Cha No Agi & It's not easy being a Luddite

I turned down every opportunity to switch over to "the new blogger.com" (aka google) for the last several months. I wasn't interested in participating in their beta test, and I sure as heck didn't want to switch over now. I am skeptical about the new features (whatever they may be), which I obviously don't need, and fear this is all a big set-up so that they can impose charges for the blogging service down the road. But they finally gave me no choice. So here I am, with a brand-new google account and a whole new login and password to remember (ugh).

Laziness triumphed tonight - I was very tempted to go catch a free concert of the Julliard string quartet at Lincoln Center tonight on the spur of the moment, but luckily I decided it was too chilly, too far, too much bother, etc. Why is this lucky? Because at precisely the time that the concert was to start, I had a co-op meeting. Which I totally forgot. All I can say is, it was a lot easier for my neighbors to find me and drag me off to the meeting from my apartment instead of somehow tracking me down in Lincoln Center. That would have been tough - the ushers won't let anyone in after the performance begins.

Tuesday, I saw "The Taste of Tea", a slow and quiet movie which is also beautiful and sweetly surreal. It simply follows a typical Japanese family out in the countryside, living in a traditional Japanese house with sliding doors. Each family member has a project of sorts that he or she is working on during the course of the movie. For the most part, they pursue their projects separately (as do daughter Sachiko and her older brother Hajime), but sometimes there is overlap, synergy, or at least a shared meal or neighboring sleeping mats. There are a few deaths, and a rebirth.

The critics loved it - as did I - and yet their reviews were misleading. For instance, they say the daughter Sachiko "is being stalked by a gigantic, mute version of herself" (TONY, 2/22/07 at 105) or "is followed around by a giant version of herself, which she thinks she can get rid of if only she can manage to do a back flip on the horizontal bar" (NYT, 2/22/07). Well, yes and no. It is a bit presumptuous to say Sachiko's doppelganger is "mute"; all we can say for sure is that it (like Sachiko herself) doesn't speak during the movie. And this presence is not "following" Sachiko around. That would imply movement along the surface of the earth. The presence just appears to her from time to time, rising out of the ground or over a building. Even more critically, the word "stalked" is wrong because the presence is not sinister, in fact, it appears to be entirely benign. It does not disturb anything in the physical realm (no buildings are crushed, no leaves sway when it appears). The presence does not seem to provoke any alarm or anxiety in Sachiko, and other people do not notice it at all. Sachiko's quest to get rid of her doppelganger appears to be motivated perhaps by a desire for normalcy or a decision that she'd rather not have that distraction in her life. She mentions the apparition to no one.

And Sachiko is actually rather skeptical that doing a back flip will have any effect on the presence -- even though she overhears her uncle telling a story about how his haunting (by a bloody tatooed male presence) suddenly disappeared at the moment he mastered the back flip. Since she knows no other technique to try, she eventually undertakes to learn to do a back flip. She finds the back flip is a very challenging manoeuver, but she is determined and perseveres. (She does not seek assistance from her uncle, who already knows how to do a back flip, so it's slow going.) When she finally masters the simple move around the horizontal bar in an overgrown and abandoned playground beyond a "no trespassing" sign, she has what appears to be practically an out of body experience with a giant sunflower that grows and expands into the entire universe. Oh yes, and her doppelganger disappears.

Her brother's project is romantic in nature: Hajime (a shy freshman boy) is desperately trying to find a way to meet and win the girl he has a crush on - even though he knows he could never dare talk to her. He seems at first to be easily duped and thwarted, yet by the end of the movie, he has started to become friends with her both because of and despite all his best efforts.

This story dynamic (where, in order to accomplish a goal, it is absolutely necessary but not sufficient that a character try his utmost) reminds me of Frodo's quest to destroy the Ring of Power. The Ring could not have been destroyed, had Frodo and Sam not struggled and suffered the entire long journey to Mordor and Mount Doom. By sheer force of will and blind luck, and Sam's unwavering loyalty, Frodo was able to bring himself to the right place: the Crack of Doom. But at journey's end, Frodo could not actually bring himself to take the final step necessary to destroy the Ring. That required an outside force, one last element of luck, albeit luck shaped by right choices.

I don't know if "Hajime" is a common name in Japanese, but it sounds a lot like the word that Sensei Mark used to use for "Begin!" during karate class.