Sunday, June 05, 2005

 
"Nous avons etudie quasiment un an sans aucun professeur! Cette epoque est celle ou j'ai tout decouvert de l'animation. Durant deux ans, je n'ai cesse de m'exercer avec passion, week-ends et vacances compris. Ces annees etaient egalement celles de la rencontre dt de la complicite avec des gens."

More proof that home-schooling techniques turn out better students.

posted by Open Mouth 6:43 AM

Sunday, April 10, 2005

 

“There is nothing I can tell you, Katya,” I say.

“Help me!” she sobs, cluching at my hand and kissing it. “You are my father, my only friend! You are clever, educated; you have lived so long; you have been a teacher! Tell me, what am I to do?”

“Upon my word, Katya, I don’t know …”

I am utterly at a loss and confused, touched by her sobs, and hardly able to stand.

“Let us have lunch, Katya,” I say.

Lunch, as the answer to how we should live, from Chekhov's A Dreary Story.
posted by Open Mouth 6:00 AM

Thursday, January 06, 2005

 
My first experience with Guy Maddin in his Dracula left me giddily turned on by his use of melodrama, montage, music, and film grain. My second disappointed me, although sexual perversion, faked hand transplants, lovers' betrayals, murders are aplenty: Maddin promises us fun in Cowards Bend at the Knee. The beginning of the protagonist's troubles develops from the "joy, joy, joy of meeting someone new," a girl obsessed with the formaldehyde-preserved blue hands of her dead father. Should I continue with any more of the absurd plot, you would not want to see the film: camp and horror genres' cliches find a perfect marriage here. Plot is just the fun on which Maddin bases his visual experimentation here. By using the fast-forward button of his film editing program (although I could be dead wrong on this technically), Maddin induces the visual effect of hands slapping and hitting, although in real time the hands would just be going through the motions. Although Maddin's vision remains strong in Cowards Bend at the Knee, what he makes the audience look at is lacking in verve. In Dracula, his style and vision perfectly matched the elegiac and unsettling mood. Here, he is just having a boy's fun, sloping towards physical hilarity without enough normalcy beneath to queer it up.

posted by Open Mouth 7:58 PM

Sunday, January 02, 2005

 
"Si tu veux faire partie des vivants, il est temps d'apprendre a vivre. Il n'est pire douleur que de decouvrir qu'on a ete heureux sans le savoir quand on a cesse de l'etre." --Marc Soriano

Only by knitting could I stay awake through Godard's latest: Moments choisis des histoire(s) du cinema, which I sat through at the Centre Pompidou tonight. The nice boy next to me left halfway. I gave Godard a second chance. His montage technique should be showing me what he means, but instead I'm lectured at. He illustrates his speech with beautifully married images (a flock of birds let loose from screen's center bottom fly over a close-up of a woman's ecstatic face--that one won't leave me soon), but he's neither didactic enough to serve as an art history professor (words serving images) nor precise enough to be interesting. I'm not so sure I'll give him a third chance.

posted by Open Mouth 5:29 PM

Saturday, January 01, 2005

 
Good things come unexpectedly. I could no longer put off laundry by New Year’s Eve. As I was sorting 10 kilos of dirty laundry, another wash-and-dryer asked me if I was going to be around for a while. When I gave him my “what-do-you-want” face, he asked if I was going to be around for fifteen or even ten minutes. I said, well, most likely but that I was going to leave after I put my dirties in the wash. He took that as a sufficient enough yes to tell me to look after his clothes in dryer number 20, the only dryer on, while he went to the post office. As I continued to sort, another guy came in and stood in front of dryer number 20, as though it were his. I started to pay attention: maybe there was reason to believe clothes are stolen from Laundromats! Even though he didn’t try to open the dryer, I was still high on red alert. A few minutes later, he came towards me and told me that the washer I was using wasn’t working and had in fact leaked yesterday. I said thanks and then started removing the other washer’s wet but clean clothes so that I could use it. He then told me that it would be better to use the smaller washers on the other side of the laundromat, but I told him that I needed the larger washers since I had too much laundry. I then noticed that he was awfully close to my bag that I had left on the table. So I picked it up and put it on. A minute later, the guy left. He didn’t have any laundry.

He came in not to steal the other guy’s drying clothes but to steal my purse! And my first washer probably worked, but he was trying to distract me so that I wouldn’t react fast enough to him running off with my purse! So if I hadn’t been on alert for this other guy’s laundry, this guy might very well have succeeded in his evil plot to snatch my purse. Even though I begrudgingly kept an eye out for my laundry neighbor, it made good sense for me in the end. When the he came back from the post office, I told him that he was right to be suspicious of people. When I told him about this suspicious guy, he said that the neighborhood isn’t what it used to be.

posted by Open Mouth 7:36 PM

Friday, September 17, 2004

 
Gentlemen prefer blondes. And dumb ones at that, even if it's plain as day that they only want money. Brunettes, on the other hand, end up with poor detectives for the sake of love. This simple formula in Howard Hawks' movie engenders two of the most spectacular musical scenes I've seen: Jane Russell as Dorothy Shaw serenading a team of aloof Olympic athletes, asking them "Ain't There Anyone Here for Love?", and Marilyn Monroe as Lorelei Lee performing with a flock of admirers "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" in a Parisian cabaret. Disturbing.

posted by Open Mouth 1:52 AM

Tuesday, September 14, 2004

 
More from Terry Dobson, who founded the Bond Street Dojo in New York:

"Am I going to charm him? Am I going to tell him stories? Am I going to bring him sweets? No. There's no way I can get into him. I can only let him get into me." (31)

"I'm interested in learning how far away I am from being a warrior. Not how close I am, but how far." (65)

"Tact is the ability to do the right thing at the right time. How do we know how to do this? How to be tactful? You can't decide to be tactful. You can only do it intuitively, when you are fully engaged, when your spirit is collected or synchronous. Tact comes from the Latin word tangere, which means, 'to touch.' " (114)

"What is much more important than anything I say is that I touch you. Through me, through my touch, comes the touch of the founder of Aikido. There is no Bible you can buy that says, 'This is what Aikido is.' It is transferred from person to person. These vibrations pass among us." (95)

"There is a way in which you can blend with energy in such a way as to use it. That was his genius." (98)

"If you are centered, you will not act incorrectly." (102) "If you stay centered, you don't have to respond like you always do when those buttons are pushed. The best way to do that is to stay connected to the ground." (109)

"True Budo is the cultivation of attraction with which to draw the whole opponent to you." (119, quoting from Morihei Ueshiba Osensei)

"If I had one piece of advice for beginners, it would be to forgive yourself on the one hand, and to be strong enough on the other to accept your grace." (138)

"Maybe the reason you can't roll is because you can't leave your feet. You can't go for it. You can't trust enough to just jump the hell out into space. Ultimately no one can do that for you. If they kick you out of the airplane, it was not your decision to jump; you were robbed by allowing somebody to do that for you and you participated in your own robbery. Once you make the decision to go for it, it is dynamite." (153)

"You must throw another person in the context of love." (127) "When you end the technique, make sure that you remain totally present. Surround your partner with your presence. You want to ensure that he has not been injured. You are responsible for his well-being, you are his protector." (155)

posted by Open Mouth 1:34 AM