Nothing But Words

The Toyosu Theater ticket counter, providing the swankiest movie ticket purchasing experience anywhere View at Picasa The Toyosu Theater ticket counter, providing the swankiest movie ticket purchasing experience anywhere06-Apr-2007 20:46, Canon Canon PowerShot S230, 3.5, 9.28125mm, 0.1 sec	The Toyosu Theater Snack Bar – I challenge you to spot the slightest spec of anything that shouldn’t be there View at Picasa The Toyosu Theater Snack Bar – I challenge you to spot the slightest spec of anything that shouldn’t be there06-Apr-2007 20:46, Canon Canon PowerShot S230, 3.5, 9.28125mm, 0.1 sec
Inside the Lalaport Toyosu Mall View at Picasa Inside the Lalaport Toyosu Mall06-Apr-2007 20:51, Canon Canon PowerShot S230, 2.8, 5.40625mm, 0.025 sec	A giant pipe organ in the Toyosu LaLaport Mall View at Picasa A giant pipe organ in the Toyosu LaLaport Mall19-Apr-2007 17:50, Canon Canon PowerShot S230, 2.8, 5.40625mm, 0.017 sec

Maria recently met up with an acquaintance who was visiting Japan for the first time. He had only been here a few days, and he was swooning, with observations like “I just bought shoes, and it was the nicest shoe shopping experience I’ve ever had…I rode the train, and it was the nicest train ride I’ve ever had…” and so on. Tokyo’s dazzling modernity, startling cleanliness, and the ubiquitous politeness of the Japanese combine to make a powerful first impression. As an American living here for a while, I’ll say it is – like anything else – something you start to get used to, until you experience it in a new context, and then it hits you all over again.

This happened to me the other night when Maria and I engaged in a strange and exotic ritual: we went to the movies. It’s something we haven’t done in probably a year (we are thrilled to have found a babysitter able to rise to the challenge of putting Eidan to bed). We headed to the Toyosu Theater, home of Tokyo’s largest movie screen and located in Japan’s largest mall, Lalaport. I have never seen such a pristine, elegant, and completely spotless movie theater. The same goes for the mall. I usually can’t stand malls, but this one has a very airy, open design, and the carpeted floor and many cloth seats gave it a comfortable and inviting feel. Also, the mall is on the waterfront, and the stores are organized into several buildings shaped like ships, so it’s not the typical mall collection of big, ugly box-like buildings.

Poster for the movie Dororo View at Picasa Poster for the movie Dororo

The only disappointment was the movie, Dororo. I actually enjoyed it, but it was a much sillier movie than suggested by its massive marketing campaign back in January, which had led me to believe I was going to see something on par with Lord of the Rings. The conceit for the film is bizarre and intriguing – it’s based on the 1960s Dororo manga that’s well known in Japan:

The story takes place in Japan during the Sengoku period, or the Warring States period. Forty-eight major demons, known as majins (lit. demon gods), sense the impending birth of a powerful human, who will grow up to be the vanquisher of demonkind.

The forty-eight majins make a deal with the samurai Kagemitsu Daigo–who is the father of the yet-unborn child–wherein Daigo pledges forty-eight body parts of his unborn son to the majins, receiving in return the majins’ guarantee that Kagemitsu will be unbeatable in any warfare and become the lord protector of the entire Japan. Indeed, the boy is born without forty-eight body parts; Kagemitsu puts the neonate in a basket and floats him down a river.

Fortunately the infant is rescued by a physician named Jukai who, over the period of many years, devises many cunning prosthetics so that the boy–named Hyakkimaru (lit. One Hundred Ogre Boy) by Jukai–can function like a normal person. Also Hyakkimaru has many supernatural powers which allow him to see, talk, and hear, despite having no eyes, mouth, or ears.

Upon reaching adulthood, Hyakkimaru embarks on a journey to vanquish the forty-eight majins and reclaim his body parts; he is soon joined by Dororo, a precocious street urchin and self-styled “greatest thief in all of Japan.” Together, Hyakkimaru and Dororo travels the feudal Japan, helping the oppressed people and defeating the demons, in the hope that one day Hyakkimaru will win back all his body parts from the forty-eight majins.

Unfortunately, it’s a mediocre adaptation. It was made by Toho studios – the folks who brought us Godzilla – and while some of the cinematography and special effects are great, they also went for the guy-in-a-rubber-suit for some of the demons, which was just laughable. The main problem with the film is that it’s just all over the place: sometimes it seems goofy like a kids movie, other times the themes are for adults, and other times it’s fairly gruesome, but in a ridiculous way, like a horror movie for teenagers. At 2 hours and 20 minutes, it was also too long, with a number of tangential scenes that didn’t do much to advance the story.

It’s supposedly going to be released in the US at some point. If they edit it down by about 30 minutes and excise some of the blood n’ guts, it might do well as a PG-13 flick for early-teen boys (assuming they’re not turned off by subtitles).

Anyway, our enjoyment of the evening didn’t hinge on the quality of the movie. It was good to be out without the boys for a few hours, and to see yet another amazing aspect of Tokyo.

An entirely gratuitous photograph of Maria, at the Toyosu Theater View at Picasa An entirely gratuitous photograph of Maria, at the Toyosu Theater06-Apr-2007 20:44, Canon Canon PowerShot S230, 2.8, 5.40625mm, 0.125 sec

Outside the LaLaport Mall View at Picasa Outside the LaLaport Mall06-Apr-2007 20:55, Canon Canon PowerShot S230, 2.8, 5.40625mm, 0.125 sec

The grounds outside the Toyosu Mall – the mall buildings are shaped somewhat like ships, and the curved landscaping is supposed to be like waves View at Picasa The grounds outside the Toyosu Mall – the mall buildings are shaped somewhat like ships, and the curved landscaping is supposed to be like waves19-Apr-2007 17:07, Canon Canon PowerShot S230, 7.1, 5.40625mm, 0.008 sec

If I were living in Tokyo but was single with no kids, my website would probably be a lot like Japan Live. The author posts regularly about bands he sees in Tokyo. He recently wrote about the “hardcore marching brass” band Asakusa Jinta:

This septet takes old Japanese popular music, mixes in rock, rockabilly and a teaspoon of punk, and cooks up a sound that is both nostalgic and brand new. The ‘jinta’ in their name refers to brass bands that were active in the Meiji and Taisho eras (that is, 1868 to 1926), and horns and saxes, in addition to an accordion and a pumped-up double bass, are key ingredients in their songs. Their music sounds like modernized versions of old Japanese movie music (you can sample some of their tunes here).

Most Japanese bands borrow from western music styles like rock, blues and hip hop, but very few tap into Japan’s own home-grown musical traditions. Asakusa Jinta does, and succeeds brilliantly.

I haven’t heard their music beyond what’s on their MySpace profile, but they sound like an awful lot of fun.

I just came across the Japan Live site, so I’m writing this post now because Asakusa Jinta are starting a US tour. Relevant locations for friends who read this blog are: Boston, March 10; Philly, March 12 (or possibly the 13th – I saw two different dates posted); and San Francisco, March 19. Details are on their MySpace page. If I’m lucky they’ll play in Tokyo again before we head back to the US.

A few months ago I started reading comic books again, for the first time since I was a teenager. The thing that got me to walk into a comic book store for the first time in twenty years was an NPR interview with a couple guys from Marvel comics, touting their 7-issue Civil War series. The premise is essentially a non-tongue in check version of The Incredibles backstory: the people have grown tired of the often massive collateral damage that results from super-powered vigilantism. But instead of The Incredibles solution of forcing all of them to retire from the superhero business, the Congress passes a law requiring them to register with the US government as “persons of mass destruction” and to start taking orders from S.H.I.E.L.D. (a fictional counter-terrorism/intelligence agency). The Registration Act is framed as a civil liberties issue, and it splits the superhero community down the middle. Iron Man leads the registered superheroes, and their first job is to arrest those who refuse to register, which is a group led by (wait for it….) Captain America.

This sounded like a potentially interesting political allegory for our times, so I decided to check it out. I have to say it’s a pretty good read, and I’ve gotten sucked into several of the tie-in stories to regular Marvel titles. One thing that’s clearly changed since I was reading comics in the 80s is the sophistication of the stories – the target audience is adults now (in our local comics store, there’s a very small section for the comics aimed at kids under 12, and the rest of the store is for the big kids). What holds the Civil War series back from being really great though is that the premise just doesn’t hold water: by no stretch of the imagination is being a superhero a “civil right.” There’s no constitutional right to vigilantism, let alone super-powered vigilantism. Having said that, the quality of the artwork and the overall storytelling goes a long way towards making up for this flawed premise.

The Spider-Man Civil War side story is even better than the Civil War series itself. In a major change for the character, Peter Parker reveals his identity as Spider Man and comes out as a supporter of the Registration Act. But he is deeply conflicted about his choice. The current writer for The Amazing Spider-Man is J. Michael Straczynski, creator of one of my favorite TV series, Babylon 5. He does what good writers do – he gets you in Peter’s head and gets you to identify with his struggle. Here’s an example – this scene takes place shortly after Captain America loses his shield in a scuffle with Spider-Man:

Spider Man, after a confrontation with Captain America View at Picasa Spider Man, after a confrontation with Captain America

For me, the one Marvel series that really outshines the others is Ultimates 2. Marvel has created a whole series of “Ultimate” titles (Ultimate Spider Man, Ultimate Fantastic Four, etc.) which they use to tell stories without being tied to the decades of history the characters have accumulated in their regular series’. This universe has much fewer superheroes in it, and is much closer to the real world (e.g. George Bush is President, we’re at war in Iraq, etc.). The Ultimates 2 series is a re-working of the Avengers. It’s much grittier, realistic, and overtly political than any comic I’ve seen before. The Ultimates team is controlled through S.H.I.E.L.D., and is used only for domestic law enforcement. But then Captain America is used to rescue some hostages in Iraq, and so the trip down the slippery slope begins. Not much later the whole team is used to perform a pre-emptive strike on one of the “Axis of Evil” countries. Here’s a snippet of a conversation between Tony Stark (Iron Man) and the imprisoned Thor after the attack (the writers have brilliantly re-cast Thor as a sort of Earth First/Greenpeace left-wing activist):

View at Picasa Tony Stark (Iron Man) visiting Thor in prison – from the series Ultimates 2

Stark: “And when did I become one of the bad guys?”
Thor: “Around the same time you took part in that pre-emptive strike against a Third-World country”

At the same time, an alliance of Middle East and Third World nations, with covert assistance from China, are planning to use their own superheroes for an assault on America. But before they strike, they infiltrate the Ultimates with a spy, and take most of the team down one by one: Thor is framed for getting his powers from stolen high tech weaponry (nobody really bought his whole “God of Thunder” story to begin with), Hawkeye is captured and his family murdered, and Captain America is framed for doing it. Bruce Banner is put on trial for a deadly rampage by the Hulk, and then secretly executed. With most of the Ultimates out of comission, “The Liberators” attack is swift and successful, including the capture of the President and control of the US’ nuclear arsenal. This situation effectively deters the Europeans and their superheroes from intervening. The leader of the attack videotapes the final moments of the assault, announcing at the end “the Great Satan has been liberated.”

View at Picasa “This is what happens when your ambitions outstrip your capabilities” – from the series Ultimates 2

The Liberators’ Leader: “This is what happens when your ambitions outstrip your capabilities”

Tony Stark narrowly survives an assassination attempt, and with the other surviving Ultimates members, they begin to organize a counter-offensive. That’s where the story stands at issue 10 of this 13 issue series – I don’t want to give away anything beyond that. Issue 12 just came out. You might have a hard time finding the earliest issues, but I think most comic shops would have it back to issue 9, which isn’t a bad place to pick it up, as that’s when the attack on the US happens. Issue 12 is just one giant battle though, so I wouldn’t recommend starting there, as you’ll have no idea what’s going on (the series tends to have 2 or 3 dialog-heavy issues, followed by a non-stop action issue).

UPDATE: The series is now available in hardcover. Here’s the Amazon link: The Ultimates 2

This makes me both happy and sad: Kohl’s is using a cover of the 1983 hit In A Big Country in their latest ad. I’m happy to see my favorite band get some (posthumous) publicity, but the cover version they’re using makes me cringe. The demographic obviously being targeted here is my age group. But, y’know, we’re all in our mid-thirties and early forties now, and – while we have fond memories of the electric guitar rock of our youth – we’ve all mellowed with age, and hearing it again in its original form would just hurt our aging, sensitive ears. We’re much more likely to shop at Kohl’s if they play a slower, more wistful version of the song for us.

And to think I listened to Big Black’s Atomizer on the way to work this morning.

Update: Some in the Big Country discussion forum were wondering if the surviving band members get any royalties from this sort of thing. The answer is no – Mercury owns most of their back catalogue and can do whatever they want with it, with no payment to the band. Since I’ve already mentioned Big Black in this post, I’ll quote their former frontman Steve Albini (who went on to produce albums for the Pixies, Breeders, and dozens of others) on the matter:

“Starting with Jefferson Airplane and The MC5 and going right up to Sonic Youth and Husker Du, it’s never worked. In 30 years no band has ever come out of the system alive. They get signed, they get arm-wrestled into spending too much money on their records, they get into debt to the record company, they spend 18 months trying to get out of it, it doesn’t work and the band breaks up. That has been such a constant that I can’t believe anyone still falls for it…”

Steve gazes calmly into the hell that is corporate rock. “It boggles my mind that everyone thinks they can pull the wool over the eyes of a company that’s had 30 years’ experience in dicking rock bands. Now that means that bands are being arm-wrestled into sounding like Nirvana; and the only way record companies can imagine doing that is by hiring Nirvana’s producer, so every band on a major label has been remixed by Nirvana’s producer this year…and I just don’t have any interest in being part of the continuum.”

We have liberated ourselves from the clutches of Comcast, and it feels good. More specifically, my checking account balance feels good. For extended basic and a cable modem our cost went from about $60/month 3 years ago, to $95/month today. When I first encountered cable TV in the early 80s, I thought it was bizarre that you had to pay and still watch ads. That first impression faded as cable became ubiquitous, but it crept back into my brain recently as I’ve been watching the cable bill climb month after month.

So tonight I bought a modestly sized roof antenna, which I’ll install in the attic. Don’t worry, I didn’t buy the one in the ad (click on it – it’s hilarious), but like the ad says, it’s legal in all 50 states, and we’re watching TV for free. For internet connectivity, I switched to DSL for $15/month. It’ slightly slower, but for everyday web surfing, the difference isn’t noticeable.

Does watching broadcast TV make me a backwards looking luddite? No, not at all! There are only a few shows that Maria and I have the time and inclination to watch, and we realized we can now download them from iTunes. The total cost of the downloads will be much less than the cable bill, there’s no commercials, and I have a PC hooked up to the TV, so the viewing experience is mostly the same (I say “mostly” because the resolution of the iTunes downloads isn’t great, but they’re perfectly watchable). I gave up on the cable news channels a while back, as they’ve become little more than 24-hour, wall-to-wall tabloid journalism (the saturation coverage of the JonBenet case being the latest example), so I won’t be missing them.

Another motivation was Kai, as he’s been asking for every toy he sees advertised on TV (we’ve been using SageTV on the PC to record his shows, with the idea being that he could skip the commercials, but it doesn’t always work out that way, since he seems to like the commercials). In the few days the cable has been gone, his TV watching has dropped dramatically. At first I thought he might want to watch his DVDs instead (he has plenty of them), but he didn’t. The DVDs require him to think about and choose what he wants to watch, instead of just flipping to whatever’s on Nickelodeon, and it seems that creates enough of a barrier that most of the time he chooses to do something else instead. Cool! (We used to be good about placing consistent limits on his TV watching, but now that we’re chasing Eidan around the house all the time, we haven’t been as good about it, so it’s nice to have this not be part of the discipline equation anymore).

If you’re curious about the antenna ad above, I copied it from the milk.com site. It’s an old site that hasn’t been updated much, but it’s “Wall O’ Shame” was one of the first humor sites, back in the day (1994!). Buying the TV antenna made me remember this very funny ad.

Last Friday night we kept the boys up late so we could all go see Bugs Bunny on Broadway – the Philadelphia Orchestra performed live, accompanying Bugs Bunny cartoons projected on a big screen. Before it was dark enough to show the cartoons, the orchestra did a short performance, which – as you might expect – Kai found boring. So we lied on the lawn and looked for shapes in the clouds. This isn’t something I’ve taken the time to do with him before, and I can’t tell you how great it was. I continue to be astounded at how curious he is – after talking about the clouds for a few minutes, he asked about how the dinosaurs died, and then he wanted to know how the solar system was formed, and then he wanted to know where the first person came from. He understood my explanations for the first two, but he had a hard time wrapping his mind around evolution (sorry folks, I didn’t go with the biblical explanation). But he didn’t give up – he kept asking me about it in different ways until he felt he had a handle on at least some of it. I’m now a true believer in lying on your back and staring at the sky – it’s probably the best way to have a conversation without distraction. Given that we live in the Age of Distraction, this is no small feat.

Kai wasn’t familiar with the old Bugs Bunny cartoons, as they’re not on TV much anymore. He loved them. Of course, he was probably influenced by the huge crowd around him laughing, and the fact that he was up way past his bedtime. If you’ve ever been around kids who are up too late, their behavior is indistinguishable from that of a drunk, except that they’re more frenzied. The same goes for Eidan – with everyone around him laughing, he had a big grin on his face most of the time. Fortunately, he fell asleep before having a meltdown (which is the big risk of keeping kids up too late).

Given the live orchestra, two “musts” for the show were The Rabbit of Seville and What’s Opera, Doc?. I laughed pretty hard at the “Rabbit of Seville” – I had almost completely forgotten this one, so the gags seemed new to me. But of course I hadn’t forgotten “What’s Opera, Doc?” from my childhood – as with many of my generation (and probably the generation before) it was my first exposure to opera. I will never be able to appreciate “Ride of the Valkyries” as it was intended. To me it will always be the “kill the wabbit, kill the wabbit!” song (and I’m sure I’m not the only one). I just learned from the Wikipedia page I linked to that many consider it the greatest animation short of all time. Seeing it for the first time as an adult, I can understand why – the scoring (dozens of hours of Wagner condensed into 6 minutes), the animation, the voice work, and the many satirical jabs are all brilliant.

We’ve been in Philly about 3 years now (…actually, exactly 3 years – we arrived in early June 2003), and in all that time I’ve been to only one show – Bob Mould, a couple of years ago. I used to be obsessed with music, so that’s quite a decline for me. Getting up at 5:30 for work every day, having 2 kids to take care of, not being up on who’s worth seeing these days, etc. – those are all factors. But I opened a Philly Weekly yesterday, and in the next two weeks there are shows by Cat Power (female vocalist with piano, or sometimes acoustic guitar), Mike Doughty (singer/songwriter with acoustic guitar, and brilliant lyrics), and the elder statesmen of Industrial/Dance/Electronica, Frontline Assembly. All are worth staying up late for!

In researching my political post yesterday, I discovered the actor Andreas Katsulas passed away in February. He had been in some movies (I think his biggest role was the “one-armed man” in Harrison Ford’s The Fugitive), but I knew him as G’Kar on Babylon 5. He and Peter Jurasik (who played Londo) were by far the best actors on the series. Their scenes together were always masterfully performed, and the episodes that revolved around their relationship (like Dust to Dust) were among the best. I was always amazed at how much emotional range Katsulas was able to demonstrate, given all the alien headgear he had to wear as the lizard-like G’Kar. He – like Patrick Stewart on Star Trek – was one of those rare TV actors who could take dialog that would sound corny or flat if it were performed by any other actor, and made it sound great.

JMS, the creator of Babylon 5, wrote a heartfelt post about Katsulas’ passing.

Stuart Adamson was the singer, lead guitarist, and primary song writer for Big Country, my favorite band. I’ve always been dazzled by his guitar work, but not being a musician myself, I was never really able to find the right words to describe what I was hearing. When I meet folks who play guitar, I always have to recommend they give a listen to Big Country, as most are not familiar with Adamson’s work, but I’ve never been able to explain exactly why he’s so good. The other day I came across Tom Kercheval’s blog – he’s an independent musician – and not only is he a Big Country fan, he listed Adamson as his primary influence, and unlike me, he’s able to explain Adamson’s talent:

…the thing that always struck me about Stuart’s playing was not so much his lead playing (although it was great) but his rhythm guitar playing, particularly the odd chord structures he came up with. To this day, he’s one of the few guitar players that gives me fits when trying to figure out what he’s playing. His use of droning, open strings when playing chords was so appealling to me, and the Scottish/Celtic sound of the playing as well. He is so underrated. Beyond belief underrated. I still think the album Steeltown is a guitar masterpiece. Listen to that one with headphones and just hear the guitar symphony that is going on on most of those songs – tons of parts interweaving with each other, creating a huge, totally unique sound. Just brilliant. Like no one else.

In regard to Steeltown, I would add that it is also a masterpiece lyrically. Unfortunately, despite a 4-star review from Rolling Stone when it came out, it went nowhere in the pop charts. I think the album was musically too intricate, and lyrically too dense, to stand a chance on pop radio. But those are the qualities that have given it staying power – more than 20 years after it’s release, the opening track Flame of the West can still send chills down my spine.

This bio piece provides a good explanation for what inspired his songwriting, and what gives it the rare quality of being deeply personal yet political at the same time:

My mum and dad also had some great friends who played folk and country music (my mum does a mean Patsy Cline) and they would come to our house after the bars were closed and people would sing through the night. This made me aware of the power of the song and how music was interwoven with the lives of the working class Scots I grew up amongst. I would watch these big rough, hard men declare their love of family and the land — emotions they would be embarrassed to admit to in conversation — in songs old and new. I realised a lot of my schooling was solely aimed at my learning to accept my place in the British class system and railed against it. I believe the measure of a man is in his actions and not his social background (maybe this is why I like the US…another disenfranchised Celt)… A lot of the darkness of the Steeltown album comes from remembering my first experiences of the prejudice of class and nationality and the obvious truths that little had changed in my adulthood. The desire to write initially grew out of just wanting to be a “real” band and then I found I was driven to communicate some of the joy and frustration of the human experience…

Those are the people I grew up amongst and I could see the beauty in such simplicity as well as the anger and beaten acceptance. I think that frustration and learned apathy is the daily bread of the great majority of people in the world and as such represents the greater part of life experience, certainly in the western world and is to me a fertile source of inspiration.

One of the problems with getting older is that I’m starved for new music. In college I was surrounded by people listening to all kinds of cool stuff, so I was hearing new music all the time. I also don’t go to shows anymore, partly because I have kids now, and partly because most of the bands I liked 10 years ago aren’t around anymore. Yesterday I came across two sites that already have me listening to some great music I’ve never heard before, and might even get me out of the house. One is Pandora – tell it a song or band you like and it’ll construct a playlist of similar music, and stream it to your computer. As you listen you can tell it whether you like the songs, and it will continuously refine the playlist based on your feedback. And it’s free – since it streams the songs, you can’t download them (not without some hacking anyway). I imagine they make their money on referral payments from the iTunes links they provide for each song. The other site is Podbop – tell it your city and it’ll tell you what bands will be playing there, and it gives you some sample mp3s of their music. Both sites are simple ideas, but as far as I know, no one’s done these things before, and most good ideas are simple ones.