Monthly Archives: June 2011

Jun252011

The Long Trajectory

Woke up this morning to the news that gay marriage is now legal in New York state. Good for New York. Social progress comes slowly. Sometimes it seems it’s never going to arrive. But if you wait long enough, work hard enough, hold on to your principles no matter what, it eventually does come around. The long trajectory of this country has forever been toward greater equality under the law for all its citizens, no matter who they are or what they stand for. New York just affirmed that fundamental idea in a major way.

Now, anyone care to wager over whether my home state of Utah will be the last in the union to the affirm that idea? No, I suppose not… the odds are too bad…

Jun242011

Friday Evening Videos: “Space Girl”

This isn’t the usual sort of thing I post as a Friday Evening Video, being neither a true rock-and-roll song nor a relic from the 1980s, but I ran across it earlier today and found it utterly charming, for reasons that will quickly become obvious:

Ah, pretty girls and rayguns… like sweet, sweet catnip!

My Loyal Readers are probably thinking that your host, being such a big-time nerd and all, can name the source of all these clips. Well, not quite. I recognize most of them but believe it or not, there are several that completely mystify even me. I’m guessing they were British productions that never made it to the states, or which I’ve simply never managed to catch. I could’ve done without the clip from Starship Troopers at roughly 2:30 — I loathe that piece of shit movie — but the poignancy of the very final scene more than makes up for it. Oh, my sweet Sarah Jane… the first celebrity death in a long time that genuinely hurt.

Jun242011

Still… Alive… Old… Friend…

Sorry, kids, I must’ve been channeling Shatner there for a second when I wrote that headline. It happens sometimes. More often than you might think, actually.

So, how is everyone? In case you didn’t catch the subtle hint in the previous entry — you know, all that stuff about the romance of the open road and such… okay, don’t feel bad, it was very subtle — The Girlfriend and I were on vacation last week, and what with The Man getting even with me for taking time off and various other things going on since we’ve been home, I just haven’t been able to find time for this little ol’ blog. Yeah, yeah, Bennion, but where did you go, you’re asking. Why, Las Vegas, I’m replying. More specifically, we drove down to Vegas on Monday, came home Thursday, then headed out again on Friday to catch my man Rick Springfield in Wendover, then finally home for good Saturday afternoon.

I hate to say it, but I’ve had better vacations.

Don’t misunderstand, we had plenty of fun, and I don’t at all regret going. We were able to see some old friends and meet some new ones, and we partied hardy with our current social circle. (To explain, Anne and I weren’t traveling alone; we met up with a bunch of people in Vegas to celebrate a wedding, and our friends Jack and Natalie accompanied us to see Rick.) But we also had a lot of irritating random mishaps; it was one of those “one damn thing after another” situations from the moment we left. First, the couple we had planned to convoy with on the way to Vegas got held up for a couple of hours because of an emergency doctor’s visit to check out a spider bite. Then I had a savage allergy attack on the drive down — my eyes looked like they were about to shoot laser beams out of them, X-Men-style, and the skin around them was puffy and tender for two days. Then Anne did something to her knee and had to spend an evening in the hotel room with an ice pack. I went out with our friends while she did that and got pulled over by the cops on Las Vegas Boulevard because — get this — the officer couldn’t see my license plate clearly enough. (I have a plastic cover over the plate that has yellowed with age, and the little light bulb that illuminates the plate had burned out.) I got off with a verbal warning, but it’s pretty damn embarrassing to get busted on the Strip with friends in the car.

The jinx continued on the way home, too: my car developed some kind of problem as we were going over the canyon between Mesquite, Nevada, and St. George, Utah. I decided it was just crappy gasoline from a Vegas 7-Eleven, and sure enough, topping off the tank and adding some STP in St, George seemed to cure it, but I was on edge waiting for something to go wrong again all the way home.

Oh, and then, just to cap it all off, Jack and Natalie and Anne and I experienced quite possibly the worst service in the history of the restaurant business out in Wendover. Our waiter was a nice enough kid — and I do mean kid; he didn’t look old enough to drive, let alone work in a casino environment — but he didn’t quite grasp the basic concepts of his work. I guess hiring standards are lower when you’re in an isolated desert outpost and its 100 miles in any direction to find more qualified candidates.

Jun132011

An Island of Light in the Darkness

My father spent 36 years, most of his adult life, working for the same company, Kennecott Utah Copper. From my vantage point up here in the 21st century, where my current job is about to become the longest one I’ve ever held at a mere six years in, that’s an almost unimaginable level of job security and stability. Nowadays, it seems like the corporate overlords are determined that everybody ought to be freelancers who can be popped in and out of jobs like disposable electronic components, owing nothing and with nothing owed to them. It didn’t used to be that way. There used to be more of a reciprocal relationship between employee and employer, and a lot more loyalty from both sides of the equation. There was an understanding that if you were good at your job, and you liked it well enough, you were going to be there for the long haul.

Still, even in those days before the world moved on, no working person was ever 100% secure. When the price of copper tumbled in the early 1980s, Kennecott responded by shutting down its Bingham Canyon copper mine — one of the largest open-pit mining operations in the world — for two years. A couple thousand workers, including my father, were laid off. Fortunately, he was far more resourceful than I imagine I would be under the circumstances. He could and would do just about anything to earn a buck, and because of this, our little family made it through those two years without too much pain. They were lean years, to be sure, but they were never truly bad. Not for us, anyhow.

Of all the myriad odd jobs he did to hold things together, the most memorable was his gig as a long-haul truck driver, ferrying massive wooden roof trusses across the western states. The trusses were built in our little rural home town and were destined for new LDS church houses that were springing up in California, Idaho, and Wyoming at the time. And the reason I so clearly remember Dad doing this particular job is because I got to ride along with him on the truck a few times. I don’t remember for sure if these trips coincided with summer break, or if Dad just took me out of school when I wanted to go, but those were magical experiences for me. I was around 12 or 13, and even though Smokey and the Bandit and the CB radio craze were long over by then, I still found the whole idea amazingly cool: traveling with my dad in a truck (not a full-blown 18-wheeler, but still bigger than all the traffic around us), a couple of manly men with the wide-open landscape unrolling in front of us and who knew what around the next bend.

Jun102011

Spielberg Sees the Light!!!

In a new interview for Ain’t It Cool News, Steven Spielberg goes on the record as being opposed to any further digital revision of his work:

(In the future) there’s going to be no more digital enhancements or digital additions to anything based on any film I direct. I’m not going to do any corrections digitally to even wires that show. If 1941 comes on Blu-Ray, I’m not going to go back and take the wires out because the Blu-Ray will bring the wires out that are guiding the airplane down Hollywood Boulevard. At this point right now I think letting movies exist in the era, with all the flaws and all of the flourishes, is a wonderful way to mark time and mark history.

Italics mine. He goes on to note that when he did give in to the Lucas-ian temptation to tinker with his early masterpiece, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, both versions were released on DVD so consumers could choose which version they wanted to watch (the way it should be done, in my opinion, whenever there are multiple variants of important movies… especially movies whose titles begin with the word “star” and end with the word “wars”), and then he adds, “When people ask me which E.T. they should look at, I always tell them to look at the original 1982 E.T.”

Steve, I can’t tell you how good it feels to have someone in your position vindicating my purist theories. Thank you. Sincerely. If by some miracle some assistant of your stumbles across my little blog and relays what I say here back to you, thank you.

Unfortunately, though, Steve later says he’s attempted to convince the Great Flanneled One of the wisdom of this position and he just can’t. And if Steven Spielberg can’t, probably no one can. Sigh…

Incidentally, Steve also makes an interesting comment about the 1953 War of the Worlds (another favorite of mine) that’s worth a click-through, and a longer version of the interview is supposed to be posted next week, so if you’re interested, keep an eye out over there.

Hat tip to Michael May for alerting me to this.

Jun072011

Remember What I Said Yesterday About Penelope Cruz?

Specifically how she looks in pirate duds? Um, yeah…

The funny thing is, I never used to think she was all that attractive. Ten or so years ago, when she was breaking through into Hollywood and everyone was saying she was going to be the next big “it” girl, I just didn’t see what the fuss was all about. But at some point over the ensuing decade, something has happened. She’s grown into her own, or some random switch inside me clicked over or something… but whatever it was… please, sir, may I have some more?

Jun062011

Pirates 4: The First Real Movie I’ve Seen in Awhile

The title of this entry doesn’t mean what you probably think I mean. Read on to see what I’m really getting at.

The Girlfriend and I finally made it to see Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides yesterday. I say “finally” because we’ve tried several times over the past couple of weeks to catch the latest installment of the franchise, but for various reasons we did not succeed on our earlier attempts. So, you may be wondering, was the wait worth it? Well, yes, I would say so. Despite the generally mediocre reviews, Anne and I thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. There’s a new director this time out — Rob Marshall took the helm from Gore Verbinski, who helmed the first three Pirates movies — and the change seems to have made a tremendous difference, especially in the action scenes, which are actually comprehensible in Stranger Tides. (That’s a big, BIG deal for me. I do not like the jittery, super-fast editing style where you lose track of who is doing what, and although the earlier Pirates movies never rose to the ridiculous level of the Bourne movies — i.e., total incomprehensibility — they flirted with it enough that I was frequently frustrated with them.)

This Pirates is smaller in scope than the wanna-be-epic second and third installments, a lot of extraneous characters from the “original trilogy” have been pared away, and the whole thing just feels much lighter overall. Like the other films in the series, it’s too bloody long. (How is it that Errol Flynn managed to get all his swashbuckling done in roughly 90 minutes, but modern-day pirates need two-and-a-half hours?) However, I can’t recall squirming in my seat or checking my watch once. I pumped my fist and/or laughed out loud a number of times. The sequence in which Captain Jack escapes from King George’s palace and tears off through the streets of 18th-century London with the redcoats in pursuit is as much fun as I’ve had at a movie in years. (That sequence also includes an unexpected and delightful cameo from the ever-lovely Dame Judi Dench, who always makes me happy.) Surprisingly, after four movies, On Stranger Tides still manages to produce a couple grin-inducing references to the Disneyland ride that inspired this whole thing. And Penelope Cruz dressed in pirate clothes is nothing less than a force of nature. So, yeah, I recommend it. It’s not a perfect movie by any means, but it is what a pirate movie ought to be, namely a nice bit of summertime escapism from the dreary, slow-motion horror that is 21st century.

You wanna know what really made me happy about Pirates 4, though? This is probably going to sound very strange, but it is what it is… I found I was irrationally pleased to see a pattern of flickering horizontal scratches along the right side of the screen throughout the entire length of the movie. As a former projectionist, I spotted them instantly, and knew exactly what caused them. Once upon a time, scratches like that on such a relatively new film would’ve driven me crazy. Anathema! My job back then, and my quest as a viewer, was to achieve a perfect presentation, or as close to perfect as you could get with a strip of easily damaged celluloid sliding through a whirring, spinning, film-shredding mechanical gauntlet. In recent years, we’ve finally achieved perfection in the form of digital projection technology: a digitally projected movie is always crystal clear, always clean, the same after 1,000 or even 10,000 screenings as it was on the very first one. But that has created a different kind of problem, at least for me. Yes, I’m going to say exactly what my Loyal Readers are anticipating. Something has been lost in the change to digital projection. Movies don’t look like films anymore, if that makes sense. They no longer have the imperfections that used to be part of the experience: the film grain and dust specks and scratches and all the other stuff we tried so hard to eliminate. It’s arguably not the same art form any longer, because the medium is so utterly different now.

Seeing those scratches on Pirates 4 was a dead giveaway that I was watching actual film, that there was a human being up there in the booth threading a strip of celluloid through the rollers and sprockets and gates before every show, and not just a computer that turned everything on at the appointed time. The projectionist had made a mistake at some point and damaged the print, true, but those platter scratches (not to mention the eruption of scratches and garbage around one of the reel changes!) were organic to the medium, and weirdly enough, I did enjoy seeing them. It made me realize how much I miss scratches and hairs stuck in the gate and juddery splice marks and the “cigarette burns” that used to signal the end of a reel, and all the other artifacts of the Way Things Used to Be that have been lost since everything became just another variety of computer.

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides was a good movie, yes, but it was also a good film, in the literal sense. And it was really wonderful to see one again. At least it was for me… your mileage may vary.

Jun042011

I Wish I Could Afford to Live in San Francisco

You just don’t see well-known pirate lords riding public transit in Salt Lake City:

There’s an explanation of this unusual sight over at Telstar Logistics, which is where I spotted it myself. That’s a great blog, incidentally. If you’ve never been there, check it out; you’ll find lots of groovy goodness about cars, planes, ships, big industrial stuff, and general San Francisco flavor.

Jun022011

Because It’s Been a While Since I Chucked a Grenade…

Kevin Drum says what I’ve been thinking lately:

Republicans didn’t care about the deficit when Reagan was president, they didn’t care when Bush Sr. was president, and they didn’t care when Bush Jr. was president. They only get religion when a Democrat is president and they need an all-purpose reason to oppose everything Democrats want to do. Is this really too complicated to understand? It’s a political tactic — and a good one! — not a genuine reaction to anything in the real world. In the real world, stimulus spending is winding down, Medicare was reformed a mere 14 months ago and is solvent for at least another decade, Social Security is solvent for two or three decades, and the deficit is very plainly not a domestic spending problem. It wasn’t a problem at all until 2001, and after that it was caused by two gigantic tax cuts, two
unfunded wars, and a finance-industry driven recession. If we just let the tax cuts expire, get out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and get the economy moving, the medium-term deficit will disappear.

No comments please. I’m not in the mood to argue about things that ought to be self-evident.

Jun012011

The End Is Near

In a scene reminiscent of those fondly remembered early mornings before school some 30 years ago, I stayed up much too late last night watching space shuttle Endeavour‘s return to Earth live on the NASA TV website. There’s not much to see during a night landing, sadly. The shuttle doesn’t have navigation lights like an airplane — I don’t know why, exactly, but I’d guess it’s because the lights would have to go right where the shuttle needs maximum heat-shield protection, i.e., the leading edges of the wings and the belly — so she’s all but invisible until she’s right over the runway. But NASA TV did its best. For nearly an hour, it was showing us the same digital map the guys in Mission Control see, tracking the orbiter’s wild streak across the globe as she decelerated from 18,000 miles per hour to about 200, her speed when the wheels hit the tarmac. (Ironically, considering how testy I get when people question the safety of these craft, I felt rather irrationally anxious during the so-called “period of maximum heating,” thinking how awful it would be to have another Columbia-style re-entry accident now, so close to the program’s conclusion.)

As Endeavour approached Kennedy Space Center, the view switched to Commander Mark Kelly’s cockpit heads-up display, so we could see the runway lights coming up out of the black landscape. Then it was on to a ground-based night-vision camera, which revealed a ghostly green silhouette of the orbiter, her nose and wing edges glowing a brilliant white, presumably because of residual heat from re-entry. Then finally the show ended with only a few seconds of the view you see above, a real-color camera feed of Endeavour’s final landing. Smooth and beautiful as always. It’s something of a wonder we’ve never seen a bad landing from one of these birds, really.

I did experience a moment of alarm after Endeavour came to a stop. While Commander Kelly talked over the radio with the ground crews, running down his checklists, I noticed an unfamiliar flickering on top of the shuttle. It seemed to be coming from near the base of the vertical stabilizer, right between the two bulging OMS engine pods. I’d never noticed anything like that before, and I briefly wondered if perhaps engineers had figured out a way to put a light on the ship after all, or if perhaps it was a reflection from some light source on the runway. But no, it was too sporadic to be a strobe light or an old-style rotating beacon. Then suddenly I realized it was a flame. My god, a jet of flame! As I said, I’d never seen that before, and a cold trickle of fear slithered through my guts… Endeavour had made a textbook landing, but she now was on fire! I waited and hoped someone on the audio channel would address this mysterious flame, but no one said a word. Feeling a bit frantic, I tabbed over to Twitter and started combing NASA’s official tweets, looking for some comment… surely someone else had noticed this… and then I breathed a sigh of relief. There it was: “The flames you saw at the top of Endeavour were normal – the vents from the auxiliary power units.” No big deal, then. Still… how odd that after 30 years and who knows how many landings I’ve watched on TV, that I’d never before seen that “normal” venting. For a moment, the spaceship of my dreams seemed more like a woman than ever, with endless layers and secrets yet to be revealed. God, I’m going to miss these things.

As I think I mentioned in an earlier entry, STS-134 was Endeavour‘s 25th mission. She is the youngest of the shuttle fleet, built quite literally out of spare parts as a replacement for the lost Challenger, after the bean counters decided that would be more economical and efficient than refitting the old Enterprise prototype for spaceflight. Her final mission lasted just under 16 days, which brings the ship’s final total to 299 days in space, and 4,671 orbits. Her final odometer reading is 122,883,151 miles. And now she’s finished. She’s already been towed into Kennedy’s Orbiter Processing Facility, where her fuel tanks will be drained and her engines and thrusters removed, to be replaced with inert mock-ups. Once the taxidermists are finished with her, she’ll be off to the California Science Center and displayed like any other mounted rhino head. Not that I’m bitter or anything.

Meanwhile, the rising Florida sun this morning was glinting off Endeavour‘s sister ship Atlantis, finally in place on Launch Pad 39A after its tedious seven-hour roll-out during the night. STS-135, the last mission of the shuttle program, is scheduled to go on July 8.

If you’ve ever wondered what it feels like when an era comes to a close, this is it, kids…