No trip to Taiwan would be complete without the ever-present Betel Nut Girls, the puddles of red chaw-spit on the sidewalk, and personally being offered a betel nut by my father-in-law. The whole thing is terrible for your teeth, and you can guarantee nobody will want to kiss you. Plus, the tree’s shallow roots leads to major hill erosion and mudslides. Oops! Read all about the little chewy bastard here.
Author: tedmills
What if Kerry and Bush were roommates?
Let’s have the wonderful Sims2 sort it out. Features cameos by Saddam and Osama.
Non-negotiable
Apparently this story has been around since 1995, but this is the first time I’d read it. Man Deposits Junk Mail Check. The bank cashes it. Quite a hilarious and long story with many twists and turns. The title “Man 1 Bank 0” gives you only a small indication how this ends up.
Tokyo Story
Dir: Yasujiro Ozu
1953
I can’t remember when I first watched Tokyo Story, but I know it was on crumb-bum video and I hadn’t lived enough.
So here comes Jon Crow shoving DVDs in my hand, shaming me for not watching Mizoguchi and Ozu enough. Fortunately, Criterion are finally getting around to releasing Ozu’s films on DVD. A good transfer of an old film is essential to its enjoyment, I think.
Anyway, “Tokyo Story” is a masterpiece, and not just because everybody says so. It has the emotional cruelty and sparse interior landscape of Chris Ware, but the sort of heart that Ware is only beginning to attain.
The story of an aging couple making a rare trip from their countryside home to the big city, only to be treated as mostly a nuisance by their grown children, doesn’t offer easy explanations to the conflicts on the screen, but suggests much more beneath the surface. That is, we could blame Shige’s bad treatment of her parents to being obsessed with making money, but there are hints that she has some sort of reason, some issues that she hasn’t worked out, something she hasn’t forgiven.
Not that “Tokyo Story” is a post-modern “everything’s opposite” twist-o-rama text, just that the film’s handling of character is so well-drawn that multiple viewings are bound to bring out the numerous levels on which these people think. The father, Shukichi, was apparently a bit of a drunk (as was the deceased son), and may explain the children’s differing responses to him.
The film asks a lot of questions about the parent-child bond, what motivates the breaking of that bond, reality vs. a parents’ expectations, and whether there’s anything to be done about it. When the youngest daughter vows at the end that she’ll never be as selfish as her older sister, there’s no way to say if she’ll be able to keep her word. “Tokyo Story” leaves the viewer wanting to know what will happen to so many of the characters. What will happen to daughter-in-law Noriko, (Setsuko Hara, an Ozu regular), now a struggling widow still young enough for remarriage? What will happen to Shukishi, especially after he is cheerfully damned in a way by the neighbor at the end of the film? (“You will be lonely” she says to him, which could be the film’s brutal message).
Milly and Rupe Go For a Stroll
I wonder if the makers of Photoshop ever thought their app would mostly be used to make silly things like the Milly and Rupe Gallery?
Buy Me This for Christmas
As blogged on BoingBoing this morning, this keychain remote will turn off all TVs in a room, regardless of make.
Wired News: Inventor Rejoices as TVs Go Dark
Altman’s key-chain fob was a TV-B-Gone, a new universal remote that turns off almost any television. The device, which looks like an automobile remote, has just one button. When activated, it spends over a minute flashing out 209 different codes to turn off televisions, the most popular brands first.
For Altman, founder of Silicon Valley data-storage maker 3ware, the TV-B-Gone is all about freeing people from the attention-sapping hold of omnipresent television programming. The device is also providing hours of entertainment for its inventor.
After lunch I went to grab some coffee in a local shop here. One TV above the counter had the insufferable “Crossfire” on mute and another one above the door was showing soap operas. And nobody was watching either. This is why I want this keychain…
Giant Robots Attack Canada
Giant wind-up robots, that is. “The Dream” is Trevor Cawood’s music video that mixes the mini with the huge, and uses seamless CG to do so. (Cawood did effects for the Matrix, so this is what he does on his days off.)
My Grief
So anyway, I’ve been transferring these old tapes of mine from back when I was a kid, recorded with my partner in crime at the time, Gabe. I’m surprised and happy to say that these tapes are still in pretty good condition, at least listenable. I have about 35 or so and hold them very dear to me, as you might expect.
But last night I flipped over a tape and found that one side was completely blank. It somehow had been erased…when? I couldn’t figure it out. The tabs were popped out to protect against that sort of thing, so this must have happened years ago. But how? If I had done it, I surely would have remembered my complete stupidity and chastised myself accordingly. But I didn’t or haven’t.
What can I say? I just lost another 30 minutes of my childhood. Weep! This makes me nervous to go through the rest of the tapes. What other surprises lay in store?
Bend It Like Bellinger
I just noticed my friend Jesse Bellinger has a site up on the net. He used to work with me at the Independent, and now he’s got a little archive of his writing up. Here’s a sample of his work which just so happens to feature an illustration by moi that I’d completely forgotten about. Now all the man needs is a blog.
“Jacques” “Derrida” “Dead” “at” “74”
I was quite surprised at the comments in the Guardian over Derrida’s death. A few writers have some interesting things to say about him, but most come off as flip or ignorant. Why bother?
Deconstruction was the part of literary criticism that I least understood in college, and was the one I could never write. It was a sort of quantum physics of literature and meaning, and seemed to require much more background knowledge going in than even New Historicism. Our instructors brought it up, and made us read an essay or two, but didn’t insist too much on it.
One day, Derrida came to speak at UCSB and we all felt the obligation to go hear him, as one would a rock star or a poet. And he certainly did look cool in his suit and his brilliant white hair.
He spoke on the Balkan war, in his heavily accented English. I began to take notes, to try to help me make sense of what I knew would be a dense talk. By minute 15 I was lost. Was he even talking about the Balkans any more? I looked over at my instructor, whose critical faculties I admired, and even he was nodding off. People started to yawn, give up, walk out.
Derrida made no effort to connect to the audience, did not offer up analogies for us to grasp. He just plowed ahead. It was lit theory as performance art, as atonal feedback music. He must have seen these walkouts all the time and knew he was onto something. He couldn’t preach to the choir. There was no choir. And what do we mean when we say “choir”? He was a man unto himself and I suspect most people who admired and followed him only understood 15% of what he was laying down.
I had class and had to leave after 30 long long minutes. And that’s all I remember about Derrida.