Tokyo is a confederacy of contradictions. A place where ubiquitous salarymen and Shimokitazawa hipsters and Harajuku girls sit slurping soba stool to stool; where ancient temples and centuries-old onigiri stalls coexist alongside hedgehog cafés, sky-high skyscrapers, and lights that never seem to stop flashing, like Times Square on steroids. In some ways, expecting the unexpected, making sense of the nonsensical, is par for the course.
As someone who has lived in Japan and travels there somewhat regularly, then, I’m surprised to find myself surprised by this country music subculture, its current crackling under the city, bubbling up in saloons like Country House in Minato, Happon in Kunitachi, Hee Haw in Nakano, Chuck Wagon in Aoyama, and Cowboy-Bar Boro in Chiyoda; a lifestyle manifest in stores like Bailey Stockman (cowboy boots), Albuquerque (leather wallets and belts), and Oregon Trail (western wear). In these bars, basements, showrooms, and dance halls, there is a fervor and fever for a facet of American lifestyle that I did not expect to find outside of the 50 states. But perhaps that says more about me than it does these acolytes of Garth, George, Johnny, Willie, Reba, Randy, and Dolly.
“At first, we took out the love scenes, and the show was falling a little flat because we’re all about romance and family interactions,” said Bradley Bell, the executive producer of the CBS daytime drama. “One of the first ideas we had was to bring in mannequins for the intimate scenes and hospital scenes, and it’s working quite well — we’re shooting it from a great distance or in a way you can’t see the form is inanimate.”
How are the performers reacting to their lifeless co-stars? “We’ve had a lot of strange looks and questions like, Do you really want to do this?” Bell said. “But everyone is game. They are getting their first latex kiss.”
When Breakfast in America first opened in 2003, most customers were students in their twenties—and of those 70 percent were American. Within a couple years, it had completely flipped and 70 percent were français. And thanks to “regulars” who’d been frequenting the diner for nearly two decades, the average age was now 30 to 35.
That said, it was rare to get anyone over 60, unless they were dining with their extended family or babysitting their grandkids. And seniors over 70—almost unheard of. That’s why I was so excited when our 86-year-old neighbor said she’d never been to an American restaurant and wanted to try mine.
“Just the fact that the same number of people came out as went in is a triumph,” says Mark Nelson, one of the original eight “biospherians”. Far from a failure, he regards Biosphere 2 as an unsung achievement in human exploration, as do many others. “I like to say we built it not because we had the answers. We built it to find out what we didn’t know.”
Like other artistic endeavors, garden making can be a response to loss. Creating a garden can be as much a re-creation as a creation; an idea of paradise, something that reconnects us with a landscape we have loved and which compensates us for our separation from nature. Way back in ancient history, the fabled hanging gardens of the city of Babylon were intended to do exactly that.
A book about the most famous composer in the western canon, a “dead white male” at that, isn’t an obvious place to look for insights into our current plight. Yet from the opening paragraph, Laura Tunbridge’s short, illuminating study of Beethoven (1770-1827), published to coincide with the 250th anniversary of his birth, casts a loose net across the centuries and deftly gathers in the connections. Not that she could have known quite how pertinent her starting point would be. Beethoven: A Life in Nine Pieces opens with a prolonged campaign, begun soon after his death and lasting nearly two decades, for a monument to the composer to be built in his birth city, Bonn. If our current preoccupation is more about knocking down than erecting, this statuary episode reminds us of our compulsion to honour, in lifelike replica or exhaustive biography, those we celebrate.
Now even the snow has grown sad –
Let overwhelmed reason go,
And let’s smoke our cigarettes through the air-vent,
Let’s at least set the smoke free.