tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-159350452024-03-23T13:19:52.081-05:00Journal Wunellewstachourhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12447198404608861357noreply@blogger.comBlogger956125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15935045.post-87157362919529279432020-02-02T19:35:00.000-06:002020-02-02T19:35:58.367-06:00UnBornAgain YesterdayOne of my favorite old films (I thought I had reviewed it here, but I can’t find it) is George Cukor’s 1951 remake of the Garson Kanin stage play <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Born_Yesterday_(1950_film)" target="_blank"><i>Born Yesterday</i></a>. It’s not that the film is so great, but <a href="https://youtu.be/Y7t4gmNYO-8" target="_blank">Judy Holliday is worth watching</a> again and again (she won an Oscar for the performance). She plays Billie Dawn, a New York chorus girl who gets lured into being the for-hire girlfriend of junk dealer and aspiring racketeer and all round shitheel Harry Brock (Broderick Crawford). Billie is loud and brash, a rough stone from a poor background who now finds herself with money via her millionaire boyfriend. Harry doesn’t really grasp how the adult world works, but he thinks he does and he imagines Billie’s ignorance is getting in the way of his success. So when a journalist shows up at his hotel suite to interview him—William Holden—Harry hires the guy to “smarten her up.” And they all learn that a rough stone might, when polished, turn out to be something very different.<br />
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It’s really a lovely little <i>Pygmalion</i> kind of story, buoyed as I said by Judy Holliday’s really fabulous performance—you really can’t take your eyes off her. Broderick Crawford plays his role splendidly well, but his character is frankly unattractive—boorish, loud, abusive to everyone, entitled yet out of his depths, critical of everything, over-rich yet not very competent.<br />
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It reminds me of someone, which fact kind of ties into today’s theme.<br />
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One of the elements of Billie’s awakening at the hands of her tutor involves his explaining the workings of American government. Harry and Billie are in DC so that Harry can buy some politicians, and Billie uses her lessons as an impetus to learn about how Washington works. And in the process—and via her tutor’s passions about the nation’s fundaments—she comes to see the glory of the system Harry is trying to break for personal riches.<br />
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Anyway, everything old is new again. History repeats again and again and again.<br />
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I thought of this film today as I spent a couple hours wandering the Capitol Mall in DC. I have a 36 hour layover in Baltimore, so I rode a local train an hour South to look around (I think it’s been more than 30 years since I was here last). I find myself hearing William Holden’s voice from the film, stirring words about the Capitol buildings as the cheesy patriotic music swells in the background.<br />
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At one point near the end of the film Harry runs into resistance from his much-abused lawyer who complains that Congresspeople cannot just be bought to suit Harry’s whims (though that’s exactly why they’re there). “Why not?” Harry asks. “Because these guys are honest,” the lawyer scolds.<br />
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Walking past these same buildings today I couldn’t help thinking what a sham the whole place is. The super-grandiose buildings (oddly mimicking architecture from 500 years before, as though the work done within won’t be taken seriously unless the buildings look MUCH older), the whole town trying like a theatre set to win us over by force of pretense; the armed guards everywhere; the black SUVs with smoked windows; the barricades and roadblocks. All of it, as it happens, protecting a failed exercise: one party bent on a malicious overthrow, the other unable to meet the challenge.<br />
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As I wandered the Capitol grounds the Senate had just failed to conduct a legitimate trial of the president for obstruction of justice and abuse of power—charges for which the House of Representatives impeached him a few weeks ago (only the third such impeachment in the country’s history). The Senate’s was a trial in name only. The Senate Majority Leader stated openly and in advance that he would scuttle the trial, and virtually every Republican lined up behind him: they voted almost to a person to refuse even to allow witnesses to be questioned. This despite the common knowledge that the president is absolutely guilty as charged—guilty of this and very much more.<br />
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The acquittal is an act of organized, pure partisanship—the latest chapter in an insurgency stretching back over 10 years now, with roots going back even before that, to Reagan. Partisanship is not <i>necessarily</i> bad; opposing Nazis, say, seems a thing that should be done without even-handedness. “Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” But this is partisanship without even the pretense of a social or civic purpose. This present act of partisanship is just a naked power grab, a nuclear-blast maneuver that will decimate representative self-government, maybe permanently. (I really don’t think that overstates it.) It fundamentally undermines our system of checks and balances such that the presidency becomes autocratic.<br />
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They know all this, but at this point they’ve stopped even trying to justify their actions. Journalists’ probing questions to officials are met with explosions of indignation and fury; press conferences have dried up entirely; journalists are being denied access unless they toe the propaganda line. The party’s goal at this point is to circle the wagons and keep the autocrat in power at any and all costs—even when the costs may well be catastrophic for the country. (At the very least they will have set the precedent that no president can be charged with any crime or removed from office for any reason. Hard to imagine this precedent would sit well with a rogue Democrat in the seat; the solution to that seems to be to just keep a Democrat from holding the office—by any means possible. There’s broad consensus that Russia—a foreign power decidedly hostile to American ideals—interfered maliciously with the the electoral process in 2016. And indeed, the president-elect invited the interference publicly, and then met repeatedly with the Russians before and after the election. Republicans, while admitting Russia’s hostile intent, refuse to acknowledge the interference or take steps to combat it, and the consensus is that Russia will try again in 2020–they’re at work already.)<br />
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So, the movie. It gives today’s events an unfortunate odor of <i>deja vu</i>: the boorish, ignorant, control-freak criminal trying to enrich himself no matter who or what is destroyed (indeed, the destruction and personal devastation are marketed as selling points to the propaganda-fed media consumer, who craves his Colosseum moment); the for-sale politician, the ignorant masses huddled behind the cartoon depictions of their noble government while donating to and voting for its destruction.<br />
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When I first saw <i>Born Yesterday</i> some years back I was shocked at how much the world had changed in 50 years—at least the Hollywood version. The Wikipedia article talks about the difficulties Cukor had in getting the film past the censors, having to skirt around their being lovers—they *certainly* could not share a bedroom!—or Judy Holliday having an actual woman’s body. But the real shock for me was Harry’s treatment of Billie which by any standard today is frankly abusive. It’s uncomfortable to watch. Judy Holliday is not allowed to show an inch of cleavage or tailbone or anything even remotely suggestive to the censors; but Harry’s violence toward Billie gets past with nary a protest.<br />
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But this is the world Republicans are striving to re-create, where white men run everything and everyone else’s citizenship is second-class—if that. Environmental regulation is scuttled to gleefully pander to the country’s most ignorant people, propaganda tells us what to think, corporate profit takes precedence over virtually every other thing.<br />
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One wants to think that we actually have progressed, and on the surface we have made progress since 1951. I know the jagged edge of history trends broadly and inexorably toward progress and equality and fairness. But always there is a reminder that human nature contains much that is selfish and greedy and clannish and self-destructive.wstachourhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12447198404608861357noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15935045.post-42742963798027586322018-09-20T11:43:00.002-05:002018-09-20T11:43:38.221-05:00A Jagged PathThis was written in 2016 before I went to ground school.<br />
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***<br />
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I've decided to change airplanes.<br />
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For an airline pilot, this is kind of a big deal. The equipment you fly at an airline determines a bunch of things: it sets the route structure you'll spend your time plying; it dictates your seniority (since overall seniority in the company is less immediately important than your relative seniority in your fleet and seat); it dictates the minutiae of your work schedule (and, in our case, your sleep schedule).<br />
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And there's the equipment itself. An airplane is an airplane, maybe, but each transport jet is kind of its own world, and we must immerse ourselves in the particulars and minutiae if we are to operate it efficiently and safely. And that's an involved undertaking.<br />
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I come to my current job by way of about eight years at regional turboprop airlines. That means I flew passengers on short-haul routes, flying many short legs in the course of a typical workday. Lots of legs, mostly hand-flown, down at low altitudes in the weather. Lots of instrument approaches, lots of paperwork and refuelings and weight-and-balance calculations. Lots of repetition of checklists--over and over again multiple times every day. Eight years of this. This contrasts pretty sharply with my current job flying international cargo on a heavy jet. I tend to fly very few legs, almost all of them long-duration legs flown under automation at high altitudes above the weather.<br />
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So life in these two jobs is very different in pretty much every way. The only commonality is that in both cases I'm operating a pretty complicated machine in the contemporary ATC and IFR environment.<br />
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When I came to my current employer 15 years ago I began in the old Douglas DC-8, first as a flight engineer (a new job for me) and then as a First Officer (copilot). This was my first experience with a heavy jet (or any jet, though a turboprop motor is in fact a jet engine that's used to drive a propeller instead of moving the aircraft purely by exhaust thrust), and it represented quite a change from the flying I knew. Most DC-8 workdays consisted of two legs: one leg after sundown from some city--Milwaukee or Detroit or Denver or Cleveland, etc.--into our package sorting facility, and another before sunrise back out to our starting point. Two legs per night, 10 legs per week. Week-on, week-off; that meant about 20 legs per month. This contrasts with my turboprop days where we averaged six to eight legs per day.<br />
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The upshot of this was that I was now flying a much larger, heavier, faster airplane and had much less time with my hands on the controls to master the task. It happened, of course, but it took me a year in the DC-8 to log as much time as I would have accumulated in a couple months of my previous job.<br />
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After eight years on the DC-8 I moved to the MD-11, where I found this same situation amplified and extended. Now I was flying a VERY heavy jet on VERY long legs. Typically one leg of nine or ten hours every other day.<br />
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The MD-11 is a challenging airplane. It can be unforgiving, with a history of punishing certain kinds of mistakes very severely. It's not an especially tricky airplane to land, but mistakes on landing can be problematic. And because of a couple design details, it's one of the fastest airplanes in the terminal environment and on approach, which makes it a challenge for controllers to integrate it with other traffic, and a challenge for pilots to play well with other airplanes (we're routinely told we're rapidly catching the airplane in front of us since we commonly are flying 30 knots faster than anything else in the pattern). And for this most challenging airplane to fly, we get our hands physically on the controls about 1/4 as often as with the DC-8 (which means about 1/16th as often as with my prior turboprop flying).<br />
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This is not a great combination. More challenging flying, less opportunity to practice. This is even further exacerbated by the fact that a portion of the copilots' time is spent as International Relief Officers--a third crewmember whose job is to give the other two flying pilots a rest period during long flight legs (since no pilot can be in the seat more than 8 hours in a day). Most F/Os on the MD-11 spend at least some of their time at IRO duties, and the IRO virtually never does the takeoff and landing. So the already-much-reduced number of legs is further reduced to below 50% for the F/O.<br />
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All this has factored into my thinking about what airplane to bid. The MD-11 has allowed me to see the world--literally. I've circumnavigated the globe in the last eight years probably 40 times or more, which activity, world travel, has been No. 1 on my bucket list forever. And it's an extremely comfortable airplane: quiet and spacious and with great visibility. It has a bunk for rest periods, a small galley with an oven and hot cup and refrigerator, and plenty of room for crew and jumpseaters. And it typically involves a one-long-leg-to-the-hotel workday, with the plusses and minuses that entails.<br />
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But with my background, I've long been leery that this is the right working environment for me--regardless of how much I may like it. My time on the airplane has allowed me to get mostly comfortable with the airplane's challenges and limitations, but always there is a sense that the airplane waits to bite if you step out of line. And the nature of the work we do with the airplane gives us the bare minimum opportunity for keeping abreast of these challenges.<br />
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My original plan was to settle in on the MD-11 and stay there until I could hold the captain's seat. But this would have required my changing domiciles and commuting up to Alaska. And after years of stagnation--almost nobody was leaving Alaska to make new captain spaces there--this was an uncertain path for progression. Add in my skepticism about the challenges of the MD-11--and my sense that learning a new airplane might be all for the good--I decided it was a good time to move over to the 757 / 767. I get to stay on my beloved international schedule, and I'll have the chance to learn a new airplane as a co-pilot--rather than step into the commander's chair in an unfamiliar machine.<br />
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***<br />
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(Shift back to the present day.)<br />
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And so it worked out. Another consideration at the time was my awareness that an upgrade to captain would likely be available sooner on the 757, and that (as the most numerous aircraft type in our fleet—by a large margin) I’d just have many more flying opportunities on this fleet than on the MD-11. And the situation unfolded thus. I had barely finished my copilot training on the 757 before I got notice that I’d been awarded a captain upgrade on the fleet. And that’s another post.wstachourhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12447198404608861357noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15935045.post-33352543666784686072018-09-17T22:58:00.002-05:002018-09-20T11:19:08.417-05:00The machine in the god.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I’ve long been fascinated with Tudor England.</div>
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Me and a zillion other people, duh. There have been a hundred billion books and films and tv shows based on the hundred+ years that mark the Tudor period (c.1485-1600+), so somebody cares, obv. In addition to the films <i>The Other Boleyn Girl</i> and<i> Anne of the Thousand Days</i> and the TV series <i>The Tudors</i>, I’ve read (in audiobook form) a bunch of historical fiction novels by Philippa Gregory and Alison Weir. The whole business is a stranger-than-fiction chapter in human history.<br />
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These actual stories are all cheating in a way, I know, since they involve emotions and words—and in some cases actual deeds—which simply cannot be known. The authors have wide leeway to make characters; the blankness of the canvas allows space for creation. At least in the case of these authors (Gregory and Weir), though, I feel their use of artistic license is limited and carefully restrained—and after all something <i>very like</i> these events MUST have taken place in order to get from point A to B.<br />
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Most stories revolve around Henry VIII and his six wives. That central thread, which needs no summary from me, is just history at its most lurid and stupefying. Different and fascinating social norms and the pernicious insipidity of religion and the vast gulf between rich and poor and the ghastliness of a world without science—the telling of it puts all this center stage. But even those several individuals are not the whole of the chapter. The book I’ve just finished is Alison Weir’s <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innocent_Traitor" target="_blank">The Innocent Traitor</a>, about the Lady Jane Grey, also known as The Nine Days’ Queen. She was the great-granddaughter of Henry VIII, yet even she managed to get caught up in the quagmire he stirred up.<br />
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And always it’s the religious angle of these stories that grabs me, mostly because there’s simply nothing more lurid—nor, sadly, more commonplace—than people killing each other over arcane points of invented mythological hooey. Henry VIII had initiated a traumatic break from the Catholic Church in order to effect his divorce from Catherine of Aragon, and this to enable his marriage to the bewitching Anne Boleyn—all supposedly motivated by the need for a male heir to cement his young dynasty. Well, viewed through the lens of the moment (which these authors are trying to show us) these ARE rather pressing needs. His dynasty IS vulnerable if he cannot consolidate it with a strong male heir, and the Catholic Church IS standing in his way. He decides to remove the church as a rival to his authority, and his very Catholic wife sees heresy afoot—rightly, if we take the nonsense seriously.<br />
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But national matters do not settle with a decree, no matter what a sovereign might say. The newly formed Church of England, though declared to be the only legitimate faith of the land, was still doing battle with the much longer-established Catholic Church. And while the next king Edward VI (Son of Henry VIII and Jane Seymour) was Protestant and sought to keep his father’s religious reforms in place, when he died at age 16 without an heir the expected bloodline reverted to Henry VIII’s eldest daughter, the staunch Catholic Mary—daughter of Henry VIII and the aforementioned very Catholic Catherine of Aragon.<br />
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But there’s a problem. A couple of them. First, in order for Henry VIII to remarry and attempt to beget a male heir, each of his preceding marriages was declared null and void—which then illegitimized the offspring of those marriages. So Mary (mother: Catherine of Aragon) and Elizabeth (mother: Anne Boleyn) are bastards, and thus ineligible to inherit the throne. Henry VIII said so, and his son Edward VI reiterated it. This mechanism might be perfect for keeping Catholic Mary from the levers of power, but it works to keep the equally Protestant Elizabeth away as well. Good for the goose... (And it sows confusion in the average citizen whose sense of loyalty follows blood.) Second, if Mary’s ascension to the throne would surely bring about a Catholic Reversion—and the resumption of the Pope’s influence as a competitor to the King’s—the prospect of it opened a larger social wound that had not really healed. The church being a conduit for political power, the disposition of the official Church of England was something that very powerful people cared about rather emphatically. For each unyielding Protestant there was an unyielding Catholic. This is the stuff that wars are made of. What to do?<br />
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Henry VI’s solution before his death was a reversion to the bloodline of a previous generation. (There’s some dispute as to whose actual idea this was.) This line of succession led (after her mother demurred) to Jane Grey being declared the legitimate heir. Jane was the daughter of Frances Brandon, who was the daughter of Mary Tudor, Henry VIII’s sister. So the bloodline WAS there. But even after the garishly fascinating lives of Henry VIII’s two daughters are set aside, the details of Jane Grey’s story are too sadly delicious. None of this was HER idea; she had no such ambition—except to see the Catholic Church kept in abeyance. But her parents... Pathologically ambitious parents schemed and plotted with their daughter’s life, hoping for personal gain—and the father, having escaped being beheaded for treason the first time, waded into the greedy morass AGAIN. The lure of power and wealth is like a disease.<br />
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He did not survive the second attempt. Nor, sadly, did she. She was brought to the Tower of London for her coronation and she never left the place. The official coronation never took place, and forces favoring Mary began to prevail. And thus the victors in this scheme were quickly made traitors and heads began to roll. Mary had sympathy for young Jane Grey (though not for her heretical faith), and was determined to spare her life. But after her father attempted a SECOND coup to put his daughter on the throne instead it was clear she was a focus for Protestant zeal and would remain a thorn in the queen’s side—even though none of this was her idea nor did she seems to want any of it. So she had to go.<br />
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You think as people are being led to the block that common sense will prevail and the slaughter of, say, a 16-year-old girl for failing to believe that <i>the wafer and the wine *actually become the flesh and blood* of the mythological character</i> will be averted. And over and over and over again you will find that instinct thwarted. And that’s why we read on and on. It’s much of human foibles and heroism, of the vagaries of human culture mixed with our base and animal natures, and all of it just close enough to ourselves that we can relate.<br />
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This was an 18 hour listen, and I found myself finished in a couple days—I looked for excuses to put on the headphones and go out for a walk. So, highly recommended. Next: Philippa Gregory’s tale of Eleanor of Aquitaine.<br />
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<br />wstachourhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12447198404608861357noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15935045.post-92109009060432725732017-07-02T13:05:00.001-05:002017-07-02T13:05:50.320-05:00Hong Kong<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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This is yet another continuation post to the two previous, detailing some of my impressions about China stemming from our recent vacation there. Specifically, I'm interested in the special case of Hong Kong.<br />
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Though obviously a Chinese city, it was a part of the British Empire--governed and administered by the British--for a hundred years until being handed back over to Chinese control in 1997. And so it's always had a hybrid feel, a city of (mostly) Chinese people living under British ideas. And under that working arrangement it has attained an iconic status, like New York or London.<br />
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But my sense is that there has always been some tension there between West and East, and the handover of the territory back to Chinese control was the subject of much angst: China felt the territory was rightfully theirs (taken from them by unfair treaties) and most of the residents did not consider themselves to be Chinese and were very happy governing themselves. As an airline person, I remember reading about Cathay Pacific's concerns that Communist China would not honor the sovereignty of the profitable and thriving business at handover, and I believe serious consideration was given to moving the headquarters of the airline out of the region.<br />
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I found myself lounging on my hotel bed in the Tuve Hotel in Hong Kong reading <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/29/world/asia/hong-kong-china-handover.html" target="_blank">a New York Times article</a> about just this subject the day before we left to return home. The gist of the article was that Chinese authorities promised to honor Hong Kong's independence after control was returned to China--what China calls "one country, two systems"--but that, unfortunately, is not really how things are unfolding 20 years on.<br />
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I've always held Hong Kong in special regard, but this is based on my visitor's impressions rather than any scholarly expertise. On this trip we spent five days in Beijing and a couple days in Xian (another Chicago-sized city of which I've barely heard), and like all other major Chinese cities these places are abuzz with construction and growth and activity and change. Hong Kong is too, of course, though in that case it doesn't represent a change from the status quo. The larger sense is that China is a country massively on the move. And so Beijing very likely thinks it can manage growth and business quite well, thanks, and perhaps that there's no need or justification for Hong Kong's special status. More than this, to acknowledge Hong Kong's special spark--to acknowledge that its differences contribute to its spark--is to imply that other Chinese cities could follow the same model. That's clearly not immediately in the cards--although modern China is hardly recognizable from what was here 50 years ago. The NYT article says that some in China feel that HK suffers from "too much democracy." Residents of the city, naturally, resist this characterization.<br />
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So where does that leave Hong Kong? Right now, kind of stuck. Beijing has actively removed several democratically-elected politicians of whom it does not approve, and even gone so far as to abduct under cover of darkness those--liberal booksellers, for example--it considers to be threatening. All of this is a nightmare for residents who having let the fox into the henhouse are really left with few options.<br />
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Meanwhile, several massive projects are on hold because the two sides cannot agree on how to proceed. One has to think this all leads inevitably toward their not being "the two sides."<br />
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Much as I love HK, I find I'm torn. As a socialist, I think putting the reins on capitalism is sensible and utile. And I'm unqualified to see how much of HK's brilliance is due to laissez-faire economic policy--and I certainly don't KNOW that HK will be a different or less attractive place when Beijing gets its way. But OTOH I feel like people ought to be able to determine their fates, and it's hard for me to see how Beijing's control will benefit HK or its citizens. In any case, Beijing seems unlikely to back down--especially when they're doing so well in other places. I fear--and I'm obviously not alone in this--a place I love will be snuffed out and turned into something much less vibrant.<br />
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At the very least one feels that Beijing cannot be taken at its word, and that no success in HK will shake the elite of the Communist Party from their positions of power.<br />
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<br />wstachourhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12447198404608861357noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15935045.post-4472149237849843432017-07-01T06:35:00.000-05:002017-07-02T12:35:22.667-05:00China<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue'; font-size: 11px; line-height: normal;">
<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-size: 11pt;">(This post kind of continues on from <a href="http://wunelle.blogspot.com/2017/06/the-builders.html" target="_blank">the previous post</a>--and is followed by a kind of Part III about Hong Kong.)</span><br />
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-size: 11pt;">We’re on a two week vacation in China.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-size: 11pt;">I’ve been here often before. Well, I’ve been in the country many times before, but I’ve only visited a handful of cities in what is after all a vast and diverse place. Most of my time has been in the Pearl River delta—Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Hong Kong—and further North in Shanghai. And I’ve spent a little time in Chengdu and now, recently (upon changing airplane fleets) a couple new places: Zhengzhou and Qingdao.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-size: 11pt;">I’ve been in love with Hong Kong since my first visit, and I’ve been trying to get Susan to come here for a decade. (She does not inherently share my fascination with the country, and she’s needed time and persuasion to take on the 13-hour flight.) She finally agreed provided we also spend some time in places I had not previously been. She suggested Xian (to see the Terracotta Army) and I suggested Beijing. And the trip would end with five days in Hong Kong.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-size: 11pt;">And so it has gone. We’re currently on Day Three of five in Hong Kong after having a spectacular visit to Beijing and, after a delay, Xian. These places have been all we could have asked for. In Beijing we saw the Summer Palace and looked around Tiananmen Square and the outside of the Forbidden City, made a trip to Mutianyu and the Great Wall, toured the National Center for Performing Arts, wandered the 798 Arts Zone, explored the subway system (the largest in the world after Shanghai, which is only fractionally bigger), wandered the famed hutongs. Weather cooperated brilliantly, and our only snafu was getting out of Beijing at the end. Everything canceled due to bad weather and we ended up having to spend an extra night at a roach motel at the airport—which after all gave us one of our best meals in a cafeteria-style hotel restaurant.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-size: 11pt;">This left us a day short in Xian, and we debated whether we shouldn’t just head straight to Hong Kong. But we didn’t want to miss the Terracotta Army, and China Eastern was not very accommodating about changing our tickets. So we got out the next morning, about 20 hours late. But everything then went like clockwork and we were at our (extraordinarily swanky) hotel in Xian by 10:30 that morning. We suggested to the hotel that we still hoped to see the army, and we were told it was no problem at all. Turns out, it may have been better to go around noon (as we did) then to go at 8:AM as we originally planned. It was a hot day and the place was only moderately busy at lunchtime. We immediately met up with a guide who took us through in a couple hours. Afterward, we spent the afternoon walking along the ancient and immense stone wall surrounding the city—some 60’ high and 60’ thick and some nine miles around! Absolutely immense, and one could land an airplane on much of it. We got a great vibe from the city, and I could see spending time here.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-size: 11pt;">The next day we had a three hour flight to Hong Kong and were at our (strange, uber-modern) hotel by about 16:00.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-size: 11pt;">My little bits of exposure to China and Hong Kong continue to kindle my enthusiasm but leave me far from being any kind of expert. I don’t speak a word of the language—something that’s more challenging away from the Southeast where English is fairly common. In Beijing and Xian people’s grasp of English was much more tenuous, making it very hard to communicate at times. And I fear the lack of language keeps everything at arm’s length for a visitor, even a repeat one. Either because of this language limitation or from my natural keep-to-myself travel mien, I’ve visited these places for years without every really talking to a local or seeing any but popular tourist sites and what you can see walking the streets.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-size: 11pt;">Consequently, I don’t really know what life is like for the average Chinese. How are jobs arrived at? Does everyone receive a basic monthly income and can one supplement that by working in a free enterprise setting? And what does the government get out of that free enterprise in return? How do people decide to work in hotels or in little art boutiques or coffee shops or as tour guides? Is the process different from that in the US? And living arrangements: does the government still assign housing? We saw numerous real estate brokers in Hong Kong and the prices perhaps exceed even Manhattan’s. Who buys these? And where do you live if you can’t afford them (that is, how do MOST people find their housing)? I don’t imagine the answers to any of this are especially interesting or intricate, but they play a role in what life must be like in these bustling places for so many of the people with whom we interfaced.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-size: 11pt;">A couple observations: All the Chinese subways I’ve been on have been things to envy. They’re relatively new and constantly growing (virtually every Chinese city I’ve been in except maybe Hong Kong is actively digging subway lines), spotlessly clean, utterly reliable. Trains seem to run (like London) as often as the tracks will allow—one is always leaving as we approach the platform, and the signs never say more than three minutes for the next train—and signage and ticketing could hardly be easier or more comprehensible. How fortunate for us that there’s always an “English” button on the ticket machines and that announcements are always made in English after the Chinese.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-size: 11pt;">Beijing particularly was striking. The system, which is now up to 19 lines and growing (from, I believe, two lines in 2002) carries 10 million passengers per day, for a yearly ridership of almost 3.7 billion. That’s more riders than any other subway system, more than twice what NYC’s subway carries. (Shanghai's numbers are almost identical.) And the Beijing system is being aggressively upgraded and expanded to carry about twice its current numbers.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-size: 11pt;">To me, this seems like but one example of immense spending for the public good. And I can't help noting that it’s exactly the opposite of what we're doing in this country. Rather than pursue aggressive public benefit--since such things are castigated as "progressive" (the *horror!*)--we’re dismantling the federal government and trying to farm its functions out to for-profit concerns. A quick visit to this part of the world shows that in comparison we’re failing at almost everything (except defense spending; I guess that's not an accident). </span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-size: 11pt;">Every single subway station we were in when in Beijing (maybe 10 stations overall) had 1) functioning, clean bathrooms; 2) uniformed traffic directors / helpers; and 3) a pair of uniformed military personnel monitoring the entrance. There was often a military guy at the main boarding platform on a raised box keeping an eye out. We never saw the military people interacting with anyone, and they didn’t seem there to hassle or discipline anyone. But there is a clear sense that the transportation of people was an important thing that was managed and carefully overseen.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-size: 11pt;">And these things continued in other spheres as well. The National Center for Performing Arts ("the Egg") is maybe the most impressive single building I've ever seen, all in support of the arts--the same programs, more or less, that we're cutting from every school curriculum Republicans can get their hands on. There are public bathrooms all over the place, every two or three blocks, and there are usually people there keeping things clean and picked up. There were no tip jars that I could see when I visited the facilities, so these folks were working for wages paid by someone and not relying on handouts. And it’s hard to overstate how lovely it is to always have a nice bathroom handy as you roam the city. There are people making the rounds of most blocks picking up trash and cigarette butts—I’ve seen this in every Chinese city—and the subway stations were typically being mopped and picked up. There is almost no graffiti, and none at all in the trains or stations (that I saw). Buses are numerous and reasonably new and clean (though we rode them only in Hong Kong).</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-size: 11pt;">So what to make of this? All these jobs require money and people. With 1.4 billion citizens--over four times our own population--people seem to be a resource they have well in hand, and many tasks that might be automated in the US (roadwork, say, or manufacturing jobs) are here done by armies of people. But keeping walkways weed- and trash-free is honorable work and very much to the public good, and these armies of workers can be turned toward any task imaginable: building a subway, driving trucks, shipping, manufacturing, construction. But there are some concerns attached to all this: where is the line between functional oversight that, say, makes it possible to have public bathrooms in the subway system and, on the other hand, Big-Brotherism? Surely to some degree everyone here behaves and celebrates the brilliant transit system because punishment for misbehavior is swift and merciless. Vandalizing a public bathroom or public transit has always seemed self-immolating to me, but at what point does preventing that vandalism become oppressive? I suppose this is the age-old exploration of the liberal and conservative mind. This is an authoritarian society, though one which has loosened considerably in the last 40 years, and it's not until I'm here in person that I begin to formulate these questions.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-size: 11pt;">It’s hard for me to have a sense of what life is like for a citizen of Beijing, especially one with worldly ambitions. Hong Kong seems to straddle these two worlds—Communist East and Capitalist West—and it seems to fall in the center of many scales: more public services than we see in the West, but fewer than in Beijing; more oversight / public scrutiny than in the West but less than in Beijing.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-size: 11pt;">For as long as I’ve been coming here I have the feeling that we underestimate China at our peril. They may not do everything well; they may not have everything figured out; their citizens may not top every poll; their culture may not dominate the world: but I cannot put anything past them. They seem well positioned to call the shots in the future—about everything. They are playing a long game, and they have time and sheer numbers on their side. If they don’t yet have the best schools, they soon will; if they don’t have the biggest or most capable military, they soon will; if they don’t dominate business and finance, they soon will. I just don’t put anything out of their reach. And this at a time when the US is clearly and obviously on the decline. Our budgets are perilously out of control, our educational system is only semi-functional, and our popular democratic politics are clearly and obviously dysfunctional. One of our two parties is a disorganized rabble unable to keep its eye on any common good and the other is actively malevolent and corrosive.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-size: 11pt;">It seems like a good time to be Chinese.</span><br />
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-size: 11pt;">Some pictures:</span><br />
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-size: 11pt;">(PS: A couple days after writing this I came across a New York Times article talking about the difficulty Hong Kong is having straddling exactly these worlds. That'll lead to another post.)</span></div>
wstachourhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12447198404608861357noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15935045.post-80765986580744066282017-06-11T10:19:00.001-05:002017-06-11T10:19:13.788-05:00The BuildersMy new airplane is exposing me to a bunch of places I've not seen before. (New airplane? That's a post I began about six months ago and never finished. Perhaps I'll finish and put up here out of order.) Osaka, Japan; Tokyo (I've landed but not laid over); Qingdao, China; Zhengzhou, China--these on top of a bunch of new places in Europe over the last few months: London; Nottingham; Budapest; Prague; Stockholm; Malmö; Madrid. And more to come.<br />
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But at the moment, Asia. I made it to a few destinations in China regularly on the MD-11, but the 767 goes to all those same places and twice as many more. My takeaway from this present trip is a reinforcement of what I've long felt: that we underestimate people in this part of the world at our peril. The populations are staggering and there is building and change going on here on a massive scale--everywhere I've been. Especially in China (Tokyo and Osaka are of course huge and well-established places) subways are being dug everywhere, and both Qingdao and Zhengzhou are in the midst of a building boom like I've never seen. Huge structures are going up everywhere, and flying over Zhengzhou one can see elevated railways being built and huge freeways being laid out. Zhengzhou city is surrounded by what appears to be a massive man-made (that is, entirely concrete-lined) river. Not a canal, but a full-fledged river. Miles of it. Huge housing blocks are newly-built (with many more underway) and there is a gorgeous new airport with an immense and eye-popping terminal--like every other Chinese airport I've been to. New industries--sometimes measured in the square mile--are everywhere.<br />
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China is in the midst of tectonic societal change, historic changes, and it's clear that it doesn't just involve people riding trains from the country to the city. The whole ancient society is changing radically, along with the economy and the social lives of the citizens. All this can be readily sensed, if not really understood, from our short visits.<br />
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I'm currently in Incheon, a Southwest suburb of Seoul. Korean society has maybe undergone a similar transformation from urban to rural in the last 100 years, but my sense is that the change has been underway here longer. Seoul is an established place. But Incheon has always struck me as something odd. It's clearly a planned community, one which might one day hold a million people; but why is it here? Why would people congregate here? I can see the need for an overflow airport to Gimpo, so I get the Incheon airport and all the surrounding infrastructure. But I don't see where the citizens of Incheon city--Songdo International Business District, as it's formally known--are coming from. Maybe because we don't ever see anything but our immediate surroundings, I can't see how all these people earn their livings--especially for what must be very expensive living quarters. There must be industry (and hence, jobs) here somewhere, but not nearly enough in Incheon to support all this housing--not that's visible from here, anyway.<br />
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On my walks this week I've become taken with a new housing complex being built a mile North of the hotel. It consists of 10 or 15 huge concrete towers, each of which must hold a few thousand people. The whole complex is in process, so one can see the towers being raised while others are being finished on the interiors while yet others are getting their exterior painting done. It's an immense project--one for which an army of workers is brought in and housed on site for the duration (I'd love to know the details of that arrangement, which seems to exist everywhere here)--but only one of a dozen similar projects underway on this little island.<br />
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As always, I get a little glimpse of something without really being able to get inside it. Our short layovers combine with my heads-down approach to walking thru strange places to keep me at arm's length to the real story. But not to complain; I'm very happy to see what I can.<br />
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Photos from around Incheon:<br />
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<br />wstachourhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12447198404608861357noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15935045.post-37119899439045662152017-04-23T17:28:00.002-05:002017-04-23T17:28:51.845-05:00Not Sir Robin's Hood(Sorry. Written in December and never posted. I have several of these to catch up on.)<br />
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I've changed airplanes. After seven and a half years on the Mighty Mad Dog--the MD-11--I decided a change was in order and I've moved over to the Boeing 757/767. (I've been fiddling with another post exploring this move, so I'll save that discussion for that other post.)<br />
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One of the benefits to this new position is that the fleet visits many more places than the MD-11 did. The MD-11 is a log-haul heavy jet, a cargo ship of the air that circles the globe but stops in only a dozen or so places. The 767 by contrast goes nearly everywhere. And because the fleet type is really two airplanes--the 757 and the 767, the latter being nearly twice the size of the former--it fulfills every mission, long-haul and short-hop. My company has about 250 airplanes, and nearly 2/3 of them are of this Boeing type. The fleet has extensive flying in the US, of course, but also throughout Europe and Asia and Canada. So my choice of layovers has probably tripled. Given that my fleet change was at least partly motivated by a desire to see and do some new things, this is a most happy turn of events.<br />
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This is my first trip after completing the two month rigmarole of training, and my priority was to explore more of Europe. This first schedule is full of places new to me: Vienna, Prague, Budapest, Malmö, Helsinki. And today's destination: Nottingham.<br />
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Susan and I were in London for a week a decade ago, but that is the only visit I've made to England. About three weeks ago for my last bit of training we stopped twice in Stanstead (just North of London) and made a quick trip to Birmingham from Germany. Now I have 48 hours in Nottingham.<br />
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My initial plan was to just catch a train into London--since, like NYC, I seem unable to get enough of that place. But after a little exploration I decided there is enough to see here that I'd stay put for my layover instead of burning half the day getting to and from London.<br />
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One of the first movies I fell in love with when in High School was <i><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lion_in_Winter_(1968_film)" target="_blank">The Lion In Winter</a></i>, a loosely historical story of the tumultuous life of Henry II and his three scheming sons and one scheming--and imprisoned--queen. One of the chief attractions of Nottingham is the Castle. It's now an art gallery and history museum, and the building is relatively recent. But the location has figured prominently in English royal history for centuries. Henry II put up one of the first substantial castles on the property, and his squabbling sons, John and Richard the Lionhearted, practiced taking it away from each other after Henry's death. There's virtually nothing of the original structures, of course--it was over 800 years ago, after all--but it's fascinating to stand on the same hill overlooking the town where they and every other British monarch have stood.<br />
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I spent several hours wandering the town, including a really lovely section of old and stately homes below and West of the castle (called, I believe, The Park--or more specifically Lincoln Circus).<br />
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Here are some photos from the morning's wanderings.<br />
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<br />wstachourhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12447198404608861357noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15935045.post-53838649431903194752016-07-24T13:32:00.005-05:002016-07-24T13:33:14.125-05:00The Collector<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I'm a lifelong devotee of music. In my early teens I saved my money to buy my first stereo set and began collecting LPs. The advent of the CD came in my junior year of college, and I promptly sold all my LPs and put the money toward CDs. (This is a pattern destined to be repeated in later years.)<br />
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I actually bought a couple CDs before I had any means of playing them--I still have them: a Denon disc of Sweelinck organ music and some ceremonial music of Handel--and had to take out a bank loan to buy my first CD player, a Sony CDP-610 ES. I remember it was $850 bucks (at a time when $850 was a lot of money, at least to me).<br />
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Anyway, what began as a musically-related stereo machinery fetish pretty quickly became a music fetish and a CD-collection fetish. I was particular, so I didn't just grab anything I could get my hands on (I knew people who did this), but music was my primary recreational outlay for a couple decades. I managed to amass about 5,000 CDs before the <i>download era</i> began, for me, with the advent of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITunes" target="_blank">iTunes</a>.<br />
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The impetus to collect must be related to the need to hoard. Maybe it's exactly the same.<br />
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Anyway. One of the challenges of the era of downloaded / streamed music was the fact that you didn't GET anything. That's especially irksome to a collector when you had to PAY for the download. In essence, you're paying for the right to listen as often as you like to iTunes's copy of a CD. In the beginning, I burned a copy of everything I bought at the iTunes Store, telling myself that this guaranteed I retained the music for which I'd payed if I were to abandon Apple and go to some other music streaming site. (I don't even remember when I downloaded my first music from iTunes, but it must have been close to 15 years ago. And in the beginning there was no guarantee that 1) streaming / downloading was really the way to go, and 2) that iTunes would be the place to keep doing it.)<br />
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Mostly, I think I just wanted to HAVE something for my purchase.<br />
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Well, I quickly acclimated to the new protocol, and even shopping for CDs--once my favorite single way to spend a day in a big city--became burdensome compared to just sampling things online and clicking "BUY." For a number of years I continued to buy some physical CDs, mostly because the obscure pipe organ music I collect often did not find its way to iTunes. But even these specialty retailers have shrunk and disappeared, most of them, so that nowadays it's downloads or nothing.<br />
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It's really been a huge shift in how we acquire and use our music, and I can only imagine what a change it represents for musical artists. The ability to make a top-shelf recording on your laptop is now very much in hand, but the ability to get that product to a wider audience is SO available as to be almost useless for the average Jane.<br />
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And now things have moved another step away from the old model. First came <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICloud" target="_blank">iTunes Match</a>, where for a yearly fee Apple would upload ALL your music to their cloud--whether you bought it from Apple or not--and then make it available on all your devices as a streaming service. That's REALLY brilliant. I have all 60,000 pieces of my collection available anywhere I have data (cellular and wifi in the US, wifi everywhere else), and I'm able to save things locally for offline use. And save for that last bit, I don't need to take ANY memory on my device to have all this music available. Even better, if it's music that Apple has in its collection, it streams to you at CD quality, even if it was ripped into your personal collection at lower quality (to save precious memory space).<br />
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That's just really, really cool.<br />
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In the beginning iTunes Match was restricted to libraries of 25,000 songs or less, so I had to wait five or six years before the restriction on library size was quietly lifted. And with one click (and $25) my library was suddenly everywhere--a fact in which I reveled when last week in Germany I was listening to some obscure Charles Tournemire pieces from my library <i>on my iPad--which had never had those pieces onboard at any time previous</i>. Fabulous.<br />
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The other wrinkle is Apple Music, a monthly subscription that lets you listen unrestrictedly to almost anything in Apple's library. That sets you back $10 a month ($15 for a family account), which means that I can listen to almost anything now anywhere for about $150 a year--which is about what I used to spend a month on music. And for a guy that travels for a living, this having access to almost anything almost anywhere is nearly too good to be true. (If you're a completeist, there is still an opportunity to spend additional money. Apple's free library contains millions and millions of things, but many artists withhold some of their albums from the service so you have to pay for some things. But a couple years into this now I have yet to succumb.)<br />
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But what of the collector in me? I now have access to almost any music I can think of--including an infinity of stuff I don't care a whit about--but <i>I possess none of it</i> (or none of the new stuff).<br />
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Well, I find my attitudes have shifted (slowly, because I'm old and crotchety) again.<br />
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<i>A collection is really a structure in the human brain.</i> That's really the thing I've had to assimilate. What makes <b>my </b>collection <b>mine</b> is<b> me</b>. It's my brain, my preferences, my tastes, my habits. And apart from the desire for acquisition (which strictly speaking is a thing that maybe it's good to stifle), all these things remain quite intact with or without the physical items. (It's like the WWII history expert: her expertise has little or nothing to do with what physical things she possesses.)<br />
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Well, that took some adjustment. But now I've begun to wonder at the wall of CDs in my music room--which, frankly, I haven't looked at in the better part of a decade. And with every passing year I'm less and less to ever look at them--and I'll eventually have no means of playing them in any case (My computers already are without disc readers / burners except for the external ones I buy just in case.) Even the liner notes are of little use: I just zip over to Wikipedia to get a question answered.<br />
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When the iPad first came out, I snapped one up (well, the second generation). And literally after reading my first book on one I promptly sold almost every physical book I owned and put that money toward re-buying electronic versions of the ones I cared about. Particularly for my lifestyle, the ability to carry my library with me was almost unfathomably grand. Notwithstanding my friends who are staunch advocates of <b><i>the paper book 'til death</i></b>, I've honestly had zero regrets. Just the opposite.<br />
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But music is a much bigger deal to me. Selling off / ditching my CDs is really like cutting a piece of myself off and throwing it away. That's what it feels like. Stupid or not, a piece of my self-identity is wrapped up in that collection of physical things: it's a piece of my brain on public display. I don't know why this should matter, and maybe I'm making my way to a place where it won't matter, a place where I'm secure with the notion that my collection lives in me and not outside of me.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVp0p2glWZ5PeeCAif7N6Iv21BUXzAibfaG7qA3RU6JJoK8NvwfLRKwTdWwOg0iIX5HIhXuumyFgWAQtpa6GwwNXyVKzq-dQtFlpji_td5MDoi-xvfUKNhllNxR7-_RepMLZbkbQ/s1600/Library2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVp0p2glWZ5PeeCAif7N6Iv21BUXzAibfaG7qA3RU6JJoK8NvwfLRKwTdWwOg0iIX5HIhXuumyFgWAQtpa6GwwNXyVKzq-dQtFlpji_td5MDoi-xvfUKNhllNxR7-_RepMLZbkbQ/s640/Library2.jpg" width="478" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Most of it. There's some stuff overhead and more behind the view-blocking treadmill. And a cabinet full of stuff upstairs. The remains of my paper books are there on the bottom shelf. Apple should love the shit out of me.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />wstachourhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12447198404608861357noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15935045.post-79928107825031379322016-03-24T19:16:00.001-05:002016-03-24T19:16:38.065-05:00A Running LifeI used to be a runner. Years ago.<br />
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I made it through high school with almost no sporting activity or vigorous exercise at all. I was not involved in any sports (I tried football in junior high, and was on the swim team in either 9th or 10th grade--neither of which were congenial to me). Playing drums was about my only physical activity. In my younger days I had been an avid downhill skier and a water skier, and I had lived on my bicycle. But that was about it.</div>
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When I got to college I began dating a woman who was a jogger. This was immediately threatening to me as 1) I knew I was in terrible shape, and 2) running seemed about the most impossible thing for me to attempt. And, if I'm honest, 3) the fact that a girl was able to run and I wasn't seemed to REALLY shine a spotlight on my lack of fitness.</div>
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(I've since learned, of course, that there are legions of women in MUCH better shape than I'll ever know, women who are much faster and stronger and who have much greater endurance and coordination than I'll ever be able to muster. But at the time I thought a certain strength and / or fitness was bestowed upon me automatically by my gender. Thus are life's hard lessons absorbed.)</div>
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Well, my girlfriend's--my future wife's--running spurred me to give it a try, and I managed to keep at it pretty steadily for most of the next decade and a half. I was never fast--I think a 9:00 mile was pretty typical--and the term "jogging" was much more accurately descriptive than "running." But over the years I managed to run some pretty long distances consistently. For a while there I ran eight or nine miles as my standard run, four or five times per week. I managed a handful of times to run distances in the low teens, but these were exceptions. I had a good friend near my house--"C-E"--who had been a runner long before I started (and continues to be), and we began doing daily runs in the woods where we would hash out the world's problems. This went on for some years and is one of my fondest memories of life in MN.</div>
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Part of my incentive to keep running was my continuous struggle with my weight. Running was a way to burn calories and keep a baseline fitness that helped me keep from ballooning upward. But as I got older and my running faded, my weight (as I would predict) followed its own runaway program and I was soon too fat to run much. And before I knew it, 15 run-less years had passed. In the interim (as documented on these pages) I had bariatric surgery to cope with my weight issues, and I even did a little running as my weight post-surgery decreased. But I didn't keep at it, both because I was not sure if I could consume enough calories to support this level of activity (that, as it turns out, would not be an issue) and also because I felt that if I didn't KEEP running afterward then I'd be almost guaranteed to put my weight back on.</div>
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But I always knew that fixing a MENTAL issue with a STOMACH procedure was likely to only have temporary effect. I knew I'd probably always struggle with my weight, and so it was not surprising (if still disappointing) that my weight began to creep back up almost as soon as I'd reached my minimum post-surgery.</div>
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A friend of mine (ironically, the new-ish husband of my running ex-wife) had the same bariatric surgery as I a week or so before I did. But he used his liberation from the prison cell of obesity to change his lifestyle completely. He turned to competitive endurance cycling and has kept at it now for four years. This has enabled him to remain trim and also to be in the kind of condition he probably never dreamed of in his past life. For a number of reasons I don't think cycling is my thing. But I certainly note with envy his daily exercise, and I can't help remembering a time when more vigorous exercise was a part of my daily routine as well.<br />
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And so I decided to strap on the running shoes again.</div>
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But not so fast, Fat Man. There are a couple issues. <i><b>One, I'm kinda old now</b></i>. Even when I was running regularly I noted the change in how my body responds to the mini-traumas of exercise. When I was in my 20s I could roll out of bed and run five miles without a second thought. By my 30s I needed to stretch a little and use ibuprofen. With the few runs I did in my 40s I had to take time between runs for recuperation. Now, at 53, I expect More Of The Same And Then Some. <i><b>Two, I'm back to being fat again</b></i>. I'm not near my highest weight, certainly, but I'm at least as heavy as my heaviest weight back when I was running. And there's no question that this extra weight complicates EVERYTHING. It makes my running slower, the trauma to my body greater, my recuperation from each run longer. And <b><i>three, I'm obviously in worse shape generally than I've been in the past</i></b>. 15 years of a not-very-good diet and a hard job schedule-wise; I fear these things coupled with my weight and my age make me a prime candidate for injury.</div>
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Though my past running life has been fortunately free of any serious injury issues, I think I still need to be vigilant about hurting myself going forward NOW. (My buddy C-E has always suffered from debilitating shin splints, and age has brought a number of new injuries to his running life as well.)</div>
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A few weeks back I heard <a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/christopher_mcdougall_are_we_born_to_run?language=en" target="_blank">a TED Talk by Christopher McDougall</a> about <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barefoot_running" target="_blank">barefoot running</a>. This is not a new concept, but it's one I had never considered. His basic argument is that our feet and legs are designed for running. The ability of our bodies to absorb shock is built into our bone and muscle structures. That's maybe not a surprising thing to say. But he argues that by our adopting cushioned running shoes (something that followed from the inevitable monetization of a national fad) we have become heel-strike runners rather than ball- or midfoot-strikers as our anatomy would dictate. And the consequence of this tendency to heel-strike is injury. He himself was always plagued by injury, and he claims that his ditching his running shoes solved his problems entirely.</div>
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It's a controversial notion, and not one entirely supported by evidence. He cites some obscure Mexican or Central American people, a barely-known and untouched-by-modernity tribe that runs great distances as a normal part of their social life. They, he claims, know no running injuries whatsoever. But other research done since his book have been far more equivocal. Modern runners who just shed their shoes--especially fast runners or distance runners--will almost certainly suffer injuries for it. And tests of people running with and without shoes do not unequivocally bear out his claims. But neither do they seem to categorically rebut them.</div>
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As a person for whom running injuries have not been a significant part of my past experience, I was both fascinated by his notions and also aware that I didn't really have a problem to which his solution might apply. But I also thought that if I were to take up running again it might be worth trying his barefoot approach to see what it was like. And if I think I'm perhaps more vulnerable to injury now, this could be a way to go.</div>
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Enter the <a href="http://us.vibram.com/shop/fivefingers/" target="_blank">Vibram FiveFingers</a>.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTeDhonhr7azm7sSYcze1FGI2tQtlQaYPawRRQPH9KRpch4amGfbtIAt0SGqrX9083ehSBeKVnkqP1RQApaWAWyqf5VRA3kyhI6bn77eOtbcNLWZWvw8QiFeOVzRuDWp6oKcPPPg/s1600/BikilaLS-M3581-hero.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="235" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTeDhonhr7azm7sSYcze1FGI2tQtlQaYPawRRQPH9KRpch4amGfbtIAt0SGqrX9083ehSBeKVnkqP1RQApaWAWyqf5VRA3kyhI6bn77eOtbcNLWZWvw8QiFeOVzRuDWp6oKcPPPg/s320/BikilaLS-M3581-hero.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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These are those very minimal toe-shoes one sees (less now than about five years ago), kind of a glorified pair of socks with a layer of rubber on the bottom. They've become kind of the single-handed embodiment of barefoot running. The very fact that they are occasionally lambasted from a fashion perspective virtually GUARANTEED that I'd try a pair out. </div>
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(OK, I'm not ready to let that fashion angle go yet. Is it ridiculous to have shoes with the toes delineated? Why? Are feet ONLY supposed to be protected by hiding their actual form? And if my feet look a bit silly now--a fat guy running on little mincing stumps where big, blocky running shoes might have been expected--how much of that is just an arbitrary expectation? Why can't women shave their heads? All right, I confess I don't really see ANY advantage coming from having my toes individually liberated; but it doesn't change the fact that 1) I HAVE toes, and 2) this is the closest I can get to NOT having shoes while still giving me a good bit of protection. So <i><b>THERE</b></i>--he says to his wife who chuckles derisively every time she sees him in these glorified rubber toe socks.)</div>
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But you know what? They're kind of awesome! Yeah, unexpectedly so. (Nyah, nyah!)<br />
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One consequence of the minimal shoes I noticed right away is that if we don't heel-strike we shorten our stride a bit. Just a little. (And a running coach friend of mine says that with competitive running that loss of stride distance would simply not be workable; to run competitively is to REQUIRE heel-striking.) But after a few seconds of jarring heel-striking as I start my runs (even the habits of 20 years ago creep back and must be countered) I find I can make a small adjustment to how I'm running and I don't think of it again. I don't think my running gate was ever a pounding one, but these shoes definitely make one run in a kinder, gentler manner.</div>
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I've been at it now for about a week and a half and I'm already going a very easy three miles and have had almost no pain whatsoever--and certainly no pain related to my choice of shoes. As I say, at my age I expect to need recuperation time from almost any physical endeavor, and I've been running every other day as I slowly make my way back. But again, I've had zero difficulties. I take an Aleve after each run with some food and that's it.<br />
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We'll see if the honeymoon lasts. Meanwhile, my bud C-E is sidelined with running-related aches and pains. Perhaps we'll see if a pair of FiveFingers fixes what ails him. A sample of TWO!</div>
wstachourhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12447198404608861357noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15935045.post-80321623108248895682016-03-13T06:38:00.003-05:002016-03-14T14:04:38.251-05:00Brushing The Iron Horse<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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One of my scattershot enthusiasms has long been the steam locomotive. Especially the technical peak of the steam era, which (naturally) occurred just before the technology disappeared altogether in the mid-1950s. I was born in 1962, so in historical terms I *just missed* this era. But I grew up among people for whom this had been mainstream technology their whole lives, people for whom diesel-electric trains were relatively new.</div>
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Steam technology made a very rapid exit. The largest and most powerful steam locomotives were built just after WWII, and within 10 or 15 years steam had vanished completely. Given the size of railroad operations, this was an immense change in a very short time. Dieselization (the railroad term for the replacement of steam with diesel-electric technology) was so rapid and total because diesels improved markedly on steam technology by every economic metric. It would be difficult to cite a more convincing triumph of one technology over another in the same application. The diesel-electric locomotive was much simpler in operation and construction, and that simplicity enabled a reliability steam never dreamed of. And diesels were hugely more fuel efficient than steam, and in maintenance matters the two technologies were almost too far apart to be meaningfully compared. I remember reading that the support staff needed to keep a fleet of diesel-electric locomotives running was a mere 10% of that needed for steam. </div>
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In business that kind of efficiency just can't be ignored. To see how little diesel fuel was needed in a diesel-electric locomotive compared to tons of coal and water needed every 100 miles or so by a big steam engine, there was simply no stopping the change. A large railroad might have thousands of miles of trackage. Coal and water facilities would need to be placed everywhere along this route structure with enough redundancy to prevent operations falling thru the cracks. (If your train runs out of coal or water you can't just get out and push!) Add in that each locomotive needed <i>thousands of gallons</i> of water and <i>tons</i> of coal at each fuel stop--all of which needed constant replenishment at the fueling stations--and we begin to grasp the workforce involved.</div>
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And back to maintenance matters. I ran across <a href="https://youtu.be/9fWnjd2eftY" target="_blank">a YouTube video</a> the other day which spent half an hour detailing what was involved in a routine trip to the maintenance shop for a large British steam locomotive. I had never seen anything like this, and I was absolutely mesmerized. And this video gave me a little insight into what made the steam locomotive technology so alluring. </div>
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And it was alluring--it still is for many people. Even before the end of steam was in sight, people routinely stopped to watch switching activities in local rail yards, and passing steam trains often caused people to stop what they were doing to watch. Once the end of steam became evident, there was a scramble for people to photograph and film these trains while they still could, and there were numerous "fan excursions" so people could ride on a steam-powered train before they were gone forever.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Two Baldwin "Big Boys," effectively the largest steam locomotives ever made. Just look at that smoke plume! Makes me think my MD-11 isn't so bad after all.</td></tr>
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Whatever the economic arguments, however inevitable was steam's exit in favor of the diesel, some magical thing was lost in the trade.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">UP #844, an Alco 4-8-4 "Northern" type from 1944. This is restored and operational.</td></tr>
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I have a bunch of steam retrospective DVDs at home. It was watching one of these on a layover that led to a Google search for some tidbit of steam-related information that in turn led to the YouTube video that so entranced me. Watching my DVDs, I'm of course reminded that all those lost jobs constituted a solid career for thousands and thousands of people, grimy men in jumpsuits in dimly-lit roundhouses who came to know this technology intimately. And many thousands of men were hired to perform the railroad analogy of my own job: pilot. To be in command of one of these huge steam engines with thousands of tons of rolling stock behind you, and marshaling all that crude and violent power to pull a heavy train up through the mountains (this is where the biggest locomotives were often employed) seems very like a 1920s equivalent to what an airline captain does today. But dirtier. Much, much dirtier.</div>
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So this YouTube video. An engine is steamed into a maintenance facility after finishing its day's work--actually, after being on the go for 12-16 days of continuous use. The operating crew gets the engine to the maintenance yard where it is released by signature to the staff there. The service crew stands ready to begin its work. The engine is coaled and watered and then taken to a special area where the "fire is dropped." The tracks straddle a pit where the embers and ash from the current fire are dumped, and the engine continues on into the facility on residual steam power (there is no longer a fire to produce the steam, but the boiler remains hot for quite a while after the fire is dropped. I had never considered this).</div>
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Several structured cool-down periods are scheduled for the now-unpowered engine as a first order of business. Cooling is accomplished slowly, since cooling down too quickly can cause pieces to warp or crack. At a specified point in the process the engine is cool enough to drain all the water from the boiler, after which further cooling is specified before the engine is cool enough to begin disassembly. As the pieces come out, the engine attains room temperature.</div>
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We are then shown a brief description of the work to be performed and the numerous jobs that one had no clue even existed: people whose sole job is to brush *this piece* or to blow out *these tubes* or to systematically oil *these joints.* All sorts of these jobs, almost none of which have an analogous position in the diesel world. This complete service, from check-in to check-out, takes about 28 hours to perform, and minus the cool down periods the work is performed continuously for this whole time. And apparently something like this 28-hour service is required for every engine every couple of weeks.</div>
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What really captured my imagination--and what turned a little light bulb on in my head--was the re-ignition of the boiler after the work had been done. A cold steam locomotive is utterly inert. Like your car with the engine off and the key removed. Without fire there is no steam; and without steam there is no electricity or air or heat or power of any kind. But whereas starting your car is a five-second affair and the difference between running and not running is but the turn of a single switch, in the locomotive it's something entirely different.</div>
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To light the fire in the cold and now-clean engine, a bunch of wood scraps are thrown into the grate and ignited with some oil-soaked rags. (I'm so used to thinking of these things as trash, that it takes a moment to realize someone won't need to pick up the junk they just tossed into the firebox! They will become part of the mountains of cinders and ash produced by the engine as it works.) It looks precisely like lighting a fire in your home fireplace, except we're monitoring the size and quality of the fire via a couple gauges in the locomotive cab. Once the wood is burning nicely, some coal is introduced (with a shovel!) and the boiler is allowed to slowly build temperature and pressure.</div>
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After several hours the machine is up to temperature and the pressure is in the correct range. The engine can then move under its own steam (you wondered where that phrase came from?). It is taken to again top off its coal and water before being turned over to the operating crew for its next assignment.</div>
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<i>It's the fire</i>. That's the difference. Yes, there's a bunch of tiny fires in your car engine to make it go, and there's even a rather large continuous fire in each of the three jet engines of the airplane I'm flying across the North Atlantic as I type this. But all this is studiously hidden from view. With a steam locomotive, the fire itself is center stage. There's even a specific job--the <i>Fireman!</i>--to keep the fire burning efficiently and correctly. And continuously. The fire cannot be allowed to go out, and if it does it's not a simple matter of just turning a key to re-establish it. (For that matter, the engine also cannot be allowed to go without water. A vigorous fire in a boiler not full of water will quickly ruin the boiler.) </div>
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It's the "dropping" of the fire that first struck me in the video. That, and the relatively involved process of re-establishing the fire when the work is done. I had heard the term before, "dropping the fire," but I had never seen it nor given the idea any thought. But this central issue for a steam locomotive--having a fire going at all times--brings all sorts of logistical issues I'd never considered. Who keeps the fires going when the engine is between runs? Or, if the fire is allowed to die out, who re-lights it the requisite hours before the engine is needed for work? (More jobs, I suspect.) It's often been said that a steam locomotive feels ALIVE compared to other technologies, and I agree completely. And that's not something one would say about an airplane, for example. There's something special at work here. And that was my revelation as I watched the video: I think it's the fire burning furiously right at your feet that makes the machine seem almost alive--that and the hissing and spitting and belching and smoking that makes it seem like it has a mind of its own. Dropping the fire seems much more like the death of a living thing than does, say, turning off the key of your car. It's a long, agonizing process which must be monitored and managed--just as the re-animation does.</div>
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Lastly, I have to look at the controls in the cab. </div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Big Boy cab. Engineer sits on the right, Fireman on the left.</td></tr>
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Every job has its particulars; everybody has tasks that are unknown to the uninitiated. Flying an airplane is a prime example: it's not a particularly difficult task, but you need to be specifically trained to do it if you're to have any hope of succeeding. And the job entails a whole bunch of little tasks which are specific to each model airplane. Surely operating one of these huge steam locomotives is quite analogous. There are a couple different positions in the cab, each of which has specific duties. And the guy in the right seat (in a train; left seat in an airplane) ultimately runs the show.</div>
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That's what led me to The Google, trying to figure out exactly what the controls were in the locomotive cab and how they were used. Naturally, it turns out there are just too many to keep track of unless you're immersed in that world. (An airplane is exactly like that.) But there are a couple main controls that are common to all steam locomotives. There is a large throttle lever at about the engineer's eye level, typically extending from the ceiling or sticking sideways from the boiler to his left. Pull to go, push to stop. (John Frankenheimer's awesome 1964 film <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Train_(1964_film)" target="_blank">The Train</a></i> shows the operation of these controls close up--though, despite the name, that's not what the film is about.) And there are separate brake levers for the engine itself and for the rest of the train behind. And then there is the so-called <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnson_Bar_(locomotive)" target="_blank">Johnson Bar</a>, or the reversing lever. </div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Johnson Bar.</td></tr>
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This is a heavy lever extending up from the floor in front of the engineer with a ratchet handle so the lever can be notched into a specific position. The Johnson Bar is used to put the engine into forward or reverse, and something more. In between the extreme fore-and-aft positions, the Johnson Bar sets the "cutoff;" that is, it determines for how much of the piston's stroke steam will be allowed to enter the cylinder. As the bar is pulled back from its extreme forward position, steam gets restricted to a smaller and smaller portion of the piston's range of travel until, in the center (neutral), NO steam is allowed in anywhere throughout the piston's cycle. The Johnson Bar works by manipulating the complex valving arrangement one sees dancing beside the drive wheels as they rotate, called the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walschaerts_valve_gear" target="_blank">Walschaerts valve gear</a><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">. It's all straightforwardly and deliciously mechanical.</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Left hand on throttle, Johnson Bar in front of right hand, brake levers just left.</td></tr>
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This is all very arcane, but it's the Johnson Bar that, in concert with the throttle, manages the power production and efficiency of the machine. And to operate a steam locomotive--to do this job as a career--was to know the finesse and nuance of this control (and of course many others) very well.</div>
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There is this overwhelming PHYSICALITY about a steam locomotive that even an airplane doesn't match. The machine captures the elemental things of nature--Fire! Steam! Steel!--and corrals them crudely into useful work. By this machine we take the latent energy in coal and with the fearsome and violent mystery of fire we transform it into massive and controlled pulling power. It's fascinating.</div>
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And that raw brutality translates into the job of operating the machine as well. In an airplane cockpit the business of flying the plane is done with small gestures and delicate switches. There's nothing small or delicate about a steam locomotive. Everything is mechanical and long-throw. Controls need to be operated with a rag in hand because everything is hot and / or greasy. And yet one sees the engines being moved around with great finesse.</div>
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To get a chance at the controls of one of these machines would be on my bucket list.</div>
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wstachourhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12447198404608861357noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15935045.post-55840335346377657192015-12-26T21:01:00.001-06:002015-12-31T13:59:50.274-06:00The Call To DiarizeWith Islamic militants causing havoc in the Middle East and elsewhere, there is an ongoing furor about what should happen to the thousands and thousands of refugees fleeing Syria for, well, anyplace that's not Syria. Europe, mostly, since it's the mostly-functional place that's in the neighborhood.<br />
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I fear I lack expertise and certainly firsthand knowledge of the situation, but the ongoing flood of stories related to the breakdown of civilization compels one to take a stand. The situation is further complicated (for me) by who is espousing what view. Conservatives think that the problem is Islam (or, if they're honest, brown-skinned people generally) and that refugees--any refugees, from anywhere--should be refused asylum. And worse. My company of fellow liberals tends to believe in tolerance and moderation and to argue that most Muslims, like most Christians, are good and non-violent people.<br />
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My views align much more with liberals than conservatives (with whom I share seemingly not a single gene of my intellectual DNA), but on this topic I'm uneasy--something I'm reminded of constantly by my inability to bestow my pathetic "like" to most of my friends' pro-refugee FaceBook posts, or at least not without some ambivalence.<br />
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But a couple thoughts recur as I go over these news items. One is Sam Harris's reminder that Muslim "extremists" are extreme <i>only in their belief in the literal truth of their texts</i>. They act as they do not because it's fun to blow people up but rather because they feel it is their duty to do so--and because of their conviction that they will be rewarded for doing this duty. This is why so many are willing--even eager--to die carrying out their missions; they are sure their reward is waiting just on the other side (a reward which, curiously, seems to closely resemble what they're rejecting with such dispatch here on Earth). So the hard truth is that the problem to a large degree IS Islam itself. (Certainly magical thinking is the more general problem here, but the biggest fire to put out in this case involves<i><b> this </b></i>religion and <i><b>these specific</b></i> bits of magical thinking.)<br />
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The other thought, of which we are often reminded by people like Pat Condell, is that the "moderate" Muslims who flee the violence of their home lands often seek to impose their will in their new homes when they reach sufficient numbers. This is not in and of itself problematic: it's what all of us do, generally finding others with our beliefs and convictions and banding together to change the world in ways that seem congenial or appropriate to us. But what I can't shake is the sense that--to some extent (and maybe the "extent" involved invalidates my argument entirely)--the refugees are bringing the very disease with them that they're fleeing in the first place. I fear their broken societies might stem in large part from the incompatibility of the modern world with the pre-scientific views held by many of their citizens. The Muslim fundies argue that the modern world itself is evil and retrograde and must be resisted and destroyed. ("<i>Well <b>there's</b> your problem," </i>as Adam Savage liked to say.)<br />
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Obviously an overwhelming majority of the general population rejects this view, yet we're the ones being blown up and slaughtered (admittedly, in small numbers as yet here in the US). Places like Sweden, which for some time now have encouraged displaced Muslims to come and make a life there are now grappling with those newcomers trying to reshape the landscape in unwelcome ways. This might, I think, have been anticipated. (There's a subchapter here about meddling American foreign policy and fundamentalist religion swelling to fill a void we've unwittingly created. But I'm even less able to talk coherently about that.)<br />
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So though I hesitate to say it--not least because it sounds perilously like something heard at a Republican debate--it's not completely irrational to worry that the problems of religious violence will come with the refugees, if not immediately then almost certainly in time as numbers and concentrations grow. It has nothing to do with the quality of the people involved; our problems stem from magical thinking in general, and from the specific magic believed in this case.<br />
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I don't know the numbers, but I'd venture this: those committing violence against humanity are probably a vanishing small number as a percentage of the faithful. If we widen our view to look at those who do not commit violence but who condone it or think it justifiable, the number grows a good bit. And if we look at the people who disagree with the violent acts but cannot bring themselves to condemn them--who, perhaps, realize they have no grounding to condemn them--then our number grows further; until I suspect we're looking at a substantial figure. This is how moderate religion is part of the problem and not of the solution; not because most people commit the violence, but because clinging to their own magical thinking deprives them of any leverage against the fundamentalist. "Moderate religion" fails as an antidote both because moderates almost by definition lack vigor and zeal, and because the "holy" book they claim to follow does not allow them to disregard the passages they find distasteful. Thinking there such a thing as a "holy" book in the first place is the problem, not any part of its solution.<br />
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The situation is further complicated by a Maslow's Hierarchy kind of scenario wherein the refugees are initially looking at much bigger problems than whether society is amenable their religious practices. Asylum countries are faced first with the reality of people needing the most basic needs--food and water and medical care and housing--followed by things like social services and schools for children. By the time these things are settled, the problems of religion seem small compared to the crisis phase just overcome. Our natural and laudable tendency is to help those in need; and the refugees (like the hitchhiker who wants only to ride in nice cars) are not in a position to make demands when their very lives and their most basic needs are at risk. But it's naive not to expect those demands to come.<br />
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The elephant in the room is religion itself. It's the tendency toward magical thinking, toward accepting and believing things that manifestly aren't true. We're reluctant / unwilling to face this plainly, clearly because the obvious dysfunction of one group's magical thinking inevitably puts the untenability of our own magical thinking under the microscope. When American conservatives say "Islam is the problem" what they're really saying is "those people are following the wrong religion." But if the moderate is helpless against fundamentalist zeal, then fighting fundamentalist fire with <i>a different</i> fundamentalist fire is stupidity itself. As history amply demonstrates: our story is full of the brutal sectarian slaughter that follows sure as gravity from this line of thinking.<br />
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But be that as it may, I fear that whatever our good intentions Islam is not a force to be reasoned with. There is no compromise solution waiting for us to grasp. The fundamentalists who drive the religion care nothing for our good intentions and accommodation except as it paves the way forward for them. We can only combat the clearly dysfunctional magical thinking of one group by jettisoning our own--and hoping that refugees connect the good lives available to them with the secularity of the societies in which they settle. (This might be a new idea to some of them.) This purging of magical thinking seems to be happening, at least in the developed world. Big social change takes time to effect. But in a world of instant and almost unlimited information, sectarian violence based on magic--and the transparent mingling of religious zeal with the desire for power--is clearly playing a role in chasing young people from the church in droves. That's a hugely positive development, but it's naive to think that this kind of power structure will fade away quietly.wstachourhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12447198404608861357noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15935045.post-65943570666529198522015-12-18T20:02:00.001-06:002015-12-20T11:19:53.204-06:00You Hear Me, Baby? Hold Together!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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How does one review a movie like this? (Is there even such thing as "a movie like this?")<br />
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The difficulty with <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_The_Force_Awakens" target="_blank">Star Wars: The Force Awakens</a></i> is not in the film itself, which is just fine, but in the galaxy of anticipation and expectation and baggage that many of us bring to the experience. We almost need two reviews: one for those with the baggage and one for those without.<br />
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And they'd be different reviews, if only slightly.<br />
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I was 14, soon to be 15, when the original <i>Star Wars</i> came out. This is right in the butter zone of the audience target, and I was duly smitten, seeing the film something like 15 times over the next several months. Sometime earlier I remember seeing a trailer for Stanley Kubrick's 1969 epic <i>2001: A Space Odyssey</i> and being giddy to FINALLY see a great space movie, only to feel... underwhelmed when there were no starships or booming space battles or laser blasts or aliens or anything I expected. Apes. There were apes. I remember thinking "What the fuck IS this? Did somebody screw up the edit?"<br />
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In retrospect, there's no contest as to which is the better film. But at 14 I wanted <i>Star Wars</i>, and <i>A New Hope</i> was a thrilling experience for me. (As an aside, it's interesting to watch the film now and see how much has changed--when I was SURE my opinion of it could NEVER change!)<br />
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But this all raises the question of for whom the subsequent <i>Star Wars</i> movies were aimed. The original sequels (V and VI) were easy enough to swallow as continuations of the original story (well, yes, there were the Ewoks). But the prequels of the early 2000s missed their marks on a number of fronts, leaving us to wonder what approach any further films might take--or should take.<br />
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Well, wait no more. The Disney juggernaut purchased the rights to the <i>Star Wars</i> universe in 2012, and J.J. Abrams (a couple of <i>Star Treks</i>, a couple of <i>Mission Impossibles</i>, a bunch of other stuff) is the first director invited to continue the franchise and his effort, <i>The Force Awakens</i>, is here.<br />
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I decided there's little point in avoiding spoilers, since everyone will have seen it soon enough. So you are forewarned--SPOILER ALERT!--I just wade all over the story here.<br />
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It's 30 years after the close of <i>Episode VI, Return of the Jedi</i>. A few things are presumed (details scavenged from the otherwise-discarded Known Universe): Han and Leia became a couple and had children. Luke formed a Jedi school to rebuild the shattered order. All this has come and gone in the intervening years. The hated Empire has reorganized into the First Order, an entity indistinguishable (for our purposes) from the Empire.<br />
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The film opens with our being introduced to a couple new faces, junk scavenger and ace-pilot Rey (Daisy Ridley) and ambivalent Storm Trooper Finn (John Boyega). Oscar Isaac plays Poe Dameron, the Republic's best pilot, who with his feisty sidekick droid BB-8 has taken possession of a secret map that shows the location of the disappeared Luke Skywalker. The plot will bring these three into contact and collaboration. With Darth Vader and the Emperor gone, the First Order is overseen by a new Supreme Leader, Snoke, and the day-to-day operations are run by the very Vader-like Kylo Ren. Luke's disappearance appears to have something to do with the current malaise. The more things change, the more they stay the same.<br />
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First, the good stuff--and it's mostly good stuff all around. The film is beautiful to look at, and it has (in updated fashion) just the stuff to fire the young kids' imagination. Planets and starships and strange creatures and epic battles. Rey lives inside the hulk of a piece of Imperial war junk, and spends her days scavenging the immense ruins of starships crashed in the great battles of the previous films. Abrams keeps everything boiling along at a brisk, but not too-brisk, pace. The primary trio of new cast members could not be better-chosen. Daisy Ridley especially as the film's primary character is fantastic. She is young and has the naivety of her inexperience, but she is in no way helpless or weak. Indeed, she discovers her skills virtually without tutoring--something not Anakin nor Luke nor Leia ever achieved. As an actor, she has the innate ability to show the contents of her mind effortlessly on her face, which lets us follow her closely on her adventures. John Boyega's role is ambivalent by design, but he proves the perfect companion: chivalrous, capable, and essentially good. But he's in need of motivation and direction. Oscar Isaac plays a smaller and more archetypal role in this film--hotshot pilot--but the stage is primed for more substantial things to come, I suspect.<br />
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And the old characters make their appearances as well. Han Solo and Chewbacca are prominent characters, and Princess (now General) Leia Organa has a bit of screen time. We're treated to brief appearances from R2-D2 and C-3PO, and Luke does show himself at the end--for two wordless minutes. But it's really the young folks' film, and their franchise moving forward.<br />
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(I hesitate to mention it, but I found Carrie Fisher's appearance utterly distracting. I fear a double standard at work here where I can celebrate Han Solo's aging and grizzled appearance but not Leia's. But I insist it's not MY refusal to let her age gracefully; somebody--either her or the studio or whomever--clearly wanted her to look younger than her 59 years. She has been so extensively Botoxed that her face is virtually immobile throughout the film. Almost shockingly so--only a wired-shut jaw would have completed the job. Her upper lip is especially troublesome, looking like some kind of plastic surgery reconstruction in its refusal to move. At all. It's like she's had a clear plastic mask fused to her own face. Personally, I'd be very happy to celebrate the REAL 59-year-old Carrie Fisher, but perhaps that person doesn't exist anymore. Maybe in a twist of reality they could use CGI to restore mobility to her face?)<br />
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The John Williams score has its moments, but I'll typically need to spend more time around it before I can decide if I like it or not. A part of me wonders if they don't need to head in a completely different direction here.<br />
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And what of the not-so-good? I was kind of struck as the story went along how closely this film follows <i>A New Hope</i>. It's almost a remake. A relative nobody (Luke originally, Rey here) is faced with epic decisions and the trials help her (him) to find herself. The Old Guard seeks new kids to carry the torch. A feisty droid sidekick provides comedy relief. "Business" meetings happen in seedy bars with "hip" music and a menagerie of aliens. The bad guy is really a fallen good guy, and our heroes alone know it and make it their mission to turn him back to the light. These elements still work, but there's a slight lack of freshness to the story. And because of the tie-ins to the previous films, the story is necessarily more complicated and multi-stranded than the almost comic-book simplicity of the original. I understand that it has to be so, and that there's no way to write a story that hits everyone's bases; but THIS story doesn't improve for this complication.<br />
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But no matter. I was thrilled to go and am already plotting my next viewing (in Sydney, if it's open there.)<br />
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We know that the next two sequels are already in the works--the filming is already underway for the next film--and I'm already eager to see how Rey and Finn's story progresses, and what role Luke will play going forward.<br />
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And the grade? For those of us yearning, perhaps irrationally, for anything Star Wars I'd give it an A-. It's a very worthy fix, and a great start to a new franchise. Without this prime for the pump, it seems a B film.wstachourhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12447198404608861357noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15935045.post-37288678007555335492015-12-13T13:24:00.002-06:002015-12-20T20:41:02.711-06:00Yearning To Breathe FreeLast night's film, John Crowley's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooklyn_(film)" target="_blank"><i>Brooklyn</i></a> (screenplay by Nick Hornby, based on the novel <i>Brooklyn</i> by Colm Tóibin).<br />
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Saoirse Ronan plays Eilis Lacey, a young girl who leaves her sister and mother in Ireland to seek a better life in America. Her older sister Rose (Fiona Glascott) sees that Eilis is smart and has potential, and that life in 1950s Ireland will be a dead end for Eilis. She arranges with an Irish priest living in Brooklyn (played by Jim Broadbent) to find a department store job and a place at a boarding house for Eilis. Along the way she is introduced to a whole menagerie of characters, and we see her finding her feet in this new life and in life in general.<br />
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There's nothing like loss to help us focus on what is important. For a young person, the loss of family must rank among the most traumatic. Eilis and Rose have recently lost their father in Ireland, and now Eilis's departure puts her entire being at sea (literally and figuratively). I wonder how many of us would thrive in that setting?<br />
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I could not help thinking--as surely we are meant to think--about the millions of people in the last two + centuries who abandoned their homes for the limitless possibilities of America. How often we have been told of the magic of Ellis Island and of the very moving sight of the Statue of Liberty--I've see these places in New York Harbor a hundred times--but <i>Brooklyn</i> puts us in the shoes of a young woman who has left everything she knows for the chance that there's something better elsewhere.<br />
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It's a big nugget for a story to digest, a momentous happening on a personal scale, and an exciting one.<br />
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The real nub of the film--as the trailers make clear--is not Eilis's departure initially, but her return to Ireland a year or so later and the forces that seek to keep her there. This difficult decision here is her coming-of-age moment.<br />
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<i>Brooklyn</i> is a quiet film, made more so by Eilis's essentially quiet, taciturn nature. Ms. Ronan has to pack a whole range of emotional experiences into a pretty limited range of expression, and the whole movie rides on her performance. Saoirse Ronan has always struck me as a bit of a chameleon. Even watching her closely it's hard for me to get any kind of a read on her--indeed, I can't even quite picture what she looks like. It's not that she's generic or forgettable, exactly--she seems very normal and reasonably attractive--but hers seems the countenance of possibility. It also means that she seems able to play almost any character--from Eilis to teen assassin Hannah to Agatha in <i>The Grand Budapest Hotel</i>--with conviction. She is in every scene and the film sinks or swims with her.<br />
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I confess I'd never even heard of Irish director John Crowley. It seems he has worked primarily in theatre, and has done a few films and a bit of television. Brooklyn should certainly raise his profile another notch. Mirroring my comments on Spotlight (though a very different kind of film than Brooklyn), I love that Brooklyn underplays most of its elements. There's a cartoon villain or two, but most everyone is subtly played and the dilemmas which Eilis must navigate are not contrived. There's a quiet and contained realism about the story that played very well for me.<br />
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A lovely story well-told. It only misses the highest possible marks for its limited scope. Grade: A-wstachourhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12447198404608861357noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15935045.post-19012634089350776682015-12-07T09:25:00.001-06:002015-12-07T09:25:36.567-06:00...For I Have SinnedYesterday's film: Thomas McCarthy's <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotlight_(film)" target="_blank">Spotlight</a></i>.<br />
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Very much in the vein of Alan Pakula's 1974 political thriller <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_the_President%27s_Men_(film)" target="_blank">All The President's Men</a></i>, <i>Spotlight</i> tells the essentially-true story of the Boston Globe's early 2000s exposé of the Catholic Church's systematic and widespread sexual abuse of children. The term Spotlight refers to the five-person investigative team from the Globe that researched and broke the story (which along with subsequent coverage earned the paper a Pulitzer Prize in 2003).<br />
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Thomas McCarthy is unfamiliar to me, but I found I was an instant fan. I see he has worked primarily as an actor in both film and television, and has a dozen directing credits on his resume. However he got his experience I cheered every one of his choices here, especially what he chose NOT to do. The drama is baked into the bones of the story itself, and no resort to film cliche or easy tension-ratcheting gimmickry were used--this must be hard to resist as this kind of restraint is very rare.<br />
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The paper received a tip-off in 2001 that priests were sexually molesting children. The story had been around before and had even gotten some minimal coverage. But a new editor-in-chief at the Globe, Marty Baron, felt there was more to the story than the paper was pursuing and he persuaded the Spotlight team to take a look. As it turned out, Spotlight's investigation was like turning over a log to find a whole ecosystem of rot and depravity throughout the church. The abuse was bad enough, of course, but the <b><i>real</i></b> story was the church's knowledge of the abuse and its complicity and cover-up. A number of private investigators and lawyers had been working for years on bits and pieces of the scandal, but those smaller efforts had been successfully fended off by the church through payouts and intimidation and the public labeling of accusers as quacks and liars.<br />
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But Boston is a very Catholic place, and the church is deeply entwined in the very fabric of Boston life. This meant that the sources needed to uncover the story and even the staff of the paper itself were at times reluctant to cooperate. It was only when the team amassed such a weight of evidence that it could not be ignored that the dominoes fell. (We see he chain of emotions from "How dare you say these things about the beloved church?!" to "Is it as bad as all that?" to "Oh god, what have we done / allowed to happen?" over and over again.)<br />
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<i>Spotlight</i> is what <i>The DaVinci Code</i> dreamed of being. <i>Spotlight</i> is everything that film is not, measured and methodical and grinding. The investigation has the ups and downs one would expect--the 9/11 attacks occur right in the middle of the investigation--but these are not dangled in front of us as The! Next! End! Of! The! World! They are things that must be ground through and overcome as the work plods on. McCarthy manages to keep this plodding from seeming at all, well, plodding, and I found I was at the edge of my seat for the whole two hours.<br />
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I especially love that Marty Baron, who would have been easy to portray as the outsider come to upset the order of things, was greeted with some natural skepticism but quickly proves his mettle; I love that Rachel McAdams is not sexualized and there are no muddling romantic subplots among the close-working reporters. Everyone is portrayed as incredibly hard working and good (but not infallible) at their jobs.<br />
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And of course <i>Spotlight</i> has the considerable advantage of being true in all its salient parts. The evil in the story is the actual, demonstrated evil of the organized church and of some of the men of that church. Marty Baron was savvy enough to recognize that the real story is not the individual abusers or even the victims but the institution itself. When it was discovered that Archbishop Bernard Law had known of the abuse and had helped engineer the cover-up, the Spotlight team was eager to post the story immediately--it was seemingly exactly what they had been looking for. But Baron alone insisted that the Spotlight team keep digging because the story was bigger than Law. (The team risked being scooped by another paper by these delays, but the risk got them a much bigger story.)<br />
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Bernard Law, of course, was simply moved to another jurisdiction. This time to a plum post within the Vatican itself. That says about everything we need to know.<br />
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This hasn't been a big movie year for me, but now at year's end this film rises to the top. Very highly recommended.<br />
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Grade: Awstachourhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12447198404608861357noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15935045.post-38247528457970751312014-12-14T17:18:00.001-06:002014-12-14T17:25:49.485-06:00Citizen Screwed<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Today's film, Laura Poitras's <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizenfour" target="_blank"><i><b>Citizenfour</b></i></a>.<br />
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<i>Citizenfour </i> is a documentary about <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden" target="_blank">Edward Snowden</a>'s release of classified information relating to massive electronic surveillance of foreign nationals and US citizens by the National Security Agency. Snowden's information was given to the Guardian's Glenn Greenwald, who released the information in a series of articles in June of 2013. The initial articles talked about the NSA's illegal surveillance of American Citizens' cell phone data; subsequent articles revealed an almost unfathomably vast capturing of electronic data from phones and internet.<br />
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Snowden was a data analyst on contract for the Virginia-based defense intelligence company Booz Allen Hamilton, and he had top security clearances. His work revealed what he saw as a shocking and illegal overreach of US intelligence gathering, and he made the decision to leak the information to the press. Upon the release of his identity, the US Government quickly leveled three felony charges of espionage and theft of government property, and Snowden fled an extradition order in Hong Kong and is currently in temporary asylum in Russia.<br />
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As we might have expected, the government agencies involved first denied categorically that the intelligence was being collected and then, after Snowden's revelations, denied any wrongdoing and went after the messenger. Investigations were promptly launched not to see who authorized the illegal overreaches, but to apprehend who was responsible for the leak. President Obama himself, who campaigned in 2008 on returning the rule of law to government activity, criticized Snowden's actions and denied that there was an ongoing surveillance of American citizens (apparently tapping German Chancellor Angela Merkel's cell phone was OK), and the charges against Snowden still stand. The governments of several other nations--among them, Great Britain, Germany, and Sweden--were shown to have been complicit with the NSA in spying on their own citizens, and a couple have threatened harsh legal action to any news outlet that prints the information.<br />
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Not surprisingly, what one thinks of Edward Snowden depends on one's politics. Conservatives tend to see him as a traitor who is undermining our attempts to keep ourselves safe, and liberals see him as a whistleblower who is uncovering a pit of lawless rot in our government. My own views will be already clear, but I confess I was a little of two minds before seeing the film. Intelligence is always, it seems, a cat-and-mouse game, with increasing ingenuity in uncovering secrets being matched by ever-increasing secrecy. Neither side is likely to stand still--nor would it seem prudent to do so. It's easy to imagine how the internet and electronic communications can enable terrorists and those bent on malfeasance to coordinate in secret and to work up plans that traditional law enforcement may not be equipped to handle. And I also think that the <i>ability </i>to do harm is not tantamount to <i>actually doing </i>harm. The US government, for example, has had the ability to obliterate its own population with nuclear weapons for decades, but we trust that it will not do so. (Certainly, we don't seem to devote any energy to opposing this possibility.) Likewise--though perhaps it's not equivalent--the collecting of all available data about a person is not the same thing as using that data against them. It certainly opens up the possibility of using that data thus. Snowden argues that knowing your government is looking over your shoulder at every moment inhibits your ability to speak freely. But only, I might argue, if that collected personal data is ever used against citizens.<br />
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But on the contrary, I have to believe that the whole process needs to be unambiguously subject to the rule of law. Our legal system should be up to the task of regulating these processes--just as I believe that those accused of terrorism should be able to face our legal system and not be held and worked over outside the protections of the rule of law. Certainly, having the government do whatever it wants without telling anybody--or while lying baldly to its citizens--is not the solution.<br />
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What I was not really aware of before <i>Citizenfour</i> was the scope and scale of the NSA's intelligence-gathering activities. Most people can imagine a set of circumstances that they feel warrant increased governmental scrutiny of a person or a group, but I suspect most regular, law-abiding citizens also have an expectation of privacy. <i>Citizenfour</i> makes it pretty clear that there's no such thing in the modern world as privacy between a government and its citizens. Certainly not in the US. I did not expect this--which probably shows how cursory was my review of this story as it was breaking 18 months ago.<br />
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I believe Snowden's claim that he was motivated by patriotism and a sense of moral outrage. What could he possibly gain by his disclosures, especially when weighed against what he would almost certainly have to pay for them? He makes it very clear in these interviews that he's aware of how the US government will respond to his leaks, and he says he's quite willing to go to jail if that's how the story unfolds. He subsequently spent 40 days in the Moscow airport awaiting a more permanent disposition, and even now his status is temporary. My understanding is that no other governments are willing to anger the US by offering Snowden asylum (our relations with Russia already suck, so they're not risking much by putting him up).<br />
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In any case, <i>Citizenfour </i>does not take sides nor draw any conclusions for us. It really just documents the events as they unfold, with Snowden and Glenn Greenwald in a hotel room in Hong Kong discussing what is in Snowden's trove and how it should be released. It really comes off more as John Le Carré novel than a bland documentary. This despite there being almost no production niceties; we just move scene to scene with occasional text cards. It's a very lean offering, but compelling just the same.<br />
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Regardless of what one thinks of Edward Snowden--and if you're like me you maybe understand less than you think you do--I urge anyone to see <i>Citizenfour</i>. It chronicles an actual historical event, and it gives us a great deal to think about--and debate.<br />
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Grade: A</div>
wstachourhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12447198404608861357noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15935045.post-7421216744248574432014-12-06T15:11:00.001-06:002015-01-25T20:25:01.942-06:00Drama On The Installment Plan
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I’ve been listening this week to the podcast <b><a href="http://serialpodcast.org/" target="_blank"><i>Serial</i></a>.</b></div>
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Lauded as a The Next Big Thing in a recent NYT article, <i><b>Serial</b></i>, from the producers of Public Radio’s <i><b>This American Life</b></i>, is a collection of podcasts chronicling a present-day investigation by the podcast team of the 1999 murder of Hae Min Lee, a Korean-American high school girl from Baltimore. She disappeared after school one day and her body was later found in a shallow grave in a remote park outside Baltimore. She had been strangled. Lee’s former boyfriend, Adnan Syed, was charged and convicted of the murder and is currently serving a life sentence in a Maryland state prison. The podcast team, led by host and co-producer Sarah Koenig, goes back through all the materials and transcripts and they conduct extensive interviews with friends and relatives and associates of the people involved, including extensive phone interviews of Syed himself. (Syed has never wavered from his claim that he had nothing to do with Lee’s murder.)
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I’m unclear what motivated Koenig (or whosever idea <i>Serial</i> was) to dig into this presumably solved case, but it makes for strangely compelling listening. This is, of course, why the Times article singled it out (along with the growing popularity of audiobooks and <i><b><a href="http://www.jefferydeaver.com/project/starling-project-2/">The Starling Project</a></b></i>, an Audible-sponsored full-cast “audio novel” by author Jeffery Deaver), and maybe that fact alone is <i>Serial’s</i> <i>raison d’etre</i>. Part police procedural, part whodunit, part character study, <i>Serial </i>covers the case in chapters of varying lengths, each focusing on one aspect of the case and constituting an individual podcast: general overview; the nature of the relationship between Lee and Syed; the unfolding of the murder events; the State’s case against Syed; the holes in the case, etc. These things are written and produced more or less as the investigation proceeds, so that we as listeners are essentially making the discoveries along with the producers. Syed may be exonerated (and his conviction overturned, presumably) or his guilt may be confirmed in a more convincing fashion, or perhaps some other option (?); but we’ll take the journey together, as it were
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I’m just over halfway through the series (10 of the planned 12 podcasts are available), but I see already that <i>Series</i> will continue into a second season, though with a different story. This template can be applied to a large number of previous investigations.
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I’m quite sucked in, but the concept does raise some concerns. First, why this murder and why now? Partly, it seems they found the “right” case for the format, both in its overview and because of the characters involved. As I say, it’s a compelling story. But making a radio drama because a particular case seems properly lurid or has the right characters or is otherwise suitable for radio seems inherently problematic. They’re not just telling a story; they’re potentially changing an outcome. Do the producers seek to exonerate the accused / convicted? (It kinda seems so.) If so, why? And is it the place of a radio show to do this? While host Koenig doesn’t overtly pull for Syed, it does seem like she’s seeking actively to find the flaws in the State’s case and in how that case was prosecuted. Syed himself—in a detail that seems seminal to this whole undertaking—is articulate and unflappable, but a little difficult to pin down: smooth-talking, seemingly very disarming and self-effacing, he has the hyper-awareness of psychological details and motivations that one sees with those who have spent years in therapy. He knows every objection to every detail of his case, as perhaps befits having had 15 years in prison to think about it. He’s an intriguing centerpiece. But is this case more in need of ironing out than other cases which might not have made for good radio play?
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It also seems problematic that the team’s “investigation” essentially seeks to duplicate much of our police and legal processes. The implication is that the police and legal procedures are not adequate and we can do better. And maybe they can. But I can see there might be resistance to a gang of amateurs going over, very publicly and with a fine-toothed comb, the work of a group of professionals—from police to detectives to forensic people to judges and lawyers. We might expect these people to be less-than eager to have their work questioned, and not surprisingly neither of the two detectives on the case nor any of the attorneys involved agreed to be interviewed for the story. (FWIW, at this point they have not uncovered any evident malfeasance or incompetence on anyone’s part.) One of the two detectives did state off the record about Syed, “He’s the guy. Without question he’s the guy.”
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Host Sarah Koenig (L) and producer Dana Chivvis.</td></tr>
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The whole enterprise feels like it’s playing with fire, which I suppose is part of its allure. The investigation bubbles along with the background assumption that something new may be uncovered or some mistake revealed. The status quo—Syed in jail—may be overturned. But there is also the possibility, throbbing constantly in the background like a dull headache, that Syed for all his charms and self-deprecation is a player of the first order and is hoodwinking the podcast team. The team are aware of this, of course, and they talk about it. This prospect of helping to free someone who might be a monster gives moment to the whole undertaking. <i>Serial </i>is an entertainment that plays with people’s lives and their peace of mind.
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I’ve never been a regular listener of <i>This American Life</i>. It's a bit too self-consciously quirky for my taste, too much an exercise in style. I especially rankle at their use of music. It’s like they have a special CD of slinky lounge music that is used for all transitions. <i>Serial</i> sounds very much like <i>TAM</i>—-the first <i>Serial</i> episode was played as a segment on <i>TAM</i>. And their use of a "theme song" is a bit grating. But that's small potatoes. Koenig is great as a host; she has a winning, candid manner and a voice for radio, and it’s all very well written. The little glimpses behind the production scene—recorded conversations between producers in the car, for example, or Koenig’s recorded phone interviews—give <i>Serial</i> a documentary feel. </div>
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Loving crime fiction as I do, this foray into crime non-fiction is welcome. I'm intrigued to see how the season winds up, and what they come up with next.
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Stay tuned.wstachourhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12447198404608861357noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15935045.post-34789477527984963532014-12-01T09:53:00.002-06:002015-02-18T14:33:42.624-06:00Wait. What Just Happened?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Here’s another in my <b><i>very popular</i></b> line of posts under the category of “Stuff Everybody Else Figured Out In Their Formative Years But About Which I’m Only Now In My Dotage Deciding What The Hell I Think."<br />
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So lately I’ve been immersed in George R. R. Martin’s <i><b>Game of Thrones</b></i> saga. I began, at the behest of friends, with the TV series, and found it engaging enough that I decided to sample the books (in audio format) and see if they’re worth the trouble. (They certainly are.) We could easily head off on a tangent here about books vs movies / TV. But there’s something else on my mind at present.
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I’m not sure how the women in my life would categorize me (to say nothing of strangers I might meet), but I have long thought of myself as a feminist. Partly this is because I rankle (“in my deepest integrity,” Christopher Hitchens would say) at the injustice of male privilege and outright chauvinism that is everywhere in our culture—an imbalance that keeps more than half the population of our small planet at a permanent and institutionalized disadvantage; and partly it’s because my experiences in life have convinced me that, however much there is a role for men and women to play, the female is simply the superior sex. They create life; they nurture others; they bring humanity to every action and decision; they are verbal and collaborative. Not all women are all these things, of course; and not all men stand in opposition to these things. But I’m just convinced that a world of all men would be a bleak and violent place (and often is), and a world of all women would be delightful. So there.
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I raise the issue of feminism because I’m grappling with some fundamental questions about justice and the writing of fiction.
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Several years back, I was very taken with Steig Larsson’s <i><b>Girl With the Dragon Tattoo</b></i> trilogy. (For the 12 people in this country who have not read the stories, they involve an antisocial young woman who must overcome a vast institutional injustice, and she does so with, shall we say, a virtuoso talent for vengeance.) I saw the films and then read the books and then saw the films again and then listened to the audiobooks and, finally, saw the films once or twice more. It’s not that I think the stories constitute a morality tale, but I reacted strongly to the character of Lisbeth Salander. And I felt the books had an essentially feminist bent: a strong, brilliant if traumatized woman manages to overcome every kind of obstacle to find self-actualization. She must rely on her friends—especially a male journalist who takes her under his wing—but her triumph is her own, and as her hurdles are high her triumph is spectacular.
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My wife’s take—and her feminist credibility obviously trumps mine—was very different (though it bears noting that her take on artistic matters is very often different from mine; in movies and books and music we like quite different things.) She contends that it’s not feminism for a woman to suffer sexual abuse and oppression as a storytelling element; no feminist would choose this story arc for fiction, and in any case it’s not a story she has any interest in reading, no matter how it turns out.
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I confess I rankled at this reaction, not least because I was so taken by the character of Lisbeth Salander. Her triumph and the brilliance and toughness with which she achieved it were thrilling to me. She did not strike me as Everywoman (thank goodness her story is not Everywoman’s story), but as a creation of fiction she seems a brilliant stroke. The idea that her character was perpetuating an essentially subversive story was not something I felt ready to accept. I’m not sure I accept it even now. But I’ve started to wonder.
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Fast forward a few years and here I am watching / reading <b><i>The Game of Thrones</i></b>. The other night I found myself in a discussion about the series (in which I am currently deeply engrossed) with Susan and a psychologist friend of hers, and I was a little surprised (and felt a little dim) to find these same themes bubbling to the surface again. The feminist in me—such as it is—thrills and exults at the brilliant and fierce and accomplished and resourceful (and, yes, sometimes devious) women in this saga: Daenerys Targaryen; Cersei Lannister; Catelyn Stark; Arya Stark; Margaery Tyrell; Olenna Tyrell; Melisandre, The Red Queen; Brienne of Tarth. But more of the characters in the story are men; and almost without exception the female characters are under the thumb of dominant men. In several cases circumstances transpire such that the woman in question rules absolutely, but much more often at least part of the character’s strength involves her asserting her will against the restrictive male who stands in her way.
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George R. R. Martin’s world of Westeros is loosely based on the England of Medieval times. It is a world of kingdoms, of knights and lords and ladies and squires and handmaidens and swordplay and jousting. It’s a male-dominated world, much, I suppose, as the England of Medieval times was male-dominated (so far as determining who was allowed to exercise power). And perhaps some of my confusion stems from my having jumped into the series without first questioning many of the premises that stand at the foundation of the story. Maybe as a man I don’t rankle automatically at the gender imbalance as a woman might—or, I fear, as perhaps I should (though in my defense I often rankle at this imbalance when I read history).
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Susan’s friend said that she made it through the first episode of the first season of <i>Game of Thrones</i> where Daenerys is sold for a bride by her brother like a piece of chattel to a barbarian ruler and is raped on her wedding night. She refused to watch another minute of a series that used this as a storytelling device, and even sent the man who suggested the series to her (on a date) packing, permanently.
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Huh.
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I readily confess that I found the scenes of Daenerys’s wedding and wedding night most discomfiting and distressing. I get not the slightest thrill or feeling of satisfaction to see a woman dominated—quite the contrary (though attempted domination that is thwarted is usually a satisfying turn of events, regardless of the sexes involved). These scenes seem much more calculated, to my eyes, to be off-putting than titillating (though other elements of the same storyline DID seem so intended), but I also confess that it never struck me to consider whether such a storyline was perhaps more than distasteful, that perhaps such things should not be allowed, or tolerated, in an entertainment. Is this just the blindness of male privilege? (If the gender roles were reversed they would CERTAINLY get the world’s attention.)
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A couple counter-arguments come to mind (though even to me they sound a mite defensive). First, we cannot have victory without a test. There is no triumph without our having had to overcome. (The analogy I raised when my wife and I discussed <i>Dragon Tattoo </i>was that Harry Potter’s story would not really work if he did not have powerful interests bent on oppressing or killing him.) This is an essential part of what makes Lisbeth Salander’s story so thrilling: she is up against an army of powerful men bent on keeping her down and she bests them all. This does not of course begin to dictate that the trial should be sexual oppression, and the fact that this kind of trial may make a compelling palette for a character study is no argument at all. And I sympathize absolutely with the charge that women have been saddled with sexual oppression and violence since before we were even human. Susan’s friend is a counselor who deals with sexual abuse on a daily basis. “This isn’t an engaging story, this is an unacceptable aspect of everyday life,” she says.
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This kind of leads to my second (very feeble) objection. This imbalanced dynamic—men ruling, women supporting and exerting influence obliquely—is no more than reality for just about all of human history. Does that fact make it acceptable to steep an epic fictional story in the same injustice? Or, knowing now that this imbalance is deeply and fundamentally wrong—as I truly believe it is—does that knowledge invalidate this milieu for our fictional entertainment?
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Anyway, I’ve been slow to register the objection, and not much faster processing my dissonance. And the <i>Game of Thrones</i> saga is not clarifying things for me. I love the female characters in <i>GOT</i> (and many of the male ones). I love them for their strength and resourcefulness, for their essential decency and wisdom, for their responses to the crises that define the story; I love them for all the reasons I love women in real life. And I love them, in part, because they are usually so much better people than the men around whom they must maneuver. I just can't come to grips with how much of what I love in the story rests on the unsavory--or worse.
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I’ve heard it claimed (as a kind of cliche) that women were the real rulers in history, that a woman’s skill was in getting a man to change his course without realizing that it wasn’t his idea in the first place. That’s a pretty offensive idea when we look at millennia of oppression and violence under which women have suffered, and it sounds an awful lot like some chauvinist pig trying to salve his dimly-throbbing conscience. But perhaps there's the tiniest kernel of truth in the claim. The king may have had the final say, and that fact may be injustice itself; but it’s also certainly true that throughout history women have influenced their partners. Influenced them and more, in some cases. The cliche might be both wrong and true.
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And so I’m back where I started. My purpose here is certainly not to recant or otherwise scuttle my feminism, but only to grapple with whether I think it’s OK to tell a story that has an element of sexism at its core. And I honestly don’t know. I can see that I might find these elements offensive and unacceptable if I were not already hoodwinked by the grand sweep and narrative skill of the story. But that’s not a very strong endorsement. George R. R. Martin’s skill stands quite apart from these questions, as millions of readers and watchers will attest; but millions of people also love the work of, say, Joss Whedon, and he oppresses and celebrates and punishes his sexes rather more equally.
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I've come to believe very strongly in the last 20 years that the more women we have in positions of power and authority, the better will be the society that results. And this leads me to wonder whether even the feminist fiction I love isn't perhaps a male version of feminism.
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wstachourhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12447198404608861357noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15935045.post-25116495842046838732014-11-24T10:28:00.000-06:002015-01-25T20:39:12.731-06:00The Nostalgia Whore Strikes Again<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Other pictures <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/wunelle/sets/72157649413166265/" target="_blank">here</a>.<br />
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Years ago I built a house in the woods in central Minnesota. Well, I undertook a range of tasks to that end, though a lot of key pieces of the process—framing, concrete work, siding, roofing—were done by others. Anyway, that’s a long time ago; the house by now has belonged to others for much longer than I owned it.</div>
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But one of the things I learned from that time came from the many weekends my then-wife and I spent clearing the lot before the proper house building began. The building site was a wooded 1.3 acre lot on a small lake, a typical Northern Minnesota plot of ground. And this is one of the things I learned: the forest contains much more dead stuff than you think from a casual look. We needed to clean up the lot and clear some trees for the house and driveway. In the end I estimated that fully 1/3 of the stuff on our lot (and on the surrounding lots) was dead and in some stage of decay; another 1/3 was past its prime and in the process of dying; and the final third was alive and growing and thriving. This was not at all what I felt intuitively, even though I had grown up in exactly this environment and had spent a fair amount of time in the woods (admittedly, riding dirt bikes or bicycles and not, as my brother had done, studying the forest or its animals).</div>
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This isn’t really what’s on my mind, but I’m reminded of this time almost 30 years ago by my current situation.</div>
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After giving up our crash pad apartment in Louisville last year, I now have no place to stay when I'm on reserve. With increasing seniority, I can generally avoid reserve nowadays--as a group we found ourselves on reserve so rarely that after a dozen years we let the crash pad go as an unnecessary expense. But I can't always avoid it, so where to stay? One solution is to look for a cheap hotel. $70 is a pretty good nightly rate for a nearly-new Holiday Inn near the airport, but I had to spend a full two weeks on reserve in June and I felt I should look for something even cheaper. The solution: the FORMER Holiday Inn, which is now in private hands. Cost: $55. Cool. (My hope is that I'd be assigned flying for most of this time, and would not spend two weeks sitting in a hotel at my own expense. As it happened, of course, I was called only once during this period to fly, and then just a mid-day out-and-back. So I had to pony up for the whole two weeks.)</div>
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A cheap hotel is nice for the wallet, but the savings have to come from something. And after a few days here I’m reminded of my time clearing deadfall on my wooded Minnesota lot. While the new Holiday Inn is a single building of, say, 200 rooms, the old place is considerably larger. The unavoidable sense is that Holiday Inn abandoned the old place when its upkeep became problematic, and evidence of the maintenance free-fall is everywhere.</div>
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I have a particular soft spot for the decayed and abandoned, and infrastructure stuff in particular exercises a perverse hold on me. I love old buildings waiting for the wrecking ball, unused railroad tracks, abandoned stretches of roadway, the things that correspond to the 1/3 of the forest that’s dead and decaying. And everybody is aware of (and many of us are infatuated with) the new and growing, new construction and development with its attendant anticipation and promise.</div>
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But what of that middle third, that segment that is past its prime and headed rapidly downhill? Well, that’s this hotel. If I have an unaccountable love for the decaying, then this should be my kind of place.</div>
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I’m guessing the place has 600 rooms [460, I learned later]. It’s billed as a “conference center,” though I can’t imagine too many conferences wanting anything to do with it. The hotel is split into two large buildings separated by a roadway. There is an enclosed, elevated footbridge that connects the two buildings. Evidently one building existed first, and the second was added in a burst of deluded grandeur (or was built as a rival hotel and then incorporated). Both buildings are now quite tired. I’ve only stayed in one of the buildings, the newer one as it turns out. The original building dates from the 50s or 60s, and the newer one from a decade or so later. The main office and a couple of mostly-closed restaurants and the pool are located in the other building; my building has a number of public rooms as well, but they're rarely used. My building especially seems quite isolated (tonight mine is the only car in the parking lot on this side).</div>
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I’ve stayed here now on three or four occasions. One of the things that first struck me is the large meeting room in this building that is covered by a glass dome. Nothing special there, except that the entire dome is now covered by a huge tarpaulin. I’m guessing this room used to be the building’s swimming pool, but first it was filled in and made a convention hall, and then the roof, when it began to leak, was just covered over. A couple weeks ago there was a big gathering in there and it seemed a little… spooky. What is supposed to bring a flood of natural light instead brings a kind of black hole effect.</div>
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Nothing lasts forever, of course, and other little signs of decay are everywhere. I went to walk across the elevated footbridge yesterday, and I found it’s been sealed off--though ventilation windows along its plexiglass-domed length are tilted open. It's a concrete walkway covered by an arched plexiglass top like a long covered wagon. Doors have been haphazardly installed on both ends, held shut on my end with a couple of long wood screws pushed through the door into the jamb. Both sides' walkway entrances are via staircases that lead to nothing else, and one walks up the steps--the hallways and carpets now unused and filthy--to find blocked passages. No signs indicate that the walkway is there, or that it's closed. Elsewhere the carpets—there’s a lot of carpeting—are stained and puckered and threadbare in places. All the doors have numerous coats of paint on them, walls have holes from missing fixtures, wallpaper seams have begun to separate, the elevators are slow and show signs of years of hard use. Everything smells a little damp. My building is mostly empty—looking at it at night, one sees just a couple lights burning among its eight stories. Most guests are in the other building, though even that is sparsely-populated. Hard to see a workable business model in all this.</div>
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It's not that the place is ready for the wrecking ball: that would augment the tragedy, as it's certainly still a legitimately functional facility. But the vector is undeniable. The parking lots are heaved and veined with cracks sprouting all manner of weeds, and there's clearly losing battle being waged against entropy to keep the outsides looking fresh. Maintenance crews dance either side of a line between things needing paint and things looking like they've been painted too often. And the facility isn't generating anything like the money needed to fix any of it.<br />
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I can’t help wondering what it is to stand watch over a decaying relic like this. There is an occasional maintenance person in the halls or roaming the grounds in a golf cart; yesterday there was someone working on one of the two elevators in this building. There is a "Sales and Catering" office in my building, the only managerial presence on this side. The office is mostly empty, though lights are on during business hours. I've talked to a manager on occasion (usually about ensuring a special “pilot rate” they offer) and I have to wonder: what is it like to spend one’s working years managing a thing on the downslope, a thing which is not long for the world? I can’t help thinking that a bad storm that goes thru and breaks a bunch of windows, or a flooding of the nearby creek would be all it would take to seal the fate of the place. (Interestingly, the original building is built on a drainage creek, and there's a flood wall not around the building, but separating it from the rest of the world. A flood would take the building but save everything else. One must drive one's car in and out of huge, swinging steel flood gates, silently waiting for the next apocalyptic spring thaw.)</div>
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On my drive to and from KY, I pass an abandoned hotel off the freeway in Lafayette, IN. I've been passing the same hotel now for 13 years, and it's been abandoned the whole time. It's amazing how quickly the rot takes over. Over that time the pool house has developed several large holes in its roof, holes that get worse and worse each year. Most of the windows are broken, and the parking lot is sprouting trees through cracks in the pavement. What once looked perhaps temporarily closed is now unquestionably beyond redemption.</div>
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I can't help thinking my current abode will soon sing a similar tune.</div>
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wstachourhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12447198404608861357noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15935045.post-84556529189830967132014-11-21T21:38:00.001-06:002014-11-21T21:38:52.500-06:00Hong Kong, 11/15/14<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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wstachourhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12447198404608861357noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15935045.post-13298071887938029272014-11-20T16:36:00.001-06:002014-11-20T16:36:32.325-06:00Chungking Mansions<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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wstachourhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12447198404608861357noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15935045.post-57210905258236225602014-11-20T16:31:00.000-06:002014-11-20T16:31:56.453-06:00Hong Kong, 11/15/14<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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wstachourhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12447198404608861357noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15935045.post-37238043310887763722014-11-20T11:05:00.000-06:002014-11-20T11:05:33.409-06:00Hong Kong, 11/15/14<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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wstachourhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12447198404608861357noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15935045.post-9406501517149888082014-11-20T09:17:00.000-06:002014-11-20T10:10:19.253-06:00Shenzhen, 11/13/14<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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wstachourhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12447198404608861357noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15935045.post-39338312642575253282014-11-19T09:17:00.000-06:002014-11-20T10:10:00.971-06:00Shenzhen, 11/13/14<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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