raphael.longbournprods.com

Ah, that unpronouncable acronym of acronyms, the nwobhm, holds a most special place in the hearts of heavy metal fans. No other term, perhaps, holds as much reverence, as much awe, as much sheer mystique, to those who follow the path of the heavy, than the nwobhm does, and not without good reason. For it was in the nwobhm, in that swelteringly-hot, clanging forge of music alchemy, that much of the foundations of the genre were formed, and to which virtually all who came after were forced to pay homage.

NWOBHM stands for the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, a term coined in a weekly music paper in 1979 to describe a grassroots, groundswell movement of heavy rock bands bucking the tide of punk rock and new wave. But, in an interesting twist, it was the article itself which served as the catalyst for the movement, and helped to thrust the New Wave of British Heavy Metal into the limelight, and a few of its most fortunate into super-stardom.

As with many fads, within a year it had lost steam, and within a few years it was gone, an entire network of like-minded groups in a whole nation ceasing to exist altogether. It arrived with a bang, left with a whimper.

Gone but not forgotten, however. As the 90s progressed, it soon became apparent that there was a whole world of fans who loved that strange, brief British fad, fans in Europe, Japan, America, as well as back home, who clambered for used copies of old vinyl, the relics of the age. A collector’s world was born, and with it the good and the bad that comes from collecting. Long-defunct bands were invited to re-form and perform again at the Summer European festivals, sometimes to audiences many times as large as any to whom they had originally performed.

It turned out that for many, the nwobhm mystique had not in fact worn off, even after so much time had passed.
But what is it about this strange, brief music movement that holds so much special magic for the heavy metal fan? Why does it continue to entice, why does the name itself seem to evoke such awed whispers?

To find the answer, we have to travel back in time and become familiar with the world in which the nwobhm was born, as well as the people who contributed to it, not just the music itself.

Hold on just a sec while I get out my map of time portals (stolen from the Supreme Being), and …

To the mainstream music companies and press, hard rock was dead in the late 70s in the UK, replaced by the edgier punk rock and New Wave movements (by the end of the 70s these would in turn be replaced by Ska and other forms of pop). Hard rock bands — especially the up-and-comers — found it hard to book gigs, and even harder to make record deals in a climate which had apparently moved on to other genres. Steve Harris of Iron Maiden has often recounted how one brief manager of the band could have gotten them a record deal … if they agreed to cut their hair short and put on leather and safety pins.

Heavy metal was a term for heavy rock that had come into existence around 1970, used to define rock bands who used distorted guitars and brisk tempos, bands such as Deep Purple and Black Sabbath. But by the late 70s most of these monoliths had lost a great deal of steam. Their output dwindled, rosters disintegrated. The perception was that these groups and the sound they represented had had their day and run their course, and it was time to move on.

There were exceptions. A very few groups, such as Judas Priest and UFO were able to sell out the larger venues and release major-label records, as most nwobhm participants were quick to point out, but the general momentum was against this type of music. If nothing else, it certainly wasn’t fashionable anymore.

Yet, throughout Britain in the mid- and late-70s, dozens, probably hundreds, of bands cropped up of young hopefuls who had grown up listening to the heavy metal greats and wanted to make their own music in that style. Generally, their aspirations were small (get local gigs, maybe pull some birds). More importantly, they had no clue that other young bands with similar tastes even existed outside their narrow little sphere. Because this style of music was not receiving any kind of media attention, nor did any kind of national network exist as such, these bands drilled away in complete isolated obscurity.

By and large the activities of these bands consisted of pursuing local gigs for little or no money at pubs and building societies, and hanging about trying to put together their own material to record demo tapes to send off to the labels (who promptly threw them in the trash).

Iron Maiden provides a quintessential example of the average activities of bands who would eventually comprise the nwobhm movement. Formed in December 1975 by bassist Steve Harris, and comprising at the time an almost endless revolving door of other East Ender players, Iron Maiden toured the local pubs in East London looking for an opportunity to play to a few punters, while they built up their homemade material, perfected their sound and their technique, and tried to develop a stage persona. They trundled around with their equipment in the back of a washed-up old van they dubbed the Green Goddess. Money was not their goal — they all had dayjobs (Harris was an apprentice draftsman). Gigs would on occasion net them the princely sum of 15 quid, not even enough to cover the expenses of their burgeoning pyrotechnics.

But money wasn’t the issue. What bands like Maiden were pursuing was the opportunity to perform music in a genre they loved in front of an audience. Not necessarily a very big audience, but an audience nontheless.

Suddenly, Maiden found themselves packing out the pubs, pubs which, like the Ruskin Arms, started inviting them back. They were developing a fanbase, local kids who loved what they were doing and would pop up, over and over, wherever the band played.

It’s important to note that the activities of bands like Maiden were going completely under the radar of the record labels and the press. Really, a little local band with a few local fans was hardly groundbreaking, but what the press (and the bands themselves) didn’t realize was that an entire groundswell movement was growing that would suddenly go from isolated, local incidents into a full-blown national phenomenon.

The dam burst early in 1979, nwobhm’s watershed year. Its catalyst would arrive in Spring 1979 in the pages of “Sounds” magazine (one of the three major national music weeklies), when Geoff Barton wrote an article describing what he called the New Wave of British Heavy Metal. In that one article was born not just the inception point of the movement, but the movement’s name as well. It was a rallying point and lightning rod both, alerting all these isolated, local favourite bands to the fact that they were part of a bona fide national movement, as well as their fans to the fact that a whole world had just been created and consolidated.

It was only to be expected that, with a hot new music fad bursting onto the scene, the major record labels wouldn’t be long in coming calling, their fat wallets waving enticingly …

To be continued …

Tags: heavy metal, nwobhm, Iron Maiden

Man, I had forgotten how much I despise pan-and-scan videos.

Starman, the science-fiction film directed by John Carpenter and starring Jeff Bridges and Karen Allen, arrived on my doorstep at the end of last week, courtesy of Netflix (to my surprise, too, which I suppose is part of the fun of setting up a queue and then forgetting about it).

Equally surprising was the realization that, unlike what is stated at the Netflix site, the disc I received had no widescreen version of the film, enhanced for 16×9 displays; in fact, it had no widescreen version at all.

Instead, I was forced to endure watching a film that had been shot in anamorphic Panavision crammed into a nearly square box, which said box is occasionally and quite abritrarily slid from side to side within the original film’s 2.35:1 format.

Now, a letterboxed movie which is not anamorphic widescreen is bad enough. But a pan-and-scan “full frame” edition? Almost unendurable. I’d managed to steer clear of full frame DVDs pretty much entirely over the last few years, but one finally managed to rear up and take me by surprise. It would have to take me by surprise — I certainly wouldn’t rent a pan-and-scan movie intentionally.

What’s worse is that this Sony release is copyrighted 2005 on the disc, the same disc which says absolutely nothing about “full frame” anywhere upon its printed surface. And the menu — I saw better menus in the very first crop of Warners DVDs way back in 1997. I think it must be the worst DVD menu I have ever beheld. Bad enough in 1997; intolerable in 2005.

The worst insult a “full frame” movie can offer is actually not that it’s chopped off about half the picture. No. What makes it so horrific is the pan-and-scan feature. Because when the picture effectively trucks left or right, there is this horrendous smearing effect on the screen that completely and unceremoniously drops you out of the cinematic cocoon in which the movie has wrapped you. It’s like a wake-up call to remind you that the director and DP of the movie are no longer in control, and some technician with dodgy equipment will now be re-shooting the movie in a very small box with a bad dolly track.

And yet some studios still release DVDs in both widescreen and full frame versions (the Star Wars Trilogy comes to mind). The idea of actually consciously choosing to spend money to get a full frame edition seems to me equivalent to buying the airline edit of a movie because you prefer it to the original theatrical edition. It’s simply a decision for mad people who ought to be shipped off to Manhattan with the mutants and not get rescued by Snake Plissken.

To return to Starman, every time I began to sink into the movie and forget that half of it had been sheared off, along would come a pan-and-scan move, and pop, suspension of disbelief bursts. The truck move, complete with smearing of the picture, is so obvious and heavy-handed, it’s impossible not to be ripped from the narrative, because it’s so bloody incongruous. Pan-and-scan moves look absolutely nothing like a film move, they don’t look like a camera on a dolly, and the unpleasant sensation of scrolling along a two-dimensional plane (in other words, the movie screen itself), is so disorienting that it makes me sick. If a real camera really filming a scene were to make a truck to the left or right, on real dolly tracks, the perspective would shift as the camera moved. As viewers, we expect this shift in perspective for the movement to feel naturally a part of three-dimensional space. A Pan-and-Scan truck does not shift perspective, because the actual shot in the movie itself is usually not moving. Instead, the equipment trucks across the two-dimensional plane of the flat movie projector screen, while the perspective in the shot remains the same. That’s disorienting enough, but when you add this grotesque smearing effect to the affair, it just totally throws it beyond endurance for me.

I suppose I’ve been somewhat spoiled by having this great 16X9 HDTV set, and having so many anamorphic widescreen movies which fill my widescreen set and offer films in the aspect ratio intended by the filmmakers. It may seem like griping over something fairly trivial to some, but to me, especially after avoiding Pan-and-Scan videos for so long, it’s shocking to realize how poorly-treated filmmakers’ work has traditionally been, just because a few people are too stupid to understand what those damned black bars at the top and bottom of the screen are supposed to be.

Selfish I may be, but I hope to God I don’t have to endure another Pan-and-Scan full frame DVD any time in the near future. I swear, the experience may kill me.

Now if I can just find an edition of Starman out there with a widescreen transfer so that I can actually give the movie the attention it deserves.

Tags: DVD, widescreen, Starman.

I’m not going to talk about the insane, sustained heat we’ve been enduring here in Los Angeles. Over at Blogging.la it seems that’s all they have the heart to discuss, and truly, it has been quite a trial. Wunderground.com suggests that the worse may be behind us, but anyway, I’m much more alarmed by friends and acquaintances in the UK and Ireland who indicate that the heat spell there is not going away, and seems to me to be frighteningly indicative of climatic shifts, global warming, whatever. A friend of a friend showed me a photo depicting all the wildfires currently burning all across the world — it’s horrendous. Could these be causing warming shifts in the temperature?

Anyway, I said I wasn’t going to talk about the heat and I just did. Frak. Let’s move on.

What’s worse than standing in line at the post office at 6 o’clock in the evening for over twenty minutes?

Standing in line at the post office at 6 o’clock in the evening for over twenty minutes when the friggin’ air-conditioning is broken. I have never seen so many unhappy people. Is this what comes of them raising all their rates, again? Man, sometimes I hate the US Postal Service enough that it endangers my health.

Later, after enduring the sweltering postal inferno, I found myself driving past the Santa Anita racetrack, a kind of strange, monstrous fixture that always struck me as somewhat awkwardly out of time, like a vestige of a less-populated, more wide-horizon era that somehow has managed to keep alive. It seems to do quite well for itself, but its grand and sweeping acreage always makes me think how nice it must have been here (and elsewhere) sixty years ago, before suburban sprawl, before choked freeways, before population booms and cheap ricky-ticky housing and afternoon rush hour.

Some years ago, I read a Frank Capra biography, and to my surprise discovered that the Pasadena area figured prominently in his life. Although Capra was raised in Lincoln Heights (across the street from a tomato sauce canning factory — I kid you not), which at the turn of the century housed a large Italian American population, he managed to find his way to the exceedingly wealthy Throop Academy (later to become Caltech) in Pasadena. His father, Salvatore, was a steward overseeing Japanese American farmers on a ranch up in the hills of Sierra Madre, which mostly grew fruit trees.

Before becoming involved in the film business, Capra worked as live-in tutor for the son of Lucky Baldwin, a somewhat eccentric coot who had made fortunes time and time again as an entrepreneur, and whose original racetrack and grounds would evolve into the present day Santa Anita racetrack, and the Los Angeles County Arboretum. In the late 19th century Baldwin’s estate stretched for thousands of acres, which he then subdivided and sold.

Although the racetrack which exists now bears no resemblance to the one Baldwin built, I invariably find myself imagining what it might have looked like around the track when he lived here with his 5,000 acres, his revolving door of mistresses, and his imported Indian peacocks (who now run wild in some neighborhoods of Arcadia), all those years ago. Before suburbs. Before the Santa Anita Fashion Park. Before the horseless carriage even.

I’ll bet it was magnificent.

As I looped round the track and started back toward home, I noticed the same tiny, dingy little shop with the closed blinds that I always notice, and the little sign on the door that I always notice:

ANALIST TURF

I chuckled, just as I always do. Analist? Is that someone who just really knows their stuff when it comes to anuses? Do analists have better turf than non-analists? Hey, what kind of turf is this anyway? Are we talking rectal turf here? Be sure to consult your family analist for all your turf needs.

Tags: Santa Anita, Los Angeles

Photo by Wikipedia, used under Creative Commons

(this post is spoiler-free)

Okay, actually the first of my summer sci-fi viewing reviews doesn’t exist yet. I’ll get to that coming up, because actually the viewing in question is much more complex and deserving of more varied, considered discussion.

First up (but second), is what I watched last night, the 1988 “science fiction” film Alien Nation, starring James Caan and Mandy Patinkin.

Set just a few years in the future (1991), the plot tells of a race of alien worker drones — dubbed “Newcomers” — who arrive on the planet Earth as immigrants, and are invited take up residence, slowly entering into society. As with any newly arrived race of immigrants, full incorporation into society is slow, and many of the aliens wind up in ethnic ghettos, such as the “slagtown” of Los Angeles. When Detective Sergeant Matthew Sykes (Caan) loses his partner in a Newcomer-related shooting, he gets Sam Francisco (Patinkin) — the first Newcomer to achieve the rank of Detective — as his new partner. Together they investigate the shooting which resulted in the death of his old partner, and unravel a criminal plot that could expose a horrendous secret of the Newcomer race.

The first and most important reaction to this movie is that, despite certain surface dressings, this really isn’t a science fiction movie at all. Most SF authors and critics state that in order for material to qualify as real science fiction, it must explore science or technology in a manner integral to the plot; in other words, that without this science element the story would not exist.

Alien Nation does not meet this criterion. It is, in all respects and in the most traditional of ways, a buddy cop picture. The science fiction elements in the movie are simply a veneer to provide color and a new taste to a very old formula (like putting cherry in Coke). Structurally, the screenplay is a very straightforward connect-the-dots “cops search out a mystery in the underworld while they struggle to work together” story. It’s like 48 Hours, except one of the two leads has a head which looks like a spotted ostrich egg. The race of alien Newcomers could just as easily have been replaced with another race of “exotic” Los Angeles immigrants — Koreans, Japanese, El Salvadorians — without any of the plot being lost. So, right there, and to my disappointment, “summer sci-fi viewing, part the second” has become “summer buddy cop picture with funny-loooking people viewing, part the first”.

As a buddy cop feature, then, how does it measure up? It’s acceptable, I suppose. Hardly revolutionary. It has most of the requisite features. There’s a high-society criminal villain, played with steel by Terence Stamp (a character indistinguishable from any corrupt wealthy citizen in any issue of Batman). There’s one car chase scene where most of the Los Angeles basin is traversed (sort of out of sequence) in something like ten minutes. There’s the requisite scene with an inexplicably aroused female who drops awkwardly out of the story as soon as she provides the needed minute or so of feminine pulchritude. There’s the standard bonding scene between the two cops from different walks of life over drinks. Then there’s the gasp shock couple of fisticuff finales at the end which tend to make things a little strung out and exhausting rather than exciting.

I’m being intentionally vague so as to avoid spoilers. But it’s actually not that difficult to avoid spoilers in this case because so many of the plot points are so generic that they are instantly recognizable to anyone who has any kind of familiarity with action movies, especially of the urban cop variety. They are given just a hint of a “science-fiction” flavor here and there, but not enough to free them from being anything but by-the-book formula.

Also, if a variety of visual effects are a necessary element in a science-fiction movie for you, this movie will disappoint. Aside from a kind of still-shot of the alien flying saucer seen on a television screen at the beginning of the movie, there are absolutely no visual effects whatsoever. And the alien makeup and prosthetics, despite coming from the vaunted Stan Winston studio, are nothing to write home about. The aliens, as mentioned, look like toned-down Coneheads with a few spots, their mouths and noses blotted out slightly like silly putty, but in all other respects they look just like any human being. Indeed, more to the detriment of the movie, they act just like native humans — the way they stand, their mannerisms, their idiosyncracies, completely blow any kind of sense of otherworldliness or exoticism. They’re terribly un-alien. This is excused away in the script with some silly reference about how they adapt to new societies remarkably quickly, mimicking the natives with ease, but it nevertheless kills any chance of the movie being perceived as anything but a standard cop movie with a handful of people with silly heads.

If there can be said to be a saving grace to the movie it’s no doubt Patinkin, who is always good, even when others around him are not. He does a commendable job acting like the straight man, in a sense, to Caan; while Caan is sarcastic and broad and wild Patinkin remains very sober and level, humorless, and calm (with one dramatic exception — you’ll understand when you watch it). I’m not sure how the writer originally envisioned Patinkin’s character Sam Francisco being played, but Patinkin played it very straight and very honest, and very seriously. Francisco therefore has a kind of weightiness and substance which makes him really the anchor of the film, far more likable than sarcastic and abstractly sleazy Sykes, and his honesty really sells the movie to the audience. Without him … hoo-boy.

There’s not much more that can be said. The story features very few supporting characters, and the somewhat slim 97 minutes don’t allow for lots of digression and subtle shading. Writer Rockne S. O’Bannon (no relation to Dan O’Bannon of Alien fame to my knowledge) would go on to serve as writer-producer on a number of sci-fi themed tv shows, including Farscape, and the Alien Nation tv series.

Ultimately, what is my emotion walking away from this movie? I think disappointment would sum it up best — disappointment that more wasn’t done with the theme, more wasn’t done to really explore the concept, and indeed, more wasn’t done to actually make this a science-fiction story and not a rather standard buddy cop movie with little more to the aliens than set dressing. As it stands, it’s a rather standard but acceptable enough buddy cop movie with an intriguing concept that is left largely unexplored, saved from mediocrity by Mandy Patinkin’s stalwart and strong performance. Not having seen the follow-up TV series, I can’t say whether or not they managed to explore the premise of a race of alien ex-slaves living amongst us in a more genuine science-fiction way. I hope so.

Up next: V: the mini-series, watched first but written about second, the classic 1983 mini-series chronicling the visitation of a very different group of aliens, and one that I think we can definitely say is unquestionably, and completely, science-fiction.

Tags: science fiction, Alien Nation, DVD.

The Akismet plugin for Wordpress informs me that it has protected my blog from 100 spam comments as of this morning.

Since this blog is read by very few indeed, I quail to think how many spam comments blogs receive which are actually popular. The mind reels.

Do these spam mailers actually think their efforts will result in sales and/or visits to whatever gobshite destination they’re trying to pull punters? Much like telemarketers, you’ve gotta wonder who’s actually idiotic enough to make a purchase from someone with such ethically questionable marketing habits.

Because going green doesn’t have to mean buying a glorified golf cart.

0 to 60 in 4 seconds.

100% electric.

Zero emmisions.

Fuck yeah.

Take that, Jeremy Clarkson. Now go have more sugary tea and let the rest of your teeth rot away.

Technorati Tags: electric car, Tesla Motors Roadster, Jeremy Clarkson, environmentalism

I suffer from chemical sensitivity, as it’s known.

Basically this means that all the hazardous chemicals which are “approved” by government agencies for use in society — but which are known to be dangerous to our health — are even more dangerous for me than they are for people without chemical sensitivity (or enviromental sensitivity, as it’s also known).

There is a reason and specific origin behind my sensitivity, which I may someday relate. Suffice to say, that — like with asthmatics — I have to be very careful when activities like tarring of roofs occur in my neighborhood, activities which cause the air to become thick with chemicals or inhalant hazards.

On Tuesday, one of my immediate neighbors had their house tented and bombed with chemicals to destroy termites. The entire house was covered in a giant plastic balloon, and the chemical Vikane released as a fog inside. Twenty-four hours later, the tent was removed and fans installed to air the house out for another twenty-four hours. Then a pest inspector took air samples to decide if the house is safe for reoccupation. In the interim, warning signs are posted on the property, and no-one is allowed inside.

Vikane is a combination of flouride and sulfur, a trademark of Dow Chemical. It is toxic to life (duh) and does nothing at all to prevent the return of termites after fumigation. It’s also a number of times heavier than air, which means that when a treated house is aired, the chemical does not rise into the air, but settles slowly into surrounding soil, or creeps along the ground like an invisible toxic mist.

In other words, it gets blown out of the offender’s house and into surrounding properties.

Properties like mine.

My whole life of chemical sensitivity started with the indiscriminate use of a chemical like Vikane, a chemical since outlawed (but only after years of use in building projects) — Vikane itself is a replacement for another chemical considered too dangerous, which is slowly being phased out of use. There is nothing to say that Vikane itself will not eventually be outlawed because it is too toxic, just like its antecedent was. One look at the chemical business shows generations of outlawed products, one replacing the dangerous former, before it too is taken out of circulation, and so on into infinity. Such is the chemical business.

How am I to simply trust that the chemical has dissipated down to tolerable levels by the time it creeps into my yard? Is there even such a thing as a tolerance level for something designed to kill life which inhales it? Given the lobby-group structure of our government’s lawmaking process, can I even trust that something which is licensed is therefore acceptable for use in public? Given the vast history of products used heavily for years then pulled (everything from DDT to Saccharin), would I be naive in the extreme to simply trust our government?

Furthermore, there are growing concerns that the use of Vikane creates greenhouse gases, just as its predecessor caused ozone depletion. Just what we need.

There are many, many alternative and effective methods to kill termites, including heat, microwaves, and other methods. When I had a termite problem removed five years ago, I insisted a non-chemical method be used (heat was used). But my neighbors are either too ignorant, or too disinterested to use an alternative method, despite the presence of a number of alternative pest companies in the area to choose from.

It’s hard for me not to be overcome with anger for being subjected to yet another hazardous chemical — not just anger at my neighbor for hiring the company to do this in the first place, but also our society for so freely and casually allowing dangerous chemicals to be used so frequently and in such an unguarded manner. This is all the more angering because it is so easy and effective to use an alternative, non-toxic method.

But there’s nothing I can do. Since the product is licensed and legal to use, my hands are tied.

Not a feeling I relish very much.

Have any of you seen that Goofy cartoon in which the meek family man turns into a raving lunatic as soon as he gets behind the wheel? It’s probably the funniest cartoon I’ve ever seen, but even more importantly, it’s totally true. Driving can bring out the worst in people.

In point of fact, it is on the road where all that is wrong and twisted with the human race is given free reign, where all the repressed and submerged psychoses bubble to the surface, and men become monsters, women become … wyverns?

Shane Nickerson, in an effort to improve our lives and our society, has instituted the Asshole Fine. Basically this means that anyone who behaves in a manner Assholeish must pay a fine. Nearly all Assholeish behaviors are exhibited while driving. For example, driving a vehicle with a bumper sticker with any character from Calvin & Hobbes urinating. Instant Asshole Fine.

I would now like to dispense a mass Asshole Fine to about a thousand and one drivers. I shall explain.

To get across Pasadena, I often take one or the other of the broad avenues running from East to West. Most often, I find myself on Del Mar, which as any native of Pasadena will tell you, is probably the fastest way to cut across the city, especially when the 210 Freeway has gone into parking lot mode (i.e. nineteen hours out of every day).

Del Mar is a 35mph zone. I often go 40 to 45 (sorry, mom). Since the police are not friendly to me in a generalized sense, I’ll be damned if I risk another speeding ticket (yes, another — I still have nightmares) and push it to 50.

I really don’t think going 45 in a 35 zone is pokey, do you? Yet invariably some mofo creeps up on my tail and tries to basically drive up on top of me, in some pathetic bid to pressure me into going faster.

I’m not talking driving a bit close behind me. I’m talking driving up so close that it’s a miracle our bumpers don’t touch, until the tailgater’s car completely dominates my rear-view mirror. I’m talking about being so close that, if an animal or a kid ran in front of my car and I had to slam on the brakes in a hurry, the person behind me would have no distance to react, plow into me, and probably knock my own car forward into the animal/kid.

I fucking hate tailgaters. I think a special level of hell should be reserved for said fuckheads, where the fires get nice and toasty, and Shane’s Asshole Fine should be at the maximum permissable by law. If you are not a tailgater, thank you. If you are, please mend your ways and turn from the Path of the Asshat before all is lost. Because those fires burn hot way down there, man.

And, do these tailgaters actually think that I’m going to go faster just because they’re breathing down my neck? It reminds me of telemarketers — do they really believe that making me annoyed by tying up my phone is going to induce me to go with their service? Same with tailgaters. Taking out their pent-up aggression to get home three minutes faster by endangering themselves and me is really kind of impotent. All it does is make me angry.

Case in point. Some while ago, in the foggy mists of the recent past, I was driving home through a quiet neighborhood back to my house, armed with cappucinos. I was going a hair over 40 on a 35mph street. The entire distance in front of and behind me was empty of vehicles. Post-morning rush hour. The only car was some complete asshole young woman in a black BMW, tailgating me like she was a particular unpleasant breed of tick which had lodged itself in my rear license plate.

She clung to the rear of my car for about a half mile of driving (over the speed limit, mind you) before I became so infuriated that I slowed down, first to the speed limit, then five below. Then ten below. Finally, I came to a dead stop right in the middle of the road.

I tried to glare at her through my rear-view mirror. But instead of perhaps flooring it and whipping round me, or giving me the finger or something, anything, instead I discovered to my horror that she was taking the opportunity of me stopping dead right in the middle of the road to re-apply her makeup in her own rear-view mirror. Like it was completely natural that the car in front of her might come to a complete standstill in the middle of the road and that under no circumstances was it at all possible that it was because she had been tailgating the car in front of her to the point of extreme danger for the last mile.

So I started forward again. And, sure enough, like a lover who cannot bear to be parted from the embrace of her loved one, she proceeded to tailgate me to the extreme tailgating permissable by physical law, until I finally turned off onto the side street which would lead me home, and we were twain.

Why? Why must people do this? This young woman wasn’t even being particularly aggressive. In her case this was like some kind of sick, depraved psychological condition manifesting itself on the road. A need to belong, perhaps? A need to be cozily close to the person ahead of you, to avoid being alone? Had she put on the wrong contact lenses that morning and actually mistakenly believed I was actually a few car-lengths ahead of her? Was she in need of medical of professional assistance?

For those who know it, Foothill Blvd. is a major two-lane thoroughfare that kind of runs parallel to the 210. I cannot count the number of times that I have been driving along at over fifty miles per hour, while someone behind me tailgates me the whole bloody way, even though there are no cars whatsoever in the other lane and they can easily shift over to pass me. Yet they don’t. They just spend the whole way breathing down my neck while I drive and drive and drive and become more and more infuriated. They just cling, oblivious, needy.

In my roundabout sort of unprofessional way, I suppose I’m coming to the conclusion that there are two principal types of tailgaters: those who cling because it is their way, and those who push because they want to go faster and you’re in their way. Both are equally annoying, both must be charged the maximum possible Asshole Fine.

On the German Autobahnen, where nearly two-thirds of the highways have no speed limit, tailgating is a major offense, because it’s so dangerous. Unmarked police cars with camera equipment drive around catching people in the act. Then they cut their heads off. No, they don’t, but I’m told that the ticket bears a heavy price tag. No cop has over pulled over a tailgater here in America in the sum of my experience. Have any of you even heard of someone getting a ticket for tailgating? I’d feel good if you did, but I bet you haven’t.

Tailgaters. Mend your ways before you roast, roast, roast.

I wonder if Shane has made his first million from collecting on the Asshole Fine yet?

Last night, or rather early this morning, I watched the utterly awesome American Zoetrope documentary on the bonus disc of the THX-1138 release.

Now, the whole early years of the film brat pack holds great mystique for me. Be a rebel, strike out on your own, form a powerful network of like-minded friends (who are all geniuses), buck the system, and then eventually make millions and millions by following your dream and being yourself.

For those unfamiliar with the term, the film “brat pack” refers to the first generation of filmmakers to emerge from the film schools in the 60s, who seized the film system then in flux and decline, and remolded it to their will by releasing a string of classic moneymakers throughout the 70s. Some of the names include: Steven Spielberg, Francis Coppola, George Lucas, Walter Murch, Bob Zemeckis and Bob Gale, Martin Scorsese, Brian dePalma. Some of their products include American Graffitti, The Godfather, The Conversation, Carrie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Mean Streets.

There’s a strain of idealism and artistic ambition that runs throughout their individual and group stories which has always captured my imagination and piqued my interest. I’ve read lots of individual biographies of some of the participants, and I’ve read other biographical type books which at least in part cross paths with this loose-knit group at one point or another, to one level of detail or another.

The American Zoetrope story, which forms, if you will, the first chapter in the saga of the brat pack, was a San Francisco-based film production company / studio founded by Francis Coppola in 1969, with the ambition to make films outside the Hollywood system, and outside the traditional confines of the Hollywood production mentality. Coppola envisioned a studio where friends and collaborators would congregate, lending support to one anothers’ individual projects while they worked on banks of the most state-of-the-art equipment that money could buy. Coppola envisioned an entirely new production process, with movies made much like student films, stripped-down, lean, documentary-style, with lightweight cameras and mostly natural lighting, and virtually no studio work. Perhaps most important of all, each filmmaker was free to make exactly the film he or she desired, with no veto or forceful involvement coming down from Coppola in his role as executive producer.
It was a revolutionary dream, and those involved in it were transformed with excitement, led by Coppola’s tireless energy and boundless charisma.

Regrettably, the dream was not to be. In late 1971, when distributor/financer Warner Bros./Seven Arts saw Zoetrope’s first product, THX-1138, they were appalled. They demanded the return of the money they’d invested and cancelled all other projects in production. Coppola went into serious debt and, for all intents and purposes, American Zoetrope ceased to exist, its members scattering to the four film corners in search of new work.

Having recently read Droidmaker, which touched on these heady years early in the book, I was thirsty for more. And when I discovered that there was a well-regarded documentary on disc two of the THX-1138 DVD release, serious Netflix queueage ensued.

It was not a waste of time. There are actually two documentaries on the bonus features disc of THX, both produced by the same crew from the same interviews. The first is entirely about the life of American Zoetrope, and the second a shorter, almost addendum-like, documentary on the making of THX itself. Since the tales of the two are inextricably linked, both documentaries are best viewed back to back, which is what I found myself doing at one o’clock early this morning.

I do love me a good film history documentary, and this one doesn’t disappoint. As a film itself, it’s very well-done, edited with panache and directly informative. Unlike so many of those trashy A&E Biography type documentaries, there’s little in the way of hype or saccharine goodiness. Occasionally the swelling soundtrack is a bit — Hollywoody? — but, you know, whatever. A documentary is only as good as its subjects, and there is virtually every participant of the Zoetrope story on-camera here, totally ready to be forthcoming, as well as bystanders heavily influenced by this Coppola-Lucas journey, like Spielberg and Scorsese.

Perhaps most surprising is John Calley himself, who was head of Warners/Seven Arts from 1969-1975, effectively the antagonist of the Zoetrope project. For him to make an appearance, freely discussing the fact that, yes, his administration hated THX and, yes, it was they who severed relations with Zoetrope — it gives the documentary an impressive sense of completeness. Especially in light of the painful realization that, as someone states in the docu, if Calley had maintained his support of Zoetrope through their early growing pains, the fruits they would ultimately bear — like Apocalypse Now, American Graffitti — would very likely have gone to Warners.

I could go on and on and on — it’s one of my favorite blab topics — but I think I’ll just leave it at that and say, well, well worth a watch. It doesn’t matter if you’re a fan of THX or not. The opportunity to watch a documentary of this quality chronicling such an important and unique chapter in the history of filmmaking is one nobody should pass up.

And it’s narrated by Richard Dreyfuss, too, in his recognizable croaky voice. I’d take him any day over that buffoon who narrates those Biography things.

I was about to pull up a volunteer fennel in my backyard when I discovered some new tenants had moved in.

click for first photo

click for second photo

I am told those are swallowtail caterpillars, sharing their space with an enormous assortment of honey bees (and a native bee or two). Looks like I won’t be bulldozing now that it’s a butterfly apartment complex.

Man, though, if you’ve ever watched these guys in action, they eat faster than Hurley discovering gallon-size jar of peanut butter in the hatch.