Femininomena
Dario Argento, the Italian horror director and father-in-law (sort of) to the late great Anthony Bourdain, is a very strange man who has had many contentious relationships and made a lot of enemies in Italian film culture over the decades. It’s probably a bad idea from a health-and-safety standpoint to let him keep making the kinds of movies he does, even though many of those movies are very good. Reading the things he said about his movies, at least in English translation, is almost as surreal and troubling an experience as watching them. It always reminds me a little of the commentary that Ikuhara Kunihiko did on individual episodes of Revolutionary Girl Utena (translated in the liner material for my Nozomi DVD box sets of that show), except Argento is at least trying to invite his interlocutor, his Model Reader, to understand the movies on a somewhat more conventional level, whereas Ikuhara is more interested in adding more of the same.
The Princess with a Thousand Enemies
(This is (not) a music review.)
A new Taylor Swift album came out last month. This happens a lot, and people don’t shut up about it when it does. I am not going to shut up about it either.
The question isn’t whether the new album is good, exactly; that is never the point with these things, not when Swift is involved. She is a generational songwriting talent, and her musicianship is serviceable, but she is also prolific, with all that being prolific tends to imply for consistency. The Tortured Poets Department has a lot of pretty good songs on it (although they tend towards the “over-written”), a few standout ones, and one or two that are some of the most emotionally immature dreck you’ve ever heard in your life. The same, however, can be said about a lot of albums, by both Taylor Swift and other artists. What makes “TTPD” different? This question is more broadly social, cultural, and even economic and political in its way.
Takasawa Keiichi’s “Kimono”: An Artistic-Cultural Treatise from Occupied Japan
Cultural relations between the United States and Japan in the twentieth century are today best remembered for two periods of hostility. In the 1940s the countries were enemies in World War II, and in the 1980s the strong postwar cross-Pacific alliance was strained due to manufacturing and trade policies that in some ways prefigured today’s rivalry between the US and China. Although President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro were both personally and ideologically close, many Americans thought of Japanese people in insecure, envious, and hostile terms.
However, between these two periods, there was a flowering of American Japanophilia influenced partly by American servicemen’s experiences in Japan during the prolonged Allied occupation of the country. The 1950s saw the Japanese printmaker Wada Sanzō (whose “Greenhouse Workers” from his Occupations of Shōwa Japan series hangs in my parents’ living room) win an Academy Award for costume design and the actress and singer Umeki Miyoshi win one for Best Supporting Actress. Beat writers like Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder admired (what they knew of) Japanese Buddhism, and D.T. Suzuki became a more famous and respected figure stateside than in his home country. It was in the earliest days of this midcentury Japanophilia that Takasawa Keiichi wrote and illustrated Kimono: A Pictorial Story of the Kimono.