Writing this one from K’s house. It’s a lazy Sunday afternoon, and we just finished rewatching Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.
For a change, I’m writing this one on my phone, lying in bed. Not because I feel lazy, mind you. My back’s been giving me some trouble over the last few days because I’ve been writing a lot – writing on a laptop is surprisingly bad for your neck and upper back, it turns out.
I’d prefer not to stop writing, so I’m trying to write the blog on my phone, while fiction will get the luxury laptop treatment. We’ll see how it goes. Might lead to more concise newsletters.
Speaking of which, last time I asked if the newsletters were getting a bit long – the last 2-3 edged close to 4,000 words, and the consensus was that the length was fine, and anyway, mail clients rarely truncate long emails these days.
I will still go ahead with my agenda to write more standalone posts. I’ve got one coming up this week on how I feel seven years since I quit smoking. I’ll be sending that one to inboxes as well as the blog.
As I said above, I’ve been writing quite a bit recently.
I took a few months’ break after the last version of the detailed beat sheet for SEASIDE, and I decided it had been long enough, so I rewrote the beat sheet entirely in the week I was taking care of my dad.
Every afternoon, while he napped, I’d fire up Ulysses and rewrite an issue of the beat sheet. Five issues over six days. It went faster than I’d expected – with the time away, the core of the story had solidified in my head, and I knew where I wanted to go with it. I think it’s turned out nice, and it’s lovely to come back after months and realise that I have an actual story, and that it’s good. Well, I think it’s good.
I’ve kept it aside for a few days. I’ll give it a last read and polish in the coming week and then it goes to my first readers, who have been hearing about this one for years. I can’t wait to see what they think.
Then, finally the actual script. First draft, of course.
Workwise, I wrapped up a True Weird this week, and that was it. I finished my “big stare” at my worksheet for next year, and I think I’ve landed at a comfortable number of pages now, while accounting for a few different kinds of surprises, though of course you can’t foresee everything.
This does mean I had to say no to some wonderful projects that I’d been waiting to take a decision on. I love my work, and I dearly wish I could do more books, but I spent far too many years being cavalier with my body, and that’s not an option anymore.
Links for the week:
- Historychatter is doing a series of episodes on coffee, beginning with this great one on how coffee became a part of South Indian culture. Lots of fun nuggets, including the Indian nationalist reaction to coffee. Reminded me of this podcast episode by Dr. Mark Plotkin on the history of coffee.
- If you’ve been following Indian news, you might have heard of the Silkyara tunnel collapse in which 41 low-wage contract workers were trapped underground for more than two weeks. Their rescuers, finally, were a 12-member team of Dalit and Muslim “rat miners”, and it was heartbreaking to read this profile, which talks about the conditions these people work in. When asked what they wanted as a reward for their heroism, their demands were: fair wages, a road connecting their village to the wider world, and to be treated with human dignity. It’s a sobering read.
- Spencer Ackerman’s obituary of Henry Kissinger is a banger, starting from the title – “Henry Kissinger, War Criminal Beloved by America’s Ruling Class, Finally Dies”. He adds some valuable commentary about the piece in his newsletter and in this interview.
I wanted to watch Monarch: Legacy of Monsters on Apple TV+, mainly because it’s being co-showrun by Matt Fraction, so I thought it made sense to catch up on some Godzilla lore – I watched the 2014 Godzilla as well as Kong: Skull Island when they came out and could neither tell you anything that happened in those movies, nor what “Monarch” is.
So I did the obvious thing, and finally watched Shin Godzilla. This film has been talked up to me for many years now, and I expected a lot from it. Thankfully, it was almost entirely up to the task. Rather than being a straightforward monster movie, Shin Godzilla is a political techno-thriller with Godzilla acting as the natural disaster being reacted to. He’s not a character here, he’s an uncanny, unknowable force of nature.
The main thematic touchpoint, is the nuclear bomb, which is directly evoked late in the movie, but there are also clear parallels drawn both to the Fukushima nuclear disaster and to natural events.
There are some key differences here from most Hollywood disaster movies. For one, while there is a nominal protagonist – the well-meaning but ambitious Rando Yaguchi played by an impressively poker-faced Hiroki Hasegawa – the film is about the ways in which large numbers of people collaborate in times of disaster. The one person who knows how to solve the Godzilla problem has died before the film begins, and the plot consists of people both good and selfish trying to navigate bureaucracy and national and international politics to make sure humanity stays alive. While there are many people here out to get their own, there’s a shared understanding that it would mean precious little if there were no world left. There’s also an undercurrent of Japanese nationalism through the film, but it’s entirely possible the unease that made me feel is intentional – large groups of people together can do great things, but the immediate celebration of that can soon curdle.
Because there are so many characters and stratagems to juggle, the film unfolds at an incredibly fast clip. Every speaking character’s name flashes on the screen, and information is conveyed fast enough that I’d bet Hideaki Anno’s watched himself some Aaron Sorkin (though he wisely opts to leaven the walk-and-talk scenes with some stand-and-talk), and it all washes over you, making you feel the scale and the urgency of the problem, and how the solution lies in mechanisms, not individual heroic actions.
That’s not to say this is only a political drama. Godzilla stays off the screen at most times, but when he’s on, you can feel the ongoing disaster – the lives lost, the vast destruction of homes and infrastructure. There are incredible moments of chaos, made all the more epic by the sudden cessation of human chatter.
Anno and his co-director/special effects supervisor Higuchi make an interesting decision to render Godzilla’s various forms as if they came directly from one of the older Toho films – there’s a rubber-suit quality to them, particularly when you’re staring into the glassy eye of Godzilla’s second form. This is disorienting for a moment, but then it helps render the creature all the more uncanny and alien, like it comes from a different world from the rest of the film. It reminded me of the better deconstructionist superhero comics from the 80s/90s that integrate the goofiness of the original concept to, perversely, heighten the naturalism of everything that surrounds it.
It’s not a perfect film – I would’ve like a bit more complexity to the characters and dialogue, and the political intrigue could’ve been a bit more subtle, but that’s a minor complaint. It certainly doesn’t stop Shin Godzilla from being a modern monster movie classic.
Continuing in the interest of eventually watching Monarch, and getting to a more relevant place, K and I watched Godzilla: King of the Monsters. As a film, it is what it is. Some well-shot monster sequences, even if the camerawork isn’t as exciting as it could be. There’s no story there, though, no complications or complexities, either to do with characters or set pieces. It’s certainly not a sophisticated enough film to confront its use of “eco-terrorists” as villains and a secret American government organisation as the heroes or to do anything else with the idea of how monsters might affect humanity.
Towards the end, I paused the movie and said to K, “I wish this were the kind of movie where one of the government agents suddenly turned on the heroes because they came to agree with the ecoterrorists that humanity must perish?” But that kind of decision would require a film that’s aware of what it’s doing, where anyone but the main character gets any interiority, that’s willing to be rough and human in a way Hollywood blockbusters rarely are. I would have liked to watch that movie.
After that, we watched the first two episodes of Monarch, and so far, it does seem more interested in its characters, which is a mercy. It’s not brilliant tv, mind you, but it feels like some thought went into it, and there was some attempt to build a world. More when the first season wraps up.
As I mentioned up-top, we rewatched Scott Pilgrim vs. the World on Sunday, and I continue to think this is a near-perfect film. It’s five minutes too long towards the end, and there’s a weird swerve post-climax where you think Scott’s going to end up with Knives (an artefact, I guess, of Wright’s original intention to have them end up together, which O’Malley put the kibosh on, thank fuck for that) before he goes to Ramona. But other than that, it holds up incredibly well.
I know we’ve had enough of Whedon-style patter and its thousand imitators by now, but this film manages to nail the comedy and the underlying emotions of that kind of storytelling, while being a great action film at the same time.
Looking back now, I think my order of Scott Pilgrim from good to bad goes:
- Original graphic novels
- Film
- Something-something-something
- Tv show
I reread the John Berger classic Ways of Seeing as a companion to Amusing Ourselves to Death, and it was a good choice. Berger’s analysis of the image and our relationship with it is inviting, incisive, and serves as a wonderful gateway towards other cultural criticism, such as by Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes and Walter Benjamin. Berger is easier to read, so he served well as a good warmup exercise before I delved into 20th century philosophy again. I posted excerpts from the book on Instagram, including the most famous quote from the book:
You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, you put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting “Vanity”, thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure.
… and my friend Piu referred me to Carol Ann Duffy’s well-known poem “Standing Female Nude”, which I hadn’t read, and which does fascinating things with ideas of the body and the gaze as they relate to class and labour.
I left my Kobo at my parents’ place by accident, so my reading for the rest of the week was restricted to whatever was on my Kindle Unlimited. I remembered that I’d borrowed some history books on Goa for research for a story I eventually want to write, and I pulled up one of those.
If you’re familiar with modern Goa, you might have heard of a craft beer brand called Eight Finger Eddie with an octopus logo.
This refers to a real person – Yertward Mazamanian – who was a hippie legend who lived in Goa around whom a lot of the “freak” culture congregated.
Eight Finger Eddie: The Hippie History of Goa and Kathmandu by a writer called Earthman is an account of Eddie’s early years and eventual move to Goa, collated from a series of interviews the author conducted with him in the months before Eddie’s death at the age of 86.
The book traces Eddie’s life from childhood to the centre of American hippie culture in the 60s to his eventual escape to Europe and then to India and Nepal. It near-deifies Eddie as some kind of Zen idol figure, but between the lines you can tell this was just a guy who wanted to “drop out”. For all the stories of Eddie helping strung-out hippies stay alive while they got their bearings, this is one man’s journey away from humanity towards non-involvement, though I can see how it looks like spirituality from the reverse angle. As Eddie himself is quoted as saying, “I’m not enlightened – I’m just older than you.”
“Earthman” being a hippie himself, the book is drenched in hippie lore, culled from the interviews and from the personal experiences of the author, and, for a modern book, is refreshingly non-judgmental about the culture itself. On the flip side, this means that the author refuses to hold his fellow hippies responsible for the darker side of the culture even as he makes note of it, and doesn’t connect the hippies’ extensive drug use to the rise in gangland crime in Goa in the coming decades.
He also seems not to notice how the hippies manage to create their own community in India, but had little interest in being of India, which extends to the fact that there’s not a single hippie of Indian origin mentioned in this book – and I doubt many were allowed into these circles.
Even in the present-day sections, which take place just after 26/11, the author depicts foreign travellers and ex-pats – even those far away from Mumbai – being frightened for themselves in a way that clarifies the way they saw these as things that happened to them – the Indians who lived and died around them were incidental.
But if one manages to ignore the casual racism (on which I could hold forth for much longer), there are many delightful anecdotes from hippie culture, lots of great jargon, and a portrait of a colourful central figure. The narrative is also aided by a great collection of photos from the period, both from the author’s own collection and from people he knows.
I noticed enough typos and sloppy typography to deduce this is a self-published book, so I went on Goodreads to see what others had thought of it, and to my utter delight, there were reviews left by people from inside the book.
Early on in his time in Kathmandu, we get this bit:
At the Globe, he talks to two Western travelers whose guru, Meher Baba, told them they should never go back to India. Eddie is amazed they are following his orders. His response is, “I’d never allow anyone to tell me where to go and what to do.”
There is a derisory review on Goodreads that claims not only to be one of these two travellers, but which goes on to assert that the encounter didn’t go as written in the book, that Eddie was a “straight” chap – nobody special, that the author is bullshitting throughout, and anyway, they introduced Eddie to hashish. There’s a reply to this comment, purporting to be the other one of the two travellers, who confirms her husband’s account and grinds her own axe about some of the typos.
All this regarding three sentences that mention no names. You know, if I thought a withering portrait in a book somewhere was about me, I would simply not go on Goodreads to talk about it.
Anyway, a thoroughly entertaining multimedia experience.
As intended, this was entirely written on the phone while lying bed. I can attest it’s been better for my back, and it … wasn’t as much of a pain to write as I expected. I type much faster on an actual keyboard, but this wasn’t unpleasant. I might do more of these if it helps my back recover faster.
Anyway, that’s been my week. See you folks in a few days!