Solidarity

Shame about the Internet

I'd been thinking of tackling the utopian topic of what kind of society I'd like to see after the whole pandemic business finishes - a more social democratic society, and one where things are less ridiculously complicated (because for some reason Americans love stupid stuff to be stupidly complex), but I decided against it.

Instead I was thinking about a topic at once less utopian, the internet, and also more utopian, i.e. how nice it'd be if it were less shitty.

I guess it's easy to complain about the ways the internet has distorted the culture worldwide - exhibit A is the Trump "presidency", which owes its existence heavily to the worst aspects of the internet, and which has given us the situation we currently face.

And it's not just here that the internet has fucked things up - misinformation on the internet generally and Facebook specifically contributed heavily to the Brexit vote in 2016 and other far-right politicians' victories in the years since. To say nothing of its success in radicalizing disaffected Muslim-background youth in Europe and leading to atrocities like the Paris attacks of 2015.

But every morning, when I fire up my laptop to do my Duolingo lessons, or when I follow along with a workout routine on YouTube, I have to remind myself of how much benefit it's brought me.

Or to put it another way, I keep trying to think how I'd be coping with boredom and so forth during this sheltering in place, if I didn't have the internet to keep me in touch with my friends and family, to keep me informed about what's happening, and to keep me entertained.

While I've gone on something of a buying spree on Kindle since the first shelter-in-place order came down, it's probably fair to say that I wouldn't be short on physical books to read. I've got my own collection here, and also my dad's, so if I don't mind re-reading certain things, I'd be fine there. Same with music, because even though I'm currently listening to John Lennon and Yoko Ono's Unfinished Music Vol. 2 on YouTube (review: don't listen to it), I have my own CD collection and iTunes library to fall back on.

TV is a slightly trickier prospect, because as a cord-cutter I really only have access to Netflix and other streamers. And there I'd find my first set of problems, because there wouldn't even be YouTube to pass the time (for instance by watching this one British nerd solve ridiculously complex sudoku puzzles).

I wouldn't be able to learn my languages on Duolingo or any of the other apps I use, including YouTube. And it'd be so much harder to keep on top of my health or finances or generally any of the other things that keep my life humming along - I don't know if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but it's fair to say that a whole ton of things are so much easier now because of it, pandemic or not.

The other important thing that I wouldn't have if not for the internet is my girlfriend, because we met online, and now that we're sequestered apart we use iMessage and FaceTime to keep in touch every day.

This whole screed isn't so much a Pollyanna-ish attempt to ignore all the disruption and chaos that the internet causes, as a reminder of all the good things that we use it for. Sure, Twitter and Facebook in particular are not just causes of our current polarization, but also actively making things more chaotic by providing a platform for all the worst kooks and grifters to either peddle falsehood or use misinformation to sow division.

But even there it's pleasing to see how my friends and family are coping on my Facebook timeline, or seeing what interesting or silly things the writers and reporters and comedians I follow on Twitter. There are bad things to all of these apps and platforms, but we can outweigh them if we make a more concerted attempt to focus on the good aspects.

This is why I get so annoyed when I see writers I like (as one example) quote-tweeting whatever idiocy the president or his enablers has vomited out into the world. If we stopped signal-boosting all these idiots, I really think they'd go away. There's no upside to retweeting those things, beyond the endorphin rush of feeling superior because you got to say something snappy to a tweet by someone who doesn't even know you exist. But they're happy because you're sharing their message with other people.

Ramit Sethi, author of I Will Teach You to be Rich (another thing I know about because of the internet) talks about improving your life by focusing on increasing the good, rather than decreasing the bad. It's not always the easiest thing to implement, but it's pretty powerful - instead of cutting out junk food, for instance, you focus on increasing the amount of healthy food you eat.

It's a good model for how we approach the internet, I'd say. Instead of rage-tweeting because some right-wing dingbat thinks Mexicans cause the coronavirus or some such nonsense, seek out the things on Facebook and Twitter that make you happy, or make you think, or even just make you laugh. Such as this:

See also male opera singers and ship's horns 🚢 pic.twitter.com/HpQu17tYtc

— Olaf Falafel (@OFalafel) September 4, 2017

Birthday Thoughts

Another birthday has come and gone. Because of the coronavirus shelter-in-place business, I had to celebrate it all online - doing Zoom calls with family and friends, and receiving texts and the obligatory Facebook messages and so forth.

For all that, it wasn't so bad. My girlfriend may not be here physically to keep me company, but she sent me some very thoughtful presents, and a lovely card (Star Wars-themed, naturally) and we've been FaceTiming as we always do on weekends. The most important thing has been knowing that she's out there, safe and sound, and that I can text her whenever I need to - I don't know that I'd be handling this isolation quite so well if it weren't for her.

As far as going out and doing stuff, it kinda felt like there wasn't much point anyway - it's not like 41 is such an exciting age to be, so you don't expect to embark on global tomfoolery like I did last year. Though it would have been nice to get out to Italy and see the relatives and all.

It is funny how far it feels like I've come since turning 40. Meeting my honey is the biggest part of it, but also the way work has shaken out, and my approach to writing and all the other goals. Maybe everyone does this when they get to a certain age, but I keep wondering how much ass I could have kicked if I'd seen things as I currently do, back in my 20s or 30s. But then, those feelings of spinning my wheels or wasting time have made me the person I am now, and who knows how obnoxious I'd have turned out if I'd been too much of a go-getter back then?

(No need to answer that, it's a rhetorical question)

There's also looking forward, though. Personally things look bright, which is light years away from what I would have said last year. And the job is... well, the job, but at least I have it in this uncertain time, which is more than a lot of people can say.

The question is, what'll happen to the rest of the world? I keep seeing a lot of inspirational quotes being thrown around social media about how the coronavirus pandemic is calling into question the assumptions underpinning American society and the economy, and how we're going to move forward into a social democratic future where everyone has health care and stuff.

But I'm not so optimistic.

I'm reminded of the (apocryphal?) quote from Winston Churchill, that the Americans can be relied on to do the right thing, once they've tried everything else. Frankly, though, I don't see us doing the right thing - I see us using this opportunity to make the economy even more cut-throat and less useful to Americans than it even was before. I see us ceding more power and money to the corporations that bully us into lower living and environmental standards, and I see an entrenchment of libertarian/objectivist ideas that'll lead to us falling even further behind the rest of the developed world.

I also see us taking exactly the wrong lessons, from exactly the wrong countries. We'll continue concentrating power in the hands of a few white men, because otherwise they stand to lose a portion of the money they'll have no hope of ever spending or passing on - money that could unlock so much more creativity and innovation if it were flowing around the economy.

It seems pretty clear to me that the country is headed toward becoming a one-party state, like Russia or Hungary - nominally a democracy, but one in which federal and congressional elections can't actually change anything for the party in power. If we're really lucky, we can look forward to a day when dissidents and journalists who dare to criticize the Republican Party, or talk about preserving the environment, get murdered in embassies and consulates abroad.

None of this is planned, and none of it is inevitable. But it's hard to see a way to a sane, fair economy or government without some sudden, sweeping change in the mentality of the people. The coronavirus itself is the black swan that's put the procession of Donald Trump to his second term in doubt, but the other thing under threat is the integrity of our elections, especially since they weren't that structurally sound to begin with.

Of course, I don't want to bring everybody down. We'll just have to see what happens in the next few
months, and hope that enough states institute mail-in voting that enough Democrats can sway the important states. But while we're being realistic let's not also pretend we're going to learn anything in particular from this crisis.

At any rate, this is one of the comforts of growing older: I get to rail against all the things that bother me in society and people will be less and less inclined to listen to me!

Revisiting All of the Marvel Movies

Or nearly all. Spider-Man: Homecoming and Far From Home aren't on Disney Plus, and neither is the Hulk movie with Edward Norton - possibly because they're worried about confusing people with discontinuity?

At any rate I've gotten through Phase 1, and am now 1.5 movies into Phase 2. I've seen most of the movies but never got around to the Thor ones (other than Ragnarok), and I can't say I was missing much. But it's interesting to see them again, given that I've never sat down to rewatch any of the movies in their entirety.

It's especially appropriate given that a couple of weeks ago I was talking about my memories of movies, music and video games I loved as a kid. Watching the first Iron Man movie again reminded me of the weekend that I walked to the cinema from my mom's place in London, where I was living at the time because I was between flats. Not having anything else on that afternoon I went to see it on my own, at the Vue Cinema where I would later see Black Panther (which is another fun story).

Since it was 12 years ago, I can't quite keep straight whether I'd already seen The Dark Knight (always at the same theatre), and whether I'd seen Dark Knight with anyone. But I do know I saw Iron Man on my own, and enjoyed it immensely, both because of the things I recalled from the comics and the fun, silly and loud goings-on onscreen.

I'm also far enough away from those days that it surprises me a little to hear that Iron Man was considered a third-tier character at the time, and that giving him an entire movie of his own was seen as quite risky. I was never that big a fan, but I knew a fair amount of back story, so it was exciting to see it all playing out in live action (if updated for modern sensibilities, i.e. not dripping with racism).

The other thing I remember is the rush of SQUEEEEE that hit when I saw the (now-famous) post-credits scene where Samuel L Jackson, as Nick Fury, tells Tony Stark about the "Avenger Initiative". Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch's reboot series, Ultimates, was still pretty fresh in my mind, and seeing them aim for that in the movies was exciting as hell.

Thinking about it all now, I still appreciate the sense of excitement and possibility from watching Tony Stark go from entitled playboy to hero. It's also interesting to see how much was referenced in Infinity War and Endgame, and how many ideas that were introduced here culminated in those movies.

On the negative side, you also see the formula early on. The origin story, which takes up the entire first act, the confusing fight scenes and the fairly limited color palette (at least at first). Add to that the fact that, excitement of seeing Iron Man on the big screen aside, the movies were full of cliche - literally the first scene in Iron Man 2 is Mickey Rourke's character watching his father die, and then screaming to the heavens - a sort of Russian-language "NOOOOOOOOO" that filled me with little hope for the rest of the movie.

What's odd is that I liked Iron Man 2 a bit better on the second viewing, that scene aside. Robert Downey Jr is as engaging as ever, and again, you see a lot of things introduced here that play out later.

Another one that's hard to separate from what came later is Captain America: The First Avenger. The last scene especially, where he's talking to Agent Carter as he aims the Red Skull's doomsday plane toward the Arctic ice, hits hard when you think of his years in the present and then his return to the 40s at the end of Endgame.

The question that keeps echoing through my mind as I write this, though, is whether any of that is more than fan service. I don't want to be a spoilsport, but I guess as a writer I can't help it? In any case, like so many comic book movies before and since, it's hard to separate my actual feelings about the quality of the Marvel Cinematic Universe from my excitement at seeing throw-away references to an obscure character I read back in the 90s, or even the pleasures of seeing Jack Kirby's art form the design aesthetic of a bunch of these films.

Both of those aspects are nice, but they don't necessarily make the movies great in themselves, and I have to say that the middle of Phase 2 dragged for me a bit. Avengers: Age of Ultron, as I've noted before, was a frustrating watch because the filmmakers were too concerned with playing up the "universe" aspects than with telling the story as it needed to be told (when I say filmmakers here, I mean the producers who forced Joss Whedon and the screenwriters to put in that crazy scene with Thor in that cave, which made no sense at the time).

What I'm hoping, though, is that in rewatching all of these movies I can see the ones I didn't like (Age of Ultron, Guardians of the Galaxy) with fresher eyes and with better understanding of the picture the filmmakers were trying to draw with all those callbacks, call forwards and digressions.

This might even extend to Thor: The Dark World, which was up until today the only MCU movie I'd never seen even a minute of. Wish me luck, though, because it's the one that everyone seems to hate above all others...

Recapturing the Feeling

Coming back to live in the town where I grew up carries some odd associations with it. I drive by certain spots, and my thoughts turn to the music I was listening to or the comics or books I was reading. I think I've mentioned this in the past few years, since moving back from London, but it's been thrown into sharper relief in the past six weeks, as I've switched from working out at the gym to running or walking in my old neighborhood.

I passed through different parts of the old neighborhood on two occasions today. The first was this morning, when I went on my run that took me past my old house and my old elementary school. The second was on a big walk after lunch, when I passed the elementary school again and walked around the houses of friends from those years.

As I thought about afternoons spent playing Star Tropics at one friend's house, it struck me (as it frequently does) how much replaying games or re-experiencing certain media is more an attempt to recapture the feeling of experiencing those things for the first time.

Not only that, but this nostalgia affects what I write. I'm aware of tics and idiosyncrasies that come straight from the comics and science fiction novels I was reading in high school, and I'd say the past few years have been a never-ending attempt to purge these tics from the way I tell my stories.

Or maybe I shouldn't be so quick to completely purge them - part of what informs a person's personality is the conversation they have as adults with the lessons they drew from media they experienced as kids. As a teenager I wanted more space battles and more questioning of Gene Roddenberry's vision from Star Trek; as a man in middle age I get tired of the bombast of shows like Discovery and want to get back to stories about how smart and well-intentioned people tackle problems like adults.

At the same time, it feels odd to write that I'm "a man in middle age", because the teenager (or child), as I was then, never feels so far from the surface. Part of it is dismay at the passage of time, and the thought that I get ever closer to decay and irrelevance and oblivion, but part is also cognitive dissonance that the "I" encompasses such a different person now compared with back then.

Paradoxically I might not feel this disconnect so clearly if I'd stayed in Palo Alto the entire time, or if I'd come straight back after college. My suspicion is that the disconnect is more marked, and appears in such specific places, because I'm confronted with triggers to these memories for the first time since I formed them. And in the case of spots I pass more frequently, it's become my habit to think about how those places reminded me of the video game or book or comic, which brings up memories of the thing again.

It's a reminder of how the brain forms grooves and your thoughts fit along those grooves quite easily, whether you like it or not. What's funny is that it also happens with new stuff I experience now - certain things remind me of working out in or wandering around London, despite there not being any explicit link. These memories then trigger thoughts of specific things I used to do or friends I used to hang out with, and as I return to the piece of media (for example a YouTube video) I'm reminded of the place or person I was thinking of the last time I watched it.

Brains are weird.

At any rate, it's a funny phenomenon that I think back to the Legion of Superheroes whenever I pass by the first condo complex my dad lived in after he and my mom split up, or that I think of the Quick Man level from Megaman 2 whenever I walk by the community center where I used to play kids' league basketball. I suppose you could call them both traumatic experiences, in their own way (basketball gave me nightmares for years afterwards), but it's interesting how the brain creates full snapshots of memories, and the weirdest triggers bring them back.

Proust, of course, wrote about this at length in A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, but we can only imagine what he'd have had to say about a reboot of his favorite comic series or the feeling of finally beating one of Megaman 2's toughest bosses. In the absence of his thoughts on these topics, I can only say that it's not always bitter to get back to that child-mind, or to see the continuity of my own sense of self between then and now. The question is whether I'll feel the same about the shows and books and whatever that I'm experiencing now, when I revisit them in twenty years' time.

Or maybe I'll just still be thinking of Megaman 2?

The Start of the Story: John Le Carre's The Night Manager

One of the best distractions from the terrors of my own to-read shelf is the bookshelves in the living room that contain my dad's books. There are obscure trashy fantasy novels alongside ponderous histories of Venice and the Silk Road, and there are Italian literary masterpieces alongside British mystery novels from the early twentieth century.

And then there are all the John Le Carré novels my dad has collected over the decades. Last year, on a whim, I picked up the Night Manager, because I'd seen the first episode (or two, I can't remember now) of the TV show when it came out in 2015 or so. I remembered the mood and the visuals, and how menacingly well-cast Hugh Laurie was as Richard Roper, the worst man in the world.

And now that I've gone back and watched the show, I wanted to look at the start of the novel and see if there were any lessons to take away from it - overall it's not my favorite of his books, but that initial section covers a lot of sins. And the story is probably more relevant now than when he published it, back in 1993, since we're a lot more conscious of the Faustian bargains governments make with the super-rich of various countries.

Where the show starts in Cairo, taking good advantage of the atmosphere of the Arab Spring to set the table for the meeting between Roper and Jonathan Pine in Switzerland years later, the book starts on that night in Switzerland. And where the show demonstrates what a consummate professional Jonathan is by having him calmly tell a guest during gunfire that the drinks in the hotel bar are free, the opening scene in Switzerland demonstrates that by describing how he's turned out in ways designed to appeal to the richer clients.

Coming back to my last post on "world-building", way back in 2015 when I had just re-read Hyperion by Dan Simmons, then I marveled at how Simmons packed all his themes into the first paragraph, and then played them out over the course of four books. Here Le Carré presents a different trick, of drawing in great detail the world that Jonathan lives in at the start of the story.

Meister's Hotel in Zurich is a world unto itself, after the fashion of the great old establishments of Europe. It's populated by the eccentrics that always populate Le Carré's books, such as Herr Kaspar, the concierge whose toupee was his stand of dignity against an overbearing client; or Frau Loring, who "had been Herr Meister's nanny, and as rumor had it, Herr Meister's father's mistress". It's also a building with its own stories to tell, like the grill room that Herr Meister has got it into his head to build, surpassing the understanding of the rest of the staff.

Because Jonathan is the night manager, per the title, the prose reflects the silence of his life at Meister's, and that in turn reflects the sense of a man hiding from life. To underscore the point, one of the letters he reads while waiting for Roper's party to arrive is from a guest with whom he had some form of potentially romantic relationship, but to whom he was emotionally distant. And to underscore that silence, and that feeling of being cut off, Roper arrives during the middle of a snowstorm, an apparition materializing from the outside world wreathed in quiet white.

And then Roper enters, and the story begins. The story, in this case, being the arrogance of the moneyed classes, the way they live a life apart from everyone else and the way that nothing - not bad weather, nor being out of the lobster salad - impinges on them getting what they want. Not even laws against selling arms to terrorists and mercenaries.

In a way the show is more successful than the book at depicting this. That might be because the flavor of rich bastard is more recognizable (Roper is first seen giving what looks like a TED or Davos talk on Youtube), and because the show takes place against the backdrop of Tahrir Square. And also it's the advantage that visual media have over prose, which has to spend a lot of words explaining and describing and suggesting all of the things that TV just shows you in a single frame.

That's not to say the book is bad. It suffers from a hundred-page stretch that the show dispenses with in about 15 minutes, but both do a good job of showing the corrupting influence of money, and how in the post-Soviet world capitalism became amoral. We live in a world where, instead of having to burnish your reputation the way the robber barons of the 1800s did, just the act of having money makes you Someone. This is down to the official bodyguards and the artfully ruffled but still upper-class younger girlfriend.

And it's not even about a clash between old money and nouveau riche, though Roper himself is proud of having come from humbler circumstances. Rather, his entry at Meister's shows the unthinking disruption that Roper's class inflicts - doesn't matter if we arrive in a snowstorm, the chasseurs will still be there to roll out the red carpet, because the old guard has lost its money and power, and can't exclude people like Roper anymore.

The book addresses Jonathan's past in Cairo much more openly than the show. In the show, he leaves his time in Cairo out of his CV, which makes him better able to disguise who he is. In the book, he tells Roper straight away that his previous job was in Cairo, but in the end it doesn't matter, because Roper's not the sort to remember the night manager in a hotel where he had a woman murdered for sharing out his arms deals.

Again, The Night Manager doesn't pack all its themes into its first paragraph the way Hyperion does. There's a reference to the Gulf War, which had just started, and the repercussions it has on both the stock market and the bookings at Meister's could signal the shockwaves that Roper's arrival has on Jonathan's somnolent life in Switzerland. But I see the section at Meister's more as Le Carré setting the table, showing us the rules of the world Jonathan has lived in as an employee of the better hotels, before plunging him, and us, into the far murkier world of arms deals and illicit sanction given thereto by governments in the name of catching "bigger fish".

You could argue that the fall of the USSR deprived thriller writers like John Le Carré of their subject matter. James Bond, for one, was never the same after 1991. The Night Manager was his first novel after that, and it's fair to say that it was the first sign of the direction he would take for the next few books, more enraged at the misdeeds of the moneyed classes than worked up by the Cold War.

What makes it impressive, if disheartening, is the way that message resonates even louder today than it did then, when the West was still basking in the glory of its victory over communism.

Make It So: Spoiler-Filled Thoughts on Star Trek Picard

So what would it take to get me to subscribe to CBS All Access, you ask? It turns out a global pandemic did the trick.

I took advantage of their offer of a free month, and in about a week managed to binge the whole ten episodes. When I saw the first few trailers, I was worried that it would be a Star Trek-flavored retread of Logan, in which Patrick Stewart reappears with a brain illness, helps a mysterious girl to safety, and dies in the attempt.

So...

Look, there's no way around it, those things all happen in Picard. But I'm happy to report that unlike Logan, this is his story, so his death is decidedly not very permanent and doesn't occur midway through. I'm less happy to report that this impermanence is foreshadowed pretty quickly.

Overall, I'd call it a good show. Not a great one, necessarily, but it seems to have avoided some of the key pitfalls that made season 2 of Discovery so infuriating. It does suffer from the same problems of gratuitous violence and swearing that make it come off less grown-up than juvenile, and it retreads some of the same conflicts as Disco, such as the corruption at the heart of the Federation and the conflict between organic and synthetic life.

Taking that first point about the corrupt Federation, I considered doing a whole blog about it, but I'll try and knock it out here. What occurred to me while watching this is that every era of Trek has approached the inviolability of the Federation according to the age it's in. For all that we consider the 60s to be a time of counter-culture, TOS was a very conservative and straight-laced show (racial and gender inclusion notwithstanding). If we take the Federation as America, you can look at the Federation in the 60s as either the idealized America, or an acknowledgement of what America could be if it solved its problems.

TNG started when the Cold War was in its final years, and the USSR collapsed during the show's run, so that when DS9 and Voyager came along the US was the sole remaining superpower. This is reflected both in the fact that the Auld Enemy, the Klingons, are now the allies of the Federation, and in the portrayal of the Federation way as the "best" way. Voyager sticks to this narrative a lot more, while DS9 questions it by introducing Section 31, the "dirty tricks" division of Starfleet.

Discovery and Picard arrive at a time when America's faith in itself is at perhaps its lowest ever, and I think that's reflected in the increased role that Section 31 has, especially in Season 2. For Picard it manifests in the widespread infiltration of Starfleet by the Romulans, and by the acknowledgement that the universe is a scary place so they have to take actions inconsistent with their ethos to preserve their citizens' living standards.

Notably, though, this topicality also means Picard examines income inequality on Earth in the 25th century, by having him live in a French chateau while his ally Raffi lives in a trailer in Vasquez Rocks, California. It's not explored much further, but the fact that the two characters are shown living so differently is noteworthy, since up to now Trek has always just waved some of those economic questions away (most infamously for me, by having Ensign Harry Kim from Voyager living in downtown San Francisco - as if).

Picard also examines the effect of his personality on the people around him, such as how his quest to save the Romulans put him at odds with Starfleet, while trying to root out Romulan infiltration caused Raffi to lose her family in a haze of substance abuse. We're used to seeing him as the undisputed moral beacon of TNG, a role he played well, so it was interesting to see that role questioned.

On the negative side, Picard suffers from the same predictability that dogged Disco. Once an element is introduced, you can see immediately how it will play out. The most egregious example is the synthetic body that's just lying there when Picard and co arrive on Coppelius. Once you hear that it's awaiting a brain transfer, you know that's where he's going to end up - and of course, that's exactly what happens.

It's hard to call the writers lazy or out of touch with Star Trek, but it's also hard to escape the feeling that maybe their reach exceeds their grasp here - or at least, you suspect they might be able to tell a more nuanced story if they weren't also trying to stuff in explosions and action scenes every episode or two. On the other hand, I have to appreciate that they avoided the big climactic ship battle that Disco went for, by having Picard deliver one of his usual speeches and saving the day.

So overall, Picard works, even if it doesn't quite hit the heights of DS9 or of TNG at its best. It gives us time with the characters, to catch up with them after decades away (and wash away the bitter taste of Nemesis), and it gives them moments of joy - like the episode where Picard and Soji take refuge with Riker and Troi on their idyllic planet. Most importantly, the plot fits much better with the main character, in contrast to Disco, which was saddled with an uninteresting main character (Michael Burnham) and compounded the problem by trying to tie every plot point back to her.

So I'll be looking forward to what they do with Season 2. It'd be nice to see him catch up with other characters, like Geordie, Worf, Dr Crusher and even Wesley. I do hope that we can move on from the organic vs synthetic life plot line, of course.

I still think I'll cancel my subscription to All Access by 23 April, though. I've found very little I want to watch on it beyond Trek...