A Dialog About Firearms and Superheroes in Cinema with a British Intellectual

I sent a friend in London a link to the opening of Deadpool (2015) to show off some excellent use of 3D animation in the service of art, or at least superhero movies.

His response was less than ecstatic:

(edited slightly for formatting purposes)

Yeah pretty good i guess...

I'm just so bored with all american productions and their fixation with guns... I mean what is the attraction in watching people firing guns? And in most of the shows it is all unimportant characters that are being shot. The main cast rarely get hit. Its really boring...

I much prefer Scandinavian tv dramas which like British shows rarely have guns because basically we don't really have them... But i currently prefer the Nordic noirs because UK drama is being influenced by US ideas and although they don't have many guns (although they are succumbing to that too) they have picked up the American sentimentality with people hugging at the slightest opportunity - Where is our stiff upper lip anymore? But the Scandi's they have almost no sentimentality so i really like them...

Have you seen the original danish 20 part version of The Killing, or Borgen or The Bridge or Wallander... I really love those shows - in the whole of Borgen there wasn't one gun or one hug - sheer delight! Its like they took away the guns and hugging from madame secretary ;-)

I do not completely understand all his references here (e.g. “madame secretary”) but I do see what his point is. Here is my response:

We must make allowances for cultural diversity. When Paul Verhoeven in the 4th Man (1983) revealed that the nurse at the end was none other than the Blessed Virgin Mary, mother of God, he was taking a bold step for a Dutch protestant to acknowledge, in a practically Papist way, the Virgin Mary.

You see where this is going?

So it is with Americans and firearms.

The American cinema and its intellectual elite has moved beyond the giant robot and turned to the comic book superhero as a medium with which to express the totality of our civilization. And yes, there is a certain number of firearms in these movies, but there is also quite a few samurai swords, as well as more European broadsword types.

In the first Thor (2011) you will find very few firearms, but rather a lot of swords, some hand to hand, and most of all Mjolnir, the mighty hammer, "for if he is worthy, let him who wields this hammer have the power of Thor". (see attached picture)

To understand America is to understand the frontier of the old west. In the classic Western, good and evil must contend and settle once and for all which will triumph, and meet at noon for the shootout. What would you have them use instead of firearms?

_____________________________________________________

Notes

The 4^th Man (1983) on IMDB

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086543/

Thor (2011) on IMDB

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0800369/

Lane Halley and Joseph Goldstone Married

draft

I am happy to report that my friend Joseph Goldstone has, in great secrecy, married his long time companion Lane Halley. Andy Kopra of Berlin officiated as Best Person.

Joseph and I have worked together many times and have been friends since about 1985 or so.

Announcement of marriage in NY Times Society Section

Joseph and Best Person Andy Kopra in NYC rest after shopping

The Black Aerospace Project that Was About To Be Disclosed That Wasn't

This is an update on various posts about the possible public release of information about a black aerospace project from over a year ago.

It is a personal pet peeve of mine that we have on the Internet and other venues (e.g. Aviation Leak and Space Mythology) breathless sightings of what may be a black (e.g. very secret) aerospace project, and then dead silence. Nothing.

Well, nothing is a little hard to interpret. So I am going to attempt to interpret “nothing” for my readers, and for what it is worth.

To recap, there were some very interesting sightings reported on www.foxtrotalpha.com. These sightings were of what appeared to be a manned flying wing aircraft which was not the B2. More than one, in fact. The B2 is a very distinctive plane and the observers, who seem to be respectable, knowledgeable and who took reasonable pictures of what they had seen, were of the opinion that it was not a B2. Well, nothing else of that type of airframe that is manned is flying, so that it seemed to be a reasonable conclusion that they had in fact sighted something not only secret, but also in (at least) limited production, as there was more than one of them.

The speculation was that whatever they had seen (and I liked the theory that it was a stealthy tactical reconnaissance aircraft that came from work in the mid-1980s and went into very limited production in the 1990s) was that this aircraft was about to be made public. Hence, they were less careful about bringing the plane back from somewhere (Iraq? Africa?) in broad daylight and so forth.

Ok that was the speculation.

Well, a fair amount of time has passed since those sightings and whatever they may or may not have seen has not been publicly announced which means one of several things. If it was an aircraft in limited production use, then whatever it is still has its uses or in some way has technology that still needs protecting and is not just ready for public release. Or maybe they saw nothing at all so there was nothing to announce. Or maybe they were B2 bombers after all.

Actually, I think they probably did see something but whatever.  In a sense this is good news, because if it is in limited production this means it is still of value, which means that the money was well spent, at least to some extent. Alright, thats a bit of a stretch.

One more thing, there are a variety of aerospace forums that discuss these things. I am not a regular reader of them but this is often where more information is found, if you have the patience to read through them and all the tendentious bullshit that accompanies the occasional nugget of interest. You can find them by searching for "black aerospace discussion forum" or words to that effect.

Proof of An Unspeakable and Conscious Evil

I believe that there is an implacable evil in the universe, a conscious evil that exists between life and death and which constructs for each of us a personalized living hell with which it torments each and every one of us.

For some people, this living hell may be an eternity on Facebook. For others it may be an ex-girlfriend or boyfriend or both who has reappeared and wants to renew the relationship. For some it will be that email out of the blue from an old colleague explaining how much he has always hated you and all the things that he or she has done behind your back to damage your career. Each one of us is different, each one of us will be made to suffer.  We will all have to face his or her own Room 101 and rot in our own individualized hell. ⁽¹⁾ 

This conscious evil will wait, it will bide its time, it will prepare, and then when you let your guard down it will strike. I know this because I have gone before, I have faced this evil. It happened like this.

Apparently, and without meaning to, by going into "computer animation" I had become a "starving artist" and so decided to see if I qualified for state assistance.  This was with great reluctance because I still had a residual self image of being self-supporting in spite of our modern globalized economy.  I have not been very good at bureaucracies in the past, nevertheless I persevered and became qualified for what we used to call “food stamps” but now goes by other names.

It is a good program, by the way, and we should support it. In fact, were I actually an artist who cared about the poor in our society, it would certainly be a good thing to discover just how these sorts of programs work and who is eligible. In this case it is only for those who are truly poor, without income and without savings. But if you are in that category, it will allow you to eat. It wont pay your rent, or keep the power on, but you will eat.

I had not been careful with my paperwork, and I had to go get my Social Security papers and return to the social welfare office and present it. It took a day to get the paperwork, and then I knew it would be most of the day to present the Social Security card and deal with that requirement.

And as I sat, alone, in that dreary office, and waited, penniless, for four hours, this pitiless evil of which I have spoken struck without warning. For there, on the LCD monitors was a “cartoon” to engage the children who waited with me, and there over and over again was a Pixar movie about some cars in the desert.

The Devil's tool ?

Oh cruel fate! Oh despicable evil. To wait until I was down and then force me to watch this movie over and over again while I, a pioneer of computer animation, had been unable to make a living at his craft. To gloat at my (economic) failure, to laugh at my defeat.

Recall that in America, success and failure is judged exclusively by the size of one's bank account.

See, it seemed to be saying, see how worthless you are.

Immediately after this incident, a project started and I no longer qualified for this program.  But even so, I know now that this evil is out there, waiting. I believe it waits for you as well. It waits for all of us. 

______________________________________________

Notes:

1. "Room 101" is a reference to George Orwell's 1984.

Motion Blur and Atypical Flare Over Syria

The following are images taken from the boom position of a McDonnell Douglas KC-10 Extender aircraft while refueling an F-22 Raptor over Syria. The point of these pictures here is to demonstrate a good use of motion blur and a form of lens flare both “normal” and “atypical” as used by our unwitting photographer for the benefit of those interested in the arts of visual effects.

In our first picture we have the image of a stabilized F-22 underneath the KC-10 with the city in the distance. The F-22 has matched its motion to the boom and our photographer so there is no motion blur (there is actually a tiny amount) but the ground underneath the plane is moving at a steady clip as you can see by the streak of its lights. Additionally both the bright distant lights and lights/reflections on the airplane itself are demonstrating what we might call “typical flare”, e.g. a roughly circular, symmetric and Gaussian glow on top of (double exposed if you will) the base imagery. Also look for saturation blowout where the image “becomes so bright” that the color is attenuated to “a very bright” white.

In the second picture, our eyes are drawn to the green flare on the left side of the image. The conceit here is that there has been some moisture on the lens, whether from rain or condensation or other. The water distorts the otherwise circular flare (as maintained for the red light) into a idiosyncratic and atypical flare such as we might see in the so-called real world, which in fact this is.

Notice that the lights on the ground are far less noticeable as we have moved over a more rural part of Syria.

In our final image, we have a different point of view. The fighter still has matched motion to the boom and hence no noticable blur, but the lights are also seen from a different angle and more in the distance, so there is also less blur.

The funny thing about motion blur done well is that at speed the apparent blur disappears.

Source of Images on The Aviationist

Wikipedia page on the KC-10

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_KC-10_Extender

Is Princess Leia Channeling Hillary Clinton?

Carrie Fisher, a sex symbol of the cinema from an earlier era, has received some mighty unpleasant criticism about how she has matured since the original film came out in 1977. Well that is 40 years with a lot of mileage for Ms. Fisher who was after all a more intellectual, spunky kind of sex object.

But I have noticed that in her role as General Leia in the latest Star Wars film, she reminded me of another senior woman of politics. Yes, Hillary Clinton.

Is this coincidence, my own fantasy, the Force, the lattice of causality that underlies the apparent coincidences of the material world, or is it just saying something about the fashion of being a woman in power in early twenty-first century America?

Globalization and Its Discontents (1/2)

Many people in Washington and in business pretend to be surprised at the backlash against Globalization, which is sometimes presented with the code words “free trade”.  If the politicians are genuinely surprised at a backlash then they are genuinely stupid.  But I do not believe that they are that stupid, I think that one more time they are lying to steal the money.

Globalization has a very clear historical track record at least here in the West.  What is human slavery but an economic alternative to having to pay one's fellow citizens a living wage?  One can just "requisition" labor from the "dark continent" and use them on your sugar plantations without having to pay benefits or for that matter salary. Just a little room and board. And no unions either! Just imagine how much profits were improved for the shareholders. It was a good system until a bunch of do-gooders got involved and ruined everything, making business pay good hard money to the workers.

Globalization serves a similar purpose: increase profits through lowering costs of labor by sending the work to a part of the world where labor laws do not exist. And if it has a result of impoverishing Americans, well who cares? They are not shareholders and the poor have no impact on the political process, as we all know so well. 

Does this mean that I do not want America to be part of the “Global Economy”? No of course not. What I want is for the burden that Globalization imposes on the citizens of this country to be shared with the people who make the profits, and to see that there are legal restraints on their power.  And I believe that the Government can do many things to bring Globalization and its negative side effects under control.  I believe that they are morally obligated to do so.

Why does our government believe that they can put that many Americans out of work and not do something to help them find new work?  If these workers need to be retrained for another job, they are not likely to be able to afford it. The money they would have spent in the local economy, all that money that is being sent overseas, is now not spent in the local, American economy, causing other business to go out and release even more workers. And the improved profits go to the top 1 percent who already had enough money, so the average American sees none of this. The corporations and the rich do not even pay their fair share of taxes, putting even more burden on the middle and lower classes.  How can our government think for even one second that this is fair?

Of course the profits that remain do not just go to the 1 percent, some of that is shared with the politicians that enabled these activities with legislation that impoverished so many of their constituents. Payment for services received, as it were.

So now Americans are finally waking up to what has been done to them. It is reasonable to ask when does unintended consequences become merely the 800 pound chicken that comes home to roost? When is it merely the greed and stupidity of our business and political elite at the expense of any responsibility to long term consequences?  Long term consequences? What long term consequences, you may ask.

Here is one. Even the most shallow observer of recent history is aware that when the United States won World War 2, it was in large part because they had the manufacturing power to win it.  Now that we have destroyed our manufacturing in order to increase the profits of the rich, it makes it unlikely that we will be able to win another World War, should one happen. Do I believe that the United States has a strategic economic plan to see that this does not happen?  Thats a joke, right? 

Here is another.  A generation of young and old Americans who can not achieve financial security or their goals in life because they and their families were impoverished by this economic policy. When will Washington get it through their heads that enriching the 1 percent is not the same as providing economic security to Americans?

But the worst part of this is that our elected representatives lied through their teeth about the results of Globalization and do so to this day, but do nothing to help the disenfranchised or impoverished.  Their job is to represent the interests of the American people, and to tell them the truth about the policies that they are proposing.  And Clinton, Bush and Obama lied to the American people on an issue that is vital to the well being of their constituents.

Can anything be done about this? Isn't it all just water under the bridge by now? The answer to that is no, not even a little bit. Yes, 20 years of people's lives have been destroyed but there is a lot that our elected officials can do to improve the situation and return some wealth to the other 99 or so percent that they have "inconvenienced".

This will be the topic of part two of this post.

John Hughes, the Doolittle Raid and Globalization

[My sources in Korea tell me that the first project for Mr Hughes in his new studio will be a Bruce Beresford film about the aftermath of the Doolittle Raid in China].

It has been announced that John Hughes is forming an effects studio in Beijing with Chinese money. The first project will probably be one that dramatizes the support the Chinese people gave to the allied war effort in World War 2, in particular the support that the Chinese gave to the Doolittle Raid of Tokyo, and the Japanese response which was severe.

Its an interesting choice of topic for a first project and I wonder who came up with it. My guess is that it was not the visual effects people, as we have learned that to have an opinion in such matters is not our place, and any enthusiasm or intelligence just makes the clients afraid (this is my personal experience). So we must assume that the choice of subject was made by the Chinese and is just a coincidence that it is on such a relevant topic in US / China relations. 

For those who are not aware of their own history, the Doolittle Raid was an improbable surprise attack by Mitchell B 25B medium bombers on Tokyo relatively early in the war.  They were launched by the Hornet, an aircraft carrier which had made a daring and dangerous approach to the Japanese coast.  The bombing itself was of minimal impact. The US had no way to retrieve the bombers or their pilots so the plan was for the bombers to fly on to China and land (or bail out) there.  Then with the help of the Chinese on the ground, the pilots would make their way back to America.  That did work up to a point.  The raid had minimal direct military impact, but it was a giant morale builder for the American people.  What was perhaps not completely thought out was how the Japanese were going to respond to the Chinese support for this activity.

From the article Aftermath: Doolittle Raid Reexamined on www.history.net: 

But the raiders’ choice of haven revealed coastal China as another dangerous gap in the empire’s defense. Japan already had many troops in China. Within weeks, the Imperial General Headquarters sent the main force of the Thirteenth Army and elements of the Eleventh Army and the North China Area Army—a total force that would swell to 53 infantry battalions and as many as 16 artillery battalions—to destroy the airfields the Americans had hoped to use in the provinces of Chekiang and Kiangsi. “Airfields, military installations, and important lines of communication will be totally destroyed,” the order read. The unwritten command was to make the Chinese pay dearly for their part in the empire’s humiliation. 

Details of the destruction emerged from previously unpublished records on file at Chicago’s DePaul University. Father Wendelin Dunker, a priest based in the village of Ihwang, fled the Japanese advance along with other clergy, teachers, and orphans under the church’s care, hiding in the mountains. He returned to find packs of dogs feasting on the dead. “What a scene of destruction and smells met us as we entered the city!” he wrote in an unpublished memoir.

The Japanese returned to Ihwang, forcing Dunker out again. Troops torched the town. “They shot any man, woman, child, cow, hog, or just about anything that moved,” Dunker wrote. “They raped any woman from the ages of 10–65.”

B25B Mitchell medium bombers preparing to take off from the USS Hornet

So it is fair to say that a movie the celebrates the long suppressed or just ignored history of our alliances in WW2 and the sacrifices of the Chinese people on our behalf is to be welcomed.

An article in the Smithsonian Magazine about the aftermath of the Doolittle raid

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/untold-story-vengeful-japanese-attack-doolittle-raid-180955001/?no-ist

Wikipedia page on the Doolittle Raid

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doolittle_Raid

The Sword of Hillary

I have recently experienced on Facebook the fate of anyone in this society who would dare to question Hillary Clinton's right to be the next president. The abuse from people that I would normally consider friends who happen to be female is quite, well, extreme.

For example, I researched on the various Hillary sites what her position was on such things as minimum wage and H1B visas.  And I reported what I learned on Facebook and was told that it was "all lies" and that, by implication, I was a liar.

There are other examples as well.  It seems to be a general phenomenon.  I suspect that it is caused by a generation of women who woke up one day and realized that Hillary Clinton was their best chance for getting a woman as president in their lifetime.  And they went on the warpath such that anyone who would dare doubt Hillary's perfection had their ethics, morality, intelligence and experience attacked.

I call these people "The Sword of Hillary", soldiers whose self-appointed job is to attack and destroy anyone who does not confess to the true faith.

Well, we all have our own road to take, and choose how we express our opinions. I think it is a good thing for people to get involved in the political process, and work for the candidate(s) of their choice.

But consider, always beating up the opposition may not be the best way to get their support when the Primary season is over and we approach the general election.  Engaging in a discussion where people are treated with respect and where the facts are reviewed and discussed is one thing. Hitting them with a big rock and trying to knock their brains out is not the same thing.

As of now, I think it is pretty clear that Hillary will be the Democratic nominee, although that is not absolutely certain, but it is likely.  And ideally the party would pull together and work to get her elected.  But to do that, people have to be comfortable with the candidate and believe that voting for her is not voting against their interests.

Beating people up and slandering anyone who dares run against Queen Hillary is not the best way to do this, in my humble opinion.

Some of this is not Hillary's fault by the way, exactly.  Some of my dissatisfaction with Ms. Clinton's position comes from the last 8 years of the Obama administration.  Obama is, I think, the best we can expect from a middle of the road, well-meaning, Democrat.  While I appreciate his efforts, his administration has also convinced me that this is not enough to begin to fix the problems that this country faces. And I do not expect that Hillary will be as good as Obama, even. So instead of attacking me or others who doubt HRC will be the “president from heaven”, who will bring about the new Millennium, that in fact she is the second coming of The Christ or, depending on your point of view, even the first coming of the Messiah, your efforts would be better used to understand why people doubt her and work to improve both her positions and any democratic platform.

"America and the Global Economy" in Foreign Affairs

[needs to be rewritten with examples from article]

If you go to the following link, you will be able to read an article in Foreign Affairs by Jacob J Lew entitled “America and the Global Economy”. Mr. Lew was director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in the Clinton and Obama administrations.

If you register with Foreign Affairs, you will be permitted to read one article a month. Isnt that nice of them? I think that is mighty white of them, myself.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2016-04-11/america-and-global-economy

When you read this essay you may notice some entertaining little details. Pretty much every paragraph is either a lie or a threat except in the cases where it is both. What Mr. Lew is saying is that you had better do it our way or you will be sorry.  And literally the subtext is that putting Americans out of work is always good. And paying for insanity at the UN is just the price we have to pay if we want the UN to be around to do things we want now and again. Its our way or the highway.

We can count on Jack Lew to make the point that putting Americans out of work and supporting the worst kind of racism and anti-semitism at the UN is all in a days work for a Washington bureaucrat.  I have no doubt that he is a big supporter of Hillary Clinton and vice versa.

Wikipedia page for Jack Lew

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Lew