My better half and I spent the night in San Francisco the other day. In the morning we walked down California Street to the Ferry Building. The hills of SF always give you such nice views.
There’s a lot of great old buildings on lower California. The Union Bank Building near Battery Street has some cool stone walruses set into its wall, remnants of the Alaska Commercial Bank.
All these complicated machineries. Vaguely like the cityscapes in Star Wars III, which I just saw. That traffic in the sky in Star Wars really bothered me. Who’d want to live under that? Terrible to see, also. Like having dinner in a restaurant next to a freeway with the headlights streaming by. You feel temporary and rushed. Not that I felt rushed in the spot behind the Ferry Building where I took this picture. Calm there.
And here’s an elephant graveyard of dead mufflers. Let’s suppose that Yoda the green attack-chihuahua is hiding underneath. I used to like to hate Yoda, but now I give up, I love him. His ears are so beautiful in the new movie. Like segments of conch shells. Slightly twitching. Remember in one of the old Star Wars when Yoda rises up from near a swamp and you just see his ears? I used to tie my handkerchief around my hand with the ends pulled out to make two Yoda ears for the kids.
Cameras and bots are everywhere, lurking. But where's Jar Jar Binks? I love him even more than Yoda. I never understood the public vitriol against the fellow. He got like one second in Padme's funeral this time out.
I picked up a bit of an anti-Patriot-Act message in Star Wars III, which was good to hear. But Lucas wrote the script? He can't afford to hire a professional SF writer? What is this with writer-directors? They don't try and create their own computer graphics, do they? Or build their own sets, or sew the costumes. But, hey, anyone can write…
May 29th, 2005 at 10:09 am
You LIKED Jar Jar? I may be forced to de-link you after this disturbing revelation!
BTW: I was in a watch store yesterday, looking at vintage chronometers. I found one I really liked, with a beautifully aged sunburnt patina on the dial. I was discussing it with the dealer, and without thinking, I referred to it as “gnarly!” The Gnarl Meme is spreading!
May 31st, 2005 at 7:27 am
I agree that George Lucas would have been much better off if he had someone different write the scripts for his movies, or at least had one or two to ghostwrite. But Lucas has always been somewhat of an egomaniac who thinks that he can do no wrong. I guess the throngs of people who turn out for his movies sort of reaffirms this delusion in his mind, despite bad reviews.
To his credit, though, Star Wars III WAS the best of the three prequels, and if you ignore the dialogue, was mostly pretty good. He actually came close to capturing the feeling of the original series.
May 31st, 2005 at 10:07 am
Um, I think a lot of people didn’t like Jar Jar because his whole character came off like a demeaning, caricature of a black slave!
May 31st, 2005 at 11:04 am
Yeah, I know, Jar Jar seemed somewhat like he was meant to be black. And his country was a little like Jamaica. But they should have kept him and just dialed up the street-reality of him and let, like, Cedric the Entertainer be his voice. Better an odd black character than no blacks at all, I say, in the teeth of our screaming discomfort at the presence of race. Kind of odd that all the aliens have to be “white,” hmm?
Once he gets his rig on, Darth Vader is black, I guess. Anniken got cooked black! And there’s that cool Cab Calloway guy who lives in the cloud city.
And in the same vein, Yoda is, I’d say, “Asian.” Maybe that’s why he annoys some people so much.
Are any of the aliens Latino?
And who wants to claim Jabba the Hut?
May 31st, 2005 at 11:56 pm
Hey, what color are the Wookies under all that fur?
(This is turning into a bad standup routine.)
The good guy aliens in Buckaroo Banzai were rastas. Now that was a good movie. Why can’t they make five more of those?
June 14th, 2005 at 5:23 pm
Yoda is Jewish! His name is too close to the Hebrew yada or yodea, which means to understand and to know, respectively. And of course the fact that his original face was modeled on Einsteins, and I think the episode 1 Yoda looked more like Asimov, especially with thise sideburns
May 6th, 2007 at 1:21 am
First time I’ve ever responded to anything like this. I just did a google search on “yoda” and “hebrew” and found this. Yoda also speaks with inverted subject-noun grammar and other inversions that are similar to hebrew grammar. I wonder if Steven Speilberg intended these. Anyone know ?
April 5th, 2010 at 3:22 am
“Jar Jar seemed somewhat like he was meant to be black. And his country was a little like Jamaica”
That made me laugh – it’s exactly what I thought 🙂
Love the last photo. Is that ball bearings?
April 8th, 2010 at 12:58 pm
Those are some cool pics. Ilike the boats the best. Alot of texture in them. Good job!