Lost In Translation

In The iPod: Death Cab For Cutie, Old 97s, Robert Forster

Death cab For Cutie’s new release Narrow Stairs seems a bit more bombastic than usual. However, I think there’s enough of their signature sound that it will please longtime fans.  “I Will Posses Your Heart” is almost a 9-minute jam.  But my favorite tracks are the catchy “No Sunlight”, the heart wrenching “You Can Do Better Than Me,” and “Cath…”

 Another longtime favorite band, The Old 97s has also put out another new release, Blame It On Gravity.  Unfortunately, while The Old 97s can still create some memorable lines and rockin melodies they are well past their creative apex that was seen in Too Far To Care.  Some standouts include “The Color Of A Lonely Heart Is Blue,”   “Dance With Me,” “The Easy Way,” and “This Beautiful Thing.”

I wasn’t a fan of The Go Betweens, but had heard good things about them. Their former lead singer Robert Forster does a decent version of “Tower Of Song” on I’m Your Fan (A Tribute To Leonard Cohen).  Like Cohen, he has a very distinctive voice. Salon recommended his solo album The Evangelist and I have been enjoying it thus far.  I particularly like “The Evangelist,” and “If It Rains.”

The New Cult Canon: Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

The AV Club has lauded another worthy addition to it's New Cult Canon: Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. I really enjoyed this Shane black film due to the great dialogue and great execution by Robert Downey Jr., Val Kilmer, etc...besides you can't go wrong with a hardboiled murder mystery:

Arriving after he had disappeared from the scene for nearly a decade, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is pure, unfiltered Shane Black. It's his directorial debut, and it's a minor revelation. I use the word "minor" not to diminish his achievement, exactly, but to say that the film is basically a show-offy writer's exercise, a feature-length riff on hard-boiled crime fiction, formulaic buddy pictures, and the surreal vapidity of Hollywood. It's all throat-clearing and no opera, sputtering forward in fits and starts, winding through the most loveable shaggy-dog plot this side of The Big Lebowski. A cynic might call it Black's monument to his own cleverness; a fan like myself would call it the same thing, but with a sweeter inflection.

Heading a cast loaded with long-in-the-tooth stars from Black's heyday, Robert Downey Jr. makes an ideal conduit for the smug, hyperkinetic dialogue, which doesn't wait around after laugh lines for viewers to catch up. (Hence the film's high rewatch value, and its mushrooming cult status.) He plays the knockabout hero and voiceover narrator, Harry Lockhart, and when the storytelling gets a little bumpy, he breaks the fourth wall and admonishes the audience: "I don't see another narrator, so pipe down." 

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Above all, the film is a celebration of language, often to the point where it indulges in hilariously wonky word-splicing, like when Harry and Perry have a fight about the proper use of an adverb. Fifty years ago, Black would have been right at home penning scripts for post-war noirs and gritty B-pictures, where stylized dialogue was more than just a means to connect one giant action setpiece to another. Until Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, his words were effectively buried in the big-budget obscenities of the day; here, he finally got the chance to express himself fully, but Warner Brothers quietly shuffled the film into theaters as if it were an embarrassment. (This in spite of mostly very kind reviews.) There are enough memorable lines to stock the lion's share of blockbusters made during Black's self-imposed hiatus. A few favorites:

"She's been fucked more times than she's had hot meals."

"Go. Sleep badly. If you have any questions, hesitate to call."

"I think you wouldn't know where to feed yourself if you didn't flap your mouth so much."

"Did your dad love you?" "Well, he used to beat me in Morse code, so it's possible, but he never said the words."

And so on. Watching Kiss Kiss Bang Bang prompts wishes that Hollywood still had screenwriters talented enough to use explosion-filled trash as a means for personal expression. More improbably, it also prompts nostalgia for the glory days of the buddy comedy, which can really zing when the right actors bounce the right dialogue off each other. Not every project allows writers to examine the clichés they're generating—in that way and others, the film is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for Black, and one he's earned—but we're now in an age where the cost of making movies is obscene, yet prominent, highly paid screenwriters with Black's abilities are nonexistent.

Chinau Achebe

There's a tribute to Chinau Achebe and his great novel, Things Fall Apart, in the New Yorker.  I've read also a book of his essays, Hopes and Impediments, as well and find him to be an intriguing critic as well as an accomplished novelist. Here's an excerpt:

The myth holds another lesson as well—one that has been fundamental to the career of Achebe, who has been called “the patriarch of the African novel.” There is danger in relying on someone else to speak for you: you can trust that your message will be communicated accurately only if you speak with your own voice. With his masterpiece, “Things Fall Apart,” one of the first works of fiction to present African village life from an African perspective, Achebe began the literary reclamation of his country’s history from generations of colonial writers. Published fifty years ago—a new edition has just appeared, from Anchor ($10.95)—it has been translated into fifty languages and has sold more than ten million copies.

Penguin Classics: All My Sons

All My Sons by Arthur Miller is another volume form the Penguin Classics library.  I really was impressed by his seminal plays Death of A Salesman and The Crucible, but I haven’t read anything else by him, so I decided to check this out.  It is a sort of classic family tragedy that Miller makes into a sort of classic American tragedy.  It has all the elements: lies, subterfuge, hubris, delusions and denial.  A family friend Herbert Dever takes the fall for Joe Keller when parts from their machine shop prove to be defective causing the death of many men. Keller escapes the punishment and becomes a wealthy man.  Several of these themes would be further developed in Death of a Salesman: fathers and sons, business ethics and personal morality. The question at the center of this play is what is acceptable to do in business for the sake of family that is engaging in morally suspect business, for example designing missiles designed to kill people for MacDonald Douglass.  This seems to be one issue that doesn’t seem ambiguous to me; there are plenty of things one can do to pay the bills that don’t compromise one's morally.

The Frugal Traveler: The Grand Tour

The NY Times' frugal traveler Matt Gross is going to Europe this summer:

This summer, the Frugal Traveler is embarking on the Grand Tour, reimagining the classic European journey as a budget-minded, modern-day jaunt. Over 12 weeks and on less than 100 euros a day, Matt Gross will circle the continent in search of cool hotels, memorable meals and contemporary culture. New columns and videos will be posted every Thursday, with updates and frugal tips throughout the week.

In 1992 I undertook a similar journey, so I will be watching closely and comparing it to my experience. We also took the ferry from Dover to Calais, and continued onto Amsterdam and then activated our Eurail passes and started our six week journey around Europe.  

When Did Reagan Stop Sucking?

I’m not sure how it happened but Ronald Reagan has become respectable if not lauded as one of the great presidents. It’s bad enough that Nixon was praised for opening China when he died, rather than reprimanded for Watergate and secret bombings in Laos. So, now, too, we have “the great communicator” who brought America together and toppled the evil empire, rather than the doddering president who fired air traffic controllers rather than meet their labor demands, who allowed the Iran Contra Affair to happen on his guard, and who supported bloody anti-Communist movements in Central America.  Perhaps it was a time of peace and prosperity. There’s a new book out that tries to explain this that was reviewed in Salon called The Age of Reagan written by liberal historian Sean Wilentz:

Between Ronald Reagan's last year of presidential office in 1989 and his death in 2004, a strange transformation took place within the Washington Post. I only noticed when, in a fit of masochism, I began to plow through the paper's coverage of Reagan's state funeral. As expected, there were the usual encomiums from Krauthammer and Will and Novak -- no different in kind than what they'd been churning out for a quarter-century -- but where was the other side? After decades of antagonism to Republican presidents in general and Reagan in particular, Post reporters, analysts, columnists and editorialists were sprinting -- practically elbowing each other out of the way -- to apotheosize a man they had never even liked, let alone endorsed.

I finally had to call my brother in Chicago and ask: "When did Reagan stop sucking?"

  

I also heard a reference from a liberal critic on Slate’s Culture podcast saying that Reagan was one of our great presidents although with reservation.  It seems unthinkable to me.  Perhaps there was a time of peace and prosperity but for whom our family of six was just getting by on our father’s modest salary. I have no great memories of the Regan era being better than the Clinton era or any other time of being alive, but knowing about all the corruption and misguided foreign policy it's hard to canonize Regan in my opinion.

28 Weeks Later

I really enjoyed Danny Boyle’s breakout hit 28 Days Later the first time around. It looks like it’s becoming a franchise with 28 Months Later, which I recently saw. It picks up where the last one left off and England has been quarantined and is being rebuilt with the help from the American military, one of the commanders Idris Elba seems out of place for me since he played Stringer bell on The Wire. The always-reliable Robert Carlyle stars as one of the survivors who is haunted by an incident where he was forced to leave his wife behind as they were attacked by zombies. I don’t to give too much away but it's a clever screenplay by Alex Garland with a lot of action and suspense. There’s plenty of great cinematography and amazing locations in London.

Penguin Classics: Common Sense

I recently learned that Meiji University has the English language Penguin Classics collection in their library for lending. So I will supplement some classic literature to my reading diet. At first I chose some slimmer volumes like Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. I’ve been wanting to read something by this American radical for sometime and given his connection with America’s independence and the recent viewing of John Adams made it seem like the right time to visit it. There’s a comprehensive introduction by Isaac Kramnick that provides a lot of useful information and background details about Paine and the context from which this writing was produced. His radical sense of equality and anti-hereditary ideas seemed to have influenced the do-it-yourself frontier spirit or vice versa. I find it interesting to learn that John Adams was truly a conservative at heart and was distrustful of Paine. He is a man of reason, a secular humanist who felt that science and reason ought to reign, and therefore eminently admirable in my mind.

Dice-K 2.0

ESPN has an interesting in-depth article on Japanese-Iranian pitching sensation Yu Darvish. It turns out that his father was a student at EWU (Eastern Washington University in Cheney, Washington). This is significant because it is 15 miles outside of Spokane, WA my hometown, also my father's alma matter and the employer of my brother-in-law. Anyway, Darvish is the best pitcher in Japan right now:

SAPPORO, Japan -- The Sapporo Dome's sellout crowd of 42,126 (not counting 45 assorted cheerleaders -- yes, 45 cheerleaders!) bangs Thunderstix and howls for Yu Darvish as he fires his 124th pitch of the game. The pitch snaps the bat in half -- the long end sails toward the mound and bounces off the dirt -- as Darvish calmly fields the ball. Taking his time, he tosses the ball to first to complete a four-hit, 10-strikeout 1-0 shutout on opening day for the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters. The best pitcher in Japan slaps his glove against his teammates' hands, walks to the dugout and exchanges a high-five with the club's costumed mascot and ...

Palestine

I recently read the graphic comic novel Palestine by Joe Sacco. Sacco goes to Israel (the West Bank and the Gaza strip circa 1992) to find inspiration for a comic series based on his interviews of Palestinians in order to get the other side of the Israeli-Palestine problem. He adds his personal commentary and shows himself warts in all, he has little trouble accepting the hospitality of refugees who invite him into their home and feed him. But I feel as though he loses part of his argument since he doesn’t present enough context to what is a very complex question. Obviously, killing and jailing kids for throwing rocks, forcibly bulldozing homes, harassment, torture, and intimidation are wrong and unjustifiable. But what led to those policies? For example, are we to assume every person that he interviews that says that he ahs been to jail is innocent? Because there are Palestine revenge killings against collaborators, suicide bombings, and terrorism. Both sides have blood on their hands. In fact, he sort of addresses this issue when he befriends two Israeli architects on vacation in Jerusalem late in the book, but acknowledges it would take another book to present the Israeli side of things. But Sacco does have a point about the Palestinian cause being underrepresented in the American media, since the government is so pro-Israeli. I have an Aussie friend who has adopted the Palestinian situation as his pet clause, which is somewhat incomprehensible since he is of Irish descent and there seem to plenty of more clear cut cause to rally around. I think it has something to do with anti-American government feelings that often crop up with certain Brits, Aussies, and so forth. Especially given that they have done the same things to the aborigines but somehow that doesn’t compute with my friend. Anyway, a fascinating personal look at complicated situation.