Cold Mountain (DVD) Review

I rented Cold Mountain, because it had Jack White in it. The therapeutic ratio of this movie is the 155 minute running time divided by the time JW's on the screen which is about 6 minutes, making the ratio 25.8. That's high, although I've watched dreadful movies for less Jason Isaacs in the past. Since I had to watch it all the way through, here's my thoughts on the subject.

By thirty minutes into it, I wasn't that overwhelmed. It reminds me of The Patriot - the horror of war contrasted with the pale and comely humanity of young love and other sick-making platitudes. I suspect that the beardie old scarecrow Teague is going to be the bad guy, rather than the elegant and savage Colonel Tavington of The Patriot, which is not an improvement.

It's managed to pile in every cliche in the book so far. The beautiful blonde middle-class preacher's daughter (Nicole Kidman), the young tongue-tied farmhand (Jude Law), the old preacher with the slight movie-cough that spells Doomed in capital letters, the insane ballet of gobbets of bodies flying through the air after a nice big blowage-of-shit-up, and quite remarkably, a shot of one man dying in the trenches cut to a white dove battering against the church windows followed by - get this - someone letting the soul oops I mean dove back out of the church followed by another cut to the man in the trenches starting to move again. Is that last one a cliche negated or a cliche squared? I can't tell! My sense of art (with a capital F) is all tangled up with with my astonishment that anyone would try such comic book cuts.

There's a Brit and an Aussie attempting ante-bellum (or in this case peri-bellum) American accents with their very best Gone-With-The-Wind enunciation switched on. There's also a lot of music so far which has reminded me that (white) American folk music is still on probation with me. I've never really liked it, finding it maudlin and superstitious, and it's on sufferance right now because so many people I respect seem to love it. But it could easily overstay its welcome in this rather syrupy incarnation. If P T Barnum or whatever his name is and Jack White were involved in it, one would expect it to get better. (Later note: Not P T Barnum. I meant T Bone Burnett.)

Spoilers oh ye who haven't seen it.

There is a much taught concept in screenwriting called "Plot Point 1". At this point the simple narrative (e.g. Jim's greatest need in life is to go to the shop to buy his wife a birthday present) takes a Jovian-gravity-sling sized turn around a pivot and jumps into the actual subject of the movie, which is about a thousand times as powerful (e.g. Jim gets halfway to the shops when a giant robot emerges from the earth and eats New York). This precipitates Act II (Only Jim knows that the monster has a vulnerable underbelly and the rest of the act is about Jim finding an F-16 and flying it into the monster's weak spot. Birthday is forgotten.) According to Syd Field, who wrote the book (literally) on this, Plot Point 1 should occur just before Act II, on pages 25 to 27 of the screenplay, or as we punters call it, at about thirty minute mark of the movie.

At thirty-eight minutes into Cold Mountain (it's a long movie all around so the points are stretched out), preacher-Dad with the slight cough dies suddenly, his death simultaneous with a rainstorm signifying Great Change and Turmoil blowing over Cold Mountain. About one minute before he died, we learned that his beautiful daughter can't cook. Therefore I predict the rest of the movie will be about her not being able to cook. This is a movie with Symbols all over it, so Not Being Able to Cook will entail being utterly destitute. And meanwhile her tongue-tied young man is on his way to fight the Yankee. What will she do?

The second part of the movie proves to be much funnier, so all is well. Renee Zellweger turns up as a sort of cross between a kobold and a farmer, choosing to live with Nicole Kidman for no apparent reason. She teaches the helpless woman how to till the soil and milk the pigs, or whatever it is people do in the country. She's as strong as a donkey and filled with wisdom. I can't understand a word she croaks, but I guess it's folksy and uproarious. Her character is called Ruby Thewes. "Thews" means "muscle" and comes from a word meaning virtue or character. You can tell that she is Flesh and Blood because she is thews and rubies. This is Deep. It is a Deep film.

I did manage to catch that the first word she learned to spell was "catastrophe" - funny plus foreshadowing plus Symbolism! Nicole's character could not deal with the farm's rooster, so Thewes ripped the cock's head off, which was pretty funny, and very Symbolic also.

Back to Jude Law's character. He's deserted the blood-filled trenches. The Home Guard is killing all deserters and those who support them, so he's walking home rather circumspectly. He meets a man at a ferry point. Hm. First suspicion that we are in a mythological world here. A ferry point? The ferryman, or in this case ferrywoman, agrees to get him and the man across the river. The Home Guard catch up at the bank and shoot the ferrywoman. This is after she'd offered to have sex for money - a typically Hollywood scene. A woman can't take charge of sexual matters and go unpunished. That rather startling shooting managed to be both funny and Symbolic too. Her purpose was to ferry the hero from one square on the board of his life to another. Usually the ferryman gets there alive with his charges, but this one hadda ruin it by offering Inman sex, so she serves the dual purpose of ferrying Inman out of the war and dying for being sexual.

Is he really called Inman? As in Man and In? He isn't called Emmanuel ("God is within") he's called "Man is within". Not a particularly lucky name. Let's hope it's IN this MAN to get through the movie in one piece.

I'm enjoying this movie now. Still can't tell what Zellweger is saying, though I think she's a Magical Negro. The film's first successful bout of non-clicheing is to have a white, female magical negro instead of Morgan Freeman or Morpheus from the Matrix. I'm sure she'll do a good job magicking Nicole Kidman out of middle-classdom and getting her in touch with her roots, literally as she's clearing a cornfield. (Though the first thing she does is build a sturdy fence. A fence! This is going up to 11 on the Symbolism scale!)

I'm following Inman's journey with bated breath. He's well on the path of Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey now. Having been ferried out of his familiar surroundings (the war) he and the fallen preacher are tempted by the sirens that tempted Odysseus' sailors, the libidinous giants that dwell on the threshold of the familiar. Inman and the sidekick are dumb enough to follow the sirens. The scene starts out realistically enough with a dead bull in a stream, but once inside their house the lighting gets darker and more smutty (as in soot/smut and sex/smut) and irreal until we're in what Campbell calls The Belly of the Whale. The belly of the whale is the darkness closing over the hero. Next he should set out on The Road of Trials. Hey, I guessed right. The Home Guard have turned up to give our hero some of those trials.

Inman is rescued from his ordeal by an old crone (with attendant goats) in a magic hut in the woods. She's even mixed up a potion to cure his ills. I really had been given the impression that this was a movie about a bloody war, and in fact it's a typical fantasy. It's more Star Wars than anything remotely realistic. Remarkable. I have both Syd Field and Joseph Campbell's books open and I'm following along. The screenplay's writing itself at this point.

Inman's just met Natalie Portman as the Mother Goddess. She's carrying a giant baby about the size of a pantomime horse. What does Joseph Campbell say? Ah yes, "The ultimate adventure, when all the barriers and ogres have been overcome, is commonly represented as a mystical marriage (hieros gamos) of the triumphant hero-soul with the Queen Goddess of the World. This is the crisis at the nadir, the zenith or at the uttermost edge of the earth, at the central point of the cosmos, in the tabernacle of the temple, or within the darkness of the deepest chamber of the heart." Inman sleeps with her, but does not touch her. And the Goddess' baby won't suckle. We have bad omens, folks. (All snarkiness aside, Natalie and her giant baby had me in tears. Not bad going for a mainstream movie.)



The Dark Night of the Soul and stuff.

Hooray! Jack White's turned up and he seems to have cured Zellweger's crush on Nicole Kidman with just a couple of twinkles of his eyes. I can see how that happens. He's a musician and his name is Georgia, which makes for another brief funny during a tense scene where his mates have been captured and he's hiding from $Bad_Guy. The dumb good guy blurts out, "Where's Georgia?" Instead of narrowing their eyes, realizing they've failed to capture all the men in the party, and beginning a methodical search for the missing Georgia, everybody laughs, thinking $Dumb_Guy doesn't know where Georgia is! Haha! Geddit! Who said this movie was all about hacking limbs off and dying of gas gangrene in the snow? It's pretty funny!

I think I know where we are in the war, but that's only because I know the words to The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down. If this is the winter of 65, then everybody's hungry, just barely alive. And presumably old Dixie is shortly in for it. The ground is frozen and barren. Snow is falling, coating everything. Mythically speaking, the land needs the return of the king to heal it.

And on cue our hero is back. Jude Law really is beautiful. He was a youth with that luminous presence, but unlike most young stars he kept the perfect symmetry as he grew up and now he's a spectacular looking man, with those widow's peaks to add a little touch of dignity. Alas all he and his earthly queen are doing in this part of the movie is talking about his loss of innocence. That won't heal the land and I suspect a twist ending coming up. Oh noes!

Yes, the twist ending came up, though it's rather predictable. Inman destroys the Home Guard including $Bad_Guy and the bad guy's obligate sidekick, the Eeevill Albino. They were the blight on the land, but the blight has destroyed the hero too. Inman is killed by the albino. And guess what! Nicole actually says those words in the character's voice-over, "The land won't heal – too much blood." Nice to know the script and I are both on the same film textbook.


The land is healed! Yay! Flowers in White Stripes' official
colors all round!

But we get a tacked-on happy ending of sorts. Jack/Georgia's still alive. He's married Ruby Thewes. It's spring again, the ground is unfrozen and everyone has had babies, including the sheep. But one sheep baby has lost its mother and one sheep mother has lost its baby. Nicole Kidman (still don't know her character's name) skins the dead lamb and puts the skin over the living orphan and the surviving ewe is fooled into accepting the lamb as its own. Not sure exactly what the writer's getting at there. Turn our coats? Hide our true natures? Something about a new skin, anyway, if we are to survive. Anyway, now the Goddess of the World's symbolic baby is thriving again. Fooled by a trick, the land at least appears to have healed.

Overall, I liked the format of the women being at home, the solid matrix, with the men being peripatetic. That's a recurrent theme in my fiction and done very well here. The cinematography is quite beautiful. I guess they couldn't cut that first half hour, even though it really does not fit the movie, as that would have reset Plot Point 1 to the start and taken out the slingshot-power of the change of focus in the movie. Shame though, as it really is an off-putting beginning. I won't watch it again and in future I will keep an eye out for films with a therapeutic ratio less than about 10.

Climb On Top of a Mountain

I was listening to Great High Mountain and Sitting on Top of the World from Cold Mountain today, and finding that all things considered, I was rather enjoying them.

It reminded me of a time several years ago when I visited a friend who's into pure, unadulterated foods. I was half-way down a glass of milk when she said, "That's unpasteurized goat's milk. Do you like it?" I felt a Ghlag!! Noise in my throat as my clack shut tight.

While I struggled to recover, she said, "What's the matter? Are you afraid of bugs?"

"No," I said, "but it's unpasteurized…goat milk…all the goat molecules are still active…entering my body…" I trailed off, unable to explain, even to myself, the sudden fear I'd had that the goat molecules would win out over mine, and slowly but surely I'd turn into a goat.

Well, it didn't happen. Whatever loopy superstition my hindbrain was grooving on at the time turned out not to be actually, like, true. But something similar is happening to me. After 20 years in this country, enough of my original English atoms have been replaced with local American atoms that the balance is tipping. I'm becoming American.

If the symptoms were confined to shopping at Mervyns (which I did on Saturday, as it was having a 60% off closing down sale) that might be one thing. But to develop some sort of a taste for native music seems rather over the top. It's not British. I mean, in a very real sense, even liking English folk music isn't very British, so to go native in this fashion is right out. Luckily, it's been confined to music by Jack White so far. And honestly, thus far, the hooks in the music have been:

1. Identity with British music, if by British music you confine yourself to tracks found on Immediate Blues Anthologies, or related items by such as Jo Ann Kelly or the Rolling Stones.
2. Similarity to Tuvan music, which is big in Southern California and I'm used to listening to it.

One track, Great High Mountain, is religious in that luminous way that threatens to be infectious, like some spiritual goat molecule. The lines about Jordan, the lines I want to climb this mountain/I want to drink from this fountain, the use of images of arduous labor and sweet succor to sketch ineffability. Far from the concrete verses, I got a girl/Her name is Sue, of rock'n'roll.

Now, turning into someone else would be peculiar enough, I suppose, but turning into the type of person who might take that song to his heart is turning into someone I might not like. What an oddity that would be – it would be like being cell-mates for ever, me and the new person in one skin. A chimera – what an adventure!


Some easy listening:

Jack White Sittin' On Top of the World

Rolling Stones You Gotta Move

Jo Ann Kelly Come on in my kitchen

Jack White Wayfaring Stranger

Huun Huur Tu Ancestors

***

Review: “Flow” by Arlan Andrews, Sr.

Review: “Flow” by Arlan Andrews, Sr. (Analog, Nov 2014) SPRP

This is a Sad Puppy and Rabid Puppy nomination.

Spoilers: I'm going to talk about the beginning, middle and end of this story. If you wish to remain unspoilt, read it first.

Analog sez up front, "Characters from “Flow” first appeared in “Thaw” [July/August 2013]." Bah. Not another one. Yep, once you get to the end, you quickly realize you've only gotten to the middle. This is not really a novella, but part of a longer story. It's not a novella or novelette if it's an installment.

In the story, a man from the cold lands helps to bring an iceberg to the warm lands for sale as refrigeration material.  The cold lands are very cold and misty, and so he has never seen the sun as a disc, or the moon or stars. He's longsighted, and I got the impression everybody in his tribe is, but he is still literate as his people write on cylinders they keep in their pockets by carving into them with a knife and reading with their fingers. Our man Rist must have the 80 gig equivalent, as he writes down everything that happens, which means he got about 25 pages on his cylinder.  In the warm lands, he hires a few prostitutes, drinks a lot, compares everything to the equivalent back home (which is invariably made from peat, excluding the prostitutes), marvels at the stone buildings, the sun, moon and the stars, and finally steals a piece of some monofilament-style rope the warmlanders dig up from deep mines that go all the way down to the layers where the gods used to live.

He's eventually chased off by a priest and, unable to rejoin his companions, he goes downriver instead, where he discovers a mighty waterfall that doesn't fall off the edge of the world – he can see fields down there. He signals with a mirror (a warmlander trick) and the inhabitants of the post end-of-the-world signal back with red dots that play on his body. Luckily, he knows where to find a long piece of rope.

Then it just ends.

The hardest part of the story to get through is that females – I won't call them women, because there aren't any women in the story – are called "wen".

To the shorter dic:

wen/noun
a boil or other swelling or growth on the skin, especially a sebaceous cyst.
   archaic 

an outstandingly large or overcrowded city. "the great wen of London"

I once gave up on a China Mieville novel partly because it had a wen in it. I was determined to be stronger this time, but when the moon, which is also female, appears, it also a "wen".

“Welcome to the Warm Lands, bird-rider!” his rough berg-companion Cruthar shouted back, also trying to be heard through the thunderous crashing, sharp creaks, and long groans as their shepherded small mountain of ice slid and pounded against river stones. “Down here, the Wen of the Mist and Pursuing Dimness, they lost a sky-war to the Shining One and the Pale Wen!” Cruthar stabbed a gnarled brown finger toward the blue bowl above them. “New gods in a new sky—all blue."

There are far too many exclamation marks.  The dialogue is in Hale'n'Hearty Barbarian speak, which gets wearing.  As for female humans, you must be joking. There are plenty of "wen" though.

 "It was a long night, and they both planned to sleep in the pub’s bedding rooms. But not until willing wen had bargained to escort them upstairs for other pleasures. His particular companion that dark, a very tall beauty with fiery copper hair and peat-green eyes— and a great heaviness of chest that was not muscle at all—was unforgettable."

Yes, the great thing about the women, I mean wen, they find in the warm lands – who are all prostitutes – is that they have tits, unlike the ones back home.

Non-dialogue is clunky.

"The bulk of the men began hammering long iron poles into the surface at the front of the berg, with large hammers."

We get bits like this:

"He carved his speculations on the wooden cylinder that Cruthar had left him, fortunately having stuffed it in his pants pocket during the long ride downriver from God’s Port."

There's a trick writers do, which is when your character suddenly needs something and you've forgotten to make sure he had it with him: You do a search for the passage where you last saw it, and write there, back in the past, that he hadn't, in fact, forgotten it. Something like this: 'He finished reading Cruthar's message, and put the wooden cylinder in his pocket, intending to discuss it with him when next they met.' Fast forward five pages: 'He took Cruthar's cylinder out of his pocket and carved his speculations upon it.'  It's not the world's best trick, but it's better than writing in a straight line and putting in a he-hadn't-forgotten-it-honest clause in the sentence when you need it again.  Arlen Andrews (or his editor) doesn't know this trick.  (And I'm not convinced the verb tenses are correct in the published version. 'Having stuffed it' is a finished action that took a small amount of time. 'During the long ride' is too long for the action. 'At some point during' or 'prior to the long ride' would be better.)

I don't read a lot of short fiction, except when I'm reading for the Hugos (which I mostly don't vote in, anyway). I'm only about halfway through. I have all the John C Wright still ahead of me. I'm already fed up of Men From the Badlands Find A Stone House And Marvel At It stories. Post apoc, in outer space, whatever, it's an old trope. Perhaps big hearty brutes in furs clapping you on the back and taking you for non-peat brewskis and easily-purchased female wens with bazooms is a fantasy that just won't die for some authors, but then again so is Harry/Draco fiction and dinosaur erotica, and they aren't up for Hugos.

I realize I'm generalizing from a small sample, but is the art of writing short stories dead? I mean the ones from the good old days that began with some initiating action, went through a complicating middle and ended when the action had resolved? (Preferably, at least for me, ending with an actual punchline?) 


Edit to add: I woke up this morning in a panic that I'd written "downriver" when obviously (to me) a calved piece of sea ice, a berg, must come into a river at a port and go "upriver". I reread the beginning, and "downriver" is correct. The berg starts at the riverhead.  I don't know how this could work, but maybe it's explained at the end of the previous installment, and another reason why this isn't a standalone Hugo-worthy piece. 

Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (DVD)

As a bit of a change from yesterday's film Cold Mountain, a masterclass in wrenching a screenplay out of Joseph Campbell's Hero With a Thousand Faces, I'm watching "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea" (1961) featuring Barbara Eden and Peter Lorre amongst others, walking around a giant, spacious nuclear submarine with massive forward viewing windows. This is the famous planarian-shaped Seaview.

The plot is simple and nobody in the crew is called Walker or Hiro or Turner or Inman or any other Deep Names. The Van Allen belts are on fire, and the world has heated up so much that everyone not on a submarine is dead. Admiral Thingy has to go to the marianas trench to fire a missile to douse the Van Allen belts. All kinds of obstacles present themselves, such as minefields in the middle of nowhere (as if someone knew during WWII to tether mines in case a big nuclear submarine wanted to get through in a hurry 15 years later).

We had a bet which Denizen of the Deep the divers laying phone lines would face. I uncharacteristically let STB lay claim to the giant inert rubber squid trying to Swallow Our Seamen and claimed for myself the old "getting your flipper caught in a giant clam horror". STB, of course, was right.

A giant octopus turned up later - go cephalopods! - but nothing daunted the Seaview and the world (slightly scorched and presumably barren, so I hope Barbara Eden's up to having a lot of babies) is saved once again.

This is an Irwin Allen production, of course. The set was so expensive The Master of Disaster kept it and persuaded ABC to make VTTBOTS into a series. I remember watching it as a kid and one of my very early science fictional efforts was based on the TV series. I think I was seven. I should look it out.

T Bone's Paralysis

The wonderful PowerPop blog tells me something I didn't know. In Genius is Pain, or something, I learn that the Legendary Stardust Cowboy's phenomenal psychobilly ditty Paralyzed features T Bone Burnett on drums.

I'm very familiar with Paralyzed. (If you're not, there's a link at PowerPop to stream it for your edumacative needs. Be careful before partaking of the mp3, as it's quite likely to be a shock.) I first heard it on Kenny Everett's World's Worst Wireless Show, a 1977 confection in which Kenny played hour-long slabs of really, really, terrible, misguided, misfiring music. I listened to all the shows all the way through with my then boyfriend, and it being 1977 and all, and us being young and not exactly in an unaltered state of mind, it was quite amusing.

In those days (you youngsters) we'd tape the radio with a microphone, and so our tapes included the odd bout of strangled laughter. For Paralyzed, however, there was nothing but mystified, respectful silence. In the end, it came only third in Kenny's league table, being outvoted by Zarah Leander's Wunderbar (which I can barely remember) and Jimmy Cross' I Want My Baby Back, a teen-angst-death-car tune that was truly sick-making and probably deserved to win if only for trying to be funny in a staggeringly unfunny genre.

Paralyzed, on the other hand, was a work of mad genius, in the vein of Wild Man Fischer (except moar in every dimension). I couldn't tell you why T Bone Burnett, now the highly respected producer, the man who made Robert Plant famous (with Alison Krauss) and the man who made Jack White famous (with Cold Mountain), decided to produce and play drums on three of The Legendary Stardust Cowboy's fifteen minutes of fame, but I can tell you it sounds more like a drumkit being thrown down a stone staircase than someone actually trying to perform music. In that respect, it matches the other instrumentation.

Once I came to the States, I learned that the vanishingly few clever things that British DJ's did were ripped off American DJs (as always, the exception being John Peel), including playing terrible songs. Despite that, I really miss Kenny Everett, who had a joyous relationship with sound, sampling and radio fun. Listening to Paralyzed brings a little of it back.

The Dead Weather - the first three years

Three years ago today, on June 17th 2009, I went to my first Dead Weather gig. It was at the Roxy, in Los Angeles and came hard on the heels of the opening of the Jimmy Page/Jack White/The Edge guitar movie, It Might Get Loud. And now there's a hint that the Dead Weather may still be a thing today....



I wrote extensively about both The Dead Weather and the movie, back in the day. I was...am...a Raconteurs fan and if the Raconteurs were to be no more, I thought, I'll go see this band and maybe I'll like them (or at least like them more than the Cold Mountain soundtrack, which gave compelling evidence that Jack White was becoming a folkie, or a singer of Americana as it's called now).  This turned out to be a significant understatement. I loved the Dead Weather, flew all over the country to see them, made the sort of online friends you make; and in many cases lost them in the sort of ways you lose online friends.

The Roxy gig was loud, and raw - a couple of mistakes were heard. Jimmy Page was in the VIP area. The crowd was relatively quiet, as we didn't really know the songs yet. The whole thing was recorded professionally, and can still be seen on the band's YouTube channel.





They were pretty new then, having formed in January, 2009 (at least, according to Wikipedia) recording several tracks at Third Man records, and then performing at the opening of the Third Man Records store, on March 11th 2009.  At that gig, the band gave away a goodie bag including among other things a copy of Hang You From the Heavens/Are Friends Electric? with sleeves hand painted by the band members. One of these recently sold for over $3000, so I guess collectors' items appreciate quickly in the modern world. (I have a Roxy Dead Weather poster, but it hasn't apparently reached those dizzying heights yet.)

Jack's been strolling in a minstrelsy way around town as a solo artist (which means he has two six piece or nearabouts bands, but since they are sidemen (and sidewomen) backing him, they don't really count. Three bands were enough, and he'll never form another, he said in February.) Along the way, the Dead Weather have ceased to be, but like the ex-parrot, they are still nailed to their perch. Jack White doesn't end bands - he seems to have some issues with that type of finality, given the way he pinned the end of the White Stripes so definitively on Meg White.  Like the Raconteurs, they still exist, if the members actually get around to doing it again. Unlike the Raconteurs, they might actually do it. Last Sunday, June 10th 2012, Jack White appeared on the chatroom area of fan site The Vault and declared that there had just been a Dead Weather reunion.

I've simplified the conversation a bit, but here's the gist of it.  Don't send me a DMCA...it's technically a derivative work but so what. Wait, what? Jack sending DMCAs?  Sounds unlikely? Not a bit of it.  Jack's been sending cease and desist letters to people who share his files and taking down videos from YouTube in an apparent effort to rewrite his own history - I guess getting his image out of the hands of what he once called the Sea of Cowards (us) makes him feel better.

Chatroom speak reads from the bottom up. Don't ask me why. It was probably dee rigger for something on a university's VAX in 1986 and we're stuck with it.

[JackWhite] bye bye bye
[JackWhite] or sense of balance
[JackWhite] with no ladder
[JackWhite] like washing windows from the other side
[JackWhite] i have some chores to do around here
[JackWhite] have to go
[JackWhite] but sometimes she feels 60
[JackWhite] alison is almost six feet tall
[lsnyder] How is Alison?
[JackWhite] but now alison is watching black sabbath
[JackWhite] we had a dead weather reunion yesterday in my living room
[stripes333] JackWhite: will there be a dead weather reunion at outside lands?
[JackWhite] nevermind
[JackWhite] did i think that or type it?
[JackWhite] i killed a man once
[JackWhite] my neck is straight, like an arrow
[JackWhite] i'm good, good like good humor ice cream
[drdano] JackWhite: how's the neck ?
[lsnyder] How are you, Jack?
[JackWhite] yep yep yep
[JackWhite] ................
[JackWhite] ................
[JackWhite] ................

It probably means they spent an afternoon drinking champagne and lying on the couch comparing airplane-held-on-tarmac horror stories, but it just might mean something's happening.

Californian's vacation: Stairs and sights in Paris

Vacation continued: 

One of the highlights of London is how easy it is to get out if and go to Paris instead.  You hop on a train at St. Pancras Station, and it deposits you at the Gare du Nord in Paris.

Well, I say “hop” but due to Brexit, you do have to go through a partially-assed passport control and customs check which is a little like being a sheep herded through a sheep dip, but once that’s over you sit on the train and munch half-French British Rail-style sandwiches and try not to think about the weight of water above you in the tunnel under the English Channel (or as the French call it, La Manche).

We stayed in an out-of-the-way hotel – a suite of rooms for around $100 a night – and utilized the French equivalent of an Oyster Card, a Navigo pass.  Same deal as the Oyster Card, you fill it up at a machine and rub it against ticket  turnstiles when you want to travel.  With a London Oyster Card, you sign in and sign out at your destination. With the Navigo, you just sign in. There’s no check of where you get off the Metro. 

I found it a bit more difficult to use, in that the first time I tried, I must have waited too long to push forward, or otherwise annoyed the Transport Gods, and the green “go through” light went out. And you can’t use the card at the same gate a second time! I assume that’s their way of preventing a traveler throwing the card to an accomplice outside the gate for a second journey, but I can’t think of a reason why they need to do that.

Anyway, one of the locals, seeing me gesticulating wildly in English, let me through the gate while his own light was green. After that, things went better.

I’d never been to Paris. I’ve been across the Channel on a ferry, notably during the Royal Wedding in 1981 when I could no longer face the  overload of Union Jack bunting in London. But we only went as far as Calais, on the coast, the spiritual home of Duty-Free fags and liquor.

I think everyone has a bucket list of what they want to see in Paris, and so did we, but since we booked the trip only a few days before we traveled, we couldn’t get tickets to 95% of them. (Places like the Louvre are famously booked up months ahead, and even then are seriously overcrowded.)  

Our first trip was to the Eiffel Tower. The summit was closed, but the lower two stages were accessible by steps (or an elevator if you booked early enough, which we hadn’t). Being a Northerner, I couldn’t help measuring it up against the Blackpool Tower, but I have to say that apart from the lack of world-class ballrooms, it is impressive. We climbed the stairs to the first stage and spent an hour looking over Paris. We set out for the stairs again and I’d climbed about nine steps before declaring the second stage could look after itself and I wasn’t going a step farther. 

Lining up for the Eiffel Tower

It is a very long way up and it was cold and windy but incredibly impressive in the way all Victorian cast-iron construction is.  It was built in a couple of years for a World’s Fair, with only a 20-year permit to stay up. (Obviously, that permit was extended.) The construction speed and determination of the people of that time was something else.

Eiffel Tower from ground level beneath it

The next item on the agenda was Montmartre. As the name suggests, it’s on a mount, so that entailed another tranche of steps. The websites explain that climbing the steps is like participating in some Film Noir or WWII drama, but cities are so crowded these days that it was more like participating in one of those religious pilgrimages where seven thousand people get trampled to death because someone stopped suddenly to tie their shoelaces.  There is a funicular (an elevator/train cross) that will take you up there, but my navigator (Hi!) led us up many flights of stairs while continually telling me the funicular was just a little further on. And so it was – the top of the funicular. Google Maps had led us to the top entrance instead of the bottom.

View of Montmartre Basilica

View of Montmartre Basilica

 Since we were already at the top, there was no use crying over it, so we explored. It’s a touristy area, of course, but the Basilica was beautiful and the restaurants around retained some of their Impressionist-era charm. 

We took the funicular down.

Montmartre from the bottom of the steps

Although we had the Metro travel-card, we walked a huge distance in Paris, six or so miles a day. Things are quite far apart (compared with London, which has its major landmarks in a tiny central area) but despite the cold they were pleasant walks. The city is well-laid out, with wide streets, reasonable traffic and dotted with architecture that extols the mightiness of the French state and the citizens’ need for proportion and beauty. The non-national buildings are in the characteristic Hausmann Style. We saw the Ramses Obelisk, in much better nick than Cleopatra’s Needle in London, the Arc de Triomphe and beautiful fountains.  Oh, and the Moulin Rouge.  One surprise was the Seine, which flows rapidly. The Thames seems to mosy along slowly, and sometimes when the tide’s coming in it seems to not flow at all, but the Seine runs like a small river coming down from a mountain. (Except much wider.) It was the sort of flow you wouldn’t want to fall into unless you’re an unusually strong swimmer.

Notre Dame had just reopened after a devastating fire gutted the interior and collapsed the roof. There are still cranes and builders’ huts around it but it’s back to its glory.  It was raining when we visited, and the Griffons were spouting water on the passers-by like something from Gotham City.

Notre Dame Griffon spouting rainwater

Montmartre Griffon

Montmartre Griffon

Fountain commemorating the Smurfs

Ramses' Obelisk

Moulin Rouge from the street

Next stop on the vacation was the famous Pere Lachaise cemetery.

European Vacation series:

M62 Memories: A Southern Californian’s Christmas in Yorkshire

After Christmas in England, peacocks in Tring

Moving on: Southern Californians brave London's Mean Streets

England Vacation - St. Anne's and sub-street shenanigans

Southern Californians abroad: Central London State of Mind

Californian's vacation: Stairs and sights in Paris

European vacation: We visit Père Lachaise cemetery

Californians abroad: Highgate Cemetery Part 1

Californians in Highgate Cemetery - Part 2

Wyoming Road Trip Day 6: Eclipse, Casper - Rawlins

August 21st - Eclipse Day

(Day 5 Rawlins to Riverton, WY.)

(c) Google

Walmart Supercenters are supposed to be 24 hour affairs, but I guess Riverton's didn’t get the memo. It opened around 7 am and I wandered in to get a Subway coffee, which took a little over an hour as they hadn’t really staffed for the occasion and there were two (2) people in front of me. The person nearest me was incandescent with rage over the slowness of the procedure. I mentioned I only wanted a coffee, ha ha and she snapped, “Some of us have to eat!” which I thought was a bit rich given that she was in a Walmart which probably housed five thousand pounds of food and she was unlikely to starve. The guy slowly making her sandwich asked me what I wanted. (As they do, to keep a production line running.) I ordered only a coffee as promised, which the guy slowly prepared for me before he finished her sandwich. Cue apoplexy on the lady in front of me. She left before he’d finished preparing her sandwich, so I guess she didn’t need to eat that badly.

By the time I got back to the RV and the row of tents, STB was squinting through his monocular and bemoaning the light haze that was over Riverton. There were a few clouds, and just a little dust, but it wasn’t good enough so we left our (not very hard won) place at the Walmart and set off down the 26/20 towards Casper, a road that pretty much followed the path of totality.

Raspberry DeLight farms

Beside the main road was a sort of lane, asphalted and well-kept. If this had been a city we’d have called it a bike lane, but I have no idea what its purpose is in the countryside. We stopped outside Raspberry deLight Farms on the lane that paralleled the road and set up our little observation post. We set out two folding chairs, two monoculars, snackerels, snackeroonies, choccies, sandwiches, those Indian treats made out of sev, Cheesy Wotsits, this morning’s Subway coffee, horrible bottled “iced” coffee, Diet Coke, Eclipse glasses, sunglasses, glasses and sunscreen.

We were almost on the road to the farm, last in a line of several other vehicles that were parked on the ‘lane’ going up the road towards Riverton. Across the farm road, on the continuation of the lane, a German family in an RV were also setting up. We saw a lot of Germans on this trip. Who knew Wyoming was so famous in Germany?

A dog ran past.

The owner ran past. “He went that way,” I said pointing into the farmland.

“I wish one of you had fucking stopped him instead of sitting there,” he said, then turned back and went to his vehicle.

A few minutes later, someone else came past. “Have you seen a dog?”

“Yes, he went into the farmland.”

“I thought so. I’m trying to find him before it gets dark. Poor thing. And the owner’s upset.”

“He is. I think he blamed us. It was going pretty fast, though.”

“He went down the whole line of people and blamed everybody. It’s his dog. I have mine tied up. He should have tied his up.”

At that moment a car came out of the farm with a dog panting out of its window, stopped and disgorged the dog on to the lane, right next to his fretting owner. Everyone cheered, except the owner, who seemed to be in a bit of a mood.

view from the road near Raspberry DeLight farms

view from the road near Raspberry DeLight farms

It turns out it’s not possible to photograph an eclipse with a cellphone camera, and since I’d forgotten to learn how to use the DSLR (and it refused to take such an oddly lit picture on auto), I don’t have any good pictures of the eclipse. But that’s not a problem as hundreds of professionals took great pictures and I had enjoyed the opportunity to look at it rather than fiddle with cameras. 

Early in the eclipse

Cellphones are not really optimized for eclipses

The beginning of the eclipse took an hour or more. During this time, through a filter, you can see the sun beginning to undertake the moon, so a crescent is sliced out of its yellow glow. The dark crescent grows larger over time. For most of this time, this makes little difference on the ground. It may be a little cooler; but that may be your imagination. The light of the sky seems a little dimmer, maybe more blue, but again that could be your imagination. It’s quite easy to see how pre-scientific communities missed the earlier signs and would become horribly aware just as the sky goes dark blue, the stars begin to shine, the birds shut up in confusion and it becomes noticeably cold. Then, pretty quickly, the sun disappears. It’s exactly as if someone had bought a stick-on black dot from the aforementioned dollar store and stuck it over the sun. It’s gone, apart from the few lights, Baily’s Beads, showing through the valleys on the moon, a last diamond-ring flash, and then you can only see the corona, a blazing halo around the total blackness. That only lasts a couple of minutes, and then there’s another diamond-ring flash and the sun begins to haul itself from behind the moon. One thing the websites telling you what to expect don’t seem to mention is that as the sun disappears, everybody cheers as though it had scored a touchdown. The whole process is so eerie and unreal that I’m guessing a cheer hasn’t been the normal reaction to a total eclipse through the millennia.

In the event, I was so caught up watching the sun disappear through the solar filters that I watched the pitch black nothing for a good few seconds until STB nudged me to look at it with bare eyes. It was spectacular.

As the various websites had promised, my very first thought afterwards was to go book a trip to catch the next total solar eclipse, which will be April 8th, 2024.

Vehicles around us for the eclipse

Sand Creek Massacre Trail

Everyone and their dogs packed up, and so did we, and headed off down the road, not back to Riverton, but onwards to Casper on the 20/26. This road is also designated as the Sand Creek Massacre Trail, another delightful name from history, marking the murder of Cheyenne and Arapaho civilians by the US Volunteer Cavalry. We passed another trail marker, that for the Bridger Road/Waltman Crossing. The same rest stop explained the importance of sage. And boy had we seen a lot of sage, so it’s nice that someone explained it to us.

Bridger Crossing

Importance of Sage

Pathfinder Ranch

Devil's Gate

Pic: Devil’s Gate. The gate is the gap in the mountain visible directly in front of the road. It’s a gorge of the Sweetwater River that, like Split Rock, formed a landmark for the Oregon and Mormon Trails.


We ate in Casper, at Chopstix Asian Bistro, which despite an unpromising modern name offered a very nice mostly-authentic Chinese cuisine. I might have naively assumed that away from the city a Chinese restaurant would be a festival of maraschino cherries, pineapple, sugar and pupu platters, but this was really good. Far above the California median “Asian” restaurant, anyway.

Casper itself I found a little underwhelming, with its dead-flat surroundings of gas storage facilities and extraction machine rentals for petroleum, gas and goodness knows what, all in gigantic sheds. 

And its road names like Poison Spider Road.

My phone was of no use for this part of the journey, as even the GPS had given up. I know that we took the 220/287 through Alcova and Muddy Gap (putting us back near Sweetwater again). We crossed the Continental Divide for around the fifth time on this leg of the journey. We got caught in our first traffic jam as the 287 from the Riverton side joined our road. At first we turned back, then thought about it a bit, got on the road and got through the jam in half an hour or so. Only a couple of miles (and one more Continental Divide crossing) later, we hit another jam. This time we decided the road was gridlocked all the way from Bairol to Rawlins.

This was exactly why we’d brought an RV. We pulled off the road into an asphalted field access…not road, exactly as the gate had been wired shut, but a 30-yard piece of metaled surface. (The terms and conditions of our RV rental rendered grass driving streng verboten, presumably even with the rear differential lock thingy engaged.) One lady was already parked up in her RV at the top and we chatted a while. Seeing us both there, a number of other cars and RVs pulled off into the area and went about the business of settling in. The police arrived shortly afterwards, but it seemed to be because we marked the tail end of the traffic jam and they wanted to stay somewhere with their lights flashing to slow down oncoming traffic, rather than any major need to move us on…anyway, where would we go? The police moved away as the tail of the traffic moved away.

Eventually, it got dark and STB called me outside to look at the Milky Way. With no lights for literally hundreds of miles around, it was glowing like something out of a movie. It almost looks alive.

I got up early enough at 6:30 but all our Companions of the Road had already departed. The traffic jam was gone.

Day 1 OC to Payson

Day 2 Payson to Albuquerque

Day 3 Albuquerque to Pueblo, CO.

Day 4 Pueblo to Rawlins, WY.

Day 5 Rawlins to Riverton, WY.

Day 6 Riverton: Eclipse; Casper to Rawlins

Day 7 Rawlins to Meeker to Grand Junction

Day 8 Grand Junction to Monticello

Day 8.2 Arches National Monument, UT

Day 9 Twin Rocks, Canyon de Chelly, to Winslow, AZ

Day 10 Winslow, Barringer Meteor Crater, Arcosanti to Phoenix

Day 11 Phoenix to OC