Wimps

We've got some big things cooking here in Hanoi, so I haven't had much time to post. Ike, I'll get you more photos as soon as I can. In the meantime, wanted you to see this ORC Worldwide report on the World's 20 Worst Places to Work. Clocking in at number 11: Hanoi, Vietnam! Woohoo!

Wimps.

I used to have picnics at the Bedford-Nostrand G-train stop in Bed-Stuy, wearing a suit, made out of money, with my eyes closed, at midnight! You think a motorbike spooks me? (Really, though, the B-N is a playground, I kid) But yeah, I mean, look at that photo. That spinach-laden bicycle sure looks scary. Here's the article:

No. 11 Hanoi, Vietnam
Overall Grade: High Risk Location
Major Problem: Disease & Sanitation
Other Problems: Medical Facilities, Infrastructure, Political & Social Environment, Culture & Recreation

The Vietnamese capital has a cooler, more comfortable climate than Ho Chi Minh City, and Hanoi's crime problem is also not as severe. On the other hand, Hanoi is the capital of one of the few remaining Communist countries. "Because Hanoi is the seat of government," according to ORC, "any stress related to official policy is heightened here."

So they're telling me Hanoi is more dangerous to work in than Detroit? I mean, I guess they're saying "places to work abroad," but Detroit is "abroad" for people who aren't American which happens to be about 95% of humanity.

Oh, and, I'm buying a house in Detroit for when I get back from Hanoi.

Photophilia

Alright, I tracked down a memory card reader today so here's a backlog of photos. The theme is our house and the neighborhood. I'll try to walk through what's what, but, they're photos, you know, you get it.

Here are a few shots of the entrance to the house. Living room on the left, kitchen in the back, and staircase on up.













Down here you've got some shots from the roof, looking down the middle of the staircase (that speck at the bottom of the first staircase photo is Ashton) and then looking from the first floor, up the staircase.

We've got more room than we know what to do with here. It's a six bedroom house and six floors. The rooftop terrace is great. But three rooms are languishing in disuse. Hopefully the cockroaches

stay in those rooms and leave us alone.

Alright down here you've also got some shots from the roof, and of our room. I want to get these shots up on the blog, but it's 3am and I'm wiped. So I appologize for the haphazard posting, but, I'll get back into it soon.

Transit

To cross the street in Hanoi is to have a near-death experience. The last time you heard from me on the traffic here, it was on this blog and I used this quote - from Denis Johnson's Vietnam War epic Tree of Smoke: "Fest continued across the street, heading into the tide of honking motorbikes without pausing, as he'd learned to do. They knew how to keep from hitting pedestrians."

It is more or less true. By which I mean, the less than three inches by which every car, bus, and/or motorbike misses wiping you out by is more than enough to make you throw up a Hail Mary every time you drop a foot on the asphalt. Last I heard, there were about 800 traffic fatalities in Hanoi in 2008. That means, if Hanoi had the population of the United States, there would be about 75,000 traffic fatalities per year. The USA currently has about 33,000 traffic fatalities per year. A 2006 study on Vietnamese driving habits reported these enticing - to Death - tidbits:

"Statistics point to alarming figures that show 50% of drivers of motor bikes do not indicate when turning; 70% don't use the hand brake (sic.); 85% didn't know how to use the horn properly, 90% didn't use head lights properly and 72% didn't wear helmets."

Things, I think, have gotten better since then. When we were in Hanoi a year and a half ago, there wasn't a single helmet to be seen on a moto-rider. Now, they are almost ubiquitous. The only thing people get stopped for in Hanoi, is riding a motorbike without a helmet. So that's a step in the right direction. Still, all these drivers are insane.



There are five types of vehicles on the Hanoi street; bicycles, motorbikes, cars/taxis, American cars, and buses. I'll give a synopsis on each.

Bicycles: These folks don't wear helmets and there is not a single reflective light on any of these bicycles. Mostly they are used by expats, old Vietnamese women who load their bikes down with anything from sandals to rolls of carpeting, and young Vietnamese students. Ashton and I were in a cab on the way home the other day and a kid jumped in front of our car on a bicycle and pedaled calmly as the driver appeared to debate whether or not to slam into his back tire. He blared his horn but the kid didn't move so he drove around him and I saw why the horn hadn't startled him - he had headphones on and was listening to music. I don't see how you can do that more than ten times and not wind up dead at least three of those times.

Motorbikes: They are loud, dirty, and unsafe even with the helmets. People weave through crevices between cars, and traffic lights are entirely optional for motorbikes. Their two-stroke engines are the largest donors to the thick gray haze that squats on Hanoi year-round. The bikes are treated like pickup trucks by many; whatever you need to move around - bricks, gas tanks, eggs, chickens - strap it on the back of your bike and go. Some of the motorbikes wind up as wide as a car. People around here just say, "you get used to driving one after a while." Yeah, well, human beings can get used to lots of things. But getting used to it does not mean you won't get killed by it. This is one of those things not to get used to.

Time-Lapse of Hanoi Traffic at Night

Posted using ShareThis

Cars/Taxis: The taxis are cheap and omnipresent. Everyone uses them; tourists, expats, and locals. You feel, slightly, safe in them. The cars are for the fairly wealthy, and they are the minority vehicles on the road.

American Cars: I don't mean cars made in America, but rather, "cars Americans drive." Like Escalades, Mercedes sedans, Porsche Cayennes, Lexus SUVs. These are less common than any other type of vehicle, but you'll see at least a couple dozen in any day spent wandering Hanoi. They look absurd on the tiny streets and clog up traffic like a blood clot in an artery. I assume most of the people driving them are Vietnamese gangsters or bank workers. I don't think there's much of a difference between the two. The people who drive them would run over a motorbike if it stopped dead in the road ahead of them. If one backs out of a parking spot while you walk behind it, it will not stop and you will have to jump out of the way.

Buses: Basically, they run complicated routes on irregular schedules. But they kill the thing they hit, not the other way around. So. Buses, FTW.

Video Game Wars

We do this every once in a while, Michael and me. He writes a post, I write a long response; I write a post, he writes a long response and then we post each others' responses and links to the original posts. It's always good, interesting fun.

Michael recently wrote a post on his blog Gamer Think titled "Violence = Quest for Self Identity?" which draws on a Norman Mailer - Marshall McLuhan discussion from a 1968 Summer Way episode (the same clip from which I, oddly enough, drew for this post on my, now-hibernating blog, The Skillman). Check out his post, and then read my response, re-posted below. Happy hunting.

"Maybe, if we begin to think about in game video game violence in this positive light, not as a necessary evil, but as an extremely powerful tool of self discovery, game developers might start taking the use of violence a little more seriously."

Michael,

You make an interesting point, and one that speaks to the nature of video games and our relationship to them. I think it's an all or nothing question; either violent video games are "necessary evils" (although, I think your mother, and mine, would dispute the term "necessary evil" when referring to violence in video games and argue rather successfully for "unnecessary evil," in its stead), or they CAN be powerful tools of self-discovery (I think they certainly are not, right now).

Here's my issue with your optimism:

In a video game, there is no real "roughhousing." I think what McLuhan is talking about, the violence that he addresses, is violence where there is something at stake.

"[McLuhan] conjectures that violence is essentially the quest for group or private identity, and that without that 'interface', without that 'roughhouse', that encounter with the world, you don't get an identity."

The reason it was so profound for you when you punched your friend in the stomach in 3rd grade (2nd grade, for me) was that you saw actual consequences; your friend hurt, and crying. What are the actual consequences in video game violence? Getting set back a level? Losing XP? That's not really putting anything at risk.

I agree with McLuhan's idea that violence can shape identity. It was not until Western Europeans encountered the "other" - be it Aborigine, American Indian, black African, etc. - that notions of superiority based on race, religion, and economy could take root. In absence of that contact and subsequent conflict, that aspect of identity, for better or worse, would not foment. But there were consequences and stakes to that violence. Civilizations ended; lives ended.

My brother was asking me a while ago about a writer, I don't remember his name now, who was working on a piece that asked, "Why don't video games make me cry?" My brother asked me that question and I responded, "because there's nothing really at stake." If I die in COD4, I just move back a bit and start over. If I put a controller in my girlfriend's hands and told her to start playing MGS4:GOP (assuming she inherently knew the controls and could play the game) and she died four hours into game play, I doubt she'd care a bit, she'd just move on with her day.



In reference to your post on PTSD for drone pilots, I find that conclusion totally unsurprising. It proves my point, in fact. The pilots are interacting with a medium - one that feels like a video game interface - which they are used to understanding has no real life consequences. And yet, there is a disconnect and somewhere in their brain they know that the footage they are watching has a real human dying on the other end. The medium and the message are totally scrambled. Their stress is entirely understandable.



Here's a question; there's nothing tangible at stake in a novel, either, but when Judge Holden murders the Kid at the end of Blood Meridian, why do I feel like I've lost something? Why was I surprised how much I didn't want to see that happen? Is it because Cormac McCarthy took his violence seriously (as you suggest game developers should do) or is there something about the finality of the unchanging word on the page that a video game cannot, or has not, replicated?

Finally, and this may or may not be a nail in the coffin, in McLuhan's War and Peace in the Global Village, McLuhan writes, "The self amputation which we call 'new technologies' generate vast new environments against which the individual organism is quite helpless."

If that is true, then the real conflict is not our interaction with the quality of the message of violent video games but, as McLuhan said, the medium by which they are transmitted. If the medium is the message, then who cares how good the violence in the game is, the real violence is going on between our head and our machine and we won't win.

In the opening to that Summer Way bit, the mediator says that in McLuhan's "War and Peace" he "firmly nails down his belief that media will eventually herald 20th century man back to tribalism." Video games might be just another stop on that path.

(Ed.'s note: If you want to see an example of what I'm talking about re: the stress of drone pilots, check out those two videos posted above. They're not videos from drone pilots, but from AC-130 gunships. One video is from Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, the other is actual footage of an AC-130 attacking militants in Afghanistan. But the difference between them is negligible.)