Which OS are You?

posted: 2:54:25 PM  

I saw Ikiru in between snowstorms. This morning brought eight inches of new powder. I went out before my coffee to shovel my walk, entertaing the fantasy that the Sunday New York Times was under the snow.

I went out early Friday to a Great Backyard Bird Count for Cornell, expecting that we'd get dumped on by Sunday morning. Nothing much out of the ordinary, 19 species and a look at one of the Glade's resident raptors. A couple of Ring-Necked Duck (Aythya collaris) diving in the part of Lake Audubon that isn't ice-covered. Surprise! Cornell has added a question—depth of snow cover—to the survey since Thursday.

posted: 2:52:46 PM  

I was a little disappointed by Akira Kurosawa's Ikiru (To Live). It's the story of a postwar Japanese city government functionary who is forced to contemplate the emptiness of his life when he learns of his imminent death by stomach cancer. Takashi Shimura plays the bureaucrat Watanabe, and his melancholic mug is the image of hound-dog glumness as he tries to lose (or find) himself in a binge of drinking and pachinko playing.

There's an effect that Kurosawa uses here (as he does in Ran) that I just love: Watanabe, having just received his medical news, walks the cacaphonous city streets, and the sound track drops out entirely for 20 seconds or so, leaving Watanabe alone with himself. When it abruptly cuts back in, it's a thrilling explosion of sound, of passing lorries and construction noise.

In a touching moment of revelation, our protagonist sees that he can save himself by championing a public works project—draining a waste dump and building a playground—that has been left in a bureaucratic backwater. He devotes the last months of his life to leading the project through the political maze. This passage, told in flashback at his wake, goes on far too long and nearly drowns the movie in preachifying.

And what is it with movies and "Happy Birthday to You"? The song seems to be following me around.

posted: 2:38:09 PM