Lost In Translation

Neighborhood Shrine

This is a little shrine near my apartment in Sasazuka in Nakano ward.

The Misfit

I have to say that Fredrick Exley’s trilogy (the semi-autobiographical novels: A Fan’s Notes, Letters From A Cold Island, Last Notes From Home) made an impression on me as undergraduate.  So I thought Jonathan Yardley’s biography, Misfit: The Strange Life of Frederick Exley, would prove illuminating and entertaining. My reaction was mixed. It provided some interesting biographical information as well as some interesting anecdotes, but it also portrays him as a narcissist, selfish with an unearned sense of entitlement. It does not paint a pretty picture.  I guess I prefer to know him through his books. I was equally disappointed to learn that the second volume of the trilogy, Note From A Cold Island, got a poor critical reception and has since gone out of print. It was that book that made me a disciple of Edmund Wilson. Wilson had always been on the radar as Fitzgerald’s editor and husband of Mary McCarthy. However, I was unaware of his importance as a public intellectual until I read Exley’s book that championed him. This subsequently led to me reading the landmark book of criticism Axel’s Castle, his history of communism To The Finland Station, and his masterpiece of American Civil War literature, Patriotic Gore.  A Fan’s Notes will rank as one of those underappreciated and seminal novels of American literature in the 20^th century-this is how I prefer to remember Exley.

Air Burger

 

Air Burger is a fairly new restaurant near Sasazuka station, my most recent place of residence. The picture above is of the pastrami sandwich-they also make a mean burger. It has a lively interior as you can see below. 

 

The Littlest Hitler

I first came across Ryan Boudinot in McSweeney’s and I enjoyed his short story collection, The Littlest Hitler. I wasn’t aware that he had Seattle connections that were seen in stories set there, “Newholly,” and characters who had jobs in the computer industry, “Written By Machines” among others.  One of the standout stories was “On Sex and Relationships” that had a great twist at the end. Some of the stories were surreal and fantastic and were entertaining, but others seemed a bit labored or simply not my kind of stories. I like how he wrote some stories steeped in the past, like "Civilization," which suggests that Boudinot is roughly the same age as me.   

That Bon Iver Sound

Here's an excellent write up of a live concert by indie upstart Bon Iver, whose debut "For Emma, Forever Ago" was one of the best albums of last year, from The New Yorker:

“Skinny Love” begins with a shuffle not so different from the one on “Flume,” and it doesn’t ascend to Heaven so quickly. The choir is contained this time, maybe only a few voices: “Come on skinny love, just last the year. Pour a little salt, we were never here.” Then Vernon’s natural voice resurfaces, to repeat “my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my,” an invocation that skirts both blues and gospel, before the falsetto finishes the stanza with “staring at the sink of blood and crushed veneer.” (That’s a cue that this number may be leaving the church.) The song stays fairly small, less adorned than the songs before it, and pauses before Vernon opens up in his natural voice, bound to the earth but revving hard: “And I told you to be patient, and I told you to be fine. And I told you to be balanced, and I told you to be kind. And in the morning I’ll be with you, but it will be a different ‘kind.’ I’ll be holding all the tickets and you’ll be owning all the fines.” Vernon spits out each “told” louder than the words before it—it does not appear that skinny love is something to hold on to.

Top Films of 2008

I feel that this has been a pretty weak year for film. There’s a good discussion about the year in film at Slate. And add to the fact that I live in Japan it is difficult to access a lot of the more interesting films. It’s always a treat to visit Seattle, which has a great film culture and gets a lot of the more interesting smaller films and they run loner than in places like Spokane-which is useful for catching up on DVD releases on my visits. Here’s my list, but I think the top 6 are basically interchangeable really:

 

1)    Slumdog Millionaire-exotic, fast-paced, feel- good, with lots of interesting cinematography and an effective narrative technique using flashbacks.

2)    The Visitor-Richard Jenkins is great in this multifaceted film that says a lot about who we are as Americans right now, but also a lot about being human in general.

3)    4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days-a mesmerizing realistic and harrowing look at getting an illegal abortion in Romania in the 80s.

4)    Transsiberia-an exotic thriller that takes place mostly on a train with a great performance by Emily Mortimer and the always-reliable Ben Kingsley (how can someone who played Gandhi be so menacing?).

5)    Rachel’s Getting Married-a fascinating look at a dysfunctional bohemian family with a standout performance by Anne Hathaway.

6)    Tokyo Sonata-another interesting family drama about a Japanese family struggling to stay together produced by an acquaintance that I had the pleasure of seeing on a flight.

7)    Man on Wire-I saw this on the plane and I can see why it was universally praised-the subjects have such passion and glee in recounting their youthful exploits. In a stronger year I don’t think I would have rated it this high.

8)    Burn After Reading: a very entertaining Cohen brothers comedy-showing the comic genius of Brad Pitt, George Clooney, and John Malkovic.

9)    In Bruges-an interesting little crime thriller filmed in majestic Bruges.

10)  BLANK-I’m leaving this as blank because I don’t think I saw any other films that belong on the list. Actually 8 & 9 are a bit of a stretch. There are several films that I haven’t got the chance to see that probably would have made it based on their critical response like: The Wrestler, Milk, Schendoche, N.Y., The Christmas Tale, or Bashir’s Waltz.

I was disappointed in Woody Allen’s Vicky Christina Barcelona, which had been getting rave reviews, this and The Dark Knight are the most overrated films this year. In particular, the voiceover is overused by Allen and I didn’t find the story particularly interesting. Here are some other films that I enjoyed this year: Iron Man, Tropic Thunder, Standard Operating Procedure

 

The Everyman Edition of Richard Yates

Here's an interesting discussion of Richard Yates' literary output, in particular, the sublime Revolutionary Road at Slate:

The film adaptation of Richard Yates' first and most famous novel, Revolutionary Road, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, is a remarkably faithful treatment of the book, which—in case you've missed the buzz—is about an attractive young couple who are discontented with 1950s suburban life and come to a bad end. The novel was published in 1961, and almost 50 years later many seem tempted to read Betty Friedan-style discontentment into it, viewing Winslet's character, April Wheeler, as a kind of proto-feminist. It is she, after all, who has the idea to chuck everything and move to Paris while her husband Frank loses his nerve and decides that the "hopeless emptiness" of Eisenhower America isn't so bad.

Yates would have groaned at such an interpretation. Outside the niceties of art, he expressed an almost pathological hatred for what he was apt to call "feminist horseshit," and, indeed, his work has a reputation for its misogynistic edge. Not that his men seem very admirable themselves; behind all the pseudo-intellectual posturing, Frank Wheeler is a cringing mediocrity and (on some level) knows it. He is, in short, a paradigm of the ineffectual Yates-ian male. It is telling, though, that when April's own dreams of being an actress—one of the "golden people," as she puts it—are dashed, she reverts to a misguided faith in her husband, who, she hopes, will "find himself" while she supports him with secretarial work in Paris.

The fact is, Yates was quite capable of exploring the hazards of self-deception from the perspective of either gender. "You know so much about women," Gloria Vanderbilt gushed in a fan letter to Yates—this with particular reference to his fourth novel, The Easter Parade(1976), now available in an omnibus volume from the Everyman Library that also includesRevolutionary Road and the story collection Eleven Kinds of Loneliness. Apart from being (I submit) a masterpiece in its own right, The Easter Parade proves that both feminism and misogyny are beside the point in Yates' best work.

Born Standing Up

I had read several interesting reviews about Steve Martin’s biography, Born Standing Up. Admittedly, I was warned by a friend that it was poorly written, but I also felt cheated by the content. I was looking for an easy read and it fit the bill-it was just over 200 pages, but there wasn’t a lot of insight. I guess there was some surface level theorizing about what he was trying to do conceptually, but all in all it was unsatisfying and over-rated. 

Rachel's Getting Married

I had a chance to see Jonathan Demme’s latest film, Rachel’s Getting Married, and I really liked it. It is definitely one of the year’s best films. Anne Hathaway was great as, Kym, a recovering drug addict released for her sister’s wedding. She has a cringe-inducing scene as she attempts to steal the spotlight from her sister at the rehearsal dinner toast. Actually there are several impressive performances by the large ensemble cast. This film navigates the dysfunction-highs and lows of “a typical” American family. I guess America is becoming multicultural, but that wedding resembles nothing I have ever experienced, it made me wonder who grew up like that-with a musical bohemian group? But apparently the screen writer Jenny Lumet-daughter of Sidney and his wife, the writer Gail Lumet Buckley< whose grandparents were the singer Lena Horne and Louis Jordan Jones. 

Gringos

Gringos by Charles Portis was more to my liking than his previous book, Master of Atlantis, due to the setting and context of the story. An American named Jimmy Burns has been making a hardscrabble existence among the other oddball gringos living in Mexico. He navigates his way among religious zealots, malevolent hippies, cranks, thieves and the like.  Portis is always funny in his descriptions and assessments of these the America eccentrics and this is a constant in all of his novels-the dry tone of his narrators.  His novels are always entertaining and accessible, only one left to read-True Grit.