The White Peril 白禍

Okay, I know that complaining about Salon's culture criticism is pointless, so this is kind of like shooting fish in a barrel. Dead fish. But still, there's something unusually dunderheaded about this whine about how Gwen Stefani and others don't understand the Asian iconography they're appropriating:

They shadow her wherever she goes. They're on the cover of the album, they appear behind her on the red carpet, she even dedicates a track, "Harajuku Girls," to them. In interviews, they silently vogue in the background like living props; she, meanwhile, likes to pretend that they're not real but only a figment of her imagination. They're ever present in her videos and performances — swabbing the deck aboard the pirate ship, squatting gangsta style in a high school gym while pumping their butts up and down, simpering behind fluttering hands or bowing to Stefani. That's right, bowing. Not even from the waist, but on the ground in a "we're not worthy, we're not worthy" pose. She's taken Tokyo hipsters, sucked them dry of all their street cred, and turned them into China dolls. [Am I the only one who wants to blow groceries when people use words like hipsters and street cred with no irony?--SRK]

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Stefani fawns over harajuku style in her lyrics, but her appropriation of this subculture makes about as much sense as the Gap selling Anarchy T-shirts; she's swallowed a subversive youth culture in Japan and barfed up another image of submissive giggling Asian women. While aping a style that's suppose to be about individuality and personal expression, Stefani ends up being the only one who stands out.

Sweetie? How 'bout you try this? Go to Harajuku. Watch the way Harajuku girls actually behave. You will see them acting just as giggly, catty, and coy around cute boys as teenaged girls anywhere else. They use the same helium voices as other good Japanese girls, too. In fact, you can think of it this way. Which of the following do you think Harajuku girls more aspire to be like?

1. Gwen Stefani, who has millions of fans, makes millions of dollars, is fawned over by stylists and journalists, designs her own line of clothes, and used to screw Gavin Rossdale
   
2. A leftish SF journalist who sulks that Asians aren't being presented soulfully enough in pop culture and seems not to have been sassy enough to put a bigot in his place when he condescended to her

Remember, Japan is a culture that really, seriously values surfaces. That's not to say that Harajuku girls' sense of style isn't fun and invigorating, but I think it's safe to say that it's mostly a fashion thing and really isn't about the sort of full-on punkish rebellion that it might be among teenagers in the West. (The really disaffected Japanese kids are either locking themselves in their rooms or attacking classmates with knives.) And there's just as much insider conformity visible among Harajuku girls as there is in any other Japanese group; that some of them have rejected the larger exam-hell scheme their parents might like them to stick with doesn't change that.

Personally, I find Stefani's new music and videos annoying. I think her use of her entourage is a rather witty way of making the same oddly-humble point Madonna made 15 years ago in the "Vogue" video, though: a star is a star because she's surrounded by people whom she depends on, utterly, to help make her one. Of course Stefani ends up being the only one who stands out. Pop music thrives on groups of anonymous backing singers and dancers whose sole duty is to magnify the charisma of the headliner. I'm sure her four back-ups are at least being paid pretty well for the job they do, and it probably beats temping or meat packing.

Making them speak only Japanese is a bit on the cute side (it's not geisha-like, either, since geiko were trained in multiple art forms and expected to make intelligent conversation on whatever topics their clients raised). Then again, I can see how the effect might be ruined if Love and Angel were seen slouching around and saying things like, "Oh, wow. That guy over there? With the press pass and the hair in his eyes? I think I know him? Uh, from sophomore year at Oberlin? Before I became, you know, a performance artist?"

Speaking of enjoying the city, I think I'll take the new Garbage album and listen to it for the first time while walking up Meiji Avenue, with the machines being used to build the redundant new subway line hulking alongside. and a lot of very large, garish billboards on strategic corners. Shirley in her natural habitat.

I normally don't talk this way, but...

Man, I'm old.

Look at this:

My partner of 12 years, Alison Maddex, gave birth to a baby boy in November 2002 — Lucien Harry Maddex. I am Lucien's adoptive parent — but certainly NOT his mother! Alison is Lucien's one and only mother. That "Heather Has Two Mommies" business gives me the creeps! — and it can only confuse a kid.

12 years?! Oy. I remember when that relationship was all rumor--Paglia's a local celeb in Philadelphia, and I was in college at the time.

Of course, she talks about a bunch of things: the absence of poets from the pop-culture landscape and the limitations of blogging in helping people develop as writers among them.

Watch yourself, Amritas. Not even a dear buddy like you is going to get away with sideswiping Kylie. I know an insinuation when I see one. (Additionally, the idea of a straight guy who's so busy looking at pious plucked chickens like Brad Pitt and Bono that he doesn't notice Kylie on-stage is frying my brain serious-big-time. ;) ) Whether she understands free markets in general as well as she knows how to market herself, I do not know; on the evidence of this particular charity she supports, probably not. But, you know, I've been a Madonna fan for twenty years. I'm used to adoring a diva's music and videos while simultaneously wishing she'd stop offering opinions about what life must be like for anyone with a fortune of less than US$200 million.

Speaking of Kylie...well, we'll get back to Kylie. I'll start by saying that, if you're looking for a song to escape into through your headphones while on an inbound Tokyo commuter train at 8:30 a.m., "Rush Hour" by Jane Wiedlin is a very bad choice. Yeah, I know--the lyrics are metaphorical. Somehow, "Feel it gettin' hot in here / Feel me gettin' close to you, dear" does not feel metaphorical when it's one of the first warm mornings of spring and you're jammed against a middle-aged salaryman who clearly took his last cigarette puff immediately before boarding. I tried closing my eyes and picturing the video, which was all zooming dolphins and stuff, but it didn't work.

Oh, yeah, and while I'm on the subject of Jane: Yoo-hoo! Mr. Three-Word-Dismissal? Vacation did not suck. NOT. Five of the songs sucked, but that's out of twelve. It's worth it for "Worlds Away" alone, one of the best songs to take a solitary bath to ever.

Now, Kylie, she's got some good bathtub songs, but her single from a few months ago, "I Believe in You"? Perfection as a crowded-train song. You could say to yourself, "I'm not actually being crushed to death by enough people to staff an oil tanker squeezed into a space the size of my entryway. I'm standing alone in a cage of abstract neon tubing, with such a lot of invitingly cool, dark space around me, singing devotional lyrics and making climbing-ivy hand gestures of serene ecstasy." It just took one jab from an umbrella to bring you out of it, but it was a nice place to float off to.

It was kind of weird to look at one of ASV Michele's recent posts of downloadable songs. Among them, the last of the four, was "Possession" by Sarah McLachlan. Good grief--the flashbacks! I still listen to most of the stuff I liked in college occasionally, so it doesn't feel frozen in 1991-95.

But "Possession" was one of those songs you didn't have to own. It was on college radio all the time. All your arty women friends had the album. (They loved that horrible flippin' song near the end that went, "Your love is better than a butterscotch sundae with extra marshmallows," or whatever, too. Girls can be such chicks sometimes.) Every a capella group that had women soloists performed it.

Personally, I already had a favorite smart-folk-Canadian
-woman-adds-hip-hop-rhythms-to-her-neuroses-circa-1993 album, so I wasn't all that impressed. Anyway, I don't know what I'd think of the whole album now, but hearing the single for the first time in 10 years...wow. What a beautifully-modulated song. Pretty and creepy in just the right proportions. Perfect for listening to at night in a darkened apartment. Well, assuming you're not in the middle of an unrequited obsession in real life, in which case that's probably not such a good idea. Personally, I find it strangely comforting, since when it was out, I still had no idea I was a repressed homosexual and was figuring I'd become one of those professors who never fall in love with anything but their books. I'm glad I ended up with books and an Atsushi, if not the professorship.

Those who know Yukio Mishima's 仮面の告白 (kamen no kokuhaku: "Confessions of a Mask") may be interested in this (English, Japanese):

A diary that novelist Yukio Mishima kept when he was a student is believed to have provided material for his later novels, contradicting previous theories on his works.

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"Railway fare, 1 yen," and "Nikkan Sports (a sport newspaper), 0.5 yen," the diary partially reads.

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In the diary he kept from 1946 to 1947, Mishima described in detail his efforts to become a novelist, his relations with another famous novelist, Osamu Dazai, and his reunion with a woman believed to be the model of Sonoko, a woman in his masterpiece, "Kamen-no-Kokuhaku (Confession of a Mask)."

...

In the novel, after the main character rebuffs Sonoko's advances, she marries another man, but they are subsequently reunited.

Well, you could kind of put it that way. Here's a hurried translation from part of the café reunion scene, in which Sonoko tells the protagonist that she still doesn't understand what kept him from marrying her:

[Warning: clunky literalness below!]

At that point, my eye was drawn to one of them. He was a very rough-looking, swarthily handsome youth--22 or 23. He was shirtless, and he was retying a white loincloth, dingy and moist with sweat, around his waist. All the while, his chatter and laughter with his friends went on, and he seemed to be purposefully taking his time about winding the cloth band. The thick, taut swells of muscle on his chest were on brazen display; downward from the center of his chest fell more solid bands of muscle, deeply ridged. On his left and right sides were thick chains of flesh, like fast rope bindings. Around this smooth, hot mass of a torso the bleached loincloth was being wound and pulled tight. His naked suntanned shoulders glistened as if oiled. From the hollows of his armpits peeked a black thicket that threw off the sunlight in a glinting gold tangle.

Seeing these things--seeing, above all, the tatoo of a peony on his toned upper arm--I was assailed by lust. My feverish gaze was fixed on this rough, barbaric--this uncommonly beautiful--body. He was laughing beneath the sun. When he threw his head back, he showed the swell of his Adam's apple. A dangerous flutter ran beneath my chest. I couldn't tear my eyes away from him.

I'd forgotten that Sonoko existed.

In fact, much of the book is like this: the progtagonist lusts after the nightsoil man, an athletic boy at school, and a print of St. Sebastian. Gay humanists frequently make a big to-do about homosexual content that doesn't really seem to be there, but there's no mistaking it in 仮面の告白. Of course, it's no surprise that a Japanese newspaper would glide over it. For one thing, a lot of people still take the line that there's no homosexuality here. (I'll wait for you to stop laughing. Done? Okay.) For another, describing the book accurately might be skirting close to commenting on Mishima's own sexuality. This is, after all, a country in which you can find articles about Mutsuo Takahashi that don't mention his sexuality.