TOP・UPDATES・FOUR PILLARS・CINEMA/TV・GAMES・MANGA/ANIME・MUSIC・WRITINGS・FAQ・LINKS
TOP・UPDATES・FOUR PILLARS・CINEMA/TV・GAMES・MANGA/ANIME・MUSIC・WRITINGS・FAQ・LINKS
Me and a friend took a bit of a jaunt out to a theater in our state that plays a lot of "arthouse" and revival stuff, and in this case I watched Possession by Andrzej Żuławski in a beautiful new restoration. I've never seen the film look so crisp and beautiful, and the power it had on the big screen was astonishing. An excellent experience. However, the audience annoyed me. They were laughing weirdly at a lot of parts. Some parts of the movie are kind of funny (scenes with Heinrich in particular), so I didn't expect them to be silent the whole time. But most of it just seemed weird.
I don't know if I'm imagining it, but it seems like in recent years when I see these "arthouse" movies (I hate the term, but to distinguish them...), people are laughing at them a lot more. It's weird. I can't proclaim to diagnose the reason, but maybe people aren't as used to watching movies alone in silence and find the experience uncomfortable, so have to react in some way and find laughter the easiest way to dispel the uncomfortable feeling. Watching a movie in a theater is a pretty intimate experience. You are alone with people focusing on the same thing and being silent for so long. There really isn't a lot like it in our modern world where everyone is isolated on their smartphones. I think it's really precious and I'd like to keep going to revivals like this for that reason. But I wish people would be more pleased being quiet and just being internally moved.
I've decided to not necessarily do a monthly "recap" any more, because I don't feel like I have as much to report in the way I used to. I am not necessarily piling up movies and anime and stuff. I move at a slower pace these days. At least I have recently. I was starting to dread making monthly reviews because it felt like more like work, and that's never a good sign. But I will try to replace that with some more free-form updates and journaling, because that is more pleasurable to me.
I have a habit of being reticent to post or express things on the internet in general because my mindset is always that the bytes of data it takes to host this stuff costs electricity and that consumes resources. If I'm just writing to get my thoughts in order, I can do that in a .txt document on my own end. And I think it actually is better than paper in some ways. Being able to quickly erase and delete things is an excellent feature of something like a word processor which is very different from paper. And in truth, it's not wholly new. In the ancient world, wax tablets were what all the poets did their messy writing on.
Anyway, right now I have been basically doing nothing but working on a large-scale philosophy lecture. I will keep it secret over what work it is, but I abandoned my last idea and am now doing another. What it is shouldn't be much of a shock, though, based on my track record (hint: it's in German). I haven't been reading, playing, or watching pretty much anything else since I started and this and won't until I finish. Of course, that's what I'm happy doing, so it's no issue.
Recently, I rewatched a movie I hadn't seen since... 2010 maybe? It's called Black Snow by Xie Fei and it's a Chinese film from 1990. I liked it a lot when I first saw it, but rewatching it made me appreciate it much more. It's about an ex-criminal who is partially literate as he was deprived of schooling during the later Cultural Revolution. You can see a China in quick cultural whiplash as it looks VERY modern and globalized, with 80s fashion and movies and music and all that. But there's a whole kind of lingering trauma in it. And a lot of the people still live in these crowded little commie hovels. It has a great tone of fatalism and anxiety towards the lurch of modern society. After having read the biography of Mao Zedong and some oral histories of the Cultural Revolution, I find this era of China at "the end of history" to be extremely fascinating. I definitely recommend watching this film if you are interested. In any case, it is a nice character-study with excellent, muted, handheld cinematography and perfectly restrained pacing and atmosphere.
I'm always late on finding out about this stuff, but it seems as though David Lynch died on January 15. If I was going to talk about my personal favorite directors, Lynch might not be at the top of the list. My view of his filmography was always a bit mixed, with some films seeming like pure works of genius and others as being merely alright. But few directors, indeed few artists period, were as important for me in coming to understand the nature of film and art itself. Lynch is up there with a few others like Edward Gorey insofar as artists go who completely defined eras of my life and taught me a lot about what it means to create.
Of course, there are a lot of ways to be creative. But for me, Lynch is one of the greatest examples of our most stereotypical images of someone "creative": someone whose head just truly seems to be a portal to a dimension that is beyond any earthly realm of comprehension and seems completely original and pure. Obviously this image is romanticized and exaggerated. Even Lynch had his fair set of prior influences. But he was the kind of artist who one is tempted to say put a lie to the idea that all artists are thieves who stand on the shoulders of giants. It is truly a sign of someone deeply in touch with and resonant towards their own mysterious inner impulses and it's something I try to learn from.
It's hard to know exactly what to say that others haven't already. Lynch always taught me that the "meaning" of a work of art is usually its least interesting part, and that we should hunger and chase after works that are infinitely challenging and mysterious and that always evade our attempts to trap them down. I also appreciate that he managed to retain this instinct so strongly even while living in the Hollywood hills and being so impossibly up to his neck in the "movie biz," with all the inhumanity that implies. My favorite works of his were always Lost Highway, INLAND EMPIRE, and the entire Twin Peaks universe, as I think these are the purest examples of it. Eraserhead is an extremely compelling alien world, but I have recently found its symbolism a little comaprably easier to understand. But when I was a young teen Eraserhead triumphed and stood tall over all other films period for me for several years, so I can't pretend that it isn't a film with a strong personal resonance and importance for me. In any case, it certainly is a sign that our world is changing very much if now we must imagine one without Lynch. I already miss him dearly, even just knowing that he was out there in the madness of it all...
The year is now 2025 by the Gregorian calendar. By the Japanese calendar, it's Reiwa 7. By the old Shintou calendar, it's 2685. This year is the Year of the Snake. The Serpent has always been one of my favorite animals in terms of symbolism. Uh... the Dog is my birth-sign, but the Serpent was my sign in Morrowind, ok?! It is unfortunate how the Serpent has become so maligned and reduced to merely a symbol of evil in many Abrahamic societies. The Snake is an important symbol of rebirth, of transformation, and of eternity. Thus, while every year is a chance for renewal and rebirth, it seems like this one especially calls for changes. I feel as though I have made dramatic progress on understanding and coming to terms with a lot of things about my life in this past year. So I feel as though I have a duty to myself and to the world to shed a lot of negative parts of myself, just as the snake sheds its skin and comes out pure and clean.
To start with, I have two important resolutions that I am placing on this site as a way to make myself hold to them and take them seriously. These are my solemn oaths:
RESOLUTION #1: I will not go to any restaurants on my own.
I have a vice of eating in restaurants a decent amount, especially after a long day of work where I don't feel like cooking. But it's a bad habit. No, I'm not going to levels of full Luke Smith autism about this. That would be an ideal, for sure, but I have to start with something more realistic. I will go to restaurants if friends or family want to go together as a sort of social event. I also sometimes go to a nearby cafe unaccompanied in order to study and put myself outside in the hope of making some friends. I usually just have a drink there, so I think this is also acceptable. However, I will not go to any restaurants by myself. All my solo eating will be what I buy and prepare myself from the grocery store. This has several benefits:
1) I will save a lot of money. I can put that money aside towards more important things, like saving up to move to somewhere else, including one that potentially might have a higher cost of living.
2) I will get better at cooking. I'm a horrible cook right now. Now, I'm not going to start by cooking everything from scratch. Microwave meals and so on will be accepted. But it is a good first step. Girls like guys who can cook, right?
3) I will have a smaller environmental footprint. I will be eating less meat and have smaller meals where I can eat only as much as I need to feel full. It's a small step since it's not like I'm going fully vegetarian or anything yet, but it is a step in the right direction.
4) I will lose weight. I tend to make better choices when I have to shop for myself. And even if I don't have the best choices in all cases, I tend to eat less during any meal when I prepare it myself rather than what I get at a restaurant.
RESOLUTION #2: I will meditate for 20 minutes everyday.
I was doing 20-minute meditations regularly in 2023 and I always was much more clear in my thoughts and positive in my emotions when I did it. It helped me through stressful and despairing times.
I must say that I have had a lot of spiritual growth in the last year, and not without bumps along the way. The greatest trouble I've always had is that I really dislike the modern "spiritual" person who basically just picks a bunch of random things from 100000 different spiritual traditions at will and creates some feel-good mush out of it. This is a deeply narcissistic form of spiritual consumerism. But what else can we do in the modern world? What is certain is that for any enlightened person, the entire world will come to be their scripture and they will learn from any source. So the best thing I can think to do to stay grounded and have the adequate attitude of a disciple is to practice what is indeed an authentic spiritual tradition near me at a Zen center.
One of the most difficult pills to swallow has been the idea that Shintou is, at least for the time being, off limits to me. Is it because of my race and is it truly impossible for a gaijin to ever practice Shintou fully? One of the most important writers, Sokyo Ono, says that pretty explicitly. He said that even Lafcadio Hearn, the gaijin who understood the Japanese spirit better than anyone else, could only ever "understand" Shintou but never really "practice" it. I'm not sure if this would read as overly old-fashioned today. I know that at least one gaijin has become an ordained Shintou kannushi in Japan. But what I do know is that even if it is possible for a gaijin to practice Shintou, I don't think it can be done when severed from the LAND of Shintou and everything physical about the religion that goes along with it
So I practice Zen Buddhism instead because it is the closest thing I can find that I have a license to be a part of. It might seem cringe in a MUH ANCESTORS way, but I think I might have to take the Varg-pill and integrate some kind of neopaganism into my life that I am authentically genetically tied to so I can have the same sort of Zen/folk religion balance that gives Japanese life such a lovely spiritual balance. Of course the sad truth is that most neopagans in the US are repulsive hamplanets with purple hair, septum piercings, 1000 tattoos, and six Free Palestine stickers all over her computer, bag, and thermos. But being part of any tradition, be it Zen or otherwise, is certainly a hundred times better than being a "spiritual" person who worships only themselves and their own ego.
A few other remarks
In general this year I want to direct my energies to people who are good and doing good things. There are a lot of evil, awful things in the world. But you influence the energy of the world by where you focus your attention. Does this mean ignoring bad things? No, that is a recipe for disaster. I think the rule of thumb I want to use is to try to talk about two good people, events, ideas, etc. for every one negative I center on. And I don't intend to focus on feel-good BS to pad that out either. I need to find people who are doing good in the most genuine, difficult ways. If there is a problem, focus on the ones helping instead of the ones causing it. Other than that I will try to read eroge everyday (It keeps my Japanese skill at a passable level) and experiment with drawing cute girls at least once a week.
The snake is a sign of infinity and the infinite possibilities of renewal. Shed your scars and wounds, and along with them your illusions, your hatreds, your fears, and your very self. I hope you all have a wonderful Year of the Snake.