# 03830 Watch Four Lions (2010)

Completed: 6 May 2011

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Lions

Barry: They’ll pump you full of Viagra. Make you fuck a dog! You’ll end up on YouTube, blowing Lassie in a ditch!

It’s rare that a slapstick comedy can be deep, controversial and actually contain a message that worth hearing.  Here is a film that portrays Islamic terrorists as I believe many actually are: scared, confused, and not very competent.   In effect, they are just like the rest of us.  And, like the rest of us, their actions are greatly influenced by the company they keep.

The only fault I find is that this film is that towards the end, like many black comedies (see for example # 03396 Burn After Reading) veers into the realm of nihilism, as all surviving characters prove themselves over the closing credits to be corrupt, amoral, or irremediably stupid.  That in and of itself does not make it a bad film, but it seems to undercut the message of universal humanity the film appeared to be shooting for.

Ethical Game Programming # 05588 Complete Braid

http://www.braid-game.com/

Completed: 1 May 2011

There are novels I read (like Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy, #02049 or Cormac McCarthy’s, The Road, #02416) and movies I see (like Richard Linklater’s Waking Life, #05444) that haunt me long after the end of the experience.   Days later I find myself obsessively searching the web for commentary essays, reader’s guides, or even usenet posts  -anything to give me more insight into what I’ve just felt.  I’ve never had that happen with a video game (with the possible exception of the WTF ending of Assassin’s Creed 1, #05565) before.

Well I finished Braid a few hours ago, and I know it will haunt me for a while to come.  I’m not going to discuss the plot, there are plenty of articles on that.  For Example:

http://www.cracked.com/article_19172_8-creepy-video-game-urban-legends-that-happen-to-be-true_p2.html

Rather I want to talk about the ideas of Braid‘s creator Jonathan Blow.  Blow is an advocate of ethical gaming, that is there should be a set of rules that developers should follow.  What is a video game, but a voluntary behavior modification program.  Viewed this way, isn’t something like World of Warcraft, which encourages grinding and other repetitive time sinks in order to maximize play time and therefore subscription payments immoral?  Shouldn’t games reward the traits we would most like to encourage I players?  Creativity, problem solving, introspection….maybe even fairness and empathy?

Full disclosure: I have not completed the seven stars quest, and I am probably not going to.  This is not a criticism of the game which I have nothing but praise for, but rather just a statement of my priorities.  I don’t have time to wait for the one star which requires 90 minutes of waiting.  I completed a vanilla run-through in 17 hours with only the occasional use of of hints.  I then used Youtube to see what I missed in terms of the secret messages and the hidden ending.

There is a great lecture by Blow found here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwsi7TEQxKc

# 03964 Watch Hair (1979)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079261/

I have a conflicted relationship with the films of Milos Forman.  In my teens they seemed the height of quality cinema: funny, exciting and erudite, with a rebellious spirit.  As I grow older, I find myself far more critical of his work.  I still believe they are great works of art, but often they seem to venerate anyone whose actions run contrary to the accepted morality, the dominant power structure or the status quo in general without regard to the individual’s motivations or to the end result of his (the protagonists are always male) actions.

I have never seen the stage play Hair, but I have read and listened to reactions of those to have, and this film, while fun, doesn’t seem to be the sort of transformative experience that they reported.  Part of this might just be the difference in energy between the live and recorded performances, or the fact that I am watching this story in 2009 rather than 1969.  Perhaps this temporal distance is why the makers of this film felt the need to alter the plot from the play.  In 1979 the Vietnam war was over, and the idealism of 1960s protest movements had given way to hedonism and cynicism of the disco era.  The internal conflict of someone caught between the responsibility of traditional society and being true to himself and his personal beliefs must have seemed rather naïve in the wake of Kent state and Watergate.  Receiving a draft notice in 1968 could still prompt an existential crisis.  In 1979, Carter had pardoned all the draft dodgers.  Disco Claude would probably have just tossed out the selective service notice and snorted another line.

The last half hour of the movie seems horribly contrived, at the end becoming a slapstick case of mistaken identity resembling an update of Tale of Two Cities played for laughs.  Also by making Claude an outsider rather than a member of the tribe, makes the close relationship between him and the other characters rather curious.  While I get that the hippies are supposed to be open and welcoming, doesn’t Claude have some friends and family from back home who would like to see him?

The other curious feature of the film, which may be an artifact of the stage play, is how emasculated all of the non-hippie characters seem to be.  No one is willing to throw the tribe out of the wedding, despite making a variety of threats.  Berger successfully carjacks a straight couple but (not once but twice) because the man is unwilling to stand up to him and the woman is sexually aroused by him.

All in all, the movie is watchable and the songs entertaining, but I don’t feel I have had a definitive ‘Hair’ experience.

# 02024 Read Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Poe

The closest thing to a novel that Poe ever wrote is notable for number of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that is has no conclusion.  It was originally written as a serial, and the form of the document definitely reflects that.  There is no narrative arc to speak of.  One event happens, and then another and then another, with the only common theme being that each occurrence is more macabre and stranger than the last.  The “climax” is when the narrator and his sidekick are approaching Poe’s version of the South Pole (Open tropical water dotted by cannibal infested islands) he sees a giant ivory humiform statue in the center of a circular waterfall and…the story ends.  A brief afterword mentions the manuscript mysteriously appearing and being prepared for publication by Mr. Poe.

I have poked around the web and found many high-minded literary explanations of this.  I find these reasons unconvincing.  I think a more pedestrian explanation is far more convincing.  As I said, Pym was originally a serial.  Often Poe writes as if he were being paid by the word, listing the various flora and fauna species which occupy his fanciful islands.  It has been proven that Poe drew on the theories of John Cleves Symmes, a hollow earth theorist and the journals of several explorers.  Much of the work is just a restatement of the explorers writing along with Symmes own half-baked theories.  The rest of the writing follows the form of a penny dreadful, emphasis on dreadful.  Even for Poe the story here is blood-soaked, with the narrator surviving multiple shipwrecks, mutinies, and acts of cannibalism. I think poor Edgar just got sick of the story and figured the enigmatic image of the statue was as good a place as any to call it quits.  I’m sure he had somewhere in the back of his head an idea for Pym’s further adventures inside the hollow globe.  Perhaps he would have his protagonists spewed forth by a volcano in a precursor to Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth.  But at some point he grew bored, or frustrated or the economics of the agreement no longer made sense and he quit.  And so when he died some years later the solution to the riddle of the statue was buried with him.

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2149

# 05598 Complete Castlevania

Completed: 26 April 2011

There is really not much to say about this game that hasn’t been said elsewhere.  It is a classic genre-defining side-scroller…and it’s HARD.  Very, very hard.  Probably the most difficult of the series.  But unlike many other old school NES games, this one is hard for the right reasons.  The controls are solid and the levels are designed fairly.  There are very few places where you are required to take damage and the monsters all do follow fixed patterns of behavior.  The graphics are appropriately moody, and the music (always a strong point of the series) is about as good as you can hope for from the NES.

I never beat this game as a kid, so I had to wait for adulthood to see the ending.  And the final screens are actually enjoyable and rewarding.  To bad the series went downhill after it’s 8 and 16-bit incarnations.

http://www.gametrailers.com/video/part-i-the-castlevania/705561

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castlevania_(video_game)

2007 Road Trip Pt. 2 # 09514 Visit Slovakia: Hike Mt. Krivan

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kriv%C3%A1%C5%88_%28peak%29

http://wikitravel.org/en/Vysok%C3%A9_Tatry

So this is the story of the time I was lost at night in the woods on the face of the most famous mountain in Slovakia with only the light of an Ipod to guide me.

The plan to go hiking in the High Tatras was formed when I  purchased a map of Poland and noticed a cluster of mountains along the Southern Border.  I thought to myself, “I’ve never hiked up a mountain before” and that’s all the thought I put into it.

You have to remember, in 2007, Google Maps was still in it’s infancy and Mapquest had limited coverage anywhere outside of the US and Canada.   For example: Google only showed 4 roads total in the country of Romania, none of which lead to Brașov, a city of nearly 300,000.  I had a GPS, but it didn’t have road listings anywhere east of Austria, so it was paper maps I had to rely on through this entire trip.

As I wrote yesterday, I was headed South from Krakow toward the border between Poland and Slovakia near Poprad.  I left Krakow late in the day and I had elected to cross the border at a smaller, less trafficked crossing.  It was well after dark when I pulled up to a candy-cane stripped pole with an adjacent guard shack which marked the border.  Inside were four guards: two Polish, two Slovak, all asleep.  Their faces were pressed against the glass like small children napping in a van.  I thought for a second of just lifting the barrier myself, it was just a wooden pole without any lock or other mechanism, but the inner rule-follower in me won out.  A few knocks on the window of the shack woke up the guards, who were not happy with the disturbance.  None spoke much English, but through a series of gestures and grunts they requested to see just about every piece of identification and documentation I had with me to include my immunization card.  After about a half-hour of this, the apparently senior guard threw up his hands in frustration and signaled to the other guard to lift the barrier.  I was into Slovakia.

I’d actually been in Slovakia before, I’d spent a weekend in Bratislava a few month’s earlier,  (See # 09522 Visit Slovakia: Stay in the Botel in Bratislava, coming soon) but the Eastern part of the country was far different and much less developed.

This is actually one of the country's top tourist spots.

I stopped at a gas station, picked up some snacks and a topographical map of the Tatras, and then headed to a hotel.   After a night’s sleep and a breakfast I headed off towards the mountains.  I selected Kriváň based on the fact it was tall, (second tallest in the range I learned) located near the road, and the map indicated the hiking trail up the mountain was of only moderate difficulty.

I would only learn later that Kriváň held a special place in Slovak history.  Ascents are traced back to at least the 18th Century and in the 50s under communism, the ascent was institutionalized as an annual celebration of resistance against fascism.  I large hammer and sickle statue was placed at the summit.  The event, called The National Ascent of Kriváň, (Národný výstup na Kriváň) continues to this day though it is now seen as a nationalist celebration, and the statue has been replaced by a Slovak cross so the summit now resembles the coat of arms of the Slovak Republic.

The image chosen for the country's Euro coin was similar to this photo I took

A well-maintained road skirts the Southern edge of the Tatras, and I parked my car on the shoulder near a trail head.  I was wearing khakis, a t-shirt and a thin fleece.  I carried a small backpack with  2 liters of water, a few snacks, a cap and my iPod.

The South Face

The three routes up the mountain are clearly marked —normally.  However in 2004 the south face of the mountain (the one I was climbing up) had been hit my high winds which had denuded large parts of it.  Many of the old trail marking had been on trees and the well established trails had to be rerouted due to debris.  There were several times during the early part of the ascent I lost the trail and had to backtrack to find it.

Once I moved above the tree line the trail became easier to follow, as the blazes were now on rocks.  It’s a fascinating experience to ascend a tall peak on foot.  You get to see the trees grow smaller and then disappear completely, followed by shrubs and grasses as well.  For a while it’s just rocks and lichens, and then the lichens fade away too.  And then you hit permafrost.  The experience of actually climbing from a warm late summer day into permanent winter gives a reality and sense of scale to the journey.  When you drive or ride the train, everything on the other side of the glass might as well be a movie.  You enter, sit down in a chair and a few hours later you emerge into a different place entirely, but if you walk, move under your own power, you know every inch of the trip is real.

The problem with climbing a mountain is that when you get to the top, you have to get back down.  In this case I had burned far more time than I planned on with backtracking on the early part of the trail.  I hurried down as quickly as I could and I was doing fine until I hit the treeline again.  Again I lost the trail, and night closed in.  I used the light of my iPod screen to located a few more trail blazes before abandoning the trail entirely.  I decided to use the position of the moon to plot a course due South.  My hope was I would be able to hit the road, and then find my car.  When I tell people this story the ask if I was scared.  I was scared.  Not panicked about being lost in the woods of a foreign country where no one knew where I was, but I did have one recurring thought—Are there bears in Slovakia?

Eventual I did hit the road and less than a half-mile west of where I had parked.  By this time it was well past ten at night, so rather than trying to find a hotel, I again spent the night in my car.  The next morning I headed towards Budapest.  More on this to follow.

2007 Road Trip Pt. 1 # 09276 Visit Poland: See Auschwitz Birkenau, # 09288 Visit Poland: See Ryner Glowny in Krakow, # 09289 Visit Poland: See Wawel Hill in Krakow

Note: For the next week or so I will be reliving my 2007 road trip through Eastern Europe by writing blog entries.  This trip started in Bavaria, crossed into Poland, passed through Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania on route to the Black Sea Coast before I turned around and drove through Bulgaria, Macedonia, and Albania.  Outside Tirana I blew out a tire and had to catch a ferry to Italy for a replacement.  From there I headed back to Germany through San Marino, Austria, and the Czech Republic.

Completed: August-September 2007

Krakow

This trip was a last hurrah before I left Germany to return to the United States.  I left Germany in late August with 30 days of approved leave, my car (a 2006 Mini Cooper S convertible) packed with gear and snacks, a passport, and little else.  No reservations, no plans, and not even a map.  So equipped I headed off toward Wroclaw.

That city was beautiful, but due to an extended stop to buy some pottery as a gift for family back home, I arrived too late to find a hotel room.  I continued on towards Krakow and ended up spending the night at a rest stop off the A4.  Unfortunately, leaving the radio and fan on overnight drove down my battery and I had to accept a jump from another motorist who spoke no more English than I did Polish.  I rewarded him for his help with 2 cans of Redbull and he seemed very excited.

Before heading into the city, I turned south towards Auschwitz, the Death Camp where an estimated 1.1 millions people, mostly Jews, died by execution or forced labor and neglect.  It’s a little know fact that if you show up at the Birkenau satellite camp early in the morning before the ticket office opens the groundskeeper will let you in and you can spend a few hours alone in the ruins of the camp.  I would however advise against it, as it is a supremely creepy experience which will haunt you long afterward.

Railhead at Birkenau

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auschwitz_Birkenau

Over at the main camp there is a museum which details all the horrors that went on at the camp, including a room stacked floor to ceiling with the prosthetic limbs of people who were executed in the camp.  For some reason that image in particular has stayed with me.  Unfortunately most of the signs in the museum were in broken English.  This would prove to a recurrent problem throughout Eastern Europe.

From there I headed into Krakow proper.  I found a bed in a local hostel and headed straight for the Polish Royal Castle on Wawel Hill.    After an afternoon spent there and a night spent drinking, I crashed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wawel_Hill

The next morning I headed towards Rynek Główny w Krakowie, the largest medieval market-square in Europe and found a bookstore where I could buy a copy of the current Sunday New York Times for $20.  I sat, drank coffee, and read the paper in one of the most picturesque setting imaginable.  I later did some sightseeing and then returned to the square for lunch.  I ordered a very large pasta dish, and unable to finish it, pressed it to the side of table.

It was then that an older, disheveled, presumably homeless fellow wandered up and asked me something in Polish.  Unable to understand, but feeling bad I fished in my pocket for a Euro coin.  While this was going on he grabbed my plate and silverware and took off down an alley.  I waved a waiter over and tried to explain what happened.  The waiter assumed I was angry at the gentleman, sent someone after the homeless man and offered to take the pasta dish off my bill.  I tried to explain that the man was welcome to my food, I just didn’t want to be charged for the lost flatware.

After this incident, I packed my car back up and headed south toward the Slovak border and the High Tatra Mountains.  More on this tomorrow.

I found this fellow near the restaurant where I ate lunch

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rynek_G%C5%82%C3%B3wny

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