Implications of the 270 Riverside Drive Experience

As readers of this blog know well, no event is random, and no situation should be assumed to be without consequence but all of them should be analyzed and re-analyzed for their deeper meaning and for clues to our mysterious future and probable doom.

In this search for meaning in our pointless lives, sometimes the use of the Esoteric Knowledge is necessary but sometimes it is not. In this case, no esoteric knowledge is required to see our stark choices. The future is only too clear.

First review my little post about my former living conditions at 270 Riverside Drive to understand the situation. Now lets ask some questions about what living there might have meant.

At the time I was living there, I was vaguely aware of how lucky I was and that this was a situation that would be hard to recreate were it to ever go away, which inevitably it must. In part that was mixed in with my conclusion that living there also allowed me to live in Manhattan which was itself quite a blessing. But beyond that, what did it mean?

What was really going on, I conclude in retrospect, is that through an artifact of the ancient rent control laws of Manhattan, themselves left over from a more Socialist period when, briefly, the living conditions of the poor and disenfranchised were a concern, however modest, of our political elite. Through a series of lucky breaks, I had been permitted to live in a situation that I could otherwise never afford. But even more important, this was a living situation that I also did not deserve.

This is where the lower animals deserve to live

You see, in America, it is only the rich who are permitted to live in a way that their life is enhanced and ennobled. The rest of the population, by the very definition of being not-rich, are a lower animal form who are unworthy of any of this. They should live in dreary poverty, stupid stucco dingbats, or endlessly similar suburban housing, where they can pay inflated rents and mortgages, buy from chain supermarkets, and live out what is left of their so-called lives as servants of the rich.

The kind of lifestyle I had when at 270 RSD was thus completely anomalous and should not be allowed to occur and in general it does not. My choices now are to live in poverty and despair or in some way prove myself by making in excess of many tens of millions of dollars, no doubt through entrepreneurial activity or, to judge from the history of great fortunes in America, through various types of theft, crime or amoral and sociopathic behavior.

This does not seem like such a hard lesson to learn, but somehow it is.

Los Angeles and Architecture in Die Hard (1988)

Many years ago, I was driving down Santa Monica Blvd late at night and ahead of me in Century City was a new building that created a fabulous National Socialist light sculpture on top of one of the new buildings that seemed to extend the building into the sky at each corner.

The night was particularly foggy which no doubt enhanced the effect.

It looked fabulous and yet I never saw it again.

Then I heard it was for the movie Die Hard (1988) which I had never seen.

So I downloaded this seminal and important film and I still did not see what I saw that night.

Oh the building was there just fine. And there were even clearly lights on the top of the building for certain important scenes near the end. But that transcendent and inspiring architectural idea that I had seen and been so impressed by was not there. It did not exist. It was an artifact, no doubt, of shooting some of the movie at night and the atmospheric conditions and not intended by the filmmakers, or the architects, at all.

Yes, one more time, I had given Los Angeles and Hollywood, each in their own way, too much credit. This building was and is intended for studio executives, lawyers and accountants. No inspirational pillars of light needed here. No striking architectural innovation. Nothing controversial at all. Just a well-made building for rich people and former presidents.

Once again, Los Angeles is true to its values.

Die Hard (1988) on IMDB

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095016/

The Mystery of "Now You See Me" (2013)

Two years ago I saw a trailer for a movie about magicians who rob banks to give to the poor.   I never heard much about it and thought maybe it had gone straight to video.  But no, it was released, but with very little marketing and then a number of odd things happened.

I may as well tell you up front that I believe that this film is actually an important and intellectual French film masquerading as a trivial popcorn movie. There are a number of things about this film that reveal that it is not mere cinematic fluff but is of interest to the readers of this blog, compelled as we are by the appropriate and innovative use of visual effects and our study of the esoteric knowledge that is hidden from the average, uninitiated member of the filmgoing audience.

On the surface the movie is an action / caper film about 4 street magicians who are brought together by an unknown person to create a new act, called the Four Horsemen. They nearly instantly become very famous and successful and their shows sell out and become media events not just because they have great style but also because they rob banks as part of their show and then give the money to their audience. Since in fact there are laws against robbing banks, unless of course you are already wealthy in which case you can do what you want, the FBI and Interpol get involved to solve the case and put our heroes into prison. The Four Horsemen have to somehow continue to evade the FBI, continue to rob banks, and somehow do all this in their final show in New York with the whole world watching and the FBI closing in.

But from the very beginning, the film confounds expectations.

A young man stands in front of a mirror practicing various sleight of hand flourishes with a deck of cards (see below). As he does so, there is a voice over, the voice of a young magician and he says to his invisible audience:

Magician: Come in close. Closer. Because the more you think you see, the easier it will be to fool you. Because, what is seeing? You're looking, but what you are really doing is filtering... interpreting... searching for meaning. My job? To take that most precious of gifts you give me, your attention, and use it against you.

So you see, the movie begins with an idea, an idea from the philosophy of magic. It is very unusual for an American movie to begin with an idea, or to even have an idea anywhere in the movie for that matter. That was the first clue that something unusual was going on.

Lots of style and glitz in our magic shows these days.

Superficially, the plot holes of the film, perhaps more appropriately called plot chasms, might signify the film as not serious. But this unusual opening monologue also suggested that there was something else going on, something behind the scenes, something mysterious.  These clues suggested to me that perhaps it was made in the cinematic tradition of another country.

Let us review some of the other unusual things about this film.

First, Hollywood (in this case, an American & Canadian studio) rarely makes movies about magic, that is, the profession of magic in this country. Whether the magicians are stage magicians, close-up magicians, famous escapists, mentalists, whatever, they rarely make films about these people, no matter how fictional. Such films are said to not make money, according to the standard received wisdom. But this movie was made nevertheless.

Step into my bubble, he said.

Second, the film, when released got lukewarm and mixed reviews, and received almost no marketing from the studio and it was expected to die a quick death. But, strangely enough, it didn't. Instead it proceeded to slowly build business by word of mouth and made over $100 million in this country for a total of at least $230 million in first release. That is very good for a film that cost $75 million to make and was expected to flop. In fact, it made more money than several other very expensive summer movies of that year and they are even making a sequel.

Third, this film was made by a relatively unknown French director and it is very rare for this country to finance a film by a foreign director because such films rarely do well in this country. Unless of course the foreign director makes films that are like American films in which case he really isn't all that foreign, now is he? Hollywood from time to time will co-finance a film by a famous foreign director, but that is not what happened here.

She is beautiful.

He needs a shave.

Fourth, the film is very, very French. It is not just an American caper film done by a foreign director. No. From beginning to end, this film feels like a French film in spite of the fact that Canal Plus did not finance it. How could I tell? Well of course there was the opening already alluded to, but beyond that French filmmakers have a very firm grasp of the essence of a film and have no problem sacrificing plot credibility at any time if it contributes to the style of the film or to the film's higher purpose. Plot, character, plausibility? Poof, that is irrelevant. Second, the French seem to have an affection for sophisticated and intelligent women who are not 22 years old as all the women in Hollywood seem to be and who, generally speaking, have an affair with the male lead. Third, they are very partial to male leads who do not shave. Fourth, the French as a culture have a strange appreciation for the big budget nightclub Vegas-type of show, in this case, of Magic. So lots of spotlights and lots of showmanship. Kindof Siegried and Roy without Siegfried and Roy. But most of all it is the cavalier dismissal of reality at any time that just felt so very French to me.

A typical French film might be a romantic action film about a beautiful and well (un) dressed young woman who is secretly a mysterious alien and who knows the secret of the rebirth of the universe and will save the galaxy if only these men in the story would stop screwing around and get out of her way before it is too late. This film is not about that, but it is about 4 street magicians who do the most amazing and implausible things with a good sense of style and outwit the FBI at every turn.

Fifth, the visual effects generally have a lot of panache and are not held back by any old-fashioned concerns about believability. As the French are very much into the meaning and semiotics of modern architecture, the final scenes are a very busy effects sequence with projection on buildings that is actually quite interesting if a little unbelievable.   The problem is that while we can project stereo on a building, I don't think we have the technology to project something such that each member of the audience will have their own point of view and perceive a holographic or stereo image that appears natural and in place.  I think that most of these techniques restrict you to one point of view or at most a very few.   This is a rare example of someone in the film business actually thinking ahead.

Since the police are after them, the Four Horsemen, now reduced to three, make a virtual appearance.

Sixth, the film seems to attribute much of its implausibility to the invisible hand of a secret philanthropic organization from ancient Egypt that may be behind the mystery.

And finally, I normally hate films with plot holes like this. But in this case I did not mind it one bit. In fact in spite of everything, or perhaps because of all the things I have mentioned, I actually found the film charming.

Although nominally the film may be about magicians who rob banks, we also have here a nice Cinderella meta-story about a French summer popcorn film that did well.

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Now You See Me (2013) on IMDB

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1670345/

Hollywood Reporter article on Now You See Me Boxoffice

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/box-office-shocker-you-see-601936

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Notes

1. A flourish is the display of a deck of cards in a way that is designed to impress. It may or may not be part of an illusion. A good card player will often use flourishes when shuffling a deck as a way of intimidating his opponents or perhaps just to show off. In magic, it is part of the entertainment value of a show and is often used to distract the audience's attention. It may also be used by the magician as an exercise to develop skill and coordination.

The Garden of Allah: An Editorial About the Preservation of Architecture in Los Angeles

Whenever you read about a famous building in Los Angeles, you are pretty sure that the story is going to have an unhappy ending. Los Angeles as a community, as an economy, and as a culture is very clear about the buildings and architecture that at one point made it famous: it doesn't give a fuck. LA will tear down anything to make a fast buck, no matter how significant, architecturally or culturally.

It is easy to be critical of this policy, but I think it misunderstands what Los Angeles is all about, and tries to make it something that it is not. The people of Los Angeles are not pretending to be shallow, they are shallow. They are not pretending to be stupid and corrupt, they are stupid and corrupt.

Once you understand this, then the clouds of confusion will lift and a positive spin can be placed on what otherwise might seem to be an obscene and offensive disregard of their responsiblity to preserve cultural resources of our civilization that happen to be placed in their district.

In other words, destroying buildings that are an important part of Los Angeles history is not in any way a bad thing, it is a good thing, because it is the true and valid expression of the beliefs of the people who own and run Los Angeles. To save historically significant buildings would be false to their nature, and hypocritical.

I spent about 10 years or so of my life (1982 - 1992 or so) in a little cabin up Laurel Canyon, 8726 Lookout Mountain Ave. My landlady had been married to Bundy Marton, 2nd Unit Director of Ben Hur (1959). My neighbor across the street was Eddie Dmytryk, one of the Hollywood Ten. This was not a rich neighborhood, this was a funky neighborhood. I lived up the street from Pat O'Neil of Lookout Mountain Films, and when we did our test for The Abyss, we shot the footage in that cabin with the YFS camera and took the footage to Pat for compositing.

I had a bank account at an anonymous little branch of some appalling financial institution in an undistinguished building on Sunset Boulevard, a block or two west of Crescent Heights. In the lobby of this branch, against the wall, was an architectural model of some building enclosed in a glass case. One day I looked closer, and I saw that it was a model of a small cluster of buildings, called, rather grandly, The Garden of Allah.

The Garden of Allah had apparently been an apartment complex made up of many, 20 or more, little cottages, what we call bungalows, each of them themed, it seemed to me, as something out of the Thousand and One Nights. Although it did have an Arabic feel to it, it also felt right at home in the Hispanic bungalow tradition of that part of town. A sign next to the model at the bank explained that this was a famous apartment complex that used to be located on this site that it had been torn down to build this bank, and that it had something to do with famous actors, actresses and writers of Hollywood in the days of silent pictures.

That was an understatement.

This was The Garden of Allah.

Our story begins in 1879 when a young girl named Miriam Leventon was born in Imperial Russia, which in case you did not know, was not the best place in the world to be born, particularly if you were Jewish. She decided to become an actress and studied with Stanislavski at the Moscow Arts Theatre, which is incredible just in itself. Moving to NYC in 1905 she co-founded with her boyfriend a Russian language theatre on the Lower East Side. It was not successful, she broke up with her boyfriend, he returned to Russia but she stayed. The director and actor Henry Miller discovered her and placed her in a play in 1906. She had a very successful Broadway career for 10 years under her stage name, Alla Nazimova.

So one more time we have a brilliant but poor immigrant who comes to America to fame and fortune. But our story is just beginning.

She was brought to Hollywood's attention in the very early days and from 1916 to 1918 she was a successful actress under contract to Selznick. She made a fortune, and apparently threw it away making her own films that were not commercially successful. Easy come, easy go, I guess. But with a few million left in the bank,  a financial advisor suggested she do some real estate development as a long term investment and income property.

So at last we come to the part of the story which is The Garden of Allah.

Alla Nazimova developed a property on Sunset Boulevard that was a themed hotel and apartment complex whose name, The Garden of Allah, was a pun on her first name, Alla. I don't completely understand the sequence of events, but she went broke building it, sold it to someone, but continued living there in one of the Bungalows for the rest of her life.

And her life was very colorful. For those of you who find the stories of wild Hollywood sex with famous celebrities interesting, you could do worse than study Alla. She was apparently a pioneer of the Hollywood lesbian subculture and a very active participant. It was she who came up with the term "ladies sewing circle", and there are apparently many rewarding chapters of her activities in this area for those who study such things.

Many stars, writers and producers, stayed at The Garden of Allah if they were working in Hollywood temporarily.  

Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Dorothy Parker.  Not to mention Ernest Hemingway, Robert Benchley, F. Scott Fitzgerald, George Kaufman, Charles Laughton, Frank Sinatra, Tallulah Bankhead, John Barrymore, Marlene Dietrich, Ronald Reagan, Jane Wyman, Errol Flynn, the Marx Brothers, Greta Garbo, Ginger Rogers.   Dorothy Parker was staying at the Garden of Allah when her husband died. When a neighbor asked if she needed something, she famously said "Another husband".

The Garden of Allah had a main building with lobby, a restaurant, the bungalows, presumably some rooms in the main building and of course a swimming pool and some palm trees. It was torn down to build the most stupid of boring boxes that we put banks into here in Los Angeles. You can see this atrocity even today.

So let us be clear. The Garden of Allah was a distinguished and important landmark of early Hollywood. To tear it down would make as much sense as tearing down the Chelsea Hotel in NYC. Those who did so should be held accountable, even if they are dead.  There are lots of ways of punishing the wicked after they are dead and we will write a separate essay on how to do so.

Los Angeles, if it wishes to be held in any respect by the rest of the world, needs to start paying attention to these landmarks and not destroy them. They must stop their cultural vandalism in desperate search of a fast buck, but they never will. This is who they are, this is who they want to be.

Shallow criminals who do not give a fuck.

Today, if you wish to see the Garden of Allah, you must go to Universal Studios Florida where they built a replica in their park. It stands unused, mysterious, alone, in Orlando.

Maybe Alla walks the abandoned halls at night.

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A write up of Gardens of Allah

http://hollywoodlostandfound.net/locations/gardenofallah.html

A description of the Garden of Allah at Universal Studios Florida

http://awolairwaves.com/2012/07/03/the-garden-of-allah-villas/

The Youtube (unofficial) tour of the Garden of Allah at Universal Studios Florida

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yb9HmODtzh8

Reviews of Alla Nazimova

http://looking-for-mabel.webs.com/nazimova.htm

Someone's partial list of lost Hollywood

http://www.hollywoodusa.co.uk/losthollywood.htm

The Shocking Truth about Roman Architecture in France

[Revised 1/7/2012]

This is the story of the first time I actually saw a Roman ruin. I think it is very funny for what it says about me, and maybe, just a little, about how some of us perceive various cultures and periods, perhaps without realizing it.

My high school had a fabulous Latin teacher (1) and I took advantage of the situation, taking many years of Latin and learning a lot of Roman history.   I may have been somewhat influenced by the fact that my high school combined the advanced Latin classes between the Boys and Girls school, so you had to go to the Girls school to study Latin.   Such were the lofty motivations of my youth.  I read Roman and Aegean history and related topics even now and I assure you the past isn't over, it isn't even past yet.

If you never studied Latin, to give you a feel for how nouns are declined and verbs conjugated, see this sequence from Life of Brian (1974) in which anti-Roman activist Brian is trying to write "Romans Go Home" and is corrected by a Roman Centurion.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbI-fDzUJXI

But, to my chagrin, I have never been to Rome. We were not of that economic class that could afford such things when I was growing up, and when I was productively employed as a young adult, I had not arranged a trip. Then I got involved in computer animation and of course my life went to hell and I still haven't been there, except of course in books.

But like so many others of my generation of computer animation, I was invited to speak at various European conferences during the late 1980s, which provided an opportunity to see at least some of Europe. So, after one of these conferences, Imagina, I arranged for a friend of mine to meet me in Monaco and we would sight see for a few days in the south of France.

So my friend, Paul Cross (2), met me at the conference and we rented a car and started driving through Nice on our way to Nimes. As we stopped in Nice, I pointed to a building and said, "Look, Paul, someone has built a building and made it look Roman."

I am still looking for a suitable picture.  This one has some of the right feel, but it is not integrated into a major current building on a busy street, like the building this post is about.

Paul looked at it and said, "No, Michael, it is Roman".

I thought that was a weird thing for him to say, so I repeated myself and tried to explain, see, someone has built a building and made it look really old and Roman. Isnt that nice?

In Los Angeles, you see, we regularly theme various venues based on classic European and other civilizations, including our own. We might have a Chinatown, for example. Disneyland would have a Fantasyland including a notable synthesis of many medieval castles at the center of the park. The little tourist town of Solvang in Southern California has a Danish theme, complete with windmills. Our Japanese restaurants such as Benihana entertain guests with a performance that is alledgedly at least somewhat Japanese in origin. Santa Barbara is zoned for a traditional Hispanic style.  Although most studio backlots have been repurposed as real estate development, a few still exist with their various themes: a New York street, an Old West street with its saloon, a small town America main street, and so forth. Theming is a major design concept in use in our local commercial architecture and culture.

So clearly, what we had here was a modern building that had been designed using Roman antiquity as a theme. I thought it looked good, although perhaps they went overboard on some of the "ancient" aspects of it, as the Roman section clearly had seen better days.   

My friend just kept explaining to me that no, they were not pretending to be Roman, that Nice was in part an ancient Roman city, and it actually was Roman.  That's interesting, I thought, it had never occurred to me that it might not be fake.

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1. His name was Anthony Ruffa, I think.   Before taking an exam, some of us would say to ourselves, "AVE RUFFA MORITURI TE SALUTANT"  ("Hail Ruffa!  We who are about to die, salute you!")

2. Paul Cross is a very amusing person, and an alumnus of Symbolics.  He moved to Taos, New Mexico and helped set up one of the internet not-for-profit web sites for the Taos Pueblo.   He has disappeared, and is hopefully doing well wherever he is.