Nihilism: The No That Says Yes

Random Rules

2008-11-12T11:44:21Z

Well, all the cool people interviewed on the AV Club do it...Why shouldn't I when insomnia and I are getting hot and heavy on the brown couch?

The Vines, "In The Jungle"

I'm not very much into The Vines. My Australian friend Mark put a few tracks of theirs on a mix CD of Australian bands that he made for me, along with stuff by The Cruel Sea, Butterfingers, and the incomparable Machine Gun Fellatio...Meh, it's not bad. The other ones, "Mary Jane" and "Gone", are squealier. This must have been recorded for a radio session because at the end of the track, an announcer says "You're listening to The Vines live on Triple J."

Joy Division, "Colony (Peel Session, 11/26/79)

More radio sessions! The "Live At The BBC" CD was my first real exposure to Joy Division. I had known about them and their inopportune end for quite a few years, as I had been into New Order for a while, but God knows why, I had never consciously heard any of Joy Division's music.

It was a Friday afternoon in early April of 2003 and I was living in Karasu-cho, Mie Prefecture, Japan. I had the afternoon off work, and I was sitting at home reading Cut, my favorite Japanese film magazine. The issue was all about great music movies and there was a big blurb about Michael Winterbottom's new film "24 Hour Party People" with a photo of the actors that played Joy Division in the film. Something about how these scruffy English kids looked with their raincoats and fags hanging from their mouths appealed to me. I had no further plans for the day; I hopped on the bus to Tsu (30 min.), got on the next Kintetsu express train for Nagoya (1 hr.), went straight to the 9th floor of Nagoya Station to Tower Records, bought this CD, and then got back on the train. I would have gone straight home and listened to it (I didn't have my CD player with me), but I seem to recall that my friend Lisa called me and I wound up getting trashed with her and some other friends and crashing at her place in Matsusaka. I got home the next day, made myself a cup of tea to combat the hangover, and put this on the stereo. I just sat there drinking my tea at the kitchen table listening. When it was over, I played it through again. I was shocked that I'd been alive for 24 years and I hadn't heard this stuff before. Are Joy Division over-rated? Of course. Is it really just a nihilist moaning over a bass solo? Well, yeah. But I've been hooked ever since.

This is an early version of "Colony" with different and slightly inferior lyrics to what appears on Closer. The guitar break in the middle is much more satisfyingly raw on this one, though.

Saint Etienne, "Dream Lover"

This is off 2006's Tales From Turnpike House, a concept album about people living in an East London tower block. It's one of St. Etienne's better albums...Up there with Finisterre and Tiger Bay. Sarah Cracknell's voice is like gourmet Italian vanilla gelato with just a touch of syrupy, aged balsalmic vinegar drizzled on the top. Trust me.

Echo And The Bunnymen, "Angels & Devils"

This is my absolutely favorite Echo & The Bunnymen song. It was released as a single in '85 (I think) and languished in obscurity until it got tacked on as a bonus track on the reissue of Ocean Rain. Will Sergeant's Fender Jaguar never sounded better, in my opinion.

Seamus Creagh, Hammy Hamilton & Con Ó Drisceoil, "Nicholas McAuliffe's/Barrack Hill"

From an album called It's No Secret by the above musicians on fiddle, flute, and button accordion. They all live in Cork, and these tunes are slides (i.e. jigs in 12/8 time), which are especially popular in the area. I used to play both these tunes at sessions when I spent a summer in adjacent Co. Kerry, which is also serious slide and polka territory...

Iggy Pop, "The Passenger"

Oh, Iggy...If any popular music performer ever deserved to get fellated by a crazed fan on stage, it was definitely Iggy...

Eno Moebius Rodelius Plank, "Mr. Livingstone"

From an album of late-70s German electronic music called Begegnungen which was produced by Brian Eno. I don't know much else about it and rarely listen to it. I got it from my friend, Gobshite Quarterly editor R.V. Branham, who boasts a probably unhealthy 48 hours of Brian Eno music on his iTunes...

Pablo Casals, Bach: "Cello Suite #2 in D Minor, BWV 1008--2. Allemande"

My dad loves this recording of Casals rocking the Cello Suites. Casals took great pains to re-train himself to eschew well-tempered tuning and played every note in just tuning--leading many unknowing music students to think that he was playing out of tune, poor bastards. He gets major points for the effort in my book. This is passion in a wooden box.

The Go-Betweens, "Streets Of Your Town

Possibly the best single from 1988 that you never heard. Andrew made a rather embarrassing recording of me singing this song at one of the ill-fated Schizoprestige practice sessions. God willing, it will not see the light of day. This song was done when the Go-Betweens were making one last effort to break into the charts before they called it a day. Even in its Steve Lillywhite-produced '80s pop glossiness, its lyrics are slightly outré, all about a man pondering the direction of his life as he saunters for the upteenth time through the worn-down streets of his girlfriend's town "full of battered brides." The cheesy video of the band running around Sydney on a warm, sunny day is even more incongruous and at the same time fits perfectly. I think I'll watch it now and then go to bed.

World War I ended ninety years ago yesterday...Took bloody long enough...

Autumnal Musing

2008-11-02T06:28:38Z

I haven't written anything on here in a long while, so I figured I'd write something.

Life's interesting right now for a number of reasons, but I'm not going to write about them. I'll write about my day instead.

I woke up late in the morning to the sound of Mara crying upstairs. Mara is my friends'/landlords' 1-month-old daughter, and judging from the noise she was making this morning, she's inherited her father's bagpiper lungs...She's actually pretty quiet most of the time, though. We'll see how long that lasts...

Checking my e-mail, I noticed that my horoscope for the day reads "The outside world does not have much to offer you right now--hunker down at home." Looking out the window, I judge this to be an accurate assessment, so I settle in on the couch after making myself an atypical Japanese-style breakfast of miso soup, rice, and natto.

Mmmm...Natto...

The next few hours are spent mostly online getting my political junk craving satiated for the day...I loved the Palin prank call by The Masked Avengers of Montreal, and my dad and I had a nice little chat about this later. I then blasted Luna's "Penthouse" album from my speakers while doing the dishes and tidying up a bit. I bought the album last week on a whim, based on an e-mail conversation with someone who considered it one of her favorite albums. I was embarrassed to admit that though I was well acquainted with lead singer Dean Wareham's previous band, Galaxie 500, I had never heard any of his work with Luna. It's pretty enjoyable stuff. In a subsequent conversation, the someone opined that Wareham's voice had a certain "aural umami" to it...I'm not entirely sure I'd agree (some of his warbling on the old Galaxie 500 records was seriously annoying), but most of his songs on "Penthouse" are great with lovely guitar hooks that linger in the brain. The dishwashing and other assorted household tasks go quickly.

"Aural umami." I love it...

It's now getting on into the evening, the sun is setting, and I'm feeling awful for not having set foot outside all day. I hop in the car and drive down to Powell's. While driving, I pop in "The Evangelist" by Robert Forster, one of the other CDs that I bought on that whim last week, but am only now getting around to listening to. On the lavender-colored inside of the CD jewel case for the Go-Betweens' 2005 album "Oceans Apart", there is a faintly discernible "9" to signify that it was their ninth album. "The Evangelist" should and would have been their tenth, but Forster's songwriting partner Grant McLennan died of a heart attack in May of 2006. He had been planning to propose to his girlfriend at a housewarming party in his new home on the night that he died.

"The Evangelist" feels like a Go-Betweens album in places, which makes sense: Forster's still got fellow ex-GBs Adele Pickvance and Glenn Thompson in his band, and he also includes three Forster-McLennan compositions on this, one of which he has transformed into a tribute to McLennan: "There was melody, there was harmony, there was sweet Sherrie, but it was melody he loved most of all", in reference to a man who turned out more than a few short, sweet, tuneful guitar solos. And later: "I write these words to his tune that he wrote on a full moon/ And a river ran, and a train ran, and a dream ran through everything that he did." It's hard to sum up the life of someone that was raised by his mother on a desolate farm in Queensland before running away to the city and becoming a rock star in one sentence, but that comes pretty close.

I finally find parking in the midst of the Pearl and idle my way through the streets, catching a whiff of diesel exhaust, and thinking of how it reminds me of the traffic in Glasgow, and how, awful though it may be, I like the smell of diesel exhaust fumes because there's something so evocative of the harsh, vibrant, lived-in city about it to me for some reason...

I walk around Powell's for a while. I pick up the latest issue of Kyoto Journal. I really should just break down and subscribe to it, but I like the ritual of going down to Powell's, unexpectedly finding a new issue, and greedily snatching it from the rack. This one profiles residents of Kyoto in interviews, memoirs, and essays. Those profiled include a zen priest, a young thatcher, several visual artists, a(n ethnically Japanese) woman from Hokkaido who has become one of the few young exponents of Ainu traditional singing, a homeless couple, and a chocolatier. There's a picture on one of the middle pages taken from a bridge over the Kamo River of the city framed by grey clouds. I know this view well; I've even taken a similar picture myself. But the quality of the light in this photo is beautifully sublime. I think of myself standing on that bridge, and I ache to see that view again.

Leaving Powell's, I realize that I need to figure out what I'm going to have for dinner. I have some pita and hummus in the fridge at home that I need to get rid of, so I head over to Whole Foods and pick up some tabbouli, felafel, tzatziki, and dolmas. They will go well with the Pilsner Urquell in my fridge that's left over from the party I went to last night...The girl that rings me up is very cute. She says "Have a great night." "You too", I reply. And I mean it.

I stop off at Impulse Video on the way home to pick up another "Prime Suspect" DVD to watch. There's a middle-aged woman standing there hassling the nice girl behind the counter by trying to describe some movie that she wants to see, but she can't remember who's in it or what it's called. Just something about a shootout on a boat. The woman then very nearly ruins my day when without warning she launches into an anti-Obama diatribe: "He's a total Marxist. And his wife, too, oh my goodness! I just can't believe anyone in this country would seriously want to vote for him." I notice the woman is wearing a NObama button. For a minute, I think of going over and trying to crush this shrew in an argument, but I decide to just ignore her and hope that she'll leave the poor video girl alone and fuck off. She eventually does. I pay for my DVD, go home, pull a beer from the fridge, and look at the tantalizing brown couch.

Òran Ghaol

2008-09-08T01:16:51Z

'S tu caraid iongantach. Tha gaol agad orm, agus tha gaol agam ort.

Bha do phòg milis. Tha mi 'gad iarraidh.

Tha mi ag iarraidh am blàs do craiceann a-rithist.

Ach tha thu 'nad fèinealachd. Mhilleadh do gluasad-inntinn ar càirdeas.
Cha tèid agam air thoir an rud a iarr thu thugad.

Chan eil a-nis. Chan eil idir.

Ach tha mi 'gad iarraidh fhathast...

すごいショックだ！俺は隠れオタク。。。

2008-03-14T08:17:05Z

Had a pretty good day today. I was down @ PSU in the late afternoon dropping off a phonology problem set at my professor's office when I noticed a flyer up for a lecture sponsored by the Center for Japanese Studies about marketing manga in America by Carl Horn, manga editor at Dark Horse Comics. I had no plans that evening, so I decided to check it out. I remembered reading a few articles by Horn in anime fanzines like Animag and Protoculture Addicts back in the early '90s and was curious about what he had to say and what he was up to now.

For those of you that haven't known me for a very long time, a bit of disclosure: there was a time in my past when my obsession with anime and manga bordered on otaku status. When I was about five or so years old, I first saw Star Blazers on TV and became totally fascinated with it. When I was eight, Robotech came on the air and I was hooked. For a very brief period, there were a bunch of anime on American TV: Star Blazers, Robotech, Speed Racer, Tranzor Z, Battle of the Planets, Captain Harlock, etc. The boom didn't last long, though, and by around 1987, anime had pretty much completely disappeared from American airwaves, but I was already beyond the point of no return...I'd save my pennies all year long and blow it all on imported Japanese toy robots at an anime-themed toy shop called The Iron Horse while visiting my grandparents in Berkeley; I'd scour comic shops looking for any imported manga. When I'd found a few, I decided I wanted to know what they said, so I taught myself to read hiragana and katakana when I was 10. In middle school, I began going to meetings of the Japanese Animation Society at the University of Puget Sound. We'd meet two Saturdays a month and sit in a dark lecture hall watching anime (most of it w/o subtitles) for six hours. The obsession nearly killed my grades in AP math and science...By the age of 15, I had made up my mind that I wanted to travel to Japan and train to be an animator over there. I was really into that idea for a while; I even got some of my artwork published in an American anime magazine...Then I started to do a little more research and heard about the not-so-glamorous life of a Japanese animator: the lousy pay, the occasional 100+ hour work weeks, living on a diet of instant ramen...Not fun. Around the same time, I went to a couple of anime conventions in the Bay Area and was a bit horrified at the level of fanaticism on display by the fat, balding 30-something anime fans squealing as they tried to get Megumi Hayashibara's autograph...I needed to get out before this stuff completely wrecked any future chance of a conventional social life.

And that was it. Just as anime and manga began to creep into the American mainstream, I tuned out. I never completely swore off it, though; ask me about just about any anime made between 1977 and 1993 and even if I haven't seen it, I could probably tell you something about it or one of the artists that created it. In college, I'd justify reading manga as a Japanese study aid. More recently, I've been impressed by the creativity and vitality in recent anime like FLCL, Tekkon Kinkreet, and Paparika. I still take an interest in odd/esoteric manga like Naniwa Kinyudo (a seriously bent story all about financiers in Osaka), and as I approach 30, childhood nostalgia has taken hold of me: there are a few classic '80s anime DVDs in my collection and my rare 1982 Takatoku Toys 1/55-scale Battroid Valkyrie still has a place of pride on my shelf.

Anyway, back to Carl's lecture. Turns out manga is seriously big business in the US these days. The market's gone from around $60 million in 2002 to $210 million in 2007 and sales continue to grow. The market is even a bit bigger in Europe (readers in Hungary and the Czech Republic are particularly interested in war stories and historical period pieces). Horn puts this down to the physicality of manga: as youths become more and more bombarded with electronic media, manga is something that you can hold in your hand, pass around, and collect. I was impressed with the range of titles Dark Horse is currently publishing--everything from the most brainless sex and violence junk and flowery love stories to some very serious, challenging stuff. Back in 2006, Dark Horse began publishing an English translation of Hiroshi Hirata's Satsuma Gishiden, a bloody samurai epic set in the Azuchi-Muromachi period (1580s-90s). Hirata was (and still is) an extremely unconventional artist: he piled his stories full of historical detail and left hardly any room for a moment of levity. He's also an extremely talented calligrapher and rather than printed script, all of the dialogue is done in his florid handwritten script. Where room permits, the English translation has preserved this, with tiny boxes containing the English translation next to the Japanese. Nine months before his spectacular disembowelment/militaristic publicity stunt, the novelist Yukio Mishima wrote a few articles on manga in Sunday Mainichi magazine in which he praised Hirata's work and compared it to the sensibility found in warrior prints from the Edo period. It's not the kind of thing you'd expect to really sell here, and Carl lamented that they had to pull it after releasing three of its five volumes due to poor sales. I bought volume 1 and am thoroughly enjoying it.

Carl also offhandedly mentioned that Warner Bros. are currently developing a live action film of Akira to be released in 2009. Intriguing...

That Portland State University's Center for Japanese Studies was sponsoring such an event says a lot about the current state of Japanese language education and American interest in things Japanese, a fact that was not lost on Carl Horn: "Back in the '80s when I was studying Japanese, Japan was at the cutting edge of geopolitics and economic growth. Everyone was reading Japan As Number One and wanting to get in on Japan's global success. I felt like I was the only person in the world that was taking it so that I could understand anime...When I applied for the JET program, I was told not to mention anything about anime or manga on pain of death. Now the Japanese government offers special scholarships to foreign manga artists."

To an extent, I could relate. Back when I was studying Japanese in college in the late '90s, mention of anime and manga in class was pretty rare. Now, here's Dr. Larry Kominz from PSU's Japanese department making announcements about a cosplay competition at an upcoming anime convention...When I took an advanced Japanese reading and writing class at PSU a couple of years ago, about half the class were anime fanatics that couldn't fucking stop talking about Inu-Yasha...All the serious business and poli sci playaz-to-be are taking Mandarin now and Japanese departments all over the country are getting filled up with fanboys and fangirls...Maybe there really is such a thing as karma.

A very interesting evening, and one that filled me with nostalgia. One thing hasn't changed about anime and manga fans since the days of my youth, though: a lot of the guys still have unbelievably bad body odor...

PS--あれ？！このブログに日本語で書けるのか？すごおおおおい！これから日本語でよく書かなきゃだな。

PPS--Carl Horn also told a funny story about how Hiroyuki Yamaga and Hideaki Anno (the founders of Gainax, most famous for Neon Genesis Evangelion) met at Osaka College of Art in 1980. Anno marched right up to Yamaga and without even telling him his name, announced "I've got all the episodes of Space Cruiser Yamato on tape except the first one. I would have taped the first one too, but I wasn't sure if it was going to be any good or not."

Kinda reminds me of the similarly obsessive behavior of people I encounter now who have boxes full of grainy recordings of dead Irish musicians or carefully catalogued bootlegs of live performances of their favorite rock bands...Am I doomed to walk the earth surrounded by obsessive nuts? Am I an obsessive nut?!

Um, you don't have to answer that...

The Unlikely Event

2008-02-13T02:56:58Z

For the past couple of months, I have been diligently heading over to my friends Lisa and Andrew's basement almost every weekend to rehearse with Schizoprestige, a shitty punk band we decided to put together with our friend Woods. Actually, we've been steadily improving and have taken an interesting German goth detour lately...A YouTube documentary about the band and our dizzy ascent towards fame and glory is in the works.

Part of the reason why I actually wanted to be in the band was because Lisa and Andrew actually have some pretty serious chops as musicians. Having both played in numerous bands in Chicago for years, they hooked up with expert knob twiddlers Todd Jackson and Jeremy Camp when they moved to Portland and put together an electro-pop outfit called "The Unlikely Event." They've been glacially creeping towards putting an album together for several years, but have recently put up some demos for public consumption.

So how do I figure into all this? The other day at Schizo band practice, Lisa mentioned she was doing some work on a new TUE demo called "I Should Have Known." Andrew had already recorded a great bass part for it, but Lisa said she kind of had something high-pitched and New Order-y in mind for it...Not exactly Andrew's bag. I had a listen to it, twiddled my fingers a bit and said I'd try to cook up something. The next evening, with the aid of a few neato digital effects, I laid down a track and much to my surprise, Lisa & Co. liked it. You can judge for yourselves and hear several other fantastic tracks on the band's webpages:

http://www.virb.com/tue
http://www.myspace.com/theunlikelyevent

Outta My F•ckin' TARDIS

2008-01-24T02:38:32Z

So, my horror-scope for today reads as follows:

"In order to get more romance in your life, you must go back in time."

Who do they think I am? Doctor Who?

Enraptured With Cheeseburger Gothic

2008-01-16T01:16:59Z

I'm not much of a consummate blogging aficionado (bloggist? bloggiste? bloggista?); I don't blog all that often, nor do I read many other people's blogs on a regular basis. I did, however, recently discover a couple of blogs that I think I'll be checking in on pretty regularly:

First off is David Byrne's journal at http://journal.davidbyrne.com. My favorite entry so far is his one about going to Ikea to find new kitchen cabinets for his parents. As you might expect from somebody that made a hit record out of a Hugo Ball Dadaist nonsense song, he was really intrigued by the names that Ikea give to all of their merchandise and decided to find out where they come from. Apparently, most of them are Scandinavian placenames; bathroom articles are named after Sweedish rivers, lakes, & bays, and children's items are named after birds.

Awww...

The other cool blog I've recently found is John Birmingham's "Cheeseburger Gothic" (http://birmo.journalspace.com). Birmingham, as you may or may not recall, is the man that spent most of the 1980s dropping in and out of school and living in 89 different shared houses all over the east coast of Australia, keeping meticulous notes on his flatmates which he later turned into the sidesplitting, horrific book, "He Died With A Felafel In His Hand." The success of this book turned him from a struggling, down-and-out writer trying to flog his stuff to Penthouse into Australia's biggest literary sensation since...Um, damn, I know there have been some tremendous authors from Australia, I'm just blanking on their names...It was kind of fun reading his reaction to the big story in the news over there about a 16 year-old kid in Melbourne who threw a party while his parents were away, several hundred guests showed up and got into a pitched battle with the police, and in the end, the house was left with $20,000 in damages...

Ahh, Australia...Reading Birmo's blog really got me caught up in nostalgia for the place. I'd really love to go back there for a while. Maybe even live there if I possibly could...Perhaps I should head down to the nearest British consulate and beg them to make me a member of the Commonwealth, like what France tried to secretly do in the 1950s...Prime Minister Anthony Eden told 'em where to stick it...Worked for Mozambique, though...Anyway, kinda wound up on a bit of an Australian kick. I went out and got the film version of "Felafel" directed by Richard Lowenstein (who's perhaps most famous outside of Australia for making commercials for the Sandanistas). The film compresses a lot of the story and amalgamates many of the characters, but is nonetheless highly entertaining. Much reference is made to a technique that Birmingham claims causes women to go "barking mad, speaking in tongues, ga-ga." This technique is never explained in the film, but I know what it is and...Yes, it works.

Also recently picked up an album by an Australian band called The Triffids entitled "In The Pines." Apparently, they recorded it in a woolshed in Western Australia for a little over $1,000 (including booze & food) back in 1986. Not the most polished record of all time, but it has a lovely spontaneity to it and you can feel their excitement of just having the freedom to play what they want to play. That's something that I can relate to a bit more now that I've been playing with the Schizoprestige gang...Not that we've got big aspirations or anything.

One thing I really enjoy about The Triffids' songs is that some of them really do exude "Australianness." Yes. I mean that in a good way. They sing about Perth on a lazy summer afternoon or driving out in the desert, and you can really visualize that imagery in their lyrics. It strikes me that there aren't really any bands from Portland that I'm aware of that are really exuding much "Portlandness" in their music.* You know, you hear a song and can see the November rain, the pretty girl passing by you on Hawthorne, stuff like that. You hear a song and it conjures up clear images of familiar places in your head. Elliott Smith briefly tapped that vein, but he's long gone now.

So here's my question for y'all, kids: What would you like to hear about Portland in a song? The good, the bad, the painfully obtuse. Sock it to me.

*I know, I know...How dare I slag the Portland scene? Especially when there is such a hyped "Portland sound" alluded to in articles about The Decemberists, The Shins, etc., etc. Granted, I haven't been out to see any local music in a while, but I just can't get up any excitement over much of what I've heard lately. I was sitting in the Albina Press earlier today, and some of the local music they played was SO toe-curlingly, ass-clenchingly twee...Like the man says, "It says nothing to me about my life."

Curse & Berate It in 69+ Languages

2008-01-04T11:23:16Z

It gives me great pleasure to announce that "Curse & Berate It in 69+ Languages", a book that I have worked on for quite a long time with RV Branham, has just been published.

Did you know that curses in Swahili are commonly intensified with the addition of a suffix meaning "in triplicate"? Have you ever wondered what you would say if you were surrounded by a hoard of rowdy transsexual Afrikaners? What about proper heroin use etiquette in Hungarian? Fancy chatting with shoe fetishists in Mexico? If you were at a Scottish Gaelic punk show in Stornoway, would you know what to say? What if you had to deal with a shitty Croatian wedding band? Have you ever wanted to use a 17th century Icelandic rune to put a death curse on someone or get the girl of your dreams?* Helpful information on all of these topics and many, many others can be found in "Curse & Berate It in 69+ Languages" a dictionary and phrasebook of insults, sarcasms, snits, cris de coeur, merde du jour, bigotries, Dutch courage, thought crimes, anti-benedictions, German sense of humor, Tijuana bibles, and other sit-next-to-mezes in Croatian, Danish, Zapotec, Cantonese, Spanish, Turkish, Scottish Gaelic, Japanese, Ukrainian, French (incl. Québecois), Mandarin,Tamil, Greek, Portuguese, Quechua, Catalan, Maltese, and many other languages.

The book is 202 pages in length, published by New York-based Soft Skull Press, and is available at fine bookshops across the US and Canada or online from Amazon.com for the ludicrously low price of $13.95. A British edition, tentatively titled "Gobshite Wisdom", will be available in the UK and Ireland later in the year.

Be fruitful & multiply.

Regards,

Channing Dodson
Assistant Editor

*The editors and Soft Skull Press are not responsible for any damages or injuries incurred resulting from the use of this book.

You could be

2007-12-28T07:40:14Z

anywhere.

Be Groovy Or Leave

2007-12-22T07:40:11Z

I'm back in Santa Cruz for the holidays. Today, I went to see "I'm Not There", Todd Haynes' anti-biopic about Bob Dylan. I hadn't been sure whether I wanted to see it: The San Francisco Chronicle's film critic Mick LaSalle, normally someone whose reviews I agree with, absolutely shithammered the movie when it came out. As curious as I was, the thought of Richard Gere attempting to play Bob Dylan (or Billy the Kid...) filled me with stomach-turning dread. Now I'm trying to decide whether it's the best movie I've seen all year.

"I'm Not There" doesn't attempt to move according to any chronology; like human memory, it falls in and out of time in smooth contours and sharp bursts. It also doesn't attempt to adhere to any accurate portrayal of a life that nobody (including maybe even the man himself) seems to know all that much about, instead peppering the film with hilariously exaggerated famous comments and incidents from his career. When Dylan goes electric at Newport, he and his band walk onstage with their Fender cases, pull out machine guns and fire on the audience.

It says a lot about a biopic that the two people that come closest to expressing Dylan's frustratingly complex persona are an 11 year-old black kid and a middle-aged Australian woman. Much of the press on "I'm Not There" has focused on Cate Blanchett as Dylan in his "Don't Look Back" phase, and every bit of it is deserved. Blanchett is amazing in this film: no one else manages to capture Dylan better as she virtuosically mimics his sputtering nonsensical proclaimations ("Good and evil are ideas for people trapped in scenes."), nervous ticks, physicality, and rage at the whirlwind of fame (s)he finds himself caught up in. Perhaps my favorite scene in the film (aside from Dylan stoned with the Beatles running, jumping and talking like chipmunks) is when Dylan stands below a statue of Christ on the cross screaming "How does it feel?" and "Do your early stuff!"

The film is visually stunning, going from rich and sometimes over-saturated color to sharp-yet-grainy black and white that at times really makes you feel like you're watching TV circa 1965. As an extension of the Dylan myth factory, he never appears under his own name, and neither do many of the other characters...I'm still trying to figure out if the blonde in the Blanchett sequences is supposed to be Edie Sedgewick. Allen Ginsberg is Allen Ginsberg, however, and David Cross redeems his existence as an actor playing him. The only part of the movie that doesn't work is (surprise!) the segments with Richard Gere playing Dylan/Billy the Kid...Thanks for bringing up Tibet every now and then Richard, but you really are a horrible, horrible actor...

Even these bits of the film that don't work remain a compelling effort, though, with their fever-dream visions of a town under threat in Missouri. Gere's interesting failure continued after the movie in liquid form when my parents and I went to Malabar, a new Indian restaurant run by the old owners of Asian Rose, previously the premier slingers of cheap brown rice and dhal in Santa Cruz...Apparently, the place doesn't have a liquor license, so they offer a bizarre selection of teas and health drinks instead. My dad ordered a rosemary and lime martini, a pulpy green concoction that was one of the strangest things I've ever tasted. It's hard to describe, but it was a combination of strident citrus, grainy rosemary and a hint of wheatgrass...It tasted terrible, but in a complex and surprising way. Now, whenever I think of Richard Gere, I'll have a seductively revolting taste in my mouth...Hoo-boy.

Best Gob du Jour

2007-12-19T08:25:51Z

Salon had an interesting interview with theologian John Haught today:

http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2007/12/18/john_haught/

I reckon Haught kinda went off the rails towards the end, but I've always thought that Dawkins and Hitchens (especially Hitchens) made a bit of a straw man argument against religion ahd I think Haught spells out some of their shortcomings rather well. He also got me to read a few short things by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin...I want more.

In the tradition of the late, great Gobshite Quarterly, here's another "best gob"; an old blog that I wrote on MyShite nearly a year ago because I'm too much of a lazy bastard to write anything new right now.

"Raise the Pressure: The Channing Dodson Story"

So, here's how it works:
1. Open your library (iTunes, Winamp, Media Player, iPod, etc)
2. Put it on shuffle
3. Press play
4. For every question, type the song that's playing
5. When you go to a new question, press the next button
6. Don't lie!

Opening credits: "Nuit Sur Les Champs-Élysées" (Miles Davis/Ascenseur Pour L'Echafaud original soundtrack)

Apparently, my life promises to be one of the coolest film noir flicks ever.

Waking up: "The Cowboy Mambo (Hey Look At Me Now!)" (David Byrne/Unplugged)

But wait! Screw the mysterious French shit! Things get wacky as I fall out of bed and direct flailing blows at my alarm clock. The line "Wasted days turn into wasted nights" does carry some poignancy...

First day at school: "Fiction Romance" (The Buzzcocks/Product)

Perfect. All my favorite fiction romances occured whilst daydreaming in class...They still do, actually.

Falling in love: "Femme Fatale" (The Velvet Underground/Peel Slowly & See)

"She'll build you up just to put you down." Hmm...Prophetic?

Fight Song: "Oops" (808 State/Ex:El)

Features Björk on vocals. I would likely say something like "oops" in a fight...

Breaking up: "Is It Wicked Not to Care?" (Belle & Sebastian/The Boy With The Arab Strap)

Would that such sentiment were present in that particular circumstance...She's going to miss me and my fey, limp-wristed indie records when I'm gone...

Formal dance: "I Know It's Over" (The Smiths/The Queen Is Dead)

What the Hell is a formal dance doing in my movie?! Still, this would be utterly perfect. I would have fucking paid a DJ to play this at my senior prom...

Life's okay: "Temptation" (New Order/Substance)

Life's just okay? For a complex set of nostalgic/psycho-sexual reasons, this song may very well be my favorite song of all time. Period. Usually does cheer me up.

Mental Breakdown: "Security" (The Beat Club/The Haçienda Classics)

As the ecstacy tabs kick in, our hero finds that he just can't cope with the intense hard house soundtrack and the thoughts of the femme fatales from Sallie Mae who are out to repossess his ass for defaulting on his student loan payments...

Driving: "So What" (Miles Davis/Kind of Blue)

Our hero regains composure and as he turns the seduction tables on the femme fatale, picks his driving music appropriately.

Flashback: "Turning Blue" (Iggy Pop/Lust For Life)

Lying in a dimly-lit motel room blowing smoke rings, the shagged-out femme fatale at his side, our hero reminisces about his precocious salad days of murder, hedonism, and break dancing in kindergarten...

Getting back together: "Stormtrooper in Drag" (Saint Etienne/Continental)

Realizing just how much she missed his fey, limp-wristed indie records, the hero's estranged love pulls him onto the dance floor to engage in one of the dorkiest, spasmodic dance sequences in cinematic history.

Wedding: "No Action" (Elvis Costello/This Year's Model)

There are a number of Elvis Costello songs I would quite enjoy having played at my wedding. As much as I like this particular song, given it's subject matter, this would not be one of them.

Birth of a Child: "Baby's On Fire" (Brian Eno/801)

Could make for an interesting song & dance number in the hospital...

Final Battle: "This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody)" (Talking Heads/Stop Making Sense)

In a sequence replete with swordplay, gunshots, and elaborately staged wire-fu, our hero and his nemesis, the femme fatale from Sallie Mae, battle it out in an abandoned disco. The twist is that they are both wearing lycra tights and leg warmers...

Death Scene: "Death of a Disco Dancer" (The Smiths/Strangeways Here We Come)

Oh Sweet Jesus in a Stuka...I swear I'm not making this one up. Serendipitous.

Funeral Song: "Ride on Time" (Black Box/The Haçienda Classics)

A screeching, soul-driven House classic. I would like this played at my funeral, actually. The priest could double as a DJ...

End Credits: "Disorder" (Joy Division/Les Bains Douche: 18 December 1979)

The title's appropriate, anyway.

Well, there you have it. A film noir/musical story of a cloak-and-dagger femme fatale working for a greedy financial institution hunting a seriously geeky guy (that'd be me) who kicks it like a fuckin' champion on the dancefloor. He doesn't care about the threat to his life or his mountain of debts, he just wants to dance. He's gotta dance. And get back his dream girl who can't understand his seemingly incongruous love of fey Scottish indie rock and Manchester hard house techno. Love, sex, ultraviolence, and singing glam-rock OB/GYNs follow the characters through a quest for the perfect beat. Not exactly The Harder They Come, but I'd go and see it...Maybe I'll wait for it to hit the beer theaters first, though.

I want Park Chan-Wook to direct.

This One Goes To 11

2007-12-16T10:24:27Z

I'm in a band. Sort of.

About six weeks ago, I was listening to a lecture in my linguistic variation class about use of prestige forms in different social contexts and my professor brought up the phenomenon of "schizo-prestige." That is, when someone uses a form thought to be prestigious and isn't clear whether it's really correct, but thinks it is. Put another way, someone who pronounces the "t" in "often" thinks that all those who don't sound foolish, and vice-versa.

My first thought upon hearing this was, of course, "Dude! That would be an awesome name for a band!"

So a few weeks later, I was talking with my friends Lisa and Andrew, who happen to have a fantastic little electronic group going (they're called "The Unlikely Event"--check 'em out: http://www.virb.com/tue), but Lisa mentioned that she yearned to be a rock diva again. Solution: let's form a shitty, just-for-the-Hell-of-it rock band. Then a couple of weeks after that, our mutual friend Woods mentioned that he had access to a friend's drum kit. A dream was born.

Lisa and Andrew are scarred veterans of the Chicago rock scene going back (in Andrew's case, anyway) more than 20 years. Woods likewise has been in a few bands, mostly in Nebraska...I have never been in a band. My only experience had been in Japan when I inherited my friend Frank's shitty bass guitar and I'd occasionally rock out with my friend Hide and some of his Japanese guitar-hero friends in his living room...Most of the time, I'd just get the bass out after a tough day at work, put on one of my favorite albums and pretend that I was Andy Rourke, Peter Hook, Bruce Thomas, Dave Allen, Tina Weymouth, or some other bassist from a band that I loved.

There's a thought: me pretending to be Tina Weymouth. Watch out.

Anyway, upshot was that we had our first practice Saturday. Run, children! Here come Schizoprestige!

Personnel:
Lisa Heckman: vocals, laptop
Andrew Heckman: guitar, drums, rock cred
Woods Stricklin: drums, guitar, goofy cred
Channing Dodson: bass, big ideas, deer-in-headlights expression

Lisa had suggested she wanted our music to sound "brooding." We talked of covering stuff by Wire, PIL, Joy Division...We wound up covering a couple of Misfits, AC/DC, and Ramones songs...It sounded pretty shitty, but not entirely in a bad way. The one truly inspired moment came when I began cackhandedly pounding out the bass riff to Joy Division's "New Dawn Fades." Woods recognized it immediately and began snarling out the guitar part, and Lisa...began singing the lyrics to "867-5309." It was truly dark, brooding, and inspired. The resulting track has been christened "Jenny Division", and I do have an MP3 of it, but I don't think it's ready for prime time yet. I'm thinking we should do a mash-up of Gang of Four and Neil Diamond or Rosemary Clooney next...

In other news, "Curse & Berate It In 69 + Languages", the book on which RV Branham and I have been laboring for over a year, has been sent off to Soft Skull Press in NYC and will be hitting the presses shortly. I'll send out some kind of blurb when it hits the shelves.

I've recently dropped a huge amount of money on instruments: regulators for my uilleann pipes (coming any day now--touch wood), and a new bass guitar to satiate my schizoprestigious rock fantasy. Last night, this guy from out of town showed up at the Alberta St. Pub session and tried to get me to buy one of the flutes that he was peddling. I told him where to stick it.

As the year comes crashing down, I'm feeling worn out and jaded about a number of things, yet optomistic about the future. My horoscope for today read "You can't see the entire picture yet, but you have all the information you need." If anyone wants to help me take a guess at just what this means, I'll be down at the bar.

Danger In The Past

2007-07-27T09:40:57Z

"Ita ego, qui me ostreis et muraenes facile abstinebam, a beta et a malva deceptus sum. Post hac igitur erimus cautiores."

("And so I, who abstain easily from oysters and eels, was taken down by a beet and a marrow. Therefore, after this, I will be more cautious.")

-Marcus Tullius Cicero, "Epistulae ad Familiares VII", 46 BC

Strap yourselves in and unscrew the cognac from the liquor cabinet. This post's gonna be a long one.

I did something really stupid the other night. I was shuffling around my kitchen in full gourmand mode and I wanted to make something vaguely "Mediterranean" for dinner. So I've got this meat cooking on the burner and I want to make a bit of a sauce for it. I whip out some tomato paste, toss in a bit of wine, some fresh basil, and I forget what else. Bingo. Smells great. As I'm putting the tomato paste back in the fridge, I notice it says "Use within 10 days of opening" on the side of the jar.

In my heart of hearts, I know it's been more than ten days. I open the jar. Smells okay. Looks okay. I look at my fragrant meal simmering on the stove.
"Fuck it."

And it's delicious.

And two hours later, I am staggering around my apartment, my hollow frame pulsating with nausea.

Bad batch.

The next morning I wake up feeling like death on toast. Most of the nauseous feeling has passed, but I'm shivering uncontrollably and I've got a splitting headache. "Think happy thoughts," I mutter in my best Julie Andrews voice, "you've got to keep the Japanese girls smiling!"

For the past two weeks, I've been teaching 10 Japanese high school girls from Kobe the finer points of the American Cultural Experience. We've talked about immigration, slavery, the internment of Japanese Americans, the Civil Rights Movement. They didn't get any of it. Today, I took them to Safeway.

Three of the girls were particularly impressed by the giant cans of menudo in the "Hispanic Foods" section.

After we returned from our shopping adventure and I was finished with class and leaving the building. I held the door open for three young Korean women who were in the middle of a deeply animated discussion. As they passed, they each shouted a single word.

"Interesting!"
"Huge!"
"Enjoyable!"

I think these girls are having more fun in their class than I am in mine.

In other topics, the NW Film Center has been running an interesting series of Spanish-language films. A few weeks ago, I saw "Comandante", Oliver Stone's new documentary featuring him in conversation with Fidel.

Fidel is still loved by the people (or was at the time of filming, which was before his digestive system went kaput)...Especially by the students at the Latin American Institute of Medicine. He's got busts of José Marti and Abraham Lincoln in his office. He's a fan of Sophia Loren and Brigitte Bardot. He wore black Nike trainers with his trademark military uniform. One of the students at the Institute of Medicine was from Oregon. Rock on!

At one point, when Stone joked that he could be another CIA agent out to whack him, Fidel responded that Stone would try to do him in with Viagra and probably succeed.
Would that our insane head of state could be so funny...

Last weekend, I saw a doco called "Basque Ball" all about the Basques and their messy problems with ETA and all that stuff. Some interesting questions about whether the EU of the 21st century will be a union of peoples or a union of states and whether Spain can successfully manage to become a more pluralized union of different cultures or whether it will continue to be accused of being an "extended Castille." These and other dramatic comments were interspersed with shots of people playing the Basque national sport of "pilota." I particularly liked one Basque author's comments about his vision of "the Basque city" (Euskal Hiria), a play on words for the Basque name for their nation (Euskal Herria). In this city, language and culture would belong to all who helped build the city. Post-Marxist applied linguistics wonks like me dig rhetoric like that.

I also just saw an advanced screening of the new movie "Talk To Me", a biopic about '60s DJ Petey Greene, the original shock-jock. Recommended. Excellent soundtrack. Sam Cooke's "A Change Is Gonna Come" really might be one of the best songs ever.

I have occasionally ranted in previous blogs about a relatively unknown Australian band from the '80s called the Go-Betweens. Formed by Brisbanites Robert Forster and Grant McLennan, perhaps the best songwriting partnership since Lennon & McCartney, the Go-Betweens' second lease on life in a critically-acclaimed reformation was cut short when McLennan died last year. During the '90s, these criminally underappreciated songwriters released four solo albums each and the best cuts of those have just been collected and released as a double album called "Intermission."
The Go-Betweens were just one of those bands that had atmosphere. They're one of the few bands that I'd dare use the cliché "listening to them is like reading a letter from an old friend" about. So it was especially nice to hear some new (to me) songs from Forster & McLennan. Forster's solo stuff is just incredibly quirky: take his song "121", musically, a crazed rockabilly pastiche; lyrically a narcissistic rant about a guy who loves the shirt he's wearing, loves the sleepy town where he lives, and loves talking to this girl down at the café one to one. Towards the end of song, Forster swoons:

You know someone told me you were at the health food store
So I rushed down there
And there you were
It was perfect

[cue honky-tonk piano solo]

Incongruous as fuck. Pure genius, I tell you.

Well, that's enough for one night. Catch you later.

Survey Shite IV: Citizens on Patrol

2007-07-22T01:25:29Z

You know how this works. Get out whatever musical program you crazy kids are using these days, and put it on random or shuffle or some other term I don't understand. Then use it to answer the following questions. It'll make no sense, odds are good, but we'll see.

[A note from the blogger: these things are pretty dumb and yet strangely alluring. A bit like Winona Ryder...Anyway, I've had some interesting musical roulette choices come up in the past, so let's see what happens, shall we?]

1. You find a hundred dollar bill on your boyfriend/girlfriend's nightstand. You exclaim as you pocket the bill:

"Ave pura tu puella!" (Hilliard Ensemble)

2. You've been bitten by a vampire. As you rise from your grave and prepare to stalk your first victim, a car drives by blaring this song:

"Take The Skinheads Bowling" (Camper Van Beethoven)

3. You've just been fired. You love your job. You need your job. You have no dinero with no prospects of ever getting anymore dinero in the near future. Your face turns red. Your boss raises a questioning eyebrow. You snarl:

"Witchcraft" (Bill Evans Trio)

4. Your mother-in-law pops over unexpectedly and runs her finger over your kitchen table, then examines it critically. You roll your eyes and mutter under your breath:

"Love Machine" (Martyn Bennett)

Well, it IS one Hell of a kitchen table...

5. Sex is about to happen. Oh my god. Real sex. For the first time in ... well, let's not say for how long, but it's been awhile. As you're about to get all sweaty and pelvic, your partner's cell phone goes off, and the song it's chiming is:

"Caliente" (Los Amigos Invisibles)

Incidentally, if there's anybody out there that actually has that as a ringtone, I would like to have real sex with you.

6. Your best friend brings over a movie to watch, but when you open the box, you find that someone done screwed up royally, and you've got the wrong film in your hot little hands! You wanted "The Little Mermaid", instead, you got:

"Flee To Me, Remote Elf" (The Badger King)

This is a song by Marianna Ritchey, the sexiest banjo player ever to attend Lewis & Clark College. The title would be good for a Disney movie, don't you think?

7. The hottest of the hotties is coming your way, and ooooh, do they look GOOD. And they're smiling. And they're opening their mouth. They say:

"36 Inches High" (Nick Lowe)

No comment on what that could possibly allude to. I would also like to take this opportunity to state that, convenient though it may be, I disapprove of the use of "they" as a gender-neutral 3rd-person singular pronoun.

8. You blink. You sweat. You stammer. You open your mouth and you reply:

"Um 'oh' e um 'ah'!" (Tom Zé)

Porque eu sou muito quente.

9. Ooooh, time has passed, and you've just been dumped. How frustrating. You pop a gallon of Ben and Jerry's, decide to gain 50 pounds, and play you and your ex's song. On a loop. Over and over. Which is:

"Wild Is The Wind" (David Bowie)

David Bowie. Sitting on a sofa. With a wind machine blowing for dramatic effect. Gorging himself on Ben & Jerry's. Singing this song. Just think about it. I think that would make an awesome commercial.

10. You're about to be devoured by a man-eating tiger. Someone told you, once upon a time, that music soothes the savage beast. Praying that your dulcet tones will distract it from eating your face, you begin to hum:

"Accidents Will Happen" (Elvis Costello)

The tiger would likely have eaten my face before I got past the "Ooooohhhh" bit.

11. It worked! You're free and clear! No tiger's gonna a meal out of you, no sir! Unfortunately, as you make your escape, you fall into a trap a bunch of cannibal headhunters have lain for a tasty tourist like you. As they dance around the pot, throwing in the occasional turnip, full of lusty good humor, they sing:

"What's Goin' On?" (Marvin Gaye)

Guess the tiger liked Elvis. Good tiger. If I were ever to be devoured by cannibals, the thought of them all singing Marvin Gaye would make my imminent and grisly demise a little bit easier to bear. Now whenever I chop up turnips, I will be full of lusty, good humor and think of Marvin Gaye...

12. Whew! That was a narrow escape! As you flee from your angry pursuers, you turn around to thumb your nose at them, and taunt them with cries of:

"Motherfucker on a Motorcycle!" (Machine Gun Fellatio)

More like motherfucker on a 50 cc scooter, but never mind...

13. Well, your significant other has decided to apologize, and is pitching major amounts of woo. They stand outside your window, crooning:

"I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself" (Elvis Costello)

How 'bout you stop yodeling out in the bushes...

14. This has the desired effect, and a wedding is about to transpire (or a handfasting, or a civil ceremony, or some sort of commitment-y thing ... work with me people!) Your father wants to sing at the ceremony, and since he's being all supportive, you allow this. He's decided to surprise you with:

"Guns of Brixton" (The Clash)

My father is a noted baritone singer. Come to think of it, he could probably do an awesome job on this...I really might ask him to sing it at my wedding.

15. It's your honeymoon! As you and your beloved get all rumbeldy tumbeldly, you can't prevent yourself from singing out:

"The Red Guard Dance" ("The Last Emperor" soundtrack)

Okay, so I have sexual fantasies that involve reading from Chairman Mao's "Little Red Book." Get over it.

16. Oooooh, your first fight as a married couple! You throw a lamp; your angry beloved retorts by screaming furiously:

"Moscow Olympics" (Orange Juice)

Obviously a veiled reference to breaking things off.

17. Your 5 year old wants a theme party, and they demand that it follow this particular theme:

"Libertango" (Astor Piazzolla)

Can you imagine a bunch of five year olds at a tango party? That would be AWESOME!

18. Your tenth anniversary party is a smashing success! All your friends are there! As you and your beloved hold hands, smiling broadly, the band strikes up:

"Found A Job" (Talking Heads)

19. Oh. You died. It was depressing; fortunately, your family knows exactly what to play at the funeral:

"When People Are Dead" (The Go-Betweens)

Hey! Perfect!

20. Well, to get them back for *that*, you've decided to haunt them for the rest of the eternity. You wake them up at all hours by wailing your rendition of:

"Fine Time" (New Order)

Any song with lines like "Baby, you know I've met a lot of cool chicks/But I've never met a girl with all her own teeth" is precisely the kind of song I aspire to sing when I'm dead...

4FBDO

2007-07-17T18:51:08Z

"Yeah, life is a carousel. A great big crazy ball of pure living, breathing joy and delight. You gotta get one."

-Ferris Bueller

I'd forgotten why I like this movie so much. Now I remember...

http://blogs.smh.com.au/lifestyle/allmenareliars/archives/2007/07/ferris_buellers_day_off_and_th.html

Quote of the Day

2007-05-18T08:28:38Z

Overheard today at 1:03 pm in the Chit-Chat Cafe on the corner of SW 6th & Hall:

"If I worked at Fred Meyer, I would be magical."

The same young woman said "Let's stop and get ice cream on our way to buy safety pins," a few minutes later, which I found intriguing, but lacking the emotive resonance of the first quote.

So Jerry Falwell's dead but oral sex increases your risk of throat cancer. Been a real emotional roller coaster of a week, let me tell you...

Ensemble...Ça Va Pas Être Possible

2007-05-08T20:06:57Z

So Sarko won the French presidential election...Can't say that I'm too surprised. French lefties, like their American, British, Canadian, and Japanese counterparts seem to have a rare proclivity for making forehead-slappingly clumsy errors at crucial moments...

After last week's freakish bout of stormy weather, gumball-sized bits of hail and all, balmy spring weather has returned to Portland. After years of rigorous study and quiet contemplation, I have concluded that spring and autumn in general aren't quite long enough...

The approach of summer does signal one great thing though: summer movies! Oh, sweet Jesus, there are so many that I want to see...Let's see here, there's "Day Watch" (sequel to "Night Watch") at Cinema 21 from June 8-14, then warped anime masterpiece "Paprika" from June 22-28, Johnnie To's new shoot-em-up thriller "Triad Election II" from June 15-21, and at last, the Edith Piaf bioflick "La Vie En Rose" from June 29-July 12. What, were you expecting "Disturbia"? Well, I suppose I might check out the new Transformers movie if I could score some good acid...

I actually saw "Paprika" already last week at the NW Film Center's "Japan Currents" festival. It's excellent! Kinda in a similar vein to "The Science of Sleep" in its nonlinear dreamscape feel but with lots of quirky pastiches of Japanese movie cliches thrown in. Mark your calendars now, 'cause when it plays at Cinema 21, I'll bug you all to see it. I also saw Kore-eda Hirokazu's new movie "Hana Yori Ni Mo Naho", which was pretty great. It's no "After Life", but it was an enjoyable and funny story of a samurai reluctantly seeking revenge for his father's murder in the backdrop of the story of the 47 Ronin. I liked how Kore-eda was able to take this watershed event in the history of Japanese Confucianist melodramatic twaddle and turn it into something funny...

Also, for any PSU students out there: the NW Film Center is offering FREE admission to PSU students for the rest of the year!!! Now you definitely have no excuse for staying home the next time there's a good Mizoguchi or Antonioni flick playing...

Last Friday was Asian Day at Pacific University, so all of the Asian overseas students (including Middle Eastern students) got together and threw together a nice little festival. The Japanese and Chinese students made some good food and sang some cheesy pop songs and my student Naoki showed off his impressive Soran dancing skills. The Saudi students provided coffee and dates, an impressive display of informational pamphlets about the unparalled joys of living in contemporary Saudi Arabia (courtesy of the Saudi government), and shishahs (aka hookahs) with a half dozen different flavors of tobacco. This was a big draw for students and I think I may have been caught smoking on film...Uh-oh...

So, all you American readers out there: if you were studying abroad in a foreign country, what would YOU do to represent American culture at some kind of international festival? Dress up as a wobblie? Whip up yer mom's bundt cake recipe? Sing a song? I'm thinkin' I'd get up and sing "Heroin" by the Velvet Underground...I could totally see a crowd of Japanese girls clapping along with that one...

comhdhail @ 2007-03-30T21:55:00

2007-03-31T05:44:57Z

I am attempting to wean myself off of my MyShite account, so I intend to start blogging here more often.

For the past week, I've been luxuriating down at my parents' place in Santa Cruz. Drove down last Saturday. I had been thinking that by the end of the week, I'd be pretty desperate to get back to Portland, but I've had a surprisingly nice time. Headed up to San Francisco & checked out the Asian Art Museum, then headed over to Berkeley for a stroll around Cody's Books and drinks. Picked up a few good CDs and DVDs at Streetlight. Helped my dad do some landscaping in the yard. Had awesome Sichuan food at O'Mei...Excellent week.

I'd forgotten how much I love reading the San Francisco Chronicle. It makes The Oregonian seem pretty third rate by comparison: excellent international reporting, references to Belle & Sebastian in the review of HBO's "Rome" series, plus Jon Carroll fuckin' rocks. The big story around here is that the SF City Council recently announced a ban on plastic shopping bags. It's received a lot of support in the City, but now people are starting to wonder how the hell they'll pick up after their dogs...Oh well...

While listening to NPR's "All Things Considered" today, host Robert Siegel spoke with Time's Tehran correspondent Azadeh Moaveni. Azadeh is a family friend and an ex-student of my dad's; a few years ago, she wrote an excellent book about living in Iran called "Lipstick Jihad", which is a must-read for anyone wanting to understand modern Iranian culture. Azadeh told NPR that there was little knowledge among average Iranians of the British hostage situation due to the Narouz (Persian new year) holiday, which meant that no newspapers had been published in several days. The story had been briefly reported on the TV news, but usually as the fifth or sixth story in. One other thing Azadeh mentioned that hasn't been getting much press outside of Iran is that the maritime border around where the British sailors and marines were captured has been in dispute for more than 50 years. So are the Iranians manipulating these poor Brits and extracting confessions and apologies under duress? Almost certainly, yeah. Is Tony Blair being a first-class asshole by refusing to back down about this? Definitely. Get those people out of there and THEN criticize the Iranians for being a bunch of lying bastards.

I was absolutely sickened to hear the news about the murder of Lindsay Ann Hawker, a 22 year old English girl who had been working for a Nova English conversation school in Chiba, Japan. She was found beaten and strangled in the apartment of a 28 year old man, Tatsuya Ichihashi, a student at the school. Nova is one of the "big three" chain Eikaiwa schools in Japan and does hundreds of millions of dollars in business in Japan. It has very strict rules about teachers liasing with students outside of the classroom but I certainly knew a few Nova teachers that taught on the side for easy extra money...Most of the women teachers I knew in Japan complained at one point or another of being leered at or in a few cases of being followed on the street, but this is the first time I've heard of a foreign teacher in Japan being murdered.

In August 2003, there was a horrific incident in Japan where a 12 year old boy abducted a 4 year old boy, molested him, and then threw him from the top of a parking garage to his death. The story shocked the entire nation and dominated the news for the better part of a month. I remember at that time picking up a newspaper and struggling to read an editorial about the incident. I remember that the writer asked Japanese readers to put aside their anger at the 12 year old and consider how his family, his school, and Japanese society as a whole had failed him. Reading this stunned me; I don't think any American newspaper would ever print something similar. If such an incident happened in the US, I think the newspapers and the airwaves would be choked with pure anger and people on Fox News calling for the laws on the books to be suspended so this kid could get stuck in the chair. I was so amazed that a mainstream paper would take such a shocking, tragic moment and use it to focus attention about how the nation as a whole was failing its youth. I would hope that this incident could have a similar effect and bring attention to how a combination of traditional male attitudes, manga, computer simulation games, and pornography are leading to young Japanese men not having a healthy, well-rounded view of women. My guess is that Mr. Ichihashi is a lonely and introverted young man of the hikikomori persuasion who had never had a serious relationship with a woman and was taking English lessons as a form of escapism...Escapism that became horribly perverted. Unfortunately, from what I've seen in the Japanese papers and the NHK 7:00 news (thanks, KTSF!), coverage of the incident has been disappointingly subdued. I'll bet NOVA's going to have a bit of a dent in recruiting, though...

...Tomorrow it's back to Portland and back to reality. Good thing it's starting to warm up...

Pangur Bán

2006-11-29T04:59:45Z

Quote of the day:

"What would you say to a nice hot mug of drinking chocolate?"
"I'd say 'Nice hot mug of drinking chocolate, get me the hell out of here!'"

If you can name the BBC comedy series that quote comes from, you'll win a prize.

The academic quarter is drawing to a close & I am stranded on my couch surrounded by heaps of books and papers trying to draw the various strands of what I have read and accomplished into a handful of papers that express the sentiment "please give me a good grade" in obscenely expanded form.

I've had the following poem on my mind a lot lately. An anonymous Irish monk wrote it for his cat circa 900 AD, so I suppose I'm not overly concerned about copyright violations if I post it here (the translation, however, was done by Gerard Murphy. Readers who lack a solid grounding in Early Middle Irish may want to scroll down to the English translation...).

Messe ocus Pangur bán,
cechtar nathar fria shaindán:
bíth a menmasam fri seilgg,
mu menma céin im shaincheirdd.

Caraimse fos, ferr cach clú,
oc mu lebrán, léir ingnu;
ní foirmtech frimm Pangur bán:
caraid cesin a maccdán.

Ó ru biam, scél cen scís,
innar tegdais, ar n-óendís,
táithiunn, díchríchide clius,
ní fris tarddam ar n-áthius.

Gnáth, húaraib, ar gressaib gal
glenaid luch inna línsam;
os mé, du-fuit im lín chéin
dliged ndoraid cu ndronchéill.

Fúachaidsem fri frega fál
a rosc, a nglése comlán;
fúachimm chéin fri fégi fis
mu rosc réil, cesu imdis.

Fáelidsem cu ndéne dul
hi nglen luch inna gérchrub;
hi tucu cheist ndoraid ndil
os mé chene am fáelid.

Cia beimmi a-min nach ré
ní derban cách a chéle:
maith la cechtar nár a dán;
subaigthius a óenurán.

Hé fesin as choimsid dáu
in muid du-ngní cach óenláu;
du thabairt doraid du glé
for mu mud céin am messe.

-------------------------------------

I and white Pangur
practise each of us his special art:
his mind is set on hunting,
my mind on my special craft.

I love (it is better than all fame)
to be quiet beside my book, diligently pursuing knowledge.
White Pangur does not envy me:
he loves his childish craft.

When the two of us (this tale never wearies us)
are alone together in our house,
we have something to which we may apply our skill,
an endless sport.

It is usual, at times, for a mouse to stick in his net,
as a result of warlike battlings.
For my part, into my net falls
some difficult rule of hard meaning.

He directs his bright perfect eye
against an enclosing wall.
Though my clear eye is very weak
I direct it against keenness of knowledge.

He is joyful with swift movement
when a mouse sticks in his sharp paw.
I too am joyful when I understand
a dearly loved difficult problem.

Though we be thus at any time,
neither of us hinders the other:
each of us likes his craft,
severally rejoicing in them.

He it is who is master for himself
of the work which he does every day.
I can perform my own work
directed at understanding clearly what is difficult.