Lost In Translation

Another Sopranos Review

Salon's Heather Havrilesky writes a detailed analysis of the latest Sporanos episode in her column, I Like To Watch (it goes without saying that if you haven't seen this episode don't read on):

The paranoia and dread that start to unnerve Tony would be enough, but the beauty of David Chase's writing is that he builds layers of meaning around the first, most obvious one, and toys with our sense of Tony and Paulie as blood relatives. As Tony and Paulie spend a night out with Beansie and some very young hookers, Paulie prattles on endlessly about old memories they've shared, including loose talk about a "mysterious" death (wink, wink), until Tony gets a sick look on his face. His discomfort is so obvious that Beansie asks him if he's feeling OK. Tony says yeah, but Paulie presses him. "You sure, T? Because you're being kinda quiet."

"That's because 'Remember when' is the lowest form of conversation," Tony responds, and gets up from the table. But is Tony only worried that Paulie can't keep quiet and that will eventually get them in trouble? Or is he experiencing the claustrophobic angst of someone who realizes that he's tied to someone he finds deeply irritating, for better or worse, for the rest of his life? There's something sad about the fact that, to Paulie, those old memories are something to be treasured and replayed over and over again, while to Tony, they're just a nuisance, a reminder of how old he is and how few decisions in his life were actually his own. Tony has always felt that he was cornered into this fate, that he's never actively chosen this existence, even if he hasn't actively resisted it either.

Ending the episode with Tony and Paulie renting a boat to go deep-sea fishing was a particularly torturous maneuver. Haunted by the memories of how Big Pussy met his end on a similar boat, Paulie becomes fearful and stiff -- and so do we. Tony glances at an ax mounted to the side of the boat as Paulie fidgets. Later, Tony gazes at a knife for cleaning the fish. Is he really going to murder Paulie, a man who's been like an uncle to him (albeit a pesky one) for most of his life?

Even with all of the other times Tony has been forced to murder someone close to him because it was best for the business or best for his own family, even compared to cousin Tony Blundetto and Big Pussy, this situation seems different than the others. Tony B. was a total wreck, Ralphie and Richie (whom Tony only considered murdering -- Janice took care of that one for him) were downright awful human beings, and Big Pussy was an informant. If Tony chose to murder Paulie (or Sil or Christopher, for that matter) out of the blue, it would trump all of his other brutal maneuvers to date. We recognize this in Tony's eyes when he looks at Paulie. Although Beansie reassures Tony that Paulie is loyal and doesn't have his own family to fill out his life, we know from experience that Paulie can be as disloyal as the next guy.

Paulie may just be another self-centered schmuck and it may make the most sense to get rid of him, but that doesn't mean Tony is capable of doing it. And even if Tony does do it eventually, it won't just haunt him -- it could undo him completely.

Cultural Referee

Kate Elwood's latest Cultural Conundrums column in The Daily Yomiuri is about mediating cultural misunderstanding like this:

The other day, I had an experience that reminded me of this type of episode. I was at a Japanese traditional restaurant for dinner with some colleagues to celebrate the successful completion of a project. Suddenly, the manager of the restaurant, a middle-aged woman in a kimono, urgently inquired, "Is there an English speaker in the house?" Well, actually, those were not her precise words, but the upshot was that she was having a problem with a foreign customer and wanted me to sort it out. Another colleague, a Japanese man, came along with me, perhaps out of curiosity, perhaps because he thought it might be a situation requiring the expertise of two English speakers.

It turned out that the customer had finished eating and was in the process of paying his bill. However, he objected to one item he was being charged for. This was the tsukidashi, an appetizer. As is the custom in Japan, it had been brought along with the beer the man had ordered. In some restaurants and pubs, this appetizer may be included in the price of the beer or other drink, but in others, especially if the appetizer is somewhat elaborate, a separate payment will be expected. In this particular restaurant, the appetizer was gorgeous and the cost for it was rather high.

In fact, both sides of the dispute had enough knowledge of the other's language to comprehend the basic situation. The customer asserted that he had not ordered the appetizer and had not been told when it was brought to him that he would be charged extra for it. The manager pointed out that he had not asked anything about it and had in fact eaten it. The customer then countered that it was unethical to not be up-front about costs, and explained that, not knowing about the appetizer, he had ordered a separate fish dish "to be nice."

As they spoke indignantly, both parties looked at me and my colleague, and as I translated what each said for the benefit of the other, they nodded in irritation. I had thought I had been summoned for language support but that was not really needed. Each side wanted me to agree that their viewpoint was the more reasonable one and to help convince the other of the rightness of their opinion. The manager and customer were each comfortable their moral outrage. Perched on the fence and seeing both points of view, I was the awkward one. This was suddenly seeming a lot trickier than preventing someone from choking.

My colleague made an admirable stab, I thought, at trying to enable the customer to see the charge for the appetizer not as a pernicious attempt to deprive him of his money through unfair means but rather as a normal fee that might apply in the customer's own country, by asking him to view it as a table charge. This might have worked if it had been translated as such right from the start, but the man knew it was not really a table charge and rejected this invitation to shift perspective.

We were all getting a bit weary and I thought longingly of my own nice food and beer waiting for me back with my other colleagues. Both sides were unwilling to admit that their position was wrong or at least not the only way to look at the situation. But they did finally agree to a compromise of the customer paying half of the charge for the appetizer. Whew! My stint at refereeing the cultural clash in progress was at an end. My colleague and I returned to our own table.

***

When I told some other colleagues about the tsukidashi incident, one of them said that when he went out with non-Japanese he translated tsukidashi as an "obligatory delicacy." This phrase has a nice ring to it. And the fascinating concept of mandated delicious tidbits seems like a useful and positive approach to all cultural conundrums. Approaching a different culture, there are things we must deal with--they are obligatory--but they are also delicacies. The beer that comes with them is nice, too.

A Better Place Here on Earth: Jonestown and Jesus Camp

I recently saw two religious themed documentaries, Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple and Jesus Camp. The irony is that I could relate more to the people in the Jonestown documentary than the people in Jesus Camp. Jonestown was a cult, in that Jim Jones needed to control his followers, but they were happy to let him do it. They thought they had a found a better life on earth. One that didn’t discriminate, one in which people supported each other financially and spiritually, but Jones grew on the power and kept people busy in order to better manipulate them, had sex with several of the followers, staged healings and increasingly felt the need to control every aspect of his followers lives. This culminated in building a compound outside of America in Guyana in South America in the middle of the jungle. Then it eventually resulted in the death of over 900 people who followed Jones bidding and allowed themselves to be poisoned. The surviving members of the People Temple interviewed didn’t seem like fanatics, but rather naïve idealists. It was about building a better life here on earth and they actually did things to make life better for the followers. It is a very American story and a very tragic one at that.

Jesus Camp is a look at an evangelical summer camp for children. I found all the people to be simple minded and uneducated-it seemed as all of their opinions were being fed to them by the likes of Ted Haggard (pre-crystal meth homosexual sex revelations). The kids were being home schooled by parents with a high school education to question global warming and extol the wisdom of creationism. The kids seemed to be mimicking the adults and giving them the religious speak that they wanted to hear. One rat-tailed boy who is one of the main subjects in the film says he was born again at 5! Just didn’t think there was anything left in life-pretty cynical 5 year old. One girl was at the bowling alley and on the street trying “to save” people. There is preaching against Harry Potter at the camp and a special visit to the camp by an anti abortion propagandist. There seems to be some speaking in tongues, and a whole lot of crying and breast beating-as if children have dark secrets to expose about their dark sins like talking back to their parents, etc…The film culminates in the convergence of nationalism with religion as a cardboard cut out of bush is brought out and the influence of a Christian in the Whitehouse is a common topic of preaching and conversation. Who are these people? Is this what America has become? What happened to religions helping people by building orphanages and giving to the poor? Now they are more interested in saving the lives of unborn children and ignore them once they are born to struggle in ghettoes with absent fathers, poverty, crime, and drugs closing in. I don't necessarily see these people creating a better life in this society-they are too worried about the possibility of an afterlife to consider that.

Ari Gold / Shark

Here's an entertaining write up of this week 's episode of Entourage from Slate that I fully agree with:

Entourage is one of those shows in which the fun is actually inherent. Studio 60, among its missteps, presented the entertainment industry as a place of high moral purpose—a point of view contrary to the very premise of the HBO hit, which features a rising actor named Vince (Adrian Grenier) and his posse as they make moves, chase women, and match egos. When American showbiz regards itself in a mocking mirror, it often recognizes venality of a distinctly adult sort, zeroing in on bottom lines and sophisticated lies. Such is the view shared by satires including Robert Altman's The Player and Jake Kasdan's new The TV Set. But Entourage is less a satire of Hollywood than its burlesque (crossed, let's say, with an extended riff on male vanity), and it takes a different tack. They say, and will always keep on saying, that Hollywood is high school with money. Brilliantly, Entourage offers a whole lot of high school. It's hormonal and antsy, and its takes on status would be right at home in the lunchroom. The show hit a peak last Sunday when Ari Gold (Jeremy Piven), Vince's erstwhile agent and the true star of the show, experienced a … well, what to call it? His outburst combined elements of a tantrum, a sermon, a drill sergeant's bark, and an instant of revelation. In any case, it was a crucial moment for Ari and a bravura one for Piven.

Ari had been more distraught than a spurned lover since Vince fired him, and his depression was affecting his work. He passed up the chance to sign a superstar writer because, in an unprecedented triumph of morality, he refused to let the guy take sexual advantage of Lloyd, his loyal assistant. Then he found himself unable to fire Rob, an underperforming underling, merely because he had just emerged from eye surgery and moaned that his wife had just left him. Ari worried that he had lost his ruthlessness and so consulted with his marriage counselor, interrupting her at her golf club: "I want my edge back. I need my anger and I need it now!" And then, erupting with rage at his shrink, he had his anger back, and he was at a crossroads. Ari looked into his soul or the absence thereof, made a choice, and went back to office.

The scene—Ari firing Rob as disrespectfully as possible in a conference room filled with his colleagues—was bookended nicely. Charging out the office elevator, sweaty with mania, eyes open for nothing but his prey, he crashed into the cart of a mailroom guy and rebounded with a triumphant gesture of good health and a snap of the finger. And strutting out of the conference room after the dismissal, radiant with attitude, he did not break a stride when snatching a candy bar from the hand of plumpish employee. He said it matter-of-factly: "Skip it, Jenny." If you've seen Shark Week on the Discovery Channel, then you know that they're beautiful animals.

Temple In Chiba

This temple is near Nihon University in Chiba.

Love Hotels & The Unreality of Sex

I saw this interestingly puritan review of a photgraphy book on love hotels in Japan recently in Japan Today:

Love Hotels By Misty Keasler (photographs)

Review by CB Liddell

If you want to get a handle on Japanese society, you can always waste your time going to the nearest tourist office and picking up a load of brochures on cormorant fishing, Zen meditation and flower arranging.

A better way to achieve an understanding of the country, however, is to look at common aspects of social behavior that are unlikely to be featured in tourist pamphlets. One of the most revealing of these is the phenomenon of love hotels, the subject of this book by the Texas-based photographer Misty Keasler, whose work has also appeared in prestigious magazines like Harpers, Dwell, and Time.

Although “explaining the Japanese” does not seem to have been the driving force behind Keasler’s photographs, there is undoubtedly a lot we can learn from the surroundings that the Japanese choose for their most intimate moments. The most obvious is the fact that, under the influence of passion, people’s good taste apparently deserts them. Where else would you take pleasure in fluorescent pictures of whales and a sofa in the shape of a condom?

This and other examples of Las-Vegas style excess — like a lobby with a Santa mannequin playing piano or a hallway lined with actual trees — might have a kitschy appeal that Westerners can at least understand. But what are we to make of the Hello Kitty SM room? While sadomasochism is as much a time-honored tradition in the West as anywhere else, conflating it with a lovable children’s character seems peculiarly odd.

Although Keasler is content to push the button with no comment on her subjects (most of which are located in the Kansai area), the book also features a well-written introductory essay by one of Japan’s top thriller authors, Natsuo Kirino, who is becoming increasingly renowned in the West through translations of novels like “Out.”

“I think the real reason behind the development of the love hotel system in Japan can be found in the 'ie,’ or traditional family system,” she writes, explaining that the demimonde of adultery, prostitution and guilt-free sexual liaisons — the bread and butter to the love hotel business — is the flip side of the country’s rigid family structure, which sees unwed mothers accounting for a mere 0.2% of all births.

“A dual system develops, in which a person’s emotions are divided into two separate spheres, public and private,” Kirino explains. The public sphere means maintaining one’s “official position” as a father, husband, mother, or wife, while the private sphere is “a secret space set aside solely for sex.”

The interesting point about love hotels is that they cater to this “private” aspect in a very public way and give it clear and unambiguous forms. This means that anyone with a few thousand yen can, in effect, gain access to the nation’s sexual subconscious and capture it on film. The result is another PR disaster for Japan, as Keasler’s snaps reveal that sex here is heavily reliant on titillating perversion.

“Did love hotels come about because the Japanese like sex so much?” Kirino asks rhetorically. “Not really. They lack the energy or physical stamina ... when Japanese have sex, they need a sense of unreality accompanying it.”

Examples of the “unreality accompanying it” include gynecological chairs, a bondage crucifix, a caged chamber with a potty training toy, a “Subway Room” ideal for acting out chikan fantasies, and a schoolroom complete with chalkboard, desks, uniform and, erm, manacles.

The picture that emerges is not a pretty one and suggests that male fantasy is the driving force. This is not surprising, as it’s usually men who pick up the bill. The result is that mainstream sexual activity in Japan, taking its cue from sex clubs and prostitution, is becoming something increasingly weird and unnatural.

The comedian Woody Allen once asked, “Is sex dirty?” before replying, “Only if it’s done right.” In Japan “doing it right” involves the possibility of a woman being manacled on top of a Hello Kitty bedspread or being led into the “Alien Abduction Play Area.”

April 6, 2007

Love Hotels by Misty Keasler (photographs)
Published by Chronicle Books
4,438 yen
0811856410

Nihon University-College of Industrial Technology

The Nihon University College of Indusrial Technology in Narashino, Chiba is another new job. Nihon Unviersity has 15 campuses and is the largest University in Japan. I can't say that the students are totally in love with English, but they're not bad and the pay is more than sufficient to justify the hour plus commute.

The Amis Inheritance

There's a long and interesting article about the famous literary father and son, Kingsley and Martin Amis, in the NY Times Magazine this week:

Kingsley Amis, an indelible figure in British letters, is the subject of an immense and sympathetic new biography by Zachary Leader (published this month in the United States) that has already caused a stir in England both by reminding readers of how funny Kingsley could be and because of its frankness about his personal life. (Leader is a friend of Martin’s, who encouraged him to write the book and put no restrictions on him.) Martin, meanwhile, who published his first novel when he was just 24, has recently brought out his 10th, “House of Meetings,” and at 57 is arguably writing better than Kingsley was at the same age. He is a more daring and inventive novelist than his father — unafraid in “London Fields,” for example, to wheel out the whole tool chest of postmodern tricks — and in books like “Money,” about a would-be filmmaker spiraling out of control on both sides of the Atlantic, nearly as funny but on a much bigger canvas.

Martin likes to say that he is of an age now when looking at himself in the mirror in the morning is like watching a low-budget horror movie with particularly lurid special effects. In fact, he has maintained most of the brooding good looks that were his trademark as a young man, though the “rug,” as Amis characters tend to call not a toupee but their own head of hair, is going a little thin on top. He wears black a lot and goes in for that dandified Brit touch of French cuffs without cufflinks. “I really do think I was blessed by Kingsley in that I really don’t get worked up or upset the way many of my contemporaries do,” he said over lunch a couple of months ago in New York, speaking in a slow, mid-Atlantic drawl in which the vowels are sometimes elongated for emphasis. “I never thought it was anything out of the way being a writer, but for them it’s been a struggle for legitimacy. It doesn’t astound me that I’m a writer, because what your dad does is banal by definition. It never seemed a big deal.”

Incidently, there's also a long piece reviewing the new biography about Kingsley Amis by Zachary Leader in The New Yorker this week as well:

Zachary Leader’s “The Life of Kingsley Amis” (Pantheon; $39.95) is a better biography than many bigger writers have had: detailed, sympathetic, unsparing without being unkind. Amis, Leader makes clear, had to work earnestly to become as bilious as he became. Born in 1922, Amis came from a tight, suburban lower-middle-class family, the accoutrements—small house, small money, paper-thin walls—closer to what Americans think of as poor, but the attitudes firmly respectable-professional; his father, whom he called “the most English human being I have ever known,” was a clerk in the office of Colman’s, the mustard-makers. This was probably, at least from a literary point of view, among the most oppressed classes in human history, or at least had the worst inferiority complex: never self-lionized, like the working classes, permanently snubbed and mocked by the uppers and even the upper-middles.

***

Every country’s difficult literary guys are different, and you know from experience how to handle the kind you’ve grown up with. Reading Geoffrey Wolff’s excellent biography of the truly ornery American writer John O’Hara, you sense that you could have managed him, for one night with a mixture of office-adulter gossip and writerly mumbling about advances and sales. But when you come to the super-ornery English novelist Kingsley Amis you realize that you have no idea what you could possibly have said to get through an evening. Office gossip would be bound to hit a clunker, publishing talk would seem vulgar this is a writer who devotes an entire chapter of his memoirs to the minor American Jewish humorist Leo Rosten in order to tear him apart, because, on the one evening Amis spent with him, Rosten (a) didn’t give him enough to drink and (b) misused the English expression “local” to mean a nearby restaurant instead of a neighborhood pub. With someone like that, you just hide under the sofa, or hope you never run into him at all.

I have been a big Martin Amis fan since college, despite some miststeps in his writing in the last 15 years (Night Train, Korba The Dread, etc...), however, I am enough of a fan that I did read his memoir Experience. I've also read Kingsley Amis' most famous novel, Lucky Jim. And I suppose I ought to at least read his Booker Prize winner Old Devils as well. Martin mentioned some others in his memoir that made me want to read those too, but, I can't call to mind the titles at the moment.

Attraction To "Adult" Women

I was reminded of this post, by Marxy at Neomarxisme, about the allure of adult women in relation to girls when I went to the gym today and saw that they had a video promoting hip hop dance at the gym. In the video there were several young girls, about 8-10, gyrating their hips and executing sesnual "adult" hip hop moves. It was a bit disturbing in the JonBenet Ramsey sort of way. Let's leave the hip hop dancing to the girls who have at least reached puberty. Whatever happened to ballet for prepubescents anyway? Here's the intro from the post:

With nine-year old girls in thong bikinis currently leading the march of eroticism in Japan (or at least grabbing the most real estate in der Zeitgeist), refined culture magazine for urban professionals Brutus has decided to come out and remind its readers that "adult" women can also be beautiful. The idea is a bit of radical contrarianism, for sure, but such sensational headlines are known to move copies. Relatively young and over-make-up'd Kashii Yuu graces the cover, but the main feature exhibits portrait shots of various older and professional Japanese women that buck the recent infantile gravity of beauty standards. From the Brutus website:

As seen in the rush of new women's magazines starting publication, this is an era of diverse ways in which women can "shine." From catchphrases such as "You've graduated from trying to attract boys (mote)" and "Adult, but cute (kawaii)," more focus is being put on "adult" women. Beauty comes from refinement, intelligence, and a strong will. The keyword for the charming female image is "adult" for men - and maybe for females as well. Our sessions with famous photographers are full of charming beautiful women. In this special feature, adult women are beautiful!

Old Joy

Old Joy is a film about nothing, not literally, but it is a simple film where two old friends from Portland, Oregon decide to camp in the Cascades and then visit a hot spring. Daniel London and William Oldham (indie musician and actor) play the long time friends. I think the story is more about the unspoken or rather not fully communicated aspects of the friendship. London plays the more responsible and settled character-he is about to have a child with his wife, his car is more reliable, a Volvo, and he has been volunteering in the community. The Oldham character shows up with a wagon and some borrowed items, his van isn’t running well, he still seems to be struggling through life looking for his place. They drink beer smoke pot and talk about the past and present in a roundabout manner. There seems to be a bit of tension between the two when the Oldham character tries to apologize for some past transgression, but it never reveals exactly what it is. He also expresses his admiration for London later at the hot spring when tells him he respects what he is doing with his volunteering. London reveals some of what he feels about Oldham when he calls his wife to tell her that they are going to be late since Oldham can’t remember where the hot spring is and says “you know how he is.” The pace is quite slow and relaxed as shots of slugs, wildlife, and nature are interspersed throughout the film. I think I can relate to these characters because they remind me of people that I went to college with who are about the same ages as these characters. Oregon looks similar to Washington State and my college friends and I used to go camping almost every summer, but we’ve fallen out of practice. Then again, I don’t always visit in the summer, others have kids and other responsibilities-so we don’t do it anymore. It is a subtle slow moving film that creates a sort of pace that reminds me of early Jim Jarmusch films. The film also boasts a great Americana soundtrack by Yo La Tengo. The film was based on a short story by director Kelly Riechardt. It’s not for everyone, but it comes across as a small pleasure to me-less than 80 minutes long, however, it produces thoughtful introspection..