The Twilight Samurai - Learning to Think

Yoji Yamada Samurai Series

たそがれ清兵衛 The Twilight Samurai

by 山田 洋次 Yoji Yamada, 2002

隠し剣 鬼の爪 The Hidden Blade

by 山田 洋次 Yoji Yamada, 2004

武士の一分 Love and Honor 

by 山田 洋次 Yoji Yamada, 2006

The Twilight Samurai was nominated in the Best Foreign Language Film category. The first part of a trilogy followed by The Hidden Blade and Love And Honor. It was seen as a strong contender to win the Best Foreign Language Film, but missed out on the famous gold statue to Denys Arcand’s Canadian-French drama, The Barbarian Invasions. Once again, The Academy Awards was a snob.

Yôji Yamada 山田 洋次, September 13, 1931. Happy 86th Birthday! 

Lives of Girls and Women

"What good is it if you read Plato and never clean your toilet? asked my mother, reverting to the values of Jubilee." —Lives of Girls and Women, Alice Munro

Alice Ann Munro, July 10, 1931, is a Canadian short story writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013. Happy 86th Birthday! 

Heart of Darkness

I must admit I have never read any of Joseph Conrad's books, but I think of him of these terms, human condition, existential loneliness, colonialism, racism, imperialism, pessimism, de-humanized, good and evil, light and darkness, Nietzsche…
It took me 20 years to gather my courage to watch Francis Coppola's Apocalypse Now. But I will never brave enough to read Joseph Conrad's Hearts of Darkness. I know T. E. Lawrence, Bertrand Russell, Alfred Hitchcock, William Faulkner, Bob Dylan… and just about almost everybody love him, but I just simply can't.
How things linked: Hearts of Darkness, 1899—Apocalypse Now, 1979—The End by Jim Morrison, 1967—Paris, 1971—Paris, 1977—me

scene from Francis Coppola's Apocalypse Now

Jim Morrison's tomb in Paris

A Night at the Majestic in 1922

James Joyce 1882-1941

Marcel Proust 1871-1922

Franz Kafka 1883-1924

Sigmund Freud 1856-1939

Pablo Picasso 1881-1973

Igor Stravinsky 1882-1971

 

Marcel Proust and James Joyce who with Kafka and Freud constitute the inescapable writers of the twentieth century, met once at Parisian dinner party attended also by Stravinsky and Picasso, in May 18, 1922, half a year before Proust’s death, and soon after the publication of Sodom and Gomorrah, Part Two and Ulysses. Joyce had read a few pages of Proust, and saw no special talent; Proust had never heard of Joyce. The aristocratic Stravinsky snubbed both, and Picasso admired the women present. Accounts of the conversation between Proust and Joyce vary: evidently Proust lamented his digestion, and Joyce his headaches. That is the only link I  know between Proust and Joyce except for Samuel Beckett’s brief monograph Proust (1933), in which Joyce’s greatest disciple negotiates a separate peace with In Search of Lost Time. —Harold Bloom

Lily Was Here by David A. Stewart and Candy Dulfer

David A. Stewart wrote: I played the four-note opening melody and Candy answered on sax. I then played the whole melody sequence with Candy answering every phrase with her own little twists and turns. After a whole sequence of the melody I nodded to Candy to take the lead and she played a very memorable melodic solo of which I remember every note. One more nod and she knew to end it. I repeated the melody again with Candy answering, and we continued once around then swapped lead licks for a minute longer and that was it! We mixed the song in five to ten minutes straight after, so the whole process from conception to final mix took around fifteen minutes.

Bento Box

2 decks bento box from a thrift shop $5.99

for single serving

for dinner

or party