Nothing in Particular | Tragicocomedia

Archive for the ‘Nothing in Particular’ Category

Kim Jong-Un’s Viagra Diplomacy

Posted in Nothing in Particular, Political Whinging on April 23, 2013 | 3 Comments »

People keep asking me what Kim Jong-Un is up to at the moment. What is he hoping to achieve? Does he actually want to start a war? Is he really intending to launch nukes? I’m flattered that my friends and acquaintances think I might have an answer for them, but I don’t exactly have a hotline to Pyongyang and am thus privileged to the same information as everyone else outside of the intelligence services. Having said that, I do have an answer of sorts, which is hardly all that original – it’s all just a lot of posturing.

The recent escalation of rhetoric has certainly been dramatic. The bellicose reminder of the state of war between North and South Korea, tough talking about ballistic and nuclear capability, overzealous reactions to even the smallest slight from the south and, more recently, the statement that foreign embassy officials could no longer consider themselves safe in North Korea – all amounts to an alarming increase of tension, but likely little else. As an official at South Korea’s defence ministry quipped – “barking dogs don’t bite.”

Pyongyang’s recent attacks on the south – the torpedoing of the Cheonan, which left 46 dead, or the shelling of Yeonpyeong Island, both in 2010 – have been by stealth, or come without warning. That doesn’t mean his threats have no substance, but it does suggests that talking and walking are by no means linked, so to speak.

Some years ago a wit described the India / Pakistan nuclear arms race as “Viagra Diplomacy,” a term which applies itself well to the current situation with North Korea. There is something ludicrously phallic about rocket launches, a situation not helped by North Korea’s tendency to suffix its rocket names with the word “Dong.” Take the Taepodong for example, a name which lends itself spectacularly to punning, or the even sillier and counter-intuitive Nodong, which was effectively an adapted Soviet SS1 or “Scud” and, dare I say it, a bit of a flop. Joking aside, there’s no doubt that North Korea has made progress with its ballistic capability and just may have the capacity to mount a nuclear warhead, but the threat to rain down missiles on the United States seems farfetched considering their as yet limited range of roughly 6000 kilometres.

Having said that, North Korea certainly has the capacity to target its immediate neighbours; the southern capital Seoul, at just 25 kilometres south of the border, is within artillery range. There is no doubt that North Korea could inflict terrible carnage if they wished to attack the south. Nuclear, chemical and biological weapons aside, the scale of their conventional forces is staggering. A quick glance at the Wikipedia list of countries by number of military and paramilitary personnel puts North Korea on top, with an active military of roughly 1.1 million, bolstered by an incredible 8 million reservists. The Korean war of 1950-53 cost the lives of two million people, and whilst any modern war would prove a very different beast, there is little doubt that it could also cost millions of lives.

Yet what, one must ask, would be the point? Surely, despite the capacity to inflict untold damage on the south, the North would ultimately be defeated. North Korea would have no allies – China would wash their hands of them and Pyongyang would find itself facing off against a broad alliance led by the United States and supported by the U.N. The north might achieve initial successes, but would surely lose the war, and, apart from the disastrous human, social, environmental and economic consequences of a conflict, losing the war would potentially mark the end of the regime, the end of military domination, and the end of North Korea as a state: the end of Kim Jong-Un. One suspects that nothing other than unconditional surrender would be demanded, especially considering how long the situation has festered and how great the desire to avoid any furtherance of this geopolitical cancer. What might follow is anyone’s guess: re-unification, a long and awkward occupation of the smoking ruins… It would all depend on the nature of the war, which, after an initial bout of shock and awe by both sides, could even be over in a couple of days with an internal coup.

Which brings us back to this important question of what the hell Kim Jong-Un is up to? If war is unlikely, what is the point of all this belligerent rhetoric and rocket-rattling? Surely the most likely explanation is that he wishes to shore up support at home.

Just as George Bush, John Howard and Tony Blair all rhetorically escalated the level of external threat to their respective countries after 9/11 in order to shore up domestic support for their imperial ambitions by creating a clear and present external danger, so it would seem King Jong-Un, perhaps struggling to define himself internally and to assert the legitimacy of his rule, wishes to create an almost hysterical climate of fear. If anything this whole business seems to highlight his insecurity rather than his capability or intent. Ironically the very survival of the regime depends on avoiding conflict, but the state largely defines itself through struggle and conflict.

The real fear is that with tensions so high war might begin by accident rather than design. Miscalculation, misinterpretation… it seems unlikely, but it is by no means impossible. The levels of readiness are such that hell could be unleashed at very short notice – perhaps before clarity prevails. Should a war begin, even by accident, it will be extremely difficult to stop.

There is also the genuine possibility that Kim Jong-Un is something of a nutcase. He is certainly less predictable than his familial predecessors and less well understood, but he must know as surely as anyone else that war would be the end of his regime with all its privileges.

It’s very easy to parody and caricature Kim Jong-Un as a greedy little brat of a despot, and I have to confess I’ve been guilty of such parody myself, yet whilst it might be childish fun to joke about him, it’s somewhat counterproductive. The belief that he is genuinely mad, propagated by the parodies and caricatures, only fuels the paranoia about his intentions.

Yet, as always with humour, there is a great deal of truth in much of it. He likely is a spoilt brat with delusions of grandeur instilled through constant inflation of his talents and charms, drunk on power. He really does come across as the tubby, nerdy gamer kid with a chip on his shoulder. His recent actions remind me of people on Facebook, including myself, who, when lonely or feeling starved of attention, start posting in a more exclamatory and regular manner. His international threats are like bad-tempered tweets – mouthing off at a world he can neither influence nor change because of his own relative impotence, despite having a vast army at his back.

We must not forget how recent his accession to the throne was. Despite great popular efforts to create a new cult of personality around him, there must be pressure to put his own personal stamp on the regime and cement his rule. Perhaps there is internal pressure from within the military himself. Perhaps he fears the ambitions of those who surround him. Perhaps there is fear of popular unrest. Whatever the case, all this rhetoric seems to be more inwardly focussed, despite its outward broadcast.

The real question now is what happens next, and, to be honest, I haven’t got the faintest idea. I suspect things will die down, flare up, die down, flare up, die down, flare up… for the next decade, possibly even longer. Then again, Kim Jong-Un might be dead next week, assassinated by an ambitious general, or dead by deep vein thrombosis for that matter. Whether North Korea will ever come in from the cold is anyone’s guess, but as unsustainable as the current situation appears to be, we should remember just how long it has been sustained – sixty years this very year. It is hardly possible for this feudal Stalinist regime to become more isolated internationally, and anyway, it is isolation and insularity that allows the regime to survive. Rarely have two nations existed in such contrasting states of connectivity as North and South Korea, the latter the most wired state in the world, the former disconnected from everything, including, it seems reality.

Perhaps somehow the internet will work its magic; perhaps starvation will start a revolution; perhaps there really will be coup, or an unexpected Myanmar-style change of heart. In all honesty I think there won’t be a war and nothing will change. Ten years from today, Kim Jong-Un will still be there, fatter than ever, rubbing his wealth in the face of his own people and waving his latest Dongs at the world.

Read Full Post »

In Praise of “Forbrydelsen”, aka “The Killing”

Posted in Nothing in Particular on March 25, 2013 | Leave a Comment »

The following review contains some spoilers…

Last week V and & finished watching the first series of the renowned 2007 Danish crime drama Forbrydelsen, aka The Killing, written by Soren Sveistrup. I’d heard a number of anecdotal reports about what a great show this was from my parents and various others, but hadn’t quite separated its potential stand-out quality from my general dislike of crime dramas. The sheer amount of second-rate CSI-type pap out there has, quite rightly, made me extremely wary of the genre. Indeed, I’ve long been spmewhat disgusted by the pornographic and gratuitous manner in which they titillate their audiences with lurid details of rape and murder; so akin to the base and irresponsible reporting of the commercial news channels and rags we foolishly grant the title of newspapers in Australia.

From the moment we began watching Forbrydelsen, however, it was clear that something very refreshingly different was going on. If there was a spectrum of quality, measured primarily on realism and characterisation, then this show sat roughly eight miles along from the best English crime drama, with its American counterparts so far behind those as to be only detectable by their own implausibly neat forensics techniques. Forbrydelsen, it was clear from the start, was not merely good, it was the shit.

When we first sat down to watch it, we were a little baffled. Wasn’t this show Danish? If so, why did all the names sound so un-Scandinavian? We watched the opening thriller sequence in which a woman is chased through the woods to her impending, yet unseen demise, followed by an introduction to what was no doubt our blonde, good-cop female protagonist, looking strong, capable, quietly determined, fit and utterly in control of her life, out for a morning jog. Then she opened her mouth. Oh dear, this was the American version. Yep, and it showed.

A few peers and seeders later and we plugged in the USB to fire up the Danish version. Within seconds the vast gulf between quality European television and American drama was revealed. After a repeat of the frightening and chilling chase through the woods, we meet our brunette female good-cop protagonist – waking up from a disturbed sleep, tired and worn out, staggering around the house in her pyjamas, checking on her teenage son who is sleeping on the lounge in front of a static-filled television screen. A single mum, we soon meet her Swedish partner, also in his pyjamas, also waking up tired and worn out, stumbling through the dark amidst the boxes of her and her son’s belongings, all packed and ready to move to Sweden for a new life. Our protagonist, Sarah Lund (Sofie Gråbøl) smiles warmly when reassured that everything about the move will be ok, but we can see in her relief the fear and vulnerability that she carries with her; her anxiety and tension, the complexity and disarray of her domestic circumstances. None of it is glamorous, none of what we see establishes her as anything other than a real person who, like everybody else out there, has to deal with the banal and quotidian demands of real life.

We paused a moment here and let out a collective sigh of relief. Wow, how much more engaging and promising the original version seemed. Even after just four minutes of viewing the American remake, it was clear that it was going to be Forbrydelsen lite, the airbrushed, sanitised version in which its audience would not be challenged to accept that the flaws of the protagonist were not big ticket things like, for example, Carrie Mathison’s bipolar disorder in Homeland or the utterly contrived and unconvincing OCD of Hannah Horvath in the disappointing second half of Girls season 2, so clearly tacked on for want of a decent plotline. Instead, in Forbrydelsen, we were going to be treated to everyday pressures.

I should digress at this point to say that I found Homeland and Girls to be excellent, high quality television. Both of these shows also have great characterisation and, particularly in the case of the latter, elements of gritty realism. Yet whereas the former does this within an overtly sensational story in an airbrushed, suburban and upper-echelon America and the latter does so in an occasionally all too smug, convenient and self-congratulatory potpourri of zeitgeist, Forbrydelsen had the balls to develop its characters and story with the slow and almost painfully intimate realism that fans of quality Scandinavian cinema, drama and lit will recognise. Like a good Lukas Moodysson film or a Knut Hamsun novel, Forbrydelsen, made an epic not just of the crime investigation itself, but of the domestic turmoil that surrounds such a shocking crime and its toe-treading, home-invading investigative process.

For the uninitiated, here is a juicy detail about this show. There are twenty, one-hour episodes to cover ONE CRIME. I can’t pretend to have the numbers, but within that roughly twenty hours there must be almost two hours total spent in the homely kitchen of the devastated family whose daughter, Nanna Birk Larsen, was the victim. Their tears are real, their emotions utterly genuine, the detail of their experience is deliciously heart-breaking.

There is no one thing which makes this show so great. It is the writing, the direction, the acting, the music, the muted colours and dull uniformity of Copenhagen in November. The performances throughout are almost universally excellent. No one character is two-dimensional; all have their flaws, conflicts, quirks and idiosyncrasies, none of which seem cheaply contrived or tacked on to create some shallow show of complexity. These characters are simply convincingly real and complex, and not in the way that characters have complexity, but in the way that real people do:

Troels Hartmann, the mayoral candidate, who soon falls under suspicion, bearing up under the weight of hiding his loss and depression, is an alluring mix of ambition and self-doubt; of integrity and political game-playing.

Jan Meyer, Lund’s mercurial partner, whose initial rough edge is ultimately contrasted with the convincing softness of a father desperate to hold down a job and provide for his family.

Pernille, the mother of the victim, whose face is always grippingly pregnant with withheld or unleashed emotion, the longing for revenge or satisfaction, the need for answers, juggling her husband Theiss’ flaws, her children’s needs, the pressures on their removal business and her family’s apparent duplicity.

And of course the very excellent Sarah Lund, our struggling protagonist, whose decision to stay in Copenhagen until the case is solved puts immense pressure on her family and relationship, and whose determination and stubbornness constantly rub against those with whom she works and is trying to help. The hardness of her character is extraordinary and constantly compelling. Her rough edges, her mistakes, her clever instincts, her obsessive nature, all emerge as the convincing traits of a plausible character.

In Forbrydelsen, even the cast of supporting characters is excellent. Take, for example, the Mayor of Copenhagen, Bremer, whose smug sniping and cutting quips leave the audience constantly wondering what lies behind the mask of bemused confidence. Lund’s long-suffering mother, concerned and interfering, at times bitchy and cruel, at times deserving of great sympathy on account of her daughter’s thoughtless impositions. The list goes on, but the conclusions are the same throughout. With no exceptions that come to mind, these are masterful performances by skilled and naturalistic actors working with clever, plausible dialogue.

The show is certainly not without flaws. There are holes and apparent inconsistencies in the story that are not all satisfyingly wrapped up. Why did Holck, an otherwise seemingly well-adjusted career politician commit such serious crimes to hide his potential exposure for a crime that was far less serious? What exactly was going on between Troels Hartmann’s advisor Rie Skovgaard and the Mayor’s advisor? What actually was the connection between the murder of Nanna Birk Larsen and the other girl murdered 15 years earlier? Would Troels’ campaign leader Morten really go to the lengths he did to cover up what he thought was Troels’ role in the murder? I was left with a lot of questions about which I am still thinking, questions that no amount of googling has managed to satisfy, other than to confirm that others have wondered the same things as I have. Yet, having said that, the fact that I am still thinking about this show and still feel gripped by its story, despite having reached the end of it, says bucketloads about its sheer excellence. I miss the characters, I miss the setting, I miss the details of the investigation, none of which can really be made up for by the second season which may be as excellent – I have yet to watch it – but will follow a different crime with a different cast of support characters, give or take the ones around whom Sarah’s life closely gravitates.

Enough said. If you’ve not seen it and enjoy watching a show that cooks slowly without ever being boring, then I can’t recommend it highly enough. Fill the fridge, keep the phone handy to call in sick, drug the kids, close the curtains and brace yourself for a serious case of “just one more episode” syndrome. It really is that good.

Read Full Post »

See you later, Pontificator

Posted in Nothing in Particular, Political Whinging on March 1, 2013 | Leave a Comment »

So, it’s goodbye to Eggs, aka, Pope Benedict XVI. I can’t say I’ll miss him a whole lot, but that’s not surprising considering I’m an atheist with a strong dislike for religion and unscientific “belief” in all its forms. In the aftermath of his rather unexpected decision to resign, we’ve been subjected to the usual preliminary obituaries of his papacy, with all manner of people voicing their opinions about whether he was successful or otherwise. Today was his last day in office and now we have the rare and beautiful breathing space of an interregnum or interpontificatus (?) as it were, during which time the papacy can choose the next man to annoy and frustrate the hell out of us secular non-believers.

I have a strange relationship to the papacy, it must be said. Having done a PhD in early medieval Italian history and had a long obsession with the late Roman Empire and the cultural and religious transformation that took place during that period, I have long been fascinated by this ancient institution. It is worth remembering that Julius Caesar himself once held the title of Pontifex Maximus, the chief priest of Rome, a position that came exclusively to be held by Christians in the fourth century once the Empire had made Christianity its official religion. The transition was not quite as smooth as this, but I’m not about to go into that sort of detail. Even in Caesar’s time, the position of Pontifex Maximus was already centuries old, which does lend the Papacy a certain cred for sustaining such an ancient institution.

As an unabashed fan of Roman civilization, culture and law, with apologies for the slavery and warmongering, I found a certain sympathy with the popes of Late Antiquity. With the slow decline and ultimate collapse of the Western Empire (a process by which they practically delegated themselves out of existence) the popes came to the forefront of Roman affairs, playing an increasingly important role in protecting Roman interests. People Leo I “The Great” even went so far as to confront Attila the Hun when he invaded Italy in AD 452 and persuaded him to turn back.

During the sixth century, after the devastating reconquest of Italy by the Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian (527-565), the papacy became the major player in the organisation and defence of the much reduced city of Rome. Presiding over the depopulated, overgrown wreck of the once-great city, with only one of ten aqueducts still functional, the popes did their best to mitigate the chaos that ensued shortly after the reconquest when the Lombards invaded to find inadequate resistance and easy plunder in the derelict metropolises of the Italian peninsula.

Perhaps the most outstanding figure of this age was Pope Gregory I, also “The Great” (c. 540 – 12 March 604) who held the position from AD 590 until his death in 604. Gregory, a Roman aristocrat with an at times almost desperate nostalgia for the long-passed glories of Roman dominion over western Europe, lamented the moribund state of present affairs and did his best to make a difference. Gregory attempted to re-energise the Church’s missionary work and to re-establish closer contact with Catholic bishops in Visigothic Spain and Frankish Gaul. He is most famous for sending Augustine of Canterbury to spread the word amongst the pagan Anglo-Saxons, who had invaded formerly Roman and Christian Britain in the 5th century. The mission was successful, and it was from England that missionaries later set out for the Netherlands and Germany. The culture of education and learning promoted by the church during this period, helped significantly to spread literacy and preserve much of the dwindling knowledge accumulated during the heights of Roman power and civilization. On that score, props.

During the seventh and eighth centuries, the Papacy worked hard to shore up the pockets of territory it held in Italy, along with those still directly governed by representatives of the Eastern Roman Empire – based at Ravenna – against the further incursions of the Lombards who had established themselves throughout Italy. It also found itself increasingly at odds with and slowly divorced itself from the policies and administrative demands of the Eastern Empire. Indeed, there was a most curious instance in 663, during the time of Pope Vitalian (657-72) when Emperor Constans II (641-68) actually visited Rome from Constantinople, allegedly considering moving his court there in the wake of a string of Islamic conquests of Roman territory in the Middle East and North Africa. In the end he stayed a mere twelve days, during which time he stripped the city’s churches of their valuables, including the gold gilding from the roof of the Pantheon. It’s hardly necessary to say that this did not leave a good impression.

When, in 726, the Emperor Leo III (717-741) decreed a new policy of Iconoclasm, banning the veneration of images, he faced revolts not only in Greece, but in the Italian territories as well. The defiant attitudes of Popes Gregory II and III soured relations with the Eastern Empire even further. Gregory II’s decision to excommunicate iconoclasts in Italy resulted in Leo’s retaliation by which he, on paper, transferred the provinces of southern Italy and Illyricum to the Patriarch of Constantinople. He further attempted to put down an armed outbreak in the Exarchate of Ravenna by sending a large fleet, but its destruction in a storm marked not only the failure of his attempts to bring Italy to heel, but also marked the final separation of the Italian territories from the Eastern Empire. From this period onwards, the destiny of all Italian territories was tied to that of the Papacy.

Likely the most significant figure of this period, however, was Pope Steven II (752-757) who first engineered an alliance with the Franks to protect against the constant Lombard threat. With the fall of Ravenna in 751, the Lombards began to look to Rome to complete their conquest of Italy. Not only did Stephen II prove himself extremely agile in negotiating with the Lombards and preventing further incursions, but he went so far as to travel to Paris to persuade the Franks, under Pepin the Short (752-768), to cross the alps in 756 and chastise the pesky Lombards in a manner they weren’t likely to forget in a hurry. The Franks forced the Lombards to surrender their recent conquests and guaranteed the lands between Rome and Ravenna should remain under the rule of the Duchy of Rome, now very much an independent entity.

It wasn’t, however, until 774, during the papacy of Adrian I, that the Lombard problem was solved once and for all. Distrustful of the intentions of the Lombards, Adrian appealed first to the eastern emperor, who was unable or unwilling to assist, and then to the Frankish King Charlemagne (768-814). Charlemagne saw it as a great opportunity both to obtain the support and legitimacy offered by the papacy, expand his territories into Italy, and get rid of the nuisance that was the Lombards once and for all. He did all of this and more of course, which is why his name is so well known into the present.

From here on in the fortunes of the Papacy are far too complex and lengthy to narrate, suffice to say that towards the end of the ninth century, a period of decline set in which resulted in the period between 904 and 964 being referred to as a saeculum obscurum, or dark age. One scholar went so far as to refer to the Papacy of the 10th century as the “pornocracy,” so corrupt and seedy were its affairs.

So, in a nutshell, the early medieval period in Italy saw some rather extraordinary characters fill the role of pope, some of whom had very interesting names. Consider the following monickers:

Hilarius I, 461-468

Simplicius, 468-483

Gelasius, 492-496

Symmachus, 498-514

Hormisdas, 514-523

Agapetus I, 535-536

Pelagius I, 556-561

Sabinian, 604-606

Adeodatus, 615-618

Severinus, 638-640

Donus, 676-678

Agatho, 678-681

Conon, 686-687

Sisinnius, 15 January, 708- 4 February, 708

And the list goes on. All we get these days is boring old John Paul and Benedict. Indeed, I’m desperately hoping the new Pope will have a peculiar fascination with one of these early figures and take on a name not spoken for centuries. How great would it be to have Hormisdas II giving the Christmas homilies instead of the likely inevitable John Paul III or some equally dull name?

Not all of the Popes during this period were Italian either. Some came from Syria, Palestine, Constantinople. Perhaps, should another non-Italian Pope don the mantle and pick up the sceptre or whatever they get up to, we might see a more creative choice of name.

Speaking of the future, one cannot help but keep one eye on the past. It seems ironic, considering how many popes have proven so divisive throughout history, that the title “Pontifex” has a curious metaphorical meaning. It literally means bridge-builder, on account of the fact that the position originally also included these duties. It is fair to say that in more recent years the papacy has attempted to build bridges between itself and other religions, or those who have felt themselves victimised, hurt or excluded by its policies. Of course, it moves with the pace of continental drift, although the shake up of Vatican II was, historically speaking, the earthquake that broke the Richter Scale.

Either way, I don’t hold much hope of any significant change taking place and, on this front, without wishing to sound illiberal or reactionary, I’m not entirely sure I want the Catholic Church to change at all. Not because I support their backward policies on abortion, contraception and er, believing in God etc, but precisely because I want them NOT to be relevant to the modern world. These sorry bastards have persecuted people throughout history, burning them at the stake, sending them to prison, exile, condemning the cultures and religions of whole peoples as worthless pagan shite and brutally enforcing their own dogma, how dare they turn around and say, oh, perhaps we were wrong about that? They should stand by all their sorry and misguided beliefs, especially where people have died opposing them, and be shown up for the uselessly effete bunch of medieval paedophile-protecting snobs they actually are. My fascination with the survival of an ancient Roman institution does not necessarily mean I wish to accommodate its continuation into the future.

One thing I will say about the Pope, which I do consider to be a sort of positive, is that despite the relative hypocrisy of the institution’s history, at least he regularly goes around preaching peace in the world these days. That at least, is a nice thing, and I’ve often wondered if present tensions between “the West” and Islam wouldn’t be tempered by the presence of a similar central figure preaching peace to Muslims the world over. Not to suggest that Islam is intrinsically warlike or even an aggressor, but if such a message were broadcast by a figure of equal authority who garnered an equal degree of respect and deference, then perhaps there would be a few less instances of people resorting to violence. Of course, it is important to note that considering the degree of hostility to Islam offered by Israel, the USA and various other nations including my own, Australia, the anger is justified. But still, non-violence is always preferable and allows one to retain the moral high ground. Controversial as it might sound, and in lieu of people just quitting religion altogether, an Islamic Pope might not be such a bad thing.

So, in brief conclusion, bring on Pope Hormisdas II, I say, and may you oversee a rapid decline in membership and faith in your antiquated institution.

Read Full Post »

Mars Rovers: Spirit and Opportunity

Posted in Environment & Science, Nothing in Particular on July 20, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

The two greatest heroes of my adult life are not people, but machines: the twin Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity. This apparent idolatry might seem almost fundamentally misanthropic or oddly fetishist, yet rather it is born of a tendency to personify and anthropomorphise everything. David Attenborough remains firmly in place as my favourite human, alongside several mentors and acquaintances from whom I’ve had the good fortune to draw inspiration and wisdom. Yet no one, nor anything for that matter, in recent memory, has achieved the level of admiration I have developed for the two Mars rovers.

The rovers were of identical design and carried a range of instruments with which to carry out geological exploration: Panoramic cameras, a Thermal Emission Spectrometer for identifying and closely examining rock types and profiling the temperature of the Martian atmosphere, a so-calledMössbauer Spectrometer for closer investigation of rock mineralogy, an Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer for analysis of the elements that make up rocks and soils, magnets for collecting dust particles, a microscopic imager for high-resolution imaging of rocks and soils, and a Rock Abrasion Tool for exposing fresh material beneath the rock and dust. Despite their six-wheeled design, the rovers were, in effect, made to mimic a human geologist, with the panoramic camera mounted on a 1.5 metre-high mast and a robotic arm which replicated the movement of a human elbow and wrist. The microscopic camera and rock abrasion tool in the rovers’ “fist” were designed to replicate the work of the geologist’s magnifying glass and hammer. With these sophisticated tools, it was hoped that the two rovers would be able to provide sufficient evidence to support the wet-Mars theory.

The two missions were launched on June 10 and July 7, 2003 and successfully landed on Mars on January 3 and January 24, 2004. The principal goal of both missions was to search for evidence of water, or a history thereof, and the rovers were sent to two different locations on opposite sides of Mars: Spirit to the Gusev Crater – a possible ancient lake-bed, roughly 14 degrees south of the Martian equator, into which the Ma’adim Vallis channel system drains, and Opportunity to the Meridiani Planum – a plain just two degrees south of the equator in the westernmost portion of Terra Meridiani, which hosts a rare occurrence of gray crystalline hematite. Hematite is usually found in hot springs or pools of water on Earth, whilst the apparent channels at Gusev closely resemble natural water courses on Earth. Hence both sites held promise of answering the question as to whether or not the surface of Mars was once partly covered with liquid water, which was strongly believed to be the case.

It is a difficult enough job landing a probe successfully on Mars – as several expensive failures have proven – let alone communicating with and driving a rover on the surface. The first successful landings on Mars were the two Viking missions of 1975, which arrived in 1976.

Both missions consisted of orbiting probes and landers, which were highly successful in providing detailed images and information about the surface of Mars, paving the way for future missions. Both landers were not mobile; they were designed to act, in effect, as stationary laboratories, testing soil samples for evidence of microbial life or organic compounds. The Viking 1 and 2 landers operated for six years and three months, and three years and seven months respectively, an extraordinary achievement in itself.

Despite this lengthy operation time, neither lander was able to discover any biosignatures that might suggest life was present or had previously existed on Mars.

Ultimately the missions only ended when the landers and orbiters failed in various ways, one by one. Whilst Viking 2’s battery failed in 1980, the tragic death of Viking 2 on November 13, 1982, was due to human error – during a software upgrade the antenna was accidentally retracted, permanently shutting off communication and terminating the mission.

It was not until 1997 that another probe successfully landed on the surface of Mars: the Pathfinder mission, which also consisted of an orbiter and lander. The major difference with the Pathfinder mission was the introduction of a mobile, roving lander -Mars Sojourner. Sojourner was just a little guy – a mere 65cm by 48cm, with a height of 30cm – it weighed in at just over ten kilograms. Operating in the Ares Vallis “flood plain”, one of the rockiest places on Mars, roughly nineteen degrees north of the equator, Sojourner’s rock analysis was able to confirm a history of volcanic activity on Mars, along with identifying erosion patterns consistent with wind and water erosion.

The mission was designed in large part as a proof of concept – that rover missions could be sent to Mars successfully for a fraction of the cost of the vastly expensive Viking missions, and to test new technologies, particularly the means by which craft were landed on other planets. Pathfinder used an innovative airbag system and effectively bounced along the surface like a giant ball.

The Pathfinder mission was considered a resounding success on all fronts – in cost-effectiveness, research significance and mission duration, which was extended two months beyond its initial target of just one month. During a mission of 83 sols (1 sol = 1 Martian day, approximately 24 hours, 39 minutes) Sojourner travelled a total of roughly 100 metres, never venturing more than 12 metres from its base-station. We thus have many lovely images of Sojourner at work on Mars photographed from its base station, a rare treat for a rover mission.

Without Pathfinder’s pioneering efforts, the successful landing of Nasa’s Spirit and Opportunity probes might not have been so easily achieved. Not to suggest for a second that it is ever easy to land a probe on another planet.

There is much more that could be said about human exploration of Mars by proxy – the Mars Voyager missions, the failed Soviet attempts to land a rover in the 1970s, the Mars Global Surveyor, the more recent Phoenix mission which landed in the northern polar region and after a successful operation, froze to death during the bitter winter, but that would be to stray too far from the base-station, as it were, and require far too many words.

Returning to the topic at hand, I’d first like to mention the dedicated teams of men and women behind Nasa’s Mars Exploration Rover Missions. From the mission designers to the people who control and monitor the activity of the rovers, to the scientists who examine the data returned by the probes, many thousands of hours of hard graft have gone into this project. Not only have the teams at Nasa worked long and gruelling hours, those controlling and monitoring the rovers have been forced to operate on Martian time – a 24 hour, 39 minute and 35 second day, sometimes for months on end. Team members were issued with special watches and expected to adjust their schedule to stay in alignment with Martian time – meaning roughly forty minutes of jet-lag every day! The watches were also fitted with accelerometers as part of a study into the effects of such a time-cycle on the human body and mind. This is no mean feat, especially when we consider that initially the mission was due to run for three months in total and yet, it is still going – eight years (!) after the rovers first landed on Mars.

It is for this reason that I have become so deeply attached to these brave little rovers, and, it must be said, to those who have kept them running through all this time. Just recently, in June 2012, Opportunity, after waking from a semi-sleep during the Martian winter, provided us with a stunning panorama of the location at which it stopped to rest back in January.

Opportunity is not only still alive, but it is doing very well in a cold world of rock, sand and fine dust. With temperatures ranging from between -5 to -87 degrees Celsius, Opportunity has survived not only freezing conditions, but also dust storms and getting bogged in a sand dune.

During the last eight years, Opportunity, which was designed to travel up to forty metres a day for a total odometry of roughly 1 kilometre, has travelled a distance of just over thirty-five kilometres. Opportunity landed, by chance, in an impact crater dubbed “Eagle” in an otherwise flat plain. On account of its airbag-aided bouncy landing, the mission controllers could hardly predict exactly where either probe would land, and the landing in Eagle was referred to humourously as a hole-in-one. It also proved to be of immense scientific interest, particularly a sedimentary outcropping dubbed El Capitan. Despite being unable to determine whether or not the layers of sediment were deposited by volcanic ash, wind or water, the discovery of the mineral Jarosite, containing an abundance of hydroxide ions, indicated it had formed in water. When Opportunity dug a trench and exposed more of the rock, it uncovered small hematite spheres, nicknamed blueberries, which are strongly believed to have formed in water. Already the mission was proving a resounding success.

Leaving the Eagle Crater, Opportunity travelled to another crater, Endurance, which it investigated between June and December 2004, methodically working its way into and around the crater.

When it moved on, Opportunity passed the some of the debris from its own heatshield, and, in an unexpectedly fortunate discovery, an intact meteorite, now known as Heat Shield Rock, was discovered nearby. This proved to be the first meteorite identified on another planet.

Shortly afterwards, as it drove towards the so-called Erebus Crater, Opportunity became perilously stuck in the sand – a problem that took six weeks to solve via Earth-based simulations, which were then successfully implemented.

Erebus Crater was a large shallow, partially buried crater, with a significant number of rocky outcrops to explore. Of course, the mission of the rovers was not merely to study the geology of the planet, but whilst at Erebus, Opportunity also photographed a transit of Mars’ moon Phobos across the face of the sun.

In September 2006, Opportunity arrived at the even more spectacular Victoria Crater. It explored the rim of the crater in detail, before returning to its original arrival point, Duck Bay. The wonderful panoramic views of the crater are some of the most evocative ever to come from the surface of another planet.

The rippled sand at the centre of the crater also makes a very alluring photographic subject.

In June of that year, Opportunity entered the crater where it remained until August 2008, conducting various analyses of the rocks and soil.

Without wishing to go into too much further detail about Opportunity’s journey across the surface of Mars, it will suffice to say that over the following years Opportunity made several stops at various other craters, including Conception, Intrepid and Santa Maria.

Ultimately, Opportunity’s destination was the much larger Endeavour Crater – no less than 23 kilometres wide – which it reached in August 2011. After spending another freezing winter sitting on the crater’s rim, Opportunity is now back in operation, doing what it does best – sophisticated geological investigation.

Of course, Opportunity has not merely been cruising about the surface taking photographs of the Martian landscape. During its travels the roverhas made many important observations and discoveries which have greatly expanded our understanding of the red planet. Principal among these were the identification of spherules – concretions which form in water, vugs – voids in rocks left by water erosion, and sulfates, which on Earth generally form when standing water evaporates. Whilst the data has been rigorously subjected to all alternative hypotheses, the nature and context of the evidence convincingly suggests the prior presence of liquid water on the surface of Mars. So much so, that this is no longer in dispute. We cannot as yet prove that there was once life on Mars, or that it may indeed continue to exist there in some form, yet we can now confidently say that Mars was once wet, and consequently, would have provided almost ideal conditions for life to emerge.

Opportunity has so far performed well beyond all expectations and provided vast amounts of data about the nature of Mars. The sheer length of the mission, and the incredible utility of having a working, mobile rover on the surface of Mars, means that more discoveries are inevitable. The Nasa website for the missions contains archives of the raw photographic images taken by both Opportunity and Spirit, along with logs of the rovers’ progress for each day of the mission, should anyone wish for more detail about the progress of the rovers. Sadly, however, whilst Opportunity continues to provide valuable data and sustain a proxy human presence on Mars, the same cannot be said of its twin, Spirit.

The Spirit rover had a rather more difficult life on Mars from the very beginning. On January 21, a mere eighteen days after its arrival, Spirit suffered a crippling problem with its flash memory that threatened to end the rover’s mission prematurely. The rover seemed to be stuck in an endless reboot loop and was not responding as it should. It was not until the 3^rd of February that mission controllers identified the problem as a file-system error and remotely reformatted the entire flash memory system, allowing Spirit to resume its mission.

To make matters more difficult, the Gusev crater site where Spirit landed, turned out not to be a sedimentary lakebed after all, but rather a plain of volcanic material. Spirit was sent as fast as possible across the plains to the so-called Columbia Hills, which were believed to be geologically more ancient.

Spirit made numerous pitstops en route, perhaps most notably at the so-called Humphrey Rock, a volcanic rock which appeared to show evidence of liquid water flow in its formation.

Little of interest was found at various other craters which Spirit passed, and eventually, after 129 Sols, Spirit finally clambered up the slopes of the Columbia Hills. Over the following two years, Spirit explored these hills– places with names such as Husband Hill, Cumberland Ridge, Larry’s Lookout, Tennessee Valley, Home Plate, McCool Hill, Low Ridge Haven and so on.

In 2006, Spirit finally came down from the hills to explore an area known as Home Plate, where it was to remain for the rest of its working life. Home Plate turned out to be a large “explosive” volanic deposit, surrounded by basalt which is believed to have exploded upon contact with water. The presence of salty water seemed confirmed by the high concentration of chloride ions in the surrounding rocks.

Throughout this time, Spirit encountered more difficult conditions and mechanical problems than Opportunity. One of Spirit’s front wheels had long been playing up, and on March 16, 2006, the wheel stopped working altogether. Spirit attempted to crawl backwards, dragging its wheel, to the north face of McCool Hill, where it was to spend the Martian winter, yet was unable to manage the ascent and was instead sent to winter in Low Ridge Haven.

The broken wheel on Spirit laterturned out to be a blessing of sorts, when its dragging through the soil uncovered a subsurface layer of silica rich dust in December 2007.

The resulting analysis suggested the silica was likely produced in a hot-spring environment, again suggestive of a water-rich history.

The site near the Gusev Crater was especially dusty and throughout its mission, Spirit’s solar arrays faced increasingly reduced capacity on account of the dust coating.

In 2007 dust storms threatened to shut Spirit down altogether, reducing the production capacity of its solar panels from 700 watt-hours per day to a mere 128, below the minimum threshold for sustaining battery charge to power the rover’s heaters.

To avoid risk of the rover shutting down completely, Spirit was kept in temporary hibernation on its lowest possible power setting. For two weeks between November 29 and December 13, 2008, on account of the so-called Solar Conjunction – when the sun is between Earth and Mars –no communication was possible with either rover.

Even when Spirit revived from its troubled hibernation, its solar arrays still struggled to produce sufficient power. It was not until February 2009, when a fortunate wind cleaned some of the dust off Spirit’s panels, increasing its energy production to roughly 240 watts per day, that the rover seemed ready to reach full exploration capacity once again. Unfortunately, however, on the first of May 2009, Spirit became stuck in soft soil and proved unable to free itself. With the failure of another wheel, the engineers and controllers were unable to extract Spirit from its location after numerous attempts to do so, via various simulations and manoeuvres. Eventually the rover’s purpose had to be redefined as a stationary research platform, but in truth, Spirit’s run had come to an end. The last communication was on March 22, 2010, the 2210^th day of the mission. The cold, it appears, was the ultimate culprit. In previous winters, Spirit had been able to park itself on a sun-facing slope, allowing it to winter in temperatures averaging -40. Stuck out on the plains, however, Spirit endured temperatures of closer to -55 Celsius – more than its reduced energy production could cope with.

Many attempts were made to regain contact with Spirit, and it was not until May 2011 that the mission was officially declared over. The final entry for Spirit’s log on the Nasa website reads as follows:

SPIRIT UPDATE: Spirit Remains Silent at Troy - sols 2621-2627, May 18-24, 2011:

More than 1,300 commands were radiated to Spirit as part of the recovery effort in an attempt to elicit a response from the rover. No communication has been received from Spirit since Sol 2210 (March 22, 2010). The project concluded the Spirit recovery efforts on May 25, 2011. The remaining, pre-sequenced ultra-high frequency (UHF) relay passes scheduled for Spirit on board the Odyssey orbiter will complete on June 8, 2011. Total odometry is unchanged at 7,730.50 meters (4.80 miles).

Despite its incredible successes and the unimaginable extension of its mission, the loss of Spirit was a great disappointment for the mission controllers. Once it had become clear how well the rovers were performing on Mars, Nasa had made the decision to drive them until they broke down, and this was certainly the fate of Spirit. When the mission was finally abandoned, Mars Exploration Rover Project Manager John Callas, sent a letter to his team, both celebrating and farewelling the great success of the tough little rover. An abridged version follows:

Dear Team,

Last night, just after midnight, the last recovery command was sent to Spirit. It would be an understatement to say that this was a significant moment. Since the last communication from Spirit on March 22, 2010 (Sol 2210), as she entered her fourth Martian winter, nothing has been heard from her. There is a continued silence from the Gusev site on Mars.

Importantly, it is not how long the rover lasted, but how much exploration and discovery Spirit has done.

Each winter was hard for Spirit. But with ever-accumulating dust and the failed wheel that limited the maximum achievable slope, Spirit had no options for surviving the looming fourth winter. So we made a hard push toward some high-value science to the south. But the first path there, up onto Home Plate, was not passable. So we went for Plan B, around to the northeast of Home Plate. That too was not passable and the clock was ticking. We were left with our last choice, the longest and most risky, to head around Home Plate to the west.

It was along this path that Spirit, with her degraded 5-wheel driving, broke through an unseen hazard and became embedded in unconsolidated fine material that trapped the rover. Even this unfortunate event turned into another exciting scientific discovery. We conducted a very ambitious extrication effort, but the extrication on Mars ran out of time with the fourth winter and was further complicated by another wheel failure.

With no favorable tilt and more dust on the arrays, Spirit likely ran out of energy and succumbed to the cold temperatures during the fourth winter. There was a plausible expectation that the rover might survive the cold and wake up in the spring, but a lack of response from the rover after more than 1,200 recovery commands were sent to rouse her indicates that Spirit will sleep forever.

But let’s remember the adventure we have had. Spirit has climbed mountains, survived rover-killing dust storms, rode out three cold, dark winters and made some of the most spectacular discoveries on Mars. She has told us that Mars was once like Earth. There was water and hot springs, the conditions that could have supported life. She has given us a foundation to further explore the Red Planet and to understand ourselves and our place in the universe.

But in addition to all the scientific discoveries Spirit has given us in her long, productive rover life, she has also given us a great intangible. Mars is no longer a strange, distant and unknown place. Mars is now our neighborhood. And we all go to work on Mars every day. Thank you, Spirit. Well done, little rover.

And to all of you, well done, too.

Sincerely,
John

Indeed, to all of those people who made this possible, well done. I rank this among the greatest of human achievements. Not merely landing a robotic vehicle on an inhospitable planet thousands of kilometers from the Earth, but successfully exploring the surface of said planet for eights years ongoing, is truly incredible.

People may well wonder what the point of all this is and whether or not we can justify the cost of extra-planetary exploration. I would argue that the question of whether or not life exists on other planets, whether or not its genesis has occurred independently on other worlds and is, perhaps, endemic to the universe, is worth answering. If not merely for the reassurance that the universe might be teeming with life, then also as a means of addressing long-standing religious and philosophical understandings of the origins of life and its uniqueness. This a fundamental question that lies at the heart of human enquiry, and yet such exploration is by no means merely for philosophical purposes. There are also many practical reasons for exploring other planets, particularly one which has had a water-rich past, and yet appears now to be as dry as a bone. Where did Mars’ water go, and was it the result of catastrophic climate change, or the result of the solar wind’s stripping away the atmosphere once Mars’ magnetic field had weakened?

The cost of these missions is negligible when cast against the vast spending on military budgets the world over, and, it must be said, when compared to the cost of putting people in space. There have long been advocates of abandoning attempts to maintain the international space station, or put people back into orbit or on the moon. Do we really need to go ourselves when we can send probes there for a fraction of the cost and risk? Even were it only for the sake of satisfying our insatiable curiosity to know what is out there, the exploration of our solar system and the attempts to answer fundamental questions about our own origins and future via planetary geological survey are worth conducting. Ultimately, it will become a target of economic exploration – indeed, recently, several start-ups have begun to raise capital for near-earth asteroid mining. If we can pull the resources we need from space efficiently, where they exist in an unimaginable abundance, then it would greatly relax pressures on our own planet to dig up and destroy valuable ecosystems.

If you have not already done so, I strongly recommend logging into Google Earth and, using the drop down menu at the top, switching from Earth to Mars. Google Mars is a fantastic tool for exploring the surface of the red planet and learning more about its geology and geography. Mars might be just over half the size of Earth, yet it holds the largest mountain in the known solar system – Olympos Mons, which rises to a height of just under 22,000 metres – Everest clocks 8853. It also has one of the largest known canyon systems – Valles Marineris – which is 4,000 km long, 200 km wide and up to 7 km deep. The Grand Canyon, by comparison, would be a mere tributary. Simply searching for Spirit or Opportunity will take you to their landing sites, from which their journeys might be followed. The panoramic photographs are well worth delving into.

There are further missions planned to Mars, though recent budget constraints have also seen various mission abandoned. This year, on August 5, in what may prove to be the last touchdown for a while, Nasa will attempt to land its latest rover dubbed Curiosity or the Mars Science Laboratory. This will be the largest rover ever sent to Mars – weighing in one tonne and roughly the size of an SUV – and it is hoped that it too might perform far beyond its initial mission plan.

I will be keeping my fingers crossed that all goes well and hoping for an early birthday present of some magnificent new images from the surface of the planet.

So, enough said! Long live Spirit and Opportunity! - Two of the most incredible machines ever built and a testament to the brilliance of humans when they work tirelessly in pursuit of answers to the eternal questions of life, the universe and everything. Hear hear!

Read Full Post »

Washing Instructions

Posted in Memoir, Nothing in Particular, The Odyssey of Life on June 25, 2012 | 2 Comments »

I put the shirt back on the rack and gave it a last look of farewell. It was a tad loose around the middle and, being very picky about the cut and fit of a shirt, it hadn’t quite made the grade. Still, it was a Diesel shirt with a nice collar and cuffs and an arrangement of blue and maroon stripes on white which I rather liked. I decided to let it go.

I looked at the other shirt I was still holding. It was a perfectly respectable, blue, white and black striped business shirt – ideal for day to day use when teaching – the sort of boring, unadventurous, yet reassuringly generic shirt that allowed me to remain both anonymous and blandly appealing.

For years I’ve been trying to blend back into the modern world, after a long Indian summer of youth in which I rejected everything mainstream and uniform.

When, now more than a decade ago, it dawned on me just how unindividual self-professed individuals were – who proved, more often than not, to be far more image conscious than the cattle they derided – I came to understand that anonymity was, in everyday life, a blessing.

I put the second shirt back on the rack. After all, it was practically identical to another one I had at home, if slightly less attractive in its colouring and thickness of stripe. It did fit me perfectly, however – so well that my girlfriend, V, who was busily prowling through Vinnies with me, had remarked at its figure-hugging qualities when I emerged from the change rooms. I had gone in there with five shirts, hoping no one would be officious about the three-items only rule. The other three shirts occupied the same end of the spectrum as the two I’d ultimately selected, then rejected, and consequently they were now all reunited on the colour-coded rack.

I lingered a moment, asking myself once more whether I wanted these two shirts. Second hand, the two were a mere thirty dollars, yet without any urgent need, the purchase seemed frivolous unless I was utterly sold on the style and cut.

Vinnies, it is worth mentioning, is a chain of charity stores who recently rebranded themselves from St Vincent De Paul. It is also one of the greatest places to shop in the known universe. There are stores everywhere in Sydney and around Australia and their range of offerings is quite formidable. Some of the larger places do furniture, household goods and kitchenware, though many only have room for clothing, books, CDs, records and the like. What makes Vinnies so attractive is the sheer amount of stuff they sell. Inevitably, anything cool and retro gets picked out pretty swiftly by hipsters, nostalgics and various other subaltern fashionistas, but there is still plenty to choose from and every so often one gets extremely lucky.

Vinnies is especially good for business shirts, trousers and suit jackets. There are quite simply so many thousands of business shirts worn and tossed aside in the world that the average Vinnies store will have upwards of three or four-hundred to choose from. Many are at the extremes of size, and many are so awfully tasteless as to garner no consideration whatsoever. Yet somewhere in that horde there is usually a very fine garment or two waiting to be snapped up. One of my favourite places to shop is the Paddington store on Oxford Street. Owing to the very wealthy and decadent nature of the locals, this outlet regularly has high quality items on its racks. I recently purchased a fine blue and white striped Van Heusen business shirt – now a teaching staple – for a mere twelve dollars. When I got it home I noticed that it had a recent dry-cleaning tag on it. Only in Paddington would someone have a shirt dry-cleaned before donating it to the local charity shop.

Another great thing about shopping at Vinnies is the complete lack of attention from staff. They are certainly helpful when approached, but otherwise they leave you alone. As there is no hope of asking “do you have this in a different size?” or “will you be getting any more of these in?” it makes for a wonderfully free and aloof shopping experience. Another great plus is that Vinnies only sells second-hand goods, which is marvellous for the environment in a world which produces far too much of everything, irrespective of demand. This knowledge, however, is tempered by the sorry fact that people actually wore some of the dreadful things on the racks in the first place.

So, having rejected both shirts, I walked back to the counter where V. was purchasing a woollen jumper.

“I decided not to get the shirts,” I said.

“Oh, why? They seemed fine.”

“Yeah, I dunno. Just not sure I really need them.”

“But they looked very good on you.”

“Did they? Oh, thanks.”

“Yes, you looked good in them. You know, handsome and respectable.”

“Oh. Yes, but – ”

I hovered a moment at the counter. Thirty dollars was hardly a big ask, and it would add flexibility to my relatively limited wardrobe. As a clothing minimalist, I usually maintain no more than about four or five outfits – combinations to which I regularly return for their comfort, style, casualness, formality or climatic-suitability. I suppose at the very least, more shirts would add a little lee-way to the wash cycle.

“Okay, fuck it. I think I’ll get them.”

Sure enough, I walked back to the rack and collected both of the shirts.

Later that day, back at home, I noticed a small stain on the arm of the Diesel shirt I had purchased. My current fad is to soak everything in Napisan for twenty-four hours to remove the inevitable yellowing around the collar and armpits. Napisan works wonders, it must be said, and my shirts have never looked cleaner. I filled up a bucket with hot water, stirred in a capful of Napisan as directed, then preceded to soak the two shirts.

The following day, having put the shirts through the wash, then ironed them and hung them up to dry, getting ready to go to work, I took the Diesel shirt off the hanger and attempted to put it on. That something had gone horribly wrong was immediately apparent, for I could barely get my arms through the sleeves at all. What had, in the shop, been a size too large for me – a little ballooning around the middle, which I thought would be countered by wearing my favourite vest over the top – was now about three sizes too small. I managed to get my arm through one sleeve; pulled it around and forced my other arm through, but the tightness across the shoulders and chest were such that I could not do up the buttons!

I tugged and stretched the fabric as best as possible, yet it was quite firmly stuck in its new size and didn’t seem inclined to expand at all. I flexed, I pulled, I wrestled with this straight-jacket, and finally, after much effort, managed to do up the buttons. I knew already that I could not wear the shirt out, but hoped that if I wore it and flexed and moved about a whole lot, it might, given time, regain some of its former size. After all, it would ultimately be advantageous if the shirt finished up a little tighter than when I had originally tried it on.

I wore a different shirt to work that evening, and when I returned home after work, put the tight shirt back on and wore it round the house. I flexed, I stretched, I pulled, I bent, but to no avail. Not only was it uncomfortable, but it looked bloody ridiculous. And, I’m afraid to say, it still does.

The buttons strain across the chest, the sleeves hug my arms like a leotard, and whenever I move it rides high, popping open at the chest and sending the collar skywards like the headdress of the flying nun. Still, having spent so long deliberating over this purchase, having invested in it in this manner and feeling a certain fatefulness about the decision, I am determined to get the damned thing back to a wearable state. And so, for the last week, I have adopted it as my home shirt, to be worn as often as possible in the hope of loosening things up a little. It’s slow going, though I’m hoping ultimately to make some progress.

Having mentioned the saga of this shirt on Facebook, I’ve had a few tips as to what I might try. One friend, Sarah, suggested I go running in it. On Saturday evening, I did this – looking very silly indeed as I pounded around the streets of Glebe, my chest ready to burst out and my arms swinging robotically in the tight sleeves. On returning home, I took a long, cold shower, despite the winter weather, and stretched and flexed the fabric as much as possible. Having since hung it up to dry and attempted to wear it again, I found my efforts have made little difference in making this shirt wearable in public. Still, I hold out hope, and will continue to wear the shirt around the house. We’ll see who cracks first.

And so, by way of conclusion, I say to you people out there, check the washing instructions before stupidly assuming, as I did, that any shirt can be happily soaked in boiling Napisan. That is all.

Read Full Post »

Elephants & Tortoises

Posted in Memoir, Nothing in Particular, The Odyssey of Life on May 25, 2012 | 3 Comments »

When I was a child, my favourite animals were tortoises. I was completely obsessed with them and went crazy over anything faintly tortoise or turtle related. All my soft toys were tortoises or turtles. Indeed, I had an entire family of stuffed toy tortoises, all of different design, gathered during my years as a toddler. There was the gigantic patchwork Papa Tort, the smaller yet still bulky bright red Mama Tort whom I won in a school raffle (organised by my mother and about which I’ve always been deeply suspicious), the less attractive and rather tatty Uncle Tort, and two younger tortoises, one named ‘Tootaloo’ – according to his label – and then, finally, Baby Tort. Together these formed the core of what my brother and I called the “Favourites” – in other words, soft toys.

My brother, on the other hand, was utterly obsessed with bears. He began with two excellent teddy bears, for which my mother used to knit jumpers, and then moved on to actual bears. Soft toy bears, that is, as we had two dogs and a cat and thus not enough room for a pet bear into the bargain. I’ll never forget his terrible sense of loss when one day our dog Poppy ate the bear my mother had brought him from Bern in Switzerland. It was made with real fur and to this day I shudder to think that perhaps it was made from bear fur, but am sure it must have been some other unfortunate animal who lost his hide. My brother’s discovery of the torn, slobbery remains sent a spear through his heart, and I hope that he has, after thirty odd years, recovered at last.

My tortoise obsession was such that I would almost certainly cry if anyone, in anyway, maligned tortoises. I remember my mother once told me what seems, in retrospect, a rather bad joke, but it went something along the lines of a Tortoise being sent to prison for “sticking his neck out.” On hearing this, and being of an age where it was difficult to divorce metaphor and wordplay from reality, I was utterly devastated and asked for days afterwards if that tortoise would be alright. Despite my mother’s reassurances that in fact she’d made the whole thing up, I never quite believed her and thought she was telling me this to stop me worrying about that poor tortoise in prison.

My tortoise collection never extended to the real thing sadly, so I had to make do with every other available manifestation of tortoises. One such was a number of small ceramic tortoises made for fish tanks. One day, I dropped one of these on the road whilst waiting at the bus stop, just as the bus was pulling into the kerb. I was saved from certain death by my mother, who restrained me as I tried to save the poor little tortoise. Unfortunately, the bus’s aim was good and after a pathetic crunching sound, all that was left was a pile of green-tinted dust.

Another of these ceramic tortoises was given by me to my father to take overseas on assignments. As a foreign correspondent who was often in warzones, or doing something ridiculously heroic like sailing around Cape Horn, we had cause to worry for his wellbeing, and naturally I thought a tortoise good luck charm would help. The great thing is that it did help, and my father managed to come back in one piece every time. So, for that matter, did the tortoise, and my father still keeps him as a travelling good luck charm.

This obsession with tortoises has stood the test of time and I retain my fondness for these curious, long-lived and fantastically ancient creatures. Yet, in my adulthood, I have come to take on a greater variety of animal totems who have, in soft-toy form, proved wonderful travel companions. These include platypuses, bilbies, rabbits and, of course, elephants.

My love of elephants also began during childhood, when I first saw these magnificent beasts at Sydney’s Taronga Zoo. For a kid who, like every other kid on the planet, was totally obsessed with dinosaurs, the elephant seemed to be the nearest approximation to the lumbering beasts that filled the pages of my many dinosaur books. Watching the shuddering flanks of the elephants as they, admittedly forlornly, drifted around the then unimpressive compound gave me my first sense of what a dinosaur must have been like. Yet elephants were no mere second-rate sop for a real sauropod – rather, they were, in themselves, magnificent and curious creatures, with possible the most exciting appendage in the animal world. I had not yet seen the star-nosed mole, which, considering the appallingly lurid nature of its snout, is likely for the best. I’ve included one here for shock value.

That first experience of elephants was sadly poignant. I couldn’t help noticing that one of the elephants was swinging its foreleg bag and forth, and when I asked my father why this was, he told me it was because the elephant was used to being chained – the foot-swinging was habitual on account of its frustration. It was enough to break a small child’s heart.

Around the age of seventeen, my mother bought me a brass elephant key-ring. It took about two years before I adopted it, but I haven’t looked back ever since. That elephant key-ring has been everywhere with me in the last twenty years and not only do I dearly love it as my very favourite accessory, but hope to continue using it for the rest of my life.

Over the last few years, I’ve been fortunate in being able to see elephants on a number of occasions. Firstly, when visiting Bali with my brother, during which trip we visited an elephant resort and I took a ride on one of the elephants. Being able to get so close to so many elephants was wonderful, though I did have many reservations about the way they were handled and kept. Not that I witnessed or suspected any mistreatment of the elephants, yet these are cultured, social and highly intelligent animals who live in sophisticated extended family groups, and the idea of them being exploited in this way, however pampered they might be, left me feeling like a bit of a hypocrite for supporting the elephant tourism industry.

I had similar reservations when I visited an “Elephant School” outside of Chiang Mai in northern Thailand. Here at least the elephants had more open, natural terrain around them, including a great river in which they were regularly allowed to wallow and wash. Yet, the elephant talent show, in which they performed tricks, played soccer, lifted logs, sat on their haunches, danced and painted, filled me with such an odd mix of pleasure, pathos and pity that I was conflicted for days afterwards. During the show a young Italian woman was overcome with emotion – seemingly the product of outrage and pity at the humiliating nature of the performance – and cried out in protest. Clutching her face in her hands and shaking her head, she hurriedly fled the scene. Her raw emotion lifted the veil of harmless fun and from thereon the spectacle was coloured with macabre thoughts of the sinister nature of archetypal circuses. Still, having said that, having come all this way, I retained sufficient excitement at being in such close proximity to so many elephants to busy myself photographing them for several hours.

It must be said that the situation of elephants the world over is certainly a sorry one. The regular killing of elephants throughout Africa has not only reduced their numbers significantly, but also destroyed the social harmony of elephant communities. The consequences of this have been, among other things, the animal equivalent of delinquency among young males in particular, who are growing up without the support and structure of a full herd with all its subtleties and complexities. The same could be said of Asian elephants, who are even more on the back-foot than those in Africa. In India, despite much love and respect for elephants, alongside much exploitation of the creatures for work and tourism, those poor beasts remaining in the wild are often forced to compete with humans for habitat and resources, and sadly, humans invariably win these disputes.

Without wishing to say a great deal more on this subject, I believe it is time we came to respect the cultures of certain of our mammal cousins by recognising their right both to territory and to an unmolested existence therein. There has been a movement in recent years to extend an animal variant of human rights to marine mammals, to protect their right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We try, where possible, to respect the still extant primitive human cultures on Earth, though we fail dismally on this front. Surely creatures so sophisticated as to be self aware, have basic language with clear vocabulary, sing songs, talk in their sleep, have local accents and dialects, play with dolls, use tools and pass on culture to their offspring should be regarded in a similar light – as cultures that ought to be respected and protected. Not only should such rights be extended to cetaceans, but also to any other creatures who show similar levels of cultural sophistication. This would of course include all elephant and primate species. I’m not exactly suggesting they should have a seat at the United Nations, though, come to think of it, a representative for the Animal Kingdom might not be such a bad thing after all.

And so, on that note, here are a bunch of elephant photographs I’ve taken in recent years.

Read Full Post »

Kim Jong-Un’s Haircut

Posted in Nothing in Particular on February 24, 2012 | 2 Comments »

Since it was first unveiled to the world, there has been a lot of attention focussed on Kim Jong-Un’s haircut. The floppy-topped undercut rather suits the overfed little dumpling and frames his face nicely. It is, as an acquaintance, Penny, would say, quite an effective brand of turd polish which gives him a certain fascist pizzazz, knuckling down with post-lobotomy chic.

Yesterday at work, not quite knowing what the rules governing the haircut were, without the advice of Mr Google, speculation was rife as to whether or not imitation of the haircut in the tragic, sad and hungry Stalinist theme park that is North Korea would be considered appropriate homage to the dumpling, or an act of treason on the scale of usurpation – a pretender to the throne.

Would the mere idea of Kim Jong-Un’s haircut being emulated be sufficient to send him into paroxysms of rage, followed shortly by mass detentions and executions, or would it rather invoke a more positive response, as though such imitators had clicked his “like” button?

It was whilst teaching my next lesson that the following scene occurred to me:

Kim Jong Un, having finished annihilating the Zergs in a game of Starcraft 2, thus earning him further accolades as a brilliant general, rises to greet the military commanders who have come to raise a serious question about his latest dictat. The generals stand, heads bowed, shuffling nervously, fearful of the forthcoming dry-cleaning bill.

“Your Unparalleled Eminence,” says the boldest of them all. “Son of the Moon and Stars, Holder-Upperer of the Heavens and Gatekeeper of Hell, Grandmaster of Tides and Winds, Binder-Together of Atoms, Higgs Boson, Horse-Breaker, Lion-Tamer and Iron Chef Korean, with all due respect and loyalty, and in humble acknowledgement of your far greater powers of reason and deduction, and,” pointing to the computer screen, “tactical and strategic genius, we are concerned that having all citizens who dare to have the same haircut, or, for that matter, any barbers who are willing to provide said haircut, starved to death in the traditional North Korean manner, will be counter-productive to the revolutionary ideal of creating a kitsch cult of personality and sustaining the largest army in the world, on a per capita basis.”

Kim Jong-Un, standing silently, glowering with a sneer of withering contempt, tosses his bowl of chicken congee at the generals. Not satisfied with the splattering of their freshly-laundered, if stylistically-dated uniforms, with one fell sweep of his mighty bingo wings, he sends a plate of pork and chive dumplings in their direction. The generals, knowing the importance of stoicism in the face of even the worst tantrums, on pain of death for showing fear either in public or private, allow the dumplings to strike them, unblinking. Indeed, several of them begin smiling in thanks for this unexpected anointing, all the while secretly thankful that their master has finished his kimchi.

“This is my haircut! I am the dear leader and no one else! I am the dumpling king, not you! And certainly not the bloody proles!”

The boldest of the generals, having borne the full brunt of the soup course, with a dumpling perched rather comically on the peak of his cap, his glasses dripping with congee and quietly thanking his wife for discouraging him from having had the troublesome haircut, continues to defy his master’s beloved insolence.

“But, your Universal Greatness, the entire population is alarmingly thin. There is little chance that anyone in our great system can get enough protein to challenge the Iron Throne. So weak and thin are they, it takes twelve of them just to change a light-bulb. Upon your accession, it took no less than six-hundred and fifty-two men to attach the warhead for your celebratory missile launch.”

“This is my haircut!” shouts Kim Jong-Un. “The leader must be unique! What good is it if the people look like me!?”

“They won’t, your Divine Grace, because there’s simply not enough food in the kingdom – er, I mean, state. And, well, as for looking like you, this is Communism after all, I believe.”

At this point Kim Jong-Un chooses to surprise them with an enormous bowl of kimchi he has been hiding behind his vast monitor. Turning and hurling the contents towards the generals in a great fan of red, chilli pickled cabbage, he slumps back in his chair, exhausted.

“It’s my haircut! Mine! Mine!”

and so on, ad nauseam.

_____________________________________________

Having since had a chance to investigate further, it would seem that in fact, Kim Jong-Un’s haircut is all the rage in North Korea and that emulation, rather than being punishable by death, is in fact encouraged as a show of patriotism and loyalty. Kim Jong-Un has been described as a “style guru,” and his hairstyle has been called the “ambition” or “youth” haircut. The North Korean newspaper Rodong Sinmun wrote that “neat and short hair for young people makes them captivating.” They went on to say that:

“A young man with an ambitious high-sided haircut looks so sobering and stylish.”

It is not only in North Korea that such a style is currently popular. The United States has also seen a resurgence in the floppy-topped undercut, known colloquially as “a modified McSqueeb,” a “J. Edgar Hoover”, a “Jimmy Darmody”, or, most popularly, a “Hitler Youth,” according to the New York Times. Though it can be difficult to nail the point of origin of any trend, it seems unlikely that style guru Kim Jong-Un is responsible for the popularity of the hairstyle in the U.S. Could it rather be that he has been watching Boardwalk Empire when not conquering his enemies in Starcraft and Civilization or trolling people in Aion and World of Warcraft? Either way the North Koreans have been rather slow in claiming this as a global coup for their new dear leader.

PS. I should like to note that whilst it is otherwise inappropriate to make jokes about people on account of their body weight and size and gluttony, I find it especially galling that this chap is so grossly overfed in a nation where people are starving to death as a direct result of the backward policies and misguided priorities of its leaders.

Read Full Post »

Ideas Man

Posted in Memoir, Nothing in Particular on October 23, 2011 | Leave a Comment »

I‘ve always been deeply envious of people whose job it is to think for a living. It’s certainly an appealing remit, though of course, something that might manifest in various ways in different fields and industries, particularly where new branding and marketing concepts are required.

I was never quite satisfied, however, with the idea of working in a particular industry, such as advertising. Instead I imagined myself as something of a general ideas guru; someone whom anyone could consult about absolutely anything; be it a slogan for a new product, the name of a character or device, a sound-bite for a movie, the caption for a picture, the name of a novel or film, or, indeed, the name of a band. I saw myself sitting in a futuristic office, swinging from a suspended, white-cushioned clear-perspex globe, dressed entirely in white, drinking cold milk and throwing out immeasurably valuable suggestions to enthralled, fawning attendees.

“Guru,” they would say, a little breathless with awe, “can you help us? We need a really catchy title for our new album, but we can’t come up with anything.”

I would sip my milk, take a long pull on my hookah then, rolling my eyes like the priestesses of the Delphic Oracle, offer up my immeasurably valuable and ultimately best-selling suggestions.

Whilst none of the above ever eventuated, partly through general apathy and directionlessness, I have spent much of my life coming up with ideas that have gone nowhere. Those that have gone somewhere have mostly found their way into novels and short stories, which is a pity as they often seemed best deployed elsewhere. I would like to think I have come up with some good story ideas and created a few cracking titles along the way, but the one area in which I’ve always wanted success and recognition has been in the invention of musical groups. Over the years I’ve spent far too much idle time imagining band and album names, styles and concepts. Perhaps I should have gone into advertising, but, typically, I haven’t ever really worked out how to go into anything in this life, apart from consecutive university degrees, focussing on obscure intellectual pursuits like early medieval Italian history.

The love of band-names and branding began with the first and only band I was ever in: Easter Road Toll. I wish I could lay claim to the name, but that honour goes to my friend and founding member, Owen, who had also suggested the name Glass Asylum. The latter was, at the time, too obscure, intelligent and thus less appealing to the thrash-loving teenager that I was, who was primarily interested in the shock value of punk. The band’s origins lay in our rejection of Australia’s Bicentennial celebrations, which we all agreed were inappropriate since it effectively constituted the invasion and theft of the continent from indigenous Australians. We wanted to tap the spirit of nationhood, suck out the poison and spit it in the sewer.

Conceptually, Easter Road Toll was supposed to be a combination of political grandstanding and blatant badmouthing, but being fifteen years of age and hopelessly naïve about politics, plus having a strong inclination to say “fuck” at every given opportunity, the songs turned out to be considerably less intelligent than they might have been. With lines such as “Ronald McDonald is a Nazi war criminal and therefore he deserves to be introduced to a ham-slicer”, it was quite clear that any intellectual pretensions were hopelessly misplaced. Some of the “tunes” such as Fingers don’t grow back (not even when you glue them back on), Zombies are Philosophers, Fuck I hate Car Alarms, Blow up your Relief Teacher, Lick the Lice off my Sweaty Butt-Hairs, Gun-toting Customs Officer, Spon-Com, Lemmings know what they’re doing and the ever popular Schwarzenegger, captured the curious spirit of adolescence with such power that I remained a sympathetic teenager for some time after their composition.

At the first ever jam we were armed only with an acoustic guitar, an electric guitar and Gorilla amp, a cheap Casio keyboard and a pair of drumsticks. We made an unbelievable racket, screaming about this, that and McDonalds, spitting at each other and freely indulging in the use of the word “Fuck.” There was very little method to the madness with the exception of my friend Max’s chunky riff on I Got Spewed on.

After three months there were just three of us left, Mike, Demitri and myself, but our dedication was unwavering. We had a lot of ambition which steadily increased as my good friend Demitri, the lead guitarist, fashioned my hastily scribbled lyrics into vaguely coherent structures. We tried a number of different ring-ins to make up for the sad reality that only Demitri was a competent musician, but organisation was a problem and as us core members had a furious passion for our art, we couldn’t risk depending on the availability of others. Demitri’s parents had been good enough to concrete their backyard and put a garage in, and it was from here that Easter Road Toll offered up its vomit to the residents of Redfern. Mike, our drummer without a drum-kit, would belt away on his carefully selected chairs, Demitri would unleash chords of unparalleled power, and I’d scream myself ugly hoarse. So professional were we that during a recording of Whipper Snipper Massacre, Demitri, who’d taken over the “kit” so his brother could give us some traditional Greek guitar and thus enhance the song with a more multicultural feel, broke one of Mike’s drumsticks and everything went to the dogs. The words “Aaaah! You broke my drumstick, you fuckwit,” and the ensuing scuffle, captured in unholy mono on a portable cassette player, are perhaps the greatest testimony to the achievement that was Easter Road Toll.

Our starting point had been cum-driven incongruity, and though it took a rather lengthy ejaculation that got Mike a drum-kit, me a decent guitar and amp, nearly wound us up in a recording studio, almost got us a gig, and saw the later addition of a Dostoevskian verse to Zombies are Philosophers to celebrate the seventh anniversary of its composition, the foundations were always going to give way. Phallic music is intrinsically immature, and as I tried harder and harder to take myself seriously, it became a considerable embarrassment.

One of the many problems faced by Easter Road Toll was how quickly we outgrew the music. When I turned seventeen and began to grow my hair long and wear paisley shirts, I lost the desire to shock and longed instead to charm and beguile. This was soon reflected in changing musical tastes and the themes and subjects of my artistic output in school. Inspired by David Bowie and Pink Floyd, I wanted not only to reinvent myself, but also to invent new bands, songs and concepts that suited the more introspective me.

This soon extended to my final-year major work in high school art class. I did a group of five drawings of the different members of a fictional band called Hydraulic Banana. The drawings were based on photographs of myself and friends playing instruments at various jams, heavily stylised to look both rock and roll and, at least somewhat futuristic. Hydraulic Banana were, in effect, inspired by Disaster Area, the fictional “plutonium” rock band from the Gagrakacka mind-zones, as featured in Douglas Adams’ Hitch-hikers’ Guide to the Galaxy. Indeed, my principal inspiration for the sound of Hydraulic Banana came from the very brief snippet of music in the BBC television series of Hitch-hikers’ Guide, which is just audible in the background when Disaster Area’s Guide-book entry is voiced. I never actually wrote a song, nor came up with an album title for Hydraulic Banana, which seems odd in retrospect as I spent so long imaging how they might look and sound.

It was around the same time, during that wondrous final year of high-school, with all its house-parties and acid trips, that my friends Simon and Viveka invented the band Onions 11 & 12. The name was based on the relatively unscientific theory that any given bag of onions contained roughly ten onions, and the subsequent, and perfectly natural concern for the fate of onions eleven and twelve. Of course, one might simply say that they wound up as onions 1 & 2 in the next bag of onions, but this was not a time for simple deductive logic. Onions 11 & 12 were essentially an industrial band, heavily influenced by the sounds of Einstürzende Neubauten, with a dash of Nurse with Wound thrown in. Rocket Morton, anyone?

Immediately after high school, my friend John and I came up with a fresh band and album concept: Stool Pigeon was a return to the thrash / punk shock music that had so enthralled me at the age of sixteen. John and I spent quite some time not only designing the album cover, but also writing the full list of song titles; none of which were ever actually written. The album, Squeeze out the Meat, was to feature on its cover a black leather-gloved hand squeezing raw meat from a sausage into a bowl of breakfast cereal, capturing the moment that the meat struck the milk, sending skywards a neat dollop. The opening track of the album was called “Push in my stool,” a rather cheap innuendo which is, sadly, the only song title I recall.

A couple of years later, whilst watching Star Wars, I came up with another band name and concept. “Look, Sir, Droids,” a line spoken by a storm-trooper when looking for R2D2 and C3P0 on the planet of Tatooine, had the added advantage of being abbreviated to L.S.D. Look, Sir, Droids was to be an unashamedly psychedelic outfit, blending elements of Cream, Captain Beefheart, Mahavishnu Orchestra, and early Pink Floyd, with the then contemporary beats of The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays. Again, my total inability to write music or play an instrument, beyond a few cock-rock guitar pieces, made it rather difficult to take things further. I had always wanted to be the lead-singer of a band, and believe, given the chance, that I might ultimately have written some half-way decent lyrics, yet my appalling singing voice shut the door on this possibility as well.

The last additions to the list of band concepts came to me only recently. We’ve all heard of the animal kingdom; the many and varied beasts who walk the Earth, but who ever mentions its natural corollary – The Vegetable Kingdom? Indeed, the only time I have ever seen this name used was in an inter-title in F. W. Murnau’s 1922 film, Nosferatu, in which a professor refers to the Venus Fly Trap as the vampire of the vegetable kingdom. Watching this film on the big screen recently during a German Modernist retrospective at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, I was struck by the quite magnificent possibilities of this title. I imagine The Vegetable Kingdom to have plenty of scope as a band; positioned precariously somewhere between folk, trip-hop and minimal electronic: the haunting sounds of Beach-House meet the more upbeat tunes of the Baths album Cerulean.

Another band name that only recently occurred to me derives from a line in the Pink Floyd song In the Flesh – “That Space-Cadet Glow.” That Space Cadet Glow would invariably be a prog-rock band; somewhere between The Church and early Radiohead, with a dash of glam to add a touch of harmonious melodrama, of melodious hysteria. The lyrics would be both poetic and poignant, ideally mixing the best elements of the successful concept album with stand-alone songs that lulled, moved and rocked their audience.

There have been a number of other titles and concepts along the way, many of which have been forgotten or lie buried in the depths of my diaries and notebooks. I can only really vouch for them by saying that I find them appealing, without any expectations of these sentiments being shared by others. One of the earliest titles to which I became attached was the incongruous Moscow Gherkin on the Rocks, a collaborative effort between myself, my brother and his friend Kieran, coined late one giggling teenage night in the kitchen of our old house. I have since appropriated the name as the title of an unwritten, fictional novel, but still dream of applying it elsewhere.

I still hope one day to find myself swinging from that Perspex globe, but until then, will have to make do with more pipe dreams and another blog entry…

ps. Should anyone wish to run with the abovementioned concepts and titles, be my guest, so long as appropriate accreditation is given : )

Read Full Post »

Thulsa Doom

Posted in Film, Memoir, Nothing in Particular on September 26, 2011 | Leave a Comment »

Of all the villains who populated the books, comics, films and role-playing games of my youth, one figure stands head and shoulders above them all: Thulsa Doom.

Thulsa Doom was, what my mother would call, the evil baddie in the 1982 film Conan the Barbarian, which starred Arnold Schwarzenegger as Conan. I first saw the film at the cinema at the age of ten with my brother and my best friend Gus. Before going, I was terrified of being made to feel unwell by reports of gore and bloodshed, for I was pretty squeamish at that age and couldn’t bear the sight of blood. Gus, who had already seen the film, warned me of a scene with a soup made of human body parts. Funnily enough, I misheard him and thought he had said a “suit”. The soup, ultimately, was mild by comparison, and when I came to see the movie, perhaps on account of the gore being rather stagey and over the top, I enjoyed it thoroughly.

And there, before me, for the first time, was Thulsa Doom!

Thulsa Doom was, and still remains, an absolutely splendid villain. A god of sorts, with the ability to change himself into a giant snake, Thulsa Doom was more than a thousand years old. The leader, chief priest and guru of an ancient cult of snake-worshippers, he was a fearsome warrior, a demagogue, a philosopher, and a downright murderous son of a serpent. Played by James Earl Jones, with long black hair and a frighteningly square helmet fringe, decked out in chunky, adorned black leather armour, armed not only with two murderous, serpentine swords, but also with the voice of Darth Vader, he was certainly something to behold. Thulsa Doom had a mesmerising stare, an enchanting voice, and a wonderful way with words.

He first appears on the screen in the opening scenes of the film, in the frozen wastes of the Cimmerian north. Having, with his warband, raided and wiped out Conan’s village, Thulsa Doom approaches Conan’s poor mother, who stands defending her young son. Flanked by his two stalwarts, Thorgrim and Rexor – Norse metal-heads never looked so good – Thulsa Doom removes his horned helmet, revealing a noggin that seems curiously moulded to the shape of said headwear. The scene is a masterful combination of sad music, pathos and lingering stares. Thulsa Doom, without a word, hypnotises Conan’s fiercely defensive mother with his big, beautiful eyes, so that she lowers her sword and relaxes, in a sort of trance. Slowly turning, as though to walk away, he suddenly swings back in her direction, removing her head with the very sword we had seen Conan’s father forging through the opening titles, now taken as loot from his mauled corpse. Conan, looking up and into the face of Thulsa Doom as his decapitated mother falls beside him, is not about to forget either the visage or standard of his mother’s murderer in a hurry. Thus begins this epic tale of survival and revenge.

Despite its being something of a fantasy genre gore-fest, Conan the Barbarian is a surprisingly good film. It has its flaws, technically and dramatically, but written by Oliver Stone and directed by John Milius, it was a serious attempt to render the epic nature of the original Conan stories by Robert E. Howard. Beautifully shot and with a very moving soundtrack composed by Basil Poledouris, it feels at times more like a sword and sandal epic of the 50s and 60s than a fantasy genre film. The great sets and locations and the use of thousands of extras in vast crowd scenes, give its settings a very real and tactile quality, whilst the limited dialogue is terse and laconic, but nonetheless emotionally engaging. I was absolutely blown away by the movie when I first saw it, largely because I had, just a year before, started playing Dungeons & Dragons and reading a lot of fantasy literature. It was very much my cup of tea – an enthralling evocation of a fantastic world that felt authentically historical. Shortly after seeing the film for the first time, my brother and I began collecting the original Conan stories, which we were to read and re-read avidly through our teen years.

I went to see the movie twice at the cinema, and as soon as it was released on television, recorded it on the VCR and watched it repeatedly. I became so obsessed with the film that I kept a tally of how many times I had watched it in my diary – an early indicator of a life of mildly autistic behaviour! I learned the entire script off by heart, and could quote it from start to finish without prompting; aided, no doubt, by the relatively limited dialogue in the film. And, all the while, there was Thulsa Doom, looming large as my very favourite on-screen villain, even more so than Darth Vader himself.

The character of Thulsa Doom first appeared in Robert E. Howard’s Kull the Conqueror short story Delcardes’ Cat. Kull was a sort of precursor to Conan the Barbarian, a hero of the world prior to the destruction of Atlantis.

Thulsa Doom is described by Howard in The Cat and the Skull as being a large and muscular man (As he and Kull are said to be “alike in general height and shape.”), but with a face “like a bare white skull, in whose eye sockets flamed livid fire.” He is seemingly invulnerable, boasting after being run through by one of Kull’s comrades that he feels “only a slight coldness” when being injured and will only “pass to some other sphere when [his] time comes.” (Wikipedia)

Thulsa Doom later re-surfaced in comic-strip versions of Kull the Conqueror as his principal nemesis, wherein he is portrayed as a powerful necromancer through various editions.

In Oliver Stone’s film version of Conan The Barbarian, Thulsa Doom’s strength seems to lie in his antiquity, demagoguery and hypnotic presence as much as his magical powers.

http://bit.ly/TheStare

Thulsa Doom can not only transform himself into a snake, but can turn snakes into arrows, which he fires from his serpentine bow. His snake cult engages in the sacrifice of young nubile women to giant snakes reared, in some cases it seems, as pets by Thulsa Doom and his principal henchmen.

After a torrid youth spent strapped to the “wheel of pain” –
http://bit.ly/WheelOfPain
– followed by years in a brutal fighting pit, having excelled as a gladiator, Conan is trained in more delicate martial arts and given an education before being set free one windy night. It is not long before Conan, accompanied by his own henchies, in the form of Subotai and Valeria, has his first run in with Thulsa Doom’s snake cult and begins to plot his revenge.

Without wishing to describe the film in detail or at length, it will suffice to look briefly at Conan’s ensuing encounters with Thulsa Doom, which are certainly memorable.

When Conan rather clumsily infiltrates Thulsa Doom’s cult and is captured, we are privy to one of Thulsa’s more eloquent outbursts. Having finished interrogating his battered and bleeding prisoner, Thulsa Doom proceeds to tell Conan of the power of flesh over steel. He summons one of his many female followers to leap from the cliff above to her death then, indicating her recumbent corpse, he says:

“That is strength, boy! That is power! The strength and power of flesh. What is steel compared to the hand that wields it?”

http://bit.ly/SteelVsFlesh

Having, in typically megalomaniac fashion, suggested that he himself was the source of all this power, Thulsa Doom admonishes Conan to “Contemplate this on the Tree of Woe,” before instructing his henchmen to “Crucify him.” An order that is duly and gruesomely fulfilled.

After having been rescued from the Tree of Woe, Conan and his companions make a murderous raid on Thulsa Doom’s compound, slaying many of his followers and guards. Thulsa Doom escapes by transforming himself into a snake, but, reverts to human form in sufficient time to shoot a snake arrow into Valeria, Conan’s lover, as they flee the scene, sated with the gore of their enemies and having liberated the princess they were seeking to liberate.

It is here that we are treated to one of Thulsa Doom’s more memorable lines; one I often find myself quoting when seriously pissed off.

“Infidel defilers. They shall all drown in lakes of blood. Now they will know why they afraid of the dark. Now they will learn why they fear the night.”

Conan, after a long night watching Valeria’s funeral pyre, now with even more reason to detest Thulsa Doom and wish him dead, prepares for the final battle amidst the mounds and gravestones of the ancient dead.

Yet the final confrontation does not take place in the ensuing, climactic battle, in which Conan slays both Thorgrim and Rexor, the latter wielding Conan’s fathers sword, taken at the start of the film. The sword is broken in a mighty overhead cleave by Conan, and, with Rexor dead, Conan retrieves it and holds it aloft. That evening, he makes his way once again to Thulsa Doom’s impressive temple, at the so-called Mountain of Power. It is here, as Conan sneaks his way past the guards, aided by the charms and access of the errant princess, that we are treated to Thulsa Doom’s finest moment.

Standing before a vast crowd of thousands of extras in white robes holding candles, bellowing from atop the podium of his epic temple at the head of a grand processional staircase, Thulsa Doom makes the following speech:

“The purging is at last at hand. The day of doom is here! All that is evil, all their lies – your parents, your leaders, those who would call themselves your judges! Those who have lied and corrupted the earth! They shall all be cleansed. You, my children, are the water that will wash away all that has gone before. In your hand, you hold my light, the gleam in the eye of Set. This flame will burn away the darkness, burn you away, to paradise!”

http://bit.ly/ConanTheEnd

I am still deeply stirred when I hear this speech, and believe it has profoundly affected my rhetorical style over the years.

A short while later, Conan approaches from the shadows and comes face to face with Thulsa Doom. Thulsa Doom turns his benevolent smile and loving gaze upon Conan and tries to woo him with his honeyed words.

“My child. You have come to me, my son. For who now is your father if it is not me? Who gave you the will to live? I am the wellspring, from which you flow. When I am gone, you will have never been. What will your world be, without me, my son? My son.”

After being briefly seduced by those beautiful, snake-charming eyes, Conan looks down to his father’s sword and snaps out of hypnosis. With a look of sudden alertness, he promptly hacks Thulsa Doom’s head from his shoulders with his father’s broken sword.

It is a rather gruesome end for a villain, to see his head tossed like a hairy medicine ball down the steps of the temple, to flip and flop with an ugly wet sound, but the simple fact is, he sure had it coming. And as for Conan’s fate, well, that is another story…

Read Full Post »

Tribal Masculinity

Posted in Nothing in Particular on July 15, 2011 | Leave a Comment »

This is a short assignment written in 2004 as part of my Masters in Creative Writing, for the compulsory unit in Culture and Writing. The aim was to take an anthropological approach to a personal experience in which one had been made to feel marginalised either deliberately or inadvertantly by a dominant narrative.

This brief essay is essentially an examination of the effects of assumed complicity in a form of mass identity and the difficulty in asserting an alternative voice in such a context. By assumed complicity, I refer to a situation where it is assumed by others that I share their identity and as a consequence am understood to share the same values and ideas. I wish to illustrate what I consider to be a tribal phenomenon with three examples. The first of these is an example of my assumed complicity in a shared masculine identity; the second my assumed complicity in a combined masculine and national identity, and the final example, by way of contrast, is a brief examination of the silencing of the masculine narrative and liberation from its identity constraints. I wish in all instances to highlight the difficulty or awkwardness in voicing an alternative attitude when confronted with a narrative that is strongly asserted by a group in a way that assumes my complicity and agreement with its basic tenets.

1. Assumed complicity in Rejection of the “Feminine.”

One such occasion was when I had reluctantly agreed to attend a double bill of the extended versions of the first two Lord of the Rings movies. I say reluctantly because I knew it would be an arduously lengthy experience at just over eight hours, but had decided to come on the grounds that I rarely had the opportunity to see two of my oldest friends whose idea it was that we should go. There were six of us in total, including three people I had not met before who were friends of my friend Mike. Having already purchased our tickets, we were queuing to enter the cinema itself when, pointing to a poster advertising the then upcoming release of Love Actually, Richard Curtis’ new film, one of these guys proceeded to remark: “By the people who brought you Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill and Bridget Jones’ Diary, as if anyone’s going to want to see that.”

My hackles rose instantly and I made no comment whatsoever. I had seen all three of these films and enjoyed them immensely, and as the other men chuckled around me in agreement, I turned away and pretended to be distracted by something else altogether. I was greatly angered that in making this comment, this chap expected my automatic complicity. I was also highly annoyed that my two old friends, who I had previously thought to be less prone to stereotypically negative masculine knee-jerk responses to romantic themes, were more than happy to share in this group derision.

I was about to speak and voice my dissent publicly when I realised that I honestly did not wish to engage in conversation with these other three guys I did not know, whom, in all likelihood, I would never see again. Not usually one to allow my opinion to go unheard, at the first opportunity I voiced my enthusiasm for these films separately to my friend Mike, and made clear my intention of seeing Love Actually, yet publicly I felt silenced by this aggressive masculine derision, however casually and playfully it was initially voiced.

As a consequence of my annoyance at having this narrative imposed upon me, the rest of the crowd seemed to take on a more menacing form. Here suddenly were devotees of the action movie genre, not people with a romantic imagining of Tolkien’s books as they might possibly have been only a few moments ago. As a consequence, I ended up leaving after the first film, feeling out of place in this group and no longer wishing to participate in this popular event.

2. Assumed Complicity in a Muscular National Identity

It was the opening night of the Rugby World Cup and Australia was playing Argentina. I had originally made plans to see a film that evening, but soon after arranging this I received a phone call from a friend urging me to go and watch the match at the Nelson Hotel in Bondi Junction. I pointed out that I already had plans and was going to a movie, and was then subjected to playful derision over my priorities. “Mate, you’ve gotta be joking, it’s the first night of the world cup and Australia’s playing. You can see a film any time.” This conversation continued for some time, and in the end I reluctantly agreed to go to the pub. I was not averse to watching rugby, but rather my reluctance stemmed from the desire to avoid large groups of drunk blokes shouting at a television and engaging in mind-numbing forms of chanting. Having worked in a pub for three years in England, I had been shocked by the zeal of sports fans and what I considered to be the rude and barbarous behaviour they exhibited. It had filled me with a strong distaste for English sports fans, and yet, in a sense, it was not as confronting as seeing my own countrymen behave in the same way, for in the latter instance, they were likely to assume my complicity in their behaviour.

Upon entering the pub, I was instantly plunged into an environment in which the hegemonic narrative was nationalism, and the sub-plot, jovially aggressive masculinity. I was not in any way afraid of the environment, I simply had a distaste for its lack of sophistication – a consequence of my own pretension. Here was a tribal environment, mostly white males wearing Australian colours and already boisterous. I was not out of place, and it was in fact partly for this reason that I felt disappointed, for I did not want to be included in the tribe. I considered myself to be a disinterested observer of a contest, and may the best team win.

It was hardly surprising therefore when, once the game was under way, all decisions by the referee that went against Australia were greeted with mass, loud shouts of protest, however reasonable the decision. I felt as though my reason had been silenced by this tribal identity in which I was expected to be complicit, because, with the exception of two Argentineans, no one wanted to hear me state that the decision was in fact fair and reasonable. By the time the game was over, I had had more than enough of this type of asserted mass identity and was quite determined that it would be a very long time before I again attended an event in which national fervour was paraded at the expense of reason and in which I was expected, by my presence, to share values and interests with people I felt I had nothing in common with at all and did not wish to associate with.

My internal reaction within this setting was a consequence of my own prejudice and I was aware that my distaste for this type of behaviour was unfair. It was a common enough, often entirely harmless celebration of unity, and as much an act as anything else. It was an opportunity to perform as a part of a common narrative with a recognisable structure, yet it was a narrative in which the protagonists were stereotypes and caricatures; the product of self-imposed reduction. It was unreasonable to turn up and expect otherwise, but the singularity of purpose and degree to which people took the matter seriously astonished me. In the end I had little choice but to participate passively, for the simple fact that no one really wanted to talk about anything else.

3. The Silencing of the Masculine Narrative: A Liberation.

The final example is particularly close to home, but one that struck me as worth some discussion; namely, the phenomenon of my being the only male in my particular class for this course.

I had not realised the scale of the gender imbalance until I sat down and the lady sitting next to me stated, “gee, you’re a bit outnumbered here.” At this I took a good look around the room and realised that I was in fact the only male present. Four more students entered after this point and they were also all female. When later I came to think about the class composition in more detail, I realised that my reaction to this situation was complex and occurred on many different levels, almost all of which were positive.

At a most basic level, it was titillating to be the only man in a room full of women, and the absence of other males ensured precisely the sort of monopoly I was genetically programmed to desire! Yet I was also marginalised in a way that gave me a heightened awareness of my gender. Whilst everyone proved open and welcoming, there was still a sense initially of being an outsider and I was concerned that I might feel isolated should the debate concern gender issues and I were to find myself at odds with general opinion. This was not something I expected, and fortunately did not prove to be the case. Instead, in assessing my position in the class it became clear that I was, in fact, made more comfortable by the absence of other males.

There were a number of reasons for this, the most prominent of which was the absence of another individual that I might be expected to bond with at the level of gender. Not having any natural ally in this sense made it more much more difficult to adopt a masculine attitude. There was no one whose natural agreement I might seek, or who equally might seek mine.

Viewed from another angle, however, as the only man present there was a certain pressure to appear representative, either broadly, or typically. This was another form of imposition whereby it might be assumed that I was a party to the extant masculine narrative. Yet, the significant difference was that I had more freedom to undermine and circumvent that identity, for here there was not so much a direct assumption of complicity, but rather a sort of challenge to prove a lack of complicity. Without the cacophony of an imposed masculine identity and its attendant necessary exchanges, I felt more at ease to project a masculinity with which I was comfortable.

Read Full Post »

Older Posts »

Smorgas Bord
- Disclaimers (3)
- Environment & Science (6)
- Film (2)
- Gaming (9)
  - Confessions of an MMO Addict (6)
- Gaming Avatars (3)
- Gonzo Journalism (1)
- Literature (75)
  - Memoir (58)
  - Novel Excerpts (10)
  - Short Stories (18)
    - Dirk (6)
- Nothing in Particular (12)
- On Writing (6)
- Photography (44)
  - Sydney, Australia (33)
- Poetry (5)
- Political Whinging (8)
- Pseudo Academia (5)
- The Arab Spring (12)
- The Odyssey of Life (18)
- Travelogues (35)
  - Greece (2)
  - India (16)
    - Darjeeling (8)
- Uncategorized (1)
The Vault
- June 2013 (2)
- May 2013 (4)
- April 2013 (5)
- March 2013 (5)
- February 2013 (2)
- December 2012 (1)
- November 2012 (2)
- October 2012 (4)
- September 2012 (2)
- August 2012 (3)
- July 2012 (4)
- June 2012 (4)
- May 2012 (4)
- April 2012 (4)
- March 2012 (8)
- February 2012 (7)
- January 2012 (6)
- December 2011 (4)
- November 2011 (9)
- October 2011 (6)
- September 2011 (9)
- August 2011 (9)
- July 2011 (6)
- June 2011 (2)
- May 2011 (4)
- April 2011 (8)
- March 2011 (9)
- February 2011 (12)
- January 2011 (1)
- September 2010 (1)
- August 2010 (1)
- July 2010 (1)
- March 2010 (1)
- December 2007 (1)
- November 2007 (10)
Colander
June 2013

M T W T F S S

« May

1 2

3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16

17 18 19 20 21 22 23

24 25 26 27 28 29 30
Follow Blog via Email

Enter your email address to follow Tragicocomedia and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 1,394 other followers
The Birds in Your Garden
- Saturn probe to acquire Earth image bbc.co.uk/news/science-e… 10 hours ago
- Xbox One v PS4: the complete comparison gu.com/p/3gjkt 20 hours ago
- m.sbs.com.au/news/#article1… 2 days ago
- Police clear Istanbul's Gezi Park bbc.co.uk/news/world-229… 3 days ago
- Iran: Hassan Rouhani wins presidential election gu.com/p/3gtze 3 days ago
Follow @BennyTheMule
Dungeon Master’s Guide
Tragicocomedia on Facebook
Back to the Front

Tragicocomedia

Tragedy and Comedy with a dash of cocoa

Archive for the ‘Nothing in Particular’ Category

Kim Jong-Un’s Viagra Diplomacy

In Praise of “Forbrydelsen”, aka “The Killing”

See you later, Pontificator

Mars Rovers: Spirit and Opportunity

Washing Instructions

Elephants & Tortoises

Kim Jong-Un’s Haircut

Ideas Man

Thulsa Doom

Tribal Masculinity

Smorgas Bord

The Vault

Colander

Follow Blog via Email

The Birds in Your Garden

Dungeon Master’s Guide

Tragicocomedia on Facebook

Back to the Front

Follow “Tragicocomedia”

Tragedy and Comedy with a dash of cocoa

Archive for the ‘Nothing in Particular’ Category

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Smorgas Bord

The Vault

Colander

Follow Blog via Email

Dungeon Master’s Guide

Back to the Front

Follow “Tragicocomedia”