Bits And Pieces January 9, 2017

It rained hard before it got light Monday morning.  We had a walking tour through Silverlake planned with friends.  J and my old neighborhood.  Back in the 1970s.  J was working downtown and I was going to school at USC so it seemed like a reasonable location.

It wasn't cool back then.  Just a funky neighborhood.

As I was preparing breakfast, I noticed a car out front of my mom's house.  I went out to take in the garbage can and saw that it wasn't a car.  It was traffic.  This quiet, out of the way street has become a way to beat traffic.  It's insane.  But it's only for a short time in the morning.  Maybe 20 minutes.  But it's sick that there is so much traffic that cars are backed up the block on this out of the way residential street.

There was a fair amount of nostalgia as we walked up and down the hills of streets roamed in our 20s, newly married, and discovering interesting people and places every time we went out.

In a lot of ways, the neighborhood looks remarkably the same.  While in my mom's neighborhood contractors buy old little houses, tear them down, then build lot squeezing villas, there was very little of that on the streets we wandered.  Places had new paint, maybe even a new facade, but most looked like the original buildings we'd wandered past over 40 years ago.

And this neighborhood is as likely to have lost parrot posters as lost dog posters.

The biggest difference I noticed was security.  Rambling hillside apartment buildings that had interesting steps used to be open to the world.  Now, many of them have security gates and locks.  Our building's old inviting opening onto a courtyard with a view, now had a glassed in wall with a door.  Fortunately a tenant came in and let us in so we could look around.  But here's an examples of what I'm talking about.

So many places now have iron gates.


But the neighborhood's funkiness is alive and well.  Here's a fence with little arm chairs and signs on it.  Since this is a nostalgia trip, I've taken the liberty to play around with a few of the photos below in photoshop.  In this case it was to get some closer views of the chairs along with the larger picture of the fence.  But then I played with the color of the sky and the saturation.

And we walked down the Micheltorena stairs.

We stopped at Night Market Song - a Thai place that left my mouth with a satisfying, if low watt,  glow - and wandered on Sunset past this motorcycle shop where our friend fell in love with an old used Vespa.

Much to my amazement, the Free Clinic was still there.  As part of a graduate class, I volunteered as an intake worker there several nights a week for a semester.

It looked a bit tired, so I took some liberties again in photoshop to perk it up a bit.






After a couple of hours of exploring the old stomping grounds, we got back to the car and made one last stop at Barnsdale Park where I took this view of Hollywood from outside the Frank Lloyd Wright designed Hollyhock House.

I've got lots more thoughts, but no more time.  It was good to just go out and have fun for the day after lots of paper shredding, sorting of boxes, and looking through old documents and memorabilia that give a little back story of my family that I never quite understood.  If I have time . . .

AIFF2016: GayLa Night Filmmakers Bennett Wallace (Real Boy) and Alex Myung (Arrival) Q&A

Back in December I got some video of the Q&A at the Anchorage International Film Festival's GayLa night.  Alex Myung's animated film Arrival opened.  It's a visually beautiful story of a young, Asian-American gay man leaving for the big city and later coming out to his mom.  It got the first runner up award for animation at the festival.

The second film, a feature documentary called Real Boy, follows Bennett Wallace's transition to a boy.  

[You can see the trailers for both films here.]

After the showing, they went on stage together to answer questions.  I've paraphrased the question below.  I got most of the Q&A but I think there were a few more questions I missed.
The first went to Alex.  The Bennett got some, and then it went back to Alex for the last one.

For Alex:

Q1:  Was this how you came out or someone you know?
Q2:  Was it always going to be a film without dialog?

For Bennett:

Q3:  How has the relationships with your parents evolved since the film?
Q4:  Given that the film portrays your cutting yourself, what would you tell kids today who are cutting?
Q5:  Would it have helped you to see a film like this?  [Spoiler:  "It would have changed my life."
Q6:  How did the film come about?
Q7:  How did it feel living your life with the camera on you all the time?  [Spoiler:  "At first I felt I always had to say something really profound.  That didn't last long."  "It was difficult when we filmed in public."
Q8:  How is Joe doing now?

For Alex:

Q9:  I seemed to see a Miyazaki influence, was he a model for you?

Painting Beauty On A Wall

We went to the UCLA hazardous waste drop-off this morning and saw these guys actually painting this Beauty and the Beast billboard onto the side of the building.

If you enlarge the one below (click on it) you can barely see the lines on the wall where they are supposed to paint.

Glad to see that these painters haven't been replaced by a giant ink-jet printer.

John Berger - "Tenderness is a Refusal to Judge"

John Berger died January 2, 2016 at age 90.

I didn't know him or even of him until this afternoon when I heard this interview on PRI with Teju Cole, who did know him.  This is a man I would have liked to have known. And I'm hoping to start an acquaintanceship through his books, and through the videos that have been left behind. The PRI interview begins like this:

"You may never have heard of John Berger.
But the English writer and artist, who died this week at 90, changed how countless art students thought about art and maybe even the world.

His 1972 television series and book ''Ways of Seeing" was designed to upend traditional, and what he termed elitist, ways of evaluating art work.
But Berger wasn’t just an art critic. He was also a novelist.
His book, “G,”, a non-linear account of a man travelling around Europe before World War One, won the Booker Prize."

[I tried to embed the audio here, but I couldn't make it work.]

It's a beautiful interview worth listening to.  It got me to look the man up and try to find out more about him.  He took on the conventional reverence for art as culture.  He also moved to rural France where he lived for 40 years or so.  Most important to me is that he saw the world and how we see the world differently from the way most people do.  Here's the first episode of that 1972 television show mentioned above.




Below is from a much later interview (I'm not sure exactly when - the posting date on Youtube isn't necessarily the date of the interview). The whole interview is available too. In it he talks about tenderness, defining it in different ways - "a refusal to judge"


In the PRI interview about Cole relates Berger's characterization of the dead as really being merely in hiding who are around us.

“Part of the storytelling is about memory,” Cole explains, “but part of it is about how the dead have not gone away. … [They] are always with us, actually supporting us.”

Jane Wyman's 100th Birthday, Rain, Clouds, And Fences

Jane Wyman was an Oscar winning actress and she married a B movie actor in 1940 named Ronald Reagan until they split in 1949.   Here's the New York Times obituary.  She'd be 100 today.  Here is the first birthday from my list of people born in 1917.

It's been mostly cloudy, with breaks of sun and breaks of rain.  Southern California can use every drop of rain it can get, so I'm not complaining. When we came home after seeing Fences Thursday evening, it was raining, which I tried to catch, not too successfully, in the lights at this soccer field.  But the fence is a good lead into talking about the film.

Fences was powerful.  The language was magnificent, but then it was written by August Wilson, a playwright who has written some of the best American plays of the 20th Century.  I couldn't help thinking about Death of a Salesman - another play about a father who was doing all he could to cope in his role as the family provider.  But while we can see that Willie Loman is a victim of the social expectations of his times, he's essentially a weak man who could have made different choices in his life.

But in Fences the father, Troy, - played by Denzel Washington in the film - was a much stronger and competent man, restricted by much harsher limits.  But flawed as well.  His anger at the injustices he experienced and perhaps some he just perceived prevents him from enjoying the comparatively decent life he has built.   He was a great baseball player, he hit home runs against Satchel Paige he claims, but it was before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in baseball.  Now he's fighting the system to break out of the restrictions of the Pittsburgh sanitation department.  He's tired of throwing the garbage into the truck.  He wants a promotion to the job reserved for white men - driver.

As the play progresses, we learn why he's such a hard ass father, and why he can't tell his son, Corey (Courtney B. Vance  in the 1987 version and Chris Chalk in the 2010 version)  he likes him, let alone loves him.   Here's that scene I found online from the play - first the 1987 version with James Earl Jones as Troy and then in the 2010 version with Denzel Washington in the role he plays in the movie.  (Washington also directs the film.)




Troy's father had abandoned him and we can see throughout the play* how stretched he is trying to provide for his family - which includes his mentally unhinged brother, a son from an earlier wife, and a son from his present wife of 18 years or so, played by Viola Davis. And you can see the pressure he feels to raise his son to be responsible and tough in a world that shortchanges black men.

And Davis is fantastic. Here's a later scene, after Washington had told Davis he's going to be a father again, and how he just needed a place where he could let go of all those pressures, where he didn't have responsibilities to pay the rent and feed the family, where he could escape and laugh and be himself. She doesn't take kindly to that at all.



No one should be saying that while men have it easy in today's world. Few people have it easy.  The system isn't kind to human beings.  But all things considered, there have been fewer barriers to success for white men than for black men. (I'm avoiding women because that's a whole other issue.) 

But I wonder how many white men who hate the slogan 'black lives matter' can watch this film and get its humanity. The issues are universal, but will the racist wing of the Trump team  be able to see past the skin color and the language? One would hope so, but how many will ever see it? And if they do, and if they felt Troy's pain, could they tell their friends?  I don't know, I'm just asking.

* I say play deliberately as I'm vaguely aware of some critics finding the movie not cinematic enough.  As I was looking for cast names I saw a link to a New Yorker article on that topic, but haven't looked because I wanted to finish this first.  I'll look now.

Before I found it, I found an article by Kareem Abdul Jabbar and I can't think of a smarter or more suited man to talk about this film.  The link also includes a video interview he had with the two lead characters of the film.  Jabbar writes as part of the intro:

"The Maxson family's unhappiness results from a toxic mixture of the patriarch's unapologetic hubris and the pressures of being raised black in a white society that marginalizes, degrades and oppresses anyone not in the mainstream. Troy Maxson (Washington) isn't aware that while he battles for equality from the white society, he's imposing the same tyrannical restrictions he's struggling against on his own family. He has become the very enemy he's fighting."

Most of it is the transcript of the video and the video itself.  They are exactly the same.  There are a few things in the written interview that aren't in the video and vice versa.  Also, in the video Davis correctly says 'baseball league,' not the 'football league' that's written.

Thursday was a break from the rain.  When I did a quick bike ride down to the beach just to move my legs a bit, the clouds were out over the ocean, but it wasn't the solid gray we'd had.

We had dinner with a friend of my mom's, a woman who came by weekly and always brought some food for my mom.  They'd been good friends for a long time.  She told us stories about after WWII when she met her husband in London.  They were both young refugees in England during the war.  They'd both gotten out of Germany before the war started.  His sister had lived through the war in Berlin with fake papers.  They had both applied for jobs as translators for the American military in Europe.  Her father took her down to the station and started talking to a young man while she was away a moment.  So, it turned out he introduced her to her future husband.  She was 20 and they first were sent to Paris for a week of training and then to Germany where their fluency in German and English were helpful.  Despite the hardships of those immediate postwar days in Germany, love and adventure are what she remembered most.

For those of you who are wondering about the New Yorker article, I did find it after I finished this.  I think the reviewer got so hung up on the idea that this should have been done more cinematically that he missed the fundamental power of the story.  He's focused on technique, even when he has praise, which he has.

Amazon's Proposed 30 Minute Delivery From Airborne Warehouse

The ADN had an article touting Amazon's patent application for a floating warehouse that could reduce delivery to 30 minutes or less.

I can imagine that there are some items that one must have in 30 minutes.  I'm not talking about an onion you forgot to buy with dinner guests due in an hour.  There could be some life-saving items that are occasionally needed quickly.

But, generally, what's the point?

I remember when my son got impatient waiting for something to appear online in 20 seconds because he was used to a faster connection.  But this instantaneous gratification comes at a cost.  Actually, a lot of different costs.

1.  Opportunity costs of creativity and money spent on this rather than on  projects that make a greater contribution to humanity's well being.

2.  Continued reduction of people's long term thinking and planning skills as businesses work compete over speed of gratification.

3.  Loss of patience as a human quality, and thus, the devaluing of things that take time to grow - trees, babies, friendship, love - and inability to deal with any delays.  It seems we already have enough road rage.

4.  Loss of attention span, necessary to evaluate ideas, test theories, make good decisions.

5.  And whose airspace will these warehouses be in?  Whose sunlight will they block?  Where will their pollution pollute?  Will they be silent or add to the noise we all suffer daily?

The article talks about using such flying warehouses at events where lots of people gather - such as a baseball game.

"Imagine you're at a baseball game and wanted to buy a meal or a jersey without ever leaving your seat. The system Amazon describes would allow you to place an order and receive the item within minutes."

Well, I'm imagining 30 drones zooming down to three rows trying to figure out which person to deliver the hot dog to and how to avoid crashing into the other 29 drones.  I'm imagining people snatching someone else's lunch, that was paid for already electronically when the order was placed.  I'm imagining drones picking up bottles of urine for a fee so the patron doesn't have to leave his seat.




Doesn't this all sound a little like the people in Wall-E?


But maybe virtual reality will make going to the stadium totally unnecessary.

But I take hope from other trends.  Here's another Alaska Dispatch News article that goes in the opposite direction:

"Folk schools offer lessons for battling ‘convenience culture’"

"Raising urban chickens, making a leather belt or building a traditional kayak aren't among the offerings you'll usually find at mainstream educational institutions. But they are skills you can learn at two of Alaska's newest schools. 

They're known as folk schools, and they focus on teaching and sharing traditional, hands-on knowledge and homesteading skills typically nonexistent in the educational system."

And the Los Angeles Times had an article about the growth of the vinyl record business.

But it shouldn't be an either/or, thus versus them issue here.  There are some great benefits from new technology.  We just need to consider the environmental, cultural, and human costs of the technology against the benefits.  People can argue that if consumers don't buy, businesses won't make the products.  But since business spends so much money tapping into people's primal brains to get them to 'need' every new product, I think that's a specious argument.  But it is true, if people don't buy, those things will no longer be on the market.

But I think that humans should always be ready for the day, or the year, when the power goes out, the satellites fail, and that infrastructure that supports the life so many are totally dependent on crashes.  Humans need to be able take care of themselves when all the conveniences collapse.

Venice Beach Sunset - But Which Picture Would You Prefer?

I didn't get on the bike until late this afternoon.  The downside is I have to ride back at dusk when, even with blinking bike lights, I'm not as visible to the cars.  The upside is a great sunset.

So, this picture looked pretty good right off the disk.

Directly from the camera

There's the bright pink clouds, a bit of ocean at the bottom, framed by the palm trees.

But could I make it better with a little tweaking?  Nothing fancy.  No photoshop.  Just playing with the contrast.

Contrast bumped a little

Which would you prefer to see?
Does it matter if it's digitally enhanced?
Would you know it was enhanced if I didn't say so and the other picture wasn't there?
Would you know the other one wasn't enhanced?

And, does it even mean anything, since the camera doesn't capture a true image anyway?

Do you even care?
Would you like enhanced images to be marked somehow so that you know?
Does cropping count as enhancing?
Does increasing the contrast matter?
Where is the line?  Adding in the palm trees?  (I didn't, they were there)  Changing the color radically?

For pictures like these, my questions are more aesthetic.  But when wrinkles are removed (or added) to people's faces larger ethical issues arise.  And what people are doing is manipulated (a gun is put in someone's hand, or removed) there are more questions. (I removed a cigarette once from someone's hand because he wanted to share the post with family, but they thought he'd stopped smoking.)

Will people just become sheep and accept what they see if it supports their world view?  Or will they not believe anything?  Both situations become debilitating for a civil society.  

These aren't new issues.  Jerry Lodriguss goes into more detail on this issue in The Ethics of Digital Manipulation.  He even says there are times when it would be unethical to NOT manipulate the picture.  I couldn't find the date of the post.

Another post, on what sounds like a promising website - Ethics in Photo Editing - offers some examples starting with an Abraham Lincoln photo.  The problem is that the posts I could find were all 2009, so either this blogger moved stuff elsewhere, or just gave up.

Another problem is that the post is dated April 1, 2009.  I always have to wonder about things posted on April 1.  But whether the examples are real or not . . .

[Writing that caused me to google one of the pictures (Oprah Winfrey's head on Ann Margaret's body on TV Guide, with neither of their permission) which got me to a 2012 Atlantic article with some of the same examples, which linked to Izitru (say that out loud) which has a large collection of such doctored photos.  It also has a service where you can send your jpg pictures and they will officially verify that it's not been manipulated.

There are some pretty egregious ethics lapses - there's one where anti-John Kerry folks added him to a picture of Jane Fonda talking to a crowd making it look like they had appeared together.]

I guess, since I posted about The Cloudspotter's Guide, I should be saying something about the clouds.  I still haven't read that much more of the book so I'm not too sure.  My guess would be cumulus medics radiatus but that's because it's one of the few I've read about.  And cloud experts out there can you confirm or correct?

Famous People Born 1917 - Some Biggies - JFK, Thelonious Monk, Indira Gandhi, Lena Horne - 2 Still Alive

It's a reflection of how the human brain and heart combine to decide who is important.  How else can one explain why I've got people whose influence on the world is as varied as Buffalo Bob Smith and Ferdinand Marcos?   There are three assassinated heads of state (Kennedy, Gandhi, and Park) and seven Nobel Prize winners (marked in the table below.)

Two are still alive - architect I.M. Pei and voice of Rocky Squirrel June Foray.

There's one Alaskan on the list - Judge Robert Boochever.  He's probably not a household name, but he was a fine judge and he was also the father-in-law of my doctor (until he retired.)

I hope to do more with this list, but I wanted to get it up on this first day of 2017 - one hundred years after these people were born.  While we know about people who gain public attention, we rarely (at least I rarely), think about people who are in the same cohort, or in this case the same birth year.  It fascinates me to think about these people all going to the same schools from Kindergarten through high school.  In that context, this chart below makes sense.  The famous folks are listed in birth order - something that would have meaning to kids.

These are all folks who would have grown up at the same time and been impacted by the same historical events - though from different parts of the world in a number of cases.  Ray Massey had a popular video tape many years ago that argued that people's world views are shaped by the times they lived and that explained differences between those who grew up during the depression and those who grew up after WW II.  We see the same sort of thing today in discussions about Millennials and other generations.  That certainly plays a factor in our world views.  So seeing this group of people who were all born in the same year gives one lots to think about.  In addition to the time they grew up, one has to consider their economic situation, race, geographic location, family influences, etc.

When I first made a list like this - 2008 - it was much harder to track people down.  That year I was googling "born 1908" to find people until I found a website that listed historical events by day in a year.  That's how I picked up many of the names.    Nowadays there are lots of sites that list people by birth year.  This year I used  NNDB  which has a long list of people born in 1917 and links to bios about each.   I'll try to do some bios about a few people on the list - particularly those not so well known, but who made significant contributions to the world.  You can see similar posts for other years by clicking on the "Famous People Born label".

If you find substantive errors or typos you can email me (see just above 'blog archive') or leave a comment.  Thanks.

Famous, Important, or Otherwise Noteworthy People Born in 1917 in Birth Order by Steve on Scribd

The Three Body Problem

As people look toward 2017 with relief that 2016 will be over, I have several thoughts.

1. First, a lot of people probably think 2016 was great.  Their candidate was elected to office and now their 'enemies' are feeling what they have felt for the last eight years.  (I could, of course, argue that this is different, but in their minds it's the same - their team won.)   
2. Second, as I read the headlines in the paper and online about what a bad year it's been, I'm wondering what makes people think 2017 is going to be better.  There's lots of news we never read about because it wasn't sensational enough or bad enough.  But the key news item - the US election - doesn't suggest to me a better year.  There will be unanticipated benefits like in any disaster.  People will pull together and discover friends and personal strengths they didn't know they had.  But the man who will be slumming by moving to the White House, thinks he's the smartest guy around.   The truly smartest people are those who know they know very little.  The only way one can be totally sure of oneself is if one has a very simplistic view of the world.  And we have a very cocksure new president and that doesn't bode well.  Yes, there will be some positive impacts here and there, but overall and in the long run, the American people and the world are going to pay big time for the new president's on-the-job training and winner mentality.  
3. But third, I've just finished reading The Three Body Problem which has as one of its key points - don't assume the alternative of a very bad thing won't be worse.   This is a very interesting book, not simply because of the story it tells and how it tells it.  It is a Chinese science fiction novel that won the Hugo Award for best novel in 2015, which makes it unique already.  

The story begins with the Red Guard harassing to death a renowned physics professor during  the Cultural Revolution.   Physicists play a big role in this book.  I really don't want to talk about any more of the plot than that.  Having the plot reveal itself as you turn the pages is a big part of the enjoyment of the book.

I will say that the book's structure has the reader  opening doors into new worlds and thinking wow, I didn't expect this.  Only to have a new door and another new world and another wow, and then another, and another, and another.  This is the first part of a trilogy. The other parts are already available.  I'm just a little behind.

But, getting back to the opening of this post, I will say that the reader will spend time in a secret Chinese military post scanning the universe for signs of intelligent life.  And there's a signal.  And the person who is on duty at the time secretly sends back a signal.  The human condition, this physicist feels, is so dire, that humans would be better off being rescued by a superior form of being.

I'll say no more about the plot, but I'd send you back to my third point above.

It's a fascinating book and I'm looking forward to the next volume of the trilogy.  Have a Happy New Year and focus on making what we have better rather than looking for a savior to take care of things for us.

More Beach And Clouds

It was sunny. The sky was blue.  The air was balmy when J and M pushed the stroller to the beach and I biked down to meet them.  

And there were a lot more people there than on other days since we've been here.

There were clouds out on the horizon, yet Catalina was sharp and clear out across the water.  There was a special golden light.

But clouds were moving in.  And as I haven't gotten past the chapter on Cumulus clouds in the Cloudspotter's Guide, I may run into trouble here.  The ones below surely are cumulus.

And maybe these here, moving in from the south.  I'm not sure what the ones in the background are.  But it's a good incentive to read my Guide more.

Soon the sky was like this.  Skipping a few chapters ahead, I found a picture that looks similar and are called Altocumulus stratiformis translucidus.  The last term means they let the sun shine through, which is what was happening, though my camera fought that.

Looking at another picture in the Guide, I'm guessing these (above) are altocumulus stratiformis (with out the translucidus.)  The altocumulus are mid-level clouds - about 20,000 feet up.

Closer to earth, this electronic beachcomber was scanning the sand, presumably looking for metal objects.  These guys have been around since I was a kid, going across the sand with the hopes of finding something metal and valuable someone lost in the sand.

It seems as good a hobby as any.  You spend your time at the beach, you get exercise walking, and maybe you find something of value.  Kind of like a fisherman, but with more exercise and you don't need a license.  

From Treasure Enterprise:

HOW ARE ITEMS LOST?
Let’s take a typical example of what happens at the beach.
Firstly, we find that many people just lie on their beach towel to sun bake - or whatever! – generally with their valuables. When they leave, the first thing they do is to give their towel a good shake, and everything from sand particles to jewellery, rings and coins generally fly off into outer space. The object hits the sand, buries itself quickly and can’t be found again in a hurry. When they realize that something is missing, they panic! … moving the sand around the place doesn’t help and of course the situation is worse than before.
Try this … throw a coin backwards into loose sand (don’t look) and see if you can find it again … I bet you don’t … and don’t even think of using a metal detector either – that’s cheating!
For those who like to swim and love to wear rings and jewellery at the same time is a recipe for disaster. Most people generally wear rings a little loose and the chances are that they will lose it. A simple scientific principle of expansion and contraction applies here – in this instance, cold water contracts the finger – the water and the surf acts as a lubricant – the ring falls off and settles down through the sand with its flat side acting as a cutting blade, going deeper and then it’s lost – simple as that! This can also apply to other jewellery items too and it happens every day.

This Australian writer goes on to talk about how to use metal detectors to find treasures.

As the clouds covered a larger area, the air temperature dropped and we decided it was time to go home.  But there was still a beautiful light over the sand and water.