Lost In Translation

In The iPod: Elvis, Patti, and Bloc Party

The Delivery Man is Costello’s finest album since When I Was Cruel. It is his first album with his touring band the Imposters. He has several excellent duets with Lucinda Williams on “There’s a Story In Your Voice” and Emmylou Harris on “Heart Shaped Bruise” and “The Scarlet Tide.” The album was recorded on Ryan Adams’ label of choice Lost Highway Records, which seems to be steeped in the country and folk orientated artists.

I finally picked up The Patti Smith Group’s seminal Easter album, that has the Springsteen penned “Because the Night” and Smith powerful tour de force almost equal to that of “Horses” on the brilliant album of the same name: “Rock And Roll Nigger” and “Babelogue.”

I can’t say that Bloc Party’s Silent Spring did much for me. They have been getting a lot of press attention and have been grouped with the likes of Franz Ferdinand and The Kaiser Chiefs, but the Robert Smith influenced vocals and dissonant keyboard sound leaves me cold. Of all the 80s Britpop I think The Smiths trump The Cure every time.

Book Club: Understanding China

This month’s book club book is John Bryan Starr’s Understanding China, which is a good general introduction to modern China. He looks at the country from a variety of perspectives: political, cultural, diplomatic, environmental, economic, and so on. It is a well-informed and well-researched book; Starr is a professor of Chinese history at Yale University as well. He ends the book by speculating potential futures for China; he seems to be a bit of a doomsayer predicting a collapse of the system. Admittedly China has huge problems with a widening wealth gap between rural people and city dwellers, massive environmental problems, and so on, but it seems to stagger on. And there hasn’t been a collapse in the five years since the book has been written. It was a good book to start off our discussions about China and it’s role in world politics.

Mardi Gras Madness

Yesterday was the annual Bourbon Street Bar and Restaurant at Sweet Basil's-it was another hedonisitic good time. Below me and Marcus with some good time girls.

How You And Your Stoner Friends Ruined Bob Marley

There's a great piece on the musical legacy of Bob Marely in Slate this week. It seemed like every hackey-sack playing, pot smoking, dreadlock wearing stoner has "Legend" blasting out of their dorm/feral apartment/beat up VW bus. In fact, it is usually the soundtrack to beach bars in Okinawa to Thailand, which is a long way from Jamaica:

Rachel Saurer, in a smart piece on the 20th anniversary of Legend, sketched out the loose set of values that Marley has come to embody: "In the realm of musical-taste-as-statement-of-personal-identity, Legend says this: I generally care about world events. I favor cotton clothing. I think stress is bad. I want to stop injustice. I'm all for love. I wouldn't say no to the herb, if you get my drift."

But if Marley's fans are cheesy and annoying, at least in this country, so are Pablo Neruda's, and no one holds that against him. How can we grudge Bob the feel-good party boys and mountain-biking philosophy majors who cling to his memory?

After all, Marley is an international star with a strong following in the Third World, especially in Africa. There, Marley fandom has a different dimension. Say you're a middle-class American white kid. It's spring term freshman year, and you've just discovered pot, Bob Marley, and ultimate frisbee. You really want to drop that organic chemistry course, but you know your parents will be pissed. In such a scenario, Bob Marley's songs, with lines like "Emancipate yourself from mental slavery" and "No chains are on my feet/ but I am not free," seem to be talking to you in a way that's deeply profound. Sure, that's laughable. But let's take a different scenario altogether. What if you're black? Or from the Third World? Then the lyrics take on a lot more historical force and contemporary urgency.

The problem with Bob Marley in white America is one of perspective. Many of Marley's songs are about resistance and violent revolution. The threat implicit in the lines "Them belly full but we hungry/ A hungry mob is an angry mob" or the song "Burnin' and Lootin' " isn't too far from the surface. But lyrics about armed resistance make America's secular-progressive middle classes—those most responsible for the cult of Marley as a cuddly "One Love" Rastafarian—uneasy. And so does Bible-beating. Marley's music is steeped in the Old Testament, especially the Song of Solomon. Marley sings in "Small Axe":

Why boasteth thyself, O evil men;
Playing smart and not being clever?
I said, you're working iniquity
To achieve vanity …

And whosoever diggeth a pit
Shall fall in it; bury in it
And whosoever diggeth a pit
Shall bury in it; bury in it.

Here, he's plundering from at least four books of the Bible: Psalms 52:1 and 94:4; Proverbs 22:8; Isaiah 59:4; and Jeremiah 2:5.

Often in Marley, militancy and religion are fused in a way that wouldn't please, say, Pat Robertson. Sometimes, the fusing is literal, as in this line of wordplay on "revolution" and "revelation": "Revelation, reveals the truth, revelation/ It takes a revolution to make a solution." Other times, the relationship between religion and resistance is more ambivalent, and menacing: "Cause I feel like bombing a church/ Now that you know that the preacher is lying."

Bob Marley crossed over because he wanted to be heard. But even when he sounded a peaceful note, there was an edge in his voice. He once told a reporter, "There should be no war between black and white. But until white people listen to black with open ears, there must be—well, suspicion!" As it turns out, Marley had every reason to be suspicious about how he'd be listened to. One love, mon.

DVD Notes: Jarhead

I guess the best I can say about Sam Mendes’ film Jarhead is that it is competently made, but there’s nothing extraordinary or compelling about it. It lacks certainly qualities that made that book interesting; the questioning of the military psyche and the dark places that the reluctant Marine went during and after the first Gulf War. Jake Gyllenhaal puts in a solid performance, as do most of the supporting actors. Jamie Foxx is over-rated in my book-but his performance is competent. Harper’s had an interesting feature about the “war porn” scene in the movie-where the guys get all worked up watching Apocalypse Now-it reminds me of an interview I read in which, some soldiers stated how some tank crews would hook up their iPods so they could have the appropriate soundtrack to their shelling in Iraq.

David Sedaris

There's an entertaining piece by David Sedaris availiable online at The New Yorker:

SUITABLE FOR FRAMING A family of experts. by DAVID SEDARIS Issue of 2006-02-27 Posted 2006-02-20

Before it was moved out near the fairgrounds, the North Carolina Museum of Art was located in downtown Raleigh, and often, when we were young, my sister Gretchen and I would cut out of church and spend an hour looking at the paintings. The collection was not magnificent, but it was enough to give you a general overview, and to remind you that you pretty much sucked. Both Gretchen and I thought of ourselves as artists—she the kind that could actually draw and paint, and me the kind that pretended I could actually draw and paint. When my sister looked at a picture, she would stand at a distance, and then slowly, almost imperceptibly, drift forward, until her nose was right up against the canvas. She examined all of the painting, and then parts of it, her fingers dabbing in sympathy as she studied the brushstrokes.

“What are you thinking about?” I once asked.

And she said, “Oh, you know, the composition, the surfaces, the way things look realistic when you’re far away but weird when you’re up close.”

“Me, too,” I said, but what I was really thinking was how grand it would be to own a legitimate piece of art and display it in my bedroom. Even with my babysitting income, paintings were out of the question, so instead I invested in postcards, which could be bought for a quarter in the museum shop and matted with shirt cardboard. This made them look more presentable.

Back To School: Correspondence Courses

I recently realized that my Washington Sate Teaching Certificate is going to expire this year and I was advised by friends to extend it, rather than letting it lapse and trying to get it reinstated later via the new portfolio process which is said to be a pain in the ass. So I need to complete 15 credits worth of courses from any state certified college or university. The cheapest way I found to do this while in Japan is via correspondence courses at a community college, so I’ve enrolled in three courses from Seattle Central Community College: Music 116 The Social History of Rock And Roll, English 223 Modern American Literature, and History 103 History of Civilization since 1800. I tried to choose courses that I would find interesting, which I am hoping will motivate me to get them done on time. All of thee courses require significant reading and writing-the Music course is mostly short essays and short answer responses, but both the English (11 2-4 page papers, a research paper, and final exam) and History courses (14 short essays and one research paper requiring 5 book length sources!) require extensive writing, significantly more than would have been required had I taken the courses traditionally, but it can’t be helped in this case. I am currently on spring vacation until April, so I’m trying to use this time to get as much done in these courses as possible. I’ve been at it a couple of weeks and I have completed 4 lessons in History, 2 in English, and basically half of the Music course, so I’m feeling confident that I can meet my timeline, but those research papers are certainly going to slow me down.

Pirabkao

I've discovered a new Thai restaurant, Pirabkao, on the west side of Ikeukuro station. I can't say much for the ambience, but good basic Thai food at a reasonable price. We had Papaya salad, Tom Yum Kun (spicy seafood soup), and Basil chicken with egg-pictured above.

In The iPod: The Greatest

I had been suspect about Cat Power (a.k.a. Chan Marshall) ever since I heard she was the "cat’s meow" among the hipsters in America. I went so far as to seeing her in concert at The Crocadile in Seattle, on one of my trips back-I came away unimpressed. But her latest album, The Greatest, has been getting great reviews and then I read a profile in February’s GQ about the new album, so the next time I was in a record store the disc was available for listening at the listening station. Before the end of the third song I was converted.

The album was recorded with a crack band of veteran soul-music sidemen who have played with the likes of Al Green, Booker T. and the MGs, and Aretha Franklin among others. Cat Power's usual sparse arrangements get an overhaul with strings, horns, effects, multitracking backing vocals, and the effect is breathtaking. The songs retain the wounded world weariness that havecharacterized the songs of Cat Power in the past. The first song, the album’s title, has a piano style Marshall has relied on in the past, but here it's mixed with strings, teary delay effects, gently nudging drums, and Marshall's own multi-tracked voice echoing her lead vocals hauntingly. The next song, “Living Proof”, is the album’s most conventionally sexy song yet. As it swaggers on lazy horns and careening organ, you can almost picture Marshall in a pair of tight jeans, swinging her hips in front of a jukebox. "Lived in Bars" retains that Southern-fried sensuality in its back half: After beginning as a late-night smoky bar lament, the song lifts off on harmonies and a bouncy beat; all of a sudden, it's getting hot and heavy. There are several standouts including the album’s most conventional sounding song, “Could We.” I think some of the songs start to sound alike, as the album progresses, but that’s not much of a criticism when the songs are as sensual and lush as the ones that Cat Power has captured on this record. Count me as one of the converted.

I got more than a little inspiration form the slightly bitchy Pitchfork review.

Day Trading In Japan

Maiko Asaba has become a celebrity for her day-trading. She is featured in Japanese investing magazines.

Day trading seems to be gaining in popularity according to this NY Times article:

YUKA YAMAMOTO dutifully quit work to assume her expected role as suburban homemaker when she married six years ago. But she quickly grew bored at home, and when she saw a television program about online stock investing, she took $2,000 in savings and gave it a try.

Today, Ms. Yamamoto says she has turned her initial investment into more than $1 million as a day trader, scanning her home computer for price movements in stocks, futures and foreign currencies that could lead to quick profits. And by writing books and holding seminars on trading strategies, she has also become a celebrity among homemakers who are investors. She says she has met thousands of other married women who now play the stock market online, many without their husbands' full knowledge.

Having overcome the country's sluggishness in embracing cyberspace and deregulating discount brokerage firms, day-trading has taken off in Japan, the world's second-largest financial market, after the United States. The number of accounts at Japan's electronic brokerage firms reached 7.9 million last September, up from 296,941 in 1999, when the first such firm opened, according to the Japan Security Dealers Association. That is an impressive gain, even after considering that some traders hold more than one account.

While Japan's business establishment still frowns on this new, rough-and-tumble style of trading, it has exploded in popularity among many who previously played only minor roles in Japan's corporate-dominated economy, particularly young people and women.