By Paul Karl Lukacs | Wednesday, May 2nd, 2012 | Los Angeles
Last week, I wrote about the case that will yield the next big copyright decision from the U.S. Supreme Court.
A mathematics scholar from Thailand devised a textbook method of leveraging his Asian background into sizeable earnings, and the U.S. Supreme Court agreed last week to decide whether his business plan is legal.
Supap Kirtsaeng was pursuing his research at the University of Southern California when he noticed that the prices for engineering and maths textbooks were unpleasantly expensive. He knew that the same books were sold in Thailand for a fraction of the price. The paper was thinner, and the inks were cheaper, but they were the nearly identical English-language texts. And these books were legitimate editions, not Khaosan Road photocopies.
Supap arranged for the textbooks to be purchased in Thailand and shipped to the States. He then resold them on platforms like eBay at a price which was noticeably lower than that of the fancy U.S. editions. The academic publisher John Wiley & Sons did not approve of being undersold, and a copyright infringement lawsuit followed.
By Paul Karl Lukacs | Friday, April 20th, 2012 | Los Angeles
The Now Infamous Escort Ad
The Number One topic of conversation in Singapore — not that you’d know it from the state-controlled media — is the spectacle of 48 men being charged this week with patronizing a 17-year-old prostitute who lied about her age. I explore the legal issues in today’s Asia Sentinel:
“There is no defense unless doubt can be raised about whether or not the sex took place. The burden is on the man to satisfy that she is 18 by asking for a passport or identity papers,” said Chia Boon Teck, a local attorney.
While the relevant Penal Code statute for the johns provides for criminal sanctions ranging from a fine to seven years of imprisonment, Chia said “nine months plus or minus is the benchmark we are looking at.” In the 2009 case of Tan Chye Hin v. Public Prosecutor, the Singaporean High Court affirmed a sentence of nine months, noting that “a custodial sentence should be the norm in order to sufficiently deter such behavior and to reflect the seriousness of such offenses.” A fine and no imprisonment would be appropriate when the woman was just under 18 and presented convincing forged identity documents to the customer, the court noted.
By Paul Karl Lukacs | Monday, April 16th, 2012 | In Flight Over Russia
Karl Taro Greenfeld
Bright Boys by Karl Taro Greenfeld (Chameleon Press 2012)
Failure isn’t climactic. It’s not caused by a bet gone spectacularly wrong or a daring moment of truth to power or a theatrical impulse. Failure is a process. Each year, the gap between potential and accomplishments widens, your co-workers become steadily less interested in you, and calls from headhunters and competing firms dribble to nothing.
The journalist protagonist of Karl Taro Greenfeld’s novella is a failure. He used to be one of the titular bright boys – a brash young man with a gleaming future. Slowly, things changed.
For some reason, the same sort of writing that had won me praise and promotions in Japan was now deemed too slight. My editors murmured that I was missing the story, that other reporters were beating me. . . . They were rewriting my stuff back in New York, adding details and information gleaned from wire service reports. What was I doing wrong? Nothing about me had changed; why was my work suddenly deemed insufficient?
Journalism has a hierarchy, and, when you’re in the wrong place at the wrong age, things become sticky. The protagonist lists his mistakes: staying in Asia too long, accepting a job at a locally owned publication, missing the all-important bank shot back into a New York newsroom. Now he shuffles through his days and waits for the axe.
I don’t know if the magazine will get rid of me, offer one of those paltry buy-out packages and send me down to the next level of Asia-hand hell: local English language dailies or the freebie magazines that abound in every Asian city. These periodicals have names like The Weekender or The Town Crier and are distributed to expats and club members and executives in every city and are little more than listings of events with a few travel stories and puff pieces. Staffed by former newspapermen who never wanted to go home, cashiered Stars and Stripes reporters or wire service has-beens eager to keep on fucking the locals and living where an American pension buys much more cheap beer than the equivalent pay out anywhere in the US, these periodicals serve as side-stapled cautionary tales of where I might go if I fuck up once more.
Then the writer receives a lucrative offer to secretly ghost the memoir of a wealthy but dangerous Asian politician, and now we have a novella.
The book also contains seven short stories, many of which are also about falling below expectations. The best of the lot is “Australia,” about a young Hong Kong Chinese woman who works as a dominatrix to fund a new life in Oz. She sees the over-the-hill crones at her sex shop and makes plans to avoid their fate. Plans don’t always work out.
Has failure become a taboo subject for fiction? Are professional writers so invested in notions of themselves as successful that, when it comes time to pitch their novel, they choose successful characters who triumph over adversity? Are consumers, closer to the financial edge than they want to admit, shying away from discomfiting themes in favor of escapism?
Greenfeld, who I’ve blogged about here and here, is a spare writer. I wouldn’t call his style elegant, but it’s readable. His background in the newsweekly world is evident; his prose lacks the pretense of more self-consciously literary writers, and I look forward to reading more of his short stories.
By Paul Karl Lukacs | Monday, April 9th, 2012 | Yau Ma Tei, China
Is the United States embassy in Singapore – which is helmed by a Democratic political appointee – improperly promoting partisan viewpoints?
A Singaporean resident emailed me photographs taken last week at The American Club, a members-only establishment which acts as the social hub for Yanks living in the small Asian nation. The club is staging a screening of the HBO film Game Change, which dramatized GOP candidate John McCain’s 2008 selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate.
A closeup reveals that the screening is in part sponsored by the U.S. embassy, which allowed its seal to be reproduced on the poster.
Furthermore, U.S. ambassador to Singapore David Adelman is an Obama political appointee, having been plucked from the obscurity of the Georgia legislature and placed into a position which will burnish his foreign policy credentials should he run for the U.S. Senate in 2014 or 2016.
The embassy strongly denies that its sponsorship of the screening had political overtones. “We are working with the American Club and HBO to show the film Game Change at the American Club. This is part of a series of events we are doing to remind American citizens on the important right to vote in the upcoming U.S. elections. Our consular section will be on hand at the event to hand out information about how to register to vote while overseas,” said public affairs counselor Eric Watnik in response to my inquiries.
“The United States Embassy is not promoting any specific party or agenda. We intend to show a series of pieces regarding American politics as the November election draws near,” Watnik continued. “Let me be perfectly clear: The United States Embassy in Singapore does not promote nor endorse any party or candidate.”
The embassy may not, but the ambassador no doubt does, and I’m sure many State Department employees have a preferred candidate (which is their right). But placing the State Department imprimatur — literally — on such a recent and controversial film about current political actors seems to be injudicious at best and a provocation at worst.
If the point is to sponsor a film series about political engagement, there’s no shortage of fictional films to choose from. Selecting a ripped-from-the-headlines film about active politicians — including a sitting U.S. senator who was bested by the ambassador’s patron — seems a suspect and suspicious choice.
Update: Embassy spokesman Eric Watnik has posted a comment about the screening. Highlights:
While I enjoy the confidence of Ambassador Adelman and Deputy Chief of Mission, neither the Ambassador nor the DCM decided whether the embassy would cosponsor the screening of Game Change. I did. Indeed, while the Ambassador and DCM generally encourage the Embassy staff to support American films they did not participate in the decision-making process relating to this event. My goal with this event is to promote American films, support American organizations, and encourage a better understanding of the American system of free speech and democracy. Additionally, I saw the program as an opportunity to inform Americans living overseas of the rules governing voting. The intention was not to promote a specific person or partisan interest.
The manner in which this event was developed is important to understand. Home Box Office, an American company, approached me with the opportunity to screen its film Game Change, which is based on a best-selling book. Their stated goal is to increase HBO subscribership in Singapore and one of this Embassy’s major goals is to support American business and increase U.S. exports. American films and television programs are exports and we are very pleased that last year Singapore was our 11th largest export market in the world. HBO offered to screen the film at no cost to the United States Government. I accepted HBO’s offer seeing it as an opportunity to raise awareness for American citizens in Singapore of the importance of registering to vote and participating in the 2012 elections.
By Paul Karl Lukacs | Tuesday, March 27th, 2012 | Berlin
When I Stop Talking, You’ll Know I’m Dead: Useful Stories From A Persuasive Man by Jerry Weintraub with Rich Cohen (U.S. 2010).
Jerry Weintraub is a successful producer and impresario, but his autobiography is old news.
If you’ve been keeping up with your Hollywood machers, you already know the story. Jewish kid from a tough but loving Outer Boroughs home rises in the entertainment industry through hard work, blarney and a bit of luck. If you’ve read bios of David Geffen, Bernie Brillstein or the old studio moguls, you know the routine.
Weintraub has stories to tell, but they’re not particularly fresh or revealing. We already knew that Colonel Tom Parker was a sun of a gun and that Sinatra was a commanding presence. We hear it again.
I think Weintraub made two mistakes. First, he waited too long to write the book, and others got the drop on him. (In fact, Weintraub’s late business partner Bernie Brillstein covered some of the same history in his jazzier Where Did I Go Right?) Second, Weintraub should have written a How To Succeed In Business book. That way, he could have weaved his tales of psyching out John Denver or attending Brezhnev’s funeral into a less stale package. As it is, Weintraub reveals relatively little about how he operated. (And, really, how hard could it have been to mentally best John Denver?)
The book was a quick read, and I don’t begrudge the time spent. The stories about Elvis and the senior President Bush are worth a skim if you come across the volume at the library. But that’s about it. The book feels like a lost opportunity.
By Paul Karl Lukacs | Saturday, March 17th, 2012 | Berlin
A Simple Life is the film that half of The Iron Lady was trying to be.
People become old and infirm. Their relatives, busy with their own lives, don’t know what to do with them. So, according to each family’s ability, they deal with the situation, which in many cases means that they pay for a convalescent home and make visits of decreasing frequency.
Some political conservatives criticized The Iron Lady for detailing Margaret Thatcher’s dotage, but that misses the point. Senescence is as appropriate a topic for film as any other aspect of life. The flaw of The Iron Lady wasn’t the story of Maggie talking to her dead husband, it was all the other parts, a forced march through television news highlights. As I watched The Iron Lady, I kept thinking that what I really wanted to see was a well-crafted movie about the final years of an anonymous senior.
A Simple Life is that film. They don’t come more anonymous than Peach. For 60 years, she has worked as a servant for one family in Hong Kong. Rather like the butler in The Remains of the Day, Sister Peach has devoted herself to service, never marrying. Her life was absorbed by cleaning, cooking, raising the family’s children and knowing exactly what to pay for ginger root at the wet market.
All that is coming to an end. The family has scattered; only one of its sons, in his mid-30s, remains in the city, and he is often traveling for work. He is all that she has left.
She has a stroke. He moves her into a retirement home, paying the costs. He is not a wealthy man. Most middle-class people in Asia have servants, and his job as a low-level film producer sounds more glamorous than it is. His family owns several apartments, but, this being Hong Kong, they are cramped, cold and filled with hard surfaces and cheap furniture.
Life in a Hong Kong nursing home is depicted starkly but fairly. Although it will seem to Western eyes to be little more than a homeless shelter, the sparseness is a function of Hong Kong’s exorbitant property prices. The government provides a subsidy that covers the most basic costs, barely.
But it’s not a chamber of horrors. Some of the other residents are playful or kind. The staff are diffidently committed. The lobby of the home opens directly onto the street, so the retirees are still a part of their magnificent city.
She recovers, and she has a second stroke, and we know how the picture will end. The family’s son makes time for her. They walk through the park on her good days, and he pushes her wheelchair on her bad days. The movie avoids pop psychology and lets you decide for yourself why he is doing all this.
The performances are mesmerizing. Andy Lau is a charismatic Asian superstar, the equivalent of Clint Eastwood, and he plays a reserved shlub in a windbreaker. But the film belongs to Deanie Ip, who inhabits her character more convincingly than Best Actress Meryl Streep inhabited hers. Peach is an entirely authentic and believable person, and I never doubted the truth in her fiction. The tone set by master director Ann Hui is understated, with an Ozu-like elision. Many of the scenes you expect aren’t shown on camera and are more effective because you have to imagine them.
Peach lived a simple life, but it was a worthy one. After 60 years, she was entitled to someone’s last full measure of devotion, and she received it. Over the two hours of this film, many people in the theater were audibly sobbing. I was one of them.
By Paul Karl Lukacs | Saturday, March 10th, 2012 | Berlin
The rulers of the Soviet Bloc were crude thugs.
People are forgetting that fact. Time, distance and misguided nostalgia have provided Erich Honecker and General Jaruzelski and even Nicolae Ceausescu with the faded glamour of old revolutionaries who once played the game of nations and provided, meagerly, for their people.
In reality, they were mid-level gangsters – local enforcers for the Don in the Kremlin. And, when their patron cut them loose, they reacted like criminals. Honecker went on the lam to Russia then Chile. Ceausescu and his deplorable wife were reduced to committing carjackings on provincial roads in their attempted escape. Jaruzelski has spent two decades dodging justice and is currently deploying the hoary gangland cliche that he’s now too ill to stand trial.
Luckily, we have an easily digestible reminder of the type of people that used to rule half of Europe. In 1992, Julian Barnes, the English writer, imagined what would happen at the trial of a Communist leader, and the result is The Porcupine, a 138-page fable.
Stoyo Petkanov was once the General Secretary of Barnes’ fictional unnamed COMECON nation, but he is now confined to a bare, makeshift apartment in the Office of State Security as his trial unfolds. A law professor, Peter Solinsky, is assigned the thankless job of prosecuting the deposed dictator.
They occasionally meet and debate after hours, and Barnes depicts the former Second Leader as a spiteful peasant roughneck. During one conversation, the prosecutor refers to the country’s newly free press, and Petkanov replies:
“Free, free. You make such a fetish of the word. Does it make your prick swell? Freedom, freedom, let’s see your pants stir, Solinsky.”
“You’re not in court now. There’s no one watching.” Only a militaman acting the deaf-mute.
“Freedom,” said Petkanov with emphasis, “freedom consists in conforming to the will of the majority.”
Solinsky did not respond at first. He had heard that line before and it terrified him.
At times, Barnes takes us into the dictator’s interior monologues, revealing a backwoods Old Country mind putrified by hatred for his enemies, especially Mikhail Gorbachev.
Now the world could see what that self-important fool meant by restructuring. He meant letting the USSR – what Lenin built, what Stalin and Brezhnev defended – he meant letting all that go fuck itself. He meant letting the republics fuck off whenever it pleased them. He meant bringing the Red Army home from its fraternal stationings. He meant getting on the cover of Time magazine. He meant ducking for dollars like a whore in the lobby of the Sheraton Hotel. He meant sucking Reagan’s dick and then sucking Bush’s. And when the republics thumbed their noses at him, when he let the Soviet Union and the cause of international Socialism be humiliated by those shitty little Baltic states, when he had his very last chance to defend the Union, to save the Party and Revolution, to send in the fucking tanks for God’s sake, how did he react?
Not to Petkanov’s liking.
At trial, Petkanov has an excuse for everything – he had 20 years to practice. He cannot be found guilty of corruption because he owns nothing, he argues. He never stole; he accepted gifts from a grateful nation. His enemies died of natural causes or were imprisoned or exiled after breaking well-defined laws. For every alleged crime of state, Petkanov has a rehearsed response, packed with so many assumptions and unproven theses that it would take hours to untangle a sentence.
But, for all the verbal shadowboxing, Petkanov and his ilk weren’t intellectuals or theoreticians, they were beer hall bouncers who had seized on opportunity. The Party was the tool they used to hold power, the laws meant whatever they wanted them to, and self-sacrifice by the masses was a shaming tactic that covered for privilege and favoritism. Put aside the elaborate self-justifications, and it was all a protection racket.
By Paul Karl Lukacs | Monday, January 30th, 2012 | Hong Kong
Kim Dotcom (left) in happier times
In today’s South China Morning Post, I opine:
Be careful where you click! If you conduct business online, you could be arrested for violating the United States’ intellectual property laws — even though you haven’t set foot in the country.
Technically, the U.S. Copyright Act does not apply outside the nation’s borders. Tell that to Kim Dotcom, who is currently being held in a New Zealand jail for allegedly violating American online piracy laws. Dotcom, a flamboyant Hong Kong resident known for his opulent lifestyle, is the founder of Megaupload, a file-sharing and storage site. Over the Lunar New Year holiday, the U.S. Justice Department instigated his arrest and, in addition, seized the Megaupload domain names, froze millions of dollars in the company’s accounts worldwide and prevented users from accessing their data.
But how does the United States claim jurisdiction over a man who is reportedly a German and Finnish national and who appears to live and work in Hong Kong and New Zealand?
To find the answer to the question, go to scmp.com and either register or subscribe.
By Paul Karl Lukacs | Monday, January 16th, 2012 | Hong Kong
Jean Gentil.Written, directed and photographed by Laura Amelia Guzman and Israel Cardenas (with screenplay collaboration by Alejandro Andujar). Dominican Republic-Mexico 2010.
Jean Gentil is an example of Discovery Cinema – the first film from a country that cinephiles are likely to see. I had never watched a movie from the Dominican Republic before, and one of the pleasures of Jean Gentil is that the filmmakers knew that.
The plot follows an unemployed Haitian accountant (played by Jean Remy Genty) as he slips into penury, homelessness and despair. He is not a stupid or lazy man; he knows at least three languages, he holds the required diplomas, and he looks, dresses and acts like a debilitatingly shy white-collar office worker in his early 50s. But, due to events which occurred before the start of the film, he lost his job and can’t find a position.
We follow his journey of downward mobility. He’s evicted from his Santo Domingo bedsit, he bribes a security guard to let him sleep at a construction site, he travels back to his family village to discover that he’s not particularly welcome, and he shifts to the jungle to dig up yams and drink river water like his pre-industrial ancestors did.
We’ve never seen these places before – which is to say that white, middle-class First World movie lovers have probably never seen locations like the inside of a Haitian evangelical church, a bar in a Dominican market town or a tuber field.
The directors — Mexican husband-and-wife production team Laura Amelia Guzman and Israel Cardenas – give us lots of space to become acclimated. Many shots are purposefully atmospheric but are never cloying or obvious. The average viewer of this film needs time to adjust to the unfamiliar surroundings, and that’s provided. (Yes, I’m taking the position that a film with Mexican creators and German financing is, based on the characters and settings and subject matter, a Dominican film.)
Jean Gentil is more visually and technically accomplished than any randomly selected mumblecore film. The pans, dolly shots, sound effects and framings are inventive but not showy. When the camera swoops, it’s to highlight a point or to convey information which isn’t in the spare script.
One of the characteristics of Discovery Cinema is that, almost by definition, the first film from a nation to receive global acceptance will be an objectively high-quality film. It wouldn’t have earned the festival slots or the distribution deal if it were a run-of-the-mill local product. So try to catch Jean Gentil when it screens in your town. It’ll be the best Dominican film you’ll see this year.
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