The Obliterated Island

They ordered the tunnels to be built underneath a hill, towards the south end of the island, across the river from the little city that had once served as the capital a hundred years before, back when this was an independent kingdom. The admiral noted the quality of the sandstone – fine-grained, easy to quarry, but also remarkably resilient. The locals had a special name for it, in their dialect. They hid in caves hollowed out of the same stone.

It wasn’t much, but it would do in a pinch. The navy, once the terror of the sea, had been pushed back, forced into increasingly desperate action in a bid to keep the enemy away from the homeland. An invasion of the island itself seemed imminent, and they needed someplace safe, in the hope against hope that they might make it through. These men had been told they were going to unite a continent. Now they struggled under the tropical sun, quarrying out sandstone.

When the bombing raids began, the admiral and his men were trapped down there. He sat in the heart of his labyrinth, a simple bed, a simple desk, some radio equipment. Not much. He was did his best to try to convince the men that it was going to be alright, that reinforcements were on their way.

And yet the situation grew worse and worse. Thousands were down here, stranded. As the bombing raids increased, they couldn’t go outside. They slept huddled together, standing up, in the little alcoves in the soft sandstone. They shat in the corners where they could, the reek inescapable. And they waited, even as bomber after bomber flew above, shaking little bits of sandstone gravel from the roofs.

Until the admiral realized it wouldn’t happen. The enemy had already taken the northern half of the island, leaving the few infantry remaining stranded on the hills to the south. He had to make his decision. He pulled out his pistol, unable to salute the rising sun from deep within his underground maze.

Some finally sallied forth, a suicidal charge to the bright light outside, carrying out a dictum under two martial codes – one modern, brought back by the intrepid young men of the previous century who had carried the most contemporary ideas and philosophies of France and Germany and England back to their little nation, one far more ancient, derived from a time when a handful of feudal lords fought over what little arable land they had between their rocky, forested mountains and the endless sea.

And other men stayed in the tunnels. Weeping, desperate, they pulled the pins from their grenades, bodies still crammed in, device after device exploding, as young men who just a few years before had been tending to their fields and delivering letters and teaching in rural schools chose death over capture.

The few survivors out of the thousands who were down there came up to an obliterated island, fields destroyed, towns leveled, nearly every tree felled, many of the residents evacuated some months earlier, but a full 25 percent of the island’s civilians dead – either killed by the enemy, or goaded into suicide by commandants who could not bear the thought of their people living without the guidance of the imperial standard.

I stare out of the tunnel, into the light and emerge onto that high hill above the city, a light rain falling, halfway between Tokyo and Manila.

I knew the American military had been there for years, on the island of hacksaws and jawbones, hell, I’d known guys who had been stationed there in the USMC, but I didn’t know that we had administered the island as late as 1972. We left American-style plugs (two blades, unlike the two rounds used elsewhere), an affection for Spam and “taco rice” (made from the taco meat of scrounged MREs, and as disgusting as it sounds), and an inferior public transportation system.

“Keystone of the Pacific” read the old American license plates still hung up in bars and restaurants around the island.

Now blurred by the scratching processes of history. That mediocre Mel Gibson movie where Andrew Garfield played a real simple feller who just wants to love him some Jesus and save some folks. That’s what about the limit of what most Americans know. That and it’s where Mr. Miyagi is from.

And I had remembered, from news stories in my childhood, the 1995 incident in which three American servicemen, having been put off by the high prices of local hookers, had instead gang-raped and murdered a local girl. And indeed, I remember seeing the press conference where the then-head of the Pacific Command, America’s top military officer in the entire Indo-Pacific region, responded as follows:

“I think it was absolutely stupid… for the price they paid to rent the car, they could have had a girl.” – Adm. Richard C. Macke

Then I stand under the two bishop wood trees, Bischofia javanica, that had survived the bombardment of the Shuri Castle, on a hill that had been thick with them.

But all of that history – 1945, 1972, 1995 – was remote from me. I was there, but I was not there. I was on the same hill, but in the here and now, the battlefields now covered in little houses and sun-bleached apartment complexes with rusted fences that would be just as familiar in Honolulu or Los Angeles, palm fronds and guava leaves fluttering in the Pacific breeze.

The tourist gazes on history. He, in turn, takes his photos and is gazed upon. And thus we form our place in the world. 

And then when I came back to my adopted city, and gave out my gifts – sweet potato candy and sea grapes, pickled scallions and preserved pork belly and dried beef tongue and spirits made from jasmine blossoms and the local shikuwasa citrus – that I sat at my local jazz venue and saw a woman in white, her eyes closed and hairline sharp like a Shinto shrine maiden, playing hypnotic, soft guitar, her voice a precise, almost impossibly mellifluous soprano.

She says to me in broken, slow, deliberate English, “I can tell. You were listening to. My music. Seriously.” Aww, that’s probably what you tell all the girls.

She smiles. “Your hometown. Is where you are.” She had said earlier in the evening.

And I look down at the page of my notebook where I had written about the tunnels. I look back at her. “My hometown is Okinawa,” she says.

Sipping Wine with the Fascisti

Over the past couple years, as anyone who knows me personally knows, I’ve become the worst sort of insufferable wine dork. The sort of person who enthusiastically reaches for the wine list, only to go “oh…” and say to the table “well, this should probably be OK…”

Which is how I got to watching Mondovino, the 2004 documentary about the battle within the wine world between global capital – represented by mogul Robert Mondavi coming off bluff and American, wine consultant Michel Rolland who comes off like a full-on action movie Euro-villain, complete with pointy beard, car phone, cigarillo, and namedrops of Charles Aznavour and Gérard Depardieu, and finally the legendary wine critic Robert Parker (who honestly just seems like a bit of a sweetheart) – on one side, and a plucky set of artisanal producers in goofy rustic hats on the other side, as well as NYC wine distributor Neal Rosenthal, who compares the big names to George W. Bush (hell yeah).

Throughout, one thing that all say, though, is that wine is a civilizing factor. Not only does it elevate the discourse – “symposium,” let it be remembered, once meant a party where you got schnockered on the stuff – but they repeat that it is a consummate art, blending the lessons of nature with the handicraft of  man, something I myself pretty much believe. But in conveying this message, here are some choice quotes on the subject, taken from the film.

“I think [Berlusconi] is helping, not just with wine, he’s much more open, trying to make things work better, trying to make the bureaucracy more modern.” – James Suckling, then senior editor, Wine Enthusiast

OK, we all have our moments… eh…

“Without art, without culture, it’s virtually impossible to make great wine. Generally, the indigenous people here have no sense of initiative.” – Arnaldo Eckart, Vinos Cafayate, the flagship producer in the Argentinean appellation of the same name

Great job guys. Amazing.

“In [the fascist period], Italian industry was stimulated and encouraged.” – Piero Antinori, of the legendary Antinori wine dynasty, and founder of Tignanello, the wine bougie enough to lend its name to Meghan Markle’s lifestyle blog

“Italy at that time needed a strong energetic hand. And fascism did bring about a certain order.” - Albiera Antinori, his niece

Well fuck!

It’s a funny word, “fascism.” Widely misapplied of course. In my youth, for instance, it generally applied to teachers enforcing quiet rules during study hall, and much abused since. It’s an epithet I’m particularly skeptical of, considering how broadly it can be applied (regardless of the Umberto Eco definition or any other attempt to define the concept), but these guys are at the very least amiable to the idea not just in practice but in name, despite decades of reflection on the insanity of Europe 1930-45.

I’ve long been confused by this aristocratic version of conservatism, which bears little in common with its American counterpart, other than an opposition to liberal and leftist views. Its roots are instead in blood and soil, or after the Second World War, a nebulous conception of “culture.” And therein lies the rub, as these conservatives deem themselves to be cultured, that thereby justifies the actions that follow suit as those of virtuous men, and the resultant barbarity is merely deemed an unfortunate epiphenomenon of their actions, rather than an essential characteristic.

This stands in stark contrast to the American vision of conservatism, particularly in an era in which the grandes dames Eastern establishment Republicans – Nelson Rockefeller, et al. – have long since faded into memory. Rather, the boorish and suburbanized American right has a bit of a tendency to devalue the concept of high culture writ large, instead favoring a point of origin not in laissez-faire capitalism and/or Evangelical Christianity – two things that have a bit of a tendency to go together, a conflation of the Kingdom of Heaven and the C-Suite. Sure, they fight culture wars, but these culture wars are decidedly not over Vivaldi’s status within the canon or the nature of an authentic Roquefort, but over salacious Megan Thee Stallion lyrics and M&Ms.

Given this relegation of conservative principle to religious and market forces, the Vivaldi and Roquefort wind up being liberal-coded, at least among the professional classes. The PMC finds themselves drawn to the local and the refined, regardless of the political valences by which that expresses itself in the world writ large. The actual material implications are irrelevant, because in a post-1960s world, this attitude constitutes both distinction (Bourdieu shout out whaaaaaa!!) and a rejection of the admitted plastic ugliness of mainstream American society. And in this way, there is a mistaken conflation of values and consumption, a Frasier Crane attitude that cannot bear the idea that its stated values and its explicit desires are incommensurate.

This isn’t too complicated, and one thing Mondovino points out, as they discuss the market cap and production statistics of every winery they visit, is that this level of artisanship is largely illusory. The great Bordeaux houses are shown to be what they are, which is to say savvy business enterprises that rely largely on the allure and aura of terroir and tradition as marketing devices.

Let it be remembered that despite what the European nostalgists of food and wine might say, this is nothing new. When the famed 1855 Classification was instituted in Bordeaux, it was not based on the unique qualities of the soil and climate – geology, meteorology, and agronomy still being infant sciences at the time – or even the subjective taste of some initial panel of gouty barons. Rather, the basis was simply the market prices as they existed in 1855, with Lafite, Latour, Margaux, and Haut-Brion being the most expensive at the time and therefore earning the title of “first growth.” The 1855 Classification then cemented this status (humming “reification” under my breath right now), with the only substantive change coming in 1973 when Chateau Mouton-Rothschild was promoted from second to first growth – and in certain sectors, c’était une scandale.

Post-1960s, and back in the Anglosphere, this became the model for the corporate artisanal, exploited en masse. Think about the early days of Starbucks, back in the ‘90s. This wasn’t just a cuppa joe, this was craft, complete with global-village aesthetics in the storefronts and the names of exotic destinations for the beans – you’re not just having a cup of coffee, you’re going to Bali, man! Never mind that it is an industrial product just like any other produced in the sorts of appalling conditions that one can get away with in the Global South, never mind that the company that produces it will mercilessly crush any attempt at union organizing and aggressively greenwashes its activities, this is “fair trade” coffee, even if it’s the diarrheaccino that Jenny from Sales is sipping on her way into the office. You consume the good thing, and you yourself become the good thing.

The conservatives – whether the Ferragamo-wearing gout cases or the American boors – have no such hang-ups.

For a point of comparison to all these types, think about the Ratliff family in the most recent season of White Lotus. We have Saxon, the punchable-face finance bro eldest son, who makes a point of demonstrating how much he doesn’t give a fuck, and his mother Victoria (played to a T by Parker Posey), who fawns over luxury scents – “cut grass, tuberose” – while complaining in equal measure about the various filths and impurities and affronts to her Carolinian upper-class propriety, whether in the form of Southeast Asia being Southeast Asian, or the army of uncouth and mildly criminal wealthy expats (more later, a whole essay worth there), and in between there’s the father, Timothy, a bit of a white-collar crook himself just starting to face the consequences of his actions. On the other side, we have the daughter, Piper, the not-quite-Buddhist seeker who eventually realizes what a princess she actually is, and between all of them there is the younger son, Lochlan, the teenage dope who doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing and occasionally gives out a handy to blood relatives. I could keep going, trope upon trope, extending the metaphor to its breaking point, but let’s stop there. 

But I’m writing this cynical take as they’re delivering the carciofi alla giudia with a glass of Fiano. I am clearly part of the problem.

So what do I do with that? Do I hem and haw about my consumer choices in a desperate attempt to find morality and authenticity?

Indeed, it’s in my recent position as an actual food and drink editor (ayyyyyy) that I actually have to be around all of these tropes (in addition to a large number of actually lovely people), and at least attempt to make nice-nice with them, even as I clench my molars. As much as I like the foie gras and the pigeon, I am ill-equipped for the social dimension of this world.

For now, I order the grappa – the carciofi and the amatriciana were perfectly fine – made from the must of the legendary Ornellaia wine. Even if I can’t help but side-eye the name “Antinori” on the bottle.

Goodbye, Nona Mecklenberg

Michelle Trachtenberg died last week – something that might not mean a lot to most people, but one of the first celebrities of my age cohort to die other than the obvious set of young overdoses and suicides. Her death was different – the death of someone, like myself, approaching middle age. Not that I was any particular fan, but I remembered her fondly as someone from my youth.

 The plaudits for her work were to be expected. She was much-remembered for her roles in Gossip Girl and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, neither of which were particularly on my radar, and also for her child-star performance in Harriet the Spy, which I mostly remember for being a story about the world’s most endearingly awful and judgmental tween who goes on a rampage of emotional revenge seemingly designed to give the girls in her class a lifetime’s worth of eating disorders.

But I would always know her as Nona Mecklenberg.

 

Not necessarily the best-known reference – but Nickelodeon’s The Adventures of Pete and Pete ran from 1993 to 1996. And few pieces of media have had as strong an effect on my outlook of the world.

What was it that made this show special among what I only later learned was a cult audience of bespectacled library girls and future wiseasses and class clowns? What did we all see in an otherwise little-known children’s show from the mid-‘90s? Why did it never get the branding push that accomplished other shows of the time on the same channel?

The premise is absurd from the beginning – two brothers, both named Pete – but this fact seems perfectly in tune with the setting, both pathologically normal (what name could be more normal than Pete?) and deeply surreal. The setting is Wellsville, State Unknown (the “Sideburn State,” per the license plates), but it’s strongly implied to be New Jersey, and the look and feel of the show is very much the look and feel of what journalist David Roth called the “old-growth suburbs” of North Jersey, hissing summer lawns and all.

 

 

But as David Lynch knew, that always hides deep weirdness. An episode of Pete and Pete feels like that childhood bike ride down an alley you’d never gone down, wondering what lurked inside, wondering if what your friend’s older brother told you was true.

What make the world of the show different from reality is that all of that playground lore is brought to the surface, front and center. Little Pete has naval tattoos. Their mom has a plate in her head that gets a frame in the intro credits. The mysterious, bizarre townsfolk are played by Michael Stipe, Iggy Pop, Kate Pierson, Debbie Harry, LL Cool J, with dulcet Magnetic Fields instrumentals humming in the background during the tender scenes. This might seem all too familiar in a world full of obnoxiously self-aware ostensible children’s cartoons that seem to be designed just as much for adults – and which I would say radically fail as grownup entertainment, and are perhaps a bit too on-the-nose to function well as children’s entertainment as well – but in the ‘90s, this was revolutionary.

Which meant that unlike most children’s media of the time period, it actually struck me as honest. There were no moralistic fairytales here, no condescension. There was only the understanding that the world is a strange, magical, baffling, fascinating place, ruled by the cruel dictates of adults who seem to operate on their own twisted logic (q.v. Little Pete’s war against adult swim at the local pool, or his attempt to tunnel to freedom to escape being grounded all summer, or the International Adult Conspiracy’s attempt to banish local superhero Artie, the Strongest Man in the World, from Wellsville). But through the spirit of discovery, exploration, and embrace of the weird, these dictates could and should be subverted, even if there’s a recognition that the magic is fleeting. Mr. Tastee, the mysterious ice cream vendor, has a whole other life to live. Summer will always end, and it will be back to the drudgery of school life. Artie will eventually leave Wellsville. You can’t live in a dream-world forever, no matter how hard you try.

“It was the story of a superhero and a kid, who ruled at dodgeball, waltzed the lunar landscape, and beat up the Atlantic Ocean. Until one day, the kid finally learned all there was to learn from this friend, and it was time for the superhero to move on.”

 And as magical as the world of Pete and Pete is, there’s a darkness that lurks in the corners. That pay phone that rings for years straight is as feared by the adults as by the kids. The bullies and creeps weren’t just funny, they were often actually frightening, with the grin of James Rebhorn’s evil vinyl siding salesman character Mr. McFlemp being just as sinister as that of Bobby Peru or Leland Palmer.

 

It’s a darkness that extends to love and sex too. It wasn’t something that I registered as a small child, but there’s a whole episode in which Big Pete borrows petty thug Endless Mike Hellstrom’s vintage Ford Mustang to take his best friend Ellen to the drive-in, fogs the windows, throws the seats back and tries to make a move… because he feels that’s what he’s supposed to do. And of course he fucks up and he winds up hurting the person he cares the most about. It might be the most honest treatment of teenage romantic confusion I know of.

All of this is why it never became part of the ‘90s marketing machine, vicious teenagers with pit stains described as “glandular freaks” are less likely to sell sugary snacks than the Rugrats were able to.

Likewise, few of the show’s stars went on to do much afterwards. Both Petes had acting credits for years afterwards, but I doubt I’ve seen them in anything else. Michelle Trachtenberg was the only one who became anything resembling a household name, and how she, too, is gone.  

And so, Nona, I hope you’re frantically dancing to Luscious Jackson in a better place.

 

Sunday Didn't Mean Much

There’s something odd about the ways in which the Super Bowl is perceived as the transcendentally American entertainment (not gonna say “the big game” like a shill). For starters, it’s rare that it’s a particularly good game, although I can remember some beauties in recent memory (the nail-biting original Mahomes-Hurts face-off in 2023, the Patriots’ unreal second-half charge in 2017, the Seahawks’ tragic last-minute defeat in 2015), nor does it seem to meaningfully represent the best of what the sport has to offer. But that’s fine – not every game has to be good for me to watch, and even if the game sucks you can just talk shit with your buddies and indulge in greasy food and cheap beer, which is a central part of the enjoyment of any sporting event.

And this time around, even if the game sucked, at least the arrogant-ass Chiefs got bodied in their attempt to be America’s team.

But what is viewed as transcendental is not the game itself, but the part I hate, which is everything surrounding the game – the branding of every second (“now it’s time for the BUDWEISER play of the quarter!”), the genuflection to American militarism, the ads in which A-listers humiliate themselves to flog whatever crap Silicon Valley is turning out, the dorky halftime shows with medley performances by all our most inoffensive pop stars (even if the campy “salutes to _____” and performances by evangelical death cult spinoff Up with People of yesteryear were probably even worse).

And this extends to the responses thereto, the attempts to scry some kind of weltgeist from the associated detritus among the commentariat. Whether it’s Beyonce cosplaying as a Black Panther, the glut of ads for crypto scams, or Timberlake v. Janet’s nipple, there is a persistent if unacknowledged belief that any of this can be used as a prism through which to view the American experience, instead of what it actually is – a means of selling shit.

So I fully expected, given who the performers were, for American conservative pundits to do the online fuming that they like to do – yelling at the teevee really is their favorite activity, and mostly they seemed to just be grumpy about Styx or whoever not performing. But conversely:

“It was an intricately detailed work of performance art that spoke directly to so many different strands of American history.” – Collider

“Kendrick Lamar sent a coded message to Black America during Super Bowl. And we got it.” – The Root

“The performance’s political messages (like the moment where Lamar’s dancers formed a human U.S. flag) were subtle enough that some in MAGA-world found themselves debating over whether the show was even worth getting upset over.” – Rolling Stone

 

 

Really? You thought Samuel Jackson dressed as Uncle Sam constituted "coded" or "subtle" it any way? Or that anything this plain-faced can be subversive?

Because that which is obvious cannot be subversive. Even when a work stands in opposition to power, it can so quickly turn into a Medieval morality play. Think about two Ruben Ostlund films, The Square and Triangle of Sadness. The first was giddy and witty and entered its satirical targets like a well-pointed arrow. The second was giddy but only at its own cleverness, and failed to enter its satirical targets, merely slapping them with a plushie.

I mean, like all halftime shows, this one sucked, but for completely independent reasons. It was just kinda lame, in the exact same way almost any kind of institutional art is lame. Kendrick and SZA both can do better, and for two artists who have produced so much actually subtle, actually complex music over the years, this felt a spectacle as silly as Katy Perry dancing with cartoon sharks.

But to me, the commentary just seems so desperate – a search for green shoots at a really bleak and dusty point, looking for emotional security above all else, hoping that culture could wishcast politics into existence, and thereby provide a correction to one’s present emotional trajectory. Even if the comments themselves are imbecilic, the sentiment just bums me out. Poor bastards.

When all I feel I can say is “it’s all a bit shit, isn’t it? This performance included. Let’s make Georgian food for dinner tonight, yeah?”

And the khachapuri turned out great.