Watercolor

In a recent post, a film blogger took issue with the performance of Marisa Berenson as Lady Honoria Lyndon in Stanley Kubrick’s 1975 film Barry Lyndon. He opined that Berenson was stiff and lifeless and Kubrick should never have put up with such a performance from her but should have brought in another actor.

In reality, of course, Berenson was giving exactly the performance that Stanley wanted. She is the ideal to which Barry aspired. Once he attained it, he finds that she, and his dream of wealth and power, are lacking. Barry has nothing like the earnest feelings he once had for his cousin back in Ireland. And, indeed, chasing his goal has left its mark on Barry, he is ultimately nearly as hollow as Lady Lyndon herself. His last authentic feelings are for his son Bryan and those are drained when the boy dies as the result of a riding accident.

Perhaps the one element of the story that doesn’t ring true is Barry’s final noble gesture of firing into the ground during his duel with Lord Bullingdon (superbly played by the late Leon Vitali). If Kubrick had stuck to his guns in showing a world where the true cost of climbing the ladder is complete moral decay (no matter how Thackeray plotted the original novel), he would have had Barry put his pistol shot through Bullingdon’s eye. Barry would have his success ratified, with no more young Bullingdon to challenge him for the estate. He would have complete victory but with the corpses of his son and Bullingdon as the companions of his triumph. The coldest possible end to Thackeray’s story.

The “Mars Face” image taken by the Viking I lander in 1976

The human penchant for seeing patterns is legendary. Recall the “human face on Mars.” For decades it was splashed across the covers of check-out line tabloids. When the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft arrived at Mars in the late 1990s with a much higher resolution camera than that carried by the Viking I mission in 1976 it was obvious that there was no face at all. Just human brains and reflexive pattern recognition. We can’t stop ourselves.  

A much higher resolution image from the Mars Global Surveyor shows that the “face” is just another Martian hill.

This poetry in patterns is the delight of art lovers and conspiracy theorists alike. Not to mention the analysts of cinema on YouTube. During a recent drift through YouTube, I watched a video commenting on Stanley Kubrick’s 2001. The video claimed that any object in the film that was remotely oblong was there to invoke the film’s famous black monolith. And that Stanley had obsessively planned this down to every last angle to underscore the importance of the monolith. The more prosaic explanation is that a rectangle is kinda the natural shape for lots of things and Stanley had a film to finish.

There was one interesting set of rectangles in the film, however, that I had never seen that way before. It’s when David Bowman (Keir Dullea) releases the memory elements of the HAL 9000 ship’s computer. And as he does so a family of monoliths rise one at a time to take their places in a tableau vivant. The sequence is visually striking, like all of 2001, and it’s emotionally wrenching too. Poor HAL’s memory is going and he can feel it. And we can’t help feel a little sad as well. HAL is a smug prick of a computer, but he does run a tight ship and he exhibits more piss and vinegar in the film than Bowman or his fellow astronaut Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood).

With his pride, paranoia and murderous disdain for his fellow crewmembers, HAL is actually the most human character on board the good spaceship Discovery One. Tightly wrapped Bowman and Poole are more akin to lifeless silicon simulations than the marvelously nutso HAL. They’re the robots. They were made to be so by the relentlessly scientific industrialization of modern society — as a popular meme from the late 60s would have it. That we would all become sons and daughters of the computer. Back then, of course, no one foresaw that instead of turning humans all into cold, calculating automatons the future would instead gift us TicToc, Twitter and YouTube, reducing humanity to emotional scrollers intent on sensation with rarely a thought to science.  

Anyway, when Bowman does zotz HAL’s memory and force the poor 9000 to devolve into a mindless machine that maintains the ship’s systems, Bowman regains a measure of his humanity. HAL, that epitome of restrictive scientism, is no longer Bowman’s jailer. He’s a free man, able to act on his impulses. So he can’t resist following his curiosity. He climbs into a pod — opening the pod bay doors himself, thank you very much — and flies off to the Stargate and his rendezvous with destiny in the green room where he will go from human to Star child.   

Charcoal effort based on a drawing by Jeff Haines. 

What to get your dad for his birthday? An annual problem for offspring everywhere. While I no longer face this vexing question — my dad passed in 2009 — my three sons still deal with the challenge. This year my youngest had a novel answer. Knowing my interest in sketching, he purchased a “visual journal” for me. 

There’s a space for a drawing each day for a year. 365 daily drawings. Great idea. Thoughtful and fun.

Although, I have to say, it has raised some new vexing questions. After a good start I’m already falling behind a bit. So I wonder: Is it cheating to do three drawings and backdate two of them? Or must the drawing be done on the date stated? What is ethical when it comes to sketching? Is there a higher law — an immutable code of conduct when pencil meets paper? Damn, I just wanted to make a little sketch, not grapple with morality.

Ulrich Harsh/Bayeux Tapestry

Harold was hasty to Hastings

But now billets at Bosham,

Traveling no more

From the West Sussex shore.*

*Today is the 956-year anniversary of the day William I (the Conqueror) and his gang of Norman toughs landed on the southern English coast at Pevensey. Only three days before, on September 25th, the English king (really the Anglo-Saxon king) Harold Godwinson (one of the few kings to be referred to by his first and last names) had defeated a Viking army at the battle of Stamford Bridge in northern England. But he had no time for victory parades, mead hall bacchanals or fist-pumping appearances on the Tonight Show. Harold had to haul ass south to confront the annoyingly confident William (who reportedly said to his henchmen when stepping ashore and grabbing some pebbles from the beach: “See, I have England in my hands. It is now mine and what is mine will be yours.”). Harold did confront Billy at the Battle of Hastings on Oct. 14, 1066. But Godwinson lost the fight, the throne and his life. The exact whereabouts of Harold’s grave are not precisely known, but are generally accepted to be in Bosham Church in West Sussex not far from the port city of Portsmouth. 

NASA’s plucky DART spacecraft was sent to do nasty things to the tiny asteroid moonlet Dimorphos. It accomplished its mission yesterday, Sept. 26, 2022. The big event was part of research into planetary defense — the effort to find a way to prevent a future earth-hunting asteroid from ruining our collective day by impacting the planet and throwing several hundred million tons of vaporized dirt, rock and humans into the atmosphere.

Throughout the approach and aftermath of DART’s attack on Dimorphos, NASA scientists and media commentators rightly lauded the high-tech effort and all the planning and precision that went into it.

But what about the actual attack on Dimorphos? Was that done using some kinda’ high-tech energy weapon recently developed in a lab? Some “pew-pewing” Star Wars laser?

Nope. This attack was no more sophisticated than the stone cannon balls blasted at the walls of Constantinople in 1453 from the siege guns of the Turks who really wanted in. No more sophisticated than the iron cannon balls fired by the English at the lumbering ships of the Spanish Armada in 1588.

DART smashed into Dimorphos using a technique brought to us by centuries of gunpowder: the simple collision of a solid projectile hitting the broad side of a barn. Boom.

Who needs fancy “pew pewing” when you’ve got classical physics? Sit down Albert and Herr Heisenberg, Sir Isaac says, “I got this.”