Reflections on ALOUD LA Conversation with Deanne Stillaman on her book Mustang

by B.J. on 6/26/2008 10:31:00 PM 0 comments Print this post

I didn't grow up around any horses, I've never ridden one, unless you count the ponys at Griffith park, but I decided to go to a lecture on the history of the wild horse in American history with Deanne Stillman.

I'm a city kid. LA Kid. Yellow-ish-brown kid born in an age of hyper- and inter-dependence on hip-hop and technological infrastructure.

From my viewpoint, what I wanted to learn more about was how these horses or mustangs were used in transportational infrastructure. I was inspired by an article I had read a few months earlier, From Horse to Horsepower.

However, I didn't quite find that information in this lecture, this conversation but nontheless still interesting.


What she wanted to convey with the book was that the horse was the animal that helped define America as a nation. Indigenous to this continent. A silent witness to our battles in war. Our real best friend in nature. Very important to our identity as Americans she says.

What's most striking however is her very real, very personal attachment to the horse. She not only grew up around them, but in her own words, "horses litteraly saved [her] life." She briefly touched on how she went from riches to rags. When that happened, she moved to the "wrong side of the tracks." The horses galloped to the rescue and gave her mom her first job, as an Equestrian trainer.

However as time progressed, gradually friends and relatives began to distance themselves away from her. It was during these rough times where she learned life lessons critical for her inspiration to the books.

Tidbits of Interest:

1) The Horse is indigenous to the Americas, crossed the Bering Land Strait, and moved back with the Conquistadors. The entire population of Mustangs began with just 16 horses!

2) By the turn of the 19th century there were over 3 million horses. Today there are only about 23,000.

3) Cattle and sheepmen hate(d) mustangs because they stole from cows.

4) The same way that Horses built America on the battlefield, Horses built Hollywood.

5) Herds of wild horses need at least 100 to be genetically viable. We don't see a lot of that today.

6) The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has 4 million cattle on Public Lands, to produce 3% of beef, which according to her isn't much. She says that livestock has a very powerful lobby. In comparison, there are only 6,000 on BLM lands.

7) Under the Bush administration, a piece of legislation sponsored by Conrad Burns

Reflections:

1) Horses are never really "domesticated." According to the author which was received as a joke, they can "go wild" in 2 seconds. I was wondering about this in metaphor to transportation. You can't really control the car either; it's fluid, we depend on it to the extent that we don't just chop it up and kill it when it's done.

2) I am ambivalent to her call to action. One of her points to join the cause is that the horses are critical to American identity, the American cowboy which I'm not sure I care too much for. America the whole, doesn't really define me as part of its national fabric, so why again should this have any meaning for me? However, I do enjoy the bit that inspires her to keep doing her work and at least more curious at best.

If you're interested in more, her article is dropping right about...here.

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The Jumping and Flying Bubble Car

by B.J. on 12/01/2007 01:15:00 PM 0 comments Print this post

"If the man can conceive it, then the man can achieve it."

Sitting in afteroon LA traffic for about 2 hours on a 15-mile commute seeing lots of one-person cars including myself, I always think about this quote. I read it on some fool's facebook quotes, and I guess I kinda believe it.

As with any societal meme, I like to play with the idea in my head. I like to stretch the meme's limits and see where it rings true and doesn't ring true.

I have this idea to stretch that quote's limitations.

Inspired by a host of generation Y popular movies and memes in the Jetsons, Bladerunner, Rocketeer the sphere ball event in American Gladiators, Flubber, Steve Urkel's bubble car, this one random bank commercial with people traveling with some type of pogo stick springs as shoes, and bumper cars and agitated into action by LA traffic and pollution, I hearby announce that I have officially conceived the idea of...

the magnetically powered flying, jumping, running bubble-shaped cars.

Before something gets used widely, it has to be proven to be 1) safe and dependable, and most importantly, 2) cost-beneficial.

I am sure people have thought that we would've been traveling like the Jetsons or the Cyborgs in Bladerunner by now, but what many of them don't take into account is that assuming that type of technology ever becomes affordable, there would probably be a high number of in-air collisions and accidents.

With flying-only cars of the Jetsons all over the place even in its initial phases of inaffordability, there would still be too much variation in the ways people would be traveling. Wasn't it that way with the car in the early 20th century?

There wouldn't be any gravity to keep them on a singular planar surface. I'd imagine every part of airspace being used to capacity. Such hyper variation is a homemade recipe for trouble.

Safety in my apparatus relies heavily on a truly bubblish design.

Strong enough to keep you in and everything in place like the sphere balls in American gladiator, but a soft enough exterior so it doesn't harm anyone else. Nothing protruding or squared so you don't accidentally stab anyone.

My design would be made out of bumper car rubber with highly flexible yet durable material for the windows like a rubber- plastic-magnetic forcefield synthesis.

In regards to cost-beneficiality in general daily travel, people want the flexibility and speed to be anywhere at any time. This is why there's still a reluctance for people to invest in mass transit...there's no flexibility, you have to walk to a mass transit station, and any of its speed is negated by the fact that it's relatively inconvenient. At the same time however, people want to be able to haul a lot of their shit with them. They want to carry cases full of court briefings and bathroom reading material.

People want to be light and heavy at the same time.

Per my apparatus' cost-beneficiality, that's why the apparatus takes the shape of a classic compact bubble car...a synthesis of a car's storage space to keep your case briefings and bathroom reading magazines, with such flexibility and weightlessness yet durability in material that you could bring your apparatus in your cubicle.

Speed would also be adequately addressed. Being magnetically powered, the flying would be easy to accomplish, and it wouldn't even seem like flying because you're being magnetically attracted to a point. This would account for the speed, thus the reduced travel time, and thus the reason you buy this thing in the first place (with safety concerns being long since addressed).

However, if you feel like being active, you would also have the options of jumping and running, and then activating the magnets whenever you feel like it.

This wide range of activities automatically gives you not only more speed, but more options in your travel.

Think of it as a bunch of rounded gigantic martial arts helmets flying around with magnetic resistance and attraction power to take you to a destination in nanoseconds.

I wonder what new age religion would condemn it, though.

If there were one caveat in terms of cost, we'd probably have to install a city-wide magnetic repelling/attracting system to magnetically repel our apparati off the sidewalks and ground level roads.

The system would be in place to minimize pedestrian incidents.

However, widespread use would eventually pay for everything. The cost to society production would be beneficial. Not as much need for parking lots, car condominiums, and

So with the required 50% of the quote's requirements satisfied, now all someone has to do is achieve it.

P.S. Note to achiever: Let me patent the achievement phase, so that my monetary obligations will not only be healed but will also allow me to indulge in excessive phases of luxuria, gula, avarita, acedia, ira, invidia, and superbia.

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by B.J. on 11/08/2004 01:52:00 AM 0 comments Print this post

Drivers in LA

More armchair anthropology, meaning I make sense of stereotypes.

LA is often called a representation of the world with all these different cultures in different parts of the city. There's a lot of stuff that I notice when I'm driving, particularly about race and class.

Every day to school, I go west from the hacked up lower-middle class neighborhood in Silver Lake through big ballin', shot callin' (though these stiffies might put it another way) 90210. The further west I drive, the more white and slanted-eye folks get, the shinier the cars get, the more traffic it gets, and the more hasty the drivers get.

Speeding up traditionally has been associated with young drivers, but you know what, it's not just them, it's these clean-cut corporate white people who like to run too.

All over Beverly Hills they are just ready to cut you off if you "slow down" to 40 mph. The type of people who do this run the gamut: Let's see there's the Bend it Like Beckham Mom with veins in her eyes after 15 face lifts when it's her pussy that needs to be patched back up blasting past you in her Beamer, there's the all-familiar corporate shark in either his BMW, his Porsche, one of those European cars. The Asian people in the rice rockets (thanks to UCLA) are actually pretty moderate.

However, not actively engaging in this speedfest are vehicles such as pick-up trucks or vans strictly for lugging lots of tools or supplies around. You will also notice how brown the drivers and scrubbily dressed they are.

This got me thinking: why aren't they speeding up ? Don't they have to get somewhere too ? Is there a fear that they're going to get pulled over ?

Racing is something that has always been done for power, but driving in the real world is a lot more varied.

Those who speed up want to establish they indeed are here and/or need to get somewhere. And Those who drive slow and casually are either ignored, busy, and/or very assured of themselves.

I don't think these things are permanently inherent in any culture as much as it has been conditioned on them by the way America has treated them in their jobs and whatnot.

So these older brown guys are acting as they have been conditioned here in America; there is a long history of them getting crapped on and getting menial jobs, so they've become indifferent to the world. So as a result, a lot of these older lower-class guys just slow down because they're indifferent.

There's also another group that generally likes to slow down, the assured and matured group, regardless of any age, race, or class. Not indifferent, just no need to speed up, turn up the radio. They tend to be well-acknowledged people who don't need anymore acknowledgment.

Too bad we don't have a lot of them in LA (or I don't even notice).

A lot of the younger generation, brown, black, white, yellow coming through in a wide variety of cars with mix of road slugs and speeders. I think what produces the young speeders in general and not just in the brown folk is this need for power and control. It's like this maybe because they like to show off whatever they have and to establish that they are here.

The other half that speeds is generally oldest and dominates the Beverly Hills that I talk about probably speeds up because they need to get somewhere and feel this need. It's pretty much exclusively white with a sprinkle of Asian folks. If they are speeding up to get to places at any class, it shows how much they are slaves to a system that calls for them to get here and there and here and there. Richer white guys. Slaves to a system. Ironic, eh.

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by B.J. on 10/07/2004 01:27:00 PM 0 comments Print this post

To Speed or Not To Speed, What Is the Reason

After a a whole summer of slow Sublimish-Santeriaish-Float-on-ish driving, I've gotten re-acquainted with stepping on the gas excessively and steering the car as needed, thereby increasing my speed on the road, out of this newborne necessity to meet temporal deadlines.

But even when I do not have temporal deadlines, I still use excessive speed because I convince myself that I need to be somewhere early so I can get whatever done. I never get whatever it is done cause I just end up sitting in the car and listen to my music. Another reason I like to speed is that don't like being blocked, and conversely I try not to block other people's way as well.

Combining those two purposes, I accidentally fall into this tension that I feel the need to tailgate cars and get pissed off every time someone cuts me off cause they're just blocking the way and about 0.00009 seconds of my time. It's a world all set up in a vacuum in which the purpose is merely to get out of whereever I happen to be. Reason never has the chance to get up and engulf me, in this high speed world in the box that is my car.

Today however, I got out of class and had nowhere to go and started the car off the block in a hurry. "I need to get home, err. . .to do what, I don't know."

As I got saddled behind some old guy with a cowboy hat in a junk car and tension in me started to mount, reason finally stood up and quietly asked, "what the fuck, mayng, what the fuck. . ."

As tension behind this beat-up white car with all the junk in it mounted, reason started to engulf me as well: It's an old guy. He's slowing down.

As desperation my tension mentioned that. . .I. . .could. . .get. . .some. . .where. . .

But the mighty strong reason calmly asked "where ? Just enjoy the ride. Listen to your music." It seems like reason was here to stay and not back down.

Mighty strong reason delivered the knockout blow dissipating tension with this statement, "If you enjoy the ride, you'll be better at sex for your partner cause you're not so focused on the purpose, but the ride." Ahhhh. . .

What was my purpose again ?

As reason and thought completely took over, my spirit fingers slowly steered the car and my mind jazzed up to go cruisin.' And I was having fun. There wasn't a purpose to actually having fun. I mean I already have known/theorized those purposes including that knockout blow for a long time, developed when I let reason take over --- taking over and bringing me back. Good lord, I became reason's bitch --- it was hegemony. But still I managed to keep control. And mostl importantly, I had fun.

And having fun is not a purpose. It just is.

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by B.J. on 10/05/2004 08:32:00 PM 0 comments Print this post

2 Shades of Grey

Not to sound like one of those romanticized or metaphysical writers, but there was two shades of grey in the sky. One was good, the other was, eh, mum. I think in both, I saw such mundane things turn into such elaborate things.

Driving down the last strip of West Hollywood Sunset with the tall buildings, I was awed at how the sky was a perinklish grey. It was like a smoke of hope cause it reminded me of good times when I was 3 or 4 and someone took me to see Bozo the clown back when we were still living in Chicago (which reminds me of the Richard Marx song "Keep Coming Back." I don't remember going, but I did get McDonalds afterward.

However further down the road in Beverly Hills territory the sky morphed into a gray grey. Now that reminded me of driving in the back of a funeral car in the rain in Los Feliz.

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