Only a Blockhead

Random Vienna

 

It is, of course, ridiculous to draw any conclusions about a country or a city when one's first visit to that place has extended to all of two days.  It's ridiculous but, I hope, excusable when the conclusions that one has jumped to in those forty-eight hours are not the standard highly critical remarks of the fish, in a foreign culture, out water.

The two days that I have been in Vienna have left me with nothing but positive feelings for the place.  Beginning with the quick and effortless trip through immigration and customs (even though neither my wife nor I hold EU passports) and the quick and effortless ride into the city on public transportation, extending through the striking architecture, good food, and excellent beer, and continuing with a day sightseeing (the Leopold Museum: it had somehow escaped me that Schiele is a first-rate painter, the cathedral, and coffee at Cafe Hawelka) it's all been a delight.

What surpsised me was the people.  I had heard and read that the Viennese are notoriously grumpy and unfriendly,  Indeed my guidebook includes three interviews with Viennese in which they assert that one of the worst things about their home city is precisely this grumpiness and unfriendliness, but we have been treated with unfailing courtesy and good humor--the fact that I've only completed lessons one through six of Just Listen and Learn German notwithstanding.

I guess it's a bit like the old canard about the supposed incivility of the French, something else I have seldom experienced.

The other thing the three Viennese interviewed in my guidebook cite as a problem with this lovely city is the abundance of dog-shit they feel they are compelled to dance around every time they venture into the street.

We've seen lots of dogs (something we take to be a good thing about the city) but have had to avoid very little excrement in the roads, so I guess the anti-dog-doo-doo campaigns which are periodically launched (the same unreliable guidebooks tells me) have been successful.

--David

Summer of a lifetime

Last Thursday for the first time in weeks the sky was a sea of cloud. It wasn't long before there were fat drops of rain, then a shower, and then the downpour. The insects were silenced and the countryside was strangely still as I cycled to work under an umbrella.

The rain stopped but continued dripping under the tree canopy over the road. In this tunnel, a couple of cicadas gamely attempted a soggy rattle before clattering off on drunken wings. The rain was the first of their two-week lives, and had obviously thrown them. In the course of the morning, several came wheeling around the buildings, settling on the dry brickwork to advertise loudly for a mate before heading back to the damply inhospitable woods.  

By late morning, the sky had broken up, the sun was out, and the insects had resumed their vigorous buzz. It was back to the hot, dry norm; the cicada's summer of a lifetime.

--Julian

Recent Reading

All Tomorrow's Parties

William Gibson

"Bohemias.  Alternative subcultures.  They were a crucial aspect of industrial civilization in the two previous centuries.  They were where industrial civilization went to dream.  A sort of unconscious R&D, exploring alternative societal strategies.  Each one would have a dress code, characteristic forms of artistic expression, a substance or substances of choice, and a set of sexual values at odds with those of the culture at large.  And they did frequently have locales with which they became associated, but they became extinct."

"Extinct?"

"We started to pick them before they could ripen.  A certain crucial growing period was lost, as marketing evolved and mechanisms of recommodification became quicker, more rapacious.  Authentic subcultures required backwaters, and time, and there are no more backwaters.  They went the way of geography in general."

William Gibson
All Tomorrow's Parties

It never occurred to the ancients to ascribe a person's sexual tastes to some postitive, structural, or constitutive sexual feature of his or her personality . . . Most premodern and non-Western cultures, despite an awareness of the range of possible varriations in human sexual behavior, refuse to individuate human beings at the level of sexual preference and assume, instead, that we all share the same fundamental set of sexual appetities, the same "sexuality."  For most of the world's inhabitants, in other words, "sexuality" is no more a "fact of life" than "dieticitiy."  Far from being a necessary or intrinsic constituent of human life, "sexuality" seems indeed to a uniquely modern, Wesern, even bourgeois production.

David M. Halperin
After Pastoral: Theocritus and the Ancient Tradition of Bucolic Poetry

as quoted in

Guy Davenport: Postmodern and After, by Andre Furlani

—David

Bombers and Baskets

Resting at #5 in the Global Peace Index rankings after Norway, New Zealand, Denmark and Ireland, Japan is a peaceable place. That there is little violence is a big reason for choosing to live here. But what if this were a repressive environment? How would the best of people act then? How would honesty, honor and selflessness express themselves?

I just watched a compelling movie about a people struggling to liberate themselves from their occupiers. After years of legal means bringing nothing, some resort to violence. The occupiers retaliate; the violence escalates. The rebels send women to plant bombs in public places. Desperate to stop attacks against their army and civilians, the occupiers use torture to gain information. It is a successful strategy in the short run, but ultimately, it is the undoing of the occupiers for it undermines support for the war at home.

The movie is The Battle of Algiers. It was released in 1966 and has lost none of its immediacy. The occupying French and occupied Algerians are fighting for what they want in any way they can. A rebel leader is captured and asked by a reporter: "Isn't it cowardly to use your women's baskets to carry bombs that have killed so many innocent people?" The leader replies, "Is it less cowardly to drop your napalm on defenseless villages, killing thousands more? Give us your bombers, and you can have our women's baskets."

When all else has failed, is violence an honorable recourse in the cause of justice?

--Julian

Random California

I'm in Pasadena (just outside Los Angeles) on vacation, and thus have been remiss in  blockheaded blogging.  I'll try to make some small amends with a post about some of the things I've noticed, enjoyed, or shook my head at here in Southern California.

• In Southern California, people who make more than X amount of dollars a year will tell you that there is no public transportation worthy of the name, and when you point out that there actually are buses, trains, and even a subway in Los Angeles they will tell you that these buses, trains, and subways are, for various reasons, impossible to use (my favorite reason: "I'd have to walk fifteen minutes to get to the bus stop!").  People who make less than X amount of dollars a year commute to and from their jobs daily on this non-existent and impossible public transportation.  (The odd tourist—me—uses it, too.)  The city seems to be doing everything it can to make public transportation more attractive—except one big thing.  Los Angeles needs to make the cars to which its citizens are so addicted less convenient.  Higher gas prices now!  No parking on any public street!  A toll, a la London, for anyone entering Los Angeles county, and a higher toll if they're driving an SUV or similar gas-guzzler!

UPDATE: The day after I wrote the above, this appeared in the LA Times.

• ANA currently offers the best economy class service from Narita (Japan) to Los Angeles.  The seats are no more roomy or comfortable than United or American (that is to say, they are not roomy or comfortable at all), but the food is better and there are enough flight attendants assigned to cattle class that one can expect a certain amount of service.
• 
  
  
  But maybe the reason the flight was less unpleasant than usual was that I had with me Haruki Murakami's newest, After Dark.  Those of you who know him only from his early work will want to have another look.  Beginning with The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle he became an entirely different writer, masterful and mature.  In that After Dark takes place over the course of one Tokyo night it reminded me somewhat of Stephen Dixon's Fall and Rise, though that may be a false impression.   I read  Dixon's book years ago.
• I went to Pasadena's excellent Vroman's Books to hear William Gibson speak, but, alas, I had misread the schedule.  He had been there the week before.  Instead I was offered Frank Herbert's son talking about how he hoped to make money off of his father's books.  I didn't stay.
  
• Uttered, into her cell-phone, by a woman at the pool: "I had my whole body fixed.  It cost me $300."  She may have been talking about her car.
• People in Los Angeles complain about what they think of as humidity when the humidity level climbs into the high single digits.  They clearly can't begin to imagine what I'm talking about when I mention the eighty percent humidity levels not atypical in a Japanese summer.

And with that I'm off, into the hot, dry heat of another LA day.

—David

The Eyes of Kazuo Oga

Last weekend, I went to an exhibition of the art of Kazuo Oga in Tokyo. Oga drew the backgrounds for most of Hayao Miyazaki's animated movies beginning with My Neighbor Totoro. His are the images of the Japanese countryside in high summer with green rice fields, great trees, clouds piled up in the blue sky (from Totoro); a decaying shrine in the shadow of an enormous tree, its rusty tin roof dappled with sunlight (Totoro); a distant green landscape of hills and fields and farm houses, and in the foreground, the sun throwing the crisp shadow of a tree onto a mountain highway flanked by a white guardrail (Only Yesterday); a sun-bleached suburban road (Only Yesterday); a decaying farmhouse with sunflowers towering over the overgrown yard (Pom Poko).

Why do Oga's images stir the heart? Perhaps because he has really looked at something in a way we cannot or never bother to do, and so, being given new eyes by the artist, we thrill to feel, yes, that is how it is. Miraculously life, elusive and beyond control, has been captured and nailed to the page.

Stepping out of the museum into the old town neighborhood around it, when I looked at the road--a bicycle parked, a yellow plastic crate discarded on the sidewalk, the crisp new houses and behind, a run-down older one--I saw it as frozen and beautiful as a picture by Oga. And later back at home, if I paid a little attention to the leaves on the trees and the clouds in the sky, they took on some of the hyper-reality of his pictures.

For a little while at least, I gratefully borrow the eyes of Kazuo Oga.  

The exhibition runs until September 30.

--Julian

Festival of the Dead

Here in Kanagawa, the Bon Festival of the Dead is held in the middle of August. Almost every farmhouse in our road has decorations at the front gate. On a small platform of sculpted dried mud sit a sleek cucumber and a bulbous eggplant on wooden chopstick legs. These represent a horse and cow respectively, and are the vehicles for ancestors to revisit the family home.

In the driveways sit more modern vehicles from which children and their parents spill, for Bon is also when living relatives come to the family home for a few days of reunion and vacation. Many businesses have closed for the week and commuter trains are empty; other trains are full.

This is the hottest part of the year but the days are getting shorter. The clocks don't change for summer in Japan so the spectacular dawn chorus of insects is before 5 a.m. when most of us are still sleeping, and it is dark by 7 p.m. During the day the sky is blue, with white cumulus clouds on the horizon. Cicadas scream and the heat bleaches the scenery. In the evening, the temperature drops to the point where it comfortably envelops your body.

The air is a little clearer than usual this week. Yesterday evening, I came out of the house to find a turquoise sky shading down to a pale orange behind the black silhouette of Mount Fuji. When darkness fell, the sky filled with stars. Later, standing on the pebble beach and listening to the crashing waves, we could see the faintest trace of the Milky Way.

--Julian

Fireworks

Summer in central Japan is hot and humid. As compensation for the discomfort, it's also a time of special pleasures. One of the greatest is the local fireworks show, and it is a point of pride for a town to have one every year.

On the designated day, as the sun sets and the heat subsides, most of the population moves en masse to the river bank or beach. Many wear thin, loose colorful yukata robe tied with a sash--stylish and perfect for the temperature. For those not bringing a picnic, the local stores and restaurants en route to the event take their business to the roadside, grilling chicken, corn and other snacks, or floating cans of beer in ice-filled tubs.

And so it was that on a recent Sunday, as every year, I joined the strolling thousands on their way to Chigasaki beach. We sat down on the spacious sand, dusk fell and the show began. From the port, rockets snaked into the night sky, exploding above our heads in great circles of red, blue and green, or erupting into hundreds of white stars that fell like weeping willows. Each burst of light came with a thunderous boom that now ricochets off the new high-rise apartments that line the coast. The shower of light and sound was punctuated by gasps, sighs, and clapping that rippled down the beach after a particularly spectacular effect. An hour later, in a blizzard of silver and white, the show was over and we all packed up and walked happily home, having seen the best fireworks that taxes and contributions from local businesses could buy.

A few days later, I cycled down the coast for the Kamakura Fireworks. No relentless spectacle here. Each type of firework is sent up individually, its descriptive name announced by loudspeaker beforehand, so that it may be appreciated and given its due. This is the champagne of fireworks shows with effects unseen anywhere else, and its reputation draws more than local people. By the time the first rocket went up, there was hardly a spare piece of beach to sit on and people were still arriving.

A fireworks show is a thrilling way to spend a summer's evening. I deeply enjoy Kamakura's refinement and art, but I love the gaudy spectacle that is Chigasaki.

--Julian

Genius: Ingmar Bergman and Groucho Marx

Woody Allen, in today's International Herald Tribune, writes that, when Ingmar Bergman died,

many newspapers or magazines called me for interviews. . . . How had he influenced me, they asked.  He couldn't have influenced me, I said, he was a genius and I am not a genius and genius cannot be learned or its magic passed on.

When Bergman emerged in the New York art houses as a great filmmaker I was a young comedy writer and nightclub comic.  Can one's work be influenced by Groucho Marx and Ingmar Bergman?

Allen's piece appears not to be on-line, which is unfortunate, because it is a useful corrective to this, which ran a few days earlier.

Sharing the page with Allen's essay, there is a nice piece on Antonioni by Martin Scorsese (also, as near as I can tell, not on-line).

—David

UPDATE: Woody Allen's piece turned up on the New York Times  web-site (the NYT owns the IHT).  Here it is.

Vacation

Is there a more joyous way of starting summer vacation than splayed out on the tatami by the French windows, a cup of tea at hand, gazing at the pale blue sky and wispy clouds, listening to Bill Evans improvising on the piano to a background of cicadas, and noting the winged things in and above the garden,

swallows soaring
dragonflies darting
butterflies flitting

and lest we should think that elegance is all,

beetles blundering
cicadas careening

in one's underwear in the sweet sweat of a hot Chigasaki summer's afternoon?

--Julian