Lost In Translation

Coen Brothers To Adapt True Grit

Some good news from The Onion AV Club:

Along with their general excellence, the Coen Brothers are among the country’s most prolific major filmmakers, working at a movie-a-year pace that’s in step with Woody Allen. Even so, the projects are piling up even faster than they can turn them around. With their latest effort, A Serious Man, projected as a possible Cannes premiere in May, the Coens have decided to adapt True Grit next. The same Western won John Wayne an Oscar in 1969, but the Coens intend to stick closer to Charles Portis’ novel, which tells the story of a 14-year-old girl who enlists a U.S. Marshal and another lawman to help her track down her father’s killer in Indian territory. In making True Grit, the Coens are shelving two other literary adaptations they’ve had in various stages of development: Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union and James Dickey’s To The White Sea. But hey, there’s always next year.

The Slate Book Club: Infinite Jest

I listened to the Slate Book Club's discussion podcast on David Foster Wallace's mammoth novel Infinite Jest. There was a reference to a short story found in the collection Girl With Curious Hair, "Everything Is Green." It can be found online at Harper's website. It is less than a page long vs. 1000 pages of Infinite Jest-check it out.

Radical Rick Steves?

Rick Steves is an American travel guru from the Seattle area and I used his book when I first traveled to Europe in 1992. Here's a surprising interview from Salon:

In short, Steves wants Americans to get over themselves. He wants us to please shed our geographic ego. "Everybody should travel before they vote," he has written. We should be represented by politicians who want America to act as a good global neighbor.

Steves' agenda is epitomized in his recent TV special on Iran. At the request of a friend in the United Nations to help "build understanding between Iran and the U.S.," Steves has produced a loving portrait of the demonized country. Characteristic Steves-on-the-street interviews open closed minds to the sophistication of Iranian citizens and their lack of antipathy toward Americans. In one scene, a man in a car pokes his head out the window and says to Steves, "Your heart is very kind." Steves is incredibly proud of his Iran film and is offering the DVD for $5 to any community group that wants to discuss it.

I recently caught up with Steves while he was killing time in the Tulsa, Okla., airport, where he had just given a talk about Iran, and was heading home to Washington state. In conversation, he was as ebullient as ever, fearlessly spelling out his views on globalization and terrorism, the scourges of tourism and the importance of decriminalizing marijuana.

Gateway To Geekery: Power Pop

The AV Club tries to put out the definitive word on power pop (one of my favorite musical genres), but fails to mention The Plimsouls, Redd Kross, Matthew Sweet, and many others:

Next steps: For modern bands who’ve followed in the Shoes’ shoes, you’d do well to pick up nearly any album by Canadian retro-power-pop act Sloan—in particular, 1996’s One Chord To Another, where the band began to push its sound into fuzzier, hookier territory. (Also, as with Shoes, every member of Sloan contributes songs and vocals to each album.) The ’90s indie-rock favorite Guided By Voices also has a Black Vinyl Shoes-like crackle to its sound, even on the relatively polished Under The Bushes Under The Stars, its most overtly power-pop album. If three of the members of The Exploding Hearts hadn’t died in a car crash in 2003, that band might well have done for 21st-century power-pop what The White Stripes did for garage-rock; nevertheless, The Exploding Hearts’ debut album Gutter Romantic is a classic. Tragedy also tabled the promising career of Material Issue, whose frontman Jim Ellison killed himself after the release of the band’s 1994 masterpiece Freak City Soundtrack, which is arguably the second-best power-pop record of the ’90s. The best? Matthew Sweet’s 1991 opus Girlfriend, which helped introduce the grunge generation to sparkle and coo. Also in the running for the 1990s’ top power-pop LPs: Fountains Of Wayne’s Utopia Parkway, which married pointed social observation to some of the sharpest hooks the genre has ever produced.

Reaching back a bit further, Marshall Crenshaw’s self-titled 1982 debut album is maybe too genteel and twangy to count as traditional power-pop, but it’s hard to think of an album from its era that’s as infectiously catchy, and in that way, it’s at least a fellow-traveler to the genre. And while the Shoes’ contemporaries in Big Star went in some odd directions before breaking up, the band’s debut album, #1 Record, practically provides the template for power-pop with songs like “When My Baby’s Beside Me” and “The Ballad Of El Goodo.” The model was cobbled together from pieces of late-’60s/early-’70s bands like The Who, The Move, The Raspberries, Badfinger, and The Nazz. The frontman for The Nazz, Todd Rundgren, has gone on to explore power-pop off and on throughout his solo career and as a member of Utopia, and the latter’s self-titled 1982 album is perhaps Rundgren’s purest shot at the genre. Lastly, there are several indispensable compilations of power-pop around, including Rhino’s Poptopia and two from Numero Group: Yellow Pills and Titan: It’s All Pop!

  

A Wild Haruki Chase

A Wild Haruki Chase: Reading Murakami Around the World, compiled and translated by The Japan Foundation is a short little book with several interesting articles about the now world famous Japanese author Haruki Murakami. I think it would be of interest of serious fans. I don’t think there’s much of “general” interest in this book. But it was interesting to hear what Russians or Koreans get out of Murakami and which books are more popular in Asia versus Europe or America. But for a more comprehensive biographical and critical look at Murakami read jay Rubin’s book Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words.

Sanshiro Sugata Part II

Sanshiro Sugata Part II is probably one of Akira Kurosawa’s biggest failures. It was made due to the success of the previous film, but it may have been rushed because of the fire bombing of Tokyo. So it makes me wonder where they got the American actors for the fight scenes between the boxer and Japanese martial artists. It is a very formulaic film: Japan (good) v. USA (bad). It is a propaganda picture, it is apparent that Kurosawa phoned this one in.

Nakameguro

The NY Times takes a look at one of Tokyo's hippest neighborhoods:

UP until a few years ago, Nakameguro was best known for the narrow, cherry tree-lined Meguro River, which bisects the neighborhood and draws tourists from all corners of Japan, particularly during the spring festival season. Then came the cafes, restaurants, bars and boutiques, most of which are low-key and laid-back, especially when compared with the hustle and bustle in nearby Shibuya.

Today, Nakameguro has gained a reputation as one of Tokyo’s hippest neighborhoods, a harmonious melding of old and new, urban and rustic.

“It’s a hub of celebrities, musicians, designers and comedians,” said Fraser Cooke, who moved to Nakameguro from London three years ago to work as Nike’s global-brand energy leader. “It’s tipped as a major hot spot in the design community, more foreigners live here than ever before, and there’s new restaurants popping up everywhere.”

Holiday In Cambodia: At the Beach

Henry Alford reports on vacationing in Cambodia at Sihanoukville:

To many Americans, Cambodia means only two things — the majestic temples of Angkor Wat and the Killing Fieldsof Phnom Penh. But there’s another Cambodia — the southern coast — that is beginning to emerge as a popular alternative to the heavily trafficked beaches of Thailand. Here, in towns like Sihanoukville — which, in its heyday in the 1960s, used to draw visitors like Jackie Kennedy andCatherine Deneuve — travelers are exploring the unusual pleasures that occur at the intersection of the luxurious present and the ravaged past.

Night And Fog In Japan

Nagisa Oshima’s Night and Fog in Japan (1960) is curious in its depiction of Japanese college students wrapped up in social causes and demonstrations. The political content is the most fascinating part of the film. It is pretty static in the camera work and drama like talking heads and flashbacks that dominate the action of the film, apparently there are only 46 cuts in the film. I realize that Oshima is taking the students to task for forgetting about their ideals and returning to more mundane issues like finishing their studies so that they can become good capitalist-in society by getting jobs, getting married and raising kids. The discussions of the factions within the factions and who betrayed who becomes confusing throughout. I feel that this is not one of his best films, but it seems to be a favorite among critics, to his credit he made three (!) in 1960.

Sincerity and Authenticity

Lionel Trilling’s seminal book of criticism, Sincerity and Authenticity is a short but dense book of ideas. In the first section, “Sincerity: It’s Origin and Rise,” there is a discussion of a variety of sources from Arnold to Lacan. In section two, “The Honest Soul and the Disintegrated Consciousness,” the discussion becomes less oblique as it gets more philosophical with discussions of thinkers like Dierderot and Schiller. In the third section, “The Sentiments of Being and the Sentiments of Art,” the dense philosophy of Hegel, Goethe, Nietzsche, and Rousseau are discussed. I was most familiar with the ideas of the fourth section, “The Heroic, the Beautiful, the Authentic,” in which there is a discussion of the novels of Jane Austen that was referred to in the wonderful Whit Stilman film Metropolis. Joyce and Flaubert are also discussed. Section five, “Society and Authenticity,” takes on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as well as looks at the connection between Nietzsche and Wilde. The last section, “The Authentic Unconscious,” is mostly focused on the influence of Freud but also encompasses thinkers like Sartre, Nietzsche and Foucault. It is a difficult book to sum up, but I think there are a lot of interesting ideas in it; however, it is necessary to have more than a passing knowledge of some of the most influential thinkers of the 20^th century. This discussion of the idea of being true to oneself is exhausting intellectually.