Lost In Translation

Making Sense of Japanese

I read Jay Rubin’s excellent book on Haruki Murakami, Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words, and thought I ‘d check out his Japanese language book, Japanese Power: Making Sense of Japanese. It was an interesting analysis of Japanese language and how it differs from English from the perspective of a teacher and translator. In particular he is good at explaining what he calls the zero pronoun, Japanese, especially spoken Japanese, often infers the subject of the sentence without using a pronoun, hence the zero pronoun. He hints that the best way to read a Japanese sentence is to look for clues at the beginning of the sentence that will explain where it is going since the verb comes last in Japanese. He humorous writes about tricky aspect of the language. For example he looks at the differences between the particles “wa” and “ga.” “Wa” essentially differentiates the subject or the topic forms other topics, while “ga” emphasizes what comes after it. It was a short thought–provoking book, probably of interest to Japanese language learners only.

In The iPod: Garden Ruin

Calexico has decided to go a different direction on the latest album, Garden Ruin, and abandon the south of the border sound that they’ve made their name by. It must have to do with their collaborations with singer songwriters like Sam Bream (Iron & Wine) and Neko Case. And although the album is competent with several standouts like “Bisbee Blue,” “Letter To Bowie Knife,” and “Nom De Plume,” it missing that mariachi spicy Mexican element that made them different from other bands. However, “Rokka” with its Spanish chorus is a welcome throwback to the Calexico of old-for the first time there are no instrumental tracks. Thus we can no longer think of them as Sergio Leonne’s heir to a house band. In a sense they have replaced those horns and mariachi strumming for a steel guitar as the songs take on a more western flavor. All in all, something has been gained and something has been lost. I’m not sure it's a fair trade off, because they enter a crowded field of singer-songwriters, whereas before they were doing something completely original with no competitors. That being said, this is a worthy album and deserves a chance.

Capote Redux

There's a good discussion of Capote on Slate. I have to admit that the two movies, of the five that were nominated for Best Picture this year at the Acadmey Awards, that have stayed with me most were Capote and Munich. I've defended Crash as not being a terrible movie, just a flawed good one, but I do have to admit that it was the weakest in the field at the Acadmy Awards. Here's a sample of the write up in Slate:

The misapprehension of Capote as a small movie begins with its own dedication to small moments. Early on it is a comedy of manners, in which a small town adjusts itself to the presence of a New York literary god, even as the New York literary god adjusts himself to the small town, in order to get it to talk. As the film progresses, so does Capote's obsession with Smith, whom he comes to regard as a version of himself. "It's as if Perry and I grew up in the same house," Capote tells Harper Lee (Catherine Keener), "then one day, he walked out the back door, and I walked out the front." (To which Lee, increasingly the moral center of the movie, replies "You kidding?") But Capote is not really a study of Capote's relationship with Smith. As Smith idles in his cell, poring over a copy of Walden given to him by Capote, Capote reads early chapters of his work-in-progress to a rapt New York audience. Later Capote sums up his feeling for Smith, hardly even noticing his words. "Do you hold him in esteem, Truman?" Lee asks him. "Well. He's a goldmine."

Capote's enormous power comes from its embodiment of all the virtues Capote the man eventually rejected—tact, self-control, reticence. Bennett Miller's palette is autumnal—one nice nugget from the DVD reveals how the color scheme of the film excluded entirely all reds and blues in favor of muted yellows and browns—and his pacing is deliberate, even stately. The movie argues, as others have, that the experience of courting Perry Smith to write In Cold Blood broke something within Capote and speeded his transition from the boy-sylph of apparently limitless talent, who published Other Voices, Other Rooms when he was 23, to the bitchy society lapdog of the '70s talk-show circuit. As a closing intertitle points out, Capote never published another book before dying of alcoholism in 1984. Within a year of publishing In Cold Blood, Capote had thrown the Black and White Ball, an affair at the Plaza Hotel that established, to the terror-laced glee of the haute mode, who was in and who was out in New York society. It was a harbinger of the Studio 54 Capote. A depressing anecdote dating from the '70s has Capote inviting the gossip columnist Liz Smith and John Berendt—later to write Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil—up to his apartment in the U.N. Plaza. Capote left the room, then returned with a giant bowl of cocaine, which Smith guessed at the time represented $10,000 worth of the drug. As suddenly as he had brandished it, Capote snatched it away, saying, "No. No. I'm not going to give you any. You're not good enough. Neither one of you is good enough."

Click here for the rest of the article.

Zip Zap Sandwiches

Zip Zap Sandwiches adds another tasty alternative to the Harajuku/Omotesando dining scene. It has outside seating as you can see from the photo above and tasty NY style deli sandwiches like the turkey sandwich pictured below. There were some other lunch specials like curry and pasta among others, but I liked the idea of a big turkey sandwich outside. I think the lunch specials were less expensive than the ala carte menu selections, but they don't skimp on the meat.

Interview: Matt Groening

This week The Onion AV Club interviews Simpsons creator Matt Groening:

Matt Groening

Interviewed by Nathan Rabin
April 26th, 2006

Does Matt Groening really need any introduction? His evolution from cantankerous Los Angeles underground cartoonist to the creator of one of the most beloved and influential comic institutions of the past century is already the stuff of legend. In 1977, Groening began writing the long-running comic strip Life In Hell, a cult favorite about the misadventures of various angst-ridden neurotic rabbits, plus Akbar and Jeff, a pint-sized duo who operate or shill for an endless succession of disreputable businesses.

Life In Hell eventually caught the eye of producer James L. Brooks, who commissioned Groening to create animated shorts to run as bumpers during Fox's The Tracey Ullman Show. Groening famously created the Simpsons in roughly 15 minutes, and Simpsons shorts ran for several seasons on Ullman's acclaimed program before getting their own half-hour spin-off in 1989.

In 1999, Groening and Simpsons veteran David X. Cohen launched the science-fiction cartoon series Futurama, which quickly attracted a rabid cult following in spite of regular preemptions and generally shoddy treatment by Fox. The network ultimately cancelled Futurama, but substantial DVD sales and impressive ratings for the Cartoon Network reruns prompted Fox to green-light four feature-length direct-to-DVD Futurama movies. Groening is also working on a long-rumored, highly anticipated Simpsons movie, in addition to publishing Bongo Comics and still writing and drawing Life In Hell. Just before a recent Simpsons episode written by Ricky Gervais aired and the 2007 release date of the Simpsons movie was announced, The A.V. Club spoke to Groening about why The Simpsons Forever is more than just the title of a book.

Click here to read the interview.

There's a bonus feature that lists some Simpsons Quotes For Everyday Use as well.

Transamerica

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed Transamerica. Felicity Huffman was great, and it’s an unlikely story that really seems to come together emotionally in the end. I guess it’s about people trying to live as best they can despite whatever shortcomings or difficulties they have. I didn’t know much about it, just that Felicity Huffman was nominated for Best Actress for her performance, but it goes beyond her performance—it’s an entertaining and essentially uplifting story, although not a traditional one and perhaps a little unsavory, but it ends on an uplifting note as it were a feel good movie.

Capitalism and the Spirit of Disobedience

The April 2006 issue of Harper’s has a fascinating article called “The Spirit of Disobedience: An invitation to resistance” by Curtis White. He begins his essay by discussing the question: “Are we fundamentally a Christian or an Enlightenment culture?” He comes to the conclusion that it is more of a capitalist culture than anything else and analyzes what is wrong and inhuman about this kind of culture. He goes onto express the history of dissent that I feel is the true legacy of American intellectual thought-Thomas Paine, Ralph Waldo Emerson Henry David Thoreau, etc... He makes a lot of porvocative points in his essay. I thinkit worth picking up this issue for this essay alone. I have recorded some of the more arresting and astute observations below:

It should go without saying that it is capitalism that most defines our national character, not Christianity or the Enlightenment. (Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations-with its arguments for the good of the division of labor, the good of money, and the preeminent good of free trade-was published, after all, in 1776.) As Henry Osborne Havemeyer, president of the sugar trust, acknowledged in 1899, “Business is not a philanthropy…. I do not care two cents for your ethics. I don’t know enough of them to apply them…. As a business proposition it is right to get all out of a business that you possibly can.”

Capitalism has not believed and does not believe in the authority of Christ’s spiritual vision nor does it feel constrained by Kant’s Enlightenment ethic, which argued that human beings should be treated as ends, not means. It can’t even be said to believe in utilitarianism’s calculating approach to belief: “the greatest good for the greatest number.” Such a precept causes good capitalists a sort of painful suspicion that they might be distracted from the immediate goal of maximizing profit. Just how many of these others do I have to benefit? I understand that I am not the keeper of my brothers, at least not all of them, but why should I keep ANY of them?

That is the only certain morality of the so-called Free Market. “Our stockholders deserve a return on the investments they have entrusted with us, and we are honor-bound to maximize that return,” say our captains of industry on CNBC or FOX or Wall Street Week or even The Nightly Business Report on PBS, a little tear of commitment welling in the corner of their eyes. They do not trouble themselves to try to operate under what John Ruskin called “conditions of moral culture,” whether Christian or Enlightenment. Compassion is at most something for private consideration as charity, though even that must be made economically rational as a tax deduction.

…do Christian republicans truly not understand the fundamental ways in which an unfettered corporate capitalism betrays Christ’s ethical vision and their own economic well-being? (It is an astonishing irony that many of these religious anti-Darwinians are in their politics and economics Social Darwinians, with a naïve and self-defeating assumption of the virtue of competition. Of course, the people as Herbert Spencer put it, of the “lowest development” to be “weeded out,” are demonstrably themselves!) Most fantastically, do Christian Republicans really not recognize their own perverse marriage with secular rationalism? Or that there is an unacknowledged alliance between the pragmatic, ultra-rational needs of corporate capitalism and the blarney of Christian cleansing through the “social values” movement?

Ours is a culture in which death has taken refuge in a legality that is supported by both reasonable liberals and Christian conservatives. Our exploitation of humans as “workers” is legal and somehow, weird and perverse though it may seem generally acknowledged as part of our heritage of freedom, and virtually the entire political spectrum falls over itself to praise it. When Wal-Mart pays its employees impoverishing wages without adequate health or retirement benefits, we justify it out of respect for Wal-Mart’s “freedom,” its “reasonable” need to make itself “competitive,” and because what it does is legal. As George Whalin, president of retail Management put it,” They don’t have a responsibility to society to pay a higher wage than the law says you have to pay.” Similarly, our use of the most fantastically destructive military power is also legal and also somehow a part of our heritage of “protecting freedom,” no matter how obscene and destructive its excesses.

Henry David Thoreau found his time so much “out of joint” that he concluded that it was better to cease to exist than t continue in corruption and injustice. As he writes in “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience”: “The people must cease to hold slaves, and to make war on Mexico, though it cost them their existence as a people.” For Thoreau, the moral bearing of the state had reached a point where he was forced to conclude it was no longer itself. As a consequence, Thoreau was not a citizen of the state of Massachusetts. As he put it in a statement to his town clerk: “Know all men by these presents, that I, Henry Thoreau, do not wish to be regarded as a member of any incorporated society which I have not joined.”

Thoreau has something critical to teach us, if we’d let him, about the relation of the personal to the public and of the spiritual to the political. But he’s mostly not available to us. He is shut away with a lot of other books in the virtuous and therapeutic confines of literary and historic institutions. He peers out to us from the pages of his book as another defeated man, another dead white male, as the professors say these days. Our question is whether we any longer know how to retrieve our own traditions from their institutional entombment. This can’t be done by teaching Walden in high school. “Saved” by the American literary canon, Thoreau is a mere dead letter. Thoreau can only be retrieved if find a way to integrate his thought into the way we live as a sort of counterlife opposed to the busy work of the legality of the culture of death. But what is his thought? How would he argue to us if he could?

Thoreau was no Marxist, but he was, like Marx, appalled by what work did to human beings. And by large Thoreau was aware of this human damage without the benefit of experiencing the grim reality of the nineteenth-century English factory. Most of his examples are agrarian, and so his conclusions surprise us, his twenty-first-centaury readers, because we tend to look back at our agrarian past as a kind of utopia lost. What Marx and Thoreau shared with Christ was s sense that “the letter killeth.” What killed was not the letter as Mosaic Law but as secular “legality.” Legality had so saturated the human world that it stood before it as a kind of second nature. But it was a false nature that brought not life but death. The culture of death understood as legality is what Paul Ricoeur (borrowing from Kant) calls “radical evil.” Radical evil is not the individual act of malicious intent; it is the world and its system into which we are born. We take this world up as our own, as if it were our duty to do so.

For Thoreau, the most basic question to ask society is, What kind of human being does it produce? His answer was not optimistic.

…in our community young people are asked to grow up into the following: you will abandon your private intelligence in the name of public stupidity (patriotism in particular) in order to do something dubious as learning to kill other humans? And yet this passes as virtue in our own time and what passed for virtue in Thoreau’s.

We need to ask, as Thoreau and Ruskin did, What are the life-giving things. Such important questions are answered for us in the present by the corporate state, while we are left with the most trivial decisions: what program to watch on TV and what model car to buy.

Gelato

There's a little gelato shop, called Super Frutto on the road that I use to ride my bike to work, and sometimes I'll stop and have one on a warm day. I recently found out that it is run by an acquaintance's sister. Anyway, I've had a sesame seed flavored scoop before, which was an interesting concoction. This cone is oreo cookie and mint chocolate chip-two of my all time favorites.

Night Sakura

I took this picture as I was leaving the Hakusan campus late Tuesday night after our annual "kangekai" (welcome) party for the Law Department. Unfortunately, this year it wasn't held at Chinsanso (the Four Seasons Hotel) in Mejiro, it was on campus in the Sky Hall. Incidentally, at the party my boss introduced me to a well-known and tasty nihonshu (sake) from Niigata: Kubota.

Listening Post: At War With The Mystics

Today's review from The Falming Lips in The Japan Times:

LISTENING POST

RECORDED

The Flaming Lips "At War With the Mystics"

By PATRICK MCCOY

Forget the supposed return to "rock" -- Wayne Coyne and his merry pranksters of indie-dom are as inscrutable as ever on "At War With the Mystics," the Oklahoma-based band's first album in four years. Although they've abandoned the concept-album approach that colored their previous releases, 1999's breakthrough album "The Soft Bulletin" and their biggest-seller "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots" (2002), the Lips still take on many of the Big Themes explored on those two albums.

The Flaming Lips are known for their extravagant production values and in this respect, "At War With the Mystics" doesn't disappoint. They play around with a variety of sounds, creating murky, spacey, goofy noises and glitches, except for "The W.A.N.D.", which is more primal, driven by a heavy guitar riff worthy of The Stooges. Lead singer Coyne obviously had a good time stretching his vocal range, especially when he hits the Prince-like highs on "Free Radicals."

Interesting and enjoyable for sure, but hardly the masterpiece that they have proven capable of producing in the past.