dr kumarMy Profile
Presently I live in Kunming, Yunnan Province, The Peoples' Republic of China. Having moved here to find work, I have been a teacher at Yunnan Einsun Software College (enrollment: 5000 students) ever since April of this year. I teach English & mathematics. I am also married to a Chinese woman named Li Zhongli; Li is her last name.
My Favorites
Favorite Directors Richard Attenboro; Bernardo Bertolucci; Federico Fellini; Ingmar Bergman; Clint Eastwood
Favorite Actors Clint Eastwood; Myrle Streep; Mat Damon; Julia Roberts; Gong Li; Charlie Chaplin; Omar Shariff; Lawerence Olivier;
Favorite Films Spartacus, Lolita, Eyes Wide Shut; The Graduate, Easy Rider; Rear Window, Norht by Northwest; High Noon; Mystic River; Alien.
My Posts
Link to my blog at Open Salon
Jan 11, 2009Some of the professional film-makers who glance through here (if ever) may find it eventually profitable to have a glance at this following website: http://open.salon.com/user_blog.php?uid=8050
I've posted a good deal of original work at this site, much of it explicitly copyrighted by a firm based in Scotland, renewable copyrights all with a duration of four years.
"Plain talk" about a possible story for a film is just that: talk. But there are thousands of stories published each year that could conceivably be utilized for a film that would turn out to be not only both entertaining and interesting, but profitable as well. In other words, a film for a mature audience whose composition would include a large percentage of baby-boomers, such as myself.
For example, one such film currently being shown is "Grand Torino." I do not mention this film merely because Clint Eastwood was and remains central to its production; I do not even mention this film because I have seen more than its trailers; but I do mention it for the very good reason that it depicts a truly interesting social situation and makes an important statement about the origins of a certain type of violence which plagues America today.
Donald Gardner Stacy
Open Remarks to Edward Zwick, Film Director
Dec 31, 2008The Peoples of Israel and Palestine
The last major war fought on American soil ended around 1865. Since then, the people of America have been immensely lucky (ignoring, of course, the bombing of Pearl Harbor), up until the first failed bombing of The World Trade Center, followed a few years later by the successful attack perpetrated by the criminal Osama bin Laden.
Right now I am listening to some symphonic music which doubtlessly has also served as the sound-track for a film due to be released in January, DEFIANCE, a film about partisan Jewish resistance against Hitler’s facist soldiers who were bent on first humiliating the Jewish people, then tormenting them, and then finally murdering them on a scale so massive that people back in the United States at first simply could not believe such atrocities could ever take place in “civilized” Europe.
We look back upon the end of the grave world-wide insanity known as World War II mostly as students of History. A few still remain alive who actually endured this war, or even fought in it. But now there is another war proceeding which also involves the Jewish people. This time, however, they are doing so ostensibly to protect themselves from further attacks, attacks mounted by Hamas.
The notion of cause and effect in this type of situation is meaningless, a situation which has persisted to one degree or another ever since the inception of the nation of Israel during the middle of the previous century. Israel is one of the youngest countries in the world today, but its citizens can and do claim a collective history reaching back for thousands of years.
Yet the Palestinians are no different in this single respect. Of course they are much different from the Jews in virtually all other ways which you would care to name. Their culture and language have nearly equal historical depth, but obviously they are quite different in temperament and world-view from their geo-political nextdoor “neighbors.”
These “neighbors” of the Palestinian people have come to enclose them within economic, political, and even physical barricades. On occasion these barricades have taken the form of extensive brick and concrete walls sufficiently high to discourage anyone from using a ladder then merely jumping down to the other side where they would probably be shot in any case.
Presently, the Palestinians are suffering a savage ariel attack being conducted by the Israeli government; their intention is to bomb and bomb, destroy roads and buildings, homes and lives until the Palestinians beg Hamas to never fire another rocket over Israeli soil.
But this ghastly and fearsome form of “diplomacy” can only backfire. The Palestinians will vow, and have already done so, to seek and obtain revenge; and this conflict, which the Israelis claim that they so much in their hearts hope finally and forever ceases, will only perpetuate itself owing to this massive present bloodshed.
Of course it is an exaggeration to say that the members of the Israeli government have lost their humanity. I expect they feel rather desperate right now. But I think that it is quite legitimate to say that these same men and women are now in danger of losing their humanity.
Donald Gardner Stacy
"The Dancing Candle Flame"
Nov 3, 2008The Dancing Candle Flame
A lady whom I’ve never met, a devoted practitioner of Buddhism living just a floor below in an apartment building where I now reside here in Kunming—this woman chants sutras each morning without fail. Several months ago when I first moved into my fiancée’s apartment, I thought this woman left her home each morning and walked down several flights of stairs and then out into the courtyard where she then engaged in her religious devotions; I had made this assumption because I could hear her chanting, seemingly a short distance away, through the opened bedroom window early each morning around half past six., shortly after I would hear a few roosters crow.
Now I know that her bedroom window is open as well, and her voice simply carries upward to the next floor, and beyond.
I came to Kunming to somehow enhance my life which up to the time of my arrival here had been, shall we say, stunted and meager. My fiancée has the most extraordinary eyes, brown naturally, but ever so large and with such an innocent-looking open gaze at times that I nearly swoon merely when we are talking.
Her name is Ling Xiao Mei. Her given name, Xiao Mei, could be translated loosely, I suppose, as “Little Beauty.” And she is small, as well as lovely. I’d estimate that she stands no taller than 4’ 11’’ because I can nearly place my chin on the top of her head; and I stand with shoulders thrust martially back at the precipitous height of 5’ 5’’.
The other day I bought a bottle of wine from a little shop somewhere along Ang Kang Lu, a street which has been completely torn up—asphalt and sidewalk tile, everything—and is now occupied by an armada of excavation machinery and men and women with picks and shovels working alongside great mounds of dirt and chunks of pavement and discarded stone tile. Of course since the label on the bottle was in Chinese, I didn’t know what I was getting; all I knew was that it was a bottle of hong putaojiu, or red grape wine.
The wine turned out to be abysmally sour. I could hardly bear to drink the stuff, and my fiancée would not even consent to smell it. Not wanting to waste money—my mother had been a frugal woman all her life—I hit upon the notion of sweetening the foul liquid up a bit with a few teaspoons of honey.
During the first week that I had been in Kunming, when I was still staying at the Camellia Hotel, I used to set out each day on a leisurely random walk to look at the sights while my fiancée was at work (she teaches mathematics at a middle-school; I’ve only been there by the gate a couple of times to meet her for lunch) and one day I came across a xiao sangdian, a small shop, where many jars of honey were on display. I may have paid as much as a hundred yuan note for that jar, a colorful salmon-colored note with a prominent etching of former Chairman Mao on one side and a large Parthenon-looking building on the flip-side. The Chinese have a considerable problem with counterfeit currency, apparently, and the woman who sold me the honey scrutinized this bill for a moment or two before she added it to the bundle of notes in the pocket of her smock.
I thought my fiancée would be pleased with this gift; instead, she acted as though she had never seen a jar of honey in her life! She displayed a sort of puzzled indifference, in addition to a rather petulant though mild disapproval over my having spent so much money. In fact she reminds me a lot of my own mother in this respect. Well, I took that jar of honey and placed it in Xiao Mei’s well-worn wok, having filled this parabolic-shaped implement nearly full of water. I fired up the gas-burner beneath it on her twin-burner stove and cut the flame back to a simmer. Then I just left the crystallized honey sit there immersed in the middle of the water-filled wok to stew for a while.
I then went into our “computer room” which was once the bedroom of Xiao Mei’s son, a nineteen year-old college freshman who’s taken on the prolonged task of studying for a degree in international trade. We exchange emails occasionally; he gets some practice writing in English this way, and I can always ask him to explain something to his mother if Xiao Mei and I ever happen to be at the slightest odds for any reason.
After trying to drum up a few “professional” connections at www.myspace.com, I suddenly realized that I had not yet retrieved the plastic jar of honey from the steaming wok in which it had been cooking all this time. I hurried into the kitchen and stepped up to the stove and glanced down at my . . . arrangement. The jar was canted to one side a bit and seemed to have shrunk in size. I snatched it out of the water and set it on the crowded surface of a wooden table at the other end of the small kitchen. I’ve got two or three bottles of wine near the back of this table alongside a coffee-maker which Xiao Mei one day had decided to buy and give to me as a gift out of the blue, and Xiao Mei herself has an assortment of plastic storage containers and whatnot.
The honey had surely turned semi-transparent, all the crystallized sugars within it now re-dissolved, long before I had finally fetched it out—but it seemed okay. Now with a long-handled teaspoon I dribble five spoonfuls of this remarkable substance into the wine bottle and then gave its offending contents a thorough shaking. I was then hoping that this introduction of sugar would . . . arouse the fermentation process again, and so I pressed the cork firmly back into the bottle-neck. Several hours later I gave this new concoction of mine a try, and I’ll be damned if it isn’t almost drinkable.
I had first learned about crystals when I was a boy. I was around ten years old at the time and I had fashioned a make-shift lab out of narrow discarded quarter inch planks in the basement of my mother’s house. Some of these weathered-gray planks still had little white pods which a spider or two had left behind, having obeyed their natural compulsion to propagate. My father, who now lived near the university in a rented room, taught organic chemistry and had consented to supply my lab with a suite of strong acids, hydrochloric and sulfuric and nitric acid to be exact. These highly corrosive liquids were contained in small thick-walled glass bottles with glass stoppers—my most prized possessions at the time.
One of the compounds which came with my Gilbert chemistry set was a substance called potassium permanganate, which was in the form a small beautiful dark purple crystal. One day I deviated from the experiments in the lab manual in the hopes of discovering some more interesting reactions. For some reason I poured out a little pile of these purple crystals onto the surface of the workbench, having glanced over at my mother’s dryer which had just chimed the completion of its task, my mother to arrive shortly to fetch out the clothes. I peered at this tiny mound of crystals and somehow then had the inspiration to pour glycerine over the top of it to see what would happen.
And this I did, thinking that my mother was probably busy upstairs and would not come into the laundry-room for a while still. Much to my astonishment, as I watched the glycerine soak into the little heap of crystals, a bubbling soon occurred; and then a faster bubbling, and now some smoke was issuing up from the surface of this mixture, and the reaction sped up and sped up—and then the whole thing caught on fire! This was fantastic! I’d made a remarkable discovery, I was gloating to myself when my mother suddenly appeared.
“Don, just what is it that you think you are doing? And what is that ghastly smell?”
“I didn’t know that this was going to happen,” I said innocently.
“Well, open up the basement door right now to air the place out. Land sake’s alive, boy!”
She was now a single-mother and she had her hands full with both me and my younger brother. The two of us frequently got into scraps as boys will, and she would have to break us up like a referee in a boxing match at times.
She’s dead now, having passed away some time in June at the age of eighty-five. It’s early September now, and I keep thinking how she would have loved to meet Xiao Mei, how she would have loved to watch us get married, and to see that at last I had grown happy.
And even though Xiao Mei and I are happy, we still have our differences of opinion, just as any other couple. When she found out that I’d begun to smoke (again) after I had returned from a trip to San Francisco to obtain a Z-visa from the Chinese consulate there, she of course was not very happy with me and chided me for undermining my health. As a small and probably unrecognized consolation to her I have not smoked inside the apartment; no, I will go out into the stairwell or the louti as its called in Chinese and have my draught of tobacco smoke there.
Sometimes I will do this when I can’t sleep, as is the case right now; and I’ve also taken up the habit of carrying a small candle along with me to make my return from the mid-floor landing less hazardous since the stairwell itself is pitch-dark until daylight. The candle sits on a ceramic pot designed for this very purpose which Xiao Mei found somewhere in the house and has let me use.
So now I sit on the bottom step just above the midway-landing, and I gaze at this candle flame as it dances in the breeze through the regular geometric gaps in the brick wall. I watch it dance, and sometimes I can still hear my mother’s voice, this time a calm soothing voice urging me to return to Xiao Mei and sleep.
Halloween Just Past: "A Child's Tale"
Nov 3, 2008A Child’s Tale
Sometimes when I feel nostalgic and perhaps somewhat lonely I’ll think back to the time, so many years ago now, when I committed my first crime. Since I was at a tender age of six, the crime which I first planned then undertook quite successfully, in sheer secrecy, has never been discovered; has not yet been discovered by anyone, least of all my departed parents.
They had been quarreling off and on for some time; and often at night, in their bedroom. From my bed I could hear them with their voices low so that they would not disturb either me nor my brother, younger than me by three years. These arguments were long and persistent; although then, at that time, I did not realize what they meant. I only understood that my parents were not asleep, that they were talking, but they were also talking about something which made them both very uncomfortable. I knew this because they had been making me uncomfortable.
* * *
I was having bad dreams as well. There was an ugly old man in the closet who walked with a limp and a bent back and had sour breath. He would try to sneak up on me when he thought I was asleep; but because of my parents, I was often awake. This crummy-looking old man would open the door to the closet just a crack and peer out at me. I could tell in the dark that he thought I was asleep because he would move a little further and a little further into the room with each passing minute.
I hated him, and I wanted to kill him. He bothered me, and he scared me.
Before I went to sleep one night I sat on my bed, thinking about how I could kill this ugly old man who would not leave me alone. I did not know how I could do this; I had never wanted to kill anyone before, except for my little brother. And then I thought of the fork I had used to eat dinner; the fork had sharp points on it; I could use a fork.
So I snuck out of my bedroom, past my parents’ bedroom where I heard them talking just like always, and I got into the kitchen and just barely opened the drawer where the forks were. I had to stand on my tip toes. . . . I grabbed the fork at last and went back to my bedroom and put it under my pillow, just like my mom had said to do with a tooth that came out a while ago.
Then I pretended to be asleep just like I have done before, and I waited for this awful old man to stick his head out of the closet door the way he likes to do. I thought about running up to him and stabbing him in the foot with my fork, but then I chickened out. After a while I don’t know what happened, I guess I fell asleep. But later on I woke up and the ugly-looking old man was looking right down at me.
I was really scared then, but I was mad, too. I reached under my pillow like I was going to put the pillow over my head, just to trick him. And I could tell he believed me. I could feel the fork in my hand, the sharp points where were I wanted them to be.
This crummy old man with his big long nose stuck his face down near me and I could smell his stinky breath, like smoke and a toilet both. Then I threw my hand with the fork at his eyeball, and I stuck that fork right into his eye.
He stood up quick and started to make a lot of noise like his head was under a pillow, or like he was crying into the blanket. I hated him; I wanted to see blood pour out of his eye, and that started to happen. Blood started to pour out of his one eye, and with his other eye he was looking at me with this look I never want to see again.
He started to walk backwards, and then he started to go away into the air. I watched him go away; he went away slow. Then I jumped out of bed and ran over where he was. There was the fork on the floor; so I reached down to pick up the fork but it was so hot I had to drop it back on the floor, and it really made a lot of noise when it hit the floor. So I ran back to my bed and jumped up on it and got under my blankets. . . . I knew I killed this dumb old man, but I still didn’t want anything to happen to me when my mom and dad saw me next morning. I did not want them bugging me too. I hated that, for them to bug me.
A Brief Historical Account of American Cinema
Nov 3, 2008Once two days ago I composed some thoughts about this matter off-the-cuff; and when I was about to submit my lazily-directed ramblings I got side-tracked by some link promising to teach me a few tricks about hyper-text-markup-language. Regretably I followed that link in the mistaken notion that I could return to my gathered thoughts and send them along to their intended destination: Here. But unfortunately, as I said, I was mistaken.
So, to begin again (an allusion to a film with Albert Finney) I must take us back to those obscure black & white days of silent speech and tin-sounding piano music. Charlie Chaplin, Rudolph Valentino, & Buster Keaton were the lead male stars back in those days; and Tulula Bankhead might have been in there along with Greta Garbo from Sweden, a most mysterious woman who lived like a recluse, so I've read, especially in her later years. Interestingly, Buster Keaton did a one-man job in Samuel Beckett's "Film," this misunderstood writer's only personal venture into screen-writing. He was also a recluse.
Of course the first major 'paradigm shift,' if one is allowed to use such a lofty phrase, came with the the innovation of color film; perhaps developed in the R&D at the Kodak labs, but I'm only guessing there. And it was probably fortunate that this happened because this fell right into the beginning of the Depression Years from about 1929 to say the late 30s when it became all too clear to those moguls in Hollywood at least that Adolf Hitler was bent on over-running all of Europe and causing untold grief among completely innocent and hard-working civilians of a certain religious persuasion which this dictator had a pathological hatred for.
Thus Hollywood soon got into the business of making essentially propoganda films which agrandized the American military, but under the circumstances this could be easily forgiven, particulary after the unprovoked Japanese atrocity upon Pearl Harbor.
After WWII was brought to rather abrupt conclusion thanks to, among others, the men on a bomber called the 'Enola Gay,' which flew over Japan, Hollywood found a huge audience in the form of returning GIs with plenty of severance pay. These guys liked the detective movies which later became known as film noir, a style first rendered in France obviously. They probably did not care too much for the musicals which flourished in the 30s and 40s.
From these remarks one might get the inkling notion that "Audience" has much to do with what type of films are manufactured, since indeed this sort of production is a very costly enterprize. . . . During the Cold War/Eisenhower years college men and their lovely sorority dates were the main target. And this encourage the production of such interesting fare as "The Ugly American," "The World of Suzie Wong," and some other film based on a James Clavell novel set in the Orient featuring Steve McQueen and gun-boat diplomacy.
So what is going on here? There is not a little politics in any film, and some are overtly political. Take Oliver Stone's "Born on the Fourth of July," or, more recently, Steven Spielberg's "Munich."
The teenagers and even many college-aged movie goers are typically quite unconscious of how their taste and ideas are subtly moulded by the films they view with such voracious pleasure. Only a century from now will future thinkers and historians be able to see with something approaching clarity just what transpires sociologically with each type of film. As for those of us now, I believe the closest we can get to a clear vision of the impact of cinema in the broadest and deepest sense possible are through sheer intuitions alone.
Mr. Diggs
Nine Decades of Public Fascination with Cinema
Oct 25, 2008I'm simply going to lay down my spontaneous thoughts on the matter of American cinema, an unrivaled force in American popular culture which dates back to roughly 1910, thanks to Thomas Edison and his invention (one of hundreds which he patented) of the film projector. . . . After a moment's reflection, it is easy to see the allure of films viewed in a theatre. The massive screen. The darkened auditorium. The hushed audience in nearly reverential anticipation of the curtain being drawn apart in two opposite directions to reveal a vivid white and empty screen.
Prior to Edison's invention, another experience could be obtained which was far richer and deeper---providing one had the imagination to fill in the gaps: reading a novel. A reader would not merely observe passively a world flashing tantalizingly and amusingly before him or her; a reader with a good imagination could nearly 'live' within the world which the author had painstakeningly created over one, two, perhaps three years of daily labor.
Statistically speaking, very few people read books anymore for amusement or entertainment, apart from young children. The fact that the Harry Potter books were such run-away best-seller and turned their British author into a millionare practically overnight says something to me, but I'm not sure what just yet.
I think what it means is that adults, most of us, have unfortunately lost our creative powers of the imagination. Most of us want to be like one another, which is why clothing fashions repeatedly changing are so successful. . . . You know, it is odd. In biology the notion of a successful species is merely one which reproduces itself collectively to maximum effect. What do I mean by maximum effect? . . . This would be nothing less than the greatest possible chance of survival; meaning the descendants would also have the greatest chance of survival. It is indeed curious that the most successful actors, the most successful directors, the most successful producers/business men & women--these people have somehow learned how to keep themselves going, such that each subsequent project is heralded as a success even before work on this same project actually begins.
I once read a biography of Harry Houdini, a young Jewish fellow who had a gift for slieght-of-hand tricks. While working at some typically dreary job he got married and continued to perfect his magical routines. This was during the Great Depression. Years later Tony Curtis would portray him in a film, which is precisely where I first found out about him; via a film re-run on television.
In a very real sense, Cinema is magic. Mormon missionaries have been known to unscrupulously pack DVDs, a television, and portable electric generator high into the Peruvian or Bolivian mountains, and once there attempt to convert the Indians to their ezats form of Christianity. They understand the power of Cinema; just as did Hitler; just as did Lennon and Stalin; and just did Mao.
In my view, the only two America film directors of world calibre are Clint Eastwood & Woody Allen, two men of utterly different temperaments. I would have named Roman Polanski, whose biography I also read; he chooses to remain out of the picture for reasons that I will not go into.
Mr Diggs
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