My uncle Clay died this morning. The obituary makes me wish I had been around to see more of his career. But I guess one advantage of being a journalist is that there will be plenty of friends who can write eloquently and prominently about you.

On June 24th Maya and I attended an evening with Tatsuya Nakadai at Film Forum. Nakadai is one of Japan's premier film actors and, according to the presenters, the premier theater actor there. In the sixties and seventies he worked with most of the great Japanese directors, including Akira Kurosawa, Mikio Naruse, Masaki Kobayashi, and Hiroshi Teshigahara (probably half his films have been put out by the Criterion Collection). He was interviewed by Michael Jeck for a good two hours and change, through an interpreter. Clips were shown from each stage of his career and he told many stories in a deep, authoritative voice. He was funny and frequently self-deprecating. Some of the things he said:

• His first role, while he was still in film school, was a two-second walk-on in Seven Samurai. He is only onscreen momentarily, in one of several shots of people walking through a crowded town square. It took six hours to get the shot right. Kurosawa kept yelling at him for walking too much like a modern man, and not the way samurai walked when they had swords in their belts.
• In A Woman Ascends the Stairs, one scene calls for him to slap his co-star Hideko Takamine. After shooting it, she told him that he slapped better than he acted.
• In the climactic scene of Yojimbo, he and Toshiro Mifune stare each other down for an extended period from only a foot or so apart before drawing their swords and quickly ending the duel. They had each trained separately for this scene for months. Each of them had to draw their sword in a very particular way, and neither of them was told how the other would be drawing. They could only do the scene once because Kurosawa wanted their genuine surprise to be evident. When they shot it, the cartoonish stream of blood that shot out of a pipe against the loser's chest was so powerful that it nearly knocked the actor backward off his feet.
• When they filmed the sequence on the bullet train in High and Low, which included a lot of fast-paced dialogue, it would have cost them ten million yen, on the order of a hundred thousand dollars, if they needed to rent the train again for a second take.
• Nakadai was in a spaghetti western. He'd always liked westerns and thought it would be fun. The movie was written by Dario Argento. When he asked the director about the plausibility of a Japanese person in the old west, he said that Nakadai would be playing a half-Mexican half-Native American.
• Usually the swordfighting in chanbara films is done with bamboo swords that have foil tape affixed to them. But when filming Harakiri they used real swords because the director wanted them to have the proper weight. But as Nakadai said, "Even with bamboo you have to be careful, because the Japanese word for bamboo is takemitsu, but the composer's name was also takemitsu" (that would be the legendary Toru Takemitsu).
• Nakadai told of the filming a scene in Ran in which a castle burns down while Nakadai's character staggers around in a daze before slowly emerging. The castle was really burned down in the scene, and only Nakadai and the cameramen were inside. Kurosawa spoke to them in an earpiece to tell him when to start moving. He waited and waited for the signal, lying down inside a burning building, not knowing if something had gone wrong. Finally he heard it. He was very afraid that he would stumble, as once again (see a pattern here?) there would be no chance for a second take. Fortunately he carried it off, and the scene is incredibly intense--talk about self-control!

Before the event we had watched Harakiri, A Woman Ascends the Stairs and High and Low and they are all excellent in their own very different ways. I've also seen Sword of Doom and it's awesome as well. I still have a lot more to catch up on as Nakadai-san has had a truly amazing career.

Maya's brother Bert made it into the local news Friday when, near the end of a kayaking trip in the East River, his kayak capsized near one of Olafur Eliasson's waterfalls and he and another man had to be rescued by the police. Here's the Daily News' take.

Meanwhile, the New York Times appears to have written their piece based entirely on the account of the leader of the trip, who claims that the accident was due to "horsing around" and trying to take pictures of the waterfalls. Bert says they were not taking pictures and that he didn't even have a camera. My parents, who are experienced kayakers, say they never should have taken beginners out on the East River. According to the News "The 4-knot current prevented the [police] boat from getting close to Spector." That sounds like pretty serious conditions.

By the way, the guide who gave his story to the Times is a "freelance writer [who] occasionally contributes articles to The New York Times." Way to get all sides of the story, Anahad O'Connor. Maybe you should get some lessons in journalism from the Daily News.

Update: I sent an email to O'Connor, the author of the story. I may have to wait a while for a response given the Times's bizarro-world reader email policy: "Please note that messages are delivered once per day, at 8 a.m. (EST)."

Several interesting elements in this Times article (they're not all bad) about the decline of Buddhism in Japan.

The Japanese have long taken an easygoing, buffetlike approach to religion, ringing out the old year at Buddhist temples and welcoming the new year, several hours later, at Shinto shrines. Weddings hew to Shinto rituals or, just as easily, to Christian ones.

This suddenly makes sense to me in a way that plain old statistics about percentages of the population devoted to each religion never did.

Mr. Mori, the priest here, said that after the war there was a desire for increasingly lavish funerals with prestigious Buddhist names. These names — with the highest ranks traditionally given to those who have led honorable lives — are routinely purchased now, regardless of a dead person’s conduct in life.

...

Mr. Hayashi argued that instead of divorcing Japanese Buddhism further from its spiritual roots, his business attracted more people with its lower prices. The highest-ranking posthumous name went for about $1,500, a rock-bottom price.

“I know that, originally, that’s not what Buddhism was about,” Mr. Hayashi said of the top name. “But it’s a brand that our customers choose. Some really want it, so that means there’s a strong desire there, and we have to respond to it.”

This Slate piece is kind of making me want to be a stock photographer, though I know it's becoming increasingly difficult to make a living at it.

It's about how Getty Images, the dominant company in the industry, has to anticipate what kinds of images will be in demand in the near future, including ones that convey abstract ideas such as people being isolated from one another by technology. As a photographer I think I would enjoy trying to stay on top of the zeitgeist in this way, while at the same time contributing to it, and putting my own spin on it to stand out from the crowd. These people must look at the ubiquitous imagery in advertising and publishing in a very different way, trying to gauge the characteristics for which it was chosen.

In principle I guess this isn't much different from the role of a musician who creates music for licensing, which I've never been drawn to. I've always wanted to make music that couldn't have been made by anyone but me, while with photography I am content to document what's around me, albeit in a creative way. But others probably see it the opposite way, or with other art forms.

Several years ago I had an argument with my bandmate Milkshake, and the rest of A+ Attitude, about profiling in airport security. Many people had been complaining about random airport security procedures that resulted in old ladies and Senators being searched. As I recall Milkshake sided with those who said this was a waste of time because no old ladies were going to be terrorists. Someone brought up the point that extremists' beliefs about women would probably prevent them from being given such a role.

My argument was that, in a world of imperfect security, random selection was the best policy, because any pattern is vulnerable to subversion. Many TSA rules are "secret" for this reason (and that produces a lot of complaints) but they would not be able to keep "never search women above a certain age" a secret. One way or another, any terrorist would jump at the chance to increase their chances of getting through by exploiting security procedures. They might send women, or they might dress up as women, but in any case such a policy would be a mistake.

Sadly, although I discussed this argument with many people since then, it appears that I did not write it down anywhere on this site. My pitiful blogging skills led me to make only an oblique reference to it in our tour journal. So this "I-told-you-so" moment carries less weight than it might. But nonetheless:

William Saletan reports at Slate that female suicide bombers are striking frequently in Iraq, taking advantage of the checkpoint guards' unwillingness to search beneath their flowing black garments.

Slate again with a piece about the environmental efficiency of revolving doors. Turns out they are pretty good at not letting too much air-conditioned air out, or too much cold air in during the winter.

Revolving doors are so popular in midtown that I walk through them at least eight times a day. But I'm always a bit annoyed by the resistance built into them to keep them from picking up too much speed. Why not make them even better for the environment by harnessing that energy and making a human turbine?