Funerals are for the Living

Funerals are for the living.

Graveyards are for the living.

The living have attachments, dangling, with the dead. When death comes, the survivors are often unmoored. There's a industry of people ready to help.

I've had some time to think about all this recently. I choose to re-read an old art book, Blinky by Jeffrey Vallance. On the 27th, April 1978, Jeffrey Vallance went to Ralph's supermarket and purchased a frozen chicken, took some photographs, and then drove to a Los Angeles pet cemetary. He paid cash for their most expensive service, then got the chicken out of his car for the service. Later he published it all in a small art book. First edition was 550 copies, second edition 2000. Used copies, and mine was used, cost about $40 these days. The whole story was described on Letterman:

But that book wasn't the only pet cemetary project of 1978. I also took the time to watch documentarian's Errol Morris, film Gates of Heaven (1978). It was made with the encouragement of Werner Herzog, and that is described in the Les Blank short Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1980).

Filmed in 1977 and completed and released in October 1978, Gates tells stories of people who operate(d) pet cemetaries, animal rendering facilities, and people who have interred pets at the cemetaries. One of the cemetaries featured is still in business, and it is a business, but their website neglects to mention the film.

Errol Morris is not cruel about the business, and seems to have genuine concern for the people. Jeffery Vallance seems a little more mocking.

My focus took me to pet death not because I have recently lost an animal, but because I am watching someone go through the complicated grief of losing a family member and it feels somewhat detached for me. There's so much paperwork for dead people, while animals need so little.

There are so many people who need to be involved but were not involved with the life. With pets, people only get involved because the owner wants it. No one stops you from just buring your animals in your yard after they die at home.

Vinegar Syndrome

Taking its name from acetate decay of old film stock, Vinegar Syndrome is a company that specializes in finding, restoring, and releases on home media films that get overlooked by other conservationists. Things like blue movies, drive-in quality B-films, exploitation titles, and things made outside the studio system.

Vinegar Syndrome

I like what they do, even if I don't want all of their titles. I have purchased a few discs from them. Their "Reviver" label, specifically to fund film restoration, has had two releases so far. They are titled on the website "One" and "Two".

There's no listing of the movie titles on the disks. I purchased "Two" as a pre-release knowing only it had two titles on it both filmed in the same non-US country. Now, post-release, they still don't list the titles. I guess I should have expected that, because "One" was post-release at the time and still didn't have the title.

For the record, "One" has Boots and the Preacher (1972) (imdb page) some shorts and related special features. The "Two" has Paradise of Terror (1965) (imdb page) and The Horror from Beyond (1965) (imdb page). So far I've watched Boots and Paradise.

Boots was considered a lost film until Vinegar Syndrome rescued it. The film has a rambling investigation into a small town murder at a church affiliated radio station. It's hick-ploitation with country music and corrupt small town stereotypes. We first see the sheriff waking up in bed with a prostitue at the local whorehouse. It's not high art.

Paradise, on the other hand, is art. Filmed in the Philippines and never released, this is a story of a military assisted evacuation for unstated purposes of a US government official from some unspecified Asian country in the midst of a conflict. Their plane is hit and everyone parachutes out. Then begins a story that's something like Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972) if it were a 84 minute Vietnam war film. Truly a delight.

But there's no mention of title on website that sells the disc. I find it hard to tell people "Yeah, this film is good, you should watch it" when you can't go to the Vinegar Syndrome website and find the disc by searching for the title. Even once you have it in hand, the slip case, both sides of the reversible box art insert, and even the disc silkscreens don't identify the contents.

In short: I like what Vinegar Syndrome has done, but I wish they would drop the secrecy now that's released.

On Cleaning Freewheels

Subject: net.bicycle.freewheel.cleaning: a reprise
From: reid@Glacier.ARPA
Date: Thu, 6-Dec-84 00:42:44 PST

In particular, a Milwaukee worm drive saw with a carbide blade will saw a freewheel clean in half. Lots of wild sparks shooting everywhere, but since it's raining they probably won't set much on fire. Ball bearings getting caught in the carbide teeth and being whipped around at 200 mph and shot across the yard, scaring the squirrels. Oh, this was great fun.

Full post in Jef Poskanzer's "Net Gems"; collection here.

Chappie (2015)

Chappie is the third film from Neill Blomkamp, and his second set in South Africa. (The aliens as Apartheid allegory District 9 (2009) was the first.) This one started out reminding me of a SA "Robocop" (1987), with but with robot humanoids (instead of cyborgs) and a remote piloted "Moose" taking the place of the ED-209 robot, then the stories diverge.

There is a large corporation building machines for crime fighting, and the C-staff are very driven to boost sales to police forces. A software engineer is very interested in a project to make the robots self-aware and fully "intelligent" but he gets nixed for business reasons. So he steals a robot intended for recycling after getting damaged and installs his software on it anyway.

"Chappie" is the name that robot gets.

In a parallel story, some drug dealers whose business has been impacted by robot police, have a plan to kidnap an engineer from the robot manufacturer in order to get an advantage on the robot cops. They grab our AI focused engineer while he has the stolen droid in his car. (The core pair of drug dealers, at least core to story, are played by the duo from South African zef-rap-rave group Die Antwoord. They sort-of play themselves, using their stagenames as character names and Die Antwoord style art around their lair.)

As Chappie first starts to learn, the learning is shown as an accellerated human baby might pick up things. Imitation, discernment of items (eg a wrist "watch" pointed out) in a complex settings, learning that people lie from experiencing it, etc.

These are important innate skills of humans (and probably other mammals) that have no parallel in the present AI tech world. Large Language Models (LLMs) like Chatgpt do not have innate immitation. They do not have feedback loops to learn deceit from observed contradictions. They do not have acces to empathy to feel bad for hurting people, or people just hurt.

The movie glosses over how the robot got these traits, and I think the AI advocates in the modern tech world have glossed over the importance themselves. Throwing a bunch of structured text at a matrix generating program fails to consider how a matrix would identify text visually, how human brains are wired for grammar natively, how humans adjust their learning based on day to day activities (and not just structured "training").

By failing to understand how computers store data, the movie script just has the robot learn like a huan. By failing to understand how humans actually learn, techbros imagine stored data is learning.

After that the movie just becomes fantasy, to me.

Side note: I remember before this came out how famous the band Die Antwoord had become, and watching it I started to wonder, "what became of them?" So I looked at the Die Antwoord Wikipedia page and, "oh my", "oh dear", and "yikes".

Chappie at imdb