Algorithmic addresses

Traveling to Grand Junction Colorado we could not stop laughing at the system designed in the late 1800's by the founders of the city to give names to their streets and avenues. 

The founders decided they wanted a grid system to designate the names of the city's streets, with the markers of one part being the number of miles from the Utah border and the cross streets being the letters of the alphabet.

What happens is that you are driving and you're going to have an address that says A and 29 three-quarter roads. For another example, B and a half road or F and 7/8 road. It's a confusing system for those of us who can barely remember our friends and family members names, much less fractions.

Here's the history on how the odd fractions and alphabet system came into being, according to Wikipedia. Grand Junction's city founders wanted to have an orderly system, but they neglected to take into account that much of the land was already owned in orchards and farmlands and otherwise developed.

So what happened is they put their neat little grid over this patchwork of fields and farms and orchards, needing afterward to build roads to correspond with the grid. Here's the bump in the road, so to speak. Orchard owners and farmers were not on board with roads dividing up their lands and said to the engineers, "Forget it, you're not putting that road through my land."

By coincidence, during our vacation we have been listening to Daniel Pink read from his book Drive (not in a car, but as in motivation). My VP at NVC loaned me a print version of the book last year and i thought a refresher was in order. We have been learning about the differences between left and right brain thinking, or as Pink puts it, operating system 2.0 and 3.0.

They were the two different kind of tasks that he writes about, the first being algorithmic and the second heuristic, and he divides them into the left side of the brain and the right side of the brain. As a college professor what interested me is that Pink saya 70% of new jobs calling for heuristic thinking instead of the algorithmic kind required in the 20th century like accounting and even legal, which are now being outsourced to other countries, where they are done for less pay. 

So, going to Grand Junction was a timely example of how stubborn we humans are. We wanted to impose a grid system and we did just that, even though evidence showed that it would not really work, because people were unwilling to give up their private property for the nice neat grid that looked good on paper and crazy in reality.

So here we have that perfect example of human messiness coming up against human desire for order.  I admit its not practical, but it is unique. And what could be more colorful than saying to someone, "meet me at the corner of F and a half and G and 3/4?"

It's a big country and que Bonita es mi gente

Traveling makes you see life from another point of view, sometimes a weary one from sitting too long in a speeding vehicle of some kind, getting from home to someplace else, sometimes a surprised point of view as in a strange supermarket when a stranger sees you and recognizes you. 

I was shopping for tomatillos in the Lake Tahoe Safeway with my brother in law when a woman in her early forties interrupted our careful tomatillo picking to inquire how we would use them, explaining she never sees anyone in the store buying tomatillos. 

We started chatting about tomatillo ideas and she asked me if I am Hispanic, because of my accent. She explained she lived now in Seattle but had grown up in Deming, New Mexico. We talked about our mutual adoration of Hatch's chiles and I noticed her kind eyes and sunny complexion.

A brief encounter, but a memorable one because even in a strange places we find each other, the folks who have a history in common, or a nationality, often less than heritage, but simply a reverence in common the things that mark our places on the planet, our foods or nature's gifts, a majestic mountain range and its trees and streams.

Eydie Wins Over the Supremes

Back some time ago, I first "met" Eydie and her partner, Thea, by watching the documentary available on Netflix about their lives together:
Eydie and Thea 

Today, the Supreme Court ruled in her favor, and in the direction many of us were hoping and praying that our nation's leaders would rule. 

The Internet, Our Brains and the Possibilities, Pro and Con

 













Is it true the Internet is affecting how we think? 

Here is a great and brief exploration of the question by Nicholas Carr, a writer who I just learned has written a new book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing To Our Brains. The link below is to the short video.

 What the Internet Is Doing To Your Brain
As I prepared to start this post, I received an email which I naturally stopped to read. Then I wandered around on the blog and scanned my posts to discover a piece of information about a birding expedition that I wanted to send family who are about to vacation in South Padre.  Then I lost track of what I was doing for a moment before I remembered I was going to write a blog entry. 

And this is a relaxed, easy day. What does my brain look like preparing to face a room full of students who mistook my class as an easy A?

What do you think of this video? I confess I struggle with some of the ideas, particularly the idea that deep, contemplative thinking is required to create works of art. It may be useful at times and for some people, but there are other ways to create. I am a proponent of group projects and know of the value of brain storming with colleagues and working with one or more partners.  

Fifty years together as artists and friends

This ARTS segment was recorded in early April at Brackenridge Park by Sergio Gonzalez, directed and written by me, and edited by David Bibbs. 

The challenge for me was to give each of these artists their due time in a brief documentary segment. That would be about two to three minutes for each person--not enough time to include very much, so I decided to focus on their craft, not personal or even group histories. I hoped 50 years together would say it all!

I was inspired one morning about a day or two before our scheduled shoot, while doing Buteyko breathing exercises, to devise a shot list that would allow me to "frame" the artists with unloading from a vehicle and use those shots of arriving and departing the park as an open and close. 

Thinking visually was challenging, but our KLRN TV (PBS) Executive Producer, Julie Coan's suggestion for our team to study the work of award winning videographer and to read Al Tomkins' Aim For The Heart, Write, Shoot, Report and Produce for TV and Multimedia
really helped to fire up my thinking: I would end each artist's mini-profile with a close up of his signature. 

The shooting was wonderful, the location couldn't be beat, and the music and editing were fabulous. The interviews were succinct and clear about the challenges watercolor painting poses to the artist. 

Not everything worked as I planned, however hard I worked on my shot list. I tried and tried to get the artists to send images of their final work of the pieces they started for us that day to show each of the completed versions, but technology barriers were too many to overcome. 

I'm so proud of this piece! It's great to see inspiration through to completion, but it's never quite like you might envision things. I totally agree with the artist, Clay McGoughy as he taps his temple, "You should see what I see in here!"

San Antonio's Watercolor Gang

The Spurs, The Cowboys, The Eagles and the Movie

Silver Linings Playbook was a good movie to see around this time of year when the San Antonio Spurs are performing their annual ritual of teasing the city with playoff action that has many fans battling something bordering mental illness. 

The film, which deals in a small way with mental health, and touches on our culture's tendency to solve all problems with medication, depicts in an amazingly tender and rare way how fathers and sons treat each other, resemble each other and love each other.

In the film I learned about the value and nature of sports, the passion and emotion that we are allowed to express through our surrogate sports persona-avatars. The steam we are allowed to vent with their wins and losses. 

You have got to give credit to an award-winning movie about ballroom dancing and football. That's a movie for everybody. The love story's ballroom contest is itself a contender for the funniest dance move in cinema history.

Hell's Got Nothing Over Mexico in film: El Infierno

At the start of the movie, I wasn't sure if the film's billing of El Infierno, or Hell, as a comedy was an error. 

So far, the friendly, polite Mexican laborer, Benny, had been sent back by the border patrol to his dusty home in Mexico after 20 years in the U.S., told "don't come back," and was then welcomed home by his dear, old mother with a whalloping slap across the face. Then Benny learns his younger brother, who he had promised to send for while away in the States, earned the name El Diablo, the devil, while Benny was away, before being killed in the narco turf wars of two look-alike brothers who hate each in the way that only family members can.

When the affable and gentle Benny needs money to bail El Diablo's son out of jail, Benny's childhood friend, also turned mafioso, takes him to his patron's ranch to get him a job in what seems to be the only trade visible besides bar-tending or patching up tires: running drugs. We need a guy in a white hat to come into this picture, I said to myself on the couch.

The old mafia don and his wife, who's the brains of the business, have a living room the size of  a museum. The photos of the don and his wife taken with Mexico's ex-president Vicente Fox and shown kneeling piously receiving the blessing of Pope John were the first clues telling me where this film was headed: dangerous and dangerously-funny territory, as in "oh-no-you're-not-going-there." Maybe Benny's old mother's slapping him to say hello was a hint. 

When Benny faints at his first mob-style execution, I sat up straight on the sofa and said, "oh-hell-yes-you-are-going-there!" A film about a complex character, a man caught in the combine.  And though I knew where he would end, I was glued to the screen wondering what I would learn in the story of his journey. Thoughts of white hats were far from my mind now.

It's a modern Godfather story, complete with betrayals and loyalties, corrupt officials and lots of blood and machine-gun fire. What makes this an A film, and not a B, guns-n-tits shoot 'em up, is the dark humor and brutal honesty of the movie. 

El Infierno takes you to the underbelly of the beast of our times:  the centuries-old resentments of the Natives against the Whites, as who Benny is perceived by the native Oaxacan military-trained soldiers-turned narcos with whom he works. Mexico's schizophrenic views of women as either virgins or prostitutes are turned upside down in characters who have no recourse but to think only of themselves, such as Benny's mother,  the knitting shop-keeper who is bought off with drugs to watch out for the mob, or the wife of the don, who is a movie unto herself. She is the more-cruel-than-anyone-woman behind the narco-throne who is surely to blame for her son's being gay, not to mention being murdered.

I'm strangely optimistic for Mexico's future after watching this film. I confess I'm probably myopic in my love for Mexico, but I'm optimistic that a film like this can be made with funding help from the Mexican government. This is not to say after it was completed, the film was later supported by the government, which it was not. I'm mainly optimistic because I'm reminded once again by El Infierno that the arts have a strong role to play in making life--if not better for us--then clearer for us to see. 

Art helps us to observe what the dusty clouds of sharp braking trucks and the commotion and business of everyday life obscure. Picasso with Guernica, Steinbeck with The Grapes of Wrath. The Spanish Civil War and the Great Depression, each seen more easily. Leading us to remember and not make the same mistakes twice, hopefully.

Here in El Infierno is the role of drugs, now entering the lives of off the shelf, average Mexican kids, cops, and even the man at the hotel desk with his own meth addiction. Here is the stereotype of the self-less, sacrificing mother exposed  as empty by Benny's mother, who as she blesses him asks for his new gold watch and for a Walkman like her neighbor's. Here is the handsome "good cop" federal agent promising immunity and protection in return for information such as offered thugs in America, and Benny falling in his trap. The trip through the combine is nearly ended. Here is the childhood friendship of two boys who lovingly call each other 'mi' or my when referring to each other. "Mi Benny" is really no one's, not wanted by the U.S., which has tossed him back, not Mexico's, who sees him only as another grunt with a strong back. 

When Benny finally takes his place at the fancy stretch of cemetery mini-chapels that are set up when men in his family die, we see through the veil of the supposed foundations of Mexican culture, that his religion and faith have also failed him. 

Benny, who was always polite, waited for the patriotic orators to complete their speeches on Mexico's Independence Day when the names of Mexican heroes sound hollow against the fact that more people have died in the drug war there than in the entire 30 year Revolution, which surpasses in carnage that of our own Civil War. Benny waited for the crowd to finish singing the national hymn before paying his respects with an automatic weapon to the assembled powerful elite standing above the celebrating crowd.

For all the seemingly never-ending cycles of misery of greed and drug-born corruption this film exposes, my optimism and my laughter at the irony of the film's story and of its making are my rewards for watching El Infierno.  

After the commercial success of the film in Mexico and its easy availability over Netflix now, if the government regrets its funding of the project, that's too bad. The cat's out of the bag. Anyway, El Infierno is too funny and too accurate to censor. Though, if the brilliant and brave filmmaker ever asks for funding for his work from the government again, he might be told, as was Benny when he was booted out by the border patrol, "don't come back." 

The link below is to the full on-line version, without subtitles. 

I would try to see El Infierno on Netflix, with subtitles, if only for the fun of watching how many ways the word "cabron" is translated. 

Also puzzled at the translation of "mas loco que una cabra" (crazier than a female goat) to "crazier than a shit house rat." Overall, surprised and grateful thanks to the translator, the writer, the director, actors and everyone associated with the making of this amazing and brave film. 

Good luck in finding a new job, too, to the government official who approved its funding.
http://cinefox.tv/ver1957/el-infierno_pelicula-completa.html