Hayao Miyazaki has exquisite taste. He loves Yuri Norstein and Frédéric Back, and most of all, Paul Grimault. This greatest of French animators, fearing neither sentiment nor destruction, left his traces all over The Castle in the Sky
I have a deadline coming up, for a long essay on Drawn & Quarterly’s Summer ‘08 release of Seiichi Hayashi’s Red Colored Elegy
First, Seiichi’s bio on D&Q’s maddening web page.
Second, YouTube video of the hit song inspired by the comic. I weep nostalgic tears for the Showa Era, thanks to Morio Agata’s haunting melody.
Finaly, a handful of (grayscale, sorry) pages from the Japanese edition, showing Hayashi’s range, storyboard-like layouts, and Tsuge influence:
I’m pretty late to the Chinese rock party– I haven’t even seen Beijing Rocks!– but I like Hang on the Box well enough. Along with thirty or so other bands, they form the bulk of the Mark Harris exhibit at the Weston Gallery in Cincinnati.
Apparently comics artist Kazuo Umezu’s house may remain a candy cane.
His neighbors had sued to stop him, but the judge ruled in his favor. Libertarianism might yet take hold in the collectivist isles. Umezu, old enough not to care, has shirts, umbrellas, even a floor totally decked out in stripes. Why? He’d never seen such a thing before. Neither had his neighbors. Which raises the question: upon what exactly does a Japanese neighborhood association frown? Since bizarre Japanese architecture’s practically a worldwide cliche. It doesn’t take Kisho Kurokawa to turn in the likes of this house of fugu:
But it’s in an entertainment district. Perhaps this typically boxy residential neighborhood’s more to their liking. This from around Mt. Koya, where Umezu & I used to live (not together, or in the same decade). Neither its charming dumpiness, nor the local Shingon Buddhist monks, explain why Umezu turned to candystriping as an affront to the place.
Which raises another question: what did the neighbors do when PL (Perfect Liberty, an Osaka-based new religion) planted their headquarters in sleepy Tondabayashi? When it looks like a spaceship that flew to the earth from a far-off star and promptly melted?
(orig. report seen via Tom Spurgeon; Japanese report & photo from Sponichi Annex; point-n-click snapshots mine)
Welcome news, Criterion’s is bringing William Klein’s brilliant Mister Freedom to DVD
“I’m a newspaper man—and the Pope is my beat!”
A relic from an odd union of the Holy See and Stan Lee, The Life of Pope John Paul II makes for a curious footnote in American comics history. Published in 1982, I remember quite clearly being perplexed, even as a child, by a four-color Pontiff next to Spider-Man on the drugstore rack. John Paul II must have seemed unusual enough to warrant such treatment: a young, vibrant Pope from a Communist country instead of Italy. Interesting how he turned out, more superhuman than almost anyone in recent memory, more of a world leader than those actually elected, and more polarizing than he had to be.
Today (March 9) is “39 Art Day,” aka “Thank You Art Day.” The name’s a pun on the Japanese pronunciation of the date, san kyuu. Artist Kaihatsu Yoshiaki started it in 2000 to promote art in Japan; it’s been gaining momentum worldwide.
My contribution: a performance piece in the vein of Richard Long, done during the UK Wildcats’ Senior Day game. The documentation:
I’m fond of DivX and VLC, the freeware video codec & viewer, in the same way I like my laptop, held together with gaff tape. I wasn’t surprised when, watching some guy on a DivX video, he was engulfed in a swarm of triangles. Every movement left a trail of them, until he drowned in geometry. It seems the codec was misinstalled. Later, when VLC pushed the the gaff tape to bursting, this happened:
It’s an image of some poor farmer freaking out over losing his milk, swimming in digital blocks.
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Last fall in Washington, DC, I first saw the work of an artist who uses these technological lesions as his medium. Takeshi Murata had three of his recent video works in the Black Box downstairs in the Hirshhorn. One was a forgettable computer animation, a devil’s rorschach in color.
The other two, though, were excellent. “Pink Dot” and “Monster Movie” both run found footage through a digital wringer, with results half-Brakhage, half-codec panic. “Monster Movie” takes footage from the 1981 junk classic Caveman
Murata renders the digital image as a flowing vat of colors, like a well-used palette. He also understands how insubstantial the medium is. Anyone who’s lost a hard drive knows how fragile digital images are. I’ve imagined chemical photography as bricks, but digital as sand. Murata prefers sludge, and he makes it literal. His subject appears to be the human figure in motion, fighting through his medium. And the music, by Lexington, Kentucky’s own Hair Police, counterpoints it all.
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YouTube never lets you down, with incomplete clips from both “Monster Movie” and “Pink Dot.” Shot handheld off the screen, it’s watchable, and YouTube’s own awful encoding adds yet another layer of muddy, endearing blocks.
With the talk of poetry, and the Economist’s obituary of Baba Amte this week, I thought I’d write on a poet’s movie. There aren’t many. In “The House Is Black,” the poet Forough Farrokhzad elevates a charity documentary into something else entirely.
