The Tanuki Ramble

How Green Was My Chavvy

Chavvy?  Diminutive of chav, a derogatory term for a (British?) young man who kits himself in pseudo-hip hop attire, like Sacha Baron Cohen's alter ego Ali G (seen here in this cringe-makingly hilarious punkumentary of the clueless Noam Chomsky.  Ali G to the professor, "How many words does you know?").

Actually, the perp is not so much a  chav as a yobbo, a  British species of young male ignoramus--in this case, specifically Welsh.  He did what young male ignoramuses around the world are wont to do: get together with similarly IQ-challenged friends and victimize some harmless, random person for laughs. 

This yobbo went one step further, however, and had the act filmed.  Then stuck it on YouTube and tagged it "Robbery."  From the Times (UK):  Be sure to follow the link for the video!

The clip, recorded on Saturday on Wrexham's main shopping street, shows a teenage man in a white T-shirt walking in front of a group of around four friends all filming him on their phones. The youth looks back at the camera and grins as he approaches a middle-aged charity worker as she talks to a group of potential donors. In the film he is shown reaching out and snatching the bemused woman's glasses before sprinting off down the pedestrianised street. The final shot shows one of the group still filming with a smile on his face as those around him guffaw with laughter. The clip was posted two days ago by "wxmboys" and titled "Wild specs robbery" and captioned: "p***ed up bald lad steals randomers specs in street! Absolutely WILD!!!" Wxmboys put it online as "comedy" but within hours of the arrest the posting, which had been left on the video-sharing website in the hope of impressing other users, instead quickly attracted a stream of derision. With those responsible variously branded "cretins", "chavs", "scum" and "retarded" one user commented: "Who's laughing now, losers? I bet your parents are proud." North Wales Police confirmed that a spectacles theft was reported in Wrexham on Saturday and that they were tipped off about the footage by a member of the public within hours of it being posted yesterday, After viewing the film officers were able to identify the culprit and a police source said officers had recovered a pair of spectacles after visiting his home. The source said: "We had a word with him - he isn't the brightest lad."

Just by coincidence, last night I watched the 1941 John Ford classic "How Green Was My Valley," the adaptation of Richard Llewelyn's novel about a small South Wales mining town .  The narrator, just before abandoning his slag-blackened, smoke-choked home and its beaten-down populace, reminisces about his youth. Then, the ill-effects effects of the mine were tidy, a little black punctuation mark on a green and Godly valley.  The men marched to the mines singing in impeccable harmonies, and the women made fiery speeches when they weren't up to their elbows in the steaming wash-water.   Propriety and decorum ruled.   Grab a biscuit at the table before Dad had his share and you got a slap.  Women who conceived out of wedlock were dragged before the congregation to be humiliated. 

Fast forward about 60 years (from the time of the narrator's leaving) to the present, and move a bit up north to Wrexham.  The pious hypocrites scrabbling for a living are gone, and the streets are full of  shops and bored consumers.  And the young people seem so ignorant of any standard of behavior that not only do they bully the helpless but are so thickly green as to think they can get away with exhibiting their crime in a world-wide accessible forum. 

The streets may be tidy, but the slag seems to have moved inside.

Kurosawa online

Whoops...guess I'm still not back in the habit of blogging yet.  And I might not get the chance, as job-hunting duties and the task of getting ready to move...perhaps back to the States...eats up more and more time.

That doesn't mean I haven't wasted time surfing, but here's a nugget that I didn't expect to turn up.  Kurosawa's the Seven Samurai on line, complete, and for free.  Boggles the mind.

While poking around Terry Teachout's site, I followed a link to Sid Caesar clip at this site: Tesla Like Television ( I bet he do!)  You can stream about 800 clips, ranging from old toy commercials to Chaplin to masterpieces like these Kurosawa gems:

The Seven Samurai.  You have not lived until you have digested this movie.

Rashomon, the portmanteau of two Akutagawa stories made into a seamless masterpiece by Kurosawa.

Yojimbo...the real Bodyguard!

Other Japanese-related treats are:

Betty Boop sings in Japan...in passable Japanese!

An Ozu classic, Ukigusa (Floating Weeds)

The Japanese Kwaidan Ghost Story Serial: Woman of the Snows, In A Cup of Tea, Hoichi The Earless, and Black Hair.

The adaptation of the mostly fictional biography of the super-samurai of the seventeenth century,  Musashi Miyamoto (by 20th century novelist Eiji Yoshikawa), eponymously titled Musashi.  The film is in two parts (thought it was three...?) and stars perennial Kurosawa samurai actor Toshiro Mifune.  Great samurai action, plus a morality tale of how a brash young warrior "becomes human" by learning to kill with less passion and more compassion.  Samurai One...and Samurai Two.

You can also find tons of other Betty Boop shorts, as well as Popeye and Superman, film classics like The Third Man and M.    Streamin's free, but you have to pay to download.

Jerry the Junker et al

Ahhh..YouTube.   Its days as a free-wheeling, free dealing...and free service are probably numbered now that Google has its claws in it, but let's enjoy it while we can.

Among the many delights available on it are some numbers by my favorite currently performing band, The Asylum Street Spankers.  Yeah, yeah, their politics and post-hippie, gonzo libertarianism are often embarrassing, but if I could, I'd like to join them on stage one time for a version of Jerry the Junker.  Amazing band...all over the place stylistically, somehow hitting the genres that do me the best.

My old band back at Chuck Wagon Honky Tonk  Saloon in Fukushima hacked off a version of Jerry that we enjoyed (dunno about the audience)...nothing like the original, though.    And clever?  Whammo, the big, bearded guy with the beer bottle permanently stuck in his hand is an award winning poetry slam artiste.

Also check out Minor Waltz, Winning the War on Drugs, Whatever, Tie A Yellow Ribbon on Your SUV (woefully reductionist, but hilarious), Breathin, and Hick Hop.

Sorry that I can't paste YouTube directly onto this blog, but Typepad apparently doesn't rate in YouTube's book.

For Sale: baby shoes, never worn.

For Sale: baby shoes, never worn.

What is it?  Hemingway's answer to a challenge to write a six word story.  As in haiku, the words are just the tip of the iceberg.  Or rather the tips of the iceberg range.  The serious bumping and grinding is going on way down below, where all our knowledge of human nature, newspaper advertisements (or rummage sales), and infant mortality lurk, sometimes earned first hand, sometimes second or more.

The trick of concocting a successful set of miniature literary matrushka is feeling out how far you can go in assuming the reader can pick up on your clues.  I don't think it's possible to condense the impression that I get from this blog, Bizarre Crime In Japan into six words, but I can certainly feel the shape of a story here. 

Forgive my prolixity, but maybe something like: "Bizarre Crime in Japan blog--nothing after the fifth post."   Would "Bizarre crime in Japan--only five posts" do?   Trick is, you'd almost have to be a gaijin blogger to get that one.  Why, there must be...dozens of us.  Not much of a target market.

The author of the blog was probably another conversation school ex-pat striking out against the slap in the face most foreigners feel they get when they discover their language, ways, and even common sense assumptions are not the default institutions of the entire world.   You're treated with deceptive deference, condescended to, and wrong, wrong, wrong about so many things.

You get together in the gaijin bars and trade horror stories, laugh behind the backs of those who were too decorous to laugh at you.  You want to strike back against the empire of the yen, expose its seamy side, show the world that the well-ordered, polite, clean, cute Japanese are horribly twisted...and there it is: evidence in black and white.   Time for payback.

And then you get over it, or most of us do.  It's actually an amazingly safe country as far as non-police states go.  Yes, there are sick crimes that occur (from today's Mainichi Daily News, for example), but we're still talking about a place where a mugging is likely to be reported as national news. 

I love the States, but Japan simply does not yet have  events like the rape-slayings in Colorado, the murder of Amish schoolgirls, and this patri-soro-cidal monstrosity  ("Son charged with murdering Iowa family"--talk about your six word short stories) happening  regularly.

It would be interesting to find out who the person who started the bizarre blog was, why he or she began, why he or she stopped.  But then again, I kind of like not knowing. Gives the icebergs more room to bounce.

Sting, where is thy death?

Not literal...artistic death, that is.  He's not that old, because if he were, that'd mean I was almost that old, and mmmmm...I ain't ready to go there yet.

I was never one of those folks who rabidly hate ex-Police man Sting, and I always thought he had a great ear for melody and pacing in a tune, as well as a deft hand at crafting lyrics.   Say what you want about the guy, he just doesn't die away like so many other 80s icons.  He's reinvented himself any number of ways, from working with jazz arranger Gil Evans (who helped Miles Davis recreate himself and the jazz idiom as well with Sketches of Spain) and narrating Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf to singing a country duet with Toby Keith and acting in a number of films. 

The guy is nothing if not eclectic.  I suppose one can't blame him too much for loopy politics.  He must be so busy dabbling in different aesthetic fields that he has no time to delve into the nuts and bolts of extremely complex situations, as this interview suggests.  I guess making statements like this takes the "sting" out of being so rich, famous, and lauded...

What do you see as the most pressing issues facing people today?

I think all of these problems are related. I don't think anything is separate. You can't separate the environment from human rights. You can't separate the environment from the imbalances of economic power. You can't separate violence from the industrial military complex selling weapons to Liberia. You know, none of the weapons are made in Liberia. They're all made in Germany, in France, Italy, Britain and the U.S. We're filling the world with these f***ing weapons. All these problems are connected. But it's all about balance, you know? It's all about trying to balance the world. It is completely out of balance in every sense. You know, in terms of justice and economics and resources.

Ah yes...ambiguous pronouncements about how unfair the world is and it being somehow all "our" fault, with a side of vulgar language.  It's the stuff of contemporary sainthood.  But I came to praise Sting, not to bury him in his own unbalanced assessments. 

Now the guy is putting out an album of the music of Shakespeare's contemporary John Dowland, the Sting of his day.  Check out the Telegraph article about Sting and a lutist named Karamazov. 

Dowland's very natural style doesn't necessarily require an operatically trained voice. Sting's warm, slightly hoarse rasp, so familiar in other contexts, fits well. 'I certainly didn't feel I had to alter much of my singing style. I haven't needed to project into a massive auditorium. The songs were designed for an intimate setting, so my relationship with the microphone is probably the right one. It doesn't normally work for pop singers to sing "classical". I've chosen this particular pitch because I think it's a battle I can win. It's not about technique, it's not about vibrato and production: it's about melody and lyric.'

Dowland hit Elizabethan gold with (what an old friend of mine would probably call a "groaner") "Flow My Tears".  You can hear a version here by C E Adamson, although I prefer his (her?) "If My Complaints Could Passions Move."  (Whining for love?  Never worked for me, either.)  Adamson seems to be going for the projective, operatic approach that Sting says he will eschew. 

There I Go Again

It's odd.  When I tried to start blogging again several months ago, it as like pulling teeth, as my mom used to say about getting me to clean my room. 

There were no topics that I felt I had anything to add to, everything was covered elsewhere better, with more wit, detail, and dressed up in snazzy graphics to boot.  Blogging's like  high wire perambulation...no different from walking any straight line until you look down...or around, as the case might be.

Now I've got to have my say, and in the immense lecture hall of the internet with more podiums (podia?) than seats, why the hell not?

Perhaps it's that I've begun writing poetry again after years of nothing but the most sporadic output.  After handling language with a teaspoon (coffee spoons?), it's fun to jump in the creek and splash around and not care who gets wet, least of all, yourself. 

Maybe it's that my time in Japan is coming to an end.  My "school's," management, after going from incompetence to incompetence, has decided to close the works entirely by next April. 

Not criminal negligence, exactly, but certainly misdemeanorly neglect.  Grizzled old job-hoppers like me who don't have a family to support can take it ( I hope), but other dedicated folks and the students who were seduced into signing over a year or two of their lives have been done an injustice.  Shoganai as some like to say over here.  "Can't be helped," shrug the ones who set up the fiasco and then did  nothing to help it.   

Anyways, I hope to be posting more.  To any old readers who haven't gotten around to deleting TR from their "favorites" list, my apologies for being the unreliable blogger that I am, and a promise to try harder.  To old friends who google me out of curiosity ("what in the world would a guy like that actually wind up doing?") I hope you find the discovery not too shocking. 

In a world in which Ahmadinejad dismissing the holocaust, Islamowhateveryouwannacallem extremists are promising us  dhimmitude, Putin's critics are winding up in the morgue, and Kim Jong Il's cooking up nukes and is reportedly treating his citizens who wish to emigrate worse than we'd allow animals to be treated, I find the Bush=Hitler meme silly, to put it politely. 

There are far, far, worse things in the world than stumble-footed Texas politicians whose flaws, however great, manifest themselves in attempts to defend the way of life most of use enjoy, and to extend it to others.    Furthermore, it seems to me that those who abuse the freedoms and advantages that we few, we privileged denizens of western democracies living in the latter half of the 20th and early 21st centuries enjoy, are its most virulent and implacable critics.

Meanwhile, there are certainly a lot of nice things in the world.  Selfless people, astounding creativity (scroll down about 55%, check out the "videos" on the right), and plenty of venues to enjoy them in. 

October Seventh

Not to presume  too many parallels, but for what it's worth, October 7, 2001.

October 7, 1571. 

October 7, 1571.  (Once more, with feeling)