Birdman (movie review)

I got to Columbia River Brewery (CRB) early and checked in via Swarm, leaving a record in my Facebook profile.

Hollywood Theater, a nonprofit with a loyal membership, including friends of mine, was doing a brisk business this day after Christmas, 2014.  Matt and I were there to see Birdman.  I saw Wild on Christmas Day, also showing here, but I saw it at Lloyd Center.

We both admired Michael Keaton in Beetlejuice and I saw a lot of continuity in the character.  A raving psychotic who should be supervised, or at least not be given openable windows, is allowed to pursue a dubious career in theater, at least in his paranoid / locked-up own mind.

His daughter does her best with this guy but is showing a lot of birdman tendencies herself.  Both achieve some notoriety, with her registers being more cyber-spatial (Cyberia-focused); she's following Twitter and all that.  Having seen Wild the day before, this young one's character reminded me of Cheryl's.

Matt and I had mostly critical things to say about the movie, but really we were talking about the whole melodramatic / theatrical culture.

I'm not exactly a quietist, as a Quaker, but on the quietist-to-ranter spectrum, I'm more a quietist than this theatrical bunch, prone to expletives, like the Nixonian White House.  I'm certainly known to rant sometimes, giving vent to invective.

But then, to be fair, this cast needed to survive on Broadway and pump it up incredibly, every night, for eager audiences, any one of which might contain a powerful media critic of enormous influence.  That's a lot of stress.  Show business drives people nuts, and likewise attracts nuts to its swirling core (cite The Zero Theorem -- nutty and fun).

We decided to hit Laurelwood Pub, adjacent Rheinlander, which used to occupy the CRB location nearer the theater, only to find it was packed to the gills.  We checked the pub I often go to after Hollywood, but that was packed too (not a work or school night).  CRB was comfortably busy with just cleared booths.  I got War Elephant Double IPA and a sandwich, Matthew a salad.

Birdman is over the top intentionally I'm sure and with enough psychoanalysis we could get something spinning around the secret psychic powers (shades of Stalker).  I'm going to leave that to other critics.

Test Piloting a QR-code

with special thanks to David Chandler, Leslie Hickcox, and to Portland Mennonites

Hobbit Economics

"everything is awesome!" (so much gold!)

So King Thorin has a serious headache with all that gold, inherited from the nasty dragon.  If he just lets it out the door then pretty soon it won't be that scarce.  We saw how the villagers treated it, but how long would that last?  It would have to be meted out, and you would need to be an Einstein, or Milton Friedman, to figure out the velocity of money issues.  How fast would be the military build-up?  Would inflation lead to food riots, with wheel barrows of gold barely buying a zucchini?

What are orc children like?  Did we see a hatchery in a back episode?  Do Mr. & Mrs. Orc ever party, and do they form nuclear families at all?  They don't appear to have much use for money in other words, or the finer things in life.  That's probably why Smaug's Mountain has to be "strategic" in some battle ground, as a bunch of gold is not attractive enough.

Indeed, what can gold buy you?  The Elves have what they need so remain aloof.  No HDTV, no iPhones... there's precious little money can buy back then, and one gets tired of mere jewelry and gold bricks used for street pavement.  So what?  What's so "wealthy" about streets paved with gold when you get right down to it?  Slippery, impractical.  Back to Thorin's nightmare.

One can almost read Gandalf's lips there at the end when he says Bilbo is a terrible liar.  We all know he's got the ring and Gandalf understands the Shire is the best place for it as the saga continues, with Mordor on its military build-up, post face-off with the elvyn chyk (tail tuck time).  We know that in the audience as well, that Gandalf is just biding his time, plus the book readers among us even better understand how the ring is increasing Bilbo's willingness to lie, never mind how bald facedly i.e. badly.

The first of the three Hobbit films got me claustrophobic and I'm reminded by last night's Solstice banter that the book is that way too.  Now that I've seen the Snowden documentary, I can't help but make the pun "snowed in" and draw the parallel of getting stuck in some hotel room in Hong Kong for N hours.  Lets just start on some adventure already!  People should let up on Assange.  In general, lets be a lot less Mordor-like, less Orc-like, if we really think the Hobbits won or deserved to.

Where's the Fair? (movie review)

Where's the Fair? asks why the USA no longer seems to care about the World's Fair or Expo concept, having withdrawn from the international body that plans them while producing only lackluster pavilions and then only when goaded by foreign governments to step up to the plate.

Talking heads propose various theories as to why the State and/or Commerce Department have dropped the ball, while the Freedom of Information Act begets a lot of heavily redacted documents.  No one seems to know for sure.

The film spends very little time on the Montreal dome of 1967, Buckminster Fuller's contribution, and mentions Kabul and Khrushchev not at all.  Minus the Bucky thread, perhaps too much of the narrative unravels?

Washington does not want to get trapped into doing another dome probably, while winning hearts and minds is an undertaking that city despairs of doing anymore, having alienated just about everyone. 

The confidence to spin truly hopeful visions of the future is not in the USIA's repertoire anymore, as there's no longer a USIA.

I learned quite a bit from this film.  I had no idea Spokane, Washington had hosted a World's Fair in the 1970s, or maybe I'd known that once and forgot.   Archival clips from some of the events were exciting.

Perhaps the USA is just too diverse to be represented by some out of touch State Department in any case.  Cascadia could have its own pavilion someday maybe?  GM did, in Shanghai in 2010, with its Chinese partner company.

Milan 2015 will be the site of the next Expo.  The documentary suggests the USA will not have a pavilion but from the perspective of December 2014, we do expect one.

:: rendering:  usa pavilion 2015 ::

Followup proposal:
A possible food candidate for the American Food Pavilion

Wisdom @ Work

Penguins of Madagascar (movie review)

Strange as it may sound if you're not used to thinking of movies in a curriculum context, ala film school, this cartoon deserves doing some homework first.

The Madagascar franchise is already well evolved, and this narrative follows an off shoot:  the special ops team of penguins, so endearing in the earlier episodes.

Ideas come quickly at high bandwidth, fighting boredom all the way (I was never bored); ideas about physics, about relationships, and about human (or octopus) motivations.

The villain feels royally dissed that all the zoo patrons coo over penguins and not him.  His revenge:  "monsterize" penguins.  The giant ray gun, a staple of villain cartoons, is playing the usual role.

Another special ops team appears on the scene, somewhat modeling the so-called "special relationship" between the US and UK.

The US broke off from the UK at a high management level, as well as in the rank and file, and the two cultures still have a lot of the same attitudes toward what "special ops" looks like (ala James Bond, though I didn't catch that many direct references to this Ian Flemming character).

Seeing Penguins of Madagascar and Big Hero 6 both on the same day, with a few hours in between (enough time to visit Yard House for dinner, bus home, come back with the car), made for some interesting thinking.

John Malkovich plays a great villain, bravo.

Note closing credits:  they get it right with the hexagons as connoting high tech.

By 2014 we have successfully migrated from the right angled XYZ look to the more futuristic / organic IVM look, when it comes to connoting high technology.  Graphene is where it's at.

When buying two 3D movie tickets at once (the 2nd for Big Hero 6 at 9:50 PM) for like $29, I mentioned something about breaking the bank.  The ticket lady said she didn't mean to be rude but if I were age 60 or greater I could claim a discount.

Although I have the requisite white hair, I wasn't sure if she'd card me so demurred: "I couldn't prove it" I said, "but I'll be 60 soon though, and then I can watch all the cartoons I want!".  The guy behind me thought that was funny.  Me too.

Men Were Too Slow

Given ongoing ops in Bangalore to raise living standards for children by sharing a more intelligent STEM curriculum (OLPC an influence), I'm seeing a next campaign shaping up.

You may remember my Kite campaign, a connecting of dots that included Alexander Graham Bell's kites.  This campaign will be similar in that many dots will connect, and many light bulbs will go on.

Before that it was "Aristotle was right, remember the Mite", homage to space-filling tetrahedrons (Sommerville a champion).

The gist of the new campaign:

Men had thirty years to appreciate Synergetics and a few of them did, but mostly the Bucky stuff, being about livingry and not killingry, is about "girlie man" stuff i.e. is "for girls" i.e. "patriarchy [sic] is too dumb to get it" (as in:  too lazy, too slow -- a non-virtuous kind of dumb).

This taps into pent up fury against patronizing men, plus helps counter the Barbie Syndrome.  Works well in India, but other places too.

More on Facebook.  Stay tuned. Wicca an influence as well.

Good Bye Party

I'm at a low key good bye party for Steve Holden, who comes and goes from Portland quite a lot, but with this departure having a penultimate flavor.  We look forward to having him back in 2015.

Steve lent some serious technology to the Blue House:  a color printer, now in the Buddha Room, and an Apple computer, to which I added an HDMI monitor and USB keyboard.  Lindsey uses this setup, freeing my Samsung tablet for use as my reader.  I bought Dataclysm this evening.

I'm chauffeuring Steve to PDX tomorrow morning.