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.

Fitna fails to stoke fires of Holy Wrath, Pre-millenial dispensationalists bitterly disappointed

Geert Wilders' hardcore fan base was a bit disappointed with the film, some of them were quoted in the NRC as thinking he hadn't really expressed himself. No riots in Holland, some diplomatic kerfuffle, i.e. Jordan considering withdrawing it's ambassador and predominantly student protests. Also on the cover of the NRC is the fantastic news that Jihadist website Al-Ekhlaas (true devotion) is only somewhat sarcastically endorsing the message of the movie. Surely that wasn't part of the plan. Islamic public figures across the country are gearing up for the debates next week, which might actually do some good. Not to be outdone, professional ex-Muslim provocateur Ehsan Jami is now planning to release a cartoon depicting Mohammad as a pedophile.

Luckily, this also means that the Christian Democrats' plan to go out in a blaze of glory is ruined and they'll have to face up to the reality of seeing the 4th cabinet in seven years fail miserably in the nesxt two to three months. There was a distinct feel of the apocalypse junkies in the 'left behind' series to the government's pres releases these anxious weeks leading up to the release of the film. How they would have loved to rally the country behind the Christian values less than a third of the population believes in, only to be dramatically felled by Moorish Scimitars, happy in the knowledge that their place at the Lord's right hand is secure. All is not lost though, it took months of campaigning by concerned imams get the Middle East fired up about the Danish Cartoons, so there's still hope for that plan.

The streets running red with Blood is out, though. Dutch Muslims seem to be taking the whole thing in stride, more interested in the one thing that successive Dutch governments have claimed to want to initiate, an open dialog with the Muslim minority in the country about the role of their religion in society. It's oddly fitting that this should be accomplished by a right-wing opposition party's rejection of the principles in their holy book, and not by strenuously avoiding offending Muslims, as was the political paradigm. This might be the best thing to have happened in the debate since the sixties, or I could be proven wrong when I turn on the news in half an hour. Fingers crossed.....

Geert Wilders' 'Fitna' might harm Dutch Trade, his oponents have assured us.

Dutch shockpol Geert Wilders has a new plan to disseminate his ideas about the Islam and Muslims in general. The film 'Fitna' taken from an Arabic word that can be translated as anarchy, or a test of faith, is definitely coming out this month, despite rather mild protests in the Arabic world and expertly managed fear-mongering by Christian coalition part CDA.

Wilders is a catholic politician who left major liberal party VVD in 2004 to form his own party, with a program apparently taken directly from the last three decades of Republican presidents in the United States, featuring such gems as smaller government, lower taxes and freedom of the individual, prompting political commentators to label his program as 'Reagonomics for Holland'.

The other main strand of his strategy is picking up the racist voting bloc that was disappointed with the failures of Pim Fortuyn's party after his death, and managing to get more death threats than Ayaan Hirsi Ali, after the death of Theo van Gogh, necessitating similar round the clock protection. Now he wants to make a film as well, reaching even more audiences with an outwardly reasonable argument that's going to be correctly assessed by the intended audiences, i.e. moderate muslims and non-muslims as having a vaguely objectionable subtext.

Because that's the main problem with Wilders' arguments against Muslims, he never continues along the same lines to pronounce the same verdict on other religious leanings. Of course the long standing suspicion that he is an Israeli agent might have something to do with this, or his catholic upbringing.

The Christian democratic party CDA has done everything in their power to make the release of the film a disaster. Wilders merely announced that he was making a film, then asked everyone, especially Dutch Muslims, to please remain calm. It's thanks to the prime minister and the minister of foreign affairs that Islamic protesters managed to burn a Dutch flag along with a Danish one. Thanks should also go to the left-liberal establishment and their various misinformed celebrities for organising a great deal of useless demonstrations. How come none of these bastards are willing to protest the parties actually in power at this time, but are always available to kick an opposition party when it's down?

Now his American provider has kicked him off their server under some vague 'objectionable content' regulation and Dutch bloggers Youtubers have slapped together a series of films where they're apologising for him. I don't agree with Wilders' politics, I think he's at best a demagogue, but that doesn't mean he can't do this. Freedom of speech is far to easy to defend if it's just the things you happen to agree with. I want to see that movie and form my own opinion, I'm not interested in left-liberal or christian-right censorship, both are patronising and ultimately a lot more damaging than anything the movie will stir up.

McCain's presidential airs in Iraq, Hillary's dogfight with Barrack

While John McCain is taking an advance on Presidential diplomacy by visiting the war torn Iraqi countryside, the democratic race is as split as ever. McCain is in Iraq as a senator, but he's also taking some time off to spearhead one of his issues. The CNN footage of McCain walking from briefing to briefing with his coffee cup is priceless. He's not only managed to steal a march on the eventual democratic candidate in the Presidential race, but also manages to make President Bush's "Mission Accomplished" banner look like the Hollywood-style showboating it was. If you want to walk around in Iraq, you drink coffee and talk to the people on the ground. Everybody's waiting for the sniper bullet to hit him in the shoulder, so he can pull a Herzog.



Newt Gingrich has called for a saner, more realistic presidential election, he's not even thinking about committing to the race until October of this year. Statistically, it's not the money that's deciding in any election, as Gingrich is claiming, it's just the candidate's likability, which gets the votes and the money, at least eventually. Trying to find the research about this referenced in 'Freakonomics', I found this blog post where Gingrich answers questions, surprisingly eloquently and sane. But Gingrich is either going to get rudely disabused of his notions, or has the most dirty, underhanded trick in the history of the Republican party waiting or John McCain. Let's not forget that he was having an affair while trying to impeach Clinton for the Lewinsky thing, or that he was the author of that 'Contract with America' which is not half bad, i.e. I disagreed with less than half of it.

A recent poll by CNN states that Obama is the preferred candidate of Democrats in The United States. However, he only has a ten point lead in a poll that has a five point error margin, and consists of a suspect and rather small sample size. The same poll points to similar percentage of Democrats disagreeing with the superdelegate system. This is odd enough in itself, but especially in light of do-over primaries that might be needed to decide the candidate. I don't know what the point of this CNN poll was, exactly, but the message is clear, somebody needs to be a clear winner in this thing. Back room deals, bribery and caucus-rigging are going to be necessary for anyone to get the majority, but some kind of PR-blow needs to cover this effectively.

There's a good chance it'll be race-related as both sides have their problems with those issues. Bill is doing his best to nuance the calculated things he said in South Carolina, and Obama has had to make excuses for whatever that insane preacher said this time. This is not a religious disagreement, though it would probably be in Obama's interest to cast it that way. Rev. Wright is a social preacher in typical African-American tradition, except that he likes his conspiracy theories as well. Obama needed the association with the reverend when he wasn't black enough, but now he's '...like a caramel coloured Kennedy, you know some Vin Diesel, or the Rock kind of shit...' * the Reverend's speeches about the government giving everybody aids are a bit of an embarrassment.



But the real problem for everyone but McCain is the missing media coverage. Usually the National coverage of a presidential election falls into two acts. One or both of the parties declare the field open, the many candidates are on more or less equal footing, the wins and losses of the primaries weed out the nuts, then the boring, staid characters, the front runner and one or two also-rans last a bit longer, usually over some issue. The party conferences bring the candidate some new luster, rifts are healed etc. There's a short intermission, national organisations are built and re-built, the stage is set for the actual election, act two.

This first act is just lasting too long. Obama is in danger of peaking too early, handing Clinton a lot of votes that she can quietly amass in his slipstream as leader. Clinton is in danger of disappearing from the stage completely before the summer is out. The more the media tries to move on, the louder she'll have to scream about things that don't really matter. Instead of do-overs, the DNC should be thinking of moving the convention up before these things happen to either candidate.

* From an informal interview with Chad, 21, college student in an Amsterdam coffeeshop.

Hillary still alive, Nader joins the fray, McCain gets the nod.

Hillary Clinton is still in the race for the democratic nomination after most projections declare her the winner in Texas and Ohio. That doesn't mean the Clinton campaign is back from the dead yet, these were must-win states, needed just to stay in the game. Obama still has the same lead and Hillary still needs a Carvillesque zinger. Clinton has the same problem this time around that George Bush Sr. had against her husband, the media cycle is running a lot faster than she expected and the other side is doing a much better job of presenting a consistent and appealing image.

Clinton was forced on the defensive by Barack Obama's delegate lead, while he has proven a master at magnanimously forgiving her for portraying him as 'all talk'. Most of the rumours about Obama that would have been useful to the Clinton campaign have been done to death, and are sliding off him like water off a duck's back. Only the Israel-Jewish conservative axis is still using his attending a madrassa and wanting to talk to the Palestinians as the 'first signs of your candidate's co-optation by the Islamo-fascist Junta'. Obama's only weak spot that will stick, is his relationship with Tony Rezko, tenuous though it may be, but since Matt Lauer dug up that picture of Hillary and Bill standing next to Rezko, she can't really exploit this, besides the fact that this would open up her campaign financing can of worms. There are more shady characters at the average Clinton fund-raiser than at the Hanoi Hilton in 1973.

The last thing an already divided democratic vote needed was the charming news that Ralph Nader and the green party are going to draw votes on the extreme left again. While the democratic nomination is not yet secured, there's no reason to worry about this too much, but whoever gets it will have to do a public appeal, urging people not to vote Nader and Nader himself to give up, for the sake of the country. What they're overlooking is the fact that a good win for Nader might finally motivate the Christian Conservatives to set up their own party. The Democrats might lose votes on the left, but imagine what a more right-wing movement would do to the Republicans. More and more polls are saying that the unusually high voter turnout expected in this election will prove once and again that the population of the United States of America is far more liberal than everyone thought. John McCain is a much more serious threat to the Democrats' voter base than Nader will ever be.

McCain got the nod, and Mike Huckabee is out of the race, but it's still by no means certain that John McCain will win the presidency. In an interview with dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad, The always diplomatic Christopher Hitchens said; "Now McCain will be forced into some kind of unholy alliance with one of those Christian thugs.." Or not, E.J Dionne's columns in the Washington Post are markedly more positive about the Republican party's chances to rid itself of the undue influence of the Christian conservatives, finally returning to their fiscal conservative roots.

Ronald Brownstein's latest book, 'The Second Civil War: How Extreme Partizanship Has Paralyzed Washington and Polarized America' has a very interesting perspective on the last quarter century of developments in partisan politics. The Democrats were the first group to use the tactics used by the Conservative Christians today. In the late fifties they started to try and work the dixiecrats in the south out of the party by polarising public opinion and manipulating Democratic party politics. They succeeded with Lyndon B. Johnson's social democratic reforms, which where a sort of clarion call for the new left. The public shrugged and the following voter migration sowed the seeds for the extreme partisanship by making the Republicans more Christian and Conservative as the Democrats became more Liberal and Progressive. So really the Democrats are to blame for George W. Bush.