closing time

YAMAMOTO Tarô, 2004

Image from http://www.h7.dion.ne.jp/~nipponga/works/04/04.html

It’s been a while since I’ve posted on this site. I opened it up when I started writing my “tenure” book. Which is now–cross your fingers–finished, and on fairly stable legs in the sea of the publishing process. This winter, I turned attention full-tilt to my book, and to day-job type writing, and put this blog on ice. I’m happily shocked, though, to see that there has been a lot of traffic lately, especially to the Captain Beefheart and the “parakeet of justice” posts.

Besides finishing the book, the parallel world that spun off this site, one further reason for shutting down–killing off this character, so to speak–is that I moved, so the small postage stamp of Atwater I used to write about is no longer my home. I moved just across the ‘5, to Silver Lake, in the hills, plausibly close to public transportation, and near cafés that stay open late at night–just like ‘real’ cities. !.

In any case, I”m re-starting a new blog, called Sengo, which I will post details on soon. Those of you who speak Japanese or know me from my day job know that this word means postwar (戦後) as well as, in the spoken vernacular, a thousand words (千語). I, along with some collaborators, will be posting 1000-word essays and translations–adorned by a single picture, worth 1000 words, naturally–mostly on Japanese pop culture, or things that connect current events in Japanese pop culture to more broad/deep/blurred swaths of history. I wanted to do something different than writing for purely scholarly audiences, and provide an alternative to the limited playbook of pieces from big news outlets on wacky/kooky Japan. This image is an example of such a group of 1000 words, yet to be written…

So, stay tuned, and thanks for reading!

the case study seesaw hammock house

I stumbled onto this very fun installation on the way to a very serious concert at the Redcat by Yasunao Tone, an electronic musician, art writer and all-around charming fellow. Part of the charm is that although it is supposed to be kind of miniature–extracting 1 feature out of an idealized California house, in the manner of the postwar Case Study houses–it takes 2 attendants to get it going, kind of palanquin-like.

It’s kind of like a lazy-person’s seesaw. Or a 2-lazy-people’s seesaw, really, as you really need another bum on the other hammock to make the weights work. The attendants remove some sandbag weights, and depending on your respective balances, they move them around, to make it roughly balanced. Then you can push-me and pull-you, tho it is a straight up and down motion, not the arc of a seesaw. Still, it made me laugh like crazy and was immensely fun, especially in such a ’serious’ space.

The installation, by the architecture/space firm Atelier Bow-wow, has 2 other components, which are even more silly/wonderful. One is an area that is like a porch w/stadium seating, filled with some barbecues. The other is a large reclining pit, with pillows, from which you watch (a video projection of) a sunset.

The ABW gets its name, I think, because of its interest in “pet architecture,” which is to say, the built equivalent of pocket parks, “charming, small and humorous,” like pets, as one of their books says.

ymo discommunicates on Soul Train

I’m still on something of a YMO tear. Here they are in a 1980 shoot of Soul Train, showing and telling one of my favorite Japanese words, discommunication. It’s not miscommunication, which often results in wounded egos and trade frictions. The ‘dis’ is not the same ‘dis’ of dis-respect, it just means that whatever came out of your mouth or pen or vocoder completely bypasses where it’s supposed to hit. The utterance goes off into outer space, and sender and receiver both go their separate ways. One example I like is what Faulkner said, in a 1955 visit sponsored by the State Department, aka his anti-Communist tour: talking to his hosts was like two people running at top speed on opposite sides of a plate glass window. You get that feeling, more or less, in this clip.

Here Don Cornelius leads in to the q-and-a by admitting to no notion of geography. I’m not sure where I would look to find YMO on a map, myself, given their penchant for city songs (T-O-K-Y-O), as well as chinoiserie (Tong Poo) and more chinoiserie with goofy breathy French dubbing (La femme chinoise). But I think his point was that YMO seemed like they were from really far away, and that if he had at least read the Encyclopedia Britannica memo, he might have had a better take on the mystical whatever of their five-piece combo form.

DC actually gives a really good example of techno-orientalism in this exchange. Throwing up his hands (metaphorically) in bemusement at the discommunication, he horses around with drummer Takahashi Yukihiro–a famous glam rocker who used to be in a Yoko Ono parody band that turned real, called the Sadistic Mika Band. After the band intros, he asks Takahashi to explain “Einstein’s theory of relativity.” This is 2 years after the Walkman debuted, and the portrait of Japanese man-on-the-street as the next-door neighbor of rocket science is well on its way.

I have to say that I found YMO’s plant in the audience, the guy designed to break the fourth wall between the stage and the dance floor (“Japanese gentlemen please stand up!”), to be a bit odd. A guy in a 3-piece grey flannel-ish suit does not seem to help their own purported cause much—the de-mystification of exoticism (yellow magic, fetishism), and its postwar Occupation stereotypes.

The customizing of lyrics, in the Archie Bell song they perform, “Tighten Up,” is kind of great, though–the narration is provided by a pretty famous Japanese radio guy, Kobayashi “Snakeman” (in homage to “Wolfman” Jack) Katsuya. The plant gets so into the actual show, as the band performs, that he keeps dancing and forgets his lines, which is also kind of cool, so I guess the whole image does get a bit unhinged. The keyboardist, Aki’s, buoyant hopping is pretty great, too.

archaic YMO c. 1978

Some interesting interview footage with the three + members of YMO (Yellow Magic Orchestra). The venue is the studio in which Solid State Survivor, the second album, was put together.

I say “+” because usually they have “fourth man,” the synth programmer MATSUTAKE Hideki on deck, but I’m not sure how many people are in the shadows here, in and among the gadgets.

Around 1:10 is a funny sequence where SAKAMOTO Ryûichi shows-and-tells how hard it is for a human to manipulate the piano keys fast enough to get the tempo he wants (it’s in Japanese, but you can see/hear clearly what is going on by watching the demo).

Keep those feet a’moving: Nike buys park for development in Shibuya

A new wave of surveillance has been directed at homeless persons near the Shibuya station area, perhaps more known for the sheer volume of people who move through the crossings of the youth-culture-and-touts district. Lately police have stepped up the evictions. The backstory, according to Irregular Asylum, links to privatization and development of one of the few public spots in the vicinity, Miyashita Park. The park was just bought by Nike.

In the past, homeless persons were seen by police officers as “criminals-to-be” and thus commonly subjected to fingerprinting and photographs. However, facing growing resistance against such treatment as voiced by homeless individuals and various NGOs, as well as public criticism for rights violations, they had not recently been visibly engaged in fingerprinting or photographing homeless individuals, even in the Shibuya area. The fact that district police have returned to past discriminatory tactics in recent weeks indicates a revisiting to former hard-line security measures that “profile” homeless individuals as potential criminals. Moreover, it is absurd to insist that this incident is unrelated to increasing evictions and property removals practiced against homeless persons in the Shibuya area over the past year.

In October of 2007, a citizen’s group was pulling strings for evictions of persons from under National Highway 246 by Shibuya station, in December the Tokyu Corporation was responsible for evictions carried out by subway guards that resulted in one death, and in July of this year persons were forcibly removed from the Tokyu Department Store by overly-eager G8 Summit guards. In addition, prior to this month’s incident, enhanced tactical use of evictions as a security measure within Shibuya subway stations has been noticeable, despite previous calm in subway corridors. Regardless, as it is a matter of survival, homeless persons in these areas continue to defend themselves from expulsion from Shibuya station.

Then, in the midst of all this, it was discovered this past May that the sports apparel and accessories maker, Nike Corporation, is backing a large-scale renovation of Miyashita Park. Nike’s plan is to invest millions into building a skateboard park and open café and buy the naming rights to the public space so as to re-name it Nike Park. Should this plan be realized, over 30 homeless persons from the park would be left without a place to stay and Nojiren would no longer be able to hold the winter and summer events it has thrown in Miyashita Park for over 10 years. Furthermore, the park itself – a public space – would be transformed into a corporate space meaning that Shibuya residents and visitors would no longer have a place to sit back, relax, snack or chat outdoors and NGOs would no longer be able to use the open area for gatherings or demonstrations. The agreement with Nike was passed without ever being put up for a vote in the Shibuya ward council, and to protest the injustice of the top-down manner of making official arrangements, Nojiren formed “The Coalition to Protect Miyashita Park from Becoming Nike Park” in June. In July, we hosted a protest before Nike headquarters in time with demonstrations at the Hokkaido G8 Summit. In August we held a summer festival at the park aiming to see that it wouldn’t be out last. In September and October we held gatherings and demonstrations. At this point, there is no question that both Nike and Shibuya Ward can sense that they are cornered.

Continuing evictions of homeless persons in the Shibuya regions are clearly being coordinated with the new addition of the Fukutoshin subway line in June of this year and extensive plans for development centering on Shibuya as the Toyoko line will be brought underground. The current harassment of homeless persons by Shibuya officers is nothing other than another way of applying pressure to persons “in the way” of city plans.

Sharon and I wrote about the park in 2005, when it was the site of “rave demos,” demos that used reggae systems to bounce sounds and DJ sets against the concrete/screen set of Shibuya spaces to rail against sending Japanese troops and money to support the US war in Iraq. You can see the multimedia version of our piece here.

monday monster mash

You’re not really big in Japan until Godzilla stomps you. All the smog and particulate of this week’s fires has put me in a rather kaijû state of mind.

The 1954 version is one of my all-time favorites, a one-size-fits-all pirate crate of postwar Japan. From the opening eyeball (from a later film in the series, actually), it’s looking right at you, all bloodshot and googly, saying “well, now what?” A procession of puzzled answers emerges. It’s got curmudgeonly old men who grumble about losing tradition and issue dire warnings about human hubris, angry housewives (the chief instigators of the real-life peace movement, after the Bikini Atoll bombings and the Lucky Dragon incident, in which fishermen were nuked by ash fallout from US testing) demanding their right to know, mustachio’d scientists giving testimony with gadgets and footprint measurer, and nosy reporters from the mainland snooping around southern islands to report back to mainland news organizations. Also, Emiko, an ingénue with a heart of gold who is the daughter of an élite scientist, as well as the mad crush of a certain mad scientist with an eyepatch, though she will later run off with a lowly garbage-man, on her own romp wreaking postwar havoc, with class-crossing true love as her means of destruction. The scientist with a murky R&D background of wartime research, Serizawa, invents a device, the oxygen destroyer. This gadget is reputed to be the last hope for saving Japan from the wrath of the radioactive one. At the fatal hour on the high seas, poised to let loose with the destroyer in scuba gear, a broken-hearted Serizawa dives underwater and commits mad-scientist harakiri–he cuts his lifeline and sacrifices himself for the good even greater than true love, doing in the monster and saving the country’s skin.

The last (and only) roar you hear after the BOC song is one sample of the musique concrète style of Ikufube Akira’s amazing tape score for the film.

maid in Japan / café sci-fi+tique

eyeglasses • science • labcoats

An afternoon of science with gleaming glasses and suited-up scientists.

Top / Scientist profiles / Cafe-Sci forum

This is a screen shot from an art-education project, Café Scifi-tique, organized in Tokyo by famous sci-fi critics, who also happen to be degreed in science (the person who sent it to me is a very well-known writer who was a pharmacist in a past life.). It’s a kind of feminist retort to the maid cafés, where geeky guys are waited on by cute girls in frilly dress. Patrick Macias investigates how dreams come true here. (It is quite amazing how well the double entendres are enunciated on NHK’s “English conversation TV…”) Maid cafés have now half-morphed to LA, tho the fetishism is of a slightly different order–more about the commodity, and less about the poured-in love of the server…

In Café Scifi-tique, science geekiness is something to be flaunted, and the whole roster is devoted to making science entertaining and accessible. The September 29 salon, for example, featured a talk by a manga artist,　whose most recent work, Science Boy (Rikei-kun), is about a literary girl fated to fall for science guys. Kind of shôjo manga-ish in plot, but less doormat-y. A list of very cute profiles is attached, listing the “doctors’” favorite gadgets (gas chromatograph), their favorite cult scientist movies (The Man Who Stole The Sun), their specialties, etc.

nobel, schmobel, noberu, ノベル

Photo from the Guardian

I was a bit taken aback when I heard and read all the spluttering about how no Americans got within even shouting distance of the Nobel Prize for literature this year. The Los Angeles Times critic, David Ulin, took an extremely offended stance, and panned the winner, Jean-Marie Gustave le Clézio, as an “irregular” resident of Albuquerque, and “very much a writer of the moment.” It is hard to say who looks sillier, in all this mess. The gate-keepers of high literature, as characterized in the piece:

Last week, Engdahl, the Swedish Academy’s permanent secretary, called American literary culture “too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature” — comments widely seen in the United States as evidence of the insularity of the Nobel itself and proof that American writers would be shut out again.

or the affronted shock troops on the literary pages themselves. I would also note that the LA Times actually deleted its own book review section (a decision which cannot have made many people there happy, especially when one of the sections that replaced it, the glossy “advertorial” LA Times Magazine, has proven to be as dull as dishwater), so it has little to stand on as a defender against philistinism. I nearly fell off my chair when I read this:

It’s hard to say where Le Clezio fits into all this; I’ve never read his books. In fact, until Thursday morning, I’d never heard of him — and I’m not alone.

Ulin casts le Clézio as trendy and kind of boffo, as apparently living overseas and learning several languages can only be seen as trendy fiddle-faddle. But he does not bother to pick up his mouse and click on a library catalog (I recommend Worldcat.org, personally). Nor does he pick up the phone and call any of the number of French readers around town who might be able to loan him a copy of one of the best-known and -regarded writers in France, a country where people, um, actually read books. Le Clézio  is often taught in college-level French classes, as I was informed by a highly erudite and well-read scholar of French lit, to whom I often sit next on the bus. If he is on the radar of the LAPL, and any moderately alert nineteen-year-old in a foreign language class, he should be on the radar of a book critic of a flagship newspaper. If he is not, a simple run to the library can do the trick. Or Google can help, at the very least. A major newspaper should simply not have a headline announcing the selection of a Nobel prize winner titled “Le Clézio–Who’s He?” It’s indeed possible that the committee should re-think the kind of works it tends to pick. But complaining about the provinciality of the prize structure without actually reading the winning novelist’s work is untenable. It actually reinforces the impression of US provinciality.

I turned to my lazy-taxpayer’s weapon of choice, the LAPL catalog, and found–lo, fifty-two books! One for every single week in the year! In Korean, Japanese, Spanish, French, and even a few rogue volumes in English. Quick, if you move fast, you can still snap up the English translation of Oritsha, a semi-autobiographical novel about living in Nigeria as a child, while it is still on the shelf.

All of this is to say that literary critics seem to be helping with the nails in the coffin of literary journalism, these days, tapping the lid a little more firmly shut with their own closed minds. I can’t help but wonder about the reasons for such trivializing descriptions as the NY Times faint-praise description of le Clézio as “a French novelist, children’s author and essayist regarded by some French readers as one of the country’s greatest living writers” (italics mine).

The resentment seems to derive from the dreary out-dated Henry James complex about European-ness many US critics seem to maintain. The defensive attitude seems to be about defending the US candidates’ presumed social engagement from charges that it does not exist. To me, the difference is clear, given the historical tendencies of the Nobel committees to privilege the modernist engagé writer. Le Clézio’s books take place, in large part, in developing countries–Mexico ranks high, in terms of mise-en-scène, as well as Africa and parts of Latin America. Encounters with otherness are part and parcel of the stories, both colonial and geographic/linguistic others.

In contrast, neither Philip Roth nor John Updike seems high on the list of non-narcissistic engagé authors. I do love Roth, or late Roth anyway. And Updike provides a window into certain east coast psycho-pathologies of the suburban era, with doleful yet somehow self-congratulatory insights in highly stylized prose whose descriptions of quiet desperation I have learned a lot from. He can also be wickedly funny. But neither is especially social. I mean, The Terrorist was downright embarrassing. Rabbit, Really? I also really like Joyce Carol Oates, especially her non-fiction writing about boxing and the meanness of girl culture, which preceded the current buzz by, oh, twenty years. Her short story, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” is on line here. It is breathtaking. It is not, however, gnarly modernism, of the sort favored by the prize committee.

All of the above is why I was thrilled today to learn something that killed two bad literary journalism birds with one stone. (Sorry about that sentence…) This announcement appeared on the 33 1/3 series blog a couple weeks ago:

Yes, it is the first Japanese translation of one of the 33 1/3 series, Jim Fusilli’s chapbook on the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds. That might seem to be quite a mind-meld, but given the many varieties of electro that ambiate in Japanese pop, it makes a good deal of sense.

The kicker is that the translator is probably Japan’s next big hope for the Nobel, Murakami Haruki. Now that is a new paradigm. Not the inward gnarly modernism of a Nabakov or Roth. Not the tragic “weighing in” of many Nobel writers, who seem more valued as pundits than stylists or engaged intellectuals. And proof that you can write serious fiction–like about death camps and subway terrorism–and have a sense of experiment and fancy. I am not sure the Nobel, founded by a dynamite magnate, will ever be ready to swerve from the tenets of modernist writing it seems to prize so dearly, and embrace a postmodern oeuvre. But this is truly refreshing, to see a seriously engaged writer also be seriously at play.

Miyazaki Tsutomu, otaku, executed

These days, the term “otaku” is often embraced with pride, to mean a sort of mild geekiness or coolness based on collecting and knowledge-sharing, but many have forgotten the term’s subcultural roots, and the moral panics that followed its embrace. Miyazaki was the first video-comic-subculture consumer to truly peg otaku as perverse and criminal. He was convicted for the pretty gory mutilation and murder of 4 schoolgirls in 1989, and sentenced to the death penalty, and when his two-room apartment was searched, a big stash of porn and horror films found was, including the items that were hyped as his favorite films, selections from the Guinea Pig series.

Not a cute animé series, but rather a laboratory of sorts, the Guinea Pig are pretty rough horror films, with  graphic torture scenes of girls, of the “let’s see what happens” sort. But, as in many cases when it helps move the goods, otaku were de-stigmatised and brought around as emissaries of cool in the post-Pokémon and post-Murakami Takashi world.

A collaborative that includes film fest programmer Alex Zahlten organizes the largest J-film fest in the world, held in Frankfurt each year. Alex interviewed a recent J-horror director, TSURUTA Norio, who talks about how the moral panic in the wake of Miyazaki, and the desire to distance from his spectre, provoked a whole new atmospheric aesthetic of J-horror films, which produced The Ring and much of what we think of as J-horror today.

Oddly, some photos of Miyazaki’s room, as in the example above, were part of the Japanese government’s offering to the Venice Biennale last go-round, as they apparently chose to ride the wave of “Japan cool,” and Miyazaki phobia had died down.

Miyazaki’s hanging took place, as is customary, without an announcement, on June 17. Rumors abound in the papers about why this took place now, just before the G8 summit which is taking place in remote Hokkaido in July. And about the relation of Miyazaki to a recent stabbing binge in Akihabara by a temp worker. Much of the speculation dwells a bit luridly, in my opinion, on recent incidents of youth crime, and connects them rather lazily to comic or game images, as responses to perverse stimuli.

More perverse to me, or differently so, is the new maid café in Culver City, which has leeched all the hostess-bar function out of the café, and made it into a coed gallery. It’s supposed to be a kind of hostess bar, an oasis of “innocent” sex industry work in the stinky-boy electronics zone of Akihabara, where the maids –popularised via Sade in the late 60s, think role play here–hold your hand and listen to you whine about not having a girlfriend, while you drink lousy dishwater coffee. It’s not supposed to be for sweet young girl-things in their twenties to meet for a yummy high tea. It’s just wrong! Of course, it’s probably easier on the server to pass out the sandwiches and not have to listen like a captive bartender and understand the freaking customer.

the melancholy of the tennis boy–more facts only a ‘Japanologist’ could love

Continuing with last week’s Murakami Ryû obsession, I came across something you don’t see often enough with US authors–cocktails named after their works! Something to strive for with the next great American novel. The conceit here is that Murakami’s late night TV blab-show, “Ryû’s Bar,” generated the drinks. Above, we have the Almost Transparent Blue.

Fair enough, very drinky sounding. Let’s see what’s in it: 15 ml eau de vie de framboise, 1 t of green mint, 60 ml of champagne. Seems a bit classy for all those orgy scenes, but maybe Ryû is just a cooler customer than I, and lord knows blue is not a naturally-occurring food color. (Here I’m not getting bent out of shape about orgies, but referring to the clichéd, un-humanish style of Murakami’s prose with the ‘unnatural label. And let’s not even ask about the draft version of this drink, shall we, as I mentioned here.)

What’s next? Well, cutting to the chase, a gin drink, the “melancholy of the Tennis Boy.” I guess the tennis boy is an old-school rummy. Also, this is the cougar drink of choice, say the jodhpurs below, when shaken, not stirred. Why not help him out by setting him up with some drinky stripes. His other ingredients include 1 t of green mint (liqueur, I am beginning to surmise), 10 ml of Pernod, 60 ml of soda.

And lastly–skipping, sadly over such drinky marvels as the “69″ and the “War on the Other Side of the Ocean,” we will truly know when we have bought the fascist farm when we all drink three squares of this, the “Love and Illusion in a Time of Fascism.” Mind you, this is a two-volume novel about survivalist high tech operators in the Arctic Circle in the time of millennial hunter and gatherers, that reads like the dry parts of the Economist. No psychology whatsoevah.

In case you are wondering, after the apocalypse, we will be drinking single malt Laphroaig Scotch and dark beer combos, 30 and 45 ml, respectively.