Gormenghast

2 August 2013

Pingtung

It’s now evening, past 9 PM, humid, dark and warm.  In our house there is a terrace off the landing between the kitchen and, on the floor above, the Master Bedroom.  It has two chairs and pots of flowers and looks inward on the small, gated cul-de-sac that is the interior of our small community here in the center of the town.

Sitting out in the dark, the buildings all stretch up above where I’m seated – five stories, I lean against the canvas back of the chair and smoke reflectively, sipping on a tequila. 
The architecture of our complex is Japanese inspired, each household having as small a foot print on the valuable soil as possible but reaching up, floor after floor, providing an interior living space that rivals and even exceeds those of American homes. 

But tonight I stare at the straight exterior lines of the buildings, each structure hosting two or even four families.  They are faced with tile, neutral, tan in color.  In the crepuscule their outlines are foreboding.  The windows are large but, apart from the lower floors where people live the bulk of their waking lives – cooking, eating, watching television, visiting with family – they are dark.  The combination of sharp corner angles, of which there are many on each building, and the darkness against the contrasting lights of the city around us, highlighting the starkness, somehow reminds me of an oriental and contemporary Gormenghast.  There are balustrades around each roof terrace and most are covered, metal supporting some man-made material that is opalescent and translucent but which provides shade against the sun or, on a clear night, the moon.

The notion of Gormenghast comes from the depths where thoughts churn and make links that are not possible in the quotidian world.  It is the result of intellectual fracking.  Tequila is the fracking medium, splitting open deep fractures in the mind, fomenting connections between neural links from years before and more recent ones.

So I live in an intellectual fantasy world created by Conrad and Lowry but decorated by Mervin Peake, he of the darkened visage, staring at the world through tinted spectacles on a black night.

Aedes Aegypti - How I hate you!

2 August 2013

Friday

Pingtung

The hot season has given way to the wet.  We await the first serious typhoon though there is none in the forecast at the moment.  So far this year we’ve been brushed by the edges of a couple that crashed through Mindanao but that only meant rain and some wind for us, nothing serious.

Each day the mountains are visible for a bit of time in the morning when the air is clear.  As the heat builds and the ineluctable Taiwanese coastal sea fog covers the lower lands where Pingtung sits, clouds build up across the peaks and then smother the lower slopes, turning dark with rain as the day progresses into evening.  Sometimes the rains roll out into the river plain where we sit and then the temperatures drop from the stifling.  The falling water somehow seems to suck the humidity from the air and then the night is cooler and pleasant and I sit on the roof terrace, training the fan on my bare legs to keep the mosquitoes off.  I drink a beer or a whiskey or even rum with ice and water.  I smoke some cigarettes; at times I angle the television so that I can watch it through the sliding door (which I leave open) and I follow an American or, in its absence, a Taiwanese baseball game.  Somehow the juxtaposition of heat and humidity and the lazier pace of the game are right.

But today, like yesterday, is overcast and there is a continuous, spitting rain, seemingly light but persistent enough that, out in it, you are wet within moments.  But the option is to put on a rain coat, even one of those flimsy yellow plastic jobs that every scooter driver carries for times like these, and that is not conceivable for the humidity is high, somehow wetter, and just walking up the steps from the kitchen to my den leaves me perspiring. 

I turn on the air-conditioner and a fan, not because the temperature is so high but to remove some of the moisture which films up the screen of my iPad and leaves the back of my neck sweaty and uncomfortable.

Outside, behind the house, there is a field, a valuable one for its unbuilt emptiness in the center of the town.  An unrepentant green now, the field has nurtured low trees and bushes that have mushroomed in the hot-warm and wet air; this verdure pops back seemingly within weeks of the occasional haircuts it is given by the municipal authorities.  Even now, in the rain, I can see the yellow butterflies that are so numerous, many hiding under the plants’ top layer, still darting from leaf to leaf and bush to bush on a mission who purpose baffles me.  Deeper below where water stands, I know that there are breeding mosquitoes and, as well as typhoon, we are now entering the break-bone fever season.  Mosquitoes laid their eggs down there as long as a year ago.  With the coming of the rains, the eggs hatch.  Last night I was bit, twice.  The itching and swelling did not last and I live under the illusion, which I will not research to destroy, that the creatures that bit me are more relative to a midge than the larger, Aedes Aegypti, an African export that has spread across the world.  I fear them more than wild dogs, spiders or mice; they are killers.

When Alex was younger and we lived in Manila, in a beautiful suburb, gated, built around green spaces, a wonderful golf course and with gentle hills, I fought a one man battle against the pests in our back yard, spraying continuously in my campaign to protect my baby girl from the predations of that awful beast, Aedes Aegypti.  In the event, I probably put her more at risk from the chemical side effects of whatever insecticide I was spraying but my intentions were noble.  Alex never got dengue or Japanese encephalitis or any other mosquito vector disease.  Now she lives in Canada where the creatures are large enough to mate with cars and leave welts where they bite but that’s it, they don’t kill you.

If you hate America and approve of unemployment, buy a house.....

11 May 2013
en route, Singapore to Brisbane

There was a completely fascinating article on the back page of yesterday International Herald Tribune by Floyd Norris, Chief Financial Correspondent of The New York Times. The article was so interesting that I'm going to paraphrase most of it.

Generally, whether Democratic or Republican, American politicians are united in the view that home ownership is good for the country. They have concretely expressed this belief by providing generous tax breaks to home buyers.

Recent research by two economists - David Blanchflower of Dartmouth and Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick -- concluded that rising levels of home ownership are a precursor to eventual sharp rises in unemployment. Essentially, they are saying that the more homes that are owned, the fewer people will have jobs.

Blanchflower and Oswald are not arguing this because homeowners are more likely to lose jobs than renters are. They do argue, though, that areas with rising levels of home ownership are less likely to be welcoming to innovation and new job creation and to have less labor mobility and longer commutes to work. Oswald said , we find that a high rate of homeownership slowly decimates the labor market'.

The authors of the study found that the five states with the greatest increase in homeownership during the sixty years from 1950 to 2010 had an unemployment rate at the end of the period that was 6.3 percentage points higher than in 1950. Those five states: Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina and West Virginia.

The five states where home ownership went up the least over the period - California, North Dakota, Oregon, Washington and Wisconsin - saw a rise in unemployment of 3.5% over the same six decades.

There are a lot of different issues around these numbers and lots of things influence unemployment rates, not just home ownership. But, and this is important, when the two professors controlled for other variables, the same pattern emerges: more home ownership means higher unemployment. Turn the question around: what about home ownership and employment growth? Same answer, higher home ownership, lower employment growth. Even the 2007 housing market crash are accounted for; the pattern was there before investment banks found a way to drive the economy into a wall.

You would wonder why no one else has notices this but Oswald says that's because the time lags are long. There is data as far back as 1996 which suggests a correlation between home ownership and higher levels of unemployment in Europe as well as the US. Researchers did not dig too deep into the reasons behind these results, they didn't find any evidence to support the notion that unemployment rates for homeowners are lower than for renters.

So, if there is a correlation here, what is it? Well, it may be a fairly mundane explanation but one with profound implications. Homeowners tend to stay put and commute farther and farther to their jobs which creates additional cost and congestion for businesses and workers. Zoning regulations may be another factor; homeowner dominated communities tend to be against new industrial investment - 'not in my back yard'.

In econ-speak, homeownership creates 'negative externalities' for the labor market.

Until the credit crisis I believe that the vast majority of us regarded home ownership as something akin to both a sacred right and a sacred duty. There were lots of positive externalities: Norris points out that realtors were publishing data which showed that homeowners were better educated, there were fewer dropouts amongst the children of homeowners, etc., etc.

Norris' article goes on to suggest that this article has helped the halo of homeownership to slip slightly and may prompt more debate about the mortgage interest deduction. This deduction was described as 'one of the largest tax subsidies in the Internal Revenue Code' by a tax expert in congressional testimony last month.

By the way, the percentage of Americans who own their own homes has dropped since 2006 from 69% to 65% at the end of Q1 this year.


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Sexual Assault Prevention -- the US Air Force

Wednesday - 8 May 2013

Jeffrey Krusinski is a fox. Not the sexy kind, he is an actual, feral, fox. The United States Air Force is the hen house:

Can this be so? The officer in charge of sexual assault prevention programs for the US Air Force, the aforementioned Jeffrey Krusinski, has been arrested and charged with sexual battery.

Late on Sunday evening, just after midnight, Jeffrey, a Lieutenant Colonel and head of sexual assault prevention programs for the Air Force, approached a woman he did not know in a parking lot in Crystal City, near the Pentagon, and grabbed her breasts and buttocks before she fended him off and called 911.

Col. Krusinski has been removed from his job as chief of the sexual assault prevention and response branch. He had been in the job for about two months. What is he going to tell the wife and kids?

There are not many bright spots to this story that I can admit to as a caring, 21st century guy. Not only do I feel bad for Jeffrey's wife and kids, I am very sorry for the woman that Col. Krusinski attacked. Obviously, though, it is a great relief that she was able to fend him off and get help.

Some might try to justify Col. Krusinski's behavior by arguing that he was taking his job seriously; this was field research: know thine enemy, walk a mile in his (or her) shoes, etc.

Could it have been that this was a sort of live fire drill?

I just don't know where to go with this. There are so many, many paths you could take. I invite everyone to send me their best explanation and I'll compile and publish them on my blog.

What I can tell you is that people who don't think Americans either 'get' or 'do' irony are entirely wrong!

I did not read this in 'The Onion'! I read it in the 'International Herald Tribune' which has no visible sense of humor at all.

Also, let me close by saying how disappointed I am in Jeffrey. He let me, and all men, down and he let us down bad! The United States Air Force expects more, deserves more!

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Homage to Kai Tak and to Casablanca

How is this like Rick's in 'Casablanca'? I'm sitting in one of the 21st century equivalencies but it doesn't cut it. I'm at the Long Bar in one of the Cathay Lounges at Chep Lap Kok. There was nothing like this at Kai Tak but the atmosphere was ever so much more adventurous. Among other things, the simple fact of landing or successfully taking off was something of an event. In the five years I was based here in the 1990's, I recall one Lufthansa jet that didn't get off the end of the runway and essentially had to be dismantled. I also remember a China Airlines 747 that accelerated off the end of the runway and into the harbor rather than the air. Fortunately, there was an alert tugboat captain shoving stuff and he just pushed the plane into the shallows before it sank.

There was nothing like landing at Kai Tak. You aimed at a checkerboard on a hill, made a sharp turn and then dove down between apartment blocks, laundry hanging like flags and snatches of Cantonese soap operas momentarily visible through the windows as you roared by and down onto the tarmac, the engines roaring into reverse as soon as you hit the ground, screaming to a stop before the pavement ended and the water began.

I loved it! But I also made myself a promise that the day it became routine would be the day it was time for a change. I think it was 1995 or 1996, a year or so before the handover, when, one afternoon, I kept reading, absorbed, as we scooted in over Kowloon and realized, after we'd come to a halt just at the end of the runway on the edge of the Bay, that it was time to go! We moved to Manila not long after.






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Adelaide -- The Friendly, Peaceful City!

9 Dec 2012
Adelaide

My mental construct of Adelaide is of a friendly town, full of churches, everyone seems to know everyone else and I've always thought of it as boring. My Saturday night there confirmed the first and put paid to the second. I flew in from Singapore and got to the hotel around 6 PM and went down to have a Barossa red and a cigarette in a small outdoor eating and smoking area. I was pretty taken aback when a very attractive young woman asked if she could join me, she sat down before I could reply and borrowed my lighter. She was outgoing and very pleasant, acting as if we'd known each other a long time. I enjoyed her company and our conversation was one of those typical of strangers - our jobs, our spouses, our children, our travels and so on. Pretty soon one of her colleagues came over, about my age, and joined us for a smoke. Nice fellow, a jewelry maker. Turns out that they were both with a jewelry manufacturer and having their Christmas 'do' at our hotel.

Pretty soon the pair invited me to join their table inside. Eventually I was persuaded and joined the group for a drink. I was impressed not only by their friendliness to me but by how genuinely fond of each other they seemed. I was also struck by their ability to slam back alcohol. This wasn't going to go on for long, at least not for me; I was tired and my capacity is increasingly greater than my ability to metabolize excessive amounts of alcohol in a way that doesn't leave me a wreck.

So around 9 or so I begged off, wishing my new friends the best for the holidays, including frenetic sales of their jewelry, and went up to my room.

I read and dropped off after about half an hour, reflecting again on how peaceful a city it was -- a Saturday night, I'm in the very center of the place and the streets are sparsely populated and quiet.

About an hour or two later I awoke when a bomb went off. I shot up, out of bed and onto the floor, completely lost. What had just happened? Where was I? What city?

It wasn't a bomb because within seconds there was a repeat of exactly the same noise that had brought me up and out of the bed -- it was a huge bang on the wall I shared with the room next door. This time I identified that it was a body making that noise. Someone was either throwing themselves against the wall or being thrown against it. The latter seemed more likely unless my neighbor was a masochist. I figured out he wasn't when I heard a woman screaming, obviously not happy at being flung against the wall. There was also a man's voice, slurry, obviously alcohol-fueled and mean sounding.

I picked up the bedside phone and rang the front desk but there was no answer! (I later learned that every person on the 16th floor where i was lodged had been awakened by the 'bomb' and had, at the same time, decided to call downstairs.)

Meantime, the noises from next door were getting louder although the man had tired of throwing the woman at the wall. He must have been doing something even worse, however, for all of a sudden she was screaming and crying for help! This was too much, I opened my door a crack and looked out into the hall. About half-a-dozen other doors were open and sleepy guests were peering out. The fellow across the hall, with more presence of mind than me, told me that he had rung downstairs and security were on their way.

Well, security did arrive in the person on one beefy fellow with an ill fitting blazer and a two way radio. He knocked on the door of the room next door to mine, the source of the screaming - I was still hanging out into the hallway, holding onto the frame of my door. There was incoherent male yelling in response to the security officer's knock. He radioed down for back-up which appeared in the form of another beefy fellow in another ill fitting blazer. At that point, after further knocking, the perpetrator (notice how watching TV police and legal dramas helps my vocabulary when describing these situations?), clearly this time, told the security officers that he had a gun and they should go away.

Security took this new information on board and left, quickly. I, and this was stupid, shut and locked my door. As I did this, I noted that all the other doors on our floor were shutting as well.

Okay, I was now in my room but quickly realized this was a mistake. I was next door to a maniac, who said he had a gun, and the evidence showed, unarguably, that the walls were paper thin and certainly could not stand up to a random bullet.

I assessed my situation. I did not want to go out into the hall, who knew what the idiot might decide to do but my bed faced the paper-thin wall which was all that separated me from my violent neighbor. If there was a consolation in what was clearly a desperate situation for your hero, the female in the piece seemed to be better off, the volume of her cries had subsided and she was just mewling (from the nasally sounds and sniffling, I could imagine she really needed a tissue at this point; not really something attractive to contemplate). But, while the female's situation seemed to have improved, mine position was dire. I was in a room whose walls might as well have been made of cardboard for all the protection they afforded me.

So, ratiocinating like mad, I mentally coughed up the concept of 'field of fire' and, like lightening, calculated that the field of fire in this case definitely included my bed and most of the room.

If I'd been truly awake I probably would have gotten into the bathtub but instead pulled the one chair in the room into the far corner, against the outside wall, taking up as little as I could of the arc of the field of fire. I sat there, heroically assuming the protective fetal position.

Eventually things next door calmed down, the male in the piece was just muttering, mostly obscene things which rhymed with duck but involved physiological impossibilities. The female had dried up or drifted off -- she was clearly as liquored as he was though not as prone to violence.

Finally, about twenty minutes after our brave security team had precipitously abandoned their post, the police arrived. Within a couple of minutes the situation was resolved. The male next door was arrested, escorted out, unarmed (in fact, he had not had a gun at all), and the female was taken downstairs and checked out.

The moral of this story? Adelaide is not boring, you can never tell when your Saturday night there could get truly lively.

Now, please excuse me, I'm traveling again and need to curl up in my chair and go to sleep.



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