August 2014 albums

Posted on August 1, 2014 by philipbrasor

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

howtodresswell14matthewdavidWhat Is This Heart?
-How To Dress Well (Weird World/Hostess)
In My World
-Matthewdavid (Brainfeeder/Beat)
Though Tom Krell’s evolution as an established in-his-own-head R&B singer-songwriter has taken years, it’s difficult to listen to his latest album and not wonder what he thinks of Frank Ocean. No matter how you look at the genre, Ocean owns this peculiar and peculiarly popular new take on soulful romantic effusion, and even if you hand Krell props for his vocal skills you can’t get Ocean’s voice out of your head as you listen to him. If there’s a distinction that becomes apparent with repeated listenings it’s the way Rodaidh McDonald’s production adds a fuller musical clarity to Krell’s songs, something most conventional R&B, even Ocean’s, doesn’t deliver this consistently. The stuttering rhythms and throbbing undertow of “What You Wanted” adds shape to Krell’s typically melody-free verses. And if What Is This Heart? doesn’t stick in the gut as tenaciously as Channel Orange does, it asserts itself more readily as an album in that its appeal becomes more apparent with each subsequent song. By the time you get to “Precious Love,” a delicate and utterly lovely pop song that lingers tortuously on the edge of falsetto ecstasy, you’ll likely have forgotten all of Krell’s more obvious influences. If Ocean had done this song he would have used more genuine instruments, but Krell is obviously selling this collection on his singing, not his production or even his songwriting, and, pardon the stereotyping, but he sounds mighty fine for a white guy. If this doesn’t boost him into the big time nothing will. Matthew David McQueen, on the other hand, while equally obsessed with the slower-metered funk of Prince as it applies to contemporary sex-you-up singers, doesn’t seem particularly interested in the mainstream. If anything, he means to subvert it with his glitchy beats and slightly sarcastic drawl. His fulsome psychedelic touches make him a more original record-maker than How To Dress Well, though, by the same token, a less appealing one. The title cut of his new album would be a perfect match for original-era Stylistics if it weren’t so jagged and hyper, and elsewhere, as on the slightly near eastern “Artforms,” he dabbles in more caucasian-sounding pop that actually benefits from his spacy ministrations, so if he’s gonna mess with the funk, he should at least leave in what makes the style danceable. The freaky touches demand attention that could be better purposed toward enjoyment, which may sound like philistinism, but the forms he’s altering were developed to bring pleasure, so any revisions should at least take that into consideration. Otherwise, they’re just art projects. In an earlier era, In My World would have been called a “drug album,” a description that would have sold its rewards to the kind of people who could appreciate them best. It’s not at all certain that people who like R&B, even the hipster contingent, will get much entertainment value out of this. Continue reading →

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August 2014 movies

Posted on July 30, 2014 by philipbrasor

Here are the movie reviews I wrote for the August issue of EL Magazine, which was distributed in Tokyo last week.

idaIda
Austerity is often a comfort to the psychologically oppressed, a means of focusing on something simple so as to push away whatever sadness and frustration the greater complexities of life give rise to. For Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska), a novice in a rural Polish convent who is about to take her vows, austerity is all she knows, since, as an orphan, she has lived her whole life under the stern but understanding gaze of the Catholic church. Dedicating her life to God is not a choice, it’s the next step in a natural progression based on where she’s from. But then the mother superior tells her that before she commits, she should meet her only living relative, an aunt named Wanda whom Anna knows nothing about. For the first time in her life, the girl leaves the convent and travels to the city. When she arrives at her relative’s apartment, her aunt is entertaining a gentleman guest—or she was entertaining him. He puts on his clothes and leaves. Director Pawel Pawlikowski, working in his native Poland for the first time after several features made in England, is cagey with the time period, and it isn’t until Wanda (Agata Kulesza) explains the circumstances of Anna’s birth and that her real name is Ida, that we understand it has been about fifteen years since the end of the war, that Poland is deeply into its socialist phase. Wanda, it turns out, is a judge, a highly influential one. Her drinking and profligate behavior bespeak not privilege, but a profound bitterness. What she tells Anna/Ida is a shock: she was born to Jewish parents, her mother was Wanda’s sister, and they were killed near the end of the war after being hidden by people who worked on their farm. The particulars of the parents’ death aren’t revealed right away and Wanda suggests Ida revisit their hometown together to try and find their graves. Ida is a road trip during which Wanda drinks too much, is arrested, and then released when the police find out who she is; during which Ida meets and is charmed by an itinerant jazz saxophonist (Dawid Ogrodnik), and learns the horrible truth of her parents’ death. The fact that this truth has more of an effect on Wanda than on Ida is one of the story’s most excruciating elements, and as with the curiously non-natural visual style—black-and-white stock, an old-fashioned frame ratio, characters exiled to the margins—the narrative is more suggestive than expository. But eventually you get the idea because when Pawlikowski wants you to know something, he tells you in no uncertain terms. Austerity can also be deceptive. In the case of this extraordinary film, it contains multitudes of meaning. In Polish. (photo: Phoenix Film Investments and Opus Film) Continue reading →

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Media Mix, July 27, 2014

Posted on July 27, 2014 by philipbrasor

itune-17-june-708x265Here’s this week’s Media Mix, about the arrest of artist Rokudenashiko. For the column I spoke to American filmmaker Anna Margarita Albelo, who was in Tokyo to screen her movie, Who’s Afraid of Vagina Wolf?, at the Tokyo International Lesbian & Gay Film Festival. Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

What is the point of the vagina costume?

I wanted to talk about the fear of the vagina, the fear of powerful women, and the fear women have of their own sexuality. The character in the film is wearing the vagina costume in the beginning and has been doing so for a while, and it’s eclipsing her. The main character is a filmmaker and at the start of the movie she’s at the bottom of the barrel. The only way she can make money is by screening her movie in art galleries and dancing around in her vagina. She hasn’t addressed her problems, but she equates a lot of them to her love life and sexuality and the way it’s perceived. Continue reading →

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Media Mix, July 20, 2014

Posted on July 20, 2014 by philipbrasor
Katsuto Momii

Katsuto Momii

Here is this week’s Media Mix, mainly about Friday magazine’s “scoop” of what went down at NHK following an exclusive live interview with LDP Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga on “Closeup Gendai,” but also about the mainstream media’s tepid coverage of the government’s decision to make the Self-Defense Forces available for collective self-defense activities overseas. Though I watched the Suga interview on NHK and, unlike the LDP aide referred to in Friday, thought it was too polite by half, it did at least try to get Suga to address the problematic issues involved. I’m not saying the media has not addressed these issues themselves, only that they haven’t aggressively tried to get the administration to address them when they’ve had the chance, which makes me wonder if there’s more at stake than just “politics.”

But the NHK angle is still worth exploring in detail. A few days ago, after the column was filed, a group of former NHK employees submitted a petition to NHK saying that Chairman Katsuto Momii should step down because of comments he has made that imply NHK should follow the government line. Though I can understand the petitioners’ sentiments, what bothers me about their demand is the idea that Momii can so easily exert his will on an organization like NHK. As I mentioned in the column, NHK’s programming can be diverse in terms of viewpoint. NHK news tries to steer straight down the middle of the road, which can make it seem as if it’s on the side of the government but mostly it just translates as a very narrow take on whatever topic is reported. NHK’s m.o. is overly cautious, which is why its reporters aren’t allowed to talk off the tops of their heads the way experienced TV reporters in other countries are expected to do. But shows like “Closeup Gendai” and many of the broadcaster’s documentaries get pretty deep into their subjects and often challenge the powers that be in their own limited way. I don’t think Momii’s presence at the top will change this situation in any substantial way, but in any case there seems little that former NHK employees can do about it. It’s up to current employees to convey information as truthfully and completely as possible. In 2001, an NHK production team made a special about a mock tribunal of Emperor Showa that found him guilty of war crimes, and when the LDP found out about it it supposedly convinced higher ups in NHK to alter the content so as to soften the tribunal results as they were aired. The organizers of the tribunal, who worked with production team on the program, sued NHK for breach of trust. Certainly the government (Shinzo Abe was involved in the alleged intimidation) and NHK top brass were the cause of the problem in this case, but the production team and their immediate superiors should have resisted them more resolutely. Unless, of course, they agreed with the tenor of the interference, in which case there isn’t much the former NHK employees–and NHK viewers–can do.

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Media Mix, July 13, 2014

Posted on July 13, 2014 by philipbrasor
Dr. Tomohiko Murakami

Dr. Tomohiko Murakami

Here is this week’s Media Mix, which is about the government’s difficulties in cutting medical expenses. Before anyone starts citing the column as proof that universal health care doesn’t work, keep in mind that, strictly speaking, Japan’s national health insurance system isn’t universal. Yes, everyone has to participate, but everybody has to pay taxes, too, and the insurance system is set up more as a tax, meaning you pay into the system what you can afford to pay. And because people pay in this way, they think they should get as much out of the system as they can, meaning treatment for even the smallest infirmity. That’s why everyone goes to the doctor when they have a sniffle. The government has been trying to discourage this kind of situation, especially among old people who look upon the medical system as some kind of social club, but whenever they game the system to penalize people for using it indiscriminately the media takes the side of the public and says the government is trying to kill people. Doctors couldn’t be happier, because that’s how they make money.

In the column, I also mention that more conscientious doctors believe the health care system as it’s operated in Japan also discourages preventive care, since the focus is on treatment of existing ailments. In a way, this problem manifests itself in the inordinate number of old people who are bedridden. The media, strangely, has never questioned this phenomenon, and act as if it’s normal for people to spend their waking hours prone after they turn 75. Active people in their 80s are celebrated as being superhuman, which is even odder considering that Japan’s longevity rates are the envy of the world. This approach to illness as something that happens out of the blue undermines the efforts of health maintenance professionals who try to convince the public that they will be not only healthier but happier if they take care of themselves.

This media mindset was illustrated in an interesting way in Dr. Tomohiko Murakami’s book, which I mention in the column. Murakami was the head of the city hospital in Yubari, and became infamous in June 2010 when the national press blasted him for refusing an ambulance’s request to bring a man to his hospital. At the time, such stories were being reported all over Japan, the result of cutbacks and other fiscal difficulties, but the media treated them all the same: monolithic medical institutions couldn’t be bothered with treating some people, even when they required emergency help. The reports implied that the Yubari man died of cardiac failure because he wasn’t treated, but as Murakami explains in the book, the man, a suicide, was already dead. The ambulance simply needed a doctor to declare him deceased, but at the time Murakami had his hands full with living patients since he was the only doctor on duty.

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July 2014 albums

Posted on July 2, 2014 by philipbrasor

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

jackwhite14blackkeys14Lazaretto
-Jack White (Third Man/Sony)
Turn Blue
-The Black Keys (Nonesuch/Warner)
It’s safe to say that classic guitar rock—blues-based, loudly melodic, often distorted—has survived the various challenges to its hegemony over the past three decades and is now more prevalent and vital than ever. If you want to credit Jack White with that development you won’t get an argument from me, though as with all pop music classifications guitar rock tends to withstand artistic pigeonholing. Since dissolving the White Stripes White has become more than a musical force. He’s a cultural lightning rod, the man who says what he means and has the talent and vision to make his pronouncements worthy of attention, regardless of how prickly or narrow-minded thay sound. His second solo album isn’t much different from his first one, only weirder, which makes it all the more interesting since blues rock exhausted most of its potential to surprise by the time Led Zeppelin recorded their fourth album. In fact, the record Lazaretto most resembles, as least tonally and thematically, is Zep’s third. The earnest folk touches are highlights rather than distracting filigree, and when things get bombastic the contrast is all the more thrilling. It’s also unabashedly accomplished. The chops on display revive the once derided image of the blues guitarist as virtuoso, but White makes sure that he’s showing off for a reason. The playful interaction between riffs and lyrics on “The Black Bat Licorice” is hilarious and scintillating. The complaint that the album is over-produced, with lots of incidental aural touches that White wouldn’t have countenanced on a White Stripes record, is off-base, since the whole point of White’s solo career is ambition, another hallmark of classic guitar rock and one everyone seems to have forgotten. But not the Black Keys. In fact, the main problem with the duo’s hotly anticipated followup to the best-selling El Camino is that Dan Auerbach seems to have run out of ideas on which to pin his ambition. This aspect of the group’s public image only serves to highlight their workmanlike approach to rock. Auerbach is no less talented than White, and may be a better singer, but his conception of blues rock sounds more like pastiche than White’s does, and while it was unfair of White to dis the Black Keys publicly for what he saw as them ripping off his style—Jimmy Page is too nice a guy to say the same about White—Auerbach does sound as if he’s still trying to get at something the White Stripes did ten years ago, which was to create an original voice in one of pop’s most overly exploited genres. The Keys do little more here than broaden their sound (“Weight of Love”) and goose their hooks (“Fever”). Auerbach also regresses into meathead male desperation. His obsessions about bad women are a leitmotif, and one that could be mistaken for editorializing rather than a tribute to the blues and soul shouters who once made such obsessions compelling. Continue reading →

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July 2014 movies

Posted on June 30, 2014 by philipbrasor

Here are the reviews I wrote for the July issue of EL Magazine, which was distributed in Tokyo last week.

beyondedgeBeyond the Edge
Given his status as New Zealand’s greatest 20th century hero, it seems unfortunate that the late Sir Edmund Hillary’s achievement is being memorialized with this pokey docudrama. Following several unsuccessful attempts to reach the summit of Mt. Everest by the Swiss and others, a British team lead by John Hunt decided to try in May of 1953 before the monsoons moved in. Hillary, a beekeeper by vocation, was a passionate mountaineer who made it onto the team but due to his nationality ended up low on the pecking order. The film does a good job of delineating events to show why it was Hillary and not one of the Brits who made it to the top, and sufficiently describes those qualities that distinguished him during the adventure. But the movie has no dramatic traction. Whether showing climbers gasping for oxygen and losing their bearings or depicting near fatal plunges down crevasses, all the scenes are pitched in the same flat tone, so even when Hilary and his guide, Tenzing Norgay, reach their goal, you feel little in the way of exhiliration. (photo: GFC (Everest) Ltd.) Continue reading →

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Media Mix, June 29, 2014

Posted on June 29, 2014 by philipbrasor
Unknown

Shun Otokita

Here’s this week’s Media Mix, about the local coverage of the foreign coverage of the June 18 heckling incident in the Tokyo assembly. As the column indicates, even the Japanese press has admitted that it wouldn’t have been as interested as it was in the incident if outlets like the Wall Street Journal and the Huffington Post hadn’t found it so compelling, but, of course, the international media had to get the story from somewhere. Most think that the Asahi Shimbun broke it, and while that seems true up to a point, as media explainer Akira Ikegami pointed out in a recent column in that very paper, the Asahi’s initial coverage was only published in the Tokyo edition, thus betraying the editors’ feeling that it wasn’t a story worthy of national exposure. It was basically an “incident,” an isolated happening with no implications beyond the notion that Tokyo politicians could be mean. The Mainichi Shimbun was the only major media outlet to put the story in all its editions.

The Asahi’s parochial response is perhaps understandable if you consider the paper’s own likely source, the blog of Shun Otokita, who, like Ayaka Shiomura, is a Your Party member of the Tokyo assembly. What the Asahi missed or ignored in the post was Otokita’s outrage. His anger may be qualified by his loyalties, but his detailed description of the incident makes it clear that it was the sexist tone of the taunts that upset him and not so much the heckling itself. Some commentators have said that Shiomura was simply subjected to the same sort of trial-by-fire that all Tokyo legislators have to go through, and that if she isn’t up to it then she shouldn’t be a lawmaker. They take Akihiro Suzuki’s specific taunt, that Shiomura herself should get married as soon as possible, as a perhaps rude but nonetheless legitimate rejoinder to her assertion that Tokyo isn’t doing enough to help women have and raise children. There’s nothing sexist about it, they say. Otokita’s blog post destroys that already flimsy argument, since it describes an atmosphere in which a group of men verbally pile on an inexperienced member of the assembly by taking advantage of the fact that she’s a woman. In order to shake her up, they used language that made sport of her gender. The Asahi may or may not have picked up on this aspect of Otokita’s report, but in any case they didn’t think it was worth dispatching nationally. When it was published in the Japanese edition of the Huffington Post (a link is provided in the first paragraph of my column) the international press was exposed to it. I’m not saying that the foreign media is more responsible than the Japanese media is when it comes to gender issues, only that in this case the foreign press saw the heckling for what it really was. Had they not highlighted it the Japanese press would have likely just shrugged it off as, at best, business as usual or, at worst, the shenanigans of bored local politicians.

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June 2014 albums

Posted on May 30, 2014 by philipbrasor

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

61lilAgBabL51Jc3xqmCGLSheezus
-Lily Allen (Parlophone/Warner)
Shakira
(RCA/Sony)
You envy Lily Allen at your own peril. She’s one of the most interesting pop artists of the new millennium and her record sales match her talent and intelligence. However, these factors have also made her a target of people who dump on pop stars as a matter of course, and since she made her mark on the Internet she is forced to accept this unfortunate aspect as part of the price she pays for fame, which has become her leitmotif. Sheezus is only her third album, and her first since the brilliantly caustic, self-effacing It’s Not Me, It’s You. It isn’t half as self-effacing, but sounds preemptively defensive, both a comment on the emptiness of current pop culture and a kind of smart-alecky attempt to place herself in that context. The fact that the title sounds like the one Kanye gave to his last album will invite comparisons, thus adding another unnecessary burden to the album’s thematic load. If the opening, title track were as catchy as the rest of the collection, its strained overview of what divas have to put up with might resonate further than it does, but it feels more like an obligation than an observation. And while the domestic-life-is-bliss material can be hackneyed and predictable, it’s also charming and lively. Lily’s blessing-and-curse is her inability to step outside herself: there’s nothing here that’s not about her, and while her candor can be refreshing and witty, it can also scan as default solipsism, which gets exhausting over the course of a 70-minute album (the CD version has 5 bonus tracks and the Japanese version 2 more). Greg Kurstin’s co-writing credit guarantees pop rigor, but Lily’s incorporation of R&B forms would seem to indicate she feels she has to keep up with all those other divas. The peril is you don’t take Lily without the personality. You have to put up with it. Colombian hip-shaker Shakira has had a lot of time and experience to figure out her own place in the scheme of things, and while her new self-titled album seems like a reboot, it mainly substantializes a lot of the elements that have succeeded on her most recent English-language records, particularly a strong identification with classic rock. Even her duet with Rihanna, one of the artists Lily disses, has less to do with that singer’s patented style and more to do with Pink’s. And while another co-conspirator, Blake Shelton, is a country star, like most Nashville pretty boys these days “Medicine” shows that he worshipped at the alter of Eagles/Clapton. Even when Shakira offers up something acoustic, it has the hard-driving ring and shimmer of an MTV Unplugged segment with, say, R.E.M. The confidence is in the performance, in the snarl and Latin bite of her delivery. She sings what she means and means what she sings. If only Lily were this naturally confident in her abilities. Continue reading →

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June 2014 movies

Posted on May 28, 2014 by philipbrasor

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

GHB_6852 20130121.CR2The Grand Budapest Hotel
It’s telling of Wes Anderson’s curious ouevre that his best films are set in an idealized past that feels like a physical place, as if the present were too changeable to get a fix on. Of course, the past is changeable, too, open to shifting interpretations, but Anderson likes the idea that what really happened can’t be changed, and though his films are fictions he treats them with such unerring sureness of purpose that they feel less like memories and more like fossils. Judging by the way he circles around his main plot in The Grand Budapest Hotel, it’s obvious he misses the idea of the “old Europe,” which idealized civilized behavior. In a gambit that feels like a brilliant joke, he moves backwards from the present through not one, not two, but three layers of flashback to the titular institution, a fine hotel in the mountains of the made-up country of Zubrowka lorded over by the proud, effeminate concierge M. Gustave (Ralph Fiennes), who beds his elderly female customers (and probably a few of the male ones) as a show of hospitality that keeps them coming back for more, so to speak. Gustave’s management style is meticulous but fair, and he treats his new “lobby boy,” Zero (Tony Revolori), with respect rather than condescension because Zero must pass on the values of service that the hotel stands for. We already know from the second layer of flashback that Zero will grow up to be Mr. Moustafa (F. Murray Abraham), the owner of the hotel in its shabbier 1960s incarnation, and it is Mr. Moustafa’s warm narration that sets the tone of this remarkable tale, loosely based on the writings of Stefan Zweig but nevertheless wholly Andersonian in execution and feeling. On the eve of World War II, Zubrowka is under pressure from authoritarian forces that contradict the old European sensibility M. Gustave represents. The concierge is forced to act on his impulses after a crime occurs in his little empire that affects the fortunes of his most illustrious customer (Tilda Swinton). He becomes embroiled not only in the customer’s noble, in-fighting family, but in the intrigues that will soon plunge the region into war, and he dives into these adventures with all the facility and determination of a fop James Bond. The machinations get complicated, and if Anderson seems to make them that way just to utilize as many of his friends as possible (Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, Willem Dafoe, Edward Norton, Mathieu Amalric, Jason Schwartzman, Jeff Goldblum) he doesn’t shortchange the viewer. You follow as breathlessly as M. Gustave as he skis down the side of an Austrian Alp in pursuit of an art thief. The Grand Budapest Hotel has everything you want from a movie. (photo: Twentieth Century Fox) Continue reading →

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