New Yorker Moment of Zen

How better to ensure that your quote gets published in the New Yorker than, 6 months after the end of the Bush administration, to get a random dig in about him? Elizabeth Kolbert writes about the mass extinction of animals around us and is talking to Al Hicks about what was happening to bats in the northeast US:

… dead bats everywhere … animals looked as if they had been dunked … in talcum powder … [sent] the photographs to … bat specialists … [n]one of them could explain it…

So far so good. But then Al Hicks gets into gear, almost immediately:

“We were thinking, Oh boy we hope this just goes away,” he told me, “It was like the Bush administration. And, like the Bush administration, it just wouldn’t go away”

What the hell? I hated the Bush administration as much as the next guy, but isn’t it a little late to be getting in gratuitous digs? But all that aside, I do highly recommend the article itself, like every Kolbert article in recent memory, she does a wonderful job of writing about the very real impact that humans have, inadvertently or otherwise, on the ecology around us. Unfortunately online access to the article for subscribers only, the rest of you have to buy the paper version or ask a friend for a photocopy.

Of course, if, like some people I know, you hate the New Yorker length essays and would rather read the Economist’s shorter edition just wait another 50 years or so at which point all the extinction will raise them out of their conservative slumber and write a quick page and a half wringing their hands about the situation and decrying the absence of free market rhetoric in the proposed solutions. Mission Accomplished!

AM Radio Moment of Zen

Every now and then, I have what Jon Stewart terms a moment of zen. Herewith the first in an occasional series. This was heard on my local right-wing AM radio station on my drive home yesterday. Paraphrasing:

You know that previous caller who compared Dr Tiller’s murder with Muslims killing our soldiers…he needs to realize that Dr Tiller was going to hell anyway whereas many of the soldiers are not, so there’s a real difference there.

One can only imagine Johnnie Cochran tweeting:

If the victim had a date with Say-tan

You must acquit this man.

Film Review: Star Trek

I had the misfortune to watch the new Star Trek flick over the weekend. Normally I would write a long essay on the many ways I didn’t like it. Works as a camp movie, but not as a good movie. But why waste precious pixels when Antony Lane has already covered it all in the New Yorker? The bit about not wanting to have my hero origin myths explained to me was particularly on-point.

Film Review: Anvil

I watched Anvil over the weekend. Going into the movie, I had not heard about the rock band, and had no idea what the movie was about. Only the sub-head on the marquee gave me any idea what I was getting into. “This is not Spinal Tap,” it read. But as the movie opened to shots from a rock festival held in Tokyo in the mid-80s where the performers included the Scorpions, Metallica and Anthrax all of whom went on to sell millions of records and also Anvil which went on to oblivion, and then moved to interviews with Lars Ulrich from Metallica telling us how the sound of Anvil was the best sound he’d ever heard and Slash telling us that Anvil practically invented metal, it was hard not to imagine that far from not being Spinal Tap, I had indeed walked into a This is Spinal Tap tribute, another mockumentary only this time the band recedes into oblivion instead of making it big. It only gets worse from here: the drummer is called Robb Reiner, and the equipment that their album is being recorded on has dials that go to eleven. Could I be faulted for thinking that this was not a documentary but a work of fiction?

The story picks up in the present where the principals behind Anvil, Robb Reiner and the lead singer Lips Kudlow (both Canadian Jews one of them with an Auschwitz history concerning his grandfather), are consigned to the dustbin of metal history, both of them in their 50s, the former involved in manual labour of some kind with power tools, the latter a catering service delivery man. They have been together for 30+ years, and still meet to rock together. The documentary follows their story arc over the next few months, and the comparisons to Spinal Tap don’t end. The band goes on a tour of Europe, and their manager can never manage to book their tickets, or get to the railway station on time, or even get to the gig in time. On the tour, they play to a lone rocker sitting in a lazy-boy and banging his head, to a meager 170-odd audience in a venue that can hold a couple thousand, and wait eagerly back-stage to meet with Ted Nugent. Eventually the manager marries one of the band members (and we’re told at the end of the movie is now arranging a tour of the Scorpions and wishes to move on to the opera). But throughout, Kudlow stays optimistic. He throws out such Zen as, “at least there was a tour for things to go wrong on,” and, “at the end of the day after all has been said and done, I can say that all has been said and done.”

And it is that which makes Anvil so likeable and human. Both Reiner and Kudlow have been together for a long time. They agreed when they met as teenagers to keep rocking, and they do keep rocking. They are supported (financially and otherwise) by family most of whom also want them to finally make it big, they are devoted family men, sometimes rockers have to play badminton in the backyard with their little children too you know.

Sacha Gervasi who made the documentary has made a masterpiece of a documentary. You might go in not caring for rock or metal, you might even go in thinking Anvil is a poor poor band, in no way comparable to Slayer or Anthrax, or what have you, but even the most hard hearted person will melt a little by the end. As I read a little about Gervasi, it was quickly obvious where his empathy for the underdog comes from: Gervasi started his career as a musician, he founded a band with his friend, then left it because he thought they had no talent, his band then renamed itself to … Bush, he then became a screen writer and turned down a Warner Bros opportunity to adapt a screen play about a young wizard named … Harry Potter.

But in a real life documentary, there can be no redemption. Life sucks. And Anvil’s does too. The tour of Europe is a disaster. An album is recorded, nobody will distribute it, many days will be spent meeting with record execs and such, but a 50+ year old rocker is an old rocker, whichever way you cut it. The film reaches its slow climax when a tour opportunity arises in Japan butwhen they get to the Tokyo venue, the scene of their last big success 20+ years ago, their show is scheduled for 11:30 in the morning. Will anyone come to a metal show at 11:30 am? We know what the answer would have been if this were a Hollywood fantasy, but how will it play out in real life? We also know that Kudlow won’t much mind either way, but we want him to succeed, we want to will the Japanese to show up for their act.

And ultimately that is why this documentary wins. Two old rockers, their long hair barely covering their bald spots, leading sad lives, and yet continuing to live the dream, and as it happens, still making good music, and we care about them. We want the dream to succeed. This is probably the best documentary you will watch this year. Which means that with Kanchivaram earlier this year, I should probably stop watching movies altogether for the year.

Like A Rock

Like a virgin
Touched for the very first time

– Madonna, Like a Virgin

Mr Pink: “Like a Virgin” is all about a girl who digs a guy with a big dick. The whole song is a metaphor for big dicks.
Mr Blue: No it’s not. It’s about a girl who is very vulnerable and she’s been fucked over a few times. Then she meets some guy who’s really sensitive–
Mr Pink: –Whoa…whoa…time out Greenbay. Tell that bullshit to the tourists.
Joe: (looking through his address book) Toby…who the fuck is Toby? Toby…Toby…think…think…think…
Mr Pink: It’s not about a nice girl who meets a sensitive boy. Now granted that’s what “True Blue” is about, no argument about that.
Mr Orange: Which one is “True Blue?”
Nice Guy Eddie: You don’t remember “True Blue?” That was a big ass hit for Madonna. Shit, I don’t even follow this Tops In Pops shit, and I’ve at least heard of “True Blue.”
Mr Orange: Look, asshole, I didn’t say I ain’t heard of it. All I asked was how does it go? Excuse me for not being the world’s biggest Madonna fan.
Mr Brown: I hate Madonna.
Mr Blue: I like her early stuff. You know, “Lucky Star,” “Borderline” – but once she got into her “Papa Don’t Preach” phase, I don’t know, I tuned out.
Mr Pink: Hey, fuck all that, I’m making a point here. You’re gonna make me lose my train of thought.
Joe: Oh fuck, Toby’s that little china girl.
Mr White: What’s that?
Joe: I found this old address book in a jacket I ain’t worn in a coon’s age. Toby what? What the fuck was her last name?
Mr Pink: Where was I?
Mr Orange: You said “True Blue” was about a nice girl who finds a sensitive fella. But “Like a Virgin” was a metaphor for big dicks.
Mr Pink: Let me tell ya what “Like a Virgin”’s about. It’s about some cooze who’s a regular fuck machine. I mean all the time, morning, day, night, afternoon, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick.
Mr Blue: How many dicks was that?
Mr White: A lot.
Mr Pink: Then one day she meets a John Holmes motherfucker, and it’s like, whoa baby. This mother fucker’s like Charles Bronson in “The Great Escape.” He’s diggin tunnels. Now she’s gettin this serious dick action, she’s feelin something she ain’t felt since forever. Pain.
Joe: Chew? Toby Chew? No.
Mr Pink: It hurts. It hurts her. It shouldn’t hurt. Her pussy should be Bubble-Yum by now. But when this cat fucks her, it hurts. It hurts like the first time. The pain is reminding a fuck machine what is was like to be a virgin. Hence, “Like a Virgin.”

– Opening Scene, Reservoir Dogs

I was doing a brief tour of Indian mythology the other day and was reminded of the story of Ahalya. Ahalya, wife of Gautama the rishi, was supposedly the most beautiful woman of her time (hence the name). But presumably not entirely happy with her relationship with a mere rishi, she promptly fell for the seductions of Lord Indra, the chief of the Devas. Gautama on his discovery of this infidelity, got so enraged he turned Ahalya into a rock, and cursed Indra to have a thousand vaginas all over his body. Ahalya was released from her curse when Lord Rama stumbled on her during his teenage expedition with his brother Laxmana and the sage Vishwamitra.

As I was thinking of this story, the arc of Ahalya from promiscuity to frigidity and then back to life on being touched by Lord Rama, the curse of Indra to be covered by a thousand vaginas (for some reason I had once thought a thousand penises, which gives “Dick, dick, dick, dick…” a whole new meaning) all of this indicates to me that perhaps Quentin Tarantino missed the real meaning of Like a Virgin.

In Which We Hate on the 2wire DSL Modem

Every now and then we hate a software product, we hate it so much it gets our geek juices flowing and wanting us to write about it. Hence this mini essay-let on the 2wire DSL modem we have here in the apartment. Warning: Geeky rant.
I’m staying here in the “corporate apartment,” and life couldn’t get much better. A place to crash in the evening, pervasive wireless connected to high speed Internet, basic kitchen with essentials, a TV with a DVD player attached, company’s own water (h. & c.), gas heater that manages to heat up the whole apartment, in short, if you had caught me in the clutch of winter, storms passing over the bay area, temperatures dropping to the 30s, and wondered aloud how I managed to have such a sunny disposition and still had a light step and a song on my lips, I would have been hard pressed not to divulge that while I would not go so far as to describe life as grand it was certainly not without its perks.
And yet in this lovely garden of Eden, we must have a snake-bitten curse, and here it is in the form of the DSL modem. To be fair, one assumes a product manager thought long and hard about a very real problem and probably believed he had found a fair solution to a pressing problem. But really? This was the best you could do?
Here’s what happens: Every now and then, the DSL connection gets dropped. Why this should happen, I don’t know, my DSL connection in India hasn’t dropped for months on end, but this one does go away quite periodically, about a couple times a day in fact. But that’s ok, it comes back fairly quickly also so one can’t really find too much fault. But mark the effect on those of us using the Internet. Here you are, one minute twittering away on the facebooks, and what should you have but a web page returned to you saying: “The DSL connection is down.”
The first time that happened, I thought, “Oh cool.” After all who hasn’t endured the little spinny thing on the browser go spinny, spinny, spinny while it says in the status bar “Looking up facebook.com…” and we’re sitting there wondering what could be up with facebook all of a sudden, only to realize it’s our Internet connection that’s down, manifesting itself as an inability to look up hostnames. And suddenly all hostname lookups are returning ugly pages on the browser suggesting a variety of possible causes for the Internets being down when all along the modem could just have told us what the problem was: we’ve lost DSL. So, at a somewhat superficial level, it looks like 2wire took a real problem of flaky Internet connections and found a neat way to tell the end-user not to worry, it was just their DSL. But then you look carefully and realize what just happened. The DSL modem which is your DNS provider on noticing that the DSL is down just returns a CNAME of “gateway.2wire.com” for every hostname lookup, and “gateway.2wire.com” always resolves to 192.168.1.1 which is your local modem, which helpfully runs a web server that serves up the sad page.
At first blush this all looks very well, until the Internets start working again. Oh, now did you dig yourself into a hole. Your browser, helpfully caching DNS lookups for you, now has facebook.com CNAMEd to “gateway.2wire.com” in its local cache and keeps taking you to the silly modem, and the modem is happy to tell you that the problem has been resolved you should quit your browser and restart it to go online again. Quitting the browser presumably being their way of killing the DNS cache. But, Goddamn you 2wire, quit my browser? Are you fucking kidding me? Quit my browser? I never quit my browser. I live in my browser. My browser comes up when my machine comes up and doesn’t go down until a few weeks later when I have to reboot to apply updates. I have a million tabs open. Do you know what it takes to quit my browser? Are you out of your fucking mind? Quit my browser, my foot. Tchah! And dare I say it, Pshaw!
The fundamental problem here is that you idiots hijacked a lower level symptom, i.e. DNS not working and attempted to resolve it via a higher level solution: i.e. a web page with buttons. But, what of non-browser applications? Will they all now try to connect to your silly modem? And how do you respond to them? What if I were trying ssh and it reported different keys and man-in-the-middle and all of that? What if someone were trying to VPN to work, and the modem had somehow been hacked? Have you morons never heard of the end to end argument in system design? You never, never try to solve a lower level problem at a higher level. Issues at a given level must be solved at that same level. Not higher. And God forbid, not lower. (Of course, Cisco has built an entire business breaking that exact principle, but we are here not to praise Cisco but to bury 2wire).
What really galls is that there are surely many other ways out there to solve this problem. A web proxy running on the modem, for instance, that hijacked all web requests and sent back a useful page when the modem was unable to connect to the Internet. Firefox-level application problem solved at the web-application layer. Perfect! And yet here we are, stuck with the silly 2wire solution, hijacking browsers around the world and screwing them over, asking them to quit their browsers. Quit your browser, indeed!

Film Review: Kanchivaram

I first watched a Priyadarshan movie when I watched Kilukkam back when I was a young college-going lad. My room mate had convinced us Bangaloreans that this was an awesome movie and took us. Kilukkam was quite a revelation, it was funny, it was extremely well made, it had a good story and plot, and finally it looked different. Kilukkam looks most like a Mani Ratnam movie, but that is not giving Kilukkam enough credit. The Mani Ratnam look of course refers to the generally dark, back-lit/side-lit cinematography that lends the movie a sensual look. But the difference is that Kilukkam was shot in Ooty, and the director did use that to his advantage by framing the shots to include the green beauty of that fine hill-town. It also helped that Ooty is a generally foggy city, see earlier note about lowered lighting in the shots. Kilukkam was also that rarest of Indian movies: a comedy feast. Historically, Indian comedies may be classified into: i) Movies that are tight, intelligent comic movies, they start as comedies, stay that way, and end that way. These are rare. Hrishikesh Mukherjee used to pull it off quite consistently in the 70s. This has recently come into vogue again, now that movies are not afraid to last two hours or less. ii) Movies that start with a comic premise, but quickly morph into a drama/tragedy/something else equally abhorrent. These are sadly quite prevalent. A subset of this type of movie is of the Chandni Chowk to China variety. Movies that could be good comedies if only they had had the sense to hire an editor and snip out the middle 1.5 hours. iii) Movies that are indeed comedies through and through, or would be if they were actually funny. This includes movies that at first blush might appear to belong in the first category. Two Kamalhassan movies illustrate this dichotomy nicely. Pushpak, that landmark silent movie of the 1980s today appears to be a movie with an interesting gimmick but a very poor, cringe-inducing comic style, firmly in the third category. Michael Madana Kama Rajan, the quadruple-role Kamal feast, on the other hand seems to belong to the first variety. All in all, I had marked Priyadarshan as a director to watch. Soon after, I left India for foreign shores and didn’t really follow his work. I was therefore quite pleased when I saw that The Asian Film Festival in San Francisco last weekend screened Priyadarshan’s latest effort, Kanchivaram.

Kanchivaram is a set in the mid-late 1940s in the Tamilnadu town of Kanchivaram. The town is the origin of the famous Kanchivaram silk sarees, intricate hand woven sarees of such incredible beauty, woven by artisans who are so poor that they cannot afford their own creations, indeed have probably never seen their sarees worn by anyone. They work for the local landlord who owns the means of production, and naturally this sets the stage for a gradual awakening of Communist spirit among the weavers. The story deals specifically with one weaver who wishes that by the time his newborn daughter is of marriageable age, he will be able to marry her off in a silk saree. This is is an admirable pursuit in one so poor of course, but the futility of a poor person’s existence in India will grind him down, it is really only a matter of time. No Slumdog Millionaire this, there are no fairy tale endings to be had. The system is stacked against a simple poor weaver, and he has to fight it every step of the way. Communism makes its appearance via an idealistic writer, but pre-war Britain banned Communism, and eventually even Communism can’t help, it is but an ideology. Ideologies can’t put food on the table. Very quickly, idealistic communist protestors turn into run-of-the-mill politicians and yet another source of hope disappears. Hope keeps springing eternal, but reality catches up very quickly eventually leading to a heart-rending dénouement. As Slumdog would say, “It is written.”

Don’t let all of this get you down, the story is outstanding: it has all the right touches to make it incredibly real and it is very well edited to tell that story tightly. This is also the best looking movie I’ve seen in a long time. It isn’t just the back-lit/side-lit scenes that are enjoyable, there are many deep-focus shots of the kind I haven’t seen in a long time. When he turns these on, the scene just pops like on a digital hi-def screen, and the collective audience’s jaw drops. The Kanchivaram village doesn’t just look lovely, it looks like an Incredible India tourist brochure come alive.

A Western audience might find a couple quibbles with the movie. The lone “British” businessman speaks an English that is painfully un-British, indeed un-anything, but one imagines that if he spoke perfectly, it would make him very hard to follow for a Tamil audience. Also the San Francisco audience that I watched this with twittered quite audibly when the Communist sickle made its appearance, this might be camp for an American audience, but the rest of us know that it is indeed quite real.

As I left the movie theater (Castro theater, about which a word, I had no idea the ceiling had all these lovely Indian/Asian motif paintings), I felt like I’d seen the best movie I’ll see all year.

Frederick Forsyth on the Unpleasantness in Guinea-Bissau

Thanks to a happy concatenation of circumstances, I was in the car today when the BBC was talking about all the recent unpleasantness in Guinea-Bissau¹. And who should they have found to talk about it but Frederick Forsyth who just happened to be visiting there on the day of the coup. This led to the best foreign-journalist reporting that I’ve ever heard on the radio. I recorded it for posterity and archived it off here. It’s equal parts wordsmith talking about the events, for instance,

As [the General] sat down at his desk, someone with a doohickey pressed the appropriate button and a bomb went off, creating out of the general, an ex-general.

and also traditional British stiff upper-lip:

I was due to fly out tomorrow afternoon, and I rather think they’re going to keep the airport closed which is very inconvenient.

Listen to the whole thing of course, it’s rife with entertainment as he talks about the President that would not die and the forensic pathologist in charge who helped him piece it together and on and on.

————–

Fn 1: For those who do not wish to click through and read it all, the President of Guinea Bissau had the General of his Army killed,  the Army not taking too kindly to this interference had their President killed right back and now the country is without a President as well as a General. All quite unfortunate of course.

Oscars and the Matthew Effect

Anand (Sr) writes about the Matthew Effect and the Oscars. To which we say:

• Of course the Matthew Effect is dominant. Oscar nominations are a function of PR and lobbying more than anything else,  the marginal PR required for the ninth nom is much less than the marginal PR for the first.
• Some noms make no sense at all. Button for editing? One imagines even the Academy is somewhat unsure what they are honoring. Or perhaps they think a consolation prize is in order so they nominate it anyway.
• Winning an Oscar is all about being in the right place at the right time, so yes the Matthew Effect must dominate again. You have to find the right combination of Hollywood liberal guilt, Hollywood elitist condescension, and Hollywood self-preening and then make it work in your movie’s favor. If all of those are pointing in your direction, you win. (Sean Penn just had to win last night, or else who else could lecture all of us for voting against Prop. 8 last year? If Frost/Nixon had been nominated last year, it would have been a lock for many Oscars, perfect opportunity for Hollywood to tell us all how to vote in the upcoming general, but now that the great Hope and Changer has been elected in, its time is past.)

Final semantic consideration: who knew that “the rich getting richer” effect had such a good name and what’s more that the Matthew in question is the Matthew of the Bible specifically endorsing such unequal outcomes? This raises a theological question:

And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.  — Matthew 19:24

For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath. — Matthew 25:29

One surmises that the kingdom of God is not all that it is cracked up to be, or that between 19 and 25, Matthew went from being a commie to an unrepentant capitalist. Perhaps Ayn Rand had made an appearance as understudy prophet. One imagines Matthew 31 being all about the subprime debacle that followed.

And the Oscar For the Most Ungracious Acceptance Goes To

Danny Boyle, for not mentioning any of his cast members who surely helped him direct the movie and get it done (not least his Co-Director)?