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Showing posts from June, 2014

Breaking with the Bad (I see a darkness)

Click to play If this were a Tuesday night like others recently, after the kids are in bed, and I have most of the week's teaching already under my belt—a strange expression little attended to—I might have abandoned work for the evening, opened a can of beer, and settled down to an episode of Breaking Bad . I understand that the fifth series aired and completed in the US about three years ago, but Netflix came late to Japan—in fact, it still isn't available, officially—so it is only in the last couple of months that what critics call the 'best tv drama series ever made' came to my attention. Not that I needed a critic, much less than army of them, to tell me I was witnessing an historic phenomenon—in all my life I have never seen an American-produced series like this. Breaking Bad is, in the truest sense, an awesome piece of theatre. There are no two-dimensional roles, and every adult character is as believable, and weirdly attractive, as they are fatally flawed...

Waiting for a miracle I (eponymous)

Click to play [My all time favourite male singer-songwriter, Leonard Cohen, covered by my favourite female singer-songwriter, Anna Ternheim] Dream on... The miracle—miracles, if we're thinking of achievements as events—is (are) language acquisition, mine and Justin's. It's been nearly 4 years since we moved to Japan, and I'm still waiting for the miracle, the day when I stop hearing Japanese as familiar noise in need of translation, and simply hear the message itself, and can respond reflexively, the moment when I don't have to summon every ounce of pragmatic inference, and common sense just to make a weak probabilistic stab at what Justin's nursery teacher might possibly be telling me about his day, or about what needs to be brought with him on Monday next (temporal adverbs, I'm good at...). It's all a far cry from my situation in the winter of 1981 when I first arrived at a German boarding school (Landerziehungsheim Gut Honneroth, Altenkirc...

Clouds

Click to play 'Beauty is not [only] in the eye of the beholder; a song is only as deep as the interpreter' —things one learns from teaching. Still here, after all the years? Nicht zu fassen!