November 15th, 2024 marks the 40th anniversary of the inaugural performance of the Tokyo Grand Guignol’s Mercuro at the Art Theater Shinjuku. While it isn’t fully complete yet, now feels as good a time as ever to share here the current progress of my new translation of Mercuro, an updated “text adaption” as I put it that crosses the full script from June Novel with details that were given through photos, video footage and recollections from audience members. The reason for this is to account for the fact that Mercuro wasn’t a literary play, but an Artaudian experience Ameya conceived in efforts to override what he saw as being a wordy pretention in contemporary theater, his direction even being described before as a sot of "destruction" of Tagane’s writing. Judging Mercuro by just K. Tagane’s text would arguably be missing half the picture, so I’ve done my best to account what I imagine from the evidence that exists what Ameya’s half would've been like to maintain a decent balance. The first act of the play is fully available in two parts for free on my Substack, the second act is still in progress and will be steadily serialized as I finish enough progress on it: - MERCURO (Text Adaption) : ACT 1 : SCENE 1 - MERCURO (Text Adaption) : ACT 1 : SCENES 2 & 3 The process has been a difficult and laborious one in consideration of not just the scarcity of original materials, but the lack of publicly available media as well. Much of Ameya’s direction is not just in the actors, but the handling of visuals and sound design as well, calling back to his influences from Artaud’s more viscerally ritualistic view of theater as a practice. While a handful of songs are known to have been featured, there are still many gaps in between of not just how the songs were sequenced, but how Ameya would’ve edited them as well. A full video recording of Mercuro’s original run (not to be confused with the abridged 1985 Mercuroid TV performance) exists, but it is only in the hands of private collectors. Despite the hurdles throughout my research, through a combination of artistic dedication with what could best be described as obsessive stubbornness against the odds I was able to track down all the materials I could. Special thanks goes to Yu Hirayama of @suikazuraofficial (known for their music compilations, the subculture magazine FEECO and the Steven Stapleton biography Nurse With Wound評伝) for personally providing a copy of the Mercuro volume of June magazine and the Roadsiders article The Time That The Flyers Came To Town. I recommend anyone with an interest in subculture to look into his publications.
“Crash Test” from Kafka’s Supermarket. Recommended to watch with sound on. The full film is available on YouTube and Vimeo. Additional blog posts (Short Director’s Statement - Initial Release Post). Additional playlist for the film with bonus content. The crash test scene was one of the earliest finalized montages that I completed for Kafka’s Supermarket, and one of the more personally formative sequences when it came to the film’s final direction. It was Christmas morning and I was up early enough so that I could do some quick editing before I was to head out to Augusta. By early, I mean probably 4 or 5 in the morning. I accumulated up to 40 minutes of crash test and car accident footage for use in the film. I was hellbent on piecing together anything to showcase the film’s current state to overcome some personal anxieties and doubts regarding whether or not I could complete Kafka’s Supermarket. I had a small handful of songs at the time that were written in advance. Out of the lot I spontaneously picked Haste In Slow Motion, a personal homage to some of the classical music I heard in my upbringing. The title of the track is a loose translation of one of the neoclassical compositions that served inspiration (Festina Lente, which more literally translates to Hasten Slowly). The songs that were sampled and converted to synth patches include a suspended string section from Festina Lente by Arvo Pärt, the choir from an early Carl Orff composition and the (very quiet) piano arpeggio from one of Orff’s compositions that he would’ve used to teach students. The drums and lead piano were in-software patches. Haste In Slow Motion was one of the last tracks I wrote in Garageband before moving to Logic Pro, recorded during a phase where I started to experiment more with creating custom synth patches from audio samples. To give a frame of reference, Haste In Slow Motion was in the same session as the song “Recapture” (which was used earlier in my October 2017 Cinematic Notebook film). It was originally written to be a one-off, but as production continued it transformed into one of the main recurring themes of Kafka’s Supermarket (with several variants in the incidental soundtrack and end credits marching song).
“The Victim” from Kafka’s Supermarket. Recommended to watch with sound on. The full film is available on YouTube and Vimeo. Additional blog posts (Short Director’s Statement - Initial Release Post). Additional playlist for the film with bonus content.
“God Bless Dick York” from Kafka’s Supermarket. Recommended to watch with sound on. The full film is available on YouTube and Vimeo. Additional blog posts (Short Director’s Statement - Initial Release Post). Additional playlist for the film with bonus content.
“Accident Analysis” from Kafka’s Supermarket. Recommended to watch with sound on. The full film is available on YouTube and Vimeo. Additional blog posts (Short Director’s Statement - Initial Release Post). Additional playlist for the film with bonus content.
“Meat” from Kafka’s Supermarket. Recommended to watch with sound on. The full film is available on YouTube and Vimeo. Additional blog posts (Short Director’s Statement - Initial Release Post). Additional playlist for the film with bonus content.
KAFKA’S SUPERMARKET: June 28th, 2019 YouTube - Vimeo - Official Soundtrack (Kafka, Incidental Music) - Letterboxd Production time - 1 year Runtime - 47:49 For those who missed it earlier, Kafka’s Supermarket was officially released last Friday, marking the official end of a year-long production cycle. It marks itself as my first proper feature film and fully culminates all the time and work that was put into it. You can read a full Tumblr post about the film’s background and the artistic collaboration that went into it here. Please help the film by sharing it and spreading the word. Reblog this post, share screencaps of the film to any film blogs, anything to help introduce others to Kafka’s Supermarket.
The first trailer for my long-running independent film project, Kafka’s Supermarket, is finally out. Kafka's Supermarket is an experimental surrealist science fiction dystopian horror film that concerns the issues of a current capitalist America, focusing on the alienation and dehumanization of commercialism. Market obsessions are rendered to their most primal states, flooding a present-day utopia with a nihilistic fixation over death and sexuality, rendering the whole city as a conceptually cannibalistic market of flesh. Market researchers and psychoanalysts watch in indifference as the mental states of their subjects quickly collapse into depressive torpor. Kafka's Supermarket features artistic collaborations with Lorelei Nuyts (MarrowMerrow) Steven Cline (stevenclineart) and Casi Cline (ephemeralityart). Please share this if you see it, help spread the word on Kafka’s Supermarket.