RIVAS-SPLICER

To Find the Shark and Kill It - Conquering Cousteau's Silent World

2009-08-08T00:46:00.000-07:00

Louis Malle had a hell of a film career.

From fictional features in his native France, for which he was nominated and won many international awards, to directing Hollywood films with major American stars, to his epic 6-hour TV documentary "Phantom India," his work has pretty much covered all subjects and settings, including some territory that in 1956 was quite uncharted.

I just got back from the Cinefamily at the Silent Movie Theater on Fairfax. It's been under the management of a pretty passionate cinephile for about 2 years now (same guy, I believe, who runs a video rental shop named "Cinefile" down by the Nuart), and the programming is pretty spectacular, even for a town like LA, which already has several decent rep houses competing for the attentions of the discriminating film-goer. Tonight's show was a must for me, being that a) it was two unreleased-on-DVD features, and b) the subject was the underwater world (I am a diver and underwater enthusiast), and c) one of the films was "Le Monde du Silence" (The Silent World) by Jacques Cousteau, which I have been itching to see for years, but have been unable to find even on torrent tracker sites due to its relative scarcity on video. How does this tie in to Louis Malle? Malle, it turns out, cut his teeth (fresh out of film school) by co-directing the film with Cousteau. I must confess to having never seen a Malle narrative feature, by the way, but his documentaries on India, and particularly his one on the American heartland, "God's Country" (1986), were what stirred the excitement when I first learned he had co-directed a Cousteau film. "Le Monde du Silence" was chum in the water for me: several interests bound up into one film and made extra enticing by its relative rarity.

I have not posted any thoughts to this blog in quite a while but tonight's films got a few bees buzzing around in my head, and after coming home and waiting for some rice to cook for my dinner at a tardy 12:30, I thought I'd finally get back to sharing some of that buzzing here. First off, I arrived early, which I never do, to find a line already forming outside, at least 40 minutes before the show was scheduled to start. Although there were only about 15 people waiting, I wondered whether this would be indicative of a strong turn-out. That would be miraculous. Friday night in LA and two Jacques Cousteau films from 50 years ago sell out the house? Turns out, that's exactly what happened.

As I speculated aloud while standing in line about a possible large turnout, the man waiting in front of me rationalized by explaining that the program had been highlighted by the LA Weekly as a "critic's pick" event. So there weren't really that many cool divers in LA. But nevertheless, I was still impressed.

Cinefamily's founder and programmer, Hadrian Belove, introduced the films and explained that he'd decided to show "Le Monde Sans Soleil" (1964) first, swapping the original order, because "Sans Soleil" was shot in 35mm Technicolor, and he wanted anyone who might leave after the first screening to definitely see that one. It was a beautiful 35mm flat (1.33) print, with minimal print damage (tail wear only) and no color fading. The story was mostly about Cousteau's team of divers, who he had dubbed the "Oceanauts," living in underwater research stations at several different depths, aided by their surface ship, the Calypso. Listening to the narrator give the statistical data, I was a little non-plussed with the depths of 35 feet and 85 feet for the research stations, although later my cocky superiority was leveled hearing of divers going to nearly 300 feet on trimix gas. There was a definite kind of hi-tech retro-future adventure flavor to it: part James Bond, part Danger:Diabolik. Besides the science and gadgetry combining to create a kind of futuristic, adventure spirit, in an effort to translate information into narrative, different little humorous gags were dropped in, and crew members were portrayed with enough quirks that one began to wonder why Wes Anderson felt the need to fictionalize the team into Team Zissou. There was even a scene with a cello-playing crew-member sitting atop the deck of the Calypso that gave Seu Jorge's guitar-strumming balladeer a run for his money. As the night's program wore on, it became pretty clear that Cousteau's crew was actually far more outrageous than the wildest stunts embarked on by Team Zissou (more on that later).

The audience was clearly primed for laughs (perhaps by virtue of their exposure to the Zissou crew), expecting to find the humor in a bunch of bare-chested guys playing grab-ass with each other while showering, or eating, or doing housekeeping aboard the sea-stations. Yeah, there was a lot of unintentional (I presume) homo-erotic subtext in a film about a bunch of manly men doing manly things out at sea. It was a hipster crowd, and everybody "got the joke" and the giggles continued through most of the night. Other things that elicited scattered (intentional) chuckles were the staged elements designed to dramatize the dangers or realities of underwater exploration, such as when one diver begins to experience symptoms of the Bends, and must be placed in a recompression chamber. It's a coffin-like cylinder that Cousteau and his men have rigged up on the deck of the Calypso, and after placing the diver inside, they all promptly head off to eat lunch without him. I found there to be some of the same brilliance of imagination in Cousteau as shared by Walt Disney. Both men are pitched to kids, although they can both come off as rather eccentric (with some dark overtones). They both imagine the future in great detail, but always in terms of "colonization," seemingly oblivious to the destructive effect of man's mere presence in certain environments.

Now that I think about it, when I was in Yonaguni Japan, drinking awamori with a fantastic human and diving-guide, Keizen, he asked me why I had taken up diving and I answered that when I was a kid I had seen Disney's "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea." So I can certainly respect the spirit of exploration in both of these men, and credit them for inspiring others to take an interest in the world. But I also find that with exploration, and "conquest," however benign it may seem (conquest of the sea, conquest of space, conquest of the frontier), there is a certain carelessness and disregard (and arrogance) that can accompany the drive to push forward into new worlds. "Le Monde Sans Soleil" contained some examples of this recklessness, but the earlier "Le Monde du Silence" contained far more - a fact that I hope points to an evolution in Cousteau's thinking in the intervening 10 years.

Before I detail some of the offensive bits of these films, I should take a minute to clarify that I am not a member of PETA. The strongest position I hold on animal rights is that I don't believe in torturing them (for research or any other purpose) and I don't own any pets (because I acknowledge that my neglectful irresponsible lifestyle would be a hazard to them). Still, I once explained to my diving buddy, Peter, why it was that I chose not to spear-fish (an activity he was eager to try). It was not because I don't enjoy eating fish. Oddly, every time we surfaced after a day of diving, we both shared a craving for sushi. The reason I chose not to spear-fish was that, after my first couple of night-dives, hovering among sleeping fish with my dive light blasting a beam of 8 "C" cell-powered white light over that "silent world," I realized how destructive my presence was as an observer, without becoming any further intrusive. As one of the only creatures underwater making noise, by the expulsion of my air bubbles, and certainly the only creature shining a bright light into the milky black water, I compared myself to the "ghetto-birds" that hovered over my apartment, whirling blades chopping the night sky into thunderous pieces, shining their "night sun" into windows at 2 in the morning, "observing." In my dive training, which was administered by a good guy, but not the most "humanitarian" individual imaginable, I was instructed that divers were "ambassadors to the ocean." We were to tread with caution, leave the environment untouched, to the extent that we not even touch the reefs, or stir the sand too much so as to cause a cloud in the water. We should respect the creatures whose world we were visiting, and seek to promote knowledge and awareness of oceanic concerns above water whenever possible. It was always my understanding that not only the science of diving, but these attitudes of conservation had their roots in Cousteau's legacy. I know that Cousteau was the man who was really responsible for scuba - he created the Aqualung !

So imagine my surprise (and evidently, judging by the shocked, nervous laughter, the surprise of the entire audience) when Cousteau's team was pictured, in their own film (!), proudly DYNAMITING a peaceful cove to collect specimens of fish for study (while the voice-over narration reminds us that fishing with dynamite is illegal due to the fact that many more fish will be killed than can be harvested). The camera drifts over piles of fish corpses that look like the aftermath of the Somme. This scene was a kind of climax to a building sense of shame I was feeling at watching Cousteau's researchers as they hammered away at reefs with mallets and chisels, collecting samples, or grabbed fish and stuffed them in plastic bags, which the film's narrator described without remorse as floating prisons, while the fish inside were attacked by predators who could not understand the plastic barrier that prevented them from swallowing the smaller fish. Clearly the "leave no trace" philosophy of diving did not originate with this Cousteau.

The worst episode, by far, was when a beautiful scene of hundreds of dolphins racing alongside the Calypso was followed by a scene of the team searching for whales. A cry goes up from one of the crew members and the boat races off to follow a pod of giant sperm whales. One of the crew races down to a platform below the bow of the boat, standing just above the water's surface. The narrator explains his excitement, "[in 32 years at sea, this is the closest he has ever been to a whale of this size]." He is promptly handed down a home-made harpoon by one of the crew-members. The narrator tells us that the man simply cannot resist having a throw at the giant mammal. We watch him hurl the harpoon, but it merely bounces off the whale's tough skin. The Calypso chases on, running with the whales for several minutes until the narrator notes danger. A baby whale has fallen behind the pod and the Calypso is closing in on it. Cousteau calls for the engines to slow, but it is too late. The engine room calls out that something has hit their left propeller and the camera pans over the side in time to see the water turning red and the baby whale gashed and sliced like a large sausage. The man who had previously tried his hand at harpooing decides that he must administer a "mercy kill," and delivers it with gunshot to the baby whale's head. The crew, "feeling horrible" begin to tow the body up alongside the boat, but the blood in the water attracts a school of sharks who begin to pick and tear at the whale's body. The crew, out of guilt and a general contempt for sharks, decide to "avenge" the whale by gaffing as many sharks as they can hoist aboard and BEATING the living shit out of them. No, I am not kidding. The film glories in several minutes of footage of crew hoisting whatever blunt object was handy high overhead and bringing it crashing down on the thrashing, bleeding, fighting sharks. I am a diver, and no lover of sharks. Encountering a large one would surely scare the piss out of me. But I could not for the LIFE of me understand how JACQUES fucking COUSTEAU could allow this to happen on the deck of his boat ! First of all, it was the Calypso that RAN OVER and killed the whale, not the sharks ! Second, the sharks came to feed. That's what they do. That's what they were designed to do. That is their job in nature. So seeing Cousteau's men bash their brains out with shovels and axes to "avenge" the death of the whale put Cousteau's comments about the conquest of the sea-shelf into an entirely different light. He began to sound less like the wide-eyed adventurer in a world of wonder that Disney would have depicted, and more like a Western frontiersman, looking to "tame" the wild through brute force. It even made me rethink another episode in the film, in which Cousteau's divers feed scraps of meat to a giant grouper, and then "imprison" him in a shark cage when he becomes too aggressive, dominating the feeding and preventing other fish from getting their hand-out. The divers even name him - "Ulysses." It's this weird effort to anthropomorphize the fish that seems jarring to me. These guys are supposed to be marine researchers. How can they learn anything if they are projecting all these human traits and biases and expectations on to the creatures they are studying? Suddenly, Bill Murray's dynamite-fishing Steve Zissou character begins to look less like a comedic caricature and more like a biographical commentary with his mission to "find and kill" the shark that ate his friend.

When the curtain closed, there was boisterous applause, despite the fact that many people were looking at each other with uncertain half-frowns on their faces. I'm sure people expected to find some humor and fun in the source of their beloved Bill Murray movie, and the movies were a lot of fun, and were executed with a kind of playfulness and humor that kept you engaged, not to mention the stunning underwater photography. In one brilliant sequence, plankton was shot with macro lenses to show the huge variety of organisms found within it. Another creature brought aboard was said to eat sand, digesting all the bits of plankton within it, and disposing of the indigestible grit. When turned upside down on deck, several living, symbiotic fish tumbled out. Things like this made my mouth drop open in wonder, and I am a diver who has watched many marine documentaries inspired by Cousteau and his team. I can only imagine how jaw-dropping these films must have been in the 1950s and 1960s. That said, the films are now artifacts from the past that must almost be presented with the all-too-familiar disclaimer of present-day political correctness. Just the other day, I was talking with a co-worker about Hergé and Tintin, asking her if she had ever read or heard of the infamous "Tintin in the Congo." (That book, in addition to it's racist depictions of Africans, also has a scene involving the dynamiting of animals, coincidentally). Watching these Cousteau films reminded me of that discussion because with such works you are forced to take the bad with the good. You cannot deny Hergé's talent or influence on the world of graphic line-art. Just as you cannot deny Cousteau's influence on future generations of oceanographers. But neither can you dismiss either man's callous big-headedness. Hergé can be said to have evolved, going back in an attempt to revise the content he considered shameful in some of his earlier work, and showing some degree of open-mindedness in work he completed toward the end of his career. Cousteau must have worked hard in the succeeding years to create a more positive legacy on film - films that can be shown without any need for contextualizing disclaimers about the "different attitudes" people had in the past - or I'm sure, despite his contributions to dive science, he would not be remembered as fondly now. Watching that shark slaughter made me realize why it is that this film is probably so hard to see - I imagine it has something to do with the Cousteau estate being less than flattered by it. For that matter, I was a bit surprised given Louis Malle's involvement - how much was he a party to the objectionable bits? Again, I do not know his work in great detail, but I have been drawn in by his documentaries and through them sensed a man of great sensitivity. Perhaps he filmed the Cousteau crew's wantonness unsparingly, as exposé - or maybe merely as verité, simply existing as a fly-on-the-wall to events on the ship and below the water.

I do know that films of this type have been considered good educational material for kids - at least when i was growing up. But they present some difficult questions to answer since it seems clear that the ideology behind today's Cousteau Society was not yet fully formed. Cousteau ends "Le Monde Sans Soleil" in an undersea cave, hundreds of feet below the surface. His submersible vehicle surfaces in a lake, the hatch opens, and for a moment he and his co-pilot breathe in the thousand-year-old air and shine their lights around the stone walls of an environment never seen before by man. It is a wondrous moment, and makes me wish we could be spending more money to explore the oceans, just as others wish to explore space. Perhaps if there was more extensive and better funded research on-going, we would develop deeper understanding and respect, not simply treating the oceans as our waste dump. I believe Cousteau began his mission as a seafarer of old - out to tame the sea, and claim his portion of it. But I would suppose that anyone spending such an amount of time as he did at sea would eventually have to develop a conservationist attitude. He is quoted as saying, "One protects what one likes," and maybe it is the hunters and conquerors who first become aware of the need to protect nature, as they see the ravages of man firsthand, before the rest of us even notice.

While standing in line to get in, the man in front of me mentioned mistakenly that Le Monde du Silence was co-directed by Jean-Pierre MELVILLE, rather than Louis MALLE. My God, I thought, leaving the theater. Could you imagine the film that THOSE two would have made together?

Metamorphosing into a Shapeless Mess: The Fly The Opera

2008-09-15T12:10:00.000-07:00

Despite my general fear of the tanking economy and growing reluctance to spend any money, I had to indulge my curiosity when I heard that David Cronenberg and Howard Shore, under commission from the LA Opera were adapting their own work, THE FLY. I am not an opera buff, but I have been known to use the adjective "operatic" to describe things melodramatic or grand in scale. Although it seemed an unlikely choice for high-brow theater, the story does have operatic qualities. It's Frankenstein, or the Phantom, or some other tragic monster who probably has precedent on the classical stage.

Without knowing the stories, there are opera selections I've listened to that drew me in through musical storytelling. In the same way that I laughed the first time I heard Frank Zappa's Peaches en Regalia, I've come to appreciate classical music that can paint pictures in your brain. Once enthralled by the music, I may be interested enough to seek out the story ( which often sounds like an illustration of the music, like the best jazz vocals can capture the musical storytelling in lyric ).

I belong squarely to the "outsider" demographic that LA Opera director Placido Domingo is appealing to with his recent recruitment of film directors. Many of the opera or symphonic selections I am aware of made their way into my consciousness because I heard them in films. A number of venerated filmmakers have turned to classical for their scores, eschewing any genre of contemporary composition. Kubrick's view was that he could never get a contemporary film composer to top what a Strauss or Stravinsky had done. Can't exactly disagree with that one.

Howard Shore is, I guess, one of the more respected contemporary film composers. His Lord of the Rings score is distinctive and effective, although I felt it was slightly overused in the edit. Like anyone else in Hollywood, he's done his share of "work-for-hire"; stuff that probably meant no more than a paycheck to him. But he's worked pretty consistently with David Cronenberg, which would suggest that the collaboration is based on more than paying the mortgage.

Shore started out scoring with Cronenberg back when Cronenberg was known as more of a horror genre filmmaker. Cronenberg, with The Brood, Scanners and Videodrome, had not quite defined his own high-brow art-house, existentialist-horror genre yet, but he was on the way. Shore was there when Cronenberg first adapted The Fly, a 1950s creature-feature, into a mid-80s horror masterpiece of brain vs body.

Apparently, it was Shore's thinking years ago that THE FLY would be a great subject for opera, so once he got the commission and composed the piece, it was around him that the other creative personnel for this production coalesced. Unfortunately, if you are going to tell a story through music - a story that many are already familiar with because you have already told it - the music should be strong enough to justify it's own existence. That's not the case for THE FLY opera.

Nothing about the score was "operatic" in the sense that I would use the word. Nothing grand, or powerful and dark, like Wagner, like I might expect for a story about a man turning into an insect. Nothing much at all. Most of the score sounds like an indistinguishable sound bed of white noise - call it buzzing if you want to be charitable. It's a flat background color for the voices - which are equally written flat. Nothing ever manages to punch through and create an emotion. I found myself distracted by the English dialogue. Perhaps since operas are usually in Italian or German, when I've heard them in the past I have not been focused on the weakness of the dialogue. Here, it was inescapable, and there was the presence of the electronic libretto display above the stage ( which I suppose is now common to all opera performances ) to draw further attention to how laughably awful the sung lines were: "Care for a smoke? -No thank you, gave it up." That's by no means the worst of it, just an example of the banality.

The show was so bad, at times I found myself closing my eyes to see if the experience worked better for me as music alone - it did not. I read that Cronenberg wanted this to be different from his film, but with so much of it following the film exactly - even dialogue chunks lifted wholesale - I wondered what kind of "different" he could have possibly been going for. The film is creepy, scary, repulsive. It might exist in a genre ghetto ( you will probably never see ladies in gowns going the Chandler to see the film ), but it succeeds in its goals - it repulses you. And it does that with score, make-up, lights - the same basic ingredients available to the opera. So why does opera occupy some higher space in the cultural hierarchy? If anything, this production proves that opera can be as flaccid as television.

In the film, Jeff Goldblum contorts his body and literally transforms himself into the Brundlefly. The actor playing Brundle on stage was gifted with some impressive physical abilities, performing several feats of gymnastic strength to hammer home the point of his transformation, but he couldn't top Goldblum's total devolution, which was aided in part by outstanding special-effects make-up. Hell, Goldblum looked a little like a fly BEFORE he put the make-up on, which in a way, might've been part of the point. Isn't it about the internal being externalized? This production works overtime to try to make the connection between physical transformation and metaphysical meditation. Believe it or not, the film with all of its slime and gore, comes off more subtly in this regard because it lacks the blunt attempts to make the audience see the "existentialism" of the piece. The great thing about cheap sci-fi and horror is that, at its best, it's anything but cheap. There are great ideas and symbols lurking in it - it never tries to "legitimize" itself with blatant intellectual soap-boxing - it's messages are often deliberately encoded.

Up in the cheap nosebleed seats I saw a few people who belonged to my demographic: many of us know that we should dress up to go to opera, but have no idea how to properly do it ( purple shirts and red ties and black leather jackets and ponytails ). Even with Cronenberg-love in the house, people could not help themselves from giggling at the lame dialogue, the puppet monkey in Brundle's telepod, or Brundle's "full monty" moment. If you are a fan of the film, just recall the incredulity you felt on hearing that this would be an opera, and then the acceptance that it could be really cool. Then imagine a dark empty stage and a chorus of singers performing as the voice of Brundle's computer, narrating about 10 minutes worth of narrative events from the film, and let your feelings of disbelief return. When Brundlefly visits a poolhall and rips the arm off of a local tough guy, a scene which is inflated from a movie gross-out shock to a full blown song where the victim closes the scene alone in a spotlight, I was reminded of the cast of the Simpsons staging their production of Tennessee Williams' Oh Streetcar! Someone next to me mumbled that he was waiting for the Sharks and the Jets to make their appearance.

What sucks about watching something bad is knowing all the work and talent that went into it. Although Shore gave the singers little to do, there were times when they delivered appreciable power from the vocal cords - it just wasn't harnessed into anything that made you feel. For a story about a cerebral guy who wants to free himself from "the flesh," the opera seemed to have liberated itself rather effectively from the emotions. I felt bad that people were up there working hard but failing to connect. They were like foot-soldiers being marched into cannon fire, brave but doomed.

Afterwards, we went to get a drink and I spotted someone I thought I knew at the entrance to the restaurant. I realized later that it was Howard Shore. I thought again about wartime defeats, only this time from the point of view of the generals who had to drink themselves to sleep after sending their men to their deaths. With bad reviews coming in from the Paris debut and now Los Angeles too, I hope the bartender mixed him a strong one.

Charles Brown Driftin'

2008-08-09T00:58:00.000-07:00

Just wanted to share some music from one of the greatest blues singers I've ever heard.
I heard this guy's voice on the radio when I was about 17 and I never forgot the song. I tried singing it for people in the record store - even at places like Amoeba, for their Jazz and Blues "specialists," and no one could place it. (I acknowledge my rendition could have been a bit lacking, but still... )
I finally found out the song I had heard about 14 years ago was Through the Courtesy of Love, by Charles Brown.
As it turns out, he was nowhere near as obscure as I would have thought, based on the trouble it took to track down the CD.
He's in the goddamn Rock n Roll Hall of Fame!
I've got a James Brown Christmas album with a Charles Brown cover on it - and I never knew it! (To be fair, it's one that James croons his way rather well through, but now having heard the original, it sounds like a Charles Brown impersonation).
Interestingly, he passed away in my hometown of Oakland just a few years ago.
Apparently he had a resurgence of popularity in the 1990s and did some touring. This would have been right around the time I heard him on the radio (which makes an awful lot of sense in retrospect). What a bummer I never figured out who he was until after he died.
At least the life of the art is extending on.
Check out this video of him performing his signature hit "Driftin'" in Los Angeles in the 1980s.

Toyama Medicine

2008-06-22T21:28:00.001-07:00

This origami cube advertises "Toyama's Medicine - 300 Years of History."

I usually don't indulge in travel souvenirs.
I take photos, but don't really need trinkets. And I am bad at finding those for other people. They always strike me as kind of chintzy. But while I was in Japan this year, I stopped at Iwase, a port town in Toyama prefecture, and found a small trinket shop with a medicine counter. As it turns out, Toyama is famous for its medicines, having a long history of powders and treatments being brought to rural customers by itinerant druggists.

A traveling drug salesman from olden times, and one from more recent times.

I fell in love with the package design of these slim envelopes, and Tomoko suggested I buy some - as a souvenir. I couldn't resist, and once committed to the idea, could not limit myself to only a few. So I picked up about $50 worth of medicines that I will never use - headache powders, stomach relief, and what all else I don't even know. But the art on these is so nice I wanted to put them up here for people to see.

They remind me a little bit of Polish movie posters - which I have written about on this blog before. This is product design without the boring constrictions so typical in the US. I know a lot of people don't think much about advertising, but I work in that industry, and trust me, the people who make it often think too much about it. Which is part of the reason why I think it tends to look so uniform and uninteresting. Avoiding photography and choosing instead to go with an entirely hand-painted approach automatically contributes more life to these designs. But I also love their color palettes, text treatments, and the depictions of masks, demons and devils.

After displaying these packets proudly to Tomoko's mother, she told me that the tradition of traveling drug salesmen continues to this day in Toyama. She pulled a plastic pill box down from atop her refrigerator and showed several packages of her own. She explained that the box was left stocked in each home, and when the salesman returned he deducted what was used from the box and presented a bill for it. In some of the rural areas of Gifu, south of her house, I could definitely see this kind of service being useful, but in the suburbs of Toyama it was mostly just an interesting holdover from an earlier time.

I might have looked a little strange in the drug shop, a foreigner with a camera around my neck, ogling the merchandise, but I was probably the biggest customer for headache powders all that week.

The Heat is Back

2008-06-22T13:32:00.001-07:00

Two months since last post. I don't know how many years since last confession.
Summer officially began yesterday - June 21. With it came the heat. The heat may have arrived a little earlier actually, but I have been putting in long shifts in an air-conditioned building all week, so I wouldn't really know the difference.
It was 97 yesterday. Feels about the same today.
Here's to hoping the power doesn't blow, as it did 5 consecutive days last year. ( I think DWP finally upgraded all the equipment for this street ).

In other news - my old domain is gone. This blog is now hosted on blogspot.com
rivas-splicer.com is property of ICDsoft until 2009 - bastards. If you register a domain through them, you are actually subletting. They own it for another year after you let it go. Makes it harder to switch services. Still, since all of my content is now being hosted on free servers (the future - no, the present state - of non-commercial internet use), I could not justify paying $60/year for hosting anymore.

In other other news - all my old video editing equipment has been sold off (finally) and the money has promptly disappeared into the newest hobby - photography. Picked up a used Canon 30D before the Japan trip in April (pictures of which are uploaded here and here). Just picked up two 580EX II flash units. Ny next goal is to learn studio lighting with the flash units - and also start using them outdoors - kinda the way trained commercial photographers do. Flickr has been an inspiration. You can learn a lot by seeing so much great work for free in one place. Now let's see if I can actually learn it-learn it... opening your eyes to something is one thing. Applying it is another.

Got a bootlegged copy of an old British Hammer studios horror film called Maniac, or The Maniac. (Not to be confused with the 1980s film with Joe Spinell). A blow-torch killer movie. Yow. Kerwin Matthews from Sinbad.

Returned to reading Gore Vidal's Lincoln. Gave it up in 2006 because of stuff interrupting my life. Now I'm fascinated with Civil War era history. Lincoln was reviled by many when he took office. Assassination was threatened before he was sworn in. He imprisoned rebels without trial. He took 2 million from the Treasury for the war without approval from Congress. He confiscated communications from telegraph offices in an attempt to intercept rebel transmissions, not unlike the current NSA wiretapping program. There was no income tax prior to the Civil War. There was no currency issued by the US government - there were many currencies issued by over 3000 independent banks, making counterfeiting a rampant problem.

I am hungry for waffles. I need to brave the heat and take a subway ride to Hollywood and Vine to get some waffles and visit the bookstore.

People are bitching about gas prices. It's currently about $4.70/gallon. Never thought we'd see it. In 2000, I was buying gas in Van Nuys for $0.96/gallon. They tell us we've always had it easy in the US. People want their freedom to drive. So we don't use public transport and don't conserve. This is the "freedom" we are fighting for.

PS - domestic drilling, hydrogen, biofuels, and hybrids are paying lip service to rising prices and global temperatures.
Hybrids get the same MPG as economy cars from 10 years ago. Hydrogen requires enormous energy to produce. Biofuels can wreak havoc on agriculture. Drilling and exploration destroy the environment.
People should realize that fully electric cars already provide the speed and range they require. Most people do not travel over 100 miles per day. If we embrace them, they'll get better and cheaper. And we can start producing more of our electricity from renewable sources. Why are we putzing around? Someone needs to start kicking asses on this.

End of rant.

La Smog di Rossi

2008-04-14T22:42:00.000-07:00

Smog is an Italian film directed by Franco Rossi from 1962. It screened April 7 at the Billy Wilder Theater (within the Armand Hammer museum) in Westwood, which seems to be the new home of the UCLA Film Archive. I went to see it because I learned that it was shot in LA, and I've become one of those Angelenos who loves to do cinematic archaeology of the city. Smog is also one of those films which does not exist on DVD in any form at the moment (bootleg or otherwise), and I really make an effort to see those kinds of rarities when I can.

The title "Smog" grabbed me, leaving me wondering if there was any connection to Italo Calvino's short story, "La nuvola di Smog." I read the story several years ago and tossed around ideas for adapting it into a short film as I drove my commute in-and-out of Hollywood on La Cienega everyday, past oil drills pumping in the shadows of Baldwin Hills suburban ranch homes. The film had no connection to Calvino, but I was happy to find a nice little cinematic gem. This film shows some interesting locations, from the opening at LAX to Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards, to the oil fields in (what is referred to as) Culver City. ( They looked a lot like the ones off La Cienega, but it was hard to be sure ). It's interesting to see what's changed and what has stayed the same. Beyond just the physical locations, it's interesting to see the portrayal of an ex-pat community in Los Angeles, since communities of foreign-born people, like the landmarks, are characteristic of the city. In 2008, I have not encountered any large community of Italian-born people in LA, and I wondered whether this reflected a reality in 1962 that has since changed. But the attitudes and ideas could be transposed to Korean or Latin-American or what-have-you.

The story is simple: A lawyer from Italy has a stopover in LA on his way to handle a case in Mexico. He is released from the airport without passing through immigration by an airline attendant who keeps his ID. He intends to do some brief sightseeing in Hollywood, but quickly discovers that the real Hollywood is nothing like what he imagined. Unable to function in English, he quickly falls in with various Italian ex-pats, making friends with their affluent and well-connected American contacts. Most of the Italian people Vittorio comes in contact with are hustling different jobs, installing stereo equipment, teaching Italian language to rich housewives, doing caricature artwork, etc. One of them, Mario, is a particularly ambitious Jack-of-all-trades type who sinks below Vittorio's standard of morality with his credo of "A little ingenuity, a lot of nerve."

Renato Salvatori as Mario, teaching Italian to idle housewives.

Mario and Vittorio (Enrico Maria Salerno) later have out over some cash missing from Vittorio's jacket pocket.

Vittorio sees himself in a different class of people than most of the countrymen he meets in Los Angeles. When asked by an airline attendant if he would like to pass time in a waiting room with an Italian couple he'd met on the plane, Vittorio shrugs them off, saying, "They're just some immigrants I met on the plane. Italians are OK in Italy, but..." He seems to find much more in common with the affluent people he meets at a Pasadena cocktail party, even if they mispronouce his name, insist that he is the "ambassador of somewhere," or generally rely on him for entertainment.

Vittorio accompanies Gabriela to a high-society cocktail party, where he seems to feel right at home, despite his inability to be understood.

I read the film as a statement on the difficulty of connecting on an honest human level with anyone in the city, regardless of their language or nationality. It's a familiar theme in many movies about Los Angeles, and is explored visually through Vittorio's outsider perspective. At times, the "smog" layer which inhibits human contact is so thick (as in a bowling alley's barroom, choked with cigarette smoke) that it is nearly impossible to see the faces in front of you. Race, class and language are the obvious barriers dividing people, but even Mario and Gabriela, who share a language, culture and situation as foreigners, seem to be pursuing dreams on parallel but separate paths, only overlapping when they need each others' comfort. In this regard, although Smog may have originally been made primarily for an Italian audience (not sure about this, but it is mostly English-subtitled Italian language), it belongs solidly among the ranks of other films about LA, many of which observe the isolation of its people.

** I did a search for information about the film on the internet and found a review that Time magazine published in 1962. It leads me to believe there may be two endings to this film, since the one mentioned in the review differs from what I saw. The Time review mentions Vittorio becoming trapped in the home of an architect, where design has overwhelmed function. The ending I saw had a considerably less sardonic tone, leaving Vittorio to revel at the party with his new friends, and following Gabriela back to the home she dreams of buying. Gabriela, the passed-over girl who leaves the party alone, spends the night with Mario, the uninvited, who nonetheless understands status even if he cannot transcend his own. Although they have each other, it is only for the night, and the film ends with Gabriela watching Mario drive away to begin his hustle anew. If this film ever sees the light of day on DVD, it would be cool to find out whether or not there was an alternate ending, and why.

Mario takes a dip in Gabriela's dream pool. Vittorio passes out after drinking too much at the bowling alley.

Restaurant Revenge

2008-03-07T11:23:00.000-08:00

Every now and again, when I have to stay late at work, I end up putting my name down on the "dinner order" list. It's a service the company provides when you stay past the normal 8 hours, so you can keep working without leaving your desk in search of food. Unfortunately, more often than not, the food we end up ordering ends up being disagreeable in one way or another.

I've been known by some to be a picky-eater. On the other hand, I've eaten stuff that might make a lot of other people puke at the mere thought of: I'm talking about bowls of guts served up hot and steamy from street vendors in Bangkok at 3 in the morning. I can and will put all manner of stuff down the hatch in the name of "experience," but when it comes to defining what kind of meal "hits the spot," or at least, "fills the void," I get a lot more discerning.

Most of the time, I turn my nose up at the "dinner order" list merely because I cannot stomach eating from the same place yet again. The pick-up is handled by our in-house driver/delivery team and the dispatch lady who works the night-shift does not like to have her drivers travel further than about 3 blocks. That puts severe limitations on dinner.

Anyway, since I've tried slipping other suggestions in, to no avail, the best revenge I could come up with, finally, to vent some of the ill-will that comes with being hungry and forced to settle for something dissatisfying (when more satisfying stuff beckons from home, less than 10 miles away), is to write a restaurant review and post it online!

This one is for Zeke's BBQ, and it's online at citysearch.com

To be fair, I contacted Zeke's management first, to complain about the burnt and oily food, but never received a response of any kind. I figured if they could torch my veggies, I could torch their rep. Honestly though, I can't imagine anyone being swayed for or against a place like Zeke's by a restaurant review.

BURNT VEGGIES TASTE LIKE CHARCOAL
03/06/2008 Posted by flyingdutchman

Another place that is conveniently located near my work. Unfortunately, like most of the other eateries around the Highland-Santa Monica-La Brea intersections, the food is not so hot. The one thing I can wholeheartedly recommend is the root beer. It's delicious. But then, Zeke's doesn't make it, they just sell it. The BBQ is so-so. I would go with a pulled pork, or brisket. I'm not a huge ribs guy. Food's not bad. But never eat their "grilled" veggies. Those BBQ'ers in the back like to torch the life out of the food, until it all tastes like ash. Is this some kind of macho revenge against vegetables? Does it make the BBQ more "authentic" if you incinerate the food? I've complained about it before and gotten no response. I give up. If I am forced to go there these days, because of work, I just eat the brisket, down a root beer and get on with life. Functional, but not enjoyable.

Pros: Great Root Beer in a big bottle

Cons: Most menu items are cremated

Bizarre New World: My Debut as a Comic Book Character

2008-02-27T13:34:00.000-08:00

My friend Skipper Martin had been talking about this story idea of his for almost as long as I'd known him. The first time I heard it, it was not quite developed; mostly just a concept. I remember him giving me the intro over some Mexican food, and it went something along the lines of ... "Let me pick your brain for a minute... Suppose you could fly..."

Skip, lover of all things Superman, wanted to write a story about a flying guy. A flying guy who resembled Skip. Uh-huh. Actually, even in that earliest incarnation, or swirl of ideas, Skip was imagining a flying world, because directly after the "what if you could fly" questions came the "what if everyone could fly" query.

I admit I was a little more focused on my margarita than on the idea of a story about flying people. It seemed too "Superman" to me. So Skip went away with the idea and came back a couple years later with a much more evolved pitch. He sent me a story outline with a three-act structure that had a strong father-son relationship, a villain, and a satiric take on religion and the media. In other words, something (other than the enchilada I had been eating last time) that I could really sink my teeth into.

One thing about Skip, the man has deep convictions. He believes in his own ideas - although not in an arrogant or immodest way. He is always open to other peoples' views. He always weighs his friends' opinions. But he has the kind of conviction that's necessary to do creative work, to take a project from his head to the sketchpad to completion.

Along with the story outline, Skip told me his plans to turn this into a serialized comic book. He was going to find an artist. He went out and shot "research photos" from a helicopter, to provide the artist with realistic aerial views. And every so often, I would get a peek at how things were progessing.

A half year or so later, Skip again prefaced one of our conversations with "Let me pick your brain..." He said he'd been mulling over the "problem" of how to explain his protagonist's ability. He wanted my theories on the subject. He said he wasn't convinced that it was actually important to his story, and I agreed. But he said he might want to do a scene where several characters discuss theories of how unaided human flight MIGHT be possible. I gave him my best theory, which came from my experience scuba diving. In short, I guessed that you could metabolize atmospheric gas into something lighter than air, which would be stored in your tissues, giving your whole body "buoyancy." Skip liked it.

When I received the first page layout showing myself in comic book form, I was amused to find that I was wearing the same London Underground T-shirt and grey hoodie. I guess some caricatures have some truth to them.

So, several months later, I got a call from Skip saying he'd like to drop by my office to take a couple of "research photos" of me to give to his artist. He cruised by, jumped out of his car, snapped two or three quick shots and disappeared again.

All this while, Skip was busy working away on his book, unsure of how he would eventually get it out into the world. Everything was being done out of his own pocket. (Remember what I said about the strength of his convictions). He prepared a fine leather portfolio with oversize inked and colored pages to display to potential publishers. On the strength of that presentation, he was given meetings to discuss his book, and eventually got a distribution deal with Ape Entertainment.

The three-acts have been broken up into three "series" for publication, each consisting of three comic book issues. The first series, in which I make my cameo, was published to strong critical response last year. The next series, titled "Population Explosion," is due to hit stands soon.

Lately Skip has been a busy guy, doing interviews and promoting the book. I wonder if my character will ever return - with the ability to fly?

Pick up Bizarre New World at a local comic book store, or visit the website for more info.

You can hear Skip in an interview from cindy.com here.

JLPTの3級を受かった

2008-02-27T11:33:00.000-08:00

Well, once again I passed the JLPT - Japanese Language Proficiency Test. The test is given every year around November or December and it takes until February to receive the results. There are four test-levels; level 4 and 3, which I have now passed, are the easiest. I understand that Level 2 is significantly harder. There are three sections to the test: Writing/Vocabulary, Listening, and Reading/Grammar. The only section I improved on from last year was Reading/Grammar. My listening really went down. I guess that's what happens when you stop taking classes.
Passing score was 240/400. I managed a 317 this time. 50 points down from last year. Guess I better study up if I plan to keep going.

The Endangered Iriomote Wildcat

2008-02-05T09:29:00.000-08:00

I just read this article in the New York Times about the danger to the Iriomote Yamaneko and decided I'd like to add a few personal notes to it.

Last April I traveled to the Yaeyama Islands in Okinawa, Japan. It's a small island chain between the Pacific and the East China Sea, just shouting distance from Taiwan. It's a small sub-chain, along with the Miyako, the Kerama, and the main island of Okinawa (mostly known here as the home of the US military) that make up the prefecture of Okinawa. But the Yaeyama chain has it's own distinct flavor and culture, stemming from the small size of the islands and their mostly untouched rural nature. Most of the land is used for farming and raising cattle. The other main industry is tourism, with most tourists coming form within Japan. The landscape is so different from mainland Japan, that people want to come to experience something foreign and to relax in these undeveloped island settings. Kind of like US tourists going to Hawaii, but in the Yaeyamas, there is really nothing equivalent to the sprawl of Waikiki, which makes me feel like I am in downtown Santa Monica, CA. Ishigaki is the Yaeyamas' most populous island, and most of its population (about 44,000) lives in the capital city at the south of the island, preserving an undeveloped island feel for miles northward.

Among the chain is Iriomote island, about an hour by ferry from Ishigaki, which is the main travel hub in and out of Yaeyama. Iriomote is actually the largest island in the chain, but also the least populous (currently). With only 2,325 people, the island is designated as a national park by the Japanese government. From what I could see, tourism was indeed its biggest industry. Most of the island is an undeveloped natural paradise. There is one two-lane road that makes an arc around the western half of the island (the eastern half cannot be traveled by car). Most of the businesses (shops, inns, gas station), towns, beaches and other attractions are accessed by this road.

One of the biggest draws for me to visit there was the possibility of hiking into the unspoiled back-country. I read about this on a site written in limited English, and I just had to do it. So, with help from a Japanese-speaking friend, I contacted a guide who agreed to take me on the hike, which traverses the entire island in a day (approx 16km - not very hard, but all of it through wild jungle).
I read some accounts of English-speaking tourists doing the hike by themselves. There were a handful of American or British English language school teachers living in Japan, who traveled to Iriomote on their vacations and decided to do the hike. They gave good information, but also confessed that it was impossible at times to find the trail and it took them far longer to finish than was estimated. One very helpful blogger, Justin, corresponded with me and sent his photos taken with his girlfriend while on the hike. They could not read Japanese, though, and halfway through the hike they encountered a sign with writing in green and red. They followed the green arrow. They got lost, it began to rain and they had to pitch a tent. The next day, his girlfriend fell in a river and got her passport wet. They made it out and enjoyed it. I was not discouraged, but I did not want to spend the night in the jungle with the Habu - a poisonous, and nocturnal, pit viper.

As it turned out, enlisting the aid of the guide was one of the highlights of my trip. His name was Morimoto-san (nicknamed "Taishi"). Despite his limited English and my limited Japanese, he was a wealth of information about the jungle, having lived on Iriomote for years. He was not a native of the island, having moved there from Kyushu, but he was the only dedicated volunteer park ranger, and generally seemed to be regarded locally as a leading authority on the flora and fauna there.

We drove together to the mouth of the Urauchigawa and boarded a boat upriver to the trailhead. While we hiked, he would identify trees, plants, bugs, even historical artifacts from the Ryukyu era and the coal-mining days, sometimes pointing to illustrations in a nature encyclopedia that he had contributed to. When our crossing was blocked by a fallen tree, Morimoto-san would pull out a fold-up saw he kept in his pack and cut through the branches. When we passed calf-deep through running water (acquiring some leeches in the process), there were ropes to hold onto, which Morimoto-san had tied in place previously. If he saw the smallest scrap of an object foreign to the wilderness, like an old sock, he picked it up. Thankfully, there was very little of that kind of thing, since few people pass through here. He told me that he was not paid for serving as a ranger for the island, so acting as a guide provided him with an income while enabling him to maintain the wilderness.

When we reached about the halfway point, we passed the sign that had scuttled Justin and his girlfriend. Next to the green arrow Morimoto-san had written, "Dame," meaning "No good, don't pass this way." That path had been made impassable by a typhoon. The red arrow pointed the proper way out to Ootomi village, and after taking a short break we followed it. Again, I was glad I had chosen to go with Morimoto-san.

Iriomote is the world's only home to the yamaneko, which Morimoto-san told me was about the size of a housecat. This animal has been made famous in Japanese animation (thereby introducing it to an audience worldwide), but few people have actually seen the animal. Morimoto-san has seen it and a big part of his passion for preserving Iriomote's ecology is tied up with preserving the yamaneko. He told me that there were thought to be only about 100 of the animals left, and that each year an average of two were killed while crossing the island's only road. The road now has warning signs with images of the cat, drawn by Morimoto-san himself.

After finishing the hike, Morimoto-san's wife picked us up at the south end of the island and we made our way back by car. Along the way, they pointed out two new hotels being built. Just last year, most of the lodgings on Iriomote were rather basic. The place I stayed was a minshuku - akin to a hostel, with simple rooms and tatami mat beds. The new buildings looked as if they might cater to a more deluxe class of traveler. On the one hand, this may be good for Iriomote's economy, and probably bring more business to Morimoto-san and other tour guides (not to mention more money for natural preservation projects), but their construction and existence also threatens the already perilous balance of nature on the island. The worst thing for Iriomote would be a large influx of tourists not interested in the jungle, but only in expanding the frontier of the "Club Med" type experience.

I did not see the yamaneko while doing the hike. But I hope that I could still have a chance to see one on a return trip.
If you decide to go to Iriomote, visit the jungle with Banana-House (Japanese only), Morimoto-san's tour company. You do not have to trek the entire island, he also offers kayak trips and other activities.
Also, look up Kanpira-So as a place to stay, and see if you can go snorkeling or hike to Pinaisara Falls with Toshio, who operates the Mifaiyu tour service, next door to Kanpira-So.

Peter Fuller Memorial Dive

2008-01-24T12:26:00.000-08:00

9/1/07
This post comes 4 and a half months late. But at least I can finally share some video.

Labor Day Weekend was hot. Of course, it's always hotter under the sun when you're suited up in black neoprene. It felt good to get underwater and cool off a bit. With Richard and Danica bringing along a DV camera, I joined Randy & Paige Sanders, as well as John "The Tank" Flores and his daughter, and Frank Enos at Catalina Dive Park on a Saturday morning to place a bronze memorial for Peter. It had been almost a year since Peter died.

Randy and Paige came up with the idea to do this and were just forming a dive club at the same time. Several of the members of the newly-formed Kelp Crusaders donated money to make the plaque and came along on the dive to place it.

Sometimes I am reminded of a conversation I had with Eric Grush on the lawn in front of the Butler house. I think both of our heads were filled with memory fragments, the kind of rush of bits and pieces that your mind sifts through like a nervous assistant, waving some forgotten file overhead in the excitement that it might mean something.
"He's not Sid Vicious," Grush laughed.
Meaning, I guess, let's not obsess over details, like fans.
I've tried to keep that in mind, in order to keep things in balance.

Randy and Paige affirmed that they did not want this event to be a somber affair. A service or memorial is for our own benefit anyway. Placing a stone or marker might mean nothing at all. Pictures and dreams might mean nothing.
But the change affected on all of us by one individual is substantial and real.

It's a strange bond that we have with the water, made stranger for me by the fact that diving was an activity that Peter and I often did together. Ultimately, it produces a very solitary feeling. Most of the sensory interference that we are used to is suddenly eliminated, and we are left with an experience that must be very remniscent of the earliest stage of our human existence. Some of the best moments in diving are floating in 10 feet or less, feeling the tide surge up and down, watching the plants and fish around you move in unison with yourself, sunlight easily penetrating the shallow water and giving everything a golden aquatic sparkle. You accept that being motionless means being in motion.

Thinking about Peter's "last dive" throws me into an ambivalent flux, floating suspended in confusing feelings. We listen to our own thoughts, the sound of our own breathing.

Morbidezza: 書を捨てよ町へ出よう

2007-10-26T18:41:00.000-07:00

Film Review: Throw Away Your Books and Go Out Into the Streets
1971 Japan. dir: Shuji Terayama

I recently obtained a copy of a film called Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets made in Japan in 1971. Two weeks prior to watching it, I watched another film from the same era, Easy Rider, with someone from Japan who had never seen it before. Mulling over the Japanese film for several days afterward, I pondered the similarities between the films, and realized bemusedly that "書を捨てよ" probably had the same effect on me that Easy Rider had on my Japanese friend. Probably, neither of us quite grasped the full impact of certain visual (or musical) references, but we each understood that the films represented a bas-relief of the specific cultural attitudes from which they emerged.

I know next to nothing about Shuji Terayama (the film's director), but I have gleaned that he was a member of a group called the Art Theater Guild, which played a crucial role in the independent Japanese film industry starting in about the late 1960s. The Art Theater Guild was a kind of filmmakers cooperative, whose chief purpose was to provide a distribution outlet for struggling independent filmmakers. Japan's film industry at that time was a studio system not unlike Hollywood's of the same era, so forming such an organization made a lot of sense for art filmmakers who would other wise have little chance getting distribution. The Art Theater Guild was able to make one-on-one arrangements with theater owners to give their titles limited runs, at times when theater owners might otherwise be facing programming slowdowns. A by-product of this coalition was that many of these filmmakers collaborated on each others' work - so it became a kind of production workshop/studio in its own right. The roster of Japanese filmmakers associated in one way or another with the Art Theater Guild is an impressive roll call, and includes Nagisa Oshima and Toshio Matsumoto. In this regard, Terayama and ATG occupied a similar space in the Japanese film industry as Hopper, Fonda, Altman and others occupied in Hollywood - at the crest of a wave of changes in film aesthetics and industry business practices.

As a straight narrative, Throw Away Your Books is much more loosely wrapped than Easy Rider (which, as a buddy-road movie, is essentially a "quest," and one of the oldest narrative models known to Western culture). Terayama's film is a series of vignettes, following a young protagonist and his family and friends, intercut with documentary elements. It is bookended by two sequences in which the narrator breaks the 4th wall and addresses the audience in a monologue on the artificiality of cinema. Obviously, these filmmakers who contributed to what became known as the "Japanese New Wave" took much inspiration from the French movement of the same name. However, in content it clearly urges Japan to reclaim an identity that is free of Western influence.

In the film's symmetrical bookend sequences, the narrator speaks directly to the audience, mockingly identifying himself as "no one," a figure of no historical importance. He questions our willingness to sit in the dark and wait for something to happen, for events to be revealed by insignificant shadows on the screen. At the film's end he chides our readiness to stroll out of the theater and let the events we'd witnessed be banished from our memories as daylight banishes the image from a movie screen.

Cueing the lights to come up, the narrator reveals himself to be standing amongst all of the crew members. "Although it is true that movies themselves can exist only in the dark," he tells us, "[from them can be born something which we can take away, into our daily lives.]"

There is almost a pre-punk, anti-Establishment ethic to the film. It swears off Western capitalism, it burns the American flag, there is a "Primer For Young People on How to do Drugs" vignette. It's easy to understand where this comes from. Japan's entire post-war identity was modeled after the US.

Terayama blasts Japan for being "like a lizard, captured in the Cola bottle" of the US, humiliated and incapable of escape. Over a shot of trashed empty cigarette cartons, branded "Peace," one of the film's many songs shouts "We want real peace." It's not just real peace that seems to be the bone of contention, but a real identity of this generation's own making, rather than an inheritance of the legacy of WWII.

All of the angst, the loud music, wild handheld camera, sexuality and drug use is part of the generational rebellion that was ocurring all over the world in the late 60s and early 70s. For American youth as much as Japanese, the generational rebellion was probably influenced in part by the legacy of WWII, since in the US it was the righteous victory against Fascism that was turned upside down in Vietnam which ignited the youth movement. In Terayama's depiction of Japan, WWII hangs over the family, even though the official Occupation has ended. Father is a "beaten dog, a war criminal," who drinks, pilfers money from his son and spies on women in the toilet. "Home is a pigsty," and father wants grandma to go to an old folks' home run by American-influenced Christian missionaries. Terayama's protagonist's urge to leave "home" could be read as a desire to escape the paternalistic shadow of the US.

There is a recurrent image in the film of the protagonist at the helm of a lightweight glider, trying to take flight, but always just barely skimming over the ground. At the film's end, the glider burns in an empty field.

In his epilogue, the narrator tells us that while filming, each actor became their role and thus, each situation became real. And while it played on screen, it was real for each of us in the audience. The glider cannot escape the bounds of the film screen; it crashes and burns, showing us again that reality of art is finite. But the implied hope I think is that the audience will be provoked, and move "skyward" by other means. Terayama was acknowledging that his art was a seed that needed minds to take root.

Lastly, the film has a really cool final credit sequence. There are no names given (at least not on the version I saw). It is merely a long dolly past all of the faces that appeared in the film. Long ago, I saw a student film titled "Morbidezza." The term originated during the Renaissance and described an extreme delicacy in the rendering of human fleshtones. In that film, the filmmaker gathered his family around a dinner table and had them hold a pose for 10 minutes, then slowly tracked over all of their faces. In Easy Rider also, Dennis Hopper films this type of "morbidezza" sequence (to re-appropriate the term). The scene takes place in the hippie commune, during a prayer of thanks for the food they have struggled to farm. I always thought it was astoundingly sensitive and real, and kind of epitomizes a film which has become a time capsule of a specific generational attitude. In Terayama's hands the shot is equally effective, especially following his character's overt bids for anonymity, which the shot proceeds to disprove. "I am no one." "You will forget us," the narrator says. These words lead into the shot, tracking across dozens of faces, in full silence, re-familiarizing the audience with every single cast member of the past two and a half hours. In their plainness and silence, they are rendered un-anonymous. All of their individual characteristics are thrown into relief and we can stare directly into their eyes and see each living soul that played a role in creating this work. It reminds us that each of us has the power to be creative and collaborative in an infinite variety of ways.

One further note -- the last face is that of Akihiro Miwa, a famous drag performer in Japan who has a small part in the film. I really loved Kuro Bara no Yakata (Black Rose Mansion), so it was a surprise pleasure to see him pop up in another film.

A reviewer on IMDB wrote that this was the "strangest" and "best" Japanese film they had ever seen. I would describe it as neither, but it's worth checking out if you can find a copy or catch a screening.

Hot Hot Heat

2007-09-05T23:09:00.000-07:00

The heatwave is finally over and thankfully, after 5 consecutive nights of being without electricity, I can again turn on a fan, or read by something other than candlelight. The temperatures got up to about 102 around here and apparently 26 people in the Los Angeles area died. Although it sucked not having power for several hours at a time, I thought about people in disaster areas like New Orleans and decided that between water and power, I would rather have water. During intense heat, you can at least jump in the bathtub.

Starting Friday, Tomoko called me to say that people were gathered outside my apartment and the place was dark. The power stayed off for several hours, and was interrupted again each day until Tuesday, lasting longer each time. Monday and Tuesday, we went dark around 5pm and did not have power restored until the following morning.

The odd (and infuriating) thing about it (as anyone standing on the street in the dark at night would have told you), was that it only seemed to be our side of the street that was affected for so many consecutive days. I took a stroll around Los Feliz on Tuesday night and the power was on everywhere else but our street. The neighbors directly across from us all had their lights on and their AC fans cranking away. I sat outside with some neighbors from my building and grumbled over brownout conspiracies and ground my teeth around the words ENRON and energy deregulation.

While it was a nuisance for us, I thought about MacArthur Park not having power for over 48 consecutive hours. Made up of mostly Spanish-speaking Latino immigrant families, they are not a community that is likely to lodge many effective complaints to the city. Was it possible that neighborhoods were selected by such criteria to lose power, thereby preventing an uncontrollable power outage in a more affluent and vocal part of the city? A kind of controlled burn? Gives new meaning to the term "brownout." I read an interview with a MacArthur Park woman who said that her food had spoiled and it was not within her family budget to replace it. There are also stories of elderly people on welfare dying because they were afraid of the energy bill that would come from running the AC for too long.

Amidst all this, there is the debate over whether global warming is "real." What I love most is that conservative thinkers who want us to pay for more power plants are the same people who say it's always been this hot. If that's so, why the hell are we blowing the power grid like never before? I think the answer is that some of those power plants that were taken off-line by ENRON during the California Gubernatorial Coup were never brought back online to full capacity (if at all).

I'm sorting through my fridge now and throwing away food that Tomoko, in all her loving maternal sweetness, bought and cooked for me, and that makes me bitter. I'm sure a lot of other people are more bitter. There's a cool breeze coming through the window now, so maybe all of our tempers will cool. Until, as my neighbor Tom thinks, we receive bills that are drastically higher next month, reflecting the costs of so many new lines and transformers that are being passed on to us. Seems like all the old infrastructure is really going to the dogs.

Time to crack open a skunky beer.

From the LA Times:
Blackout losses no sweat for utilities
Steaming over an abuse of power
This is absolutely miserable

Efrem's Visit - Sun Drunk Biking and Skidoo

2007-07-15T21:42:00.000-07:00

My friend Efrem came to visit again this summer. He is working on a phD in Math and for the past two summers has participated in summer academic programs at UCLA. Last year I caught up with him a bit - saw that he had his dreadlocks back, which reminded me of the old days when we used to play in a band together. I know Efrem's into biking and I had wanted to do a Midnight Ride with him, but the scheduling just didn't work out while he was here. So I met him in Westwood with the aim of biking down to the beach.

We biked down to Santa Monica and then headed south along the beach bike path. This summer has been hot as blazes in LA and Saturday was no exception. After an hour or so, we began to discuss getting some food. We were down around Playa del Rey and I knew there was a pier at Redondo with a restaurant that served deep-fried seafood. Efrem seemed into it, so we started biking for that.

But I had forgotten how far Redondo really was. I was looking for the twin smoke-stacks of the power plant that sits just off Redondo Beach. I have seen those when I have been diving there. As we approached the El Segundo area, I saw the smoke-stacks and told him, "We're almost there." But, it was a water treatment plant - false alarm.

My ass began to get REALLY sore. My bike is 12 years old and badly needs some chain grease and a new seat. It was squeaking and the seat felt like it was made of nails. We both started to complain of being tired. The sun really didn't help. I could feel my face and arms getting a good burn. I started to laugh everytime I told Efrem that it was just a bit further. We were both hungry, but I could not let us stop before we reached the seafood joint.

Eventually, I saw the pier.
We found the seafood place and got a couple of deep-fried plates of seafood and some beer. Efrem swatted at the seagulls who begged at our window. We noticed that the place was Korean, and we saw some delicious looking Korean seafood stew being served. Since we were still kind of ravenously hungry, we decided to order some. And more beer. And some soju to go with it. Efrem thought the soju was strong, so I drank most of the bottle.

Now exuding spicy garlic kimchee fish breath and alcohol fumes, we hobbled back to our bikes and began the trek back to Westwood. Having been the one inciting us to persevere on the way down, I was doing a lot more complaining on the way back up. When we got back to Westwood, it was about 9pm and dark. I had wanted to make my way to the Cinematheque for a screening of Otto Preminger's LSD-inspired 1960s comedy Skidoo, with Jackie Gleason and Groucho Marx. (I'm not kidding, either... I'd heard rumors that Jackie and Groucho and Otto all did LSD together before making this film. I can only confirm that Otto did.)
For some incomprehensible reason, despite the ridiculous distance we had just biked in sweltering heat, under the influence of large quantities of fermented hops and rice, and knowing that we were already late to the screening, which was in Hollywood - a 20 minute drive - we decided to go.
They let us in free since we were over an hour late, but the film had not started yet anyway. Since it is such a bizarre cult film that is rarely ever screened, there was an hour or so of introduction, which is what we walked in at the tail end of. For a review of the film, you will have to talk to Efrem, or Jeff and Teresa, who also showed up. I sat down, saw about ten minutes and the fatigue from the day caught up with me. I snoozed through Jackie Gleason's famous acid trip scene and woke up to Carol Channing singing "Skidoo" on a boat, while a bunch of people danced behind her in a samba line. I've probably slept through better films.

The next day, Efrem sent me this map of our trip. Just so no one thinks I am a complete wuss, we biked more than 40 goddamn miles! Drunk and sunburned!

Lastly, there's this: (I wonder if this was post-LSD Gleason talking..?)

(Buy Skidoo on DVD! Through the wonder of the internets!)

Hiking Alone

2007-07-01T22:01:00.000-07:00

I made a loop. Earlier than I'd intended. Made an incorrect assumption. It happens. I returned to where I'd started and missed what I'd been looking for. Despite the near-constant stream of banter which passed between me and Jae, we somehow avoided making this particular mistake together. I guess internal monologues can be louder and more distracting than external dialogues.
Maybe the second head was the smarter one.
The worst wounds are the self-inflicted ones, the ones that strike at one's self-worth. The soul is what rebuilds the self when the world has struck it down. Rebuilding takes ingenuity.
Losses always seem to stir memories of other losses, other failures. We mark time by what's changed. Everything is a choice; sometimes our choices are unconscious. Morality is a choice.
Staring at a tree that's lost its leaves can be melancholy. But being melancholy is a choice. And so is staring.
Emotion is inherently irrational. We're equipped with reason and feeling. Are these not tools? If we find ourselves flailing, could we not choose a more appropriate tool?
Is it our confidence that blinds us when we trample off-road and lose our way? Or is it our doubt that leads us there?
No animal, man or beast, can destroy you. Only you can do that.
Love yourself, harm no soul.
Remember, and leave something wonderful to be remembered.

Linda Lea I Love You Still

2007-06-22T17:21:00.000-07:00

On foot one day in downtown LA, I noticed a dilapidated old neighborhood movie theater with a cracked marquee featuring a kimono-clad geisha. Linda Lea Japanese Films, read the marquee. Up top, I noticed the Toei Studios logo, familiar from so many yakuza and samurai flicks that I have been unearthing over the past few years on DVD.

I usually make my way to the Egyptian for their annual Japanese Outlaw Masters series, which is a great way to get your fix of chanbara and yakuza films on the big screen. But seeing the Linda Lea marquee there on the edge of Little Tokyo kind of blew my mind. For one thing, there is only one operating movie theater in downtown now; chalk that up to a small residential population and the plethora of other movie/shopping "destinations" around the city. But for another, even considering the number of former theaters demolished, decrepit or being used for other purposes in downtown, I was startled to see one that specialized in Japanese films.

The theater sits on Main Street, which is not the bustling metropolitan thoroughfare that the name might suggest. The street on this block (and stretching several blocks south) is populated mostly by homeless people who are corraled into Skid Row by an unofficial and controversial policy of containment. Standing on the desolate street before the cracked marquee, I could imagine this place as it must have been in the late 1960s or early 1970s, with the words GRAVEYARD OF HONOR or SWORD OF DOOM stuck in red plastic letters to the marquee.

In fact, the theater's history is much older than that. I found a great site called Cinema Treasures, on which users submit data about old theaters dug up from public records. The history of the Linda Lea is a little patchy and hard to follow. It seems to have gone by several different names, and there are records of different kinds of businesses inhabiting the address. As far back as 1890, there are conflicting city records documenting the existence of (variously) a saloon, a furniture store and the Los Angeles Floral Society, all at 251 S. Main. Confusing matters slightly is the fact that, apparently, another theater existed at 255 S. Main (next-door), which was known at different times as the Union and the New York. Clearly, from looking at newspaper articles and directories, Main Street in the early 1900s was a booming entertainment district with many bars, burlesques, shops and theaters. The first real historic thread for the Linda Lea appears in 1924, when a construction contract was put together to build a 500-seat theater at 251 S. Main, the site where she currently stands.

A photo of Main St taken c.1925, showing the Arrow Theater, later to become the Linda Lea. Note the distinctive upward slope on the roof and the sign proclaiming "All Seats 10 cents." This is where the Linda Lea/Toei logo would later be mounted. From LA Public Library. Click to enlarge.

In 1925, right around the time the Arrow (as it was then known) was opening for business, another theater was built just up the street at 324 E. 1st St, in the heart of Little Tokyo. It was called the Fuji-Kan and screened Japanese movies exclusively. Wikipedia* states that "At its peak, Little Tokyo had approximately 30,000 Japanese Americans living in the area." That's about the estimated population of all residents in downtown today. Clearly, there was enough patronage for an all-Japanese movie theater. But 16 years later, that would change with the attack on Pearl Harbor and Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066. In 1942, Little Tokyo became a ghost town. The doors of the Fuji-Kan were boarded up.

The Fuji Kan Theater at 324 E. 1st St. Left: 1939. Right: 1941.

With many white American men in military service, African-Americans from the South moved to California in numbers to work in the shipyards, where bosses temporarily put aside their discriminatory hiring practices to meet the demands of the war. People came to the coast cities in such numbers, there was a lack of housing. In addition, in most of the city, restrictive housing covenants were in place that prohibited African-Americans from buying or renting. The empty buildings of Little Tokyo soon became home to a thriving African-American community with an identity of its own. Few people that I've met have heard of LA's Bronzeville, as its tenure lasted only about three years. But it forms an important part of the city's history, extending the African-American corridor of Central Avenue into the heart of downtown. Music critic RJ Smith recently wrote a very interesting book on Central Avenue's cultural significance, and includes an entire chapter on jazz and rhythm-n-blues in Bronzeville.

Perhaps a former restaurant, a sign over the door reads Bronzeville Arcade. Through the glass, a neon sign written in Japanese is still visible, reading 料理, or "cuisine." One of many Little Tokyo buildings that served Bronzeville residents. c.1945 (From the Bronzeville site.)

In 1945, the Fuji-Kan, now sitting in the heart of Bronzeville, re-opened as the Linda Lea. At its gala opening on Sat Feb 10, there was a double-feature of Minstrel Man and Brazil, as well as an orchestra, tap dancers and other stage performers. Meanwhile, the Arrow Theater back on Main was undergoing its own changes. Sometime around 1940, it changed its name to the Azteca and began showing Spanish language films. A news photo from Nov 20 1940 shows the building's marquee (minus the geisha of today), with the titles El Vuelo de la Muerte, and Bajo el Cielo de Mexico.

It's interesting to me seeing how the names of the theaters, and the titles of the films programmed, reflect the changes in the area demographics. In addition to the creation of Bronzeville, one of the other side-effects of the Japanese internment was an increase in Mexican immigrants. LA has always had a large Mexican population, but during the internment, there were more people coming directly from Mexico to work. Japanese-Americans played a large role in farming and agriculture, operating their own farms, or working for other growers. In Hawaii for instance, where Pearl Harbor actually ocurred, the Japanese-Americans were not interned, because the government recognized that their labor in pineapple and sugarcane fields was too indispensible, and could result in economic collapse if lost. Just as the war industry was willing to look the other way when it came to hiring African-Americans in the factories, some Japanese were released from the detention camps in order to help harvest crops. "They literally saved the beet harvest in '42 and '43, because so many of the men were away for the war," said Patricia Wolfe, treasurer of the Heart Mountain, Wyoming Foundation.(USAToday*). America was facing a shortage of labor of crisis proportions, so Mexicans were brought in by train to downtown LA Union Station, under the Bracero Program.

From 1945-46, with the war still on, but Japan in retreat, the internment camps began to close and release Japanese-Americans. They had lost farms, houses and shops, and would find it difficult to resume life as before. Nevertheless, there were those who returned and downtown landlords returned their leases, beginning a transition that ended the Bronzeville era. In 1947, the Linda Lea on 1st St (the former Fuji-Kan) closed down and re-opened at 251 S. Main, replacing the Azteca (the former Arrow). I have not yet found information on whether the theater switched its programming to Japanese films at this time. One can only speculate as to why the name remained Linda Lea once Japanese programming resumed.

After the internment, Little Tokyo would never fully recover, as most families moved to outlying suburbs like Torrance and Gardena instead of returning to downtown. From the "30,000" believed to have lived there prior to 1941, there are now "about 1000," most of them retirees (Wikipedia*). Although the Japanese-American community became politically active in the 1970s and 80s, seeking restitution for the internment and attempting to restore Little Tokyo through community development projects, a new residential base never took hold. In the years following the war, the city of LA claimed property under Eminent Domain laws for the construction of city projects (including the Police headquarters) and the New Otani Hotel, with other portions being plowed under for industrial warehouse space. As an ethnic enclave, it became characterized by an assortment of ramen shops, video rental and bookstores, and Japanese grocery markets. Despite a recent surge in popularity of Japanese pop culture, and the resultant influx of dollars from visiting shoppers, Little Tokyo seems to be steadily assimilating into the generic downtown backdrop, as businesses like American Apparel, Office Depot and Starbucks replace storefronts previously occupied by Japanese businesses.

A friend of mine commented that Little Tokyo today is "like Disneyland," presenting a dressed-up, tourist version of its former self. Would preserving the Linda Lea only add to that sense of the artificial? Many people that I've talked with, even LA history buffs, have never heard of Bronzeville. Does the preservation of buildings like the Linda Lea automatically raise our awareness of our city's history?

Right now, downtown LA is experiencing one of the largest urban makeovers anywhere in the country. The NY Times reports that over 15,000 new residential units have been completed or are in the process of construction in downtown since 1999. There are numerous loft/condos in converted warehouses surrounding Little Tokyo with selling prices starting around $670 per square foot. Proponents of urban redevelopment can point to conditions on Skid Row and argue that change in downtown is a good thing. But few people can afford to buy in to the condos and lofts that are being built. And LA has a particular habit of destroying historic buildings, only to memorialize them later out of some pious regret. The current wave of development is just one of many changes in the downtown neighborhood over the decades, but it is the most large-scale and expensive. Is there anything wrong with asking whether downtown will be better served by franchise clothing stores, coffee shops and luxury lofts than by family-run LA institutions like Fugetsu-Do, the Japanese confectionery which has been here since 1903?

Recently, some Angelenos have banded together to slow the development of the area. After being petitioned with over 5500 public signatures, Councilwoman Jan Perry has expressed concern over the potential loss of Little Tokyo's "distinct characteristics."

Mulling over these things, I have watched the Linda Lea sit in disrepair for months while plans for its renovation were discussed. Finally, work is underway, although at the moment it looks like it is being completely demolished to make way for the new project. Leased by the ImaginAsian Entertainment company, the site will host a theater programming Asian films from all over the world. I'm happy to see another theater occupy this spot where, for over 80 years, people have been watching movies. That's a span of time that is almost as old as movies themselves. Hopefully the new theater will connect with an audience, and movies will continue to live on Main St. It may be interesting for some armchair history sleuth to discover the lineage of whatever building faces demolition eighty years from now.

History is a white elephant sale: what's meaningless to one may be dear to another. Unfortunately, as with so many things, the value is often determined by the highest bidder.

My Sources
Bronzeville
Cinema Treasures
Articles on Downtown Development
Little Tokyo Motion Highlights Downtown's Lack of Specific Plans
Downtown development spills into rebounding ethnic enclave
In Los Angeles, a Gehry-Designed Awakening
Articles on the Linda Lea and the ImaginAsian
ImaginAsian Center Will Add Modern Life to Main
The Linda Lea Sequel - Rundown Theater to Be Recast as One-Screen Specialty Cinema
Curtain Comes Back Up on Historic Japanese Theater
Articles on Skid Row
Desolation Boulevard
Escape from L.A.'s Skid Row Can Prove Difficult

Turning 30.

2007-06-04T22:22:00.000-07:00

It's come...
My palm crystal is starting to blink.
30 kinda heralds the end of feeling like a kid.
I can still scale Half Dome, but I'm not likely to be let off the responsibility hook anymore.
In Okinawa, people generally accepted that I was a young, lone traveler until they found out I was 29. Then most of the rural people told me I should be married.
All the things you thought you should have achieved by now (whatever they are) begin to seem either urgent or distant and unattainable at this age.
If you still don't know what those goals are, the rootless, randomness of your life is not brought into any sharper focus by aging alone.
Eh, it's just another day.
The best lesson of aging is to try to live all of them well.

Yaeyama Photo Blog

2007-04-30T01:36:00.000-07:00

I finally got some pictures from my recent trip to Okinawa online to view. You can check them out by following this link.

Kurt Vonnegut.

2007-04-21T04:32:00.000-07:00

This is only my second day back from my Okinawa trip, but it feels like one long, continuous day since I left, and the trip itself feels like it happened months ago. I am not on island time anymore, but I am not yet on LA time. I drank island awamori with Jeff tonight, but even that could not convince me to go to bed, and here it is 6:30am.

Being in the islands was fantastic, but I think my greatest sadness hit me as I left Yonaguni, the first and furthest small island that I visited. I did not expect the kindness that I received there and I felt terribly lonely to be leaving friendly people behind me indefinately. There were good times ahead of me though, and it it felt great to be unaware of the world for that short two weeks.

Coming back to the US, I was greeted with many unfortunate news stories that had transpired while I was away, oblivious to US current events. The first was of course the VA Tech shootings. While in Yonaguni, a week before the massacre ocurred, Naomi had asked me whether I'd ever used a gun. It seems like an unusual question, but reflecting back on what people know of LA and the US, maybe it is totally logical. Anyway, I have used one, so perhaps my surprise at the question is more unusual than the question itself.

In the wake of that news, there has been the following story of the NASA Space Center contractor who killed himself and a female hostage in Houston. There have also been a flurry of small, local alarms and building closures now that the media coverage of these events has everyone on edge and in fear of their safety. A local high school was closed today after a teen went missing with two of his parents' handguns. Does this kind of thing happen everyday and go unreported? Is it suddenly news because it is a convenient tie-in to the VA Tech story? When that story finally dies, will these smaller ones go away too? Or was that large-scale massacre like a full moon, upsetting the equilibrium of people teetering on the edge of their sanity? Is our society so pathological? Does our way of living make that many people sick, or is it by sheer power of numbers that we see more evidence of murderous rampages than in other countries? Or is it our citizens' convenient access to handguns that differentiates their outbursts from those of their crazy counterparts abroad? Will we ever develop the will, as a society, to limit our free access to guns in exchange for a reduction in wanton murder sprees? Gun activists say that people, not guns, are to blame for killing. Which people are to blame for Seung-Hui Cho's ability to purchase handguns off the internet?

Today I also learned that one of my favorite writers passed away on April 11. Kurt Vonnegut was 84 years old and survived the firebombing of Dresden Germany during WWII, a scene he later depicted famously in his novel Slaughterhouse-5.
What is there to say? Vonnegut was a writer who was often erroneously classified as a science-fiction novelist, although he was more succesful at transcending the genre ghetto than other great American writers of the late 20th century, such as Philip K. Dick (although the two have little in common). He was a satirist, a social critic, he used very simple prose and had very sharp wit. His accessibility and acerbity attracted me at a young age and I quickly dissolved most of his major novels and short story collections.

Although opposite in writing style, his sensibilities are more in line with his equally luminous contemporary, Thomas Pynchon I think. They both have a kind of gleefully goofy irreverent humor, concern for the fate of humanity, contempt for authority, cautious attitudes towards technology, disregard for narrative chronology and they have both written books featuring robots, talking animals and end-of-the-world scenarios.

Vonnegut always seemed to me like the cool old crotchety grandfather of American writing; the kind whose complaints you would love to sit and listen to. After buying and reading more than 13 used paperbacks when I was a teenager and only had $4 to spare for a book, I eventually eased out of my Vonnegut phase, but like a great relationship, the memories lasted long after it ran out of gas. I think having such a literary gradfather in my early teens was formative and contributed to the brand of cynical idealism that is my current philosophy. Vonnegut was someone who was humorously cynical, but not without hope that his work as an artist-observer and cultural critic could prevent us from causing our own absurd decline.

In recent times, Vonnegut retired from writing fiction and turned his attentions to magazine articles, wherein he often gave the Bush Administration the much-needed ass-ripping that so many other writers have been unable to muster the balls for. Vonnegut, a man in his 80s, a distinguished man of letters, highly regarded and recognized, did not have any fear of offering his opinion when something struck him as absurd - it is what his entire career was founded on - and the recent Bush years provided him with ample fodder for magazine articles, but sadly, seemed to diminish his optimism for the fate of humanity.
LA Weekly columnist Dave Shulman, in his obituary to Vonnegut, quotes a passage from his recently-published non-fiction collection "A Man Without a Country:"

"Many years ago I was so innocent I still considered it possible that we could become the humane and reasonable America so many members of my generation used to dream of. We dreamed of such an America during the Great Depression, when there were no jobs. And then we fought and often died for the dream during the Second World War, when there was no peace.
But I know now that there is not a chance in hell of America becoming humane and reasonable."

Sadly I missed an opportunity to see Vonnegut several years ago when he read at LA's Armand Hammer museum. I normally try to see the people I consider the cultural heavyweights of my own time. I felt that Vonnegut's passing might be soon in coming, due to his age, and there was an incident several years ago, when his house caught fire, which I thought might have been his last call. I'm glad he lived long enough to get a few more jabs in at deserving targets, but I hope that the above quote was not representative of how he felt at the end. I suspect that it was not his final verdict on humanity, even if the pessimism towards the US culture, state of education and political system was genuine. People like Vonnegut are part of why I can accept the unwieldy American identity as my own, because in the end, all such arbitrary identities become irrelevant and the only thing that bonds people together is their ability to comprehend one another. For every unreasonable, ignorant, fearful, greedy, or weak force in the world, and for the mindless collectivism feeding around those forces, let their be a Vonnegut who can gently or scaldingly, with humor or frustration, provide a counterweight of independent thought to inspire people to question any seemingly obvious logic.

I wonder whether in this post-modern era, in which people seem to be unable to create anything that is not a direct reference to some pre-existing idea, when we will produce another like Vonnegut. Is such a person already at work and I am just unaware of it, or has our culture become so stagnant? He was that old grandfather, but for all of us who grew up at his knee, has no one yet stepped forward to resume in his place? Will we create another Vonnegut who is not merely "another Vonnegut," self-consciously referencing his predecessor's style and voice? How will our generation write our own stories and histories, how are we reacting to our own times? We do not have the grand historical furnaces of the Great Depression, or a Great War in which to fire our collective generational identity, but are the significant events of our own histories simply not registering on a generational scale the way they did in the 30s and 40s? Are we not at war now? Are we not in economic decline? Are the events of our lives grand enough to call attention to themselves, or must we continue to have the volume turned up with each succeeding generation? Can the events in our time compress each of our loose carbon bodies into critical diamond minds? Do we not love? Do we not die? Can our generation not also be great if we choose to be? Will we grasp the materials at hand, the events which unfold like historical threads around us, and make it so?

There is one last quote, again from an article that was collected in "Man Without A Country:"

"The Army kept me on because I could type, so I was typing other people's discharges and stuff. And my feeling was, 'Please, I've done everything I was supposed to do. Can I go home now?' That's what I feel right now. I've written books. Lots of them. Please, I've done everything I'm supposed to do. Can I go home now?"

Last Post From Okinawa

2007-04-18T18:47:00.000-07:00

I'm at Naha Airport.
Not much to say. Never is when you're at the end of your vacation.
Okinawa was great.
I did not get to see much outside of Naha city, but I would like to return and visit the north side of the island.
I only spent 2 days here. I made it to Shuri-Jo, but was mildly disappointed to learn that almost the entire thing had been destroyed in the Battle of Okinawa and re-built over the past few decades. But then again, maybe I am attaching too much significance to the actual stone or wood, rather than the idea. I have heard that in Japan, many castles, shrines and temples are re-built with new materials every decade or so anyway. It keeps them in pristine condition.
Last night I went to a cool traditional Ryukyuan restaurant where some musicians were performing traditional music. I saw them performing from outside, through the second-story window, and noticed a sign explaining that they were being broadcast live on the radio. I decided to go check it out and got ushered in by one of the wait-staff.
Island music is pretty cool. It's dominated by sanshin (3-stringed guitar) and has drum and hand percussion accompaniment. But the singing is what's really cool. There are these percussive, staccato chants that the female singers stick in between choruses, like "ay, ay, ay." Maybe here at the airport I can find a CD store. I still wanted to buy a DVD copy of Dr. Koto, the TV show whose vacant set still sits on the beach at Yonaguni. I thought that would be good Japanese language practice.
The restaurant last night was a good watering hole. I got a few beers in me and was having a really good time. I would ask the waiter what a certain item was. I could read the name, but had no idea what it was. He would ask the chefs (I was sitting at the counter where I could see them preparing everything) and they would all shake their heads, and then I would say "Tabetemimasu." I will give it a try. They would nod, shout "Hai," and set about cooking it up. I tried pigface, mountain potato tempura, some kind fo raw meat that I have not yet figured out what the name means, and up front I ordered some goya champuru; in case anything after it turned out to be horrible, I would have gotten a good bed of digestible matter in my stomach first. But everythign was delicious and each time I got a new plate, I would signal to the chef that it was "Oishii," which seemed to please him.
Later on, I cruised around Kokusai Doori street, but it's all just junk shops, selling the same corny gifts: trinkets, fruits, T-shirts. It's OK, but it's similar to many other such streets. Not special the way the Yaeyamas were.
I decided that I would try to find a big bottle of Awanami Awamori as a return gift. Every shop on that long street sold awamori, but Awanami is somewhat elusive. It is made in Hateruma, the southern most island in Japan and the normal-sized bottle is said to be extremely rare. I did score some mini bottles for $10 each in Ishigaki. Last night I walked into a gift shop and asked if they had Awanami and the guy directed me to a shop down the street. I've noticed that some awamori brands use a lable with a very similar design, which is sorta amusing. I walked into the shop and found it, and read the sign that said 98000 Yen. About $80..? The shop-lady looked at me and said, "Awanami. 98000 yen."
I said, "Wakarimashita." SHe looked at me in disbelief and started talking to me in Japanese all about how no gaijin ever comes looking for that stuff and how amazed she is that I can speak at all and how jouzu I am. It was fun.
Anyway, the bottle is wrapped very carefully in several layers of underwear and towels in my checked luggage. That was the only way I could get it through security.
I sure hope it survives.
Shit. My plane will board soon.
Goodbye, Okinawa. Thanks to all the kind people.
Hope to come back soon.
-Andre.

Passport Lost and Found

2007-04-17T01:35:00.000-07:00

Today was slightly harrowing.
This morning, in a rush to get my scattered crap together to make check-out time and do some sight-seeing and gift-buying during my last morning on Ishigaki, I lost my MOTHERFUCKING PASSPORT !
I had turned all my crap upside down looking for it, in all my bags (realizing that I really brought way too much crap from home that I didn't need). Yesterday, I had rented a scooter and gone around the island, stopping many places. I brought my passport and International Driver's License, needed for renting the bike. When I stopped at the Yaeyama Cultural Center, I took the passport out and stamped it with an Ishigaki stamp that was on display in one of the traditional Ryukyu village settings. Later, I stopped at Yonehara beach and jumbled my clothes around in my bag so I could do some snorkeling, which was fantastic. (Anyone who wants to know where awesome snorkeling is in Ishigaki should know about Yonehara. Next time, I want to bring a tent and camp there.)
Anyway, this morning I could only figure that maybe at Yonehara the passport and IDL had fallen out of my bag and were still laying somewhere on the sand, although I thought it odd that I would not have noticed the conspicuous dark blue US passport on the white sand beach.
Not really knowing what to do, I went to Ishigaki City Hall. My first brush with Japan's famed bureacracy. Many Americans in Japan have blogged about what a nightmare it can be to navigate the Japanese bureacracy. Maybe because it was Ishigaki and not a massive metropolis like Tokyo, or maybe because they took pity on a tourist and I was not a foreigner trying to obtain a resident alien card or something, the experience was very smooth and nothing to complain about.
I waited for about 10 minutes until an English speaking staff person could meet me. I did not feel up to the challenge of communicating in Japanese at this level. Fortunately, there was a guy working there who studied English in college. Most Japanese people seem to have had exposure to English in junior high, but their level of fluency ranges widely. Some people claim not to be able to speak and actually do fairly well, while others try to use English because they think they are being helpful, and actually it is easier to understand their Japanese. Haha.
Anyway, this guy (whose name I forgot! haha, but whose business card I have at my hotel) was very fluent and very helpful. He found the phone number for the American Consulate in Naha (Okinawa main island) and then drove me to the keisatsu (police station) to fill out a report. I was supposed to take the report, fly back to Okinawa main island and give it to the Consulate and hopefully have a new passport issued.
While we waited at the police station we chatted a bit. He asked about my job and what I had been doing in the Yaeyamas. I told him I had done a lot of diving and had gone to Yonaguni, and he perked up. "Which diving service?" he asked. I told him SaWes. "Aratake? He is my uncle!" So it turns out his mom's brother is the guy who owns SaWes diving service. He said he had a cousin who was living in Torrance, but moved to Sacramento. He went to Torrance once for a month and enjoyed it. I told him if he ever winds up back in California to come for a visit in LA, but in the madness of the moment, I forgot to say "Ni fai yuu," which might have impressed him since he was an Ishigaki native. He said his parents were from Yonaguni and I said I wanted to move there, buy a house, find a job, get married and call it a day. He told me, "Yeah, let me know. I'll help you." Hahaha. So all I need now is money.
Anyway, that was the easy part.
I got an early plane to Naha, Okinawa and jumped in a cab (expensive! about $35) to the Consulate. It was kinda amusing because the cab driver had no idea where I was requesting to go. That was when I was grateful that I had brought my electronic dictionary (and had not lost it).
When we figured out what I was talking about, we headed off. He asked me if I was "ami," or "soja." By now, I have learned these words: Japanese for "army" and "soldier." I said no and he goes, "Atama ga ii ne." You're smart. "Soldiers aren't very smart. They're no good," he told me. What could I say to that? I figured there was probably a lot of legitimacy to what he was saying. He and I seemed to hit it off pretty well though since I could communicate with him in Japanese a bit.
When we got to the Consulate, I had to speak to the guard to explain why I was there before they would open the gates and let us drive in. Kinda weird. Not really the kind of stuff you want to be doing while on vacation. Once we drive in, the cab driver starts pulling out my bags and another guard walks up and tells me in Japanese that the passport staff were already gone, as of 3pm. It was now just about 4. The cab driver looked at me like he wanted to drop me off the nearest bridge, probably thinking, "This guy is the world's biggest moron." He stuck my bags back in the trunk and we started to turn around. In my defense, I told him that the woman I had talked to on the phone told me they were open until 5. You should have complained to him, he told me. We paused for a minute and I considered jumping out to do so, but we looked at each other and thought Fuck it. "Ashita, ne." Handle this shit tomorrow.
I asked him if he knew an inexpensive business hotel, thinking I might get stuck here a couple days longer than expected. In Japan, a business hotel caters to traveling businessmen and is a little bit cheaper than a regular tourist hotel. They average around 5500 yen per night, which is about 50 bucks and they usually come with free breakfast. He said there were a lot around Kokusai Doori, which is the main drag in Naha, chock full of shops and restaurants and hotels. As we drove, he reached in his glove compartment and handed me a can of tea, apologizing that it wasn't cold. "Taihen da ne." Tough day.
When we got to the business hotel, he pulled over and said "Just a minute," running inside to check that the price was good. He came back, excitedly telling me that it was only 43000 yen per night and came with free breakfast! I thanked him profusely for all his trouble and checked in, tired and sweaty.
Like most people I have met so far, the guy was super kind and I thought about how he commented on his dislike for soldiers and how his perception of them undoubtedly extended to most Americans. It's a weird situation. I can't trash soldiers because I know who they are. They're mostly all just kids and don't know shit about Japan and don't necessarily care about it. On the plane from LA to Tokyo and again from Tokyo to Naha I sat with one Airforce guy and another Army guy. They looked tired. They looked like people do when they are at work. Their work involves traveling to foreign countries and doing whatever it is they're told to do, whether it is driving trucks in Okinawa or killing people in Iraq. I think those young guys are aware of not being necessarily well-liked here, which probably only adds to feeling alienated and uninterested in this place. It all depends on the individual of course, but my experience here is very different since I choose to be here and want to engage with people here. It seems like, even being a total dunce with Japanese language buys me the key to the city because I make an effort to fit in a little bit. I asked the cab driver if no other Americans here speak Japanese and he said none do. While we were driving down Kokusai Doori, he spotted a blonde "gaijin" (foreigner) and said, "Tomodachi?" (Is he your friend?) It's funny that Kokusai Doori (International Street) has few foreigners on it. Actually, although I have not seen much of it yet, Naha reminds me a little bit of Tokyo. Throughout Japan, you seldom see foreigners really. Which contributes to peoples' amazement when they see one, or when they see one use chopsticks, or when they see one who speaks Japanese a little bit. Which is why, even though my Japanese sucks, I get compliments (Jouzu desu ne.)
Anyway, Naha seems very crowded. There are tons of flashing lights and businesses. It may not be as easy here to make friends as it was in the small islands. The small islands are very laid-back and peaceful. Coming here is a weird way to decompress on the way back to LA.
Finishing up this story, once I had checked into my hotel, I once again tore apart my bags, thinking how much it would suck to be going back to the Consulate again tomorrow morning. And, there, buried in dirty clothes in a plastic bad with suntan lotion (so it would not get soggy at the beach) was my GODDAMN PASSPORT!
I thanked the heavens and stars and called the Consulate to apologize to the kind lady there and tell her not to expect me the next morning. Now, I am keeping it on me. Very close. In my underpants.
So, tomorrow, hopefully I will see Shuri-Jo. It is a historic castle from the days when Okinawa was the autonomous Ryukyu Kingdom. Maybe I will make it all the way north to see Churaumi Aquarium. Everything I have heard is that it is amazing, but that plan might be too ambitious. There are many things I did not get to do while here which I had wanted to, such as visiting an awamori distillery or the Orion beer brewery (I guess I could do that tomorrow), or going to the Observatory at Hateruma (the southernmost point in Japan), or camping on the beach. But that leaves me with an agenda for the next trip.
I really like Okinawa, more than any other place I have been to in Japan, and maybe any other place in general. Being here and meeting people and hearing the island music and being introduced to hougen (island dialect) really got me interested again in achieving fluency in Japanese. I know I would have benefitted so much more from certain experiences (such as the cross-island trek - the guide was an encyclopedia of knowledge or hanging out with Toshio-san or Furugen-sen) if I had been more fluent. I think when I return to LA, I will dispense with the silly community college classes and try to find a class taught by native Japanese people that is geared towards conversational fluency.
Anyway, I think I will sign off and have a look around Naha. The day after tomorrow is a long day. Crossing the International Date Line from East to West sucks! I will leave here in the PM and arrive the same day in the AM. Let's see if I can meet anyone here.
Ato de mata ne.

First Mexican In Ishigaki

2007-04-16T16:26:00.000-07:00

Today is my last day on Ishigaki Island, and also my last day in the Yaeyama Islands. Today I fly to Okinawa hontou, or main island. I'm guessing it will be a different sort of experience, since I got a small taste of it when I passed through there on my way here. The feeling I got then was that the atmosphere was dominated by the US military presence. But maybe not. The airport definately was. Several times, while I have made my way through these islands, when people found out I was American (it is not always assumed, at least two people thought I was Italian), they ask me if I am "ami," which had me shaking my head in confusion until I realized they were asking me if I was in the Army.

I've met a ton of people here, all interesting, and many possessing bottomless kindness. This blog is totally backlogged, but I guess that's alright. When I get my pictures up at Kodak later, I'll try to remember to fill in the blanks in the travel chronology.
Anyway, last night was noteworthy.

I had rented a moped and made a complete circuit of Ishigaki, going all the way out to the northernmost point, where there is a lighthouse. There are many beautiful lighthouses on these islands, and I:ve seen almost all of them now. Yesterday, by the time I reached Hirakubo lighthouse, I had seen enough to only want to stay a few minutes and then jump back on the moped to race back to Ishigaki city before the road got too dark to see. So, I had returned the bike, taken a shower and was walking around the city, thinking I would buy a few omiyage (gifts for people back home). I was also looking for some place that looked like it would have good food, thinking I might go for a steak of Ishigaki beef. (All over these islands I have seen cattle grazing. It's really been quite beautiful just cruising the country backroads on the bike and viewing green hillsides with horses and cows on them. Many people are also cultivating rice fields which attract cranes.)

As I walked down the street I noticed a guy who did not really look Japanese, strumming a guitar. (There are not many, but some Japanese faces which don't really look Japanese to my non-native eye). I gave him a second look and thought he might be Latino. I kept walking, but could not really resist the urge to approach him and find out what his deal was.

His name is Martin and he moved to Ishigaki four years ago. He comes from Cancun, Mexico, where he studied Japanese for about 10 years. He told me that in Cancun, people kept asking him, "Martin, when are you gonna move to Japan?" as though they were making fun of him. I found that amusingly familiar. So after a short stint in Los Angeles, he moved to the mainland, staying for awhile in Osaka before moving to Ishigaki.

He asked me how long I had been studying and nodded approvingly when I was able to converse with a couple on the street who I had been out diving with the day before, and who just happneed to be strolling by. "TV is the best learning tool. You gotta watch a lot and imitate," he told me. I mentioned that being here is really quite different than being in LA because you almost feel yourself starting to think in another language. "But," Martin said, "you cannot let a lack of native speakers in LA or wherever be an excuse for not studying. Besides," he said, "there are thousands of native speakers in LA. In Cancun, there were zero."

While we were talking, a family of three approached and the husband started talking to Martin about the guitar. As it turned out, he had stopped by to listen to Martin for the past few nights and was a guitar player himself. After a few minutes of talking about guitar and sanshin (a traditional Okinawan stringed instrument), the man sat down and began to play a couple of Beatles tunes on Martin's guitar.

For awhile after we chatted, and Martin told me about his obsessions - soccer, guitar, snorkeling, studying languages (he speaks English, Spanish, French, Japanese, and a little bit of Russian and Italian!), and he also demonstrated one of his other primary interests - skirt-chasing. Martin is a nampa extraordinaire. In other words, he excels at the art of picking up women. Well, so he claims. I only saw him get turned down, but I must say he always elicited a lot of laughter and smiles with his gregarious and direct methods.

We headed to an izakaya (restaurant/bar) for some food and a few beers. Martin checked the place out first to see if any girls were in there that he might want to talk to first. He did not think the prospects looekd great, but he figured some cute girls might stroll in later. We sat and talked about diving, living abroad, and his business (he set up his own language school). While we were talking, the couple across from us took notice and the guy introduced himself. He and his girlfriend were Ishigaki natives and wanted to compliment us on our (mostly Martin's) Japanese ability and skillful use of hashi (chopsticks). I have found that I get that a lot in Japan. It does not matter how shitty my Japanese is, people will forever compliment me on how "jouzu" I am. Courtesy is big.

Martin talked with the guy for ahwile. I think his name was Hide, but I've already mentioned that I have a talent for forgetting names if I do not write them down. I could follow the gist of the conversation, but the details were tough. Hide (as I suppose I wil refer to him) talked about how parents always force their kids to study, taking all the fun out of it and conditioning people to hate study, which makes it harder later in life to try hard to learn something. He watches a lot of American movies with Japanese subtitles to practice listening to English. "He LOVES movies," his girlfriend said. "Culture is more important than language," Hide said, which I suppose means that language is just the key to understanding the culture. It was kinda funny to me to find people doing the same thing I am, interested in learning another language, another culture and being obsessed with movies.

Martin claimed that many people just do not have the requisite discipline to learn another language though. He was very disciplined and demonstrated amazing an amazing memory when Hide taught us some hougen (hougen is island dialect). He taught us three phrases. "We are brothers from the first time we meet," (does not translate to English very well, but said to someone you hit it off with), "Thank you very much," and "Nice to meet you." Of the three, I can only remember "Ni fai sei yu," which is "Thank you very much." (And I can only remember that one because Toshio-san taught me that on Iriomote.) But Martin's brain was like a sponge and he could repeat each one after hearing it only once. When Hide and his girlfriend told Martin he was "jouzu," I think it was pretty goddamn sincere.

While were walking, Martin said, "To really master the language, you gotta get inside the person's head, anticipate, be ahead of the game. Know what they think, know what they expect." I considered how his thoughts echoed Hide's as we stared down the street, Martin scanning for beautiful women. "Know what the rules are. And break them," he burst out laughing.

In Ishigaki

2007-04-14T06:49:00.000-07:00

I am now on Ishigaki Island in Okinawa Prefecture, Japan.
I originally planned to arrive here on the 12th, but today is the 14th.
2 days late.
I am on island time. Shima jikan.
Ima chotto tsukarete iru kedo, nagai kan burogu wo shite inai.
It's weird... I know my Japanese is shitty but slipping into using it seems a lot easier now that I am surrounded by native speakers.
My last post was about Yonaguni. That must have been about 4 or 5 days ago.
Yonaguni was awesomr, or as Keizen-san would have me say, "Pisshari."
Keizen is from Kobe originally、but no Japanese person that I have met since leaving Yonaguni has any idea what "Pisshari" means, even people from Kobe.
In these small islands of Okinawa, the Ryukyus, the Yaeyama islands, there are many dialects known as hougen. I do not think that "pisshari" is hougen. Or Kansai-ben. I think it is Keizen-ben.
Anyway, there is a lot to tell about Yonaguni, but too much has happened since I left there to do a recounting now. This blog's accounting of Yonaguni will be like my pictures of the place: selective and not adding up to the whole. I do not even think I grabbed any shots of Yonaguni houses or typical neighborhoods. They were interesting. All tile roofed. All very simple.
As mentioned in an earlier post, I did meet with a woman named Ikema Nae. She runs a kind of museum called the YOnaguni Minzoku Shiryokan, out of her home. It is basically a cultural artifact museum of things she kept while growing up on Yonaguni. She showed me some old pictures of the island and some traditional ceremonies. She also took me outside and taought me to take the spiny Adan plant and make it into a windmill toy.
She wrote the only existing Japanese to Donan dictionary. (Donan is Yonaguni:s native laguage.)
Anyway, I am nodding off here.
I thought I would write about Iriomote about I keep falling asleep in this hotel lobby and I just heard the guy on staff clear his throat rather loudly.
Tomorrow, I am meeting Tom Sawyer Diving Company across the street to dive with manta rays at "Manta Scramble" in Ishigaki.
Tonight I had a great dinner at a place called SUSHITAROU. I and some friends met the host of that place a few nights ago at Toshio-san's place..
OK, I just fell asleep again and heard the guy clear his throat loudly again so I better wrap this up and have energy to dive with the mantas tomorrow.
Mata ne.

Last Night in Yonaguni

2007-04-09T04:01:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow I move on to Iriomote, via Ishigaki airport.
My original purpose in coming here was to dive at the ruins, which I did, but I spent all day today sightseeing around the island by moped, which was equally great.
I noticed that at 8am and 7pm, a loudspeaker plays a 30second or so melodic chime, the kind which is familiar in many places in Japan, such as train stations. The chime reminds me of an alarm clock, one to start the day and one to signal that the day is over. I want to ask someone what it is for. I took a video of it with sound from my balcony.
I don't seem to need an alarm clock here though, not like I would in LA. I am somewhere in between LA time and Yaeyama time. I get tired around 10pm and wake up around 3am, but can kinda coast through 4 hours of stage one REM dozing.
Yesterday morning I woke up super early, maybe 2am, and dozed for the next 4.5 or 5 hours. Diving the previous day had been great, and I was wondering if the day's dives would include a trip to Isseki Point - the ruins I had come here to see. Depending on the weather, the crew would make the call as to where the dives would be.
I should say that in the weeks leading up to coming here, I was a little terrified of this dive, having read nothing but how strong the currents were and how it was definately not a destination recommended for anyone but the most experienced of divers, which I am not. But Saturday's dives had calmed my nerves and gotten me excited about the possibility of getting to see the ruins.
The water here is crystal clear, although visibility was not great because it has been so overcast. Mostly that just makes for darker water, it did not affect clarity. The sea was relatively calm when we were at the various dive sites, but it got fun when we were making our way in and out of Kubura Port. The cliff overlooking the port is home to one of Yonaguni's two lighthouses and is famed for being Japan's western-most point. As the boat neared this point and rounded it into the port, the waves would surge up and down pretty high and the boat would toss like a rollercoaster, dropping your stomach out from under you and sending plumes of spray into to air to wash over your entire body. A couple times, a huge wave would come from behind the boat and overtake us, flooding water onto the deck. It was a little hairy at first, but I started enjoying it. I was still in my wetsuit and half the time it was pouring rain anyway, so I just hung on and watched the black waves crash against the black rocks and turn into white spray and foam.
I did three dives on Saturday, the last one with just Rui, who is kinda the lead guy under Aratake it seems.
Sunday, I did four dives, with the third at Isseki Point. All day I followed Naomi, who moved to Yonaguni from Hokkaido, but thinks that it is cold here! (Hokkaido is in the far north of Japan and famous for being snowy and cold). I told her to come to California to dive so that she could experience what cold water diving is really like. A couple of weeks before I came here, I dived at Catalina and the water was about 55 degrees F. Here, it is about 75.
I am really happy that I got to see the ruins. While I was waiting at Ishigaki airport, speaking in broken Japanese with Ishida, I asked him whether he thought the ruins were really man-made ruins, or a natural geologic formation. Experts estimate that the stone is 8,000 years old, which predates any known recorded human history. Ishida laughed and said, "Jibun no me de kimete." Look for yourself and see what you think. After having been there and seen it, I cannot really say. Before Isseki Point, we dived at another site which had very similar geometrically cut stone. It's possible that if the Isseki site was man-made, there could be other areas around Yonaguni that would have been made by the same prehistoric people. But seeing other stones which resembled the ones at Isseki Point made me think that, fantastic as it may be, perhaps these are a remarkable creation of nature. I don't think it lessens the appeal of the place to think that they are not man-made stones. It is fun to speculate about mythical cities like Atlanatis, or Mu, or other lost continent stories though.
When the day's diving was done, we got cleaned up at the SaWes shop and I told Keizen that I wanted to go drink awamori. Luckily for me, he agreed and later I went to a great restaurant with him, the boat captain (another name I forgot, OUCH!) and Naomi. I must say that whether the ruins turned out to be ruins or not, discovering this group of people was the real find of the trip to Yonaguni. I could not have met better hosts, more gracious or more fun. Keizen is a lot of fun to drink with, and he introduced me to the proprietress of the restaurant, who he said is "not the mafia Godfather, but the Godmother of Yonaguni." She was incredibly gracious to me, giving me not one, but two bottles of special awamori. I wanted to drink them with the crew, but they would not let me open them up. (Awamori is a potent alcohol that is unique to the Okinawan islands. There were many distilleries throughout the Yaeyamas, but I never made it to visit any of them. The bottle I was given was the brand Awanami, which is made in Hateruma, and is difficult to purchase because it is so sought after).
Haning out with the SaWes crew was one of my best memories of the trip. I don't know how to repay them, but hopefully one or more will come to LA to visit sometime.
I want to write more, since there is time at the moment, but the proprietress of the internet cafe is finishing cleaning up and the 9pm closing time is approaching. We are listening to Japanese R&B/hip-hop again.
Some other time I will recount today's adventures on the moped and my meeting with Ikema Nae, one of the coolest women I've ever met who runs a museum out of her house and who gave me a book that she wrote.
I wanted to hang out with the SaWes crew again, but they are not to be found today. Tomorrow, I'll go on to Iriomote and hopefully more great people and cool stuff to see and do.
Good bye Yonaguni. Some of the world's best people are here, at Japan's land's end.

Yonaguni Morning

2007-04-08T06:30:00.000-07:00

From a handwritten note:
It is 6:30am on April 8 and I am laying awake on Yonaguni Island. I just realized it is my sister's birthday, but only here in Japan. In California it is 2:30pm on the 7th.
There has been a mild wind all night long. I left the sliding glass door open at the balcony of my room and the breeze stirs the curtains. It's not like the Santa Ana winds. There's no howling, no rattling of the windows all night long, no dryness.
It's just fresh cool air.
It has been raining, and is still lightly raining now. I can see clouds drifting low overhead toward what I think is the north, which means: minami-kaze? South-wind. Maybe.
Ishida (who I met at Ishigaki airport) told me that if the minami-kaze is blowing, diving at Isseki Point is called off.
I am supposed to walk down the road to meet the SaWes crew at 8am to find out what the diving shedule for today will be.
I have been awake since about 2am? Time difference. Jisa. I brought a little alarm clock, but I can't read it in the dark because the LED backlight sucks.
I was falling-over tired as I ate dinner last night. It was only about 9:45pm. Extremely early for me. In LA, I am not usually tired until about 2am. After one beer and some champuru ("Goya ga nain desu. Yasai chanpuru ii desu ka?"), I was ready to put my head on the table and sleep. I don't know the name of that restaurant; I chose it at random after walking up and down the streets. I wish I had taken more photos of Sonai. Inside this place was quiet, which suited my mood. A couple guys sat at the bar drinking, and a couple sat on tatami in another corner. There was a bookcase full of manga and girlie magazines and a wall-mounted TV was showing a samurai TV drama. I saw rows of awamori bottles over the bar and I wanted to try some, but felt like tonight was not the night.
The cook looked like he was about 25, but a big husky guy. I thought he was the only one working there, but an older woman appeared later and served me my food. I guessed they were from the islands because physically they looked a little different from mainland Japanese people. Hard to describe how. Maybe more like a South-East Asian mixture? More island.
Yonaguni is called Donan in the local language. I am not sure I have heard any of Yonaguni's indigenous language spoken yet. Most people I've met here are from mainland Japan.
What I do not hear, thankfully, is cars. Because there are very few. Most are very small pickups, that look to be about half the width of standard ones on the streets in the US. Occasionally, I hear the rip of a moped engine, but this morning nothing but the ocean crashing against the rocks, rain trickling off the corrugated metal roofs of houses, birds calling to each other, and the gentle hush of the wind.
Even though I planned this trip with the intention of doing active, adventurous things like diving the ruins, I don't think I've felt this good in over a year, just sitting on this balcony, as the sunlight gradually filters through the diffuse grey cloud cover, brightening the day, listening.

Yonaguni Dive Log

2007-04-07T18:45:00.000-07:00

Dive 1:
April 7
Double Arch (point 9 on this map)
Is the clock set wrong on my computer? Did I really go in at 4:05pm?
Temp was 75 F - Warm !
Using all my own gear from home, minus the hooded vest.
Max Depth 82 feet, avg depth 42 feet.
Dive Time 31 minutes.
Visibility 60-100 feet? Very clear water.

There was a film crew aboard the boat, practicing for underwater scenes to be shot in the following weeks. It is a horror feature I am told. The female actor and the director are from Taiwan. Various other crew from Hong Kong. Many are fluent in English. The assistant director went to college in New York.
I cannot believe that, with LA only 2 days behind me, I am in Yonaguni Japan about to scuba dive with a film crew.
Aratake Kihachirou is on board to assist them, sometimes holding on to the body of the film director, who was a novice diver. Aratake is known as the discoverer of the Isseki Point ruins site, and is a Yonaguni native. Although Aratake was leading the film crew divers, I mostly stuck by Kitako's side, a young girl recently moved to Yonaguni from Nagasaki.
I do not recall any extraordinary fish. The water was dark because it was very overcast.

Dive 2:
April 7
Great Hall (point 5 on this map)
In at 5:22PM. (Really that late?)
Max dept 60 feet, avg depth 45 feet
Surface interval 44 minutes. (We dropped off the film crew at Kubura dock, and Rui and I went out alone).
Dive Time 27 minutes

Rui chased an umigame - sea turtle - and I tried to snap some pics of it, but my camera was hard to unclip and I fidgeted with it a lot. I need to figure out this whole camera rig a bit better, with spare batteries and a strobe light.
Dive times are short, and we are diving with tanks filled to only 2800 psi, rather than 3000, but I still need to work on air consumption. There were not a lot of crazy exotic fish on display - I think I only got one decent shot off - but we checked out cool geological formations, which is what this place is really known for.

Dive 3:
April 8
Anchor Point (point 8 on this map)
In the water at 9:45am.
Max depth 85 feet, avg depth 52 feet
surface interval 15 hours 55 minutes
Dive Time 33 minutes

It's raining today.
My buddy is Naomi. I developed a bit of a crush on her. She's from Hokkaido, and has been in Yonaguni for only a few months (5, I think..?)
She points out some animals to me in the rocks. A shrimp. Some strange worms under a rock that writhed around like they were mating that Naomi could not identify and I could not photogragh well (surge makes it hard to keep still enough to get a decent shot off, especially one requiring macro focus). The currents here are not the legendary strong ones I had feared from reading other bulletin posts, but maybe they are weak right now. Rui says they are nothing to really fear.
I don't remember many extraordinary sightings. No eels, or octopus, or hammerheads. We are diving a lot around the same area.
Each time we surface, the staff serves delicious sweet barley tea. Many people shiver and complain about the cold. "Samui!" Even Nao, who is from snowy Hokkaido. I don't feel cold, even though it is pouring rain, but the barley tea still feels good going down.

Dive 4
April 8
Ishibutai (Stone Stage) (point 20 on this map)
In the water at 11:15am.
Max depth 61 feet, avg depth 39 feet
surface interval 55 minutes
Dive Time 37 minutes

We went further east up the south coast of the island, toward Tatigami Iwa (which translates to Standing God Rock, because it looks vaguely like a human shape standing up out of the waves).
We moved from the first site pretty quickly, slapped new tanks on and jumped in without wasting any time. The waves were pretty choppy so the crew tried to get everybody off the boat quick. It was a little tough with the film crew on board. Rui and Keizen hate them.
Nao and I split off on our own again, first stopping by the Jacques Mayol memorial plaque. Mayol was the famous free diver whose life was ficitionalized in the Luc Besson film, "The Big Blue." He was friends with Aratake and spent a fair amount of time diving around Yonaguni.
Rui mentioned that there was a stone here that resembled a human face, perhaps carved by ancient people like the ruins of Isseki Point. I failed to notice it. Haha.
However, the rocks here DID appear to be carved into right angles, much like the rocks at Isseki. Which made me think that the ruins might not be man-made. If the right-angled rocks were in several places, it was possible that they could be naturally-ocurring. On the other hand, if they were man-made, it's feasible that the people who made them could have traveled another few hundered meters west and carved more trenches.
Over some awamori, Keizen said that Aratake carved the ruins. Haha.
Keizen Rocks.

Dive 5
April 8
Isseki Point - The Yonaguni Ruins (point 17 on this map)
In the water at 3:05pm.
Max depth 50 feet, avg depth 30 feet
surface interval 3 hours, 12 minutes
Dive Time 35 minutes

This is it. The ruins site. This is what convinced me that I had to come all the way west to Yonaguni for diving. There's so much information on the web speculating on what the origins of these stones is. I think the guy I met at Ishigaki airport, Ishida, said it best; "Jibun no me de kimete." The currents were nowhere near as bad as I'd expected, based on other peoples' accounts on blogs and bulletin boards. Maybe it was a light day. But it did get quite strong near the east steps of the "Main Terrace." All divers had to grab on to the bottom "step" to get a look at the stones. When we were ready to move on as a group, we let go and one by one drifted away over towards the east side of the structure, where we got a good look at the "Turtle Monument." They are mysterious stones. I don't know what to make of them. I am no more a geologist than a marine biologist: I am often unable to identify the types of fish I see, just as I am ill-equipped to make much a of judgment on the source of the geometry in those rocks.
In the narrow crevice between the "Twin Pillars" after passing under the "Gate," we spotted a moray eel. Unfortunately, my shots were blurry and without flash.

Dive 6
April 8
SaWes Palace (point 7 on this map)
In the water at 4:44pm.
Max depth 54 feet, avg depth 38 feet
surface interval 1 hour 3 minutes
Dive Time 32 minutes

This was to be my last dive in Yonaguni. Sad. Hopefully only until next year.

Yonaguni-jima - Westernmost Point in Japan

2007-04-07T03:48:00.000-07:00

Success.
Left Okinawa Hontou (main island) at 8:30am. Decided on skipping the comp breakfast at the Hotel Gran View since I am such a morning straggler. I did not want to risk missing my plane and fucking up my whole travel itinerary.
Gran View was a great convenience I must say. Being able to roll outta bed, jump in the shower and hop on the monorail, one stop away from the airport was precious.
Once in Naha airport, I got to play the part of the smelly foreigner since hoofing it around with all my shit on my back had me breaking a sweat. Not to mention, I was a little tense trying to figure out where I needed to go, where my luggage needed to go, and whether it was gonna follow me when I changed planes on Ishigaki-jima (the word "jima," as in　"Iwo Jima," translates to "island." Ishigaki is one of Okinawa's many rittou (small, separate islands). Ishigaki is one of the most populated of the Yaeyama island group.)
The plane touched down on Ishigaki without incident and I made my way through the tiny airport to the boarding area for departing flights. My flight to Yonaguni was scheduled to leave an hour later, at 10:30am. I sat for a while by myself in the mostly empty waiting room. Most of the other people who were there boarded the plane I had just exited and returned to Naha. Although I have been feeling pretty good about interacting with people in my broke-down basic Japanese, I have some difficulty understanding the loudspeaker announcements made on the planes and in the airports and on trains. For the most part, this does not present a problem as in many places they are conducted in English as well, but it seems that the further out one goes here in Okinawa, the fewer translations one finds, hahaha. Which is absolutely fine. However, as the small group of Yonaguni-destined travelers sat in Ishigaki airport, some announcements about our flight were made that I could not quite follow. 10:30 was fast approaching. The designated boarding time came and went. I noted that a flight to Hateruma, scheduled to leave before ours, showed as cancelled on the overhead monitor. The weather in Ishigaki was quite overcast, with a very low cloud ceiling. I was beginning to infer that weather was delaying the flight, but I could not make out any details of the annoucements.
While I was sitting there, wondering what the fuck was happening and what I should decide to do about it, I noticed a guy sitting a few rows ahead of me with an underwater video camera housing. I nervously decided to approach him and strike up a conversation in Japanese. He was a pretty cool guy from Shibuya in Tokyo. He said he comes to Yonaguni to dive a lot and had been to Isseki Point (the famous ruins - more on that later) a few times. We talked about Hammerhead sharks - Yonaguni is famous for them - apparently they do not attack people - and he helped me figure out what was up with the plane. Apparently, Ishigaki was the only outlying island with low cloud cover, so the plane had re-routed to Miyako to wait the weather out. He figured it might be an hour or so that we would have to wait.
An hour came and went and we were still sitting there, thinking of things to discuss in broken Japanese. He planned on being in Yonaguni the same number of days as me, but on the 10th, when I would head to Iriomote, he would have to head back to Tokyo and work. Ugh. So, in some ways he had more riding on the weather, although I did travel further to get there.
After about three hours, around 1:30pm I think it was, we got the great news that the clouds had lifted enough for the plane to land. My new friend, who had introduced himself as Ishida, almost leapt with joy. It would have been a retarded detour, I must say, to hang around an Ishigaki airport-area hotel until the next morning to see if the weather would clear. Luckily, that situation was avoided.
Now, my only problem as I had explained to Ishida who looked bemused, was that I still had no idea what or who would be waiting for me at Yonaguni airport, if anyone. I had checked my mail at the hotel that morning, but had received no word from the American dive company that had assisted me in making arrangements for Yonaguni. I had decided that I would simply make my way to Sonai, where most of the diving shops seeemed to be located, and inquire (in broken Japanese) about going out. As soon as we de-planed at Yonaguni kuukou (airport), I saw about 5 or 6 dive companies waiting just outside the baggage claim area, waiting to pick people up. I grabbed my stuff and approached a guy holding a sign for SaWes, the dive company I had read the most about while doing internet research for the trip. SaWes is owned and operated by a guy named Aratake, who is kinda the scuba godfather of this island. The name SaWes actually stands for "south" and "west," Yonaguni being the south-western-most island of Japan. (Hateruma has the distinction of being the southern-most).
The guy holding the SaWes sign was a guy of about 30-something. (This was Keizen, aka "Joe.") I hit him up with broken Japanese and he answered me back with broken English. We worked it out. I hopped in his van and we headed for SaWes. I was the only one of about 30 people who had arrived to roll with him.
I explained, in bad Japanese, that I had attempted to make arrangements already, with an American dive shop on Okinawa hontou, but had been unable to make a confirmation. As it turned out, I had found my reservation, as SaWes was the dive shop that had been reserved for me. Since my plane was late, we stopped first at Irifune. I think it is a hotel that is also owned by Aratake. They hooked me up with lunch, which was needed at that point. I slammed down some eggs, fish cake, some kind of seaweed something-or-other, and another bowl of noodles that resembled last night's souki soba quite a lot. (Souki-soba, or Yaeyama soba - a close variant - turned out to be very prevalent, and I think I ended up eating more of that dish than any other, although I got to sample a wide vareity of dishes, including raw beef liver and pig's face). It was great, but I knew I was gonna go diving right after, so I was afraid to really chow down.
Sure enough, while I ate, I filled out some paperwork and then was told it was time for "junbi" - preparation.
We drove over to SaWes and I was shown to the shower and got suited up. I was the only diver in sight this whole time. I figured all dives for the day had already finished and they were taking me out alone. As it turned out, we drove a short distance to Kubura port and jumped on a boat that was bustling with (what I thought were) Japanese divers. I had ample opportunity to look like an idiot novice diver, running late, not speaking the language well, and fumbling with my equipment, being rather out of practice with diving in general. Not to mention, I took note of Aratake-san sitting on the boat. He pointed at a tank and told me to get set up. I felt like the guy who was holding shit up, sitting right in the way of everything.
The "Japanese divers" actually turned out to be a film crew. I tried to ask if they were doing a documentary. Isseki Point's ruins have ignited a lot of interest and controversy as to their origins and it seemed feasible to me that a TV crew might want to do a special on them. There was just too much hustle and bustle to have those questions answered at the time though. (I found out the following day that the crew were all from Hong Kong and Taiwan, and only a few spoke Japanese, but most were very fluent in English. The film is a horror/thriller whose title is roughly translated as "Lost.")
We set out and as soon as we left the port, I was clutching the side, hanging on tight to avoid falling on my ass and being swept off the boat by the swells we were coasting over. I would guess they were about 6-10 feet in height. Good enough size to cause the boat to pitch pretty dramatically. I'm used to day trips to Catalina, not the East China Sea.
I had two guides really. But I forgot their names, isn't that fucked up? I forgot everyone's name, which makes writing this blog really adjective-heavy and proper noun deficient. I apologize to the SaWes crew for being retarded like that... I have just had too much sensory stimulation to retain names.
Anyway, one of my guides was a girl from Nagasaki who has only lived on Yonaguni for a week ! (...This was Kitako...). And the other was a guy who was really cool and did a second dive with me alone and helped me get settled at my minshuku. (...This was Rui...) The guy is pretty fluent in English, which makes life way easier. Even though it is fun trying to use Japanese, I think the ocean surge and whole dive boat experience would have been a lot more overwhelming if I also did not really know what the fuck people were saying. So that calmed my nerves quite a bit, just to know what conditions we were about to jump into.
We went to the south side of the island, to a spot called the Twin Arches (I think). The film crew did giant stride entries off the back of the boat and Rui and I backrolled off the side. We did not meet at the surface as we often do in California, but just plunged right on down and grouped at the bottom. That plunge was fucking crazy. I was still halfway thinking to myself, "What the fuck am I doing here, about to jump into this crazy foaming ocean?" when I found myself upside-down in bubbly warm ocean water on my way down to about 50 or 60 feet.
The site was an interesting geologic structure, with a few arches (hence the name), which we made our way under and through. Visibility was not the greatest, although it still beats shitty days at Catalina. The sky was dark with clouds and the water was a deep rich dark blue. I imagine that if the sun is penetrating well, there are probably a lot of colors in the fan corals and rocks and stuff we saw down there.
Fish-wise, I saw some that looked like Moorish Idols - pretty gigantic ones - and some other stuff that I would have to use a book to identify. There are some large ass fish out here though. Nothing totally amazing today - no hammerheads. I did see a tortoise on my second dive of the day. And Rui and I explored more caverns and tunnels.
All of my underwater photos are sucking so far. The first dive, I had my camera too locked in to my BCD to be able to free it up and compose decent shots. I tried twisting my body around and snapping a few. Aratake-san led us through a tunneled area, where once we emerged from the other side,we could see our spent air bubbles rising like a curtain from the cracks in the rock. That was cool and I think I managed to take a shot of it.
Anyway, diving was fun and it got me tired. Tomorrow, I don't want to forget my motion sickness pills. I forgot them today and lucked out that I did not want to vomit. The boat pitches pretty strongly on the way out and back.
Right now I am in Sonai's only ( as far as I know) internet cafe. It is actually a store, but there are 2 PCs here that are hooked up to the internet where I can rent time. (On my last day, I chatted it up with the proprietress of the place and hit it of with her. Her name was Kotoe Tajima and she worked as a computer consultant in Yonaguni, in addition to running the shop. She has a sister in the States and she introduced me to her brother, Yoshikazu, over sandwich and a coffee in the back of the shop. What is REALLY cool is that she has a blog that is all about YONAGUNI ! Please check it out at this link. ) It feels like it is getting late - it is 9pm. I am sorta afraid that the propietress might want to close and I am holding her up,but she has not said anything to me. I am also worried that everything else around here will close soon, if it hasn't already. There is a market I need to go to to pick up some morning munchies. ( A few days later I got some excellent chocolate bread at this market, but it was brought in on Thursdays from Ishigaki and they were out when I went for more. ) And I should go see about dinner, although I am much more tired than hungry. ( I ended up eating in a small restaurant with a sit-down bar, some tables and a tatami mat area. Some dudes were parked at the bar drinking and I ordered goya champuru, knowing that it was Okinawa food and not really knowing what anything else on the menu was. Unfortunately, the chef told me there was no more goya and no more tofu, so he'd cok me up some "yasai" (vegetable) champuru instead. Champuru is basically a stir-fry, famously made with goya - a bitter gourd - and SPAM ).
My minshuku is called Adan (a minshuku is basically an inn... there is a private room with a shared bath and shower... Adan is a cactus-like plant that grows all over the Yaeyamas). I already tried the bed and it's comfortable. I'm gonna be getting back to it soon I think. I'm here two more days. Tomorrow is diving - hopefully weather is good and we make it to Isseki Point, as that is really the main point of this trip. However, the last day I hope to rent a moped and just buzz around the island. There are some cool cliffs and lighthouses and stuff. The waves crashing on the rocks are pretty amazing - especially when you are getting a close-up view of it from the boat. I'm gonna try to get some better photos, but no promises where the underwater ones are concerned. I've already found a link to another diver's photos of Yonaguni that are fantastic, so if mine suck, just look at hers. I saw many of the same sights, but cannot match her photographic skill, so check them out. Also, she shot more of Sonai, which will give you an idea of what the town looks like.
I think I have heard the same Christina Aguilera song three times now in this internet cafe, so that is officially my cue to sign off and go in search of food.
More tomorrow or the day after.

First Night in Okinawa

2007-04-06T07:31:00.000-07:00

So, as often as possible for the next two weeks, I will post some updates as to where I am and what I am doing.
I left for Japan this morning - it was Thursday when I left. Jeff dropped me at LAX at about 9:30am. I arrived at Naha airport in Okinawa about 9:30pm of the next day. Except it is not the next day in LA. I don't have any idea what freak-ass time it is there. Okinawan time actually feels normal to me because I got to the hotel where I am spending my stopover night and I was hungry and tired - and being 9:30pm, I am right about on schedule.
I took the Yui monorail to my hotel - the Gran View Okinawa - chosen for it's proximity to the airport. Indeed, I only needed to ride one stop to get here. Although that stop cost me about 2 bucks.
The room's super-small, but this is Japan.
I went to the restaurant in the lobby cuz I'm too burnt to try and find anything else. This area does not look like there are many shops/restaurants around... it's too near the airport and a few stops from "kokusai dori" (International Street) - the main tourist drag in Naha.
Later, when I return from the Yaeyama Islands, I will check out Kokusai Dori I suppose.
Right now, I am just happy to have eaten something and be able to communicate marginally well. I got some Souki Soba. I didn't know what souki was. Turned out to be pork ribs that were really good, cuz the meat was falling off the bone and could be picked apart easily with chopsticks. The soba was weird - not the usual buckwheat dough, but something that reminded me more of store-bought packaged yakisoba. The consistency was good though - springy and al dente. The Yeayamas are known for having their own special soba, so I will try some when I get there.
It is not too hot, but I was a little heated from carrying my luggage around (although the hotel is literally at the base of the monorail station - almost Disneyland-like). So after my dinner (which included an Okinawan-brewed Orion beer), I decided to try a Goya Aisu. It was a root beer float made with ginger ale and goya flavored ice cream. Goya is some kind of bitter melon I think. I have read that it figures prominently in Okinawan food. The dessert itself was fine, but I was happier that I understood when the waiter came to tell me rather apologetically that the kitchen was busy and it would take time to make it. I asked him how long and he replied, again very apologetically, that it would be about 10 miuntes. I told him that was "Daijoubu" - totally fine, and I don't think it took even that long. But the verbal exchange made me feel great. It's great not only to be understood, but to understand.
That's it for today. Typing is slow because this is a Japanese keyboard. Hopefully, it will post correctly.
Tomorrow I get up early and head for the furthest western point in Japan - so far from Japan's mainland in fact, that on a clear day it is said you can see Taiwan. That island is called Yonaguni. If I am successful there, I am sure there will be a lot to write about. Actually though, I have been unsuccessful in contacting the American from Okinawa who was supposed to arrange my scuba diving there, so I may be landing there without any plan. If that's the case, then I suppose I will REALLY have something to write about, as I will really become dependent on my nihongo skills to get anything done.
That's it for today. I need to sleep so I can be up at the crack of dawn tomorrow.
No pictures yet. I suppose when I return I will put them all up at Kodak, but for now, just words.

日本語能力試験を受かった

2007-02-28T17:54:00.000-08:00

去年の九月、４級日本語能力試験を受けて、今成績をもらった。
４級だけだったけど、受かられたからうれしい。三百六十七点、九十一パーセントです。
今年、３級を受けるつもり。
それも受かられるといいんですが。

Eat at Yuca's, Our Tamales Are Best

2007-02-05T10:30:00.000-08:00

I’ve been hiding inside all today with the shades drawn. Not interested in the Superbowl or the 2.5 million dollar ads.
Thank goodness a friend of mine surprised me yesterday with a "hey-I’m-bored-let's-go-see-Babel" phone call, or both my days off would have been spent this way. In the twilight zone.
I wish I could write something other than letters, but I can't, so I’m typing away with the rest of the bloggers.

I went to Yuca's yesterday. Little Mexican food stand on Hillhurst, about a block and a half from my apartment. I don't know what their hours are, but they rarely seem to be open when I need them, and believe me, single guy who seldom ever cooks... I need them often.

I have come to learn that they maintain quite reliable hours on Saturday afternoons. Saturdays often find me crawling out of my apartment around 1PM, when I’ve summoned the courage to squint down the afternoon sunlight if it will mean I can score some decent grub to quell the grumbling in my stomach. Like any decent Mexican food stand, prices don't really go over $3-$4, so even if I am short on cash, in an emergency I can dip into my supply of laundry quarters to get together enough for a torta.

Since I’ve been going there regularly on Saturday afternoons for about the past 4 weeks, I’ve learned that Saturdays are the only day you can get tamales there - $1.50 each for a banana-leaf-wrapped, beef-filled bite of steamed masa in a thin, tangy tomato sauce. Two of them for $3 will hold hunger at bay for a few hours and please the palate sufficiently well, even if some critic inside of you wonders why their tamales and burritos are merely checkbook-sized, not the "pregnant" enterprises of Mexican food trucks of fame. As has been amply reported and observed by now, we're conditioned to the super-size, and even the most cynical consumers may be a little pouty about not getting a two-handed portion of anything. One can always assume an explanation for the portion size to be attributable to the regionalization of their cuisine ("yuca" very likely derived from yucatecan..? not the nickname of the grandmotherly proprietress), although being light on the wallet is always the biggest shoutdown of any squeak of discontent over serving size.

There’s always a crowd around Yuca's on Saturdays. Maybe there are more working people in Los Feliz than I am used to acknowledging. Unable to eat their fill of Yuca's during the week, they wait like me to get their fix on Saturday afternoon. Yes, whatever your routine, in LA there are always a few dozen others who will have the same idea and show up before you. Being only a kitchen with a walk-up window to order and a few tables under an awning that will seat the first 6 people who can grab them, patrons tend to stand in clumps around the sidewalk and adjacent parking lot, stomachs grumbling, trying not to grow impatient. There’s not a lot of room in the kitchen either; 3 or 4 people shuffle around a small cube, bumping about while steam rises over simmering meat and beans. No room for storage and no liquor license are probable reasons why very few beverages are offered - OJ, maybe coffee? No sodas. No beer obviously. But people come for food and Yuca’s is not losing any business for not offering drinks. They are next to a liquor store and the enterprising people who have staked their claim to table space have often also procured brown paper bags hiding cans of Modelo Especial. Brown bags also hold orders of warm tacos and burritos when names are finally shouted from the window.

As usual, there were anywhere from 9-15 people standing around, crowded in to hear their name called. Skater kids, men in work clothes, women in yoga pants, artsy guys with Henry Kissinger glasses. Me. I looked in through the window, into the kitchen and caught the eye of one of the cooks, a guy behind two other people, transferring a pot of steaming food from stove to counter, a distance the width of a torso pivot and that was all, a head protruding from shoulders that were not his own. For a second I thought about the heat, the steam, the sweat, the standing, the lifting, the pivoting and no room to stretch, no place to sit; and then about the people eyeing each other outside, counting, estimating how much time they should let pass before they questioned the status of their order. I thought it was great that this was a thriving business, but how horrible must it be to feel tired and look up to see only a mob of hungry faces at the window, staring at you like mute zombies. It made me think about how everything good in LA is ultimately discovered and overrun.

On Friday night, I walked down Glendale Blvd in Silverlake, past the Red Lion Tavern. Outside, there stood a line of at least twenty people, waiting to have their IDs checked so they could get in. I was astonished that a decent, but not extraordinary, neighborhood bar would attract people in those numbers. This is not your designer-label gin and tonic trough for the well heeled. But like I said, whatever your taste, there's another 5 dozen people who are connoisseurs of it. Walking past the Red Lion, Robin and Yolanda remarked on their perceptions of LA's increased population. For the most part these are superficial complaints: the transformation of Latino drag-queen dive bars into trendy, young, sanitized versions of edginess, or the rampant popularity of places which had never before held any special appeal. But inevitably, the discussion of LA's rising population leads to complaints about the corresponding rise in rents and a scarcity of affordable housing. Many people in the city are new enough to not know the "old LA," the affordable LA with its former cultural topography, although certain of us blogging city dwellers become obsessed with trying to find it archeologically in old photos and histories. In this city, you can tell stories of population and neighborhood changes if you've been here more than 10 years. As a newcomer to the neighborhood, I’m not much of an authority on the ill effects of gentrification. The fact that I'm paying $1200/month to live here actually makes me complicit in the problem, helping to drive the rents up by my willingness to pay it. Tom, who has been here at least 10 years, once told me about how the neighborhood was largely Russian/Armenian, a north-easterly extension of Little Armenia, a fact that is only evidenced now by the tuxedoed valets who wait outside the Russian/Armenian parties at the rented Monte Cristo ballroom on Vermont, and the remaining Russian/Armenian tenants who have weathered the rent increases. He said that Vermont had many more businesses that reflected the ethnic make-up of the neighborhood.

Many of my friends have been here for years if not their whole lives, and have complained at some time or other of the passing of old neighborhoods into gentrified versions of themselves. They mourn the passing of old bars, the changing demographics. Alberto once told me his theory that LA was being yuppified by trust-fund NY city kids, scared out of Manhattan by the fall of the World Trade Center. He said it with half a laugh, perhaps thinking it sounded paranoid, but with a genuine irritation. As more of an armchair neighborhood critic/cultural observer, I feel less sense of cultural encroachment I suppose. But population is in flux here, and it is dramatic enough now to capture the attention of the veterans who’ve lived here for ten-plus years. Times writer Lynell George wrote a great article on the transition of South Central from black to predominantly Latino. And there have been other dramatic demographic changes in the city’s history (my favorite, the story of Bronzeville). I read on Wikipedia that Los Feliz was the original home of Hollywood's wealthiest elite, although I think that portion of the neighborhood still exists untouched, north of Los Feliz Blvd. Whether these blocks between Los Feliz and Sunset have changed from Russian or Latino to bobo riche, I have not been present to witness it. Whatever this fashionable neighborhood is, it became that before I arrived. All of the trendy boutiques and hip places to eat and drink existed here before I did, so while I can criticize them, and do, I don’t do it with any kind of nostalgia for what used to be, although I have a more general sense of nostalgia for a California that I grew up in, and now feel unable to afford.

Looking in through the crowded kitchen window of Yuca’s, I wondered if the Saturdays of 30 years ago were this manic, or if they have gradually become more so.

We wait and we eye each other, and we try not to grow impatient as our stomachs gurgle. I grab my paper bag, holding my warm tamales, and head for the constriction-free zone of my $1200/month apartment, to eat without competition, like the Los Feliz wildlife probably do in their dens and nests: rats, skunks, opossum and raccoons whom I have seen on their nocturnal scavenges. On second thought, judging by their hostile machismo, the raccoons probably don't give a fuck about any competition. And hostile machismo is one way to deal with limited resources, I guess.

>>LA Times data on the past 10 years of rent increases in various neighborhoods.

Ryszard Kapuscinski

2007-01-25T08:51:00.000-08:00

"The most important thing is to write. And to write, I need the stories." -- From Los Angeles Times Obituary.
Just learned of the death of Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski.
I read his book, "The Soccer War," a few years ago when I was looking for more information on the little-known war that broke out between El Salvador and Honduras in 1969 over the outcome of a soccer game.
Kapuscinski covered wars and third-world governments all over the globe. The Soccer War not only included detailed accounts of his time on the ground in Honduras during the 1969 war, but also chronicled his time in the former Congo, where he recounts reactions to the assassination of Patrice Lumumba.
It's hard to imagine his writing, which captured the absurdities of the conflicts he witnessed, appearing in objective newsprint. He was a much better writer than the label "correspondent" would suggest. And as the Times obit has noted, he didn't do too bad, making it to 74 years old after tempting fate with his life so many times for the sake of his occupation.

Donald Richie on the Death of Yukio Mishima

2007-01-11T13:08:00.000-08:00

Came across this in the recently published Japan Journals by Donald Richie.

"'Japan is gone, vanished, disappeared... [T]here is nothing left to save.'
When I first learned of his suicide that is what I first remembered - that he already knew that there was nothing more to save. His may have been a political statement, an aesthetic statement, but it was also a despairing personal statement.
...And it is true that a real romantic is he who compares things as they are with things as they ought to be and then has the strength of character to live by those standards which he himself finds better."

Les Chats Sauvages

2006-12-22T13:02:00.000-08:00

Best music video of all time? Quite possibly.

Zen and the Art of Currency Counterfeiting, Plus a Concise History of the Secret Service

2006-12-14T00:17:00.000-08:00

As if further testifying to the state of detachment I have developed toward just about everything, I was recently amazed at how even a subject so near and dear to peoples' hearts as money (to paraphrase Bob Farina) could fail to evoke anything stronger in me than laughter when I was recently passed counterfeit currency in a moderately large sum.

A few weeks back I sold my G4 tower for $500 on craigslist. Obviously, cash is pretty much the only thing you want to deal with in a transaction like that. So I got a stack of 50s and 100s from the buyer and left them on my desk, gradually using them up for groceries and daily expenses. Saved me several trips to the ATM. I'd made my way down to the last hundred and I scooped it into my wallet last Sunday as I headed off to an internet cafe on Vermont.

The internet cafe experience is a new thing for me, now that I have sold the tower and traded it in for a laptop with wi-fi. Besides "war-walking" (my other habit for picking up free wi-fi access), on cold wet days (such kind as we are frequently getting more of with the arrival of winter) when I have excess time to kill and nothing to do, I will stop in at a cafe for a cup of tea and surf like a true Los Feliz techno-bohemian. ( By the way... support small businesses that offer free wi-fi and piss on Starbucks and other large chains who could easily afford to provide it, but partner up with other mega-giants like Verizon to charge you for it instead. )

Anyway, I was wondering where I should break this hundred. I considered using it at the coffee shop, but the girl behind the counter was young and cute and my chamomile tea was only about $2. I didn't want to risk making her unhappy by emptying out her change drawer, or giving her the idea that I was trying to impress by flashing big money. I decided to break it somewhere else.

Later that night I went to Albertson's up the street and bought about $20 worth of groceries. It seemed like a good time to get some change.

The check-out guy was a man in his 50s. I gave him the bill and he made a two-handed "snap" with his fingers at the edges of the bill: a habit people seem to develop when they handle money all day long. And guess what? The fucking bill split almost clean in half !

He made an "uh-oh" sound and walked away with the bill. He took it over to a little UV light stand set up by the manager's area and flipped the bill this way and that for several minutes, seeming to wait for something to appear. Then he came back over shaking his head and said, "Nope, can't take it," and handed the two pieces back to me.

"Wonderful," I said.

"Take it to the bank and see if they can give you a replacement."
"That doesn't seem very likely," I thought aloud.
"Well, then take it to a liquor store. We've been getting a lot of bad 50s and 100s lately."

I paid with a credit card, picked up my groceries and began walking back home, thinking over the situation.

I should've spent it at that cafe. That girl in her young 20's never would've snapped the bill, it never would have broken and she never would have put it under a UV scanner.
But someone there might have gotten in trouble when it was found out the bill was no good. But what were the odds of that? I didn;t know the bill was bad. It looked pretty damn convincing. Just how many of those bills I got from that guy were counterfeit anyway? I'd been spending them all month. I wonder if he knew his bills were counterfeit. Maybe he didn't. Maybe this was the only one.
Should I try to tape it together and use it somewhere else? Just get rid of it!
But inevitably, someone is going to discover, just as the Alberton's guy had, that the thing was a fake. And then someone will be out a hundred dollars.

I could give it to a homeless person I thought. If it worked for them, great. But there's the same problem. They take it somewhere and it gets found out. (What shopowner will accept a torn hundred from a homeless person without checking it out?) Or, the shopowner takes it and they have to eat a hundred dollar loss later. Or someone else further down the line does. It always comes down to that. Someone will have to eat a hundred dollars worth of shit.

Well, fuck it. It might as well be me, I thought. There've been times in my life when I've needed a hundred dollars a whole lot worse than I do now.

So then. What to do with it? There was always the chance that a bank or government agency MIGHT give me a legit bill in exchange for it. I decided to check the website of the US Treasury.

In fact, the Treasury website has some interesting pages devoted to the subject of counterfeiting. Apparently, the Secret Service was established in 1865 to combat counterfeiting, which had been in practice since the British used counterfeiting to devalue the currency of the "Continental" during the American Revolution. Counterfeiting continued through the Civil War, when over 1600 state chartered banks printed their own unique currencies, "making it difficult to detect counterfeit bills from the 7,000 varieties of real bills. " [- from SecretService.gov)

The Secret Service did not officially begin protecting the life of the President until 1902, although they began informally watching over President Grover Cleveland on a "part-time" basis in 1894. I'm not sure what that "part-time" thing was all about, but once McKinley was assassinated in 1901, it was gradually eased on to their roster of duties, even extending to the President-elect in 1908.

In this era, President Theodore Roosevelt transferred 8 Secret Service agents to the Justice Dept. This was the beginning of the modern FBI. Over the next 40-50 years, the Secret Service's criminal jurisdiction expanded to the investigation of espionage and the protection of former Presidents and family members (spouses until death or re-marriage, children until age 16).

Further attacks and assassination attempts extended the protections of the Secret Service to Presidential and VP candidates and foreign diplomats and dignitaries. The office was continually subdivided and renamed and their jurisdiction was redefined, although it was usually directed along the lines of protecting the lives of people in public office or investigating fraud. Today however, the Secret Service has been folded into the Dept of Homeland Security, so they are now also the executors of the Patriot Act.

All of this, in addition to the following:

Please Note: There is no financial remuneration for the return of the counterfeit bill, but you will have pride in doing the "right thing" to help combat counterfeiting.

... ultimately led me to question the wisdom of inviting the Secret Service over for tea. I began to think that whatever I chose to do about the situation, it was essentially costing me $100. Although it might be cool to meet a real live Secret Service agent, if only so I could write about the experience, it might actually NOT be cool. For instance, the paranoid part of me reasons, what if contacting them casts suspicion on me? I prefer not to be noticed by any agent in charge of administering the Patriot Act. Anyway, I've learned some interesting trivia about US currency and the Secret Service that I would not have looked into otherwise.

And it only cost me $100 !

I pass the savings along to you.

What to do if you suspect a counterfeit
Fun Money Facts! From the Bureau of Engraving and Printing
Know Your Money - Interesting Facts from the Secret Service website
A History of the Secret Service, as told by the Secret Service

War-walking and Midnight Riding

2006-11-18T16:36:00.000-08:00

Got a new macbook last weekend. Decided not to fork out big bucks for top-shelf machines anymore. I always end up unloading them a few years later for pennies on the dollar, and the base models have enough kick to do the tasks I give them.

I love the portability of this thing though. I never thought I'd be a laptop guy, and it's true, my fingers are rather more clumsy on this little keyboard than they are in my online bay at work, but at least I can be out, instead of cultivating the "edit-bay suntan."

So, my new obsession is something known as "war-driving," I guess. Part of my motivation for getting the laptop was knowing that they came with Airport wireless network gear. But as it turns out, there are very few places where you can pick up free wi-fi (the public library, a block from my apartment, happens to be one of them, which is great when they are open). Never one to be defeated so easily, I began reading up on ways to gain entry to password-protected wireless networks. I've heard so many stories of people who do not subscribe to hi-speed internet being able to log on with their Airport-enabled Macs, but I guess they live near unprotected networks... all of my neighbors seem to be a bit more savvy - or they hired the Best Buy "Geek Squad" to configure their service.

Well, like most other things that you are not supposed to do with your computer (such as illegal downloading, duplication of copyrighted media, etc), it seems that where there is a will, there is a 16 year-old Norwegian kid with a way. So I got my hands on a freeware program that scans for wireless networks and reports back on whether they are protected or not. For the time being, it works great for finding hotspots where I can jump on, but as yet, it is useless to me for password lock-picking. Am I painting an unethical portrait of myself? Does this make you uncomfortable, reader? When I was information-gathering, I hit up a programmer who is a classmate of mine in Japanese. The topic got him all red in the face and he told me he couldn't help me. "For ethical reasons, or technical ones?" I asked him. "Both," he replied.

I can't really explain the draw for wanting to do something you are not supposed to be doing. I think it's a basic character trait. I guess everyone has that line drawn nearer or further down-field. I don't feel like such a rotten human for wanting to surf the internet for free, I just don't feel like forking out the cash anymore, and I want to know how this stuff works. I think that's the driving motivation for me more than anything else. Anyway, the "sport" of cruising around, scanning for open networks is referred to as "wardriving," but since I am not so dedicated that I want to go burning gas all over the city and mapping hotspots to GPS data as the real nerds do, I call my modest habit "war-walking." It consists of walking out of my building, powering up my laptop and starting a scan, stopping about three doors down once I've found an open network, and sitting on the curb to surf away, while neighbors come and go, giving me funny looks. I'm actually semi-ashamed of being so cheap.

The other nocturnal weirdness I got into recently was participating in Midnight Ridazz, a bike collective not unlike Critical Mass, that meets up a few times a month for night rides throughout the city. Anyone can join, and any "member" can organize a ride. I first became aware of them driving back from a Friday night Japanese tutoring session in Little Tokyo, when I was intercepted by mobs of bikers huffing up Vermont. I tried to shout an inquiry out the window at them, but I think they assumed I was fucking with them, and I was ignored. Someone told me the name of the group later and I found them on the internet and decided to join an upcoming ride.

The ride I joined was called "Noche de los Biciclistas Muertos," and was a Dia de los Muertos-themed ride with riders painting their faces like skulls and mounting skeletons on their handlebars. It was a lot of fun, bringing back a lot of my enthusiasm for street riding. I had not been on my bike since I was a fulltime student at UCLA, when it was my main transportation, but cruising deserted streets at night is a very liberating feeling. The ride was about 22 miles I hear, and the route took us past a couple of graveyards. We stopped on the Whittier Blvd bridge for a moment to listen to tunes that someone was pumping out of a trailer-carted stereo system (Oingo-Boingo Dead Man's Party, anyone?) and someone set off some fireworks. It was an oddly beautiful scene: the downtown skyline at night, lights glinting off the LA River, 800-900 bikers hovering above the river on the bridge, fireworks popping over our heads. I was a bit out of shape ( embarrassingly apparent when I was gettin' smoked by cute girls in ponytails passing me on the uphills ), but the cool night air and the scenery made my post-ride butt pains and leg aches worth it. I love the kind of anarchic spirit of events like that. We met at Griffith Park, right near my apartment, and there were so many riders it took a good 20 minutes (!) just for all of us to make the left hand turn out onto Los Feliz Blvd. It's not so much that I get a kick out of inconveniencing drivers, but there's just a wild spirit to it that's made even better by all the customized bikes and zany outfits. There's so many people, most couldn't possibly know each other, but everyone has the same idea of weird good fun.

In a very short time it seems, the idea of Midnight Ridazz has grown from a few die-hard bike enthusiasts to rides that draw over 1000 people. Maybe it is like anything else in LA - it's something hot with a short lifespan. I often think that people here will get in line wherever there's already people standing (think Pink's Hotdogs). I'm not even sure how often I plan to return to it. But it's interesting how quickly Midnight Ridazz has spawned offshoot and copycat groups. Hell, I don't know, maybe they are an offshoot of something else. It's just something that seems to have caught on. An interesting little item for the metrobloggers, like me. I guess.

Until I get Photoshop running on the Macbook, I can't pst any images to the web. So, for now, go to the Midnight Ridazz site for images of the Noche de los Biciclistas Muertos. They have video too.

Infiltrating the DGA: The Donner Cut and My Dinner with Ilya

2006-11-07T18:32:00.000-08:00

On the left stands Director Richard Donner at the screening for his long-awaited version of Superman II. On the right, the impish Producer blamed for keeping this film from public eyes, Ilya Salkind.

For reasons I should probably not reveal, I was a guest at the industry-only screening of "Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut," at the Director's Guild Theater this past Thursday night.

I'm not a religious Superman or comic book fan. I simply got myself involved several years ago with a crazy bunch of people in their passionate attempt to convince Warner Bros. to unvault some missing reels of footage that were rumored to exist. There are detailed accounts around the web of how that footage came to be "lost" and why there are now two existing versions of Superman II, so I won't recount the story. But as an obsessive film geek, hearing the unusual production history of the firing and hiring of directors, the re-writing of the script, and the elimination of Marlon Brando from the final edit refreshed my interest in the film as further documentation of Hollywood's madness.

The invitation, and the film's existence, felt like a vindication of my clandestine group's efforts, although probably very little credit is attributable in our direction. Nevertheless, we were allowed in, wearing suits and ties, to mingle freely with the likes of Richard Donner, Bryan Singer, and other cast and crew members from both feature film franchises.

With the recent proliferation of "Director's Cut" DVDs, there are increasingly more films for which multiple versions exist, although it is rarely the case that the different versions are drastically different . Often, the "director's cut" is merely the re-insertion or extension of a few trimmed scenes which were lost for the sake of a kinder MPAA rating, or for the sake of pacing, etc. It has seldom been the case that a studio or producer has assumed complete creative autonomy and delivered a film that is radically different from what was scripted and shot. One example is the Japanese film Gojira, which was completely reformulated and released in English as Godzilla, King of the Monsters, with new scenes filmed with Raymond Burr and a totally different storyline (aside from the basic premise of a giant lizard crushing Tokyo). A new DVD which pairs both films is a perfect demonstration of Lev Kuleshov's first experiment in film montage - artificial landscape. A commentator on Godzilla, King of the Monsters notes that audiences were unaware that the film was different from what Japanese audiences saw, and the film was admired for it's authenticity in Japanese casting and Japanese set creation. Raymond Burr, it was thought, had been flown to Tokyo for the filming, when in fact, all of his scenes were shot on a cramped stage at a low-rent studio on Vermont Av. ( I hoped to find the studio, since I now live just off of Vermont, but found out that, like many other sites of historical significance in LA, it was torn down years ago).

The next film I can think of which falls into this odd category is Terry Gilliam's Brazil. It too has been released on a great DVD from Criterion which clearly documents the studio's interference with the film and offers two versions to the viewer for comparison.

And then there's Superman II. The backstory to this one seems to have been common lore to any self-respecting film geek; in fact, it is mentioned on the Godzilla commentary as one of the few other examples of an alternate version of a film existing, although, at the time it was not known whether it would ever see the light of day. Most of the fans seemed to be content with the idea of just seeing the raw footage. Apparently, it existed and somewhere buried among it was a performance by the late Marlon Brando. There were photographs which roughly illustrated scenes from the original script, and all of these artifacts had been shared over the magic of the internet for years, giving fans a chance to reconstruct in their heads what Superman II would have been like in a parallel universe.

Finally, due to a confluence of recent events - the revival of the Superman film franchise, the alignment of the planets, and some would say the emergence of a fan-edited reconstruction of the film using bits of "lost" footage culled from international TV broadcasts, Warner Bros and Ilya Salkind and the other powers that be agreed that there were tremendous profits awaiting them should they put aside past differences and allow a new cut of Superman II to be released into the world. And so Donner's sometime editor, Michael Thau, took on the job of patching together a new cut of the film, after 20-some odd years, following the original script and using footage that Donner had shot before he was fired.

Although the DGA theater was mostly filled with industry people (Joe Dante sat directly behind me, Richard Donner and Bryan Singer off to my left, Margot Kidder and Brandon Routh behind them), there were some covert fan infiltrators, like ourselves, peppered throughout the crowd. The sense of anticipation ran through them like electric current, causing nervous twitches and excited bursts of energetic gab. When the MC finished his announcement of the film, a guy in front of me tensed himself inwards, hissing "YES!" in a scream of catharsis that he self-consciously tried to keep from echoing off the theater walls.

The film itself was a bit of a patchwork. There are completed scenes which were lifted unaltered from the theatrically-released Superman II. There were new scenes which were completed with rough visual effects work and/or body double shots. And there was at least one scene which was completed with the only existing footage available - two screen tests of Chris Reeve and Margot Kidder. Even in an industry screening, there were people in the crowd who expected the polish of a finished film, not a historical blueprint; and so, there were snickers at some of the rough FX shots and at Chris Reeve's inconsistent hairstyle across cuts. I was bothered more by gaps in the narrative logic than bad continuity, but I refuse to critique it as a movie because I don't really feel that it is one. For all the money that was spent putting these pieces together (and I don't think it was much), it is really just a chance to see the missing footage that fans were dreaming about all those years.

After the screening there was a panel discussion with Donner and other crew and cast members. Donner seemed content with the film and vindicated at seeing his vision on screen, which is interesting since I think his involvement was mainly to critique Michael Thau's editorial work, rather than play a hands-on role in shaping the cut and re-shooting. Truly, with the deaths of the two actors playing the story's central characters and twenty-plus years of age on everyone else, there was little that could realistically be done in terms of re-shooting. But I think he was perhaps slightly more ambivalent towards a re-edit than say, Terry Gilliam was towards restoring his vision of Brazil. That may have to do with the fact that Terry Gilliam actually shot and cut his version, and saw it with his own eyes before it was shredded to pieces under the supervision of Sid Sheinberg. At any rate, Donner says he now feels relieved that it exists in this "restored" form. Audiences will take away what they will.

After the screening, my friends and I went across the street for a bite only to have Superman's producer, Ilya Salkind, seated with his guests directly across from us. He's a crazy guy. He told us to say that.

"Tell them he's a crazy fucker, because I am!" he giggled in his multi-lingual accent, sipping a beer.

Ilya Salkind proved quite genial and loquacious, hanging over the divider between tables at Greenblatt's to tell his side of things.

We all looked up in disbelief as he walked in and sat at a table near us, but he engaged us directly in conversation, saying first that we looked like the Reservoir Dogs (all of us dressed in suits), and then asking if we were Hollywood consultants. When my friends explained that we were just a group of Superman fans, Ilya's companion decided to quiz us and see if we were "real" fans. "Name three girlfriends Superman had whose intials were all LL." I knew that if I had been alone, the conversation would have ended there, but I also knew that this guy had no idea who he was fucking with. My friends were the real deal. Having passed the test, Ilya cheerfully leaned over the handrail separating our tables and bantered on for at least twenty minutes about the difficulty of working with Donner, his reputation in the media, and his previous attempts to re-edit Superman I & II with Richard Donner into one long movie.

"We were gonna trim all the fat, and that fucking movie would have been like a rocket! Dick was so excited about it, we were jumping up and down, kissing each other."

I don't know whether Richard Donner and Ilya Salkind ever shared so much joint passion over anything that they actually jumped up and down kissing each other. Donner made it rather clear on the panel that he had banished the Salkinds (Ilya produced with his father, Alexander) from the set and that their relationship had ended very badly. Margot Kidder also engaged in a little Salkind-bashing on the panel, and mentioned that her previous on-record outrage at the producers back in the early 1980's had resulted in her part being vengefully slashed away in Superman III. Clearly, history has been kinder to Donner than Salkind. This was Donner's party, after years worth of fan support, clamoring for Warner Bros to release the footage from the vaults. All the celebrating was leaving Ilya feeling a little cold though, and as the night wore on, he embarked on an above-the-belt revenge-rant against Donner and Donner-philia, pausing only for self-congratulatory asides.

"Do you know how many fucking takes he did of that red sun?" Ilya claimed it was in the 40s I believe, though I have forgotten the precise number.

"That's hilarious," one of us responded.

"It's not hilarious when you're producing a movie! What did you think about the boy in Superman Returns having super powers? The love scene in this Donner Cut was edited with that in mind, but it makes no sense! How could he fuck her? He's an alien ! It makes sense in our film."

When Tom Mankiewicz spoke at the panel discussion, he related his initial reluctance to do a comic book adaptation. He went to meet with Richard Donner and found him dressed in the Superman costume. "Just try the costume on, Tom. Once you do, I swear you'll want to do the story," Donner told him. Mankiewicz attributed the film's narrative success to Donner's willingness to "get inside" the story, to accept the fantastical elements as factual and proceed to the emotional heart of it. Whether this view of the story was shared by Salkind I don't know, but he seemed as passionate about the story as any fan I'd ever met, and just as ready to engage with it on his own terms of "realism."

"What did you notice in the original Superman II about the molecule chamber?" he asked, as we were leaving. He had that impish grin again, waiting to trip us up on our knowledge of Superman. "Not this edit, but the original one. What did you see? No fan has ever caught this."

My friend, who has seen the Superman films more times than is safe for one's health, made several attempts to guess at where Salkind was leading.

"No! Wrong! What did you see?!"

Giving up, he finally told us. "His skull! It's his skull!"

We looked at each other blankly.

"He has an alien skull!"

I meekly attempted to follow up the uncomfortable silence with a query for more information. "What was the distinguishing characteristic of the skull?"

"It's ALIEN!" Salkind roared. "Go and watch it! I made them put an alien skull in there!"

As we said goodnight and shuffled off, I pondered Salkind's situation. He was the Judas of Superman. He was blasted by Donner, the cast and crew, the media, and the fans. Although he had initiated the project and put as much sweat into it as anyone, his legacy was as the "ruiner." There was something a little bit sad about the whole thing. Donner being celebrated for a work that is supposed to be "his," Salkind's frustrations with the project growing out of his hands and turning its back on him like an angry teenager, and not least, the fans who would undoubtedly watch the new film and return to the internet to bemoan its shortcomings. For many people, it will always be what it was supposed to be - simple inspirational myth. But filmmaking is such a wierd political, strategic beast to conquer, sometimes the events surrounding the mythmaking take on their own mythic qualities. Those who care enough to do the archeological digging end up sharing the neuroses of the filmmakers, and the whole spectacle can shift focus to new players.

As much as I have sometimes hated being a part of the pollutive cultural fallout of the entertainment industry, the trade-off is being able to swim in these little eddies of minor historic cultural significance. The dramas that unfold here may be of little import on the grand scale of life, but some of these episodes are almost Shakespearean in their parade and bedeviling of pride and passion.

Harlan Ellison, Still Angry After All These Years

2006-10-30T10:44:00.000-08:00

DISCUSSION / BOOK SIGNING - Oct. 29 - Skylight Books
Moving to Los Feliz was a mixed bag for me. I've been there for almost a year and I love that I can walk to anything I might need (grocery stores, post office, library, movie theater), but I am also irritated at having to share that convenience with LA's trendy elite. Resistant to the Borg-like mentality which compels LA's scenesters to emulate each other in heroin chic-derivative dress and mannerism, I often feel like an outsider walking the streets of my own neighborhood. As much as I bristle at the rude treatment received from coffee shop waitresses whose minds are on their afternoon auditions, I accept it as the cost of living in a bohemian atmosphere that provides a sustainable ecosystem for places like Skylight Books. I've never lived in any other famously bohemian neighborhoods, like Haight-Ashbury or Greenwich Village, but I imagine they would be stimulating and irritating in similar ways.

I love to visit Skylight. It's not that I can afford to buy new books (I can, but if I indulged in the practice as much as I am tempted to, it would become an expensive habit), but Skylight is one of those bookstores that gets writers like Harlan Ellison to make an appearance, and I love the fact that I can discover events like this on my way home from the supermarket, walking down the street with a bag full of chicken drumsticks and garlic. Beyond that, they are one of those bookstores, which are becoming increasingly rare, into which you can walk and make a discovery, rather than going into Barnes & Noble because you expect to be able to find that classic Ray Bradbury book that you would like to give as a gift, and discovering that it is not stocked because they need the shelf space for John Grisham.

Having written over 1000 pieces of fiction, from short stories to television scripts, and edited numerous anthologies, Harlan Ellison is now one of the American elders of science fiction literature. He's matured into grandaddy status, having outlived Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick. He used attract media for his "live" storywriting sessions, where he would sit in the window of a bookshop and type an original story. He wrote the original "Star Trek" episode "City on the Edge of Forever," in which Kirk, Spock and McCoy travel back to America during the Depression, as well as several influential episodes of the original "Outer Limits;" two of which, "Soldier" and "Demon with a Glass Hand," provided the inspiration for "The Terminator." Ellison was recounting this story when I walked in. Apparently, James Cameron almost went on the record in a magazine interview, giving credit for his story to Ellison, but had his lawyers contact the magazine shortly before publication to remove the quote. There was eventually a legal settlement, and Ellison is credited as an "inspiration" in the final credits of the film. Ellison comes across as principled and vindictive. In response to his almost being snubbed out of credit on "The Terminator," he took out a full page ad in one of the trade magazines, reprinting the "inspired by" credit from the film under the title "Exhibit A."

"He thinks his shit don't stink! He really thinks he is emperor of the world or something," Ellison exclaimed about Cameron.

One thing Ellison is not is modest. He doesn't even give the impression that he would claim modesty as one of his virtues. He sings his own praises, recounts his own accomplishments, and in true geezerly fashion (he's now in his 70s), condemns today's generations for allowing the internet to provide them with a false sense of informed awareness. I can't say I disagree totally with his cynicism, although since no one in the audience was as old as Ellison, I wondered if we were granted special exemption from the uninformed masses by virtue of being in his sage presence. I'm capping on the man a little bit, but I think Ellison has always been a kind of cynical geezer - in the best way - as a critic of media and society, who has been prone to outbursts along the way - over anything from tampering with his work (which includes posting it online without permission, see the legal case against AOL), to making assaults on people in public (various documented cases online, differing circumstances).

He says he has had quadruple bypass heart surgery and has been warned against having emotional outbursts, "but it happens... everyday." Certainly there is record of him having outbursts in public, and some of those have been dark accounts. I tend to romanticize people with angry, emotional natures, perhaps since I identify so well with them, and I am drawn towards the manifestation of this nature in his work and in certain aspects of his life (being a Hollywood outsider with enough power and contempt for producers to turn them down, participating in the Selma-Montgomery Equal Rights marches). Harlan Ellison, like Terry Gilliam, is the type of personality who indentifies himself as the underdog, and if you identify yourself as such too, there's an instant attraction. (For evidence of my own geezerliness, just review the first few paragraphs). There is a substantial amount of legend surrounding Ellison's brash public behavior that is less than a romantic underdog fable, but I am mostly familiar with him for his writing.

Among those who may only know him for his legend are those who would hire him. Ellison described the process of collaboration between him and the producers of the upcoming "Masters of Science Fiction" series as a back-and-forth game of indecision. The executives wanted Ellison to pick a story. "I have 1400 stories! How the hell do I know what they wanted?" he screamed. "Apparently they have time to be executives, but they don't have time to read." Then he was asked for an adaptation of "Repent Harlequin! Said the Ticktockman." Despite it being a reader favorite (undoubtedly why it was chosen by the execs), Ellison did not feel it lent itselt to a television adaptation. "Why can't something that you like exist in it's own medium?" he begged. It must be a particularly nagging question for a guy who's been so prolific and had so many of his pieces adapted, directly or indirectly, to varying degrees of success. He expressed his amazement that he was not only courted for the series, but that ABC, who was putting up half of the funding for the show, stipulated that their involvement would be contingent on Ellison being attached. If this is not a case of Ellison's ego self-deluding him, it is a nice piece of irony. "There are studios where I am still not allowed to work!" he hollered. "They lay out minefields when I walk on the lot." I guess as you get older, your legend grows, and whether that is owing to the stature of your work, the myths that surround you, or simple longevity, having a reputation for being "difficult" ceases to be a handicap when your name is synonymous with big sales.

I've always found it interesting to see the legends of my own time up close, whether that be James Brown, or Charlton Heston. Whether you love their work or hate it, and however you feel about the individuals themselves, there is some charisma that these people use to cast a spell over millions of people. In his immodest way, he told the room that there were things he could not do and things he was great at. "I can sing well," he told us (apparently he has sung professionally, casually name-dropping that he is good buddies with Mel Torme). "I can do these kinds of public speaking events. And I can write like a son of a bitch." I find it interesting that he excels in two talents, writing and verbal storytelling, which are not always co-occurent, and I can count it as an experience to have heard this son-of-a-bitching writer hold court and charm an audience with his brashness for an hour.

宇宙からのメッセージ Message From Space Trailer (1978)

2006-10-25T18:05:00.000-07:00

Wow. Youtube truly is magnificent.
I found the trailer for Fukasaku Kinji's Star Wars rip-off "Message from Space," starring Vic Morrow and Sonny Chiba.
Now if only I could find the whole movie...

You Always Hurt the One You Love

2006-10-18T17:18:00.000-07:00

Haunted George has gotten me going on the virtues of Youtube. There are some truly amazing archival materials to be found, if one has the time to go sifting. I saw a clip of a young Frank Zappa "playing the bicycle" from the Steve Allen show. Haunted George found a great clip of Korla Pandit playing mysterious and exotic sounds on his Hammond organ that he linked to on his Sick blog. I wonder, now that Google has purchased Youtube, if some of these cool videos will disappear due to fears of copyright infringement, etc.
Perhaps.
But in the meantime, here's a cool clip of the Mills Bros. doing "You Always Hurt the One You Love." I never should have let Alberto remove this from his film.

Peter Fuller.

2006-10-06T16:45:00.000-07:00

A good friend to a good many people. Went away too soon.
I've decided to share some of my images and memories of him here.

Chicag/no

2006-09-08T22:56:00.000-07:00

Labor Day - Just returned from Chicago and Indiana. The Lake Michigan region. Said lake is big enough to fly over in a jet aircraft and not see either side for twenty minutes. It's big enough to look down on from the clouds and see white caps, as one sees when flying over the ocean. It's big enough that in Chicago, they refer to the waterfront as "the beach," and there is sand and surf and seagulls too. For all that size, Toddrick, who lived in Chicago for six years, tells me that in the winter, when temperatures can drop to 40 below, that entire lake will freeze solid and chips of ice can be lifted off of it, sailing on the wind through downtown's city streets. "Great city to visit, hard city to live in," he mumbles.

I traveled to the northern midwest with Richard, Danica and Salomón. Richard has been doing a documentary on Salomón, a painter whose art was being featured in a show at Notre Dame. I didn't know Notre Dame was in South Bend, Indiana. I didn't know I was going to Notre Dame. Some of my pep for the trip had subsided when I found out we would not be spending the majority of our time in Chicago. There's something about the big cities that has always lured me in. San Francisco, New York, London, Tokyo, even New Orleans, although it is not known as the massive metropolis some of the others are. These are places that have layers and layers of human history that no amount of urban renewal can ever completely remove.

Before we could even get off the ground at LAX, we were delayed for about an hour due to some kind of security breach at the airport terminal. No one passed through security during that time. We all just stood outside on the curb in the pre-dawn darkness, while our planes waited empty on the other side. We speculated on the changed nature of air travel and the false sense of security these new measures provided. I wondered why someone could not swallow a condom filled with explosives and find a way to detonate it on board. Drug mules swallow condoms filled with drugs.

We stayed at a hotel on the Notre Dame campus called the Morris Inn. It was nice, comfortable. Although Salomón accurately pointed out that from the outside it looked like a prison (all beige concrete and right angles), inside were pieces of furniture that looked expensive, which always makes people feel like they are getting the best. In the bathroom were hung quaint Irish proverbs - toasts and prayers. The legacy of the Irish is felt strongly throughout the school, although it was founded by a French priest. The driver who picked us up from the airport, a student of politics who was born in Guatemala, recounted for us the origin of the "Fighting Irish" mascot. Apparently, the name stuck after the Irish went to rumble with the Ku Klux Klan, who were attempting to set up a chapter in South Bend.

After we dumped our junk in our rooms I sat outside for moment to enjoy some fresh warm air. There was a bit of tropical humidity, but not enough to make your shirt cling to your skin. Cicadas hummed. The campus is all manicured green lawns and large shady trees.

There was a large dome on campus, topped with what looked like a gold plated figure of Mary, mother of Jesus. Notre Dame. Our lady. Makes sense. There was a building across from a massive football stadium with an arms-uplifted mosaic they called "Touchdown Jesus." Jesus was everywhere. Most of Notre Dame's student body is Catholic. Richard and I took a walk at night and discovered "the grotto," a candlelit stone recess where students came to pray during all hours of the night. The quiet flickering candlelight was serene, a marked contrast to the nights of screaming and beer drinking I remember from UCLA.

Notre Dame has an Institute for Latino Studies and a guy named Gil Cardenas is the Director of it. Although there are ethnic studies departments at most universities, I wondered if Notre Dame was making a special appeal to potential Latino students (known statistically to be predominantly Catholic), as they may have done in years past with America's larger population of recently immigrated and Irish Catholics. Gil's an interesting guy. He lives in a massive house that seems to keep expanding into more rooms as you travel through it. It is just outside of the campus and sits on the bank of a calm green river that reminded me of Tom Sawyer Island in Disneyland. Every inch of interior wall space is covered in art; above bookcases, under stairwells, in bedrooms, in bathrooms, above the toilet, art was hung. My first and second nights in South Bend, I moved about the rooms of his house, following the dozen-plus artists who had gathered for the show with a video camera and making them slightly uncomfortable.

It has been a long time since I have done any shooting. It was a nice change of pace, scenery, action, mood. Not the sunless edit bay of the Cimarron Group, air-conditioned to 70F everyday. I didn't mind playing paparazzi, it was good exercise, but there was very little I could do with the camera on or off that would make me feel like more than a functionary, a walking lens.

I know nothing about fine art and my attitude towards it tends to be ambivalent. There is fine art that I can admire and relate to viscerally, but the scene surrounding it seems to be about qualifying good art over bad for the purpose of creating value. I hate the snobbishness of gallery spaces and I despise the idea of people gloating over their precious private collections. Gil seemed to have a real passion for all of his art though, and his repeated attempts to get artists to sign books or do sketches for him stemmed from both his nature as a curator and his desire to create and maintain personal relationships with all the artists he admired.

The artists and work gathered for the show were all quite different from one another. The show was titled Caras Vemos, Corazones No Sabemos: The Human Landscape of Mexican Migration, so it all focused on immigration or the immigrant experience in the US. I was a little too overwhelmed by new faces and information to remember names, but I saw video installations, photography, traditional paintings, and silkscreened art. Some of the artists made three-dimensional sculptures and one created a mural out of twelve panels which were printed from woodcuts. Another guy made masks out of mirrors that were intended to scramble the wearer's facial features with those of the person who looked at him.

Richard chats with Marcos Raya.

Marcos Raya's work caught my eye. One of three men in the show whom I never saw without his hat, Raya had a lean and nimble figure. He spoke seldom, seeming to reserve speech for comments which were necessary or worthy. He was impossible to gauge; after looking at his work, I had no idea how to begin a conversation with him. Regardless of the fact that he was fluent in English, I found myself wishing I could make conversation with him in Spanish, feeling that might help bridge the intellectual chasm between us. I suspect I know less Spanish than Japanese these days, which doesn't say much for my capabilities in another language. I felt out of his league, even on my linguistic home turf. His art is surreal and incorporates a lot of imagery of technology, seemingly gone haywire. He paints himself into some of the images, and other times incorporates himself in a much more unusual "first-person" perspective, showing the inside of a skull and the view through a pair of eye-sockets. He's got a Fellini-esque fascination with asses, bulbously distorting the naked shapes of women and driving foreign technological shapes into the flesh of his human subjects. Sometimes his colors are bright reds, blues, greens, and sometimes his paintings look as though they were made with ash.

Malaquias Montoya gave off a much more approachable, almost grandfatherly vibe. I guessed him to be in his mid 50s, but he had that mellowed, good-natured air that people usually ease into once grandkids appear in their lives. Never once did I see Mr Montoya without his fedora, or a paint encrusted stopwatch which he hung around his neck. Shaking hands with him was like shaking hands with a tree; his skin was calloused and weathered from years of working with brushes and chemicals. His smile was carved by deep lines in his face. One never expects to find brothers in a place far from home, but I learned that Montoya had lived for several years in my hometown of Oakland, and taught at the California College of Arts and Crafts. I was introduced as well to his son, Maceo, whose work was also featured in the show. It was interesting to see the artistic lineage being passed down, the same way a carpenter or mason or other craftsman might pass on their knowledge and skill to a son or an apprentice. Malaquias' silkscreened image, UNDOCUMENTED, was chosen to represent the show. On the return flight, I flipped through a book of his images, based on the theme of capital punishment. I admired him for his idealism, which is nothing more than rational thinking, but so uncommon. I recently watched "Gangs of New York" and recalled a scene in which four men were pulled from the streets and hanged to create a political distraction and the illusion of civil control. I remembered an argument I had with my family over the execution of Stanley "Tookie" Williams, and how plain it seemed to them that vengeance was the right answer to crime. Malaquias' paintings depict the graphic deaths of several hanged, electrocuted and poisoned convicts, not simply to garner sympathy for their suffering, but to question the humanity of the perpetrators. Making that argument verbally, I could not do anymore than have heads shaken at me, and I doubt whether these paintings would make their way into many people's homes. I sympathized with Montoya's placement of his principles above his concern for offending an audience's aesthetic sensibilities.

Much discussion about the purpose of art and the ways to connect it to an audience was had during the conference which followed the exhibit. Particularly since this show focused on Chicano art, which is by nature political, there was a deep concern with how to engage the public in the issues addressed by the show. Jose Limón of UT Austin made the valid critique that a museum show, with limited public accessibility, was not an effective way to engage people in political ideas. I thought that the inclusion of a Lalo Alcaraz "L.A. Cucaracha" comic strip panel came closest to representing art from a public sphere that people could easily relate to. Fine art does not seem to me to be a part of many peoples' modern lives. I think graffiti and stencils and Xeroxed posters and other street art that augments/alters/vandalizes advertising is the most interesting type of "fine art" going right now. It addresses some of the same ideas that the artists in this show are concerned with, but it makes itself visible in places where people already are, it does not wait for people to find it. And it uses a familiar visual language. Some of what you find on the street is just self-promotion - many people are branding themselves with an image the way Shepard Fairey did with Andre the Giant. But other people are coming out of the advertising world and using the visual language of advertising, which is common to everyone, to tackle political issues, even if their message is not always totally clear. I remember distinctly the wave of iRaq posters featuring Abu Ghraib silhouettes that lampooned the Apple iPod campaign. It would be cool to see a show that tracked down more samples of this kind of political art.

Salomón Huerta stands before an early piece in the home of a collector.

Richard observed that this show was attempting to "canonize" Chicano art within the "mainstream" world of fine art. Salomón Huerta had some interesting points on this. He appears to have carefully managed his career to avoid being "ghettoized" in an ethnic artist category. He's achieved fame for dealing with ethnic identity uniquely, by painting the backs of subject's heads. Where most Chicano artists seem to qualify themselves as Chicano first, Salomón seems to want to achieve notice simply as an artist. He struck me as an incredibly smart guy who kids around a lot and projects a kind of casual but super-confident indifference, like my old friend Joaquin, but with the chops to back it up. There has been plenty written already about his heads and suburban houses, so I won't try for a critical summary here. My sense was merely that, behind the wisecracking exterior, there was another kind of cool - a patient, watchful eye, as observant of color as of behavior. I realized with Salomón and some of the others that they've done art most of their lives, and whatever art you do, that level of practice and discipline nurtures highly developed thought, because it is a constant meditation on oneself and one's surroundings. I never quite viewed myself as an "artist" and I think being in the company of these guys made that distinction in self-perception and commitment apparent.

Lastly, there was Chicago. I finally made it there for a day of roaming around and to take in the Cubs against the Giants at Wrigley Field. I've now repeated to various people that the Wrigley Field experience is a must, not just for baseball fans. I am not a sports fan of any kind, but the flavor of that field is distinct and historic. It's situated in a neighborhood of brownstone apartment buildings, from the roofs of which people gather to watch the games. The field is one of the MBA's smallest, which supposedly accounts for more balls sailing out of the park. We saw Barry Bonds rock one out, around the 4th inning, to mixed cheering and boos. The Giants took the game 7-4 (although we left in the 8th, when we thought it was over at 4-3).

From Wrigley Field we moved on to Millennium Park, a new development on the lake shore which opened in 2004 and purportedly cost in the neighborhood of $500 million. Taking in the public art pieces, it was easy to see where that money was spent. One of the favorite pieces was referred to as "the bean," and was a chrome kidney shaped lozenge, with enough of a curve for several dozen people to pass under at once. Because of the distorting reflections, I smacked my head up against the side of it while trying to pass under, haha. Like a carnival fun house mirror, people loved just standing in front of it, taking pictures, doing strange walks and dances, or just smiling and pointing at themselves and each other. I was slightly more impressed with a piece a few hundred yards away. It was two towers of video screens facing each other, projecting images of faces with pursed lips. After about fifteen minutes, water shot forth from the pursed lips in a thick stream like a suspension bridge cable while naked kids dodged and danced underneath it. It was such an unusual sight and people seemed to be having so much fun splashing in the water around it. There was also a massive outdoor public theater designed by Frank Gehry that bore quite a strong resemblance to LA's Disney Concert Hall. Gehry also designed a winding overpass bridge that pedestrians could walk and park themselves on, suspended over six lanes of downtown traffic for stunning views of the city's skyline. There were public gardens filled with grasses from around the world, from which a small rabbit bounded out and nibbled on the lawn at the foot of Gehry's bridge. There was a large grassy field where a free jazz festival was being held and beyond that, the massive water fountain I remember from the opening credits of "Married... With Children." There were museums everywhere, all of which were closed, it being the Sunday of Labor Day weekend. As we walked downtown, Danica pointed out a large sculpture by Picasso, sitting in a public square. The guys were somewhat skeptical about it being a Picasso, but Danica was the only one of us who had been to Chicago before, and taken a guided tour of downtown landmarks no less. The sculpture was large enough to walk on, which Richard and I did. Salomón seemed a little disturbed at the idea of skateboarders busting ollies off a Picasso.

Richard suggested we try a restaurant that his friend had given the glowing recommendation of "best Mexican restaurant in the US." So we went in search of it. Along the way, we found a massive drawbridge which had been left abandoned in the vertical position. It stood, arm upraised at the elbow, at the base of the Chicago Sun Times. It looked as if it might crash down at any moment. The river winding through the city reminded me of Tokyo and the ferries that one could take to get around the city there.

Even at 9 or 10pm, there were large numbers of people on foot in downtown areas, walking under skyscrapers, near L-trains, past storefronts and restaurants, outside of jazz clubs and blues bars. I decided I needed to come back to see the rest of this place: all the art inside the huge museums, all the old buildings, all the historical landmarks, all the unique neighborhoods, all the old bars, hear the music, ride the trains.

Yeah, it's definately on the list of places to return to.

Polish Movie Posters ( ...Are Cool... )

2006-07-25T09:34:00.000-07:00

Polski Governator circa 1984

I haven't had much to say lately. Maybe it is the heat-wave that has been burning up Southern California and the rest of the country lately. Maybe it is watching Beirut get blown to bits while Bush and Rice say they don't want to negotiate for peace unless it is a lasting peace. I have no idea what any of this blather means anymore. Sitting in my shorts sweating and watching people make meaningless blah-blah talk. The weather forecasters keep saying that LA is in the 90's, but the "feels like" temperature is well over 100. I don't know when they began giving the forecast in "feels like" degrees. Temperature seems to have become a very subjective issue this year, with Al Gore trumpeting the alarms of global-warming and being ludicrously compared to Joseph Goebbels by the right-wing pundits. Voices on the radio and television are talking about blackouts in California again, saying this time, there is no Enron to blame. Ken Lay is Dead; not from heat exhaustion, but heart exhaustion. Too much cholesterol in his diet. News that the energy crisis was manufactured came too late to stop the Republican coup that seized the California governorship, but it probably did slow the rate at which they hoped to build new power plants. Now that we are all sweltering, the hands are hovering over the power kill switches, and politicians are ready to explain to us that the power grid is old and out of date and insufficient to meet current demand, which I understand owes its blame to increased population... caused by immigration. It all dovetails so nicely sometimes. I found this rather ingenious solution to the problem while poking around the web: http://www.pocho.com/news/2001/wattback/wattback.html
I actually had this idea myself, when I was frequenting the gym. Why are those treadmills and ski machines plugged in, drawing power? Why not reverse the flow and let those hot young girls in their 20's pump their energy back into the grid? As one dirty old man said to the other, if we could bottle that heat, we'd be rich.

So on to the Polish movie posters.

Sampling of Polish movie poster art from the late 1960s to the 1980s. From L-R top to bottom: Apocalypse Now, Platoon, In Cold Blood, Playtime, Alien, and The Phantom of Liberty.

I signed up as a volunteer with the American Cinematheque. I've been trying to get myself a little bit more involved in community affairs. Being a lousy manager of my own time often makes that extremely difficult. But the Cinematheque is one of those places that has exposed me to too much good stuff, and I owe something, however small, in exchange for all the great films I've learned about from their programming staff. So this month I searched the internet for movie posters to upload to fandango.com, to represent the films that are programmed in August. Found some cool old stuff for the Roger Corman retrospective, and old Elvis movie poster art is fun to look at it.

One of the great resources on the net for old movie poster art is posteritati.com. They specialize in film posters for collectors and have a bunch of posters for foreign films and foreign posters of American films. While browsing, I began to notice that almost all movie posters from Poland resisted the typical Hollywood marketing strategies that have been inherited in most other parts of the world. Polish movie posters, first of all, are almost always painted artwork, rather than photographic art from special photo shoots. Also, in concept, they do not strain themselves to "sell the star," by showing his stupid face. Instead, they draw their concept from the theme of the film, resulting in great expressionistic (or impressionistic?) subjective variations on the content of the movie. I have no idea how many Polish artists were active in the film advertising industry during its peak, or during the duration represented by posteritati's collection. But the art seems highly individual, as though there were no agency art director, no creative meetings, no client on the phone to dumb down the concept or request that it look more like the poster of last year's Oscar winner. These are designs where the painter seems to have had full control.

It is interesting to see how they interpreted huge Hollywood blockbusters, movies that were marketed here with bright colors, big stars' faces, bold letters. The Polish art is totally indifferent to the salary of the actor who was in the movie, or the box office draw of the name "Spielberg." In the case of Back to the Future, it's as if the artist knew the movie was a pointless piece of shit and could not be bothered to make any unreasonable fuss over it. In more than one instance, looking at the Polish movie art for Hollywood films makes me curious to see what a Polish version of those same films would have been like. Of course, with films that have interesting thematic content, the artist grabs hold of it and produces a bold, effective design that often trumps the design from any other country. What's cool about posteritati's search engine is that you can search by film title or just by country, so after pulling a huge list of Polish posters, you can select one title and compare it to other art from around the world. This is exactly how I discovered that there was a consistent style to the art from Poland. If I knew more about art and painting, maybe I could use vocabulary to describe it more effectively or understand its relationship to the rest of Polish or Eastern European art. But as it is, I'm just a film buff who finds it extraordinary, and if I had the disposable wealth, and the mind to spend it on a collection of stuff, I would doubtless be buying Polish movie art.

Great Polish art for a great Polish film director. Polanski's Rosemary's Baby and The Tenant.

Go to posteritati's search engine and select POLISH from the POSTER NATIONALITY drop-down menu.
While you're at it, why not go to the Cinematheque's calendar and see what cool movies are showing this month?

Capote on DVD

2006-06-12T20:43:00.000-07:00

I never even noticed that Capote had come out on DVD, but I should have, since I did some work on it. I no longer really work with the DVD people at Cimarron, but every once in awhile I am called back into their service. This little task was actually kinda fun, and unusual for me. (I think the studio normally takes care of it). Sony asked us to break the film down into 28 chapters for the DVD - to identify the break points, name the chapters, and select an appropriate image to represent each chapter on the DVD menu. Somehow this job got passed to me. I kinda enjoyed it. This was all just before the Oscars, so it was even a little fun to think that the film might be a Best Picture winner. Anyway... for anyone who has ever wondered... yes, there is a person whose job is to sit and watch the movie, decide where to put the chapter breaks, and choose catchy chapter titles and images for the DVD menus. On Capote, I was that guy. Yippee.

My Experience with Habitat for Humanity, or How to Properly Celebrate the Birth of the Antichrist

2006-06-06T19:17:00.000-07:00

I had been meaning to volunteer for Habitat for Humanity for months. At some point I realized that there were areas of Los Angeles (and probably every other major American urban center) that could reasonably qualify as third-world. In addition to that, I observe on a daily basis how much personal wealth is generated for people who do not contribute anything valuable to society. OK, forget about contributing anything valuable to society... some people take home huge salaries without even knowing how to do their goddamn meaningless jobs.

I work in the movie advertising business.

Working in such an industry makes one observant of the fact that today's world is driven by so much theoretical wealth, theoretical exchange, theoretical "goods."

Working in my corner of the world, it is very hard to feel that you are doing anything of value with your life. It is a challenge to feel personally invested in campaigning for a product that you do not believe in - whether that product is a movie or Arnold Schwarzenegger's campaign for governor. My job consists of trying to dazzle people and convince them that they want something that they really don't need (and would be better off without).

Since I feel that way about it, it seems weird to me that I am paid to do this work. Surely, it is not to the benefit of society to have advertising, especially when it distorts the truth (as all advertising does). Not only is this work not beneficial to society, but I have observed a large amount of bloat in this industry - grossly over-inflated salaries, positions which could be entirely eliminated. It's led me to believe that this is widespread in the modern world. Most of us who live comfortably in the world do not put in as much work (physical or otherwise) as those of us live poorly. Comfortable jobs come with less supervision, more freedom, more autonomy, less efficiency, more waste. In addition, most of us who live well in the world make our living by producing goods or services which are of little or no practical value.

It's so odd to my naive mind that immense wealth can be generated by such a system.

I suppose it feels good to know that we have specialized skills and college degrees, and that the jobs we do could not be done by just anybody. But we're not teaching anything valuable. We're not producing food, or providing water. We're not caring for the sick or dying. We're not addressing causes of violence between people, or reducing damage to the environment. Nope, we here in the movie advertising business are just pumping out more junk for consumption and disposal.

Humankind has hardwired instincts to do physical work. We have always fought those instincts, creating a division of labor and a system of trade to bypass the need to provide for ourselves by the sweat of our own effort. But that instinct is a survival mechanism - it is our bodies telling us we are supposed to be out there, gettin' shit done so we can survive the winter. Because the model of society has drifted so far from any kind of productive work, to a model of mechanized production and mass consumption, our minds are growing as fat as our bodies. We're like earthworms, eating and shitting and transforming the landscape as we go.

I'm not sure if everyone who lives this way is conscious of it - or if they even want to be. Clearly, the remedy for everything these days is to buy something new. If you can't feel better buying new clothes, or new entertainment, we now offer surgeries and prescriptions that can act as goals, rewards and distractions. Clearly enough people are fucking miserable to sustain an expanding pharmaceutical industry that can afford to mass-market its anti-depressants on TV and in magazines. I can't wait to see billboards on the highway for Wellbutrin. "I'm ready to experience life. Ask you doctor if Wellbutrin is right for you."

Amidst all this musing, I got a bug up my ass to break away from my stupid job, which "pays the bills," and do something beneficial for someone, anyone. Habitat for Humanity seems like a worthy project to me because it provides a basic necessity - housing - to people in need. You might argue that half of Southern California is in need of housing, what with real estate prices being what they are here. But the organization screens for working families who are below a certain level of income and requires them to invest their own labor into the construction or renovation of a home which they purchase at a discounted rate. HFH pays for trained construction co-ordinators and building supplies. Other materials, such as appliances, and all other labor are donated. The homes are sold to the family at far below market price ( I believe LA area HFH homes were selling around $50,000 ) and they are financed at monthly payments that are affordable for the families. The money is used to roll back into the program which operates non-profit.

Although they are Christian, and I am non-religious, nobody tried to preach to me. Although I have my problems with religion, I can participate with a group like this which acts according to humanitarian, rather than dogmatic religious principles. I don't think anyone on the job site was affiliated with a church group of any kind. In fact, two of the volunteers were high school seniors who were obligated by their class to do community service, while two other volunteers were consigned to the program by the talent agency they worked for. I found it mildly amusing that a large Hollywood talent agency would conduct a community service PR campaign by sending the mailroom boys to do the gruntwork, while wearing the agency T-shirts in case cameras were present. The guys themselves, former college fraternity brothers, viewed the experience akin to a hazing. Cynical as I am, it is still good that even on a Tuesday, HFH can manage to find volunteers.
As for the work itself, it consisted mainly of stripping wood siding off an exterior wall with hammers and prybars. In addition, we cleaned out the three storage areas under the house. The house had been condemned and was possibly donated to HFH by the city of Long Beach. According to Billy, the site foreman, one of the storage sheds had been occupied by a couch and a pile of condoms and syringes when they moved in. The neighborhood was not great, and the living space in the house was smaller than my one bedroom apartment. However, the plan was to build out the storage shed area into a first floor living space, which meant that the concrete driveway would have to be broken out. Billy told me that the family consisted of a single dad, two daughters and one son who was confined to a wheelchair, so there were also plans to install a lift to the second floor. HFH has only been working on this project for a week, so it does not look like much. However, Billy tells me that projects are typically budgeted for about four months.

I would like to come back to this site to see the progress, although it was difficult enough to get away from the job for one day, so I might have to wait until they can schedule me for a Saturday. If you are interested in volunteering with HFH, you can check them out on the web: http://www.habitat.org/local/
They take volunteers most days, except Sundays, but they can get you signed up faster if you are available during the week.
I decided 06-06-06 was a good day to do a good deed - not because of religion or superstition - but to atone for my involvement in the promotion of that ridiculous-looking "Omen" remake movie.

Trailer for "The Invitation"

2006-05-02T19:35:00.001-07:00

"The Invitation" is the second film I worked on with Alberto Barboza, a director and friend I met at UCLA film school. "Premeditation," which was Alberto's thesis short film, generated momentum with favorable response at festivals, garnering an award at the LA Latino International Film Festival that led to attention from Showtime. Showtime provided air dates for "Premeditation," in addition to funding for a second film, which became "The Invitation."

The story centers on two young painters, each of whom are being promoted at a gallery opening by a husband-wife team of art sellers. There is competition among the artists and among the gallery owners, Gloria and Marco, to outsell the work of their chosen protegés, and determine who will be established as the new sensation in the fickle art world. The film reveals that in the world of art, as elsewhere, success is often determined by political machinations and one's willingness to sublimate their personal values to overcome the competition.

Although some key crew positions carried over from "Premeditation," such as DP Chris Bernal, I did not edit the film. This time out, the production team had the honor of working with the great Caroline Ross, who has contributed her editing talents to episodes of "The West Wing" and one of the great entries in the political satire/sci-fi genre, "Starship Troopers." I had the pleasure of assisting Miss Ross, and then porting the project over from AVID to my Final Cut bay at the Cimarron Group to do the online. I monkeyed around with the footage during the slow days at Cimarron and came up with this trailer.

The film aired on October 5, 2005 on Showtime and has since played in several festivals.

Guess Who's Coming to Breakfast?

2006-03-28T19:43:00.000-08:00

This is an old educational filmstrip that was shown to a friend of mine when he was growing up in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He remembered the film and tracked it down through his old teacher. Finding the content interesting, and being surprised that it had been shown in a public school, we decided to preserve it for the ages. This meant cutting up the filmstrip and scanning dozens of images, attempting to adjust for the faded colors and scratches throughout. The audio is still in pretty degraded shape, having come from cassette.

The narration examines the products we use everyday, and the global impact of the corporations that create them. It focuses particularly on the Gulf and Western corporation and their role in sugar harvesting in the Dominican Republic. I do not know when this filmstrip was produced (judging by the clothing and hairstyles, I would guess the late 70's or early 80's), so the information presented is obviously no longer up-to-date.

The topic of the negative effects of globalization is now something of a hot button issue, with WTO conferences provoking violent demonstrations around the world. I don't know if there was as much awareness or sensitivity to these issues in the early 1980's, which makes this filmstrip a curiosity to me.

The recent Hubert Sauper documentary "Darwin's Nightmare" takes a look at the current negative effects of globalization being felt in Tanzania, and I would encourage anyone who finds this filmstrip interesting to seek out that film as well.

One caveat: the filmstrip is broken into two parts and total running time is about 20 minutes.

Mr. Solarsin Has Left the Building

2006-02-10T23:49:00.000-08:00

Cheers to Mr. Solarsin Ngoenwichit who recently departed the US for his hometown of Bangkok, Thailand. A painter, restaurateur, and filmmaker (to list only a few of his known occupations), Solarsin returned to Bangkok to further his film producing and directing career. Somehow the Singha won't taste the same without this crazy guy around.

Photo by Pia Tanyakorndilok.

Sundance Film Festival 2006

2006-01-31T18:50:00.000-08:00

January in Park City, Utah. One of the biggest and most prestigious film festivals in the US occurs in one of the country's smallest and coldest towns. I would love to have each film that I work on culminate in this kind of an event - where the crew, who has grown into a family of friends, can gather and share their film with enthusiastic audiences in a beautiful chilly-air setting, conducive to scotch-drinking and the kind of laughter that gets warm blood pumping back into your frozen cheeks.

The occasion for my attendance this year was the programming of a feature I worked on in early 2005 as an assistant editor. Journey From the Fall is an independently-financed narrative film based on the real-life experiences of Vietnam war "boat people" refugees and those who were imprisoned in North Vietnamese "re-education camps." Working on it was a great learning experience, not only in filmmaking (my first feature in post-prod), but also in a specific socio-historic subject. I made many friends and enjoyed a spirit where people really cared about the work, plus it afforded me the chance to work abroad for a week in Bangkok, Thailand. So I could not have been happier to see the film making its way into the world via Sundance. I will undoubtedly post more about the film in the future, but in the meantime, I encourage anyone to visit the official site and see the film if you have the chance.

So, on to my impressions of Sundance.

"Steer clear of the hype," was the advice one colleague recommended to me when I informed him I would be going. It's true that this event swarms with business and industry types, seeking the hot buy, that handful of films that audiences are buzzing about. Numerous celebrities attend in support of their films, attracting media coverage and showers of corporate swag. Businesses all strive to have their logos placed on or near the bodies of celebrities when the news cameras roll. Evidently, during the first weekend of the festival, there is a "giveaway tent," where attendees can visit the booths of corporate sponsors and walk away with hundreds of dollars in swag. When we arrived on Thursday night, Long Nguyen showed us a nice-looking pair of leather boots he'd scored, in addition to a canvas duffel bag in which to keep the rest of his free goodies.

Sundance has long been regarded as an "indie" film festival, where "mini-major" distributors go to pick up crowd-pleasing movies at a discount. Although there are occasionally legends of the $7,000 film being sold to a major distributor, the unwritten consensus is that films made for less than $1 million have a much harder chance of attracting attention from a buyer, because they were unable to afford the production values that movie-goers have come to expect. Since Sundance results in five or six high-profile theatrical distribution deals a year, each of whose film budgets are usually over $1 million, it has contributed to the paradigm of the "couple million" dollar independent film featuring stars who "work for scale."

As business deals go down day-by-day, gossip spreads among the after-hours parties about how much money this film or that film sold for and who was bidding. Filmmakers and their representatives become protective about information like how much their film actually cost to make. Our film was represented by a publicist and a kind of "sales agent." The sales agent was a young guy named Nguyen who told me that his job was to go to every film that had any buzz associated with it because that's where the buyers would be. He would attend the films and their after-parties and have a drink with buyers and drop our film's title into the conversation and make sure they knew when it was screening. It was wierd, but interesting, knowing that your team had this kind of operative working for it - a kind of viral marketing secret agent.

Indie filmmaking is kind of a catch-22. Like proud parents, filmmakers always want the best for their creations. Whether it be the best cinematographer, the best publicity, or the best theater to show the film in, it is always the best that money can buy. However, the concept of "indie" can be variously interpreted, as different budgets allow more or less material love to be lavished on a production. As the budgets and expenditures go up, whether the money came from a studio bank account or not, people often feel that the film becomes less of a true "independent" film, and more of a large-scale film that mimics the low-budget aesthetic or thematic content of a true independent.

I can understand why this might embitter the zero-budget DV filmmaker. At the same time, I don't think it has gotten any harder in recent years to complete small films and get them noticed than it ever was. John Cassavetes, considered by some to be a kind of godfather of American independent filmmaking, was already a successful Hollywood actor with connections and money before becoming known as a director of his own small, risk-taking films.

Although living in LA has given me a low threshold for glamour, there is a satisfaction to knowing that your product, and by extension your crew, is there on the showroom floor, sharing the spotlight with other known commodities. It's a distance marker, indicating that you may not have arrived yet, but you haven't broken down by the side of the road.

Although I ultimately did steer clear of the hype, it was not necessarily by force of will, but simply because by the last 3 days of the festival, most of the celebrity frenzy seemed to have quieted somewhat. Nevertheless, the streets, bars and shuttles were crowded with festival attendees, and each theater had crowds in front of it with people looking to buy tickets to sold out shows. Talking to fans outside of theaters or riding on the shuttles was a nice way to exchange notes or get film recommendations as well as get some background on what brought people out. Although a lot of attendees are connected to the film industry or to a particular film that has been programmed, many people are simply film enthusiasts on vacation, or people who make films of their own and volunteer at the festival. Every shuttle stop had a volunteer attendant who helped festival goers board the ride bus to get to their theaters. Many of them simply came out because they loved movies. Everyone who was approached for information was amenable to conversation and seemed curious to hear your thoughts or where you were from. I enjoyed being there with a film that brought a sense of internationalism to the table.

I finally got a link up to a photo album from the trip. Many of the best shots were taken by Pia or Santahn. You don't have to be a member to view. Just click "View Photos without Signing In."

iofilm review
Variety review
Film Threat review
Rotten Tomatoes review
Wire Image gallery 1
Wire Image gallery 2

Tomine Talks and Signs

2005-11-06T22:21:00.000-08:00

DISCUSSION / BOOK SIGNING - Nov. 5 - Skylight Books

I first saw Adrian Tomine's art at the GR2 gallery on Sawtelle. GR2 is one of Giant Robot's many storefront operations these days. Besides running interesting interviews with Japanese, Hong Kong or Korean filmmakers, Giant Robot succeeds, like any good art and culture magazine should, in occasionally turning my head slightly to catch something new on the passing cultural landscape.

That's exactly what happened when I walked into the Adrian Tomine show last summer. I saw a wall of 20-30 ink and watercolor panels that were as detailed in their capture of emotion as photography is, yet simplified in their high-contrast style of line drawing. They were like snapshots of people caught unobserved in mundane daily activity, whose faces revealed something about what they were thinking. Tomine struck me as an eavesdropping doodler, with a flare for capturing the expressions of people-in-passing. On some of Tomine's panels, he would scribble an impression or additional detail about the people he was spying on. "Deep in thought (or maybe just staring at his expensive-looking shoes," is written over a guy riding the train. "Making subtle facial reactions as one Wall Street guy explains to another his plan for 'scoring' with his ex-girlfriend when she comes to visit," reads the text beside a weary looking woman trapped between two jovial men.

I suppose the ostensible filmmaker in me appreciated the panels not only for their visual qualities, but for their stripped-down storytelling. Each one seemed like a micro-world of one or several characters, colored in their distraction or anxiety, with the past or future glazed into their eyes or reeking off their clothes.

I would have loved to walk out with one or more of these little ink panels, but each was attached to a price tag of $200-$400. Although I believe in "supporting the arts," I have never "owned art." Not the high-priced one-of-a-kind variety. So, bumbling around the store, I came across Optic Nerve - Tomine's comic book.

To anyone unfamiliar with the current state of comics, Optic Nerve might come as a complete departure from the expected. Super-heroes are still the driving force in that end of the publishing industry, but there has been a growing niche of illustrated fiction, autobiography and even journalism in comics that goes back at least 20 years to works like the Hernandez Bros.' Love and Rockets. Optic Nerve continues that tradition.

I am actually not well-versed in the existing body of comic literature out there. Having never been much of a comics reader as a kid, I did not naturally gravitate towards "adult comics." Many comics readers would mark the publication of Alan Moore's Watchmen and Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns as key moments in the evolution of "adult comics." Each put a post-modern spin on super-heroes, exploring real psychology, politics and graphic violence. They were not simple, innocent tales of heroism. The adult "superhero" that emerged in the following years was more often than not an "antihero," the protagonists and antagonists of these stories each had a moral yin and yang. The gradual over-arching trend which culminates in works like Optic Nerve shows a move away from mythic characters altogether.

Optic Nerve is mostly populated with people in their 20s, living in and around Oakland and Berkeley, who have unhappy or awkward relationships. It does not tell one continuous story, but is a collection of short vignettes that read like fleshed-out forays into the worlds of Tomine's ink drawings and watercolors. They're great short fiction, small slices of mood, with an authenticty that feels autobiographical. Initially I picked up Issue #1 as an affordable way to take home some of Tomine's drawings, but I found the stories, with their occasional cliff-hanger endings which emphasized mood over narrative, to be addictive. I have scooped up the remaining issues in print (Drawn and Quarterly is currently re-printing them all), but was surprised and frustrated to learn that there were only 9 issues in total. To add to my frustration, Issue 9 was the first of a serialized three-part story - a departure from the normal anthology format.

Optic Nerve seems to have been an on-going project for Tomine since his late teens, when he published it himself. Since he has been signed to publisher Drawn and Quarterly, issues have appeared as seldom as once a year. Doing all the writing and art himself, in addition to making a living with illustrations for mainstream magazines like the New Yorker, doubtless slows down production time. So I was enthused to hear that Issue #10 was soon to be on shelves and Tomine would be making the rounds doing in-store appearances.

The event drew a sizable crowd. There was some discussion on the settings in which comics now find themselves, which was interesting to ponder as I took in the faces of LA hipsters and literati - this was not Comic-Con. Tomine remarked that comic book art is out of context when hung on the walls of a gallery. The art is the book itself, he argued, the painting or drawing done to make it just a part of the process in creating that piece of art. After a lot of talk about whether or not the work was autobiographical or not and what sources served as influences, I felt that was the nugget of the evening. Art might be commerce, as Warhol argued, but you don't always need to be in the company of the trendy or the well-dressed, drinking shitty wine and receiving disapproving glances to appreciate it. For two or three bucks you can read it a few times and still have the author sign the worn cover.

Interview with Adrian Tomine
NY Times article on graphic novelists
Online gallery of Tomine art for sale

Must Be the Season of the Witch...

2005-10-31T00:03:00.000-08:00

FILM REVIEW - "SEASON OF THE WITCH" aka "JACK'S WIFE" (dir. George A. Romero - 1972)

Just in time for Halloween... I watched one of the lesser-known films from George Romero's oeuvre known variously as Season of the Witch, Jack's Wife or (best of all) Hungry Wives. I'm a fan of Romero's zombie films, for the outrageous gore and for the evolving social commentary that reflected the decades they were made in, so I was curious to see some of his earlier, more obscure work. Night of the Living Dead may be one of the most history-securing first films ever made - the Citizen Kane of zombie films - and surely for Romero it must have felt hard to top, since its success was largely serendipitous (a film whose subversive style and content was informed in part by its small budget). In fact, most of Romero's other films did not share Night's box-office success. Jack's Wife floats somewhere in that era of films made between Night and Dawn of the Dead, before he would become more widely recognized as an auteur, and/or as a commercial filmmaker. (Romero directed seven features before landing a deal to make Creepshow with a major Hollywood studio.)

Perhaps it is because of the success of Night that Romero was anxious about being pigeon-holed as a horror film director. One of the most interesting things about Jack's Wife is how it flirts with the horror genre without totally fulfilling on the thrills and chills of a horror movie. It employs a creepy soundtrack and shadowy imagery to tell the story of an ordinary housewife, trapped in a rigid suburban lifestyle. In tone it is similar to Romero's later film Martin, although the conventional shadows and spiderwebs seem to find their way even less into this film. Both films deal with a supernatural archetype, the witch and the vampire respectively, and tell their stories in contemporary settings where fangs are replaced by syringes and cabals are replaced by bridge parties. The same way Martin makes you doubt whether its main character is really a vampire or just a disturbed teenager, Jack's Wife delves much deeper into the anxieties and neuroses of suburban home-keepers than it does into the occult. I actually noticed that nearly an hour had passed until I finally saw the main character, Joan, crack open a book of spells. I was not frustrated by this genre subversion, but I imagine this did not help the film to find an audience. Supplemental content on the DVD explains that the film's distributor (the legendary pulp-king Jack Harris) had no idea how to market the movie, finally opting for a soft-core exploitation approach - a kind of early 70's forbear of the current TV hit "Desperate Housewives." It is easy to see why the distributor thought this would be the best way to go, since the film brims with sexual frustration. However, other than some minor nudity and sexual suggestiveness, there is not enough pay-off for potential audiences of a sexploitation flick.

The film's genre subversion begins with the opening titles - a strange dream sequence accompanied by eerie sound effects. The dream imagery is rife with symbolism, which along with the hair and costumes, refers strongly to the film's early 70's time period, when filmmakers, writers and students all freely quoted from the theories of Freud and Jung. The dream depicts a woman (our main character, Joan) following a suited man (her husband) through a forest of bare trees. He is oblivious to her, parting dead branches for himself and letting them slam backwards into her face. She subserviently fixes his coffee for him, which he takes without acknowledgment, and watches as he bites a hard-boiled egg. The dream communicates the woman's isolation vividly. The sequence is starkly expressionistic, recalling not specific films to my mind, but a familiar catalog of scary images from old black-and-white creature-features. (It's unfortunate to note here that the master this DVD was made from is horribly faded. Perhaps it is the de-saturated look of the print in addition to the autumnal setting that suggests a black-and-white palette. Mysteriously this version is also letter-boxed. The film was shot on 16mm and framed for 1.33.)

The dream sequence continues past the opening credits (of which there are three versions on the DVD - for each of the three attempts at marketing the film) to show Joan's husband slapping her in the face with a newspaper and then leading her to a large suburban home on a leash, where she is placed in a cage.

A clearly satiric tone begins to be established, remniscent of "The Stepford Wives," as Joan is given a tour of her home by a salesman-ish figure with a clipboard. Many faces are introduced that will later reappear in her waking life as significant characters and the tour showcases not just the rooms and the appliances but the "errand boy" (Greg, a local college professor with whom she later forms an adulterous relationship) and "the ladies" (the neighborhood gossip circle). "Don't forget to pay your bills," the man with the clipboard advises with a smile as a shriveled mummified-looking version of Joan stares back at her from the mirror.

As the dream ends, the film moves into the comfort of an advising psychoanalyst's office. Although the setting is meant to convey a sense of trust, the doctor's face is recognizable from the dream as one of Joan's captors. During this short scene, I noticed Joan had not yet uttered a single word of dialogue. The visual ideas of Joan's oppressed, silenced, and isolated state were accentuated by the absence of her own voice. However, despite the narrative's attempt to cast suspicion on the doctor, he reasons with Joan. "The only person imprisoning Joanie is Joanie," he advises. As viewers we are thus made distrustful of which narrative to believe - whether to sympathize with our protagonist's psychological perspective or believe the omniscient perspective of "realism" that we are being introduced to.

Witchcraft is introduced during conversation among wives at a cocktail party. Shirley, a neighborhood wife, begins to gossip that another neighbor, Marion, is a self-proclaimed witch. "Isn't that wild? I've got my next party all planned." The women giggle over visions of one of their own dancing naked and casting spells. However, curiosity has hooked Joan and her friend Shirley into paying the witch a visit. The scene in Marion's house does not have much menace to it, aside from some mildly creepy organ music on the soundtrack. Marion's den is adorned in the same shag carpeting as the other suburban interiors we've seen. The truth is, their witchy neighbor is nothing more than mildly kooky - a notion that Romero reinforces with the humorous sound effect of a chiming cuckoo clock. She comes off as more of a spiritual advisor, a consejera, offering a Tarot reading to Shirley which is less a prophecy of the future than an observation that "romantic love has failed," a verdict applicable to most of the neighborhood women. Shirley seems fascinated by the reading.

As it happens, the visit to the witch's house is framed by two rather revealing conversations between Shirley and Joan; the first in which Joan wonders aloud how many dissatisfied women actually commit adultery (to Shirley's shock), and the second, during their return, where Shirley reveals she has herself had a failed affair, and she seems emotionally worse for wear because of it.

The two women's views towards extramarital affairs and witchcraft differ in similar ways. Shirley is amused with witchcraft, viewing it as a kind of "therapy" or diversion, less dangerous than that which she has already tried. Joan is disgusted that it could be widely adopted by bored, dilettante housewives. "Sex without love" is a philosophical divide that separates Joan and Shirley. Deeply dissatisfied with her life, such that it plagues her subconsciousness, Joan takes the idea of a coven of women bonded and empowered by magic seriously.

Although minor characters, Joan's relationships to her family (husband Jack and daughter Nicki) provide valuable insights into her psychology. Nicki is a young adult, perhaps 18 - 20. She is old enough that her father Jack's idea of parenting her has dwindled to off-handedly advising her to "Try to stay a virgin," as he rips off his tie and storms through the house to prepare for the evening's cocktail party. The truth is that Jack, true to his depiction in Joan's dream, is minimally invested in his family's well-being. He sees it as his job to step forward only when he feels that Joan is somehow inadequate. When Jack discovers Nicki has had sex in the house while Joan was present, he places full responsibility on Joan, slapping her and proclaiming that more effective parenting could be enacted by "[-]kicking ass." It is the first time, outside of Joan's dreams, that we see Jack hit her, but the cumulative impression is that it may be a habit.

Joan's relationship with her husband is typified in dreams and waking life with his back turned toward her, or...

...his hand turned toward her.

In one conversation with Nicki, it is revealed that Joan suffered a miscarriage before Nicki's conception. This idea of a "lost child" resonates when Nicki herself runs away from home. It comes after Nicki discovers Joan has overheard her having sex with Greg and suggests that the bond between mother and daughter is strained by generational differences in attitude towards sex, drugs and lifestyle in general. In one exchange, she tells her mom, "You have a nice body." It illuminates her own sexual awareness and makes Joan self-conscious yet flattered, despite her anxiety regarding aging. It is also one of the first overt references the film makes to a woman's sexuality as a source of power.

The character of Greg becomes the largest male figure looming in Joan's life because he represents a freedom from the responsibilities that imprison her. On first meeting, he tricks Shirley into thinking she has smoked pot, which starts off as an innocent prank, or experiment in the "power of the mind." Shirley appears tragi-comic as she feigns intoxication, desperate in her bid to take part in something taboo. But the joke turns into an emotional psychoanalysis session in which Shirley, in a semi-hysterical state, confesses her deepest anxieties about growing old. This cruel experiment reveals Greg's underlying egocentrism, an aggressive confidence in his worldview, which Joan sees and disapproves of.

When Joan returns from escorting Shirley home and overhears Nicki and Greg having sex, she is unsure of how to respond. She tiptoes into her room and thrashes about as the sound of thunder and flashes of lighting are used to accentuate her frustration. It is a mildly comical editing device which re-focuses the sights and sounds of horror's "dark and stormy night" on the sexual frustrations of a woman in her 40's.

Nicki discovers Joan has been listening.

As Jack heads off for another business trip, Joan decides to visit Greg's classroom, although she again feels shocked and ashamed when exposed to his candor regarding sex. He mocks her unapologetically for coming onto his turf with a feigned aura of naivete. She leaves in a huff, but is unable to turn away from her own needs as easily. Perhaps it is Joan's shame, or morals, that separate her from women like Shirley, who would not agonize over a decision like whether to have an affair. Greg tells her freely, "I'm available." But Joan cannot concede to a cocky, arrogant kid.

Still, Greg charms her. He contains danger and bravado, but he is like Joan and her neighbors, a product of suburbia. He is clean-cut enough to play the role of Nicki's college boyfriend and dangerous enough to be tempting to Joan. Jack's Wife was made 5 years after the Graduate, but Joan bears no resemblance to Mrs. Robinson, nor Greg to Benjamin other than in the incestuous love triangle that develops. If anything, there's almost a reversal of the roles of The Graduate, where Joan is the one seeking some kind of life fulfillment that neither sex nor stability can provide.

It is her need to feel in control that draws her to witchcraft. She commits herself to the practice in the hope that it will reward her piety with power. Joan has not just been at the mercy of men, but of the changing values of society in general. Having achieved the highest ideal of her upbringing, Joan finds herself feeling unrewarded and out of place with the changing social mores sweeping through the culture.

When Joan finally employs the power of the occult to lure Greg into her charms, nothing actually happens. She sits before her candles, waiting for him to arrive in some kind of love-spell stupor, until finally giving in to more practical means. Modern technology, in the form of the telephone, proves a more reliable method of bringing Greg to her husbandless house. While they are together, Greg cautions Joan to understand what is happening. But it becomes increasingly apparent, as Joan returns to visit Marion, that she is losing touch with reality.

Romero's Mrs. Robinson.

"I've caused things to happen," she says, believing that her witchcraft, and not her local phone carrier, was the method by which she contacted Greg. "Fear is necessary to believe," the witch tells Joan. And Joan is hounded by fear. It is her loneliness turned into insecurity, which gradually becomes paranoia. Her nightmares evolve to depict her trapped in her house while an intruder breaks in. The intruder could be seen variously as Greg's confident and threatening sexuality, or her flirtation with the unknown power of witchcraft - for even though witchcraft is her tool of control, it also represents her breaking away from her traditional code of values. Ironically, as the fear within her builds, she confesses her practice of magic to Greg, who begins to see echoes of Shirley in Joan. To him she is another tragic unloved housewife, driven mad by her neurotic inability to accept responsibility for her desires.

In the film's climax, Jack returns at night from a business trip and meets his fate at the wrong end of a shotgun as he comes through the door. Joan's nightmares of an intruder have fatally taken shape in reality, as she plunges into her occult-inspired fantasy of free-will. Jack's death is inter-cut with Joan being ceremoniously inducted into a coven of witches. The final scene brings the film full-circle to yet another cocktail party where Joan is the subject of gossip. "It was terrible when it happened... but now I must admit I'm just a bit envious," chats one wife to another. The comments that echo throughout the party clash with those of the police officers heard over the preceding images of Jack's death. "Whether she's lying or not, she'll get away with it. Goddamn women get it all from us in the end. They get everything." In a grand guignol fait accompli worthy of Roald Dahl, Joan has emerged victorious, conquering her nightmares, overcoming her oppression, seemingly defying even age itself. "I can't get over how young you look," she is told by another admiring housewife.

Although it all wraps up rather pat, I can willingly excuse whatever narrative gaps Romero may have left in the superficial elements of the plotting for the stylistic and thematic tidbits he has stewed together (whatever did happen to daughter Nicki?). As I have maintained, although this film uses the language of the horror genre, its true subject matter is harder to classify. The NY Times described it as a Psychological Drama/Feminist Film, but I have mulled over whether it can truly be defined as "feminist." Certainly having a female protagonist is enough to make it uncommon amongst most American narrative films, and the voice of all of the female characters consistently speak toward their dissatisfaction in the traditional married wife roles. However, this is a film made by a man which still contains the fears and insecurities of men toward women. Therefore is it feminist or, like Fellini's Città Delle Donne, is it about fear of feminism? Romero's original title for the film was Jack's Wife, which I appreciate for its irony, since it is consistent with Joan's conflict of being identified only by her social status. Although Jack's wife's assertion of her own identity involves murdering her husband, women after the feminist era have not found the Y-chromosome irrelevant. However, to males encountering radical feminism for the first time in the early 1970s it must have seemed they would. With all of the turmoil on the streets from the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam war protests, and the assassinations of prominent leaders, the prospect of unrest within the home, and within the bedroom, must have seemed like the stuff of nightmares indeed.

Although Romero himself has claimed that this film was a failure, I would recommend it. It may not be his finest hour, but it stands in the shadows of his more famous "Dead" series as a clever overlooked gem with good ideas and moments that are more reminiscent of Cassavetes' Faces than some of Romero's later (and lesser) work in the horror genre.

The Wonderful World of DVD-R Bootlegging on the Web

2005-10-09T10:56:00.000-07:00

After reading a recent article in the LA Weekly, my attention was turned to several internet sites that offer obscure films for sale on DVD-R. Actually, to say that these films are obscure is an understatement. Although some of the films available for sale are recognized genre classics such as Jacques Tourneur's "I Walked with a Zombie," (which until recently was simply unavailable on "legitimate" DVD) others are unknown or long-forgotten titles which will never be distributed in the US.

A trip to a site like 5 Minutes to Live will introduce you to film genres you never even knew existed, such as Nunsploitation (soft-core plots set in convents), Bruceploitation (films which claim to star Bruce Lee, but which were released after his death) or Turkish Remake Cinema - a category of films made in Turkey that loosely remake Hollywood blockbusters. Titles include Turkish Star Wars, Turkish Exorcist and Turkish Young Frankenstein ! (All films in Turkish, with no English subtitles).

Turkish Darth Vader?

"Bruce Lee" with Asian Popeye in "The Dragon Lives Again."
The film is dubbed into English and is subtitled in German !

The sites vary in content and presentation - some providing detailed descriptions of the films and the quality of audio and video, while others (like Robert's Hard to Find Videos) give only a line-listing of titles and prices. Each of these resellers is essentially a collector, and many of them are willing to accept trades of titles not yet in their catalog. Often, the titles are created with a standalone DVD-R recorder, with no perks or menus whatsoever, however the folks at Super Happy Fun recruit multi-lingual people to subtitle their DVDs ! Anyone fluent in another language with patience and a passion for cinema can enlist with them to create subtitles for DVD-R titles in trade.
While most of the DVD-R titles are mastered from horrible VHS copies with frame drop-outs, bad tracking, atrocious color and cavernous sound - some of these titles actually reflect a high level of care in their preparation.

Super Happy Fun stocks a title called "Superman 2 - Restored International Cut" which compiles all the known extant and accessible footage from the 1980 film "Superman 2" (culled from international broadcasts and collected from fans around the world). It is split onto 2 DVD-Rs and comes with a load of extra features, such as the out-of-print Superman 2 soundtrack score, original artwork and DVD menus, an on-screen subtitle guide with production information, a gallery of unpublished promotional stills, and a demonstration of the extensive video restoration work that was done on the footage to make it look more presentable. There is a lot of background information on the film's missing footage on the DVD-Rs, which has also been obsessively detailed on the fansite Superman Cinema. Granted, most of the "missing footage" consists of extraneous dialogue or endless 2nd unit sequences of extras enjoying Niagara Falls, so this is not the version of the film you would use to introduce kids to the Superman movie franchise. (It runs over 2 hours and yes, you notice the time going by). However, for fans who were always dying to see General Zod pick up a machine gun and fire it at soldiers in the White House, or for any cinephile curious about the story of how a major blockbuster film got all mangled up in studio red-tape and contract disputes, this DVD-R is a great piece of film history.
Who in the world would spend so much time and effort creating things like this?
Who in the world would waste so much time watching stuff like this?

Gen. Zod lobbies Washington in "missing footage" from Superman 2.

I was ecstatic to have found that there are people committed to sifting through images and collecting, compiling, categorizing and calling attention to them. I am eagerly awaiting delivery of my DVD-R copy of the 5-and-a-half hour workprint version of "Apocalypse Now." And I would definately recommend the "Lost and Found Video" series at 5 Minutes to Live. These are video grab-bags, around 90 minutes in length of select clips of recorded TV. The collection I saw contained a live performace by Funkadelic on an Ed Sullivan-type variety show as well as odd foreign commercials, highlights from televangelist shows and a Tracy Lords workout video.
Bad taste has never had a better home.

(clockwise from top left) A TV evangelist with a remedy for clear skin; the Fabulous Freebird tag team wrestlers; William Shatner's famed "Rocketman" spoken word performance; Barney and Fred relax with Winston ... Tastes good, the way a cigarette should ! (From Lost and Found Video Night Vol. 2 - 5 Minutes to Live)

5 Minutes to Live
Superhappyfun
Subterranean Cinema
Superhappyfun
Revenge Is My Destiny
Pimpadelic Wonderland
Gravedigger Video
Witching Hour Video
Robert's Hard to Find Videos

Trailer for "Premeditation"

2005-10-07T19:48:00.000-07:00

This was a short film I edited for Alberto Barboza, a friend from UCLA Film school. It was completed awhile ago, but I thought I'd include the trailer here for posterity. It was nice to cut a narrative project - it was really my first one, besides my own student projects. It was fun to cut something with a talented actor in it - Sal Lopez.
The film played in Havana Cuba and picked up an award at the LA International Latino Film Festival, which led to it being aired on Showtime.
Showtime supplied funding for an additional short film which was just recently completed titled "The Invitation."

Half Dome Hike

2005-09-27T17:51:00.000-07:00

Click photo to enlarge

Just returned to work after a calf-brutalizing hike to the top of Half Dome in Yosemite National Park. Santahn took me seriously and actually put this trip together. His friend Chad found last-minute reservations for cabins in Curry Village on craigslist. We set out hiking on Saturday about 5:30am and did not return till after 9pm. It's about a 16 mile hike roundtrip.
The last stretch of the hike is a cable climb up a near-vertical stretch of rock. Going up, someone spilled water making the rock extra slippery. A woman almost slipped away. Three guys grabbed her. We stood for long stretches, clinging to to the cable in a kind of mountain traffic jam.
The top is a bit windy and the landscape looks like the moon.
Coming down, the water bottle in the side pocket of my backpack got caught in the cable and tumbled away down the mountain. Not having water made the remaining 5 hours of the hike a bit hallucinatory. We were all out of fluids and had to resort to splitting an orange four ways. I ate the peel.
But at least we had lights. After about 3 miles on the return trip down the mountain we lost the sun. As we made our way down we came upon several groups of people who either had no lights at all, or had them but could not find the trail. Those who had no lights were simply sitting beside the trail in the dark, waiting for people with lights to come along !
Our group grew to about 20 people... a long line of tiny lights snaking its way down a wooded mountain trail... like elves.
The prevailing sentiment seemed to be "amen" as large quantities of pizza and beer were consumed after our safe arrival back to Curry Village.
Click here to see a slideshow. (You don't need to be a registered user of Kodak Easy Share...)

UPDATED

2005-09-27T08:14:00.000-07:00

I am converting this site over to a blog so I'll be able to add posts and new info easier. Should be able to add text and photos directly through the web now. We'll see how well it works...