I was in Japan Town for dinner tonight and was reminded of the International Taiko Festival this weekend at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco. I’m not going this year because I’m headed to Disneyland for Jessica’s birthday, but everybody else should go. Seriously. The shows are really spectacular on every level, breaking out everything short of pyrotechnics and lasers. In San Francisco, you’re lucky enough to have the top taiko dojo in North America right here, and you don’t even have to go to Berkeley to see them this year.

I’d forgotten the show was this weekend until I saw the book The Way of Taiko by Heidi Varian. It’s got some great photos of performances, as well as a history of taiko in Japan and the US, and an explanation of the different parts of the performances. It’s the kind of thing that would’ve been a perfect gift for me had I not already bought it myself.

The best line I’ve encountered so far is a quote that’s left unattributed:

It has been said of taiko that “rhythm and joy ride together on the end of a drumstick. Its closest cousin may be gospel singing.”

The introduction in the book goes on about “The Way of Taiko” and “The Spirit of Taiko,” and it’s hard for the cynical-minded (like me) not to roll our eyes at the suggestion that there’s as much a zen component of banging on a drum as there is to more obviously spiritual activities, such as serving tea or punching someone.

But even I can recognize that there’s something else going on at a taiko performance that’s more than just a drum corps. And the gospel analogy helps explain what it is — the taiko performers get so caught up in the spirit of it, and are encouraged by the vocalizations of the other performers (which I see in the book are called kiai and are the vocalization of chi energy), that you can see and feel it spread, and you can’t help but be caught up in it. The expression on the performers’ faces at the beginning of a show is one of concentration and discipline, and by the end when they’re doing the free-form piece called Tsunami, you can see it’s turned to one of power and joy. It’s not difficult to see the comparison to a gospel soloist belting out the end of a song with a huge chorus of happy, clapping people behind her.

The other reason I like the gospel analogy is because it suggests the multiculturalism that the SF Taiko Dojo seems to emphasize. And it’s not the weakened, meaningless concept that goes by “multiculturalism” these days — the kind of simple-minded, self-serving reverse-chauvinism borne from White Liberal Guilt. It’s true multiculturalism, a product of a Japanese folk art form growing inside San Francisco, forced to cohabitate along with dozens of other cultures fighting for dominance.

In his foreward to the book, Seiichi Tanaka says that one of the reasons he fought to bring taiko to the US is because he’s disappointed to see more of traditional Japanese culture being lost as that country becomes westernized. It’d be easy to interpret that as stereotypical Japanese xenophobia, at least it would if you’d never been to an SF Taiko Dojo performance. They are big on tradition, and always emphasize the clothing, music, theater, and folk legends of Japan, but are careful to present it along with reinventions and analogs in other cultures. One show began with a Native American drummer performing a blessing of the stage. Others have taiko groups that incorporate jazz, or electric guitars.

It’s not just some reactionary assertion that Japanese heritage must be preserved to the exclusion of all else, like the French insist that English words be expelled from their language. It’s an acknowledgement that true culture is a living thing (if you’ll excuse the Berkeley-speak). You can’t preserve the traditional culture of Japan, or anywhere, by treating it as something that’s in a museum that you have to pay attention to because it’s History and it’s Important. You can only preserve culture by showing people how it’s cool, how it’s relevant to them, and how it still exists; that’s how it spreads.

And as a result, you get situations like a painfully white southern boy who goes to Japanese restaurants to get comfort food (because katsu curry rice is closer to what I think of as southern food than anything else I’ve been able to find). And people who go to festivals where Asian drummers carrying on a tradition to honor bring forth animist spirits, are reminiscent of formerly African singers in Christian churches in America.

Things are pretty dismal in the world of kludgey, predictable, cliched literature. I’m still stuck just under 10,000 words and have been stalled for about a week now. I can confirm that the key to the whole NaNoWriMo thing is momentum, since I haven’t been all that compelled to go back to the thing and pick up the slack. After more than a couple days of inactivity, the philosophy of “this isn’t great or even all that good, but at least I’m getting results,” turns to “if it’s turning out this boring and predictable, why even bother?” Apparently I was not born with ink in my veins — it was most likely Coke, or maybe gravy — and I lack the desire, no, need to create that fills the hearts of true artists such as Danielle Steele and that guy whose name I forget who writes all the mystery novels around horse racing.

I’m genuinely glad to see my writing buddies doing better than I am, though. Assuming that they’re not, well, lying, and that they haven’t just copied-and-pasted “banana” over and over again for tens of thousands of times. (Which now that I think about it, would probably be a better artistic achievement, in the James Joyce-ian sense, than what I’ve got so far). It’s nice to see real evidence that the whole contest works: after a month of concerted effort, you get to check something off your life’s list of things to do.

If it sounds like I’ve given up, I haven’t. I’m not going to admit defeat until midnight on November 30th. And 40,000 words in 15 days amounts to 2,667 words a day, which isn’t completely out of the realm of possibility.

Tonight after work I decided to go see Chicken Little at The The The El Capitan Theater in Hollywood. I’ve been wanting to see the theater for a while now, and I had to do something to make up for not going to Disneyland this trip, and it was showing in Disney Digital 3D! I’m not familiar with the details, but apparently the theater is all historical and shit. It’s not as big as Grauman’s main theater, but they make up for it by making a big production out of everything.

When we went in they gave us all the Chicken Little 3D glasses to keep as a souvenir — and because you don’t want to be wearing the same glasses that some freakshow off Hollywood Boulevard came in and wore before you. As we went into the theater the guy was already playing on his swinging organ on stage. That was really cool — he did a whole Disney medley and they had it somehow hooked up in stereo so it was like being surrounded by organ. Yes I used the same dumb double entendre twice in a row. Then the theater manager came out and welcomed everyone and announced upcoming shows. And then we saw trailers of some movie about snow dogs that get lost in the Arctic, and The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe.

So far it sounds like great old-time movie house experience. Well, that was before the cute young singer in a short skirt ran out on stage and started dancing to one of the songs from Chicken Little and she brought out two people dressed as Chicken Little and the Ugly Duckling to dance on stage with her. And then she asked everybody in the audience to stand up and dance with her. Sure, it’s a G-rated kids movie. But it was at 10pm on a Thursday night, too. I didn’t go out to dance, and I didn’t go out to feel curmudgeonly, either, dammit. Luckily, nobody else stood up either. At the end of three minutes of dancing they launched the confetti cannons and started the movie.

And the problem is that that whole attitude of forced commercial whimsy carries on through the whole movie. The movie’s technically very well done, and the 3D is neat without being overdone. But it’s all just kind of flaccid and weird and formulaic and forced. It’s not even Dreamworks bad, like a mean-spirited Shrek movie that’s desperate to show how hip it is. This wasn’t cringingly unfunny; in fact it was pretty clever in some places. But there was no spark to it. Not just because of a lack of imagination; it feels like the imagination was actively supressed to make room for the songs and the commercial tie-ins.

I’m still trying to figure out exactly what it was, because the movie doesn’t have the usual Disney formula but still feels completely formulaic. I had somewhat high hopes, too. Not because I’m rooting for Disney in the whole Disney vs. Pixar thing, but because I’d like to see more good CGI movies coming out. Pixar can only release a movie every so often, after all, and I can’t say I’ve got high hopes for Cars. I’d even be rooting for a Dreamworks movie to be good if they ever announced one with any potential.

My point, I guess, is that I’ve been a Disney fan for so long that I tend to automatically filter out the stuff that people complain about the company. It’s vaguely unsettling to see it all laid bare.

(I won’t mention the bit about how I don’t know my way around Burbank and Glendale like I thought I did so I ended up driving all over the place for an hour and missed the 7:30 show and had to wait two hours for the 9:45 one so I missed a whole night of writing and I’m feeling all guilty about it).

No Disneyland for me this week, since they’re only keeping the park open until 8pm every night. Even I’m not stupid enough to drive at least an hour and a half through Los Angeles rush hour traffic to be able to spend 30 minutes to an hour in the happiest place on earth.

Okay, I am, but not this week. There’s just too much to do. I think we’re making a lot of progress on the project, which means that when I get back to the hotel I’ve got plenty of stuff to write on the design document. That’s good! But I’m so very, very tired. That’s bad. Still, having too many ideas and not enough time and energy to commit them to (virtual) paper is a hell of a lot better than vice-versa.

I did get to tag along on a tour today of the R&D presentation, following a group of Japanese employees of the Oriental Land Company (they run Tokyo Disneyland and Tokyo DisneySea). The demo was really cool; there’s some really neat stuff in development. Plus, as it was all run through a translator, I got the abbreviated version that hit on all the special effects and visual “Wow” stuff. And I’m pretty sure that’s all I’m allowed to say about it.

Even if I didn’t have work, there’d be too much to do for Disneyland. I’m still fighting under the ever-escalating word count deficit. The zen of “it’s okay; I can do this” has gone away since I haven’t really made a dent in my fictional masterwork (fictional in that it’s a work of fiction and it doesn’t exist at this point), and I still have only introduced one character at this point and haven’t even gotten to the main plot.

And of course, yet another distraction. The game The Movies came out this week, and it’s one I’ve been semi-interested in ever since it was announced. It’s getting fair-to-middling reviews, but I’m still intrigued enough to check it out; the only question is finding time to do it. The game sounds like it does a pretty good job of Sims-like emergent behavior, getting results that were completely unexpected. Something as completely unexpected as GameSpy running a genuinely funny article, about one columnist’s attempt to make a western and ending up with Brokeback Mountain.

I haven’t done the actual calculations, but I reckon I’m around 5,000 words behind in my creative masterpiece. And that’s what’s finally convinced me that the NaNoWriMo thing is a good idea. Before, whenever I told myself I would write my Great American Novel or Life-Altering Screenplay or Subtly Disguised Semi-Autobiographical Erotic Escapade*, I would get about 10 pages in and then give up and start procrastinating and let myself get behind. So no new surprises there. And I would realize how stupid it was to even try it, and just give up there. But, having a deadline looming hasn’t made me all frustrated and depressed, but resolved to make up the slack. And knowing that it’s something that’s only important to me makes it a “I can do this!” deadline instead of “Oh crap I’m going to get so fired I’m just going to lie down and close my eyes until the panic goes away” deadline.

I’m also behind in my sleepin’. Not because of the writing, but because of… not sure what, exactly. I’ve been averaging four hours of sleep the past couple of nights, and yet still somehow kind of halfway functioning. Glendale is taking on a semi-magical fever dream quality. I guess if I’m going to be stuck in a hotel in Burbank for a week with no access to my media, might as well throw insomnia into the mix.

One thing I’m not behind on is my work. I was dreading having to spend a whole week in LA, but it turns out to have been the best thing. We’re making progress, and for the first time in a few weeks it doesn’t feel like the whole world is collapsing around me. I think when this Disney gig’s over I’m going to have to go back to a real job, instead of working by myself from home. Turns out I ain’t so good with self-schedules and writer’s block.

*Just kidding. I’ve never attempted to write such a thing. I swear to God.

An hour of “Arrested Development” and the eternal shame that comes from coming in too late to fandom over a television series.

Any other show would’ve settled with just the jet pants instructional video and left that as high comedy. But they just keep going. My favorite gag is when they suspected some kind of listening device in the board room, and had a shot with the boom mic in the frame. Or the Pretty Woman bit where Rita grabs for the star. Or how Dave Thomas’ “fags” gets bleeped out when he’s talking about his cigarettes. Or how he knows how to read Rita’s hand turkey drawing.

Now I’m going to get a corndog cross with all the crucifixins.

Jackson West’s post on SFist mentions this article on Slate which calls the Star Wars series a masterwork of post-modern cinema, and one very angry blogger’s rebuttal.

Okay, simmer down, Poindexters. Yes, the Slate article is a bunch of ridiculous garbage. But calling it the silliest thing they’ve ever published is just ridiculous over-the-top hyperbole. It’s Slate, the poor man’s Salon. And yes, the article is astoundingly pompous and pretentious. But then, so is writing a blog post that uses the word “pomo” about a thousand times, mixed in with liberal use of the f-bomb.

(And while I’m thinking of it: screw you, Kevin Smith! Since you came along, you’ve given a million nerdy white guy imitators free license to write this same type of garbage all over the internets. Suddenly it’s okay to pontificate about the most inane of topics using the most pompous and over-blown speech imaginable, as long as you throw in enough swears to make it clear that you’re down. Stupid topic + a thesaurus + expletives = insightful pop culture commentary.)

So the article — apparently written by a teacher at my alma mater, as if I didn’t need enough shame in my past — is ludicrous, even for cinema studies. But so is the rebuttal; for once it’d be nice to see some self-proclaimed intellectual talk about Star Wars without feeling the need to completely dismiss it. Bitch about summer blockbusters and space operas and Joseph Campbell and The Hidden Fortress and Muppets and bad dialogue and acting all you want; that doesn’t change the fact that there’s a lot the series does exactly right.

Like directly paying homage to the old serials without turning them into camp or parody. And creating a huge world that’s both alien and accessible without having read 10,000 pages of the history of the Freemen, or The Simarillion. And taking a space action story and giving it all a sense of grandeur and history just by making everything look old and using the right music. And, at least at the beginning, telling a classic fantasy story about good vs. evil, when everyone else was going for realism — they’re the ones that seem dated now, while Star Wars, even with the haircuts, still has a timeless quality about it.

And the bit about how the shaky-zoom camera thing in Attack of the Clones was just an attempt to outdo Firefly? Please.

Four of the six Star Wars movies are still pretty damn good, and two of them are still brilliant. They don’t deserve the reverence that a lot of the fans give them, but that’s what sci-fans do. It’s their thing. They don’t deserve to be completely dismissed, either. You can still keep whatever cinematic legitimacy is important to you while acknowledging that they’re good movies. You don’t have to compare them to Prospero’s Books or anything. For starters, the Star Wars movies have the definite advantage of not featuring a naked John Gielgud.

There’s another post up at SFist, which I mention only because that’s the only way they show up in the sidebar down below to your right.

Speaking of belated responses to basically inconsequential news: A couple of weeks ago there was a big stink all over the videogame section of the internets about this “lawyer” named Jack Thompson and his run-in with the guys from the webcomic “Penny Arcade.” In brief: he wrote something claiming that he’d donate $10,000 to charity if any videogame company would make a game based on his premise, which was a ridiculous story about a father whose child was killed as a result of game-inspired violence and went on a killing spree murdering game developers, publishers, and retailers. The Penny Arcade guys, to their credit, handled it reasonably well: they pointed out to the guy that they ran a charity which raises money and supplies games for sick kids, and they made a $10,000 donation to that charity in Thompson’s name. He responded with legal threats and various letters to the FBI, several webcomics and hundreds of blog articles resulted. (And when somebody did actually make the game, he responded by saying that his claim had all been “satire,” and then with a couple more threats of legal action.)

In short, everybody got what they wanted. The sleazy ambulance-chasing lawyer got the attention he wanted and kept his name in the press. The Penny Arcade guys drew more attention to their charity, which could be seen as self-serving, but was basically a potent way of getting their message across, that most of the people who play videogames are not hyper-violent, semi-autistic selfish children.

I don’t even like mentioning Thompson, because it just adds one more internet reference to him, however insignificant, to make it seem like the guy’s having more impact than he really is. He’s laughably incompetent, and his agenda is completely transparent, even if you’re not aware (as I wasn’t) of his history of grandstanding and dementia. One of the Penny Arcade guys had an unexpectedly mature take on it: he said that they were aware they should just ignore the guy instead of giving him more attention, but that it was essentially a good thing he was at the forefront of the debate. Because if they ever had anyone competent taking all the credit as leader of the anti-videogame crusade, game fans and companies would be screwed.

(Senator Joe Lieberman and SF Assemblyman Leland Yee also make occasional headlines in videogame censorship news, but usually only when it’s around election time. And when they do, it becomes apparent they have no real expertise in the issue other than knowing enough to mention Grand Theft Auto and Postal).

The problem is that there’s nobody particularly competent on the pro-videogame side of the issue, either. All we’ve got is the insistence that there’s no evidence linking game-playing to violent behavior, and the First Amendment. Which means that as soon as someone releases a study showing that there is a correlation between GTA and Columbine, then all you’ve got left is the ACLU and “I know my rights” and an argument that has parents responding, “Well yeah, but…”
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