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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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Image of Totoro at the bus stop from www.totoro.org
My Neighbour Totoro (Miyazaki again) is a romantic story about animism that turned all my world weariness to jelly and melted it away (for an hour or so). There are big strange creatures, spirits resembling animals to some degree, that inhabit nature and remain neutral with regards to human concerns. Yet they might relate to us, and occasionally there can be a meeting between person and spirit beast. In this case the spirit is Totoro, a furry sleepy grumbling creature. He stands with the girls at the bus stop and although he is cute he is also scary; his eyes are inhuman and stare with fixed incomprehension at such foreign curiosities as little girls. He rumbles and roars, and when he opens his mouth it is huge enough to swallow a house. He seems to be on the brink of eating somebody most of the time. Eventually a cat bus pulls up. Yes it is a flying cat with many legs, wild eyes, a crazed manic grin and zany, bus-like enthusiasm for freakish careening around. The cat has a furry, enclosed seating area in its back. When it picks someone up it opens a door-shape in its own hide for them to enter.
Totoro gives the girls a packet of seeds and they plant them. They wait and wait for the seeds to grow. One night Totoro and his two little companions (small-sized and smaller-sized versions of Totoro) show up, hopping around by the garden. The girls run out to join them and they do a sort of yogic dance, raising their hands and bowing to the earth. The plants start to grow and all of a sudden a giant bursting tree is boiling up out of the earth. It's momentous and breathtaking. Too much growth -- that scary out-of-control power of nature spirits. But its okay, fun even, a sort of permission to mania and exultation in life. Totoro has a spinning top for flying around. The girls jump onto his chest and hang onto his fur, and up they go into the air. Then they all sit up high high in a tree branch and play little owlish night tunes on their ocarinas. It's beautiful.
Today I was inspired by Mr. Wilson's May Day post to go outside and look at plants. I am fond of plants, and prefer that they live, therefore I've given up trying to grow things myself. Luckily my good friends/neighbours can handle it, so I went over there and hung out in the back yard.
I've been directed to The Memory Hole (Rescuing Knowledge, Freeing Information) by two separate sources today (Tom Moody's blog and Ben Smith Lea's post to IDEAL mailing list). American media is by and large trying to ignore the US Military Intelligence condoned torture of Iraqi prisoners. But the bloggers are on it. The quote below is from The Memory Hole's "some favourite quotes" section.
"The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naive and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who loves his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair."
H.L. Mencken
I've been working on this blog for about 5 months and I am still feeling out the medium. One thing that I love is how fast ideas move by. As someone who thinks slowly, and has trouble being "in the moment" I find the pace here challenging and stimulating. But there are some drawbacks. I don't have time to follow up right away on all the interesting recommendations that get posted in the comments. Later, when I'm ready to go browsing/researching/video_renting, they can be hard to find. So I've made a new page of recommendations. I did this for myself, but realised others might get something out of it too. It's sort of like a links page, but not quite because often there aren't links, and each entry has a referral back to the thread where it appeared on this blog. Now that I've done the back posts, it shouldn't be too hard to maintain. I'm not sure if this is a throw-back reaction I'm having, an old-fashioned desire to hang on to things, or a genuinely useful type of archive. We'll see how it goes, I might abandon the idea if it starts to drag me down. Anyhow. Recommendations from comments on this blog are currently posted here.
Ah spring. Found my very own Erick Swenson artwork embedded in some old leaves in the back alley.
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music by Tom Moody, graphics by Sally McKay
Robot Landscapes is presented as part of digifest 2004: On The Move. It runs May 1 to July 4 in Case Studies at Harbourfront Centre in Toronto. Participants are Wai-Loong Lim, Sally McKay, Jenny San Martin, Jon Sasaki, the teams of Kirsten White and Marc Sullivan, Magda Wojtyra and Marc Ngui, Arek Jackowski and Dorota Gelner, Magic Pony and curator Paola Poletto.