More on bitter ideals

Tashkent v. Moscow

New York v. New Orleans

Paris v. Vienna

What city would you choose?  For NJ Kpopper, the choices are stark and clear.  NJ Kpopper needs a feeling of loss, of nostalgia, of yearning.  Cities striving to regain past glories or struggling to overcome obstacles of history have room for the humans within them to breathe, collect their thoughts, and build up their own ideals.  Cities full of achievement and ambition become toxic due to their waste and vanity.  So, thumbs down to Moscow, New York, and Paris, and any other place that becomes a "magnet" for the world.  Does that rule out Seoul and Tokyo as well?  NJ Kpopper should consider carefully before making any further travel plans.

Remembrance of loss is necessary to awaken humility and curb human arrogance. After all Amir Temur Square used to have trees...

From Bunraku to Big Man Japan

So NJ Kpopper is thinking more about the earlier Japan post after finishing a cycle of Japanese film with Gan (Wild Geese).  It is true that for those far from Japan, what is Japanese to them consists of some kind of abstract representation of selected ideals.  That is quite far from what the lived experience for someone saturated in the reality of the place would see (e.g., Big Man Japan - half-joking :) ).

But do not cultures do this to themselves by holding up their own ideal but restrictive representations? - ukiyo, no, bunraku, kabuki in Japan, or list your favorite culture's examples here...[idealized history in Independence Day, День Победы, Navroʻz, Наадам].  At least the individual has the option of selecting their own personalized combination of ideal representations that mean something to them. Then later, if they encounter the reality, they can recast their impressions into a new fusion that hopefully balances bitter reality against some hopeful ideals.  Tashkent, Moscow... but that seems to be another idea for another post...

Baikal or Bust

NJ Kpopper has been moving further and further east, and some of the other steps along the way may or not make an appearance on this blog.  But it seems like the time has come for NJ Kpopper to journey to the center of the world, Lake Baikal.  Baikal, a twinkling heart oasis of oxygen, ideally reached by crossing leagues of Mongol steppe [have to break out my old Mongolian dictionaries and phrasebooks for that], seems like a final target that must be reached sooner than later. 

 Irkutsk, Ulan Ude, and Ulan Bator are not so far apart, relatively speaking.  Some discussion of Kyzyl and Tuva is coming in an upcoming post. Not this summer, but I am planting a flag for 2017.

Mittel Europa

Actually NJ Kpopper did go to London as a 7-year old, but doesn't really remember that.  He just has artificially reconstituted memories from looking at the photos of that trip.  And besides, it doesn't really count what with the shared language and all.

As a young teenager, I ended up in Austria taking side trips to Munich, Switzerland, Italy, and a few other spots.  Kind of a standard European experience, but one that at least set me on a path of seeking more experiences.  After college, another European tour that saw me swing in an arc from Paris to Vienna to Athens.  Because I was travelling alone, that trip left deeper memories.  Vienna was a special favorite, so aged and refined, along with the south of France because of a perfect combination of food and light.

Various other things brought me back to Munich and central Germany, which to me is a kind of comfort zone for my own view of the comfortable life in Europe - clean, well-kept, modest.

But I was still "oriented" towards the West at that point.  Later, Istanbul began to point me towards the east, and it seems I have never looked back from then on.

I have never felt a great desire to actually live in Europe.  Perhaps I am overwhelmed by the majority culture present in most places there, whereas in the US things are so fluid (at least where I live) that it is possible to avoid pigeonholing yourself and to continue to siphon up the best of what the world has to offer without ever settling on a single cultural definition like "German".  But I have to tip my hat to that Mittel Europa experience that started me on the global road.

Green Tea

I was just reminded recently that my first experience with Japanese Green Tea prepared from Matcha powder came when I was tutoring a Japanese student in the early 1990s.  It was at a thank you dinner from him and his wife, and was just a one time forgotten thing until I started getting into Matcha about a year ago or more.

I find that green tea is the stuff that will make me most awake, most alert, and most vibrant.  After years of coffee consumption, I am switching more and more to the green stuff.  And the more I get into it, the more I like higher and higher quality pure Japanese varieties like this Konacha powder.  Pure matcha is still only an occasional treat, but this stuff energizes my brain more than coffee.

[Although it may read like it, this is not a product placement :)

Japan

Another influence in life that NJ Kpopper is now beginning to understand better is the role of Japanese culture.  It is not something that I will ever fully experience or fully inhabit.  I will never learn the language and have a long term relationship with it like I have with Russian or French.  It is not even going to be one of those ever-present elements like Korean or Turkish.

Instead, there are very specific elements that fascinate me [including green tea].  Visually, I like whimsical Bento Boxes 

I like all of the variety and customizable of Japanese pens, pencils, and other writing gadgets - anything orange is especially good.

I like Japanese interior decorating style - clean and uncluttered.  I would like to have a Tatami room in the not too distant future.

But even with all of that, I am not a Japanophile.  I am indifferent to Japanese architecture, manga, or any of the other manifold expressions of culture in a general sense.  I don't feel that I want to move towards Japan in the same way that I would about Russia or Korea.  Maybe that is because of the famous Japanese xenophobia?  That I know I could never be accepted there, and therefore don't even consider the possibility?  Perhaps.

But...

Now we are getting to the point.  

But...

There are a few things about Japan that are turning out to be VERY important to me.

There are a couple of giants of Japanese literature: Mishima and Kawabata.  Mishima I have been reading and rereading for a long time.  Kawabata I only recently discovered.  They are quite different from each other in many ways, but the underlying fatalistic doomed ideals of perfection that seem to me to be at the center of their work is maybe the closest thing to my own artistic ideals.  And so I am clinging tightly to those particular works, such as Snow Country.  I have looked at a few other Japanese authors, and I really don't care for them much, so once again this is not a general thing.

Then there is Japanese film.  While contempary Japanese culture seems to be a few gems hidden in an ocean of weirdness [sometimes the gems are weird], there is a lot of good stuff if you look back to the past.  For the last year or so I have been on an intensive study of the classics of Japanese cinema, at least as collected by the Criterion collection.   

Since this is just a blog post, I would sum it up like this.  The collaboration of Naruse and Takamine represents the best of what film has to offer.  Naruse as a director mostly creates very close studies of the emotional world of women with an ultimately pessimistic worldview.  His visual language is extremely precise, but extremely subtle, and always serves the story.  Takamine is just gorgeous in an Elizabeth Taylor idol-like way, but with fantastic emotional depth.  Her acting prowess is not displayed in any one show-stopping scene, but builds power from small details that change from scene to scene as the movie progresses.  For example, Yearning. These movies are so good I can even get my family to sit still for them.

Also, I lost all respect for Akira Kurosawa after learning about how, later in life, he dissed Mifune, who was really the soul that animated Kurosawa's intellectual constructions.  

Who knows if I will ever go to Japan, but Mishima, Kawabata, Naruse, Takamine is enough for me!

Uzbek v. Mongolia bathrooms, Compare and Contrast

Only a very cynical person could watch this Harmogu video ten or more times until they were able to ignore the spectacular musical performance and start to focus on the physical background that it was filmed against.

But some people are just watchers, I guess.  If you look closely, you will notice the kind of single-hosed water environment that I first encountered in Uzbekistan, although I think it extends to many post-Soviet states.  For reasons of economy, the same tap serves to provide water to the sink and the bathtub. This is  a very sensible arrangement, once you think about it.  Along the way, please take a moment to appreciate the Dolce & Gabbana fragance prevalent in Uzbekistan circa 2003.

So seeing the piping in the backdrop of the Payphone music video induces a warm wave of nostalgia for me that only adds to the musical resonance of the song.  The song makes me reflect on my own life, which notably includes Uzbek bathroom experiences, and those reflections deepen the emotional impact of the song.  This perhaps helps explain a bit of why a Mongolian cover of an American song can have a deep hypnotic power over me when I am indifferent to more professionally produced versions.

Dead Prince

Prince died today.  One of the major musical presences of NJ Kpopper's adolescence.  More than just music, his insistence on creating a romantic fantasy world in movies and soundtracks like Purple Rain and Under the Cherry Moon had a major impact on me.  I made my Mom take me to Under the Cherry Moon, if I remember correctly (because I had no other options).  The semi-farcical, but still with underlying sincerity, nature of romance in Prince's world is one thing that has stayed with me.  And a lot of beautiful music at a very high level.

Prince's music somehow does not quite penetrate the inner circle of the most precious music in my world, the stuff that you would have to kill me first before taking it from me.  You don't see me walking around in Prince t-shirts or with Prince stickers on my stuff, like you would with other artists.  That is odd, given how much time I spent listening to Prince in my earlier days.  I think it has something to do with Prince being too talented, that he could just jam on anything he wanted to, and it would sound good.  He expressed himself beautifully, but didn't have to struggle for it to the same extreme degree that others did (not saying that he didn't work hard).

Certainly this makes me feel old when yet another influential figure (Bowie, Rick James, etc.) among musicians has left this world.  I know that I will be leaving this world soon too, and have to hurry up my preparations...

But it is in bad taste to gripe that Prince has not made my top 5 on the day that he died.  Let me say instead that I am so very grateful that his music helped shape who I am.  He tried to make the world a better place, and if everyone were to go back and watch Under the Cherry Moon with the spirit of a romantic 14 year old, they too would see that and overlook any flaws.

And I will leave this here for those who want a groove to grieve with.

Cajun Accordion

Why does NJ Kpopper respond when the harmonica calls?

I believe it is because I went through a period of investigating Cajun roots music that even led to the purchase of a Cajun accordion.  The vibrating reed tones are obviously quite similar.  And there is something about the in and out mechanism that encourages more emphasis on the rhythm at the core of the music (in comparison to say a clarinet, saxophone, or flute).  Saxophone - that is one instrument that does not speak to me - although it certainly seems popular with some.

Cajun music has its own direct and elemental earthiness, with the added bonus of mostly French lyrics.  Is it global slumming if you are slumming close to home?  Something about the phenomenon is the same.  The Cajun accordion, by being limited to one key, is unlike other accordion music that seems to just imitate say piano.  Being limited to that one series of notes forces the intensity to be dialed up in other ways.  To me that is somehow purer, and aspiring to the pure is one of those unattainable ideals at the heart of life anyway.

Other than noodling around a bit on that accordion when I'm in a strange mood (definitely soothing), I never really learned to play.  So I now I live vicariously through other's music.

Global Slummers

Looking back on the book This is Not Civilization, NJ Kpopper came across this review, which contains this interesting bit:

"At times it seems that Rosenberg uses his ethnic (for a lack of a better word) characters as nothing more than foil to demonstrate the stupidity and arrogance of white American middle class travelers and global slummers. This is a chronic trapping of this section of American society that travels, reflects upon their lack of cultural sensitivity with borderline obsession and ironically elevates themselves to a higher degree of pretension by becoming the self-effacing, self-aware middle class American who is chronically attune to his inability to really get anything."

The "global slummer" is a memorable shorthand for something that I think most travellers consciously or subconsciously fear becoming.  Better to be a "tourist of the mind" and continue to reconfigure one's own mental landscape until traditional boundaries are broken apart.  And better to make new culture than be defined by the old.

Landlocked countries of Central Asia: Compare and Contrast

Just putting this out there for comparison:

Documentary on Kyrgyzstan/Uzbekistan

Documentary on Mongolia

Seems like climate change is going to bring some harsh truths for all the world.  I hope it doesn't lead to fighting.  In the words of Rodney King, "Can we all get along? Can we get along? Can we stop making it horrible for the older people, and the kids?"

I hope we can get behind that kind of sentiment to just a tiny degree.  I am such a coward.  I saw someone idling their car in an NJ parking lot for more than an hour on a perfectly mild spring day, just to maintain some kind of idealized "climate control", and yet I couldn't bring myself to say something to them.  We'll see about whether "climate control" is possible in the next decade.

I love the emphasis on the ritual snuff sniffing in the Mongolia video.  Snuff is such a complex topic, dating back to the early days of English tobacco consumption.  I can imagine Richardson taking a pinch to aide his writer's cramp from endless pages of Clarissa.  My own tobacco cessation took a long detour through the snuff-lands and the traditional English snuff producers.  Sniffing snuff has a lot of positive aspects in comparison to smoking or dipping, as long as one has a lot of hankies on hand...

It is so intriguing to observe the snuff-bottles preferred in Mongolia (as originally introduced through China).  More than intriguing, it induces a desire to start collecting those snuff bottles, as I came perilously close to doing.  Instead, I quit tobacco altogether.  I hope that was the right decision...

NJ Kpopper is blogging!

NJ Kpopper may appear to be an inanimate bear from his profile photo, but that is only because it is a poor likeness.  NJ Kpopper actually has thoughts, and has decided to put a few of them on the web for public consumption.  Somehow, in contrast to all previous training, NJ Kpopper has come to believe that now is the time to let the "freak flag fly" than to remain quiet and conform.  This blog will probably mostly be about things other than Kpop, which doesn't require a lot of analysis to enjoy!

So this blog is going to be a collection of random public thoughts that correspond to private communications and creative processes.  Hope no one gets hurt along the way.