Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon

As a Christmas present for the family, I bought tickets for last night’s performance of the musical, “The Addams Family,” starring Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuwirth. It’s a new production that is having its pre-Broadway tryout run here in Chicago. The reviews have been fairly good, with the exception of a more dour response from the Chicago Tribune, and the NY Times now reports that a show doctor has been brought in to spruce the piece up before its New York opening in March.

Our verdict? The show is fine, especially the second half, which consists of a series of very strong set pieces that allow the cast members to display their considerable talents: Uncle Fester’s charming romance with celestial bodies in “The Moon and Me,” the father of Wednesday’s ‘normal’ boyfriend (played by Terrence Mann) discovering his inner truth “In the Arms” (of a squid), and Gomez and Morticia dueling in a comic tango. Grandma (Jackie Hoffman) and Lurch (Zachary James) each have strong, albeit brief, comic turns in the closing sequences, as well. And Krysta Rodriguez and Wesley Taylor are very appealing as the young lovers, especially in their “Crazier than You” number.

The first act is not quite as strong. That is where I would apply my scalpel if I were doctoring this production. Even there, though, it is a matter of fine-tuning, methinks. The sets and costumes are terrific, there are several strong tunes (“Let’s Not Talk About Anything Else But Love” being clearly the strongest), and the hooks from the television series are all alluded to cleverly (Thing, Cousin It, the snapping fingers) without being overused.

The show received a standing ovation last night — albeit one of those semi-reluctant ones that starts slowly and only gradually spreads across the house. I think the play will do fine in New York. The last time I saw a musical in its pre-Broadway run was “Evita” in San Francisco back in 1979, and that one turned out pretty well, too.

Paying homage to music at the Church of Beethoven (LA Times).

We are back in Chicago now after running up to Minnesota to spend Christmas (and the snowstorm) with family. If you’ve ever wondered how sumo wrestlers celebrate Christmas, the Tamanoi beya blog has an update (Japanese-language only), complete with photos of a truly massive Christmas cake. We had no Christmas cake in St. Paul, but made up for it with cookies, chocolates, &c.

Only a few days left in the year now–and the decade, as well. Can ten years have already passed since we were all obsessed with fears of Y2K and the impending doom of the Internet? The Minneapolis Star/Tribune in its review of the best and worst moments of Twin Cities culture over the past ten years notes the very untimely death last February of poet and essayist Bill Holm as one of the lowest points. I wrote about it at the time here; Holm was a remarkable writer and human being, and a family friend as well. For Christmas, I received his posthumous poetry collection, The Chain Letter of the Soul. I am now savoring every word, melancholic in the knowledge that there will be no more of his witty, angry, loving poems after this.

Jonathan Raban has a terrific review essay on Sarah Palin up at New York Review of Books. He provides a keen analysis of not only what makes Sarah tick, but also what provides her appeal to a certain segment of the electorate.

The rage for Palin’s pert simplicities reflects in part the failure of the Obama administration to persuade people of the wisdom and benefits of its far more sophisticated policies. Recently, I came across FDR’s fireside chat of April 14, 1938, when, speaking from the bottom of the second trough of the double-dip recession, he delivered a plain and passionate defense of deficit spending; Keynes for the family, and as resonant and topical now as it was seventy years ago. Nothing I’ve heard from the present administration matches its clarity, and where puzzlement and incomprehension exist, Palin leaps to fill the gap with facile and völkisch answers.

Finally, I’m very much enjoying Haih or Amortecedor, the recent studio comeback by Os Mutantes, the legendary Brazilian band. I’ve discovered this very helpful pronunciation key for how to say the group’s name aloud. I’ve also discovered this terrific interview at The Daily Swarm with band leader Sérgio Dias. It includes several classic videos of Os Mutantes from the 1960s and 70s, including the day Brazilian folk music went electric (the audience didn’t like it any more than the Newport Folk Festival liked it when Dylan showed up with his electric guitar):

I have tickets to see their co-conspirator Gilberto Gil here in Chicago on April 2. 2010 is looking up….

Merry Christmas and happy holidays to you all, from snowbound Minnesota. We’ve received about six inches of fresh snow here in the last 24 hours, with more promised tonight, but we’re in a cozy warm house surrounded by mountains of Christmas cookies and brownies, and the refrigerator is stocked with egg nog, so we’ll survive somehow!

I hope that you are all enjoying a lovely holiday season with family and friends, and that 2010 brings you peace and great joy.

Here’s a small Christmas gift for you that I just discovered this morning: an English-language version by Yamashita Tatsuro of his classic 1983 hit, “Christmas Eve.” (For purists, the original Japanese-language version is here. Then again, if you’re a purist, what are you doing here?)

“Last call for Wendy’s” a blog report from the Japan Times:

You may have heard that the American fast food chain, Wendy’s, will be closing all 71 of its Japanese outlets on Jan. 1. Zensho, the local company that runs Wendy’s Japan, announced at the beginning of the month that it would not renew its contract with Wendy’s, which runs out Dec. 31. [...]

As often happens in situations like this, Wendy’s is suddenly the most popular fast-food chain in the country. Since the announcement was made, all the outlets have reported lines forming even before they open, and then after they open selling out a full day’s worth of their hamburger products by the early afternoon. The Wendy’s at Shin Yurigaoka in Kawasaki told J-Cast that usually by the time dinner rolls around all they have left is chicken sandwiches and fish sandwiches, but other outlets don’t even have those left. After the standard Wendy’s burger, the most popular item is Wendy’s chili, something you can’t get at McD’s. There’s been hundreds of Twitter posts a day from Wendy’s fans reporting on what’s available and what isn’t. “I went to mourn, but everything is sold out except drinks!!!” one micro-blogger reported.

I’ve been working this week on the section on Arai Yumi (a.k.a. Matsutoya Yumi or simply Yuming) for my book on postwar popular music in Japan. Today, while looking for something else, I stumbled upon a remarkable cover version of a Yuming tune by one of my favorite contemporary J-Pop singers.

The song is “Kageriyuku heya” (something like “The darkening room”). First released as a single in 1976 — her last record, in fact, before she married Matsutoya Masataka and changed her name — it’s one of Yuming’s best compositions, inlaid with chord progressions reminscent of classical music. In fact, it all sounds a bit like a hymn, from the pipe organ opening to the swelling chorus on the backing vocals. Here’s the original version, in case you aren’t familiar with it. It’s one of the great moments in mid-1970s Japanese pop.

The cover version I discovered today is by none other than Shiina Ringo, with whom I’ve been pretty heavily infatuated for the last six or seven years. Shiina respects the song’s essential structure, but nonetheless manages to make it entirely her own. The recording comes from Dear Yuming, a 1999 tribute album.

The philosopher Merleau-Ponty in his Phenomenology of Perception has an interesting discussion of the embodied processes at work when we drive a car. We possess detailed knowledge of the gear shifts, turn signals, steering wheel, brakes–yet most of this knowledge exists outside consciousness. It is embedded as habit in our bodies and for the most part functions automatically, only irrupting into conscious thought when something unexpected happens and requires us to make a decision. According to Merleau-Ponty, when we drive we become one with the car. It becomes an extension of our body and vice versa: our bodies become an extension of the car. You may believe you are driving the car, but actually the car is driving you.

It’s a particularly telling example of the ways in which our bodies are organized socially, crisscrossed with habits acquired through the specific postural schemas we incorporate into ourselves from the world around us. When that external world changes, then so do our bodies. This all came to mind recently when I read an article somewhere (I thought it was in the Chicago Tribune, but I can’t find it there now; there are similar recent articles here and here) about how today’s teenagers are increasingly likely to delay getting their driver’s licenses. It’s just not worth the bother or the expense, they say.

As the father of an 18-year-old who doesn’t drive,I found this interesting. Thirty years ago, when I was a teenager, a driver’s license meant freedom: freedom of movement and, more importantly, freedom from your parents. Today’s kids apparently don’t value that as much–because, of course, they have a different kind of freedom of movement, virtual movement through the Internet and through video games. It isn’t so urgent for them to get away from the home. I suspect this also says something about the changing nature of parent-child relations.

Following Merleau-Ponty, this also means that today’s teenagers are acquiring different sorts of bodies than my generation did. They aren’t acquiring as second nature the habitual embodied practices of being driven by a car. Rather, they are uploading postural schemas largely through the repeated patterns of movement of their fingers across various kinds of keypads as they sit hunched over a screen. The mouse and the touch screen have replaced the steering wheel as the prosthetic devices that open our bodies up onto a broader world. The results of this change are still unfolding, and whatever they may be, they will be written into our very flesh.

It’s that time of year: when critics and others assemble their “best of” lists. For the first time ever, I’ve discovered my own name on one of them: the website for Public Radio International’s “The World” has included Natsume Soseki’s Theory of Literature and Other Critical Writings, which I co-edited with Atsuko Ueda and Joseph Murphy, on its list of “World Books: International Reads for the Holidays.” I feel flattered, even if the author describes our book as “the nerdiest pick on my list.”

Over at the Japan Times, Mark Schilling has posted his best ten list of Japanese films from 2009. I haven’t seen a single one, alack. Meanwhile, over at the Daily Yomiuri, the erstwhile “Wm. Penn,” whose column I have been reading religiously for two decades now, gives us her picks for the best of 2009 Japanese television dramas.

Closer to home, Greg Kot of the Chicago Tribune, picks the top rock albums of the year. Alex Ross of the New Yorker does the same for classical music recordings.

As for me, I’m just glad to be done with my grading. Now it’s time to plow ahead and try to finish that last unwritten chapter in my book on postwar popular music in Japan….

It’s been a lively weekend so far. It started with my first ever visit to Buddy Guy’s Legends downtown on Friday evening. I saw a remarkable set by Michigan guitarist/singer Larry McCray. Too often nowadays, a blues show tries to get by on showboating and on the charisma of the front man. It was refreshing to see McCray’s sharp band bring down the house relying instead on sheer talent and creativity. He’s got a terrific style that contains elements of B.B. King and the Allman Brothers (both of whom McCray has worked with in the past), and he tosses off these little atomic guitar fills between vocal lines that leave you flabbergasted, the way John Lee Hooker used to do (though McCray sounds nothing like Hooker).

McCray also possesses a wonderful voice full of gravel (again, B.B. King comes to mind). In other words, he brings the full package. I have seen the future of the blues, and I’ve just ordered my copy of his 1993 album, Delta Hurricane.

Then, yesterday afternoon, we took Sonia to see the Joffrey Ballet’s Nutcracker at the Auditorium Theater. It’s a nice holiday spectacle with amazing sets and costumes. The stage gets a little crowded during the first half, when narrative dominates. The second half, when the real dancing happens, was lovely (and the handful of crying children in matinee audience actually added to the atmosphere, I thought), though Sonia found it a bit boring. I always think the Arabian dance should be shorter and the Russian dance longer, but that’s probably a sign of my bad taste.

Now it’s back to grading for me. I hope you’re having a fine weekend, wherever you may be.

There’s a fascinating story (Japanese-language only) in the Tokyo Shinbun newspaper. It should give pause to the music industry and other intellectual property rights holders who are currently waging Holy Wars against their own consumer bases.

The Taiga Drama is one of Japan’s most successful television programs. Since 1963, each January the NHK network has launched another year-long weekly drama that takes up some incident from Japanese history and gives it the full-blown epic treatment. Broadcast on Sunday nights, the show is usually among the top-rated programs, and it has produced some of the most beloved television series of all time. As a result of its popularity, the satellite broadcasting network Jidaigeki Senmon Channel has begun rebroadcasting old entries from the series, to the delight of its viewers.

Unfortunately, because of the high cost of broadcast-quality videotape back in the day, NHK routinely used to recycle cassettes, recording over the master tape of episodes after they had been broadcast. As a result, many episodes from the first two decades of Taiga Drama are now lost. But the program is so popular that Jidaigeki Senmon Channel decided to rebroadcast episodes even from series that were no longer complete.

For example, they recently aired the 14 extant installments (out of an original total of 51) from the 1979 series, “Kusa Moeru,” based on the 12th century exploits of Minamoto Yoritomo and his clan. When those were broadcast, viewers contacted the network to let them know that they had home recordings of some of the missing episodes. The network followed up, and it turned out that one of the producers who worked on the program had also recorded a number of episodes for personal use. Eventually, NHK put out a call for tapes on its webpage and located yet another fan who had home-taped copies of 50 of the original 51 episodes.

As a result of all of this home-taping (back then the bête noire of the television and film industries, just as peer-to-peer file sharing is for today’s music industry), the full “Kusa Moeru” series has now been recovered and restored. The Jidaigeki Senmon Channel will broadcast it in its entirety starting early next year, and no doubt NHK will pursue other means of exploiting the treasure it has recovered–entirely thanks to fan copying.