Duluth, Minnesota, February 2008

Thanks for nothing.

Bibendum Lost

About five years ago, at a flea market in Paris I saw (but did not buy, stupid stupid stupid!) an old Michelin poster.

It’s from, I’m guessing, probably the late teens, and it’s an ad for some kind of rubber resistance-strap workout device. Apparently Michelin was at one time involved in the manufacture of various rubber products beyond tires.

It shows Bibendum, very jaunty and unconcerned—I think he’s even wearing a monocle—with his walking-stick hooked over his arm. And he’s simultaneously, effortlessly, punching and kicking a pair of very Gallic-looking muggers—kind of one fist going out sideways this way to hit one of them in the nose, the opposite leg striking out the other way to nail the other. Paf! Paf! A Belle Epoque Charles Atlas ad.

I have since scoured the Internet and better poster shops everywhere, looking for a copy of this. No one else is aware of its existence. I’m starting to think I imagined the whole thing.

If anyone can direct me towards a print of this poster or (failing that) proof of its existence, I will be very grateful and reassured of my own sanity.

Mad Max

You need to be careful about attributing too much meaning to movies, especially big noisy action movies. Reading the cinematic tea leaves for deep relevance to the world of today is a mug's game, or at least a game for those poor souls who have opted to do graduate studies in film.

At the same time, part of what makes a movie work is how it taps on our familiar experience and resonates in the audience's mind. Any movie, if it's any good, is a little bit true--even if it's an over-the-top fantasy.

Idle Primate and I went out to see Mad Max recently. That's the first of George Miller's postapocalyptic trilogy set in the Australian outback and arguably the least iconic of the three. When people talk about a "Mad Max dystopia," they're usually referring to The Road Warrior, the second film in the trilogy, set after a nuclear war. That's a very simple world--rampaging motorized gangs of punk rock mutants in a completely lawless post-nuclear wasteland, where civilization is clearly and indisputably dead and gone.

Mad Max is more interesting in that it takes place while things are falling apart. It's not post-apocalyptic so much as... well, I guess pre-post-apocalyptic is the best word. (Which technically should just be "apocalyptic" but it's not really that either, because apocalypse suggests a clear and sudden transition and that's not really what's going on here.)

Max and the other good guys are highway-patrol cops, chasing down the first generation of the emerging road gangs that will have completely taken over by the time we get to The Road Warrior. It's clear that the police force is on its last legs as a civic institution; the cops themselves are starting to look and behave like just another (albeit relavitely benign) gang operating out of the trashed-out remains of the Halls of Justice.

But what's striking is that no one seems to think the world has ended. Notwithstanding the obvious failure of major institutions that is underway, a good chunk of the movie involves Max and his Sears-catalog family piling into the station wagon and going on a pleasant road trip, even though we know those roads are full of biker gangs. The bikers themselves are kind of goofy and clean-cut--a missing link, the last of the 1960's-style bikers, sort of a coelocanth-like specimen of pre-Altamonte Hell's Angel, from just before it split once and for all from the hippie genus and became something vicious and malignant. The kind of bikers you would imagine doing security for the Monkees.

At the same time, ambulances still come when you call them; lawyers still show up to get their clients out of jail; whiskey and hookers are still bought with money, not cans of Spam.

So the film and its characters exist in this odd space of apocalypse denial. In this respect Mad Max is a much more realistic film than The Road Warrior.

The big problem I have with survivalists and hard-core doomers is not that they anticipate some serious shit going down; it's that they seem to expect and even hope for a very clear-cut situation to emerge afterwards, where life is a matter of having lots of guns and being willing to use them. Where all complications of society, rules, expectations and having to deal with other people are swept away, and where life--if nasty, brutish and short--is at least freed from bullshit.

But as we've seen in Russia and Afghanistan and even the late Roman/early Frankish period, civilizations don't collapse that neatly. There is never any clear-cut signal that says, "NOW it is necessary and okay to quit mailing out resumes, pick up a machine gun and start marauding." You can lose and lose and lose some more--retirement plans, public schools, the rule of law--and yet that blessed state of nature never seems to come. The survivalists and Tea Partiers are bound to be disappointed. Just what does someone have to do to get a Hobbesian war of all against all going around here, anyway!

Of course, in Mad Max, the title character gets just that signal. Something Changes Forever and the hero is freed from all obligation to the old world, freed to become the Road Warrior.

It's only a movie, guys.

What's really interesting is how plausible even the implausibilities are. In this crumbling world, where even the police station looks like a trashed-out squat, the roads are still being maintained with beautiful smooth asphalt, well enough to drive on at eighty miles an hour. Absurd on the surface of it; roads are fragile and take an insane amount of effort and coordination to keep functional at all, and in a general center-not-holding-things-falling-apart those roads should turn into cowpaths right quick. Except that in real life, while civic institutions such as schools and city halls and libraries have to close due to collapsed tax bases, the half-assed thrashing of governments trying to jumpstart the economy is largely directed towards road building. Suddenly Mad Max seems eerily prescient.

Getting ready to make a mess!

So this weekend I've started looking into what's involved in this learn-to-make-stuff thing.

Something I've been wanting to do for some time now is to build some bicimaquinas. The word is Spanish and was coined by a group called Mayapedal in Guatemala. They take donated bicycles and carve them up, modify them and put them back together to make stationary pedal-powered machines. So far they've designed and built a blender, a corn grinder, a water pump and a number of other useful devices that make life a hell of a lot easier when you live somewhere without a reliable, affordable electricity supply.

Depending on who you ask, that might include a lot of us in the next few decades.

Even if you're not of an apocalyptic bent, there's a lot to love about these things. We're surrounded by clever technology that lets us imagine we're really in charge of the universe, but an awful lot of it doesn't work at all unless we keep feeding it some form of concentrated fossil sunlight.

Bicycles are sort of different; they take the power output of a human being (up to 300-400 watts in short bursts, more like 75 watts over long periods of time) and strip away as much friction as possible, allowing us to get the most work done with the least effort. It's a truly clever invention, an elegant solution to a persistent problem that dogs every animal on the planet, i.e. moving around without blowing your calorie budget. It's an honest invention that doesn't rely on a geological trust fund to work its apparent magic. In this respect it's a much bigger achievement than a car or an airplane or a moon shot.

(Let's leave aside for the moment that making replacement parts for bicycles itself depends on an industrial system that may or may not be able to function, even at a drastically reduced level, on the available renewable energy sources. Someday even bicimaquinas might not be viable. But in the meantime...)

What I also like about the bicimaquina concept is that, even for us pudgy and comfortable first-worlders, it deals with some of our current problems as well as our future ones. Leave aside the whole issue of reducing energy consumption for environmental reasons. Right now we've got labour-saving machines doing a lot of our physical work for us, while we go to gyms to work out on different machines whose purpose is to help us burn off extra calories while doing no useful work.

The Dutch cheapskate in me finds this objectionable.

So I'm gonna start with bicimaquinas because, of all the greasy, dirty, hands-onny get-stuff-doney crafts, bike repair is the one at which I am least inept. I've actually got a decent grasp of how bicycles work, though I haven't actually worked on one in years. So there's something to start with.

I think eventually I'd like to build a pedal-powered washing machine. Something like that would give you a good workout over the course of half an hour or so and get something done that, frankly, I tend to avoid. (Of course I tend to avoid exercise too...)

But for now I think the first project will be a stationary stand to mount a bike frame on--the power plant for whatever other devices I then decide to hook up to it.

Gonna have to learn how to weld...

Energy Intensity of Urban and Intercity Passenger Modes

Here are some more charts showing the energy intensity of various travel modes. The data comes from

Gagnon, Luc. Comparaison des options énergétiques: Options de transport. Hydro-Quebec. 2008.

I built these charts using the data in Gagnon's paper. (Actually, he had some charts in there as well; they were really good and look a lot like these. But they were in French, plus they were in PDF format, which often gives weird results when you swipe an image for, say, a PowerPoint presentation for a class you're teaching.)

If you want to make a point on energy and transport options to an English-speaking audience, feel free to use mine.

Future shock in Rotterdam

Swans with porn shop.

Just cleaning out my camera after several weeks in Europe. I didn't think this one turned out and in a way it didn't, but in a more interesting way, it did.

I just noticed...

that the remote control for my DVD player has an "eject" button on it.

So I can eject the disc without getting up from couch.

Then what?

Pirate Shmirate Redux

I saw the movie Pirate Radio today, which is the European-release title of The Boat That Rocked. I posted a few months ago on what it appeared to be, based on the trailers. The comment on the film trailer was really just a jumping-off point for a rant about the ease with which myths of rebellion (especially the confluence of social/cultural/historic/demographic conditions known as "The Sixties") are used to flatter ourselves that partying is the same as pursuing social justice.

As it happens, the movie (I mean the movie itself as a story and as entertainment, never mind what it brings to mind about the real world) is... not bad. It's not great, it might not even be good, but it's not awful either.

I do have my beefs with it, chiefly the portrayal of the British government minister assigned to shut down the offshore rock 'n' roll station. This guy starts out as a stock stick-up-the-keister Face Of Authority right out of a Twisted Sister video or Police Academy XII, and becomes a figure of such cartoonish callousness and evil it sort of demolishes his credibility as a person and therefore as a villain. (It doesn't help that his chief hatchet man is actually named Twat.)

In his last act as Villain, he actually orders his underling NOT to send boats to rescue the crew of the sinking radio station/ship, perfectly willing to condemn them to freezing death in the North Sea. I'm not a maritime lawyer but I'm pretty sure this would be among the most serious breaches of international law, not to mention basic human decency, on the books. This kind of abrupt levelling-up from Officious Prig to Indirectly Murderous Motherf**ker is a really clumsy breach of tone for what is supposed to be a comedy.

But one saving grace--and the reason I'm bothering to post on it at all--is one knife-in-the-heart scene by Philip Seymour Hoffman. It's a scene that is so poignant and insightful and full of truth that it makes all the rest of the nonsense worth sitting through.

Hoffman, the rock 'n' roll pirate hero at the top of his game, sits on the deck and confesses the thought that has been tormenting him for months, which is: These are the best days of our lives. Everything that comes after will be a letdown.

Maybe, he concedes, the kid will get lucky and even better things are in his future. (The line is delivered with a particular blend of weariness, hope and mendacity. In an age when there are so few true markers indicating that we have moved from one stage of life to another, maybe this is one of them: The first time you have to tell a half-truth to someone younger, in order to temporarily shield their hopes from the crushing that yours have already endured.)

But, there it is: This is as good as it gets. From now on, every day will be better than the next. We fear it is true and hope it is not, but there comes a time when there's just too much evidence to deny. Personally I'm not there yet, but I know that moment is out there.

In the end, this is what storytelling is for: it reminds us that in all the awful things we fear and will have to face someday, including our own personal extinction, we are not alone. That a fictional character has spoken our fears means that a real person shares them.

It's not much but in the cold black waters of the North Sea, you'll gladly cling to anything.

Four states of control and chaos.

Just a thought: Consider that you can classify a situation in one of four ways:

1) Under your control;
2) Under control, not necessarily yours;
3) Out of control;
4) Beyond control.

(The last two courtesy of the film "Ever Since The World Ended.")

What does this mean for how you think about events?

Planner humour.

Here's a graphic I did for a presentation in 2004 on NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) opposition to development proposals. Any planners out there, I feel your pain.

At Ground Zero of modern history

Well, I'm back. Apologies for the lack of posting but I have been pointedly avoiding computers for the past few weeks as I travel around central Europe.

At one point my travels took me to Berlin, over a bitterly (and, I am told, unusually) cold couple of days. There are plenty of things I could say about the place. The short answer is that I highly recommend it (and the Aloha Hostel on Torstrasse where I stayed.) It's particularly appealing if, like me, you lived in Montreal in the early 1990's and pine for those days when a huge metropolis, still staggering from the forces of history, had ample nooks and crannies and spaces for broke and eccentric people to do cheap and fascinating things. It is changing, alas, as all such places do, but for now Berlin is still a great place to be young and interesting.

The weather being as I said absurdly cold during my visit, I was drawn more than usual to museums and other outposts of the great indoors. I must confess that I like the idea of museums more than I enjoy museums themselves. I am always disappointed to go somewhere full of relics and artifacts of the past and find that the past does not come alive, that I cannot feel the Middle Ages or the revolutions of 1848, that this is just a collection of stuff. It is the feeling I imagine I would have if I were to open up an old high school yearbook, seeking comfort and connection in the past, and finding that I do not remember any of these people. It's a letdown.

One museum that did not disappoint, however, was the Story Of Berlin museum on Kurfurstendamm in the old West Berlin. This is a very well designed multimedia experience (I mean multimedia in the true sense, i.e. sound and film and light and text as appropriate to convey information and understanding, not in the more usual sense of "the latest computerized doodad designed to impress you with its deterministic program disguised as interactivity.")

For instance, while most of the museum is located on the upper floor and arranged in more-or-less chronological order, there comes a point where you make the descent into the Nazi years. (You can't have a Berlin museum or decent Indiana Jones movie without Nazis.)

To get to this section of the museum, you literally descend three flights of stairs. At each landing is a collection of black-and-white photos of famous Germans of the era. At the top landing, all the frames have pictures in them. The next landing down, some of the frames are missing photos, replaced with words like "emigrated." The next flight down, more missing pictures, and words like "murdered," "suicide," "preventative detention." Meanwhile, from below, the hellish lights of burning books and recordings of chanting crowds. The air gets colder. It is literally and figuratively chilling.

What's even scarier is the tour of the bunker under the museum. (Fittingly, even lower than the Nazi exhibit.) This is a Cold War-era bunker designed to house about 1300 people in the event of a nuclear attack. All steel and concrete and blue light, like a vintage James Cameron movie. The guide, with the black ironic humour that seems to be standard issue in the old Eastern Bloc, pointed out that all the bunkers in Berlin could house about one percent of the population. As he detailed the conditions under which the bunker would be expected to operate, it became clear that these things would never work. Over a thousand people, eighteen-inch-wide aisles between bunks, three toilets and probably a lot of people with radiation poisoning. Next to no ventilation (and even those shafts would be likely as not to be clogged from the destruction up above, on the surface.) These were nothing but a public-relations exercise--something to keep the public from objecting too strongly to an insane arms race in which there could be no victory, just varying degrees of defeat. The German slogan, equivalent to our "Duck And Cover," translated as "Everyone Has A Chance."
As a planner, I wonder what it must have been like to be one of the guys designing these things. Did they know it would never work? Did they consciously block out that knowledge and just do their jobs? What an awful way to make a living--confronted every day with the total destruction of the world and knowing that even your best efforts will make no difference.

When I was a kid, I took it for granted that I would not live into my thirties; the destruction of the world seemed imminent and inevitable. The threat of nuclear annihilation isn't gone. We now have arguably even more serious problems on our hands. For all its terror, nuclear annihilation required that a handful of people decide to do something incredibly stupid. Now, avoiding a different disaster requires that everyone decide to get real smart, real fast. It's enough to make you feel like a kid again.

But here we are, surprisingly enough. Despite my generally anxious and pessimistic nature, I need to remind myself from time to time that sometimes disasters are averted. Then again, a lot of those blank picture frames on the way down to the Third Reich exhibit probably told themselves the same thing.