Colin Marshall

Linkage

• Some guy who won $30m from Mega Millions by pure dumb luck now travels the world (including North Korea), collects Golden Age comic books, breeds custom weed and answers Reddit's questions about his experience and lifestyle:

  What is a typical day in any given city consist of for you? More so do you find yourself doing a lot of site seeing or is that a given and you mostly find yourself chilling and relaxing all cool.

  Try to find a nice section of a city, find a nice bar, enjoy a few beers, take in the sights, strike up a few conversations, and see if I can repeat the next day.

  I'm most fascinated by how the sob stories came out of the woodwork as soon as word of his wealth spread, and how friends have cut him off when he refused to give them money whenever they wanted. Also — and this is in line with every story I've heard — finding a respectable girlfriend becomes near-impossible as the tidal wave of gold diggers crashes down. If I ever came into a sudden, unexpected fortune, I feel as if I'd have to spend most of it concealing it.


• The first session of Werner Herzog's Rogue Film School happens over January 8-10, 2010, in Los Angeles:

  Depending on the materials, the attention will revolve around essential questions: how does music function in film? How do you narrate a story? (This will certainly depart from the brainless teachings of three-act-screenplays). How do you sensitize an audience? How is space created and understood by an audience? How do you produce and edit a film? How do you create illumination and an ecstasy of truth?

  Related, but more practical subjects, will be the art of lockpicking. Traveling on foot. The exhilaration of being shot at unsuccessfully. The athletic side of filmmaking. The creation of your own shooting permits. The neutralization of bureaucracy. Guerrilla tactics. Self reliance.

  Censorship will be enforced. There will be no talk of shamans, of yoga classes, nutritional values, herbal teas, discovering your Boundaries, and Inner Growth.

  The Rogue Film School will not teach anything technical related to film-making. For this purpose, please enroll at your local film school.

  I'm unlikely to have put together the requires $1450 and 5-minute short film by the application deadline, but maybe when the east coast session rolls around...

• Unsurprisingly, James "Angry Video Game Nerd" Rolfe and Mike Matei of Cinemassacre Productions collect 16mm prints of vintage cartoons and horror films. In a three part series of videos, they get into the agony and esctasy of 16mm collectorhood and viewership. (One example of the agony is having to manually attach a strip of leader in order to watch the Rocky trailer.) Rolfe uses a two-camera setup to capture he and Matei watching, and commenting on, the various old-school Looney Toons they've accumulated.

• From 1992, Roger Ebert comments on the thill of breaking the 120-minute barrier:

  Modern audiences expect to enter a theater at 7 or 9 (or perhaps at 6, 8 or 10) and emerge promptly two hours later. Whenever a longer movie is released, a film like "Dances with Wolves" or "JFK," movie critics know the reaction they'll get if they recommend it to somebody. "But I heard it was really long," they'll say, as if they were contemplating an evening in the dentist's chair.

  There is an obvious answer to that statement: Bad movies are always too long, but good movies are either too short, or just right. Besides, with a longer movie, you get more for your money. I try that line on people, and they kind of squint their eyes, trying to imagine the thrill of breaking the 120-minute barrier.

  Of course there is another answer, harder to explain, and that is the particular appeal that longer movies have on you. They absorb you. They isolate you more completely from the real world that lurks at either end of a film. They create a world that you have the time to get to know.

  I happened upon the article while researching the 237-minute La Belle Noiseuse, the next Jacques Rivette I intend to see. I find that, in my own mind, films under 90m tend to ring up as "short," between 90m and 160m as "regular," and over 160m as "long." This, of course, is totally orthogonal to quality; I've seen excellent films short, regular and long, and crappy films short, regular and long. I buy Ebert's revised dictum that "every great film is the perfect length."

• At erstwords, well-known field recordist Toshiya Tsunoda — he of the wind in glass bottles and the ultra-limited-edition releases — reflects on field recording and the experimental music scene:

  We grasp a place or a space conceptually as a map or a model. But when we observe a vibration, every space is constantly trembling. If we pay attention to the behavior of the vibration, some new phenomenon different from the conceptual map will emerge. What kind of condition is ongoing at a metal fence, on the surface of pavement, in a narrow passage or inside a pipe? Is it a secondary incident that is like a by-product of the space, or is it considered to be a nature of the space itself? This question fascinated me and drove me into recordings. By fixing the vibration on a tape, I can make a catalog of phenomena that transmit the actual space. This is my field recording works.

The Colin you don't know

Eugene Ahn interviews yours truly on this week's installment of his podcast, The People You Don't Know. While I was already an admirer of the show — I can't get enough of (a) interview media and (b) hearing about people I don't know but should — I came away from the conversation more than favorably impressed with his super-conversational, high-curiosity hosting skill. My brief, sketchy notes about the topics we cover follows:

• Making an internet thing while avoding the "geek" route
• Desperately trying to get on the geek route (in childhood)
• Podcasters' rebellion against the typical public radio persona
• The role of opinion and the existence or nonexistence of objectivity in media
• Growing up a radio fan, sort of
• How, exactly, I got myself into hosting three different shows
• Interviewing by not thinking about interviewing
• The elusive "super-awesome" questions
• The tragic tackiness of commercial radio
• How the components of ideas (like those for Barely Literate's) align
• Actually reading the books of the authors one interviews and finding the time to do it
• The noise in our society and the necessity of creating places without it (and with good conversation)
• Art as possible-world-building
• Breaking the mental block to pull value from discussions of mundane-seeming subjects
• The critical importance of curiosity and connection

Subjects I ran my mouth too much to cover: film, filmmaking and "The Humanists"; music production; the unholy monster than is my Twitter account; my pathetic struggle to learn the Korean language.

Also, erratum: I mistakenly called KCRW the "most popular" public radio station in Los Angeles. Actually, I believe KPCC has more listeners by something like an order of magnitude. KCRW's got a much higher public profile, though.

Enotes

Last Sunday, I saw "The Domed One", "Brain One", "God" — or, if you prefer, Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno — speak at the Carpenter Center. The lecture came in association with "77 Million Paintings", a visual art installation at CSU Long Beach's museum. The core of the show is a dark room with a set of randomly generated "paintings," made from a bank of Eno-composed images from the last three or four decades, projected on one wall while sparse generative music plays in the background. (Unifying the space and the work, the room also contains piles of faux rocks illuminated with a random patterns of slowly-shifting colored light.)

I plopped down on one of the couches and spent a good 45 minutes watching the images shift so gradually that I couldn't catch them in the act (no matter how hard I tried), knowing that the exact configuration of music, sound and space I experienced would never, ever arise again. Of all Eno's ideas, I've always found find his concept of art as the creation of spaces the most compelling. Whether you're making music, paintings, films, novels or whatever, he might well argue, you're actually creating places for your audience to be, think and experience. This installation, of course, takes the notion more literally than metaphorically, as it really is a place you can hang out in, a place you can be, think, experience, etc.

The points of Eno's talk that I remember most clearly follow:

1. The broad thrust of the talk had to do with a bunch of ideas that appeared, in less developed form, in Eno's book, A Year with Swollen Appendices. (Some of the ideas go as far back as his first magazine interviews in the early 1970s.) These included his definition of art as "everything you don't have to do," the importance of cultural creation as risk-free simulation of possible worlds, axis thinking, the line between style and utility, the inseparability of artworks from their context, the modern irrelevance of many hierarchical structures (his bête noire the orchestra included), and haircuts.
2. One of the new illustrative devices he brought to this suite of concepts was the lowly screwdriver. He set a series of them on his video projector, each with an identical flat metal head but a completely different plastic handle. He presented these as an elegant illustration of how utility meets style: the "utility" bits of the screwdrivers are the same, but the "style" bits vary. One part you have to do a certain way, and the other, like art in general, you don't. (He also showed a few pictures of "women's screwdrivers," all of which had feathers attached to their handles. "On the assumption," Eno said, "that a women can't use a tool unless it's got feathers on it. By the same token, I've devised a new line of male knitting needles. They've got rifle sights.")
3. By way of tracing the lineage of "77 Million Paintings", he described his very first piece of electronic visual art, crafted by his own fair hand in 1965-ish. He divided a box into nine compartments, each containing a blinking light and covered by a different-colored gel. Looked at directly, the box's face presented what appeared to be shifting patterns of color due to the imperfectly-constructed lights' tendency to fall out of phase. Eno thought this might make a fine piece of bar entertainment, and thus filed a patent about which he received not a single inquiry in its seventeen years.
4. He made fun of David Pagel's lukewarm review of "77 Million Paintings" in the L.A. Times, which goes a little something like this:

   The biggest surprise of Brian Eno’s light-and-sound installation is its modesty, both in terms of size and ambition. In other words, “Brian Eno: 77 Million Paintings” is a small show. Despite the playful overstatement of its title, the mellow exhibition requires very little of visitors and repays their attentiveness with a perfectly pleasant (and perfectly ordinary) experience of tasteful relaxation.

   [ ... ]

   Rather than sticking with a consistent line of inquiry to see how far it can be pushed, like filmmaker Pat O’Neill, abstract painter David Reed or sound sculptor Michael Brewster, Eno is a visual dabbler, a little-of-this and a little-of-that sampler who skims the surface of media without diving into their philosophical underpinnings or wrestling with the consequences (and difficulties) of sustained inquiry.

   Though he disagreed, he did admit that the writeup made him think about the show's nature and purpose. (Not shying away from the "why" has, perhaps more than anything else, kept me strongly interested in whatever Eno says and does.) And it gave him some lecturing mileage!
5. He told his current favorite joke, concerning a Texas rancher who decides to return to old Blighty to rediscover his English heritage. He visits his great uncle, a yard farmer, and asks him how far his land extends. "All the way down there to the street," replies the yard farmer, gesturing proudly. The Texan chuckles. "I could drive all day long and not reach the end of my property." His uncle replies, "I used to have a car like that."
   
   Eno meant this not just to get a laugh but to illustrate his point about works of art. To wit, that works don't contain any objective, universally perceivable substance — "art" — that always and everywhere has an impact but are utterly dependent on their position in the greater cultural conversation. Oft-misunderstood pieces like Duchamp's "Fountain" and Malevich's "White on White" aren't standalone entities — they're punchlines. Presented by themselves, they make about as much sense as just saying "I used to have a car like that" in expectation of guffaws.
6. He described much of what he does as an attempt to answer the double-barreled question posed by avant-garde trumpeter Jon Hassell: "What do I like, and why do I like it?" (This, to my mind as well, may be the question.)
7. Perhaps as a bid for chance and randomness, the evening included a longer-than-usual Q&A, at the end of which a near-forest of hands remained raised. Before opening the floor to the audience, Eno laid down two caveats: questions must be concise (because he'd have to repeat them for everyone to hear), and questions must be interesting to at least someone else in the world. Despite the rules, he had to shoot down a number of askers, especially the ones who asked "What's the snake guitar?" ("A way of playing guitar I invented 97 years ago. Next.") and "Can you talk about The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway?" (he just wrote "ZZZ" on the overhead projector).
8. Madelaine asked Eno whether he considered "77 Milion Paintings" more of the realm of visual art or video art. Calling it a good question, he thought for a moment and said that he doesn't much care what category it falls into. He added that he doesn't even think it belongs to the realm of fine art at all. As long as it functions as a bridge from one cultural point to another, he explained, it doesn't matter what specific points those are.
9. Something, possibly a question, got him talking about a series of panic attacks he experienced a few years back, which felt so much like heart attacks that they landed him in the emergency room at least once. Though he ultimately determined a probable cause of caffiene overconsumption — his then-new assistant was an exotic coffee buff — he saw a psychiatrist who told him to just roll with the panic attacks, to just accept his next panic attack as a panic attack. Surprisingly, this worked. Eno then segued into a discursion on how the psychiatrist was provided by the NHS, and how the NHS' incentive is to have you cured quickly so you cost less instead of selling you all sorts of expensive treatments for a profit¹, and how Americans need to boost Obama in order to furnish the political will to do whatever he wants. I'm no Sarah Palin death panel-invoker, but the sudden rush of political tribalism I felt around me, which made me very, very uncomfortable.
10. He said he's working on a book about all this stuff, but that it's damn slow going since he develops his ideas not by writing, but by talking.

---

¹ I might add that the NHS' operative incentive isn't exactly to cure you — though that indeed gets you off their financal back — but to simply stop you from being an expense. There are many ways to accomplish that besides curing you.

Four films by Sangsoo Hong

Sangsoo Hong¹, the latest addition to my stable of most favored filmmakers, had an eight-film retrospective at LACMA over the last two weekends. I considered it an imperitave — nay, my duty — to attend. Or at least to attend one of the weekends — hey, repeatedly renting cars can get pricey! — which served up four pictures, three of which aren't available on North American DVD.

Besides providing an opportunity to test and slightly bolster my understanding of the Korean language, the screenings gave me what amounted to a shot of pure cinematic narcotic. I knew, going in, that it'd be the good stuff, but eight hours of unadulterated, theatrically-viewed Hong helped me gain some understanding of what, specifically, I like about the man's work.

First and foremost is his visual aesthetic, which usually comes down to "keep it simple." He tends to compose scenes in single shots, two or three in bolder moments. It wasn't until I closely watched a few filmmakers do this (Béla Tarr being another notable practitioner) that I realized just how irritating, consciously or subconsciously, I find the constant cutting that goes on in most movies. When I watch one of Hong's trios of drunken, red-faced Koreans sitting around a table and venting their semi-coherent frustrations, I'm actually seeing it — the setup, the performances, the pacing, the build — rather than seeing it chopped into fifty different bits originally shot over a week's time.

Second is his structuralism. By this I don't mean alignment with any intellectual fads, but a tendency to work out his projects' structures first and go from there. Other filmmakers might slap together an ad hoc structure to acommodate a story; Hong builds story around, or into, structure. As he's often quoted as saying, "People tell me that I make films about reality. They're wrong. I make films based on structures that I have thought up."

Subpoint: it must be said that I also appreciate his process-orientation. During the Q&A that finished the screenings, he described his adherence to his method of commencing photography with only a treatment in hand, spending exactly one hour each morning of the shoot composing the day's dialogue. I've started to believe that effectively imposing structures, processes and procetures on oneself to work within speeds the creative process. Can Hong's having racked up nine films in thirteen years be a coincidence?

Third is his willingness to probe restrained thematic territory from many angles. Hong's territory, as he's thus far staked it out, would seem comically limited: modern-day Korean creative types in their 20s and 30s smoke, drink, fall gracelessly into bed and brew half-assed solutions to their problems both pedestrian and existential. As dry a well as this sounds, he's gone to it nine times now and always come back with something fresh, intriguing, funny and pretty damn genreless. Outline his films and they sound just like what you'd call "romantic comedies," but their dozens of sharp angles would never, no matter the force, fit into that peghole. In many ways, I regard Hong's filmography as one big movie, each separate release its own distinctive chapter.

In Hong's second film, 1998's The Power of Kangwon Province, Jisook, a college student, and Sang-kwon, a married professor call their affair quits and both embark, separately and unbeknownst to one another, on head-clearing mini-vacations to the scenic northerly province of Kangwon. The film tells their geographically overlapping tales in parallel — first Jisook's, then Sang-kwon's — with a few interesting (and mostly non-contrived) points of connection.

From what I've read, this movie firmly established Hong's prevaling style: one-shot scenes, retreats into nature and distant towns, soused gatherings around tables piled with empty soju bottles and the most unromanticized sex scenes ever. (I haven't seen his first picture, The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well, but I hear it's not half as developed.) Lots of Hong fans ("Hongheads"?) call Kangwon Province their favorite, and while it's clearly a strong entry, I admit to having trouble rank-ordering his work. But it's definitely in the running.

2002's Turning Gate, Hong's fourth film (the third being Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors), also sits on my personal top tier. It earns most of that status by virtue of its humor alone. In response to several intractable personal dilemmas, protagonist and frustrated actor Gyung-soo repeatedly trots out the semi-meaningless phrase "I know it's hard being human, but let's not turn into monsters, okay?", parting words with which his previous (and hardly less pathetic) director shooed him away. A flighty dancer with whom Gyung-soo briefly grows enamored performs a strange compressed routine of the world's dance styles. A bunch of people pile into a van for a day trip, only to immediately slam a girl's fingers in the door; everything, from the industrious beginning to the clumsy, halting abrupt end, plays out in one high-angle wide shot. "How do you like my moves?" Gyung-soo keeps demanding throughout one of Hong's trademark unsexy sex scenes.

Hong uses a symmetric, repetitive structure here, emphasizing Gyung-soo's tendency to make the same mistakes over and over again in whatever arena he happens to enter. Hongheads will recognize this as the predominant trait of the oeuvre's males: they're stubborn, buffoonish, uncommunicative, impulsive. But they also try their damndest to snatch at the closest source of dignity. Gyung-soo tries, he really does, but he can never quite become the person others want him to be, whether those others be his audiences, his directors or the two women he fumblingly romances.

(Jeff Reichert in Reverse Shot once compared Turning Gate to Garden State. I haven't seen the latter film, though plenty of friends have told me I wouldn't like it.)

Even Hongheads appear to regard 2005's Tale of Cinema, Hong's sixth movie (number five being the oft- and unfairly maligned Woman is the Future of Man), as difficult to properly judge. A lesser blogger than I would write "spoilers ahead," I suppose, but here goes: the film pulls a switcheroo at the halfway point, revealing the melodrama onscreen to be a short film within the larger, "real" film. This is welcome, since the inner movie ends with its sorrow-filled teen protagonist rushing to a rooftop shouting "Mother! Mother! Mother!"

The screening turns out to be one in a series honoring its director, who's hospitalized and maybe on his deathbed. Or maybe not. In attendance is Yeong-shil, the actress who portrayed the chaste love interest/unsuccessful suicide pact member in the film-within-the-film, and Tong-su, an old (and less successful) film school buddy of the director's. Tong-su grows fixated on both the movie and its lead actress, approaching her until they both end up in one of Hong's unsexy sexes. (The best of them, for my money, though I'm not quite sure why.) Complications ensue.

From frame one, it's clear something's up. To take the most startling quality, the cinematography's full of zooms! Hong seriously breaks loose with the lens lever, and while the result doesn't look "better" than the static shots of Tale's predecessors — "zoom is crappy" remains my aesthetic position — the change of look and feel fascinates. Also contributing to that is the use of way more music cues than usual. At this point, a Honghead-in-training would be well used to hearing a melody at the very beginning and the very end — maybe. These bells and whistles aren't just the tropes of the short film, either; they continue through all the action.

The relative terms "simple," "fun" and "light" might — and have been used to — accurately describe the picture, but it also seems to have disappointed more than a few diehard Hongheads. I suspect there's more complexity behind its brief, sub-90m length and constant goofiness than meets the eye, but I'd also recommend it as an introductory, gateway doseage of Hong's work. That is, I would if it were available on domestic DVD.

As yet Hong's ninth and most recent release, 2008's Night and Day (which was proceeded by 2006's Woman on the Beach also happens to be his most ambitious. Not that you'd know it by Hong's own introduction: "This film is quite long, two hours and 25 minutes," he muttered before the screening. "I hope you find something good in it."

After getting busted smoking pot with a bunch of foreign exchange students, fortyish painter Seong-nam flees to France, far from the reach of Korea's harsh drug laws. Flopping down in a well-known Korean-owned boarding house, the bumbling non-Francophone wanders the city, spends the last of his money and falls in with three fellow artists, women, though even the plaigarist among them produces a lot more than Seong-nam does. Each night he tearfully phones his wife back in Seoul, where it's day. (Geddit?)

Like most Hong men, Seong-nam's full-bore bullshitting can't quite stand up to the harsh glare of the womenfolk. Here, it's for some reason even more hilarious than usual, possibly thanks to the transportation to a foreign land that renders him even more ineffectual and uncomprehending than he would've been in Korea. Not that he escapes the homeland's concerns entirely: he totally freaks, for example, after happening upon a North Korean student at a party, almost instantaneously demanding to know his opinion of the Great Leader and Eternal President. "I just met a North Korean!" he exclaims to himself. "What do I do? Should I tell the consulate?" He later squares matters by his usual method: arm-wrestling.

My immediate impression of Night and Day is that it simply has a lot more stuff than its antecedents. Hong is correct, predictably, that it runs two hours, 25 minutes, but his hope that I find "something" good in it proved too humble. The film's diaristic style — it depicts a small-to-medium scrap of each of Seong-nam's many days in Paris — creates, bit by discrete bit, a sketch of a displaced, disoriented life. It doesn't hurt that the device affords opportunity for as many laughs as Turning Gate. I'll never stop chuckling at the cut straight from Seong-nam's deer-in-the-headlights stare at one of his ladyfriends' demands to know his definition of art to the next day's title card. And what have I learned above all else about Sangsoo Hong's cinema? It's hilarious when people cry their eyes out. No greater master of the comedic weep shall ever live.

---

¹ Up to this point in my effort to grasp Korean language and culture, I've assumed that every romanized Korean name consists of two syllables separated by a hyphen. Apparently it's a matter of choice, as Hong is known to prefer "Sangsoo" to "Sang-soo". As for the non-Asian name order, that's my own quirk; when I speak and write in the Anglosphere deliberately putting Asian surnames first, I feel like the vaguely slimy weenie who, presented a fork at a Chinese restaurant, irritatedly demands chopsticks.

Cinematic melody

In his writeup of Vincent Gallo's Buffalo '66, Adam Cadre argues:

The first couple of times I saw this movie I thought it was totally great. So many bravura flourishes! And, man, scoring the climactic sequence with the beginning of "Heart of the Sunrise" — how cool is that? So if you think of the content of the film the way I tend to think of the lyrics of a song — i.e., not remotely as important as the music — you might think that these strengths "balance out" the film's shortcomings in the feminism department.

But I don't think that's how it works. As I mentioned in a Livejournal comment, this boils down to the Triumph of the Will question: does superlative style mitigate objectionable content? Or does it actually make it worse, by increasing the likelihood that people will admire the work and, consciously or not, become more favorably disposed towards its message?

On the other end Livejournal commenter was none other than yours truly, Colin Marshall. The discussion continues in the writeup's associated LJ thread, where I ask why, specifically, a film's plot isn't analogous to a song's lyrics. His reply:

Every song I've ever written has started either with a guitar riff or as a tune that I have started singing with nonsense lyrics. The lyrics change right up to the moment of recording, then change in the middle of the recording process and continue to change thereafter. The song is thus not a vehicle to convey the words; the words are a vehicle to convey the melody.

Also, when I listen to songs, I usually can't understand the words. There are songs I've been listening to for fifteen or twenty years but can only sing along to with a phonetic approximation. If I do understand the words and like them, it's a mild plus. If I do understand the words and hate them, it's a big minus, but not necessarily a killer unless they're truly evil in the manner of misogynistic rap lyrics.

I buy it! But more importantly, this explanation reveals a point I find extremely interesting about different approaches to different art forms. As my question may have revealed, I do happen to consider a film's plot to be the analog of a song's lyrics, and if I simply sub cinematic terms in for the musical ones in the quote above, a strikingly accurate description of how I view film results:

Every movie I've ever conceived of has started either with a theme or as a structure that I started building with a nonsense plot. The events change right up to the moment of shooting, then change in the middle of the shooting process and continue to change thereafter. The movie is thus not a vehicle to convey the plot; the plot is a vehicle to convey the form.

Also, when I watch movies, I usually can't understand the plot. There are movies I've been watching for fifteen or twenty years but whose plots I can only recount to an approximation. If I do understand the plot and like it, it's a mild plus. If I don't understand the plot and hate it, it's a big minus, but not necessarily a killer.

Chillingly true, sure, but a couple of complications remain. First, I've replaced "the words are a vehicle to convey the melody" with "the plot is a vehicle to convey the form." I searched for a filmic equivalent of "melody," and I'm pretty sure that "form" isn't it. This bugs me, because the "melody" of a film — whatever you want to call it — really is, to my mind, the most important component! I've been won over time and again by Ozu's melodies, Tarkovsky's melodies, Hong's melodies, Weerasethakul's melodies, yet I have no idea how to refer to them. (Some call this the "music" of a film, but using that term makes me feel way too fancy.)

Second, claiming that "when I watch movies, I usually can't understand the plot" sounds implausible. I really can't grasp the events of most pictures I see? Could I possibly be that stupid? But take note of how Adam Cadre initially used the phrase "can't understand the words," which appears to mean not "unable to process the words" but "unable/unwilling to perceive the words accurately," which, given the relatively low importance he grants them, is entirely understandable. To concentrate on a song's lyrics, the original explanation implies, is to wilfully ignore the work's creative core; turns out I've got the same view of a film's plot.

Linkage

• The New Yorker's book club is now reading Haruki Murakami's A Wild Sheep Chase. My own writeup from last fall is here. I look forward to how they'll handle such an oddball novel, especially when the midget in the sheep suit shows up. Would that they follow up with a communal read of Dance Dance Dance.

• I knew nothing of broadcaster/food critic/television essayist/architecture writer Jonathan Meades until imomus penned a post about him, but now I feel the need to dig deeper. All (!) his unconventionally-composed television documentary sorta things — on buildings, travel, cities, food, surrealism, etc. — reside, free for the watchin', on YouTube's MeadesShrine.

• (Former Marketplace of Ideas guest) Daniel Menaker on the pleasures and sorrows (and randomness) of editing:

  Genuine literary discernment is often a liability in editors. And it should be — at least when it is unaccompanied by a broader, more popular sensibility it should be. When you are trying to acquire books that hundreds of thousands of people will buy, read, and like, you have to have some of the eclectic and demotic taste of the reading public. I have this completely unfounded theory that there are a million very good — engaged, smart, enthusiastic — generalist readers in America. There are five hundred thousand extremely good such readers. There are two hundred and fifty thousand excellent readers. There are a hundred and twenty-five thousand alert, active, demanding, well-educated (sometimes self-well-educated), and thoughtful — that is, literarily superb — readers in America. More than half of those people will happen not to have the time or taste for the book you are publishing. So, if these numbers are anything remotely like plausible, refined taste, no matter how interesting it may be, will limit your success as an acquiring editor. It's not enough for you to be willing to publish "The Long Sad Summer of Our Hot Forsaken Love," by Lachryma Duct, or "Nuke Anbar Province, and I Mean Now!," by Genralissimo Macho Picchu — you have to actually like them, or somehow make yourself like them, or at least make yourself believe that you like them, in order to be able to see them through the publishing process.

• Dept. of nihil est sanctum: the trayless college cafeterias. (See also Cushing Academy's bookless library.)

• Brian Eno's newest installation hits CSU Long Beach:

  Eno's restless endeavors often produce oases of calm reflection for his listeners and viewers. Exhibit A is one of his most recent projects, "77 Million Paintings," a multimedia installation that will be unveiled today at the University Art Museum of Cal State Long Beach.

  It consists of a wall of 12 computer-operated monitors of varying dimensions, displaying a procession of constantly mutating images that group and regroup into a virtually limitless series of configurations. The protean "paintings" are accompanied by Eno's ambient original score.

  Eno also designed the installation's computer software and hand-drew the interchangeable images on slides, using etching tools and paintbrushes. Most of the configurations are abstract, but Eno occasionally added variety by tossing in found art culled from magazines and elsewhere.

  The idea of making art that links one sensory or cognitive process to another — for example, hearing with seeing — has roots in the concept of synesthesia, which has been employed by such artists as the Russian painter-theorist Wassily Kandinksy and elaborated on by the likes of Matthew Barney, in his "Cremaster Cycle." Eno's overall intent with "77 Million Paintings" was to create what he calls "generative art," a random flow of visuals patterned after the "generative music" he has created using synthesizers and other computerized instruments.

  He hopes that those experiencing the installation will be inspired to consider different notions of time, a goal that he's been pursuing as one of the founders of The Long Now Foundation, a San Francisco-based institution that aims (in its website's words) to "provide counterpoint to today's 'faster/cheaper' mind set and promote 'slower/better' thinking."

  "The dominant theory coming out of Hollywood is that peoples' attention spans are getting shorter and shorter and they need more stimulation," Eno says. "I point to this work as a counter-problem. I think it's a myth that American public or any other public is so stupid that they need to be constantly pricked."

  Needless to say, I'll be seeing it this weekend, just as I'll be seeing Eno's talk at the Carpenter Center, just as I'll be attending LACMA's Sang-soo Hong quadruple feature. As always, if I succumb to awesomeness intoxication, avenge me.

Tiers

Top-n lists have become the accepted coin of the realm of expressed cultural preference, especially regarding film, but the more I think about the practice or one-by-one ordinal ranking of one's favorite movies, the less sense it makes. What could distinguish, say, number six from number seven, other than the impulse of the moment? No wonder my own top-tens look unsettlingly different each time I'm made to compose them.

Furthermore, a top ten doesn't accurately reflect the way that I — and, from what I can tell, others whose reviews I read — actually think about film. We can all, if pressed, name our probable favorite picture of all time and its close competitors. We can also point to a few films that we'd never leave off a top ten, and, with a shade harder effort, define another group of movies which have repaid and will likely continue to repay our repeat viewings. But credibly making a fine enough distinction to rank one ahead of another in any meaningful fashion? Doubtful. Better to use tiers, since, I don't know about you, but my brain tends to cluster, not order linearly.

So the next time I ask someone about their cinematic habits, I won't ask them to name their favorite film, their top three directors, their favorite cinematographers numbers four through eleven, etc. I'll ask what's on their top tier. My own top three tiers, with examples of the residents of each, follow:

Tier A: films that are the reasons I watch films in the first place

• Takeshi Kitano's Hana-bi
• Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey
• Akira Kurosawa's Ran
• Wes Anderson's Rushmore
• Chris Marker's Sans Soleil
• Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris
• Chris Smith's American Movie
• Neil Jordan's The Crying Game
• Ridley Scott's Blade Runner

Tier B: films that remind me of the vast potential of the medium

• Yasujiro Ozu's Late Spring
• Apichatpong Weerasthakul's Syndromes and a Century
• Pen-ek Ratanaruang's Last Life in the Universe
• Werner Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God
• Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park
• Abbas Kiarostami's Close-Up

Tier C: films astonishingly exemplary of their type, look and feel

• Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
• Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line
• Wayne Wang's Chan is Missing
• Hiroshi Teshigahara's The Face of Another
• Hiroyuki Okiura's Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade

That seems more informative than — and certainly put up less of a struggle than — my average top-ten. Ideally, the tiers would include fewer films toward the top, not more, but hey, this idea's in beta. What's on your top tier?

Linkage

• paradoxdruid hooks me up with Indexed, a web comic somehow simpler than xkcd and thus even more conceptually elegant. Each morning, author Jessica Hagy posts a graph drawn on an index card. Two favorites:
  
  
  
  
• Gourmet takes Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's Oblique Strategies into the kitchen:

  "What wouldn't you do?"

  "I had an idea to make mussels with basil and garlic," he told me. "I was going to call the dish 'pesto mussels' or something, but as I was getting ready to cook, Melissa pointed out that two months prior she made a mussel dish with a watercress cream, which, of course, would look exactly the same as 'pesto mussels.'"

  The mussels and basil were already ordered and on their way, so Ian asked Melissa for advice; she suggested pasta. Ian cooked the mussels and pasta and tossed them with the basil, and that's when the strategy came into play: "There's an Italian no-no when it come to eating fish with cheese. It's rarely done. Because it's such a faux pas, I would never have gone there. But because the card said I should, I did." In the end, Parmigiano-Reggiano added depth with out strong-arming the more delicate flavours in the dish.

• Errol Morris names five favorite films on Current TV. Though thin on substance — it's Current, after all — the segment nevertheless piques my interest, and strongly, in Kazuo Hara's The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On, a documentary about a WWII veteran desperately, and angrily, trying to find out the fate of his army buddies.
  
  If you're looking for slightly more content, do check out Morris' list of favorite books as well. Curious line about Dale Carnegie's How to Stop Worrying and Start Living: "I dare anyone to read it without an immediate and overwhelming desire to open up your veins in the tub."

• Tyler Cowen, who comes from a somewhat libertarian perspective, defines "progressivism" as reasonably as possible, to the best of his ability in eleven points. Selections:

  1. There exists a better way and that is shown by the very successful polities of northwestern Europe and near-Europe. We know that way can work, even if it is sometimes hard to implement.

  6. Limiting inequality will do more to check bad governance than will the quixotic libertarian attempt to limit the size of government.

  10. The United States has to struggle mightily to meet the progressive standards of western Europe and we should not equate the two regions in terms of their operation or capabilities. Yet there is an alternative strand in American history, if not always a dominant one, showing that progressive change is possible. Think Upton Sinclair and Martin Luther King and the organizers of early labor unions.

  And he defines "conservatism" as reasonably as possible, to the best of his ability in ten points. Selections:

  1. Evil is real and there exist evil nations in the world; the relatively virtuous Western powers require strong states to fend off such evils. This distinct from "big government" in the sense advocated by modern liberals.

  2. In international affairs, in the twentieth century, the United States in particular has been unselfish to a remarkable degree. We therefore should trust the United States with unprecedented power. In fact we have no alternative. Some cultures really are better than others.

  7. We do not have either the resources or the norms to remake society in the direction of a fully-comfortable-for-everyone social democracy. We do need welfare states to keep a polity in running order, but we should be modest about what such regimes can accomplish. They cannot overcome a fundamental lack of proper values as found in many poor or disadvantaged communities.

• Dick Cavett and Jimmy Fallon talk shop about talk shows in New York. I've never seen Fallon in action, though I routinely look to Cavett's back pages for examples of How It's Done. (It would not be entirely inaccurate to say that I aim to perform a slight bit of re-Cavettization on the media scene.) I assure you, based on my limited experience, that when Cavett speaks the following about preparation, he speaks the truth:

  You can be inhibited by the notes, and then there’s that awful moment where you think, “Oh shit, his lips have stopped moving, and I’m not quite exactly sure what he said, because I was thinking what I might say next.” Jack Paar said to me, “Kid, don’t do interviews. That’s clipboards, and David Frost, and what’s your pet peeve and favorite movie. Make it a conversation.” And I didn’t get it immediately. And then I realized, well, that’s what Jack did. He didn’t ever, “I’ve got one more I want to ask you, okay, let’s move on to geography.” It’s a lesson that has not been learned by enough people in the world.

  Listen rather than formulate. Don't ask about peeves and favorites. Make it a conversation.

When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (Mikio Naruse, 1960)

I don't know how it is over there, but we midcentury-Japanese-film-loving Westerners tend to think of our form of choice as pretty much being all about Ozu, and if we need two great filmmakers, it's somewhat about Mizoguchi as well. True, the period also saw releases from auteurs of Kurosawa and Imamura's caliber that hold up today — the former's High and Low is one of my favorites, with The Bad Sleep Well not far behind — but those guys worked well into the 90s. Ozu and Mizoguchi passed this mortal realm in 1963 and 1956, respectively, and thus forever remain creatures of that era.

Western cinephiles thus bring their names up together often, but another director merits membership in the fold; the "duo" of Yasujirō Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi should rightly become the "trio" of Yasujirō Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi and Mikio Naruse. Naruse, a fellow Shochiku intern alonsgide Ozu and a onetime boss of Kurosawa who lived from 1905 to 1969 and put out his final film in 1967, seems to have possessed the same cinematic skill of his two colleagues but for whatever reason has remained almost completely known outside Japan. Number of pictures made: 89. Number of pictures available as Netflix DVDs: one.

That single rentable DVD, though, is When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, which possesses the strength of at least five regular ol' midcentury Japanese movies. From what I've read, it's also representative of Naruse's later period — which, to certain specialized film critics, seems to mean his better period — where geishas, bar hostesses, wives and mothers come up against Japanese life's harsh realities. As Wikipedia quotes Naruse as saying, "From the youngest age, I have thought that the world we live in betrays us; this thought still remains with me."

Japanese film of the 50s and 60s could hit a fairly vertiginous height of melodrama, so it's deservedly noted that Naruse here refrains from treating his central character, a widowed Ginza bar hostess named Keiko, as some sort of Job figure. Still, she's pressed on all sides: wrong side of 30, no husband, obligated to lay out heaps of cash on luxurious clothes, clung onto by an ineffectual brother and his polio'd son. She could start her own bar, but doesn't quite have the scratch. She could get married, but promised her late husband she wouldn't. She could get a bit more support by sleeping around, but then would risk tarnishing her all-important reputation. A homely businessman seems to offer the way out, but he turns out to be a deluded compulsive con man with a shack by the power plant, a worn-down wife and a couple kids who circle around on a tricycle in the dirt all day. Hmm.

This sounds like a downer, and maybe it downs some viewers, but I find more of a richness in it. I won't do any better than (former Marketplace of Ideas guest) Philip Lopate, who in his Criterion essay observed that Naruse takes no "cheap, feel-good shortcuts," nor does he indulge in "facile apocalyptic bleakness." Complaining about the mainstream prevalence of the former has, with good cause, become standard movie-critic copy, but taking the latter pose and calling it realism constitutes, I would submit, even more of a threat to cinematic quality. "No one is that good — or that evil — in a Naruse movie," Lopate continues. "He neither ennobles nor demeans, but shows realistically the ways that we are all mixed, contradictory creatures."

So, richness and complexity of life? Check, and then some. That would be enough for me to put out a solid recommendation, but Naruse also delivers it in an aesthetically interesting fashion; this thing brims with early-60s "cool," neatly suited to its multilayered black-and-white photography. Events move along in a highly measured fashion, which, combined with the even, stylized surface, really makes me realize what Kurosawa meant when he likened Naruse's work to "a great river with a calm surface and a raging current in its depths." The understated method of transmission renders the material that much more effective. Keiko's voiceovers, on the other hand, may or may not lend richness; as much as I like the line "The best go home by car. Second-rate ones by streetcar. The worst go home with their customers," it probably would've been better illustrated than stated. But how could that xylophone jazz score not make up for any artistic lapse, large or small?

Seeking yet more randomness

I'm down for another round of shaking up the topics. Whether you've been reading for years or hours, whether you're a commenter or a lurker, whether you enjoy what I write here or loathe its every keystroke, send me any and all questions you think it would be interesting to have me publicly answer either in the form of comments to this post or e-mails to colinjmarshall at gmail. Answering in a separate post, I'll attribute the question to you (with a link to your internet presence, if you have one) unless you specifically request anonymity, which is fine.

From what I can tell, many new readers have signed on since we last did this, so the exercise has definitely built up potential.