Lost In Translation

The Audacity of Hope

In honor of Barrack Obama’s inauguration I decided to read his second book, The Audacity of Hope (great title). It was well written and interesting in several parts, but a bit of a disappointment after the brilliant Dreams From My Father, which was a more personal and explorative book. So in a sense that book sold me on Obama with his carefully thought out impression of people and events in his life. It showed the mark of a deep thinking and intelligent man who wanted to be of service to the public and he had a host of experiences that would make him an ideal politician in my mind. These impressions are backed up by his actual thoughts on many aspects of the political process and society in general in his latest book. 

The book is organized into 9 chapters: 1) Republicans and Democrats, 2) Values, 3) Our Constitution 4) Politics, 5) Opportunity, 6) Faith, 7) Race, 8) The World Beyond Out Borders, 9) Family and epilogue in which he talk about how his life had changed after giving the famous speech at the national Democratic convention in 2004, that essentially launched him into a presidential contender.  Much of this book sounds like a policy piece, but he does talk frankly about race, religion, and his family in away that I find it difficult for other politicians to do. In addition, I found his use of Indonesia as a metaphor for American foreign policy in chapter 8: The World Beyond Our Borders interesting, informative and effective. This is in essence further evidence that we have made the right choice.

John Updike R.I.P.

John Updike will be mainly remembered for his great "Rabbit" teratology, but he was also a gifted short story writer and critic. He will be missed. From The NY Times:

Endowed with an art student’s pictorial imagination, a journalist’s sociological eye and a poet’s gift for metaphor, John Updike — who died on Tuesday at 76 — was arguably this country’s one true all-around man of letters. He moved fluently from fiction to criticism, from light verse to short stories to the long-distance form of the novel: a literary decathlete in our age of electronic distraction and willful specialization, Victorian in his industriousness and almost blogger-like in his determination to turn every scrap of knowledge and experience into words.

Tucano's

 

I had churasco at Tucano's, a Brazilian restaurant in Shibuya last weekend. I was introduced to this style of food by a second generation Japanese-Brazilian friend, there is a large Japanese community in South America. There are several churasco restaurants in tokyo.The ones I have been to generally have an all-you-can-eat plan which includes a salad bar, feijoda (black bean and meat stew), french fries and rice. The grilled steak, chicken (hearts and wings), pork sausages, and grilled pineapple are served on skewers like the one below and the server cuts off the amount that the customer wants to eat. Thiis restaurant had samba dancing and live music as well. Although, I do have to admit that my favorite is Barbacoa.

The Wrestler

The Wrestler has lived up to its hype; it was an impressive film. It seems like such an odd choice for Darren Aronofsky to follow up this realistic look at a down on his luck professional wrestler to his un-impressive and surreal previous film, The Fountain. Mickey Rourke was amazing as Randy “The Ram” Robinson. Marisa Tomei was also great as the stripper love interest to the hero. It follows some dramatic traditions-it almost spookily reminds me of the plot the studio executive tells Barton Fink to write “you need a love interest or a sick child…”  But the fact that there were a few surprises in store for me shows the mark of a great film. It also stayed with me long after the viewing as I evaluated why I liked it and why it made such an impression on me. I’m curious to see what Aranofsky’s next project will be.

Jule's Spices

Jule's Spices is a Sri Lankan restaurant with a great menu with all sorts of tasty and spicy food. It's my favorite take out place and is just minutes from where I live in Sasazuka. Some of my favorites include tandori chicken kebabs, spicy garlic shrimp, beef soboro (kind of minced beef cooked with spices) rice bowl, and my personal favorite the spicy chicken rice bowl pictured below.

Comedy

I enjoyed the behind the scenes look at comedy, the stand up tradition, and the legacy of “The Aristocrats” joke documented by Paul Provenza in the film of the same name. It deconstructs the joke by discussing its appeal, history, the way it is told by men and women, and the execution of it by a who’s who of comedy from Sarah Silverman to George Carlin. I found it extremely entertaining. 

Speaking of George Carlin, may he rest in peace, I also watched his HBO concert film, Life is Worth Losing. He has a very dark satiric take on modern American society that calls to mind the comedy of Lenny Bruce. Some of the topics he discusses includes: suicide, violence, autoerotic asphyxiation, natural disasters, and the human condition. He puts forth an inspired performance with lots of clever word play and devastating insights into society. And there is outrageous offensive material to round it out. It was a thought provoking and entertaining performance. 

Two From The New Yorker

Here's an entertaining little vignette from Noah Baumbach (director of Kicking and Screaming & The Squid and the Whale) in Shouts & Murmurs:

August 24, 2008
I uncork a 2003 Haut-Médoc, which has a delightfully oaky nose, and pour a glass for myself and a bowl for my subject, Louis, the gray-and-white mouse I’ve selected for this study. I’ve chosen him for his serious and restrained demeanor—among the other rodents, he keeps to himself. Cautious by nature, he sniffs the wine apprehensively, but after a sip or two he laps it up eagerly.

The Château La Croix opens up in the glass, developing a full body and a luscious texture, and really hits its stride by the sixteenth bottle. Once we get a good head on, Louis is able to do the treadmill for twice his normal length of time and I do a pretty solid forward roll.

The Wire creator, David Simon, has an interesting pop culture-related obituary as well:

In February of 1963, twenty-four-year-old William Zantzinger, armed with a toy carnival cane and wrecked on whiskey, made a spectacle of himself at the Spinsters’ Ball at the Emerson Hotel in Baltimore. He was a drunken country mouse in the big city, at a time when the notion of racial equality had barely shown itself in the neighborhood of his father’s tobacco farm. When the hotel’s black waitstaff was slow to serve Zantzinger another drink, he yelled racial epithets at Hattie Carroll, a barmaid and a fifty-one-year-old mother of eleven, and he rapped her on the shoulder with his cane. She became upset, then collapsed and died of a stroke.

Bob Dylan read about the case in the newspaper. He wrote the magnificent “Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” with the paper splayed on the table of a Seventh Avenue luncheonette. Zantzinger was then and forever after a master villain.

Obama and Books

Obama has inspired millions. Many of my non-American friends have been congratulating me on Obama's inauguration-there's a massive sense of hope for the future. There will be a backlash, but when? Until then here's a good piece by Michio Kakutani in The New York Times on Obama and books:

Much has been made of Mr. Obama’s eloquence — his ability to use words in his speeches to persuade and uplift and inspire. But his appreciation of the magic of language and his ardent love of reading have not only endowed him with a rare ability to communicate his ideas to millions of Americans while contextualizing complex ideas about race and religion, they have also shaped his sense of who he is and his apprehension of the world.

Mr. Obama’s first book, “Dreams From My Father” (which surely stands as the most evocative, lyrical and candid autobiography written by a future president), suggests that throughout his life he has turned to books as a way of acquiring insights and information from others — as a means of breaking out of the bubble of self-hood and, more recently, the bubble of power and fame. He recalls that he read James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright and W. E. B. Du Bois when he was an adolescent in an effort to come to terms with his racial identity and that later, during an ascetic phase in college, he immersed himself in the works of thinkers like Nietzsche and St. Augustine in a spiritual-intellectual search to figure out what he truly believed.

As a boy growing up in Indonesia, Mr. Obama learned about the American civil rights movement through books his mother gave him. Later, as a fledgling community organizer in Chicago, he found inspiration in “Parting the Waters,” the first installment of Taylor Branch’s multivolume biography of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

More recently, books have supplied Mr. Obama with some concrete ideas about governance: it’s been widely reported that “Team of Rivals,” Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book about Abraham Lincoln’s decision to include former opponents in his cabinet, informed Mr. Obama’s decision to name his chief Democratic rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton, as Secretary of State. In other cases, books about F. D. R.’s first hundred days in office and Steve Coll’s “Ghost Wars,“ about Afghanistan and the C.I.A., have provided useful background material on some of the myriad challenges Mr. Obama will face upon taking office.

Mr. Obama tends to take a magpie approach to reading — ruminating upon writers’ ideas and picking and choosing those that flesh out his vision of the world or open promising new avenues of inquiry.

I think it might be time to start reading his second book-The Audacity of Hope.

More Please Do It At Home

Gonzo / Step Brothers

I recently saw Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter S. Thompson and was very entertained by this biographical documentary. He was quite an individual and an equally entertaining element. It was probably the best documentary of 2008.  It’s unfortunate that he had to cut his life short, but it sounds as if he became a victim of his own popularity in the end.

Also, I was reading the end of the year movie discussion at Slate and one reviewer brought up how much she liked the movie Step Brothers. I have to agree that I laughed out loud more than any other movie I saw last year-it’s no classic, but funnier than Tropic Thunder. Definitely worth a look.