Artist's Date Thursday

Any of you who have read any of the Julia Cameron books will know the importance of having a weekly "artist's date" by oneself. Tonight the editorial we went to the Shanghai exhibit at the Asian Art Museum. It was as disjointed as some of the reviews claimed but had some wonderful pieces all the same. My favorite was a traditional scroll painting that featured a pair of 1930s mob bosses.

Twelve Stars Rising from the East

My cold has prevented me from posting much the past few days, and Bow has been too busy nursing me to take over the blog. I am slowly rising from the dead.

Nothing helps raise my spirits more than this, my favorite renditions of one of my favorite holiday songs. It isn't the holidays without '80 synth pop repurposed on traditional Asian instruments by lovely, talented young women.

(Mostly) Asian on 24th Street

From the former China Books (where the Black Panthers bought Chairman Mao's Little Red Book and sold in on the Berkeley campus to fund themselves in the 1960s) to the vintage shops "up" on Noe Valley, the Hispanic Main Street of 24th Street is looking a lot more Asian these days.

Here's My Dong and Uncle Ho

Since I will be having an unprecedented patch of seven weeks of not flying anywhere, I thought I'd relive this 1996 trip to Ha Giang Province and Hanoi. Yes, I seem to still have a few Dongs left and my boarding pass. Sadly, no photos are allowed inside Uncle Ho's tomb. He looked sort of blue/green.

$800 Billion Peaceniks

The decades of persecution in Burma are no laughing matter, but two outrageously contradictory news items today are. As the White House pushes for what is nearing a cost of $800 billion war in Iraq, they are expressing supposed compassion for the oppressed in Burma. I can't help but wonder how long Bush has known the name of Aung San Suu Kyi or asked if he should call the nation Myanmar or Burma. (For the record, most of those who've been oppressed prefer the historical name of Burma since they consider Myanmar to be little more than an invented name of military junta. I also love to hear Bush say "yoontah".) Driving home from SFO and hearing Condoleezza Rice speaking on the radio about her concern for people who were simply exercising free speech and demonstrating to end war and violence, it was hard not to chuckle. They tried that in another country without success and the White House wasn't very sympathetic.

Fearing and Trembling Perverts on the River Kwai

Now and again, a particularly obscure or forgotten bit of cultural history keeps coming back. Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve heard mention of Sessue Hayakawa at least eight or nine times. He first resurfaced during my recent purchase and viewing of The House of Bamboo and then he was heavily referenced last night in a documentary on KQED about Asian leading men when in Hayakawa's early career he starred in films like The Tong Man (1919) and DeMille’s potboiler, The Cheat (1915) where he reputedly predated Valentino as a matinee idol. Personally, I only like DeMille’s sexy melodramas and always crawled under the bed when those spooky Biblical epics came on during the Easter season. Growing up on the Great Plains, I always free associated DeMille, The Wizard of Oz, Jesus, pastel colors, the stench of boiled eggs and tornados as sickly inter-connected omens of spring. I always cheered for the Witch of the West as a woman of color (green), but that’s another story.

Like most people under 98, I only knew of Hayakawa from The Bridge on the River Kwai, a movie I don’t think I’ve seen all the way through in eons. I just remember from my childhood hearing that friggin’, ceaseless whistling coming from the TV set in the den while I tooled away on some crafts project on the other end of my parents’ home.

Hayakawa deserves to be remembered for more than that. There is this little clip available from The Tong Man, and I am anxious to view my now ordered copy of The Cheat.

When I first came up with the concept of JunkThief , I promised that it would be filled with Japanese prison camp neurotica/erotica. I’ve never gotten around to that, but I always thought that The Bridge over River Kwai had those elements subliminally predating the anything but subliminal Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence. Those themes, however, I think were best updated in Stupeur et tremblements (Fear and Trembling) in which the Bowie/Sakamoto relationship is transferred to a Belgian woman obsessed with her Japanese female supervisor who forces her to clean the washroom, a duty accepts in bowing, salivating submission. The entire power dynamic and transfer of gay male desire onto repressed lesbian Belgian/Japanese women is very Fassbinder-esque. (Honestly, I didn’t make that plot up.) Someday I promise to explore that whole prison camp scenario and dive deep into the childhood dreams of baby JunkThief. The fact that two of William Holden's greatest roles were with former DeMille silent era leading players (Swanson and Hayakawa) fuels the JunkThief imagination of a Sunset Boulevard follow-up starring Hayakawa and Holden in which an exotic, still handsome leading man gives tips to an emerging young talent while urging him to help him return to the screen in an Oscar Wilde penned epic. Alas, that one will only screen in the JunkThief imagination unless we can somehow put it up on JunkThief TV in Junk-mation...

I am curious what the recently discovered Slavoj Zizek of The Perverts Guide to Cinema would make of it? Gosh, I’m glad to know I finally have a guide in all of this.

Nepal Again?

There is a good chance that JunkThief will be going back to Nepal for a sixth visit this October or next March. Though it's a colorful place, I have to admit that I am less than excited, if only from the thought of making the flight from SFO to Bangkok or HK or Singapore. I can hardly stand flying to JFK these days.

And there are too many places (Nome, Reykjavik, Sapporo, Baku, Dubuque) that I've not visited yet that I would rather go to.

Then again, I might get me a nifty, shiny double-breasted suit from the boys at Fit Wel.