September 2004 Archives

I’m entering B-school with one eye open.

See, Mod gave me a Daruma on our last visit to Oakland. It’s a Japanese thing, Daruma, a paper-mache figurine of the monk Bodhidharma. He’s a round, roly-poly guy, the backstory being that Bodhidharma’s arms and legs fell off after he meditated for seven years straight.

Daruma dolls have no eyes - it’s up to you to paint them in, yourself. One eye gets painted when you start working towards a goal, and the other eye can only be painted if and when you complete that goal. Unsurprisingly, it’s mostly a New Year’s thing, though I’ve heard Japanese politicians make a big show of drawing Daruma eyes during political campaigns.

School’s started. Which means our once-blind Daruma now sits winking by the telly, and I vaguely suspect he’s watching more BBC than he should.

(And a year later…)

We just rented ‘Shaun of the Dead’, which proudly bills itself as ‘a romantic comedy, with zombies’. Unlike most movies, it actually delivers on that promise. Az laughed, I found it romantic, and yes, the walking undead get their screen time.

The kid at Blockbuster tried warning us off it, after hearing my American accent. “This is quite good,” he said, then hesitantly added “but very English”. Fair enough. But so then are Wallace and Gromit, Flying Circuses, and The Office - and they export just fine. (In truth, if ‘Warning: Very English!’ labels existed, I’d slap ‘em on Walker’s “Roast-Lamb-and-Mint-Jelly flavour” potato chips, first thing. But I digress…)

Actually, there is one joke in ‘Shaun of The Dead’ that hit me as tragically, tearfully hilarious - largely because it is doomed to go unnoticed by most Americans. It happens like this:

Shaun and Ed, urgently needing weapons for zombie-head-removal, stumble across Shaun’s old record collection, at which point they frantically start tossing discs (Frisbee-style) at the neck of a nearby zombie. However, (and here’s the British comedy for ya) they can’t help but bicker and argue over which LP’s are too precious to be thrown at the zombie onslaught.

Ed [holding up a record]: Stone Roses? Shaun: Noooo! Ed: But it’s ‘Second Coming’. Shaun [pauses]: I liked it!

Thing is, the Stone Roses hardly made a dent in American pop culture, and remain relatively unknown in the U.S. despite having been massive chart-toppers in the UK. The band released only two albums in their ten years, the first being hailed as the album of the decade, and the second (coming) widely trashed as… well, I liked it.

Sure, you’ll still find a few hopeless Roses fans (is there any other kind?) Stateside, and I proudly count myself amongst their number.

For Roses fans like me, it’s been a good week, and not just because they’ve written in-jokes for us into ‘Shaun of the Dead’. On September 13th, former Stone Roses lead singer Ian Brown released his fourth solo album, ‘Solarized’. I was personally excited because it was the first time I could buy one of his albums without an ‘Import’ sticker and 30-dollar price tag on the cover.

And how is it? Not half-bad, in fact.

A few tracks shine: the surprisingly sweet ‘Time is My Everything’ stands out as my initial favorite. (Respectably, ‘Time’ achieves the highly-improbable feat of substituting John Squire’s legendary guitar licks with latin horns, of all things.) ‘Longsight M13’ and ‘Keep What Ya Got’ (w/ Oasis frontman Noel Gallagher) also display the craftsmanship you’d expect for radio singles. Whether this ‘approachable’ sound was a production decision, or the result of Ian Brown recording this album sober (so he claims), I can’t say. But it’s better than the last one.

There’s still a fair shake of the less-listenable, self-indulgent stuff. (Not exactly uncommon with lead singers who’ve ‘gone solo’, now is it?) But c’mon — it’s hard not to spot the warning signs for that, right on the cover - the album artwork/branding consists primarily of Ian’s name written in various fonts, and the highlight of the liner notes is a juvenile photo-collage of you-know-who’s simian face, striking various poses. Anybody who buys this album should expect as much.

At the moment, though, it’s the only CD we own. (We hauled our MP3 and AAC collection with us, but left the good speakers behind.) So, for better or worse, Solarized is getting heavy rotation hereabouts.

I steeled myself for my upcoming capitalist indoctrination (B-school starts next week) by watching ‘Battleship Potemkin’ on Sunday. The movie, in true socialist form, was free for the masses - it played in a drizzly Trafalgar Square, and featured a thumpin’ new soundtrack composed and performed live by the Pet Shop Boys.

Surprisingly, it wasn’t so much a big spectacle, as a good show. I’d expected a double-dose of high camp; that the synthetic techno bombast of Mssrs. Tenant and Lowe would serve only to make Potemkin seem anachronistic and crude by comparison, probably send the whole thing up as a terribly naïve work — technologically, artistically, politically, historically, whatever.

Instead, it was engaging. The music was surprisingly complementary, at times almost natural, and if anything, made the film seem more contemporary, not less. Given, I actually like the music of the Pet Shop Boys (hence my trek from Cambridge to London), so my opinion is undoubtedly suspect to some, but I’d call it a success, and an artistic one at that.

No, it wasn’t perfect: some passages veered too far to the club sound (IMO, the words “Da!” and “Nyet” do not a natural bass line make), some slower strains went on just a bit (like Phillip Glass pumped full of Red Bull). But pacing, I suppose, is something the revisionist soundtrack composer can’t completely control, and one of the more obvious aspects where early cinema shows its age.

Standing in the rain surrounded by umbrellas wasn’t the best screening venue, but it was memorable. The best seats in the house, alas, were on a red double-decker bus snarled in Trafalgar’s traffic - we watched passengers wind their way to the top deck, sitting high and dry, until a traffic cop finally cleared ‘em out.

Just north of the Cam, past Magdalene College, is Kettle’s Yard. From four 17th and 18th century cottages, Jim and Helen Ede built foundations for a single house, and a singular home.

It’s an art museum, now - though I suspect Mr. Ede (himself the curator of the Tate in London, once) would agree that the scale and setting make it something altogether different. Above all, Kettle’s Yard remains simply a home: you need to tug on the doorbell to enter, and once inside, you can grab a seat anywhere, and pull a book from the shelves. And that’s how it went for us, yesterday afternoon.

Of course, art is the big draw: when you’re a networked fellow like Mr. Ede, I suppose it was easy to gather up pieces from ‘artist friends’ like Ben Nicholson, Gaudier-Brzeska, even Miro and Brancusi. However, the personal authenticity of the collection is what impresses the most — knowing that behind every piece was afternoon tea or a handshake, the ties of friendship and patronage.

You can feel how the house was all slowly assembled, truly built — not simply bought at Sotheby’s. In that sense, Kettle’s Yard reminds me of Jim Thompson’s house in Bangkok: like the organic shell of an extraordinary life. That, and then there’s the fun of traipsing through the tiny bedrooms, hallways, and winding staircases, so unlike the squared halls of most museums.

Best of all? At Kettle’s Yard, it’s the arrangement and selection of every piece which matters, not cash value; some of the most important features are pebbles, plates, and lemons (just ask), each item placed properly, and just so.

Oh — and it’s free. Next time it really rains, I’m heading back.

I bought my gown last week. I couldn’t help but grin, trying it on: the long robes are probably one of the more peculiar and quintessential images associated with Oxbridge colleges.

Actually, the first time I glimpsed a formal Cambridge robe was in Berzerkley, of all places; one of my undergrad professors was a Cambridge (and Oxford) don, and at graduation he’d ambled onto the stage wearing colorful garments which looked like a cross between a rodeo clown’s outfit and the Vatican Guard uniform. Amidst all our cookie-cutter rental-quality black robes, and the tattered business-class upgrades worn by most Berkeley profs, his outfit was… brilliant.

Americans generally associate gowns only with graduation; here, it was a more important part of your daily outfit, once upon a time. I needed to purchase mine before school starts (T-minus 2 weeks, ack) because it’s still mandated for nightly dinner at my college.

Thankfully, I won’t need to strut about town always looking like Zorro, or a wayward Renaissance Faire vendor - graduate-level gowns are simple, uniform black affairs - and anyhow, I gather it’s a thing to keep stashed in a locker or backpack right until you walk into Formal Hall. Perfect compromise, in my book.

All it takes is a little Murphy’s law: the day after local papers led with “WETTEST SUMMER IN 50 YEARS”, this place starts feeling like California. In a sunshine-y sense, that is.

We took a most civilized stroll out of town yesterday, and walked alongside the river Cam towards Grantchester. The footpath dips and rises through hyper-pastoral meadows, and it offers exactly the sort of scenery you’d hope for: grazing livestock, starry-eyed punters, and rolling farmland in the distance. It’s quiet, verdant, and all feels (relatively) isolated, especially for a route that starts just twenty minutes’ walk from the city center.

An hour later, we stumbled across Grantchester, and its tea-room of some repute: The Orchard. As the name implies, the outdoor grounds are sprinkled with apple and pear trees; Az and I entered from an adjacent meadow by first squeezing past some cows and then climbing a cattle-fence. I’d hoped to congratulate myself on my little discovery, but turns out this is a place Cambridge students have flocked to for 100 years; The Orchard even offers a glossy brochure listing its famous tea-takers, beginning with Virginia Woolf and ending with John Cleese.

Closer to my own heart, they claim Alan Turing ‘first conceived’ the idea of Artificial Intelligence whilst strolling from Cambridge to The Orchard. I don’t entirely buy it: I’m no genius, but do I spend an inordinate amount of time daydreaming about computers, sci-fi, and othersuch nerdworthy nonsense, and I can say that bits, bytes, and computer cognizance were the last thing on my mind during that pleasant walk. To me, it’s like arguing that Thoreau penned Walden whilst riding the London Underground. Doesn’t jibe, somehow — but, then again, I’m no genius.