20 Great Japanese Movies

The Top-10 Japanese Cinematic Double Whammies (i.e. the 2 best films of each director) THAT I HAVE SEEN, in _NO_ particular Order:

1: Izo / Happiness of the Katakuris (T.Miike)

2: Rashomon / The Seven Samurai (A.Kurosawa)

3: Taste for Tea / Funky Forest (K.Ishii)

4: Tetsuo / Gemini (S.Tsukamoto)

5: Battles Without Honour And Humanity / Battle Royale (K.Fukasaku)

6: Sonatine / Takeshis’ (T.Kitano)

7: Ju-On: The Curse / Ju-On: The Grudge (T.Shimizu)

8: Suicide Club / Strange Circus (Sion Sono)

9: Love & Pop / Ritual (Hideaki Anno)

10: My Neighbour Totoro / Nausicaä of the Valley Of the Winds (Hayao Miyazaki)

(Not an exhaustive list, but one that I believe represents well both Japan and my own taste.)

The Never-Ending Construction: A Short-Story

They’ve been at it for weeks, now. We just left, but now we’re back. And they’re not away. They’re still there. I met my husband in Cairo three years ago. We wondered about the construction of the pyramids. How could they? So, that and whiskey really made for a great honey-moon. Those peaks, I’ve been at Kilimanjaro, but that’s natural. I’m talking man-made. What’s great about the pyramids, and what’s great about architecture, is that it’s hands-dirty man-made shovelled-up shit. I left butter out to melt. What’s wrong with… me? I didn’t even eat eggs.

Pile beauty on top of beauty, cheese-up your sandwich. Oh I like big things like that. Big things like Cairo and big carrots. Yes, so now we’re back here, but why are they still working? I can see them, occasionally at least, hanging, literally enough, outside the window. They’re building something, but that’s why – right? That’s why it’s a building, it’s a building ‘cos it’s built already? If they built it in 1976-7 – OK not these lads, but other operatives - then why are they - I mean these guys - back? It’s always window-to-window movement. It’s done, but it’s never over. I can see clearly, somewhat, through their lies. What am I thinking, they don’t even speak! They’re there, we’re here, never the twain… Oh, that reminds me, yep, got to meet Daniel outside the dorm. Imbue some maternal, constructive criticism for his stupid career choice. Well. Later. Not yet.

Outside, it’s warm. Inside… Then why do we even have central heating in the house? But what if fires were started out of thin air, like match-magic? What if it’s like a matter of policy or stuff? They made these rules. Who makes these rules, and why do I care? I need to finish my breakfast before dawn. It’s illegal.

The firm that bought our last house turned it into an office. More people than ever before. Big venue. We piled our own stuff in boxes. Moved it around, here, and then forgot about it. These boxes are lying in vertical piles behind the quick-peak closet. They are neatly arranged, but worthless. Like Ascii art. Or like my horse sketches. Well my cousin told me a story about horses which was funny. Apparently they like to build up steam right before the collapse. Like they gasp for air just before they die. It’s an instinct, to focus energy like that. Elephants and mosquitoes. Everybody dies. I won’t though. Reminds me of mother. She wasn’t supposed to die. But she liked to make plans. She was into personal development, like creating one’s self out of nothing. But she got nothing, she became nothing. Which is ok. Some people - they don’t even have money, much less nothing.

Oh. I can see the men at work. Now they’re working on some new brickwork or iron grid or whatever. I can see. The window let’s in air. I the window-sill… What’s wrong? Who left the butter, I don’t think it was me. I don’t destroy things.

I love E.O. Wilson

1) I want to look as good as E.O. Wilson,
as charming as "Sri" David Attenborough,
as well-reasoned as Noam Chomsky,
... when I'm sixty-four. Tam tam.

2) A rundown of a common phenomenon: Internet message boards are composed of trolls (so-called "users"), harassing ("posting to") other trolls ("users") with drivel ("opinions") and spam ("new topics"), constantly creating conflict ("discussion") based on misunderstanding ("interpreting") what the other trolls ("users") have written... This is a way of perpetuating the societal divides and conflicts on a micro-scale, playing them out in the doll-house of make-believe arguments and debates called message board, or forum - or even "guest book"... Yea, let's behave like good guests, shall we?

3) Message boards are even more inane than your regular politics, since in the virtual world there is no material resistance, and since (to expand the scope for a minute) the internet meme/virus/trend/youtube phenomenon propagates by disarming the remaining mental resistance of the user, infiltrating the subcutaneous world of the WWW Everyman by forcing acceptance of a complete inanity, a total jackass obscenity. Because "that's cool". It's not cool. It's hot. Internet is (McLuhan) cool, but youtube is hot. Youtube is the final act in the history of Television (which, by the way, turned "hot" around 1980, when CNN was launched) and thus a viral infestation within the Web. I suggest eradication, but this is to be achieved by simply turning our backs on suggestible user marketing, which is hardly any worse than corporate- or state marketing. But we go online to escape the drudgery of everyday existence - what do we find? Drudgery of everyday existence, but more "spaced out" and hyper-textual. Dead links and 404's are simply gaps in our consciousness, like the blind spots of our retinas. We are urged (and urge ourselves) to feel connected, but sometimes the modem (brain) is not plugged (tuned) in .

4) I had some 4th point but I forgot... Oh yea!

5) American films focus on the subject-object conflict ("fend off evil and fetch a reward"), and on the thorough-faring ("tunneling through") of the protagonist. American (and to some extent European, Latin American etc...) movies are made out of destructible material: The COST of a movie is measured in wrecked cars, houses and sets. Even when nothing explodes, people feel in control of their plastic and silicon appliances and gear: people have knobs and monitors to fondle. Maybe it's eternal, this effigy of destruction? Maybe all theatre is theatre of the sacrifice? Whatever the historical origins, American cinema (of the Bruckheimer variety) is ugly precisely because it has no peripheral consciousness. Whatever is seemingly "peripheral" in these scenes is a hopeless mess! Really, from film to film - I'm absolutely gutted. These fuckers don't know how to measure proportions of light, space and sound in all 4 dimensions - except to the degree it relates to the struggling protagonist and his gear (i.e. appropriated material mobilized for the sake of a cause, i.e. utility). American cinema is hopelessly pathetic and melodramatic, precisely because the model is an operatic aria with an empty stage. But when one realizes that this "emptiness" is simply blindness or unwillingness to see (the richness of the environment and so on), then the truth is laid bare: American movies, especially their "action" sequences, are generally (with a few exceptions, from Lynch to Cronenberg) devoid of natural elegance. The world is violently transformed: The model, then, is Kali rather than Brahma. Contrast this with the superb elegance of Oriental, Russian or French cinema. Despite an almost painful lack of a subject-center, the world of the un-American (indeed anti-American) cinema is constantly aware of the situatedness of the stage - of, as it were, the position of the camera frame within the environment. From fixed shots to pan shots, the peripherally conscious psyche draws elegant, smooth, erotic, brush strokes, like a calligrapher or a vine farmer. This, of course, is what much of this "New Wave" of Chinese, Hong Kong, Korean, Japanese and Taiwanese cinema is consciously rebelling against (just look at films like Infernal Affairs). While I recognize the need (and indeed right) of a rebellion for the young (what a curmudgeonly thing to say!), I would hope this utter Americanization of the Oriental arts (if not the Oriental mind) is a superficial or a passing phase. But that's just an Orientalist position, I grant, which can be neatly summed up as the simultaneous longing for an exotic Other coupled with a wish for their constant lagging-behind and stagnation: the Third World shall remain the Third World, or else the First World has nowhere to escape to!

Well, at any rate, I would hope to enjoy my septuagenarian years watching Bergman and Kurosawa, reading E.O. Wilson, and consuming the Orient in a feverish attempt at a white man's re-appropriation of what Alan Watts called the "flood-light consciousness."

a few observations

Maybe the one big idea behind Man is ultimately nothing more than the claim that we can know something about the world that the world itself cannot know. The world speaks to us in a language only the recipient, the audience - us - will understand. This seems absurd. But true?

Evolution, in this regard, is a process of attuning to responses ("facts"), and the responses are taken as a sign of our own experiential intelligence as Evolvers, due to our power of attributing subjecthood to the Giver of Ur-communications (that is to say, Nature/God/World...). God is killed already when we understand Her better than She does. She is subverted. But we are thereby "activated" into objective action. And action produces "speech", which again merits an audience (i.e. an evolved responsive organism), which again relegates US to the miserable status of the over-interpreted and over-understood dying God, doomed to objective subsumption in a reverent consumption and idolization of our all-providing, all-giving status as a Godhead.

Thus nature, in its deification (whether in the Vedas or in Genesis), was already doomed to appropriated consumption. Viruses, too, are in the process of worshipping and deifying humans and other biological hosts (we shall wait for the viral equivalent of the "Gaia hypothesis", something like the "Man hypothesis"). Should we be grateful or smite the bastards with all our godly might?

3000, 4000, 10.000 years of history - a history of ritualistic consumption of the Godhead.

Attaining godhood in the speech of Others is a sign of certain death. That's why nothing short of anarchy can save the integrity and purity of the unknowable powers of change.

699 Years Ago...

699 years ago, to a day, Jacques De Molay was seized and jailed by forces of the (Not-So-Fair) Philip IV, a monarch with a penchant for heavy taxation and wealth reappropriation. The date was, of course, Friday 13 in October of 1307.

Today, Friday 13, October of 2006, is, if you will, the eve celebration (or lament) of the septocentennial of this historical event (reportedly commemorated on the 30th degree of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry) to be celebrated exactly a year from hence. But only this year do all the factors align perfectly: day of the week, day of the month, month, year (-1)... Today, to make it clearer, is a day of celebration because the Divinities themselves are on our side!

With or without the symbolic, spiritual and mysterious significance of that event, even the economic and exoteric side of the Philip IV / Avignon Papacy period suffices to arouse deep emotions in a man, like myself, who has drank deep from the Pierian spring of Freedom/Freiheit/Liberté.

This man (Philip IV) had the religious institution of Papacy amended - NOT for the purposes of liberation and rejuvenation, mind you, but for the simple purpose of milking a veritable cash-cow. Taxation, Control, Command Economy: tenets of International Criminality. Only a year before rounding up the Templars, under a pretense of religious heresy (talk about pot calling the kettle black!), the Fair King singled out the jews for a special levy to fund the monarchy's debt economy. The jews have always been, of course, the enemy all Christians love to hate... From the very first Crusades on... To me, and to the Templars, Philip IV represented Heavy Taxation, Minority Persecution, Perpetual War Economy, Monetary Manipulation and General Buffoonery. All these are themes right fit in our own times!

If both Boniface VIII & Benedict XI suffered the assassin's hand, ultimately traceable to the cash and power of the French monarchy, the cohorts between secular and celestial reigns were taken to a new heights, where theology became subservient to economics; God to Man; Jesus to Caesar...

Alas, despite the Templars' pre-enlightenment syncretism in the realm of spirituality, such an end was detrimental BOTH to spiritual and secular advancement, and the mystery religion undercurrent could hardly claim victory until the final overthrow of European monarchies towards the 18th and 19th centuries. The fact that "Elizabitch" (as the Rastafarians call the Queen Mother of the Britons) is still in power shows that there is still Great Work ahead.

J.d.M., Thou SHALT be Avenged!