I finished reading Akira Kurosawa’s Something Like An Autobiography earlier today, and started working on an article about a new Kurosawa book. A few things turned up in surfing/researching that I wanted to keep track of, so I’m posting them here.
The poem “Heroic Smile” by Robert Haas begins:
When the swordsman fell in Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai
in the gray rain,
in Cinemascope and the Tokugawa dynasty,
he fell straight as a pine, he fell
as Ajax fell in Homer
in chanted dactyls and the tree was so huge
the woodsman returned for two days
to that lucky place before he was done with the sawing
and on the third day he brought his uncle.
And ends:
The path from here to that village
is not translated. A hero, dying,
gives off stillness to the air.
A man and a woman walk from the movies
to the house in the silence of separate fidelities.
There are limits to imagination.
William Meredith discusses the poem in his essay, “Reasons for Poetry“:
We are asked to believe that the poem takes place at the limits of imagination, where the poet’s debilitating reluctances threaten to overpower his fancy and drag it back into the territory of the literal. And the poem shows us, by exhibiting its own process, how the energy is to be found, in the process of simile itself, to mix modes and times and feelings in ways that are disturbing and mysterious and, for our souls’ sakes, necessary.
Alex Cox’s incredible documentary on Kurosawa is online:
On his website, there’s an interview with Cox about the movie:
Buñuel and Kurosawa are the greatest of directors, for me. Buñuel for his sense of humour and his stories, Kurosawa for his technical mastery and epic despair.
Rashomon is online too:
This is the short film Crows, from Dreams. I like Martin Scorsese as Vincent Van Gough. It’s kind of funny to compare this to Tim Roth’s version in Vincent and Theo.
Pink Tentacle posts an amazing collection of yokai artwork by Shigeru Mizuki. The descriptions of the monsters are strange and surreal, and kind of melancholic. Here are three of my favourites.
This one reminds me a little of Gustave Dore. It depicts koboku-no-kai. Pink Tentacle provides this odd fable about them:
“Koboku-no-kai are spirits of old trees. One such tree spirit was encountered by Tarōemon, a man who lived in Niigata prefecture long ago. One drunken night, Tarōemon noticed a prowler standing next to the old tree in front of his house. He stepped outside to confront the stranger, and they started fighting. Tarōemon subdued the man and managed to drag him inside, only to discover that he had transformed into a large tree branch.”
Drank too much and got into a fight with a tree, you say? Sounds familiar, except my version of the story involves getting into a fight with the pavement. But I digress.
I love the expressions on these creatures. They are umi-bōzu, “giant black bulbous beings that live in the sea.” Pink Tentacle provides this invaluable information:
“To survive an umi-bōzu encounter at sea, one should remain quiet and look in the opposite direction. Speaking or looking at the creature may send it into a rage — and that usually ends in tragedy.”
How could you not look into the eyes of an umi-bōzu? They look like they would be almost comforting during a storm at sea.
This is a Kijimunaa:
The illustration is from a Mizuki book of anatomical drawings of classic Japanese monsters. It makes me think of those “Visible Man” anatomical models from the 1960s and 70s. I would love to see a series of “visible monster” models.
This is my favourite description of all:
“Kijimunaa is a playful forest sprite inhabiting the tops of Okinawan banyan trees…The Kijimunaa’s brain contains vivid memories of being captured by an octopus — the only thing it fears and hates.”
I wish more of Mizuki’s books would be translated. I’ve read more about him than by him.
Saru Dama reviews a few of his books that haven’t been translated yet. This line is kind of funny:
This is just a classic example of my oft repeated assertion that Japan is SERIOUSLY FREAKY regarding the amount of (real) traditional superstition is has floating around its cultural core.
They link to an excellent interview Mizuki did in 2005 with the Japan Times, which has this exchange:
They say yokai disappeared as electric lights came in. Monsters prospered in the pre-electricity days, when people used andon (a standing lantern with a wooden frame and paper shade) and oil lamps. Electricity was too bright for yokai to survive. The darkness, with a touch of light like that of paper lanterns and oil lamps, was great for yokai, and it inspired people to imagine yokai.
You mean electricity made yokai vanish from people’s imaginations?
No, it’s not imagination . . . The ambience of electric lights is bad for yokai. Andon and lamps are fine, even candles are, as long as there is plenty of darkness. Babies nowadays don’t scream, “Yokai!” Before, they did. There were yokai everywhere, and that was probably because of andon and lamps.
It’s been a busy week with PopMatters articles. I had one posted yesterday, and another two today. It feels good to be writing so much.
Yesterday’s review was Brain: The Complete Mind. It was an interesting read (and way to heavy to lug around), although I think my preference is for stranger brain stories like those of Oliver Sacks.
Aiming to be a comprehensive introduction to the “three pounds of flesh (that) create an entire universe inside your head,” this three-pound book manages the admirable feat of balancing heavy-duty science with the lightness of a popular magazine (well, a stack of them). Read more…
The first article up today was a review of Biomega Volume 1, a manga by Tsutomu Nihei that felt like a bit of a throwback to cyberpunk-y sci-fi of the 1990s.
Biomega shouldn’t be so much fun. The story sounds like a checklist of sci-fi cliches. Dystopian futureworld: been there. Corporations as evil overlords: yawn. Zombie apocalypse: what, again? A stoic good guy who wears black, rides a motorbike and…zzzz. Read more…
And then this afternoon my latest Four-Eyed Stranger column came up. This one is about Yuichi Yokoyama’s Travel manga, and draws connections to Lao Tzu, EC comics, Alain Robe-Grillet, and Sesame Street (whew).
An enigmatic and wordless work, Travel follows three characters as they take a train trip somewhere in Japan, and along the way all manner of strange things happen. Or not. It’s hard to tell. Read more…
Next Thursday: a new Borderland Speakeasy.
I’m on the email list of a store that sells magic tricks (and why not?). Here’s the exact text of this morning’s email from them, with line breaks added:
Many of you
have ordered the box
of Destiny
and many have called
and asked if there are
more.
Tonight
we went through all
the shopping carts that had them
in their order but had not completed
the order and put them
back into the inventory.
There are 30 left however
we are out of the bird paddles
so we will substitute
the Hot Rod Pen
for the Bird Paddle,
You will be both
the Red and Blue Pens
and the Thought Controller Wallet.
This is a great offer
and when these 30 are gone
that will be it
My column on PopMatters this week is the second Borderland Speakeasy. It looks at “They Found the Car,” the second issue in a series called Wish You Were Here, by Gipi.
The comic begins with a man receiving a phone call late one night. A voice on the other end of the line simply says, ‘They found the car’. When the man who receives the call thinks back to that moment, he recalls how those words ‘transported him back, in a single moment, into a life he had thought was gone and buried’. Read more…
A cool and kind of strange coincidence came up while I was working on this article. I knew I wanted to draw parallels between the book and Out of the Past, the classic movie with Robert Mitchum. I felt a strong connection between the two works.
Then, long after I’d started drafting the article, I was looking through a book on film noir called Somewhere in the Night, by Nicholas Christopher, and found a quote from the movie. It’s a key scene, and Robert Mitchum says, “I wish you were here.” I’d completely forgotten that he says that.
I watched the movie again to make sure, and there it is, the title of the comic book. Funny how that works out.
Next week’s column: a new Four-Eyed Stranger.
By coincidence, I have two articles up on PopMatters.com today. That’s never happened before (two in one day).
The first is a book review of Supervillains and Philosophy, an anthology of essays that examines the deeper ideas behind comic book evildoers. I would like to read more stuff like it. I was happy about being able to work in references to Reading Comics and The Supervillain Book, both of which I enjoyed and plan to re-read.
“‘Is a little tyranny justified in the pursuit of a good cause?’ Dyer writes. ‘If someone finally became all-powerful, is there anything they couldn’t do? Can someone truly desire evil? Why the heck are good henchmen so hard to find?’” Read more…
The second article up today is my new Four-Eyed Stranger column. This appears every other Thursday, alternating with my Borderland Speakeasy column. Four-Eyed Stranger covers manga, focusing mainly on classic reprints and unusual modern work by Asian artists.
Today’s Four-Eyed Stranger turned into a longer article than I had expected. I wrote about The Box Man by Imiri Sakabashira, recently published by Fantagraphics. When I started writing and associating things, the article just kept going. I also found ten interesting links that I wanted to include at the end.
The Box Man is an amazing little book that haunts and lingers. It manages to balance its linear and non-linear narrative, being almost hallucinogenic while suggesting an interpretation of it as a metaphor for aging, and the relationship of a son to his infirm father.
“The human protagonist is an adult whose father is aged and infirm (his lower half doesn’t work anymore, or works differently, and he must be carried). The son can’t take care of his father anymore, and undertakes a mission to transport his father to a place where he will make friends.” Read more…
I’m probably way, way off the mark with my ideas about The Box Man, but it was fun to explore the line of thought and the associations that came to mind with it.
My newest column is up on PopMatters today. This is the first Borderland Speakeasy, and it’s about the first story in the first issue of Crime SuspenStories, an infamous series from the 1950s published by EC Comics.
That first story, “Murder May Boomerang,” presents an interesting case of a tale that reverberates back and forth through the last half of the twentieth century, from the short story that served as a possible inspiration, to the debut TV episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, through Road to Perdition, and up to Memento.
Next Thursday: a new Four-Eyed Stranger.
I started writing two columns for PopMatters, and the first one is up today. It’s called Four-Eyed Stranger, and will look at classic manga reprints and unusual modern work by Asian artists that might not fall under a strict definition of manga.
The second column is Borderland Speakeasy, and it explores classic horror and mystery reprints, along with modern crime (non-superhero) comics. The columns will alternate with each other, and will appear every Thursday.
The first column is a sort of appreciation (I tend to ramble) of Taiyo Matsumoto’s Blue Spring, and examines (among other things) its cinematic quality:
Before we even reach the table of contents, we pass through three sketchy pages that seem to follow at least six distinct moments. Each is a haunting, silent narrative in its own right: a baseball player looks with a kind of fear into the air (the blue sky), makes the catch, and then we cut to a shot of an utterly defeated batter at home plate; a young man watches a plane fly overhead, takes hold of his girlfriend’s hand, and together they jump off the roof. Read more…
What a fantastic find to start the new year. From wikipedia:
The Codex Seraphinianus … appears to be a visual encyclopedia of an unknown world, written in one of its languages, a thus-far undeciphered alphabetic writing.
I read something about this book now and then, and I always end up trying to track down a copy, but they are all far too expensive. Then I saw on bookninja today that the entire book is available online, even embeddable (although that doesn’t seem to work here).
Justin Taylor wrote an excellent article in the Believer a few years ago about the book, where he compares it with the “First Encyclopedia of Tlön” from the Jorge Louis Borges story, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” Taylor also makes an interesting point about the book’s impenetrable nature:
You can go through the book page by page, as I have, but the sensation of discovery never entirely goes away. Also, as with any artistic or literary work, the viewer/reader’s mood and mind-set have a substantial—if not constitutive—effect on the reading and interpretation. Isn’t every piece of art a kind of inkblot?
Someone once described the movie Dark Star to me in vivid detail. I was probably around 13 or 14 (almost 30 years ago–jeez), and the person telling me about the movie was in her twenties. She made the movie sound like the most amazing thing ever. Mind-blowingly, life-changingly awesome.
I should add that this happened at a grown-up party where I was the only kid, and there was probably alcohol involved.
Strangely enough, I never got around to seeing the movie until recently, and wow, was that person’s description wrong. I don’t remember everything she said to me about the film, but I think she misremembered pretty much every detail.
The funny/strange part is, I remember that she described it in vivid and minute detail, enacting scenes, dialogue, sound effects and all. It turns out she had all the details wrong.
And now here it is, the whole movie on YouTube. The recently passed-away Dan O’Bannon is a righteous dude as Sgt. Pinback.
