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.

Cold Cases

There was a show that used to be on prime-time Sunday night, I guess, called Cold Case. I've caught a few episodes in rerun latenight on one of the free channels we have. The premise is that a Philly cop team solves old, still open, cases, AKA "cold" cases. The gimmick is that the scenes of the crime-time are played out with one set of actors, and then usually a second set of older actors are used during the investigation phase, and they occasionally flicker between the two, for dramatic effect.

If you like cop mystery/procedural shows, it's probably serviceable. If you're one of the many The Wire fans, most cops shows are ruined for you. The fully preposterous nature of solving crimes on a single span of forty-two minutes of show is made painfully clear in that hyper-realistic show.

But then there's the cold case aspect  of the show. Another show they used to show on A&E, I think, and now on some local channel in the morning, is called Cold Case Files, and it's a documentary style cop show about how old cold cases are solved. This show is hard to watch as well, but for a different reason. It seems like the only cold case files that get solved these days are rape/murders where now they have DNA technology and old swabs left over.

I'd be willing to guess that the prime-time cop drama doesn't feature too many rape/murders getting solved due to DNA samples. That's a little too, eh, much of a downer for Sunday night television, I guess.

Essentially LA

What's essential to Los Angeles and the Southland? Why, driving of course.

And what's more essential to LA driving than our criss-crossing collection of freeways? Nothing, I'm guessing.

Here's some "neat" shots of the various locations and names of highways in an around LA county, and even a non-LA county destination. It's not Orange County, and good luck finding which one it could be.

First up on our non-exhaustive list of area highways is the Artesia Freeway, in the numerical nomenclature it's CA Hwy 91, Redondo Beach to Riverside. This is an actual freeway, bigger than US 101 in San Luis Obispo.

Here's a buy spot getting near downtown LA, where the arteries break apart like the branching aorta, 101 heading to downtown LA, I-5 heading to the mountains and north out of the city, and I-10 heading west to Santa Monica. The eastbound section of 10 is less than a mile away.

Here's where the 101 splits off just north of the city on it's way to Hollywood and Ventura, with the 110 becoming Interstate 110 heading south, through LA all the way to San Pedro, becoming the Harbor Freeway, and becoming CA Hwy 110 going up to Pasadena (that's probably more like "over to Pasadena" at this point).

CA Route 27 is also known as Topanga Canyon Road, and it dies/begins at the ocean into/from the PCH. I made sure I got the sign notifying the location: 4 miles to Santa Monica, 7 miles to Malibu.

Having seen CA Hwy 91, we see CA Hwy 90 here, the Marina del Rey Freeway. This seems to be a freeway link from the 405 through Culver City to Marina del Rey, a coastal community immediately south of Santa Monica. This is also the first picture of the famous CA Hwy 1, also known as the Pacific Coast Highway. Calling something "the Pacific Coast Highway" doesn't make as much sense when it's an urban street like Lincoln Blvd here, or Santa Rosa Rd, in my old college town. But it is what it is; weird things happen when it's an almost thousand mile long road.

Briefly we see the 405, the San Diego Freeway on the way to Long Beach, as the spur 105 shoots off in two directions, one to Norwalk, and one to El Segundo. Norwalk is in the South-Central section of the city, while El Segundo is north of the Rancho Palos Verdes peninsula and even north of Torrance, but south of Redondo Beach (which itself of south of Santa Monica and Marina del Rey).

CA Rte 107 heads from Inglewood to Lawndale, to mostly forgotten communities in Central LA; neither is violent enough to become famous in the hip-hop arts, nor wealthy enough to influence politics.

Here we see the Harbor Freeway, I-110, again, as it crosses the 405 far south of where it originated, heading off to San Pedro.

And, getting back to where we started our journey, we meet up with the Long Beach Freeway, which heads south to Long Beach and north to Pasadena, while the 405 heads down to Orange County, where it meets up with I-5 and heads down to San Diego.

Lastly, here is the classic picture with the classic name, seen together. Oddly, this exit represents easily the ugliest stretch of this road. Before this crossing of the 710, the road signs in Long Beach all say "PCH", but it's really 18th street, a few miles from the ocean. On the west side of the 710, it stretches between refineries and industrial wastelands. At least the sign gives the right idea.