Lost In Translation

Kurikimikage Shrine

This is our neighborhood Shinto shrine, Kurimikage, which is just down the road from our apartment. I expect we'll visit it during New Year's Day this year.

Say Cheese! A History Of The Snapshot

Slate has a really great slide-show essay on the history of the snapshot. Click here to check it out.

Silk

Alessandro Baricco’s Silk is a historical novella about a Frenchman who is a merchant of Silkworms. He travels back and forth to Japan. These trips bring him great wealth and one particular incident with a woman in the court of the nobleman from whom he has his business dealings leads to a lifelong obsession with that brief encounter. It is a poetic short novel that seems to reinforce the “Madame Butterfly” stereotype of the erotic, inscrutable aspects of the orient-the promise of erotic fulfillment. It is almost a short story, but I can see how this could be conceived as a historical drama on the big screen-which it seems to have recenly been adapted for. I found it a bit wanting due to its brevity. No doubt there’s a interesting story that could have been more fully realized.

Low Concept: Celebrating The Films Of Van Damme

Slate has a really funny article, classified as Low Concept, about the the films of our favorite effeminate Belgian action star Jean-Claude Van Damme:

Jean-Claude's other limitation, however, has turned out to be impossible to overcome: He can't act. If that sounds judgmental, then I suggest you watch Universal Soldier, a movie in which both he and Dolph Lundgren play cybernetically enhanced, reanimated corpses. You'd think this was the perfect showcase for Jean-Claude Van Damme, but watching him pit his acting ability against Lundgren's is like watching one of Jerry's Kids get in the ring with Mike Tyson. Even as a zombified killing machine, Jean-Claude is clearly out of his depth.

But he's managed to do a lot with a little. Jean-Claude has three expressions: worried, charming, and doing a split. Of the three, doing a split is the most convincing. Getting crucified in Cyborg? Worried. Disposing of a bomb that could blow up a sacred Muslim shrine and start a jihad in The Order? Really worried. Meeting a spunky lady reporter in any number of movies? Charming. Confronting the hitmen who killed his wife? Do a split.

For a lot of actors, not being able to act would be an obstacle, but Jean-Claude has transformed it into his trademark. Acting? Acting is for weirdos like Forest Whitaker (Bloodsport), Kylie Minogue (Street Fighter), or Kieran Culkin (Nowhere to Run). Jean-Claude is just a normal, average guy, you know? When he fights, he likes to head-butt his opponents and kick them in the nuts, the way normal people fight. His love interests don't look like supermodels or even actresses, they look like the gals you see at commuter bars packing away Bloody Marys and waiting for the 6:45 to Hackensack. In Jean-Claude Van Damme movies, USA Today is the paper of record and foreign countries are where the police are corrupt and you get hassled by immigration. He may be from Belgium, but in his movies, he's an All-American Guy.

Urban Camoflage

Here's an article about some new intriguing fashion designs to elude that overzealous stalker:

Deftly, Ms. Tsukioka, a 29-year-old experimental fashion designer, lifted a flap on her skirt to reveal a large sheet of cloth printed in bright red with a soft drink logo partly visible. By holding the sheet open and stepping to the side of the road, she showed how a woman walking alone could elude pursuers — by disguising herself as a vending machine.

The wearer hides behind the sheet, printed with an actual-size photo of a vending machine. Ms. Tsukioka’s clothing is still in development, but she already has several versions, including one that unfolds from a kimono and a deluxe model with four sides for more complete camouflaging.

Yukaisoukai: Sento

Yukasoukai is a chain sento (public bath) where you can go to soak, get a massage, indulge in aroma therapy, as well as get a bite to eat. There's one just a few minutes down the road in Kurihira.

Microbrew In Japan

There's a good article about microbrew in Japan in The NY Times today:

BEER aficionados who move to Asia discover quickly that they need to scale back their expectations. Major cities offer a fair selection of British and Belgian ales and German Pilseners, but outside of the occasional brewpub, such as Brewerkz in Singapore, there is little in the way of fresh, flavorful beers. And once you head outside of those major cities, your choices often become limited to a Heineken, a Tiger or the local Pilsener.

But there's hope brewing in Japan. Thirteen years after it legalized microbreweries, the country has produced craft brewers who can hold their own with the best that the United States and Europe have to offer. Their pale ales are as refreshingly hoppy as Sierra Nevada, from the United States; their whites are as fruity and fresh as Hoegaarden from Belgium; and their barley wines, in their tendency to mellow and mature over the years into a syrupy, portlike digestif, match up with Thomas Hardy's Ale from England.

Click here to read the rest.

My Year of Flops: Home Of The Brave

I watched Home of the Brave mostly because it was filmed in my hometown of Spokane, Washington, but it was truly a grim picture. Here AV Club reviewer Nathan Rabin takes it to task, with observations like this:

...in a startling scene where Jackson drunkenly invites a bunch of day laborers to his Thanksgiving dinner, launches into a bizarre monologue about Iraq, becomes enraged by his son’s lip ring, and tears it out, then stalks around with a gun. This was clearly supposed to be Jackson’s big Oscar moment, but it’s written and filmed like a PCP freak out in a hysterical ‘70s anti-drug movie. Given the scene’s heavy Death Drug overtones, I guess we should just be grateful that Jackson didn’t kidnap a neighborhood baby, stick it in an oven for an hour or so, then serve it to his mortified family as a “California Cheeseburger.”

Hangover Square

Hangover Square is yet another winning Nick Hornby suggestion from the pages of The Believer Magazine (of which his reviews have been collected in two volumes: The Polysyllabic Spree and Housekeeping vs. The Dirt). It is the story of a group of unemployed people living in Earl’s Court just before the war, spending all day in saloons killing time with drink and waking late everyday with a hangover and no money in their pockets. George Harvey Bone was once a solid citizen, but he has come on hard times and has fallen under the spell of a certain femme fatale Netta, described as thus:

This girl wore her attractiveness not as a girl should, simply, consciously, as a happy crown of pleasure, but rather as a murderous utensil with which she might wound indiscriminately right and left, and which she would only employ to please when it suited her purposes. They were like bad-tempered streetwalkers without walking the street.

At first it was difficult to read this novel as George time and time again played the fool to Netta letting her take advantage of his kindness and devotion. The novel becomes more complex as we learn about George’s spells in which he sort of withdraws and becomes a different person and a plan of revenge emerges. Needless to say I got caught up in the story and felt impressed enough to pick up another Patrick Hamilton novel, The Slaves of Solitude, since I enjoyed this one so much.

Stealing Life: The Crusader Behind "The Wire"

Maybe I have rhapsodized too often here about David Simon’s The Wire, but I'm really excited for the 5th Season slated to air in January. The New Yorker just published a very long and detailed profile on Simon that is accessible online here. Here are a few choice tidbits from the profile:

...“The Wire,” Simon often says, is a show about how contemporary American society—and, particularly, “raw, unencumbered capitalism”—devalues human beings. He told me, “Every single moment on the planet, from here on out, human beings are worth less. We are in a post-industrial age. We don’t need as many of us as we once did. So, if the first season was about devaluing the cops who knew their beats and the corner boys slinging drugs, then the second was about devaluing the longshoremen and their labor, the third about people who wanted to make changes in the city, and the fourth was about kids who were being prepared, badly, for an economy that no longer really needs them. And the fifth? It’s about the people who are supposed to be monitoring all this and sounding the alarm—the journalists. The newsroom I worked in had four hundred and fifty people. Now it’s got three hundred. Management says, ‘We have to do more with less.’ That’s the bullshit of bean counters who care only about the bottom line. You do less with less.”

***

Simon makes it clear that the show’s ambitions were grand. “ ‘The Wire’ is dissent,” he says. “It is perhaps the only storytelling on television that overtly suggests that our political and economic and social constructs are no longer viable, that our leadership has failed us relentlessly, and that no, we are not going to be all right.” He also likes to say that “The Wire” is a story about the “decline of the American empire.” Simon’s belief in the show is a formidable thing, and it leads him into some ostentatious comparisons that he sometimes laughs at himself for and sometimes does not. Recently, he spoke at Loyola College, in Baltimore; he described the show in lofty terms that left many of the students in the audience puzzled—at least, those who had come hoping to hear how they might get a job in Hollywood. In creating “The Wire,” Simon said, he and his colleagues had “ripped off the Greeks: Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides. Not funny boy—not Aristophanes. We’ve basically taken the idea of Greek tragedy and applied it to the modern city-state.” He went on, “What we were trying to do was take the notion of Greek tragedy, of fated and doomed people, and instead of these Olympian gods, indifferent, venal, selfish, hurling lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no reason—instead of those guys whipping it on Oedipus or Achilles, it’s the postmodern institutions . . . those are the indifferent gods.”

***

Critics, meanwhile, have compared the show to a great Victorian novel. The Chicago Tribune, Salon, and the San Francisco Chronicle have called it the best show on television. Jacob Weisberg, writing in Slate, went even further, declaring that “The Wire” was the best American television series that had ever been broadcast: “No other program has ever done anything remotely like what this one does, namely to portray the social, political, and economic life of an American city with the scope, observational precision, and moral vision of great literature.” Sometimes the fan base of “The Wire” seems like the demographics of many American cities—mainly the urban poor and the affluent élite, with the middle class hollowed out.
favorite phrase of David Simon’s is “You can’t make this shit up.” In the opening sequence of the very firs episode of “The Wire,” Jimmy McNulty—the half mensch, half jerk of a Baltimore cop, played by the Britis actor Dominic West—is sitting on a stoop across from a crime scene. McNulty is talking to the compatriot of a dea guy called Snot Boogie, and can’t resist a little philosophizing on the subject of his name: “This kid, whose mama wen to the trouble to christen him Omar Isaiah Betts—you know, he forgets his jacket, so his nose starts runnin’ and som asshole, instead of giving him a Kleenex, he calls him Snot. So he’s Snot forever. It doesn’t seem fair.” Snot Boogi liked to shoot craps with his pals in the neighborhood, it seems, but, every time he did, he’d steal the pot before the en of the game. So why, McNulty wants to know, did they still let him play? “Got to,” his interlocutor answers. “This i America, man.” It was a perfectly crafted setup for Simon’s themes: how inner-city life could be replete with bot casual cruelty and unexpected comedy; how the police and the policed could, at moments, share the same jaundice view of the world; how some dollar-store, off-brand version of American capitalism could trickle down, wit melancholy effect, into the most forsaken corners of American society. But, as it happened, the Snot Boogie story wa real—Simon had heard it, down to the line about America, from a police detective, and it appears in “Homicide: Year on the Killing Streets.” Simon’s gift is in recognizing an anecdote like that for the found parable that it is—“stealing life,” as he once described it to me—and knowing which parts to steal

***

This final season of the show, Simon told me, will be about “perception versus reality”—in particular, what kind of reality newspapers can capture and what they can’t. Newspapers across the country are shrinking, laying off beat reporters who understood their turf. More important, Simon believes, newspapers are fundamentally not equipped to convey certain kinds of complex truths. Instead, they focus on scandals—stories that have a clean moral. “It’s like, Find the eight-hundred-dollar toilet seat, find the contractor who’s double-billing,” Simon said at one point. “That’s their bread and butter. Systemic societal failure that has multiple problems—newspapers are not designed to understand it.”