The Puns That Would Not Die, Tom Swifties Yet Again

“Can you direct me to the men’s room?” Tom asked gently.

“I seem to have set the rear of the attic aflame,” Tom fired back loftily.

“Henry VIII was very fat,” said Tom unthinkingly.

“It will have to wait until the leap year,” he said lackadaisically.

“The cat seems happy now that he’s been fed,” said Tom purposefully

“Phone call for Mr. Greene,” the waiter said forlornly.

“I didn’t intend to send that telegram twice!” she said remorsefully.

“I’ve never had a filling,” she said precariously.

“Why, I’d love some Chinese soup,” he said wantonly.

“You are so much bigger than you were the last time I saw you,” he said gruesomely.

“It seems to have made the grass wet,” he said after due consideration.

“Thanks so much, Monsieur,” he said mercifully.

And my two favorites for the week:

“Who was the Vice President under Bill Clinton?” he asked allegorically.

“Once upon a time there was a beautiful princess,” he began grimly.

Note: Please feel free to send along any good ones you run across. I will publish the ones that are not too racy, and undoubtedly have a good laugh at the ones that are.

 

 

Grocery shopping in Japan

I take my camera with me everywhere in Japan; for this reason, I carry a tiny Canon point-and-shoot, rather than the “my-lens-is-bigger-than-yours” SLR camera that shouts “TOURIST GEEK” in capital letters. (I have one of those, mind you, for those times when I want to be obnoxiously creative, snapping close-ups of flower petals or nose hairs or some such, but it doesn’t travel with me unless I have a car at my disposal.) Today, I went shopping for cookie fixings; I have had a hankering for chocolate chip cookies for a couple of days, and I was missing a couple of the key ingredients (chocolate chips and baking soda, in case you were wondering). As Japanese supermarkets offer a seemingly endless assortment of weird and wonderful products, I often find myself wandering aimlessly up one aisle, then down another, to see what new oddities I can unearth. For example:

When you're in a snack mood, howzabout a Cream Collon?

Or how about these Moony Man disposable diapers, each variation featuring a different baby, each with a distinctly different attitude:

That last one is my personal favorite; the kid seems to be saying “So what did you expect, potty training awready? I’m only a year old, for heaven’s sake!”

A while back, a friend of mine, Al Brandt, told me a story that had me in hysterics. I may have a detail or two wrong, but this is the gist of it: Another friend, Bob Berg, had come to Tokyo, and Al agreed to serve as Bob’s guide around the city, showing him things he’d never have found easily, if at all, on his own. Bob, quite grateful, offered to take Al out for drinks. Al demurred, citing a prior engagement, upon which Bob asked if there was anything else he could do by way of appreciation. “Well,” Al replied thoughtfully, “You could buy me a cantaloupe.” A cantaloupe? Well, it turned out that Al had been craving a cantaloupe for a while, and just had not gotten around to getting one. Bob, for his part, thought he was getting off quite lightly, considering that he had planned on springing for at least a couple of rounds of drinks. “Hell,” he said magnanimously, “I’ll buy you two cantaloupes.” Al grinned contentedly, knowing full well what was about to transpire, and they headed off together to the supermarket. I will leave you to imagine what happened; have a look at the picture below, and be sure to note the price (the yen-to-dollar exchange rate is about 90-to-1…)

For the mathematically challenged, the 6500 yen cantaloupe pictured here runs about $72 US!

Japanese Woodblock Prints, a Brief Introduction

Part of what drew me to Japan (apart from the girls, the food, and the exotic foreign-ness of the place) was a distinctly Japanese art form known as the woodblock print. As the name suggests, woodblock prints are made by carving a design into a block of wood, then printing it onto paper. This would seem to be a fairly straightforward process, at least until you introduce color into the equation, at which point numerous blocks must be utilized, one for each color, each perfectly aligned with the previous and succeeding block (as you can imagine, this makes the undertaking exponentially more difficult). Sometimes dozens of blocks are used, and the results can vary from photorealism to Picasso-esque abstraction. Although color woodblock prints have been around for hundreds of years in Japan, they didn’t come to the attention of Westerners until the late 1800’s, at which time individual woodblock prints were used as wrapping paper (!) for packages sent to Europe and the Americas. The prints caught the eye of painters such as Van Gogh, Mucha, Whistler, Toulouse-Lautrec and many others, and elements of Japanese woodblock images would figure prominently in their paintings from then on (Van Gogh blatantly lifted a couple of designs from Ando Hiroshige’s 100 Views of Edo, essentially rendering in oil what Hiroshige had done with wooden blocks and colored ink).

The prints that tend to catch the eye of this Westerner are largely from the 20^th century. They fall into two sometimes overlapping categories: shin hanga, in which the artist creates a design, usually in watercolor, which is then made into a print by a team of professional carvers and printers, thus a collaborative effort; and sosaku hanga, in which the artist creates his own design, does his own carving and printing, and thus is responsible for the whole process from conception to finished result. The shin hanga prints tend to be more accessible to new aficionados, as they are often images of beautiful scenery or attractive kimono-clad women, while the sosaku hanga prints tend to be avant-garde, and thus rather more of an acquired taste. Also, shin hanga prints are often (but by no means always) more carefully carved and printed, as those artisans are schooled in their respective crafts, and do not have to be responsible for other elements of the process. Here is a representative selection of some shin hanga and sosaku hanga prints, dating from the early part of the 20th century up to about the early 1970s. Enjoy!

A shin hanga print by Uehara Konen, pre WWII

A shin hanga print by Hiroshi Yoshida, also pre-WWII

A shin hanga print by Kaburagi Kiyokata, early 20th C.

Japan becomes more westernized; a modern girl by Ito Shinsui

Ito Shinsui again, altogether more traditional

A shin hanga print by a Westerner in Japan, Elizabeth Keith

Some sosaku hanga, by way of contrast; Kihei Sasajima

A sosaku hanga abstract by Reika Iwami

 

A sosaku hanga harbor scene by Fumio Kitaoka

Mt. Fuji, by Hideo Hagiwara

A fanciful cat by Tomoo Inagaki

Stay tuned for my next woodblock print post, where we’ll have a look at contemporary printmakers, both Japanese and Westerners, working in Japan nowadays. 

BookPage Whodunit Overflow Redux

This month was painful, and next month will be worse; there were (and are) ‘way too many good books to fit in the print edition of BookPage’s Whodunit column; check it out for yourself at www.bookpage.com. April brings books by perennial favorites Walter Mosley, Jonathan Kellerman, C.J. Box, Benjamin Black, and Lisa Scottoline, as well as a fine-looking group of international novels from Norway (K.O. Dahl’s The Last Fix), Scotland (Denise Mina’s Still Midnight) and WWII Russia (Michael White’s Beautiful Assassin). That’s eight books all begging to be included in a four-book space, the proverbial quart trying to fit in the pint pot (or 946ml trying to fit into the 473ml pot, for readers in Canada and Europe), plus several other new offerings I haven’t checked out closely yet. So keep an eye out in these parts for the ones that don’t fit in the print edition; it promises to be a bumper crop.

First up: Bestselling author Michael Palmer, a personal favorite of former president Bill Clinton, offers up The Last Surgeon, a truly diabolical tale of a professional assassin in the employ of a shady quasi-governmental organization known as Jericho. The killer makes contact with his employer via eBay, of all places, using his bid amount to convey the price of a kill. The hero of the piece (and the aforementioned killer’s nemesis), Dr. Nick Garrity, runs a mobile clinic from the back of an aging RV, tending to the homeless of Washington, DC and its environs. He is an Iraq vet, suffering from PTSD, but on a good day, he is able to keep the demons at bay. Nowadays, he deals with sleep deprivation via an overload of work and his ongoing search for his missing friend Umberto, who disappeared in the wake of a bout with post-Iraq depression. Meanwhile, nurse Gillian Coates has her own set of issues to deal with: her sister Belle was found dead in her bathtub, an apparent suicide, leaving behind a mysterious comic book collection featuring super-hero Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. Gillian does not believe for a moment that her sister killed herself, and she is convinced that the comic books, which were well outside Belle’s normal area of reading interest, hold the key to her death. Soon, Garrity’s and Coates’s paths will cross, and their lives will connect in ways neither could have seen coming (although the reader will have no trouble whatsoever predicting at least one sort of connection…). Nick and Gillian are both well-drawn characters, as are the supporting cast members, and the killer, Koller, is a piece of work. At times the prose can be a bit gushy (“Damn you, McCandliss, he barely kept from hollering out, why tonight?” Note: the italics are from the author, not added by me.), but all in all, the tension level remains high, and the tale advances speedily toward its denouement in true time honored page-turner fashion.

Facebook, T-shirts, and Other Odds and Ends

A couple of weeks back, I broke down and actually set up a Facebook profile. Don’t bother to go there yet; there is nothing to be seen save for one picture of yours truly in the company of Hotei, the chubby Chinese god of abundance (and that has already been posted in this blog). I finally joined as a means of staying in touch with my daughter, who is more scrupulous about returning Facebook messages than she is about either emails or phone calls. What I didn’t expect was the influx of messages from folks I hadn’t heard from in years. I have to say it was kind of weird getting an email saying that “so-and-so wants to be your friend”, especially when so-and-so was my brother (to cite one example), and as far as I know, already my friend. Still, it has been pretty amusing, and I can’t wait to see who comes out of the woodwork next.

One such friendship request came from my cousin Cindy (with whom I have also maintained a friendship prior to Facebook), who asked that I post some pics of weird fractured-English Japanese T-shirts, so here are a few of my finds from earlier this afternoon:

I guess "raised wisdom" is better than the unleavened variety...

The "autheticity" is in doubt...

Humility is key, don't you think?

That adoult mood always gets me so flushed...

Nothing I could say could improve on this...

And then there were a few other odds and ends from this weekend that I thought merited inclusion:

When it comes to H1N1, you can't be too careful...

It's that old "L-versus-R" thing again...

Franchise opportunities available!

A manly health aid...

Humility is key, part 2; a Yamaha record player

(*$@&@%#@! Chin’s Grocery Store

Sometimes you have to actually go somewhere to get a true sense of the place. A TV special or even an article in a pictorial-laden publication such as National Geographic doesn’t begin to give you the complete picture: the sounds and smells of the place, the foreign-ness of the local language, the feeling of tranquility or danger, and most especially, the unusual application of English that is endemic in the areas of the world where “the mother tongue” is not the first language.

Case in point: in Hong Kong a few months back, I was looking out the tour bus window when I saw a hastily painted sign (in English) on the side of a building, a scribbling of the caliber usually associated with gang “tagging”, suggesting someone’s extreme dissatisfaction with “Chin’s Grocery Store” (see title, above). Sadly, since this is a PG-rated column, I cannot include a picture (although you can rest assured that I took literally dozens), but suffice it to say that it was about the crudest epithet that could be lodged in English against the aforementioned grocery store. A word which, had I used it in my childhood, would have caused my mouth to be washed out with soap by my mortified mother. And here it was, in capital letters, in plain view of the tour bus, adorning the side wall of a pleasant-seeming neighborhood food market.

So, when the bus made its next pit stop at some cultural oasis or another, I took the guide aside and asked what was up with Chin’s, what on earth a grocery store could possibly have done to engender such animosity. She looked a bit perplexed as she flipped through the images on the screen of my digital camera, then gave a big grin as she realized exactly what she was seeing. “Um, this is a bad word in America, no?” I acknowledged that it was, without a doubt, the baddest of English bad words. “Here,” she said, ”it is not a bad word. It is just the store owner’s first name.” Excuse me? Let me get this straight: old Mr. and Mrs. Chin named their newborn son (*$@&@%#@!? “It is not so uncommon here,” she went on. And indeed, this turned out to be the case: as the day progressed, I found several other examples of the unexpected given name, on billboards, shop windows and once on the side of a delivery van.

It got me to thinking in a couple of odd directions: first, what if Mr. and Mrs. Chin moved their family to the US? Poor (*$@&@%#@! would be suspended from school on day one, after answering the very first question posed to him by his new teacher. Or spin it the other way: an American family with a grade-school-age kid visits Hong Kong, whereupon young offspring happens upon the aforementioned sign. “Hey dad, check that out…” The father, upon assessment of the situation, posits that (*$@&@%#@! is actually somebody’s name. The kid, realizing the street cred that this discovery will give him upon returning home, basks in the sensual warmth that only an unpunished bad word can summon up in one that age. The mother grabs the dad urgently by the elbow, flashes him a dark look and mutters under her breath, “I told you we should have taken him to Epcot.”

Art Is Where You Find It (not necessarily where you might expect it…)

For twenty-odd years I have been a fan of Japanese art: woodblock prints, paintings, scrolls, and furniture. Last year, on a chance Saturday trip to nearby Inokashira Park, I happened upon an art form that a) I didn’t expect to find in Japan, and b) until I did, I suspect I would not have considered it a true art form (but I do now, believe me!). This past Tuesday, I had the opportunity to pay another visit to Inokashira Park, and to my surprise, on a weekday in the dead of winter, the artist was again busy at work, and with a gaggle of approving spectators close at hand.

The artist is Moto-san, a fifty-three year old gentleman whose sense of humor and charm transcend both age and language. Several afternoons each week, he can be found in Inokashira delighting children of all ages, doing magic and crafting the most elaborate balloon figurines I have ever seen. There is more than a bit of the showman in Moto-san; think “Ronald McDonald meets Elton John”, and you would not be far off in the assessment of his costume. His hair is dyed raspberry pink and shaved into the shape of a heart at the crown.

He keeps up a relentless patter which is immensely entertaining even to a non-Japanese speaker; judging by the crowd response, it is even more so to those who do speak Japanese. He engages audience members young and old, bringing them into his tricks and making them look a bit silly in the process, to the immense amusement of those not chosen. As the only foreigner in the crowd, I knew I was going to be singled out for some special treatment, and indeed I was. I was given a balloon to inflate, a simple thin balloon that was going to look sort of like an extended sausage when blown up. That was the plan, at least. The fact of the matter was that I met with exactly no success whatsoever, occasioning peals of laughter and shouts of encouragement from those standing close by. One of the three others chosen for this experiment had better luck (or lungs) than I, but the other two met with dismal results. Then, with a sigh of feigned disgust, Moto-san retrieved the four balloons from us and proceeded to blow them up, in unison—with his NOSE!

(For an encore, he blew up a rubber glove, of the sort used to protect delicate hands when washing dishes, and continued inflating it until it was the size of a turkey, at which point it popped! As soon as I figure out how to upload videos, I will add a few; in the meantime, check out this link at YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-g7Vjak65Mk)

Oddly, this whole experience left me feeling a bit philosophical (at least after I got my breath back and my eardrums stopped hurting). The purpose of art, I think, is to appeal to different people in different ways, to touch some part of them that daily life doesn’t typically reach. Perhaps it brings them a sense of peace, or longing, or insight, or even unease, but in the best cases, it makes them reconsider their assumptions about beauty in all its various forms. It can bring out the wonder of a child in the heart of a rather more jaded adult. It can bring back memories of a simpler or happier time. And for a child, it can open up a world of magic and imagination that can add broad washes of color to their later lives. If that seems an acceptable definition of art, then there can be little argument that Moto-san is an artist, a living national treasure. Just have a look at the faces of his harshest critics:

Whodunit Overflow…

As I prepare my reviews for the BookPage Whodunit column (check it out at www.bookpage.com) , I have to winnow down the choices to a mere four books, from the fifteen or twenty mysteries that cross my desk each month. Sometimes, there are four that are just head and shoulders above the rest in terms of writing quality, suspense quotient, humor, etc; other times, like this past month, I wish I had space to review another two or three, as there were so many deserving choices.

The Bricklayer; Noah Boyd; William Morrow; ISBN 9780061827013; 400pp; $24.99

One case in point is Noah Boyd’s gripping debut novel, The Bricklayer. The title character is Steve Vail, an iconoclastic ex-FBI agent with serious authority issues; he was tough, he got the job done, but he relentlessly called a spade a spade in a milieu where a certain amount of political savvy might have served him better, and it got him unceremoniously sacked. Nowadays, he works as a self-employed bricklayer; the money is not as good, the excitement factor is considerably lower, but on the plus side, he quite likes his boss. So it is a bit of a surprise when his services are once again required by the bureau, to track down a group of extortionists who are threatening to kill famous figures one by one (and making good on said threats) if the FBI does not pay their “ransom” beforehand. Vail’s would be handlers promise him full autonomy, the ability to work “off the grid”, unconstrained by any of the rules (Miranda, search and seizure, wiretapping) that keep law enforcement agencies in check. So let the games begin…

Vail is a character in the mold of Robert B. Parker’s Spenser, a slightly loose cannon who doesn’t take guff from anybody, but with a “heart of gold” side that only a few close associates ever get to see. He is gifted with a reasonably good visage, brains, brawn, skills and a good sense of humor, basically everything you need to succeed in a suspense series (or in life, for that matter). The Bricklayer is a great series opener; I am looking forward to installment two.

Fantasy in Death; J.D. Robb; Putnam; ISBN 9780399156243; 368pp; $26.95

J.D. Robb’s Eve Dallas stories, genre-benders of the first order, are a complex mashup of police procedural, detective novel, and sci-fi thriller, set some fifty years in the future. Robb’s post-postmodern New York City would be easily recognizable to Big Apple fans of the current day, but with some significant evolutionary changes: androids, often indistinguishable from humans except under close examination, perform many of the more mundane functions of daily life; virtual reality has become significantly less virtual and much more real; computers and computer games have evolved to a level almost unimaginable given current technology. Case in point: Bart Minnock, founder of computer gaming company U-Play, has a project in development which promises to up the ante in computer games; the player can choose his milieu, his opponents, his weaponry, from a virtually infinite array of choices. What even Bart Minnock didn’t realize, however, was just how dangerous his new game could be; when homicide detective Eve Dallas first lays eyes on him, he is lying on the floor of his game room, his head completely separated from his body. Eve is no techie, but she has a couple of gamers on her team, and their combined skills as computer geeks and investigators serve them well as they pick apart the threads of the most unusual case of their careers. Fantasy in Death is a welcome addition to one of the longest-running series in genre fiction (absolutely the longest, if you consider the genre as being “police procedural detective science fiction”), bound to appeal to “Bladerunner” fans and their ilk worldwide.

Betcha Didn’t Expect “Heartwarming”!

I know y’all don’t come here for “heartwarming”, but every now and then it does us all good to mix it up a bit, I think, so here goes: I got a letter from my step-cousin, Dick Pennock, shortly before Christmas, in which he let me know of a project that was near and dear to his heart. His father, Anthony Phillips “Tony” Pennock, was about to turn ninety, and Dick was soliciting reminiscences for publication in a family journal to be presented to Tony as a birthday gift. In the letter, Dick asked each of the members of his extended family to contribute an essay based on the theme “What Made Me What I Am.” His only instructions to the group at large were: “Cover as much or as little as you like. Keep it under three pages. I mean, you’re fascinating, I’m sure, but not THAT fascinating…”

I have known Tony since the summer of 1967, when his brother Jack married my mom, or to put it another way, since Tony was younger than I am now. Because he lives in Atlanta, and I am a leaf in the wind, we don’t cross paths all that often. The last time, I believe, was shortly after my stepfather’s funeral in 2005. There were three memorial services, actually, one in Cape Cod, one in Prince Edward Island and one in Pennsylvania, for my stepfather put down a taproot in every place he loved and those were three places he loved without reservation. Tony stayed with me for a few days after the PEI gathering, and we talked well into the night each of those days. This is not by any means uncommon when we get together. Our last marathon was also after a funeral, my mother’s, after which Tony accompanied my brother Thane and me on a road trip from Canada to Boston, where we would catch flights to our respective homes: Atlanta, Los Angeles, and Nashville. It was that experience that I chose to write about in the closing of my contribution to the journal:

“By way of a birthday note, Tony, I would like to say that one of my finest travel experiences ever was the ride home from Prince Edward Island with you and Thane after my mom’s funeral. (For those who don’t know this, Tony had air reservations back to Atlanta after the service, but at the last minute asked Thane and me if he could ride with us as far as Boston, a day’s drive from Prince Edward Island, just to be able to hang out together and catch up.) The three of us talked about everything under the sun, as members of this extended family have been known to do. We argued, we agreed, we laughed, we commiserated, and we solved most if not all of the world’s problems.  After Jack’s memorial service, you stayed with me again in PEI for a few days, during which time, in my estimation, we entertained one another exceptionally well. Given your religious leanings or lack thereof, I think it might amuse you that the closest I have gotten to prayer in the past forty years was when you took the helm of my then-new Mini Cooper and the two of us went for a supercharged spin through rural Kings County.”

In all, some two dozen family members contributed essays to the journal: Tony’s three sons, grandchildren, nephews and nieces, and their spouses/significant others as well as several of us (myself included) who share no DNA, but think of one another as family nonetheless. Our lives are the richer for it.

Happy Birthday, Tony!

It seems Kit Kats are not the only foodstuffs in Japan with unlikely flavor variants…