Lost In Translation

In The iPod: Retro

The only things that are new to me that I've been listening to recently were released in years previously. The most recent is the soundtrack from The Guard (2011) by Calexico by way of Ennico Morricone.

I have finally listened to a couple of Superchunk recordings as well. I was always curious about them, since they were from Chapel Hill, which was dubbed the next "Seattle." They were getting a lot of good press in the early 90s as well. The Steve Albini produced No Pocky For Kitty (1990) is very much of the era, guitar heavy and raw sounding with the standouts being "Seed Toss," "Cast Iron," and "Throwing Things." I have also been listening to Come Pick Me Up (1999), which was produced by Jim O'Rourke who does some counter intuitive things like adding strings to arrangements. My favorite songs are: "Hello Hawk," "1000 Pounds," and "Pink Clouds."

The first Sonic Youth album I got into was Daydream Nation, but I remember my room mates in college being fans of Sister and EVOL. So I've been listening to EVOL (1986) which is apparently a move to a more accessible sound and the first album with drummer Steve Shelly, who would become a mainstay. The standout tracks are: ""Tom Violence," "Shadow Of A Doubt,"  "Green Light," and "Expressway To Your Skull."

I was also catching up with some full length Uncle Tupelo albums (I know the standout tracks from a compilation) that I didn't have before like, No Depression (1990), Still Feel Gone (1991), and March 16-20, 1992 (1992).

I also rediscovered my passion for Camper Van Beethoven, especially via their brilliant Telephone Free Landslide Victory (1985), which has one of my high school anthems: "Take The Skinheads Bowling" as well as classics such as "The Day Lassi Went To The Moon," "Wasted," "Where The Hell Is Bill?," "Opi Rides Again - Club Med Sucks," and "Ambiguity Song." But let's not forget Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart (1988) with "Eye Of Fatima (I&II)," "One oF These Days," and "Life Is Grand." and then there's Key Lime Pie (1992) and "When I Win the Lottery," "(I Was Born in a) Laundromat," and "Pictures of Matchstick Men."

I was also revisiting INXS, which was one of my faves in my new wave incarnation. So it was very nostalgic to hear Shabooh Shoobah (1980), The Swing (1984), and Listen Like Thieves (1985).

An anomaly in that I wasn't much into rap, but cannot dispute the brilliance that is NWA's Straight Outta Compton (1988).

Aunt Julia And The Scriptwriter

Mario Vargas Llosa has created another world in which the reader can inhabit over time in his 1977 novel, Aunt Julia And The Scriptwriter. I imagine that much of the story is autobiographical. It is about a young man, Marito, who is inspired to become a writer, but must toil away at a law degree to please his parents while working part time as a radio journalist for the local news radio station. Two Bolivians come into his life in Lima and change the course of his life, the scriptwriter Pedro Camacho and his recently divorced Aunt Julia. Pedro Camacho becomes a Peruvian sensation with his antics as a one man scriptwriting machine, simultaneously producing several wildly popular radio programs that are recounted in the odd chapters of Llosa's novel. These stories often have fantastic elements or tall tales and always end as a cliffhanger and that simultaneously got more and more dark, until Camacho has killed off all of his characters. And then he is finally taken away to a mental hospital for exhaustion. However, he had become a sort of friend and mentor to the young Marito along the way. Marito catalogs his many eccentricities, which includes an untold hatred for Argentinians-which is later revealed to stem from his unstable marriage to a wayward Argentine woman. Aunt Julia disrupts his life by becoming his first true love and muse despite a 14 year age gap. I wonder if she is to stand for a metaphor for standing up for what your true love is and having the power to follow through with it despite parental objection. From what I understand Llosa's father thought that a life in letters was unmanly and undignified. So for Llosa, writing was a dissident activity. This also reads as a nostalgic love letter to a time and place that no longer exists and I enjoyed inhabiting the Lima of what I guessed to be the 50s.

Rikyu

Rikyu (1989) is director Hiroshi Teshigaghara's paean to traditional Japanese arts. Teshigahara took over his father's famous ikebana school, the Sogetsu School, after he died and took a step back from film making. In this film all sorts of Japanese arts can be seen as Rikyu teaches the art of tea ceremony to rulers Nobunaga Oda and then later to Hideyoshi Toyotomi. The significance of this period alludes me and makes me want ot broaden my knowledge of Japanese history which is lacking aside from modern history. This might not be the best transfer of Teshigahara's film, but he does an excellent job of framing shots through doorways, hallways, from behind weeds, screens and many other inventive ways. The final scene displays Teshigahara's modernist/avante garde credentials with an ikebana bamboo forrest while identifying Rikyu's suicide. It is something of a quiet film in that there isn't a lot of action and that might try the patience of some viewers, but it is a contemplative type of film that has many rewards throughout.

Jai Thai

I tried Jai Thai at Ebisu Garden Place as a possible default Thai restaurant, and found it lacking. It has a nice atmosphere, but it is overpriced, ¥1200 for the basil chicken set, and not very authentic=not spicy enough. I won't be back.

Ebisu Garden Place Christmas Chandelier

The Magnificent Ambersons

I think it is safe to say that we will never know whether or not The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) was a worthy successor to Citizen Kane, it suffers from studio meddling. It seems after an early screening 40 minutes form the original version were cut and a new ending was shot. That being said there are several aspects of the film that can be praised. The film has effective lighting throughout, and the ball scene near the opening is a great set piece that introduces all the major player in the film. I also like the ending of the film, which looks like documentary footage, that shows how Indiana has changed over time and lost something vital that it once was. The Ambersons house set is something akin to a character, not unlike Xanadu in Kane. It is a heartfelt tale of a family in decline, that is said to have had special significance for Welles and his upbringing in the midwest. Unfortunately, we will never know what his true vision for the Ambersons was.

Boardwalk Empire

I finally started watching the HBO Prohibition era drama Boardwalk Empire. There is a lot that is attractive to me: one of the executive producers, and director of the pilot, is Martin Scorcese (one of my favorite directors of all time), several other members of the production team worked on another great New Jersey crime drama, The Sopranos: producer-writer Terrence Winter and producer-writer Tim Van Patten, one of my favorite character actors of all-time in the lead role of Nucky Johnson-Steve Buscemi, as well as one of the standout actors from The Wire: Michael Kenneth Williams ("Omar"). The rest of the cast has some great actors as well: Kelly Macdonald of whom I have been a fan of since Trainspotting, Grethcen Moll, Dabney Coleman,  Paz LaHuerta, and several others. I like how the writers have created fictional characters and story-lines that intersect with real historical figures (like Arnold Rothstein, Al Capone, etc.) that intersect with real historical events (Prohibiting, women's suffrage, the Black Sox scandal,etc...). I also like the fact that it isn't a straight gangster series and that politics are involved in the equation as well. I look forward to catching up with season three, which is currently in progress now.

The Trial Of Henry Kissinger

I have been a Henry Kissinger critic ever since I read William Shawcross’ compelling book Sideshow, about the illegal bombings in Cambodia and Laos during the Nixon administration during the Vietnam War, while on vacation in Cambodia 12 years ago. So I was intrigued by what the late Christopher Hitchens might have to say about it to condemn the man (in hindsight I realize I might have read a Harper’s piece about it prior to the publishing of this book) in his book The Trial Of Henry Kissinger. The introduction to the Twelfth edition is by Chilean playwright Areil Dorfman who met Hitchens while in exile from American backed dictator Augusto Pinochet. Hitchens sets up the argument that Kissinger should be tried for crimes against humanity by citing the places that directly or indirectly caused massive human suffering, misery, and deaths: Indochina (Vietnam-Cambodia-Laos), Latin America (Chile-Argentina), East Timor, Washington (via the Demetracopolos {Greek journalist} affair), and Legal Consequences. I think the strongest argument comes from the illegal bombings of Cambodia and Laos during the Vietnam war, but he is certainly guilty of being in bed with some bad people who cause untold amounts of human suffering. I think a case can be made for the CIA sanctioned overthrow of the Salvador Allende’s Marxist democratically elected government that became a nightmare of oppression. But I was at a loss to see how he was involved in the war between Bangladesh and Pakistan. He seems to have been indirectly supporting the Indonesian invasion/occupation of East Timor that would take lives of almost a third of the population. I also found the arguments relating to Cyprus and the Demetracopolos affair somewhat suspect. That being said I appreciated Appendix I: A Fragrant Fragment, in which Kissinger responded to Hitchens’ review of The Arrogance of Power, a book about Kissinger, by Anthony Summers and Robyn Swan. It was an interesting discussion of Kissinger’s misdeeds, but I think I would like to read Walter Issacson’s biography of Kissinger sometime in the future for a more comprehensive look at controversial figure and American villain.

Tokyo March

Tokyo March (Tokyo Koshinkyoku 1929) is a 23 minute silent film by Kenji Mizoguchi. There are two striking things about this early film: the location footage of Tokyo and the themes that Mizoguchi would develop over his career are readily apparent in this film. I was surprised to see so much location of the late 20s Tokyo. I was under the impression that most silent films were produced on sound stages. That being said I was also intrigued to see that Mizoguchi incorporated a journal entry and a letter reading into the film to propel the story along in addition to the benshi (narrator) cues read in between scenes to comment on the action.  It is a complicated love story that result in a somewhat bittersweet conclusion. Essentially, Michiyo, a poor fatherless girl loses her mother to illness and must become a geisha to support her uncle and aunt who she lives with since the uncle has lost his job. A woman turning to the “water trade” to support a family is a recurring theme in the films of Mizoguchi and a reflection of what happened in his own life as his sister became a geisha to support him and his family. It was more compelling than I expected it to be.

Cultural Conundrums: Do And Done

Another interesting cultural comparison from Kate Elwood's Yomiuri column:

Following the recent Nobel Prize announcements, and heading into autumn with winter looming around the corner, my thoughts have turned to Yukiguni (Snow Country). This stylistically beautiful novel is one of three by Yasunari Kawabata that were cited by the Nobel Committee when he was awarded the prize for literature in 1968. Edward Seidensticker's well-known translation of it begins, "The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country."

It's a lovely opening, and yet as many scholars with an interest in Japanese literature have observed, it differs somewhat from the original text, "Kunizakai no nagai tonneru o nukeru to, yukiguni de atta," which is more like "Coming out of the long border tunnel, it was the snow country."

The linguist Yoshihiko Ikegami notes that the Japanese words suggest an abrupt transformation of an entire view, while the English primarily focuses on one constituent of the scene--a train that is only mentioned in subsequent sentences in the original--undergoing a change of location. Ikegami asserts this difference in mode of expression is not simply an interesting contrast between the two languages, but reflects a fundamental divergence in the way the world is viewed--the English text emphasizing do vs. the Japanese original's become.

Japanese language researcher Yoko Hasegawa and her colleagues set out to investigate the basic premise of whether in fact the English language does make more frequent use of do constructions compared to Japanese. The researchers created a parallel-text corpus of language published in Scientific American articles and their Japanese translations published in Nikkei Science. They found that transitive clauses with inanimate subjects were almost twice as frequent in the English corpus as in the Japanese one. These included sentences such as "The popularity of Wi-Fi also brings problems" or "The alternative possibility...strikes many people as science fiction."

Nevertheless, Hasegawa and her team advocate caution in coming to the conclusion that English speakers are so intent on "doing" that even inanimate objects are seen as conscious agents. The researchers comment wryly, "Anthropomorphism gone wild is exciting; differences in lexical meanings and in subject selection possibilities are boring." Variations in mode of expression may exist; determining their significance is another matter.

And yet, it is possible that such language differences may influence one's perception of events. Cognitive psychologist Caitlin Fausey and her colleagues explored a connection between agentive language use and subsequent recall of the agent involved. Monolingual English speakers and Japanese speakers were shown videos of 16 events. For each event there were two versions, one in which something happened intentionally and one in which the same thing occurred accidentally. For example, a man might take an egg from a carton and intentionally crack it, or he might take the same egg and crack it accidentally. The participants viewed the videos in a random order and after each event they were asked to write down what happened.

Ninety-seven percent of both the English-speaking and Japanese-speaking participants used agentive language to describe intentional actions, for example, "He broke the vase." But in describing accidental actions, 69 percent of the English speakers used agentive language compared to 52 percent of the Japanese speakers, who were more likely than the English speakers to use nonagentive language such as, "The vase broke" instead of something like, "The man accidentally broke the vase."

Fausey and her team then showed the videos to new groups of English and Japanese speakers, who were simply told to pay attention because their memory would be tested afterward. Two Japanese men appeared in the various videos, one wearing a white shirt and the other a black shirt. Afterward, the participants were shown some of the same events again, with a new man featured. The participants were asked to recall who had done the same action previously, the man in black or white. The Japanese speakers and English speakers exhibited similar recall for the intentional events (72 percent and 70 percent correct recall, respectively). However, in regard to the accidental events, the Japanese speakers were somewhat more likely to have forgotten the agent of the action, with 66 percent of them identifying the event actor correctly compared to 73 percent of the English speakers.

I've been thinking for a while about that scene at the start of Snow Country, repeating it to myself sometimes in Japanese, sometimes in English. The experience of flipping back and forth between the two versions feels like one of those optical illusions when an image, clearly perceived, slyly recedes and is replaced by another.