Order tracking

Order No. XXX-549-9462494838 placed 27 Apr 2010 (01:15:39) on BookDepository.com
Order status: dispatched

"The Selfish Gene"
by (author) Richard Dawkins
Qty: 1
$12.06
(Save $7.89)

"Jazz"
by (author) Gary Giddins
Qty: 1
$30.03
(Save $9.92)

"The Border Trilogy"
by (author) Cormac McCarthy
Qty: 1
$13.68
(Save $3.21)

Shipping: Free worldwide shipping
Total order value: $55.77

My next walk

I've started planning my next walking adventure: the Koshu Kaido. One of the gokaido, or five main highways of Edo-period Japan, the Koshu Kaido (labeled C on the map below) is just over 210km long and connects Tokyo with Shimo-Suwa in Nagano prefecture.


Shim-Suwa is also on the Nakasendo, which I walked in 2007 (you can read a bit about it here and here). Since I started both that walk and last year's Tokaido walk in Kyoto, I thought it would be nice to start in Tokyo this time. However, I changed my mind after looking at the following graphic from the glorious Papa Walks the Koshu Kaido website showing the change in elevation along the way (Shimo-Suwa is on the extreme left and Tokyo on the extreme right). So for the third time in four years I'll be walking to Tokyo.

The Imperial Hotel

They say you should stick to blogging about things you know something about. I don't know much about architecture, but I know what I like, and I like Frank Lloyd Wright. So this post is about the Imperial Hotel.

The Imperial Hotel today

The Imperial Hotel in Tokyo is a dour, unimaginative, uninspiring piece of architecture. Looking at it today, it's hard to imagine that half a century ago there stood on the same site one of the most imaginative and inspiring building's ever created.

I can't remember when I fell in love with Frank Lloyd Wright's Imperial Hotel, but it was probably around 1991 when, while a student at Nagoya University, I visited Meiji Mura, an open-air museum of architecture in Inuyama. It was here that the hotel's main entrance hall and lobby were relocated in 1968 when the building was demolished to make way for the present Imperial Hotel. I remember walking around inside and being impressed both with the ornateness of the interior (which features intricately carved lava rock) and with how cool it was despite the heat outside and the lack of air-conditioning.

What's left of Frank Lloyd Wright's Imperial Hotel at Meiji Mura

When Wright was commissioned to build the Imperial Hotel in 1915 he was asked to come up with a design that would withstand Tokyo's frequent earthquakes and fires. He achieved this partly by using floating foundations - an idea that was widely criticised at the time. Who would have imagined that so soon after its completion in 1923 - on the very eve of its official opening, in fact - Wright's design would be put to the ultimate test in the Great Kanto Earthquake. And while legend has it that the Imperial Hotel was one of the few buildings in the city centre to survive the earthquake and subsequent fires unscathed, there was some damage, including slumping and bulging of the floors. This slumping along with wartime damage and the demand for a more modern hotel with larger rooms were among the reasons cited for the demolition of Wright's Imperial Hotel in 1968.

The Imperial Hotel in the 1960s

While in Tokyo last month I stayed just across the road from the new Imperial Hotel and the day before I left I went over to have a look. I was pleasantly surprised to find a small exhibition in the lobby celebrating the 120th anniversary of the hotel, which included quite a few photos of, and small items (chairs, plates, etc) from, Wright's hotel. I learned quite a few things, including that Wright designed not only the building but almost every aspect of the interior design, even down to the dinnerware. In fact the project consumed him, and he spent much of the time between 1915 when he took on the job and 1923 when it was completed living in Japan. But his interest in that country dates back even earlier. He began collecting Japanese woodblock prints in the 1880s, and when he went overseas for the first time in 1905 it was not to Europe but to Japan, which he called "the most romantic, most beautiful" country in the world.

Imperial Hotel coffee service, produced according to Wright's design

Another thing I learned was the derivation of the Japanese word baikingu, meaning a smorgasboard or buffet-style meal. I knew that it came from the English word "Viking", but the exact derivation was a mystery to me. Well, it appears that in 1958 after a trip to Europe, the Imperial's manager decided to open Japan's first smorgasbord restaurant at the hotel. However, the word "smorgasbord" was considered too long and difficult for Japanese to pronounce, so they decided to name the restaurant the Viking. The name became synonymous with this style of dining, and so it was that the word baikingu entered the Japanese lexicon.

The Road

A couple of weeks ago I asked my sister if she wanted to go and see the movie The Road. I remembered she'd read and enjoyed the book, by Cormac McCarthy, and I think we'd even talked about the movie and the excellent reviews it was getting. So I was a bit surprised when she told me she didn't really want to see it. The reason she gave was that she thought she'd find it too depressing.

I first heard of McCarthy when the movie No Country for Old Men came out (he also wrote the novel on which that movie was based), but I only really became interested in reading his work after he was mentioned several times in Don Watson's American Journeys, the book about traveling around the United States by rail which I read last December. This story about McCarthy auctioning his old typewriter, which appeared in various newspapers at around the same time, further piqued my interest.

Anyway, since my sister wasn't keen to see the movie of The Road, I decided to read the book. I found a copy of it on the shelves at the public library and finished reading it the other day. It is very dark, although like American Rust, the novel I read last year in which the protagonists seem to wander from one hopeless situation into another, it was saved by an ending that, while not exactly happy, does provide some hope. Now that I'm used to McCarthy's quirky style of writing (he omits apostrophes in negative contractions like hadnt and isnt and doesn't use quotation marks for speech) I might see if the library has any of his other novels.

Jasmine

The more I hear about Keith Jarrett's soon-to-be-released new album Jasmine, a collaboration with bassist Charlie Haden, the more I look forward to it. From the liner notes (you can read the full text as well as the track listings here at Amazon):

An ecstatic moment in music is worth the lifetime of mastery that goes into it, because it can be shared.

Nothing in life is that funny

I always hesitate to call myself a jazz fan. Yes, these days I listen almost exclusively to jazz, but my tastes are quite limited (I prefer acoustic, melodic, melancholic jazz, and above all jazz that moves me) and there's a lot of jazz I don't particularly like. One thing I have a real aversion to is jazz vocals. So, for example, in deciding which jazz club to visit during my recent trip to Tokyo, the first thing I did when going through the schedules on the club websites was disregard all the dates with vocalists.

As with most rules, there are a couple of exceptions. I've always quite liked Tony Bennett. Which is lucky, because a couple of Christmases ago my brother, knowing that I was a Bill Evans fan, gave me The Legendary Sessions, a CD of duets by Evans and Tony Bennett. The other exception is trumpeter and singer Chet Baker.

Until recently I'd resisted listening to Chet Baker, not only because he sings, but also because I was put off by his image as the pin-up boy of West Coast cool jazz, which caused me to dismiss him as a lightweight. According to Wikipedia, between 1966 and 1974 Baker did record music that could be classified as early "smooth jazz," but from what I've heard of his recordings from the 1950s before his heroin addiction got the better of him and in the 70s and 80s when he cleaned himself up enough to make a comeback, he was anything but a lightweight. His music certainly has many of the qualities I look for in jazz.

Baker's abilities have always been the subject of controversy. He could barely read music, and he was no great technician, sticking to the trumpet's middle range and employing little or no vibrato. His singing, described as "an acquired taste" and having "an innocence and a sexual ambivalence that is vaguely unsettling," helped him acquire a mainstream audience beyond jazz, but it also attracted scorn from jazz purists, who were incensed when he won popularity polls in jazz magazines ahead of such distinguished contemporaries as Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis.

In the 1950s, his youthful good looks saw him courted by Hollywood (he appeared in the 1955 film Hell's Horizon), and for a time he lived the life of a movie star, his popularity among women, contempt for rules, and love of fast cars earning him a reputation as the James Dean of jazz. But he turned down an offer of a Hollywood studio contract so that he could continue to tour as a musician.

Baker's drug habit (he became addicted to heroin in the 1950s) began to interfere with his career in the 1960s. He fled to Europe to escape a drugs charge in the U.S., only to be jailed in Italy and expelled from England and Germany for drug-related offences. He returned to the U.S., but was forced to switch from trumpet to flugelhorn after losing several teeth in the mid-1960s. He left for Europe again in 1975, living out of a suitcase for the rest of his life. By this time he was playing the trumpet again, his sound "frail, airy, almost ethereal." Years of heroin use had taken its toll, not only on his playing but also on his looks. According to the liner notes to Chet Baker: The Collection (a compilation of Baker's mid-1950s recordings for the Pacific Jazz label):

By the time of his death in 1988 his face told his story. Much photographed, the boyish good looks of the 1950s Pacific Jazz album covers had disappeared with the ravages of a junkie lifestyle, his lined face displaying the all too tangible evidence of addiction. "They're laugh lines," he once quipped to fellow trumpeter and arch-humorist Jack Sheldon. "Nothing in life is that funny" came the response.

And while I'm quoting liner notes, here are some more, this time from Broken Wing, one of the many albums Baker recorded in Europe in the 1970s and 80s as he was struggling to resurrect his career:

After praising him to the skies - abusively, in his estimation - when he was the West Coast trumpeter-playboy, the men of America's "show-business" had looked the other way when, unrecognisable, with the craggy face of an old Indian, Chet was trying to emerge from what might possibly have been the nearest thing to hell. "There are no second acts in American lives," wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald.

My lucky hat

I've just returned from a week-long trip to Tokyo. To make sure everything went smoothly, I took along my lucky Italian felt hat.

I bought the hat in Florence in 1994 during a trip to Switzerland, Italy, France, and London. From memory it was at San Lorenzo Market, where I'd earlier resisted buying a leather jacket despite the stall owner's insistence that he had one "just for me," a line I found about as convincing as the one from the man standing outside the Indian restaurant in Avignon, who, on hearing that I was from New Zealand and Mrs Fool from Japan, exclaimed, "Ah, Japan, India and New Zealand form a triangle!"

Guy in hat with bicycle (Paris, 1994)

And although I'm not generally superstitious by nature, it's hard to ignore the fact that since then I haven't been involved in a single hijacking, plane crash, kidnapping, or other major calamity overseas while I've had my Italian felt hat with me.

On the other hand, I didn't have my Italian felt hat with me the day in March 2005 when, while bicycling through the picturesque countryside near the town of Ubud on Bali, I fell victim to a daring young motorcycle-mounted thief who lifted my bag containing my video camera from the basket in front of my very eyes before speeding off into the distance. (The loss of the camera I quickly came to terms with, but the loss of the film inside it, which contained footage I'd shot at Borobudur a few days earlier, was a real shock.)

Neither did I have my Italian felt hat with me on the ferry from Mandalay to Bagan in February 2007 when I suffered food poisoning, robbing me of the best part of two days of my five days in Bagan, one of the most beautiful places on earth, where I also had the misfortune of renting an Indian bicycle whose chain came off no fewer than three times in the course of a single morning (although on each occasion I was aided in getting it back on by kind and enterprising locals, one using a machete and another a metal Chinese soup spoon).

My trip to Tokyo was a resounding success. But who knows what disasters would have befallen me had I not taken my lucky hat.