Finishing a John Irving novel, as I recently did with his newest opus, Until I Find You, is both a sad and joyous time. Sad, because the odds are good that you won't be reading another new Irving novel for a good four, five years; and joyous, because to read John Irving is to find your faith in literature restored and your love for humanity renewed.
Those are strong words, and I'm all too aware that Irving's critics can't fucking stand the guy. "Enough with the 'modern Dickens' garbage," they say. "Enough with the sentimentality," they spout.
To which I say: Guilty, and guilty. He really is our Dickens, and he really is sentimental (and hey, when did such a humane word as 'sentimental' become a profanity? What's happened to us?).
His plots are improbable, his characters outlandish, his coincidences ripe and frequent. (Just like Dickens.) We grow to love the characters almost as much as much as we love our friends and family, almost as much as the characters grow to love each other. (Hence the sentimentality.)
But as with all great writers, there's 'something else' going on with Irving. He understoods, at a deep, profound level, the unfairness of the world. When I was younger, his books seemed filled with odd, brutal, disarming accidents and tragedies. As I aged, as I experienced more of the world, I suddenly realized that Irving's novels aren't odd, brutal or disarming enough. Living in the Philippines and Cambodia is enough to make you realize that the world is a savage place. (And getting whacked in the stomach by a two-by-four by a homeless Korean in Japan is enough to confirm that absurdity and violence go hand-in-hand.) Those who diss Irving for how ludicrous his stories are don't live in the same world I do. Those who bemoan his sentimentality are denying the common roots of love and loneliness that link us all.
Irving once said: "When I say I'm a storyteller, I'm not being modest." No kidding. I'll go out on a limb and say something that I was never quite sure of before, but am confident of now: that he's the greatest storyteller of the last fifty years. Not the most innovative, or modern, or erudite, or elegant, or stylish, or hip, or clever -- just the best.
Period.
Usually, when I finish a book, I'm on to the next one, usually by the next day, often within the same hour. When I finish reading a John Irving book, I want to start again. Immediately. Like, now.
I'm telling you: He's that good. There's no one better. I don't know how else to say it.
So, enough. Go read The World According to Garp and The Hotel New Hampshire and The Cider House Rules and A Prayer for Owen Meany and A Son Of The Circus and A Widow For One Year and, now, Until I Find You.
Allow yourself into in his world. Fall in love with his characters (allow yourself that privilege; it's okay to love fictional characters, words on a page, punctuation in a chapter -- I swear; noone will know.)
All hail the king!
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Absolutely loving a movie that the majority of people don't even freakin' like is a lonely feeling. You start to wonder: Is my taste in movies skewed? Are they all right and am I wrong? Are they sane, and am I a looney? Was I dropped on my head as a child? (If so, fuck would that explain a lot of things. But I suppose that's another post...)
However, any true film fan soon gets over such a sensation, and sticks to their guns. I still think Rocky IV and Superman IV:The Quest for Peace have been unduly, nay, tragically maligned over the years. I'm now convinced that Heaven and Earth is Oliver Stone's best film. (Though probably tied with J.F.K.) The three new Star Wars movies, the last of which was released last summer, are more complex, metaphorical, engagingly political and discretely profound than the incarnations that possessed me as a kid. (As entertaining? Well...) No Way Out, starring Kevin Costner, is probably the best suspense film ever made, with the saddest, most subversive 'trick' ending in all of cinema.
Anyone with me here? Anyone? No? That's alright. We like what we like, right?
And yet, I'm heartened by the fact that at least somebody else in the universe considers Lady In The Water as a cinematic event worth celebrating.
I usually read somewhat intellectual magazines like The Economist to try and figure out and understand the world around me, but the July 22-28th, 2006 edition features a review of M.Night Shyamalan's latest film that ends with the statement: "The result is a messy masterpiece, a portrait of turbulent transition, that constantly risks falling on its face but almost never does."
A "messy masterpiece", this anonymous reviewer writes (all writing in The Economist is anonymous, come to think of it); last week I posted a post titled "Lady In The Water: Something Close To Brilliant". And then read online in the next few days a million reviews stating that the flick was, in fact, the worst piece of garbage since, well, The Garbage Pail Kids. (Which actually wasn't half bad...)
But now. Ah. I'm vindicated. I called it as 'something close to brilliant'; The Economist calls it ' a messy masterpiece.' We're spiritual brothers, me and that magazine. A million and one people think the flick blows, but I, at least, I am not alone. Somebody else saw that Shyamalan was trying to do something new and different and special; somebody else recognized that it "risk[ed] falling on its face", and how rare, if not invisible, such a trait is in today's artists.
Me and my homie at The Economist can both spot genius when we see it.
I wonder what he thinks about The Karate Kid III...
Saturday, July 29, 2006
Thursday, July 27, 2006
SAD LOOKING MOON -- NOT 4 HIRE
Taxis have names here. So do cars, somtimes. As do jeepneys. And so do trucks, their monikers spread across the side doors or their back grilles. I saw one the other day, glossy in green and white: SAD LOOKING MOON. On the side of the vehicle, another familiar sign: NOT 4 RENT.
I suddenly, inexplicably felt sadness, almost pity, for the owner. For who would name their truck such a thing? Was the owner the 'sad looking moon'? Was it his own nickname, or that given to him by his wife, or mother, or son? Was his truck the moon itself? His and his alone, not available for another's use? Did he want to horde his own unhappiness? Did he sometimes, at night, look up at the moon, and see nothing but doom and gloom?
I imagine him leaning against his truck in his driveway, late at night, after the wife and kids have hit the hay. He is smoking a cigarette, his third after dinner. There are few stars out, but only one moon. He stares at the moon for a long time, and thinks about his past, and his kids, and where he is, and where he will not be going. He takes another puff on his cigarette, another stare at the moon, then heads on back inside, throwing the butt over his shoulder. The moon is bright, but he does not give it another glance.
I suddenly, inexplicably felt sadness, almost pity, for the owner. For who would name their truck such a thing? Was the owner the 'sad looking moon'? Was it his own nickname, or that given to him by his wife, or mother, or son? Was his truck the moon itself? His and his alone, not available for another's use? Did he want to horde his own unhappiness? Did he sometimes, at night, look up at the moon, and see nothing but doom and gloom?
I imagine him leaning against his truck in his driveway, late at night, after the wife and kids have hit the hay. He is smoking a cigarette, his third after dinner. There are few stars out, but only one moon. He stares at the moon for a long time, and thinks about his past, and his kids, and where he is, and where he will not be going. He takes another puff on his cigarette, another stare at the moon, then heads on back inside, throwing the butt over his shoulder. The moon is bright, but he does not give it another glance.
Saturday, July 22, 2006
LADY IN THE WATER: SOMETHING CLOSE TO BRILLIANT
Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami recently remarked in an interview that the line between reality and fantasy is much more permeable in Japan than in the west, with Japanese readers and viewers being more willing, more able, to accept and integrate the marvellous and fantastic into their lives and their stories. He invoked the notion of the boatman on the River Styx herding passengers onto his boat for their journey to the other, fantastical side; for the Japanese, he implies, it's not that long a voyage, while for Westerners it might be a more bumpy ride until they finally reach shore. (And a lengthier one, too.)
I suspect that Lady In The Water will go over much, much better in Japan than in Canada or America. In fact, I suspect that many in the west will actively dislike, if not hate, Lady In The Water. It's strange, and surreal, and more than a little clumsy, truth be told, and yet it's also something close to brilliant, I think.
There's always a point in M.Night Shyamalan's films where the mystical and the mundane become inextricably intertwined. The hardest part in any story of the supernatural is the point at which the characters suddenly, finally, believe in what's happening; in Shyamalan's films, that moment is always hard to pinpoint. It just happens. The characters accept; the audience accepts.
What are we to make of a film in which a woman is found in a pool in a Philadelphia housing complex, eventually requiring the help of all of its inhabitants to find her way back home?
I'm not sure, to be honest. But there's a tone and a texture to this film, to its understanding of myth, to its acknowledgement of the glorious realities that underlay our own mundane lives, that made me want to cheer and weep at the same time. You are worthy, the film is saying. You, the one in apartment 13-B, can save yourself and others. Things might not work out in the end, but your influence will be felt, and remembered, by others, by strangers, long after you're dead.
There are a number of technical reasons for why I like Shymalan's films: his preference for long takes; for creating a filmic space that has character and style without being obtrusive; his use of sound to enhance and subtract meaning. This time he also has the brilliant cinematographer Christopher Doyle, an Aussie expat who usually lenses Chinese flicks, to augment the colours and tones with his trademark impeccable -- and, here, restrained -- taste.
But there's something else in all of Shymalan's stories, a sense of wonder, a sense of grace that underlines and highlights his plotting. He is a populist, make no mistake; we are not talking about a Godard or a Truffaut or a Bertolucci. He wants to be liked, perhaps a little too much. But he is also willing to go out on a limb, and risk failure, even great failure, to achieve essential human truths.
Oh, and those moments. They're there, in all his films. Those moments where the music swells, slightly, and things start to come together, and the characters' humanity is revealed, and we are made to feel, only briefly, that the world has a mystical and magical underpinning that is here, goddamnit, if only we'd look hard enough and long enough. If only we'd put aside our adult ingenuities and oh-so-sarcastic point of views.
Look, I can see the criticism of this film coming a mile away. (I mean, the fact that the least likeable character in the entire piece is a film critic who gets his comeuppance should hint that the critical response to this film is going to be, well, blunt. Film critics hate to be made fun of.) There is some racial stereotyping that could be deemed offensive, but which I find, ultimately, transforming, part of a larger statement on the ways that we communicate, the enclaves that we build that keep us together and drive us apart. All the characters start out one-dimensionally, but are slowly, gradually revealed to be deeper.
I don't think westerners are ready to accept a film that blends fantasy and reality so comfortably together. We're too jaded and cynical. Give us Superman, yes, but a merwoman in a pool? Come on. And this is supposed to move me? Please.
Well, it did. It moved me. All of Shyamalan's films have, and I've always been surprised by that fact. It's rare that a film or book actually does move me, but this one did. In some ways, it's a strange and odd and ragged jewel of a film, like none I've ever seen. It is a kind of fairy tale, and perhaps we're told for that sort of thing.
The director thinks so, too. At the beginning of the film is a short explanation (voiced by the typically solemn unseen narrator) that explains who these creatures are, and their somewhat tangled relation to the human race. I wasn't sure that this was necessary; too much exposition, I thought, and at the beginning of the film, no less.
Now, I'm not so sure. Maybe us westerners do need to be reminded of magic tales and ancient rites. I think Shyamalan was warning the audience: This a film about myth, and I'm telling you that right from the get-go, so that you're ready and prepared and willing to go where I'm taking you.
This is one of those films that I think is 'advanced', to steal Esquire writer Chuck Klosterman's term. Everyone will hate it, but it's ahead of its time. Of this I am sure. (Like Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, and Stone's Alexander.) I hope people give it a chance, and not scoff and roll their eyes and laugh out loud as the film goes along. (Boy, can I see that happening.) I hope people think about this film, too, because I think it says a lot about who we are as people, and what we need from each other. There's a line in the film that you might miss if you're not listening carefully, something about how people are drawn to a place almost against their will, that they congregate without quite knowing why. The characters in this film do just that: lead simple lives, not realizing that they, too, have the potential, together, to allow the mythic and the extraordinary aspects of life to transform them -- and, in turn, allow their own humanity to transform others.
God, I hope that's true. Because if it's not, then fairy tales truly are just a myth.
I suspect that Lady In The Water will go over much, much better in Japan than in Canada or America. In fact, I suspect that many in the west will actively dislike, if not hate, Lady In The Water. It's strange, and surreal, and more than a little clumsy, truth be told, and yet it's also something close to brilliant, I think.
There's always a point in M.Night Shyamalan's films where the mystical and the mundane become inextricably intertwined. The hardest part in any story of the supernatural is the point at which the characters suddenly, finally, believe in what's happening; in Shyamalan's films, that moment is always hard to pinpoint. It just happens. The characters accept; the audience accepts.
What are we to make of a film in which a woman is found in a pool in a Philadelphia housing complex, eventually requiring the help of all of its inhabitants to find her way back home?
I'm not sure, to be honest. But there's a tone and a texture to this film, to its understanding of myth, to its acknowledgement of the glorious realities that underlay our own mundane lives, that made me want to cheer and weep at the same time. You are worthy, the film is saying. You, the one in apartment 13-B, can save yourself and others. Things might not work out in the end, but your influence will be felt, and remembered, by others, by strangers, long after you're dead.
There are a number of technical reasons for why I like Shymalan's films: his preference for long takes; for creating a filmic space that has character and style without being obtrusive; his use of sound to enhance and subtract meaning. This time he also has the brilliant cinematographer Christopher Doyle, an Aussie expat who usually lenses Chinese flicks, to augment the colours and tones with his trademark impeccable -- and, here, restrained -- taste.
But there's something else in all of Shymalan's stories, a sense of wonder, a sense of grace that underlines and highlights his plotting. He is a populist, make no mistake; we are not talking about a Godard or a Truffaut or a Bertolucci. He wants to be liked, perhaps a little too much. But he is also willing to go out on a limb, and risk failure, even great failure, to achieve essential human truths.
Oh, and those moments. They're there, in all his films. Those moments where the music swells, slightly, and things start to come together, and the characters' humanity is revealed, and we are made to feel, only briefly, that the world has a mystical and magical underpinning that is here, goddamnit, if only we'd look hard enough and long enough. If only we'd put aside our adult ingenuities and oh-so-sarcastic point of views.
Look, I can see the criticism of this film coming a mile away. (I mean, the fact that the least likeable character in the entire piece is a film critic who gets his comeuppance should hint that the critical response to this film is going to be, well, blunt. Film critics hate to be made fun of.) There is some racial stereotyping that could be deemed offensive, but which I find, ultimately, transforming, part of a larger statement on the ways that we communicate, the enclaves that we build that keep us together and drive us apart. All the characters start out one-dimensionally, but are slowly, gradually revealed to be deeper.
I don't think westerners are ready to accept a film that blends fantasy and reality so comfortably together. We're too jaded and cynical. Give us Superman, yes, but a merwoman in a pool? Come on. And this is supposed to move me? Please.
Well, it did. It moved me. All of Shyamalan's films have, and I've always been surprised by that fact. It's rare that a film or book actually does move me, but this one did. In some ways, it's a strange and odd and ragged jewel of a film, like none I've ever seen. It is a kind of fairy tale, and perhaps we're told for that sort of thing.
The director thinks so, too. At the beginning of the film is a short explanation (voiced by the typically solemn unseen narrator) that explains who these creatures are, and their somewhat tangled relation to the human race. I wasn't sure that this was necessary; too much exposition, I thought, and at the beginning of the film, no less.
Now, I'm not so sure. Maybe us westerners do need to be reminded of magic tales and ancient rites. I think Shyamalan was warning the audience: This a film about myth, and I'm telling you that right from the get-go, so that you're ready and prepared and willing to go where I'm taking you.
This is one of those films that I think is 'advanced', to steal Esquire writer Chuck Klosterman's term. Everyone will hate it, but it's ahead of its time. Of this I am sure. (Like Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, and Stone's Alexander.) I hope people give it a chance, and not scoff and roll their eyes and laugh out loud as the film goes along. (Boy, can I see that happening.) I hope people think about this film, too, because I think it says a lot about who we are as people, and what we need from each other. There's a line in the film that you might miss if you're not listening carefully, something about how people are drawn to a place almost against their will, that they congregate without quite knowing why. The characters in this film do just that: lead simple lives, not realizing that they, too, have the potential, together, to allow the mythic and the extraordinary aspects of life to transform them -- and, in turn, allow their own humanity to transform others.
God, I hope that's true. Because if it's not, then fairy tales truly are just a myth.
Friday, July 21, 2006
HOW DO FISH SLEEP?
How do fish sleep?
This is one of those things that I could google in no time flat, but I'd rather not.
Before Google entered our lives, we would have had to ask our friends, our parents, gone to the library, hunted down an encylopedia. We would have had to earn our answer.
Everything's too easy now. We can find out just about anything we want. (If we're online.) We're not forced to ponder, think, converse with others.
I mean, fish don't have eyelids, right? So how come the water's not always getting in their eyes? And when they sleep, do they still swim around? Are they ever, in their entire lives, still?
All questions I don't know the answers to.
I want to know, yes, but I'd rather look at things from the perspective of the fish in the fishtank, being fed by its master. It maintains the essential mystery of life. For the fish sees, dimly, through foggy glass, a creature that looks in on him. Sometimes the fish opens his mouth, and the creature will drop food on top of the water. The fish is grateful. The fish eats the food. But the fish, at some primal level, must wonder where that food came from. How does it get there? Why does the creature glimpsed through the glass drop it at random intervals? Where does the food-dropping-creature go when it leaves?
I want to be like that fish. Full of questions, denied the answers. Forced to swim, and feed, and wonder what it's all about.
This is one of those things that I could google in no time flat, but I'd rather not.
Before Google entered our lives, we would have had to ask our friends, our parents, gone to the library, hunted down an encylopedia. We would have had to earn our answer.
Everything's too easy now. We can find out just about anything we want. (If we're online.) We're not forced to ponder, think, converse with others.
I mean, fish don't have eyelids, right? So how come the water's not always getting in their eyes? And when they sleep, do they still swim around? Are they ever, in their entire lives, still?
All questions I don't know the answers to.
I want to know, yes, but I'd rather look at things from the perspective of the fish in the fishtank, being fed by its master. It maintains the essential mystery of life. For the fish sees, dimly, through foggy glass, a creature that looks in on him. Sometimes the fish opens his mouth, and the creature will drop food on top of the water. The fish is grateful. The fish eats the food. But the fish, at some primal level, must wonder where that food came from. How does it get there? Why does the creature glimpsed through the glass drop it at random intervals? Where does the food-dropping-creature go when it leaves?
I want to be like that fish. Full of questions, denied the answers. Forced to swim, and feed, and wonder what it's all about.
THOMAS WHO?
Thomas Pynchon has a new book coming out soon. I've read a few books by Pynchon, but I've really been able to 'get' him; I keep thinking that he's one of those writers that's waiting for me, sometime down the line, when I'm smarter, more sophisticated, more willing to go where his writing leads.
But I like the fact that nobody knows jackshit about him. He's been one of the leading lights of American literature over the past forty years or so, but doesn't give interviews. Doesn't have his picture taken. Doesn't create a media-driven image of himself and then complain, constantly, when the media distorts who he 'really' is.
Apparently he's voiced a version of himself on The Simpsons a few times recently, complete with a paper bag over his face to hide his identity. That's funny. It shows he's aware of his status as an isolated introvert, but can still poke fun at it. (And still remain an isolated introvert.)
He's a writer who truly, completely allows his words speak for themselves.
In this confessional day and age, that's almost a revolutionary idea: to let a book be a book, and nothing but. Nothing more.
But I like the fact that nobody knows jackshit about him. He's been one of the leading lights of American literature over the past forty years or so, but doesn't give interviews. Doesn't have his picture taken. Doesn't create a media-driven image of himself and then complain, constantly, when the media distorts who he 'really' is.
Apparently he's voiced a version of himself on The Simpsons a few times recently, complete with a paper bag over his face to hide his identity. That's funny. It shows he's aware of his status as an isolated introvert, but can still poke fun at it. (And still remain an isolated introvert.)
He's a writer who truly, completely allows his words speak for themselves.
In this confessional day and age, that's almost a revolutionary idea: to let a book be a book, and nothing but. Nothing more.
RANDOMNESS
I'm only a hundred pages into the nine-hundred page plus paperback version of John Irving's latest epic, Until I Find You, and I already don't want it to end. Ever. It's not necessarily the story itself, or the language, or the ease with which he tells a story, old-fashioned but in a modern guise; it's something else.
John Irving has figured out what he believes the novel should do, can do, and will do. He has perfected the means by which the novel can achieve its maximum effect.
Others will disagree with his style, his approach, his characters, his plots -- that's fine. That's what writers do: write differently. But I can't think of another writer who has so carefully, so deliberately, come to a place in his or her career where they have understood, at a fundamental, almost archetypal leve, what their art can and can't do.
One usually has to wait four or five years for another Irving novel to hit the stands, so I'm trying to savor this one. Almost bask in it.
But it's hard. The story is so strange and bizarre and human and compelling; the characters, already, this early on, can break your heart.
If you drink the magic Kool-Aid that Irving offers, like I do, then you can only open the book, begin Chapter One, and surrender.
************************************************************************************
The advantage of seeing a movie like Pirates Of The Caribbean II with only having seen snippets and snatches of the orginal version is that you're not constantly comparing it to the original film. You understand most of what's going on, but not all; you can figure out the majority of the action, but never completely. Characters come and go and you wonder who they are, and you're not judging them by their past accomplishments, but on what they're doing here, now, at this moment in time.
Kind of like life, strangely.
************************************************************************************
I still cannot get used to the clouds here in Baguio, way up high. This morning the tip of a mountain bisected one in such a way that the white and foamy mist resembled nothing more than nature's unibrow, spread out across a green and mighty face.
***********************************************************************************
Last week Baguio underwent a 'state of calamity', as the government officially dubbed it. There were monsoon rains for three, four days straight, twenty-four hours a day, complete with howling winds and falling trees. I'd never experienced anything like it -- this constant barrage of sheer, unapologetic wetness. Not even the courtesy of a drizzle to offest the onslaught.
***********************************************************************************
Again and again I'm realizing how most of the world (meaning mostly me) is blissfully unaware of how fucking corrupt most governments in developing countries actually are.
The current Filipino president, Gloria Arroyo, has been caught, on tape, ordering the head of ball0t-counting in the previous election to make sure that she wins by a million votes. Due to the legality of how the tape was acquired, an impeachment seems unlikely. The president infamously apologized on TV for her 'lapse in judgement'.
Countries like Cambodia and the Philippines have governments composed of people who do not give a flying fuck about helping people; they only want to get rich. That may sound naive of me to think otherwise, but, well, I'm a naive guy, I guess. In western countries, if you want to get rich, you go into IT or banking or computers; in poor countries, the only way to make money is to get into government. The result being that the parliaments and congresses are filled with people who will do anything to maintain their status and their money, who have little, if no, qualifications, and who rule by a combination of bribery, fear, and military might.
Look at the leaders of poor countries and they are almost all, invariably, fat. There's a reason for this: To be overweight implies to the slender, starving masses that you have the money and the influence necessary to buy food. You can afford to be big; you can afford to indulge while others starve. You flaunt your wealth and what it can buy.
It's what continues to make me so frustrated over events like last summer's Live 8 concert. Well-intentioned, certainly, but so many countries' governments are so corrupt to their cores that you cannot make poverty go away by cancelling debts. It won't do shit. The governments' will continue to siphon off whatever aid money is available, and the good people who work within the systems, trying to make change, trying to live honest lives, will continue to fight an uphill battle against the forces of inept and almost evil bureaucracy that are aligned against them. But the fight must go on. To concede otherwise is to let the bastards win.
***********************************************************************************
Sometimes I think that the world is a dream dreamt by a sad and lonely man. I am a character in his dream, as are you, as is your mother, and your fifth-grade teacher. We are all merely characters' in one another's dreams, which is why we sometimes recognize strangers in the street. Our paths have drifted into each other before, and will again, in the future. Unless the old man wakes up and decides to have his cereal. Then we will dissipate, like morning dew after the sun completes its inevitable rise.
John Irving has figured out what he believes the novel should do, can do, and will do. He has perfected the means by which the novel can achieve its maximum effect.
Others will disagree with his style, his approach, his characters, his plots -- that's fine. That's what writers do: write differently. But I can't think of another writer who has so carefully, so deliberately, come to a place in his or her career where they have understood, at a fundamental, almost archetypal leve, what their art can and can't do.
One usually has to wait four or five years for another Irving novel to hit the stands, so I'm trying to savor this one. Almost bask in it.
But it's hard. The story is so strange and bizarre and human and compelling; the characters, already, this early on, can break your heart.
If you drink the magic Kool-Aid that Irving offers, like I do, then you can only open the book, begin Chapter One, and surrender.
************************************************************************************
The advantage of seeing a movie like Pirates Of The Caribbean II with only having seen snippets and snatches of the orginal version is that you're not constantly comparing it to the original film. You understand most of what's going on, but not all; you can figure out the majority of the action, but never completely. Characters come and go and you wonder who they are, and you're not judging them by their past accomplishments, but on what they're doing here, now, at this moment in time.
Kind of like life, strangely.
************************************************************************************
I still cannot get used to the clouds here in Baguio, way up high. This morning the tip of a mountain bisected one in such a way that the white and foamy mist resembled nothing more than nature's unibrow, spread out across a green and mighty face.
***********************************************************************************
Last week Baguio underwent a 'state of calamity', as the government officially dubbed it. There were monsoon rains for three, four days straight, twenty-four hours a day, complete with howling winds and falling trees. I'd never experienced anything like it -- this constant barrage of sheer, unapologetic wetness. Not even the courtesy of a drizzle to offest the onslaught.
***********************************************************************************
Again and again I'm realizing how most of the world (meaning mostly me) is blissfully unaware of how fucking corrupt most governments in developing countries actually are.
The current Filipino president, Gloria Arroyo, has been caught, on tape, ordering the head of ball0t-counting in the previous election to make sure that she wins by a million votes. Due to the legality of how the tape was acquired, an impeachment seems unlikely. The president infamously apologized on TV for her 'lapse in judgement'.
Countries like Cambodia and the Philippines have governments composed of people who do not give a flying fuck about helping people; they only want to get rich. That may sound naive of me to think otherwise, but, well, I'm a naive guy, I guess. In western countries, if you want to get rich, you go into IT or banking or computers; in poor countries, the only way to make money is to get into government. The result being that the parliaments and congresses are filled with people who will do anything to maintain their status and their money, who have little, if no, qualifications, and who rule by a combination of bribery, fear, and military might.
Look at the leaders of poor countries and they are almost all, invariably, fat. There's a reason for this: To be overweight implies to the slender, starving masses that you have the money and the influence necessary to buy food. You can afford to be big; you can afford to indulge while others starve. You flaunt your wealth and what it can buy.
It's what continues to make me so frustrated over events like last summer's Live 8 concert. Well-intentioned, certainly, but so many countries' governments are so corrupt to their cores that you cannot make poverty go away by cancelling debts. It won't do shit. The governments' will continue to siphon off whatever aid money is available, and the good people who work within the systems, trying to make change, trying to live honest lives, will continue to fight an uphill battle against the forces of inept and almost evil bureaucracy that are aligned against them. But the fight must go on. To concede otherwise is to let the bastards win.
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Sometimes I think that the world is a dream dreamt by a sad and lonely man. I am a character in his dream, as are you, as is your mother, and your fifth-grade teacher. We are all merely characters' in one another's dreams, which is why we sometimes recognize strangers in the street. Our paths have drifted into each other before, and will again, in the future. Unless the old man wakes up and decides to have his cereal. Then we will dissipate, like morning dew after the sun completes its inevitable rise.
Friday, July 07, 2006
MEGUMI
Megumi is Japanese, young, not more than ten. She has finished school. She has finished her badminton practice. She is heading home. She waves good-bye to her friends, and then turns towards the short path that leads towards her family's house, not more than five or ten minutes away on foot.
But she never gets there.
Instead, she is kidnapped by North Korean spies, who bring her to their homeland, where she lives, grows up, and eventually marries a South Korean man who had also been kidnapped. They have a daughter, who is now almost a teen. The North Korean government says that Megumi is now dead; her husband, a man of fifty (or near enough), already remarried, recently was reunited with his South Korean mother.
An astounding story, one that has hardly been reported in the western media, but it's stories like this one, profoundly human stories, that make the situation with North Korea so real and heartbreaking and vital. Stories that make fiction seem not only improbable, but almost unnecessary.
Dozens, if not hundreds of people were kidnapped byNorth Korea: Japanese, South Koreans, Thais, you name it. A few years back a few of those Japanese were sent back home -- after almost thirty years. The government states that Megumi is now dead, but how are we to know? Who can trust anything that they say?
I've seen Megumi's parents in person, at a symposium on North Korea that was held in downtown Tokyo over three years ago, just before I left Japan for Cambodia. There were American academics, Japanese scholars, and the moderator, Shinzo Abe, is currently in the running to replace Junichiro Koizumi when he steps down as the Japanese prime minister later this year. It was a grave discussion, a serious discussion, and Megumi's parents, elderly now, almost frail, watched in the audience, accepted condolences, kept a tight, rigid smile on their faces. The kind that the Japanese have patented.
A whole country, cut-off and isolated. What is it: forty, fifty million people? Absolutely brainwashed. Severed from the modern world. Noone gets in, and noone gets out. (Unless you try and escape, which thousands have done, but if you're cut, the chances are good that you will be killed or else imprisoned for life for disobeying the Dear Leader's insane dictates.)
Ever since that symposium, and the endless media coverage in Japan that heralded the return of the Japanese abductees from North Korea, I've been fascinated by that 'hermit kingdom', as it's affectionately dubbed. I want to go there. As a Canadian, I can go there. (Sorry -- no Americans allowed. See www.koryogroup.com for more info.) One week tours are available; one of my students in Japan, an elderly lady who'd also bopped around Iran, went there. She had to empty her entire suitcase at the airport, piece by piece, and while on a tour of Kim Jong Ill's endless statues a tour guide, middle aged, cautiously asked her, in soft tones, if she would be able to send him a copy of a record recorded by a popular Japanese singing sensation. Popular, that is, in the 1950's.
The man who brought me to Japan, American Bernie Krisher, based in Tokyo, publisher of The Cambodia Daily, has been to North Korea on more than one occasion, helping deliver rice. He even had a heart attack there, for God's sake, and spent a week in a Pyongyang hosptial, with IV's made from empty beer bottles. His verdict: "The North Korean people know more than we think they do. They're very smart." Or words to that effect.
One of my students in Cambodia was a North Korean whose father worked for the North Korean embassy (which was directly across the street from my apartment on Sihanouk), and operated the North Korean restaurant in town, complete with zombie-like, grinning, robotic waitresses who serve you food and then perform traditional North Korean music and dance. I would see my student reading biographies of Kim Sung Ill, and on more than one occasion he let me know that his homeland isn't as bad as everyone says it as, and that the people who leave, the people who try to escape, are all criminals. One of his reports confided that, when he was a child, his mother used to tell him that those who did not love their homeland were little more than sperm in the street. Ah, childhood.
Now that North Korea has launched a series of tests, who knows what they're up to? I suspect they don't know, either; they're waiting to see what the rest of the world does, waiting to see how they react. North Korea is like a man in a room with a loaded gun, who may or may not be crazy. How do you negotiate with someone like that, without getting him, you and everybody else killed, or at least wounded?
I don't know.
But it's Megumi I keep thinking about. A little kid with a badminton racquet. Who would be kidnapped to North Korea, undoubtedly brainwashed. Who would give birth to daughter, whose DNA has been proven to be that of Megumi's. Who who will be photographed, smiling, seemingly happy, at the age of thirty, perhaps thirty-five.
What happened to her in the intervening years? Was Japan a distant, dream-like mirage? What kind of world do we live in, where people can be snatched up out of their lives and into ulterior dimensions? The heartbreak of the story; the absurdity of it; the little girl that was born because of it. She wouldn't exist if her mother had not been kidnapped.
All of it, I think about.
The politicians and the pundits argue about first-strikes and last-strikes, and chemical weapons and nuclear bombs, but I often find myself thinking about Megumi, and the North Koreans, held against their will, collectively, that she must have met there, and grown up with, and shared laughs with.
At the base of every political dilemma are the people. The ones who laugh and smoke and drink and smile and bleed. The ones who simply want to live their lives, raise their children, drink some beer and watch the sun slowly set. The ones who flick off the light and wonder what tomorrow will bring. Sunshine or rain or something in between.
But she never gets there.
Instead, she is kidnapped by North Korean spies, who bring her to their homeland, where she lives, grows up, and eventually marries a South Korean man who had also been kidnapped. They have a daughter, who is now almost a teen. The North Korean government says that Megumi is now dead; her husband, a man of fifty (or near enough), already remarried, recently was reunited with his South Korean mother.
An astounding story, one that has hardly been reported in the western media, but it's stories like this one, profoundly human stories, that make the situation with North Korea so real and heartbreaking and vital. Stories that make fiction seem not only improbable, but almost unnecessary.
Dozens, if not hundreds of people were kidnapped byNorth Korea: Japanese, South Koreans, Thais, you name it. A few years back a few of those Japanese were sent back home -- after almost thirty years. The government states that Megumi is now dead, but how are we to know? Who can trust anything that they say?
I've seen Megumi's parents in person, at a symposium on North Korea that was held in downtown Tokyo over three years ago, just before I left Japan for Cambodia. There were American academics, Japanese scholars, and the moderator, Shinzo Abe, is currently in the running to replace Junichiro Koizumi when he steps down as the Japanese prime minister later this year. It was a grave discussion, a serious discussion, and Megumi's parents, elderly now, almost frail, watched in the audience, accepted condolences, kept a tight, rigid smile on their faces. The kind that the Japanese have patented.
A whole country, cut-off and isolated. What is it: forty, fifty million people? Absolutely brainwashed. Severed from the modern world. Noone gets in, and noone gets out. (Unless you try and escape, which thousands have done, but if you're cut, the chances are good that you will be killed or else imprisoned for life for disobeying the Dear Leader's insane dictates.)
Ever since that symposium, and the endless media coverage in Japan that heralded the return of the Japanese abductees from North Korea, I've been fascinated by that 'hermit kingdom', as it's affectionately dubbed. I want to go there. As a Canadian, I can go there. (Sorry -- no Americans allowed. See www.koryogroup.com for more info.) One week tours are available; one of my students in Japan, an elderly lady who'd also bopped around Iran, went there. She had to empty her entire suitcase at the airport, piece by piece, and while on a tour of Kim Jong Ill's endless statues a tour guide, middle aged, cautiously asked her, in soft tones, if she would be able to send him a copy of a record recorded by a popular Japanese singing sensation. Popular, that is, in the 1950's.
The man who brought me to Japan, American Bernie Krisher, based in Tokyo, publisher of The Cambodia Daily, has been to North Korea on more than one occasion, helping deliver rice. He even had a heart attack there, for God's sake, and spent a week in a Pyongyang hosptial, with IV's made from empty beer bottles. His verdict: "The North Korean people know more than we think they do. They're very smart." Or words to that effect.
One of my students in Cambodia was a North Korean whose father worked for the North Korean embassy (which was directly across the street from my apartment on Sihanouk), and operated the North Korean restaurant in town, complete with zombie-like, grinning, robotic waitresses who serve you food and then perform traditional North Korean music and dance. I would see my student reading biographies of Kim Sung Ill, and on more than one occasion he let me know that his homeland isn't as bad as everyone says it as, and that the people who leave, the people who try to escape, are all criminals. One of his reports confided that, when he was a child, his mother used to tell him that those who did not love their homeland were little more than sperm in the street. Ah, childhood.
Now that North Korea has launched a series of tests, who knows what they're up to? I suspect they don't know, either; they're waiting to see what the rest of the world does, waiting to see how they react. North Korea is like a man in a room with a loaded gun, who may or may not be crazy. How do you negotiate with someone like that, without getting him, you and everybody else killed, or at least wounded?
I don't know.
But it's Megumi I keep thinking about. A little kid with a badminton racquet. Who would be kidnapped to North Korea, undoubtedly brainwashed. Who would give birth to daughter, whose DNA has been proven to be that of Megumi's. Who who will be photographed, smiling, seemingly happy, at the age of thirty, perhaps thirty-five.
What happened to her in the intervening years? Was Japan a distant, dream-like mirage? What kind of world do we live in, where people can be snatched up out of their lives and into ulterior dimensions? The heartbreak of the story; the absurdity of it; the little girl that was born because of it. She wouldn't exist if her mother had not been kidnapped.
All of it, I think about.
The politicians and the pundits argue about first-strikes and last-strikes, and chemical weapons and nuclear bombs, but I often find myself thinking about Megumi, and the North Koreans, held against their will, collectively, that she must have met there, and grown up with, and shared laughs with.
At the base of every political dilemma are the people. The ones who laugh and smoke and drink and smile and bleed. The ones who simply want to live their lives, raise their children, drink some beer and watch the sun slowly set. The ones who flick off the light and wonder what tomorrow will bring. Sunshine or rain or something in between.
Wednesday, July 05, 2006
THE THINGS I THINK ABOUT
For some reason or another I found myself in class today explaining what a minotaur was, and I suddenly wondered what I would do if the door opened and a live, breathing, in-the-flesh version of that mythical beast came on in and sat on down. Would I welcome it? Would I ask it to wipe its hooves? Would I tell it to put on a shirt? Would I make it aware of the fact that, technically, logically, historically it did not, in fact, exist? I'm not saying such a thing was likely to happen, no, but I had to wonder: Would I do the right thing, should the impossible become reality?
I have thoughts like these all the time. It's what makes me glad that I'm not a lawyer, or a banker, or a statistician. I don't think strange and abstract thoughts like these are allowed in jobs like those. (They might be, I don't know, but I wouldn't think so.) I stand in front of the kids and teach my lessons and wonder what would happen if George W. Bush, like Kafka's tormented hero, were suddenly to transform, not into a giant insect, but instead into a rather large rabbit. Still English-speaking, of course; still understandable, despite the new buck teeth. Would we take him seriously, now that he was a rabbit? How would other world leaders shake his hand? Would they be obligated to bring carrots into his chambers? I'm just asking.
In school I used to imagine the door to my Italian Geography teacher's classroom being slammed open by hoods in dark cloaks clutching machine guns, muttering: "Gino -- you're late with the payments." Or there would be a knock on my Math room door, and a little blonde-haired boy, crying, weeping, in fact, would stand there and explain, in halting, gulping breaths, that he was lost, and I, safe and snug in my seat, would sit up slowly, gradually, realizing: That's me -- the past version of myself has become unstuck in time, and come face to face with the classroom containing his elder, teenage version. Or a donut, a big one, a mammoth motherfucker, would come barreling into the classroom, a chocolate glazed, possibly even a honey roasted. It would flat-out flatten two or three students, leaving them with white, sticky powder in lieu of blood. We would talk about it for three, four months after, daily: the day that the donut, the big fucker, the one that, like, almost levitated, entered our classroom. Good times.
Right now I'm wondering what I would do if the ground beneath my feet opened up and dropped me down into the sewers of Baguio. Is there some kind of kind and benevolent clan living beneath the streets? Would they help me find my way back up to the surface? Or would they be jealous of my ability to ascend, the ease with which I could escape their dark and drafty and dungeon? They might want to keep me all for themselves, possibly even dining on my flesh and bones for dinner later in the day, when the sun goes down and the rats come out.
Doesn't everyone think thoughts like these?
I don't know. Sometimes I think they do; sometimes I think it's just me.
Regardless, I'll keep thinking them. They emerge from somewhere within, and I nod and smile and grimace and growl at their appearance, but at least I let them come.
After all, I wouldn't want to live in a world where there wasn't at least the possibility that my Grade 10 Geography teacher could, at any moment, be gunned down by the mafia, in cold blood, outside his own classroom door.
Would you?
I have thoughts like these all the time. It's what makes me glad that I'm not a lawyer, or a banker, or a statistician. I don't think strange and abstract thoughts like these are allowed in jobs like those. (They might be, I don't know, but I wouldn't think so.) I stand in front of the kids and teach my lessons and wonder what would happen if George W. Bush, like Kafka's tormented hero, were suddenly to transform, not into a giant insect, but instead into a rather large rabbit. Still English-speaking, of course; still understandable, despite the new buck teeth. Would we take him seriously, now that he was a rabbit? How would other world leaders shake his hand? Would they be obligated to bring carrots into his chambers? I'm just asking.
In school I used to imagine the door to my Italian Geography teacher's classroom being slammed open by hoods in dark cloaks clutching machine guns, muttering: "Gino -- you're late with the payments." Or there would be a knock on my Math room door, and a little blonde-haired boy, crying, weeping, in fact, would stand there and explain, in halting, gulping breaths, that he was lost, and I, safe and snug in my seat, would sit up slowly, gradually, realizing: That's me -- the past version of myself has become unstuck in time, and come face to face with the classroom containing his elder, teenage version. Or a donut, a big one, a mammoth motherfucker, would come barreling into the classroom, a chocolate glazed, possibly even a honey roasted. It would flat-out flatten two or three students, leaving them with white, sticky powder in lieu of blood. We would talk about it for three, four months after, daily: the day that the donut, the big fucker, the one that, like, almost levitated, entered our classroom. Good times.
Right now I'm wondering what I would do if the ground beneath my feet opened up and dropped me down into the sewers of Baguio. Is there some kind of kind and benevolent clan living beneath the streets? Would they help me find my way back up to the surface? Or would they be jealous of my ability to ascend, the ease with which I could escape their dark and drafty and dungeon? They might want to keep me all for themselves, possibly even dining on my flesh and bones for dinner later in the day, when the sun goes down and the rats come out.
Doesn't everyone think thoughts like these?
I don't know. Sometimes I think they do; sometimes I think it's just me.
Regardless, I'll keep thinking them. They emerge from somewhere within, and I nod and smile and grimace and growl at their appearance, but at least I let them come.
After all, I wouldn't want to live in a world where there wasn't at least the possibility that my Grade 10 Geography teacher could, at any moment, be gunned down by the mafia, in cold blood, outside his own classroom door.
Would you?
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