Philip K. Dick

There’s a pretty good article over at Wired about The Second Coming of Philip K. Dick, specifically his popularity as a source for the Hollywood-movies machine these days.

At a time when most 20th-century science fiction writers seem hopelessly dated, Dick gives us a vision of the future that captures the feel of our time. He didn’t really care about robots or space travel, though they sometimes turn up in his stories. He wrote about ordinary Joes caught in a web of corporate domination and ubiquitous electronic media, of memory implants and mood dispensers and counterfeit worlds. This strikes a nerve. “People cannot put their finger anymore on what is real and what is not real,” observes Paul Verhoeven, the one-time Dutch mathematician who directed Total Recall. “What we find in Dick is an absence of truth and an ambiguous interpretation of reality. Dreams that turn out to be reality, reality that turns out to be a dream. This can only sell when people recognize it, and they can only recognize it when they see it in their own lives.”

Like the babbling psychics who predict future crimes in Minority Report, Dick was a precog. Lurking within his amphetamine-fueled fictions are truths that have only to be found and decoded. In a 1978 essay he wrote: “We live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups. I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudorealities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives. I distrust their power. It is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.”

Viewed in this context, Dick’s emergence in Hollywood seems oddly inevitable. His career itself is a tale of alternate realities. In the flesh he was the ultimate outsider, pecking out paranoid visions that place the little guy at the mercy of the corporate machine. Yet posthumously he feeds the machine, his pseudoworlds the basis of ever more elaborate entertainments doled out by the megacorporations we pay to stuff our heads. How he made the leap from pulp-fiction writer to Hollywood prophet is a tale almost worthy of the man himself.

I really must read more of this man… maybe I’ll find some good stuff in Bangkok? I hope so!

The Weekend

Well, the weekend was good, mostly.

Saturday we played a gig at Led Zeppelin, supporting Wounded Fly. For those of you who are not into the younger generation’s music, “supporting” means we were one of the “opening acts”. Wounded Fly is another Cavaret (Cabaret) band, meaning they’re tied to the same label we’re working with for our second album. We played mostly new songs and they went well… despite the sound board guy being in a trance half the time and not fixing any of the feedback problems. The hardest song for me was the new one, Delerium, because I play flute on it, and seeing as I only bought my flute a couple of weeks ago, I’m a little out of practice. But overall I think the show went well.

After our set, Thai (and Kathleen) and I took off in a taxi to Iksan, to try to get to Kimberley and Chai’s pre-wedding party. The party was a blast, it was so good to see so many people I’ve not seen in a while. Kimberley was beautiful in her hanbok, but stupid me, I didn’t take any pictures… I was too distracted by the social events. Chai tried to set me up with a girl, but… uh, um, I had to walk my friend John home, so she and I didn’t really talk.

I did have a really good talk with a couple of other people I’d met only briefly before, new teachers at the Wonkwang Language Center. Funny, Leslie (the wife component of a married couple at the school) is having the same experience I had at the YMCA: she’s a pink unicorn at the pool! Like my lusty ajumas, she has an ajeoshi who is obsessed with her (though the ajumas never obsessed, really).

Finally, we took a cab to Jeonju and I drifted off to sleep.

On Sunday I took a bus to Seoul, arrived at 3pm, and went to the recording studio. We’re recording sketches of all the songs we want to put on the album, and so this time around the recording process is a little more relaxed. I’m really enjoying working with the people at Cavaret, it’s a good experience. Sunday’s session was the last before holidays, so we won’t record again for 2 months… actually more like two and a half months! That’s a little scary. But as for me, my sax abilities might be rusty then, but I’ll be much better at flute, at least!

Today (Monday) and tomorrow I will finish off testing my students, punch the grades into the computer, and hand in my grade sheets. Then I am finished work until March! It’s a wonderful thing. But, I’d better get some lunch into me and hurry to school… I want to finish by tomorrow afternoon, as one of my old students from Iksan is coming over for dinner.

About Twenty Years From Now

…. if Iraq is full of people who hate America with a seething passion, don’t be surprised. After all, the only thing they’ll have to go on is what their parents said, and their own vague memories of scenes like this. In this photo by Ashley Gilbertson (from the New York Times), this boy is standing in what used to be his kitchen.

Have you ever stood in what used to be your kitchen? I never have. I’ve been fortunate never even to have experienced this via something as pedestrian as a housefire.

And the take home message is that there is going to be a lot more to mend than a few bridges and government buildings. And if America tries to pull out now, that’ll win them hate. All I can say is that I surely hope America doesn’t plan on doing what it did in Korea, setting up a military government and backing it despite torture, political repression, violence against agitators for democracy. If they do that, they’re only fueling the fire of whatever hatred and violence against America exists out there.

Of course, by then Bush and Rumsfeld and Cheney and the lot will all have their profits solidly in pocket, and be done with the government; and the old hawks will all be too senile to remember what they agitated for. Which makes the question of how anyone could be so shortsighted much easier to answer.

It’s striking to think that the kids this boy’s age in America will be dealing with the fallout of all this ridiculous crap… perhaps even literal fallout.

Thanks to the link for the article where I found this, Marv.

Kill Bill, Vol. 1

Ooops, I wrote this about a week ago but left it in draft format, and forgot to publish it. So now I am. Eeek!

Over on my other little side-project, New Sophists’ Almanac, in a post called Asthmatic Aesthetics, my blogmate Marvin brought up this Quentin Tarantino film that he was excited about, called Kill Bill Vol. 1. Knowing only that it was Tarantino (but thereb knowing a fair bit) I decided I’d see it, if only to have one more “aesthetic experience” to discuss with Marvin. (We’re discussing that sticky area of philosophy, aesthetics, these days… tying to brains and minds and cognition and so on…)

Anyway, it seems I am seeing a lot of movies in slightly delayed synch with Marvin: Master and Commander, for example, and now Kill Bill Volume I. Another (slightly surprising) trend is that I keep going to movies not knowing who is in them and finding Lucy Liu playing some big role in each one. I saw Cypher a few days ago, and Kill Bill tonight, and she was in both. Is she in every movie these days? Is she playing every Asian female role in Hollywood? Whatever happened to Sandra Oh? Good grief. Ah well… she was actually pretty good in Kill Bill, as was Uma Thurman.

The opening of the film was shocking. I like to think I am tough, but honestly it shocked the hell out of me. A person being shot in the head is horrible, but… in midsentence? That disregard for a human’s last moment, to extinguish them in midsentence. It’s something I’ve never seen in Hollywood, but it’s probably not uncommon in murders.

I don’t think movies create violence, I think violence is always part of the human spectrum. I think at least this is honest. It’s like the first five minutes of Saving Private Ryan, actually: if the rest of the movie had kept the relentlessness of that first five minutes, then we’d have a lot better idea of what a fucking hell World War II actually was, instead of the romanticized notions that float about in our minds, focused on the boys who made it through to the end. There’s so few of those left now, we’ve forgotten what war is, and the poets have long been out of the woodwork. They can, and will, rhapsodize as much as they want: violence in its true form is not balletic, not beautiful. It’s awful shit.

And sometimes it’s necessary.

That is one thing I appreciated in Kill Bill. It was balletic, but when it was, it was clearly romanticized, and honestly so. We are all so used to the idea of a hero in a story, someone touched by magic, so that when she leaps, she lands on her feet. Uma Thurman’s character manages to pull this off, with some beautiful stunts and wire-work.

The fights are long but in fact don’t feel so long. It’s like these pulses of action, with moments of dialogue interspersed so you can catch your breath: the storming of the beaches of Normandy time and time and time again, each time worse and more horrible.

The line in the Yo La Tengo song Tom Courtenay runs through my head: “… as the music swells, somehow struggle from adversity, and our hero finds inner peace…” Thurman’s character is that hero, no matter how nasty she is, no matter why the assassins tried to kill her: she’s seeking revenge, and she’s doing it with style, and somehow you can’t help but root for her.

And that’s interesting, if you think about it. We root for O-Rei Ishii (was that her name?) when she seeks revenge for the murder of her parents. And then we root for Thurman’s character when, in similarly seeking revenge, she slays Ishii. How does this make sense to us?

We’re apes. We have a sense of justice, and it overrides things like who is who, at least when they’re not people we really truly know. Our stories about blood and guts are really stories about order and anarchy, and how order always must be restored. It throws into question all kinds of things we hold dear about ourselves, that we are inherently moral creatures, that deep inside us we want mainly to do good. Perhaps we are more primally creatures whose gregarious evolutionary past has bred in us more deeply a sense of order than any kind of compassion except the personal kind.

When was the last time you felt real compassion for someone you didn’t know? It’s an unsettling question. Sometimes art has awakened it in me. After seeing a Korean movie (called Jiburo, or “Going Home”) about a little old lady who, once we see her life in great detail, goes to market to sell some vegetables. I have never looked at the grannies selling vegetables by the side of the road the same again… but in general, compassion for strangers is rare to us, and I’d say probably less pronounced than our sense that order and justice of some sort must prevail, in order for our social world to function.

That doesn’t mean cops: in Kill Bill it’s mainly gangsters. But I wonder if this explains part of the beauty of the movie. For, whether we like it or not, there is a strange beauty in all that horrible, bloody ugliness. If there weren’t, Tarantino would never have gotten money for a another movie… nobody would have gone to it, knowing what they do about what they’ll see in his films.

Hm. This begs more consideration. Later…