Category: Personal

Just a little update on the new album for those wondering, Beck’s sixth major label record, produced by the Dust Brothers and Tony Hoffer, should tentatively be out in early 2005. Keep checking back in the coming months for more info.

Tony Hoffer did production on Midnite Vultures, while the Dust Brothers famously produced Odelay, so I guess we can expect Beck to continue his back-and-forth pattern, alternating between introspective and extroverted records. I have to admit that I’m a bigger fan of Beck’s work with Nigel Godrich — Mutations and Sea Change — than of his pseudo-soul experiments. But Midnite Vultures has grown on me, and Beck is a much more mature artist now than he was during the Odelay sessions. It’ll be interesting to see what comes of it.

Korean culture is apparently the latest craze in Japan.

Here’s a note from Graeme, my friend and former colleague in Korea:

Greetings all,

Just a short note to let you know that I’m alive and well in Anyang.

My new school is pretty good, the boss doesn’t cause me too much stress and my two co-workers, while quiet, are reasonably communicative and helpful. Most of my classes have around six students, most of whom are well behaved and have good English. Of course there is the odd need for behavior modification … I had a middle school kid mutter “son of a bitch” at me in Korean … but even he has been fine since he stopped crying. (Don’t worry, no violence, only intimidation.)

I’ve been pretty lazy since my vacation as far as studying Korean and getting fit go … my two erstwhile goals. I actually went to my first Korean language class on Saturday. The shoe certainly was on the other foot, with my imploringly shaking my head at the teacher, begging that she not ask me questions. Despite my fear, it appears that I have picked up a surprising amount of the language through osmosis. I know what you are thinking … he should be fluent, but remember everyone I meet wants to speak English. Oh, and I am dumb and lazy. [This is false. -Ed.]

I continue to have a pretty quiet life. Most Fridays I have dinner and a couple (read 15) of beers with some mates. Saturday we generally watch a football game at night and Sunday I usually spend window shopping or reading. I haven’t been walking in the hills so much since my dog was abducted and forced to live in Japan.

Next weekend we are going to Busan to watch the international friendly Korea v Germany. I mentioned this to a woman I had lunch with on Sunday.

The conversation sort of went:

G: “I’m going to Busan with my friends next weekend so I can’t see you next Sunday.”
Her: “What are you going to do?”
G: “We are going to see Korea-Germany.”

A look of horror, surprise and revulsion appears on her face. She has pretty good English, but the idiomatic deletion of “soccer game” made her hear it slightly differently; especially with the difficulty over “r” and “l”, “Germany” can sound like the Korean word for “young men”.

Thus my innocent news was translated in her mind to “Me and my mates are going to a sleazy port city to see young Korean boys.”

Luckily we were able to clear that one up.

The Korean economy continues to be talked down by everyone. The locals fear that their rising currency will have the same effect as it did on Japan 20 years ago when it caused mass relocation of factories and two decades of recession. That combined with the rise of China and people really fear for the future. Despite that, things are pretty good for foreigners … especially since most imported things we buy are priced in terms of the US dollar.

I know I’m not a bookseller anymore, but I’d like to recommend my reads of the year … it’s a nostalgia thing, humor me. In no particular order:

1. “Moneyball” by Michael Lewis … don’t worry, it’s not really about baseball … anyone interested in human behavior will love it.

2. “Travels with a Tangerine” by Tim MacKintosh-Smith … a pom following in the footsteps of Ibn Battuta.

3. “Land of the Living” by Nicci French … the scariest book you will ever read … a young woman wakes up to find she is blind-folded and tied to a bench in basement … where her captor only talks to tell her about the previous women he has killed.

4. “The Number 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency” by Alexander McCall Smith. Simply lovely and sweet.

5. “Korea and Her Neighbors” by Isabella Bird … it may have been written in the 1890s but it’s still the best insight to life here.

Of course Dick Scott’s autobiography should be on the list, but you can’t get it here!!

I hope you all have a great Christmas. If anyone is in Mt. Eden and would like to have dinner and a beer on January 15 can you let me know!

My brother-in-law is a Captain in the Marines, serving in Iraq as a logistics officer. We’ve been emailing back and forth, and it’s been an enlightening experience for me. He’s extremely intelligent, forthright and capable. He’s also a strong supporter of the war in Iraq and of the Bush administration. I disagree with him, but it’s what I think of as the right kind of disagreement: a constructive working through of ideas and principles.

He sent an email complaining of press overreaction to Donald Rumsfeld’s comments regarding armor for the troops. I agreed with a lot of what my brother-in-law had to say — he pointed out that it’s not a simple on-or-off question, but one that involves tradeoffs: the more armor you add, the slower the vehicles become, and the more fuel, maintenance and spare parts they require, while the money for armor might be better spent on more intelligence or more forward deployment of up-armored combat vehicles ahead of convoys. But he did make one comment that I disagreed with strongly:

But in the end the Secretary is right; we go to war with what we have.

Here’s what I wrote back:

This is my one area of disagreement. You go to war with what you have, because you’re a Marine within the chain of command. Donald Rumsfeld, however, is the man in charge of determining what war we go to and what we have when we go. He’s second only to the president, and war planning is his responsibility. In the case of this war, we chose the time and we chose the shape of the fight. It’s not like troops were massing on our border and he had to go right away, or like we were responding to an attack. We could have invaded a week earlier, a week later, six months later. (This is not to debate whether we made the right political decisions regarding the Security Council, etc., but just a tactical observation: the status quo would almost certainly have held for a few weeks or months). And we could have gone with more troops, or with fewer, or with different configurations of forces. Rumsfeld is largely responsible for how we went, and with what equipment. He’s a strong believer in the transformation process, which means smaller, lighter forces — that is, less armor, more mobility. I’m not saying he’s wrong to have made that choice — I’m by no means certain that we would have been better off with the kind of giant force we’d built up over the decades to push the Soviets out of Poland — but he was wrong to imply that this was just something that happened, rather than something for which he was responsible.

I do think that Rumsfeld’s attachment to the concept of a quick, light, small military blinded him to some very real tactical concerns, particularly the looting that took place just after the invasion (and which was predicted in a detailed State Department report that the Pentagon largely ignored). In that instance, similar to this one, Rumsfeld’s response was that it was all up to fate — “Stuff happens” — when in reality, he had a great deal of responsibility for what was happening. Again, I’m not saying that a much larger force would necessarily have been better, but it was possible to plan for the potentiality of widespread looting, and one possible plan would have been to send in a greater number of troops to keep the peace in the immediate aftermath of the invasion. So either Rumsfeld was aware of the possibility of looting but chose not to worry about it — a tactical decision — or he was unaware of the possibility of looting — a failure of military intelligence and planning, for which he is ultimately responsible. Either way, as top man, Rummy should take responsibility: “Yes, that’s right, we’ve decided that there are limits on how much armor we want to use because that keeps our forces faster and lighter, which we think will improve our operational efficiency and win this thing faster, ultimately saving more lives.” That would be acceptable to me, although I might then choose to question his decision on tactical grounds. But it’s unfair to the troops and the American people for our SecDef to pretend like this war was a big surprise thrust upon him. It wasn’t. According to some reports, he was ready to hit Iraq just days after 9/11, and there’s no question in my mind that Rumsfeld’s Pentagon should have been developing Iraq war plans even before 9/11, simply because there was always the possibility of our needing to fight Saddam’s regime. I recognize that back before the war, Rumsfeld couldn’t just waltz on over to Congress and demand a whole pile of heavily armored Humvees, but I do think he had greater control over how we went to war than he is letting on.

The Times has an interesting article on stirrings of debate within Islam as its adherence grapple with the violence that has torn apart the Middle East for so long. Islam is now in its 15th century — about as old as Christianity when Martin Luther was born. One wonders whether the fractures in Islam will lead to a similar reformation.

On a roughly related note, I was recently reading Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy and was struck by a description of Spartan women, who, according to Russell, mixed with men and went uncloistered — unlike the women of most Greek cities. Until that moment, I’d always thought of the veiling and cloistering of women in Islamic culture as something either indigenous to Arabs or inherent in Mohammed’s teachings. But the tradition of veiling, as I understand it, is much stronger in the Arab and Persian heartland of Islam than in the communities of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. One explanation I’ve heard for this difference is that these more far-flung Muslim populations are less fully Muslim — still in the process of being Islamicized, as it were — but the observation about Greek treatment of women suggests another possibility. Veiling and cloistering may be remnants of Greek culture, which was dominant, or at least highly influential, from Afghanistan to the Levant and Asia Minor prior to the arrival of Islam.

In other words, purdah may be a pagan custom.

I’m not sure if this is true. It’s a hypothesis, not a theory, and I’d be very interested in any additional insights. But it strikes me that if the Muslim world could be convinced that purdah and the oppression of women are actually Greek pagan cultural artifacts, that might go a long way toward justifying a rethinking of the role of women in Islam.

Remember how trustworthy the CIA’s evidence was of WMD programs in Iraq? A new article in Foreign Affairs argues that their evidence on North Korea’s alleged uranium enrichment program may have been just as good. It seems that the Bush administration, eager to pull a number of countries along on its more hawkish path, took very sketchy evidence and declared it proof positive. Sound familiar?

If you’re at all interested in North Korean or nuclear issues, you gotta read this.

(Via Talking Points Memo)