Journal Wunelle

Root Canal

2012-01-26T23:29:00.002-06:00

Steven Soderbergh has had an amazing career. I remember being bowled over by his first film Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989--for which he also wrote the screenplay). That seemed a genuinely innovative film, and even now I cannot imagine anyone other than James Spader in the lead role. What a start to a director's career.

Since that time his output has been all over the map, including The Limey, Erin Brockovich, Traffic, Oceans 11, 12, and 13, The Informant, Contagion; and a couple of my personal favorites, Solaris and The Good German. And quite a few others, including the rather bizarre The Girlfriend Experience (which I watched recently and can't corral my thoughts enough to review it.) The only thing this output seems to have in common is his name on the letterhead.

The latest addition to his canon is Haywire, a very Jason-Bourne-like story about defense contractor Mallory Kane (Gina Carano) who must exact revenge on her employer (think Xe, née Blackwater) when they inexplicably turn on her. Beginning in the present day, we flash back to Mallory's recent series of jobs handled in a couple different locations out of the country, the last of which turned sour when her work partner had tried to kill her. This puts Mallory on the run. Why? Who wanted this outcome? And for what purpose? Trusting no one, she sneaks back into the US, where she sniffs her way to the root of the evil. And how she gets to the root of things is, well, it's why we love these kinds of movies. (As we hear Ewan McGregor say during the preview in a conversation with an unknown man, "Oh, don't think of her as a woman. That would be a mistake.")

This is the era of the female ass-kicker, it seems, with Lisbeth Salander on everyone's radar. And while Haywire doesn't rewrite the rules of the genre it gives another very engaging take on the Bond / Bourne theme of the super-competent agent having to fend for herself. What's different here is not only that the special agent in question is a woman, but that Soderbergh has cast a woman who is absolutely believable in the role and filmed her accordingly. Not that there isn't plenty of artistic license taken in the film, but Soderbergh has managed to tell a pretty typical spy thriller kind of story with less movie magic than is typically employed; and the film is better for it.

And it's all possible because of his star Gina Carano, who is recently retired from a career as a top-rated MMA (Mixed Martial Arts) fighter and TV "gladiator." This is Carano's first major role. She acquits herself extremely well, I'd say, though whether she's suited to a broad range of styles remains to be seen. Perhaps, my wife suggest, I'm just made soft in the head by her; she is built like the proverbial brick shithouse (as her Maxim pictorial attests). Unlike Rooney Mara, Carano is built to a very sturdy specification and is unquestionably able to fend for herself. The film has plenty of fight scenes, and for once the moves do not appear to be solely the output of movie magic. There is much less camera work involved to capture the action, presumably because the action is (mostly) really occurring.

The supporting cast is all excellent: Ewan McGregor (playing a rare baddie as an Erik Prince impersonator--no wonder revenge tastes so sweet when such a lowlife scum gets what's coming to him), Michael Douglas (great to see him rebounding from his cancer so well), Michael Fassbender, Channing Tatum, Bill Paxton, Antonio Banderas.

Here's yet another genre tackled deftly and satisfyingly by this most chameleonic of directors. Things have been clearly left open for a sequel, and I would gladly pony up to see Mallory Kane's further adventures.

Grade: B+

Brother, Can You Lend Me $450 Million?

2012-01-23T14:23:00.000-06:00

Like much of the rest of the world, I've been absolutely mesmerized by the January 13th sinking of the Costa Concordia off the coast of Italy.

Susan and I have done a bunch of cruises over the years, so one naturally places oneself in this setting; and yet this is completely anathema to every experience we've had on a cruise ship. All of our cruises have been with Holland America, and they've never put a foot wrong. Everything is friendly but quietly professional at every turn. Quite apart from the initial, showboating mistake of the Concordia's captain, I feel confident that no Holland America crew would allow such disarray and mayhem once an incident had occurred.

But that's of little help to the passengers of the Concordia. The pictures of the ship, still lit up like a christmas tree, listing to one side next to the island of Giglio have a huge fascination / horror factor, especially when followed a short time later by the half-submerged ship laying on its side.

Of course one's heart aches for those who did not make it off, and for their friends and loved ones who will suffer their loss. But after that initial pain, I'm fascinated at the prospect of what they'll do with the wreck from here onward. They can't just drag it into deeper water, nor, I suspect, can they cut it up where it lies, at least if they want to preserve the pristine setting where this all occurred. I'm also taking it as a given that the ship is beyond salvage, so that no attempt to save it for refitting will be involved. I could be wrong on all these counts, of course.

One article I read said that the ship would likely be moved, once the fuel is off-loaded, by first patching the hole then surrounding it with flotation and rolling it to an upright-but-mostly-submerged state. And then the water pumped out. I would pay money for a front row seat to witness such an operation. I wonder if it's ever been tried before?

Regardless, someone will have to do something about the wreck. I'll be watching eagerly to see what is decided.

An L.A. Times article from a couple days ago addresses some of these questions.

Iron Depletion

2012-01-21T09:14:00.000-06:00

The recently-departed (and much-lamented) Christopher Hitchens said that the worst sin for a writer was to be boring. By this standard I fear I'm a sinner of the first water, and there is hardly a more egregious observation I could make than to say that Meryl Streep is a goddess. But sometimes the truth hurts, and there's just no getting around the fact that the woman can do anything. She has played a huge range of characters over her long career, and has hit more out-of-the-park homers than anyone has a right to. And beyond critical success, her characters are invariably a great treat for the film lover. What a list: the deliciously evil Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada; her magnificence as Karen Blixen in Out Of Africa (one of my favorite films); her turn as Julia Child in Julie and Julia (would that the whole film were about her); Doubt, Silkwood, Kramer vs. Kramer. Like a musical virtuoso, it's worth the price of admission just to see her work.

It's especially fun to see her tackle accents (at which many actors recoil, or should), and yet to see her interviewed you'd never guess she has such a facility. She has a certain statuesque beauty but it's mingled with a kind of everywoman aspect, and she seems remarkably down-to-earth; if there's a diva in there, it's well-hidden. Her chief ambition just seems to be to have fun on the set (in interviews she cannot tell a story without making sound effects and laughing most endearingly at her own jokes).

The role of Margaret Thatcher is one for which Streep seems perfectly suited. Larger than life, brimming with conviction and charm, yet possessed of a rather uncompromising, even casually unfeeling, underpinning; the former Prime Minister is the perfect kind of role for Streep to sink her teeth into. Thatcher remains a controversial figure, and I confess I'm not necessarily predisposed to enjoy any biopic about her, mostly because I cannot look forward to two hours' immersion in these survival-of-the-fittest politics where the common workers are smashed underfoot and their due given to the "fittest" who were never so bad off to begin with. I don't know enough of history to determine whether this "tough love" approach was really necessary or effective, but there is no dearth of footage showing folks getting ruined by these policies. (Come to think of it, there are a few parallels to our modern times. I guess there really are just so many stories in life.)

Having seen Phylidda Lloyd's new film The Iron Lady, I don't think my reservations were unfounded; there's no telling Mrs. Thatcher's story without letting her espouse her politics (whether we want to hear them or not--though there will be those for whom they resonate). But I'm also reminded that I should not underestimate the Goddess Streep to deliver a deeply moving and richly satisfying portrayal regardless of the source material. Not that Margaret Thatcher's story is not fascinating. From modest beginnings, she rose through the rough-and-tumble, male world of British politics to improbably become the leader of the ruling Conservative party, and thus the Prime Minister of Great Britain, the country's first woman to hold the title. And from that position of power she undertook a bold--you could say brutal--reordering of society, crushing unions and privatizing a number of key industries in England, which made her extraordinarily unpopular, at least for a time.

And yet this is not exactly the storyline of Lloyd's film. We revisit these events, certainly, but in the context of an aged and feeble Lady Thatcher in her waning days reliving in memory the key events of her life. Her husband, Dennis Thatcher, is long since dead and one of her two children lives half a world away. She has a staff and a daughter that look after her, but dementia is setting in and hers is a life characterized by all that is behind her. True, this is the inevitable condition of the aging process, especially for one who has lived a rich and eventful life; all of us will reach this point, and the mighty have further to fall. But it seems questionable to put so much of the great lady's decline on the screen as though the loss of her faculties were as interesting as her accomplishments when still hale and hearty. I've heard Meryl Streep defending this part of the story as the simple truth of Thatcher's life, and it's true so far as it goes. But surely the decline and death that awaits every one of us is not what makes Thatcher's story an interesting one (even if there will be plenty who are happy to see her too hobbled to harm any more people). Lloyd's approach is not disrespectful, I'd say; it's just pointless to devote so much screen time to what makes her exactly like every other person.

Having said that, I totally see why Streep was itching to play the role. She gets to age about 40 years on screen and to be a person (the aged Thatcher) who is most challenging to play. And we can see her revel in all the little details that bring the character to life, for her and for us. It's another grand slam for Streep.

It strikes me now that maybe the reason Director Lloyd had focused so much on Lady Thatcher's decline is to bring some variety in what might otherwise come off as her monolithic persona. There's strength and eloquence and resolve and an unwillingness to compromise in abundance here, but it might be a bit cloying to watch two-plus hours of that without a little relief. But the character Streep gives us is so nuanced and so fully human that we'd be sucked in no matter the subject. The film covers Thatcher's whole life, but focuses mostly on her time in politics (and her final days). For the younger scenes the young British actress Alexandra Roach portrays her, and Streep covers the rest, ranging age-wise from mid-30s or 40 to the end. I disliked this technique of using two actors to play a single character in John Madden's film The Debt, but for whatever reason found it unobjectionable here. Ms. Roach quite holds her own, though the meatiest stuff is naturally reserved for Streep. And she is quite reason enough to see the film. It's a chance to see our greatest living film actress doing a brilliant, larger-than-life role whatever you may think of the subject.

Grade: B

The Tin Eye

2012-01-11T14:26:00.000-06:00

Today: Steven Spielberg's holiday treat, The Adventures of Tintin.

Previews for this film began showing up around Halloween, and it promised to be a rollicking good adventure and yet another step for computer animation on the continuum of stick figures on the one hand and absolute realism on the other.

The character of Tintin comes from a series of Belgian cartoons which ran from the 1930s to the 1960s plus or minus. Tintin is a young journalist who gets embroiled in adventures and solves puzzles. He is helped by his genius fox terrier Snowy, whose intellect appears to surpass that of many humans in the stories. (Even the journalist status of Tintin is a bit of whimsy, as he appears too young to have graduated from school, let alone attended college; but this is the stuff of fantasy: what child does not dream of her / himself in adult adventures?)

In Spielberg's film (produced by Peter Jackson--quite an adventure pedigree!), Tintin comes across a model of an old three-masted sailing ship at a street market and purchases it. He's immediately overrun with offers to buy the ship and warnings that the model is a dangerous implement that he would do well to avoid. When the ship is shortly stolen from his house, he and Snowy are off on a grand adventure around the globe to recover the model and discover the root of its mysterious power.

Animation over time has occupied a strange place in the world of entertainment. Many cartoons, especially TV cartoons, are aimed squarely at kids--TMNT, Scooby-Doo--and adults have a difficult time sitting still for them. But throughout the history of the cartoon, there have been many with a distinctly grown-up, or dual, appeal. Looney Tunes, for example, or The Pink Panther or Woody Woodpecker or Popeye, and later Ren and Stimpy or Beavis and Butthead. (Others are aimed primarily or entirely at adults, like Archer or Family Guy or South Park.)

Pixar has continued very much in the Looney Tunes vein, making features that capture the fancy of most kids while making fans of their parents as well. The Adventures of Tintin is not a Pixar project, but it carries on in the stream Pixar has helped feed now for 20 years. The previews for Tintin made it look almost like animated characters plunked into photographic settings. And indeed everything here that is not animate is rendered virtually in photo-realism. It's an absolute treat for the eyes throughout, combining the tactile, 3-D sense of the real world with the whimsy and no-limit possibilities of animation. Only the people (and Snowy) are rendered with a degree of cartoon distortion, but even this is highly variable. Tintin himself (voiced by British actor Jamie Bell) is pretty realistically drawn. You won't mistake him for a real person, but he's very close to that and his cartoon-ness quickly fades, as does that of Tintin's nemesis Sakharine (voiced by Daniel Craig). Others are more broadly made to varying degrees, and all are at least entertaining to look at. Voice talent is first-rate. There is still just a bit of stiffness to the human characters' movements. The realism of the backgrounds exacerbates this, since there is so much realism surrounding the action.

But that segues me into my chief complaint. One expects action and mayhem in a globe-trotting adventure, and the previews make this look almost like an installment in Spielberg's Indiana Jones franchise. That is very much its flavor. But after the initial setup and a chance to revel in the magnificent world Spielberg has created for us, I found myself a bit overwhelmed by the amount of screen time devoted to action scenes. It wasn't nonstop, but for long stretches one lengthy and frantic chase or fight scene follows hard onto another, and I wished for some breaks in the action, some quiet moments to chew on, you know, the plot. Both my wife and I left the theater with the senses a mite frazzled by all the explosions and whizzing cameras and shouts and gunfire. Overstimulation. With this I fear Spielberg will leave much of his adult audience behind (though I don't imagine kids will object). And all this action comes at the expense of a bit more detailed character development. We just don't get inside anyone's head enough to really care about them, and ergo it's hard to care much about the tale. This seems especially unfortunate, as all the dominoes are set up to make a really grand story, and it just feels like someone failed to exercise a little prudent restraint.

That leads us to that old style-versus-content conundrum, and we always get the same answer: technology and style can be fabulous things, but only insofar as they assist the telling of a compelling story. And it's worth remembering that it's possible to make a compelling cartoon with stick figures. It's all about story. To my mind, this lesson was lost sight of in The Adventure of Tintin, even if just a little. There's room here for improvement.

Grade: C+

London Underground

2012-01-07T15:41:00.001-06:00

Tonight, Tomas Alfredson's film Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. An adaptation of the 1974 John le Carré novel of the same name, there was also a previous BBC TV miniseries of the story starring Alec Guinness. So this story has some miles on it. Alfredson, a Swede, is scarcely known in this country, having previously directed a 2008 vampire film called Let The Right One In (I recall hearing someone on NPR sing its praises). Beyond that I'd not heard of him. Le Carré is of course famous for a series of Cold War espionage novels. In his Wikipedia profile, le Carré's writing style and plotting are contrasted with Ian Fleming's James Bond novels from the mid '50s:

The le Carré Cold War features unheroic political functionaries aware of the moral ambiguity of their work, and engaged in psychological more than physical drama. They experience little of the violence typically encountered in action thrillers, and have very little recourse to gadgets. Much of the conflict they are involved in is internal, rather than external and visible.

Unlike the moral certainty of Fleming's British Secret Service adventures, le Carré's Circus spy stories are morally complex, and inform the reader of the fallibility of Western democracy and of the secret services protecting it, often implying the possibility of East-West moral equivalence.

This is a better summary than I could manage, not least because I've read none of his novels. But also because the film version has its hands full trying to keep us in the loop (me, anyway). There are so many names and so many faces, all of them mixed up in plots involving Russia and Czechoslovakia, people representing different and competing governmental agencies--or different clearance levels within an agency, people conspiring with Americans, and nobody seeming to be quite who they claim. With no one apart from the main character figuring very prominently in the story, I had only a vague, general sense of who anyone really was and of what was going on--yet to come back and read the plot summary I find I got most of it. I certainly applaud the film's refusal to resort to easy action sequences to keep us engaged, but the flip side of that coin is that we are left guessing for much of the film as to what the hell is really going on. In this sense, a seven-part miniseries seems very much apropos (I'm reminded of David Lynch's attempt to make Frank Herbert's sci-fi epic Dune into a film. Lynch's film was incomprehensible, while the later mini-series of that book at least had a fighting chance of being followed by anyone not already familiar with the novel.)

George Smiley (played by Gary Oldman) is an intelligence analyst in the highest tier of British Intelligence, a group called "The Circus." Smiley and his boss, "Control" (John Hurt), dispatch one of the Circus's agents to Czechoslovakia to meet with a military man who has information for sale. The information apparently relates to a Soviet spy working inside the Circus, but somehow the meeting goes badly and the agent is shot, causing an international incident. The debacle cause Smiley and Control to be forced out of the Circus and into retirement, shortly after which Control dies. It is then left to Smiley to figure out who the mole is.

I can't really comment much on the character of George Smiley as envisioned by le Carré, but in general the emphasis on internal conflict and moral ambiguity and tension over action gets my strong support. The George Smiley of the film is a real departure for Gary Oldman. Not only because Oldman, an American, is playing a Brit, but because his Smiley is utterly taciturn and stoical, adjectives that do not leap readily to mind when surveying Gary Oldman's previous work. [Epic research fail! Oldman is indeed a Brit, though that's news to me! H/T to dbackdad.] Indeed, Smiley is in several scenes before he speaks a word or indeed even moves a facial muscle. But Oldman is utterly convincing in the role, and I'm surprised to find that the enigma of George Smiley draws one in; I might have expected such an inscrutable character to leave me unengaged. But there's a touch of detective in him, and some of the plot details--a wife who left him after having an affair with one of Smiley's coworkers, for example--hint at something more than what we see. And it's enough, maybe even to get me to see what le Carré had in mind.

The rest of the cast is excellent, though nobody gets much screen time: Colin Firth, Ciarán Hinds, Tom Hardy, Toby Jones (it is, I realize as I type this, a very male-centered story). The film does an additional public service in letting us revisit the foibles of our past: the '70s were a great period for Cold War spy stories but, it must be said, a bad time for clothes and hairstyles. Members of MI-6 may not necessarily dress as if for a Blaxploitation flick, but there's just no getting away from the stylistic dark alley we were plunging down at the time.

I'm left feeling intrigued by the story and the manner in which it was told, but in truth I'm more inclined to watch the 1979 miniseries or read the book than to see this film again. I might have enjoyed it immensely if I knew the story, but that's not a very strong endorsement for this endeavor.

Grade: C+

Come On People Now, Smile On Your Brother

2012-01-03T11:29:00.001-06:00

I remember the point a couple years into college where I had a revelation about the subject of history. Always a lazy student, I spent my whole academic career chafing against the necessity of doing a bunch of stuff I didn't want to do, and this caused me to equate reading history for pleasure as akin to volunteering for torture.

I forget the circumstance now, but sometime in the early '80s I remember finding a book on my parents' bookshelves and deciding to take it on. The book was William Shirer's epic Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which clocked in at a whopping 1,386 pages. For a guy who basically didn't read, that was an undertaking.

It's one thing to undertake it, and quite another to finish it. But I hardly put the book down until I turned the last page. Turns out it wasn't what I expected, and it kind of changed my whole perception of history. Instead of having to commit to memory a bunch of names and dates that had tenuous (or no) relevance to modern life, this book read almost like a novel. It was a personal eyewitness account of an almost unbelievable, world-shaking tale of events only recently past. And what a story; to this day nothing I have read in fiction can match the character of Adolph Hitler or the Nazi Party's rise to power and the consequences thereof. Whether inherently or because of this awakening event, the events of Germany in the 20s-40s retain a particular power on me.

I hope it's unnecessary to stress that nothing in the Nazi racial philosophy, and very little of their methods, resonated with me; on the contrary, I think (as I have said elsewhere) the idea that any meaningful thing about a person, or especially a group of people, can be known by their race is about as strongly disproven as anything can be. But I'm lying if I don't admit to finding the whole business magnetic: the downtrodden country unable to hold onto a government; the tyranny of the Versailles Treaty; the easy resort to scapegoating and the ready-made culture of anti-Semitism; the raucous street competition between thuggish groups of political adherents; the Nazis' utterly brilliant use of propaganda; the marches and mass rallies and symbolism; the snappy uniforms. And there is the character of Hitler himself, whose impact on people far surpassed anything I had seen in tepid, cynical American politics. I find myself instantly sucked in, and the film footage and photographs of that era are endlessly fascinating.

All this by way of introduction. Another crewmember mentioned a while back that there was a Nazi history museum here in Cologne. In my three years of coming here I had heard nary a peep about the place. I always assumed there would be such a facility in Berlin, but I hadn't thought to look for anything here. The party's control over the country was absolute, and the organs of state were everywhere, but I hadn't assumed that this chapter would be immortalized in museums in various places around the country. I just hadn't stopped to wonder about how modern Germany dealt with Nazi history.

I did a little research yesterday and located the place--not far from our hotel--but after walking over I found it closed for the holidays. I tried again this morning with better results.

Called the El-De Haus (i.e. L.D. House, for Leopold Dahmen, the name of the jeweler who owned the building before it was taken over by the Gestapo), it served as the Gestapo's headquarters in Cologne from the middle '30s up to the end of WWII in 1945. And the reality of the place throws one straight into the brutality of the movement. It's not surprising that the Nazis would have had offices in any city or town, but the El-De Haus is sobering for its collection of detention cells in the basement and for its courtyard out back where hundreds of executions took place. The rest of the museum pulls no punches about what went on here and elsewhere. There were no laughing, chattering kids here; everyone walked around in a stunned silence.

I'm fascinated by the question of how a country moves on after something like the Third Reich. In some ways I think this kind of descent into mass insanity could have happened anywhere (we see plenty of scary parallels in American culture right now, in fact). But it didn't happen just anywhere: it happened in the very center of Western civilization, in one of the most advanced and learned societies in human history. The arc of the Third Reich dragged much of the world along in its wake to its fiery conclusion, leaving a trail of millions of dead and billions of dollars spent to undo and / or contain what never needed to happen in the first place.

I certainly don't contend that contemporary Germans are under an obligation to atone again and again ad infinitum for the (admittedly unfathomably huge and ubiquitous) sins of their forebears; but neither can one just say "well that's done--let's move on!" however tiring it might be to have the elephant re-enter the room seemingly without end. It's important that these lessons, after all still very close in historical terms, not be swept under the rug of time. But how does the German state approach these things? And how should regular Germans look on them?

Apparently, without flinching and without pulling punches. The El-De Haus is a stark and grim reminder of just what the Third Reich was all about. In room after room, and display after display, no stone is left covering the ugliness that characterized what really happened here and across Germany. The numbers of people killed and tortured, who they were and how and when it was done, how it was justified and how and why citizens went along with it--all these things and more are gone over in graphic detail in the museum's five levels. I rented an excellent little audio player (there is some English in the displays, but obviously most everything is in German) and the displays have numbers which one punches into the player for an accompanying narrative.

Everybody knows about Hitler and Goebbels and Goering and Rudolph Hess, and maybe even about Julius Streicher and Martin Bormann and Ernst Röhm. But the thousands of other uniformed functionaries fade to history. Here we see a small progression of Nazi leaders from Cologne's past, none of whom I had heard of.

The only actual Nazi flag in the place. I'm fascinating that it is displayed in a rumpled fashion and not unfurled. There is something undeniably dangerous in the idea of displaying this flag unfurled. There remains a kind of mystical power in the symbol, which is surely a function of how its image was manipulated by Goebbels and others and of all the turmoil it caused.

War's end. This is the area right near our hotel, looking North toward the dom. The devastation was near-total--90% of the city, we are told.

Where the 'love locks' are currently.

There are numerous displays and photographs spread through the offices, mostly organized a topic to a room and arranged chronologically within subjects. Rather than a history of the El-De Haus and the Nazi doings in Cologne, it's a more comprehensive exposé of Nazism with an emphasis on Cologne. The museum finishes up with displays showing the state of things in Cologne at war's end. A video screen shows aerial footage of a completely bombed-out Cologne while the opening strains of Glenn Miller's "In The Mood" plays in a loop.

I'm glad I went, and it's a really important undertaking; but it's probably not a place I ever need to see again.

A Scientist and a Prophet Walk Into a Plague Pit...

2012-01-02T01:30:00.000-06:00

A couple tenuously-consilient items in the news in the last week kind of have me tweaked.

The first is that scientists have made relatively simple mutations in the H5N1 bird flu virus to apparently enable it to propagate through the air. My understanding is that the virus's inability to transmit this way naturally is the only firewall keeping us from an epidemic far beyond anything we've seen in modern times. I don't generally spend much time wringing my hands over these impending-medical-catastrophe things, but it seems like a fella ought to be kept awake by this one. This very extant strain of flu is especially devastating, killing somewhere near 50% of the people it infects. The article I read (different from the linked one above) cites some expert saying that we will be dealing with this flu and this type of transmission within the decade. Given that, as I understand it, we really have no medical defense against viruses, this coming plague promises to hit every one of us hard and leave a radically different world in its wake.

The second item was the hiring of a big Times Square display for New Year's Eve by an anti-vaccine group to spread their reprehensible pseudo-science alternate reality. The use of vaccines to ward off, and in some cases completely eradicate, major illnesses has been one of humankind's greatest collective achievements. And these folks are pounding away at this foundation as they run scared from a lie. It's one thing to choose to opt out for yourself, and maybe another thing to opt your children out (ugh); but it's a totally different matter entirely for your choices to place everyone else in society in peril, which is exactly what is now occurring. In an effort to flee from a completely invented and thoroughly-debunked risk--that the MMR vaccine causes autism--these people are now mounting a campaign against all vaccines, thus exposing their kids and everyone else's kids to a host of things that were heretofore under control. Catastrophic and unconscionable and apparently immune to reason. At some point this all leaves the realm of personal freedom behind and skirts instead with crime against humanity. (I can imagine a not-so-strange-as-reality sci-fi novel where society is forced to quarantine these denihilists to retain our herd immunity, only to have them lie about their convictions to avoid the rampant diseases they've released in the quarantine communities, thus making our efforts to contain their damage futile.)

My wife says, with some justification, that I am being too hard on people who are simply reacting to a devastating occurrence in their lives. But my objection is certainly not to their fear and personal anguish--of course not; I object to the strain of misinformation that preys on their vulnerable state, and to a media subculture that turns these wounded folks into passionate carriers of misinformation. And I especially object to a broader media model that covers the controversy instead of correcting the swirl of misinformation. Our current setup is creating a sect of willfully-ignorant obstructionists, people who shoot the messenger when their pet myths are faced with conflicting data, and giving them a megaphone. (A clip of a caller from an NPR Talk Of The Nation program a while back was held up as an example of cultural insanity: a doctor was a guest on the show, and to the question "What if I could show you the data to prove you're wrong?" the caller said openly that no information he or anyone else could possibly give her could make her change her mind and vaccinate her kids.)

I see the stamp of our current milieu in all this, the mark of our current media model. Rupert Murdoch has made a fortune out of putting the wacky in the spotlight and fanning the flames of white man's anger, and I know scores of people who buy unquestioningly into the results of this methodology. Part of his bag of tricks is to undermine anyone whose information runs contrary to the desired narrative, with the result that people now choose their facts. And we end up with climate and public health scientists being shouted down at public meetings while Jenny McCarthy and Rush Limbaugh are held up as qualified to expound to the masses on these subjects.

What got me thinking about all this is my current book. I'm currently reading Barbara Tuchman's account of life in the 14th Century, A Distant Mirror, and I'm up to the chapter about bubonic plague. Jesus, what an absolute horror. The disease showed up rather suddenly, and quickly overwhelmed whole towns and villages. The time between onset and death could be very short, from three days to a single day, sometimes even a few hours--a person could go to bed perfectly well and not survive until morning. There are examples of doctors showing up to treat a patient and dying from the disease before the patient herself expired. It's estimated that the plague of 1347-1350 killed off a third of the population of Europe--some 20 million people--and some places were left without a single survivor. I'm reminded of the shocking portrayal of a 19th Century England trying to deal with cholera in Steven Johnson's fascinating 2009 book The Ghost Map. There was little science at the time, no fact-based medicine, no antibiotics or any pharmaceuticals that were more than happenstances, no clue about the essence of infectious disease; and all of steeped in a really toxic mixture of total ignorance and rampant superstition mingled with a constant struggle for power and supremacy. And Tuchman's book takes us back another 500 years from that. Ugh.

And yet I daresay we were mired in the same level of ignorance and superstition in both periods. We had certainly learned things in the 500 years between the two stories, but the modern scientific method was just taking its first baby steps by the late 1800s, and so the same ignorance and superstition held sway. The big change took hold just into the early 1900s and onward, where careful observation and evidence-based research have resulted in a century of progress never before seen on this planet. We now understand plague and cholera very well, and know exactly how to treat them as well as a zillion other diseases. And we didn't get there by praying.

We may shortly be faced with an epidemic perhaps even worse than the Black Death, and I contend that science is all we have. To repudiate the science is to put us back in the comparative Dark Ages.

Look At The Night Sky In Wonder

2012-01-01T22:39:00.000-06:00

Jazz critic Gary Giddins on Louis Armstrong (from a Ken Burns interview):

What does he bring to this music that has not previously existed?

First of all, he establishes, almost single-handedly, that jazz is going to be a soloist's art, not an ensemble music.

Number two, he affirms for all time that a fundamental basis for this music is going to be a blues tonality, which is going to be as fundamental to jazz as a tempered scale is to Western music. It's the blood, it's the life of the music.

Third, and most significant, and I think this is maybe THE great innovation in American music, and it's the most astonishing to contemplate; Armstrong invented what, for lack of a more specific phrase, we call swing. He created modern Time.

The music that Armstrong improvised in 1928 excites us today. And if that's not classical music, I don't know what is.

What an amazing force of nature Armstrong was.

Stand 'Em Up Again

2011-12-31T07:20:00.000-06:00

It was nearly two years ago that I subjected myself to Guy Ritchie's first Sherlock Holmes film. I wasn't inclined to like the film even before setting foot in the theater, and the actual product did little to scold me for my prejudice. But sometimes the repeated exposure to an irritant can allow one to build up a resistance. Or maybe it's a question of someone (Guy Ritchie) pounding home their ideas again and again to make a hydra-headed schmoe (wunelle) kind of see the light.

Not that I'm here to extoll the virtues of Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. But I can grudgingly admit that Ritchie's sequel goes some ways toward reversing the pall I felt at the first film. The first time around I felt that Ritchie was trying awfully hard to be stylish and hip and I wasn't quite sure how this furious emphasis on style added up to, or even assisted in the telling of, a worthy story. It was American mainstream culture in a nutshell: too much style, too little substance.

And yet I admitted in that review that even the substance of Sherlock Holmes in his original setting was unlikely to lure me into the theater. So even by my own admission some extra thing was needed. Whether that extra thing involves Matrix-like slo-mo effects and Holmes's little interior monolog as he pre-scripts his physics-defying fight moves is an open question. Yet here we are. And Ritchie, by revisiting the stylistic world of his first film, makes an argument that his stylistic ideas are something more than a flash in the commercial pan.

And I had to admit even with the previous film that he had done a fine job of depicting the London of 100 years ago, with however heavy a degree of poetic license. That film looked awesome. Settling into my theater seat I find it's a world I'm happy to revisit. I didn't feel much chemistry last time between Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law, but they feel more worn and comfy this time around. It's all still a bit cartoon-y for me, but I admit to being entertained.

One bit of delight was the inclusion of Noomi Rapace as Sim, the gypsy woman who assists Holmes in some capacity or other. (I find, if one hasn't noticed, no purpose in expounding upon plot points for this kind of movie. It's all so formulaic that pleasure is to be found in the details and execution rather than the story, a variant of which we've been told 10,000 times.) But for the original Swedish language versions of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo films we would likely never have heard of Rapace. But she was awesome in those, and while she's given not an especially challenging part here, she certainly has more to do than her Dragon Tattoo partner Michael Nyqvist in his big-budget film debut in Mission Impossible. She has a number of lines and gets to do a good bit of physical work. It's very much a supporting role, but she's a definite asset to the film.

(She even gets her own poster!)

I'm still left wondering at how completely Ritchie and Downey have diverged from any hint of Conan Doyle's original Sherlock Holmes character. Though both are supposed to be brilliant deducers, at some point it seems silly not to just invent a new character to embody what I now think is a coherent set of characteristics in the director's and actor's minds. It's been so long since I read any Sherlock Holmes that maybe I'm missing how much these two conceptions--book and film--have in common; but I tend to think that Robert Downey's Holmes is so much a creation for 21st-Century audiences that it's a new substance entirely.

But no matter. The story is told with plenty of humor, and the whole motley cast goes from one cliff-hanging moment to the next, none of it sullied by mundane reality. I found this a mite too trying in Brad Bird's recent Mission Impossible 4, but for whatever reason I'm willing to give Guy Ritchie a pass.

It's a broad entertainment intended for a broad, American audience and I suspect most people will be delighted with it.

Grade: B+

My Idea Of A Horror Story

2011-12-31T05:16:00.001-06:00

I bought a DVD in Hong Kong of the fantastically brilliant Polish pianist Krystian Zimerman playing Chopin and Schubert. I have a number of Zimerman's recordings, and he is inarguably one of the greatest piano talents on the planet. He's especially fantastic with Debussy and the works of his fellow countryman, Chopin.

He has also become famous for interrupting his U.S. concert performances to speak out angrily against this country's military aggression. Normally very taciturn, he has a couple times declared a boycott of U.S. performances, first in 2006 until George W. Bush was out of office, and later altogether. Also in 2006 he criticized the U.S. extra-legal prison at Guantanamo Bay, and in 2009 he stopped a concert in Los Angeles to denounce President Obama's continuation of a missile shield in his country. "Get your hands off my country" he said in a quiet but angry voice. A number of people got up noisily and stormed out of the hall, some shouting obscenities. (This fact itself astounds me; who is so unable to brook criticism of a controversial political-military decision by their country that they publicly shout obscenities at a resident of the other country who objects to the policy? How perfectly Bill O'Reilly to impulsively shout an obscenity-laced objection in a packed auditorium.) It seems some in the audience cheered him, while others "told him to shut up and keep playing."

I'd boycott this place too if my very legitimate frustrations were treated thus.

But reading all about this I learned of an even more horrific factoid. It seems he has an even more tangible and personal reason to hate this country with the fire of a thousand suns. Like many of the greatest pianists, Zimerman routinely travels with his own personal Steinway, but unlike most pianists he is a master technician and has personally altered and finely adjusted his instruments. Into this china shop let us introduce the bull of the TSA:

"Shortly after 9/11, his piano was confiscated by customs officials at New York's JFK airport, who thought the glue smelled funny. They subsequently destroyed the instrument."

They WHAT??! You've GOT to be kidding. Some coven of strutting, high-school dropout martinets don't like the smell of a crated, $120,000 Steinway D Concert Grand shipped in from Poland and they have it destroyed?! "Just to be sure," one of the reports said of the TSA agent. Sure of what? That you're a weapons-grade imbecile? I am just absolutely speechless at this. Just getting fired for that would be nowhere near penance enough, even if the country paid to buy him another (and I can find no mention that it did). An artist of this caliber has a connection to his musical instrument we cannot begin to fathom. Would a TSA agent be allowed to destroy a Stradivarius violin that they thought "smelled funny?" Do they get to kill your dogs if they think there is cocaine in the digestive tract? Couldn't they quarantine the instrument and call in a Steinway technician?

To have such a thing destroyed on a whim is unforgiveable; I'd be on a lifelong personal vendetta against any and all who were involved. At the very least they should be subject to extraordinary rendition and free housing in the secret, black-ops prisons we seem unable to function without.

Meanwhile, I'm off to buy a couple more of his albums to help fund his recovery.

The Fall and Rise of David Carr

2011-12-28T02:00:00.000-06:00

After Andrew Rossi's film Page One, and Terry Gross's Fresh Air interview with one of the film's principal characters, the journalist David Carr, I picked up Carr's recent autobiographical book The Night Of the Gun.

Not a traditional biography, The Night Of the Gun chronicles Carr's descent from functioning wild boy journalist to drug addict and junkie and his long struggle to get a handle on his addictions and make his way back to the land of the living. From a rock bottom that was apparently the very teetering edge of ruin, he made his way back to a great job as Media and Culture reporter for the New York Times, and he gained sole custody of his twin girls--taken from him and his wife for their drug addiction--remarried, and battles every day to stay clean.

It's a quick and engaging read--and an undeniably dramatic story--but one that leaves a fella with mixed feelings. Carr has an obvious talent for weaving a tale and for making connections between things in life, and the human drama inherent in his up-and-down life make for a fascinating read, if a lurid one. But I haven't decided if Carr is a fella I need to meet in life. Certainly the person he used to be--thug and drug dealer and blithe, egocentric manipulator--is one I can do without. But our lives are often a series of redemptions big and small, and Carr's story is shot through with mea culpa and regret.

Yet not so shot through as to keep from advertising these egregious failures to the world in a best-selling memoir. I'm all about self-disclosure and living a life without secrets, but there's something a touch untoward in this wallowing self-regard, a kind of black-belt self-absorption in digging into the details of what a bunch of other people think and feel about you. (I remember an early lesson in one of my Russian language classes a thousand years ago, "But enough about me. Let's talk about you. So what do YOU think of me?") This is of course not lost on Carr, who beats us to any criticisms we might lodge against him. This doesn't always feel like taking ownership of these wrongs, but mostly it does. Not that one has to like and perfectly relate to an author to find merit in their works, but this book makes me think I live a life sheltered in the extreme. It's a garish tale that brushes uncomfortably close to things I'm happier to keep at arm's length.

The David Carr that assembles from the Page One documentary and from his book is an undeniably fascinating character: movingly human, good at his job, a man of extremes. As an addiction memoir, it's a gripping read. But this isn't everyone's cup of tea, methinks.

I'm Ready For My Closeup

2011-12-27T23:30:00.000-06:00

I begin with a confession: I have never seen any of Marilyn Monroe's films. I've seen bits and pieces of things, YouTube clips and such, but I've never watched any of her films start to finish. I remember stumbling upon one of her early films (The Asphalt Jungle, I think) and though styles have changed so much since 1950 I still remember the sheer earthquake sexuality of her the moment she came on screen. Even at so brief an exposure it was clear that she had--literally--an animal magnetism about her, a kind of lit-from-within quality that stole every scene she was in. But I haven't made a study of her, and she's more on my radar as an icon than an active enthusiasm.

But the movie choices here in Dubai are limited, at least for a visiting Westerner, and Simon Curtis's recent film My Week With Marilyn seemed intriguing. Based on an autobiographical sketch by the obscure British entertainment grunt Colin Clark, the film tells the story of Clark's brief acquaintance and quasi-affair with Monroe in 1955 when she was in London to film The Prince and the Showgirl with Laurence Olivier. Olivier, played fabulously here as a steam-kettle diva by fellow Master Thespian Kenneth Branagh, had little time for Monroe's unschooled and needy nature, and his exasperation was redoubled by the thorough upstaging she gave him despite seeming not to know what the hell she was doing.

Newly-hired Third Assistant Director Colin Clark is tasked with looking after the needy Monroe, and a friendship blossoms and becomes something a little more, the briefest of flames.

That story is reasonably entertaining on its own, but the film's raison d'etre is really to serve up a character study of the complex persona of Norma Jean / Marilyn Monroe. Endowed with a certain degree of talent and this clock-stopping bombshell aspect, the Monroe of this film is unable to show her face in public for the mayhem that instantly ensues. But there are inherent difficulties to being the most famous person on Planet Earth, as the interest of everyone rather makes it difficult for anyone to get to know you in a meaningful way. When everyone wants from you without limit, it becomes very difficult to trust anyone. By 1955 Monroe was recently embarked on her third marriage, this time to Arthur Miller, a marriage which the film implies was on its way out a mere three weeks after the nuptials. Take this person and put her in front of a camera with an older, established stage actor with a retinue and an impatient nature (and plenty of insecurity of his own), and you have guaranteed extra-curricular drama.

Monroe is played here by Michelle Williams, last seen by me in 2010's Shutter Island. Watching a couple trailers for the film before I went, I was a little skeptical as she doesn't exactly parrot the almost self-parodied characteristics I've seen in Monroe's clips--the breathy voice, the shimmying walk and ditzy persona. Williams does all these things, but they're fairly subtle, and it's in the film's quieter moments--the stuff not shown in the trailers--that she seems to magically conjure up the doomed diva. Williams is neither as stunningly beautiful or voluptuous as Monroe (though she scores high enough on both counts), but her brilliant performance gives us someone absolutely magnetic, yet so wounded and needy and scared; her Monroe is not a weak character, but a blindly self-contained one under unimaginable pressures. Like the real Marilyn Monroe, our eyes are glued to Michelle Williams every second she is on screen. There is a light in her eyes that is irresistible and a certain childlike quality to her that is at once vulnerable and frighteningly out of one's league.

There are several other luminaries in the cast: Judi Dench and Michael Kitchen and Emma Watson and Julia Ormond and others. Eddie Redmayne does a lovely job as Colin Clark.

But it's Marilyn Monroe who, as expected, steals the show. The character given us by Michelle Williams is deeply intriguing whether or not she is conjuring an actual person. The fact that there is an historical Marilyn Monroe makes Williams's accomplishment so much better. It's not the movie of the year; but it's a lovely story and a fine entertainment.

Grade: A-

Training Day

2011-12-26T08:44:00.002-06:00

Our visits in and out of Cologne this trip have been met with gray skies and drizzle and unseasonably warm temps. The famous holiday market across the street from our hotel refused to be dampened by the warm temps and lack of snow, but the unrelenting clouds and damp seem determined to cast a pall on things.

So I spent today doing the next best thing to walking in the gorgeous European sunshine. I began the day perched on my usual bench in the train shed of the Hauptbahnhof, eating my portable breakfast and watching the trains come and go. But today is surely one of the peak travel days for any Western country, so there was lots to look at. It's especially fun to see families accompanying relatives and friends to the train station and seeing them to their car (one of many things now denied the air traveler). Then they stand opposite each other and gesture and laugh at each other through the glass until the train glides silently past the platform and out of sight. So many moving little partings after the holiday visits.

The superiority of train travel to air travel is striking in this setting. I have to remember what we sell in my industry; it's not comfort or service (though those things help): no, we're selling speed. America is a big place and very spread-out, and airplanes make it all accessible in a reasonable timeframe. But how much better the experience of train travel is to airplane travel. Everyone has space; your knees and elbows are not guaranteed to be offending someone else; you're able to actually get up and walk around; there are big windows and you're on the ground where there's always something to look at; there is food and drink available, typically in a separate car; you can even sit around a table to work on your computer or play a game of cards. And you don't have to be strapped down all the time. You can even buy a compartment for complete privacy.

Next stop: Hannover Hauptbahnof.

Sitting in the station (wikipedia has a great article on CGN's Hauptbahnhof) one sees a variety of grades of train, reflective of the distance being traveled. The longer-distance trains are shaped like a bullet and move at very high speeds. The local and regional trains tend to be a bit more utilitarian-looking, though everything seems in good repair and reasonably clean. Signage is everywhere and decipherable even to a foreigner, plus announcements are made over an actually-functional public address system in German, French and English (I chuckle to think of the announcements on the NY or Chicago subway systems, which sound exactly like Charlie Brown's teacher in the old cartoons: wawawa, wawa waaaaa, wawa.)

And there's an even more local train system that runs beneath the Hauptbahnhof, Cologne's subway / surface local trains. I had never been on these, though one sees them all about town. So, it not being a very good day for walking, I decided to buy a day pass and just ride around for a few hours. On my walks about town, I had come to think that the subway entrances I saw were for a different train system than the surface trains, but this is not the case. All of the city trains appear to spend at least some of their time underground, and depending on the line it may be mostly beneath or mostly above. On my travels today I got to see a variety of both settings.

The No. 9 train at its terminus at Sülz Hermeskeiler Platz.

It never fails to astound me that a train system can be so beautifully developed and (ergo) so brilliantly utilized in a place like Cologne with its one million inhabitants, while a city like Minneapolis, whose metro area is, I think, considerably larger than Cologne's, struggles to put in two or three surface rail lines, and very Johnny-come-lately at that. Cologne, meanwhile, has something like 15 city train lines (some of which extend out to connect a suburban hamlet) and another 5-10 regional rail lines, plus the longer-distance, high-speed trains. (Even Chicago, a much bigger place than CGN, has but 10 city lines.) The surface trains ride on a light-ish rail, typically set flush into the street, but the ride is quiet and smooth apart from some sharp corners dictated by the ancient layout of the town. The trains I rode were not impeccably clean, but they were cleaner than the American subways I'm accustomed to and not rife with vandalism or graffiti.

The implementation is just what you'd expect from the Germans. Everything runs on time, and equipment is smooth and quiet. Even in remote areas there are lighted dot matrix signs counting down the minutes until the arrival and departure of any train using the track. You always know where you are, what direction you're pointed, and when your ride will be there. Clearly some substantial resources have been poured into this system, and the result is a public transit system that many people prefer to driving their cars. There are enough trains that with maybe a single train change you can get anywhere in town without too much walking, and they are comfortable, reliable and not very expensive. And because they had a good transportation system developed early, the town has grown up around the rail lines. What a concept.

Fun to contrast this photo with a similar one from my first visit here nearly three years ago. The number of love locks has grown 10-fold.

Between rides I spent some time walking from train to train, and hopped off some distance from the hotel and walked back, snapping pictures of odds and ends as I went.

One of Cologne's many museums; this one, I think, a city history museum.

A forlorn little beer garden sitting fallow for the cold months.

Lunch on the street; a, um, currywurst bar!

I didn't see anything on my travels unexpected, but using the trains did let me see a bunch of underground stations, plus a few neighborhoods I had not yet walked through. Everything reinforces my sense of Cologne as a really great place to live.

Tomorrow: back to Dubai and on to Hong Kong.

Recombinist Extractionary Clustible Sqatterclism!

2011-12-24T12:06:00.002-06:00

Brad Bird gets an automatic lifetime pass for any future endeavors because of his miraculous 2004 film The Incredibles. That movie is so delightful, so entertaining, so perfect that he could spend the rest of his career making cinematic faceplants and still go down in the annals of film history as a great director.

Which is good, given his latest effort, Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. I wouldn't go so far as to suggest that he needs some residual credibility in the bank before releasing this baby into the wild, but expectations naturally tag along in the wake of such a talent.

Not that Mission Impossible is absolutely without merit: after all, there are such things as 10-year-old boys, and they need entertaining too. Boys and emotionally stunted adult men. (OK then, men.) But I always say the same thing when I go to see a film like this (I had hoped to see Tin Tin or Sherlock Holmes or even Dragon Tattoo for a second time, but this was the only remotely appetizing thing on the menu); my distaste is probably not likely to be widely shared, and I'm just the wrong person to review a contemporary action film. I'd personally consign most of the output of guys like Jerry Bruckheimer and Tony Scott to television if I had my druthers. And everything based on a Marvel Comic.

But this is Brad Bird! A fella's just got to see what he's been up to. And as expected, Mission Impossible has a cracking pace and ri-DONK-ulous action scenes and some nice verbal cracks... but that's about it, really. Having a plot that really makes any coherent sense--or indeed is really any more sophisticated than a timer counting down to doom--is just not on the table here. We have a group of super-talented good guys (Tom Cruise, Paula Patton, Jeremy Renner, and Simon Pegg) who are working "off the reservation" to thwart the plans of the evil guys (mostly Michael Nyqvist, doing a turn in a big Hollywood film after playing Mikhail Blomkvist in the Swedish Language versions of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo franchise). Lots of explosions ensue with car chases and fistfights edited so that you have no idea what's happening but you KNOW it's mayhem and the good guys will win! At the Very! Last!! Second!!!!!! I laughed out loud at the film's ridiculous foley work. A punch to the jaw sounds like someone taking a baseball bat to a closely-miked side of beef, and gun shots are like artillery. Add in a big dollop of music-video-style editing and one emerges from the theater fairly vibrating from the assault to the senses, having barely avoided a flickering-light-induced epileptic seizure.

Tom Cruise continues to do what he has always done, though he looks a bit longer in the tooth than he used to. He's still in great condition, but his body shape has changed over the years. He begins to look like an old man, if a ripped one. And he still manages to conjure this kind of megalomaniac grim reaper that passes for his character. He glowers and says nonsensical things that make him sound tough. Like, abominable snowman tough. Phrases like "Ghost Protocol" are tossed around as if they're not actually ridiculous ad-speak. His smiles are dangerous, and his most serious lines caused eye rolls so severe that I almost hurt myself. The stunts are so eye-popping that one just about laughs with ridicule. Thank the Buddha for Simon Pegg who is hard-pressed to provide enough comedy relief to offset the tsunami of grim, though not for lack of effort. But for him we'd have a Sylvester Stallone picture where you'd almost welcome a bullet to get some relief from the grim. Jeremy Renner, who was so impressive in Ben Afleck's The Town (2010), seems to actually bring some chops to his little role as an agent trying to make his way back after a botched job (that, I guess, wasn't really botched after all; it's like Harry Potter where you can't really buy into ANY of the plot twists because MAGIC can always be used to undo things or make them never have happened in the first place. Or whatever). The last member of the team is the lovely and statuesque Paula Patton, who gets to kick some ass and look stunning in a saucy evening gown. They're a ragtag bunch who hardly know each other and squabble continuously yet pull off things that, well, need special effects to enable ANYONE to even appear to do them.

But hey, it's an action film. Sigh.

One thing that randomly contributed a faint magical glow to the evening was that I saw the film in the theater complex attached to the Dubai Mall, which just happens to connect to the Burj Khalifa-the world's tallest building--where Mission Impossible's most spectacular action sequences were filmed. It was fun to sit in the theater and be closer to that building than some of the shots of it in the film.

But that ain't much of an endorsement. Sorry, Brad. (I'll still eagerly wait for your next one!)

Grade: your pre-pubescent son gives it an A+; for myself, call it a C.

Ink Blot

2011-12-22T21:17:00.000-06:00

I wonder if there were ever a movie pushed bawling out into the world more freighted with baggage than David Fincher's new film The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Adapted from the sensational best-selling novel from 2008 by the Swedish journalist Stieg Larsson, the book and its two simultaneously-published sequels were an international phenomenon, all of which were quickly made into Swedish-language films. The original film of the first novel was titled in Swedish "Men Who Hate Women," and was an excellent film, I thought, though not one that found a broad audience in the US (Americans turn away in droves from any film with subtitles). I stumbled unwittingly onto the first film in Louisville a couple years ago, and this was my introduction to the whole phenomenon. This led to a frantic search for the other two films (shot simultaneously with the first film but, unlike the first film, intended for TV and so shot at a lesser production quality), and thence to the novels and even the audiobooks. I've had Stieg Larsson on the brain, I'm afraid.

The story--both the story of Stieg Larsson and of his trilogy--are well known at this point to virtually everybody, and there is no need to go over the plot again here. (Wikipedia has a nice summary of the first novel for the unfamiliar.)

It's a pulpy story and a great crime whodunit. But I've become convinced that the real reason we have taken to the story so strongly is because of the books' (and films') principle character, Lisbeth Salander. She is one of the great inventions of fiction, a compelling admixture of dysfunction and extraordinary skill and competence. She's the unlikeliest of heroines: tiny, damaged, anonymous, beleaguered. She's a bit of a freak, but not in the cartoon-ish way of a James Bond or a comic book superhero. Her skills and deficits are believable, and her story is a sad but compelling one.

Truth be told, I was actually disappointed to hear that an English language version of the film was being made, not least because I loved Niels Arden Oplev's original film and felt there was little chance of topping it. Mostly I resent that a great film will flop in this country if audiences are asked to do any work to get at it; a part of me feels we don't deserve a great film if we will only see it by insisting on our own Hollywood version. But (after I breathed in a paper bag for a minute or two) I reminded myself that David Fincher is a huge talent and I should just wait and see what he comes up with.

It's hard to evaluate the film without making comparisons--to the book, naturally, but also to Oplev's original film. Condensing any 10 hour book down to a two hour film necessarily means tossing out about 75% of what's in the original text, and that leaves a lot of leeway about what the final product might look like. Two movie adaptations may be very close in arc while still being quite different in their details. And so it is with Fincher's film. Fincher's screenplay was written by Steven Zaillian, and the original story is there in the main. And yet there are a host of changes, most of them little but not all of them. And my predominant feeling exiting the theater is one of being mired down a bit by these changes. I suppose it's my familiarity with what has gone before, but a lot of these changes strike me not as the best way to tell Larsson's story but more like somebody's attempt to "improve" it. This instinctively raises my hackles. As I say, the screenwriters are to be expected to find their way to some kind of condensation, but a lot of these things change the nature of the story being told--especially projecting out over the next two films--and some of them have a real impact on what we think of the characters involved. (I read one bit of publicity with Zaillian talking about what could be "tightened" or otherwise improved. Steven Zaillian is a very accomplished and successful screenwriter, but I still found myself thinking reflexively 'when YOU'VE sold 30 million books--as opposed to getting 30 million folks to see your films, which is quite another matter--you can make that claim; for now you should just try to provide good stewardship of another author's very popular work.') This verdict is still out.

Fincher's casting is beyond reproach: Rooney Mara, Daniel Craig, Christopher Plummer, Stellan Skarsgård, Robin Wright; all fabulous. And yet, though the film feels more expensive than the earlier film, I don't find that it improves on Oplev's film in any particular. No, on the contrary; it seems less adept at telling the story, and some of what was tossed aside we might wish we understood later (say, the inner workings of Millennium magazine, or making better sense of the labyrinthine Vanger family tree). And much of it goes by so quickly that I wonder how many details are lost to anyone not familiar with the story from the book. Niels Arden Oplev devoted very little effort, it seems, into making his film feel hip or current or fashionable, whereas Fincher seems to have paid considerable attention to this aspect (the opening title sequence seems to have been spliced incongruously into place from an unrelated MTV music video). In the end, Oplev simply does a better job of telling the details of Larsson's finely-detailed story.

Mara and Craig are the two principles, of course, and are in virtually every scene (at least one of them). Craig's Mikhail Blomqvist is more of a supporting character to Lisbeth Salander than Michael Nyqvist's. Rooney Mara is really excellent, a fine variation on a theme drawn pretty carefully by Stieg Larsson. Her Lisbeth Salander is not better to my mind than Noomi Rapace's--and not even terribly different; they're both channeling the same rare substance--but she has found her own creature in Larsson's creation, and she is similarly magnetic on screen. More so than in Oplev's film, Fincher has made this Lisbeth Salander's story and she, I maintain, is why we come to the theater.

My wife, who knows a thing or two about drama, has had a pretty strong distaste for the whole franchise from the beginning. Though I think Larsson was a feminist and an uncompromising egalitarian, my wife (and others, to be sure) find something salacious and unnecessary in Larsson's depiction of the injustices perpetrated upon Salander, especially in the first book. The story involves some rather brutal and explicit sexual violence against Salander, violence shown quite explicitly in both films, and Susan questions whether this is necessary or even forgivable.

I'm sensitive to this view, but I can't bring myself to convict. Larsson wrote these scenes for a reason. There is nothing sexy or alluring to them. They are intended to bring us into an act of violence and tyranny, to give us a visceral sense of a horrible wrong. Screams behind a closed door might accomplish much of the same thing, but modern culture is rife with casual violence--including all manner of violence as entertainment--and the point here is to bring us back to reality and make us feel the violation involved. Whether we approve of it as story fodder or not, actual crimes against actual women occur all the time--sometimes in exactly this fashion--and these are shoes that Larsson felt we should all walk a few steps in. And so he forces us to watch what we should find revolting and profoundly discomfiting. I respect that decision even if I wish I didn't have to watch. (As it turns out, this violence against Salander is something more than it seems, and that larger arc is the cord running through all three novels.)

But Larsson's book is still the obvious work of a male writer. Its (non-violent) sexual content feels different from what I expect a woman would have written (Twilight it ain't), and this fact, plus the quite differential nudity in the films--Salander is shown pretty graphically naked in both films while Blomqvist is kept mostly covered--further contributes to my wife's suspicions about the film's feminist credibilities.

Duly noted. But we both found ourselves glued to the screen, and it certainly makes for a gripping couple of hours. I'm always inclined to see films I like more than once, but here in particular I feel I need another viewing to see this more as Fincher's work than as his adaptation of someone else's.

Grade: B

Extreme Makeover: Gray Lady Edition

2011-11-28T14:27:00.001-06:00

Today's film: Andrew Rossi's 2011 documentary Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times.

I heard of this film during a Fresh Air interview with David Carr, who is a correspondent covering media and culture for the Times. The film follows several reporters on the Times' Media Desk during what must surely rate as one of the most tumultuous years in newspaper history. The film mostly consists of interviews with a bunch of people inside and outside the Times, both about the institution of the Times itself and its inside operations, and about the states of journalism and of print media during the exploding digital age.

The interviews make clear that virtually everybody, friend and foe alike, looks at the Times as a unique place, something quite above and beyond newspapers in general. But time does not stand still, and the changes wracking the media universe in the past decade make for a gripping story. We live in an unprecedented age of information, and we have become accustomed to having largely unfettered access to all information all the time--and for no cost.

Or not for a monetary cost, anyway. What used to take time and careful vetting before it was presented authoritatively to us--an expensive proposition--now gets splashed up on the Web at the first hint, often raw and rife with rumor and inaccuracies. Any vetting follows in the form of corroboration from other sources, and revisions and corrections now follow the initial reports as necessary. It's a different world; we simply consume information differently than we have in the past, and our expectations have changed accordingly. Page One shines a light on a lot of this, and makes it plain that news gathering and production involves skill and art and a whole lot of hard work. (There's a very interesting panel discussion where someone representing, I think, Gawker argues that traditional media is dead and it's time to move on. The New York Times correspondent deftly demonstrates how aggregator websites like Gawker create little or no original content, so that if the "traditional media" go away then the aggregators will go with them. Point taken.) [Correction: the website in question was Newser.]

Like many people, I've been grappling with this whole idea for a while now. For years I've clicked a dozen times a day on Yahoo News to check headlines, and I've become accustomed like most people to thinking of news as something like fresh air that's just all around us and free for the taking. Though I've always been a contributor to NPR, I came to the realization a few years back as this issue was heating up that I needed to start paying much more seriously for the coverage I have come to rely on. All of this is front and center in Page One, and serves as a pretext to give us a rare glimpse into the inner workings of the newsroom and the briefings and editorial meetings that result in a daily paper that is read around the world. The Times we see on the inside is a place characterized by a group of really smart middle-aged people struggling to understand complex things and to work through a codified collaborative process to tell the world about those things in a fair and relevant way. It's an impressive thing.

But David Carr, who emerges as the film's central character, was the real revelation to me. I lived for years in Minneapolis, and during this time Carr did a stretch as the editor of the premier weekly paper in Minneapolis / St. Paul, the Twin Cities Reader. I vaguely remember his name from around that time. But in between his stint at the Reader and his job at the Times (which he's held now for about 10 years) it sounds like he lived a life of great variety and richness, as it were. He wrote a book in 2008 called Night Of the Gun which details his addiction to cocaine and crack and alcohol and his struggle to get and keep clean while trying to raise a family. Carr plays a central role in Page One, both because he is working on a couple stories which figure prominently in this tumultuous year at the newspaper and because he was most extensively interviewed. And this is likely because he comes across as a very compelling character on camera (and indeed on tape). He is a striking physical presence; after a bout of Hodgkins' Lymphoma the treatment for which left his neck muscles in shambles, he walks around with his head bowed and his voice raspy and hoarse, a small man's head and neck grafted onto a big man's body. But woe to anyone who mistakes this physical trait for frailty. He is a tenacious reporter who is not given to social nicety, and people quickly learn that whatever he looks like he means business. Fiercely intelligent and, thanks to his hardscrabble life, absolutely unshockable, he says what he needs to say, speaking with a surprising directness and force that is both disarming in its honesty and disconcerting in its unflinching character. He is simply a fascinating character. I have his memoir on deck.

The film is told absolutely without bullshit. It's professionally made, but there are no effects or flash. If you care about print media, and especially if you care about the New York Times, this is a really gripping film. It tells an important story about one of the biggest possible players.

Grade: A

A Love Letter To Glass-Steagall

2011-11-27T12:54:00.001-06:00

From Nomi Prins's book It Takes a Pillage (emphases mine):

Here are some numbers for you. There were approximately $1.4 trillion worth of subprime loans outstanding in the United States by the end of 2007. By May of 2009, there were foreclosure filings against approximately 5.1 million properties. If it was only the subprime market's fault, $1.4 trillion would have covered the entire problem, right?

Yet the Federal Reserve, the Treasury, and the FDIC forked out more than $13 trillion to fix the "housing correction," as Hank Paulson steadfastly referred to the Second Great Bank Depression as late as November 20,2008, while he was treasury secretary. With that money, the government could have bought up every residential mortgage in the country--there were about $11.9 trillion worth at the end of December 2008--and still have had a trillion left over to buy homes for every single American who couldn't afford them, and pay their health care to boot.

Think about those numbers for a minute. The difference between the problem ($1.4 trillion) and the solution ($13 trillion--which is incidentally almost equal to our country's accumulated national debt, and about as much money in adjusted dollars as we have spent cumulatively on all the wars in our nation's history) is how far under water the banks had gone--how much leverage they had taken on--in their desperate efforts to make themselves obscenely rich. Those are billions of dollars which the banks borrowed or created out of nothing and then put down on rigged schemes and fraudulent speculation in expectation of huge payoffs. And it's worth reminding ourselves that these government bailout funds to plug the holes of a criminal enterprise are not moneys we actually possessed; given that we're borrowing about 1/3 of our government's total expenditures for this year, the bank bailouts represented an increase in debt. (This is the kernel of what caused Matt Taibbi to write Griftopia and Prins to write It Takes a Pillage.)

If the banks had made good on this scheme--which they did for a time--would the country have realized some benefit? Fat chance. Jesus, we can't even get these guys to pay a fair share of taxation on their obscene compensation! But when things turned south the people of this country were told, not asked, to pony up to the tune of $13 trillion to cover their bets. (And actually, we weren't even told. It was just done with no real discussion or public awareness.)

How is this not criminal behavior? By my (admittedly crappy) calculations, $13 trillion divided by a population of 330 million works out to be just shy of $40,000. That's almost $40,000 for every person in this country paid out to the people who already control the great bulk of this country's wealth. This is what was taken from us--now a debt to which each of us is obligated--to keep the financial services industry from taking down our entire economy. More than this, it kept these bankers and executives in unconstrained salaries and ludicrous bonuses despite their criminal activity. We suffer so they don't have to.

How many things are we unable to do in this country because we are told we cannot afford them? Improve our schools? Cover our citizens' health care costs? Pay for a high speed rail infrastructure that rivals, say, Europe or Asia? Fix our crumbling roads and bridges? Put more money into space exploration?

And conservatives have the gall to declare that taxing the very rich is "class warfare," that regulating this criminal activity is "socialism." You know what? Count me in. I'll happily wear a socialism button at this point.

What The Tracks Bisect

2011-11-22T22:02:00.001-06:00

These weeks on reserve are highly variable. I'm on call here in Louisville for a 12 hour period each day, and the rules say I must be in uniform at the airport ready to go within 90 minutes of receiving a call. Sometimes you're snagged right away and stay out for the entire stretch of days, and other times--like this week so far--the phone doesn't ring. So what to do with this free time? Well, eat out a lot, get in a good walk each day and see a lot of movies. There are a hell of a lot worse ways to spend a week.

Tonight's film is Tate Taylor's brilliant adaptation of Kathryn Stockett's book of the same name, The Help. Set in Jackson, Mississippi in the early '60s, the film tells the story of a group of African-American maids employed in white Households and of a young white woman who wants to tell their story. The backdrop is of course one of lingering Jim Crow and of the racially-motivated assassinations that marked the civil rights movement, and we are quickly (tho fairly gently) reminded that this simple idea--an exposé of life as a black maid in a white household--is nowhere near as simple and innocent in this setting as it might sound.

Emma Stone plays Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan, a woman recently returned to Jackson from college and integrating herself back into social life. Skeeter was raised by the family maid Constantine (Cicely Tyson), but returns from school to find Constantine suddenly gone from the household. Constantine was as constant a presence in Skeeter's life as anyone else in her family, and was probably the single biggest influence in Skeeter's budding character as the child became a woman. Her absence is, well, like an unexplained disappearance of a family member. In addition to not being able to get a straight answer out of her scattered mother (Alison Janney) about what happened to Constantine, skeeter is repeatedly exposed to subtle and overt racism toward the maids and gardeners at her friends' houses, and she decides to try and write a book about this reality as told from the servants' point of view. Her efforts are kept secret initially, and indeed none of the maids are initially willing to risk their jobs--and, as civil rights turmoil breaks out all around them, perhaps their lives--to tell what they really feel. But as the repeated acts of discrimination and hate crimes occur all around them the group gradually come to feel that their story needs to be told. More than this, it MUST be told.

The two primary maid characters are Aibileen Clark (Viola Davis) and Minny Jackson (Octavia Spencer), both of whom are really off-the-charts fabulous. I've seen and loved Viola Davis in several past films (Solaris, Doubt, State of Play), but I'm coming to think there is a force to her presence that might elevate her to goddess status. I think in person I might be actively afraid of her, she just seems that formidable. Her role here is a role of a lifetime, I think, playing a strong and intelligent woman entrusted with the raising of another family's children--children she dearly loves, but who must come before her own children's needs--while occupying an inferior place in that same household and in society in general. In the best of circumstances this secondary status is subtle and gnawing, and often it manifests itself as pure, sickening tyranny. I know that racism is alive and well today--look at the Tea Party's treatment of President Obama--but to see it practiced so pervasively and even solidified into law and every social code is revolting to even the most embryonic sense of justice. To paraphrase Lincoln, if this is not wrong then nothing is wrong. And yet this is our history; it is who we were and who some of us still are.

For all the heavy material, the film is shot through with comedy and most of the story passes quite entertainingly. There's this very serious sinew running throughout, but we are given a lot of laughs and small triumphs along the way. Life is like that, I think.

But as a white guy in America I must be careful talking about what I think life is really like for anyone but myself. Films like The Help do an immense service of putting us in the shoes of someone whose path through life was likely very different from our own, and that seems the most valuable of lessons.

Grade: A

The Secret Life of Cats

2011-11-22T14:43:00.001-06:00

I suspect there has rarely been a film in the whole history of film less in need of explanation than Dreamworks' latest, Puss In Boots. (But why let that stand in my way? I have my reputation to uphold.)

Directed by Chris Miller (Shrek the Third), Puss In Boots tells the central tale of the Shrek franchise's most popular ancillary character, the Flamenco-dancing, sword-slashing Hispanic feline. The formula responsible for such success in the Shrek films is again hewed to here, with a tossed salad of unrelated fairy tales providing the backdrop for Puss's boilerplate adventures.

Puss (Antonio Banderas) is on the cusp of realizing his lifelong goal of acquiring magic beans (which resultant beanstalk will lead him up to a castle in the clouds and hence to the golden-egg-laying goose that resides there) when he is thwarted by a be-masked feline who appears out of nowhere and nearly beats Puss to the goal. The beans are in the possession of the evil and crude Jack and Jill, who ride around in a carriage drawn by a team of red-eyed boars as they search for the proper place to plant the beans. Puss's plans thwarted, he chases his new rival across town where he discovers *gasp!* that the rival is really a girl cat (Salma Hayek) and that she is working with Puss's onetime best friend and now mortal enemy, Humpty Dumpty.

You can fill in the rest, making sure to include betrayal, an orphanage, outraged townsfolk and lots of verbal and sight gags.

So, maybe not high marks for originality exactly, but it all works and makes for a fine entertainment. I chuckled through the whole thing. It's not too intense for kids, is paced to keep them distracted, and there's enough wordplay and cleverness to entertain the adults. As always, I'm especially drawn to the technical elements. Modern animation just gets better and better technically, and the whole film is a real treat for the eye. (As an aside, one of the previews before Puss In Boots was for Martin Scorsese's upcoming holiday film Hugo, which looks to take another big step toward the seamless blending of live action and digital effects. I'm fascinated by this, since at some point in the near future a feature film will be produceable without any actual flesh and blood on the screen. The ramifications for the effects to be shown or the worlds to be in habited are being seen even now--think Avatar--but I wonder at the outcome when we will be able to replace actors altogether.)

Lastly, this is another of only a handful of films I've seen in 3D, and (the great Roger Ebert's scorn notwithstanding) I think the jury is still out about the technology. Especially in a kids' movie there's an inevitable circus stunt quality to many of the effects (which seems fine here), and while I can agree that the technology does not make for a better story per se, yet I think the added visual realism helps draw you into the story, at least into a certain kind of story. But I think the bogus applications of the technology are all too easy to envision, and there are a lot of films--say, The Other Boleyn Girl--that just don't need you to wear funny glasses to enjoy the show. Stay tuned.

For this one, a solid effort in its genre and a fine entertainment.

Grade: B

The Wizard of Oz

2011-11-21T09:55:00.001-06:00

Today's film, Clint Eastwood's biopic, J. Edgar.

My first look of any detail into the FBI came recently from Bryan Burroughs's book Public Enemy (and, to a lesser degree, from the Michael Mann / Johnny Depp film of the same name that grew out of it). Of course, anyone growing up in this country is familiar with the acronym FBI and, if you're old enough, with the term "G-Men." And I had heard of J. Edgar Hoover a zillion times in my reading over the years, but I had never read a biography of him and most of those previous accounts mentioned his name with a kind of knowing sideways glance. He's an oversize and controversial figure in American history, one of those love him / hate him kind of guys who--whatever else you might say about him--got shit done.

So, a worthy and logical subject for a movie exposé. And I was especially interested when I learned that Eastwood was directing and Leonardo Di Caprio was starring. Eastwood has a reputation for being thoughtful and a calm and probing eye behind the camera, and Di Caprio seems always to surprise and delight, an everyman who seems able to pull off anything he tries. And what they're trying is ambitious indeed: the story covers more or less Hoover's whole life from a quick look at his childhood to his death in 1972. The story mostly takes the form of flashbacks as an elderly Hoover, in his office, dictates his autobiography to a series of clerks. He's really dictating the autobiography of the Federal Bureau of Investigations, and indeed it's hard--for us and especially for Hoover himself--to see where one entity ends and the other begins; the Bureau without Hoover, and Hoover without the Bureau, were both difficult to conceive.And so the task faced by director Eastwood and writer Dustin Lance Black (Milk) was always going to be daunting.

But now I wonder if it isnt too daunting, if there isn't simply too much here to be covered adequately in two hours' time. The material is just so voluminous and the character of Hoover so outsized that I'm suspicious when leaving the theater that I really "know" anything. The rise of the FBI, one of the world's signal shadowy governmental agencies, and Hoover's role in it, coincides with the rise of modern culture, and all of it steeped in the raw-sewage world of politics and power. A mini-series at the least seems called for. And so much of what makes Hoover intriguing personally was the controversy that swirled, and continues to swirl, around him: Was he gay? And just HOW gay? What was his relationship with his mother? And with his second-in-command? Was he a hypocrite for demanding a purity of his agents that he seemed not to possess himself? And would that detail be salient even if true? What has any of this to do with his effect on history?

Though I certainly don't accuse Eastwood of dwelling on the prurient or sensational, yet to concentrate on these things in our quest to understand the larger questions--and J. Edgar Hoover is one huge larger question--is like paying attention to Glenn Gould's mittens and creaking chair and humming instead of the transcendant Bach that came from those mittened fingers. I suppose you cannot tell Hoover's story without talking about his apparently closeted and confused sexuality, and yet the phenomenon of Hoover seems much, much larger than these personal details. Much as I love the brilliant Dame Judy Dench, who here plays Hoover's domineering and exacting mother, I wonder if this whole aspect could not have been cleared out to make space for more, well, relevant bits of the story.

Di Caprio is in every scene and is brilliant as the driven and exacting and paranoid man who erects a massive bureaucracy around his very personal demons. But there's a certain distance in Di Caprio's portrayal that keeps us from really getting inside the man. This is very likely by design; perhaps no one really understood J. Edgar Hoover. But it contributes to this sense at film's end of not really knowing anything for sure.

Technically, J. Edgar is brilliant, slick and professional. Eastwood and co. faced quite the stylistic challenge in having to span several decades with the myriad changes in clothing and decor and so on. After I objected in John Madden's The Debt to that director's method of solving the thorny problem of his characters having to age 30 years on camera, I must tip my hat to Eastwood's use of makeup to allow Di Caprio to stay on screen throughout. This is a tricky business no matter how one goes about it, but I think Eastwood has found the best possible solution here. Di Caprio in old man makeup is a mite stiff (as is the really brilliant Armie Hammer as Hoover's chief advisor and largely unrequited paramour Clyde Tolson), but this is less distracting than using different actors.

A very worthy use of a couple hours of your life, but I was left wishing there was another hour or so to wrap things up.

Grade: B+

Three Days in Sydney

2011-11-09T20:36:00.000-06:00

I believe this is the first three-day layover I've had in Sydney. I was scheduled for one last year, but some issue elsewhere made for a reaction chain that had my layover canceled and me operating after minimum rest up to Guangzhou and taking my layover there instead. This was fine by me, as I think China is the most fascinating place we visit. But I've still been regretting I did not have a little more time to explore Sydney, which seems like one of the world's amazing places.

So what to do with 73 hours? In the absence of any particular destination, my plan was to do my usual thing and walk through different parts of town and absorb what I can. Well, I did have a bit of a plan: Susan suggested that Sydney should surely have a world-class zoo and I could get a taste of the local fauna. An excellent idea, so on Day One after getting some sleep I took a ferry across from the nearby Circular Quay to the Taronga Zoo. My sleep schedule was predictably out of whack, so I was awake about 3:AM and had to wait half the day for the zoo to open at 9:AM.

(Pictures of the zoo visit here.)

But it's really a magnificent facility. Located on a zillion-dollar spit of land across from downtown Sydney, there are hundreds of animals in a variety of settings, and everything seemed clean and well-tended and the animals seemed happy and healthy and very well cared-for. Australia is the land of the marsupial, a fact which has been most instructive to evolutionary biologists. Marsupials here have filled in many of the niches occupied elsewhere in the world by placental mammals, often crafting animals which look very like their non-marsupial counterparts: squirrels and dogs and deer and so on. And of course there are a bunch of unique marsupials as well. I somehow thought I'd get a lesson this via my visit to the zoo, but in truth there was just so much to see that I was quite overwhelmed by the scope of things. The two things that were actually most striking to me were the sheer number and prevalence of reptiles in Australia--lizards and snakes, mostly--and the amazing variety of birds here. The birdsongs heard both in and out of the zoo were really something to behold. Several times I shot video with my phone trying to capture the sounds, but of course the birds were having none of this copyright violation. Still, a brilliant day. A long walk back to the hotel from there, but all of it interesting (alas, no pedometer map).

The next day my plan was to take the ferry over to the fairly distant suburb of Manly (yes, it's called the "Manly ferry," a fact which my 10-year-old self cannot let pass without comment) and walk from there East and South out onto the spit of land that separates Sydney Harbor from the Tasman Sea. Turns out this is protected land, the Sydney Harbour National Park, and is shot through with walking trails. As ever, I started out not really knowing where I was going and just felt my way along. The biggest thing on this walk is to realize how high up this plateau is off the water. As we fly into Sydney the coastline as far as one can see North and South is high and rocky and really stunning, but to be up close to the sheer drop-off is really profound. I'd guess the rock cliffs rise up a good 150-200 feet and one can hear the surf pounding below as you get close. The view out is of course knee-weakening: in one direction the vastness of the South Pacific, and in the other the vista of Sydney Harbor making its way inland with the city probably five to seven miles away. This is one of the world's profoundly beautiful places.

(Pictures of the Manly walk here. The Pedometer map is here.)

The other moving thing about the walk about the park was my stumbling upon the "Third Quarantine Cemetery," a burial place for some 241 people most of whom died of smallpox or plague (there are a small group of WWI vets there as well). The burial ground was intentionally remote in hopes of keeping the corpses from infecting anything else. And what remains a century later is desolate and haunting. The graves are well on their way to being unreadable and the plot itself to being reclaimed by nature. Still, the headstones give some inkling of the horror these folks went through. Many of them give the name and say "died in quarantine" and give an age when they died. A little boy, "our beloved son" died at 21 months. "Loved by all," the stone says. I cannot help thinking--forgive me for saying it--how terrible these diseases must have seemed in so recent a past when we did not understand shit about infectious diseases, and what an amazing triumph we've accomplished so very recently to have gotten them under control. And now there is a huge movement afoot to stop vaccinating against these things and we're already beginning to pay the penalties. In many cases it's not just a death here and there that could have been prevented: it's a threatened resurgence of epidemics which we had successfully controlled and are now retreating from. This cemetery is a frightening bit of our past which suddenly seems to be rushing back towards us.

Today was only a partial day. Again, up at 2:15 AM, I waited until about 6:AM to have a quick bite at McDonald's before just picking a street and heading South away from the hotel. I picked the major thoroughfare of George St. and walked until it curved into Broadway and eventually Parramatta Rd. I got to see a few areas of downtown I had not yet seen, and I passed the University of Sydney. I made slower progress today because of intermittent rain showers, but it was overall a great day for a walk.

(Today's walk pictures here. Pedometer map here. And back, of course.)

My chief find on today's walk was the Deus Ex Machina motorcycle company on Parramatta Rd. in the section of town called Camperdown. My eye was caught as I walked by a row of cafe-racer type bikes parked on a side street outside an old warehouse, one of which had "Deus" stenciled on the gas tank. It was clearly a modification of an existing bike--a Yamaha SR500, I believe--and it was parked with a bunch of other machines which had been similarly modified to varying degrees. As I looked around I saw that the bikes were the products of the commercial concern that occupied the warehouse, and that Deus had quite a large store space filled with bikes and apparel and with a large restaurant attached. It being only about 7:30 AM (and the shop not opening until 9:AM), I decided to keep walking but plan my return to catch the place open. Shortly later it began to rain, and I didn't get very far, sitting inside a nearby McDonald's with a Diet Coke and free wifi while I waited the shower out.

They opened shortly after I got back, and I was kindly given a tour by one of the employees in response to my query, something along the lines of "What in the hell ARE you guys?" Turns out they are a shop that specializes in modifying existing machines according to a particular aesthetic, and the rest of it--the apparel, the pedal-bicycle business, the restaurant--are all add-ons to this core business. Their favorite core machine to modify is indeed that Yamaha SR500--a late '70s-80s single-cylinder standard bike which I nearly bought years ago--but they work on all things. It sounds like you bring your bike in and they'll "see what we can do with it." The business card says "Mikey McDonald, Bike Wrangler," and the guy showing me around stressed that all their design work for bikes and apparel and everything was done right there, right upstairs in the offices.

My only critiques involve 1) their not having fat-boy sizes in their apparel, and 2) my sneaking sense that they're OK with the bike having slightly hobbled functionality so long as it LOOKS cool. This latter sense, if it's even accurate, is hard for me to swallow. I'm very happy for the bike to look awesome, but the function should always come first. Indeed, the cool look should extend naturally from the function--form follows function: it should look cool exactly because it's been made to work so well. (This is exactly my chief critique of Harley-Davidson, that they've sacrificed so much function to aesthetic prerogatives.) In the end, the whole Deus concern was a bit younger / more pierced / more tattooed than seemed wholly appropriate for my rotund and superannuated self. But if this is what the kids are into, then I must applaud. I asked him if they had ever worked on any Buells, and he said they just sold a really cool one they had modded. I'd have loved to see it.

Six hours later I'm back at the hotel and will try to get a nap in before blasting off for China.

In Search Of An Analytical Faculty

2011-11-05T20:49:00.002-05:00

This is a book I've been struggling with for a couple months now. I'm not a voracious reader, but I made especially slow progress with this one, reading it in several-page snippets over weeks of lunches. But I've needed time to digest it, and I'm frankly making even slower progress with that. There's a lot to chew on in here, and I find myself strongly drawn and chastened at the same time.

I don't read a lot of politics, but I've been increasingly frustrated over the past decade at the seeming inability of progressives to craft a coherent message and stay on point. Conservatives by contrast seem to be able to lock arms at a moment's notice, and it seems nothing obstructs them in propagating their message. This doesn't need to be surprising, when conservatives have all the money and own most of the means of communication; but I've never been convinced that the gauntlet of their unified message was really reflective of mass thinking (though every election result gives me doubts). Regardless, progressives have done a much worse job of rising to the challenge: not only has our national discourse moved further and further to the right (in part due to Overton window mechanisms we've looked at previously), but progressives and centrists have been incredibly inept and disorganized in pushing back against this Dark Ages tide.

One could at this point toss off a growing, but far from comprehensive, list:

an unjustified war--a war waged against another nation!--followed by another and yet another, making for a kind of permanent state of armed conflict, the immense funding for which is now paid into the coffers of a handful of for-profit vendors;
the Patriot Act;
the suspension of habeas corpus;
Guantanamo Bay;
so-called "extraordinary rendition;"
secret "black ops" prisons on foreign soil;
governmental sanction of the torture of prisoners;
the constantly escalating efforts to erode the separation of church and state;
the undermining of science education, and of the acceptance of the findings of science for political purposes;
the systematic hobbling of government oversight of industry and of the protection of our environment and natural resources;
the war on women;
the victimization of the poor;
the politicization of our mainstream news coverage, including the escalation of hyperbole and outright falsification, always for political ends;
the systematically and ongoing transfer of the nation's core wealth from the lower and middle classes of this country up to a tiny (and already very wealthy) sliver at the top of the food chain, a transfer which is mostly illegal and fraudulent and certainly immoral but which has been protected and sanctioned by the governments of both parties

This can go on and on. I want to cry to read a list like this, to think how far we have come from the innocence and can-do attitude for which this country has stood as a beacon for generations. But my dismay is far from universal. Conservative television and radio hosts speak to large audiences who alternately deny these conclusions or defend them pridefully.

I've found some relief from my gloom in the writings of Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, people who aren't promoting a particular political philosophy so much as standing up forcefully for well-reasoned argument and the force of logic. And I hide for an hour or two a day under the awning of NPR, where issues are given a calm and methodical dismantling and look-see.

Chris Hedges is a former reporter and bureau chief for the New York Times, among other places (the Wikipedia article has an overview of his CV). I've read a number of his columns at Truthdig, and he shows up on NPR and on the occasional YouTube video. Like Christopher Hitchens, Hedges writes and speaks like a machine gun, fearlessly and brimming with righteous outrage. I find I am immediately drawn to him in print or in person.

So I bought one of his books, picking as an introduction one that seemed most germane to our present moment in history: The Death of the Liberal Class. And from the outset he presents one challenging page after another, premise after premise that make me sit up and question what I think I know and ask whether I really agree with what he's saying. On principle alone this seems like the best sort of book.

But--and here is the crux of my ambivalence--I had my hesitation as well: Hedges' name also crops up from time to time on religious matters, and invariably in a way that makes me wince--or at times droop in crushing disappointment. A graduate of divinity school and the son of a Presbyterian minister, Hedges consistently plants his flag on the opposite shore of the discussion from my own (and has earned the wrath and even dismissal of people I really admire like Sam Harris and PZ Myers). I don't care especially about his religious views in a political discussion, but I find he does not carry himself nearly so well on religious matters as he seems to do when discussing politics and this makes me wonder: are his political arguments similarly poorly supported and am I simply too ignorant of history to see it? Like Christopher Hitchens, Hedges makes his arguments by tethering current events to the long line of human history, and as with Hitchens I find I am ill-equipped to critique much of this approach. I am naturally skeptical of any argument from authority, but his eloquence and forcefulness are winning when he talks of politics; yet when he takes on atheism he seems quite out of the water.

But I vowed to forge ahead, and apart from a few sections where his mythological views come out and circulate among the crowd, he keeps the church bottled up for most of this book. And I find I have highlighted passages on nearly every page, hundreds of quotes ranging from quiet truisms to calls for militant action, passages where he connects solidly with the ball and hits it out of the park. Winnowing these passages down seems nigh-unto impossible; there's just too much here. Just starting with the opening chapter, I am immediately drawn into his argument (again apologizing for the e-book not providing reliable page numbers):

The inability of the liberal class to acknowledge that corporations have wrested power from the hands of citizens, that the Constitution and its guarantees of personal liberty have become irrelevant, and that the phrase consent of the governed is meaningless, has left it speaking in acting in ways that no longer correspond to reality. It has lent its voice to hollow acts of political theater, and the pretense that democratic debate and choice continue to exist.

The media, the church, the university, the Democratic Party, the arts, and labor unions--the pillars of the liberal class--have been bought off with corporate money and promises of scraps tossed to them by the narrow circles of power. Journalists, who prize access to the powerful more than they prize truth, report lies and propaganda to propel us into a war in Iraq. Many of these same journalists assured us it was prudent to entrust our life savings to a financial system run by speculators and thieves. Those life savings were gutted. the media, catering to corporate advertisers and sponsors, at the same time renders invisible whole sections of the population whose misery, poverty and grievances should be the principle focus of journalism.

Since the presidency of Ronald Reagan, the corporate state has put the liberal class on a death march. Liberals did not protest the stripping away of the country's manufacturing base, the dismantling of regulatory agencies, and the destruction of social service programs. Liberals did not decry speculators, who in the seventeenth century would have been hanged, as they hijacked the economy... The liberal class was eventually forced in this death march to turn itself inside out, championing positions it previously condemned. That it did so with almost no protest exposed its moral bankruptcy.

Capitalism was once viewed by workers as a system to be fought. But capitalism is no longer challenged. Capitalist bosses, men such as Warren Buffett, George Soros, and Donald Trump, are treated as sages, celebrities and populists. The liberal class functions as their cheerleaders. Such misguided loyalty, illustrated by environmental groups that refuse to excoriate the Obama White House over the ecological catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, ignores the fact that the divide in America is not between Republican and Democrat. It is a divide between the corporate state and the citizen. It is a divide between capitalists and workers. And, for all the failings of the communists, they got it.

Permanent war is the most effective mechanism used by the power elite to stifle reform and muzzle dissent... The collapse of liberalism, whether in imperial Russia, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Weimar Germany, the former Yugoslavia, or the United States, was intimately tied to the rise of a culture of permanent war.

Military spending, which consumes half of all discretionary spending, has had a profound social and political cost. Bridges and levees collapse, schools decay. Domestic manufacturing declines. Trillions in debt threaten the viability of the currency and the economy. The poor, the mentally ill, the sick, and the unemployed are abandoned. Human suffering is the price for victory, which is never finally defined or attainable.

I have to stop. These come from the first 10% of the book, and Hedges is similarly quotable to the very end. On the strength of these passages alone I have to strongly recommend the book to anyone who inclined to this kind of subject matter. Myself, I find it incredibly energizing to see some fire and brimstone (to borrow a term) applied not against the little person but in their defense, and in defense of the dignity of work and the correctness of the desire for the good of society to spread among all its citizens. I understand the degree of naivety involved in this utopian vision; I can see as well as the next person the looming horde of freeloaders waiting to live off the public teat. But I've come to see that the expense and waste of THAT injustice is child's play next to the corporate welfare that is currently bankrupting our nation. (Hedges' recent speech at the OWS gathering in Zuccotti Park, after which he was arrested, gives an excellent introduction to his style and content.)

And yet. I listened a couple days ago to an interview on NPR with Chris Hedges after the publication of this book last year. Neal Conen spend half an hour talking with Hedges, who was a onetime correspondent for NPR, and in typical NPR fashion the soundbite is eschewed and the interviewee is given time to elaborate his theories and to stand for some grilling. I had just finished the book, and it was Neal Conen's grilling that again gave me some pause. On two or three occasions during the interview, Conen clearly restrained himself from asking yet another followup question after Hedges had seemingly gotten around the previous challenge. And again I was left feeling that I'm not really qualified to assess whether Hedges has made a good stand for his views or not. His fire and his dialectic skills connect solidly with me, but I feel it would be wise to embrace him provisionally while further efforts are underway to see how well tethered his conclusions are.

I welcome the comments of others who have read this (or other of his columns).

Layover In Dubai

2011-10-15T12:23:00.001-05:00

(Yes, I read the book. It was intriguing.)

I had dinner in Dubai the other night at the hotel bar with my other flight mates. Never done that before. The hotel is so upscale that I feel frankly out of place with my iHop culinary tastes and my Carhartt wardrobe. No one looks askance at me, though I'm honestly more at home with mystery-meat-on-a-stick from a street vendor.

I knew before I came over here that most true Emiratis don't work; most of the laborers you see around Dubai--the zillion folks working at the airport, the people staffing the malls, the cab drivers, the hotel employees--are imported from neighboring countries. And further afield than that. Our mechanic on one of our departures was a guy from Atlanta. The bartender for our dinner was a woman from China. "Lucy"(her adopted Western name) had been in Dubai about four years. Presumably working as a bartender at one of the top-drawer hotels in such a wealthy city constitutes a pretty good job. She was friendly enough, but not effusive with the details of her personal life or story.

But it got me thinking. As a woman, especially a single woman, I wonder if Dubai would be my first choice for a place to emigrate for work. Both because a woman's inferiority is coded into law and custom here and also because Chinese folks seem pretty rare in the Middle East. I would find this combination unsettling.

And yet. Dubai is said to be the most liberal of Muslim nations, and one senses that folks here have seen everything, that nobody shocks very easily whatever they may feel in their deepest recesses. Walking around the mall one sees the full spectrum of dress and behavior. Most people are in the standard Western uniform of jeans and a polo or button-up shirt, and overtly sexual dress is rare--but not extinct. Victoria's Secret and several swanky French lingerie shops are scattered throughout the mall and have the customary risqué displays. And mixed with this Western dress majority are thawbs and burqas. All traditionally-dressed women have their hair entirely covered--and many more liberally-dressed women wear hats or head scarves, though there are plenty of Western-dressed women who do not--and full head coverings with slits for the eyes are fairly common. (I think I mentioned in an earlier post that one occasionally sees a woman with a full head covering--no eye slits--being led around like a blind person by her mate.)

I find the Burqa unsettling, and the full-coverage variety repugnant and a bit shocking. But the formal robes for Arab men-the thawb--seem regal and stately to me. There's something magnificent in it. I suppose that impression is reinforced by the fact that only the wealthy seem to dress this way, based on shoes and jewelry and on the perfection of the garments. (I assume, perhaps wrongly, that this dress is a kind of indicator of who's a native and who isn't). I've never seen a thawb that was wrinkled or had a speck of dirt on it, or the headwear--the keffiyeh--askance or out of place. It all seems very desert, a mode of dress harking back to a utilitarian origin in the heat and blazing sun of the sand sea. One occasionally sees boys in their teens in the thawb, typically with an older man, and the boys are invariably sedate and quiet and regal. I even saw a young couple walking together in the mall--thawb and burqa--though of course not holding hands (perhaps brother and sister?). I simply do not understand any of the customs involved.

(A couple American friends just took jobs in Qatar and moved 5,000 miles away from Wisconsin with their son in tow. He will have no difficulty, I imagine, but she is strong and outspoken, exactly the characteristics that are rejected for women in these traditional places; I wonder continually at her experiences. Whatever I'm thinking about all this, these questions must be much clearer for the two of them, having deposited themselves in a semi-permanent fashion right in the thick of things.)

***

We pushed back from our gate and taxied out to depart for Cologne as the sun slipped behind the desert horizon. And I found myself musing that there is just something alluring about this place. We were supposed to feel that about Greece, I thought, though neither of us felt much pull in that case. But Dubai: the desert, the brutal heat, the passionate and excitable nature of the people, the sudden influx of vast amounts of money, the foreign-ness to a Westerner and the unsettling unfriendliness to Westerners (or at least the ambivalence); all this makes it a place that feels different from any other place I've visited. It's one of the ironies of this traveling life that on the one hand there is incalculable value in getting to visit diverse and widely-scattered cultures, to get an expanded taste of what life is like for people whose experiences are so different from what we know; and on the other hand, the more I see, the more I come to think that people are people are everywhere. The great bulk of our lives is consumed in things which we all recognize and understand. The devil may indeed be in the details, but those details can often be summed up more briefly than you expect.

After Dubai, Cologne seems almost to be America.

Danger's My Mother's Maiden Name

2011-10-12T18:18:00.000-05:00

Tonight's film, Rowan Atkinson in Johnny English: Reborn.

This segues nicely from our earlier discussion about James Bond knockoffs. You can't get more overt in your knockoff than Oliver Parker's installment in what feels like a franchise-in-the-making. The first film of the series, 2003's Johnny English (Peter Howitt) was evidently an exercise in combining faithful attention to the James Bond franchise with Rowan Atkinson's bumbling, comedic persona. I did not see that film, but this one certainly hits its marks.

Apparently, Johnny English's last assignment did not end well. The present film begins with our hero in exile at a religious monastery in Tibet where he is doing penance for allowing the president of Mozambique to be assassinated while he was heading the security detail. The exact nature of his penance is best left to the film to illustrate. When British Intelligence gets a tip that there is a plot to assassinate the Premier of China, Johnny English is recalled from exile. This is not quite the rehabilitation he desires, as it turns out that the terrorists have stipulated that they will only talk to English.

What follows is just what you'd expect: a globe-trotting adventure of good-against-evil with a huge dollop of buffoonery. Every detail of the Bond franchise is represented here: the obsession with gadgetry (with the crotchety Q-like character), the cheesy toss-offs, the haughty Section Chief, the saucy female love interest, the heroic music. But everything is turned up a notch or three from the already absurd to the patently ridiculous. And it's good fun. There's not a shred of anything new in the formula, but hey, there wasn't anything new in, like, 20 of the 24 Bond films either. And it's is a formula that Atkinson knows how to use. His deadpan delivery and wiry frame and rubbery face are put to continuous good use here with a constant barrage of verbal howlers and sight gags. There's a bit with a malfunctioning office chair that had the theater in stitches.

Newcomer Daniel Kanuuya plays Agent Tucker, the agency's greenest recruit and Johnny English's assigned partner. Dominic West plays the good guy / bad guy, and Rosamund Pike the love interest (she was a Bond Girl some years back). The section chief role is played, rather unexpectedly, by Gillian Anderson--who manages to be a passable Brit.

But Atkinson is, of course, the reason to see the movie. If you like his schtick you'll love the film, and you might just love it anyway. A happy way to spend a couple hours on a rainy afternoon.

Grade: B+

*******

OH! And PS: I meant to talk about the Hong Kong movie experience! For instance, I paid $75 for a ticket (don't panic; that's about $10 US, but $75 for the film and another $58 for popcorn and a soda seems very... Blade Runner). And the seating is assigned! First time I've seen that in a modern movie theater. You look at an iPad-like flat screen showing a schematic of the theater with available seats highlighted. "How about G-4?" I asked. "G-4" she responded. And they're all very cushy leather seats to boot! And then there was my order of a small popcorn. "Salty or sweet?" the concession girl asked. Turns out 'sweet' is very nearly carmel corn, but with a sweeter, lighter syrup. I've never seen the option, though I have to think there are places in the US where you can get carmel corn for your movie. The snack bar was uncharacteristically small, and there were three times as many attendants helping you get to and from your seat. Much more labor intensive than we're used to; very Chinese.

fin

A Day and a Night in Hong Kong

2011-10-12T09:55:00.000-05:00

I've done this before, ridden the #6 bus from near the ferry terminal at Central to the other side of Hong Kong island and the little village of Stanley. Stanley is know for, among other things, its market, which is a very Chinese-seeming collection of stalls and tiny storefronts set along narrow, winding alleys. It's mostly a tourist market, a fun collection of local stuff--paintings and carvings--and more generic Chinese industrial output--t-shirts and cell phone covers, etc. Like all these markets I've seen, it seems as much a place for the vendors to socialize as a market for selling things. More so than, say, the Best Buy in Appleton, there is a sense that the Stanley Market represents the lives of these vendors; they've all drawn this lot and they're in it together.

(Hong Kong's version of the Routemaster.)

But the real fun with the Stanley Market is getting there. Hong Kong island seems to have an unexpectedly huge number of bus routes (in addition to the old double-decker trolley system and a subway). The buses themselves exist in a hundred varieties, but most of them are sturdy double-decker units that seat about 80 and stand as many more (I suppose in deference to British custom, which is still so recently in the colony's past). So right from the get-go you're in for a treat, since plunking yourself anywhere upstairs gives you a vista of the passing scenery that you likely will not have experienced before.

(The view from up top.)

And what views. From the passage through the constant traffic jam of downtown Hong Kong, the bus climbs up narrow, winding streets which cling to the sides of the steep hills, with seemingly inches between the sheer rock face on one side and the opposite direction buses on the other. The tops of the buses are continuously brushed by the trees so that one appears to be driving most of the time in a tunnel. Today's bus was the 6X, which passes through a mile-long tunnel through the middle of the island, presumably cutting 10-15 minutes from the trip.

(Stanley with its market.)

(Roaming the Stanley Market.)

(The view from the #6 bus on the back of the island.)

(Repulse Bay seen from the bus.)

In a past life I spent 10 years driving a bus like this, but the ways this experience differs from what I know--the double-decker bus, the narrow, winding, mountainous roads, the right-hand drive--just conspire to make something as mundane as a city bus ride seem daring, almost adrenaline-filled. The double-decker buses have about twice the capacity of the buses I spent most of my career operating, and they seem near-to-full most of the time. In Minneapolis, where I drove, the larger capacity routes were assigned a bendy bus (called an "articulated"), but this solution would clearly not work here. Like Hong Kong's building practices, one must add transit capacity by going UP (or down) rather than OUT.

It's very difficult to get pictures on the bus, as the amazing scenes flash by and are gone, and everything is so close to you that it's tough to frame a shot. There are a couple videos on YouTube, I see, showing someone's filming of the trip.

I got back downtown from the market about 5:PM and decided to see a movie. There are a zillion screens here, and most big American films can be seen along with Chinese and Hong Kong films and German and French movies. Not feeling up for The Help (which is supposed to be excellent), I defaulted to Rowan Atkinson's latest Johnny English installment (I'll review that separately).

Emerging about 7:30 PM into a drizzly night, the city is electric with possibility. The low-hanging clouds reflect the light from millions of bulbs to give a kind of twilight aspect to the entire city, and neon is everywhere, on signs and storefronts and decorating the sides of buildings. There are even decorative lights on some of the tour boats out in Victoria Harbor. The clotted mass of cars and trucks and buses and trolleys makes for a din that's almost overwhelming. I talked briefly on the phone to Susan (as in, $4.95 a minute briefly, but I needed to share the moment with my traveling partner) and conversation is not particularly easy in so noisy an environment. But you're flooded with a sense that a billion things are happening all around you--thousands of bars and restaurants, hundreds of open shops, meetings and gatherings, folks going to and from work in a 24-hour city. I am for the natives one of tens of thousands of daily visitors to the city, an obvious foreigner standing on a footbridge watching the city hum around me.

(The crowd at the Tsim Sha Tsui ferry terminal.)

(My hotel room view.)

One of my coworkers has a friend who flies for a competitor, and his company has a pilot crew base over here. His friend lives here now, moved over from the States with his wife and two kids. I learned this in a discussion about whether that company's cost-of-living stipend for these displaced workers was adequate to the huge cost increase from living here. I could not help feeling envious, thinking of what an experience it would be to be here long enough to really get to know the place.

All In a Day's Walk

2011-10-09T10:39:00.000-05:00

Just over 48 hours here in Cologne. Not quite enough time to do anything ambitious (like travel to another place for exploration), but enough time to log a couple long walks. I managed a good 12-miler on Wednesday out to the southwest of town, and then about 10 miles each yesterday (to the northwest) and today (east and north), all of them on roads I had mostly not been on before. I didn't see anything particularly special, and I had no specific destinations in mind (some museum or specific building or neighborhood, etc.); I just tried to pick a different section of town and soak it in.

Today's walk was across the Rhine and northward along the eastern shore. (Map here.)

One especially interesting find was a large abandoned industrial concern a couple miles north of the city proper, a collection of fabulous old brick buildings with steel girders and multi-paned windows that are half abandoned and half under renovation. These seem like perfect structures for urban lofts, and it seems a real boon that they've not been torn down to make way for something new. A bunch of the pictures are of these.

There's a Flickr feed of the day's photos here, which threaten to be of only marginal interest even to me.

Nobody Knows Anybody, Not That Well...

2011-10-08T17:26:00.003-05:00

I continue in my tradition of reviewing old films that nobody saw when they were current.

I find I see fewer and fewer films in the theater nowadays, instead grabbing things that seem intriguing when I pass through China. DVDs are cheap there, and I use this as a way of seeing things I'm unsure of rather than renting. For films I take a shine to, like Stieg Larsson's Dragon Tattoo Girl trilogy, I end up buying the real thing so I can get the special features and commentaries.

One of my recent Guangzhou acquisitions is Atom Egoyan's 2009 film Chloe. I only vaguely remember this being released in theaters early in 2010, and it probably never played in Appleton. Julianne Moore Plays Dr. Catherine Stewart, a gynecologist, and Liam Neeson her husband David, a music professor. They have a teenaged son (Max Thieriot) who is poised to graduate and leave home. Amanda Seyfried plays Chloe, a call girl whom Catherine watches from her office window working out of a high end club across the street. When Catherine becomes convinced her husband is having an affair, she approaches Chloe and hires her to place herself in the husband's field of vision, as it were, and report back. David's reaction to the approach of a beautiful young woman will, it is thought, reveal to Catherine his faithfulness (though she already sees flirtatiousness in David's every interaction with women, especially young ones).

I can't imagine anything going haywire with that scenario, no? And we wander in not knowing if there is solid ground beneath our feet. Is David really having an affair? Or could he really just be texting his students as he claims? Is he really losing interest in Catherine, or is he really as busy as he claims? Is Chloe the right tool for the job?

Is Chloe anything like what she appears and claims to be?

You get the picture, but maybe not completely, which is what is engaging here. I went in cold and was continually a bit surprised at how things turned. The film is quiet and tense and relatively slow-moving, and while the characters seem believable and the issues palpable, yet we don't really know what's going on. Not really. Julianne Moore plays what can only be described as a not very attractive person. She spends most of the film in a frazzled state, and we never really grasp whether she has her feet on the ground or not (though, to be fair, she is playing a woman whose marriage is, she fears, in jeopardy). Amanda Seyfried, whom I've not seen in anything before, is lovely as a quiet young woman of some intensity who seems to like her job. Or not. She has what seems like a settled core and a curious eye. Or not. (The camera seems to love her; we can say that with confidence.) Neeson, whose wife Miranda Richardson died during the filming, is in only about half the scenes and plays a perfect older man who still exudes a certain virility.

I've not seen any of Egoyan's other films, but this one is moody and atmospheric and engaging. I see the reviews of this were kind of all over the place, but it seems a worthy effort to me.

Grade: B

High Interest Indeed

2011-09-26T12:01:00.000-05:00

On paper this is a film I expected to like: Helen Mirren and Tom Wilkinson and Ciaran Hinds in a spy thriller with a Nazi twist? Shhhhhya!

But the latest from John Madden (Mrs. Brown, Shakespeare In Love), the Debt, fails to fully hit its mark, though I'm struggling with why this is so. Mirren, Wilkenson and Hinds play a trio of former agents for Israel's Mossad (a national intelligence agency equivalent perhaps to the US CIA). In 1966, the story goes, the trio is tasked with locating the Nazi war criminal Dieter Vogel, known as "The Butcher of Birkenau," who is living in East Berlin. From their safehouse, the plan is to kidnap Vogel and shuttle him past very tight border security (as in shoot-to-kill tight) to the West to face trial. That sounds gripping enough.

The story is being told from near-present day when all three agents are old and no longer in the service. Since the events of 1966, one of the trio has disappeared, another is injured from a subsequent mission, and the last, after a quieter life as a speaker and national heroine, is again in the public eye when her daughter writes and promotes a book about her mother's activities three decades ago. But from the outset we sense there's something fishy with the official narrative. After the filmic depiction of the kidnapping that opens the film (the story the public knows), we return to 1966 and replay the events as they actually happened, and we explore the human dynamics that inevitably come into play in such an endeavor as an extended kidnapping of a high-profile target (especially a Nazi target, who, as we all know, intrinsically has Hannibal-Lecter-like powers of psychological manipulation).

Despite the juicy setup, there are a couple things that bother me here. Because of the 30 year time lapse, different actors are cast to play the Mossad trio for the '66 and '97 sequences. The choice of actors is beyond criticism: Mirren, Wilkenson and Hinds are portrayed as youngsters by Jessica Chastain, Marton Csokas and Sam Worthington, and they are all superb, all of them. But the story cuts back and forth and back and forth such that it is impossible not to wonder about the business of two different actors trying to portray the same person. Three times over. (Indeed, it took me a long time to figure out which young guy was which old guy.) This is a device that rarely works for me, though I cannot suggest a better alternative. All three older actors are too old to pull off characters who are 30 years younger, and the younger ones too young to play old folks. So I accept that Madden has done the best he can, but it's an irremediable problem I fear.

And while the film does due diligence in bringing a sense of urgency and consequence to the original kidnapping (and subsequent events), I found it hard to buy very far into whatever disaster would befall the group given a failure at any point. You don't come to care a great deal about any of the characters, and death and misery and injustice and horror are everywhere in the aftermath of WWII. After accepting that Vogel is a monster who deserves to die--an easy enough precept with high ranking Nazis--it's difficult to get too worked up if their mission fails and he, doubtless like many other officials who did very odious things during the Nazi reign, slips away into anonymity. The battle to find the monsters will be ongoing. The agents' honor and the dignity of the fledgling state of Israel are trotted out as further straws for the camel's back, but alas it doesn't rise to more than a middle-weight load for me. Maybe I've become accustomed to my spy thrillers holding all of humanity or the Earth itself in jeopardy. This is more a personal story about the agents, and if we don't really connect with them then it's harder to connect with their story.

The film's last chapter, the one that really connects the early story with the present day, has something of the potboiler flavor I expected as I entered the theater. Helen Mirren again proves herself a goddess who can do no wrong (a pity we don't see more of the equally-brilliant Tom Wilkinson), and the story leaves off on a properly unsatisfactory note. So high marks for ambition and I'm glad I saw it, and I might see it again. But I expected something a little different.

Grade: B-

Pretty In Pink

2011-09-22T11:46:00.001-05:00

I remember having a bit of a revelation watching James Cameron's 1994 film True Lies (which I saw again the other night), realizing for the first time that it was maybe possible to do James Bond better than, well, James Bond. Arnold Schwarzenegger was not exactly a carbon copy of Bond, but he felt like an evolution of the concept. And the idea of infusing great physical prowess and encyclopedic knowledge (in this case with the help of a wise-cracking sidekick) with a big dollop of humor made for a winning recipe (the wretched cheese of the Roger Moore era doesn't count). A few years later (2002) we got Doug Liman's take on Robert Ludlum's fictional hero Jason Bourne in The Bourne Identity (a shame, I think, that Liman did not continue to direct the franchise). Not a True Lies clone by any means, and not quite a James Bond clone either, but a great variant on the theme: a super-competent killing machine infiltrating the most secretive halls of government and taking out the garbage.

I was led to think of these comparisons, variations-on-a-theme, if you will, after seeing Nicolas Winding Refn's new film Drive. Like about 95% of the rest of the folks who set foot in a theater, I naturally thought of Jason Statham's character in the series of Transporter films. But again the comparison only gets one so far before running out of steam. Still, it's a useful starting point, as most people seeing this film will have seen that one.

Ryan Gosling plays an unnamed character who has a knack for driving and makes his living putting this skill set to use in a variety of ways. He works part time for the film industry as a stunt driver and spends his off hours working for a friend at a garage fixing customer cars or working on his personal car. And, when the need arises, he offers his services to those with nefarious intent, but only according to a strict set of rules: he agrees to a five minute window where he is committed to whatever action is taking place, but outside that window he looks out for himself, mission be damned. This is an odd detail, and as it happens an incongruous one; it's like someone had this idea to build a character or film around and this is all that remains of the original concept. We witness several instances of the driver plying his skills in a variety of high and low settings, one of which puts him in close proximity to his lovely neighbor Irene (played by Carey Mulligan). Irene is living alone with her son in an apartment two doors down from the driver, and a series of recurring problems with her car put the two of them together long enough for a bond to develop.

But where Transporter director Louis Leterrier brings a touch of levity to Jason Statham's otherwise grim and taciturn character, Refn has pared all character development down to the bone. Gosling's driver remains fundamentally mysterious. He has almost no lines--his taciturnity is almost comical--we don't see him really doing much of anything. There is very little surface for the light of understanding to reflect off of. By this formula Refn and Gosling come up with a very film noir character, a misunderstood loner with no human attachments or material possessions who has difficulty fitting into the world.

Carey Mulligan's Irene is slow to warm to the driver, as she must necessarily be when interaction with him occurs almost without dialog. She lives in her little apartment with a young son, waiting for the boy's father (who may or may not be her husband) to get out of jail. She's lovely and very believable as an actress, though perhaps just a touch whitebread for this hardscrabble setting. The return of the boy's father stirs the pot nicely, and his character (played by Oscar Isaac) is written and played deftly clear of the bumpers of stereotype. The one unexpected detail with the driver's character is how he bonds with Irene's son: quietly, slowly; but it's there nonetheless.

Ryan Gosling has always struck me as a rather lightweight, TV-ish actor, but he pulls this role off nicely and the film is unexpectedly contained and satisfying. It has a low-budget feel, but in a good way. One jarring detail is the choice of having the credits roll past in pink cursive writing. For the life of me I can't figure out how that was deemed an inspired choice.

But it doesn't stand in the way of anything. A fine effort within the limits of its genre.

Grade: B

Hong Kong

2011-09-09T02:37:00.007-05:00

(Look over Hong Kong Island across the harbor to Kowloon.)

Such a flood of thoughts / feelings / impressions from this place. I was supposed to have a 48-hour layover here, but this got truncated to about 15 hours, which, with sleep in there, makes for minimal exploration time. As with Cologne, I've had a taste of this place and I wish I could get more time to explore. Alas, this is much better than nothing.

I made a beeline for the Star Ferry across to Hong Kong island and made my way thru town to the funicular up to Victoria Peak. I've written about the funicular on a previous visit, but it's hardly less astounding the second time. One simply doesn't encounter a public transit ride this steep anywhere else; it's so unnatural that it's humorous! This is ultra-high-dollar real estate (it's said the rich and famous of China live here) and the last time I was up here I lamented not being able to look around more. The problem is, it's hard to figure out where to go to see things. I found no decent map--even at the visitor's center--and there is not great signage. Plus, it's a mountaintop, so roads and walkways are very twisty and steeply inclined, and it's impossible to know without prior experience where any given path ends up. So I picked a likely walkway and had a very nice walk that was clearly not where I was expecting to go. C'est la vie. Eventually, after descending about 500' over a couple miles (which is much better than ASCENDING 500', though there was a bit of that too) the sidewalk ended abruptly and I backtracked to a bus stop and hopped on. (Hey, it's an island; how far wrong could I possibly go?) I got the front seat of the upper deck and had a spectacular views of the island's tight and twisty roads as we made our way back to Central and the ferry to Kowloon.

(Much of Hong Kong island is wooded like this.)

(The road / sidewalk combination. It's steeper than it looks.)

As for the Star Ferry, I could just ride back and forth for a living. The sturdy old double-ender, double-decker steel boats make the 10-minute journey between Tsim Sha Tsui on Kowloon and Central on Hong Kong Island continuously all day, and there's simply no better way to soak in the natural wonder of the place than this (for a bargain price of $0.26 one-way; $0.32 if you want the luxurious upper deck with its enclosed sections fore and aft).

(The Star Ferry docks.)

(Lower deck accommodations. "Steerage.")

(The aft wheelhouse, soon to become the forward wheelhouse. The helmsman doesn't change ends; he just gets a break while the other guy drives in the other direction. Love the ancient boat and controls with the little flat screen with four camera feeds.)

So what's so fascinating? Like New York in the US, Hong Kong seems a nexus of urban Chinese cosmopolitan culture. Nowhere is it clearer than here that America is not the center of humanity (though the glory of New York will hold its own, thanks). And the density is very high, like Manhattan and the very opposite, of, say, Los Angeles. When one looks at the square mileage of the region of Hong Kong, I don't know that the population density is so very high--much of Hong Kong island is wooded, for example--but to visit in person is to see how little of the cragged island is habitable, and so people are jammed into the habitable places three to a bed. I'm not sure which came first, but the result is a collection of high-rise residential buildings that I'd venture is not matched anywhere in the world, including high rises where perhaps they are not necessary; that's just the way things are done here.

In our area of Kowloon--Nathan Road--the density and noise are overwhelming. Sidewalks are so crowded that walking around is difficult, and the noise of traffic and especially the visual noise of banners and neon and storefronts are like an assault. Vendors--and especially tailors--bark loudly at you as you pass, sometimes even tugging on your sleeve to get your attention. While I would not call Hong Kong dirty, the detritus of so many people in so little space gives it the grime of any big city. The view out the third-floor window at the pizza parlor I frequent here is grimy and canyon-esque and obstructed. The sidewalks crawl with people like an ant colony and the traffic noise penetrates the windows. Looking out on the scene you know that a million things are happening all around you all the time, and there's something intoxicating about wading into the crush.

And as always, infrastructure things. On the drive to and from the airport--which is a new facility located maybe 20-25 miles from Kowloon--we pass what I believe are the busiest and most extensive port facilities in the world, mile after mile of vast container facilities; cranes and piers and warehouses, with all manner of ocean-going ship bellied up for loading and unloading. (I'd love to know the logistics and various controls and systems they use to keep the whole business organized and running smoothly.) The roadway itself, a multi-lane modern highway, wraps around the mountainous terrain and glides on huge concrete spans suspended over the industry below. The bridges alone are an architect's dream, with all manner of gigantic suspension and cable mechanisms. (The old airport, Kai Tak, is famous for its hair-raising nature with an approach right next to the mountainous terrain which required a tight turn to a short final and required landing on the single-direction runway built on a man-made spit of land out in the water. There was no room for error throughout the procedure, and stories of the place are legendary--as are the many videos and photos on airliners.net. Alas, it's condos now.) All of this--plus the trains and buses and, of course, the airport facility reinforces this sense of everything here in extreme density and proliferation, and most of it scaled for extremely heavy usage.

I'm scheduled to get back here in mid-October for 30 hours. We'll see if that comes to pass.

Sail On

2011-09-06T23:31:00.007-05:00

The match races which will eventually determine the challenger for the 34th America's Cup sailing race (in 2013) are underway. The first round of the America's Cup World Series has taken place in Cascais, Portugal, and the teams are now preparing for the next round in Plymouth in the Southwest of England (beginning 9/10).

I wrote a bit about 18 months ago on the 33rd America's Cup challenge of 2010, which saw 150 years of sailing tradition turned on its ear with the shocking introduction of radically new and extremely advanced machinery to the world of international yacht racing. After the dust had settled, with BMW Oracle Racing's sweep of the series in the spectacular one-off USA 17, there was a sense that the series would return to more conventional machines, i.e. sloop-rigged monohulls. I felt a little twinge of disappointment.

(The 2010 champion USA-17, a 90' Tri-hull for BMW Oracle Racing.)

But there's no stopping the forward march of progress. Clearly, I was not the only one awed and thrilled by the technologies on display at the 33rd America's Cup, and the consignment of the multihulls to the scrapheap was premature. I think the speeds were just too addicting and the technology simply too mesmerizing to turn back.

(How to keep us down on the farm when we've seen this?)

And so race organizers have settled upon a 72 foot catamaran specification for the 34th America's Cup (slightly smaller and more tightly specified than the 90' multi-hull specification of the previous Cup). These boats do not yet exist except on paper. The America's Cup world Series match races currently underway are being run on scaled-down versions of the AC72, dubbed the AC45. These 45 foot carbon fiber wing sail catamarans are in themselves fabulous pieces of machinery. These early match races are used to winnow down the field and determine the final challenger, who will take on standing Cup holder BMW Oracle USA in 2013. It's in these final races we'll see the new AC72.

I love the concentration of so much human ingenuity on such a whimsical goal. Eight teams including the defender are involved in the challenge: BMW Oracle (USA--defender), Artemis Racing (Sweden), Emirates Team New Zealand (New Zealand), Aleph Equip de France (France), Energy Team (France), China Team (China), Team Korea (South Korea), and Green Comm (Spain). The design and manufacture of the yachts themselves is almost impossibly fascinating to me. All the design elements--hulls and sails and rigging and materials and tactics; everything is literally up-to-the-minute, and everyone is striving for the tiniest advantage, much like my beloved Formula One car racing. The crews of five or six guys per boat are jetting around the world, everyone approaching the business like a top-tier athletic endeavor. Watching everybody scurry around the boat as it rounds a mark, one understands the comparison. Imagine having this as your job! (Overheard in a bar: "Oh, I'm a grinder on an America's Cup yacht.")

(The high speeds also come with perils; the boats can be dangerous.)

There's something anachronistic about high-tech racing using only the power of the wind, but especially in these climate-conscious times that seems a boon (I'd love to see a similarly international effort given to electric car racing, and I think this is coming).

Racing organizers are also trying a new method of broadcasting things this year, putting everything on a really excellent website with hi-def videos on YouTube. I think this is beyond brilliant, and surely something that will become the norm for this type of activity. I can watch all the content on my schedule, plus lots of promotional material and in-depth features. I find myself sucked into these videos and hours pass.

If you have any interest in these things, take a quick look at the video channel. I defy you not to get sucked in! (But don't say I didn't warn you.)

A Little Travelog

2011-09-06T05:44:00.005-05:00

This place just defies description.

I'm sitting on the 29th floor of the Fairmont Dubai, looking out at the desert as it stretches away from me. It's an utterly foreign view, like what I imagine the view from a hotel on Mars would be.

Things were weird right from the beginning of the trip. We started in Cologne, which feels like Western civilization itself (though at 3:00 in the morning it's a sleeping civilization). Flying is flying, and mostly my job in the cockpit is what I've been doing now for almost 18 years. Mostly. The phraseology is a bit different as we cross Europe to the East, and the further one gets from one's regular haunts the more you have to be aware of the odd sounds of fixes and navaids and such. We're forever being cleared to places that are neither familiar nor roll off the tongue gracefully. But that vigilance is a skill acquired like any other.

What a roster of places we go over, reflected by the controlling agencies we talk to. After departing Cologne we talk to Langen Radar (pronounced LAHN-gen), then Rhein Radar, then Munich Control, Vienna Control, Budapest Center, Bucharest, Sofia, Istanbul, Ankara. Normally we leave Turkey's airspace and enter Nicosia (called "Ercan Control" for some reason), but because Cyprus and Turkey are not on speaking terms there is no coordination of air traffic control services between them. This would all be so junior high except that there are missiles involved. So make that so Lord of the Flies. And so our radio contact with Turkey just kind of fades away, and we are expected to have made our own contact with Nicosia before crossing the border into Cyprus, hunting and pecking among the thousand frequencies on the crowded high altitude enroute chart. The problem is that you have to make contact with Nicosia before entering their airspace--that is, before actually exiting Turkey's airspace--and both entities have the bad habit of giving you instructions--headings or an altitude change or a new squawk code--which the other side knows nothing of and has not authorized. Here's a new tool for the skill set: avoiding international incidents!

After Nicosia we talk to Beirut, Damascus, Amman, Jeddah, Bahrain and UAE Center before talking finally to Dubai Control. That's the normal routing. But on this day we are routed to the North of the Turkey / Cyprus quagmire, only to encounter... a different quagmire. (This is, after all, THE quagmire part of the world, or one of them. Every crumbling rock or washed-out little hill seems to hold the concentrated passions of the adherents of this or that mythology. Even my captain, when I ask whether the body we're crossing is the Black Sea, says "I think so. Noah's Ark is down there." Sorry, dude, but it's not. Wait! I think I see the Flying Spaghetti Monster's limo on the highway down there! But I digress.) Today's routing skirts us over the Northern edge of Iraq and into Iran's airspace. Tehran Control. We follow the Eastern shore of the Persian Gulf down a ways and then cross the Gulf to Dubai. Those Tehran folks, they not only don't like we Yanks, but a big commercial airplane like ours might seem to perfectly exemplify one of their key pinch points. Kinda makes a fella nervous.

Today everyone is on their best behavior (as they have been each of the two or three other times I've been here), and soon enough we are on descent for the 105° heat of Dubai. I always have trouble actually doing my job as we descend in here, as I can't keep from staring out the window. The heat envelopes everything in a kind of dusty haze, and there seems to be no color until one is almost ready to touch down. And almost none then. This is starkly different from every other place I've ever seen. Mostly it's because there is no natural foliage here, apart from some widely-spaced scrubby bushes. The city has some imported and carefully-cultivated trees and the occasional golf course or manicured lawn, but these things are rare and seem as shockingly unnatural as prime rib in India. Looking in every direction, over city and open desert, one is aware that about 2/3 of the color palette is AWOL. Everything is the color of sand: white, bleached, dusty, baked. Houses and roadways and walkways. It's a challenge to pick out the airport from the surrounding terrain even when you're practically on top of it, as everything is exactly the same color.

Apart from a domestic architecture that reflects the building materials and climate, the city looks and feels otherwise like a city. Albeit one without shade trees or hedges or lawns or anything like that. (I'm reminded that China is nearly as hot--and its humidity makes it even more insufferable to me--but there are trees and shade everywhere.) But out beyond the hard border of the city things become surreal, like a page out of Frank Herbert's Dune. There's a real sense of the town having a distinct perimeter: outside this line you're on your own. And there are scattered settlements out in the desert that I simply can't fathom. Quite a few of them. They appear to be single-family dwellings, but I can't be sure. They're scattered like widely-spaced farms, except that there is no acreage with them. They're just round courtyards with dwellings in the interior (much like Luke Skywalker's home on Tatooine but bigger). Each has a clear perimeter like a human cell with its distinct border and the functioning machinery inside. A sturdy fence or wall or some such. And there seems to be no way to actually get to these places, as there are no roads or visible tracks. They just float out in the desert like lily pads. Where does their water come from? Or power? How do they deal with sewage? The modern multi-lane highways that slash off to infinity across the desert seem to be protected with walls or borders, and the on- and off-ramps all have sand drifting over them, threatening to engulf. One even sees sand plows parked beside the roads like snow plows in Minnesota. Out in the desert roads are visible which are completely drifted over. There's no way for me to know if this is the work of hours or days or months or years. They look to go to facilities that may or may not still be in use, and it's impossible to tell from 5,000' whether the drifts make the roads impassable or not. But it all gives the impression of a hostile place, even deadly. And to live out in the midst of it is to exercise a real expertise, I think. A guy like me turned loose would go Chris McCandless pretty quickly--within hours, I'd say.

We schlep our bags down to the crew bus and go through the customs shuffle. Lots of little differences: all crew vehicles have the motors running at all times to keep the interiors cool, and all have curtains which are drawn against the sun. As you approach, the driver keeps the doors closed until you're right at the door and closes the door quickly behind you as you board. The mechanics have air conditioning carts ready to keep the airplanes from heating up while they're on the ground; all window shades are pulled and screens turned down to keep heat down. People are dressed in a mixture of familiar Western clothes and several varieties of desert clothing. The most resplendent are the men in the long white robes with headscarves. Very cool and comfortable, I'd think. This mode of dress seems reserved for the wealthy or important.

The customs line at the airport is like most other customs lines, plodding and listless. The woman sitting at the luggage scanner stares hard at me for about 90 seconds after looking at my bag scans. It's a stare that's equal parts utter boredom and contempt. These kinds of civil servants the world over tend to have the civility pounded out of them like a cheap steak, but this woman's stare seems something more. Maybe I'm imagining things. The hotel driver is waiting outside the door, standing in the heat in a dark suit (in fact, all outdoor workers wear long pants and shirts and hats; protection against the sun's rays seems to take precedence over facilitating evaporation). We drag our bags over to a white Toyota Previa van (the Previa is a dead model in the US, but alive and well here, I see). He has a cooler with ice water and *cold* wet towels for a quick freshen-up.

The desert whizzes by as we drive the 10 miles to the hotel, probably the nicest hotel I've ever seen. Shockingly posh. We have 48 hours here, but we're cautioned that the anniversary of 9/11 is shortly upon us and to be vigilant. I think there's not much trouble typically in Dubai, but it is a Muslim country and I'm pretty obviously American. Kidnappings for ransom are not unheard of. We'll see whether I can make anything of the layover or not.

Take Me to the River

2011-09-04T16:35:00.006-05:00

The visits I've been able to make to China with my job in the past couple of years have left me with a couple recurring thoughts. Yearnings, really. Primarily, I wish I could get a better sense of what life is really like in these places (to say nothing of all the places in China I've not seen, many of which must differ greatly from what little I know). Even after all my wanderings I'm still quite in the dark about how people actually live. Not how they make a living, exactly, but how they spend their time and what their home lives are like. I've made note of appearances often enough, but my sense is that the reality of all the billion plus lives passing here is still quite hidden from a Westerner's eyes. I wish I spoke the language, or, maybe more accurately, I wish there were some reasonable means for me to learn to speak the language. I bought the Rosetta Stone for Mandarin (but have yet to even open it), and I know I can take classes and maybe even hire a tutor, but without any means of regularly applying the language I have little faith in my ability to make progress.

I've just finished Peter Hessler's River Town (2001), a book about someone who experienced in reality the things I've been thinking about and much more besides. River Town chronicles Hessler's two years in the central Chinese city of Fuling as a Peace Corps English teacher at the local teacher's college. Hessler is the author of three books, River Town being his first. His second book (which I read first) is Oracle Bones; and his most recent is Country Driving, about his acquisition of a Chinese driving license (this is on deck).

At the time of Hessler's arrival in 1999, Fuling (which lies near the Eastern edge of Sichuan province) had seen very few Westerners, and his presence with another American Peace Corp teacher was quite an event for the town. A crowd formed wherever he went (regardless of what he was doing), and it took all of their two years plus a few dust-ups and the arrival of several more Peace Corps teachers in rotation to get the locals used to these foreign devils in their midst, and they never did fully squelch the pointing and whispers and (more rarely) outright hostility.

But a pretty deep immersion in the culture came automatically with the assignment, and Hessler got to really know people from all walks of life--teachers, laborers, shopkeepers, party members, peasants. His students were cautioned not to get too close to him (though all were cordial enough), but he inevitably made friends. And his reporter's way of asking questions and probing gained him much information that officials seemed to wish him not to have. On top of this, the sheer oddity of a Westerner in China opened doors to many experiences simply not available to a mere observer. He taught several classes of English literature, and used the opportunity to probe his students about political matters and to absorb their sense of their own culture in the world and their impressions of the rest of the world--he writes brilliantly and insightfully about these all-encompassing cultural differences. And he took daily Chinese lessons with a pair of older tutors from the Teacher's College--the passages about these lessons give one pause about the utter foreign-ness of the language to a Westerner and the difficulty in learning it.

It's an excellent book in any case for anyone who loves travelogs, but especially for anyone with a pointed interest in modern China it's indispensable.

I'll include a few quotes (my apologies for not giving a page number, as the number of pages in the electronic version varies with font size; a new issue we must grapple with!):

Street scenes:

Another staircase is home to a group of three dentists who work at a table covered with rusty tools, syringes in mysterious fluids, and pans of cruelly defeated teeth--a sort of crude advertisement. Sometimes a peasant will stop to have his tooth pulled, after haggling over the price, and a crowd will gather to watch.

About the role of literature in school:

But mostly I was disturbed by the politicization of literature in the West: the way that literature was read as social commentary rather than art, and the way that the books were forced to serve political theories of one stripe or another. Very rarely did a critic seem to react to a text; rather the text was twisted so that it reacted neatly to whatever ideas the critic held sacred.

And several quotes addressing an issue I was especially interested in, this idea of a society built entirely on the collective rather than the individual:

...collectivism was limited to small groups, to families and close friends and danwei, or work units, and these tight social circles also acted as boundaries: they were exclusive as well as inclusive, and the average Fuling resident appeared to feel little identification with people outside of his well-known groups.

...There were lots of small groups, and there was a great deal of patriotism, but like most patriotism anywhere in the world, this was spurred as much by fear and ignorance as by any true sense of a connection to the Motherland.

...Despite the self-destruction of the Cultural Revolution and the subsequent rush to open to the outside world, there was still a definite sense of what was Chinese, and I believed that this would help them survive modernization. But there was also a narrowness to this concept, and it seemed nearly impossible for a Chinese to go to a place like Xinjiang, learn the language, and make friends with the locals. In the five thousand years of their history it was striking how little interest the Chinese had in exploration, and today that same characteristic limited them, even within their own borders. They seemed completely content in being Chinese, and they assumed that this feeling was shared by everybody else.

...Everything was further complicated by the influence of traditional collective thinking. The longer I lived in Fuling, the more I was struck by the view of the individual--in my opinion, this was the biggest difference between what I had known in the West and what I saw in Sichuan. For people in Fuling, the sense of self seemed largely external; you were identified by the way that others viewed you. That had always been the goal of Confucianism, which defined the individual's place strictly in relation to the people around her: she was somebody's daughter, somebody else's wife, somebody else's mother; and each role had its specific obligations. This was an excellent way to preserve social harmony, but once that harmony was broken the lack of self-identity made it difficult to put things back together again.

Writing about visiting an old priest and how the man uses language:

He traces the ten characters on the surface of the low table in front of min, stroke by stroke, dipping a finger into his tea. This is a common Chinese habit when speaking with foreigners--because so many characters have the same sound, a conversation will sometimes pause as the speaker writes a word in order to clarify the meaning for the waiguoren listener [foreigner]. They write them in the air, on the palm of their hand, in tea water on a table; and to watch a Chinese person do this is to realize how unique the written language is, and how its words are truly shapes--not just sounds, or collections of letters but tangible things that are handled and touched.

If My Wife Dumps Me I'm Marrying Paula Kirby

2011-08-24T15:12:00.005-05:00

...if she'll have me.

This editorial from the Washington Post's On Faith column should be required reading. She begins with the question posed to the panel:

Q: Rick Perry, at a campaign event this week, told a boy that evolution is 'just a theory' with 'gaps' and that in Texas they teach “both creationism and evolution.” According to a 2009 Gallup study, only 38 percent of Americans say they believe in evolution. If a majority of Americans are skeptical or unsure about evolution, should schools teach it as a mere “theory”? Why is evolution so threatening to religion?
So-called “reality TV” has done the world a grave disservice. I don't just mean because the vast majority of such programs are mind-numbingly tedious, but because they have given people the idea that reality is something that can be decided by popular vote. In a “reality TV” show, the winner is decided through a popularity contest: the person who gets the most votes from viewers emerges triumphant. Anything less like reality it would be hard to imagine - when it comes to facts about the world, at least.
In the real world, facts are stubborn beasts. They are supremely unmoved by whether we like them or not. We may sternly disapprove of the idea that stepping off the window ledge of an apartment on the 14th floor will result in our death; we may go further, and resolutely contradict all claims to that effect, clinging religiously to our belief that such activity is nothing more than an enjoyable and exhilarating way to spend an afternoon; but neither our disapproval nor our disbelief will make the slightest difference to the real-world splat.
And it is the same with evolution. Evolution is a simple fact. We can choose to remain ignorant of it, we can stick our fingers in our ears and refuse to think about it, we can even rail against it and shout and scream that it is not allowed to be true. But facts are facts, and will not go away just because we don't like them. We don't get to vote for our preferred method of having come into existence as a species, any more than we can choose to have been delivered by stork rather than conceived and born in the usual way.
The primary role of the school is pretty straightforward: it is to educate. It is to give young people the opportunity to learn as much as possible about the world, on the basis of the very best knowledge we have. Education is about overcoming ignorance - so the idea of allowing ignorance to set the school curriculum and to perpetuate itself by continuing to teach generation after generation information that for the last 150 years we have known to be false, is a shameful betrayal: a betrayal of young people, who put their trust in us and who deserve better; and a betrayal of the very concept of education itself.
Remember that 'ignorance' is not an insult, but merely a term for 'lack of knowledge'. Many of the people who protest so vociferously against the teaching of evolution do not understand how overwhelmingly strong the evidence for it is; and many of those who proclaim “But it's only a theory” do not understand that the scientific and everyday usages of the word 'theory' are very different. In everyday English, 'theory' can mean something vague, a hunch, a guess. In scientific English, it is almost as far from that meaning as it's possible to get: in science, a theory is the best explanation for a set of facts. It carries real weight: in science, nothing can be called a 'theory' until it is very well established indeed. Science has its own term for what, in a non-scientific context, the rest of us might call a 'theory': the scientific term for a suggestion, a best guess, something that seems plausible but has not yet been shown to be reliably true, is 'hypothesis'. You will never, ever hear a scientist talk about 'the hypothesis of evolution', for the simple reason that evolution is long past that stage. Evolution is a theory in the scientific sense of the word - tested, researched, explored and supported by masses and masses of evidence. There may still be specific details that are not entirely agreed upon; but the fact of evolution itself is not disputed by any reputable scientist. (If you are in any doubt about the evidence for evolution, I highly recommend The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins or Why Evolution is True by Jerry Coyne , because both authors have explained comprehensively, beautifully and very accessibly just why we can be so sure that evolution really is a fact.)
To deprive children of this knowledge, or to water it down so as to pretend that it's just a wild guess, is to deliberately deprive them of one of the most powerful and illuminating pieces of knowledge that humans have ever acquired. It is to deliberately keep them from what we know to be the truth. It is to conceal from them their true identity, and all meaningful knowledge of their roots. To suggest that creationism is in any way a rival 'theory' is to confuse reality with myth. Creationism is to evolution what Santa Claus is to frazzled parents frantically buying and wrapping presents for their children at Christmas. There comes a point in our childhood when we must let go of the fantasy of Santa Claus; and there comes a point in our civilization when we must let go of the fantasy of creationism too.
Evolution is science, and should be taught in science classes. Creationism -- let us be very clear about this --is a purely religious doctrine, with no scientific underpinning whatsoever. Indeed, all the evidence points very strongly to its being false. It therefore has no place in a science lesson. Science proceeds on the basis of evidence, religion on the basis of faith, and any teacher who tries to teach faith-based dogma in a science class is clearly demonstrating her unsuitability for the role.
But of course evolution poses a problem for Christianity. That's not to say it poses a problem for all Christians, since many Christians happily accept evolution: they see Genesis 1 as merely a metaphor, and declare that if God chose to create us using evolution, that's fine by them. I used to be this kind of Christian myself; but I must confess that my blitheness was only possible because I had only the vaguest possible idea of how evolution works and certainly didn't know enough about it to realize that unguided-ness is central to it. While I welcome anyone who recognizes that the evidence for evolution is such that it cannot sensibly be denied, to attempt to co-opt evolution as part of a divine plan simply does not work, and suggests a highly superficial understanding of the subject. Not only does evolution not need to be guided in any way, but any conscious, sentient guide would have to be a monster of the most sadistic type: for evolution is not pretty, is not gentle, is not kind, is not compassionate, is not loving. Evolution is blind, and brutal, and callous. It is not an aspiration or a blueprint to live up to (we have to create those for ourselves): it is simply what happens, the blind, inexorable forces of nature at work. An omnipotent deity who chose evolution by natural selection as the means by which to bring about the array of living creatures that populate the Earth today would be many things - but loving would not be one of them. Nor perfect. Nor compassionate. Nor merciful. Evolution produces some wondrously beautiful results; but it happens at the cost of unimaginable suffering on the part of countless billions of individuals and, indeed, whole species, 99 percent of which have so far become extinct. It is irreconcilable with a god of love.
Evolution poses a further threat to Christianity, though, a threat that goes to the very heart of Christian teaching. Evolution means that the creation accounts in the first two chapters of Genesis are wrong. That's not how humans came into being, nor the cattle, nor the creeping things, nor the beasts of the earth, nor the fowl of the air. Evolution could not have produced a single mother and father of all future humans, so there was no Adam and no Eve. No Adam and Eve: no fall. No fall: no need for redemption. No need for redemption: no need for a redeemer. No need for a redeemer: no need for the crucifixion or the resurrection, and no need to believe in that redeemer in order to gain eternal life. And not the slightest reason to believe in eternal life in the first place.
Christianity is like a big, chunky sweater. It may feel cozy, it may keep you warm, but just let one stitch be dropped and the whole thing unravels before your very eyes. Evolution is that stitch. Evolution destroys the loving creator on which the whole of Christianity depends. I can quite understand why the evangelicals throw up their hands in horror at the very idea of it and will do everything in their power to suppress it. But they can throw up their hands all they like: it won't make any difference to the reality. All that will be achieved by their determined efforts to keep young people misinformed about it is that another generation of Americans will be condemned to ignorance, unable to understand the world around them properly, and at a real disadvantage when having to deal and compete with their peers from more enlightened countries. Willful ignorance is a choice; evolution is not.

A-freakin'-men.

***

ADDENDUM:

The great Richard Dawkins' response is similarly entertaining and brilliant and contains this zinger:

The population of the United States is more than 300 million and it includes some of the best and brightest that the human species has to offer, probably more so than any other country in the world. There is surely something wrong with a system for choosing a leader when, given a pool of such talent and a process that occupies more than a year and consumes billions of dollars, what rises to the top of the heap is George W Bush. Or when the likes of Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin can be mentioned as even remote possibilities.

Athens: the Finish-Up

2011-08-24T10:10:00.002-05:00

Photos here. And others from the trip here. And now here (cemetery pictures).

As I mentioned, we both felt a little ennui returning to Athens, as the island life was quite relaxing and we felt we had seen most of what we intended to see in Athens (which is certainly not to say we had seen everything). But it was actually kind of fun to come back into a now-familiar place and make further explorations. And I have to say that I just gel better in a city setting than I do on the beach. I love water, but it's the city that energizes me.

Our plan for the next morning--Sunday--was to explore the much newer of Athens' two major cemeteries, the First Cemetery. This one, a couple clicks Southeast of the Acropolis, dates from the 19th Century--comparatively just yesterday in this place--and contains many of Athens' prominent citizens of the past century or so. It seems space here is at such a premium that people only rent a plot for a few years and the bones are then removed to make space for another tenant, as it were. Indeed, as we climbed up a hill in the cemetery we looked down on a maintenance area with hundreds of metal boxes, some of which were open to the weather and the bones clearly visible. Most remains are supposedly removed to an "ossuary," though that term leaves plenty of interpretive leeway. We saw a small chapel-like structure packed to the gills with these metal boxes, many with photos and lit candles on them, but there are clearly a lot more ex-tenants than there is available space in a structure like this one.

The cemetery itself is lovely, though maybe a bit tired and at times unkempt (in a way that's not an automatic demerit for a cemetery). I still find it hard to adjust to the arid climate in this part of the world. There are trees, but (as I understand it) only those actively provided by some intervening human. And without any lush vegetation the ground is dusty and dry and cracked and rocky and generally uninviting. This is the setting for the cemetery, though plenty of trees have been planted here and some of the monuments are, well, monumental.

This consumed our morning, and by the time we walked back it was lunchtime. Our pattern then has been to follow lunch with a short time indoors for the hottest part of the day (many shops seem to close for a siesta as well), and then we venture out for another adventure. I suppose my world is entirely too food-focused anyway, but I think I could live very happily with Athens' leisurely approach to food. Lunches and dinners are prolonged affairs by default; service is leisurely; nothing happens quickly. The wait staff will never bring you a bill or hurry to remove your dirty dishes. And I think many of my fondest memories of this trip are of sitting under an umbrella or awning with a spectacular view of this or that archeological artifact, sipping endless Coke Lights and munching on cheese croquettes and watching the diverse crush of humanity parade by.

Today's post-siesta adventure was the climb up to the terminal of the funicular railway up to Lycabettus Hill. This is the highest point in Athens, rising to nearly a thousand feet MSL, and from whence one can look DOWN on the mighty Acropolis! The views were in fact spectacular, with a 360° panorama of the entire city's four million inhabitants. And we got to wander through unfamiliar neighborhoods getting to and from.

On the last day we took an above-ground tram to the beach areas on the South side of the city (and East of Piraeus), just to get a glimpse of some of the areas we had not seen. And then further exploration of the little streets of the Plaka around our hotel. We found a brilliant, narrow shopping street a block North of Ermou St. that was like a picture of 100 years ago. With meals and packing that was about all the day had in store. We did some last minute shopping and lingered in the squares over a beverage and tried to soak in a scene we may well not see again, or certainly not for a while. The flights back were long, long, long but uneventful. (I must say that Alitalia was competent and got us there mostly on schedule, but there was always some hiccup with every flight. I heard other folks bitching about them, but ours was an OK experience.)

I think the aftermath of this trip for both of us is a gratefulness that we saw the place and its historical treasures. And even knowing that we saw so very little of the Greek isles, I think we both enjoyed our visit to Milos and could happily investigate other islands if the planets aligned this way. But in comparison to other places we've visited, I don't think either of us feels compelled to return here for further exploration. If my work travels should send me here, I'd be thrilled to revisit things and maybe see other parts of the city I didn't see on this trip; but I don't know that we'd plan another vacation here without some external pressure. This is in contrast to many people's reaction to Greece, I think. Many people find a particular pull to this place, and I can see it in a way, but I just think we're not those folks especially. I think, by contrast, I could return to Paris or London an unlimited number of times. I suppose that pigeonholes me in some way, but there it is.

And as quickly as that we're back in WI, with a yard that's overdue for some mowing!

Greece, Days 4-5: Milos

2011-08-22T13:20:00.000-05:00

(More or less related Flickr photos here.)

Neither Susan nor I knew anything really about Greece before embarking on this vacation, so we had little idea what to expect from our time here--especially as the country covers a large geographical area and is quite varied (Susan, of course, knows the history of Greek theatre, but this was not a primary directive for our vacation). I think our incentive to visit was more island beauty than archeological mecca, but we planned to experience something of both. Still, we naturally wondered what the proportion should be. We are historically more aligned with city vacations, liking to walk the streets and experience shopping and street fairs and city culture. But in the winter we have done several cruises in the Caribbean and Mexico, which are a more passive, island-y way to vacation. Greece offers both.

The plan we settled upon was to spend three nights in Athens, and then two nights each on two successive islands. Given the time needed to get to and from the islands, we concentrated on the nearest group of islands to Athens, the Cyclades. This group includes the most popular islands for visitors--Mykonos and Santorini--and the Cyclades also typify what most people think of as Greece: rocky islands with whitewashed houses clinging to the cliffs with blue roofs and shutters. I discovered a collection of web pages on Greece by the American expat Matt Barrett (a really useful and informative website--more on this later) and he had recommendations for people not hell-bent on night life (Mykonos, for example, he said should be avoided by anyone older than 25. That would be us). Based mostly on his recommendations, we settled on the smaller, less-well-known islands of Sifnos and Milos. And as our plans began to firm up, we decided to limit ourselves to a single island and make sure we had seen everything in Athens (we reasoned that two adjacent islands would likely be indistinguishable to us, and we'd just have to move all our stuff and spend time getting to and from to no good effect).

We also followed Matt Barrett's recommendations and used a travel agency (also the agency he recommended--Aegean Thesaurus) to do our bookings, something we've never done before. This ended up being a fantastic suggestion, and his recommendation of them is well-earned. They were very prompt and professional and they helped us immensely with all our planning. They approved of our initial itinerary and explained how well it matched our stated goals, and they were subsequently disappointed that we decided to drop Sifnos, though they understood the rationale. I think for most Greeks Athens is an unfortunate necessity of life, and they look at their island culture as their chief asset for tourists (after all, there are fabulous ancient ruins on most every island). We reasoned that we were always going to miss out on so much of the country's charms no matter our itinerary, and so we set our plans.

At 6: AM on Thursday morning our pre-arranged taxi was waiting outside our hotel to take us to one of the world's busiest passenger ferry ports, Piraeus--about 15 miles from the hotel. From there we caught a high speed ferry from Athens thru the islands of Sifaros and Sifnos and on to Milos, where another pre-arranged taxi was waiting (interestingly, a very normal-looking Chevy Caprice but with a stick and a diesel--ah, the automotive things we are denied!). From the port town of Adamos on Milos, we were driven about eight miles to a tiny spit of land on the Northeast tip of the island called Pollonia, and to our accommodation at the Apollon Rooms.

The contrast from Athens could not be much greater. On the drive from Adamos to Pollonia there were houses scattered across the countryside individually and in little groupings, but most of the land was empty--dry and rocky and with scrubby plants. Pollonia itself is a resort area, with a zillion little whitewashed cubes for rent and a bunch of restaurants with outdoor seating along the town waterfront. There are a handful of permanent residents, but most people are there seasonally to serve the even larger number of tourists. We had specified air conditioning and a pool if possible and the Apollon Rooms appeared to be about the only place in Pollonia that had these--once again, the travel agency had done very well. The walk from our room into town was maybe 1/4 mile or so, and we passed an excellent swimming beach on the way. We got familiar with this walk, going back and forth half a dozen times a day. There are things to see on Milos ("too little time!" we were told by the friendly hotel folks when we checked in and they pointed out recommended sites on a map of the island), but mostly they are of a geological nature, and a visit of any length would seem to require renting one of the many scooters available on the island (or a car, though there cannot be more than 50 miles of good, paved road on the island). There is bus service, and the buses are beautiful coaches and always full, but it would have been fun to explore the little side roads on a motorcycle. We debated, but decided to concentrate on getting lots of sleep and spending time in the water every day and trying each of the town's handful of restaurants. And in our two and a half days that was quite enough. While we both at first rather wished for more available to do, we gradually settled into a deep relaxation vibe. At the end we kind of wished we had booked just one more day, especially as we suspected we had already seen most of what we planned to see in Athens (and thus didn't really need the two full additional days that awaited us). But it is what it is, and we went with the flow.

Meanwhile, the travel agency was definitely earning their keep, keeping track of their VIP foreign charges (or so we like to think). In addition to all the help with planning, they were keeping an eye on our ferry bookings--and subsequent taxi bookings. The first day in Milos was letter-perfect, but on the second and third days there was a howling wind. The temps were still in the middle 90s with a cloudless sky, but the winds made swimming a bit problematic as the sand blew everywhere and the surf eventually got rather rough. On the second day (unbeknownst to us) some of the ferry service to Milos canceled because of the rough seas, and we received a phone call at the resort on the morning of our final day from the travel agency alerting us to potential problems. They said they expected the ferry to cancel again today (Saturday), and tomorrow was booked solid and we would be unlikely to get out until Monday. Our flight to Rome and on to Chicago leaves Athens at 6:AM on Tuesday morning, so we did not want to flirt with not getting back. So after a few phone calls we find ourselves on the slow 4:PM ferry, from whence I'm typing this. Again, had the travel agency not been keeping tabs on our plans, we would not have known we even had an issue until we had checked out and found ourselves at the dock with no ferry and no room. I begin to rethink the value of a good travel agency. The ferry out to Milos was a high speed ferry, averaging about 28 mph and getting us to our destination in about four hours. This present ferry is a huge, lumbering cruise-ship kinda thing, and it takes a good 6:20 to cover the same ground.

Once again, a taxi was waiting with our name on it when we walked off the ferry, and the hotel was expecting us even though it was midnight. Another gold star for Aegean Thesaurus.

Athens, Day 3

2011-08-22T12:10:00.001-05:00

Pictures of the day's doings here.

Today was a lazier day, as Susan was not feeling 100% and we'd both had plenty of heat and sun in the last couple days. So we slept in late and had a lazy breakfast downstairs before heading off for the National Archeological Museum, the one must-see museum among the many here in town. We decided to use this as an excuse to get familiar with Athens' subway system, which did not go particularly well. The stop nearest our hotel is under construction, and trains are running both directions on only one track. We realized this little salient detail during last night's supper, where we chose a cafe overlooking the train stop (the train runs in a channel here, open to the sky, and the station is just at the mouth of a tunnel that runs underneath the Plaka). I noticed that trains came and went on the same track. What we did not know is that the trains running the "wrong" direction on the existing track do not stop at the platform during the day (they were certainly stopping in both directions last night). And so, after about 20 minutes, we realized we needed to ride the wrong-direction train to the next stop and then cross the tracks and board the right-direction train back. The other thing we did not realize is that once we were on the correct train it would only run for two stops and then everybody had to get off and change trains. A comedy of errors ensued.

We made it up to the correct stop for the National Archeological Museum eventually, the actual stop being 5-6 blocks to the Northwest of the museum proper. We exited the station and headed back in the opposite direction on foot and eventually found the place after being sent in the wrong direction by an armed security guard and running a gauntlet of homeless and loitering men in an alley between buildings--the only time we have felt unsafe, and the place was strewn with trash and feces and smelled like a latrine. This was definitely Athens at its least welcoming. After that the museum felt like a bunker, a stone crypt of safety.

The museum was pretty amazing, having room after room of sculpture and pottery and such covering about 500 years from roughly 500BCE onward. I took a bunch of pictures and we stopped at the museum shop and the cafe in the basement. But I simply don't know enough about any of this to have any intelligent commentary except to say the age of things rather takes one by surprise. So many confident, brilliant pieces which date from a couple thousand years before America was even discovered; it makes the bits of history in America seem, well, very recent indeed.

Well, I do have one comment: lots of statues appear to have been beheaded, and it also appears to be a fact of life noses are not safe. Noses and penises. Penises especially. It's a rare stone bloke who has survived with his tackle intact (which is odd when so many were pointedly sculpted with these bits on display). Someone appears to have gone through the collection with a brick and removed all offensive appendages in a systematic way--though why noses are offensive remains a mystery to me. The Greeks seemed to like their boys entirely au naturel, and the Romans seem to have liked theirs covered. Women were in a different category, it seems: the Greeks paid little sculptural attention to them, and the Romans seemed to like them nude. Go figure.

***

Evening now, and we're back from a full exploration of the Acropolis and Parthenon and environs plus (naturally) some more shopping and another excellent dinner.

I take back any criticism of how Greece is dealing with their historical sites. I realize I had formed an opinion before even getting inside the site proper (not that this has stopped me in any other of my posts). This time I made note of the work on the walkways and entries leading to the site, and of course I got to look at the restorations actually ongoing within the compound--something I had not seen before climbing the steps and inside the walls of the main compound. And what the Greeks are undertaking to restore the Acropolis site is almost beyond fathoming. There is so much up there, and so much has been lost, that figuring out what stones go where and then crafting replacements for what is missing is, well, a decades-long process. I couldn't help noting that what the Greeks accomplished with slave power (and by what exact mechanism I cannot imagine), the modern Greeks are using contemporary heavy construction equipment.

The whole site with its breathtaking panorama of the city of Athens and the Aegean sea to the South is an unimaginable treasure. When I see what they have accomplished already with the Theatre of Herodes Atticus and with the Parthenon and the smaller Erecthion temple, I can see that it quite misses the mark to not only what they have NOT done. So I stand corrected. This ended up being a high point for us, naturally, and we were both glad we waited until the late afternoon when the crowds were notably thinner and the sun was not pounding down. I daresay we would have enjoyed all of this much less had we continued the previous morning. And I think the discomfort would have stolen some of the inevitable awe that one feels in this place. It's not a supernatural thing, of course, but there is an almost religious sense of the work of humans like us on a massive scale going waaay back.

Tomorrow, off to the island of Milos

The Greatest Movie Event in Cinema History

2011-08-21T15:29:00.006-05:00

OK, well not the movie, exactly.

Or rather, only partially the movie, which was the perfectly serviceable romantic dramedy by Mike Mills, Beginners. Ewan McGregor plays Oliver, a man coping with the death of his father and with the consequences of an unusual upbringing and the unusual parents responsible for it. The story is told with a scrambled timeline, with many scenes in flashback. Oliver's mother has been dead for five years, and his father Hal (played by the superb Christopher Plummer) announces at the age of 75 that he is gay. With a sudden sense that he has no real knowledge of the two people closest to him in life, Oliver struggles to find North again in his world. Shortly after these revelations, Hal is diagnosed with stage four lung cancer and thus undertakes with gusto the business of finally living and, finally, dying. This gives Oliver a renewed sense of urgency, but does little to clarify things.

This story is interspersed with Oliver's ongoing struggles after his father's death, and the scenes of him disposing of his dead father's belongings are touching and sad. The one living artifact from Hal's life is his little Jack Russell terrier, Arthur, who quickly becomes inseparable from Oliver. Arthur is in virtually every scene and he quietly steals the show. He communicates sparingly with Oliver through subtitles and serves as a strange kind of glue holding the disparate elements together.

At a party to which Oliver is forced to go by his friends (who are desperate to get him out of his funk), he meets Anna (Melanie Laurent), an actress and fellow Odd Creature, and the two of them begin a relationship. But these things are messy, as both Oliver and Anna come from homes where their parents' marriages were at best unconventional, leaving neither with a strong skillset in relationship matters. Perhaps Oliver can learn something from his father; not the father of his upbringing but the one who is living true to himself at life's end.

This is all told in a rather Wes Anderson vein, with quirky music and voice-overs and whimsical graphics, and none of it takes itself too seriously.

So why the Greatest Movie Event Ever? Well, because of this.

We saw this film in the most magnificent setting on the planet: Cine Paris is a rooftop garden in the middle of Athens' Plaka district, seating about 400 and with a magnificent view of the Acropolis (which is lit up like an xmas tree at night).

(The coolest movie house in human history!)

(Behind us, a full-service snack bar--and a full wet bar!)

(The East end of the Acropolis.)

(The view from our seats; the film awaits the sunset.)

In this setting, George Lucas could have won a Nobel Prize for Literature for his Star Wars dialog. Really, it's that amazing. We both quickly determined that this event was the high point of our entire trip.

The film was fun (though I had a bit of trouble hearing and the subtitles were in Greek, so I plan to revisit when I can), and worthy of a B+ I'd say, but the setting elevates everything to AAA-rated, gold-plated A++ quality.

Athens, Day 2

2011-08-21T08:13:00.001-05:00

Pictures for this day (more or less) are at THIS Flickr stream.

Just about a perfect day. I'm reminded how fortunate I am that Susan and I travel well together, both loving to do about the same things among the many choices we might make. We often run across couples for whom the stresses of travel are rather getting the best of them (sometimes with kids), and I think how dreadful traveling like this can be. So much enjoyment for me comes from sharing an experience with someone who wants to be there with me and loves many of the same things as I do (though she also constantly points out stuff I hadn't thought of or introduces me to things I might not have explored on my own). I enjoy traveling on my own--which is fortunate, as this is most typical state for me--but I like it more when I can share the experiences with someone.

The hotel here (which we're coming to think of as being perfectly adequate, though not more than this) has a free, simple breakfast, so we each had some fruit and toast and cereal before heading off on foot towards the Acropolis and Parthenon. There are two ancient theatres in the complex, both along the Southern perimeter, and those were the first order of business. The Theatre of Herodes Atticus is on the Southwest corner of the complex and has been restored to functional status. It seats about 5,000 people, and I know I've seen video footage of concerts given here--Pavarotti or Yanni or Andrea Bocelli or someone. Everything is made of stone, and the terraces are steep so that there's a real sense of intimacy to the setting, even with an audience of this size. The backdrop to the performance space is an immense stone facade, which looks like the wall of an ancient building with arches and windows and doorways. It would be a magnificent space to see any kind of performance in, and it is still in regular use for theatre and dance and live music of many stripes. Accordingly, it is fenced off and one can only see it from some distance (which, with the armed guards on the other side, seems to be the only way to keep things graffiti-free). Further East at the foot of the massive retaining wall leading up to the Parthenon is the ancient Theatre of Dionysos, which is a ruin. In its functional state, this would have seated considerably more people than the Atticus theatre--maybe 15,000. Many of these theatres, as I understand it, were built to a certain size by the ancient Greeks and then later expanded by the Romans. The Roman contribution to the Theatre of Dionysos--or at any rate the upper tiers--has long been removed (the stone likely cannibalized for other purposes) so that only the inner seating rings remain. But one can see the stairways extend up the rocky hills to seats which are no longer there, and all of it appears to be yielding to the elements. Everything here is crumbling and dust-covered, and the space seems quite beyond what could be whipped back into a functional state. But to see these things up close--to touch the stones and walk the paths--is to give one an eerie sense of connection to something back at the very start of what has continued thru time to become contemporary Western civilization. The spaces are quiet now, but we readily see what they would be good for; and those things have not changed so much. Human beings have maybe not changed so much in 2-3000 years. (In fact, we learned later that there is a move afoot to restore this theatre as well.)

This leads me to comment on how the Greeks have undertaken restoration and on their management of their national treasures. Or not. These ancient ruins are absolutely jammed with tourists, so much so that we actually abandoned our attempts to get up to the Parthenon because the crowds were ridiculous. Add in 95° heat and any hope of enjoyment and / or awe are duly pummeled out of you. (We plan to try again tomorrow evening, gambling that at the end of the day things thin out a bit.) Of course I don't mean to bitch about everyone else doing exactly what Susan and I were attempting to do, but the whole site seems barely managed by anyone. There are few set walkways, and the surfaces are rocky and sand- and gravel-strewn and nothing is level, so that at times one feels in a rather perilous state going up and down the hills. I have to think that falls and at least minor injuries are commonplace. And while some things are roped off, lots of other things--most things--are just exposed to the elements and to what must amount to millions of yearly footfalls and children's hands and so on. My experiences with the US national parks had let me to expect walkways with guard rails here and numerous explanatory placards--but there's none of this (yet another example, I feel compelled to add, of our tax dollars doing things for which we should be proud and happy to pay). The Acropolis has probably 10 different attractions within the complex, and if each of these had a set walkway and posters explaining what we were looking at, they could probably accommodate the same number of people but in a much more orderly fashion, and with much less wear and tear to the facilities. There is a big gate where the tickets are bought, and they open and close it to admit people about 100 or so at a time. But these groups scatter once inside only to meet and mass at numerous pinch points, like long stairways which need to accommodate both upward and downward traffic, but are wide enough for only one stream. So there is always a huge line waiting at the top and bottom and (again, in 95° heat and pummeling sunshine) no one is particularly happy to be there. The end result was of crowds so haphazard that we struggled to enjoy ourselves at least part of the time. (To be fair, the guidebooks warned about this very thing.)

Of course, what I propose would be hugely expensive, and knowing the state of Greece's finances that seems unlikely. That being said, it's really heartening to see thousands of people eagerly paying their 12 Euros to get in and see these artifacts of human history. And I guess that's kind of my point: these things belong in a small way to all of us, we all trace much of our world back to these places and to what went on here. It would not seem a bad idea for nations who could afford it to pitch in to help Greece with such an undertaking. But that's just me talking.

After we saw the theatres (and decided to finish the Parthenon tour later), we walked extensively through the Plaka, the old neighborhood near our hotel. This is all shops and restaurants and it feels narrow and winding and filled with character. I think the character of the Plaka, nestled beneath the towering Acropolis, will be what we remember most from this trip. We shopped for a couple hours and then picked a nice sidewalk cafe for some lunch. Afterward we walked a short distance to another ruin, the Temple of Olympian Zeus. This is little more than a handful of huge, standing columns where an immense temple once stood. There's enough there to give one a sense of what the original must have looked like, and with the Acropolis towering above as a backdrop it's a breathtaking sight. Our entry fee for the Acropolis gives one entry to several big attractions in town (the Temple of Olympian Zeus being one of them), and you have four days to use your ticket once bought. Nice.

We finished up with a bit more shopping and sightseeing (interrupted by a short nap at the hotel) before a light dinner and some not-so-light ice cream. A fantastic day.

Another gripe (forgive me a little bitching, as we had a really wonderful time today; but I want to record our impressions so I don't forget what we noted at the time). Athens, at least around the Plaka, is suffering a graffiti epidemic. Anything that's not protected by fencing--and very much that is--has been tagged extensively, the most extensive vandalism I think I've ever seen anywhere. The street our hotel is on is literally painted stem-to-stern, like the New York subway trains of the '70s (as are, appropriately, the trains themselves). Damage becomes more extensive in more out of the way places, but the paint is literally everywhere. When there's so much beauty around, it's really discouraging how completely the city is trashed in this way (there are even a couple paint-sellers--advertised as graffiti shops!--in the Plaka). I find I cannot help thinking on what might be tried to put a halt to this, as the defacement is everywhere you look. In truth, I have no idea how one should go about tackling this problem, but it makes a big contribution to the impression of central Athens as run-down and tired (quite the opposite impression we had coming in from the airport). And it seems so unnecessary; it's not like there's some vital rebellion or social movement afoot here. It just feels like kids wrecking shit. Tomorrow we'll head further afield in Athens than our local neighborhood, and maybe the rest of the city has been spared. But I doubt it.

First Impressions of Athens

2011-08-17T08:01:00.004-05:00

(Photos for this post are at my Flickr page here.)

(Not the right picture for this day, but it's just too awesome to resist.)

I love how by some alchemy of big and small things a place takes on a unique character. Even with all the places I've had the luck to visit in the past few years, I find Athens to be like, but not like, any of them. Starting with the drive into the city from the airport--a good 45 minutes over a new and beautiful highway that includes a number of tunnels--the topography is different from any place I've been. Hilly and rocky and with water everywhere, it feels, appropriately enough, like Europe on a rocky coastline. Architecturally, it has something of Almaty's masonry building style coupled with Europe's cleanness and modernity--at least on the drive into town. Unlike Almaty, things look to have been adequately financed: buildings are interesting and in generally good repair, and the infrastructure looks up to date. But our cabbie reminds us this is the route tailored for visitors to the Olympics of 2004, and it's Athens putting its best foot forward. And sure enough, things get dirtier and more run down as we enter the heart of the city, and streets get narrow and crowded and there is nary a building without extensive graffiti tags.

We arrived at the Hotel Attalos about 7:PM. The lift would barely accommodate the two of us and our big travel bags, and our room was hardly bigger than that. But it all seems reasonably clean and we have our own bathroom and air conditioning, features that are not guaranteed, especially at our middling price point. Despite our body clocks being in crisis mode, we stowed our bags and headed out for some dinner.

The hotel is on the edge of the historic district of Plaka, an ancient neighborhood that sits beneath the towering Acropolis in the center of the city. The streets, as I say, are narrow and many side streets are paved with stones. In a half hour walk we must have passed 200 restaurants, all with extensive outdoor seating. It's hot here, and many outdoor eating areas are sprayed with big floor-standing fans with little water misters in front of them. Huge umbrellas provide shade, but are retracted at night. The Greeks eat late, and most cafes were largely empty at 8:PM when we picked a place and sat down. By the time we were finished at 8:45 or so things were beginning to fill up.

Our dinner was unexpectedly fabulous--I say unexpectedly because, well, I don't really know my Greek food. Susan and I have a favorite restaurant in Appleton called the Apollon which features a Greek menu, but that and the occasional gyro have really been my only exposures. However, looking at the menu of Greek favorites I realized that I had at least a passing familiarity with most of the lamb and veal recipes on offer. And I'm embarrassed to say it but the cheese-stuffed hamburger tickled my fancy. So we got several things to split: a greek salad, some saganaki (how do you make cheese better? Fry it, of course!), Susan got some obscenely good cheese croquettes, and my burger (with fries I didn't need or particularly want). The burger was actually a huge, flat, stuffed beef patty on a wheel of pita bread, to be eaten with a fork. And everything was amazingly good. It was too much food--we didn't finish it all--but there wasn't a dud in the mix (though we both declared that an entire meal of the cheese croquettes would be completely merited). We could have lingered there after our meal, and mealtimes here seem to be prolonged, very social affairs, but we felt we had so much to see that we rushed off to shop and sightsee.

The streets in the Plaka go on and on (or maybe round and round; there are few straight lines), and as the sun set things got busier and busier until every restaurant was packed and people were milling around on the streets by the hundreds. Live musicians strolled the crowds and vendors set up booths selling jewelry and antiques and various tourist junk; the atmosphere was calm but festive. Out in the many public squares people loitered and peddlers tried to sell their knockoff watches and DVDs and purses. Knots of 20-something kids sat in the middle of the square sharing beers. One especially interesting trinket that I've never seen anywhere else is this rubber-band-launched thingie with multi-colored flashing LED lights and little plastic tails that cause the device to spin down after launch like a helicopter. They're like a miniature firework, and for two Euros we had to have one. But it's more interesting to sit there in a crowd of several thousand people and watch the peddlers launch these over and over as they try to get sales. It adds a magic little atmosphere to the gathering.

We finished the night with a little ice cream from a street vendor and were fast asleep by 10:PM.

More to come.

Living In the Past

2011-08-10T22:09:00.008-05:00

On today's docket, a couple old films.

First, one of my favorite old films, Anatole Litvak's 1967 thriller The Night of the Generals.

The story involves three Nazi generals, one of whom is involved in the serial murder of prostitutes. The generals, Kahlenberg (Donald Pleasance), von Seydlitz-Gabler (Charles Gray) and Tanz (Peter O'Toole) are all suspected, and all three are unaccounted for at the times of the murders and each is concealing something. The tumultuous events of WWII serve as an improbable backdrop, less for the crimes themselves--what could be less shocking than murder in wartime?--but for the dogged investigation into the murders undertaken by the zealous fellow Nazi Colonel Grau (Omar Sharif), who insists that justice means nothing if members of a class can exempt themselves from its mandates.

In itself it's a fascinating setup, but it's made most compelling by the central performances. While there is some late '60s period filmmaking cheese at the perimeter, the central figures are quite magnetic, particularly Omar Sharif as the good-natured but almost manically-focused Grau. Even as he is taunted--and frankly warned--about his obsession over such peripheral matters while Germany is struggling for its existence, he will not, cannot, be sidetracked. "Above all, Major Grau, not too much zeal," he is warned by a colleague when Grau insists on confronting the three men (who have systematically refused to see him) at a cocktail party. "I have a zealous nature, sir; I can't help it," he says congenially.

The other standout performance--the real star of the show--is Peter O'Toole as the magnificently pathological General Tanz. As the quintessential Nazi, "the pet of Hitler," as he is called, Tanz is dogmatic and brutal, and manically rigid. Or just a plain maniac. He is obsessed with cleanliness and comically devoid of social graces, such that one waits mid-cringe for the next little blowup that follows inevitably in his wake. Unfortunately for the rest of the world, Tanz has the power to indulge all but the most savage whims with impunity--and, with a little care, those as well.

(As an aside, I vaguely remember seeing the film 30 years ago, and I daresay it was seeing a bald Donald Pleasance in huge Birth Control Glasses that grabbed something deep in my brain stem and gave it a good shake: I identified with this look on some unutterable level--and indeed I still do. Apart from slightly toned down glasses--a recent development--I adopted the look almost immediately and have found my stylistic home ever since. Pity I couldn't find a better role model than a wacky Nazi general, though I daresay Kahlenberg is the sanest of the group here. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.)

Mixed up in the story is the historical plot to kill Hitler in his bunker and sidestep his hand-picked successor in favor of a saner government, a situation covered recently in Bryan Singer's 2008 film Valkyrie. But those events play at the edge of The Night of the Generals, and that eccentricity is kind of the film's point: even as high Nazi officials are trying to murder Hitler, a dogged investigator continues to probe the murder of a couple prostitutes. I saw it on some TV rerun in my early days of college, and I looked for the film in VHS and DVD catalogs for years to no avail. I was thrilled to find it recently available on iTunes. It's not a film that deserves the very highest grade, but it's a worthy effort and an excellent entertainment (if this is your thing). For brilliant performances and a wonderful period feel I would give it a solid B+.

The other film is new to me, Edward Dmytryk's 1947 film noir Crossfire.

The film stars three Roberts: Young, Mitchum and Ryan. Mitchum and Ryan are servicemen back from the battlefields of WWII who, with a collection of soldier friends, find themselves mixed up in the murder of a civilian, a man scarcely known to any of them. Robert Young plays a detective who is trying to get to the bottom of the murder, trying to figure out who is responsible in a group of men who are frantically--and often unthinkingly--trying to look out for each other (as perhaps they have had to spend the last four years doing). Both Young and Mitchum play cynical men who have seen it all and are tired of life. But each is also intelligent and observant and almost impossible to catch off guard, and it is the strength of these two performances that carry the film. The supporting actors are not weak by any means, but Young and Mitchum are deeply satisfying, giving the kind of performances that make me want to watch a film in the first place.

A lot of really wonderful films came from B Movie reels, especially noir films. Noir films are known for an emphasis on style, particularly lighting, and the lower budgets often give the films a play-like quality, forcing them to concentrate the story on small sets and in verbal exchanges between people rather than in broad action or battle scenes. The deep shadows of Crossfire's opening scene sets the mood instantly, as does the cynicism and world-weariness of all the main characters--these things are very noir. I especially like the way the soldiers are portrayed here, as generally good kids who have been through hell and have come out the other side with much of their baby skin scrubbed off. It seems a very mature and measured thing in 1947 to recognize the essential goodness of a soldier's task in this war while at the same time refusing to give anyone a free pass on that account. It also seems visionary to grapple, if just a little, with what it is to return from the hell these guys lived through and try to set up a normal life in the aftermath. This last angle doesn't get much play, but at a time when I suspect jingoism was running rampant it's refreshing to see the cold water of reality splashed on things. These men's accomplishments are not diminished by acknowledging the difficulties they face after the fact.

The film ultimately grapples with racism, though in the form of the battles among white man's clans (this is still a world where dealing with prejudice against nonwhites was nowhere near on the table, even if it is exactly the same argument; that would take several more decades). But it's a plot point that's kind of sneaked in through the side door and apart from one of Young's speeches it's not too fervently handled (idealism of any kind is really at odds with noir sensibilities). The rest is just a good old fashioned detective story, a whodunit with great characterizations, high-contrast lighting and lots and lots of smoking. What's not to like in that?

Grade: B

A Refueling Stop

2011-07-19T14:49:00.012-05:00

(The Mighty Mad Dog departs Anchorage.)

I forget at times how really extraordinary my job is.

Not often, though, as I think I'm possessed of a rather childlike fascination with things; even now after 17 years in this profession (plus another four as a private pilot) it still puts me in a bit of a flutter to hurl down the runway and take off. That's true in any airplane, but in one the size of an MD-11 you feel like you're cheating somehow, performing a bit of magic.

Today we blasted off out of Kentucky about five in the morning and headed off across the Atlantic for Germany (from whence, in my cozy room at the Maritim in Köln, I type these words). The nature of international airline flying is that one is typically engaged for a fairly lengthy period of time--say, two weeks--followed by a similar amount of time off. Ergo, the first departure of a trip usually follows a stretch of days off, and so there's a touch of newness and reacquaintance as you start the trip. It's also the case that in a big transport jet there's a great deal of automation and the airplane is flown on autopilot virtually all the time. And so takeoff and landing are about the only times one actually takes the controls and physically flies the airplane--a moment of connection to the fundamental skills one learned years ago, now applied to a huge, hydraulically-powered industrial machine.

(Our Front Office)

(An aside: this degree of automation prevails for some very good reasons. A jet cockpit is a very complex place--each airplane is its own universe, really--and at the speeds we travel things happen very quickly. Job One is to anticipate what challenges and duties lie directly ahead and, as we say, "stay ahead of the airplane." The pilot's job has evolved from earlier days where the duties were centered around basic stick-and-rudder skills; those days are long gone (though those skills are still called upon at times). What is needed now is for both flight crew to be focused on what is coming up, on where the airplane is going, and on communication with ATC and looking for other traffic. Of course the person flying has as her / his primary job keeping an eye on the airplane, but the automation frees both pilots from an intense second-to-second concentration on the actual flight path of the airplane and allows at least some attention for bigger-picture things.)

So this first takeoff is always an eye-opener, partly because it still seems nigh-unto impossible to me 1) that anything of this size and weighing 630,000 lbs can be finessed off the ground and skyward at 500 mph; and 2) that I get paid to be the person doing the finessing. Today's was a middle-weight takeoff, about 550,000 lbs, but our takeoff power is modulated downward (to save wear and tear) so that we have what we need and the rest is held in reserve. A big jet needs a lot of runway, and the red lights which mark the end of the 11,000' of tarmac are rushing toward you at a pretty alarming rate by the time you have enough speed to lift off. But it's all a question of numbers, and at the appropriate speed one pulls back on the yoke and the big bird tilts gently backward and leaves the ground. That just doesn't get old. A tug on the gear handle and everything that's making noise out in the windstream is sucked up into the fuselage and blessed silence (with a growing white noise background) prevails. Even stranger than having all that mass climbing into the atmosphere is for it to be happening with very little sound (that we can hear up front).

I thought about all this today as I was maneuvering out of Louisville and on towards the enroute portion of our flight plan. The controller issues us headings and altitudes and airspeeds, and I get to muscle the airplane around manually for a while. Like driving a car, but much, much cooler. There's something kind of surreal about moving my little foot-wide control yoke a couple inches and having almost 300 tons of airplane (hurling along at nearly the speed of sound) tilt and bank precariously in response to my commands. But we're soon enough up at cruising altitude where by regulation the autopilot must be engaged, and both of us are focused on the North Atlantic crossing which is shortly to come. I've been flying a lot of Asia and Pacific routes in the last couple years, and the 10-hour legs in and out of Australia make the three hours or so that one is over water crossing the Atlantic seem rather brief. But as land approaches to the East, it's all stuff I'd love to parachute down and look over. To the North as we cross, Greenland and Iceland (just beyond sight, depending on the routing assigned), then over Ireland and England (just South of London), across the English Channel, over Belgium--France just to the South, Netherlands just to the North, and into Germany (we talk first to London Control, then Brest, then Brussels, then Maastricht and on to Cologne Director). There's too much cloud cover to see much today, but the little glimpses show a land without a grid, a landscape which betrays the ancient origins of the civilizations. Everything was laid out here in a time before surveying.

(The English Channel at its narrowest point. England in the foreground, Belgium and France on the other side. The Chunnel is somewhere below.)

And as quickly as that (well, minus the two hours I spent snoozing in the bunk) we're touching down in probably the most civilized place I've been to. We gather our things and descend the stairs to the waiting crew bus, the airplane ticking and clicking on the ramp as the metal cools after another eight hours on the clock. Another crew awaits, and the airplane will be shortly emptied and refilled and headed onward--back to the US, Eastward to Poland and China, Southeast to Dubai, maybe someplace totally different.

Yeah, it's still a major geek-out. What an immense privilege to be able to do this.

Another New Review of an Old Movie

2011-07-17T20:43:00.005-05:00

Tonight's fare: Milos Forman's 1984 film Amadeus.

Based on Peter Shaffer's 1979 stage play of the same name, Amadeus won an Academy Award for Best Picture in 1984, plus a Best Actor Oscar for F. Murray Abraham as well as Best Director for Milos Forman and Best Adapted Screenplay for Shaffer (plus four other Oscars).

The story tells a mostly-fictionalized tale of rivalry between the preternaturally-gifted composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and the man who might otherwise have been in the spotlight, the Italian composer Antonio Salieri. The story takes the form of a series of extended flashbacks, in the form of scenes narrated to a priest from a mental hospital where Salieri has come after a suicide attempt. He believes himself to have been responsible for Mozart's premature death (at age 35) after having spent the latter half of his life conspiring against the oblivious genius who blithely crushed Salieri into obscurity and humiliation at every turn. He is now wracked with guilt mingled with a continuing awe and envy of Mozart and a loathing of the god he feels betrayed him.

While the historical record bears little evidence of the key plot points in this drama, the story is so delicious and compelling for a couple key reasons: First, F. Murray Abraham's performance is simply miraculous. To a person who loves music, it's obvious that Abraham gets his subject matter. His Salieri is a tortured man who has dedicated his life to glorifying his god by way of his divine gift (as he sees it) of musical talent. But in Mozart's presence, Salieri's "divine gift" is made mock of; he is overshadowed again and again, even humiliated by the younger man's sheer, white-hot genius. Second, the use of music--and the music itself--is sublime. The gallant style which Mozart brought to such perfection is perfectly matched here to its time and place, and Salieri gives a brilliant play-by-play of several pieces as they play in background. As an accomplished composer himself, he is perfectly qualified to show us what is so extraordinary about Mozart's accomplishments. The score was supervised and conducted by Neville Marriner, and it is lush and really beautifully played. And lastly, it's a period costume drama, and Forman has brought the Vienna of the middle 1700s wonderfully to life. The American accents mixed in with the more urbane-sounding Brits is a bit jarring at first (like Tom Cruise's Col. Stauffenberg in Valkyrie) but one settles in.

The character of Mozart is played by Tom Hulce. His Mozart is a petulant, arrogant, frivolous and vulgar young man who is nonetheless possessed of a talent the world had scarcely before seen (and he knows it). Hulce was also nominated for several awards for this role (but not winning, I believe), but ironically it's not really Mozart's story. Hulce is almost a place-marker here, a stand-in for the genius against whom (and off of whom) the real story takes place; it's Salieri's story. The light emanates from Mozart, but it's the reflection of that light off of Salieri's face that fills the screen here.

But the rivalry, and Salieri's agony at his humiliation, is palpable. With such a beautiful setting to watch and brilliant music for your ears, the film is a Grand Slam. Ironically, Mozart for me has never been on my list of favorites. I cannot but acknowledge his freak-of-nature genius, and his heavier works like the Requiem are sublime. But I'm not primarily an opera person, and I gravitate toward heavy and dense over light and airy (even if that lightness is deceptive). But this is a film which so wonderfully makes its own case that one needn't bring any prior baggage to the show. What a fabulous way to spend a couple hours.

Grade: A

America Needs a Heart Transplant

2011-07-15T19:31:00.011-05:00

Another of these thinking-aloud-but-not-really-getting-anywhere kind of posts.

***

I find I've been reading books of a certain tenor lately. Chicken-and-egg, I don't know whether these books are spurring me to read more of the same or whether I'm in a new place philosophically and I seek out books to satisfy this hunger. But there's a common theme here.

I began with Jonathan Safran Foer's book Eating Animals, about the ethics of eating meat. I followed that with Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, and that one with Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma. Lest we think the theme I'm referring to is about food per se (for which impression one could be doubly forgiven when my previous post about insulin resistance is considered), I went from there to Matt Taibbi's Griftopia (with a brief stop for the film Inside Job), and am now reading Chris Hedges' Death Of the Liberal Class (with a few more waiting in the wings: Hedges' Empire of Illusion; Nomi Prins's It Takes a Pillage; Noam Chomsky's Understanding Power).

The thread connecting all these books? We're fucked.

OK, not really that, exactly. But all these books refer however obliquely to a massive sleight-of-hand being systematically perpetrated upon us which is changing the landscape right beneath our feet. The one theme that comes up again and again here is that our existence, our country, our government, are much less to do with personal freedom than I have spent my life believing. I grew up thinking that one could with a bit of application do almost anything in life that one could imagine; we were limited only by our imaginations and our ambition. But in the past few years I've come to think that the needs and wants of the individual--the sanctity of the individual in our system--has been absolutely trumped by the needs and wants of a power center that has almost nothing to do with the average citizen. What remains is the mere illusion of choice and self-determination.

Always it strikes me that I'm only now grasping what people were trying to teach me in high school and college. The lessons of American history and of class struggle and workers' rights and the rise of industrialism and the great robber barons; all these things went in one ear and out the other, as though the lessons of the past had no real application in a world marching inexorably forward. But as I get older I begin to understand (as I was told) that there really is nothing new in the world, and we're only living again and again the lessons and travails that we've seen before in recorded history. (What I wonder now is whether all this reading has given me an uncharacteristic Glenn-Beck-like paranoia about things going bump in the night.)

We find ourselves now in a society in which the needs and wants of big business have been given supremacy over all else.

Tax obligations for big business are easily gotten around (i.e. there are no tax obligations for big business), and government oversight is virtually non-existent. Despite this, the relentless pursuit of profits over every other consideration has caused these companies to ship millions of jobs out of our country to subsistence economies and then hide the vast resultant profits offshore (thus escaping having to sustain the system which they've gamed for these huge rewards).
We have spent the last 30 years dismantling government oversight of safety and environmental concerns, and further efforts are ongoing. This is likely to be catastrophic for us--for pollution of ground water and air and global climate and so on--but the imperative to get everything out of the way of big profits is given the first chair at the table.
We've discussed the absolutely disastrous interface between big business and the food we eat, and we have an epidemic which is growing at home and abroad at alarming rates (a survey I heard the other day on NPR claimed that 68% of American adults are now overweight or obese. 68%! Almost 3/4! These figures are up sharply in just the past couple decades).
Since 2003 we have been engaged in a war of aggression based on highly spurious and shifting rationales, first in one country and then another (and now a third), at a staggering financial and human and moral toll to the nation. The outcome of this policy (if one can call it that) has been to make vast sums of money for the private contractors who constitute a majority-and-growing share of the effort, supporting a smaller and smaller cadre of men and women who are actually in harm's way. The turning over of military functions to private, for-profit industry is now an established and dominant fact, and it undermines any political will we may have to end the conflicts since continuous war is a huge moneymaker for the big corporations who are running the show.
There is a similar move afoot to privatize other government functions--health care, social services, infrastructure maintenance, etc. (Chicago recently sold its parking meters as a "business" to a Middle-Eastern consortium, as well as its Skyway expressway, and many other cities are poised to do the same to get operating cash.)
The information we receive--carefully-packaged and skillfully marketed in 24-hour portals--all comes via the filters of huge industry-owned media conglomerations, which helps to explain why we spend much of our time in titanic battles over gay marriage and abortion instead of focusing on foreign wars and the realities of national economics.
The financial services industry (a behemoth that didn't even exist a century or so ago) has engaged in the last decade in immense, industry-wide fraudulent gambling schemes (the impetus for which is--you guessed it--the accumulation of obscene wealth) which have brought the very economies of the industrialized world to the teetering brink of ruin. The disaster was averted by our government hollowing out the wealth of the nation itself and making the debts--no, worse: the obscene payouts--good. In the aftermath of this scare we've done exactly... nothing.
The conservative Supreme Court has ruled that corporations have the same standing and rights as citizens. (Put me in a courtroom against DuPont or KBR and tell me who's going to prevail?)

None of this has happened by chance. This has been a systematic and ongoing Republican effort--with much Democratic complicity--to paint the very idea of government as evil and to get it and every other impediment out of the way of maximizing profits for a handful of folks at the top. We have been fed a firehose of horseshit about rising tides lifting all boats while our pensions and homes and salaries have been drained. And the net result of all this has been to take the collected wealth of the nation and shift it up to a tiny segment at the very top of the food chain--a transfer of wealth that has been unprecedented in history. And we appear powerless to stop it. Worse, in what seems like an ultimate example of Stockholm Syndrome, we seem eager to protect and facilitate the ongoing transfer--to the point of angrily demanding it! Meanwhile, the media are dutifully "reporting" that it's greedy union workers and lavish government handouts that have brought us to this point--the very converse of what the facts show; it's the common worker who has stagnated or gone significantly backward while the rich have gotten MUCH richer.

Chris Hedges points out in Death Of the Liberal Class that there are 35,000 paid lobbyists in Washington. Think of that. The people sent there to do OUR bidding--those we elect to govern our country--number exactly 636 (plus a few hundred staff). Is there any question who will prevail in any issue that comes before our elected representatives? I now feel like an epic fool to have written my representatives, ever. Even the threat of removal from office has no sting if what waits is better yet.

The question is what to do about any of it? The elected representative who goes to Washington with even the very best intentions is inexorably disabused of his / her starry-eyed ideals. The perks of playing along are simply too lucrative, and again and again we see people move from government service to one of those highly-paid lobbyist spots when their tenure is done. Experience has shown that it's simply not realistic to expect most elected officials to retain the convictions which gained them their office; it simply doesn't happen. So any idea of electing our way out of this mess is stillborn.

So what to do? Is there any saving the system?

Thoughts about insulin resistance.

2011-06-27T18:56:00.012-05:00

(Not me, thankfully, though I'm not far behind this dude.)

I continue my long tradition here of breaking all the rules of good blogging, this time with a diversion into... medicine! (To paraphrase Mark Twain, never let a lack of knowledge stand in the way of a perfectly good post.)

***

I vowed from Day One at the JW that I would not devote any time here to dieting issues. Not because this isn't a perfectly legitimate thing to write about, and not because no one would be interested--indeed, weight struggles are something with which many of us are familiar. My rationale has been that I find blogs that concentrate on a person's life rather tiring, especially on their interior life (unless you're just a hell of a lot more interesting than I am... internally). I'm much more interested in reading about ideas and issues than I am about a particular person. (Granted, with a blog it's all personal at some point, but I still think it best to stick to ideas.)

So what to do then when one's personal life brings one into contact with ideas? Well, we just stretch the rules a bit.

So. I've been fat my whole life, really. I remember seeing 202 lbs. on the scale when I was in 8th grade (a time when I should have been what? 120 lbs?) and I was probably 220 when I finished high school. By my 30s I was in the 250 lb. range, and now, nearing the ripe age of 50, I'm around 270. By most calculations that puts me around 100 lbs. overweight. I don't think of myself that way, and I think I carry my weight in such a way that I'm perceived as being stocky but not 100-extra-pounds obese. But I am. I used to be a runner in my 20s and 30s, a tactic for trying to keep my weight under control. But I had only limited success with this, and like many people my weight has been an up-and-down-and-mostly-up-again struggle.

In addition to my attempts at exercise I--like much of America--have spent much of my life trying to diet. I rarely followed a specific program, mostly concentrating on calories-in / calories-out. But that gets harder the older one gets. A few years back I tried the Atkins diet, and I was particularly taken with it, both because I found it worked and because the concepts behind the diet were aimed precisely at me (one of my first clues that calories-in / calories-out may not really be enough). America is suffering a growing epidemic of obesity and diabetes, and Atkins was the first source I'd come across that made any real sense of this epidemic. I lost around 50 lbs. on Atkins, but I learned that a life entirely without carbs was not really sustainable for me.

But, again, the takeaway here was that Atkins' philosophy had me directly in its crosshairs; I am the poster child for the phenomena that prompted him to concoct his regimen. (There are a lot of people, I know, for whom his diet regimen is not workable, or even applicable.) I also tried Weight Watchers, which I think is a truly great program and one which IS applicable to many people. But while good-sense advice and meal planning are surely beneficial to me, I've come to see that I suffer from a particular and specific metabolic problem, and any real fix for my weight is going to have to grapple with this. (And I think ultimately WW will need to grapple with these issues as well.)

A friend was recently put on the South Beach Diet by his doctor, and that led to us discussing dietary matters. Susan has a copy of the South Beach Diet book, and my perusal of the book and my discussions with my friend reinforced my impression that Drs. Agatston and Atkins are pursuing in pretty similar fashion the same demons (and both are singing my song). Agatston's attempt to differentiate his thinking from Atkins' feels more marketing than substance to me, though I acknowledge his emphasis that fat consumption should be reigned in and specified. But in the final stage of Atkins one is consuming quite a number of fruits and veggies. (So often Atkins is characterized for the first phase of his diet, a shocking plan which runs contrary to just about everything we adults have been told for 40 years; but his "maintenance phase"--my phrase--looks about like what most of us think of as a healthy diet.)

But the South Beach Diet: I read the book--and began the plan--and it all has me chewing specifically on the topic of insulin resistance (or type-2 diabetes or metabolic syndrome or even syndrome X). These terms all address the same phenomenon, or at least stages of it. For my purposes, insulin resistance refers to a dietary condition where insulin loses its effectiveness in metabolizing carbohydrates. The condition appears to arise from excessive carbohydrates in the diet over a prolonged period; all these carbs require the body to produce lots of insulin to metabolize, and over time (for a number of reasons I have not internalized) the insulin loses its effectiveness. As the insulin becomes less effective, the body produces more and more of it to compensate; meanwhile these high levels of insulin contribute to storing these excess carbs away as fat, a condition which exacerbates the whole situation. A vicious cycle develops where the carb addict consumes more and more carbs (because the ones he's already eaten aren't turning into energy), which further increases the need for insulin. The result is the body essentially losing its ability to metabolize carbs adequately--diabetes.

As I say, I'm really a poster child for this problem (while thankfully avoiding diabetes thus far): I've been overweight all my life, and I've eaten over 90% of my meals out for 30 years. This means that a huge preponderance of my diet consists of processed food. I'm also regrettably a product of the food-industry culture, with my almost laughable Diet Coke addiction and my love of candy and chips and all the junk that exactly brings insulin resistance about. Food has long ago been dissociated from hunger and nutritional maintenance for me; it's all about wants and desires. At my twice-yearly medical checkup last week, I learned that my blood sugar is slightly elevated--not enough to be a problem yet, but it's trending where I don't want it to go, and this is on top of my already being on medication for blood pressure and high cholesterol.

This is just a stupid situation all around; I'm gradually killing myself with food.

The American diet has become very heavily weighted toward the foods which cause this metabolic disaster (the exploding epidemic of diabetes in America is proof positive): our convenience stores and drive-thrus and even our supermarkets are stocked with an overwhelming preponderance of processed quasi-foods that are triumphs of marketing and profitability but disastrous to our bodies as sustenance. I know this because these are precisely the foods I have spent my life eating--and much of my adult life fighting against the effects of (as any overweight person can tell you, being fat is a low-grade 24/7 preoccupation).

I'm at risk of sidestepping a crucial fact here: none of us is overweight--let alone trending toward diabetes--except by way of food we've placed voluntarily in our own mouths. We don't get fat without complicity. But that argument adds up to shit when we are being walked doe-eyed into an epidemic. Ongoing appeals to will power and self-control have brought us steadily backward until our present catastrophic state.

It hasn't just happened. Whether we are complicit or not, this is something that has been systematically done to us--and for one simple reason: it makes a shitload of money for big corporations. And it is being increasingly done to the citizens of other nations. Like the tobacco industry or the gambling houses of Las Vegas, the food industry has found the secret button--found, carefully nurtured and cultivated it--that gets us, zombie-like, to pursue a path that is very decidedly NOT in our best interest, and they are hiding with all the other industries behind the tree of individual free will as a means of escaping responsibility for the damage being wrought (it's a very crowded space behind that tree).

Cigarettes and gambling are perhaps instructive analogs. Cigarettes are now universally acknowledged as unquestionably dangerous to our health. They are ONLY deleterious; there is no possible upside to smoking--except, significantly, the relentlessly-marketed "social benefits" (a whole-cloth invention of the tobacco companies). And with the health questions firmly decided, society has in consequence moved consistently in the last 30 years to discouraging smoking, with warning labels and heavy taxes. (My point is not to debate whether this is the correct way to approach the problem of smoking, but simply to note that as a society we are taking active steps against a thing now universally acknowledged as harmful.) With gambling, things are fuzzier. It's possible to gamble without vice or ruin, and one's gambling does not necessarily hurt other people. For millions of folks it's fun to save up a couple grand and live it up for a few days in Vegas; no harm done. But we don't let minors do it, because it's easy for our sense of risk and reward to be misled--indeed, the entire industry is based on a predictable mis-firing of our risk/reward instinct.

Food strikes me as more like gambling. But it differs from gambling or smoking in that everyone HAS TO eat. You can steer clear of Vegas if you feel unable to control yourself at the craps table, but steering clear of food is a non-starter. And what a leg up for industrial food producers! The process of getting people hooked on an obscene proliferation of bad foods--our supermarkets are now about 80% junk--has been a gradual one, but it piggybacks on our inexorable need to eat something. A company need only find a way to make THEIR something THAT something and the profits that are the be-all and end-all of industry will come rolling in: caffeine (in the case of Coca-Cola, it was cocaine originally--the ultimate way to addict your patrons to your product); sugar--LOTS and lots of sugar; intense, lab-crafted artificial flavors.

And billions of dollars spent yearly on marketing, especially to kids.

So all this to get to this question: At what point do these companies bear responsibility when their relentless drive for profit causes them to take actions which they know and we know will cause many people to bypass their common sense and best interests toward an outcome that's disastrous for us (but not for them)? At what point do we hold McDonald's--maybe the largest food vendor in the country--accountable for marketing and selling products which they know to be deleterious to our health--more than this, they know to be actively contributing to a medical epidemic? To say they bear no responsibility is, IMO, bullshit.

(This seems an especially germane question as I look around China and see a new generation of fat, American-looking Chinese. These have never been seen in China! This is like discovering a pristine land and quickly destroying it to get to the precious metals underneath, except the pristine land is 1.3 billion human beings. Convenience stores in China are much smaller than ours and have very little of our standard junk food, but the phenomenon is clearly growing. I generally see only young folks in the 7-11s, and mostly kids in the McDonalds, but there is a huge effort underway by McDonalds and Subway and Burger King and KFC and many other American brands to turn China into an immense new source of revenue. As the population in China ages, hundreds of millions of consumers of American junk food are being created--and, predictably, millions of people who will suffer from insulin resistance and eventually type-2 diabetes.)

So what to do? Good socialist that I am, I propose that what appears to be working for the tobacco industry should be applied to the junk food industry: we should tax the shit out of processed foods which cannot be demonstrated (scientifically, independently) to have some dietetic reason to exist--not marketability, not profitability; manufacturers should have to demonstrate dietary merit for any processed food or we should be required to pay something extra for the privilege of exercising our freedom of choice to eat what we know will hurt us and burden our health care system. Put that money in the health care fund.

I love me some jalapeno Cheetos, but I have to look myself in the mirror and acknowledge that they're killing me; them and peanut M&Ms and Double-Stuff Oreos.

This is not going to happen, guaranteed, because we are easily kept from speaking with one voice and in any case we're no longer in control of our government. But that's another post.

Well, Apparently Somebody Asked.

2011-06-25T18:09:00.012-05:00

Tonight's movie: Cars 2.

This is probably not a film that needs my review. No one is likely to see it without having first seen the original Cars, or at least another Pixar film, and then you know the protocol. The specifics are almost incidental: Mater bumbles himself into an international spy caper and hijinks and mayhem ensue.

But still, a fella chews on stuff. Pixar's first feature, Toy Story (1995) was world-changing. Featuring computer-based animation, Toy Story was a visual revelation, but it also sported top-shelf voicework and a cracking good story well-directed. It had a look and pacing and story that were bound to attract kids like puppies, and enough adult humor and nostalgic references to keep their parents happy. The desire to make a sequel (or two) of this film was a surprise to no one--it seemed inevitable.

But Pixar's history shows that the sequel thing really isn't their bag--with that one exception. Monsters, Inc.; Finding Nemo; and especially The Incredibles: with fabulous plotting and really wonderful characters, these all fairly begged for follow-on films. The Incredibles pointedly left that door open with the film's final scene.

What I didn't expect was for Pixar to make a sequel to Cars. The original film's very premise--talking, expressive cars having adventures in a cars-only world--seemed highly dubious to me, and I've always thought it Pixar's least successful outing. Not that I'd give it a sub-par grade: they rounded up, as always, a stellar cast of voices and the plotting and pacing were delightfully fast and furious. And the visuals just get better and better with each successive film. On reflection, it's not surprising that little boys fell head-over-heels for a bunch of talking cars, especially a talking race car and his hilarious rusty tow-truck best buddy; but I would not have put money on that reaction justifying a sequel. Particularly, I would not have expected Pixar to make so blatant a marketing move solely for the narrow demographic of pre-pubescent males (no other of their films seems so pointedly aimed at a specific demographic).

But then it strikes you: there was no substantial merchandising for any of Pixar's films, apart from the occasional t-shirt, before Cars. And then it apparently took off like a shot. One of my good friends has a son who has amassed everything Cars, and I can imagine he is pee-his-pants excited for the new film--and all the merchandise that comes with it. And so, Cars 2. I'm so inclined to feel contempt and angst about this, about the pollution of what has seemed a pure, if popular, art endeavor until now. Maybe that's quite naive of me: none of these films would have been made if the previous ones didn't make money. But I would venture that Toy Story or Ratatouille or The Incredibles were never just, or even primarily, about making money. When we get to Cars you can't really say that. I just see nothing to celebrate in that.

And Cars 2 is kind of the proof in the pudding. It's the same great voices (plus a couple new ones: Michael Caine as "Finn McMissile, British Intelligence," and Emily Mortimer as Finn's trusty analyst sidekick), it has the same beautiful look and attention to detail, the same fabulous whimsical cartoon departure from reality, the same edge-of-your-seat plotting. But Cars 2 has absolutely nothing new to say. The first movie covered all this ground quite adequately. This is not a new routine, it's the stadium tour of the old routine for revenue-gathering purposes. (In fact, there's a sense that it's relying at least a little on the accomplishments of the first film to carry us, at least with some of the characters.) True, Looney Tunes weren't always about introducing something new with every episode, but they were a low-tech, low-dollar daily kinda phenomenon (and for all that they did some edgy and far-out stuff). Pixar is an industrial behemoth making a multimillion-dollar product of long gestation: it seems a little strange and sad to devote this herculean effort to a mere sequel. One expects more.

And lastly, the 3D business. The theater where I saw Cars 2 was showing it only in 3D (for a $1.50 premium over the standard matinee price). Roger Ebert, much as I love reading his reviews and much as I admire how he is using the virtual world to lead a rich intellectual and social existence after his cancer, has found his bete noir in cinema 3D. I daresay he has written and tweeted more about the stupidity of 3d in the past couple years than any other topic. (Well, I can't really say that: let's just say a lot.) He really hates it.

And while I think I'm inclined to agree with him about technology pushed for its own sake, in this case I can't quite make up my mind. I think a rough analogy can be made with surround sound. When surround sound first started showing up in theaters I was immediately skeptical. And now that 5.1 channel surround sound has taken over home audio so completely that it's difficult to find stand-alone home stereo equipment that's not "home theater-ready" (with its phalanx of plastic speaker pods) I'm convinced that we have fallen victim en masse to a marketing ploy. I suppose it's "cool" in some way for the occasional gun ricochet or passing car sound to shout from behind one's head, but there is not one iota of additional realism imparted by the technology. We're not even close to being fooled into thinking we're actually there, that we're not watching a screen and listening to speakers. (I contrast this with the value of full-range sound, both frequency- and volume-wise. I don't think full-range sound makes the movie more realistic per se, but I do think it contributes to greater enjoyment of films, which devote much more attention to sound than in past times.)

3D seems similar to this, except that I have more trouble determining that its contribution is completely bullshit. Of course these early 3D films contain a few too many look-at-this shots of things flying out into the audience, but I find I can't just dismiss the 3D experience out of hand. A great film will continue to be a great film without 3D--a film like Chinatown would benefit little from the technology. And yet stereoscopic vision is how we see, and film is predominantly a visual medium. Even a scene of, say, a gathering at the kitchen table takes on a little snap of something with 3D, a sense (if I dare say it) that yes, you might actually be among these people (cringing against Roger Ebert's thrown shoe). If it isn't quite that profound, it certainly feels to me that it moves the experience at least a little ways in that direction.

On the negative side, the required glasses are hot and not very comfortable and, maybe key for a Pixar film, they dim the image somewhat. This detracts from the film's texturing and lighting and color saturation--all things for which Pixar is known. So there's a trade-off for the technology that I'm unsure how to account. Stay tuned.

As for Cars 2--I must assign some demerits for retracing their steps, but it's still a fun way to spend a couple of hours, especially (as my buddy Lance might attest) with a young son cackling away in the theater seat next to you!

Grade: B-

A Lob Out of Right Field

2011-06-24T18:42:00.005-05:00

So the plan was to head over to the local theater and see Pixar's latest, Cars 2. But I was snagged at the very last moment by Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life. I had seen the trailer when I saw Woody Allen's latest and I was intrigued. I showed up about two minutes after the start time for Tree, and made an executive decision to go I knew not where (I hadn't read a single word about it). Probably just as well, as the description might have scared me off.

But what an interesting movie. It's kind of two separate films--connected only in the most tenuous way--rather randomly mashed together. Part highlight reel from some Discovery Channel or National Geographic exploration of our universe, and part brooding meditation on the life of a particular (fictional) family in the '50s or '60s, it seems like a film that doesn't know what it wants to be, and hasn't known it for so long that THAT has kind of become what it wants to be: a film that wants to be a film that doesn't know what it wants to be. That's my excuse for a disjointed summary.

The human-centered part of the film stars Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain as the parents of this '50s family. They are shown (without any strict chronological order) raising three boys, with a particular focus on the trials and adventures of the eldest boy, Jack (Hunter McCracken). The father's ambitions for himself and his children form (as they naturally would in 1960 Texas) the rather ragged path which the family attempts to follow. Interspersed with these scenes, Sean Penn plays a now middle-aged Jack coping with the death of one of the other boys--an event which plays heavily in the human part of the film without being shown or even much referred to directly.

This family-based storyline is intermingled with absolutely stunning photography of the natural world, from the microscopically small to the cosmically big, all of it mashed together seemingly without any rhyme or reason. The images are so arresting that one almost waits on the edge of one's seat for the next episode. (The human story is also visually lovely, though in a much more standard cinematic fashion.) These scenes are underpinned beautifully by composer Alexandre Desplat, with a combination of famous and semi-famous existing works and original compositions; the soundtrack is lovely.

This celebration-of-nature part of the film really defies an easy description. The images are stunning and moving and profound; they reveal the awesome and extreme parts of the universe we inhabit. I'd venture that Malick is trying to use movie magic to put across his personal religious view of the world without being pinned down with any direct statement that (naturally) cannot be supported. Leave the canvas blank for our imaginations--but not so blank that we fail to insert Jebus. (The effect is very much like parts of Stanley Kubrick's monumental 2001: A Space Odyssey. The Jebus version.) The film opens with a Biblical quotation, and the whole human side of the story features a series of short voice-overs of family members offering up truncated prayers to, presumably, Jebus.

I naturally found the religious claptrap too much of a bad thing. And yet the effect of these overtly religious bits placed amid all the cosmic and astounding is to make mythological explanations of the universe seem ridiculous. Our stone-age attempts to explain the world Malick so beautifully shows us are laughably incapable of shedding any light whatsoever on these mysteries, especially when the scope of the universe is shown to us and our insignificance made plain. It's all manageable (barely) until the end where Malick--maybe running out of money?--tries to cobble together some photographic rendering of what he thinks awaits us at the end of life, a reunion of lost folks or some such hooey. This infantile deus ex machina (literally) rather brought the work of the previous two hours crashing down: why is Sean Penn old and the rest of the family young when he meets them? He's older than his mother! Why? How does he meet them if he's not dead? Is he dead? Why? Why are they on a beach? What does a beach have to do with anything? Where are the siblings and parents of the senior folks? Weren't the parents once kids themselves? Why isn't their heaven a return to those times? And what of the parents and siblings of the grandparents and so on? And where are the young folks' families, the living boys' families? Why did the clock apparently start and stop with this family at this brief click of time? Why not just put up a white placard with the words "Imagine what you like." Ludicrous. I'm trying to forget that as I evaluate.

But. (Deep breath.) When I sidestep this ham-handed detail, I'm moved by how wordlessly the story is told, by how few lines anyone has to move things along. The mother particularly (the lovely Jessica Chastain) speaks nary a word in the whole film, and yet she's kind of the guiding force of the family, the thread running in a straight line beneath the bullish father's jagged path. The natural world has nothing to do with the family's story, really, and yet it gives it all a perspective, oddly. The juxtaposition helps us to see this family as a group of natural organisms like all the rest that make up our world and universe: dinosaurs and plants and cells and dogs and supernovae and so on; they are part of nature: WE are part of nature, a nature that is breathtaking in its beauty and cruelty and vastness.

I think if I were a Jebus person, I might give it an A- or B+, and I applaud Malick for ambition if nothing else. But he gets demerits for not keeping the ball in the air the whole time. Honestly, it would have been a better film without Jebus, even if you like Jebus. (The groups of people standing about in the lobby afterward having a little post-film gathering about "god's plan" did not help my still-warm impressions.)

Grade: B

The Witching Well

2011-06-20T19:24:00.005-05:00

I was conflicted about this movie from the start.

I've been slow to warm to Woody Allen, despite the enthusiasm of a movie-loving friend who has long sung his praises. While I appreciate that he has made a career of celebrating New York City on film--which remains my favorite single place on earth--I can never shake the conviction that he is making exactly the same movie over and over and over (and over and over) again, with the same characters and the same shots and the same soundtrack and the same titles and largely the same plot. I'm all in favor of a person knowing their limitations and with fine nuances wrought from a restricted palette, but I can't help thinking that he's taken this concept to extremes.

And yet if you do it often enough the formula is bound to yield some really engaging stuff (like me shooting a zillion unschooled shots with my iPhone camera; there are bound to be some great pictures in there--not that my photography non-skills have any business being compared to one of history's greatest filmmakers): Manhattan, with its paean to the City (and its Gershwin soundtrack); I loved Vicki Christina Barcelona; Zelig was fun; Mighty Aphrodite. Looking over his filmography, I realize I've seen only about a quarter of what he's done, and the list includes some really noteworthy films (and many things which are frankly above my pay grade to even attempt to critique).

But his new film is about Paris, which detail will in itself cause me to forgive many a sin or faux-pas.

Owen Wilson plays Gil Pender, a writer on a vacation to Paris with his fianceé Inez (Rachel McAdams). Gil is absolutely infatuated with Paris and especially with the magical decade of the '20s when so many luminaries from the worlds of art and music and poetry and literature were congregated there. Inez shares none of his enthusiasm for the city (or its past luminaries), thinking him romantic and unrealistic. While she and Gil are having lunch one day they run into one of her old college friends (Paul, played by Michael Sheen), a pompous blowhard who absolutely captures Inez's fancy. And so the couple are soon pretending that nothing is wrong while pursuing completely different lives on their vacation, but it gets Inez out of the picture so that Gil can have his adventure.

I feel as though to say more than this is to give away the charming and intriguing detail that is really the cornerstone of the film (Wikipedia has no such qualms if you don't mind the spoiler). But the success of the film rests on the beauty and magic of the city and on the unspoken intriguing detail more than on the strength of the story or its main present-day protagonists.

And in fact the film feels a bit like Allen is skating along, cushioned by the formula he has spent his career creating. All his characters here are drawn almost as caricatures, as personality archetypes which Allen has placed each in their own pigeonhole: asshole conservative; ugly American tourist; rich, snotty woman; nervous, yammering Woody-Allen-like Jewish protagonist; misunderstanding spouse; famous artist. I was watching Anthony Minghella's The English Patient (a film with which I remain unrepentantly enamored) last night and I can't help contrasting the subtleties with which the characters are made, both in the writing and in how the performances are captured. There is little subtle about Allen's characters here--any of them--while Minghella's characters are a symphony of small details and gestures and expressions.

And yet despite this Allen had me at hello. Because it's Paris. I haven't been to Paris for over four years, but the film's opening shots (so beautifully captured by DP Darius Khondji) give us so many familiar and characteristic scenes from the world's most picturesque city that it feels like being there. I would gladly have paid the admission for two hours of that and come back for more. Allen revisits these scenes intermittently as the story progresses and never forgets where he is.

But (my love of the place notwithstanding) I cannot pretend that the setting, however brilliantly captured, makes for a great film. I enjoyed watching Midnight in Paris and the film keeps one guessing quite enough to ward off any looming boredom. But I can't bring myself to give it a stronger public embrace than that.

Grade: B

On Friendship vs. Solitude

2011-05-28T12:57:00.004-05:00

I've written about this before. Apologies.

I had a nice trip a week or so ago that took me over to Cologne and from there for a short in-and-out to Romania. This was a charter, so it's kind of off the company's regular radar and a nice change of pace for we who are used to everything going off with clockwork regularity.

I don't get to Cologne (CGN) nearly enough, and I'm always struck by how civilized Germany seems to be. Everything is clean and picked-up and people are friendly; transportation is first-rate and food is excellent. It would be a great place to live, I think.

Across the road from our hotel is an open square about two football fields' worth in size. There are many such public places, especially in central CGN, but the one next to our hotel seems to be hosting some kind of shindig about 50% of the time. When I was there near the end of 2010, the square was full of holiday booths--a skating rink and places to stand by a fire and drink beer or hot wine and lots of shops selling little knick-knacks. (As it turns out, this square actually spills over to a series of other squares in sequence to form a famous holiday market.) Cheesy but delightful holiday music is piped all through the place and people were crowded all throughout, everyone having a jolly old time.

On this most recent visit, the chill of winter had passed and spring was in the air. And the square was now playing host to a wine festival, again with about 200 vendors selling all manner of wines, both local and more generally European. Live musicians strolled the massive crowds, and the restaurants which ring the square were all packed as well. Even when the square is not hosting a festival of some sort, the adjacent restaurants offer many hundreds of outdoor seats such that there is always a festival atmosphere for the place, in summer anyway.

I don't drink wine, and I'm not much for crowds. (I love the random crush of a busy city, but I really dislike going to mass events.) I especially have little patience--no, it's worse than that; I have an active dislike--for what happens to people as they drink and pass the one-too-many mark, and so most of these festivals are not things in which I would ever actively participate. But oddly, I love that others participate in them. I love the idea of people getting together to converse with friends over dinner and a glass of wine, and these things contribute to my sense of CGN as a vital social place. I always wander thru the festivals or at least around the perimeter to take in the scene.

On this last visit I flew with a captain who had become friendly over the years with several of the bar owners near the hotel, and for the first time in years I actually spent a few hours on a barstool while he schmoozed with his friends. I don't normally socialize with other crewmembers (as I've made laboriously clear, and for reasons I've also devoted too much time to) but this guy was very friendly and a lover of music (an automatic feather in anyone's cap) and spoke nary a political word the whole trip. I liked him more and more.

His bar friends were a couple of guys working at the local Irish pubs, guys with whom he had been swapping music files for years until everyone had massive libraries of new and old bands. And both guys were delightful conversationalists. I sat nursing my dreaded Coke Light (for which I was given shit constantly but gently) while the rest tried out this and that beer or spirit, and we swapped stories about our homelands and I listened to their tales of how Irish fellas end up working at foreign bars in a German city.

The point of all this is to note my sense of something being fucked up in my life that these kinds of social scenes occur all around me and I feel alienated from all of them. I don't think I am by nature an antisocial person--indeed, during my high school and college years I remember thinking it intolerable to have to spend time on my own; I HAD to be around family or friends. But I always felt that my inability to be happy with my own company was a character flaw. As I became more and more involved with classical music--something which was necessarily a solitary endeavor--I spent more and more time on my own. And then finally I ended up at a job where I simply don't enjoy the company of most of my coworkers, which has led me to PREFER to spend my time alone. And the years pass and suddenly I find myself gone 180° from socialite to a bit of a hermit.

As I say, I've lamented this before, talking about living now for a dozen years in Appleton and not really having any social friends not connected through Susan (I've met plenty of people I like, but there's nobody I hang out with when Susan is working). I happily spend my days off with her, and if she's busy I spend my time alone. Seeing the vibrant social world taking place in CGN makes me wonder anew at this almost complete lifestyle shift I seem to have experienced. I'm inclined to blame much of this on the extreme nature of my coworkers (I had a more active social life even at previous airline jobs where a much broader array of personality types were ready to hand, including flight attendants and station agents, few of whom were of the type that almost universally populates the cockpit of my present job), but even to me this sounds a bit specious.

I remember several earlier jobs--bartending, or my earlier airline jobs--where my coworkers were a bit slow to warm to me but eventually we all came to embrace and appreciate each other. But while I rarely if ever actively clash with my current coworkers, I think we get to know each other enough to know that we're each not the other fella's cup of tea, and so our relationship becomes a professional one where we cordially do our jobs together and flee to our separate corners when we leave the cockpit.

And so far as it goes, I'm not unhappy with this arrangement. But another part of me wonders what is wrong with me that I haven't cultivated any kind of a social life in the city to which I've devoted a quarter of my life. I have a couple friends from my flying years with whom I am in regular contact (though only one lives in my home town and our lives have little connection now), and otherwise I cultivate my two closest friends from before high school.

A Book Recommendation

2011-05-19T13:34:00.006-05:00

I've certainly made no secret of the fact that I don't really understand high finance. Understand or trust. I've long suspected that the complexity of financial matters is an intentional thing, an obfuscation which encourages schmoes like me to disengage and which provides cover for guys who are gaming the system to make themselves very rich. I suppose it's not unwise to look with some skepticism at my own suspicions, as I'm an outsider to this world, but that's what I've come to: a suspicion that the explosions and implosions of markets in the past 30 years have been carefully crafted and manipulated to benefit a very small group of people. Right or wrong, I distrust the world of finance and markets profoundly.

The 2008 collapse of the economy is yet another mystery to me. All the talk of derivatives and credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations tends to make my eyes glaze over, but even without this stuff I grasped that the markets were inflated quite unrealistically; the value of the markets in 2000 was not representative of anything real. And when THAT wealth-generation avenue seemed to fall apart after 9/11, these people accustomed to making ridiculous return on their "investments" turned their genius to housing, trying to extract their now-expected billions from that slice of the economic pie. All of this current morass seems to flow from this. But likely I'm a financial idiot; the more salient point, I think, is that the most all the rest of us have no clue about what's going on either. People have various strong feelings about the crash, but I'd venture it's a rare person who really understands the mess.

Matt Taibbi is a columnist for Rolling Stone, and he's made it his mission in the past couple of years to dig into the financial mess and put the byzantine, obscurantist mess into plain (and colorful) English. (He became an overnight sensation for referring to the giant banking house Goldman Sachs as "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.") His book Griftopia (2010) is an expansion on a series of columns about the meltdown from Taibbi's blog. Taibbi began this endeavor as a person knowing nothing about finance, and the book is written for non-finance people. It's the best, most lucid explanation I've seen about exactly what is behind the ongoing implosion of our economy.

And we should be beyond livid.

This is one of these books that is hard for me to summarize, as the whole thing reads like a 300 page summary of a much bigger, more detailed phenomenon--every summary leaves out vital stuff. I find I've highlighted about 70% of the text, such that it will be very difficult to find any given passage without, well, rereading it (which I feel like I ought to do). And while I'm generally distrustful of apocalypticism, Taibbi is expanding on what I've already suspected from some years' observation, and in any case he supports himself well enough that no apology is needed. (The only criticisms I've come across to Taibbi's book all relate to his "tone" and not to the substance of his claims.)

Anyway, I will attempt to summarize (I would put in quotes, as Taibbi is endlessly quotable, but this already-too-long post would get waaaay longer. Just buy the book):

The 2008 financial meltdown was not a normal market correction or part of the normal cycling of a market economy; it was fraud. It involved the contrivance, with malice aforethought, of arcane financial "instruments" whose sole purpose was to extract money from the markets without the progenitors having to actually risk anything of their own. The instruments, invented and handily test-driven on these guys' personal bank accounts, were then sold for MORE profit to other banking institutions, who in turn leveraged themselves to an obviously unwise and reckless degree in order to tap into this seemingly free stream of endless wealth. And all of it built on absolutely nothing. Everybody knew it was a fraud, that it would eventually come crashing down and very likely threaten our entire economy when it did, but nobody gave a shit so long as they were themselves getting big payoffs from the scheme (longtime Fed Chief Alan Greenspan spearheaded numerous schemes to keep sand in the government's eyes, earning him Taibbi's title of "Biggest asshole in the universe.")

Eventually this fraud involved so many too-big-to-fail banks and such huge sums of money that the crash when it came could only be prevented from tanking the entire economy by the federal government stepping in. With our money. The same government that had abdicated its responsibility for oversight and regulation that might have prevented a relatively small group of guys enriching themselves on an economy-wrecking Ponzi scheme then put all of us into hock to keep the banks from pulling the trigger of the gun the same government had helped raise to the nation's temple.

Though Taibbi has written with delicious barb and wit about the idiocy of the Tea-Baggers and the risible nutcases like Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachman, he calls the bullshit where he sees it; and there is plenty to go around from both parties. He finds that the abandonment of government oversight of the financial services industry continued just as much under the Clinton administration as under the Reagan and Bush 1 administrations (and, of course, continued with abandon under Bush 2)--that is, Clinton was not any kind of counter force to the destructive Reaganomic tide that was frantically dismantling government oversight in everything.

And for this almost unfathomable destruction of wealth and outright theft, there has been no accounting whatsoever. These guys basically suffered not at all for the almost unbelievable damage they've done to the country's and the world's economies. The US Government jumped in with some $700 billion in bailout money to guarantee the fraud payoffs, basically making good "investments" which no one thought were good in the first place. This amounts to over $2000 for every man, woman and child in the country just for this particular bailout of a few big banks and insurance agencies; the drain on government resources extends very far beyond this. It doesn't touch the losses in mortgage values, the losses of pension funds and home equity and all the savings and investments of normal folks, and the loss of tax revenues from the crashing of businesses and the widespread unemployment and underemployment of millions of people. Suicide and homelessness and pain and agony for millions, and these Wall St. fuckers were living the dream--as the film Inside Job makes clear, hookers and blow and multiple homes and jets and the works. Meanwhile working folks lost their houses and their jobs as business owners "optimized" profits by sending our manufacturing jobs to China and India--often with US taxpayer funding.

And that's just the mortgage scam. Taibbi goes on to explain similar large-scale ripoffs of the public--with government complicity or even insistence--from commodities bubbles (including the devastating effects of market speculation on petroleum) and wealth funds and health care reform. This latter is surprising to me, not because I didn't expect a big bill like health care to have dark corners but because I didn't expect it to be nothing but dark corners. Obama came to office by showing a pretty nuanced understanding of exactly what was wrong in our health care system, and he then more or less completely abandoned his pledges to reform and handed the insurance companies and big pharma a blank check. There has been furious right-wing opposition to health care reform, and in this case it turns out they are riding a stampede of lies and misinformation to a proper conclusion: they are right, though for all the wrong reasons.

***

All of this contributes to a sense I've had for years that we will only save ourselves from the gnashing jaws of the profit motive and big business and markets with some prudent regulation. We've seen clearly enough what markets will do when government looks the other way--the last 30 years have seen a transfer of wealth from the lower and middle classes up to the very top (what Taibbi calls the "grifter class") that is unprecedented in history, while the shell of economy has appeared to hold station or recede even as its guts have been hollowed from within.

The idea that business is good and government is bad, that markets are good and regulation is bad, seems to be disproven in its purest form in the most painful way. And I'm tired of having the sanctity of markets and free enterprise thrown in my face continually at the mere suggestion of moderation. If government oversight of business and industry is "socialism," as we are hysterically told it is, then maybe we need to rehabilitate the term. Because we've tried the other way to a variety of degrees, and every further degree seems to bring more and more pain and misery to most of us to benefit a tiny oligarchic elite. Call me a utopian or a stooge for the workers' paradise, but I have to think the little folks of this world need to matter a whole lot more than just to promise them that one day they might have what we all know they never will.

But more than regulation, I think we need to re-examine what is supposed to underpin our democratic system. I can't imagine a much clearer demonstration that our government is now at the beck and call of business and moneyed concerns--this is where governmental power is centered now; it addresses the concerns of individual citizens only in a rhetorical and symbolic way. (Inside Job points out that the financial services industry has three times as many paid lobbyists as there are even legislators to lobby.)

It will be an ongoing task to figure out what to do. As an individual voter and consumer, I have an almost infinitesimal influence over anything--especially compared to international banks and national governments. And yet I have to believe that We, the People retain essential control over the government of our states and our country, that we still have the ability to effect that control.

We can start by trying to get corporate money out of politics, I think.

About That Vampire Squid...

2011-05-19T12:16:00.004-05:00

From Matt Taibbi's latest blog post:

A lot of people aren't aware of the role Wall Street investment banks had in moving American jobs overseas. Most of the major bailout recipients, in fact, helped finance the wholesale export of the American manufacturing sector by lending money to the Chinese to build the sophisticated industrial infrastructure it needed to take full advantage of its inexhaustible supply of cheap pseudo-slave labor. This has been one of Bernie Sanders's pet peeves for years, that we not only provide financial assistance to companies who lay off American workers, we even spend taxpayer money to help finance the disappearance of American jobs.

As I will urge shortly in a review, everyone should get a copy of Taibbi's book Griftopia, which explains what's really going on with the financial meltdown. (It's probably not what you think.)

Guanadu

2011-05-13T20:40:00.001-05:00

(Urban China in a nutshell: busy, crowded and social.)

More obsessive-compulsive hand-washing about China. I had a 36-hour layover in Guangzhou, good for a couple days of good walking in the dictatorial heat and hegemonic humidity. Nothing particularly extraordinary happens to me on these trips--certainly not from the perspective of a native--but as I walk the streets my Westerner's sensibilities are continuously tweaked in ways big and small and I'm dying to bring some of the experience back with me and share it. (I always say this, but the desire to absorb these experiences and share them does not seem to abate with repeated exposures.)

(Near our hotel, the notorious Cave Bar. Never been inside.)

It's mostly little things, especially once the big things have sunk in, things like the language and the millions of people and the broad strokes of architecture. But as I walk around I'm continuously filled to the brim with the foreign-ness of the place, overwhelmed with the zillion tiny details that mark China as different from any other place I've been. I'm aware that this fabulous alignment of circumstances is a temporary thing for me; even if it lasts another 10 years, I'll someday stop coming here and I'll likely never make it back. And so I want to grasp and understand as much as I possibly can while I have this chance.

The first thing I notice--one of the strongest impressions--is the smell; it strikes me right away every time I step off the airplane or out of the hotel. I hear my un-enamored coworkers ready to chime in at this comment, but I don't mean it as a criticism. It's not a bad smell, though not exactly a good smell either. New York City has a certain, identifiable urban smell (and it's one of the many things I find endearing about NYC) and this is like that. But different. For one thing it's not confined to the city itself, but is kind of everywhere. And I notice it--or I think I do--in all the places I've been in China: Guangzhou especially, but also in Shanghai and Hong Kong and Taipei. (Of course, these are all huge cities, so maybe it IS a city smell.) It's the smell of human habitation, maybe, but mixed with incense and diesel exhaust and the cooking of unidentifiable foods and… something else. But it's a characteristic smell like a woman's signature perfume, one which if encountered years from now will bring me right back here to this place and time. And it's one of the things that makes me rub my hands together in anticipation of some small adventure every time I step outside. Inside my hotel room, away from the crush of humanity and the oppressive heat and humidity, it's easy to get sucked into a film or to be lulled into surfing the (censored) web or just loll around on the extremely unyielding but incongruously comfortable hotel beds. (Seriously, it's like lying on a sheet of plywood. And yet I wake up feeling like a million bucks.) But the moment I step outside for a bite to eat or a Diet Coke from the 7-11 across the street I'm grabbed by this amazing smell, the smell of millions of things happening all around you.

(Interesting block of old buildings.)

That smell is doubtless related to how densely-packed everything is here. The streets and sidewalks are Manhattan-busy (at least during the day), a function of there being more people being packed into every square mile here than maybe anywhere else in the world--certainly when scale is taken into consideration. I've never been in a Chinese household, so I'm speculating; but my sense is that no one has very much living space, even the quite prosperous. This is a culture where it's normal to live cheek-by-jowl with one's neighbors, people above and below and on all sides. With the one-child policy there really aren't any large families, but I suspect that three or four generations live under a single roof. And that density of living spaces brings a concurrent density of all the stuff needed to support them: utilities and vendors and public transit and pollution and every other thing. And it's not just a section here or there, but it extends for miles and miles. Even out of the city center where there is presumably more space, housing still looks to be small and multi-unit.

(Love the narrow alleys and the piled-up ancient housing that looks about to crumble.)

(One of the more fascinating things I've come across is the occasional still-occupied neighborhood which is literally falling apart and pushing its inhabitants out as it crumbles. In Shanghai particularly I walked thru a section that looks almost bombed out with half or more of the structures crumbling and uninhabited--the walking tracks literally wind over and thru the half-walls and huge piles of crumbled bricks and dirt. There's a tier just above this of housing still standing but too far gone to be safe to inhabit. And these exist intermingled with similarly-dilapidated structures which are yet still inhabited. This is obviously a very poor part of town, but once again I'm surprised to see the places comparatively picked up and the inhabitants quite clean and well put-together. It's hard to get pictures in these settings, as I'm aware that I'm out of place and being watched slightly--about the only time I ever feel this in my wanderings around China; I want not to make a spectacle of these people's circumstances, and yet it's a very different flavor from any poor or old places I've seen in my own country; there's no sense of self-destruction or self-immolation here.)

(These few from a visit last year to Shanghai.)

For the zillionth time, I'm surprised at how often the rest of the crew have never really looked around the place. As we discuss what we might do on our layover, the various markets and so on, they're always surprised that anyone would actually walk to these places. Despite flying in here for years, they often have no real idea how to get anywhere except to give a pre-printed card to a cab driver. They're even more astounded when I try to point out the location of someplace I've visited on a map but caution them that I'm not exactly sure whether the place in question is here or here. "How can you not know where you're going?" they ask. And my response shows the gulf in our philosophy: while pilots tend to be single-focus, goal-oriented kinda guys, I try intentionally NOT to know exactly where I'm going as then I'd never see anything I hadn't seen before. The IDEA is to get a little bit lost. There's always a little satisfaction in coming out of an unfamiliar section of town to find myself someplace I know, or to find my way to a familiar destination by way of a random, unfamiliar route. Because there is no standard grid here, getting lost can carry one quite far afield from where you might expect to end up, so one has to expect to not make quick, linear progress. Even after two years of this, I've surely seen only the tiniest fraction of what there is to see here, but from a starting point of zero I've managed to see quite a bit of stuff. More and more I find myself using the subway to see things further out, making my walks one-way affairs rather than a loop that begins and ends at the hotel. (I could of course keep busy for years this way.)

(North of our hotel, an outdoor cafe. Unusual, as this isn't really cafe culture.)

So many little details. I always note the security person / watchman / party informant that sits at the entrance of each little neighborhood--hundreds of people employed in this way, maybe thousands. Sometimes they're just sitting on a battered chair, other times they have a little weatherproof booth. They're almost always in uniform, but I never actually see them doing anything except sitting there reading a paper or playing on their cell phones or chatting with others on a ramshackle collection of lawn chairs. I tend to be sheepish about entering a neighborhood with one of these sentinels on duty (since I don't know that their function isn't precisely to keep me out), but the further one gets from the main thoroughfares the more the neighborhood entrances are unguarded, and I will take the opportunity to head in and look around. I've exited past these guards a hundred times and never had anyone give me so much as a glance, so maybe my sheepishness is unwarranted.

(A neighborhood entrance, this one unguarded.)

This profusion of small jobs for which we have no analogs in the US is everywhere. The health club at our hotel--an amazingly swanky place--features a small army of track-suited folks whose primary job is apparently to "facilitate" your workout. (The facility, though beautiful, isn't particularly large, maybe accommodating 10 people working out at once. There are nearly this many attendants.) They walk you from the front desk to the facility itself (though no guidance beyond a simple finger point is needed), and they stand around at attention in the facility ready to assist with every little thing--handing out a towel, giving a bottle of water, helping with the machines, answering questions. The idea of these folks earning a living this way strikes me as odd, an obvious area where a company could economize. There are zillions of staff members paid to do these little arcane service jobs.

(A couple pictures from a previous visit.)

Likewise on the streets. Crossing guards and sidewalk sweepers and general trash-picker-uppers and traffic cops and little motorcycle taxi drivers. At the technology markets where I buy DVDs, I'm amazed at how many booths are selling the exact same items (or very slight variants)--iPhones and Android phones and Blackberries and all manner of cases and covers and accessories for these things. Hundreds and hundreds of these booths in mall after multi-level mall for several blocks, all concentrated in a particular part of town (the purse markets are in one place, the watch markets in another, the toy markets in another, etc.--this must be according to some plan). One typically doesn't see much commerce going on at any of these places, and you wonder how they make a living when a hundred other places within a stone's throw are selling the exact same stuff (maybe they do a big web business). Some booths have some action going on, but most are empty but for the clerk. I also cannot help noticing that almost none of the folks who work at these booths actually use an iPhone themselves, despite selling them (and despite seeing iPhones all around Guangzhou). What to make of this? Is the iPhone just that expensive to buy here (yes,I think) and / or is the plan so expensive that these vendors cannot afford them despite getting them at cost? I suspect that most iPhones sold here are not the real McCoy; perhaps the "Chinese" iPhones don't work very well? There are many items for sale in these booths that are China-only, copyright-infringed items: iPhones and iPads in different sizes and configurations, Apple branded items which Apple clearly had nothing to do with. Who buys these? Sure, a fake iPad is much cheaper than the real one, but its functionality must be a fraction of the real one; what's to be gained this way?

I walked yesterday through the campus of the Sun Yat-Sen University, noticing the phalanxes of smokers taking their breaks outside the Cancer Center (no, really). Odd that smokers here are almost exclusively men. One sees the occasional woman smoking, but it's rare. But probably more than 50% of men are smokers.

I love that this is a public transit culture (and that there's a vital rung below this on the transit ladder: human powered). Guangzhou's subway system is quite new, and the times I've ridden it has been absolutely jammed to the gills--so much so that I'm surprised there aren't "pushers" to force folks into the cars. There are no surface trains for in-town transit, but there appear to be hundreds of bus lines (my attempts to learn more about the bus system in general have only made the whole thing seem larger and more multi-headed than I thought going in). Buses are everywhere, in a profusion of types and sizes. I'd say about 1/4 of the buses in the inner city are electric, with the overhead catenaries giving away the route structure. The rest are diesels, mostly of regular city bus sizes, but all of them have manual transmissions (like most of the rest of the world). And the buses are invariably full or nearly so. During rush hours they are standing-room-only affairs, and one NEVER sees an empty bus. The vehicles themselves are well-worn, sometimes bordering on shabby, but one does not see much graffiti or other vandalism.

I also can't help noting things which seem to have bigger ramifications, chicken-and-egg things. Like diet. Walking around, I'm always amazed at how little of the food I can identify, and how fundamentally different the Chinese diet is from our own. Of course, McDonalds and KFCs are popping up everywhere here, and we will doubtless see a steady rise in all the health problems Americans suffer from as the Chinese fall prey to Western big-business culture--obesity and diabetes and heart disease, things largely foreign to these Asian cultures (this makes me wonder about the liabilities of these companies that introduce these things--bad food and tobacco and so on--for reasons of profit and marketing success even as they leave a trail of human wreckage behind them--and know that they're going to; but that's another post, I guess). There appears to be no such thing as a Chinese jogger. I've seen maybe one or two in the few parks I've walked thru here, but they're very much an aberration. I suspect this is because the Chinese diet is not at war with the human body as ours is. We are having to battle the effects of a diet which has evolved solely for the benefit of other people--of CEOs and shareholders and board members--of organizations operating purely on profit motive. This is literally killing us. The Chinese markets still contain raw foods sold by mom-and-pop vendors, people supplying a particular grain or fruit or fish in small quantities to individuals. (At some point business will discover that they can process and package these essential foodstuffs, thus taking nutrients out and making people pay more for the privilege.) People eat at home, or the restaurants (mostly street vendors) seem to sell exactly what you'd make at home. It's not the first thing I notice, but over time the difference becomes striking: it's rare here to see an overweight person here, certainly not an obese one. The difference with Westerners is quite striking.

(A third-floor coffee bar. Just... odd.)

At the aforementioned health club, the machines are almost exclusively plying the gelatinous flesh of Americans. Anyone else is European, and about 85% of us are fat or nearly so. I have never seen a Chinese person at this health club who was not an employee (and none of them actually working out), and I've never seen a health club as I've walked any Chinese city. This cornerstone of American life is all in pursuit of a solution to a problem the Chinese simply don't have.

I leave this discussion with some t-shirt wisdom. Printed t-shirts are all the rage among the young here, and for some reason the shirts MUST contain an English slogan (I honestly don't think it's that I simply don't see / understand the Chinese sayings or those in some other language; they just don't seem to exist). Some of them are perfectly comprehensible: I saw a fella yesterday whose shirt said "I'm smiling because I have no idea what is going on." But many others get their slogans subtly--or spectacularly!--wrong. (I don't mean to criticize when I don't speak a single word of either primary languages--or any of the hundreds of others--of the country.) A while back I saw one that said "But Over Just Here More Delight." My favorite from yesterday's wanderings was a young woman's shirt saying:

bizarre MUST awesome WANT.

Hey, amen to that. Or whatever.

To Eat An Egg

2011-04-22T12:28:00.009-05:00

Last night's movie: Joe Wright's Hanna (2011).

Saoirse Ronan plays the title role, a teenaged girl who lives isolated in the Arctic wilderness with her father Erik Heller (Eric Bana). Mr. Heller is apparently a defector from a secret agency, a man whose background has given him a wide variety of survival skills including all manner of weaponry and hunting skills. His full-time job appears to be teaching these skills to his daughter. Exactly what they are doing out in the wilderness in complete isolation is not immediately clear, but we come to see that it has something to do with keeping Hanna herself out of sight. The agency in question (or at least the part of it we're concerned with) is headed by the icily malevolent Marissa Wiegler (Cate Blanchett), who has detailed knowledge of, and interest in, Hanna's case--apparently Hanna is a product of something in which both her father and Ms. Wiegler were involved. When Hanna's father has given her all the training he is able, she is released into the wild, as it were--left to survive out in the larger world on her wits.

Initially, I thought that the character of Erik Heller might be a little bit like Robert Ludlum's Jason Bourne: a self-contained creature of extraordinary competence in all things who is set loose on an adventure. But it's Hanna's story, and she's really the Bourne analog here. And while Jason Bourne is surprised after his amnesia event to find himself in possession of amazing skills and instincts, Hanna is hinted from the outset as being something more than the product of extensive training. Still, the similarities are there: both respond instinctively to the slightest perception of threat, and both possess skills which, while seeming at times quite excessive to the threats presented, are nonetheless effective.

The film is wonderfully cast; I can't imagine improving on Saorise Ronan (apparently it's pronounced SEHR-shuh) in the title role, an inscrutable young woman who seems to exist suspended in a kind of stylistic isolation. She is attractive enough to spend two hours looking at, but not stunning, and she does a fabulous job inhabiting a character who seems hard to pigeonhole: part typical young girl, part tomboy, part caveman and part something else. This sense of a person raised outside of any human culture--and having been given extensive book knowledge of things she's never experienced firsthand--being suddenly plunked into the middle of a city and having to make her way is pretty well played. It's a lot to try and put in a movie already dense with plot elements, and this could make a story unto itself. Still, I thought it was nicely, subtly done. (I especially love the contrast between Hanna and a more typical American teenager, played here by Jessica Barden.) Eric Bana and Cate Blanchett are also on the money in their roles.

I also appreciate that there is no sexual element to Hanna's story. Not because I'm in any way prudish or object to sexual content in movies--quite the contrary--but because I'm so accustomed to Hollywood falling back on the easiest of levers to engage the human psyche, usually because there is an overt failure to engage us with story. (Bogey says to Peter Lorre in Casablanca: "I don't mind a parasite--I object to a cut-rate one." It's like that; I don't mind sex appeal--I object to a too-easy resort to it.) Director Wright has stayed on point here and made his story stick.

Well, mostly. If I have a criticism, it's that all this is an engaging and fascinating setup for a plot that never quite delivers its payoff. That Hanna survives her ordeal will be a surprise to no one, and the manner in which she survives is also not particularly shocking for this kind of movie (though that doesn't diminish its entertainment value). But there's no sense of any wrongs being righted, or of any revelations being laid before us. The story begins with what seems like a strong story arc, but the arc seems to dissipate after the apex and never reaches the ground. Like the Bourne movies, this one seems calculated to leave the end open for a continuation--a development I would welcome. But a movie that only works because of what is promised to follow is to me less than a full success.

Grade: B+

The Hitch is Hanging On

2011-04-16T20:25:00.000-05:00

From a recent "In Confidence" interview with Laurie Taylor.

Q: I wonder what feeling you have about America today? I mean, coming here, there's a sense that America's almost lost the will to live, it seems to be sad and lacking spirit, it seems almost as though it's rolling over and waiting to be overtaken by China and by India…

A: Yes. The great thing about the United States and the historically magnetic effect it's had on a lot of people like me is its generosity [he emigrated here from England in 1981 and became a US citizen in 2007]. To put it simply, broadmindedness; curiosity; willingness to accept strangers, allow them to become citizens really quite easily, assimilate to their arrival.

There's a tremendously cramped feeling now, a mean-spirited feeling that was very much to be detected in the last election cycle, people talking in what I would once have called Dennis Thatcher-ite terms--curmudgeonly, but rather less amusing than him: "Country's filling up with riff-raff; country's going to the dogs; President doesn't seem to be exactly 16 annas to the rupee, might even be a Kenyan." Petty, spiteful stuff of that kind, often from quite senior people. Hardly even deserves the name of cynicism or pessimism; it's just sour. And nasty. And boring. That's been a depressing reflection, yes.

And I know it comes from the feeling--they're probably both related--that the country itself has, very rapidly and suddenly and unexpectedly, ceased to be the hyper-power, that at best it's one power among many. And second and subliminally related to this, the feeling among--what should we say?--let's just say white Americans for now, the realization that they're not going to be the majority quite soon. They'll be the largest group, but they won't be the majority--actually, it's already true in several states, and it's going to be true in several more, and no one quite knowing how to react to that.

And all these things going to need very careful handling and require a lot of thought and reflection, and all I know for now is that there are several tones of voice in which NOT to talk about it--how not to address it--and one is by saying "the President is a secret Muslim," for example. Really unworthy stuff of that kind.

It's so excruciating to see the body failing while that mind remains so vibrant and singular. I'm continually amazed at how much knowledge the man has at his fingertips, especially of all the thorny political and national movements and upheavals of human history. These are exactly the kinds of things I can't really keep focused in my brain. (But don't let's use my brain as a yardstick for anything.)

He has gone rather suddenly from the hale and hearty roustabout and rogue to ill and fighting to having to cancel appearances and even missing writing deadlines. It's hard to continue to find pleasure from such ominous circumstances. I just find Hitchens' mind a nourishing thing. Love him or hate him, he's a rare intellectual genius and the world is simply much richer for his being here. One hoped for another 20 years of incendiaries lobbed from the man. Well, hope springs eternal; he's not gone yet.

My Two Cents' Worth about the iPad 2

2011-04-15T19:39:00.005-05:00

I did not purchase the first iPad. Truth be told, I couldn't figure out the iPad's raison d'etre--at least for someone like me who already had both the iPhone and a MacBook. The overlap between these other two devices left relatively little ground uncovered. But there was so much buzz about the device, and when the buzz turned towards the second-generation device I found myself getting sucked in. Many sources were predicting that the mobile / tablet platform would be THE area of computer development for the foreseeable future. And the more I read, the more I began to see uses for the device which I hadn't anticipated, uses for which neither phone or laptop was really satisfactory.

Initially, my chief motivation was mostly to get an e-reader. On my long trips abroad I already have so much shit to carry with me, and the two or three books in my backpack seemed an obvious target for weight savings (and bulk). Plus I had a sense that I'd like reading this way if I had the right format.

And there's a pointed work-specific angle as well: we have about 10,000 pages of navigation and official company documentation which we are required to carry--a good 35 pounds' worth in six or eight heavy binders carried in a big, blockish flight case. There's an Aircraft Operating Manual; a Minimum Equipment List; an International Operations Manual; a Flight Operations Manual; a Fault Reporting Manual, etc. All of this stuff is dryly technical and chock-full of legalistic ass-covering verbiage and technological gobbledygook; these are not easy-to-read, page-turning documents, which makes some kind of search function seem like a godsend.

Not all of our documents are available to us in electronic format--the 5,000 pages of Jeppesen navigational and approach charts, for example (though it's worth noting that these charts ARE available electronically; my company just hasn't transitioned to this format). The other big FAA and company documents which ARE available as PDFs are not yet approved for use in this format. Nonetheless, more and more of us are carrying the documents on our laptops in PDF format. Even if we must still carry the document case to be legal, the electronic documents are just much more user-friendly. In addition to the search function, one can switch easily among numerous cross-referenced manuals without having five of them actually open around the cockpit.

In defiance of protocol I've been carrying my company PDFs on my laptop for several years, and I'm much more likely to reference these documents electronically than I am to dig out the paper manuals and search. I carry a second copy of all this stuff on my iPhone as well, just because, well, because I can. I make sure to upload the latest versions every time I leave for a trip, making my electronic versions more current than the paper copies, which may have a revision in process which hasn't yet reached us (or which I have not yet done the laborious process of inputting). Also, it's worth noting that with so many pages of documentation, all of which are subject to regular revision schedules, there is no way I haven't screwed up a paper revision somewhere and left myself with errors in my library. The electronic versions fix this problem in a stroke.

The problem with the iPhone and laptop libraries are that 1) the iPhone is simply too small to read, especially in a dim cockpit. And its limited memory makes searching within these huge documents a very slow process. And 2) the laptop is not a very convenient way of looking at things in the cockpit either; there's no ready place to set the laptop while you're searching, and there is the process of getting my backpack from wherever it's stored, extracting the computer, waking it up, putting it back when you're done, etc.

The iPad seems tailor-made to address this exact scenario. It's compact and easy to carry, easily taking the place of an entire case full of charts and books (indeed, it can contain a thousand times the library size I would ever need to carry); it's easy to read and customizable for one's eyes and ambient light conditions (within a week of getting the device I felt certain I would never willingly read a paper book again, it's that good!); it's fully searchable; it has GPS locating capabilities, which offer navigational possibilities that make paper charts instantly obsolete.

Other devices, like Amazon's Kindle, share some of the iPad's capabilities, and the Kindle is considerably cheaper and even smaller than the iPad. But the Kindle is an e-reader and little else, while the e-reader function is the least of the iPad's offerings: you can watch movies, play games, surf the internet, take care of emails, watch TV, read the newspaper, listen to music, video-chat. On and on. I finally decided that it was worth the extra dough over and above a basic e-reader to have all this extra capability, even as just a toy. I would run the experiment of buying one and seeing whether it really added up or not. (The purchase itself was another little goat rodeo that I'll skip over for now. Suffice it to say that on Susan's and my recent visit to Chicago, I dragged myself out of bed at 5:AM to wait outside the Michigan Ave. Apple store in the rain with 100 other folks to get a crack at their limited daily supply.)

I decided initially on the 32GB 3G model, but ended up getting a 64GB model, mostly because (I reasoned) the cutting-edge of today is the entry-level of 6 or 12 months' hence, and I would almost certainly sell this on eBay when the next model comes out. The top-line model would likely retain more residual value. And so, new device in hand, I headed off for a five-day trip, the first trip in a decade or more where I had not carried a laptop. After that trip, and in the subsequent month, here's what I've learned:

I think whether one could live without a laptop--especially on the road--entirely depends on what you do with your laptop. For reading emails, doing a bit of surfing, checking the news, and maybe watching a movie, the iPad excels. Especially with a bluetooth keyboard, you would never miss the computer. And it's all small enough that you can likely just shove it in a pouch in your suitcase. But I found myself pining for my MacBook at times. I'm still deciding whether this is just a learning curve issue or whether I'm really lamenting any real loss of capability. I did not buy an external keyboard for my iPad, and I find that the virtual keyboard, while being much better than the iPhone and fine for the occasional email, is not suited to writing anything of much length. Writing a blog post like this one on the iPad is quite out of the question without a bluetooth keyboard. Also, my typical layover involves walking around and taking pictures on my phone and then posting some of those photos into a blog post. While the iPad surely has available apps with image-editing capabilities, there's no ready way to get the photos from the iPhone to the iPad, especially in Australia or China where I do not have ready access to a data network (most of our layover hotels offer wired internet service). Over time I'm sure I could find a fix to the photo business, but for now it's a detriment.

I also find that for surfing the iPad is good, but not so good as my MacBook. You are often directed to the mobile versions of websites, which typically give truncated presentations. Also, for all the touted speed of the A5 processor, I still find that surfing can be a time-consuming process. Pages load more slowly than with my MacBook, and searching my big work documents is still a good deal slower than on my laptop (though better than the iPhone). And there are quirks: I got a news aggregator--Pulse--which promises to keep a bunch of my favorite feeds updated for me. But I find it's a slower process than it might be, and twice I've had it kind of crash and need to be thrown away and reinstalled to return to its already mediocre functioning. Likewise a Google image search (with the Google Mobile app): not infrequently the pictures come up blank, and I've never really been able to look past two or three panels of pictures before the whole thing just becomes buggy and stuck and dysfunctional. Not to overstate the point: it works quite well almost all the time, but there are quirks.

And then there is the music. It has taken me years to get my whole music collection ripped into digital format and to finally be able to carry all 36,000 pieces with me on the road (where after all I spend 1/2 my life). In fact, my present MacBook is the first device where I've been able to do it. And having just gained that capability, it pains me to do without it. The 64GB iPad has a lot of storage capability (and again, my company document library takes up a fraction of a fraction of it). But with 15 movies thrown on there for a long trip, I'm left with very little space for picking and choosing among my 200GB of music files. I think the time is coming where I'll keep the whole collection on the cloud somewhere and access it wirelessly (which will give yet another challenge when overseas), and in any case future iPads will surely have a terabyte of storage which will solve the problem. But for now if I don't carry it I don't have access to it.

And all of this, iPad and iPhone alike, seems to require a home or laptop computer to manage all the stuff on them. So you can't ever really get too far away from your main computer.

I understand that my challenges may not be everyone's challenges, but for these reasons my iPad is not going to replace my MacBook. The MacBook stays in its bag much more than it used to, and the iPad is a revelation in ways I had not expected--I'm glad I got it, and sorry I didn't get the first one. But my sense is that all this is a work rapidly in progress and the iPad of five years from now will be a different animal yet from the one in my backpack. THAT iPad will almost surely be a stand-alone device, but for now I find I need both devices to keep my world in alignment.

I Wish I Believed in Reincarnation

2011-04-09T17:37:00.002-05:00

Maybe I'd get to come back as Rolling Stone columnist Matt Taibbi.

Then I could write things like this.

Paul Ryan, the Republican Party’s latest entrant in the seemingly endless series of young, prickish, over-coiffed, anal-retentive deficit Robespierres they’ve sent to the political center stage in the last decade or so, has come out with his new budget plan. All of these smug little jerks look alike to me – from Ralph Reed to Eric Cantor to Jeb Hensarling to Rand Paul and now to Ryan, they all look like overgrown kids who got nipple-twisted in the halls in high school, worked as Applebee’s shift managers in college, and are now taking revenge on the world as grownups by defunding hospice care and student loans and Sesame Street. They all look like they sleep with their ties on, and keep their feet in dress socks when doing their bi-monthly duty with their wives... (continued)

Yes, yes, he begins with some petulant character assassination, but he soon enough gets down to business telling us how we are helping speed ourselves up to, and over, the precipice of financial ruin.

I am so tired and discouraged at seeing my country on its knees and those who have most benefited from our system unwilling to do their part to help. Our national debt is nearly universally cited as an impending national catastrophe, and yet to Republicans it's clearly not as great a catastrophe as failing to deliver more tax cuts to the country's well-off. Tax rates are at an historical low (for modern times) and yet Rupert Murdoch and his cabal have convinced a large part of middle America that they're being pillaged by taxes--and better yet, that the tax burden of rich folks is keeping the economy down!--even as the country is coming apart in front of us. How do you pull off such an illusion and get people to go to the polls eager to chop off their own hands?

We have not had such a dangerous wealth disparity since the days before the Great Depression, and yet I get lectured every day by Republicans about our tax system as a "redistribution of wealth," as though the world is full of deadbeats living fat off the hard-working rich white man. In what is becoming standard Republican strategy, the reality is the mirror-opposite of that narrative: a small group at the top is living super-fat off the poor and middle classes, and off the capital gains of the investments they were able to make by not having to pay a fair share of upkeep for the country that made them rich. No wonder guys want to get into business and become moguls and stock brokers and currency traders and CEOs.

The tax code in this country may be byzantine and as full of holes as swiss cheese, but the idea that the rich are being punished by taxation is a lie. And I'd like to stop hearing people try to make this argument to me.