; the compositions being held upon for too long are beautiful, so there's that.)

Then the government comes through with news of a plague on the animals, and how they need to confiscate all heads of sheep and move all herders into a "city" and become productive workers in a coal mining concern. Then Bagi rescues a beautiful coal thief from sure death, and then they both get arrested.

It must be my powers of summary, because those preceding paragraphs almost make Khadak sound like it was a nearly coherent movie, when that's not the case. There's some performance art later on, and then some other stuff, but it really breaks down near the end. I remember when the camera was in a maneuver that I couldn't comprehend exactly why it was fucking doing it, the combination of the image and the subtitle from the voiceover was so perfect as to demonstrate this movie's essence, that I blurted out laughing, and pretty loudly at that.

I paused it and took a picture, laughing that showing it to someone who hadn't seen the movie was just as enlightenng as having seen it live in the 75th minute of this 100 minute long thing. Here's the picture:

So...there you go. Have fun with that.

When I say the movie broke down near the end, I should some things. There was a fair amount of gin and beer involved, but those things only help with my critical enjoyment of cinema. I seriously watch films, especially when they're perplexing or otherwise incoherent because that's how I enjoy them--trying to figure out just what the hell is going on. This movie's incoherence is widespread.

I went to Wikipedia to get a sense of what contributors to the site said about the movie. They claimed that Bagi and the girl thief start to pull pranks to on the people in the mining town to enliven their lives and bring some mirth to the cadre of former herders. Um, that's not this movie. They try to get some justice, because of course there was no plague, but pranking?

And then, on Khadak's own webpage, they claim the story is about Bagi trying to come to terms with his own destiny to be a shaman. What? In no way did I get that as a sense of what the movie's trying to be about. I mean, Bagi finds and saves the girl from under a huge pile of coal that he would otherwise have no way of knowing about. He said he heard her, knew she was there. Fine. He has visions and epilepsy--or at least what we call it these day--but he's connected to her, and this connection made it possible for him to find her. At least that was my take on that whole scenario. But since there is very little dialogue and the actors are more like statues in a windy valley, there is very little cues to give away the motivations beyond the human sculpture.

And besides, Bagi dies. (I can't imagine anyone being terribly upset about me spoiling it.)

Neither Wikipedia nor their own website have story explanations that resemble what  we watched, and neither resemble each other...wow, good job German director.

One thing I learned to appreciate from this German/Mongolian production is that they have very cool names in Mongolia. The main character, teenager Bagi, has for a real first Batzul. Now that's pretty sweet.

Also, they all have such badass coats and hats.

Some Well Executed Tattoos

In my random journeys around the Internet, I've come across some weird things. One was originally subtitled "The Gallery of Regrets", it was known as Ugliest Tattoos.

In the early times, they'd showcase poorly executed or poorly designed tattoos, maybe with misspellings, maybe with zombie-my-little-ponies, and each one made you embarrassed to look at it.

Now they focus on a wider range of tattoos, some that are done well, some that are godawful, but they don't have the really explicit stuff like they used to have. It always shocked me how many people have tattoos of flying penises. Seriously.

So here I've collected some that mean something to me and are well executed.

The first is a pretty well done Cornholio, Beavis' alter ego that emerges after too much caffeine or sugar:

Next we have a pretty well executed Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem, the band from the Muppets. I always liked the name:

This look of Popeye--as a realistic person and grizzled sailor--always caught my attention. I have no tattoos, but this work has been done masterfully, and is from an artist that I would want for myself, had I an upcoming ink-work plans.

Gonzo Gonzo and Animal as Oscar Acosta. Awesome.

How could I pass up a brilliantly executed portrait of Tesla, history's baddest-ass maddest-ass scientist?

(Thanks to Ugliest Tattoos.)

The Many Meanings of "Ocean View"

This blog is about pop-culture and/or the Southland, and like an earlier post about some of our finer highways down here, this one highlights one of the other, less thought upon phenomena.

There's seventy miles of coastline in Los Angeles County and another forty in Orange County. A-hundred-ten miles of coastline sounds like a lot, but there are more than a dozen-million people living in the five counties that make up the "Southland", and yet...

...Not all views of the ocean are equal.

Here's a shot from the hills in San Pedro, an erstwhile independent community that was annexed by Los Angeles (and everybody around here insists on pronouncing it San Peedro):

This is the western edge of the breaker system fencing in the ocean around the south-eastern side of the RPV peninsula and encircling our little breezy berg in Long Beach .

From this vantage, residents can watch as the sheer tonnage comes and go every day if they wanted, but I imagine few do. At least this view is better than this next, only off to the left of this point:

Not all are "Ocean Views" are equal. This hazy look back at towards the ports would be showing off Terminal Island and Long Beach's skyline, if the visibility was a little more forgiving.

Sometimes the views you get around these parts in no way jive with the romantic views most of this country ascribe it.