My Private Idaho (movie review)

For some reason I wanna share the quirky context wherein this movie came up for me, I thought to watch again, but upon viewing, I'm doubtful I'd seen it, but maybe. 

I've been contemplating this drive to the coast, from Portland, Oregon, and if you know your geography you know that's a one to two hour drive at least, not some trivial jaunt. 

And yet there's a movie out there somewhere, that I saw long ago, wherein it looks like Portlandia high schoolers get off school at like at 3 PM, and are all at the beach in their cars, hanging out, but minutes later, like one could drive to the coast routinely just to socialize. I wanted to find that movie. 

We (I had help from Mercado Group) narrowed it down to a Gus Van Sant film. He'd directed films around Portland a lot. 

I now think the scenes I remember are in Elephant, and I plan to watch that next, if for no other reason than to watch one of our Wanderers, Joe Cronin, play the chemistry teacher in that film. It's been decades since I saw it (or Joe). and I'm looking forward to rewatching it.

My Private Idaho is about young male prostitutes or escorts or street kids or whatever you wanna call 'em. They bounce around as a subculture, mainly between Seattle and Portland. 

Our protagonist, played by River Phoenix, would like to see his mom again and Keanu Reeves, his friend and protector, accompanies the main character (who has narcolepsy, and so really needs protection) all the way to Rome, Italy on this quest to find his mom, based on various clues. No dice (the mom is long gone, back to the Americas), although Reeves lucks out in finding the girl, which is gut-wrenching to Phoenix, who has a crush on him, feels a bond.

As a denizen of both Portland and Rome, I can attest to the movie's authenticity in terms of the Rome scene near the Colosseum, a known spot for outdoor recreational sex under the cover of darkness. I even knew that as a kid, wandering through there by day sometimes, because of all the condoms lying around. 

I'd wandered all over that city, a middle-school-aged flaneur. I was never accosted, mugged, nor otherwise messed with. My parents were persuaded by the their friends that Rome is safe for kids like me (young boys, roaming alone), and in retrospect it was. Later in life, on some visit, a gay guy got me drunk, encouraging me to talk about Wittgenstein in broken Italian, but he wasn't being predatory, just having fun with another weirdo.

As for Portland, this city is known for a high number of strip clubs per capita, as well as microbreweries. Sex workers, practicing and retired, abound in Portland (as in almost any big city), a few of whom I know personally, as friends or perhaps collaborators. I worked for Sisters of the Road as a computer guy (I'd call them my client) back in the day. Our little road show (me the roadie) worked with women's' shelters some, in a fundraising capacity.

The movie is highly stylized. Sex scenes are presented as stills flashing by, as if we're flipping through a an adults only magazine. A lot of the dialog, around that guy "Bob" especially, sounds Shakespearean or maybe Dickensian, in the sense of stilted, formalized, ritualistic.  

The "pack animal" pattern of young boys around an adult male leader is well played, especially at Bob's "funeral", where their unsupervised antics (hooting and hollering) are contrasted with a parallel service happening a few gravesites away, more demur, more high society. 

The high society funeral was for Reeves' character's dad. Even though street roots Bob had considered Keanu an heir apparent, like a son, Reeves had rejoined his social class and left the pack. 

Reeves had been born into wealth and, although estranged from his dad because of his promiscuous lifestyle, he'd since met his future queen in that Italian farmhouse, while accompanying Phoenix on his quest. Returning with a queen won him a place in heteronormative society, thereby securing his inheritance.

Phoenix, on the other hand, was born into poverty, in Idaho, without any prospect of an inheritance. As a loner, now without Reeves, and with narcolepsy, his prospects remain relatively dim. Fade out, the end.

Addendum: this was a two DVD Criterion Collection edition, so after writing the above I was able to take in lots of additional data, including listening to Gus Van Sant being interviewed (like on a podcast). All very informative. I enjoy taking in data from these director types and usually do watch these extra features, when available.

Nostalghia (movie review)

No that’s not a typo: nostalgia with an h. Like Bagdad is without an h (the local move theater). I watched this on a rented DVD from Movie Madness, my 3rd in a set, along with Fun with Dick and Jane (the one with the real Jane) and Le Mans with Steve McQueen. [1]

Nostalghia is filmed in Italy, the opening credits say for RAI TV, and is in Italian. I’m acoustically very acclimated to Italian but need the subtitles to really follow along, so I had those turned on. Half the plot was about translation, and how Russian can’t really be put into Italian or vice versa, let alone English, or can it? The movie investigates the question.

The film comes as a masterful set of reframings wherein our understanding of what’s happening twists and turns, like on a dark ride at some mysterious theme park. Does he have a crush on her, or her on him? At first, the answer seems obvious but as the film starts going back and forth between black and white, and color, the first shock, we start to realize what we’d mistaken for reality, was more likely just a dream (but whose? — usually at least that much is pretty clear).

A second shock is when all those birds fly out of the statue Madonna. Who saw that coming? Not me. One epiphany after another in this film. And speaking of pregnancy and motherhood, just the night before I’d watched the new Fantastic Four (Marvel universe) at the Bagdad. Talk about a double-dose of the same archetypes! A double-whammy of mammy, hah hah.

I think the translator lady mostly freaked out over the relationship (professional) because her professional abilities were called into question. She thought she could read body language well enough to know the village crazy person was not going to submit to an interrogation. But interrogation is not what the Russian poet had in mind. He was just seeking to understand at a deeper level. He was on a quest and therefore curious.

The crazy guy had imprisoned his whole family for like seven years in a previous chapter (flashbacks), until the police finally did a wellness check and helped his family break free. Things move slowly in Italy, apparently. 

The Russian poet, ostensibly researching the life of a famous composer, another one who’d committed suicide, once back home in mother Russia, after a long excursion in Italy, really seemed more drawn to the crazy guy’s story by the middle of the movie. The shift in focus came at the hot springs, near their hotel, where he caught wind of the local gossip and met the crazy guy for the first time.

The translator lady gave up on getting him an interview (her Italian was perfect, his broken), concluding the crazy guy was just too crazy and he should try it himself if he thought it possible. She resigned on the spot. He then ended up getting past the crazy guy’s defenses and they had a deep interaction (something involving a ritual candle — spoiler alert).

That blew her mind, his succeeding where she’d failed, and explains why she flipped out, and literally flipped her breast out, while giving the Russian a bloody nose — not with her breast, but with something she threw. She was pissed, that much was clear.

She made it up to him (the Russian poet) later by phoning him from Rome to say the crazy guy was holding forth downtown, with a crowd gathered. He was ranting like Fidel Castro she said. She encouraged the Russian poet to come check it out, while meanwhile reassuring him she’d overcome any  romantic notions; she had a new guy (Vittorio?) to go to India with.

I won’t spoil the ending in this case. Let’s just say the Russian poet and crazy guy underwent a kind of Vulcan mind meld during the candle episode, helping answer the question of whether Russia and Italy could ever become convergent cultures. Apparently they could.

[1] thanking Fran of FranLab for opening my mind to watching a race car movie, against which I have a certain bias (ditto westerns and musicals — but we’re talking filters, not walls).

Friends Respond

click for slides

I was surprised to learn at Meeting for Worship last Sunday, that one of the Friends there was there because he'd been called to Portland on short notice owing to the fact that his son had been incarcerated on charges of assaulting an officer. The trial is still pending, and the son has since been released.

Although I don't know Jacob personally, I was aghast by his housemate's account of the theatrics employed to show off the type of bully-state that wants to assert itself as running the establishment. 

The FBI was all kitted out in SWAT style costumes, flashed their guns around, and refused to engage in proper paperwork (by showing the warrant or whatever). Jacob had apparently done something forbidden versus an ICE agent six weeks prior, but we don't know what. 

Excerpt:

At around 9 a.m. on Friday morning, July 25th, Jacob and I looked out our bedroom window to see a flood of armed officers race into our driveway and charge at our house with assault rifles. We quickly put on the first clothes we could grab and heard pounding and screaming on our door. Because everyone in my household is a safe, caring person, I was convinced they had the wrong house and couldn't understand what could warrant this kind of threat to our lives. Jacob attempted to ask through the window if the police had a warrant, and they responded by aiming laser reactive targets on his body, threatening his life. 

I told Jacob to open the door because I feared we would die if we continued to ask for a warrant. Jacob opened the door with his hands up, empty-handed, and I and my roommate followed. We were screamed at, handcuffed, and put on the street in our underwear. There were about 20 FBI agents surrounding our house in unmarked vehicles, and several local Portland police officers. Jacob was put in the back of a car. I could not speak with him. We were not shown a warrant at this time.

Quakers are strongly biased against use of violence but "assault" does carry such a connotation in ordinary language.  Unless we're talking "verbal assault"?  Is that a crime, or free speech? We're done with free speech by now right?  Resisting authoritarians has by now been criminalized, even though that's what made this country great. 

Protestors who gathered across from the Hatfield Justice Center, me one of them, in photo journalist mode for my peeps on Facebook, were mumbling about wanting body cam footage so we could judge for ourselves what this "assault" event was like. 

Whatever it was, the bully-state certainly wanted to escalate. Their goal was intimidation, and to get applause from those viewer-voyeurs who always enjoy the spectacle of armed thugs striking fear into the hearts of privileged white kids who think they're entitled to resist authority.  It's time to put all those "college kids" in their place and ship them off to Vietnam like all the "working class" kids, to use some  anachronistic Boomer Era terminology.

Another goal may have been to spark some sort of violent protest, thereby justifying opening another front against west coasters, after sending in the US military -- so-called "posse comitatus" is dead in the water, a floating corpse, by 2025 -- to quell the agitated crowds in LA. 

As I wrote in an email, using voice-to-text while waiting at a bus stop:

I’m pretty sure the feds are trying to spark some kind of violent response so they can crack down LA style using Israeli Gestapo techniques. Their base loves to see Portland being “quelled” as Trump put it The last time they tried this during the Joker Riots. It’s a kind of gladiatorial event from the point of view of the cable news people. Good for ratings. Beat up Portland. More news right after this word from our sponsors.

The entire nation is familiar with the militarization of the police forces as the congress prepares for a crackdown against the populace that might happen when they decide to draft us into NATO or whatever hell they have planned (something by the RAND corporation no doubt -- always a source of disaster scenarios).

Funny addendum: later the same evening, I watched Fun with Dick and Jane (the original Jane Fonda 1970s version -- a comic light-hearted prototype of Breaking Bad) with a friend. The joke about how "Jewish Gestapo" is an oxymoron comes up in the script, followed by a picture of Moshe Dayan in that aerospace headquarters basement. But I'm one of those who makes distinctions between zealous authoritarian nationalists, and religious practitioners (a Venn Diagram), so no oxymoron intended.

DOGE Thyself

Speaking of Superman, the Tai-Chi based MuscleMan app I purchased, I thought for a one time fee, was actually purchased on subscription. 

That's what everyone wants these days, for you to keep buying the same thing over and over, be it a workout app or Windows, or something on top of Windows (like a workout app -- mine was for iOS however).

In a way I got my money's worth in getting sucker punched for not reading the fineprint. By the time PayPal and taken a monthly rental check, it was too late to realize my mistake. Score one for Muscleman. 

That got me poking around in my PayPal account bowels, where I found some other questionable autopay  subscriptions, although I think most were simply leftovers. But they were marked "active" nonetheless. 

Time to "doge myself" and counter my own bad habits, time to clean up the autopay mess.

Now in another sense, it is only I who have this view, that I was somehow being deceived. 

I'm sure MuscleMan has an army of coaches, AI and for real, along with a huge catalog of how to keep oneself fit. I was paying for access to this valuable library. The O'Reilly School I taught at had a similar model: when you're ready for coaching, we're here (and we're not bots).

Silly me for imagining anything so simple as one time fee was our agreement. 

That's what I mean by "learning my lesson". 

Maybe those with eyes wide open going in, already fully committed to becoming proficient in Tai Chi, shedding pounds, restoring fitness, are willing to pay a gym-level monthly fee just for a smartphone app and whatever trainers it connects them with. 

That's discretionary spending I'd rather spend another way, like on a memory stick, or a tank of gas. Even a real gym membership might be the way to go -- I've had many already. I'm really not at all sickly or weak. I'm nursing a back muscle I strained, and hauling a heavy body around, but I have the muscles for it.

Doge Thyself!  You'll be glad you did.

Superman (movie review)

I was on the fence about seeing this one, as I’ve got my Bayesian bias against superhero movies, somewhat newly acquired maybe, thanks to over saturation by DC and Marvel. 

That’s just my own personal bias mind you, as I have nothing against others loving superhero movies and pigging out on them as a central part of their movie-intake diet. 

I have a similar stance towards alcohol: me, I’m not into it these days, but I have some in the kitchen for guests and have no problem people enjoying alcoholic drinks. I’m not into feeling morally superior. It’s more like “I’ve had my share” and it’s not a punishment to refrain, just another life chapter.

Anyway, back to the movie, I enjoyed it a lot. It reminded me that cartoon extremes of action, of violence, such as superhero films feature, are also meant to be extended to the plot. We have all the basics of the Superman universe, sharply rendered, but then we permute it a bit, rotate it, move it in some dimensions. Like Louis is well aware of who Superman is in real life, I mean at work.

This movie has the inter=dimensional wormholes, the evil genius, tortured by jealousy, the well-acted Lex Luthor… but then we have a whole caste of superhumans, of which Superman is but one. The Earthlings have become acclimated to comic book levels of disaster as their city is routinely visited by various monsters, against which Superman must defend.

The biggest envelope push is not Louis knowing the ET’s secret, but the ET’s midlife crisis vs-a-vs how his real ET parents actually envisioned a career for him, a future. He had only ever heard the first part of their message and had been shaped by his human foster parents into a good and noble type of character. That’s who he was. He had chosen that identity. Finding out his ET heritage was not in alignment with his personal values was a coming of age story for an older guy. The lesson: we may go through “coming of age” transitions at any age. We morph into a next chapter.

So back to the top, if I was on the fence, what tipped the scales and got me to go see it? My friend on Telegram, whom I don’t get to see in person anymore due to distance, said it was worth seeing. That was enough. Bagdad is close by. Why not?

Eurasian Affairs

I don’t know how it is in your coffee clutch or coven, but out here in mine, it seems like using Ukraine as a staging ground for long range missiles into Russia is retroactively the justification for why, from Russia’s point of view, Ukraine must be demilitarized, i.e. purged of NATO assets. 

If NATO wanted to stick to its narrative that Ukraine would not be used for such aggressive purposes, then this hardly seems a way to inspire confidence. 

But come to think of it, NATO never made such promises. On the contrary, the whole point of the 2014 coup, enabled by the celebrated Azov group, pumped up by Nuland, Bidens et al, was to teach Russia a lesson in humility. 

Now that the USSR had fallen, the time had come for a global reckoning, or so some deluded neocons (including “McCaine democrats”) imagined.

Now we’re hearing that Germany is keen to enter the battle against Russia on the side of Azov. If Ukraine is to host more NATO missiles, then let them be of German origin, or at least design. 

Apparently there’s a demographic in Germany that feels encouraged by these moves.

I think all factions with empathy for the Ukrainians are eager to stop the air war and bring an end to armed drones wreaking havoc across the land. However there’s a lot of inertia to any war of this scale. The option to simply stop is not there. 

Trains can’t stop on a dime either, which is why some train wrecks that may have looked preventable to casual observers, really weren’t after a certain point.

I’m thinking the eastern Ukrainians have voted with their feet, hearts and minds, and for the most part do not regret their decision to rejoin the Russian federation. The UK does not acknowledge that Donbassers have the right or even the jurisdiction to make such a choice.

But then English has not been an imperial language for a couple hundred years at this point. The Americans have always spoken in many languages. I’d say the Donbass has time on its side as it continues with writing its own history, with elections, with redevelopment projects.

The idea that Germany would step up to the plate as a chief belligerent suggests its people are reconciled to living with wartime rhetoric 24/7. 

So far, the Americans are fighting back, demonstrating a sharp unwillingness to be manipulated by the usual suspects. But then Germany is a much smaller place with a relatively tiny inner circle.

The A-Team Code

:: Ant vs Bee ::

:: high roaders ::

Perambulating

One root meaning of Wanderer is "flaneur", let’s say the random idle gentleman, perhaps a lady in disguise, out with a sketch pad and an eye for what’s happening. Recreational curating. Tourism. 

That’s one reading, and for me, it well fits. 

I wander with my trusty camera, and today also an iPad, around town. In my youth, middle school era, my parents allowed me to roam about Rome. I’d spend some days exploring, hopping one bus, then another. No phone.

Nowadays I’m with phone, although I’m not really using its camera. I have a separate device, somewhat bulky, but it’s my habit. I’ve gone through a series of such cameras, the kind you can just point and shoot, letting it take care of most variables except framing. That’s a typical tool of the flaneur.

Today’s route retraced last week’s trek at the start, so I could pick up where I’d left off on the theme of Rust as a motif. From there I explored the Lloyd Center, with one skater, with another doing floor exercises. They had a coach as I recall.

I roamed over to the Lloyd Center Max station, heading west, to the last stop on the east side, at Moda Center, the swoopy enclosed stadium that replaced the old Memorial Coliseum as a primary venue, although the latter still stands and does service, such as by hosting high school graduation ceremonies. 

I used the Memorial Coliseum as a skating rink, in an earlier chapter, having taken to inline skates as a curious hobby, encouraged by Tom Connolly. I’d circle on smooth concrete, wearing helmet and knee pads, Wrist pads maybe? Memory fades. I remember falling a few times but not getting hurt.

From Moda Center I made my way along well-marked walkways to the East Side Esplanade, a well-thought-out lane for pedestrians and bicyclists mainly. Runners. I think I saw one mono-board or whatever those are called. The bicycles may be mechanically enhanced i.e. battery power assisted.

My walk took me south from the Steel Bridge, east entrance in view, to the Hawthorne Bridge, along a path that’s partly floating and includes bridges. I’ve gone through these same paths as a cyclist many times, but today was about being a ped, and using TriMet, more like my middle school days when I’d roam in Rome.

I mistook a bus 6 for a 14, so ended up adding another walking segment from the eastern shoreline of the Willamette, to Asylum central, meaning the food court by that name, named for the Oregon State mental hospital that had a large property here, a campus with running streams, not some dreary urban structure you might have been imagining. 

This side of the river was all very bucolic back then. I’m drawing from well researched accounts, not sharing personal experience, as I was as yet unborn in this chapter.

The 14 got me back to The Bagdad from which its a short and familiar jaunt home. I had my shoulder bag leather briefcase in which I stored the iPad, camera, brush, kombucha bottle, a random reading from my shelves.

Silicon Forest (not Valley)

Yesterday I went dog walking with a peer engineer, as in software engineer, a loosely used term as there were so many routes to get here, me through applications development for nonprofits and data science types, him through psychometrics and government lab work (Sandia I think it was). We'd both been on the same code school's faculty. He helped me find my way to Clarusway, a source of recent teaching gigs.

Anyway, we were chatting about the difference between NaN and None in Python, walking Sydney and Quinn, enjoying the perfect weather, when I realized various new things, meaning I had some insights, sparked by what we were talking about, a free ranging conversation.

Towards evening, I tackled the task of rounding out my online profile a little more, as the requests or queries need their data to hit against. Lots about me out there, but maybe not always as helpfully cross-indexed as it could be, and I'm in a catalytic position when it comes to connecting loose ends.

For example, I cross-posted my reddit account to DobbsTown, a Mastodon server. I also wired my right side main access panel, on the right margin of World Game (Grain of Sand), to include said reddit and tiktok connections. The content dates back but the links are brand new.

Speaking of branding, it's hardly lost on the market researchers and PR types, that Silicon Forest and Silicon Valley have remained quite distinct in Geek Lore. The former is gravitating into Cascadia, the bioregion (not really a political entity) whereas Valley boys and girls are seeing dollar signs in more military contracting. Washington State gets a lot of that, whereas Oregon's role is more subtle (think field testing), to the point where Oregon actually advertises as a "peace state" in some circles (hint: WILPF). We also have better land use planning than you'll find in many states (another source of pride).

The story goes like this: the Oregon Trail, coming west from the Great East (lots of peeps seeking a better life, refugees from Euro-think), came to a fork somewhere in Montana or one of those. Keep going along a northern latitude, and reach Oregon, with its lush and secure agricultural lifestyle, or turn south and wager your future against the likelihood of striking it rich, laying your claim to fame and fortune. The former sounds relatively prosaic and vaguely communist, whereas the latter is Ayn Rand, bold, heroic, venture capitalist.

Feeding my story (above) is an example: a true life story featuring a young, dashing CEO, looking to base a startup here in Portland, but finding the venture capital culture close to non-existent relative to what he was used to in strike-it-rich California. His idea was to use AI to provide a look ahead feature in any browser that could steer junior away from pornography, a see-no-evil genre product. 

The only problem: he was twenty years ahead of his time (this all happened a long time ago). 

VCs tend to live in the future. Portlanders, given all the rain, and Powell's Books, tend to be bookworms, as likely to live in the past as anywhere. Getting Portlanders to march towards the future is difficult when so many of them still believe they're in Nirvana already (even in the wake of the Joker Riots). 

When PDXers do get around to futurism, it looks like socialism, given half of them are latent Swedes and Finns and see society more as a design problem begging for elegant solutions, than as a source of melodrama and outrage and Protestant moralizing about who deserves what they get.

Memories & History

The Google Earth close up view is not the same as Street View. The structures look a bit cartoony given a computer doing its best to data structure the surfaces. I’m not the expert (never had a job with Google Earth). This is a classic Portland food pod, named Asylum in honor of the facility run by Dr. Hawthorne when this whole area was still more park like, all green with running streams. Oregon State contracted to have its first state mental hospital between SE 12th & Hawthorne and the river. We tend to call the whole area Asylum District, commercially if not officially.

 

Now I’ve switched to actual Street View to capture this facade further north a few blocks from the Asylum food pod. I used to work in the basement of this building when its top floor served as CUE headquarters, CUE being Center for Urban Education. We had a Mac lab in the basement, with LaserWriters, state of the art at the time and a grant from Apple to the nonprofit community in Portland. We shared the tech with a wide variety of NGOs and provided training in its use. That was Steve Johnson’s responsibility more than mine. My job was to train still-working or job-seeking seniors in office-relevant computer skills. We mostly used PCs (IBMs or clones thereof) and left the desktop publishing skills to the others. I’d use the Mac publishing equipment myself for various fun projects e.g. Project Renaissance.

 

Further north along the same street: Revolution Hall, formerly Washington High School (where the young Linus Pauling was enrolled, if oft absent from) and in my own writings HQS (Ministry of Education) for OPDX (Occupy Portland) during a time when said building as spooky-ghostly-abandoned. That served my purposes just fine, as I was simply including it in my curriculum writing to help anchor it geographically.

    

This Google Earth view marks all three locations: Asylum food pod, CUE building, Revolution Hall, with blue balloons, against the backdrop of much of Portland, Willamette River running south to north (bottom to top).