A couple of you who shared the table discussion session with me at last year’s symposium might remember me talking about how Japanese people appreciate the skills to actually ‘read’ what’s not spoken, referring to this as ‘read the air’ (we do also have that well-known expression ‘read between the lines’ for written communication, so reading ‘the air’ is more about oral communication).
Even though some of my table-mates seemed really fascinated with this notion, it is obviously not something that you only experience in Japan. Good air-reading skills can definitely help us be good audience (the theme for the upcoming symposium).
Without making today’s post too serious, I would like to introduce this funny clip from Clint Eastwood’s latest installment ‘Gran Torino’, definitely one of my recent favorites. Clint Eastwood’s character is trying to ‘man up’ this Asian boy so that he can get a job in construction. Check out and enjoy how the boy learns to ‘read’ and ‘create’ the air that he never breathed in before.
I am dying to watch this but I get “embedding disabled by request”–is everyone else succeeding?
Bonnie– sorry about that. Editor’s error. Click on the link to see the clip.
I thought this was a great movie and particularly liked this very funny scene. It was interesting to see how the young guy ‘reads the air’ and comes up with something wacky here; later, he uses what he’s learned to land a job in construction. I guess there’s an effort in the movie to be so over-the-top offensive toward every ethnic group that all the epithets cancel each other out. It’s an interesting case the movie makes for the changes a dying Detroit is going through and what it all means. The old white guys are dying off in the movie, leaving the neighborhood/ country to a younger generation of new immigrants. And, along with cars and homes and guns, part of the legacy they pass on (as in helping the younger ones ‘man up’) is this outrageously prickly racist banter. Is it manly? Hell yeah!