I drew this not exactly book accurate sketch of Bilbo and Gollum in the art club of one of the schools I've been working at lately. I confess, I made Bilbo look a little more cherubic because I was hoping to stimulate the students' interest in Tolkien. No such luck.

I live near a train track. The area north of the track has some factories followed by rice fields, forests, and hills. South of the track are more urban areas. Last week, I was working at a school north of the track and I've been listening to The Lord of the Rings on my iPod. Listening to the tale of the hobbits walking through forests and farmland paired well with actually walking through farmland and forest. I even walked through a very old graveyard which paired well with the chapter on the Barrow Wights.

I was compelled yet again to wonder at the fact that, though Harry Potter is wildly popular, most people I've met in Japan haven't even heard of Lord of the Rings. One teacher I worked with had seen the movies but told me he didn't find them especially interesting. Yet I can't help being struck by the similarities between the Japanese in these affluent rural towns and the descriptions of hobbits. They're a people, relatively short in stature, suspicious of outsiders, passionate about creature comforts, and sticklers for tradition and taboos. Maybe the problem is that it's too close to home. I don't know. Well, I also think the beauty of Tolkien's language probably doesn't translate to Japanese well.



X Sonnet 1943

The worser grass was vast ahead of her.
She chose a certain flower turned away.
The blossom pointed north and pointed sure.
Decision made, she stopped and took the day.
With rations low, she woke and cursed her sloth.
The sun had sunk and now the night was nigh.
She poured her beer and savoured all the froth.
And stuck the floral charm upon her thigh.
Her feet disturbed the dust and gravel path.
Suspicious birds upon her glanced and squawked.
She felt she risked a hidden demon's wrath.
For something through the dripping grasses stalked.
She felt a chill and saw a giant stone.
She wondered now if luck would lead her home.

I watched an oddly lame episode of Ally McBeal last night, "In Search of Pygmies" from February, 2000. It has two plots; one in which Ally intentionally gets into a fender bender in order to ask out the cute guy in the car ahead of her, and one in which Ling, Lucy Liu's character, is trying to save Orson Bean from getting thrown out of a retirement home.



That's right, the Rankin Bass Bilbo Baggins himself. And he's still fighting dragons, having convinced everyone in the nursing home that such monsters are lurking in the shadows. Ling's heartlessness is usually played for laughs so it's kind of abrupt that she's so passionate about helping this old man. It feels like a stock plot from a standard drama while Ally's plot feels more like something from Seinfeld. It really feels like a phoned in episode, but phoned in from two different eras.

Here's Bean in better times:

I came across my old iPod and charged it up. After more than fifteen years, it still seems to work fine. It has the old audiobooks I put on it to listen to back when I worked at JC Penney, when I really needed them. I kind of need them again these days so walking to and from work yesterday I listened to the entirety of Beowulf translated by Seamus Heaney, read by Heaney himself.

I started asking myself if something like this could've been produced by A.I. There's a line I like from Grendel's attack:

He grabbed and mauled a man on his bench,
Bit into his bone-lappings, bolted down his blood
And gorged on him in lumps, leaving the body
Utterly lifeless, eaten up
Hand and foot.

I love the use of "bolted" as it not only carries on the "b" alliteration but also conjures the impression of speed and discourtesy. Apparently it was a choice of Heaney's. The original text has, "blôd êdrum dranc."

Could A.I. one day devise something like this? Why not? You could reduce the work to the rationale under it. Start on the broadest level; it's a story about a monster attacking people. Then go to details; the violence of the attack, the severity of the injuries. Then go to associations of words. What is the percentage of contexts in which "bolted" is used? What juxtaposition would communicate Grendel's character and the savagery of his actions?

It's beyond A.I. now, I'd think. But maybe after a hundred or two hundred years. Maybe only ten. It's fitting to think about with Beowulf which is so much about the achievement and fame of men. It's the fame Beowulf wins through his deeds that leads him to become king. Praiseworthy feats are fundamental to the fabric of Beowulf's society, of organising humans in some manner useful for survival in the harsh conditions of life in the fifth century or earlier, whenever the story was first conceived as an oral tradition before being transcribed. Do we need that anymore? Do we need ourselves?



X Sonnet 1942

Bewildered monsters grin amid the press.
The fire drive was routed back in pipes.
Abducted veins became the ducted dress.
A lady wears them now as nervous stripes.
The frothing imps were dancing 'midst the crowd.
No shame could tame the venom pulsing round.
She hurries on and clutches tight her shroud.
But soon, by hyper tripping hogs she's found.
Her veil removed, the reavers sing and dance.
The engine underfoot becomes a beat.
With vicious glee they seize her veins for chance.
A hectic day dissolves in ugly heat.
The dream of grace dissolves in humid stench.
The frenzied engine breaks for want of wrench.

I'd planned to watch the season finale of Doctor Who last night but for some reason it didn't go up on Disney+ as early as it has normally been. So I watched it this morning and it was worth the wait. I thought it was terrific. It was pure ice cream for a long time Doctor Who fan but, again, I have to say that the hypothetical young new fan would be totally lost between all the plot dependent references to old episodes and an extraordinarily complicated plot with fast pace dialogue. Just like the clear political bias, it's something I can appreciate, even though it seems perfectly obvious this is all dooming the show to minuscule ratings and almost certainly a hiatus.

Spoilers ahead for the episode.

I expected the title of "Reality War" to make this a sort of allegory for the ongoing global, cultural/political war between the various shades of right and left. And it kind of was. Maybe it'll seem even more so once I've had time to digest it. I liked the conclusion of Conrad's story, not only because it was less politically polarised but also because it saved Ruby from looking like a complete idiot for falling for Conrad pretending to be her boyfriend. There was something real in their relationship and Conrad did have something more than just smug spite in his heart. On that note, I also liked the more nuanced dialogue between the Doctor and the Rani as the two bonded over being the last of the Time Lords.

With all the timey whimey plot stuff, the episode still managed some truly satisfying emotional beats. The strongest being the thread about Poppy--and Ruby being the only one who could remember her. I loved how Poppy vanished, her jacket, as it's being folded, slowly transforming into a handkerchief before disappearing entirely.

I thought Poppy was going to end up being Susan's mother. But then we never even got an explanation to Susan turning up in the past couple episodes. I guess they didn't want to overwrite that Eighth Doctor audio play after all.

The reappearance of Anita from the Christmas special was good and I liked her visiting the Eleventh and Third Doctors instead of it being yet another reel of every single previous Doctor. The moment of her finding out the current incarnation is gay was a nice character moment though, considering he spent a year with her and certainly wasn't keeping his sexuality a secret, it's hard to believe she didn't know already.

I kind of appreciated the appearance of the Thirteenth Doctor although it didn't make any sense. Maybe it was just nice because she got such a raw deal. Jodie Whittaker never gave a bad performance.

She seems to have taken the spot usually occupied by the current Doctor's former companions who all make appearances when a Doctor regenerates. I'm so glad Davies didn't do another bigeneration, though it may be a pretty clear sign that Ncuti Gatwa really wanted to get gone. He only lasted two seasons. Anything less than three is a sign of unusual circumstances. Eccleston stayed for only one season because that was the plan from the beginning and he was a big movie star there to just help kickstart the show (and, it turns out, there was a lot of bad blood between him and the producers). Notably, Colin Baker only got two seasons because he was so terribly unpopular. Gatwa's departure, given the fact that it was preceded by abysmally low ratings, seems like it was certainly a sign of some form of dissatisfaction with the current state of the show.

I wondered if we would even see the Doctor's new face. Just like the 14th Doctor, it turned out to be someone not so new. I have to say, I'm not pleased with the choice. It really feels like Davies is cannibalising his own work in a desperate attempt to slow a free fall. I don't think it's going to work, at least not for ratings. I can appreciate a fan service fest and Davies is able to inject even that with stimulating ideas. But the show desperately needs a true regeneration.

Doctor Who is available on the BBC iPlayer in the UK and on Disney+ everywhere else.

Last Saturday I went to one of the malls in town, a place called Ario. It has no movie theatre and, unlike American malls, Japanese malls never seem to have anchor department stores. The food court did have a surprising number of American restaurants, including a McDonalds and a Burger King as well as a Subway. I hadn't been to a Subway since leaving the U.S. so I ate there. There were no footlongs on the menu because the country uses metric and because the Japanese don't like large portions. The regular sandwich looked roughly equivalent to a six inch. I got the cheapest one, which was a tuna sandwich at just over 700 yen, with fried potatoes and coke coming to just over 800 yen, a bit over five dollars. So no five dollar footlong here, though I heard the footlong is now just over six dollars in the U.S. Still, since the tuna sandwich was the cheapest on the menu, that means Subway in Japan is on average probably more expensive than it is in the U.S., at least in this town. I imagine it can only be more expensive in a major city.

It was a nice mall and I was pleased to see their grocery store had Guinness stout. I've noticed that the quality of the beer selection is inversely proportional to the quality of the liquor selection in most stores here. If they have a good selection of beer, they have a weak selection of whiskey. If they have a good selection of whiskey, they have a weak selection of beer. I tend to enjoy beer only on hot days and it was a cool, rainy day, so I didn't buy any, opting instead to pick up some Tullamore Dew at an excellent nearby liquor shop (which has a weak selection of beer).

Rounding out my nostalgic Saturday, I stopped at a nearby Starbucks and ordered a tall drip coffee for just over 400 yen, roughly comparable to the average three dollar price in the U.S. Nowadays, if I get a coffee when I'm out, I tend to opt for a vending machine, where it's usually around 150 yen. But a sparsely crowded Starbucks on a rainy day is invaluable. I stayed there reading Marius B. Jansen's Making of Modern Japan, published in 2000, the year of its author's death. Marius B. Jansen shares a birthday with me, April 11, though he was born over fifty years earlier, in 1922. Born in the Netherlands and raised in the U.S., he was a professor of Japanese history at Princeton and in the aftermath of World War II had a role in the Occupation of Japan. He was the first foreigner to receive the Distinguished Cultural Merit Award from the Japanese government.

The book, as its title suggests, is fundamentally teleological, constructed in such a way as to explain why Japan is the way it is to-day (or in 2000), beginning with a narrative of history starting with Sekigahara, a battle in 1600 that began the Tokugawa era. I've been surprised how useful the book's insights are to my own life and situation and, in descriptions of Japanese customs and behaviour in the 18th and 19th century, I've been gaining a better understanding of the culture I interact with daily.

I first heard of the book from a mysterious YouTuber called Apostolic Majesty who has a number of really good lectures on his channel on history, The Lord of the Rings, and Bethesda games.

An enterprising lad goes from shining shoes to ruling Harlem in 1973's Black Caesar. Fred Williamson gives a charismatic performance in this decently written blaxploitation film.

Tommy (Williamson) starts his way up the ladder when he grabs hold of a man's leg while he's shining his shoe so a gangster can gun the man down. From there, Tommy gets courier jobs before finally taking the initiative and killing someone wanted dead by the local mafia boss. In return, he asks for control of part of town.

The argument is pretty clear; the oppressed black man becomes the oppressor once given the opportunity, a sad, fairly common commentary on the cyclical nature of tyranny. Williamson's performance is good and impressively vicious and the film has a score and songs by none other than James Brown.

Black Caesar is available on The Criterion Channel.

Somehow, movies from the 1930s and '40s seem to do a better job portraying the experience of living in a foreign country. One terrific example is 1937's Pepe le Moko, directed by Julien Duvivier and starring Jean Gabin. Gabin plays the titular gangster, a Frenchman hiding out in the Casbah of Algiers where he has the foreigner's peculiar experience of being welcome and rejected at the same time.

Pepe has a strange friendship with Inspector Slimane (Lucas Gridoux), the man intent on arresting him. So long as Pepe remains in the Casbah, Slimane is unable to do so and the two carry on a cold but puckish friendship. Fate finally puts the finger on Pepe in the form of a woman, a tourist named Gaby (Mireille Balin) from Paris. Pepe's conversations with her revolve around reminiscences of Paris. In bed with her, Pepe remarks that for all her loveliness and the fineness of her clothes and jewellery, he values her for how she reminds him of the Metro. She seems to recall for him an old familiar world from which he has long been separated.

Pepe's local lover, Ines (Line Noro), is jealous of Gabby but is more frightened of the vulnerability Gaby creates in Pepe. Slimane spots the same vulnerability and exploits it, manipulating both of the lovers. This leads to a remarkable scene where Pepe, at home, believing Gaby has abandoned him, listens to another exiled Parisian as she sings along with herself on a recording from decades earlier, a song about a past and a better life that is forever out of reach for her. I love how there's no reaction shot of Pepe for the whole scene. Her song is so clearly suited to his mood and situation that to show any reaction would be somehow redundant and cheap.

Pepe le Moko is available on The Criterion Channel.

I was in the mood for a Marvel movie last night and I was scrolling through the ones on Disney+ I hadn't seen. I hadn't seen the first Wolverine movie from 2009 because everyone said it was really bad, so much so it was gratuitously retconned in the Deadpool movies, complete with insults. I started watching it and, yeah, it's pretty bad. It's kind of dull. Ryan Reynolds is in it as a distinctly not-Deadpool version of Deadpool. It was like having a movie with a Spider-Man who can't climb walls and has a different personality. Why do it? I suppose writers David Benioff and Skip Woods figured their ideas were superior to the source material. That is the same Benioff who adapted Game of Thrones for television so I guess that was par for the course.

So I switched to the original, 2000 X-Men film that introduced Hugh Jackman's Wolverine to the world. What a difference. How good that movie remains. It still feels fresh that it spends time introducing Wolverine, Magneto, and Rogue in very natural, earthly circumstances.



The recent news from Marvel is they're shaking up their release slate in the wake of disappointing box office performances by Captain America: Brave New World and Thunderbolts. It's really a shame because Thunderbolts is actually quite good. I could've told them it wouldn't do well, though. Florence Pugh is very pretty but she looks like a little boy in all the posters. Everyone wears boring black costumes. I remember months back when Grace Randolph was comparing Thunderbolts to Suicide Squad she called Yelena, Pugh's character, the Harley Quinn of the film. Margot Robbie's sexiness as Harley Quinn in the original Suicide Squad movie single-handedly made it a hit and redoubled the character's cultural icon status. Florence Pugh's dowdiness seems to have drawn no-one to the cinema. The sexy Harley Quinn made the otherwise lousy Suicide Squad a hit, so I think it's fair to say the aesthetically unimpressive hair and makeup on Yelena sank the chances of the otherwise well made Thunderbolts. Yeah, you can turn your nose up at the fact that sex sells. But you do so at your peril.

What is the central gag of 1987's Spaceballs? It's Star Wars but everyone's regular schlubs from Canada and New York, mostly Jewish (John Candy was Catholic). The 80s was a time of great Jewish comedies. Nowadays, we still have Larry David and Mrs. Maisel but the time of the Jewish comedy superstar is over. Well, comedies in general tend not to be box office hits now.

A lot of Spaceballs' comedy also comes from literalising. Chewbacca was always based on George Lucas' dog, now John Candy is playing a literal half man, half dog. The Millennium Falcon was like a mobile home, now it's actually a Winnebago. There's more to this comedy than simply unmasking creative concepts; it divests the concepts of the poetry of the fantastic and makes them mundane. It's a joke on the characters because that's the joke played on everyone in real life. No-one's ever going to have the Force. You're more likely to be stuck with Schwartz. But, hey, that's life. The vile gangster is more likely to be a pile of pizza than a giant space slug.

It's a galaxy of puerile motives. Everyone is thinking about sex all the time. The pretty female officer smirks at the camera after seeing President Skroob's exposed genitals. Joan Rivers' version of C3PO's primary mission is to protect the virginity of the princess. That actually brings her a little closer to the mute servant girl in Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress (隠し砦の三悪人), the movie that was a primary influence on Star Wars. The characters that provided the basis for R2D2 and C3PO were much earthier, much more focused on bodily needs than Lucas' version of the low caste, point of view characters. Maybe Andor introducing sex to the Star Wars universe is a precursor to getting something closer to The Hidden Fortress in a way. I'd say it would need at least fifteen years to develop and I'm not sure Star Wars is going to be financially viable for that long.

We've come all this way and it's still hard to talk about sex without making it a joke. But something like Spaceballs can feel like a breath of fresh air. Or at least canned air.

Spaceballs is currently on Amazon Prime in Japan.

I was going to watch Psycho last night because I saw it was on Japanese Amazon Prime but it was some really lousy, unrestored print. Sometimes I wonder if the reason old movies tend not to be popular in Japan is because most movies made before 1970 are only available in copies that look like they came from a roll of celluloid that's been stashed on the floor of a taxi for twenty years. There are exceptions. For some reason my Japanese copy of Secret of the Incas is pristine.

So I didn't watch Psycho. I tried to watch Ally McBeal a bit but the episode, a Thanksgiving episode in which it turns out Ally's father had been flirting with Georgia, was filled with too many lame coincidences and I couldn't keep watching. So I just drifted off to sleep watching Valerie and Her Week of Wonders again on The Criterion Channel. What a wonderful colour palette that movie has.



This morning I woke up to see Natasha Lyonne visited the Criterion Closet practically naked. She chose Mike Leigh's Naked and David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch among other movies. Maybe she was protesting Cannes' recently announced prohibition on people showing up nude on the red carpet. Maybe she just wanted to remind people she's not exactly like Peter Falk.



I realised she's almost exactly my age. She was born the same year and the same month--she was born April 4, 1979 and I was born April 11, 1979. She's definitely aged better.

X Sonnet 1940

Where citizens were nothing more than pies,
The shop was selling cakes and sticky rolls
Of upper crusts, the best were kept with eyes
Obscured in tanks of fish with shaky goals,
Accrued for foggy syrup, placed within,
A filter's clog, to make a sweetened life,
To quickly ravage thoughts of idle sin,
And check the dance of someone's drunken wife
Before the crew of new cadets could dream
Of something bigger, pulling up parades
Above the heads who just escaped a stream
Of molten rock as music now invades
The sound of happy morning coffee beans
Stampeding down a hill of leafy greens.