I have seen movies that suck, and here’s why Plan 9 doesn’t suck. Of course I watched the movie gleefully, delighting in its utter badness. Yes, some of the headstones in the graveyard fall over, revealing that they are cardboard props with stands in the back, and you can see the strings that hold up the toy flying saucers, and the ridiculous stock footage for which Wood was famous almost makes the movie look like someone’s sitting on the remote control and you’re just watching the channels flip from one to another.

However, when it was all over, I was kind of awestruck, not only by how awful the movie was, but by the obvious fact that Ed Wood had a vision. What that vision was is just about impossible to tell, but there’s a thinking director here, an artist (if terribly untalented) at work. It’s one thing to have some weird vision and then to put that weird vision on screen and to compromise that vision a hundred times because you don’t have the time or money or talent to make it come to life. It’s another thing entirely to have no real vision at all except the vision of dollar signs, to string together a hundred cliches, borrowing shamelessly from idiotic movies before yours just to bring people into theaters. Whatever one says about Plan 9, it cannot be that its existence is a crime against film or sensibility. I’ve seen films that were (paging Misters Bay and Bruckheimer!), and I have walked away feeling insulted. Plan 9 is not an insult; it is a mystery, a puzzle, a curiosity. I’ve seen Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville, a movie nearly as puzzling to me as Plan 9, and while it is supposedly a successful film, it reminds me a great deal of Plan 9. I have to say that the Wood film is undoubtedly worse than the Godard film, but I cannot honestly say why.

So it is with music and poetry and painting: there’s all kinds of crap, but it’s the crap that aims low and succeeds that’s the real crap. The crap with lofty ambitions that somehow doesn’t work? Still crap, but not as bad. This is why Event Horizon (still my least favorite movie of all time) and Valentine’s Day and Men in Black II are suckier films than Plan 9 from Outer Space.

Again, for me it’s really about color, but I also just love the mood here.

The second is by Vincent van Gogh: A Corridor in the Asylum.

I’m not as fond of the colors here, but I love those sweeping, downward-curving ceiling beams and those jagged bits of floor and carpet. There’s something graceful but almost punitive about those arches, and there is something scary about that floor. I wonder all the time if I would consider it worth it to be as tormented a soul as Vincent if it meant that I was going to create the greatest paintings in Western art. I’ve never come up with an answer.

• The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck
• Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
• Lord of the Flies by William Golding
• Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare

“Why is the assigned reading so depressing?” I was often asked by the students.

“Remember that Layer Three stuff?” I would respond. Layer Three was part of a model of asking questions about literature, something the AP English people thought up and which my teaching partner and I renamed. I’ve taught it for more than ten years now and named my English classes’ website after it. It’s basically the part where, removing yourself from the context of the reading, you ask big questions inspired by the text but not directly related to it, such as “Does love at first sight exist?” and “Why are there so many songs about rainbows?”

“Those big issues are the things that make people create art, sometimes as a way of exploring and dealing with them, and sometimes as a way of expressing insight about them. Does anyone ever really need to dissect and examine happiness? When someone calls you on the phone and says they really need someone to talk to, is it ever about happy stuff? Does anyone ever say they need a hug because things are going so well?”

It was an answer that satisfied most of the thoughtful students. Nobody ever asked the question I was really hoping for: with all the great poetry and literature and music and painting that’s been created in exploring these things, why does anyone need to create anything anymore? Why can’t we all just read Shakespeare and Cummings and Frost and Steinbeck and be done?

It’s a good question, one that my bright students probably could have come up with. I wonder if they never asked because they already knew the answer. And if that’s the case, I wish they’d shared the answer with me.

But then I was in first grade. I was in a combined first- and second-grade class. Another boy (whose name I don’t remember) and I took our math classes with the second-graders. I don’t remember too much about that except that we sat at the table of four students with the two prettiest girls in class (the second-grade boys were always telling us how lucky we were) and I received my first real homework assignments. I hated homework even then and would never do it until it piled up and my teacher said she was going to send a note home. “If I get it all done by tomorrow,” I’d say, “will you not send home a note?” My teacher would say, “You’re not going to get it done! It’s three weeks’ worth of assignments!” But I always got it done. This was a very, very bad lesson for me.

For language arts stuff, I sat at a separate table with two other first-graders, Melanie and Jimmy. Melanie was a tan, round-faced girl with long, very curly brown hair. She was a competitive swimmer and the chlorine turned her hair a kind of green I’ve never seen since. We teased her about it a lot, but I really thought it was pretty. Jimmy was a skinny, hairy-armed Japanese hapa like me. His mom and my mom were good friends and we spent a lot of weekends at his house while my dad was deployed. We were given lots of writing assignments, and although I put in my best effort, I don’t think my heart was really in it. I liked hanging out at that table with Melanie and Jimmy, but I still wasn’t taking school very seriously.

Then one day, we turned our work in, and one of the teachers looked at Jimmy’s work and passed it to the other teachers in the room. They all laughed and told Jimmy what good work he’d done. This part gets a little fuzzy; I don’t know how much of it is stuff I constructed and how much really happened, but the teachers made a big deal of Jimmy’s work and praised him to his mother. My mother knew about it and somehow I heard that Jimmy was this really talented writer. It is unlikely that I overheard his mom and my mom talking about it because they spoke in Japanese. It’s possible that my mom just told me that our teachers had sent Jimmy’s mom a letter or something. It was the kind of thing my mom would do, tell me about how much praise others were getting from their teachers.

I’d never really taken an interest in Jimmy’s work before, but once I became aware of how good he supposedly was, I looked over at his work once in a while. I remember him ending one of his compositions with, “So ha ha ha!” A few days later, I ended my work with the same thing. I (thankfully!) got no praise for that.

It was on. I wasn’t motivated by praise or competition, but something inside me realized that there was such a thing as good work, and that good work couldn’t be what everyone else was doing. In math class, all you had to be was correct, and if you were correct more often than others (as I was), you were better at math. In writing, it was clearly different. You had to be different. You had to make something that didn’t look like everyone else’s work. I don’t know if all this kicked in that same year, but it wasn’t long before I was stubbornly refusing to do the same work as everyone else. At Christmas, we made these wreaths out of paper plates and tissue-paper squares. A hole was cut out of the middle of the plate (giving it a wreath shape); we wrapped the tissue-paper squares around the eraser end of a pencil, dipped that in glue, applied it to the plate, and did it again. The result was a kind of AstroTurf-looking carpet of green tissue paper. I took really long on mine because I was squeezing the little tissue-paper cups as close together on the plate as possible, making a wreath that was fuller and thicker than anyone else’s. My teachers were slightly annoyed that I was taking too long and kept me in during recess to finish. When one asked me why I was working so slowly (definitely not my tendency!), she took a look at my work and got it.

In Sunday school, we were doing some kind of cut-and-paste activity illustrating whatever Bible story had been read to us. Others cut out construction-paper squares and triangles and made shapes looking like trees or people. I took the glue bottle and made swirly, curly patterns with the white glue on a blue sheet of construction paper. The teacher suggested that there was enough glue and maybe I should start putting some paper on it, but I said I needed to put a few more dots. I did that, then turned that in as my illustration. My teacher got it. I was ENORMOUSLY disappointed to learn the following week that glue dries clear! Argh!

In fifth or sixth grade, our teacher had us cut out a certain number of outlined shapes. They were long, thin rectangles, mostly, with a few circles and triangles of different sizes thrown in. The assignment was to use the same shapes as everyone else but to make our own illustration, gluing the shapes to a piece of colored paper. Where others just glued their shapes flat down on their pages, I made mine three-dimensional, looping the long rectangles off the page and back down like little roller coasters. Then I wrote “In Search of Eternity” as the title. So obnoxious and so silly, but I was the only one who did it that way until some girls at my table saw what I was doing and did the same thing. They didn’t have the pretentious title, though.

It was this way with stories I wrote, poems I composed, eggs I dyed at Easter, and just about everything else. By fourth grade, I was such a hardcore reader that I’d declared myself an aspiring author and spent time alone in my room trying to write stories or songs. I still have some of the narrative prose and freeverse poetry I put together back then; it certainly doesn’t proclaim genius, but it does show a boy who was having fun with writing.

I don’t know when people started calling me “creative,” but I noticed it much more outside of school than in school, and I’ve been labeled that much more frequently as a teacher than I ever was as a student, as far as I know. I appreciate the characterization, but as I’ve grown more experienced, I think I’ve come to the conclusion that creativity is little more than the stubborn refusal to do things the way everyone else is doing them. It’s almost a neurosis with me. As soon as someone else says, “Here’s my idea,” I’m closing my mind to it for use in my own classroom or I’m already thinking of how I can make it different or better. It’s made me a pain in my colleagues’ necks when it comes to collaborative efforts, but what do they want? They can’t praise me for being creative and then expect me to want to collaborate, right?

The worst thing about collaboration is the compromise. If we’re going to go with your vision, that’s cool. Tell me what dots to connect and I will connect them. If we’re going with mine, what do I need you for? And if we’re somehow supposed to come up with something together, the stars and planets and all the mitochondria of the earth have to be aligned a certain way for truly creative collaboration to happen. What usually happens, though, is thoroughly non-outstanding work that gets the job done and satisfies someone else’s vision of working together.

I guess there has to be more to it than the stubborn refusal to do what everyone else is doing; I mean, what if you stubbornly refuse and just don’t have a single original idea in you? I guess that’s possible, but what if we all had that stubborn streak in us beginning in first grade so that we made ourself do something—anything—that was unlike what others were doing. Then would we be developing and nurturing creativity? Or is creativity just something to be bestowed upon us by the benevolent muses, like athletic ability, small pouty mouths, or gorgeous silky hair? I have a very creative mother and have seen what she does with cake decorating, crocheting, and other semi-expressive pursuits. I suppose I might have gotten it from her, nurture-wise OR nature-wise.

I’ve been lucky enough to have friends and colleagues whose creativity dwarfs mine, and they don’t change my opinion. They have that same stubborn refusal, although perhaps with them there’s a more positive way of looking at it. I’ve seen in them (all women for some reason) a kind of personal flair, a touch that they seem not always to know they’re putting on their work. Maybe that’s real creativity, the stuff that just kind of bubbles up as part of a person’s character and temperament, and what I’ve got is a creative tendency, a drive that often results in creative-looking behavior that’s really not creativity but stubbornness.

More on this as the month progresses. Readers with opposing thoughts are welcome to contribute.

It’s Solitude by Marc Chagall, and when I teach my students how to look at art and how to make interesting comments on it, it’s one of the ones I use. I teach them first ONLY to talk about what’s ACTUALLY there. It’s not as easy for them as you would think: they always want to interpret! But I handcuff them and make them only list what they actually see. THEN I let them interpret within the context of the painting, and then they come up with things to say that go beyond the painting.

It’s fun to see them emerge as art commenters. They start off going, “Huh?” and by the end of a class period, they are making intelligent comments about the painting and even kind of liking it.

Those colors! My students always want to talk about the goat and the violin; some of the more insightful ones want to talk about religion or the town in the background, but what I always point out to them is the deepness of the red in that scroll and the lovely blues and grays in the sky. There are a lot of things to love about Chagall, but what I love most is the color. I have never taught Chaim Potok in my English classes (the tenth-grade English teacher got to do that), but if I ever do, I’ll make this painting the cover of the unit.

Remember that Chagall print Hugh Grant has in his apartment in Notting Hill? “Happiness isn’t happiness without a violin-playing goat,” says Julia Roberts in admiration. I totally agree, and neither is solitude. I love that painting too; I love this painting more.

A movie about painting: Pollack, with Ed Harris and Marcia Gay Harden. It’s something of a downer, but it’s still a terrific film. Harden is fantastic, and Harris as Pollock was an education for me. I saw this with Grace and had one of the worst experiences ever with other theater-goers. I’ll save it for another time. And I’m glad Grace was there to corroborate the lousy experience, ‘though I think I was much more peeved than she was.

A movie about music: Tous le Matins du Monde with Gerard Depardieu. I saw this at the Academy of Arts theater with Reid shortly before moving to Hilo. It was a slow movie; yet I found it fascinating and plan to see it again very soon. I have it recorded but need to set aside some time for it. Depardieu plays a violist and there is a lot here about art.

A movie about poetry: Il Postino, which I saw on VHS when I was in college in Hilo. It’s a fictional story about Pablo Naruda and his friendship with a young Chilean postman, but it’s really about poetry. Many people who mistakenly think this is supposed to be about love find it an unsatisfying film, for the love involves a very busty young woman and little else. It gave me a lot to think about with poetry, though, and I do recommend it for that. It’s also a nice film to look at.

A movie about photography: Born into Brothels, a documentary I saw with V, Cathy, and a few others at the Academy of Arts theater just a few years ago. It’s about the children of prostitutes in the red-light district in Calcutta. A photographer teaches a bunch of these young kids some photography and gives them cameras and film, and they capture images of life in this awful place, images the documentarian is unable to capture herself because she’s not an insider. A really good film, and quite heartbreaking in many ways. I show this to my photography students every year.

A movie about dance: Shall We Dance?, a Japanese film that played at the Varsity for months. I saw it with Cathy and V, I think. Perhaps it is more about how many of us work jobs that rob us of our souls and joy, but it’s about how dance can put that stuff back. I choose this as my film because it’s not so much about the performance of dance as the learning of dance. It’s a nice movie, and no: I haven’t seen the American remake, but I’m not against it.

A movie about film-making: Visions of Light, a documentary about cinematography. Perhaps one of the most enlightening, eye-opening films I’ve seen. Should be required for anyone who loves film as art.

A movie about stage-acting: Noises Off, which isn’t really a movie about stage-acting, and I in fact haven’t seen it, but I have seen a local production of the play the film is based on, and it is TERRIFIC. Part of the play is actually seen from behind, as if you’re viewing it from backstage. A brilliant piece of work!

A movie about sculpture: Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Hahahaha. Just kidding, obviously. But I can’t think of one and this is the closest I could get.

In the holding tank I built for myself
It’s feeding time
And I start to feel afraid
‘Cause I’m the last one left in line.

The endless string of summer storms
That led me to today
Began one afternoon with you
Long ago and far away.

And someone leads the beast in on his chain
But I know you’re thinking of me
‘Cause it’s just about to rain.
So I won’t be afraid of anything ever again.

In the cell that holds my body back
The door swings wide
And I feel like someone’s lost child
As the guards lead me outside.

If the clouds are gathering
It’s just to point the way
To an afternoon I spent with you
When it rained all day

And someone leads the beast in on his chain
But I know you’re thinking of me
‘Cause it’s just about to rain.
So i won’t be afraid of anything ever again.

Dang it. He was so right. Once I got out of high school, I turned into a total night owl, something my parents are well aware of. I don’t know why I’m like this. I was like this in college almost forever, except when my sister started getting her own rides to school. Then I started getting up at five to beat the traffic out to Manoa. If there’s something I love more than the dark, lonesome hours of the middle of the night, it’s the dark, lonesome hours of the early morning.

I have had two graveyard shift jobs, both of them when I was in college. If only I could do that kind of thing in my current profession.

And: if only I could find somewhere to swim in these late, late hours. I wouldn’t stress out about getting to the beach so early. I mean somewhere to swim where it’s private and the water’s not dark. I need to write my best-seller so I can get my own pool, dang it.

I’m not going to the beach this morning either. It drives me insane that I can’t discipline myself enough to make the best of these vacation days. If I were somehow doing something meaningful and productive with my vampire hours, perhaps I wouldn’t feel so bad, but what I am mostly doing is indulging the vampire in me by staying up, something I can’t do enough of during the school year.

I’ve read two books since my last review but have been unable to review them. Actually, the one I just finished this evening would be easy to review, but the one I read just before that is proving difficult, and I want to do that one first or I’ll never get it done. I might just have to do it non-creatively, just getting the basic stuff down so that I can move on. The trouble is that I think the book deserves better than that, and that’s what’s freezing me up. Gotta turn off that internal editor.

A former student of mine, now employed at UHM, wrote in her blog several weeks ago about daikon legs. I kind of want to send her my own daikon legs piece, but I don’t send people I know in real life links to this journal. Maybe I’ll just copy and paste it into an email.

I’ve been really in a foul mood for the past few days, an extended period of grouchiness that’s unusual even for me. I keep dwelling on some unpleasant thoughts and it’s adding a bitter taste to almost everything I do or say. I think I need to get back into my early-summer routine. If nothing else, it kept me too tired to focus on negativity.

That schoolmate Heidi I mentioned in my dream entry a couple of weeks ago? I friended her on FB just so I could ask her if she happened to have a younger sister I didn’t know about. No younger sister. It was worth a shot.

It’s a tie between bears and elephants. I don’t think we have bears at our zoo, so at least here at home, it would be elephants. They are so noble and admirable.

I dislike circuses after what happened in 1994. I won’t go to a circus that has wild animal acts. In fact, that 1994 circus was the last circus to visit Hawaii, and good riddance. However, of non-animal acts, I have to be honest. I like any that involve pretty girls.

I really don’t like parades either. Most people know I hate crowds, so you are VERY unlikely ever to see me in attendance at one. When I was a Boy Scout, my troop annually marched in the Wahiawa Veterans Day Parade. That was a nice tradition. My last would have been in 1986.

In March or April, I went to a baseball game between my alma mater Hawaii Pacific University and Pacific University at Hans L’Orange Park. We won.

Well, there’s the Waikiki Spam Jam, which I have never attended. Kona has a coffee festival I’ve never attended but would really like to. And some people I know just attended the Kapalua Wine Festival. That would be really fun to attend, too.

This is the best thing Cynthia Kadohata‘s A Million Shades of Gray has going for it. The story of Y’Tin, a young elephant handler who longs to quit school so that he may pursue his dream of training other elephant handlers, is a glimpse at a culture I was completely unaware of. After the signing of the 1973 Paris Peace Accords, the Americans leave a Vietnam that is divided North and South, assuring the Rhade that if the armies of the North should aggressively move into the South, they will return to help.

Y’Tin is the youngest elephant handler his village has ever seen. Although he is a talented tracker and his father is a successful tobacco farmer, elephants are his passion and he is sure he will spend the rest of his life caring for them. But the northern armies are moving south, and the Americans don’t seem to be coming back. Y’Tin is worried about what his village will do in response as his way of life and the survival of his people are thrown into jeopardy.

It’s an interesting story, but largely unsatisfying. Y’Tin’s character is rather shallowly defined, and although Kadohata’s descriptions of everyday life in his village are interesting, her story feels flat and it doesn’t resolve well. I am currently a few chapters into Kadohata’s Weedflower, and already it has the deep, poetic, heartbreaking beauty I remember from her Newbery-winning Kira-Kira. A Million Shades of Gray lacks that depth, and although it’s a pretty good read, it’s fair to call this one a mild disappointment.

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