Another Video, Part One

My favorite form of exercise is cycling. When I can, I go for bike rides, choosing from a few differet routes. But when time is constrained, or when I get on the bike and realize it's not in me, I limit my ride to a simple circle about 25km in length.

After buying a GoPro HERO5 Session, recently (actually, it was a gift...), I bought an axle mount, made by Rec-Mount, and attached it to my front wheel. Because I wanted to record the entire route on a single ride, it had to fit within a single charge. So I took the shorter circuit and made it back in time.

Since then, I've been futzing around with the video, ultimately deciding to cut it in half because it would othrwise be ridiculously long. After finally, adding music that, I think, fails least badly, I uploaded it. Part two will be easier and so should follow sooner than Part One followed my boats-on-Tokyo-Bay timelapse (posted immediately below this one).

Enjoy?...

Tried out my new GoPro Session 5, by attaching it to my bike's front axle and zoomed around Tokyo for 20-something kilometers. It was hot and windy. This is part one. Part two will be posted soon/someday, probably.

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I Made A Video

I had the idea late last year to start a vlog but, over time, realized I don't really have any ideas for a vlog that are interesting enough to overcome my reticence to be on camera. But while I thought about different things I could do, I shot the occasional bit of video - sometimes straight recordings, sometimes timelapses, which I prefer.

As it stands, I have quite a lot of unused video and a basic shyness about putting it online. But a couple weekends ago, I was in Odaiba for a friend's event, and I thought, screw it, and recorded a timelapse to edit and upload. And here it is.

In a way, this is freeing. Having put up a video already, I'm oddly eager to do it again - as if it was a hurdle I needed to clear before I could really attempt to run out in the open. We'll see if that turns into anything, but for now, flawed as it is, here's video #1.

Odaiba beach time-lapse test from my new-to-me GoPro Hero 4 Black. I assembled and rendered the shots in Photoshop, then exported the video, titles, and music via Final Cut X. Shot September 3rd, 2017.

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A Tweet Storm I Tweet-Stormed (Elaborated)

The husband of one of my cousins, died of cancer a few days ago. My dad sent me an e-mail informing me of his death. Which brings me to this point: I hate the way Americans talk about death.

People don't "pass on" or "pass away" or "go home"; we die.

A few days after, there's not a "service" or a "home-going"; there’s a funeral.

The guy you pay is an undertaker, not a "mortician" or a "funeral home director".

There’s a grave not a "place of rest", and it is prepared by a gravedigger.

We do with our language what we do with bodies: we pretty them up to protect ourselves from the most predictable fact of life: death. The words are washed of meaning, childish, and unhealthy.

The directly aggrieved may take comfort in abstraction through euphemism, but there’s no reason for the rest of us to wrap ourselves in the same blankets so we can pretend it’s not cold and everything’s fine.

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Ozu And Imported Fame

Speaking of assumptions (or approximations, which aren't dissimilar), a student asked me why Yasujiro Ozu is popular in America. Maybe I'd had too much caffeine, but this was my answer. I wouldn't be surprised to find that it's mostly wrong, but, hey, why do actual research? I was only getting ¥200, for this, and I'm lazier that you're giving me credit for being.

As for the popularity of Ozu's movies, I can only speak about America. Among American movie buffs, Ozu is famous. But among regular people, he probably isn't. And neither is Kurosawa - even though he's the most famous Japanese filmmaker. (This is also true of many of the great European filmmakers.)

The reason for this is probably, chiefly, the occupation of Japan by American military forces. Kurosawa, Ozu, Neruse, Mizoguchi, et al., were making (censored) films in Japan at the time, and American GIs were exposed to them during their time here. (GIs also brought hundreds of American films to Japan, which had some effect on future Japanese filmmakers, but this is a different topic.)

Cities with strong movie cultures (New York City; Los Angeles; Portland, Oregon; etc.) had some pre-war exposure to Japanese films and filmmakers, but probably only these places. Sadly, in cities like these, they were limited to art house theaters (small movie theaters that specialize in rarer and more advanced films). To some extent, this is still true these days, except that there are many very-famous Japanese films.

But as the GIs returned to America, so did some of the Japanese movies they discovered here. This also served as wartime propaganda in America, by showing American citizens how Japanese people were prospering under the occupation.

This helped to spread some of the greatest and more popular Japanese movies in America - Roshomon and Tokyo Story, in particular. And samurai movies helped introduce Japanese historical cultures to the west (for example, Kurosawa's Yojimbo and Sanjuro, although these arrived a little later).

Nearly simultaneously, the French New Wave (La Nouvelle Vague) happened. Godard, Renais, Bazin, Truffaut, etc., began, for the first time, to talk about movies as a serious art form. They focused especially on what they called the auteurs (artists who wrote and directed their own movies - people who had a vision in their minds and then created it on film). This intellectual argument shifted the focus onto serious filmmakers like Bergman in Sweden, Kurosawa and Ozu in Japan, Renoir in France, Hitchcock in England and America, et al. And it had a lasting effect on how we think of films and filmmakers.

This caused a rise in the number of foreign films that were imported into America, the places they could be seen, and the respect given to their creators.

Finally, and this should not be considered a small point, Ozu made extraordinarily beautiful and evocative movies. You can pause any of his films and admire the composition as if they were just great landscape/portrait photographs.

So these three reasons are probably the biggest and best ways to explain why Ozu is popular in America. There are probably dozens of other reasons, but these are the key ones.

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Even After Death, We Age!

This is fascinating, but for the life of me I cannot decipher the unclear mathematics.

I think this means that Homeric days were 7 hours shorter than modern days - but there's no mention of how not just unreliable but wrong(!) this makes best-guesses about the ages of the few ancients for whom we have reliable birth and death dates.

Using front-of-smartphone calculations this would imply that Æschylus and Thucydides would be around 17.5 modern days older than we already guess; Socrates's final drink happened around ~20.4 days later than we think. (Not that it's therefore less a tragedy....)

These are poor examples as we have fixed dates for none of them; these are approximations atop best-guess approximations. But still.

Alexander the Great (who did just slightly more in his nearly 32 years, 11 months than I have in my 39 years, 11 months) was ~9.59 days closer to 33 than we think, modern-diurnally speaking.

Anyway, interesting.

And then, as I went to wrap this up, I realized, to my substantial disappointment, that I'm 20-or-so seconds older than I thought. God dammit.

Maybe this is the reason so many people hate science....

UPDATE: I'm pretty sure I've fallen down a bad-math hole here, but I can't see the source of the mistake. I'm sick, tho, so perhaps that's why? He said, hoping that's why...

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Enlightenment Via Stupidity

A moron I work with taught someone this: "We use similies to exaggerate, to stretch the truth."

Obviously, that's just fucking bizarre. We use similes (and metaphors) when attempting to simplify an explanation -- usually from more complex to less complex -- by introducing an understandable comparison. But as a result of hearing that erroneous explanation, I did realize something I'd never explicitly thought about before:

Similes and metaphors perform this action (ironically but not quite paradoxically) by introducing another element – which is to say, by adding the complexity inherent in another bit of knowledge, in other information; and it's all wrapped up in an assumption of familiarity.

An example: I know almost nothing about, say, how fuel-burning cars work. So, were someone to attempt to explain to me the workings of a complex thing by comparing that thing to the workings of an internal-combustion engine (or the rules of cricket, or why chickens exist), we would find ourselves further adrift in a widening river of confusion. All based on the assumption that this common-knowledge comparison would elucidate matters by introducing a (to-me-absolutely-opaque) abstraction.

It's the workable absurdity of clarification-via-further-complication that I found interesting.

Then it occurred to me that this is also how synonyms work:

"What's A mean?"
"B."
".... What's B mean?"

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A Nuance in Two Parts

From my Dad:

"I learnt* today [...] that the word "retaliation" equates more with "vengeance" whereas "retribution" equates more with "justice" -- I had thought retaliation and retribution meant the same."

Here are facts:

   Retaliation

    — noun
    
    the act of retaliating**; return of like for like; reprisal.
    Origin: 1575–85; retaliate + -ion
    

And:

   Retribution

    —noun
    
    1. requital according to merits or deserts, especially for evil.
    2. something given or inflicted in such requital.
    3. Theology. the distribution of rewards and punishments in a future life.

Fascinating nuance. If I would've thought to describe it, I would've said "retaliation" was more immediate, "retribution" more determined, full throated, intense. But that otherwise they contained the same fundamental concept. 
 

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* Ignore this. My dad sometimes finds it funny to write with British English misspellings.
** This is a circular definition. Lexicographers who do this, defining a word with itself, are lazy.

Word:

From an e-mail my dad sent some time back:

ster·to·rous [stur-ter-uhs] adjective
1. characterized by stertor or heavy snoring.
2. breathing in this manner.
Origin: 
1795–1805; stertor + -ous

Related forms
ster·to·rous·ly, adverb
ster·to·rous·ness, noun
post·ster·to·rous, adjective

Pugs breathe stertorously. And so did Tony Soprano.

The More Things Change....

December 20, 1943, Committee on Foreign Relations of the Senate report recommending the passage of a Resolution (S.R. 203) favoring the appointment of a commission to formulate plans to save the Jews of Europe from extinction by Nazi Germany.

We have talked; we have sympathized; we have expressed our horror; the time to act is long past due.

Quoted here, which is incredible and will ruin your day.

1: The Wire

One of the things I do these days is consume podcasts - I’ll address this is a related post soon. One of the newer podcasts I’ve taken up is Marco and Tiffany Arment’s “Top Four”, which is a list show where they (kinda sorta) rank their top four of the episode’s subject1. In the second episode, they tackle TV shows.

I like the idea of a top four of things. It’s short, but a little weightier than the gold-silver-bronze standard top-three, and less tired and tiring than top-ten. But it’s also a hair limiting. Because of that, I’ll use the Arments’ system here. Then, as number 5, I’ll give everything that could easily have made the top four - and which may have if I’d written this list on a different day. Then I’ll tack on an honorable mention to list the things which easily could’ve filled out the rest of a top-ten list. As this will be wordy, I’ll put it up as separate posts.

——

My Top Four TV Shows

Number One

The Wire

When I recommend The Wire, I almost always say that “it’s the best thing America has ever done - including the Apollo Program and eradicating smallpox.” I present it as hyperbole each time, but I don’t fully regard it as such2. Whatever else can be said about American TV, it must include this: the highwater mark was HBO’s The Wire.

The Wire is an epic novel, really - about the death of an American city. It builds for us an entire fictional city, founded on a real one, and lays bare its flaws and failings. It shows how the death of a great city comes, not from a bang, but from a million tiny cuts sustained over decades.

It does this in a way that is both dramatic and devastating. In the second season, as the focus shifts from the drug trade in housing projects, the focus of season one, to the docks where the drugs (and nearly everything else) arrive in the city, the plotting is incredibly good. In the 4th season, as the focus shifts to the local school system, we see, for perhaps the first time in all American content, how parents are often complicit in some of the worst events and effects. These are no mere bad kids, out of control and violent; some of them are pushed into the drug trade by the people who should be their greatest protectors - their own parents. The disease runs so deep, not even family is enough to protect against it.

But these are just plot style and points. The Wire’s highlight is how it shows everyone’s complexity. We’re shown that some of the bad guys aren’t just bad (and that some are psychopaths), and that the police aren’t entirely good (especially the psychopaths). Complex characters aren’t new to art, but to American TV shows - especially cop shows, a category The Wire sometimes gets confined to - it was damned near unique. We’ve had antiheroes before, but seldom more than a few of them, and perhaps never so many convincing characters.

And there are so many! A list of fascinating characters would extend well behond those we get to know well. If ever a show laid fertile groundwork for a spin-off, this is it. And yet no spin-off came.3

The bredth of the show is also incredible. Each season focuses on a new part of the city: new environments of failure, mismanagement, sloth, and greed at each premier. Each time I watch The Wire I’m reminded of this:

“Each [Peloponnesian and their allies’ policy-making bodies] presses its own ends… which generally results in no action at all… they devote more time to the prosecution of their own purposes than to the consideration of the general welfare – each supposes that no harm will come of his own neglect, that it is the business of another to do this or that; and so, as each separately entertains the same illusion, the common cause imperceptibly decays.” Thucydides, as reported by Edith Hamilton

There is, of course, corruption, too - and it’s shown. But corruption is easy to show and to comprehend, which is why cop shows always focus on bad guys doing bad deeds. Corruption is, has always been, and will always be, a problem. It’s impossible to root out, because where people are interested, they will always find a way to expand their interests. But incompetence is far more prevelant, and much more damaging. Corruption exists; incompetence predominates. Individual cases of corruption may cost more, but incompetence makes up for it in volume. Incompetence shows up plenty in comedy, but much less often in drama - maybe because someone doing a bad job is inherently funny and not so inherently exciting. But as with corruption, it can also lead to tragic consequences. Not everyone who helps to push a city toward extinction intends to; some just fail to do their jobs well, which helps to increase the speed of the downhill roll, tiny rockets on a giant Catherine wheel.

The Wire handles all of this - the characters, the corruptions, the incompetences, the complexities, the plotting, etc. - so extremely well, all without preaching or suffering. I rewatch it every year.

終

  1. Video games, worst Weezer singles, podcasts, etc. ↩︎

  2. I mean, sure the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedoms exists, but… ↩︎

  3. Aside, I guess, from those character shorts. ↩︎

Movies, great and small.

Lately, I’ve been rewatching some great movies (Dog Day Afternoon, Three Days of the Condor, Hannah and Her Sisters, Kind Hearts and Coronets, Brief Encounter). And, incidentally, the occasional not-so-great ones (Serpico). Below is a screen-grab of the title card from Yasujiro Ozu’s marvelous and under-praised Munekata Sisters (宗方姉妹, 1950), the latest movie I rewatched.

The story follows two sisters not connected to each other so much as orbiting a common center of gravity - a man named Hiroshi. Setsuko, the elder sister, and Hiroshi were once in love, but never married. Today, Mariko loves him - but she denies her own love attempting to reunite him with Setsuko. (In this way, the sisters’ situations mirror each other, but only vaguely.)

The movie plays as a comedy interwoven with deep sadness (this is an Ozu picture, after all). (Or maybe it’s the other way around: the first time I watched it, I found the movie much funnier than I did this time.) Mariko, Hideko Takamine, brings lightness and humor to the film, offsetting her older sister’s destruction. She’s lively and young, sticking her tongue out, frog-like, whenever she’s uncomfortable, yelling and running off when offended or embarrassed. She’s cute and fun, charming and youthful.

Setsuko, who owns a failing bar and supports a failing husband, long ago lost whatever she had that resembled Mariko’s zest. Life and its responsibilities (or the consequences of her decisions), have left her stoic and struggling, unhappy and adrift. When she and her husband have a fight, late in the movie, she barely breaks on the outside, but is crushed. It’s a subtle performance by Kinuyo Tanaka, counterbalanced by Hideko’s comedic skills.

While this isn’t Ozu’s masterpiece (or, considering the artist, one of his masterpieces), it is exquisite - and recommended.

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