michael lambe's scrapbook

Last night the guys I teach in Osaka took me to a magic bar called Vernon’s where you can be entertained by a magician at your table. The main magician at the bar was a TV celebrity known as ムッシュ・ピエール or Monsieur Pierr whose shtick is that he pretends to be French and says tres bien every time he completes a trick. He had us completely wrapped around his finger. Some of the tricks he was doing last night you can see in the following video but the video doesn’t really do him justice. When somebody performs this level of sleight of hand right under your nose it’s pretty impressive.  Anyway, I recommend Vernon’s Bar if you’re in Osaka. A very good evening’s entertainment.

The Daily Show ran this short piece last week on just how dumb and tantrum prone Sarah Palin is:

Basically the critics accuse her of being stupid, ill-educated and prone to tantrums. Sarah Palin has since hit back by calling them “jerks” and saying “it’s not fair“… thereby pretty much proving their point. Well, one thing we can all be thankful for is that this nasty little hate-monger has been kept out of the White House. Only, apparently she wants to give it another shot in 2012 if God shows her “the open door”: “I’m like, OK, God, if there is an open door for me somewhere, this is what I always pray, I’m like, don’t let me miss the open door. Show me where the open door is,” says Palin (eloquently) and “if there is an open door in [20]12 or four years later, and if it is something that is going to be good for my family, for my state, for my nation, an opportunity for me, then I’ll plough through that door.”

How do you plough through a door? Please God – NO!!!

Meanwhile, here in Japan, we celebrated Taisho’s birthday at Joao last Saturday and followed the party by going to Alphabet Ave. and drinking till dawn. Here’s a picture of my gang all lined up at the bar:

Aren’t they lovely?

This is what happens to them if I play with them at Photfunia:

Last night I went to Woodnote which is a fine little 25 year old cafe in the Kitaoji area where you can hear Irish music and drink organic coffee and eat cinnamon toast. And you can see pictures of that here: LINK

And tomorrow I’m meeting up with Kageyama-san for the first time since Small Town Talk closed down in February and I’m really looking forward to it!

I just tried out this GenderAnalyzer thingy. It uses artificial intelligence to find out if a blog is written by a man or a woman and apparently it usually works pretty well. So I tapped in urls for both this blog and for deepkyoto and do you know, in both cases, I’m a lass. Who would have thunk it? I wonder what criteria they are using to judge one’s gender by. Perhaps I need to write more about football and erm… cars?

Anyway, we just had a glorious three day weekend so here’s what I’ve been up to…

Friday

Fine wine and cake at Bocca del Vino. If you want to treat yourself or someone else to something reet posh – this is the place for you.  I spent over 20,000 and I don’t regret a single yen. Here’s a picture of some very very luscious cake:

After that we moved onto Joao for some Halloween frolics…
BubbleShare: Share photos – Find great Clip Art Images.

And finally onto Kisui where Setchan was being a cheeky monkey:
BubbleShare: Share photos – Play some Online Games.

Saturday

Lovely weather so we had a picnic by the river and cycled up to Kamigamo where I prayed for some luck in regards to (ahem!) future endeavours. When I got home I discovered two very exciting (yet entirely unconnected) emails from magazine editors who had discovered Deep Kyoto and want to work with me. I’ll let you know more about that as and when it develops.
BubbleShare: Share photos – Find great Clip Art Images.

Sunday

Went to a bar called Ringo where they play Beatles hits ALL THE TIME. Weirdly, I enjoyed it. I also finally managed to finish this: In Search of… Vinyl.

Monday

A return trip to Kobe. Took in China Town, Ijinkan and Harbourland. I also managed to remember where Piccolo is. Kageyama-san introduced me to this rock bar – a “Deep Kobe” institution – the last time I was in Kobe. This time the master of the joint was completely wasted, so much so he fell asleep standing up and could not be awoken. Fortunately he has some very honest customers who left their money with him when they left… Most funtertaining.
BubbleShare: Share photos – Find great Clip Art Images.

Here’s what I’ve been up to lately:

Saturday October 4th: Went to see Randy Weston and Alex Blake at Kamigamo. That was an amazing night. Those two guys are no spring chickens but they play with all the mercurial energy of youth. Alex Blake plays his bass like a crazy man, and both of them are just pulling, no yanking music up from the depths of their souls. At the end of the night Randy Weston thanked us all for a deeply spiritual evening – and truly I felt blessed. So much so, I bought the CD.

Sunday 5th: Braved the rains and went to the Vegetarian festival at Okazaki park and ate a lot of food. Despite the incessant inclemency there was quite a big turn out and the lady who runs Sunny Place told me later she sold all her foodage. Here are a couple of pictures of things that look (and taste) like hotdogs and burgers but aren’t, and me enjoying an organic beer.

Wednesday 8th: Went to “Gnome” Irish pub on Kawaramachi. It’s a good place, good music, lovely food but no customers. I think it may need the Deep Kyoto treatment. Later on I went to “Alphabet A” on Pontocho with Massun, and Yoshida-kun turned up later too. That’s a good bar too. I really really ought to give it a review sometime…

Other than that a fairly normal week, worked a bit, wrote a couple of tests, and was told by some first years that I have a very small bum. Please don’t look at my bum, I said and moved swiftly away before any other ideas entered their heads. Went to “Field” Irish pub on Saturday to hear some Irish music, as they have a session there most weekends, but they weren’t much cop unfortunately. In fact the guy playing the tin whistle who seemed to be the leader, was practically tone deaf. So ended up in Joao instead. No problems with that though it’s a great place and we had a great chat with Taisho. Sunday I checked out the Parisian art exhibition at the Kyoto City Art Museum in Higashiyama. It was interesting but too packed with people to be enjoyable to be honest… Then last night I went to Uji. They have lit up the streets and the bridge there with lanterns decorated with scenes form the The Tale of Genji. All very pretty. It finishes on the 19th so go now if you can or check out the pics below (because who needs words when you can look at pictures?).

Today, I went to Otsu to record some narration for a KCTP promotional video (I’m as smooth as an NHK newscaster apparently) for which I received a handsome fee. I wonder how one gets into narration work… And that pretty much brings us up to speed. Here’s a couple of pictures of a friendly cat I met in Uji last night:

I want to get a couple of links out of the way first so…

There aren’t enough posts on bars on Deep Kyoto. This summer I aims to remedy that. God help my liver! Anyway, the first of many is up tonight: Bar Hawkwind. It’s a good place. I like it.

And this will make you smile if you haven’t seen it already: Where the hell is Matt?

Now on to tonight’s topic. The last meditation from Hozouji, if you remember went like this: すべてが割りけれぬところに人生の妙味がある
Which I somewhat lazily translated as: Not everything can be broken down into simple solutions, and therein lies life’s beauty.

Well, Masaya was good enough to write to me with some thoughts on it and here they are:

There are two tricky parts in the original, which are difficult to translate.

The first is 割り切れぬ（割り切れない, the opposite of 割り切れる）.

Maybe you know, but it’s originally a mathematical term.

If you divide 10 by 2, you get 5. That’s 割り切れる.

If you divide 10 by 3, you get 3.333333333333333333(and 3 continues forever). That’s 割り切れない（= 割り切れぬ）.

We use this idea metaphorically for something that you have to decide, you have to make choice, or even how you feel about.

For example, if someone ask you whether you like your job, and your answer is either ” Absolutely” or “Absolutely not”, then that’s 割り切れる.

If your answer is “Yes and no. I like it because such and such, but I don’t like it because such and such, but then …, even so …. but on the other hand … (arguments for and against continues on and on like the never ending decimal places)”, that’s 割り切れない.

It is also used to describe feelings. When you decide something or accept something, and you feel that something is not quite right about it, that feeling can be described as 割り切れない.

割り切れない indicates there is no simple solution, it’s not easy to find a simple answer.

In your translation, you use “simple solutions” to capture the idea, which is very good.

The next one is 妙味. This is an interesting word. It’s a combining 妙(strange) and 味(taste). “Strange taste” in 妙味 has a positive meaning. It’s strange, unusual, not boring, not common, so it’s interesting. Life is interesting because not every thing has a simple solution, and you have to find answers to many things. And even when you think you’ve found an answer, you have an uncomfortable feeling of unsettledness（割り切れない）.

I like this poem. Thanks.

Thank you, Masaya! Now the thing is, when I first translated this poem there was something, an uncomfortable feeling of unsettledness in fact about my translation that bugged me. That strong sense of life being “interesting” in 妙味 was completely lost in my translation because I stuck too closely to the dictionary definition of beauty. This despite the still small voice at the back of my mind telling me that something was amiss. Of course I could have gone with charm as my friend Osamu suggested, but that word didn’t seem to carry enough weight (not in it’s light and fluffy modern meaning anyway). So Masaya’s commentary got me thinking again and I think I finally hit on the right word:

Not everything
can be broken down
into simple solutions,
and therein lies
life’s fascination.

Seems kind of obvious now… Lesson learned: trust your instincts, not the dictionary!

I shall be posting a fresh meditation very soon.

For the concerned: my computer is fixed (took it to Sofmap and had the hard-drive replaced) but now I have an enormous backlog of stuff to post both here and on Deep Kyoto, and heaps and heaps of pictures. What have I been doing for the last month? Well, teaching obviously. New classes are going well and they seem like a super-friendly bunch this year, thank goodness. We had a very enjoyable hanami party at the start of April (sadly sans-Kageyama), for which I volunteered my services as 場所取り (which roughly translates as place-guarder-from-the-crack- o’-dawn), hence my sleepy grimace among the pictures below.

BubbleShare: Share photos – Play some Online Games.

I took a lot of pictures of the cherry blossom too. On Shimogamo-hondori:

BubbleShare: Share photos – Powered by BubbleShare

On the Philosopher’s Walk:

BubbleShare: Share photos – Powered by BubbleShare

And on Kyodai’s Katsura Campus I caught these little beauties:

BubbleShare: Share photos – Find great Clip Art Images.

Also, Taisho has renovated Joao, making half the counter standing only. I’m not sure I approve of this particular change – some of us prefer sitting, especially those among us in high heels – but we had a party to celebrate anyway. As you can see I have recently started wearing glasses:

BubbleShare: Share photos – Play some Online Games.

And now it’s Golden Week, and I have enough free time at last to write up some reviews for Deep Kyoto. Today’s fresh post is on Bar 探偵 (Detective Bar) which opened up last month and impressed me right away for the playfulness of both its theme and construction. Read more about it here: Bar 探偵

Advice

Here are a couple of links I’ve been meaning to post for donkey’s.

First, some good practical advice from a writer that I started following last week and it has worked wonders for me: Link to Neil Gaiman’s Journal.

And here’s a nice post from Yaro Starak, (who is famous for writing a massively successful blog on… um, how to write a massively succesful blog) on how to motivate yourself when you feel like crap and can’t be arsed and would much rather stay in a funk or better yet in bed. Your mind is your greatest asset he says, but it can also be your greatest hindrance:

[The great thing about output is the power it has over your mood. Negative emotion breeds negative actions - lying in your bed or watching TV for example - or a lack of any action at all. If you focus on creating something and just take one little forward step, the physical effort you exert effects your inner emotional state. Your ability to soldier on in the face of emotional dissonance can carry you through the darkness and return you to a state of congruent activity and thought.]

Clearly Yaro Starak is clued-in to the benefits of mindfulness. LINK

Well, here’s my little tip for getting yourself out of bed when it’s dark and cloudy both outside and inside your head. Have something to look forward to right at the start of the day and make yourself an awesome breakfast. Preferably with lots of fruit. For me it’s a bowl of cereal, one of those healthy-yet-tasty crunchy cereals with lots of nuts and dried fruit in it, and then on top of that heaps of chopped fruit: banana, apple, pears, mikan, strawberries, grapes, pineapple, kiwi, whatever you like, and add a bit of yoghurt on top of that too (why not?). These days I’m into Country Farm Fruit Crunch which I buy at Maki but which I think is available in some other Import Stores here in Kyoto. Fruit is of course expensive in Japan but entirely worth it. It’s refreshing and tasty and gives you that much needed energy boost right at the start of the day. I like a nice cup of fresh ground fully-caffeinated coffee to wash it all down with too. Awesome.

Small Town Talk finally gave way to harsh economic realities on the weekend (even a special guest appearance by Bono couldn’t save it) but it didn’t go out with a whimper. The place was jam packed with STT supporters, DJs Noda, Yoshida, Masuda and Nana all took turns at the turntables, beverages were quaffed, emotional speeches made, gratitude expressed, Queen renditions sung and good times had. Here’s a short compilation of photos with a short message from Kageyama-san at the end. Adios STT!

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/bT2QELeJOiU" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

I put the photos up on Bubbleshare if anyone wants copies: LINK

Mikey Lambe’s Liver is Saved

My very favoritest bar in the whole wide world, Small Town Talk, is closing down this Saturday. Devastated. However, on a brighter note it does perhaps mean that we won’t be afflicted with sights like this anymore:

I actually have a short video of Masuda dancing and shaking his meat and two veg about, but trust me you don’t want to see that.

Yasunari Kawabata and Kaii Higashiyama

On a more cultural note: there’s a really nice exhibition celebrating the friendship between novelist Kawabata and artist Higashiyama at the “Museum of Kyoto” (京都文化博物館） on Sanjo (between the post office and the Duce Mix building) . It’s only on until the 24th so check it out if you have the chance. Kaii Higashiyama’s paintings are really beautiful.

BubbleShare: Share photos – Find great Clip Art Images.

A bunch of pictures for ya. This first lot is from Taisho’s birthday party on Friday night:

BubbleShare: Share photos – Print Christmas Coloring Pages.

And these are from last night at Pagode which has now closed it’s doors for good. All things must pass. (Sigh)

BubbleShare: Share photos – Delicious Christmas Recipes.

Things that have happened lately that I have neglected to blog about… Hmmm. Let’s see… It got colder…

Seriously, I’ve watched “It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown” 13 times with my students (a palpable hit!) and have only 3 viewings to go…

Amusingly, I was chased down the street by a policeman last Tuesday morning (yes – CHASED!) and questioned as to the ownership of my bicycle AGAIN (that’s about 12 times since September). They like to claim it’s simply because I have “the wrong type of lock” but I think the fact I am white and have a big nose has something to do with it too. I think they think “Oh Jimminy! It’s a foreigner! He’s bound to be up to no good!” and then come galloping along in their excitement only to be met by my scowling face asking them “What’s your name and the name of your police station?” as I whip out my notebook and take down their details. Table-turning see. Role-reversal. Yeah. (Doesn’t work though).

Foolishly, I woke up late for my job at the clinic this Saturday (AGAIN!), jumped in a taxi and mailed K___-san to say I would be late. She then immediately replied, pointing out it was a national holiday and I had the day off anyway. So that felt a bit silly.

Nepotistically, I’ve put a link up in the blog-roll to Chris Cotter’s “Heads Up English!” – an English teaching resource site that looks pretty snappy.

Sadly, Luka’s bar Pagode is closing down on Saturday and you can read about that and about the final live music performance this Friday (Nov. 9th) and about a possible Pagode resurrection up in the mountains up on the sister-blog at Deep Kyoto.

Regrettably, tonight I managed to wind-up one of my (adult) students by being just plain rude. Thing is, I’m not naturally the most patient person (bad trait in a teacher I know) and he is one of my more mind-bogglingly obtuse students. He has a habit of sinking into his own little world, and staring at the page or the ceiling whilst muttering to himself in Japanese and holding up the class for twenty to thirty minutes at a time. After ten minutes of him doing this while his partner tried to get him to respond with endless unanswered questions I decided to intervene and spur him on a bit. Which was the right thing to do. But I was less than diplomatic in doing so. And I have to be dimplomatic. Because he is a customer. And for better or for worse, for the time being, that’s my job. Sigh. Oh well, I shall just try to be nicer next time and hope he forgives me…

And finally… to explain tonight’s title. There’s an amusing post by Neil Gaiman up on his website today on a press junket for the new Beowulf movie. He makes brief mention of two of the stars of the movie; Angelina Jolie (turns out – she’s a human being!) and Ray Winstone, who, quite delightfully, is very much Ray Winstone. And I’m not going to give you a link to that you lazy gits – just type in “Neil” on google and be totally awe-struck by the fact that he is the most popular Neil in the entire google-verse.

And there I was not blogging for the last couple of weeks because I thought I had nothing to blog about.