A Date With Lady Kaede

Autumn is closing in, and with it comes evenings snuggled up with the cat to watch movies. I saw Ran the other night. I saw it years ago in the IFC and thought it was great, but for some reason I'd never gotten it out on DVD, although I love historical epics.

I couldn't remember if it was Ran or Throne of Blood that contained one of my Favourite Scenes Ever, in which a scheming woman falls weeping to the feet of a man in order to get him to do something awful and while he looks away, stricken, she takes the opportunity to crush a moth on the floor in the folds of her kimono. Well, it's Ran, and the woman in Lady Kaede.

Aah, Lady Kaede, how could I forget you? Your absolute stillness and grace, your glacial beauty, your pathological hatred of the Ichimonji clan. She really is a great character, the sibilant whip-wheep sound of her silk robes is nearly as terrifying as Asami's 'ichi ichi ichi' in Audition.

But having watched the film with its audio commentaries (Film Studies professor and a mate of Kurosawa's) I find I object to the characterisation of her as a great schemer. Kaede does work towards the destruction of the Ichimonji but she hardly needs to plot their downfall. It is Hidetora who puts events in motion, all it takes for Kaede is to direct those events just a little, vanity, greed and ambition of Hidetora and his sons do the rest for her. Where Kaede's real skill lies is in her ability to exploit her moment. When Jiro plots the death of his brother with his vassals they laugh at the easy pickings until Jiro says 'His wife, the Lady Kaede, is a different matter' and then they all go silent.

A different matter indeed.

One of these things is not like the others

So as I'm waking up yesterday morning, there's a hockey report on the radio.
Hockey news this week has been quite interesting, not that I know anything about it, but as far as I can tell money is being thrown about like confetti. This report is about one of the latest hot signings. Don't ask me to remember his name, we'll call him 'Bob'. In any case this post isn't about him really, it's about the journalist who did a feature on him.

"Before Bob joined the NHL he did something that he doesn't really talk about with his teamates, but he credits it with making him a man."

Blimey, I think, it's a bit early for this sort of thing isn't it?

But it turns out that Bob, who sounds like a nice young man, worked for two years in Las Vegas as a Mormon missionary. The interviewer was terribly excited at all the crime and hardship that nice young Bob had witnessed, police shootouts, dead soldiers crunching underfoot as he went from boarded up door to boarded up door, all the while wearing a suit in 98 degree heat.

"His neighbours were prostitutes, strippers, and crack dealers," intoned the journalist.

Hang on, I thought. That's just not right. Prostitution and dealing crack = illegal. Stripping = perfectly legal. It's Niagara's second biggest industry after tourism. It's not a career choice for everyone, but there's nothing wrong with it per se. At the end of the day it's a way to pay the bills, like everythings else. How dare the interviewer lump them all together like that? Lazy journalism, it ticks me off.

And today's commentators on Quebec's 400th anniversary kept saying that the Irish ambassador was speaking 'Gaelic'. No she wasn't, she was speaking Irish. Gaelic refers to football or what they spoke in Scotland.

The Incomparable Mme CKS or What I Will be Doing on my Summer Holidays

One of the irritating things about being an academic is that when summer rolls around you find a lot of people say things like "So, you've got the summer off then?".

And the answer is "No, I will be working bloody hard earning my tenure."

But if I learnt one thing last year it was that you have to make some proper holiday time for yourself where you can leave your home and work offices, not check your email, and avoid your family.

So I'm going to Halifax to visit Queenie in August. People keep telling me that Halifax is a great town, the Dublin of Canada. I'm looking forward to a week of cafe's, vintage clothes stores, gossip, drink, music and maybe even dancing.

I'm so excited I've already got my holiday reading sorted out. I will be bringing Mmm. Chiang Kai-shek's biography and a pulp novel about the Soongs. I'm fascinated by Mme. and her sisters. I'm beginning to consider her something of a role model: intelligent, beautiful, rapacious, and she wears great shoes. Look at the photo. There she is at the Cairo summit in 1943, wearing peep-toes with huge bows. That's style. Shame about the husband, though.