8 posts tagged “books”
Would you ever consider having your life taped for a reality show?
No! My life's boring and there's nothing to see.
I would consider being a contestant on a reality show though. Like one of those over-the-top ones on vh1. Where you have to drop the sponsor's name every three seconds and talk about how awesome you think the stupid "prize" is. I'm serious! I'd go on one tomorrow if I could. I'd have to get my teeth bleached and hit the gym for a few weeks first, so I can look FIERCE while I lose my dignity!
I'm actually not joking. I really love reality tv.
On a side note, this documentary looks cool. It's about a photographer who took pictures of naked people in Las Vegas for his book "Naked Las Vegas," seemingly having a nervous breakdown in the process. Couldn't embed the trailer but the book is below.
Little Sayuri, the heroine, was weak, starry-eyed, kind of stupid, and a completely passive victim of her circumstances.
Mineko Iwasaki is a long-retired legendary Geisha who donated her knowledge and time to the author of that abomination of a story. He even thanks her in the book.
Unfortunately she was so disgusted by the book, she wrote her own.
Make no mistake, she is strong, she never saw a problem she didn't try to remedy, she fearlessly confronted the established authorities controlling the whole geiko and maiko industry, and she doesn't make excuses for herself or anybody else. In fact, she gave everyone from British Royalty to legendary movie stars a dressing down when they behaved inappropriately.
Basically, she's my hero. If I was her, I would have been very angry at "Memoirs of a Geisha" too, which is nothing less than an orientalized, western male interpretation of Japan.
And lets be honest, that's the last thing the world needs.
Look! Book 2 is finally coming out! What adventures do Jesus and Buddha get up to this time?
I wrote about Book 1 here btw ; )
It's a collection of short stories covering the Indian-American experience from almost every angle you can imagine. A young Indian-American family vacationing in India, reeking of McDonalds and western arrogance. A white woman having an affair with a married Indian man she could never have. An Indian wife who follows her husband to America, only to feel confused, stifled, and frustrated by her American life.
The title story follows an older, bilingual Indian man who translates for Indian patients at a doctor's office. He's a little frustrated with his life. He's educated, accomplished, he was meant for greater things. Yet here he is, interpreting maladies.
I felt that the author was making a statement with this story. She is also bilingual and bicultural, and she is also an interpreter of maladies. She's interpreting the bicultural experience. And that's both lofty and mundane.
My dream after reading this book was to also be an interpreter of maladies. Great book.
I just discovered this manga. Guess what it's about?
A vacation in Tachikawa, Tokyo.
Jesus and Buddha live together in a small apartment, and get up to all sorts of fish-out-of-water adventures. Jesus and Buddha have a funny married couple type dynamic -- Jesus is the more flighty, irresponsible one and Buddha is forever trying to save money. They are just so cute.
My favorite part was when Jesus and Buddha have a conversation about how artists tend to depict them in not-very-flattering ways. Buddha complains that "people always choose to depict me when I was at my fattest. That was a really hard time for me, and it kind of makes me depressed when I'm faced with that image of myself all the time. And how come my eyes are always half closed like I blinked in a photograph?" To which Jesus responds, "and how come I always look so weak and wasted?"
Very funny.
Just as I thought, my boss thought I skipped town because my phone was disconnected (I didn't pay it before I went to NY). So I don't have to go to work until the end of the week. Bye bye money!!! The one good thing about being a workaholic is that I always have more money than I need, but now that I've totally become a lazy non-working girl, I've seen my money just disappear. All my money's gone!!! I think I'm gonna have to start living like a poor person again.
Marty (photographer who dyed my hair disastrously) makes as much as I do on a good month at the club, and she has a real 9-5 job. A surprising number of old friends have become lawyers. Best Friend's book deal has made her a little bit of money too. (In totally unrelated other news, have you read Bar Flower, the best book ever, yet?) My grown up friends are making REAL money. Then again I do have a lot more freedom than almost anyone I know. I can just not show up to work, I can take as much time off as I want, blah blah blah.
However, I'm pretty restricted when it comes to my social life, and in my dating choices.
In that book I read about the MIT kids beating the system and winning millions in Vegas (21: Bringing Down the House), they talked about people REALLY making money. I mean they made millions with their crazy little math-whiz brains, card counting at black jack. But the strippers and hookers and companions were making serious money too. If I was working in a brothel in Shibuya making the equivalent of 300dollars a day, I'd be really pissed to know that my counterpart in Vegas was making 3,000dollars for working less.
I guess the lesson of the day here is that Vegas is the big time for sleazy work. And the other lesson of the day is money for money's sake gets old really fast. I need to grow up and get a real job.
I'm home, home home. Home where everything works and people aren't lazy and you don't have to check everything to make sure you haven't been short-changed/given the wrong order/accidentally put on a wanted list.
I hadn't paid my phone bill so my phone's not working. Oops. I'll sort that out tomorrow. I guess I'd better do that first thing. Otherwise I won't be getting any work, and then I won't be getting any money, and then what will I do????????
Books I've read/movies I've seen this past week while on vacation. Some were by choice, some were not. All were worth my time.
陰日向に咲く (Kagehinata ni saku) by 劇団ひとり(Gekidan Hitori). Very good, and a very fast read. If your Japanese is good but not quite super fluent, and you want a challenge, try it (I'm talking to you, Hopeless in Saga Prefecture)! It's a bunch of interconnected short stories about people struggling in Tokyo. Starts with a salaryman that decides to free himself from the cage of society and become homeless, then just keeps getting deeper and weirder. I guarantee you'll recognize yourself in at least one of the characters in this book. And it'll hit you so close to home.
I finished reading it on the plane, then gave it to the Japanese salaryman who wouldn't shuttup that was sitting next to me. He was 29, and he was on his way to a three month stint in Virginia. His boss told him that he was being sent there last week. Being the corporate samurai he is, refusing wasn't even an option. But he said to me, "I'm saying goodbye to my 20s in Virginia, what am I doing with my life?" Poor corporate samurai. He felt like the salaryman that becomes homeless in the book. I had to give him the book so he could finish it.
Candy Girl by the incomparable Diablo Cody. Man, she does not spare any gory detail in this memoir of her year as a stripper. And when she says she threw herself into a world of sleaze, she really did. she stripped in dive bars, she stripped in high class clubs, she spread her legs wide and showed her goods all over the place. She even took a break from stripping and did shows in a glass box for a few weeks. Supremely honest and entertaining. Side note -- what's with dudes going commando and coming in their pants at strip clubs? Come on boys...
The Heroine Diaries by the also incomparable Nikki Sixx. The also gory and detailed, but incredibly self-absorbed and unhinged diaries from a year in the life of everyone's favorite rock star junkie during the height of his junkie years (keeping a diary while you're strung out is a truly exceptional commitment to being a self-absorbed rock star). I always had kind of a crush on him. Probably because he looks like he couldn't give two sh**s about you, but you still want to save him. What is wrong with girls? Who teaches this to us? My own issues aside, this book was fun, and even uplifting.
Fear and Trembling the movie. It's in French. A girl spends the first five years of her life in Japan and has a life-long love for the country, until she takes an entry level position with a major Japanese corporation and returns to the country of her birth as an adult. It's scruffy but lovably klutzy young French girl against stiff and uptight Corporate Japan. Who will win? If you're Japanese at all, you might feel embarrassed and incensed by the biased portrayal of the country. But Best Friend's dad rented it especially for us, so I kept my judgment to myself and ultimately was entertained.
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