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By Dustin Wilson
"I'd really like to make the first point clear of how much of a drag it is to play in NYC and have promoters mess you around, when you clearly play for free and have people come in," says Elijah Campbell Amitin, guitarist and vocalist for Brooklyn-based Palomino.
"We get e-mails all the time from these online booking companies saying what a great opportunity this is," Amitin says, "and sometimes we respond and sometimes we don't - we can get these shows on our own".
This do-it-yourself mentality has served Palomino well, as the Brooklyn-based band have made great strides since forming in 2010, with the recent release of their new music video for their single "Ponte Vecchio" from their forthcoming self-titled EP, shot by Jonathan Hansen and the Pioneer One web series crew.
Amitin and drummer Mike Sweeney met at a party in Astoria where they discussed music and shared e-mails, not thinking they'd really cross paths again.
"Elijah e-mailed me the next morning, and I didn't remember having the conversation, " says Sweeney, laughing.
"It was one of those drunken ramblings about music that no one remembers," adds Amitin. "But after that I had a feeling things would click."
The duo soon started writing their own music and playing venues in Manhattan and Brooklyn, sharing the stage with other bands like Family Fun and Casiorossi.
"Honestly our favorite place to play is upstairs at Piano's, where they have the free shows. And we can play for people who don't know us, just cutting out the middleman who drives up the cover charge," says Amitin.
"Playing as a duo is fun, we played without a bass player for two years, and it was mostly out of not wanting to compromise," says Sweeney. "We had a really good vibe we were in to. It was always a big thing where people were either turned on by it or hated it. We always got the White Stripes or The Black Keys comparisons but we sound nothing like those bands. It was always a weird thing for us. As a drummer, you have to fill up the space, and that kept both of us writing really honest and simple."
Rounding out their sound with bassist Pat Deeney for their EP release party, the newly minted trio harken back to the days of early alternative pioneers Husker Du and The Replacements.
In 2011 the band recorded their debut self-titled album, five songs layered with Amitin's emotional dissonance over jangled guitar and drums that grab at your heartstrings.
Palomino plays their EP release party at the Ella Lounge Feb 17.
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De Capo Press, January 2012
By Peter Milne Greiner
Heroin addiction and rock 'n' roll celebrate wide appeal in terms of their respective and overlapping readerships, and just as there are major rock acts and major addicts, so too are there minor ones. Must we presume, though, that underlying the grand narrative of addiction as it is experienced in the context of a successful band, let's say in the 90s, there is a unifying consilience? A story and message to be told and delivered regardless of the prominence of the carrier-band; one that is common, hazarding trope status? You've heard of Nirvana, correct? We all know that story. How about Soul Coughing?
That's what I thought. Not all roads lead to Addis Ababa, and if you get a chance to pick up Mike Doughty's The Book of Drugs, you'll learn my meaning. I came to this memoir as a fearful superfan; fearful that Doughty's yarn, or call it a cable, would yield its revelations only to one who, like me, has uncannily followed the strange and meandering career of a musician who, for all his later efforts to gain a wider audience, is ostensibly a cult-followed misfit.
So imagine for a second that the idea of a memoir recounting the addiction days of the lead singer of Soul Coughing did not make you feel alienated or lost. Imagine--as someone who has never heard their music but is maybe generally interested in the 90s, rock music, or recovery--there is, nevertheless, something meaningful to extrapolate from such a text. It's a tough one to parse, too, coming from the opposite angle. But here's what I think.
The Book of Drugs is full of succulent period errata, much like Patti Smith's Just Kids and Eileen Myles' Inferno. We go to legendary places and meet legendary people along the way. Places like CBGB's and people like Jeff Buckley, a friend of Doughty's. Like Smith and Myles, Doughty recreates downtown Manhattan in his formative moment with adroit and insouciant deftness. One comes to see and know as he has. It is a deeply enchanting backdrop for a deeply disenchanting behind-the-scenes.
The onset of Doughty's addiction as he tells it was slow and insidious, with an origin story oddly, if partly, set in the small town in Massachusetts where I grew up. For him, that was the end of the 80's, and it would take the chokehold a full ten years to mature, threaten certain death, and finally surrender to Doughty's entreaty for mercy. That decade takes us to bleak tour stops in Middle America, London, Cambodia, through far-flung romances, through creative promised lands and waste-scapes, and the manias of ecstasy and heroin, marijuana and Jack Daniels.
Throughout its patent darkness and struggle, though, Doughty maintains a clownish and invective sense of humor about his journey. After all, he did author the New York Post's "Dirty Sanchez" column, not to mention all those weird Soul Coughing songs--whose bizarre felicity is present on every page of The Book of Drugs. It's also possessed of a candor, a very real and often stunning directness that is completely disarming coming from the man who wrote the line "Normalize the signal when you're banging on Freon/Paleolithic eon/put the fake goatee on"--particularly when discussing addiction's interface with sexuality.
It might be that the book as a whole can only be fully understood by its various initiate niche audiences, but hilarity, heartbreak, and scandal are central tenets of any story. Add dope, electric guitar, sampler-playing henchmen, mysterious European ingénues, and a dash of Southeast Asian travelogue--and you have a good one. It helps, too, to be utterly fearless.
By Matthew D'Abate
We've seen the ravages of drugs thoroughly portrayed in several harrowing films like Neil Armfield's nightmarish Candy and Danny Boyle's drug-frenzied Trainspotting.
We've seen the agony of sexual passion in erotic thrillers such as Ang Lee's measured piece Lust, Caution and Bernardo Bertolucci's incestual sex play, The Dreamers.
But here, with British director Steve McQueen's sophomore cinematic effort, Shame, we are exposed to a subject matter that years ago would perhaps have been mocked: the porn obsessed, hooker friendly sex addict, bluntly confronted in the character of Brandon Sullivan (Michael Fassbender), a 30-something man whose raging sexual addiction is actively tearing apart the seams of his cloistered, bourgeois life.
And there's skin, all right--lots of it.
Already infamous for its brutal depiction of loveless sexuality and the slapping of an NC-17 rating by the puritanical MPAA rating commission, Shame has garnered comparisons to other films where a burgeoning set of filmmakers attempted to seduce the mainstream into an acceptance of X-rated films, demonstrated by such films as Midnight Cowboy or Last Tango In Paris. Proudly purchased for distribution by Fox Searchlight Films with a promise not to challenge the rating, Steve Gilula, the company's president, even went as far as saying in a press release: "I think NC-17 is a badge of honor, not a scarlet letter. We believe it is time for the rating to become usable in a serious manner."
Brandon Sullivan is a good looking man, lean and fit, with a successful job, and a beautiful, yet sterile loft apartment in the heart of Manhattan, and the last candidate one would assume is addicted to Internet porn, habitual sessions of masturbation in the work place, and the hiring of countless, lifeless prostitutes to grind against in mechanical fervor. But there is seemingly no true pleasure in these debasing acts Brandon subjects himself to, and, like an addict whose tolerance grows by the usage, it rarely satiates, only merely sustains. Michael Fassbender, already rising in artistic fervor from critical acclaim, is a stellar monster, a satyr in an Armani suit, depicting the worst kind of gross abuse in sexual depravity.
Add to this the sudden interruption of his routine by his train-wreck pseudo-bohemian sister, innocently played by Carey Mulligan. Watching Mulligan inhabit the mentally unstable Sissy Sullivan is awkward, and slow to taste, primarily from her history of playing soft, dough eyed girls like her stint as a guileless adolescent in An Education. But she catches us halfway through the piece, and her Sissy acts as a foil to expose just how depraved and debased her brother has become.
Many films attempt this perverse honesty through cinematic melodramas, but McQueen, an arthouse progeny, fearlessly differs from these typical cheap pageantries, broaching a body desire chalk full of masochism, similarly perverse in his previous jaunt with Fassbender, his film Hunger. McQueen's images border dangerously on too scintillating in Shame, where the brutality of the flesh resembles high-brow porn, destroying any care from the audience for the obviously troubled and unexplained psychic back story of its characters. And despite long nuanced plays towards pathos from the audience, Shame fails in achieving empathy.
But the journey is the payoff: A raw, and emotive Michael Fassbender, the most awkward dinner date Woody Allen would have be envious to write, and enough New York City depictions of harlotry, both criminal in legality and in mind, blend for a cinematic Dante's Inferno of the flesh, showing us the life of a man whose lust has finally burned away any chance of a hope for true intimacy and peace.
Shame is now playing at Landmark Sunshine Cinema and Chelsea Clearview Cinemas in New York.
]]>Ben Nadler's debut novel, Harvitz, As To War, follows the romp of a young Jewish man from New Jersey across an archipelago of the trans-millennial American subcultural occult: punk, whatever that means; the Army, whatever that means; the hobo, and the Born Again Christian. Sammy Harvitz, its dubious hero, undergoes initiation after initiation into these various obscurantist entities in search of his Place, but we share his doubts throughout as to whether it is ever truly possible to become part of any of them.
For Harvitz each subsumption smacks of enactment, of posturing, whether it be in a punk house, a barracks, or a shelter. The difference between fulfillment and what suffices hovers above each persona. At times the narrative is as choppy and ill paced as Harvitz's life, as lives in general can be and often are; filled with transitions demarcated by that asterisk metastasis that in fiction is akin to the snap decision. One considers its concept, its haste, but moves on to the next pose or deferment.
Ultimately what Nadler's protagonist is after is an ever-elusive baptism by fire, access to which is always the central promise of the next kaleidoscopic life change. Though, for Harvitz, conversion does not guarantee revelation. Ever. Or maybe it does. A rich, if at times rushed, account of Harvitz's search--from a Vietnam vet's weed farm in California to a gated community in Florida, from Coney Island to Williamsburg--As To War enticingly intimates Nadler's great fund of erudition, shrewdness, and brutality.
BEN NADLER lives in Brooklyn, New York, and is currently pursuing his MFA at The City College of New York. Harvitz, As To War is his first published book.
By Matthew D'Abate
It should come as no surprise that the new David Cronenberg film would have something to do with sexually repressed intellectuals, the dueling nature of primal rage versus the rational mind, and some sadomasochistic erotic encounters. In fact, in the virile filmography of Cronenberg's oeuvre, one can see it was inevitable for him to address the birth of Freudian psychoanalysis, and A Dangerous Method is an ode to this moment in scientific thought.
In fact, as Sigmund Freud and his heir apparent who philosophically breaks with him later, Carl Jung, arrive off the coast of Manhattan, Freud, brooding in his cape, a cigar lodged in his mouth, with the darkness of the Atlantic brewing behind him, asks: "Do you think they know we're on our way, bringing them the plague?"
Psychoanalysis is the order of the day in A Dangerous Method. In this sharply beautiful, dialogue heavy jaunt, we are transported to the crux in history when such a philosophy as radical as a 'talking cure' attempts to uncover the repressed passions and fears of a 'civilized' society. Perhaps now in 2011, just after a century of such ideas being introduced, psychoanalysts and layman alike have disputed, demonized, and shrugged off Freud for his theories about the sexually explicit psychic battle that rages in the subconscious of humanity.
The film is talky; as it was in play form, skillfully written by Christopher Hampton. A Dangerous Method shares the intellectual and rigorous exploration of sexual repression with its stage rendition due to Cronenberg's incessant attention to detail, the director finding himself far from the body horror era of The Fly and Crash, staying taut thematically with Christopher Hampton's cerebral and emotive play.
Michael Fassbender is Carl Jung, a rigid and repressed Swiss young doctor married to a rich wife. He is a doting husband, but it is his psychological work that fills him with intellectual hunger, and the ghostly blue emptiness of Fassbender's coolly lost eyes exposes his lack of sexual passion for his wife. Michael Fassbender brings Jung to life with calculating diligence. Jung attempts to use Freud's psychoanalytic techniques, still in their infant stage, upon a hysterical Russian prone to spasms of jaw wrenching psychic pains, played with acute mania by Keira Knightley.
Freud, played by the perpetual shape-shifter Viggo Mortensen, slinks around like a silent old Zen master. Mortensen is a calmer, gentler Freud, not the dogmatic tyrant of psychological thought imagined by the common populace. Freud talks with Jung, in their famed selection of letters and 13 hour dialogues with a parental regality, and Jung, in response, is the doting student. That is until Knightley's character, Sabina Spielrein, seduces Jung himself, and reveals his own deep-seated repressions.
As his initial father figure reverence and idolization fades, Jung then revolts against Freud's dominance, as he finds himself edging closer towards a sexual freedom with Spielrein that could destroy everything he has built out of the duty he has to his loving wife.
With systematically gorgeous texture, A Dangerous Method is a full-fledged period piece, and a first for David Cronenberg, unless you count the 1950's set hallucinogenic dalliance of Naked Lunch as a paranoid time piece. A Dangerous Method, completely based on actual events, depicts how rebellious each of these early psychoanalysts were, and how strange 'the talking cure' truly was against the backdrop of polite society. Each of the protagonists use these techniques against each other to expose the hidden truths about themselves and their divergent philosophies.
Boring to those with no interest in a visual plays of the mind, A Dangerous Method may come off as a spiraling tale of self-interest. But any audience member attracted to the labyrinthine chasms of the unconscious will find this wordy feature a feast to all of the senses, even ones they repress inside.
A Dangerous Method is now playing at Landmark Sunshine Theater on Houston St. in New York City.
Saturday evening is the book launch of Le Chat Noir's 2011 literary journal, Drinking with Papa Legba, hosted by the journal's editor, Lee Anderson, at KGB Bar in New York's East Village.
Anderson is the founder of Alphabet Pony, a literary arts collective that hosts events and authors a weekly blog dedicated to the promotion of arts and literature.
Anderson may not fit the mold of the artsy, literary type, judging by his successful career as a New York City real estate broker, but this hasn't stopped Anderson's original passion as a writer and as a patron of the literary arts.
"I was trying to think of different ways to promote my business," he said. "I've always been into arts and literature, so this was a natural step, combining the two."
The transition from blogging about properties and apartments to the arts was seamless. With the help from a colleague who works for the head of the city's Department of Cultural Affairs, Anderson was granted permission to use the Department's official banner on his site.
"I didn't want to do another blog critiquing someone else's work. I knew that getting the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs' sponsorship would add some legitimacy to us here at Alphabet Pony," Anderson said.
With Alphabet Pony firmly established, Anderson began conducting interviews and articles about events having to do with up-and-coming artists and writers. A friend suggested taking Alphabet Pony to the next level by posting short videos of local performance artists and music videos from promising new bands.
"It's a Sunday ritual for me to sit down all day on the computer trolling for content. Nothing too viral, nothing with an ad in it, whatever was cool," Anderson said. "Lately people have been sending me videos, and it is great having others involved. I like the community spirit."
While at school at Florida International University, Anderson and a classmate started a literary society in Miami, hosting events involving burgeoning writers, poets and musicians.
"I used to co-host events in Miami at a South Beach hotel. I remember how much I enjoyed it. It was nourishing to be around these other writers," Anderson said.
Relocating to New York City, Anderson sought to immerse himself in the literary scene, seeking other talented individuals, with the urge to create another community based collective. After bring introduced by a mutual friend to Matthew D'Abate, YBNY writer and creative director and founder of Le Chat Noir, a film, music, and literary arts collective based in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the two decided to join forces with a monthly reading series at the famed literary, communist-styled watering hole, KGB Bar.
"I wanted to make Le Chat Noir bigger and more visible. Until then, most of their events were based in Brooklyn. One of the ways Matthew and I came up with was to host these monthly readings in Manhattan," Anderson said.
The next move was to prove to the powers that be that both Alphabet Pony and Le Chat Noir could bring the crowds to the busy literary dive bar. The highly booked calendar at KGB is filled each night with readings from both established and emerging authors.
"KGB is a literary landmark and I am honored that they let us host Le Chat Noir's readings there," Anderson said.
Drinking with Papa Legba is edited by Anderson and the 18 stories in the volume all metaphorically relate with Papa Legba, the Haitian Voodoo Deity that guards the crossroads between the material and the spiritual world.
Editor's Note: Drinking with Papa Legba includes a piece from YBNY founder, Joel Silverstein.
The Drinking With Papa Legba Launch Party is Saturday December 10th, from 7pm-9pm, at KGB Bar, 85 East 4th Street in New York City, featuring readings by authors Karissa Chen, Lourdes Simon, Eric Kingrea, and Matthew D'Abate. Drinking With Papa Legba will be available for purchase at the event, and online after the launch.
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By Matthew D'Abate
It is difficult when dealing with such a provocateur and pioneer as Lars Von Trier to separate the director's personality from his work. The critic attempts, often unsuccessfully, to ignore the enfant terrible persona Von Trier has cultivated over his 25 years of award winning filmmaking in relationship to his films, and this fact remains true with his latest creation, the lyrical Melancholia. In the hands of any other filmmaker, Melancholia would have been a laughably apocalyptic and masturbatory narrative careening towards a Michael Bay-style denouement.
The story line is a blunt instrument:
The Earth collides with another planet and it is the end of everything.
Perhaps if Von Trier filmed Melancholia 14 years ago, somewhere between The Idiots and Breaking the Waves, when his artistic grudge against anything mainstream was at its height, it would have been filled with such artistic pomp it would have been unbearable to watch.
However, Melancholia is one of Von Trier's most mature and tempered films, astoundingly written, and a departure from his last creation about a phantasmagoric battle between the sexes, the hellish Antichrist.
Melancholia opens with an amazing prelude, a purely separate fugue from the narrative line of the film, and then splits into two parts named for each of the protagonist sisters: ennui-filled, gorgeous Justine, and the frail and brooding Claire. We are shown images from space of the Earth colliding with this telluric, newly discovered planet, choicely named Melancholia. Rich, bold string sections from Wagner's Tristan and Isolde surge as the images, eerily akin to Terence Malick's recent secular, god-hungry picture The Tree Of Life, depicts Earth doomed to an elegant apocalypse, with birds falling from the sky and people scurrying in fear.
Justine is Von Trier's coded personae; irrationally saddened and compelled to 'fits' of hysteria, made clear by the obvious dysfunctional family who've all gathered to celebrate her wedding to the young, doting Michael. The wedding is held on the opulent estate of Claire and her 'filthy' rich husband John, played with quiet gluttony by Keifer Sutherland, who is continually peeved by Justine's spells of depression. It is here, in Part One, Melancholia becomes a 19th Century novel, a true milieu in which the characters each expose their weaknesses.
Charlotte Rampling's turn as the old nihilist crank mother who doesn't care for such pageantries of love is dreadfully spot-on, and John Hurt as Justine's drunk and self-admitted fool of a father couldn't be more natural.
Von Trier is a master at displaying the idiocy, inanity and the pure nihilistic undercurrent of human existence. All of Justine's family and other friends somehow undercut her strength that it becomes no wonder, later in the film, that she is reduced to a bag of skin who can't even bath herself. Here is where Kristen Dunst shines, aptly noted by her Cannes nod for Best Actress. This sort of vulnerability, Dunst's only truly expressed role since The Virgin Suicides, elevates Justine's depression into an understandable option out of a broken and poisoned world.
"Everything on this Earth is evil," Justine tells us, "and no one will miss it," her placid grey-blue eyes welling with existential emptiness.
Part Two's focus is on Claire, with Charlotte Gainsbourg playing the pouting and vaguely happy sister, confronting the fact that Melancholia, the 'double-planet', is careening towards Earth. Her husband happens to be an astronomy buff and swears the planet will just pass us. We know, from the fiendishly detailed prelude, exactly what comes next. Part Two drags upon hour two, and is unfortunately the weaker part of this otherwise well-executed tale of despair.
At the close of the picture, one of my delights was watching the expressions of those that followed me out of the theater. The sheer thematic hopelessness might be heavier than most in the popcorn 3D crowd might be up for, but if unapologetic displays of brutal human truths are your thing, then Melancholia is your bet.
Melancholia is playing at the Angelika Film Center on Houston St.
]]>"These aren't my people," I think, lying there on my back on a mat, with a blanket over me and lavender oil on my forehead.
My people are still in bed, blissfully unaware of the day of nausea and vomiting ahead of them, the headache and the shame once the memories of the night before come flooding in. My people are sweating the alcohol out right now by their bodies' own means, NOT in a meditation class at the Health and Racquet Club 11 a.m. on a Sunday.
The people here, I imagine, all curled up with a book, Oprah tested and approved, before bedtime. And the granola and soy milk they had time to eat before the yoga class that preceded this, is nourishing their organic cells at this very moment. What they did NOT do was collapse onto a couch at four in the morning, thankful for something, anything, soft to fall onto.
I'm only here because I crashed at a friend's place, and, instead of going home, I am at the club with her on a guest pass, in a borrowed pair of shorts and a t-shirt.
I am lucky to find meditation being offered because it is the greatest amount of physical exertion I am capable of at the moment. I walk in to the classroom, and suddenly became very aware of my Spongebob t-shirt and boxer shorts, stylishly accompanied by my boots from last night. My outfit did not meet appropriate New York City standard yoga dress criteria. Everyone in here is dressed exactly the same like they were shooting a Rodney Yee workout video this morning, and I was crashing the shoot.
Lying here, while everyone is fully aware of their thought patterns I am fully aware of my feet, barefoot and smelly, relieved to have been given a blanket to tamp out the smoldering stink lines coming off of them. I am fully aware of the alcohol sweating it's way out of me, and the stale stench of cigarettes in my hair. I am fully aware that I am single handedly screwing up the entire aesthetic of this room, like bringing an egg sandwich into Prada. I imagine everyone else in the room being enveloped by a holy glow, actually hovering an inch above the ground, while I am sinking into it, demons screaming around me. I mentally try shushing them, hoping desperately that no one is noticing my cesspool-of-an-aura.
This is when I fall asleep. I don't know much about meditating but I do know, at the absolute least, it requires you to be conscious. But I figure everyone's eyes are closed, what's the difference, no one will know, unless I start snoring or something. And when the instructor gave me a little nudge, I realized that is exactly what I started to do.
"Ok everybody, slowly make your way back into a lotus position." As people slowly came back to, I shot up and quickly put my black socks and boots on, and without looking anybody in the eyes, I hear a faint "Thank you for coming!" as I head out of the class room, through the front door, and into the sadistic December wind to hail a cab. The cab driver drives me back uptown, like a heroic prince in his pine scented chariot, and we drink coffee and sing along with "Homeward Bound" on the radio, as we disappear into the horizon.
Follow Maria on Twitter - @MariaShehata .
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By Phil Anderson
Planting a garden and writing a book are not dissimilar. When you plant a garden, you lay your seeds in the soil and water them and hope that the light shines often enough and in the right spots so that the flowers you intended to sprout grow and create a beautiful thing appreciated by passers-by and, if you're really good, other horticulturalists. Sometimes seeds die, but that's fine--they're buried deep in the soil out of view.
When writing a novel, though, all seeds are visible. The darkest roots dangle on the same page as the brightest petals. Everything, in essence, is exposed. And when the novel is a large, complex garden, as in Haruki Murakami's latest, 1Q84, there's evidence of every seed that didn't grow, every root that died at exposure, and the reader cannot help but notice.
Murakami's novel is long. At a whopping 925 pages, it's an extensive story of boy and girl meet, boy and girl fall in love, boy and girl don't see each other for twenty years. Meanwhile there's an organic farming cult, ominous "Little People" who crawl out of a dead goat, a vengeful old lady and her gay bodyguard, rapes, assassinations, and two moons--our heroes, Tengo and Aomame, the would-be lovers, have entered a parallel universe that is no longer 1984 Tokyo, but instead 1Q84.
Murakami's writing has always had two strong points. First, he can create an air to his world as if the flowers in his garden do not, in fact, produce oxygen but something else, and, as you breathe it in, you experience a true feeling of "other." His noir-esque writing combined with the elements of magical realism is uniquely Murakami. According to a recent interview in the Times, Raymond Chandler is one of Murakami's favorite authors, and the dark aura that subsumes the readers of Chandler's novels hangs deftly over every page of Murakami's latest book.
His second great talent is telling a story within the story. He uses nice long soliloquies, often by bit players, to further illuminate the meaning of the story as a whole. These bits are the most captivating parts of his novel--Reiko's piano lesson story in Norwegian Wood, or the skinning of humans in Wind-up Bird Chronicle.
In 1Q84, we have too few of those moments considering the novel's length. Many of the stories involve literature--a direct passage from a Chekhov memoir, and a Kafkaesque short story about a "town of cats." There are, however, some passages that come close to the fascinating personal histories of Murakami's previous characters.
One of those comes from the gay bodyguard, Tamaru. In an enthralling scene, Tamaru tells another character about Carl Jung's stone house--how Jung keeps expanding this house despite its original intent of a simple place to think, and how Jung carved on a stone at the entrance, "Cold or not, God is present." The significance of this phrase is admittedly lost on Tamaru, but he notes that it's something that he often thinks about, unable to forget it. He tells it to someone at the most opportune and interesting time, giving that story the punch one expects from Murakami.
But Tamaru is one of those seeds that didn't grow. He is a defined character--gay, Korean, orphan, professional--but around the end of the novel Murakami gives him a strange additional detail that seemed not only out of character but set up only to add unnecessary mystery. He does the same with Kumi Adachi, a nurse at the sanatorium in which Tengo's father resides. She's a minor character, but as if to answer a question asked within the first couple pages of the book, she has a mysterious memory of a past life. She may or may not be the reincarnation of someone we'd heard about. A seed with roots and not much else, and an ugly nothing plant. There's also a gun that, despite Tamaru concisely explaining Chekhov's rule, does not go off. And there's an end that seeks more.
Murakami originally wrote this as three novels, and that's how it was published in Japan. In the English edition, the book is nicely divided in three units split up by time moving along easier--one can finish the first part and still feel a sense of accomplishment, ready to plunge into the second section, then the third. Upon finishing the novel, I longed for a fourth section. Only there wasn't one. But there's hope. Murakami hadn't planned on writing the third section, but it came to him. With luck, this story will continue, if only to see some of those dying seeds mature and blossom and continue exhaling more of that mysterious air.