Susanna Forrest: 'The Age of the Horse: An Equine Journey Through Human History' (2016, 2017)

Susanna Forrest: The Age of the Horse: An Equine Journey Through Human History (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2016, 2017).

Brilliantly written, fantastico!  Forrest clearly loves horses, but does not shy away from any aspect of their history or roles in conjunction with human beings.

Chapter headings (not including their subheadings; originals in caps): "Evolution, Domestication, Wildness, Culture, Power, Meat, Wealth, War."

The height of exploiting the horse must include the height of the British Empire. Certainly it was up there. "And so we reach the scrum of our London gentleman's horse-powered Britain, with its vanners, bussers, cabbers, pitmen's horses, farm horses, cab horses, costers' donkeys, trammers, drays, ferry and railway horses, all leaning their weight into their collars and drawing the nation along." (Pages 178-179). "By 1871, there were as many horses in the city as in the countryside, and by 1901, urban horses outnumbered rural by two thirds to one third." (Page 179). Contrary to popular imagination.

The change from horse-driven reality to truck and car-driven reality was even more shocking than the onset of self-driving vehicles will be in the near future. A similar "future shock" moment arrived with the replacement of the analog world with digital technology at the beginning of the 21st century. 

Think in terms of dramatic "tipping points" of the past, present and future. This is just one of may reasons that Forrest's The Age of the Horse is so riveting.

Horse Progress Days -- among the Amish in the 21st century, Forrest observes a twelve-horse team on display. "When this juggernaut marched on  . . . it was like standing by as a siege engine passed: the air was filled with the high jingle and clink of the connectors and heel chains, bits champed and mouthed, the work of muscle and mass, the soft rush of the Ohio soil as it was sliced deep, caught and turned over by the plough, leaving a black, shining and broken wake behind like a harbour ferry's." (Page 189).

Forrest crafts scores of such evocative, even exciting sentences, right up there with Marcel Proust and Vladimir Nabokov, among others.  I am deeply impressed.

I also like the fact that she wields the word "poleaxed" on more than one occasion. It sticks to mind.

Vivid descriptions do the job repeatedly. When Forrest is visiting China after "Golden Week," industry has paused long enough for air pollution to abate. "Over Chaoyang Park on the fourth of seven Beijing ring roads, the skies were deep blue and there was a fresh, brisk breeze that bent the tops of the silver birches lining the entry roads."  (Page 280).

To the Great Wall: "A rampart of rocky slopes rose straight from the plain, littered with huge yellow boulders, and the neat, grey crenellations of the restored Wall rose and fell along the peaks and gorges as vertiginously as a roller coaster." (Page 289).

Observing a bullfight in Portugal: "There was a cry and the gate flew open, clapping against the barrier, and out came the black bull, a surge of dark energy and muscle so thick that it guttered over its narrow rump." (Page 322).

On the adaptability of horses during the First World War of 1914-1918: "Even in Flanders in the Great War, the horses soon became accustomed to the shattering boom of shellfire and continued to pull their wagons as houses, roads and people disappeared into blasted mudscapes." (Page 334).

Horses prefer "cohesion, space and synchrony." (Page 339). The Age of the Horse is a stellar work upon which I'm still ruminating three days after finishing a first read-through -- a remarkable occurrence in the digital age, and something to be treasured.

Today's Rune: Breakthrough. 

Flash of Light, Fog of War: Japanese Military Prints, 1894-1905 (Part II)

The Great Victory of Our Forces at the Battle of the Yellow Sea (1894)

Bradley M. Bailey, Flash of Light, Fog of War: Japanese Military Prints, 1894-1905. Chapel Hill: Ackland Art Museum, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2017. And exhibition at the Ackland, October 6, 2017-January 7, 2018.

An original and fascinating exhibition of Japanese woodblock prints, highlighting with jingoistic relish the rise of the Japanese military. Artistically, aside from the purely historical context, the prints highlight fog, smoke, exploding shells, searchlights, bursts of red and exciting activity. 

Also in the Ackland, meet No'om of Palmyra (Tadmun), Syria. Her age is about 1,850 years. Can you dig?

Today's Rune: Partnership.  

Flash of Light, Fog of War: Japanese Military Prints, 1894-1905 (Part I)

Bradley M. Bailey, Flash of Light, Fog of War: Japanese Military Prints, 1894-1905. Chapel Hill: Ackland Art Museum, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2017.

In the late 1800s, Japan industrialized rapidly and, through war, took on two major powers: China and Russia. One of its prizes was the Korean Peninsula. 

Given that these same powers are still connected in the latest Korean conflict, the rise of Japan as a major military power is highly relevant -- as was its total destruction as a military power by 1945. 

Japan wasn't the only nation playing jingoist games at the time of the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese Wars. Besides Western European powers and their own imperial wars, the United States of America initiated the Spanish-American War, resulting in a number of intended and unintended consequences. 

Outside of Africa, Spain's old empire was virtually demolished -- leading eventually to the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939. 

Also as a result of the Spanish-American War, the US seized Puerto Rico, Cuba, Guam and the Philippines and annexed Hawaii at the same time. The US became a world naval power, steaming toward conflict with Japan. The poor, innocent US that never does wrong and only fights to defend itself! 

As for a Korean nuclear war in the 21st century, the verdict is still out -- but the surprise should be not at all, given the history of the last 125 years. 

Yesterday, today and tomorrow: Cherchez la guerre / Look for the War.

Today's Rune: Initiation. 

'Tokyo: A Biography' (2016). From the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake to Fukushima

Stephen Mansfield, Tokyo: A Biography. Disasters, Destruction and Renewal: The Story of an Indomitable City (Tokyo: Tuttle, 2016).

Imperial Japan took control of all of Korea in 1910, exploiting its resources. After the 1923 earthquake and its resultant fires, Korean workers in Japan became targets of Japanese nationalists (Japan First types). "Koreans were convenient scapegoats, and were easily sought out in slums where they lived by members of the police force, the notorious Black Dragon Society, military sports clubs, or anyone with a personal grudge or score to settle . . . lacking rational judgement or orderly deportment, [they] dragged Koreans from their homes and workplaces and hacked them to death. Others were strung up on telegraph poles or boiled alive in drums. Those who failed impromptu linguistic tests in Japanese were sentenced in mock trials and beheaded."  (Tokyo, pages 107-108). Also targeted were socialists, feminists, and other social reformers. 

By the 1930s, with dissenting voices suppressed or crushed, Japan as a whole became increasingly militaristic and jingoistic; its leadership became increasingly reckless. 

When Japanese forces seized Nanjing/Nanking, China, in December, 1937, they began a wholesale slaughter of its inhabitants -- killing as many as 300,000 civilians. 

The writer Iris Shun-Ru Chang (1968-2004), committed suicide seven years after completing The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (1997) and other works. She had been severely depressed, and no wonder why.

When the Japanese and Anglo-American Empires violently collided into each other, the scope of the Asia-Pacific War widened and deepened. More and more people were consumed, by the millions. 

Yet there was still a flicker of dissent among some Japanese. "Not everyone was keen to make the sacrifice and go to the front line. Prohibitions on tattooing were introduced during the war as a response to an increasing number of young men seeking ways to avoid conscription. People wearing tattoos were considered noncomformists who might spread dissent among the military ranks." (Tokyo, pages 126-127).  

Naturally, many writers and artists were dubious of the war and Japanese militarization, too. Nagai Kafu wrote: "However cruel and arbitrary the methods of the government may be, they cannot restrain the imagination, While there is life, there will be freedom." (Quoted in Tokyo, page 127). 

But like the Japanese military, the American military, too, became increasingly vicious. By early 1945, "the Americans [were] now bent on causing mass casualties to civilian populations as they later would with Hiroshima and Nagasaki," exploding napalm to "extract a maximum death toll. . . the first of America's high-tech massacres" and "slaughter bombings." (Tokyo, page 130).

After Japan's surrender, the American Occupation began. In immediate response, the Relaxation and Amusement Association (RAA) was formed to "entertain" American military personnel with "comfort stations" and brothels, which were also given euphemisms such as "Tea Shop Sanitation" and "Café Associations." These were large-scale operations with some 70,000 organized "comfort women" and tens of thousands of freelancing or yakuza-(gangster)-run "panpan girls." For the many gay servicemen, there were dansho and a quick blooming of gay bars. (Tokyo, pages 140-141). Very little of this seems to have made its way into celebrations of "America's Greatest Generation" -- or family histories. For most, apparently, what happened in Tokyo stayed in Tokyo.

Galloping through the Cold War, Godzilla movies came out amid understandable atomic jitters (Hiroshima and Nagasaki being very close in the rear-view mirror); and Japan's economy took off, thanks in part to servicing American military efforts in Korea and Vietnam in the 1950s and 1960s respectively, and while showcasing the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. By the 1980s, Japan's economy was swaggering, at least until the next bust. Though Americans back in the USA feared the pointed competition from Japanese companies, they were all the while buying more Japanese cars and electronics.  

In 1995, Tokyo was again traumatized, this time by the Doomsday Cult Aum Shinrikyo / "Supreme Truth," which used sarin nerve gas to attack the subway system. This was the same kind of gas recently used in Syria to attack Syrian villagers. In the Tokyo attack, 5,000 people were sickened and twelve died outright. (Tokyo, page 181).

Jumping to March 11, 2011, the catastrophic Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami caused an accident at Tokyo Electric Power Company's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power facility, a horrendous and toxic radiation event still ongoing in 2017. Fukushima is situated about 150 miles (200+ kilometers) from Tokyo. (Tokyo, page 183).

Arriving at today, May 5, 2017, Fukushima is still a dangerous and daunting problem, but Tokyo is also under threat from a possible North Korean missile attack. For Tokyo, the fun never stops! 

Today's Rune: Breakthrough. 

Akira Kurosawa: わが青春に悔なし / 'No Regrets for Our Youth' (1946)

Blend one portion of Jane Austen with two of Fyodor Dostoevsky, season with a little Gone with the Wind. Sit down for a Japanese meal during the Second World War period and voila, you have tasted of  Akira Kurosawa's わが青春に悔なし / No Regrets for Our Youth (1946).  Bon appétit!

Let's look briefly at three aspects of this early post-war film.

1. Love triangle, beginning in 1933. Yukie (played by the astonishing Setsuko Hara) is wooed by Noge and Itokawa (all pictured above).

At one point, Yukie matter-of-factly spells things out for Itokawa:

"If I follow you, my life will be peaceful.  But, if I may say, it'll be boring . . . If I follow [Noge], something dazzling will await me. My life will be stormy . . . It terrifies me and fascinates me."  

2. Family. We learn important things about the connections between Yukie, Noge, Itokawa and their family systems, how they help inform their existential decision-making -- even in rebellion. 

3. Society under pressure. Japanese fascism and nationalism begin to squash socialist and even the most moderate dissent. At first, the students and faculty fight for free speech and against militarism, but eventually, many of the students are absorbed into the war machine and most of the faculty either removed or cowed into silence.

Noge goes to prison and is seemingly rehabilitated by the time of his release, though he still remains, in actuality, a member of the resistance. Itokawa becomes a government prosecutor and is seemingly sympathetic, though in actuality, he has become part of the new status quo. 

Yukie is the character who changes the most, and, existentially, for the better.

No Regrets for Our Youth has additional facets worth exploring -- including fine matters of technique and craft -- but three are enough for one post!

Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune.  

'Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham Du Bois' by Gerald Horne (2000)

Gerald Horne, Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham Du Bois (New York University, 2000). Fascinating and well-researched biographical study of Shirley Graham (1896-1977), composer, playwright, writer, human rights activist, and second wife of W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963).

Horne's work stirred up my interest in the anti-establishment scene, especially during the 1940s and 1950s period. Here's a page from Shirley Graham Du Bois' FBI files, labeling her and W.E.B. Du Bois as "colored." Click to see the whole image, as necessary.

What could be a more "Un-American Activity" than a cultural and scientific conference for world peace?  

Harassment, both formal and informal -- including withholding of travel documents and clandestine rifling through living spaces -- by overzealous members of government agencies, etc., actually led Shirley to become more radical as she matured. She became a communist, in fact (in her late forties), inspiring her husband to do the same (in his eighties), and together they moved to Ghana, where they were visited by influential people from all over the world.

Shirley Graham Du Bois and Malcolm X in Ghana (1964)

Over time, Shirley Graham Du Bois tilted away from Soviet accolades toward Red China; top Chinese leaders fêted her and provided medical support. 

The pathetic state of race relations in the United States made race as well as class powerful wedge issues inside the US and globally -- as they continue to be in the 21st century. 

Gerald Horne's Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham Du Bois serves as a needed specific chronicle in support of universal consciousness raising. 

Today's Rune: Partnership. 

Note: Unsure of the provenance of the last photo, but another copy of It can be found here. 

'The Path' (2016): Journey III

Michael Puett and Christine Gross-Loh, The Path: What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us About the Good Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016).

Like poetic fragments left by Sappho, here we go for Journey III.

". . . boundless curiosity about all that exists . . ." (page 150).

"Trained spontaneity means freeing ourselves of a conscious mind that is by definition restricted to a single self. Our mind gets in our way, causing us to battle against rather than flow with the Way . . . (pages 150-151). 

"What would it be like if I looked at the world as if I were a butterfly dreaming I am a human being? . . . (page 152).

". . . constantly cultivating . . . ability to imagine transcending our own experience . . ." (page 152.)

"The opposite of mindlessness and complacency is not mindfulness. It is engagement" (page 194).

"In this fractured and fragmented world, it's up to us to generate order. We are the ones who construct and give pattern to the world . . ." (page 197). 

Simplified 气 (Qi) from Stroke Order Project, Wiki Commons. 

Today's Rune: Movement. 

'The Path' (2016): Journey II

Michael Puett and Christine Gross-Loh, The Path: What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us About the Good Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016).

Another thin slice of radish . . .

This is right on:  "By making concrete, defined plans, you are actually being abstract, because you are making these plans for a self that is abstract: a future self that you imagine based on who you think you are now, even though you, the world, and your circumstances will change" (pages 77-78).

All things interrelated, not isolated -- sounds like a Dr. Bronner soap bubble saying.

"The Way [Dao] isn't something we reach while walking in the woods on the weekend. It's something we bring about actively through our daily interactions" (pages 94-95). 

Start anywhere: you're already here -- or there.

Mind your Ps and Qis. 

Qi, which I first heard about as chi or ch'i (akin to Prana) is vibrancy and life force. 

Do anything new -- or anew -- and feel a tingling, like some culminating moment of acupuncture. 

Songs in the qi of Life [bad pun, sorry Mr. Wonder].

"We nourish [there's that word again] our qi . . . when we marvel over a painting in a museum or feel transported by a piece of music. Anything that inspires awe refines qi by training the senses to respond more profoundly to the world around us. When we are more aware of the world in all its dimensions, we are more open to all that we can potentially feel about it and are better able to react to it" (page 134).  

Hence my interest in just about anything that refines qi -- a broad spectrum, indeed. 

Today's Rune: Movement.

'The Path' (2016): Journey I

Michael Puett and Christine Gross-Loh, The Path: What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us About the Good Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016).

Like a radish, this book tastes best when thinly sliced.

"Heart-Mind" imbalance. You can see this just about anywhere: people's life-paths obstructed by their own emotion. 

Emotion can obscure otherwise clear thinking and, thanks to paralysis, prevent good action.  

In the long term, an effective approach is this: "respond to people in ways that we have cultivated, instead of through immediate emotional reaction" (page 27). 

Don't let your EQ muddle your IQ.

"A Confucian approach . . . note your patterns and . . . work actively to shift them . . . (page 43).  ". . . just as the world is fragmented, we are, too. Instead of . . . single, unified selves . . . complex arrays of emotions, dispositions, desires, and traits . . . often pull us in different and contradictory ways" (Ibid.).

Somewhere in the text, the authors note that we choose to "nourish" certain relationships (and interests) -- or not. Here it is: different "trajectories exist all around us. . . Your neglect is an active choice that will set things on a certain path" (pages 64-65). This is true: by not doing, we are doing, and by doing, we are not trying something different. Don't be so stubborn about not branching out. 

And last thought for now: "Use your mind to cultivate your emotions. Become aware of . . . patterned habits . . . entrenched narratives . . ." (page 71).  

I've been reading daoist and other Chinese philosophy in English translation since I was about twelve or thirteen, only then it was called taoist in English; Laozi and Dao de jing were more often spelled Lao Tzu and the Tao Te Ching. 

None of The Path is entirely new, but the old is given a few new twists, possibly because of more refined translations and additional contemplation. Kind of clunky, but interesting. 

Today's Rune: Possessions.   

Welcome to the Year of the Fire Monkey

Dig it while you can, for the next Year of the Fire Monkey begins on February 5, 2076. These are some of the photos I took yesterday inside a cool Vietnamese oasis in North Texas. Here, sustenance is offered to ancestor spirits and the gods, presumably. (HTC cellphone shot). 

God (or boddhisattva) in a rocky place overlooking a pool. Women dressed in beautiful silk dresses were praying here, but I didn't want to disturb them in process. (HTC cellphone shot).

Temple complex by front entrance. (Nikon Coolpix L830). This is February!

Shiny cake! Really these are giant candle holders. In the evening (and maybe at other times, too), folks light candles, one for each departed soul among their loved ones. (Nikon Coolpix L830). 

The main complex from fifty paces back. I came across these sacred grounds by chance, synchronicity, fate, kismet, divine guidance or luck of the draw, right on the Eve of the Lunar New Year (Tết), coming back from a Chinese New Year celebration by a new route. Certainly better than getting vaporized by a meteorite, like that poor guy in India. (Nikon Coolpix L830). 

Today's Rune: Harvest. 

Signs and Wonders at the North Carolina Chinese Lantern Festival (2015)

Chimerical Chinese light configurations in Cary, North Carolina, at the Koka Booth Amphitheatre. Cool beans, Wellington!  Thanks to the gestalt effect, we know a dragon when we see one.

Nearby Dorton Arena in the gloaming. Looks the same as when I was Boy Scout for two years, during which time there were a couple of jamboree-type events. I remember on one occasion, the sun was so hot we fried eggs on a rock. The last concert I saw here, as a young adult, was James Brown. The "paraboleum"-style architecture was designed by a Polish fellow who died in a plane wreck; its construction dates back to the early 1950s, though it has since accrued something like the patina of a 1970s vibe. 

Peacocks and roses at the Chinese Lantern Festival.  

Nearby Bond Lake. There's a nice trail that goes around it, and plenty of birds nesting. 

Full-length shot of the dragon situated on the edge of a small lake. I fell into a hole more than a foot deep while roaming around taking photos, coming out a bit surprised and muddy but otherwise unscathed. It was worth it. 

Today's Rune: Possessions.  

Kang Je-gyu's 'My Way' / 마이 웨이 (2011): Take Two

Shirai (Fan Bingbing), one of the characters in Kang Je-gyu's My Way / 마이 웨이 (2011) is a Chinese sniper. There were thousands of women snipers engaged in combat during the World War II period-- none of them American. Consider Lyudmila "Lady Death" Pavlychenko, a Ukrainian Soviet sniper who killed 309 Axis men. Women snipers fought during the American War in Vietnam, as is depicted in Stanley Kubrick's 1987 film, Full Metal Jacket (Ngoc Le plays a Viet Cong sniper).    

Another element of Kang Je-gyu's My Way / 마이 웨이 (2011): the runner. The two main characters compete in races before the outbreak of war -- just as in Peter Weir's Gallipoli (1981). In both films, running is another way to spotlight race, class and socio-economic competition. It makes one think of the Olympics, the ancient Greeks, The Iliad and the "tribal core" sports of the 21st century. It also might make one think of the Robert Altman film MASH (1970), set during the Korean War of 1950-1953, and prison films like Robert Aldrich's The Longest Yard (1974), as well as Hugh Hudson's Chariots of Fire (1981), which among other things deals with anti-Semitism. In My Way, there is not only the runner vs. runner aspect; at Normandy, we see Axis soldiers playing football (i.e. soccer) before the coming Allied invasion.

Kang Je-gyu's My Way / 마이 웨이 (2011) also deals with prisons, POW camps, gulags, concentration camps, forced labor and all of their most terrible conditions. Indeed, the German title for the film at its 2012 release in Germany was Prisoners of War -- in English. 

Since forever, it seems, POWs and prisoners in general have been treated very badly. Who would want to be trapped in an Iranian or North Korean prison? Or a Chinese, German, Russian, Turkish one? Or a French or British penal colony? During the American Civil War, both sides treated POWs in an abysmal manner, leaving them -- their fellow  Americans -- exposed to the elements, malnourished and decimated by infectious disease. Captured freedmen and free black men were either executed or sent back into, or into, slavery. Today, groups like the so-called Islamic State execute prisoners en masse. I doubt treatment of prisoners in ancient times was a pretty picture, either. 

Why are prisoners treated so cruelly? It's so easy -- too easy. Millions of prisoners -- civilians and soldiers, grownups and children -- perished while in prisons, camps and gulags during WW2. Millions more died in captivity after the war, never returned by the captor nations to their home countries -- or expatriated and then imprisoned-to-death in their home countries. My Way reminds us.

Today's Rune: Growth.   

Kang Je-gyu's 'My Way' / 마이 웨이 (2011): Take One

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Kang Je-gyu's My Way / 마이 웨이 (2011), delivers an epic story that begins in Japanese Occupied Korea in the late 1920s and ends, or almost ends, at Normandy in 1944. Drawing on the real story of Yang Kyoungjong and the great sweep of history, My Way works on several levels -- from the small and human to the mass and inhuman violence of global war. 

Like The Iliad, My Way lets us see multiple viewpoints. And as with that Homeric epic, there is an abundance of courage, stupidity, shrewdness, luck, fate, adventure, cruelty and death. 

Among a group of characters, three stand out: Korean Joon-Sik (Jang Dong-gun), Japanese Tatsuo (Joe Odagiri) and Chinese Shirai (Fan Bingbing); the latter, a female sniper, contributes to an unlikely romantic thread, as well. 

Among the crazier things one will encounter in My Way is a Japanese infantry frontal assault against Soviet tanks at Khalkhyn Gol (1939).  

Here, a Soviet frontal assault against German positions at Kharkov in Ukraine (1943). 

In My Way, no one is as fanatical as low level military officers -- Japanese, Russian and German -- in sending their men into doomed, bloody efforts. 

As members of Ostlegionen units, Asians were positioned at Normandy, part of the German defenses of the Atlantic Wall. There were all sorts of ethnicities in the Ostlegionen: mostly desperate POWs converted into cannon fodder. 

Spotlighting the existence of the Ostlegionen is fascinating, another way in which My Way raises consciousness about the complexities and nuances of war on a massive scale.   

Today's Rune: Breakthrough. 

In Praise of Limes and Lemons

If you were to compare lemons and limes, limes and lemons, what would you say?

Limes are lime green, lemons are lemon yellow.

Lemons have seeds, limes don't (with exceptions like the Key lime variety).

Lemons and limes can be mixed, combined together to juice up a gin and tonic, for example.

The lime (lima in Spanish, like the capital of Peru) originates from Persia (Iran) and Iraq, but is now grown in various places around the world, including Mexico and the USA.

The lemon (limone in Spanish) originates from China, India and in between, and is also now grown in various other places, including North America.

Lemons tend to be larger than limes -- though such is not the case in the ones I recently purchased (pictured above), thanks in part to drought.

If something is a dud, it's sometimes called a lemon, but not a lime. Why? I don't know and am too lazy to look it up at this juncture. Do you know?

Personally, I like lemons and limes, with a tilt to the lime for its zestier pop to the taste buds.

Sometimes on a hot night, I love to squeeze lime juice into a tall mug or glass filled with Cerveza Modelo Especial, the rather sharp, thirst-quenching Mexican lager. (A bottle's worth delivers about 145 calories, by the way).

If the limes run out, lemon juice alone or even a little lemonade can be mixed with just about any lager to make a shandy or panache, though for me, a little added lemon juice goes a long way. Limes are better. 

Today's Rune: Wholeness. 

Wong Kar-wai: In the Mood for Love (2000)

With Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love / 花樣年華 (2000), one is bestowed a vision of a way of life in 1962-1963 Hong Kong -- sort of like a miniature Hong Kong Mad Men. Luxuriate in excellent attire, slow-moving scenes, morsels of food, smoking and social mores played out in mostly tight spaces. It's a gorgeous film.  And it's a sort of homage in the use of color and camera to a Jean-Luc Godard film of the actual 1962-1963 time frame -- such as Godard's Le Mépris (1963). The marriage of music, camera movement and scene approaches perfection.   

In the Mood for Love focuses on the strange friendship and understated romance of Mr. Chow (Tony Leung) and Mrs. Chan (Maggie Cheung). We hear but never see in full Mrs. Chow or Mr. Chan -- they in turn are too busy "seeing" each other offscreen. We do see, partly for comic relief, co-workers and fellow apartment dwellers ranging from Mrs. Suen (Rebecca Pan) and Mr. Koo (Chan Man-Lei), who is often drunk, to Mr. Ho (Lai Chen), who has a wife and a girlfriend competing for his time away from work.  

Today's Rune: Journey. 

Wong Kar-Wai: Chungking Express (Take II)

Wong Kar-Wai's 重慶森林  / Chungking Express (1994) has, I can see now, the same elements as many of his later films. There's a keen sense of space and time and opportunity, missed, found or brushing lightly. Everything depends on velocity, or state of mind. Two ships pass at night, sending signals. Or, one ship signals and the other doesn't either receive or understand the messaging until time passes. It's got the stuff of Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu / In Search of Lost Time / Remembrance of Things Past (1913-1927). It's got the subversive pizzaz of Jean-Luc Godard. It reminds of Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, which also came out in 1994, though without the more grotesque elements (i.e. no "bring out the gimp" here). Turns out that Tarantino helped showcase Chungking Express in a video/DVD release. Everything really is connected when it comes down to it.

A month passes; a year passes. How will people communicate down the road? What are tomorrow's possibilities, after yesterday's are finally understood?

Today's Rune: Separation (Reversed).
    

Wong Kar-Wai: Chungking Express (Take I)

Wong Kar-Wai's 重慶森林 / Chungking Express (1994) tells two obliquely related tales of contemporary Hong Kong. Its style is the quintessence of hip and genuine cool.

Chungking Express stars Brigitte Lynn, Valerie Chow, Takeshi Teneshiro, Faye Wong, Tony Leung Chiu-Wai and the Chungking Mansions.    

Every scene in Chungking Express has colorful and memorable imagery.

Today's Rune: Journey.