Detail from Eyes of the Cat, by Moebius and Alejandro Jodorowsky
My last years of college and the first few out in the real world I was a bit of a fan of the magazine Heavy Metal (and of the original French version Métal Hurlant). As anyone of that time and space would, I especially enjoyed the work of the artist/illustrator Jean Giraud – better known as Moebius.
I was sad to see he passed away this year, at 73. I thought of him recently as I stumbled across some of his work on a favorite art blog, But Does it Float.
Recently, that blog had a post on a work I was not familiar with. It was a collaboration of Moebius with Alejandro Jodorowsky – among many, many, other things, a director of amazingly disturbing and odd films.
It’s called Les Yeux du Chat (The Eyes of the Cat) – and was their first comic together (I believe it’s from 1978). It’s a simple collection of wordless drawings, telling a horrific story about a man, his falcon, and an unfortunate cat.
Pretty disturbing, not for all tastes (not too good for a cat-lover, for example) – but it’s the sort of thing that you will like if you like that sort of thing.
It’s what I would do if I had the talent. Sorry.
The book is terribly expensive and very short – but through the magic of this interweb thing, you can see it here.
Detail from Eyes of the Cat, by Moebius and Alejandro Jodorowsky
Do you have a recipe that requires egg yolks? This provocative scene from Tampopo is one hell of a way to separate an egg.
It was early afternoon and I was down in East Dallas, overheated and very hungry. As I contemplated the twists of neighborhood streets and grids of avenues I tried to think of someplace to get something to eat… something good, quick, cheap, interesting, on the way home, and, preferably, someplace I’ve never been to before.
One word popped into my dehydrated and sun-frazzled brain – Tampopo.
Tampopo, on Greenville Avenue in Dallas
Tampopo is a bright humble-looking little Japanese café on Greenville Avenue – just south of Northwest Highway (on my way home). I had heard of it, driven by it, but never actually stopped there. Its name (Japanese for Dandelion) has always fascinated me, because it is also the name of one of my absolute favorite films.
Tampopo (the movie) is an odd lark of a film, a Japanese comedy loosely modeled after a Clint Eastwood Western yet set in a Ramen Shop run by a young widow named Tampopo. It is a wondrous wandering mess of a movie – jumping around in tone and sliding sideways into odd set pieces that have very little to do with the main story….
Except they are all about food. Tampopo is struggling with her third-rate Ramen shop until a macho truck driver and his sidekick come along and end up devoting their skill and energy into creating the perfect ramen. It is greatness.
The movie is very difficult to see in the United States. I had to jump through some hoops to get a copy of a DVD and it is one of my prized possessions.
So, I stopped in at Tampopo (the restaurant) and ordered some Beef Udon soup. I was a little disappointed they didn’t offer Ramen – but I’m a bit of an Udon man myself anyway. It was good and a nice treat on a hot day.
My Beef Udon Soup. Unfortunately, I had a telephoto and couldn’t get the soup in focus… but you get the idea.
This behavior by high-ranking public servants should be considered scandalous. People in Washington consider it business as usual, and don’t even raise an eyebrow.
Right and wrong no longer matter in this deviant subculture. Sealed off from personal responsibility by accumulated bureaucracy and thick walls of special interest money, our government is covered by a putrid mold of cynical gamesmanship and everyday hypocrisy. People scurry around its baseboards seeking short-term advantage, but big change is so inconceivable as to be laughable.
Even reformers have given up. What is politically feasible, they ask? The answer is clear: nothing.
Change will nonetheless happen, political scientists tell us. How? Through a crisis….The main challenge then will be not merely to reform Medicare and other unsustainable programs. The challenge will be to change the culture of government.
I’m sort of suprised Dexter (or Voldemort) isn’t on here – but I’m not sure that a popular series is considered “Literature.” I dunno, it’s not Crime and Punishment (or Macbeth, or even Lolita), but that still feels a little snobbish to me.
Fabricated silicon bronze, three sculptures approx. 15h x 5 x 5 each for the Cedars Light Rail Station, Dallas Area Rapid Transit authority, Dallas, Texas. Commission awarded through a national competition sponsored by DART. The sculptures relate not only in form to the landscape design but are also intended to recall the evolution of the neighborhood from a cedar forest, to an elegant Victorian neighborhood, to a now light industrial district.
I was wandering around, looking into the historic buildings that have been moved from all over North Texas into Old City Park, now Dallas Heritage Village. Some kid walked into the Renner School House at the same time I did.
“Can you imagine going to school in a room like this?” I asked.
“I’ve been here before, I think. I think it was a field trip,” he answered.
“Look at how each chair holds the desk for the person behind them. Oh, do you know what the little holes are for?”
“For the inks!” he said.
“It’s a shame we can’t go upstairs or play in the playground,” the kid said. “Do you know what all these cans hanging on the wall are for?”
I said, “Those are what the kids brought their lunch to school in. See, they are little metal buckets. They called them lunch pails.”
I kept running into the kid as I walked around the place and he would leave his family, walk up to me and point out something. In the historic barnyard he was looking around, trying to find the rooster that was crowing.
“I think it’s a recording,” I said. “They are playing that sound over and over.”
“It sure sounds real,” he said.
The historic Renner School House, in Dallas Heritage Village, with the skyscrapers of downtown rearing up in the background.
Lunch pails hung on the wall pegs at the Renner School House.
I very rarely get out to see an actual movie at an actual theatre any more. The biggest reason is that I hate going out to the suburban googleplex with everybody else and paying all that cash for an experience much worse than I can get at home on the HDTV.
One exception, though. Back in the day, back when I still had a life, I used to really enjoy going down to the Angelika on Mockingbird Lane. I would take the DART train down there on the weekend – sometimes not even knowing what I was going to see – and pick one of the offerings from the selection of art-house films. There is a little restaurant attached and sometimes I’d get pot stickers or something else simple to eat – make a leisurely afternoon of it.
There was none of the cattle-car feeling of the googleplex – none of the packs of loud, tittering teenagers, blaring lights and sounds of video games or awful garish food displays… I like the architecture of the Angelika – the open areas with little tables and chairs, the little stands with postcards and literature about the upcoming features – the classic old movie posters. It is a place designed to show a film, not corral huge herds of the faceless public into chutes and strip them of their cash.
There are now a whole set of theaters dedicated to art-house quality cinema in the Metroplex – the two Angelikas, The Magnolia, and the Inwood – to name a few. I love the Inwood especially, but it is a long difficult drive from where I live.
Often, when I look at the list of first run films at the googleplex I can’t find a single one I’m really interested in seeing. Today, when I thought of going down to the Angelika, it was tough to decide which one to see – there was Killer Joe – which looks good, but I wasn’t in the mood for NC-17 today… then there was Beasts of the Southern Wild, set in South Louisiana, but again, maybe too intense for a lazy early Sunday. They are showing a classic, The Graduate, and that would be good… but I’ve seen that film, maybe ten times already.
So I decided on the low-intensity alternative, Wes Anderson’s newest, Moonrise Kingdom. I have enjoyed almost all of his work (not a big fan of the animated film, that Mr. Fox thing) – though his highly mannered style can be a bit shrill at times.
I loved Moonrise Kingdom, by the way. The test for a work with a unique and personal style like Anderson’s is a simple one for me – do I care about his characters? Some of his work is so precious and so complex that the people at the center of the story are lost – and at the end you are left with an empty feeling. A lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Moonrise Kingdom is a simply story, however (which I will not discuss – no spoilers here) and the two main characters are sympathetic and easy to relate to. All the messy complexities of a Wes Anderson film are present, but these are played out by the large and familiar supporting cast, and don’t take away from the main conflict at the center.
Strip away all the Wes Anderson shiny trappings and odd eccentricities and it is simply a strange little love story.
When the film ended I thought, “Hey, that was better than I expected,” which is high praise, indeed.
Now I want to go back and see some of those others.
I have been looking for this for a long time… and now, here it is, on Youtube. Alfred Hitchcock’s version of the Roald Dahl short story Man From the South with Steve McQueen and Peter Lorre.
It’s almost a half-hour long… but find a time when you can sit down and watch the thing.
I think this story is the best example of how to manipulate tension, excitement, and dread in a tight little story I have ever seen. This version is a bit droll for my taste – the original text is more horrific. It’s been done and riffed on many times (check out Quentin Tarantino’s version as the fourth and last story in the otherwise-horrible film, Four Rooms).
I try and study it.
This is what I want to write.
“The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.”
“A dry martini,” he said. “One. In a deep champagne goblet.”
“Oui, monsieur.”
“Just a moment. Three measures of Gordon’s, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it’s ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon-peel. Got it?”
I’m sorry, but this is about the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. As a child, I lived in a few locations that had… well, let’s say they had a lot of flies – a lot. Swatting flies became a cheap amusement for when there was precious else to do. I would have given anything for this thing.
Bill Chance 