On PBS, Becoming American: The Chinese American Experience: Isn't it so fucking fascinating how the history of Asians in America is not only marked, but characterized by racism? And still, the treatment of Asians in America is characterized by varying shades of hatred or fetishization; dehumanization either way. I'm watching all three parts of this, over four hours, and it's just so depressing.

There's a quiz on the website about Chinese American history. It's easy to get the test all right, just pick the most cynical answer of the choices. There is one question where that strategy only works if you live in San Francisco - just pick the name that a street is named after.

Remember "video tape"? I was flipping through my long-neglected videotape collection and started watching some of the stuff I've recorded through the years, horrible quality notwithstanding. You know how it is, that slippery slope of memories. You start digging, and all of a sudden you're in a well, spending hours and hours in the past.

I watched "Bagdad Cafe" which I want to call one of my favorite movies, but my experience with the film is tainted. I first saw it as part of a film syllabus for a religion seminar in college, so now I can only watch it looking for the religious (primarily mystical, not one particular religion) symbolism, like "Rosenheim" (home of the roses), "try our new desert it's called the "Garden of Delight", the boomerang, "too much harmony".

It's easy to view the film as just an early indie film without any religious indicators, but once you see the halo, you know that Percy Adlon intended all of it. Then it's just a domino effect of figuring out what means what. In the seminar, we had no idea. It took the professor to start pointing things out for us to be enlightened. It was a matter of knowing the signs to look for them.

Another film on that syllabus was "Field of Dreams", so that also gets the same treatment. Although I don't think there was anything overt in the film that indicated that the director intended a mystical/magical religious interpretation. Except maybe the, "Is this heaven?", "No, it's Iowa" lines.

On that same tape, after a Letterman segment with Jackie Chan, and then a channel 2 news segment on Jackie Chan, I assume this was recorded the year "Rumble In the Bronx" was released in the U.S., was the remnants of one of my personal favorite "Star Trek: The Next Generation" episodes. It was a seventh season episode, and I think it was called "Parallels". There are a lot of flaws with the physics, but this is science fiction, folks, and it just looked like the writers were having fun with the quantum theory, and I think anyone with a fascination for the stuff had fun with the episode, too. Worf accidentally rips open a tear in the space-time continuum while returning to the Enterprise in a shuttlecraft and finds himself jumping from quantum reality to quantum reality. The quantum theory being that all possible realities that could happen, actually do happen in other quantum realities. So if I come across a crossroads with two decisions, I might decide to do one thing, but in another quantum reality I do the other. Scientifically, this is just silly, but science fictionally, it's fascinating. So there's a scene where the quantum fissure gets ripped open and space starts filling with hundreds of thousands of Enterprises from all the different quantum universes. It's fascinating, if not cute, and Troi's bitchy, "What's that supposed to mean?" at the end is priceless.

Up next, "Home for the Holidays", which definitely is one of my favorite films, I think, and "Trust".

Critical Mass: On the last Friday of every month, hundreds of bicyclists in San Francisco congregate for an "impromptu", leaderless ride during rush hour to remind Americans that at any time, they might be really, really inconvenienced.

So last night, "Colonial House" ended. It was intriquing. More so than stuff like "1900 House". Re-creating the conditions of a 17th Century British colony in America, I think, is intrinsically more profound than re-creating living conditions in urban England in 1900 because of the historical crux involved. And I'm glad that the show addressed that.

First there was the African American participant in the project, a descendant of African slaves in America, who decided to leave the project when the historicity of what he was re-enacting got the better of him like a devil in his soul. I really had to get into his shoes to understand why he left. It was just a project, an experiment, not reality; so abstract reasons for leaving the project seemed a bit of a cop-out.

But I think to him there may have been an impending horror to it all. The project allowed him to step into the colonists' shoes and the hardships they endured, and he started to make sense of the mentality, and the economic desperation, that allowed slavery to begin in America within 50 years. Not an easy thing to stomach, even though your existence is owed to what is arguably one of the most horrific events in human history - the trans-Atlantic African slave trade.

My number one most horrific event in human history would be the European arrival in North America, and that was also covered in the show. Unbeknownst to the project participants, a simultaneous project was going on, whereby descendants of Native American tribes were doing the same thing, re-creating the conditions of their ancestors in the 17th Century. When the two projects clashed, the colonists got a dose and an earful of what their project meant to the native peoples.

What seemed like a benign experiential experiment ended up carrying the weight of what happened to the Native Americans as a result of the European incursion they were re-creating. One of the colonists voiced it well when she said that she joined the project because she was unhappy with the recent direction our country is headed in, and the project allowed her to get back to a simpler, purer time in our nation's history. After meeting the "ideologically hostile" Native Americans (they had already encountered friendly Native Americans), she realized from the start there were no pure moments in our history. Even back then it was about greed and economics and subjugation. The fact that it was diseases, over which there is no control, that the Europeans brought over that were instrumental in effectively wiping out an entire civilization and way of life is cold comfort.

It was a moving series; the experiment was an emotional, potentially life-changing experience for many of the participants. Major kudos to the producers for saving the last 20-25 minutes of the show to follow some of the participants' return to their 21st Century lives. I would have liked to have known what happened to the site of the experiment, though.

I'm not sure what to make of the one Asian participant in the project. I presume his presence was just a matter of 21st Century concepts of inclusion in a 21st Century project, and not meant to make any statement about history or race. Alls I can figure is that they needed a friggin' violin player!! Doh!!

How's this for cute packaging. Yes, "Northern Exposure" Season One was released on DVD today, and I rolled out my bed and out my door, and fought the lines thronging the local Best Buy, all vying to buy it bloody "Lord of the Rings", which was also released today. I am very, very happy. And Netflix is carrying it, so there's no excuse for you not to check it out, but note that they don't strike upon their magical formula until the last episode of first season (episode 8). Until then, it's quirky, well-written, intriguing, not the best editing, but when they struck that mushy, glowing, "wow" feeling in episode 8, they discovered what they would be striving for for the rest of the run of the show.

I went on what we are calling a fotostroll. Fotologgers going on a walk to take shots. More here. It was very cool getting out and about with folks with whom you vaguely have something in common, but that's it.

Sunset Boulevard on PBS. A great film. A classic film. But hardly one of my favorite films. Basically, I watch this film, an hour and 50 minutes long, for just one line. The very last one:

"I'm ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille"

Actually, it's, "Alright Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up", but I like the Pinky & the Brain version better, said with much hammed up menace.

I've been really lucky in my movie viewing. I can't remember the last film I saw that I wasn't glad to have seen; that I could've done without; that I could've waited for on DVD; the last "eh" film. Today I saw Twilight Samurai, and I'm still thinking about it. It's a slowburn of a film, a bit slow in pacing, but it couldn't have been done any other way to build the right amount of tension and imbue it with just the right amount of muted emotion. It's a samurai film (duh) unlike any I've ever seen. And I haven't seen a whole lot, they tend to start running together in my mind. At least the settings do.

Maybe I'm doing my usual thing of reading my own stylized perspective into the film, but it resonated most as a philosophical film to me, almost a meditation on how to live one's life true to one's self. But the main character is not the renegade hero, cutting everyone down with superior swordsmanship as one might expect from a samurai hero. This guy is a low-ranking paper-pusher of a samurai, who is forced by circumstance to rise to occasions and deal with them accordingly. Maybe it's admiration I have for the character and his flexibility, his "non-attachment" to anything. His joys are simple, he's competent in his duties, and appreciative of his little good fortune. And when the chips are counted at the end of your life, the people who pitied your fate are people who never came close to even scratching the satisfaction that you got out of it.

Now really reading my own stylized perspective into the character, yes, his life could be seen as a journey; yes, his approach can be seen as spiritual (non-material); yes, he's as monk-like as a samurai can get (or more so); and yes, life is beautiful in all its tragedy and tragic in all its beauty - deal with it! And yes, sword fighting is messy, messy business. Samurai films and anime that depict sword fighting as elegant, clean, and swift need to be taken with a tablespoon of wasabi. I, of course, don't know, but I reckon it was more often disgusting and clumsy and excruciating than not.

That said, the samurai film I'm really waiting for, and just saw a poster for at the theater, is Beat Takeshi's take on Zatoichi! The violence in Beat Takeshi films may be an acquired taste, but that guy's got style. Now the question is whether I should re-activate my Netflix account to get acquainted with the original Zatoichi films beforehand.

We have photos! Sutro Tower in fog, September 12, 2002.

Fixed those movie links below. I woke up late enough so the only matinee I was able to catch today was the 2:50 screening of James' Journey to Jerusalem. It was pretty good, and a nice dose of a foreign language film that wasn't Asian or French. It was interesting because the film had a "spiritual" component in the title character, but just as interesting was the look at Israel's seedy illegal immigrant underbelly, removed from the turmoil of regional politics.

I've been immersed in one of my favorite books lately, The Conference of the Birds, so the idea of the spiritual path has been informing anything I've been watching that has a religious bent, such as "Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter...Summer", which showed the spiritual path through the course of the season/life cycle. "James' Journey to Jerusalem" was more literal with the spiritual path in the form of a pilgrimage. James is slated to become pastor of his village in Africa, and is sent on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. There's no explanation why he has to make this pilgrimage in order to become pastor, but the idea being he is sent away from home on a spiritual quest, and what he encounters and learns will enable him for the position. But like in "Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter...Spring", the spiritual path is fraught with temptation and human failings, and James immediately finds his journey stymied and himself tested.

I read a lot of the whole "distance from God" thing into it, which is central to so many Judeo-Christian-Islamic influenced stories. James has to lose his "divine sanction" (the dice), along with all that he has gained straying from the path, to make it to Jerusalem, and then there's how he gets to Jerusalem which is none too subtle, in a subtle and subtlely shot film. So it's like he starts close to God, he's "chosen" both by his village and spiritually, and he has to move away from God, i.e., become more human, to become God's messenger. Jerusalem is nothing. It's not holy. It means nothing to the pilgrimage. It's just where he goes to go back to his village.

There was also a very subtle, wonderful little parable within the movie that is worthy of the likes of the Conference of the Birds. Whenever there is something about a king and a slave, or father and son, or lovers in these stories, it's about God and humans, and it's as if the writer couldn't resist putting something in to make sure we realize this story was one of those. There was once an old man that lived on a plot of land in the slums of Tel Aviv. His son was a successful businessman and landlord whose next project was to build a lucrative apartment building. The only problem was he wanted to build on the land where his father lived. For years he argued with his father to buy the land, telling him he was too old to live alone and he should live in a nursing home. It got to the point that all they did was argue, and all there was left between them was contention and disdain. When the old man was asked why he wouldn't sell the land, he answered, "Because if I sell the land, I will never see my son again".

All I seem to write about is what I watch. There must be some Peter Gabriel quote to re-name this weblog that more accurately describes that. Tonight it was the PBS version of a reality show, what they are calling "experiential history", called Colonial House. It's apparently the new trend in public broadcasting. I've already seen shows about re-creating the conditions for building Stonehenge, for building the Pyramids, and being a Roman foot soldier. Fascinating stuff, really. I think I ended up watching more than half of most of those shows. But now they've graduated up to the mini-series, of which Colonial House is one with four two-hour episodes. I'm not sure I can wait to the end to see who wins!

But really, the first installment of Colonial House was pretty compelling, re-creating the conditions in which the so-called "Pilgrims" lived in when they arrived on this continent in the 1620's, and shoving modern folk to live in them and as they did, and see how they fare. Man, the things we take for granted! The most austere monastery in this country would have nothing on arriving on shores to sheer wilderness and trying to eke out survival. I went to pour myself a glass of orange juice, thinking, "those poor so-called pilgrims never had it this good". The easiest part of the original experience was wiping out Native Americans with disease! Of course, for obvious PC reasons, that was not re-created (but was mentioned).

But that was pretty brave of those first Europeans to come over here. Well, a bunch of them got duped into coming over, which was pretty stupid, but once they got here, that was pretty resourceful of those first Europeans to survive. Well, the ones that did survive, that is. Most of them didn't, they weren't that hardy of a bunch, and the settlements would have been wiped out if more people hadn't arrived fresh off the boat to keep things going. The point is that it must have been horrifying and terrifying and incredibly depressing and demoralizing, quite a low of human experience, to have been one of those folks. Man, you know what? This post is going no where, so I'm just gonna quit while I'm behind.

OOH! But I got my Peter Gabriel quote. Duh! And I didn't even have to go to a different album. It's about TV, but OK.

Maybe that wasn't just a "sore throat" I got last week and was actually sick. I'm still hacking up phlegm. Annoying cough. General overpowering listlessness this past week. I don't remember doing much of anything this past week. And the weather has returned to its unacceptable, miserable "normal", where sunny and mild in the forecast means a window of three or four hours in the late afternoon in San Francisco. Unless it's windy, in which case it's still mildly unpleasant. The forecast is calling for even chillier weather next week. That is just unacceptable for late May. Soon, I'll be out of here, I tell myself. Eh, I guess I'll spend my afternoons in movie theaters for Twilight Samurai, Coffee and Cigarettes (the review is bad, but the reviewer, who just doesn't get it, has very little credibility in my book), and James' Journey to Jerusalem, which screened at the Int'l Film Festival and looks really good from the look of the previews. And it's about time I saw Kill Bill, Vol. 2 if I ever plan to see Vol. 1.

Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter. . . Spring may have shot onto my top ten films of all time in record time, and of all places to have come from - Korea! I traditionally have not been a huge fan of Korean films, but in the past few years I've been surprised by the quality of film-making coming out of Korea. Not that I have a top ten films of all time. And not that one of the criteria for being on my top ten films of all time wouldn't be standing the test of time. So saying a film that I've only seen once, and saw today, is on my list of top ten films of all time can't mean a whole lot.

The subject matter renders me biased, though, so I might have to be careful to whom I recommended the film. The film is highly allegorical/metaphorical, and set in a monastery that floats in the middle of a lake in the mountains of Korea. And at any given time, there are no more than two monks there.

This is probably a bold thing to say, and maybe wrong, fine, but out of all the films I've seen with Buddhism as a theme or influence, this film really gets to the heart of Buddhism from a human perspective more than any other. It doesn't preach, and there's no holier than thou moralism. Despite being set at a monastery and having monks as the main characters, it's about human fault, and the religious path entails a lot of tripping up. And the trip ups are part of the path. I think the film itself is pretty bold in having the monastery floating in the middle of a lake without any foundation. As soon as you think of the search as something concrete, something to build upon, something tangible, you've missed the mark. It is only concrete in the ephemerality of death when the lake is frozen over.

I'm reading into the religion because of my bias. As a film, it is beautifully shot, wonderfully conceived, and emotionally rich. I'm a sucker for seasons being used as an organizational device for a life metaphor. Or separate stories used metaphorically for different stages of life. "Robot Stories" sort of did that. I thought "Three Step Dancing" did that. There's a Vietnamese film called "Three Seasons" which I need to see again which also, obviously, uses the seasons as metaphor. "Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter...Spring" does raise questions that don't get answered, which may be annoying to some (the "what the hell" factor), but since so much is not to be taken literally or is meant to represent more, it's easy to let those slide.

As for Korean film, I think they do well when they do something that neither Hong Kong nor Japan already does better. When they succeed in just getting to the heart of "something Korean" (broad range), you get good films. Same with Taiwan. If Taiwanese film-makers tried to do what Hong Kong and Japan already do well (or not), they would suck. But I think recent Taiwanese film-makers really capture "something Taiwanese" in using a very naturalist approach, and instead of forwarding a plot, they try to capture or express some emotion through an observed scene, often done in long shot. I don't know, I may be wrong. I may be reading what I want to into Taiwanese cinema.

*sigh* to every season, turn, turn, turn. things fall apart by Chinua Achebe. que sera sera. Blogger changed its interface and there's nothing I can do about it, and even less to say about it. Except maybe "yuck". I'm sure I'll get used to it, that's how we're programmed by corporations. In a few weeks, I will have completely forgotten what the old interface looked like, I'm sure.

I felt a tinge of a sore throat this morning that has only gotten worse. If I'm getting sick, I know where I got it - sharing a strawberry shortcake with a woman named "Kuniko" after Juan's birthday karaoke thing on Friday night. After my throat started hurting, I recalled maybe hearing her mention that she was just getting over a cold. Sucks. If I'm gonna get sick from someone else's direct germs, at least I should get a wild make-out session out of it.

I did go on another 50 mile ride today, though. Which is weird because 50 milers are at the upper end of my riding ability, and two weeks in a row is a little nuts. Maybe I'm just getting better at it? I rode most of the way up Mt. Tamalpais, but I turned around 400 vertical feet and 3 miles from the summit (2500'). No regrets, it was pretty sick attempting Mt. Tam having done so little riding this year. The thing was that it was windy and getting chilly. Also I know that last stretch is the hardest part of the climb and it would have taken a lot out of me for the return ride. It would have been miserable getting to the top, and with the wind I would have had to turn right around and come back down. You know someone is really hardcore if they climb Mt. Tam and don't stop and head back down. And I'm not that hardcore. I like panoramic views.

Actually it turned out well, too, because a fire started on the route coming down, and Route 1 was detoured. The detour was down the way I came up, so I knew the way, but traffic was bumper to bumper on the descent. Which for me, meant riding down the middle of the road and in the opposing traffic lane, slaloming out of the way when cars came up. I thought it was fun. The cars coming up probably didn't think so. There was another cyclists who was right behind me when we started, but by the time I turned off onto another road I had come up on, which no traffic was going down, he was no where in sight. Perhaps he found my technique faulty.

current soundtrack: Victor Wooten - "Yin-Yang"

I'm drawing a line in the sand. I will not listen to DVD commentaries of white people doing commentaries on Asian films unless I know who they are, and trust they have something intelligent to say. Case in point: Executive Producer/co-screenplay writer James Schamus co-commenting with Ang Lee for "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon". Ang Lee's commentary is insightful and explains things we in the West might not get. In that shadow, Schamus has very little to offer and resorts to cute, flippant, unfunny remarks that at least aren't racist. They just reveal his ignorance. To me, he comes across as an idiot. And he's not an idiot. When he talks about the writing or the script, he's interesting.

Not quite the same, and not quite so offensive is the commentary by Hong Kong film expert Ric Meyers on the Jet Li film, "Once Upon a Time in China". His only problem was the most inexplicable inability to pronounce Chinese names and words. He's an "expert" on Hong Kong films, and yet he butchers the most common and simple words in Chinese. He can't even pronounce accepted English mispronunciations of Chinese words. He would probably mispronounce "Sesame Chicken" in a Chinese restaurant! OK, it wasn't that bad, but it was pretty appalling. I have to go check if he successfully pronounces "Jet Li".

In contrast, I recall that Roger Ebert was asked to record commentary for a classic Japanese film. That, I would listen to. It has nothing to do with what I think about Roger Ebert, but I trust his expertise and genuine appreciation for the international film medium that what he has to say would be intelligent and interesting. I may not like or agree with what he says, but I'll listen to it. Also Quentin Tarantino, whose appreciation for Asian films easily crosses the border into freakishness, if he were to provide commentary for an Asian film, I would also listen to it, even though listening to Tarantino is not the easiest thing for me to do. That guy is one scary nerd!

I got the latest alumni magazine from college, and there is an interview with a Buddhist monk, and there are examples (since I can't quote any of the Schamus offenses) of how some Americans try to be cute and flippant when they are out of their element (NB: both interviewer and monk are white (and Oberlin grads)):

Q: Are there ever days when it's difficult to drag yourself out of bed?
A: There are times when I say, "I think I'll do some lying-down meditation."
Q: I'd be great at that. (wtf?)

Q: You get one meal a day. Are you getting enough fiber? (wtf?)

A: We clean up, and everyone goes back to his hut. We meet again at about 5 P.M.
Q: Is that for Happy Hour? (wtf?)

Mind you, for most part the interview was quite good with respectful questions. There were questions made with a flippant spin, which is alright as long as the question is the focus or the flippancy is easily sidestepped. But if the flippancy says, "look at me, I'm funny", you just come across as an idiot (to the reader, not necessarily the interviewee in this case). Also NB, I notice now that the interviewer is a playwright, and I suppose their minds are hard-wired to always try to be clever and witty. You never know when you're gonna hit on something that's gold. So alright.

Urg, I should have given notice on my apartment this month, instead of allowing another month of dinking around just because I got money back from taxes. Dinking around has already gotten old. I guess I could give notice now instead of waiting until the end of the month, but there's that thing about already having paid my last month's rent. Landlords don't take kindly to tenants asking for money already paid back.

Is it that time again? To give blood? The blood bank has been calling, and unable-to-commit me, I told them I would be a walk-in either today or tomorrow (or the day after or next week, but I didn't say as much). I'll try to make it down there today. Get my free dougnut. I also went on a 51 mile ride on Sunday that I didn't know would turn out to be a 51 mile ride, so I'm not gonna do anything strenuous anytime soon. Mind you, for some people 50 miles is easy. For me, it's at the upper end of what I can do alone, given the current state of my ride preparation. It was supposed to be easy, too, riding the Iron Horse Trail in the East Bay from Dublin/Pleasanton BART up to Walnut Creek. That trail is as flat as any stretch of pavement in the Bay Area, and I did 19 miles of it. But then from there, I headed towards the hilly open space and ranches of the East Bay reservoirs, doing most of that loop, and then climbing the 600 feet up the East Bay hills on Wildcat Canyon Road. I guess doing all that was dumb, I was already struggling at mile 25. But since I knew that some BART station or another was in range if I seriously bonked, at least I had that safety net. With the exception of the Paradise Loop, I guess that was my first real "ride" of the season.

It was nice and hot for that ride, but it's starting to cool down again. Today is sunny but windy and I hate riding around town in this weather because it's impossible to dress comfortably. If you dress for the wind and chill, the sun and the riding heats you up really fast. Then if you shed layers, the cold and your sweat make you freeze. But I saw a documentary last night on the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge and now I want to go and appreciate it. Usually I ride the western catwalk at top speed without stopping. It really is a beautiful bridge. From the art deco architecture of the towers, to the engineering, to the color and how it changes with the light through the day as well as through the seasons, to how it complements the natural surroundings. It's absolutely perfect. Imagining any other structure would be appalling in comparison.