silver bromide bagnio

Who Wrote Shakespeare's Plays?

2011-10-14T10:21:00.001-07:00

You might see a movie trailer in which a dark and brooding nobleman thunders down to some conniving peasant, "You have no voice!" This nauseates me. As an archetype, an image, and a theory -- it literally nauseates me. Why? Because that artless peasant is William Shakespeare and the heroic, high-minded noble is the Earl of Oxford, the true genius behind the commoner's humble facade. To me, it's like saying the Beatles' hits were written not by some working-class kids from Liverpool, but by a wealthy Hollywood record producer. I just don't understand why anyone would go out of their way to believe the world is so ordinary.

To be fair, this isn't a post about the movie. I haven't seen it, and know very little about it. This post is about this curiously stubborn urge to somehow debunk the existence of William Shakespeare. The basic logic is that a man born to a middle-class family in rural Stratford lacks the worldliness or intellectual heft to produce Shakespeare's body of work, and that the true author must've been some educated aristocrat. But let's just put aside how mind-numbingly patronizing that sounds.

William Shakespeare was no aristocrat, but he wasn't born into poverty. He was an alderman's son. An introductory education was not beyond his middle-class reach. And most of what is crystal clear from the plays that bear his name is that the author was someone with a bead on popular tastes, an obsession with stories, a rich imagination, a healthy sense of humor, an uncommon grasp on the human condition, and a singular way with words -- absolutely none of which requires an expensive Oxford education.

Some say that the plays demonstrate a suspicious familiarity with noble lifestyle, but do they? How? Which bits? Yes, his stories feature characters of noble-birth, but surely we can postulate that commoners knew that such people existed. And it's not as if his dialogue or plots were otherwise preoccupied with the ephemeral details of the aristocratic life. Often, it was quite the opposite. What might not be obvious to the contemporary American reader is that the plays are full of period country affectations, so much so that his dialogue was actually attacked by some of his fellow playwrights (such as Cambridge-educated Robert Greene) for sounding too provincial.

This is the problem, we've gotten much too used to thinking of Shakespeare's plays as lofty, high-class theatre. Centuries ago, it was anything but. We are outside of the context. We shouldn't assume we get what they are right away. Because the truth is that these plays weren't remote, courtly meditations; they were raucously popular entertainments. As alien as it sounds to us, the Shakespearean cadence wasn't something the groundlings had any trouble following. It's not that everyone spoke like Hamlet. The plays didn't reflect the way Elizabethan people spoke any more than a contemporary box office blockbuster reflects the way we speak (we're never so fluid or coherent). The plays, like most drama, reflected the way the audience imagined they spoke.

The only reason we assume these works are the stuff of academia is because we only know them from academia. We don't immediately notice any of the humble flaws and brushstrokes. In A Winter's Tale, the author makes reference to the "coast of Bohemia," but Bohemia was a landlocked country. A curious mistake for a university-educated aristocrat to make. It's been said that these plays contain many references to the sea, indicating an aristocrat's tastes for travel. And yes, the sea is a fixture of the plays, but let's remember that it's portrayed as a wide and forbidding dominion of shipwrecks, gods, and magical storms. It's not the voice of someone who's spent much (if any) time at sea. It's the voice of someone who fears the sea. It's the voice of someone who's overheard inflated sailor stories in pubs. There's no real evidence that the plays' author was well-traveled. Again, Shakespeare was perfectly aware that Venice and Rome existed, but merely setting a story in Italy doesn't by itself scream that he must have been to Italy.

But he at least had to speak fluent Italian to adapt the Italian folktale of Romeo and Giuliette, right? Not really. Trashy Italian love stories were all the rage on the streets of London, and there were at least four versions of the Romeo and Juliet story in print before Shakespeare's play. Two of which were indeed in English. Likewise, stories of grand historical figures like Julius Caesar and Cleopatra were already pretty firmly rooted in the popular culture.

For me, the most important question is why. Why would anyone need to invent this cover? The usual answer involves some ambiguous claims about the dangerously subversive subtext in some of his plays. And yeah, there were poetic allusions to events of his time, but nothing that ever got Shakes in trouble. We have no record of the man ever being arrested. No one made an example of him. He wasn't exiled or executed. He had a full and respected career. His supposedly dangerous works were performed for the courts of Queen Elizabeth and King James, the most powerful offices in the land, without evidently raising any eyebrows. So what on earth was "the real author" so relentlessly wary of? What was he supposedly hiding from, for all of four decades?

I don't know why we have no letters in Shakespeare's own handwriting, but is it really so strange to suggest he simply didn't write home much? Are handwritten 16th century documents so bloody common in modern day flea markets? Either way, people obviously knew this man. He had fans. He had a family. He had a hometown. He has birth records. He has a grave. He had a professional reputation. He had rivals and critics. He was a busy man. The life of a working playwright wasn't some cloistered existence. He worked in the theatre. He revised scenes. He gave the performers their lines. Actors John Heminges and Henry Condell worked with Shakespeare for two decades, and published his first folio with this dedication: "to keepe the memory of so worthy a Friend, & Fellow aliue, as was our Shakespeare, by humble offer of his playes." Ben Jonson (another playwright with no university education) calls Shakespeare a personal friend in his private journals. Who was he lying to, in his own journal? And why?

So let's review what we know. We know that a "William Shakespeare" was at least credited as being the author of several plays. We have no evidence this was seen as an implausible feat by anyone who saw the plays or knew the man. We have no evidence his social background and education stirred any suspicions whatsoever. We have no evidence his plays were conspicuously difficult for uneducated audiences to follow. In his own lifetime, in the white hot epicenter of this supposed conspiracy, not one soul in all the world ever thought to ask who wrote Shakespeare's plays. Not one single soul in forty years. By all accounts, they all fully believed they knew.

So, when I hear this theory that a person (or persons), for some unspecified reason, contrived a massive conspiracy to write over a hundred poems and dozens of well-admired plays under the name of a man who was more or less perfectly capable of doing it himself, I have trouble grasping the point. You see, to my admittedly biased thinking, you do not just shred a writer's credit on a lark.

- Travis

[via mobile device]

Goodnight, Spirit

2011-05-25T10:37:00.000-07:00

A Martian sunset photographed by the Spirit rover.

After months of silence from the Spirit rover, NASA has officially admitted the robot's demise.

The Spirit rover was designed to work for three months...

She explored the red planet for six years.

Spirit was built in Pasadena, not at all far from where I sit right now. Finally she rests, quietly gathering the dust of another world; her home planet, a pale blue star in the evening sky.

Spirit turns her eyes towards home and snaps a picture of Earth (as seen in the Martian sky).

Yes, Our Era is Unique --

2011-05-23T14:11:00.000-07:00

-- but so is every other era.

For as long as human civilization has existed, there have always been too many volcanos and earthquakes and floods. There's never been a perfectly acceptable amount of disaster or tragedy. There's always too much crime. There's always too much injustice. There's always too much poverty. There are always too many maniacs, despots, and crooked politicians.

There's always bad art and graphic pornography. There are always dumb love songs and bloody stories. There's always sexy dancing and violent games. There's always some new gadget that scares and baffles the old timers. There's always someone remembering the good ol' days and wondering what the world is coming to.

There's always some ancient inscription and a prophet who "knows what it means." There's always someone yelling about hellfire and brimstone. The signs and omens are always "urgent." The astrological alignments are always "significant." The final showdown between good and evil is always "the day after tomorrow."

For millennia, there have always been people expecting the one and only doomsday to strike at any minute, and they have always been wrong.

Twenty Light-Years Away

2011-05-18T21:03:00.000-07:00

This GIF is a scale model that illustrates (in real time) the time it takes light to cross the distance between Earth and the Moon (about 1.26 seconds). I'm sure I've posted it before, but it's such a neat illustration of the fact that light does have a speed -- something to remember when reading about the recent hubbub surrounding a planet called Gliese 581 d.

Gliese 581 d is a planet orbiting a small red star in the Libra constellation. Picture a warm, wet world under a dusky red sun. It might have monsoons. It might even have oceans. Scientists are calling Gliese 581 d the most habitable of any exoplanet yet discovered. And (as many reporters seem keen to add) it's just 20 light-years away...

Only 20 light-years? That's not so bad. In a galaxy that's almost a hundred thousand light-years across, 20 light-years is practically right next door... Right?

Well let's remember that a "light-year" is the distance light travels in a year. And let's also remember that humans can't travel at the speed of light. We can't even come remotely close.

Apollo 10 set the speed record for any manned vehicle at 24,791 mph.

After that, the fastest manmade object ever is the Helios 2 probe. It clocked in around 157,000 mph.

Crazy fast stuff, right? But here's the kicker -- the speed of light is nearly 300 million meters a second. That's many times faster than the fastest thing humans have ever built. Ever.

Science fiction has relentlessly demystified the humbling distance of the light-year. We've all seen countless fictional spaceships zipping about from planet to planet with little more than the push of a button.

But sadly, this is the real world, and we don't have hyperdrives or warp drives or jumpdrives or stargates. What we have are rockets. Sure we've toyed with stuff like solar sails or ion engines, but nothing outside the plain Newtonian physics of just basically booking it from A to B as fast as possible. In that context, nothing outruns light, and crossing a 20 light-year distance means at least 20 years in a vacuum-sealed space capsule (and probably quite a bit longer).

Not that I believe opening a wormhole or bending spacetime are ultimately impossible goals, but they are goals well outside NASA's current budgetary restrictions. In a world wherein politically ambitious deficit hawks circle hungrily over every mundane space probe NASA proposes, defying the laws of physics is simply not on the table. (It's not even scheduled to be considered to be on the table.) In the here and now, 20 light-years may as well be a hundred million.

There's only so much ordinary people like you and me can do about all that, but it ain't nothing. Write your president. Write your congressperson. Tell them to make science a priority. Tell them to go to Mars and to keep going. Write tweets. Write blogs. Write stories. Write movies. Talk about it. Be your future's own evangelist. Dream big. Because big dreams cast long long shadows. Longer than light-years.

Look up tonight. Somewhere up in that huge night sky, there are unseen oceans shimmering under alien suns. You want to see them? Make someone else want it too.

Wait... Doomed? Or Not Doomed?

2011-05-12T17:40:00.000-07:00

It occurs to me that I may have appeared to contradict myself. Are we an imperiled people living in the shadow of a brooding volcano? Or is doomsday bullshit?

All of the above... Let me put it like this:

Massive cataclysms do happen. They just do. Mankind will likely confront one at some point in the future. But the odds that *your* lifetime happens to coincide with the sort of fiery Roland Emmerich catastrophe that strikes once every few hundred million years are unspeakably slim.

In short, fret for humanity, sure, but don't cash out your retirement fund.

- Travis

[via mobile device]

An Islander's Dilemma

2011-05-09T13:18:00.000-07:00

Picture an isolated tribe living on some unknown South Pacific island in the shadow of an idly smoking volcano. Before airplanes or transoceanic voyages, this island is all they know. Generations upon generations are born and die here. They don't fear the smoking mountain because it's never overtly threatened them. Yet as old as the tribe is, they are young by the mountain's standards. They are but a single tick of its geological clock.

Some in the tribe dream of leaving that island, but the prevailing wisdom is that the timber is needed to build homes, not boats. They feel they can't indulge the yearning to venture beyond the horizon until they've sorted out how to best live on their island. Nevertheless, no matter how responsibly they farm their land or how egalitarian their values become, the tribe's fate is tethered to the imbecilic whims of that mountain. It isn't alive. It has no soul. It has no sense of justice. It is simply a bubbling cauldron of liquid rock; arbitrary and indifferent. And in the instant it explodes, nothing this tribe has done will matter.

So the tremors begin, and inevitably they grow stronger day by day as that column of smoke turns a brutal shade of black. Fear grips the islanders. But it's too late now to build boats. Even if it wasn't, they have no place to go. They've been content to allow the sea to be a menacing expanse that confines them. When the eruption strikes, everything they are and everything they wanted to be burns in a scalding avalanche of vaporized rock. The richness of their heritage; the promise of their future; it's simply snuffed out as if they never existed at all.

And it would be a shame that they'd never spread off that island, not only because their culture would have endured, but also because the memory of their homeland would have endured. The songs of their tree frogs would have endured. The colors of their flowers would have endured. It would be shame because they'd yearned to explore and had been perfectly capable of following that wanderlust. It would be a shame because the things they might have seen beyond the horizon would have stirred their soul.

This is our situation here on Earth. This is the context of manned spaceflight. Beyond all the questions of cost and ethics is a very simple concern -- If the day comes when you hear of a massive asteroid barreling down on your home planet, would you rather not be on it? Does mankind have anything you'd choose to save from that catastrophe? Is your species still growing up, or is it finished? Because we live in a capricious universe. As long as we confine ourselves to this lonely island, we could end poverty, reverse global warming, and become something deserving of survival only to be summarily obliterated by a lump of cosmic iron. I promise you, inertia will eventually destroy us, whether we deserve it or not.

We should indeed live in a way that recognizes the marvel of a world we inhabit, but we shouldn't assume that doing so fully exempts us from profound risk. On at least five separate occasions, even in the absence of smog and nuclear weapons, more than half the life on Earth has been wiped out by some random extinction event. These events may be as extravagant as a comet the size of a mountain or as tedious as a global drought. But they do happen. Life can be robust, no doubt, and it is certainly not unacquainted with the risks and sometimes disastrous perils of a single-world existence. But to the best of our knowledge, never before has evolution endowed a single species with the means and the inclination to grow beyond those risks. Never before has a species imagined itself on other worlds, or been so physiologically and intellectually capable of carrying the legacy of Earth into the cosmos, and we have no special reason to think there will ever be another.

We have been travelers for longer than we've been human, literally. The only reason we've survived long enough to set foot on the Moon is because we were never content to stay in one place. It wasn't the Almighty who exiled Adam and Eve from Eden. It was their own relentless curiosity. Because some organisms prowl and hunt. Some graze. Some drift on the wind. And some sink roots deep into the ground. But Man, he is a wandering dreamer of dreams and asker of questions, for better or worse. He is a voyager.

Dinosauroid Poetry

2011-05-09T06:42:00.000-07:00

You go back in time to the Jurassic and step on a shrew and you return to the modern age only to find that dinosaurs, not humans, have evolved into a majestic civilization. They have cities and language and art. They have religion and science. The letters in their books may be different; the music they play may sound exotic, but the whole thing is nevertheless tantalizingly familiar. Because in the absence of humans, these industrious reptiles have developed a society.

It's an occasional trope of science fiction -- you venture into the far future or to a parallel reality or under the sea only to find that some non-human species has evolved an entire human-like civilization. In these stories, Earth seems to be almost crawling with heretofore unknown peoples and races. I'm as big a fan of this sort of thing as anyone, but it derives from one mercilessly stubborn misunderstanding of evolution -- that it has a purpose, a goal, and that the goal is to eventually become civilization.

But get back in your time machine and jump back to the halfway point of Earth's history, about 2.3 billion years ago. You don't see forests. You don't see giant lizards. You see an apparently barren world. Evidence of life is subtle. Here, at the halfway mark of natural history, the only organisms on the entire planet are microbial -- bacterial mats, perhaps algae. And it has been this way for most of the entire first half of our planet's history. In another two billion years, the first multicellular animals will begin to appear, but for now, all is hauntingly quiet.

Consider this for a moment, really consider it -- a full three quarters of Earth's history saw no creature bigger than a protozoa. Neither tower nor tree rose up from the desolate expanses of bare rock. No ships nor sharks crossed the empty seas. No sunsets were witnessed. No songs were sung. No stories were told. No shred of civilization, nor any indication that there ever would be. For over three billion years, three times as long as the entire history of all animal life, bacteria was by far the most complex organism on the planet. That is, to say the very least, an astonishingly stable ecosystem.

It is sometimes said that we are unwilling to be accept the fragility of our human civilization, but I don't think that's the case. Often, we are too willing to accept it. We either believe the show ends with us, or we believe the event of our extinction will be followed by some new non-human civilization evolving to replace us, and perhaps even accomplishing all the things we couldn't. We aren't quite so obsessed with our own inevitability, but we do like to think music and art and poetry and philosophy are inevitable; that if it wasn't us who created the things we value, it would at least be something a lot like us. The notion that our stories and ideas are fragile is perhaps even more terrifying than the notion that we are fragile. To think that we are but a fleeting blur of activity bookended by eons of wilderness chills us to the bone.

And it should. It should terrify us. We are too willing to lay down and wait for an end to swallow us up. To value anything we've done -- sonnets or ballads -- is to value us. If we are endeared to an ode on the beauty of an ancient forest, then our duty is not only to nature, but to the heart that aches to describe it. We should behave as if we understand that the very best of what we are can indeed be lost and forgotten along with the worst, because when it comes to creatures so complex, it would seem Mother Earth creates no species twice.

The Latest Apocalypse

2011-05-08T19:18:00.000-07:00

"Our earth is degenerate in these latter days. There are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end." - Assyrian clay tablet, 2800 BCE

You may have seen the billboards already, but in under two weeks, the world will end. At 6:00pm on Saturday May 21st, hundreds of millions of Christians will suddenly vanish before a wave of shattering earthquakes rolls across the globe, effectively ending human civilization. Not to be confused with last month's Supermoon antics or next year's ambiguous Mayan cataclysm. No, this particular armageddon was uncovered by the calculations of one 89-year-old radio evangelist.

It isn't our first such prediction. (Hell, it isn't even his first.) From time to time, humanity likes to imagine itself perched at the climax of history. These days are only different in that we should probably know better. But as we seem to be entering a new golden age of obsessing over cosmic alignments and strange omens and ancient prophecies and all that, I thought it might be a rather opportune time to peruse a few of the doomsdays that never came.

1000 CE:
Many common Europeans would not have been aware what year it was, but among those who were, the seductively round year of 1000 was believed to be the year of Christ's return -- the "deadline," so to speak, to convert the pagans of Northern Europe to Christianity. Yet the turn of the first millennium can't be said to have been any more apocalyptic than the turn of the second.

1033 CE:
Once Jesus did not arrive on the thousand year anniversary of his birth, theological thinkers pushed the expected date of his return to the thousand year anniversary of his death, with similar success.

February 1, 1524 CE:
A supposedly novel alignment of the planets in the hydrologically significant constellation of Pisces lead some London astrologers to forecast a world-drowning flood. Homes were abandoned. Food and water was hoarded. But, alas, the 1st of February passed without so much as a single drop of rain.

October 19, 1533 CE:
In 1532, a devout Christian and noted mathematician, Michael Stifel, published a dire volume claiming the Day of Judgement would begin at precisely 8:00am on the 19th of October in the following year.

1555 CE:
In the 15th century, a well-known French theologian by the name of Pierre d'Ailly calculated that the end of the world would fall the 7000th year of human history -- a milestone he assigned to the year 1555. Christopher Columbus was among the suckers who bought into this ultimately arbitrary forecast.

April 28, 1583 CE:
For reasons known only to them, numerous astrologers and clergy interpreted the alignment of Jupiter and Saturn as a sign that Jesus would return at noon on April 28th.

October 22, 1844 CE:
Perhaps the most notorious failed doomsday prediction, dubbed "The Great Disappointment" by the many thousands of William Miller's followers after the famed Baptist preacher's much-hyped apocalyptic prediction fizzled without event.

1910 CE:
Astronomical observation of Haley's Comet detected trace amounts of toxic cyanogen gas in its tail. The fact that Earth would be passing through the comet's tail spurred much fearful speculation (including a front page New York Times article) on the existential threat posed by this cosmic death cloud. Much to the dismay of scientists, popular hysteria escalated, but naturally no such disaster ever materialized.

July, 1999 CE:
One Nostradamus quatrain states, quite frankly: "The year 1999, seventh month / From the sky will come great king of terror." Yet the Summer of 1999 seems to have been largely devoid of any mighty cataclysms falling out of the sky.

January 1, 2000 CE:
Ah yes, the dreaded Y2K -- the day on which every computer in the world would forget what year it was. Blackouts, nuclear meltdowns, planes falling out of the sky. It was to be the day on which we'd be done in by our modern hubris. It was instead just a moment that came and went like all the moments before.

Obviously, the world is not an unchanging place. We know that old continents will break themselves apart to build new continents. We know that species will die out as new species are born. My understanding is that in roughly five billion years our Sun will begin to burn the last of its hydrogen and swell to eventually consume our planet. My understanding is that we are not necessarily fated to be present at "the end of the world." We could, like so many dominant species before us, fall victim to an asteroid or a supervolcano or even our own machinations. But I don't know that anyone can tell me exactly when.

Catastrophes, sometimes huge catastrophes, do happen, but not when some blustering holy man promises they will. Meteors don't adhere to ancient Mayan schedules. Mountains are not heaved up in one cataclysmic instant at the top of the hour on the word of a number-crunching evangelist. And we can't sit and wait in ecstatic dread simply because some starry-eyed believer stands on a street corner and pronounces that the end of ends is two weeks away. It's such an old old tune. And we've all heard it before.

*(Many more expired doomsdays at A Brief History of the Apocalypse and Failed end of the world predictions from 30 to 1920 CE.)

The Chronoporter; or The Anachronistc Exploits of a Hero, a Caveman, & a Future Girl

2011-03-02T10:59:00.001-08:00

A pulp story told in tweets, collected here for your reading pleasure...

Travis Beacham (@travisbeacham)
1/30/11 1:11 PM
Running from the SS, Kit Revere strapped on the stolen Nazi teleporter. As they opened fire, he pressed the button — & was gone. #tweetpulp

The Tweet Pulp (@thetweetpulp)
2/1/11 8:11 AM
As the Neanderthal hunters bore down on him, Kit Revere realized he hadn't stolen a teleporter; he'd stolen a time machine.

The Tweet Pulp (@thetweetpulp)
2/4/11 1:23 PM
When Hok the Neanderthal accidentally triggered Revere's device, he was flung to the year 3030 AD, dawn of the Global Robot Empire.

The Tweet Pulp (@thetweetpulp)
2/17/11 8:57 AM
The robots cornered Hok the Neanderthal & Z the last human. There was but one escape... Hok gave Z the timejump device — & braced to fight.

The Tweet Pulp (@thetweetpulp)
2/20/11 3:02 PM
The block of prehistoric ice contained a man in modern attire. The name on his uniform read "K. Revere." And he was alive... #tweetpulp

The Tweet Pulp (@thetweetpulp)
2/24/11 8:01 AM
Even in this far-flung future, the Neanderthal Hok was still a force to be reckoned with. He ripped the robot army limb from sparking limb.

The Tweet Pulp (@thetweetpulp)
2/26/11 5:16 PM
With each time-jump, Z grew to see history as a vast gulf of wild and barren silence. Mankind was a lost city on a mote of temporal dust.

The Tweet Pulp (@thetweetpulp)
2/28/11 7:28 PM
As the spinosaurus opened its mighty jaws, Z bet her life on the chronoporter's final jump. She pressed the button and was gone. #tweetpulp

The Tweet Pulp (@thetweetpulp)
3/1/11 4:29 PM
None knew where the mysterious chanteuse called Zee came from — until a Nazi scientist found a curious device in her abandoned Berlin flat.

The Tweet Pulp (@thetweetpulp)
3/2/11 7:42 AM
Kit Revere's masked mentor knew the teleporter he'd sent his protege to steal was actually a chronoporter. He'd once been that young man.

Thus concludes this harrowing Möbius strip of a tale (insofar as such tales have conclusions), but take heart, loyal reader — new yarns are always spinning. Follow @thetweetpulp on Twitter for more 140-character pulp fiction by yours truly.

Answering the Challenge

2011-01-28T10:48:00.000-08:00

Twenty-five years ago today, we were reminded of what was once a rather obvious conceit — space travel is dangerous. We used to know it was dangerous. We used to understand that cramming a few brave souls into the nose cone of a three hundred foot missile and blasting them into the vast and airless gulf of outer space was, at heart, in defiance of any sane definition of safe behavior.

But we got too good at it. Extraordinary became ordinary. We grew numb and bored. We pulled back from the Moon, about two hundred thousand miles back, tenuously content to dip our toes into near Earth orbit from time to time with the shuttle program. Until Challenger, twenty-five years ago today.

We saw the shuttle explode and we thought about the astronauts and the teacher, handpicked by NASA to go into space in a tragically desperate effort to rekindle the public's waning imagination. But that angry plume of smoke seeped into our national will, and we began to wonder what the point was. Our faith in our national aerospace institution was eroding.

Tragedies like the Challenger disaster have unfortunately contributed to NASA's rather abysmal public reputation, reinforcing the idea that this is a bloated and ineffective expenditure of resources. And if there was any massive expenditure, it'd be difficult to argue that this reputation wasn't deserved. But that's just not the reality of the situation. Public perception is that NASA constitutes up to 20% of the federal budget. The reality is that NASA's funds are usually from about 0.5% to just under 1% of the federal budget. Could you pay for a safe, hundred million mile roundtrip to Mars with less than a quarter of the TARP budget? (The answer is "no.")

And yet, for what little they have to work with, NASA has built a vacuum-sealed habitat almost three hundred miles above the Earth's surface, taken pictures of the beginning of time, and landed robotic explorers on a planet thirty five million miles away. All for just half of one percent of the federal budget. Just imagine what they could do with two percent. Or three...

Accidents like Challenger and Columbia are often attributed to bureaucratic incompetence. The reality may just be that breaching the cosmic void of outer space is considerably more difficult than the minuscule fraction of a fraction we spend on it. Maybe we don't believe it's worthwhile because we, as a nation, have ceased to entertain especially worthwhile aspirations. We seem content to underfund and underestimate the institution that sent us hurtling to the Moon.

Space travel is dangerous, whether you go to Mars, the Moon, or just a quick hop to the International Space Station. It's extremely difficult and extremely dangerous. It can and will cost some of our brightest and boldest lives — no matter how far we reach... So let's reach far. Let's have goals that are worth the risks. Apollo 1 burned on the launchpad, but the Apollo program endured. Why? Because we decided to go to the Moon. Good, amazing people with all the right stuff will die trying to get us to the stars. So let's raise the ceiling and let them stretch their ambitions. Because the ones who have succeeded have become our reasons to dream big, and because the ones who have fallen, the astronauts of Apollo 1 and Challenger and Columbia, would have never in the darkest corners of their souls wanted to become our excuses to aim low.

- Travis

(via mobile device)

The True Meaning of Christmas

2010-12-25T14:32:00.000-08:00

Brace yourself, but Christmas is much older than its name. Yes, there's long been reason for Midwinter revels; especially in the days before central heating. See, the Solstice is the dead of Winter and the shortest day of the year; the crest of the snow-capped peak; the day after which the daylight hours begin to grow longer and warmth begins to grow. The Sun is returning. Spring is coming. There's a twinkling light at the end of the frigid tunnel. There is hope. It's always been celebrated with some enthusiasm.

We can see the vestiges of Christmas's pre-Christian roots in many of our holiday traditions. We know the Romans exchanged gifts and made merry during their winter Saturnalia. Pagan Scandinavia's Midwinter observance was known as the Yuletide, and was a heavy influence on our modern Christmas. Yuletide gave us the Christmas tree, the Yule log, and wassailing. Even in modern parlance, Yule is all but synonymous with the season. And to this day, Jul is the Scandinavian word for Christmas.

When it first crossed Pagan Europe, Christianity was a more fluid species of evangelism than the iron-fisted fire and brimstone we see today. It seeped into cultures by nimbly adapting to native expectations. It insinuated itself into existing traditions and familiar mythology. It evolved according to the needs of the locals. They were already celebrating the birthday of the Sun. Insisting it was also the birthday of the Son was only a rather modest rebranding. Keep your greenery and lights and music and add this sacred story to your holiday lore.

But during the Reformation, it wasn't the atheists or the Pagans attacking Christmas. It was the Puritans. That devout faction denounced Christmas revels as little more than Papist hedonism. To the stark Puritans, Christmas feasts and decorations and music were all seen as a repugnant display of ungodly excess. They detested it, and banned it; and their reasons were strictly religious.

Not only was Christmas not always Christian. It wasn't always American. Our founding fathers looked down on it as an essentially British tradition, and as such, a tradition they had little interest in preserving. Knowing full well that they'd be unprepared for it, George Washington attacked the Hessians on Christmas. He would not hesitate to exploit this sacred observance in order to shed his enemies' blood. Yes, Virginia, George Washington didn't give a reindeer's arse about Christmas.

And I say all this only to say that I do give a bit of a reindeer's arse about Christmas. Though it certainly does turn my stomach to hear a certain devout crowd jealously fighting for their interpretation of the holiday's auspices. I hate the insinuation that there is a concerted effort to neuter this inherently Christian holiday of its inherently Christian significance. Because the simple fact of the matter is that it has never been an entirely Christian holiday, and Christians themselves haven't always cared so much for it.

Not to let the atheists off the hook. And I don't mean the ones who simply don't believe in a supernatural higher power. I mean the ones who deeply believe in not believing, with all the fervor of a Cromwellian zealot. The ones who claim offense to even hear the word Christmas (which strikes me as a profoundly meta superstition), because there's nothing really at stake, is there? I mean it's one thing to strive to purge Creationism from the public curriculum. It's another to strive to purge any remotely theistic vestige from a multi-thousand year old cultural vocabulary. To wit, as someone who doesn't believe in Thor, I could struggle to rename Thursday as 5day, but it'd be an impossible fight with an unspeakably pointless goal.

At the end of the day, I'm rather fond of Christmas, exactly how it is. I like the big Pagan tree in the living room right beside the old crèche. I like the thousand year old elven saint with the Coca-Cola red overcoat. I like it all. Christmas is a storyteller's holiday. It's an intersection of histories and legends. It's a mongrel child of contradicting gods and traditions. It's old and it's new. It's spiritual and it's secular. It's heavy with stories, the blood of human culture, and that's what I love about it. Not only that, it's a season where people make some shred of an extra effort to tolerate one another, and whatever the reason, it's good enough.

- Travis

[via mobile device]

The Price of Imaginary Security

2010-11-20T09:17:00.000-08:00

I hate airport security. Every time I'm threaded through the whole bureaucratic tangle of procedures, I can't help but feel like it's primarily concerned with merely seeming meticulous; as if the TSA is basically just covering their ass. What is it if not a preposterously theatrical series of exercises; a cartoonish creature engineered by committee to combat a confluence of all our silliest nightmares.

A guy hides explosives in his shoes and suddenly every passenger has to take off their shoes. A crotch bomber fails to detonate his undies and the TSA rushes to deploy machines that can see through our pants. Never mind that those half-baked ideas might have easily never worked, it makes us feel better. Seems as if any halfwit terrorist need only light a match on a plane to trigger some new intrusion in our growing Rube-Goldberg array of airport security measures.

And this is usually the point at which some very stalwart, well-intentioned passenger inevitably chimes in to dutifully surrender our collective privacy with an unflappable declaration along the lines of, "If touching my junk is the price of security, I'll pay it." Which is noble and patriotic and wonderful, except for one thing — IT DOESN'T ACTUALLY MAKE US SAFE.

Safety isn't currently on the table, is it? Privacy or security — as much as we'd love to frame it in these very dramatic terms — isn't the practical reality of our situation. Deep down inside, we all realize this. We all understand that a naked psychopath looks almost exactly like a naked well-adjusted citizen. We only believe our convoluted little games work because we desperately NEED to believe they work. We NEED safety to be an option. Yet if we give ourselves permission to question that premise, it immediately becomes very easy to see the flaws in the assumption.

I'm no expert, but neither is the guy at the x-ray monitor, jaded by the endless parade of portable devices scrolling by; and really how difficult is it to disguise an explosive as an iPad or a Kindle? I don't know, but it doesn't seem totally impossible, does it? A potential hijacker looking for a sharp edge to hold to someone's throat need only snap a CD in half. Prison riots have been started with less than we're allowed to take onto planes. So ban all electronics. Ban all carry-ons. Okay. What's stopping the intrepid madman from infecting himself with smallpox before he boards? The plots that work are never obvious until they're played out, and they will always be at least as numerous as our most clever enemies — regardless of security.

Our whole airport security infrastructure, in all its vast Byzantine complexity, is bizarrely obsessed with policing inanimate stuff. But it's not a stuff problem, is it? Our would-be attackers aren't so casual in their righteous hatred that they'd give up because they suspect they couldn't get away with strapping C4 to their balls. It's not a stuff problem. It's a problem of intent. And that's not an excuse to appoint Juan Williams as head of the TSA; there's still plenty of caucasian psychos out there. No, the most dangerous thing a terrorist can take onto an airplane isn't a pair of scissors or a Quran; it's little more than the will to do serious harm, and we have no machines to detect that.

We need a new way of thinking about security. A new philosophy. Maybe a passenger vetting program; maybe bomb-sniffing dogs. Ultimately, I don't know what the ideal combination of security measures looks like. I don't know how you build a perfect system. I don't even know if you can. What I do know is this — bloated reactive protocols and humiliating violations don't make us safe. They make us tools, but they don't make us safe.

And anyway, is there any TSA obstacle more compelling than the unspoken social contract that any especially suspicious doings (like trying to detonate your blackberry or whittling a plastic shiv) will probably buy you an epic, mile high ass-kicking?

- Travis

[via mobile device]

On Names...

2010-05-14T11:22:00.001-07:00

What's in a name? It's true, a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but were it named a gore-turd, I doubt many would smell it. It'd certainly hold diminished sway in matters of romance. So perhaps there may be something in a name.

Ancient Egyptian priests sought to discover the names of the gods because they believed to invoke a god's name was to invoke a god's power. For similar reasons, ancient Hebrews were bound by a potent taboo that kept the name of their own omnipotent God shrouded in unspeakable mystery. Because names have a power. They have a soul. They have transformative magic. The simple act of naming a pig, for instance, is a strange alchemy that changes it from meat to a pet. From an it to a he. From bacon to Rufus.

Your name, I promise, was agonized over. It was discussed and debated to no end. Lists were made. Hours if not days or months of thought were put into it. It was likely first uttered before you were even born, bringing a smile to your parents — Yes, that's it; that's who this new person will be. It encapsulates history and aspirations and has, over time, tangled its roots into your very identity. And it's the same with anything, really. Cities, streets, mountains, ships, inventions. Names are agonized over, because the name will become the very thing, and the thing will become the name. Names are tested, tasted, and argued. Anyone may have only a handful of opportunities to name something, but each is its own ordeal.

So imagine what it is to constantly be naming things; to be an author of fiction; to give every nameless person, place, or thing the calculated moniker of something real. It could be a world as small as Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County or Lovecraft's Arkham, or as wide as Baum's Oz or Tolkein's Middle Earth, or as unfathomably vast as Banks' interstellar Culture or Herbert's Dune — where the scale of the naming has made it an altogether different sort of endeavor. And none of them, from Faulkner to Herbert, from Stan Lee to Homer, from Chaucer to Whedon, none would dream of saying a name is unimportant.

Just imagine if Stagger Lee was Sonny Lee, or if Vesper Lynd was Prudence Rectum. There is a very deliberate reason Dracula is not named Nigel or Walter. Just as it's no coincidence the cryptic Captain Nemo's name is Latin for "No One," or that a fellow called Remus Lupin transforms into a wolf. And beyond that, just the way a name sounds can say so much. Think of Atticus Finch or Forrest Gump or Moriarty. Dickens was a master in the poetry of naming. Ebenezer Scrooge, Oliver Twist, Mister Fezziwig, Abel Magwitch, and so on. You need only speak the syllables to begin to know these characters; before they utter a word — just from the way the cadence tastes on your tongue. Names can be carefully designed to trip certain wires in your mind whether you know it or not. Names contain a simple kind of power in that they are the beginning of your story. They are the very thing itself in the most perfect of nutshells.

What's in a name? As much as you decide to put in it, I think. And for my part, more is far far better than less.

Tranquility Base 7

2010-05-08T12:03:00.000-07:00

Testing out the Scripts Pro iPad app. Works for me...

Second Best

2010-03-08T13:06:00.000-08:00

The Wizard of Oz
Citizen Kane
Double Indemnity
It's a Wonderful Life
The Third Man
Sunset Boulevard
To Kill a Mockingbird
The Graduate
Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid
Chinatown
Jaws
Network
Star Wars
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Dead Poet's Society
Beauty & the Beast
A Few Good Men
The Shawshank Redemption
Pulp Fiction
Apollo 13
LA Confidential
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Moulin Rouge
Fellowship of the Ring
The Dark Knight
Avatar

Avatar FTW

2010-03-05T09:36:00.000-08:00

You will, no doubt, hear many reasons why Avatar is undeserving of the Oscar. Well, more like the same reason many many times.

Mainly, that it is derivative. You will hear how it is a rehash of Pocahontas or Ferngully. And yeah it's a little like those things. And Last of the Mohicans, Dances With Wolves, Lawrence of Arabia, etc, etc. But for me, it was much more like something of the same species as those old ERB planetary romances; ripping yarns like Princess of Mars and Carson Napier of Venus, and personally I was giddy to see that kind of Barsoomian swashbuckling exploding across the silver screen. So yeah, I agree that it's "derivative," if that's the term you want to use. I'm just not sure why I should care.

Calling a movie derivative is like saying it's a movie. Of course it is. You think you've seen new stories? You haven't. Believe me. You can take any movie and make a long long list of all the things it is like. Even Avatar's Oscar competitors. Hurt Locker has famously been compared to Point Break, and no one can say that doesn't make sense. We've seen Precious god only knows how many times. I recognize Up in the Air's Bingham from basically every Chuck Palahniuk novel I've ever read (and let's face it, he wasn't new then). And as for Inglorious Basterds — well, come on, we all know Tarantino. If we like something, it's an homage. If we don't, it's derivative. Sometimes it's a rip-off, sometimes it's a love letter, and sometimes we just don't bother to think about it. But it's always there. Everything is like something else. After all, D9 is certainly no stranger to the well-tread story route Avatar's plot follows.

Homer, Chaucer, or Shakespeare would have thought pure novelty a strange priority. Their mantra was to tell a story, to captivate their audience; not merely to impress those few jaded critics and aficionados who might want little else than to be surprised by the mechanics. Cleverness, in and of itself, isn't an especially substantial aim, you see. Drop by any second year film school screening if you don't believe me. Go and see what a brand new kind of story desperately reaching for originality looks like. Because it isn't moving or meaningful. Not necessarily. And that shouldn't really come as a galloping surprise to anyone, should it? Is demanding to be surprised by some fresh new plot device any less shallow than being impressed by a familiar yarn with lushly crafted visuals?

I'm not saying Avatar's flaw is everyone's flaw. I'm saying it's not a flaw. Stories have always been and can only be old. We're not trying to say new things. We're telling you the stories that said something to us. We're bringing our voices and imaginations to the stories that have lived in our hearts. We're reshaping the words that shaped us, to make them urgent again for you. Your voice can be original, but the words are timeless. They can only be timeless.

That said, to argue Avatar doesn't tell it's story with an inventive flair is just patently myopic. This movie summoned up a whole world from nothing; gave it a geology and a natural history and peopled it with an alien species; gave them a culture and a religion and a functional language. This kind of creative attention to detail is neither common nor easy. And neither, for that matter, is getting the average American to give a shit about a tree or the fate of the blue-skinned creature who lives in it. And yet this movie brings its considerable engines of creativity to the task of creating a sense of wonder. It should be gorgeous. It should be huge. It should be a spectacle. It is attempting to communicate in the broadest elemental terms the value of a natural world many audience members may never encounter. I've never seen it done so well, and neither have you.

Here is a big budget genre flick that isn't a remake, isn't based on any book, or video game, or comic book, or tv series; and yet has somehow become one of the most successful films of all time. As a creator and lover of original genre stories, I'm sleeping fine. Why wouldn't I? A capably crafted sci-fi popcorn epic with ground-breaking visuals, a lavish imagination, and an utterly worthwhile message is nominated for the Oscar. You're goddamn right I hope it wins.

The Austin Tea Party

2010-02-18T16:16:00.000-08:00

Well, it seems as if the Tea Party and Al Qaeda finally have something in common.

And no, I'm not saying the Tea Party is a terrorist organization. They'd be the first to tell you, it's hardly an organization at all. It doesn't even have organizational aspirations. Take, for example, the movement's resistance to its own convention in Nashville. The Tea Party isn't interested in being a party at all. And that's the problem, isn't it?

The Tea Party is essentially a generalized area in which the most disgruntled parts of several otherwise unrelated belief systems overlap. Many may well be rooted in coherent, well-intentioned philosophies. But nothing about the movement as a whole necessarily precludes especially extremist philosophies. On the contrary, the movement's ambitions are almost protozoan in that they possess no structure whatsoever -- ethical, or otherwise. What it does have is an enemy and a lot of anger. It's difficult to imagine what would stop its more destructive fringe elements from drawing strength from that culture. It's difficult to imagine Joe Stack would not have at least felt perfectly at home in that culture, or would by virtue of belonging to it be disinclined from his suicide attack.

Because the Tea Party seems, to me, concerned mainly with aggregating, amplifying, and empowering generalized anger, without codifying or channeling it. It articulates itself with signs, costumes, and caustic chants. It is a medium in which outrageous rumors spread far faster than sober information. It has no leader. It has no John Hancock or Patrick Henry, nor does it want one. It has no will to organize. It has no voice save for noisy chaos. It wants no formalized agenda or priorities, or to take any action which might ideologically alienate any of countless separate but intensely furious elements, some of which are not the most wholesome folks in the world. It seems therefore as if its two most essential values are rage and sheer numbers. And that isn't a party, or a movement, or a revolution. It's a mob.

Pale Blue Dot

2010-02-12T19:05:00.001-08:00

pale blue dot, originally uploaded by travisbeacham.

Twenty years ago today, a small probe coasting through deep space somewhere beyond the orbit of Pluto received instructions from home to turn around and snap a photograph of the distant world that had sent it out into the universe. The picture Voyager 1 sent back shows our very own Earth as seen from across that humbling 3.7 billion mile gulf. If you look very closely, you can see it -- a pale, blue dot hanging in the first ray from the right. Sagan had lobbied for Voyager to take this picture, and though some of his colleagues were reluctant to chance the probe's sensitive equipment on such an unscientific task, the picture speaks for itself. The tension between our heartbreaking fragility and the reach of our ambitions has never been so potently illustrated.

"Look again at that dot. That's here, that's home, that's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."

- Carl Sagan

Goodwill Toward Men

2009-12-17T08:50:00.001-08:00

mankind was my business, originally uploaded by travisbeacham.

"I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine."
- Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

Tea Party hardliners have lately embraced Rand's libertarian philosophy as embodied in this scurvy little germ of a saying as an intellectual and moral validation of what many a wise man have called mankind's basest tendency -- mainly, frigid self-interest. So often our choices are not between good and evil, but between easy and hard. The truly vile thing about this little bon mot is that it appeals to the temptation to pursue the easiest path, that of cruel narcissism and indifference to our fellow man, and somehow manages to sound righteous about it. But this season of all seasons shines a harsh and unforgiving light on this jaundiced worldview, by reminding us of the inexorable truth stridently articulated in a truly ubiquitous literary classic that will likely outshine that small, self-serving nugget for some time to come...

"Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!"
- Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

The Caseyad

2009-10-28T11:36:00.001-07:00

the caseyad, originally uploaded by travisbeacham.

Sing in me, Obama, and through me tell the tale
Of a man who alone ventured unto Dixien frontiers
To challenge those hordeful slickers and prevaricators
So intent on blighting his beloved homeland.

Born Adam of the Clan Casey in the Smith Fields,
Stood he a man apart.
Eleventeen cubits tall and bearsomely bearded,
He cut a long and fearful shadow,
And was known far and wide.
But before he banish'd Zeus from his thundered throne
And made the mighty Thor to weep,
Before he groped Aphrodite's untouch'd tatas
And boned fair Isis witless,
Before he saddled the dread Sharkodactyl
And ascended unto planet Mars,
He was first defender of truth and scourge of lies.

It came to pass that a rosy dawntide of bold change
Had washed the sullied night off his ravaged land
And young Adam's heart swelled with pride and hope.
But darkly envious minions of night
Watched with a great surge of spite
And quietly drew their wicked plots.
Twisted Apostles of the frigid frost-harlot Palin,
Tea-bagging Furies and Birthers
Of viral lies born on unctuous waves of vitriol.

And lo, Adam saw his shores licked by this infectious tide
And vowed it would not, could not, abide.

Muster'd he his lightning wits and bruin strength
And set out for the very den of the demon,
That black soul-rotting hole in the good earth
From whence are birth'd the delusions and knavespawn
Strangling his countrymen in their perfidious thrall.
Through the mired Limbogs of the Beckcountry
And into that fetid pit he did march,
A brazen light into the hoary darkness,
Wherein the heathen trinity dwelt.

He found them in the whispering dark,
Three in number.
A lurksome Ghoul and a scurvy She-Wolf
Crouching in tacit deference to the third:
A great ballock-cringing Crone,
A true Birther bloated with a brood of lies.
Out-number'd but not out-witt'd,
Brave Adam unsheathed his sword.
Thinking this intruder merely a bewitch'd minion,
In her dull pride the ungodly Crone was swept off guard
When like a thunderbolt Adam did strike
At that swollen purpled womb.

She came upon him
With all the furor of a storm-churning dragon,
Belching her blazing spume of baleful sophistry
Which hath blackened the hearts of so many.
But not Adam. No, not he.
Stood he firm with his truthful sword,
And slayed the festerly Crone,
The She-Wolf and Ghoul looked on the fall of their mistress,
Their eyes flickering with a great and lucid dawning,
As truth began to thaw their bale-frozen souls.

Emerging from the dark,
The sun fell warm upon his skin,
And Adam of the Clan Casey
Knew he'd fought a rare and goodly fight,
And prevail'd.

And so take heed, gentle reader,
Of lessons here enshrined:
That his victory was not in slaying the Birther Crone
But in the match-less bravery of his charge
And in the hearts opened to look upon it.
So take up arms of light, noble brethren,
And chase away the night.
Pursue her to her dank and dark strongholds;
Into every pit, cave, warren, and well --
Bring forth that brave new day.

~

(My friend Adam Casey spotted a GOP booth at a fair and twittered that he should have asked to see their birth certificates. I responded that he must do just that, and that if he did, I'd write a glorious epic poem about it. So, the next day, he returned and threw down with the crazies manning the booth. And that, friends, is the origin of The Caseyad. The accompanying illustration is, I'm pleased to note, by Adam himself. And stay tuned for more, Adam and I are hard at work on an unrelated but surpassingly awesome comic book.)

All Under Heaven 9: Non ho, Shanghai

2009-07-27T19:09:00.001-07:00

supertall, originally uploaded by travisbeacham.

"Non ho" is a greeting in the Shanghainese dialect. It's their way of saying "nihao" (which as it turns out doesn't mean anything like "have you eaten?").

And that's Shanghai really -- another world. Almost. Certainly another China. Forget everything you thought you learned about China. Wipe the slate clean. We're starting from scratch.

Shanghai hasn't been around since the beginning of time. It was never the seat of imperial power. It's considerable gravity is a very very recent phenomenon.

Before the mid 19th century, Shanghai was little more than a sleepy mudflat town at the mouth of the Yangtze.

We had a glimpse of what this former Shanghai might have been like when we visited a small town called Xinchang just outside the city. It's a forgotten salt-panning village tucked away in the marshes, forgotten since the collapse of the salt farms some hundred something years ago. Xinchang looks like something out of someone else's dream, with it's cobbled avenues too narrow for cars and half-moon bridges arching over brackish canals. We negotiated it's alleys between the sagging timbers of old teahouses and mouldering plaster facades as the elderly, leather-skinned locals turned their curious eyes on us from the windows and doorways of their five hundred year old houses. They'd nod with a quiet twinkle in their eyes or flash jagged, ancient smiles or mutter a tentative "non ho," but mostly the swallows were the only sound. The absence of vendors and surplus of watchful eyes made me wonder if anyone ever comes here. There were ghosts in this place, dead and alive. It was very close to perfect.

This, I imagine, is what Shanghai might have been like. Might still be had the stars not conspired a different fate.

Shanghai (as we know it) was the child of two worlds, East and West, born of the Opium Wars, a trade dispute which saw Western powers divy up the nacent city amongst one another. Trade with the Far East was opening up, one way or another and whether the Far East liked it or not, even if the West had to pry open the mouth of the Yangtze by raw brute force. Shanghai was the port to this very end.

It was a divided city. Like Jerusalem or Vienna after the War. The British settlement. The French Concession. The Chinese City. The sheer volume of authority meant, in effect, there was no authority. And we've seen this before, haven't we. The lawless gold rush town on the edge of the known world. This was Shanghai. Multiplied a thousand fold. Because it sat on two frontiers. This was where East grinded against West. And the gold was more than just a promising lode, it was the wealth of an entire hemisphere.

And Shanghai grew. It grew like an explosion.

By the time the Roaring Twenties hit Shanghai the Roar was deafening. This Shanghai of the 20's and 30's is the Shanghai of legend. Of films, songs, and pulp novels. The Paris of the East. The Pearl of the Orient. It cast a towering glow in the Far East just beyond the horizon. A dangerous and radiant splendor. It's streets were populated by spies and tycoons. By triads and taipans. By witches, warlords, and jazzmen. This is the Shanghai that holds a merciless grip on my imagination. I wanted to lose myself in the mirrored labyrinths of the Great World. I wanted to sneak into a Blood Alley cabaret in time to see a bobbed peach part the slit of her cheongsam to flash some leg as she renders a Cantonese "Paper Moon."

Of course I knew I couldn't. Born much too late. Nevertheless I wanted to see where it all happened.

Shanghai's a different place these days. But she's no less important for it. Lately, she's become the poster child of the new China. The cloud-raking summits of her ambitious skyline gleam like ambassadors from the future (three of the tallest towers in the world among them), lending her the atmosphere of a permanent World's Fair. And on that note, there was one thing in particular I could cross off my Shanghai list. So as soon as I got a free moment, I blazed a trail to the Shanghai high-speed maglev.

It's the first commercial maglev in the world and covers the 30 km distance between the city proper and the Pudong airport in just over seven minutes (about seven times faster than our tour bus). Electromagnets pass the train down the track, cracking speeds 350 km/h in just the first two minutes. Michele pointed out the streaks on the bullet-shaped front, as if thousands of small creatures had met their unexpected end on it's windshield. This train, in short, goes very fast. You know the feeling you get when a plane throttles it down the runway on takeoff? That's what the maglev feels like. Except it doesn't ever leave the ground, it just keeps picking up speed. The landscape outside smears across the window (Was that a telephone pole or a house?). The ride is eerily smooth and quiet, save for the low magnetic drone and the sounds of clicking cameras as the cabin spedometer tops out at the 431 km/h. The point (or part of it at any rate) is that China is as much the land of invention as it was in the days when paper and gunpowder were new. And that Shanghai is where the country's ingenuity lives.

I'd decided that I rather loved new Shanghai -- perhaps as much as old Shanghai. We strolled along the Bund and admired her stately gothic edifices and art deco towers. The Cathay Hotel. The Customs House. The Shanghai Club. This waterfront thoroughfare was the face of old Shanghai's coming of age. This was where it all happened. And I turned to glance across the Huangpu River, to the supertall skyscrapers rising from the opposite bank. The bulbed spire of the Oriental Pearl Tower soared fifteen hundred feet above the river and the stark angles of the 101-story Shanghai World Financial Center loomed behind, her glass-bottomed observation deck hidden by the clouds. And I wondered if the space between the two riverbanks wasn't perhaps smaller than I had imagined.

(Visit my Shanghai set on flickr for more images of Xinchang old town, the Bund, the maglev, and more.)

All Under Heaven 8: That Beijing Air

2009-07-26T18:59:00.001-07:00

armillary, originally uploaded by travisbeacham.

Beijing was my first experience of China. (And yes, I know I already did the Xi'an post and I am confusing the order of the trip here, but just cut me some slack.)

Beijing (or Dadu or Beiping or Peking as it's been variously known) has been the center of Chinese culture since the days of the Mongols some 800 years ago. By itself, an impressive span that comfortably swallows the whole of American history, but to the Chinese it's rather like the last two or three chapters in the history book. Because written Chinese history (just the *written* bits mind you) begins almost four thousand years ago. Viewed through that telescopic lens, it's easy to imagine how Beijing could still be considered the new kid.

The very very first thing you notice is the air. Beijing, you see, is a bit smoggy. Or, to do it proper justice, five minutes in Beijing left me feeling as if I could not up to that point claim to have experienced smog. And I was coming from Los Angeles of all places. But LA's haze (and you'll notice the very deliberate absence of quotation marks) is like a gossamer will-o-wisp when measured against Beijing's sweltering blanket of sooty murk. In LA the very worst of it is "I can hardly see downtown." In Beijing it's "I can hardly see the building next door." Just breathing Beijing's air is like smoking a pack of cigarettes a day, literally. So, I say again, this was my first experience with smog.

But let's talk about a different sort of atmosphere altogether. The political atmosphere. It is almost inescapable after all. This is the capital of China we're talking about. And Beijing not infrequently feels like the place every red-blooded American neo-con fears the whole of China to be.

Take this as a for instance. There is one very specific reason every Westerner has heard of Tiananmen Square. A reason that can't be far from the front of any Western mind visiting Tiananmen Square. A reason very pointedly omitted from the commentary of local guides even as we crossed Tiananmen Square. And so here you are in this broad, notorious plaza bordered by stark red star emblazoned colonnades on either side, the unblinking portrait of Mao before you, and an airport-grade security checkpoint at your back and at some point you may have the fleeting notion that you might be in a communist country.

There are guards everywhere. There are surveillance cameras everywhere. There are even signs with cute anime-style guards gesturing towards cartoon surveillance cameras like Hello Kitty's Big Brother. It would almost feel a trifle Orwellian if not for all the tourist buses.

Here, contradictions are somewhat par for the course. China contains multitudes, in every possible sense. There is at least as much to like about Beijing as not.

Even here, at the axis of the largest communist empire on the planet, capitalism exerts an obvious influence. You see it in the avenues of impressively garish hyper-modern high-rises. You see it in the ranks of vendors swarming around the gates of any major attraction. It rained on our second day in Beijing, rained hard -- a merciful respite from the smog but not pleasant in and of itself. Well never fear, because no sooner do the clouds open up than some unlikely entrepreneur's tapping you on the shoulder hawking umbrellas.

And mentioning the smog without mentioning the billions of dollars China's spending on reversing it would leave you with an unfair impression of the country's priorities. Beijing has the largest fleet of natural gas buses in the world and thousands upon thousands of recently planted saplings dotting her growing cityscape.

The Forbidden City -- with its acre upon acre chock-a-block with shrines, palaces, and courtyards -- is jaw-dropping even under the dreariest conditions. (Did I mention it was raining?)

And the Great Wall of China... Where do I begin? Here is a wonder, if ever there was one, most deserving of it's reputation. We hiked the Badaling section threading the precipitous contours of the mountains outside the city, plunging down the face of one only to soar straight up the next dizzying slope. Following the crest of the wall up such a steep, stair-less grade can't help but leave any sane hiker wondering, "With mountains like this, who even needs walls?" But only for as long as the beguiling scenery permits such distractions.

But maybe the most unexpected treasure I found in Beijing came in the form of the Old Observatory. Oldest in the world to be precise. Completed in 1442 when stargazing was far more than a pastime. It was integral to the Emperor's authority. For the Emperor was the Son of Heaven, and that wasn't just a lofty pretense. The Emperor was expected to possess a special wisdom, a unique insight into the movements of the heavens by which he could, among other things, set the calendar -- an act of priceless import to a feudal nation fed and peopled by illiterate farmers. And to this end, the Emperor employed legions of imperial astronomers.

The Observatory, for me, was a more than welcome change of pace. Quiet, uncrowded, and preoccupied with the scientific trappings of another age. The rain was lightening, just enough to rinse the smog and cool the summer air. It pooled in the stony crevices of the tree-shaded courtyard under giant bronze armillary spheres and celestial globes intricately gilded with coiled dragons and other mythical beasts. I'd have been perfectly content to explore it well into the day. It was distinctly hard for me not to fall in love with the Old Observatory. Here was an ancient artifact of a culture endearingly obsessed with the stars. It occurred to me that China might just be the perfect place to witness an eclipse of the century.

(For more images of the Old Observatory, the Forbidden City, the Great Wall, and all else Beijing, drop by my Beijing set on flickr.)

All Under Heaven 7: Impressions of Xi'an

2009-07-25T15:06:00.001-07:00

the great mosque of xi'an, originally uploaded by travisbeacham.

China, it should be said, has a long long history. Something we all seem to forget when we speak of the "Rise of China." And there may be no place in China where the full breadth of this history is more intimately felt than the timeless city of Xi'an.

It was the site of a bustling Stone Age village before becoming the eastern terminus of the Silk Road. And it has been the capital of China for much of a period beginning over a thousand years before Christ and on into the storied Tang Dynasty some twenty centuries later -- right about the time distant Europe was enthusiastically plunging into the thick of the Dark Ages.

All this from a city (I'm embarrassed to admit) I'd never heard of, though I doubt I'm alone in that regard. As the Silk Road fell from importance and other dynasties relocated the Chinese capital time and again before finally settling on Beijing, Xi'an suffered a kind of obscurity until that fateful day in 1974 when a farmer stumbled across one of the greatest archaeological finds of the 20th century -- the Terracotta Army.

To this day, the site is the pride of Xi'an and a vital tourist draw every bit as integral to China's cultural identity as the Great Wall itself.

The story of the Terracotta Army's creation is detailed in a film called The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, which serendipitously premiered on our hotel's HBO the night before our visit to the museum. And maybe it "premieres" every night in Xi'an but nevertheless, I felt I had the whole backstory down by the time I saw the clay warriors the next day.

But seriously folks, the real story's rather more earthly (if you'll forgive the pun) but no less impressive. This extraordinary feat of craftsmanship was undertaken by order of the first emperor of China over two millennia ago.

So what about Xi'an these days? Well, to draw an awkward comparison, if Beijing is Washington, then Xi'an is something along the lines of Philadelphia: older, industrial, and with loftier historical claims. The whole place is boxed in by mountains and rural farmland and, despite it's heady growth, feels somehow overlooked. To its independent credit perhaps.

The Xi'anese we met were less dogmatic than Beijingers and generally quicker to criticize the faults and wastes of the government. From the absent ventilation system in the Terracotta Army's sweltering main pit to the shoddily paved airport highway. Not only that, but the ravages of Mao's Cultural Revolution which infamously sought purge the country of its heritage was largely ignored by the local party officials in Xi'an. Consequentially, as Beijing's once proud city wall was dismantled for its bricks, Xi'an's Ming-era wall still stands pristine around the distinctly modern city center, critical to the city's unique personality.

By and large, and (as with all things China) for the moment, Xi'an seems on the cusp of finding some sort of healthy balance between its modern ambitions and its older heritage. You drive thru the stone arch of the 700 year old city gate, past name brand boutiques under faux Tang-style eaves, and you turn a corner to find yourself suddenly in the gorgeously ramshackle mayhem and crammed street markets of the city's old Muslim Quarter. And tucked somewhere in the maze of winding alleys tangled with bamboo scaffolding lies the thousand year old Great Mosque of Xi'an, her timeworn stones sagging into the very fabric of the city.

The Mosque in particular struck me as a quietly haunted place. Sweat drenched my clothes as I explored it's cobbled walkways and I all but forgot Xi'an's suffocating summer heat. (And Xi'an, I should pause to point out, boasts unspeakably hot summers. 110 degrees that day.) You find the Mosque like a treasure at the center of a crowded urban labyrinth. There it sits, untouched amid the bustle, an ancient place in a growing city, permitted the rare dignity of aging and crumbling like a revered elder.

And really, I can think of no more essential point on which to wrap up my impressions of Xi'an.

(For more images of the Great Mosque, the Terracotta Warriors, and other Xi'anese stuff, visit my Xi'an set on flickr.)

All Under Heaven 6: Picture This

2009-07-25T11:58:00.001-07:00

rickshaw driver, originally uploaded by travisbeacham.

I'll be uploading pictures from my trip over the next week or so. I've created a collection to this end on my flickr. It includes sets for Beijing, Xi'an, and Shanghai respectively and will, I imagine, be updated in intermittent fits of productivity. You're welcome to check back from time to time if you're at all curious.

All Under Heaven 5: Room With a View

2009-07-23T08:51:00.001-07:00

over shanghai, originally uploaded by travisbeacham.

Incidentally, this is my view as I type this from my hotel room on the 32nd floor of a Shanghai skyscraper. Beat that with a stick.

Tomorrow I get on a plane to return to the states. So naturally I'm pretty stressed about that, but what else is new.

All in all, it's been an extraordinary trip full of much more raw experience than free time to recount it. But, worry not - I'll do my best to fill in all the gaps after I settle down to a pace more like everyday life.