Lost In Translation

UC Davis 2017

I'm back in Davis, California to evaluate the UC Davis study abroad program for TWCU. This time I'm staying at an Eco Lodge, low budget, but better than staying in the dorms again.

Some shots of UC Davis campus.

The new International Center.

Some art downtown.

Pence Gallery

In-N-Out Burger, a California institution, it has a big reputation. While it IS merely fast food, there are a couple of features that help it stand out from other fast food chains. The buns are toasted and crunchy as are the vegetables are super fresh, crispy lettuce and strong tasting onions. I was surprised how cheap it was-I got a cheeseburger and a small coke for under $5.

 A bike tunnel.

Art at the local cinema, I can't believe I overlooked it last year when I was here for a week and definitely looking for things to do. I see that Kathyrn Bigelow's Detroit is playing nowand that Stephen Soderbergh's Lucky Logan opens on Thursday, so I plan to see both.

Benches at the cinema.

In Flight Films 08/2017

I was happy to see that the well-received Japanese Koji Fukada drama Harmonium (2016) was available as a film selection on my flight to LA from Tokyo. It won the Jury Prize at eh 2017 Cannes Film Festival-rightfully so. It is a family drama that changes to a thriller halfway through. It's difficult to talk about the plot without giving too much away, but a mysterious stranger, Yasaka (the reliable Tadanobu Asano in a familiar role) is released from prison and visits his friend the inscrutable Toshio (Kanji Furutachi) and his family. He soon becomes a favorite with his wife Yukie (an impressive performance from Mariko Tsutsu) young daughter. After a tragic incident Yasaka disappears and the second half of the film starts. It is a powerful and original family drama, one of the best contemporary Japanese films I have seen in recent years for sure.

If I watch a blockbuster film it is usually on a plane rather than anywhere else, and that is where I saw Kong: Skull Island (2017). Of course it relies too much on special effects and the Vietnam metaphor is a nice touch to separate it from other big CGI tent pole films, but sometimes feels too on-the-nose with music choices among other choices. I needed a bit of mindless entertainment after the foreboding tragedy of Harmonium.

James Mangold's Logan (2017) also falls into the blockbuster category. These superhero films in their basic premise are not going to be among my favorites-due to he the fact that there needs a certain amount of action and CGI used to attract the fan boys-and even a well-acted and written film like this one is going to be weighed down by those necessities. So despite being entertained, I feel as though this film was overrated. I am not a big superhero film fan, for the reasons mentioned above (i.e. the average viewer is thought to be an adolescent male) and I did note this one had been getting almost universal praise. It's good-for a super hero film-average among all films.

Animation is another genre that I am not so interested in, but it is hard to dismiss the almost universal praise for Makoto Shinkai's body switching film Your Name (2016) based on his novel. In this case I think it is more warranted, that being said I think it suffers from of the sentimentality that mars Japanese TV dramas and many films. But he amazing animation that employs cinematic techniques was quite impressive. Without giving too much away the body switching happens between a city dwelling boy, Taki, living in central Tokyo and a country girl, Mitsuha, from a Shinto shrine family in the mountains of Gifu in central Honshu. It was a surprisingly moving and compelling story.

The Lost City of Z (2016) directed by James Gray has been getting a lot of critical praise. But the true story of British explorer Col. Percival Fawcett, who disappeared while searching for a mysterious city in the Amazon in the 1920s, is basically a conventional bio pic. SO I felt it was sort of bland and a color by numbers production-the fact that it is based on a true story is something though.

South and West

Joan Didion's South and West (2017) comes several decades after the initial writing of the notes. It is comprised of two sections about the south and California (west) in particular. It's a pity that Didion never finished her project about life in South when she flew to New Orleans in 1970 and rented a car and started driving around the south talking to people and trying to understand it and she hope that understanding would help her also understand her experience in the west.

The way in which all the reporting tricks I had ever known atrophied in the South. There were things I should do, I knew it: but I never did them.

Her reporting is sharp as she characterizes people and describes the places she visits with her husband and tries to imagine having grown up there-something that she is incredulous about. This book would have been good background writing when I was visiting New Orleans last year:

When I think about New Orleans I remember mainly its dense obsessiveness, its vertiginous preoccupation with race, class, heritage, style, and the absence of style. A sit happens, these particular preoccupations all involve distinctions which the frontier ethic teaches western children to deny and to leave deliberately unmentioned, but in New Orleans such distinctions are the basis of much conversation, and lend the conversation its peculiar childlike cruelty and innocence.

From New Orleans she drives all over Mississippi making the same pity and provocative observations about the region. She tries to imagine herself living there:

It occurred to me almost constantly in the South that had I lived there I would have been an eccentric and full of anger, and I wondered what form the anger would have taken. Would I have taken up causes, or would I have simply knifed somebody?

Many of her statements about the south are almost aphorism, and they still feel accurate today: "The time warp: the Civil War was yesterday, but 1960 is spoken of as it were about three hundred years ago."  I very much would have liked to read her book on the south, I expect it would have been as fascinating as her book on Miami. The second section was inspired by a piece that she was assigned to write about the Patty Hearst incident that she never completed. However, that did eventually lead to a book on her growing up in the Sacramento Valley that was Where I Was From (2003). I enjoyed that book and perhaps it would have been good to re-read it as I visit the region for the second year in a row now that I am more familiar with the area-I suspect I would get much more from it now. That being said this short section has some pearls of wisdom as well: "In the South they are convinced that they have bloodied their place with history. In the West we do not believe that anything we do can bloody the land, or change it, or touch it." I guess my biggest complaint is that I want more of Didion's summations and observations about these two regions.

New York, I Love You

I was familiar with the city film anthologies that started with Paris and was followed by New York, I Love You (2008), but I hadn't gotten around to seeing any of them. Then I decided to start with that I when I saw that Jiang Wen, who I recently saw his excellent Devils on the Doorstep, directed a segment for it along with several other directors I respect: Mira Nair, Shuji Iwai, Allen Huges, and Faith Akin among others I was in on seeing what they came up with. Generally, it's an entertaining if not unbalanced film-some sections were better done than others. The two standout segments were Six and and Ten in my mind. Six directed by Allen Huges starring Drea De Matteo and Bradley Cooper as would be lovers who are preparing to meet for the second time after their first. The other, Ten, was directed by Israeli director Yann Attal stars Chris Cooper and Robin Wright shows the excitement of two strangers meeting for the first time outside a restaurant that discuss the possibility of meeting again. The film is notable for having Natalie Portman star in a segment and direct a segment as well. It was entertaining but uneven overall.

Fuku

A few months ago I had a friend visiting from overseas and she booked a yakitori restaurant, Fuku, in Yoyogi Uehara that I hadn't been to but I was surprised to see that they had many of the specialties of my favorite yakitori restaurant in Nakameguro, Kushiwakumaru. These included cheese piman (green pepper with cheese), tankui (mushrooms stuffed with minced chicken), and niku shisho (breast meat with shisho mild peppers). Well, I was impressed and vowed to go back since it was like my favorite yakitori joint. I went back and learned from the staff that the owner had worked at Kushiwakumaru previously and it all made sense. It's more upscale and a smaller space, but very satisfying.

Tanuki!

Cheese Pi!

The Best American Travel Writing 2001

When I saw that Paul Theroux, one of my favorite travel writers, edited two editions of the The Best American Travel Writing, I ordered both from 2001 and 2014. Inconveniently the 2014 volume arrived first,Patrick Symmes visits Columbia to interview the guerillas  so I read that volume first and it was a strong collection. The same can be said of the 2001 volume. I think this is one of the strongest collections of the The Best American ... Writing series, a lot of great writing and interesting subjects. Some of the most compelling for me were: Scott Anderson's autobiographical essay on how he and his brother became war correspondents in "As Long as We Were Together, Nothing Bad Could Happen to Us," "Michael Finkel's harrowing first person account of trying to leave Haiti by engine-less boat in "Desperate Passage, " "Susan Minot's comprehensive and heartbreaking piece on child soldiers in Joseph Kony's army in "This We Came to Know Afterward," and Bob Shachochis' story of dear friends who lived in Turk and Caico Island years before they became a tourist destination in "Something Wild in the Blood." There were many more essays that educated me on a place or opened up new worlds such as: Gretel Ehrlich's travel with Greenland Eskimos in "The Endless Hunt," Peter Hessler samples life in China on the border between it and North Korea in "View from the Bridge," Kathleen Lee describes life in Sichuan province in China in her essay, "Into the Heart of the Middle Kingdom," Janet Malcom travels to Chekhov's Yalta in "Travels with Chekhov," Lawrence Millman introduces us to the Mediterranean island of Pantelleria in "Daughter of the Wind," David Quammen explains about wolves and life in post-Ceausescu Romania in "The Post-Communist Wolf," Edward Said laments on the lost charms of the Lebanese mountains as a summer retreat in "Paradise Lost," Thomas Swick is among the early travelers in post-war Croatia in Split in "Croatian Rock," Patrick Symmes goes to Columbia to interview guerillas on the renewed American commitment to defeat in "Miraculous Fishing," Jeffrey Tayler travels to Belarus to see what life is like there post USSR breakup in "Back in the USSR?", Jason Wilson's survey of Iceland and the food they eat there (yuck!) in "Dining Out in Iceland," as well as "Beyond Siberia," where Simon Winchester falls in love with Sakhalin Island that Chekhov thought was hell on earth. Great collection of essays, I learned a lot and found a lot of inspiration.

Shane

George Stevens' Shane (1953) is the second film in his American trilogy-and considered by many to be one of the greatest westerns of all-time. Alan Ladd stars as the solitary cowboy who stumbles across a turf war in Alabama via a family that adopts him when he rides through. On the surface it is honest families of settlers versus thugs hired by a greedy land lord, but it is more complex than that. This film is notable for having Jack Palance as the gun for hire villain Wilson as well. There are feelings between the family's mother and the newcomer as well as hero worship by the young boy who idolizes Shane. The standout feature for me was the impressive cinematography by Loyal Griggs. It is easy to see why this film is considered a classic.

Elle

Dutch director Paul Verhoeven has made another sexually obsessive thriller like his infamous Basic Instinct in Elle (2016). The film is anchored by a commanding performance from Isabelle Huppert, who plays an emotionally damaged and domineering woman who is raped in her home at the onset of the film. She has had a bad experience with the police in the past and decides not to report the rape and spends the film trying to identify the rapist-there seems to be a large number of potential attackers due to domineering style-she is universally reviled at work. Some of the film felt contrived, but it did have me guessing until nearly the end of the film-entertaining if not somewhat cringe inducing.

Hashi To Renge

Hashi To Renge is one of the new tenants in the new Beans complex under the tracks at Asagaya station. It is part of a ramen chain, it seems that this branch is courting female patrons with farm to table ingredients and a small and medium size ramen portions. I went with the medium sized Tosa Yuzu ramen (Tosa is a region in Kochi-prefecture in Shikoku where the citrus fruit was harvested) set menu that included three side dishes for ¥1180. The side dishes I choose (from 12) were potato salad, carrot salad, and Sichuan style bean sprouts. It was healthy and reasonable priced-so I'll be back.

Slap Shot

I decided to re-visit George Roy Hill's classic sports film Slap Shot when I saw that the Lincoln Center was having a 1977 retrospective and this was one of the films included. It is one of Paul Newman's best films, and apparently his favorite to make. I was surprised to learn that future Twin Peaks star Michael Ontkean played college hockey at New Hampshire. Apparently, the screenwriter, Nancy Dowd (Coming Home) had originally conceived the project as a documentary as her brother Ned play professional hockey, but Hill talked her into making it a comedy. The film was seen as excessively violent and relying too much on foul language at the time-it seems tame today. It's easy to see why it is still a classic among sports enthusiasts.