The Tejas Chronicles

I had a bad dream Sunday night.

Let me explain. I was chasing my Papa around the beach, through the tents and the recumbent chairs. He was dapperly dressed and riding an electric bicycle, never looking back. He died five years ago.

My mom's father was the one who escaped. By some miracle, his entire immediate family made it out of Germany right before they would have been sent to the death camps.

As survivors, my family's existential crises are somewhat different than most peoples. Most people, to stay sane, believe that if history had been slightly different then they themselves would be slightly different. I, however, know that if things had been a little off I would not exist. There would be no me to speak of. Survival is a lot hard work, the will to make it, and a little luck.

That last point is what was driven home this weekend. Papa and his older brother had always refused to talk about their experiences. "Why do you want to know that?! It's ancient history..." What we do know is that after they escaped, the two boys went back over to Germany as spies for the U.S. Army Air Force. To us children and grandchildren this means that we are of that rare breed of Jew that not only survived. We managed to actively fight back.

Several strange and unexplained artifacts were found when we cleaned out his place, post-mortum. But that is where the information ended.

Sunday, my mom spoke with my Great Uncle Kurt, my grandfather's brother. Apparently, November 8th 1933(?) is the anniversary of their escape. We were always told that they got on one of the last boats to leave in 1939. This is not quite true.

Uncle Kurt, on the same day decades later, told my mom that my Great Grandfather Gaston was friends with a member of the SS. The SS man was so fond of Gaston that a few days before my family was supposed to be rounded up, he told my Great Grandfather to get his family out of the country. His daughter, my now deceased Great Aunt Erica, was already living in Paris.

But more than this, this SS fellow let Gaston, his wife, and his sons hide out in his house for four days before they themselves made their escape to France. For now, the story ends there as Uncle Kurt did not want to go over any more on the phone.

That is it. My story is now more similar to the hundreds of others that managed to hide out. I owe my life, every day, to the kindness of a stranger. I owe it to the un-patriotism of someone who couldn't be more in the establishment. I owe it to the network. It is all about who you know, and when. I owe it to being likable.

We didn't just fight back, we were also supremely lucky. I don't know why my grandfather refused to look back at me in my dream. I don't know what that means. I just want to catch his memory.

Hello Everyone!

Sorry that I missed Pallas. It sounds like those of you who went had a really great time! Normally, I would be completely jealous. But instead I was here...



...having an equally good time.

Basically, Madison rocks. Maybe not as hard nor as long as Austin does, but it is still damn cool. I understand that my experience may be atypical. I have many excellent friends here from several vectors. Also, it is an escape where I can dedicate my time to programming. Which is lovely. Most grad students spend the vast majority of their time doing tasks extraneous to their actual research. So when you get a chance to do what you are interested in you take it.

That has been my life here: 12-17 hours of research + 4 hours of hanging out (drinking and eating cheese) + 3- 8 hours of sleep. It has been bliss. I feel really at home here. A different home. It probably helps that my co-worker here is from Belleville and Nakia is from Madison.

Still, I am coming and staying home tomorrow. I'll get to be in one place for 6 weeks! I am excited. I am also pleased to be leaving their midwestern climes. I grew up with this and left it with purpose and dedication. California had my graces for a decade, as does Texas now.

More than anything, I am looking forward to seeing my main squeeze Anne. One more day and I promise I won't leave you anymore. This semester.

So I haven't updated in a WHOLE month. Even my "minimum once-a-week" rule has been shamelessly broken. My Google Reader is in a complete disarray. I have been busy.

Right now is the first night of a 10 day stint in Madison. It has involved, keys, bike rides, meeting people, citywide WiFi, bourbon on the rocks, and beer. Have I mentioned that I love this place yet? Fear not AustiKnights, you are still bigger and have better weather. I was really concerned that I would be completely burnt out by the time I got up here and come to resent this trip, but so far I love it.

Of course loving Madison requires leaving the Pumpkin Patch behind...



...though supposedly drunken corn mazes are all the rage up here. (1 liter of Cranberry Juice and 1 liter of Vodka in a Camelbak, seriously?! That is fantastic.)

But that has all been in the last 2 and a half days. Before that I was in the Bay Area. Someday I will live in my house. Can I hear it for November?

If there is one thing I have learned, there are a lot of fucking cool people in America. All distilled separately, it proves hard to mix them. Seems I'll just have to keep travelling and sampling.

So I realize I haven't updated in a while. Or really been out of the house.

Surprise! Guess who had Swine Flu?!



Well, at least now I am back in the swing of things. I no longer feel like death. Right well in time for me to run off to California and Wisconsin this month. Woo hoo...

The major event I more or less missed due to illness were High Holy Days this year. I sort of book-ended them. I went to the first day of Rosh Hashanah and the concluding services for Yom Kippur. I was not well enough to fast, sadly.

But more than this, I didn't really get out apologies this year. I sent out one email. To which I have yet to hear a response. Many of those whom have received them in the past were not slated for them this year. Which is good news. But a bunch of new people who didn't get them simply won't. For better or worse, I have turned.

So if you felt like I owe you an apology, consider it granted. On the other hand, if you feel like you have wronged me in the past, you are now forgiven.

It seems a bit antiseptic to do it in this blanket fashion, but hey! I was really fucking sick. And as my mom told me, Swine Flu isn't even Kosher!

Well it seems like I can't please everyone. Some people think my posts are too long. Others feel they are too cryptic. Still others think that my 'musings on women' and my sexuality are 'annoying.'



Exciting News! So given the recent criticisms, I am going to tell you about it in a short, encoded, and peevish fashion.

So while I was in Paris, my adviser and I had a meeting where we decided that it would be good for me to spend some time north of the wall. It is known that it is quite a magical land up there. Which is good since previous attempts to befriend the majestic unicorn have been successful. So it looks like this expedition is going to take place. It took a lot of work to get this off the ground. After all, one does not simply jumping stilts into Mordor.

However, in the interim Super Secret Project 2 has come to a close. How this affects the northern climes (not to mention where everyone loves vagina) is unclear. It has also come to light that Duncan Idaho of House Atreides has a made a similar passage to the one I am about to embark upon. I expect an upset among expatriate Argentine cowboys.

Unlike K. D. Lang (not my brother), Super Secret Project 2 is not +5. Maybe it is -5. Maybe it is 0. Maybe it is +2.5. Still, I now have no desire for lollipops nor hats worn by old ladies. Despite what you believe, people change.

Sisyphus-like, we build. "Things fall apart; it's scientific."

It was the best of times, or some other Dickensian nonsense. Paris was much more enjoyable than I had anticipated. The city, if done right, can be quite pleasant. The conference was better than expected as well. I even enjoyed one of the plenary sessions. The first panel was my Nuclear Engineering dream team sans el Baradei.

My photos can be found here. But by far the best experience I had went as follows. Picture it, I had just had dinner with my co-worker, a two crepe and coffee course, at a little place near the backside of Notre Dame. She needed to get back to the hotel to prep for her talk the next day. I had seen on the map "Place Dauphine" on the other end of the island in the Seine on which that great cathedral sits. Being a Jeanne d'Arc fanatic, I was of course interested in a park dedicated to her liege-lord. Is it right for a Jew to have a patron saint all picked out (break glass in case of Catholicism)? Likely a topic that will take a separate discourse to answer. It was 9:30 pm.

On my way, I noticed at the rear of the church-under-remodel Cafe Esmeralda and I said to myself "Hah, you cannot trick me; I have read Victor Hugo and know your little game." Further on I stopped and took pictures of dramatically lit gargoyles. Then it happened.



Turning the corner to the front of Notre Dame there were people. A lot of people. A crowd. Even better this throng seemed to be dedicated to the noble task of blowing bubbles. Had I just wandered into the best flash mob ever?! Yes. Clearly, these were my people.

Eventually, a large man with short black hair, a large black satchel, wearing a black suit with a white shirt came by. He took a bubble vial out of his bag and handed it to me. I knew what to do.


White dots in sky are bubbles reflecting the camera flash.

But knowing only brings further questions. What was this all about? Right as I was about to leave, after the photographs, TV cameras, and inquisitive police, I saw her running around speaking perfect English.
"Can I have another bottle?"

After Carla got a second serving of the miracle stuff from our provider, she ran off blowing with reinvigorated enthusiasm. Carla was lithe and hyper-active. She wore classy black cargo pants, a black sleeveless top, and a simple gold cross necklace. Her hair was Red. Char Aznable
red. The kind of dark/bright red that is in no way natural but cannot be begrudged on those grounds. It was cropped short and tipped black.

Of course, I asked her what all the bubbles were about. "Who knows?! I was told it is a Celebration of Life!" Check. We wandered through the throng blowing bubbles for a bit longer. It turns out she is a Neurobiology PhD student in Bonn and was in Paris for, what else, but an international congress. Her English was so good because she had previously spent 10 months working at an equestrian hospital in Oakdale, CA (near Sacramento). "We should go see my co-workers." Mate.

I spent the next hour or so blowing bubbles and hanging out with these four awesome German biology PhD students. They were all pretty neat. At one point, they busted out beers from a small cooler they brought with them. So now my canonical view of France is sitting in front of Notre Dame, amongst babes and bubbles, complaining about Corona and the superiority of darker brews.

Is it a function of my personality that I get into these situations? Or is it my wacky life that has thoroughly skewed my persona? The chicken is cooking scrambled eggs, surely.

At one point Carla asked me what I did for fun. "This! Celebration of Life," I answered. By now I had put together the obvious similarities between the current situation and the Burner Community. Keeping it simple I said, "Have you hear of Burning Man?" Her excitement was palpable. She was unaware of any German burns, but her year in California taught her what she needed to about what happens in the desert. She wants to go, but it is that much more expensive with the intercontinental flight.

But what she does for fun is analogous. She, somewhat obviously, is into Metal. So she goes to all of the big European Metal concerts. So we start talking about metal bands we like or have seen. I've seen Tyr;
She has seen Dio; I am jealous.

This spawned a conversation between her and one of her co-workers about what was actually good. If you have never seen two passionate Germans argue about what 'real' metal is, then you have not lived. Their focus was only broken half-an-hour later when an androgynous French child in desperate need of Ritalin ran by. Her/His disengaged parents were on the other side of a shrubbery managing the one still in the cradle.

We supplied the kid with a bubble bottle. It's contents were quickly dumped onto the ground after the little lips failed to produce the desired soapy effect.



Somewhere in all of this the flash mob broke up. They were replaced by drummers and a girl in Arabian pants spinning poi on the steps of Notre Dame. The whirling balls of flame, naturally, attracted our ADHD adoptee. When mein klein homunculus ran straight for the fire was the only time I saw the mother step in and stop her ward.

Sitting there, I thought to myself, "Esmerelda lives!"

I am enjoying Paris much more than I thought I would. Outside of the conference, life is very relaxed and my non-existent French is not as much of a barrier as I thought it would be.



Now, don't get me wrong. The city is still founded on imperial thuggery. And if anyone can lay claim to the copyright on Urban Sprawl it is the Parisians. But generally things are quite nice. Perhaps it is the excellent coffee that is lubricating my attitude.

I gave my first real presentation at an international scientific congress yesterday. And not completely blowing it equals success. When you are the youngest, least accomplished person in the room by 20 years (and all of the others present are DOE and foreign equivalent bigwigs), the audience can be quite imposing.

Also, in a fit of cosmic annoyance, my adviser missed my debut! He had to cover for a talk that was scheduled at the exact same time...

More to come, surely.

So yes, I now have an excess of chocolate coffee cookies. Come and Get 'Em!

On A Totally Unrelated Note: Yesterday, my bicycle decided to launch me off of it. I am alright. Mostly.

This used to be my knee:


And this used to be my wrist:


On A Totally Unrelated Note: I heard a brand new Frank Zappa song I didn't even know existed today. Fabulous.

On A Totally Unrelated Note: Having spoken with my adviser, it doesn't look like I should plan on graduating until at least August 2010. I feel like it will probably be even longer. Good news for the Austin folks!

This trip to Raleigh validates so many of my beliefs. Whatever started in Gainesville has been reinforced here. I don't want to leave; What a twist!

I do not have time to reiterate all of the lovely people here. But Austin, you get me back. I am coming for you.

I feel that I am now loved in every corner of this big nation. And that is important to me.

The times are fast upon us. That is right people, my first in a series of 25th birthdays is coming up! (I subcontract out City of Austin Utilities to Tuck Everlasting Water Management.) But my birthday is on a Tuesday this year. LAME.

Therefore, I have pegged off Friday August 21st for the Quarter Life Crisis / ATX Homecoming / Back-to-School Party! However, I am out of town and busy writing a paper right now. So I am taking suggestions. What do you want to see done? The wackier, crazier, more nutso the idea, well, you know me. The more likely it is to grab me. Have At!



The thread is yours.

Hello crowdsource!

Does anyone have any idea what the hell OrFunner is?

Is it some sort of acting class? A secret cabal I am not cool enough to join? A space walk? A pickle?!

Together we can do more...

This weekend was the first time I have genuinely enjoyed myself since I got to Raleigh, and it was lovely! Here is how it all went down:

Wednesday: After my meetings in the morning and afternoon, I went and got a haircut in preparation for...



Thursday: ...when I went to get new glasses and a new prescription. Unfortunately, the optomitrist was all booked up and so I had to come back on...

Friday: After my morning workout routine. I was forever at the optomotrists, but luckily, the girls who worked there were hilarious. It was cookie Friday; I got some. Unfortunately, I was so late that I didn't get to spend a lot of time working. Shabbat was upon us. I could have been a bad kid and worked on. But I had seen some flyers and read some blogs. LOVE BUG was calling out to me. Not really understanding what it was, I went back to the hotel to freshen up before heading to the 101 Lounge, downtown, for the Great Bug Draw Off.

What "Love Bug" turned out to be was a timed, competitive, spectator art show for charity. So at the outside bar of the lounge, they lined up artists who had tags on their backs like marathon runners. There were two preliminary rounds of 25 minutes where, in their chosen medium, local artists would scramble to produce bug-related art on 8 x 10 cards as fast as they could. Each time one was done, a moderator would lift it up, show the crowd, and then walk it inside. Most cards were sold before they left the stand; each was $25. The crowd often pushed into the street. The artists from each session who sold the most were advanced to the last round of 15 mins in which larger more elaborate pictures were created. All the proceeds benefited non-profit Toxic Free NC, whose stated goal is to remove dangerous chemicals from the hands of children. Fantastic.

But why is this important? Well, the 101 lounge certainly made a killing selling bug-based drinks like the Bee's Knees. But what to note is that, while there was a swarm outside, more discerning folk would see that the lounge had two stories! And large portrait windows all around. One side, naturally, was basically right above the bar where the worker-artists were humming away. So the queen seats in the house were inside, upstairs looking down perfectly on the art and the people. This is where the story starts.

Among the other queens enjoying such a visage, were a group of friends. Girls+. Sometimes some of them would go downstairs and communicate with the low-lying subjects in random-seeming walks. In any event, it was fairly clear that the binaries and norms of the colonial subjects were at least questioned from such great heights. After all, there is more than one way to make honey.

Woefully friendless in Raleigh prior to this point, I rectified my situation by spending a few hours casually chatting with this interesting bunch. Thereby proving I was not some sort of owl or bat or bullfrog. I was invited to go see the opening of a photography exhibit at one of their coffee shops. They were tragic pieces in Black and White biographing the lives of local homeless.

Not wanting to say "Goodbye Forever" after this, we exchanged numbers.


Saturday: Shawn, who has moved to Maryland for graduate studies, stopped by for the day. We hung out, went downtown. Had dinner. Checked out their ridiculous live music in the park. We walked around and saw all of the civil buildings (Raleigh is the capital recall). Both of us wanting to drink more, but me having driven, we go and hit up a couple of euphemistically named liquor stores ("Campus Beverages") and a Kroger. Porter, Sauvignon Blanc, cherry ice cream, and whipped cream in hand, it hits me.



What if we take the 'root' out of Root Beer Float? A bottle of wine and Beer Floats later, Shawn and I were nicely toasted. We spend the rest of the evening entertaining ourselves on the Onion and Craigslist.

Sunday: Shawn and I head over to this delicious brunch place, southern style. Humid as boring sin, we sit outside in the heat. We go back to the hotel and sit off brunch for a bit. This is in preparation for going over to the mall across the thoroughfare and walking it off as well. We come back to the hotel and try to watch old stand up comedy on Netflix, but it fails. Shawn leaves me and Raleigh behind as he must need be in Lexington, VA that night. I go over to one of my favourite haunts in town and order my new favourite: cafe meiele. Somewhere in the middle of writing a paper outline, one of my new found friends calls me.

Wow! That was fast; I planning on calling or texting them to try to hang out on Wednesday if I hadn't heard back. They were inviting me to a smore cookout / storytelling extravaganza. It was a very subtle blast. Suffice to say that I learned things about squid reproduction and sea cucumber survival tactics that I had never known before. Stop me if you've heard this one.

And now I am here, back in my hotel room, smoke seeped into my hair. But present in such a way that I feel absolutely free. I've got my Status Back, Baby.

If you want to read something, go outside and look at street signs. If you want to read the best damn thing written this millennium, find and swallow Ta-Nehisi Coates' "The Beautiful Struggle." It is a fast and dangerous read.

TNC, as he is known online, writes like words don't matter. His pacing makes prose seem poetry. He capitalizes nouns that deserve to be capitalized, not just ones that normally get the treatment. His abject neglect of quotation marks will leave you reeling.



Basically, it is his memoir of growing up in Baltimore and somehow surviving the crack epidemic, AIDS, and his super-human vegan, Vietnam Vet, ex-Panther leader father. Add on this TNC's status as the awkward, Dice-throwing nerd and you gain an unrivalled perspective.

I am not going to spoil the book for anyone, because you really must read it yourselves. But I am going to reflect on some of the basic themes. He talks a lot about having Knowledge and being a Conscious person. Concisely, this is the knowledge that you will always be judged by your looks and conscious that your heritage and birthright are the very things that will forever put you in harms way. But more than this, it is knowing that a better world can be made, built for you and yours. Maybe not today, maybe not this generation even. It not an overly hopeful message. It is knowledge that we were slaves.

TNC's father struggled to teach this to his children. In spite of their ignorance and apathy, in opposition to their surroundings, to make them into Conscious Individuals. In many ways this exemplifies the analogies between Blacks and Jews.

I think every religiously Jewish child grows up Conscious. If they didn't get the message, there was something wrong with the teachers. Even the strictly culturally Jewish have a budding awareness of Knowledge. They are keen to the fact the even though their great-grandfather may have been Jewish, they themselves would have been sent to a Death Camp.

Jews, as a scholarly people, tend to approach the Knowledge academically. Which frankly hasn't done wonders for our survival rate. Diaspora works, and if it isn't broken why fix it? But the Knowledge comes through. We were slaves. I was a slave. I am a slave. As long as there is oppression. We have been shambling in our manacles since Exodus. Struggling, hoping to free ourselves and others. Sometimes some of us get stupid. But there we are, chain ganged to our mothers and our fathers; our family promise a whip through the ages.

It strikes me as more than coincidence that the same things that tie me to my People also tie me to a little black boy growing up in the skids of Baltimore a decade before I was born.

Some of you who grew up with me may recall my rants against White people and privilege. How could I even consider being attracted to someone who stands on the systematic marginalization of my family, since before Mathematics existed or History was invented. In the wake of that great un-discussable, how could I love those who made my grandparents crazy, who made my parents crazy, who made me crazy. The Klan was active not a few blocks from my childhood home.

My parents nodded. They understood. They taught me not to Hate. But this wasn't Hate. This was wanting a safe place. A place where I wouldn't be constantly confronted by the crazy past, by the nonsensical now. Every side walk and manicured lawn was the product of the theft of my blood and ashes. Holocaust dialogue is Never Again. The unspoken message is When. Each Yiddishe kid worth two buttons asks themselves, my childhood raped? Will I be an Adult? Will I be prepared?

TNC most certainly had it harder than I did. But the values are the same. Reading "The Beautiful Struggle" was like reading an alternate version of my youth. In fact, it was closer to what my mother experienced, sans the nerd. But there is a lot of Truth in what he writes. So even if you are the progeny of the great oppressor classes, I think you'll still gain some gem of wisdom by reading it.

Last night, I was on the phone with my mother trying to explain the problems I was having with my research. Right now, I am doing uncertainty analysis and I was getting results whose error was seven orders of magnitude greater than the actual data value. Clearly this is wrong.

So I used the following analogy to get across the problem to my mom: "It is like thinking you have one M&M, you know, plus or minus 10 million M&Ms."

Mom: "Yikes! That is a lot of variance!"

Me: "Yup...And what I'd really like is one M&M plus or minus half an M&M."

Mom: "So, give or take an 'M'."

I thought it was cute. I wonder if this is a good way to teach error analysis. It worked seamlessly here...

Ya Raleigh!

Well, maybe not so exuberant as all that. I have been here a couple of weeks now, and have a couple of weeks left to go. I am painfully lonely here, in addition to the overworked/undersexed status that usually follows from graduate studies. Last year when I was here, my friend AJ from high school was also out doing an internship. At the time I didn't realize what this meant for my mental health. Normally, I am very good on my own: two sigma better than average. However, the previous two months of travel, going from seeing nearly everyone I have ever known to nothing was too severe. It was a train running into a brick wall.

But the trend might be changing; the end is in sight. To combat said loneliness, and think about something other than nuclear fuel cycle error propagation, I went to an album release party for Raleigh-local group Birds of Avalon. I found out about this though my avid blog-watching.

The concert had two opening bands before Birds played. The first was pretty decent. The second was some hybrid Indie-Punk, which frankly I was not into at all. Punk should have some bite, rather than be about your 4th of July weekend. And Indie-music, well I guess I don't care enough to have an opinion.

Birds of Avalon, however, were great. Their material encompassed words like 'Musicality' and 'Thoughtfulness' and 'Presence' and most of all, 'Entertaining'. Still, only one of their songs was truly spectacular, and they saved it for last.

I go into all of this because the venue was fairly interesting itself. The Pour House (get it? beer, pour) has an extensive upstairs balcony area that wrapped around two sides of the top of the building. From here you can look down on the pit and the band. This upstairs is where it is allowable to smoke. But the view makes it worth it. Basically I got an eagle eye view of the drummers for the cost of putting up with a little smoke. I loved it. At one point between the bands, this man Robin started talking to me. Robin, Raleigh born and raised, could tell within 5 minutes (from my accent) that I wasn't local. Damn.

In other good news, though, my friend Shawn from UCSB is going to visit me next weekend. He is moving to Maryland for graduate school from LA and I get the benefit of a visit. Awesome. And a week after that I am outta here!

Like with so many things in my life recently, my review of this year's silent film festival has been backlogged for a couple of weeks. But here it is, finally, in an attempt to get it out of my To-Do list.

The San Francisco Silent Film Festival this year was spectacular. In my brief three day visit to the city, I managed to see four films.

The Gaucho (1927): Aside from being my alma matter's mascot, gauchos are the Argentine version of the more northern cowboy. I knew that I wanted to see this film the moment saw it listed for the festival. 'Douglas Fairbanks' is a name that means less than it should outside of the silent film crowd. Thankfully, Dougy-Baby didn't fail to deliver.

The basic plot goes as follows. Girl master thief (Lupe Velez) meets boy master thief (the Gaucho, Douglas Fairbanks) and they fall in love. In their raiding of small town antics, they get roped into saving a small mountain shrine (the City of the Miracle) from a recent coup's dictator whose lackeys were shaking the Church down from money. Apparently, the plot occurred to Mr Fairbanks while visiting a similar shrine in the French countryside.

Douglas Fairbanks aerobics were impressive as always. Watching the man vault up and down buildings, on and off moving horses never seems to get old. But the truly shocking thing to me was his mastery of the bola. The bola is a weapon that is notoriously hard to learn. To master it takes practice from early childhood. However, Fairbanks performs difficult tricks with smooth ease. He even incorporates their usage into a dance!

Nor should the utter competence of the leading lady be overlooked. Lupe Velez was effectively the equal of her male counterpart. The most memorable moment for me of her was when she was locked up in a room. The key was stuck in the door on the other side. She pushed a rug underneath the door, used a pin to push the key out of the lock, the key fell onto the rug, she dragged the rug buck under the door, used the key to unlock the door, and walked out of the room. It was brilliant.

To overcome the dictators army currently garrisoned at the shrine, the Gaucho causes a stampede of thousands of cattle and ushers them into the city. This gives one of the most stunning shots of the film. When the cattle first get to the city walls, they cram up against them until their sheer mass breaks down brink and mortar. Then a flood of cow-flesh pours over the wall. When I am old and grey, that is an image that I will remember when I have forgotten all else. This movie was fantastic!

Wild Rose (1932): I have trouble finding good things to say about this movie. Not that it was bad, per se. I think fundamentally when I sit down to see a movie, I want to be entertained. This is probably a broader category for me than it is for most people; if I am challenged or forced to think, I am entertained.

That said Wild Rose wasn't entertaining. It is supposed to be this big paradigm shifting film for Chinese cinema. The director, Sun Yu, had just returned from the United States (having learned cinematography) and made this film. So maybe Yu's Chinese audience had never seen something like this movie before. However, I swear I had seen some of his shots in earlier films by Vertov and Chaplin and others. What was special was who made it and who was watching it at the time, not the film itself. The plot was OK, but overloaded with nationalist sentiment. I understand that some people really get off on such palpable propaganda, but I can't stomach it.

Underworld (1927): Easily my favourite film of the festival this year. It was marginally better than "The Gaucho". Billed to us as a proto-noir, it was truly the essence of a gangster film. To get an idea of how excellent this film was, it won the first ever Oscar for best writing. The plot is roughly about the sordid affair of the manly bank robber, criminal overlord Bull Weed, his girl Feathers, lawyer turned bum turned henchman Rolls Royce, and the usual cast of side character policemen and criminals. The movie is dark and funny, but never both at the same time. Rather than trying to describe the movie further, here is a poem I wrote about "Underworld":

I saw a girl named Evelyn yesterday.
She's dead now.
She died in 1975 and there is no going back.
Her skin turned black and white,
and Feathers were everywhere.
She had a Rolls Royce,
but never rode it.
What did that hour buy you,
you gregarious overgrowth of a man?
Did you polish the hard black body?
Do the ivory dressings now glisten in the night?
Draw a bad hand.
Reshuffle the deck.
The Police are here now
and Feathers are Everywhere!
Her head,
Evelyn's head, is too big. Was too big.
But maybe I am projecting.
I am no more interested in women than a fancy car.

You really should try and find a way to see this movie. Without discussing it to much more, Rolls Royce has this excellent line when Feathers first starts flirting with him. Even though Bull Weed is absent, Rolls legitimately plays hard to get.

Feathers says something like, "I am not interested in books." To which Rolls slyly responds, "And I am not interested in women."

The audience laughed. But there is an interesting historical point here. 'Woman' used here is a double entendre. The first meaning is the obvious one, 'woman' as in female human. The second use is 'woman' as a profession. So it is this second meaning that has since (thankfully) fallen out of usage. But I think it is this second one that Rolls really meant. Unlike Bull Weed, his character was not interested in having an unthinking, sit-there-and-look-pretty partner.

Aelita: The Queen of Mars (1924): This was a Soviet Russian science fiction film. I had seen this one in Austin a few years prior so I didn't bother seeing it again. I think I even made a post about it back then, but I am having trouble finding it. In truth, I was a bit disappointed. This was the first time that the Festival was screening a film I had already seen.

Erotikon (1929): 'Erokikon' was a Czech film discussing 'modern female sexuality'...if you ignore the glaring plot holes. The story is about a love pentagon. Basically, it follows this creepy (but handsome) sleaze-ball, the two women who he has seduced, and their husbands. The plot holes all revolve around the women. There is NO REASON after the first 20 minutes of the film for the women to ever even speak to the creepy guy again. But for some reason, they see him and fall head over heels once more.

The film was pretty good. The camera work had at least one toe in Avant Garde. Which of course was awesome. Virginal sex where the camera is placed on the bed, aimed upwards and pivoted. Splice in the picture of Mary on the wall looking down on you, and my friends, you have one awesome sex scene.

More than this though, I noticed that my facial features were similar to those of the actors in the movie. This perturbed me. They look like me. I know I have some Czech in me, somewhere. I have never felt th at I need to find people that I look like. Skin tone and is Italian, my height is French, hair is German. I don't look Jewish. But I always figured that I was an amalgam. These Czechs, though, they have my face. Of course what I really mean is that we share facial bone structure. This is even more clear and present since I have been recently beardless. For some reason this bothers me. They have my face!

Congrats if you made it here!

Alright folks, I rarely proselytize. So that should note to you that this is important.

In event that you don't know, the Tamil people are the ethnic minority in Sri Lanka. The history of the Tamil's shows striking parallels to that of my own people. I don't have the space here to go into full, comparative detail. So let's start with modern history then.

Most people in the United States are keenly aware of the strife that British Empire introduced to the Middle East with their policy of Partition for Israel/Palestine in 1948. To a lesser extent, we understand that our chums across the pond created huge problems for the world when they partitioned India from Pakistan at the same time. What is not well known here is that at the same time that India and Pakistan were split, Sri Lanka was made into a separate sovereignty.

Stemming from the independence came many problems. Mired in history that I am not covering here, Sri Lanka's Sinhalese majority and the Tamil minority have been effectively at war since 1948. From such a prolonged conflict has come many unsavoury types and deeds on both sides. I am not here to argue who was worse when. I am here to sue for pluralism.

In a recent push, the Sinhalese-majority government declawed the Liberation Tamil Tigers of Eelam, the Tamil's former military establishment. However, it appears that this has been just the first step in a larger attempt on genocide on the Sri Lankan Tamils.

I bring this up now on the urging of one of my friends and her mother. They are Tamil living in diaspora. Specifically, they requested for me to bring to the attention of my friends and relations a recent condemnation of the Sri Lankan government made by Elie Wiesel, the famous holocaust survivor and author.
Please, if there is any news outlet, religious organization, or the like that you could forward this statement onto, I know it would be appreciated.  Help send the message that this sort of inhuman behaviour will not be tolerated in the 21st century.  You have my personal gratitude.

Whooo Ok. Let's finish this off here.

Day 2: Believe it or not, the second day was when the pucky really hit the fan. Shane and I slept soundly the night before so we got sort of a late start. We saw the Tortoises a couple of more times on our way up to Hamilton Lake. It was another couple of thousand feet up over a short and steep trail. Serene and clam, the lake provided our lunch time spot at about 1 pm.

With plenty of daylight left to us, I posed the question to Shane on whether to press on to Precipice Lake or to stay at Hamilton for the night. Shane wisely lead us up and away.

If the hike to Hamilton was steep, the one to Precipice was worse. Notice a trend? On the way we come across a couple of guys making their decent. Apparently, they were trying to go from Giant Forest to Mt. Whitney in a mere 5 days. This leg of the hike was too much for them and so they decided to turn back and do some other route with their time. This was our first sign. Oddly one of the men knew about Eric Schwartz, whose t-shirt Shane was wearing.

Further up this leg, we meet a couple of other guys, also on their way down. We tell them that we are going to stay the night at Precipice. They tell us that there is snow there. We say "Great, we'd love to cool off!" They inform us that it would be well worth the 45 minutes to push over Kaweah Gap that night. We thank them and continue on. This was our second sign.

We loose the trail several times on our way up to the lake because of vast snow cover. This was our third sign. But we make it to Precipice and this is what we see...

So Shane gets the question again!

"Do we press on or do we turn back and go to Hamilton?" It is 5:30 pm. Light is no longer a luxury. We need to make for a place to camp. Not wanting to backtrack after this ordeal, Shane orders the push over the gap!

The trail has been converted into a stream for most of the rest of the short and flat jaunt to Kaweah Gap. But hiking down the other side of the gap into the Big Arroyo Valley was easily the most dangerous and difficult part of the trip.

After taking in the sweeping vista for a few minutes, we decide that we need to make it to the valley floor and the trail (which we think we can see in the distance) before dark. Unfortunately, the trail is snowed out even worse on this side! The parts of the trail that we can't find are now measured in quarters of a mile, and not yards. We don't know where we are going and we can't see how to get there. In a word: Lost.

'Down' is the best, chilly, dusky guess we can muster. But the hillside is steep and snowy. And where it is not snow-covered, it is rocky and rugged. It does not take us long to arrive at an impasse that we can't simply walk down. I think for a moment. I look around again. Then I remember a part in "Desert Solitaire" where Edward Abbey, being too lazy to walk down a snowy mountain he had climbed, decided that it was much easier to slide down a snow drift.

Ding! Off go our packs and shoved in front of us, they lead us down 60 feet that we could not have walked down, to the next ledge. Thanks Eddie-Baby, that trick worked...once. The next impassable portion was too steep even for that to be vaguely safe.

Here, there is a place in the rock that Shane and I can climb down and only have to jump around 5 feet to make it. However, there was no way for us to have our packs on and live. We considered lowering them down on ropes, but even that seemed risky. But! If we had good aim, we might be able to throw them to the next ledge down. Tricky business since the ledge we wanted to hit gave us less than a foot for margin of error with the width of our packs.

I asked Shane, "Is everything secured?" For each pack, Shane grabbed the top of the pack and I the bottom. One, two, three, and off they went! Amazingly they both made their mark! Mine almost went over the far edge, but thankfully did not.

"Shit!", I yelled as I remembered that my camera was still attached to the outside of the backpack and probably took the brunt of the fall. Apparently, my brother safely secured his inside his attic... Even though I felt like an idiot, my camera ended up being fine (Wheeew).

We make it to the warmer valley floor and find the trail. We hike for an hour before making camp by the mosquito-infested river. Fuckin' day two, I swear.

Day 3: We find ourselves today in a high mountain valley, on the wrong side of the Great Western Divide. We had crossed it the day before at Kaweah gap. We hike downriver, crossing several rivers and streams, until we turn off and up to the Little Five Lakes. We make good time and stop for lunch at about noon.

The next part of the trip takes us over Blackrock Pass, the next-southernmost crossing of the Great Western Divide. At this point one might consider us bored by words like 'snow' and 'rock'. Or barring that experts at traversing them. No.

Blackrock Pass offered new and exciting ways to loose the trail. On the way up, the trail was out as often as it was in. I'd often scramble up over rocks to get an elevated perspective on where the trail re-emerged. I'd shout out the information back down to Shane, who was not so dumb as to hop over anything with a full pack on. Finally, we see Blackrock itself. And between it and us is the largest snow field I have ever seen in June. What must have been at least 400 yards across, it hid the trail and thus any idea of where we were actually going.

Brief patches of trail-like land appeared for 10 feet or so before disappearing back into snowy anonymity. However, most of the snow is below a certain elevation, like salt collecting in the bottom of a bowl. Unfortunately, once we make it beyond the vast snow, we have the side of the bowl to deal with.

I know I have used the word steep previously. That was a misuse. Making it to the top of Blackrock Pass was steep. Angles of 75+ degrees, hands-and-knees on jagged rocks steep. Somewhere between this, ~65 lbs on his back, and an elevation of close to 12,000 feet, Shane started complaining that he wasn't feeling well.

Crap. We *have* to get over this thing! Tonight! I give him the pep talk about no trail being hard if you are willing to spend the proper amount of time on it. We take frequent breaks. At long last we make it. It is very very windy at the top.

Worth every gust.

That night we hike down to the Kaweah Middle Fork Valley giddy at our accomplishment. Oh, and the ability to walk downhill. We make camp at Pinto Lake and Shane sets up the hammock.

Day 4: Mosquitoes drove us fast and early that morning and we make excellent time: 7 miles before lunch at Redwood Meadow. There we meet a creepy guy who wanted to show us a 'special mushroom' that he thinks he can find again... We declined in feigned interest of feeding ourselves.

Our goal is to make it to the foothills, camp, wake up the next morning and go to Buckeye Flats and hitch a ride back to our car. Nature had other plans.

While in the middle of a creek, it starts to rain, lightning, and thunder. This is the backpacking equivalent of being caught with your pants down and your junk in a melon or any vegetable halfway up your cootter-hole. We get the fuck out of that creek.

We throw our rain gear on and take a sweaty run farther down the mountain to where it is no longer raining. Between the great time we made that morning and being recently propelled by weather, we make for Buckeye Flats that night.

Somehow, near dark, we do end up getting there and finding a camp-site. We had walked 23+ miles that day. In the last 28 hours we had gone from an elevation of 12,000 feet to a mere 3,000 or so. Our bodies were spent. Food and sleep were the only conceivable things.

Notice how Asian tourists doing Karaoke by the fire at the camp next door wasn't on that list? They didn't!

Also, recall the calm and professional way we handled that bear from Day One? Yeah, no one at the camp site was there for that, so they all freaked the hell out.

It really is amazing what will keep you awake when you are that tired!

Day 5The next morning which hitched a ride back to our car, as planned. We went to Three Rivers, took a shower and then drove back to Santa Ynez.

As Shane said to me at one point, "I don't think I like pain as you." This trip was incredible!

So it has now been a few weeks, I suppose, since I went backpacking with my brother Shane in Sequoia. But if it is any indication of how hectic my life has been recently, I am just sitting down to write the post about it.

The long and the short of the trip was that since we took our parents van we couldn't make it to Mineral King, a very steep and remote part of the park. However, there were still some trails that lead off from Giant Forest that we had yet to do. Specifically, The High Sierra Trail.

The High Sierra Trail has a pretty interesting history itself. It is essentially a quite long, well established cut-off trails. It was meant as a quick way to give access to longer and more imposing back country romps like the Pacific Crest Trail and the John Muir Trail. Starting from Crescent Meadow in Giant Forest, the High Sierra Trail takes you 60 miles up and down to the peak of Mt. Whitney (the highest peak in the continental US).

That is not what we did. Hiking clear east across the park and up Mt. Whitney was not the plan this time out. However, we did end up walking a couple of days down this way and used the High Sierra Trail to cross the Great Western Divide the first time. But the really strange thing about the High Sierra Trail was that it was both very busy. And in spite of this traffic, everyone on it was a little off, if not downright nuts.

Day 1: We pretty much walk into this bear on our first mile out. I have been close to bears before but never like that. Shane is the one who has to tell me that there was a bear ten feet in front of me on the trail, if only I would bother to look up. We stand there and look at each other, us and the bear, for a moment. Shane and I make ourselves big, wait, and then take a step towards it. The bear scuttles off. It was pretty comical.



It did not take us long for us to meet a certain older couple for the first time. She was lithe and ladylike. He had a classic seventies 'stash. We nick named them the 'Tortoises' to our 'Hares'. We would pass them, take an extended break. They would chug along and pass us. We would sleep in, only to find them ahead of us on the trail again! This scenario played out five times in various ways over the course of two days.

Later that day while eating lunch in the middle of the trail, a mule train came upon us. While we are moving out of the way, the leader (who was decked out in full, real cowboy attire) made small talk with us. He asked what we were eating. We responded, "Ummmmm peanut butter and jelly on a tortilla." The esteemed gentleman's uninterrupted response was "Nothin' Better!"

When we made it to Bearpaw Meadow, the family in the camp next to us strongly hinted that we were not welcome there. Not wanting to be part of any club that had such jerks as members, we took the easy road and left.

And now I am tired in real life...I'll try getting the rest out soon!

1) If you didn't know, Nakia was in a car accident tonight. She is fine, if a little bruised and currently car-less.

2) I am currently home in Austin, until Wednesday. If you want to do lunch or coffee or dinner Tuesday, let me know! Call, write, carrier pigeon...