ARTS BAG: Things in Stratford, Ontario That Heal My Soul

1. The river, and the trees that hang over it;
2. The moon, and the river and theatre beneath it;
3. A great play ("The Tempest," because it was the only show we saw and it was bloody brilliant. It's not the only one, apparently; rumor round town is that this year's Stratford Festival is the best in years);
4. Rheo Thomson: the little chocolate shop that could (cause they make their goods - and they  are so good - on site);
5. The other couples that stayed at A Cottage on Brunswick, the B & B we stayed at, people who spend money and energy on the arts and who can "waste" 2 breakfast hours talking about them;
6. The Artist's House: the artist (Gerrard), his art, his little house, his perfectly named little dog (Smudge);
7. The bravest girl I know. Hint: she's from Japan;
8. The ducks by the river and the ducks in the river. Because they remind me of Holden. And because, well, they're just nice;
9. A used bookstore, as it should be - cluttered and smelling of old books; and
10. An 80 year-old Christopher Plummer as sprightly and brilliant as any man in his prime could dream to be, so full of voice, so full of life. What is his secret, I asked the couples round the breakfast table at our B & B? He still has passion for what he does, they said. He still has passion.

5 New Songs and the Movies They Come From

For best results play Music to Read By soundtrack

1. Nina Simone's "Sinnerman" -- The Thomas Crown Affair (1999)
2. The Temper Trap's "Sweet Disposition" -- 500 Days of Summer
3. Jon Brion's "Theme" -- Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
4. Sting's "My One and Only Love" -- Leaving Las Vegas
5. Elvis Costello's "Shipbuilding" -- High Fidelity

BOOKISH: Slowed to Sip Tea on Tatami: The novel is called "Kokoro"

Kokoro. It means heart in Japanese.  

[For this Post's inspiration, click: Getting to The Japan of My Fictional Dreams ]
 
Like Haruki Murakami and even more so like Yasunari Kawabata (Snow Country), reading Kokoro takes you into an Eastern frame of mind. This is perhaps a trite thing to say, but it is true. And like Kawabata, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Soseki, who died in 1912, is from another time, and in writing about a Japan that is more than 100 years old we get one of those deepest pleasures that only the intimacy of reading stories can bring: we are taken back to that other time, that other place. Slowed to sip tea on tatami mats in open old Japanese houses on hot summer eves.

Just that. It's almost enough. For the young man, the story's narrator, who so often seems to just kneel on tatami mats and wait, waiting to know the truth. For the wife, the one who is to pour the hot tea, who holds back so much of what she is thinking.

This is Meiji Era Japan, a Japan that had only just began to open its doors again to the world, a place so profoundly unique and not that ready to change.

Here, in these pages, no one is rushing toward anything else. The Tokyo noise described in the book is the noise of horse-drawn carriages and slow running trams. To get away from the big city to be by the sea, as the narrator does at the story's start, we feel as if the waves of that ocean never hurry to wash their way up the shore. The woeful pain at the heart of this intense story, it too takes its time to be revealed.

The writing is simple and sparse. The tone is one of great patience, of care - it is, in the writing and thus the reading of each word, each line, the idyllic sense of what it means to be Japanese.

Soseki's Meiji era Japan is a world so lightly drawn. That wonderful kind of writing that hardly seems descriptive and yet is so powerfully evocative. It makes me think of Hemingway. I should reverse that. It should go the other way (at least in terms of chronology). I don't know that Hemingway had access to Japanese texts, but like the Impressionists who could not have existed were it not for the Japanese art prints that influenced them, somehow there seems a connection between one of American's greatest writers and Japan. One critic compared Hemingway's prose to that of the Japanese haiku. That sparse, evocative style. A style so deeply inside writers as varied as Haruki Murkami, Raymond Chandler and also Raymond Carver.

How can a story be sad without being depressing? I once read (and perhaps even blogged about) a reaction Sean Penn had to seeing a piece of Hollywood fluff. He talked of how high he'd been lifted up by the movie and then the terrible drop that came after he was forced to return to the real world. He swore to stop seeing movies of that kind from that moment on. In a similar vein, I often find that the best "sad" stories are the ones that most honestly ease the suffering in my soul. Suffering: a Buddhist notion. Certainly one that pervades much of Japanese art. Kokoro is not a book that takes you from the world; rather, it draws you deeper inside of it. 

Even if you don't luxuriate in a perfect sentence or a remarkable economy of storytelling, to be taken back to a different era, to a far off land; this book takes you to that other place, the place we've wanted to fly to since we were little kids begging our parents for just one more story. But Kokoro is no fantasy. It is that more intense kind of literary reality.

It is considered Soseki's masterpiece, one of the great books of modern Japanese literature, and for good reason.

Getting to the Japan of My Fictional Dreams

Only now do I realize that I may well have already visited Japan long before I set foot in the country. Just as Holden Caufield running away from Pencey Prep one late December night took me with him on that fictional train to New York before I first visited that city, I'd been to Japan in books I read and movies I watched before ever touching down at Kansai International.

I've not gone back to it, but Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha was a novel I really liked in my early 20s and though, even after reading it, I'd not once considered going off to live in Japan until my cousin suggested it, perhaps the book got inside me. Closer to my actual departure, I saw Hirokazu Koreeda's After Life (Wandafuru Raifu in Japanese). The movie is set in an unnamed part of northern Japan. Much of the story, about a group of people who have died and are in a sort of in-between place, between life and afterlife, takes place in a very ho-hum simple wooden building or set of buildings. Only in Hollywood does death evoke bright lights and Enya-like music. Here there is no orchestral music, no Viennese choral choir of children. Here all is quiet, simple, rustic. It is winter and there is snow everywhere. Often when there is no talking we get that quiet only winter can bring - blankets of white silence over leafless trees.

A scene comes to mind: a young woman in a steaming Japanese-style bath, only her head above the water. The water is not moving. The girl is not moving. She sinks her head beneath the hot water to take a break and go deep within. She does not rush to resurface.

I remember a line from the movie: "I love the sound of snow falling," one character says to another, and perhaps already on some subconscious level I left Canada at that very moment, at the moment of watching, in search of this part of Japan. 

These things, these works of art, attracted me. They drew me in. Drew me closer to the place that would for 5 years become my home. So follows the nonfictional event, ie. something actual. My cousin Greg asking what I'll do next year. I'm twenty-four, just finishing my first degree. I say,

"I don't know. Get some shitty job and write."

He suggests travelling. I say, "yeah, but I don't want to return to Canada poor."
He suggests Japan. It's as unromantic as that. My head come out of the steamy water.

Eleven months later I am on that plane.

But the book and the movie. They don't just effect what we know, but what we experience. That great art gets in you, we've all hopefully felt. But that it becomes a part of you! It becomes your experience. Even a piece of music, how it can stay with you, change your mood, and even touch on the core of who you are and will be.

I think to myself: what fiction reader, what lover of the novel, if they're read Arundathi Roy, if they've read A Fine Balance or Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy, what fiction reader hasn't wanted to visit India?

But even better, is if you have ever had the good fortune and keen sense to travel to a far off land, and whilst there read a little of that country's fiction along the way.

You ever done that? Read Hesse while hiking through the Rhineland in Germany? Read Murakami while staying at a ryokan in Tokyo, Japan? Or read The God of Small Things while stuck on a slow train, perhaps leaving Mumbai to visit Kerala, India?

I want to tell you about a book called Kokoro written by one of Japan's most famous writers. He was, until very recently, on the 1000 yen note (think $10 bill), and yet I know almost no gaijin who've even heard of him.

That'll be my next post. Of reading Kokoro in Japan and beyond. Of the way a place you were not born in, that you do not blood come from, can still seep its way so deep into your heart.

Kokoro. It means heart in Japanese.

See you then.

Movie (Rental) Recommendation: Stanley Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket"

I'll never know what it feels like to go through basic training. I am only guessing then when I say the first half of Full Metal Jacket is the closest any movie has come to the truth of that feeling, the intensity of that feeling, the downright shitty reality of that feeling.

Far more to the point, no movie I know has better portrayed the cruelty to which man (in this case) is capable. The danger of the herd. Ie. the film's about a lot more than just basic training. This is why, though Platoon (which came out the same year) won the big awards in 1987, had the bigger stars, and certainly made far more money, is not 'the other' Vietnam movie film nerds like me go back to ('the other' of course being Apocalypse Now).

The greatest war movies are never just about war, much as the great love stories are never just above love, much as Field of Dreams is so much more than just a baseball movie.

The first half* of Full Metal Jacket lasts 45 minutes and is some of my favourite film making ever without using any fancy effects, big name stars, or even overly stylized film making.

Watching the first half again (I've seen it a lot; used to show it in class with my uni students in Japan; I've never been afraid to show 18 year-olds a little dark material in the classroom. Since when does school have to always be so firmly, squarely-prudishly stuck inside the box?) I was amazed at how not stylized the film is. And this is Stanley Perfectionist Reclusive Genius Kubrick we're dealing with, bar none one of the greatest filmmakers in the medium's short history. It's not just a technical genius either, not just the camera angles he chooses, the close ups he makes, or the way he lights a scene. In other words, it's not just aspect ratio ultra movie obsessiveness (which is of course the kind of nerdy detail I get orgasmic over). And it's not even his astonishingly unique and powerful use of music. What is often overlooked (and we'll just ignore Eyes Wide Shut, though I always have an affinity for that flawed film) are the remarkably powerful performances Kubrick drew out of his actors.

Full Metal Jacket was the great director's last masterpiece. Kubrick had more than a few of those. But then, I'm biased. He is my J.D. Salinger of directing, my Miles Davis of film making. Been loving the director since I saw The Shining as a teenager and, unlike John Hughes and Pink Floyd, the brilliance of his work hasn't faded. Quite the opposite.

[*I should add that the 2nd half of the movie takes place in Vietnam and is also pretty damn good.]

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Game Over

Movie names now included in previous (revised) post ("Sometimes the Music Makes the Movie"). See below.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, simply read the post below and ignore this. If you do know what I'm talking about, thanks for coming back.

Sometimes the Music Makes the Movie: Latest Music to Read By*

[By request from my fan(s) in Europe (because I am the David Hasselhoff of blogger virtuosos) who said they (she) can't see my Music To Read By soundtrack, I've posted the songs titles and their composers in the comments section.]

10 new songs in my The Soundtrack is Optional playlist [see left side of screen, if not in Europe], actually songs and scores, all from movies.


In some cases, like Nancy Sinatra's "These Boots are Made For Walking," (#2) the song is excellent, how it was used in Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket was even better - it opens the second half of the movie, the part in Vietnam; we see a prostitute from behind, hip swaying as she walks down a Saigon street in broad daylight. (This song choice had to have influenced Tarantino, who opened Kill Bill: Vol.1 with "Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)," another N. Sinatra classic).

In others, like Regina Spektor's "Us," (#4) the song is great, the movie, 500 Days of Summer, not as much. (I'll take abuse for this so then, while I'm being contrarian, let me add that I fucking hated Garden State.)

Then you get John Williams. And when you get John Williams ... well, nuff said. And no, it's not Darth Vader's Theme. (My most sarcastic apologies.) It's the theme from Catch Me if You Can (#5) , to my mind one of Spielberg's most brilliant movies. I'm not even kidding.

Finally, Gustavo Santaolalla. Say his surname aloud with me: Santaolalla. The name alone, it's like a Christmas celebration where the food is spicy and even the Jews are invited to join in the celebrations. But the composer, he's no joke, and his music, it's actually rather melancholy. I've got him down twice, 2 different film scores. The one, The Motorcycle Diaries,** (#3) is one of my favourite movies in years, and the aching guitar based score is an essential ingredient in its myth-making magic. The other piece, #1 on the list, is called "The Wings." I wish Brokeback Mountain, the movie it was used in, could have lived up to its music (and landscape) (and potential). But what music!

The Rest of the List:
6. The Rolling Stones' "I Am Waiting" is from Rushmore.
7. Air's "Alone in Kyoto" is from Lost in Translation.
8. Connie Francis' "Siboney" is from 2046.
I'd not heard these 3 songs before seeing these movies. I own all of these movies. I recommend all these movies. I keep wanting to write 'these movies.' I will stop that now.

9. Badly Drawn Boy's "I Love N.Y.E." is from About a Boy.
10. Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova's "Falling Slowly" is from Once.
These songs were written for their respective movies. I own About a Boy but not Once, though I liked Once a lot. It's Irish. I recommend it.  I recommend all five of these movies wholeheartedly, passion-determinately.

*Please note that this Music that is meant To be Read By, could as easily be enjoyed as Music to Play Solitaire By, or Music to Eat Chocolate Digestives and Sip Tea By. The options are, in fact, endless.... 

**If I owned a movie theatre I'd have invited you all to come and we'd have watched The Motorcycle Diaries on my big screen for my 34th later this month. But I own no such theatre and couldn't convince the rep theatres in Toronto (the Bloor in particular) to play the great flick... True (if sad) story.

This Month's Photogapher

 When he's not, amongst other things, a practicing doctor, my friend and fellow traveler extraordinaire, Yaniv Hason, takes pictures. Damned good ones if you ask me. This month's is an untitled beaut, taken from Toronto's harbour.

The 4th of Salinger's Nine Stories: "The Laughing Man"

[The 1st and most famous one is: "A Perfect Day for Bananafish".]

At the risk of alienating a few die-hard Salinger fans, I'm skipping the 2nd and 3rd stories in Salinger's Nine Stories to proselytize "The Laughing Man," because like all the arts that tickle my fickle fancy, this story is melancholic at the same time as it is an adventure, it has longing while being very funny, and in grand Salinger fashion it is as observant of the human condition as most any small child, as articulate about it as most any literary giant.

And what else is fiction for but to capture the otherwise elusive nature of what it means to be human, and have a heck of a good time doing it?
 

The Man, The Myth, The Chief
At first glance "The Laughing Man" may seem like a "normal" Salinger story as it centres, in part, around a young person, in this case a nine-year old boy from New York who is part of an extra-curricular "organization" known as the Comanche Club. Everyday after school, this boy, our narrator, and a group of other boys would be picked up by school bus and taken, most often, to Central Park. There, "weather permitting, we played football or soccer or baseball, depending (very loosely) on the season." The driver of the bus and organizer of all the sporting events or other outings was known to the Comanches as the Chief. He was also one John Gedsudski, a law student at N.Y.U.

But the man who was a great athlete and is a law student, is both myth and legend to the boys when he is the Chief. And the story that the narrator is looking back on manages to mix a perfect blend of genuine fascination and childlike awe with a kind of gentle humor at how seriously things like a Comanche club (we, the modern reader rightly shudder at the name) were back then. To the boys, the Chief was, "an impartial and unexcitable umpire at all our bedlam sporting events, a master fire builder and extinguisher, and an expert, uncontemptous first-aid man. Every one of us, from the smallest hoodlum to the biggest, loved and respected him."

It goes further than that, though, when we learn in a parenthetical aside, a Holden Caufield-like digression that, as in all Salinger's stories, can be the spot to drop a bright bit of humor or, in the case of "The Laughing Man," a touch of something even more spirit nourishing.

If our Comanche hearts were set on camping, we went over to the Palisades and roughed it. (I remember getting lost one Saturday somewhere on the tricky stretch of terrain between the Linit sign and the site of the western end of the George Washington Bridge. I kept my head, though. I just sat down in the majestic shadow of a giant billboard and, however tearfully, opened my lunch for business, semi-confident, that the Chief would fine me. The Chief always found us.)

The Magic 
If this were just about a bunch of boys and their fearless leader (and his inevitable imperfections) it would be a good story that no one would remember some 60+ years later. What so elevates "The Laughing Man" to the lofty heights of the resonant, is that it, quite literally, works on two levels. Perhaps the narrative's greatest pleasure of all is its story-within-a-story.

The Chief, it turns out, is a great storyteller. The Comanches are suitably floored by this to the nine-year old degree of taking story time as necessity. On the Comanche bus after a game or, when waiting, for example, for the Chief's new girlfriend, they (and we the reader) hear the Chief tell the story-within-the-story, the story of the Laughing Man, a kind of fantastical, adventure story quite unlike anything else Salinger ever wrote.

In other words, in the frame of a literary and very New Yorker-like short story we get something out of a comic book, something that literally takes the reader back to when they were a nine-year old. 

The magic of "The Laughing Man" (and here I'll momentarily disregard what Picasso said; cause this story really does put a spell on you) is that both the story within and the story without are equally captivating in their own right. This, in my reading experience, is rather rare, as so often the story within should be the story throughout, or otherwise not exist in the first place.   

The Laughing Man Comic Book Adventure Story
The origin story of the Laughing Man is that as a child he was kidnapped and disfigured by Chinese bandits. His face is grotesque to say the least: "... A face that featured, instead of a mouth, an enormous oral cavity below the nose. The nose itself consisted of two flesh-sealed nostrils. In consequence, when the Laughing Man breathed, the hideous, mirthless gap below his nose dilated and contracted like ... some sort of monstrous vacuole." In turn, the bandits force The Laughing Man to wear a mask made out of poppy petals. As ever Salinger peppers these details with little winks to the reader. The bandits chose a poppy mask so they could smell the Laughing Man and know where he was. He wreaked of opium. 

In Marvel-like compensation for his disfigurement, the Laughing Man has special abilities, and within a story that is a wistful but also a very funny return to childhood and, as it turns out, a kind of young love, we get an adventure story, but an adventure story Ala J.D. Salinger.

Every morning, in his extreme loneliness, the Laughing Man stole off (he was as graceful on his feet as a cat) to the dense forest surrounding the bandit's hideout. There he befriended any number and species of animals: dogs, white mice, eagles, lions, boa constrictors, wolves. Moreover, he removed his mask and spoke to them, softly, melodiously, in their own tongues. They did not think him ugly.

[For an all-time reader favourite of the Nine Stories visit J.D. Salinger's "For Esme--With Love and Squalor"] 

Go Local!

Returning home from New York  last month was hard. From a vacation in the Biggest Apple of them all, seeing theatre, going to museums, concerts and even a brunch with old friends and their famous writer parents, to then return to ... Toe-ronto, or Trono, as we locals pronounce it, or rather, mumble it (when asked where we're from we can barely say our city's name aloud, we have such little pride). The gastronomical analogy is that it was like going from a spicy Thai curry to a cold piece of dry toast (though in all fairness T(o)ron(t)o sports some killer Thai options).

But, you know, when the sun is shining and the weather is sweet, when t(h)ree little birds are by my doorstep, when Ai and I can walk from our midtown apartment to a pretty ravine, walk silent amongst a forest of green, I think, gosh darn it (no I do not; I think, fuck!), I don't need 5th Avenue. I certainly have no desire for Times Square. And the Greenwich Village Paul Simon sang about, where "$30 pays your rent," let's just say the up and coming Paul Simons, they aren't living there. They aren't living close to there. You'll say they're all in Brooklyn. I say, shit, on a day like this I don't even care about Brooklyn and the hipster music it's producing. CBC Radio 2 keeps reminding me we have all the great music we could want right here. And once the leaves come back to the trees and the people return to the streets, with each passing year, and each newly risen condo, Toronto for all its conservative, uptight woe, gets a little bit denser and a little bit buzzier. When you can spend an evening on a Bloor street patio drinking a Creemore, watching the multi-coloured crowds go by, you realize it is a pretty great city after all.

Also, when I have my first heart attack and they rush me to hospital I won't have to worry about whether I brought along my credit card(s).