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Last night I had the good fortune to be invited to a cast & crew screening of Michael Clayton, the latest George Clooney film from his independent production company. Not being in “the industry,” it was a unique experience for me both in terms of seeing a movie without having read any reviews or head from anyone who had seen it, and also the opportunity to interact with some of the people who worked on the film.

Sydney Pollack does a good crusty old law partner

The movie itself is good, the action is tight, the villains are villainous and the hero does the right thing in the end - Hollywood enough to be entertaining but not so much that it’s completely predictable. I’m not sure why Clooney chose the moral dilemma of being a corporate lawyer serving “the wrong side” as his main theme though - that’s been done so many times (e.g. The Firm) and this particular story didn’t bring any new angles to it. After Good Night, and Good Luck and Syriana, both of which touched nerves much more raw from recent events, this latest punch feels a little soft.

What I was genuinely impressed by was the crew. They all seemed like genuinely cool people, though in a project-based industry where you get your next gig through referrals, I suspect most of the jerks get weeded out pretty quickly. All of them work what sounds like pretty long hours, for a lot less money than they’d earn in just about any corporate job, purely because they love being part of the filmmaking process. Definitely made me doubt my chosen path all over again.

After a week in Tokyo, Manhattan feels like a small town. You can walk across the island in an hour. Whenever someone opens a new restaurant a dozen blogs and newsletters announce it. And even before the opening, several blogs will have already gossiped about arguments between the chef and the owner, or problems getting the liquor license from the community board. I even run into people I know in the street. That’s not supposed to happen in a big city, I should be walking anonymously through crowds full of strangers.

Feeling out of your skin?

So what does one do after coming home from a trip to Japan? Go out for sushi.

Wrting this blog post on an iPhone, while sitting on the tarmac waiting for our flight to take off, feels both very modern and very last-century. The iPhone itself rocks, but waiting 60 seconds for each page refresh is so 1996 dialup era. And while I love being able to jet between Tokyo and New York, after 2 hours on the tarmac waiting for air traffic control to let us take off.. I’m imagining passengers in horse-drawn carriages stuck in traffic jams on the streets of ancient Rome didn’t feel much different.

Don’t drink the water at O’Hare

Last night I stayed in a high-end ryokan, the kind that serves a full kaiseki dinner in your room. This one was as extravagant as any, with a full 15 (yes, fifteen) courses that elegantly combined a variety of regional, in-season ingredients into a medley of artistically presented hot and cold dishes in a sequence that evoked the rhythms of nature, the rise and fall of empires and the progress of civilization since we emerged from the seas.

Whenever I encounter food-as-art I have a very mixed reaction. Not the usual developed-country guilt that we’re wallowing in luxury while people elsewhere are starving, it’s more a sense that maybe we’ve just lost the plot somewhere along the way. I certainly enjoyed the meal, each dish was indeed an edible sculpture and the overall experience was almost symphonic in scope. But the formality made it all feel a little distant. I missed the part where you take your first bite of a dish and go “mmmm!” out loud.

 Eenie meenie…

I wonder if people who live in Tokyo eventually stop being surprised by anything. Today I came across a noodle place that has its menu on a big back-lit sign outside, above what looks like those ticket machines in the train stations. Only in this case, instead of fare classes and destinations on all the buttons, each one corresponds to a menu item. You push a button (”Noodles with pork and soft-boiled egg, 980 yen”), feed in some money (1000-yen note), and the machine spits out a little ticket along with your change. Go inside, sit down at the counter, hand the guy your ticket, and he comes back 2 minutes later with your noodles. When you’re done, you just leave, no check, that’s it.. genius.

Spending a day shopping in Nakameguro and Daikanyama is enough to make you wonder whether Japan was once a French colony in some parallel universe. It’s not just Comme des Garçons, feels like half the stores have French names, or use faux French paraphernalia as props for exotic ambiance.

The food, too, was very Europhile. Tons of cafes full of hipsters sipping wine and eating panini. Soba for lunch is probably as pedestrian here as a hot dog or burger in the US. Is the grass always greener on the other side? I think the only country that considers its own food cool is Italy.

Forget Japan’s reputation for homogeneity, a quick stroll through the Akihabara district and I was pretty blown away by the sheer diversity (and occasional bizarreness) of electronic entertainment and gadgetry on offer. There’s the usual computers, cameras, etc.. but also entire stores specializing in LED lighting, or model figurines, or softcore anime DVDs with abnormally large-breasted cartoon schoolgirls on their covers. I can imagine there are people who would be into almost any kind of niche interest, but enough to support block after block of these stores? Scary.

Beef jerky?

A lot of the arcades and amusement halls have those machines where you put in a coin and then move this big claw around to try to pick up prizes, usually stuffed animals and such. I found one that gives you a chance to snag a box of smoked beef snacks. Maybe there’s a special thrill to scoring something for 100 yen that would ordinarily cost 500 or 600 at the local convenience store.

More passion!

Speaking of Lost In Translation… I walked by a huge billboard with Cameron Diaz in an ad for a local mobile phone operator. Wonder how much they paid her? Don’t think we’ll be seeing her doing Verizon ads back in the home country anytime soon..

After 2 days at the Tokyo Game Show, I’ve decided that I’m not 13 anymore, and there’s a limit to how long I can play/stare at video games before my brain begins to turn to jelly. Or maybe it did turn to jelly when I was 13 and I just didn’t notice.

Even the fighting games are cute

Spending this much time with Japanese video games also makes me wonder.. how much do the differences in Japanese and western games reflect underlying cultural differences? Western games are all about photorealism, and most involve competition and/or combat. Japanese games are cute, cartoony, fantasy worlds.. not necessarily innocent or child-like, they often have dark and even twisted themes, but they’re always taking you on a trip away from the real world rather than trying to make the game feel “realistic”. Video games are usually about fantasy and control, but why do Americans want to pretend they’re soldiers or athletes, while Japanese gamers want to leave this world entirely and hang out in trippy technicolor dreamlands? Do they have more imagination than Americans, or are they just more bored and need stronger stimuli?

Mousepad with a comfy wrist rest

My first blog post finds me in Japan, newly arrived, and my brain is starting to feel slightly addled from the mix of slowly-fading junmai daiginjo sake and the ambien I just took. Lost in Translation was a great movie.. uncanny how well it captures the feeling of being a westerner jetlagged in Japan.

The thing that always strikes me about Japan is how everything feels so familiar, even though the Japanese aesthetic (not to mention the signage) is clearly different.. after dinner today, we found a little back-alley basement bar called Bar Jinn, a couple of blocks off the main drag in Ginza.. it was the classic neighborhood bar transplanted to Tokyo - the owner/bartender made every drink himself, cracked jokes (mostly bad) with all the customers, and did his best to make sure everyone was having a good time. We did.

I say I’m starting a blog about as often as most people resolve to go on a diet. Let’s hope it sticks this time.