AncienTrails

Departures

Lughnasa                             Waxing Artemis Moon

Spoke with the folks at Dadant.  They found my order and have begun to ship the honey extractor and other parts of the Ranger extraction kit.  5 boxes from different locations.  Sounds like they’ll arrive before I have to pull the honey.

A wet, cooler morning with a hot day later and tomorrow to follow.  We continue on our stormy way.  Minnesota, that’s right, our Minnesota, leads the nation in tornadoes this year.  By a lot.  We have had 50 more than either Texas or Oklahoma.  Maybe tornado alley has found me and wants me back.  Paul Douglas says it’s due to a blocking slump in the jet stream that holds weather patterns here that would normally be further south.

Kate and I watched a Japanese movie the other night, “Departures.”  In it a young cellist gives up the cello after his orchestra dissolves.  He and his wife move back to his home in a small town by the ocean.  There he applies for a job listing seeking a person to help with departures.  A misprint.  It should have read departed.

I don’t know how common the rite of casketing is in Japan, but it involves, in essence, performance of what we consider an undertakers job (the cosmetic part, not the embalming which seems not to be part of the job) in front of the mourners.  The body is then placed in a coffin, also called encoffining, and transported to the crematorium where the equivalent of a graveside service occurs.  The whole process seems humane, accepting of death and the reality of grief.

As with most Japanese movies I’ve seen that have funerals, this one has a comedic side, too.

The movie pulls the heart, not in contrived ways, but in its honest depiction of difficult human moments, sensitively portrayed.  Highly recommended.  Available on Netflix.

Lunch

Lughnasa                                      Waxing Artemis Moon

Slept well past 6:30 this morning, then a very long nap.  The body still marshalling its resources.  I’m ready to be done with this, but it does not seem ready to be done with me.

In between I went into the MIA to have lunch with Mark Odegard.  Mark’s a Woolly, a friend, an artist and a damned fine jazz piano player.  He has very interesting friends.  One friend of his is on a two-month journey in Peru working on developing a complete catalog of all, underline all, the plants in the Amazon.  Sounds like a crazy task, but he’s found somebody who’s already done a lot of the work.

This was a thank you lunch, in part, for the bang-up design work he’s done for Artemis Honey.  As we have before, we wandered through the museum, looking at various things, talking about them.  The Ricci map.  The Minnesota Artists Gallery works by two young Asian women.  Ceramics and glass and wood bowls by women artists.

In talking about my work I told him something I realized last week.  The museum work grabs my heart; I think about things there, mull them over, look forward to going in, get excited about new collections, new artists, encounter objects that pierce my soul.  Even the Sierra Club, which is important and I do it because it’s important, doesn’t grab my heart the way the art does.  I wish it did, but it doesn’t.

Spent most of the day without internet service.  I tried to alter the way my router plugs into the internet and it worked for a while, then the router just went all kablooey.  An hour and a half of reading the manual, trying this, then that and I got the connection back but I lost the alterations I’d made.  I’ll try’em again tomorrow.

Oh.  The Wolfman.  I spoke too soon.  As I watched the end, I found it gained texture and strength.  The cinematography was wonderful and the pathos of the altered conclusion–altered from the Chaney original–made the story more emotionally gripping.

Chicken Wings, Legislators and a Wolfman

Lughnasa                                        Waxing Artemis Moon

More napping.  Still getting the body back to its old form.  Maybe tomorrow.

Into the Sierra Club for the Legislative Awards.  It was the first time these awards have happened.  Justin’s idea and a good one.  Speeches, good strokes.

Ran into Randy Neprash.  From days gone by.  He was part of Phoenix Builders who worked with the West Bank Community Development Corporation.  I remembered him, he didn’t remember me.  He’s now doing some multi-city storm water drainage project as a civil engineer.  I knew him from somewhere else, too, but it didn’t come to me.

Back home after picking up fried chicken wings from the Wing’s Joint.  It used to be on Nicollet, a ways past Lake Street.  How it ended up in Blaine in a strip mall, I haven’t figured out, but I’m glad its there.  Best wings in town.

Watching the Wolfman with Benecio Del Toro spent the first half of the movie–what I’ve seen so far–trying to capture the heaviness, grief-stricken weariness and stolidity of Lon Chaney.  He’s just not Chaney.  Anthony Hopkins is, as one reviewer said, Anthony Hopkins.  It’s easy to see where they were heading with this.  The set, the costumes, the whole ambiance is right, but the story is draggy, too complex, too frilly.  With Hopkins and Del Toro there are enough acting chops here to produce a good film, but it likes a great story line.  Too bad.

So. You’re Undead. Now What?

Lughnasa                                   New (Artemis) Moon

What is it with all the vampire stuff around right now?  Those terrible Twilight movies.  The much better Vampire Diaries and the Gates on TV.  The Passage, which I just finished, written by a “literary” novelist.  Not to mention the background of Anne Rice and all those undead erotica books, I don’t recall what they’re called.  Is it about the outs and the ins?  Is it about the saved and the damned?  Is it about the need for mystery and wonder in an increasingly secular age?  There’s even a BBC series called Being Human.

I’ve not read or seen a really good vampire story, I mean really good, since Hammer Films “Horror of Dracula” with the exception of True Blood and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  I enjoyed the Anne Rice material, her stuff about the Mayfair witches, too.  I also liked Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot.  True Blood, the HBO series is among the best ever in my opinion, right up there with Buffy.  I’m not sure what it says, either, that the ones I enjoy most are on TV.  I’m a literary and movie guy at heart, but the small screen does allow for character development and multiple story lines.

There’s a lot of media studies and cultural studies ink that has been spilled about the fascination with vampires.  I’m sure many of you who read this find them quite beside the point.  My guess is that they give us a way of exploring the notion of an afterlife without having to get to close to it.  The evil nature of the vampire prevents idolization, though much of contemporary vampire fiction plays with this received wisdom.

Even so, we wonder, what would I do if I had all the time I wanted?  What would I do?  What would I become?  If the only answer is, feed blood lust, well, that turns out to not be very interesting after a few dead bodies, but the question of love between an immortal and a mortal, that’s juicy.  What about power?  Would you seek wealth and control if you had eternal life on this earth?  What might you do if you loathed the thing being a vampire made you?  Self-loathing is a favorite distraction among teens and adults alike.  This question drives a lot of today’s Dracula derivative stories.

Whatever it is, and it’s probably each of these and more, there seems to be plenty of energy and money for turning out vampire stories.  Even bad ones.

Worth Seeing. Again.

Lughnasa                                          Waning Grandchildren Moon

Saw Ran yesterday.  The film’s remastering did not make it as crisp as I imagined, but it was good.  The storyline is similar, though not identical to Lear.

The lead character, the Lear equivalent, is Lord Hidetora, the terror of the Azusa plain in yesteryear, now old and wanting to lay down his reign.  He chooses his eldest son, Taro to replace him.  Primogenitor lies at the heart of many classic tales and Ran shares this theme with Lear and the Romance of the Three Kingdoms.  Why?  Well, passing over the eldest son created an automatic schism based on traditional expectations.  Choosing the eldest son, however, is not a meritocratic approach and can yield, as it does in Ran, a weak leader at the top.  Result?  The same as the other option.  Oh, well.  You’d think they’d figure this out.

Hidetora finds Taro and Jiro, his eldest two sons, unwilling to have him in their homes, spurred on by Lady Kaeda, the scheming and heartbroken daughter born in Hidetora’s first castle to the father and mother he killed in taking it.  Her scheming drives the movies plot dynamics as male pawns shove soldiers around the chessboard in response to her plans.

I said she was an evil woman.  Sheila said, no, she was avenging her family.  Not exclusive ideas.  Yes, she avenged her family with the tools she had available to her, sex and inside knowledge of power politics, but that doesn’t excuse her from judgment.  You could say, in fact, that Hidetora, Jiro, Taro and Lady Kaede were all evil in their way, while the third son, Saburo, who plays Cordelia to Jiro and Taro’s Goneril and Regan, dies an innocent, loyal to his father.  The quadrumvirate hacked and murdered and intrigued their way to power.  They died, each of them, as a direct result of their behavior and, in turn, killed the only filial child.

This is a movie about power, violence, loyalty, existentialism, group and family honor and angst.

Here is a key moment, early in the movie, with Saburo speaking to his father, Lord Hidetora:

Sabour:  What kind of world do we live
in?

One barren of loyalty and
feeling.

Hidetora:  I'm aware of that.

Saburo:  So you should be!

You spilled an ocean of blood.

You showed no mercy, no pity.

We too are children
of this age...

weaned on strife and chaos.

We are your sons,
yet you count on our fidelity.

In my eyes,
that makes you a fool.

Later, the Jester says:  Man is born crying.

When he's cried enough, he dies.

Later:

Hidetora:  I'm lost.

Jester:  Such is the human condition.

Hidetora:  This path...

I remember...

We came this way before.

Men always travel the same road.

Ran

Lughnasa                                      Waning Grandchildren Moon

Got too much sun.  A bit woozy this afternoon.  Us fair-skinned Celtic types can’t stand much of our nearest star and I exceeded my dose.

Going to see Ran this afternoon in Edina.  Akira Kurosawa’s Lear. I haven’t seen it, though I’ve seen many of his others.  This is a remastered edition supposed to be in spectacular shape.  Afterward we will eat at Raku, a new Japanese place in Edina, with Matt Welch, curator of things Japanese and head of curators at the museum.  Matt is a great communicator and educator so it should be a fun evening.

Leafy Streets, Expensive Cars

Summer                                      Waning Grandchildren Moon

Kate and I drove 20+ miles to the Edina part of Hopkins, directly across from Blake school’s driveway.  This is the home of former State Senator Steve Kelley, also a former candidate for governor.  This was a Sierra Club fund-raiser.  We listened to speeches, talked to friends, ducked out and then drove past her old home on Highwood Drive in Edina.  This part of Edina has lots of mature trees, leafy and atmospheric, homes with long driveways and expensive cars, landscaping that looks natural, yet manicured.  Her old home had received a new story, slightly curving windows and wooden garage doors.  It was strange to think of her living there, it seems so far from our life here in Andover.

We enjoyed being out together on a fine summer evening.  Cirrus clouds curled and twisted into mare’s tails as the sun set over South Dakota.  We crossed the Mississippi on highway 610 and we were back in the northern ‘burbs.

When I asked Kate why you would send a kid to Blake instead of Breck, she said, “Legacy, maybe.”  I thought, demographics and met geography.  She added, “Some people get their undies in a bunch if you send your kid to the wrong private school.”  It’s hard to be upper class.  So many rules.

Since I have Netflix and it doesn’t cost more to get anything, I watched the first Twilight movie.  The guy looks like a schlub to me, shows you what I know it comes to pretty boys.  The girl, Kristen Stewart, has charm, but is unconventional in her attractiveness.  The plot line weaves teen angst into a bit of supernatural and the favorite theme about vampires since Anne Rice:  the misunderstood, empathic vampire.  True Blood, the Vampire Diaries, Twilight and even the Gates have the vampire who wants to fit in and be friends with their food.  I’m sure ‘ol Vlad is spinning on his home turf inside the coffin.

The movie as a whole is weak, but since my standards for supernatural fare have a lot of flex, I watched it to the end.  Not worth it.

Still Reading Romance of the Three Kingdoms

Summer                                   Waxing Strawberry Moon

Hot today.  At least by our standards.  85.  Plus a dewpoint of 70.  Not outside weather for this gardener.  I did work outside this morning, weeding in the orchard and checking the trees.  I’m going to need a consultation with Ecological Gardens because some of the stuff they planted, I don’t recognize and I don’t want to remove friendlies out of ignorance.

Kate’s off getting a pre-op physical, having dental work done and nails and hair.  A sort of clean up, paint up, fix up day for her.  Her surgery is a week from tomorrow and can’t come a day too soon for her.  The pain in her hip gives her fits during the day when she walks and at night when she sleeps.  She looks forward to having more than two sleeping positions.  So would I.

The Romance of the Three Kingdoms has held me for several weeks now, though I’m not reading in large chunks.  It’s a three-volume work about the end of the Han Dynasty and the emergence of the three kingdoms of Wu, Wei and Shu.  This period only last for about 45 years, but it holds a position of particular importance in Chinese culture, with many of its figures like Liu Bei, Cao Cao, Zhuge Liang and the three brothers:  Guan Yu, Zhang Fei and Liu Bei attaining iconic and archetypal significance.

(Liu Bei, Zhang Fei and Guan Yu)

It’s not an exact analogy at all, but it resembles the mythos of the American West, a time when men were men and some men were very good and others were very bad.

If you enjoy political and military tales or have an interest in the logic of other cultures, then the Three Kingdoms may enthrall you as it has me.  If you’re not sure, I recommend seeing the Red Cliffs, the two disc version.  The movie showcases all the main characters and records a pivotal battle, one that has ongoing importance in Chinese culture.  Not to mention that it’s great fun.  Again, if political and military intrigue fascinate you.

An Unconquerable Soul

Beltane                                 New Moon (Hungry Ghost)

Kate and I just watched Invictus.  Joseph got it for me for Father’s Day.  I agree with the critics that it’s not a great movie, but under dog stories play well in these United States.  Freeman did a masterful job with Mandela.  Matt Damon was all right, but not special.  The one tall crew cut white Presidential Security guard gave a wonderful performance in a small role.

It’s ethnocentric to say so, but I don’t understand rugby.  When I was in Singapore, I saw four of five matches in something called sevens, where they play for 7 minutes and the one ahead at the end wins.  It did not improve my understanding of the game.  Here’s a site I just consulted that made sense.

The movie did reinforce what an unusual world leader Mandela was, a moral force so strong it’s hard to imagine.  We need more leaders like him, able to rise above historical grievance and ethnic hatreds.

Goya’s Ghosts

Beltane                                 Full Planting Moon

I often see movies well past their sell-by date.  Tonight, for instance, I got around to seeing Goya’s Ghosts, a Milo Foreman piece from 2006.  This has Javier Bardem, Natalie Portman and Stellan Skarsgaard as Goya.  It must have been so named because the character Goya seems to have a very slight role in the movie, a go-between role between the church and the daughter of a wealthy family arrested by the Holy Office, aka the Inquistion, aka the predecessor office to the last job held by the current Pope, Benedict.

How dangerous it is to have dogmatic or ideological people in power.  With no need for evidence or facts, with no system of truth seeking committed to verifiability the church, the monarchy and the aristocracy can be confident in their decisions with no checks or balances.  Goya’s Ghosts shows that much better than it shows much about Goya either as a man or an artist.

It does show the suffocating nature of unchecked, self-righteous power as it also shows the dramatic political and military events through which Goya lived, again without illuminating Goya’s life.  A strange set of choices.

As a costume drama focused on the turmoil of Europe in the late 18th and early 19th century, the movie worked for me.  As anything about Goya, it did not.

-