This Post-doc Life

An LCD screen in front of me

I wait, while the numbers 

Count down to 423,

I've been here an hour 

This is my monthly visit

To the Leuven town hall.

When my turn finally comes,

Ahead of waiting mum and wailing bub,

The lady at the desk

Scans my documents,

Murmurs in Flemish,

Shakes her head and 

Pronounces in English

I'm missing

The hosting agreement!

That piece of paper which says

The university is ready to host me,

Following which, a bureaucrat in Brussels

Can sign off on a card - a residence permit,

Stay of executioner's sword

And permission to stay

A few months more.

As I bike back to the HR department,

Through icy streets - it's freezing outside

For more rides around 

This bureaucratic merry-go-round

I think to myself

This is the price to pay

For a career in academia,

For a post-doc in mid-career

Or a professor without tenure

A vagabond's existence

No idea where I'm going to be next year.

Till recently - no family, no girlfriend,

Who's going to take in a drifter?

Chin up, mister!

I have to consider myself lucky

Think of the really stateless,

The wretched refugee on a leaky boat

Parched infant at her tit

Careening against surging ocean,

Or the landless labourer

Whose years of savings

For his daughter's wedding

Cash in 500 rupee notes, 

Rendered useless by government decree.

I am relatively secure

Thanks to random birth,

Fancy passport

And advanced degree

It's ironic that it's

The work of this itinerant drifter

That renders others jobless.

I will be fine, for at least another decade,

Till my own job is replaced.

I can't but be gloomy 

About the coming storm,

The twin disruptions of AI and climate change

That will make terrorism seem like child's play

They'll wreak havoc on a world 

Misled by demagogues and false prophets

Could this be our Great Filter?

The Fermi Paradox,

That natural barrier 

That stops our civilisation

In its tracks.

The Road

The road stretches out ahead of us,
Twin-laned type-writer ribbon
Untold story of a journey beyond,
Hyphenated paint separates us
As we unspool through
This particular enunciation
Of time and space.

Tap on accelerator pedal elicits

Deep-throated growl
From supercharged Jaguar
G-forces pin us to leather seats,
Temporary ecstasy
On this highway of broken dreams.

Like the Beats
All those years before us,
We take the
Long road south
The journey is what matters,
The destination only a footnote,
The freedom of the open road
Sustenance to parched souls.

Blue sky, infinite horizon,
Not a cloud in sight,
Engine hum and tyre roar
Bring to mind
Cormac McCarthy,
Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty
Road-trips and continents past

Yester-year, and younger days,
A companionship
That's lasted decades.

12 gold stars on blue background
Shine at us
We fly across borders,
Leave Belgium behind
And breathe in the quixotic air
Of liberté, égalité, fraternité.

Tractors toil on wheat fields,

A van-Gogh patchwork 

Of green, brown and olive

High above,

Slow-moving tripods

Slice through still air,

We tilt at our windmills,

Our own private daemons.

The sun, now low in the sky

Shines on yellow and violet,
Fields of exquisite beauty
A kaleidoscope of colour,
Sunflower and lilac.

What does it mean

To be alive 

In the year of our lord 2016?

We are men of science,

We tip our hat 

At the Big Bang,

Hell, we are prepared

To countenance 

A multi-verse 

With infinite storylines

And multiple versions of 

Our own reality.

But sometimes, science fails
To bring succour to troubled minds,
For times like these,
We have The Road,
An infinity ahead

Of tormented souls.

True Detective

On this July day of 2016

The future uncertain,

The summer wind

Blows across my apartment

As the mysterious Lera Lynn

Permeates the airwaves

With her melancholy Nashville drawl

Southern voice and strummed guitar

Lend company to a tired soul

At the fag end of a long day.

Lera Lynn, of True Detective fame

Croons - "This is my least favourite life

The one where I'm out of my mind

The one where you're just out of reach,

The one where I stay and you fly."

35 years on this planet,

Perestroika and Glasnost,

I was around when Reagan exclaimed,

"Mr. Gorbachev, Tear down that wall,"

A future of hope, 

Obama - "Yes We Can!"

We walked away from MAD,

Mutually Assured Destruction

Only to have Osama bin Laden,

Declare his war on the west.

I was awake at 2 am

Aged 20, working on an assignment

At the University of Melbourne,

When, precision strikes

On twin towers

Made Islamic terrorism

The defining headline of the decade.

Defying international law,

Invasions were made

Radar-defeating F-117 Nighthawks 

Flew over Baghdad

And destroyed non-existant

Weapons of mass destruction.

Osama is dead,

The Middle East is a mess,

Saudi Mullahs 

Continue to preach

An abhorrent ideology.

Syria burns, Assad lives

The Land of the Free and 

The Home of the Brave

Manhattan skyline of my youth,

Glistening in the dawn of 

That day on September the 11th

Can do nothing right.

On Capitol Hill,

My beloved Obama, 

Defeated, his hair grey,

Lame-ducks his last few months 

As cretin and presidential nominee

Donald J. Trump

Seeks to build up that wall

To insulate and segregate America

From the rest of the world.

On this side of the Atlantic,

Demagogues and Trump's choirboys,

Brexit and ISIS sing his refrain,

"Make America Great Again."

As airports and subways explode,

They appear to fulfill a prophecy foretold

By Samuel P. Huntington

And his thesis,

A Clash of Civilizations.

Meanwhile, I take refuge in fiction;

Flickering on my apartment wall -

Rust Cohle intones in

A scene from the True Detective ..

"Human consciousness

Is a tragic misstep in evolution,"

As he drives across 

The vast Louisiana floodplain.

Test-driving the Tesla Rocket-Ship

I'm buckled into the rear seat of a sleek black sedan with 3 of my fellow-travellers from the Expat Club as our host presses a virtual button to engage "Ludicrous Mode" on the massive, 17-inch touch screen on the centre console. Ready, he screams over the soundtrack - ACDC's Highway to Hell blasts through the car's entertainment system, also controlled through the ipad-on-the-centre-console. I take a deep breath as the rocket-ship - excuse me - car takes off. Standing still to 100 kmph in a Ferrari-beating 3.2 seconds. My heart has exited my chest cavity, bulletted through the rear of the car, and is lying on the scorched asphalt, still beating. Ludicrous!

Tesla factory in Tilburg, Netherlands

I got a chance this last week, to visit Tesla's only European factory in Tilburg, the Netherlands, and test-drive their P90D, the most powerful car in their S-series line-up. The factory is highly automated - the cars arrive in three pieces from California and move around the factory floor on robotic vehicles. There, the chassis of the car is mated to the battery - a platform of Li-ion cells in a thin, flat package that makes up the car's floor, and the rear-axle, that contains the motor and the gearbox. The 800 kg slab of batteries so low down in the car's centre of gravity gives it superb handling characteristics (no under or over steer through corners), and the absence of an engine block means that the whole front of the car is a crumple zone - making it the safest car ever built. A battery of tests are performed on the car, including driving it at highway speeds in the largest indoor test track in the world.

Tesla model S sedans on the factory floor

As impressive as the factory is, with all its automation, even more impressive is Tesla's Master plan of ridding the world of polluting and green-house-gas-emitting vehicles with internal-combustion engines. Tesla superchargers, capable of giving the car a 400-something km range in 40 minutes (for free) are available throughout North America and Europe and the car's navigation system allows you to plot a route through those two continents so that you're always within spitting distance of a supercharger. Tesla also sells solar panels and a battery pack for home, that allow you to get off the grid completely - and, as Elon likes to joke - survive the next zombie apocalypse. The car I drove was also equipped with an auto-pilot. I took my hands off the wheel as the car steered, braked, accelerated and changed lanes (when asked to, by a gentle press on the indicator stalk) using its computer brain and a combination of radar, sonar and visual sensing. When not on auto-pilot, I was able to pedal-to-the-metal standing still to 130 in a flash, leaving other cars on the road behind till they were mere specks in the rear-view mirror. I know now what it feels like to drive a McLaren F1, and save the world at the same time.

Post heart-attack-inducing test-drive in the Tesla rocket-ship (Model S P90D).

The Model 3, which comes out in 2018, will offer all this for an affordable price of about $35k US. But, I don't think I will be buying, because I buy into Elon's vision of a world with a completely changed model of car-ownership, or lack thereof. Non-polluting, autonomous electric vehicles that no individual will have to own, available round-the-clock, summoned with an app on your phone. Till then, I'm content with my trusty bicycle - pedal power is still the most sustainable mode of transport there is.

The Neon Demon

The body of a girl lies draped over an ivory coloured French-revival sofa, her throat slit from ear to ear, rivulets of dark crimson dripping languidly down her limp arm. Her electric blue dress has ridden up her hips, revealing much of her slightly parted legs. Bathed in the funereal glow of a diffused light source, she is lit up periodically by the flashes of a fashion-photographer, while an eerie-ambient soundtrack plays in the background, establishing the necro-erotic opening shot for The Neon Demon.

This is director Nicolas Winding Refn's latest venture. What sort of name is that anyway - okay, he is Danish. Refn established himself on the directorial stage with the 2011 crime-noir film Drive (starring Ryan Gosling as a getaway driver) and followed it up with the ultra-stylistic and ultra-violent Only God Forgives.

Director Nicolas Winding Refn shares a couch with a dead model [image source: The Guardian]

The Neon Demon is about a small-town teenage girl with iridescent good looks, who comes to LA (the seductive neon lights of the city give the film its name), briefly scales the dizzying and predatory heights of a city obsessed with fashion and beauty, before she is chewed up and spat out, until all that remains of her is one bloodied eyeball on a bathroom floor. Literally.

There is not much in the way of storyline or character development, but this super-stylistic film is a finely crafted piece of post-modern art - dazzling and provocative. Refn skirts around the edges of what is socially acceptable, indeed he actually crosses the line on occasion - there are scenes of female necrophilia and cannibalism. Regardless of the shock factor, every shot is visually spectacular and some of them had me mouthing "wow". 

Elle Fanning (Dakota's less famous sister) plays a 16-year old girl of ethereal beauty, a star so dazzlingly bright that despite her lack of runway experience, is lapped up by the best name in fashion, eclipsing more established models around her. 

There are touches of the absurd - in one scene, a mountain lion invades her shabby motel room, and the dream world sometimes blends with the real - she wakes up to find a knife being plunged down her open mouth millimetre-by-pain-staking-millimetre, this time by a human invader (played by the still-handsome 51 year old Keanu Reaves) - only to wake up again, from a dream.

At its screening at Cannes this year, half the audience walked out (the other half loved it), and if the director keeps this up, he is going to acquire the reputation of his controversial Danish compatriot, Lars von Trier. Cliff Martinez is director of music, and his other-worldly electro-synth tracks reminiscent of the music of Tangerine Dream lend an even more uncomfortable quality to the already edgy visuals. 

If you liked Drive, go watch the Neon Demon. If you didn't, go watch it anyway - you will be witness to cinematic history in the making.

Magic in the Moonlight

Woody Allen directs Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart on the Bow Bridge in Central Park, New York. The bridge is a recurring backdrop for many a romantic liaison in his films. [Image source: lwlies.com]

There is scarce little in life more satisfying than watching a Woody Allen flick at the cinemas.

A frisson of excitement runs down my spine as I park my bike on Bondgenotenlaan, the deserted main drag of Leuven, on this warm summer evening, with a sliver of a crescent moon in the still-blue sky above me. I step into the cinema with a box of popcorn for company, the cinema similarly deserted, save for a handful of senior citizens. The young people of Leuven are probably at home watching Eurovision, preferring to save the big screen for a Hollywood blockbuster like Transformers, or Batman vs Superman. Good for me - I can pretend that I am at my own private screening that Woody has arranged for a selection of his discerning fans.

Someone asks me about the film later, and my description of it would probably be similar for any of the 50-odd films he's made over a career spanning 50 years - he makes roughly one movie every year. It's about life and the fear of death, falling in love and betrayal in love, often by someone close to the protagonist. It's about a starry-eyed couple silhouetted against the pearly lights of New York's Queensboro bridge, whispering sweet nothings to each other at 4 AM in the morning (Manhattan). It's about a city as a muse - New York in his earlier films (Annie Hall - 1977, Manhattan - 1979 and Hannah and her Sisters - 1986), and more recently, London (Matchpoint - 2005), Paris (Midnight in Paris - 2011) and Rome (To Rome with Love - 2012). It's about a dazzling opening montage showcasing New York of the 1970s - the Manhattan skyline, the Brooklyn Brownstones, the art-deco Empire Diner in Chelsea, the Staten Island ferry,  set to the pulsating tunes of George Gershwyn's Rhapsody in Blue (Manhattan). And moving vignettes of Paris - the Sacre Coeur and Montmartre, the Moulin Rouge and the Pont Alexander III, set to Sidney Bechet's lilting, jazzy notes ("Si Tu Vois Ma Mère") in Midnight in Paris. It's about voice-over narrations and actors breaking the fourth wall to speak directly to the audience.

Cafe Society, his latest film (like his 1977 classic Annie Hall), is set in two cities - New York and LA. It depicts the high-octane, ego-driven Hollywood Cafe society of the 1930s. Young, twenty-something Bobby from New York (played by Jesse Eisenberg), arrives in sunny LA, hopeful of securing a job with his uncle Phil (played by Steve Carell), a big-name movie producer, who wines and dines big-name Hollywood stars like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, in his multi-million dollar art-deco mansion in the Hollywood hills. Bobby is shown around town by Phil's lovely secretary Vonnie (Kristen Stewart), and promptly falls in love with her. Vonnie is beautiful, but in a girl-next-door kind of way. Like Bobby, she is apparently unfazed by the shallow and plastic world that surrounds her - they share a common contempt for it. But she rejects him for another suitor, from the same shallow Cafe Society that she apparently despises. Dejected and heart-broken, Bobby goes back to New York, and with capital from his criminal brother, sets up a jazz bar that soon becomes the toast of town, Bobby's own Cafe Society.

Unrequited love kills more people in a year than tuberculosis - "I'm kind of seeing someone," Vonnie tells Bobby, when he professes his love for her. [Image source: Daily Mail]

Many years later, Vonnie visits Bobby's celebrity jazz club with her high-profile husband in tow. Bobby is also married, but still pines for her. He meets up with her in private, and shows her around his town, New York, just as she had shown him LA. They walk all night, and share one passionate kiss on the Bow Bridge in New York's Central Park, a setting for many a romantic liaison in Allen's oevre. The film ends with each celebrating the New Year with their respective partners, and Bobby muses wistfully about what could have been - 'Life is a comedy, written by a sadistic comedy writer.'

The curtains come down with Allen's familiar crediting style - white Windsor type-face on black background, set to a sentimental 1920s  jazz tune. I am satisfied.

Ray

This is the first day 

Of Spring, it's early May,

The weather finally good enough

For a sit-out on the patio

10 floors up,

I have for company

A book of short-stories 

And a glass of Pinot.

Memory and longing,

Streams of consciousness

Swim along tunes 

In a melancholic playlist.

Meanwhile from Zavantem,

Aircraft take off with twinkling lights 

On wingtips and fuselage,

Silhouetted by the setting sun,

Trailing contrails like brush-strokes

On a many-hued canvas.

On the front page of my book,

In a scribbled scrawl,

"To Jay, 

With compliments

From Ray."

Ray Jarvis, my mentor, my guide,

Wrote 110 short-stories

In the last year of his life

In the throes of death,

During a battle with mesothelioma,

Contracted 50 years earlier 

In Wittenoom Western Australia,

An old asbestos mining town.

Many hours, I spent 

With this giant of Australian robotics,

Discussing problems of engineering

During my PhD.

Yet his enduring legacy,

My most treasured possession,

This signed copy of

His book of fiction,

"Two Moons",

Written on his death-bed

In a frenzy of activity.

These stories of ordinary lives,

Set against the backdrop 

Of desert dunes and country towns,

Of extraordinary Australian landscapes,

These lessons in life,

Speak out to me

From far beyond his grave.

I have my own students today,

And I hope I can give them

Guidance in research,

Impart in them a work-ethic,

Intellectual vigour.

But more importantly,

Teach them to lead decent lives,

That it is most important to be kind

Transfer to them through osmosis,

Some of the wisdom

That I received from Ray.