It’s Saturday morning in Hanoi at 4:50 am, which is 2:50 pm Friday by the Los Angeles clock. This after crashing at midnight or Friday morning Pacific at 10 am. Yeah, I’ve more or less acclimated. Didn’t take long. It was misting most of yesterday afternoon and evening — precipitation so faint it’s barely worth the name. Jett and Cait arrived late last night. Jett will buy his own SIM card and then it’s off to the races. We’ll be renting bicycles, not scooters. A nice long day ahead. I’ll be filing daily but I’ve no intention of keeping up the usual pace. To me a vacation is when you indulge in spiritual rest and nourishment but at the same time you get very little sleep.
The trouble began within seconds of my Seoul-to-Hanoi flight landing at 11:15 this morning. AT&T’s default partner Viettel, which is Vietnam’s largest mobile operator, wasn’t allowing me to (a) text, (b) use Skype or (c) use Google Maps. I had no such difficulties when I was here in 2012 and ’13. Puzzling. I asked around after checking in at the Art Trendy hotel in Hanoi’s Old Quarter, and I gradually learned that Viettel can’t shake hands with the iPhone 6 4G technology. (Or something like that.)
I’m afraid this is one of those times in which I couldn’t post an original HE image. Rest assured this is almost exactly what it looks like outside my hotel window. I was too consumed with cell-phone hassles to snap my own stuff.
This could’ve been a huge problem. The plan from the start has been to get around on our own (myself, Jett and Cait) without a guide, but for that we obviously need to access Google Maps. So I had to buy a Vietnamese SIM card, and now everything works. I’ll keep it in the phone until we head south on Monday morning.
The Hanoi atmosphere was all milky and foggy as I flew in. It’s now 6:05 pm on Friday (4:05 am in Los Angeles) with the smell of scooter exhaust and street grime mixed with the aroma of spicy hot noodles with steamed chicken and fish. The Old Quarter is no one’s idea of antiseptic but that’s part of the charm. It takes character to appreciate such a neighborhood. (No Club Med luxury queens.) My fifth-floor hotel room is small but acceptable. Dusk is just starting to settle in. I have a list of several Hanoi street food joints that we’ll be hitting tomorrow and Sunday. We’ll be dining at Club Ly on Sunday evening.
Ditto.
I’ve rarely slept for more than a couple of hours on any flight. Okay, I’ve gotten three on a couple of NY-to-Paris flights and once I did four or five hours after taking two (2) Ambien. But last night’s 12 and 1/2 hour flight from Los Angeles to Seoul was a corker. I slept for just under seven (7) hours, and right now I feel rested and ready. How did I manage it? A tab and a half of Percocet, that’s how. I might bag a few more zees on my five-hour flight to Hanoi, which leaves at 8:10 am. It’s Friday over here — 6:40 am in Seoul, 4:40 am in Hanoi. 2:40 pm on Thursday in Los Angeles.
Artist’s rendering of grand entrance to Inchon Int’l airport, which is roughly 7 or 8 miles west of Seoul.
I dropped into Book Soup last night and, for a reason I’ll shortly disclose, decided to buy a $20 trade paperback of Scott Eyman‘s “John Wayne: The Life and Legend.” The Vietnam trip begins late Wednesday night (12 1/2 hour flight from LAX to Seoul and then another five hours from Seoul to Hanoi) and there’s no wifi across the Pacific so I’m figuring a nice comfortable biography will fit right in. Yeah, the irony of Wayne and Vietnam…I get it, I get it.
The following excerpt, an anecdote from Wayne pally Rod Taylor (who died a little more than a year ago) is why I bought the book. It explains that Taylor invited Wayne to “one of his marriages at a church in Westwood.” Taylor was married three times — once in ’54 and once after Wayne died so it had to be a June 1963 wedding to model Mary Hilem, with whom Taylor had a daughter, former CNN financial reporter Felicia Taylor, in 1964. Anyway, here it is:
In a sense my late mom has treated Jett, Cait and myself to a 10-day Vietnam visit in late March. Bicycles, scooters, street food, earthy aromas, exotic atmospheres, helmet GoPro, etc. Hanoi, Dong Hoi and Paradise Cave, Hue, Hoi An, My Son. Anthony Bourdain will be…well, one of our spiritual guides.
Earlier today a journalist colleague asked why I’m not currently at South by Southwest, which he’s having a great time attending and respects as a great festival, etc. My reply: “I was going to attend but I’ve developed an opinion over the last few years that while SXSW is interesting, crackling and cool, it’s not 100% vital. But I was going to attend anyway for the sake of Ondi Timoner‘s Russell Brand doc and Trainwreck and Alex Gibney‘s Steve Jobs film and one or two others, but I got angry about the expense.
By my standards the rates for a decently located Airbnb or Craig’s List room or hotel accomodation in Austin seemed stratospheric. I didn’t want to drop $1200 to $1500 for four or five days on a room of some kind plus another $700 or $800 on airfare, food, cabs and whatnot. SXSW is not worth dropping $2000 to $2300. If I could do four days for $1500 or maybe a bit less ($150 per night rentals), okay, but not $600 to $800 higher than that. Plus I really hated the lines when I was there three or four years ago. Lines, lines, lines, lines, lines and more lines. It’s as bad as Berlin in this respect. So I thought it over for two or three days and said “the hell with it.”
I’ve made no secret of my admiration for Rory Kennedy‘s Last Days in Vietnam, which I first saw last June at L.A. FilmFest. It is, I feel, her best film ever and one of the two finest competing for the Best Feature-Length Documentary Oscar, the other being Laura Poitras‘s Citizenfour. Kennedy and I spoke this afternoon for about 17 minutes. She’s been making docs for 16 years, but I didn’t really pay attention until Ghosts of Abu Ghraib (’07), which pretty much everyone admired, and particularly the emotionally affecting Ethel, which I saw at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival and later aired on HBO on 10.18.12. Last Days in Vietnam has made a big impression because of its humanity. It’s a doc about Americans who showed compassion and decency and stuck their neck out for their Vietnamese friends during the final days of the Vietnam War. I’ve told Kennedy before that it’s a shame Last Days will probably never be seen in Vietnam due to presumed objections over political content. The Hanoi government would probably argue with Kennedy’s portrayal of the victorious North Vietnamese forces looking to settle scores with thousands of South Vietnamese who threw in their lot with American forces, which of course they did. (Tens of thousands were murdered or otherwise taken to task.) Kennedy’s film doesn’t lie but her main thrust is not political or tactical criticism but an honoring of loyalty and humane instincts and taking care of your own. Nobody’s angry about the war over there any more. I visited Vietnam in 2012 and ’13, and my sense was that the citizens have moved on and are living in the present. The young guys I met in Hanoi, Hue and Hoi An were all into iPhones and iPads and making money and getting ahead as best they could. I think they’d understand and admire Kennedy’s doc if they had a chance to see it. Again, the mp3.
Two nights ago a week-long Nastassja Kinski film series began under the auspices of the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Last night (11.28) they screened James Toback‘s Exposed (’83), in which Kinski costarred with Rudolf Nureyev and Harvey Keitel. (It also featured model Janice Dickinson, who recent came out as one of Bill Cosby‘s victims.) As a Paris-based terrorist named Rivas, Keitel delivers a memorable riff (in a scene with Kinski) about what he considers good-life essentials: “I’ll tell you what I want. Good food. Women. Good cigars. Good beds with fresh sheets Hot showers in Hilton hotels. New shoes. Poker. Blackjack. Dancing. Clint Eastwood westerns. And you. I knew from looking at your face.”
Rudolf Nureyev, Nastassja Kinski in James Toback’s Exposed.
Toback told me this morning that a major critic said at the time that “only Toback would have written dialogue as arcane as that for an international terrorist.” In fact the line was taken directly from an interview with the real Carlos, Toback said. Everything verbatim except Clint.
I felt profoundly moved and even close to choking up a couple of times while watching Rory Kennedy‘s Last Days in Vietnam yesterday at the Los Angeles Film Festival.
The waging of the Vietnam War by U.S forces was one of the most tragic and devastating miscalculations of the 20th Century, but what happened in Saigon during the last few days and particularly the last few hours of the war on 4.30.75 wasn’t about policy. For some Saigon-based Americans it was simply about taking care of friends and saving as many lives as possible. It was about good people bravely risking the possibility of career suicide by acknowledging a basic duty to stand by their Vietnamese friends and loved ones (even if these natives were on the “wrong” or corrupted side of that conflict) and do the right moral thing.
Last Days in Vietnam director Rory Kennedy during post-screening q & a.
Kennedy’s incisive, well-sculpted (if not entirely comprehensive) 98-minute doc is basically about how a relative handful of Americans stationed in Saigon — among them former Army Captain Stuart Herrington, ex-State Department official Joseph McBride and former Pentagon official Richard Armitage — did the stand-up, compassionate thing in the face of non-decisive orders and guidelines from superiors (particularly U.S. Ambassador to South Vietnam Graham Martin) who wouldn’t face up to the fact that the North Vietnamese had taken most of South Vietnam by mid-April and would inevitably conquer Saigon.
It was obvious as hell to almost anyone with eyes and ears, and yet Martin and other officials, afraid of triggering widespread panic, wouldn’t approve contingency plans for evacuation until it was way, way too late. So the above-named humanitarians and their brethren decided it was “easier to beg for forgiveness than to ask permission” and did what they could — covertly, surreptitiously, any which way — to save as many South Vietnamese as they could.
Sent this morning — two previous requests have been sent over the last week or so: “Please consider chatting with me briefly about The Wolf of Wall Street, Oliver. Your Wall Street perspective alone demands…er, requires this. In a sense you and Gordon Gekko/Michael Douglas fathered Jordan Belfort — he was one of those “greedy little shits” of the late ’80s who got into stockbroking partly because Gekko’s swagger and “greed is good” speech turned him on. C’mon, man — you created him. In a certain sense, I mean. Henry Frankenstein didn’t mean to create Boris Karloff‘s “monster” either, but that’s what happened.
“I also need you to address the view that The Wolf of Wall Street is the new Scarface. (I riffed on this on 12.13). Like Scarface was in ’83, Wolf has been decried by older conservatives, slow-on-the-pickup critics, industry lightweights and in some cases women. Wolf‘s crime, they feel, has been its failure to deliver sufficient payback to Leonardo DiCaprio‘s Belfort, for seeming to enjoy the amorality of its lead characters at the expense of some moral scheme. Or for being too long or too excessive in its portrayal of Belfort’s wild-ass shenanigans. Over-the-top excess is very clearly the point, of course.
If there’s some vestige of old-world French colonial architecture in Saigon (which nobody calls Ho Chi Minh City), I haven’t found it yet. I’m sure there are some appealing nooks in this big, noisy, sprawling burgh. I only arrived here last night so what do I know? But I can say without qualification that Saigon is an aggressively commercial city with Godzilla-sized super-towers on every other block (at least in the downtown area) and that there are piles of garbage floating near the banks of the Saigon River. Plus the iPhone receptivity has been just awful and the wifi at the Saigon Grand Hotel is the worst I’ve ever experienced in any big-league town in my life. Saigon clearly has an economically vital pulse, but it lacks that culturally refined je ne sais quoi that always defines a great city. People always want your money wherever you travel, but the good citizens of Saigon really want it — merchants and street hustlers have been hitting on me relentlessly. I love the tall trees and the big parks, but it’s just not my kind of town. I’m guessing it might be a little bit like Bangkok, which The Hangover Part II and Only God Forgives convinced me to never, ever visit. I guess I’m just more of a Hanoi type of guy.
The drive from Hanoi to Ha Long Bay is no picnic. Three hours and change, lots of traffic, two-lane blacktop, road construction, etc. And submitting to a Ha Long Bay tourist cruise aboard the Annam Junk made me feel like a very well-treated steer. I just don’t like being herded along. But the area is one of God’s greatest creations and the Vietnamese tourism industry tries very hard to make everyone feel special and honored so I should just ease up and call it a nice pleasant time. Which it was.
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