Chrononautic Log

December 26, 2003

I seem to have missed the boys from the NYPD choir singing Galway Bay, and all that; no bells ringing out, at least on the way in from Newark airport last night. It’s clear and cold out there, and for this neighborhood rather still. Time to put on my Manhattan disguise and go find some breakfast.

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December 23, 2003

Maj. Gen. Charles Swannack Jr., commanding general, 82nd Airborne Division, quoted in the Fayetteville Observer (“82nd Troops To Fill Iraq Gap”, 20 Dec. 2003):

The Department of Defense is concerned about the transition of troopers this spring and sustaining the continuity of effort for stability in Iraq. They need special troops to fill this “gap” in order to smoothly transition troops into and out of Iraq. Our paratroopers would have it no other way in these times that require the best of the best to give a little more.

Reaction from a friend of mine with family in the 82nd:

ROFL.

The paratroopers are pissed. They’re being sent to Iraq because someone else isn’t ready to do their job. When this battalion came back to Afghanistan, they came back a month or later than they were supposed to because the idiots that were replacing them shipped their gear by boat (to a landlocked country) and the boat got rerouted to Iraq where nobody knew what to do with it, and they couldn’t go out without their gear.

The people I talked to all seem to have a sense that the 82d is being abused to cover up other peoples’ fuckups.

I’m sure Gen. Swannack knows this is how his troopers feel. Predicting it wouldn’t exactly take a Ph. D. in organizational psychology. What’s interesting to me is that he feels compelled to say stuff like this (not just to the press, but to the troopers’ families, who must know better), and that the press feels compelled to print it.

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Lucius Shepard is a God-damned genius.

That is all.

You may return to your regularly scheduled programming,

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December 18, 2003

Yes, folks, it’s Barbie® and Ken® as Arwen and Aragorn. $59.97, plus shipping and handling. (Warning thoughtfully provided by Jon Hansen.)

No word yet on whether there’s going to be a companion set Kelly™ and Tommy™ as Eowyn and Faramir.

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December 17, 2003

Something I forgot to mention: Whatever sound-effects guy put in the shink noises when the swords are drawn, needs to go back to Foley School. And if the sound-effects guy knew better, and someone higher up on the Hollywood food chain made him put those noises in, that someone should be sentenced to twenty-four hours of sitting in zazen on a hard wooden floor, while a priest with a wooden paddle stands by to make sure he or she concentrates properly.

Japanese swords have wooden scabbards. They do not (sorry, Brandon) go shink. At most, if you screw up, they might go clack. When drawn properly, they make no noise at all.

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December 16, 2003

I don’t intend to add my voice to the clamor of denunciations of the Interstitial Arts Foundation. I think the founders’ intentions are good; they have some high-caliber people on board, and with a little luck the IAF will probably go on to do some interesting things.

But — am I the only one who detects in their recommended reading list a kind of . . . I won’t call it a bias against science fiction . . . but a certain feeling that science fiction (as distinct from fantasy, which apparently is thoroughly respectable) is something that has to be explained away or apologized for?

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December 15, 2003

This Michael Caine interview on Salon captures better than anything I’ve ever read or heard the difference between an actor and a movie star.

It’s a movie-star thing. Some people think they’re movie stars and some people think they’re movie actors. I think I’m a movie actor. The difference between a movie star and a movie actor is a movie star gets a script — movie star Michael Caine gets a script and he says, “Now how can I change this script. It’s not quite Michael Caine. I've got to change it.” And they say things like, “Michael Caine wouldn’t wear that kind of thing. Michael Caine wouldn’t say that to a girl. Michael Caine wouldn’t drive that sort of car. So we’ll have to edit the script.” And everyone says, “Oh, of course, Michael, we’ll change all that.” They change the script to suit them. A movie actor, he changes himself to suit the script. He wears glasses, puts on a fat belly, gains weight, loses weight, grows a beard, moustache, any bloody thing.

I think something very similar happens with authors and novels; we just don’t have a word for it.

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December 14, 2003

(Continuing on our facial hair theme from the last entry . . .)

So The Last Samurai isn’t a bad movie. It is a thoroughly conventional movie; if you’ve seen the previews you pretty much know what’s going to happen, and if you’ve seen any of a dozen or two Hollywood movies of the last twenty years you pretty much know how it’s going to happen, too. (I’m not going to worry about spoilers here because there isn’t really anything to spoil; no point in trying to hide plot twists when you can see straight from one end of the plot to the other.) The writing, while adequate, is Hollywoody, and the dialogue occasionally clunks. And the truth is the film just doesn’t have that much to say — except, as Stephen Notley put it,

it’s not that war itself is horrible, an orgy of ugly useless death; just that certain ways of waging war are cooler than others. Samurais are just intrinsically cooler than Civil War-style musketeers and so it’s sad to see the passing of those better, purer times when a battlefield was strewn with dead bodies chopped to pieces by highly trained swordsmen rather than riddled with bullets by dummies who can barely reload their muskets. Truly, the business of killing large numbers of people lost something special that tragic day, something that can never be recovered.

The film’s not so much historically inaccurate as it is historically myopic — if you want to read about the real Satsuma Rebellion you can have fun counting the important details they omitted, such as the fact that the main motivation for Ken Watanabe’s real-life counterpart was that he couldn’t talk his fellow oligarchs into annexing Korea. (Eventually they saw the error of their ways, but not for a generation or so — see below.) Like Barthes’ Empire of Signs, The Last Samurai is not so much about Japan as it is about “Japan”, a hypothetical and largely fictional — yet fascinating — construct.

But if you can put these flaws behind you, the film does have its good points. It’s probably best to approach The Last Samurai as a sort of science fiction movie, not so much about the encounter of the real Japan with the real West as about the encounter of a hypothetical feudalism with a hypothetical modernity.

Divorce the film from its historical specifics and you’re free to muse, for instance, about the pathos of the peasant musketeers Cruise commands in the first act: terrified, half-trained conscripts set to be slaughtered by ruthless professional warriors, in a war they never chose to fight — but a war that, nonetheless, stands to liberate them and their descendants from serfdom. (For those of us who happen to know quite a few Japanese people, this is where it’s worth noting that despite whatever romantic notions we might have about the samurai, it’s among those conscripts, or people like them, that most of the Japanese we know probably count their recent ancestors.) Then in the second act, in the unreconstructed traditional countryside, you can set aside your class loyalties for a moment and share with Ken Watanabe’s noble rebel and Koyuki’s war widow the knowledge of the brevity of this last winter idyll, the awareness that each victory serves only to postpone the inevitable defeat. In the first two acts you can find yourself racking your brain trying to find a way to make it all work, reconcile tradition and modernity — give these distressingly cute children a chance to grow up.

In the third act — well, in the third act you get some 19th-century Tokyo street scenes and a couple of decent action sequences. The filmmakers do their best to undermine the sympathy you felt for the conscript soldiers in the first act by giving you not just well-drilled riflemen but swaggering uniformed thugs. Ken Watanabe’s character exposes the essential hollowness of the film when, asked by the young Emperor for his advice, for an alternative to the policies of the modernizationist clique, the best he can do is to prostrate himself and abdicate the responsibility. (If Watanabe’s turning up in Tokyo mid-movie despite being Japan’s Most Wanted reminds you, structurally, of Russell Crowe’s mid-movie confrontation of Joaquin Phoenix in Gladiator, it’s probably because both screenplays were written by John Logan.) Fencing, fighting, chases, escapes, and we’re into the fourth act, which, despite the references to Thermopylae and Little Big Horn, you can pretty much tell is going to end up as the Charge of the Light Brigade, only less successful.

In the epilogue, naturally, the young Emperor, moved by Ken Watanabe’s futile self-sacrifice, gives the chubby plutocratic prime minister and the mercenary American ambassador their comeuppances and, holding the sword with which Watanabe served him, utters some suitably portentous platitudes about the necessity of the Japanese people never forgetting where they came from. (If this reminds you, structurally, of Russell Crowe’s deathbed call for the restoration of the Senate in Gladiator, it’s probably because . . .) At this point the hypothetical feudalism, hypothetical modernity structure breaks down, and we’re into a different kind of science fiction: an alternate history in which everything after this counterfactual incident happens exactly the same as it did in our timeline — but with a completely different light thrown by this incident on all the events that followed it. Cruise’s lovable surrogate sons grow up to sink the Russian fleet at Tsushima in 1905 and conquer Korea in 1910; their children invade China. The Emperor’s endorsement of Japan’s martial heritage in 1878 leads directly to the establishment of military dictatorship sixty years later.

The Second World War, in the final analysis, is all Tom Cruise’s fault.

Sorry — I just finished a set of alternate-history vignettes a couple of weeks ago, and I got a little carried away there. What I meant to say was that the sets, costumes, and scenery (New Zealand again — and did I see Sala “The Dark Lord Sauron” Baker’s name in the list of location scouts?) alone make The Last Samurai worth seeing. The story may be one you’ve heard before, but the film’s capable of making you stop and think about that story again, if you’ll let it. The performances are better than the script deserves; the kids are almost up there with Anna Paquin in The Piano, Ken Watanabe is the next Chow Yun Fat, Koyuki, um, doesn’t have much to do (but she’s nice to look at), and Tom Cruise comes closer to disappearing into this role than any other I’ve seen him play, though maybe that’s because of the beard.

And the swordfighting, all things considered, is actually quite decent.

(Gohatto’s swordfighting is still better, though. Plus, I mean, gay love triangles in a secret police death squad fencing academy — how can you go wrong?)

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Looks like they finally found Saddam Hussein. Here’s hoping a lot of ordinary Iraqis sleep more easily now. And here’s hoping we have enough international goodwill left that we don’t have to resort to a show trial by an American kangaroo court.

(But what I really want to know is, what happened to all those body doubles we kept hearing about?)

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December 9, 2003

Okay, it’s ten years late, and it’s not exactly Discovery, but it does bear Discovery a certain resemblance: the proposed Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter, or JIMO.

Figure 1. Artist’s conception of JIMO

Three hundred feet long, nuclear-powered, ion drive. I can’t figure out if that’s cool, or just retro-60s. Where are the starwisps?

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December 8, 2003

George Will, I think it was, was once quoted as saying he would be perfectly happy if the US were to return to the social order of 1905. It’s an idea that should strike horror into anyone who’s not an upper-class white male with no conscience; but thanks to what passes for fiscal policy in the GOP these days, we’re now well on our way. Paul Krugman (pause while conservative members of the audience leave the room, assuming there will be nothing of substance to follow) lays it out in the New York Times magazine:

Here’s how the argument runs: to starve the beast, you must not only deny funds to the government; you must make voters hate the government. There’s a danger that working-class families might see government as their friend: because their incomes are low, they don’t pay much in taxes, while they benefit from public spending. So in starving the beast, you must take care not to cut taxes on these “lucky duckies.” (Yes, that’s what The Wall Street Journal called them in a famous editorial.) In fact, if possible, you must raise taxes on working-class Americans in order, as the Journal said, to get their “blood boiling with tax rage.” . . .

The astonishing political success of the antitax crusade has, more or less deliberately, set the United States up for a fiscal crisis. How we respond to that crisis will determine what kind of country we become.

If Grover Norquist is right — and he has been right about a lot — the coming crisis will allow conservatives to move the nation a long way back toward the kind of limited government we had before Franklin Roosevelt. Lack of revenue, he says, will make it possible for conservative politicians — in the name of fiscal necessity — to dismantle immensely popular government programs that would otherwise have been untouchable.

In Norquist’s vision, America a couple of decades from now will be a place in which elderly people make up a disproportionate share of the poor, as they did before Social Security. It will also be a country in which even middle-class elderly Americans are, in many cases, unable to afford expensive medical procedures or prescription drugs and in which poor Americans generally go without even basic health care. And it may well be a place in which only those who can afford expensive private schools can give their children a decent education.

It was bad enough when the future looked like Mexico City. I’m not sure it’s an improvement now that it looks more like Yoknapatawpha County.

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December 4, 2003

Meanwhile, among the invertebrates:

A fossil found in Herefordshire, England, may be the oldest record of an animal that is unarguably male. Scientists report today in the journal Science that the tiny crustacean, only two-tenths of an inch long, had an unmistakable penis.

In the paper published in today's issue, the scientists name the creature Colymbosathon ecplecticos, which they say means swimmer with a large penis.

—— James Gorman, “Fossil Find Hailed as Earliest Recorded Male”, New York Times, 4 December 2003

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Six new species of large prehistoric mammal have turned up (dead, sad to say) in Ethiopia, including enough Proboscidea to firmly establish the African ancestry of the elephant family. With the exception of the SUV-sized Arsinoitherium — the largest yet discovered — and a Deinotherium “halfway between a large pig and a small hippo,” most of these guys seem to have been in about the one-ton range. I can’t help but think that would be just about right for ranching.

(Courtesy of Kathryn Cramer.)

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December 3, 2003

Let us remember, first, that the victory of democracy over autocratic governments in Europe [or the US — Ed.] did by no means give the power, even in its formal sense, to the ‘individual’. For many decades, the citizen with the right to vote in European democracies was the white, ‘free’, male owner of land or capital. The voting right of workers, women, etc., is not an organic component of the definition of democracy, and has not been born along with it. It is, rather, the outcome of the struggle for justice of various classes and layers in the existing democratic societies — struggles waged under the intellectual and political banner of other movements, such as the socialist movement, the women’s rights movement, the anti-racial or anti-ethnic discrimination movement, etc., and, more often than not, waged by undemocratic or illegal methods.

—— Mansoor Hekmat, founder of the Worker-Communist Party of Iran

Interesting guy; seems to know whereof he speaks. And unlike too many leftist writers, Hekmat quite deliberately doesn’t require you to have a degree in Marxist criticism (or equivalent coursework) to get where he’s coming from. Worth a read, especially in a time when the Right, having spent the last hundred years deliberately confusing “democracy” with “anti-Communism”, can toss around oxymorons like “democratic-minded strongman.”

(Courtesy of Ken Macleod.)

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Update: I can’t resist posting this one more bit, which says more about the failure of third parties — left or right — to get anywhere than anything else I can remember reading:

If fundamental changes are not on the agenda — as the very act of elections, parliamentarism, and the existence of a non-revolutionary situation make the people understand — then it is quite natural that the deprived masses, who have no alternative but to be satisfied with reform, should vote for reformist personalities and parties within the ruling class itself — personalities and parties that, as they see it, have the actual possibility to bring those reforms about. The problem of the Left is not that the allocation of the seats is not proportionate to the number of direct votes, or that the neighbourhood Trotskyist party does not have equal possibilities for propaganda to eventually secure one seat out of four hundred. The problem is that, under normal circumstances, the workers do not regard someone who wants to become a member of the parliament for four years from a revolutionary position against capital a good representative for pursuing their interests through this particular channel.

Not that I’m asking for a revolutionary situation, mind you. But it’s nice to see someone explain this in terms that don’t amount to a second-order idiot plot.

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I’m half-tempted to recommend this Onion story for a Sidewise Award:

New Alternate-Reality Series Puts 12 Strangers
On Island Where South Won Civil War

LOS ANGELES — CBS executives announced Monday that they have begun filming Antebellum Island, a new “alternate reality” series in which 12 strangers compete for $1 million while isolated on an island still under Confederate rule.

“Set to air in the spring of 2004, Antebellum Island gives us the unique opportunity to play with both social dynamics and recorded history,” CBS Chairman Leslie Moonves said. “The contestants on Antebellum Island will spend 60 days braving the elements, each other, and the unfamiliar customs and practices of a 21st-century Confederate States of America — all for a chance to win a cool million.”

Added Moonves: “That's one million in Union dollars, of course!”

What I’m really looking forward to, though, is The Man In The High Castle In The Outback, if it ever gets the green light.

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