June 2012 albums

Posted on May 26, 2012 by

Here are the album reviews I wrote for the June issue of EL Magazine, which was distributed in Tokyo last Friday.

Blunderbuss
-Jack White (Third Man/Sony)
Boys & Girls
-Alabama Shakes (Rough Trade/Hostess)
Jack White is the premier rock star of our age, and though he’s a slippery personality by design he more or less acknowledged the honor when he appeared in the documentary It Might Get Loud with two certified rock stars of earlier eras, Jimmy Page and The Edge. The main difference is that both of those rockers are guitarists who don’t sing, while White is a singer-songwriter who happens to play fierce guitar. His first genuine solo album not only includes a cover of a U2 song (as a bonus track) but generally sounds more like a Led Zeppelin LP than any White Stripes record did. It’s mostly there in the vocals, which resemble Robert Plant’s in timber and attitude. It all goes to show that some models are eternal: rock stars still adhere to a certain type of image, which is probably why White is so cagey about his history and opinions. Befitting his talent and outsize imagination Blunderbuss ranges far and wide stylistically and the emotions never settle for less than full exegesis. The teenage rant “Sixteen Saltines” is like an attempt to recapture the first flush of sexual ardor, while the cover of Little Willie John’s feverish “I’m Shakin’,” complete with a female chorus egging him on, sounds as if it were squeezed out through a pinhole. A lot of the lyrics express a desire for physical pain, though it’s not always clear to what end. Unlike his idol Bob Dylan, White isn’t capable of indirection: everything comes straight from his soul and seems to end up back there as well. As rock goes this is the genuine article, meaning its familiarity is part of its immediate appeal, and while I suspect much of the record is calibrated to make you feel before you think, he makes you feel it real good. The hot young band Alabama Shakes makes you feel it, too, on their debut album, which impressed White enough that he asked them to open for him. AS’s classic rock sound is more delineated by Southern soul and within that bailiwick manages to sound less derivative than you’d imagine. Guitarist-songwriter Brittany Howard sings in a raw blues style that has become the band’s most celebrated element, and her equally raw playing is complementary enough to make the impression stick. The desperation that informs love songs like “Be Mine” and “Heartbreaker” is more genuine-sounding than anything on Blunderbuss, but that may be due to Howard’s relative youth. You get the idea she’s more in love with her feelings than with the actual object of her attentions. The band’s two-guitar configuration and affection for conventional song structures, complete with solo instrumental bridges, clarifies their classic rock constitution so their inexperience in terms of delivery and production is more pronounced. Reports claim they’re dynamite live, but despite the genuine talent on display the record is uniformly even-tempered. Maybe Jack will give them some pointers. Continue reading →

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June 2012 movies

Posted on May 25, 2012 by

Here are the movie reviews I wrote for the June issue of EL Magazine, which was distributed in Tokyo on May 25.

Attack the Block
If you have to see only one alien invasion movie this summer, see Attack the Block. Though not a masterpiece, it’s a movie that juxtaposes gritty social realism with farfetched horror-science fiction in a way that satisfies both sides of the entertainment divide. The opening scene may initially repel viewers, since it presents the ostensible heroes of the story in a frightfully bad light. A young woman walks from a tube station to her apartment in a poor South London neighborhood at night and is soon surrounded by hoodie-wearing teens who threaten her with knives and take her purse. It’s a scary sequence, but rather than follow the viewer’s sympathies and stick with the woman, director Joe Cornish follows the gang members as they roll off on their bikes and are themselves attacked by a streaking ball of flame. Considering what we’ve witnessed it’s as close to a purely visual non sequitur as you’re likely to get in a movie; but in a way it isn’t, because Cornish dives right into the sci-fi story without changing gears or losing the urban tone he’s established. When the flame disgorges a disgusting creature, ringleader Moses (John Boyega) snuffs the slimy ET and, puffed up with victory, carries it around like a trophy. That act of bravado will soon come back to bite the gang in their collective ass and lay waste to the dank, graffiti-covered public housing estate where they live with whatever family members haven’t succumbed to drugs or fled their responsibilities. As we get to know the gang, we see their predicament and the dead-end lives they lead, and even when the young woman, Sam (Jodie Whittaker), reappears with police in tow to arrest her muggers, they save her from the aliens; which doesn’t redeem them in her eyes but does force her to consider their circumstances a little more closely. This is all running subtext, because on the surface Attack the Block is a fast-moving, suspenseful monster movie of the stalk-and-grab type, and the grimy, shadowy housing block provides the perfect setting for an invasion of aliens who are as inky black as a starless night (only their nasty teeth are visible). Along the way, we meet other denizens of the neighborhood, including its top gangsta (Jumayn Hunter), whose face-to-face encounter with the aliens doesn’t make him any less tolerant of these upstart punks; a loser white pothead (Luke Treadaway) whose book-learning comes in handy; and the estate’s local drug dealer (Nick Frost). But it’s Moses’s crew of barely adolescents who steal the movie, an Our Gang collection of wiseacre brats whose unavoidable immersion in pop culture has prepared them for this apocalypse without their knowing it. (photo: Studio Canal/UK Film Council/Channel Four TV Corp.) Continue reading →

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Media Mix, May 20, 2012

Posted on May 20, 2012 by

Remember 3D TV?

Here’s this week’s Media Mix about the slow, agonizing death of TV as we’ve always known it. To many people, if not most, this will seem like a non-story because TV has been dying a slow death for years now. It’s a fairly common theme among media critics, though what they usually talk about is the medium of television, which has had to readapt many times over the years to keep up with technological developments and different business models. When I was growing up in the U.S. in the 60s and early 70s, there was only one model: broadcast TV, which was presented either by national networks or local independent stations. In the mid-70s, when I was in college, cable television added “pay” features to the standard fare and became more widespread, but I didn’t own a TV at that time (sort of ironic since broadcasting was my major). Cable TV became the norm in the 1980s, challenging network dominance but not destroying it. That pattern persisted until the late 90s, when Internet usage became ubiquitous. It was at this point that the need for a TV set became, for the first time in its history, less of a compelling social indicator. If people still bought TVs it was simply as a monitor. Movies and even regular TV shows could be downloaded on demand. The advertising and TV program production businesses had to adapt to these realities and they did, often in spectacular fashion. American TV dramas are now much, much better than they were when I was growing up because in many cases they have to measure up to viewers’ direct expectations. People pay to see them, which, in turn, means nominally “free” network fare has to measure up as well. Continue reading →

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Media Mix, May 13, 2012

Posted on May 13, 2012 by

Serving and protecting

Here’s this week’s Media Mix, which is about road safety and the lack of discussion in the media about the role of infrastructure in the recent series of deadly accidents. Though I address briefly the notion that the media has certain interests it may want to safeguard by avoiding the subject, the problem is also exacerbated by a mindset that sees motor traffic as the norm in modern life. Last week a 60-year-old man wrote a letter to the Tokyo Shimbun expressing some of the same points I did about the media in my column but for a completely different purpose. He believes the media does not stress how responsible pedestrians are for many traffic-related accidents. He complains about people “crossing the street both in front and in back” of moving vehicles. “As a driver it scares me,” he writes. “Cars can’t stop quickly, though pedestrians think they can. Pedestrians should pay attention to manners.” Apparently, I wasn’t the only reader bothered by the letter’s patronizing tone. Several days later a 52-year-old man replied in the same space, saying that often he sees pedestrians walking across streets on painted crosswalks where there are no traffic signals. According to traffic laws, the pedestrian has the right of way in such a situation, but most of the time drivers don’t even decelerate. They just assume that since they are in a car and there is no traffic light they can keep going. “This is even more dangerous,” he writes, implying that, whatever anxiety the previous writer feels about people crossing the street, the pedestrian will always suffer worse in an accident than a motorist. Continue reading →

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Media Mix, May 6, 2012

Posted on May 6, 2012 by

The cover of Atsuko’s book, “Aki: The Woman Who Lived With Kakuei Tanaka”

Here’s this week’s Media Mix, which is about a supposedly “hidden child” that Ichiro Ozawa fathered two decades ago. As explained in the column, kakushigo is a fairly popular subject for tabloid and even not-so-tabloid journalists. Consequently, some stories become so freely reported that “hidden” seems the wrong adjective. Coincident with the Bunshun story about Ozawa’s kid is the publication of a book by Atsuko Sato about her late mother, Aki, who was the consort of Ozawa’s mentor, Kakuei Tanaka, probably Japan’s most powerful postwar prime minister and the master of the sort of money-politics that still dominates the Diet. Continue reading →

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Beastie Boys, Yokohama Arena, 1999

Posted on May 5, 2012 by

This is a review I wrote about a Beastie Boys concert at Yokohama Arena in 1999 for the Japan Times.

Sean Lennon opened the Beastie Boys concert at Yokohama Arena on February 6 with a 30-minute set that was sharper than the one I saw him play last September. The band appears to have honed its songs to a finer edge over the past several months. What’s more, Sean seemed amazingly focused for someone playing to such a huge audience. He thanked everyone for coming out to see “the Sean Lennon experience,” and playfully exhorted them to buy his T-shirts and paraphernalia in the lobby between sets, and, of course, to purchase his CD if they hadn’t already. “You’ll be the coolest kid in Japan.” He also graciously thanked the Beasties for asking him to open for them, adding that “they started my career.”

Actually, all the Beasties did was give Sean a recording contract. For all intents and purposes, his “career” started when one of John Lennon’s sperm entered Yoko Ono’s ovum. But it’s obvious that he’s learned about the work of contemporary pop very well — and quickly, too. And for that, he should thank the Beasties, who not only perfected the notion of careerism in indie rock but made it respectable. Continue reading →

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Media Mix, April 29, 2012

Posted on April 29, 2012 by

Tabloid calling Kijima "goddess of death"

Here’s this week’s Media Mix about the recent lay judge trial of Kanae Kijima, who was found guilty of murdering three men and sentenced to death. The piece focuses on the trial itself and NHK’s attempt to recreate what may have been going on in the lay judges’ minds during the proceedings in order to discuss the whole question of having non-professionals condemn people to death. NHK’s purpose was to understand whether or not capital cases are too much for non-professionals given the emotional burden of having someone’s life in your hands, though they skirted the larger question of whether or not prosecutions of capital crimes, not to mention the executions themselves, are carried out in a way that is appropriate to their gravity. As I pointed out in the first paragraph, owing to political realities the decision to hang is arbitrary, subject to the whim of whoever happens to be the justice minister at a given moment. But even sentencing is arbitrary, as pointed out by the Japan Bar Association, which says that if you’re going to have a team of judges decide on a person’s life, the decision should be unanimous.

Complicating these issues is the special nature of the Kijima case. As I mentioned, the media had already tried and convicted her before she was served a warrant for murder. They had used their own resources to look into her background once the police started investigating her connection to the deaths of two men who committed suicide using the exact same method and who were said to be her former lovers. This was just catnip to the tabloids and wide shows, which discovered a whole trail of lovers from whom she made her living, so to speak. The primary fascination of such a “black widow” case was intensified by a blatantly sexist position that asked how such a homely woman could possibly be this successful as a murderous golddigger. The circumstantial evidence presented by the media pointed to only one conclusion, that she killed at least three of her lovers because she was afraid that once she broke off their respective relationships they would ask her to return money they had paid her. Part of Kijima’s defense was that two of these men, the ones police first ruled as suicides (the third died accidentally in a fire), were so heartbroken that they killed themselves. In the context of how the media had already presented the case, this defense strategy sounded desperate at best, ludicrous at worst.

But the fact remains that the prosecution’s only evidence was circumstantial, and they had to surmise a motive since Kijima didn’t talk during interrogations. Though the sum total of this circumstantial evidence was certainly damning, it was difficult to separate the mostly speculative points the media has made and what the prosecution was allowed to present in court. Consequently, the prosecution’s case seemed mostly based on common sense, a highly problematic foundation on which to base a death sentence. In a way that no one found disconcerting, the prosecution used a metaphor to say that despite the lack of material evidence the judges should easily understand Kijima’s guilt: When you wake up in the morning and see snow on the ground where there was none the day before, you know for a fact that it snowed during the night. In other words, you know just by looking at what happened, and don’t really need anyone to prove it. Is that a valid legal argument?

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