Most Hustle & Desire

A still from one of my first attempts at documentary . The sound and picture leave much to be desired, but I am satisfied with the overall form the piece took while editing and my efforts restoring photographs, like the above. Don Kenny is a comedic study of character – on and off the stage, in front of and behind the mask – of a man who lived it up in the boom of post-war Tokyo, from interviewing Judi Dench to going to bed with Yukio Mishima. The film is also on file at the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival .

Only one question, one test of intelligence remains: Can a computer love? When I think of the communist poet of love, I think of Andrei Platonov, his love of people, his love of language, and his love of machines – his “aspiration to create a better, fairer world.” He wrote only one collection of verse, Blue Depths , but his fiction is more poetic in its imagery and its use of language, “[his] use of letters, archaisms, substandard vocabulary, and even handwriting. Platonov’s experiments in language and his interest in the physical fact of a text gained him an immediate audience.” Chevenger , his quixotic ramble through the heart of Civil War-torn Russia in search of the communist utopia, reminds me of the often ignored stretches of the Midwest from Wisconsin to Nebraska. The novel captures Platonov’s early ideals, embodied in the main character, Sasha Dvanov, who is trained in the operation of locomotives by Zakhar Pavlovich, a man who “so achingly and jealously loved st...

Again once more into the winter night my heart set out roaming this seaside town A pipe on an earthenware oven somewhere rapped Shall I go as cold as I am So be it dilly-dally I shall build a fire in the hearth between her thighs Translated from Seascape by Shinkichi Takahashi