‘Terayama Shuji died of liver failure almost 30 years ago, but it feels odd to need to reintroduce him to a new generation in the West. His reputation is secure in Japan: books by and about him are in every decent bookstore, his movies are readily available on DVD and his theatre productions are still revived. His name is still current. But he’s largely forgotten in Europe and America. His theatre company Tenjo-sajiki last performed in London in 1978 (it was a play inspired by Jonathan Swift’s satire Directions to Servants, and his films haven’t been much seen since the last retrospective at the National Film Theatre in 1987.
‘Two experiences in Terayama’s childhood and adolescence were formative. He was born (in 1935) in Aomori Prefecture, in the foothills of Mount Osore – a ‘haunted’ mountain which has attracted ghosts and shamanists for centuries. He soaked up local myths and legends throughout his boyhood. And then he spent what should have been his student years confined to a hospital bed in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district, struck down by the nephritis which eventually killed him in 1983. Outside the window of his ward the alleys of Shinjuku were increasingly alive with student protests, street theatre and art happenings, plus the odd yakuza skirmish. (Shinjuku became the epicentre of Japanese counter-culture in the mid-1960s: see Oshima’s 1968 movie Diary of a Shinjuku Thief for details. You’ll probably need to clock a “rare DVD” site to find it. Stuck in the hospital, Terayama conceived a parallel between the ghost traffic on Mount Osore and the street-life of Shinjuku. This perception gave him a vein of imagery which fed into much of his later work.
‘Terayama entered Japanese public consciousness as a poet, publishing neo-classical tanka (31-syllable poems) with a surrealist spin. By the time he was out of hospital and co-founding the Tenjo-sajiki troupe – the name means “Les Enfants du Paradis” – he was well on the way to national notoriety, on account of his widely publicised calls for teenagers to run away from their oppressive families and, in particular, to break with their domineering mothers.
‘This would have been scandalous in any country; in conformist, group-think Japan it was like an earthquake. For the last 15 years of his life, he stayed in the public eye with a barrage of plays, films, novels and poems. Thanks to frequent appearances as a commentator on boxing matches and as a racing tipster, he also reached sectors of the public whose interests didn’t extend to the arts. He was what we’d now call a “public intellectual”, popping up often with idiosyncratic points of view on talk-shows and in news discussion programmes. And he did all this as a voice of the unaligned Left and as an unrepentant surrealist, calling for a revolution in the head.
‘All of Terayama’s work was interconnected. He quoted his own poems in his movies, and quite often put images and visual motifs from the plays on to the screen too. His one foray into mainstream genre filmmaking was Boxer (1977), which drew on his sports commentaries and featured a number of real-life champs.
‘The flow went in both directions. One of his short films, showing nails of all sizes invading the lives of the characters, ends by inviting the audience to step up and hammer nails into the screen. Another begins with painted harpies on screen insulting the audience’s passivity and impotence until one guy – a plant, of course – stops throwing popcorn and stands up to remonstrate; the women drag him into the screen, strip and humiliate him and then eject him back into the auditorium naked.
‘The final Tenjo-sajiki production, mounted in a vast docklands warehouse on three stages, each several hundred metres from the others, was a version of Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. And the final Terayama film, Farewell to the Ark (1984, completed by his team after his death), was in turn a version of the Marquez-based play, transposed to Okinawa and featuring the largest square peg and round hole ever seen.
‘In his filmmaking, Terayama switched between features for theatrical release and ‘experimental’ short films for smaller-scale screenings more naturally than any other director I can think of. One reason is that both strands of his film work featured members of Tenjo-sajiki and drew on ideas they’d already explored on stage.
‘His earliest shorts (such as Emperor Tomato Ketchup, which imagines 5-to-10-year-olds mounting a revolution against controlling adults) were essentially group improvisations with his actors, and his debut feature Throw Away Your Books, Let’s Go into the Streets (1971) took off from a piece of ‘theatre vérité’ of the same name, in which members of the audience had been invited on to the stage to act out their desires and fantasies. But Throw Away Your Books imposed a typical Terayama narrative about a working-class boy’s rite of passage on its collage of otherwise disparate material, and this set the pattern for later features like Pastoral Hide-and-Seek (1974) and Labyrinth in the Field (1979), both of which also focus on young men exploring their erotic desires but with a new sense of aesthetic assurance.
‘Terayama’s last completed work in any medium was an exchange of video letters with the poet Tanikawa Shuntaro (known, amongst other things, as the Japanese translator of Mother Goose). Video Letter (1982) is full of small epiphanies as both ‘correspondents’ explore the possibilities of what was then a new medium, but it’s also a heartbreaking chronicle of Terayama’s physical decline and the pain he lived with in his final months. It brings his career full circle by returning him to his first love: poetry.’ — Tony Rayns
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Stills
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Further
Shūji Terayama @ Wikipedia
Shûji Terayama @ IMDb
SHUJI TERAYAMA, EMPEROR OF THE UNDERGROUND
Where the mountain meets the street: Terayama Shuji
Shūji Terayama @ instagram
Who Is Shūji Terayama?
DVD: ‘THE EXPERIMENTAL IMAGE WORLD OF SHUJI TERAYAMA’
Book: ‘TERAYAMA Shuji, Japanese Dream’
Book: ‘Japanese Counterculture: The Antiestablishment Art of Terayama Shuji’
Terayama Shuji @ Ubuweb
Shūji Terayama @ Letterboxd
Attempting to Find the Real Terayama Shuji Through the Anarchy of Trauma in Pastoral: To Die in the Country
Shuji Terayama’s Notes from the Japanese Underground
Sleek’s Guide to the Groundbreaking Films of Shuji Terayama
Sutja’s Metaphysical Circus: The Sensational World Of Shuji Terayama
40 years after his death, meet Terayama Shuji when he was still unknown
SHUJI TERAYAMA: WHO CAN SAY THAT WE SHOULD NOT LIVE LIKE DOGS?
To the Lighthouse: Shuji Terayama’s Tanka Poetics
The Antiestablishment Art of Terayama Shuji
POETRY IN MOTION
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Extras
Shuji Terayama | TateShots
Shuji Terayama: No bird exists that can fly higher than the imagination
Shuji Terayama – Growing Up Is Surreal
The last two years of Terayama Shuji
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Shuji Terayama Meets Yukio Mishima
Mishima: You may think I’m an old fashioned classicist, but I don’t trust language without a logical structure.
Terayama: Then you couldn’t put up with a dog sitting on a book by Aristotle. I think it would be erotic if Brigitte Bardot was carrying Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.
Mishima: Here is the principle of bodybuilding. It’s to get rid of the involuntary muscles in your body.
Terayama: In short, getting rid of unpredictability from the body?
Mishima: You’re right. For example, look at my chest. I can move it freely to the music [he moves the muscles in his chest]. Does your chest move?
Terayama: I’m an unpredictable being.
Mishima: It may move all of a sudden one night.
Terayama: I can’t have any enjoyment without the fantasy that an unknown treasure may be hidden in my small body. Mishima-san, if you learn all about the structure of your body, you’ll find that it’s only water and fibre.
Mishima: You’ll live longer than me.
Terayama: Mishima-san, the day will suddenly come when you can’t move your involuntary muscles, even if you throw out your chest.
Mishima: That day won’t come.
Terayama: Yes, it will. Eroticism overflows at a time like that.
Mishima: A day like that won’t come. Never.
Terayama: Mishima-san, the day will suddenly come when you can’t move your involuntary muscles, even if you throw out your chest.
Mishima: That day won’t come.
Terayama: Yes, it will. Eroticism overflows at a time like that.
Mishima: A day like that won’t come. Never.
Terayama: Mishima-san, have you heard this story? There was a man who said “I’m an Edokko [inhabitant of pre-modern Tokyo] so I don’t accept the existence of trains” Then a train hit him straight on and ran him over. As he was dying, he said “there was no train.”
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20 of Shūji Terayama’s 32 films
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Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets (1971)
‘A film concerned with ending film itself by breaking all conventions of film. Why? It already tells you in the title, to throw away your books and rally in the streets.
‘Books (and film, and games, and media in general) are important to be clear, but what is the reason one reads, watches, plays? Primarily it should be to educate, to help inform the recipient and improve their life, but often it ends up as a way of passing time. There is nothing wrong with entertainment but over-indulgence leads us to forget why we do it in the first place, as shown regularly in the film where intellectuals who spend all their time reading are the most disconnected from society. How are these people then supposed to shape society? How do they apply what they’ve read in any practical form? Books then morph into an empty medium, one that then exists to propagate more reading for the sake of reading alone, and such a life is an empty one. They spend too much time reading when they should be out on the streets.
‘And the film understands it is itself part of an empty medium, and so it tries at every opportunity to subvert the format of empty entertainment. Loosely-strung vignettes, intertitles scrawled on walls, constant breakage of the fourth wall, listing all would be pointless but there’s a point to pointing them out: Terayama wants us to think about film itself through the incisive and critical application of experimental technique. What can film do when it has a clear ideology? What can film do when it is clearly didactic? What can film do when it is unbeholden to appeasement? Film can become useful, it can question its own medium, it can cross over into the real world, it can lead to meaningful change. This is a film that doesn’t hate film, but hates what materialism has done to film and film watchers and works at every opportunity to shatter that conception.
‘This is also a film that feels increasingly relevant even over forty years after its release. At the risk of sounding laughably over-reductionist, the ways in which technology has expanded into our lives has become alarming. Obviously some of this is good, to believe otherwise is naïve, but so much more of technology itself is to prevent us from rallying in the streets. Technology, or more-accurately the creators of certain technology, does not have our best interests at heart and is created to keep us reliant on technology. Social media manipulating our emotions to constantly engage with it; video-games utilizing addictive designs to get us to spend far more of our time and money on them; the ‘franchise-ation’ of works to metamorphose from medium to lifestyles that ask us to invest our very identity into such works; media and technology become grotesque techno-vampires of human life when an ideology of late-capitalism is applied and it’s paradoxically easier to give in to them when they promise relief from the other horrors of late-capitalism. Throw it all away.’ –– reibureibu
Trailer
Excerpt
Excerpt
the entire film
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Emperor Tomato Ketchup (1971)
‘Terayama’s great satire on the various, then current, violent revolutionary tendencies in Japan, Emperor Tomato Ketchup shows a world where children have staged a violent coup and conduct ongoing war with the adults, who, up until then, have subjugated them. It needs to be stressed, however, that the children enact everything in this movie with a serious sense of play.’ — Dale Wittig
Excerpt
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Janken sensô (1971)
‘Two generals portrays World War II through the rock-scissors-bag, but also by some absurd torture techniques.’ — IMDb
Excerpt
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Pastoral: To Die in the Country (1974)
‘I don’t think we’ll ever understand exactly what was going on in the gloriously twisted mind of Shūji Terayama, whose groundbreaking work spans a few decades and looked at growing up in a way very few artists ever managed to. Perhaps his most beloved film is Pastoral: To Die in the Country (Japanese: 田園に死す), a deeply sentimental but also highly amusing dark comedy that serves to be a fascinating journey into childhood, and an almost unsettling surreal exploration of broad themes that are by no means uncommon in fiction, but are repurposed to be almost uncanny in how they’re presented to us, familiar yet detached from reality. Featuring the same outrageous absurdity that has come to be associated with Japanese surrealism, but also retaining the immense heart and incredible intelligence to tell a compelling and beautiful story about youth and the intersections between the past and the present, Pastoral: To Die in the Country is an undersung masterpiece, a deliriously strange but unquestionably meaningful depiction of memory and the revisiting of the past as a way of informing the present, and shaping the future, and one of the most gorgeous films of its era.’ — The PostModern Pelican
the entire film
Behind the Scenes – Rare Footage
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Laura (1974)
‘Three showgirls playfully mock the audience for attending a projection of an art film.’ — IMDb
the entire film
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Butterfly (1974)
‘Rainbow auras surround an orgy of sensual pleasures, esp. food and sex, as figures seem to watch in silhouette before the screen, and all intensifies as bondage, cannibalism, and lepidopterism invade the screen. It’s as much about transformation as perception, about masks and filters as about desires and instincts. it is intentionally transgressive, seeking to break through your barriers, unifying its two major themes.’ — Sally Jane Black
the entire film
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The Labyrinth Tale (1975)
‘Two men carry a portal door which leads to different realms.’ — IMDb
the entire film
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A Tale of Smallpox (1975)
‘The smallpox virus has created its own unique atmosphere in Terayama’s film where the skin of a bandaged adolescent and the surface of the filmic image are subjected to a bizarre ‘disturbance’ as snails cross the screen and nails are hammered into the skull of the ailing patient. Illness in this film is as much a psychic entity as a physical one and manifests itself in an array of theatrical tableaux from grotesque women rigorously brushing their teeth to a snooker game where the players in white face makeup behave like automata. A Tale of Smallpox uses a medical theme to chart the traumatic dream life of Terayama’s times, evincing deep-rooted concerns in the Japanese national psyche that hark back to the upheaval of Meiji modernisation and the devastation of World War Two.’ — Nowness Asia
Excerpt
the entire film
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Trial (1975)
‘Terayama’s vision of Kafka’s story is a thorough dive into his typical object/signifier heavy psycho-sexual surrealism. The meaning of ‘the nail’ motif remains ambiguous throughout; endless hammering, a phallic presence, violent penetration, political insurrection. What’s most interesting is how Terayama takes this object and uses it to reclaim cinema’s visceral connection to physicality in the most radical way. The audience proceeds on to the stage and hammers nails into the projectors screen.’ — Stanley Luk
Excerpt
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The Eraser (1977)
‘Saturated with dreamy images of lapping Pacific waves, “The Eraser” is a characteristically poetic portrayal of a vague relationship between a woman and a naval officer. Photographs are torn and sewn together in this puzzling slice of cinematic poetry.’ — Sleek Mag
the entire film
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The Woman with Two Heads (1977)
‘Much like the shadows Terayama employs to achieve filmic and psychic effects, the film’s underlying meaning is perpetually out of reach—it oscillates from childhood innocence to the throes of sexual passion.’ — MUBI
the entire film
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The Boxer (1977)
‘If you’ve ever seen a boxing movie or any sports film in general for that matter, you’re likely to be familiar with the narrative presented in “The Boxer”. After a surprising yet somewhat consequence-less opening, the film soon settles into the typical ‘jaded ex-pro takes angry young fighter under his wing’ plot. Familiarity with such a story is likely due to the slew of similarly framed sports stories put to the silver screen in more recent years. Still, Terayama’s film does little to distinguish itself, even when given the benefit of the doubt.’ — Tom Wilmot
Trailer
the entire film
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The Reading Machine (1977)
‘In The Reading Machine, Terayama puts the distance between the projector and the screen in place of the distance between the eyes and the book in order to experiment the concept of “reading.”’ — MUBI
the entire film
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Les Chants de Maldoror (1977)
‘A “reading film” of delirious image and text, Les chants de Maldoror takes its title and inspiration from Comte de Lautréamont’s 1869 proto-Surrealist poetic novel which, for instance, describes beauty as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table. In the novel’s six cantos, a young misanthrope indulges in depraved and destructive acts. Unexpected encounters abound, with turtles and birds joining Terayama’s regular cast of snails and dogs to wander over books and bare torsos. Feverish video processing posterizes, inverts and overlays images that are further colored by sound—pushing the limits of his literary adaptation. Terayama wrote that the only tombstone he wanted was his words, but, as Les chants de Maldoror demonstrates, words need not be confined to carved monuments or bound hardcopies.’ — Letterboxd
the entire film
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Nuhikun – directions to servants (1978)
‘I hate to keep calling Terayama’s work “intense,” but I don’t have any other vocabulary for it. The physical, sexual, and emotional content of these films/performances is defined by the force with which they are projected from the performers, from the relentless devastation done to usual tropes, methods, conventions, to the way film is supposed to be. This is just footage from a play, an experimental play, edited together, and it still conveys all of that, that distinct journey beyond the box of “cinema” or “theatre” into performance art that renders ideas as something from the gut, something from the genitals, something from the hind brain, something akin to madness or dream or loose, broken memory. It is the origins of narrative rendered here.’ — Sally Jane Black
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Grass Labyrinth (1979)
‘A near-masterpiece from the legendary Japanese avant-garde artist Shuji Terayama, 40 minutes long and originally included in a French movie package Private Collections, the other two films of which were directed by Walerian Borowczyk and Just Jaeckin. Grass Labyrinth, apart from featuring cult comedy director Juzo Itami in a small role, is also blessed with J. A. Saezer’s lullabyish soundtrack which sometimes also consists of heartbeats played along with a recording of someone breathing.’ — mevmijaumau
the entire film
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Fruits of Passion (1981)
‘I was tempted to have my write-up be nothing more than “you see Klaus Kinski’s balls in this”, but that would be doing this movie an immense disservice, because Fruits of Passion really is some next level awesome shit. It was directed by experimental filmmaker/avant-garde poet/photographer Shūji Terayama and was written as a sequel to Histoire d’O by Anne Desclos (aka Pauline Réage). It is quite a salacious movie but everything is shown in such a wonderfully compelling way. Seriously, this looks absolutely stunning, with many a colourful and surreal sequence. It also contains some raw and *cough* unsimulated performances by Kinski, Isabelle Illiers and Arielle Dombasle (of Pauline at the Beach fame). In other words, it has got plenty of things going for it.’ — Lou (rhymes with wow!)
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100 Years Of Solitude (1981)
‘The poet, filmmaker and theater director Shuji Terayama adapted One Hundred Years of Solitude for the big screen. But his version failed to convince García Márquez, who did not allow him to use the book’s title for the film’s commercial release. The movie was re-edited and screened at the Cannes Festival in 1985 as a posthumous work of Terayama, with the title Saraba no Hakobune, or Farewell to the Ark. Like Ikezawa’s universe, Terayama’s Macondo is infused with Japanese folk culture as it depicts García-Márquez-ian situations: the disappearance of all the town’s clocks, notes stuck on objects to identify them, or a woman punished with a chastity belt shaped like a crab.’ — Gonzalo Robledo
the entire film
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Shûji Terayama & Shuntarô Tanikawa Video Letter (1983)
‘This remarkable compilation follows an exchange of video letters that took place between Shuji Terayama and Shuntaro Tanikawa in the months immediately preceding Terayama’s death. It can be thought of as a home video produced by two preeminent poets and inter-laid with highly abstract philosophizing, slightly aberrant behavior and occasionally flamboyant visuals.’ — helge79
the entire film
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Farewell to the Ark (1984)
‘Shuji Terayama’s final film, Saraba Hakobune, or Farewell to the Ark, was released in 1984, shortly after his death from illness at the age of 47. Amongst all his films it had the largest budget and the highest production values. In the cast are well-known actors such as Yoshio Harada and Tsutomu Yamazaki, later to star in Juzo Itami’s Tanpopo and Yojiro Takita’s Oscar-winning Departures.
‘Although replete with Terayama’s usual hallucinatory imagery and surreal characters, the film is less autobiographical that his 1970s work and is set on a fictional Okinawan island, rather than his northern home territory of Aomori. There is even a plot of sorts, revolving around a quarrel amongst different branches of the family that owns the only clock in the isolated village, all the others having been stolen and destroyed.’ — Peter Tasker
Trailer
Excerpt
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p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! We should learn how to do that tuck & roll move to use when falling that I guess they teach in the military or something. Unless you already know it, I shouldn’t presume. Love had a good day with you, good, good boy. Ha, I guess love needs to learn how to be loved. Love pinning the tail on the donkey, G. ** _Black_Acrylic, Ah, the world is in balance again. That link didn’t work for some reason, but I can go find an edition of ‘Crash’ with a car painting on the cover easily enough. Whoa, Play Therapy returns at long, long last! You know I was quite the addicted fanboy of said audio venture of yours, so that is enormous news. Hooray! Space is being watched. ** kier, Kier, you genius, my old pal! It’s so good to see you! It’s been fucking ages, and I’ve been wondering how you are. So how are you? Or, to use your lexicon, how’s tricks? My tricks are mostly quite good. Come visit Paris again or at least France! Big love, me. ** Jack Skelley, Jack Your Booty — Thank you most passionately for the retroactive Mexican meal. I haven’t heard from that Vanity Fair writer yet, but he knows where I am if he needs me. So you’ll be pretty involved in the FOKA stage adaptation? Going to rehearsals and stuff? Sounds like such fun. Long time no see, Broderick, from your old friend Jack Webb. ** Corey Heiferman, Someone drove a tractor trailer under a low bridge right in front of my car once. Surely sucked, but it sounded amazing. I don’t know Philadelphia well at all, but the one must-see I can recommend is the Mutter Museum. It’s great. Everyone, Is anyone reading this familiar enough with Philadelphia to recommend some things to see there to Corey on his upcoming trip to said location? If so, please share, thanks. That mall documentary intrigues on a number of levels. How was it? ** Tosh Berman, Hi, Tosh. Yes, I saw the terrible news about David J. Skal yesterday afternoon. I never read him, but I knew of his work and have always meant to read him. Terrible. I’m going to start reading him belatedly but at last. ** ellie, Hi, ellie. Ah, November, so you’ll be age stabilised for a while. That’s interesting about not feeling born. I sometimes feel like I’m being born every time I wake up. Usually only until I’ve had my first coffee, and then I go, oh, right, this all seems very familiar. My Friday was okay. Met a writer friend I hadn’t met in person before and had a lovely hang out. And my painful leg started feeling slightly less painful. And I walked around on my favorite street in Paris: Rue de Faubourg St. Denis. Have you ever been to Paris? You should visit. After it warms up a little bit. Did you have a momentous weekend, I hope? ** Steve Erickson, Hi. Zac’s out of town this weekend, so no film stuff until Monday when we’ll do the absolutely final detailed edit of the film to ready it for the sound mix that we pray will start a week from then. Your EP is at long last in the air at large! Everyone, Steve Erickson’s new and long awaited EP ‘Bells and Whistles’ is now completely ours to hear and even download with the mere click of these words. Do join me in imbibing. ** Uday, Hi! You’re at UCLA. Are you just using the facilities, or are you a student there? Are you writing something about Sontag? I didn’t know her archives were there. Have you found things that surprised or really helped you? I wish I could get you a copy of that Rimbaud book. It’s possible there might be a copy or two in storage in LA. I could ask my LA roommate to check if you want? Glad the post made for fun. Have a productive and somehow joyous weekend. ** Charalampos, Aw, thanks. I did hit After8, and I did buy books. What did I buy … I bought three books: a tiny Jack Spicer poetry book called ‘A Book of Music’, a reprint of Bernadette Mayer’s ‘Sonnets’, and a quite big book called ‘Bobby Bluejacket: The Tribe, The Joint, The Tulsa Underworld’ by Michael P. Daley that looks very interesting. Good morning from France’s most famous location. ** Misanthrope, Wow. crazy, three trips. Do it, man. Life is short. Take it from me. Enjoy your new TV. Anything special about it? I’ll try to find entertainment galore in my weekend if it ponies that up. ** alex, Yeah, she’s famously a ballbuster. That’s why none of the Bresson DVDs have any extras or behind-the-scenes stuff or anything. She’s why no one can see his paintings. Etc, etc. We’ll see. She’s pretty old. Yow, about your accident. In the 90s I was driving along and got smashed into head on, completely demolishing the car without harming me or my passenger. And it was my mom’s very expensive Mercedes Benz that I had borrowed for an afternoon because my car was in the shop. And, oh, boy, she was not a friendly mother for quite some time after that. ** Nasir, Hi. Fantastic about the breakthrough. No, so sorry, I haven’t read the piece yet. I’m so way behind on everything these days, it’s terrible. I’ll pin it to my ‘priority attend’ space, which I do actually have and need. Scary medical terms: scary. Smelvins … maybe there’s a Melvins tribute band called that. Rock your weekend accordingly, pal. ** Bernard Welt, Hi, B. Oh, shit, I didn’t know, of course, that you knew David Skjal. I’m so sorry. Painful to know. Like I said, I’m going to finally read him. Long intended. Similar-ish situation, crash-wise, with me, as described slightly above. Hugs, maestro. ** seb 🦠, Hi. When I was a kid, I had a friend whose dad had one of those massive, interconnected, transparent city-like aquariums in their living room where the fish could live gigantic, well traveled lives. It looked cool, but I hung out there a lot, and I was never there when the dad wasn’t in the middle of cleaning the tanks or feeding the fish or something. I guess he liked doing that? I just restored an upcoming post about Gerard de Nerval who had a pet lobster that he would take out for walks on the Paris streets, so maybe that would be an option? I hope your Sunday plan pans out unless bed seems highly preferable at the time. I guess the trick with godspeed is where it speeds one. But I guess it’s like a superpower that can be utilised however one wishes. And I guess the ‘god’ part is because nothing is supposedly better than ‘god’ albeit with a capital ‘G’ which I can’t bring myself to use. I don’t know what I’m saying. ** Matt N., I’m going to get that book for sure. I’m already looking for it. Yeah, symbolism, urgh, but still. Awesome about the new film! Have you got your crew and whatever cast and all of that in place yet? I miss shooting ours. I hate how long it takes to get to the point where you can shoot the film. Is it an especially nice beach? I hope your brother’s okay, haha, and thanks for intersecting my stuff with him. I have not read that Bernanos, no. You recommend it? I think I’ve only read the Bresson-related ones. Have a beachy weekend with, I don’t know, big waves and I guess lots of sunblock? ** 2Moody, The 15th, hold on … oh right. Yeah, but juvenile is also a positive term, or to me at least. That word has a bad rep, but, when you think about it, technically, juvenile speaks of a beautiful rebellious innocence or something. I don’t know. I’m rambling, sorry. Pixel art, cool, I think I know what you mean. There’s one almost really good Mexican restaurant here, but it’s kind of far away. Noted about Stockholm. I had the best ramen I have eaten in my entire life in Stockholm. I can’t remember the restaurant’s name though. If you’re ever going there and want ramen, I’m sure I could figure it out. I think you’re probably right about the contemp. equivalent of the prank landline call. The days when you could call your parents from some scary drug den or out of state or wherever and tell them you were at your cousin’s house and they had no way to prove you wrong … I do think think that’s one downside to progress right there. Fine weekend, you! ** Okay. I realised recently that I had never done a Day about the great Terayama Shuji, and so I did, and that’s your local weekend. See you on Monday.
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