Musings of a Research Hound

This post represents a "trip down the rabbit hole" of sorts. I liked how the random connections and motivations lead me to a heretofore unknown to me scrap of historical information, especially since it helped my basic understanding of human history as it relates to my own ethnic background and my understanding of European history.

The post will be broken up into a rough collection of parts.

I'm not sure why certain types of history keeps my attention fully rapt and sends me off on research hunts, but I do believe that this thirst for a better understanding of the world-at-large, my own foundation for the Ganzebilde, is healthy.

Random Historical Conclusion: Germanic tribes were integral to the formation of the earliest parts of the Spanish Crown; and, different Germanic tribes were integral to the later expulsion of the Moors from Spain and the Iberian Peninsula. Those crazy Krauts.

Previous Knowledge Base of Weird Germanic Connections: Being of Germanic descent has lead me to do some digging in the machinations of the "barbarians" in the past. I always thought it was weird that both England (the Anglos) and France (the Franks) are named for Germanic tribes, even as England and France's historical disputes with the Germans and Austrians have defined much of European history since the 18th Century.

The view in certain circles is that the inability of the Germanic peoples to create a unified German-speaking country has been a tragedy that has lead to much death and carnage. It stems from the Prussians and Hapsburgs fight over the nature and character of what a unified Germany would be. While the Italic-speaking people of Umbria and Tuscany and Venice and the rest codified into Italy for example, the Prussians were able to unite Westphalia, Munich, Baden, et al, while Austria and Switzerland remained independent.

Anyway...

How it all started: I dropped Corrie and Cass off at LAX back in May for their flight to OKC. I went to El Segundo for a virtual conference and then eventually drove home in traffic. During my drives to and from work I listen to a rotation of three separate things: NPR, AM radio sports talk, and a rotation of CDs that includes Fran Zappa's "Hot Rats", James Brown's "The Payback" and Durand Jones and the Indications self-titled first album.

I listen enough to know the different shows on the sports talk radio, but at this late part of the day, after 7 pm, it was a show I didn't know exist: an LA soccer talk show. One thing I learned on this day was that LA has more Chivas fans than anywhere in the world outside of Guadalajara. There may more Chivas fans in LA than even Dodger or Laker fans, which is astounding.

The host was also very nervous that LA's soccer fans may peel away from the local MLS franchise, the LA Galaxy, and switch allegiances to the new and shiny team to start out next season, LAFC. It has star power at ownership (Magic Johnson, Mia Hamm, Will Ferrell, among others) and a snazzy new logo:

Upon Further Investigation: I keep a blog about Flags and Logos, so the idea that a logo could be so cool and with-it and help snatch up fans from a historically-good-but-currently-floundering Galaxy team caught my attention. I did some research and even posted about it over on that blog.

One thing the creator of the graphic brand mentioned was that the shield look is based on the seal of the city of Los Angeles, so I went and looked that up next:

Official seals for countries and cities and kingdoms and general zones are things I find fascinating, but in a different way than logos and flags in general. They are far too busy, because they try to contain an entire history in a single, jumbled image.

Take that seal above: grapes, olives, oranges surround the shield, I'm sure the number of circles has meaning, and then the shield itself. One corner is obviously for the US, one is a mockup of the California flag, one looks like it hearkens back to the city's history as part of Mexico, what with the eagle killing the snake on a cactus on a rock, the same image on the Mexican flag.

But then there is that last quadrant, circled below:

That's the "Crown of Castile," showing the city's original founding as part of the Spanish crown. The Crown of Castile is made up of the Kingdom of Castile and the Kingdom of Leon.

The earliest united front of what we call the Kingdom of Spain is when Leon and Castile became one, and depending on your timetable was between 600 and 800 CE.

Wasn't this about Germanic Tribes? Both Leon and Castile were in the northern section of the Iberian Peninsula, and they were the result of a couple centuries of the intermingling of the Iberian-Celts and the Visigoths, a Germanic tribe. The Gothic peoples arrived originally as Roman soldiers and workers; the Romans put plenty of barbarians to work after fighting them for centuries. By this time the Franks were already pushing the Gauls around further north and the united Anglo-Saxon tribe was pushing around the Brittons much further north. It makes sense that the Visigoths could be somewhere far away from their original homeland.

What about the Reconquista centuries later and the expulsion of the Moors? That was the Vandals, a Germanic tribe that had, it looks like, made it to the Ruins of Carthage on the African Mediterranean coast and kept heading west, eventually helping pinch the Moors from the south, dealing a definitive blow for their toehold on Europe.

>>>>>><<<<<<

I love coming across these connections. I love having my understanding of the world enriched.

Part of my background work on the Germanic tribes stems from an as-yet unwritten post about Germany shellacking Brazil in their World Cup semifinal back in 2014. Maybe I'll get to it before the next World Cup.

Can I finish and be ready with it by next summer?

The Real Question Posed by "Midnight in Paris"

I totally missed mentioning the real quandary posed by Woody Allen's "Midnight in Paris" from the previous post:

To which era would you be transported?

Dinner with Frank Zappa? Dropping tabs with Jimi Hendrix? Hanging out at the Lapin Agile with Albert and Pablo? How about the awkward afternoon when Pynchon was brought over to Brian Wilson's while the Beach Boy worked and Pynchon sat mostly silently for a few hours?

Maybe you'd like to go to the bar after work with Ted, Ray, and Ray. The three worked together during WWII to make how-to movies for the GIs: Ted Geisel, Ray Harryhausen, and Ray Bradbury. That would ave been a helluva talk, seeing as how we all know Ted Geisel by his pen name, Dr. Seuss.

Dr. Seuss, Ray Harryhausen, and Ray Bradbury worked together with a famous composer (whose name I forgot), and that would have been unique...

But does that make for a Golden Age that I'd want to live in? Or one that I pine for?

Rethinking Owen Wilson (Weekend Movie Talk Part 2)

Most of my friends have actors that they have an irrational distaste for. For Ryan it's Keanu Reeves; for Norm it's Johnny Depp. Corrie isn't a fan of either the Cusack siblings (but "School of Rock" remains the outlier she enjoys).

I have a few, some from television (David Schwimmer) and some from the movies. Owen Wilson has always been on my movies list. I'm not sure what it was about Owen, because I do like his brother Luke Wilson. It's at the point that if Owen Wilson is starring in something I won't be seeing it, and if he's in a guest role, the concept must be great. I'm sure the close connection to Wes Anderson doesn't help. I don't dislike Wes Anderson per se, in fact I think he's a highly skilled director with a wonderful eye for color scheme and frame composition. His forced whimsy irks me irrationally.

I didn't hate Pixar's "Cars", but it is probably their worst film from their Golden Age (1995-2010).

Anyway, we finally got around to watching Woody Allen's 2011 "Midnight in Paris."

I enjoyed it quite thoroughly, with all its awkward scenes and existential problems with being a rom-com of sorts.

It doesn't live like a traditional Hollywood rom-com, of course, but it counts in the largest strokes.

The opening is a montage of postcard views of Paris, far more than necessary to establish location, set to stereotypical "French" score. If you've been to Paris, you say to yourself, "Ahh...Pah-ree" and if you've never been you say either, "It looks so beautiful," or "Can any place be as magical as how this is being portrayed?" (Short answer: Yes.) It goes on and on, and I started to feel grateful to Woody for showcasing Paris and letting us viewers know that Paris is the real star of the film.

Then, after a brief interlude of blank screen, the montage starts again, only this time there is dialogue over it between a man and a woman. Both American, he loves Paris and talks about living there; she thinks that idea is preposterous and thinks that Paris is annoyingly full of French people and pretension.

Immediately you realize this couple is all wrong for each other. Owen Wilson plays Gil and Rachel McAdams plays Inez, an engaged couple in Paris to visit her wealthy and conservative parents, equally as disenchanted with Paris as Inez. Gil is a successful sceenwriter in Hollywood but is working on his first novel and thinks living in Paris would be the medicine his life needs---all his literary and artistic heroes spent time in Paris: Hemingway, Zelda and F Scott, Gertrude Stein, Picasso...

The big picture is the dissolution of their engagement. The fantastical smaller picture that makes the movie so much fun is that at midnight at a specific Parisian back alley corner an old style car shows up and takes Gil to the 1920s era Paris.

In the hours between midnight and whenever Gil arrives back at his hotel room safely in the year 2010 he befriends the Fitzgeralds and Hemingway and has Gertrude Stein read his manuscript. He falls for one of Picasso's lovers, but a falling out with her sees her head to Africa with Hemingway (who is equally bewitched by her). Once she returns to Paris (it obviously doesn't work out between Ernie and Adriana) she and Gil go for a romantic walk when a carriage pulls up and invites them in like the car did for Gil.

During their conversations, it becomes apparent that while Gil is in love with 1920s Paris and considers it a golden age, Adriana is in love with the Belle Epoque era of 1890s Paris in a similar fashion and considers it the true golden age.

The carriage takes them to that very same 1890s era Paris. During a conversation with her idols, it becomes clear that they all pine for the Renaissance, and Gil makes his breakthrough: everybody's current may be dull to them, so dull they look back with a glowing view, regardless of era.

Adriana decides to stay in 1890s Paris while Gil decides to return to 2010. It ends happily for him, which I was surprisingly rooting for.

All in all my feeling for Owen Wilson changed. By no means am I an expert on Woody Allen's oeuvre, but this has become my favorite film he's made.

Former French first lady Carla Bruni has a few scenes, which is pretty cool.

Birthday Party and Father's Day

It's probably impossible for me to get perspective on this kind of thing, raising a baby, being a father. To say that you're "so close to it" or "to close to being able to look objectively" betrays the truth of parenting: if you're not that close at this early stage you've failed.

Today itself is Father's Day, and for the second year in a row, we went out to breakfast at a nearby hip diner called The Breakfast Bar. Last year was my first Father's Day in any sense, and we'd had the baby with us for a week. Because of some confluence of events he came five weeks earlier than we were expecting, and our task once we got home was pretty daunting. 

Every three hours we had to wake him up and try to feed him. He was teeny-tiny and barely ate. It was very stressful, and add in that we couldn't sleep more than 2 hours at a time and the world becomes very small.

He caught up on weight, sprinted past the pack, and is now a very big boy. We even avoided any NICU time.

But that first Father's Day, last year, was at the beginning of the Hardness, after just the first week. It was the first time we had left the house for something other than a pediatrician or lab visit. Born on Friday, went home Sunday, Monday pediatrician visit, Tuesday pediatrician, Wednesday lab, Thursday lactation consultant, Friday pediatrician...

That Sunday, Father's Day, we realized that the sun was out after our 5 am feeding ended and we had finished the cleanup and pumping. We were the second people in after they opened at 6.

A week short of a year later and we hosted a birthday party for Cassius, our big boy. We weren't going to do anything big, or at all, when my mom asked that if we were going to do something, that we let her know so she can come.

That settled it: we would do something small for her and Auntie Peg and Bobbi and a few of the other moms from our Bradley group...and a few of the friends we have in LA...and and and...

It grew into mostly standing room only at our tiny apartment. We had a nice spread of food provided by me, finger sandwiches and dips, crudites and fruit, most of it able to be eaten by our vegan guest.

The "cake" was one of Corrie's vegan carrot/apple muffins (they're unbelievably good) with cream cheese frosting like you'd find on carrot cake. Since Cass doesn't really like having his hands or fingers all gooey, he mostly skipped the frosting. Here we are, him sans shirt (to keep it nice) and me with my eyes shut:

Look how swanky he looks in his new Colombian drug-lord hat Grandma Kate gave him:

She also let him play with her phone for about thirty seconds and he was able to snap a selfie:

From earlier today at The Breakfast Bar:

2017

And last year, the weariness on my face is obvious to me, and it looks like we're new parents, but look at the difference a year makes for the baby:

2016

Shane Carruth Strikes Back! (Weekend Movie Talk Part 1)

Shane Carruth is math major grad who has made some LOW BUDGET films that gained legendary status in the industry, mainly for how low budget they were (did you see the all caps before?), but also because they were pretty deep and original.

I've written before about Carruth's first film, Primer, and about it's intricate, time-paradox laden plot.

A few weeks back we finally got around to watching his second film, "Upstream Color":

Because I'd watched "Primer" a few times, I figured I'd need to pay close attention to this longer and more ambitious effort. It's budget of reportedly $50k was seven times(!!) the budget for Primer, so let's see what he can do with a little cash I said to myself.

The first ten or fifteen minutes has no dialogue, which is cool in its own right, but forces viewers to really commit if you really want to get anything from the movie.

It starts out with a guy harvesting grubs from the soil of what look like blue orchids, and then boiling their bodies, or steeping them, and focusing on that liquid. A couple of kids get some and drink it, and start doing some kind of tai chi---basically showing them whacked out on a psychedelic. But the grub-steeping-drug-making guy doesn't care about them---they're just a minor detail to show the power of this drug.

The guy then takes either the liquid or an entire grub to a club, picks a girl, and forces it on her. She passes out as he's like, "No, she's okay, I'm juts taking her home." As a viewer you start to fear the worst, but to say it gets strange would be an understatement.

I'm going to go into a brief (LESS BRIEF THAN DESIRED) rundown of the plot, because you can't really describe what the movie's about without totally doing a disservice to the story like the Netflix summary. So, SPOILERS follow, be warned.

Okay: the drugged girl comes to with the dude in her place and she is totally under a spell where he can control her. He has her get dressed up and head to the bank, cashing in all of her savings, her mortgage, all of her credit card checks, doing something bad at her work, and collects all the money. It's a bizarrely silent opening, when some of the first words in the film is the girl returning to her car from one bank trip and relaying the entire conversation she had with the bank manager---doing both her lines and his---in deadpan to the weird rip-off-nefarious-drugger-dude in the back seat.

She comes to abruptly in her house, still dazed, now alone, gets in her car and drives to what appears to be a pig farm. Strange sound effects have been drawing her. A trailer in the middle of the pig farm has been outfitted for surgical purposes, and after collapsing on the dirt, a super weirdo guy gets her prepped and starts operating on her, connecting her to a pig---some kind of umbilical cord connects her ankle to a pig's navel.

We're maybe 25 minutes into the movie and there has been virtually no real dialogue.

She really comes to at her house, soon realizes she's been fired and has no money, and can't explain why she has weird cuts and sores all over her body (and ankle). Next we see her with short hair and must conclude that some time has elapsed. She still hasn't returned to a sense of normalcy, what with the amnesia and all.

A different weirdo (Carruth) starts macking on her on the light rail---he's drawn to her. She reluctantly starts to see him, and it turns out they have the same scar on their ankles.

Their awkward situations are interspersed with the weird pig-farming-amateur-surgeon guy off doing his real job, collecting sound effects for the film industry. All the while through the movie the score has been ethereal and nuts, mostly just the realization of this character's work. He'll pull over in his dusty murderer's truck to record the sound of rocks rolling down a metal grate or whatever.

Then it starts to get really weird.

It turns out that the surgeries seem to connect the souls of these victims to their linked pigs, and sometimes the human characters start to have visions or feelings of what their pigs are doing or going through. Two pigs seem to be inseparable, and this alarms the farmer/surgeon because he knows that two of his "patients" are with each other.

The human couple start to argue because their memories start to blend, and they can't agree to whom a specific memory has happened. The female pig ends up pregnant and the farmer/surgeon snatches up all the piglets; the lady cowers in the bathroom, sobbing, with no understanding why she's encountering these feelings.

Before the randomness of it all leads to them finding other "patients" and eventually finding and ending the pig farmer, a sequence that leads to the film's name, Upstream Color, occurs:

The farmer takes the piglets from the lady-pig-avatar, puts them in a sack, and throws them into a river to drown. Eventually the sack settles somewhere, and a time-lapse-y scene of the piglets decomposing happens (up close and not as heart-wrenching as it sounds), and some of the gore released into the river is a blue liquid. We viewers see this blue liquid flow downstream and turn the orchids growing on the river's edge from white to blue.

The Netflix summary says something like: A couple tries to rebuild their shattered lives after being drugged by a compound derived from plants.

Um...sure? Here's my updated summary: A psychic connection between select people and pigs is exploited to make a drug that turns new victims into controllable zombies who unwittingly give away all of their assets.

The official website talks about parasites... Maybe I saw that?

Anyway: ORIGINALITY KICKS ASS! MATH IN THE HOUSE!

Is this weird and high concept, or weirdness for its own sake?

Proper Use of CGI

In general I'm a fan of the projects of James Rolfe---his many videos in character as the Angry Video Game Nerd; his movie reviews, et al---and most can be found on his website Cinemassacre.com. One idea that he espouses as a film maker and enthusiastic, if not professional, critic is that the use of computer generated images (CGI) is mostly out of control, and that by looking at old classics we can see the power of practical effects. Check out "Jurassic Park" or "Terminator 2": the presence of CGI doesn't make the need for practical effects---animatronics, real pyrotechnics---disappear.

In today's landscape the final battle between the queen xenomoph and Sigourney Weaver's Ripley in the climax of "Aliens" would be completely animated by computers. In reality it was a mechanical beast with two humans inside and powered by a half-dozen more with cables and rods.

The idea that CGI is a bit overused is one with which I agree.

Except for what we watched last night. For the first time ever during a scene I said outloud to Corrie: "See, this is why you need CGI." I guess these comments could be made about Peter Jackson's LotR trilogy, but they used plenty of practical effects there as well.

Last night we watched "Doctor Strange" and the scenes were his first astral trip through the multiverse.

Doctor Strange was usually considered unfilmable (so was LotR, so...); too much magic and too many trips to weird places:

And then there was the early '70s shift into outright LSD work, as the heads who made the book realized that it could be a vehicle for their altered ideas, and were taking acid as they wrote out the plots and artwork:

These things are what made the character a cult phenomenon in underground head circles, only there weren't too many of those, and sales never flourished.

I'm not the biggest Doctor Strange fan, but the idea of specifically psychedelic character does appeal to me, and I felt like they did a reasonably sound job with the movie. I'm certainly not that invested in accuracy or history or anything like that.

I did enjoy the movie. Those scenes, though, I could watch on repeat, and it specifically begs the question:

Was the first psychedelic event generated by computers and marketed for the masses a handful of scenes in 2016's "Doctor Strange"?