My mom asked me to shave my beard. If I got contact lenses I could change my name and start a new life.
I never miss a chance to see Lawrence of Arabia. Years ago we reviewed it on our late, lamented podcast Friendly Fire, an episode I recommend.
It’s a masterful film but there are plenty of good criticisms of its politics, its perspective and its historicity. You can watch it aware of those legitimate critiques and still gain valuable perspective on our present world.
This is something we’ve only recently lost as a society: the ability to hold multiple ideas in our heads simultaneously. A thing can be problematic AND thought-provoking. An idea can be troubling AND insightful. Too often people assume the harshest critique is the truest, or even that the first critique they encountered is the definitive one. Nothing is perfect, no idea or poem or work of art is all-encompassing. The purpose of an education isn’t to have an iron box of “correct” ideas. An education should prepare you to hold conflicting ideas and not collapse under their weight.
So Lawrence of Arabia was made in a different time. It’s chock full of Orientalism, patriarchal colonialism, Great-Man-Theory ahistoricism and racism. It even has Obi-wan in brown face. It is nonetheless, in addition to being a cinematic masterpiece, incredibly instructive in a summary understanding of the post-WWI layout of the Middle East. You might have to Google 10-50 things in your after-action research but set aside a weekend and you’ll have more perspective than 90% of the people spouting opinions on contemporary affairs.
History doesn’t “begin” anywhere—you can always go back further—but one can argue that the Sykes-Picot agreement in 1916 was a kind of Genesis Bomb of Turmoil. Lawrence of Arabia puts you on the threshold of it in Technicolor.
My Threads account is borked and I’m fine with it.
Charles De Gaulle Airport is actually five airports and maybe one of them is the “best European airport” but of the other four, one of them is like if the Spokane Airport had a million passengers a year, one of them is the original Charles De Gaulle airport with no improvements or repairs since the day it opened, one is what you’d get if Melania Trump designed an airport and one of them is like the airport on Tatooine if it got a million passengers a year. If you have to travel BETWEEN one of these airports to another airport you are required to use the Detroit public transit system as it existed in 1974 with connections through the Soviet Exhibition Hall at the World’s Fair in New Orleans in 1984.
For these reasons I feel that the “Europe’s Best Airport” award might be something invented by the marketing team at Charles De Gaulle Airport and not competitively judged.
This is an example of digital enshitification, small but pernicious. As of April the EU no longer stamps passports on entry or exit. They’ve replaced the age-old custom with encrypted notepad and photo biometric scan or whatever. I’m sure it’s very techy-cool, expensive to implement, totally bulletproof, never crashes and makes the world safer.
It’s also shitty. Crossing international borders, presenting your documents, getting scrutinized by guards and interrogated by customs is an ancient ritual, exciting, dangerous and exotic, and the reward—and it IS a reward—is a little ink stamp in your cardstock book. Your passport is more than just something you present THEM, it’s something they endorse for YOU. Even the most seasoned traveler isn’t immune to flipping through their passport like a photo album, deciphering the inscrutable glyphs and uneven numbers and connecting them to what are always life-altering events. No one crosses a border without it meaning something.
Losing that ritual is an immeasurable theft, great and small. I’m not even decrying the surveillance-state info-harvesting, which is inevitable (and proof all tech is inherently neo-fascist). It’s just that everyone in the chain of custody of this crap transition ALSO has a passport and knows in their hearts the importance of this small ritual. They know, at some level, that taking away passport stamps is dehumanizing. It’s a police-state joke to suggest it streamlines the process, and it would add exactly three seconds to also stamp the book after the photoscan’s complete.
What the Eurostate gains in data is clear: now they can track your face on CCTV as you move through the world and, who knows, maybe sell that info to Nestle or Esso or maybe shock your balls remotely when you swear. But what they’ve done is violate their half of the bargain and taken away the little prize and the memory, they’ve reduced your passport from a living thing to an inert one.
I’m owed four stamps from this trip: in and out of Poland and France, and I’ll never get them back.
You know who is GREAT at moving things along? The Poles. This airport security line is cooking like… like someone knows what they’re doing.
View from my hotel, last morning in Warsaw.
I got the middle bunk this time!
Headed to Poland.
The air raid sirens are sounding again but I’ve learned that sometimes it means Russian drones and missiles will rain from the sky for eight hours but most of the time it means play ping pong in the sunshine.
This is the first time I’ve had real-time translators for bilingual lectures and panel discussions. About 1/4 of attendees are listening in English and everyone else is Ukrainian, so the translators are working overtime translating in both directions.
Some of the very illustrious panelists at yesterday’s inaugural symposium of the new National University of Ukraine Kiev-Mohyla Research Center for Heritage Preservation and Recovery. These are real heavyweights. I’ll be chewing on these discussions for years.
I asked to take his picture because he is keeping it 100%. He obliged and we both had a good laugh because he knew exactly what I meant. #kyiv #ukraine #menswear
This is a very long escalator from a very deep metro station. #kyiv
Last night’s drone and missile attack was one of the most intense of the entire war. I don’t have a ton of drone and missile attacks to compare it to but I’ll take their word for it.
Now it can be revealed that I’m here to attend the inauguration of the Naukma Research Center at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. It’s a gathering of government ministers, politicians, archeologists, cultural historians and academics. Representatives from UNESCO, Nova Ukraine and Cornell are here. I’m grateful to be participating and will tell you much more about it in later posts and on my Patreon.
Just got back to my room and it smells like smoke, on the tenth floor. Then I see there’s smoke in the sky but I can’t see the source.
People here all subscribe to Telegram OSINT channels and are texting me screenshots of incoming drones and missiles. The missiles are purple, drones are yellow. An apartment building on the left bank of the Dnieper was apparently destroyed in this attack.
Tonight in Kyiv tells a very different story. A mass missile attack at 3AM and EVERYONE is in the shelter as the ground is rocked by explosions. Some people have been here all night, some (like me) were late arrivals. Everyone is calm, the lights are still on. Some are snoring loudly, some are reading books and then there’s me, sitting straight up in a chair in my bathrobe still with my heart in my chest from the blinding flash and explosion that woke me up and sent me crawling across the floor and high-tailing it to the shelter.
You need to turn your volume up to hear the air raid sirens of Kyiv. They started at dawn and this is the third time today. It’s gray and rainy after three days of clear weather so I’m writing in my room.
Before I came to Kyiv I promised friends to take air raid sirens seriously but after four days here they seem surreal. I mean that Kyiv is not a war-torn town cowering under attack from a superpower but rather a bustling and fairly cheerful modern city being harassed by dickheads with model airplanes, so sirens are a bizarre overlay. I don’t mean at all to diminish the devastation of the war or minimize the continuing risk here, but most people have no idea how much Kyiv is a MAJOR metropolis of the world, larger than Paris or Rome, and absolutely indomitable.
Putin’s only goal is to save face, he has no capacity to “defeat” Ukraine except to cling desperately to the land he’s managed to grab at the expense of over 350k Russian lives, so attacks on Kyiv have no purpose other than to annoy, petulantly play-acting like the regional strongman he no longer is. Amazing that almost all our current global conflicts can be similarly described.
The last time the sirens wailed I looked out my window at a woman walking her dog, a man emptying bottles into a dumpster, people strolling by with coffee in hand. I thought I heard distant explosions but then realized the man was rolling the dumpster out to the sidewalk. I know blackouts are a thing and I packed accordingly but have experienced none. I’ve been all over the city and have witnessed no damage from air strikes, no militarization, no fortification and fewer soldiers in the streets than in San Francisco. There’s a Ferris wheel. Two days ago I saw a riot grrl flash mob take over a pedestrian mall and make a music video of Gangnam Style in ripped fishnets with a decided goth-lesbian energy. It was celebratory, not “We are resilient against oppression!” but in a “We are teenaged punk dorks and our dads HATE this!” way.
So I’m not in a bomb shelter. No one is. The Ukrainian army is killing it. Kyiv is just trying to get on with it. When this war is over Kyiv will step into the light as a w
You need to turn your volume up to hear the air raid sirens of Kyiv. They started at dawn and this is the third time today. It’s gray and rainy after three days of clear weather so I’m writing in my room.
Before I came to Kyiv I promised friends to take air raid sirens seriously but after four days here they seem surreal. I mean that Kyiv is not a war-torn town cowering under attack from a superpower but rather a bustling and fairly cheerful modern city being harassed by dickheads with model airplanes, so sirens are a bizarre overlay. I don’t mean at all to diminish the devastation of the war or minimize the continuing risk here, but most people have no idea how much Kyiv is a MAJOR metropolis of the world, larger than Paris or Rome, and absolutely indomitable.
Putin’s only goal is to save face, he has no capacity to “defeat” Ukraine except to cling desperately to the land he’s managed to grab at the expense of over 350k Russian lives, so attacks on Kyiv have no purpose other than to annoy, petulantly play-acting like the regional strongman he no longer is. Amazing that almost all our current global conflicts can be similarly described.
The last time the sirens wailed I looked out my window at a woman walking her dog, a man emptying bottles into a dumpster, people strolling by with coffee in hand. I thought I heard distant explosions but then realized the man was rolling the dumpster out to the sidewalk. I know blackouts are a thing and I packed accordingly but have experienced none. I’ve been all over the city and have witnessed no damage from air strikes, no militarization, no fortification and fewer soldiers in the streets than in San Francisco. There’s a Ferris wheel. Two days ago I saw a riot grrl flash mob take over a pedestrian mall and make a music video of Gangnam Style in ripped fishnets with a decided goth-lesbian energy. It was celebratory, not “We are resilient against oppression!” but in a “We are teenaged punk dorks and our dads HATE this!” way.
So I’m not in a bomb shelter. No one is. The Ukrainian army is killing it. Kyiv is just trying to get on with it. When this war is over Kyiv will step into the light as a w
