After Dark by Haruki Murakami

I seldom read non-English speaking authors, so I have Carl over at Stainless Steel Droppings to thank for pointing me to this vivid little book, After Dark by Haruki Murakami.  After Dark came out in Japan in 2004 and was published in English in 2007.

I wonder how much the translation to English altered Murakami’s prose?  What we get is stark.  Crisp dialog and vivid details suggests little of Japanese culture.  It’s almost as if world culture has all melded together.  After Dark had more American pop culture in it than Japanese.  Was the cultural specifics converted for American readers, or do people in Japan eat at Denny’s and pick up milk at 7-Elevens?

Murakami plays with narration, telling the reader to pretend to be a movie camera, while weaving in unexplained fantastic elements.  The novel was beautiful to listen to, but it caused so many questions to enter my mind while listening.  Am I learning about citizens of Tokyo from reading this story?  How many of them love American music and old LPs?  Is the percentage about equal to American kids who love Anime, or is American pop music very popular in Japan?  Is crime part of their culture like it is in ours?  Why is the prostitute Chinese?  Is Japan becoming an Asian melting pot?

AfterDark2

Mari, the 19 year-old main character seems no different from young female characters in American novels.  Now these observations are not meant to be critical of Murakami’s writing.  What I’m exploring here is how much we’re all alike.  One hundred years ago, stories from Japan made their people seem exotic and even alien.  This story only confirms the Los Angelization of the world.  Is that good or sad?

The story is full of detail observations, like Mari sitting at Denny’s smoking and drinking coffee, or surreal views of her sister, Eri, sleeping like Snow White.  All the reviews I’ve read are positive and mesmerized by the writing.  I know I was too.  The writing is real and meta-real which pushes me to believe that After Dark has something to say, but I’m never sure what.

The story starts with Mari accidentally meeting with Takahashi, a jazz lover and musician late at night, who just happens to know her model beautiful sister.  Mari has a mild adventure during the seven hours covered by the novel, and gets a glance at the seamy side of life.  It’s not a major story with a gripping plot, but a quiet tale allowing the writer to show off his writing chops.

To be honest, this story left me wanting more.  Like I said at the start, I live in the American pop culture and study English lit, so I don’t get far from my own language.  I read books like Memoirs of a Geisha to travel to places and times I’ll never get to see on my own.  That’s sad, but I try to make do. This book makes me want to know a whole lot more about Tokyo today.  I wished my cable company got the Japanese equivalent TV show like our CBS Sunday Morning or The Today Show.

What is the best way to transmit a snapshot of culture from one part of the world to another, while changing languages at the border?  Do movies do a better job?  Did Priceless give me a good view of life in Paris?  How accurate was The Band’s Visit of Israel?  Or how does Jane’s Austen teach us about England in Pride and Prejudice?

Am I expecting too much by trying to travel via novels and movies?

Jim

Neil deGrasse Tyson

I became a big fan of Neil deGrasse Tyson when he came to Memphis to give a talk last April, where his comedic side had a chance to run wild.  I’ve been noticing him showing up all over the TV spectrum for years, mainly on NOVA scienceNOW and The Universe on the History Channel.  I bet he gets tired of the comparison, but Tyson has taken on Carl Sagan’s role as cheerleader for science.

Friday night at the Memphis Astronomy club we watched an online video of his Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Colloquium Spring 2008 speech called “Delusions of Space Enthusiasts.”  If you have any interest whatsoever about space exploration this is one hour and twenty-five minutes excellently spent.

One reason why I love this speech by Tyson is he covers many topics I’ve explored too and come to the same conclusion.  In one segment he attempts to calculate the number of space enthusiasts in the U.S., something that I’ve also attempted.  I think I got 300,000 and he got 400,000, but he counted employees working at various aerospace plants that I didn’t count because they should have also been members of the various space enthusiast groups like The Planetary Society, The National Space Society and The Mars Society.  Anyway, we both got a small number.  Tyson goes a step further and lists many organizations with more than 400,000 members, like the NRA with 4.3 million and the Hanna Montana fan club, with a membership I’ve forgotten, but which dwarfs the total size of all the space groups combined.

First off, Tyson explains that the early days of the space race was political, and that the cold war sent us to the moon and not science or the quest for exploration.  He shows how President Kennedy didn’t care for space exploration at all, but wanted us to beat the Russians.  Tyson jokes, if you want America to go to Mars, convince the Chinese to say they are going first, even if they have no real intentions.

Tyson spends a great deal of the talk explaining the battle for funding between advocates of robotic and manned missions at NASA.  He makes a great case that without manned missions there would be no scientific missions by showing graphs that reveal that the percentage of spending for science missions has always been a fraction of the total NASA budget that directly related to the manned mission budget.  He says you can’t sell science to Congress.  He says NASA needs more exciting manned missions of exploration to keep NASA moving forward.

However, Tyson doesn’t believe that grand missions to Mars with $400 billion dollar price tags will ever fly.  His graphs reveal that NASA has always had about the same amount of effective budget dollars, even compared to the Apollo years, so any new missions beyond LEO will need to fit into those annual budgets.  Evidently Tyson was on the brainstorming team that imagined the new Constellation Program and the Orion Crew Vehicle.  This back to the future vision is very Apollo like.

One thing Tyson doesn’t cover is whether or not science missions will get the same level of funding once the Constellation Program ramps up.  I would think you’d get a lot more astrophysics bang for the buck with robots, but it appears to be Tyson’s belief that manned missions excite the public to carry science along on its coattails.

I highly recommend you download this talk, and also suggest you get the latest version of RealPlayer.  Friday night I saw the talk on an older version of the player and it had a lot of bad spots.  My version plays the film very smoothly.  It’s a shame they didn’t use built in Flash movie technology because video players like Real and Quicktime aren’t universally installed like Flash and discourage people from viewing the video.

For more Neil deGrasse Tyson science lectures with sparkling humor, just search on his name at YouTube.

Jim

Too Many Paper Towels

I’ve become a semi-bachelor this year when my wife had to take a job out of town.  Because of this new status I have to do my own shopping, and I’ve always hated shopping.  When we first got married over thirty years ago, I volunteered to do the laundry if Susie would do all the shopping.  Learning to shop properly is hard to do, as I’ve discovered late in life.  And with the current climate of shopping to save money while also being green, I feel like I need to buy subscription to Money Magazine, Consumer Reports and The Economist to effectively make a foray to the grocery story.

Susie always bought large bundles of paper towels that we had to squirrel away in all our closets that would take years to use.  Well, the last batch ran out this past week, and since we have a couple of cats that love to groom and puke, paper towels are a necessity.  Of course this could be a green issue.  I could wipe up my feline family member’s hairball regurgitation with a rag that I could wash out, but that’s time consuming and messy, so I take the easy paper route of buying towels.

When I got to the store and the isle with the paper towels I made a troubling discovering – there are dozens of choices.  I didn’t remember which brand Susie bought.  I stood staring at the selection for several minutes not knowing what to do.  I considered asking one of the many women passing by but worried they might have considered my genuine ignorance as feigned male stupidity for a pick up line.  There were so many brands, so many styles, so many patterns, so many bundle choices, and I figured I’d needed a laptop and a spreadsheet to calculate which was the cheapest if I figured for length of roll, number of sheets, number of plies, and number of rolls in a bundle.

And even more confusing was trying to figure out quality.  Some looked pretty cheap and were cheap, and others looked cheap and were not.  And none of them claimed to be good for barf removal from rugs.  I stood there totally befuddled, not knowing what to do when I saw the name “Brawny.”  Hey, I remembered that from the TV, and it sounded manly, and I’m a man, so I figured that was a sign from God.  I bought one roll, thinking I’d give ole Brawny the vomit patrol test.  When my wife got home this weekend, all she said was, “I like the kind that have the half-sheet tears.”  Well, they do clean up after Nick and Nora just fine.

The question now is did I get a good buy?  I have no idea.  I don’t know how much I paid for that Brawny roll.  In my panic to select I didn’t look.   Just now, I jumped on Google and started studying the problem.  First off, I found that there are paper towels promoted as being green because they are made from recycled paper and less chemical processing.  And there’s toilet tissue also made from recycled paper.  This sounds like a no-brainer, so the next time I buy I’m going to look for recycled paper products, but I don’t remember seeing that at my store.  GreenDealsDaily also recommended 100% biodegradable sponges, but that sounded nasty when I imagined how all those cat crunchies expanded with digestive juices would clog up its pores.

There’s lots of confusing information on Google, but after looking at several links, I found Paper Towels and Napkins vs. Cloth.  Melissa Breyer rates various types of cleanup solutions by their friendliness to the Earth.  I’m sold on recycled paper products, but she also makes a good case for cloth napkins and towels

If I go with cloth I’ll have to wash them, but I won’t have to shop for paper towels anymore – a relief that saves money.  I wonder if I can live without them?  Since I hate shopping, this decides the issue for me, and it gets me out of the math of figuring out which paper towels are the best buy.  However, if I spot some of those green recycled paper towels I might buy them to keep for fast cleanups like when I hear the lovely call of a retching cat when I’m trying to run out the door to work.

Jim

The Economics of Inefficiency

During bad economic times people seek ways to get more for their money – in other words they try to become efficient spenders.  The trouble with that thinking, it’s bad for the economy.  What we want is a thriving economy where there’s a chicken in every pot and the future is rosy.  Woefully, a thriving economy is highly inefficient.

Take saving money.  All money advisors advise people get out of debt, save a portion of their salary and only buy what they’ve saved up for – good Puritan ideals.  If everyone followed this advice we’d fall into a world-wide depression.  The economic success of all depends on everyone spending as much money as they can.  If we had a world where the only credit card spending was paid off at the end of the month, people wouldn’t buy nine-tenths of the crap that they do.  That’s a lot of people out of jobs.  And when those folks lose their jobs, even more bad things happen, and a recession becomes a growing snowball rolling down hill.

There’s always a silver economic lining, even to bad things.  If everyone was honest we wouldn’t need jails, police, lawyers, judges, counselors, bail bondsmen, mystery writers, cop show producers, and so on, as I’m sure you get the idea.  I hate the idea of crime.  Crime is the true terrorism in America.  But ending crime would be like one of those stories about a person finding a Genie in a bottle and getting a wish that turns out disturbingly screwed up.  If someone did get to make that wish and tomorrow all illegal activity stopped we’d have a whole lot of honest people out of work, and a lot of criminals previously not working, would be looking for jobs too.  Could the world’s economies handle the impact of so much ethical behavior?  I’d much prefer a crime-free efficient economy and the main way to reduce crime is for the economy to produce a lot of good jobs.  It’s a Catch-22.

The same reverse philosophy could be applied to the advice about eating right and pursuing healthy lifestyles.  If everyone ate healthy, how many people would be out of work when all the fast food restaurants went belly up?  Add in the junk food makers, their related industries, vending machines, packaging, salesmen, suppliers, warehouses, etc.  And then think about all the health care workers that clean up after we lead lives of poor healthy choices.  Sure, we’d produce a lot more sport fitness jobs, but would they make up for all the lost careers selling evil calories?

What if everyone bought the store brands instead of the big name brands?  What if everyone jettison their designer clothes and shopped at Target and Penney’s?  What if everyone wore sensible shoes and drove practical cars?  What if people gave up vanity, putting the make-up makers and cosmetic surgeons out of business?  What if everyone stole their MP3 songs and DVD movies?

Certain things in life are vital:  air, water, food, shelter and jobs.  And maybe jobs should be listed third because getting food and shelter without a job is very difficult.  Right now America is in a panic over an economic downturn and we see everything about the future through the spectacles of fear.  It doesn’t seem to matter that there’s more peace and prosperity now than at any time during all of history.

Everyone is wailing and gnashing their teeth that gasoline costs $4 a gallon.  Forecasters have been predicting that for forty damn years – so why all the tantrums?  Nor do people seem to notice that the high price of gasoline comes just at the perfect time when we need to wean ourselves off of fossil fuels because of war and global warming.  It’s a good thing.  It’s our second warning before economic hell comes to town.  We knew back in the 1970s that living off of cheap oil was like borrowing from the Mafia.  Is it so surprising they’re breaking our legs right now?  And we really haven’t had a true oil crisis, because no one is going without yet.  Wait until there are oil shortages.  That’s when they chain cement blocks to us and throw us in the ocean.  Are you ready for the day when there will be no gasoline for sale at the pumps?  Gas lines are just one terrorist act or hurricane away.

Cheap fossil fuels made for wonderful sensible things like wooden toys made on one side of the planet, practical to sell to people on the other side of the globe.  See where the economics of inefficiency come in?  We use cheap fossil fuels to move our fat asses, which desperately need exercise, around in 6000 pound vehicles, instead of vehicles, if they were efficiently designed, weighing in at 500-1000 pounds, and use renewable energy instead of molecules sequestered by the Earth millions of years ago to get carbon out of the atmosphere and allow life to blossom.

We may be the smartest creatures in creation, but heck, we ain’t smart enough not to poison our only habitat.  When you live in the basket with all your eggs, eating omelettes every day is dangerous.

To pull ourselves out of this economic mess we need to learn to consume more while using less, a Zen koan if there ever was one.  Moving music to MP3 files is a perfect example.  Distributing MP3 music requires an infinitely small fraction of the resources it took to make and sell CDs.  The demise of the CD puts a lot businesses and people out of work, but if the music industry worked it right they could eventually create a lot more jobs.  This economic theory fails if you steal the MP3s.

If everyone had solar panels on their roofs it would require the creation of whole new industries and millions of jobs.  To feed and educate all the needy people in the world would create more millions of jobs.  To build houses that withstand hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, fires and severe weather of the changing climate will create more millions of jobs.  There is no end of jobs to be create because of need.  There is plenty of economic activity, both efficient and inefficient if you have the vision to see it.

I know a lot of Americans are suffering because of the current economic crisis, but I have to agree with Phil Gramm that part of our economic recession is a “mental recession” and we’re doing too much whining.  Hell, we’re not living in Afghanistan.  What happened to that American spirit of when the going gets tough, the tough get going?  I’m voting for Obama, but I didn’t like his quip about not needing another Dr. Phil.  We need all the positive thinkers we can get.  There’s lot about McCain that I like, and if he wins I won’t be too unhappy, but his spin-control pandered to voters rather than exploring the point I think Gramm was trying to make.

During election times all voters become beggars looking for handouts demanding that their politicians promise and promise and promise.  Politicians get nowhere if they aren’t leaders.  Of course sometimes they lead us off the cliff into places like Iraq, but didn’t George Bush take us there because he was playing off the country’s fear?  We’re living in the current economic chaos because of greed and the refusal to think and pay attention.  Do we really need brilliant hindsight to know that making house loans to people who can’t afford them is silly or owning SUVs are a bad idea when oil was predicted to run out forty years ago?

Our crazy economy reminds me of the classic science fiction story, “The Midas Plague” by Frederik Pohl, where consumerism drives the economy so much that the poor are forced to change clothes several times a day to keep up with production – because to make less would hurt the economy.  In this bizarro world, the rich get the freedom to live without being consumers, but the poor must consume like hamsters on a wheel to keep the economy going.

Who’s fault is it if we take the most powerful and prosperous country in the world and run into the economic ground because we all like to make bad choices?  For decades we have built an economy on inefficiency.  What happens to China when we stop buying all that crap we don’t need?  What happens to the U.S. if China suffers an economic chill?  It’s like “The Midas Plague,” we could stimulate the economy by forcing the poor to go into debt and buy a new HD TV every month.

Right now everyone is panicking and cutting back on their spending, but if you wanted to help the economy, you should be doing just the opposite.  Now, here’s the crucial part – your economic decision has impact.  You can make an efficient choice, or a wasteful choice.  If you buy a new HVAC that uses 1/3 the energy as your old one, then you have stimulated the economy and reduced the demand on fossil fuels, plus saved yourself some bucks.  If you fly to Paris for a vacation, you have helped the airlines, but hurt the rest of us by increasing the demand for oil.  You can’t win for losing sometimes.  But if you had the choice between flying on a plane fueled by green technology or old technology, your choice could build a new industry.

We need to cowboy up and channel our ancestor’s pioneering spirit.  We need to take responsibility for our actions.  Like the old Pogo cartoon said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”  Whether gasoline is $2 or $4 or $7 a gallon, the choice is made by us, we set the price.  If you want gasoline to go to $7 a gallon, keep burning oil like there’s no end of it, live like the oil companies will always find new resources, use it like we’ve been doing for the last thirty years.  Keep panicking over the economy and oil prices will rise.  Keep advocating going to war with Iran and oil prices will rise.

We need to get our heads together, overcome fear like FDR taught us, become frugal like our Puritan forefathers, develop green technologies, and oil prices will come down.  If gasoline went to $10 a gallon, but we had cars that got ten times the mileage, it would be like getting $1 a gallon gas.  When gasoline was $2 a gallon we could have been driving cars that made it equal to 50 cents a gallon, but we didn’t.  We collective decided to drive cars that would force gasoline to become $4 a gallon.  Our choice – so why bitch and moan now?

The other lesson of this current economic crisis is the world changes.  We built our current economy psychology, retirement system, investment system, and all our financial expectations around the idea that the world won’t change and growth would be predictable. How stupid is that?  Our current state of economic fear is because we’re having to deal with change.  Change is as constant as time.  People hate change, but we’re the dominant species on this planet because we’re adaptable.  Humans can handle habitat change that puts all other species into extinction, but that’s at the species level.  Cultures go in and out of existence like TV series.  Because the U.S. is a very diverse culture, we can take quite a beating and still keep on ticking.  Go study your Douglas Adams and Adam Smith, and don’t panic.

Jim

Beyond the iPod

Because the iPod and iTunes has had such a fantastic impact on the music industry, I have to wonder if another industry shaking revolution like it is possible?  I’m reading The Post-American World by Fareed Zakaria, where he praises the U.S. for economic innovation, so I assume for us to stay ahead of the pack we’ll have to keep inventing new tech to market.  We’ve seen a lot of technological change in the last 50 years, but does that mean we’ll see constant growth in the next 50 years?

And will other emerging capitalistic markets start beating us at our own game?  Zakaria claims that America is not declining but the rest of the world is rising.  That means both new markets and new competitors.  But will anyone anywhere create another product like the MP3 player to change the marketing of music again?

I remember the days before video recorders – where few people saw the advent of the VHS revolution coming, but once it was underway it was very easy to accept a steady stream of new tech acronyms like CD, PC and DVD.   The MP3 was even more revolutionary and economically disturbing because music moved from physical objects to bits, bytes and electrons.  There was no need for any of these inventions other than convenience, which shoots down that old theory about necessity being the mother of invention.  We’re now into the HD and Blu-Ray upheavals.

I originally started collecting music by buying 45s and LPs.  Then I had to start over with CDs.  And for a short while a few years ago I had started moving to SACDs.  I’m hesitant to make another move, but I’ve finally committed to the MP3 format.  The question is, will I have buy my favorite songs all over again in another format in the future?

But back to my questions about iPods.  Assuming that the iPhone is really an iPod merged with two other revolutionary technologies, a cell phone and a computer, is there theoretically room for a new paradigm shifting music device?  If Steve Jobs sanctioned subscription music there would be a slight bump in the iPod road, but not much.  People would still be listening to music with white plastic buds in their ears.  Once you get rid of the physical media where is there room to invent?   Sure, we could talk science fiction and imagine ESP delivered music, but we have to stay somewhat realistic.

Maybe I’m not imaginative enough, but no matter how much I rack my brains I can’t imagine a new gadget for music.  I can imagine variations on the current iPod, lots of them in fact, but they’re all just improvements:  larger hard drive, larger flash memory, better sounding headphones, tiny built-in Hi-Fi speakers, SACD quality files, better filing systems, but nothing that offers drastic change.  I feel the same about personal computers and televisions.  Once you go beyond the physical medium of DVDs like DVRs, improvements are more of a matter of storage space and video quality.

Gadget junkies are going to need to look elsewhere for big society-changing technology.  Before long I think the geekiest of geeks will be buying home solar power generators.  If you can generate a significant portion of your own power, getting into a plug-in hybrid cars is the next gizmo that’s going to change society.  Now those two technologies are going to be huge game changers.  It will be like the iPod – you won’t need to buy that much gas to run your car – or at least not much compared to how things are now, and the secondary fuel may not even be gasoline.  See the trend – away from the physical.  Think 1950s movie science fiction where all the aliens did everything with glowing balls.

Mechanical evolution is moving towards fewer moving parts (hard drive to flash drive) and away from the physical (CD to MP3).   Electric cars have a lot fewer moving parts, and fewer parts in general.  Solar energy panels, LCD TVs, iPhones don’ have any moving parts.  If computers move to flash memory storage and became completely net oriented, they could even jettison the optical drive, and the only moving parts would be in the keyboard.

There’s a chance that Blu-Ray won’t even catch on because we’ve already gone beyond the physical with online movies and DVRs.  I would buy a Blu-Ray player now if it was $99.95 and get discs from Netflix, but if they don’t bring down the price soon they will have competing products that distribute HD video over the web, or cable companies will figure out a way to distribute HD programs on demand.  Cable companies are already teamed up with Rhapsody and other subscription music services to provide songs on demand.

My guess is the end is near for revolutionary gadgets for music, movies, television, audio books, e-books and other media that can be digitized.  What we will see is refinement in software.  Putting a cell phone, GPS, camera, computer into an iPod styled package isn’t revolutionary, just evolutionary.  What makes the new iPhone 3G so exciting is the software.  Now that the iPhone is opened up to developers it becomes very promising for endless speculation of what it could be, but it’s still the same old gadget.  That’s why Google saw the Android phone as such a big deal – open development – build it and they will come.

If a person could ask his iPod to play the ten most played songs on iPods in America during the last 24 hours, that would effect the music industry.  If she could ask for the top iPod songs from Russia, India or Dubai, that could have a new kind of impact too.  Or if you’re on a road trip and could ask your iPod to play the most popular songs of the towns you are passing, that would be another interesting variation.  The Zune song sharing feature is very cool and Apple and others should copy it.

All those features effect the distribution of music, making music more global and making it more social.  Sheet music was the technology for spreading music in the early days.  The first gadget to change the world of music was the phonograph.  Then came the radio, creating the mass audience.  To understand the impact of radio watch Ken Burn’s Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio, which you can buy from Amazon or rent from Netflix, but if you want even more details, track down the out-of-print book by the same title written by Tom Lewis.   The phonograph went through many refinements including the CD, but ultimately, the ethereal MP3 player replaced it.

At first the MP3 file technology, combined with technology to play the file set music free.  Bad for the industry.  The goal of the music industry is to sell music as widely as possible.  Illegally free MP3 music has a wide distribution, but it’s not necessarily the best way to promote music.  Kid’s pretty much stole what they already liked.  Radio has always been the best medium to educate people about new music, and it’s always been free too, because it came with programming and promotion.

What will be the next big revolution in the music industry won’t be a gadget but software.  The networked computer part of the iPhone and iPod Touch has the ability to promote music in ways never possible before.  Whether you buy songs 99 cents at a time, or subscribe to them at $15 a month, getting you to commit ear time to a song is the dream of all musical artists.  People have complained about the stale rotation of Top 40 music for decades, but with a world of hundreds of countries and thousands of cultures, and all their musical history, there’s a lot of music to discover and play.

Let’s say you want to get into music history, wouldn’t it be fun to tell your iPod to start with 1950 and begin playing the Top 100 Hits of that year and move forward in time, and then use your click wheel to rate the songs.  Or buy a future edition of “How to Listen to and Understand Great Music” from the Teaching Company and have it play full pieces while it instructs you about the history of music?  Or buy a special edition of Richie Unterberger‘s history of folk rock and whenever you hear the narrative mention a song, it pauses to play the song.

Just remember, it’s not about the iPod stupid, it’s about music.  What we want is great music.  What we want is for as many composers, performers, producers and publishers to become wealthy or at least make a good living as possible.  We want music to stimulate the economy.  We want it to be a driving force in culture and art.  Every decade needs their own Beatles, Springsteen, Madonna and Prince.  Modern pop music is produced like candy and not art.  It needs more new waves like Rap and Hip-Hop before they got tired like rock, jazz and country.

I’m willing to call it quits with the development of MP3 music technology.  I don’t need any more convenience.  What I miss is the excitement I got from music back in the 1960s when I was growing up.  What I love is discovering a new song that I’ll play over and over again for two weeks.  It’s been a long time since I’ve found such a song.  Susie and I are watching The Beatles Anthology, an eight part DVD documentary and it’s riveting.  I don’t need or want a new generation of iPods, what I want is the new Beatles.

Jim