We’ve been watching Little House on the Prairie on and off since July. It was sort of done on a dare. My friend, Jeff, told me that Little House was crap television. I figured that wasn’t true, but had to find out for myself. Sure, I watched this a bit as a kid, but it was sporadic and I remember pretty much none of it.

I knocked down the first and second season a while back and just a couple of days ago finished the third.

The first thing I noticed that was different in season three was a slightly changed theme song. It had a bit of country swing to it. I’m not sure if it sticks around into the future seasons, but honestly, I didn’t care for it.

Country legends, Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash (as well as their son, John Jr.) appeared in the first episode. Johnny played an ex-con who tries to swindle Walnut Grove out of money by posing as a man of God. Thanks to Pa and the good folks of the town, the Man in Black sees the error of his ways. He sings a couple of songs too, but surprisingly not in a cheesy way.

That’s one of the strong points of Little House. It somehow manages to not come off (too) cheesy. That’s surprising since it aired in the 70s. Even episodes like the Halloween-themed “The Monster of Walnut Grove” didn’t amp up the cheese factor. Sure, it was a little far-fetched, but I never felt cheated.

Johnny Cash wasn’t the only guest star. Todd Bridges (later played Willis in Different Strokes
) plays Solomon, a runaway black kid who wants Pa to buy him. He didn’t really get that slavery had ended (and this still didn’t come off as cheesy!). Willie Ames (from Charles in Charge) plays a racist kid who doesn’t like the “Injun Kid.”

We often joke about how the random school children change from episode to episode. As is natural, we riff along with Little House quite often. My favorite riff is saying “Who the hell am I?” whenever the featured character is some new kid we’ve never seen before. That’s often followed by regular characters asking each other “Who the hell was that?!”

This clearly isn’t a series that builds upon itself (like most hour-long dramas today). Some episodes span only a day or two, but others span a season or more. It’s a bit difficult to understand how the Ingalls could do all of these things over the course of one television season, but if you don’t really get too wrapped up in it, it’s no big deal.

With that said, there’s some continuity from episode to episode. Pa’s shirt that he got in “The Blizzard,” a Christmas episode, makes several appearances throughout the rest of the season. The third and forth episodes are about Bunny, Laura’s horse. The DVDs get it wrong, switching the running order of the only two episodes that really rely upon plot continuity to make any sense.

That brings me to the DVDs. Whoever released these did it on the very cheap. The original series was filmed on 35mm film stock (like a movie). Instead of transferring from the original, uncut film, they used the heavily edited versions used by TBS and transfered from worn out video tapes. Often the color is off and it looks like you have to adjust the tracking on your VCR (except that this is DVD). The edits are the worst as they usually cut off a scene in a really unnatural place. Why the producers of these DVD sets chose to do this was probably financially driven, but what a horrible mistake.

The season ends in a strange way. The Ingalls and the Edwards pull up stakes in the spring and move to Deadwood for a gold rush. They don’t really want to, but it’s been raining a lot and they’ll never get their crop in the ground at this rate. Deadwood turns out to be a pretty nasty place with murders and prostitutes, so at the end, they leave. It’s not clear if they’re going back to Walnut Grove – so where will they end up in Season Four?

I guess that’s the best we’re going to do as far as a cliffhanger goes. I’m ok with that. If I wanted a cliffhanger, I’d watch Lost or Dallas or something.

Season Three is all about really bad things happening to the Ingalls. First, three bullies try to take over the town, then everybody nearly dies in a blizzard. Carrie, the youngest mouth-breather, falls down a mine shaft and then everybody nearly dies again from “the fever.” Mary nearly dies from an intestinal infection and Laura shoots Pa and he nearly dies alone in a broken down cabin. Nobody seems to notice that Pa, Ma, Laura, Mary and Carrie are really bad luck. In fact, Pa saves the day on a regular basis. Each of the episodes are fun, a little far-fetched (but not too much) and touching.

Three seasons down and I can conclusively say that this isn’t crap television.

RR by James Benning, which played on Wednesday night at Seattle’s Northwest Film Forum, on one hand is simply a movie that takes 43 static shots of trains and puts them together into a 111 minute movie. On the other hand, it’s a study of landscape and consumption – our “need” to have so many things shipped across the continent. Though mostly, it’s about trains.

I had never been to the Forum before and I was (prejudicially) expecting an artsy, stuffy crowd. I was a little wrong here, though maybe not at first. The crowd numbered roughly 100 and seemed to have a mix of normals (probably here for the trains), stuffy artsy types and filmmakers. There was also one fairly obnoxious guy wearing a safety vest. He asked if this was where the 8 o’clock showing of a train movie was. I figured he was ironically asking. He made another comment about hobby shops.

After a very short introduction by a nice filmfan fellow, RR started. Like any good movie, the credits were short. A simply black screen with the letters: RR and then we began. A shot set up on a bit of grass buffering a street from the tracks. A train heads towards us and we watch, with the camera untouched, unmoving, as the train passes. Before the sound fades, we hear the Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

This is our movie. Most shots start before you can see the train. Most end after the train leaves the frame, but before the natural sound is allowed to return. Each episode is separated by a silent black screen lasting three or four seconds.

Our second shot is from Bagdad, California, a place that I’ve been to several times. The train now moves away from us. The third very slowly crosses a bridge in Tennessee. A fish pops its head out of the water towards the end of the train. The forth is at a crossing in Minnesota. A car comes into frame.

By the fifth episode, six or seven people had left.

Even for a railfan, this isn’t a very easy movie to watch. Most railfan movies have a few shots of the same train, and while the edits aren’t really what you’d call quick, they cover it from several angles. Narration often explains where the train in, the percent of the grade, what kind of engine is pulling the load and often what contents make up the consist. Each scene fades to the next and sometimes has goofy swipes and silly transitions. Also, too often really amazingly bad synthesizer music complete with fake drums and guitar provide the always unwanted soundtrack.

While that doesn’t make good art, it makes up your typical railfan documentary. RR is in many ways the opposite of that. Benning’s movie simply watches the trains go by, just like you did when you were a kid, just like I do now. I have no idea what the train is pulling or which engine is being used and thankfully that crappy synth music isn’t stuck in my head.

By the time the 10th episode, a shot of a cement coal tower in West Virginia, rolled around 15 people had left.

What caught my eye was just how varied the shots of trains could be. Each shot began before you could even hear the diesel engines. In some, you couldn’t even see the tracks. The shots were always beautifully composed. Benning, like any good photographer, has an eye for such things. The camera angles were not “weird,” but interesting. The trains themselves varied widely from shot to shot, but his choice of distance from the tracks, angles and seasons (he shot year-round) made each episode very different from the last.

His use of added sound was also interesting. I mentioned the Mormon choir, but he also added a baseball game (Nolan Ryan’s no hitter vs. Toronto in 1991), a Huey helicopter from Vietnam, Gregory Peck reading from Revelations, Karen Carpenter singing a very sad Coke commercial and Eisenhower’s farewell address. All of them are added in post-production, but done so in a way that makes them feel natural, like the trainspotter is somehow listening to them on the radio in his truck. For the most part, it worked.

The Tehachapi Loop shot where the train is moving away from you into a tunnel only to appear crossing over itself was beautiful. I saw a still image of this scene before watching the movie and thought that he could have found a much better angle to shoot from. But I stand very corrected. This shot was brilliant. By the time it ended a few more people had left.

Filming and watching RR can be neatly summed up into one shot. It is a desert scene in Amboy, California (again, a place I’ve visited several times). The shot starts with three empty tracks. Before long, a train carrying cars speeds past and away from us. We watch as it passes. Just as the rear of the train enters the shot, we see a black and orange BNSF engine appear and speed towards us on the tracks farthest from the camera. It is a tanker train carrying oil. This seems beautifully choreographed and timed perfectly. But, of course, it’s not. It’s just luck. This is a very rare shot. Benning explains:

The one that’s in the film where they actually passed is in Amboy, California. That was a very hot day, and I didn’t want to sit and wait for a train, so I drove down the line until I met a train, and then I drove like 90 miles an hour back down Route 66 to Amboy, and I set up. But the train I was waiting for that I was racing to catch got caught by a red light. All of a sudden a train started coming from another side. So I thought, okay, maybe I should start shooting that train, or should I wait for the first one, and then I got real anxious not knowing what to do so I just turned the camera on. And that train turned out to be the one hauling automobiles with these Auto-Max cars that are made especially for SUVs—the huge white cars—and it went flying by, and just as it’s ending, the other one showed up.

The perfect alignment of two trains, one carrying cars away from us, the other carrying oil towards us is not only fun to watch, but say something about our culture – shipping cars east and oil west. This shot was intruded upon by a van carrying a railroad worker. The van drives towards and then past us. A minute later, unseen, a worker gets out and passes between the train and the camera. For a second we (and probably Benning) figured that this amazing shot would be ruined by this guy telling us to get out of there, we’re trespassing. But he just walks on buy and waits for the train to leave so he can cross the tracks.

That, in a neat little nutshell is our film. Trains coming and going carrying things that we really don’t need across a gorgeous landscape. Like the railroad employee, we have to stop and wait for these trains to go by. While we’re waiting there’s not much else to do but watch.

By the end of this shot, 22 people had left the theater. That’s nearly a quarter.

A movie such as RR, just a succession of 43 shots of trains, must end somehow. Our last shot is in Palm Springs. Large white wind turbines share the background with a brown desert mountain. The foreground is dotted with old, thrown away tires. A train enters slowly from the right and grinds even slower through the frame until it comes to a complete halt. The camera holds us there for another very long minute, leaving us to wait for something, even the sound of the train’s brakes releasing, that never comes.

The film ends with a black screen and the initials JB. That is all.

There was a discussion after the movie moderated by the same gentleman that introduced it. The folks who stayed were mostly filmmakers. A railfan or two stayed and then obnoxious guy in the safety vest was there too. He wasn’t being ironic as I had previously thought, he was just a little crazy. Nice guy though. He knew a lot about trains and railfanning. I was very pleasantly surprised.

The discussion bordered on “too artsy” for me, but thankfully stayed enough in the practical area. I even added a few comments (mostly about the shooting and locations and about the added sounds – I had done my research before watching). Of course, a few of the comments offered some lofty interpretations that seemed to want to see more than was there – and when those comments became the norm, we left with a great impression of the film and a pretty good impression of the discussion before it headed too far south.

For me, the most important thing about this movie, or about any work of art, is how it makes you feel. The best art makes you want to create art yourself. James Benning’s RR makes me want to hop on my Vespa with a good camera and film trains. There are some things I’d do differently, of course. I’m no James Benning. But the experience would be amazing.

When art makes you want to experience what is on the screen or canvas, etc., that is good art (maybe the only art). RR isn’t something to just look at. It isn’t even something to look at think about. It’s a catalyst. If only I had a year of freedom and a camera! I already have the love of train and a mental list of locations where I’d shoot.

Benning does not release his movies on DVD. RR will never be able to be seen outside of a theater. If I have one critique, it is that. Not that this should be mass distributed all over the globe or even to railfans reading Trains Magazine. But it should be seen. I count myself as extremely fortunate to have seen it. And I wish you could too.

Maybe, in a few years, that’s where I’ll come in.

For more reading on this, there’s a great interview with him here. Also, a location list, written by Benning, is here. That is where I got the pictures for this post.

Since my camera effectively died several months ago, I’ve really missed taking pictures. Sure, I’ll swipe Smartz’s camera from time to time, but it’s not the same as having my own.

My Pentax Optio 750Z was a fine, metal-bodied camera. It’s still basically functional, though takes pretty crappy pictures now. Over the several years of ownership, it’s traveled across the country five times, been dropped many times (two or three of those drops were while riding).

The most memorable drop was after taking some shots of trains at Horseshoe Curve, I was riding through Altoona and noticed that the camera was no longer with me. I turned around, retraced my route and found the camera lying upright along the side of the road. Along this portion, I was probably only going 35 or 40mph. It had some scratches and dents and was missing several screws, but after some duct taping, it was fine.

What I liked about this was that it was compact. I could shove it in my pocket and go. Also, it had great manual controls. Most point and shoots do not. Smartz’s camera, for example, doesn’t have much in the line of any manual controls that you can set from shot to shot.

Most of the photos that I take and “display” have a lot of post-camera work done on them (photoshop). However, that doesn’t mean the camera is unimportant. If I can’t get a decently lit shot or if it’s blurry, etc, no amount of photoshopping is going to change that. The source material is really important here.

Which is why I’m ready for a new camera. The Pentax is still ok for well-lit, outdoor scenes where things are fairly stationary. But over the years it’s gotten noisier and much less reliable. Smatz’s camera, like I said, is great, but 1) it’s not mine and 2) it’s been moody as of late, especially in lower-light.

I’m not sure what the future holds for me and cameras, but eventually, a new one will come along. I’d like something a bit larger this time. Something with a nice zoom on it. And something that does well in low-light. Financially, I can’t go the digital SLR route. Maybe next time.

For now (well, not as later), I think I’ll hover around the “prosumer” end of things. The Canon Powershot SX20 is a contender, as is the Nikon Coolpix P90. Both can be obtained for just over $300ish. That’s not a bad price if I’d like to have one by summer. I’ll have to do some more research here.

Any other suggestions of cameras in that price range would be helpful.

To check out the pics taken with the Pentax, look here. And here too. Oh, and these.

The Pentax has been mostly useless since early 2009. Here’s hoping that 2010 brings something new.

While skimming Netflix for decent Railroad documentaries (hint: there aren’t many), I came across a four volume series called Running a Steam Locomotive. Sounds like a lot of fun, no? I’ve always wanted to learn how to do this.

I know that you really can’t learn to run a steam engine from a DVD, but I figured it would give me a good basis. Turns out that I was right.

The first thing that I noticed about this DVD is that it’s a rerelease. Running a Steam Locomotive was originally filmed in 1980. The guy who looks like a hipster was a dead giveaway. This blond fellow with big glasses, mustache and questionable hat seems like he was taken right off of Capitol Hill, here in Seattle. But no, this guy wasn’t being ironic, he was just being who he was.

The program starts off oddly. I figured that since disc one was the basics, it would start with an overview of the engine. Nope, it starts off with how to change out a broken flue pipe inside the boiler. You start out inside the engine itself. It’s sort of like showing up on the first day and the boss doesn’t have time to teach you how to blow the whistle or start the engine because there’s a flue pipe that needs to be replaced using some special tools.

It’s an odd way to start, but kind of fitting and I found it interesting. You’re in the boiler with the engineer, Charles Daigh, and while he’s fixing the piece, he’s explaining why it needs to be replaced and covers a lot of how a steam engine works. Tom Scott, Jr., the fireman proto-hipster and engineer take turns covering different areas of the locomotive. It’s all a bit scattershot, but all useful.

Nearly every aspect of running a locomotive is covered: from starting up the fire (start it with wood and some kero) to warming up the cylinders to starting up and coupling the cars. Along the way, you learn about basic wheel alignment (what 2-6-2 means, for example), the suspension, electrical system, valves, regulators, lubrication and what the whistle signals mean (two long bursts means that the train is about to move – two longs, one short and another long means that the train is coming up to a crossing).

The railroad where this was filmed must have hosted a “How to Run a Steam Locomotive” class. At times, the engineer seems to be talking to other people rather than the camera. He also uses the tender (coal car behind the engine) as a chalk board. Pretty nifty.

One of the things that I really appreciate about this is that there’s no amazingly bad music accompanying it. Many, many train documentaries are filled from start to finish with insipid, canned Casio keyboard music. Generally, the soundtracks are embarrassingly horrifying and relentless. Thankfully, this chose to have almost no music in it. The music that existed was done by a jug band (over the opening and closing credits). This is probably because it was filmed in 1980. Somewhere around 1984, everyone and the brother got a Casio keyboard and decided that they were going to make music for crappy documentaries. Sadly, as far as train documentaries go, this is the rule rather than the exception.

This documentary was filmed at the Monticello & Sangamon Valley Railroad in Illinois. Now, it’s called the Monticello Railway Museum. The locomotive used in the film is their No. 1, a 1930 0-4-0 built by Alco. It ran until 1988. Monticello’s current roster features no working steam locomotives, but a few fine older diesels.

Anyway, if you’re interesting in this sort of thing, I guess this will interest you. It’s fairly technical and maybe a little dry, but very well done (by 1980’s standards – even by today’s standards) and very informative.

The DVDs in the rest of the set seem to be from different places. I’m not sure if it’s the same film company that did the original, but I’ll soon find out.

After watching everything an engineer on a steam locomotive has to do, I’m kind of glad that I’m not one. It all seems like a huge pain. The fireman, even though he’s got to shovel the coal and keep the fire going, has the better of the two jobs. I think I’d rather be a fireman.

Last night I watched Pink Floyd The Wall for the first time in years. I honestly don’t remember the last time I really sat down with it. Probably high school. I remember showing it to my cousin, Josh, who really didn’t get it. I’m sure I didn’t really get it either, but it was weird and I liked it because I liked weird things (same year as my Eraserhead kick).

That’s what’s neat about being young and a little off. When you’re that age and you like weird movies or strange music, people think you’re deep and intelligent. But really, you’re just a weird little kid who likes weird stuff. That was me.

So when I started to watch The Wall last night, I wasn’t sure what to expect. The music holds up, of course, but what about the weirdness? Some things don’t age well. Take Chris Elliot, for example. When I was a kid, I loved his show, Get a Life, but seeing it later on, I couldn’t even make it halfway through an episode.

As it turns out, The Wall was much more powerful seeing it as an adult than as a kid. Maybe over the years I’ve been desensitized, but I didn’t find it particularly weird. This time around, I saw the “weirdness” as a medium for telling a very sad story of loss and alienation.

My childhood, like Pink’s, was mostly a good one. But I had no idea what the future held for me. In the movie, Pink was a little weird, just like me. He felt alienated and alone, just like I did (just like every teenager does). Would those voices in our heads continue after high school, into adult life? Would I end up building a wall around me with the bricks of my own oddities, fears and ignorance? I had no idea then. Maybe I’d end up crazy, just like Pink.

Of course, I really didn’t end up crazy and I never built that wall around me. But I could have. Somewhere, I made the decision not to. I think we all come to that crossroads at some point in our lives. We could become isolationists, locking ourselves behind our walls, or become somewhat normal people.

It was nice to see The Wall transforming, for me, from a weird movie I watched as a kid to a powerful and meaningful experience. One of the scenes that really effected me was right after Pink shaved off his eyebrows and opened the bathroom door. Another was at the end, when Pink yells “STOP!” Both scenes really shook me. Others did as well, enough so that the whole movie became something more to me.

I’m not going to give you some big analysis or even tell you the story. See it if you want, but if you do, really try to watch it. It’s not a difficult movie to get, really. Yes, it relies on some major sensory overload to get its point across. This is a complaint of many (including Roger Waters). For some, that makes it hard to become a part of the movie. I can definitely understand that. But for me, it worked. Maybe it’ll work for you too.

Oddly, some things that I liked as a kid, didn’t work for me now. The animation, for example, seemed out of place. Of course, the animation is one of the most famous and important parts of the whole Wall concept. As part of the concept, it works. With the album and the live show, it worked just as it was supposed to. But in the movie, I’m not sure that it did.

The best time to see Pink Floyd The Wall is probably around 9th grade. You won’t get it and that won’t matter. It’s just weird and that’s all you need. Apparently, the best time to watch it again is in your early 30s.

We only tackle two TV shows at a time. For awhile it was Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel (watched in the order in which they aired – we are that geeky). But after the end of Buffy, we decided to pick back up where we left off a few months ago: the little Minnesota town of Walnut Grove.

We somehow squeezed the first season of Little House on the Prairie between Buffy and Angel seasons. I wrote about it here.

While the first season picks up with the Ingalls Family moving to Walnut Grove, the second season just sort of picks up from no where. This isn’t really a bad thing, of course. A lot of these episodes are “timeless” – some cover weeks or even months. This was the 70s and TV time didn’t really exist yet.

Like many shows of this era, we see characters that are centrally important to specific episodes that we’ll never ever see again. There’s the mean ol’ widower in “Haunted House” who Laura befriends. They apparently walk by his house to and from school/town every day. This is the first and (probably) last we’ll ever hear of him.

But there’s also a strange continuity going on too. The town is growing and therefore must be populated with new, reoccurring characters. The season opener features a new bank run by Ebenezer Sprague, a real hard ass to everyone. Nobody, not even that nasty Mrs. Oleson, likes this fellow. But Laura befriends him (she didn’t know he was the banker) and teaches him a valuable lesson.

Some of the episodes are real duds, for sure, but this season gave us some real classics too. “In The Big Inning” is a baseball episode that pits Walnut Grove against the mean and nasty town Sleepy Eye (sort of The Grove’s very own Shelbyville – though the Sleepy Eye team wasn’t called The Sleepy Eyeians). “The Runaway Caboose,” which features Laura, Mary and a neighbor boy aboard a runaway caboose. I’m a big railfan, so I was very ok with this train-based episode (it was the same train as in Petticoat Junction!).

Other series-changing classics would involve the Mr. Edwards/Grace Snyder story arc. Edwards thinks he just wants to be a loner, but Grace has fallen in love with this big furry cartoon man. However, when Oscar-winning actress Patricia Neal’s guest character learns that she’s dying, leaving three kids to be split up, Edwards trusts his heart and asks Grace to marry him so they could have an insta-family. The whole two-part episode was a tear-jerker.

The end of the season featured a string of guest stars. From Lou Gossett Jr in an episode about racism and transporting blasting oil to Richard freakin’ Baseheart as a mean ol’ teacher. Throw in a young (but not nearly young enough) looking Richard Mulligan as a Civil War vet and Theodore Bikel as a Russian imagrant telling us how great America is (this was the “Centennial” episode about 1876 that aired in March of 1976, just as the hoopla of the bi-centennial was getting started.

Season Two ends with a tornado ruining all of the Ingalls’s corn crop and leaving them with nothing. Pa decides to sell the farm and move back to The Big Woods (Wisconsin). If this were being made today, it would be a cliff hanger, but this isn’t Lost or even Dallas, this was a nice little show about a nice little family in a nice little town. We get episode-to-episode resolution. That’s not a bad thing, really. I’m glad that this isn’t serialized.

Continuity is important and is definitely there. But story arcs last pretty much one episode each. We do get a bit of foreshadowing here though: in the second episode, Mary needs to get glasses.

As each episode begins, we try to predict how it will go. You’d think that a series such a Little House would be amazingly predictable. Strangely, it isn’t. Not that there are freaky twist endings or anything, but it’s just not. Sure, the kids are rescued from the runaway caboose and the Ingalls keep their farm, but nobody (not even the racist guy) died transporting the blasting oil and why wasn’t Pa sorry when he punched the guy on Sleepy Eye’s baseball team? Many episodes left us wondering “ok, where are they going with this?” only to take us on a (sometimes very) long walk.

Next season promises more thrills and more guest stars (like Johnny Cash and Willie Ames!!!), but it will also be Mr. Edwards’s last season before a nearly five year hiatus. We’ll be starting that soon enough – we have to finish the fifth season of Angel. We’ll probably start Twin Peaks to watch along side Little House – you know, because that’ll warp us in lots of fun ways!

These couple few weeks that Smartz is in Boston, I decided to finally watch the Horatio Hornblower series. This A&E series is actually made up of eight feature-length movies all about the exploits of a fellow named Horatio Hornblower. It takes place in the late 1700s through the early 1800s to the start of the war with Napoleon.

Through this, Hornblower is the center figure and we follow him from the moment he joins the Royal Navy as a Midshipman (sort of a middle-management officer). As the series progresses, he is promoted through the ranks to the rank of Commander. This is often both because of and in spite of his careless bravery.

Ioan Gruffudd plays Horatio, the humble, yet headstrong officer who knows his duty, loves his ship and his men and is loyal to the last. He is most often surrounded by bumbling officers who out-rank him and who he naturally (and humbly) shows up.

It’s difficult to really make the Hornblower series seem as good as it is. All eight movies are very well made (though the first is distractingly shot on video) using full size ships and exotic locations. The stories are fiction, but based around historical events and portrayed with what appears to be a high level of historical accuracy.

It took me years to finally convince myself to watch these. And honesty, I’m glad I did and I’m sorry I sailed through them so quickly. They films are based upon the C.S. Forester novels and I’m sure I’ll be reading them soon enough.

I apologize for this being a fairly crappy review. But seriously, you’ll probably dig this and thank me for suggesting it. Netflix has only the last two films, so try your library (where I found mine), it’s very worth it.