cutriver

Last night, in the cinema, I watched Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter and... Spring, a Korean film about a wise old monk who lives in a hut in the middle of a lake with his young apprentice. It's minimal to say the least, but it contains two or three images that are so powerful and unforgettable that each one is worth a thousand lesser movies: the boy apprentice ties stones to a fish, a frog and a snake and laughs at them, until the master ties a stone to his back to teach him a lesson; the apprentice, and later the master, place paper over their, nose, mouth and ears reading 'SHUT'; the master writes out the characters of a sutra on the deck of his hut, using a cat's tail as a paintbrush, before making the apprentice carve out all of the characters with a knife; a woman conceals the whole of her face beneath a scarf, for reasons we never discover... Comme quoi, two or three images are all you really need... (and the fact that none of these images probably work on the page only demonstrates their status as images first and only.)

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Today I:
- watched Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (Fritz Lang, 1956)
- did a little payday shopping: Sonic Youth: Sonic Nurse; Wilco: A Ghost is Born; Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse
- attended a talk for prospective new students, and allowed someone's mother to flirt with me
- took tea with HD
- sent an e-mail to BL inviting her to come out with me on Friday night and see what happens under the full moon
- watched The Portrait of a Lady (Jane Campion, 1996)
- and, uh, that's about it!