Reviews for march

Kenzo Kitakata's Winter Sleep is apparently only the second of the hundred books he's written to be translated, and I can't say how happy I am that someone is going to those lengths to bring us modern Japanese authors besides Haruki Murakami. Kitakata is described on the jacket as the 'Don of hardboiled detective and mystery writing in Japan' and it does tend to remind me of 'Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World'. But Kitakata doesn't use a fairytale to represent the inner world. His main character is an ex-con artist philosopher and his lack of interest in money, social conventions and anything besides his art is neatly captured in the sparse language, which acts as a metaphor for his artistic pursuits and how they isolate him from society.

The artist secludes himself in a cabin in the mountains to paint without interruption, but an attractive older art dealer drops by and tries to get him to switch galleries. He's unconcerned with the piles of cash she brings whenever he lets her take a painting away, and she ruthlessly tries to manipulate him any way she can. The other woman is a young girl trying to become a painter herself. He becomes her lover and teacher and the foil for explaining Kitakata's artistic theory. The third main character is a mentally disabled murder with talent, who becomes obsessed with his paintings, who he teaches to paint, so he won't have to kill again. the characters dance around each other for a while, moving towards a not very happy ending. The artist needs to finish his masterpiece, and his two protogées need to become artists before the winter is over.

What I found most interesting about the book was the way in which artistic growth could be captured in the hardboiled scheme, it seemed a bit incongruous, but turned out to be a fantastic find. It also revealed why authors like Murakami are so fond of a pulp genre that's hardly used by anyone in the states and Europe anymore. Early translations of Spillane or Chandler must have looked like desert landscapes to the Japanese. A barebones mystery, dotted with references to alcohol, cigarettes and beautiful women, all centered on lonely and fundamentally self-destructing characters. But the Japanese probably never regarded it as genre fiction, I like to think they viewed it as a kind of philosophical zen poetry about these themes, with the actual mystery or detective story as completely inconsequential.

Katherine Dunn's Geek Love is apparently some kind of classic, having been nominated for a National Book Award in 1989. It details the family life of a Carnival proprietor, his wife and the freakish children they made experimenting with chemicals and radioactivity.

Just like the characters, this book's outward displays of unique weirdness really doesn't make for interesting insides. There are no interesting twists, no revealing descriptions, no fascinating characters, despite all the effort expended to make it into an engrossing macabre fairytale, it's really just a grotesque catalog of perfectly ordinary episodes, only ugly because they don't coalesce into anything more than that. For all your freak show needs, watch any episode of Carnivale, which manages to pull off everything Dunn wanted to do and more, sans the family relations angle.

Dana Vachon's Mergers and Acquisitions starts off like a fresh Brett Easton Ellis, but manages to stay quite lighthearted in tone, except for the incongruous suicidal girlfriend subplot. The main character is a slacker investment banker, who manages to work his contacts for a job at a rapidly disintegrating Wall street firm, while of course remaining somewhat aloof to the bizarre personalities and extreme temptations of life among the super wealthy idiots.

Most of the book is a somewhat entertaining farce about the main character's total lack of talent and surprising bad luck in his new job. His considerably dumber friend does better, because he's mistaken for a more senior and competent banker than he actually is, and because everyone has slept with his sister at some point. The whole thing isn't exactly biting satire like the cover blurbs would have you believe, what's missing is the dark underbelly Ellis and Jay McInerney always seem to find.

It's quite hard to write convincingly about a completely superficial world, but if you can't find anything substantial at all in the plot, it becomes almost impossible. The suicidal girlfriend is supposed to be that anchor, but Vachon just writes her as a mopey chick that wants to kill herself because her impotent father is raising another man's child as his own with his latest trophy wife. They grow apart and she dramatically attempts suicide, but lives, now alienated from him. He manages to suck-out and gets a lot of money and recognition for nothing, amidst various misadventures. I'd describe this book as a slightly more cynical version of 'the Secret of My Success', Micheal J. Fox's 1980's business comedy.

Maybe I just need to know the Wall street deal makers some of these people are supposedly based on, whose pathetic loneliness and desperation will certainly be enough to sue Vachon for the unflattering descriptions he provides. But there's no reason for me to care about super-rich jerks and the vapid, privileged hipsters they spawn otherwise.



We own the Night was competent and that's really all there is too it. Marky Mark and Robert Duvall are the cop father and son duo that try to rope black sheep club-managing brother Joaquin Phoenix into helping them catch some of the drug dealers hanging out in his Brooklyn nightspot. He refuses, and after his brother takes a bullet from a regular customer, he goes undercover to catch the assailant. He gets hurt and the purposely vague Eastern European escapes, then kills his father. The brothers reunite to catch him, Joaquin now a provisional cop planning to join the good fight as soon as family business is dealt with. He deals with it, taking up the gauntlet and finally admitting he loves his brother, who takes a desk job because he can't take working on the streets anymore, but losing his girlfriend because she just doesn't understand why he has to do this. The movie is supposed to be set in 1988, but the Blondie songs in the club sequences at the beginning are all from 1979-1982, which is my only quarrel with the movie. Nothing amazing, but well worth the trouble of going to see, solid acting all round.



Lars and the Real Girl is one of those bittersweet films from the Wes Anderson school of film making. There are the kooky characters presented with a lot of understatement, the social misfits trying to grow up, the tortured relationships between everybody, etc. The script is by one of the writers of six feet under and that shows, it's high quality, but a bit too episodic. The story centers on Lars, a 27-year old programmer with severe social anxieties, played surprisingly well by Ryan Gosling. He lives in a shed outside the family home where his older brother now lives with his pregnant wife. His brother's wife and all the other people in the small Alaskan town they live in are urging him to get a girlfriend, he's even being pursued by girl just a little bit less adorably awkward than he is. One night he snaps and orders a real doll over the internet, but he believes her to be an actual person. A kindly psychiatrist convinces everybody in the town to play along and soon 'Bianca' the wheelchair-bound half-Danish, Half-Brazilian Nurse is more popular in the town than Lars himself is. He begins to have fights with her, and is also begin to like the titular 'real girl' a lot more. Predictably, 'Bianca' isn't breathing one morning and at the funeral Lars finds comfort with the real girl. The big surprise for me in this movie was how well Ryan Gosling managed to play both Lars and 'Bianca', getting both the tics and mannerisms of the man and of the one-sided relationship with the doll absolutely perfect. And this from the guy who was in 'the Notebook', a saccharine tearjerker a movie like this is the insulin for. The balance between quirky comedy and drama was just off, though. It was a good film, but a bit more tension, uncomfortable weirdness and at least a mention of sex (those dolls are anatomically correct, after all) would have made it great.



Mad Men is the new show by the production team and one of the writers behind 'the Sopranos'. Apparently David Chase was so impressed by the pilot script he hired creator Matthew Weiner on the spot for the last season of his show. And it's clear why, Mad men doesn't have the Soprano's easily explained conceit -mobster character study through psychiatrist- but it does have the same appeal, a great cast struggling with superior scripts with multi-layered things to say about American Society. The show is set in 1960, and deals with the professional and private life of Don Draper, a creative director for a Madison Avenue advertising agency. His colleagues and city mistresses don't seem to know anything about his private life, and his wife doesn't seem to care about his job. The show is dedicated to being period specific and representing a 1960's microcosm that also explains where modern consumer society comes from. So there's a lot of smoking drinking and cheating on wives going on, absolutely charming racism and misogyny (Draper's wife sees a psychiatrist who calls him the following evening to tell him what she talked about) and gems of wisdom about the advertising business and some of the classic campaigns of the sixties. The famous 'lemon' volkswagen' campaign is ridiculed by Draper and colleagues. There's some fantastic lines in every episode but these from the second episode are just immortal:
"Have you ever been in love mister Draper?"
"Love doesn't exist. Love was invented by a man like me to sell nylons."
All said while knocking back an old-fashioned and chain smoking. BBC 2 is showing it on Tuesdays, there's no DVD yet, but there will be one soon.

Last but not least, I'll be reviewing a lifestyle/youth craze from the depths of urban despair in post-industrial France and Belgium.. I originally thought it would be some kind of music craze, but it doesn't have any signature songs, except this one, a remix of a cover of a French 80's classic by artist Yelle.



Predictably, they whole thing is already over six years old, being invented, or maybe co-opted by the manager of Parisian club MetroPolis. Tecktonik is a registered trademarked and has it's own line of products. The hairstyles and fashion are clearly defined, as is the dance.
This is what they look like....



The only workable definition of any kind of ethos behind it is no rebellion, no statements and no messages. The name reflects the clash of more Southern European (read : Metrosexual) types of dancing with more Northern European (read: Violently Heterosexual) styles. The movements are a representation of that tectonic shift when the continental plates hit each other. Style over substance. Thank god the beef is there, or it might seem anemic even by fad standards. Hardstyle and jumpstyle dancing enthusiasts are already using it as a self-defining exclusion. Tecktonik is gay, what they do is more acceptable.

The fact that I'm talking about what is essentially a trademarked youth culture concept, should chill you to the bone. It's not the kids who decide what's cool, even in the underground, it's a guy in a suit. It's only cool because it sells energy drinks and t-shirts. This is the one of the most bankrupt crazes I;ve ever seen so much so that there is no message, and the music is an afterthought. The Yelle video is basically an add for expansion into Northern Europe.