One thing I like to do is watch a movie and value all the wrong things about it. I don't know anything about movies really, despite the fact that I've seen hundreds or thousands of them. When it comes to movies I'm all idiot, no savant. There are times when I watch dozens of movies compulsively, obsessive periods. I live sequentially inside each one for the duration of the viewing and feel this wonderful immersion in something better than life or worse than life but never exactly as good as life, that's the beautiful part, and then they end and I have no idea what I've seen, I just value the feeling they leave behind, whatever it is. I just watched Ozu's Tokyo Story, after yesterday watching Kurosawa's Ikiru, vastly different early-1950's movies about old men and death in postwar Japan. Both are filled with sadness and resignation and elderly characters squeezed out of their own lives and scorned by feckless young people. I'm sure they say profound things about Japanese society after the war, who the hell knows, but I don't really care. My experience of them as I watched them is all that matters to me, and I didn't exactly do a lot of research beforehand. Of course two directors could not be any more different than Ozu and Kurosawa, that much is obvious. I loved how boring Tokyo Story was, it was absolutely crushing tedium, yet riveting. I wanted to watch it again when it ended but I was sure I'd fall asleep, plunged into unconsciousness by the best boredom ever. People have this strange idea that movies need to be exciting to be captivating, when really excitement in a movie isn't difficult to provoke. Making movie audiences excited is like making babies cry or stoned people laugh, it's a hollow achievement. Tokyo Story shows how you can be driven nearly to suicide by dullness and yet be so hypnotized that two and half hours just flies by. It reminds me of going to a reading by Don DeLillo in Berkeley one time, and being utterly mesmerized by his plodding monotone delivery and total absence of gestures, facial expressions, and body language. My hunger for affect was on the level of starvation. I wanted to die but I was so happy to be there watching him that dying was absolutely out of the question.