Lost In Translation

Ben Gibbard Talks To Mark Kozelek

The AV Club has an interesting discussion between two great artists that both have cool records out at the moment:

Mark Kozelek (Red House Painters, Sun Kil Moon) and Ben Gibbard (Death Cab For Cutie, The Postal Service) are terrific songwriters who are also friends. That's why The A.V. Club figured it would be fun to have the have the latter phone the former and interview him about the new releases on his Caldo Verde imprint: April, Kozelek's first album of original material since 2003's Ghosts Of The Great Highway, and Nights Of Passed Over, a recently updated lyric book accompanied by a disc featuring alternate and live takes of songs like "Carry Me Ohio" and "Wop-A-Din-Din." Gibbard can be heard singing on April—Kozelek's third full-length as Sun Kil Moon, the moniker he adopted after retiring the Red House Painters name, following 2001's Old Ramon. The album finds Kozelek in his usual reflective mood, with a particular emphasis on his ex-girlfriend and muse Katy, who died several years ago from cancer. Their conversation eventually turns to Gibbard and Narrow Stairs—Death Cab's new album, which is due out May 13—as well as their forays into acting, including Kozelek's memorable turn as Stillwater bassist Larry Fellows in Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous, and Gibbard's appearance in John Krasinski's forthcoming adaptation of David Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews With Hideous Men.

Yakuza: Big In Japan

There was an interesting article about the yakuza in The Washington Post supplement of today's Daily Yomiuri:

I have spent most of the past 15 years in the dark side of the rising sun. Until three years ago, I was a crime reporter for the Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan's largest newspaper, and covered a roster of characters that included serial killers who doubled as pet breeders, child pornographers who abducted junior high-school girls, and the John Gotti of Japan.

28 Minutes In Hell

The Odakyu line is jam packed to over 100% capacity every morning, and twice a week I have to suffer all the way to Shinjuku...28 minutes with a briefcase lodged in your ass, as you sample body odor, bad breath, and stifling heat. It could be worse...an hour...

Persepolis 2: The Story Of A Return

I recently finished reading the follow-up to Persepolis with Persepolis 2: The Story Of A Return by Marjane Satrapi. The film covered both books and beyond. But I enjoyed revisiting the story of Satrapi returning home and trying to find out who she is she is. She is torn by her culture, her intellect, and her emotions. It is a story that shows warts and all. It also shows how difficult it must have been to live in such a repressive culture. It is inconceivable to me to put up with the strict Islamic laws and lack of personal freedom. I guess we take a lot for granted. Satrapi had to learn a lot of her life lessons the hard way-it must also be difficult to be so head strong and always have to do things your own way despite the consequences.

In The iPod: Portishead, Elvis, and R.E.M.

I recently acquired three albums by artists who have been around for a while, but all three seem to have been more or less successful with their latest products of inspiration.

Portishhead made a couple of interesting atmospheric trip-hop albums about 10 years ago, Dummy and Portishead. Their follow up, Third, is heavily influenced by that electric, atmospheric sound that is most effect as background music for me. I’m not sure there are any other bands that still fall under the “trip-hop” moniker and it seems Portishead was never comfortable with this label, but it is an interesting listen and can be classified as a success.

I was excited to hear that Elvis Costello and the Imposter’s new album, Momofuku, was recorded with Jenny Lewis of Rilo Kiley (she has become one of my favorite artists with her band, solo, and projects like this and The Postal Service). It turns out that most of her presence is limited to background vocals, which is OK, since the material is quite strong. It isn’t among my favorites, but it sis a solid album. It is impressive that Costello can continue to make music of consequence.

I have to admit that I was much more suspect about the new R.E.M. album Accelerate, which many people have cited as a return to classic form. Although I won’t go that far, I will admit it is one of the better post-Life’s Rich Pageant albums. I agree with the guys at Flowering Toilet about R.E.M. (check out this post with two downloads from “So Much Younger Then” a classic bootleg from 1981), they were a defining band of my youth that slipped into mediocrity early on and haven’t really risen out of that designation in my opinion. Again, that being said this is one of their better efforts in some time.

The New Cult Canon: The Rules Of Attraction

I really liked The Rules of Attraction, in fact I liked it so much, I read the Brett Eason Ellis novel AFTER seeing it. And I liked that equally as well. Then again I liked Killing Zoe as well. The AV Club's Scott Tobias gets the best parts right, this one:

The key point is that Sean, Lauren, and Paul—and by extension, perhaps, Gen-X'ers of a certain age and social station—are solitary bodies, not accessible or knowable to the people with whom they come into contact. In the film's brightest moments, Avary puts their individual isolation in thrilling visual terms, starting with an opening sequence that introduces them at a party by following one character for a stretch, then rewinding time to focus on another. The effects are as fun to watch as a ball-and-paddle set in 3D—vomit projecting back into a drunkard's mouth, scattered pool balls zipping into their original formation, etc.—but they also give the impression of people who occupy the same space, but are fundamentally disconnected. Then there's this incredible split-screen sequence of Sean and Lauren meeting in a school hall, set to the strains of Donovan's "Colours":

And this one:

Still, cult movies are often remembered more for scenes and sequences than they are as complete works, and in the DVD age, where chapter stops isolate the highlights, The Rules Of Attraction offers plenty of re-watch value. Avary loads his screenplay with spiky bits of comedy—Sean bedding a girl by passing off a Counting Crows song as his own acoustic creation; a line about the age of consent ("Old enough to pee, old enough for me") that's shocking enough to repulse even predators like Sean and Victor; Lauren's roommate (a luscious Jessica Biel) explaining the difference between "bulimic skinny" and "anorexic skinny"—and he captures Ellis' collegiate wasteland perfectly in broad strokes, even though he misses some of the particulars. But mostly, he succeeds in finding visual solutions to a novel that peskily resists them, and the essence of Ellis' work survives intact. Ellis-haters might call this a dubious achievement, but if you can't appreciate sequences like this short-film-within-a-film about Victor's trip to Europe, I for one have no use for you:

John Adams

I recently finished watching the seven part miniseries about John Adams, based on the biography by David McCullough, starring Paul Giamatti as the blustery second president of the US. I applaud the high minded content and attention to detail that has come to define HBO productions (see Band of Brothers, The Sopranos, The Wire, Rome, Deadwood, etc.). However, despite the dramatization of some of the nation’s most famous historical moments, it often came across a bit dry. As much as I like Giamatti, his physicality and countenance seems wholly modern to me. Laura Linney, on the other hand, completely sold me on her Abigail Adams, despite the fact that I watched her in The Savages, where she plays a completely modern New York bohemian. David Morse as George Washington, Stephen Dillane as Thomas Jefferson and even Tom Wilkerson as Ben Franklin seemed to have been well cast, too.

Please Do It At Home

Tautology: Culture Is Culture

This week Kate Elwood tackles culture specific tautologies in her Cultural Conundrums column in The Daily Yomiuri:

Tautologies such as "steak is steak" are present in many cultures and, because they assume the speaker and the listener share a common understanding of the integral nature of what is being referred to, they do not always work in cross-cultural situations. Of course, contextual clues often provide more information, as with Jessica's follow-up comment about authority and the general conversation topic, as it developed, of the difficulty of creating dazzling, knock-your-socks-off vegetarian feasts. Even without these tip-offs, in the United States, certainly it is still possible to access the notion that steak is something that many people recognize as an expensive food item and hence impressive, but different cultures have their own "steaks." In Japan, the food for celebratory occasions is sea bream, or tai. A proverb, kusatte mo tai, ("even if it's spoiled it's sea bream") corresponds well to Jessica's steak observation because the Japanese saying means that sea bream is sea bream, always special.

To make tautological matters even more complicated, the "A is A" formation is often used to mean that each thing in a certain category is the same as the others in the same category. So "steak is steak" could also be used by someone trying to persuade another to buy steak at a discount butcher rather than a gourmet food shop, implying that no matter where you buy it it's essentially the same. This second use of tautologies to emphasize fundamental sameness is easier, in a way, for those out of the cultural loop since all that the listener really needs to grasp is that one type is no better than another type. For example, I can get a handle on the meaning of "motor oil is motor oil," the title of a paper on English tautologies by applied linguist Bruce Fraser, even though I know very little about cars. But I was nonetheless at a loss several years ago when a Japanese acquaintance said, rakkyo wa rakkyo. Pickled shallots are pickled shallots? And by this I am supposed to infer...what exactly? I felt a distinct lack of cultural knowledge regarding the precise "rakkyo-osity" of rakkyo.

Anna Wierzbicka, another applied linguist, has created a taxonomy of English tautologies, noting types related to: 1. realism in human affairs (for example, "war is war"), 2. tolerance for human nature (ex. "Boys are boys"), 3. tolerance at special times (ex. "A holiday is a holiday"), 4. limits of tolerance (ex. "Enough is enough"), 5. seeing through superficial differences (ex. "A man is a man"), 6. recognizing an irreducible difference (ex. "East is East and West is West"), 7. tautologies of value (ex. "A party is a party"), and 8. tautologies of obligation (ex. "A promise is a promise"). With all of these varying functions, the task of assigning meaning can be tricky without a firm grasp of other contextual clues.

Clearly, tautologies of value are likely to prove problematic cross-culturally, but other types may also pose difficulty. Wierzbicka notes that "boys are boys" or the more common "boys will be boys" is not understandable in French, German or Russian. I gave it a try with some Japanese acquaintances in both English and in various Japanese versions and they similarly did not twig the meaning that boys are naturally unruly and therefore we must be tolerant of their rowdy disruption. Interestingly, every Japanese person I asked guessed that the tautology implied that boys should strive to be manly. Apparently the pretty tight English associative connection between boys and boisterousness is more culture-bound than one might expect.

Wierzbicka further notes a few kinds of Japanese tautologies that don't really exist in English, including tautologies that show that what seems to be impossible is really possible and tautologies of a matter of course. A common example of the first type is the often stated Okoru toki wa okoru. ("When he/she etc. gets angry he/she gets angry.") Wierzbicka observes that most English speakers imagine this to mean that when the person in question gets angry they really fly into a rage. Yet in Japanese it simply means that even if a person seems to be the type to never get angry, when anger is warranted it is duly--but not unduly--displayed.

Tautologies of matter of course are followed by da kara ("so...") and use "ga" rather than "wa." This type of tautology is very prevalent in Japanese and generally implies that something is undesirable, adverse, or challenging without coming right out and saying it. The applied linguist Shigeko Okamoto observes, for example, that Otenki ga otenki da kara (The weather is the weather, so...) is only used to when the weather is bad. In the same way, Oya ga oya da kara ("The parent is the parent, so...) is said when a child misbehaves to insinuate something along the lines of "With a parent like that, what do you expect?" and never to suggest that a child has excelled in some way, for example by winning a piano competition, and that their triumph might be due to their parents (who might also be talented musically or whatever). On the other hand, according to Okamoto, if someone says Oya wa oya da kara, using wa rather than ga, the meaning changes completely, signifying that the parent (good or bad) is the parent and not the child and should therefore be considered separately.

Ryan Adams & Sincerity

The AV Club blog has an interesting piece by Steve Hyden about his ambivalent attitude to Ryan Adams. I can relate and I'll comment on some of his more provocative points below:

I’m a big fan, and I often can’t stand him, either.

The man is a genius singer/songwriter, but he's always making a jackass out of himself. It's hard to defend his douchebagy actions outside the studio. I suppose anyone who has seen him in concert has a grip. The one concert I saw (at Priest Lake Idaho for the Cold Roses Tour) had incoherent, audience-baiting banter in between songs in which he played an inordinate amount of new material that would later be on Jacksonville Nights and 29. A friend of mine saw him during the Easy Tiger tour and felt short changed by the lack of "any" banter or stagemanship.

A.V. Club contributor Amanda Petrusich summed up this argument in her scathing review of Rock N Roll from Pitchfork: Ultimately, the problem isn't knee-jerk alt-country purists getting pissed about Adams' penchant for electric guitars, or cred-obsessed indie kids hollering about Gap commercials, it's Adams' newfound incapacity (or refusal) to write a song with any acceptable degree of sincerity-- and knowing that he probably could really stings.”

I think artistic license transcends "sincerity"-imagination provides a conduit for expression that belies experience. However, I agree with Hyden when he says:

Call me naïve but Adams’ public persona, to me, seems like the polar opposite of contrived. In fact, Adams is a case study for why contriving a public image is good for an artist. Most artists, whether they like to admit it, put a lot of thought in how they’re perceived by their fanbase. They want the image to fit the music so the two can become interchangeable and feed off each other. Because it’s the art that ultimately matters, not the person that made it. Arcade Fire won’t be doing any photo shoots with Playboy models, for example, because fake tits might undermine the inspirational, chin-stroking power of “Intervention.” This is seen as Arcade Fire acting like Arcade Fire, but it’s really about maintaining a premeditated public perception in a consistent, orderly fashion. Win Butler doesn’t really dress like an Amish farmer in real life, and I’m sure there are days when he doesn’t ponder the future of existence or experience swelling crescendos of uplifting emotion. Some days he might feel like sleeping in, or curling up on the couch with some Cheetos and his Gilmore Girls DVDs. Butler, though, is able to block out the non-Arcade Fire-esque parts of his life from his public persona, which really isn’t that hard to do. (Not blogging about it is a good first step.) But Adams can’t do this. He behaves in public exactly the way he’s feeling that day, which makes him look insincere when he’s actually being completely, utterly, stupidly sincere.

But Adams’ sincerity has nothing to do with his talent. In fact, the two stand in steely opposition. Adams’ unguarded persona has always overshadowed what’s really noteworthy about him: he writes so many damn good songs. As much as Adams himself would hate to be called as much, he is a consummate craftsman. He has what show business people used to call “the knack.” He’s a natural with melody, he sings beautifully, and he can churn out good songs like a one-man Brill Building. He’s more Neil Diamond than Neil Young. If Adams’ realness didn’t always get in the way more people would admire his talent especially since he’s getting better over time.

But I have to disagree with him on this point:

Adams’ growth as a songwriter is re-enforced by the re-release of Strangers Almanac, a late-’90s alt-country touchstone that doesn’t really hold up 10 years later. Because he hadn’t yet developed his craft, Adams was forced to fallback on the down-home, genuine country fella shtick that Jay Farrar and Jeff Tweedy laid on thick on the early Uncle Tupelo records. (I still cringe whenever I hear that part in “Screen Door” when Tweedy sings “Down here, where we’re at, everyone is eq-ually poor.”) Adams was only 23 when he made Strangers Almanac, and he wasn’t good enough at songwriting yet to make up for his lack of lyrical insight. (Lyrics still are Adams’ weakness.) Only “Excuse Me While I Break My Own Heart” and “Dancing With The Women At The Bar” stick, and point the way to the better songs he’d write later on and, hopefully, will continue to write in the future if blogging doesn’t take up too much of his time, or the public’s attention.

"Dancing With The Women At The Bar" doesn't even make my Top 5 songs from, what I think is, a timeless album, Strangers Almanac. "Excuse Me While I Break My Heart" is one of my favorite Whiskytown tracks, the other from this album that are rated 4 stars or higher on my iTunes are: "Losering" (5) / "Waiting To Derail," "Somebody Remembers," "House On The Hill," and "Everything I Do." (4)