CULTURE

Hayao Miyazaki redefines the art of animation

By Joe Knowles

Oct. 25— With a little help from a rotund forest spirit, a teen-age witch, and the odd flying pig, Hayao Miyazaki has spent a lifetime redefining animation and the possibilities of cinema for children. But after his 1997 eco-fable Princess Mononoke smashed box-office records in Japan, he indicated that perhaps it was time to step aside.

“I wanted to retire,” Miyazaki, 62, explained to Roger Ebert. “I opened all the drawers in my head; they were all empty. So I realized I had to make a movie just for 10-year-olds, and Spirited Away is my answer.”
That this ostensibly kids -- only picture went on to top Mononoke and become Japan’s biggest blockbuster in history may suggest that Miyazaki was being unduly modest with Ebert — or, perhaps, that General MacArthur wasn’t so far off the mark when he infamously described the country he occupied as a “nation of 12-year-olds.” Certainly, a variation of this patronizing attitude — a belief that American adults are too sophisticated to watch “just a cartoon” — has kept Miyazaki’s luminous art relatively obscure on this side of the Pacific.

But here, the problem is not just that animation is considered the exclusive domain of kids. The problem, more precisely, is that animation is dismissed because of its association with children. In this way, we dismiss not just an art form but the intellectual needs of children as well. Not surprisingly, the average Hollywood kidflick is a dreary studio exercise in cross-promotional synergy.
Spirited Away, on the contrary, is proof of the great cinema that is possible when somebody takes the wild mind of a 10-year-old seriously. For on one level, the film really is intended just for children: It lacks the unified simplicity of earlier Miyazaki classics like My Neighbor Totoro or Kiki’s Delivery Service, which a grown-up, literary sensibility can easily appreciate. In Spirited Away, the sheer density of fantastic imagery — all of it meticulously hand-drawn — can be both breathtaking and baffling to the over-12 set. The most bizarrely untethered creation of Miyazaki’s career, the story of young Chihiro’s picaresque journey through a supernatural underworld very quickly spins beyond the point of no return.

After tumbling down the rabbit hole, you’re pretty much on your own to make heads or tails of the principal setting, a bathhouse whose clients include a massively polluted river-deity and an enormous “radish spirit.” The bathhouse is run with an iron fist by one Yubaba, a mean old witch (who nonetheless does have her good points). That Chihiro becomes a kind of indentured servant in this place thanks to her profligate parents — Yubaba turns them into pigs after they noisily and grotesquely devour some food left out for the gods — is a detail surely not lost on the film’s Japanese audiences, who for a decade have lived with the economic consequences of an earlier generation’s extravagance. The spirit world teems with the lost souls of capitalism, harrowingly glimpsed at dusk as Chihiro frantically searches for her parents. (Banned from the bathhouse, these “No-Face” gluttons are unable to responsibly handle such luxury.)

The malevolence of the spirit world’s reaction to Chihiro is a far cry from the gentler, agrarian world of My Neighbor Totoro (1988), where the titular forest spirit amiably grunts and gestures his acceptance of the human children who seek his help. But in Miyazaki’s quasi-animist universe, flora and fauna aren’t jauntily anthropomorphized à la Disney, they simply are, and humans must coexist with them. This is not always a Totoro-like warm and fuzzy proposition: In Princess Mononoke, where people have done some very awful things, it means contending with the wrathful denizens of the endangered Forest of the Deer God. In Spirited Away, there are consequences for dumping trash into rivers — or filling them in outright to service urban sprawl.

Both Mononoke and Spirited Away can be at times disturbing — but so too is the episodic terror of the original Alice in Wonderland, from which Alice nonetheless emerges a more enlightened young woman. What makes Miyazaki’s movies great, and so eminently suitable for children, is the manner in which these films arrive at their endings, which are indeed quite happy. In Princess Mononoke, the humans’ iron foundry may be rapaciously destructive to the forest, but Lady Eboshi — its fiercely feminist leader—employs women, lepers and other castoffs accorded no other place in medieval Japanese society. The villainy is not so cut and dry. It falls on an indigenous human prince — whose people are as endangered as the forest — to find a way to draw the two sides into constructive and meaningful cooperation. In Spirited Away, Chihiro likewise learns to recognize the legitimate claims of competing interests, which directly helps her own quest to save her parents from porcine oblivion.

There is a mature morality on colorful and humor-filled display here, one that stands in pointed contrast to the childish fantasies of tit-for-tat vengeance at the heart of too much cinema — and political discourse — pitched to adults and children alike. In the present climate, America would be well served by a wide distribution of Porco Rosso (1992), a Miyazaki gem rarely seen over here. A fond homage to the roughneck culture of early aviation, the film is also, along the way, a gently rigorous parable of creeping authoritarianism.

The eponymous hero, a flying-ace mercenary pig, patrols the Italian Mediterranean between the world wars. When one of his old human chums from the Air Force tries to convince him to rejoin the military, Porco snorts, “Better a pig than a fascist.” Thuggish air pirates, led by an opportunistic Hollywood actor, join up with the Blackshirts, and Porco becomes an enemy of the state. Like much of Miyazaki’s work, you cannot quite believe you’re watching an animated children’s picture.

The good news is that we might actually soon get a fair chance to see Porco Rosso and other movies from the formidable canon of Studio Ghibli, the animation house Miyazaki cofounded in 1985 with fellow director Isao Takahata. This is because Spirited Away appears to be a Ghibli first: something of a bona fide theatrical hit in America, steadily but remarkably accumulating a following in its second month of a modest stateside release. Disney, stung by the flop of its poorly dubbed version of Princess Mononoke, cautiously floated Spirited Away to 26 theaters in September. Now that number is up to 151, and the film is gamely holding its own on a crowded playing field. (Red Dragon, for example, hogged 3,363 screens on its opening weekend.)

Undoubtedly, this momentum has a lot to do with Pixar’s John Lasseter, a longtime Studio Ghibli devotee, who handled the film for Disney and treated it with uncommon reverence from the beginning, supervising an excellent English dub that puts to shame the Miramax-conceived maiming of Mononoke. Disney, much to its credit, has even taken the unprecedented step of also distributing Spirited Away in English-subtitled Japanese prints, for those who prefer to view the original.

Let it be a lesson for the studios: Treat a master filmmaker with respect, and reap the rewards. More to the point: Treat a child with respect, and discover a whole new world.

Source: In These Times
Image courtesy In These Times

Slut Liberation:
An interview with sex publisher Janet Hardy

By Sachie Godwin

Janet Hardy, founder of Greenery Press and a prolific author, might not be a household name. Her titles include Sex Disasters and How to Survive Them, The Topping Book (Getting Good at Being Bad), and When Someone You Love is Kinky — not to mention quite a few others.

Janet Hardy, author of
The Ethical Slut.

One of Janet’s most acclaimed books is The Ethical Slut, co-authored with Dossie Easton, using the pen name Catherine Liszt. The Ethical Slut is about how to be a responsible and respectful lover — no matter what type of relationship you are in. Unlike recent books such as The 50 Mile Rule by Judith Brandt, which advocates deceitfulness, upholds gender stereotypes, and blames “cheating” on the male need to procreate, The Ethical Slut supports non-traditional relationships that embody love, respect, and mutual growth. The Ethical Slut, like many of Janet’s books, is non-judgmental and supportive with practical tips, examples from the authors’ own lives, and comprehensive subject coverage. The writing is compelling and engaging, and can help you build trust, respect, and happiness in any relationship.

Janet is profiled here as a pioneer of radical relationships. Much of what is printed in Clamor involves individuals who are defining their own needs and lives — people like Janet remind us that we need to examine our personal relationships as well as well as our political and social lives.

Clamor: How did you start in writing about sex issues? Could you share some of the experiences you have had that led you to question sexual norms and relationship models (i.e. tell us a little about yourself)?

Janet: I spent the first part of my adult life living a very conventional sexual life — heterosexual, monogamous, married, with two children. As I neared 30, though, I began to feel that the life I’d chosen wasn’t enough — and wasn’t, in fact, even very consciously chosen. I’d simply assumed that marriage was what happened when you fell in love with someone.

At the same time, my interest in BDSM (bondage, discipline, and sado-masochism) — an interest that my husband didn’t share — was burgeoning. We spent several years trying to find a way of being together that would accommodate my need for exploration and his need for security, and couldn’t. We divorced but remain good friends. Our boys are now adults, but when they were younger we shared custody, even over the 90-mile distance between his home and mine.

I think I’ve always been a questioner of norms, though. I remember shocking my friends in eighth grade by telling them I thought people should live together before they got married. (This was in 1968 or so, in a conservative suburban community.) The group of friends I was closest to in high school have all turned out to be gay, bi, kinky, and/or transgendered, although few of us knew it at the time — but there was just this sense of some other way of relating that might work better for us than the one we’d been taught.

Why do you think it is important to question these norms and models and how do you think this relates to political activism?

It’s only by questioning the norms that we enable people to speak freely about their own experiences and desires. The more who speak, the lighter the burden of shame becomes. People who are ashamed tend to hide — and people who are hiding cannot demand their rights of free speech and privacy.

You co-authored a book a few years ago called The Ethical Slut, could you give a brief overview for readers that might not be familiar with it?

The Ethical Slut is an exploration of what sex and relationships look like when you remove the paradigm of ownership — the belief that loving someone gives us a right to control their behavior. We explore a lot of different ways of relating: celibacy, monogamy, long-term multi-partner relationships, primary/secondary type relationships, fuck buddy circles, casual sex, group sex, and a bunch more I’ve probably left out.

We try to give real-world, workable solutions for the actual issues that come up in such relationships — negotiations, communications, logistics, jealousy, raising kids, dealing with the outside world, etc.

Why did you choose the word slut to reclaim and how would you define who an ethical slut is and why do you think they are important to society?

Actually, my co-author Dossie Easton gets the credit for the reclamation of slut – she’s been working on it since the early ‘60s. Slut has been used for many years as a way to shame women out of their sexuality. We think sluts are adults of any gender or orientation who love sex and welcome it into their lives in whatever form feels best to them.

An ethical slut is a person who adds to that belief a commitment to honesty and to respecting and taking care of their partner(s). It’s that simple.

In The Ethical Slut, you put forth the notion that one lover does not have to fulfill all your desires. Most people would agree with this statement on one level (i.e., you can’t get all your emotional or social needs met from one person) but would have trouble accepting it on a sexual level. Why do you think that is?

Well, historically, of course, there’s the whole idea of a man needing to know that he’s the father of his children and thus controlling his wife’s sexuality.

But more than that, sex is a very powerful thing. I think some of the mystique we’ve built up around sex has its roots in that power — the ability to cement relationships, to open barriers, to achieve altered states. That’s strong stuff!

Unfortunately, in our culture, we have no models for love or sexual attraction except the monogamous one. It’s taken for granted (assuming you’re heterosexual) that when you fall in love with a suitable person, you’ll marry him or her, probably have kids, share property, and so on. Sexual contact is presumed to be a part of that process. So when someone hears that their spouse is having sex with someone else, their first fear is often that the spouse will leave with the new person. It’s a big adjustment to view intimacy and sex as an end in themselves, not as an audition for marriage.

Many activists challenge the rules and priorities handed down in our society; however, when it comes to relationships, far fewer question the monogamous model, including those who are not heterosexual. Why do you think challenging sexual norms is often the final frontier?

Oh, I don’t think it’s the final frontier; I don’t expect (or want) to live to see the final frontier, whatever it may be. However, monogamy is so deeply ingrained in our culture that it may never occur to people to question it, at least not seriously. We didn’t watch Ozzie & Harriet & Mary when we were kids, most of us grew up in at least outwardly monogamous households, almost everything we’ve seen and read is monogamy-based. It’s like the ground we stand on or the air we breathe; nobody thinks to question it.

Many people would say that a relationship including a primary couple and an outside lover will result in disaster. How would you challenge that notion? Could you talk a little about tribe vs. alienation?

Well, I could introduce such people to many, many, many successful arrangements of this type who would argue heartily against it. I’m personally not wild about the primary/secondary designation so many polyfolk use, but I have been living with my life partner, Jay Wiseman, for nearly 13 years, and each of us has always during that time had at least one outside lover, sometimes more.
People who have never experienced ethical sluthood tend to assume that two people who love the same person must be competing for that person’s attention. In fact, what tends to happen is that affiliations form — you find yourself on the same side as your lover’s lover. And from there sometimes you go on to forming bonds with your lover’s lover’s lovers, and so on. Kinship networks spring up, loose groupings who serve many of the functions of family, who share values around sexuality and relationships.

You recently co-authored the book Sex Disasters with Charles Moser — could you give our readers an idea of what that book is about? What other projects have you worked on since The Ethical Slut? What are you working on now that we can look forward to in the future?

Sex Disasters ... And How To Survive Them is a humorous but accurate look at, well, sex disasters -- everything from an erection that won’t go away through lost condoms, hostile dogs, cops at the front door, and all the other small or large nasties that can happen to people who are having sex. Aside from Dr. Moser’s expertise in medical and sexual matters, we interviewed attorneys, therapists, police officers, locksmiths [1], and a veterinarian [!!]. The book is designed to be read in small chunks — a lot of readers say it’s perfect bathroom reading.

Dossie and I are working on editing the updated revised version of The Topping Book, called (with startling originality) The New Topping Book, which will probably be out in November or thereabouts. After that, we’re hoping to do a book about the role of energy, intuition, and transcendence in BDSM, but that one’s going to take some serious work and thought.

Source: Clamor Magazine (full interview available at www.clamormagazine.org)

The Fire This Time: a trance/audio documentary

By Shawn Gaynor

Bold yellow letters in the liner notes of this album read, “If we let people see that kind of thing, there would never again be any war.” It was a Pentagon spokeswoman’s justification for censorship. And that’s just what The Fire This Time, a double CD set from Hidden Art Recordings, aims to achieve: the unveiling of decades of political deceit leading to a war so horrible that within the first twenty-four hours American and allied planes had dropped more bombs than from 1942-1944.

The first disc of this set is an unavoidably difficult account of the Gulf War, and the history that lead up to it. It begins in 1985 at the height of the Iran-Iraq war. A tape plays of then-Col. Oliver North talking with Iranianbusinessmen in Frankfort.

“One of the things we would like to do is we would like to become actively engaged in ending the war, in such a way that it becomes very evident the real problem to peace in the region is Sadam Hussein and we will have to take care of that.”

Set to ambiant music, an audio documentary unfolds, starting a long, long time ago, when Europeans were living in caves. A great city called Babylon rose between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The message is simple. Iraq, “the enemy” is no barbarian. From that civilization was born the first codes of law and the basis of modern mathematics.

With the fall of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I a cascade of events erupted thoughout the Middle East. Iraq, whose citizens for hundreds of years had lived under Ottoman rule, was colonized by the British. Though they won self government in the 1930’s, the British remained the dominant economic force in the nation. This was the time period when oil was discovered and began to be exported. Foreign interference continued over the decades. Then came the Iran-Iraq war, a bloody battle in which the west backed the Iraqis against the Shah of Iran, and his fundamentalist rule.

The War left Iraq a nation exhausted. Iraq started the war with a $30 billion reserve, free health care, food subsidies, and social services; at the war’s end, it had a debt of $80 billion and massive unemployment. What follows is an incredibly researched account on political manipulation and misinformation on the part of the Untied States that, despite Iraq’s desire for a diplomatic solution before, during, and after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, a war for the purposes of the rich would be waged.

The disc goes on to describe in painful detail the war and its repercussions. How hundreds where boiled alive in water that filled a civilian bomb shelter in Baghdad which was deliberately bombed by the US. How the depleted uranium left scattered about the country caused horrible deformities to babies. How a million and a half people perished in a political swindle — a resource war arranged years before.

The disc is well researched, with a flood of sampled sound bites from talking heads of the day. It provides glimpses into the motives behind the war, and how it was portrayed – sold — to the American public and the world community.

The liner notes are a collection of shocking, provocative quotes, and scathing pictures. “Is there any man, is there any woman, let me say any child here, that does not know that the seed of war in the modern world is industrial and commercial rivalry,” it challenges, quoting President Woodrow Wilson 1919.

This album is clearly bound to become a favorite among pirate radio stations, aiming to educate their audiences about the Gulf War, and the timing of it could not be better as we face the possibility of renewed full scale war with Iraq. It will doubtlessly also serve as an enormous archive of audio samples for DJ’s who want to bring an anti-war message into the mix.

The second disc is exclusively audio. It is generally trance music with traditional Arabic music flowing though trance beats, and in some tracks emerging as a lone oud (an Arabic string instrument). The disc is a compilation of several artists. Soma’s track, Get Behind We, eerily mixes the two genre. Naseer Shamma stands out as the lead Arabic influence, his oud giving a beautiful pause for breath among the electronic beats.

The most haunting, the most painful track on the disc is a vocal mix by Kait Gray, called Nails in the Wall. It is like the howl of a thousand dying souls, and is a grim shadow of the horror of the civilian bomb shelter attack.

This is followed by the real dance song of the album Come to Daddy. Placed perfectly to dance a cathartic dance, to drive the images from the mind, to exhaust yourself and push back the wails of Kait Grey. Recorded by Aphex Twin, and remixed by Black Lung, this track has a hard and driving trance beat that forces bodies to move of their own will.