Fiction

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Suck a Donkey: the libel of Don Quixote (OR Where is the rhubarb?)

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Mladen Dolar, one of the Slovenian philosophers I enjoy reading from time to time, published a short work called  Rumors  (2025), navigating from the destructive nature of libel to the liberating function of gossip. Among the authors sampled to explicate his theory are Shakespeare and Cervantes, who some say were the same person(s). Dolar, however, never touches on this rumor, nor the one about William Shakespeare being Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (with Francis Bacon—more on this later). The latter is in fact no longer a full-fledged rumor, and has emerged into the realm of truth through the work of the late Alexander Waugh and the De Vere Society, United Kingdom, and the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship, United States. I recently used their work to help riddle the gist of David Foster Wallace’s  Infinite Jest  (1996), a 1000+ page cryptology game inspired by Charlton Ogburn’s tome  The Mysterious William Shakespeare: The Myth and the Reality  (1984). ...
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The film festival

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Werner Herzog recommends in his MasterClass not submitting to film festivals -- unless of course you are Werner Herzog and the festival is Sundance or TIFF. The same advice might be applied to volunteering for film festivals, but yet again, it depends upon the experience of the individual. In 2020, I was able to help out and document the one installment of the BonDance International Film Festival, held at a ninja village park in a resort town near Nagasaki. The theater in which the films were shown was unique and cozy with its lanterns, tatami floor and sofa seating; however, the park goers, mainly parents and their children, had planned a day of amusement outside, not sitting indoors watching films. In 2021, I was asked to be a judge for the newly formed Golden Harvest Film Festival , Tokyo. Eager to put my film knowledge to work, I agreed. Some of the documentaries that I voted up were Le Film Intiatique and The DS King . Some fictional films I liked were False Teeth , nominated fo...
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Jajji!

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Generation after generation is enamored of being in the movies. My mother’s father often recounted how as a U.S. Marine munitions expert at Camp Pendleton, California, he set up the beach-scene explosions for Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), seen at the end of this trailer in which he is off camera pushing buttons. My first chance came as an extra in ジャッジ! (pronounced “jajji,” meaning “judge”), in which I screwed up a shot by walking between the camera and the actors Satoshi Tsumabuki and Keiko Kitagawa. As I participated in the closing scenes with an eclectic mix of foreigners who had been bussed from Tokyo to the set at a desolate seaside resort on the Boso Peninsula, it all seemed an ill-conceived cheering-up centered around the promotion of a fish product following the Fukushima nuclear disaster, and 2011 earthquake strangely referred to as “3/11.” The main character (Tsumabuki) wins an ad competition under the paternal-like assurances of a U.S. contest judge played by Jam...
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