Welcome to Brother Pete's Blog Space where current events, books, historical moments and memories, movies, new & old ideas, and other randomnesses are allowed to mingle as we see fit for comment.
Opening shot from David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986)
He smelled like Captain Black: There is a story that goes like this: A little boy had a kind old grandfather who brought him gifts and smelled of pipe tobacco. The boy's name is inconsequential, his grandfather was Fred, but the boy called him Gran-pa...
Yellow-green skies and brown-grey pipe smoke: The boy has a memory of running into the yellow-green-skied tropical winds of his backyard during Hurricane David's run up the east coast while Gran-pa watched on from the shelter of a side porch. It's a strange memory to have and might be corrupt*, but in it the sky was so weird, the wind powerful enough to knock the boy down, and the pipe-smoking kind-smiling leather-skinned Gran-pa, so calm. It's a suspicious memory that might be a hybrid with ties to two or more separate side porch moments, perhaps even spanning two homes and multiple days in the late 70s; but it is a powerful recollection, nonetheless, for a seven year-old contrasting exciting yellow-green danger with calm brown-grey pipe smoke...
He was a great man: Gran-pa, at one point in his life, had been a mayor of a small town that surely had white picket fenced houses, a candy store on the corner, and a gazebo/band-stand at the center of town across from the soda fountain/diner. He was married to a woman who was elegant and had one child who fit right-in on the fall-harvest float in the town parade. Gran-pa had also been a volunteer firefighter in his time; and he had a kind smile. Gran-pa died when the boy was seven of emphysema. Everytime anyone spoke to the boy about his grandfather, they said things like, "He was a great man. He was a firefighter, you know." The little boy always heard, "Your grandfather was a great man, BECAUSE he was a firefighter." And so he always thought firefighters were great men (and women)...
Life imitating fiction imitating life: The boy visited the local firehouse in North Baltimore throughout his youth, and eagerly watched any movie or show that featured firefighting as he grew older:
Emergency (1972-1977) - TV
Towering Inferno (1974) - Movie
Code Red (1981-1982) - TV
Backdraft (1991) - Movie
Firestorm (1998) - Movie
Third Watch (1999-2005) - TV
9/11 (2002) - Movie
Ladder 49 (2004) - Movie
Rescue Me (2004-2011) - TV
Chicago Fire (2012-present) - TV
The quality of some of these cinematic depictions of firefighting is suspect, as is the acting and plot in places. Director of Backdraft Ron Howard has commented on how hard it is to film fire well, but makes it exciting in Backdraft, and the fire in Jay Russell's Ladder 49 is near perfect. What is captured consistently in each of these shows and films is the camaraderie of the firefighters themselves as they do the work they are trained to do and rely on each other as soldiers must in any conflict...
And so the boy decided one day to be a firefighter and perhaps be a great man like Gran-pa...
4/4/12
"If this ain’t the greatest job in the world, I don’t know what is.": Many events from my childhood, along with relocation to my own small town with picket fences and volunteer firefighters, and ultimately the events of 9/11 (2001) moved me to join the local fire department and train to be a firefighter. God, I love my jobs! Both interior firefighting and wildland firefighting are a mix of exciting yellow-green danger with calm brown-grey pipe smoke... We don't run into buildings or forests on fire, spazzy and uncontrolled; we walk in, find the beast, look it in the eye, and kick its ass. The chaos of an interior fire and limitations of equipment on light-hearted communication makes fighting structure-fires acute and exciting, but lacks the slow buddy-building that fighting a fire in the woods might. Wildland firefighting is its own beast, and requires different gear and training than interior work; it yields a different sort of camaraderie, not better or worse, just different. Walking into the woods at dawn with your crew to resume battle on a fire that has been resting all night but ready to spring back to life is an amazing feeling...
2013 events fictionalized in 2017: On October 20, Columbia Pictures will release Only the Brave, a movie based upon the story of hotshots battling the 2013 Yarnell Hill Fire of Arizona. Although the director, Joseph Kosinski, is reasonably unproven, the trailer for this film has me very excited nonetheless. "We’re only seconds away, it’s going to feel like the end of the world. As long as you can breathe you can survive"...
* I called my mother after writing this and found some facts. Oh, how memories can be corrupted by time. We lived on Midherst until Summer '78. The porch there had steps leading into the back yard. Fred loved that porch. He visited Overhill before he died and loved the porch there as well, but it does not have stairs leading to the back yard. Hurricane David did not land in Maryland until Fall '79, several months after Fred had died. Memories of green skies and brown grey pipe smoke are just the mind of a boy grasping at wisps of his beginnings it seems...
Blade Runner (1982): Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) is a replicant, a bioengineered, biorobotic android, who is being hunted by Richard Deckard (Harrison Ford), a Blade Runner cop who's job is to retire rogue "skin-jobs." The year is 2019, a future in which our science is pushing back against it's creators. In the final moments of the film, perched atop the canopy of a post-apocalyptic urban landscape, Deckard has his final moments with his prey turned hunter...
Roy Batty: "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I've watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those ... moments will be lost in time, like tears...in rain. Time to die." [exeunt]
Richard Deckard: "I don't know why he saved my life. Maybe in those last moments he loved life more than he ever had before. Not just his life... anybody's life... my life. All he'd wanted was the same answers the rest of us want. Where do I come from? Where am I going? How long have I got? All I could do is sit there and watch him die."
Neo-Noir Cinema: I fell in love with cyberpunk when I graduated from middle school to the time of disenfranchised angst that is adolescence. I am not sure when I first saw it, but Blade Runner rained down upon my imagination like futuristic nuclear rain and drowned me in a love of the dark sci-fi that would come later, The Fifth Element, The Matrix, Gattaca, 12 Monkeys, Dark City, City of Lost Children, and so many more. Although I was moderately tantalized and intimidated by Pris' (Daryl Hannah) thigh crushing fight with Deckard, and terrified by the sheer maniacal taunting and power by Roy, it was the repeated use of the extreme close ups and close ups of eyes that for 35 years has been what I cherish most about the film...
Proverbs 30:17: "The eye is the window to the soul": Perception / reality, android soul, lens vs. mirror, intimacy and coldness; the eye is the object theme that Ridley Scott returns to scene after scene. Whether reflecting the urban landscape, being used as a test of humanity, or bringing us to the intimacy of emotion in a sea of indifference and coldness, Scott uses eyes in this film that way Tarantino uses the F-bomb and bullets, frequently and without mercy. The dark grey & black sets lit by hazy sunsets or neon lighting make many characters eyes pop in almost inhuman ways, and makes one wonder if it is intentional when occasionally certain characters eyes are allowed to languish in dull shadow. The eyes in this film haunt me and I have been thinking about whether androids dream of electric sheep ever since. On October 6 producer, Ridley Scott returns with Blade Runner 2049! I cannot wait...
"I'm fixing a hole where the rain gets in - And stops my mind from wandering - Where it will go": So much depends on the quick fixes that aren't done right or with the correct tools and that make the things work in an only partial way of course. So much depends on the time time potentially saved to fix something else in a half-assed way when we jump right in and wing it. So much depends on the mistakes we make in our haste and sloppy impatience as we stumble through the repairs of our lives...
"I'm filling the cracks that ran through the door - And kept my mind from wandering - Where it will go": Sometimes I might spend days researching, planning, and learning to do a job right. Working at it such that the outcome just has to be as I hope as I invest time and money and effort and hope in a solution. And sometimes the learning is incomplete and those plans go awry and the job gets botched...
"And it really doesn't matter if I'm wrong I'm right - Where I belong I'm right - Where I belong.": So every once and a while I just use duct tape, or hot glue, or a piece of tin. Sometimes I just wing it. And sometimes winging it gets me a victory.
"I'm taking the time for a number of things - That weren't important yesterday - And I still go - Ooh ooh ooh ah ah": It reminds me that sometimes the solutions are simple things, incomplete things, messy things. Sometimes the "fix" is just a "mend" that doesn't impede the momentum of living. Sometimes I think it might be the right thing to just show up and see what happens...
There is something poetic about the proper ratios found a simple bowl of cereal in the morning. Dry, plain Cheerios filled almost to the top of a simple white ceramic bowl. Two heaping teaspoons of dark brown sugar—trying so much to be tablespoons—lumped near the center, on top. 1% milk-fat milk poured over the sugar to coax it down into the bowl while the Cheerio line rises to just the top edge of the bowl. Perfect.
And a book.
And a teaspoon.
And a desire to coordinate the approach of the spoon to the mouth without the seemingly obligatory drip of milk below the lower lip that needs to to be repeatedly cleaned with an up-flick of the left index finger.
The process would be easy if it weren't for the book—held beyond the bowl to avoid any splashes and spills; it would be easy if all that was concentrated on was the slow approach of the spoon to the mouth coordinated with the eyes and with the mind; but the eyes are somewhere else—perhaps reading about motorcycle maintenance—and the mind is trying to do too many things before benefitting from the perfect cup of coffee that comes later.
And about halfway down, the ratio become wrong. The milk outnumbers the O's (or is it Oh's?). Another pour of the cereal to just cover the surface of the now partially exposed milk, followed by the slow turning over the the mix like a gardener mulching.
And all is right again.
The ratio might be corrected even one more time before the final bowl-tilt-slurp is performed to finish off the meal. No waste!
And then on to the perfect cup of coffee...
