Ce n'est pas la guerre

Gamblers the world over are placing their bets today, 11/11/11. Here in the Philippines there are low-odds lotto games of only two and three digits. The bet is ten pesos and can win you up to 4,500 pesos ($100). By yesterday, all bets for 11-11 and 1-1-1 were sold out. They're sold out to make sure that if too many people bet on the same number and it wins, the national lotto doesn't go broke.

If you were a soldier in the British, American, French or German armies on this day in 1918 - and you were alive - you would have considered yourself extremely lucky, since an estimated ten million soldiers died in the First World War. This day used to be known as Armistice Day in the States, but they changed it to Veterans Day in 1954.

On this Veterans Day, I want to simply say hello to all my former buddies, shipmates, and comrades-in-arms with whom I served from 1988 to 2000. And to all those with whom, mysteriously, I continue to serve nightly in my dreams. In a very real and very satisfying sense, I never really left the service. But I'm too old and out of shape to keep up with the men who haven't aged a day since I last saw them. The ones who are dead are ageless.

And the dreams are progressive, adding one onto the other. So instead of enlisting again with twelve years under my belt, as the years have passed it's fifteen years and seventeen years, until I'm just one more enlistment away from my twenty year retirement. Perhaps when I'm on my deathbed I can be honorably discharged, the way they let my father go at the age of fifty-five. They told him he'd had a heart attack, and showed him the scar tissue on his x-ray. But he was unaware of any heart attack, and after thirty-one years in the army, was totally unfit for civilian life.

He lived another twenty years not knowing what to do with himself. I wonder if his dreams were like mine, still in the service to his last gasp. (Or was it a yawn?)


Memory

When I was young my heart and head were light,
And I was gay and feckless as a colt
Out in the fields, with morning in the may,
Wind on the grass, wings in the orchard bloom.
O thrilling sweet, my joy, when life was free
And all the paths led on from hawthorn-time
Across the carolling meadows into June.

But now my heart is heavy-laden. I sit
Burning my dreams away beside the fire:
For death has made me wise and bitter and strong;
And I am rich in all that I have lost.
O starshine on the fields of long-ago,
Bring me the darkness and the nightingale;
Dim wealds of vanished summer, peace of home,
and silence; and the faces of my friends.

Siegfried Sassoon, Limerick, 1 February 1918

Andy Rooney

"If you smile when no one else is around, you really mean it."


Fifty years ago, it seemed that America and other Western democracies were moving toward a society with greater equality and justice. By now, however, it's obvious that we've been going in the opposite direction for quite some time, toward extreme inequality and injustice. We the people have taken a backseat in our own country.

For the last forty years, Andy Rooney was a rare commodity in American broadcast news. By the time the Ronald Reagan era, which included the term of his vice president, was over, the word "liberal" had become so dirty that few Democrats would dare to call themselves one. Bill Clinton, we are told, was a "moderate", a "centrist", which is the only reason why he managed to serve two terms. After eight years of George W. Bush's bungling, Americans expressed their exasperation by electing the first black president. Despite cretinous suggestions the he is a socialist, Obama's liberal credentials are impeccable.

So were Andy Rooney's, even when, for a terribly long time, it was unpopular to insist on pushing liberal values in his newspaper columns and his 60 Minutes segments. He was a curmudgeon whose heart was always in the right place. He was an American. In an age of equivocation, we always knew what he stood for - and why. When his friends try to flatter his late father's memory, Hamlet silenced them by speaking the most moving words I can think of at the moment: "He was a man. Take him for all and all, I shall not look upon his like again."

No Smokin'

I recently had a chance to watch the documentaries, Thriller in Manila (2008) and Facing Ali (2009), both of which showed Joe Frazier as he looked in his prime against Muhammad Ali and as he looked only a few years before he succumbed to liver cancer on November 7. He was living in the building that houses the old gym where he trained in Philadelphia, still very much himself - quiet, proud, but embittered over what Ali said about him before their three fights, calling him an "Uncle Tom"* and a "gorilla".

It would be hard to name two great boxers who were less alike than Ali and Frazier. When they fought for the first time, in March 1971, I was twelve and I didn't like Ali because he was a braggart. I thought it was too much to be so successful at what one does and to brag about it. Of course, Ali's "trash talk" was as much for Ali's benefit as for his opponents'. Frazier was so hurt by Ali's remarks that, late in his life, he derived some satisfaction at Ali's being stricken with Parkinson's Disease. Ali's words to Frazier were clearly absurd, since they were both victims of racism. The film Facing Ali recounts how, when Frazier visited his mother in South Carolina in 1970, he went to a local bank to cash a check. The bank wouldn't cash it, despite Frazier being the heavyweight champion of the world.

When they fought for the first time, the fight was billed as "The Fight of the Century". My mother and big brother were routing for Ali. I bet them both $5 that Frazier would win. Thank you, Joe, for making me the winner that time.


*In Facing Ali, a Frazier friend comments that Joe didn't know what an "Uncle Tom" was. He thought Ali was saying he peeped in people's windows.

It's Nice to Go Trav'ling

Four years ago today, I arrived in the Philippines for an indefinite stay. The indefiniteness has deepened to the point that, even though I've had more than enough of this place, it evidently hasn't had enough of me. Four years of living like an ordinary Filipino, even if my per capita income is more than twice the national average of $2,000, and I could live a lot better if I weren't supporting three other castaways who happened to wind up in my lifeboat.

I alluded some time ago in this blog to the misadventure that landed me here in the Sticks - a small island tied by a bridge to a bigger island. Someone once said that freedom is like air conditioning - once you've experienced it you find that you can't live without it. It's a funny line, but I've learned that freedom isn't at all like air conditioning, since I've lived comfortably without the latter all this time. For half of that time I have somehow lived without cable TV. So I missed the entire 2008 presidential primaries, all the debates, the conventions and the most remarkable election of my lifetime. I feel a deep sense of regret that I wasn't home participating in my country taking those enormous steps.

I was preoccupied with the daily challenges of maintaining my composure while I was afflicted with typhoons, swarming tropical insects, power failures, screaming roosters, full-volume karaoke, and the alarming day by day spectacle of poor people struggle against a full-fledged oligarchy for the last ounce of liberty they can cajole out of them. Compared with all this, the economic crisis in America is like distant thunder or watching the track of a super typhoon as it veers to the north toward Taiwan or Okinawa. Not a disaster averted but one diverted. I tell myself that I'll deal with the scarcity of jobs, the reluctance of banks to provide credit to small businesses or ordinary people, or the prospect of a Republican winning the 2012 election when I get home.

There are moments when a cold wind will swoop down from somewhere high in the atmosphere and slip through my window, making me wonder from what compass point or what altitude it came and remind me of fairer climes and better times. Like the lyricist who wrote the song "It's Nice to Go Trav'ling",* I've learned that the best part of a journey may well be its end.


It's very nice to go trav'ling
To Paris, London and Rome
It's oh, so nice to go trav'ling
But it's so much nicer
Yes, it's so much nicer to come home

It's very nice to just wander
The camel route to Iraq
It's oh, so nice to just wander
But it's so much nicer
Yes, it's oh so nice to wander back

The mam'selles and frauleins and the senoritas are sweet
But they can't compete 'cause they just don't have
What the models have on Madison Ave

It's very nice to be footloose
With just a toothbrush and comb
It's oh so nice to be footloose
But your heart starts singin'
When you're homeward wingin' across the foam

And you know your fate is
Where the Empire State is
All you contemplate is
The view from Miss Liberty's dome
It's very nice to go trav'ling
But it's oh so nice to come home

You will find the madchen and the gay muchachas are rare
But they can't compare with that sexy line
That parades each day at Sunset and Vine

It's quite the life to play gypsy
And roam as gypsies will roam
It's quite the life to play gypsy
But your heart starts singin'
When you're homeward wingin' across the foam

And the Hudson River
Makes you start to quiver
Like the latest flivver
That's simply drippin' with chrome
It's very nice to go trav'ling
But it's oh so nice to come home

No more customs
Burn the passport
No more packing and unpacking
Light the home fires
Get my slippers
Make a pizza

(Frank Sinatra sings the song here.)

*The lyricist was Sammy Cahn.

Good Climates are Worst

Just before Halloween, what was identified as an "unseasonable" snow storm hit the eastern seaboard of the U.S. Watching the BBC's video shot in New Jersey of the heavy snow coming down, a Filipino friend who has never experienced snow in his life asked me if it was cold this time of year in the States. "Yes," I told him. It's mid-autumn." Then I had to explain to him what autumn was, since he had no notion of it.

George Orwell wrote the following essay for the 2 February 1946 edition of the Evening Standard. What he meant by a "bad" climate is one that causes discomfort when exposed to it, in the cold, the rain, or even in a gale. He suggests that the "good" climates - like the one I'm living in - are actually worse than bad because they are so unvarying. The heat is unending, it even rains more than in England, and there are typhoons instead of gales. There are really only two seasons here - the wet and the dry. Some years they are exactly divisible as such, but in others, thanks to the El Niño/La Niña effect, there are long dry spells in the rainy season and plenty of rain in the middle of the dry.

Orwell may have been unfair toward tropical fruits and flowers (rambutans are delicious) and flowers (I see daffodils every day here), but he knew that happiness can only be based on variety, not on sameness; that hot weather is not just the price to be paid for the cold, the two are faces of the same coin.


Bad Climates are Best

The time was when I used to say that what the English climate needed was a minor operation, comparable to the removal of tonsils in a human being.

Just cut out January and February, and we should have nothing to complain about.

Now, however, I feel that I would not remove even those two months, supposing that I had the power.

This is not entirely an academic question, for, if our popular scientific writers are to be believed, we are within sight of being able to control the climate. By the use of atomic energy, it seems, we could melt the polar ice caps, irrigate the Sahara, divert the Gulf Stream, move chains of mountains from one place to another, and, in short, alter the planet out of recognition.

And if the day ever comes when Britain has to decide what kind of climate it is to have (it will be done by plebiscite, I suppose, or on the basis of a Gallup Poll), I hope we opt for what is called a "bad" climate and not what is miscalled a "perfect" one.

The great thing about the English climate is its variation. It is not merely that you never know what the weather is going to do to-morrow, but that each season of the year, and indeed each month, has its own clear-cut personality, like an old friend - or, in the case of two or three months, an old enemy.

In very many parts of the world this is not so. In most Eastern lands there are only three seasons, the hot weather, the cold weather and the rains, and in each of those three periods one day is just like another day.

In very hot climates there is not even anything corresponding to spring or autumn; there are always flowers in bloom, the trees are evergreen, the birds are nesting all the year round. Down near the Equator even the length of the day barely alters, so that you never have the pleasure of a long summer evening or of breakfasting by artificial light.

I am going to try the experiment of running through the months of the year and seeing what associations they automatically call up.

They will not all be pleasant ones, but I think it will be found that they are sharply differentiated from one another. I will start off with March.

March. - Wallflowers (especially the old-fashioned brown ones). Icy winds sweeping round the corners and blowing grit into your eyes. Hares having boxing matches in the young corn.

April. - The smell of the earth after a shower. The pleasure of hearing the cuckoo punctually on the fourteenth; also of seeing the first swallow - which, in fact, is usually a sand-martin.

May. - Stewed rhubarb. The pleasure of not wearing underclothes.

June. - Cloud-bursts. The smell of hay, Going for walks after supper. The back-breaking labour of earthing up potatoes.

July. - Going to the office in shirt sleeves. The endless pop=pop-pop of cherry stones as one treads the London pavements.

August. - Midges. Plums. Sea bathing. Beds of geraniums, painful to look at. The dusty smell of water-carts.

September. - Blackberries. The first leaves turning. Heavy dew in the early mornings. The pleasure of seeing a fire in the grate again.

October. - Utterly windless days. Yellow elm trees looming up out of the mist, with all their leaves dead and none fallen.

November. - Raging gales. The smell of rubbish fires.

December. - Owls hooting. Cat ice on the piddles. Roast chestnuts. The sun hanging over the roof-tops like a crimson ball which one can study with the naked eye.

Those are merely my own associations. Anyone else's, I suppose, would be different, but they would probably be just as varied.

I cannot believe that in, say, California or New Zealand, or in the pleasure resorts of the Riviera, the months have so individual a flavour.

But how about January and February? February, I admit, is a particularly detestable month, with no virtue except its shortness. But in fairness to our climate one ought to remember that if we did not have this period of damp and cold, the rest of the year would be quite different.

The flavour of our fruits and vegetables depends on the rain-sodden soil and the slow coming of spring. With the doubtful exception of the banana and the pineapple, no fruit worth eating grows in a hot country. Even the orange and the lemon come from fairly temperate lands like Spain or Palestine, and the characteristic tropical fruits - mangoes, paw-paws, custard apples - are watery, tasteless things.

Fruits like apples and strawberries all need a period of frost and heavy rain, and never attain their best flavour in countries where the summer is really hot. The most attractive flowers also need a cold winter. In the plains of India, for instance, it is easy enough to grow zinnias or petunias, but the most skilful gardener alive could not grow a primrose or a wallflower or a daffodil.

If we want to make January and February less unpleasant than they are, we might start by building our houses more intelligently.

For instance, it would not be a bad idea to arrange the water pipes so that they do not burst every time there is a hard frost.

But that is a different question. What we shall have to decide, if this notion of changing the climate ever becomes practicable, is whether we want a dead level of continuous sunshine, or a few exquisite days paid for with fog, mud and sleet. When Shakespeare, describing this time of year, wrote:

When all aloud the wind doth blow
And coughing drowns the parson's saw,
And birds sit brooding in the snow
And Marian's nose looks red and raw

he was describing rather disagreeable phenomena, and yet there is a kind of affection in the lines, a perception that everything has its place.

There is a time to sit in the garden in a deck chair, and there is a time to have chilblains and a dripping nose. Perhaps five days out of seven our climate gives us cause to curse it, but there are also days, especially in spring and autumn, when even the streets of London take on a beauty that is not found in sunnier lands.

Wake Up John Doe

When the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations began, I watched how the major American news networks scratched their heads trying to figure it out and take it seriously. They saw its potential as a news item but couldn't decide what to do with it. Unlike the demonstrations of the Arab Spring, which the networks were anxious to own and, in some cases, to physically take part in, there is no single, clear agenda in the Wall Street protests (aside from the obvious one - it isn't called Occupy 42nd Street).

Consequently, the American media have tried to portray the protesters to fit their own unofficial ideological agenda. Fox News, for instance, has denounced them as nothing but anarchist hippies. Other media networks are being more cautious, just in case the movement amounts to something. Politicians are taking sides as well, with the 2012 presidential race looming. Republicans are calling Occupy Wall Street - at best - a pointless distraction, while Democrats are tentatively supportive or noncommittal.

I, for one, think it is encouraging that there doesn't seem to be a unified, monolithic message towering above these messy and shambling demonstrations. Some observers have tried to make the various conservative movements that seemed to spring up spontaneously in 2009 - that eventually coalesced into the Koch Brothers' Tea Party - analogous to the multifarious origins of the protests on Wall Street.

One thing is clear: Occupy Wall Street is a movement of the left. So often with such movements, there is a tendency for unaffiliated leftist groups to be hijacked by extremists like the anarchists who always seem to appear on the fringes to scare away liberal or libertarian elements. Certainly the enemies of the movement must be hoping that it turns violent. It is a maddening habit of leftist groups to refuse to compromise and cooperate with one another for a common cause.

Conservatives argue that Wall Street isn't responsible for the worldwide economic crisis. Barack Obama, who took office four months after the Crash of '08 and three months after the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 that saved the American banking system, is responsible. The banks, conservative reasoning suggests, should've been left alone to fail.

However much I somewhat agree with that disaster scenario, the bailout of the banks was not a Get Out of Jail Free card, inviting them to continue the same practices that brought about the crash. However much the banks do not seem to have learned their lesson, it was eminently necessary that their misdeeds didn't completely shatter the world economy. The cries of outrage at the evident money madness infecting the 1% of the American population that controls 40% of the American Pie may sound shrill but they are genuine. It has shaken alot of people's faith in capitalism - a system that relies on that 1% to behave themselves. Too many Americans know that they cannot rely on them any more.

I think the moment someone comes forward to give Occupy Wall Street one face and one voice and one message, it is finished.

Assassination

[An edited version of the following essay was published in Issue 59 of Senses of Cinema last summer. Adrian Danks, the editor of the pieces published for the Melbourne Cinémathèque Annotations on Film has always been a cooperative guy. But when I submitted the essay below he removed some things, a sentence here, a paragraph there, and rearranged other things, that lessened the essay's impact as a piece of writing. Danks even quibbled at my use of the Vernon Young quote which, coming from Young, was meant as high praise. Perhaps despair was too strong for a Japan still recovering from the earthquake and tsunami. Indulging my own vanity, here is the unedited version I submitted.]


“I would like to be able to take hold of the past and make it stand still so that I can examine it from different angles.” Masahiro Shinoda (1)


In the long history of Japan, few eras were as volatile and violent as the Meiji restoration in 1868. Two hundred and fifty years of peace under the Tokugawa Shogunate (1603-1868) had resulted in cultural and economic stagnation. After the American Commodore Perry’s arrival in Tokyo Bay in 1853 with his “four black ships”, a power struggle erupted between the forces loyal to the Shogunate and those wanting to restore the emperor as the head of state.

In the midst of this turmoil, powerful individuals emerged whose allegiances changed direction with the prevailing winds. One of them, Hachiro Kiyokawa, rose from a lowly position as the son of farmers to become one of the most respected and feared samurai of his age. He is at the center of Masahiro Shinoda’s extraordinary historical film Assassination. Donald Richie, the doyen of critics of Japanese film, called it Shinoda’s best film, as did fellow director Kon Ichikawa.

The historical context of the film is extremely complex, and Shinoda further complicates matters by recounting events in Kiyokawa’s life from the perspective of several different characters and shuttles us backwards and forwards in time. The result is a little confusing but makes it that much harder to take one’s eyes off the screen.

After two minutes of expository history, the film opens on a map of Edo (old Tokyo) with the Chrysanthemum seal, representing the emperor, at its center. We first see Kiyokawa crouched before a Shogunate official, the same seal on the wall behind him, who reads out his official pardon of the murder of a policeman. Next we see two prominent Shogunate players who figure prominently throughout the film, commenting on Kiyokawa’s exploits. One of them smokes a cigar, a sign of his corruption by Western customs and ideas.

Kiyokawa’s antagonist in the film is the samurai Tadasaburo Sasaki. Early in the film we are shown the grounds for Sasaki’s enmity toward Kiyokawa. Priding himself on his own fencing prowess, he faces off against Kiyokawa in a kendo match and is roundly beaten. Sasaki was also the name of Musashi Miyamoto’s nemesis, Kojiro Sasaki, dramatized in legend, literature, and film, the most popular being Hiroshi Inagaki’s trilogy of films starring Toshiro Mifune as Musashi.

Kiyokawa is presented by the film as a powerful, larger-than-life character. Shinoda is so evidently enamored of him that he is willing to forgive him his sometimes unsettling brutality. One of the best scenes in the film shows us Kiyokawa’s savage murder of a Shogunate policeman in broad daylight on a crowded street. After beheading the man in the blink of an eye (Shinoda freezes the shot of the man’s head launching into the air), Kiyokawa is chased by the angry mob of witnesses. As Kiyokawa flees from the stone-throwing mob, his sword still drawn, Shinoda eliminates all sound except for Takemitsu’s percussive score. The image of a lone samurai being chased down the road, as onlookers scurry out of his way, is unforgettable.

Of all the angles from which we are shown insights into the life of Kiyokawa, the most complex is from the perspective of his mistress, Oren, elegantly played by Shinoda’s wife Shima Iwashita. She recounts in her diary - which Sasaki grudgingly reads - her first night with Kiyokawa (he is her first customer) and their intimacy when she becomes the mistress of his house. When a warrant for his arrest is issued after his murder of the policeman, Oren is tortured by Shogunate officials, but does not divulge his whereabouts. In tribute to her, Kiyokawa tells his parents to pray for her.

By the end of the film, Kiyokawa remains an enigma. Oren’s death and, perhaps, the death of his idealism, have driven him to a dissolute life of sake and prostitutes. The final sequence of the film is shown entirely from the perspective of Sasaki, who stalks Kiyokawa, even spying on his intimacy with a prostitute whom he calls “Oren”. Sasaki is waiting for his chance to attack, and he sees his opportunity in a chance meeting he witnesses from a safe distance. Shinoda freezes the frame as Kiyokawa, in greeting an acquaintance in the street, stops to remove his straw hat, his hands clear of his white-handled sword.

Our efforts to understand Kiyokawa are driven by Sasaki’s efforts to find a point of weakness in his character, a chink in his samurai armor. A problem arises when we realize that a lot of Kiyokawa’s behavior isn’t exactly explicable. For instance, he organizes his own army to defend the Shogunate but interrupts its march on Kyoto with the sudden announcement that he is waiting on orders from the emperor. Or at one point he is obviously shaken by his impulsive beheading of a policeman but later unhesitatingly steps up to behead a group of captured “traitors”.

As Kiyokawa, Tetsuro Tanba is riveting. He exudes an intelligence and strength that makes the other characters fascination with him understandable. There are two actors in the cast whose faces are probably familiar to filmgoers. Eiji Okada, who plays Lord Matsudaira, played opposite Emmanuelle Riva in Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) and was the captive of Teshigahara’s Woman in the Dunes (1964). And Isao Kimura plays Sasaki, Kiyokawa’s sworn enemy. Japanese cinephiles might not recognize him as the actor who played the novice samurai, Katsushiro, in Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954). In that film, he was a devoted admirer of a master swordsman. In Assassination, Katsushiro has grown up, admiring Kiyokawa’s swordsmanship while hating the man and his reputation, determined to beat him when he finds the chance.

The music of Toru Takemitsu is so closely integrated with the action that it becomes a protagonist. A superb modernist composer, Takemitsu actually preferred to compose film music, and he did so for Masaki Kobayashi (Harakiri, Kwaidan), Hiroshi Teshigahara (Woman in the Dunes, Rikyu), Kurosawa (Ran) and particularly for thirteen of Shinoda’s films. For Assassination, he composed a spare but powerful score, making liberal use of traditional Japanese instruments, particularly the biwa.

A companion piece of sorts to Shinoda’s film is Kazuo Kuroki’s The Assassination of Ryoma (1974), which follows the last days of Ryoma Sakamoto, who figures prominently in Kiyokawa’s story. Kuroki’s film is markedly different in style from Shinoda’s, much looser and avant garde. (It was made for the independent Art Theater Guild.) Its anarchic imprecision reveals the extent to which Shinoda was still working within a filmmaking tradition in 1964. Assassination is a late but brilliant example of that tradition.

Assassination comes close to being a paradigm of Japanese esthetics, which Vernon Young described as "despair, reconciled by formal beauty - the Japanese answer to life resembles that of the ancient Greeks, or of Nietzsche." (2)


(1) Told to Audie Bock, Japanese Film Directors, Kodansha, 1978.
(2) Vernon Young, On Film: Unpopular Essays on a Popular Art, Quadrangle Books, 1972.