chimera of austerlitz

The Strategic Importance of Coffeshops to Blogging

If you’re like me, you can’t spend too much time at home and still hope to get work done. Coffeeshops, besides offering caffeinated beverages, also reduce a bit of the loneliness inherent in writing by giving the writer a social space in which to produce content. Below are some of my favorite places to write in LA and DC. This list is rather short as I’ve yet to explore most of the best places to write in DC. I’m more than open to suggestions as to where I might get a good writing experience.

Bourgeois Pig

At times I resist saying this place’s full name as it sounds unbelievably pretentious. But the Pig was one of my favorite places to write when I lived in LA. It had large tables, fiercely caffeinated but flavorful tea, trippy lighting, and a nonstop barrage of dubstep and droning folk music over the speakers.

Cha for Tea

Before they removed the power outlets (essential for plugging your laptop in), I would drive all the way to Alhambra to go to Cha for Tea. They made some of the best bubble tea imaginable, and you could also eat dinner there as well. One of the biggest blocks to blogging is obviously getting hungry, and anywhere you can both eat and work at is a plus.

Epicurean and Company

This chain had a Georgetown campus outlet, which was useful for me for locational reasons. But Epicurean is a good place to write for a number of reasons. First, they have food and a good deal of it. Second, they have (if you can grab them) wide tables next to the window, which are perfect for stacking lots of books. They have a bar section that also allows you to write while watching the news or sports.

Snap

Open late (a rarity in DC) Snap has delicious bubble tea, plenty of space for writing, and is a couple of doors down from a rare bookstore in Adams-Morgan. How could you say no?

Kramerbooks

No outlet or wifi, but if you have a wifi hotspot generator or are willing to write offline take your computer to the bar after perusing the books for a spur of creativity.

Tryst

I was told Tryst was a great place for laptop lounging, but was at first disappointed. Not very many spaces for plugs, and distinctly subpar tea. That being said, Tryst’s numerous cushions are a plus and during the summer it can be really fun to sit at the window’s edge and write during the evening.

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Some Notes on the Decline of the American Action Film

Adam Sternsbergh doesn’t exactly tell us why the American action film disappeared, despite the title of his essay:

Eventually the shirtless commandos gave way to men in tights. Superheroes flew in and colonized the Cineplex, draped not in a myth of lethal exceptionalism but one of nonlethal nonexceptionalism — the regular kid who flowers into a hero through a spider bite or a cosmic ring.

And from the technical end, computer animation gobbled up everything, chewing it all into weightless pixels. American action films now are merciless spectacles splashed on a green-screen canvas — Shia LaBeouf flying around on wires like Peter Pan in front of spasmodic robots who aren’t really there, while entire cities, also not really there, collapse in on themselves. Ultimately, the American action film, like a fish that can’t stop eating, wound up choking on its one reliable virtue: excess.

This doesn’t quite get at the problem, which Ian Buckwalter more ably diagnoses: 

Safe is symptomatic of everything that’s gone wrong with American action cinema: visually incoherent combat, an unnecessarily convoluted story, and forgettable characters.

To put it more bluntly: they suck because of nausea-inducing handheld camera shots, stories that aim for highbrow “complexity” (which usually translates to the protagonist realizing it was a Conspiracy That Goes All The Way To The Top or finding out it was All In His Head), and characters that are simply forgettable and interchangeable products. The writing also lacks basic storytelling and economy of narrative skills that even knucle-grinders like Predator, Lethal Weapon, and Top Gun displayed. You got the feeling when watching an 80s action film that you were consuming a delicious and well-crafted—if calorically excessive—meal. If 1980s action films were cheeseburgers, today’s are just potato chips.

But part of the problem is that classic action films were victims of their own success. If the idea, for example, of a damaged SOF guy looking for redemption is stale in Safe, it certainly wasn’t with Mel Gibson’s former veteran of the shadow wars in Lethal Weapon. This is part of the reason why (besides fiscal conservatism) Hollywood likes superhero properties. They’re in a universe that seems exciting, and unique, rather than the familiar tropes of action films featuring heroes battling Nazis, Soviets, street punks, mafioso, Russian ultranationalists, neo-Nazis, Islamic terrorists, and aliens.

It doesn’t have anything really to do with American exceptionalism (or lack theorof).

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Bo Xilai: The Movie Edition

Dan Trombly and I were joking around on Twitter a couple nights ago about what a Hong Kong action movie version of the Bo Xilai saga would look like. Our musings were quoted in an article by Howard Shih: 

Ongoing Bo Xilai fallout fascinating, but it’ll be even better when the (John) Woo/Chow Yun Fat gunplay adaptation comes out,” tweeted Dan Trombly, an international relations student.

“If the Bo scandal were a (Hong Kong) movie, Wang Lijun would have fought his way to the US Consulate through hundreds of corrupt cops…” replied Adam Elkus, a security and international politics analyst.

Shih’s piece goes into Chongqing insider Wang Kang’s desire to write a Bo screenplay, incorporating new revelations that Xilai’s wife Gu Kailai may have had an affair with Neil Heywood, the British businessman the Xilais are accused of offing. There have also been accusations that Bo may have wiretapped Hu Jintao’s calls. Perhaps the most ironic part of the Bo mess is that he sought to convert his crime-busting record in office into a Godfather-style film franchise, potentially directed by John Woo.

Now, Damien Ma has already made a run at what a Bo screenplay might look like. But his script is missing some essential elements: casting, some storyboard scenes, and a general sense of aesthetics. But I have a few (wholly unsolicited) suggestions.

Now, this will be sort of a weird mashup of mainland and HK film cliches and will certainly (like the movies both Wang Kang and Bo Xilai wanted to make) play fast and loose with the facts. But I’m doing it for the lulz.

• Zhang Yimou should direct. After having decided to throw away hard-earned cineaste credibility to make soapy and lurid melodramas and comically overdone wuxia films, he is the perfect director to make a lurid melodrama/comically overdone wuxia film. Think of him now as a Chinese combination of Douglas Sirk and Steven Spielberg, only vastly crappier. He’s also made a lurid political thriller that revolves around poisoning and prominently displaying Gong Li in various campy outfits/indulging her habit of scenery chewing, which brings us to the next bullet…..

• There is no substitute for Gong Li as Gu Kailai. She’s made the same operatic, amps-to-11 prima donna performances for years, most hilariously in Memoirs of a Geisha. Imagine a set of Wong Kar-Wai esque scenes of her walking in slow motion, trading slow-burning glances at Neil Heywood. And yes, with a sensual violin score in the background. Of course, the couple falls apart with an argument considerably more direct and violent than anything in one of Wong Kar-Wai’s films, hence the need for Zhang Yimou to direct it with his characteristic absence of any subtlety whatsoever. The man, after all, directed this scene. A season-spanning fight? Really?

• I picture Heywood as sort of an archetypical British world-weary fixer type, like Thomas Fowler. Piece Brosnan, maybe? Dan’s idea of Chow Yun Fat is good, although I can’t decide whether it would be Wang Lijun or Bo himself.

• The scene in which Wang Lijun goes to the US consulate should involve parkour jumping and fighting hundreds of corrupt Chongqing cops. There must be at least as high a body count as A Better Tomorrow II. All male leads must also wear dark sunglasses and long coats, just like Mark Gor. And Wang Kang should find a way to work a shootout in a restaurant into the script. Just because.

• A stirring scene in the beginning, just like at the start of Bullet in the Head, in which a drunk Neil Heywood and Bo Xilai pledge brotherhood, to set up a fierce vendetta for later. The murder of Heywood will be a all-out gun battle in a church with white doves flying everywhere—which ends, somehow in him being poisoned. 

Wang Kang, give me a call. This is Criterion Collection material here. Because as Shanghaiist noted in its review of Curse of the Golden Flower, all you need to get international movie critics’ attention is melodrama + Gong Li overacting + vaguely ornate action scenes.

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On Relevance and Irrelevance

As someone who will soon be starting a PhD program, I’ve always wondered about the debate about the engagement of scholars and other professionals (defined fairly loosely as those who specialize in a domain with a set of norms, languages, and disciplining functions that differentiates it from outsiders).

Blogs like Stephen Walt’s 2009 entry “The Cult of Irrelevance” are fairly common: academics are becoming irrelevant because they prefer, well, academic subjects of little import to the policymaker or the educated layman. The heart of the problem very much lies in the way the debate is cast—the tired stereotype of the cossetted professional, who writes “boring” things that either have little relevance to what is seen as an “real” world or scare away outside readers with disciplinary jargon. But unless one believes that (as per comments about “real” Americans during the 2008 election) there is something that somehow makes International Organization or American Political Science Review objectively “fake,” the framing already sets out several notions that are broadly harmful.

This post is basically an extended reflection on the problem of policy relevance in international relations (IR) and social sciences writ large. First, let’s get something out of the way. Academics are driven to spend large amounts of time and energy to learn a discipline’s tools and in turn be disciplined precisely because they want to create or consume knowledge in a manner different than everyone else. In other words, professional work is not journalism. Irrelevance to mass tastes is really not an aberration—it’s a big part of the endeavor. And in this way, academics are hardly different from other professionals. Few fault computer programmers, doctors, or architects for caring about fairly dense and technical things that do not interest most other people. Up until fairly recently, no one wanted to bother military officers for focusing on learning how to carry out their mission of fighting and destroying the nation’s enemies. And force-feeding Israeli Defense Forces officers Deleuze and Guattari didn’t turn out too well in Lebanon in 2006. Force-feeding soldiers anthropology textbooks is unlikely to yield better operational results in Afghanistan either. 

The problem with the way the “real world relevance” debate is framed is that it implicitly casts the academic as a deviant, punished for doing what—for centuries—has been defined as “academic”—studying something of little interest to anyone else (if there was, there would be no point in producing the knowledge in the first place since someone would have already written it!) and producing knowledge. Yes, there is a bad problem in IR and poli-sci with a reductive definition of what counts as science and a refusal to think about deeper ontological problems with how research is conducted. But this is really an internal issue of method and inquiry, not a question of relevance per se.

The term “policy relevant” also implies that, if not for other academics, academic writing should be crafted for a fairly narrow audience of policy analysts. This is basically trading one elite group for another, because policy relevant work really counts little to your Thomas Friedman-reading layman. Those all-consuming debates about counterinsurgency and the future of American strategy? TL;DR. Outside of maybe “Clash of Civilizations,” I doubt you could find many people outside of government, military, or academia who could tell you about Huntington’s most famous work or give you a lecture about the “normal theory” of civ-mil relations. You can, however, find a lot of people who can tell you a pop-globalization theory they read in an airplane book.

It’s not that people are shallow, superficial, or have had their attention spans shortened by Angry Birds. It’s that most writing that really illuminates a given historical or current issue tends to be of genuinely marginal interest to the mass public. Not passionately interested in military history? Never served or don’t know anyone in the military? Not involved occupationally in a defense related field? Chances are that you would rather go to the bar than talk about the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle, the Navy’s shipbuilding crisis, or Clausewitz’s theory of the culminating point.

What mass interest does exist is often (but not always) skin-deep and rooted in simplistic images. Regional specialists often criticize these depictions and call for greater complexity and an end to harmful narratives. But as Jack McDonald points out, you’re simply not going to get them. Complexity doesn’t sell papers. And you can’t “like” complexity on Facebook. Yes, #Kony2012 was really, really stupid. But what “slacktivism” represents is simply politics infusing everyday life—through the mediums most people use to interact with each other day-to-day. The fact that they liked a Facebook status and did nothing else is a feature, not a bug. The debate over whether or not slacktivism represents a dumbing down of the public sphere or a wave of new network-centric activism miss the point. It’s neither. It’s simply someone deciding to incorporate politics into their daily routine. Whether that is good or bad depends on your pre-existing expectations.

One might argue that foreign policy is important and deserves attention because it concerns matters of state, but so is the chance that an asteroid might inflict catastrophic damage on the Earth. And how many FP specialists flip through the pages of The Astrophysical Journal or even evince interest in the subject? It’s not like we’ve seen a COIN-like debate between champions of a kinetic interceptor-based asteroid deflection approach vs. those who think we should use solar sails. There is no Gian P. Gentile figure arguing that NASA’s thinking about asteroid defense is a “strategy of tactics” or that too much focus on Mars exploration has made NASA forget about the fundamentals of asteroid defense. And this is not an exception that proves the rule. There are millions of subtle and overt social and natural forces that shape our lives that even the most polymathic of us could sincerely care less about.

None of this is an excuse to ignore what other people feel is relevant, write unnecessarily dense research, or deride those interested in working on things that might be construed as broadly relevant to nonspecialists. And there are plenty of ways that academic professionals can influence debates with their research and disseminate their views. Doctoral work would not, for example, have been so attractive to me if I hadn’t read The Duck of Minerva. But let’s recognize that “relevance” is not context-neutral. There may be an objective way to measure relevance, but in practice relevance is often a reflection of what elite audiences judge to be important at any given moment. Relevance is also shaped by public desires that may seem objectively bizarre—why would so many people suddenly care about an Ugandan warlord and display so much apathy to say, the real wars going on that the US is involved in?

There are benefits to relevance, certainly—Eliot Cohen and Joseph Nye are both models of how an engaged academic can combine public service and the life of a public intellectual with sound scholarly work.  But the most important reasons academics should care about relevance, however fickle it may seem, do not have anything do with the NSC giving you a phone call to ask about how to use game theory to get Hamid Karzai to cooperate. No, the most important reasons academics and other professionals should care about relevance are fundamentally personal.

Most academic books contain an dedication thanking a long-suffering spouse or child for “putting up” with endless research on war termination and such. There’s a reason I’ve included a picture about video games up at the top of this post. Gamers constantly struggle to find some way to legitimate their interests, often coming up with highly convoluted arguments about how, say, Mass Effect 3 is a form of art. Certainly, there’s a societal disapproval of gaming (like any other subculture) they’re struggling against. But it’s also because they feel fundamentally lonely when not around other gamers and want to bring other people into something they love to do.

Academics should care about relevance because they fundamentally love what they do—and would love it more if they could bring a wider set of people into the circle. Writing that long book would be more interesting and bearable if the academic could get their spouse or friends to be interested in offense-defense theory or the crisis in constructivist research methodology. And the burden for making offense-defense theory just as exciting or interesting as The Bachelor, yet another round of Modern Warfare 3, or a recounting of the day’s office gossip lies squarely on the shoulders of the professional. We’re social beings and we’ll get the greatest emotional pleasure from our professions when we can share them with those we care about.

This is also why younger scholars are attracted to blogging and Twitter. Why settle for only talking to a few people who read Journal of _____?  Why not talk to many people, most of whom you’ll likely never meet in your lifetime? Speaking in a language others can understand is one small step to living a more fulfilling life. Creating knowledge is important, and also necessary for professional and career purposes. But it doesn’t have to be a lonely enterprise.

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Toward a Generational Peace Treaty

Living in Washington, I sometimes read Washingtonian, mainly to take some time off from the kind of subjects I write about at my main blog (Rethinking Security) and look at softer subjects. I must say that from the get-go I wasn’t too well disposed to look at this article, and my instant reaction on Twitter could be boiled down to “not this again.” It is catching a lot of blowback on Twitter, so my reaction was not unique. The title to some extent is misleading, and I didn’t appreciate the complexity of the stories in the article, and my own reaction lacked empathy. So I decided to step back.

I think that these pieces are not very helpful, and decrease our understanding of generational communities rather than illuminate them. Moreover, they provoke unnecessary conflict between generations and fruitless battles over the authenticity and legitimacy of individual personal experience.

The terms “Gen Y,” “Gen X,” “Boomers,” “Greatest Generation” are really meaningless. They’re pop culture reference points, something a marketing guru or a magazine writer coined at one point in time that have stuck even if the implicit and explicit stereotypes don’t describe the reality of substantial groups of people within those cohorts. They stick because people prefer stereotypes to dealing with the complexity of entire groups of people who in some ways have little in common except their age and geographic location.

Moreover, the stereotypes crafted as a result of these cultural reference points are often crude and demeaning. They have a habit of leading to bitter and divisive disputes that are simply unnecessary. It’s kind of ugly seeing people crowning themselves as unelected spokesmen for entire generational communities in order to bash stereotypes of other generational communities.

And for what? Again, largely of the purpose of marketing. It’s somewhat transparent that we often define generations explicitly in terms of commercial products (the common shorthand of Gen X = Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Winona Ryder movies!) . I understood that the intention of the writer was to try to build empathy and tell a set of complex and interesting human stories. But the story has the opposite effect. It simply helps perpetuate an endless cycle of sniping, poor understanding, and raging against cardboard cutouts.

In order to build a profile of a generation, the writer simply dialed up their friends, and wrote a anecdotal story that unintentionally bolstered a preexisting and negative narrative about what “Gen Y” is supposed to be. The title and first few paragraphs, which suggest a focus on entitlement and gratification, don’t even really reflect the stories of the people profiled in the article—which are more complex than such a crude opener would suggest.

But aside from the lazy journalism habit (by no means exclusive to this article) of calling up your friends and calling something a trend, let’s be clear that criticizing this practice does not mean that the hopes, fears, and dreams of the people profiled are somehow less authentic than those of other members of “Gen Y.” They’re real—not a marketing gimmick or a stereotype.

But the terms Gen Y, Gen X themselves, and the constant search for a neat box to put all of that complexity in is broadly dehumanizing, inevitably leads to a decreased ability to put ourselves in other people’s shoes, and a competition over whose own personal experience is more legitimate and authentic. We don’t need that destructive competition.

The point I’m trying to get at is that millions of people, young and old, are having to make painful transitions in their lives. No one—whether they are gray-haired or a recent college grad—is helped by either pity or condescension. Empathy is not the same thing as sympathy. The entire idea of strategic culture analysis, for example, is to try to understand the framework from which your adversary sees the world, which is a kind of empathy even if you are using it to defeat them.

And the tragedy about this Washingtonian article is that it actively decreases empathy in a world already very much lacking it.

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Alexander Hamilton as Defense Analyst

Props to Dan Trombly, sitting next to me as I type this, for digging up this gem: 

War between the States, in the first period of their separate existence, would be accompanied with much greater distresses than it commonly is in those countries where regular military establishments have long obtained. The disciplined armies always kept on foot on the continent of Europe, though they bear a malignant aspect to liberty and economy, have, notwithstanding, been productive of the signal advantage of rendering sudden conquests impracticable, and of preventing that rapid desolation which used to mark the progress of war prior to their introduction. The art of fortification has contributed to the same ends. The nations of Europe are encircled with chains of fortified places, which mutually obstruct invasion. Campaigns are wasted in reducing two or three frontier garrisons, to gain admittance into an enemy’s country. Similar impediments occur at every step, to exhaust the strength and delay the progress of an invader. Formerly, an invading army would penetrate into the heart of a neighboring country almost as soon as intelligence of its approach could be received; but now a comparatively small force of disciplined troops, acting on the defensive, with the aid of posts, is able to impede, and finally to frustrate, the enterprises of one much more considerable. The history of war, in that quarter of the globe, is no longer a history of nations subdued and empires overturned, but of towns taken and retaken; of battles that decide nothing; of retreats more beneficial than victories; of much effort and little acquisition.

This was a fairly lucid analysis of 18th century warfare, before Napoleon and the levee en masse. This has inspired me to dig through the rest to look at Hamilton’s defense analysis.

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Ellis of Benghazi

Aaron Hugh Ellis of Thinking Strategy has been a roll lately.

First, his essay on aid and security:

You can argue that giving aid is morally good, which alone justifies protecting the budget from cuts, but don’t try to win against your opponents by playing the security guard. It is disingenuous, if more politically fruitful.

Second, Ellis has a piece at Egremont on history in British politics.

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Review: Bin Laden’s Legacy

I review Daveed Garteinstein-Ross’s new book at Fear, Honor, and Interest.

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Voodoo Child

1960s report on folk beliefs in military and paramilitary operations in Africa.

(Source: zenpundit.com)

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