Regenstein Emergency

I wanted to check out Schneewind's Moral Philosophy from Montaigne to Kant to get some readings for my Phil Perspectives class yesterday, but there was some emergency going on. All of the readers were assembled out in front and there were three fire engines and some police cars parked out front. I didn't stick around to see what was going on because PJ showed up and gave me a ride home in his new bassmobile.

Fish & Chips in Santa Monica

Ye Olde King's Head pub and restaurant in Santa Monica. B Chan suggested that we have lunch at this place.

The fish and chips were decent. The chips/fries were crispy and substantial, and I liked the chunky tartar sauce. But the fish suffered from over-battering. And the batter was crunchy, rather than crispy. There was about 1/2 inch of batter you had to crunch through before you got to the cod, which was sweet and nice (and "fresh from Iceland"). Compare the look of the batter on the fish to this, for example. The batter on English fish and chips is almost translucent.

We also tried their mushy peas (too watery, not pulverized enough), and their rhubarb crumble. I asked for the Bird's custard to be placed on the side, because it usually smothers the taste of the crumble under a pale yellow mass of super-sweet pudding-like stuff (that's "pudding" in the American sense). But this rhubarb crumble might have benefitted from the Bird's camoflauge, because it wasn't very impressive looking.

The Look of Southern California

The view from the walk-up window at Randy's Donuts in Inglewood: cars, asphalt, concrete, palm trees, pale blue sky.

Kicking and Screaming

Noah Baumbach's Kicking and Screaming was one of the first movies that my friends and I watched as freshman in college. We liked the way Grover and Max dressed: sportcoats, corduroys, brown shoes. Some of us still dress like that.

The college scenes in the movie are supposed to take place somewhere on the east coast. Grover at one point refers to the town the college is in as "Munton", but I haven't been able to find Munton on the map. But there are any number of reasons to think that it's set on the east coast: In the opening party scene, Max says that his parents have flown out from Chicago "to rent out these swank digs". When Friedrich says that "racism spans the globe", he says that "from Howard Beach to Crown Heights we witness acts of hatred". Howard Beach is in Queens and and Crown Heights is in Brooklyn. It's unlikely that that would be a familiar geographical reference to someone not close to New York. Grover's dad is obsessed with the Knicks and has an apartment in "the village", and his girlfriend works for the New Yorker and has "a lovely place in Oyster Bay" (Long Island, presumably). The high-school girl, Kate, who Grover tutors and who eventually takes Max to prom has a New Jersey-like accent. And the clothes everyone wears (corduroys, sweaters, sportcoats) are not really west coast. But most conclusive is a remark that Otis makes he is leaving to go to grad school in Milwaukee. Grover and Max say that Milwaukee is only an hour's difference, and Otis worries that he'll be hungry for dinner at five and ready for the local news at four. That means he has to be in the Eastern Time Zone.

But any attentive viewer of the movie will realize that the outdoor shots of the college don't look like anything on the east coast. The buildings have red, Spanish style tile roofs and there are even some palm trees in the background of some shots. It turns out that Baumbach couldn't shoot the movie at Vassar. He shot it at Occidental College, up in the hills above LA. I've known about the location for awhile, but I haven't gotten a chance to go check it out until this last trip to LA. Ben Chan was nice enough to take a break from working on his dissertation and spend an afternoon driving me up there.

Stupidly, I didn't bring shots from the movie with me, so I was working from memory. That meant we spent a lot of time walking around trying to spot locations, with only moderate success. At one point, out of desperation, I approached a bunch of college kids lounging around on the lawn and asked them if they were familiar with the movie. "What movie?" They asked. "Kicking and Screaming", I said. "I haven't seen that", one of them said, and another said, to my surprise, "That's not a very good movie". Somewhat surprised, I asked them if they knew that some scenes from the movie were filmed at their college. None of them knew that, and they seemed nonplussed. I would have thought that watching the movie would have played some role in college orientation the way that The Exorcist or St. Elmo's Fire played at Georgetown.

Later I realized that these college kids thought that I was asking about the 2005 Kicking and Screaming, which clearly was not filmed at their college and isn't a very good movie.

I spotted the location of the scene where Max and Grover talk about improving Grover's resume. Grover has listed on his resume that he "Drove a truck". Max thinks that's not impressive enough and says that Grover should put instead "Responsibilities included: delivering gourmet cheese products throughout the metropolitan area".

From the movie:



From my visit:



Here's what the arbor Max and Grover are walking under looks like from the other direction:



Grover and Max notice that a student is hanging up flyers that read "Cookie Man: Pro Life?" on the pillars of the arbor:



Here's a close-up of one of the pillars:



There are several other locations that I missed:






That means I'll have to go back for another visit.

One thing that came to mind while hiking around the hilly Occidental campus is that the actors must have been unbelievably hot in the jackets and sweaters. It was around 95 degrees when Ben and I were walking around. There is a good reason why people don't dress like that out in Southern California, even in the fall.

Del Mar

The horse racing equivalent of the Zamboni. At the Del Mar Race Track in Del Mar, California.

I only observed the races. My attempt to bet on the 6th race failed when the betting machine ate my $5 ticket.

Paycheck

I found an old roll of film lying around, from the summer of 2005. I think that's like $1000 in cash.

Falklands War Fly-By

Tim, Ant, Ben, Yaz, and I sat for hours out on Hampstead Heath waiting to see the fly-by commemorating the 25th anniversary of the Falklands War. The day was pleasant, but overcast. From our spot on top of a low rise in the Heath, we could see, for maybe an hour before the actual fly-by, dozens of specks forming up on the horizon. Their presence whipped us into a frenzy of anticipation, which was slightly deflated when it turned out that there was no roaring fly-by, since the specks were all helicopters. A helicopter seen from a few miles off doesn't appear to move very quickly. As far as we could tell, there were formations of Chinooks, Gazelles, and Lynxes.


Eventually the jets showed up. The above shot was taken just after the Red Arrows, the British equivalent of the Blue Angels, released red and blue smoke. The red and blue smoke appears as that purplish smudge across the skyline. The BBC website says that the Red Arrows flew in a V-shape to "to represent the Vulcan bombers that played a vital role in the war". There was some talk that a Vulcan would take part in the fly-by, but it couldn't be made flyable in time. Shame.



Two formations of Hawks and Hercules circled around and flew right over our section of the Heath.

Daily Politics

An incredibly low-res shot of Ben talking about growing disparities between rich and poor on BBC 2's Daily Politics show, while he messes around in the London Classic Car Club. He drives off in that Jaguar at the end of the segment.

Austin et la question du réalisme

The University of Picardie, Jules Verne hosted a very enjoyable conference on J.L. Austin's Sense and Sensibilia last month in Amiens.


In the background is Amiens cathedral. I took this shot of the town from the top of a 30 foot tall rope jungle gym shaped like the Eiffel Tower:



Amiens has an impressive cathedral. The exterior is covered in carved vignettes. This one is a good symbol for the conference--the saint is at what looks like a podium and the guy listening to him looks like he wants to raise an objection:



Some scenes from the conference. J. Benoist, B. Ambroise, and J. Elliott.



O. Massin, C. Asaleh, C. Ramond, C. Travis, S. Laugier, and a nice woman whose name I don't recall.