I couldn't sleep last night so I read the latest Sirenia Digest, which didn't help me sleep but was pretty good. It contains a new short story from Caitlin R. Kiernan called "Terra Mater (Dissolve)". In her prolegomenon, Caitlin includes a quote from herself in which she talks about the stories for the digest being "dreamlike". The new story fits that bill especially well, consisting of two women voyaging through some kind of dark underworld. The sense of living myth mixes well with Caitlin's talent for credible dialogue.
Like a lot of people lately, particularly writers and artists, Caitlin has been struggling financially. If you've enjoyed her work, or hope to some day in the future when you get a chance to read it, I recommend visiting her GoFundMe and donating.
The year's not been kind to me financially so far, either. By the way, if you ever decide to cancel your subscription to Amazon Prime, be prepared to put in some labour and creative thinking. I had two Amazon Prime subscriptions, one for American Amazon Prime and one for Japanese Amazon Prime. Japanese Amazon Prime is much cheaper, only about five dollars a month, and I can order products from all over the world on it. So there was no point in me paying 149 dollars a year for the American version. I went to the subscription page and clicked the end subscription button and the note on it changed to say my subscription would end on April 18. I thought it was settled. But about a week later I found I still had that subscription and I'd been charged 149 dollars. A little quick googling turned up this article which reveals the FTC claims Amazon Prime has been actively sabotaging customer attempts to cancel their subscriptions.
I went back to my subscription page and tried to cancel again and discovered Amazon is willing to refund me the money it charged me against my wishes on the 18th. It's supposed to take three to five days to come through for some reason. We'll see if they're good as their word this time. Does it seem to you various services are getting more and more crooked?
A wealthy businessman is murdered and it somehow involves boutique prostitutes and a whole lot of ornate decor in 1995's Jade. It's not a boring movie. I quite enjoyed it though, apart from a terrific car chase, I suspect the film's appeal lies more in campiness than its filmmakers intended.
Director William Friedkin was really proud of this movie but he seems to be in the minority. Michael Biehn, who had a supporting role, called the screenplay by Joe Eszterhas "a mess". Eszterhas was so upset by the extent of the changes Friedkin made to the story that he almost had his name taken off of the film.
The cast is entirely c list, headed by David Caruso as a detective investigating the murder and Linda Fiorentino as a psychologist who has a secret life as the sexually adventurous "Jade". If I had to pick one, I'd say Fiorentino's casting is the primary flaw in this deeply flawed film. She's meant to be playing an intensely seductive, sexually voracious mystery woman. Fiorentino was unwilling to be naked, necessitating the copious, obvious use of body doubles. She was unwilling to even take the role until it was made clear that her character was not a prostitute. Fiorentino, with her monotone delivery, is about as alluring as an iron ingot.
The film is set in San Francisco, a location famed for its car chases in various films. There's a scene in this one in which Caruso's brakes have been cut and he's forced to try to control his car as it goes down the city's famous hillside roads. 1951's House on Telegraph Hill, which I watched recently, has almost exactly the same scene.
Then there's a fantastic car chase in which Friedkin seems to be trying to outdo Bullitt. He doesn't accomplish that but it's a damned impressive sequence, starting with Angie Everhart convincingly being hit by a Ford Thunderbird. Caruso pursues the car down those wavy streets, down grassy hillsides, through a Chinatown parade, and finally out at the docks. There's some incredible stuntwork.
The film ends oddly abruptly with the reveal of a secondary villain. We're left knowing Caruso has one clue to this villain's identity but the film, I guess, decides we don't need to know if he ultimately succeeds in his investigation.
The film's score is by James Horner but you don't hear much of Horner's work. Mostly you hear Loreena McKennitt's "Mystic's Dream" over and over. One long sequence just uses Igor Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring".
Jade is available on The Criterion Channel.
X Sonnet #1839
Suspicious choices tripped the tightened string.
Alarms were hid within the violin.
Assembled cops commenced to end a sting.
Disarmed, the thugs subside to ride a tide.
Corrosive jobs in conscience make a crow.
Embittered prey conveyed the way ahead.
Aggressive blades obeisance made below.
Determined wolves know hooves behoove the dead.
Tenacious cars debarred heroic men.
Confusing plots were thought the blot of art.
Ambitious dames defamed angelic sin.
Barbaric broads applaud the oddly tart.
Renewing fires tries the blighted pan.
Recumbent dusk has crushed the lusty ram.
It seems everyone's talking about 1995's Heat lately (probably because the studio's trying to generate buzz ahead of the sequel) and there it was on The Criterion Channel. So I watched it for the first time in nearly thirty years. I like it a lot more now. It's a movie for older viewers.
It's very cool. Elliot Goldenthal's score veers between subtle electronic atmosphere and rock n' roll pulse. Mann had a reputation for music from Miami Vice so that played into it, I think. The whole film's filled with the anxiety of being perched on the edge of destruction, or being just around the corner from "the heat" as De Niro's recurring line has it.
All the promotion at the time was about De Niro and Pacino but their performances aren't particularly interesting. Not that they're bad. Even Pacino, who'd already lost the subtlety that distinguished him early on, is not strictly bad with his bombast. I can believe a weathered L.A. detective is like that. Watching it last night, I didn't remember much about my viewing approximately three decades ago, but when Pacino entered a warehouse with his men I knew something about the scene involved Pacino shouting, "Great ass!" So it's certainly a memorable performance.
De Niro isn't so different from his character in Goodfellas but, frankly, without the complexity. I don't think he phoned in any role at that stage in his career but this was probably the closest he got to it. It's nowhere near as interesting as what he did in Cape Fear and Jackie Brown. But that's fine. Coolness is this movie's excellent vibe and De Niro's plain performance works perfectly for that.
I was more surprised by what an amazing supporting cast it has. In main roles there are Val Kilmer, Tom Sizemore, Natalie Portman, and Ashley Judd. But the film also has Danny Trejo, John Voight, Henry Rollins, Jeremy Piven, and Hank Azaria. That's a party.
That legendary action sequence, when the heist goes wrong and there's a gunfight in the street, is still exemplary. The sound design and editing are fantastic. You feel the pervading terror of what's happening like few other scenes of its kind in other movies. It's still an amazing film.
Demons have been on my mind a lot lately. I've gone back to reading Carl Sagan's Demon Haunted World again. I'd been reading Saint Augustine's City of God and some time ago I got to a portion in which Augustine wrote about demons. Of course, Augustine wrote under the premise that demons were really malevolent entities while Sagan invokes the term as a symbol for intellectual processes gone compulsively astray. Yet the effect is not so different; the nature of the cause may be different but both men caution the reader against the same effects. Sagan's book has this wonderful quote from Francis Bacon's 1620 work Novum Organon:
The human understanding is no dry light, but receives infusion from the will and affections; whence proceed sciences which may be called "sciences as one would." For what a man had rather were true he more readily believes. Therefore he rejects difficult things from impatience of research; sober things, because they narrow hope; the deeper things of nature, from superstition; the light of experience, from arrogance and pride; things not commonly believed, out of deference to the opinion of the vulgar [in Bacon's time, "the vulgar" referred to the common, majority of the people]. Numberless in short are the ways, and sometimes imperceptible, in which the affections colour and infect the understanding.
It's prettier hearing Augustine talk about such things as demons, though, as false mediators between God and humans.
There's so much in City of God that I recognise in the rhetoric of Christians I've heard all my life, in some ways more than the bible itself. It really speaks to how Augustine shaped the religion as we know it.
In talking about the faults of religion, Carl Sagan mentions the Holy Trinity as a tellingly confused concept. Augustine spends quite a lot of time explaining the Trinity, at one point talking about how the Trinity is plainly reflected in human nature. I was impressed by one particularly complicated line of thought:
For we both are, and know that we are, and delight in our being, and our knowledge of it. Moreover, in these three things no true-seeming illusion disturbs us; for we do not come into contact with these by some bodily sense, as we perceive the things outside of us--colours, e.g., by seeing, sounds by hearing, smells by smelling, tastes by tasting, hard and soft objects by touching--of all which sensible objects it is the images resembling them, but not themselves which we perceive in the mind and hold in the memory, and which excite us to desire the objects. But, without any delusive representation of images or phantasms, I am most certain that I am, and that I know and delight in this. In respect of these truths, I am not at all afraid of the arguments of the Academicians, who say What if you are deceived? For if I am deceived, I am. For he who is not, cannot be deceived; and if I am deceived, by this same token I am. And since I am if I am deceived, how am I deceived in believing that I am? for it is certain that I am if I am deceived. Since, therefore, I, the person deceived, should be, even if I were deceived, certainly I am not deceived in this knowledge that I am. And, consequently, neither am I deceived in knowing that I know. For, as I know that I am, so I know this also, that I know. And when I love these two things, I add to them a certain third thing, namely, my love, which is of equal moment. For neither am I deceived in this, that I love, since in those things which I love I am not deceived; though even if these were false, it would still be true that I loved false things. For how could I justly be blamed and prohibited from loving false things, if it were false that I loved them? But, since they are true and real, who doubts that when they are loved, the love of them is itself true and real? Further, as there is no one who does not wish to be happy, so there is no one who does not wish to be. For how can he be happy, if he is nothing?
Augustine addresses suicide later in the book but putting aside whether he's right or wrong about people always wanting to be happy or alive, there's also a problem with the certainty of love, as it's certainly possible for a person's affections to be manipulated chemically. He was aware of this and elsewhere he takes time to talk about the distinction between will and passion.
The insight into human nature is considerable and Carl Sagan acknowledges the power of religious stories and myths to relate such things. Sagan also has a quote from Bertrand Russell: "Insight, untested and unsupported, is an insufficient guarantee of truth."
Speaking of Bertrand Russell quotes, recently the famous former Muslim converted to atheism, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, has recently written an article announcing her conversion to Christianity called "Why I am now a Christian", in reference to Russell's "Why I am not a Christian". She talks about the influence Russell had on her initially becoming an atheist but the gist of her justification for her more recent conversion is that the human mind cannot effectively cope without the bedrock of some formally organised moral belief system. She also quotes G.K. Chesterton "When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything." This seems similar to what Augustine says about the dangers of demons leading the mind astray.
So it's not like she had an epiphany, some sudden awareness of God's existence and the veracity of scripture. It's similar to what Jordan Peterson once said when asked if he believed in God: that he behaves as though he does. Can this sort of conscious double think really be useful? Carl Sagan had a quote from Thomas Paine on the matter:
Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what one does not believe. It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.
Of course, Hirsi Ali and Peterson are being somewhat honest about the dissonance. Does that make it better? Sagan acknowledges Christianity was the origin of many of the tools of rational thought that characterise science:
On one level, they share similar and consonant roles, and each needs the other. Open and vigorous debate, even the consecration of doubt, is a Christian tradition going back to John Milton's Areopagitica (1644). Some of mainstream Christianity and Judaism embraces and even anticipated at least a portion of the humility, self-criticism, reasoned debate, and questioning of received wisdom that the best of science offers.
Maybe this new conscious application of Christian belief will work, I won't claim to have the wisdom to say. It seems like it would be cold comfort to most people, though, for whom comfort is a primary function of religion.
I suspect there's a very complicated equation written on a white board somewhere at Disney HQ explaining why we should like 2023's Wish. One thing's for sure, the film's writers and directors tried very, very hard to make this movie, celebrating 100 years of Walt Disney Studios, the best possible. Their failure, creatively and commercially, is tragic. I can only hope it will serve as an edifying example of why an artist shouldn't put analysis before expression. I know it won't but I can hope. Or wish.
And, boy howdy, was it a failure. Let's marvel at that a moment. It was projected to make between 45 and 50 million on its opening weekend and instead made only 31.7 million. It only went down from there. Variety called it a "cataclysmic disaster".
Sometimes, good movies do poorly at the box office. Sometimes bad movies do very well. This was a bad movie that performed badly. Like so many bad movies, it seems like its chief flaws ought to have been obvious. Its confusing premise about a wicked king who accepts the wishes of his subjects, volunteered for safe keeping, is right away something that's going to be hard to explain, particularly to the film's target audience, children. I tried to imagine a mother trying to help her kid with it.
KID: What is the bad man doing, Mommy?
MOM: He's stealing their wishes.
KID: What's a wish?
MOM: You know when you want something very much?
KID: Like an iPhone?
MOM: No, no. Like something really important. Remember when you told me you wanted to be a singer?
KID: *struggles* The bad man takes Asha's voice, like Ursula?
MOM: No, no. He takes your desire to be a singer.
KID: What's desire, Mommy?
MOM: Well--it's--well. You'll understand when you're older.
KID: Can we go home now?
The film makes a lot of references to the whole of the Disney canon but there's particular attention to "When You Wish Upon a Star". It's worth remembering how clearly that functioned in Pinocchio. Geppeto wanted a little boy, Pinocchio wanted to be a real boy. The audience didn't need to take a literary analysis course to appreciate it. "Wish" comes off so much as a lousy college essay that the first laugh it got out of me was when the bullshit culminated in a song called "I'm a Star". These are actual lyrics:
Here's a little fun allegory
That gets me excitatory
This might sink in in the morning
We are our own origin story
If I'm explaining this poorly
Well I'll let star do it for me
It's all quite revelatory
We are our own origin story
I tried contemplating what it would mean if we weren't our own origin stories. Do the lyrics mean the alternative is to think that we're only supporting characters in another person's origin story? A funny thing to condemn in a movie filled with supporting characters.
The main problem with all this gobbledygook is to render character motivations utterly meaningless. It's not clear why the citizens of Rosa decided to participate in this scheme to begin with, it's not clear why they suddenly change their minds about it, it's not clear if people are able to formulate new wishes, or if people really did have dangerous (for example, murderous) wishes the king really was keeping for the public safety. I think there was some idea of this being a dystopian tale along the lines of Brave New World or 1984, one in which suppressing ambition has disastrous consequences. But the king doesn't take people's wishes until they turn 18, leaving lots of time for ambitions to accrue.
Anyway. I think it's abundantly clear it's time for Jennifer Lee to retire. The art design is really pretty, though, and I liked the purple and green palette.
Wish is available on Disney+.
X Sonnet #1838
The summoned actor stalked the shady stage.
"And where's a mark?" he asked the glaring ghost.
The shaky spectre crushed a puck in rage.
Above, the script descends to coat the host.
A pair of nervous legs traverse the dark.
A human mountain breathes across the night.
Romantic dreams began as child's lark.
What starts as shade becomes a blinding light.
A chandelier becomes a billion suns.
The wretched truth was inked throughout the sky.
As black as coffee, death invests the guns.
Demise was writ behind the spirit's lie.
The lovely pictures change to tiny dots.
Desires change to foggy math and thoughts.
I'd forgotten how much Ally McBeal was about looks, at least in it's first season. It's like David E. Kelley felt he had to present a lawyer's argument about why he was making a show about a pretty lady. In episode six, "The Promise", Ally is forced to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to an obese lawyer, saving his life. A side effect is that he falls in love with her.
Ally's roommate, Rene, like many token black characters before and after her, is so far there just to be the show's moral centre. She chastises Ally for turning the guy down, insisting it was a decision based on looks (Ally never asks Rene if she'd date someone overweight). Ally has a good defense--she'd met the guy's fiancee, who thanked Ally for saving his life, just a few days before their wedding. Of course Ally doesn't want to date him. But under Rene's questioning, Ally clearly seems to realise this is only a convenient excuse.
This kind of topic was somewhat taboo in the early '90s, it's really taboo to-day, in which the current PC creed holds that everyone is equally beautiful, one of those party lines that feels like a willful denial of the reality in which Sydney Sweeney recently became a sensation.
The episode ends somewhat ambiguously. Of course Ally doesn't date him but we're left to wonder if, by choosing his obese fiancee, he's settling for the best he can get, giving up on his dreams of true romance. While I dislike the PC dread of acknowledging beauty, I think presenting the failure to attain romantic fulfillment as intrinsically tied to looks is not satisfying. There are plenty of unhappy couples of two attractive people. Maybe the real anachronism of the episode is that it betrays a belief in being able to find and pursue true love. The guy's attraction to Ally is based on the fact that she "kissed" him to save his life. That's sweet and poetic, but actually tells him very little about her personality, her hopes and aspirations. I think it's fair enough grounds to want to go out with someone, but not to conclude that this person is the love of one's life.
Ally McBeal presents an American culture with a much greater prevalence of economic stability than is experienced by the vast majority of Americans to-day. Many people are newly discovering the very old consideration for marriage, the economic one. A show like Ally McBeal is quite darling now.
I remember there was a lot of controversy outside the show, too. Calista Flockhart got a lot of flack for being too skinny so I guess it cuts both ways.
"Bright Eyes", last night's new X-Men'97, was pretty good, despite not being written by Beau DeMayo. Instead, the teleplay comes from Charley Feldman and JB Ballard--not JG Ballard, as Google will suppose you mean when you try to google him. JB Ballard doesn't have enough writing credits to be noticed by Google and once again Disney shows their propensity for preferring cheap writers over experienced writers. If they don't have AI working on scripts now, you know they want it so bad. Anyway, it was a decent episode.
Rogue tearing up a military base gave us some satisfying action and a seeming reference to Gunbuster's "Inazuma kick".
I enjoyed that.
This comes with a cameo by Thaddeus Ross, still sounding more like the late William Hurt than Harrison Ford (it's neither of those actors, though). But the big cameo comes later in the form of Captain America himself, who doesn't approve of Rogue going . . . rogue. That was fun. All of the plotting was satisfying, everything clicked.
I really liked Rogue killing Trask and Wolverine giving his seal of approval only for Trask to pop back up as a superzombie, like a physical manifestation of moral consequences. That adds a great extra layer of tension.
This is from a 1992 episode of The Simpsons, "Colonel Homer", which I watched last night. I love how the song, which was written for the episode by the voice actress, Beverly D'Angelo, strips all nuance and complexity from the experience of a companionable song. It would be absurdly simplistic for most of us, but Homer matches its absurdity. Here's one of the reasons The Simpsons used to be magical. We laugh at Homer but it's a laughter that comes as we're forced to acknowledge we know exactly why he reacts as he does. By presenting a simplified equation, it holds a mirror to the valuable experience we've all had at one time or another, when we connected with a piece of art because it somehow seems to understand us better than any friend or acquaintance.
The episode proceeds to be a parody of Coal Miner's Daughter and various other stories about troubled rises to fame. Homer is positioned as the corrupt manager, modelled on Elvis Presley's Colonel Tom Parker, but it's clear from beginning to end that he has no conscious idea of exploiting Lurleen. He's motivated by the power her song had over him and the desire to see her succeed. Again, his simple-heartedness is both funny and kind of beautiful.
This is the only episode of the entire series to be written solely by series creator Matt Groening.
The Simpsons is available on Disney+.
X Sonnet #1837
A phantom's wrists were tied behind a post.
A picture moved across the darkened room.
Between the candles, smoke revealed a ghost.
A voice remained beyond the day of doom.
Reflective tea would spread distrustful dreams.
Some figures stagger up the jagged beach.
A thousand miles down some hazy beams.
An ancient skull suggests a faltered reach.
A banshee born at dusk conceives a song.
A simple tune beguiles simple souls.
A burning building steers the driver wrong.
A mirror beer was warmed by freezing coals.
The final lizard dropped an ancient curse.
Decrepit hearts have dreamed of something worse.
It was my birthday a couple weeks ago (April 11) and I celebrated by drinking whiskey and watching Chimes at Midnight, or, more accurately, falling asleep during it, around two thirds through. Now that I'm apparently someone who dozes off easily, there are some movies I think particularly suited for it. Chimes at Midnight is one, Blade Runner is another, I watched that on Sunday. It's just the hour, between 9pm and 10pm, somehow this seems to be prime doze off time. Often I then find myself perfectly able to stay up as long as I like once I've gotten past 10pm. So, yes, Master Shallow, I have heard the chimes at midnight.
Orson Welles constructed a pretty good digest of Falstaff's story from Henry IV, parts 1 and 2. There's nothing you miss, nothing that feels extraneous. Falstaff's story is intrinsically tied to Hal and the King and they both have plenty of their dialogue from the plays. Henry IV's death scene, in which Hal takes the crown prematurely, is all there so you understand the depths of Hal's feeling of debt to his father. This is necessary to show the tension in Hal's choice between the two father figures, which is also the choice between whether he's going to be a responsible, moral leader, like Henry IV, or a man given to sloth and debauchery, like Falstaff.
I often think Shakespeare didn't intend Falstaff to be such a great character. I think he was really just meant to be the devil on Hal's shoulder. But in giving him depth and genuine charm, Shakespeare ended up making one of his most believably human characters. I saw an interview with Orson Welles in the 1960s (Chimes at Midnight came out in '66) in which he likened Falstaff to a "Flower Child". He really isn't, and this is clear enough in Welles' own film. He's a robber and he takes bribes. His great speech about how honour can't mend wounds is both genuinely thoughtful and genuinely cowardly. I mean, what's Henry IV supposed to do, just let Hotspur take over the country? It's possible Henry IV shares some blame for being too harsh with Hotspur but it's a deliberately ambiguous point.
But no-one wants grievous injury. Everyone "would it were bed time and all well" instead of being forced to take part in deadly battle. We'd all like to take our ease in our inn. So Falstaff is naturally easier to identify with, even if it might be hard for some of us to admit. Which is of course what makes the central moral conflict of the two plays so perfect.
Over the weekend, I tried some recent, western produced TV series about Japan, Shogun on Disney+/Hulu, and Tokyo Vice on Max (though it's included on Amazon Prime in Japan). I enjoyed both for different reasons. Shogun is a satisfying adventure story while Tokyo Vice is an insightful procedural.
I never watched the old Shogun miniseries with Mifune Toshiro. This new one, like that one, is based on the novel by James Clavell. American couple Justin Marks and Rachel Kondo serve as creators of the new series which was shot in Vancouver, with the exception of a couple of establishing shots in Japan. It stars Hiroyuki Sanada, whom you might remember from the recent John Wick movie. I think he's replaced Ken Watanabe as the biggest Japanese star in Hollywood. The series is mainly told, though, through the point of view of an Englishman called John Blackthorne who came to Japan on a Dutch ship, hoping to unseat the Catholic Portuguese monopoly on trade with Japan. This has a lot of basis in history and Blackstone is loosely based on an English navigator called William Adams.
Tonally, the series is clearly aiming for something along the lines of Game of Thrones and it succeeds with a lot of tough-as-nails dialogue, though some of it is anachronistic, as when noblewoman Toda Mariko (Anna Sawai) suggests to a Catholic priest that he'll find Christ up his own ass. Japanese feminine modesty is sacrificed to the familiar Hollywood cause of trashing Catholics. Not to say Catholics are particularly popular in Japan (I recommend this lecture on the topic).
The first episode of Tokyo Vice was directed by Michael Mann, was shot in Tokyo, and is based on the memoir by Jake Adelstein, an American journalist who was the first foreigner to work at a major Japanese newspaper. The book had enough of an air of authenticity in its coverage of organised crime in Japan that it has never been able to find a Japanese publisher. Mann's assured style seamlessly brings you into a world of casual corruption and routine journalistic capitulation. Shadows and neon halos conjure crime scenes and strip clubs, illuminating a jaded detective who matter-of-factly tells the protagonist "there is no murder in Tokyo." Ansel Elgort stars as Adelstein and I found him a lot more effective than he was in The Fault in Our Stars. I'll have to see how effective the show is in episodes not directed by Michael Mann but so far I'm impressed.
Yesterday would've been really unpleasant except I was obliged to walk for several hours. Yes, I like walking that much. It was a long walk for a smart phone. I had to get a new smart phone. When I came to Japan in 2020, I bought an iPhone 5 for just 5000 yen, or about thirty two dollars. The Japanese generally dislike old technology so it's easy to find old phones and appliances at various used stores such as Hard Off. I hate smart phones so the fact that the iPhone 5 could make and receive calls made it perfectly adequate for me. But then last week I discovered it no longer makes or receives calls.
Apparently my service provider, Softbank, discontinued use of "3G" on the 15th of this month, as I found out when I visited a store yesterday. The iPhone 5 doesn't support anything higher. Apparently I needed something no older than an iPhone 12, which was first released in 2020. In the span of four years, they've already gotten up to the iPhone 15! You may be slightly confused that this information is new to me but you have to realise my disdain for smart phones runs pretty deep. Sure, I have to admit they're useful. When I visited Tokyo a couple years ago, it was nice to have Google maps at my finger tips. When I first arrived in Japan, I didn't have a working smart phone so I had to find spots where I could sit down with my laptop and find wifi, which was certainly cumbersome. But I dislike the way smart phones lull people away from physical reality. You may get where you're going using google maps on a smart phone, but you actually learn about an area by walking it and looking around, getting a little lost, and doing it multiple times. There are plenty of foreign teachers in Japan who know nothing about the towns they've lived in for years. I talked to one American who casually spoke of the courage it took him to visit a hamburger restaurant down the street from his apartment.
Anyway, I didn't find a sweet deal like I did with the iPhone 5 four years ago. The Hard Off I went to had only one smart phone calibrated for Softbank and it was 110,000 yen, or around 711 dollars. That's not much different from the price of a new one. I didn't buy it and walked to another used goods store. It put me in a bad mood, feeling the increasing inevitability of being forced to spend a lot of money on something I really didn't want. How can so many people afford these things? Practically everyone at the schools where I work, teachers and students, have them. Presumably parents have their own and then buy others for their kids! How did it come to this? I did read recently Japan has a much higher standard of living than other countries.
I ended up ordering an iPhone 12 from Amazon for about 256 dollars. Hopefully it works. I just need to be able to make phone calls, for Pete's sake. It would be nice if I could get Skype working properly on it. It's a weird irony that Skype works perfectly well on my computer for no extra fees. I can make video calls for free but audio calls are the province of a new economic stratum.
X Sonnet #1836
Collected notes were breathing pulp and ink.
Resurging gowns replace your style cheap.
A wobbly chair was pushed beyond the brink.
The captives chat below the stony keep.
An extra mountain scorned the use of names.
As summer stole the spring, a chill was chased.
Across the knights there sat a row of dames.
More dice were rolled than any press has faced.
It's tricks and traps inflate the dummy brain.
A rusty droid's amused by human need.
But hungry buckets find they choke on rain.
Alas, deluge has washed away the seed.
Required calls demand a lengthy walk.
Enormous work conducts the normal talk.
There's a new, special nine page chapter of my webcomic, Dekpa and Deborah, online to-day. Usually the chapters are just eight pages. Why is this one longer? I miscounted the pages when I was writing the script. Oops. But lucky you.
Happy Birthday to Emperor Go-Komyo (後光明天皇) of Japan; Princess Beatrice of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha; Harold Lloyd; Lionel Hampton; Betty Lou Gerson; Tito Puente; George Takei; Peter S. Beagle; Ryan O'Neal; Veronica Cartwright; Luther Vandross; Crispin Glover; and Andy Serkis.
I found myself watching Drunken Angel (酔いどれ天使) again last week. From 1948, it's Kurosawa Akira's first collaboration with Mifune Toshiro and Kurosawa's only film to feature a yakuza protagonist. Kurosawa hated yakuza enough that he was never compelled to romanticise them, not even in this film in which a handsome young Mifune was playing one.
There's some ambiguity in the title as to whether it refers to Mifune's character or the doctor played by Shimura Takashi. Both of them drink a lot but Shimura vociferously rebukes Mifune for drinking throughout the film due to Mifune's tuberculosis. Shimura's character thinks there's a slim chance for prolonging the young gangster's life if he can just lay off the drink. Shimura sees no reason to lead by example and has several scenes humorously spotlighting his drinking, like one in which he mixes tea with 100% medical alcohol and another in which he fills a glass to the very brim with whiskey and carefully drinks off the top.
Kurosawa's point may have been to reassure the audience that he was not condemning alcohol consumption in all circumstances.
The movie's called a film noir and that's a fair label. It has the existential tension. The key scene is, after Mifune's finally agreed to stop drinking, he unexpectedly meets his old boss, who's just gotten out of prison. Of course the first thing the old man wants to do is go get a drink. How much choice does Mifune's character really have? Having a drink may kill him but not having a drink is surely the first step in upending his entire life. Here Kurosawa makes a pointed criticism of rigid cultural practices, much as American films noir used tension to subtly criticise American morality.
Drunken Angel is available on The Criterion Channel.
I guess it's kind of inevitable the new X-Men'97 would pale in comparison to last week's. It wasn't really bad though it hardly reached the levels of excitement of "Remember It". "Lifedeath Part II" was also the first one not written or co-written by Beau DeMayo. Charley Feldman receives sole credit. Could this be blamed for some lack of momentum and particularly awkward lines?
We get two stories. We finally catch up with Professor X, who's in some distant part of the cosmos, getting ready to become an emperor, and we get a conclusion to the story about Storm losing her powers. The latter was the better story and I like the physical manifestation of a psychological demon. I wish her claustrophobia had been better established in the season, though.
I was so happy she got her original look back. It kind of makes sense as she was psychologically reclaiming herself. I know there are fans of the mohawk but it really doesn't fit her personality in my opinion.
The Professor X stuff, meanwhile, was pretty weak. I don't buy that he'd renounce all memory of earth just to get married. His line about Rudyard Kipling was really weird, calling him "a man of many burdens, none of them real." It was obviously a reference to "The White Man's Burden". Xavier ought have just said that. Why be so coy? Surely Kipling had one or two real burdens in his life, regardless of what you think of the poem. It makes me think "The White Man's Burden" is the only thing Feldman knows about Kipling.
I've been experimenting with muffins a lot. The above muffins are lemon ginger muffins with trail mix. The trail mix I get has cranberries, raisins, dried pineapple cubes, almonds, and cashews.
More recently, I made some muffins with which I was trying to capture something of the season. Sakura or cherry blossom mochi is a popular treat in Japan in the spring. It's pink mochi wrapped in pickled cherry tree leaves. I thought I could use whatever presumably cherry flavouring was in the mochi to make muffins but it turns out the sakura mochi only has sugar and food colouring. The only genuine sakura flavour comes from what little seeps into it from the leaves.
Then I thought, what if I mix cherry syrup into the muffin batter? I thought at least that would make the muffins kind of pink-ish and I could make them visually recall cherry blossoms by adding white chocolate chips. I use almond milk instead of real milk and since cherry and almond is a classic pairing, I thought it might make for a good muffin all around. Well, the muffins came out more brownish than pink. The cherry flavour is really subtle, kind of an aftertaste. It needed a boost so for the next batch I added cranberries and cinnamon. I'm basically happy with the result and gave a bunch of them to my coworkers. They seem more Christmasy than spring timey, though.
X Sonnet #1835
A soldier's sleep invades the honey air.
For toxic beds, the trooper pines at heart.
The pastel kids were lost amidst the fair.
An angry message spurred the brain to start.
Repeating quacks announced approaching ducks.
No time was better poised to build balloons.
A secret void with friendly vigour sucks.
In harder chess you play with eight dragoons.
Some soggy flakes descend from almond skies.
With toneless jokes the dame retreats in haste.
Decided posts construct the noiseless lies.
A vicious box supports the kind of waste.
With spiky chairs the office changed to death.
A box of flowers steals the human's breath.
Katharine Hepburn marries Robert Taylor but finds herself strangely drawn to an absent Robert Mitchem in 1946's Undercurrent. It's a fascinating gothic noir from Vincente Minnelli.
I really wonder sometimes how Robert Taylor came to be a star, I always found him kind of one dimensional. He plays Alan Garroway, famous for inventing a kind of engine crucial to winning World War II. When he meets young Ann (Hepburn) he sweeps the star-struck young woman off her feet. But her heart is almost immediately distracted by some ambiguous shadow in Alan's life. Violently jealous, he becomes enraged when Ann shows a fondness for a particular song or poem. Taylor's lack of subtlety as a performer makes it all seem even more nightmarish.
Ann is the point of view character and we follow her as she compulsively digs up clue after clue, in spite of, and largely because of, her husband's rage. When she finally meets Robert Mitchum, playing Alan's estranged brother Michael, she doesn't even know she's met her quarry. He pretends to be the caretaker of a ranch.
Mitchum's cool melancholy stands in contrast to Alan's angry grasping for Ann's loyalty. It's kind of the story of the sun versus the wind trying to get the man's coat off. Mitchum wins Hepburn's heart with the barest hints of his existence. It provides an interesting existential subtext to Alan's plight. How much is fate drawing Ann to Michael, how much is Alan's own rashness, how much is the peculiarly effective chemistry between Ann and Michael?
Undercurrent is available on The Criterion Channel until the end of the month.
I've been watching Ally McBeal again lately. I sure loved this show when it first came out in late 1997, a few months after I graduated high school. I watched it and The Practice, both legal dramas created by David E. Kelley that took place within the same universe, despite airing on different networks. I gradually came to prefer The Practice as it focused almost entirely on the courtroom drama while Ally McBeal was obliged to find new ways to be quirky. Kelley seemed to run out of inventiveness on the quirky front by the end of the second season. I still haven't even seen the last couple seasons, the show got so insufferable. Still, I have to admire the fact that Kelley wrote or co-wrote every single episode of the five season series. I suspect illegal stimulants were involved.
Of course, it's always refreshing now to watch something from the '90s, to stick your head out of the cultural Mirkwood of to-day. The third episode features the characters arguing about age discrimination and the ethics of hiring on the basis of physical beauty. In the second episode, the characters debate the ethics of sexwork. Kelley clearly had a point of view himself but he had the imagination to play devil's advocate and intelligently write characters who disagreed with himself.
A culture that believes in the intrinsic virtue of debate is not as common as many Americans still take for granted, even though it's become increasingly devalued in current American culture. David E. Kelley's shows and Star Trek among other things fostered my love for it. I guess from shows about arguments, good television evolved to implicit arguments. Shows like Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad, instead of presenting individuals or groups directly debating each other, an argument was implicit in how the characters made unusual choices based on unusual circumstances. I would say that's more sophisticated, possibly too sophisticated for much of the audience and that's why many shows now seem to feel being obnoxious is the same as being smart.
A small time arms dealer gets mixed up with big time arms dealers with darkly hilarious results in 1983's Deal of the Century. Despite the big stakes, director William Friedkin opts for a delicately satiric tone in many ways resembling Doctor Strangelove.
Chevy Chase plays Eddie Muntz, an American who's made a life for himself in South America by selling guns and explosives to various revolutionary forces. Chase's particular brand of deadpan plays very well in establishing this guy as so seasoned, so confident in his con, that he can casually talk his way through any sticky situation.
He bumps into a suicidal Wallace Shawn at a hotel one night. Once Shawn's dead, Muntz answers his phone and bluffs his way through a conversation with Shawn's company. It's an American defense corporation trying to market a new drone. Muntz seizes the opportunity to upgrade his career and finds negotiating with petty dictators as easy as dealing with small time guerrillas.
Sigourney Weaver and Gregory Hines are also in the film and they're both great. There's a particularly funny scene of rigorously deadpan slapstick in which Weaver shoots Chase in the foot and when Hines intrudes he assumes it's some kind of kinky sex.
Deal of the Century is available on The Criterion Channel this month as part of a collection of William Friedkin movies.
X Sonnet #1834
A humble gun was stranded south of Hell.
Hotels refused a dealer pushing shoes.
A sample case supplied a partial sell.
Remember these for later 'cause they're clues.
A television burned with grey delight.
Obtrusive nets of cable cut the mind.
Its precious thoughts implied a mental light.
However, metal teeth have bit the rind.
A message floats along a desert breeze.
A mighty woman skips the hungry croc.
Defenseless eggs present to snakes a tease.
No serpent, though, is any girl who'd walk.
A bouncy worm deploys the lyric scroll.
For growing mutant legs, the critters stroll.
I was really excited to see Fallout, the new Amazon Prime series based on the beloved video game franchise. I'm a big fan of that franchise. On the whole, I'd say I was pleased with the adaptation but I also find it deeply flawed in extremely frustrating ways. Number one being the writing.
I was excited when I heard it was coming from Jonathon Nolan, brother of Christopher. Jonathon frequently collaborated with his brother. He co-wrote Memento, The Prestige, and The Dark Knight, three of my favourite Christopher Nolan movies. Unfortunately, he does not serve as writer on the Fallout series but as director. The primary writers and showrunners are Geneva Robertson-Dworet, whose only two previous credits are Captain Marvel and the 2018 Tomb Raider, and Graham Wagner, whose more substantial list of credits includes The Office and Portlandia among others. Of the eight episode first season of Fallout, I would say the strongest are four that the two showrunners didn't write; episodes four, five, six, and seven. Episode eight, sadly, is the worst of the series. At the same time, I wouldn't say any episode is truly bad.
The show benefits a lot from the premise and extensive lore it inherits from the video games. The protagonist is Lucy, played with plucky passivity by Ella Purnell. Like the player character of most of the Fallout games, she's a Vault dweller, a citizen of one of the massive bomb shelters built to protect a community of wealthy individuals from nuclear war.
In most of the Fallout games, story elements related to the Vault take up a very small portion of the game, usually only serving as background for the player character. The Amazon series revolves almost entirely around the Vaults and we learn only a little about the wasteland communities and power players two hundred years after the bombs fell. Lucy sets off across the wasteland to find her kidnapped father, played by Kyle MacLachlan in a perfect piece of casting. Two denizens of the wasteland round out the main cast; Maximus, played very effectively by Aaron Moten, and "The Ghoul", aka Cooper Howard, played by Walton Goggins. Cooper was a famous movie star two hundred years ago, now he's a noseless abomination, a ruthless bounty hunter.
Goggins is great, of course, and a surprising lot of the series revolves around flashbacks to his life before the planet was devastated, when he was a movie star known for Westerns. As good as he is, these segments are one of the elements that drag the show down. At times I was reminded of Netflix's Cowboy Bebop adaptation in that the greater expense involved in live action productions prevent the show from indulging in the scope which distinguished the source material. It seems clear one of the reasons so much of the show is spent in Vaults is because they built the Vault sets and then they couldn't afford to build much else. Likewise, the flashback scenes, which could utilise more real locations and cheaper sets, take up a lot more time than they otherwise would have. But they also involve a chronic problem in modern television writing, which is the ritualistic inevitability of set-ups and payoffs. If Walton Goggins meets someone at one point in an early episode, the rules dictate that this person must play a crucial role later on. So what seems at first like it'll be an intriguing backstory for a wasteland bounty hunter ends up being his whole story. It's vaguely stifling as we feel like we're being prepared for an adventure but we're really going no further than the front yard, so to speak.
You know what, I'm just going to quote Pauline Kael in her review of Shoot the Piano Player:
A number of reviewers have complained that in his improvisatory method, Truffaut includes irrelevancies, and they use as chief illustration the opening scene--a gangster who is running away from pursuers bangs into a telephone pole, and then is helped to his feet by a man who proceeds to walk along with him, while discussing his marital life. Is it really so irrelevant? Only if you grew up in that tradition of the well-made play in which this bystander would have to reappear as some vital link in the plot. But he's relevant in a different way here: he helps to set us in a world in which his semi-normal existence seems just as much a matter of chance and fringe behavior and simplicity as the gangster's existence--which begins to seem semi-normal also. The bystander talks; we get an impression of his way of life and his need to talk about it, and he goes out of the film, and that is that: Truffaut would have to be as stodgy and dull witted as the reviewers to bring him back and link him into the story. For the meaning of these films is that these fortuitous encounters illuminate something about our lives in a way that the old neat plots don't.
Over half a century later and screenwriters still haven't learned this lesson.
Another problem on Fallout is that, for a guy who's survived on his wits and fortitude, Cooper's shown to be really sloppy. I blame the fact that the writers lack the experience and/or imagination to craft a survivalist narrative of the kind that made the first seasons of Walking Dead so popular. Just playing the Fallout games might have tipped them off that you don't just stroll casually down the middle of the street surrounded by tall buildings and rubble. Might as well douse your head in fluorescent paint for the snipers. No, you sneak, you find cover, you stick close to walls. Not only does the Ghoul fail at that, he's lousy at taking care of his physical needs. The Ghouls need regular injections to avoid turning feral but Cooper loses his stash due to sloppiness. Then, when he finds a big box of drugs, he starts putting handfuls of it in his hat instead of simply taking the box. And then he gorges himself on it instead of parcelling it out and makes himself a sitting duck for whatever psycho gang happens along.
The show really needed more people who understood action.
Okay, okay. Bitching is a cheap thrill. What did I like? Lucy and Maximus are great together, each sheltered and morally preoccupied in their own way. They have good physical chemistry, too, once you get past the tiresome modern messaging about how all sex should be casual and without emotional investment.
In episodes four through seven, the comedy is a pitch-perfect refinement of the games' blend of horror and absurdist satire. A scene featuring Fred Armison as a DJ is a perfect piece of body horror comedy. They should've gotten Sam Raimi for this.
While the writers may have lacked the chops to write wasteland survivalist stories, they do have the right backgrounds to write Vault dwellers. It occurred to me that the western, let's call them, Internet class, the group that's always online and becoming increasingly insulated from the massive population that doesn't give a shit what's trending on X, finds a perfect reflection in the isolated Vault dwellers. Some have said the show is an indictment of capitalism and maybe it was meant to be but, if so, it inadvertently plays a strong devil's advocate in its portrayal of Lucy. She's mocked for her morality that could only be a product of isolation from the harsh conditions of real life. Yet anyone watching will likely feel cheered by her adherence to the Golden Rule. I know I sure was. And that's the kind of morality only money can buy.
Maximus is sheltered in another way, having been brought up in the military cult called the Brotherhood of Steel. As the name suggests, the group is all men, except one non-binary character, a nonsensical bit of token casting. Maximus is tormented by the clash between rigid discipline and ruthlessness promoted by the group and Aaron Moten's performance is perfect for it.
So it's a mixed bag but it has enough good in it I look forward to season two. I really hope they get Ron Perlman onboard. To any fans of the series, the absence of his opening narration is a massive disappointment.
One of my hobbies for the past few years has been baking bread and cakes. It's in this way I discovered a possible error in our civilisation's understanding of reality. So this is a public service announcement I've been meaning to get to for some time.
When I started making bread, sometimes I didn't do a very good job. The dough didn't get cooked all the way, the temperature was too high, I left it in the oven too long or not long enough, etc. So it wasn't really a surprise that sometimes I'd get a peculiar stomachache from eating it but it was a sort of ache I'd never experienced before. Finally, when I thought I had all the timing and temperature right, and I was confident in all the ingredients, I still occasionally found I got this ache. I couldn't figure out what was causing it and it would last for days and seriously affect my mood. It was like having a rock in my stomach and it made me glum that I'd done something stupid and possibly seriously impacted my health. But I couldn't figure out what I did wrong, which was also depressing in itself. I googled and googled, I went back over each step and I never could figure it out.
Then, on Saint Patrick's Day last year, I watched Darby O'Gill and the Little People. And something about this scene struck me as it never had before:
"Did no-one tell you about the hazards of hot bread?" No, Katie! No-one ever had! Neither had google!
If you google "The dangers of hot bread" now, you generally find articles and forums in which people say it's a myth, that it's not dangerous at all, it just might not taste as good. However, there are things like this 1858 issue of Scientific American that say it is indeed very dangerous.
Hot bread never digests. After a long season of tumbling and working about in the stomach, it will begin to ferment, and will eventually be passed out of the stomach as an unwelcome tenant of that delicate organ, but never digests
Maybe for a lot of people, it has no ill effect. Maybe it's psychosomatic for some people but I can't say it is for me because I didn't even know about it. It's been over a year since that Saint Patrick's Day, I've made a lot of bread and I've always waited for it to cool completely before eating it, usually for 24 hours. And I've never had that stomachache again.
