On ‘Drive’ and Los Angeles 03/09/2012
Posted by Vaughn in Art, Editorial, Film, Global, Media.Tags: Drive, Los Angeles, Nicolas Winding Refn
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2011′S DRIVE was as much about the look and feel of modern Los Angeles as it was about a quiet, young stunt driver and part-time mechanic with a good heart, stuck in an inescapable devolving life unwillingly tied to violence and criminal enterprise. The film’s title sequence and soundtrack painted the city romantically and in an emotive, etherial manner reminiscent of the Los Angeles in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and the Tokyo of Katsuhiro Otomo in Akira. It was somewhat of a departure from the expected by Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn, which historically has tended to see other directors portray the City of Angels as a festering cesspool, and largely a creation of its Hollywood subterfuge and post-World War II boom development cycle, with a critical mass of sad lives beneath California’s golden sun and haze.
“A Real Hero,” College featuring Electric Youth, Drive
And maybe that is true for the city — possessing a critical mass of sad, broken lives — as it is anywhere, or perhaps a bit more. But overwhelmingly, that has been a pet of and vehicle for directors to transport viewers to a land of broken dreams and terrible misfortune, such as what is currently imagined in Michael Mann’s and H.B.O.’s serial drama of cinematic quality, Luck. (Or the classic Chinatown and the odd, Mulholland Drive.) While all of these films which have Los Angeles as a main character — and not merely as a setting — and a complete environ that influences the story in many ways, tend to deal with the underbelly of life and crime within a rubric and genre known as film noir, unlike them, however, Drive doesn’t seem to fault the city.
Refn skillfully captures its balance of urban and exurban landscapes and nature, even pivoting much of our perception of the main character’s sensitivity on it, by way of his excursion with a potential love interest and her son through the empty concrete canal of the Los Angeles’ river to a secluded brook. Refn also uses the emptiness of the night-time Los Angeles streets; a familiar and relevant scene so apparent to anyone who has driven the city any time after 2 a.m., to show its serenity, before his juxtaposing with adrenalin-dumping scenes.
Further, the soundtrack and musical score, produced by Cliff Martinez, seems to echo much of modern Los Angeles and its love for synthesized music elements, articulated in the younger communities of the city and the dreamy, hazy, pop and nostalgia for the contemporary found in the Angeleno music since even the Beach Boys. The standouts: “A Real Hero” by College featuring Electric Youth (above), “Nightcall” by Kavinsky and Lovefoxxx, and the rest of the score by Martinez, find their way into your bloodstream and imagination, and perfectly yaw-and-pitch the varying moods of the film.
‘Freakonomics’ on Cheating Enviornments 11/17/2011
Posted by Vaughn in Editorial, Film, Global, Media, The Great Recession.Tags: Books, Cheating, Economics, Freakonomics, Japan, Sumo Wrestling
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Photo Credit: Dr. Lakra
THE 2005 BOOK FREAKONOMICS was a resounding hit. The authors, Steven Levitt, a University of Chicago economist, and Stephen J. Dubner, a New York Times’ journalist, looked to explain the world through economics and the lens of the transactions that govern daily lives. The project eventually spawned a film (and blog) in 2010, where various directors were enlisted to explore sections of the original book. In one of the more salient moments of the film, the section entitled “Pure Corruption,” written by Peter Bull and directed by Alex Gibney of Taxi to the Darkside, the authors relay a case study concerning how the perception of “purity” in environments, such as those in Japan and its cultural mores, facilitates the cloaking of cheating.
A philosophical cornerstone of Japanese society is the ideal of honor, promoted by the nation’s dominant religion, Shinto. This permeates any discussion of corruption in Japan: from individuals’ motivations to how it becomes systemic. But Shinto’s principle of honor has helped the country consistently rate among the lowest across nations in measures of corruption. [Japan scored an "8" this year according to Transparency International's 2011 Corruption Perceptions Index on a scale of ten, with "10" meaning "very clean" and "0" meaning "very corrupt."] So while Japanese society is not considered corrupt, there are, nonetheless, warrens which exploit that reality; specifically those elements walled-off from everyday society, say like those activities of the yakuza.
In Japan, Sumo is sacrosanct. This is partly based on the facade of its entwine with Shinto, as even referees are presented as Shinto priests, but also it is the effect of its time-honored legacy and weave into the nation’s culture. Sumo’s rituals date back thousands of years, which further helps in representing the ideal of Sumo’s honorability in the society. All of this provides it with an air of infallibility, an environment where Sumo’s propriety is seen as beyond suspicion. The belief is that it shows no taints and therefore has no impurities.
Yet there is a great incentive to cheat because of the money, the high-stakes gambling surrounding the game and the reputation conferred to its wrestlers at the highest levels. The Japanese public learned this in 1996 when two whistle-blowers, one of whom was a former stable master — stables are Sumo’s training communities, where young wrestlers begin their rise through the ranks and live together under austere (and many times physically abusive) conditions — who penned a tell-all book that included names, allegations of match-throwing, and which was re-printed in a series by the Shukan Post, exposed the dark-side of Sumo. Professional Sumo’s governing body, the Japanese Sumo Association, responded to the allegations by claiming that the tell-all and its corresponding Shukan Post series were outright fabrications, and it roundly dismissed the printed accusations as the words of a vengeful man seeking publicity and compensation.
In response, the whistle-blowers decided to hold a press-conference. However, two weeks before that press-conference, both men mysteriously died on the same day, in the same hospital, from the same unidentified respiratory problem. Despite these extraordinarily odd circumstances surrounding the men and their demise, the culture of honor and its appearance of pervasiveness in Japanese life, led to an absence of inquiry by either of the deceased’s families or the media. Everyone from the families to the nation’s press, simply accepted the police’s line on the matter, who said: “It’s a very good hospital, and there were no grounds for suspicion.”
But when another young, in-training “rikshi” — directly translated to “strong man,” but means wrestler — passed in what was initially explained as an accident, but whose body displayed visible signs of assault and mutilation; suspicions were again aroused throughout the country concerning the propriety of Sumo. It was found, only after an autopsy requested by the wrestler’s father, that the young man was beaten by baseball bats and burned with cigarettes by fellow rikshi, whom he had trained with. The wrestlers were ordered by their stable master to punish him for attempting to run away. The incident sent a shock-wave which rippled through Japanese society, and the way in which murders were being investigated by the nation’s law enforcement, came to the fore as a national issue and an example of an overly-imbalanced separation between Japan’s dueling concepts of “tatamae,” meaning the perceived truth or appearance of propriety, and the “honnae,” or the hidden truth. It is a Shinto philosophy that looks to sometimes explain moral dysfunctions.
This separation between the two versions of truth was so wide that it led Tokyo police investigator, Hiromasa Saikawa, to publicly question the procedures involved in conducting murder investigations, in the wake of the wrestler’s death; particularly in a country where law enforcement regularly boasts an arrest rate greater than 96 percent. According to Saikawa, in Japan when there is a suspicion of murder, the police look to identify a killer, much like any country with an honest law and order system. But unlike in other nations, it is only if authorities can identify a suspect, do cops initiate a murder case. If there is no identifiable suspect, then a case can potentially be closed and ruled as an “abandoned body.” This obviously manipulates Japan’s crime statistics in such a manner, that it can’t ever accurately be known what the nation’s true murder rate is, or the police’s ability to solve such crimes. Hiromasa Saikawa officially resigned the Tokyo police force in protest of this investigative procedure.
This kind of numbers rigging which governs Japan’s police work is an important microcosm as it is a cultural red-flag that ties to Sumo, beyond those mysterious deaths that surround the sport. As in Sumo, as long as law enforcement kept its appearances and produced great numbers, then there was no need to question their propriety, regardless of schemes, because the “tatamae” — in this case, the widely-held perception of cops’ honorable intent to solve crimes – was met. But the data in Sumo, much like that of Japan’s murder arrest figures, tells a story about (another kind of) numbers scheming: A systemic preponderance of corruption known as “yaocho,” meaning match-fixing; which was long suspected, but still seen as unlikely by many.
To Japan’s outsiders Sumo is a sport and an important pastime, but to its wrestlers it is a lifestyle and cherished community. Wrestlers live in a closed society, which they were raised in since they began training as youngsters. This fact, along with the sport being treated as above suspicion, only motivates cheating given Sumo’s system, which operates on a hierarchy of ranks and money distributed to all its wrestlers, at every level; with every match promising a certain amount as one travels up this hierarchy, known as the “pyramid.” The best parts of life as a wrestler, like anywhere else, accumulate at the top, and for only wrestlers with the best records. However, there is but a minimum threshold where this “good life” is bestowed, and so individuals’ records matter, only to a certain point; in the sense that a better life is dispensed upon one’s performance, determined by meeting that threshold.
In professional Sumo tournaments wrestlers wrestle one match per day for 15 days, with the eighth win of a wrestler being critical in the schedule, because it produces a winning record (say of 8-7), and allows him to advance and move up in rank. Otherwise, a wrestler could drop from the sekitori class, the highest division of Sumo, that is made up of the juryo and makuuci divisions, and where the most prestige and privileges in Sumo lie. The difference in half a rank in professional matches can be as much as (the equivalent of) $5,000 USD a month. As wrestlers attempt to rise through the stable system from the “jonokuchi,” the lowest rung, to the “makuuchi,” the sport’s highest individual realm; wrestlers inevitably become friends and begin to understand that a blind-spot in the organizational architecture, is that the ranking system affords a better life for some, at no cost to others, at certain points. Since it is a system based on honor and trust; that all wrestlers will put up an honest fight.
This produces collusion that allows for many wrestlers to essentially win outside of the game, by being rewarded the fruits of victory liberally, with the assistance of their sympathizing buddies, who they’ve fostered relationships with since they were in the stables. The authors found that at the threshold between the seventh and eighth wins, when a rikshi is entering his final fifteenth do-or-die match between him and an opponent who has already gained the all-important eighth win, the wrestler who needs the eighth win, won an astounding 75 percent of the time; an incredibly odd deviation from the normal odds of it occurring.
It turns out that when two wrestlers meet and one has already secured his place within the pyramid, it is a common practice that he will usually help the other wrestler who needs the win more, and he will literally take “the fall,” hoping at some point the favor will be paid forward. But when those two wrestlers happen to meet again, the wrestler with the better record, originally, going into that deciding fifteenth match, wins a resounding amount of time according to the same data. It’s a built in incentive, and is the result of the tight-knit bonds of the wrestlers’ smaller society, and the presumption of purity in Sumo. Moreover, it keeps earnings high for everyone and fosters Sumo, as this money trickles down the pyramid.
What the authors conclude from looking at the case study of “pure environments,” is that presumptions of honorable intent can produce systemic fraud, as in the case of the most recent American financial mess: The presumption of free-markets and good, honorable stewards such as Alan Greenspan or to a lesser degree, financial agents like Bernie Madoff; men who held pristine reputations in the finance world, led to the wide moral failure in the system to go unnoticed. The presumption of honest and fair-play throughout finance created by supposed oversight boards and transparency regulations and trumpeted by the examples of those men, averted attention and reserved our suspicions for far too long.
‘The Ascent of Money’ 09/20/2011
Posted by Vaughn in Film, Global, Media, The Great Recession.Tags: Books, Documentaries, Economics, Niall Fergusuon, The Ascent of Money, The Great Recession
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THE COMPLEX instruments of the financial sector that helped to deepen the trough in Bush no. 43′s economy, and then fully bottomed it out during the last year of his second term, made for a shocked global financial market in late 2008. (And for an absolutely apocalyptic one, nationally.) Nearly four years later, this is still the case, with the Eurozone in crisis and Greece and Italy, particularly on the brink, while America’s “real unemployment” — an indices which combines those who looked for work and didn’t find it in the past year, with those who are underemployed, or known as “marginally attached”– hovers at around 16 percent [Bureau of Labor and Statistics].
Those grim facts everybody knows, and particularly as the 2012 campaign season heats up, candidates who are tirelessly campaigning will inevitably flog the dead economic horse over and over to make sure it is not forgotten, even with or without the proper credentials nor the grasp to talk about economic matters otherwise. (Sup, Michelle Bachman and Herman Cain!?!?) But answering just how we got here is the harder part, since it seemed to sneak up on us — except for this revered guy — like it was that of the highest level order of ninjas. Just how did “money” become about derivatives and credit default swaps (C.D.S.), high frequency trading (H.F.T.) or “algo-trading,” which looks to maximize profit, even at the cost of international economic stability; and what were the conditions that made for a system where mortgage companies lent to the risky and then, essentially, dangerously bet against those very loans failing? ( And, oh, did they ever fail.)
Oxbridge/Harvard professor Niall Ferguson‘s 2009 book and its companion documentary, The Ascent of Money, both of which were somewhat criticized for their organization, digressions geared towards the already informed, sometimes topical coverage, the overlooking of competing historical viewpoints and which left some feeling like both endeavors were superficial examinations, especially considering Ferguson’s past meaty efforts; did actually yield a documentary that was a relatively good primer on an ambitious, expansive, complex subject. (I’ve not read the book.) The documentary, though it spans four hours — later bulked up to five hours – criss-crossing the globe to explore how money came to be and then morph to what it is now, in all its multiple forms (e.g. credit, bonds, real estate, et cetera), is quite digestible and interesting. And Ferguson is able to pepper in related historical elements that enlighten a greater understanding of the world beyond money, just as he did in covering the early lending practices of Venice, and which ultimately leads to some explanation as to how some of the more pernicious forms of anti-semitism and the accompanied stereotypes concerning money (wrongly) came to be.
Though he never thoroughly connects the dots on the matter, possibly finding it best left unacknowledged, since it is more a sociological matter, or it is presumed to be already known and unnecessary, Ferguson explains that it was an established practice in Venice to import Jewish bankers and use them as lenders, since in Catholicism lending money with interest to other Catholics was deemed a sin by the papacy, but there were no such rules of any kind in Judaism. These same, imported Jewish bankers were then cordoned off in an area of Venice known as the ghetto (Italian for “armed boundary”), which left the bankers treated as an entity separate from the city’s population.
This practice obviously would create spite in some local Venetian’s eyes as these bankers became rich by way of the practice (and the Jewish community being largely limited to the banking trade), and the resulting limited interactions of some Catholic Venetians to the only Jewish people in their town — and only so when they were in their most desperate financial times — possibly produced an enduring animus that lives on in the racist banking conspiracies of today and the denigrations: “blood-sucking,” or “blood-suckers,” coupled with “Jews”; both ugly invective, disparagements still heard today, and which still refer to lending practices.
While this is a digression, and not particularly important to the story of money, other than it is an early example of usury (referring to the original/antiquated meaning of the word, and not what is now considered loan-sharking), and how it influenced the world and still influences everything today, from the rise and fall of nations to the globalization of markets and the invention of commodities trading; it is still important, even if Ferguson doesn’t fully touch on its non-economic boundaries. And further, it is an example of how The Ascent of Money illuminates how the story of money is as Ferguson implies, not just a story about financial history, but really the back-story of human history, saying, “the ascent of money has been an indispensable part of the ascent of man.”
Watch the first four episodes of The Ascent of Money (above) or [Here]
Watch the update “Episode 6″ explaining the meltdown [Here]
‘The Anderson Platoon’ 05/13/2011
Posted by Vaughn in Conflict, Defense, Film, Global, Media, Politics.add a comment
COUNTER-INSURGENT WARS are as hellish as conventional ones. (Perhaps more.) Everything is much more insidious in such conflicts: the enemy is more covert, more aware and exploiting of its surroundings, and much more able and willing to use local citizens to meet its ends. The farmer by day is now a soldier at night, the young man or young woman, obedient and sensitive, is just a personal and familial vendetta and a rifle away from being dangerous. All of which is exacerbated, motivated and inflamed at times, by the mere presence of foreign soldiers in a country, and the unintended consequences of interactions between those citizens and those soldiers. And that was Vietnam.
French director, Pierre Schoendorffer — originally known for his gritty and realistic 1965, French war film on the country’s Indochina excursion, La 317e Section, (clip here), which won a Cannes Festival prize for “best screenplay” — was a war correspondent for the national television station, and was originally embedded with forces in Vietnam’s infamous Dien Bien Phu in 1954, documenting and reporting on the French Army’s struggles there. But those reels and his intended full documentary never saw the light of day, as the material was confiscated upon his surrender alongside the French Army to the Viet Cong.
Photo Credit: EBONY
Following his work with French military forces and their departure from the region, and just months after he finished La 317e Section, Schoendorffer was given a second opportunity to finish his initial 1954 project, that immersive documentary following a military infantry unit in Vietnam, which had been confiscated. Only this time, he’d be swapping the French Army for the United States Army; as the American side of the war was beginning to escalate in the wake of France’s defeat and the Second Indochina War was set to fully ignite.
From September to October of 1965, he worked in a two-man crew, on a documentary following a rather unique bunch: the U.S. Army’s 12th Calvary, Bravo Company, 1st Platoon. The group was unique, precisely because of who was leading it, a 24-year-old, black West Point graduate by the name of Joseph Anderson. For six weeks, Schoendorffer followed Anderson’s unit on seek-and-destroy missions, where soldiers would wade through the dense jungle looking for an enemy to fight, and faithfully executing the cornerstone of the United States’ Vietnam strategy. The Anderson Platoon won the 1968 Academy Award in the documentary category. It is an honest meditation on the monotony, tremulous fear and odd experience of war.
‘The International’ Gugenheim Shootout 10/08/2010
Posted by Vaughn in Film, Global, Media.add a comment
2009′s THE INTERNATIONAL‘s (somewhat true-to-life) plot about a large international banking institution’s conspiracy to broker arms deals for mendacious and nefarious governments, and is complicit in the committing of murders, through war — that partially based itself on the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (B.C.C.I.) scandal of the early 1990s, as the bank became a shell operation for joint Pakistani intelligence and Western government clandestine operations at some point prior, the film even uses a modified form of the their acronym, employing: “I.B.C.C.” – being exposed by an Interpol agent and an American federal attorney aside; the flick still tends to stick out in the mind, for me, more so because of the shootout that everyone talked about.
Set in the dynamic surround of the Gugenheim, on multiple floor levels, the gun battle was among the best we’ve seen in the decade, and perhaps even longer. (Admittedly, my short recall of famous gun battles in film boil down to Heat and The Way of the Gun.) While I thought highly of the picture after seeing it in theatres just after its release, the exact details of its conspiracy and the consequences that conspiracy had wrought, creating a series of events that led to the dramatic shootout, seems to have faded in the mind. And maybe that is a testament to the actual scene? Since if there were no big-time pyrotechnics ending and the conspiracy thriller had gone more the route of Three Days of the Condor or some other similarly-minded paranoia-thriller and lacked a Hollywood “big-bang,” the picture might’ve fallen somewhat flat and read as overly cerebral in this era with audiences who expect much more than a subtle yet well-written climax.
On ‘Chiefs’ 09/19/2010
Posted by Vaughn in Film, Media, Reviews.add a comment
I’VE been developing a perhaps misguided but devout belief that basketball’s culture — its general milieu — is the most sociologically observant, tolerant (though taken with a grain of salt, since it is perhaps as homophobic as any other male-dominated arena), and socially liberal of all the four major sports. (As anecdotal evidence: women’s college hoops is perhaps the most prominent and male supported of any female sport.) For one, basketball, though started in the environs of the Illinois countryside by Dr. Nasmith, has become a sport almost wholly linked to the urban experience due to the role-modeling of cohorts of basketball families and the urban planning of many populous cities who created public parks that included basketball courts as central to their arrangement, and the fact that the game is thusly cheaper than baseball or football, comparatively, both of which require more persons and equipment to play with any kind of intensity.
Basketball, particularly in cities, only requires a ball, and you can essentially become above average in the sport just by practicing all by your lonesome. But I believe the game truly excels because it is inclusive in every way, from cost to numbers needed to play: any number of multiples can play through the playground game “21,” and so it is in some sense perfect for the urban environment. And even if a city-dweller doesn’t have a basketball court planned and erected near their community; with just a bit of industriousness one could in short notice produce a makeshift basketball court as the now famous images of bottomed-out, milk-crate hoops hanging off light-poles and telephone-poles, implies.
These sociological factors in concert have made basketball a draw for particular demographics: the young, urban and generally liberal — since urbanism tends to create socially liberal dispositions — at every level. While, yes, you can still have a Bobby Knight and/or Rick Majerus, a man who once infamously said that he wouldn’t recruit players who wore earrings, and then there were the Adolph Rupps of the world, who were unapologetic bigots, modern basketball has been dominated by its awareness that its players often have come from sometimes very difficult and different backgrounds, and to be successful as a coach, general manager, or league official of almost any kind at any level, it is necessary to have an understanding of this.
This is the backdrop of the basketball documentary Chiefs, which followed a perennial high-school championship basketball team with a legendary coach, who all hail from a reservation in Wyoming, for two seasons of state title contention in the late 1990s. While the film was about the young boys’ love of the game and their First Nation’s community’s commitment and sense of pride about their squad, it was also a peer into their family lives and the cloister and pitfalls of life on the reservation; often echoing the same struggles of the urban ghetto, and it makes the film a fitting bookend to the seminal basketball documentary that every hoops’ doc is ultimately compared to, Hoop Dreams. In both films, the shared story of a hard-scrabbled existence for some truly great prep-level players is exposed for all the world to see, and they are only separated by geography. The reservations’ problems were what as seen as the characteristically ”urban problems” of Chicago in Hoop Dreams.
Throughout the nearly two hours, one is also given the requisite run-down of generational plight, the cycle of poverty, alcoholism and drug abuse, and the historically low expectations that has befallen the Native American community as a result of a “separate and unequal” program that has ravaged the lot of several of their generations of potential human capital. The film particularly tracks a young star swingman during his senior year and his year following graduation, where he experiences the personal turmoil of his existence — through some fault of his own — and his decisions concerning his future, with the expectation that he is one of the kids who could “make it out” of the situation that his people have been mired in.
The film also simultaneously follows another subject, a model citizen, who provides the counterbalance to the oft-told story of local reservation kids not seizing and mobilizing the opportunities they are given. Both stories are essential to the documentary and produce an ethnographic understanding of what it means to be a young male on a reservation, who is looked to as the pride of the community because of its rich basketball legacy, and who is saddled with great expectations. Chiefs was powerful because its lens was the game that is so important to these young men, but its message was more about what the game could particularly do for them in regards to their social mobility, if they chose to exploit it.
On ‘Dreamland’ and Her Tentacles 05/07/2010
Posted by Vaughn in Aviation, Film, Global, Journalism.comments closed
Photo Credit: Wikipedia
Area 51. It’s the most famous military institution in the world that doesn’t officially exist. If it did, it would be found about 100 miles outside Las Vegas in Nevada’s high desert, tucked between an Air Force base and an abandoned nuclear testing ground.
Then again, maybe not– the U.S. government refuses to say. You can’t drive anywhere close to it, and until recently, the airspace overhead was restricted–all the way to outer space. Any mention of Area 51 gets redacted from official documents, even those that have been declassified for decades.
“The Road to Area 51,” Los Angeles Times
I HAD known of what is collectively identified as “Area 51″ in the pop-mind, since about the time that I was 9-years-old. It wasn’t that much of a secret. Back in the early 1990s it was often mentioned in part — since Area 51 can and should be thought of as a collection of several Nevada test sites, separated by only a few miles and all perhaps connected by tunnels — in books on the now-retired F-117 “Nighthawk,” as Tonopah Test Range. It was the place where “Skunk Works,” a then semi-secret division of the Lockheed company, now Lockheed-Martin, the United States’ go-to for all things clandestine-aircraft related, often operating in my own So. Cal backyard, would iron-out the kinks in its projects, as they had done with the U-2 in the 1950s, the SR-71 in the 1960s and the F-117 in the 1980s, when they weren’t using Los Angeles’s High Desert of Palmdale. Tonopah was just a short plane ride away (about 70 miles) from Area 51 and it was contained in the same, desolate space as “Groom Dry Lake,” the geographic name of the basin that houses the most well-known, secret anchor of a network of government-ran Nevada test sites.
Over the years, Tonopah or “Groom Dry Lake,” held a pull for me, as it does for those of the more tech-geeky conspiratorial quadrants of the world. But its magnetism wasn’t because of the mysteries and the possibilities of technology yet comprehensible, or for the more fringe out there, “reverse-engineered,” to become man-operated alien technology. For me, it was simply about what was known: there was a remote place in-between California’s defense aircraft hothouse and the rest of the country, where anything that couldn’t be reasonably flown with some level of secrecy in the skies over the sprawling megalopolis of So.Cal, could be transported to a nearby geographic wasteland in Nevada and ran without much notice, just hours away, and near a city where hustlers of all kinds drank, gambled, traded services and caroused; distracted by the lights and debauch of Las Vegas. At one point, I even had a non-immediate family member supposedly slated to work there. (“Supposedly” is in italics, as to offer all kinds of protections. The Internet is permanent and can haunt a younger person’s life.)
Looking back, its location was fitting. After all, everything about Las Vegas has this kind of hazy, Mazzy Star — “Fade Into You” video — feel to it. The area, though desolate outside of its pockets of commerce and tourism, is somewhat dreamy (once you get over its hellish climatic conditions), and is an actual desert oasis where mirages, fantasies and reality have entwined. It is of no insignificant coincidence then, that Area 51 is also known as “Dreamland.” A place where all things become possible in the popular mind and defense mind, from anti-gravity craft, to an entire squadron of grifted Russian jets.
*
Area 51 became something else altogether by the time I was in my teens and Will Smith was making his run on the summer movie box-office. Whether it was in Independence Day or the Men in Black franchise, there was always an allusion to what it had become to many. The place as a Hollywood trope was a wink and a nudge to the growing global conspiracy believers who asserted America had somehow cornered the market on exotic technology that did not belong to humans. By the time I was in, I believe, the 10th grade, there was even a first-person-shooter video game titled Area 51, where you’d blast aliens who once worked with government scientists, but had since overrun the base. But how did this very important base, perhaps the most important, become this? A ceaseless, cultural joke, touchstone and manifestation of a somewhat honest fear in the population of a Machiavellian government plot to secure the perpetual domination of its empire through technology light years ahead of humans’ knowledge, as well as the end-all-be-all of (intelligent) extraterrestrial belief, for some sects? It started in another desert town.
It isn’t surprising, but its mythology started with Roswell, New Mexico — which symmetrically also has long cultural tentacles, just ask Collin Hanks and Sheri Appleby — and a case that has just as long a touch on the cultural pulse, even leading to a television series of the town’s name. The now infamous “Roswell incident” is part and parcel to Area 51, in that if one subscribes to the well-known report of a U.F.O. crash there some 60 years ago, then certainly, the supposed anthropomorphic bodies that were drug from the wreckage had to be sent somewhere for observation, debriefing, scientific inquiry; what have you. Area 51 became that “somewhere,” for some. (If not another based named Wright-Patterson, home of the Air Force’s “Foreign Technologies Division.”)
Whether that long-told story is all true, half-true or not true at all, (I am not making a call either way); the truth has been ultimately obfuscated by time, denials, myths and the admonition of the elite, (then) “Army Air Force” unit at Walker Army Air Force Base, Roswell, New Mexico; the 509th Bomb Wing. It was the very same group who introduced the world to the Enola Gay and the first atomic weapons delivery, who divulged that they did, in fact, recover a spacy, extraterrestrial craft and unearthly bodies, to the local Roswell newspaper. And the admonition was made by none other than Walker Army Air Force Base’s own information officer. This has given Area 51 its one sliver of mythological record, though perhaps in a round-about-way, that ties it to all the possibly imaginary things that have so fruitfully latched to it.
Chances are we will never, ever know the truth of Area 51 and suss out its reality from the urban myths that have defined its existence to so many, and which have led to a number of theories about how American “ingenuity” came to shape the second half of the 20th century. It is to the point that I am buying into a new meta-idea, that the base — while still a semi-secret nerve center for our military-industrial complex — is now really a clever disinformation campaign for even more secretive locations that will never, ever be known. Admittedly, while this is entirely far-fetched, it is no more far-fetched than what is already thought about the base, and it is actually consistent with how such a campaign would work.
For example, if you think that the somewhat-secret military technology you see now is impressive, remember that most of those programs’ development cycles are in the 20-25 year range; from concept, operational fruition, to completely verifiable to the public. Whatever is seen and acknowledged now, is just a tease for an even larger movie, so to speak. And so “Dreamland” being so very public, is truly the best case for an installation greater in import and scope, and even more remote. But one can now at least read about “Dreamland” in a historical albeit, gap-laden, superficial way, and you should, as it has been one of the sites where the Cold War may have turned, and which is still often talked of unofficially.
The Los Angeles Times had recently taken a look behind the fourth wall of the mysterious installation known-but-unknown-officially, culling a cadre of former Area 51 employees from its early days, for interviews on the experience of working there and their shuttling between family life in the wide-open American West to the austere existence at one of the most-secret elements of the Cold War, American defense machine. The piece was featured in L.A. Times Magazine last year and it is the work of Annie Jacobsen, an investigative reporter and frequent contributor to the Bill Buckley introduced, “intellectually minded,” conservative periodical, National Review, primarily reporting on matters of military intelligence.
Read Los Angeles Times Magazine’s “The Road to Area 51″ [Here]
* Lockheed’s Advanced Developments Program “Skunk Works” logo, photo via Wikipedia.
The First Public Embroglio of Allen Iverson 04/25/2010
Posted by Vaughn in Editorial, Film, Journalism, Media, Reviews, Television.Tags: 30 for 30 Documentaries, Allen Iverson, E.S.P.N.
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Photo Credit: Daily Press
AT least half of the (listed): 6’0, 165 pound, shooting guard, now-prematurely-retried-for-reasons-of-pride, Allen Iverson’s legacy; is wrapped in an everlasting bifurcating air of controversy. It is to the point that saying the formerly great gunner’s name in a sports culture so toxic that even a sanguine personality like Magic Johnson’s would’ve found it hard to survive all the slings and arrows from the fans and media, will generally conjure ill-will or a child-like fascination with his on-court ability and lasting cultural impact of cornrows, shooting sleeves, a go-to crossover, [at least] three pairs of classic Reeboks, and an air of unabiding strong-mindedness. Any middle ground between an ill-will towards him or “fascination” with his game, exists merely on the margins.
How this came to be is partly on Allen Iverson, and as mentioned, partly on the culture that has spawned around sports since the 1990s and its every-minute-of-play examined, every rumor explored, dissecting radio stations, filled with primarily white patronages who provide a seemingly only petulant, one-sided voice to fans and further charge the environment with their sometimes venomous talking heads. (There is in some sense a parallel in this environment to right-wing radio, with figures who are purposefully spiteful by trade.) It is a place where the feeling among them is: “We can go hard at them (pro-athletes), because they’re all arrogant, undeserving millionaires.” Iverson is a victim of this, in a small way. But the role Allen Iverson has played in his sometimes unflattering perception, feeding into the nasty elements of the sports environment megalith, should not be underplayed, as it partly stems all the way back to his roots and an incident he experienced as a kid in Hampton, Virgina, where he learned that he had to be as hard as the times he lived early on, and to always appear bulletproof.
I have been making a point to watch E.S.P.N.’s outstanding documentary series, 30 for 30, which commemorates the cable sports news network’s three decades of existence. Nearing the eve of this year’s N.B.A. playoffs, E.S.P.N. aired their latest installment, “No Crossover: The Trial of Allen Iverson.” The film by Steve James of Hoop Dreams, a native of Hampton, Virginia — the very same town that Iverson grew up in — and a man who attended the very same high school years earlier, and who is the son of a Bethel High fanatic that rooted for Iverson’s football and basketball teams passionately, was enlightening for just the Iverson sociopsychological sketch and the biographical history it chronicled. Not to mention, a hearty examination on Iverson’s unwitting effect on race relations in Hampton. But that is just one facet of the now-cemented Iverson story of being polarizing, in the publics’ mind. And Allen Iverson, “the standout athlete,” it turns out — as the documentary revealed for those who do not remember the first national headline-grabbing Iverson case was about — had pretty much always been publicly ensnared in a heated debate that split people down the lines of culture and race in some way or another, since the time he was one of the nation’s top prep athletes.
Those who remember Allen Iverson as a rookie N.B.A. phenom in the fall of 1996, following his more or less lilly-white, cross-cultural appeal and respite from negative perceptions, at the elite university Georgetown, where he performed legendarily well during his time there for John Thompson; can surely recall his obstacles towards acceptance and praise among the establishment of pro-basketball. “A.I” immediately drew fire from all angles in his first few games for being anything from too “brash” or “ignorant” of the game’s history– I still have no idea if that means he was not deferential enough, or if he genuinely was unaware of who to dole out heaps of respect to according to the established league pecking order — to being the physical manifestation of the beginnings of David Stern’s death rattle as the commissioner of a less-threatening league than the coke-blown, “too black for T.V.,” thugged-out one that he inherited in the 1980s.
But years before donning Philadelphia 76ers’ red and blue, as a Virginia prep-level legend in football and basketball, the young man known as “Bubba Chuck” to the denizens of Hampton, found himself and some friends notoriously caught on videotape in Allen’s crucial senior year of high school; where they unfortunately participated in a Valentine’s Day bowling alley brawl that pitted white residents of the community against black residents of the community on the innocence of Allen Iverson, a person some within the Southern, coastal community had begun to believe was given too much, already. The video that was dug up for James’ doc clearly shows Iverson, but it is also unclear in the video that he did what he was accused of, hitting another person with a chair; a young, white girl, at that. (The racial overtones already then-overpowering, as it still would be now, and far before the gender of the alleged victim of Iverson was brought to public record, and which only inflamed the situation.)
Photo Credit: E.S.P.N. 30 for 30
What set forth following the brawl, which began according to some due to the slinging of a racial epithet by whites who had confronted Iverson and his friends, could have derailed the promising career of the 17-year-old, in 1993. That year Iverson was a consensus top basketball recruit in the nation and a Pied Piper for the depressed Hampton community and particularly so for its black residents, many mired in a restless situation of poverty. According to Steve James, Iverson was already on the level of a Muhammad Ali figure for Hampton by the time he found himself in quite a bit of trouble, especially for a Southern town, even if it was the more progressive 1990s. In the words of James: “The Allen Iverson case in Hampton was O.J. before O.J.” The town was going to attach years of prejudice and tension to the trial, from both sides of its divide, and marry it to a newer one, that of: “the over-privileged athlete.”
The documentary poignantly outlines the dramatic racial divisions among the faction-ed communities of Hampton and how the event also played into the various racial and local politics of the town. There is even an implication of a high school rivalry affecting the judicial decisions in the case. Steve James goes on to make mention of the clear delineations between where he was raised — a more middle to upper middle class section of the town, though his father, integral to the story and its underlying sympathy for Iverson-the-athlete, owned a tile company for several decades in the “black” area of Hampton — and the city’s more “redneck” areas, in his words, it seems to be defined by, though he was less familiar with.
While the ground, granular truth of the case is never revealed, Iverson and his friends did end up doing time for the charges leveled against them and Iverson was harshly sentenced to 15 years, which some believed was for him to be “made an example of,” for his involvement in a bowling alley matter that produced minor injuries, and despite near-overwhelming support for Iverson by Hampton’s community activists and black leaders of the time, as well as extremely shoddy evidence. Though, it turned out to only be four months of served time for Iverson, after he was granted clemency by Virginia governor Doug Wilder and the Virgina Court of Appeals overturned the entire case for insufficient evidence.
Whether what Iverson and his friends experienced because of that night, all inevitably spending time in some kind of correctional facility, was justice, though, is left out in the ether by James. What is known is that the prejudices (on both sides), and the narrative that surrounded the “Iverson case,” which even drew the attention of C.B.S.’s Tom Brokaw, had left the Hampton community ravaged by racial tension that is still unresolved 17 years after the fact. And ironically, in a racially-charged brawl, it was four young black men who were draconianly sentenced due to an obscure Virginia law — known as “maiming by mob” — which was placed on the books, post-antebellum, in order to protect people like them, a century earlier, from lynching. To his credit, Iverson has said something akin to, “Whatever I went through, I had to go through at that time,” either cryptically commenting on the incident that nearly left him to the clichéd fate of so many athletes who never make it, trapped in a ghetto, or the need for him to endure to be the me-against-everybody-ever-in-my-way person he was, and was so loved because of. And it is perhaps why, even, the young man has been given so many chances, because everyone knows the Iverson internal creed that sprouts from all of his adversity: “Make it in spite of all of this.”
On ‘In Between Days’ 10/29/2009
Posted by Vaughn in Editorial, Film, Global, Reviews.comments closed
IN all the “model-minority” code speak that seems to denigrate all “others,” while simultaneously backhandedly complimenting Asians, that seems to go on in the less nuanced parts of North American society; one thing that is often overlooked by those quick to make a monolith out of a diversity of cultures and experience, is that life as an Asian emigrant is generally very rough, just as it is for any recently immigrated population.
While it is presumed — based on recent history — that many first generation Asian immigrant youth (and even higher percentages of second and third generation Asian immigrant kids), with enough hard work and a bit of luck, end up attending the U.C. Berkeleys, Stanfords or U.C.L.A.s, if not the Ivies, and then summarily transition to relative security in middle class careers and a perceived “well-integrated” station in Western society, because that is a part of their parents’ understanding of “making it”; for most first generation immigrants, merely adjusting to the Western ways is an uphill climb.
The 2006 film, In Between Days, anecdotally examines such a world, through the eyes of a Korean girl who is new to her North American environs: estranged from her father, with a strained relationship with her mother and only one friend — a male — as her escape and sole compass in an entirely different world than the one she is accustomed to navigating. But that is where the problems just begin, as she falls in love with her friend and vies for his attention against “Westernized” Asian girls, whom he shows more interest towards. The result is a look at the personal Asian immigrant struggle in full interplay with the normal challenges of teen life, school and home.
In Between Days was a Sundance Selection Winner in 2007, and it drew much-deserved magnanimous reviews from critics and viewers. The film worked in a deliberately artistic way that conveyed the awkwardness of not only the main character’s life and personal situation, but the absolute foreign nature of everything to her and many making similar transitions to a wholly different society. It made every moment appear to be if not just some small struggle, then part of a larger, never-ending one: from the expectations of her mother, to the expectations of her friend, for her to adapt to new ways and teen rebellion.
And the film succeeds in telling the story of Aimie — the main character, a South Korean emigrant — without saying much in its dialogue. In much of the exposition, there is only but a paragraph of actual verbal interaction dispersed over the span of multiple scenes, as visuals and the situations viewers find themselves watching Aimie in, say much more: from awkward interactions with Westernized Asian girls who display their personal freedom demonstrably at a party, and their comfortability in such expressions, to the My So-Called-Life, “Angela-and-Jordan Catalano”-type angst that she feels in regards to her object of affection, Tran.
In this way, In Between Days universalizes the emigrant experience, and it helps one to both relate and care for the character of Aimie, who is given a very rough road to trudge, as the memorable scenes of her walking alone in the snow symbolically convey. In Between Days is the first feature film directed by So Young Kim, and it is a masterful debut; as the film strikes on two fronts, being both incredibly honest and very well-acted. And though it is about life as a South Korean, teenage, female emigrant, the film is wholly relatable and especially skilled in re-creating the sense of the liminality of youth and the feelings of isolation, even when with someone, or in a crowd.
A Serendipitous Encounter; ‘The Wizard’ (1989) 10/01/2009
Posted by Vaughn in Film, Gaming, Marketing, Technology.comments closed
I saw The Wizard again, over the weekend. It was a late-night, just out of a semi-catatonic state, kind of gem. Seeing that snobby, punk character “Lucas” and what was basically an extension of Fred Savage’s “Kevin” from The Wonder Years, set in the ’80s as opposed to the ’60s, and him still pre-Stanford and adulthood, was an awesome trip down memory lane. The film also reminded me of how unsophisticated I was about conspicuous consumption and blatant marketing. The flick’s products reads like a cavalcade of late ’80s latchkey youth product placement. To which, I was a hyper-proud member of that consuming class.
- 7-Eleven?
- NES and all its peripherals?
- Universal Studios?
- Nintendo Power publications?
- Vision Street Wear?
- Super Mario 3?
- The Power Glove?
