Elephant Talk

Obviously I’ve had a lot of strange observations since being back in the States for the first time in a year. I guess I’ll start with boobs.

The boobs here are huge, and they’re falling all over the place. It makes me wonder how many of them are real. Women take great care in presenting them perfectly, in a way that borders on the obsessive. They seem to be a great source of pride. They might also be an effective source of power. On the one hand, perfect breasts effectively mesmerize the heterosexual male population, giving the bearer a slight edge in any possible negotiation or confrontation. They may also provide an advantage in relating to other females, as an effort to establish position within an unstated social hierarchy. My boobs are bigger, can you not see that? So I am a more valued breed of female species. You must respect me.

I don’t know where I’m going with this. Just that it’s the subject that, um, stands out most in my mind.

I’m very sleep deprived. So this post might not make any sense. The flight was uneventful, except for some significant turbulence. I like turbulence. There’s that briefest instant of freefall and then the “thud.” I was half asleep when one hit — I never did become fully asleep — and I imagined what might happen if the wings ripped apart. Would the plane start spiraling, or would it nosedive? I envisioned a kind of nosedive and then I thought that if I survived the impact, the cabin would probably be shred to shit and I’d have to think fast to grab my life vest. I like to think that I’d look around to see if there were any children who had forgotten to put a vest on and maybe I’d try to save one. Then we’d float in the icy water and he/she would scream and I’d have to say kin-chan-ay-yo, kin-chan-ay-yo, or however you say that. Then the sun would rise a little and I’d die from the cold but the child would survive and get rescued. Anyway, that was my story. In truth I’d probably panic and swallow a bunch of water before I could take off my seatbelt.

I watched an episode of Friends. It’s been a year since I’ve seen American situation comedies. I’d forgotten about the laugh-track. What a silly, stupid thing. Every two seconds the crowd did this loud, canned laughter. I kept wishing they would shut the hell up.

I read the International Herald Tribune and there was something about US customs officials seizing people’s laptops and copying their hard drives. I thought that if they did that to me when I landed I’d tell them to fuck off. Then I’d wind up in jail and that would be fine with me.

I’m reading an amazingly brilliant, brilliantly amazing book called Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, which is probably why I’m writing like this. Or maybe it’s the no sleep thing.

America is weird. Everyone is so polite to complete strangers. Things are so clean and average. Everyone looks different from everyone else. And I can hear conversations again. Most of the time I wish I didn’t. But it’s nice to be back.

I’ve been listening to a lot of Wilco lately. Four months ago or so I didn’t have a single album. But so many of my friends praised them up and down that I had to give them another shot.

I tried once before, somewhere around 2002. That’s when everyone was talking about them. Their Yankee Hotel Foxtrot album was the cause de celebré for the independent minded youth of the digital age. It was a triumph of art over commerce. They were the band that stuck it to The MAN. Of course, that was all I heard about. Nobody seemed to mention the music. I hate that kind of media-generated buzz, so I had no interest in getting to know them.

But one day I was driving around Palo Alto with my girlfriend at the time. She was more curious than I was so she bought the album. OK, sure, let’s give it a shot. So she put the CD in the car stereo. Thirty seconds into it, I knew I hated it. Once I heard that sad-sack voice I thought “God no, not another self-emasculaed, indie whiner please.” Two minutes into it I couldn’t take it anymore. I begged her to turn it the hell off. My preconceptions were confirmed: Of course the critics loved them, I thought. These guys hate themselves. They fit perfectly into that drab, post-punk attitude where you have to sound like you don’t care. Critics love that shit. I can’t fucking stand it.

Fast-forward some five or six years into the future, to March 2008. I went with a group of friends to the Korean countryside for some fresh air and to climb a mountain. It had been raining the whole drive up and that night. When we woke up the next morning I opened the curtains and looked outside. The trees were dripping with last night’s rain, the hotel pavement was soaked. But it looked like the weather was going to break and we could climb that mountain.

And then someone put on some music. I heard this really nice, mellow guitar, and then the singer sang the first lines: “Maybe the sun will shine today. The clouds will blow away. Maybe I won’t feel so afraid…” Wait a minute, who’s this? Wilco. First song off their most recent album, Sky Blue Sky. I loved it. It was pretty, it was mellow, the singer was really singing, the mix was beautiful, and it was a great song. In short, it was everything my first experience was not.

And that’s Wilco. There’s a reason every website’s favorite adjective for them is “interesting.” As evidence of this, everyone I know who is a fan has a different preferred phase, a different favorite album. My friend in Pittsburgh thought nothing was ever quite the same after A.M. The bass player in my band prefers Being There. One of the guitarists in my band likes Summerteeth best. The other guitarist swears by A Ghost Is Born. His girlfriend digs Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. I, to this day, still prefer Sky Blue Sky by a mile.

Before I dig into my praise of them, and of that album in particular, I gotta get something off my chest.
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It is July 4, which is not only the birthday of the United States of America, it is also the one-year anniversary of this here blog. Let’s see, in that time there have been…

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Looking at blog stats feels wrong, but I do it anyway. I had a huge peak in January, when I was posting a lot about my Europe trip. I guess naming all those places got the search bots buzzing. Now it’s like a ghost town, probably because I don’t post very much. When life is most interesting, there’s less documentation of it: fewer photos snapped, less writing, less blogging. Interesting.

I’m celebrating America’s birthday tonight by playing my final gig with my band. The guitarist and keyboardist are moving on to other parts of the world. I’ve played with a lot of musicians in my life and been in a lot of bands, but this is probably the most talented collection of folks I’ve ever had the privilege of playing with. So it’s sad, but we’ll have fun.

It’s the end of an era. I feel a kind of fall hibernation coming on. But I’ve learned that nothing happens according to plan in Korea, so we’ll see how things go.

It’s been a strange past 20 or 30 days and now I feel a strong urge to get the hell out of here for a while. So finally, I’m actually looking forward to my trip. Not just wanting to go but needing to go. I’ve probably said this before, but this place shifts and turns in such strange ways for me. One week I feel like I have a sense of my reality and another I’m not sure. It’s not so much a matter of objective reality, but my perception of myself within it. Who the hell am I here? It’s different than who I am there, that’s for sure. So it’s time to go back, get some perspective, remember things I’ve forgotten, and try to forget some other things for a while.

I’ve got a rough plan, and I’m excited about all of it:

July 11: Arrive
July 12: Welcome home party/BBQ
July 13: San Francisco with mom & dad
July 15-19: Yosemite cabin
July 20: Busan reunion. Me and three friends who used to live in Busan are serendipitously meeting up in San Francisco. This should be a hoot.
July 21-31: Rent a car. Float. Enjoy. Eat burritos. Hang with friends in San Ho and SF. A Stern Grove festival? A trip to Santa Cruz, a trip to Sacramento… not quite sure.
Aug 1-4: Nevada desert. Road trip with college friends. I think the plan is to shoot guns and blow things up.
Aug 5-7: Come down. Gear up.
Aug 8: Back across the ocean to welcome the rest of my life.

Liberals may not admit it now, but we are so going to miss this guy when he’s gone. Obama will be too intelligent, McCain dry as a bone. But Bush, oh the laughs we’ve had over the years…

“And I reminded the President that I am reminded of the great talent of the — of our Philippine-Americans when I eat dinner at the White House.”
- President George W. Bush (From the Huffington Post.)

I’m glad he cancelled his trip to South Korea. In the current political-social climate, we really don’t need him fucking things up more than they already are.

We only get the major blockbuster US movies here in Busan, which means we get a lot of crap. But it also means we get all the big animated films, which are most definitely not crap. Kung-fu Panda, for example, was not only a laugh-out-loud riot, it was also beautifully made.

The new Pixar movie, Wall-E, sounds really interesting. In particular, I was intrigued by this little bit about the approach to dialogue:

Throughout the film, the lead characters, and most of the robots they encounter, utter not a single word of traditional dialogue. (There is ooooing, eeeping and beeping.) It’s yet another variation from previous Pixar films in which toys, rats, fish and bugs all have talked - and talked smart.

Still, Stanton says, “there’s dialogue from Frame One. It’s just unconventional dialogue.

“I knew this was a big bite to chew, and it had been a long, long time since someone tried to do a film with this unconventional dialogue in it. I kept saying, ‘It’s like I’m trying to do R2-D2 the Movie.’ I kept using that phrase so many times that one of my producers said, ‘Why don’t you just call Ben Burtt,’ ” the legendary audio and sound man who was the “voice” of R2-D2.

“So I called him and asked him if he could sign on early and help me with dialogue for these characters and grammar for each of the characters,” Stanton says.

“Now that I’m on the back end of working with him for two years, I realize that was the smartest move I ever made. I got 25 years of knowledge of how to do this stuff. He’s just the master of it, and I don’t think I could solved [sic] it without him.”

I’ve been waiting for something like this. Movies tend to “talk” very fast and too much, but I’m always fascinated by those that strip away the need to explain everything. A film like The New World, for example, is a great love story even though the main characters barely speak to each other. Another is Triplets of Belleville. What little language it has is unnecessary. This requires a filmmaker to be more creative in storytelling.

And of course, the other reason I like films without little or no dialogue is that I have more examples I can show in class.

Edit (June 24): Here’s the trailer… looks and sounds great!

I want to marry this woman. But me in Korea… her in Iraq… It probably wouldn’t work out.

OK, I’m going to dip into the geek pool — familiar waters for me, I should add — and give my opinion on the Star Trek versus Battlestar Galactica debate. Sam J. Miller wrote a very good analysis comparing the two shows, highlighting the optimism of the former and the bleakness of the latter, also pointing out how they reflect their respective cultural zeitgeists. As he writes:

“These days, Battlestar Galactica’s warning that technology and progress will bring us to the brink of total annihilation is far more resonant than Star Trek’s hope that technology and progress will solve all of our problems.”

I was never that into the original Star Trek series, but I am a huge fan of The Next Generation. That show was quintessential science fiction, with some brilliantly inventive stories. We got some real mind-benders that dealt with the nature of reality, death, time travel, dreams, free will, and other aspects of human nature. But we also got some intriguing cultural and political parallels of the time — gay rights, abuses of power, the individual versus the collective, war treaties, colonialism, terrorism, etc. Each episode seemed to be a sort of life lesson and a means toward inspiring our better nature. American culture was more positive then, not to mention more innocent.

Ronald D. Moore was one of the principle creative forces on the latter (better) half of the show’s seven-year run. He is also the lead creative force behind his more recent project, Battlestar Galactica. This show displays humanity in a different way. As Miller points out, unlike in TNG, humanity in the BSG future is still very, very flawed. The “heroes” of the show rig elections, assassinate enemies, make bad decisions, destroy themselves, and behave like depressed drunkards. Why shouldn’t they? Most of their species has been eradicated and hope is fading. They’re confused and afraid.

This is the fear that underlies modern society. The fear of today isn’t simply that the Soviets or the Americans will hit the red button at the wrong time and for the wrong reasons; it’s the feeling that this time, perhaps we deserve our own annihilation (again, paraphrasing Miller, but also reiterating my own opinion, which I expressed here a couple months back). It is our own mistakes, our own lack of foresight, our misunderstanding of our enemies, and an inability to change that gives us this feeling that we are unworthy of continuing. This is an oft-echoed theme of BSG, and it’s the reason the show works so well. It’s also the reason that the constructed world of BSG is far more compelling and complex than TNG.

But does that make it a better show? This is where I’m going to disagree with Miller, Moore, and perhaps every media critic out there who adores Battlestar Galactica.

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I have to be careful with this post because I don’t want certain readers to get the wrong idea.

Much of the appeal of moving to Korea was getting a good 4 or 5 months a year off. I thought I’d use all that time to go back to America in the Summer and Winter. I thought at the time that I’d need to. More recently I thought I’d simply want to.

I’ve got my ticket. I’m going back to the States July 11 for just under a month. But I find that as the date gets closer, I’m less excited about going. In fact, I find a nagging, inexorable pull that I’m fighting. I can’t figure out why, but I just don’t really want to go.

I will say this: I want to see my family, and I want to see certain friends. These are things I am looking forward to. But American culture is not one of them. There’s nothing about it that I miss, nothing at all. ……… I’m kind of stuck staring at the computer monitor after that last sentence. I’m not sure how to tactfully put this. I guess that, in seeing things from a distance, there are certain aspects of America I find disgusting, and there are other aspects that I find boring. As a culture, it’s hardly living up to its original ideals. And I get the sense that no one there really cares. People will continue to ride out their personal ambitions and forms of entertainment and continue to live in a self-imposed ignorance about the rest of the world.

As for the boredom, it’s a simple thing. People will have their own lives, they will go to their jobs. I’ll have to find ways of amusing myself in a very predictable society where everything functions by stringent laws and overly polite gestures. All these discrete individuals will go around this way and that and I’ll have no one to really talk to, no one to share anything with. And then I’ll be stuck, tied down and waiting until I can come back.

To put a finer point on it, we should travel to discover something new. There’s nothing new for me about America. In fact it seems very, very old, and increasingly irrelevant. And yet it’s packaged in this arrogant attitude that it’s the best society in the world. Sorry, but I’m just not looking forward to that vibe at all.

I know… this sounds whiny and self-important. But the feeling is there. Maybe it’s that I’ve been away too long. I haven’t been back for a full year.

I’ll adjust. I’ll see the people I miss. I’ll explore the landscape, go to the desert, see the Sierras, have a steak, BBQ with friends. Maybe these are things to get excited about as the time approaches. Regardless, it’ll probably be good for me.