simultan’s Neighborhood

Our New Year's Resolution is to improve our Japanese.  We'll start with this:

New Year, midnight:
The full moon's light paints the roof of the forest shrine with snow.

New Year's morning:
Always more cards from those I didn't send them to than from those I did

New Year's Day:
It's a new beginning but tell that to the warming earth.

--Julian

I read eighty-five books.

A very rough count suggests that:

58 of them were fiction,

6 of them dealt with current affairs (often Japan-related),

5 of them were poetry,

4 of them were collections of essays,

4 of them were histories,

3 of them were science-fiction,

2 of them were comic books,

1 of them was a book of philosophy,

1 of them was a travel book,

1 of them was a collection of letters,

1 of them dealt with writing pedagogy.

—David

Ideally I'd like to be an
intensely local poet the kind
that publishes in the town newspaper's
                        "Poetry Corner"
remembered fondly by the County
Historical Society & recited at
Grange picnics.  Perhaps a pageant
for the public elementary school or
                        an epic
printed privately for the author
still to be found on the shelves
of the village library where the
old lady tells anecdotes about my
                        bouts of alcoholism
but represses the other scandals
which were never proved anyway.
Every once in a while a strange phrase will
jump off the page & stick with you like
                         a personal memory.

                                   —Hakim Bey

—David

It’s said that when the Lumiere Brothers first filmed a train rushing screenward, the novice audience dove under their seats. 120 years later, I went to perhaps the first mainstream movie for general audiences in modern state-of-the-art 3-D, and we spectators let out a collective gasp at the first effect. We were sitting wearing clunky glasses and witnessing another leap forward in cinema magic.

Avatar capitalizes on this leap by imagining and realizing a wondrous fictional world. The first act, when we are literally taken through its flora and fauna, is reason enough to pay this movie a visit. The computer graphic characters are also so realistic as to appear closer to actors than animation. The illusion is nearly complete.

On the downside, it would be charitable to call the story formulaic, although it does include a few nods to current conflicts and climate issues. And charitable to call it long as it keeps us in our seats for a buttnumbing, bladderstretching 3 hours. Neither strike disqualifies it as essential viewing (in 3-D of course) for anyone interested in the evolution of cinema.

--Julian

Concluding my round up of the year following Part I and Part II

Wikipedia: It’s ubiquitous to the point of being taken for granted, so it’s worth noting that I access it multiple times a day, which is many times more often than I turn on the TV let alone consult reference books. In eight years, Wikipedia and its sister sites have managed to become the Internet’s knowledge’s most valuable resource. That’s worth a hefty donation whenever I’m asked.

A tie between a Tokyo izakaya and a Shikoku mountain resort hotel.

Norabo: I went to this intimate space in the heart of Tokyo with friends who ordered masterfully from the extensive menu. The result was dish after dish of original, scintillating fare, handcrafted by the three chefs in residence. Tofu, vegetables, fish, and shellfish were transformed and combined with flair and imagination for an entirely delicious and memorable evening.

Hotel Kazurabashi: An entire meal made up of vegetables, river fish and buckwheat noodles—in a large hot spring resort hotel no less--might not seem a promising candidate for meal of the year. But this was the isolated Iya valley, and the kitchen was charged with showing that an isolated region can compete with cuisine anywhere. Each dish was superb, and the whole was a wonderful balance of its parts.

Inaka: In my experience, these are still the juiciest, most generous, most unpretentious cuts of raw fish in Japan. A few months ago, thick slices of katsuo bonito with garlic and soy sauce lured us there night after night. Now it’s buri yellowtail. Selected and cut by the veteran owner and offered with pride, it’s also tremendous value, as is the rest of the simple, down-to-earth menu.  

Shikoku: This island exists in a time warp. We left modern life behind for the glory of Meiji-era Dogo onsen, and the lonely splendor of the Iya valley with a bucolic outdoor hot spring bath by a sparkling river. We’re already planning a return trip to explore the south.

Tea ball: Tea is an essential part of my day, and I was used to the convenience of tea bags. But this summer, friends brought a present of loose tea from the UK. And so I bought a tea ball to seal the leaves inside before steeping them in the pot. What flavor loose tea gives! Plus I can mix teas into the smoky but dense blends of my choice. It’s a whole new world.

--Julian

It's been a nostalgic year. Listening to a 5-CD set of Beatles outtakes, I was struck by the music's humour, the way so many songs play with parody. The collaboration with George Martin, a producer of comedy records, makes sense. It is still the most fabulous stuff and done so quickly (23 singles and 12 LPs in 7 years) and is what really lies behind Harold Wilson's 'white heat of this revolution'.

 

Before the Beatles, there were Westerns. The first image I remember seeing on TV is a cowboy riding up a dusty gulch, possibly with Indians above, ready to pounce. The box set of the Budd Boetticher/Randolph Scott RANOWN oaters, minus 7 Men From Now, is a long way from Bronco Layne and Wells Fargo.

Press on The Tall T, where guns, girls, violence, stoicism and an overpowering landscape make for an updated Natty Bumppo, with urban and sexual anxieties expressed out on the range: Hemingway's Men (trying to be) Without Women and Boetticher's own interest in bullfighting at back. Then there's Ride Lonesome's hard-edged cinemascope, its very deep focus, another Burt Kennedy script, and three more, all Cowboys (and sometimes Indians), to explain things to the Martians. 

 

In moving house, a copy of the first English edition of Fitzgerald’s Pat Hobby Stories, a Penguin bought in December 1971, came to the top of a yet-to-be-shelved pile. Nothing was as wry. His portrait of the ageing, deluded hack is compassionate and wise. The stories envisage a sit-com for those in thrall to Hollywood's Golden Age, PG Wodehouse rewriting Nathanael West. As you read, you can't help but cast.   

 

While living in a loft on 821 Sixth Avenue in the flower district of Manhattan between 1957 and 1965, the photographer W Eugene Smith exposed 1,447 rolls of film and recorded 1,740 reels of tape. The photos are of the many jazz musicians, famous and obscure, who came to the building to jam after-hours, and of views of the street taken from his perch at the fourth floor window. Smith also wired every room to record music sessions, stray conversations and the sound from his TV and radio.

The Jazz Loft Project by Sam Stephenson collects some of the photos (Thelonius Monk, Israel Iseson from Brooklyn in his truck) and transcribes some of the talk (a pianist OD’ing in the hall, Jason Robards reading The Crack-Up). It’s for those who like New York, and misses the top spot only because of early spring’s Hiding Man, Tracy Daugherty’s nifty biography of Donald Barthelme. I bought my first copy of Playboy because it contained a story of his.

—NC Tate

I read a lot of good books this year, as  I do every year.  Two stood out: The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll by Álvaro Mutis and Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire by Iain Sinclair.  Julian has already mentioned Maqroll in his list, so I'll just add that Mutis's novellas are adventure stories for adults.  There is nothing else like them, and one fully understands why Mutis's friends beg him not to let the hero die.  I read most of it over Christmas last year while spending an idyllic week just down the beach from President Obama in Kailua, Hawaii, and I wrote about it here.

I am unable to come up with a pithy summation like "adventure stories for adults" to describe Sinclair's massive (but not a page too long) and labyrinthine tome.  It is the kind of book that anyone who has ever loved a city, or a neighborhood in a city, wishes he could write, but which, in fact, only Sinclair seems able to produce.  It is fiction; it is fact; it is travelogue; it is city-guide; it is literary criticism; it is . . . the list could go on.  You can get a flavor of the book from this excellent video interview with Sinclair here.  Upon finishing Hackney I wrote this.

Late in the year I came across a CD by a musician I was vaguely aware of as an influence on several other musicians I enjoy: Geoff Muldaur's Texas Sheiks.  I learned about it from a Terry Gross interview with Muldaur.  Gross remains one of the least-skilled interviewers around, but when Muldaur, in the course of their chat, picked up his guitar and started picking and singing I was convinced.  This is a must-hear for anyone who enjoys down-home American roots music (that, needless to say, has nothing to do with Nashville or anything prefixed with alt-).

As usual I didn't watch many films this year, and don't regret a bit devoting my free time to books and music instead.  One movie I saw, however, did stand out.  A rough and dirty test for whether a movie has artistic merit is the extent to which it depends upon cheap thrills: the more cheap thrills, the less chance of artistic merit.  Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles offers no cheap thrills at all.  Rather, it serves up long, real-time takes of potatoes being chopped, bathtubs being washed, and so on, and director Chantal Akerman manages to make it all mesmerizing, horrible, and illuminating.  Think Ozu and Kore'eda but with no humanist uplift.

Last night my wife wanted to hear some Christmas music—it was Christmas after all—and she didn't mean Handel or 17th century English folk songs—so I went to my gadget of the year, the iPod Touch, and, using one of the thousands of apps available for it, was soon tuned into one of many all-Christmas-carols-all-the-time radio stations, so my wife and I were able to get our fill of Bing, Sammy D., Bob Dylan, and James Brown.  And of course the Touch is much more than a radio: it also offers email, music, notes, dictionary, calculator, and countless other functions.  Once one of these little machines falls into your hands you'll find it hard to put it down.

It would be boring (though certainly possible) to name Inaka, once again, restaurant of the year.  The good news is that it's not necessary to do so, because there's another restaurant, just a town over, that is equally exquisite: Brasserie HxM.  Not only is HxM just as good as Inaka; it's good for the same reasons: perfectly fresh ingredients, preparation that is careful and inspired, and a friendly staff that knows they are giving their customers a first-rate experience and are proud of that.  I was there a week ago for my birthday, and hope to visit again soon.

Trip of the year was definitely our jaunt in the UK, from Edinburgh to Yorkshire to the Cotswolds to London.  The Yorkshire leg of the trip was a particular delight because we stopped with fellow-blockhead NC Tate, and whether he was serving up his classic Hunter's Chicken, guiding us through Shandy Hall, or simply delighting us with his conversation, he was the consummate host.  I wrote about the trip here.  

—David