The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeosie (movie review)

I’m back to Film Studies, even though the HDTV is on the blink, no longer beholden to its own API (control panel). I have a CRT TV right next to it, a Sony Trinitron. Works great. The same DVD player feeds either display device via three cables (one video, L and R audio).

Don Luis Buñuel has been the focus. I watched The Discreet Charm of The Bourgeoisie, a kind of anthropology translated to a surrealist register. Then I took in the rest of this Criterion Collection two-disc set. This felt like one of those laser-cut exceedingly complex jigsaw puzzle pieces fitting into place, giving more of the picture.

Buñuel grew up with Salvador Dali, the hallmark surrealist; they were good friends, though far from clones of one another. He moved to the USA in hopes of making films in that film-making mecca, but his reputation preceded him in that closed-minded culture and he ended up churning out what we might call TV shows in Mexico (formulaic, mass produced, low budget, relatively). I became a Mexican citizen. Then he made it back to Spain and reestablished his career there, especially around Toledo. He married, had kids, loved making and drinking dry martinis.

I realized I’d seen at least one other of his films already, the one where a lotta people feel trapped indoors, unable to cross some invisible line. Someone at the Quaker meeting had recommended that one. I wonder if I wrote a review of it. I’ll look later.

As for this particular film, it features repeated variations of scenes we’d expect at this tier of society: dinner parties, embassy intrigue, trysts, triangles, drug dealing (via diplomatic pouch), often polite  interactions with the police and military, although not without run-ins. Lots of drinking. 

Also the occasional murder, most likely a poisoning or by means of a firearm. A lot of the violence takes place in dreams. As the movie progresses, we start to realize it’s pretty surreal, but, per the director’s aesthetic code, not over the top. Don Luis is into deadpanning. He keeps things low key.

What comes through in the tributes from his associates is he was a much loved and treasured guy, somewhat the mischievous rascal from the outside (the impression he gave). I was reminded of the David Lynch tributes, which is not to conflate two very distinct personalities. Lynch was something of a surrealist too, and had a strong eye for what he wanted to capture on film (not an unusual trait in a director).

The Darwinisms

Although I do hype some aspects of the speed reading course I took in the Philippines, in a Makati business tower (not at the school), namely the utility of doing recalls after reading (diagrams, more than any squiggly notes in longhand), I'm no speed reader. I’m a browser.

As soon as I got home from the Belmont Street Fair, I started looking at some books I’d just snagged for a dollar apiece, The Age of American Unreason among them.

Yes, I agree:  the backlash against Darwinism wasn’t entirely over whether fossils disprove Genesis, but over whether the billionaires (as we call them today) are entitled to rule, not by divine right anymore, but by by the divine right of evolution, a eugenics ideology in other words.  Social Darwinism gave Darwinism a bad name, and still does.

The eugenicists are champions of the idea of “races” pitted against one another in some struggle for supremacy. There’s no real genetic science to bolster their “races” hypothesis although we do have haploid groups, right? Traits travel together sometimes, much as personality traits do. Authoritarians like to micro-manage and obsess about others’ business. We all know the species.

I’m not especially sympathetic to the self-righteous who believe their grasp of science is what entitles them to dictate. It’s that feeling entitled to dictate that I find suspect, for whatever reason. Religion plays the same role, of cementing some hierarchy among wannabe bosses. Such organizations are attempted anyway. They come and go.

Cascadian Synergetics

Phony Intel Age

Fall Term Prep

Today was one of those beautiful Fall days with the bright blue sky and amiable temperatures. It started out more overcast, when I started on a bicycle adventure, picking up where I'd left off the day before, with the loose accessory in need of home base repair.

However, before setting out on said Sellwood Loop (taking Clinton Street to the train crossing at SE 12th, and Orange Line station, which I'd pass through later on the Max, after following Springwater Corridor to the SE Linn and my favorite Sellwood station, the one with the portals), I made the above video.

Polymaths tend to be good at self-learning, or at least pride themselves on that ability. However I'll be the first to admit a good teacher oft supplies the activation energy, the boost, it takes to get over the hump vs-a-vs some skill or topic area. These teachers come out of the woodwork sometimes, as if sent by central casting (I look over my shoulder for the camera crew that must be getting this).

Along those lines, I'm pretty avid in my studies of techie topics, such as a Jupyter Notebook version that'd give me ways to access AI company APIs or choose some local model. 

I learned about Herdr, for getting several agents going at once in a terminal session. I took in a few vids on how query key and value transforms help the contextual semantic balls (the systems) to form based on incoming prompts. The LLM learns to splash around in whatever neighborhood within the embeddings, spinning out strands, or trains, of thought.

However in a more mundane vein, they queue in an orderly fashion as postponed vids, books, articles, movies, magazines... the throttling factor, as always, is my own ability to take in. 

One needn't apologize for intake limitations, any more than a car maker need apologize for upper limits on speed vs-a-vs some specific make n model. Of course any model has its limits. I'm glad when I'm somewhat able to keep churning through it all, but my appetite for this and that varies. I seek a balanced diet.

Karpathy is a good tour guide. I watched his presentation at Stanford shortly after his return to OpenAI, wherein he gets an LLM to generate pseudo-Shakespeare, having trained on his corpus, a monkey far ahead of the others in approaching bardic benchmarks. LLMs also generate credible Haikus. Hello Hal.

That last topic, LLM word2vec type embeddings (those crazy diamonds the AI companies seek to press), got me into a NeuralNine presentation on SQLite extensions that turn it into a vector database, suitable for querying about cosine similarity between simple phrases, based on an imported, in-memory model.

Labor Day 2026

I’ve been prepping for Fall Term, lately focusing on the Generalized Pythagorean Theorem, which I started working on in my head during Meeting for Worship at Bridge City Friends. It came to me that I could move my thinking to actual paper later, but after doodling for a while I decided to check prior art, of course using Perplexity, my go to LLM of choice.

Music is also a focus. Although an acting principal, I’m likewise a student in my own school and I bore various time tunnels (query-key on “bore”) through new terrain when I can, or cross old terrain from a new angle. 

Going into Fall, I’m looking at Mark Fisher, the British philosopher, in connection with his fluency around pop culture, post punk. He looked back somewhat fondly on Brutalism (in architecture) as boldness in the public sector, something missing when everything is privatized, as it is today.

The reference to post punk means asking what is punk and that takes us back to Sleater-Kinney, a Cascadian grrl band with connections to Weird City, Portlandia. Sleater-Kinney appeared at a McMenamins recently.

Aside from curriculum development, I’ve been getting back into my cycling groove post North Circuit and Whittier Loop (I daisy chained them). 

On Saturday I took a least action geodesic to Voodoo Doughnuts, the bakery, then cycled south along Naito Parkway and under the Marquam Bridge (a double-decker for I-5) to Tilikum Crossing (one L), where I wheeled my bicycle onto an FX2.

Today, Labor Day, I certainly thought of Voodoo Doughnuts. There’s some attraction. However I set out on a vector towards the OMSI area with the expectation I’d be heading south the Sellwood, another favorite loop. 

However, I cut it short upon noticing my water bottle and backup pump assembly was working its way loose, and I was close to losing the two screws irretrievably. 

None of my keys (like the car key) fit the hexagonal screw heads snugly enough to tighten them securely, whereas I knew I had the right tool in a kitchen drawer (a whole set of hexers). 

I decided to make the FX2 the deciding factor: if the bus were coming shortly, I’d board it and go back uphill, whereas I’d consider continuing to Sellwood if not. 

In the latter case I’d’ve detached the assembly, snaking it to the back rack, and pocketing the screws. An FX2 was due in six minutes. So I took it home and effected repairs in my kitchen. I’ll do the Sellwood Loop another day.

Tek in Hindsight

Dr D had mentioned this vid, and I'd mentally queued it, so yesterday I watched it for the first time. Edifying. Having visited VintageTek with Dr D and another geek earlier, I was already primed to get a more developed picture. Tek (Tektronix) was the premier cathode ray tube (CRT) innovator and manufacturer for quite long spell, and grew to have around 23K employees. Tek’s culture was of, by and for engineers in a way that shaped the larger surrounding Silicon Forest culture, for the better we like to believe (with some justification).

My particular slant on the Vollum story (Tek founder) was I noticed at his award ceremony at Fort Evans he was surrounded by DDUs, Dymaxion Deployment Units, what Bucky & Co were testing as a quickly deployable sheltering solution at the time. Butler grain bins had been an inspiration. This was pre dome and even pre his Wichita House (the one suspended from a utility mast). Or did I get that backwards? The Dymaxion car, house and map were all part of a science fiction projected lifestyle built around education automation i.e. the internet, around which MEMEX (Dr V’s vision) became AI (umbrella term for natural language models, which includes the visual “semes” from semiology).

Another slant I take is through the history of a partially overlapping company: Electro-Scientific Instruments (ESI), former owner of what became the Quaker Meeting House on Stark Street (since then greatly remodeled), in southeast Portland. Doug Strain, ESI’s founder, got a boost from what would become Hewlett-Packard, which ended up competing in the CRT market. ESI, like Tek, was in the business of precision measurement (metrology) and they created some products in partnership. Doug also endowed the Linus Pauling Center on SE Hawthrorne in Asylum District as well as the LP reading room at OSU, as well as supporting Pacific University in Forest Grove.

Public Transit

I’m giving high marks to the transportation machine, by which I mean the combination of planes, trains and automobiles (which includes buses) that participated in ferrying me to and fro this trip, not forgetting the ferry itself, from Kingston (Olympic Peninsula) to Edmonds, north of Seattle.

I thought I really got my money’s worth riding SoundTransit Link, Line 1, both ways ($3 each way), Lynnwood to Federal Way,  almost the whole distance, getting off and on at SeaTac. The Lynnwood to Stanwood bus is only $2.50.

In LA: Metro C line, all the way to the end (Norwalk) and back, with a connecting bus right to my destination. Pretty painless. Everything went smoothly. I was able to add funds to the Tap card at the Whittier Senior Center (my iPhone directed me there). 

Although I traveled light, Group 6 borders on United don’t get to bring a complementary carryon beyond the one personal accessory, like a brief case, so I did have to check a bag ($50), even though it was small enough to be a carryon. 

All these systems, including the airline and airport, the LAX Hilton with the shuttle, seemed to be humming along, getting the job done. The transportation machine is a vast global enterprise. I was experiencing a tiny sliver of it. 

Tomorrow I’m back to the adjoining network: the freeway system with its privately owned cars and fleet vehicles.

Wandering Around

So “wandering in LA” proved to mean “mentally” more than in 3-space (as some call it), as we tick along through that fourth dimension (As the World Turns was a soap on TV when I was a kid, that I avoided). 

[ Note to new readers: our “time tunnels” (world lines) tend to be more tetrahelix-modeled at FSI (successive tetrahedral movie frames, action packed), which, to a “Quadrays head” at least, may translate to “4D” (embedded as “chariot” or “car”) times the Heraclitus Effect (time) ]

The metaphor of finding the deepest valleys along which to travel, also has a “least action” flavor to it. Why take the twisty-turny scenic route when you could barrel along at a better clip by sticking to the “Roman Imperial” ones (another metaphor for “paths most frequented by the normies”)? It all depends on exactly what you want to minimize. Time? What if only death awaits? Keep it waiting?

A well-appointed path, to take one example, leads from Leibniz-Newton to Euler-Lagrange, and on to Hamilton-Tait. A path between their maths. 

Calculus funneled through this time tunnel, gaining in sophistication (fluxions, Lagrangian, Hamiltonian), feeding into our present day quantum mechanics. Terry wants us to retrace to the Carnot branch as well, remembering that thermodynamics (the discipline) aka economics, springs from many sources. Lets add information theory while we’re at it.

So what does the Principle of Least Action really tell us about the Oregon Trail, the pathways followed? Clearly the settlers were hoping to minimize risk, meaning maximizing chance of survival. Safety in numbers represents one of the principles (not fully generalized). 

But what if a family just couldn’t go on?  What was the calculus? Don’t waste supplies. Who were the bad apples? As the World Turns. From such migrations we get a whole genre of trekker lit. What physics applies? What movie-making techniques?

Wandering in LA

Mt. Hood from UA 1218

As some of you already know, I’m kicking around in Greater LA, widening my pattern from Portland, meaning Wandering, capital W, and that entails tackling (as in learning about) the local public transit system. 

Yesterday, after getting dropped off in Lynnwood, I rode Link through (under) Seattle to SeaTac airport. I’d been wanting to ride this light rail system for quite a while. A dream come true.

Link Passenger