Quadruple Feature

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Shin Sabure and Michiyo Kogura in Ozu’s The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice

I had not done such a thing since my early film freak days. Then it was not unusual to sit through five John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, or Budd Boetticher films projected one after the other in a screening room. Yesterday I did the same sort of thing as I watched four Yasujiro Ozu postwar films from Shochiku Studio screened between 5 pm and 12:30 am by Turner Classic Movies (TCM). I could have made it five pictures, but I had to miss Tokyo Twilight (1957) because I was beginning to fade by the time that midnight rolled around.

The films I saw were:

  • Record of a Tenement Gentleman (1947) about a small child lost in the ruins of a bombed-out Tokyo
  • A Hen in the Wind (1948) about a young wife sells her body to pay her son’s medical bills
  • The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice (1952) about a middle-aged couple that begins to separate over various issues, but comes together again in the end
  • Early Spring (1956) about the travails of salary-men in Tokyo

All four films were brilliant, and all featured interpersonal problems which ended in some form of reconciliation. In the divided West, such reconciliation would be replaced by buying a gun, wearing camouflage clothing, and committing a hate crime. We seem to prefer the irreconcilable in our own entertainment.

I am enthralled by TCM’s Ozu festival. So far this month, I have seen nine Ozu films; and there are four more screening next Tuesday, plus two more that I missed but could see using TCM’s WATCH NOW feature.

Why do I love Ozu’s films so much? For one thing, they are jewel-like in their perfection—even the silent films Ozu made before 1937. Also, they make me feel good without being saccharine in any way: His films, psychologically, are true to life. (In two of the films, there are depressed little boys with a bed-wetting problem.) Finally, Ozu’s films have a Buddhist sense of Mono no aware, which can be translated as “the pathos of things” or “the bittersweet awareness of impermanence.”

Yes, his films are all bittersweet. But they all end in sweetness.

A Recurrent Suspicion

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MAGA Rally

In July 1943, the Writers’ War Board asked New Yorker writer E. B. White to make a statement on the subject “The Meaning of Democracy.” Below is White’s statement:

Surely the Board knows what democracy is. It is the line that forms on the right. It is the don’t in don’t shove. It is the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles; it is the dent in the high hat. Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere. [Italics mine]

In 2016 and 2024, I learned that, according to Mr. White’s statement, we are NOT living in a democracy. I say that because a certain individual was elected president twice by more than half the voters—voters who were not only wrong in electing him, but very probably wrong in their judgments on any subject you care to name.

I suppose I could be forgiving toward the voters who propelled Trump to the presidency, but I don’t feel like it. I have no intention of agreeing that water flows uphill, that the sun sets in the East, or that the Commander-in-Chief of our armed forces can declare war at any time against anybody. In fact, I am feeling very non-committal about our country as it begins to celebrate its 250th anniversary as a former democracy.

Traveling with Influencers

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An Influencer Couple Takes On Caye Caulker, Belize

Planning a vacation will never be the same again, now that influencers have weighed in. As usual, the results are both good and bad.

Recently, I have been researching vacations in Isla Mujeres, Mexico, and Caye Caulker, Belize. The good thing is that I have seen enough images of the two islands to feel confident that there are interesting sights to see, good places to eat, and decent accommodations. Now that everybody and his brother has a video camera and a drone and professional underwater equipment, there is no lack of images promoting a large variety of vacation destinations.

On the minus side, many of the producers of these videos insist on highlighting themselves, sometimes in every shot. My interest is in seeing what Isla Mujeres and Caye Caulker are like, not in the drinking habits of these influencers. Of course, now I know that an inordinate number of visitors to Isla Mujeres are serious alkies. There are times that, on seeing these videos, I wonder how the influencers are still on their feet and not face-planting in a puddle somewhere.

There is also a lot of mispronounced names of places and misinformation. It is obvious that most travel influencers don’t do their homework when visiting another country.

Another point is that some influencers have received free products and services to promote destinations, hotels, and restaurants. As such, one has to take their recommendations with a grain of salt. Of course, the viewer gets a chance to see the accommodations and the food and get some idea of what to expect.

The important thing is balance one influencer off against another and use one’s judgment to make good decisions. But then, you knew that, didn’t you?

Lion Dancers

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Colorful Lion Dancers from UCLA’s Jade Lotus Lion Dance Troupe

Martine and sat on a ledge in the Maguire Gardens by the west entrance to the Los Angeles Central Library. At 11 am two pairs of lion dancers entered and performed a vigorous dance to open this year’s AAPI Joy: Voices, Then & Now. This is a celebration by various local Asian and Pacific Islander groups of their cultural heritage and the experience of living in Southern California.

After the dancers left, I notices the inscription in Latin above the west entrance: ET QUASI CURSORES VITAI LAMPADA TRADUNT. After doing a little digging, I found the quote comes from Book 2 of the De Rerum Natura (The Nature of Things) by Lucretius and, translated, means “and like runners, they pass on the torch of life.” Very appropriate.

We had attended the AAPI Joy event last year and were happy to find there were even more events scattered across the library premises this year. We attended four of them:

  • The lion dancers
  • Book awards to Filipino-American authors receiving the Carlos Bulosan Book Club awards
  • A Filipino dance troupe called Kayamanan Ng Lahi performing dances from Mindanao
  • The Koto and Nihon Buyo group playing popular Japanese koto music accompanied by dancers

I like the special events put on by the Central Library. Over the last eight years, the library has become a major factor in my life—thanks largely to the opening of the Exposition Line (the E train) on L.A.’s Metro Rail. It has been an unfailing source of great books, an ever-present help to my psyche thanks to the Thursday Mindful Meditation sessions, and a provider of entertainment at their luxurious Mark Taper Auditorium.

My trips to the library downtown are now one of the highlights of my life.

Chichicastenango

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Food Vendor at Sunday Market in Chichicastenango

One of the best meals I ate in my 2019 visit to Guatemala was breakfast at a comedor in the huge marketplace at Chichicastenango. The Maya ladies dished out simple peasant food with eggs, beans, and tortillas, but it was filling and delicious.

At first, I was leery about eating at public marketplaces. But then, after time, I realized that the hard-working women were more motivates to cook good safely prepared food than many hirelings at restaurants. I don’t recall ever having any gourmet food in Guatemala, but what I had was most satisfying.

I spent two nights in Chichicastenango, and I was tired after climbing Turk’aj Hill to visit Pascual Abaj, an idol to whom sacrifices are made by the local Maya shamans. It was quite a hike, and I was already at high altitude (1965 meters or 6,447 feet) to start with.

The Maya Idol Pascual Abaj

I remember wanting to visit the local cemetery after I got down from the hill, but by that time I was totally exhausted. So I had to be contented with a long shot:

View of the Maya Cemetery at Chichicastenango

I wonder if today I could take a trip today as exhausting as my three weeks in Guatemala and Honduras in 2019.

“Being a Ghost”

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Crowd of people with phones

I was reading an old copy of The New York Review of Books from May 23, 2019, when I came across a poem by Robert Pinsky that caught my attention. Pinsky is a former Poet Laureate of the United States who composed one of my favorite poems, “Samurai Song,” which I urge you to read. In the poem below, Pinsky takes on the smartphone zombies our time:

Being a Ghost

When they die I become a ghost
Afloat from room to room as vague
In grief as when I can’t find my keys.

Some say zombies became popular
Just when phones became so smart
We began staring into them entranced.

Alone without my dead to phone
I’m left adrift as when I can’t
Remember a name I know I know.

Shadowy appalled ghost-mind aghast
At the crowd of names stranded alive
Ashore outwaiting my shadowy boat.

The last stanza surely refers to Charon, the boatman to Hades on the River Styx. The fare: One obol.

Vilcabamba

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Vilcabamba a.k.a. Espiritu Pampa

When Hiram Bingham III first laid eyes on the spectacular ruins of Machu Picchu in Peru’s Andes, he had been looking for the last capital of the Incas who had rebelled against the Spanish conquistadores. It was a place called Vilcabamba. Curiously, he had actually discovered the ruins of Vilcabamba a few weeks later at a place called Espiritu Pampa, but rejected it as the last Inca stronghold.

Why? Let Bingham explain in his own words, quoted in Kim MacQuarrie’s The Last Days of the Incas (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009). The American explorer found it hard to believe that

the [Inca] priests and Virgins of the Sun … who fled from cold Cuzco with Manco … would have cared to live in the hot valley of Espiritu Pampa. The difference in climate is as great as that between Scotland and Egypt. They [the Incas] would not have found in Espiritu Pampa the food which they liked. Furthermore, they could have found the seclusion and safety which they craved just as well in several other parts of the province, particularly at Machu Picchu, together with a cool, bracing climate and food stuffs more nearly resembling those to which they were accustomed.

Essentially, Espiritu Pampa was too yucky. (Note that in the above photo, a considerable amount of tropical foliage has been cleared.) Too yucky for the Inca and too yucky for the … the … Virgins of the Sun?!

Who in blue blazes were the Virgins of the Sun?

According to Wikipedia’s AI overlord: “The Aclla (Quechua for ‘Chosen Women’), often called ‘Virgins of the Sun’ or ‘Wives of the Inca,’ were young women in the Inca Empire chosen around age 10 for their beauty and purity. Sequestered in convents called Acllahuasi, they lived a cloistered, nun-like existence, specializing in weaving, brewing, and religious duties under the supervision of Mama Cuna.”

Well, I could see why a lonely American professor, scion of two generations of New England missionaries, would become entranced by the idea of Virgins of the Sun. Might as well junk everything that several generations of Spanish sources wrote on the subject of Vilcabamba and declare Machu Picchu to be the site of the Inca city It’s a nicer chunk of real estate and could more easily be promoted as the next Disneyland.

Curiously, none of those old Spanish documents ever mentioned Machu Picchu, however gorgeous it looks compared to Manco Inca’s hidey-hole in the jungle, far from the Spanish who had massacred so many of his people.

East Is East and …

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Poet Charles Bukowski (1920-1994)

I like to write about Charles Bukowski, partly because he is completely honest about himself. The following is an excerpt from a 1985 New York Quarterly interview conducted by William Packard. He asked Buk the question “Over the last few decades California has been the residence of many of our most independent voice poets—like Jeffers, Rexroth, Patchen, even Henry Miller. Why is this? What is your attitude towards the East, towards New York?” His answer follows:

Well, there is a little more space out here, the long run up the coast, all that water, a feeling of Mexico and China and Canada, Hollywood, sunburn, starlets turned to prostitutes. I don’t know, really, I guess if your ass is freezing some of the time, it’s harder to be a “voice poet.” Being a voice poet is the big gamble because you’re putting your guts up for view and you’re going to get a lot more reaction than if you’re writing something like your mother’s soul being like a daisy field.

New York, I don’t know. I landed there with $7 and no job and no friends and no occupation except common laborer. I suppose if I had come in from the top instead of the bottom I might have laughed a little more. I stayed three months and the buildings scared the shit out of me and the people scared the shit out of me, and I had done a lot of bumming all over the country under the same conditions but New York City was the Inferno, all the way. The way Woody Allen’s intellectuals suffer in N.Y.C. is a lot different than what happens to my type of people. I never got laid in New York, in fact, the women wouldn’t even speak to me. The only way I ever got laid in New York was to come back three decades later and bring my own with me, a terrible wench, we stayed at the Chelsea, of course.

The Zoo Lady and the Politicos

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Sharon Matola (1954-2021) and Scarlet Macaw

I just finished reading a book about the difficulty of fighting an environmental battle in a developing country. The book was Bruce Barcott’s The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw: One Woman’s Fight to Save the World’s Most Beautiful Bird (New York: Random House, 2008). The story is set in Belize where a naturalist from Baltimore named Sharon Matola founded a zoo consisting solely of critters from within the borders of the country.

Sharon was particularly proud of her scarlet macaws. Now these are a kind of bird that is not endangered in South America; but the Central American variety, a legitimate subspecies, could be found in the valley of the Macal River, where they had their nests. When suddenly it was announced by the Belize government that a dam (to be called the Chalillo Dam) was to be built smack in the middle of the macaws’ nesting territory, Sharon went to war against the forces behind the dam.

These included not only a Canadian firm named Fortis but a number of Belize politicos who stood to gain from kickbacks and other underhanded tricks possible when dealing with large construction projects such as Chalillo. Barcott’s book not only gives us an excellent picture of what the tiny Central American country of Belize—formerly known as British Honduras—is all about, but gives us blow-by-blow accounts of Sharon’s war against the Powers That Be.

Well, in the end, the Powers That Be won, and the dam got built. The politicos were so irate about this gringo lady’s attempt to subvert “cheap electricity for the masses” that they scheduled a massive landfill to be created right next door to the Belize Zoo. Fortunately for the Zoo Lady, that project failed when it was demonstrated that a river important to longtime Belizean residents would become badly polluted.

In the end, she had other irons in the fire, such as reintroducing harpy eagles to Belize. Alas, however, Sharon died of a heart attack at the age of 66. Fortunately, her zoo continues on; and I have earmarked it for a visit if I can take a trip to Belize.

“I Asked A Thief To Steal Me A Peach”

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The following short poem by William Blake (1757-1827) is not what one would expect. The All Poetry page from which I copied the poem contains an interesting comment, saying that the poem is“Part of Pickering Manuscript; distinguished by blunt depiction of collaborations across moral dichotomies.” That’s an interesting way of putting it.

I Asked A Thief To Steal Me A Peach

I asked a thief to steal me a peach:
He turn’d up his eyes.
I ask’d a lithe lady to lie her down:
Holy and meek she cries.

As soon as I went an angel came:
He wink’d at the thief
And smil’d at the dame,
And without one word spoke
Had a peach from the tree,
And ’twixt earnest and joke
Enjoy’d the Lady.