Two more transcriptions for my commonplace book. Notebook Transcription 62 May 10, 2008 - The abdicated emperor whispered three times in the ear of his sister's new infant. "Heaven your father, Earth your mother. Take these ninety-nine pieces (coins) as a sign of long life." - The bell was ringing for the dawn watch - Change is my theme. You gods, whose power has wrought All transformations, aid the poet's thought, And make my song's unbroken sequence flow From earth's... (cont.)

I take notes from my reading in Mead memo pads that I always carry. Here is a reason why I do this, and a transcription of a recent notebook. I will try and post future transcriptions here. (cont.)

It has been too long. Busy with various things, primarily getting into law school. It looks like we are headed to Columbia, though I am staying on the wait list at one school. Very exciting! Also, I was inspired recently to start a list of books I read. It follows after the jump. (cont.)

The United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) counts about 33 million refugees in the world today. There is an even larger multitude saddled with the chillingly bureaucratic title "internally displaced persons." Shocking as those numbers should be, they provide little insight into the heart of the issue. What is a refugee exactly? What does it mean to live as a refugee? What of the pain and sadness, the hopes and dreams of these many millions of human beings? In... (cont.)

There are those who love Tokyo instantly, taken in by the sheer size and peculiar ugly beauty of the place. It is putting it mildly to say I was not among them. I will not bore you with all the petty details of my discontent, nor will I attempt to describe the mortification all that pettiness inspires in me today when one or two of the obnoxious things I once said beginning with “you know, the Japanese…” or else, “the... (cont.)

Eugene Hutz is a difficult man to pin down. He is rarely in the same country, let alone the same city, for more than a few weeks at a time, touring with his band Gogol Bordello across time-zones and cultures on four different continents for most of the year. If there's a reason for the itinerancy of this vigorously mustachioed Ukrainian-born frontman, perhaps it is because his musical vision is inspired by the kind of music that exists in its... (cont.)

For the length of the Occupation of Japan, from defeat in 1945 to the return of sovereignty in 1952, the skies belonged to the Allies. Among the less well-known punitive measures implemented by Gen. Douglas MacArthur and the American GHQ from their roost in the Daiichi Seimei Building in Marunouchi was a complete ban on Japanese civil, and of course military, aviation, as well as airplane research, development and manufacturing of any kind. Though it was just one of a... (cont.)

Where are the wildernesses of lore? The late scholar of curios, W.G. Sebald, wrote wistfully of the high forests of the Dalmatian Coast, the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa where fir trees rose like the spires of cathedrals to heights of over 50 meters. They were all gone by Christ's day. Elsewhere in Europe the old-growth deciduous forests and sprawling wetlands of Germany and Gaul took longer to tame. But tamed they were, to such an extent that a... (cont.)

The sea started to shake up and down as if in a rapid boil. Jaloe steered alongside the Mitra Buana, one of many bigger boats fishing in the water. The captain, Rhaban bin Amad, was Jaloe's friend. "I think there is a ghost in the sea," Jaloe shouted up." "No ghost," the captain replied. "It was an earthquake." Jaloe weighed this. "I think it was a ghost." I see you picking through a field of ruins, strewn with the... (cont.)

The stone faces in the limestone cliffs that rise from the sands of the Western Desert like giant decorated facades of an unfinished temple, have surely never seen the likes of it. Egyptian artist Wael Shawky built a screen atop a mountain of sand on which he projected an animation of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem spiraling like a carousel. American Joy Episalla transformed a wall of stone into a massive wall of ivy filled with chirping birds... (cont.)

“It is poetry, just poetry”, we keep telling them ("sher, sher!" in Arabic), and one angry young slightly cross-eyed young man spits his reply, which is roughly translated for us by a bald Canadian Egyptologist in town for a few days before returning to a dig deep in the desert near the Libyan border, as "no poetry on earth!", said while pointing his finger accusingly at the ground, traced with chalk scribbles. (cont.)

They said in Sparta, "since Alexander wishes to be a god, let him be a god." He climbed up the steep bank of the wadi into the still and growing twilight, with the punctuated ringing of bells in the distance, and thought: Alexander was here. Not so long ago, even. With a handful of men he braved the desert passage (two weeks and five days) and arrived early one morning as if having grown from the sands so that the... (cont.)

History is full of lies, but there's at least one truth you can count on: times of great upheaval and change often lead to, and are on occasion born of, great flowerings of human genius. In case anybody was asleep during that part of history class, all that is needed as a refresher is a trip to the Yamaguchi Prefectural Art Museum in southern Honshu to see a powerful and exhaustive exhibition of the works of the 15th-century Japanese... (cont.)

The Tokyo International Film Festival opened this evening with a bang. There was of course the star-studded red carpet ceremony that saw many of the luminaries of this year's event walking down the long crimson avenue that was laid on Saturday afternoon between Roppongi Hills' soaring office buildings and residential towers. But the explosions that confronted audiences in Clint Eastwood's recreation of the brutal 1945 battle of Iwo Jima proved an equally important part in the launch of what is... (cont.)

If ever there was a story that needed to be told it must certainly be the one of looming planet-wide catastrophe so compellingly and convincingly presented in Al Gore and Davis Guggenheim's "An Inconvenient Truth," which will have its Japanese premier at the 19th Tokyo International Film Festival on October 24. Global Warming is not a new idea, but to hear Gore tell it in his 90 minute presentation of the history, science, politics and future of the phenomena, it... (cont.)

For Americans, it was the day that changed everything. In the five years since September 11, 2001 many have come to question the morality, effectiveness, and direction of the government's response to the bloodiest and boldest attack against the United States on its own soil since Pearl Harbor. But no one can argue that on the morning of Sept. 12 Americans viewed the rest of the world and their position in it the same way they did just 24 hours... (cont.)

The filmmaker Mitsuo Yanagimachi has a problem. "I have no audience," he says, shaking his finger at an interviewer and cracking a wide grin just after a screening of one of his films in Tokyo last month. Though he is widely regarded by knowledgeable critics in Japan and abroad as an immensely talented director, their warm praise has not turned into widespread popular appeal. It's a fact doesn't seem to bother Yanagimachi too much, though it may be one reason... (cont.)

At age 15 in 1945, Shomei Tomatsu was working at an aircraft assembly plant in Nagoya. U.S. B-29s were bombing the industrial city so relentlessly that by the end of World War II, nine out of 10 of its buildings were destroyed -- compared with five out of 10 in Tokyo. Still, just months before the A-bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, Tomatsu paid no heed to the air-raid sirens that called out in the night. Instead of... (cont.)

The departure of director David Elliott from the Mori Art Museum to take over the Istanbul Modern in Turkey is the first major leadership change at Japan's largest privately endowed cultural institution. Though it was not without controversy, Elliott's tenure saw the 3-year-old museum develop into what is arguably Tokyo's most important new forum for contemporary art, and where it goes from here will be left to the incoming director, Elliott's former deputy, Fumio Nanjo. Nanjo, 57, is one of... (cont.)

Most people outside of Japan had never heard of the legendary Japanese Director Yoji Yamada until the release in 2002 of his period drama "Twilight Samurai." The film was an international hit, winning Yamada audiences and accolades across the globe, and an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film along the way. But while Yamada may have been a bolt from the blue for cinema lovers abroad, in Japan he has long been the country's most beloved living filmmaker,... (cont.)

It would have been difficult to find a more dramatic backdrop for last week's press conference announcing that Mori Art Museum's British-born director David Elliott will be leaving after October, and that his second-in-command, Fumio Nanjo, will take over the helm of Japan's largest privately endowed art institution. The conference was scheduled for the late afternoon in a westward-facing conference room near the top of the Mori Tower in Roppongi. As Elliott, Nanjo and Yoshiko Mori, the museum's chairwoman and... (cont.)

The Islamic world is home to one of the richest and most important musical traditions on Earth. It doesn't hurt that it also spans an incredibly vast area, stretching west to Morocco and east as far as Indonesia, and that it contains an intricate tapestry of races, languages and cultures, or that it is an area where just about everything we recognize today as elemental to human civilization first arose. With music, as with so much else, people from the... (cont.)

The Mori Art Museum's director, David Elliott, will leave his post at the end of October to take a position as the new director of the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art in Turkey. The news was announced Wednesday at a press conference at Roppongi Hills, where Elliott spoke of his five years in Tokyo working as the first foreign director of a major museum in Japan, focusing especially on the three years since the Mori's opening in October 2003. Located... (cont.)

You've probably heard of the father of Afrobeat bandmaster and award-winning musician Femi Kuti. And if by chance you haven't, you're missing out on one of Africa's greatest musical legends. Fela Kuti, known by most simply as "Fela," was by turns renowned and notorious for the relentless Afrobeat sound that he blasted out of the combustible urban supernova of Lagos, Nigeria, onto the world stage beginning in late 1960s. The genre he created changed the course of music across the... (cont.)

Of all the program sections in this year's 19th Tokyo International Film Festival "Japanese Eyes" must certainly be numbered among the most compelling, and in terms of the future of the festival and cinema in general in Japan, the most important. A showcase category that offers a unique survey of contemporary films being made in Japan, since its inauguration at the 17th TIFF only two years ago "Eyes" has attracted the attention of visitors from abroad who arrive in Tokyo... (cont.)

Picasso once said, "good artists copy, great artists steal." Of course, it has never been as simple as that. Questions concerning artistic authenticity, honest or dishonest intentions and outright plagiarism have been around ever since societies began to consider artistic expression the unique product of individual artists. The notorious difficulty of determining the veracity of conflicting claims in a highly subjective field might be enough to make an artist who feels they have been defrauded by another pause before pursuing... (cont.)

Much has been written in recent years about the transformation of the Roppongi district of central Tokyo from a seedy neighborhood catering to the late-night pleasures of the city's expatriate community, as well as off-duty soldiers from American military bases, into its leading center for international culture and commerce. The dives that fan out from Roppongi crossing where bouncers, pushers and women offering "messagi" are still to be found plying their respective trades each night are being squeezed now more... (cont.)

Youki Kudoh is a farmer. She also happens to be an internationally acclaimed actress who has accomplished what few Japanese actors or actresses have managed before or since: make it in Hollywood. In particular her staring role in the 1999 film “Snow Falling on Cedars” opposite Ethan Hawke and a scene-stealing performance as the young geisha “Pumpkin” in Rob Marshall’s 2005 blockbuster “Memoirs of a Geisha” have brought her work to a wide international audience and established her as one... (cont.)

Just a few hours north of Tokyo's seemingly endless sprawl is the mountainous region of Echigo-Tsumari in Niigata Prefecture. Like so many other rural parts of northern Japan, it is a rugged, isolated, aging and economically stagnant place where elderly men and women can be found doubled over in terraced rice paddies with their hands in muck as their kind have done for 1,000 years. It could be any number of places in this country, beautiful but overlooked, with a... (cont.)

Time and again Western journalists ask superstar Senegalese pop singer Youssou N'Dour, arguably the most successful African musician in history, the same question: Why, despite selling hundreds of thousands of records in the West and collaborating with artists such as Peter Gabriel, Sting, Wyclef Jean and Paul Simon, do you continue to live in Africa? For an African artist, N'Dour has enjoyed unequaled international popularity over the last two decades, thanks to an inimitable tenor singing voice that flutters effortlessly... (cont.)

When the Persians had marched across the desert, they took up a position close to the Egyptian army, in order to join battle. But then the king’s mercenaries, who were Greeks and Carians, found a way to vent their anger at Phanes for bringing a foreign army into Egypt. Phanes’ sons had been left behind in Egypt, so the mercenaries brought them to the Egyptian camp. They set up a bowl between the two armies, in full view of... (cont.)

Everyone has an idea about "Africa." Pestilence, famine and genocide top many people's lists. Others think of boundless natural wonder and sprawling metropolises bursting with life. But the truth of it is, there is no one "Africa." There are only Africans, and they defy generalization. "It is impossible to comprehend fully what Africa is. Like placing a bet that cannot be won," writes chief curator Simon Njami of "Africa Remix," the largest exhibition of contemporary African art ever assembled, which... (cont.)