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.

A Free press is vital to democracy

Welcome to Amerika
When writer Elena Lappin flew to LA, she dreamed of a sunkissed, laid-back city. But that was before airport officials decided to detain her as a threat to security ...

The Wood campaign roll on like the political juggernaut it was destined to become as The Candidate trounces local Tory frontman in an all candidates meeting

Bell tolls for Bonzo's buddy - Mourning in Amerika

As the tributes from people like Margaret Thatcher, the Bushes (jr and sr) and Brian Mulroney come in, and conservative mouth-breathers prate about their golden era, let us really consider what Reagan did.
Where are the tributes from Nicaragua's late dictator Anastacio Somoza or the Contras or any of the other right-wing death squads Reagan propped up in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras? How about a few kind words from his old buddies Saddam Hussien, Ferdinand Marcos or the Ayatollah Khomeni? How about Osama Bin Laden? After all Reagan did for them in supplying arms and money, you'd think they would at least send flowers.
For all his preaching about shrinking government, the machinery of state grew by a third on his watch. Public debt doubled while taxes for the rich plummeted. By cutting funds to public mental health facilities and presiding over the export of manufacturing and heavy industrial jobs from the rust belt to Mexico and Asia, Reagan almost invented homelessness. He handed the Republican party over to the religious right and the conservative extremists that have managed to divide the United States to its current extent.
Before becoming president Ronnie Ray-gun had a nefarious record as Governor of California of having police break up protests, notably at UC Berkley, using clubs, rubber bullets and tear gas. As president of the screen actors guild he scurried to the front of the line to volunteer to name names in front of Joseph McCarthy's UnAmerican Activities Committee.


Amid the right-wing hagiographies appearing throughout the mass media it nice to see a few people willing to tell the ugly truth about Ronald Reagan.


KILLER, COWARD, CON-MAN
GOOD RIDDANCE, GIPPER ...
MORE PROOF ONLY THE GOOD DIE YOUNGSunday, June 6, 2004
by Greg Palast
You're not going to like this. You shouldn't speak ill of the dead. But in this case, someone's got to.
Ronald Reagan was a conman. Reagan was a coward. Reagan was a killer.


Not Even a Hedgehog
The stupidity of Ronald Reagan.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, June 7, 2004, at 10:03 AM PT

Not long ago, I was invited to be the specter at the feast during "Ronald Reagan Appreciation Week" at Wabash College in Indiana. One of my opponents was Dinesh D'Souza: He wasn't the only one who maintained that Reagan had been historically vindicated by the wreckage of the Soviet Union. Some of us on the left had also been very glad indeed to see the end of the Russian empire and the Cold War. But nothing could make me forget what the Reagan years had actually been like.


Ronald Reagan, Party Animal
The man who taught Republicans to be irresponsible.
By Timothy Noah
Posted Saturday, June 5, 2004, at 4:33 PM PT


I've registered as a Republican exactly once in my life. The year was 1980, and Ronald Reagan, who died today at the age of 93, was seeking the GOP nomination for president. Teddy Kennedy was challenging President Jimmy Carter for the Democratic nomination, and in Massachusetts, where I then lived, Kennedy was certain to win the primary. Better to cast my vote where it could do some good—in favor of John Anderson, who at that point was running as a Republican, and who seemed the only candidate capable of denying Reagan the nomination. Reagan was dangerous.

This sign should be on the door of a recording studio, not an airport bus toilet

shut door and rock on
Show room light

In your ear - Jerry Garcia and David Grisman, Doc and Merle Watson,

In Your Ear

By Kevin Wood/Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer

Jerry Garcia and David Grisman
Been All Around This World
Vivid, 2,625 yen

When people talk about Jerry Garcia it is usually in the context of the Haight-Ashbury hippie scene and his long strange trip with the Grateful Dead. He's probably more famous as a countercultural icon than as a musician. But forget everything you think you know about Garcia and lend an ear to Been All Around This World and you will hear a master folk singer and acoustic guitar picker par excellence.

The king of the 20-minute psychedelic electric guitar solo got his start playing the squarest of traditional folk and bluegrass songs on banjo and guitar in the very early 1960s and never really left it behind, working on and off over the years with his longtime partner in acoustic wizardry, mandolin virtuoso David Grisman.

In the end it's Grisman we have to thank for Been All Around This World. The creator of the bluegrass-jazz fusion dubbed "dawg music" had the presence of mind to insist on recording hours of his informal jams with Garcia in the early '90s, resulting in a number of brilliant collaborative albums that include So What, Shady Grove and The Pizza Tapes (with guitarist Tony Rice). Grisman hints in the liner notes that Been All Around This World is likely to be the last in the series, but it is hardly the bottom of the barrel.

The disc leans heavily on country and bluegrass repertoire with songs by Merle Travis, Mel Tillis, George Jones, and Jimmie Rogers, with a few odd digressions--notably Jimmie Cliff's "Sitting Here in Limbo" and James Brown's "I'll Go Crazy." The performances are built around Garcia's heartfelt, rough-hewn tenor and Grisman's expressive mandolin breaks and fills. The tempos are mostly relaxed, and the two talented players stretch out for long, melodic solos that lack the demonic intensity of some of their other duets, but are no less tasty for the laid-back, sunny, Sunday afternoon feel. The sessions were some of Garcia's last, and while he strains to pull off the vocals on the aforementioned James Brown number, he's at his plaintive best on "Limbo" and Travis's "Dark as a Dungeon."

All in all an excellent introduction for those new to bluegrass and the acoustic phenomenon of Garcia and Grisman.


Doc and Merle Watson
Sittin' Here Pickin' the Blues
Rounder, 2,519 yen

A remastered reissue of Doc and Merle's 1985 album Pickin' the Blues with an additional eight tracks from their early '80s recordings for Flying Fish Records. Arthel "Doc" Watson and Merle Watson were undeniably the finest father-son team in music--bluegrass or otherwise. Doc's high-speed flatpicking and unadorned, warm baritone paired with son Merle's fluid slide and finger-style guitar were a potent combination unmatched since Merle's 1985 death in a tractor accident.

Even for folk and bluegrass, this music is so down-from-the-mountains square it has corners. However, even as cornpone as some of the songs may be, these performances by two monster guitarists render them indisputably hip. Merle's slide playing on "Taking to Casey" will make any rock fan forget Duane Allman's name.

In addition to the guitar pyrotechnics, the other real joy on this album is Doc Watson's simple, straightahead singing. His cover of "Stormy Weather" is the perfect antidote for the stale vocal gymnastics of the so-called pop divas, and his "How Long Blues" and "Honey Babe Blues" prove that a white man can sing the blues without trying to sound black and still have plenty of soul. Guest appearances by the likes of star blues harp player Charlie Musselwhite and bluegrass stringman Sam Bush provide the last unneeded push into the stratosphere of must-have recordings.

Bad boy novel rings true

The Very Man
By Chris Binchy
Pan MacMillan
361 Pages

Kevin Wood / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer

Chris Binchy's sharply written story of a young man on a downward spiral in Dublin on some level has the same appeal as those trash television programs with titles like "America's Most Horrific Power Tool Accidents" and "Grizzly Bear Attacks Caught On Video." You know something bloody and awful is going to happen to someone, but you just can't look away.

In Binchy's perceptive first novel, we see everything through the eyes of Rory, a 30-year-old who has clawed his way up the advertising ladder in New York over the last half-dozen years and has now returned to his native Dublin to attend his mother's funeral. Reacquainting himself with friends and family underscores the emptiness of his New York life, and he decides to stay.

The flash New York job has left him with the money for a fancy apartment in the city's Temple Bar neighborhood and the credentials to land a good job in his field at the height of the Celtic Tiger economic boom. His new girlfriend moves in with him a few months later and it looks like Rory has the world by the tail.

But looks can be deceiving. Rory's center cannot hold and things fall apart. Rory can't seem to decide if he loves or hates Dublin for not being like New York. Sure the pace is slower, the people more genuine and the city has become more modern, but after working in Manhattan, the Dublin advertising scene seems like the bush leagues to him and the restaurants and clubs are painfully out of style. Alternately cocky and insecure, Rory leads himself astray through an inability to be satisfied with his life. He drinks too much, lies too much, starts to cheat on his girlfriend and deceive his boss. It bring to mind the scene in every cheesy, gory slasher movie where one of the minor characters hears a noise and tells his friends to wait while goes to investigate.

The reader watches while Rory loads the gun, cocks it, aims it at his foot, pulls the trigger and then blames everyone around him for the results. We want to tell Rory to get out of the way of the train of consequences that is rushing down the track of his selfish irresponsibility. His lack of empathy, his self-centeredness and his utter inability to take responsibility for his actions should make Rory an unsympathetic character, but aside from wanting to give him swift kick, ultimately we feel sorry him as he loses his job, his girlfriend, his apartment, and finally his dignity.

Binchy has been likened by more than one critic to Nick Hornby, but a more apt comparison might be Tony Parsons. Like Parsons' Man and Boy, and its sequel Man and Wife, The Very Man has the confessional, moralistic ring of a cautionary tale. This mini-genre seems to be intended to warn men that it's time to grow up and learn to appreciate what you have, and that living out your fantasy of picking up that hot young thing in the bar will only screw up your life and turn your happy home into a smoking crater.

Though the ending seems a bit abrupt, The Very Man is a promising piece of writing from a new author with a flair for realistic dialogue and a clear, flowing style.

Vote early and vote often

"A mongoose, not a wombat"

Dryden (the goalie, not the papermill town) to run for Parliament

Gotta love this. If he can do for the country what he's done for the leafs in the last ten years, it should be a good thing.