Author: Chris C.

Brother Gordon — it was just a 15 minute short, but a compelling view of a man who speaks eloquently of his conversion from a life of shady civilian/military contract killings to a life of Buddhism and bringing herion addicts back to a healthy life.

Rain on a Dry Land — standard PBS/POV-style doc; illustrative of how immigrants can get chewed up and spit out by America, especially if they don’t know English well enough to converse verbally; particularly illuminating was one scene where you could see how the system essentially encourages them to have more children because it’ll solve their immediate money problems; this also illustrates the language problem because the state support mechanism was trying to communicate more subtle issues, but the “baby=money” message is what made it through the language barriers.

Rural Rock and Roll — careening between insipid interviews and dopey fun, this documented an inbred indie rock scene located in an isolated corner of northern California (pot-growing hippies, contractor rednecks, students of local liberal arts college). Illustrates well one of my rules of life: The Scene Is Now. Don’t wait for someone to tell you that you’re in the midst of a larger movement or scene, because by the time it’s recognized as such and the word gets out, it’s dead and the energy has moved elsewhere. Make your own scene, do it now, and let someone else write about it later. By the epilogue at the end of movie, all of the bands in the doc had broken up.

Edge of Outside: Independent Filmmakers — talking heads documentary about some key filmmakers who invented “independent”: Cassavetes, Fuller, Peckinpah, even Capra. Produced by the staff of Turner Classic Movies, this will air on TCM on July 5th at 8pm and is well worth watching. I’ll be watching it again to catch all the movie references and make my Netflix queue even longer …

No. 2 — writing was too pat, overwrought; but a nice slice of life in suburban (!) Fiji; adapted from the director’s play, and she probably didn’t (yet) have the skills to translate it to screen properly. Looks like I have a new actress to hate to take the place of Keira Knightley. I’m guessing that this got included only as part of the deal that brought Ruby Dee to the gala that preceded the festival.

Note: the film titles below link to the AFF description of the movie; please do read those short descriptions because I don’t recap that material in my comments.

Future By Design — a well-meaning utopian whose grasp of technologies is a mile wide but an inch deep, and none of his ideas would stand up to serious scrutiny. But he keeps his audience of lay dreamers (mostly itinerant retirees, it seems) entertained with lavish drawings and models. Oddly amateurish filmmaking.

Home Front — What strikes me during these scarred-by-Iraq docs is how I know absolutely nobody, even indirectly, who has been sent to Iraq. Middle America has bought into this delusional “freedom isn’t free” “fighting them over there to protect us over here” bullshit that the neocons have cynically fabricated to lure them into voting for their puppet, and Middle America pays for it with their sons and daughters lives and livelihood. But they can’t let themselves come to a conclusion other than “support the troops and the mission” because otherwise they might have to realize that they lost their eyes and limbs and lives for a fraud. These are simple, decent people who have been taken advantage of by a profit-making, body-chewing machine.

Al Franken: God Spoke — Eh. An entertaining crowd pleaser. Nice to see it demonstrated once again what a reptile Ann Coulter is. Anyway, nothing in politics really matters ever since the nation failed, on November 3rd 2004, to rise up en masse and correct the mistakes and crimes of the previous four years. Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?

It’s early June and time for the annual Atlanta Film Festival. As I do every year, I’m taking the whole week off of work, I’ve bought an all-access pass, and I’ll be going to every screening that I reasonably can. In the past I’ve usually found a gap here and there in the week’s schedule of movies where I can have a few hours to … run errands and generally relax my mind, but this year seems to be denser than before. I don’t know if it’s the quantity or quality of movies or what, but there’s a lot more that I want to see this year — mostly documentaries as usual.

I’ll be posting here with my thoughts about what I’ve seen, like last year, although unlike last year this time I will post daily to try to capture what I’ve seen as soon as I’ve seen it. We’ll see how that goes .. I don’t know where I’ll find the time.

“Writing is finally about one thing: going into a room alone and doing it. Putting words on paper that have never been there in quite that way before. And although you are physically by yourself, the haunting Demon never leaves you, that Demon being the knowledge of your own terrible limitations, your hopeless inadequacy, the impossibility of ever getting it right. No matter how diamond-bright your ideas are dancing in your brain, on paper they are earthbound.”

— William Goldman, novelist, playwright and screenwriter.

Yeah, I’ve got some things I need to write down, here, and it’ll happen soon …

Three fantastic writers …

Andisheh Nouraee — a columnist for Atlanta’s alternative weekly Creative Loafing (his collected writings for CL here). In one column he’s a man about town reported on the scene (and herd), and in the other column he does a Slate/Explainer take on questions about current events. Recent favorite quote: “… the United States and India also reached an agreement on sharing nuclear technology. The world’s largest democracy and the world’s fattest democracy are now nuclear BFF.”

Matt Taibbi — Politics in the style of Hunter S. Thompson. Take an ex-sportswriter and Russophile, add some tabs of acid and a gorilla suit, and sick him on the campaign trail.

Stephen Colbert — obviously just about everyone’s going to know about him already. His vicious satire is simply the best thing on television right now — I hope it lasts. I have a tedious rule against cable TV at home, but fortunately (!) I work for the beast itself (cable TV) so I actually can tape it at work. So in fact I have a VCR in my office whose sole job is to tape the Colbert Report so I can bring it home and watch it with the sweetie. Colbert recently was interviewed on the public radio show “City Arts & Lectures” and you can hear/download the hilarious hour here. Do it! Now!

Commercial nuclear power has increasingly been in the news lately. Westinghouse has received various approvals from the NRC for its new “advanced” design, Toshiba’s trying to get a small reactor going in Alaska, and general oil supply issues have brought nuclear back to the table again. It’s been nearly 30 years since Three Mile Island, 20 years since Chernobyl, and Americans’ fear of all things nuclear is starting to fade. We’ll probably see new licenses in the next year and construction of new reactors starting before the decade is out.

So I figured I might as well go ahead and get my position down on paper, because people have asked about it in the past.

I spent a few years working in nuclear power plants all over the country. I went into the industry agnostic about nuclear, and came out against it.

The reason I ended up against it is that I found that about 90% of the workers inside really had no idea what they were doing. About 10% of the workers did understand the technology that they were responsible for, and that 10% was feverishly running around trying to correct the mistakes of the 90%.

I felt that I was one of those 10%. Specifically, I would review the results of maintenance work that others had done days earlier and find that it had been done wrong (e.g. “oh crap, his analysis is wrong, that equipment is about to fail”). Faced with a huge number of these situations, I’d have to pick my battles about which equipment to send a crew in again to rework. Or spend even more time and rework it myself. Some problems I just had to let go.

Of course, you see incompetence like this in any industry or workplace, but in nuclear energy, the worst case failure scenario is truly terrible. If you have worker incompetence at a restaurant, or phone company, or auto factory, the worst case failure is far more limited in the damage that it does. And of course these failures happen every day, but hardly ever make the news.

Now, on the other side of the table you’ve got the massive potential of nuclear energy, which of course was originally “clean*, plentiful energy too cheap to meter”. So you’ve got a huge risk and a huge reward, and in the middle you have human beings running the enterprise, and therein is the problem: human nature. It’s human to be incompetent, have nepotism in the workplace, be laggard in firing poor workers, have lapses of memory or judgment, and so forth.

Communism held a lot of promise in its ideals of equity and efficient use of resources, but failed in the face of the inate human qualities of greed and selfishness. Nuclear power promises cheap and clean* energy, but fails in the face of the inate human quality of fallibility.

High risk and high reward, with man in the middle. I don’t trust the private sector to ever get that to work right.

Spring is approaching, and the radio tower at work is still up, so I thought maybe we’d be getting a bonus year of The Hawk Channel. Alas, last weekend The Powers That Be (TPTB) took down the large metal platform (about halfway up the 250-foot tower) that the hawks had been nesting on. I think they were trying to discourage nesting activity so that they don’t run into trouble later this spring when they get around to finally taking down the tower.

Problem is, the hawks really like that tower.

They’ve managed to wedge themselves behind one of the pieces of gear mounted on the tower — hardly as lavish a pad as the old place, but it’s still a great location location location.

Sadly, this will probably only push TPTB to get that tower down pronto. The hawks will probably find a new place to nest in the tall trees nearby, but it’ll take a couple years before the nest successfully produces chicks — first year nests usually fail, from what I’ve read.

[Chris reporting, a few days after the fact]

Woke up, got out of bed, dragged a comb across my head … Took the train across town to the main Tokyo train station, stored our suitcases and bought our airport train tickets. From there, we headed over to the Imperial Palace, which is basically an island (approximately a square mile) surrounded by a huge moat. Inside are gardens, huge walls upon walls, and somewhere in there is an imperial palace which we don’t get to see. This picture shows one of the gates through the walls. As you can see, it was raining — crappy weather characterized the last couple days of our trip. Fortunately we did have OK weather at the beginning and fantastic weather in the middle.

Took our first and only taxi ride of the entire trip back to the train station (in soooo much pain …). We had a few minutes to kill before heading to the airport, so I bought us a platform ticket to the shinkansen platforms. If I wasn’t going to get to ride a bullet train on this trip, I was at least going to see one. Saw several, coming and going, Very sleek.

Went to the airport, got on the airplane, saw CRAP movies (War Of The Worlds, Dark Water, please kill me), got home, unloaded all of the SWAG out of our suitcases.

Hey fans, Chris here. Sharon is out like a snoring light so I’ll make today’s entry. This morning we looked at our master list and planned how to spend the last day and half. After a leisurely breakfast at one of the several Starbucks look-alikes that they have here (“Excelsior Caffe”, I kid you not), we headed over to the Shibuya part of town to go look at a couple museums, some shopping districts, more fruit hunting, etc. Most destinations are closed on Monday so half the things we still wanted to see were out of consideration (like the Tobacco and Salt Museum) so we were relegated to things like the Electric Power Museum, which was pretty dull, let me tell you. Sharon wisely sat in their little library and read magazines while I spent a little while wandering the place pushing buttons and dodging elementary school kids. Then we wandered around a few shopping districts, including an encounter with a deeply subterranean Mandarake store and other nuttiness, and ended up at a gigantor department store to buy swag for the peeps back home. My wallet is an empty vessel, my soul is full. And a little damp, it rained off and on all day, sometimes very on.

A few random pictures: first, most restaurants (except for the very upscale) have wax/plastic models of their dishes on display out front. Do not trust the glisten, this is NOT real food!

A closeup of the architecture of the Meiji shrine.

An incredible parade that just popped up alongside the traffic while we were trudging down the Omote Sando in the Aoyoma district. They were doing a choreographed dance to a song that everyone seemed to know. I saw a twenty-something woman come off the sidewalk and jump right into the routine. I think it’s a song/dance that everyone knows, I don’t suppose there’s an American analogy.

Most buildings have signs indicating the businesses that are up on the non-ground floors — most restaurants are not street-level storefronts. There’s not enough storefront to go around, so you have these vertical signs, sidewalk placards (with glistening food photos or glassed in displays), carneys hollering out their restaurants offerings. This isn’t just in the cute tourist districts, this is everywhere.

This is a view of our hotel room. A sizable chunk of it. The one thing we noticed the minute we walked in for the first time (carrying suitcases) was that there were no dresser drawers or even suitcase stands. D’oh. So we improvised with upended chairs and spreading out on the narrow shelf that ran along the window. Noted: can’t take dresser drawers for granted in a Japanese hotel room. Also noted: high speed internet connection (using my laptop seen on left) was a freaking godsend. I love the internet!

The fabulous “Excelsior Caffe”, with fonting, color hues and store layout details to make it look remarkably like a Starbucks; close enough that a Japanese person not familiar with English or Latin characters might not even notice the difference. There was also a “New Yorker” coffee chain doing the same thing. I spent more time in Starbucks-lookalikes in a week in Tokyo than I’ve spent in my entire life in the US (read: none).

The surely-incredible Tobacco and Salt Museum, sadly closed on Mondays.

Wacky architecture.

We have a friend (hi Mark!) who draws for Marvel, and we were trying to find some Spiderman comics (with Japanese translations) that had his art work to bring home. On Monday we stumbled across an entire Spiderman store, closed. Picture taken through front door — flashback is from the mirror at the back of store; mirror’s are used widely to make spaces look bigger.

After a respite at the hotel, we had a fabulous final-night dinner at a well-regarded restaurant 50 stories up a nearby building (note: not revolving). One of the dishes we had was garlic rice. It was served with the papery covering of the garlic on top and it was so hot the papery sheaves were quivering and dancing around on the rice. The server then stirred them into the dish. An amazing presentation.

Now we’re just getting some rest in preparation for the long day tomorrow — a little more sightseeing then on to the airport for the 13 hour flight home to Atlanta’s spectacular fall weather and regular life again.

[updated with pictures and more commentary on 23-Oct]

We’ve been doing all sorts of things, but we both got colds and have been doing it all verrryy slowlllyy. So, the condensed version of our last two days: Went to Ikebukuro and spent half of the day there getting planned tattoos (me, not Chris). Went to a mall with used and new manga/anime/gashepon stuff (these pics are just of ONE of the gashepon stores, about 1/20th of the entire place). Completely overwhelming and geeky.

Went to Harajuku looking for the “fruits” girls who dress up in costumes and parade around. It was a bust! It was raining and there just weren’t many girls there. There were some, but not en mass. Boo hoo. All the swank fashion stores are there though: Chanel, Louis Vitton, D&G, etc.

We trekked out to Meguro to see the Parasite Museum. It was so “1960’s educational film” and none of it was translated into English. The pic shows an example of a 30 foot tapeworm found in some poor guy’s stomach. Although the museum appeared to be targeting public health issues, the audience was young hipsters looking for gross stuff (and the indifferent and unsupervised school kids which seem to infest all museums in Japan).

Oh and shrine, shrine, temple, shrine. And a parade.

Random pics: