Aeolus

On the heels of Harvey’s havoc in Houston, Huricane Irma inundates Florida. I’ve been in a few hurricanes over the years and so far have been fortunate. One was Hurricane Floyd in North Carolina in 1999, which I rode out without serious incident in a hotel. Most hurricanes cease to be hurricanes by the time they reach my home state of NJ, but there are exceptions. Hurricane Sandy back in 2012 struck the state with hurricane force winds and torrential rain, though for technical reasons it was at that point categorized as an extratropical cyclone. Regardless of terminology, the storm claimed lives and caused damage that at the time made it second only to Katrina as the financially costliest storm in US history. Again I was lucky: trees came down in my driveway and yard but (barely) missed the house and barn. My home was without power for a couple weeks, but I was inconvenienced rather than harmed. Both Harvey and Irma have been lethal and both are sure to set new records in money damages.

The deadliest hurricane in US history – in fact the deadliest US natural disaster of any kind – is known as the Great Storm of 1900. In those pre-satellite days, the residents of Galveston Texas had a totally inadequate single day’s warning of the oncoming storm. A 15 foot (4.6 meter) storm surge washed over the island; it destroyed buildings and killed 12,000 people. Nowadays warnings come enough in advance to avoid loss of life on that scale, but there are always those who do not or cannot heed evacuation orders.

I do not wish to minimize in any way the current storms, which have consequences both brutal and tragic for those in their paths. For most folks, however, the good news, if one may call it that, is that the chances of meeting one’s end in a natural disaster are remote. Something catches up to all of us eventually, of course; 1 in 120 American residents die in any given year. Naturally the odds vary by age group. Overwhelmingly that final something is likely to be a natural health problem such as heart disease. The second most likely cause is accident (5% of all deaths), and the third is violence at the hands of humans (including ourselves). Insurance actuaries have calculated with their usual precision the odds of being done in by forces of nature, and they are reassuring.

Some examples of annual fatality risk from natural forces:

Lightning                                            1 in 4,326,748

Earthquakes                                        1 in 9,288,426

Cataclysmic storm                               1 in 4,570,498

Floods                                                 1 in 31,993,469

Natural heat                                        1 in 822,689

All natural forces combined                1 in 236,211

None of those numbers constitutes a good enough reason to be complacent about an oncoming hurricane though. If one is headed your way, leave or hunker down according to expert advice at the time. As for other risks both natural and unnatural, quoth Effie in The Hunger Games: “May the odds be ever in your favor.” Come to think of it, the context of that line that might not be very comforting, so let’s just go with “good luck” instead.

Barenaked Ladies - Odds Are

Yellow Leaves and Buses

I saw the strangest thing on my street on Thursday: a teenager. (See last blog about iGens.) What’s more, not 500 feet away was another one. Astonishing.

I live in a cluster of four cul-de-sacs that share a common entrance with the main road. (“Main” may give a misleading impression of the winding 20-foot wide road.) In my cluster there are 36 houses. Most of them contain at least one person of school-age. Based on the passengers of school buses and soccer vans that whiz up and down the street in mornings and afternoons on school days, I’d guesstimate there are no fewer than 30 students that attend elementary, middle, and high school – maybe more than 40. Yet during summer vacation I NEVER see them: not on bikes, not in yards, not walking, not anything. I don’t even hear them even though kids aren’t known for being quiet when swimming and half the houses in the neighborhood have pools.

The local high school

So what accounted for the dual apparition on Thursday? Apparently, a few schools these days start the school year (or at least some school activities) the last week of August. The teens were waiting to be picked up for school. Their noses were in their phones, of course, which might give a hint about how they spent their time when they vanished for the summer.

Contrary to popular legend, summer vacation is a not holdover from agriculturally dominant days when kids needed to work on the farm. Summer is the wrong time of the year for one thing. CUNY historian Kenneth Gold explains that summer vacation is an urban invention. 19^th century educational reformist Amariah Brigham, among others, successfully argued that school in the summer was a factor in “a growing tide of insanity” among urban young people. Well, we can’t have that.

My sister and I, not at school but in 1957

I was one of those weird kids who actually liked school and looked forward to September. It occurs to me, by the way, that today is the anniversary of my very first day of it: September 3, 1957. (We didn’t do pre-school back then.) I remember it. I helped make the day memorable by getting on the wrong bus afterward to come home. Somehow in those pre-cellphone days the bus driver knew where I lived; after making his regular run he drove right up my driveway to drop me off. (Was getting on the wrong bus a common enough occurrence that he had a clipboard with all student addresses? To this day, I don’t know.) It wasn’t my last mistake in school-related matters, and it was far from the worst one. Still, though I mostly enjoyed school, I can’t say I miss it. Most kids don’t like it in the first place, and their position is not unreasonable. By and large school has been made a tedious and joyless place from which any fun that might be had from learning is carefully excised.

This may change as schooling increasingly moves online. This was foreseen long ago by sci-fi author Isaac Asimov. In 1951, almost 30 years before the first home computers, Asimov describes them as home teaching machines for children in his short story The Fun They Had. In his tale, two children in the 22^nd century discover an old paper-and-ink school textbook in the attic. They are astonished to learn that large numbers of children once attended “classes” together led by live human teachers. The story concludes, “Margie was thinking about how the kids must have loved it in the old days. She was thinking about the fun they had.”

The story was and still is widely anthologized in school books, largely because educators almost always miss Asimov’s point. In his eclectic book The Roving Mind, Asimov complains that those school anthologies “together with certain letters I get, often make it clear that the story is interpreted non-ironically as a boost for contemporary education.” His true point is that the future kids on their machines, able to proceed at their own pace and to break for play on their own schedules, are learning better and (though they don’t know it) are having a much better time. As for the social aspects of school (many of them awful, really), they can be had much more cheaply and pleasantly in non-school settings.

For now, however, the appearance of students at school bus stops are akin to the first hint of yellow in the leaves: a prelude to autumn. The two teens will be joined by others Tuesday when most schools open their doors. Tomorrow, after all, is Labor Day, the “unofficial end of summer.”

I don’t care much for unofficial beginnings and endings, however, so in my book it’s still summer until the equinox, which is September 22 this year. I’ll likely have one more BBQ the weekend of the equinox to celebrate it. Until then, despite unseasonably cold weather I’ll stubbornly start each morning with a dive in the unheated pool – even if the water numbs.

The Donnas - I Don't Wanna Go To School

The Generation App

Millennials (those born 1980-1999) have garnered intense attention for more than a decade. Concerned attention always is given to the young, and it is enhanced by the sheer size of this particular generation. Millennials are the first generation to outnumber the Boomers (1946-1964), though admittedly only because one more birth year is included in the definition. The attention has been accompanied by copious commentary, much of it unflattering. But the time has come, as it does to members of every generation, when they have the chance to chut-chut about the next one. Those born between the year 2000 and the present, sometimes called Generation Z and sometimes iGen, are the current crop of “the kids today.” The first wave of them will be graduating high school in 2018. Jean Twenge, PhD, whose book Generation Me defined the Millennials, has turned her eyes to the next group in her new book iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Religious, More Tolerant, Less Happy – and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood.

Before going any further, a few comments about generalizations and generations are in order, for a common complaint about books such as Twenge’s is that there is too much individual variation among people for generalizations to be valid. This is true when we speak of any random individual, but there can be statistical consistencies within a large group that are worthy of note. For any given behavior there is bell curve distribution. For teenagers in the 1950s, for example, there were, as today, bohemians and conformists, drinkers and abstainers, risk takers and safety seekers, smokers and nonsmokers, leftists and rightists, and so on. But it is simply wrong to argue that there is therefore no difference between teens in the 1950s and teens today. Of course there is a difference: the centerlines of the bell curves, where most folks live, are in very different places today than they were then. Take marriage: nearly half of all teenage women in the 1950s got married before they reached 20. Today we are surprised and alarmed when a teenager marries. Twenge does not ignore the tails of the bell curves where the outliers live. While noting the decline in religiosity, for example, she interviews evangelicals as well as secularists; nonetheless the centerline of the bell curve has shifted over the years and that is noteworthy.

What about the boundaries of generations? They are not always clear but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Generations are rather like watersheds, formed by ridges (social moments) that need not be tall. Like water, how and where we flow culturally is shaped by which side of a ridge on which we live. Those near the ridge on either side share a lot of similarities with each other. The last cohort of Boomers born in the ‘60s, for example, have many similarities to GenX (1965-1979), but fundamentally they are still Boomers. They share a cultural milieu with other Boomers right down to the music they play and the clothes they wear. iGen members are no older than 17 at this writing, but they have enough in common with the youngest cohort (1995-1999) of Millennials that Twenge includes many of the latter in her surveys and interviews for greater insight into how the generation is growing up. The answer, by the way, is slowly. One thing iGen members have in common is that they can’t really remember a time before smart phones, and this turns out to be key.

Several of Twenge’s conclusions are in her title. They are not pulled out thin air. Many governmental and non-governmental agencies and entities have been tracking the most arcane details about youths for decades: the American Freshman Survey, the General Social Survey, Monitoring the Future, the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System, etc. These allow us to compare today’s teens not to their elders today, which is often misleading, but to what their elders were like when they were teens. This gives a clearer sense of trends, which Twenge illustrates anecdotally even as she graphs the actual numbers. The smart phone is intimately bound to all the trends. As one 13-year-old told her, “I would rather be on my phone in my room watching Netflix than spending time with my family…I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.” In most Western countries iGen is extremely diverse in background; in the US it is the first generation not to be majority white. There is very little diversity in the trends, however; the same ones hold across ethnic and class lines.

Some of the characteristics of iGen seem an unalloyed good. They are safety-minded to the point of making the notoriously safety-minded Millennials look reckless by comparison. They drink later (if at all), do drugs less, smoke less, have sex later (if at all), and have fewer unwanted pregnancies than any generation since 1940 when reliable numbers first became available. Twenge argues this is not a sign of greater maturity, however, but rather its opposite. Teens are growing up more slowly. By all the numbers 18-year-olds look and act like 14 and 15-year-olds once did. They drive later and often have to be pushed by parents into getting licenses. They are less likely to have summer or after-school jobs than any generation before them. They are in no hurry to grow up and don’t hesitate to say so. “Adult” is used as a distasteful verb to describe activities like paying bills or earning a paycheck; most commonly it is in present participle form, as in “adulting sucks!” This helps explain student demands that colleges (in loco parentis) be emotionally safe spaces instead of spaces where they are treated as adults as Boomers once demanded. In particular, they like to be protected from ideas and opinions different from their own. This is not just a North American phenomenon. When British author Claire Fox was a guest at a UK girls’ high school for a debate, instead of reasoned arguments she unexpectedly encountered tears and the plaint “You can’t say that!”

There are positives to iGen. They are less bigoted than any previous generation and more tolerant of alternate sexualities. But they are aware they are lagging in some ways, which may contribute to depression. “In just the few years between 2012 and 2015, more and more teens said they don’t enjoy life…Across all six items depression has skyrocketed in just a few years, a trend that appears among blacks, whites, and Hispanics, in all regions of the United States, across socioeconomic classes…” Or perhaps it’s that living one’s life mostly on Snapchat and Instagram is not as satisfying as one might hope. The same 13-year-old quoted above mentions that in-person company is not enough to compete with the lure of the phone. “I’m trying to talk to them about something and they don’t actually look At. My. Face.”

The good news is that iGen (resembling GenX in some ways, which for all its youthful pessimism was pretty successful) doesn’t have grandiose expectations about economic prospects, so they are less likely to be disappointed than the preceding generation. They are a more practical bunch than Millennials. They are certainly technologically savvy. If they just put down their phones occasionally they’ll probably be alright – if just a few years late.

A marvelous animation starring the smart phone:

Moby and Void Pacific Choir – Are You Lost In The World Like Me?

Yonder Window

My house, not unlike myself, is getting old. I fight entropy in both cases as best I can but with an eye to the wallet, which is far from thick enough to be safely ignored. I have yet to require any replacement parts for myself unless you count a few dental crowns, but the structures on my property have not fared quite so well. Roofs, retaining walls, doors, furnaces, faucet valves, central air units, and kitchen appliances are among the many things that have decided to retire while I still had want of their services. Not wanting to emulate Grey Gardens, I patch or replace as needed, though no more than needed, which is to say I do no purely decorative remodeling. I do hire professionals, albeit reluctantly, when I don’t trust myself (e.g. for furnace troubles or for plumbing repairs beyond the most basic toilet-mechanism-replacement sort of thing), but if it is just a matter of mixing cement, wielding a shovel, or swinging a hammer I’ll be cheap and do it myself. I will admit to having had second thoughts while recently re-roofing the barn; about halfway through, it became painfully obvious that I wasn’t 18 anymore. However, once the roof was done – well, after the aches and pains faded anyway – I was glad to have saved the $.

The do-it-yourself job this past weekend was a window replacement. For passive solar reasons my roof has two-foot (61 cm) overhangs and no gutters. The rainwater spills directly onto gravel catchment pads which recharge the ground. This works well, but there is one basement window in one back corner of the house that is beneath a roof valley and so gets a lot of backsplash from the gravel during heavy rains. Unsurprisingly, after several decades of this it was the one window that was rotting away. (A few other windows have problems, such as cranky crank mechanisms, but none is rotting.) Replacing it along with the exterior frame and trim took me all day instead of the couple hours it would take a pro, but at least the cost was just in the low three figures instead of four. The original window manufacturer is no longer in business, which is just as well. In place of the original double casement with its finicky Rube Goldberg-esque cranks, I put in a slider: no gears, levers, and rolling wheels to foul.

Windows are an obvious solution to the need for interior light and ventilation, so it is no surprise that everywhere in the world they are as old as permanent structures themselves. Weather being variable, ventilation is not always welcome, however, so for comfort (and security) some way to close them was necessary. Hinged wooden shutters were the preferred solution and they persist to this day, but they defeat the “light” purpose. Something translucent was desired. In the ancient West the most common early solution for upscale folk was parchment (thin treated animal skin) while in the East it was paper. Fabric was a lower cost alternative. All three work but have limitations. Glass seems like an obvious answer today, but the ancients had a very hard time getting the stuff transparent. Until they did it offered no advantages for windows.

Glass per se is not difficult to make. Even the Sumerians were able to do it. Heat up a silicate (SiO2) such as quartz until the crystalline bonds break and you have glass. You can reduce the temperature at which this happens by adding a flux such as potash. Cuneiform tablets from the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal (650 BCE) include a recipe for glass. But that just gives you a blob of rapidly cooling glass. Turning it into something useful is much more difficult. Making it clear (manganese dioxide is the key ingredient for that) took centuries of trial and error. The Romans were the first to make glass windows in large numbers, and not until the first century CE. Because of the production techniques, the windows were small panes set in mullions. Techniques for rolling large sheets of plate glass had to wait until early modern times; Louis XIV wanted them for the mirrors and windows of Versailles.

Today, of course, as a small part of the overflowing muchness of the modern world, large glass windows are so ubiquitous that we don’t even think about them – until, that is, we have to replace them. Or when a gremlin stares back at you through one. I hate when that happens.

Stevie Ray Vaughan – Looking Out the Window

window

It’s a Mystery

Mystery novels are not my default fiction genre for reading myself to sleep at night, but they do show up on my end tables occasionally. Last week three were my soporifics. That probably doesn’t sound flattering to the books, but they didn’t last a week precisely because all proved to be good reads.

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Runaway by Peter May (2015)

Runaway is billed as mystery fiction, and it is, but it stretches the definition beyond the usual limits. Veteran Scottish crime fiction author and screenwriter Peter May tells a tale of youthful adventure and late-life remorse – and, of course, murder.  There are no private investigators and no police, except as people to be avoided.

The novel alternates between 1965 and 2015. In 1965 the central character Jack MacKay, upon his expulsion from high school, convinces four of his friends to leave notes for their parents and run off with him from Glasgow to London in a van in order to become a successful band in London – something the author tried himself as a teenager. Along the way, Maurie, one of the runaway friends, insists on picking up his cousin Rachel in Leeds to rescue her from an abusive relationship. Despite one disaster after another, the six make it to London where they fall in with a trendy psychologist who dabbles in LSD, celebrities, and attractive young men. Heartbreak and murder ensue. Three of the original runaways including Jack return to Glasgow feeling beaten and disillusioned.

50 years later, the prime suspect in the 1965 slaying is himself murdered. Maurie, who is terminally ill and barely ambulatory, learns of this and urges a second runaway, this time from offspring and grandchildren. Once again he means to travel from Glasgow to London where two of the original six had stayed behind in ‘65. Jack and Dave need little persuasion. Jack maneuvers his grandson into driving them in a trip that is scarcely less eventful than the first one. There is much unfinished business in London after all these years. The two murders – one a half-century old and one new – are only a part of it, and mostly for Maurie. For the others it’s largely a poignant tale of paths not taken and of choices that still exist.

This finely written novel is not the usual mystery fare, and it likely speaks the most to those old enough to contemplate the consequences of those untaken paths.

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The Little Sister by Raymond Chandler (1949)

After Peter May, it was time for a well-seasoned classic, and it’s hard to get more classic than Raymond Chandler. Philip Marlowe is a century too late to be the prototype pulp detective, but he nonetheless is the archetype; he is everything we still imagine a private detective to be. For those who know the character only from the movies, the portrayal most like the Marlowe of the books is that of Dick Powell in Murder, My Sweet (1944). In purely cinematic terms, I like Humphrey Bogart’s Marlowe in The Big Sleep better, but Powell’s is closer to the flavor of the literary character: a world-weary cynical wisecracker who doesn’t take life very seriously, yet chooses to finish the jobs he takes even when it would be far wiser and safer not to. My pick was The Little Sister, which I hadn’t previously read.

The Little Sister is the fifth of the seven Marlowe novels and the last from the decade in which the character is most at home. By 1949 several of Chandler’s novels and short stories had been adapted to the screen and he had written a few screenplays of his own including The Blue Dahlia and Double Indemnity. Chandler had had a mouthful of Hollywood and he didn’t much like the taste. (See Writers in Hollywood, an article he wrote for The Atlantic in 1945 in which he explains why; multiply all his $ figures by about 20 to adjust for inflation.) He brings his insider knowledge and perspective to this novel, which features second tier actors, producers, and agents along with the criminals, lowlifes, and drug dealers interacting with them. The novel is worth the price just for the glimpse of 1940s Los Angeles.

The action begins when the interestingly named Orfamay Quest, an apparently uptight and naïve young woman from Manhattan Kansas, walks into Marlowe’s office and asks him to find her brother Orrin, who is missing. She doesn’t want to involve the police in case he has fallen in with a bad crowd and the police might cause him trouble. Orfamay is not quite what she seems to be, however, even though "nobody ever looked less like Lady Macbeth." Orrin and Orfamay, it soon turns out, are half-siblings of B-actress Mavis Weld who has a real chance of becoming an A-actress. Mavis is also the girlfriend of a semi-retired gangster named Steelgrave on whom the cops would love to pin something. Several seemingly unconnected threads involving photos, blackmail, greed, an old unsolved murder, drugs, film studio politics, and scorned affections intertwine. Bodies pile up from ice picks and bullets. Even more than usual, Marlowe is loose with the law, thereby annoying the police who are alternately sadistic and kind – frequently in the same encounter.

Chandler always writes very well and he often is funny even as he conveys the mood he wants: “I smelled Los Angeles before I got to it. It smelled old and stale like a living room that had been closed too long.” Or, “Down at the drugstore lunch counter I had time to inhale two cups of coffee and a melted cheese sandwich with two slivers of ersatz bacon in it, like dead fish in the silt at the bottom of a drained pool.” Yum. The Little Sister is another solid entry in the Chandler bibliography. Definitely recommended.

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The State Counsellor by Boris Akunin (2000 – trans. 2008)

Anyone who is a fan of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes but hasn’t read Boris Akunin needs to start right now. Holmes’ contemporary Erast Fandorin first appeared in print as a 20-year-old neophyte detective in The Winter Queen, a tale set in 1876. The State Counsellor, the sixth Fandorin mystery begins in 1891.

General Krapov is secretly traveling by train from St. Petersburg to a post in Siberia, where he being sidelined for a while due to bad publicity from an incident with a female prisoner. Fandorin is responsible for Krapov’s safety during the stopover in Moscow, though the responsibility doesn’t come with adequate authority. Neither the police nor the security service are specifically under his direction and the two agencies are virtually at war with each other. Someone impersonating Fandorin boards the train before it reaches Moscow, assassinates Krapov, and escapes. Fandorin is arrested for this but is quickly released thanks to the witnesses on the train. But who leaked the information about the “secret” trip and to what killer or killers?

The reader learns the answer to the second part of that question right away. In fact, the book alternates between the perspective of Fandorin, and that of Green, the leader of the revolutionary Combat Group. We learn of the pogrom that turned him into what he is. The Combat Group throws bombs at the elites, robs banks, and commits political murders to further its purposes. We see things from the points of view of the nobility, the underclass, those in between, and the insurrectionists. Meanwhile there are personal intrigues, double agents, professional infighting, and femmes fatales. Fandorin’s job is to solve a crime, but the crime can’t be separated from the social context. Knowing what we know about Russia’s fateful upcoming 20^th century adds a deep portent to all the goings-on.

Andrew Bromfield’s translation is clear and readable. That’s all one really can ask.

If you’re already an Akunin fan, this will keep you one. If you aren’t one yet, pick up The Winter Queen. You’re likely then to seek out The State Counsellor.

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Trailer for Murder, My Sweet (1944). Except, strangely, for the title (changed from Farewell, My Lovely), this is the truest to the spirit of a Chandler novel of any film adaptation to date.

One of Those Blogs that Ramble Nostalgically before Getting to the Point

I live in a house that previously belonged to my parents, so naturally there are a lot of artifacts of theirs in cabinets and closets and other storage spaces. I’m no hoarder. I’m actually pretty good about keeping the place free of clutter by throwing out useless things. There are, of course, some items of sentimental value that I keep. Also, there are some things I don’t use but that are useful in principle. If they are not actually in the way, they tend to get left where they are. There are my mom’s teacups, for instance. I’m not sentimental about them. I’ve never have had a formal tea party and I doubt I ever will. On the occasions when I drink tea, I always use (as I do for coffee) a mug for its heft and capacity. I nearly always serve tea to others in mugs too. I doubt I’ve poured tea more than three or four times into a china cup in the past fifteen years, and then only for guests who specifically asked for a cup rather than a mug. Only once was the full set used during all that time, and on that occasion by a quasi-niece as a lark with her friends. Nonetheless, the space the cups occupy in the hutch otherwise would be empty, so it simply doesn’t occur to me to give them away or sell them on eBay. Writing that last sentence was the first time it ever did, but I still don’t plan on it.

What brings all this to mind is an ashtray. Years ago I disposed of most of the ashtrays that had been stored in various cabinets, but there is one that is both useful (some people do still smoke, at least outside on the porch) and of mild sentimental value. Dating to the 1940s, it was in my parents’ home before I born. I recall it being on some table or household surface my entire life.

Like most Americans of my generation I grew up in a smoke-filled house, travelled in smoke-filled cars, worked in a smoke-filled office, and relaxed in smoke-filled restaurants and bars. I am not a smoker and never was. In the 70s, however, I was so accustomed to life amid ambient smoke that I truly didn’t notice it. The nose is an accommodating organ that way: after a while it stops informing you of whatever is constantly present. Lacking the zeal of the reformed, to this day I am less sensitive to tobacco smoke than the typical former smoker. Throughout the 70s, ashtrays were normal items on counters, coffee tables, and desks in homes and workplaces. It was the rare den, living room, dining room, or kitchen without at least one.

The decline of smoking accelerated in the 80s and 90s as tobacco smokers became first segregated and then banned altogether from work spaces, indoor public spaces, and bars. In the 90s automobiles without ash trays started to appear though my ’98 GMC pickup has one. As smokers became exiled to the out-of-doors in one venue after another, ash trays began to vanish from homes and offices as well. Apparently, younger folk no longer always recognize one when they see it. Recently a Millennial at my house for a get-together employed my keepsake ashtray for a candy dish. I thought it was a clever repurposing and quipped that it still was being used for something bad for your health. This evoked a puzzled response. She hadn’t recognized it as an ashtray, but thought it was a purpose-designed candy or hors d'oeuvres dish.

I suppose that’s a good thing. There is a country-western homage to classic vices from 1947 (about the same age as the ashtray) Cigarettes Whiskey and Wild Wild Women. Millennials – especially the younger ones 18-24 – have cut back on all three. According to the consumer expenditure data of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, since the year 2000 in inflation adjusted terms, spending on tobacco by Americans in this age-range has fallen by a third while spending on alcohol has cut in half. (Yet binge-drinking and non-automotive alcohol-related hospitalizations are up in the same group – figure that one out.) Tobacco sales have fallen only slightly in other age groups while alcohol sales to non-Millennials are up substantially. The Bureau doesn’t keep track of the final part of the song, but other studies show that Millennials are dating and having sex a good deal less than their elders did at their age. They’re eating their fruits and vegetables though: their spending on those is up well over 50% since 2000.

I have nothing against responsible bibulation of whiskey, and I have not a word to say against wild wild women either as an identity or as a companion of such. But in truth, I don’t much miss days and nights when Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. I’m happy to have a new candy dish.

Sons of Pioneers – Cigarettes Whiskey and Wild Wild Women (1947)

Over the Top

“Over the top” is always a chancy choice, as is appropriate for a phrase that originates in WW1 trench warfare. Occasionally it achieves some success though, and “some” is what it achieves in three recently visited popular entertainment products.

Empress (2017), a graphic novel by Mark Millar and Stuart Immonen

This retro space opera is the first 7 issues of the Empress comics collected as a hardcover. Those familiar with Mark Millar’s other work (e.g. Kick-Ass, Wanted, and Kingsman: The Secret Service, among others) or with movies based on them should have some inkling what to expect here. Millar typically goes far over the top while eschewing out-and-out parody. The result is both campy and disturbing, two descriptions that don’t usually go together. Kick-Ass and its sequels, as examples, ramped up violence beyond what one ever expects to see in mainstream Western comics (and far beyond what appeared in the two anything-but-tame movies) while presenting the would-be superheroes as the unbalanced characters they would have to be. Wanted confirmed every nightmare you ever had that the world really is run by a sociopathic criminal elite. Kingsman: The Secret Service is Bond and beyond. The derring-do in Empress makes Flash Gordon look like a poser.

The time is 65,000,000 years ago when earth is one planet in an interstellar empire inhabited by an earlier version of humanity. (We aren’t given an evolutionary history of this ancient breed; presumably, evidence of these earth outposts was wiped out by the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, though that event is not a part of Empress.) The empire is run by King Morax whose governing style makes Flash Gordon’s adversary more appropriately called Ming the Merciful. He is ruthless not just by inclination (though he does have that inclination) but as a matter of policy. He believes the only way to hold the scattered empire together is to respond to the slightest hint of defiance anywhere with overwhelming and savage reprisals in which “collateral damage” is the main point. It encourages the locals to eliminate signs of defiance themselves.

In her youth the beautiful Emporia was infatuated by the bad boy take-charge ways of Morax, but as his wife and the mother of his children she has a change of heart. Not least, she worries for the safety of her children whom, she knows, Morax won’t hesitate to execute if they give him the tiniest cause. Emporia takes her kids and flees with the help of Dane, her square-jawed, well-muscled, always superbly competent bodyguard. Morax is not amused. He is more concerned with Emporia’s public display of defiance than with the flight per se. He cannot be seen to take it sitting down. Is there more to Dane’s relationship with Emporia than just the dutiful loyalty of an honorable bodyguard? Emporia’s daddy-worshipping daughter thinks so, and she may be onto something.

Empress is not just 1930s-style space opera. It is space opera cranked up to 11. Immonen’s artwork suits the story perfectly. If you “get” and like Millar, you’ll like this.

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Walkaway (2017) by Cory Doctorow

Dystopias are commonplace in science fiction, but this is a rarer beast. It is a utopia of sorts, or at least the beginnings of one. It brings to mind a line from an earlier time: “tune in, turn on, drop out.” If we take the “turn on” part of that 60s mantra to mean turn on tech instead of something psychedelic, it pretty well describes the philosophy of the main characters in Walkaway.

In near-future Canada, Hubert, Etc. (yes, the “Etc.” is part of the fellow’s name), Seth, Natalie (runaway daughter from ultra-rich family), and others have walked away from the “default” world of jobs, bills, and judges. The walkaways step outside the system. They no longer need it. Modern tech has made possible the end of scarcity, and inequality is maintained only by the elite rigging the economic system through corporate controlled governments. In voluntary ad hoc associations, walkaways occupy and repurpose abandoned factories where they hold “communist parties” with DJs and with 3D printers churning out goods to be given away for free. Hydroponic food is also to be given away. The techies among the walkaways are even on the verge of defeating death by digitally scanning brains; the hope is to be able one day to download them into back-up bodies. Naturally, the current elite of the default world are threatened by all this; their status vanishes if wealth and the whole notion of property become meaningless. They respond with lethal force, but can they stop the walkaway tide?

Cory Doctorow describes himself as emphatically a man of the Left, yet his voluntaristic anarcho-communist vision is weirdly similar (except for labels) to anarcho-capitalist post-scarcity utopias such as James Hogan’s Voyage from Yesteryear or Vernor Vinge’s post-Singularity fiction. This helps explain why Cory Doctorow is a winner of the libertarian Prometheus Award for science fiction. It’s the “anarcho” element that makes me count this utopia as over the top. My philosophical preferences are as anarchistic as anyone’s, but I think Mogadishu has settled the issue of whether those preferences are practical. They are not. In The Dark Knight Alfred tells Bruce that some men just want to watch the world burn. True enough. Some – he didn’t say but also true enough – just want to plant their boots on other people’s faces: domination for the hell of it, you understand. Armed gangs will fill the void in the absence of law.

Nonetheless, Doctorow’s vision is entertaining and much of it is plausible. We really are in the midst of another industrial revolution that will shake up society profoundly. Also, even if the world as a whole is unlikely to shed “default” power structures, as a matter of personal lifestyle “tune in, turn on, drop out” wasn’t bad advice (properly understood) in the 60s, and the reinterpreted version isn’t bad today.

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Atomic Blonde (2017)

Based on the graphic novel The Coldest City by Anthony Johnston, Atomic Blonde is set in 1989 Berlin in the final days of the Wall and the Cold War. It’s a particularly risky time for intelligence agencies and their contacts because their unsavory double-dealings could be exposed in the power shake-ups underway. The movie is structured as a backflash ala Murder My Sweet or DOA as MI6 agent Lorraine Broughton (Charlize Theron) recounts events in an interrogation room.

Lorraine is an ice queen who appropriately takes ice baths. She is sent to Berlin when a British agent is killed and a list of agents stolen from him. An East German trying to get to the West is the original source of the list and he has memorized it. Lorraine is to get the list, extract the East German, and find a double agent. But who in Berlin isn’t a double agent? Her contact in Berlin, David Percival (James MacAvoy) is particularly unreliable. Her task might not seem enough of a reason for the unrelenting violence and mayhem that follow, but it’s the only explanation we have.

The over the top stunts, car crashes, bullets, punches, and general kickass-ery rarely pause for a breath, and through it all Lorraine is an unstoppable force of nature. In a hypothetical matchup, Bond wouldn’t survive 30 seconds with her. One of the few nonviolent interludes is Lorraine’s lovemaking with a female French agent, who is playing a spy game of her own. So, who among the primary characters is really working for whom? It’s complicated, and at the end of the day we really don’t care. It’s hard to believe Lorraine cares. We are left to assume she likes the danger and mayhem for their own sake, and that one assignment is as good as another. Personal sharing is not her style, however, so that’s only a guess.

The camerawork and cinematic style are well suited to the subject matter, the stunts are impressive, and the fight choreography is extraordinary. And there is Charlize. For those reasons alone the movie is worth a look, which is good because there aren’t any other reasons. Don’t worry too much if you have trouble following the plot. The various intrigues and betrayals are just excuses for more violence, so the details aren’t important. Perhaps that’s the point.

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I assume that Blondie’s Atomic was not in the '80s soundtrack of Atomic Blonde because the song was released in 1979. Or maybe it wasn’t included because it was just too obvious. I don’t mind being too obvious, so: