Lost In Translation

In The iPod: In The Reins

An unlikely collaboration, between two of the more critically acclaimed indie bands, Calexico and Iron & Wine, has produced an impressive effort. “In the Reins,” was recorded in December of last year for Overcoat Recordings. This seven song EP mixes the eclectic southwestern flavored arrangements of multi-instrumentalists Joey Burns and John Convertino of Calexico with the introspective and nuanced songwriting of Samuel Bream (Iron& Wine). Calexico has had previous experience helping other artists arrange their songs; evident in their 2002 collaboration with Neko Case on her dark and evocative album, “Blacklisted”-her best to date.

The duo’s influence on Bream’s songs is prominent here as well. Bream’s minimalist execution of his timeless songs gets a southwestern surge of flavor here. His songs speak of an earlier era where passions, heartbreak, drink, violence, regret, and death are closely intermingled. It is country and the blues existing in the postmodern world to remind us of simpler times. The first track, “He Lays In The Reins”, boasts the most familiar sounding Calexico arrangement opening with strumming south of the border mariachi-like guitars. Midway through the song a steel guitar joins in with Salvador Duran on percussion as he interjects en Espanola. “A History Of Lovers” is another highlight. It is the most up-tempo song on the album and the chorus is uplifted by a burst of horns during the chorus. The breathless vocals for “Sixteen, Maybe Less” are appropriate for evoking the feeling of regret for a lost love. Calexico has effectively fleshed out each of Bream’s seven barebones compositions in characteristic fashion.

Chuck Klosterman and The Sports Guy

Chuck Klosterman, author of the entertaining Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs and columnist for Esquire, is interviewed by the Sports Guy in two parts this week(links supplied by my brother a Sports Guy enthusiast). I think Klosterman is one of the most funny and interesting cultural critics around these days.

Here's Part 1.

And Part 2.

Music and Film

My brother sent me an interesting link fom The LA Times about Cameron Crowe's latest film and music in film generally speaking:

Music, and particularly songs, can be a finicky partner to motion pictures. After all, both are often attempting to tell a complete story, their way, without the help of the other. But just between you and me, right up through my own sixth film as a director, "Elizabethtown," it's been the prospect of those long afternoons and evenings in the editing room, coaxing that marriage between the right song and the right scene, that's kept me going through the grueling parts of making a movie.

Click here to read the rest of the article.

Book Notes: Dog Soldiers

Dog Soldiers is not what I expected. After seeing the paperback on my father’s bookshelf so many years ago, I thought it was a novel about being a soldier in the Viet Nam war (ala the excellent The Things They Carried). Instead, it is a sort of counterculture noir thriller version of The Treasure of Sierra Nevada. It’s about a Viet Nam journalist who decides to smuggle heroin into the country and sell it off. But it all goes awry as crooked federal agents become involved as his former Marine buddy Ray Wise goes on the lam with his wife and three kilos of uncut heroin. It’s got a lot of references to the era from which it was spawned: “turned on,” “right on”, “freaks,” etc… But it is a compelling character study of some very different types of people, as well as reflection of the times. I heard that it was made into a film called “Who’ll Stop The Rain,” which was one of Nick Nolte’s first starring roles-I would like to see it sometime to see how it translates to film, but I don’t think it’s likely that I’ll find it here. It was a very dark, fascinatingly compelling read.

Favorite Places: Stair

I went to a really cool bar called Stair, in Aoyama over the long the weekend. It had a really cool interior design and a tasty fusion menu (i.e. traditonal western foods like cesar salad with Japanese ingredients like Date chicken).

Recent Rental Roundup

I‘ve rented some movies over the last few weeks, so I thought I’d briefly comment on them. Starting with a quirky little film called Young Adam staring Ewen McGregor and Tilda Swinton. It’s a sort of mystery thriller set in 50s Scotland. But I found it oddly compelling, it’s based on a novel and it depicts another time and era quite well, but not necessarily in a flattering way. McGregor is a sort of amoral cad who goes about causing trouble to a series of women, but the movie unfolds methodically and slowly reveals his mysterious past and explains his strange behavior, as well as his position as a laborer on a river barge.

I also rented Mean Girls, which is a rarity-an intelligent teen film. Tina Fey, who co-stars as an eccentric Math teacher wrote the clever script based on a nonfiction book about teen girls and their "catty" behavior with one another called Queen Bees and Wanna Be's. I was pleasantly surprised how much I enjoyed it.

Intermission was a sort of Irish indies all-star film with producer Neil Jordan (The Crying Game-director), starring Colin Farrell, Colm Meaney (The Snapper), Kelly MacDonald (Trainspotting), and Cillian Murphy (28 Days) among others. It’s sort of a dark comedy with a heart of gold, so I found it a bit uneven. However, interesting in a conventional British indie film sort of way.

Then there’s Michael Winterbottom’s controversial 9 Songs. I think Winterbottom is a very interesting director who is always trying to go in new directions and I see this as a courageous failure. It’s sort of a Last Tango In Paris meets concert film. There are several live music performances intertwined with some very intimate erotic encounters between a couple. I guess some people would consider it pornography, but I think he was trying to document the intimacy of lovers, which is a very difficult thing to do and failed in a sense, because it is different for everyone and often obscure in the sense that I don't thinkthat it has to be sexual.

I’m not a big action adventure-CGI movie type of person, but I have to admit to enjoying Hellboy. It was cool, there’s no other way to describe a very comic bookish adventure story about Rasputin, devils and demons, Nazis, etc… But it worked for me on some level, and I thought Ron Perlman was excellent as Hell Boy. Some great camera work, special effects, costumes, etc…

And I have to say that Man On Fire was another unexpected guilty pleasure. I think the story was weak, but I found the cinematography with the muted colors and jumpy hand held cameras seductive as the exotic locale. It drew comparisons to two of my favorite Latin films of the last few years City of God and Amorres Perros. It’s essentially a basic revenge genre film, but it looks sooo good-it’s style over substance here.

Hard Gay

Just the other day I was watching a drama and one of the characters redecorated his girlfriend's apartment and sprayed "Hard Gay" on the wall-what the **** did it mean? Well now via the Blue Lotus blog I know-a comedy schitk which involves a heterosexual playing gay to get laughs-sound somewhat like Matthew's Super Hits TV, which was featured in the film, Lost In Translation. I haven't explored the link that's from the source, Conbinibento, that Blue Lotus links to, but when I have more time I'll have to check it out more fully-looks like it might be pretty funny-which is rare on Japanese TV.

Lee Gang Ju

Edward and Jeleesan brought me some Korean rice wine called Lee Gang Ju, which is 25% alcohol. I really like the cool ceramic containers. It is suppose to calm your nerves and help you keep in shape by being enrgetic-so it says on the box. They told me it is good for "man's stamina" (read virility), as well. I'm sorry to say that it tastes like cold medicine-just awful.

Apartheid America

In the September issue of Harper's magazine there is an article adapted from Jonathon Kozol's new book The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America. Much of what is in that article is repeated in an interview at Salon.com:

By Sarah Karnasiewicz

Sept. 22, 2005 †|† "Segregation is not something that happens by chance, like weather conditions," says Jonathan Kozol. "It is the work of men." So it is not without irony that it has taken a hurricane -- and the excruciating images of stranded black faces, beamed across cable airwaves -- for Americans to confront the reality that vast numbers of their fellow citizens live in segregated ghettos and suffer from abject poverty. But for Kozol, who has built his career on exposing the race- and class-based injustices endemic to the United States' educational system, the knowledge that we live in a deeply divided society has long been a foregone -- if heartbreaking -- conclusion.

For 40 years, in bestselling books such as "Savage Inequalities" and "Amazing Grace," Kozol has reported from urban schools across the nation, befriending teachers and students who, despite the promises of Brown v. Board of Education, still live and learn in crumbling buildings and in overcrowded classrooms with scarce supplies. "I cannot discern even the slightest hint that any vestige of [the Brown decision] has survived within these schools and neighborhoods," he writes in his new book, "The Shame of the Nation." "I simply never see white children."

The America Kozol describes in "Shame" is in essence an apartheid state. White suburban districts receive disproportionate funding and praise, while inner-city schools that serve minorities are denied equitable federal aid, threatened by repressive testing mandates, and drained of creativity and joy. The book is also something of a polemic. Kozol accuses the Bush administration of implementing sinister educational policies in which rote memorization is valued more than imagination and children are treated as capitalist commodities to be molded into an army of obedient entry-level workers. Using the voices of dissatisfied students and teachers as a rallying cry, Kozol calls upon "decent citizens" of all political stripes to rise up against social and educational segregation -- and reclaim the ideals of the civil rights movement.

Kozol, 69, lives outside Boston but was in New York last week on his book tour. I sat down with him and -- in between sips of coffee and puffs on his cigarette -- he explained why he believes that newspapers are partly to blame for America's reluctance to discuss race, "Winnie the Pooh" is more essential than standardized tests, and lazy liberals need to "get off their asses" and fight for educational equity.

At the end of the interview he makes a call for liberals to do something about it:

I didn't write this book simply to provoke another incestuous and interesting debate among inert liberals. I wrote this book to ask my liberal friends to get up off their asses and deal with an injustice which is right before their eyes. There are too many books about the heroic struggles of the 1960s and the courage people showed then. Those books exempt us from summoning up the courage we need to face the injustices from which we still benefit today.

I like to think that if I go back to America, this is something I'd like to fight, presumably from within, that is by becoming an administrator and trying to fight against defeatist educational policy.

Book Notes: Things Worth Fighting For

I picked up Michael Kelly’s posthumous collection of writings, Things Worth Fighting For, because I was a fan of his writing when I subscribed to The Atlantic Monthly a couple of years ago. I was disappointed to learn what a self-righteous, puritanical curmudgeon he was. The book was mainly made up of profiles and commentaries, but there was also some war reporting. Arguably his best writing was the profiles of Ted Kennedy, Jesse Jackson, and Richard Daley. But the problem of these was that he tended to be over reliant on personality/psychological profiles of his subjects. For him character is everything despite whatever they had achieved. Regan gets off the hook, but he doesn’t mention Kennedy’s accomplishments until halfway through the piece. Similarly he cannot stand Clinton, because he doesn’t trust him, but Bush Sr. and Regan again get off the hook despite the fact that they were embroiled in some of the most devious wrong doing ever at the white house, they were involved with the Iran-Contra Affair, which mirrors mainstream journalism and America’s amnesia about the past they prefer not to remember.

Kelly desperately wants to be part of America’s Greatest Generation that liberated the world from fascism, where everyone was clean cut, law abiding, country loving, God-fearing, married, responsible, and supportive of their government. Kelly’s conservative compassion will not admit that the government has ever acted out of self-interest, that there has ever been a reason to protest against authority, or that another America exist that is impoverished and at odds to succeed, because of inadequacies in the system.

Some of his most indulgent and sappy writing comes at the end of the book in the section on family and emails from the front. These little homage’s to his sons and family give no insight into anything other than his own happy family. He seems contemptuous of anyone who has not had a stable, happy family life as if it was their own fault and that they were a bunch of whiners, remember in Kelly’s rosy Voltairian view of America everyone is loved by their parents, gets three squares a day, and is tucked into to bed by loving parents every night before heading off to school seat belted in their SUV.

I am further put off by his “hawkish” patriotism. Even though I am more tolerant of the first Iraqi invasion, Kelly joins the equally disappointingly hawkish war apologist Christopher Hitchens in hyperbolic descriptions of the liberation of people living under unjust rule. He is selective about who these people are and never challenges the long range implications or costs of such actions, when defends his actions as a “chicken hawk”(one that has never been to war, but advocates it). He seems to regret this (never having been to war) and is like an overeager boy scout reveling in his opportunity to become embedded in a division during the second Iraqi campaign that were are still enmeshed in, and it is there while playing soldier that he dies in an SUV accident. I’m sorry that he didn't live long enough to realize his folly.