March 2008

Le Roi et l’Oiseau

(AKA “The King & the Bird.” Sounds dull translated, but it’s better than the alternate English title “The Curious Adventures of Mr. Wonderbird.”) 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 [...]

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Preview: Red-Colored Elegy

I have a deadline coming up, for a long essay on Drawn & Quarterly’s Summer ’08 release of Seiichi Hayashi’s Red Colored Elegy (“Sekishoku Erejii”), now open for preorder. The book, first serialized in GARO from 1970-71, far outstrips contemporary U.S. undergrounds in narrative sophistication. It focuses on a young couple living in sin, but [...]

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I Am a Red Comet

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.

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Kazuo Umezu’s Shimashima House

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 [...]

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Mister Freedom

Welcome news, Criterion’s is bringing William Klein’s brilliant Mister Freedom to DVD, along with a couple of his others, for a few ailing dollars. They call it a “delirious fiction.” It offers a gun-toting, corn-spouting superhero fighting Commies in France, all dreamed up by an expat American who found things out fighting in World War [...]

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Marvel’s Pope Comic

“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 [...]

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39 Art Day

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 [...]

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Takeshi Murata’s Videos

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 [...]

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The House is Black

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. The setup’s simple. For barely 21 minutes, the film follows lepers in a [...]

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