1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 46: Maborosi

Some dialog from Michael Cera’s Youth in Revolt:

I think my favorite film was Tokyo Story. I just think Mizoguchi is a great director.

But wasn’t that by Ozu?

Who can say?

I’m reminded of this joke because I, too, must talk about Ozu without having seen his movies.

Does that matter? I know enough about Ozu to understand that, visually and rhythmically (and also, probably, thematically), Maborosi has the style of an Ozu movie.

I didn’t get so strong a feeling when, a couple of years ago, I watched The Third Murder. That movie introduced me to Maborosi’s director, Hirokazu Kore-eda. Maborosi, more than The Third Murder, must be Ozu-like.

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I doubt I’ll review a quieter movie than Maborosi – even if I decide to review Microcosmos (which, I dimly recall, is just footage of insects chewing leaves).

Stuff actually happens in Maborosi, but it barely seems to.

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There’s a wonderful passage in Haruki Murakami’s novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. A man describes a brief but sublime experience involving a single beam of light at the bottom of a well. His life, ever since, has been shadow-like.

Like this unfortunate man, Yumiko, the protagonist of Maborosi, has largely stopped living.

In early scenes, she is gloriously happy with her young husband. Then he dies. It is a baffling death. It seems to be a death full of life, if such a thing can be; at the very least, he dies on his own terms.

The life that is snuffed out is Yumiko’s, even though she’s just twenty years old and has a beautiful infant son.

Yumiko remarries. She moves from Osaka to a remote seaside village. Her son and stepdaughter grow up happily together. Her new husband and inlaws are good people. Yumiko has good moments.

But she is not fully present in her life. The memory of the dead husband draws her away from her surroundings. Usually, this is not explicitly commented upon; but everything suggests it. Action is observed from a distance. The scenery is gloomy to look at; meanwhile, this or that person performs this or that movement in some remote corner of the screen. Foreground becomes background.

Life goes on, but only at the edge of Yumiko’s consciousness.

Meanwhile, this or that supporting character is lured toward death. Some characters die; most don’t. Yumiko can’t understand the attraction of death. That’s why she constantly grieves.

I am going to stop now because the New Year is almost here, and I am about to fall asleep; and besides, there is little more about Maborosi that I could discuss. The richness is in the detail with which daily life, or its negation, is observed.

P.S. Another movie Maborosi reminds me of: Lynne Ramsay’s Morvern Callar.

Closing credits

This year, I thank:

First, the people who gave money, advice, or labor to help our family to buy and move into our new house. I love our house. Every day, I am happy to be in it.

Second, our COVID-19 vaccinators.

Third, our TV. These shows stood out:

• Benidorm
• Cracker
• Det som göms i snö
• Mystery Road
• No Offence
• Rebecka Martinsson (especially, the first season, with Ida Engvoll)
• Wire in the Blood

Now that I’ve listed them, I see they’re all police procedurals, except Benidorm (a sitcom). Their seriousness varies. Wire in the Blood is gothic and ridiculous. No Offence is jokey and ridiculous; it’s very near to being a sitcom. Rebecka Martinsson has the saddest murder cases. The saddest murderers are in Cracker, which Karin & I are currently watching. The best investigators to watch are played by Ida Engvoll in Rebecka Martinsson, Aaron Pederson in Mystery Road (and in two movies, Mystery Road and Goldstone), and Robbie Coltrane and Geraldine Somerville in Cracker. Pederson and Coltrane, I daresay, are great, and Somerville is often great (the script doesn’t give her enough scenes). Mystery Road and Wire in the Blood are stunningly photographed, and Mystery Road and Rebecka Martinsson have stunning landscapes. Benidorm is ugly to look at, and that’s the point.

One more show, or YouTube channel, is worth mentioning again: Un mundo inmenso.

For completeness, I’d have to list Samuel’s shows, which certainly have taken up much of my time; but I’ll let him discuss them when he begins to blog. This year he has taken great physical and intellectual strides. I am grateful to YouTube for his intellectual ones. Samuel now knows his colors, shapes, numbers, letters, animals, and vehicles; he recognizes quite a few written words; he repeats interesting phrases; and today, he sang a few lines along with Dua Lipa and Elton John.

This year I’ll have completed the Bible-reading schedule devised by Robert Murray M’Cheyne. It’s the best schedule I’ve used, and the Good News Translation has been a joy to read.

I also passed my eyes over more philosophy than in any year since I lived in Ithaca. I wrote down the title of every article and book chapter I finished. Perusing the titles, I’m dismayed that I remember so little of the content. There’s something to be said for reading less.

(This doesn’t reflect well upon the industry of philosophy, whose practitioners are caught up in a whirlwind of having to publish more and more and more.)

I also wrote down the vast majority of the calories I ate; and, consequently, I lost a lot of lbs.

So did Karin, though she’s been gaining weight again. In February, Lord willing, we’ll have another son.

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P.S. I forgot Clarkson’s Farm. That show was outstanding, too!

R.I.P. Joan Didion

Today, in her honor, I read “The Getty” and “Quiet Days in Malibu” from The White Album. The second item, especially, is moving.

I expect that the Library of America will soon exhibit another piece by Didion as a Story of the Week.

We have a mouse in our mud-room. I saw it dart behind a box. Jasper and Ziva rushed past their food and sniffed at the mouse but didn’t catch it. Later, Karin went into the mud-room and the mouse stared at her with its little brown face. We’d been using the mud-room to store cat food and other non-perishables; now, we must rethink this arrangement.

’Twas the night before Christmas / and all through the house / not a creature was stirring / not even a mouse.

Well, it depends on whether you count the mud-room as a part of the house.

We went to a Christmas Eve party and one of my uncles gave another of his biennial talks about the perils of the hantavirus. Don’t sweep up or vacuum after a mouse, he said. Use a wet cloth. Unlikely as it is that we’ll contract this virus, I figure the advice is worth posting because, who knows, it may save a life. One’s words might do tremendous good down the road. I told this to another of my uncles, who was lamenting that a paper he’d presented had involved a lot of work for a negligible result.

At least I didn’t get beaten up, he said. A group of Caribbean Christian brothers and sisters had been praying and fasting so that that wouldn’t happen.

His paper, which he gave at an evangelical theologians’ conference, argued for racial reparations.

Pre-sleep, pt. 2

Having run laps through the house the previous half-hour – and much of the day – Samuel sleeps. Karin snaps this photo:

He is running laps again this morning; and on his own initiative, he has graduated from the aforementioned biography of Agatha Christie to my prized coffee table book, Agatha Christie: The Art of Her Crimes: The Paintings of Tom Adams. (Adams and the mystery writer Julian Symons comment on Christie in the book; samples of Adams’s cover art are on this Pinterest page.) I have misgivings. The boy handles books rather well, but every month he does tear a couple of pages out of this or that volume. And he always has peanut butter on his hands.

I’ve given up calling him when it’s his nap-time. I simply take a book to another room, put on music, and wait for him to wander over.

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The boy: “Some pizza?”

John-Paul: “We don’t have any pizza.”

The boy: [Cries.]

After this exchange is repeated several times, he comes around to thinking it’s a big joke. He laughs every time I say, “We don’t have any pizza.” Then, more realistically, he says:

“Some beans?”

“Some eggs?”

I am happy to oblige.

Pre-sleep

My wife keeps accusing me of going to sleep while I write this entry. I am not sleeping, I tell her. I am just resting my eyes while I think how to make this entry brief.

We did some Christmas shopping at the mall tonight. Not brilliant of us, I know. The place was crowded with mask disdainers.

What with our still-recent bouts of illness, we would have been immune to most everything but the Omicron variant. Here’s to hoping we didn’t catch that.

A bedtime biography that Samuel enjoys:

María Isabel Sánchez Vegara, Agatha Christie.

This is quite the series. It has books about everyone from Ernest Shackleton to Emmeline Pankhurst to Ayrton Senna. Want to make sure your child grows up loving the right pop figures? Gandhi, Prince, and Bob Dylan, for instance? Read him their biographies (and play him their records, if you dare).

December’s poem

The Omicron COVID variant has hit Cornell hard, CNN reports. Many of the infected persons are fully vaccinated. A good number have been given booster shots.

The latest figures are here. They are worth beholding.

I’d bet that most of us, at some time or another, will get infected with Omicron or something worse.

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Here is the latest video of Un mundo inmenso. It’s about the hipster despot of El Salvador, the one who made Bitcoin a national currency.

I always knew hipsterdom would get out of hand. I just didn’t expect El Salvador to lead the way.

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This poem is by William Blake.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Is this a holy thing to see,

In a rich and fruitful land,

Babes reduc’d to misery,

Fed with cold and usurous hand?

Is that trembling cry a song?

Can it be a song of joy?

And so many children poor?

It is a land of poverty!

And their sun does never shine.

And their fields are bleak & bare.

And their ways are fill’d with thorns.

It is eternal winter there.

For where-e’er the sun does shine,

And where-e’er the rain does fall:

Babe can never hunger there,

Nor poverty the mind appall.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Emelec 1, Independiente del Valle 1

The home-and-away series’s concluding leg was played last night, and Independiente del Valle became Ecuadorian champions for the first time.

It rained hard in Guayaquil, and the flooded grass made for a hideous but fascinating match. The ball wouldn’t roll. All preparation had to be disregarded; the players could only improvise.

By the end of the game, even dribbles and short passes had to be lifted off the ground. The most skillful players, such as IDV’s Junior’s Sornoza, set the example. Every touch was a neat little aerial chip.

IDV weren’t able to dominate as in the first leg, but even under these weird conditions, it was clear that they were the better team.

Here are highlights of IDV’s first-leg victory in Sangolquí.

Everyone knows that little IDV is Ecuador’s best-run club. The truth is, this first domestic title was late in coming. IDV have my warmest congratulations.

Any year that Emelec and Liga de Quito don’t win is a good year.

Leaves migrating south for the winter

Temperatures got up to the high forties (F) today. Had it not rained, Samuel and I might have kicked a ball around on a field near our house. Instead, we did some napping.

I have told Karin I won’t buy any more books this year, at least not out of pocket (i.e., without gift money).

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The Atlantic has been publishing a special series about U.S. democracy. Online, that is. The articles will reapper in the January/February print issue. That’s why some of them talk as if we already have come to the anniversary of the U.S. Capitol attack, though that attack took place on January 6 of this year.

The Atlantic must not be the only medium that is talking like this. One of my right-wing Facebook friends, who wouldn’t be caught dead reading that magazine, posts:

The fact that January 6th is even a topic of conversation anymore, let alone the object of extensive judicial inquiry, is mind-boggling.

My mind is boggled that his mind is boggled, though by now the mutual incredulity is predictable. I have no great point to make about this. Why mention it, then?

In one of my favorite Peanuts strips, Charlie Brown overhears Lucy explain to a very young Linus that in the autumn, leaves fall off trees because they are migrating south for the winter.

“My stomach aches,” Charlie Brown says.

For many of us, engaging opponents, listening to opponents, has become well-nigh impossible because it’s just too stomach-churning. Not because of mutual contempt, name-calling, etc., though those things are bad, but because facts and plausible interpretations of those facts are treated contemptuously, while ludicrous interpretations and lies are treated as truth.

So, if we want to talk politics, we talk with people who agree with us. Or we attend to those on the other side to get a perverse pleasure from what they say. But, in the long run, those things also are stomach-churning. They’re like eating stale food, or like eating junk food that gives us a quick high and then leaves us ill and out of shape.

Maybe the best course is to be like Charlie Brown and not have any friends, only enemies; to lament that they are our enemies; and to live, as fully as possible, with the constant stomach-ache.

O Christmas tree

Quito, my birth city, turns 513 years old today; its fiestas should be just concluding. Last night, its suburb of Sangolquí observed a great success. Independiente del Valle built a two-goal lead over Emelec in the first of two games that will decide the Ecuadorian championship.

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Karin put up a Christmas tree, and, predictably, Samuel has been knocking it over and taking off the ornaments. Even so, he’s treating it more reverently than I expected. He knows a thing or two about Christmas trees, having familiarized himself with a picture-book version of A Charlie Brown Christmas.

I am so tired of reading that book, last week I broke down and ordered the DVD. I hope it calms his urges.

Fear not, Samuel says, quoting Linus’s recitation about the angel and the shepherds.

Today I saw him paging through a Christmas board book that he never used to look at much. He was talking to himself about the baby Jesus.

Another treadmill

Some church friends who no longer run indoors have given us their old, ornery treadmill. The motor has a mind of its own. It goes faster than I instruct it to do. Yesterday, I had to keep reducing the speed until the display said I was running ten-minute miles; but surely I was going much faster, and when I dismounted, I was so tired I almost collapsed. I have no such trouble when I exercise out of doors.

Still, I’m glad to have this contraption. What with Halloween, Thanksgiving, our COVID quarantine, and the cold, November was the first month since July of 2020 in which I gained rather than lost weight.

Some days, I’m within 15 lbs. of my final target. At least, I think I’m within 15 lbs.; like the treadmill’s display, our scales are inaccurate, probably because the floorboards in this house are not evenly laid out. Each day I must take different readings until I get the same reading several times. Never before, in my personal experience, has the mode of any series of measurements been a more useful average than the median or the mean. Live long enough, and everything happens to you at least once.

Never been overweight? Just wait. Never been overweight and then lost that weight? Just wait.

In the seventh or eighth grade, I wrote a story about a thin man who drinks some delicious chicken noodle soup, decides that his life has been lacking, turns into a glutton, and becomes hugely and famously fat. At the apex of his fame (and size), he stops liking chicken noodle soup. He ends up thinner than before. I was reading a lot of Ray Bradbury when I wrote this story.

Spotify has compiled the statistics of my usage in 2021. I listen to Spotify more hours than 97% of all subscribers. Money well spent. I listen to Vangelis more than all but 0.05% of Vangelis’s listeners. Vangelis is whom I often choose for Samuel’s napping-time.