The Deeper Meaning of the La Brea Tar Pits

Its easy to look at the surface of Los Angeles and miss a lot of, indeed, most of, its nuance and subtlety. To understand this city, you must dig beneath the surface, and when you do, you will probably find petroleum byproducts.

Petroleum is all over Los Angeles, it is at the center of a lot of the secret history of the town. One place to see Los Angeles' relationship to oil, at least symbolically, is at the La Brea Tar Pits.

The La Brea Tar Pits was part of the Rancho La Brea land grant and became Hancock Park in Los Angeles before the turn of the century. The name comes from the Spanish: la brea means "the tar" so "The La Brea Tar Pits" means "The The Tar Tar Pits".

Discovery of fossils happened in 1901 with more formal excavations in 1913-1915. Intermittent excavations have happened since then, most recently in the last few years as they excavated for a new parking facility for LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) but other than that they have been mostly inactive for decades. In these excavations they have found the fossilized remains of bison, mammoth, sloth, bears, lions, tigers, saber-tooth tigers, vultures, eagles, deer, falcons, a huge number of dire wolves and one human, a Chumash lady, killed by a blow to the head with a blunt instrument and pushed into the pit many thousands of years ago.

Image by Charles Knight for the American Museum of Natural History in NY.

They built a nice museum to hold the remains of the bison, wolves and Chumash lady, the Page Museum, and its the best place I know to buy your Giant Sloth hand puppets. The Chumash lady is no longer on exhibit because the Chumash quite reasonably felt it wasn't very dignified. She is still there if you know where to look, however.

But there is a deeper meaning to the Tar Pits, a darker meaning: one that is not appropriate for the Page Museum.

Some people believe that the La Brea Tar Pits are a metaphor for life in Los Angeles.

To see this, imagine life 10,000 or so years ago. We are in the arid valley that one day will be Los Angeles. It is not a desert but it is very dry.  Arroyo might be the more appropriate term.  There appear to be some pools of water.

Notice the oil wells discreetly in the background of this picture of the Tar Pits

A little deer comes to the edge of what she thinks is a pond to drink. Her mother is nearby. Delicately stepping to the pond, the deer discovers that her foot is stuck in the tar and she can not get out. This is not a pond, of course, this is the La Brea tar pits. She calls for her mother who tries to help her, but in doing so, also gets caught in the tar. All their struggling just makes it worse: they sink deeper into the wretched tar. Now they look closer and see the bodies of other animals that have gotten trapped by the fake pond and who have died and are half-buried in the muck all around them. A dire wolf hears their struggles and comes loping over, sensing an easy dinner. They struggle but they are no match for the vicious dire wolf, but now, ironically the wolf is also caught in the tar and desperately struggles to get free.  A sabre-tooth tiger seeing their dead and rotting bodies comes to scavenge but gets trapped as well. Later the same thing happens to a vulture and other scavengers.

Driven by greed to exploit the innocent victims of a cruel and sticky trap, the opportunistic predators are themselves trapped, and the predators of the predators as well. They become a horrifying, rotting, collage of death, some dying in the act of trying to devour the others and, covered with the filth of petroleum byproducts, they sink into the bottomless pit, forever lost from sight, destroyed by their greed.

Very little has changed in Los Angeles since then.

Revised 1/15/2013
Revised 10/11/2013

Transcendence in Visual Effects: The Flying Bus in Speed (1994)

All too often visual effects is called upon to create the illusion of something "real" in a literal sense of that overused word. So, for example, when visual effects creates a giant robot beating the shit out of another robot, the intent of that sequence is nothing more than to show the protagonist literally hitting the bad robot with a giant metal stick, or whatever that particular action-filled moment may call for. But there are other uses of visual effects that are possible even though they are rarely used and it is our intent to showcase some of them here on this blog.

Unfortunately, these unusual and non-conformist uses of visual effects can also be misunderstood by an audience who has been fed a steady diet of literalism as we will also show.

The particular sequence we discuss in this post is the flight of the bus at a key moment in Jan DeBont's underrecognized masterpiece, Speed (1994). In this highly intellectual film, good and evil struggle for the lives of the passengers of a Los Angeles public transit vehicle, the lowly bus. These lives are held at risk and if the bus is slowed to below a certain speed, the bus will explode. At one point in this drama it appears as though there is no hope as the bus is travelling at high speed towards an uncompleted freeway, can not turn around, can not stop and hurtles towards the precipice and certain death. But our protagonist encourages the passenger / driver / love interest to accelerate as fast as she can and the bus hits the ramp at the end of the freeway and in a moment of triumph leaps over the precipice onto the continuation of the freeway beyond.

Fly, Bus! Fly!

Movie audiences were thrilled by this unexpected escape from certain death, but of course there are always those who are critical and, predictably, some small-minded critics laughed at this apparent physical impossibility. The internet forums are filled with endless discussions of mass, angles, inertia, stunt drivers, and other irrelevant matters. What completely went over their head is that the bus flying is an example of "self-transcendence" as the bus, who is of course a character in this film, strives to transcend, to leave behind, its worldly, wheels-on-the-ground existence and, wishing to fly, by using all its energy and will does so and, in doing so, defeats evil.

I suspect that it was Jan deBont's intent for all of us to be inspired by the bus's achievement and for us to also strive to transcend our daily existence and limitations just as our noble bus has.

Speed at Imdb

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111257/

[NOTE: I think the shot above was done by VIFX but I am still confirming this.]

Los Angeles Urban Design and the Location of the County Museum of Art

[Note: Tom Duff points out that methane is odourless, and that I probably smelt sulfur dioxide around the museum.  So I have changed this post to reflect that except in the case of the exploding methane detectors, where I am sure it was methane that was referenced.]

Many people who are not from Southern California do not understand Los Angeles (aka El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles). They look at it with unpracticed eyes and see a rotting heap of garbage, smog, corruption, greed, racism, oppression of the poor, a failed public education system, unplanned and impossible traffic, a failed transit system, pot holes, drug dealers, crime, cheap and bad architecture and very shallow people.

But that is not all that there is to LA, not at all. I believe that Los Angeles is pure and unspoiled and completely true to its values. I believe that a city is created by thousands or hundreds of thousands of decisions made by its people over many, many years. And that these decisons made by these different people in different roles at different times create a kind of gestalt, a framework in which to fit the individual pieces. When you understand this, then one can see the patterns and beliefs that shaped a decision and so bring order to what may otherwise appear to be chaos.

In other words, Los Angeles is exactly the way that the people who live here want it to be. It represents their morals, their desires, their beliefs and their values. It represents who they are honestly and in a straightforward fashion for all to see.

So now I am going apply this thesis of urban design theory in order to explain a specific decision: the location of one of my favorite places in Los Angeles: the Los Angeles County Museum of Art or LACMA.

Why is it where it is? Why isn't it in scummy downtown Los Angeles, or in the crime-invested park next to USC? What is it doing conveniently located to people who live on the west side, people who live in Hancock Park, people who live in the Valley, people who live in the beach cities? Why is it located where the air is often clean and crime is low and parking is convenient yet where real estate is certainly not cheap? How did "they" let this happen?

LACMA is an anomaly in many ways. It is an institution esteemed across generations in Los Angeles and it has affected many people's lives in a very positive way. I used to attend film programs there in the Bing Theatre and that is where I have seen many notable screenings of animation of various types on film projected from pristine prints from the UCLA Collection. The plaza in the center of the common area of LACMA is the closest thing that the region has to something that feels like NY City: people hang out outside in a well-designed space, listen to music, talk about art, watch people and have a soda. Although the collection is uneven, it certainly is not the Metropolitan, it has its strong areas and it has curated some important exhibitions over the years which have toured the country and probably the world.

Notice the probable Hasselblad square format.  I saw some originals from this or a similar photoshoot in the cafe of the Bing theatre and they were all in this square, probable 6x6 format.

When I was very young my mother used to take me to art classes there. I smile when I remember the Calder mobiles, the smell of petroleum byproducts, visiting my grandmother, having lunch above the Folk and Craft Art museum at The Egg and I.

The smell of petroleum byproducts?

Yes, you see LACMA is located right next to, and actually on top of, the La Brea Tar Pits. Tar and various other petroleum byproducts ooze, bubble and outgas all around the park. There used to be moats, shallow sidewalk shaped pools of water, around the main buildings of the art museum, on the ground floor, where the art classes were, and you could watch the sulfur dioxide, or whatever it was, bubble up through the water. I loved it. You had to be careful not to walk with bare feet on the grass because of the tar that oozed up, but otherwise it was great fun if you were a kid.

Mommy!  Look!  Elephants playing in the Tar Pits!

In fact, most of the area around the Tar Pits can only be developed with special restrictions and with special monitoring and controls because of this geology. The Fairfax district, right next door, used to be a neighborhood for many elderly jewish men and women. And every few years a few of them would blow up, because, unfortunately, the methane detectors in the basement of their apartment buildings would sometimes fail, the methane would accumulate, and then BOOM, another few old people would explode. Everyone felt bad about it, but we all understood, growing up here, that methane detectors are expensive and it would not be economical to expect them to be working all the time. 

When a major and ugly development a few blocks away was built it required a major amount of special zoning exemptions to get permission to build where they did because of the special restrictions and requirements of building on what is essentially a low grade oil field.

So I am suggesting that the answer to the riddle of how it is that LACMA came to be where it is has its origins in the restrictions on commercial use of that site.  They would not be permitted to put commercial buildings there, not at the epicenter, not right on top of the Tar Pits themselves, so they just made it a park and put the art museum there.

And that, I propose to you, is how it happened. If they could have put another cheap, shitty mini-mall there they would have, but they couldn't.

True to their values.  Pure and Unspoiled.   

Today, whenever I smell petroleum byproducts, I think of my childhood and of my mother taking me to the art museum for classes and it reminds me of happier times.

____________________________________
See the following for a discussion of the deeper meaning of the La Brea Tar Pits
http://globalwahrman.blogspot.com/2012/09/the-deeper-meaning-of-la-brea-tar-pits.html

Predicting the Future of 3D Printing: Sex, Killing People and Stealing

Predicting the future can be straightforward if you follow certain rules.   They are more guidelines than rules, actually, as I will expound upon later when we get to discussing one of the pioneers in this field of prognostication, that well-known 16th century writer of entertainment fiction, Nostradamus.  One approach to this art of prediction is to apply certain constants in human nature to otherwise unrelated trends.  Whatever it is, you can be pretty sure that people will find a way to apply it to the themes of sex, killing people and stealing.  Its almost guaranteed.   Airplanes? Internet? Automobiles?  It doesn't matter, people will use them for sex, killing and stealing.

So lets apply this approach to the emerging field of 3D printing.

3D printing is hot, it is not only in our future, it is in our present. People are printing out parts for their vintage cars already.  As always it helps to have a lot of money because then you can have access to printers that can print stuff that is really hard and very precise, but even the cheaper printers are fun.

So, first sex, then killing, and finally stealing.

In the area of sex and 3D printing an obvious approach is to consider the impact on sex toys.  I know very little about sex toys I admit, but I once employed an animator who was very involved in collecting items made in Bakelite (the classic original plastic) and other plastic items on Ebay.  She was particularly fond of Hello Kitty sex toys.  If she had a 3D printer today, she could print her own and possibly reveal a whole  new dimension to her already formidable creativity.  So it is easy to predict new and creative forms of sex toys unleashed with 3D printing, no problem.

Notice adorable Japanese color choices of their Hello Kitty sex toys.  Why are they all in the "on" position?

How about using 3D printers to print semi-automatic weapons?   Again, no problem, it is already being done.  See this excellent link to a hardworking pioneer in the field and his discussion of how the topic is regulated on various 3D printing sites.

As a technical addendum to this example, I should point out that the history of modern weapons since before WWI has been to design a very reliable, accurate and functional weapon that can be produced in quantity.  The standard infantry weapon of most modern armies can be made out of a remarkably few pieces of stamped metal.   The author of the post referenced below, as a student of firearms, was well aware of this.  

"Gunsmithing with a 3D Printer, Part 1" on haveblue.org
http://haveblue.org/?p=1041

AR-15 rifle, minus barrel and stock, with .22 magazine attached

Finally, how do we use 3D printers to steal money?   One way of course is to use the weapon you just printed to rob a grocery store.   Simple, clean, and yet very stupid.   After armed robbery the first approach that comes to mind is the low-quantity counterfeiting of valuable art objects, collector's items of one type or another, including objects from antiquity.  The feasibility of this depends on how the choice of materials evolves with 3D printers and how clever people can be with emulating the characteristics of objects made of other natural materials as well as how clever they can be in emulating that feeling of antiquity at the surface of the object.  Of course none of this would fool an expert, we are just talking about fraudulent items on Ebay in this scenario, I think.  It would take a very precise "printer" indeed to sculpt out of metal a simulation of a rare Roman coin, perhaps a counterfeit Sumerian cone would be more amenable, though less valuable on the current market.     But whatever the future of art fraud is with this technology, I have no doubt that the biped mammals will make me proud and find ways to use this technology to steal.

Only time will tell if I am right or not, but I am optimistic about this.

The Run-on Sentence and Charles Dickens

You will have noticed by now that I am fond of run-on sentences and use them all the time, often with a sense of barely repressed glee. You have no idea how it used to irritate me to have my sentences corrected back in the day when anyone cared enough to try and correct me. Now they know better.

But I do realize, I mean, I am aware, that there are many out there in Internet-land who believe that this style of writing is wrong, also very wrong, and some people believe that it is also extremely and definitely very wrong.

Well, I just don't agree and for support I am going to call upon my friend the well-known writer Charles Dickens. This is from an essay he wrote in 1852 about the "Ragged Schools" movement in England of the time. I am sure you will agree with me that Mr. Dickens knows how to write English and that we should strive to emulate him in our own work.

I offer no apology for entreating the attention of the readers of The Daily News to an effort which has been making for some three years and a half, and which is making now, to introduce among the most miserable and neglected outcasts in London, some knowledge of the commonest principles of morality and religion; to commence their recognition as immortal human creatures, before the Gaol Chaplain becomes their only schoolmaster; to suggest to Society that its duty to this wretched throng, foredoomed to crime and punishment, rightfully begins at some distance from the police office; and that the careless maintenance from year to year, in this, the capital city of the world, of a vast hopeless nursery of ignorance, misery and vice; a breeding place for the hulks and jails: is horrible to contemplate.

Now that is a run-on sentence to be proud of.  I have a ways to go before I reach Mr. Dickens' level of excellence in this area.  But I will try.

If you don't know about the Ragged Schools, its a great story, and here is the Wikipedia page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ragged_school

The above quote is from an article written by Charles Dickens for The Daily News, published in 1852. See http://www.infed.org/archives/e-texts/dickens_ragged_schools.htm for the complete essay.

Music Notation, Prokofiev & Super Mario Paint as an Anti-Depressant

A friend and I were discussing music notations in the context of using one to transcribe a fugue (a fughetta technically) and he pointed me to something called a piano roll notation, called that because of a certain similarity to the original player piano "scripts" which were rolls of paper with holes punched in them.  I find this much easier to understand than traditional music notation.

Here is Beethoven's Great Fugue (op 133) in this notation:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6s0Mp7LFI-k

I am not sure that this notation as seen above has a formal name.  It seems to be a variant on a modern "piano roll" notation but has some additional features as well.

I can not think of music notation without thinking of the brilliant (well at least hilarious) adaptation of Prokofiev's Troika from the Lieutenant Kije Suite as performed on "Super Mario Paint".   And thus obviously Mario Paint has some sort of notation one can use to play music.

Notice the always appealing Mario is the mouse cursor/pointer

The troika as adapted for Mario Paint:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dO1FWlbWQWs

I remember the first time I ever heard this piece in its more authentic form at the beginning of the Woody Allen film Love and Death. I was astounded at how appealing it was the first time I heard it, and every time I heard it thereafter.   The first use in film was the movie Lieutenant Kije, produced in the 1930s in the Soviet Union, this music was written originally by Prokofiev as a score for that film.  Music fasns who look down on soundtracks and their composition as not serious should take note.

Does anyone compose music like this anymore?  I find that this piece in any of its forms works as an amazingly effective, if short term, anti-depressant and it is to recommend this music for that purpose that I wrote this post.

Here is a more traditional version:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QsRDpsItq0&feature=fvwrel

Music is still a mystery to most Darwinists, there is not a generally accepted theory, so I am told, for why we respond so strongly to it.

Update to Editorial on Firesign Theatre, the President's Ride and Unemployment

I rewrote the post about the "president ride", unemployment, and the responsibility of our elected officials.  It goes into more detail and is more explicit about what is expected from elected officials and how they should be evaluated.

http://globalwahrman.blogspot.com/2012/09/the-firesign-theatre-presidents-ride.html

Schadenfreude! Schadenfreude!

Schadenfreude (pronounced:  shah-den-freud) is that amazing word from German that refers to the pleasure one gets from the misfortune of others.

The recent event at the Hollywood Bowl where 18,000 people sang along with the Sound of Music has inspired me to document a poem/song that I wrote in NY after some particularly spectacular and bloody incident between senior vice presidents at Viacom in the mid-1990s.

It is to the tune of Edelweiss from The Sound of Music by Rodgers and Hammerstein.

Schadenfreude!  Schadenfreude!
Its a pleasure to beat you.

          Black and blue,
          I told you

Its a pleasure to hurt you!

(with feeling)

Down the toilet your career will go!
          Career will go!
          Forever!

(slowly and with wistfulness)

Schadenfreude, Schadenfreude.
Its a pleasure to hurt you.

(c) MW 1995 all rights reserved

A picture of Christopher Plummer as Captain George Ritter von Trapp singing Edelweiss.

The post about the "Sing-A-Long Sound of Music":
http://globalwahrman.blogspot.com/2012/09/sing-long-sound-of-music.html

Sing-A-Long Sound of Music

One more time I have evidence that I am deeply embedded into the collective unconsciousness of popular culture without realizing it.   I think something is completely obscure and then it turns out that it is no less than the very topic of a mass movement.

A friend has posted on facebook a picture he took at the recent "Sing-A-Long Sound of Music" in which 18,000 people went to the Hollywood Bowl to sing along with Maria and Captain v. Trapp.

Could this just be a coincidence, that I would write my post about The Sound of Music and its relationship to submarine history and that then this event would happen?    Is this more proof of the lattice of causality that underlies the apparent coincidences of the material world?

Although I do have other situations that do strongly indicate the apparent presence of the lattice of causality, I doubt very much if any of the participants at the Sing-A-Long were aware of Captain v. Trapp's immense importance to the history of submarines.  But maybe that doesn't matter, it occurs to me, maybe his importance to submarine history influenced their behavior without their conscious knowledge?

[An aside: the Hollywood Bowl claims that their screen is the largest outdoor motion picture screen in the world.   A few years ago I saw a sequence from the Sound of Music at the Academy that was projected in 70MM from the original 70mm negative.   It was completely amazing and much better, read my lips, much better by an order of magnitude than the best digital projection I have seen.   Obviously progress is not about making things better.]

Here is the link to Jim Hillin's picture on Facebook.
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151187914489312&set=a.462289734311.253257.573349311&type=1&comment_id=7932189

And the Hollywood Bowl event:
http://www.hollywoodbowl.com/tickets/sing-long-sound-of-music/2011-09-24

Jim Hillin's picture from the event itself:

My original post about Maria, the Captain and the submarine is at:
http://globalwahrman.blogspot.com/2012/07/the-baron-novititate-and-submarine-in.html

TRW Commercials, Robert Abel & Associates and the Origins of Computer Animation

[Updated 3/6/2013   I am now quite sure that other companies also did TRW commercials, I remember explicitly one that Digital Productions worked on.  It did seem as though RA&A did get a lot of them, however]

The origin of computer animation lies in part in the very high end advertising production that was done by such companies as Robert Abel & Associates, R/Greenberg, Digital Productions, MAGI and so forth. Among these, highly prized were the very expensive and generally quite abstract  TRW commercials.

TRW was a major defense contractor, originally created to be the project lead on the secret space program of the United States after Sputnik. Their commercials were more about raising awareness of their name among the public and associating the name with cool technology than it was about selling product.  We would recognize their goals today using terms like "brand identification and management".

A typical TRW commercial might have a computer screen with CAD program, the wireframe design of a butterfly which then comes to life and flies off the screen with a voice over that says "A company called TRW". They were always hits at the SIGGRAPH Electronic Theatre back when that event, the so-called film show, was important.

These commercials seemed to be done at Robert Abel & Associates exclusively as far as I could tell.  If there were other high-end TRW spots done by other companies, I probably was just not aware of them.  I thought it was amusing, sort of, that my peers at RA&A did not have a clue what TRW did whereas I, coming from the RAND Corporation, had a pretty good idea what their business was: spy satellites and related technologies.

So I wrote a fake TRW commercial in my head and now, many years later, I present it to you here.

The logo for TRW itself was slit-scanned, but I have not found an image or copy of it yet, so for now the basic artwork will have to suffice.