Redirection
I have a rant on visa requirements (a follow up to my piece on this blog on being able to walk over the bridge from Germany to Poland) over at Samizdata, and a piece on the Sydney Swans and their ghastly final quarter in their preliminary final over at ubersportingpundit. (This last piece will be of utterly no interest to people who do not follow Australian rules football).
I'm an Aussie presently living in London. This blog normally consists of my random thoughts on a variety of subjects, ranging from politics to telecommunications technology, movies cricket, urban design, beer, cheese, and whatever else comes into my head.
Saturday, September 20, 2003
Friday, September 19, 2003
On borders, the gender of German rivers, and not visiting Poland.
There are certain species of independent traveller. One of these is what is known as a "border freak". A border freak is someone who feels the urge to visit as many countries as possible. If he is getting closer to the border with another country, a certain urge to cross the border into that country starts to overcome him. It doesn't really matter what the country is. Visiting anything in that actual country isn't the issue. The point is simply entering the country.
Some people take this to extremes. Your real border freak will swim a crocodile infested river, before crawling through a jungle filled with landmines in order to enter some country not normally open to foreigners. Having done this, he will then crawl back without actually looking at anything.
I am not an extreme example. But I do feel certain urges in this direction occasionally. Which is why on Monday I found myself on a train from Berlin to Franfurt an der Oder, a town to the east of Berlin. The River Oder marks the border between Germany and Poland. As it happens, I had been there before.
In 1992, I went on my first substantial solo trip. The central European places I visited were a little dodgier than anywhere I had been before. (Today they are all a piece of cake. In fact, they weren't in reality very dodgy in 1992. They just felt that way to me at the time). I flew to Berlin, and then via a series of train rides went to Warsaw, Prague, and Budapest, before a bit of travel in rural hungary with an insane Californian television journalist I had met at random, and then by boat down the Danube to Vienna, from where I flew back to London. (Although Western, Vienna was and probably is in reality the dodgiest place I visited on the whole trip, although I didn't understand the subtleties of this at the time).
In any event, after a few days in Berlin, I set of for Warsaw. The overnight train left from Berlin Ostbahnhof, the main train station for long distance trains in the former East Berlin. Not much rebuilding had occurred in East Germany since the wall had come down, and the station was dark and dilapidated. The train was an dirty old diesel thing with "DR" (Deutsche Reichsbahn) on the side rather than the "DBB" (Deutsche Bundesbahn) written on the more sparkling Western trains. I was heading east into the void.
As it happened, the first stop of the train was at Frankfurt an der Oder, after which there were passport checks. The Polish smugglers with who I was sharing a train compartment bribed the customs officers, and we went on into Poland. (The Polish smugglers story remains one of my best travel tales to this day, but it is not the one I am telling here).
And so Frankfurt an der Oder remained one of those places that I had visited in a physical sense but had never visited in most more practical senses. Its more famous namesake, Frankfurt am Main, also fits into this category, as I have landed at the airport and even changed planes and gone through immigration there on a number of occasions, but I have never left the airport. (The river Oder is feminine whereas the river Main is masculine, which is why the words for "on the" are different for the two rivers. See "Grammatical Gender is stupid").
In any event, when in Berlin this last week, I thought it would be nice to see somewhere outside Berlin. I went to Potsdam (which I had also not visited in 2002) but while this is technically a separate city, in practice it is part of the Berlin metropolitan area, although this is complicated by the fact that until 1989 Potsdam (being to the west of Berlin but in east Germany) was in a different country to the parts of Berlin close to it. However, I also wanted to go somewhere further afield. And that Frankfurt place I had been through at night in 1992 seemed as good a place as any. So I bought a ticket to Frankfurt and hopped on a train.
But of course, there was another factor in this. It was my border freak tendencies calling me. I knew that full consumation of my desires in this department could not take place, as Australian citizens require a visa to enter Poland I didn't have one, and it certainly wasn't worth the cost and hassle of obtaining one just so that I could cross into Poland, sit down in a restaurant and have a meal and a couple of beers, and walk back again. But the border drew me just the same.
But anyway, I went to Frankfurt. It was a perfectly nice little Prussian town in a river valley, I wandered around the streets a bit, and down to the Oder. The river was not especially wide, and it didn't look like a great barrier to anything much.
If I had really wanted to cross into Poland, it did not appear that it would have been hard to walk downstream a little, and swim across. (I have no idea whether the banks of the river were fortified in any way to prevent this. Perhaps there might have been something). However, I was certainly not going to do this. All I could do was enviously watch all those Polish and German people with shopping bags who walked onto the border control area on one side of the bridge, flashed their ID cards, and then walked on. I knew that if I tried to cross the same bridge, I would be turned back. And that made me sad.
So to drown my sorrows I went to an outdoor cafe on an open square in Frankfurt and ordered a weizenbier and some food. I put 10 euros or so into the German rather than the Polish economy. It was their loss. But also mine, as I would have liked to have visited Poland.
There are certain species of independent traveller. One of these is what is known as a "border freak". A border freak is someone who feels the urge to visit as many countries as possible. If he is getting closer to the border with another country, a certain urge to cross the border into that country starts to overcome him. It doesn't really matter what the country is. Visiting anything in that actual country isn't the issue. The point is simply entering the country.
Some people take this to extremes. Your real border freak will swim a crocodile infested river, before crawling through a jungle filled with landmines in order to enter some country not normally open to foreigners. Having done this, he will then crawl back without actually looking at anything.
I am not an extreme example. But I do feel certain urges in this direction occasionally. Which is why on Monday I found myself on a train from Berlin to Franfurt an der Oder, a town to the east of Berlin. The River Oder marks the border between Germany and Poland. As it happens, I had been there before.
In 1992, I went on my first substantial solo trip. The central European places I visited were a little dodgier than anywhere I had been before. (Today they are all a piece of cake. In fact, they weren't in reality very dodgy in 1992. They just felt that way to me at the time). I flew to Berlin, and then via a series of train rides went to Warsaw, Prague, and Budapest, before a bit of travel in rural hungary with an insane Californian television journalist I had met at random, and then by boat down the Danube to Vienna, from where I flew back to London. (Although Western, Vienna was and probably is in reality the dodgiest place I visited on the whole trip, although I didn't understand the subtleties of this at the time).
In any event, after a few days in Berlin, I set of for Warsaw. The overnight train left from Berlin Ostbahnhof, the main train station for long distance trains in the former East Berlin. Not much rebuilding had occurred in East Germany since the wall had come down, and the station was dark and dilapidated. The train was an dirty old diesel thing with "DR" (Deutsche Reichsbahn) on the side rather than the "DBB" (Deutsche Bundesbahn) written on the more sparkling Western trains. I was heading east into the void.
As it happened, the first stop of the train was at Frankfurt an der Oder, after which there were passport checks. The Polish smugglers with who I was sharing a train compartment bribed the customs officers, and we went on into Poland. (The Polish smugglers story remains one of my best travel tales to this day, but it is not the one I am telling here).
And so Frankfurt an der Oder remained one of those places that I had visited in a physical sense but had never visited in most more practical senses. Its more famous namesake, Frankfurt am Main, also fits into this category, as I have landed at the airport and even changed planes and gone through immigration there on a number of occasions, but I have never left the airport. (The river Oder is feminine whereas the river Main is masculine, which is why the words for "on the" are different for the two rivers. See "Grammatical Gender is stupid").
In any event, when in Berlin this last week, I thought it would be nice to see somewhere outside Berlin. I went to Potsdam (which I had also not visited in 2002) but while this is technically a separate city, in practice it is part of the Berlin metropolitan area, although this is complicated by the fact that until 1989 Potsdam (being to the west of Berlin but in east Germany) was in a different country to the parts of Berlin close to it. However, I also wanted to go somewhere further afield. And that Frankfurt place I had been through at night in 1992 seemed as good a place as any. So I bought a ticket to Frankfurt and hopped on a train.
But of course, there was another factor in this. It was my border freak tendencies calling me. I knew that full consumation of my desires in this department could not take place, as Australian citizens require a visa to enter Poland I didn't have one, and it certainly wasn't worth the cost and hassle of obtaining one just so that I could cross into Poland, sit down in a restaurant and have a meal and a couple of beers, and walk back again. But the border drew me just the same.
But anyway, I went to Frankfurt. It was a perfectly nice little Prussian town in a river valley, I wandered around the streets a bit, and down to the Oder. The river was not especially wide, and it didn't look like a great barrier to anything much.
If I had really wanted to cross into Poland, it did not appear that it would have been hard to walk downstream a little, and swim across. (I have no idea whether the banks of the river were fortified in any way to prevent this. Perhaps there might have been something). However, I was certainly not going to do this. All I could do was enviously watch all those Polish and German people with shopping bags who walked onto the border control area on one side of the bridge, flashed their ID cards, and then walked on. I knew that if I tried to cross the same bridge, I would be turned back. And that made me sad.
So to drown my sorrows I went to an outdoor cafe on an open square in Frankfurt and ordered a weizenbier and some food. I put 10 euros or so into the German rather than the Polish economy. It was their loss. But also mine, as I would have liked to have visited Poland.
On some recent travel to Germany, as detailed on my own blog, I looked sadly across the river Oder, unhappy that I could not walk across the bridge into Poland, but unable to do so due to the requirement that people travelling on Australian passports (such as myself) require a visa to enter Australia. In terms of immigration (at least for tourism and business that does not involve you actually living an being paid a salary in the country you are visiting) the world can normally be divided into two groups of countries: rich and poor. "Rich" consists of the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the EU and other countries in Europe that either could have joined the EU but haven't (ie Iceland, Norway, and Switzerland) or are too small to (Andorra, Monaco, that kind of thing), Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan. "Poor" is everyone else. (There are a few countries in Asia, South America and Eastern Europe that have almost made it into "rich", and heaven knows how you categorise South Africa).
If you come from a poor country, you generally need a visa to visit any other country, although sometimes exceptions are made for countries adjacent to where you live. If people ar
If you come from a poor country, you generally need a visa to visit any other country, although sometimes exceptions are made for countries adjacent to where you live. If people ar
Sometimes I love the English
I learn that pop star Dido's real name is not in fact Dido. Okay, I could have suspected that, although given that Madonna is really named Madonna and Prince is really named Prince, maybe not. However, here real name is "Florian Cloud de Bounevialle Armstrong", which I think is actually quite cool.
I learn that pop star Dido's real name is not in fact Dido. Okay, I could have suspected that, although given that Madonna is really named Madonna and Prince is really named Prince, maybe not. However, here real name is "Florian Cloud de Bounevialle Armstrong", which I think is actually quite cool.
Thursday, September 18, 2003
Search engine queries, and redirection
I think I might suggest developing a genuine enthusiasm for the game of cricket in advance. While on that, I have a piece at Ubersportingpundit that hopefully contributes to the discussion started by Steven Den Beste on sports that don't favour particular body types.
I think I might suggest developing a genuine enthusiasm for the game of cricket in advance. While on that, I have a piece at Ubersportingpundit that hopefully contributes to the discussion started by Steven Den Beste on sports that don't favour particular body types.
Food
Like Josh Chafetz and Eugene Volokh, I am also fond of smoked salmon. However, I don't tend to do much with it. I just prefer eating it straight, with some cheese (Sainsbury's supermarkets in the UK sell a lovely blue brie) and maybe some plain water crackers. Bagels have never done anything for me, although I never encountered them until I was an adult. I have tried smoked salmon on a bagel with cream cheese the way Josh describes, but I think I prefer it without the bagel.
Normally when I say something like this, people respond by saying "It wasn't a proper New York Bagel. You have to try the ones in the deli on the corner of Seventh Avenue and 79th Street". So if Josh wants to recommend a particular deli, I will try the bagels there next time I am in New York. (I believe the smoking of salmon in Scotland is not that old a practice, but was introduced into Scotland by Russian emigres in the early 20th century. I don't know if they were Jewish, but I suspect probably).
Eugene Volokh's recipe with caramelised onions in tortillas sounds interesting though. I must try that some time.
While on this, I must recommend both the smoked salmon and the soft cheeses from the Australian state of of Tasmania if Josh or Eugene are ever in the antipodes. Really very good indeed.
Like Josh Chafetz and Eugene Volokh, I am also fond of smoked salmon. However, I don't tend to do much with it. I just prefer eating it straight, with some cheese (Sainsbury's supermarkets in the UK sell a lovely blue brie) and maybe some plain water crackers. Bagels have never done anything for me, although I never encountered them until I was an adult. I have tried smoked salmon on a bagel with cream cheese the way Josh describes, but I think I prefer it without the bagel.
Normally when I say something like this, people respond by saying "It wasn't a proper New York Bagel. You have to try the ones in the deli on the corner of Seventh Avenue and 79th Street". So if Josh wants to recommend a particular deli, I will try the bagels there next time I am in New York. (I believe the smoking of salmon in Scotland is not that old a practice, but was introduced into Scotland by Russian emigres in the early 20th century. I don't know if they were Jewish, but I suspect probably).
Eugene Volokh's recipe with caramelised onions in tortillas sounds interesting though. I must try that some time.
While on this, I must recommend both the smoked salmon and the soft cheeses from the Australian state of of Tasmania if Josh or Eugene are ever in the antipodes. Really very good indeed.
Wednesday, September 17, 2003
Analogue technology
The coming of digital cameras has been a major boon to the camera industry, although it has turned the camera business into essentially an outpost of the electronics business, at the same time that the consumer electronics inudustry was turning into an outpost of the PC business. It has done this because it has forced everybody to upgrade. In the elder days, camera companies were frequently adding new features to their products, but these didn't make the older cameras any less good at what they did. They took photos on 35mm film. If you were a good photographer, you could take good photographs using virtually an camera. New features sometimes made it easier, but didn't change the end result.
However, these days we want to put our photographs on our computer, either to post them on our blogs, e-mail them to our family, or simply store them for later use. And if we do this, we don't want to wait for processing, and we don't want to have to go through the hassle of scanning them. Plus, we want to take lots of photos all the time and we don't want the cost of film and processing. So, digital is the way to go. (While it may be a boon for camera manufacturers, the change to digital is obviously a disaster for people in the film and processing businesses, given that digital makes them entirely unnecessary).
Personally, though, I haven't gone through this. I purchased a 20 pound toy digital camera last year, but it has no LCD display and its pictures are not good enough even for blogging use. For my general photography, I am still using a Pentax P-30N manual focus SLR that I bought 12 years ago, and which has been with me virtually everywhere I have gone - to about 35 countries - in that time. I have a wide assortment of lenses and attachments for the camera, and it feels like an old friend. The camera is nothing special, but simply a decent, good quality SLR that does the job. I am fond of it, and I like using an SLR rather than a compact camera.
But, sometimes I find myself the way I do now, which is that I have written a blog article about being an experience I had last week of being unable to cross the German/Polish border, but I haven't posted it because I am waiting to get my photographs back. (The mail order place that I get to do my photographs is very cheap, and does a perfectly good job, but takes a few days). Thus I now find myself blogging about the reasons why I am not blogging.
I think an upgrade is coming soon. Ideally, I would like a digital SLR, so I can have fun with lenses and all sorts of fun photographic tricks that you can't really do with a compact camera. However, these are still too expensive for now, particularly if you consider that my lenses would be incompatible, and I would have to start building a new collection from scratch, and lenses for digital cameras are more expensive than those for analogue cameras.
So, when I do this I might find myself carrying a digital compact and an analogue SLR for a while. Or not. You never really know until you try it.
The coming of digital cameras has been a major boon to the camera industry, although it has turned the camera business into essentially an outpost of the electronics business, at the same time that the consumer electronics inudustry was turning into an outpost of the PC business. It has done this because it has forced everybody to upgrade. In the elder days, camera companies were frequently adding new features to their products, but these didn't make the older cameras any less good at what they did. They took photos on 35mm film. If you were a good photographer, you could take good photographs using virtually an camera. New features sometimes made it easier, but didn't change the end result.
However, these days we want to put our photographs on our computer, either to post them on our blogs, e-mail them to our family, or simply store them for later use. And if we do this, we don't want to wait for processing, and we don't want to have to go through the hassle of scanning them. Plus, we want to take lots of photos all the time and we don't want the cost of film and processing. So, digital is the way to go. (While it may be a boon for camera manufacturers, the change to digital is obviously a disaster for people in the film and processing businesses, given that digital makes them entirely unnecessary).
Personally, though, I haven't gone through this. I purchased a 20 pound toy digital camera last year, but it has no LCD display and its pictures are not good enough even for blogging use. For my general photography, I am still using a Pentax P-30N manual focus SLR that I bought 12 years ago, and which has been with me virtually everywhere I have gone - to about 35 countries - in that time. I have a wide assortment of lenses and attachments for the camera, and it feels like an old friend. The camera is nothing special, but simply a decent, good quality SLR that does the job. I am fond of it, and I like using an SLR rather than a compact camera.
But, sometimes I find myself the way I do now, which is that I have written a blog article about being an experience I had last week of being unable to cross the German/Polish border, but I haven't posted it because I am waiting to get my photographs back. (The mail order place that I get to do my photographs is very cheap, and does a perfectly good job, but takes a few days). Thus I now find myself blogging about the reasons why I am not blogging.
I think an upgrade is coming soon. Ideally, I would like a digital SLR, so I can have fun with lenses and all sorts of fun photographic tricks that you can't really do with a compact camera. However, these are still too expensive for now, particularly if you consider that my lenses would be incompatible, and I would have to start building a new collection from scratch, and lenses for digital cameras are more expensive than those for analogue cameras.
So, when I do this I might find myself carrying a digital compact and an analogue SLR for a while. Or not. You never really know until you try it.
Tuesday, September 16, 2003
New York, Daniel Libeskind, and the Berlin Jewish Museum
Brian Micklethwait points to this animation showing the details of Daniel Libeskind's design for the Word Trade Center site in New York. I have to say that at this point I am not blown away by the design.
I visited Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin last week, and I have mixed feelings about it. The spiritual showmanship was all on the lowest level, full of "This empty space represents this", and "this empty space represents that", with some very sparse related exhibits mixed in, mostly to do with the flight of Jews from Germany in the 1930s and the holocaust itself. (The "Wedge of light, where no shadow will fall on September 11 from 8:46am, when the first plane hit, to 10:28am, when the second tower fell", in the WTC plan, is the same sort of Libeskind touch).
This museum isn't meant to be principally a memorial to the holocaust. A separate (enormous) holocaust memorial and connected museum is being built elsewhere in Berlin, between the administrative area centred on the Reichstag and Brandenburg Gate, and the commercial/retail area centred on Potsdammer Platz.
Two other levels of the museum were devoted to actual displays (ie the history of Judaism in Germany) but they had a cramped feel to them: too much in too little space. This led to the museum having an oddly fractured feel to it: it felt like two separate things. It would be possible to do a much better job of mixing the spiritual showmanship and the exhibits together, but I didn't feel the building succeeded in doing this.
The World Trade Center Plan has office space, a cultural centre (museums of some kind) and various pieces of memorial space - most notably a "memorial garden". I hope that everything manages to be integrated together. The memorial sections of the design must be used regularly by the people who work there, and the memorial garden therefore must be a park as much as a garden. If people don't eat lunch there, then it will ultimately become some kind of ghetto and it will not be part of the living city of New York. Remember, this has to work in 50 years as well as now. And while people will certainly remember September 11 in 50 years time, they will inevitably be less haunted by it than we are now. If the rebuilt World Trade Center ends up consisting of separate parts that don't really interact with one another, which I think is the problem with Libeskind's museum in Berlin, then in my mind the plan will be a failure.
Brian Micklethwait points to this animation showing the details of Daniel Libeskind's design for the Word Trade Center site in New York. I have to say that at this point I am not blown away by the design.
I visited Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin last week, and I have mixed feelings about it. The spiritual showmanship was all on the lowest level, full of "This empty space represents this", and "this empty space represents that", with some very sparse related exhibits mixed in, mostly to do with the flight of Jews from Germany in the 1930s and the holocaust itself. (The "Wedge of light, where no shadow will fall on September 11 from 8:46am, when the first plane hit, to 10:28am, when the second tower fell", in the WTC plan, is the same sort of Libeskind touch).
This museum isn't meant to be principally a memorial to the holocaust. A separate (enormous) holocaust memorial and connected museum is being built elsewhere in Berlin, between the administrative area centred on the Reichstag and Brandenburg Gate, and the commercial/retail area centred on Potsdammer Platz.
Two other levels of the museum were devoted to actual displays (ie the history of Judaism in Germany) but they had a cramped feel to them: too much in too little space. This led to the museum having an oddly fractured feel to it: it felt like two separate things. It would be possible to do a much better job of mixing the spiritual showmanship and the exhibits together, but I didn't feel the building succeeded in doing this.
The World Trade Center Plan has office space, a cultural centre (museums of some kind) and various pieces of memorial space - most notably a "memorial garden". I hope that everything manages to be integrated together. The memorial sections of the design must be used regularly by the people who work there, and the memorial garden therefore must be a park as much as a garden. If people don't eat lunch there, then it will ultimately become some kind of ghetto and it will not be part of the living city of New York. Remember, this has to work in 50 years as well as now. And while people will certainly remember September 11 in 50 years time, they will inevitably be less haunted by it than we are now. If the rebuilt World Trade Center ends up consisting of separate parts that don't really interact with one another, which I think is the problem with Libeskind's museum in Berlin, then in my mind the plan will be a failure.
Monday, September 15, 2003
On five star Tokyo hotels, expense accounts, Japanese popular culture, dislocation, art house movies, and Just how good is Sofia Coppola?
In early 2000 I spent a month in Tokyo at the expense of the investment bank for which I was then working. This was the moment when certain parts of the global economy were going quietly mad with the irrational exuberence of it all, and I thus got to spend a month living in the Okura, a five star Tokyo Hotel. This is a famous hotel rather than a modern business hotel, (although it has all the features of a modern business hotel) and it is popular with famous people as well as businessmen. The hotel is just across the road from the US embassy, and the entire wing of the hotel I was staying in had been taken over by Bill Clinton's entourage on his trip to Tokyo the year before. If I had chosen to stay in a more modern hotel, the rooms would have been bigger but the character of the establishment would have been less. And as it was, the character of the establishment was such that on one evening I found myself sitting in the bar having a whisky with Liam and Noel Gallagher at the next table. On another occasion, I was passing through the lobby one morning and I found the hotel staff laying out a red carpet. I was intrigued by this so I waited for a minute or two, and William Cohen, then American Defence Secretary, walked into the hotel. I was no more than a few metres from the guy. I assume that there were a couple of Secret Service agents handy, but he didn't seem all that well defended. If I had had a gun...... Actually, let's not go there. Somewhat amazingly, I was a few metres from the US Defence Secretary. I cannot imagine anyone like me would get that close to Donald Rumsfeld these days.
In any event, despite the hotel's tendency to host American cabinet secretaries, the television in my hotel room had only three channels in English, and these were CNN, CNBC and BBC World. And frankly, there is only so much news that you can take and stay sane. Japanese television is bizarre and incomprehensible, and is fun to watch for a while even if you can't understand it, but only for a while. The hotel did have for pay movie channels, but I was not allowed to watch these. This was due to what might be described as the "porn problem". Almost all hotels everywhere now offer pornographic movies along with Hollywood movies. As hotel bills have to be dealt with on expense accounts, the movie is normally not named on the hotel bill. However, knowing this fact, and being terrified of sexual harrasment lawsuits, my company simply banned the watching of for pay movies of any kind in hotel rooms they were paying for to ensure that there was no way they were paying for porn. (This wasn't about the money: they had no problem with my drinking $13 whiskies at their expense in the hotel bar). The trouble with this was that I didn't want to watch pornography. I just wanted to watch something vaguely entertaining to prevent me from being bored shitless. Arnold blowing things up would have been just great. A television channel showing old episodes of Friends would have been good. But there was nothing.
But in the end I could cope. For one thing, my number one rule in life is "always bring a book". and I had brought half a dozen, so I got some reading done. For another, I did have one of the greatest cities in the world to explore. For a third, while I couldn't watch movies in my hotel room I could go and watch movies in the cinema. While some parts of Japanese popular culture exist in a different universe from that of the rest of the world, cinema does not, at least not completely. Although there are many Japanese films made and shown, Hollywood is dominant there like anywhere else and there was no trouble seeing American movies in English (with Japanese subtitles I couldn't understand). Tickets were very expensive. At the time they were 1800 Yen, which was equivalent to about $27 Australian dollars and about $US16. However, as I was on expense account for everything else I could certainly afford a movie or two even at this price.
And I explored Tokyo. Like London, Tokyo is not so much a city as a group of villages that grew together in a single metropolis. Like London, it does not have a single centre as much as a large number of different centres, each of which has its own people, culture and mood. Of these large centres, I found Shibuya to be the most fun. This is an area catering mostly to people under 30. There are Times Square like video screens, and seven story shops selling all manner of DVDs, CDs and video games, with bowling alleys lit in fluorescent blue on the top floor. Video game arcades hide down small alleys. Immense stores sell fashion items catering to incomprehensible teenage trends. Teenage girls wear enormous and ridiculous platform shoes. It's the modern, post-modern and post-post-modern city all together. I liked it. (I also found the best English language bookstore in Tokyo - at least in terms of catering for youngish expatriates - on the seventh floor of a Tower Records outlet in this area, so I spent a little time there too).
And one other thing that exists in Shibuya is movie theatres. The district contains twenty or thirty of these: little cinemas with one or two screens showing arthouse movies. These are often American arthouse movies, and they are the same arthouse movies that you see in the rest of the world.
Except that in a way they are not. There is a joke in the music world about being "Big in Japan". Some musician who is down on his luck in the west will say that it is okay because he is "Big in Japan". Japan is such a huge and lucrative market that to be big there is clearly a good thing and is incredibly lucrative, and many western musicians clearly are big in Japan, but the disconnection between that and the rest of the pop-cultural world is such that they are often not the same acts that are big in the west, and it is difficult for anybody else to actually know whether this claim of bigness in Japan is actually true. And this extends into other media, in odd and unpredictable ways. Prince Edward Island in Canada gets enormous numbers of Japanese tourists due to Japan's extraordinary Anne of Green Gables cult.
Sometimes western celebrities who genuinely are "big in Japan" will go there to take financial advantage of this by filming declasse commercials in Japan, getting paid a lot for this, and then assuming that nobody back at home will see them. Harrison Ford has done this. Leonardo Decaprio has done this. In the world of sport, David Beckham seems to have made this his principal career.
If a film is a big hit in the US, then it will almost certainly be a big hit in the UK, and in France, and for that matter in most of Asia. However, Japan has its own rules. Sometimes a film that is not a hit in the rest of the world will be a huge hit in Japan. Sometimes the reverse will happen.
And this is also true for arthouse movies. Japan has its own taste. The little cinemas in Shibuya are the key to all this. Films will open on one screen in Shibuya, and this will often be the only place in Japan that they are playing. They will stay on that one screen for as long as they are doing good business. This can be many months. Because ticket prices are very high, and there are more than thirty million people in greater Tokyo, a film that becomes a big hit in this environment can make a great deal of money from it. It is not unheard of for small arthouse films that the Japanese for some reason decide to be partial to to gross five million dollars or more on one screen in Shibuya.
And when I was in Tokyo in 2000, one movie was making a huge stir. This film was The Virgin Suicides, the feature film directorial debut of Sofia Coppola. Coppola was (and outside Japan possibly still is) most famous for having been cast by her father Francis Ford Coppola in the part of Mary Corleone in The Godfather Part 3 (1990) when Winona Ryder dropped out of the production. Sofia Coppola's performance in that movie was savaged by critics. I saw the film when it came out, and at the time I thought she was criticised a little unfairly. She wasn't brilliant, but she wasn't terrible either, and it was a case of kicking perceived nepotism. If someone that nobody had ever heard of put in the same performance, then it would have received little comment. At least, that is what I felt in 1990. Perhaps I should watch the film again and see if I still feel that way.
In any event, most of us heard little of Sofia Coppola again until 1999, when The Virgin Suicides showed at a few festivals. This was based on the novel of the same name by Jeffrey Eugenides, and was a dreamy piece about adolescence and suburbia and the question of whether adult life is something worth passing into. (The female protagonists of the movie decide that the answer is no). And it was really a good film. It was one of those films where you remember the music (by Air, mostly), too.
The Virgin Suicides was generally well received, but there was still quite a bit of sniping about the advantages that Sofia Coppola got through being the daughter of Francis. It was said that she wouldn't otherwise have been able to raise the money to get the film made, or to have got Kathleen Turner and James Woods and Danny DeVito to play parts in the film without being a Coppola. (The adolescent leads in the film were played by Josh Hartnett and Kirsten Dunst, who would both be very difficult to get now but who were no doubt easier to get then. Coppola's judgement in casting them was good). The nastiest of the sniping suggested that Coppola had been "helped out" by her director/actor husband Spike Jonze, most famous as the director of Being John Malkovich. This wasn't fair, as Coppola's movie had a very different tone and feel to any of his. While it would certainly be much harder for me to get a first film made than it was for Sofia Coppola, the principal reason for this is that as a Coppola she knew lots of people who could help her and I don't. And apparently she was very persistent until they did help her. (This applied equally well to her husband, though, who had access to the same networks that she did, and he didn't receive any grief from critics for it).
In aggregate, though, the film was well received. It was a good piece of work, and pretty much everyone knew it. But, it still wasn't a huge hit, grossing $4.8 million in the US.
However, when I visited Tokyo in early 2000, I discovered that its impact was enormous. Virtually every CD and DVD store in Shibuya had the soundtrack of the film in large displays in pride of place at the front of the store. The film opened on its one screen in Shibuya, and then played for months and months and months and months. The film grossed more on that one screen in Shibuya than it did in the United States. One can only assume that when this happened, Sofia Coppola spend a lot of time in Tokyo, doing publicity, being interviewed, making appearances, wandering through that exquisitely weird world of high end Tokyo hotels and popular culture, which foreigners are always half excluded from and in any event cannot fully participate in due to not understanding the language.
Which is why it is very interesting to look at the description of Sofia Coppola's new film, Lost in Translation that was released in the US last week. It is the story of a jaded American film star, played by Bill Murray, who goes to Japan to film a series of whiskey commercials for which he has been paid a large sum of money. In parallel, there is an entire world of rather inscrutible Japaneseness going on simultaneously. He meets a young woman (played by Scarlett Johansson) who is in Tokyo with her fashion photographer husband and who has been left on the sidelines in a hotel bar, and they share one another's loneliness and move through that strangely dislocated Tokyo world together.
Or that's how the movie has been described. I haven't myself seen it yet. (Heaven knows when I will. An Australian release is scheduled for December 26, and I can find no information about a British release. Even Shibuya isn't going to see it until next year, and although there is actually some possibility I will spend a short time in Shibuya in the next couple of months this won't help).
Critics seem to have got over any need to snipe and Sofia Coppola, and if there is any pattern at all, it is now the opposite. The film has been received rapturously. Coppola is being described as potentially a great film-maker. A couple of weeks ago the New York Times magazine put her on the cover and ran a lengthy profile in the magazine. (Unfortunately this is now behind a for pay wall so I can't link to it). This was a kind piece, and revealed that yes, she is very well connected in the industry and that this has helped her get her films made, and that she is sometimes very persistent (which was necessary to get Bill Murray to commit to this film). However, she is very smart and talented, and is apparently sensitive to the feelings of people around her and most people like her.
However, this profile missed a point that all the subsequent critics are missing too. Which is that Sofia Coppola is herself really big in Japan. In a sense this new film is about the reception of her last film there. However, bigness in Japan doesn't really carry into the west, even when it leads a film-maker to make her next film about that very subject. Japan is like that, and round and round we go.
And one other thing that is clear just from looking at the trailer for Lost in Translation is that Sofia Coppola gets just how magnificently cinematic Tokyo is. For some reason the city hasn't been used as a location for many American films. Perhaps this is that filming there is too expensive. Perhaps this is that it is culturally just a little too weird. Perhaps the sorts of people who run Hollywood just haven't been there. (It isn't just that the city is Asian: Hollywood has repeatedly set films in Hong Kong). The little details of the city are just extraordinarily interesting, and to an observant eye could make an amazing film. (Cyberpunk author William Gibson, who loves describing places in great detail, finds himself endlessly setting his rather cinematic books in the city, perhaps for this reason). Which maybe is what Sofia Coppola has done.
I'm certainly looking forward to seeing what she has done.
In early 2000 I spent a month in Tokyo at the expense of the investment bank for which I was then working. This was the moment when certain parts of the global economy were going quietly mad with the irrational exuberence of it all, and I thus got to spend a month living in the Okura, a five star Tokyo Hotel. This is a famous hotel rather than a modern business hotel, (although it has all the features of a modern business hotel) and it is popular with famous people as well as businessmen. The hotel is just across the road from the US embassy, and the entire wing of the hotel I was staying in had been taken over by Bill Clinton's entourage on his trip to Tokyo the year before. If I had chosen to stay in a more modern hotel, the rooms would have been bigger but the character of the establishment would have been less. And as it was, the character of the establishment was such that on one evening I found myself sitting in the bar having a whisky with Liam and Noel Gallagher at the next table. On another occasion, I was passing through the lobby one morning and I found the hotel staff laying out a red carpet. I was intrigued by this so I waited for a minute or two, and William Cohen, then American Defence Secretary, walked into the hotel. I was no more than a few metres from the guy. I assume that there were a couple of Secret Service agents handy, but he didn't seem all that well defended. If I had had a gun...... Actually, let's not go there. Somewhat amazingly, I was a few metres from the US Defence Secretary. I cannot imagine anyone like me would get that close to Donald Rumsfeld these days.
In any event, despite the hotel's tendency to host American cabinet secretaries, the television in my hotel room had only three channels in English, and these were CNN, CNBC and BBC World. And frankly, there is only so much news that you can take and stay sane. Japanese television is bizarre and incomprehensible, and is fun to watch for a while even if you can't understand it, but only for a while. The hotel did have for pay movie channels, but I was not allowed to watch these. This was due to what might be described as the "porn problem". Almost all hotels everywhere now offer pornographic movies along with Hollywood movies. As hotel bills have to be dealt with on expense accounts, the movie is normally not named on the hotel bill. However, knowing this fact, and being terrified of sexual harrasment lawsuits, my company simply banned the watching of for pay movies of any kind in hotel rooms they were paying for to ensure that there was no way they were paying for porn. (This wasn't about the money: they had no problem with my drinking $13 whiskies at their expense in the hotel bar). The trouble with this was that I didn't want to watch pornography. I just wanted to watch something vaguely entertaining to prevent me from being bored shitless. Arnold blowing things up would have been just great. A television channel showing old episodes of Friends would have been good. But there was nothing.
But in the end I could cope. For one thing, my number one rule in life is "always bring a book". and I had brought half a dozen, so I got some reading done. For another, I did have one of the greatest cities in the world to explore. For a third, while I couldn't watch movies in my hotel room I could go and watch movies in the cinema. While some parts of Japanese popular culture exist in a different universe from that of the rest of the world, cinema does not, at least not completely. Although there are many Japanese films made and shown, Hollywood is dominant there like anywhere else and there was no trouble seeing American movies in English (with Japanese subtitles I couldn't understand). Tickets were very expensive. At the time they were 1800 Yen, which was equivalent to about $27 Australian dollars and about $US16. However, as I was on expense account for everything else I could certainly afford a movie or two even at this price.
And I explored Tokyo. Like London, Tokyo is not so much a city as a group of villages that grew together in a single metropolis. Like London, it does not have a single centre as much as a large number of different centres, each of which has its own people, culture and mood. Of these large centres, I found Shibuya to be the most fun. This is an area catering mostly to people under 30. There are Times Square like video screens, and seven story shops selling all manner of DVDs, CDs and video games, with bowling alleys lit in fluorescent blue on the top floor. Video game arcades hide down small alleys. Immense stores sell fashion items catering to incomprehensible teenage trends. Teenage girls wear enormous and ridiculous platform shoes. It's the modern, post-modern and post-post-modern city all together. I liked it. (I also found the best English language bookstore in Tokyo - at least in terms of catering for youngish expatriates - on the seventh floor of a Tower Records outlet in this area, so I spent a little time there too).
And one other thing that exists in Shibuya is movie theatres. The district contains twenty or thirty of these: little cinemas with one or two screens showing arthouse movies. These are often American arthouse movies, and they are the same arthouse movies that you see in the rest of the world.
Except that in a way they are not. There is a joke in the music world about being "Big in Japan". Some musician who is down on his luck in the west will say that it is okay because he is "Big in Japan". Japan is such a huge and lucrative market that to be big there is clearly a good thing and is incredibly lucrative, and many western musicians clearly are big in Japan, but the disconnection between that and the rest of the pop-cultural world is such that they are often not the same acts that are big in the west, and it is difficult for anybody else to actually know whether this claim of bigness in Japan is actually true. And this extends into other media, in odd and unpredictable ways. Prince Edward Island in Canada gets enormous numbers of Japanese tourists due to Japan's extraordinary Anne of Green Gables cult.
Sometimes western celebrities who genuinely are "big in Japan" will go there to take financial advantage of this by filming declasse commercials in Japan, getting paid a lot for this, and then assuming that nobody back at home will see them. Harrison Ford has done this. Leonardo Decaprio has done this. In the world of sport, David Beckham seems to have made this his principal career.
If a film is a big hit in the US, then it will almost certainly be a big hit in the UK, and in France, and for that matter in most of Asia. However, Japan has its own rules. Sometimes a film that is not a hit in the rest of the world will be a huge hit in Japan. Sometimes the reverse will happen.
And this is also true for arthouse movies. Japan has its own taste. The little cinemas in Shibuya are the key to all this. Films will open on one screen in Shibuya, and this will often be the only place in Japan that they are playing. They will stay on that one screen for as long as they are doing good business. This can be many months. Because ticket prices are very high, and there are more than thirty million people in greater Tokyo, a film that becomes a big hit in this environment can make a great deal of money from it. It is not unheard of for small arthouse films that the Japanese for some reason decide to be partial to to gross five million dollars or more on one screen in Shibuya.
And when I was in Tokyo in 2000, one movie was making a huge stir. This film was The Virgin Suicides, the feature film directorial debut of Sofia Coppola. Coppola was (and outside Japan possibly still is) most famous for having been cast by her father Francis Ford Coppola in the part of Mary Corleone in The Godfather Part 3 (1990) when Winona Ryder dropped out of the production. Sofia Coppola's performance in that movie was savaged by critics. I saw the film when it came out, and at the time I thought she was criticised a little unfairly. She wasn't brilliant, but she wasn't terrible either, and it was a case of kicking perceived nepotism. If someone that nobody had ever heard of put in the same performance, then it would have received little comment. At least, that is what I felt in 1990. Perhaps I should watch the film again and see if I still feel that way.
In any event, most of us heard little of Sofia Coppola again until 1999, when The Virgin Suicides showed at a few festivals. This was based on the novel of the same name by Jeffrey Eugenides, and was a dreamy piece about adolescence and suburbia and the question of whether adult life is something worth passing into. (The female protagonists of the movie decide that the answer is no). And it was really a good film. It was one of those films where you remember the music (by Air, mostly), too.
The Virgin Suicides was generally well received, but there was still quite a bit of sniping about the advantages that Sofia Coppola got through being the daughter of Francis. It was said that she wouldn't otherwise have been able to raise the money to get the film made, or to have got Kathleen Turner and James Woods and Danny DeVito to play parts in the film without being a Coppola. (The adolescent leads in the film were played by Josh Hartnett and Kirsten Dunst, who would both be very difficult to get now but who were no doubt easier to get then. Coppola's judgement in casting them was good). The nastiest of the sniping suggested that Coppola had been "helped out" by her director/actor husband Spike Jonze, most famous as the director of Being John Malkovich. This wasn't fair, as Coppola's movie had a very different tone and feel to any of his. While it would certainly be much harder for me to get a first film made than it was for Sofia Coppola, the principal reason for this is that as a Coppola she knew lots of people who could help her and I don't. And apparently she was very persistent until they did help her. (This applied equally well to her husband, though, who had access to the same networks that she did, and he didn't receive any grief from critics for it).
In aggregate, though, the film was well received. It was a good piece of work, and pretty much everyone knew it. But, it still wasn't a huge hit, grossing $4.8 million in the US.
However, when I visited Tokyo in early 2000, I discovered that its impact was enormous. Virtually every CD and DVD store in Shibuya had the soundtrack of the film in large displays in pride of place at the front of the store. The film opened on its one screen in Shibuya, and then played for months and months and months and months. The film grossed more on that one screen in Shibuya than it did in the United States. One can only assume that when this happened, Sofia Coppola spend a lot of time in Tokyo, doing publicity, being interviewed, making appearances, wandering through that exquisitely weird world of high end Tokyo hotels and popular culture, which foreigners are always half excluded from and in any event cannot fully participate in due to not understanding the language.
Which is why it is very interesting to look at the description of Sofia Coppola's new film, Lost in Translation that was released in the US last week. It is the story of a jaded American film star, played by Bill Murray, who goes to Japan to film a series of whiskey commercials for which he has been paid a large sum of money. In parallel, there is an entire world of rather inscrutible Japaneseness going on simultaneously. He meets a young woman (played by Scarlett Johansson) who is in Tokyo with her fashion photographer husband and who has been left on the sidelines in a hotel bar, and they share one another's loneliness and move through that strangely dislocated Tokyo world together.
Or that's how the movie has been described. I haven't myself seen it yet. (Heaven knows when I will. An Australian release is scheduled for December 26, and I can find no information about a British release. Even Shibuya isn't going to see it until next year, and although there is actually some possibility I will spend a short time in Shibuya in the next couple of months this won't help).
Critics seem to have got over any need to snipe and Sofia Coppola, and if there is any pattern at all, it is now the opposite. The film has been received rapturously. Coppola is being described as potentially a great film-maker. A couple of weeks ago the New York Times magazine put her on the cover and ran a lengthy profile in the magazine. (Unfortunately this is now behind a for pay wall so I can't link to it). This was a kind piece, and revealed that yes, she is very well connected in the industry and that this has helped her get her films made, and that she is sometimes very persistent (which was necessary to get Bill Murray to commit to this film). However, she is very smart and talented, and is apparently sensitive to the feelings of people around her and most people like her.
However, this profile missed a point that all the subsequent critics are missing too. Which is that Sofia Coppola is herself really big in Japan. In a sense this new film is about the reception of her last film there. However, bigness in Japan doesn't really carry into the west, even when it leads a film-maker to make her next film about that very subject. Japan is like that, and round and round we go.
And one other thing that is clear just from looking at the trailer for Lost in Translation is that Sofia Coppola gets just how magnificently cinematic Tokyo is. For some reason the city hasn't been used as a location for many American films. Perhaps this is that filming there is too expensive. Perhaps this is that it is culturally just a little too weird. Perhaps the sorts of people who run Hollywood just haven't been there. (It isn't just that the city is Asian: Hollywood has repeatedly set films in Hong Kong). The little details of the city are just extraordinarily interesting, and to an observant eye could make an amazing film. (Cyberpunk author William Gibson, who loves describing places in great detail, finds himself endlessly setting his rather cinematic books in the city, perhaps for this reason). Which maybe is what Sofia Coppola has done.
I'm certainly looking forward to seeing what she has done.
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