Child of a Metal God

Last night I attended a screening of Apocalypse Now at Cinerama, thinking I should give it another try after ~20 years. I'm glad I did. I still think the editing is oddly clumsy, but I'm a lot better at appreciating long, slow films now. More importantly, I've just had more life experiences to help it resonate. Nothing major -- in no way am I comparing my lived experience to that of a participant in the 20th century's most famous asymmetrical conflict -- but it adds up.

I've seen people go deeply weird in those 20 years. I've now seen societies go deeply weird. That is real for me in a way it wasn't last time. I've done a long river trip, stuck with the same people in a small boat, and I understand the weird bonds that form better now. And I know how disassociating it feels to watch endless terrain unfold, all the same, with nothing to do but worry. Lance, tripping balls, wondering at the beauty of explosions and fire surrounded by utter chaos... well, if that isn't a genuine Burning Man experience then I don't know what is. But I think most of all, the detail of Kurtz having gone back to bootcamp at 38 struck me much, much harder this time. The absolutely inhuman, monstrous amount of willpower which that would take is now all too clear to me at 41.

My emotions run closer to the surface now. I'm less willing to abstract things away. I don't remember feeling anything but an intellectual disapproval during the Ride of the Valkyries attack, watching people blown up so some asshole could go surfing, but this time I was almost crying. That whole aspect of the movie seemed much more interesting to me. What was once funny was now tragic and evil, but all the more worthy of exploration because it's so obviously real.

Like Fight Club, there is a lot of toxic macho bullshit coming from a fandom who love the movie for reasons antithetical to the content of the movie itself. I watched the Fight Club heresies develop in realtime, so those don't surprise me, but Apocalypse Now has always been there. It took me this long to realize that the received wisdom about it is, simply, wrong. It's still a deeply flawed movie, with so many fucked up racial issues that I'd have to write a whole separate post just for that. But it has a lot worth thinking about, too.

And this is why I like revisiting media. Without the parallax it provides, it's very hard to see the changes in my own personality.

When the Lego Saturn V came out 2 years ago, I had the idea to recreate the Apollo 11 mission using it. In realtime. This was partly inspired by Tom Sachs' art installations, and partly by the moon landing anniversary party I didn't make happen in 1989. A few weeks ago, 50 years after the original events to the ~minute, the reenactment went up on ApolloLego on Twitter. By the end of the mission I had made almost 200 updates with as many unique pictures. The response was good, with the account gaining over 1,000 followers in a week and getting likes and retweets from some people I really respect and admire. And complete strangers were unrelentingly enthusiastic about it. It was the first time I've had a 100% positive experience online in far too long. I'm planning to do it all over again for Apollo 13 next spring.



( Some highlights )

I'm taking a genetic engineering class at a local biohacker space. (Some of you might remember my attempts to teach myself a long time ago. Hopefully this will work better!) It just started, so we're still doing the preliminaries like learning how to pipette and extracting strawberry DNA, which is pretty great fun. During this week's class the subject of how DNA was prepared for Franklin's early crystallography attempts, and no one knew. So I volunteered to do some digging. The results are pretty interesting, despite the best efforts of Nature's paywalls to stop me, so I figured I'd share them here.

( Vaguely organized references and excerpts here )

I'm getting better at reading very long, very dense books. Having a daily page goal (usually 25) is becoming instinctual, and there is something comforting knowing that I'll finish something in PAGENUMBERS/DAILYGOAL days. Even if that means the book will take a month, it's less of a psychic burden to have a fairly firm date by which it will be done, and then any days that I do extra reading are a nice bonus. And since I always have a book club book and often an audiobook going at the same time, I'm still getting the dopamine hit of finishing a book often enough.

This was definitely a challenge, though. I've read some Kierkegaard before, but nothing this long. His worldview of Christianity+Kant+Hegel is pretty alien to me. Yet overall it was still a compelling read, and I'd go as far as to call some parts beguiling. It is full of very earnest introspective thoughts about how to choose one's own nature and personality, the kind of thing I obsessed over in my late teens. Kierkegaard is trying out potential personalities, aspects that he sees within himself, and having them argue with each other. Most of it is pretentious rubbish, of course, but it's rubbish that occasionally spoke directly to the pretentious teen inside me. It reminded me a lot of Herman Hesse in that way -- though being far less directly enjoyable, let's be honest.

I'm pretty sure I would have hated Soren in person. The misogyny is pretty thick throughout the whole thing, though no doubt he would have been shocked by the very concept. He might as well be the patron saint of "nice guys". He didn't even have the guts to directly say the things he was thinking. The book was published under a pseudonym, the contents are presented as mysterious manuscripts the pseudonymous author happened to stumble across in a contrived fashion, and even the "Diary of a Seducer" section (the most straight-forwardly interesting, though in the service of describing an utterly despicable character) is wrapped in yet another layer of deniability by itself being found by one of the anonymous authors of the found manuscripts being presented by the pseudonymous Kierkegaard!

Under the moralizing, much of the book is focused on questions of contingency vs. necessity, an issue I still find philosophically pressing. I can't accept its argument that the solution is to be Christian, of course, but that's an interesting approach to take. From my outsider perspective, a lot of the religious drive does seem to be driven by a fear of the contingent. I finally understand why Kierkegaard is considered a proto-existentialist, at least.

My reading group decided to try the Hornblower books in response to my nautical adventures. I read the first (the first written, not the first chronologically) while on the Lady, and while it proved great reading when I was dead tired and couldn't think, I wasn't entirely impressed with the writing style. Upon my return the reading group decided to watch the 1951 Gregory Peck movie, which covered the first three books. I really hate watching a movie version first, so I quickly listened to the next 2. (Most fiction is pretty quick at 2.5x!) By the time I was done with those I was hooked, so I continued listening in chronological order, then went back and listened to the first 5 covering the earlier parts of his career.

So, obviously, I enjoyed them enough to inhale 11 books over just a few weeks. And I'm enjoying the British TV version, though it's diverging more and more from the books in needlessly dramatic ways. I don't think it will be a lasting influence on me. Possibly because Hornblower himself is just a bit too human -- the internal narration gives you an intimate view of his insecurities and uncertainties. That's not a bad thing, but at some point it starts to feel a bit indulgent to once again have it spelled out that Hornblower, while participating quite actively in a horrendously cruel and inhuman system, is actually kind of uncertain about the morality of much of it, so it's totally okay, don't worry.

I totally get the comparisons to Vorkosigan now, though. That was definitely the best parts of the books, when Hornblower has to solve problems in unexpected and lateral ways.

Early next month I'll be joining the crew of the Lady Washington for a two week training course. I'll go onboard in Ventura, then the next day we sail 240 nautical miles north to Monterey. The rest of the time will mostly be spent in port, giving tours and short cruises. (Apparently we might have to anchor out in the harbor for a night or two to make room for a cruise ship!) I'll be a deckhand, doing whatever needs doing: scrubbing decks, polishing brass, cleaning the head, etc. But it's a working tallship, and the program is designed to train tallship sailors, so I'll also be helping with the operation of the ship, including going aloft to release/secure sails as needed. I'll also be standing watch, at least during the trip up the coast. I know the reality will be cold and boring, but, damn.

This is something I've meant to do for at least 13 years, going by the evidence I could find in my archives. The last few years have made me realize on a deeper and personal level that, while by no means imminent, there is a very finite horizon on my ability to partake in activities involving heavy physical labor. I need to make sure to do these kinds of things sooner rather than later.

I've spent the last week practicing knots. (By itself that's a great benefit. I've never been particularly good at knots, and have always been a bit jealous of the skill. Nothing like being forced to finally learn a skill you wanted.) The gear has started to arrive -- I have a marlinspike now! This morning I made travel reservation down and back up. Since I have the weekend before free, I decided to take the train down and save a bit of carbon. (Plus, I've never taken the train past Eugene!) The last leg from Bakersfield to Ventura will be by Amtrak bus, so not only will the trip be by land, by sea and by air, it will also include planes, trains and automobiles.

Basically, I'm super excited and can't stop thinking about it. Watching hours of tallship videos has been a side effect. Most aren't very useful in terms of learning how things are done, but they sure are pretty. The following two are exceptions, being kind of terrible in terms of quality, but really great for technical details.

I knew nothing about this book other than the title and a vague sense that it was commonly assigned reading for teenagers. Turns out it is heart-breakingly good. Partly that was the tragic situation of the family, but mostly it was how delicately it captured coming of age. That's a rare thing, despite the popularity of the bildungsroman. Few manage to convey the phenomenology of those ages, the real feeling of becoming a person and bootstrapping a full personality. This book did.

This is one that I wish I had read as a teenager. I think I would have appreciated it then? Maybe I would have been too much of an ass, though. I had a lot more class biases back then than I would have cared to admit. I hope I would have at least identified with Frances being bullied by a self-righteous teacher.

The relatively open way sex was addressed surprised me. I'm even more surprised the book isn't prominent on banned book lists! No doubt it has happened, but it certainly isn't linked with moral panics in my mind. I don't tend to do research on books before I start them, preferring to experience them raw. As I read them, I play a game of trying to guess details like date of publication based on the content and style. I started with a guess of 20s or 30s for this one. By the end, particularly after Frances' mom tells her that maybe sleeping with a guy would have been a great experience, I was thinking more like mid-60s at the earliest. Nope, 1943! Pretty astonishing.

( 123 books this year )
I'm up to 2x playback speed for almost everything audio. 2.25x if it's particularly slow-but-easy. Frankly, it's a bit hard to find enough material. I'm getting kind of thoughtless about following the established canon. That worries me some.

I spent two weeks in October driving around the eastern seaboard with my mother. 5187.7 kilometers in total. We visited Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia (very barely), Vermont, New York, Pennsylvania, West Virginia (barely), Maryland. Delaware and Virginia.



( I took some pictures, obvs. )