Hamish Downie’s News Sushi #118: Morsels of News From Japan and Beyond
Hamish keeps serving the best News Sushi!
Hooray! More News Sushi for you to enjoy!
Editor Note:It is Friday and that means it is time for the World Famous, soon to be Intergalactic Famous, News Sushi from our very own, Hamish Downie. Hamish brings us a decidedly different slant on Pop Culture as viewed through the lens of a non-native living in Japan.
Thank you (ありがとうございました) Hamish, for your insights.
こんにちは！Which means “Hello”!
Ahoy matey! This is the column where I’m going to completely ignore the Olympics, like most people in Japan.
Let’s start with two comics from Hiroki and Jason:
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My partner and I just look at pet shops… for now. That said, if we did get an animal, I’d want to get one from a shelter. I can’t imagine
that any pet would or could ever replace my childhood dog, though.
To me, this is summer in Japan:
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Sean Michael Wilson has pages from his new book The Spirt of Japan to show us. It’s mainly a non fiction textbook about the magical element in festivals and rituals and every day life in Japan, but has lovely art:
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What happens
when six people head into the #Idaho
wilderness (heyyy, Idaho Basecamp) for a month to make a feminist
fantasy western horror survival film called SUFFER? Magic. @dosgoatsfilms
@IdahoBaseCamp
pic.twitter.com/HJ8R2dM1d4—
Naomi McDougall Jones (@NaomiMcDougallJ) July
1, 2021
We have an update from Naomi McDougal Jones:
“Hello all! I’ve just returned from a month in the Idaho wilderness where I had the great privilege of collaborating with filmmaking duo Kerry Carlock and Nick Lund-Ulrich on their feminist fantasy survival horror film, Suffer!
Suffer is set in a Medieval-esque fantasy land, terrorized by a rapacious prince who flagrantly kills those who disobey him and chains rebellious women into masks that prevent them from being heard. Against this backdrop, the film’s heroine, Ida, manages to escape from the cart leading her to certain execution when it crashes. Chained, masked, and bleeding from the accident, however, Ida finds herself in a vast and unfamiliar wilderness that she must not only survive, but successfully traverse so that she may use the magic given her to take on the Scarlet Prince and free the people of the realm.
For those of you who saw The Joyful Vampire Tour of America docu-series, you may remember that I first met Kerry and Nick when they generously offered to share their sales and distribution numbers from their first feature film, Armstrong, in Episode 7.
On top of the joy of getting to act again and collaborate with Nick and Kerry, this shoot was extra special because a mere six people (including me) spent a month at Idaho Basecamp making this film on our own: Kerry, Nick, and I, plus our cinematographer April Frame, steadicam operator and wizard Alex Flannery, and producer / actress / and 27-other-jobs-holder-on-this film, Jennifer Sorenson.
For those of you unfamiliar with filmmaking, that is…erm…not that many people to make a feature film. The resulting process was one of the most demanding, but also joyful and creatively fulfilling I have ever experienced.
What an utter thrill it was to get to be with people – to be on set again – after this time of isolation. Every moment was an elixir. Yes, even the weirdest ones…
I cannot wait to share this film with you when it comes out! If you want to receive updates on Suffer as it makes its journey through post-production, you can do so by following Kerry and Nick’s production company Dos Goats on…
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dosgoatsfilms/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dosgoats
Twitter: https://twitter.com/dosgoatsfilms
You can also sign up for their newsletter by texting DOSGOATS to 66866
We have a new press release from “The Container:
Ghost of Copy
松延総司
Soshi Matsunobe
26 July – 11 October, 2021
Matsunobe is presenting at The Container new and older images from his ongoing series Ghost of Copy, in a site-specific installation that makes use of the dark and intimate environment of the exhibition space. The series captures in photography a range of objects and patterns from the artist’s everyday life—his workplace in the agricultural surroundings of Shiga prefecture, his studio, nature, ceramic workshop, and random objects around him. The photographs are manipulated to emphasize, in the artist’s words, “reflection, reversal, and repetition.” The strength of the images, as in Matsunobe’s other projects, is the lack of a hierarchy of motifs and the absence of negative and positive spaces. As in the rest of his practice, his ability to avoid definition and to capture the “in-between” creates images on the cusp of abstraction where positives and negatives coexist peacefully and underscore the traces instead of the objects themselves.
The installation sees some eighty images from Matsunobe’s Ghost of Copy projected onto the back wall of The Container, using a low-tech carousel slide projector. The images seem to sum up Matsunobe’s entire practice, accenting many of the conceptual and aesthetic notions he has been contemplating for over a decade. Withal, the repetitive mechanism of the slide projection helps to contextualize the works and setting in a form akin to a virtual sketchbook that leads the viewers through a transcendent narrative that is as beautiful as philosophical, and as cerebral as physiological.
Due to the continuing COVID-19 pandemic, we will not hold an opening night reception.
I want to spotlight a youtuber who is spotlighting other indie filmmakers, “Low Budget Visions”:
Please give him a follow and check out his videos, and the filmmaker’s he spotlights.
Hot Link of the Week
Remember when movie stars weren’t gym junkies?
Happy
Birthday Harrison Ford, seen here in his home in Los Angeles in 1981
pic.twitter.com/wDk0xYorvk—
Diane Doniol-Valcroze (@ddoniolvalcroze) July
13, 2021
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Thanks again, that’s all for now!!!
Want to support Hamish? Please check out some of his films here:
https://linktr.ee/hamishdownie
「またきんようびね！」
