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For the past few weeks, I've been hooked on "Shameless", a channel 4 program that has been running in the UK since 2004. I was not aware of this show until I read an article in early January that it was picked by Showtime for the US adaptation and that made me curious about the original UK version.
Thanks to the on-demand channel 4 site, I was able to watch the entire 7 seasons in few weeks, and wondered what made this show a good drama, as opposed to soap opera, albeit dramatic characters and plots. Here are some of my thoughts:
Frank, a great traditional British character
Interesting thing about Frank, an alcoholic father of 6 (by season 7, father of 9) on dole is the fact that his character is very much in the tradition of jesters or fools in British novels and plays. In fact, his constant ranting and unique moral standards are quite similar to Falstaff and Fagin, and perhaps because of the skills of the actor playing Frank, he sounds quite Shakespearean in some of his speeches. He could be quite a philosopher and a keen observer, with surprisingly high intelligence, but his practical aptitudes are non-existent.
Frank also represents the tolerance for failure in Britain, quite an opposite from the way the failures are depicted elsewhere. Having lived in competitive and workaholic countries of USA and Japan, it is refreshing to see his idleness and lack of wills accepted as part of life and fact of the world, not only by Frank, but by the people surrounding him. Frank's character is, by no means new, appearing in Ken Loach, Mike Leigh and other British film makers' films, but by naming the show "Shameless", Frank's unapologetic attitude toward failure constitutes the core of the show, and I find this quite British.
The more we get to know Frank, the more we see his multifaceted character, such as his strong love for his family, but no active role as caregiver, and his sense of entitlement to the government's handouts, but no strong sense of ownership for his possessions (except for his constant needs for alcohol and drugs.) He could be extremely observant to his surroundings, but he cares less about how people see him. This complexity and ambiguity of character makes Frank real, and consequently, set the show apart from the soap opera.
Whether he exists merely as a jester or as a central character in the episodes, he is the omnipresent character, and Shameless is not Shameless without him. After watching full 7 seasons of the shows, I still don't know Frank, and he remains a character with full of surprises.
The moral standards of Chatsworth Estate
Fictional Chatsworth Estate in Manchester is where this show is taking place, and as Frank mentions in his speech, this is not a "garden of Eden", nor anyone's cup of tea. In fact, this is the place where the characters (mostly Frank's children) would do anything to get away from, unless one is happy to live off on permanent government handouts.
What intrigues me from the cultural perspective, is the Estate residence's moral standards. For them, petty crimes such as stealing, fraud, minor violence, drug dealing, abuse, etc., are part of their daily lives and they seem to be quite oblivious. In other words, if you are caught, bad luck, and it really is not your fault. This doesn't mean that they don't have moral standards...they do, and they draw an ambiguous line on what's right and wrong, but they are not based on laws or religious beliefs. This ambiguity may be the reason why the show has been so successful. You just can't guess what the characters will do, because there are no set standards for moral codes, and their decisions are more or less made on their instincts. For many of us, this lawlessness is utter fiction, and as long as they are within the confine of fictional Estate, we can sit back and enjoy the show, because I think deep down, there are desire for us to act upon instincts, rather than on moral codes.
But what if this was reality, and not a complete fiction? In fact, the estate is based on where the creator of the show, Paul Abbot, grew up, and I have seen some viewers' comments that the shows are "too painful to watch because it is too close to home." This means there are world out there, where this estate exists for real.
Other thoughts...
- Season 8 has been a bit of disappointment for me. This is probably because many of the Gallagher children are no longer in the show, and for me, the show was about the Gallagher clan. My all time favorite Gallagher children has been Ian, as I find him a good, but confused and ambiguous soul, but now he is gone, that gentle ambiguity is no longer there and the show seems to become more aggressive and somewhat brutal. Season 8 is more about the Maguire family, and while I like Mickey, this clan tends to act a bit out of my comfort zone, especially without Paddy who had been the anchor of his clan and kept the dynamics of the family intact.
- I've never been to Manchester, but learned few things about the city through this show. At first, I couldn't understand half of their dialogues, but now have ears for their accent. Also, having been an obsessive The Smiths and Morrissey fan during my long-gone student days, I understand better about the cultural context of Morrissey's lyrics, like the word "Strange Way" means prison, and his desperation for not being able to fit into macho and violent surroundings. One of my favorite plots in the show is when Shane and Mickey drug the tourists and take them to see the place where The Smiths used to have gigs, with Shane pretending to be Morrissey with a bunch of flowers on bicycle. Classic!
- I thought slung are universal, but they are not...learning British slung was like learning foreign language. Thanks to online slung dictionary, I get to understand them better now, but not sure if I ever have a chance to use them myself...may be in my sleep.
Until last week, Tate Modern hosted a special Gauguin exhibition, and I was able to catch this very popular and crowded show.
Gauguin has never appealed to me in the past, even if I was quite impressed with his use of colors and bold compositions. After immersing myself in his world for several hours, I confirmed that the exhibition has not changed my dislike for his paintings and it made me wonder why this is the case. The exhibition was well-curated, showing his artworks according to the themes, such as "portraits" and "religion", with plenty of biographical and background information. Gauguin led a sensational life, so his biographical information was crucial for understanding his artistic progression. Through this exhibition, I learned that Gauguin's life and art are one and the same, more so than other artists, as he was an instinctive artist who seem to have been affected by his immediate surroundings.
I'm still not sure why I dislike his paintings. It may have to do with his half-heartened early influence by Pissaro or the sense of flatness in his paintings. On the other hand, I happily discovered that I like his wood-carvings and sculptures, and thought he might have made a better 3 dimensional artist than 2.
As an artist, Gauguin lived an incredible life, but as a person, he would have been someone I did not care to get to know, with his pre-feminist, chauvinist views on women quite typical of his era and incredible drive for artistic mission on the verge of pure selfishness. As his art and life are entwined, perhaps his paintings are acutely mirroring his views, whereas his 3 dimensional works obscure them, and that may be the reason why I prefer his works in non-2 dimensional medium.
Like or dislike, this was an incredible exhibition that helped me understand Gauguin's art and his insatiable drive for life and art.
Finally, 2011 has arrived.
2010 was the year that fundamentally changed many things in my life. I realized that what I believed to be solid and firm are actually fragile and precarious, and the future does not continue in the straight line from the past.
The end of the era should bring forward the new era, but no new era started for me in 2010, as I kept myself in the limbo, wishfully hoping that the new era will show its face and lead me through the chaos. This never happened without my active participation in life, and the year ended with the sense of immobile stagnation.
Luckily, I was in the position to ponder my past and prepare my mental state for the future, but I don't think I used the time wisely. I spent many hours "catching up" on things, or so I claimed to my friends and family, but in reality I was escaping from taking actions because I was in denial that the past has really became the past.
This needs to end now. To be inside the comfort of well-built cocoon is tempting, but this is counter-productive, and I'm still too young to stop living.
According to the Eastern horoscope, luck is cyclical, and there are times of growth and times of stagnation. I was told that 2011 is the year when my new cyclical era of good fortune and growth will start, and so I waited.
There is no more excuse for me to stay status quo, now that 2011 has finally arrived.
My new year's resolution is to accept that the past is really the "past"and move on.
I woke up this morning with a smile on my face.
Looking out the window, the sky is blue, as if my good dream has decided to stay for the day.
In my dream, I was at the hair salon (yes, I need a haircut and that has been on my mind,) waiting for my turn. I was assigned to a stylist who seems to be very popular and busy, so I needed to wait for her for a while. Then there was an electric failure and the lights went out, so the stylist decided to take a break and sit at the round table, where I was invited to sit with her and her colleagues.
While I waited for the power to come on, I looked at the stylist, and realized that she was a girl who I used to play with in Africa. She was only there for a short while, visiting her American uncle, but while she was there, we played together. Then, I saw a man sitting across from me, and realized that he was a boy who I knew from Africa. Though we were never close, he was at my school, and we both played football. I mentioned this to both of them, and voila! they both remembered me. The man was a proprietor of the hair salon, and though he and the stylist worked together for some time, they had no idea about their African connection. Then we recalled a day when all three of us played in the vast open area, from day break to dusk, and looked up at the jakaranda tree as we waited for our parents to come pick us up.
We all hug each other, and I woke up.
The boy and girl in my dream did not exist, but there are few friends from the time I was in Africa that I would like to see again. My brief 2 years stay there was one of the best times of my life, and when the memories come back in full force, they arrive with nostalgic happiness.
Zambia. The name of the country still casts a spell on me when I hear it. I heard it mentioned yesterday on TV, and may be that was the reason why I had this dream.
Goodness how the time flies! With a blink of an eye, now we are approaching Thanksgiving Holidays!
Since the last update, the world has become a very different place; credit crunch arrived in gusto with no short-term ending in sight, and Obama is the President-elect. Privately, my traveling intensified toward the end of the year, and for the past few months, my life has been all work, no play.
Somewhere in this world, however, there are places where the time seems to have stopped, and I would like to write about such place in this entry.
When I was 10, our family moved to Fukuoka, and we spent 4 years there until we moved to Yokohama. For whatever reasons, my father decided to place my sister and I into a Catholic girl school, a school known to educate girls from the upper crust of Fukuoka society from kindergarten to high school. I don't know what got into my father's head, as we are not Catholic, and certainly not of the upper crust, but may be he wanted to join the rank, with his recent promotion to the General Manager of the branch office.
The school took few dozen students for the first years of primary school, secondary school, and high school, but in principle they did not take any new comers for other years. Therefore, it was truly exceptional for the school to accept me as a fourth year student, and my sister as the first year student, from the second term of the year. My father must have had a truly influential connection.
My feeling for this school has always been divided; I was miserable for the first two and half years, and was happy for the latter years. My misery probably had not much to do with school, but rather my wanting to go back to where I lived before we moved to Fukuoka. Looking back, this was a great school, encouraging us to learn things from experience. They had Kendo (art of Japanese sword) class once a week, tennis club for children over 10, and we were all encouraged to learn how to play at least one music instrument by age 9. I don't recall studying hard at this school...I spent hours and hours in library, reading.
Since I moved to Yokohama at 14, I only went back to Fukuoka once, an year later, for a visit.
In early September this year, our office in Tokyo organized an event in Fukuoka, and I had a chance to visit Fukuoka. As the event ended on Friday, I extended my visit for one day for exploration. My goal was to trace my commute from school to where I used to live 20+ years ago. I walked almost everyday during these 4 years, walking 40 minutes one way. I was a stubborn child, dismissing to commute with bus for being too lame, just as I claimed wearing coat in the middle of winter was lame and lived without one...I wonder what I was thinking, really.
Central Fukuoka has changed massively over the past 20+ years, and there weren't too many places that I could recognize.
But school...it stood there, solid, as if 20+ years has not existed at all. I felt like I was a girl again, with pigtails and dark blue uniform, carrying heavy black leather bag full of books and feeling quite lost in a city that I didn't belong. I wondered around, fearing that the place still tried to grab me. I wanted to escape, but wanted to stay at the same time.
Then, I started to walk home...I mean toward my old home. My body pulled me toward the direction, and my head just looked to see the changes. Strangely, only few things have changed, but everything looked smaller than I remembered. There was a memorial park along the way, with the bust of Buddhist nun and an old wooden house; a European-styled house built on red bricks with statues of two angels holding a fountain in the front; a remains of former fortress with sharp rising stone walls; a pond with floating lotus leaves...
Finally I reached my house, a tired looking apartment building that used to look spanking new and modern while we lived.
35 minutes walk from school to home, with additional 10 minutes to the nearest station with my adult legs...that was the world I lived in for 4 years, a 5 kilometer radius of that apartment building.
That world still exists, only without me. I am glad that I escaped from it, like I dreamed of escaping as a child...yet it is a comfort to know that it still exists, like a parallel world that never crosses, only showing itself like an illusion once in a blue moon.
San Francisco in the evening and the nightfall...
I was in San Francisco this week, and spent half a day to completely move out of the apartment I lived in since 1997. The apartment was in Noe Valley, still my favorite part of town in San Francisco. I kept my place there for various reasons, subletting it for the past few months, but the opportunity came my way to move into a new place in San Francisco with less hassles, so I decided to say goodbye to good old Noe Valley.
The apartment itself wasn't perfect, as it was on the ground floor with little light, and fixtures were very old, some probably dating back to half a century ago (they have their own charms, but not in the sense of convenience.) The ceiling was too low, and I could hear too much of the neighbors upstairs.
Still, it was my home, and home it was for close to a decade. So, it was with a pang of sadness that I left the place for the very last time.
It was a home for me and my two cats; one now deceased and another adopted. I have great memory of this place, especially of the first 3 years while my friends from New York lived in San Francisco (they all went back.)
Goodbye Noe Valley as my neighborhood...I will still go back there for a visit, but not to be at home again.
View from my hotel room in Istanbul
It snowed and snowed and snowed...On my last trip to to Tokyo, I flew over Istanbul to meet with our business partner for a day. I flew on Lufthansa via Munich, and on that long-haul flight, watched a German film called "The Edge of the World". The film description on the program didn't say much, except that it was a film about a Turkish family in Germany and their journey, and I thought it was more than appropriate to watch it on my way to Istanbul.
The film was about the crimes and how such crimes are dealt with by people who are not directly involved in the crimes...in this case, a son whose father became an accidental murderer, and a mother whose daughter was killed by being too involved with her lover's affairs. I was especially touched with the process of healing leading to the ultimate forgiveness by the mother.
The film was inter-cultural, but ultimately what resonated was the universal humanity. And I thought Istanbul suited so well as the backdrop for this film. It's unique mixture of the west and the east is just what I think of Istanbul: a city with beautiful European architectures juxtaposed with impressive mosques; a very liberal party town with some women in scarfs and veils; wealthy urbanites walking alongside old men pulling garbage carts.
Istanbul may really be the "Edge of the world", in the sense that it is the "edge" of Asia and the "edge" of Europe. If that was the intension of this film's title, it could not be more true.
With few films that I've watched so far in the past few months, I thought this topped...but then, the situation could not have been more perfect, as I was on my way to Istanbul on Lufthansa.
