My Christmas decorations tend toward the eclectic. I’ve always collected old-fashioned toys and when I lived in Japan, I hunted down folk toys wherever I went. These three cows/oxen are actually clay bells, literally cow bells but not what we think of when we use the term.
This year, for the first time, I put them in the nativity creche that my father carved for me. How appropriate, then, to discover that 2009 is the year of the ox.
Movie meme from Incandragon. My problem is that I can never choose just one–just listing some of these movies makes me want to go back and watch them again.
1. Name a movie that you have seen more than 10 times:
The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Zardoz, My Brilliant Career, Back to the Future, After Life, Tonari no Totoro , Star Wars. Aliens. The Abyss. The Piano. If I like a movie, I watch it over and over and try to get my friends to share my joy of it. (And because of AJM: The Godfather and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.)
2. Name a movie that you’ve seen multiple times in a theater:
The Rocky Horror Picture Show (25). Zardoz (13). My Brilliant Career (11). Gone with the Wind (?). Wings of Desire. Walkabout. Bladerunner. 2001: A Space Odyssey. Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Most recently, Master and Commander.
3. Name an actor who would make you more inclined to see a movie:
George C. Scott. Clive Owen. Edward Norton. Gregory Peck. Jeremy Irons. Richard Armitage. John Cusack. Katherine Hepburn. Audrey Hepburn. Charlotte Rampling. Helen Mirren. (But I’m attracted to movies by directors I like more than by actors I like.)
4. Name an actor who would make you less likely to see a movie:
Brad Pitt. Sylvester Stallone. Nicolas Cage. Christian Slater. Will Ferrell (although I loved ‘Stranger than Fiction’). Russell Crowe (although I loved “Master and Commander”).
5. Name a movie that you can quote from:
My Brilliant Career. The Piano. Cabaret. Anne of Green Gables. The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
6. Name a movie musical that you know all the lyrics to all the songs:
None…I’m not good with remembering song lyrics or people’s faces.
7. Name a movie that you have been known to sing along with:
The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Cabaret. Singin’ in the Rain. The Sound of Music. A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.
8. Name a movie that you would recommend everyone see:
After Life. My Neighbor Totoro. National Velvet. The Twilight Samurai. The Great Escape. Tampopo. The Secret of Roan Innish. Stranger than Fiction. The Incredibles. Singin’ in the Rain. Roman Holiday. The Miracle Worker. M. Hulot’s Holiday. Rivers and Tides.
9. Name a movie that you own:
The Twilight Samurai.
10. Name an actor that launched his/her career in another medium but who has surprised you with his/her acting chops:
?
11. Have you ever seen a movie in a drive-in?:
Yes. All five Planet of the Apes movie in a row.
12. Ever made out in a movie theater?
No.
13. Name a movie that you keep meaning to see but just haven’t gotten around to it:
?
14. Ever walked out of a movie?:
No. That would violate my contract with the director. But I don’t usually go to a movie without a specific desire to see it. However, there have been movies we rented that we turned off after about ten minutes: “Texas Chainsaw Massacre”, “Anchorman”.
15. Name a movie that made you cry in the theatre:
Probably easier to name movies that I didn’t cry at.
16. Popcorn?:
No. Not eating at the theater means more money to see more movies.
17. How often do you go to the movies?:
When it was me and the boy, we used to go every other week. Now I’m lucky if I go four or five times a year. AJM is not a movie buff.
18. What’s the last movie you saw in the theater?:
Let the right one in
19. What is your favorite/preferred genre of movie?:
Psychological. Character-driven and dialog-rich (whether drama, comedy, sci-fi, suspense). Don’t like gratuitous CGI, gratuitous action, gratuitous gore…well anything that’s just there from the marketing department.
20. What was the first movie you remember seeing in the theater?
I don’t remember exactly…possibly “The King and I” or “The Greatest Story Ever Told” both when I was 5 or 6. I must have also seen Walt Disney’s “Sleeping Beauty” and “Lady and the Tramp” quite young but I don’t remember the movie…just the companion toys. Being a large family, my parents rarely took us out as a gang. However, I remember very distinctly my father taking me to two movies where it just the two of us–very, very special occasions: “How to Murder Your Wife” when I was 8 and “Patton” for my 13th birthday. (He apologized for the salty language.) Three other movies that made a big impression on me as a child were “The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad” (which they showed in school when I was 7) and “The Miracle Worker” and “The Time Machine” which I saw about the same age on TV.
21. What film are you waiting to see next year.
No anticipation.
I’ve learned to be patient. Or maybe it’s just that I’ve learned to trust myself. My Need-for-closure Self (the J-type) has learned to let my intuitive self (the N-type) do her job. Intuitive Self knows that with enough pieces, the puzzle will come together; she’ll be able to connect the dots, to see the patterns. Need-for-closure Self has to suspend her need to know the parameters and constraints before starting out. She has to fly blind for a little bit, until Intuitive Self gets the lay of the land. This makes Need-for-closure Self nervous. She wants to give up before she begins. She wants to remain in well-charted territories. She likes to be on firm footing.
So I’ve been slogging. Just putting one foot in front of the other, not understanding what I was seeing, not knowing where I was going. Just keep going, keep going. Something will click and then it will make sense. And suddenly it does. I see the world with new eyes. It feels just like this.
A Note About The Miracle Worker: I saw this movie when I was very young, perhaps 7 or 8 years old and it had an incredible impact on my psyche, especially because my older brother was mentally retarded. I knew wanted to be a teacher, someone who could unlock the mysteries of the world to others. It is a very dark film, especially in the scenes showing Anne Sullivan’s childhood. Do children today watch “serious” films or are they restricted to a children’s ghetto of slapstick humor and animation?
As July 31st rolls over to August 1st, my life tends to change direction completely. In 1989, just as I was feeling a sense of comfort and achievement in my relatively new career writing software documentation, I packed everything I owned into a 5×10 foot storage shed, sold my car, and started a new life in Japan, bringing only two large suitcases and my 10-year-old son.
In 1991, I reversed the process. But on my return to the US I had no job prospects, and found that it was more difficult than I had imagined to reestablish my identitify with potential employers, car insurance companies, and banks.
In 1993, I gave up independent contracting and returned to life as a full-time employee to enjoy the comraderie of teamwork and the benefits of medical insurance.
In 1998, JQS moved into the condo that today he is vacating.
In 2001, the patterns and habits of eight years dissolved and I had to create new ones.
Today, exactly a year later, I feel as if the cards in my life’s deck are being reshuffled and redealt. A new life begins for me tomorrow. And although it is what I’ve always wanted, I’ve learned to be wary of getting exactly what I wish for. Fulfilled desires often bring unexpected consequences. As I cross the line, will I arrive at the point of no return?
Six years have passed and I thought the wheel of my fortune had rusted to a stop from disuse. Slowly, creakily, it begins to turn again. This time I embrace change unreservedly.
Rereading the original entry, I remember another year that fits this pattern: 1975. My father retired from the USAF and we moved back to Las Vegas from Killeen. I discovered that I was stuck between lives and could move neither forward nor back. So I took the diagonal. Are all detours simply tangents? In taking the detour, doesn’t it becomes part of the pathway through our life?
The objects of the present remind me of objects in the past. As such, they take on a depth unseen by other people. Every object has two natures. An object is simultaneously itself and a symbol of something else, an association made by the person perceiving the object.
If I expand the concept to include events as well as objects in this discussion, then it explains why I often experience the world on multiple levels. I experience the past and present simultaneously. The past intrudes verbally as an echo or visually as ghost image. These shadows of the past provide dimension, give a greater depth to experience than when I perceive it on the singular plane of the present.
Does my layered worldview create multiplicity and fragmentation? No. What it does is provide a connection with the past so that I am more whole. The scope of my experience is not just the present moment but a larger moment, where the past, present, and future are interwoven.
If you are sensual, then you might experience this echo on many different levels. The moisture in the air, the smell of the cedar smoke, the dampness of the fog against your cheek, the texture of a lover’s hair, all recall certain memories and allow them to mingle with the present.
In modern life, sadly, we are out of touch with our natural cycles. We keep clock time and live in artificial environments. I think this is why we feel cut off from things, although we don’t know exactly what we are cut off from. We search for a tradition that will restore our sense of connectedness. We cultivate habits to create our comfort zone. We look inside ourselves and develop our own lexicon of symbols.
Perception is a strange word because it means both observation and the translation of observation into useful conclusion. In the first sense I am perceptive. I notice things, everything.
A mesmerizing clock from Yugo Nakamura, of Business Architects, a leading web design firm in Japan: Industrious 2001.
The May 30, 2005 issue of The New Yorker contains Arthur Krystal’s rather scathing book review of A. Roger Ekirch’s At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past. In fact, I might have never read the part of the article I found interesting, the last few paragraphs which touch on sleep patterns. Luckily I always read the New Yorker from the back, like I do all magazines, so I started with the end of the article, skipped to the beginning and then read on until I met myself in the middle.
Ekirch’s asserts that “until the close of the early modern era, Western Europeans on most evenings experienced two major intervals of sleep bridged by up to an hour or more of wakefulness.” Around midnight, they woke up, and instead of tossing and turning restlessly trying to get back to sleep, used the time to meditate, study, or talk.
In test subjects denied artificial light, their sleep patterns reverted to what was believe to be the pre-industrial pattern of broken slumber: “the subjects first lay awake in bed for two hours, slept for four, awakened again for two or three hours of quiet rest and reflection, and fell back asleep for four hours before finally awakening for good.” The researcher Dr. Thomas Wehr “likened this period of wakefulness to something approaching an altered state of consciousness not unlike meditation.”
Ekirch then theorizes that by replacing a 14-hour segmented sleep with an 8-hour seamless sleep, “we have lot touch with that deeper, more primal aspect of ourselves which emerges during moments after the first sleep.” Krystal thinks Ekirch’s stance that “segmented sleep is essential to some deeper understanding of who we are.” twists the evidence a bit too neatly.
I’ve long recognized that my own sleep/wake cycles are out of step with modern times. I used to think my ideal work day would be to work from 6AM to 11AM, rest from 11AM to 4PM and then work from 4PM to 8PM. In those days I usually slept through the night unless I was frantic about some deadline, when I’d wake up at 4AM. I wrote many a long email trying to explain some part of a project to my coworkers at 4AM.
Now that I have no schedule to keep, I tend to go to sleep around 11:30PM, wake up at 2:30AM, write or study until 4:30AM and then have a second sleep from 4:30AM to 7:30. I no longer lie in bed trying to sleep, because 1) it’s pointless, and 2) I don’t have to get up and be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for anyone. So I’ve come to terms with my odd sleeping habits. Now here comes the Mr. Ekirch saying I’m normal; it’s the rest of you who are weird.
Apparently I hum to myself when I’m totally immersed in my writing. AJM had to keep kicking me under the desk because I was derailing his train of thought. So we both put on our headphones and pressed on. Usually when I’m writing I can’t listen to music with words in it as they distract me. But I decided I could try “Diamonds and Rust” because that was the song I was humming so it was playing in my head anyway.
Well I’ll be damned
Here comes your ghost again
But that’s not unusual
It’s just that the moon is full
And you happened to call.
And here I sit
Hand on the telephone
Hearing a voice I’d known
A couple of light years ago
Heading straight for a fall.
Despite my high tolerance for listening to the same piece of music over and over (or even just the same few phrases of a piece of music), eventually I decided to try something else. I settled on “Der Himmel Uber Berlin”, the main theme from “Wings of Desire“. Then I was called away to dinner.
When I finally got back to work, I realized that I’d left iTunes running. The song was still playing.
“It’s played 64 times!” I mentioned to AJM and then was silent.
He could not see my face behind my monitor. He peeked around to look at me. “I don’t think there’s a way you can reset it.”
I looked up startled. “How did you know I was thinking that?”
AJM laughed. “You just can’t stand for the stats to be wrong. It blows your whole system. ‘Panic! iTunes will think I like this song more than I do’!”
Well! It’s nice to be so understood.
I was trying to find a blue cotton yukata for AJM when I came across this kimono. The cream and peachy-red colors are atypical of what I usually find at the antique kimono shops in Nihon-machi (Japantown). The design is very understated and I like how the little red bells get larger and smaller and create a secondary pattern. The fabric is a cream on cream brocade, with subtle raised circles that aren’t obvious at first glance. In Japan, I would be considered far too old to wear these colors. And I have so many fabrics, yukata, and kimono at home–rarely used and most packed away. No, I didn’t need another kimono.
I bought AJM’s yukata and returned to the hotel. But I kept thinking about the kimono. That night at dinner. The next day while bike riding. The following day eating lunch at a brew pub. So, on Saturday, we walked from the Haight to Japantown and I bought it. Bonus: it was on sale–only $40. Less than what I paid for dinner at Ponzu the night before.
Impulsively I also bought these little plates. The only time I’ve ever enjoyed shopping for dinnerware was when I lived in Japan. There it was practically a passion. We’ve been looking for dinnerware to replace some a cheap set I bought 15 years with no success. These plates, like my other Japanese plates, don’t solve that problem. They are only four inches across. I was attracted to the design which echoes old-fashioned Japanese indigo prints.
The set of four was only $13.50. (I saw them in an upmarket shop at the Ferry Building later for $18 and felt smug indeed.) The one thing I thought was really strange is that these plates came in sets of four, an unlucky number in Japan where plates are always sold in sets of two or five. This set must be strictly for export.
