Sight or Solution

Twitter Sonnet #242

Blue pastel protects rectangles from dust.
Crushed almonds conform to ideas of cream.
Leslie Nielsen saw some kind of a bust.
Hidari knew how one wants monks to seem.
Dust clay melts unphotographed grasshopper.
Caustic fake bugs convene on the right real.
Copper disks can spin straight as Joe Cocker.
Sleepless noons just remember the next meal.
Twitter oration's unfettered by croup.
Pirate fleets are sunk awkwardly to-day.
Breadstick rainstorms show up in the wrong soup.
Real ducks have no insurance anyway.
Bills lost in shadow shout at the sunset.
Dalek eyes see no trivial asset.

I hate having to go school on Saint Patrick's Day. I had my Jameson last night to make up for it.

Appropriately, perhaps, I also watched Kurosawa's Drunken Angel again last night. The crises in Japan has made me want to watch Japanese movies and television shows, to honour Japanese culture I guess, though I guess I watch a lot of Japanese movies and television anyway. Though I thought of Drunken Angel particularly somehow, perhaps because of the cesspool that's in the sort of thematic centre of the story.



It's part of the general, post-war ruined state the story's town is in, and isn't often discussed directly, mostly just when the drunken doctor, played by Takashi Shimura, angrily tells children to stay away from it.

I've often thought about how much Japanese fiction is preoccupied with large scale disaster, seemingly a natural reaction to World War II. Now it seems like a nightmare coming true again. There are so many post World War II Japanese films that beautifully capture a sense of the psychological impact on society, or even document it directly, as one can see in the minutes of footage in Stray Dog of the vital black market that arose in Tokyo which Japanese citizens frequently needed just for basic necessities. Toshiro Mifune plays a yakuza--someone who belongs to a criminal organisation--in Drunken Angel, an occupation Kurosawa had a very low view of, though they apparently do make themselves useful. Apparently one group provided swifter disaster relief in the 1995 Kobe earthquake than the Japanese government. It makes me wonder if there'll be any such stories a few weeks from now, particularly as news of the Japanese government's incompetence has been brought to light by WikiLeaks. This does sound like an opportunity for yakuza to accrue some goodwill, another thing that does not bode well for the future of Japanese society.



But, something else pertinent one might gain from watching post-World War II Japanese film is the reminder that much that is good in Japan can and will survive.

Here are some pictures of the ducks I fed yesterday and a few small birds who got in on the action;









A spider who ran rather quickly across my path on the way back.