Takato Yamamoto

Throne of Blood (1957)

Throne of Blood (Spider Web Castle) is a 1957 Japanese film co-written and directed by Akira Kurosawa. The film transposes the plot of Shakespeare's play Macbeth from Medieval Scotland to feudal Japan, with stylistic elements drawn from Noh drama, a classical form of music drama dating back to the fourteenth century.

According to Kurosawa:

"It was a very hard film to make. We decided that the main castle set had to be built on the slope of Mount Fuji, not because I wanted to show this mountain but because it has precisely the stunted landscape that I wanted. And it is usually foggy. I had decided that I wanted lots of fog for this film... Making the set was very difficult because we didn't have enough people and the location was so far from Tokyo. Fortunately, there was a U.S. Marine Corps base nearby and they helped a great deal; also a whole MP battalion helped us out. We all worked very hard indeed, clearing the ground, building the set. Our labor on this steep fog-bound slope, I remember, absolutely exhausted us; we almost got sick."

The film has received praise from literary critics, despite the many liberties it takes with the original play. In 1961, the Time review praised Kurosawa and the film as "a visual descent into the hell of greed and superstition." The American literary critic Harold Bloom judged it "the most successful film version of Macbeth." In his 2015 Movie Guide, Leonard Maltin gave the film four stars, calling it a "Graphic, powerful adaptation."

Callanais Stones Photography

Gerald Ponting's book Callanish & Other Megalithic Sites of the Outer Hebrides is a short & pleasant easy read. The illustrations are delicious and on high quality paper. The book focusses on  theories of the stone's origins, their excavation history and the stone circle of Callanish itself, which should actually be known as Callanais. The photography is mostly from the Facebook group Callanish Digital Designs, which is an endless font of creative photography of the Hebrides. 

Suck: Season of the Witch (1970)

Suck were a rock band who were part of South Africa's first wave of hard rock titled, the "Big Heavies". The group lasted eight months between 1970 and 1971, during which they recorded their lone LP, Time to Suck. It was later released in America in 2009. Time to Suck is the first and only album by the South African hard rock band Suck. Released in 1970, it was recorded at the EMI Studios in Johannesburg in six hours. The album was initially only released in South Africa and France. The French edition's cover had the colours inverted. The first official CD release came in 2001 on Fresh Music with the bonus track "War Pigs". In 2002, a label called Progressive Line purportedly operating out of Australia released its own CD version of Time to Suck. German label Shadoks reissued it in 2009 on CD and vinyl, the first vinyl issue of the album since 1970.

500th Birthday

Welcome to the Bohemian Budgie's 500th Blog!

I started writing this blog as a counterbalance to being stuck in an artless soul destroying job. Whilst that putrid existence was collapsing all around me, and with all the chaos and instability that engendered, the Bohemian Budgie became a unifying oasis, a monthly reminder of my Inner Temple. It seems my creative outlet turned out to be quite therapeutic in the end because I am now trundling along in a much more appropriate and liberating career in which I am my own master. I am free!

So you would think that the Bohemian Budgie has served its purpose and would naturally wither on the vine. In truth, there has been a bit of that dynamic at play, but I also feel a monthly reminder of my Inner Temple is an essential feature of the new me. So I will continue on a blogging for now and hope to celebrate the 1000th BB Blog looking off from from who knows which attractive vista.