Nothing But Words

Iron Man: The Comic is Good, the Movie Trailer Isn’t

Topic: TV, Movies, and Music
Tags: Comics, Movies

A while back I confessed to my renewed interest in comics. Iron Man was my favorite when I first started reading comics in high school. Tony Stark is Iron Man, and he’s essentially the Batman of the Marvel universe: a billionaire industrialist with no superpowers, he becomes a superhero by means of his own ingenuity and limitless resources (refreshingly though, he doesn’t have Bruce Wayne’s brooding, morbid personality). What impressed me at the time was the bold and unconventional plot the series had going in the 80s:

The cover of Iron Man 182, when Tony Stark hits bottom as an alcoholic

…a ruthless rival, Obadiah Stane, manipulates him [Stark] emotionally into a serious relapse into alcoholism. As a result, Stark loses control of Stark International, becomes a homeless vagrant and gives up his armored identity to Rhodes, who becomes the new Iron Man for a lengthy period of time. Eventually, Stark recovers and starts a new company, Circuits Maximus. While Stark concentrates on new technological designs, Rhodes continues to act as Iron Man but steadily grows more aggressive and paranoid…

That kind of storytelling has become more common as the audience for comics has matured, but it definitely stood out in the 80s. I was amazed to see issue after issue with the main character as a homeless man. It wasn’t just a “social issue of the day” storyline that the writers dispensed with in a couple months. They didn’t shy away from the ugliness of alcoholism, as Stark inexorably lost his company, his fortune, and his friends.

I stopped reading comics after high school, and then started again last year with Civil War, and the new Iron Man series. I was astonished to learn that the original Iron Man series was canceled in 1996, after a 28 year run. That was the year Marvel went into bankruptcy due to mismanagement. I also learned that the current series is actually the fourth, following two ill-fated attempts to revive it. Iron Man was one of many titles that suffered as Marvel’s top talent left the company.

The new series is great - one of the best titles Marvel has going right now. Both the character and plot development are intricate and engaging. What’s annoying though is the distortion of Stark’s character when he makes appearances in other series. In Civil War he becomes almost unrecognizable, portrayed as a brutal fascist, willing to violate any and all ethical principals to force total compliance with the superhuman registration act. And in the otherwise fantastic Ultimates, where he always seems to have a martini in hand and a woman on his arm.

Unfortunately, he’s a self-caricature in the new movie trailer as well (available in hi res for Quicktime, or low res at YouTube). I was looking forward to when it became available online last week, but my heart sank as I watched it. The problem is that they turn Stark into an overgrown frat boy with a passion for things that go boom. He thinks it’s cool when a reporter refers to him as a “merchant of death,” and in a speech to some troops he proclaims he prefers weapons you have to use only once, as opposed to ones you don’t have to use at all. Compare that to the more faithful portrayal of his character in the current comic series. This is from an interview he’s having with a Michael Moore-like filmmaker, after the interviewer takes him to task for designing hi-tech landmines and “seedpod,” a daisy-cutter style bomb (click to enlarge) :

An interview with Tony Stark, from issue 1 of the 4th Iron Man series

Judging by the trailer, it seems likely you’re not going to get thoughtful dialog like that in the movie. Also, I have to admit while watching the trailer I went from just a sinking heart to an audible groan when my ears picked up the droning bass line of Black Sabbath’s Iron Man in the soundtrack. Being hit over the head with early 70s heavy metal is more than enough to take me out of the moment of the film. I can only hope that the song is just in the trailer and not the actual film.

I don’t understand how Marvel makes its decisions when bringing a comic series to the big screen. The flagship series Spider-man deservedly got top notch talent, substantial financial backing, and careful attention to the portrayal of the characters. So did the much more obscure series Blade. But then another flagship series, Fantastic Four, was made into not one, but two mediocre films that were far more cartoonish than the actual comic. Unfortunately, it looks like Iron Man is also getting the cartoonish treatment, just with a better cast.

Update: I’ve seen the movie since writing this post, and it was pretty good. Without giving anything away, Stark has an experience in the first part of the movie that changes his outlook, making him much less of a jerk. In the preview we only see him as a jerk, so I’m happy to report it was not representative of the overall film.

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Japanese Youth Hostels, Ryokans, Minshukus, and Capsule Hotels

Topic: Japan 2007
Tags: Japan

Our room in the Yakushima Youth Hostel Our room in the Yakushima Youth Hostel

The communal room in the Yakushima Youth Hostel The communal room in the Yakushima Youth Hostel

A traditional Japanese dinner, served in our room at the Nakamuraya Ryokan - http://www.japaneseguesthouses.com/db/sapporo/nakamuraya.htm

If you travel in Japan, there are a number of different types of places you can stay. In our travels around Japan so far, we’ve tried most of them:

• Ryokan: a traditional Japanese inn - Wikipedia has a good page on ryokans. You’ll sleep on futons on a tatami mat floor, and have a traditional Japanese dinner served in your room. They tend to be pricey but you can sometimes find affordable ones. When we visited Sapporo we stayed at the reasonably priced and very pleasant Nakamuraya Ryokan (pictured on the right). In Kagoshima City we stayed at the Nakazono Ryokan, which was a nice place to stay, but was actually much more like a minshuku…
• Minshuku: in my experience these are similar to youth hostels in the US. Bathroom and shower facilities are usually shared. Meals are not served in your room. What you’ll get for food may vary: some may offer breakfast in a communal room, others may simply offer a communal kitchen where you bring your own food, and some may not have a kitchen at all. During our 2004 trip we stayed at the Kimi Ryokan, but it really should have called itself a minshuku: all the facilities were communal, no meals were provided, and the guests were primarily noisy foreigners. In Tanegashima we stayed at the Tanegashima Miharusou, which was a relatively quiet, slightly rundown, but well run minshuku that catered to the many surfers that visit Tanegashima.
• 

  The Oirase Keiryu Grand Hotel. This is where the conference took place, and it’s where we stayed. The grounds of the hotel, and it’s hot spring baths, were great

  Hotels: western style hotels are common everywhere in Japan nowadays, except in the most rural areas. The only major differences from western hotels are that the rooms are typically smaller, and pricing is usually per person, not per room. They’re especially popular with business travelers who want a western style bed, and may not have the time for, or interest in, the amenities of a ryokan. When we visited Aomori in 2004, we stayed at the fabulous Oirase Keiryu Grand Hotel. Normally it’s not the kind of place that would be an option for us financially, but we were fortunate to have the room paid for by the folks sponsoring Maria’s conference.

• Capsule Hotels: these are unique to Japan - it’s kind of like sleeping in a cadaver drawer at a morgue, except there’s a small TV in your capsule instead of a freezer. It’s not the kind of accommodation one is likely to seek when on vacation (unless you missed the last train on a night of drunken revelry, and you don’t have enough yen to take a taxi or stay anywhere else). I’ve never had the experience of staying in one, but Wikipedia has an excellent page, with pictures.
• 

  A room in the Miyanoura Portside Youth Hostel in Kagoshima, Japan

  Youth Hostels: I’ve saved these for last, because they’re the best. The Japan Guide site says Japanese youth hostels “…do not differ much from European or American youth hostels.” This could not be further from the truth. American youth hostels are more akin to Japanese minshukus: not always clean and not always quiet. We’ve stayed in 3 youth hostels in Japan ([text="goodbye-aomori-hello-nikko-goodbye-nikko-hello-ikebukuro" text="when we visited Nikko in 2004"], and two in Yakushima this spring), and they were all immaculate and quiet, with attentive staff. All have at least a communal fridge and microwave, and some provide a communal dinner. They have communal bathrooms and showers, but in my experience they were always very clean. All have doors locked and lights out policies, usually around 10pm, so they’re not good options for nightcrawlers (but traveling with children, we thought it was great). They also offer common areas for the guests, so they’re great places to meet other travelers. In Yakushima, I enjoyed a long conversation (after the family was in bed) with a man from Yokohama who was planning to hike clear across the island. He gave me some good hiking tips and we shared opinions on various Miyazaki films. The youth hostels on Yakushima island are especially worthy of praise. The southern one is very nicely designed (pictured at the top of this post), has nightly communal dinners, the staff organize and lead hiking trips for their guests, and they offer car rentals on the premises. The northern one is more utilitarian (pictured on the right), but is very well run, and offers western style beds.

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When in Japan, Talk Like a Man

Topic: Learning Japanese
Tags: Japan, Japanese Language

Tomorrow’s Christian Science Monitor has a fun article on a topic I’ve been meaning to write about, but they got to it first: the difference between men’s Japanese and women’s Japanese. It’s a personal story written by an American journalist working in Japan:

Wherever you go, men and women tend to speak differently. But in Japan, those differences are more pronounced than in many places. Among the multilayered rules of grammar and usage governing spoken Japanese, there also exist underlying concepts of “men’s Japanese” and “women’s Japanese.” By the end of my 2-1/2-year stay there, I had unwittingly become conversant in the latter form.

Like many Western men who spend more than a year in Japan, I learned most of my intonation, expressions, and slang – the things not taught in the classroom – by mimicking a Japanese girlfriend.

I thought my Japanese was fine, while in reality the effeminate, almost childish twang I had been learning made me sound very much like a 20-something, pink miniskirted Japanese woman.

My Japanese isn’t good enough for me to share a specific example of this, but I’ve been immersed in the language long enough to have an ear for the difference in how Japanese men and women speak. It really is a striking contrast. The men typically sound quite gruff and blunt, and the women often speak in an artificially high pitched or even nasally tone.

I’ve been fortunate enough to have spent a good amount of time around both Japanese men and women. But like many male foreigners working in Japan, the article author was in an English speaking office, and was mostly around Japanese women when not at work:

The solution, of course, was to hang out with more Japanese guys. But for me, a freelance journalist with a part-time job and daily Japanese classes to attend, I had little time for new friends.

Besides, Japanese men, unlike their friendly female counterparts, are often inaccessible. They generally work 12 hours at a stretch and afterward go out in tight-knit, impenetrable groups. My girlfriend once tried to recruit a few male coworkers to teach me better Japanese but had little success. They were either too busy or just too exhausted.

My friend Fred, who’s an American living in Tokyo, married to a Japanese woman, went through the same experience as the author. He told me about one night during his first year in Japan, he passed a policeman on the street and offered him a high, lilting “konban wa” (good evening). He said the officer halted him, quickly surmised the situation, and corrected him with a low, gravelly “konban wa!” My friend Chris, who is half Japanese, told me of a female friend who had the opposite problem many years ago: she was in Japan learning Japanese from a bunch of male friends (surly teenage guys to boot), and later had to unlearn a number of Japanese language habits that were very inappropriate for a woman.

So, if you’re learning Japanese, once you get past the basics, definitely make an effort to spend some time learning from someone of the same gender.

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Avatar: The Last Airbender, and the Joys of #6 Plastic

Topic: Kai and Eidan, TV, Movies, and Music
Tags: Anime, Kai

Kai and Maria made shrinky dinks of Kai’s favorite Avatar characters, Aang and Zuko

I’m writing this post at Kai’s request. Tonight he and Maria made Shrinky Dink versions of Kai’s favorite characters from the Nickelodeon show Avatar: The Last Airbender. Maria sketched them and Kai colored them in. Kai is very proud of their work. (They’re not actually Shrinky Dinks though. We made them from the lids of take out sushi containers. You can use #6 plastic just like Shrinky Dinks).

I have to admit Avatar has become a guilty pleasure of mine. The target demographic is 6-11 year olds, but I think it’s actually more sophisticated than a lot of shows intended for adults. The world created for the show is rich in detail, and draws on a wide range of Eastern religions and history to shape its many cultural and supernatural aspects. As an example, the final episode of the second season revolves around Aang (a young boy, who is the main character) having to clear his seven chakras as a step in achieving his potential as the Avatar. I didn’t know much of anything about chakras going into it, but I looked it up afterwards, and it seemed like they actually made a reasonably faithful adaptation of the concept for the show.

What impresses me the most though is the quality of the show’s martial arts animation. Most animation I’ve seen comes up short when it comes to intricate physical movement, but Avatar doesn’t. What’s particularly impressive is that the animators bring to life the distinct styles used by characters from each of the show’s four nations: “The creators use Tai Chi for waterbending, Hung Gar for earthbending (although Toph employs a Chu Gar Southern Praying Mantis style), Northern Shaolin for firebending, and Ba Gua for airbending.”

Also, I’m a sucker for serialized epics with intricate plots. Each season of the show is presented as a book, with each episode being a chapter. The third season trailer below shows some of the maturing of the characters. Like a lot of shows these days, the main characters are kids, but unlike most others, they don’t behave unrealistically (setting aside their magical powers, of course). I also credit the writers for not shying away from how fast the characters are forced to grow up, given their situation. The Aang we see in the third season trailer seems a long way from the goofy kid he was in the first season.

Given the intensity of the trailer, I’m curious to see if the show loses any of the humor that nicely balanced the action and dramatic elements of the previous seasons. I imagine that writing humor gets harder as a story like this moves forward and the stakes just keep getting higher. But maybe that’s why I’m not a fiction writer . My bet is that they’ll pull it off.

Check out the trailer. The new episodes start airing next week.

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Shashin 1.0

Topic: WordPress and Web Programming
Tags: Shashin, WordPress

Shashin 1.0 is now available. New features include an options menu (so you don’t have to touch the code to change settings), improved random image and thumbnail display features, the ability to show the latest uploads to your albums, and UTF-8 support. Thanks to everyone who helped with the beta testing (the beta version was downloaded exactly 100 times).

Shashin is available at the WordPress plugin repository now, so you can get it there as well. The plugin repository requires a readme.txt file with an FAQ section. To avoid maintaining two sets of documentation, I rewrote my Shashin page to also follow the FAQ format.

If you’re crazy for code, you can read the PHPDoc documentation.

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9/11 Remembrance at U Penn

Topic: Politics
Tags: U Penn

9/11 Rememberance at the University of Pennsylvania’s College Green

Every day on the way to my office I walk through Penn’s College Green, past The Button and Penn’s replica of the famous Love statue. Today, on the anniversary of 9/11, the Green was adorned with a multitude of small American flags (the crummy picture is from my cell phone camera). I didn’t come across any information about who worked on it, but I imagine there’s a flag for each person who died that day.

The memory of 9/11 has been so cynically used and manipulated for political purposes over the years (the latest example being the timing of General Petraeus’ Senate testimony) that its anniversary has become a political and emotional minefield. Given all that, I thought this remembrance was very nicely done. It reminded me of the loss we experienced that day, it made me think of the families of the victims, and it evoked a quiet patriotism. It let you experience those feelings without feeling like you were being used in someone’s political agenda, and these days that’s not an easy thing to achieve.

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Happy Anniversary To Us

Topic: Family and Friends
Tags: Me

Maria and I got married 8 years ago today. So I decided it was finally time to put our wedding pictures in an album. About a year ago Maria picked out some pictures, then this weekend I picked out some more and actually put them in an album. Unfortunately, we are both so completely overwhelmed with work, taking care of the boys, and everyday chores that our celebration consisted of sitting at the dining room table for 30 minutes after the boys went to bed, having some gingerbread and ice cream, and talking. But it was 30 minutes that I greatly enjoyed

I also scanned about half the pictures we picked for the album and uploaded them to the site. I’ve had wedding pictures on toppa.com since 1999, but I had shrunk them from their original size, because back then - in the dark ages - any picture more than 300 pixels wide was just way too slow to download over a modem. I’ve replaced the old pictures with full size scans, and added a bunch of new pictures. So, if you weren’t at our wedding or haven’t seen the pictures in a long time, take a look.

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Kagoshima City

Topic: Japan 2007, Kai and Eidan
Tags: Japan, Kai, Me

This is my fourth (and long overdue) post profiling the places we visited during Golden Week. The first was Yakushima, the second was Tanegashima, and the third was the Fukiage Beach Sand Festival. We also had a couple of misadventures on the trip which I wrote about here and here.

The plaque for this statue reads, in part: “Satsuma, now Kagoshima, produced brilliant, far-sighted men during the Meiji Restoration (1868). In 1865, defying the Tokugawa Isolation Law, 17 courageous young students from Satsuma were smuggled to Europe and America to learn advanced Western technology. Overcoming great difficulties, they returned to become the driving force in the modernization of the feudalistic society.”

Kagoshima City, with a population of approximately 600,000, is the fourth largest city in Kyushu, the largest southern island of Japan. “It has been nicknamed the ‘Naples of the Eastern world’, for its bay location (Aira Caldera), hot climate and impressive stratovolcano, Sakurajima.” The city is best known for its history in the period surrounding the start of the Meiji Restoration. In violation of the isolation laws preceding the Restoration, 17 students were secretly sent from Kagoshima (known at the time as Satsuma) to study Western technology in Europe and the US (the students are commemorated in the statue above). As a result, many of Japan’s early industrialization efforts were centered in Satsuma. It is also known as the home of the samurai Saigo Takamori, a legendary figure in Japanese history, who led the Satsuma rebellion against the Meiji government. He’s roughly analogous to General Lee in US history, minus the animus of slavery. His last stand was depicted - with great hyperbole - in the movie The Last Samurai.

The city is now known for its shopping districts, local cuisine, tourist attractions, and, of course, the simmering, occasionally ash spewing volcano that dominates the eastern skyline. The outdoor Tenmonkan shopping district has a series of long, translucent roofs, which are there so shoppers can go about their business without worrying about ash getting in their clothes and hair. For the rest of the city, there are ash collection points every few blocks, where residents and shopowners are expected to deposit the ash they sweep up and bag.

The footbath at Dolphin Port mall. It’s a real hot spring with sulpher water that’s good for your skin but very stinky

The central area of the city is dominated by a modern aquarium, the Tenmonkan, the Dolphin Port outdoor mall, and a number of museums, ancient ruins, temples, and statues celebrating the area’s history. The Dolphin Port mall sports a hot spring-fed footbath, which Kai and Maria thoroughly enjoyed. Unfortunately, you don’t see things like this in the US - only in Japan is there complete, mutual trust that everyone will clean their feet properly before using the footbath.

All the food we ate in Kagoshima City was delicious. I remember the night we had sushi especially well, because it was the freshest sushi I’ve ever eaten, and because just a few hours later, I threw out my back.

For our last night in Kagoshima City, I took Kai to see Spider Man 3 at the enormous, modern Amu Plaza, which is probably the only place within a 100 miles where you can really immerse yourself in Japan’s consumer culture (which, believe it or not, surpasses the US’). We were staying across town from the plaza, so we rode on the trams. They aren’t too hard to figure out once you get to know the main roads, even if you don’t speak Japanese. Fortunately, in Japan they show most American movies in English, with Japanese subtitles. Unfortunately, Kai got scared towards the end of the movie when Venom was on the loose, so we had to leave before the movie was over - I still don’t know how it ends .

The only part of our visit that didn’t work out was our last half day. It was raining so we decided to cancel our plan to take the ferry over to see the historical sites surrounding the volcano. Instead, Maria and I cobbled together the last of our yen coins so I could take the boys into the aquarium while she tried to figure out where to get some more cash. It was a holiday, and the post office ATMs were unexpectedly closed (I wrote about how all that turned out in this post).

I should re-iterate from my previous post that we enjoyed staying at the Nakazono Ryokan. It’s inexpensive, it has a central location (it’s within walking distance of the Yamakataya bus terminal and the main port), and the man who runs it is very attentive. He even helped us buy our ferry tickets and gave us a ride to the port after I hurt my back. And he speaks English .

On the trip home Maria and I had idle conversation about someday retiring somewhere on Kyushu. It’s a place of stunning natural beauty, but with a few cities big enough that you can enjoy what civilization has to offer too.

Bronze statue of Saigo Takamori, who’s legend was retold (with several major historical innaccuracies) in the movie The Last Samurai (he was named Katsumoto in the movie)	Hot dog sushi, at a restaurant in the Dolphin Port mall, Kagoshima City	A common sign on the sidewalks of Kagoshima City, instructing residents and shopowners to bag the volcano ash they sweep up, and leave it by the sign for collection
The covered shopping district in Kagoshima City, known as Tenmonkan. The roof is there to protect against ash from the nearby volcano.	The road in Tenmonkan has a number of tiles depicting astronomical phenomena. This is a favorite of mine, the Hourglass Nebula	A nicely decorated cafe, along the road by Shiroyama Park

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