Paper Planes From the Aerie

A Bummer Trip to the End of the World

2012-01-29T16:06:00.006+09:00

Because we live in a 24-hour news cycle you probably heard the story slipped in somewhere between nuclear contamination fears, carnage in Afghanistan and sexual indiscretions of Republican candidates— 2005 YU5, a massive asteroid four hundred meters in diameter passed within the orbit of the moon on November 8^th. It’s the closest an asteroid this big has come this close to Earth since 1976. Though scientists were explicitly clear that there was nothing to worry about, it hasn’t stopped the morbidly inclined of our newspersons from speculating on the high-magnitude earthquake, seventy-foot tsunami waves and various ecological catastrophes associated with such potential deep impact. A cosmic apocalypse can be a boon for ratings.

Another godsend for newsgathering minions is when a famous person expresses “sympathy” for Adolph Hitler and the Nazis, as Lars Von Trier supposedly did at a press conference at Cannes earlier this year. Trier, an idiot savant if there ever was one, was extrapolating carelessly on his genetic ancestry, having recently learned of his German bloodline. His words were taken out of context and French authorities went into a huff. Melancholia, his very great film about a planetary collision wiping out the earth and all existence was disqualified from the Palme d’Or competition.

I don’t know anyone who’s ever named Lars Von Trier as a favorite director. His aesthetics can be wildly inconsistent—in addition to directing lush, surreal melodrama, he is one of the founders of the anti-Hollywood Dogma 95 movement, which among some of its manifesto points, insists on using unknown actors, natural lighting and diegetic music. Melancholia, starring Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg, among other famous names and beginning with a special-effects laden series of moving stills depicting the end of the world to the music of Richard Wagner’s dramatic Tristan und Isolde is decidedly not the latter. Nevertheless, for all its Hollywood stars and high-concept content, Melancholia is very European in tone, execution, and ultimately, pessimism.

If a diabolical European filmmaker is going to sabotage our relation with certain beloved tropes then, he may as well begin the story with a white wedding at a Cinderella-style castle, celebrating a bride and groom whose love story is utterly doomed. Justine (Dunst), a gorgeous, busty blonde is to marry handsome nice guy Michael (Alexander Skarsgard) at her sister, Claire’s (Gainsbourg) and husband, John’s (Kiefer Sutherland) sprawling garden estate. Claire has taken the trouble to organize the gala and John has bankrolled an event with hundreds of beautiful people in attendance. The problem is Justine: she suffers from crippling depression and tends to disappear in key ceremonial moments.

We don’t know why Justine is sad. She’s a successful copywriter but she doesn’t like her job (her boss is a slimeball played by Trier regular Stellan Skarsgard). Her divorced parents make spectacles of themselves. Her father (John Hurt) is a philandering, unserious drunkard while her mother (Charlotte Rampling) could win a cinematic award in the category of World’s Worst Mom for her bitchiness (she condemns the institution of marriage in her dinner speech and when Justine turns to her in a moment of need has only cold-blooded pragmatism for comfort). Let’s face it: there is no such thing as ‘normal’ and most people have crazy parents so though you may feel ashamed when your father makes an ass of himself at your wedding table, it’s not entirely destabilizing. After all, the sister, Claire, is well adjusted, thoughtful, and kind.

It appears then that Justine’s sadness may be of the more inexplicable kind—a nihilism peculiar to certain personalities susceptible to “What’s the point?” thinking. It afflicts those too sensitive of the misery and suffering in the world, for whom the benefits of material security and distraction are of little comfort. It is rather sourceless, or rather, existence itself is source enough.

Justine fails not just on bridal protocol but on moral terms as well, avoiding intimacy with and abandoning Michael to be alone, dragging her gown on the golf course, taking a bath, peeing in the garden and at the moment she should be consummating her marriage, fornicating with a relative stranger on the 18^th hole. The planet set to collide with Earth is yet just a speck in the sky but Melancholia is already a disaster film.

With such inauspicious beginnings, the marriage never gets off the ground and following a complete nervous breakdown, Justine moves into the fairy tale castle with John and Claire and their five-year-old son, Leo. A few weeks have passed and it is understood that the rogue planet— named by astronomers as Melancholia— will pass very close to Earth without destroying it, a “fly-by.” Nevertheless, there is an alternative slingshot theory called the “dance of death” that argues that Melancholia will collide with the Earth, though scientific details are somewhat vague. But science is not the point. Trier’s interest is not astrophysics but psychology— how would uniquely polarized personalities deal with the specter of absolute extinction?

Claire, who appreciates her wonderful life and thus has much to lose by certain death, is understandably agitated. On the other hand, Justine feels a kinship with a planet describing her acute condition (she bathes naked in its reflected light one night). That it might destroy the earth gives her a certain amount of vindication and through the ordeal, she is abnormally calm if not excited about total annihilation. It’s what she’s been waiting for her entire life.

Lunacy Never Looked So Sexy

Hollywood has a long tradition of end-of-the-world thinking. This makes sense, as after putting together civilization, man has seemed certain of its inevitable destruction (the early 1940s and WWII must have been a boom time for self-professed nihilists). Doomsayers like their fin de siecle preordained, the most topical one being the Mayan calendar and the pseudo-science arguing that the poles will move setting off titanic earthquakes, biblical floods and for the survivors, floating arks to which to start over (already filmed by eminent disaster film guru Roland Emmerich as 2012). When December 21^st, 2012, passes without incident, the world’s Chicken Littles will come up with a novel day and method for our demise, sure as tomorrow’s sunrise. Always, it seems there is some cult of fear that gathers enough momentum to infiltrate our collective consciousness— a real pain in the ass for those who enjoy themselves and believe that life on earth is getting better, not worse.

Eschatological tales have great dramatic potential with a mass audience and Hollywood is wise to capitalize on our fears as such, though its enterprises are often incompetent and buffoonish. The nationalistic Armageddon is among the very worst offenders of bad taste. The problem in nearly all disaster films—rendering them unwatchable for intelligent viewers— is their scattered lack of focus. Instead of the particular, they focus on the general, jumping around the globe, introducing and then ignoring characters in the buildup to the disaster which then becomes this horrible MTV-style edited mess of CGI nonsense that has no coherence for those of us who have not hot-wired our brains on video games and Michael Bay filmmaking technique. The effect then is not urgency but utter boredom.

What is so very great about Trier’s Melancholia is that we have no idea how the world is reacting to the news of apocalypse— we suffer the fear and resignation with a single family living in an opulent setting isolated from the rest of humanity. There is no television or radio sculpting our emotions, just the phenomenon of the approaching planet itself. No one in this family is capable of doing a thing to prevent destruction should it occur so we are left merely with dealing with it. I cannot think of another disaster film that has let alone the problem solving to focus exclusively on characters that cannot be proactive, who merely react with one line of thought or another until that speck in the sky is the harbinger of our ultimate end.

When the time to die is at hand and Justine’s life philosophy ascendant, she espouses to a desperate and distressed Claire that life on earth is “evil” and we are “alone in the universe.” It’s not a viewpoint one wants to cling to in mortally bad circumstances and again, for optimists it’s a rather dour summation of existence. But for all that, Melancholia finishes beautifully. Of course, how one faces death is more suggestive of one’s character than how one dies, a point asserted with the film’s terrific ending, one of the most dramatic, beautiful, cosmic final flourishes rivaling any movie ever made.

Though we live in the Age of Terror, it’s important to point out that for about forty-five years vis-à-vis the scheming Soviets we were on the brink of mutually assured destruction, a fact of life Generation Y readers cannot contemplate and for this author is a distant childhood memory. That nuclear war has been relegated to history books is just one instance demonstrating human progress. Life on earth is not entirely evil and we are not necessarily alone in the universe. There are many reasons to believe in the Hollywood happy ending, the most important of which is that it suits a beautiful, fulfilling life.

I may be wrong and the end may be nigh—until then we will have to live vicariously through the imagination of depressive dreamers. You can do a lot worse than spending two hours in the dark with Lars Von Trier and friends. One does not need to share his discontent to pleasure in his glorious end-all-be-all. “To life,” John toasts his wife when they mistakenly believe themselves to be in the clear. “To good cinema,” I raise my beer can from a temporarily safe cosmological vantage point.

The Fool On the Hill

2011-11-25T16:11:00.008+09:00

“You are excrement. You can change yourself into gold.”

--Jodorowsky’s Alchemist

Cinema was developed more than a hundred years ago with purely entertainment purposes in mind: it was a way for an entrepreneur to make a buck. However, it didn’t take the State too long to discover its manifest possibilities as a tool of propaganda, which, more or less, bears little difference to having a warty man with bad breath shouting slogans in your face—disagreeable no matter your politics. Later Hollywood developed guidebooks for living that have evolved with various zeitgeist movements, whether it’s embracing consumerism or choosing to follow one’s dream. “Your life is yours to live!” is a popular New Age bromide for those who need the reminder. To misquote for my own purposes of making a point, “The message is the medium.”

It’s inevitable that many filmmakers will to articulate his politics or belief system in a narrative format. The bravest ones will even try to capture that elusive ghost better known as the meaning of life. Whether or not I agree with the message does not seem the point—most messages are just idealistic clichés anyways, whether good-hearted or not, the candy-coated maxim often interchangeable among very different films. I’m more concerned with the messenger and how he utilizes his imagination to make such points without resorting to saccharine behests or melodramatic drivel. That he succeeds is the difference between good storytelling and bad.

Alejandro Jodorowsky, a self-described magical shaman, is generally not a great storyteller and his masterpiece, The Holy Mountain, is not a great story if one defines storytelling by taut structure and a sense of urgency. Now that that beef’s out of the way I can and will say that Jodorowsky is an undeniable genius of the mise-en-scene. Within The Holy Mountain, a brave attempt to dramatize the spiritual quest for immortality, is a world hitherto unseen anywhere in literature or film. One doesn’t just watch The Holy Mountain. One experiences its caterwauling, rank odors, and tactile projections on a very visceral level. A fat woman urinates in a tall toilet, an art magnate pokes the ass of a live human exhibit, the Chief of Police castrates a teenage boy, a crusty, old man removes his glass eye from its socket and hands it to a child prostitute. For those partial to the gross-out, he’s an inspiration unlike any other.

But what is it all supposed to mean? The answer evolves slowly in episodic quantities. The Holy Mountain is set in a disturbing, dystopian future run by perverse industrialists and a corrupted government. Undesirables are publicly executed by firing squads, their bodies mutilated, eviscerated, and pillaged to the delight of camera-toting First World (American) tourists, one of whom is raped by a soldier, the physical violence of which is filmed joyously by her husband on his camcorder. Streetwalkers worship a very bloody crucifix and ply their trade in front of the cathedral. Poverty is endemic, madness ubiquitous.

Witness to all this is a human savage, revived and cared for by a multiple-amputee gimp. The savage has an unmistakable Christ-like visage in his ratty hair and beard, naked but for a g-string loincloth. If that weren’t enough likeness, he carries an oversized cross, is drugged by obese Roman legionnaire actors, and while passed out his likeness to Jesus is molded and reproduced into a thousand Christs. Through it all, he is more thief than martyr, reacting rather than willing: equally victim and wastrel.

Within this savage society, he discovers a windowless tower rising high out of the human stink. (One is reminded of Kubrick’s black monolith and its mysterious projection of order within chaos.) Into this tower our savage enters a marvelous room painted in bright rainbow colors. Ravi Shankar-style fusion-rock sets the mood. A Bactrian camel looks uselessly on and a statuesque black woman tattooed with enigmatic runes stands guard by a man in white priestly tunic and a conical hat, apparently awaiting the visitor on a throne partly composed of bipedally arranged goats. This man in white is the alchemist. He quickly subdues the savage via some gentle martial arts moves.

The alchemist is our guru for the film, played by Jodorowsky himself. He sees potential in the savage as an apprentice (“It is the master who seeks the disciple”) and following a scrub-down baptism in a bathtub with a baby hippo, he educates his inductee in a tarot-themed room on the perversions of politicians and industrialists— “thieves like you”—their wax effigies spaced in niches throughout the round room. The fat middle of the film digresses into their individual biographies, e.g. gluttonous habits and exploitative fortunes, et. al. It is worth going into some detail about these tycoons, as the flesh of power structure is thoroughly skewered in the bizarre presentation of a decadent plutocracy.

There is Fon, of the planet, Venus, heir to a cosmetic empire, prospering because “people want to be loved-- not for what they are but what they appear to be.” Isla, of Mars, runs a chamber of horrors, manufacturing ray guns, hydrogen bombs, bacterial diseases, anti-matter waves, carcinogenic gases as well as novelty arms like “psychedelic shotguns, grenade necklaces, rock and roll weapons... mystical weapons for buddhists, jews, and christians.” Berg, of Uranus, a weirdo with a fat-woman fetish and financial adviser to the President, reports “to save the nation's economy we must eliminate 4 million citizens in the next five years,” to which his superior responds by picking up the phone and casually ordering to “begin operation of gas museums, gas movies, gas whorehouses, etcetera.”

Beyond profiting off the superficial traits and weak character of a society losing its moral prerogative are those who seek to profit by brainwashing it. Sel, of Saturn, is a beautiful redhead who dances in a mime troupe in her off hours when she isn't running a toy factory operating in conjunction with the war department. In her words, “We feed the computer data on coming wars and revolutions. It tells us what kinds of toys to produce to condition children from birth... For example if the government decides to wage war on Peru, we manufacture hyper-sexed, brown, native vampires who can only be destroyed by crossing white skin.” They produce a comic book called The Peruvian Monster, another calculated move to indoctrinate children to “hate the future enemy... in order to kill Peruvians with pleasure.”

There is also Lut, of Pluto, who claims to work in architecture, but whose prowess is in urban realignment. Having lost money building “homes” with central heating, plumbing, electricity, he and his architectural firm want to convince workers that they don't need creature comforts and only require shelter. In a presentation to fellow champagne-imbibing, drumstick-gnawing magnates, he unveils his model of residential planning-- dozens of tall, coffin-like rooms bunched together in faceless buildings, an anonymous, meaningless existence in a ghetto designed to maximize profit at the expense of the human spirit but advertising minimalist merits on a colorful poster, behooving us to, “Be a free man. Without a family. Without a house.”

Flying by helicopter to join the alchemist and his small entourage, the millionaires embark on a quest for immortality that will take them to a holy mountain at Lotus Island. Before this is possible, they must renounce their fortunes as well as their individuality, becoming part of a collective being. In addition to money, wax effigies are ceremonially burned. Heads are shaved, identical cloaks donned, chlorophyll concoctions drunk, the journey undertaken. There are distractions on the way, notably the last stop for sinning on Lotus Island called The Pantheon Bar where debauched parties are thrown in French-style cemeteries. It has the atmosphere of a Renaissance fair or a lysergic carnival. A drug dealer points out, “The holy mountain is in this vial,” selling a shortcut to enlightenment. But this coterie, as grossly self-serving they may be, are wise enough to trust that so far as immortality is concerned, it's not to be found on the cheap.

I won't tell you whether or not they acquire the immortality they so desperately covet-- by now it should be obvious that this film is crawling in messages, though one supersedes all others and after all the guru-speak, its thematic declaration comes as a bit of a surprise, in effect turning the film's aesthetic on its head. That the message is commonplace and sensible makes it all the more beautifully resonant after such a ride. Jodorowsky then proves himself a wonderful messenger, although that’s an underwhelming way of putting it. There is no other film like it—The Holy Mountain is weirder than anything Bunuel or Fellini or anyone else has ever dreamed.

Well, what happened? John Lennon and Yoko Ono, fans of Jodorowsky’s acid-Western, El Topo, provided the bulk of financing. The film’s distributor, Allen Klein, who built his hipster CV managing the Beatles and Stones, had a very public falling out with Jodorowsky, burying the film for more than thirty years. Already finding it difficult to secure funding for his outrageously subversive material, this petulance on Klein’s part effectively denied Jodorowsky an audience for his very best work. All filmmakers have personal ‘What if…’ scenarios but few are as likely disappointing as Jodorowsky’s, who has only made three films in the near four decades since.

Though of course, even had he found the audience that might have loved him in 1973, it’s not inevitable they would have followed him into the 1980s and beyond. The Holy Mountain has been described as a movie very much of its time. But really it is a sixties artifact in politics and content—by the time it came and went in the few theaters it was shown, most spiritual questers had abandoned the communes for jobs in the city. The “Me Generation” was developing a belief system in which wealth and enlightenment were not irreconcilable. Immortality could be rendered in lifestyle through Beverly Hills cosmetic surgery and haute-couture fashion.

The Holy Mountain is a cauldron of ideas, many of them dangerous, and for every enthusiast then there is the proportionate number of haters. The comments section in youtube videos is as a good place as any to extract testimony from the court of public opinion. Beyond the majority of “Trippy, Dude!” comments we discover some surprisingly visceral language. One person writes, “It was a complete and total piece of shit that attempted to portray disgusting and distasteful shit as something meaningful.” Okay, then, but another poster, named ‘Oblivious Wolf’ writes, “This movie made me hate the human body and seeded a rage inside of me that gave me an urge to punch things till my fists were just bloody stumps.”

Perhaps ‘Oblivious Wolf’ harbors strict rules regarding filmmaking conventions. Or he/she did not like a Christ-like figure portrayed as an ignorant, avaricious, primal screaming fool. Or he/she watched it late at night dosed on controlled substances, as it seems many are wont. (The Holy Mountain does not need a psychedelic coating— it is fully formed weirdness, just the right amount, no need to up the dose. A cup of coffee and a sense of humor will suffice.) That it can be so polarizing makes it all the more important as a work of art. You love it or hate it but you never shrug, “Meh…”

Not a lot of people saw The Holy Mountain when it came out, though not a lot of people saw The Velvet Underground live in the 1960s either. They say that anyone who did see the V.U. play went off to start their own bands. And maybe that’s true here too, as there are elements of David Lynch, David Cronenberg, George Miller, and Marilyn Manson, among others who likely saw the film and said they want to do that too.

It might seem to today’s wired-up, post-modern kids that all the sacred cows have been butchered, packaged, digested, shat, flushed. But judging by the vitriolic on youtube there are yet plenty of prudes left to provoke. All we need are wealthy eccentric financial benefactors who understand that immortality is not just a spiritual quest but attaching your name to piece of art that survives to piss off future assholes and inspire artists who say, “Yeah, that’s right. Now let’s see what I can do.” Ad nauseum. To the infinite.

* This was originally published in Heso Magazine.

The Kids Are All Right

2011-10-18T11:15:00.009+09:00

"Everybody passing through here is somebody, if nobody in the outside world." –Patti Smith

In one of my favorite scenes in Jim Jarmusch's "Coffee and Cigarettes," two disheveled old men raise their glasses for a toast. One says, 'To Paris in the 20s;' the other pauses for a moment, considering his own heroes: 'To New York in the 70s.' Both are wistful of generations mythologized and eulogized, beloved and altogether gone. They were societies where artistic impulses thrived over commercial ones and yet, ironically, because of their brilliance and decadent grandeur, these urban neighborhoods have become prohibitively expensive and are thus unlikely to spawn the kind of anarchic creativity that marked those cities in more carefree, dangerous days. For those of us who were never there, the closest we may come are paeans from persons who knew it best.

It's no surprise therefore that Patti Smith's "Just kids," a memoir of that heyday era should be a bestseller. New York in the 1970s: a crossroads of Avant-garde and street movements, hippies putting away tablas and sitars, giving way to a younger generation of punk kids turning on electric guitars and rage. Smith's rise from a starving artist to household name straddles this evolution in taste and form, the arc from flower power giving way to the aesthetic 'fuck off.' Those of us born in its aftermath can only YouTube those times with great envy, navigating our own generational malaise with characteristic longing. If that weren’t envy enough, ‘Just Kids’ is a record of Smith’s “making it,” appreciated for her own peculiar hybrid of poetry, rock and roll, and shouting. Even if like me, you’re not a fan of her music, credit is due: rock stars aren't born, they're made and it takes time, luck, talent, and of course, the thing that counts most of all in the end, persistence.

Through it all, Smith had a friend in the battle, the late photographer, Robert Mapplethorpe, who was her closest friend and greatest confidante in those transformative years and for whose memory this memoir is indubitably dedicated. Smith writes tenderly of her memories of Mapplethorpe, the gay, pixie prince who became world famous for his Polaroids of S&M carnality and the censorious rebukes his work engendered. But in the Summer of 1967, they were 'just kids,' a couple of dreamers from the American suburbs. Smith left a factory job in Jersey to make it as a poet in New York (does that still happen anymore these days? the hungry poet in the big city?), sleeping in the park and taking day-old loaves from charitable bakers. In the beginning Smith had absolutely nothing to live on, save the faith she belonged somehow to New York and that it would be all right. We don't know what might have happened otherwise, but it seems that her meeting Mapplethorpe might have saved her from danger or worse, the disaster of giving up and going back to where she came from, never to return.

Mapplethorpe dresses the dandy-- when she fell in love with him he was into beads and a sheepskin vest but he went through a sailor boy phase and Lizard King leather, among other personas attempted and discarded, "searching, consciously or unconsciously for himself." In 1967 he didn't own a camera-- for him photography was getting your image snapped on the Coney Island boardwalk. A talented dilettante, he dabbled in jewelry design, collage art, drawing; he did not read, though he was Smith's first audience when she recited her poetry. A lapsed Catholic obsessed with good and evil, he flirts with Satanism, tarot cards and the occult. Smith recalls there was something indefatigably childlike about him. He drinks chocolate milk and loves grilled cheese sandwiches. He could not keep a job-- Patti was the breadwinner (she's an ace at uncovering rare first editions, Henry James, The Golden Bough, for instance, and unloading them on customers when she worked at Scribners). As long as he followed his artistic aspirations, she was happy to provide for the both of them.

Smith paints a picture of an enviably adorable couple: never mind they were among the beautiful people; they understood one another's needs like few lovers could. That his homosexuality precluded longtime physical compatibility did not mean that their friendship could not thrive. Together they had their songs, signs, a coded language. Inspiration was the sustenance that they fed one another. Their mutual role-playing had always been founded on muse more than lover. Through it all, they are one both with and against the world: "Nobody sees things as we do, Patti," Robert tells her.

In those days, an artist could catch a break or two that is difficult to contemplate happening today. Many struggling, broke, down-at-the-heels types stayed at the famous Chelsea Hotel. Some went delinquent on their bills, trading in their portfolios to management as collateral. When Smith and Mapplethorpe arrived there in 1969, sans a dime and Robert suffering an abscessed mouth and ailing wisdom teeth, they did just that, trading in their work to Mr. Bard, the manager and shouter extraordinaire, as most of the residents were lousy with jobs, rent and various real-life obligations. Robert and Patti rented a small room with neither windows nor physical space to set up their workstations. Nevertheless it was the very best thing that could have ever happened to them, for if the art world is a beast (and many will attest it is exactly that), then they had landed themselves in its belly. The Chelsea Hotel had dirty shared bathrooms, an irresponsible clientele, and brownish tap water but it was also was a community within a larger society.

The Chelsea Hotel

Smith and Mapplethorpe made fast friends, eventually finding themselves regulars at Max's Kanas City, with its rowdy transgenders and Factory crowd, enjoying the Velvet Underground, the occasional house band. This was more Robert's thing as he idolized Andy Warhol. Smith and Maplethorpe were more conspirators than lovers at this point and she drifted into friendships with scenester Bob Neuwirth and Todd Rundgren. She learns intimately from poet Jim Carroll and the playwright, Sam Shepherd. Patti is privvy to Janis Joplin's boy troubles and Jim Hendrix tells her his dream of a new musical language.

Smith's own language sometimes feels that she read 'On the Road' at an impressionable age and never quite got over it. Her prose has some affectations: she calls fellow Chelsea Hotel residents, "inmates... guitar bums and stoned-out beauties in Victorian dresses." Making art is "an unholy ritual." She has hippie-dippy superstitions; birthdays of famous poets are often propitious. Hipspeak colors her interactions (maybe this reviewer, with his allegiance to many formalities of language would be too "square" for the scene he idealizes) and she and Robert often speak of magic. So she may have had a beat fetish, I will grant her this: she was a friend to Burroughs, Ginsberg tried to pick her up (he mistook her for a 'pretty boy') and she loaned money to Corso to support his junk habit.

There are a lot of famous names in 'Just Kids,' but Smith does not drop them to prove her worth-- she seems as much at awe at her good fortune as we are. But for all their fame, the rock stars and celebrity artists are only background characters here. The story through it all belongs to the kids, Patti and Robert. The memoir begins and ends on a cold day in March 1989, when Robert dies of AIDS complications. By then, they'd drifted apart, Smith to a family and recording career in Detroit, Mapplethorpe to a stellar artistic career as a photographer. They reconnect because of his illness and once in touch, the old patterns return and they understand anew a quality of friendship that is uniquely theirs. It's a love story between friends and to feel Smith tell it, those impoverished years when Mapplethorpe was her greatest companion is worth all the gold records on the wall. A trip to Coney Island in 1969 suggests the purity of this friendship beautifully: "We were just ourselves that day, without a care... Only weeks before we had been at the bottom, but our blue star, as Robert called it, was rising. We boarded the F train for the long ride back, returned to our little room, and cleared off the bed, happy to be together."

So what is a kid in New York City with paint on his hands a tumblr site that no one visits is supposed to take home from all this? It could happen to you too and that might help a person navigate optimistically the next couple months as he struggles to pay his rent and make the time to create something that might find an audience, or better, a champion.

* This piece was originally published in Heso Magazine

Freedom Is Fun! Freedom Is Good! Freedom Is Sexy!

2011-09-26T10:59:00.010+09:00

That Jonathan Franzen’s fourth novel, Freedom, debuted at #1 on the Fiction section of the New York Times Bestsellers List in September last year is one of those phenomenal outliers that defy the logic of free market capitalism. It’s not that it has no business being #1 when the spot is usually held by the likes of Henry Potter and Danielle Steele— on occasion there are tremendous works of literature that manage to win public adulation (although it doesn’t happen anywhere near as much as it used to)— what makes Franzen’s sales trumping remarkable is that it is a case of dog biting the proverbial hand. Freedom is an angry work of literary activism that wholeheartedly skewers the celebrated virtues of capitalism— unrestricted growth, consumer branding, mass production— indicting nearly every American, who whether they feel guilty about it or not, enjoy unsustainable lifestyles that are a “cancer on the planet.” Freedom is a novel that Al Gore might have written had he the imagination to portray the extravagant waste of the Bush era as an American family in microcosm.

The family in Freedom is the Berglunds, Walter and Patty, who raised their son, Joey, and daughter, Jessica in St. Paul, Minnesota. On the surface, to neighbors for example, they are secular middle-class Democrats. But in literature, a character is rarely just a character; just as often it is a metaphor for an idea. Walter is an environmentalist with a Malthusian obsession of population growth, a “nice” guy who loves his wife in spite of her eccentricities and lingering depressiveness. Because she was once a basketball “jock,” Patty has a very competitive spirit that shadows every decision she makes. She is a stay-at-home mother, an atheist, and an adulterer. The person she has a long-term affair with is Richard Katz, a moody, womanizing post-punk front man, and Walter’s long time best friend. This rather untenable and scandalous development is the personal drama of the novel. At its bones, Freedom is the story of a Midwestern family growing up and growing old, weathering the inevitable life crises that is the fate of all of us.

At 562 pages, Freedom is quite a bit more than just a tricky love triangle. It’s not possible to describe the many subplots of the novel but suffice it to say, the political undercurrent begins in the novel’s first paragraph referencing an item in the New York Times about Walter making “quite a mess of his professional life out there in Washington… in trouble now for conniving with the coal industry and mistreating country people,” in methods described as “arrogant” and “ethically compromised.” How “nice” Walter got into so much trouble is a mystery that beguiles the reader to understand what might have developed.

But horses will be held: we’re almost 300 pages into the novel before Franzen lets us inside Walter’s life with the close third person. The novel, carved into jigsaw pieces that slowly fit together, begins in St. Paul, describing how the Berglunds had become the inspiration of playful, if sometimes malicious gossip, as conveyed in the tone of an omniscient scuttlebutt. Their next-door neighbor, Carol Monaghan, falls in love with a noisy, self-righteous Republican, Blake, while her daughter, Connie, seduces Patty and Walter’s son, Joey, who leaves his family to move in with the Monaghans, disappointing Walter and devastating Patty. It’s comic and sad and seems to suggest that American families, for all their secrets, can’t help exposing their dirty laundry.

The second section is a long “autobiography,” called “Mistakes Were Made,” written by Patty, a Babushka doll-like story within a story in which Patty writes about her social awkwardness, her rape experience, her desire to get away from her parents and “special” siblings. When she finishes high school in Westchester, New York, she attends the University of Minnesota, plays collegiate basketball, and falls in love with her best friend’s boyfriend, Richard Katz, who fronts a band called The Traumatics, singing derivative punk ditties like “I Hate Sunshine.” At a Traumatics show, she meets Walter, who comes from a rural dysfunctional family that doesn’t appreciate his intellectual curiosities and strong work ethic. Richard and Walter are challenging thinkers—they can recognize the bullshit of the Reagan-Thatcher era they’re entering—but diverge wildly with their attitudes toward women. Richard has the rock star’s gratuitous one-bite-and-throw-‘em-away appetite. Walter, sensitive beyond reason, falls in love with Patty, who has a thing for Richard, who doesn’t reciprocate her feelings but thinks she’s pretty unique for a jock. Patty is grateful for Walter’s many kindnesses though she’d throw it all away for a wild night with Richard. The triangle’s degrees thus first measured.

Patty, recognizing that by choosing one man she loses the other, hedges her bet, and marries Walter even though she’s not nor could ever be in love with him. But Walter is smitten and acquiesces to her bourgeois middle class desires—buying and renovating a house, finding a good-paying job and starting a family that she stays at home to raise even though he’s a Malthusian feminist, suggesting that for Patty’s sake he compromises on his ideal woman, that of the childless working professional.

Not all crushes go unrequited however and years later there is a short weekend with Richard, brisker yet much more intense than the average honeymoon. It’s a betrayal that’s horrible for the both of them—Richard and Patty are essentially competitive people whose touchstone for goodness is Walter. And for Patty their amorous aberration magnifies the emptiness in her life:

“She had all day every day to figure out some decent and satisfying way to live, and yet all she ever seemed to get for all her choices and all her freedom was more miserable. The autobiographer is almost forced to the conclusion that she pitied herself for being so free.”

Patty drifts into depression while Richard discovers enormous success. In his early forties now, he draws from their affair a mature, quiet, lyrical alt-country album that goes multi-platinum, turning him into a reluctant celebrity. It’s the kind of CD bought by people who like Norah Jones or the “Brother, Where Art Thou” soundtrack: easy listening background music for people who don’t really have sensibility or taste, something Starbucks might promote as a tie-in, a stocking stuffer. It’s so disheartening for Richard to become a profitable product for capitalists that he quits the industry altogether to go back to his day job of roofing. Having been spewed out by the star-making machine, he can only express his fall from artistic integrity in bitterly cynical terms:

“We in the Chiclet-manufacturing business are not about social justice, we’re not about accurate or objectively verifiable information, we’re not about meaningful labor, we’re not about a coherent set of national ideals, we’re not about wisdom. We’re about choosing what WE want to listen to and ignoring everyone else.”

An inevitability in American exceptionalism and the cultivating of online personas in which our tastes and predilections are catalogued and itemized on social networking sites, Richard is speaking for all of us in the iEverything generation, zoning out on iPods, tweeting on iPhones, watching downloaded vampire flicks on iPads—generally oblivious to the Big Picture, that of the world going to hell in a hand basket. People may give lip service to the environment but self-interest prevails in habit and identity.

(As an interesting aside, how much of Jonathan Franzen is in Richard Katz? Franzen is more famous for refusing Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club seal of approval when she praised his last novel, The Corrections, than he is for receiving the National Book Award for the effort. In a famous Harpers essay from 1996, “Perchance to Dream,” he claims he sought to follow the example of author William Gaddis, in that the novelist should get out of the way of the novel: “no matter how attractively subversive self-promotion may seem in the short run, the artist who’s really serious about resisting a culture of inauthentic mass-marketed image must resist becoming an image himself, even at the price of certain obscurity.” Franzen doesn’t need to apologize his dissing Opraholic housewives who in his estimation didn’t have the necessary literary intelligence to understand The Corrections. Nor does he need to explain why such a contrarian viewpoint might be useful dramatic fodder.)

By this time, Walter and Patty have left St. Paul for D.C., where Walter has forged an unlikely working alliance with Vin Haven, a Texan multi-billionaire whose fortune was built on America’s limitless capacity for energy consumption. For all his professional faults (he also hunts with Dick Cheney and is pals with Bush) Vin is a bit of a birder and wants to preserve some considerable land in coal-rich West Virginia where a certain songbird, a cerulean warbler, breeds in its annual migration to and from the South American tropics.

Of course, when you’re dealing with wealthy, ambitious Texans, it is good to beware of looking gift horses in the mouth: the devil in the deal is MTR, mountaintop removal, a term most familiar to coal companies and green activists, in which a mountain is blasted and pillaged of its minerals. But once plundered, it is the responsibility of the coal company for reclamation, that is, reforestation of the surface. Walter wants to be an insider, a voice of conscience ensuring that the coal companies keep their word and build a biodiverse forest that will serve as a sanctuary for the cerulean warbler and other migratory words. But the compromises are obvious— condoning mountaintop removal, coal extraction, and the eviction of local families with longtime ancestral roots.

But Walter is no starry-eyed college student mired in Manichean us-and-them trenches. It’s better than nothing and it gives him access to unprecedented capital for his more important project: putting population control on the mainstream activist agenda. The correlation between rising population levels and rising energy use is obvious. Walter believes it might be checked with responsible “breeding.” He wants to marginalize big families living in big houses with big lawns, which, though sensible of course, is like scribbling earnest agitprop over a picture postcard of the American Dream. In Walter’s own words: “We just want to make having babies more of an embarrassment. Like smoking’s an embarrassment. Like being obese is an embarrassment.”

In order to make it work, Walter has invited Richard to work with them on the message. He needs Richard because Richard is famous and cool and thus people want to follow his example: “Join rock legend Richard Katz in Washington this summer.” Richard, bitterly cynical yet generally apathetic, is more intrigued by Lalitha, Walter’s young, lovely, energetic Bengali-American personal assistant. It seems to Richard that Walter and Lalitha have, if not “a thing,” then some powerful chemistry going on and Lalitha has an obvious crush on Walter. She lives upstairs from Walter and Patty in D.C.. So it seems to Richard that their triangle has expanded into a quadrangle. And we are then well into our characters’ midlife crises, from which personal catastrophes— the stuff of page-turning literature— is wrought.

Nearly ten years after Franzen snubbed Oprah for recommending The Corrections, Oprah Winfrey came out last year with a ringing endorsement for Freedom. It is not surprising she would like the novel— Franzen has a gift of interweaving the micro and the macro, the family and the nation, that Leo Tolstoy was so tremendous at (Oprah is a big Tolstoy fan). But though I had posited some of Jonathan Franzen was in Richard Katz, it is likely that a lot more of Jonathan Franzen is in Walter Berglund. If Franzen wants his Cassandra calls for temperate energy use heeded, then he needs the largest possible audience and with Oprah comes her common touch, a medium that connects his ecological concerns to those millions of American housewives who might otherwise glance at his novel’s title and girth, shrugging, “Meh, too political.”

Franzen writes ‘social novels,’ a certain kind of fiction that holds a mirror up to the society that has produced the conditions that gives the social novel its raison d’etre. In this increasingly distracted media culture we’ve entered, it is becoming increasingly difficult to process the warning signs when we have the “democratic” options of channel changing and googling. With so many entertainment options, it becomes increasingly difficult to recognize our limitations— social, political, economic, special— much less care. Walter puts it best while pitching his Free Space campaign to limit population growth to Richard:

“We can never sit down and have any kind of sustained conversation, it’s all just cheap trash and shitty development. All the real things, the authentic things, the honest things are dying off. Intellectually and culturally, we just bounce around like random billiard balls, reacting to the latest random stimuli.”

In that same Harper’s essay from 1996, Franzen wrote, “Expecting a novel to bear the weight of our whole disturbed society—to help solve our contemporary problems— seems to me a peculiarly American delusion.” It’s just a book and not only that but a work of fiction. But the purpose of art, unlike argument and documentary, is a transformative experience. Art affects the heart more than it does the head; more often it is emotion, rather than reason, that is the source of our convictions. And perhaps in literature a political message can become more palatable because in this forum ideas are explored rather than declared. Franzen, perhaps aware of the rare privilege bestowed upon him— a polemical artist with mainstream reach and generous publicity—is willing to challenge that delusion and like Walter Berglund, utilize his authorial star power to reach those normally impervious to such viewpoints.

But how successful can such ambitions be? It may very well depend on your existing political framework as well as preferential taste. Some critics believe that literature is blighted by politics, i.e. the world is already a bad place and we need not be reminded of it when our agenda is escapism. The Amazon.com page for Freedom is especially contentious. The book rates only three out of five stars; there are as many one star reviews as five. Not a few people hate Franzen, his ideas, and most especially, his books.

But should we take what Franzen said in 1996 at face value? That it is “delusional” that a novel could enter the national conversation as a voice of conscience counterweighing our extravagance? Should we make allowances that the world has changed enough in the fifteen preceding years that artists have been politicized, embracing a sense of duty in spite of the accompanying baggage of delusions, hatred, and ridicule? To my mind, it’s worth it. We are better off with Jonathan Franzen than without him. We need more event books populated by rational environmentalists and selfish nihilists instead of teenaged vampires and boy magicians.

Freedom defines a decade— it was the idea of ‘freedom’ that morally guaranteed our bombardment and, later, privatization of Iraq and it was ‘freedom’ behind the motivation of banks making questionable loans to people buying McMansions beyond their means to afford them. American freedom has hardly changed since we defeated the Soviets in the Cold War—that is, the freedom to buy whatever you want, whether its blue jeans or rock and roll LPs or Italian sports cars, the layman’s simple explanation why capitalism, perhaps imperfect, remains the world’s best economic model. Yet the correlation between freedom and purchasing power is so obvious it must confound the political philosopher that there is not more violence in the streets. When we say we want our MTV, we don’t mean we want to watch the cable network—we want lifestyle freedom, liberated from our economic limits.

When luxury becomes the end game of freedom (private jets and gated communications its apotheosis) getting there is going to be competitive. You could argue those who invested in defense and energy blue chips in the aftermath of 9/11 were vultures fattening on our freedom to bomb Islamic countries and pillage and pollute the earth but you might also say such investments were exceptionally prescient (or pragmatic). Walter and Patty’s son, Joey, a burgeoning Republican, suffers a massive crush on Jenna, a high-maintenance rich girl who believes that “…the world wasn’t fair and was never going to be fair, that there would always be big winners and big losers, and that she personally, in the tragically finite life that she’d been given, preferred to be a winner and to surround herself with winners.”

Joey has his own interesting subplot. It involves pro-war Jewish American think tanks and parasitical war profiteers. Joey, who has an independent streak and a contentious relationship with both Walter and Patty, becomes immersed in a shady business deal (involving a company modeled on Halliburton) that would make him incredibly wealthy but would almost certainly consequence in dead Americans overseas in Iraq. Herein lies the true freedom of a human being, that of trying to determine and act upon the right thing. With financial and personal needs, the answer is not always obvious:

“He didn’t know what to do, he didn’t know how to live. Each new thing he encountered in life impelled him in a direction that fully convinced him of its rightness, but then the next new thing loomed up and impelled him in the opposite direction, which also felt right.”

It’s not easy being free. Sometimes it takes an 18-years-old kid speaking off the cuff to frame the discussion perfectly:

“Isn’t that what freedom is for? The right to think whatever you want? I mean, I admit, it’s a pain in the ass sometimes.”

*This piece was originally appeared in Heso Magazine.

Parting. Sweet. Sorrow.

2011-06-30T02:00:00.004+09:00

Bear with me: at this eleventh hour, I feel compelled to attempt the complex task of fitting eight years of my life into a short essay. I wasn’t planning on doing this—the haphazard entry dating in my journal attesting that self-reflection, at least the kind organized on paper or screen in paragraph format, has not been my strong suit of late. When the personal life moves fast, rare is the indulgent hour in which the whirlwind can be tamed with coherence. And at this particular moment, the personal life is moving particularly fast.

I could tell you about watching my last sunset from a terrace I called home for more than five beautiful years but that would be getting ahead of myself. Rewinding some eight years ago, I first landed in Tokyo on the 27^th of February, 2003. At the time I had not expected to stay long in Japan. Not a week into arrival, I had lucked upon representation for my first novel (any good news or career advancements in an artist’s life is 90% luck, 10% talent). My agents at the time were excited about my story, eager for it to make the rounds in large New York publishing houses. They were certain of imminent success. I imagined returning that summer as some kind of hero, feted by a literary community apologetic for overlooking me for so long. It seemed then my primary reason for leaving America in the first place—disgust with the direction of Bush America— had been misguided. Watching footage of the Iraq War my third week abroad, a war in which I’d marched in protest against, I felt the world I’d known (the one I had always felt comfortable writing about) needed my attention. After all, I had to come up with a story for my second book and being a fictionist interested in the social novel, I was confused how exactly I would do this away from America, embedded in a culture to which I had virtually no experience or genuine interest.

There it was, the ugly truth. I had none of the idiosyncratic curiosities that draw so many foreigners to Japan. I didn’t really care about karate or manga or ikebana or anime or video games or Zen gardening or kimonos or design or tea ceremony or karaoke or J Pop or kawaii culture. I didn’t know anything about the language, was not a huge fan of sashimi, and had no real yen for Japanese girls. What I liked was literature and cinema and though there were some great masters in both disciplines, I wasn’t avid enough a fan that it warranted relocating across the Pacific.

As I said, I’d wanted to get out of America— America and its corporate gangsters and its strip mall environmental character and its fanaticism with war and revenge— I found deplorable its rank materialism for her winners and dead-end cages for its losers. I’d wanted a break from all that, a place where I’d make enough money to travel. America might have been a horror show, but I craved a frame of reference, journeys within other cultures and figured that Japan, for all its recessionary gloom was a place I might make enough cash to fund adventure.

Some plans bear out, others don’t. My novel didn’t make the grade in New York and my agents and I eventually parted ways due to creative differences. It would take me nearly five years to compose my second novel. It takes place in India, a country I’ve visited five times. I have been extraordinarily fortunate for my travels (occasional lucrative bookings as well as commissions from a national travel magazine) but this story is not about India or my novels or even how things pan out exactly as you hoped (your career as a novelist excepted). It’s about Japan, particularly Tokyo, and the home I’ve made for myself.

Last Thursday, the 23^rd of June, a moving van came to the apartment in Meguro I have shared with my girlfriend, Ariko, for more than five years. They took everything we needed to Kyoto, our new home city beginning this September. After a dinner at a local Thai restaurant we’ve enjoyed for years, Ariko left on the bullet train to manage the storage of our things on the other side. I have stayed on alone with just a backpack, a few books and items of clothes, a computer, and a ragged Thai cushion to sleep on. The areas uncovered by sofas, fridges, washing machines are amok with tufts of dust and undesirable matter. All that’s left of the pictures, drawings, charms, and mementoes on our wall is the tape’s sticky residue and a few thumbtacks. Our rock garden is bagged and boxed, the houseplants drinking Kansai water down south, the sofa where I’d loved to loll for the occasional afternoon nap, gone. There is no more music. The gas is off, the showers are cold, the pantries are bare. The air-con still works, as does the Internet, giving the place the feel of a squatter’s paradise. Home is as much about possessions and person as it is place and it’s hard sometimes remembering what was once was. Something’s already gone. I’ve compensated by sleeping at friends’ places, though last night I bedded down on the Thai sofa, awoken at five a.m. by an aggressive mosquito.

From those early times of asylum and dreams through my current last days of Tokyo residency, a lot of things went right, a lot of things went wrong. Nearly every aspect of Japanese culture of which I had once been indifferent I now entertain very strong feelings (some loving, many loathing). If I might never altogether adapt to the culture, it does not mean that I haven’t found communities within, and within these communities, good friends that make urban life bearable.

At times, it can be very difficult to enjoy Tokyo. When the enormous crowds lose their novelty, they are simply annoying. As are the lights, the barkers, and the buskers. While I have acquired a strong appreciation for the national cuisine, for all its pretensions of a Michelin-rich restaurant scene, it can be an expensive, disappointing trial-and-error journey finding a decent bean burrito, pepperoni pizza slice, or pan of squid paella. Teeth-grinding music blares constantly from storefront speakers and politicians sloganeer from obnoxious election vans. The youth culture frightens the sensible with its hopeless mediocrity and tasteless heroes. Too many read manga, not enough read books. The geek culture, its obsession with cartoon porn and blow-up dolls, is completely beyond my comprehension.

But for all that I was happy here. Tokyo doesn’t lead itself to a singular understanding—it’s a collection of fragments that never add up to a whole. You get lucky when you find your community. Luckily, I found a few. The reality then is not the city itself, but the home you’ve made for yourself and the friends you keep. Eight months abroad can only become eight years via a series of accidents. Nothing was planned. I simply got lucky.

Having been terrible at self-reflection all this time, I cannot begin to imbue it with any higher meaning beyond this. It’s too late for swift and decisive declarations and I’d be a fool to commit myself to revelation. And Tokyo, as anyone who has spent any amount of time here can assert, defies any assessment beyond the usual clichés of enormousness, peculiarness, and bedlam. What I can say for sure holds true for any other city—that if you can leave in better shape than when you arrived, the city has been good to you. And when you consider your person-metropolis relationship in this context and you come out on the plus, then your complaints might be a bit shrill. But then when you and the city you adopted for some considerable and impressionable period of your life fall a little short of greatness, it’s no big deal. Fallibility is what makes things real.

I feel sad in this coming darkness, this end of things. The sentimental fool feels saddest when something splendid has passed into ephemera. He will miss all of it, especially, the things he’s taken for granted, the things he looked at ten thousand times. He knows this move is significant— he’s getting older but it does not make him any wiser. He is, in fact, a fool. A fool enjoys his foolishness, most especially because it makes him feel connected to the greater powers within and without.

So he says, ‘Sayonara, then, for now…’ and means it, swearing some kind of bittersweet return, knowing it will never feel quite the same way again.

The Beguiling Charms of Handsome Self-Interest

2011-06-16T18:29:00.015+09:00

"It don't take long to kill things. Not like it does to grow."

-- Melvyn Douglas (Homer)

It is entirely natural that formative personalities with a thing for cinema will gravitate towards Paul Newman. From the late 1950s through the early 1970s he’d picked up where James Dean left off, becoming the embodiment of the handsome, brooding rebel, a man at home with tough guys and dangerous ladies, operating outside mainstream moral codes. Because becoming an adult entails following societal rules—the wife, the job, the mortgage, the taxes, the Judeo-Christian value system— flouting them, or at least making it up as you go along, can make a man feel unique, alone among a crowd of dullards, though all his desperado might be, at best, a smokescreen covering up the insecurity about making one’s way in the world, and at worst, a tragic absence of real human empathy.

Of all Paul Newman’s films, the one I think best embodies this juxtaposition of charming hustler and selfish man-boy is Martin Ritt’s Hud, based on the novel Horseman, Pass By, written by Larry McMurtry. Produced in 1963, Newman plays the eponymous Hud, a philandering cowboy who works for his father, Homer Bannon (Melvyn Douglas), and razzes his nephew, Lonnie (Brandon De Wilde) and housekeeper, Alma (Patricia Neal). They live on a ranch in a large spread in remote cattle country Texas. The crisis in the story involves one of their cows dying of foot-and-mouth: a highly contagious livestock infection that requires special quarantine measures as well as the immediate slaughter of all infected animals to contain the disease.

James Hong's cinematography sometimes reminds you

of Edward Hopper surveying Texas

Of course, the right thing to do is to follow the law. Homer doesn’t like the situation one bit— he’s been a rancher all his life and stands to lose his fortune. But the alternative is knowingly swindling his neighbors, passing his crisis on people who trust his word, which not only means bankrupting a man after looking a man in the eye with a strong handshake but also possibly unleashing an epidemic that could affect the region, if not the nation, infecting millions of cows and financially ruining hundreds of other families, who like the Bannons, have been living off the land for generations. But that’s exactly what Hud proposes to do before the government veterinarian can declare an emergency situation: “Let us put some of our bread in that gravy while it’s still hot.”

Beware of men bearing flowers?

Caught between Homer’s sense of duty and Hud’s self-interest is Homer’s grandson, Lonnie, an impressionable sixteen-year-old getting to the age where he is figuring out what kind of man he wants to be. It’s not such an easy path. Soft-spoken, addicted to cowboy ballads on his wireless, he admires Hud’s way with women, the devil-may-care attitude that puts him in daily situations most sensible men would recognize as dangerous, like driving drunk and tomfooling with married women. Living off his family wealth and good looks, Hud acts impulsively with a sense of entitlement oblivious to naysayers and moralists. For a kid suffering both hormones and virginity politely, the spectacle of a man that gets what he wants—what society fetishes but does not altogether condone, that of the virile, uninhibited lothario— is heady inspiration.

Uncle Hud and his corruptible nephew

Essentially then, Hud is a family drama about the contestation of two ways of life. And though we naturally sympathize with Homer, we can’t help liking Hud. Newman’s performance inspires every man’s inner sixteen-year-old. We know he’s wrong, even morally repugnant, but Newman plays him so charming that the audience— women, but especially men— forgive him. This is good for a film but bad for us as a species. That we could be so bamboozled by charisma suggests why so much has gone wrong for America in the last thirty years. The character, Hud, epitomizes the late twentieth century politicking corporate cowboy that would connive us out of our clean skies and untouched frontiers with huckster good ol’ boy hucksterism.

“Don’t plant ‘em where I park,” he barks at the housekeeper, Alma, after she reprimands him for driving over her flowers. It’s a small detail—an automobile crushing a delicate patch of Mother Nature— but suggestive of how little Hud is tied to the land. He has none of his father’s frontier spirit. There is no romanticizing this vast, stark, dusty landscape. A modern man trapped in rural Texas, Hud is a new kind of pioneer, the technocratic cowboy, much more comfortable behind the steering wheel of a convertible than holding the reins of a horse.

Hud anticipates the opportunist millionaire oilman that would transform Texan power. His father, Homer, senses that his son represents the changing times. When it becomes clear that the family’s situation has become perilous and it’s suggested that they drill for resources, Homer rails beautifully against a future landscape ruined by tractors, derricks, and tarmac scarring up God’s country: “What can I do with a bunch of rotten oil wells? I can’t ride out there and prowl amongst them like I can my cattle… I can’t feel a smidgen of pride in them. I want money to come from that something that keeps a man doing for himself.”

The moral contest escalates as it becomes certain that their cattle will be ruled dangerous. But Homer never doubts there is any other way than living by his conscience. “I want out of this spread what I put into it,” Hud tells his father. It leads to a painful confrontation in which Homer reprimands his son in the clearest possible language: “You don’t give a damn… You don’t care about people… You don’t value nothing. You don’t respect nothing. You don’t check your appetites. You live just for yourself which makes you not fit to live with.” Lonnie expresses some solidarity for his uncle, arguing that Hud may be selfish but he’s not so different from everybody else. Homer, recognizing that he may lose his grandson to Hud’s easy living, responds sadly, “Little by little the look of the country changes because of the men we admire.”

The bulldozer & the horseman

It’s a beautiful line, prescient of our contemporary celebrity culture that has blurred the traditional merits of heroism. I don’t remember exactly how I felt watching Hud fifteen years ago other than liking the film and loving Paul Newman for it. But watching it recently, I no longer felt empathy for his character, only tremendous respect for Newman for giving such a contemptuous antihero magnetic charisma. From this viewing many years later, I have to wonder what kind of person I was at twenty that I could be taken with a character so symbolic of man’s capacity to trample the earth and his fellow men. Is it just me? Or is it a mistake nearly every young man makes in his long journey to goodness?

Chrome Jell-o

2011-06-01T15:56:00.007+09:00

“For if one had an imagination vivid enough and a sympathy sufficiently sensitive really to comprehend and to feel the sufferings of other people, one would never have a moment's peace of mind... One is always alone in suffering; the fact is depressing when one happens to be the sufferer, but it makes pleasure possible for the rest of the world.”

--Aldous Huxley

Crome Yellow

The problem for the author who writes a landmark novel is that once he or she has departed and is thus no longer capable of putting out new work, it is all too easy for posterity to associate him or her with that single legendary text. Herman Melville might have believed it all right we revere Moby Dick but it hardly stands to think that Jack Kerouac— who published eighteen novels in his lifetime and who disassociated himself from the Beat Generation—would be pleased that outside his small, committed fan base, anything not titled On the Road is mostly yellowing, dusty, forgotten, unread. It might be said that for any author who desires immortality, a beloved masterpiece is the ticket, but a caveat of oblivion for the remaining oeuvre is fair warning.

Aldous Huxley was one of those great geniuses who wrote one of the twentieth century’s masterpieces, Brave New World, which with its test tube babies, soma addiction, and sexual promiscuity predicts the pleasure principle of our contemporary times. It deserves its place in the literary canon but like said conundrum for many writers, most readers stop right there, as if all there was to know of Huxley and his godlike omniscience of the human condition was in that small, lovely book.

Published in 1922, Crome Yellow, Huxley’s first novel, demonstrates his unique gift for language, theorizes some of the blueprint that would become Brave New World, and vaguely predicts the Second World War as well as the eventual apotheosis of the machine as man’s best friend.

Crome Yellow is a quietly subversive parable, the whole of which takes place on the eponymous castle estate in the English countryside. It is less a story and more a forum for Huxley to air his many social theories regarding history, politics, reason, madness, love, and poetry. Not much really happens: a small party from Britain’s leisure class has congregated for the season to banter, create, review, discuss, and feast. The reader enters and leaves this tableau with Denis, a young, middling poet with a few published broadsheets and a modest book of verse to his name. His hosts, the Wimbushes, have a niece, Anne, whom Denis is hopelessly in love with (in the desperate, maddening vein romantic poets are wont) but whom treats Denis cynically as she would a kid brother for whose best intentions raise only snickering. She is more drawn to Gombauld, an artist of some repute and Byronic handsomeness.

Among the other guests, the primary character of interest is Mr. Scogan, who looks “like an extinct saurian… his nose was beaked…the skin of his wrinkled brown face had a dry and scaly look; his hands were the hands of a crocodile.” A friend and contemporary of Henry Wimbush, he is something of a pedantic, a bore, a philosopher king and, conjecturally, a mouthpiece for Huxley. He also has many of the novel’s choicest lines. Upon learning Denis is at work on a novel, in Scogan’s assumption of the plot he indicts nearly every writer of the 1920s, including, one supposes, Huxley himself:

“I’ll describe the plot for you. Little Percy, the hero, was never good at games, but he was always clever. He passes through the usual public school and the usual university and comes to London, where he lives among artists. He is bowed down with melancholy thought; he carries the whole weight of the universe upon his shoulders. He writes a novel of dazzling brilliance; he dabbles delicately in Amour and disappears, at the end of the book, into the luminous Future.”

His spot-on assessment humiliates Denis who vows quietly to tear the pages to pieces when he unpacks later that night. It’s a bad start for a young artist of marginal confidence and it’s a slippery slope from there. When alone with Anne he often contextualizes their time together by quoting poetry, an affectation which his muse calls “a bad habit.” In a setting of larger-than-life personalities at home with confirmed belief systems, the work-in-progress Denis inevitably flubs his lines (his social ineptness and half-cooked awareness is not dissimilar to Huxley’s more famous punching bag, Bernard Marx.) However, due his ingenuousness, Denis is an ideal sounding board, especially for the talkative Scogan, who often pins him down with breathless soliloquies.

Huxley would not publish Brave New World for another decade but here are the seeds being planted by Mr. Scogan, a self-described realist in an age of madmen. Anticipating the Greek alphabetical hierarchy of Huxley’s imagined future is a rough sketch of what would become the human organizing system of his greatest novel:

“In the Rational State, human beings will be separated out into distinct species, not according to the color of their eyes or the shape of their skulls, but according to the qualities of the their mind and temperament. Examining psychologists…will test each child that is born and assign it to its proper species. Duly labeled and docketed, the child will be given the education suitable to members of its species, and will be set, in adult life to perform those functions which human beings of his variety are capable of performing.”

This so-called Rational State consists of three distinct groups: the Directing Intelligences, the Men of Faith and the Herd. The breakdown is self-explanatory: the Intelligences devise the system, the Men of Faith sell it and the Herd follows orders. Of Denis’ role in this future society, Scogan is at a loss. Denis being independent but neither persuasive nor clearheaded, Scogan “can see no place for you; only the lethal chamber.”

Huxley before the Future

Denis’ host, Henry Wimbush, is a scion of some fortune. His magnum opus is a history of the village of Crome and especially the castle where they reside. On two occasions, Henry reads from his historical tome. One story involves an ancestor named Hercules, a dwarf, while another relates three sisters feigning an anorexic appetite as pseudo-spirituality. The first story is decidedly tragic, the second comic, which seems true for the novel as well. Although Huxley’s narrative voice is sportily sardonic, the philosophical musings on the future reflect an anxiety about the end result of technology intertwining itself with the worst instincts of human nature.

When the consequence is not deadly, it may be simply alienating. Even the affable Wimbush isn’t very much interested in mankind. Being a character in a Huxley novel, he is thoughtful, given to intelligent musings with some remarkable capacity to witness the distant future. Confiding with Denis the night of the country fair, Wimbush describes his own utopian vision:

“Perhaps, in the future, when machines have attained to a state of perfection—for I confess that I am, like Godwin and Shelley, a believer in perfectibility, the perfectibility of machinery—then, perhaps, it will be possible for those who, like myself, desire it, to live in a dignified seclusion, surrounded by the delicate attentions of silent and graceful machines, and entirely secure from any human intrusion.”

Huxley is not describing television, video games, and the Internet, or any of the quotidian appliances that guarantee a self-sufficient existence. But he knew human nature and its pull over us like moths to the flame. Would the descendants of Henry Wimbush bother hosting a party of individuals for the summer season if it stood to interrupt their online presence?

The answer is difficult to say. Denis might disagree. Humiliated multiple times he nevertheless needs other people to exist himself. He has no true form without recognition from others. In his own words:

“The individual is not a self-supporting universe. There are times when he comes into contact with other individuals, when he is forced to take cognizance of the existence of other universes beside himself.”

If we are to survive as a viable, energetic, empathetic species, may it always be so.

Time Has Come Today

2011-05-30T08:59:00.008+09:00

“You may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?”

--David Byrne

“When does a fake Mohawk become a real Mohawk? Who decides? How do you know when it’s happened?”

--Rhea from A Visit From the Goon Squad

I believe it was in my mid-twenties when I began downgrading my artistic aspirations from ‘the voice of a generation’ to what it has become ten years later in its more or less present incarnation, ‘a voice.’ It’s embarrassing looking back but there was a certain point of my life when I truly believed I would be one of those authors— the few, the proud— who would survive posterity not only as one of those writers whom people wanted to read but also whom they wanted to be. Hey, there’s still time and you never know but I’ve had to adjust my expectations into a more modest outlook. Sometimes I’m okay with this. Sometimes I’m not. I’m only human.

As you roll into your thirties, you should be hitting your career stride. When you aren’t, you can’t help but observe those who have. Particularly friends and acquaintances. If you dare go there, the route is peppered with questions, like, what is it about the neighbor’s grass? What makes it so green? Is it a human folly to envy the qualities of others or is it Madison Avenue marketing that has created this general dissatisfaction? Is the difference between happiness and discontent the difference between having chosen the life we lead and the life we have having chosen us? It doesn’t seem fair, does it? The way we are compared against the way we were supposed to be?

Whoever said introspection was for weenies never took a long, hard look at the mirror. ‘What if…?’ is the worst kind of self-interrogation since it almost always consequences in regret. This self, this person that we are leading now may be hard-won but isn’t necessarily the best person we could have been. Invariably something went wrong somewhere and this life we lead is the one we got stuck with, for better, for worse.

Disheartening this is, we can self-medicate. Sex, drugs, and rock and roll are viable options (but don’t they often mislead us away from our ideal selves?). Or one can read good literature that utilizes sex, drugs, and rock and roll to frame these questions. A worthwhile book need not answer the unanswerable— it’s enough that it reminds us that failure and humanity are cut from the same cloth and that this might be a beautiful thing.

It is certainly beautiful the way Jennifer Egan writes about it in her novel, A Visit From the Goon Squad, the closest a book has ever come to the literary equivalent of a solid mixed tape, rewinding and fast forwarding across the years, or perhaps ‘skipping’ over generation gaps, as the story—it travels between New York City, San Francisco, Naples, and Italy as well as from the early 1970s to the 2020s— is as much about the progress of technology as it is culture. The truth whether or not new technology is good or bad, necessary or distracting, safe or dangerous, nearly always depends on who’s asking. For those holding onto some yesteryear ideal, change is something to be despised, as Bennie Salazar, a record label owner who came of age in San Francisco’s late 1970s punk scene, wearies once the direction of his company changes after a corporate takeover:

“The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was digitalization, which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh. Film, photography, music: dead. An aesthetic holocaust!”

Just as our relationship to music and musicians evolves with technology (shrinking considerably from LPs to cassette tapes and CDs, disappearing totally as a tactile thing with the rise of the mp3), so does the way we communicate with one another. As Bix, an NYU student doing his postgrad in computer engineering in early 1993 tells his friends, “This computer-message-sending is going to be huge—way beyond the telephone…” But though Egan touches on facebook, google and how “the days of losing touch are almost gone,” she goes further: a preteen using Power Point slides to describe her family’s dysfunctional faults and then later to the near future when Instant Messaging has become the medium for our more difficult words as when Lulu shares with Alex on their “handsets” that she “Nvr met my dad. Dyd b4 I ws brn,” texting him this even though they are sitting across from each other in a café.

But now you’re wondering who’s Lulu? And who’s Alex? In 2021, they are working together using Internet bloggers called ‘parrots’ to word-of-mouth the upcoming concert of Scotty Hausmann, a publicity-shy, burnt-out slide guitarist who played in The Flaming Dildos, the same High School punk band Bennie played with in the 1970s. Scotty had unsuccessfully pined for Jocelyn, a girl who learned the fast life as Lou’s teenage mistress. Lou is a super successful rock and roll producer-cum-hedonist that mentors Bennie. Bennie marries Stephanie, a one-time protégée to La Doll, Lulu’s mother and a PR titan who falls from grace. Stephanie’s brother, Jules, is a journalist who goes to jail for assaulting a movie star named Kitty Jackson. Meanwhile, Bennie makes a name for himself in the music business discovering and recording a punk band named the Conduits. Around this time his factotum is Sasha, a beautiful redhead who euphemistically calls her shoplifted things, “found objects.” She survives a druggie stint in Naples and leaves New York and the music business when she reconnects with her college sweetheart, Drew, moving to Arizona to start a family. She has an autistic son obsessed with great pauses in rock and roll songs and a daughter who expresses herself with Power Point slides. If it seems very six-degrees-of-separation, it is. One story’s peripheral character is another’s hero.

And heroes they are in a very rock and roll sense of the word: interesting people making catastrophic mistakes, sometimes large, sometimes so small it is hard to know exactly where everything went wrong. Once The Flaming Dildos disbanded, why did Bennie wind up with his own record label and a corner office on Park Avenue with a fantastic view while Scotty performed janitorial functions and fished for his lunch in the East River? It doesn’t bother Scotty too much when he goes to see his old friend again because, “there was only an infinitesimal difference, a difference so small that it barely existed except as a figment of the human imagination, between working in a tall green glass building on Park Avenue and collecting litter in a park.”

Like the incremental movement of continental plates, pressures mount in our own lives to a breaking point, in which an inevitable seismic shift leaves a trail of victims, most especially ourselves. For Jules Jones, Bennie’s brother-in-law, once a promising, young writer who had come to New York full of ideas (“Who isn’t, at twenty-four?”), his decline began when he’d become another hack celebrity journalist. This is the late 1990s now and some are getting spectacularly wealthy while most are being left behind. His feeling is common to many of us, that sense of not belonging, of having missed some boat that’s not coming back for us. In a young, ingenuous film star, Kitty Jackson, he witnesses everything he will never be: beautiful, rich, successful, loved. His sole advantage over her, the one card he can play, is the knowledge that time, though slow and deliberate, takes no prisoners:

“Because Kitty is so young and well nourished, so sheltered form the gratuitous cruelty of others, so unaware as yet that she will reach middle age and eventually die (possibly alone), because she has not yet disappointed herself, merely startled herself and the world with her own premature accomplishments, Kitty’s skin—that smooth, plump, sweetly fragrant sac upon which life scrawls the record of our failures and exhaustion—is perfect.”

In a very confessional meta-me article for Details Magazine, he describes his attempted rape of Kitty in the canny, ironic prose so typical of magazine writing today, but briefly he too considers what went wrong:

“At what precise moment did you tip just slightly out of alignment with the relatively normal life you had been enjoying theretofore, cant infinitesimally to the left or the right and thus embark upon the trajectory that ultimately delivered you to your present whereabouts—in my case, Rikers Island Correctional Facility?”

It seems no accident then that the album central to this story should be called A to B, offered up by the Conduits’ former frontman, Bosco. Bosco was once a skinny, manic redhead known for his explosive live shows but he didn’t age well. As he explains to Stephanie, Bennie’s wife and his publicist, “The album’s called A to B, right? And that’s the question I want to hit straight on: how did I go from being a rock star to being a fat fuck no one cares about?” But A to B is not a comeback album— for Bosco it’s the only dignified way out of his messy life. It is his belief that this farewell tour should be a rock and roll suicide, “I want out of this mess. But I don’t want to fade away, I want to flame away— I want my death to be an attraction, a spectacle, a mystery. A work of art.”

Bosco believes his tour will be a success because of the public’s infatuation with “Reality TV.” Reality, of course, has everything to do with authenticity and is at play in the characters’ lives. It’s extremely important, yet somehow elusive, as being real is knowing oneself. As Rhea says enviously of her friend Alice, “I can’t tell if she’s actually real, or if she’s stopped caring if she’s real or not. Or is not caring what makes a person real?”

It’s not an easy question, but there might be some connection between authenticity and happiness, at least in this literary world. We are always in the act of becoming: artists, doctors, drug addicts, hookers, lovers, husbands, fathers and mothers— and some roles work better than others. It often depends on who you’re partnered with. Jules’ sister, Stephanie, knows that Bennie is unfaithful and she suffers to keep their marriage intact. Witnessing the flabby, tragic mess of Bosco, once a promising singer, now a joke on her hands, is a straw-camel’s back revelation: her life is a sham and an unhappy one at that. Helplessly she thinks of the old days: “premarriage, preparenthood, pre-money, pre-hard drug renunciation, preresponsibility of any kind…going to bed after sunrise, turning up at strangers’ apartments, having sex in quasi public, engaging in daring acts that had more than once included (for her) shooting heroin, because none of it was serious. They were young and lucky and strong….”

… And perhaps, real.

* * * * * * *

Published in 2010, Jennifer Egan has already won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Two days after receiving the Pulitzer, she inked a deal with HBO to adapt A Visit From the Goon Squad into a television series. It’s no surprise. Like very few novels, it succeeds on visceral, literary, and spiritual levels. It’s bold: besides the Power Point chapter, her point-of-view shifts between the third person, close first person and even the second person in a way that the ‘you’ is not directed at the reader but at the self-critical narrator himself. Skipping around between years, places, and heroes does not feel jarring in the least bit. Each story feels self-contained, yet integral, not to the greater story, but the unifying theme, that which relates to the inevitability of personal change.

Perhaps nowhere in the novel is this exemplified better than when Sasha disappears to Naples and her stepfather sends her Uncle Ted out to search for her. Instead of looking for her, Ted, a tenured arts history professor at a minor university, spends most of his time wandering museums, the ruins of Pompeii, and labyrinthine alleyways. He is away from his family and unusually pensive. Why had he sexually disengaged himself from his wife, Susan, to the point that there could be no more true intimacy between them? From an initial rage, Susan mellows into a “sweet, eternal sunniness that was terrible in the way that life would be terrible without death to give it gravitas and shape.” What is so tragic about this turn of events is that he didn’t abandon his desire for any other reason than because he could. He had ruined her and now having found Sasha and trying to win her confidence to come back with him to America, he helplessly recalls a happy moment before everything was irrevocably ruined. Herein may be the saddest paragraph in a bittersweet book:

“On a trip to New York, riding the Staten Island Ferry for fun, because neither one of them had ever done it, Susan turned to him suddenly and said, ‘Let’s make sure it’s always like this.’ And so entwined were their thoughts at that point that Ted knew exactly why she’d said it: not because they’d made love that morning or drunk a bottle of Pouilly-Fuisse at lunch—because she’d felt the passage of time. And then Ted felt it, too, in the leaping brown water, the scudding boats and wind—motion, chaos everywhere—and he’d held Susan’s hand and said, ‘Always. It will always be like this.’”

Perhaps Ted was caught up in the moment but he was certainly not disingenuous. At the time he believed it was true. As Bosco says, “Time’s a goon.” The novel’s boogeyman is as invincible and irrepressible as any villain in literature. Time sets the booby traps and we’re the ones clumsy enough to step on them— yet it might not be our fault. We can’t be so hard on ourselves as we don’t always have as many choices as it may seem.

Fucking up is a life process as universal as birth, childhood, adolescence, marriage, aging, and death. Being inevitable thus, we can only hope that when it happens to us, it a) is not lethal and b) perhaps we learn something.

Not all of us are lucky enough to balance self-destruction with redemption. A comeback is not always in the works. But sometimes it may be enough to learn from our mistakes and carry on the best we can.

Sasha speaks for the novel, if not a good percentage of the human race when comforting her friend, Rob, after a failed suicide attempt she reminds him:

“We’re the survivors.”

This originally appeared in Heso Magazine

One Order of Freedom Fries Two Security Sodas Please

2011-05-26T10:13:00.008+09:00

“Everywhere you look—Britain, the States, western Europe--- people are sealing themselves off into crime-free enclaves. That’s a mistake—a certain level of crime is part of the necessary roughage of life. Total security is a disease of deprivation."

--J.G. Ballard

One of the great conundrums of a democracy, especially during a political era defined by a so-called War On Terror, is how to balance freedom with security. Like the mechanics of a seesaw, any action, whether it be the government’s or the individual’s, disequilibrates, favoring one value over another. It is not surprising that most governments choose security; what surprises is that the barbed wire walls, homeland bureaucracy, detention centers, security cameras, tapped phones and no-fly lists are proclaimed as tools to “protect our freedoms.” This argument— security as a means to freedom, an end— is a canard. In practice, there is no bargaining, it is one or the other, the seesaw going up or down. So for all the talk of freedom in America and elsewhere, it is a more frightening state of existence, one that is better dreamed than lived. That we should, in general, favor security over freedom makes me wonder if this is human nature or an evolutionary development made comfortable by the pleasures of Chinese takeout, wireless Internet, and three-hundred channels on cable TV.

I had not expected these questions to emerge when beginning a book called Cocaine Nights, but then I’m new to the dystopian fiction of J. G. Ballard. The narrator, a middle-aged travel writer named Charles Prentice, arrives in the small resort town of Estrella de Mar in Spain’s Costa Del Sol after his brother, Frank, pleads guilty to the murder of five individuals, setting fire to their cottage during a party with half the town in attendance. Charles is flabbergasted by his brother’s willingness to incriminate himself; he doesn’t believe his guilt is authentic. He moves in to his brother’s apartment, beds his paramour and takes on a job with Frank’s former colleagues.

While the titular cocaine may be in short supply firsthand, the drug’s inherent paranoia governs the storytelling. Charles is there to ask questions, to get at the truth and the truth being truth, especially when murder charges are involved, is a dangerous thing. He learns that Estrella de Mar is quite unlike most sleepy Costa Del Sol resorts in that people are actively participating in a cultural and intellectual life—taking sculpture classes and putting on Harold Pinter plays. There are sailboats rigged to the wind, waiting lists on the tennis courts and a busy nightlife centered around Club Nautico, where Frank, Charles’ brother, had worked once as manager. It’s a lot of activity for a strip of coast most famous for sitting around the pool or television, knocked out on pharmaceutical depressants.

But with artistic endeavors come criminal ones— seems the bored housewives are into cocaine as much as they are ashtanga yoga and not a few get mixed up in the local porno ring. In his search for the true culprit responsible for the deadly fire, Charles becomes involved with Bobby Crawford, the town’s blonde, beautiful, hyperactive resident philosopher-clown. Crawford is the mad social scientist responsible for Estrella de Mar’s cultural flowering. The problem with so many of the little resort towns of the Costa Del Sol, “people locking their doors and switching off their nervous systems,” has an unorthodox solution: inject a little petty crime into a community— vandalism, burglaries, car theft (victimless crime more or less) –- and its residents respond by coming together as a civic unit, forming committees, film clubs, and softball teams. Thus, if you take away a bit of security, you get freedom, or as Bobby Crawford puts it: “Sadly, crime is the only spur that rouses us. We’re fascinated by that ‘other world’ where anything is possible.”

If there’s a can of worms lying around, Ballard’s packing a Swiss army knife. Like many interesting novels, Cocaine Nights is a philosophical question tested in a narrative format. That crime is a catalyst for art— Ballard cites Shakespeare’s London and the Medicis’ Florence as examples— is an interesting idea. Moreover, the premise that men see this connection and will behave like gangsters in order to guarantee its flourishing is the stuff of good fiction. The only problem, as I see it, is that Ballard doesn’t successfully persuade me that crime inspires civic pride and the arts. It’s a nice try but the stuff of hardboiled fantasy.

We can assume that Bobby Crawford is Ballard’s mouthpiece, a Devil’s Advocate arguing a cloud’s silver lining. The logic at work is that crime causes individuals (some of them at least) to reflect on the precariousness of existence, concluding that as life is finite, it must be enjoyed and that this is best done by pleasuring in social taboos and expressing one’s creativity. Creativity, after all, is a strong expression of individualism, which of course is the essence of freedom, Mr. Hyde to security’s Dr. Jekyll.

Mr. Ballard--

the idealist dystopian or dystopian idealist?

For every Jazz Age with its bootleggers and masterpiece makers, there’s a dozen vice-ridden metropolises in which nothing beautiful developed. With all due respect to the artists of Washington DC and Camden, New Jersey, these two cities have consistently produced torrid crime and very little culture (at least little on a national level). Ballard’s thesis is provocative but it doesn’t hold up to logic. The Costa Del Sol is populated by the retired white-collar crowd. It does not follow that a middle manager or retired bank vice president would spontaneously develop an aesthetic vision just because his garage door is vandalized or some burglaries are reported in the neighborhood. Some aesthetic background and artistic energy are more important than a line of coke or a broken window.

Cocaine Nights was published in 1996. Had Ballard procrastinated on the book and witnessed the consequences of September 11^th, would he have even bothered giving form to his idea? In the novel’s view, the more spectacular the crime, the greater the stimulation to live. But that did not happen after 9/11. There was very little reflection on the reasons behind this great theatrical work of horror, no reevaluation of America’s role in the world and the enemies we’ve created in a foreign policy bent on total self interest. There was no renaissance in the arts. Instead pop culture witnessed a superhero boom in cinema, Harry Potter led the publishing industry into blockbuster dependency and no real innovative movements developed in pop music.

One could argue the terror of 9/11 engendered isolation and ennui and that the naughts were the true lost generation. What could have been a 1960s utopian outburst puttered out in Twitter feeds and blogs no one would bother to read. Our retreat is not wholly complete. Still, someone may yet discover the magic formula that produces an engaged, intellectual, artistic society. Until then, watch out for pickpockets. Should your wallet get pilfered, it’s a logical fallacy that from this inconvenience you may pen the Great American Novel.

Airborne Philosophy

2011-05-02T15:38:00.011+09:00

“A pilot’s business is with the wind, with the stars, with night, with sand, with the sea… He looks forward to port as to a promised land, and truth for him is what lives in the stars.”

--Antoine de Saint-Exupery

‘Philosopher’ really isn’t much of a career option these days, if it ever was a profession taken seriously by your average working man. Anyways, it hardly stands that a person sitting at home, doing not much more than sketching and organizing his or her thoughts can be expected to demonstrate some higher truth. The most vibrant ideas regarding that elusive concept known as “the meaning of life” are usually arrived at by men and women that have immersed themselves in the world, experience being a superior barometer of wisdom than intelligence. Thus, more than the Wall Street buccaneer it is often the gutter poet who understands life’s tragic inevitability far better, who, for all his material poverty, can articulate the arc of existence more beautifully.

It is no surprise then that those who come of age and choose a career that sends them forth into the world should return from their journeys with something valuable gleaned. Soldiers, sailors, circus performers not only travel but also witness human nature at its extremes, pieces of folly, glory and degradation providing potent color for a person’s scheme. A pilot is slightly more privileged in being literally above it all, on the very edge between earth and space. Is it the proximity to the heavens that gives the pilot his philosophical weight? The view of the Earth as God might look down upon it? Or possibly is it the risking of one’s life to elements of earth that are ferocious, capricious and untamable?

Flying is one of those modern conveniences so taken for granted that it is no longer special to fly and passengers need massive distractions with in-flight entertainment to pass the time. The idea of flight, once romanticized and later marveled as one of man’s greatest ingenuities, has the contemporary patina of plastic.

But it was not always so easy getting from one place to the next. In the early days of long-haul travel it was actually quite dangerous and emergency crash landings were hardly out of the question. We often think of air traffic as the movement of people but it is just as often the movement of people’s things— mementoes, documents, food, invoices, photographs, antiquities, contraband, love letters. FedEx and DHL are today’s major message carriers, but before the torch was privatized, airmail had been the domain of the state, a government job maybe, but one in which you could fly to the ends of the earth.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery is probably the most important pilot you might not have ever heard of. Even if you don’t know his name, you know his most famous work, The Little Prince, which is one of the best-selling and most-translated books in the history of the world. What Saint-Exupery manages in his children’s book is an adaptation of his general philosophy, summed up in his own words, “One sees clearly only with the heart. What is essential is invisible to the eyes.”

Saint-Exupery was as compulsive a graphophiliac as he was an aviator, publishing often throughout his brief life. Not as famous as his children’s book, Wind, Sand and Stars, is no less important in engaging the reader in his personal philosophical musings, that comprehensively, reads as some of the most beautiful humanistic espousals ever rendered.

The title references the pilot’s most elemental possessions composing his dangers, his bearings, and perhaps his inspirations. Saint-Exupery flew mail on the Toulouse-Dakar route, an occasionally fraught journey that took him over the Spanish Pyrenees and a great expanse of the Sahara Desert. This was in the 1920s and 1930s, at the twilight of the French colonial empire. In this golden age of aviation, pilots had far fewer instruments with which to monitor their journeys and thus survived only with sharp instincts and an aptitude for detail. They stored in their heads a bird’s eye’s lay of the land the way a stationmaster might rattle off timetables:

“Little by little, under the lamp, the Spain of my map became a sort of fairyland. The crosses I marked to indicate safety zones and traps were so many buoys and beacons. I charted the farmer, the thirty sheep, the brook. And, exactly where she stood, I set a buoy to mark the shepherdess forgotten by the geographers.”

It was a job Saint-Exupery loved, not for the responsibility of the mail he carried, but because it afforded him great frontiers for his insatiable curiosity. From his anecdotes, one senses a sensational dinner companion who greatly appreciates everything that had ever happened to him, no matter how small. His prose rings of vitality and gratitude in equal measures.

In Wind, Sand, and Stars, Saint-Exupery writes about his cherry flight, the brotherhood of pilots, the loneliness of the French colonial desert posts, the views over the Andes, the purchase and freeing of an African slave, emergency landings, and plenty of hair-raising episodes fighting wind to stave off a crash so as to fly one more day. But like any great writer, he is building towards something momentous and it is in the final two chapters in the book where Saint-Exupery becomes expansive not about airplanes and flying but about men and living.

In December, 1935, attempting a record-breaking flight from Paris to Saigon, Saint-Exupery crash-landed in the Libyan Desert. Saint-Exupery and his engineer survived but they didn’t know their coordinates and had only an orange, some grapes, and wine to survive. They had no wireless to communicate their situation and no idea which direction portended water, man, civilization. The rule of thumb recommended pilots stay close to their aircraft, as it was more likely for rescue teams to spot the crash site than wandering dots. But the Sahara was huge ground to cover and what if just over the next sand dune was a village with a well?

A friend of Saint-Exupery, Guillaumet, had crashed in the Andes a few years earlier and had survived. Survival is about will power as much as it is about wits. In moving across a limitlessly barren land, it is his friend’s words that he remembers and from which he gathers both motivation and hope: “What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step. It is always the same step but you have to take it.”

Over the next few days they wander from the plane searching, returning before nightfall, laying out an oil-slick tarp to collect whatever moisture accumulated over the night, retching afterwards. Hallucinations plague them. It would have been so easy for the both of them to lay down on the sand and sleep for all time, were it not for their family, who would have to go on without them:

“I was haunted by a vision of my wife’s eyes under the halo of her hat. Of her face I could see only the eyes questioning me, looking at me yearningly. I am answering, answering with all my strength! What flame cold leap higher than this that darts up into the night from my heart?”

Completely out of food and liquid they commit to a direction they hope is the sea and salvation. They become weary of an enveloping bright light that they believe will herald the end. Near death, they encounter a nomad who in giving them water and food and taking them in, saves their lives. Saint-Exupery writes of his gratitude thus:

“You, Bedouin of Libya who saved our lives, though you will dwell for ever in my memory yet I shall never be able to recapture your features. You are Humanity and your face comes into my mind simply as man incarnate. You, our beloved fellowman, did not know who we might be and yet you recognized us without fail. And I, in my turn, shall recognize you in the faces of all mankind.”

The Little Prince was inspired by Saint-Exupery's desert crash

“Nothing is easier than to divide men into rightists and leftists, hunchbacks and straightbacks, fascists and democrats.” -- Saint Exupery

Having narrowly survived such an ordeal and possessing such rich affection for humanity, what might have motivated Saint-Exupery to go to Spain in 1936, where the brutal ideological bloodbath was a preview stage for the Great War to come? Was he like Voltaire’s Candide, an individual fatally curious, but operating with a different incentive in mind: rather than hypothesizing that this may be the best of all possible worlds, was Saint-Exupery curious to know what abstract political idea should be worth one’s life?

After all was any fascist, monarchist, anarchist, communist more right than another? Saint-Exupery is not above politics— he is wise to know it affects all areas of men’s lives— he just argues that the willingness to kill and be killed for a belief system betrays a fundamental, yet invisible rule of man: “All beliefs are demonstrably true. All men are demonstrably in the right. Anything can be demonstrated by logic… To agree to discuss them is tantamount to despairing of the salvation of mankind— whereas everywhere about us men manifest identical yearnings. What all of us want is to be set free.”

Though a pioneer in aviation, interestingly Saint-Exupery disdained many of the emerging rubrics of modern life: bureaucracy, ideology, and most especially, industrialization. What he seemed to loathe in all of these was depersonalization, the reduction of man into a machine processed to dig minerals from the earth, file paperwork, or charge enemy trenches. In doing so it was quickly or slowly making null and void a human being.

Later, back in France, Saint-Exupery is restless on an overnight train and wanders to the lower class compartments where Polish migrant workers are sardine-canned into tight compartments, exhausted and beaten-down. He takes a seat across a young couple as extinguished as any of them and concludes:

“The problem does not reside in this poverty, in this filth, in this ugliness. But this same man and this same woman met one day. This man must have smiled at this woman. He may, after his work was done, have brought her flowers. Timid and awkward, perhaps he trembled lest she disdain him. And this woman, out of natural coquetry, this woman sure of her charms, perhaps took pleasure in teasing him. And this man, this man who is now no more than a machine for swinging a pick or a sledge-hammer, must have felt in his heart a delicious anguish. The mystery is that they should become these lumps of clay. Into what terrible mould were they forced? What was it that marked them like this as if they had been put through a monstrous stamping machine? A deer, a gazelle, any animal grown old preserves its grace. What is it that corrupts this wonderful clay of which man is kneaded?”

It is the forces of tragedy at work that death often robs those most vivacious among us. In 1944, flying for the French Free Forces, Saint-Exupery was shot down after taking off from Corsica. He was just forty-four years old. What he would have had to say about Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Cold War terror, the end of colonialism, and Civil Rights movements we shall never know.

In his brief life, Saint-Exupery had many heartbreaking experiences but when he witnessed death, he did not see it as a moment of great pain or abasement, but a man's spirit being stolen from the world:

“I thought of the white sanatorium where the light of a man’s life goes quietly out in the presence of those who love him and who garner as if it were an inestimable treasure his last words, his ultimate smile. How right hey are! Seeing that this same whole is never again to take shape in the world. Never again will be heard exactly that note of laughter, that intonation of voice, that quality of repartee. Each individual is a miracle. No wonder we go on speaking of the dead for twenty years.”

Or in the cases of some truly loving, charismatic men, go on cherishing for all eternity.

Dangerous Ground

2011-04-20T10:05:00.011+09:00

Many friends have suggested I try to write about my experiences since the events of March 11^th. Living in Tokyo, I would be a poor candidate for such an endeavor. The ongoing catastrophe is about two hundred miles north of the city and I have not yet experienced any hardship, save the frazzling of multiple aftershocks and concerns over elevated radiation levels. My good fortunes aside, there are many with a deeper background in seismology, nuclear energy, and Japanese political history— journalists, researchers, writers— devoted to the task of chronicling, analyzing, and piecing together what this calamity means for Japan. My larger personal concerns are not what has happened but what shall come to pass.

The changes in Tokyo are more superficial than substantial. Shibuya is no longer a flaming candle, streetlamps are off, and the subdued lighting in train and subway stations is a dingy hue that might lead to a revival in pickpockets’ fortunes. Everyone dreads the summer when rolling blackouts will make it very difficult to overcome the humidity. Air conditioning will once again acquire its luxurious quality. Tokyoites have been asked to conserve energy. Self-restraint is not a problem in brilliant spring weather. But these inconveniences are banal when set against worst-case scenarios—that is, the inevitable monster shake known as the Tokai Quake that happens in the Shizuoka region just west of Tokyo with some regularity every 150 years. The last quake was in 1854.

As tragic as this year’s triple whammy of earthquake-tsunami-meltdown has been, it may pale when measured against the consequences of the inevitable Tokai Quake. Not only may it lead to another tsunami and an eruption of Mt. Fuji (which is seeing some activity for the first time in a long while), but perhaps worst of it all is that Japan may have to deal with the fallout of yet another nuclear crisis that would be much more detrimental to Tokyo— the meltdown of its nuclear power plant at Hamaoka, built almost directly above what is believed will be this disaster’s future epicenter.

Essentially, it does not seem sound judgment to build a nuclear reactor on top of a historically active fault line, especially when your country’s preeminent seismologist argued against the hubris of such an undertaking before construction even began. Dr. Kiyoo Mogi has long argued for the responsible application of nuclear technology on Japan’s vulnerable territory. Unfortunately for hundreds of thousands whose livelihoods have been destroyed by the manmade disaster of Fukushima (residents, farmers, fishermen) Dr. Mogi’s good judgment has been vindicated. The authorities at Hamaoka swear that the plant can withstand a major quake but the same corporate suits made the same fail-safe promise at Fukushima.

It seems then in the court of common sense, the government should have taken a proactive role in shutting down the nuclear plant at Hamaoka weeks ago. Already global public opinion is mixed on Japan— there is sorrow for the victims and their families and bitterness at the country’s mismanagement of the crisis. Radiation leaks affect all of us, more or less, since we understand the ecosystem to be something shared by all of us, from the air we breathe to the fish on our plates. It’s not hippiespeak to say we are of one world.

Every human drama needs a villain, if only to lash out our frustrations and humiliations. The fact that there has been lying, mismanagement, deliberate cover-ups, and general incompetence on the part of Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) has led to some consternation on the part of the international community. What would conventional wisdom make of Japan should a similar if not more catastrophic meltdown were to occur in short succession? I am helplessly reminded of the aphorism reserved for the gullible: “Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me.”

Being a foreigner, it is hard to know exactly what the public’s sentiments are. Most people would like to be let alone of the issue and trust a benevolent fate. The Japanese are trying to go on with their daily lives and in this beautiful spring weather it is easy to forget the carnage of the north and the direness of the near future. Only occasionally do the aftershocks rattle us into reality, returning the fear that trembles our hearts. But even these, frequent as they are, subside easily enough into the mundane elements of more trivial pursuits.

But many Japanese have been politicized for the first times in their lives. Like Middle Easterners uprising against their governments the Japanese are using Facebook, Twitter and other social media to organize. On April 10^th a major demonstration in the Tokyo neighborhood of Koenji drew at least ten thousand protesters. It was a very Japanese affair— more like a parade than a march: wonderful costumes, peaceful inclinations, gentle shout-outs. At the head of the parade, was a simulacrum of a New Orleans jazz band, dressed in razzle-dazzle kimonos and playing popular yesteryear numbers. Some attendees were unironically costumed in radiation suits and gas masks. Most wore sanitary face masks, a usual seasonal big seller for protecting the allergic against hay fever, but now a symbol of our very flimsy protection against radioactivity.

Making good use of the if-no-one-hears-the-tree-falling-in-the-forest theory, Japan’s mainstream media managed to drop the story. It was an election day in Tokyo (the incumbent, Shintaro Ishihara, who publicly claimed the earthquake and tsunami were divine punishment for Japanese greed, was handily reelected) and moreover, that Sunday was the most beautiful weekend day for hanami, cherry blossom viewing. After the protest I took the train to Yoyogi, Tokyo’s largest park and site of the biggest parties. Arriving just after the sunset, it was surreal to see this forest of pink flowers in twilight, where tens of thousands frolicked, wasted on good sake and cold beer, pleasuring against all arguments to be somber and self-restrained. I couldn’t blame them.

On the 16^th this month there was another protest in Shibuya but it was much smaller and I’m worried that the so-called Sakura Revolution might be losing its momentum. That would be a shame since it is the most appropriate week to get out and fight for peace-of-mind. Today, April 20^th is Earth Day, and next week on the 26^th is the 25^th anniversary of Chernobyl.

Understanding Japan’s limited availability of resources, I am not against nuclear energy per se, but am very much in favor of safe and responsible use. It’s bad enough to worry about earthquakes and tsunamis, the sudden catastrophic moment where everything changes. This is more than enough than the average person needs to worry about.

The Terrified and the Bored

2011-03-04T15:55:00.008+09:00

“They were still on the treadmill; the misery, the ennui, the dislocated horror…. Things would happen and time would pass, but there was no hope, no anticipation. There would be nothing but the deep cloudy dejection that overcast everything.”

--Norman Mailer

An author, like any artist mindful of his or her spread in the busy, kinetic, attention-free pop galaxy, must consider the brand as well as the art if hopeful for a multiple book contract, which is altogether negotiable depending on the number of readers willing to put down money for good storytelling. While a few like J. D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon built their reputations with reticence, some like Norman Mailer bet on bombast, creating a trademark presence but with it the baggage of distraction. Before I’d read any of Mailer’s books, I knew him as the writer who stabbed his wife the night he threw a party announcing his presidential candidacy in 1960. That and he was the guy who wrote the first How To book for hipsters, The White Negro. But for all the talk shows and celebrity gladhanding, Mailer wrote better than anyone. Many detested him for his theatrical pretensions, but very few for his literary verve.

The Late Great Norman Mailer

Mailer made a name for himself by capturing the zeitgeist before anyone else, whether it be beatniks, hippies, or mass murderers. Writers write what they know and Mailer had survived the great drama of the Second World War with enough notes for a book, publishing The Naked and the Dead in 1948 when he was just twenty-five years old, catapulting him into the high chair of literary enfants terribles. Ostensibly, it is a book about a reconnaissance platoon, a motley collection of soldiers ordered by military brass to survey the Japanese behind their position on the invented island of Anopopei during the Filipino campaign, but The Naked and the Dead is very much a modern American novel, which means it is a subversive criticism on American social life, economic opportunity, and an illusory freedom of choice.

Very few of the soldiers in the platoon are there by virtue of patriotism or sense of duty. They’re there because war was happening and there was not much else going on for them in the economic maelstrom of the 1930s and early 1940s. They are true grunts: outcasts, farmhands, street punks, and failed entrepreneurs stinking of bad luck. As General Cummings, a philosophical mouthpiece for Mailer, explains, “The individual soldier in that army is a more effective soldier the poorer his standard of living has been in the past.” The Army, first in line as cannon fodder, would not work so well as a fighting unit had it educated men who might second guess suicidal mission objectives.

In spite of its grandiose subject and prolix verbosity (it’s more than 700 pages long) not much happens in the novel. The platoon participates in the landing mission where there is little resistance. There are some small, deadly skirmishes where the army is digging into the Japanese line. The soldiers make and break camp as necessity sees fit. And the recon unit goes on its difficult mission. The major battle is not described except in dispatches to the command center. The reality has little to do with the PR campaign that had fueled recruitment drives and positioned every private a starring role in his own personal movie: “He had always imagined combat as exciting, with no misery and no physical exertion. He dreamed of himself charging across a field in the face of many machine-guns; but in the dream there was no stitch in his side from running too far while bearing too much weight.”

Island Hopping GI Joe Style

Major episodes describe the futility in keeping your tent secure in a typhoon; of loathing yet another rations can of ham and eggs; of fighting sleep deprivation on guard duty; of fantasizing over the “million dollar wound,” some injury that wouldn’t cripple them but was bad enough it would warrant a ticket home, thus becoming a veteran, a survivor, and guaranteeing the opportunity to tell young women, “I was there…”

Daydreaming about what they’ll do after the war does little to make their labor bearable: most duties are makeshift and disposable, the temporary conditions of camp living producing no sustenance. The tedium is only more tolerable than the logistical errands necessary to reorder military positions in constant flux. Endurance is taxed and tolled mercilessly, so much that a man’s humanity is crushed by the dead weight of his task as when the platoon is ordered to move heavy artillery guns through muddy paths to a new position on the front: “By the time an hour passed, nothing existed for them but the slender cannon they had to get down the track. The sweat drenched their clothing and filled their eyes, blinding them. They grappled and blundered and swore, advanced the little guns a few feet at a time with no consciousness any longer of what they were doing.”

an American platoon

And who are these guys suffering for the sake of their country anyway? There is no central hero in The Naked and the Dead— at least, there is no one with outstanding moral qualities— instead they are neither good nor bad, but merely human, reacting to the violence, tedium and proximity to death in a myriad of ways. Wilson, a philandering Southerner wants to get drunk and swap sex stories; Red is a hard-luck cynic mistrustful of authority; Goldstein is a New York Jew who wants to be liked and is easily hurt by discrimination; Gallagher is a high-strung Commie-baiter; Martinez is an excellent scout brave in spite of his fears; Hearn is a college grad from a good Midwestern family dabbling in socialism, assigned to lead the platoon on their recon mission after a falling out as General Cummings’ secretary; only Croft, a tough bastard from Texas, truly fits the ideal soldier, a man with a “crude, unformed vision in his soul… rarely conscious of it.”

In the 50^th anniversary addition of the novel, looking back Mailer calls his first calling card opus the work of an “amateur.” If there are any flaws in The Naked and the Dead it may only be Mailer’s conceit of using a Freudian device he calls THE TIME MACHINE, in which in a very close third person (adapting local vernacular whether Boston or Brooklyn street, Georgia hillbilly, or Texan Mexlish) Mailer explains characters’ backstories. Not that they are superfluous— they are all piece and parcel of Mailer’s most persuasive point: that America is an unequal society and that these men, should they survive, had very little to look forward to coming home short of some good home cooking and a few rowdy nights of casual sex: “…it did not matter because both girls would look the same in thirty years and Wyman would never amount to very much. He saw a future vista of Wyman’s life, and rebelled. He wanted to be able to tell Wyman something more comforting than the fact it didn’t matter. But he could think of nothing.”

Recently, I was discussing with my family the famous essay by economists Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt and their controversial assertion that the great drop in crime over the last twenty years has its origins in Roe vs. Wade. They contend that legalized abortion has resulted in a million fewer unwanted babies a year, arguing this as a causal effect since statistically most criminals come from single parent, low income backgrounds. Something the economists never touched on and is worth bringing up is the role of America’s large standing army.

It’s a long time passed since the Army has relied on Uncle Sam posters for recruitment. Nowadays, the big draw for those ambitious to leave the ghetto are things not generally associated with masculine glory: steady pay, technical skills, health insurance, and government pension. Even in garish TV recruitment commercials in which soldiers and marines fight CGI monsters, some of these essentials do not go unmentioned. Nowadays glory is the fringe benefit; security is where it’s at, even if it means risking deployment in Somalia, Afghanistan, and Iraq— for a number of men this trumps the quiet desperation that afflicts so many civilians. As Mailer’s General Cummings puts it perfectly, “The natural role of twentieth century man is anxiety,” especially true in a nation whose safety net is worn through and breaking.

Cummings again: “The Army functions best when you’re frightened of the man above you, and contemptuous of your subordinates.” But Mailer might as well be talking about his vision of America, the scramble for earnings, the problem of love and marriage in circumstances of poverty, the hypocrisy of the American Dream being realized for so few. I was shocked to discover The Naked and the Dead on Bill O’ Reilly’s Top Ten list. Had he completely missed Norman Mailer’s essential idea?

Today, The Naked and the Dead is hardly known for its brutal realism and tough stance on American inequity. If anything, it is notorious for the censorship of it’s language, as in “Ain’t none of your fuggin’ business,” or “The fug you say!,” an unintentionally humorous tact Mailer’s editors employed as to not offend Middle America’s sensitive moral palate. Tuli Kupferberg called his marvelous freak-rock band, The Fugs, and the actress, Tallulah Bankhead, apocryphally said to Norman Mailer upon meeting him, “Oh, you’re the young man who doesn’t know how to spell…” It’s a good story but the book deserves more than an anecdotal cocktail throwaway— it is essential reading for anyone interested in the American’s precarious existence.

The men of the recon patrol lead a Sysyphean existence. So little of their exhausting work produces real meaning or tangible results. Even that most vital human instinct most of us in our technocentric lives never have to exercise, that of survival, is dulled from arduous exercise so that a bullet in the head would mean a welcome respite from this trial called life. The rare moments they have in combat, the hero's stance is not charging the field but merely holding one's ground and not running. Winning the war then becomes the accumulation of small victories. You might not like the soldiers in recon but you know them and you feel for them because at the extreme other of the killing in war is that elusive quality called human empathy. A corpse is not just a corpse; he is a storehouse of love, life and stories that have ceased to exist. Even Mailer’s battle-hardened, sarcastic grunt, Red, is alive to this:

“Very deep inside himself he was thinking that this was a man who had once wanted things, and the thought of his own death was always a little unbelievable to him. The man had had a childhood, a youth, and a young manhood, and there had been dreams and memories.”

A Bend in the Bias

2010-12-26T17:59:00.006+09:00

For all its inherent drama and uncompromising tragedy, Africa figures comparatively rarely in literature. Despite the continent’s mad kings, power brokering, tribal rivalries and wild frontiers, as fiction goes it remains one the great untapped resources available to storytellers. But writers beware of treading this path for good reason: the difficulty, particularly for foreigners, and thus non-Africans, of telling a story truthfully, without prejudice or simplification. The background in violence that bewitches some storytellers in the first place too easily becomes the point of it all, the overarching theme left standing in the smashed and scattered debris.

In A Bend in the River, the Trinidadian writer V. S. Naipul, has penned a novel indicative of the worst stereotypes. One need not go further than the first sentence to get to the heart of his ideology: “The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.” Such vile, free market cold-blooded Darwinian absolutism sets the tone for a story short on human compassion, long on self-centered palaver.

It begins with Salim, a coastal Indian Muslim, escaping anti-foreigner violence at the end of colonialism, when much property of the former power structure was appropriated by revenge-minded nationalists. From a family friend, he buys a dry goods shop in an unnamed town in Africa’s interior, where later he is joined by one of his family’s slaves. There is a rebellion early on and a soldier who takes power in the capital becomes a megalomaniac dictator referred to by everyone as The Big Man. Early on, his powerful presence stabilizes the country. Violence and tribal rivalries fade and there’s an economic boom. Europeans arrive to advise and build infrastructure as well as chronicle this significant step in African history. The narrator’s shop business is thriving and he has a torrid love affair with a European woman married to someone close to the President (“The Big Man’s White Man”). Being close to the machinations of power, gives the main character a sense of identity and destiny, though it is illusory of course. The new boss is the same as the old boss: inevitably corruption and violence return, proving history to be cyclical, putting the narrator in a conundrum about whether to stay or flee.

A Bend in the River was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1979 and Naipul has won the Nobel Prize for literature. Such acclaim is difficult to comprehend considering the genuine failure of this, his most famous story. Like many writers, Naipul takes real-life historical events and frames them in a dramatic narrative, creating a mask disguising an author’s political philosophy, one of the great tricks of literary art. Yet it’s one thing for a writer to have appalling political viewpoints (i.e. Ayn Rand), so long as the writing itself works but having drearily sludged through several of his other books, I can spot a naked Emperor when I see one. V. S. Naipul is a very bad storyteller, on all the essential points.

Salim, for example, our narrator, is supposed to be a member of the Muslim diaspora, but he’s also a man who’s lost communion with his spiritual and cultural roots, practicing beliefs more out of habit than faith. But there is little to suggest the character is a real Muslim (Naipul is suspected of Hindu nationalist sympathies). In Salim, there is no piety, no loyalty, no moral compass. He needs an adulterous affair to feel better about himself. He constantly looks for the weaknesses in others, obviously to salve his own self-esteem issues. Naipul seems to suggest that the only way to survive in such dog-eat-dog circumstances, one must act selfishly as Salim behaves in all his interactions. He is a cold person, calculating, envious of the success of others, a thinking man but at the expense of real emotions.

Then Naipul’s storytelling instincts can feel distinctly out of step. Every time something vaguely dramatic occurs, his character withdraws from the action for analysis, an annoying habit of one step forward, three steps back. Stylistically, these digressions can be very long-winded—one hears not the narrator but Naipul’s presence, his pedantic blah. This is especially evident at a critical moment in the story, when Salim and Yvette commit adultery. Naipul elaborates in his typically sexless form:

“To write about the occasion in the manner of my pornographic magazines would be more than false. It would be like trying to take photographs of myself, to be the voyeur of my own actions, to reconvert the occasion into the brothel fantasy that, in the bedroom, it ceased to be.”

Does anyone, particularly a shopkeeper, bother with such pseudo-existential jabberwocky in the throes of an exciting, illicit affair? But this romance, an expendable subplot that has little to do with the big theme (which is what exactly…? Africans, they can’t do anything right?), is problematic. There is little to suggest why an educated and ambitious woman would fall for Salim. Naipul doesn’t bother to illustrate an attraction nor a courtship. It just happens, chemistry be damned. In fact, the affair, only serves to alienate us further from the narrator, as it climaxes in misogyny and unbelievably, masochistic submission, a ridiculous male fantasy concept which betrays Naipul’s complete incapacity to draw out and understand women.

Though Naipul has a Victorian tendency towards exasperating exactitude, he never directly mentions the town nor the country he is in by name, though it is obviously The Congo (formerly Zaire) and The Big Man (portrayed in leopard print hat and cane in ubiquitous reproduced photos) is clearly Mobuto Sese Seko. Why this conceit, unless Naipul believes that the violence and anarchy affecting the story’s region is not a Congo problem but an African one? It’s all but clear that Naipul has calculated for this disastrous state to represent the continent as a whole. The problem of violence and corruption then is not specific but general.

Mobuto Sese Soko, the Big Man

Though not as odious as ideology, tedium can be offensive in its own distasteful fashion. What is most incredible about Naipul’s effort is that it could take the Congo, Africa’s literary “heart of darkness” and all its attached sex, violence, wildness, history and promise and make it dull. That is what he does and it is because of his prose. Naipul writes like a neutered academic, a showoffy dinner companion one endures at a wedding due an ill-fated seating arrangement. One expects some kind of payoff from all this talk but after so many words, one learns the point is the words themselves and not the story and that it is for his benefit, not yours. I’m talking about the worst kind of storyteller— know-it-all, masturbatory, self-indulgent, offensive. Ugly. What’s just as remarkable is that for all the praise Naipul receives for his language, there is not a single beautiful sentence in the entire novel. Nothing amuses nor surprises. Nothing enchants.

There is little incentive then to read beyond the book’s opening lines, “The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.” Africa and its Africans is a failure, and thus have no place at the world’s dinner table. One can, as Naipul does, ignore the complexities of tribalism, the holocaust of the slave trade and the exploitation of the colonial system and blame Africa’s problems on the Africans themselves. It’s easy, it’s clean, and it makes for a good, bloody yarn. For all its circular syntax and complicated contextualizing then, the purpose of the novel, under the cover of flashy, intellectual grandstanding, is simplification cynically celebrated: Those Africans… they deserve it.

The Life and Times of a Stoner

2010-09-23T04:23:00.006+09:00

In the first few paragraphs of John Williams' novel, Stoner, we learn that the title character was born to rural farmers, taught English literature at a University and died rather quietly at age 64. By putting all of his cards on the table early Williams leads us to understand that this is not a dramatic story. Drama, however, is inessential if a character is drawn well enough. In such circumstances it doesn't hurt either if a modest life is explained in luminous prose. Williams succeeds on both counts and perhaps his sympathetic portrait is as good as it is because the omniscient voice is marked by its precision and economy. Williams may have published Stoner in 1965 but the novel has the serenity of late Victorian storytelling rather than the breezy tongue-in-cheek style of so many of his contemporaries.

The story is simple. William Stoner, a dirt poor Missouri farmer tends his father's fields for a share of dimimishing returns. When he is 18 he receives an opportunity to escape destiny and destitution attending a university in the nearby town of Columbia. Though he matriculates as an agronomics student he falls under the spell of his English professor, Archer Slone, and embeds himself within the fixed course of acadamia, receiving his degree, his masters, his doctorate, and finally a teaching position. His life, once isolated by the strict demands of land becomes just as restricted by his love of English Renaissance poetry, an esoteric interest that he cannot share with his wife, Edith, an attractive yet frail blonde from a more successful family. There is no way that Stoner can merge his old life with his new. Stoner's family understands the irreconcilability of this:

“His mother was facing him, but she did not see him. Her eyes were squeezed shut; she was breathing heavily, her face twisted as if in pain, and her closed fists were pressed against her cheeks. With wonder Stoner realized that she was crying deepy and silently, with the shame and awkwardness of one who seldom weeps.”

But as exclusive the collegiate universe is to Stoner's parents it's just as difficult accommodating Edith. She and Stoner do not ever truly understand each other and being mutually inexperienced in life, they struggle to fill their middle class masks while also failing spectacularly at the lovemaking that produces their only daughter, Grace. Williams can write extreme melancholy and human awkwardness with the best of them as he does here describing the Stoners' sex life: “If she was sufficiently roused from sleep she tensed and stiffened, turning her head sideways in a familiar gesture and burying it in her pillow, enduring violation…”

"Office in a Small City"
Edward Hopper

Their marriage is an unhappy one but Stoner is not necessarily unhappy himself. He genuinely loves his work, even if he never got over his childhood clumsiness and whose bearing is marked by "stooped shoulders." As a scholar he enjoys the challenge of rigorous acadamic interpertation, helping students on their dissertations and publishing his own specializied and obscure monograph. Though he may feel lost outside the campus, Stoner thrives in his work environment, perhaps --as explained by one of his only friends, Dave Masters, an intellectual killed in the First World War-- because he could do no better anywhere else: "It (the university) is an asylum…a rest home, for the infirm, the aged, the discontent, and the otherwise incompetent…”

Events in the novel debunk this assertion, setbacks which if not destroying Stoner, strips him of what might have been a happier life. A petty rivalry between Stoner and Holly Lomax, a gnome of a person obsessed with his crippled leg, stymies his career. Lomax runs the English department, assigning Stoner the least desirable classes and inconvenient scheduling. And when Stoner's uneventful life becomes thrilling when he falls in love with Katherine Driscoll, an intelligent and intriguing graduate student, gossip among faculty and students is the seed for a scandal that dooms the only true happiness Stoner had ever experienced. Indeed, the university members who pride themselves on living outside the social contract prove themselves to be outsiders by pretense only. The asylum never actually existed or for Stoner, it retreated to a small basement room that existed on borrowed time, a small, dark ordinary place but made magical by a secret love, shared intimately and solely with his lover:

“It was a world of half-light in which they lived and to which they brought the better parts of themselves—so that, after a while, the outer world where people walked and spoke, where there was change and continual movement, seemed to them false and unreal. Their lives were sharply divided between the two worlds, and it seemed to them natural that they should live so divided.”

But there is no duality of living, there are just moments and in these moments one is either safe or exposed, either happy or distraught. Stoner the academic never loses the posture of Stoner the farmer. The wife he tolerates is the one he once fell madly in love with. If there are any compartments, they are manmade, invented by a reasoning, imaginative mind to organize the world into a more satisfying existence. Doing so, however, entails the peril of losing that safe, trusted place.

My Fated Disappointment with War and Peace, Briefly

2010-09-23T04:19:00.001+09:00

When people found out I was reading War and Peace this summer the most common question posed was, “Is it worth it?” To which I generally shrugged, sighed and said, “Yes and no.” For those who love literature and are interested in the evolution and idea of the novel, then it probably should be read. But for most of us, with all the options of books, not to mention various entertainments and outdoor diversions available, the answer leans towards No, that it is not worth it and that life is too short to read War and Peace. You can lead a wonderful life without ever knowing the Rostovs or the Bolkonskys or even its pontificating author.

This is not to say that I feel War and Peace is a bad book per se. Tolstoy does some marvelous work dramatizing one of the most cataclysmic events in Russian history. (Who will dramatize the Russian Revolution? It seems incredible that no Russian novelist has tackled that event and transformed it into a literary epic.) Tolstoy demonstrates a thorough capacity for detail, describing the nuances of aristocratic manners and the gruff speech of common foot soldiers with persuasive savoir-faire. His characters are lively and unique and undergo profound changes, grappling with responsibilities of war and career, marriage, finances, births, and death-- in other words, life in all its glory and banality. As some critics have suggested, should the earth write a novel, it might sound like Tolstoy.

But the Earth is not perfect and neither is Tolstoy’s book for that matter. We can generally gauge the quality of a novel using three primary benchmarks: the story, the characters and the style. War and Peace suffers from many digressions into the lives of periphery characters but remains compelling due to its dramatic historical nature. The main characters, as I mentioned, are mostly sympathetic, their humanity drawn out beautifully. It’s difficult to discuss style since War and Peace is a translation (I had the Anthony Briggs edition) so while we cannot judge Tolstoy by his prose, we can nevertheless opine on his structuring of the novel and the general pool of language he has chosen to tell that story. It is here that Tolstoy astonishes me with his narrative miscalculations. The problem is the author inserting himself into the story to make declarative points that relate to his celebration of a divine force. The unfortunate consequence on the reader is having to bear the lecturing of a writer guilty of a god complex. Little is left for us to interpret on his or her own. Everything must be explained according to the way Tolstoy intended it. He violates the cardinal rule of storytelling: show, don’t tell.

In doing so, Tolstoy comes off as an insufferable dinner companion. He never hesitates to interrupt the narrative with long-winded discussions regarding the scientific basis for understanding history (an irritating device that has no place in a novel! None!) but literature, though an aesthetic branch of the arts, is understood by rules established between authors and their audience. Of course these rules are malleable (art being more lenient than science) but to disregard them is done at the writer’s peril.

As everyone knows, whether consciously or intrinsically, good storytelling makes for an irresistible yarn: the writer instills in the reader the need to know what happens. Napoleon’s invasion of Russia was an incredible event, changing the course of history. Historical narrative is drawn out in both micro and macro formats-- the lives of individual characters contrasted with the nation’s larger struggle. I found Tolstoy’s telling at the micro level engrossing. For example, on the eve of the French entering Moscow, during the collapse of public order Count Rostopchin’s justification for throwing a criminal (traitor) into the mad violence of a crowd is apropos of Tolstoy’s insight into human character, in this case, a politician’s:

“Since time began and men started killing each other, no man has ever committed such a crime against one of his fellows without comforting himself with the same idea. This idea is the ‘public good…’” (Vol. III, Part III, Ch. 25)

Could a historical novel involving George W. Bush’s faith in the Iraq War be written any different? In a thoughtful meditation on the wastefulness of armed conflict, Tolstoy, speaking through Andrei Bolkonsky in a midnight oil heart-to-heart with Pierre the night before the Battle of Borodino would destroy the young prince, suggests:

“If we didn’t have all this business of magnanimity in warfare, we would only ever go to war when there was something worth facing certain death for, as there is now.” (Vol. III, Part II, Ch. 25).

Here is Tolstoy at his very best, pensive and theoretical, but, importantly, expressing himself through his characters. His narrative problems come when he enters the scene, for example, carrying on about troop movements, particularly the fate of the French army making the catastrophic blunder of retreating on the Smolensk road, which had seen the land around it plundered and destroyed and so would not provide the needs for Napoleon’s massive army. Tolstoy wastes our time with endless dissections of this blunder, reveling in it, repeating it, and in the end, boring us with such eye-glazing assertions and unnecessary sarcasm:

“This was done by Napoleon, the man of genius. And yet to say that Napoleon destroyed his own army because he wanted to, or because he was a very stupid man, would be just as wrong as claiming that Napoleon got his troops to Moscow because he wanted to, and because he was a clever man and a great genius. In both cases his individual contribution, no stronger than the individual contribution of every common soldier, happened to coincide with the laws by which the event was being determined.” (Vol. IV, Part II, Ch. 8)

This paragraph propels two important theories of Tolstoy’s. First, that historians put too much weight on single individuals (personalities) guiding history-- in doing so, they fail to cite the billions of contingencies that determine world events (which are God’s doing). Secondly, it’s another opportunity for Tolstoy to criticize Napoleon. Sometimes it feels he wrote the book for the purpose of excoriating Napoleon to a general reading public. Throughout the novel but especially in the epilogue, Tolstoy goes out of his way to downplay his achievements, arguing that Napoleon was simply an egotistical, arrogant opportunist at the right place and the right time.

This is the book’s greatest failure: not his antipathy for Napoleon-- Tolstoy is entitled to his likes and dislikes-- but that his arguments overwhelm the storytelling in pompous cant. According to biographers, Tolstoy turned to literature as a young writer after being disenchanted with history. In his second epilogue, he spends more than 40 pages (in technical, colorless, dull language) disparaging the work of historians on the premise that they are unable to differentiate the actions on mankind, whether it be free will or motivations built from necessity. What he seems to suggest, dramatically in Napoleon’s retreat and the marriages of Pierre and Natasha and Nikolay and Marie is that they were predestined by a supernatural force. It was all meant to be:

“And just as the indefinable essence of the force that moves the heavenly bodies, the indefinable essence that drives heat, electricity, chemical affinity or the life force, forms the content of astronomy, physics, chemistry, botany, zoology and so on, the essence of the force of free will forms the subject matter of history.” (Epilogue, Part II, Ch. 10).

A decade before Tolstoy composed his thoughts on this subject, Charles Darwin had published his Origin of Species, whose arguments of evolution refute Biblical infallibility. Probably, its evidence threatened Tolstoy’s vision of the world. Obliquely referencing Darwin’s thesis, he argues that,

“in the frog, the rabbit and the monkey we can observe nothing but muscular and nervous activity, whereas in man we have muscular and nervous activity plus consciousness.” (Epilogue, Part II, Ch. 8)

But this confuses me. What is the importance of consciousness if everything is divinely predetermined? Is it so we can recognize and celebrate God? And why are we even getting into this? On abstract terms rather than through the prism of the characters’ actions or dreams? Imagine John Steinbeck ending The Grapes of Wrath not with that lovely and tragic scene of the Joads’ pregnant daughter sharing her breast milk with an emaciated stranger but the novelist spending thirty pages examining the causal effects of the Great Depression and the merits of the New Deal. I’d love to read Steinbeck’s views on politics, but preferably in a chapbook or a magazine interview format.

In the epilogue Tolstoy ignores the Rostovs and Bolkonskys, only bothering to mention Napoleon (for one last drubbing) in his final descent into didacticism. Beyond whether or not Tolstoy is persuasive in his argument is besides the point. The best storytelling weaves philosophy into its narrative without resorting to pedantic posturing. I found Tolstoy’s voice irritating, his arguments confusing, his language obfuscating. Not to mention hypocritical. After lambasting historians for telling us how to interpret events, he goes and instructs us himself. The nerve of great minds!

The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful

2010-09-14T02:24:00.003+09:00

“We’re on the cutting edge of reality itself. Right where it turns into a dream.”

It’s hard to believe that there has been no great Vietnam War novel. The war has been better served by memoirs (Ron Kovics’ Born on the 4^th of July and Neil Sheehan’s Bright Shining Lie) and especially cinema (Apocalypse Now and Coming Home, among others). Perhaps the best story about the conflict may be Graham Greene’s The Quiet American but that was written by a Brit in 1955, before the conflict became a national security issue making front page headlines. Back then it was but one of the many stories of decolonization rapidly transforming geopolitics in Asia and Africa in the 1950s. At the time of Greene’s novel it wasn’t quite yet the war it became, an ideological civil war between North and South lasting more than 15 years. The great World Wars were comparatively brief. Is it for this reason that Vietnam defies the ambition of writers in recasting the war in a poetic narrative? Is it just too damn big, ugly, and morally wrong? Where would you even begin?

It shouldn’t be so. After all, moral dilemmas make for some of the best reading. Into this discussion rides Denis Johnson and his Vietnam novel, Tree of Smoke. At first glance, it wouldn’t seem that Johnson, famous for his poetic tales of dropouts and ex-cons in books like Angel and Jesus Son would be the kind of guy to give the Vietnam War its just due. But this isn’t quite about politics or platoons as it is about personalities, dreams, and God. The hall-of-mirrors confusion of such a setting is perfect for a writer like Johnson, a writer that revels in tricky storytelling and moral ambiguity. Rather than going there, he prefers tumbling down the slippery slope of Manichean worldviews. When everyone is just trying to stay alive in a place as brutal as ’Nam, who are the good guys anyway? Literature being a Western art form, in a cross-cultural conflict we tend to write from our side of things. Among various detailed atrocities, to save us from a supposed Communism menace, our government employed seven-ton super bombs against North Vietnam, capable of decimating 8000 square meters. Into this inferno we also dropped Spiders, small grenades with near-invisible antennas that were detonated upon touch. They were designed to kill survivors helping the wounded or putting out fires. And for what purpose in the end? The defeat of an exaggerated Communist means. No, the end never justified the means. While Johnson describes little of the fighting itself (besides the Tet Offensive), at times he captures the situation’s moral ambivalence perfectly:

“They threw hand grenades through doorways and blew the arms and legs off ignorant farmers, they rescued puppies from starvation and smuggled them home to Mississippi in their shirts, they burned down whole villages and raped young girls, they stole medicines by the jeepload to save the lives of orphans.”

The closest we come to a concept of a hero (in the Greek sense: military honors, hubris, appetites, tragic trajectory) is an alcoholic raconteur, Colonel Sands. Running a renegade CIA outfit with his nephew and a few aids, he understands that the Vietnamese goal of self-determination may be too powerful for the U.S. to win the war no matter how many bombs are dropped. However, he believes in a certain hearts & minds strategy:

“This land under our feet is where the Vietcong locate their national heart. This land is their myth. We penetrate this land, we penetrate their heart, their myth, their soul. That’s real infiltration. And that’s our mission: penetrating the myth of the land.”

Ironically (or perhaps not very much so), the colonel’s base is above Cu Chi, the famous tunnel network from which the Vietcong conducted guerilla warfare. The Colonel is a true Cold War Warrior, a legend of his own time, with nearly three decades experience in Asia battling “evil.” In Vietnam his status or relationship to the Top Brass is enigmatic and it seems his scheming is likely outside of the military hierarchy or jurisdiction. Even his relationship to leadership in the CIA seems sketchy. Like an artist or perhaps a conman, he is looking beyond military strength to defeat the enemy. In the colonel’s world, mindfucking can be just as powerful as strategic bombing, as this memo conveys:

“…Consider the possibility that a coterie or insulated group might elect to create fictions independent of the leadership’s intuition of its own needs. And might serve these fictions to the enemy in order to influence choices.”

The Colonel’s number one point man in carrying through his plans with a double agent is his nephew, Skip. Skip likes languages and has a mustache. “Always a sucker for sardonic, myopic, intellectual women,” he enjoys a fling with Kathy, a missionary in the Philippines, who also relocates to Vietnam to help orphans and who writes Skip digressive letters that make him uncomfortable. Kathy “wasn’t, herself, beautiful. Her moments were beautiful.” But Skip is mostly alone in a countryside villa that once belonged to a French colonial doctor who went mad in isolation and whose obsession with tunnels was his mortal ruin. Skip, bored with a pre-Internet burden of cataloging everybody or everything associated with the war up to that point spends hours translating the deceased doctor’s diary entries, including the following:

“Is the mind a labyrinth through which the consciousness gropes its way or is the mind the boundless void in which certain limited thoughts rise up and disappear?”

It feels like Johnson’s own consciousness is in on this labyrinth. The novel feels piecemeal at times, following satellite characters to dead ends. The book often reads like a screenplay or a poem, shifting between bizarre conversations and weird prose. Johnson is capable of lovely, nuanced language and it is for the writing more than anything else that one reads Denis Johnson. However, sometimes you just don’t know what to make of him. Getting carried away with the kooky, psychedelic nature of the war, Johnson occasionally fails to articulately establish setting:

“He crouched by the window and listened shuddering to the sound of ripped high-voltage wires out there stroking the darkness, humming closer and farther, feeling along the darkness after fear. The voltage sucked along the shaft of fear toward any heart emanating it and burned the soul right inside it. That was the True Death. Thereafter nobody lived in that heart, nobody saw out of those eyes. The stench of such burning floated in and out of the room all night.”

But I’m nitpicking. If the story and its scenarios are confusing, it’s only mirroring the war. The novel’s titular Tree of Smoke has Old Testament connotations as well as, of course, an atomic reference to widespread devastation. It’s also about something that has a shape but no actual being, much like what happened to our soldiers who fought there. War is brutal enough when it’s waged with something at stake. But when we have to invent principles, the line between tragedy and farce blurs, just as our notion of heroism. In such battlefields, many one-eyed kings are crowned:

“You’re sad about the kids, sad about the animals, you don’t do the women, you don’t kill the animals, but after that you realize this is a war zone and everybody here lives in it. You don’t care whether these people live or die tomorrow, you don’t care whether you yourself live or die tomorrow, you kick the children aside, you do the women, you shoot the animals.”

Touchdown for the Man

2010-07-28T10:50:00.009+09:00

"But it's all part of being alive, man. The pleasure and the pain. You can't have one without the other."
-- Quarterback Seth Maxwell

What is it about football that is peculiarly American? Is it the intricacy of its strategies? The use of padding offering the illusion of controlled violence? The peculiar use of slang coloring the insiders' lexicon (fumblerooski, slobber-knocker, pooch punts)? The utilitarianism of every player on the field to some designated responsibility? The celebration of heroes and roasting of scapegoats? A harmonious association with High School memories? That it is best pleasured with mass quantities of beer?

Of the three great sports the U.S. has produced, only football has failed to create an international following-- it seems it will never qualify as an Olympic competition. If a character in a film once said, "Football is a game of inches," giving the sport a sense of delicacy and precision, a real-life coach also said, "Winning isn't everything; it's the only thing." The latter quote more accurately explains the game's ferociousness and the human capacity to brutally subjugate common sense and physical pain to the more immediate attainment of victory. When one considers the sacrifices your average American makes in compliance with his country's values-- substandard health care, comparatively little vacation time, the costs of extraordinary consumption, and most importantly, a fetishism of work and income as the definition of a man's worth-- then it seems we would expect our athletes on the gridiron should rally to that ideal as well.

In the early 1970s, a second-string flanker for the Dallas Cowboys named Peter Gent retired from the game and wrote what is perhaps the best novel ever written about the sport, North Dallas Forty (produced in 1979 into a mediocre comedy with Nick Nolte, all the nuances of Gent's themes stripped in favor of dumb jock jokes). The novel takes place over the course of eight days in the life of a wide receiver named Phil Elliot. Elliot is the team's joker but also a thinking person, who does not go for Vince Lombardi's philosophy on the merits of winning, hoping only to perform with enough aplomb as to guarantee himself more playing time and better pay. His logic, to wit: "Reading a contract is vastly more important than reading a blitz. A great negotiator makes much more money than a great running back." Of course, if money was what it was all about Elliot would be much more careful about toeing the company line but as he is, he cannot abide by any regulation or philosophy that marginalizes the individual. Through confrontations with management, players, and the society that celebrates the group effort of winning, Gent dramatizes this theme of the individual vs. the collective.

Winning means a number of adjustments on the players' parts. In fact, it seems that the only way the team can come together on Game Day is through liberal use of a psychoactive and pharmacological cornucopia. Injured players (particularly Elliot) pop Codeine like candy to combat the pain and linebackers swallow handfuls of Dexamyl (a once popular methamphetamine "upper") in order to reach the proper psychological level where body and mind can be properly tuned to a level of violence required to destroy opponents. Elliot self-medicates with "grass" on his down time and team parties are rowdy and debaucherous. The human body has limits but the devastating toll is tomorrow's problem: "The body wears out quickly but with training and chemicals the mind is conditioned not to notice." In this sense trainers and physical therapists are as essential to a team's well-being as a solid coaching staff. Without the ingenuity of team doctors, careers would be cut short and playing levels suffer. In the end, it's the player's responsibility to bear the pain as his body is not of his own but is contracted out to the sports franchise: "Don't worry about health; after all the body belongs to the club. Deal in pain thresholds and analgesics, amphetamines and anesthesia. Short circuit that bothersome equipment that communicates pain, numb it, bind it, but get the property back to work."

This idea of belonging to the club not as a person but as a thing is a vision unique to Elliot. The patriotism that affects Americans worshiping the flag is the same fever infusing team loyalty. In spite of claims as to being part of a "family," the team is a corporation and a person is a commodity whose value is conditional to his usefulness:

"We're just the fucking equipment to be listed along with the shoulder pads and headgear and jockstraps. This is first and foremost a business, with antitrust exemptions, tax breaks, and depreciations. And all the first and tens, all the last-second touchdowns, and ninety-five-yard passes, are just items on a ledger to be weighed along with the cost of precooked steak and green eggs..."

Coach Tom Landry: Gent's coach in Dallas

Of course, this fulmination against systems is not unique to football and the rules of the market apply just as boldly to the American worker, many of whom desperately cling to their jobs for mortgages, health insurance and overall livlihood. In the the event of downsizing or a family illness, the catastrophic loss of home, health, and savings is of no concern for a company concerned with its own financial welfare. As Elliot puts it so bluntly, "The past was worthless, the present anxious, and the future impossible." The player as a metaphor for the worker, this is American life, love it or leave it.

Although Elliot can clearly see the faults in the system, in no way does he desire to leave it. It may be a job but it does have its intangible benefits, particularly glory, fame and associated perks. "I'm a contemporary folk hero," is how he explains his profession to a group of stoned college feminists (who assume from his banter that he's a musician rather than an athlete). Men want to shake his hand and women want to bed him. He really is a contemporary folk hero, the kind whose efforts you can watch on television or read about in newspapers and the pleasure of being so well-regarded by friends and envied by enemies is intoxicating, even for someone as level-headed as Elliot.

But the team is not propelled forward by success, by wine and women nor by bold print and statistical averages, motivated instead by a more primal urge: "Fear, man. It's fear and hatred that supply us with our energy. They're what keep us up." Fear is in the newspaper headlines and the radio bulletins: this is Dallas, Texas in the early 1970s, a city suddenly wealthy on petrol profits, yet still mired in racist ideology that prefers apartheid to progressivism. The Vietnam War is ratcheting up the body count numbers and there are always typical, localized catastrophes: "A young housewife was found dead with her throat slashed." This is a society negotiating the delicate route between violence and fear. When these become our only alternatives, the consequences are terrifying. As Elliot puts it, "I am a man who has learned that survival is the reason of life and that fear and hatred are the emotions. What you cannot overcome by hatred you must fear. And every day it is getting harder to hate and easier to fear." Worded in even starker terms is an invective posted on the locker room's bulletin board by Thomas Richardson, a black fullback benched for his political views:

"MODERN MAN NO LONGER FEELS, HE MERELY REACTS.
CREATIVITY HAS BEEN REPLACED BY CONFORMITY.
LIFE HAS LOST ITS SPONTANEITY:
WE ARE BEING MANIUPLATED BY OUR MACHINES.
THE INVIDIDUAL IS DEAD."

Elliot's closest companion on the team is Seth Maxwell, the team's star quarterback (who enjoys possibly one of the best hagiographic introductions in literature: "There wasn't a pass he couldn't throw, a team he couldn't beat, a pain he couldn't endure, or a woman he couldn't fuck, given the right time and combination of pieces. That was how he lived. Time took care of itself; he collected the pieces.") Elliot's conversations with Maxwell on the conflicting values of individual vs. team success are the framework of the novel. In the end, Elliot has the last word on what it means for the individual once the game ends and the party's over:

"There is a basic reality where it is just me and the job to be done, the game and all its skills. And the reward wasn't what other people thought or how much they paid me but how I felt at the moment I was exhibiting my special skill. How I felt about me. That's what's true. That's what I loved. All the rest is just a matter of opinions."

Not everything: the only thing!

These provocative ideas are woven into a novel with a very grounded and well-tested framework: the team has a big game in New York and Elliot hopes to perform well. The author, Gent, is clever in his mingling of politics within the narrative. North Dallas Forty is never preachy though it is tragic. The determination of Elliot's fate has nothing to do with his talent, his marijuana, or the fact he is caught sleeping with the team president's woman but everything to do with the following mindset, a logic that should figure Phillip Elliot as a major (however under-appreciated) character in modern American literature: "There is no team, no loyalty, no camaraderie; there is only him, alone."

The Walking Contradiction

2010-07-05T22:57:00.009+09:00

“Dreaming was as easy as believing it was never gonna end.”

--Kris Kristofferson from the song, “Leaving Her Was Easier.”

The music scene in the 1960s saw a lot of stars break out and just as many break down. The lucky ones were the one-hit wonders that just faded away, slipping into nostalgia and collecting royalties, as the next inevitable big thing came along. Many more were casualties of alcoholism, drugs, madness, guns, and the law. The 1972 drama, Cisco Pike, starring Kris Kristofferson as the eponymous Cisco, explores the idea of a once upon a time rock star living through the aftermath, dreaming only of a comeback.

You see, Cisco’s been busted twice for dealing and now that he’s set up in a small apartment in Venice Beach with his yogi girlfriend, Sue (the ubiquitous rock and roll cinema muse Karen Black), he just wants someone in the record business to appreciate his new recordings. Right away, we know Cisco is hard up— when we meet him, he’s walking into a music store intent on pawning an acoustic guitar autographed by Dylan, Cash, and other legends. The storeowner (poet Roscoe Lee Browne) is more interested in some “coke from Cuzco” than the guitar.

Gene Hackman’s Officer Leo Holland, a weird and wired-up policeman with a jogging penchant, has busted Cisco twice. Officer Holland has lately uncovered a Mexican pot ring, scoring a mother lode of marijuana and rather than report it to his precinct, desires Cisco’s help in unloading it for him. Cisco is naturally suspicious that this might be some kind of set-up but his nemesis seems “honestly crooked.” Holland needs ten grand pretty bad— bad enough that he’s promised Cisco he can keep whatever superfluous profits remain. Only problem, he needs the money by Monday, less than 72 hours away, or it’s big trouble.

Let's Make a Deal

Much of the film is Cisco journeying through Los Angeles in this hourglass timeframe, hooking up with characters in back streets and bars, recording studios and venues, in an altogether eccentric cityscape like something out of a lost world: dealers named Buffalo in pimp fashions eating at a local diner, Hare Krishnas dancing in front of the Troubadour, and Beverly Hills millionaires buying ten kilos of grass in their tennis wardrobes. Though these characters are holding on to the good times blazed by the sixties comet-- hip with the fashions and the lingo-- they're not nineteen anymore and the fast life is beating them down.

Kristofferson, Viva and Hare Krishnas outside The Troubadour, '72

This is no more apparent than when Cisco’s old bandmate shows up unexpectedly. Jesse (Harry Dean Stanton) hasn’t slept in three days— he’s a meth addict, completely oblivious to the tension between Cisco and Sue (caused by the former’s return to dealing). Once he’s got his high going, Jesse babbles manically about getting the band back together: “Hey, listen, this time we save our money, man. No more color TVs or Hollywood sports cars. We take our time, get it tight and then slip it in there slick as shit, man!” It’s a junkie’s ramble, a dream of second chances, a receding future put off by one more hit. Cisco’s no dummy: he knows that as things stand, it will never be like it was.

‘Who’s to say you’ve thrown it away for a song?’ sings Kristofferson over the enveloping personal disasters. The song, “The Pilgrim- Chapter 33,” is more famous for Cybil Shepherd’s Betsy describing to Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle his strange personality in Taxi Driver: “He’s a prophet, he’s a pusher… partly truth and partly fiction… a walking contradiction.” But the language ably fits Kristofferson’s character. Who is Cisco Pike? Is he a musician who deals or a dealer who plays music? Cisco carries his product in his guitar case, further confusing the identity issue. When he meets Merna (Warhol superstar Viva) and she pins him as a dealer, he sighs, “I used to be a teenage idol.” Cisco may sign to a new label but he’ll never be a teen idol again. “You wouldn’t believe it, Lynn,” Merna tells her young groupie friend. “Things were insane then.” It’s only 1972, but already the 1960s are a long time ago, as happens when a personal narrative veers terribly off track.

Hackman’s corrupt policeman, explaining his problems, says, “You do things and then you wonder why you’re doing things:” a conundrum transcending humanity, from the dealer to the cop. How you handle yourself once you’ve figured this out determines whether you are a fatalist or not. But change is not easy, even for the beautiful and the brave. In some films you have to go through hell to get there.

What Sort of Sun Is Rising?

2010-06-30T09:39:00.010+09:00

“Serious sport is war minus the shooting.”

--G. B. Shaw

As a person who believes geographical allegiances should be local rather than national and who has only the dilettante’s interest in competitive sports, I find the fanatical devotion characterizing the World Cup as amusing as the tournament itself. The World Cup produces intense feelings, which manifest themselves in a variety of aspects including facial paint, lucky charms, bizarre costumes, wild inebriation and customized cheering. For most followers of the competition, the World Cup is an opportunity to feel a uniquely communal agony or levity, dependent on the outcome of a match to which the fan has had no part in but who undergoes the winning or losing as if it were one’s own experience.

In Japan, this loyalty involved some ungodly match times due the time difference East Asia enjoys in relation to South Africa. When Japan advanced to the Round of 16 after defeating Denmark, 3 – 1, thousands of fans erupted into the streets to celebrate the victory. It was just after 5:00 AM on a muggy Friday morning and Hachiko Crossing, the busiest pedestrian intersection in the world, had erupted in such pandemonium that the casual non-fan might have been forgiven for believing that Japan had defeated Brazil to win the tournament itself rather than just the first of five rounds, a feat accomplished by fifteen other teams. Were such celebrations a spontaneous outburst born from low expectations? Was it a fit of pride, anomalous good news for a nation suffering through two decades of slow growth that has seen their economic cachet dwindling against China and other emerging East Asian markets? Or was it simply inevitable that thousands of young fans staying up all night drinking beer would want to get down and party when their team won?

To say the least, witnessing such an outburst in Japan is highly unusual for a culture famed for its social reticence. The Japanese may open themselves to others but rarely do they thrust their joys so deliriously upon strangers. The peculiarly Japanese cartoon types— exuberant in blue superhero suits, Yukio Hatoyama gag masks, and bright blue afro wigs (blue being the team color)— worked the fans like deft cheerleaders, gathering crowds and stirring them into a frenzy. Thousands of people streaming from Shibuya’s teeming bars towards the central train station threw off their exhaustion to improvise a jig with strangers, actions they would view with bewilderment in more sober circumstances.

The atmosphere had that rare whiff of danger, as one might expect in an environment compounded by sleeplessness, alcohol, and a sports victory. Yet this danger did not seem so much physical as it did psychological. You could hear it being screamed and sung in wild cacophonous eruptions, “Nippon! Nippon! Nippon!”— a cry as aggressive as any outburst of “USA! USA! USA!” to those not given to national self-mythologizing. They say one man’s meat is another man’s poison; thus the peril, which sometimes requires the competitive energy of a sporting event to make evident, is nationalism.

Like nearly all countries, Japan has its share of right-wingers, nativists, and xenophobes. Though they are ostensibly a minority, their soapboxes and bullhorns, ubiquitous at train stations and embassies, mean they are politically loud. However, they seem to be a dying bunch, grumpy old men with long memories of losing a great war.

I was thus surprised then to witness Japan’s Imperial Flag brandished by a heap of twentysomething soccer fanatics. There it was billowing in the morning wind with all the suggestiveness of history dyed in the bright red rays emanating from a rising sun. You might call it beautiful if you didn’t know better but for those who do, it symbolizes Japan’s catastrophic attempt at empire: colonies in Manchuria and Korea, gory battles in Iwo Jima and Okinawa and of course, the apocalypses of Hiroshima and Nagasaki— the fluttering cloth becoming an object of collective pride for hundreds of young, intoxicated, impressionable young men.

But soccer teams, like governments, do not always succeed in what they set out to do. Promises cannot always be kept. Despite a plucky performance the Japanese team was eliminated from the tournament in a tense, hard-fought finish against Paraguay. Those fans screaming the loudest will have to process the humility in losing with their convictions of national pride. This synthesis can only bring them into the greater fold of humanity, which may be the point of the World Cup after all.

Why the Disenchanted Enchant

2010-06-20T10:09:00.007+09:00

“Fame, romance, success—these things were so precious that no one could be entrusted with their possession for more than a moment.”

-- Budd Schulberg via Manley Halliday

If we are to employ the old standby, “There are two kinds of people in the world…” to Americans, we would say there are winners and losers, but it is not a black & white world of course and there are permutations to the categorization— what about losers who come to win and more spectacularly, winners who come to lose? What is it about déclassé failure that makes us feel better about ourselves? Are Mike Tyson, Richard Nixon, Michael Jackson, and Mark McGwire, to name but a few great legends that received their comeuppance, more famous today for their declines than their greatness? Are they not interchangeable? For example, can you talk about Nixon without mentioning Watergate or McGwire without steroids? It’s fascinating that the term for taking pleasure in others’ pain, schadenfreude, is a loanword borrowed from the Germans, since, with all the pleasure we take in our heroes’ downfalls, you would have thought by now we could have come up with our own Americanism for the blissful joys reaped from the public disgrace of others.

One of the greatest novels ever written on the subject is Budd Schulberg’s The Disenchanted (1950), which is a dramatization of Schulberg’s experience teaming with the legendary F. Scott Fitzgerald, who by the time he was hired out to work on an inane studio script was more legendary for his boozing than The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald died before he could finish his comeback novel (from whose notes for The Last Tycoon include the famous, clairvoyant line, “There are no second acts in American lives.”) But Schulberg, most celebrated for his screenwriting credit for On the Waterfront, made the most of this opportunity, developing a story that not only indicts Hollywood, but the Jazz Age itself, the generation that spawned Fitzgerald and the excesses that would create the Great Depression.

Budd Schulberg

In The Disenchanted, art imitates life: it is the winter of 1939, the world is heading towards another war (“how calmly they floated towards the falls”) and Shep Stearns, a lit-grad and idealist leaning towards Marxism, has taken a low-level screenwriting job because he believes movies are “the great new folk art.” Shep is youthful, enthusiastic, and can talk the talk, even though he knows Hollywood-speak is “a world fenced in with exclamation points… a world where hyperbole is the mother tongue.” But he’s accommodating since he desires to marry his sweetheart and avoid a regular job, i.e. inheriting his father’s studio car rental business. So Shep’s written a stinker of a college romance called “Love On Ice,” which he knows bears no relation to realities or art but “is the most convenient of apologetics: the means to an end.”

The studio head, Victor Milgrim, a rags-to-riches nouveaux riches aristocrat emblematic of the early studio founders, sees potential in Shep’s script but wants to polish it so he’s hired Manley Halliday to work on the script. Halliday is a legendary but mostly forgotten Jazz Age novelist. He is also a recovering alcoholic trying to glue himself back together long enough to finish his final literary masterpiece. Milgrim wants them to travel cross-country together to Shep’s alma mater, the fictional Webster College in New Hampshire, to shoot background scenes at the Mardi Gras festival. He believes the adventure will inspire their writing endeavors (though Halliday is sure that Milgrim, an intellectually insecure millionaire, is pushing for an honorary degree and wielding Halliday as bait for the prize). Manley, dependent on his live-in girlfriend, Ann, agrees to go in spite of grave misgivings regarding what might befall him on the journey. His fears are perfectly ground. The great novelist soon falls off the wagon and the consequences are disastrous.

The problem is that screenwriting is all wrong for Halliday, an idiot savant, prolific with the most exquisite prose but incapable of correctly folding his suits. Screenwriting “wasn’t writing; it was diplomacy” and as a younger man, powerful, free and a bit of the snob, “he’d been able to indulge in a lofty contempt for movies.” But Halliday needs quickie cash and lots of it— he’s paying down the debts racked up from the wild living: back taxes, back alimony, back rent, his ex-wife’s analysis, his son’s prep school education. As in the case of Shep, the lure of Hollywood money is more powerful than pride or convictions.

But the young screenwriter turns out to be a tonic to the old artist: Shep has not only read all of Halliday’s books, he quotes liberally from them and whose generation he inexplicably, guiltily, envies and admires. On the flight to New York, Shep shares with Halliday a few bottles of champagne, which is the first burst of the floodgates. The taste of booze is the flavor of memory and once they arrive in New York, Manley operates in a twilight consciousness revolving around a glorious past, a catastrophic decline, and an inebriated, less than elegant present. And rather than writing, Shep is compelled to live up to his name, shepherding Manley safely through numerous crises, mostly of the self-inflicted variety.

Like Fitzgerald suffering his beautiful Zelda, Halliday’s bête noir was a flapper named Jere. Much of the novel’s thick middle is close third person stream of consciousness covering the couple’s witty banter, bad behavior, terrific parties, and wholesale crack-ups not dissimilar to the Fitzgerads’ very own. It’s a life of gay yachting parties on the Riviera and grim sanitariums in Upstate New York. And though we veer from the plot (will Manley get it together and solve the damn cipher of this silly movie?) the digressions provide some of the most exquisite prose in the novel. After falling in love in Paris, Armistice Night, 1918, Jere “made his young manhood a time of bewitchment, when springtime was the only season and the days revolved on a lovers’ spectrum of sunlight, twilight, candlelight and dawn.” As long as Halliday had the Golden Touch they thrived vivaciously: “we weren’t a-Freud of anything.” But neither Manley nor Jere could transition to the austere 1930s, as “the trouble with both of them… was that they thought youth was a career instead of a preparation.”

The Good Old Days:

Two Flappers and a Gentleman

Failure has embittered Halliday, who can’t help but loathe the new generation. Jealous of the youthful love between Shep and his girl, he comforts himself with the knowledge that “the happiest of people were machines running down.” Pressured by Milgrim and Shep to produce something usable pronto, Halliday fortifies his incapacity to create with his condescending view of writers that churn out material by demand: “Writing comes easy… when you’re a natural hack an’ haven’t got any self to express.”

Nevertheless, Halliday sees himself as a professional. When it’s sink or swim, Manley can riff on the plot, adding poetry and dimension to the staid college romance formula. Shep’s impressed, but dubious, for “it was much too good for what they needed. But for what they needed, not good enough.” Unfortunately for them (but felicity for the schadenfreude-happy reader) when they finally reach Webster, Halliday is “too stupefied to tell day from night, gin from vodka, love from hate.” When the great writer humiliates himself at a college mixer to the delight of colleagues and students, Shep is furious: “Manley was drunk and he was a spectacle. But they seemed glad this had happened to him. That is what galled.” It’s that damn devil, envy, working itself into a fit again, expressed in shits and giggles. Halliday knows the source of their spiteful laughter all too well, as from a time when he nearly conquered his own demons through self-reflection:

“Ruthlessly he made a list of all his faults and found them all to be the same fault, an over-supply of vanity, an over-developed concern to hear his name at the end of the cheers. The wish to be publicly admired. To be a Success. Like the others he had sneered at the Babbitts with their ordinary business success, their abysmal bourgeois ignorance that passed for ‘being a smart operator’ and yet inadvertently he had allowed himself to be caught in the great American net.”　

Thus written is the central dilemma of living in a consumerist society: this is the mother of our disenchantment and our insatiable appetite for the new and the next. It may even be defined by that vague catchall word, “cool.” We have an unfortunate tendency to compare our fortunes to those of others, whether it be money, knowledge, gadgets, or style. When we fall short, for we inevitably do because there is always someone better, faster, cooler, loathing is the default emotional reaction. There is only one great truth to salve such insecure feelings, true then, now, and forever and for a moment, Halliday nearly grasped it:

“Men as far apart as the Bible poets, the Elizabethans and the French symbolists all seemed to agree that if there was a single wisdom it was simply To thine own self be true… All he had to do now was decide what was his own self.”

Manley Halliday only seemed to really understand Manley Halliday in the process of writing, in great confessional prose that excoriated his blunders and romanticized the things that were worth making beautiful. In a difficult culture where morals are compromised and pride despised, art is the single greatest outlet afforded the honest man. In Halliday’s own intoxicated language, “No good work of art I mean there’s no good work worthwhile work of art without the artist exposing himself.”

The Great F. Scott, circa 1938

In the end, Halliday has exposed too much in real life and it destroys him. When he is dying in a hospital at the end of the story, Shep, in spite of the promise of his hero’s unfinished manuscript, believes that only in death will his friend reach immortality: “Let him be lowered into his grave so that disciples may begin to worship, so that readers may savor the pleasure of rediscovery. Let us bury the remains. Let the Halliday revival begin.”

Sometimes life follows the inspirations of art. F. Scott Fitzgerald died at the young age of forty-four. Posthumously, he has become a larger-than-life success, The Great Gatsby being quite possibly the most beloved book of our culture, the so-called Great American Novel. Death, it seems, can save a reputation. Schadenfreude has only so much emotional reach before sentimentality overwhelms it and we Americans are more famous for being maudlin anyway.

Unfortunately, forgiveness comes too late but at least it does arrive in time for posterity.

It’s Showtime!

2010-06-14T10:15:00.007+09:00

“To be on the wire is life; the rest is waiting.”

Bob Fosse as Roy Scheider as Joe Gideon

In Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz, the director’s altar ego, Joe Gideon (Roy Scheider), part-time choreographer, part-time director, full-time bon vivant, may improvise his experiences as they happen, but his mornings necessitate a certain consistency in ingredients and routine: plenty of cigarettes, a hot shower, a pair of Alka Seltzers dissolving in a cup of water, a handful of Dexedrines, Visine squirts in both eyes, Vivaldi’s gloriously optimistic Concert in G on the tapedeck and finally, properly fueled, the best “It’s Showtime, folks!” Gideon can muster to his middle-aged, goateed reflection. Unfailingly, it is this ritual that keeps him sane and steady through an unpredictable and eventful daily life.

Being a film about show business, there is of course, a show and the film opens with a mass audition of aspiring stars, young men and women in their Hellenistic primes pirouetting, swaying, and diving to the sounds of George Benson singing a funked-up version of The Drifters’ hard-luck wannabe-famous anthem, “On Broadway.” (“They say I won’t last too long on Broadway/ I’ll catch a Greyhound bus for home, they all say/ But they’re dead wrong I know they are/ Because I can play this here guitar/ and I won’t quit ‘til I’m a star/ on Broadway”). Within five minutes of watching Gideon at work, we learn what kind of man he is— a perfectionist, a chainsmoker, a flirt, that he has a weakness for dancers’ good legs, and that he is his own man, casting his choices for the production and disregarding the advice of his financial backers. His will is formidable, with the charisma to back it up.

Not many make Joe Gideon's cut

All That Jazz is the story of how this busy choreographer juggles his career obligations with his personal life against the pull of a failing physical health. An unconventional artist, Gideon struggles to put together a dance routine for a showtune inspired by commercial flying and his vision finally results in a very bawdy sketch with the makings of a mile-high orgy, leaving the big brass producers flabbergasted. (“I think we just lost the family audience,” one groans to another.) The dance numbers are great as you’d expect from an old master like Fosse, but what is most intriguing is the meta-mixing of reality and cinema Fosse indulges in so that frontiers between fiction and autobiography are no longer discernable and the audience becomes confused by the razzle-dazzle confessionary storytelling— is Fosse the ventriloquist, Gideon the dummy, and we the audience, the priest? Expected if not to forgive, then to understand?

"Now Sinatra will never record it."

Comparisons to Fellini’s 8 ½ abound since it too was made by a philandering director with autobiographical pretensions (Fosse had even used one of Fellini’s cinematographers, Giusepe Rotunno). Both Fellini and Fosse developed their sensibilities in yesteryear entertainment mediums; Fellini fascinated by clowns and the circus, Fosse grinding it out in vaudeville. One can credit Fellini with inspiration but then a line should be drawn: Fellini has no copyright on a great artist’s storied decline. All human lives, especially those weaned on show business, have their own tragic follies and brilliant failures and Fosse deserves credit for making a brave film.

There are both professional and personal connections between Joe Gideon and his creator. Like Fosse, whose last film was a dramatization of the comic Lenny Bruce, Gideon works late hours in the editing room, cutting a film about a philosophical funny man (whose routine about the five stages of death: anger, denial, bargaining, depression, acceptance, haunts Gideon in his physical and mental dissipation). Fosse’s real-life live-in girlfriend (Anne Reinking) plays Gideon’s best girl, Katy (for there are others…many others). When Gideon and Katy have a serious talk about love and fidelity, Gideon defending his capacity to give, Katy agrees but elaborates, “I just wish you weren’t so generous with your cock.” The effect on Gideon is not one of shame for his running around, but appreciation for the turn-of-phrase: “That’s good! Maybe I can use that sometime.”

Joe employs a delightful sense of humor when dealing with the accusations of the women closest to him, including his ex-wife, Audrey. In the same argument with Katy, in a clever twist of logic, Gideon assures her she is the most important person in his life because, “I go out with any girl in town… I stay in with you!” In another scene, when Audrey challenges him to name “the blonde with the television show from Philadelphia,” a worked-up Gideon blusters, “I remember her name because she meant something to me. The blonde with the television show… her name was ‘Sweetheart!’”

The difference between Joe and his women are that they are keeping score and he is not. He’s not even playing the game to win, but for the fun. Gideon doesn’t know any different and never will and the women tolerate his adulteries because they perhaps intuitively understand his present-moment living. As the cigarettes, the pharmaceuticals, and the situational amorous whims attest, he has a go-go appetite, insatiable for pleasure and passion even after he is admitted to the hospital, disobeying doctors' orders.

“Never bullshit a bullshitter,” Gideon jests. On the usefulness of saying ‘I love you,’ he declares in self-deprecatory fashion, “Sometimes I don’t know when the bullshit ends and the truth begins.” He may sneak around but when the moment comes to telling the truth, Gideon never wavers as when he needs to pep talk Victoria, a long-legged beauty with faltering self-confidence: “I can’t make you a great dancer. I don’t know if I can make you a good dancer but if you keep trying and don’t quit I know I can make you a better dancer.”

You Don't Need an Appointment in Samarra to Meet Her

Gideon is absolutely straight with Angelique (Jessica Lange), the Angel of Death, whom he carries a running conversation with in some fantastic dream-like state (more reminiscent here of Bergman than Fellini). She is alluring, delicate, and gentle, but her kiss, as enticing as it may be, has symbolic repercussions. The Angel of Death is calling because finally the tobacco, the speed, the booze and the pursuit of carnal knowledge were withdrawals to be paid back with interest. When his time comes his mental space becomes a great theatrical stage where Joe Gideon is introduced by an emcee (Ben Vereen) for his final performance in a hip language of extended epitaph so rich in its damning, it deserves to be quoted in full here and now:

“Folks, what can I tell you about my next guest? This cat allowed himself to be adored but not loved and his success in show business was met by his failure in his personal relationship bag. Now that’s where he really bombed. And he came to believe that work, show business, love, his whole life, even himself and all that jazz was bullshit. He became a numero uno gameplayer to the point where he didn’t know where the games ended and the reality began. Like for this cat, the only reality is death, man.”

"Bye-bye Life."

Far and away, this is the greatest-ever musical meditation on mortality. Fosse, who came up with the idea for the story after suffering a heart attack himself, has created a film touching on what nearly every person who ever lived has ruminated: the meaning of his or her death, and thus inevitably an examination of the meaning of one’s life. Gideon goes out with a showstopping bang, ad-libbing the Everly Brothers’ hit “Bye-bye Love” to “Bye-bye Life” and “I think I’m gonna cry,” to “I think I’m gonna die.” Everyone who ever mattered is in attendance: producers, rivals, dancers, doctors, the wife, the women, his daughter, Michelle. It is the greatest sayonara party ever imagined.

So ends Joe Gideon and his mornings in front of the mirror. His signature mantra, “It’s Showtime!” is not about a real show per se, since as we the audience know him, his life revolves around auditions, rehearsals, story conferences, trysts and dinners with his daughter. Rather, the ecstasy of Showtime represents his existence in its entirety, from beginning to end a masterpiece lived rather than created. Any dramatization, no matter how well choreographed or acted, will only be an echo of the real thing.

To quote a line from the director’s more famous film, “Life is a cabaret, old chum!”

For Bob Fosse as Joe Gideon, it certainly was.

Harold Fine Is Just Fine, Thank You

2010-05-28T14:42:00.006+09:00

"Kiss my ankh."

-Peter Sellers as Harold Fine

As hilarious as Inspector Clouseau, Clare Quilty, Chance the Gardener and Dr. Strangelove are to the pop culture conversation, there must be a little bit of room for Peter Sellers’ Harold Fine. In the mostly forgotten 1960s film, I Love You Alice B. Toklas, he plays a very straight Los Angeles lawyer whose life changes one night after accidentally gorging himself on pot brownies. Giving up the suit and tie he grows his hair long and moves in to a swanky bohemian pad with Nancy (Leigh Taylor-Young), his gorgeous hippie paramour.

As far as I know, I Love You, Alice B. Toklas is the first great caricature of the 1960s counterculture, satirizing the movement’s embracing of Native American dress, Mao fetishism, Warholian weirdness, astrological infatuations, colorfully painted automobiles, and most especially, its language. (“Groovy… yeah, very, very groovy scene,” Harold says to his brother, Herbie, with the enthusiasm of a man greeting his dentist: it seems that already in 1968, the exclamatory power of ‘groovy,’ had slipped out of fashion.) Consider Harold’s conversation with a guru regarding his path of knowingness:

Guru: “How can you know a flower if you don't know who you are? Who are you? Do you know who you are?”

Harold: “I’m trying, Guru, I’m really trying.”

Guru: “When you stop trying, you’ll know who you really are.”

Harold: “I’m trying to stop trying.”

With the Guru

How many well-intentioned truth-seekers have been ripped off by such ambiguities substituting for life advice? Coming from a rational background—the law— in which arguments must be substantiated with some degree of proof, the semantics of Hippie colloquialism have begun to wear thin for Harold, especially when their general meanings really do seem to indicate general emotions.

This dearth of substance hits Harold when he discovers his lovely Nancy painting flowers on some handsome stud’s back. She is doing this because she “likes him,” but reassures Harold she likes him too. Enraged, Harold yells, “Is there anybody you don’t like?” This acting out of possessiveness betrays hippie etiquette and when she confronts him on his desires to be free, Harold cries aloud, “You bet I want to be free, but I want to be free with you alone.” It appears, thus, Harold would like to eat his pot brownie and have it too. Bourgeois love dies hard, especially when the girl you love is as gorgeous as Nancy.

The film climaxes at a party with Harold suffering a bad trip, but this being a Peter Sellers film, it is more ridiculous than frightening. I Love You Alice B. Toklas is a vision of the 1960s that can only exist within Hollywood, a place where hitchhikers don’t get molested and junkies don’t OD in the bathtub. As much as it has its fun at the movement’s expense, the film embraces the counterculture as well— marijuana certainly makes Harold Fine a better person. He may use the word “love” as casually as any bell-bottomed babe but there’s an awareness of his feelings and the needs of others that didn’t exist when he was a straight attorney. And having experienced the best and worst of both worlds, Harold remains committed to his revelations, abandoning his fiancé, Joyce, at the altar a second time so that he can find himself. Strutting down a busy Downtown street in an tuxedo, a stranger asks where he’s going, to which Harold cries, “I don’t know and I don’t care but there’s gotta be something beautiful out there, I just know it.” Harold’s choice is the filmmakers’ of course, and more than just an ending, it suggests that for all the silliness and naivety involved in finding oneself, it’s worth it.

Who needs a house when you have a girl like Nancy?

One last interesting parallel: I Love You Alice B. Toklas premiered in October, 1968. Though it wouldn’t be released until July, 1969, Easy Rider had already finished principal photography and was undergoing a lengthy editing process. It had a very different take on the counterculture. Like Harold Fine, Captain America and Billy the Kid want to be themselves, living apart from conventional social constructs. They take to their bikes to see America, a paranoid and dangerous journey in which they are martyred for their choice of freedom. Easy Rider thus feels like a cautionary tale, while I Love You Alice B. Toklas endorses the skewing of conventions wholeheartedly. One can't help but dissect the irony in this just a little: was it accidental, this bewildering of their intended audiences or were the mixed messages intentional? No wonder nobody says, ‘groovy,’ anymore…

The Long Egyptian Night Coming

2010-05-12T11:51:00.013+09:00

In his novel, The Yacoubian Building, author Alaa Al Aswany employs a clever literary technique: a single, crumbling edifice and its population within serves as a metaphor for the decline of Egypt. Literature works well with restrictions and better with the ghosts of nostalgia and this trick could be well disposed for use among other residential landmarks with storied pasts (the Beverly Hills and Chelsea Hotels with its long-term guests come to mind, as does the Chateau Marmont Hotel on the Sunset Strip, a setting that could strip rock and roll to its essence, and perhaps, its popular decline). Decline is a popular theme in literature and for the fictional residents of the Yacoubian Building old enough to remember, change is not usually a good thing. Present circumstances, at least (the novel’s setting is the winter of 1991 during the onset of the first Gulf War), prove intermittently corrupting, debilitating, and horrible—those of a delicate cast, it seems, do not fare very well in modern Cairo.

Built by an Armenian businessman in 1937, the real life eponymously named Art Deco structure once housed Cairo’s elite but Third World capitals have their own kind of ‘white flight’ not dissimilar to ours (the rich gravitate towards greater space for their golf courses, swimming pools, manicured lawns— not so different from their Long Island or Montecito counterparts— it is a flat world, after all) and the inhabitants within Al Aswany’s novel represent various paradigms of contemporary society: political wannabes, Francophile dipsomaniacs, gay journalists, scheming tailors, and Islamic terrorists. Okay, perhaps not exactly. Rather than being an honest survey of urban Cairo this description of characters might appear handpicked at prima facie but Al Aswany has written a great book, one to my mind, is very nearly to his Cairo as Salmon Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is to Bombay, The Master and Margarita is to Mikhail Bulgakov’s Moscow and What Makes Sammy Run is to Budd Schullberg’s Hollywood— a novel that is so evocative of time and place it defines a society as well as its culture’s plight, better (and certainly more poetically) than any history is capable of. And like these other great novels, there’s a lot of anger there. Its stand against a social system, with which it finds fault, is a brave one.

There is no central plot in The Yacoubian Building— Al Aswany weaves between characters, whose stories do not always intersect: Zaki Bel el Dessoui is a wealthy, aging, alcoholic womanizer reminiscing over the glorious pre-revolutionary past; Taha el Shazili is the doorman’s son who fails at his policeman’s test and is politicized enough to become a suicidal terrorist; Malak is a shirtmaker conspiring to hustle himself into a better apartment; Hatim Rasheed is a gay journalist who’s in love with a married soldier from the country, whom he bribes with gifts to woo his affection; Hagg Muhammad Azzam is a self-made millionaire opportunist aspiring into politics, an individual whom betrays his religious averring when he drugs his concubine mistress in order to force an abortion against her will.

But to my mind, the hero of the story is Busayna el Sayed, a young, beautiful woman who has to work to support her family, which involves indulging the sick petting of her boss for a mere ten Egyptian pounds reward (about two dollars worth). Like another character in the building, Abashkharon, a factotum to the philandering fleshpot el Dessouki wielding a prosthetic leg as “moral blackmail,” Busayna is compelled to use her body for whatever tiny, if not shameful, gains available to her. Inspired by her fetching figure, the charming lecher, el Dessouki, hires her as his assistant but eventually falls in love with her integrity. With his fond memories of an elegant, pre-revolution Cairo, El Dessouki might despise the impoverished, insular, religiously fundamentalist nation Egypt has become (Al Aswany’s prose describes drinking alcohol in Cairo as very nearly a speakeasy affair) but the old gentleman flinches when Busayna mocks his nationalism in the most important speech of the novel:

“You don’t understand because you’re well off. When you’ve stood for two hours at the bus stop or taken three different buses and had to go through hell every day just to get home, when your house has collapsed and the government has left you sitting with your children in a tent on the street, when the police officer has insulted you and beaten you just because you’re on a minibus at night, when you’ve spent the whole day going around the shops looking for work and there isn’t any, when you’re a fine sturdy young man with an education and all you have in your pockets is a pound, or sometimes nothing at all, and then you’ll know why we hate Egypt.”

Busayna is speaking of her own hardships, but she may as well be reporting for all the world’s fellaheen, whether they are Indians, Africans, or even Americans. The language resonates, particularly in its locale and environs: The Yacoubian Building was the decade’s biggest selling Arabic novel. It’s remarkable that such a book could be published and popularized in a country notorious for its censorship (it’s even been adapted into a film and TV series though in sanitized forms). As a work of art that challenges the status quo, the novel spits in society’s face: the government is portrayed as corrupt, barbarous, nepotistic, irreligious, and despotic— torture is described vividly. Malice, perversity, and cravenness pervade the motivations of much of the remaining characters. Egyptian society, here at least, seems to be tearing itself apart.

But how does one of the country’s annual seven million tourists perceive this? Well, he or she doesn’t. Although the Egyptian government fails to provide for the poor, an infrastructure catering to the needs of tourists is very well established. And why not considering the profits? High admission prices, luxury hotels, comprehensive tour programs are big, big business. In the popular press, Egypt is safe enough to visit but dangerous enough that individuals are advised against doing so on their own, a happy medium for a government quite enthusiastic to exploit a rich heritage they had absolutely no part in creating. This concern for travelers’ safety is a fallacy predicated on Egypt being a Muslim, and therefore dangerous, nation. Handholding becomes de rigueur so that in their ten-day ‘adventure,’ the average tourist’s interaction with Egyptians is limited to souvenir peddlers, waiters, concierges, bellboys, drivers, and the ubiquitous tour guide, an air-conditioned experience filtering the traveler’s participation to a culturally predetermined test formula.

Another way of looking at the Cairo skyline

It’s often the case that in the interests of tourism a country’s glorious history will overshadow present-day realities. In perhaps no other country is the disconnect between myth and reality so vast as it is in Egypt. Moreover, the historical gap between the marketed fantasy and the onerous reality is equally prodigious. Between the New Kingdom and modern Egyptian state, the fellaheen have suffered incompetent and taxing governments under Persians, Greeks, Romans, Circassians, Turks, and the British. Even religion has a long and varied history so that between Aman Ra and Allah, believers might have prayed to Zeus, Jupiter, and Jesus Christ— you can witness this textured history in ancient temples where stone-cut reliefs of Horus have been plastered over with painted Last Supper scenes, the facial features chiseled out by Muslim iconoclasts.

In most countries, it’s common to see as many locals as tourists at famous monuments, but not in Egypt. In fact, in the interest of state-sponsored tourism (and thus tourists) whole neighborhoods are being razed in order to recreate the glory of ancient Egypt, as in the Nile Valley region where the Sphinx road between the Luxor and Karnak Temples is being restored, displacing entire neighborhoods and thousands of people who are not being adequately compensated for the loss of their homes. For the casual tourist or amateur Egyptologist, the government’s initiative may seem a matter of course. After all, when the scales are weighed between the visual recreation of a glorious dynasty and the miseries of a few thousand peasants, which side do you think the majority of Nefertiti fetishists will find purchase?

Tourism: an inexhaustible machine

Egypt’s President Mubarak came to power in 1981 after the spectacular assassination of Anwar Sadat. Egyptian society has been in a “state of emergency” ever since. What this means is the suspension of habeas corpus, civil rights, and an impartial justice system. Dissidents, radicals, journalists, religious fundamentalists, and free thinkers are routinely jailed and tortured. Yet, Egypt is often held up as a model of the region’s potential for democracy. These tone-deaf proclamations as well as financial support (Egypt is the second highest recipient of U.S. aid— two thirds of which goes to military spending and police espionage used to oppress its citizenry) reveal the utter depths of American hypocrisy. Mubarak is eighty-four years old and expected to die soon. One of his sons, his rapacious reputation preceding him, is being groomed as the heir apparent. This is not a happy prospect for the impoverished Egyptian and in the cafés, many Egyptians, even those in middle-class positions who have benefited from the regime’s policies but whose moral instincts are disgusted by its behavior, are open to a people’s revolution. The land, so fertile with history, may burst into the international spotlight yet again.

As for fate of the characters in The Yacoubian Building, most end tragically, but the final scene finishes the novel on a happy note, one of love redeemed and survived in spite of the brutal reasons it shouldn’t. It may seem maudlin to some after so much tragedy, tagged on by a publisher’s recommendation, softening the political hammer but in its own way it works. Because readers, and by that extension human beings, need a reason to hope.

That's the Way the Tortilla Crumbles

2010-05-02T17:42:00.009+09:00

Although globalization has sped the process that colonialism began, integrating and importing different cultures and people into foreign lands, America remains foremost among the world as a nation of immigrants. The indigenous excepted of course, all Americans come from somewhere else. The ancestors that founded our American lines thus once upon a time endured a very brave journey to be here. There is no shortage of mythologizing these romantic origins and my family is no different. Collecting and adding up various stories of apocrypha, my great grandfather and progenitor of the American Lotmans was born in the Ukraine port city of Odessa. An army captain stationed in the Black Sea during the First World War, when the Russian empire collapsed into revolution, civil war and a pogrom against Jews, Captain Lotman went AWOL, gathering his wife and his brother’s family and fleeing the violence. It took nearly three years for them to walk across Europe—a Europe at the time devastated by war, revolution and the Spanish influenza— three years sleeping in barns and stealing chickens before they made it to the South of France where there was a little money and a ship to take them to New York and beyond, to Chicago, where lived a cousin with a tailor shop. Was this really how my American line was born or was it much more ordinary, bureaucratic, sanitized? I prefer to celebrate my great grandfather’s adventure regardless of disputations. As the famous line from the John Ford western advocates, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

Even the most hard-line, bigoted nativist waxes starry-eyed fables about the time his or her ancestors came over, glossing over the fact they were once aliens, maybe illegal, probably culturally and linguistically confused and likely despised for their efforts in trying to make a better life. The hatred reserved for Mexicans, Guatemalans, Salvadorians and the bulk of our South-of-the-border neighbors was once reserved for Wops, Micks, and Pollocks. Immigration is one of those issues that will never go away. Just last month, the Arizona state government passed Arizona SB1070, legislation also known as Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act, which proposes police activism in interrogating suspected aliens regarding their papers and facilitating punitive measures for those in violation. Boosters of the bill deny any kind of racial profiling involved but it’s hard to imagine a white guy driving a Lexus being asked to provide proof of citizenship. Elsewhere this week an Alabama gubernatorial candidate in his TV ad proclaimed sanctimoniously that if elected he’ll make sure that Driver's Ed. tests are administered only in English and in California, a Republican congressman wants to deport U.S. born children of illegal immigrants, defying the Constitution.

Even those sympathetic to our melting pot heritage have precarious loyalties in moments of national crisis. Just look at attitudes towards Germans during the First World War, the Japanese at Manzanar, and Middle Easterners and South Asians after the terrorist attacks on September 11^th. In normal times as well fear has been the catalyzing agent for the proclamation of draconian measures. While it may be true that immigrants commit crimes, you could argue just as exhaustively that it is poverty, more than culture, that is the inspiration. What is nearly always missing from the talking heads in the bully pulpits is some compassion and desire to understand the roots of the problem. It does not require tremendous common sense to realize that a human being will seek out his best opportunities for food, shelter, and work. What’s a thinking man with a strong body to do when his country suffers forty percent unemployment and his country’s biggest source of revenue is work remittances from the United States? It’s a problem, all right, and always it seems the solution is the reflexive ‘kick ‘em out, build a wall,’ answer. Never mind that California and the whole Southwest was once Mexican territory until an imperialistic war of the 1840s saw it ceded to the U.S. for a paltry sum. Never mind that we’ve damned the Colorado River and built so many aqueducts that by the time the river reaches Mexico, it’s so small and insignificant farmers are going bankrupt by the thousands. Never mind that without illegals picking lettuce out in San Bernardino farms for three dollars an hour, we couldn’t enjoy the very cheap produce we love drenching our low-fat Ranch dressing over. Never mind all that. It’s their fault, not ours, that people are scared, starving and killing each other.

It is not the artist’s responsibility to put the issue in perspective, but he or she can dramatize it in such a way that creates a sense of powerful empathy. T.C. Boyle does this admirably in his novel, The Tortilla Curtain. Published fifteen years ago, it feels as contemporary, relevant and urgent today as it did then. Compared favorably with John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, a similar story of migrants, prejudice and their tragic trajectory, Boyle quotes Steinbeck’s character in the lead-in to his novel, “They ain’t human. A human being wouldn’t live like they do. A human being couldn’t stand it to be so dirty and miserable.”

Dehumanization is omnipresent in Boyle’s story, beginning when Delaney, a liberal white naturalist, runs over Cándido, an illegal alien crossing Los Angeles’s Topanga Canyon road at an inauspicious moment. Delaney doesn’t speak Spanish, the injured Cándido knows no English, and the unfortunate action is resolved by Delaney’s handing over twenty dollars to the battered Cándido. Explaining the resolution to his incredulous wife, Kyra, later, Delaney says, “I told you, he was Mexican,” as if that reduces the transaction into its simplest terms.

Nevertheless, their lives are herein interwoven and Boyle adroitly switches chapters between his characters without ever losing momentum. Delaney and Kyra represent the wealthy liberal’s contradictions. They live in a gorgeous, secluded enclave named Arroyo Blanco. The neighborhood, which owes its name and architectural style (Spanish Mission) to the culture of the undesirables it aspires to keep out, decides to put up a security checkpoint and when that doesn’t seem far-reaching enough, a steep wall is erected to enclose the community to the exclusion of others— Arroyo Blanco works as a fair enough metaphor for America itself and the futility of preventing the outside world from coming in. Kyra, a hotshot realtor, is particularly sensitive to the clustering of Mexican day laborers in certain convenience store parking lots and its inverse relation to property values. Although, she must have awareness such an action will have dire repercussions for those doing what they can to eke a living, she makes a phone call to immigration to “clean up” the streets. She doesn’t even feel guilty about this nor does she appreciate the choice of language. For Delaney, whose sympathies are always with the natural world he writes about, it doesn’t take much— a stolen car, a piece of graffiti, a low rider with tinted windows and rumbling bass speakers ominously encountered— before his feelings towards illegals are destabilized so that a personal vendetta develops in his mind between himself and the man he hit to a degree that violence becomes a rational solution.

As interesting as his psychological descent may be, what makes Tortilla Curtain so powerful is Boyle’s compassionate portrayal of Cándido and his young, pregnant wife, América. Cándido has been coming to El Norte for years to do backbreaking work, from Idaho’s potato fields to West Hills landscaping, never managing to secure that elusive tarjeta verde. América has come with him on the premise of a better life, which in her estimation is as little as a small apartment and three meals a day, not the stuff of Horatio Alger riches, but then Cándido, though clever, industrious, and diligent, is working in a cruel, violent world, which is one in which an individual, no matter how much his efforts, good intentions or small contributions to the local economy, runs the risk of deportation and the loss of everything accumulated and saved.

The Tortilla Curtain

Cándido is a victim of bad luck and the capacity of human beings for greed, thoughtlessness, and self-absorption. Promising América a better life, he is ripped off in Tijuana, humiliated at the border, reduced to squatting homeless in a creek bed, hit by a car, robbed in Canoga Park, and when things are finally beginning to improve for him and his pregnant wife, Cándido unwittingly sets off a catastrophe that not only ruins everything he’s worked for but nearly kills him. It is not for a lack of effort that prevents Cándido from getting ahead but a complex social structure that despises him for his efforts:

“Cándido was a sinner like any other man, sure, but no worse. And here he was, half-starved and crippled by their infernal machines, bounced from one to another of them like a pinball, first the big jerk with the Elvis hair and then the pelirrojo who’d run him down in the road, the very one, and his gangling tall awkward pendejo of a son who’d hiked all the way down into the canyon to violate a poor man’s few pitiful possessions. It was too much. He needed to go to confession, do penance, shrive himself somehow. Even Job would have broken down under an assault like this.”

Of course, there is some symbolism suggested in the choosing of a character’s name such as Cándido; a point is being made, an apologue being wrought and an interesting one at that. His namesake, a character created by a secularist in pre-Revolution France, leaves his native village behind in order to discover if it is true as his mentor Dr. Pangloss teaches, that this is the best of all possible words. Like Job, like Cándido, he discovers it to be a violent, soul-stricken place. In the end, the Candide of the French imagination returns home reassured that though the world may be horrible one can run a clean, lovely garden— your joys and ambitions will not fail you if they remain small scale. The big difference between the Candide of French literature and the Cándido in America is that our Cándido doesn’t need philosophy or its gratuitous hypotheses—his goals have always been a small home, food, maybe some house plants, and a woman and children to love. Of course these humble dreams are not uniquely Cándido’s own but remain a universal value to nearly every brave, hardscrabble immigrant who has ever strode boldly into the unknown world.

The Bottom of the Bowl

2010-04-23T01:13:00.012+09:00

“Nothing in the world was more terrible than an empty bottle! Unless it was an empty glass.”

One of the worst transformations undergone in the publishing industry over the last generation has been the elevation of the personal memoir. Self-centered celebrity tell-all books notwithstanding, it is the testimony of former addicts, alcoholics, sinners and the apologetic like whose personal anecdotes of shame and redemption that tend to be very popular with an inquisitive public. These stories of decadence share a typical trope: wanton excesses are laid out for our prurient (and natural) curiosities, which are then incontrovertibly condemned by a puritanical (and programmed) morality. Other than refuting Blake, Huxley and Jim Morrison’s cause-and-effect advocacy regarding excess and wisdom, these books do not reveal the reason why some of us are destroyed by substance abuse while for others drugs and alcohol remain an indulgence, if not an occasional delight.

If you’ve read one 12-steps recovery tale of self-aggrandisement, you’ve read them all and, yet, you’re still no closer to understanding what was the point of all this embarrassing solipsism. Generally, it is understood that addiction is a terribly personal affair, a lonely misadventure so desolate that for the addict lost in lostness, “sunlight could not share his burden of conscience of sourceless sorrow.”

You will never find the above quote— so exacting in its prognosis of alienation—in any contemporary memoir. It belongs to literature, specifically Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, published in 1947, during a time when alcoholic and drug fiends—if they wanted to be published— transubstantiated their brutal experience into an exquisite poetry that demanded from the reader a severe attention if he or she decided to go along for the ride. For Lowry, an alcoholic who never beat his demons but exorcised them in this literary masterpiece, the devil doubled as the muse.

Under the Volcano is the story of Geoffrey Fermin, an ex-British consul drinking himself into oblivion in Quauhnahuac, Mexico. The story, like Joyce’s Ulysseus, comprises a single, eventful day, the Dia de Las Muertes, November 1^st, 1938, a day that begins with his estranged wife, Yvonne, an American B-actress past her sell-by date, returning from California after a year’s estrangement. Along with the Consul’s half-brother, Hugh, they decide to travel to the nearby town of Parain. En route, they witness a crime that has later tragic repercussions.

The setting and time are important, related as they are to the major global event at the time, the Spanish Civil War, which, ideologically, had been a contest between anarchy and communism against fascism and, industrially, a testing ground for the weapons of mass destruction that would follow within a year, once Hitler’s Germany invaded Poland. The progressive ideas coming out of communism, particularly that of nationalization of resources, was a testy subject in Mexico, beset with its repressive Catholic heritage as well as its own Revolution’s legacy and the State’s very recent takeover of its oil reserves.

The best novels feature an interconnectedness between the greater world and the interior one and this complex relationship is evoked within the characters in different ways. Hugh, a failed commercial troubadour and utopian-minded drifter-dreamer, feels guilty that in spite of his convictions and the knowledge that the Spanish Republic’s defeat is a fait accompli, wonders if he has missed the one opportunity to do something honorable and meaningful in life. Of course, he disagrees with the Consul’s self-destructive apathy, yet he is not unaware of man’s survival instinct to let well enough alone what is not his battle to fight. This is eloquently expressed following the incident of the crime and his witnessing of the other passengers’ reaction: “Death they knew, better than the law, and their memories were long… in these old women it was as if, through the various tragedies of Mexican history, pity, the impulse to approach and terror, the impulse to escape, having replaced it, had finally been reconciled by prudence, the conviction it is better to stay where you are.”

The Consul, well aware of the benefits of isolationism, has his own contentions. His alcoholism is not a pleasure nor is it a form of escapism. It is a sickness, and the drinking is necessary for him to reach a physical and psychological equilibrium. The DTs strike whenever he attempts to empower himself any degree of free will over his disease. Just as bad is the sense of doom that pervades sobriety, liable to wipe out any sunshine or cheer. Sitting at a café, in view of a fair celebrating the holiday, the setting “had suddenly become transcendentally awful and tragic, distant, transmuted, as it were some final impression on the senses of what the earth was like, carried over into an obscure region of death, a gathering thunder of immedicable sorrow; the Consul needed a drink…”

Malcolm Lowry

Mexico, which Lowry once wrote in a letter to friend was "the most Christ-awful place in the world in which to be in any form of distress, a sort of Moloch that feasts on suffering souls," is a grandiose theater from which this tragedy plays out: Mexico and its ruined palaces, Gothic churches, hideous ravines, pullulating flowers, clandestine scorpions, and canvas-like skies where "high overhead sailed white sculpturings of clouds, like billowing concepts in the brain of Michelangelo." There is also its tequila and its mescal, the sad-eyed drunks and the corrupt police. In the turning point of the novel, when the Consul, Yvonne and Hugh encounter a brutalized Indian lying injured on the side of the road, one of the other passengers not only pockets the man's money and pays his fare with it but shamelessly keeps the pelf on his lap conspicuously for all to view. Was it any wonder then, that Europe was rushing headlong and heedless into another great war and that for those who knew better, the human race would not be worth dying for?

But in the end this is a love story and it is the Consul's tumultuous relationship with Yvonne that is the real source of his despair. Yvonne, having come to rescue him from Mexico and its addictions, has agrarian dreams, one in which they withdraw from the world onto their own farm, in the country, a place where Geoffrey would be able to write (he is working on a book on Mayan ritual, the Kabbalah, and other occult matters) while she tends their living space, looking after him, being his friend, his housewife, his lover. It doesn't matter that she knows nothing of the day-to-day affairs of such an endeavor, for after all, it is but a dream and one that can be easily discredited by reality. Though they never discuss it outright, Geoffrey suspects it's on her mind and though he loves the novelty of such an enterprise, he believes more in futility than fruition. Early in their reunion, he hints at the hopelessness of her schemes, his query, “What’s the use of escaping from ourselves?” quickly forgotten. There was not even real regret that this inevitable failure was something to feel bad about: “the past was irrevocably past. And conscience had been given man to regret it only so far as that might change the future.”

That the Consul may be pessimistic about his predestined perdition doesn’t make the reader any less sympathetic to Yvonne’s cause—her imagining of the farm comes as a contrast to a brutal sporting event—since the marriage, in spite of its flaws and blemished disgrace seems worth saving, as these two people, for all their mistakes, need each other desperately. The novel's greatest substance comes from the construction of the small details communicated between a man and a woman with a long tragic history, beautifully evoked in Lowry’s prose: “…as he approached she turned this hand palm upward…like an unconscious gesture of appeal: it was more: it seemed to epitomize, suddenly, all the old supplication, the whole queer secret dumbshow of incommunicable tendernesses and loyalties and eternal hopes of their marriage.”

Yvonne is no innocent: her affair with M. Laurelle, a childhood friend of the Consul is what makes it so hard for them to reconcile. It is not clear whether his alcoholism was responsible for the affair or the affair responsible for the alcoholism. This chicken-or-the-egg argument has no bearing for Geoffrey and Yvonne in their current predicament. They are doomed lovers, a Romeo and Juliet denied any future union of consummation not due to external parties but from deep within themselves. Being responsible for so much unintentional pain upon the other, is it any surprise “how alike are the groans of love to those of the dying…?”

The Consul understood the inarticulateness of his debilitation and that though every drunk’s tragedy might be as mass-produced as the liquor he drank, his very real pain was personal in its broken-tongued head-spinning downfall, a sui generis descent into a forgettable void. People might help you, they might care for you, but in the end, you were on your own: “In the final analysis there was no one you could trust to drink with you to the bottom of the bowl.”

This may be true. But as an old barkeep consoles Geoffrey on his long day’s journey to the end, there can always be a sense of companionship among the lost nevertheless, for “I have no house only a shadow. But whenever you are in need of a shadow, my shadow is yours.”

The Writing’s On the Wall

2010-04-18T14:28:00.017+09:00

"I’m an artist. When you tell people that they usually say, what's your medium? I always say, 'Extra large.'"

-Jean Michel Basquiat

Nobody as far as I know has written about the cultural significance of walls and that may be too bad, for though their subject may be pedestrian at first glance, their prominence within history and art is undeniable. Jerusalem has a Wailing Wall where wishes are wedged into the stone by faithful worshippers. Israel has another wall built recently, used as a border to filter Palestinian people through security checkpoints in and out of Gaza and the West Bank. Berlin once had a wall utilized for similar reasons and Pink Floyd has a depressing album about one. China’s wall you can see from the moon and Jean-Paul Sartre’s most readable short story is called The Wall.

Walls have been with us ever since man has sought shelter from his environment. They have various necessary and symbolic functions, the most obvious of which is providing structural support for homes and business. While accommodating privacy they also separate us, shutting people away from each other. Walls are boundaries; they suggest limits, establishing private property, telling us where we can and cannot go. They can be white, padded, and locked if one is deemed insane. Should they be covered with squiggly marks done in aerosol paint, they jeopardize real estate values. Walls are intended to protect us yet too often in these terrifying times they are adorned with barbed wire, their symbolism taking a ghastly, violent poise. We forget this but walls are also potential canvases. Huge, inspiring, storytelling space.

While the kingdom of Morocco may be famous for its deserts, bazaars, and couscous, it may be the vividness of color that strikes the visitor on a level that might be described as ecstatic. Psychologists have long pointed out the connection between mood and color and that melancholy can be a consequence of grayness. Throughout the large cities and small towns of Morocco, windows, gates, and doors are gilded with reds, pinks, and orange. Although it can feel slapdash and improvised, if not whimsical, the effect of urban color on the spirit is deliberate and powerful.

Asilah, a small Atlantic seaside town just south of Tangier, annually commissions international artists to create large, painted murals. Some are representational while others are abstract: visible are elements of cave paintings, cubism, and Cy Twombly. Like most inner-city medinas in Morocco, Asilah's central layout is a complex maze of plazas, streets, and alleys that takes some time to orient oneself. Throughout the medina these huge murals can be found, though the best ones are located by the main elementary school, which hopefully, is an inspiration to the passing children.

This is a wonderful thing. To keep art in museums-- as opposed to the streets-- is to suggest that art is 'historical,' and thus has little relevance to contemporary culture. Worse, secluding its appreciation to privileged circles within the museum complex, society withholds art's everyday effect from the ordinary citizen. To do this in Morocco, a country with double-digit unemployment would be spiteful and absurd. The streets of Moroccan towns are never silent. In cafes men smoke and talk. Women converge to gossip on doorways and park benches. Home for many is a cramped, dark place so it makes sense the street would be a viable contrast in brightness.

Chefchaouen is another city remarkable for its color. Most of the town center has been painted a rich knockout blue and has been since the 15th century. This bold use of a uniform color has a tremendous effect. It gives the city a visible personality. Moreover, it welcomes the visitor into its space effortlessly, so that old men in djellaba cloaks, children playing with water guns, cats lazy from the sun and you, yourself, have all become characters within this rich and beautiful canvas.

If one walks long enough (and in such surroundings one is inclined to walk all day), a person will eventually witness cracks in the walls, exposed brick and wood, childishly scrawled graffiti. Rather than imperfections, these marks seem to define character and age: not all dilapidation is bad just as not all shiny surfaces are beautiful. In fact, the flaws insinuate the aura of collaboration between time, nature and human creativity as on evidence is the work of the stonemason, the carpenter, the journeyman laborer, and the eleven-year-old boy.

As the world moves closer in globalized sameness it becomes imperative that we adopt a flair for color so appreciable within the towns of Asilah and Chefchaouen. Doing so would bring people out of their techno-cocoons and into the street for games, talk, and friendship. There is no excuse. After all, we have plenty of wall space to fill.

Burning Billboards and Other Literary Matters

2010-03-05T12:51:00.009+09:00

Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang begins with “the aftermath” of the novel itself, the detonation of a bridge in the Four Corners Region of the American Southwest. Like an inspiration born of yippies or Al-Qaeda, the bridge is a high-profile target, sabotaged during a media event with officials glad-handing, local TV news crews videotaping, and the public witnessing: the bigger the spectacle, the larger the message, which is more or less, neo-Luddist.

It is generally a risky move to make literature overtly political (as opposed to presenting your polemics with subtlety, which is the greater trend; done right, nuance can be just as powerful). Fictional agitprop generally does not sell well with the public nor does it charm the midlist critics. Notable exceptions would be Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, both of which went on to affect the public conscience on such vigorous levels that their narratives entered the national debate over slavery and food safety, respectively.

Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang was published in 1975, a fascinating period in liberal dissent, in which some radicals had more or less abandoned sit-ins and peace marches in favor of violence. Members of The Weather Report and the Symbionese Liberation Army really did believe that terrorist acts against institutions that promote or profit off the industry of war and oppression were fair targets and through their destruction would come significant change. Putting down the love beads and picking up the Molotov cocktail, they were fearless, if not misguided individuals operating in a social climate that was moving comfortably towards The Hustle and cocaine on pleather love seats.

Abbey’s Monkey Wrench Gang is not a clan of hippies indoctrinated by the burgeoning Earth Day celebrations but are men of the earth who have soil in their fingernails and the wherewithal to live by their philosophy, that is that technology and industry are incompatible with the pristine beauty of nature. As Seldom Seen Smith, the polygamous, blonde, lanky, good-humored Mormon whose living, livelihood and life is the marvelous Colorado River, says:

"The river, the canyon, the desert world was always changing, from moment to moment, from miracle to miracle, within the firm reality of mother earth. River, rock, sun, blood, hunger, wings, joy-- this is the real... all the rest is androgynous theosophy. All the rest is transcendental transvestite transactional scientology or whatever the fad of the day, the vogue of the week."

Philosophically, he is right on with Doc Sarvis, a middle-aged surgeon with a pathological antipathy regarding highway billboards, of which he indulges in his pyrotechnic habits. Doc Sarvis views man’s fate through fiery-tinted apocalyptic goggles, the Devil’s Advocate in any conversation related to man’s inherent goodness:

"The wilderness once offered men a plausible way of life. Now it functions as a psychiatric refuge. Soon there will be no wilderness... then the madness becomes universal. And the universe will go mad."

Over a campfire of rations, whiskey, and beer, they discuss possible targets, Doc Sarvis working himself into a rage as he lists nature’s worst transgressors due a mean reckoning:

"And don't forget the billboards. And the strip mines. And the pipelines. And the new railroad from Black Mesa to Page. And the coal-burning power plants. And the copper smelters. And the uranium mines. And the nuclear power plants. And the computer centers. And the land and cattle companies. And the wildlife poisoners. And the people who throw beer cans along the highways."

Doc Sarvis’s secretary and chauffeur-cum-lover, Ms. Bonnie Abbzug, is a Bronx Jewish beauty who is the Patty Hearst of the gang, a city gal politicized by charismatic company and the delight of detonating bulldozers. As the men get carried away with their visions of sabotage, she reminds them that prudence would be key to survival. She’s the voice of the 1960s, bright, lovely, idealistic, meditative, and yet she can see the more clearly than the others:

"But they have everything. They have the organization and the control and the communications and the army and the police and the secret police. They have the big machines. They have the law and drugs and jails and courts and judges and prisons. They are so huge. We are so small."

Her philosophical rival within the group is George Washington Hayduke, a hairy, squat, muscular, vulgar Vietnam Vet with itchy trigger fingers and an incapacity to resist any kind of sabotage, as much for the fun factor as for the environmental statement itself. Though told in the third person, it’s clear that Hayduke is the story’s protagonist, if not Abbey’s altar ego, as he is the most offended by the pathetic turn in materialist America. Hayduke is a kind of rampaging Greenpeace Rambo whose end-all pastoral vision of America is compromised by his ingrained pessimism:

"When the cities are gone and all the ruckus has died away, when sunflowers push up through the concrete and asphalt of the forgotten interstate freeways, when the Kremlin and the Pentagon are turned into nursing homes for the generals, presidents and other such shitheads, when the glass aluminum skyscraper tombs of Phoenix Arizona barely show above the sand dunes, why then, why then, why then by God maybe free men and wild women on horses, free women and wild men, can roam the sagebrush canyonlands in freedom--goddammit!--herding the feral cattle into box canyons, and gorge on bloody meat and bleeding fucking internal organs and dance all night to the music of fiddles! banjoes! steel guitars! by the light of a reborn moon!-- by God, yes! Until... the next age of ice and iron comes down and the engineers and the farms and the general motherfuckers come back again."

Take or leave the politics, this is passionate prose, and the story flows with energy and humor. Progress of the narrative is simple and inevitable: after forming the Monkey Wrench Gang (also called the Wooden Shoe Conspiracy as the word sabotage is derived from the French sabot or ‘wooden shoe,’ as in “from damage done to machinery by sabots (Webster’s)), they progress from simple to complicated operations that lead to evermore close calls with the law, including some extraordinary chase sequences that would make great cinema (though it’s very unlikely corporate Hollywood would spend the big bucks financing such a piece). Throughout the Four Corners region, they have supplies cached for regrouping, survival, and the next act of mayhem. In case you were wondering, the typical inventory was such:

“The stores consisted of (1) food: tinned goods, dried meats, fruits, beans, powdered milk, sealed drinking water; (2) field equipment: medical kits, tarps and ponchos, fire starters, topographical maps, moleskin and Rip-Stop, sleeping bags, canteens, hunting and fishing equipment, cooking gear, rope, tape, nylon cord and (3) the basic ingredients: monkey wrenches, wrecking bars, heavy-duty wirecutters, bolt cutters, trenching tools, siphon hoses, sugars and syrups, oil and petrol, steel wedges, blasting caps, detonating cord, safety fuse, cap crimpers, fuse lighters and adequate quantities of Du Pont Straight and Du Pont Red Cross Extra."

If Abbey is political, he is also poetic and oftentimes funny. The Gang’s enemy, the representatives of industry are the kinds of people that "can hear a dollar bill drop on a shag rug." No institution is safe with Abbey, even cartoon characters suffer embarrassing acts of vandalism:

"Bonnie unbuttoned Smokey's fly, pictorially speaking, and painted onto his crotch a limp pet-cock with hairy but shriveled balls. To Smokey's homily on fire prevention Hayduke attached an asterisk and footnote: "Smokey the Bear is full of shit."

Mr. Abbey

Would you play with dynamite with this man?

In the copyrights page, Abbey declares that though the novel is “fictional in form,” it is “based strictly on historical fact.” Mischievously, he adds that “it all began just one year from today.” It seems then that his novel is a call to arms for all environmental warriors to take up wrenches against industry. As we all know, such a Neo-Luddite revolution never occurred but that is not to say it might happen yet with Abbey some smiling godfather angel poet.

Abbey, who had an FBI file going back to the 1940s, was a fringe thinker with a golden pen, but is not known to have engaged the system as his fictional characters had. But he was at the right place at the right time, as it’s hard to believe that he could get away with his politics in our contemporary and endless War on Terror. Finding an empathetic editor and courageous publishing house would have been extraordinarily tedious. When the character Hayduke speaks for Abbey, “Because freedom, not safety, is the highest good," he is contradicting the literature of our age, with its sanitized, whitewashed machinations. Had he lived long enough, maybe the author would have gone rogue in his eighties. Abbey was too aware of what was at stake to stand by idly. Best to let the bard enjoy the last word:

"That ultimate world... the final world of meat, blood, fire, water, rock, wood, sun, wind, sky, night, cold, dawn, warmth, life. Those short, blunt and irreducible words which stand for almost everything he thinks he has lost. Or never really had..."

The Journey Upriver Nilewise

2010-03-03T08:27:00.013+09:00

In the 18^th and 19^th centuries, so little was known of the Nile and its source that one of the most trusted authorities continued to be Herodotus, the great Greek historian, whose writings on the subject were more than 2,300 years old. Maps of the African interior were topographically blank, leaving one to conjecture that the Dark Continent was one vast void where one descended into Hades, which it might as well have been, as leaving the coast one would have to contend with malarial fever, savage tribes, and wild beasts. Only the most ingenious and intrepid explorers could hope to survive such expeditions. A contemporary history of its survey, Alan Moorehead’s excellent The Blue Nile, is not so much about the travails of these curious eccentrics as it is about the engagement of major military expeditions into Egypt, the Sudan and Ethiopia, in which scientific learning was not always as valuable as the procurement of gold, ivory, and slaves.

Moorehead’s history begins with James Bruce, a Scottish aristocrat-turned-adventurer, who convinced that the Nile’s source was in Lake Tana in the Ethiopian Highlands, sets out to prove his claim. Bruce’s résumé was not atypical of the age’s explorer, for “he studied Arabic manuscripts in the Escorial in Spain, he sailed down the Rhine, he fought a duel in Brussels, he made drawings of ruins in Italy,” and eventually he was posted as a British consul in Algiers among the Barbary pirates. Having accumulated experience and confidence among ruffians and scoundrels, he attempts crossing into Ethiopia via the Red Sea Route with his secretary, Luigi Balugani, successfully entering the kingdom of Gondar, where with a great demonstration of élan, he makes courteous acquaintance with the royalty there. Disgusted by the behavior of the court, where raw meat was devoured and licentiousness carried out in the open (“…and if we may judge by sound, they seem to think it as great a shame to make love in silence as to eat.”), Bruce nevertheless managed to mark what he believed to be the source of the Nile at Ghish Mountain. Bruce’s ecstatic reaction deserves to be quoted in full:

“Faithful squire! Come and triumph with your Don Quixote, at that island of Barataria where we have most wisely and fortunately brought ourselves! Come, and triumph with me over all the kings of the earth, all their armies, all their philosophers, and all their heroes!”

Unfortunately for Bruce, he had not been the first European at this spot, some missionaries having passed this way before. Moreover, this was not even the true source of the Nile, which lay 1,000 miles away at Lake Victoria (coming down via Khartoum in the Sudan and witnessing the appearance of the White Nile where the two rivers join had to have been heartbreaking for the explorer). Bruce’s journey back to civilization took some years and when he finally published his findings, he was ridiculed on-end for his anthropological observations. So much so that a new edition of Baron Munchhausen was dedicated to James Bruce. In spite of the bad press, Bruce’s geographical findings were more or less accurate and would make an enormous contribution to the coming military campaigns, beginning with Napoleon in 1798.

Napoleon, only 28 at the time, and coming off a string of successes in Italy where he had made his name humbling the Hapsburg empire, believed that if he could cut a route through the Suez isthmus, he would give France immediate access to the Red Sea, thus creating a short cut to India, the crown jewel of the British colonies (the British at this time were committed to the Cape of Good Hope as passage). As a learned man, Napoleon’s interest was not restricted to conquest but to the arts and sciences as well, and could count on this military expedition a staff of engineers, geologists, mathematicians, chemists, zoologists, astronomers, geographers, mineralogists, archaeologists, arabists, poets, and painters.

Bonaparte, intent on winning the loyalty of the Egyptian fellaheen then under the autocratic thumb of the Mameluke caste (paying nominal tribute to the Ottoman Empire and who at this stage had succumbed to decadent decline), gave strict orders to his soldiers that mosques and Muslim priests were to be regarded as sacrosanct and that women and private property were to be respected.

Not dissimilar to the more famous janissaries of the Ottoman court, the Mamelukes were purchased children from the Caucuses who were taught Islam and the arts of war. They ruled Egypt with a fierce militaristic ethic, hoarding the resources and wealth so they could live in opulence. The indigenous Egyptians and various minorities endured their rule the best they could, via passive aggressive resistance, avoiding any civic commitment whatsoever. It was a comfortable arrangement, centuries in the making. Napoleon’s calls for equality, fraternity, and liberty would later prove baffling to a people more familiar with the strong arm.

Bonaparte managed to evade Admiral Nelson’s frigates in the Mediterranean, successfully landing near Alexandria and easily taking the city, commenced his divisions on the long march across the desert to Cairo. After three days they reached the Nile. Upon arrival, the soldiers suffering from the appalling summer heat in their blue serge uniforms threw themselves into the river without bothering to remove their clothes. On the far side of the bank waited the Mameluke army, led by a hothead named Murad, oblivious to the anachronisms of his military strategy.

A turning point in history, now, east meeting west upon a battlefield dormant for centuries. The Mamelukes were certainly brave horsemen, but in spite of the best efforts of their headlong cavalry charges, they were easily slaughtered by rifle-fire and cannonballs. Technology, rather than courage, had decided the outcome. More a massacre than an actual battle, the shootout was a harbinger of 19^th century colonial warfare.

A Mameluke charge painted by Goya

From there it was easy progress for Napoleon and his forces to take Cairo and thus, Egypt. In the spirit of his enthusiasm, he pronounced that though he was a Catholic in France, he would be a Mohammedan in Egypt. Dressing like a robed pasha and eating with his fingers, he hosted dinner parties for the imams and those warriors acquiescing to French rule, the attendees of various banquets receiving both the Koran and Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man translated into the vernacular Arabic.

The romance of oriental conquest for this latter-day Caesar did not last long. Nelson’s frigates sank the French fleet at Alexandria, stranding Napoleon and his forces in Egypt. If worrying over his annihilated navy wasn’t enough, the fellaheen rebellion against the French efficiency for collecting taxes consequenced in violent crackdowns. Equality? Fraternity? Liberty? So they said but what they had really created was a bureaucracy enforced by military law. Napoleon began having trouble with his own troops, grown fractious from the tedium of a conservative desert society and Napoleon’s request to the Directory in Paris for replenishments reads like a sumptuous bachelor’s party: “a company of comedians, a troupe of ballet dancers, a marionette show, a hundred prostitutes, two hundred thousand pints of brandy and a million of wine.”

Marooned as they were, Napoleon assigned his best lieutenant, General Desaix, to finish the last of the Mamelukes, now led by Murad and committed to a kind of guerilla warfare down the Nile River Valley. Accompanying this expedition was Vivant Denon, an all-around aesthete and archaeologist. Moorehead, always astute on gathering the more profound observations, artfully chooses to follow Denon on this journey even with regards to battle (the artiste described the skirmishes as a clash of “northern austerity with eastern pomp: iron seemed to be trying its strength with gold; the plain glittered, the spectacle was admirable.”)

Let’s pretend we are sailing the Nile towards Upper Egypt with Denon and the French forces. Suffering attacks from both the Mamelukes and Bedouin scavengers, it was hardly the idyllic trip it is today but then again it must have been stunning for a man of Denon’s learning to be visiting these ancient, revered, mythical monuments at Luxor, Philae, Karnak, and Dendera, awestruck among the first Westerns seeing these fantastic but crumbling temples, tombs, and obelisks for the first time in a thousand years. What might it have suggested to a Frenchman whose own nation and thus civilization was reaching its own apex? Denon was spellbound and much harried trying to record what he saw in drawings, often dodging spears and arrows, assailed by troglodytes squatting in the mausoleums (“this was a war with gnomes.”). General Desaix was able to pacify the region but the French lasted just three years in Egypt. Nevertheless, Egypt was no longer a forgotten land but a very strategic piece of real estate in geopolitical wrangling.

In the power vacuum of their hasty departure, emerged the original Muhammad Ali, a Turk from humble origins whose chief tools were cunning, sadism, and a force of cutthroat Albanian bodyguards. Unlike the Mamelukes, he desired to modernize Egypt as well as to utilize Western technology to mine whatever materials were available, particularly gold. The third section of The Blue Nile deals with his brutal reign and the various explorers, adventurers, and tourists now coming down to visit the ruins.

Muhammad Ali

What Ali wanted for his court was slaves and gold and sent a military expedition towards the Sudan to claim it. In 1820 when the invasion commenced, the Sudan was as backwater as any place on earth: “nothing was built, every activity was delayed, and the villages turned listlessly in upon themselves…” This was pagan Africa, a frontier between the Islamic desert of Egypt and Christian highlands of Ethiopia. If there was a power in the region it was the Shaiqiya, a Muslim cavalry caste of adroit warriors similar to the Mamelukes in both horsemanship and passé fighting tactics. The battle, though hopeless, deserves to be described for all its raucous pomp:

“A young girl mounted on a gorgeously caparisoned camel, gave the Shaiqiya the signal to attack—that warbling cry, lilli-lilli-loo— and a horde of unarmed peasants came running down on the Turks in a cloud of dust. They had been assured by a religious fanatic that bullets could not kill true believers…behind came the Shaiqiya cavalry, accompanied by a roll of drums and uttering their sardonic war-cry Salaam Aleikoum as they charged… the Turks took to their guns and pistols.”

After the battle, ears were collected from the living and the dead, as Ali had offered a small bounty for them.

As horrible as the campaign would prove to be it made the Nile safer and some Europeans decided to include the Nile experience in the Grand Tour. Those who visited published, and those who read were entertained to tales of temples, animals, savages, concubines, and treasure buried in the sand. That a “sophisticated past was overwhelmed by the primitive present” illuminated the adventure in a profound context. But great care had to be spent on the undertaking as this fascinating inventory of the big game hunter-turned-explorer Samuel Baker testifies: “a large umbrella with a double lining, a quart syringe for injecting brine into meat, sticks of Indian ink that can be ‘rubbed up in a few moments to write up the notebook during the march’, tinted writing paper, burning glasses and flint and steel, quicksilver and lead for making bullets.”

The final section of The Blue Nile deals with the mad Emperor Theodore of Ethiopia who puts several British envoys and missionaries in chains upon deciding that the Empire is conspiring against him. By now it is 1867 and John Speke has confirmed that Lake Victoria is the source of the Nile and in Egypt construction of the Suez Canal is underway. Rescuing several dozen Europeans was not a priority with England when it was very much involved in so many global affairs, but in order to save face, they sent a major expedition to rescue the hostages. The situation was indeed delicate as Theodore had a habit of having prisoners thrust off a precipice.

The arrival of the British in Africa was indeed the culmination of the taming of the Blue Nile. It marked the arrival of major technology in the region as the British employed a remarkable exercise in logistics (the commander, General Napier, had begun his career as an engineer). Napier had to move 32,000 men (only 13,000 of whom were soldiers, 9000 of them Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs conscripted from India, Persia and Egypt) as well as 55,000 animals from the coast at Zuba to Magdala in the mountains, where the prisoners were being kept. To make it happen, a port with pier and tramway was constructed. A railway with locomotive came next and inevitably a native bazaar. In the march itself, engineers composed the vanguard, ensuring that the crossing would be safe for the forty-four trained elephants sent from India to carry the heavy guns. Even the banks in Vienna were solicited, as the only European currency accepted in the region was that of the Maria Theresa dollar, the one minted in 1780 showing a “profusion of bust.” Because the expedition was so religiously diverse, great sensitivity was taken in culinary matters so that 50,000 tons each of salt and pork were inventoried (as well as 30,000 gallons of rum). Discipline was strict regarding propriety: “No swarthy damsel was subjected to any rude gallantry on the part of the redcoats.” Such the 19^th century globalization column appeared:

“The cavalry came first, the troopers dressed in crimson caps and green uniforms, and the officers with silver helmets on their heads. Among the infantry that followed on, many of the white men in the Irish regiment wore beards, their cheeks burned a deep brown by the Indian sun, and the native soldiers, the Beloochees, marched along in green tunics with red facings and with large green turbans wound round their fezzes.”

The British in Ethiopia

This is a story in logistics rather than in war and the battle was somewhat anticlimactic, if a little tragic as will happen when technology is so mismatched. Suffice it to say, the Battle at Magdala ended Ethiopia’s isolation forever and would be now engaged in contemporary politics and its characteristic swindling. The history of Africa is a brief one as far as written records go and reads like an awakening. It is rude, but it is also at times comic and poetic. That might be Moorehead's strength as a historian: he tells a good story, one so vivid and anecdotal, it inspires readers into engaging flights of fantasy that make Africa, in spite of all the detailed hardships, worth the while so that the reader not only commiserates with the British wayfarer wandering under an assumed name such as Sheikh Ibrahim ibn Abdullah (as the explorer, Burckhardt, does), he wants to be him too, warts and all, sailing up the Nile, notebook hidden within one's jellaba.

In spite of the inevitability of history detailed in this book, when technology competes with superstition, more often than not it fails. This is generally true in Africa at least. The efficiency of machines just cannot compete with the wonders of the mystical. Beyond Aswan and the cataracts that make journeying by boat difficult, life on the Nile has yet to be revolutionized by the digital byte or even a Big Mac bite. Part of it is politics and violence, part of it is the brutality of the climate and part of it is that some people hold fast in their ways. Thus traveling in some regions in the Sudan and Ethiopia remain nearly as exotic today as they were two hundred years ago. And anyone going there today is considered as much an adventurer as they were in Victorian times. The risk lingers. As does the sense of drama.

The Spirit of '76

2010-02-07T09:49:00.010+09:00

The most humanistic pronouncement in the history of political tracts, that which asserts "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" are among man's "certain inalienable rights," is the utopian secular American signature written into our Declaration of Independence. That was the spirit of '76 and a quality of political imagination that has been difficult to live up to ever since. Certainly, Thomas Jefferson's ebullient claims taken at face value are abstract but in the proper contexts they can be defined with certain qualifications. For example, the right to "life" would be the right to proper, affordable health care. "Liberty" would entail a transparent government, the closure of illegal detention centers, proper civilian trials and habeas corpus. The pursuit of happiness is the fuzziest of the three, yet so-called modern day patriots would probably equate it with mass consumption. But if the revolutionaries of 1776 knew their strenuous efforts were undergone so that their descendants could laze around sofas tweeting, facebooking, shopping, and eating "freedom fries," would they have risked their fortunes fighting the formidable British empire? Or might they have stayed home to tend their farms, lamenting that the American Dream in a philosophical sense would always be just that, a dream?

David McCullough's history of George Washington's Continental army in the very grim fighting year of 1776 isn't asking those questions. As an establishment historian, a winner of two Pulitzers, McCullough is strictly concerned with the facts, drawing so generously from a prodigious survey of primary sources it's easy to forget that he's even there. 1776 is a focused work meaning that 1775's Battle of Bunker Hill is mentioned in passing and the battles of Lexington and Concord not at all. Nor are Valley Forge, the Maquis de Lafayette, and Yorktown discussed. As any sixth grader who passed his civics test will tell you, 1776 is the year the Continental Congress signed the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia, but even that monumental convergence of great philosophical minds merits just one paragraph. This book is about one man, George Washington, and his ragtag army.

As a fighting force it was a pretty pathetic sight, the Continental Army. Consider, in his own words, Washington's dire assessment of his underpaid, underfed, undertrained motley ranks:

"Men just dragged from the tender scenes of domestic life-- unaccustomed to the din of arms- totally unacquainted with every kind of military skill, which being followed by a want of confidence in themselves when opposed to troops regularly trained, disciplined, and appointed, superior in knowledge and superior in arms, makes them timid and ready to fly from their own shadows."

Your Average Soldier in Washington's Continental Army

1776 is divided into three parts: the siege of Boston, the battles of New York, and Washington's retreat through New Jersey, into eastern Pennsylvania. McCullough portrays the strategies of the British as well as the American forces in order to create a thorough narrative of the events in the early stage of the war (though to British high command, the word, 'war,' was never used as that would legitimize the conflict as one between sovereign states; 'rebellion' being the preferred epithet.) The British did not want to fight and would have been happy with a capitulation returning things more or less to the prior status quo. In fact, throughout the contest, the British eagerly proffered the olive branch, going so far as to publish a Proclamation granting amnesty to all revolutionaries conditional on their signing of a loyalty oath. That was refused by the rebels, even when it appeared the destruction of the Continental Army and therefore the American military seemed all but certain.

As many Americans would be today, many civilians at the time were perturbed by the revolution, more concerned with commerce than politics. Those so-called "Loyalists" were not necessarily monarchists, but just ordinary people at odds with a sweeping movement, more concerned with property and the safety of their family. Hoping to expedite the end of the war, many of them gave intelligence to the British, jeopardizing secret missions and troop deployments. Had Vegas odds been around in '76 only fools would have wagered on the rebels. Although in Massachusetts the Americans defeated the British in the challenge to command Dorchester Heights (instigating a humiliating Redcoat retreat), the situation went sour in New York, a city that was viewed by both sides as the key to the Hudson River and thus should it be taken by the British they would be able to split the rebels geographically, isolating New England, disrupting communication and supply lines. The Americans spent the spring of that year fortifying south Manhattan and Brooklyn against a formidable British siege: at one point one hundred frigates docked around Staten Island forming the largest Armada ever seen on the continent. But after the Americans lost The Battle of Brooklyn (it's interesting to place the fighting in a modern city context), Washington and his soldiers had to abandon Manhattan, the fortifications, and of course control of the Hudson River. It didn't do well for troop morale. Soldiers deserted in droves often taking their muskets home with them as souvenirs. Many of them, shoeless and hungry, deserted to the enemy.

Leading them in their flight was George Washington, a by-his-bootstraps surveyor-turned-wealthy planter with virtually no military experience prior to the war. What comes across from McCullough's exhaustive research is a plainspoken man of common sense, who was a small town fellow in over his head and knew it:

"Could I have foreseen the difficulties which have come upon us, could I have known that such a backwardness would have been discovered in the old soldiers to the service, all the generals upon earth should not have convinced me of the propriety of delaying an attack upon Boston till this time."

If Washington could have "justified the measure to posterity, and my own conscience," he would have, "retired to the back country, and lived in a wigwam." But that's why he's celebrated today as one of the Great American Heroes, because he believed in the Cause so fervently, that he was willing to risk his livelihood, and being a self-made man also had much to lose. Today he is revered as a national godhead but in the early stages of war, he lacked decisiveness and good judgment. Had the British known just how dire his situation was and had pursued the Americans beyond New Jersey and into Pennsylvania, it is likely the revolution would have failed and Washington would have disappeared into history books as a footnote. Perhaps, our journey to autonomy would have progressed like Canada's, evolving into dominion status, a bloodless passage towards sovereignty.

Crossing the Delaware

But Washington put on a good fight, which of course being primarily a military history, composes the climax of 1776. Famously on Christmas night, General Washington and his forces crossed the icy floes of the Delaware River in order to ambush the mercenary Hessian soldiers quartered in Trenton, New Jersey. The Hessians, perhaps drunk with holiday spirits, were properly surprised and routed. As far as battles go, it was hardly decisive in what would become an eight-year struggle. But McCullough treats it as a turning point in the war, a desperately needed morale injection as well as confirmation of Washington's leadership skills.

What makes 1776 a good read is the harrowing portrayal of how just how close Americans were to being vanquished. Then, just as now, to speak out and especially act against an unpopular government required tremendous courage. Had the rebels been forced to surrender under British terms they might have been executed or at the least had their livelihood ruined. They risked their lives because they seemed to really believe in what was at the time a newfangled concept of civil liberty, those certain unalienable rights. Without faith in these ambitions-- life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness-- the revolution would have likely failed.

Brave Men Putting Their Names to Independence

Today should we be asking the same questions as our Founding Fathers regarding the legitimacy of government? Does Congress and the President really intend to guarantee the rights of all citizens and if it does not, what is to be done? If you want to go back to that same prized parchment penned by Mr. Jefferson, he suggests something overlooked and ignored by the establishment hypocrites and power brokers today, that is:

"That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of the these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness."

It's something we should all think about come every 4th of July after the hot dogs and beer and pleasure seeking. Freedom is more than picking through the supermarket, the television, or the information superhighway, and its intrinsic value is revealed to us when we witness demonstrations in other countries, as seen most recently in Burma and Iran. What happened in 1776 was a movement, a collection of passionate philosophers who contemplated a better reality. This process, without proper liberal reform and better guarantees for the burgeoning poor and jobless, is likely to repeat itself once a crisis brings us to a breaking point.

The revolutionaries shocked the world. It happens from time to time. Let's just hope that when it happens again, it doesn't take eight years of war to recognize that a new humanitarian approach is the better way.

In Memoriam

2010-01-29T12:32:00.007+09:00

Howard Zinn, on the cusp of politicalization

This past Wednesday, two larger-than-life writers, who had not insignificant effects on my world view, passed on. That Howard Zinn and J. D. Salinger died is not especially tragic-- Zinn was 87 years old and Salinger, 91, and certainly their very best days were behind them. Zinn's most famous work, The People's History of the United States, was published in 1980 and Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye in 1951. Both men are old enough that they served in the Second World War, Salinger participating in D-Day and Zinn as a bombardier, whose vigorous anti-war beliefs stem from being one of the first pilots to use napalm, dropping it on Royan, France, at the end of the war. Zinn and Salinger had paradoxical reactions to their successful careers in letters. As much as Salinger withdrew from public life, Zinn embraced it, lecturing at universities and rallies on the role of the average American in producing progressive change, teaching that it has been the participation and inspiration of ordinary individuals, the unsung heroes, who have effected whatever liberal programs we enjoy (and take for granted) today.

I've read People's History twice. The story of America's rise to power is an overwhelmingly tragic tale, from the theft of indigenous land to the brutal, cheap labor enjoyed by both Southern plantation owners and Northern capitalists, building industries and making fortunes on the work of slaves, and later, immigrants. If there is a thread that connects this history, it's one of blood and tears. Well-researched, much of People's History is told in the first person by Americans who were brave enough to challenge the power structure and its tight grip on the status quo. Zinn was a revelation for a number of modern historians (termed "revisionist" by a reluctant establishment) for taking on a view of history in which progress is not measured by the winning of wars but the championing of basic human rights deserving of all men and women.

J. D. Salinger

I've read The Catcher in the Rye three separate occasions: the first time was in High School when I was too young in life to "get" it; the second time was just after finishing university, having decided to pursue a writer's life but having no idea how I would make my way in the world otherwise, wary of the transformations necessitated by adulthood; and the third time was during my first extended stay in New York City when I was 25. That final time, I didn't get it either but it was because I had moved on from Holden's callow obsessions. In short, I felt that Holden was a sympathetic misanthrope, sympathetic to the extent that he felt powerless in a society that strips us of our innocence and that this was the world's biggest "f*** you" he could never efface. All of us, especially young readers, can relate to the realization of our limitations, which is the true, great pain of young minds raised on the myths of superheroes.

I wonder had the character, Holden Caulfield, read Zinn's People's History, might he embrace the idea that there is no absolutism in life and that adults are capable of amazing, beautiful and imaginary actions. A fictional character, Holden, on the edge of life: his fate is whatever we care to dream.

More Than Just Bad News on Page 25

2010-01-25T15:54:00.011+09:00

Of the considerable technological achievements of the twentieth century-- the automobile, the jet airliner, the Internet, DNA fingerprinting, the bomb-- none have had as profound an effect on everyday life in Africa as the invention of the plastic bucket. Consider that for centuries that women used heavy clay or stone vessels to fetch water for the day's cooking, drinking, and washing. Traditional tribes unfamiliar with wheeled vehicles required the village women to carry this heavy container on their heads over great distances. The advent of the everyday and ordinary plastic bucket-- cheap and light and to us from the West oh so sundry-- revolutionized life in Africa. Longtime resident, the Polish journalist, Ryszard Kapuscinski, in his collection of writings on the continent, "The Shadow of the Sun," writes appreciatively for small things, aware that in Africa if a plastic bucket be a miracle, then to be grateful for small miracles nonetheless.

Kapuscinski, who died three years ago, spent decades reporting from Africa. Famously, as written in his author's bio, he "witnessed 27 coups and revolutions" and "was sentenced to death four times." In the compilation of his reportage from Africa, he suffers cerebral malaria, tuberculosis, nearly drowns in an ill-planned attempt to escape a coup in Zanzibar when his boat gets caught in the monsoon, survives several mechanical breakdowns in the bush, and is nearly bitten by a mammoth cobra in an abandoned hut. Critics have accused Kapuscinski of fabricating his experiences in the interests of the narrative-- while these are serious allegations, these criticisms miss the point of his writing, which although is harrowing is not the real story for Kapuscinski for all his nine lives does not seem at all boastful as he does compassionate. This not his story but the people of Africa's. If anything "The Shadow of the Sun" is a journey of a foreigner between optimism and disenchantment, an arc mirroring that of the African, who had higher hopes for the equitable distribution of wealth once his brethren took power. As anyone who pays any attention to international news at all, this transfer of power did not pan out very well. At one time or another, nearly every African nation has suffered the ignominy of failed state status. Kapuscinski, a convivial, friendly writer who seems to put his subjects at ease, translates this heartbreaking process in a variety of places and people, shattered sometimes by malicious greed, other times by tribal pathologies.

When Kapuscinski first arrived in Africa, in Ghana, in 1956, during the early years of decolonization, he found people who had been humiliated for centuries by Europeans via the slave trade and exploitation of resources, ready to demonstrate to the world their capacity for autonomous rule. But from the beginning the transition failed. As the journalist explains:

"On the one hand lay the deeply encoded remembrance of the history of one's clan and people, of the allies one could turn to in times of need and of the enemies one had to despise, and on the other hand was the awareness that one was supposed to be entering the community of independent, modern societies, a precondition of which was the renunciation of all ethnic egoism and blindness."

Here Kapuscinski is discussing Uganda but he may as well be talking about nearly every single African nation. As Kapuscinski notes later in his writings, there are comparatively few international wars within the continent. Africa's fiercest fighting is internal, between clans whose history of harmony or discord predates even the earliest European meddling. Kapuscinski illustrates this with the meeting of two men in Somalia. They give their names, family lines, clans, lineage, roots:

"Their personal rapport, their mutual sympathy or antipathy, have no meaning; their relationship, be it friendly or hostile, depends on the current state of affairs between their two clans. The human being, the singular, distinct person, does not exist..."

This is not to let the Europeans (or for that matter the Americans) off the hook. African nations have been incredibly self-destructive in their penchant for civil wars and corruption, but it is the sorrow of slavery that is most emasculating (and here, yet again, is the complicity of the African himself). But slavery has been a most complex burden, not only physical but spiritual and psychological, one that has engendered an inferiority complex.

Nowhere is the legacy of slavery so apparent as in Liberia, which Kapuscinski goes into graphic detail. There is much to tell but in summation, Liberia's story is a lesson on the extent of man's capacity for ruthlessness. By the early mid-19th century the entire coast of West Africa had been colonized by European powers save a narrow strip of land west of the Ivory Coast, disregarded; because of dense jungle thicket it was deemed impenetrable. This is where Robert Stockton, an agent of the American Colonization Society, docked in 1821, with designs to resettle former slaves in their homeland. Within a generation, these former slaves had adopted the plantation habits of their former masters including the columned mansions, The Good Book, the big gowns and stiff collared suits, as well as the enslavement of local tribes, who were denied citizenship, deemed heathens.

In Liberia, slavery lasted well into the 20th century. 1980 and 1989 witnessed two major coup d'etats and the country has been in perennial unrest ever since. It's a fascinating tragedy but I bring it up as a detail illustrating the structure of troubled African states as well as the inadequacy of aid programs:

"International relief for the poor, starving population is an exhaustible source of profit to the warlords. From each transport they take as many sacks of wheat and as many liters of oil as they need. For the law in force here is this: whoever has weapons eats first. The hungry may take only that which remains. The dilemma faced by international organization? If the robbers aren't given their cut, they will not let the shipments of aid get through, and the starving will die. Therefore you give the chieftains what they want, in the hope that at least the leftovers will reach those suffering from hunger."

Damned if you, damned if you don't has real life-or-death repercussions here and usually for want of a better option, the warlords reap the treasures and Africa itself is regarded as a colossal failure that cannot take care of itself, still even after colonization, "the white man's burden."

There are some Africans who feel that the mess was pre-determined, that the European colonials intended that the African nation states should appear incompetent without the direction of foreign officials. These protesters (legitimately) cite the promotion of uneducated tribal partisans (Ida Amin in Uganda, for example) and the ill-advised cartographical drawing of borders (something for which the British Empire in Kashmir, Iraq, and Palestine has blood on its hands, blood still being spilled in the world's biggest hotspots). In Africa, their mapmaking error was the creation of The Sudan. The Sudan comprises 2.5 million square kilometers incorporating the Sahara and Sahel, vast desert and savannah space as well as a very green, tropical south. More importantly, the people of the north are Muslims, the people of the South, animists. The origins of the longest running war in African history began nearly forty years ago when large landholding Arabs with access to money and arms ousted numerous fellaheen from the fertile Nile Valley, converting small subsistent farms into export crop estates producing cotton and rubber. The dispossessed Arabs were prodded south towards lands inhabited by what was defined to them as pagans and savages. When the war evolved it was no longer between armies but between roving bandits, armed and hungry. They follow the women and children since this is where they can find international aid, which is taken at gunpoint. But who is killing who, so well catalogued in the West has so few reference points in places like the Sudan, where:

"... even the longest and greatest war is quickly forgotten, falls into oblivion. Its traces vanish by the day after: the dead must be buried immediately, new huts erected on the site of burned ones."

The media constantly portrays Africa as a wasteland ravaged by war, AIDS, malaria, famine, poverty and crime. It is true of course that there is little of Africa that has not been touched by apocalyptic conditions but with such reportage concentrated on the horrible, it can render a place as large and significant as Africa a place useless and vile, easily regarded in a niche of hopelessness so despairing as to beyond realistic sympathies. The media does little to focus on the resilience of the average African. That they can live an entire life uncomplaining in conditions Europeans and Americans would find intolerable within 24 hours:

"Everything is eaten, down to the last crumb. No one has any supplies, for even if someone did have extra food, he wouldn't have anywhere to keep it, no place to shut it. You live in the immediate, current moment; each day is an obstacle difficult to surmount , and the imagination does not reach beyond the present, does not concoct dreams, does not dream."

The African can never take anything for granted, as Kapuscinski explains:

"Life here is a constant struggle, an endlessly repeated effort to tilt in one's favor the fragile, flimsy and shaky balance between survival and extinction."

Shade and water and the securing of these two fluid, inconstant things is what constitutes the average African's quest. Kapuscinski does not fetishize these simple desires nor does he feel sorry for them. What comes through in the telling of his time in Africa is that the continent's failings is not an African problem but a human one. There is no pie-in-the-sky solution offered by Kapuscinski as he is not a theorist but a journalist. If there is anything to be taken from his story is inspiration. Africa needs first person accounts, people who genuinely feel compelled to understand it via experience rather than judge it with headlines from the newspaper. That's your duty, then, yours and mine.

What Is It All Supposed To Add Up To, Singapore?

2010-01-25T10:25:00.014+09:00

Acrobats on Orchard Road

If there is one thing visitors to Singapore complain about, they say it's boring and that once you've done your shopping you can move on. Certainly, consumers in revolt would find themselves disgusted by the buyer's impulse running the national engine. On Orchard Road alone-- a two-mile boulevard of wide sidewalks and tall fruit trees-- there are dozens of enormous shopping centers including Orchard Central, Ngee Ann City, and Wheelock Place, boutique-rich megalopises catering to a great gamut in tastes. Prominent are the big names and Armani, Gucci and Louis Vuitton enthusiasts with good credit can outfit themselves for the next dozen balls. Ubiquitous is the handsome lady with stooped shoulders, weighed down by designer label bags in both hands. Big spenders and small ones can cool their heels at any of the number of Starbucks cafes en route. And this is only Orchard Road, the grandest shopping district in a city designed for mass consumption and air conditioned pleasures.

It wasn't always this way. Singapore was a fishing village less than 200 years ago when one of the great visionaries of the British empire, Sir Stamford Raffles, declared the island a free trade port. The British, competing with Dutch and Portuguese merchants in the region, consolidated its regional commercial interests on the island. This was not an overnight task. It took years to clear the malarial marshes of the island (as well as hunt the man-eating tigers) and beyond the luxuries of the colonial administrators, much of the Chinese, Tamil and Malay population used for constructing the infrastructure suffered in terrible poverty. The island's darkest years came during the short, bitter Japanese occupation, in which thousands of Chinese were slaughtered as national security risks and survivors starved through rampant food shortages. During the great colonial uprisings of the 1950s and 60s when Asian and African colonies liberated themselves from European rule, Singapore was briefly ruled by Malaysia, finally becoming an independent city state in 1965.

Singapore today is the vision of one man, Lee Kuan Yew, who was the small nation's first prime minister in 1965 and has never relinquished power (his son is the current P.M. and Yew is involved in the government as a quasi regent in the post of Minister Mentor, created specifically for him). Yew is both revered and reviled for creating what Singapore is today: a consumeristic society managed and systemized by a paternalistic control-freak (chewing gum, anyone?) Singapore is not alone among twentieth century nations dictated by a strong personality; Fidel Castro, Ferdinand Marcos, Juan Peron, and Suharto are just a few individuals that having wielded considerable power become individuals indivisible from their nations. Many rightly despise Yew for his record on civil rights: dissidents are punished, polemic presses shut down. Nevertheless, there is something about the society that works.

Visitors (I was there three days) can only glean so much and their impressions will naturally be skewed by a highly selective experience. Yet, I was impressed with Singapore, which feels more first world than the First World itself. It has a solid infrastructure in place: numerous hospitals and a cheap, clean convenient public transportation system. Nearly everyone I met spoke good English, a sign of quality education (a great legacy of the British empire is the city state's multiculturalism and Anglophone communications). People looked fit and well-attired. I did considerable walking yet did not see anyone destitute or pan-handling. My hotel in Little India felt like India, Indians everywhere, but unlike the big cities of the sub-continent, Little India was spotlessly clean. The city was safe to walk at night. The food is of high quality, delicious, and affordable. Tap water is potable.

Singapore may be highly regulated but this is not to say that Japan, the U.S. and Europe are very cooperative involving citizens in the decision-making interests. Rarely in judicial cases does it seem that the citizen has more rights than the corporation. Democracy is often a canard, empty promises for elections. In much of the western world corporate interests finish first. Of course, corporations thrive in Singapore but it seems like the system is well regulated enough that the high taxes trickle down to the general population. Singapore has an enviable quality of life that we would do well to emulate (albeit with regards to civil rights, we should be careful). The island's success seems all the more significant when you consider that it has no natural resources and is so small.

Multiculturalism in Singapore:

the man on the left is the day's groom

But possibly it is its very size that is its reason for success, its manageability. While visiting I couldn't help thinking what Manhattan would be like if it seceded from the country to become a city state. It would no longer have its revenues plundered by a rapacious government in Albany or wasted by a fiscally irresponsible national government. It wouldn't even have to come to secession (which is pure fantasy as the majority of Americans will always love the concept of America in spite of its brutal realities). Perhaps regions could initiate programs of self-sufficiency in which the majority of taxes were paid to civic or state authorities rather than the bulk going to the national government. Perhaps citizens then would be more involved in the system in a proactive, civil capacity rather than the patriotic and emotional (and let's face it: empty) actions that characterize our participation today.

But what Singapore makes clear is that once we've solved the problems of hunger, homelessness, unemployment, and interracial violence, reaching more or less a Utopian state in which there is no crime or want and people sleep within four walls and eat three square meals, once man has had his comforts and needs satisfied the end journey is the line at the cashier. History, culture, and art becomes kitsch, lovingly assembled and packaged, available in various colors and sets. Some Singaporeans might argue that these conclusions are insultingly reductive, gathered from such a short visit but they are not exceptional. The general impression of Singapore is that of a shopper's paradise, for better or worse.

Singaporean lifestyle was not always so sanitized of course. As late as the mid-twentieth century opium was a legal indulgence within the Chinese community. You can learn that at the Chinese Heritage Museum where the old ways of life-- the opium den, the brothel, and the open street where most everyday people spent their time-- have been reconstructed in diorama settings. Once a lifestyle is memorialized in the museum the raw edges have been completely rubbed clean. The dens and whores are gone but so are the children in the street, involved as they are in video games, TV, virtual realities. Life is undoubtedly better, healthier, easier but the vividness is no longer evident. The streets of Chinatown today are often empty, people removed to their air-conditioned chambers. The peculiar ephemera that made life eclectic is the province of the antique store. Like newer, factory-produced items, it is for sale.

Singapore: old and new

In spite of the gentle comforts of utopian ease, some customs die hard. The Buddhist temples remained crowded with those for whom faith is not a superstition, joss sticks creating a smoky, heady atmosphere. In Little India, a live performance of the Ramayana attracted a huge crowd on the street. A man in drag played Sita, to be rescued by a hunk playing Rama. The spectators giggled and applauded as Rama defeated a clownish Lanka.

Tamil Temple in Little India

On my last day in Singapore I took a bumboat northeast of the island to Pulau Ubin, which is what Singapore looked like a century ago. I rode a bicycle through nationally protected green leaf wetlands, rife with a rich algae, crabs, and large lizards. There were herons fishing in the water and in the sky, but for a moment, a sea eagle gliding over it all. The island was quiet, shaded by mangrove trees and varieties of tropical forest. And I realized that this was not supposed to represent the past but the present, a natural getaway for the mall-weary utopiasts, a day trip on the occasional wistful Sunday, at least until developers find it with their creatively disruptive eyes. Look out for a gift shop selling yesteryear trinkets at the docks. That might be the beginning...

Wetlands in Pulau Ubin

Being Happy

2010-01-24T13:34:00.008+09:00

Todd Solondz's most famous film sums up its view of its characters, the audience, humanity, et. al in its opening scene in which Jon Lovitz's Andy, on the wrong end of a breakup in a chichi restaurant, tells Jane Adams' Joy, "You're shit and until the day you die...you will always be shit," the shattering silence shared between them fading into the film's title, written in glorious wedding cake font... "Happiness." You know you're in the 1990s thus, a time when irony enjoyed a carte blanche in our stultified, deadpanned culture, winking so much you might wonder if we didn't all suffer from some kind of nervous disorder of the oracular variety. Depending on whether or not you long for the Clinton years, Solondz's pretensions are the zenith or nadir of that careless affectation.

The story is set where the butt of most jokes originate, New Jersey. Revolving around the three sisters of the Jordan family, the story's center is Joy, who Solondz bludgeons with a series of Job-like trials that leave her loveless, ridiculed and cheated. Solondz, operating like a Judaic godhead with punitive bills to reckon, does not equate good works with success since Joy, a sweet-tempered aspiring musician floundering between day jobs, cannot seem to do right screwing up to the very end. Though self-righteous when making comparisons, Joy's sisters aren't much better off. One sister, Helen (Laura Flynn Boyle), is a successful, feted poet who takes advantage of the American tendency toward morbidity writing lurid poems about being raped as a child (knowing she's a phony for having lived an easy life). Molly Shannon's Trish is a perky, judgmental married mother of three, whose husband is the film's chief bait, a sympathetic pedophile.

Easily the creepiest scenes in a creepy movie are the father-son talks between Bill Maplewood (Dylan Baker) and Billy. It begins when 11-year-old Billy asks his father what cum is. This leads to an explanation of masturbation and even an offer from Bill to help Billy facilitate the operation of his gonads. He politely declines. Billy has a friend named Johnny Grasso on his baseball team, a boy whom Johnny's father confides to Bill is a "fag" (Bill is a psychiatrist, thus simple people feel safe telling him embarrassing stuff). Suspecting that little, effeminate Johnny Grasso is as his father suggests, Bill drugs him with a tuna sandwich during a sleepover, taking his perversions to the next level. Another friend of Billy's, Ronald Farber, is molested by Bill when his parents are out of town. He is eventually found out by the Grassos and arrested. The family estate house is scribbled with accusatory vitriolic graffiti and his wife walks out on him with the kids, abandoning him to his presumed ignominious fate.

Judging him by his actions alone, Bill is without question a monster. Violating the most sacred lines of decency, he drugs little boys and, in his words, "fucks them." But his character, perhaps because Solondz finds his double life so fascinating, is also the most developed: in this cast of selfish, self-absorbed, self-righteous whiners, Bill alone knows he is "sick," and feels real pain because he knows it's wrong-- abominably so-- but can't help himself anyway. In probably the most heartbreaking father-son heart-to-heart ever dramatized, Billy asks his father about his actions, learning that Bill, had he a second chance, would do it again. Billy then asks his father if he would ever "fuck" him, to which Bill replies, "No, I'd jerk off instead."

Don't Play Footsie With the Man at the Head of the Table

It's really difficult for me to understand what Solondz is really doing with this film: is he humanizing the child molester or is he just "fucking" with us? After all, there is no redemption in his world. In order to have a happy ending, a film's characters must feel motivated to resolve their crises. But when the crises are the humanity of the persons themselves you've got nowhere to go.

Cleverly, happiness exists in Solondz's New Jersey but only in the clichéd ideas of saccharine pop music. In such contexts happiness sounds outrageous (if a little ironic). Through films, music, and fashion magazines, we get a skewed view of how we are supposed to be happy and it's usually expensive. What is soft afternoon light, beautiful literature, and good food worth if we can only see Big Picture facts which are that we are not only not rich and famous but unattractive and uninteresting? The Jordans and their intimates are victims of a society that blueprints its ideas of success and respectability, judging those with and without into categories of winners and losers, a simple system, really, that the majority of us (i.e. losers) deal with by turning off just about everything connected to the thought process. Case in point, the sisters' parents (Ben Gazarra and Louise Lasser), who are undergoing a separation because the father wants "to be alone." He has an affair. After climaxing the woman tells him not to feel guilty. Instead, he claims, "I feel nothing."

The film, "Happiness," is like reality TV: man's most embarrassing traits are brought to bear to an audience feeling correspondingly sanctimonious about witnessing such flaws. Watching these people screw up we tell ourselves we are distinct, above, or at least, not that stupid. "Happiness" belongs to the genre of 'rubberneck' cinema, in which we feel guilty for watching but gladly suffer our curiosities.

Had Solondz chosen a less ironic title for his intersecting storylines their emotional impact might have had more resonance-- the title choice thus feels as catastrophic as the characters themselves. He might have intended it to represent something elusive and ethereal, the goal that no one succeeds, but in this day and age such a title feels trite. Happiness, ha ha, what a joke. What Solondz produced is courageous enough without needing that kind of bullet proof armor.