A Park Off the Compass

I have HBOMax until September 12th and, streaming problems aside, I want to get my money's worth out of it. Last night looking for something I could watch knowing there'd be technical problems, I came across the South Park Pandemic Special. I remembered hearing about it and kind of wanting to see it last year, partly because I was surprised anyone was talking about South Park again, and partly because we were just a few months into the pandemic's accompanying social madness, in which people cooped up in their homes were screaming routinely online at each other from both sides. If there was ever a good time to lampoon the lunacy of the American media and public, that seemed like it. Unfortunately, I found the South Park Pandemic Special to be just kind of annoying and sort of fascinatingly out of touch on multiple levels.

I'm not sure how long it'd been since I'd seen a South Park episode. Probably fifteen years, that's the last time I blogged about it. From a 2006 entry:

Matt and Trey used to be more inventive. I wish they'd retire, before the show shares The Simpsons' fate.

Well, that ship has definitely sailed. As a side note, it's amazing to recall that The Simpsons seemed well and truly creatively dead fifteen years ago and it still lurches on to-day.

South Park succumbed to a different kind of death. While The Simpsons became boring and cynical, South Park seems to have just become dumber and meaner while also pandering to a political ideology whose young adherents probably wouldn't be caught dead associating with the show. Fifteen years ago, I got in an argument with a friend about the infamous trans episode of South Park, in which the writers equated being transgender with getting surgery to become a dolphin or something. At the time, I thought one could have a discussion about where the line is as to what constitutes legitimate grounds for reassignment surgery but that the trans community seemed too small and vulnerable to deserve such angry potshots. My friend, a trans person herself, argued that the South Park episode was only meant to criticise people who call themselves trans but make no serious effort to pass and who get angry when other people call them on it. Ironically, this same friend is to-day too woke to even speak to someone as politically incorrect as myself. This is something I've found again and again in this new era--the wokest people I know are usually the people who liked deeply "problematic" humour years ago.

Now, in the Pandemic Special, writers Matt Stone and Trey Parker have portrayed the police force as violence addicted adolescents who deserve to be defunded in between a plot about Stan's father being responsible for the pandemic because he fucked the bat in Wuhan (and a pangolin). How many "defund the police" types are up for Stone and Parker's gags about kids and animals being mutilated? I'm not even sure the circles would touch in that venn diagram.

They do make a few jokes about the hysteria and hostility of lockdown culture but it's not very insightful. The episode did stream without any problems.

There's a too brief subplot with a hint of heart in which Stan desperately tries to help Butters get to Build a Bear. Stan sublimating his own anxieties into helping Butters was kind of sweet and genuinely seemed to speak to the general cabin fever experience of the pandemic among those who can afford to stay at home. But, sadly, the episode decided to spend 90% of the time with the plot about Stan's dad thinking his semen is the cure for Corona. It was just tedious, like a drunk who thinks he's really funny rambling on and on.

Deborah by Starlight

A new chapter of my webcomic, Dekpa and Deborah, is finally online. I passed the 200 mark with this one and now the comic stands at 202 pages. And it only took me six years! Anyway, I hope you enjoy it.

Twitter Sonnet #1468

The years in sequence gather thorns and leaves.
The time of curling wind reveals the rock.
A gnarled trunk would seem a face that grieves.
The roots combine to make a wooden lock.
A sooner mass abuts the rooster crow.
Misleading lefts revert the step to right.
Inexpert shafts rebound abaft the bow.
The question fish produced a western kite.
With water thoughts the soap would clean the clothes.
Forever running, pipes conveyed the spark.
A stone was like a door that never closed.
The journey stopped before the starting mark.
The frozen ear detects a fire near.
The darkened ice contains a waiting fear.

The Beaming Dead

2000 was the year Spike turned pink on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The same year, Kate turned pink on Angel.

I guess pale was out of fashion in the Buffyverse, for vampires as well as humans.

The Kate screenshot comes from "Dear Boy", an episode of Angel in which Darla, the vampire who turned Angel originally, newly resurrected as a human, poses as an ordinary human to make Angel's friends think he's crazy. I suspect it continues the influence of Vertigo seen more directly a few episodes earlier in "Are You Now or Have You Ever Been". Vertigo references always make me happy (and aren't going out of style since WandaVision ended with one). But I also like the Darla plot in Angel season two for how it starts to bridge the gap between Angel and Angelus, his evil self. It can seem like kind of a cheat, the ideal of souls on the two series. Why should Angel feel guilty now for things he did when he was essentially possessed by a demon? 2000 was the year lines started to blur a little.

On Buffy as well. This was the year Spike realised he was lusting for Buffy. Or the year he realised he was in love with her, depending on how you interpret it. What does it mean for him to love without a soul? It certainly seemed like his relationship with Drusilla was more than lust all along.

I kind of like that the shows never really explored their implicit Christian rulebook. We never find out why crosses hurt vampires. We never find out exactly what having a soul means. The ambiguity tortures the characters in a pretty credible way.

The Great Eye is Frustrated

Well, it took about a week, but I was finally able to squeeze The Two Towers out of HBOMax. There have been thunderstorms around here lately and I think it interferes with my internet, which is wifi from a box. Yet, all my other streaming services worked well enough. Even The Criterion Channel worked fine if I set the quality to 520. But when I got halfway through The Two Towers: Extended Edition, the part where the wargs attack, the player stuttered and finally froze up completely. Over the next few days, I tried to pick it back up but could only get two or three minutes at a time. Last night it finally let me watch the rest but, sadly, the spell was kind of broken. The emotional impact of a film is of course modified by whether or not you watch it piecemeal. Not always in a bad way--I like to prolong the experience of some movies by splitting them into episodes. Oddly enough, as long as they are and kind of episodic, the Lord of the Rings movies are not among those I like to split up. Peter Jackson's filmmaking style is so much about flow from one scene to the next that breaking them up feels wrong.

So I enjoyed the first half of the film much more, being able to get swept up in Jackson's pacing and arrangement of scenes. The casting continued to be spot on. Brad Dourif as Wormtongue is a great example of an actor elevating the material. He doesn't hold back on the delivery, even making little hissing sounds. Yet he suggests depth and complexity not present in the dialogue that helps make him captivating. The screenplay gets some credit, giving some dialogue of Gandalf's from the book to Wormtongue so he can have a moment of genuine insight into Eowyn (Miranda Otto). The dialogue is still beautiful but now it also helps establish his threat and his humanity.

Andy Serkis makes Gollum age very well. The cgi has started to look dated though these movies never did have the most seamless computer effects. But it's the authenticity of emotion that matters and Serkis does it. I only wish Elijah Wood and Sean Astin's performances had aged as well as everyone else's. But most of the time they're good enough.

Even a lot of changes Jackson's team made that I don't like I can still understand. Like the scene where Sam cooks the rabbits. There's no way the film could do something like the version of that scene in the book, which is about the wonder of Sam creating something like the feel of Bag End right there on the edge of Mordor, just with his cooking and ordering Gollum about like a servant. There are other changes I've come to sorely lament.

It's easy to see why they did what they did with the Ents. To give Merry (Domanic Monahan) and Pippin (Billy Boyd) something to do, to add dramatic tension to the end of the movie. These things are nice in the short term but the logical integrity of the book's version makes it something you can contemplate on its own terms years later. When I watch the movie now, I just think, "How did Treebeard, a shepherd of the forest, not know Saruman (Christopher Lee) was cutting down Fangorn? How did none of the other Ents know?"

The Arwen (Liv Tyler) scenes have a beautiful tone and I love the fact that they gave Hugo Weaving the text about Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen) from the end. Arwen's inner conflict over her devotion to Aragorn doesn't feel explored well enough for it to be introduced at all, though.

I do like the Ents unleashing the river on Isengard as an action sequence more than the Helm's Deep battle which feels oddly stagebound. It has too much artificial lighting. The night battle sequences on Game of Thrones definitely did it better, though, since everyone complained about it, it may not set a new standard, sadly enough.

Generally, The Two Towers is not as good as The Fellowship of the Ring, though maybe I'd feel differently if it'd streamed properly. Even if I could afford to keep HBOMax, I'm not sure if I would. Maybe after a few years when they've ironed out their technical problems and I've become a trillionaire.

Faster than the Speed of Mario

A few days ago, I found myself watching a YouTube video history of speedruns of Mario 64. I was astonished when I realised I was coming to the end, the 50 minute mark, having intended to watch just a few minutes.

The video premiered six days ago and it already has over a million views. It details attempts to complete the old Game Cube Mario game in less and less time over the course of twenty years. A small group of speedrunners from America and Japan consistently started to take the top spots about ten years ago. But you know this thing must dominate the focus of many people's lives. I don't mean to sound superior when I ask if these boys didn't waste a significant portion their existence. We could as well ask that of the people who honed their skills at prehistoric games over the course of a lifetime. Even the original performers of Shakespeare's plays can't be appreciated now.

I would say any of Shakespeare's plays enriches the viewer or participant in more ways than Mario 64. But that's not a fair comparison--most things don't come close to Shakespeare but achieving skill in a game isn't necessarily comparable to the profundity of an art. I guess you could say a great waitress can go to sleep at night knowing she helped make the evening better for hundreds of people.

Now video games are increasingly becoming a spectator sport. Many of the students at the schools I work at here in Japan spend their free time watching gamers on YouTube playing games they may never hope or desire to play themselves.

I find it kind of fascinating that the YouTuber I was watching, someone named Summoning Salt, has taken it upon himself to make a series of little documentaries, weaving a story from all these mad people dedicating themselves to finding new little glitches or ways of spinning Mario around at key points to shave another second or another half second from the runtime. I'm often fascinated by the complexity and variety of internet subcultures. It makes sense that a community would naturally produce a historian from among its ranks.

Where are we going with this world of ours?

Twitter Sonnet #1467

Returning storms obstruct the current flow.
In time the screens repulse their image sheet.
The stoppers work to thwart the thought of go.
A power grows in bubbles 'cross the street.
His mighty feet could crush the surface grace.
His knees were pachyderms with extra tusks.
His belly button boasts a human face.
His necklace joins the heads' internal husks.
The cheaper chicken carries extra rice.
The curtains part and show the bowing head.
A supper bell reflects the monster twice.
Machines can carry sleeping fawns to bed.
Repeating screens create a living dream.
The green of life explodes the tidy seam.

Gone Up the Mountain

Yesterday I visited Koyasan in Wakayama, south of Osaka, with my friend Tiffany and her boss.

Koyasan, or Mount Koya, is covered with temples, museums, and cemeteries.

It's also a functioning town, high up on the mountain, with a college, a high school, a fire department, and many stores.

First we visited the cemetery, easily the strangest and most impressive cemetery I've ever visited. The first thing I saw was a rocket.

This cemetery has company plots for some of the largest companies in Japan. Employees who die on the job are buried here.

The plot for the UCC coffee company has two great urns that are kept filled with coffee.

There are many pet mausoleums onsite, too.

This is a memorial for all the ants killed in Japan, an apology for killing them as pests:

Tombs further in are more traditional.

We went inside the temple at the centre of the cemetery where no photography is allowed. We listened to a monk chanting in the amazing, dark interior decorated with thousands of lanterns. Little candles illuminated gold Buddhist statues.

Afterwards, we visited Kongobuji, the headquarters of Shingon-shu Buddhism.

Its rock gardens are the largest in Japan and are intended to represent dragons "emerging from a sea of clouds".

The interior is filled with beautiful painted doors. Signs prohibited not only photographs but sketches as well. We sat for a time in one very comfortable, large room with cushioned seats and tatami floors as a monk gave instructions on meditation.

Afterwards, we visited a number of pagodas in the area, some of them as old as the 12th century.

Most of them, though, are less than a century old because the original buildings burned down and were rebuilt several times.

Finally, we visited the Koyasan Reihokan Museaum, which houses many incredible artefacts. I saw mandala tapestries, scrolls upon which 11th century poets actually wrote, and astounding wood and gold statues, most of them dating from the Heian era (794-1185).

My favourite was a statue of the Heavenly General Jinja-daisho sculpted by Kaikei in the Heian era. This fellow has a necklace of skulls, a placidly smiling human face in his belly button, and elephant heads on his knees. Not only that, but each elephant head has four tusks. It's a work of genius.

All of these museums and shrines are surrounded by beautiful forests.

A Smoggy Day in Kaiju Town

What a mess we've made of our planet. And who's going to clean it up? Godzilla! At least when the mess manifests as a giant monster as it does in 1971's Godzilla vs. Hedorah (ゴジラ対ヘドラ). Filled with strange jumps in the narrative and improbably lucky guesses from the humans that undercut the tension, this is still an extraordinarily stylish Godzilla movie with plenty of points of interest.

A beautiful singer (Keiko Mari) takes us through the opening credits with a groovy song in which she implores the fates to return our green forests and blue seas.

She reappears in a club scene later where a young man inexplicably hallucinates fish heads on her and the crowd.

The message about pollution is heavy handed, as it usually is, but the movie succeeds best when it's just plain weird. The villain, Hedorah, is actually an alien whom the scientist protagonist somehow deduces was created by a nuclear reaction before coming to earth and thriving on industrial waste. The old symbol of nuclear menace, meanwhile, Godzilla, is a hero at this point in the film series, sharing telepathic communications with the child protagonist (Hiroyuki Kawase).

In one scene, the kid watches his father, the scientist (Akira Yamauchi), go scuba diving to investigate the strange giant tadpoles that have been turning up. We see the man encounter Hedorah underwater and there's a cut to the kid vainly calling out for him on shore. And I thought, "Oh, the poor kid's lost his dad." But then there's a jump cut to the man in bed, back at home, with his son by his side, and there's a calm conversation about his injury. It feels odd, we definitely should have seen the man finally pulling himself out of the water. But half his face is disfigured, a little moment of horror that helps shore up emotional impact for the scene.

The movie also includes animated segments and altogether the production design is pretty good. The fight scenes are a little silly by this point, especially since Godzilla at this point had picked up a habit of wiping his mouth and bobbing and weaving like a boxer.

Godzilla vs. Hedorah is available on The Criterion Channel. Yeah, that's right.

The Upbeat Life of Constant Apprehension

I see a few people have claimed that 1952's Mother (おかあさん) is upbeat for a Mikio Naruse movie. I guess the music is a little more whimsical and there are a few amusing moments earlier in the film but it's still the kind of desperate tale of common economic woes that Naruse excelled at. This "upbeat" Naruse movie has two deaths during the course of the story and many of the relationships and desperate circumstances we see are due to deaths that occurred before the narrative begins. There is a definite charm to this one, though, with Kinuyo Tanaka in the title role and especially due to Kyoko Kagawa as her eldest daughter.

Kagawa, better known for her roles in Sansho the Bailiff and Tokyo Story, is usually pretty somber but here she gets to be a vivacious and petulant teenager with pigtails. She narrates the film, fondly describing her self-sacrificing and tireless little mother.

Toshiko (Kagawa) has an older brother at the start of the film who escapes from a sanatorium to die at home, staring wide-eyed at the ceiling, begging their mother (Tanaka) to sleep beside him one last time. Toshiko has another sibling, a little girl named Chako, and their cousin, a little boy named Tetsu, stays with them. His father was killed in World War II and his mother, Noriko (Nakabe Chieko), is unable to care for him as she struggles to find a career of her own. But when financial trouble deepens for the film's subject household, they're forced to take seriously an offer from a neighbouring family to adopt Chako.

Tanaka's husband runs the family business, a laundry, and, when he falls ill, his friend played by Daisuke Kato shows up to help out.

Like most of Naruse's films, the story is an endless give and take of tension as new misfortunes or sudden small strokes of luck create a delicate balance. In this case, whether or not the characters come out ahead by the end is open to your interpretation, and obviously many feel that they do. I would argue the film actually ends under a cloud of doom, though. But your mileage may vary.

Mother is available on The Criterion Channel.

Twitter Sonnet #1466

A thousand steps were taken past the coin.
The longest mollusc shrank to fit a ball.
A smiling idol jumped from out the loin.
We hung a folded picture 'long the wall.
Suspicions start as salmon jump to mouths.
The busy forest glowed with simple songs.
The '80s synth ascends as Heaven bows.
The sleeping fish was laid between the prongs.
The shifting crowd produced an extra star.
A total six dismissed the leading rank.
They're lining glass across the lacquered bar.
Let's carry cakes to feed the money bank.
The snug and tiny flee before the spray.
The smug and smarmy flea adored the clay.

Being Bear

Even hunter gatherers in the Ice Age have to keep in mind it's wrong to kill bears in Disney's 2003 animated film Brother Bear. The premise is trite but I'd say this film is generally underrated. Joaquin Phoenix as the hotshot young protagonist, an Inuit named Kenai, gives a great performance matched by terrific animation from John E. Hurst and Byron Howard. Even more than Treasure Planet, Brother Bear follows in the footsteps of the original Star Wars trilogy. There are also echoes of Bambi, The Fox and the Hound, The Lion King, Pocahontas, and Dinosaur.

It's worth remembering Bambi was written by a game hunter. Despite the horror and trauma certainly intended by the killing of Bambi's mother, it's a story that acknowledges the inevitable pain of existence rather than an argument for abolishing meat consumption. The Fox and the Hound takes it a step further, being fundamentally about two friends learning to accept that one's nature as a killer can't be changed.

Arguably beginning with The Little Mermaid, though, Disney started to walk away from this, presenting a shallower ethic that essentially endorsed embracing an alternate, impossible reality in which meat and animal byproducts are presented as good clean fun while the actions necessary to acquire them are depicted as evil.

It's true, Kenai marches off in pursuit of the bear not for its meat or its hide but as revenge for it stealing a basket of fish Kenai neglected to tie up in a tree. But one suspects the meat and hide from a large bear would be a pretty handy fringe benefit.

But if one takes Kenai's recklessness just for its value as part of his character, one is reminded of the impetuous young Luke Skywalker on Tatooine, or the young man who rushed away from his training on Dagobah to help his friends only to end up requiring a rescue himself.

The bear does give Kenai a slightly better reason for revenge than stolen fish when it kills his brother, Sitka (D.B. Sweeney)--not unlike Luke having plenty of motive to kill Vader after the deaths of Obi-Wan and his aunt and uncle. Once in the spirit world, Sitka, continues his Obi-Wan role and decides Kenai would learn his lesson better in the form of bear. At this point film switches from a 1.75:1 aspect ratio to 2.35:1.

I found this technique more distracting than interesting. It may have been subtler in the movie theatre where one would be less aware of the black spaces on the sides of the screen in the first part of the film. The colours also become more saturated as Kenai joins the world of talking animals and he meets a bear cub named Koda (Jeremy Suarez).

Despite having a less grounded conception of killing and survival than Fox and the Hound, Brother Bear is less squeamish about killing off main characters. Disney producers balked at killing any main character onscreen in Fox and the Hound while such a death is the cornerstone of Brother Bear's story.

The relationship between Kenai and Koda is fantastically developed through performance, design, and top notch animation. You can see how the process of learning to care for Koda causes Kenai to mature. Though the rest of the Inuits depicted aren't much more complex than Pocahontas and her people, Disney once again deciding that indigenous people are of course magical and supernaturally in harmony with the all wise and benevolent forces of nature.

Among the animals, though, the supporting characters are superb, especially a pair of moose voiced by Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas, essentially reprising their SCTV characters Bob and Doug.

Phil Collins returned once again to write songs for the film but one of them, the opening song, is performed by Tina Turner. It sounds distractingly similar to "Circle of Life" and most of the film's songs lack real life of their own. Except "On My Way" because the first few lines are actually sung by Koda and the viewer is momentarily reminded of the films where Disney had the sense to let the characters do the singing.

Brother Bear is available on Disney+.

...

This is part of a series of posts I'm writing on the Disney animated canon.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
Pinocchio
Fantasia
Dumbo
Bambi
Saludos Amigos
The Three Caballeros
Make Mine Music
Fun and Fancy Free
Melody Time
The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad
Cinderella
Alice in Wonderland
Peter Pan
Lady and the Tramp
Sleeping Beauty
101 Dalmatians
The Sword in the Stone
The Jungle Book
The Aristocats
Robin Hood
The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh
The Rescuers
The Fox and the Hound
The Black Cauldron
The Great Mouse Detective
Oliver & Company
The Little Mermaid
The Rescuers Down Under
Beauty and the Beast
Aladdin
The Lion King
Pocahontas
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hercules
Mulan
Tarzan
Fantasia 2000
Dinosaur
The Emperor's New Groove
Atlantis: The Lost Empire
Lilo and Stitch
Treasure Planet

Trains and Pirates

This is the most respectable looking Starbucks I've ever seen. I think most of the building is actually a tourist centre--this is in Nara City, where I ended up yesterday towards the end of a very long day out.

I got up early to take the train to Osaka, a journey of a little more than an hour, where I sat on panels to give oral exams to Japanese college students hoping to become English teachers. Then I decided to save some train fare and walked from Sakai to Tennoji station, a walk that turned out to be about two hours. But I'm pleased to say I never got lost and I only used my phone once. I didn't see anything really interesting except a couple weird buildings.

I think this one's an apartment building:

Would you call that a skyscraping barn?

Closer to Tennoji I saw this barber shop:

For a mere 1000 yen (around ten dollars) this dedicated barber will cut your hair right to the roots! I like to imagine nothing can stand in the way of his commitment.

Instead of taking the Kintetsu line as usual, I had the bright idea I could get to northern Kashihara faster by taking the JR line. When I realised this was wrong, I figured it was no big deal because my phone said I could transfer at Oji station to a train that went directly to Kashihara and I wouldn't lose any time. But it turns out Google maps is not infallible because the train it said would be at Oji station never arrived. After that, the only way I could see was going all the way to the end of the line at Nara, about fifteen kilometers north, away from my destination, and transfer to a southbound train. Altogether I think I travelled around 75 kilometers yesterday by train. Who knows how far by walking. Once in Nara, I had to hoof it again to go from the JR station to the Kintetsu station. It was a pleasant walk, though.

I got a lot of reading done on the trains. I finished reading Pirates of Barbary, a 2010 book by historian Adrian Tinniswood. Some of it was really interesting but not what I was hoping for. It's really not a book about the Barbary pirates, it's a book about European dealings with the Barbary pirates. The first several chapters of the book deal with European pirates who became prominent figures among the Barbary pirates, even commanding ships, such as John Ward and Zymen Danseker. Profiles of corsairs actually born and raised on the Barbary coast are pretty scanty as are descriptions of the institutions that supported them. Worse than that, the self-hating European bias is surprisingly prevalent for an author whose Wikipedia entry says he's a nearly 70 year old Officer of the Order of the British Empire. He frequently mentions the Janissaries, a Muslim fighting corps who were the main muscle of the Barbary pirates, but has very little to say about their society and produces no illustrative examples from among their numbers in the way he talks about European pirates. He mentions an incident where 30 Janissaries gang raped the son of a Dutch renegade in a Tripoli tavern but he only mentions it to say that the inclusion of the incident in the journal of the British consul to Tripoli reflected a peculiar preoccupation with sex on the part of the Brit. Perhaps a remark could just possibly be spared for the Janissaries and what the incident says about them?

Tinniswood's instinctive hatred for European culture carries over to the U.S. In describing the peace treaty temporarily signed between the U.S. and Tripoli 1805, Tinniswood quotes from the U.S. consul, Tobias Lear;

On finally meeting his former adversary, Lear commented with some surprise that [pasha of Tripoli] Yusuf [Karamanli] was "a man of very good presence, manly and dignified, and has not, in his appearance, so much of the tyrant as he had been represented to be." Abstract notions of the Other as barbarian are hard to sustain when you come face-to-face with the reality.

Abstract notions? This comes after several pages in which Tinniswood described how Yusuf had extorted tens of thousands of dollars from the young country, essentially protection money, because the U.S. navy wasn't strong enough yet to fend off the corsairs, who had already taken a few American ships and their crews.

He concludes his book by reminding us, "Fear of European conquest had turned the Barbary states into pirate kingdoms in the first place, motivating the Barbarossa brothers and their sixteenth-century corsairs to set out on their sea-jihad. Without that fear of conquest, Barbary's socialised piracy would never have grown into the scourge of Christendom." Yeah, of course, somehow it's all, always, European colonialism at fault. It's clear even from Tinniswood's own book that history simply isn't that simple.