Japonisme

Like many renters, I have extravagant dreams of future home-ownership. There will be a library with lots of cherry-wood bookcases, and a sun room, and many bedrooms of various themes. Among them, I am convinced that one must be a "Nipponese Room", with bamboo floors and ukiyo-e prints and, prominently, posters of The Mikado and Madama Butterfly, two of my favorite things. I suppose there are several theses to be written about the influence of Japanese art and music on that of fin de siècle Europe. What interests me is not how accurately European artists translated Japanese forms, but rather how they idealized them. Japonisme tells us next to nothing about Japan: it reveals far more about the Europeans who reveled in it, dreaming of an exotic, venerable, ancient courtly culture quite removed from a Europe with its ethnic strife and dark satanic mills. (It requires a special sort of stupidity to think The Mikado is racist. The operetta is all terribly English.)

Here I shall mention that my absolute favorite recording of Madama Butterfly is the 1966 one directed by Barbirolli, with Renata Scotto in the title rôle. Aside from one clarinet lick that is almost comically off, I find the recording to be nearly perfect. And, fortunately, it has been remastered for posterity.

I will add, as well, that one of my favorite movies is Topsy-Turvy, which, besides being about the making of The Mikado, is one of the best depictions of the artistic process that I have seen on film.

If there is anything in actual Japanese culture that attracts me, it is perhaps the country's apparent obsession with cats, both in this modern age of the internets and in ages past. I should like to see, were I in New York, the current exhibition of cats in Japanese prints of the 17th-20th centuries.

The Grand Budapest Hotel

Plane travel, as anyone can tell you, is onerous. (It is really quite convenient, of course, and somewhat miraculous, that we can cross the Atlantic in a matter of hours THROUGH THE AIR! But I will set aside this optimistic view, as I wish to complain. Or, as one says in German, ich will mich beschweren.) One must either be foolish and improvident and spring for business class — which gets you to the same place at the same time for many hundred dollars more — or ride in steerage, which always feels to me like descending into the bowels of the galley in Ben-Hur where the slaves are rowing to the beat of the drum. The slaves in Ben-Hur, at least, had no wailing infants to contend with. Sing, O Muse, of the multifarious unpleasant sounds that babies make! The periodic waaaa waaa waaaaa, the sort of gurgling hiccup, the high-pitched, sustained eeeeeee.

But don't let me bore you, dear reader, with my travails on the plane. What I really meant to write about was the movie I saw whilst crossing the Atlantic, coming back from Vienna: The Grand Budapest Hotel. Ten minutes into the film I was certain that I would want to watch it again. Perhaps this is partly for sentimental reasons: the story takes place in a fictional Mitteleuropean nation, "once the seat of an empire", that, over the course of the twentieth century, goes from decadence to fascism to communism to post-communism. (The titular hotel is depicted in the thirties as a gorgeous jugendstil palace; by the sixties its gaudy façade has been replaced with depressing concrete. It's finely-observed details like this that make the film especially satisfying to anyone who has traveled in those parts of the world where this happened.) The dialogue, while not composed of sentences that people actually say, was charming, perhaps because of the excellent performances, by Ralph Fiennes and F. Murray Abraham in particular. (Certain writers have instantly recognizable dialogue that irritates me to no end because it is merely how the writer himself speaks. I find Aaron Sorkin to be especially bothersome in this regard.)

The movie is written and directed by Wes Anderson, whose works generally inspire passionate intensity of feeling, either positive or negative. The chief charge leveled against him is that his films are excessively twee. I cannot say whether this is a fair assessment, as the only movie of his I have previously seen is Fantastic Mr Fox, which I found to be a fun adaptation of the Dahl book, and not unduly precious. In any case, I have a high tolerance for whimsy. The real issue, of course, is whether Anderson's films are entirely style without any substance, and whether that is bad. To be certain, they are highly stylized — but we can't condemn a movie simply because it isn't verismo. Looking at the other arts as an instrumental musician — and thus a producer of art that cannot make explicit reference to anything — I am very reluctant to pan a film simply because it is so stylized as to be non-referential. Must a movie make us think about other things? Why can't a movie simply be an exercise in making a movie, as skillfully as possible? I found The Grand Budapest Hotel to be a well-made movie, with fine actors, a carefully-realized setting, and a compelling story. Does one need anything more from a film?

Downton Abbey: the Interactive Fiction Video Game

Perhaps you, dear reader, like everyone else, are watching the television programme Downton Abbey? I saw the first season when PBS re-aired it back in December, and am currently in the midst of the second season (unlike the Limeys, who have already completed the second season, but like all the rest of the Americans who hesitate to watch it illegally on the series of tubes that is the internet). For those who enjoy costume dramas, the Edwardian era, Maggie Smith, and Anglophilia, as I do, it is the perfect storm. It is commonly observed that the first season is far better; indeed, it is nearly perfect. But the second season, so far, is still quite satisfactory, even though the plots feel far more rushed. I almost hesitate to recommend it, for everyone is doing that now and popular media usually drive me to be contrary, but Downton Abbey really is quite good and you should probably watch it. Start at the beginning, though.

There's already been some merchandising — observe the PBS store, should you need proof of that — but the obvious next step is Downton Abbey: the Text-Based Video Game. I am clearly the man to make this happen, but for the fact that I have only great ideas and no relevant skills to do so. (Such is the plight of the "Idea Man", as no doubt Newt Gingrich could tell you.) Nevertheless, a taste:

You are a DOWAGER COUNTESS.

You are in the library. There is a SWIVEL CHAIR here. There is a FOOTMAN nearby.
Exits are EAST, SOUTH, and WEST.

What do you do?
>


Faust (1926)

Sort-of-but-not-really because it's Halloween I finally sat down and watched the 1926 silent film Faust, which I had never heard of but just read about over at the A.V. Club. (That web-site has some good things, but its advertising is consistently obnoxious.) If you haven't seen it and fancy yourself a film-lover, you should see it. The modern moviegoer is perhaps reluctant to take silent films seriously — so conditioned are we by the special effects and other conventions of movies these days — but once one discards certain expectations and assumptions it becomes clear how original and effective the best silent movies are. To employ an inadequate metaphor, it's like drawing a circle: sure, it's quite easy to open MS Paint and make a perfect circle, but it takes real practice and dedication to actually draw a circle, with a pencil, on paper. Faust passes the test of all real art: it's still worth experiencing today.

It occurred to me that Faust can be understood as symbolic of 20th-century German history: Faust renounces God to reshape the world according to his own ideas, with disastrous consequences. It then occurred to me that Thomas Mann already noted the Faustian resonances in the Third Reich. It then occurred to me that I really ought to begin reading Mann's Doktor Faustus: presently all my knowledge about it is secondhand, by way of The Rest Is Noise, which you really should read.

"Don’t you want to earn Schrute bucks?"

The Office is one of the few television shows that is not entirely loathsome. (Others in this select group include Mythbusters and several PBS shows.) Now that it's in syndication I've been occasionally watching older episodes; from this it's evident that the show has changed quite a bit, especially in this past season. The thing we forget is just how unpleasant everything is in the first two seasons or so: the humor derived from the awkwardness of the interactions between characters, more than anything else. This is still true, to an extent, but it seems that the writers have become much more fond of the characters in recent years. The biggest change is the dynamic between Jim & Pam and the environment of the office: earlier, we rooted for them because they were the only two people who had not resigned themselves to a lifetime of drudgery and obscurity. By now they've given in. Is this because they've finally become adults? Or because they can no longer give up a stable source of money? (What's the difference?)