MovieMonday: It

Since Halloween is coming, it's time for horror movies.

Last week's entrant, "It," comes from a very popular, very long Stephen King novel that previously had been made into a 1990  television miniseries. 

The "It" story is set in Derry, Maine, a lovely town but one where seven young teenagers, known as the Losers Club, are bullied for various reasons -- speaking with a lisp, being pudgy, seeming sickly, being Jewish or, in the case of the token girl, being a slut when her actual problem is an abusive father.  The Losers are the targets of several older boys who might have been called greasers or stoners in the film's late-80s milieu.

There is another problem in Derry:  a shape-shifting clown named Pennywise who lives in the city's sewer system.  He grabs and presumably kills a boy named Georgie, the younger brother of one of the Losers.  Later on, an older boy disappears.

As the plot unfolds, we learn that Derry has had similar problems before.  The Losers -- some brave, some wisecracking, all loyal -- try to learn what happened to Georgie and what is happening in their town.  The theme of the story is that the Losers must work together and protect each other.  The conclusion hints very, very, very strongly that a sequel will be released in the next year or so.

That said, the film is only pretty good.  The young actors are believable, and their personal  fears are exposed well in their encounters with Pennywise.  Still, the pacing is uneven and the narrative consists mostly of one scary meetup with the clown after another.  Also missing is even a flimsy hint of a backstory to explain why a murderous clown has come after Derry and its children. Presumably this is a matter to be taken up in the sequel.  


Popularity

What is remarkable is that the "It" opening weekend domestic gross approached $120 million, trouncing recent genre-breakers like "Wonder Woman" ($103 million) and "Dunkirk ($50 million), and doing so when many of the theaters in Houston and Florida were closed.

In fact, movie ticket sales were much lower this summer than in 2016.  Some in Hollywood want to blame the messenger, i.e., the rottentomatoes website, for advising people when new film releases weren't all that good.  A more credible theory, and one that I favor, is that people finally are getting tired of formulaic superhero movies, grossout buddy comedies and three- to eight-quel films with the same old characters and not much new in the way of plots.

Maybe a bunch of the people who have bought 350 million copies of Stephen King books were ready for something different, like "It." 

The West Is Burning

While Americans in Houston and the southeast deal with severe hurricanes and flooding, in the Pacific Northwest there is a different concern: an unusually active forest fire season.

The Idiosyncratist spent last weekend and the first part of the week in northeast Washington state and north Idaho, where talk of fire and smoke was common.  

By Monday, the air in Spokane smelled of smoke and the sky was gray, not its usual blue.   Newspapers warned of increasing smoke from fires in Montana and Canada.  

Here are fire and smoke maps from Tuesday.

Below is a Forest Service fire map from the same day.

After these images were released, existing fires grew bigger and other blazes began.  Many of the fires continue to burn.

Flames

Eagle Creek Fire

Forest fires usually are touched by lightning sparks.  (The exception this year is Oregon's Eagle Creek fire, which a teenager has admitted he started with a firecracker.)   Dry summer conditions allow fires to spread from tree to tree, and wind-borne embers can travel a quarter mile or more to set new fires.  This fire blew across the Columbia River and caused havoc in Washington as well.  At least 30,000 acres of forest have turned to ash.

One of the biggest fires this year is the Rice Ridge Fire in Montana, which was lit by a lightning spark on the afternoon of July 24.  As of yesterday, it had burned 123,000 acres and was about 5 percent contained.

According to wildfiretoday.com, "The objective on the fire is not to put it out or contain it, but to herd it around as necessary to protect private property and structures."

On Friday, officials announced a planned burnout, which I believe means setting a deliberate fire ahead of where the wildfire is headed; the purpose is to destroy plant life that will feed the fire and thus to stop the fire in its path.

There have been occasional high-fire years since the turn of the millennium, but the 2017 incidence of forest fires has been particularly high.

On Friday, wildfiretoday.com said this:

"The 10-year average of the acres burned in the U.S. to this date (September 8) is 5,515,998, while 8,036,858 acres have burned to date this year (National Interagency Fire Center, September 8, 2017). That is a 48 percent increase over the average."

Smoke

Below is a picture from a hotel room of Coeur d'Alene Lake and Tubb's Hill in North Idaho on a cloudy day.

The Significant Other and I stayed at the same hotel last Tuesday.  Here is my cellphone image from a similar location at midday, plus a picture of the sun taken just afterward.

Below, from a forester friend, are two photos of a Mount Shasta view in Northern California's Siskiyou County.  The first is from winter 2016.   The second was taken earlier this week.

The forester told me that a measurement of air-borne particulates in Weed, Calif., that day had registered 450 on a 0-500 scale.  Any measurement over 300 is regarded as hazardous.

As a result, schools in the region canceled outdoor recess.  People with vulnerable health were advised to remain indoors in Washington, Idaho, Oregon and California.   The hope is that rain over the weekend will improve the air and, ideally, extinguish the fires.

Context

My forester friend shared some of his thoughts in an email the other day.  Here's what he said:

"This has been my reality for the past 5 years with smoke burying us typically for one or two months each summer.  Currently we are one month into it, and I wouldn’t expect it to change significantly anytime soon given all the current fires going on. It’s become an annual event. 

"I’m sure that drought has had some influence with dead and dying trees being more susceptible, as has last year’s heavy rains/snow creating more dead grasses in certain areas -- but I’m convinced that these fires are more related to environmental and land management changes.  

"Environmental changes are what they are.   It’s getting warmer, and weather (moisture) patterns are changing.  That's a fact.

"On the land management side there were significant changes beginning 20-25+ years ago that are coming to affect us now.  We all know that lower-intensity fire was a common occurrence before human influence, and this resulted in a more varied forest composition (by size, age, species).  This was replaced by clear-cut logging and aggressive firefighting of any and all fires which was effective in minimizing the size of fires as the forest was more fragmented -- the fuels loading was more diverse.  This is still the case on most private industrial lands.  What has changed, though, is the Forest Service/BLM.  (Fire-fighting) activities on federal land have become almost nonexistent and given previous activities, these lands are coming back with dense, even aged stands that can’t tolerate fire." 

MovieMonday: The Wrecking Crew

This was a slack week at movie theaters in my neighborhood, and I so stayed home and watched this documentary about Southern California session musicians in the early rock and roll period.  

Think about some modern pop and rock songs -- "Smells Like Teen Spirit" from Nirvana in 1991, "One Step Closer" by Linkin Park in 2000, or 2016's No. 1 Billboard single, Justin Bieber's "Love Yourself."

Are people going to be familiar with these songs 50 years from now?  Does hearing any of these make you want to tap your foot or hum along?

Now think about some popular songs of 1966:  "Good Vibrations" by the Beach Boys, "Strangers in the Night" by Frank Sinatra, and "California Dreamin'" by the Mamas & the Papas.  

We still hear those 50-year-old songs today.  Heck, I ran across a millennial recently who had heard "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'", a less distinguished hit from that same year.

Why do those old songs resonate?   My guess is that the melodic lines were stronger and the supporting musical arrangements were better.  For the latter, we can thank the Wrecking Crew.

This documentary, made in 2008 and then punched up a bit for theatrical release in 2015, sets the Wrecking Crew in context.  It was made by Denny Tedesco after the death of his father, guitarist Tommy Tedesco, a Wrecking Crew regular.

The film includes interviews with composers, producers and the musicians themselves, and it explains how the ad hoc Wrecking Crew stable influenced, punched up and enhanced popular music for a remarkable moment that lasted 10 or 15 years in the rock, pop, soul and R&B genres.

The beginning coincided with the relocation of much music production from New York to Los Angeles, and it was pushed along by surfing culture and Phil Spector's Wall of Sound-enhanced LA productions, including "Be My Baby."

Dennis Wilson, the driving force of the Beach Boys, is interviewed in the movie.  When he heard that song for the first time, he says, "I was so impressed I pulled my car over to the side of the road to listen.  It just blew me away."

Subsequent Beach Boys numbers were recorded by Wrecking Crew members because they were better musicians than members of the band.  (This also was noted in "Love and Mercy," the 2014 Wilson biopic.)  A member of the Birds rock band notes that Wrecking Crew musicians could knock out a new song in a few hours while the band itself once played a song 77 times in the recording studio before getting a satisfactory result. 

Among the people featured in the movie are bass guitarist Carol Kaye, a real character; Earl Palmer, a jazz drummer who acknowledges he made much more money from rock music than jazz; Hal Blaine, a drummer with a fun backstory; and New Orleans-raised horn man Plas Johnson, who provided the sax solo for the Pink Panther theme.  There are many others, all thoughtful and interesting.

Anyway, the movie explains the whole story and showcases some really talented insiders in good detail.  It's worth a look.  

Another Movie

"Standing in the Shadows of Motown," a 2002 film gives the background for a similar group musicians, the ones who backed up Detroit recordings starting in 1959 for Berry Gordy Jr.'s influential record productions.

The Motown star roster was long and distinguished -- Smokey Robinson, the Temptations, the Isley Brothers, the Four Tops, Martha and the Vandellas, the Supremes and Marvin Gaye, among many many others --  and the production values of the records they produced were excellent.

But perhaps because Detroit musicians worked for a single studio (while in LA there were various companies) they were treated less well, paid less money and left behind when Gordy upped stakes and moved his company to Los Angeles between the late 1960s and early 1970s.  

Books: The Call of the Wild

This short novel about the life of a dog has been in continuous publication since 1903.  It functions as an adventure novel, as a travelogue about a little-observed moment in the American past and as a meditation on how personal character is forged by survival against adversity.  

Generations of young people, mostly boys, have been raised on the book.  Its writer seems clearly to have been influenced by Rudyard Kipling, and in turn to have shaped and inspired 20th-century American writers from Ernest Hemingway to Jack Kerouac to Hunter Thompson. 

Here's how the story begins:

Four-year-old Buck, a St. Bernard/Scotch shepherd mix, is separated from his comfortable  life on a California farm and sold by a family servant to settle a gambling debt.

The year is 1897, and large dogs with thick coats are in demand as sled dogs in the Alaskan wild, which has attracted 100,000 ambitious prospectors after a gold strike in the Klondike.  (This setting is factual, by the way.)

Buck is caged and sent by train and without food and water to Seattle.  When released, he attacks the first man in sight and in return is clubbed repeatedly until he learns that the clubbing will stop only when he stops fighting.  From the book:

"That club was a revelation.  It was his introduction to the reign 

of primitive law, and he met the introduction halfway.  

The facts of life took on a fiercer aspect; 

and while he faced that aspect uncowed, he faced it 

with all the latent cunning of his nature aroused."

Thus begins Buck's transformation.  He is sent by boat to Skagway and hitched to a sled team carrying mail thousands of miles north into the Yukon in the early days of the gold stampede.  

Over time, Buck's body hardens, grows stronger and adjusts to the snow and ice.  He observes the behavior of other dogs and of humans.  He learns to choose his fights, and he earns the respect of other dogs and the French Canadians who run the team.  

At the end of the 2,500-mile mail journey, Buck and the other dogs are sold to a trio of lazy and stupid people who all but run them to death.  The story proceeds from there.

Through these experiences, Buck continues to match his actions to his circumstances.  He comes to understand the nature of his ancestors, wolves, and adopts their ways.  The old formalities of civilization are replaced as he hears and answers -- yes -- the call of the wild.

This is a fine adventure story with a lot of respect for its lead character and insight into the character of individual dogs as well as human characters in the story.  Its themes and lessons obviously are meant for human readers.

The book still reads well, and I recommend it to people who can absorb the violence that shapes Buck into the creature he was meant to be.  My only quibble, and it's a small one, is that the writer's transliteration of his French Canadian characters' dialog is a bit klunky.  

The Author

"You can't wait for inspiration.  You have to go after it with a club."

Jack London was born in 1876 in San Francisco.  He was a rebellious sort and dropped out of school at 14 to become a hobo and small-time thief.  Later, after a year at UC Berkeley (as it is known today), he dropped out again to head north for the Klondike gold rush.

London returned without having staked a claim but with material for "The Call of the Wild" and many short stories.  Perhaps the most famous of those is "To Build a Fire," a nicely rendered piece that French filmmakers turned into a good animated feature last year on the centenary of London's death.

As hinted above, London saw himself as a man of action.  He traveled broadly, lectured often (he was an iconoclastic, of course) and wrote continually, publishing dozens of books of fiction and nonfiction.  But his health was poor, and he died at 40; it hardly needs saying that he worked full-tilt until the very end. 

MovieMonday: Good Time

"Good Time" is the new -- and misnamed -- movie from Josh and Benny Safdie, the talented New York brothers who have spent the last 10 years turning out stories with gritty urban themes. 

Its star, Robert Pattinson, plays Connie Nikas, a resourceful but ultimately ineffective hood from Queens; his single admirable quality is his absolute loyalty to his mildly retarded brother, Nick.

As the film opens, Connie drags Nick out of a psychiatric session that is making him uncomfortable and angry.   Then Connie and Nick pull off a seemingly well-plotted bank heist that ends quickly with Nick's arrest and transfer to a Rikers Island holding pen. 

Things go downhill from there.  Connie tries to find money to bail out his brother and then learns that Nick has been hospitalized after a beating by other inmates.  He perseveres through plan after failed plan, using cunning and charm to draw in his sometime girlfriend and then several unsuspecting African American people.  There are many tension-inducing plot elements, including a colossal case of mistaken identity, a midnight encounter with a security guard at a faded amusement park and a large bottle of LSD that is seen for a time as the solution to Connie's money problems.  The movie covers a lot of ground in its ever-urgent 100 minutes.

Cinematographer Sean Price Williams has shot the film almost entirely with handheld cameras that focus mostly on very tight facial studies of anguish and desperation. The action is punctuated with electronic music (by Brooklyn's Oneohtrix Point Never) that maintains the atmospheric themes of anxiety and dread.  

"Good Time" is exactly the movie its creators set out to deliver, and it is very well done. 

That said, it is unsettling to watch.  If you're a student of film, you should see it.  If you are not, you should think twice.

Nature Wants Your House Back

Not my house.  At least, not yet.

When you buy a house, the bank wants its mortgage payments and the county wants its property taxes.

These are minor matters in the larger scheme, however.  The real challenge is this:  Nature wants your house back.  Over the long term, nature will win.

Some years back, the Significant Other and I bought a newly built house.

During the first big wind and rainstorm, water pushed under the sill of a slider door and left a puddle on the living room floor.   I cut a piece of lumber to fit the space, nailed it in and caulked it all around.

The next storm ripped a bunch of shingles off the roof.  I called a roofer and had them replaced.

Then a couple skunks dug their way under the house one night.  They got in a fight, and one of them died.  I called a pest control company to remove the (very, very) smelly carcass and a handyman to build a barrier at the skunks' access point.

I planted climbing hydrangeas that grew so well they started covering the windows.  I cut the hydrangeas back; they returned the next year.  I applied herbicide; two years, later the hydrangeas returned again.  I gave up.  As usual, nature had won.

Nature owns the world.  We humans are just squatters.

I think about this sometimes when I see pictures of Detroit houses whose owners have moved on.

In fact, it happens all over the country.  Here is a house that nature is reclaiming in Aberdeen, N.J.

And here is a house in the American South that is being swallowed by kudzu.

Several years ago, a house in our town fell into disrepair. The front yard grew tall and straggly, and dead leaves overflowed the gutters. Then one of the window screens worked its way loose and dangled over the driveway. The paint began to peel, and spots of green stuff, probably fungus, appeared on the roof. I heard that the man of the household had a gambling problem -- he couldn't fight his own demons and nature at the same time. Ultimately the house was sold. It looks fine now, but I still wonder about the man, his wife and their children.


Below is a pioneer homestead cabin built in 1906 and abandoned during the Great Depression.  Structures like these, rendered unlivable, dot the prairies, the Dakotas, Montana and portions of Canada.

Nature has won, and humans, knowing their defeat, cannot muster the energy to tear down the little that remains.

No matter.  In time, nature will see to that.

The Lesson of Charlottesville

If someone had told me two weeks ago that hundreds of self-proclaimed Nazis and white supremacists would show up for a public demonstration in an American city, I would not have believed it.  And yet, 10 days ago, that is what happened.

I am not going to weigh in on the politics here.  Reasonable people already understand that Nazism and white supremacy are bad ideas, and this point has been made, repeatedly, already.  

Let's just talk about one guy instead.  

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At right is the mug shot of the fellow who "allegedly" drove the car into a crowd at Charlottesville, killing a peaceful demonstrator. The event seems to have been taped, and so the only questions are whether or how he will be punished. 

This guy is 20 years old.  He was raised and schooled in the United States and, except for a four-month stint in the military, hasn't done much since high school. 

Since his early teens, he has been a self-declared Nazi and white supremacist.  Here is what I have read: 

1)  In freshman year, he wrote an essay so full of neo-Nazi themes that it was shared with the school principal.  The young man wore a belt decorated with swastikas to school and was observed drawing swastikas on various occasions.

2) He harassed a fellow student, a Muslim, and called her a terrorist.

3) On a two-week class trip to France and Germany, his traveling roommate flew home after only four days because he was so offended by the young man's praise of Hitler, by his description of the French as "inferior" and by his eagerness to get to Germany, which he called the "Fatherland." (Interestingly, the accused man's father died before his son was born.)

4) By senior year, he was known as "the Nazi of the school."

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It is not unusual to find contrarian young people who go against the grain.  It is also legal in this country to believe what you wish.  

On the other hand, let's consider some of the things adults said after the incident:

 -- His mother said that she and her son did not talk about politics.  She thought he was going to Charlottesville because of "something about Trump."

 -- A history teacher said the young man was smart, argumentative, adamant and not particularly receptive to the idea that his beliefs might be wrong.

 -- His high school principal said, "This (he) is one outlier.  That's not who we are."

 -- The school board chairman said he'd never heard of the young man because the board only dealt with students who were facing expulsion.

 -- A man from the neighborhood said he did not know the young man, but "If he's a racist, I don't want to know him."

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One adult, quoted in a news report, said that the event in Charlottesville presented a "teachable moment."  I would argue that many teachable moments were not seized as this young man curdled his brain with stale ideas and vile delusions.

1) Was his mother called to visit the principal after that first freshman paper, and then after the young man was spotted wearing Nazi garb, and then he after bullied the Muslim student?  Was he referred to the school counselor and, from there, to a psychologist or a college ethics professor or perhaps even a clergyman?

2) Did anyone show him photographs of the dead bodies and skeletal remains found in 1945 when Nazi prison camps were liberated by Allied forces?  Did anyone challenge him to explain, after 300,000 Americans died fighting in World War II, how he squared being a Nazi with his US citizenship?

3) When he went on that school trip to Germany, did no one think to call ahead to a German school to ask for someone to speak with the guy?  Germany has spent more than 70 years stamping out the traces of Nazi ideology, and it has no shortage of people who have spent careers on the project.  It wouldn't have been difficult to find one of those people.

Moral Truth

I wonder sometimes how people derive their ethical values.  For many, it comes from religion. Christianity teaches that "All men are brothers," and other faiths all preach some variation of the "Do unto others" idea.  For non-believers, philosophy reasons its way to the same conclusion. 

(We also have many people now who scorn religion and metaphysics and claim to be driven by "science."  Personally, I find this amusing.  By and large, Americans are scientific illiterates, and our current political discussions are largely emotion-driven and boil down to name-calling and finger-pointing.  I wish it were better, but this is reality.)

Even if you have none of the above, there is American history.  I hope every high school student still learns the line, "All men are created equal," one of the self-evident truths enumerated in the Declaration of Independence. 

This young man has turned himself into a pretty twisted person, and he will be held responsible.  But I wish the adults who witnessed his decline had been a lot more "pro-active," as we say, in his formative years.  His failure is not just his but also that of his community.  

Maybe this is the ultimate teachable moment.