Philip Brasor - The Japan Times

JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX

Oct 21, 2001

Meeting baseball's Dr. Ichiro and Mr. Suzuki

Last Sunday, Nihon TV did something interesting. At the last minute, they pulled the scheduled installment of their biography series "Shitteru Tsumori" and replaced it with a hastily produced documentary about "Mr. Baseball," Shigeo Nagashima, who a few weeks ago announced that he was stepping down as manager of the Yomiuri Giants.

CULTURE / Music / HIGH NOTES

Oct 17, 2001

Festival Conda Lota

The lineup for the upcoming Festival Konda Lota, Tokyo's annual celebration of global roots music, is smaller than usual but no less potent for that.

JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX

Oct 14, 2001

The truth about the 'enemies of the people'

For the past month there's been a lot of talk about how much our sense of the world has changed since the events of Sept. 11. Actually, it's mainly changed for Americans, but as someone once said: When America sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold.

CULTURE / Music

Oct 10, 2001

I once was lost, but now I'm found

Radiohead's ascent to superstardom presents an interesting paradox. The English quintet's talent for creating infectiously melancholy pop was undermined by a clear ambivalence toward the value of such a talent. "This is our new song," singer-lyricist Thom Yorke sang in 1995, "Just like the last one/A total waste of time."

JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX

Oct 7, 2001

What Lara can tell us about Afghanistan

Angelina Jolie's new movie, "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider," might not be up to much, but I have a lot of respect for Jolie herself. On Sept. 10, at a Tokyo press conference to promote the film, the actress mentioned her new job as special ambassador for the U.N. High Commission for Refugees. She spent almost a year in Europe making "Tomb Raider" and found "that the news you get there is different from the news you get in the United States. There was a lot I didn't know about the world, and when I got back, I called up the United Nations to find out more."

CULTURE / Music / HIGH NOTES

Oct 3, 2001

Alicia Keys: 'Songs in A Minor'

When it comes to describing pop artists, few adjectival phrases are as off-putting as "classically trained," especially when it's used repeatedly in the course of a five-year PR buildup for a teen prodigy. But classically trained Alicia Keys' long-awaited debut album, "Songs in A Minor," is neither as annoyingly precocious nor overburdened by technique as one might expect. Her occasional teasing contributions to movie soundtracks ("Men in Black," "Shaft") have shown that the 20-year-old singer-songwriter knows what makes for good R&B radio.

JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX

Sep 30, 2001

Finding redemption under the surgeon's knife

One of the less memorable show biz scandals of 1998 involved the 48-year-old actress Ayako Sawada and her 36-year-old manager/husband Yukihide Matsuno. The pair had been married only a few years, but Sawada wanted out. She accused the dour Matsuno of physical and mental abuse, not only of herself but of her daughter, the product of an earlier nonmarital liaison.

CULTURE / Music / HIGH NOTES

Sep 26, 2001

Sigur Ros

Since the worldwide release of their second album, "Aguis Byrjun," last year, Iceland's Sigur Ros has been dogged by more pretentious journalism than any pop group in history. Melody Maker took the cake when it described the group's music as "the sound of God weeping tears of gold in heaven."

JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX

Sep 23, 2001

'Comfort' education at expense of standards?

Earlier this year, the Education Ministry announced a set of guidelines for public schools that go into effect next April. These changes include reduction of the school week to five days, a 30 percent cut in "academic content" and the development of "general studies," the gist of which remains vague but that will nevertheless amount to between 70 and 130 hours a year. In addition, the ministry has directed each local board of education to expand "optional" subjects, which have been interpreted as community volunteer activities and the like.

CULTURE / Music / HIGH NOTES

Sep 19, 2001

Bob Dylan: 'Love and Theft'

You can tell how much the critical establishment needs Bob Dylan by the praise heaped on his last studio album, 1997's "Time Out of Mind," which contained five excellent songs, five pretty good ones and one 161/2-minute bore. Music critics decided the album was all about death, and as this was, after all, the Voice of His Generation, it subsequently acquired meanings it couldn't support and became representative of something monumental even if in parts it was unlistenable.

JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX

Sep 16, 2001

Documenting an unprecedented disaster

Crises, it is often said, bring out the best and the worst in people. In the case of the terrorist attacks that took place in the United States on Tuesday, the best was illustrated by citizens waiting five hours to donate blood, while the worst was exemplified by service stations gouging customers for gasoline and those customers threatening violence in return.

CULTURE / Music / HIGH NOTES

Sep 12, 2001

Rachid Taha

Algeria's indigenous pop music, rai, which gained international attention in the 1980s, was, like many popular music forms, the result of city slickers adapting music from the sticks for their own purposes and enjoyment. Originally ribald, rai became pointedly political after young people in the '60s and '70s used it to express their anger and desires.

JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX

Sep 9, 2001

Making space to swing a cat in a rabbit hutch

Blame for the consumer spending slump is usually pinned on widespread anxiety over an uncertain future. But another reason, one that isn't discussed as much, is that most citizens already have everything they want.

CULTURE / Music / HIGH NOTES

Sep 5, 2001

Nils Petter Molvaer: 'Solid Ether'

Being a respected regional musician has its good points and its not so good points. Nils Petter Molvaer, who was born in 1960 and raised on an island off the northwest coast of Norway, eventually made his way to Oslo in the early '80s and became the most acclaimed trumpeter in the city's burgeoning jazz community, but his local success sealed him off from the larger world. On the other hand, untainted by constant professional exposure to influences that might have turned his head, he immersed himself in his first love, electric Miles Davis, simmering in the expressionistic juices of the master's last great experimental phase.

JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX

Sep 2, 2001

They say breaking up in public is hard to do

Pop culture has given us many marriage archetypes. At one extreme, there was "Thin Man" Nick Charles and his wife Nora, who epitomized a partnership based on privileged cynicism: witty, alcoholic, rich and inseparable. At the opposite end are "The Honeymooners," Ralph and Alice Kramden: the short-tempered, blue-collar blockhead and his harridan wife, who, though constantly fighting, couldn't live without each other.

CULTURE / Music / HIGH NOTES

Aug 29, 2001

Marshall Crenshaw

With its encyclopedic array of early rock 'n' roll hooks and a spare guitar sound that anyone could duplicate, Marshall Crenshaw's eponymous 1982 debut was the perfect primer, the kind of record mainstream acts could plunder for material to plug into the already ebbing New Wave. The fact that the record didn't make its author a star along the lines of other retro-pop singer-songwriters like Elvis Costello and Nick Lowe is considered by some to be one of the great injustices of the '80s.

CULTURE / Music

Aug 29, 2001

Boy Bands II Men Bands

On July 9, the day after the Backstreet Boys announced on MTV that their tattooed bad-boy member A.J. McLean was entering a rehabilitation facility for "alcohol and depression," advertisements appeared in the Japanese dailies announcing the Boys' Japan dome tour in November. Tickets, however, would not go on sale until Sept. 9, which was exactly two months away. In deference to group solidarity, the Boys canceled the dates on their summer tour until McLean finished his monthlong hiatus, but in early August they had to expand the cancellations when McLean's doctor suggested an extra two weeks of treatment. The Japan promoter's caution was obviously justified.

JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX

Aug 26, 2001

Intimidation, deception -- and that's just the cops

Earlier this summer, when an American serviceman was accused of raping a Japanese woman on Okinawa, the U.S. military authorities were put in a difficult position.

CULTURE / Music / HIGH NOTES

Aug 22, 2001

Nina Persson: 'A Camp'

Not too many musical groups preface their name with the indefinite article, but A Camp doesn't describe a band so much as the state of mind that led to this album's recording. Promoted as a Nina Persson solo effort in fact, if not in name, the record of the same name is loose and uncluttered, dabbling mainly in various species of country music, from its pop-twang version of Restless Heart's "The Bluest Eyes in Texas," which graced the closing credits of "Boys Don't Cry," to the murky folk of "Silent Night."

JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX

Aug 19, 2001

Family drama of Koizumi's forgotten son

To: Fuji TV Attn: Programming Department, production division From: Izawa Office Talent Agency Re: Proposal for drama series

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