NYC August 2009

The machine that is the Bureau of Odd Shaped Objects runs at a stately pace, so it is only now that I have turned my bureaucratic attention to the trip that Madame Le Chef and I took to NYC last month. We were happily surprised by two recent works that we saw. The first was the newly opened High Line. The city has built a park on the tracks of a defunct West Side elevated rail line. It is currently open from 20th St. down to Gansevoort St. and gives one the pleasure of walking in a park which is a couple of stories in the air. You see building from angles impossible before and even a distant glimpse of the Statue of Liberty. They’ve also given retro New Yorkers the ability to bask in the carcinogenic rays of the sun.






The other discovery was a multimedia piece at MOMA by Chinese artist Song Dong in collaboration of his since deceased mother. Having lived through the deadly history of modern China, his mother saved absolutely everything. The piece consists of the immense collection of often virtually worthless objects arranged in and around the skeleton of her house. It’s strangely fascinating.

Doggerel for the old dogs

Wanting to be a better chef du bureau, I attempted to audit a Creative Writing course at San Francisco State. The instructor agreed to let me audit but it was later kiboshed at the department level. I understood. Paying students were desperate to keep their full time status in the face of so many courses being eliminated because of huge state budget cuts. Why should a state with the 10th biggest economy on the planet and a population of 37 million people bother to educate its next generation?

Anyway, the assignment from the one class I attended was to write a manifesto. This is it.

ANTI-MANIFESTO

Manifestos are for the young, the firebrands, the visionaries, the mad artists and the drunken poets.

Baudelaire wrote, “Stay drunk! On wine, poetry or virtue, as you please!”

But I saw the best minds of my generation tear gassed while tripping on acid, going to jail, enduring broken hearts in cold climates, forced to get jobs.

I saw them marrying, buying houses, sending their kids to college, worrying about their health plans and those goddam Republicans.

I saw them realizing that the older you get, the more dead people you know.

I saw you, Allen Ginsberg, in 1969, dressed like a sadhu, playing a harmonium and chanting Blake off key.

25 years on I saw you again, wearing a nice sportcoat, surrounded by acolytes, walking through the food court of a shopping mall in San Francisco. A few years later you were dead.

The manifestos of the older set tend to lack élan vital.

“I have had my fun if I never get well no more.”

After a certain age, manifestos are replaced by memories:

“These foolish things remind me of you.”

And elegies:

“Earth, receive an honored guest: William Yeats is laid to rest.”

Better those than admonitions and sage advice, because no one listens to that shit.

Maybe there can be mini-manifestos: “I shall not wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled”; “I will dare to eat a peach!”

No. Too much like cocktail wieners, lacking the flavor of the full sized sausage.

Wait! It’s almost lunchtime.

Terra Incognita

When Madame Le Chef and I decided that this was not the right year for a trip to France, we planned a car trip to visit friends in Oregon. Instead of reading up on Oregon like we do on France, we decided to wing it. Normally I’m a strong advocate of the supremacy of knowledge over ignorance but in this case we had a series of delightful surprises.

It turns out that the unknown land (to us) started just north of Sacramento, a flat, sun-baked area with temperatures in the hundreds (this was not delightful). It dropped down into the 90s as we climbed into the mountains and soon we had our first pleasant surprise---Mt. Shasta. It’s not only very tall but relatively isolated, so it is visible on and off, from Interstate 5, for what seemed about 100 miles.
We broke our journey in Ashland, OR and the next day drove up to Portland to enjoy the hospitality of our friends. It turned out that the next pleasant surprise was only a 35 minute drive outside of Portland---the gorge of the Colombia River. The gorge itself is beautiful but the waterfalls along it’s banks are truly spectacular. Multnomah Falls, the tallest, has been a tourist attraction since the turn of the last century.
We made a two day side trip to the Oregon sea coast where the weather was unfortunately similar to San Francisco summer weather (foggy, cold and windy) but the landscape was magnificent. On our way back to Portland we stopped at Cannon Beach which has a big rock, appropriately named The Haystack, rising out of the surf.
The final wonder was a crab sandwich from the South Beach Fish Market which is on RT. 101 just south of Newport Or. They put a quarter pound of steamed, picked crab on sliced sourdough with just mayonnaise, lettuce and tomato---sublime simplicity.

Rififi (Du rififi chez les hommes)

This is a 1955 French crime drama by blacklisted American director Jules Dassin. It earned him the best director award at Cannes that year. There seems to have been a two-movie wave of French gangster films with odd slang in their titles, in the middle 50s. The other was Jacques Becker’s “Touchez pas au grisbi” (1954).

Although “grisbi” seems to be actual French slang, “rififi” may have been made up by Auguste Le Breton, the author of the novel that the film was based on. It seems to mean something like “rough and tumble”. The term was obscure enough that Dassin inserted a goofy but enjoyable nightclub song and dance number in the film to explain it.

Rififi was shot on location in Paris, in the winter. The black and white photography is beautiful. After a certain amount of time has passed, any film shot on location has a second existence as a historical record (have I said that before?). It’s a pleasure to see Paris in 1955.

The movie is famous in film nerd circles for the long safe-cracking scene done with no dialogue or music, that is wonderfully tense and enthralling. Interestingly, the above mentioned passage of time has made another scene even more intense for the 2009 viewer. A wonderfully good natured and oblivious five year old boy, outfitted with a cowboy hat and a plastic gun, is being driven home by a gangster who is not in good shape. They are in a convertible with the top down. The kid is jumping back and forth and climbing over the seat.

I knew that the car was most likely being towed and the camera truck was right beside it but I kept thinking, “The kid is going to fall out!” and “Why isn’t he in his god damned car seat?” Oh.

This is an excellent movie.

OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies (Le Caire nid d’espions)

OSS 117 is a French secret agent, with the wonderfully absurd name of Hubert Bonisseur de la Bath, who is the central character of an astonishing number of French spy novels cranked out by Jean Bruce (91 books), his widow Josette (143 books) and two of her children (24 books). The family must have owned a magical sausage-making/novel-writing machine. The first book came out in 1949 and a series of films based on the books was made in the 50s and 60s. (Thank you Wikipedia.)

When a group of French filmmakers decided to reanimate Agent OSS 117 in 2006, they brought him back to make fun of him, and they succeeded. Although they don’t cop to it in the DVD extras, they had to have seen Don Adams in the “Get Smart” TV shows, since OSS 117 exhibits the same level of totally unjustified self regard as Maxwell Smart. The 2008 film version of “Get Smart” got rather mixed reviews from the critics, so if you’re hankering for idiot spies go directly to OSS 117.

Tell No One

This French thriller (in French, “Ne le dis à personne”) was one of the few films Mme Le Chef and I saw in a theater last year and we enjoyed it very much. We recently watched it again on DVD and it wasn’t diminished in any way. We were amused that after two viewings we still couldn’t follow every twist and turn in the plot, but that doesn’t matter.

The film is by Guillaume Canet and is based on an American novel by Harlan Corben. It’s peopled with well delineated characters who are played by an excellent cast. Our hero, the beleaguered Dr. Beck, is played by François Cluzet, who bears an unfortunate resemblance to a young Dustin Hoffman, but is a good enough to make us forget that. The other main male actors are also excellent but the actresses are amazing.

In one film you get both Kristin Scott Thomas and Natalie Baye in supporting roles. These are two of the best actresses on the planet. You also get the delicious Marie-Josée Croze and, in a small role, an unknown actress named Mikaela Fisher. She’s on screen for maybe five minutes and establishes one of the scariest villains I’ve seen in a long time. The actress is freaky looking; skinny, wiry, elongated, androgynous. I can’t tell if it’s really good type casting or good acting but her character is one of things you’ll surely remember about the film.

Intelligent, entertaining thrillers are far rarer then they should be, so if you haven’t seen “Tell No One”, put it on your Netflix queue (svp).

We Are Not Alone, Unless Maybe We Kinda Are

When Madame Le Chef was getting her undergraduate degree at San Francisco State, she was lucky enough to take classes from both Debra Fischer and Geoff Marcy. Since then these two astronomers, along with Paul Butler, have discovered 70 of the first 100 planets orbiting other stars. This past Saturday, Professors Fischer and Marcy gave a talk, which Mme Le Chef and I attended. It was very interesting.

Professor Fischer first explained the techniques (very ingenious) and the difficulties of detecting extrasolar planets and then Professor Marcy discussed current views on microbial life on “Earthlike” extrasolar planets and “technological” life (us) on same. There seems to be a strong consensus among exobiologists that microbial life is extremely likely to exist on “Earthlike” extrasolar planets and a growing feeling that “technological” life on those planets might not be very common at all.

The reason that basic life is thought likely is that there are many organisms on Earth that live in environments no less harsh than those on other planets. Prime examples are the algae and other organisms found in the boiling, sulfuric-acid laden water of the Yellow Stone geysers.

The reason for the growing doubt about numerous technological civilizations out there, is the total lack of evidence for their existence. Project SETI has been listening for alien transmissions for 40 years and has heard nothing. We have mapped the surfaces of the Moon and Mars and found zero alien probes or observation posts and, despite the claims of legions of whack-a-doodles, the same goes for Earth. There are numerous telescopes, with sensors across the entire spectrum of energy, looking out into space and there are no positive results---not even some gamma rays from a matter/antimatter drive.

Of course in order for us to detect another technological society, its time frame would have to overlap with ours and that could be very difficult. Professor Marcy did not get into our species’ history but I was struck by the thought that agriculture was only developed 10,000 years ago and cities were settled only 4000 (or perhaps 6000) years ago. In that short time (from a galactic point of view) we overpopulated the planet and developed multiple technologies that could destroy us. We could pop on and off the possible alien sensors when no one is looking, and so could they.

During the question period someone asked the “what if” question. What if the aliens weren’t like us and so we would not recognize their emanations. Professor Marcy revealed his Star Trek fanboy status by replying, “Yes, like the Horta.” He then pointed out that there are many creative people who can think of many possibilities but that as scientists they have to narrow things down so they can search for indications that are detectable with our current instruments. It’s up to the Horta to reveal themselves.