Strange Empire

I remember learning that Cara Gee from The Expanse (a.k.a. Drummer, Fred Johnson’s lieutenant) was in the Western TV show Strange Empire and was intrigued.

Well, I watched the first episode on the CBC site and can say that it’s a bit slow. It’s basically what one would expect from the phrase “CBC Western”, which is to say self-consciously mythologizing in a Canadian multicultural way (I’d say “politically correct” except the term is basically only a pejorative nowadays). As a government channel it’s no surprise CBC would project Canada’s multicultural political ideology into the past, and it’s not like they’re being especially historically revisionist about it – women and minorities were there during the settling of the West and had agency and goals and sorrows lived within the possibilities and limits of their society. This is how Canadian propaganda works.

Anyway, the show is about a bunch of women on the Canadian frontier whose menfolk have been slaughtered and who have been taken in hand by a violent brothel owner. It’s not awful, and in fact I can see something worthwhile that might fully come forward later in the show. It’s interesting watching a Western through the eyes of the hookers who only have bit parts in the traditional violently masculine cowboy story. But like I said, it can be slow, and I have to say for the first half of the episode I was afraid that it would turn into a typically boring Canadian historical piece about immigrants and the downtrodden settling the Prairies. I was never so relieved for a massacre as immediately after that point.

But let’s speak of the show’s politics. Cara Gee plays a Metis (half-Native) woman who is the gunslinging cowgirl one would expect from a female Western (though she isn’t a superhuman like a Calamity Jane or whoever Sharon Stone’s character was in The Quick and the Dead). Terry Chen (Praxideke Meng to you Expanse peeps) doesn’t play an opium-smoking Fu Manchu stereotype. There’s a female doctor whose husband thinks her intelligence is a freakish biological quirk. There’s a wagon train full of widows afraid of how their lives will turn out now. And there’s the brothel owner/railroad developer and his gang of thugs who wants them all under his thumb.

It’s clear that the central conflict of the show will be between the Metis woman and the brothel owner, which is to say that the show is an intersectional feminist Western about resisting the dictates of a patriarchal society. Which does make it sound rather dull in a programmatic kind of way.

However, there was another Western TV show that interrogated at length the mythology of the frontier which I think may be compared to this one if you feel like being generous. Yes, I’m saying this could be a Canadian Deadwood. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think Strange Empire will prove to be as iconic or even as good as Deadwood, but to me it seems to be working in the same space.

So do I recommend this show? I’m not sure. I didn’t watch past the first episode and I don’t feel like I really missed anything. I guess it’s fine? I’ve got a ton of shows on my queue and I gave it one episode, which I think is fair. It didn’t really catch me so I’ll try other things instead.

Vive L’Empereur

I recently saw Sergei Bondarchuk’s Waterloo (1970). This is probably the definitive movie depiction of the battle of Waterloo. The story of its production itself is impressive: a vast field in Ukraine bulldozed to recreate the topography of the historical site in Belgium, an underground irrigation system installed to mimic the muddy conditions at the battle, 15,000 members of the Soviet army trained for several months in Napoleonic-era rifle drills, 2,000 horsemen brought in from all across Russia. Any modern creation would rely heavily on CGI for the battle scenes but there’s something to be said for seeing an actual army on the screen. There’s reading about how terrifying it was to see the army raised by levee en masse marching at you and then there’s seeing a vast sea of men marching in lockstep for real.

I’m not a big war nerd but it’s obvious how careful the movie was to get the general idea of the battle across. The effects of weather, morale, the ploys in combat and the counters and risky gambles all get a showing, which is quite a difference from the typical Hollywood battle where armies just charge at each other and the side with braver guys win.

But surprisingly, I actually enjoyed the movie more in the first half before the battle started. It starts with Napoleon’s first defeat and surrender, then it covers the Hundred Days of his return and the lead-up to the titular battle. It also devotes almost equal time to Wellington’s doings on the other side and takes pains to be quite neutral and not show one side to be the heroes of the story.

However, the movie was a commercial flop and I think I can see why. The battle is definitely trying to be very historically realistic but it kind of feels too cerebral, or perhaps not visceral enough. Of course, the movie technology of 1970 wasn’t up to faking large groups of men being blown to smithereens, but this leads to lots of explosions on screen with men mostly being unhurt unless the story calls for a character to die from shrapnel. This is probably something CGI could have helped with if this movie was being made today. In any case, it’s the Waterloo nerds that would get the most out of this movie and casual viewers may start getting antsy when the battle starts to feel like it’s dragging – I know I did, and I was watching at home when I could pause when I wanted a break.

Anyway, overall I liked the movie. Apparently there was an even longer version made with one of the related battles included between the Prussians and two of Napoleon’s marshals, but god knows how interminably long the movie would have ended up if it had been kept in.

Also, a helpful person on Reddit added the original historical soundtrack to the movie.

Tales of University

I just finished the first season of Moyashimon: Tales of Agriculture, an anime series about a student at an agricultural college who can see microbes with the naked eye. It’s not the kind of work that stirs great emotions or speaks timeless truths. Instead, it’s just pleasantly watchable.

Despite the premise, the protagonist’s supernatural ability isn’t actually very important to the show, and not a lot would be different if the main character were just another first year student freshly arrived in the big city campus from the countryside. However, this anime is one of the few fictional depictions of higher education I can think of that actually shows how much of the experience is taken up with academics.

Almost the entire show is taken up with hijinks and tomfoolery, but the shenanigans tend to revolve around the academic experience – frosh week stupidity, weird seminar partners, overbearing TAs, eccentric professors, and other such components of the university experience. It all looks like fun.

Of course, that should tell you right there that this show isn’t actually about depicting the university experience realistically. Who had fun all the time when they were a student? Lots of stuff wasn’t enjoyable for me. It seems silly to remember some of the things I used to freak out about, but they didn’t feel so minor at the time. The characters in this anime have problems as well, but the way the show depicts those problems makes clear just how ultimately minor they are.

What this show depicts, then, is not the experience of being a university student, but the recollection of being one. But this show is not a documentary about university, and is instead an anime set in one. A truly realistic depiction of the university experience would make for a boring show.

So what is Moyashimon about? It’s about the nostalgia of being a student.

Who You Gonna Call?

I just saw the 2021 Oklahoma Ghostbusters (a.k.a. Ghostbusters: Afterlife). It’s about the grandkids of one of the original Ghostbusters who move to the farm their gramps owned. They never met old Egon Spengler, but he happened to die right when they were getting evicted from their New York apartment, so off the family goes to live in flyover country. As far as they know, he was just a crazy old geezer, but they quickly learn there was an apocalyptic reason a hunter of the supernatural moved to the middle of nowhere.

This movie is like other modern sequels in that it retreads the ground that its forebear covered. But somehow I didn’t find the nostalgia annoying, likely because instead of just making constant references to a movie from the 80s, it was directly trying to be a movie from the 80s – in its directing choices, in the design of its sets and props, and even in its CGI that mimics the look of the special effects from the first Ghostbusters. In fact the only real indication that it’s set in the 21st century – besides the fact that the characters say that the year is 2021 – is that smartphones and Youtube exist.

Anyway, the deliberate 80s throwback is obviously why the movie cast Wolf Gunblood or whoever the hell that kid is from Stranger Things. One character that did bug me was the kid who was named Podcast (ugh). Reminds me of Juno trying too hard to be with it (for example, the “honest to blog” line). Also Podcast’s actor was noticeably worse than everyone else. I know he’s just a kid but it kind of invites comparison when he’s constantly around another kid who’s a better actor than him.

Also, I didn’t realize the original cast from the first movie cameos, or as many of them that are still around (Ramis is dead, Moranis retired). Dan Aykroyd’s Canadian accent really comes out in the one long conversation he’s in.

Anyway, watching this made me think of the first movie and how in retrospect it’s clearly from when Reagan was president. I mean, small business owners save the world while the government’s representatives are either useless or actively harmful. I don’t think anyone involved in the movie was a Reaganite but it just goes to show how you can’t escape the times you live in.

As for the Ghostbusters of our current age, it’s decently entertaining. I’d say put it on if you’ve got a lot of laundry to fold.

Today China, Tomorrow also China

Thanks to The Wandering Earth, I just read my first Cixin Liu text: his short story collection To Hold Up The Sky. I had tried reading The Three-Body Problem before but quit in the prologue.

It’s because like many other sci-fi writers, Liu is not good at social realism, and the prologue of Three-Body Problem really just could not grab me with its depiction of the Cultural Revolution. But thankfully I could skip the stories in this collection that showcased too much of the weaknesses of Liu’s writing and go with his real strength – the sci-fi crap. He’s very old school in that way.

For instance, the first story in the book is about a teacher in a dirt-poor mountain village and it was a struggle for me to keep reading until aliens finally showed up. I also completely skimmed the story about coal miners which had nothing science fictional until the really short epilogue with schoolkids in the future learning about why coalmining was dumb.

But the neat speculative stuff worked for me. A finance guy embezzling money to pay for life extension treatments? A quantum computer that allows perfect simulation of the universe and therefore perfect vision of all events past and present? Cryogenically-frozen refugees going further and further into the future to find a time that will take them in? All of that was my jam. Although the story about a near-future war between an invading NATO and the heroes of a Russia newly-returned to communism is kind of odd to read today until you realize it was published in 2001, when Russia had spent over a decade being carved up like a Christmas turkey by American consultants.

So yeah, Cixin Liu is a decent read if you’re aware that he’s very much into sci-fi being the genre of ideas and not the genre of well-written characters or compelling human drama.

Snowball Earth

The Wandering Earth is an entertaining disaster movie. It’s got the stupid twists and sappy drama endemic to the genre. I mean, the sun is going to engulf the Earth so the world’s governments build giant engines move the planet to a different star? A wonderfully dumb premise. It’s even got a rebellious jerk who has to step up to help save the world.

I did especially like how consciously international the movie was. We had people speaking Bahasa Indonesian and Filipino while Sulawesi was where half the major action takes place. Also it’s hilarious how the one white guy was the comic relief. Well, there’s another white guy who’s more heroic but he’s there to supply the tragic death to motivate the protagonist to keep fighting. I think I liked it more than Armageddon. Two goddamn thumbs up!

Love Don’t Cost A Thing?

Because This Is My First Life on Netflix is objectively a very sappy Korean drama. I’m watching it anyway because I find the female lead unbearably cute. Also I guess I’m a big sap at times.

The show is about a failed TV writer who enters into a fake marriage for a roof over her head and her landlord who goes for it so he can get help with his crushing mortgage payments (also tax breaks? I haven’t seen episode 1 in a while). If you’ve read South Korean romance comics before then you’ll know this is a very standard setup in that medium and the show is very much one of those comics but in live action form. I’m better able to accept the extraordinarily dumb events, though, possibly because real people can sell stupid twists better than a lifeless drawing.

The show is actually more of an ensemble piece and is really about three different couples who are friends with each other. One couple is a woman who wants nothing more than to be a housewife who’s working as a waitress to support her loser boyfriend who swears his app is going to be a hit any day now, and the other is two hard charger businessfolk where the woman just wants to be friends with benefits while the guy pretends he’s okay with that.

Money is essentially another character in the show because the lack of it hangs like a miasma over every interaction we see. It’s kind of operating in the same space as Friends in that it’s a comedy about people living and loving in the big city. However, Friends is basically about being a broke hipster but still being able to live a full romantic and social life in New York, while in this show there’s no handwaving about rent-controlled apartments in Seoul. Who you date and who you marry is always tangled up with money and I suspect half the characters secretly have stress-induced ulcers about it.

I haven’t finished watching the show yet but it’s obvious the main couple are going to end up together. I really hope at least one of the other couples doesn’t make it because that’s just realistic when it’s the 21st century and people with different ideas about their future are in a long-term relationship.

Anyway, this is me revealing myself as a big softie.

Coming to America: A Horror Story

I just finished reading The Necessary Beggar by Susan Palwick. It’s about a family exiled from a parallel dimension who end up as refugees in post-9/11 Nevada. The blurb on Amazon compares it to Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, but I think that’s going a tad too far (especially since that book is one of my favourites).

Frankly, the science fiction aspect of The Necessary Beggar doesn’t figure that strongly into the story. Ghosts and reincarnation figure very prominently in it so it could actually be more easily classified in the fantasy genre.

To be honest, the alternate dimension thing could have been cut out completely and it would have worked out just as well by being a magical realist story about refugees from like Afghanistan or Somalia. But doing the story that way requires a lot more research to get the culture right and I can’t help thinking that was the main reason the family came from a made-up country.

If you’ve read immigrant stories before then a lot of this book will be familiar – it’s got migrants going through the everyday trauma of navigating a foreign culture, feeling an aching and unquenchable yearning for a lost home, clashes between tradition and American modernity, that kind of thing. I feel like there’s a Salman Rushdie novel in here struggling to break through.

The Book of Tongues

This is definitely the end of popular science books for me, I’m three for three in disappointment with Languages Are Good For Us by Sophie Hardach. It’s about, uh, it’s actually kind of hard to explain because it goes all over the place. I guess it’s an overview of how humans use language and writing, but not in any systematic sense. It basically covers interesting language stuff from the author’s research interests.

And don’t get me wrong, there actually is interesting stuff here that I didn’t know about before or never looked into too deeply. It covers the development and use of cuneiform writing as well as the story of its decipherment, it examines the story of Hernan Cortes’ translator Malinche and her role in the conquest of the Aztecs, it covers the creation of the secret language Unserdeutsch by children who spoke Tok Pisin but were forced to speak only German at missionary boarding school, and maybe some other stuff I’m forgetting.

But there’s also stuff in there that I don’t really care about and I can’t even justify as forming necessary connective tissue in the book since the book doesn’t really have an intellectual framework. There’s a chapter about how the word “kamunun” in Akkadian over the millennia became “cumin” in English and the networks of trade by which the spice was spread around the world, there’s a part about how multilingual London’s children are which contains a lament from the German immigrant author about Brexit, there’s another chapter about the Eskimo-Aleut language family which mentions the author’s fears over COVID-19 and her wish that she could make a research trip to Canada instead of just reading about these languages, there’s a whole thing about Japanese sensitivity to the seasons and their relationship to seasonal foods which comes across to me as too Orientalist.

So if I take the stuff that I liked and balance it against stuff that I was lukewarm on then my final opinion on this book is that I wish I’d read something more technical about languages. Anyway, this really is it, no more popular science books for me.

The Lands below the Winds

My vow to read more non-fiction from actual experts instead of popular science stuff came across the barrier of accessibility. For instance, I’ve always had a thing for Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems theory so I went to look for one of its foremost applications, Janet Abu-Lughod’s Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350. The public library only has a copy in its reference section, so I can’t borrow it, and while a classic in intellectual history it’s not a popular book like Guns, Germs, and Steel so it’s kind of pricey. Plus I don’t even want a copy – I’m not a big book collector and I don’t even have copies of my favourite works of fiction, much less academic works. But such is the lot of certain classic works of non-fiction.

Still, I was already in the middle of reading A History of Southeast Asia: Critical Crossroads by Anthony Reid and this is definitely the stuff I was wanting. It synthesizes the current state of academic thinking about the region across multiple fields: history and archaeology primarily with a bit of linguistics and comparative theology, but it pulls together sources culled from like ten different languages so it’s a pretty impressive intellectual effort.

So far I’ve gotten through the prehistory of Southeast Asia, with the initial human settlement of the area (including arrival of other human species before Homo sapiens), the dispersal and probable driving out of Austronesians from southern China and Taiwan (which at the time was part of the mainland) into the most geographically-dispersed diaspora before modern times (from Madagascar to Easter Island), the simultaneous spread of speakers of the Tai language family (for example, Thai and Khmer) on the mainland, the early Buddhist polities (including the central role maritime Malay cities had in spreading Buddhism to China), the veneration of Shiva by early kings, the spread of Islam, and now I’ve reached the Ming dynasty expeditions of Zheng He and the modern colonial era.

Anyway, yeah, I’m enjoying this a lot more than a popular science book.