As I was mentioning before I’ve got a bunch of stuff I’ve been meaning to review. I wonder if anyone ran out to borders to check out Bunny Drop. Mini-blog: thinking of cheeseburgers. Be sure to watch the video linked in the post.

Tokyo Vice Jake Adelstein: It’s no secret that I’ve been into Japanese stuff recently. It’s been years since L.A.M.B. was burning up the top 100 and that wave of interest seems to have passed. But I don’t know. I’ve gotta say that a lot of entertainment and so forth produced by our culture just doesn’t appeal to me much. I think it’s best not to try to explore the psychology of that. When you look to a culture that is not your own for guidance you get the one two punch of encountering something that seems new and different and also the luxury of projecting your own hopes and fears onto something you don’t implicitly grasp.

Then there is Tokyo Vice by Jake Adelstein. The subtitle reads, “an American reporter on the police beat in Japan.” I think that subtitle along with the picture on the front cover tells you everything you need to know. The promise: a harrowing and enlightening journey through the means streets of Tokyo with wizened in-the-thick-of-it Adelstein serving as “Virgil” to the reader’s “Dante.” So did it deliver? A moment of thought should convince you that it emphatically didn’t. Would I be writing this review otherwise? No, I’d be pulling 6 Gs drifting through mountain passes in a tuned Lancer EVO while tying a tourniquet around my shoulder with my teeth and texting “dinner @ 9″ to an international supermodel. I’d be closing deals on a private beach in Hawaii, throwing back the so-many-I-lost-count round of premium scotch and getting my assistant to double check the private jet.

All seriousness aside, there is kind of a perfect storm of problems with this book. I can forgive what I consider not so great writing if there is a lot of compelling information. Or, conversely, good writing can go a long way for a not so interesting story. But I feel this lacks details and lacks good writing, for example

If you want to know the number of years any particular woman has been working in the industry, just listen to the timbre of her voice. If she sounds like Scatman Crothers, she’s a veteran.

… *birds chirping* …

There’s nothing really inconsistent about the narrative but I found it strange how Adelstein talks about rubbing elbows with mafiosos in dives and then he is talking about optimizing his PC to play Thief 2.

But yeah, I’m sorry to be so negative and that I don’t bring a recommendation with this post. There is some interesting information in Tokyo Vice. What comes to mind is the discussion about those full body tattoos. Apparently they kill a person’s sweat glands and can make it difficult to flush out toxins.

Does anyone still take Kristol seriously?? Obama, re: BP oil spill:

And I don’t sit around just talking to experts because this is a college seminar; we talk to these folks because they potentially have the best answers, so I know whose ass to kick.

Kristol, re: Obama:

Guess the criticism of him as a professor and seminar leader has gotten to him. But his pseudo-macho defense of “talking to experts” is itself professorial: He talks to experts so he’ll “know whose ass to kick.” Real men don’t need experts to tell them whose asses to kick.

That’s right! Real men force their perceptions to conform to their a priori assumptions about the world so that whose ass needs kicking is a fait accompli!!!
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My interest in Prussia goes back to the European history class I took senior year in high school, when I was first confronted by an unfamiliar territory splayed across the map of central Europe, a phantom country whose capital – Berlin – was familiar, but whose national territory circa 1870 represented an odd amalgam of lands now belonging to Germany, Poland, Denmark, and the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad (formerly Königsberg). As I learned, prior to German unification in 1871, Prussia was one of a myriad of kingdoms and smaller sovereignties laying claim to bits and pieces of what would eventually become the unified German state. Surprisingly to me, it was Austria – often thought of these days as a sort of quaint southeastern afterthought to Germany proper – that for centuries represented the most important player in the game of German and Central European power politics, with Austria’s Habsburg monarch by tradition retaining the (increasingly ceremonial title) of Holy Roman Emperor. Though as I would learn, Austrian hegemony or quasi-hegemony in a disunited Germany would become increasingly tenuous as the eighteenth century bled into the nineteenth, and as Prussia expanded outward from its traditional power base in Brandenburg (now in northeastern Germany) and Ducal Prussia (now on Poland’s Baltic coast).

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[Warning – this post is essentially one big spoiler]

Anathem (2008), speculative fiction writer Neal Stephenson’s latest novel, is nothing if not ambitious. Building from the principle that at its best, science or speculative fiction should hold up a sort of refracted mirror to our world, allowing us to appreciate the difference between our present and our possible futures (or alternate presents, or even alternate pasts), Anathem not only presents the reader with a convincing portrait of an alternate Earth – Arbre – but offers up an entire Arbran intellectual genealogy that reads as an alternative evolutionary model for our own Western intellectual tradition.  This invented tradition has Western science not emerging (as it did on Earth), as a byproduct of or critical response to the strictures of institutionalized religion, but presents both religion and science as descending from a single creation event or myth, the two having bifurcated after a decisive, potentially supernatural encounter.

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I’ve been considering some sort of music, book, or movie review for a while now, though I’ve been so busy and my culture and media exposure has been so varied of late that I haven’t been able to focus on any one particular thing to review.  So here’s a mixed bag of what I’ve been reading/viewing/listening to over the last couple of months:

Wavering Radiant, by ISIS:

What a difference a producer makes.  One of my complaints about ISIS’s last album, In the Absence of Truth, was its somewhat muddy quality, the fact that ISIS’s precipitous musical highs and lows were drowned by a generally undistinguished production style, as well as by the band’s annoying tendency to bury its songs in excessively piled-on riffage, guided by what seemed like a sort of metal geek concern with virtuosity.  With Joe Barresi at the helm, ISIS delivers a clearly superior album in Wavering Radiant. Sounding simultaneously more metallic and prettier, ISIS and Barresi let a good deal of space and looseness into the songs this time around, and the band’s earlier experiments with keys and sung vocals pay off in spades. Indeed, Aaron Turner’s “clean” vocals are unquestionably more interesting than on the band’s previous album, making the contrast between his singing voice and his growl that much more powerful. While ISIS will probably never be described as “loose,” this is about as close as they may get.  A great album, an album’s album, and highly listenable all the way through, from the menacing “Hall of the Dead” to the epic Floyd-ian ending of “Threshold of Transformation.”

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Toda a América [All of America], by Ronald de Carvalho.  Published in 1926, this is one Brazilian poet’s impressionistic attempt at describing a nascent, distinctly American identity that would bring together geographic regions, races, languages – everything (hence the book’s title).  There are some winning lines in this volume, and the project is interesting on a conceptual level as well, given the traditional lack of Americanist/continentally-themed literary production in Brazil.  Nietzsche and Italian futurism excerpt appreciable intellectual influence, with Carvalho praising the destructive energy of American industrial growth and cultural encounter in heroic terms.  Not the most ethically appealing position, in retrospect (see: fascism), but evidently aimed at invigorating the otherwise potentially staid topic of pan-American unity.  Then again, José Martí did the same his essay “Nuestra América” [Our America, 1891], without the same degree of fascistic subtext.

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy.  I plowed through this post-apocalyptic novel in two days, a function of lots of free time, not a lot of print per page, and a compelling if consistently frightening and depressing plot.  McCarthy may take the prize for most enduring of the recent run of post-apocalyptic novels and films reflecting the decidedly pessimistic mood in our culture (see Saramago’s Blindness, Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, Children of Men, I Am Legend, that recent Scottish zombie movie, etc.).  McCarthy deliberately avoids the fanboy particulars of the apocalypse (nuclear winter is alluded to, never specified, cannibalistic gangs appear in passing, but are never explored in Mad Max-like detail), instead focusing on the relationship between a father and son trying to survive by scavenging the scattered remains of a dead civilization.  The language is Faulknerian-biblical without William F.’s exuberant verbiage, and the novel reads, if you want it to, as religious allegory or mythological tale.  Stark, well-fashioned, often brutal.

Collapse, by Jared Diamond.  To summarize a long book, Collapse attempts to find underlying patterns in various cultures’ apparently mysterious collapses, and from what I have read so far, ultimately points the finger at poor land and resource management, group prejudices and traditions that predispose cultures in new environments  to make poor decisions, and general lack of foresight and effective group decision-making (like the Norse, who attempted to graze sheep in Greenland).  Unforeseeable disasters (hurricanes, earthquakes, prolonged droughts, etc.) tend to finish off otherwise compromised groups.  While Diamond is praised for presenting complex arguments via accessible language, I find his writing style annoyingly long-winded and somewhat dry.  And his argument, while broadly convincing, tends somewhat logically toward environmental determinism and on balance discounts cultural particularities. Yes, Easter Island’s topography likely predisposed its Polynesian inhabitants to a decentralized political structure that provided an impetus for competitive moai (i.e. giant head) construction by chiefs vying for influence, but rivalry between elites could have manifested itself in other ways that might have been less environmentally destructive.  Beyond topography and available resources, cultural inheritance and good old individual personality were obviously at play in the birth of the moai, though these elements are difficult to fold into arguments based on quantifiable data, which explains why Diamond may tend to avoid them.

hey guys. you know roaringshark has hit the big time because it’s now blocked in China.

the past couple weeks and in particular the past few days have been pretty profoundly upsetting for me, but things seem to be on an upturn now that I’m out of Jiading and hanging out in Bejing for a couple days. I’ve been seeking solace, though, in Michael Chabon’s “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.” I bought it for my dad in an ill-advised “buy someone else a book” moment. Predictably, he hated it and promptly re-gifted it to me. I’ve been pretty into it. For whatever reason the humor really speaks to me. A choice passage:

Apart from the bed, the only other furnishing, in the corner by the door, is a metal wastebasket. The wastebasket is a thing for children, blue and yellow with a cartoon dog cavorting in a field of daisies. Landsman stares at it for a long time, thinking about nothing, thinking about children’s garbage and dogs in cartoons. The obscure unease that Pluto has always inspired, a dog owned by a mouse, daily confronted with the mutational horror of Goofy.

I wish I had more stuff but internet access and a positive mood have been less than forthcoming in the past little while. Hoping that traveling around with Chu in August will restore me a little bit before coming home. Almost decided like “Fuck China” and rebook my ticket home for tomorrow, but I know as soon as I got on the plane I’d just be like: “shit.” Watching a lot of chinese music television here (vchinese.com). Here’s one pretty big song now that’s not too bad, Khalil Fong’s cover of Faye Wong’s “Red Bean.” Dig the girl’s sweater/hair combo.

An incredible and scathing review of Chris Anderson’s “Free: The Future of a Radical Price,” a new book about how Information Wants to be Free. I guess I’m always psyched to read scathing reviews of anything, but this one really struck me as being spot-on. The article is too pithy to really be excerpted, so I’ll just quote my favorite part and you’ll have to click the link to really get the full effect:

The biotechnology company Genzyme spent five hundred million dollars developing the drug Myozyme, which is intended for a condition, Pompe disease, that afflicts fewer than ten thousand people worldwide. That’s the quintessential modern drug: a high-tech, targeted remedy that took a very long and costly path to market. Myozyme is priced at three hundred thousand dollars a year. Genzyme isn’t a mining company: its real assets are intellectual property—information, not stuff. But, in this case, information does not want to be free. It wants to be really, really expensive.

It seems that as I get older, the thrill of the new, at least in terms of culture, comes along less and less.  Maybe my tastes are maturing, or maybe I’m getting pickier now that I’m well past the moment during my teenage years when I first took a real interest in music, movies, books, etc., and in which everything seemed new and exciting.  Another problem in terms of music, at least, is that the last band I could rely on for consistently great albums (Sleater-Kinney), beginning with my college-era love affair with the album The Hot Rock, broke up about four years ago. 

I don’t think my current pickiness necessarily has to do with any sort of lack of interesting cultural offerings in the last few years – there seems to be much more going on musically now, for example, than during the late 1990s/early 2000s.  And I regularly come across recent novels I’d add to my list of favorites – The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Díaz, is the latest.

In any case, I saw the movie The Brothers Bloom shortly before leaving for Brazil, and I thoroughly enjoyed it, more so than any other new “adult” movie I’ve seen in some time –Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control was conceptually interesting and visually appealing, but was so slow that sitting through it amounted to watching some particularly beautiful and well-crafted paint dry, maybe on a painting by Mondrian. 

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Earlier this week I was reading a Jorge Luis Borges story, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” which I was preparing to sic on my literature students.  It’s an absolutely crazy piece of short fiction – a narration (supposedly by “Borges”) of his fictitious discovery, along with his friend Bioy Casares, of a pasted-in entry on a fake country in a second-rate encyclopedia.  This leads to the friends’ ensuing discovery of an entire fake planet named “Orbis Tertius,” which is supposedly populated by various cultures speaking various languages and holding various customs.  All of this seems to have been designed and described by some sort of mysterious committee – a sort of meeting of the dungeon masters.  This is a much too literal description of a highly confusing, very metatextual story, which deceptively presents itself to the reader as no different from Borges’s non-fiction personal narratives or criticism – except for its references to various invented sources, people and places. Trust me, it’s a weird story.  Literature geeks and D&D veterans would love it, most of my students did not.

Anyway, one of the aspects of Borges’s fictional world that really struck me this time through was his discussion of hrönir, his Nordic-sounding term for objects one group of people on the “planet” of Orbis Tertius create whenever they lose the original.  So if I were to lose my pen, I’d fabricate a hrönir in the form of the pen, which would distinguish itself by being somewhat distorted in size and form from the original, but would otherwise look just like my lost pen (it’s not clear whether hrönir have to be functional, or if they’re more like totems).  According to Borges, hrönir have become so omnipresent on the planet that they now account for a large percentage of all objects in circulation, and even produce their own hrönir when they’re misplaced, which leads to the fabrication of copies of copies (of copies, of copies, and so on infinitely).  

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