The White Peril 白禍

There's a post at Right Reason about gay marriage. I know--the topic has been flogged to death already, but Steve Burton's post brings the topic back to some of the underlying social-fabric issues that can sometimes get lost as the debate gets pickier. The commenters also don't suffer fools gladly, so if you can still stand the topic, it's worth a read.

There's also a post that links to this piece about Julia Child as culinary conservative. Interesting, although if all cooks had followed known tradition and authority and been afraid to jump off a few cliffs, we might not have, say fugu in aspic. Or--generalizing beyond cooking--countries, such as ours, populated by venturesome immigrants.

The Julia Child thing reminds me of when I was growing up. We'd come home from services on Saturday evenings, and Julia Child and Company would be on PBS some time around sunset. Later, there would be Mystery!, which I loved even as a small boy. I'm not sure what it says about me that I was that keen on watching a show where people were murdered all the time, but I maintain that the draw was the restoration of the moral order at the end of every episode.

Anyway, the Mystery Channel in Japan has just launched and is part of my cable subscription, so I've encountered the odd nostalgic rerun--A Touch of Frost and the Joan Hickson Miss Marples and the like. (Not all of them are nostalgic. P.D. James couldn't plot her way out of a paper bag, so I quickly bail if I realize I'm watching a dramatization of one of her coherence-free Dalgliesh porridges.) The other day, it got me thinking about a Mystery! series--one of the many British imports--that was broadcast when I was in elementary school. Since I had the laptop here open, I decided to see whether that nice Mr. Google could tell me anything.

Man, there is nothing you can't find on the Internet now. All I'd remembered was that it was about a writer whose wife's Mini Cooper crashes, and that she's taken to a place called the Meadowbank Clinic and held there while her alkie husband tries to figure out what's happening to her. Looking for it, I came upon this page, which not only described the whole thing in impressive detail ("The Limbo Connection"--that's right!) but also reminded me of another series I'd completely forgotten.

It was called "Quiet as a Nun." In it, there's a convent being stalked by a phantom nun who blacks her face out with a fabric mask. The site has a video clip of the climactic moment when the protagonist, your typical girlie but plucky suspense-story heroine, decides to go up into one of the towers looking for the Black Nun. She finds her, all right. shivers Watching it again thrilled every fiber of my gay being.

If you (1) majored in poetry and (2) are a Madonna fan, life can be very cruel. It's not just that she sometimes produces lines that could have been written while she was waiting for a bus. (Imagine Madonna waiting for a bus! I'll wait for your peals of laughter to die down.) I actually don't mind the sort of time-honored placeholders that rhyme "burning fire" with "my desire" and the like. They've become conventions, and every art or craft form needs conventions.

Thing with Madge is, she's often ten times worse when she actually seems to want to say something of importance. I think my favorite thing on the new album is "Jump," which is one of her always-charming songs about navigating through life with pluck and determination. There's one on every Madonna album somewhere, and she always pours feeling into it.

This is the second verse of this year's model:

We learned our lesson from the start
My sisters and me
The only thing you can depend on
Is your family
Life's gonna drop you down
Like the limbs of a tree
It sways and it swings and it bends
until it makes you see

The top four lines are fine. Unimaginative, but sincere-sounding.

The bottom four? I just...I don't...I have this thing, okay? I can't read a poem or listen to lyrics without trying to interpret them, and I am getting a serious cognitive short circuit here. It sounds as if "life" is what's supposed to be parallel with "the limbs of a tree," but it could be "you" instead. Is she comparing you to dead limbs being dropped by the tree? Dead leaves? The latter would be nicely seasonal, but they don't have a whole lot of the life force she's obviously trying to project. Maybe she's telling her fans we're all fruits (as if we didn't already know)?

Or maybe we're supposed to be kitty cats who have climed up the tree and have to take the risk of jumping off even though the...uh...wind is blowing? That would make sense given the chorus--but what would the tree be making you see by swaying, of all things? Does swaying make trees more instructive, somehow? You'd think that would have stuck in the memory during life science class in eighth grade. And how much bending around does the poor tree have to do until you see whatever it is you're supposed to see? I guess the other possibility is that the verse is supposed to work as a whole, so it's a family tree we're dealing with. Do family trees sway? I thought she just said family was the only thing that was stable.

This song is going to be so much easier to handle in a disco while surrounded by cute boys, fueled by a vodka or two, and moving it under seizure-inducing colored lights.

What I love most about Madonna as a lyricist is her inventiveness with language, the way she's constantly stretching her idiolect to accommodate new contours in her idiosyncratic inner world.

For example, this is the chorus to "I Love New York" from the new album:

Other cities always make me mad
Other places always make me sad
No other city ever made me glad
Except New York
I love New York

It's like you're privy to her most private thoughts, huh?

Okay, enough with the deadpanning. WTF? I could have written that. In fact, I think I did write it--in first grade when Miss Cramer gave us an assignment that was, like, "Write a poem describing where you'll live after you grow up and decide you're too fabulous for the Lehigh Valley." Maybe Lourdes was helping Mommy at work that day?

Madonna's intelligence is generally, uh, of the non-verbal variety, and that's okay--she's a musician and dancer primarily. Her lyrics are almost never graceful--she likes clunky metaphors and lines that scan dicily--but when she's at her best, they're punchy and immediate. Frequently (as above), she's at both her best and her worst in the space of the same song. Of course, maddeningly enough, I love "I Love New York" to death. It's just, I swear I can feel that chorus making me dumber every time I hear it.

So I got this e-mail from my buddy Alan yesterday, asking whether I had any advice on improving reading comprehension in Japanese. It seemed odd. For one thing, his characteristic "Hiya darlin'" salutation was missing, and for another, he essentially works as a translator. If my reading comprehension is better than his--big if--it's not by much. It's certainly not by enough for him to be asking my advice about improving it.

But, having been asked, I wrote a paragraph of very earthy bitch-snark about the gross guy who'd been hitting on him when we were out a few nights ago and then a paragraph about reading fluently. Then I did what everyone who sends a lot of work-related e-mail does out of force of habit before clicking on "Send": I checked the address line. Whoops! The message had come from a different Alan, a reader with whom I've corresponded a few times who's studying Japanese in the States and who most assuredly was not sitting on the stool next to me being come on to by a falling-down-drunk guy in his 50s on Friday night. So I carefully excised the paragraph of bitch-snark and sent the rest along, thus sparing a fortunate reader a serious surprise in his inbox.

The surprise Atsushi got in his mailbox yesterday, on the other hand, was intentional. He's been worked to death lately, but he still makes time to come home at least once every third weekend, so I thought I'd get him a new business card case. You know, so even if he's meeting with trying clients, he can have a little reminder that I'm thinking about him. While I was at Seibu, it occurred to me that I forget to bring my own business cards places all the time--that constitutes a real problem in Japan, where exchanging them can be a multiple-times-a-day event--so I may as well pick one up for myself, too. The idea of his-and-his matching card cases struck me as a bit on the cute side, but...well, this is Japan. Cute rules. I absent-mindedly told the saleswoman to wrap them both as presents, and she looked at me askance. Probably thought they were Christmas presents for two girlfriends who don't know about each other.

Atsushi's officemates, on the other hand, will doubtless assume that the sudden appearance of an expensive new business card case is yet more evidence that he has a secret lady friend. A few years ago, when he brought Mozart chocolates back as his souvenir gift from our trip to Prague and Vienna, his colleagues joked that he must have gone with a chick because, as a man, he wouldn't have known about them. (Too precious, I guess? But the travel guides all tell you what the proper face-maintaining souvenirs to bring back to Japan are, and I would assume most single men just kind of get whatever's at the top of the list. I can't imagine Mozart chocolates aren't at the top of the Austria list, even if you don't do Salzburg, though I didn't really look. My own office got the Empress Elisabeth chocolates--I like the apricot and marzipan together--but they've known all about me from day one, so no eyebrows were raised. Need I mention that if we'd brought back anything but Mozart or Sissi for our gay friends, our status would never have recovered?)

I wonder whether the Dominican Republic--I've mentioned that I have a meeting there next month, yeah?--has any Japan-ready souvenir candy things. A sugar cane theme, maybe? If it's been a resort center long enough, getting them shipped back ahead of me so I don't have to carry them might be easy, but I don't think it has. Since I'm going home to the States, too, I'll probably bring back Jelly Bellys. They went over big when Atsushi and I brought them back two years ago. I have no idea why; they're just jelly beans, for crying out loud, even if you can mix them together to taste like pears poached in port with crème chantilly and slivered almonds, or whatever.

Speaking of desserts based on fall fruits, I have to think of something to make for Thanksgiving this weekend. Atsushi can't be home on Thursday, of course, but he's coming on Saturday. Our first Thanksgiving together was in 2001, so it's been obvious from the get-go that I'm not blasé about it the way I am other holidays. Maybe I'll even look into getting a turkey, though convincing Atsushi to take out a second mortgage might take some doing. And I'd have to dismember it to get it into the oven. But considering what the Pilgrims went through, the trial of shoehorning a farmed turkey into a little portable oven is hardly worth fussing over.

I hope no one has read this far expecting me to make a point. I've been a bit nettled lately by people praising Atsushi and me for maintaining a long-distance relationship and vaguely thought that might come up organically here, but we seem to have ended up on Plimouth Plantation exchanging business cards and faking Indian cornmeal pudding from three flavors of Jelly Bellys, so maybe I should save that for another post. (Yes, by the way, this is exactly what living with me is like.)

Yoo-hoo! Madonna? You're a native speaker of English. STOP OVER-PRONOUNCING YOUR Rs LIKE AN EXCESSIVELY EARRRRRRNEST ESL STUDENT! Okay?

I did like this part, though: "If you don't like my attitude then you can F off / Just go to Texas--isn't that where they golf?" Heh-heh. Funny.

Atsushi was here this weekend, one of his short stays--in the door at 11 a.m. on Saturday and on the train back to the airport at 5 p.m. on Sunday. But he's been stressed lately, so it was good to be able to attend to him, even if only for thirty-six hours. We went to the Meiji Shrine, where the leaves hadn't yet turned but the wooded walk was beautiful as always. Saturday night, we went out with two friends for Korean barbecue.

Actually, come to think of it, we went for drinks at a Scottish-themed pub first, so I guess we were subconciously working a peninsular-peoples-persecuted-by-their-more-aggressive-neighbors kind of thing. When I asked where the toilet was, one of the bar guys (Japanese) gave me the most frankly lascivious once-over I've gotten in quite a while--and it wasn't a gay bar, BTW. Must be the influence of that fiery Celtic spirit.

Anyway, about more literal kinds of fire: Several months back Japundit linked to this NYT article about Korean restaurants in New York, and it made me wonder anew why they haven't caught on more. That Korean food in Korea is way hotter than what most Westerners are going to want to contend with isn't a difficult problem to address, after all. And unlike the Japanese food that was made fashionable, which emphasized raw flesh and bizarre creatures of the deep, Korean barbecue and rice dishes are comparatively, comfortingly familiar-looking to Americans. Oh, and they're delicious--the stuff in Japan is toned down, but it's still spicy enough to be stimulating. Great cold-weather food. And as far as the service goes...uh, complaints about brusque service in New York? Whatever.

The one problem I can see is when the hot stone bowls and open-fire cooking hit America's skittish-schoolmarm safety obsession. On Saturday, Atsushi, our friends, and I sat around a gas-lit brazier in the middle of the table, spreading sliced beef, chicken, and vegetables over the metal grid. It was all you can drink. We drank. Well, except for Atsushi, who doesn't.

So after an hour or so, there were three tipsy fags flinging rounds of beef tongue rather sloppily over the flames. (I was reminded--frankly but not at all lasciviously--that I was the only one with hair on the backs of his hands that might get singed. A little lasciviousness might actually have been nice at this point, given that the reminder was coming from my boyfriend, but he's not big on even mild PDAs.) A lot of those last pieces of kalbi were probably just a little more well-done than they might have been under more alert supervision, but hey, it all goes to the same place. Good weekend, and Atushi gets to come home again the Saturday after Thanksgiving.

Am I the only one who's noticed an awful lot of guys running around Tokyo in charcoal grey suits + pointed tan shoes that...you know...TOTALLY DON'T GO TOGETHER?

What's up? This has been over, I'd say, the last two or three weeks. Did some popular TV drama feature an actor in that kind of get-up in a pivotal scene? Did Donatella Versace send models down the runway that way? Did Men's Non-no do a five-page feature (complete with bossy pictorial how-to's) on healing the rift between antiqued brown leather and grey wool?

The look is utterly hein, and I can only hope it passes quickly. (When cocoa brown + black--both of which at least have cool, blue undertones to unite them--came in a decade ago, it was here for-flippin'-ever.) There are far better reasons to think about taking men's clothing off than that it's COMPLETELY HIDEOUS. Please, just stop.

Remember about eighteen years ago when Madonna had three number one singles off True Blue and the people complaining about her realized she wasn't a flash in the pan and were all like, "Damn! She's going to be pushing fifty and still shaking her T&A at us in music videos"? Lo, it has come to pass. Good grief, is she limber. But I kind of prefer the part where she's striding through the city...perhaps imitating Kylie striding through the city in "Giving You Up"...who was perhaps imitating Madonna striding through a cityscape/fantasy skyway surrounded by fairies* in "Love Profusion." Or the part where she's dancing in the club...sort of like Kylie in "Spinning Around"...which is sort of like Madge in "Deeper and Deeper" but much more pleasing to look at. All these circular references may be dizzying, but tracking them is much more fun than paying attention to what Madonna says these days when she stops singing and shimmying and starts talking.

* By which I refer to the presence of tiny CGI wingèd spirits, not of backup dancers.