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Favorite Films: Grizzly Man (2005)

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Timothy Treadwell in Alaska’s Katmai National Park

Over the last thirty years, some of my favorite movies were directed by Werner Herzog. So when I screened his Grizzly Man for myself, I was not surprised to find that it was nothing short of amazing. Its subject, Timothy Treadwell as to grizzly bears what Aussie Steve Irwin was to crocodiles and other dangerous denizens of the wild. In the end, both men died because they were exposed to one too many dangers. In the case of Treadwell and his girlfriend Amie Huguenard, they were eaten by a bear that Treadwell failed to charm.

There was always something strange about Treadwell with his Prince Valiant blonde mop. (He had failed to win the role of Woody Boyd in Cheers that was filled by Woody Harrelson.) He spent his summers in Alaska’s Katmai National Park trying to convince us that grizzlies were like warm and fuzzy Teddy Bears. He even camped with a favorite Teddy Bear, as well as a girlfriend.

After Treadwell and Huguenard’s death, German filmmaker Werner Herzog made Grizzly Man, but probably not as Treadwell would have liked. Much of the footage was actually from Treadwell himself, and showed him in his various moods—including defiance at the National Park Service. He did not like to be reminded by them that what he was doing was dangerous. Unlike Steve Irwin, he downplayed the dangers of closeness with the bears. What amazes me was not that he was eventually attacked and devoured by them than that he survived as long as he did.

Grizzly Bear

In his and his girlfriend’s last few minutes on earth, Treadwell was actually filming. Because of the circumstances, he did not have a chance to remove the lens cap, so all he had was an audio track. In Grizzly Man, we see Herzog listening to this track in the presence of one of his associates, Jewel Palovak. Upon finishing, he hands the tape to Palovak and recommends that she destroy it. She did the next best thing: Instead of listening to it, she had it placed in a bank vault. Nobody wants to have his or her dreams turn into nightmares from listening to the death of someone they had loved.

Herzog believes that Treadwell was a disturbed individual with a death wish. Treadwell’s own footage, much of which appears in the Herzog film, bears this out. In fact, I was so disturbed that I had disturbing nightmares the night after I saw the film.\

 

I Don’t Feel at Home Here, Either

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No Brie and Chablis for Me, Thanks … I’ll Just Have a Coke

“Here” is a part of town not far from me, but that I haven’t visited for several years. I decided to take a walk down Main Street in Santa Monica, hopefully ending up at Small World Books in Venice—but I never got that far today. I noticed that a lot of my favorite places, like Röckenwagner’s, were gone. The whole street was thronged with young Liberals. Now, I consider myself a Liberal, but without the cachet that usually comes from belonging to an in group.

For lunch, I stopped in at he Samosa House, a newish Indian Vegetarian place that was quite good. With my masala dosa and Indian tea, I sat at a counter that faced the line of customers coming in. Almost all of them were younger than me, and started flashing smiles of approval at the decrepit old man who was eating the approved Liberal vegetarian diet. After a while, I not only did not seek their approval but wished I had been gnawing on a pig’s knuckle instead.

I walked a little further on to a Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream. Now some of my contrary feeling was still with me, because I ordered their Kale and Quinoa Ice Cream topped with fish eggs. The guy who took my order laughed heartily with me, and made me feel good about it. I settled for a scoop of Chunky Monkey in a dish instead.

It seems funny to me to feel neither part of the Conservative scene (which I have always abhorred) nor now the Santa Monica Brie and Chablis Liberals. Oh, well, I guess I am marching to what Thoreau called a different drummer.

Just to drive home the point, the bus I took back was full of retarded kids attending some institutional sporting event.

 

The Endless S[l]ideshow to Hell

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They Lure You In and Don’t Want To Let You Go

The starry-eyed young lady in the above photo is the first image in one of those multi-page Internet slideshows that are there to devour your time. This one is about tattoos that people got and later regretted. (Actually, I think most tattoos are ultimately in that category.) You can view the slideshow by clicking here. I remember taking one slideshow this last week that purported to tell me my IQ. It had 100 pages, covered with “Hey look at me!” clickbait opportunities. There would be a picture of Oprah Winfrey, and I had to identify it as belonging either to Oprah Winfrey or a Gila Monster. In the end, I got 100% right, and was told I was probably a college professor. I never did get my IQ.

That’s not unusual. These slideshows are like carnival barkers trying to lure you in. According to the Business Insider website:

Practices like splitting articles into multiple pages or delivering lists via pageview-mongering slideshows have been with us since the early Web. I figured they’d die out quickly, but they’ve shown great resilience—despite being crude, annoying, ineffective, hostile to users, and harmful to the long-term interests of their practitioners.

There seems to be an inexhaustible supply of media executives who misunderstand how the Web works and think that they can somehow beat it into submission. Their tactics have produced an onslaught of distractions that are neither native to the Web’s technology nor inevitable byproducts of its design. The blinking, buzzing parade is, rather, a side-effect of business failure, a desperation move on the part of flailing commercial publishers.

The sad thing is that most of these links to slideshows are interspersed with real news and help pay to subsidize that news. Sometimes they are (inadequately) labeled as sponsored content; just as often, they aren’t.

Below is a rough graph of the effect on an Internet user who gets dragged into one of these seemingly endless slideshows (I almost said sideshows):

Units of “Microhate” Graphed Against Number of Pages in Slideshow

Business Insider concludes:

If you’re on a web page that’s weighted down with cross-promotional hand-waving, revenue-squeezing ad overload and interstitial interruptions, odds are you’re on a newspaper or magazine site. For an egregiously awful example of how business linking can ruin the experience of reading on the Web, take a look at the current version of Time.com.

 

The Face of L.A.

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By Now, he Majority of L.A.’s Population is Hispanic

Probably one of the reasons our Presidente hates California (other than the fact that we all pretty much despise him) is that there are so many Hispanics here. And I mean Hispanics of every variety, from Mexicans and Central and South Americans to Cubans and Puerto Ricans and even a few real live Spaniards. And here in Los Angeles, we pretty much get along with one another. I mean, after all, the city was founded in 1781 as El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Angeles de Porciúncula, long before there were any gringos in evidence. It was then part of Spain, then part of Mexico, and eventually part of the United States of America, who stole it fair and square from Mexico. We even got the papers to prove it.

I remember vividly when my brother and I had our first tacos. It was in New York City, of all places, where we were attending the World’s Fair of 1964-65. We bought it at the Mexico Pavilion. The real reason I was in the Big Apple was to check out New York University’s graduate school in film. Well, I wound up not going there because I didn’t like Haig P. Manoogian, who was top man there. I don’t think he liked me very much either. (Michael Scorsese, who attended NYU, thought Manoogian was hot stuff; but then he was a filmmaker, and I wasn’t interested in making films.)

When I finally picked UCLA as the place to go, I thought I would prepare myself by buying frozen food that purported to be Mexican cuisine. It really wasn’t. In fact, it was about as bland as any other frozen food available in Cleveland. It was not until I took the train to L.A. that I encountered the real thing. And I liked it, and I still do.

I’ve lived here now for more than fifty years and haven’t been raped once. Will someone please mention that to the Tweeter-in-Chief?

 

 

Xu’tan

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The Term Means, Literally, “The End of the World”

The contradiction goes all the way back to 1562, when Spanish Bishop Diego de Landa ordered some 5,000 Maya cult images and a number of codices in Mayan to be burned in the city of Mani in Yucatán (see illustration below).  Yet, four years later, this same Diego de Landa preserved an incredible amount of Maya culture in his book Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán, without which it is doubtful we would have learned to read the Mayan language. So what is the verdict on de Landa? Only history will tell.

In his book Mornings in Mexico, D. H. Lawrence wrote:

The Indian way of consciousness is different from and fatal to our own way of consciousness. Our way of consciousness is different from and fatal to the Indian. The two ways, the two streams are never to be united. They are not even to be reconciled. There is no bridge, no canal of connection…. The sooner we realize, and accept this, the better, and leave off trying, with fulsome sentimentalism, to render the Indian in our own terms.

Yet we cannot seem to ever “leave off trying.” I certainly can’t. In my reading and in my travels I revisit this primitive world. I have been numerous times to the Hopi and Navajo Reservations, and visited many of the Pueblos of New Mexico, from Acoma to Zuñi. I have eaten their food, purchased their crafts, even given rides to their hitchhikers.

Diego de Landa Burning Maya Codices

I have just finished reading Victor Perera and Robert D. Bruce’s The Last Lords of Palenque: The Lacandon Mayas of the Mexican Rain Forest, which tells of the doom in store for the Lacandon Maya of Chiapas. The doom begins with visits from foreigners, continues with ecological disaster (building roads, cutting down or burning forests), and ends with the end of a culture which has survived for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years.

The old spiritual leader of the Lacandons, the now deceased Chan K’in, predicted this xu’tan, or end of the world:

“The world is going to die,” he said, with the bright obsessive gaze that overtakes the younger Lacandones when they speak of the world’s end. “It is too old already. The flesh is also old. It is exhausted. The world will burn up soon. The sun will stop, not move in the sky, and it will burn everything down. It will burn everything until the world is naked. It will burn for three weeks. Then it will rain. It will rain for three weeks without stopping, until everything is flooded. Then, above, in the upper heaven of the minor gods all will be dark, and they will cut off the heads of the people and Ts’ibatnah [the god of the graphic arts] will paint the houses with the blood of the good people. Their blood is bright red and smells very good, like nthe tuberose. But the celestial jaguars will eat the people with dark blood, which will be spilled on the ground….”

The details become ever more bizarre and remote from the experience of people like me, however much we like to study primitive civilizations.

 

City on a Hill? Hah!

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Their Equivalent of Greyhound: Better Than Us—By Far!

We like to talk big about the United States, but we are fifty years too late, or more! The one time we were reckoned to be the A-Number-One Country in the World, the rest of the world lay in ruins. Now instead of being the City on a Hill, we are more like the lopsided shitshack being dragged downriver by a flooded, polluted stream.

What brought this to mind was Martine’s story of her travels to Portland, Oregon, then Sacramento, then back to Los Angeles. Unless you are flying—and even then, sometimes—you are treated like scabby vermin. Both Amtrak and Greyhound will dig into your back with horribly designed seating. On the Amtrak dining car, you get a microwaved hamburger with pretensions to fanciness. In fact, everything on the menu has pretensions to fanciness. And it all tastes like nuked camel dung.

I remember the buses I took in South America. There was one fifteen-hour ride from Buenos Aires to Bariloche aboard a Via Bariloche tutto letto bus with seats that reclined a full 180º, with blanket and pillow.  In addition, there was a steward who served us three meals, whose price was included in the cheap ticket price. (Okay, the food was not perfect, but was adequate.) And there was a clean restroom on board. Try getting that on Greyhound!

Rio Uruguay Ticket Office in Puerto Iguazu, Argentina

BTW, the customer service is better, too—even if you have trouble speaking the language.

We tend to run down Latin Americans as being somehow backwards. We gringos are actually the backward ones—primarily because of our greed. When I went to pick up Martine at the Greyhound station in Los Angeles (located in Skid Row), no one knew when buses arrived. I was told to wait in the ticket line, which had something like seventy-five people plus their bags and children. I wasn’t about to spend an hour asking when the bus from Sacramento was to arrive. More greed!

It makes me want to spend more time in Latin America, even if they are rapists. At least they’re not so greedy with their people.

 

Jim Carrey Takes on the Trump Troll

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I Scream, You Scream …

Actor Jim Carrey looks to be on the point of starting a brilliant new career, as an Anti-Trump Twitter Troll. The tweet that went with the above picture is:

Jim Carrey

✔ @JimCarrey

 Dear Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery @NPG, I know it’s early but I’d like to submit this as the official portrait of our 45th President, Donald J. Trump. It’s called, ‘You Scream. I Scream. Will We Ever Stop Screaming?’

Even more artistic is this one about General Kelly:

 

Guess Who

The accompanying tweet reads as follows:

Jim Carrey

✔ @JimCarrey

 All who enter his crooked carnival with integrity are doomed to leave without it. General Kelly has been trampled by his own compromise. Who dares be the next to ride the carousel of fools?! Muahahaha!!!

Finally, I couldn’t pass up this attack on the current Speaker of the House of Representatives:

Paul Ryan

And the tweet thereunto appertaining:

Jim Carrey

✔ @JimCarrey

 Tone deaf Paul Ryan brags that his tax bill is going to make low income voters an extra $1.50 a week! That’s almost enough for a box of Band-Aids. Who needs healthcare? WAKE UP REPUBLICAN BASE! You are parked on the tracks, cheering for the train that’s about to run you down. ;^P

You can see all the pictures by clicking here.

Bukowski: “A Dog Walking Backwards”

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Poet Charles Bukowski

The title of this poem is “For the Foxes.” I do not understand why. But that’s okay with poetry. It takes quite a lot of readings sometimes to understand what is going on. Whatever it means—specifically—I like the feel of this poem.

Don’t feel sorry for me.
I am a competent,
satisfied human being.

be sorry for the others
who
fidget
complain

who
constantly
rearrange their
lives
like
furniture.

juggling mates
and
attitudes

their
confusion is
constant

and it will
touch
whoever they
deal with.

beware of them:
one of their
key words is
‘love’

and beware those who
only take
instructions from their
God

for they have
failed completely to live their own
lives.

don’t feel sorry for me
because I am alone

for even
at the most terrible
moments
humor
is my
companion.

I am a dog walking
backwards

I am a broken
banjo

I am a telephone wire
strung up in
Toledo, Ohio

I am a man
eating a meal
this night
in the month of
September.

put your sympathy
aside.
they say
water held up
Christ:
to come
through
you better be
nearly as
lucky.

 

An Inflammation of the Eyelid Margin

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Inflamed Eyelids of a Blepharitis Sufferer

No sooner did Martine return to Los Angeles than I broke out into an array of allergic responses. On one hand, I started going into sneezing fits and blowing my nose. More serious was a siege of blepharitis, a condition in which the eyelids feel like inflamed constantly itching parchment. The only thing that works against it is an expensive drug called Avenova, which, for some obscure reason, is not on Blue Cross’s approved drug formulary. I was able to pick up some today, so I am sure that the current infestation will not continue much longer.

Allergies have been one of the banes of my existence. In high school, I had a seborrheic dermatitis that made my scalp look full of snowflakes. Then there were the usual spring and fall respiratory allergies, which I still have to some degree. I am not able to eat shrimp or lobster unless it is caught in near-Arctic waters without getting a reaction that feels like a severe strep throat which lasts for two or three hours.

The worry and stress about Martine has certainly contributed to the intensity of my allergic responses. In time, it will gradually subside. I hope.

 

Not Out of the Woods Yet

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The Conditions That Led to Martine’s Leaving Are Still in Place

I was happy to see Martine again yesterday, but her return had more to do with the discomfort of land travel over long distances on the cheap, and the fact that she had come down with a cold. She still hates Los Angeles and wants to leave. Yet, at the same time, she said she missed me and thought of me daily. (I also thought of her daily.)

Ultimately, to be cured of this mania, she has to takes steps to confront her depression: She spends some twelve hours a day in bad, and about six hours a day lying flat on her back on the couch. She does the laundry, washes the dishes, and cleans up around the apartment. That accounts for most of her time.

Today, I made a big pot of lentil soup with vegetables cooked in chicken stock. I hope it helps her with her cold.

I do not give Martine money to leave town, and on each of this trips, she wastes more of her own funds, which are dwindling rapidly. While she is with me, I will continue to pay for her food, rent, health, and recreation. I don’t think she can afford more than one or two at the most of these little escapes. But we are not talking about rational behavior here.

Whatever I can do without hurting myself, I will do. I feel no real resentment at her escapes, just sadness. I try to leave her with the feeling that, when the escape attempt fails, I will be there to try to pick up the pieces again.