Werner Doesn't Like the Jungle

The Two Escobars

ESPN Strikes Again. ESPN Scores With the Two Escobars. Filmmakers have a ball with Narco-soccer Doc. The Two Escobars is Right on Target. Gooooooooolllll!

It's hard not to succumb to bad soccer headline writing, but ESPN has acquired another masterful documentary, the Zimbalists' The Two Escobars, which follows around notoriously ruthless drug kingpin Pablo Escobar and the straightedge captain of the Colombian national soccer team, Andres Escobar. They were from the same town, Medellin, and their lives ran in strange parallel, but they were not related.

The film details Pablo Escobar's increasing involvement in Colombian soccer, as he bought club teams and paid local players big salaries to remain in Colombia, so they would not be lured away to European club teams. He built soccer fields in the barrio and housing for the poor. Everybody knew he was a drug lord, but he took care of his people... and because of this infusion of money, Colombian soccer developed rapidly, and the film climaxes at the World Cup in the US in 1994, after a historic 5-0 drubbing of Argentina in the qualifying rounds.

What's remarkable is that young Jeff and Michael Zimbalist (Favela Rising), sibling directors in their early 30s, got so much access and so much incredible footage from the 80s and 90s, in and out of Pablo Escobar's compound. I've read that the family of Andres Escobar rejects the movie and feels betrayed by the filmmakers, but I think the film speaks for itself. I got a lot of grief from people in my documentary who claimed that I deceived them as well, but the director's job is tell the truth, not make a glossy puff piece glorifying a sportsman. The film is a masterpiece.

Anyway, check it out. It may actually be better than the OJ Simpson documentary I lauded a month back, June 17, 1994... Actually, the climax of the film takes place on virtually the same day as OJ's fateful drive down the 405--how weird is that? The Two Escobars is a feature-length documentary--unlike June 17, 1994's truncated one-hour running time--and it uses this extra time to maximize tension, and emotion, and passion, right up to its heartbreaking, shocking conclusion.

The Two Escobars makes me want to make films again, and that is no small feat.

Polyphasic 2011

Some of you might remember my polyphasic sleep experiments from a few years back (5 years, back, believe it or not, back when I was single or just courting the K). Historically I went for a core sleep of 4.5 hours nightly and 3 20 minute naps per day. This seemed to work for about a week after which my body couldn't take it anymore. I never was able to convince my body that this was a better mode of living than the old system, and invariably I'd lay down for a 20-minute nap and then sleep through my alarm and wake up about 9 hours later.

Then I'd really be screwed.

Well, the K left for Texas, I've got a few days off, and a long list of chores needed to accomplish -- a perfect opportunity to restart the polyphasic insanity.

I'm very excited about this, actually, and I will file a full report on my productivity in the coming week!

Another great (and healthful, actually) bonus about polyphasic sleep wackiness is that my caffeine intake will diminish close to zero (hopefully). It is IMPOSSIBLE to do this while jacked up on caffeine. I might drink some tea when waking up but coffee is out of the question.

Out of the question!

Fun Times in Taiwan

On Learning Mandarin in Taiwan

Lately I've been thinking about Middlebrow and his comments on the difficulties of the Cyrillic alphabet -- made as he was preparing for his trip to Russia a while back. It seems there are three basic types of letters: letters which look and sound like Roman letters, letters which look like Roman letters and sound like something different, and letters which look and sound like nothing you've seen or heard before. I'm sure I am simplifying and getting it wrong, but that was the crux of it. One would think that learning the third category of unfamiliars would be the most difficult, but it is actually the second category which presents all of the problems. Something that looks like an "N" but sounds like a "P", for example... These are what throw all of your learning out of whack, because the first category is telling you that you have a head start (that A really does sound like an A!). But you'd be better off to learn and entire language of the third category, a language of sounds and letters that are all unfamiliar, with no head starts.

I've decided to dive into learning Mandarin, for the first time really since I traveled to China in 1997. In the meantime, I learned some Japanese, which gives me a head start on many of the characters. And since Taiwan uses traditional Chinese characters, they are closer to what I already learned studying Japanese (but not exactly, of course, why would it be so easy?). However, most Chinese study materials use the characters that mainland China uses, simplified characters, which I have no real desire to learn yet, since they are like the category two above (familiar but different, and just plain lousy to look at) and because K's family is all in Taiwan.

So that is one issue. But the main thing I seem to be wrestling with in Chinese language acquisition is the tonal component of Mandarin. The ideal way to learn it would be VERBALLY only from a very young age, but as a foreign adult I have a hard time retaining this info without a written, visual reference. Learning the vocab and even learning the characters and learning grammar isn't so hard, it's the retention of the tonal component of the word/syllable that gives me fits. The problem is that pinyin (Romanized pronunciation of Chinese with a tonal marking (or diacritical mark)) is often used to give foreigners a chance... but because pinyin is in Roman letters it is impossible for me to create a permanent link between the sound of the word and and the tone it's supposed to carry... The word for big ("DA") is said with a fourth tone, but if I see the word "da" in pinyin (English) with a number four diacritical mark, it doesn't sink in because the letters D and A are seen all over the place in my life, in that order, and everywhere, and there are other words containing "da" that use different tones.... so a "da" will not always have the same tone inflection so how in the hell do I know which "da" I am looking at if I'm in the world of Pinyin? Using romanized pinyin as a bridge to reading comprehension is actually obfuscating the connection between the word and its tonal meaning. You're back in Middlebrow's second category (things that look familiar, but sound and mean something different), and maybe it's easier in the long run to go to the third category instead...

So I think it will actually be easier to NOT use pinyin once the word and its meaning have been apprehended, but instead to get it out of English as soon as possible, hand off the visual association to a character, and attach a one-to-one relationship between a traditional Chinese ideogram and its tone. "This character here is always a three-tone", etc. And in some ways this is easier than Japanese because each character as one syllable, always, as opposed to Japanese, in which kanji can have many different readings of varying syllables (often a Chinese variant and a Japanese multi-syllabic variant). There are a zillion 2-syllable compound words in Chinese, however, that are slammed together much differently than Japanese...but hey...

K thinks I'm crazy, though, because written Chinese is a huge barrier to 99.999% of all foreigners (and to some locals too, I'm sure), not a LIBERATING device with which to learn a language. This is why simplified Chinese was invented, of course, to improve literacy, because the language is impossible!

One doesn't learn Chinese through the writing. Writing comes after speaking, much after... But I'm going to go the other way, dammit, just watch!

I Married an Artist

Don't know where I found this gem.

Ancient History

I was listening to some podcast the other day and they were talking about Germany in the 70s and how it was still living then in the shadow of WW2 and how that reactively shaped policy... and I was very struck by this because I was born in 1971 and WW2 always seemed like ancient history, not close at all to the 70s...

But in reality there was only 26 years between the end of WW2 and my birth. Not a long time, really. Not at all.

For kids born in 2011, tracking back 26 years gets you to 1985, the summer of Back to the Future, Rambo, and Cocoon. Astonishing. 1971 is to Nazi Germany as 2011 is to Back to the Future.

And tracking back 26 years beyond that gets you to 1959, or pre-production on Psycho!!! I remember watching Psycho in 1985 at a friend's house... It seemed ancient... black and white, with strange wardrobes, and odd filmmaking technique and pacing. A curiosity. A relic from another time. The limitless sprawl of ancient history that unspooled before my birth.

Is this how my nephew will view Top Gun?

And then there's the two lifetimes between today and the Civil War. It's nothing, really. My grandfather's grandfather was probably in his 20s during this war...

We are such a young country.

52x52x52x52: Film #5: June 17, 1994

I often wonder why sports movies are so inferior. In some ways movies like Rudy or Hoosiers can be guilty pleasures, but for me it is difficult to cope with the cornball sentimentality of these films. Indeed, sports films are so often mishandled that it makes one wonder if these two things are simply incompatible: the live urgency of a sporting event, and the predetermined film narrative of a movie. One of my dreams is to remake Jim Carroll’s The Basketball Diaries because of this reason… because it was so mishandled the first time around. This has to be an impossible sell, though. Picture Sleepy E in a meeting: “So what I really want to do is take this critical and commercial flop… and remake it!” (I'm talking about the 1994 movie version, of course.) But that is another story.

ESPN has come out of nowhere, though, and legitimized the cinema of sports in their new 30-for-30 series, in which 30 directors were commissioned to make one-hour documentaries about sports. The films are exceptional, even when they’re mediocre (I think there’s a Woody Allen joke in there somewhere: “Even my worst orgasm was right on the money!”). These documentaries contain all of the inherent pathos and regret and drama of sport that is normally absent in sports movies. Some standouts that I’ve seen so far: Billy Corben’s The U (about the thuggish Miami Hurricanes football team of the late 80s), Without Bias (about Len Bias), Barry Levinson’s The Band That Wouldn’t Die (about the Baltimore Colt’s marching band), The Guru of Go (Paul Westhead and Hank Gathers), and Muhammad and Larry (the Maysles Brothers take on Muhammad Ali getting crushed by Larry Holmes).

The finest so far, however, is June 17, 1994, by The Kid Stays In the Picture director Brett Morgan. June 17 was the day that OJ Simpson took off in his white Bronco, but there were other momentous things going down as well: the ticker tape parade for the NY Rangers first Stanley Cup in 45 years, game 5 of the NBA finals, the beginning of the World Cup in Chicago, Arnold Palmer’s final round of golf ever, Ken Griffey Jr.’s 30^th home run (the fastest to 30 ever) in what was to be a strike-shortened season).

June 17, 1994 cuts between all of these events as the day unfolds and the OJ Simpson drama gets more and more surreal. There are no interviews and no narration – it’s an editing exercise in some way, just a bunch of footage and an editor and a director putting it together. They have access to communication between the police and OJ that wasn’t admissible in court, and they show outtakes and off-air communication as the media tries to cope with this (Tom Brokow telling his producer that there is no way to elegantly segue from Game 5 of the finals to OJ’s narrative without it sounding “totally callous.”) It is a whole new kind of media circus, that prefigures TMZ and the Internet and Twitter.

The result is epic storytelling. “A modern tragedy and drama of Shakespearean proportions,” Brokaw says. It is a good feeling to see a movie this great! And even though the film isn't really about sports (even though it's ostensibly ONLY about sports), that's the right call because sports contain the seed of something unique in culture -- something combining athletics and battle and celebrity -- where the stakes of winning and losing are amplified and the biggest winners are all eventually cut down to size. The tragedy of losing escapes no champion if one waits long enough.

Photowalk #1: Skirball

K and I have decided to renew our love of photography and long walks by committing to a twice-monthly Photowalk of our design. Walking L.A., a book of interesting urban hikes, is on the way from the sales-tax haven of Amazon. In the meantime, feeling the urge to get out of the house but lacking any direction, we decided to head off to the Skirball to check out the Maira Kalman show there and to see the Los Angeles leaves turn color (in January?)

This is a picture of Maira's work. You've seen her on a ton of New Yorker covers and in In the Pursuit of Happiness, a series of micro-essays done for the NY Times with pictures and text during the run-up to the 2010 election. Maira is awesome! (I don't think this is a self-portrait, just in case you are wondering).

Since this was our first time to go out and shoot together, we really had no idea what we were doing... I focused mainly on landscape, it seems, and K on patterns.

Here are some of my shots:

Here are some of K's:

Hopefully we can improve if we do this often enough!

Heal Thyself

Today's quiz:

What do the following foods have in common?

1. Barley

2. Buckwheat

3. Cacao Bean/Chocolate

4. Cow's Milk

5. Garlic

6. Hazelnut

7. Malt

8. Pistachio Nut

9. Rye

10. Sunflower Seed

11. Wheat

Yup, you guessed it. I am officially allergic to these foods... Let us consider the ramifications of this. No beer, no chocolate, no dairy, no wheat.... but no garlic? Come on!!!!

I feel immense sadness but also relief as well, knowing finally that these foods have been isolated... (my amazing insurance is not so amazing when it comes to food allergy diagnosis and treatment).

Since this year's New Year's Resolution is to "heal myself" I suppose I might get used to eating the rice gruel and green tea and forget about ever going out again!!!!!

Don't get me wrong, I will be in incredible shape after cutting all of this stuff out of my diet. But the foodie in me laments...

52x52x52x52

Last year was a disaster on the reading and writing fronts. Some stats:

-3 movies watched in the theater: Inception, Social Network, True Grit

-3 books or fewer read.

-7 blog posts (5 of which accomplished in November)

This is unacceptable. Truly. So to honor the 10x10x10 ladies, I've decided to embark upon the 52x52x52x52 Project.

-52 weeks

-52 books

-52 movies (one-hour episodes and documentaries only count for half!)

-52 blog posts

I've already read more this week than I did all of last year.

See you in a week!

You Should Feel Lucky to Fall Victim to Somali Pirates

Well, the documentary has just been pirated by some punk and it's up everywhere for download. Here is an image of the action from 2am on the 20th, at :

Chris Anderson of Wired would have you believe that this is a good thing, that 1500 downloads in 20 hours is better than selling 150 units in a month.... And he might be right. But why does this make me so sad?

Air Hockey and the Male Gaze

Where was this image when I was fourteen years old?

Venice and the Moneyed Boho Elite

Spent an hour in a Venice cafe this morning waiting for K to finish her yoga-and-spinning class. Afterwards, I asked her to distill into a single human that essence of Venishness, and what that person might be like. "A rich bohemian," she said.

That's about right.

There's something to say about this, but I'm not smart enough to say it. But I think areas like Sedona, or parts of Brooklyn, or even Park City (never been there) have a similar thing going on.

I personally think there is an irreconcilable schism between these two concepts of bohemianism and material wealth, since bohemia traditionally was a theoretical place where artists and free spirits where could live and work cheaply and behave unconventionally. There was poverty, and maybe some poor hygiene as well.

Which does not describe Venice. Not anymore. So then who are these folks?

Frankie and the Bride

You might have heard that they are re-remaking the Sting/Jennifer Beals movie "The Bride." Or maybe you haven't!

Photos by Middlebrow used without permission.

The Bloggo is Blotto

Middlebrow in town very recently to celebrate the DVD release of the air hockey movie, Way of the Puck.

Discussion about blogging v. Facebooking, blogging v. essaying, blogging v. tweeting, blogging v. fishing, blogging v. drinking beer, blogging v. not blogging.

Felt twinge of something, resolved to blog more. Middlebrow, to blog even less.

All writing and actual creativity sucked out the room in the last few years by the gorilla air hockey movie. Now that that is over I hope to actually begin blogging again.

We shall see about that.

Not so happy with the Facebook, no.

Don't Hate on The Facebook

I already cannot stand The Facebook. I cannot stand The Twitter either. The good thing about the blog is that only a couple of people read it. The Facebook tends toward some kind of Friend Acquisition Contest, which I do not like. As one friend put it: "The fact that you're on Facebook isn't the most surprising thing. It's... why now????"

That is all I'm going to write because I'm trying to get more life out of life. I think this grand return to blogging by the SLC crew is a good thing, though. They say blogging is dead. Good for them. Long live The Facebook.

Chat Roulette Funny Piano Improv #1

It Wouldn't Hurt Us To Have a Nick, So Now We Do

Texas Tech's madman genius coach on why he made quarterback Taylor Potts wear a jersey with the name "Nick" on the back:

"I never had the opportunity to meet a guy named Nick Reed who was a linebacker for Kansas. And I always felt like he personified what a football player is and what a football player should be. I'd actually like to have a picture of Nick Reed.

But anyway. We decided as Potts was going through his tough times, we decided all of our players, we'd like them to be more like Nick and led by Nick would be even better. We figured it wouldn't hurt us to have a Nick, so now we do."

I love that, I really do.

It's Time For Your Close-up, Ron

So a month or so ago I’m working on a Toni Braxton video, of all things, and I’m sitting there all numb and demoralized, and I hear the assistant director calling for Ron to come to set, Ron, who will play the shirtless ripped black Romeo to Toni Braxton’s R&B middle-aged goodness.

So the love interest comes in, confused, and he is large, larger than me, perhaps, and very very awkward, and I see that Ron is, in fact, Mr. Ron Artest, former Indiana Pacer, former Sacramento King, former Houston Rocket, and the perpetrator of the largest brawl in NBA history, an incident from a few years back when he vaulted into the stands and beat the shit out of some Pistons fans and then was suspended for a year.

Ron.

This shoot took place before the NBA season had started and I didn’t know he had been acquired by the Lakers so having him just appear as the SENSITIVE LOVE INTEREST in a Toni Braxton video was just too amazing to comprehend. It is still amazing to comprehend, even knowing that he lives in LA now. The caressable pecs, the unhinged smile, the curious angularity to his face, like some flesh-and-blood gemstone.

Ron is crazy.

I was going to post links to the infamous riot, but I came across something even more incredible and offensive than that bit of thuggery. It seems he has a new rap record out and the single is called “Afghan Girl.” The video has to be seen to be believed. It’s documentary footage of abused Afghan women intercut with footage of Artest leaning on trees and rapping about how he would take care of these women and caress their hair, faces, etc.

Somebody please explain this video to me:

Oh, and here’s some great stuff of Artest battling with the Jazz from two seasons ago. Highly entertaining!

NO LAYUPS! NO LAYUPS!