Yet another reason to see the Asylum Street Spankers in concert

Things you never thought you'd ever see #237: Las Lindas Spanker songstress Christina Mars double necked ukelele

Adachi's novel isn't socks
Kevin Wood / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer
The Island of Bicycle Dancers
By Jiro Adachi
St. Martin's Press, 230 pp, 22.95 dollars
Jiro Adachi has obviously taken the creative writing maxim "write what you know" to heart. It is therefore not surprising that the bike messenger, English teacher and native New Yorker's first novel is concerned mainly with the lives of bike messengers and non-English speaking immigrants in the Big Apple. The surprising part is what a terrific book Adachi has produced with The Island of Bicycle Dancers.
The story centers around Yurika, a half-Japanese, half-Korean young woman born and raised in Kawasaki who has been sent to New York to work in her Korean uncle's corner store and learn English. Having fallen in with the wrong crowd in Japan--mainly out of boredom--and flunking out of a few junior colleges, the directionless Yurika has been sent overseas to get her act together.
The offspring of a Hungarian mother and a Japanese father, Adachi has some firsthand knowledge of the cultural identity issues faced by those like Yurika who grow up straddling a cultural divide. Yurika has been raised Japanese and her father hides his Korean ethnicity to avoid discrimination. Arriving in New York, Yurika's wholly unlikeable and inhospitable aunt, Hyun Jeong, insists on calling her by her Korean name and generally treats her either as a burden or an indentured servant.
Yurika's American-born cousin Suzie, a promiscuous party girl, welcomes the new arrival with open arms, teaching her enough English to gossip about Yurika's crush on Hector, a handsome Hispanic bike courier.
Yurika also learns English from Whitey, another bike messenger, who falls hard for her and shows her the New York outside her aunt and uncle's Little Asia neighborhood.
The love triangle of Whitey, Yurika and Hector provides the main thrust that moves the plot along, but the closely linked themes of personal liberation and community provide the wheels.
Throughout the novel, Adachi shows us characters who have set themselves free. Whitey has dropped out of college and turned his back on his family's expectations to pursue his dreams of traveling and writing. Suzie reinvents herself as an English teacher. The idea of the United States as a nation of immigrants, the land of opportunity, the place to make a fresh start and create a new self is constantly in the background of Adachi's New York.
For Yurika, learning English is the key to becoming a new person. It is also the key to shedding the dead weight of her complicated family history and becoming a member of the bike messenger tribe, one of several communities Adachi presents us with here as alternatives to family.
The messengers watch out for each other, enforce their own code of conduct and pursue their own goals. New York's ethnic neighborhoods are shown in much the same way--tight-knit social networks that look after their own. Wealth is reckoned in terms of friendship, respect within the community and the joy taken in pursuing one's dreams.
Hyun Jeong is one of the villains of the novel, an immigrant who has never tried to learn the language, a grasping, hypercritical harpy who generally makes her husband, stepdaughter and niece miserable. She has no friends and doesn't seem to want any. Hector, too, closes himself off from the rest of the group and suffers the consequences.
The author's experience teaching English as a second language has clearly given him a taste of the immigrant experience and, as clearly evidenced here, an ear for the expressiveness and color of the English language--broken, slang, patois and otherwise.
Yurika learns the evocative street slang of the bike messengers, words like "badass" and "kickin'" and the all-important expression "up yours." From Suzie, she gets vocabulary lists and pronunciation drills that show off the sensual nature of the language. Adachi also throws in the occasional humorous malapropisms ESL teachers inevitably hear from their students, as when Yurika complains, "My English is socks."
While the constant use of the bicycle as a symbol of freedom becomes repetitive by the novel's end and the significance of the final scene, in which a set of training wheels are removed from a child's bike, is beyond obvious, The Island of Bicycle Dancers has all the fluid grace, speed, sweat, muscle and guts of a fixed gear racer without any needless ornamentation or chrome. It is a simple machine that transports us while letting us see some interesting things along the way.

As I have mentioned in the past, I work for The Man - a 'newspaper' with a quasi-facist editorial policy and that is often racist, always sexist and a major apologist for the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy. Basil Fawlty's "Don't mention the war" is usually our watchword. Failing that we fall back on the radical Japanese right-wing idea that Japan was a victim in World War II and was punished for its altruistic efforts to end colonialism in Asia. 'Nanjing? Where's that?'
Hence you get editorials like the following




Chinese government to blame for booing
Yomiuri Shimbun
It is unfortunate to see the Asian Cup soccer games being held in China marred by anti-Japanese sentiment.
"I don't care about booing (by Chinese fans against the Japanese team)," said Japanese national team coach Zico, a Brazilian. "But any soccer fan in the world should pay due respect when a national anthem is played."
As Zico pointed out, Chinese soccer fans apparently went beyond the bound of ordinary behavior since they kept booing even when the Japanese national anthem was played.
Anti-Japanese sentiments were expressed in the crudest manner Saturday at Chongqing Olympic Sports Center during the game between Japan and Jordan. Some Chinese fans provoked unrest by throwing things at Japanese supporters, surrounding the bus carrying the Japanese national team and heaping abuse on them.
The Chinese government should be blamed for developing such narrow-minded nationalism among the public.
Anti-Japanese sentiment in China has spread like an epidemic since
the mid-1990s. This has been particularly evident since 1995, the 50th
anniversary of the end of World War II, when then Chinese President Jiang
Zemin's government launched a major campaign to celebrate China's victory in the
anti-Japan war in an effort to strengthen patriotism and solidarity
among
the public.

Wartime antipathy rekindled
That year, Chinese newspapers and TV programs were filled with various reports on the
invasion of China and the atrocities committed there before and during World War II by the Imperial Japanese military. Since then, patriotism in China has been taught based on anti-Japanese sentiment.

A majority of Chinese soccer fans who filled Asian Cup venues are young people educated in such a way. It is unfortunate, but antagonism toward Japan has become a self-evident truth for
them.

Through patriotic education, Jiang and his government have amplified the antagonism of the Chinese people toward Japan to maintain the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party's dictatorship and its ability to unify the Chinese people.

Japan tends to be used as a target for the venting of frustration by Chinese youths who are not allowed to criticize their own government. The Chinese government may be able to learn various lessons from the Asian Cup.

Host's role may be questioned
In four years, it will host the Olympic Games in Beijing with its national prestige at stake.
If it cannot control the unruly, bad-mannered jeering seen during the current tournament, Beijing's ability to host the Olympic Games will be questioned.

The China Youth Daily, the official newspaper of the Communist Youth League of China, carried an unusual article warning Chinese fans to show restraint in preparation for the 2008 Olympic Games when the quarterfinal match between Japan and Jordan was held in Chongqing.
However, the article apparently had a limited effect on the crowd at the game held between Japan and Bahrain in Jinan on Tuesday. Saturday's final match between Japan and China will test whether the country and its people are really ready to host the Olympic Games.

When he visited Japan in 1998, Jiang one-sidedly and doggedly repeated that Japan must
keep learning lessons from history. His remarks in turn ignited anti-Chinese sentiment among Japanese. Current Chinese President Hu Jintao's government, which will host the Olympic Games, a festival of peace and friendship, in four years, must end the vicious cycle created by Chinese antagonism toward Japan that has been nurtured by China.

It is unfortunate for both Japan and China to see this cycle of antagonism continuing.
(From The Yomiuri Shimbun, Aug. 5)

Face it he deserves a medal, not prison time. Hurrah for Matsuno-san!


Peko-chan thief gets 1 1/2 yrs for 'vicious crime'
Yomiuri Shimbun
The Maebashi Summary Court in Gunma Prefecture on Tuesday handed down an 18-month sentence to a 42-year-old man for stealing two Peko-chan figures--the well-known character of confectionery maker Fujiya Co.
According to the court ruling, Kojiro Matsuno, unemployed of no fixed address, stole two automated Peko-chans from outside Fujiya shops in Ogomachi and Omamamachi in Gunma Prefecture.
Presiding Judge Seiya Sano said Matsuno had stolen the figurines to sell, and that the crime was vicious.
Prosecutors said in their closing argument that Mastuno had stolen 30 to 40 Peko-chan figurines around the Kanto area and had sold them to acquaintances for 20,000 yen to 30,000 yen apiece.

Numbers say Bush warm bread
A more informed look at the polling numbers here

Nicholas Kentaro Wood 

Brother Mike and his son Maxwell 

the family on Nick's first day of kindergarten 

Hiromi and Lucy in Hawaii 

Lucy Miyako Wood 

This is a test of our new graphic and layout capabilities just to see

what some of this shit does

• ignore the basic content for now and revel in the pleasure of:
• form over content, something most of the internet has in plenitude - although as Cousin Beav and Marshall McLuhan would tell you
• form is content

the colours the colours or as the Americans would say the colors, the colors

while we are busy rebuilding things - cool off and amuse yourself with a snowball fight

somewhere in the mix we seem to have lost the comment function. I'll see what I can do to fix that.......

This blog is currently being redesigned to keep it from looking so completely lame, in the meantime citizens, go about your business.

Finally figured out how to post photos on this danged thing so as a test here's Hiromi and I on our wedding day five years ago.  

 
In your ear
The Daily Yomiuri
reviews by Kevin Wood
Wilco
A Ghost Is Born
Warner Japan, 2,520 yen
Singer-songwriter-guitarist Jeff Tweedy and Wilco seem to have become the poster children for artistic integrity in rock since their 2002 album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Deemed unreleaseable by Warner's Reprise Records, the quirky mix of post alt-country and pop rock accented with odd bits of electronica became a major critical success, eventually selling 400,000 copies for Warner's Nonesuch label.

A Ghost is Born is another step down the same path to glory as Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, with more emphasis on the natural interplay of instruments within the band and less on overdubbed electronic frills. Wilco has produced an excellent disc destined for inclusion on a lot of "best of" lists.

Lyrically, the overall theme of the album seems to be self-perception and the search for identity: "His goal in life was to be an echo" sings Tweedy in the Beatles-esque "Hummingbird," "Exactly what do you want me to be?" he asks in the poppy "Handshake Drugs," and explains on a later, far punkier track "I'm a wheel, I will turn on you."

Musically, the album ranges from the delicate folk of "Muzzle of Bees" and "Wishful Thinking" to the up-tempo piano-driven retro-soul of "Theologians," to the 15 minutes of feedback, loops and electronic psychedelia that makes the otherwise straightforward "Less Than You Think" sound like an almost unlistenable outtake from Pink Floyd's Saucerful of Secrets. Wilco's rock credentials are nailed down by songs such as "Hell is Chrome" that builds from a quiet solo piano to a crescendo of bristling distorted guitar feedback that would do Neil Young and Crazy Horse proud.

Tweedy has hit his stride as a singer, moving from earnest innocent to arch sophisticate; angry, snarling sneer to plaintive, lonesome lament with apparent ease. As a songwriter, Tweedy has cast aside the conventional structure of repeating verses and choruses to forge ahead with his own outside-the-box implied narratives and fragmentary poetry.

While Tweedy is considered the driving force behind Wilco, credit for the overall sound of A Ghost Is Born must also go to producer Jim O'Rourke for coordinating the subtle bass work of John Stirratt and brilliant drumming of Glenn Kotche with Mikael Jorgensen's versatile piano and evocative touches of hammer dulcimer, viola and organ.

With the exception of the aforementioned sonic experiment that follows "Less Than You Think," Wilco has produced an album of consistent excellence, spirit and quality.

Phish
Undermind
Warner Japan, 2,520 yen

Jam band favorites Phish decided in May to call it quits once and for all, picking an Aug. 15 festival show in Coventry, Vt., as their last gig.

The band's final studio album, Undermind, shows them quitting while they are ahead, leaving behind their best studio album since 1996's Billy Breathes.

The usual criticisms of Phish's studio efforts--weak songwriting, lackluster vocals, and too much emphasis on overlong instrumental solos--just won't wash here. From the catchy title track to the jangly pop of "The Connection" to the bouncy goofiness of "Access Me," Undermind is a very radio-friendly album that might even propel the band out of its tie-dyed ghetto.

Phish wear their musical influences on their collective sleeve here, with a Revolver-era Beatles sound permeating the entire disc, and regular stylistic nods to the Beach Boys and the Grateful Dead. The soulful "Army of One" sounds like a long-lost hit by the Band.

Despite standing on the shoulders of these rock giants, Phish still manage to create a sound all their own. Undermind makes a fine capstone to a monumental career. Phish are going out in style.

 
Like there was ever a doubt...
Bush wins big at Stupidity Awards
NELSON WYATT
CANADIAN PRESS
MONTREAL — The November elections may still be ahead of him but U.S. President George W. Bush came out a big winner yesterday — at the World Stupidity Awards.
Bush was a dominating presence at the second edition of the awards presented at the Just for Laughs comedy festival.
Host Lewis Black, whose biting satire is a highlight of TV's The Daily Show, took pride in the recognition the United States received at the awards, saying: "we are the gold standard."

full story

Suburban thriller worth more than 'Just One Look'

Kevin Wood / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer 

Just One Look
By Harlen Coben
Dutton, 384 pp, 25.95 dollars


It is said that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it, but what about amnesiacs?
The protagonist of Harlan Coben's Just One Look, suburban soccer mom and painter Grace Lawson, has been missing a small chunk of her memory since she was trampled nearly to death in a rock concert stampede 15 years ago. In addition to the small hole in her past, the horrifying experience has left her with a permanent limp and the friendship of a mob boss whose son was killed in the concert crush.
When a strange photo of a group of people turns up in a packet of newly developed pictures, Grace doesn't give it much thought, but her husband Jack disappears with it after just one look. Grace's search for him takes her down a spiraling path crossed by an former football player, a sociopathic bleach-blond North Korean assassin, a fading Indian femme fatale, an exhibitionist neighbor, her husband's estranged family, a former rock star and the man who started the deadly stampede at his concert.
Thrillers and mystery novels tend to fall into obvious categories: Agatha Christie-style locked room murders; hard-boiled detective stories; police procedurals; suspenseful espionage capers; hunts for psychopathic serial killers; thinly disguised action movie scripts and many others. The worst are formulaic cliche-ridden trash, the best, like the work of Raymond Chandler, rise above genre to become great literature.
Trying to pigeonhole Harlan Coben within the thriller genre is like trying to pick up a blob of mercury. In terms of subgenre, file Just One Look under "other." In terms of quality, Coben may not have reached the literary peaks, but he is certainly blazing a trail up from the foothills.
Despite a plot that seems to stagger in six different directions at once and surprise the reader at every turn, Coben never once resorts to stereotypes or shallow characters. He spends a considerable number of words, often pages, breathing life into the most minor characters. His suburban New Jersey setting is realistic and populated with bored, uncooperative cops, frustrated housewives and nosy neighbors.
One of the keys to Coben's appeal is that his characters are believable, often unremarkable, people who act in believable ways when confronted with remarkable situations. One character outwits a professional killer by respecting her own limitations and purposely doing the exact opposite of what the standard brainless movie heroine would. These are not the usual hard-boiled heroes with nothing to lose, these are people with kids, mortgages and minivans who get scared, hurt and lonesome.
The downside of all this character development is that Coben provides much of it by telling us directly about characters rather than letting their actions and thoughts show their motivations and personality quirks. Whenever a character is introduced the reader knows a detailed biography is soon to follow.
Throughout the novel's many twists, turns and numerous false endings, Coben does an excellent job of pacing and captures Grace Lawson's growing, barely contained sense of panic in a variety of subtle ways. He has the ability to surprise with the familiar and add unexpected, but perfectly reasonable boomerang curves to the storyline.
Coben's novel is worth more attention than its title suggests.
Copyright 2004 The Yomiuri Shimbun

Put 'The Genius' on the U.S. ten dollar bill

sign the petition started by the Derek Truck Band here to put Ray Charles on the ten dollar bill and check the Bluesblog to see what that bill might look like.

'The Meaning of Ichiro' and the meanness of yakyu

Kevin Wood Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer


The Meaning of Ichiro
By Robert Whiting
Warner Books, 318 pp, 25.95 dollars
A new star rose in the east in 2000. New at least to North American fans of major league baseball.
In his first year in the majors, this virtual unknown won the American League batting title by hitting .350, with a league-leading 242 hits, 59 of them infield trips to first. He led the league in runs scored with 127 and bases stolen with 56 and pushed his team to a league record for victories, earning Gold Glove, rookie of the year and most valuable player honors along the way.
Most Japanese had certainly heard of Ichiro Suzuki, even if the Giants-centric television coverage of Japanese pro baseball meant most fans rarely got to see him play. While he had won seven batting titles in a row in Japan, the appearance of such a phenomenon took most MLB fans by complete surprise.
Fans of America's national pastime wondering how to make sense of this sudden domination of their game by a player who is the product of what was long supposed to be an inferior game would do well to pick up Robert Whiting's The Meaning of Ichiro.
Whiting is the premier English-language writer on Japanese baseball. His first two books, The Chrysanthemum and the Bat (1977) and You Gotta Have Wa (1989), are considered the standard texts on the subject and the latter is often found on reading lists for courses on Japanese culture.
While these books, along with a third, Slugging It Out in Japan (1991), cowritten with Major League Baseball and Yomiuri Giants slugger Warren Cromartie, focus on the experiences of foreign players in Japan, The Meaning of Ichiro chronicles the impact and adventures of Japanese players in MLB.
Written with a North American audience in mind, The Meaning of Ichiro, in part, recaps the history of besuboru from the 1880s advent of seishin yakyu or spiritual baseball at The First Higher School of Tokyo, known in Japanese as Ichiko, up to the present day. In particular, Whiting traces the Japanese approach to baseball as an extension of martial arts that stresses endless repetition to achieve perfection of form and emphasis on building fighting spirit and mental toughness. "A team motto urged participants to practice so hard that they urinated blood, while another team rule forbade complaining of injury or pain," writes Whiting of Ichiko.
From such roots comes the more modern 1,000-fungo drill, 200-pitch practice sessions and year-round training techniques employed by Japanese professional baseball.
Whiting's examination of the institutionalized harshness of yakyu may help to explain players' willingness to put up with the conditions of indentured servitude that go hand in hand with a pro career. A major part of the book deals with the efforts of team owners and management to discourage players from jumping leagues.
Much credit is given here to pitcher Hideo Nomo, the second Japanese major leaguer, and the first in more than 30 years, for his courage in standing up to an unfair system. Credit also goes to "the most hated man in Japanese baseball," Don Nomura, who found the contract loophole that allowed Nomo to begin the exodus of stars to MLB. Whiting shines a light into the dark corners of the Japanese game with his descriptions of the selfish and often sinister machinations of team owners.
Biographical sketches of Ichiro, Hideki Matsui, Kazuo Matsui, Shigetoshi Hasegawa, Kazuhiro Sasaki and others illustrate Whiting's case that while Japanese players are more disciplined and more highly trained than MLB players, it takes a sort of personality rarely found in the pro yakyu ranks to make the leap to the majors.
The discipline and devotion to the game evidenced in the early years of Ichiro's life are unparalleled in MLB. From the age of 3, he trained six or more hours a day with the focus of a Zen acolyte. Whiting quotes a passage from a school essay the future star wrote when he was 12 years old:
"My dream when I grow up is to be a first-class professional baseball player...I have the confidence necessary to reach that goal. I started practicing from age 3. From the age of 9 I have practiced 360 out of 365 days a year and I practice hard. I only had five or six hours (in a year) to play with my friends. That's how much I practiced. So I think I can surely become a pro."
The constant thread in The Meaning of Ichiro, aside from Whiting's clean, straightforward, anecdotal style, is that Japanese pro baseball and Japanese players, while different in many important respects from their North American MLB counterparts, are by no means inferior. Whiting presents a persuasive case for the need for both baseball cultures to learn from each other.
Whiting's contention seems to be the Japanese game needs to respect individual players more and leave the "practice until you collapse and then practice more" approach in the 19th century where it belongs and loosen up a little. MLB, on the other hand, had better learn to expect a little competition, shape up, and remember the hit-and-run days before steroid-enhanced power hitters and pampered superstars.