BEST OF PBIHT: Tokyo Tomato - A Story

[Originally published quite some time ago...]


One cannot live on tomato alone, but one can be very, very inspired by a tomato.
-J. Mendelsohn

THE RUT
All the thrills of crossing the ocean, the many memoirs of geisha I planned to write, and I was stuck in the rut of a routine that was killing me. Turns out the English Conversation schools that set you up with work visas and apartments expect you to work in return, the bastards! They aren’t paying you to sightsee or write the great novel. I hadn’t gone to Osaka for this. To teach eight conversation classes a day. Yes, at first it was the easiest job ever because you’re paid to chat. That’s what the students want. But give it a couple weeks and you’ve long since run out of conversational material. It’s not like you can assign in-class work either. Your job is to chat, to always be "on," engaging and entertaining like a clown without the makeup or a psychiatrist without the sedative; you don’t even have a set of steak knives to sell to give the interaction some purpose. And believe me, after eight hours of being "on," even the most loquacious conversation teacher goes mute.

This was the opposite of inspiration. This was dispiration. Once again I was living for every lunch break, end-of-day, day off and – dare I say – holiday? They get them in Japan too, sometimes.

When the long weekend in May finally came, I hopped a bullet train to Tokyo. I’d have yelled FREEDOM out the train windows with a bad Scottish accent but I feel conflicted quoting old Mel Gibson movies. Also, the windows were the kind you couldn’t open.

SHEEP IN CHRISTIAN SLATER'S CLOTHING
They say the hardest truth of travelling is realizing you must take yourself wherever you go. I’m not so sure. I’ve been other people all over the place. Like back in high school when I pretended I didn’t like reading and wore a trench coat to travel downtown, to smoke cigarettes and perfect my pool game and impersonate Christian Slater impersonating James Dean. The good sheep from the white suburbs turned baaad, scamming free meals I’d convince fast food managers to give me for some “mistake” one of their employees had made the day before (an alleged allergy to onions or something). After that I learned to complain my way into movies, into concerts; I even scammed my way into a Leafs game once, a playoff game.

I could be other people in Tokyo as well.


JUST LIKE THAT
Roppongi Hills is a new, super-fashionable district of Tokyo. I was supposedly there for the museum, but really I cared about the newly built movie theatres with their first-class seats and their high-rise tall screens. It was by accident that I came upon the Tokyo Grand Hyatt (like a regular Hyatt, only a five-star hell of a lot more grand). I already had my ticket for a George Clooney movie and had time to kill. So the hotel.

As soon as I walked through that lobby I was walking taller, prouder, imagining myself as someone. Not like being rich was my biggest priority. Duh, I’m an English teacher who wants to be a writer. But one classy hotel and suddenly all I ever wanted was a little ritzyness in my life. Up till then Japan for me had been all ramen noodles and $1 sushi and more McDonalds than I’d like to admit. No more. Fuck it. From now on (or for the weekend anyway) I was some fancy writer drinking highballs and writing stories. Not just writing them, selling them, not just selling them, but actually earning the big bucks for them. Oh yeah, a regular F. Scott Fitzgerald. I liked that. F. Scott. Just like that. That’s who I’d be. I wasn’t in a suit but that was ok. I had my journal. A couple pens. They were in my knapsack, and I was wearing hiking shoes but that was ok too; so long as I felt it. They’d see it. They’d know. Just think it: F. Scott. F. Scott.

The image of the scotch on the rocks at the classy hotel bar – it’s always been a favourite. The ice tinkling against the glass as I finish my drink. The fantasy suitably rounded out when the older lady sitting beside me, her slim cigarettes in their silver case, asks me for a light, then she takes me back to her room. It’s that easy. The illusion shattering realities of budget and knapsack being the only hindrances to the plot. Never mind. The idea was to get a free drink or two. I’d go in for the old ‘journalist doing a story’ bit. It wasn’t so far-fetched. I’d written. Even if very few had read me. I was a writer. That’s what I told the lady at the reception desk that afternoon. I’m here to write about the hotel’s jazz bar, I said. And indeed I was. I would be. I could be.

[The Tomato story continues here.]

Mort: A Story

Today a seventy-seven year-old man named Mort came into the bookstore and spoke straight to my heart. Decades ago this now gentle, lovely, dare I say, spitirtual man was an angry and deeply unhappy man. He was also an alcoholic. Today, retired, he says he finds his best places to meditate inside the darkness of a good movie theatre (kindred spirit much?), and particularly enjoys movies that have both love and a sense of magic. "The Natural" might be his favourite all-time movie. I had to admit I hadn't seen really seen it (the time with the family at the drive-in, when it was the second flick on the bill and I was about eight and fast asleep within minutes of the flick's start in the back of our Chev station wagon doesn't count, does it?). But Mort and I had no trouble agreeing on "Field of Dreams" and "It's a Wonderful Life" as movies that were in both of our top-ten.

Mort not a man afraid to share his love of the sentimental. Ah the benefits of age. (I'm getting there, slooooowly.)

I told Mort my simpleton theory, that when I look to older men I see two types: the grumpy and the gentle/sweet. Before I even got to mentioning the types Mort stopped me, said he knew what I was going to say.

When he was young, when he drank, he described how he used to carry this "ball of anger" in his belly. It wasn't about the drink. It never is. He had to go deeper. He sought out therapy, wanted to understand that ball of anger and to then find ways to rid himself of it.

Mort retired from his work as a designer seven years ago. A friend of his, a very successful marketer, asked Mort for his help. Said he wanted to learn what Mort had learned, nothing to do with design; he wanted to learn about letting go of that "ball of anger," about not sweating the small stuff.

At the end of their "session" the man asked Mort what he would charge. Mort was perplexed, he'd had no intention of charging anything. The friend said he had to to put value on his work and proceeded to hand Mort a check.

Mort has since counseled or helped seven or eight people. It is his side business.

His business: sharing a little wisdom of how to be the gentle old man.

How not to sweat the small stuff.

How to remember to be thankful.

It's so easy to be angry. It's so rare and beautiful and powerful to know how to love and to give.

That's all it's about, Mort told me: love.

He left the store after our having chatted a good half hour and the rest of my shift I felt on a cloud. That there are folks in the world like Mort. That hope and faith and love are possible.

He wasn't selling me anything.

He wasn't forcing anything on me.

He didn't want anything in return.

Just love, and the key, he shared with me, is finding a ritual to remind ourselves of these things everyday when we wake up.

Thank you, Mort.

Desert Island Novel to Read and Read and Read Again #1: Haruki Murakami's "Norwegian Wood"

[Originally published November 28, 2008]

I once had a girl
Or should I say, she once had me

I was living in Osaka, Japan, teaching at a conversation school in a place called Takarazuka the first time I read "Norwegian Wood." When I reached the last page of the novel, after reading its pitch-perfect last line, due to an utter unwillingness, a near inability, to leave the beautiful world Murakami had created, I proceeded to immediately flip back to the first page and start all over again. That was seven years ago. I've read it again since. More than once. I've also gone on to read and buy every book of Murkakami's translated into English, including his short story collections, and non-fiction.

Why? Because "Norwegian Wood" hit a place in my soul, it became a mate to my soul, a heart to beat along next to mine.

The Beatles song Murakami's 1987 novel is named after is on surface listen a pretty two minute ditty. A pretty, but sad, thing. The tone of Murakami's novel has something similar gently pulling the reader through. It is also equally deceptive to the song in how simple it seems, how easy it reads. Yet, beneath a book that reads like almost pure autobiography, and a song that listens like effortless melody, lie layered artful structure, and things thematically heavier than meet the eye.

The Beatles' song that is so melodically sweet ends with a man taking revenge on a girl who would not sleep with him, by burning down the furniture in her room.

Murakami's narrator does no such thing. But his book too juxtaposes a gentle tone with themes of longing, of loss and of what can and will never be.

To be intentionally vague (no plot spoilage here) and very brief, "Norwegian Wood," set in the Tokyo of the 1960s, is a love story. Basically it is a sad story. Most all the love in the book is of the unrequited variety, and there is more than one suicide. The book has much to lend itself to feeling blue, like Miles Davis on his muted trumpet. But for every lonely moment, you get a scene with a character like Reiko, a friend like Reiko, a woman who should be tragic considering her history but who, by the time we meet her in a sort of sanatorium for sad or screwed up people, turns out to be that rock solid salt-of-the-earth type who seems like the mentally healthiest person in the book. Better still, though no longer the piano virtuoso she once was, she plays a mean guitar, Beatles song included.

The magic of Murakami's "Norwegian Wood," is that a book so focused on sad subject manner manages to have what all books need to be great - a sense of adventure. Not, of course, in the children's literature sense of the word, but in the 'you've gone off to another place' sense.

... the bus plunged into a chilling cedar forest. The trees might have been old growth the way they towered over the road, blocking out the sun and covering everything in gloomy shadows. The breeze flowing into the bus's open windows turned suddenly cold, its dampness sharp against the skin. The valley road hugged the river bank, continuing so long through the trees it began to seem as if the whole world had been buried for ever in cedar forest - at which point the forest ended, and we came to an open basin surrounded by mountain peaks. Broad, green farmland spread out in all directions, and the river by the road looked bright and clear. A single thread of white smoke rose in the distance...

Best of all is the poetry is in the book's balance, as alongside depression and suicide, you also get a character like Midori - one of my favourite in all modern literature.

At 5:30 Midori said she had to go home and make dinner. I said I would take a bus back to my dorm, and saw her as far as the station.
"Know what I want to do now?" Midori asked me as she was leaving.
"I have absolutely no idea what you could be thinking," I said.
"I want you and me to be captured by pirates. Then they strip us and press us together face to face all naked and wind these ropes around us."
"Why would they do a thing like that?"
"Perverted pirates," she said.
"You're the perverted one," I said."

And really, what else do you need to help you cope with death, and the kind of love that will never be, but perverted pirates?

[Click J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye for Desert Island Book to read and read and read again # 2]

www.twitter.com/mendelsohnjon

Catcher in the Rye The Movie?

I didn't think so.
RIP JD.


Follow me on twitter; you'll love it; I swear.

The Elegance of Intelligence in Paris: A Book Recommendation

[Originally published December 26, 2009]

In my romanticized version of Europe, after I've eaten ravioli in Roma, and sipped cappuccinos at a stand-up cafe, then I will stroll along the Seine and stop at booksellers with used treasures they sell along the river. In my romanticized version of Europe, the French and the Germans and the Albanians, they all drink good wine and smoke Gauloises at will. They eat thin slices of excellent cheese and talk about interesting things and deep things and not what they watched last night on TV. They talk about politics and paintings, they discuss books and don't care what Oprah thinks. The men read fiction and care about it. The women dress well but are also smart as hell. Together the men and the women, before they go off to have tantric sex on old-fashioned beds, they have long slow dinners at long wooden tables, or perhaps they are small round tables at an outdoor cafe on a cobblestone walkway, some Van Goghian starlight to brighten the evening, to sparkle off their bread knives.

This place I imagine is not real, I know. Oprah is shown around the world. Michael Bay films are global monsters and we stopped lighting the night with stars a long long time ago.

But then I read Muriel Barbery's "The Elegance of the Hedgehog" and all the intelligence and philosophy and the wit and the hope and pathos of the European, of the French, becomes real again. I haven't flown through a work of fiction like this in ages. Fact is, I keep putting the books I'm reading down (Hilary Mantel's Booker Prize winning "Wolf Hall" included). Barbery isn't afraid to discuss Marx and issues of class that continue today, she philosophizes on death and the meaning of life, but then she also discusses her love of Ridley Scott sci-fi movies and she quotes Eminem.

Yet for all its brainy seduction, the book is no lecture, the story no bore.

For those who require a book description, here, c/o Amazon, it is (for those who don't, skip this next paragraph):

We are in the center of Paris, in an elegant apartment building inhabited by bourgeois families. Renée, the concierge, is witness to the lavish but vacuous lives of her numerous employers. Outwardly she conforms to every stereotype of the concierge: fat, cantankerous, addicted to television. Yet, unbeknownst to her employers, Renée is a cultured autodidact who adores art, philosophy, music, and Japanese culture. With humor and intelligence she scrutinizes the lives of the building's tenants, who, for their part, are barely aware of her existence. Then there's Paloma, a twelve-year-old genius. She is the daughter of a tedious parliamentarian, a talented and startlingly lucid child who has decided to end her life on the sixteenth of June, her thirteenth birthday.

How many times did I stop at my local Indigo bookstore to look at the beautiful blue of the cover and the sheer perfection of that title: The Elegance of the Hedgehog. But it takes so much more to buy book, to read book, to trust all those hours to turn all those pages to force all those neurons. So I must thank my dear friend, poet, writer, and philosopher, Sana, for the suggestion. She told me I had to. And we all have friends like these. When they tell you you have to - you have to.

So I did. And now I recommend it to you.

Follow me on twitter; you'll love it; I swear.

Brad Pitt and Sean Penn starring in The Movie of the Summer

Directed by "Badlands," "The Thin Red Line" and "The New World" director Terence Malick. It's called "The Tree of Life" and you bet your ass I'm psyched for it.  Pretty damn cool website they got going too. 

Jukebox Offering #71

There is a moment in Todd Haynes' "I'm Not There" that takes place at a sort of otherworldly western frontier town. A rather tired and believe it or not soulful looking Richard Gere - it might be the glasses or the shaggy facial hair - is in poor cowboy getup, walking his horse amidst a motley crew of similarly poor looking people and the free walking animals by their side all moving in the direction of what might be the centre of the town. They stop in front of a gazebo, on which a band starts up playing. The song a dirge; the event a funeral of sorts. It's the mood of the song set in the midst of this fable like land, with its odd cast of characters, some of the people in face paint, wild animals in the middle of town. A sliver of a moment in an uneven movie. But I can't forget it. The song is Bob Dylan's "Goin to Acapulco" performed by Jim James and Calexico. It's pretty devastating and it's playing on The Jukebox now.

In the Telling

None too many can tell a tale like a Jack London or an Ernest Hemingway
And this one, it won't be easy
I can say that straight
It'll be told simple enough though
The language mostly plain
But in the telling a kind of beauty
Of what men must do
Men in nature
Men against the elements and worse still against each other
And themselves
The old story, the struggle to survive
Campin out there in the wilds
A fire to keep the lions from getting at your horse
Or so the story goes
But so too the way the moon looks reflected off a river
Just to stop and notice that
Amidst the harsh world God has wrought
That's what this tale'll show
That's what it'll do
The writer calls himself McCarthy
The book's "The Crossing"
Part of his Border Trilogy
This the second in said threesome
And I'm recommendin her to you

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. 
-Joseph Addison