An Ainu Ceremony

From Jude Isabella's article "From Prejudice to Pride," about the history and current state of the Ainu, in the online Hakai Magazine. "Kamuy" means "god" or "spirit."

When Yahata and her non-Ainu husband purchased a used Suzuki Hustler, they decided to welcome the little blue car with the white top into their lives as a traditional Ainu family would welcome a new tool. They conducted a ceremonial prayer to the car's kamuy. On a cold, snowy December night, Yahata and her husband drove the car to a parking lot, bringing along a metal tub, some sticks of wood, matches, sake, a ceremonial cup, and a prayer stick.

The couple tucked the car into a parking space and made a little fireplace with the metal tub and wood. “Every ceremony needs to have fire,” Ishihara translates. For half an hour, the couple prayed to the car kamuy. They poured sake into an Ainu cup borrowed from the museum and dipped a hand-carved prayer stick into the cup to anoint the car with drops of sake: on the hood, the roof, the back, the dashboard, and each tire.

Their prayer was a simple one: keep them and other passengers safe. Of course, adds Yahata with a smile, they got insurance...

The ceremony was so much fun, Yahata says, that the couple held another when they changed from winter tires to summer tires.

The entire article is also available as a podcast via the link above.

Hard to Find

"In response to the question 'Why do you play such strange chords, Mr. Monk?' he once told a disc jockey, 'Those easy chords are hard to find nowadays.'" — Related by Lewis Lapham in "Monk: The High Priest of Jazz"

Thelonious Sphere Monk was born on this date one hundred years ago. Below is a recording of one of his best-known compositions, "Blue Monk."

Brown study

It's drizzling today as I write these words, but the woods have been dry for weeks, and with the days getting shorter and the temperatures marginally colder there hasn't been much new to see. At the halfway point of a two-hour walk I found these healthy specimens of Ischnoderma resinosum, commonly known as the resinous polypore. I'm told it's edible in the early stages, but I don't forage; I'm happy just to enjoy the rich earth-tones and textures and know that the woods still have a few sights to offer before winter shuts down the show.

To the center

Like many in my generation, I grew up knowing the works of Jules Verne primarily through Hollywood adaptations — mostly bad ones — and comic books. About fifteen years ago, when I read Journey to the Center of The Earth in a well-regarded recent translation, I was underwhelmed. That the geology was implausible was the least of it. The expected dramatic payoff when the travelers finally arrive as close to their destination as they manage to get (they never actually get anywhere near "the center" at all) just didn't seem to pack much of a punch. Reading it now in French, though (my very imperfect French), it seems like a much more considerable book. True, some of it remains very silly. Verne mangles Icelandic names and thinks that a medieval Icelandic manuscript could have been written in a runic alphabet (highly unlikely), and the whole climactic ascent through an erupting volcano is cartoonish and absurd, but on the other hand the trek across Iceland is vivid and evocative, the descent is tautly narrated, and the dreamlike depiction of an immense underground, vaulted sea — illuminated by some obscure electrical phenomenon — is beautiful and psychologically potent. It lacks the epic character of Vingt mille lieues sous les mers, but on the other hand you don't have to struggle through page after page of abstruse 19th-century natural history jargon along the way.

There have been many adaptations and imitations of Verne's underworld tale, and there's something instinctively appealing about the whole idea of burrowing down into the underworld. One version that remains elusive, to English-language readers at least, is Hikaru Okuizumi's The New Journey to the Center of the Earth, published in Japan some fifteen years ago. It is untranslated, but we do have Tatsuro Kiuchi's lovely and mysterious illustrations from the original serialization in the Asahi Shimbun to ponder over.

Millipede

Narceus americanus

Do millipedes dream? This one wasn't moving when I found it draped over a dead twig this morning. Its head (to the left in this picture) was bent down, so maybe it was sleeping off a rough night, or more likely it had a face full of whatever it is that millipedes eat. I took pictures at leisure — there's something to be said for an inert subject — then gave it a gentle prod. It moved off, but in no great hurry.

It appears to be Narceus americanus, the American giant millipede, which lives as long as ten years and can emit a noxious fluid to deter predators.

Elsewhere, I found a gloriously ruby-colored patch of what I believe is hairy pinesap (Hypopitys lanuginosa).

The owls

I was walking on a quiet back street in the next town north. Some twenty feet up in the branches of a great oak that rose up next to the sidewalk I caught sight a family of owls — two parents, and a fledgling — then saw three more owlets sheltered in a hollow at the base of the tree, peering out at me as I approached. That the owls were visible in broad daylight was not as remarkable to me as was the fact that they were sharing their quarters with a comparably-sized family of cats, who played and curled up with the little owlets, tails and wings fluttering and shaking together as I watched, as if nothing could have been more natural.

I hadn't brought my camera with me. I ran home — a distance of some five miles — and when I returned again I took a wrong turn down a parallel street. A Frenchman approached, seeing my camera and indicating his own which he carried around his neck, and asked me a highly technical question regarding photography. As I am essentially an ignoramus in that regard I apologized and said that I couldn't help him, but as compensation I offered to lead him to the tree, where he was sure to find a promising subject for his lens. We walked the few blocks that remained, but when we arrived we learned that the health department had ordered the people who owned the cats to send them away, as their presence was deemed a threat to the vulnerable owls. There was nothing left for the Frenchman and I to do except shake hands and exchange our farewells.

Image by Toshi Yoshida.

The world is inside of nothing

It's funny how the world is inside of nothing. I mean, you have your heart and your soul inside of you. Babies are inside of their mothers. Fish are out there in the water. But the world is inside nothing. I don't know if I like this or not but you better write it down.

I just watched Bertrand Tavernier's 1986 film Round Midnight again for the first time in nearly thirty years. This scene, in which saxophonist Dexter Gordon, playing a fictional jazz legend named Dale Turner, philosophizes while a friend's daughter plays on a French beach, is one of my favorite parts of the movie. It's a bit hokey, of course, but that's show business.

I can readily understand why a black filmmaker like Spike Lee had issues with a film like this, and there's much that could be said regarding its rehearsal of cultural clichés about black men who are in one way or another damaged being sympathetically "minded" by whites, as well as about the portrayal of jazz musicians as oracles rather than as disciplined, skilled professional musicians (see Cortázar's "The Pursuer," which may have been one of the inspirations for this film), but on the other hand this is one of the few fictional feature films from the second half of the twentieth century in which jazz musicians are actually played by jazz musicians rather than by professional actors. In addition to Gordon, who reportedly contributed to the development of the script, the cast includes Herbie Hancock, Bobby Hutcherson, Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter, and other luminaries. The music is splendid (and plentiful), Gordon and co-star François Cluzet are splendid, and you have this scene on the beach, all of which ought to count for something.

Maxine Gordon (Dexter's widow) has written a nice appreciation of the film.