TOO MANY ROOSTERS IN THE CHICKEN HOUSE

The foreign film of the week is Blood and Bones. Japanese, the story of a Korean peasant family that left Korea for Japan when north/south tensions were boiling, fascism vs communism, the story beginning with the crowd on the deck of the transport ship Koreans were taking to Osaka where they believed they'd find their fortunes. We follow the story of one man's family, Kim something or other. It turns out he was the kind of person summed up by his son at the end of the story, he was here for nobody's pleasure but his own. He was severely cruel to the people closest to him, at home, like his wives, one at a time, his kids, making all their lives miserable. Some people killed themselves and attempted it because of his behavior. Everybody whose lives intersected his suffered. He started a small factory, made a bundle of money working his employees too hard, paying too little, violent temperament, carried a club with him all the time. He became a loan shark and was ruthless. His wives tended to die. He only raped them, beat them, berated them. He ended up dying of old age in his own bed, mutual abandonment by the various members of the family. One of the boys went back to Korea never to be heard of again.

I saw it because the man was played by Takeshi Kitano, the director who made a string of excellent films. A feeling that the director of this film, Blood and Bones, must be on a par with Kitano for him to be a leading role in this director's film, Yoichi Sai. One I saw yesterday that Kitano directed, Scenes At The Beach was the same as a silent film. It was the story of a young guy whose job was trash collection, he's deaf and finds a broken styrofoam surfboard. He takes it home, fixes it and sets out to figure out how to surf. At the end of the movie he wins a trophy at a tournament. He has a little girlfriend who goes with him everywhere he goes. He can't talk. He can't hear and it is nearly a silent movie but for the sounds of the ocean. No soundtrack, just silence. Sometimes you hear people talking, but little of it is necessary but as sounds going on at the moment. Beautiful, quiet film. Surf about like the South Carolina coast. The most interesting part about the film was having no soundtrack or dialogue by its characters. A very great deal of communicating went on in that silence.

In the midst of my own private film festival of Kitano films, I like everything I see by him. Each one is off the wall in its own way. They tend to be way off the wall, like out in the middle of the room. He plays lead role in several of them, usually a man who is something of a loser, sometimes a yakuza mobster who goes too far, a loose cannon who tears up everything and in the end himself included. His one film that stands out from the others is Zatoich the Blind Swordsman. A Japanese samurai legend figure like Hopalong Cassidy is in television culture in America, though nothing similar as characters. Zatoichi is a blind man who has advanced senses as a result of his blindness. He was a humble man, always saves women, children and old people.

He has extrasensory knowing is the only way I can define what it is he has.

Zatoichi is the origin of Stephen Seagal's character who continues from film to film, usually with different names. Seagal, like Zatoichi, never loses. When I saw the connection, I understood. Seagal grew up in Japan with American parents, school there, his life there, then they moved to LA when he was 18. He studied martial arts since childhood. Zatoichi was a weekly television show when he was a kid, like the Lone Ranger or Roy Rogers here. Seagal understands Asian ways. He brought the legend of Zatoichi to America with him and has given it now to all the world. He doesn't kill anybody not trying to kill him. Leave him alone and he goes in peace. Pull your sword on him and you're dead, that quick.

Kitano made a good Zatoichi. The other actor in Japan who made a Zatoichi film is just as good as Kitano's version, in its own way. Both of them beautiful films that happen to be samurai films. I don't remember the name of the other man who played Zatoichi, but he also played him in the weekly television series Seagal grew up seeing. The making of them was at as high a level as the making of the film. They might have inspired Seagal in those years to take an interest in film making. They stood out in their time, certainly for television. Beautifully made, and a man of action who has the uncanny ability to disappear. Some of his adversaries call him the Ghost. Seagal's character is also like Zatoichi's in that he is portrayed as a devout believer who visits temples. The monks and other believers are his people. They're home base. Out on his travels by foot is where adventures flare up. Seagal's character works out there on the fringe when he's with The Company where something happens to him they never heard of him. Men with guns. Men with swords. Roosters with spurs.

PUPPETS AND PAINTING

ironweed

Today's film was Dolls by Takeshi Kitano, Japanese, 2002. Kitano is one very interesting director. This film opened with a Japanese puppet show of a man and a woman in some kind of drama. It's a professional puppet troupe, masters at handling the dolls telling the story by their movements in relation to one another. Someone sings the story and someone plays a shamisen, something like a 3 string Japanese banjo. After the puppet dance came the a story acted out by two people in a kind of complex relationship. They were in love. He promised to marry her, then turned and went to marry someone else. Girl 1 attempts to kill herself. It didn't take, but left her in a vegetative state. Boy feels terrible, goes and takes her with him. He tied a red rope around each of their waists and they walked dragging the rope that allowed 10 or 12 feet between them. They spent the entire film walking. It became a film of beautiful clothes they wore, different from scene to scene, and colors of the seasons. Not much goes on. They just walk.







About all the time not watching the movie I was painting. Smearing paint onto a 2'x2' canvas covering it up. I'm feeling good about the direction it's taking. That's a good sign. It's becoming quite colorful. The colors bring to mind RB Kitaj, though only the colors. That's because I tend to primary colors like he does. It feels good painting with zeal, wanting to, In this one the figure is almost life size so the folds in the shirt are long and casual, fingers more manageable. All I want to do now is paint. It's fun playing with colors. I need to find sleep. Will end here for today and go lie down til morning.

AND LUNCH AT THE CIRCLE L

scott freeman (fiddle) & michael fox (dulcijo)

The last of last night's videos from the Front Porch is uploading onto YouTube now. Two of Michael Fox's story-telling tales I recorded and uploaded. One is him telling (reciting doesn't sound right for how he told it) the Stephen Vincent Benet poem, The Mountain Whippoorwill,

the other his story of why he calls his "ducijo" his "green banjo." At the end of The Mountain Whippoorwill, Scott Freeman joined him with fiddle and they played Hell Broke Loose in Georgia, the tune the hillbilly boy played in the Benet poem. I've read it over a couple of times now, and have listened to Michael telling it, in awe of Benet as a poet. He gets inside the fiddler's head while he's fiddling. He gets the rhythm of the tune going with words, phrases. It rewards a good reading.

Also uploaded 4 songs by Michael and Donna. I had one of Donna singing by herself an old song called Little Margaret. For reasons "unknown" it didn't take at YouTube. It does that from time to time. I have no idea why, and when I've tried uploading them again, they don't take again, so I wasn't able. I made the pictures with a zoom from the back of the room, which emphasizes my trembly hands, and I found the big chrome mic with the long chrome stand caused the automatic focus in the camera going all the time. When it is in the central region of the frame, the auto focus goes crazy. Donna's mic had a black stand and the auto focus didn't change with her. On Michael it was all the time, because he used the big chrome mic. I've wondered before why the focus changed a lot sometimes. It read distance by light somehow. That chrome stand play havoc with the auto mechanism. Everything from last night is up now on YouTube. Write in the Search box hobblealong1 and last nights entries ought to be at the top of what comes up.

I bypassed the Mtn Heritage Fest in Sparta today. There were bands I wanted to see. I had to go in to town to the library and Halsey Drug. Went in the back way. Cars parked everywhere. The library parking all filled up. Every parking place was filled up. At Halsey Drug the parking lot was full, both sides of the street between the PO and Ed Adams lined with cars. I went back out 18 north and re-entered Sparta by the street next to the bowling alley. I wanted out of there. Turned left on 21, drove out to the Circle L and had a good lunch. From there I came home. I wanted to spend the day getting those videos uploaded, wanted to plan the composition of the next portrait of a mountain musician, wanted to see a Takeshi Kitano film, Kikujiro.

I've lined all his films up at the top of the Q at netflix, giving myself a Takeshi Kitano film festival. He makes zany, off the wall kinds of films. Today's was himself acting a man of such an unpleasing personality he kept everybody at a distance, yet he's an interesting kind of guy at the same time. He and his wife, who nags at him all the time for being such a worthless slug, are friends with a boy's grandmother who is keeping the boy. The boy's mother lived some distance away in another city. The boy wanted to go see his mother, so the man's wife sent him with the boy to help him get there and back. They make the journey and the story is their adventures along the way, comic goofball kinds of adventures that are more adventures of the mind than physical adventures.

A little bit of me wanted to go to the Mtn Heritage Fest in Sparta, but the immensity of the crowd intimidated me. I wasn't going to buy anything. And I'm not one to shop just be to be shopping. I felt good for the people who put it all together. It was a good enough crowd they didn't need one more, esp a nonpaying one. I was advised at the library that I should paint scenes on circular saw blades---I'd make a lot of money. I oughta get a job if I want to make money. What I really ought to do is go up to the Air Bellows Outdoor Art Museum and make a contribution before winter. That's more my speed.

TAKESHI KITANO

image borrowed from amazon
I bought one so it's ok

Exactly as the forecast, today it was clear then cloudy and started raining at 2. Fog came in with the rain. It's been a foggy mountaintop. Daffodils are up and about to bloom the next day the sun is out. It's one of the most beautiful days there is, wet landscape in cloud. The wet makes all the colors vivid, the yellows, tans and browns of last year's leavings, the greens of pines, and the fog gives it beautiful depth against the light gray backdrop. Last year friends here from Missouri were disappointed their day here was wet with light fog. I mentioned that the wet brightens the colors the sun bleaches and the light fog gives actually greater clarity in what you see, and a sense of distance. The evidence came up on the digital screen and a lousy gray day turned into a spectacular day in a flash. I love to walk in the woods on a foggy day. Umbrellas don't do so well in the woods, so I wait until it's not raining to go walking.

The windchimes ting lightly with the splashes of water running off the roof to the rocks below. 48 degrees. It was funny at the radio station attempting to tell the weather news Saturday morning. I had to operate Sue's laptop, which I'm not familiar with at all. She showed me how to get up the weather and scroll it. It worked. I'm reading Saturday, Sunday, Monday and I couldn't get it to scroll. It was a full arm's length away from me, because the mic was quite a ways from it. I was in there trying to keep voice near the mic and reach as far as I could reach, hold one little thing down with my thumb and scroll on the mouse pad with my finger to make it go on to Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. I like to go through Thursday, because it gives a pattern of weather for the next 5 days. Nobody can remember the details of each day. I certainly can't. So I find the pattern and feel like about everybody gets the pattern, like if it gets warmer every day, or if it gets rainier every day, see which way the wind blows. I like it so you don't have to be a weatherman to know.

Today I watched a netflix movie twice. BROTHERS. It was made by Japanese director Takeshi Kitano. He writes screenplays of all his films, conceives the story, plays lead character and directs them. Plus he has his own studio, Office Kitano. I've seen 5 of his films recently and find Takeshi Kitano a brilliant mind. Each one is radically different from the others except for the Kitano mind that runs through them. This one takes place in Los Angeles, both English and Japanese spoken. I used subtitles for all of it. He has what I interpret to be a post-modern twist in his films. He has funny asides from time to time. His films tend to have 4 dances in them. Not dances like conventional dancing. On one, 4 guys are making music with 4 wooden staffs banging them on the floor making intricate rhythms, while they tapdance on sandal type shoes with a flat wooden circle for a heel and one for the ball of the foot. Get a bunch of them going and the sticks hitting the wooden floor, and they can make some noise and music. Two guys banging on both sides of a big drum. It an aside, comic relief, a surprise dance.

In today's film, one of the "dances" was 4 men in suits on a beach seen from a long ways back, an inch or so high, with the ocean, horizon and sky beyond them. 2 of them were tossing a football back and forth, and 2 of them just stood around. I've found he does this 4 times in each of his films. One of the dances in today's film was half a dozen guys in suits playing basketballs indoors with a portable indoor basket, none of them players. Jumping around, tossing the ball, moving here, moving there. This would be Takeshi's humor. In a film of mostly men, yakuza, mafia, he has them dancing with balls during the dance scenes. I think of all the attempts to make a basket, it happened only once. The guys are shown as being inept at everything in their lives but shooting guns, and not so hot at that. They use the point and shoot method. Shoot enough times and you're bound to hit something.

Constant movement, all of it in relation to the ball. Fascinating when seen as a dance. Our man, Kitano's character, Older Brother, gets a cell phone call from guys in another mob telling him they have his girlfriend. Meet them at certain place and time. He shows up. 2 guys have their guns on girlfriend's head. Older Brother stands and looks at them awhile, pulls out his gun and shot all 3 of them, girlfriend included, and drove off. It wasn't like he intended to. She was collateral damage for his method of shooting: point and empty the gun.

It had the humor of the unexpected in it. Nobody in gangster movies does that. It says, this guy's a loose cannon and everybody better watch out. He was, too, and he made a mess of things before he was through. Takeshi Kitano, the artist, likes to play with the unexpected. That's him in the center of the picture above. Omar Epps is the black man. He makes a good character in every movie I've seen him in. He puts on a great solo performance driving the car at the end, leaves us laughing.

Kitano makes characters that are a little bit off the deep end, you never can guess what they might do next. Any of them. I've come to see him as something of a Woody Allen of Japan. Not that his characters are involved in psychoanalysis, but he writes them, directs them and plays the lead character in them. They're not anything like Allen's films, but he is an artist to the same degree Allen is an artist. His films are visual dynamite, the compositions of vertical and horizontal lines and color in architecture for backgrounds. Kitano has a similar eye that finds art everywhere.

In one of the crazier scenes, he and Epps kill a bodyguard of the man they're after, and lay him down in the street where it says BUMP in big white letters and two lines above them making an arrow to point to this one spot where the bump is presumably located. They put him on the street at the tip of the arrow and ran off. Every scene is a beautiful picture inside the rectangle frame. The characters are from a wide variety of personalities, each one individual in every way. And like Allen, there is unexpected humor everywhere, clever, good humor. In some of the scenes I can see Kitano off camera laughing at something the actors are doing. His sense of humor is zany and he makes the most of it. I get the impression he's a zany individual, too. His movies are never comedies, anything but, yet I always laugh inside when I think of him for all the funny pranks he pulls in a film. I had to give this one 5 stars on the netflix evaluation.