The constancy of friendship

On Fridays I tend to cry “whaaaa?” and let loose the dogs of loopiness on this blog. But I was driving down El Camino Real this morning when NPR’s Friday morning feature “Story Corps” came on. I had to pull over to concentrate on the exchange between Peter Obetz and Jeff Jarrett, as they talked about their friendship.

Do yourself a favor and listen to the clip. I mean, really listen to their voices. This is literally one of the most heartening things I’ve heard this week, and I’m doing you a service by sharing it.

"Our friendship is the only thing that's constant." Damn.

Twittervice

One of the things you see a lot of on Twitter is, well, God-awful amounts of happy-clappy aphorisms that purport to be words of encouragement, but in fact are just mechanisms for getting the tweeter’s name/face into your feed.

A lot of the time the sayings are attributed to someone. Who may or may not be anyone you’ve ever heard of. (I certainly haven’t heard of many of them.) I suppose that if you cited Robert Browning when spewing forth a random collection of words, it would suddenly take on Deep Meaning. Or even Vince Lombardi. But Henry Cloud?

There are many people who churn this stuff out—they must have the tweets stockpiled. Because they come out in spurts, like someone turned on the spigot; then later they come out again. With the same drivel.

I’m going to give you just a quick sampling of ones I picked up over a very short period of time—because I’ve trained my eyes to skip over the people who tweeted or retweeted. & I'm not breaking training even to share with you.

Now, this one even invites you to RT. As bloody if.

I don’t even know what that one means. But apparently it’s key to both business & leadership. Which may explain quite a lot.

Uh—so why even bother?

&--if you’re not clear about the language, maybe you shouldn’t be handing out life-coaching wisdom.

Alice in Twitterland

I mentioned yesterday that I have two Twitter accounts—the “grown-up” one where I’m trying to show prospective hiring managers how socially with-it I am, as well as eager to soak up all the very latest technocrap, etc., etc., etc.—and the one I activated to try to drive traffic to my blog, and maybe connect to forensic/police sources.

Well, that’s been quite the eye-opener. On my non-professional Twitter profile page, I link to this blog. Since I started actively using it, maybe a month ago, around 100 people have “followed” me. (There are fewer now, because you can “unfollow” as well. And if a follow is not immediately reciprocated, people typically break the connection. Because it’s all about what they can get.) Of that number, three have actually clicked on the link to my blog. None of them has returned, that I can tell.

It’s enough to make a girl enter a convent. Without broadband.

So—people click “Follow” without having any notion of (or caring) who you are or what crack-brained theories you espouse, because once they’re connected to you, all that matters is that you look at whatever crack-brained crap they’re spewing out.

And, boy do they ever do that.

I follow about 140 people on this account—mostly writers, publishers, British cops (my novel is set in England, remember?) and just people who sound interesting. I’ve got a handful of “social media thought leaders” because they’ll follow anyone, and you need to have followers before people will follow you. (Look—of course it doesn’t make sense, but that’s the way it is. If I had a very large extended Italian family, I could just scoop them up, but I don’t, so I have to start out with what’s out there.)

(Or, actually, it’s possible to buy fake followers. People do that. People will do anything.)

The social media gurus do a fair amount of churning out their stuff, and I can pretty much skim that, because I’m picking it up on my professional account. Then there’s the category of aphorists—people who just like to upchuck the twitterized version of those inspirational posters corporations like to decorate their company walls with. I’ll deal with them separately.

But, you know what? It’s the writers (largely the self-publishing, e-book or paperback-only crowd, to be sure) who do nothing but endless, mind-numbing self-promotion, 140 characters at a time. Again and again and again.

I’m not sure when they have time to actually write their, you know, e-books & crap. And--as with the positive thinkers and thought leaders, they must have bots doing a lot of this, because I don’t think it’s possible for human fingers working at a regular keyboard to even cut-&-paste and click “post” as fast as they churn it out. There’s one woman, a writer of fantasies, in South Africa—one morning last week I counted more than 150 tweets from her in about a 40-minute period.

And then there were the retweets. That woman will retweet a ham sandwich. Especially if she’s mentioned in the mustard.

Then—later in the day, a whole new spate of the same old stuff.

I’m telling you—someone needs to take a machete to that woman’s Internet connection. Where are the damned crocodiles when you need them?

And let me just state the obvious, Spammer-twits: the instant I see your name in a tweet, I skip the content. Just like I don’t even see online ads or hear TV commercials. Your name means “nothing to see here, move on, move on”, so I do.

It's called Twitter for a reason

As long as I’m talking about Twittering, I have two Twitter accounts—one is my “professional” one, where I follow and comment on things like Agile product development methodologies, software and companies I’m interested in, and news affecting the high tech sector. The other is associated with my blog, so I follow whoever seems interesting and occasionally comment on things that strike my fancy.

Just like I do, you know, here.

The thing about Twitter is—there is a freaking 24x7 tsunami of absolute, idiotic, pointless, badly-spelled crap out there. Being on the “business” side is no defense from this, because there are plenty of self-proclaimed “thought leaders” (God give me strength the next time someone introduces him/herself to me as that meaningless term, because all I want to do is shove a fistful of infographics down their throats) who spew and re-spew factoids and injunctions on how to capitalize on this or that trend.

The worst offenders are the “thought leaders” in “social media”. They’ve got bots churning these things out at a rate of knots, and when they’re not tweeting, they’re retweeting crap like you wouldn’t believe. And by “retweeting”, I mean not only do they RT the maxims of others, they just take what they sent out a few hours ago and post them again, either as something new or a RT.

Yes, they RT their own tweets.

If someone retweets a post of theirs, they retweet the retweet. If someone mentions them in a tweet, they retweet. It’s all about getting your Twitter handle in the feeds of your followers, your little avatar in their faces.

On my professional account, I follow about 300 people. Most are in the SaaS software and social fields—they’re the ones who automatically follow you if you follow them. The socialites are also the ones tweeting at least 500 times per day. Some work for companies I’m interested in; since they have actual, you know, jobs, they’re somewhat more measured in their output.

Even so, after going away and returning to Twitter after a few hours, it's not possible for me to actually read all the hundreds of tweets and retweets that have accumulated in my feed. I have no idea what people who are following tens of thousands of twitterers do.

(I’ll say that it’s also interesting how tech companies use social media. I don’t follow companies on Facebook, because that’s not where you find B2B engagement. But when I follow a, say, SaaS company specializing in tag management and big data analytics, which only has 700 followers and 1400 tweets…well, they’re not really taking advantage of the platform. But it’s hard to point that out to them in an interview. For some reason, it doesn’t seem to play well when you tell them they’re not actually sitting at the cool kids’ table in this regard. At the least, they’re not taking a systematic approach to expanding their reach, which—if done right—should cost them not very much and at least gain them some social street cred. Just sayin’.)

I admit to being a mere padawan in this field. So I find it interesting that I’ve figured more out about it than some companies who tout themselves as being on the bleeding edge of some bleeding edge technology.

I’ll speak tomorrow about some of the specific crap that comes my way—mostly via the blog-related account.

Tweeting for history, Chapter 2.5

Well, hmm—I posted the comments below about rapper Boya Dee’s real-time Twitter coverage of the killing of a soldier in Woolwich.

And then this morning, I fired up the old laptop and find that after a week of lying low with respect to the media, he’s written a thought piece in The Guardian.

When I say “thought”, I mean that it’s a thoughtful, considered argument for people to make the effort to just get along with one another.

It would be nice if it had some reach.

Tweeting for history, Chapter 2

The twitterverse is a strange place. I happened to be on Twitter intermittently last Wednesday when the young soldier was murdered in Woolwich, and following the #Woolwich trend was, ah, fascinating.

One of the tweeters I noted was a rapper named Boya Dee (@Boyadee), who was logging comments apparently in real time:

(This is social media—you have to read from the bottom up.)

As with the case of Sohaib Athar, who live-tweeted the raid on Osama Bin Laden’s lair in Abbottabad two years ago, Boya Dee became quite the media sensation. He was apparently beating off reporters & TV presenters with a carpet-whacker.

Because of that, what news stories you can find about him are basically rehashes of his tweets. Interestingly, if you go to his Twitter feed today, all the real-time Woolwich tweets have been deleted. The Rodney King-like call for everyone to just get along is still there; everything else is gone.

Here's his header & feed from the 23rd; all the tweets have disappeared (& as of this writing, he has 25,051 followers):

So I don’t know what to make of it. Like Twitter itself, it’s pretty much just out there.

Gratitude Monday: It's called service

It’s Gratitude Monday; I’m so thankful for the men and women who have served in our armed forces—past, present and future.

Americans have an uneasy relationship with the military; we don’t like standing armies. In general, we pay our combat services crap, we treat them like potential criminals and we would prefer to pretend we don’t need them. We ask everything of them and their families.

Then we send them out to do the most ghastly jobs imaginable on our behalf.

And they do their duty.

The war writes hard

For Memorial Day I have a reading recommendation for you: Operation Homecoming: Iraq, Afghanistan, & the Home Front, in the Words of US Troops and their Families. It’s not an easy read, which is why I commend it to you.

Operation Homecoming was an NEA project sending writers (including Tom Clancy, Stephen Lang, Jeff Shaara and Tobias Wolff) to teach writing workshops to serving troops and their families. The sessions were held in country, on Navy vessels and at various locations around the US. The result was thousands of pages of essays, short stories, poems, letters, journal entries and emails. Editor Andrew Carroll distilled these down to this book.

If you ever want to explore the nature of war from the most granular human level, this is your introduction. You get everything, from the banality and stultifying boredom to “pink mist” (someone who steps on a land mine and explodes in a shower of flesh and blood); the sand, snakes and spiders in your tents; and having to walk a thousand yards out to the latrine in the middle of the night over rocks and stuff you don’t want to think about. And, of course, there’s the fighting and the destruction. You won’t get closer to it—without being in it—than reading these pieces.

The book starts with an account by a Navy captain at the Pentagon on 9/11 and moves on from there. It’s not precisely chronological, because Carroll didn’t want to imply that the wars went to a certain point and stopped. As we know, mission is not accomplished.

One of the last was an essay by a Marine colonel who accompanied the body of a 21-year-old Marine killed in Iraq home to his funeral in Wyoming. (It’s since been made into an HBO film, Taking Chance, starring Kevin Bacon.) From the staff at the mortuary at Dover AFB, Del., who prepare the body (including X-raying the coffin before opening—they found a live grenade in one) to the people at the various airports who treated the coffin with such respect to the funeral held in the gym of the local high school…well if you can read it without crying then you’re way tougher than I.

One of the early entries is from a doctor on a Navy hospital ship, 27 March 2003, waiting for casualties. I loved this comment: “Mike from Massachusetts thinks an attack on our ship is a near given, with a 50 percent chance of success. However, he is a proctologist and Red Sox fan and naturally pessimistic.”

There was another account by a Guardsman returning on a charter flight after his tour in Iraq. Their plane developed mechanical problems in Germany and they had to wait for the next flight, which wasn’t until the next day. Here’s what he relates:

“Thirty-six hours after our scheduled arrival, we landed in Bangor, Maine. It was 3 a.m. We were tired, hungry, and as desperate as were to get to Colorado, our excitement was tainted with bitterness. While we were originally told our National Guard deployment would be mere months, here we were—369 days later—frustrated and angry.

“As I walked off the plane, I was taken aback; in the small, dimly lit airport, a group of elder veterans were there waiting for us, lined up one by one to shake our hands. Some were standing, others were confined to wheelchairs, and all of them wore their uniform hats. Their now-feeble right hands stiffened in salutes, their left hands holding coffee, snacks, and cell phones for us.

“As I made my way through the line, each man thanking me for my service, I choked back tears. Here we were, returning from one year in Iraq where we had portable DVD players, three square meals, and phones, being honored by men who had crawled through mud for years with little more than the occasional letter from home. A few of them appeared to be veterans of the war in Vietnam, and I couldn’t help but think of how they were treated when they came back to the U.S., and yet here they were to support us.

“These soldiers—many of whom had lost limbs and comrades—shook our hands proudly, as if our service could somehow rival their own.

“We later learned that this VFW group had waited for more than a day in the airport for our arrival.

“…Looking back on my year in Iraq, I can honestly say that my perception of the experience was changed; not so much by the soldiers with whom I served—though I consider them my saving grace—but by the soldiers who welcomed us home. For it is those men who reminded me what serving my country is truly about.”

We’re winding down the war in Afghanistan, and they tell us that Iraq is…a success? Over? Whatever.

But you should read Operation Homecoming. Really.

The war? It was in all the movies...

This being the Memorial Day weekend in the US, not at the moment having any home DIY projects to attend to and being disinclined to go shopping or incinerate slabs of meat outdoors, I thought I’d commemorate the holiday by listing some of my top picks in war movies.

Back in college a visiting Russian professor of films said something that really stuck with me: you can tell a lot about the prevailing attitudes towards the nation and the world by how the motion pictures of a country view some iconic events or eras. The example she gave for the US was westerns—think the 50s and 60s and any flick with John Wayne; pure Manifest Destiny. Starting in the 70s think Little Big Man or The Wild Bunch; all sorts of ambiguities seeping through. (For the Soviet Union she cited the Russian Revolution and the Great Patriotic War.)

But I think this holds true also for how we (and especially we in America) portray any war—those films are a sign of the times, regardless of which war, exactly, a picture is about.

Anyway, here are the ones I particularly recommend (in order of conflict chronology):

Henry V, 1989. Yes, it’s Shakespeare, but the depiction of the battle of Agincourt is absolutely stunning, one of the best I’ve ever seen. Kenneth Branagh’s take on the story whips Laurence Olivier’s ass—that 1944 propaganda piece is effete and antiseptic by comparison. (Don’t get me wrong—Henry V itself is propaganda; Shakespeare was pumping up the Tudors big-time when he wrote the play. But Olivier just over-egged the pudding.) And this one was made before brilliance and success expanded Branagh’s ego to the point he permanently lodged his head up his own butt.

(George MacDonald Fraser, in The Hollywood History of the World, waxes poetic about Olivier's film. The book was published before Branagh's version came out. I hope Fraser saw the light and would have amended a second edition.)

Everyone knows Henry’s Saint Crispin’s Day speech at Agincourt, but I really like his warning to the burghers of Harfleur; it’s very like what you’d expect from a commander who’s pissed off by civic resistance and really wants nothing so much as a hot bath and a bed. He basically describes their choices, up to them: you can surrender now & lose nothing but some face and supplies, or you can continue fighting and I’ll personally see that my soldiers make Harfleur a wasteland.

"What is it then to me, if impious war,
Array'd in flames like to the prince of fiends,
Do, with his smirch'd complexion, all fell feats
Enlink'd to waste and desolation?"

Carthage, anyone?

(BTW—they surrender.)

Napoléon, 1929. Abel Gance’s film was meant to be the first of six chronicling the life of the Emperor of the French; he never got the readies to complete the series. Pity, as this one is just brilliant. Back in the 80s Francis Ford Coppola rediscovered the film and reissued it with a score written and conducted in live orchestral accompaniment by Carmine Coppola. You can get it on DVD.

Gettysburg, 1993. Yes, it’s long, and a Ted Turner vanity-piece. But it’s really a good overview of the seminal battle of the War Between the States (or “the war of northern aggression”, as my thesis director referred to it). Martin Sheen as Robert E. Lee is cringeworthy, but let that go. Focus on Jeff Bridges as Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, a professor of classics at Bowdoin College who turned out to have a superb gift for command.

(Stephen Lang as George E. Pickett is also excellent. Following the criminally futile charge up Cemetery Ridge ordered by Marse Robert, when Lee urges Pickett to reform his division for defense, Lang’s delivery of the reply is scathing: “General Lee, I have no division.”)

What’s particularly good about Gettysburg is some of the detail. When Chamberlain gives the order to fix bayonets you hear that metallic clicking sound all up the line. Listen to that and think about what was going through the minds of the 20th Maine Regiment: you fix bayonets because you know the fighting is going to be hand-to-hand, you’re going to meet your enemy face to face and blade to blade.

(Forget the prequel to Gettysburg. Gods and Generals is all over the place. And you can discuss Gone with the Wind amongst yourselves.)

The other WBTS film of note is Glory, 1989. This is a stunning picture, about the 54th Massachusetts regiment, a unit of African Americans commanded by white officers. It’s a good study not only of the war, but also of the psychological strains imposed by putting freed slaves through the rigor of military training. Think about it: you spend a good part of your life having every aspect of your existence dictated by a master; you escape one way or another & start experiencing the new world of freedom; and then you join the army, which demands you surrender your life to your commander.

Zulu, 1964. Leave aside the fact that this was Stanley Baker’s paean to the 24th Foot, a Welsh outfit, and that there are some extraneous bits that make no sense storywise. It portrays the defense of a small station by 140 British soldiers against a force of more than 4000 Zulu warriors, fresh from a major victory against the Brits at Islandlhwana.

Zulu has, without question, the single best battle scene ever filmed. As in Henry V, the battle is filth, blood, fury, luck, fear and some degree of strategy and tactics. The camera focuses in on the three lines of riflemen formed by the two commanders as they alternate firing—front rank, fire; second rank, fire; third rank, fire. Then fire, fire, fire, fire. Focus on the faces and the gunpowder smoke. When the shooting stops, the camera slowly pulls back to reveal the pile of twitching bodies mere steps from the firing lines.

During the aftermath, Colour-Sergeant Bourne whispers, “It’s a miracle!” To which one of the commanders replies, “If it's a miracle, Colour-Sergeant, it's a short-chamber Boxer Henry point 45 caliber miracle.”

(Something I discovered only recently was that Colour-Sergeant Frank Bourne, the actual Colour-Sergeant Bourne, was 25 at the time of the battle. Gesu.)

World War I got more attention from filmmakers outside the US than here. Of the movies out there, the one you must see is Gallipoli, 1981. If you know nothing about the actual campaign, it was an attempt by the Brits to unhinge the alliance among the Central Powers by invading Turkey. As Kitchener refused to shake loose any troops from the Western Front, most of the invading forces were Australians and New Zealanders. It was bungled from the git-go.

Gallipoli is Peter Weir’s homage to those Anzacs who fought and died there. It stars a very young Mel Gibson (back in the days when he acted rather than postured) and is utterly heartbreaking. Weir is brilliant and he had a devastating story to tell.

La Grande Illusion, 1937, is an interesting study. Here’s an example of that understanding-national-views-thru-war-films thing: Jean Renoir made this picture about French POWs in the First World War during the immediate run up to the Second World War, when France was really struggling with how to deal with an increasingly bellicose Germany. No one really wanted to go to war again, and Grande Illusion speaks to this.

The Shooting Party, 1985, isn’t strictly speaking a war film; it’s a pre-war film. If you want a taste of what that last summer before the four years of carnage was like, this is your introduction.

And it’s taken its hits, but I like the 2001 TV mini, The Lost Battalion. Again—filth, fear and men carrying out their duty because that’s what’s expected of them, no matter the cost. Colonel Whittlesey collecting the dog tags of his dead men at the end sums it up visually.

And King of Hearts, 1966, about a British soldier holing up in an insane asylum, is quite the commentary on the Vietnam War.

There’s an embarrassment of riches on World War II. Saving Private Ryan, 1998, was Spielberg’s apotheosis, and it’s fine. But check out The Big Red One, 1980. This is Samuel Fuller’s cinematic memoir of his own experiences, and it’s very good indeed.

I also like A Midnight Clear, 1992, about a small group of American soldiers during the Battle of the Bulge. It’s focused and I’m getting frostbite just remembering it.

Most of the films on my list are outside the immediate post-war years, because from the 40s to the end of the 60s WWII movies were pretty one-dimensional. One exception in my mind is 1951's Go for Broke! It's still gung-ho, but it's the subject matter that sets it apart: the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. Like the 54th Mass, the 442 was all-volunteers of the disenfranchised: a Japanese-American unit, commanded by white officers. It was the most decorated unit in the history of the US military; many of the soldiers had families in concentration camps, yet they still volunteered to serve.

Go for Broke! is the Hollywoodized version, so in a purely filmic sense it's pretty much second rate. And way too much is made of Van Johnson as the commander. But the rest of the cast is largely unknown Japanese-American actors (not Chinese or caucasians with heavy make-up) and the story is mostly true overall, following the men from training to being awarded a Presidential Unit Citation from Harry S. Truman. Until a better telling comes along, this'll have to do.

(There's plenty of dreck out there on WWII. The Longest Day, 1962, and Valkyrie, 2008, come to mind as examples, both more concerned about star turns than verisimilitude. There are also a number of fine films like Best Years of Our Lives, 1946; Bridge on the River Kwai, 1957; The Great Escape, 1963; Das Boot, 1981; Soldier of Orange, 1977; and Windtalkers, 2002. You could even count The Third Man, 1949.)

Empire of the Sun, 1987, takes us to the Pacific. It’s Spielberg’s adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s autobiographical novel, and it’s a very powerful account of a young British boy separated from his parents during the Japanese invasion of Shanghai, and, who survives several years in captivity.

(I just this week read Ballard's memoir, Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton. I think I understand more of the psychology of Jim, the main character of Empire, and his distance from everyone around him.)

Hope and Glory, 1987, is John Boorman’s film of his own experiences as a boy in England during WWII. Perhaps because it’s so personal, & seen from the viewpoint of a pre-teen, it’s very human.

Finally, okay—it’s TV, and it’s a mini-series; but you can’t do better than Band of Brothers, 2001. It follows Easy Company, 506th PIR, 101st Airborne. Each episode is filtered through one of the men’s viewpoint; it’s extraordinarily powerful.

One of the seminal moments is toward the end of the war, when Easy Company is traveling in deuce-&-a-halfs into Germany, passing columns of bedraggled German POWs, walking & in horse carts. One of the soldiers just can’t stand it any more. He stands up & shrieks at the Germans (who, exhausted and dazed, don’t even notice):

“Hey, you! That's right, you stupid Kraut bastards! That's right! Say hello to Ford, and General fuckin' Motors! You stupid fascist pigs! Look at you! You have horses! What were you thinking? Dragging our asses half way around the world, interrupting our lives... For what, you ignorant, servile scum! What the fuck are we doing here?”

I think by 2001 we were far enough away from WWII to produce something as thoughtful as Band of Brothers. You can take a look at almost any movie from the 1940s through the 60s and pretty much find the John Wayne western viewpoint.

There’ve been a few films about the Korean War, although I’ve seen very few of them. M*A*S*H’s 1970 subject matter is Korea, but it’s actually about Vietnam.

And I have to say that we’re probably still too close to that war to produce anything but polemics. Or maybe I’m just too close to it to be able to bear anything that comes out about it. But look: The Deer Hunter, 1978; Coming Home, 1978: Apocalypse Now, 1979; Platoon, 1986; Full Metal Jacket, 1987; Born on the 4th of July, 1989—they may be stunning or stirring, but they’re all screeds.

The thing about my picks is that none of them (except possibly Grande Illusion) speaks to the "gallantry" of war. There's a moment in Zulu when the retreating warriors salute the remaining Brits, but they mostly give you a sense of what one of humanity’s oldest activity is about, what it costs. 

Something to think about on Memorial Day.