Vampires Turn Up

I'm still watching Angel and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, now into season two of one and five of the other. The two shows deepen their fantasy cost of living in California--On Buffy, Xander is easily able to get a huge, beautiful apartment using himself as a reference in "The Replacement" while Angel just appropriates a 68 room hotel on Angel in "Are You Now or Have You Ever Been".

Just two episodes earlier, Angel had expressed concern for Gunn's current living situation and Gunn had told him a property owner was allowing his crew to stay there in exchange for keeping the area safe from vampires. Meanwhile, a whole hotel with working utilities just falls into Angel's hands. I know there's a small arc about Wolfram and Hart buying the building under Angel's nose but that elaborate bit of lampshading kind of highlighted the issue more than alleviated it.

I might take a cheap shot at the show's internal logic but, the truth is, that hotel is a big part of why I love Angel. It is a fantasy, but that's not a bad thing. I'd love to live in my own hotel. Few people not named Howard Hughes ever know that luxury. But I think this hotel ties into my love of stories about groups of people trapped in large haunted houses. Which reminds me, of the three boxes of my old books my grandmother sent me before she died, I found my copy of House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski that Caitlin gave me. Maybe I should read it again.

Currently I'm rereading Interview with the Vampire, though. The old paperback I bought in high school, the first copy of the book I ever read, was also in one of those boxes. It's funny, I bought a nicer hardback copy a few years ago but I think I ended up selling it. I find myself marvelling at what things manage to stick around in my life.

I started reading Interview with the Vampire again after my grandmother died because I think it's one of the great books about death. Unlike the rest of Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles, something about Interview really captures a consciousness of death. A few days ago, I was watching Carl Dreyer's Vampyr on The Criterion Channel and it was only then it struck me how, between that, Angel, and Interview with the Vampire, I seem to be circling a lot of vampire fiction lately. I really don't know why. I sought out Vampyr because I wanted something soothing.

I talked to one of the students in art club a couple weeks ago about a manga she's reading called Vampire and Rose, a series about which I can find little information on the internet--a google search turns up a couple different series with a similar title but only a few images of the one my student was reading. I wonder if it's any good.

Twitter Sonnet #1465

The ladles wait for soup surpassing pea.
American, the ties were dollars less.
The train derailed to catch some time for tea.
Barbarian, the hordes would fain profess.
The missing tracks reduced the disk to grammes.
The loyal horse advanced on flame and frost.
An icy sabre cut the winter dams.
A heavy tender spread at dire cost.
An extra thirty minutes bought the bread.
With harm we relish nothing less than time.
Replenish pencils, stubs adorn the head.
Extract the lemon, leaving only lime.
The extra rooms were magic gratis fruit.
A streaming service dripped a lotus root.

Sonny Chiba

I awoke this morning to the news that Sonny Chiba has died due to Covid related complications. He was 82, which seems too young. I can't find any news site that says whether he was vaccinated or not. Vaccines have been rolling out slowly here in Japan, prioritising the elderly. I'm 42 but as a teacher I'm considered an essential worker. Even so, I wasn't able to make an appointment until a couple weeks ago and the earliest day I was able to get was September 20 (I made an appointment for the 25th, a Saturday).

Western fans probably know him best through his association with Quentin Tarantino--clips from his films were shown in True Romance and Christian Slater's cinephile character heaped praise on the Japanese actor. Chiba later appeared as Hatori Hanzo in Kill Bill.

If you've seen some of his movies from the '70s, it's not hard to see why Tarantino is such a fan. Chiba's films not only feature terrific martial arts, they're also very light on sentimentality or moralising. They're not only violent, they're creatively violent, and Chiba's sparkling, understated charisma sells that humour terrifically. Whether he's inexplicably carrying a live pig through Tokyo in Doberman Cop or tearing out a throat in The Street Fighter. If you're looking for action, you should look for Sonny Chiba.

A Brief Slice of Osaka

I had to go to Osaka for a work related meeting yesterday. I managed to navigate the city mostly without use of my phone for once. I finally used my phone after the meeting to search for vintage American apparel shops. I'd heard American-made clothes could be sold for a lot of money. I had a few thirty-five year old neckties that actually were that--they were made in the 1980s, before all American clothes were made in China, Taiwan, Vietnam, or Bangladesh. The one shop I found willing to buy them would only give me 300 yen per tie (around three dollars) so I held onto them.

The shop was in a part of town called "America Village" (アメリカ村). There are a bunch of vintage American clothes shops but they mostly seemed to sell boots, denim, and torn canvas jackets. Ain't that America. I suppose no-one's looking for neckties in those parts.

There were a lot of pigeons chilling out on Nishiki Bridge. Covid numbers have necessitated a state of emergency in Osaka so crowds were light and some stores were closed.

I can't seem to find any info on this amazing building nearby. It appears to be home to a life insurance company now.

Seems like an architectural marvel worthy of bigger things than that, though. Especially in a country known for devastating earthquakes.

Meanwhile, this place is the "Organic Building", whatever that means.

Hold On to Your Parasols

A volatile love triangle emerges between a student, a waitress, and a yakuza boss in 1956's Black River (黒い河). It was directed by Masaki Kobayashi, not one of my favourite directors of the period and I found this film to be a little weak. The characters aren't explored to the minimum depths necessary for the story and its messages about sex and poverty are pretty trite and romantic. Still, the film has nice performances from Ineko Arima and Tatsuya Nakadai.

The film is set during the American occupation of Japan following World War II. Events take place in a dusty shanty town near an American base. Prostitutes who service the Americans lounge about the streets and bars. Among them walks one virgin, her purity symbolised by her white parasol, Shizuko (Arima).

Kobayashi is far from subtle about that symbolism. She draws the eyes of all kinds of men in town but two in particular--a quiet young university student who's just arrived in town, Nishida (Fumio Watanabe), an the fiery young local yakuza boss, Joe (Nakadai). This was during the period when Japan's government infrastructure was so weak that areas of Tokyo like this were effectively governed by gangs. So Joe's position is much bigger than just a street thug and it's up to him whether or not someone's home gets demolished. In one amusing scene, a character asks another yakuza just who he thinks he is that he can tear down buildings at a whim. The yakuza replies simply, "Godzilla." A bit confusing since the film is set at least two years before the first Godzilla movie but still funny.

Joe obsessively watches Shizuko walk to work every day and has his men tip him off whenever she walks by. He decides he must take her virginity. So he has his men kidnap her and blindfold her and then, in an absurd scene, he pretends to fight them all off and "rescue" her. He tries to play nice but quickly gets too rough and rapes her anyway. He takes custody of her parasol then and keeps it in his apartment. Shizuko's response, surprisingly, is to beg Joe to marry her. It seems she's a very traditional girl.

Or one assumes. One of the frustrating things about the film is that we learn almost nothing about Shizuko. We don't know why she came to town, we don't know if her parents are alive or where they live. We don't even know where she lives, a strangely absent detail considering the film spends so much time commenting on Nishida's home.

He'd been harbouring a crush on Shizuko as well and becomes angry when she suddenly seems to give him the cold shoulder. The movie has a series of that annoying kind of melodramatic scene where Shizuko is just about to explain everything to Nishida but . . . just can't and arranges to meet with him later to tell him everything. And of course something always prevents her from showing up and Nishida starts to feel more and more bitter towards her. Meanwhile, there's a subplot about Nishida and his neighbours being evicted by Joe, who wants the building torn down to build a love hotel. This subplot is actually a little more interesting than the main plot. Many of the tenants are Kurosawa regulars, including Seiji Miyaguchi and Eijiro Tono. Tono is particularly interesting as a pimp with whom Nishida tags along to the American base one evening, a little adventure that indicates some hypocrisy in his condemnation of Shizuko's apparent love for Joe.

Kobayashi seems to be trying to say something about the folly of men's preoccupation with female purity but the ideas are too muddled and the characters too weak to make any kind of point. But the attempt gets in the way of the film being enjoyable as an exploitation film.

Black River is available on The Criterion Channel.

Twitter Sonnet #1464

A glance diverts the cutting damp from leaf.
Assumptions sink beyond the surface sand.
The crinkled cards collect around the chief.
A drifting rain consoles a desert land.
The problem solved was long beyond the range.
A ribbon cut was measured first to size.
A book's return to hand is nothing strange.
It's odd to watch it cheat a thousand eyes.
An extra hand was added later on.
In post production limbs were pasted back.
Across the board a queen became a pawn.
A spoon replaced the knife in ev'ry rack.
The running night has carried bills to hell.
Confusing tables hold a silent bell.

Shire Impressions

I'd gradually been getting into the mood to watch Peter Jackson's adaptation of The Fellowship of the Ring for a couple years. In the two years before leaving the U.S., I read The Lord of the Rings twice, first in my hardback and then as an audiobook in the last month before I left the country. At that point I wasn't at all in the mood for Jackson's movies and it'd become clear to me just how tonally different the book is to them. It may be that I was identifying with book Frodo in ways I couldn't with movie Frodo, too. Elijah Wood was a smooth-faced boy while the Frodo of the book was a hobbit of fifty years when he left the Shire. I felt closer to the stage of maturity and age Frodo is shown to have in the book but I think, even more than that, the process Frodo went through before leaving the Shire, of gradually selling or giving away his home and possessions, over the course of months before leaving, seemed to mirror my own experience. I was listening to that audiobook in my car while I drove to places where I could sell my books or donate a lot of my clothes. And there was the sense of doom hanging over everything. Corona was just gaining traction but I'd had an impression of incremental decline in my home city of San Diego for years.

I did love the Peter Jackson movies when they came out twenty years ago. I remember watching Fellowship of the Ring before driving to Seattle, my first big road trip, and it calmed my nerves a lot. The film presents more of a young man's adventure rather than an unseasonable exile.

But Japan is no Mordor. Frodo was going towards a bleak and horrible destination while I was fleeing to someplace I'd always longed to visit. And I found the good impressions I'd had of Japan not only proved to be true but better than I'd cautiously imagined. Maybe it's working with kids, too, that got me in the mood for the films again, though Lord of the Rings is sadly not popular or even well known around here.

I could watch them on Australian Netflix if I used my VPN but only the theatrical cuts and that just seems pointless. I was pleased to find HBOMax has the extended editions.

As with Labyrinth, I marvelled at what a feast Fellowship of the Ring is in terms of production design. But of course it's even more ambitious than that. What a miracle this movie was financed, a movie that's so many things. What other movie has scenes like the boys reuniting in effervescent Rivendell along with scenes of the billowing black smoke creature in Moria? A movie with an amusing birthday party and also heads being lopped off? Few movies dare to devote so much time to such disparate tones, at least in Hollywood now. The closest analogy I can think of is the old biblical epics or certain Bollywood films. Films designed for audiences who plan their whole day around one very long movie.

It begins all wrong, with a history lesson, Cate Blanchett dumping exposition on us. Everyone knows you're not supposed to do something like that. The book doesn't start that way, every movie that imitated Jackson's was just shooting itself in the foot. In itself, the info-dump in Fellowship isn't good cinema but when taken as part of the whole it works very well. It really is a history lesson so when you start to get little call-backs throughout the film, new little snippets of Isildur or Sauron, it feels like encountering some real, physical evidence of something you heard about in a history class long ago. It gives you a nice, creeping feeling of having been warned, but not having appreciated the warnings, far in advance.

The film's excessive closeups, that were so refreshing at the time, haven't aged well. My opinion may change on that in ten years. But they don't hold up like Sergio Leone's famous long closeups primarily because of the pace of the editing. Leone lingered on closeups but he also lingered on wide shots more.

The performances and casting are all pitch perfect, though I might quibble over Elijah Wood and Sean Astin. I've always felt British or Irish actors would've been better in the roles and I still do. But they're not really bad. Ian McKellen has the perfect combination of warmth and wisdom and a genius for subtle but clear expression. Viggo Mortensen has that cagey stillness about him moderated by subtle, sensitive quirks of the eyebrow or a faint grin. He really comes off as self-possessed, someone perfectly suited for leadership. Sean Bean, jockeying for time among everything else in this movie, believably establishes Boromir as a man torn between resentment and respect for Aragorn.

Jackson generates terrific excitement. The Moria sequences have a real swashbuckling sense to them. Gandalf's apparent death is still gut-wrenching.

I just realised December this year will mark the 20th anniversary of the film's premiere. Twenty years is a long time but it's recent enough to still seem like a miracle of modern cinema. To me, anyway. To plenty of kids, it's as ancient as the Great Depression or World War I.

Another Streaming Labyrinth

So, trying to make the most of the HBOMax subscription I plan to have for only a month, I've been searching for other things to watch. I'm finding the selection pretty disappointing. I had the impression they had rights to most Warner Brothers films but they have almost nothing from the golden age, none of the strings of movies from their famous contract players. No Errol Flynn movies, no Bette Davis movies. Only one James Cagney movie, Public Enemy, and only three Humphrey Bogart movies--The Maltese Falcon, Treasure of Sierra Madre, and Casablanca. On the other hand, their search algorithm is so bad, maybe I'm just not seeing a bunch of movies that are actually on the service. If you do a search for "anime" the first thing to come up is A Time to Kill with Matthew McConaughey, and number two is Once Upon a Time in Mexico. Does it think I'm trying to search for "animosity"? I'm sure lots of people are signing into their HBOMax accounts, hankering specifically for movies about animosity.

I have to scroll way down to the bottom before I see some bona fide anime, a random episode of the old Rurouni Kenshin anime, not even the first episode, but episode 53. Before that there's episodes of Ben10 and South Park and even a Doctor Who Christmas special.

By the way, I'm going to go on a bit of a tangent here. I'm noticing studios are more and more trying to claim the "anime" moniker for American animation series. Why not? You may ask. "Anime" is a French word meaning animation. In fact, here in Japan, the translation for "animation" is often simply "anime". I hear junior high school students talk about Disney anime films like Cinderella and Shirayuki Hime (Snow White). Similarly, "manga" is presented even by the English text books as a direct translation of "comics".

I was kind of mindlessly going along with it until I was sitting with the kyudo sensei in the club dojo and he flatly said, no, manga is not comics. They're two different things. And, duh, of course they are. You go into any American bookstore and they're in two different sections. Manga has a specific style that's different from the more general appellation "comics". Under comics you can find American, British, French, Italian, German publications, etc. Manga is typically smaller, typically black and white. The artwork focuses more on closeups and full body shots, particularly nowadays--there are fewer panels per page and not nearly as much dialogue. And, in Japan, manga is a whole lot cheaper, particularly used manga. People take much better care of their books in Japan so I can go into a used bookshop, easily find a title I want, and buy a nice thick manga for 100 yen (about a dollar) that looks like new. That's one reason manga is thriving in Japan while comics in the U.S. is riding a death spiral.

And anime is different, too. Calling an American production "anime", even if it employs Japanese animators, even if it employs an anime studio, is generally not accurate. For one thing, anime typical starts with the animation and the voice actors record their dialogue to the video, whereas American studios do it the other way around. This accounts for a lot of underlying stylistic difference it's difficult to otherwise put your finger on. But true anime also differs in other respects--there's more emphasis on design and dialogue, less emphasis on movement and continuous action. There's more importance generally placed on beauty in anime series.

Anyway. It's not the same thing.

So, one thing HBOMax definitely has going for it are some big fantasy properties. They have the Harry Potter movies and the Lord of the Rings movies. They also have Labyrinth, and that's what I ended up watching a couple nights ago.

I hadn't watched it since a few years before David Bowie died in 2016. I'd been meaning to but the last time I'd watched it had been disappointing. This time was much better, I don't know why; my mood or the place I'm at in my life. I think it makes a difference for me that I'm looking at it through the eyes of a junior high school teacher. I so want to show this movie to the art club students.

I know they'd totally dig the Brian Froud designs and I think I'd be doing them a big favour introducing them to David Bowie this way.

Last time I wrote a blog entry on Labyrinth--all the way back in 2009--I focused on the sexual chemistry between Sarah (Jennifer Connelly) and Jareth (Bowie) and lamented how boring Sarah is. I completely disagree with that assessment now because I see Jareth and everything as manifestations of Sarah's imagination. Her "you have no power over me" line is much better thought of as directed at herself and it's certainly a worthy lesson for teenagers needing to learn self-control. Jareth is Sarah's idealised man--we see she has a statue of him on her dresser. She's a Jareth otaku. So it makes sense she can't manage to look anything more than blankly stunned in the dance sequence.

If you look at a kid's face while they're watching a favourite movie, that's generally the expression you see. Learning to have expressive expressions is a part of maturation. We think of people who show their emotions very clearly as being like an open book but most of the time expressions are an effort of will designed to communicate something or conceal something else. The real "open books" are people who aren't usually very expressive at all. That's one of the reasons people tend to underestimate the job actors do.

Bowie sure seems to be having a lot of fun in this movie. And I love how full it is, all the various different kinds of puppets and monsters. Movies where the filmmakers make this kind of effort are all too rare.

Ninna-ji

Last month, I visited Ninna-ji Temple (仁和寺) in Kyoto.

It was originally built in 888 but most of the current buildings date from the 17th century.

The interior of the main building is sort of interwoven with meticulously maintained gardens.

This heron was so still at first I thought it was a statue:

There are a number of modern art pieces on the extensive grounds:

I was more interested in the ancient parts, though.

There were many beautiful rooms inside the main hall:

It's a lovely place.

Twitter Sonnet #1463

The deadly sea adopts an arrow shape.
Another portal opens briefly now.
A snazzy tie can smarten up the ape.
Between the buns he put a piece of cow.
A water ball awaits the planet rock.
We're counting sheep to fill the empty pen.
A sleep surprised the cat, removed a sock.
Excessive feathers dried the yellow fin.
The eyes of truth were framed by slender bones.
Reliance rests upon a platter primed.
The planet's foreign flute has extra tones.
Clairvoyance tests a darker, brittle time.
Remembrance dims the morning back to night.
Forgotten years return to conscious light.

It was a Dark and Stormy Night . . .

What a big nothing sandwich. Last night's Bad Batch finale reminded me of the last few episodes of Clone Wars--it had a weak script covered up by expensive animation and decent direction. To be fair, though, director Saul Ruiz created more tension than the last few episodes of Clone Wars had and Jennifer Corbett's script for the Bad Batch finale was much emptier than those fairly lifeless Clone Wars teleplays.

It was a two part finale--last week's nice part one by Matt Michnovetz ended with a cliffhanger--the Kamino city had been destroyed, Crosshair (Dee Bradley Baker) was knocked out, and the Batch were in the middle of escaping the destruction. Corbett, seemingly terrified of making decisions or perhaps totally insecure about writing characters, gives us an entire episode of the Batch . . . escaping Kamino in which nothing changes. If you skipped this final episode, it completely wouldn't matter. Even the end scene, where the Kamino scientist shows up at an Imperial base, was already something we were told was going to happen in a previous episode. It looks like she meets a new Imperial character but all that character basically does is say, "Welcome to the base." If she shows up next season or on The Mandalorian, you would have missed nothing significant by skipping this episode.

Crosshair does wake up and they do have a discussion but everyone stays in exactly the same position they were in in the previous episode. Crosshair doesn't offer any arguments about why it was better to stick with the Empire, and the Batch and Omega (Michelle Ang) have nothing to say about why it's important to fight the Empire. Every exchange is variations on, "You should go with us!" "No, you're wrong!"

Even the revelation that Omega had been around to watch the Batch's birth was mentioned in a previous episode. It sounds like Omega doesn't have the accelerated aging the other clones have so if she shows up in one of the live action shows she should be around the same age as Han Solo. Michelle Ang is 37 so that's close enough.

It's funny how people keep saying Omega's an unmodified clone of Jango Fett. I'm pretty sure Jango Fett was male.

I did like the sea monster attacking the underwater tunnel. Again, though, since no-one died and no actions were taken based on any especially dramatic dialogue, you don't need to see this scene to follow the story going forward. It's weird, it's like they assumed no-one was going to watch this finale.

I want to see season two but I sure hope Jennifer Corbett hands the reins over completely to Matt Michnovetz. It's likely she'll get all the accolades for this season, though, like Dave Filoni now seems to get all the credit for Clone Wars. Maybe the best case scenario would be for her to be "too big" for Bad Batch season two, the way Dave Filoni was apparently too big to direct any episodes of this show he supposedly created.

The Bad Batch is available on Disney+

There's Life in the Old Squad Yet

Happy Friday the 13th, everyone. I celebrated by watching 2021's The Suicide Squad, or as I like to call it, the Golden Miracle. As we enter into a declining period on superhero films and studios grasp desperately at gimmicks, politics, and formula to strong-arm you into seeing increasingly dull radioactive dishwater, James Gunn's The Suicide Squad shines as a beacon. And I knew it from the trailer with the little dialogue about Peacemaker eating dicks on the beach for liberty. I knew from how much that little piece of dialogue accomplished: it was funny, it was impressively fucked up (thus contributing to the film's main concept), and it told you a lot about a specific character. I'd say a good 80% of the dialogue in the movie has those three qualities. James Gunn still isn't great at writing women and his political bias is certainly on display but neither of these things really detract from the film. There are terrific candy- coloured visuals, dynamic action sequences, an incredible quantity of good supporting performances, and a truly impressive final boss monster.

People are going to remember the giant starfish. That's going to leave its mark like all the generic skybeams could never do. Starro the Conqueror originated in the Justice League comics in 1960. He is absurd but he works on a genuinely Lovecraftian level, not the least because his creation was likely influenced by Lovecraft's own aliens.

I would still like a movie where the Suicide Squad has a genuinely amoral mission but this movie did so much better at actually playing with the concept than the 2016 film. That movie had one good character, Harley Quinn (Margo Robbie), and so, appropriately, she's one of the few who return for this one. The other returning characters are more interesting in Gunn's hands.

One of the weakest aspects of the Guardians of the Galaxy movies is that Gunn tends to make women all true-hearted saints, even when it's not appropriate, and he kind of does that here with Ratcatcher 2 (Daniela Melchior), though her flashbacks with her father, played by Taika Waititi in an inspired cameo, are genuinely sweet. Harley Quinn forces Gunn to go out of his comfort zone and she is pretty funny and fucked up, more effective than she was in Birds of Prey but still somehow lacking the bite promised by the visuals in the 2016 film's trailers. Somehow that little hot-pants outfit just can't be eclipsed by everything else they try, even a gorgeous red gown she wears in this film when she wines and dines with the president of Corto Malto (Juan Diego Bolto). Quinn's shifting moral outlook in this movie look less like lazy writing, as it did in Birds of Prey, and more like someone whose mind genuinely just ploughs through the woods, reinterpreting reality as it races along, blissfully heedless of its own contradictions. This leads to an especially funny moment at the end where she confidently refers to Idris Elba's character by the wrong name.

Elba plays Bloodsport, a clear replacement for Will Smith's Deadshot character. But he's much better than Deadshot anyway. Again, Bloodsport is a solidly crafted character, again and again showing himself to be an unapologetic mercenary thief. His rapport with Peacemaker (John Cena) is terrific, especially in a scene where they take turns murdering a camp of soldiers.

Peacemaker is, one the one hand, a pretty stale left-wing caricature of a ringwinger. He's only a slightly scarier version of Stephen Colbert's Comedy Central persona. But he has some surprising nuance, enough that you actually kind of like him in moments like when King Shark (Sylvester Stallone) makes a little doll of him out of plastic explosive. Peacemaker waking up in the forest camp wearing only bright white briefs is an emblematic moment for him--he's unaware of how naked his messed up psychology is which paradoxically gives him a kind of attractive vulnerability. At the same time, it makes him a little scary because you're constantly reminded he's incapable of rational judgement. You could say that about a lot of characters in the movie.

Then there's King Shark, a brilliantly absurdist presence, and the Polka Dot Man (David Dastmalchian), another wonderful recontextualisation of '60s imagery with deft psychological performance and writing. All that and Peter Capaldi in Malcolm Tucker mode, too. This movie is a refreshing feast.

The Suicide Squad premiered here in Japan to-day but I realised it would be about five dollars cheaper for me to just get the HBOMax subscription for a month. I'm kind of sorry I didn't get a chance to watch it with a Japanese audience, particularly considering what a sensitive subject suicide is in this country. But there probably are a few other things on HBOMax I could watch this month. I don't think I'm going to keep the subscription, though. Between Netflix, Disney+, The Criterion Channel, and Amazon Prime, I think I'm normally well off. But The Suicide Squad was the first time I remember being excited to see a comic book movie since Joker. Batman's rogue's gallery really is a gold mine.

Twitter Sonnet #1462

Pandora's scuba sequence opened chests.
Indulgent fish began to buy the reef.
A team of ghosts retained their worsts and bests.
The spirit patrons wonder where's the beef.
Suspicious vases clasp their flowers tight.
A better lunch across the office waits.
The second shoe was rich and worn to right.
A phony name inspired traps and baits.
A winning smile lost its way in grains.
Dividing wheat from rice we chose the maize.
A breakfast berry mixed potential stains.
The fruit of plants was bought in many ways.
Diverging tails originate from loops.
Our questions float as basil leaves in soups.