free stuff from Japan–Odd Obsession screening May 29 @ UCLA

Crank, the student cinéphile society at UCLA, has organized a tribute screening in homage to the late, lamented director ICHIKAWA Kon. It features all the themes so near and dear to the younger set, like aging and impotence. Actually, I am told that the director IWAI Shunji will be on hand, for a Q & A, moderated by the organizers and the extremely savvy and well-informed Sachiko Mizuno.

In the February 2008 obit, the New York Times defers to the Globe and Mail to describe Ichikawa’s accomplishments at the time of the big retrospective in Toronto. I can confirm that this is how people talked about him, as I worked on both the TO Cinémathèque catalog, and on the lush coffee-table book that accompanied the series:

The Globe and Mail, the Canadian newspaper, called him in 2001 “the last living link between the golden age of Japanese cinema, the spunky New Wave that followed and contemporary Japanese film.”

His films included one narrated by a suicidal cat, “I Am a Cat” (1975), and “An Actor’s Revenge” (1963), in which a Kabuki female impersonator avenges the death of his parents.

The students programmed the film, and will provide program notes and introduction. The film features the awesome MACHIKO Kyô as the sultry wife.

The screenplay was adapted from Tanizaki Jun’ichirô’s dishy diary novel. Here is a synopsis of the film:

Odd Obsession (1959, 96 min): Director Kon Ichikawa’s adaptation of Junichiro Tanizaki’s KAGI is a black comedy reminiscent of the films of Luis Buñuel. Ganjiro Nakamura stars as Mr. Kenmochi, an aged Japanese art critic whose increasing impotence has led him to take injections to maintain his sex life. However, even this remedy is now failing him, and, hoping to use jealousy to achieve arousal, he decides to instigate a relationship between his wife, Ikuko (Machiko Kyô), and the attractive younger Dr. Kimura (Tatsuya Nakadai). After Kenmochi shows the doctor nude photos of his wife as well as employing other expedients, the two begin a passionate affair, much to the disappointment of Toshiko (Junko Kano), Kenmochi’s daughter, who has a crush on the doctor. Ichikawa’s fascinating film is photographed by the estimable Kazuo Miyagawa (KAGEMUSHA, YOJIMBO, and RASHOMON) and is exceptionally well acted, particularly by Kyô as the perverse Ikuko.

indicator species of Glendale Narrows

A series of weird activities has been afoot in the micro-climate of Atwater Village where I live. I live within spitting distance of both Griffith Park and the LA River, and often walk or bike around. The river bike path, the Glendale Narrows part, is especially pleasant at twilight–you see teenagers sitting eating potato chips riverside, yuppies on fast bikes with tons of gear zipping past, kids with training wheels, regular joes like me on their chop-shop bikes. I like it because you can zone and just ride, and observe the epic infrastructures of water treatment plant, huge warehouses, walls of graffitti.

I am not sure why I didn’t notice that major islands of the river have, apparently, been clear-cut of the thatches of Arundo and cottonwood trees in the last couple of weeks. (I’m not completely up on the Renaissance court intrigues of the Atwater Village Neighborhood Council, but people are pretty upset about it here.)

Saturday morning I had actually been pretty up-close-and-personal with those very trees, and stumps, since I spent a good chunk of time cleaning up the riverbanks, with a bunch of other people, as part of the annual Friends of the LA River river-salvage event. I had hoped that the haul would yield at least a good toaster oven, if not the Jacuzzi that was harvested a couple years back, according to Blake Gumprecht.

There was lots of free stuff on Saturday, and I am pretty sure I worked off my worth in free t-shirts. Actually, I don’t even want to think how many years out-of-school it will be before the phrase “free stuff” stops warming the cockles of my heart. But I had no sightings of real “urban indicator species” such as the shopping cart. Much of my haul was actually junk food wrappers and, perhaps not surprisingly, toilet paper. Yikes. There were other species missing, like birds. But when I heard about the recent wave of avian botulism, I was a little weirded out. It seems like a pretty big deal in the bird world, and while I am not technically avian, I might have fished around that muck a little more cautiously, had I known. I was kind of puzzled that neither the tree-cutting nor the avian botulism topic was evident at the event itself, but maybe there was a word-of-mouth thing I didn’t tap into.

Actually, I think the cleanup could do with a little more implementage–something sophisticated like dowel rods with hooks on them. The image that comes to mind is that picture where Walt Whitman is sitting in overalls on a chair, in his incredibly messy study, with a big hooked stick, staring at a pile of papers, wondering what to stab next.

As you go upriver, the scene gets a bit more epic in its mix of Hoover-Dam-type modernism and human structures. And sometimes you can see the river…I wouldn’t say undulate, but it sometimes moves.

(They clear-cut windmills, don’t they! Oh Glendale!).