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As I look at the bleeding oil drilling operation that’s currently contaminating the Gulf of Mexico, the body of water against which I spent most of my childhood, I have to wonder what those Republican advocates, those chanting “Drill, Baby Drill” in October of 2008 in waxy chorus to Madame YouBetcha herself are thinking now.

Looking at Louisiana, where the $1bln recreation fishing industry and $1.8bln seafood industry are greivously imperiled, I wonder if those Atlantic, Southern, Republican states and their Republican voters are now, thanks to restriction removal by President Obama, re-thinking if that’s a gift they really want. Is the drilling tax revenue greater than the annuity of the yearly beach revenue?

It’s almost as if the President gave some teenagers “the cool loaded gun just like their friend has” that they asked for, and minutes later they saw a friend shoot himself with it. Do they still want to keep the gun?

Curiously the “socialist” president has taken action to advance business interest, will the party of business now work against that? Fortunately most voters seem to be immune to the effects of cognitive dissonance, so it won’t matter too much.

I have never seen a film that captures dramatic tragedy better than Chan-wook Park’s Boksuneun naui geot or, to us non-Hangul speakers, Sympathy for Mr. Vengance. This film has all the epic tragedy of something by Sophocles or Shakespeare; and it has all the concomitant blood and tears. I grit my teeth throughout, except for the moments where I was taking sharp in-breaths in the “a-ha” moments as threads collapsed together in a symphonic story-path.

Simply put, a poor factory worker arranges to sell a kidney and give 5million won to shady organ harvesters so as to acquire a kidney suitable for his ailing sister. The harvesters double-cross him, a miracle organ arrives for his sister and he is now short a kidney and broke. This leads him to kidnapping and from there it goes horribly wrong. The father seeks his vengeance, the “hero” seeks vengeance against the harvesters who instigated the long causal chain that lead to greater tragedy than could be limned in a short review.

In a fascinating direction, the one who loses truly has to take on the life of his transgressor. In so doing he resolves the mystery, grows to understand he who did him wrong, grows to understand himself, but despite this he cannot forgive the transgression and its resultant loss. The plot threads are rich and every character, no matter how small or non-relevant plays a part in facilitating a horrific and tragic resolution.

The screenwriting is painfully tight. Everything works with everything else so flawlessly you’d think it was surgically broken down from something that would have been organically grown.

Park explores the familial blood obligation in a way that is unrelenting and probing with a relentlessness that I’ve not felt since I read Antigone. Everywhere there is desperation, everywhere there is loss, everywhere there is remorse, and everywhere is the thrumming blood-law whose thirst is never satiated. It is a very, very hard movie to watch but very rewarding for people who love the craft of film.

On top of it all the acting is top-notch all the way through. While the story setup might be a bit far-fetched, seeming contrived and designed to falsely ratchet-up the intensity, the movie delivers the experience of tragedy, really Greco-Roman tragedy in a way I’ve never seen before.

I am stunned.

“If you want to live, just leave”

Yes, but what if you’ve been so wronged, you don’t?

Getting off of the evening workday train commute has a rich set of sensations and experiences all its own.

At 7:00, after being crammed in with the tired, the huddled masses, you step out into a windy tunnel or a funky-smelling stop and hurry home through the ænemic late-winter (or permanent, in the case of SF) cold back home. You replay the winnings and failings of the day and hope that you have enough ingredients at home for dinner so that you don’t have to go to Safeway and wait in that line (“I hear there’s an unemployment crisis, why can they not staff a few more people at rush hour”). You wonder why that woman gave you the stink eye, what, did she think she could stand in the entry doorway and not get jostled in a packed train?

Some times you wonder if you can bear it again.¹

The other day I suggested to meet Lauren at the Chuch street stop. I waited for her on the bridge that spans over the two train tracks. The rumble of the trains thrummed beneath my feet, the 70’s vintage orange tile rested aginst my leg and I watched the trains dart under the visual horizon of the tunnels’ edges and on to places like West Portal and the Embarcadero.

But one of those trains was different, it was carrying my sweetheart. If you’ve never waiting a sweetheart on a train, it’s a unique thing. It makes you feel rather Edwardian, even if the present generation are a good deal less sooty. When she stepped out I saw her and made a great-big side to side wave.

And so you wait, asking is this the one? Is she in the foremost or aftmost car? And then, brought from a reverie amidst these thoughts, you see her leave the sniffling sardines behind. She’s thinking those quotidian thoughts but this day is different: home was waiting for her here.

I threw a big side to side wave and a smile. She looked about for me on the platform but then heard her name, and saw the wave and I saw the post-train shuffle melt away and turn into a great big smile. Between the souls headed smoothly up the escalator or trudging up the stairs in those thoughts about dinner, cold wind, and Kleenex was a person who was about to be held, greeted warmly, and told the sweetest and tend’rest of nothings.

I felt so lucky to know she was as eager for the peace we share as I was. She walked across the catwalk and I pulled her in close to me, smelling her shampoo and feeling her face on my shoulder.

The electronic bell chimed, and another tube of the everyone else rolled through on to places like Glen Park and Montgomery Station. We remained.

1. I’ll take that over a car commute any day, though.

Or, “Dont’ make me use your ‘rich editor’”

At work we’re using a wiki engine whose power user syntax has been disabled. While it’s been disabled for good reasons, it still bothers me much.

What one is left with is the rich text box which works great for dumping in cut-from-Word documents or which people who don’t want to type quickly and don’t mind mousing to turn on bold etc. As a person who wants to type fast and format as he thinks it, not being able to write markup as I write in wiki data is sad, sad sad.

A guru on the topic suggested that I take some sort of editor, generate the HTML, and then paste that into the rich box because modern OS’s carry HTML formatting data into pastes.

Ugh.

But it’s better than the alternative. Ergo, I downloaded the Markdown extension for VIM. This was a step forward because it provided me the syntax highlighting that makes the process a bit faster. What I really needed was a way to generate the HTML and put it in a browser for ease of cut-and-pasting.

This forced me to dive into the world of vim scripting. Agg. I give it to Emacs every time on this, Vim’s scripting language sucks. I avoid it at all costs, when I can. Tonight I couldn’t. I wrote this pair of functions such that you:

1. Write markdown in Vim (yay)
2. See the syntax highlighting thanks to the plugin (yay)
3. Hit :mm (yay)
4. An HTML artifact is generated via the markdown perl script
5. open() on MacOS is called to process that HTML artifact so that it launches your browser, in my case, Chrome

To make the :mm work you need this snippet of code added to your .vimrc.

" Written by steven for quick loadup of Markdown text into HTML
function Mkdp()
  write
  let file   = expand("%")
  let mkd_file = file . ".html"
  let result = system("markdown " . file . " > " . mkd_file)
  let result = system("open " . mkd_file)
endfunction
:map :mm :call Mkdp()<CR>

A few caveats.

1. I think I must be doing it wrong, I suspect putting this code in the .vimrc is not the “blessed” way to do it.
2. I use the vim system() call which is complete butchery in most programming languages. I’m pretty sure there’s a more blessed way to make requests to the OS, if anyone knows it, please leave a comment.

“All straight guys think: ‘Some day some woman will show up and figure all this stuff out for me.’”

Keenly aperçu by a friend of mine to the question “Why the stereotypes about gays knowing so much about drapery and track lighting.”

Well, just to show that if you make anything nerdy enough, I will do it, here’s the Google SketchUp of my future residence. Yes, it’s to scale. I don’t think it’s too bad for a first stab at the tool.

As our move in date approaches, as we choose flooring and carpet, we’re starting to have some panic about what happens when an Austin-sized lifestyle and set of accoutrements meets San Francisco space restriction. As a means to try to figure out what we can and cannot do, I’ve set up this drawing.

“Hm, that LazyBoy just won’t fit!”

or

“Hm, maybe we can use a flop-down ironing board as a dining table?”

I’m learning golf.

I’m also learning tango.

It’s fascinating that both of them have, at heart, the creation of a coil via twisting. Lindy Hop is much more focused on creating springy compression, but coil isn’t something I often did (was I doing it wrong?).

Golf’s coil is the famous backswing. You guide that left arm backward and around as your torso coils above your waist. Then the release: the torso swings forward, the arms follow, the wrists propel and the follow through digs the ball up and into the air (when you do it right).

Tango coils in its most basic pattern. You step back and pull the lady close. You step left and bound her by coiling to the left, you keep her coil bound by sliding your right foot to the outside of her, and hold the tension one more step with the left. You shift your weight and release the coil, her legs cross into the famous tango step of the same name. And then a slow, careful box step unwinds (yep, it’s a sexy dance).

I see coils all around.

I’ve always had a soft spot for noir.

Men are men, dames are dames, bartenders sling murky off-brand whiskey when they deign to look up from the LA Times crossword where they’ve been stuck on 46 across all day, the corrupt win, and with any luck the good scrape by to see another day, sometimes.

This genre’s icons bear hard names like Chandler, Hammett, Leonard. The form dictates roughing-ups, sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong, lonely codas of reflection and loss, and sticking it to Mr. Big, when you can, and the general chill that comes from the inescapable realization that it’s still all law of the jungle out there and that sometimes when you win, you lose. In short, one line from one of the greatest noirs ever covers it all:

“Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.”

If Jake Gittes could feel like he was in Chinatown even as he was in LA, what happens if you take a Jewish kid from the midwest with a crusading heart, plunk him down in Tokyo’s seediest, yakuza-hosting districts as the Yomiuri’s newspaper’s vice beat reporter? The book Tokyo Vice tells that tale. Here’s the kicker, it’s all true¹.

The story is tri-partite. First our narrator Jake comes to Japan and against all odds winds up getting accepted to write for the Yomiuri Shinbun, something like the New York Times. It narrates a cub reporter’s early and naive steps. Jake gives us a picture of the politics of the newspaper and the politics of the police department. If the structure that is overt and explained is complicated and designed to protect the honor of all involved, the secret structures that form how the work really gets done is even more interesting.

In the second act Jake describes his continued growth of a network of whores, pimps, yakuza, and cops. The stories generally fall into the form of where a cultural precept is discussed and stories from the beat clarify the issue or the story about the pursuit of a meaty topic is given. In the first class we have the explanation of a woman’s place at the paper (“Evening Flowers”) or a case about a serial killer (“Whatever Happened to Lucie Blackman”). These two parts set up the conflict that opens and closes the book: Jake getting on Yamaguchi-gumi gang leader Tadasama Goto’s hit list and calling in all the favors and players we’ve come to know through the first two acts.

Amazingly enough, the thing that ties all those pieces together is honor. The cops’ honor to the favors paid, the yakuza soldiers loyalty to each other, and the businesslike honor of the criminal empire known as yakuza (“Goldman Sachs with guns,” Jake quips). The stories are independent vignettes that, in sum paint a confusing picture of the turmoil around doing what’s right. Doing right by some sacrifices other good people, to win you have to be willing to lose it all, left and right.

If “Chinatown” could make that world complex with only one financial scheme and relatively few power gangsters, Tokyo, with its density and wealth, escalates that by a whole order of magnitude.

Jake gets his larynx squeezed by silent, nine-fingered enforcers. Jake plies secrets out of cops and criminals in hostess bars in Roppongi with sake and blackmail. He takes lonely walks into the suburbs to visit a cop mentor and he gets very, very little sleep.

I really enjoyed the story, for all its grit. You can easily imagine the wrinkled, dirty suit at the end of the day. You can imagine the reek of cigarettes and perfume and you can understand the paranoia of knowing that one of the most powerful gangland leaders has dozens of punks who know they can make a big splash by doing the boss a favor and getting rid of you.

I really enjoyed the descriptions of the inter-factional yakuza system of obligations. It’s amazing to consider that there’s a board of directors and that rival sub-factions have no compunction about getting into the board’s good graces by shutting down non-performing franchisees. It’s a very, very different way of looking at organized crime.

For me the payoff for the two gritty opening parts is the mournful, elegaic third act. Good friends die, evil prospers, a true innocent is destroyed with Jake as the one who brings it about, and Jake scores a last, final, desperate victory. He manages to put a scratch in the paint of the organized crime juggernaut that is the yakuza’s enterprise. This sadness is so critical to noir, where the hero re-connects to human emotion in the quiet spaces. For this reason I think the part’s title “Dusk” is perfect.

I think that this sadness aspect was caught in this great hard-boiled text from “Evening Flowers:”

Setsunai is usually translated as ‘sad,’ but it is better described as a feeling of sadness and loneliness so powerful that it feels as if your chest is constricted, as if you can’t breathe; a sadness that is physical and tangible. There is another word, too — yarusenai, which is grief or loneliness so strong that you can’t get rid of it, you can’t clear it away.
There are some things like that. You get older and you forget about them, but every time you rememeber, you feel that yanusenai. It never goes away; it just gets tucked away and forgotten for a while.
…
What’s yarusenai?
It’s that one email you never replied to and will never open. It’s the bad advice you gave and the phone call you should have made and everything that came out of it. It’s thinking about the friends you suspect you might have been able to save.

The language is terse and crisp, like McCarthy or Hemingway, the economy and unadorned nature of the language prompts a clarity and a nakedness that helps advance the story.

It’s a good read, and a lot of fun.

Updated: April 2 evening for typographical errors.

1. We don’t actually know how much is “true.” Jake may well have bent the story to protect the innocent, to hide secrets, etc. This text assumes the truth is told.