Saturday, January 30, 2010
San Francisco Thing #6: The Human Parade
This deserves a longish post but it is late! And I am tired! So I will just say San Francisco's reputation for attracting more than its share of characters is well-deserved.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
San Francisco Thing #5: No Car
I have lived all my life without owning a car. This was much more awkward in Utah than it is here. I guess that people coming from New York might find the mass transit system less than stellar, but, well, that's New York, the only really top-notch mass transit system in the United States (my anecdotal evidence says). You've got the BART, you've got the MUNI, you've got CalTrain...you can get all kinds of places.
Admittedly, it's not as convenient as a car. But it's SO much cheaper!
Admittedly, it's not as convenient as a car. But it's SO much cheaper!
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
San Francisco Thing #4:
The muzaks!
I do not by any means fully take advantage of the San Francisco music scene. There is a well-known club that plays much local music five minutes' walk from my residence, and do I go there and listen? No, I do not. (Well, I did once, and saw Experimental Dental School, which was...wait for it...oh, never mind. Dentist jokes are too easy.)
Anyway! Even with my relatively little advantage taken, I have seen a LOT of good musical performances here in SF. Jethro Tull, Richard Thompson, the Soul Savers...the best was a little music festival thing up in Marin that was all local acts playing for an audience of, oh, maybe one hundred fifty in a little community center with a two-foot stage. That was where I fell in (lyrical) love with Miss Joanna Newsom. It was a great night.
I do not by any means fully take advantage of the San Francisco music scene. There is a well-known club that plays much local music five minutes' walk from my residence, and do I go there and listen? No, I do not. (Well, I did once, and saw Experimental Dental School, which was...wait for it...oh, never mind. Dentist jokes are too easy.)
Anyway! Even with my relatively little advantage taken, I have seen a LOT of good musical performances here in SF. Jethro Tull, Richard Thompson, the Soul Savers...the best was a little music festival thing up in Marin that was all local acts playing for an audience of, oh, maybe one hundred fifty in a little community center with a two-foot stage. That was where I fell in (lyrical) love with Miss Joanna Newsom. It was a great night.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
The List: San Francisco Thing #3
It is always early spring, or late spring. Except for the two days of winter (in either December or January) and two weeks of summer spread out in two or three day intervals between March and October.
That's it. That's all you get for seasons.
The magnolias bloomed a couple of weeks ago, and that's why. They'll do it again in April.
That's it. That's all you get for seasons.
The magnolias bloomed a couple of weeks ago, and that's why. They'll do it again in April.
Monday, January 25, 2010
The LIst: The Things About San Francisco no. 2
Hills.
I am thinking of this one because yesterday I had to get out to a house party to send off our Australian friend, and it involved a fair amount of walking, because I convinced myself it would be faster than taking the bus for the second leg of the trip.
So there I was, walking. And walking. And I came to a hill, and started to go up it, and I realized it was gonna take a while going up the hill. Just at this moment I passed...a staircase. A staircase which promised to take me directly from where I was to where I wanted to go without all of this tedious switchback action.
Accordingly, I started to go up it. And up, and up, and up it.
And up.
And up.
And up.
And then I got to the place I'd been looking toward as my milestone and discovered I was only about half-way to the top.
So.
Up I went.
355 stairs later (I didn't count myself, but I was told that's the number) I was at my destination, rubber-legged and sweaty. But! It was faster than going 'round! So I had that going for me at least.
Going down that staircase when I left was pure pleasure.
I am thinking of this one because yesterday I had to get out to a house party to send off our Australian friend, and it involved a fair amount of walking, because I convinced myself it would be faster than taking the bus for the second leg of the trip.
So there I was, walking. And walking. And I came to a hill, and started to go up it, and I realized it was gonna take a while going up the hill. Just at this moment I passed...a staircase. A staircase which promised to take me directly from where I was to where I wanted to go without all of this tedious switchback action.
Accordingly, I started to go up it. And up, and up, and up it.
And up.
And up.
And up.
And then I got to the place I'd been looking toward as my milestone and discovered I was only about half-way to the top.
So.
Up I went.
355 stairs later (I didn't count myself, but I was told that's the number) I was at my destination, rubber-legged and sweaty. But! It was faster than going 'round! So I had that going for me at least.
Going down that staircase when I left was pure pleasure.
Avatar reviewed.
My problem with movie reviews is that either I don't think enough about them to say more than "Yeah, that was pretty cool/all right/a waste of $10," or I have so much to say that it would be the essay with footnotes. (The Dark Knight was like that.)
Avatar falls more into the latter camp, which I guess says something for it. Maybe. Unlike TDK, though, what I want to say is not "This film made me think about human nature and the nature of evil," it was "I found this movie obnoxious in ways I have a hard time stating concisely."
It does have its good points. Namely, that it is beautiful. And perhaps even more important, for movie purposes, when you have humans interacting with what I presume is computer animation, the eye just pans across the scene. No visual jar at all. This is not Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
So, there's that.
Just a few notes on the "story" side: the Na'vi are not really alien at all. They are tall blue humans with tails. It is hard to do "alien" effectively, of course, but here it seems to be done deliberately in a sort of psychological sleight-of-hand. We empathize immediately with the "aliens" because they are, in fact, human, which is important because we are supposed to root for the "aliens" and against the humans, and it would be much harder to bring that off if the aliens really were strange/uncanny/incomprehensible to the audience.
We are also supposed to root for the aliens because we never see an alien do anything that would lose our sympathy, whereas none of the humans not ultimately allied with the aliens do anything to gain our sympathy. Well, OK, this is a very slight exaggeration; one of the Na'vi gets the standard "truculent tribal alpha male displaced by hero" role, in which he says rude stuff, and the Marine colonel is intelligent, decisive, and physically brave...but, of course, he's also a warmonger, so all of those good qualities just end up making him worse. That's about it for the moral ambiguity.
So, fine, we are rooting for the aliens. (And Our Hero, who, in the finest pulp tradition, is the white guy swooping into the native society, assuming the leadership of the tribe, and poaching the most available of the ladies, who is also the tribal shaman-in-waiting, as if Edgar Rice Burroughs had written this part of the plot. Oh, and Our Hero's friends. We are rooting for them too.) And they win! Through the power of the coalition-building montage scene, and a lot of heroic self-sacrifice from the expected quarters, and the Mother Tree zapping all the Marines, or whatever they are.
And the humans are frog-marched to their waiting spaceship and forced to decamp to their "dead world". About three-quarters of the way through the movie we learn that humans have "killed their mother (meaning Earth)" and that there is "nothing green on the planet (Earth again)". If this is not just wild hyperbole, then one might think it would have come up at some point in the movie prior to this--say, when the corporate mucketymuck is explaining why humans are interested in Pandora. At the time he says it is to get "unobtainium", the utility of which is never even hinted at, but maybe it is to establish Pandora as a human colony because the Earth is rapidly becoming uninhabitable, and they just forgot to say so.
But if that's really the case, I have bad news, Na'vi: Human nature being what it is, the defeat of a few hundred Marines is not gonna stop us, and I doubt even Toruk-Makto will be effective against being bombed from orbit.
Avatar falls more into the latter camp, which I guess says something for it. Maybe. Unlike TDK, though, what I want to say is not "This film made me think about human nature and the nature of evil," it was "I found this movie obnoxious in ways I have a hard time stating concisely."
It does have its good points. Namely, that it is beautiful. And perhaps even more important, for movie purposes, when you have humans interacting with what I presume is computer animation, the eye just pans across the scene. No visual jar at all. This is not Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
So, there's that.
Just a few notes on the "story" side: the Na'vi are not really alien at all. They are tall blue humans with tails. It is hard to do "alien" effectively, of course, but here it seems to be done deliberately in a sort of psychological sleight-of-hand. We empathize immediately with the "aliens" because they are, in fact, human, which is important because we are supposed to root for the "aliens" and against the humans, and it would be much harder to bring that off if the aliens really were strange/uncanny/incomprehensible to the audience.
We are also supposed to root for the aliens because we never see an alien do anything that would lose our sympathy, whereas none of the humans not ultimately allied with the aliens do anything to gain our sympathy. Well, OK, this is a very slight exaggeration; one of the Na'vi gets the standard "truculent tribal alpha male displaced by hero" role, in which he says rude stuff, and the Marine colonel is intelligent, decisive, and physically brave...but, of course, he's also a warmonger, so all of those good qualities just end up making him worse. That's about it for the moral ambiguity.
So, fine, we are rooting for the aliens. (And Our Hero, who, in the finest pulp tradition, is the white guy swooping into the native society, assuming the leadership of the tribe, and poaching the most available of the ladies, who is also the tribal shaman-in-waiting, as if Edgar Rice Burroughs had written this part of the plot. Oh, and Our Hero's friends. We are rooting for them too.) And they win! Through the power of the coalition-building montage scene, and a lot of heroic self-sacrifice from the expected quarters, and the Mother Tree zapping all the Marines, or whatever they are.
And the humans are frog-marched to their waiting spaceship and forced to decamp to their "dead world". About three-quarters of the way through the movie we learn that humans have "killed their mother (meaning Earth)" and that there is "nothing green on the planet (Earth again)". If this is not just wild hyperbole, then one might think it would have come up at some point in the movie prior to this--say, when the corporate mucketymuck is explaining why humans are interested in Pandora. At the time he says it is to get "unobtainium", the utility of which is never even hinted at, but maybe it is to establish Pandora as a human colony because the Earth is rapidly becoming uninhabitable, and they just forgot to say so.
But if that's really the case, I have bad news, Na'vi: Human nature being what it is, the defeat of a few hundred Marines is not gonna stop us, and I doubt even Toruk-Makto will be effective against being bombed from orbit.
Sunday, January 24, 2010
The List:: Seven Things About San Francisco
Thing #1: Fog.
Not original! So sue me!
The thing that really weirded me out about San Francisco fog...well, two things, actually. The first one is that it can be so localized. My former roommate's brother had a house in Diamond Heights where you could literally walk in the front door in the fog, go to the back door, and look out at a blue sky.
Trip-pee.
The other thing is that it's fast. In Utah the fog just comes in and sits. In San Francisco it goes ghosting along at 10-15 miles per hour sometimes as it comes in off the sea...it's really weird to watch it. So quiet and so swift.
Not original! So sue me!
The thing that really weirded me out about San Francisco fog...well, two things, actually. The first one is that it can be so localized. My former roommate's brother had a house in Diamond Heights where you could literally walk in the front door in the fog, go to the back door, and look out at a blue sky.
Trip-pee.
The other thing is that it's fast. In Utah the fog just comes in and sits. In San Francisco it goes ghosting along at 10-15 miles per hour sometimes as it comes in off the sea...it's really weird to watch it. So quiet and so swift.
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