sheridanh0pe

[sheridanh0pe]

Iconic Women in Film: Tarantino

Alias Grace. The Handmaid’s Tale. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Superwoman. 2017 was a strong year for stories of heroism and humanity from a female perspective. A role is iconic when you can describe its character traits to someone who has never seen the show or film without describing physical appearance, costume, or occupation. With rare exceptions, the lineage of James Bond girls are prototypical for roles defined by physical appearance (title role Pussy Galore’s death by gold paint), costume (Honey Ryder’s white two-piece), or occupation (Xenia Onatopp’s thigh strangling femme fatale). Such flat and unchallenging character arcs write-off women into stock characters standing in for half of our world’s population.

From the Quentin Tarantino movieverse, Mia Wallace, the mob boss wife in Pulp Fiction, invites outmoded audience expectations as the femme fatale at the center of a criminal, male-dominated world. She’s the most talked about character in hard-boiled Los Angeles before you ever meet her. And when you do, Mia is uninhibited and provocative but in a welcome turn away from the orthodox gangster’s girlfriend, she dons a black suit with an open white collared shirt. Antithetical to a suit for suit’s sake, Mia expects to be taken seriously as an equal to the hitmen she matches in uniform and in wit. As the evening progresses with dancing, drugs and a near-death gaffe, Mia breaks character. Magnetic in her normalcy, she delivers silly jokes and spins tales of a former life in television acting. With this casual prelude to a pilot television episode of Fox Force Five, entering a fictional grindhouse layer within the film world of Pulp Fiction, Tarantino incepts an incarnation of Mia, the greatest action heroine in cinematic history. Nearly a decade later, we meet the Bride and her Russian doll of identities under civilian name Arlene Machiavelli and assassin code-name Black Mamba, whose real name is later revealed to be Beatrix Kiddo in Kill Bill.

A name, an afterthought if not forgotten for most female roles, is focal in Kill Bill, as is self-invention where women have multiple names under the singular squad leader Bill. Names are a hurdle a story must pass in the Bechdel-Wallace test, in which two or more women talk to each other about a subject that does not involve men. While this is a seldom passed gender bias test, much of the formative dialogue defining female relationships is unspoken. There lies the brilliance in Kill Bill, where style is content. A Tarantino film is a layer cake of homage and references for the genre enthusiast and a party on the surface as well with character and action driven plotlines. The blood feud opens in the Twin Pines chapel with a black and white close-up of the pregnant and dying Bride at her most vulnerable. Bang Bang by Nancy Sintra resonates with the reveal that the wedding party had just been massacred by the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad and the Bride’s former lover, Bill. After the four-year coma of this sole survivor, all but one of her adversaries have retired from the squad. In the Bride’s operatic journey for retribution, she crosses a vast mise-en-scene of social dislocation from the rigid suburban household thru outlawed but honor-bound yakuza-samurai Japan and ends at the frontier justice of the arid Western desert. Across varied landscapes, the Bride displays the range of her handle the Black Mamba as the deadliest killer in the world, and her relationships with former squad-members through the cinematic language of fight choreography and a flourish of blood-letting and violent deaths.

The first target, Vernita Green under civilian name Jeannie Bell as a suburban housewife is everything the Bride wanted and lost from quiet family life. When their knife fight tumbles into a stand-off with the arrival of Vernita’s young daughter from school, Vernita buys time but slips up in this domestic rendition of the quickdraw with a poorly aimed shot through a cereal box. Vernita grew sloppy in retirement, and just as suddenly as she is called into action as Copperhead with the Bride bursting thru her door, she is swiftly murdered before the eyes of Nikkia. The Bride, in her truest moment of sympathy, invites Nikkia to find her when she grows up to avenge her mother’s death.

O-Ren Ishii, a child witness to the murder of her parents and accomplished assassin who ascends the Yakuza is lauded with the longest and most developed storyline in Kill Bill and several melancholic odes by Meiko Kaji, actress and singer in Lady Snowblood, O-Ren’s character inspiration. This adulation of the former Cottonmouth’s notoriety as the ruler of vice in Tokyo discloses the Bride’s deep respect for a dear friend. When the Bride arrives in the Bruce Lee Game of Death jumpsuit, an extended panoramic tracking shot sizes up the House of Blue Leaves restaurant, anticipating the 20-minute combat setpiece in which the Bride scales the formidable body of O-Ren’s power, cutting down the Crazy 88s and the unhinged Gogo Yubari across multiple planes and axes in the restaurant. The sprinting pace slows in the lead up to O-Ren with a solemn and honorific open-air samurai duel, the height of professional ceremony. O-Ren’s veneration of and defeat by the Hanzo katana, the superlative instrument of death, is so weighted with sadness that the Hanzo sword is brandished not as a threat to victims but to those that wield it of the fate of killers. In the making of the sword, the background song The Lonely Shepherd by Gheorghe Zamfir is a sly grin, harking back to Pulp Fiction’s hitman Jules Winnfield, who reverses path to become a humbled civilian. This prideful sequence is wrought with regret and bitter finality.

Elle Driver, code-name California Mountain Snake, is introduced thru a Brian de Palma style split-screen of Elle dressing in a nurse’s uniform and the comatose inpatient Bride; Elle is preparing to poison the Bride in her sleep. This burlesque of close-up body shots marks Elle as the Bride’s self-professed rival, still under the employ and tutelage of Bill. In Elle’s betrayal of shared kung fu master Pai Mei and Bill’s younger brother Budd, there is no honor amongst assassins, so it is appropriate that Elle and the Bride’s bar room style brawl is the tonal opposite of the Bride’s mid-tempo, rhythmic duel with O-Ren. The tight frame of Budd’s ramshackle trailer precludes the teased display of what are now two Hanzo kantanas in the same room. Following the striking pluck of her second eye, Elle meets a savage and comic death in complete blindness. Here, the literal Black Mamba that kills Elle and Budd is a fun on the nose avatar for the eponymous Bride.

The Bride’s great satisfaction in her final fight with Bill, our snake charmer, transcends the fulfillment of her bloodlust. Their intimate hand to hand combat around a patio table befits fighters who are also lovers and a film where the seduction is in the action. Pai Mei’s presence in name drops and proverbial voice-overs, like Mia Wallace, precedes his formal introduction until the middle of Kill Bill volume 2 when the Bride has been incapacitated by Budd and tossed alive into a buried grave. Tarantino marries Eastern and Western influences with the Pai Mei training montage, a tribute to the Shaw Brothers’ 36th Chamber of Shaolin, in the ramp up to the Bride punching her way out of her “Texas Funeral” from a distance of a few centimeters while championed by a commemorative Ennio Morricone piece. The moment of satisfaction comes from Bill’s last gasp surprise that Pai Mai taught only Beatrix the deadliest move in martial arts, the mythic Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique, surpassing Bill in mastery of the martial arts. Beatrix Kiddo has thoroughly earned her vengeance.

[sheridanh0pe]

If I could describe grandma’s cooking...

Our best-loved meals stem from early joyous experiences with food, the succulent that brings us succor, the delectable that delights, like the first lover who informs lifelong romantic hopes. When I began this personal cooking project to learn the delicate art of balancing flavor and crafting intrigue in ethnic cuisine, my thinking was that I’ll never cross the entire globe but I can explore the world’s foodstuff. Along the way, I found in an anthology of Chinese recipes that old memories can be kicked up when struck by happy chance. I felt the roiling of past sensations of warmth and eagerness mix with present sensations of hunger in my recollection of grandma’s steamed egg custard with its aromatic accent of sesame and spring onion. Turning the pages to a soup of lotus roots, soft peanuts, and winter melons, I remembered the salinity that satiates, and how I used to love slurping fat bubbles circling the liquid surface, another favorite from my grandmother’s reserve of after-dinner broths for good digestion. I paused to reflect on these memories of my gastronomic caregiver, overlooked in the busy rush of my 20s. And how, unlike the emotional life that defines our 20s, when the intensity of our passions, anger, and heartaches begin to pale with cynicism and irony, our joy from fine cooking is unreduced by age.

Chinese take-out restaurants serve the Hakka style, soul food for migrants such as pork with pineapple, chicken wings in black bean sauce, and braised eggplant, the heartier and meatier cousin to Cantonese food with saltier, exotic seasonings like preserved vegetables and red wine. As a nosy child clattering behind pau pau around the kitchen, absent from my mind was a future longing for her take on Guangzhou (southern Chinese) cuisine, a delicate medley of stir fry and steamed dishes. Even after hours of play in my family’s garden of garlicky chives, firm “yard-long” beans, and spring onions, I was taken in by the distractions of fast food chains, and now spend adulthood recovering from this amnesia of herbaceous knowledge, convalescing in the mustard greens and yu chow over long walks in the produce aisles of Wholefoods. Memory is poetic, a recording of everything that charms or touches us.

As immigrant parents labored long hours to support first generation American children, the hallmark of the diaspora family is a gap in generations, where grandparents bring up grandchildren. This is a blessing in indirect proximity like nature’s way of balancing biodiversity with genetic traits that skip a generation. Reason tells me the gap space relieves friction from the high-pressure expectations of Chinese parents for assimilation and economic success. As I build up my cupboards for my future family while reminiscing in pau pau’s cupboards of rich fermented bean paste (sweet and meaty like miso) and black vinegar characteristic of Beijing’s style of sweet and tangy piquancy, I marvel at the gap space that produced a generational simile.

The primal allure of the crackling hearth found renewed life on the gas stove-top. Those waiting to be fed eagerly surround the cook working the kitchen, perhaps a bit too close for the cook’s comfort. Cooking is theater where the backstage is more fascinating than the feature show. Conversations come back to me in faint silhouettes but tastes and smells evoke an earnest feeling of presence like a seance for ghost moments. Our eating behaviors provide continuity. When diasporas cross borders, they bring along eating habits and cooking techniques. With the exception of the last couple of decades of rapid modernization, Chinese dishes were not so dissimilar from those of ancient ancestors. Dead recipes are continually revived in modern, globalized kitchens just as the Classic Han language is continually revived through a fractured network of dialects held coherent by the same Chinese calligraphy (a diglossia), a mother tongue of words and spices. 

I did look back haughtily at the pseudo-science of grandma’s herbalist doctors in Chinatown, who prescribed desiccated roots, beans, and earthy miscellany measured out on a two-pan iron scale after a brief description of one’s ailments and a gentle reading of one’s pulse from the wrist. The pungent assortment folded up into a thin paper sheet would be unrolled into a clear but hearty broth or brewed tea that evening. “What do you have for colicky, spoiled children”, pau pau once asked. I was a good sport when she soaked me in a Chrysanthemum flower bath. She believed Chrysanthemum to be therapeutic for children’s skin ailments. It was like a chicken-poxy scene out of American Beauty. Grandma classified food by its innate energy “qi” of “hot air” or “cold air”. An imbalance in either direction led to illness in this superstitious conception of gut health. When there’s too much fried, spicy or greasy food in the digestive system, balance with cool teas (i.e. soaking a child in tea to cure a skin imbalance).

My grandmother had a mean scar across her right cheek from a scythe in her rice farming days. Food in Guangzhou style cooking is distinct from Northern Mandarin, Shanghai, or Sichuan cooking in that southern China is defined by generous rainfalls, winding waterways, and a long coastline of underwater plants like bamboo shoots and water chestnuts along with seafood. A cook who values authenticity will design meals based on the supply-side principal of sourcing from the local land, unlike a trendy demand-side cook. I can picture grandma wading through flooded rice paddy fields wielding a guttural dialect that travels well across crop distances (and too well across the dinner table). 

The Chinese prize textured foods, including the slithery, bouncy, rubbery mouth-feel Westerns write horror stories home about. This appreciation for texture, and bitterness in kind, reflects an expansive agricultural heritage of disparate landscapes. This heritage also informs the political language underscoring Chinese landscape paintings. Such style in painting where natural topography is used to embody the will and turmoil of regional people under an oppressive regime is thematically consistent with a hardened culture accustomed to indirect expression. Despite its diglossia, there is still a need to communicate over a gap space be it through written words, shared landscape imagery, or food.

The little I knew of grandma’s personal history is underscored by the weekday routine of red bun pastries cooling on my desk for my return from school or the rattling of the rice cooker full of porridge with dried fish and cured eggs whenever one of us had a stomach ache. Lacking common words (I didn’t speak much Chinese) but sharing in common foods, we spoke in edible allegories. Peanuts and noodles aided longevity, appearing in most of our soups and main courses. Oranges and chestnuts provided good luck and were prolific dining table decorations when receiving guests. Rice cakes were celebratory and glutinous rice balls kept the family together (by keeping chatty daughters quiet). Grandma connected with me through her coca cola braised chicken (a sugary twist on a neutral wine base with soy sauce, 5-spice and ginger). American children love coca cola, so her southern Chinese flavor principles of soy sauce, ginger, garlic, and green onions assimilated coca cola to be Chinese America.

In my recent Honeymoon excursion to Beijing, my husband and I found the local fare too murky and sweet, a mistranslation of the American idolization of sweetness. The substance of my grandma’s cooking was largely absent. Her version of Chinese cuisine was from a generation open to complex and bitter, savory taste profiles some thirty years ago. Having traveled overseas, her cooking became immune to the sucrose-soaking of the burgeoning Chinese middle class, in the haven of our small nuclear family, existing in a place in-between, neither one direction or another, but oblique, askew.  

If I could describe grandma’s cooking, I’d say it’s the distilled wisdom of decades of family tradition balancing foreign innovation from kitchens spanning continents, in which the recipes were made just right to pass freely to young mouths, gifting a precocious palate.

[sheridanh0pe]

A Tour through the In-Between Places

Southwest Corner of 14th Street and 6th Avenue c. 1937

Cities are Darwinian. Far-traveled newcomers churn its asphalt tracks, dragging with them optimistic capital and young talent with an appetite. Nonetheless, in this city where land values reach $1,000 a square foot, a quiet corner in post-bohemia Chelsea on 14th Street and 6th Avenue presents an urban development mystery. With its vacant HSBC, blighted McDonald’s, and Big-Mac-loving vagrants, this run-down half-block radius is a stark contrast to its neighbors.  High-end furniture showrooms and Barney’s flagship flank the north. While in close company with the multi-billion dollar Google headquarters and Chelsea Market on the west, buzzing scores of restaurants and bars come up the rear from the West Village.

Surrounding this “in-between place”, the likely deadweight is a cluster of community centers—the YMCA, Salvation Army, food stamp office, and Presbyterian Church—and self-contained art schools, most notably the New School and Parsons School of Design.  This sliver of 14th Street is one of few feeder corridors to the low-income Fulton houses on 17th. Surveying the wider two-block stretch of small storefronts in prewar walk-ups, we discover an affordable small business corridor staking its place on a major crossroad between the haute couture Meatpacking district and touristy, big-box Union Square. Retail rents escalate to $500 to $3,500 per square foot a year in Meatpacking, Soho, Time Square, and 5th Avenue Midtown. On this Chelsea stretch, small businesses can set-up shop for below $100 per square foot, a bargain that is still double San Francisco and at least quadruple national rents.

Peering through urban lens, we observe that the blighted McDonald’s houses small music tenants in its upper office floors (i.e. Drummer Collective, Rhythm Section Laboratory, etc), just a school child’s walk from the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music on 13th Street and the Guitar Center on 14th. Last winter, the HSBC building was sold to a developer for a windfall, bundled up with air rights and the adjacent walk-up for 60,000 square feet of developable apartment space. Crime made people move in the 1960s, but today condos do the job and it may soon shake down these shallow-pocket music tenants.

Novelists know the power of stories told by a place. Without narratives, commercial streetscapes are vague contours. A casual Midtown stroll can provide polite acquaintance with the likes of wealth and high fashion on 5th Avenue, but turn a corner on 57th Street and suddenly a jolt of recognition, an intimate sentiment about a dreamy small town girl in a black Givenchy gown and silk gloves holding her danish and coffee, as you’re both peering into Tiffany’s.

Looking north from a rooftop view around Chelsea, Curry Hill brightens up the east 20s, so named for the effusive aroma of cumin and turmeric, beckoning dozens of taxi cabs to park on its side streets during lunch hour. Head west and roses and lavender mark the fragrant borders of the Flower District dating back to the 1890s. Follow the faded perfume trail down Ladies’ Mile on Sixth Avenue, and enter the cool but gritty Beatnik’s Village. Some enclaves are temporal like early morning Saturdays and Sundays at soccer pubs like the Red Lion, airing Premier League games for British ex-pats, who recede back into the anonymity of the crowd in the afternoons, a little tipsy. Other haunts have dematerialized into myths—further west beneath Death Avenue (aka 11th) where train cars once barreled down pedestrians, the underground tunnels transporting cattle for slaughter in the Meatpacking District are long lost in the haze of alcohol and glossy dance music in what is now a nightclub haven by night and art gallery crawl by day. These delicate ecosystems survive on the power of their stories.

Death Avenue (11th Avenue) c. 1910

We want to live where our story has a place. Where housing projects share city views a block away from millionaire townhouses (e.g. the Chelsea-Elliot houses and the Fitzroy brownstones on “Millionaire’s Row”) and luxury boutiques abut bodegas, there can be no objective city. Preservationists point to the destruction of neighborhood character in their rally against the pace of development. Character should be valued, it being bestowed only by history. Character is built by the surviving enterprises of emigres who, in their plight for identity in this hard-hustling new home, give rise to alternative interests and commerce. Bringing the global to the local, since as far back as 120 BCE with the inception of the Silk Route, commerce opens roads to culture. We walk into the old world in bakeries, delis, pubs, and diners–quite literarily in McSorley’s Old Ale House with its 100-year old sawdust grounds. Cafes and bars provide warmth for contemplation and conversation, especially those graced by famous thinkers like the Beatniks in Café Wha? and the White Horse Tavern, low profit businesses with high ideological gains. Quirky hobby and apparel shops like Trash and Vaudeville on St. Marks Place are souvenirs from transient subcultures like 1980s punk rock whose music scene passed but clothes and dive bars were made fashionable with age. We live through shifting trends but with an enduring need to find home in our surroundings.

Trash and Vaudeville on St. Mark’s Place c. 1980

Since the 1880s, the Hotel Chelsea on 23rd Street was home to the Bohemians who defined Chelsea as an art and theater district next to a manufacturing hotbed along the Hudson River rail tracks. The Hotel Chelsea no longer houses legends like Arthur C. Clarke who wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey in this affordable art co-op, Dylan Thomas who impressed Arthur Miller with his alcoholism, or Nancy Spungen, rumored to have been killed by Sid Vicious in that very sanctified building. When the hotel re-opens next year after being sold for $250 million (at $1 million a room), the artwork donated by its poor tenants in lieu of rent during its chaotic history will be gone.

Hotel Chelsea Today

Meanwhile, gentrification can be evolutionary. These days, brick-and-mortal publishing houses, theaters, and vinyl record stores are sinking into condominium paydirt. Where “Book Row” once stretched across 4th Avenue from 9th through 13th Street in the 1960s with its 48 stores, the Strand (with its 18 miles of books) remains as the sole monument to this literary city. The public literary scene has since dissipated into private book clubs or decorative accessories in chic living rooms. Instead, the print and entertainment industries evolved to be omni-presently electronic.

4th Avenue Book Row c. 1933

On occasion, a delayed upzoning (i.e., land use change to allow for density and higher value uses) allows local businesses to take root and grow into hubs of commercial industries and lifestyles that the stranglehold of condo-ization would have precluded. Few can compete with high-rise condominiums, tall beacons of landlord profits. West Chelsea, in any case, benefited from its early years of neglect. The 1969 raid of Stonewall Inn in the Village and subsequent riots pushed the politically activated LGBT towards Chelsea’s affordable spaces. By good fortune, the auto-body shops and loft warehouses of Chelsea’s industrial 1980s provided cheap land ownership opportunities for nascent art galleries (i.e. its flagship Larry Gagosian gallery) and art collectives. Art came and filled the void and distressed, and resisted displacement from booming real estate prices over the last 30 years to replace Soho as the epicenter of the contemporary art world with 200 galleries.

West Chelsea and Meatpacking remind me of thomassons. Thomassons are architectural byproducts of buildings expanded and contracted, renovated and removed over hundreds of years—stoops leading nowhere, gates wrapping around nothing, or pipes emptied of function. Chelsea’s loft warehouses with its exposed vents and pipes are Thomassons, specters of history lending mystery to the new art galleries with which its detritus is tonally at odds while linking modernity to the past. By the 1990s, the dusty workers tenements and farmers market of the Astor Family were upended by a new patron figure, wrap-dress doyenne Diane von Furstenberg. DVF then sponsored the High Line project, another Thomasson. As this retired backbone of production transformed into a playground for the rich and tourist with newly minted “Stepford” shops, mindlessly designed and impossibly polished, some of the art galleries are folding up.

Gansevoort Market c. 1907

Moneyed developments are fickle. High land values precede high risks and so the inevitable turnover of young shops and restaurants that fail to feed the real estate beast creates a transient corridor with few old-timers. Historically, the apparel and food industries, with the least barriers to entry, were an accessible avenue for entrepreneurial immigrants to find wealth. With Meatpacking rents hitting $500 per square foot, businesses occupying 2,500 square feet would need to ring-up $30,000 a day in sales to afford rent and maintain sustainable profits. In turn, pushcart peddling from the late 1800s has come full circle with rotating pop-up stalls in craft food courts and Odysseian food trucks battling parking tickets and roadside construction.

Pushcart Peddlers on Mulberry Street c. 1900

Window browsing in Chelsea, West Village, or Flatiron, shoppers will notice instead the empty display cases, a comic tragedy of high-rent blight. Landlords looking to cash in on rising values in the neighborhood are leaving storefronts empty, doubling down for high bidders like national chain stores or office developers. These landlords are exchanging local character for the retail platitude; the store that is present everywhere is representative of nowhere. With rising demographic incomes, educated and well-off Americans replacing minorities in the late 1990s to 2010s gentrification wave may patronize minority-run restaurants and groceries in their hunt for novel experiences but rarely do they become regulars. Soon long-time, low income residents are displaced without ever leaving home as they witness the fall of their bakeries, churches, and restaurants with hardly a coffee shop uniting them with their gourmet neighbors. The threat of homogeneity is not the loss of color but a failure of empathy and memory.

Vacant Storefronts in Manhattan Today

Ernst Roeber’s Saloon at 499 Sixth Avenue c. 1908

And yet, gentrification can be positively Progressive. Roaring brunch spots are more welcoming of women and children than the pubs that followed working class Irish and German wholesalers and dockworkers on the west side. Females present in taverns in the 1850s were likely trawling for the night’s clients instead of mimosas.

As chain stores reduce footprint in today’s overbuilt market, the Millennial wave of in-fill retail involves eateries, innovative food and beverage concepts like food halls and Bar Works (i.e. a bar and workspace for freelancers and telecommuters), specialty stores, and showrooms for local designers and foodmakers.

Food establishments impervious to displacement have strong currency in authenticity like pizza. Pizza followed southern Italian immigration patterns from the 1900s through the 1930s since Lombardi’s anchored as the first pizzeria, moving up a Pizza Belt from Philadelphia, Trenton, New York City, to Boston. As a pizza and food capital, Manhattan’s culinary heritage has since strengthened as food manufacturing surpassed apparel as the largest manufacturing employer in the city. Demand is clamorous for homegrown, artisanal, or ethnic dining options. At the same time, ethnic restaurants are overlooking pure tradition by assimilating into trendy fusion offerings in this extroverted city. The Reuben sandwich is arguably more New York than the Romanian Jewish pastrami in its defiance of kosher convention by combining dairy with meat, and topping it all off with Russian dressing. It takes a global village to make a sandwich.

As cities grow and evolve to accommodate next generations and new centuries, the invisible hand of e-commerce and profit-motivated developers loom over historical institutions. We want to uphold Progressive principles of inclusiveness and preserve the stories that provide a sense of place and enrich a neighborhood stroll. We want physical spaces to be affecting in this delicate ecosystem of grand futures and intimate memories. Community discussion are a respectable counter to apathetic fatalism. Yet, in this appraisal of opinions, there are still no easy solutions.

[sheridanh0pe]

Pretty in Pink: character as defined by one’s friends

Pretty in Pink is surprisingly mature for a coming-of-age film about the early romantic missteps between a rich boy and a poor girl. As the writer, John Hughes approaches the scandalous punk/nerd and popular preppy affair tagline with a refreshing class-reversal of the trope about a well-to-do girl choosing between the rich or poor suitor.

The opening scene presents Andie’s dreamy sensibilities and confidence through fashion as she arms herself for school in pink and lace; Andie’s outfits reflect a strong sense of identity that she defends throughout the film. In the first 5 minutes, we meet the men in her life—her father Jack, love interest Blane, and lovesick childhood bestfriend, Duckie. Andie’s obstacles follow shortly, and we see her bullied by wealthy girls in school and is hit-on and abruptly insulted by the sleazy but spurned Steff. Even with this powerful introduction, Andie’s character becomes iconic because her personal values, desires, and insecurities are as developed as the people around her who define who she can become or may never become. The characters of John Hughes’ stories have depth beyond the archetypal “Brat Pack” circle of the pretty rich girl, the jock, the nerd, the bad boy, and the misfit (e.g. The Breakfast Club); all of the major character subplots in Pretty in Pink are relevant to and inspired by Andie’s story. Starting out as misfits in parenting, social status, age, and in love, Andie’s friends and family evolve through unique and defined character arcs, reflecting a complex range of “coming of age” experiences.

Throughout Andie’s journey to get a date for the prom, her candid way of speaking and emotional insightfulness guide her friends and father to live up to their real potential, producing a dynamic web of opposing and supportive relationships in this simple but not simplified story.

John Hughes’ shows his sophistication crafting dialogue through Andie’s frank and open discussions about her desires and fears in contrast with everyone else’s subtext heavy dialogue--masking embarrassment, insecurities, or pain--particularly with Duckie’s clever, occasionally cringe, repartee.

Pretty in Pink’s plot ending closes the loop on Andie’s desire to be with Blane and attend the prom while reuniting with Duckie in friendship. The controversy lies in the film and the book’s original ending where Andie chooses Duckie over Blane. While Andie and Duckie appear to be a natural match, choosing Duckie results in an arbitrary ending that (1) discards the themes of identity, opposition, and transcending class distinctions, (2) ignores Blane and Duckie’s need for growth to complete their character arcs, and (3) washes over the lesson on her father’s heartbreak when her mother abandons them after realizing she chose someone she did not truly love.

Andie and Blane are a modern Romeo and Juliet in their pursuit of love in spite of their friends and each other’s self doubts with Blane’s callous remarks about Andie’s punk friends and Andie‘s defensiveness over her social status. When both have sacrificed a best friend for each other at the height of the emotional stakes, it’s only natural that Andie and Blane end up together.

[sheridanh0pe]

The Skin I Live In, and Almodovar’s Secrets

With few empowering, complex roles for women in Hollywood movies, Pedro Almodovar’s female-centric films provide a cathartic meditation on womanhood through his stories of gender performance and transformation. The depth of his female protagonists extend further than what critics have said are gay and transgendered men masquerading as women (a textbook example being Holly Golightly in Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s). Such suspicions are valid given Almodovar’s drag queen inspired flamboyant and troubled divas that physically resemble famous leading ladies, and the needs of these women to exorcise a past trauma that haunts them and unsettles their identity. The mother in this story Marilia is a subtle nod to Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire. In The Skin I Live In, the film title and tragedy that befalls the unassuming Vincente (who has been transfigured into a woman, Vera) centers on the trauma of gender not being a choice and the resulting entrapment, struggle, and later on healing. The designing principle behind Almodovar’s stories is based on a character who encounters loss and betrayal in a malevolent world and who must also overcome the estrangement of her mother and the mother’s failed attempts to protect her children. Fathers are largely absent and unnecessarily in the family unit but the mother’s return and acceptance is crucial to the main character’s ability to move on.

The Skin I Live In is a Pygmalion story of chauvinistic Vincente, whose assault on the mad doctor’s daughter Norma leads to his kidnapping and sexual reassignment surgery (becoming Vera). Almodovar treats the skin as a parallel motif for clothing, both being sculptural elements that define gender and sex. Vincente previously worked in a dress shop with his mother. The mad doctor, Robert, is a gifted plastic surgeon. In her claustrophobic madness, Robert’s daughter could not stand fitted clothing and it was her wayward removal of her clothes in the gardens after a party that provoked Vincente’s assault. In addition to the body stocking that protects Vera’s skin, Vera works with sculptures that pay homage to Louise Bourgeois’s fabric portrait-heads and body sculptures. Still mourning, unhealed after his wife’s disfigurement from a fiery car crash and subsequent suicide, the mad doctor atones by creating an artificial layer of skin on Vera that is burn proof and also recreates his dead wife’s face on Vera.

Together by Louise Bourgeois

The Toilet of Venus by Diego Velazquez

Melodramas are moral tales of good and bad but The Skin I Live In is certainly not so simple.  Almodovar takes his main characters through a Kafkaesque labyrinth deviating from gender and sexual norms (e.g. nuns, prostitutes, transvestites, Chinatown mother-daughter familial ties, etc). His characters suffer psychological brutality, physical deformation, power struggles, and isolation, ultimately returning full circle to a state of equilibrium with the family (often all women) after a life-changing experience of transgressive and destructive love. Borrowing tropes from Hitchcock, as his films often do, The Skin I Live in plays on mothers and their strained relationships (i.e., Marilia as the servant mother reunited with the criminally-insane brothers Robert and Zeca); disorders of paranoia, claustrophobia and voyeurism that heighten the suspense through restricting actions to a single setting (i.e., Robert’s home clinic in which Vera is held hostage in a room equipped with video surveillance cameras); and a possessive love of beautiful women and their sexuality (i.e., Robert’s obsession with his unfaithful, dead wife through Vera’s body).

Like Shakespeare’s use of the father’s ghost in Hamlet, ghosts and mysterious deaths drive the character actions. The surreal quality of Volver, Talk to Her, and The Skin I Live In comes from these women having close ties to death like Salvador Dali paintings, which often depict sexuality, death, disembodiment, metamorphosis, and nightmares overlapping reality. Almodovar weaves in masterpieces of art, providing a backdrop of sophisticated and beautiful artwork that reflects the chaotic emotional realities of his characters, where story meets style. Zeca’s tiger suit and body modifications and his assault on Vera pay homage to a Dali painting. Zeca’s assault provides the rising action that leads to Robert’s killing of his own brother in revenge and Vera later bedding Robert.

Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening by Salvador Dali

In the tragic aftermath, Marilia cleans up the blood-stained sheets from her dead son Zeca. Almodovar’s signature use of bold red colors in bloodied fabrics, fruits, costumes, décor, and other props throughout his oeuvre is a tribute to the powerful relationship mothers have with life and death, which is why the mothers reveal the big family secrets affecting all of the characters. After Zeca’s death, Marilia breaks the history of Robert’s madness to Vera and the woman Vera has been made to resemble.

Almodovar’s meditations on love as a destructive and healing force are built off of the inciting incident (found in the family secret kept by the mother) that led to the current state of disequilibrium, paralysis, and chaos. The secret is a transgressive love affair that scatters the family unit, which the characters must resolve and overcome to reunite and reaffirmed the bonds of family that come with feeding all of their stories into the narrative thread. Almodovar’s movies are exciting because they don’t start off with the inciting incident in linear chronological order but instead the characters work backwards towards a single event or memory that is explored at progressively deeper levels as they come back together.

https://vimeo.com/167873646

Short Visual Essay on Almodovar’s Obsession with Red

The prevalence of red objects as an expression of passion and pain reinforces the catharsis of the characters’ self-revelations. As a film structured around the woman’s worldview and natural reactions to crisis, feelings of need and desire are powerful drivers in the hero’s journey and the telling of stories and secrets inspire dramatic actions of escape, murder, bravery, love, and reunion.

Vera’s weakness and obstacle is her captivity by a love-possessed man (like Lena in Broken Embraces and Marina in Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!) and Vera’s body taken out of her control (such as Alicia in Talk to Her). Almodovar toys with the idea of Stockholm Syndrome in some of his films, which has the audience guessing if Vera will love Robert back. Finding solace and inner strength in yoga during her 6 years in captivity, Vera exploits her newfound sexuality to seduce, kill and escape from her captor and his servant mother. Almodovar often stages women in deep contemplation under the warmth of a sunlit window, as inspired by Edward Hopper’s Morning Sun painting, symbolizing a woman’s need for warmth in isolation and freedom outside of the home. The film ends with Vera reunited with her mother and a lesbian friend she previously slighted, ready to tell her story.

Morning Sun by Edward Hopper

[sheridanh0pe]

Blade Runner: Paranoid Androids

For a work of science fiction set in futuristic 2019 and produced in 1982, the film Blade Runner has borne out to be a timeless beauty despite the lack of any resemblance to our reality in 2017. Blade Runner outshines modern C.G. spectacles by virtue of Philip K. Dick’s masterful cyberpunk world-building and symbolic reveries in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and Ridley Scott’s virtuosic execution, codifying the perfect atmospheric ennui for the tech-noir genre. This tale of android-slavery in post-apocalyptic Shinjuku-Los Angeles blends science fiction’s A.I. fearing sermons on technology as a tool of war and political control with the cynical nuances of the hard-boiled detective mystery. Rachel plays a wide-eyed femme fatale fallen from grace as the assistant of the Tyrell Corporation’s CEO when exposed as a replicant; however, Deckard chooses not to turn her over to fellow cops Bryant and Gaff (contrary to the fate of a comparable femme in Maltese Falcon). Allusions to Deckard’s true identity as a replicant imply a bleak conclusion but there is a hopeful echo of Casablanca in which the cynical man later sides with the rogue replicants (but gets the girl in this case).

By tying the artifice of classic noir with a tech-jungle backstory, the former is refreshed as a narrative of oppression and survival between machine and man in lieu of good and evil. Industrial danger from the nuclear fall-out of radioactive dust and acid rain soaks the decayed and bleak city streets, a world reflecting the apathy and aggression inherent in Deckard’s character. The unseen wealthy abandoned Earth for off-world colonies advertised on billboards on monolithic towers and blimps, radiating a neon hue over the forsaken poor, rogue, and miscreant. Mega-corporations inhabiting mega-structures cast long canyon shadows, providing the signature low-key lighting. Noir tropes of amnesia, flashbacks, and misleading identities find new life in androids implanted with real people’s memories.  The fatalistic mood is heightened by the stopgap four-year lifespan of androids such as the Nexus 6.

Low-Key Lighting from Hitchcock’s I Confess

Much of the Philip K. Dick novel has been adapted into the film but the script diverges on important plot points such as the question of its retired cop and blade runner’s true identity; therefore, it makes sense to treat the film as a self-contained work when describing a few story mechanics that make Blade Runner such a compelling movie.

Stacked Symbols

By expressing the story’s moral arguments and themes in the background setting and its moods, as well as with props and its stacked metaphors, Blade Runner’s dystopic rhapsodies are spared the preachy undertones unlike when dished out as a monologue. With film being predominantly a visual medium, dialogue can elevate emotional force, subtlety and style or flatten through sluggish expositions.

Philip K. Dick’s metaphoric use of extinct animals is quite brilliant in its reveal of this society’s hypocritical values. The ownership of real animals is a class status symbol and a nostalgic token for one’s humanity. Less well-off humans and replicants aspire to possess real versions of android animals as pets while the wealthy aspire to own humanoid replicants, engineered by the Tyrell Corporaton as slaves. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery in this two-tiered metaphor.

Sebastian’s house of Franken-dolls, set in the historic Bradbury building, stockpiles incomplete iterations of android models. This mise-en-scene begs the question at which point do replicant lives become more valuable than the work they perform for humans or even become as valuable as human lives. As the gifted geneticist working closely with Tyrell, his collection provides a survey of his work leading up to the Nexus 6, the latter described to be perfect creations by Sebastian and Tyrell. Sebastian echoes the replicants’ fatal flaw with his own premature aging disorder, a ploy to elicit sympathy for the replicants with whom humans share the common desire of an extended lifespan.  

A Network of Opponents and Fake-Ally Opponent

Deckard’s main opponent is not the CEO of the Tyrell Corporation, who with his chief bio-engineer Sebastian were revealed to be red herrings with no solution for prolonging the replicant lifespan. Deckard must defeat the mutinous replicants who defied the Nexus 6 ban from Earth. Each represent some aspect of humanity’s complexity. What began with a rumble in the blighted and smoggy streets straining from the population explosion of seedy outcasts escalates up into cavernous high towers, a symbolic transition from the suffocating chaos below to the open skies above, freedom.

Deckard’s first victory, the sex goddess Zhora brings him discomfort after witnessing her desperate charge through store windows despite the futility of having been shot a few times in the back. Blood glistens on her transparent raincoat. The warrior, Leon, observes from the sidelines and corners the blade runner in time for Rachel to save Deckard’s life with a shot from Deckard’s dropped gun. Deckard becomes indebted to her but learns Bryant has marked Rachel for “retirement”. With Deckard’s revelation that he can love a replicant, he becomes a mirror to the Batty and Pris subplot in which Batty, the leader of the rogue replicants, also wants to save his lover’s life. Batty fails as trickster Pris is picked off by Deckard in the blade runner’s final climb up the high tower, chasing Batty to the rooftops.

After finding only disappointment in Batty’s quest for further life from his maker and father, Batty taunts Deckard but decides ultimately to rescue Deckard from slipping off the rooftop ledge. Batty shares a glimpse of his short life’s cherished memories. This replicant’s ability to express such beautiful emotions is Deckard’s penultimate revelation. Rushing home to help Rachel escape, Deckard receives his final reveal when Gaff, the fake ally-opponent, informs him that the cops know of Rachel’s whereabouts. One of Gaff’s origami calling cards is left on the floor of Deckard’s apartment, a unicorn like the one in Deckard’s dreams that appear now not to be his own. Deckard is a replicant after all.

Flipping the Dramatic Theme

What began as story on delivering justice between cops and outlaws evolves, after Deckard’s romance with Rachel and battle with the dying Batty, into an inquiry into the nature of humanity and of slaves and masters when replicants can pass empathy tests or at least come very close (e.g. the need for over a hundred questions to determine Rachel’s identity). The eyes are the replicants’ giveaway, a metric of the sincerity of their emotional responses also marred by defect to produce a red glare in certain lighting circumstances. This same radiance is briefly found in Deckard’s eyes the night he falls in love with Rachel. The replicants’ preferred method of murder by eye gouging certainty makes them appear resentful of that defect.  

A recent trailer for the sequel set thirty years after the original reopens the case on Deckard’s identity. The case seems pretty resolved to me but perhaps a rogue protagonist with a heart of steel just may not sit well with other fans.

[sheridanh0pe]

Finding the Urban Heart of Japanese Cities

For a stranger in a strange land, art museums and historic relics are customary routes to cultural enlightenment. As a student of urban history and design, however, I’ve come to appreciate the background to be as informative as the landmarks, seeing the forest for the trees. Displaced from the domestic burdens and familiarity of home, outsiders are keenly receptive to new thoughts accompanying new places. This newfound sensitivity for observation helps us perceive the larger framework shaping the local perspectives that define a foreign land.

Landscape of the Four Seasons by Tensho Shubun

The built and natural environments are the socio-economic roots for an inhabitant’s vernacular existence, penetrating further than monuments hallowed by history. Yet, one observes the latter and only sees the former. In a global hub where 98% of residents are native Japanese, Japanese cities diverge from American cities in unanticipated ways. Commercial corridors in Miami, Atlanta and New York have become reproductions of each other with multinational retailers dominating high streets (e.g. Zara, Gucci, and Starbucks). Travel rarely feels far from home.

Tokyo’s downtown consists of 29 neighborhoods within the railway loop of the Yamanote line, a massive 21 square miles (and roughly the size of Manhattan). The center of downtown in the Chiyoda ward is an empty heart, reserved as sacred grounds for the Imperial Palace. Spending most of our Tokyo stay in Shinjuku and Shibuya, memories of the reclusive feudal shogunate and samurai seemed long lost while we meandered in a jet-lag fever dream through narrow, wide-stretching roads, guided by the tech-saturated cityscape like fireflies in the long night. The buzzing nightlife of Tokyo’s downtown wards is vertical. Among compact restaurants and boutique shops stacked up to nine floors high, there is a robust clutter of niche local fare and intimate spaces. Mom and pops are near-extinction in American downtowns.  In the Western world, boutiques surrender to the big box that can command high rents and fill large commercial spaces. Where New Yorkers satisfy most shopping and dining needs on local streets along the ground floors of mixed-use buildings, consumer footfall rarely supports 2nd much less 6th, 7th or 8th floor retail businesses. 

Density and vibrancy was unthinkable for Shinjuku in the 1950s, whose core wards lost nearly 90% of its prewar buildings in the 1945 Tokyo Air Raid. Manhattan speakeasies, hold-overs from the Prohibition era, are nestled behind barber shops and hotdog stalls within the nooks and crannies of the city grid. In contrast, hundreds of bars and eateries provide intimate hideaways in plain sight amongst the pandemonium of backlit signs in Tokyo alleyways. Built originally for receiving and storing hay, coal, and waste, alleyways are the antiquated orphans of old city plans. These shadowy strays are given second-lives as strips for cozy nightlife establishments.

I was overjoyed to find the Mandarake store in Shibuya, an otaku haven. Otaku was coined to describe a person with obsessive interests in animation. Westerners adopted otaku to be interchangeable with nerd to denigrate the marginalized hobbyist, often an avid collector of nostalgic keepsakes. In Japan, these eccentricities are woven seamlessly into daily surroundings. This Mandarake store, for example, was not prominently placed at a corner but blended into the general hodge-podge. Traditional principles of site selection are based on anchoring at the point of least consumer resistance—at the corner of heavily trafficked intersections, the end of the view corridor of wide boulevards, or as a monolithic block monopolizing the sky. This approach promotes high grandeur (and real estate values), but lacks the magical element of vivid mystery or curious distraction. 

Looking closely at icons of Japanese eccentricity, there are clues to its rich cultural heritage. The Japanese penchant for hostess cafes—as a setting for socializing with cats, owls, girls in maid outfits, or even pretty boys—is a modern offshoot of the geisha subculture of trained performance artists.

The plastering of cartoon mascots is unmissable and especially so in Akihabara, otaku ground zero. Anime characters are a cultural echo of the kami, believed by Shintoists to be spirits possessing many forms in nature, all feeding into a zeitgeist of inner diversity and complexity. There are animist guides for many sorts of everyday objects.  Like Americans, the Japanese enjoy a liberal, visual culture from a delirious body of material including cinema, music videos, and video games for home; billboards for drivers and store windows for pedestrians; graphic novels kicking the dust off the literary canon; and graphic artists re-imagining brand icons and product designs for a futurist generation.

Takeshita Dori in Harajuku

Prone to frequent earthquakes, Tokyo’s density is spread horizontally and produces by default human-scale building heights and charming backstreets, like Takeshita Dori or Cat Street in Harajuku. These quirky streets thread out from starchitecture-lined boulevards like Omotesando. This center of high fashion paves a champagne-sparkled path to the Meiji Shrine comparable to the Arc de Triomphe connected Champs- Elysees.

Tod’s Store by architect Toyo Ito on Omotesando

Shibuya and Shinjuku’s bustling entertainment wards grew up around the rail stations. In our mistake seeking supper in Shinjuku on a Friday evening, we were familiarized with Shinjuku Station as the busiest subway station in the world packed wall to wall between the shoulders of thousands of thrill-seekers spilling out into the night for karaoke, bars, and fast dining. We weren’t the only ones trading off sleep for food and nightly pleasures. Here, pachinko parlors are sized to anchor the strip like JC Penney in a shopping mall. If people were not making late night stops at the train station ramen or curry joints on the way home, they head downtown instead with friends and coworkers for meals.

Shibuya owes its department store heritage to the Tokyu Corporation, a private railway conglomerate that married its retail empire with rail service, popularizing the train station and department store format with ground floor eateries. Lacking the steel or marble majestic of Fulton Center or Grand Central, Tokyo’s train stations instead relieve the daily drudge to work through dopamine shots of fresh-scented baked goods and light mood music proselytizing retail therapy.

In a society where work supersedes family and home life, 7-eleven and capsule hotels proliferate. Commuters, fighting the tide of urban sprawl and density, are rewarded with daily conveniences that include beverage and  ramen vending machines, lockers for stowaways, “scramble” crossings, timely and speedy trains, and detailed wayfinding signs throughout the transit network. Japan’s strategic focus on transportation and communication after the Meiji Restoration paid off with their superiority over the Western world in these industries. I jumped from the explosive sound when a shinkansen passed me on the platform for the first time. I love the elevated walkways granting pedestrians safe passage over car-bustling multi-lane thoroughfare. Western cities have yet to implement urban planning ideas from the Progressive era in response to vehicular pressures, crowding, and the clamor for park and civic arts preservation. Tokyo (with its core population of 14 million and metro population of 38 million) transcends with elevated walkways connecting roads and buildings, multiple subterranean levels for mass transit, and gardens on rooftops.  

Off commercial corridors, architects find plenty of work for even the avant garde in Japanese single family homes. Japanese homes are the smallest of major cities. They are minimalist in furnishings, and treated as disposable assets to be demolished and rebuilt each generation. The Shinto belief in death and renewal of nature informs this domestic exercise as well as larger rituals like the rebuilding of the Ise Grand Shrine every 20 years. A homeowner’s loss in capital wealth is an architect’s gain in design freedom in a country with the most working architects per capita and healthy profits for the construction industry. This superstition feeds not only the spirits but the Yakuza as well where construction is notoriously one of many channels for the syndicate to line their pockets.

Modernity blends seamlessly with the traditional in this templed city. Layered over state-of-the art infrastructure and laissez-faire centralized zoning policies, local individuals and families rebuilt after WWII along an open plan with small housing settlements. These later evolved into today’s low-rise, high-density mixed-use habitats and organic city of intersecting villages.

Asakusa map, heart of Edo-era Tokyo

Most prominently in Kyoto but throughout Tokyo as well, many storefronts wear the guise of historic relics with independent shop formats on the base of private residences in this home-based economy reminiscent of feudal artisan quarters and informal home kitchens. The small-scale, specialized production of the local workshop is integrated into the global factory system, allowing small businesses access to greater economic wealth.

Lost gaijin are the collateral victims of this informal planning process. Foreigners must navigate an irrational address numbering system based on the chronological order of construction in that geographical unit rather than in spatial relation to one another along a street–the number of the subdivision of the neighborhood “cho”, the block number, and the building number. Our first day in Shinjuku, two elderly men on bikes led us to our hotel on Kabukicho Street, expressing sympathies for our desperate circling around a couple of unmarked crooked blocks.

Most neighborhoods lack a grand plan and defined center, and even after the Allied firebombing, Shinjuku and Shibuya were deliberately rebuilt with its warrens of streets and alleys intact. On city maps, excluding topographical workarounds, disorderly regions provide clues to where the oldest settlements took hold (e.g. the Financial District in Manhattan) or where abandoned stretches were left to marginal social outcasts like the West Village. The newer city adhered to the developer-friendly order of the rectilinear gridiron plan.

Landmarks punctuate the space rather than order it, the latter method exemplified by the spoke-wheel of roads radiating from the White House and other civic buildings in Washington DC. Like Frederick Law Olmstead’s strolling gardens imbued with the flow of nature, Japanese cities have strolling walkways with a multitude of view corridors, many of which oriented around the natural landscape. The urban development of Japanese cities is tied spatially to its hills (high city) and valleys (low city) that historically divided economic classes with the upper class residing in the scenic and templed hills and the lower classes in water-oriented valleys and island formations.

Canal in Osaka

Footbridges over canals are especially picturesque and romantic, particularly in Osaka and Kyoto where the canal is surrounded on both banks by restaurants and teahouses facing the waterway with musicians performing in the open air for seated crowds. Seen from a high vantage point or moving train, the sea of rooftops in the valleys is quieting stuff for daydreams. Shrines and temples on parklands serve similar public gathering functions as civic squares, providing an ideal spot for pop-up or permanent market stalls and a short reprieve from the bustle in the natural environment.

Inari Shrine in Kyoto

My favorite shrine is Senso-ji in Asakusa, a former red-light district and old heart of the Edo period, because of the street market leading up to the shrine. The entrance begins at Kaminarimon gate and continues through Nakamise Street, a festival shopping arcade running several centuries old with souvenirs and local fare, scented with o-cha and red bean paste and ringing from temple charms and cicada bells. These cinnabar shrines and torii gates are transition points for ghosts and giants from the profane to the sacred. They serve as reminders that even with a fashionable taste for the new, the emergence of hyperactive robots, and the haze of pachinko parlors, a person is never too far from his spiritual and ancestral roots.

Nakamise Street

[sheridanh0pe]

Borrowing from the Male Wardrobe

Take a trip to the store windows at Bergdorf Goodman. You may be surprised to see – not satin gowns or leather handbags—but sneakers off the catwalk from Alexander McQueen and Fendi at the corner of 5th at 58th Street, the crossroads of high fashion and high-tops. I call them “haute-tops”. A bastion to masculine athleticism until the 1980s, the sneaker industry today thrives under lifestyle fashion influencers Jeremy Scott, Yohji Yamamoto, and Kanye West (Adidas). Divas on 5th Avenue have cast aside the red-bottom Louboutins to sport Stan Smiths with the signature colored heel patch.

Unisex apparel have yet to endear the mainstream but sneakerheads are trail-blazing a gender fluid space with men fawning over pink colorways and women donning smaller sizes of hyped-up men’s trainers. I like the Don C Air Jordan 2 collaboration inspired by the Chanel lambskin handbag.

The female hypebeast has the challenge of finding the gender neutral or modern woman’s alternative to uninspired soft colorways of pink-purple-blue or “dressed-up” luxury labels at Bergdorf. Josh Luber, of sneaker stock exchange stockx.com, estimates just 2.4% of sneakerheads are female (as measured by participants in the resale market). Many sneaker releases aren’t available for sizes 7 and below. Luber’s survey of the most valuable women’s deadstock sneakers (meaning no longer in general release) show that 11 of the top 15 women’s sneakers were also ranked high for men on their substantially longer list. Men are still the prime taste curators for women.

Here are sneakers that ranked high in value for female sneakerheads, albeit at a lower premium value than the men’s version (with the exception of the Lebron Fruity Pebbles). There’s a clear market gap since your average woman and female sneakerhead spends more per shoe and buys more shoes than your average man.

In 1985, Michael Jordan spawned the cult of the sneakerhead when he flaunted his Nike red-and-black basketball sneakers (the historic Air Jordan 1) despite the ban against non-white shoes and subsequent fines from the NBA commissioner.

The Jumpman came to symbolize individuality. Since then, high-end kicks became a cultural cache of male success, hip-hop and the celebrity as ushered in by Run-DMC when artists wanted to be basketball players and basketball players wanted to be artists, the cool streets of the inner-city, and more broadly, authenticity. 

The question of authenticity goes beyond palette-deep to the function behind the flattering form and the desire behind the structured silhouette. In the 10th century, the Persian (male) calvalry wore heels as a demonstration of upper class rank (and to stay in the stirrups). By the 17th century, heels were worn by upper-class women and became higher and tapered. Stilettos were later popularized by pin-up models, who only had to stand for a few minutes for a photograph. High heels were expressions of feminine power and fancy, encouraging wildly impractical but fantastic feats of constrictive design akin to the corset and the bodice. In contrast, like day to night, the history of sneaker technology revolves around ergonomics and movement. How do you clean-up the mixed messages between immobilizing high heels and performance sneakers? Sneaker wedges appear to miss the point.

Coco Chanel upturned Parisian fashion houses through looser designs with simple-lines as opposed to the hourglass and diversifying fabric materials with jersey. She borrowed grey and navy blue from traditional European masculine colors and popularized skirt-and-jacket suits, presenting to the world a bolder feminine look. Chanel’s signature quilted and leather-trim construction reinforces garment shape while worn, an application of form following function. The absence of a Coco Chanel for female sneakerheads is widely felt.

Women bucked the trend in the athleisure market, keeping it casual in runners or tennis shoes from sports where female athletes gained a large foothold. These women aren’t avid collectors moving the market, but they are changing the conversation and expanding the audience.

Known for quality arch support and an understated look, New Balances are redefining active footwear as an alternative to over-designed haute-tops. Classic 574s or 998s pair well with dressy and sophisticated ensembles.

Influencers for the female shoe market like Rihanna (Puma), Rita Ora and Stella McCartney (Adidas) are escalating the game for sole sisters, driving up the hype traffic, and hopefully providing style cues for experimental designers.

Powered by collaborations with influencers and the circuit of new and retro styles (including of course the limited releases of quickstrikes and hyperstrikes), the cult of the sneaker is ever-evolving. As a wacky example of such, I present the Nike SB Low “What the Dunk”, a mash-up of 64 pairs of other Nike SB Dunks (shown in the photograph of the ShoeZeum collection in Las Vegas).

Here’s a few of my favs from my own modest collection.

[sheridanh0pe]

Crimson Peak: Guillermo Del Toro’s Poetic Bugs and Ghastly Benefactors

Guillermo Del Toro does not understate his fascination with insects. This arthropodal affiliation with fantasy, evident in the fairy masquerading as a stick bug in Pans Labyrinth, could derive from their place of home beneath the earth as subterranean cohabitants with the supernatural: the giant toad in the rotted tree trunk, the pale man in the dungeon or the clay spirits from beneath Crimson Peak. In his veneration of supernatural creatures, Del Toro paid tribute with the faun in Pans Labyrinth, the vampires in Cronos, and his attempts to bring Lovecraft’s Cthulhu to the big screen. Insects in their exposed exoskeletons and primeval form, thereby appearing immune to the ages, can be re-imagined as ancient, earthly siblings to the occult and mythic.

Del Toro’s creatures showcase his gift for myth-making. A myth is born from an eternal being personifying a root human quality—gods in the Greco-Roman period or, my favorite, the family of Endless in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman—who finds the answer to the origin of the natural world or humanity at its most unnatural.

Edith Cushing’s Victorian costumes were Lepidoptera-inspired in the exaggerated wide puffed sleeves and silky, flowing capes and hair made to mimic a golden butterfly. Delicate and fashionable, Edith contrasts with the nocturnal colors of Lucille and baronet Thomas Sharpe. Del Toro applies symbolism with a bold brush stroke and most heavily with his characters. Early in the baronet’s courtship of Edith, we find a thinly veiled threat in Lucille’s allegory of the moths eating the butterflies. The orphans Del Toro so favors for his protagonists radiate vulnerability in the mythic world. Having lost their provider of sustenance and succor, they seek substitutes in the cold, existentially wicked realm outside of home.

Grimm tales shock with crimes against nature as in the eating of children most famously in Hansel and Gretel and the  suggestive psycho-sexual violence of a young girl in Little Red Riding Hood. Del Toro’s spin on his homage to the young prince takes the form of the seductive honeypot,  wayward and unhappy, as the baronet Thomas Sharpe or groundskeeper Jacinto in Devil’s Backbone. Where princes are vilified, it follows that ghosts are cloaked benefactors in this reversal of roles. Selective blindness being the major theme in Crimson Peak, Edith’s myopic failure of intuition for the shady baronet during the initial courtship was marked by her reading glasses but found an antithesis in her gift for spectating specters. From Hell, come her saviors. Edith is a spiritual sister to Ofelia in Pans Labyrinth as character descendants of Lewis Carroll’s Alice, a bookish, imaginative girl who adventures into an anthropomorphic natural and supernatural underworld where consumption of the native food and drink endangers the Persephone-incarnate Alice to a permanent stay. Young girls should be wary of false knights.

The passing of time in Del Toro’s movies ushers in decay and corruption. Defying conventions of character development, protagonists are challenged not to change throughout their journeys but to uphold purity against the undercurrent of profound evil. Short of the eternal life, through legacy or personhood, so desired by many of  the characters, remaining true to self is the honorable alternative. Clockwork machines, with its repetitive turns and mechanical internal workings representing our striving for the eternal, are scattered throughout Del Toro’s movies. Edith and Lucille’s final contest beside the baronet’s clay-mining invention was another one of Del Toro’s heavy brush strokes on the themes of eternity and death and purity and corruption.

[sheridanh0pe]

My Art Wall, where Film meets Architecture

In cinema and in architecture, lines and forms are sculpted into a visual cohesion of moods and motifs. Directors famed for iconic film sets, like Alfred Hitchcock and Wes Anderson, are meticulous with architectural design, the blueprint for psychological and dramatic content aka mise-en-scene. Architecture provides the canvas on which frames, lighting, and perspectives are painted in broad strokes. Buildings are embraced as living vessels of historic nuance and star characters by their own right.

Form Follows Art

House by the Railroad, Ed Hopper

The Norman Bates motel home in Psycho pays homage to Ed Hopper's desolate House by the Railroad, whose style is itself influenced by cinematic angles and lightscapes. The foreground railroad track's intersection of an overcast Victorian wood mansion conjures up a solitary figure forgotten by America’s new industrialized lifestyle. Queen Anne and French Second Empire homes, archetypal haunting grounds, are gloomy spaces scantily wired for electricity with obsolete and lumbering features. The many windows, doors and stairs are punctuation marks for fright scenes as vulnerable transition points between public to private space and the concealed depths of a house.

Palace of Abraxas, Ricardo Bofill

Stereotypes of the built environment can be recast in surprising juxtaposition. Ricardo Bofill’s eclectic Palace of Abraxas in a Parisian suburb is an affordable apartment complex featured in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, housing the film’s lower level bureaucrats and other common folk. Monumental neo-classical architecture, with its imposing concrete and geometry of order, form, and virtue, are common tropes in bureaucratic, totalitarian films. Ironically, scenes of explosive confusion and chaos feature in this Brazil set.

In the St. James Theatre’s backstage corridors in Birdman, Iñárritu reduced the space from the ceilings and walls to enhance the claustrophobic intensity of his continuous-action camera technique. After extended takes of Riggan meandering through narrow, winding hallways, the tension is relieved only when Riggan takes to the rooftops of Time Square, unenclosed by crowds, hard pavements and cement buildings, whose large exaggerated windows resemble cages in the poster below. 

Birdman in Time Square, poster from Etsy artist

Nostalgia Lane

Winkie’s Diner in Mulholland Drive, based on Caesar’s restaurant, poster from Etsy artist

Googie diners in films shot through nostalgia filters such as Pulp Fiction, or in this print David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, are 1950s roadside caricatures of curvaceous and geometric futurist shapes, representing motion and free form. While this generation of populist architecture is now defunct with few survivors, Los Angeles filmmakers are fond of googie for its Roy Lichtenstein colors and energy, a comic book technique of conveying irony, sorrow, and violence in a plot reveal or turning point.

2001 Space Odyssey, floor plan from Interiors online journal

In Dave Bowman’s death scene in 2001 Space Odyssey’s neo-classical hotel room, the appearance of the monolith ushers in a final enlightenment, signified by baroque furnishings and Renaissance paintings. The unwelcoming, sterile floor, with gridlines brightly lit from beneath, expresses the stark contrast of the new era. This interior set is later referenced by the frosty container home in the Tron Legacy sequel showcasing retro “futuristic”, mid-century modern decor. The 2001 aesthetic and modernist architecture, epitomized by John Lautner’s “deco noir” Bond villain homes, has long been associated with unsavory or alien characters. People distrust those who live in glass homes.

2001 Space Odyssey, Dave Bowman’s hotel room

Tron Legacy, Sam Flynn’s Container Home

Destined for Movie Stardom

Bradbury Building, by George Wyman

While directors often craft establishing shots from the facade and structure of distinctive buildings only to redesign the interiors and floor plan in the studio, location scouts memorialize natural born stars such as the Bradbury building in downtown LA. The fully-enclosed romanesque revival structure provides ample vantage points for action shots and a remarkable source of light from the atrium skylight. The marble staircase, glazed red brick, exposed elevators, and cast iron reinforces a modern look and machine aesthetic while the geometric ornamentation and repeated arcading romanticize antiquity. The contrast blends into a timeless aura, most recognizable as the industrial ghetto in Blade Runner.

Ennis House, by Frank Lloyd Wright

The dystopic sci-fi features a star by its own right in the architecture world, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis House as Deckard’s home.  The trabeated Mayan textile blocks are a horizontal design motif reinforcing Blade Runner’s commentary on divisive social classes, where the wealthy thrive in modern skyscrapers that cantilever over the old world ruins of the poor and neglected. Horizontal and low lines, a parallel metaphor of the ground, signify oppression from the upper hierarchy and impoverished circumstance weighing down the common people.

Monument Valley

Another location gem is not man-made at all but worth recognition as the backdrop for The Searchers, Easy Rider, Forrest Gump, Back to the Future, and more . Monument Valley in Colorado allows filmmakers to frame its heroes against intrepid rocks that punctuate an unending blue skyline and hostile plains. Against peaks and plains, directors can paint in scale and verticals.

Cinema’s wide imaginative scope allows architecture’s expressionistic qualities to be brought to final and unusual conclusions. My art wall, still in progress, is a collection of these images of film and architecture as a daily reminder to not look but really see the world before me.

[sheridanh0pe]

Ex Machina: The Wrong Questions

“Nothing in biology makes any sense except in the light of evolution,” Theodosius Dobzhansky

Ex Machina is a delightful piece of sci-fi introspection with the melancholic and sterile look of 2001 Space Odyssey and skepticism of identity and empathetic soul of Blade Runner. Bluebook CEO Nathan’s classified research bunker is inspired by the midcentury modernist color and symmetry of Kubrick’s spacecraft. The frames of Caleb watching Ava in her room mimics the uncanny awe of the 2001 Space Odyssey space explorer at the Louis XVI bedroom beyond Jupiter in which he observes his own death and the monolith, a critical moment in the evolution of a species. Ava’s cogitative pauses to Caleb’s empathy test resemble a re-calibrating GPS device but also appears expressive of the space where mystery lives. What is robot intelligence? Mystery is a nebulous of strong forces in equilibrium, a fleeting balance of tension, contradiction, and turmoil. Mystery is not a void but an echo of the space beneath consciousness, a pied piper that calls to the unseen instinctual reflex.

Robots made to conform to human likeness emote like people. However, can a robot’s metaphoric associations and moral algebra connect with the human brain map? Did Nathan construct a neural Tower of Babel? How do machines indifferent to temperature and mammalian climate preferences comprehend our evolutionary logic behind a warm personality and likeability? Language as we know it may become the fossil of our species. When Caleb asked Ava her age, she responded, “one”. Ava transcends human measurement of time.

Nathan’s closed-circuit bunker gives the pretense of total control with no windows, access-regulated and compartmental rooms, and constant surveillance if not for the autonomous force flooding the circuits. In the moment of cinematic excitement Caleb is left to die in the remote bunker, his horror is not Ava’s destiny in the singularity but awareness of his complicity in this weapon of emotional engineering, fed from the exuberance of people’s transitory sacrifices of privacy. Implicit in Nathan’s Turing Test 2.0 is the ability of AI to create and use tools for survival. Caleb became the instrument of his own destruction under a non-sympathetic AI user. Our obsession with faces and masks betray a survival mechanism for identifying the trustworthy from the threat useful only to us. Lovecraft’s weird fiction of a shared universe outside of human understanding takes modern form through synthetic beings plugged into a wide information network through which mankind observes it irrelevance.

Caleb and Nathan were made vulnerable not from attack but in being disarmed by narcissism, the hallmark of human evolution, self-consciousness. See a robot in our own likeness and we are absorbed by the similarities in a feedback loop. See distorted monsters and we become wide-eyed to the contradictions, unmitigated impulses of lust, violence and corruption. Nathan’s eccentricities, a byproduct of extended solitude, begs the question of whether we recede into our true personhood or corrupt when unplugged from the larger community of mutual preservation and compromise. What complexity beyond organic versus mechanical engineering defines us? Perhaps the difference is in deliberate anarchy, happy accidents, DNA mistranslation, and idiosyncrasies in communication. We should set our sights not to perfection but on pivoting off the mistakes.

People cannot exist in a void, but they cannot exist in a mirror either, a recurring motif in Ex Machina. We need a stock of words to grasp language concepts and need mutants and aliens to ask questions about our nature and motivations.

  �

[sheridanh0pe]

Oculus: Deadly Thoughts

A ghost story is a looking-glass into irrationality and emotional excess. The ritual retelling of a family locked in a ghastly role-play of another’s trauma feeds off universal superstitions of karma and shared societal guilt for the profoundly wronged. If asked the question of what’s scarier, haunted houses or demonic strangers, 2014’s Babadook and Oculus answers with the possession of your own mind. Good horror fads are borne out of the sickness of that generation and tease mainstream tensions out to extreme conclusions. The body horror of the 1970s and 1980s (e.g. David Cronenberg) exploited the AIDS hysteria amongst the Pandora ’s Box of problems coming out of the age of experimental drug-use and sex. Millennials are described as the most nihilistic generation, by Radiolab’s In the Dust of this Planet podcast, in addition to the most over-medicated and mentally –insecure. These days, personal therapists are as customary as accountants and family lawyers.

As the adage goes, “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”, Oculus manifests how self-control lost in fear can lead to fatal ends. The reveal of the monster is rarely the best part of the film compared to the anticipation. The Lasser glass is chilling because of our psychosomatic vulnerability to hallucinations and pain. We are made uncertain during or even after a violent encounter.

In a refreshing turn, the mirror is treated as a serial killer with willful intention, the intelligence behind the paranormal chaos. Kaylie plays the detective who deconstructs clues and measurable behavioral patterns. Akin to Clarice’s partnership with Hannibal Lector to use a serial killer to catch a serial killer, Kaylie guarantees her own safety with perilous technological tricks. Kaylie’s experiment runs its course and as it becomes apparent the irrational human element cannot be removed, the scientific ecosystem falls apart.

In a reversal of roles, Tim had just been released after nearly a decade in an asylum yet the sibling spared becomes the obsessor, paranoid and delusional. Priests and psychic readers played the experts to prior generations' poltergeists. In Oculus, camcorders, cell phones, and timers proved to be the false savior. As Tim declares, breaking the mirror won’t break a delusion. In choosing to relive their childhood trauma, unlike the hapless family in traditional ghost stories, Kaylie and Tim condemned themselves. 

[sheridanh0pe]

Book Recommendations for Urban Studies Enthusiasts!

Usually I've a love vs. disappointment ratio of 50/50 with new books, but this winter break, I happened upon these wonderful texts on urban planning and cities' innovative capacity. I want to share and invite further recommendations from other enthusiasts. I love how nearly all of these writers quote Jane Jacobs like The Death and Life of Great American Cities was the urban planning bible. 

Atlas of Cities by Paul Knox

http://www.psmag.com/footnotes/book-reviews-100-words-less-atlas-cities-93809/ 

Paul Knox: Urban geographer and university administrator. Senior Fellow for International Advancement, reporting directly to the President of Virginia Tech. Between 1997 and 2006 Dean of the College of Architecture and Urban Studies and in 2009 Director of the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute. 

----------------------------------------------------------

Chicago Metropolis 2020: The Chicago Plan for the Twenty-First Century by Elmer W. Johnson

http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo3613958.html

Elmer W. Johnson: From 1999 to 2002, President of the Aspen Institute. Lawyer at Kirkland & Ellis. Hired at GM by chairman Roger Smith with the idea that he could be Smith's successor. 

----------------------------------------------------------

Los Angeles Boulevard: Eight X-Rays of the Body Public by Doug Suisman

http://suisman.com/oro-editions-will-publish-the-25th-anniversay-edition-of-doug-suismans-classic-los-angeles-boulevard/

Doug Suisman: Founded Suisman Urban Design in 1990. An urban designer and licensed architect, Suisman has gained international recognition for his ideas and designs of urban public spaces. 

----------------------------------------------------------

The City in History by Lewis Mumford

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

Lewis Mumford: American historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and literary critic. Architectural critic for The New Yorker magazine for over 30 years.

----------------------------------------------------------

Infrastructure: A Guide to the Industrial Landscape by Brian Hayes

http://industrial-landscape.com/#/home

Brian Hayes: Senior writer for American Scientist. Visitor at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley and at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste.

[sheridanh0pe]

Identity-Seeking at the Crossroads: A Euro Trip

Two years ago, Jeremy and I did a whirlwind tour of Munich, Salzburg, Vienna, and Prague in nine days, inadvertently a “Life and Times of Mozart” culture crawl. I adore walking timeworn but spiritually urban cities, comparing centuries old structures and community-centric space planning with the protruding steel towers and rationalist grid of Manhattan. A city’s ethos and magnetism comes from how space is divided and centralized, guiding the circulation of its inhabitants. In the evolution of people, communal groups shifted from perpetual movement as hunter-gatherings to settlements and swung back around as enabled by the structure of cities. A favorite pastime of mine involved people watching along pedestrian bridges like Charles Bridge and public squares. Robert Moses showed Manhattan the evils of highways disrupting and dividing communities and the drabness of long commutes to work. While traveling in vehicles isolate us from the frenetic energy of urban living, beating the soles of our feet against the pavement brings a greater peace than sedentary rest. 

The provocative author Will Self said the young took cheap vacations in others’ poverty and the middle-aged wealthy took vacations in others’ piety. In vacations, we look for something missing from our daily selves such as the loss of spirituality in the materialistically-sated from Self’s quip. Having forged my tastes from European and American 20th century literature, I soul-seeked through ways modern updates of millennium-old cities preserved or overturned rich albeit antiquated histories to adapt my anachronistic tastes with commercialized, global sensibilities. Oscar Wilde said, “Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.” This begs the question on should we recreate idols that aged with class but become functionally obsolete? When nomadic creatures elect a center of physical permanence, they collect themselves, their belongings, and the bones of all the prior generations. The joy of travel comes in finally seeing what once was only visible. 

The sublime in mountains and the limitless horizon along oceans dwarfs us and confronts us with our mortality. Town centers provoke feelings of the many and powerful as folks conduct unique errands or adventures on a stage of crowds or reflect on their lives beside the profiles of strangers. Town clocks like the Glockenspiel in Marienplatz square, Munich or the Prague Astronomical Clock (the Orlog) below mark the end of the Middle Ages and the coming of capitalist interests with regulations more precise than the sun or natural circadian rhythms. 

The shops and cafes of "brandscape" destinations are hotspots for crowded, loud, and slow moving queues of tourists and cameras. There, tourists are bludgeoning each-others’ counterfactual daydreams about being natives themselves. Keepsakes of that feebled assimilation are souvenir or Polaroid pastiche, out of step with the current fashion and the old world.

Because we are reimagining ourselves through the lens of a disparate culture, our eccentricities are better guides than guide books. We know ourselves better at the crossroads between a familiar and a strange place. I am fond of specialty museums and shops, commercial validation for the influence and glamour of special artistic interests and emotional confirmation that there’s hope for me yet! Jeremy with his fondness for quiet, history-steeped and elaborate relics and landscaping found solace in cathedrals and gardens. The ideals of urban planning and architecture is religion for atheists in the pursuit of exaltation and seeking expression for the best traits of human nature in the spirit of Jane Jacobs but in the physical space of the world we build for each other.

Botanical gardens like the baroque Volksgarden in Vienna are quietly subversive to its Neolithic heritage. An explosion of flowers have replaced life-bearing fruits. Art and culture are the prodigal sons of an early struggle for survival and subsistence. 

The symmetry and rational orderliness of Greco-Roman inspired buildings are pretty but less stimulating than modern curvilinear, concentric or polygonal designs that encourage encounters with the unexpected and the occasional scenic route in lieu of the quick and efficient path. Classical forms inspiring ideals of perfect proportion and godly scales do not communicate with us people on the ground but above us. Societal stratification, the procreator of implosive ripples within the city, is better discouraged in lieu of a serendipitous patchwork of warm and transparent human textures and ratios. 

In art, rationality fails us as proven out by the abandonment of the ideals of Le Corbusier. I will defer in the case of Munich’s BMW museum for which Corbusier’s car and ship inspired functional designs are topically relevant. Of functional opposites, I love Frank Gehry’s Fred and Ginger buildings in Prague. The homage carries a Proustian resonance for us Americans of home far away. This Rushdie quote is apropos to Gehry, “ A poet’s work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.”

The rise and fall of derelict warehouse districts Manhattan knew so well appears absent in Eastern European inner cities. In this century, the renewal of former manufacturing facilities and laborers' slums as design districts of artists and artisans have demonstrated the positive side of blurred lines between work and lifestyle in social productions of ideas and innovation. The touching element of the foodie, art, and tech as craft resurgence in the abandoned industrial grotto as in Dumbo is the return to the founding of the village to give succor and neighborly benevolence to the travel worn. Oh how I miss the beer cheese…

[sheridanh0pe]

The Ice Storm: The Ache for Home

“The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.” - Maya Angelou 

This snowy Thanksgiving reminds me of The Ice Storm.. Ang Lee is a master of visual metaphors and symmetrical narrative arcs between the teenagers and parents in this treatment of the dissolution of family. In the 1970s, the political nation-state was crumbling; cinema reflected this lost identity from the violent severance of that generation from their parents, colonial or familial. While Ang Lee recycles themes of confronting one’s own image in mirrors and inarticulate wandering, the film’s moral statements diverge from the 1970s. Family is intended to be a neutral zone from the stress of the times and societal pressures, allowing children to play and tumble into fully functioning adulthood and a young couple’s love to season. Ben Hood exemplifies this point,

“Well, that’s the whole point of the holidays, Paul. So you and your sister can mope around the house, and your mother and I can wait on you hand and foot, while the two of you occasionally grunt for more food from behind the hair in your faces. Believe it or not, we actually enjoy it.”

After Wendy is caught fooling around, Ben’s acquiescence when he noticed Wendy’s feet were cold privileges us to the tender scene of Wendy carried home by her father like a weary child. The other-worldliness of the muted blue and green tones, a backdrop of bleak fragility in the snow, foreshadows how everyone lost sight of the purpose of family. Children reach an inflection point where they no longer need their parents but, despite their cool disregard, long for role models to guide the hard decisions they must make for themselves. Love is a blind ambition but raising a family requires vision.

The parallel plot-lines of inappropriate liaisons, tensions of privacy and deception between the adolescents and the estranged parents function like the Larsen effect, in which sound loops between a microphone and loudspeaker and is amplified by the relays. The safe space provided by the intimate and unifying confinements of home anchors a child’s conception of empathy and self-awareness. This can give way to a highly charged testing ground for the family to act out against their fears and frustrations. Reared under the barrage of rancorous shrapnel and barbs, this kind of casualty is poison, too deep to bleed. The Virgin Suicides features an iconic perversion of familial intent where the white picket fence of the five daughters’ suburban upbringing is debased after the youngest is impaled in her suicide leap.

Paul Hood’s introductory narration is telling,

“…a family is like your own personal anti-matter. Your family is the void you emerge from, and the place you return to when you die. And that’s the paradox - the closer you’re drawn back in, the deeper into the void you go.”

Mikey’s tragedy is Ang Lee’s harbinger on experimentation without foresight. Enchanted by the storm that proves to be a dangerous conductor of electricity, Mikey’s idealization of frozen molecules’ inability to pollute one another may be nostalgia for the Carver family’s better days. The neglect of his futile romanticism is the film’s tragedy. Where were the parents? Counting grievances and clutching thoughts. The second time Ben carries a child home, in hovering silence, he presents a dead son to the horrified Carvers. 

Home is not like the shell of a hermit crab that can be swapped for a bigger world when outgrown. Aptronym describes a nominative determinism in instances of people drawn to specific professions on the basis of their names. Remarkably, people named Dennis are more likely to become dentists, and that’s just from a name. Identity, with all its genetic gifts and weaknesses, is directed by the impressionistic years of youth, with a host of meanings and consequences. Just as visual and Chomskyan aural constructs in the mind precede the metaphors of art and language, as another matter of abstraction, the perception of self is born from the family. 

[sheridanh0pe]

Se7en: The Virtues of Good Film-making

How do we identify features that distinguish a good movie from a bad one? Pleasure or distaste for art is visceral, and when something is really good, it’s beyond articulation. I’d narrow down a simple but working definition of good filmmaking to (a) distinct and rich plot material and characters and (b) craftsmanship in visual direction and cues, which is the point of cinematic storytelling. Emotional reactions to tone, dialogue, and scene transitions are shortcuts to the mind’s deeper and complex processing of an experience. Directors who have mastered the craft exploit this state of pre-verbal, affective comprehension made possible by the greatest strengths of human ingenuity, pattern recognition and the intuitive capacity for abstract conception and judgment. Lesser directors don’t and the audience will feel as if they’re treated like idiots by the uninspired use of clichés or messy direction with wasteful editing, camera movements, or dialogue. David Fincher’s films are examples of good craft.

David Fincher finds expression in the smallest details and subtly and gradually builds up the story so viewers can enjoy moments of dramatic transcendence just as the characters experience them. Fincher is known for his tactful use of empty or cluttered space, deep shadows, and setup of changing power relationships through the size, distance or position of characters in a frame. A poor director will be tempted to hammer out a point with tired film conventions such as the orchestral flourish or even worse, the characters basically tell you how to feel. In SE7EN, nearly every scene in Detective David Mill’s apartment is punctuated by the rumbling of a train passing overhead and when Mills gives chase to the suspect Jonathan Doe, in one of the rare instances in the movie, a shaky cam was used. These are subliminal emotional cues highlighting Mill’s impatience and hot temper. The camera becomes a lens into the character and how he sees the world. 

Some of Fincher’s cryptic match cuts are clever ways to connect one scene to the next. Before we’re introduced to a dark silhouette of the D.A. addressing the press about the attorney’s murder, there’s a preceding close up of a newsstand owner counting his profits beside tabloid headlines of the dead criminal defender. For a split second, we know the next theme is greed before we even see the writing on the carpet. Close ups alert the audience to pay attention to what an object or person will reveal of events to come. Later on, the close up of the photographs of the victims hung from Jonathan Doe’s ceiling confirm his culpability. This moment is particularly important because a few minutes after, we find photographs of Detective Mills developing in the bath tub, a visual foreshadowing of his fate.

As much as I admire Fincher’s talent in screen direction and visual techniques, I personally find his longer dialogues tedious. While most directors use dialogue to flesh out character personalities and move the narrative along, Tarantino is one of the rare few with the gift for gab to use conversations as the main set piece and the creativity to integrate criteria (a) and (b) as defined above with the playful, symbolic infrastructure of his films. As Schopenhauer quipped, “Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.”

[sheridanh0pe]

Interstellar, Inception, Infinity, and Inconsistencies

Christopher Nolan’s films are delightful for the baroque plot architecture, vertiginous action sequences and pyrotechnics, if you like cerebral massages and a good kick to the eyeballs. In Interstellar, we do not doubt the leitmotif of Dylan Thomas’ “Do not go gentle into that good night” will hold true for the characters as they are thrashed by windswept dirt, massive waves over eerily shallow water, and etcetera. Yet the leitmotifs, such as Edith Piaf’s “Non, je ne regretted rein” in Inception, are misleading in their thinly-veiled message. Nolan crafts his noirs in the hostile, alternative world of dreams, fifth dimensional cosmic beings, magic, and faulty memories where natural laws and mechanics are tenuous threads pulled by the miasma of paranoia, deceptive identities and false truths. Nolan’s labyrinthine stories are more easily digestible after peeling away his favorite tropes, speaking the same language as Hitchcock, of the elusive woman, the beguiling narrator, the false friend, and a hero who must make a crucial moral decision determining the fate of his world. Yet, the core components of Nolan’s worlds are not simple by any means.

His characters are trapped in a recursive space (e.g. Leonard, with anterograde amnesia, repeatedly solving and avenging his wife’s murder in Memento or the bending of time on itself in a tesseract behind Murph’s bookshelf). The protagonist’s only salvation is to break out of the cycle, leading to a climactic narrative twist. Science fiction fans who also fancy mathematics understand the paradox of how self-referential and formal rule systems can acquire meaning despite its meaningless components. Nolan’s leitmotifs, meaningless in the beginning, then align with first impressions of the characters, and later become twisted upside down, inside out. Did Dominick Cobb and Mal really regret nothing? Will Cooper and Murph go into that good night? Like the worm hole, Nolan’s films are a proliferation of personas and even worlds turned on its head (e.g. Cooper Station being the O’Neill cylinder) like the symbol for infinity.

Godel’s incompleteness theorem states that any effective, arithmetic theory cannot be both consistent and complete. The consistency of certain theory X cannot be proven from the axioms of theory X itself. There needs to be a theory Y, a meta-theory, which is not contained in theory X, therefore, theory X is incomplete. Computer programmers will recognize the “call stacks” of Inception’s dream within a dream and the toss and tumble of slaps, head on collisions, and explosions where characters are kicked up and dropped down layers of the subconscious. Call stacks are fairly complicated, so I’ll defer to the dictionary, which defines “the call stack is organized as “stack,” a data structure in memory for storing items in a last-in-first-out manner, so that the caller of the subroutine pushes the return address onto the stack and the called subroutine, after finishing, pops the return address off the call stack to transfer control to that address.”

The “inconsistent” or “nonsensical” sequences that appear to break rules of causality or implicate a bootstrap paradox (where objects or information have no origin) in Nolan’s films are grand metaphors for Godel’s incompleteness theorem. The question is: where is meaning embedded and how do the protagonists such as Cooper break out of the cycle?  Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine who wrote some of the best recursive short stories, has a story The Aleph about the point in space containing all other points, a paragon of infinity providing a vision of the entire universe from every angle simultaneously. Tokens are used in surreal films to drive the narrative, be a focal point for tension and act as a vessel for character anxieties. Nolan’s tokens, objects symbolic of the protagonist’s attachment to another person or home, are alephs. Murph’s watch is the aleph for the singularity and it brings Cooper home to complete the plot loop.