Art and Moving Pictures

Day Two of artistic endeavors. I went with Mayo and her friend Mariko down near Osaka to learn a new/old way of dying paper. It was based on the old art of dying cloth with designs using wax, but this artist uses washi, Japanese style paper, instead. The process involved drawing a design with hot wax and dying the paper, leaving the wax covered areas undyed. This is repeated numerous times reapplying wax to areas of color you want to keep. It sounds easy, but it is difficult to think what colors you want to keep and what will change. I made two coasters with random designs.

Then I went to see an independent film over in Otsu on the shore of Lake Biwa. It is called The Motorcycle Diaries, and I suggest that everyone goes to see it. Well, go to rent it, anyway. It's probably out of the theatres by now in the US.
Anyway, the only problem with going to see a foreign film in Japan is that the subtitles are not in English. They are in Japanese. In general, I didn't have too much of problem in understanding - I was very proud of myself for that. The difficulty was not the words, it was how fast they came up and left the screen. In Japanese grammer, the verb is at the end of the sentence. I would be three-quarters through when it would disappear, leaving me with no idea what the action that this person at that time had done. I mean, I could guess quite a lot, but it was still annoying.