Lost In Translation

Mishima: A Life In Four Chapters

I recently bought and watched the Criterion Collection edition of Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters directed by Paul Schrader. You may remember Schrader as the screenplay writer of Taxi Driver and director of American Gigolo and Cat People. This package has a new, restored high-definition digital transfer of the director’s cut with new audio commentary from Schrader and producer Alan Poul. The second disk has video interviews with cinematographer John Bailey, producers Tom Luddy and Mataichiro Yamamoto, composer Phillip Glass, and production designer Eiko Ishioka. In addition, new video interviews with Mishima biographer John Nathan and friend Donald Richie. Other features include: an audio interview with Chieko Schrader, a video interview featuring Mishima talking about writing, and The Strange Case of Yukio Mishima, a 55 minute BBC documentary. There’s a booklet that has a new essay by critic Kevin Jackson, a piece on the film’s censorship in Japan and photographs of Ishioka’s sets-which are pretty spectacular. It is a fascinating story of how the production got made and the struggles they had to make the film in Japanese with an almost all Japanese crew and American director. And the film is a triumph and the score by Glass has become a sort of classic and some of it was used in The Truman Show as well. The film is a complex intermingling of Mishima’s biography, his last day where he committed seppuku, and adaptations of his fiction: The Golden Pavilion, Runaway Horses, and Kyoko’s House (which has yet to be translated into English). Add to this: sublime production values, impressive cinematography, evocative acting, and a memorable musical score and you have an art house classic.

More on Herbivore Males in Japan

Slate has a "herbivore boys" article this week:

In this age of bromance and metrosexuals, why all the fuss? The short answer is that grass-eating men are alarming because they are the nexus between two of the biggest challenges facing Japanese society: the declining birth rate and anemic consumption. Herbivores represent an unspoken rebellion against many of the masculine, materialist values associated with Japan's 1980s bubble economy. Media Shakers, a consulting company that is a subsidiary of Dentsu, the country's largest advertising agency, estimates that 60 percent of men in their early 20s and at least 42 percent of men aged 23 to 34 consider themselves grass-eating men. Partner Agent, a Japanese dating agency, found in a survey that 61 percent of unmarried men in their 30s identified themselves as herbivores. Of the 1,000 single men in their 20s and 30s polled by Lifenet, a Japanese life-insurance company, 75 percent described themselves as grass-eating men.

Japanese companies are worried that herbivorous boys aren't the status-conscious consumers their parents once were. They love to putter around the house. According to Media Shakers' research, they are more likely to want to spend time by themselves or with close friends, more likely to shop for things to decorate their homes, and more likely to buy little luxuries than big-ticket items. They prefer vacationing in Japan to venturing abroad. They're often close to their mothers and have female friends, but they're in no rush to get married themselves, according to Maki Fukasawa, the Japanese editor and columnist who coined the term in NB Online in 2006.

Grass-eating boys' commitment phobia is not the only thing that's worrying Japanese women. Unlike earlier generations of Japanese men, they prefer not to make the first move, they like to split the bill, and they're not particularly motivated by sex. "I spent the night at one guy's house, and nothing happened—we just went to sleep!" moaned one incredulous woman on a TV program devoted to herbivores. "It's like something's missing with them," said Yoko Yatsu, a 34-year-old housewife, in an interview. "If they were more normal, they'd be more interested in women. They'd at least want to talk to women."

Shigeru Sakai of Media Shakers suggests that grass-eating men don't pursue women because they are bad at expressing themselves. He attributes their poor communication skills to the fact that many grew up without siblings in households where both parents worked. "Because they had TVs, stereos and game consoles in their bedrooms, it became more common for them to shut themselves in their rooms when they got home and communicate less with their families, which left them with poor communication skills," he wrote in an e-mail. (Japan has rarely needed its men to have sex as much as it does now. Low birth rates, combined with a lack of immigration, have caused the country's population to shrink every year since 2005.)

Blood Meridian Revisited

The AV Club is having a book discussion on one of my favorite Comac McCarthy novels the classic bloody western Blood Meridian. Here's a link to an interview with Harold Bloom on the novel:

Bloom was also one of the first champions of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, Or, The Evening Redness In The West, the most recent selection in the A.V. Club’s Wrapped Up In Books feature. He took a few minutes recently to talk about the novel and its place in American literature.

New Cult Canon: Trust

I used to be a big Hal Hartley (does he still make films?) fan and I think it was The Unbelievable Truth that got me interested in his films. But Trust was one of my favorites and it gets the AV Club treatment here:

What happened to Hal Hartley?

Back in the early ’90s, Hartley was the epitome of cool in the indie world, doubling down on the deadpan minimalism of Jim Jarmusch while asserting his own unmistakable cadences. Key films like The Unbelievable Truth, Trust, Simple Men, Amateur, and the hour-long “Surviving Desire”—all produced within a fertile five or six-year period—established Hartley as something like the voice of his generation, or at least a voice for college-age Gen X-ers who appreciated his balance of brittle wit, Godardian deconstruction, and occasional moments of genuine feeling and insight into matters of the heart. At the time, it was inconceivable that the arguments over his work—or the legions of passionate Hartley devotees, for that matter—would ever go away. But his staying power has undeniably diminished as his career has crept further and further toward the margins. To give but one example: 1990’s Trust, perhaps his signature film and easily among his best, isn’t even available on DVD in America. And that’s no longer true of, say, Howard The Duck. (It can be watched, however, as an instant viewing selection on Netflix.)

 

Amusing Ourselves To Death

Written in 1985, Neil Postman’s book Amusing Ourselves to Death has proven to be prophetic about the culture of entertainment. Postman does an admirable job of recounting how the literal typographical culture of early America made its citizens among the most informed in the world. TV has changed the essence of our society for the worse and has profoundly transformed how we think, view the world, and process information. Some of the more thought provoking sections include “Media as Epistemology” and “The Typographic Mind.” In the second part he is right on target with “Reach Out and Elect Someone” and “Teaching as an Amusing Activity.” 

The Decmeberists-Y / Animal Collective-N

I didn’t have a lot of familiarity with The Decemberists. There was a track on The Believer’s 2005 Music Issue CD-“Balloons and Bridges” that I enjoyed. I also read a memoir by lead singer/songwriter Colin Meloy that was centered around The Replacement’s excellent album Let It Be on Continuum’s excellent 33 1/3 imprint. The Hazards of Love is something of a revelation for me-a solid album through and through. It is heavy on orchestration of different sounds and full of stories. Some f my favorites include: “The Hazards of Love 2,” “The Rake’s Song,” “The Hazards of Love 4,” Annan Water,” and “The Hazards of Love 1.” There are several guest appearances by other indie rock stalwarts-this is among my favorite albums of the year-I haven’t made many poor choices so far.

 

That being said The Animal Collective’s latest album, Merriweather Post Pavilion has been critically acclaimed as one of the year’s best. I find it cold and inaccessible. However, it joins a list of critically acclaimed bands that didn’t do it for me along with: Kings of Leon, TV on The Radio, and The Hold Steady.

Two From Slate

There were a couple of interesting literary articles on Slate recently. The first is a critical re-appraisal of Jay McInerney by Stephen Metcalf:

This raises the question: How to place Jay McInerney? What context does he deserve? McInerney has been a tireless campaigner on his own behalf. The handsome gaze fixes, the mouth opens, and out trots F.R. Leavis, disguised as Eeyore. "I suppose an unsympathetic critic," he once told an interviewer, "might say that my ostensible critique of the manners of my age is overwhelmed by participation in that culture." (No need to suppose.) "We live in shitty, depraved and complacent times," he wrote in Esquire in 1989 in an infamous piece defending himself against his critics. He understands the stakes are not small. If McInerney is simply part of the zeitgeist, then he is a party to a collective loss of social memory that is inimical to the literary canon into which he eagerly seeks admittance. (At the table of posterity, it's better to be seated next to Fitzgerald than Brett Easton Ellis.) To deserve the company of his heroic predecessors, he believes he must position himself as a cold-eyed chronicler—and not merely a symptom—of these shitty times.

The origins of the insecurity aren't difficult to trace. McInerney's first book, Bright Lights, Big City, was published 25 years ago. It appeared as part of a uniform trade-paperback edition—as a "Vintage Contemporary." Everyone is now familiar with the imprint; it is as ubiquitous as the Ikea shelving that typically houses it. Against a white background, the author's name sits suspended in the upper right hand corner, embedded in a rectangle of color. A grid of black dots connects a suggestive illustration to the title, then wraps around the spine, drawing the eye to the blurbs on the back. Raymond Carver's Cathedral, Frederick Exley's A Fan's Notes, Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road—the house specialty is the not-so-young-adult near-classic. It was invented by Gary Fisketjon, a (quite young) editor at Random House, who wanted to introduce small-press writers he had admired as a reviewer for the Village Voice to a larger audience. Instead of sending a new work of fiction to market as an orphan, Fisketjon included it within a family of titles, all cheaply priced, all sharing a graphic design vaguely reminiscent of rock-era album art.

The second piece is concerned with the possibility of J.D. Salinger archives not surviving his death:

 Writing is hard; memorable writing like Salinger's, even harder. His writing made him sweat blood. You can feel it in the later work, not always to its advantage, admittedly, but it's there, the blood, sweat, and tears.

It's pretty remarkable—amazing, isn't it, when you think about it—that he stopped publishing when he was only 46, half a lifetime ago. He stopped publishing but may not have stopped writing. For all we know, he may be withholding what will turn out to be the eighth wonder of American letters. Or not.

And why would someone as publicity-intolerant as Salinger go to the trouble (ultimately, if the case goes far enough, he might even have to testify in public) of suing the author of the Holden sequel? Perhaps because he still cares about the character and the way it's been read and he doesn't want any more naive misreadings—by pro- or anti-Salingerites—to distort the nature of his work.

Indeed, these misreadings may be the problem that caused Salinger to retreat from the world in the first place. The cult that reads The Catcher in the Rye as an endorsement of Holden Caulfield's callow, purist point of view and obsessively badgered Salinger as a kind of guru could have driven him into hiding. In fact, I once wrote a piece in which I essentially blamed the assassination of John Lennon on the misreading of Catcher by assassin Mark David Chapman, who carried around a copy of the book and proclaimed that he had killed Lennon because he'd become a "phony," just like the ones Holden hated. Of course, anyone who brings to Catcher a somewhat more sophisticated sensibility than Mark David Chapman, an awareness that novelists often use unreliable narrators and, you know, ironic distancing, can see that it's a novel about the conflict between Holden's naive and narcissistic juvenile romanticism (the world is full of "phonies"—duh!) and the kind of accommodations he needs to make to its corruption to survive.

Ashes of American Flags

It seems I’m old enough to indulge in nostalgia-something I resisted when I was younger. I think it is always there, but I refused to look back when there’s so much to look forward to. But after seeing Wilco’s new concert video, Ashes of American Flags, it makes me realize that I have yet to see one of my most personally revered bands live. I think that they may have played festivals in Japan but I don’t think they’ve toured here. I may be wrong, but I also remember missing the “Being There” tour when they came to Seattle because I didn’t have anyone to go with. I should have went alone. Anyway, the video is a close second to having been there, but I resolve to see them if they ever set foot in Japan again. Wilco is one of my all time favorite bands. And I have respected Jeff Tweedy since he was in Uncle Tupelo. I couldn’t help but sing along with my favorites like “Via Chicago” and “A Shot In The Arm” and marvel at the show where they had a horns section that fleshed out their live sound. I need to witness it myself. 

"Don't": The Secret To Self Control

There was a fascinating article by Jonah Lehrer in The New Yorker about self control and how it is a better indicator of success in life than IQ tests:

The initial goal of the experiment was to identify the mental processes that allowed some people to delay gratification while others simply surrendered. After publishing a few papers on the Bing studies in the early seventies, Mischel moved on to other areas of personality research. “There are only so many things you can do with kids trying not to eat marshmallows.”

But occasionally Mischel would ask his three daughters, all of whom attended the Bing, about their friends from nursery school. “It was really just idle dinnertime conversation,” he says. “I’d ask them, ‘How’s Jane? How’s Eric? How are they doing in school?’ ” Mischel began to notice a link between the children’s academic performance as teen-agers and their ability to wait for the second marshmallow. He asked his daughters to assess their friends academically on a scale of zero to five. Comparing these ratings with the original data set, he saw a correlation. “That’s when I realized I had to do this seriously,” he says. Starting in 1981, Mischel sent out a questionnaire to all the reachable parents, teachers, and academic advisers of the six hundred and fifty-three subjects who had participated in the marshmallow task, who were by then in high school. He asked about every trait he could think of, from their capacity to plan and think ahead to their ability to “cope well with problems” and get along with their peers. He also requested their S.A.T. scores.

Once Mischel began analyzing the results, he noticed that low delayers, the children who rang the bell quickly, seemed more likely to have behavioral problems, both in school and at home. They got lower S.A.T. scores. They struggled in stressful situations, often had trouble paying attention, and found it difficult to maintain friendships. The child who could wait fifteen minutes had an S.A.T. score that was, on average, two hundred and ten points higher than that of the kid who could wait only thirty seconds.

Yatai-Shimokitazawa

Outdoor seating in Shimokitazawa.