Shiina Ringo's Magic Powers

The punk scene in Japan is somewhat touch and go. Occasionally, you see a somewhat original act come along but most of it is just a bad Green Day rip off or costume rock. So, when Shiina Ringo put together a new band, The Tokyo Incidents (東京事変), I was somewhat hopeful for the future of Jpop. I've given a thorough listen to both albums they've put out in the past couple of years, and with the exception of Shiina's recent tendency to sing through a megaphone, both albums are entirely solid productions.



But--there's always a butt with me--Shiina at some point in her musical education managed to acquire the most amazing talent: the ability to take any given song, even those that should by all rights rock the house, and in performance make it seem downright boring. I thought possibly this was a feature of the "artsy-fartsy" music videos directors feel the need to churn out these days, but the same seems to be true of her live performances as well. At times, it looks like she'd much rather pop a squat on the monitor and crack open any one of the numerous disgusting canned coffees you can buy here.

Of course, this is neither typical of Japanese punk nor of a particular feminine performance trope. The Pillows easily dispell the former and Yoshida Miwa (of the band Dreams Come True) the latter. Though, admittedly, she (Yoshida) is the only Japanese woman I've ever seen who can work the pimp hat. I go so far as to mention this, because one of the aforementioned mantics has proclaimed Shiina Ringo the messiah who will save Jpop from it's uglier tendencies to imitate the west. I am, in fact, starting to get sick of the occasional sweaty who picks up a copy of something by Zizek and let's it "blow his mind" or something like that.

I have in the past described Shiina's music as mesmerizing; perhaps stupifying was the correct participle.

A Little Not-music

So, challenged by our savage to produce yet another work of genius, I have translated another poem by Cao Cao, if only to prove that I can do it. Admittedly, after studying it some, I like it more than the tortoise poem--which, I don't really like all that much. The original can be found in Liansu's comment on my previous post, so I won't bother reproducing it here.

I must say, I found translating this a bit taxing, and not merely because Classical Chinese is not one of my better languages. It has certain musical features that I would love to reproduce but invariably can't. The repetitive adjectives in certain lines (e.g. "bright so bright the moon") are meant approximate the repeated syllables in Chinese, but I just can't manage the internal rhyme.

So, thinking about what Liansu said about the kind of language used, I tried translating it into an affected Elizabethan English. The result was monstrous, because Classical Chinese tends toward the spare and direct where The Queene's Anglishe is ornate and oblique. So, instead I decided to go back to the alliterative style common in Old English, even reproducing the caesura that I felt roughly approximated the pause in the Chinese lines. I'm not certain I succeeded to any significant degree--I'm certain the Savage Sinologist will let us know--but if nothing else the lines "from far and wide / we gather together / to rest and rehearse / the rites of our friendship" are some of the best I've ever produced.

N.B. I apologize for the picture of the text; I couldn't for the life of me get the html to do what I wanted it to.

Go update your blog already (cept Mickles).

Assholes Make the Best Poets

This post is at least partially dedicated to our resident 中国野蛮人, Liansu, who recently badgered me into updating my blog. I'd also like to note that Colleen has a new "thinking blog," which, though still in it's infancy, promises great things. The link to the right has been updated to direct you there.

So, like many of my filthy generation, I was first introduced to the intracies of Chinese history via that now classic strategy game for the NES, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which was notorious amongst gamers of the era for being absofuckinglutely hard and damn near impossible to beat without about a gabillion hours of gameplay. The series--yes, series--is now in it's tenth incarnation. The graphics are better, but it's till basically the same. All that the PS2 has done for the title is to make micromanagement even more intricate.

Your only real hope of beating the game was to choose Cao Cao (for those of you about to make moo jokes, it's pronounced tsao-tsao) as your starting character. Only much later did I realize that it's because he is the one who historically was in the position of greatest strength. The novel of the same name mostly maligns the man as cruel and ruthless (which he probably was) and fails to mention that he was mostly responsible for bringing about reunification after the fall of the Eastern Han dynasty. However, he did not live to see this happen.

Our chinoise savage did her best to convince me this morning that Cao Cao was, in fact, a gifted poet. I was inclined to disagree partially out of my generally contradictory nature and also partially because the only poem of his I've read is about a tortoise. This multi-lingual pugilism is the basic format of our conversations (much like mine and Mike's, though with different languages), a kind of playful jibbing that has upset more than one liberal minded professor of a prestigious Midwestern university.

Two universal truths came out of our conversation this morning: one directly and one indirectly. First, all assholes live long, healthy lives. Furthermore, this does not necessarily mean all people who live long lives are assholes. Second, for some inexplicable reason, the truly talented lyric poets tend to be righteous pricks. Cases in point: Ezra Pound, Yosano Akiko, Catullus, Goethe, Walt Whitman, etc. I'm sure the list could go on ad infinitum. It remains to be seen, though, whether all assholes have the potential to be good poets.

神龟虽寿， 猷有竟时。
the blessed tortoise lives long but has only his allotted time.
腾蛇乘雾，终为土灰。
the winged serpent rides the mists but finds his end in ashes and earth.
老骥伏枥，志在千里；
the old warhorse submits to the stable but longs to run a thousand miles.
烈士暮年，壮心不已。
the noble warrior getting on in years never gives up the fight.
盈缩之期，不但在天；
his life, full or cut short, does not depend on Heaven;
养怡之福，可得永年。
he who is fit and carefree can live countless years.
幸甚至哉！歌以咏志。
with a joyous heart, I long to sing this song.

No doubt Liansu will be itching to fix all the egregious mistakes I made in translating that, but consider it my penance for insulting her tastes earlier.

I leave you with an obligatory picture of cherry blossoms, if only because it's spring.

The Fifth Humor

Knock knock.

Who's there?

Jacques Derrida.

Jacque Derrida who?

Precisely.

Audience Participation

Spring in Dai-Nippon brings with it the usual schedule of getting out after holing yourself up in a drafty apartment watching the bitterly cold rain rappel down the concrete sides. The cherry blossoms bloom, and most see fit to honor this harbinger of spring by plunking a little plastic mat down somewhere and getting piss drunk on it. Remember to take off your shoes before entering.

Colleen and I, though--always ones to buck the system--decided to take in a bit of light entertainment at the Misonoza in Nagoya. Seats were offerred at a reduced price (though the added price of the nosebleeds may have covered the difference) to we foreign folk, and as an added bonus they threw in a little lecture beforehand to acculturate our barbaric tastes to the finer points of kabuki. It wasn't so much a lecture as a comedic duo comprising a nasally "lecturer" and his consistently interloping translator.

Our Japanese Laurel and Hardy went to great pains to be certain that we would pay particular attention to the culmination of the evening's final performance. After the curtain closes, the character Benkei was to perform a particular flourish as he exited on the hanamichi. I remember it leaving me with the impression of being a simplified form of hopscotch. Shit, I did that in grade school!

Kabuki seems to be mostly about posing, after all the modern verb to which it is related, kabuku, means "to strut" or "to show off." Everytime one of the actors would pose, geezers in the audience--kabuki otaku, if you will--would yell out the player's name in almost ebullient glee.

That was Saturday.

Sunday, our cravings for music having not been satisfied by the twanging of shamisen and shrieking of bamboo flutes, we headed to Sakae for a Pillows concert. It was the sweatiest I've been in a long time; even today my right ear is still a little numb from how fucking loud it was in there. Normally these things would piss me off, had the concert not been so absolutely amazing. The floor shook from the beating it was receiving and I think it was the guitar solos that were making my balls vibrate. I found myself yelling out Yamanaka's name with ebullient glee as he climbed on top of the monitors and leaned out over the audience. Can you blame me? The man is a golden god!

Later, Yamanaka mused to himself as the band prepared for a second encore, "Nagoya is a mysterious place."

Well, only in spring.

25 Days in a Cage

If I had to pick one critic (that overgeneralized word for "smart" people who write books) I admire more than any other, it would have to Frederic Jameson, not becuase I actually believe his Marxist claptrap but because I really have to admire someone who can be a Marxist and simultaneously filthy stinking rich. I heard somewhere, can't remember where, that all American Marxists are really capitalists, because, ultimately, all Americans are capitalists, closet or otherwise. Ah, yet another gross overgeneralization...

If I had to pick one critic (here meaning someone who actually criticizes written works, social systems, and so forth) whose influence I grapple with most, it would be Ezra Pound. I've always admired people who, despite being fundamentally flawed, manage to produce pure genius. Also, being something of a polymath myself (according to Mickles), I see something of the old, middle, and young Ezra in myself. The major difference is I try to shut up about the things that could quite easily land me in hot water.

I resent being something of a mantic. In this half the world (i.e. Asia, the new Orient), I spend most of my time conversing with non-Western types explaining "our culture" to them in terms they claim to understand. The same, of course, is true back in the Fatherland. Japanese, Chinese, whatever culture is a big fucking mystery to the paleface (apparently), so we produce a class of mantics whose jobs it is to commune with the natives and interpret their signs for the powers that be. "Why are Japanese men so concerned with saving face in public?" Hmm, good question, because obviously Americans have no need of spin doctors or PR firms.

And we punish these mantics when they're wrong. I should revise that statement: we punish these mantics when we perceive that they are wrong.

All of you already know that you learn infinitely more about people when you live among them. The first and truly valuable thing you learn is despite superficial peculiarities, they're not different.

Ezra Pound went apeshit trying to make sense of the world as a whole. When the Americans found him in Italy they locked him up in an outdoor cage for the better part of a month. When he was finally released from the mental institution where he spent a good deal of his remaining years, he returned to that Italian city which I still claim to this day stinks of cigarettes and garbage, obviously something a sane man would not do.