friscalation

Not much media watching here at the end of the term, as one might imagine. I've been pretty caught up with end of the term work: busy work for language class and final papers. Not to mention grading. Pretty much I'm just watching stuff I have to for classes. How bleak this life! Summer vacation, I need you! Though, I'm not sure how much media I'll consume in Nicaragua...

4:00 pm: Film
Come Drink With Me (1966), d. Hu King
Apparently this is the movie that started the whole Hong Kong martial arts thing.
watched in class with fifteen-odd other students.
This movie has one of the best lines I've heard (read) in a long, long time.
Being on the verge of death has confused you.
Must use in the classroom in the future.
Can that get me fired?
90 min

10:00 pm: TV
Six Feet Under pilot
We have finally started in on the SFU craze after hearing such rave reviews from Josh's housemates for what seems like ever.
watched on laptop a la TV Links.
I'm not sure about the TV Links format. On the one hand it is a form of instant gratification, but the quality is terrible. I think it's probably worth it just to wait for the torrent, especially for programs with such high production values.
how long is the pilot? one hour? two?

5:00 pm: Film
The Great Yokai War (2005), d. Miike Takashi
watched with a hundred other students in the class I GTF for.
This movie is the best kids movie I have seen in a long time.
Then again, I don't watch many kids movies, so I wouldn't really know.
124 min

1:30 pm: Film
Le Fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain (2001), d. Jean-Pierre Jeunet
this is one of the films I am writing about for my color filter paper in cinematography.
watched on 17" TV while I made lasagna for my department potluck later that day.
Lasagna, as it so turns out, is delicious, but entirely a pain in the ass to throw together. Took me three hours.
I still love Amelie, even when distracted.
122 min


10:00 pm: Film
Nightmare Detective (2007), d. Tsukamoto Shinya
watched with other members of my department at my advisor's house.
Tom Mes was in town for our speaker series and he showed us Tsukamoto's newest film, which is very Tsukamoto-like. Unfortunately, I couldn't stay for more than 40 minutes of the movie, because, fortunately, college friends of mine came into town for the weekend and I had to meet them at High Street.
It was a pretty awesome viewing situation because my advisor has an enormous screen and a very comfy couch.
40 min

4:00 pm: Film
Jigokumon (1953), Kinugasa Teinosuke
watched in class, project, with fifteen-odd other students
I think that 4 pm is a terrible time for me to watch movies. I always tend to fight nodding off, even if I like the film.
Same student did his same old cell phone texting bullshit
86 min


7:00 pm: Film Clips
watched flim clips from Miike and Tsukamoto films at the Tome Mes lecture with over a hundred other people in Lilis 182.
altogether maybe 15 min.

10:00 pm: TV
Seinfeld
Not sure why, but Seinfeld has replace Futurama recently in the late night relaxation.
Jerry reminds me of my best friend who is very far away.
watched on laptop in living room while my roommate was packing her stuff up.
Kind of distracting.
two eipsodes
1 hour

media usage file

8:45 pm: Film
Kill Bill 2 (2004), d. Quentin Tarantino
Went out to a friend's in Bend for memorial day weekend.
watched film with others in living room on a sweet-ass large wide-screen tv with surround sound.
I was surprised by some of the comments by my fellow viewers. One person asked, "Why is that other part in black and white?" Another asked, "Is she remembering this part?" And another stated, "Wait, I thought this already happened."
I sort of assumed the conventions of film could, by now, be understood and read by a general audience. I mean, I get that Tarantino's over-the-top excessive film style (self aggrandizing?) muddles things up a bit, but he's really only using conventions that are well established. Puzzling reactions.
Think I'll use some clips for my section on "exoticism" on Tuesday.
136 min

media usage file

10:25 pm: Film
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (2007), d. Gore Verbinski
watched at the new VRC theatre
originally we had tickets for the 9:50, but they oversold? we couldn't find any seats?
so we joined the line forming for the 10:25 show.
The theatre was packed, which surprised me for Eugene.
I was also surprised by the half hour onslaught of commercials that played before the trailers.
I was also surprised to discover that I find teenagers entirely annoying. Okay, not that surprised.
I was pleasantly surprised by the film itself: MUCH better than the previous.
I was unfortunately surprised to learn that I would rather not attend the new theatre in the future. At home or theatres will small audience size is far better an experience.
I feel old.
It's too bad, really.
3 hrs

A friend on my flist from my other blog posted a link to the following site: How to turn your photo into movie-like effect using photoshop.
I'm not quite sure how I feel about it - interesting, bizarre, nifty, something? - but I do think it's (one/all of those terms) that there is a "movie like effect" and that there is a tutorial for how to create it. I mean, I suppose a photograph is just one image in the montage of cinema, but that rather than being photographically artistic the goal here is to resemble a moment of a moving image. I'm not quite sure what my thoughts are on this, but I know I had some and I know I'm tired. Photographing a facsimile of a real event and turning it into a cinematic construct: layers of realism and fiction, posturing and fantasy. Why is the photo like a screenshot, rather than the screenshot like a photograph?

So I gave it a five minute whirl.








I'm sure everyone pictured enjoyed their unsolicited exposure on the internet.

I guess I can somewhat see the appeal, but I'll keep with my regular photographic technique.



Which I guess is fairly 'cinematic' already. Whatever that means. Perhaps "could use some work?"


media usage file

11:00: Film
Clips from Merchant Ivory Films
watched in class
altogether less than 10 min

sometime in the afternoon: YouTube
Starcraft 2 Promotional Trailer: Hell, It's About Time
on laptop in office.
Perhaps I would have had higher grades in college if not for Starcraft 1.
No, I prolly would have tanked Organic Chemistry regardless.
4 min

8:00 pm: TV
So You Think You Can Dance
This only happened because I had a mojito with dinner and was overpowered by the laws of inertia. Spell check doesn't seem to know about mojitos. Spell check lives a sad existence.
watched on mini wide-screen TV (that doesn't even make sense, but it's true!) with Josh's roommate
The last ten minutes of this show were horrifying. I'm amazed I sat through it.
90 min

9:30 pm: TV
On the Lot (?)
Inertia won tonight, big time.
What a stressful show.
What a Carrie Fisher.
What a waste of time.
30 min

media usage file

4:00 pm: Film
Ninjo to kamifusen (1937), d. Yamanaka Sadao
watched projected in class with fifteen or so other students
We had some trouble getting this film started. Apparently the multi-region dvd player wouldn't play through the room's VCR. I ran to my office during the class break to grab my region 2 PS2 and give that a try, in the process admitting via show and tell to all the other students that yes, I own a Japanese Playstation 2.
Anyway, it didn't work so we had to watch a sort of bad VHS copy.
I really enjoy the camera placement in this film, but for some reason I was having a very difficult time staying awake. Maybe it's the time of day or my recent habit of working until 3 and 4 in the morning, but I kept nodding off and feeling really guilty about it. In my defense, I have seen it before.
86 min

~7:00 pm: YouTube
Feist music videos, over and over
on my laptop in my office
I should have be reworking my Sakura no sono paper for a submission deadline, but I got all caught up in admiring Feist's music videos after seeing them on Anne's blog. I posted them at my other blog and got some response as to their similarity to Ok Go's video:

but what I guess is so appealing about Feist's My Moon My Man video for me is perhaps that I'm used to seeing fellahs do goofy things. It's nice to see a gal up there being wacky who's not Bjork for a change. Also, I like the unrefined quality of Feist's choreography. It's like dancing to music by yourself in your apartment, only now someone gave you a budget so you've got the atmosphere and special effects that you were imagining in your head. I'm not the only one who is arabesquing in their living room, right?
too much time, maybe an hour

9:00 pm: TV
Lost season finale
At home in living room.
I don't even want to talk about it anymore. Lost is dead to me.
120 min

I had planned to go hiking today, but I live in Oregon so it is raining. Instead, I am in the office working. Boo hiss. I guess it balances out since yesterday I did go on a picnic, play kickball, and throw the disc around.

Last week I finally set aside some hours to go through the agony of searching through Japanese periodicals. Not indexed or searchable electronically, searching through Japanese periodicals means sitting in the library stacks, opening one bound volume of journals after another, and leafing through each issue's table of contents. Three hours later, I made it through about four years of Kinema Junpo. The first two hours yielding nothing, but I eventually came up with some articles.
Today, I am scanning images.

( Japanese Movie Theatres )

media usage file

2:00 am: Film
The Italian Job (2003), d. F. Gary Gray
watched on 15" TV while in bed.
It's always amazing to me that a director can completely fail to direct good actors.
What a terrible movie.
And yet, it seems there is a sequel The Brazilian Job on the roster for 2009.
On a side note, during the film Josh said, "I bet this movie was made by a man." He's learning!
111 min

~4:00-5:30 pm: You Tube and a DVD
comedy shorts of the late great Mitch Hedberg
watched in bed on laptop via both youtube and a dvd Josh happened to have.
I was supposed to be napping, but I got all distracted by the internet and crankiness.
Mitch cheered me right on up!
I had no idea what he looked like until now. For some reason, and I'm guessing it's because they have the same voice pattern, I had always imagined him as looking just like my ex. But, no! He's blond! And has a mustache!
Weirded out.







11:00 pm: Film
The Brothers Grimm (2005), d. Terry Gilliam
watched on 15" TV while I played Settlers, which, thankfully, no longer captivates my attention
what a pretty movie
118 min

1:30 am: Film
The Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl (2003), d. Gore Verbinski
watched on 15" TV in bed
what a pretty man
only about 70 min before falling asleep

media usage file

4:00 pm: Film
Ikiru (1952), d. Kurosawa Akira
watched projected in a class with fifteen or so other students
Same kid from before bothered the hell out of me. He left after an hour and a half of the film.
So did a couple of other students.
This drives me insane. Seriously. Okay, so I can see how to a younger audience, Ikiru might not be the most riveting roller-coaster romp in cinema history. However. These little kids have one task and one task only for class a week and that is to sit through class. Sometimes that might mean watching a movie that one considers to be boring. But that is your task. It's not hard and it only takes two and a half hours. If you can't manage to do that, I have serious concerns for your ability to do anything.
That aside, it was difficult for me to enjoy the film for reasons completely beyond the scope of the film itself. The movie is about a man who learns he has stomach cancer and how he decides to spend his remaining time. My good friend who was sitting next to me recently lost her mother to cancer and I know the film was incredibly difficult for her to experience. So I was split between enjoying the film and being distracted by my concern for my friend. After class, we sat down and had a good long talk and it made me think seriously about how the experience of moviegoing is so conditioned by the personal experience and what an individual brings to the film. For example, the message of the movie is, overtly, that life is precious and we shouldn't waste what time we have. My friend on the other hand overlooked this entirely and felt the film was about honoring your parents and about the regret one feels about not having lived up to your parents' expectations or taking care of them when they are old and/or dying.
As film scholars, I think we overlook this experience of personal projection all too often.
148 min

10:00 pm: TV
Lost
watched in my living room on 17" TV while we ate fresh pesto made from the basil in my garden, salad (lettuce from the garden as well), and asparagus soup. It was a very unintentionally green dinner.
Earlier in the day, I was thinking about how I was not at all affected by the melodrama of Ikiru at all, even though I felt badly for my friend sitting next to me. This led me to the erroneous conclusion that the more I study film, the less susceptible I am to its emotional trickery.
I was wrong.
Stupid Lost had me crying even through commercial breaks.
Way back in Season One, I claimed that if they ever killed Charlie, I would stop watching.
I mean it. Lost, I'm putting you on notice. Again.
50 min.



11:30 pm: TV
Futurama
2 episodes on laptop
I'm hooked. It's just so easy.
40 min


In case anyone was wondering why I've put Pachelbel's Canon on notice:

Settlers of Catan Online

I'm uncertain if this counts as media usage or not, but I will make one entry regarding this recent obsession.
Since we are counting video games, I assume this online java script game falls under that category.

Essentially it's a resource management game.
I love to win at it.
But really, I'm losing hours of life to it.
I don't care to say how much time I've wasted at this, but it's there, lurking in the background of my media experience recently, and hopefully it will stop soon.

This situation is far far worse than my obsession with Kingdom of Loathing last year. With KOL you are only allotted a certain number of turns. With SoC, it just doesn't stop.


(gunn, this is all your fault! Love, Mas)

media usage file

11:00 am: TV
Lost
Watched in bed on laptop with coffee
I know he's not dead for good.
50 min

10:00 pm: Film
What's Eating Gilbert Grape (1993), d. Lasse Hallström
Starring my ex-boyfriend, who I eventually dumped for someone better, more available, and not living on an island in France with some super model.
Josh had not yet seen this, so we watched it late at night as we hid from a bunch of Comp-Litters downstairs.
It's still a super sad movie. Just when I thought that I was beyond cinematic sentimentalism.
15" TV
Dvd from Hollywood Video.
118 min

12:00 am: TV
Futurama
2 episodes.
We watched these on Josh's laptop while I played Settlers of Catan online on mine. I wish gunn had never mention SoC online, because then I wouldn't have wasted so much of my recent life playing it.
Excuse me, I have to return to my game.
40 min.

media usage file

7:00 am: Film
Slaves of New York (1989), d. James Ivory
watched on laptop in bed.
watched with very sleepy, heavy eyes.
I meant to watch this during the weekend, but since I left the dvd at home and was away from Eugene, I had to watch it when I got back. Monday was too busy, so I had no choice to watch it before class on Tuesday.
It's really wierd to wake up and watch a movie at 7 am. I don't think I recommend it.
124 long, long minutes

7:30 pm: Film
Pitch Black (2000), d. David Twohy
watched on 15" TV in upstairs bedroom while lying in bed.
Not feeling well, I opted to watch this instead of doing some reading. This is one of the films that I am writing about for my cinematography class, so I was taking some notes.
I remember loving this film so much when it first came out. Now, it's okay, but kind of boring? Maybe it's because I've seen it several times already, or maybe it's because I'm older and wiser and no longer intrigued by thin plot lines. Neat ideas for visuals, though.
110 min

10:00 pm: TV
Futurama
watched on laptop in bed
I was feeling even more ill that evening and the antics of Bender helped distract me.
watched three episodes.
I think I feel asleep before the last one ended.
60 min

media usage file

What with the sunny days, I've kicked back significantly on my media watching, preferring rather to spend more time outdoors. Bad for work, good for sanity.

9:30 pm: Film
The Birds (1963), d. Hitchcock
This weekend I was out farm-sitting in Sweet Home, Oregon, so I watched this on a big screen TV while eating asparagus soup (from fresh asparagus grown in the farm garden) and stuffed tomatoes for dinner with partner.
I had spent a significant portion of the day in and around a hot tub out on the back deck of the farmhouse, that has a great view of five bird feeders. These feeders were swarming with frisky yellow finches(?) and it was pretty relaxing to watch them throughout the day. Inspired by them, I suggested we watch The Birds later that evening.
Since we were out in the middle of nowhere, we got to watch the movie without interruptions or external noises. Pretty ideal.
119 min

12:00 am: TV
Futurama
Watched on laptop on couch.
Roaring fire in wood stove. So romantic, except of course it was Futurama.
Needed something light after Hitchcock.
20 min

media usage file

10:30 am: You Tube
promotional footage from Otoko-tachi no Yamato
watched on laptop in office
came across this clip as I was gathering together info for my wiki entry on the Battleship Yamato.
I should see this movie. It looks horrifyingly nationalistic. The ship is seriously fetishized (as usual) with particular reverence to the tragic crew and the setting sun. I'll bet PM Abe-san thought it was great.
5 min 11 sec

4:00 pm: Film
Cure (1997), d. Kurosawa Kiyoshi
watched in classroom with twenty-odd other students
I like this movie a lot.
I like Koji Yakusho a lot. Even saying his name is so much fun. Koji Yakusho.
This movie stars Koji Yakusho.
The most incredible part of this viewing experience was unfortunately not the movie (nor Koji Yakusho) at all. Rather it was the undergrad sitting two seats away from me.
The desks are set up strangely in this room. They are long tables, put together somewhat in this formation, with the front of the room to the right:

---X-----O
I
I I-------
I I
I I-------
I
I---------

So, like two U's, one inside the other. I sit at the X. When we are screening the film, Prof DM sits at the O. The student in question sat between us.
Throughout the entire film, this student texted on his phone. He would always put the phone back in his pocket after he sent his message. And then, when his phone would vibrate, he would pull it back out. When he did so, he would also pull up the side of his windbreaker that was on the side of DM, as if his jacket would somehow shield the fact that his phone was a blazing beacon in the darkness of the room that illuminated that which he was half-heartedly tired to hide. And when I say he was texting throughout the entire film, I mean THE WHOLE TIME. It was truly appalling. Everytime he did it, you could feel the whole room tense.
Thing is, I had this kid in one of my discussion sections last year. He tried to text then, too, but I called him out on it in class in an awesome feat of public embarrassment. Obviously, it did not have that lasting of an effect.
Kids these days.
111 min

10:00 pm: TV
Lost
watched during dinner, while sitting on couch with partner, in my living room
I got up at commercial breaks to do the dishes and prepare sweet sticky rice with mangoes for dessert.
I was also periodically stunned that I was watching what, by all outward appearances, seemed to be a good episode of Lost. Pretty much any episode featuring John Locke is alright by me.
55 min

media usage file

2:00 pm: Film
The Hills Have Eyes (2006), d. Alexandre Aja
watched on my laptop, dvd borrowed from boyfriend's housemates
sat at the dining room table with earphones on, while trying to rewrite my essay for Japanese class
I don't really like horror, excepting J-Horror and psychological/suspense thrillers, so it's not really surprising that I didn't enjoy this film. In fact, I couldn't even sit all the way through it.
But the reasons why I couldn't watch the whole thing had nothing to do with being scared. Instead, a) it was boring, b) it was gross, and c) the gender politics were atrocious. I sat down to watch this thing because the movie had been the center of a heated conversation the evening before at our weekly bbq. The argument was about representations of middle-class America. I have to admit that I was rather appalled that this could have even been the focus of the discussion, as I couldn't personally get past the gendered violence and graphic objectification. At first, I tried to sit through it all, for the sake of getting to what others had described as the point. But finally I switched it off thinking, "You know, I why am I subjecting myself to this representation of women? I don't have to watch the violation and destruction of female bodies as a form of entertainment."
And so I didn't.
I had to go for a lengthy bike ride afterward just to blow off steam. It was a beautiful day!
~ 50 min

11:00 pm: Film
North by Northwest (1959), d. Alfred Hitchcock
I don't know why, but I'm on a Hitchcock kick.
watched in bed on laptop.
I was all distracted by the terrible CHC lighting to the extent that I became convinced that the DP for the film couldn't have possibly been the same DP for Vertigo. But then it turns out that the same dude both! Freak out!
watched with partner who kept saying, "shut up about the light already," or something to that effect.
136 min

media usage film

9:30 am: TV
Lost
watched on my laptop with breakfast in bed (chilaquiles!)
beautiful light through the window (it's an awesome day today!)
I cried during this episode. I like Sun and Jin and they have such a sad story. My partner made fun of me for crying over Lost.
45 min

1:00 pm: Film
Monday (2000), d. Tanaka Hiroyuki (Sabu)
watched in my office during my office hours, so I was occasionally interuppted by students consultations regarding their upcoming midterm.
what an immensly weird and funny movie. I think I like it better than Sabu's Drive, which is saying a lot.
no subtitles. can't say as i understood everything those damn yakuza said with thier rolling Rs and slurred gutturals, but I feel pretty good about watching without subbies.
100 min

I was ruminating about the early Japanese theatre I posted about.
Something else strikes me as interesting.
So the first narrative films that would have been shown in such theatres would have been kyugeki films, which were basically filmed scenes from kabuki theatre. Yet, the style of the theatre itself was inspire by Noh. Kabuki and Noh fall along different class lines and have different cultural aesthetics and values associated with them. Now they are both considered to be old "traditional" forms of theatre and the people who go to them are usually either stodgy culture fiends, or tourists. Or students, I guess. But, historically, Noh was a theatre for the upperclass, the elite samurai class. Noh is all about yugen, and wabi sabi, and minimalism and being difficult to comprehend with a great deal of symbolic content that requires a very highly educated audience. Kabuki, on the other hand, was for the masses. It arose out of scandalous shrine dancing and was known for being pretty risque. It was all face paint and special effects, sword fighting and melodrama. Which is not to say that samurai didn't go see kabuki, but they wore a hat. Seriously. Straw hats were a common disguise for samurai who were "slumming". I mean, everyone knew they were samurai because they were the only dudes carrying swords, but on the public surface of things they were just guys in hats.
So it is interesting to me, even though the samurai days were 40-50 years gone, that early theatres had kabuki content, but a Noh venue. High class legitimacy for low brow entertainment perhaps?



media usage file

9:00 pm: TV
Heroes
Yay! Heroes is back on and returns with a bang. Lost, take notes.
watched on my living room TV with SO.
I didn't make it back in time to have dinner ready before the show started, so I had to cook while it played. We put the TV at an angle and I tried to watch as I made salad and enchiladas. Sometimes I lost bits, like when Mohinder finally turned out to be special. My boyfriend has started calling me 'Magneto' because I don't like characters without special powers.
55 min

8:08 pm: Web Stuff
Steven Colbert's Meta-free-phor-all against Sean Penn
watched on my laptop in my office, using windows media player on the Comedy Central website.
Windows Media Player is such an awful program. I used to watch a lot of Daily Show and Colbert Report on the Comedy Central site, but WMP always crashes during clips and it just got too frustrating.
It's too bad really. I mean, you'll be watching something hilarious, the image will freeze, but the sound keeps going and you know that there was an awesome joke because the audience is laughing really hard, but you can't see it. So Sad.
~ 5min

7:42 pm: Trailer
Nancy Drew
Watched on my laptop in my office.
Why did I click on this? I should have known better.
This movie looks terrible. Heaven forbid I one day have a child that I have to take to things like this.
I guess what compelled me to watch the trailer was good old childhood nostalgia. I was hoping for an awesome Nancy Drew movie to come out, but I forgot that it did already and it was called Mulholland Drive.
What really weirded me out about the trailer was the realization that I have this permanent image of Nancy Drew in my mind where she is all posh and sophisticated and, importantly, older than me.
But I guess Nancy Drew always stayed sixteen and I didn't stay eight.
2:04 min

5:00 pm: Film
Zatoichi (2003), d. Kitano Takeshi
see below.
I still like this movie, even though I've seen it so many times.
I always enjoy the way students react to this film. It's so interesting that the scenes of gratuitous violence inspire chorus reactions of "Oh, Awesome/ Kick Ass!", "ew", gasps, and laughter. But not all at the same time. It'd be really interesting to pay attention exactly to which scenes inspire which reactions. I kind of meant to, but then I got all distracted by the film. And the crumbly cookie I was eating.
116 min

4:34 pm: Film Clip
Genroku Chushingura (1941), d. Mizoguchi Kenji
see below.
an example of a jidaigeki film actually approved by the military government.
we watched the suicide scene.
oh Mizoguchi, did you know that your woodblock print inspired aesthetics would feed into orientalist readings of Japanese film for years to come?
4 min

4:18 pm: Film Clip
Orochi(1925), d. Futagawa Buntaro
see below.
I like this particular clip. It's all long shots with fast-paced one man against dozens sword-fighting. It's so ridiculous, I love it. DM used the clip to demonstrate jidaigeki films of the 1920s. People were all fed up with the theatrical head on, static, long shots of kyugeki that basically were films of kabuki theatre scenes. They wanted something to match the times: modern, fast paced, exciting.
Well, they got it.
2 min

4:18 pm: Film Clip
Goketsu Jiraiya (1921) d. Makino Shozo
see below.
One of the few films I've seen that features a ninja.
Samurai are greatly featured over ninja.
I don't know where this ninja mania of young people came from.
30 sec.

4:15 pm: Film Clip
Momijigari (1898), d. Shibata Tsunekichi
watched (again) in a room of maybe a hundred or so students.
for the class I'm GTFing.
30 sec.

I was doing some prelim research for my possible term paper this week. I am thinking about looking into early Japanese movie theatres, more specifically to see if Japan also had so-called "movie palaces" during the salad days of the studio system. When I asked DM for some references, he commented that not much work has been done on Japanese movie theatres, and of course I became even more interested. This could be a terrible idea, as I may end up, as usual, entirely frustrated by lack of primary sources.
Anyhow, I started looking through some books, came across this picture, and totally geeked out. I'd seen many pictures (photographs, even) of the exteriors of early movie theatres before, but never an interior.





According to the caption, this is an artist's rendition of the inside of the first projection theatre in Asakusa, or for that matter in Japan. I assume that this was a showing of the Vitascope. There are a number of things I find extremely, and geekliy, fascinating about this depiction:

-first, of course, is the comparison with the image of Edison's Vitascope as advertised in New York.



The perspective is extremely similar (audience in foreground with the projection light overhead from the left), including the image on screen...presumably one of the "dancing girl" films.

-It looks as if the inspiration for interior of the theatre, the place and setting where the film is projected and subsequently viewed, is taken right out of Noh.



The above is a contemporary photo, but back in the day, people would have naturally sat on the floor rather than in bleacher chairs. Sans the walkway and the small stage for the chorus and narrator, this first theatre is so obviously inspired by Noh, down to the four posts. Why Noh and not Kabuki?

-I believe to the left of the screen sits the benshi

-obviously there is a class division in the audience, with a clear separation between the more expensive and nose bleed seats.

-I find the use of curtains on either side of the screen very interesting.

-It's obvious, but, the audience is sitting on the floor. I mean, of course they are, but in my imagination, I never ever would have pictured it that way. I wonder if there was ever a habit of throwing one's cushion at the screen, like in sumo. Sometimes I would like to throw a cushion at the screen.

media usage file

8:00 pm: TV
The Amazing Race
We were eating dinner (my first harvest of lettuce from my garden!), but my boyfriend's roommate and his girlfriend starting watching this show in the adjoining living room. It was pretty hard not to be distracted by this, so I eventually gave in and watched. I'd never seen The Amazing Race before, and I'm pretty sure I'll never watch it again. What a brilliant concept: have people two at a time confirm to the rest of the world that Americans really are asshat assholes afterall. Awesome.
What is particularly ridiculous about this show, as opposed to particularly offensive, is the use of music to instill a sense of drama, adventure, and pathos. I mean, music in media is meant to manipulate anyway, but this was seriously over the top...unless it was meant to manipulate me into recognizing its own ludicrous, constructed pretension. In that is the case, then the show is brilliant.
I guess I don't get 'reality television', but my companions were good enough to explain the "rules" of the game. Which is to say I kept interrupting with questions.
55 min

9:13 pm: You Tube
Clip: Marlene Dietrich in Morocco
Watched in bed on my laptop.
Linked from the course wiki.
Marlene. She's so great.
1:59 min

Today was finally and actually a sunny day. So I spent most of my time outside in my garden. I didn't watch much today. I'm pretty okay with that.