131

Heading west on the south side of the Shakujii-gawa tonight, I was vaguely annoyed by the realization that nothing in particular caught my attention. I often turned my head like Seijun Suzuki's slow tracking shot around a rice cooker to stay attentive to various objects as I ran past them. Yet, my observations had no particular focus and constantly meandered from the indecisive angle of tree branches to the indeterminate feelings associated with the time between 16:00 JST and 17:00 JST. Nevertheless, while returning east on the north side, I was practically stopped in my tracks by a quick sequence of appearances. First, a spotless, yellow, eight-prong Lego brick was resting on its side in a patch of dark soil. It seemed as if the ground had been evenly raked, then the brick placed on top with such care that it left no impression and floated slightly above the ground. This sighting was followed immediately by a young boy bounding towards me in a green down vest, his left bloody nostril plugged with tissue paper. Evidently, his nose had been packed for some time, as the tissue had drawn blood out from deep inside his skull, almost to the remaining white tip. The last triangular iceberg of tissue would no doubt soon succumb to the flow in his mobile paper chromatography experiment.

Three paces later, three identical dogs emerged in rapid succession from a bush. They were impossibly small dogs in matching and impossibly small dog sweaters, their nails nervously tapping out an erratic Morse code like a bushel of crabs dumped on the pavement. The dog in triplicate instantly made me conscious that tonight, along the Shakujii-gawa, there were no cats. Simultaneous with thinking "no cats" from the end of the thought, "Tonight along the Shakujii-gawa, there are no cats," a cat promptly appeared on my left. The cat's head momentarily raised, ceased the meticulous cleaning of its ass, swiveled, and slowly tracked my passing; all the while, its left leg was sticking up in the air at a precise ninety-degree angle to the ground upon which it was sitting.

129

The rice cooker from Seijun Suzuki's 1967 film, Branded to Kill, is undeniably the most photogenic cooking appliance in the world. The slowly opening curtain is an admirable supporting cast member.

112

The euphoria of encountering a clear beginning on a crisp day is soon to be interrupted by a crossroads, a conspicuous absence of people, vast openness, and the sound of a prop plane overhead. I am not inside of Alfred Hitchcock's 1959 film North by Northwest, but a check on Google Earth shows that my current position in Japan is not so different looking west from Garces Highway near Corcoran Rd. in Wasco, California.

106

The Excelsior Café on Inokashira Dōri across from CoCo Ichiban Curry House in Udagawachō is positioned so that anybody outside rounding the corner will accidentally activate the sensor of the automatic sliding door. When sitting at the front counter next to the door one is treated to the right edge of the glass door continually moving back and forth in front of you. The change in perception that this creates is delicate, only the vertical line of the glass’ edge erratically moving horizontally across your field of vision, but it is enough to disrupt the normal flow of mental meanderings so common when one sips espresso and stares aimlessly out a window into a place crowded with people. The moving glass edge reads as a scratch on a projected modern Japanese version of James Agee and Helen Levitt's 1945 film In the Street, with its concentration on frenetic activity and impromptu human dramas. It could also be an enormous twitching whisker from a cat sitting atop the café. As well, it reminds me of the shimmering light in Ain Soukhna in Egypt last August, which reminds me of the shimmering light in Onomichi last week. This succession of remembrances is all the consequence of the edge of something that is principally invisible.

100

I am interested in the multipurpose Japanese “I’m going fishing for the afternoon / I'm going painting in a garden / I'm going to school / I'm going to make one of the best films ever” hat seen on adults, grandparents, school children and famous filmmakers alike. Sometimes the back brim of the hat is turned upwards for a stylish flair, other times it is pulled down fairly tight. I wonder if this gentleman knows that the rock he is painting in front of him is actually the Rikugien skull rock when viewed from the right of where he is sitting?

96

Last Tuesday somewhere around 12:50 JST someone outside close to the laundry balcony was whistling something along with the hourly chime – skillfully, like pastel colored birds warbling in an animated Disney film. Either it was a "ten minutes before the hour" chime, or my watch was off. At least I am not saying, as Dr. Hugo Z. Hackenbush (Groucho Marx) said in A Day at the Races, “Either he’s dead, or my watch has stopped” – not that I really have ever understood what that means. That said, last week while running by Teikyō University Hospital I believe that I saw a body with a sheet covering its face being wheeled out from the back of an ambulance. Perhaps there is a chime, or a song that I have yet to hear.

44

どですかでん、どですかでん、どですかでん。。。(Dodesukaden). In onomatopoeic terms, dodesukaden is the sound of a moving trolley. Also, sometimes, the sound of click-clacking heels. Also, the name of Akira Kurosawa's 1970 film set in a Japanese garbage dump and a failure that almost drove him to kill himself.

38

Here is a description taken from the internet of Busy, Busy Town by children's book author and illustrator Richard Scarry: “About the Book: ‘Battle Royale, a high-octane thriller about senseless youth violence, is one of Japan's best-selling - and most controversial - novels. As part of a ruthless program by the totalitarian...’” Wait – there must be some kind of mistake because that doesn't sound like the idyllic Swiss backdrop for Richard Scarry’s characters Huck the cat and Lowly the worm to learn the process of transforming trees into paper, the operation of a mill, the transportation industry, and the daily details of running a stationery store. Huck the cat is not a totalitarian – he always shared with Lowly the worm. Wait a moment – hold on a second, "Lowly the worm?" Now that actually IS starting to sound just a little bit suspicious as I think back to the paper pulp factory, who had to operate the dangerous machines, endlessly clean the shop floors, manage the stinky dumpsters, and who seemed to be sitting pretty and cozy with fat cat management. Large sigh, bipedalism trumps reptilian locomotion yet again. It is time to send in Lewis Hine.

35

Everywhere I go I make it a point to look at where I am from above on Google Earth so that I can see my surroundings. One never knows if there is a nearby neighbor with a kidney shaped pool that can be secretly drained when they are away on vacation, and furtively used for the purpose of skateboarding. The Google technology that allows one to zoom in and out reminds me of two films that incorporate zooming into their structure – A Rough Sketch for a Proposed Film Dealing with the Powers of Ten and the Relative Size of Things in the Universe made in 1968 by Charles and Ray Eames and Cosmic Zoom made in the same year by Eva Szasz.

From the vantage point of 2-32-10 Takinogawa, Kita-ku, The National Film Board of Canada presenting eight minutes of film in Cosmic Zoom of a boy rowing, a mosquito, his dog, and a blood cell, along with the Eames' eight minutes focusing on a picnic all seems like some far away experiment. Still, genuine connections and linkages exist. They are on a river and I am near a river. I have no dog, but I was born in 1968. I like picnics and I also like rough sketching without the requirement of crafting a final, honed something. However, neither film hints at the possibility of a kidney shaped pool.

29

On Sundays I sometimes go to Narita Airport to photograph the people photographing the jets and the people photographing their children photographing the jets from the outdoor observation deck. Today I am thinking about that Austrian Airlines jet that just arrived from somewhere. Also, I am thinking about traveling from New York to Vienna to see The Third Man on January 17, 2003 at 7:44 AM and the jet bridge stretching out to meet the Japan Airlines jet that was next to me. Could there have been a hatsumelo warning song as the jet bridge pulled away from the aircraft? If the hatsumelo for the Japan Airlines jet flying to Vienna were in fact the theme from The Third Man, then what Japanese film might have been referenced in my plane's departure song as the jet bridge pulled away? On that note, could Austrian Airlines hatsumelos for jets departing Vienna for Narita possibly play Kojun Saito's theme from Yasujirō Ozu's 1953 film Tokyo Story?

28

I am sitting at the kitchen counter watching the 14:30 JST afternoon light illuminate my beer and pondering how each weekend in Vienna Harry Lime and Holly Martins are resurrected when the film The Third Man screens. Orson Wells (Harry Lime) and Joseph Cotten (Holly Martins) both previously starred in Citizen Kane where they played close friends. Watching The Third Man one can't help but sense their friendship leaking out from Citizen Kane and into The Third Man. I decided to screen the two films consecutively and marveled at the extraordinary saga of a tumultuous and shifting friendship with characters that argue, age, die, reappear, are thought to be dead, then reappear again and argue before finally dying. I specifically chose an icy cold Ebisu beer rather than my usual Sapporo to commemorate the occasion. The long yellow streaks of late afternoon light across the white counter top and intensified through my glass of beer serve as a lovely tribute to the strange longevity and richness of their friendship.

23

During the day I can see that the building next to me is an innocuous hospital of some sort. I see hospital beds, people in hospital beds, people shuffling around the hospital beds in hospital gowns, and hospital nurses wearing surgical face masks. At nighttime a transformation takes place and I am staying in Takinogawa, in Tokyo, in Japan, yet I am next to Dario Argento's Tanzakademie in Freiburg, Germany, from his 1977 film Suspiria. At nighttime the shuffling of feet no longer seems quite so innocent and must be coupled to the supernatural and sinister red and green illumination. Why else would the lights blink, flicker, pulse, and send me messages in Morse code? Sitting at the kitchen counter in the morning having an espresso it is exceedingly difficult to believe that the building next door is a zombie hospital, but I fear in the depths of my heart that it is true.

19

I am sitting on the 18% gray expanse of the terrace overlooking Takinogawa and thinking about Venice, Italy where Luchino Visconti made his film, Death in Venice, in 1960. In doing so I am technically thinking about death, but that is really just a trifle because I am primarilly considering that I might be related to someone who worked for Visconti. I thought that I projected something into Visconti’s film, but after rewinding the film I realized that I actually did see my last name scroll by in the end credits, albeit slightly misspelled. I am still sitting on the 18% gray expanse of the terrace overlooking Takinogawa, but now I am thinking about Tokyo in 1953 and the quotidian, and that if I could read kanji I would be able to understand the end credits for Tokyo Story and find that I might even be related to someone who worked for Yasujirō Ozu.

10

In a local Ōji Station café they were silently projecting Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke’s 1997 film Funny Games. It is an odd experience to be drinking an icy cold Sapporo beer, eating a tastefully spicy curry, and watching a father get methodically beaten with a golf club in front of his own child. Still, the curry was delicious and the late afternoon light streaming in the windows washed out the film projection in such a way that made it look not so much a projection, as an undulating and particularly violent portion of the wall. I ordered an espresso after my beer and settled in to study the murderous nature of some architecture.

5

If the singer and songwriter Jacques Brel wrote the theme for Carol Reed's 1949 film The Third Man it would be the hatsumelo (train departure warning song) for Ebisu Station on the Yamanote line, but I have the feeling that I have said this somewhere before and that this thought will pervade everything I write from here on, like the anti-hero Harry Lime's presence before he actually appears on screen in The Third Man, or like Joseph Conrad's mysterious Kurtz lurking upriver in the Belgian Congo. Jacques Brel was a Belgian, Orson Welles played Harry Lime, and Orson Welles was going to make Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness as his first film before he made Citizen Kane in 1941, but I am uncertain of how this will all play out in regards to the looping Yamanote train.

1.5

I wake up all of a sudden. It is 2009, and Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film 2001 is playing on Inflight Television on the back of the seat in front of me. I pause the film at a frame where people in the movie watch films on the backs of the seats in front of them as they travel through outer space. The main character seems to have fallen asleep. For me, this is all transpiring in a jet somewhere over the International Date Line, where today is furtively changing into the future while passengers in the film also drift in and out of consciousness. The shift back to a depiction of the future in a movie made before I was born, which accurately predicts my current state is creating a dizzying, floating sensation, which is then promptly echoed in front of me in the film when a pen weightlessly glides by in front of the camera. I decided to watch the film for a bit in slow motion and reverse, but the complex mirroring and shifting in time gave me a surprising case of the giggles. I write a brief note in my journal and place my orange pen in my shirt's left pocket, hoping it will float out in front of my face once I fall asleep.