Following link to link to link I found this someone out-of-my-depth blog on Japanese culture. NeoJaponisme
It seems geared towards academic hipsters and expats living in Japan (and being hiply academic over there) who are fluent in the language. The blog is in English, but sprinkled with kanji to clarify points. I was enjoying skimming it… it’s has a more interesting (cynical, grouchy, arty) point of view than the very G-rated and general-interest J-List blog (G-rated blog from the site that introduced the US to the Hello Kitty vibrator).
Then, in their archives I discovered my new favorite thing ever. Japan’s answer to The Electric Company—CURRICULUMACHINE.
A sample Curriculumachine sketch:
• To teach the word “shoeshine” (靴磨き), a shoeshiner is sitting down while a customer comes by, drops his briefcase, opens his fly, and urinates on his face.
The NeoJaponisme article does an amazing job of explaining the show so best to just hop over there and read the whole thing. Curriculumachine sounds amazingly terrible in the same wayPythagoras Switch is amazingly adorable.
Also, I find Electric Company (the real American one) both off-putting and depressing for reasons I have trouble putting into words. I may have watched it as a kid (I was the right age for the tail end of its syndication) but don’t really have any specific memory of it. I rented a couple of the DVDs when I was directing Free to be Friends (which was a comedy-musical stage show based on 1970’s New York kid show The Magic Garden and Free to be You and Me that we did at UCBT and then at the NY Fringe Fest). I dunno… it bummed me out for some reason. Especially the troupe of actors waving to the camera at the end. Maybe it’s the earnestness? And they’re all dead now? (They are not actually all dead now… but that’s what the waving makes me think of.)
I am an angry person with a cold black heart filled with rage and despair, but there are two things I love: the inscrutable ridiculousness of the Japanese nation and wacky rock-and-roll exploitation movies.
I do not speak Japanese for real so I do not know what’s actually going on in this trailer. It features a fictional band called “The Tightsmen” that would be a good index of worst-case-scenario, unflattering haircuts. The Peppermint Engine is taking screenshots to their barbers as I type.
“Group Sounds” (GS) refers to mid- to late sixties Japanese “garage rock.” A weird chimera of matchy-matchy haircut/outfitted sunny lads and bizarro psychedelia that grew out of The Beatles appearance at the Budokan in 1966. The odd label was coined to minimize embarrassment (the leading killer of Japanese!) created by the pronunciation minefield “rock and roll.”
The Spiders tribute to psychedelia and being confused.
For actual information instead of my unresearched opinions, check out this bilingual resource site or The Video Beat! Movie Page of Info which also has ordering info for GSploitation films such as: WILD SCHEME A-GO-GO, BIG COMMOTION!, HI! LONDON, and HEY YOU, GO! (all of which sound like movie form titles). In the US, if you’re lazy, you’ll probably just have to make due with the high-art, low-rocking-out nonsense of Tokyo Drifter to fill your Japanese psychedelia tank.
But really, a movement is hardly worth discussing unless they’ve sold out and devoted their teen rebellion to selling things so here’s a contemporary commercial for sweaters and jump cut editing (and no GS, so my transition was pointless)—
But let’s go back a couple years and see what the kids were so hopped up about rejecting. A perfectly jazzy animated clothes commercial where dresses turn into hot air balloons and flocks of doves.
The gist that I got from internet translators is that I used to work at Modern Humorist, my Mad Men illustrations have been well-received on the internet and Cakey is a show I made. I might be more than one person. My name comes from that of a dynamo generator. My website’s name means “who are not boyfriend” and at the end—“A little attracted to the KW not uncommon for persons to register. ”
If anyone can manage a better translation I’d appreciate it. Also anyone willing to translate my response please contact me.
I found this site back in January and started obsessively reading the most bizarre titles on the site (top picks: competitive makeover artists vs. a reluctant “Iron Beautician,” another good one is about a tough guy who’s face burns off in a bus crash and a mad “perverted” doctor gives him the face of the girl he has a crush on; sexual hijinx ensue). There’s a huge network of “fan translators” who do titles that no publishing house in the US would touch. Too weird. Too niche. Too old. Too Japanese.
Between this and the videos on crunchyroll.com (go there and watch Bartender if you haven’t) and episodes of The Bob Newhart Show on hulu.com), I will never pay for entertainment media again. (You hear that, all megaproducers of entertainment on the fence as to whether you will make a profit from putting things on the internet? I WILL NEVER pay you money or support your advertisers. Haw haw. Jokes on you!)
AV and I saw this movie last Friday at Monkeytown in Williamsburg.
If you’re not local or haven’t heard of it. Monkeytown is a restaurant/performance space/bar/screening room/lounge. It’s a restaurant/bar in the front with a kind of industrial-rustic look (dim light, knitted grapevine hanging from the ceiling, exposed steel and cement floors) and you travel along a super-fluoro, bright-white hallway with a series of primary colored doors (the toilets, I’d later discover) and into a massive (for NY, natch) dark square room with blank white walls. Around the perimeter of the room are neutral colored low futons, two to a wall, and a pair long TV-tray-style table set for four. On each wall the same looped pre-show animation is being projected simultanously. You can, and are expected to order as the movie plays, from the roaming waitress from the menus posted on each station, listing fusion-y, foodie odd combos of small plates and molecular-gastronomic cocktails (includingthe Umami Martini that featured “brine, parmesan, capers, clam broth, and pickle”).
I loved it as a sum of its parts. There’s definitely something appealing about doing something that’s an “experience” that’s totally removed from the everyday. I remember going to see Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind in Chicago years and years ago and it was the same kind of thing. Every stage of getting to the show was a small strange experience… you waited in line, then you got a small plastic chit. Then you put your chits in a bag and they were scrambled, so the order you were in line didn’t matter. Then you were lead through a series of rooms in this brownstone-style house, each of which was filled with disturbing art or piles of furniture or actors doing something. I mostly remember the “Hall of Presidents” with abstract, garishly-colored portraits of all the presidents hung on the walls and a jumble of abused school desks you were ordered to sit in. Decommissioned old schoolbooks were heaped on the floor. There were other hoops you went through to get to the actual show, which I don’t remember nearly as well (a side from one particularly hoary awful monologue we mocked for the rest of the trip) as the process of getting there.
At Monkeytown, movies are free as long as you order $10 of drink and food. Usually their programming is unwatchable, plotless art film nonsense, though last month featured a Mickey Rourke retrospective (irony is alive in Billyburg). AV saw the listing for Funky Forest and immediately connected it to my love of Japanese weird bullshit and gave it a green light. I’ve been burned before, so I was a bit hesitant—the thing was over two and a half hours and of the many things the Japanese do well— plastic knick-knackery, street fashion, misogyny—comedy is not one of them. Intentional comedy anyway.
Funky Forest definitely has its high points and a lot of its successes are more as “art” than as “comedy.” Comedy divorced from context and culture is a really hard sell—most jokes don’t travel outside your group of friends so asking it to work across international borders is asking a lot. In the 2h30, there’s probably a pretty funny or at least satisfying 60 minutes in it. More odd than hilarious, but the Eraserhead fetus-like alien shit scenes (never explained, of course) are pretty mesmerizing. There’s a through-line across segments about various lonely men who can’t seem to meet/are obsessed by women that’s more than one note. And lots of line dancing that is confusing, then irritating, and then, eventually winning you over, totally charming.
I’ve just ruined the movie by posting the most interesting moments in this entry (that I could find on youtube… sans subtitles), but if it comes to DVD check it out (with your finger on FF). “Heightening” to the Japanese comedy mind reads as “stalling” in the American one, which is terrifically frustrating. In the mean time, I actually thing Tampopo is a better package of Japanese sketch… not nearly as self-consciously weird and mercifully shorter. It also has a “main plot” about a mysterious truck-driving “cowboy” who teaches a woman about ramen which pulls you through. As an academic nerd exercise as much as anything, I love watching outdated and international sketch comedy, just to see the mechanics at work and to get a sense of their sense of rules.
P.S. If you’re a Japanese cinema nerd (or just “nerd”), you’ll probably want to see Funky Forest just for the in-jokey cameos by actors from Beat Takeshi films, anime director Hideaki Anno and Babel’s Rinko Kikuchi
I had considered writing something epic and facinating (probably about the Thai restaurants near my apartment), but instead I’ll show this—
I found it at my parents’ place a long time back and only just got to scanning it. The book is kind of inpenetrable but I got through it on the second try. That cover’s a beaut’!
As this week is my birthday (the entire week is my birthday, yes) and despite my recent and staggeringly dull financial woes (short story, client bounced a check), I bought manga. I only wanted the Kare Kano, but there was a price break if you bought three and I arbitrarily got the other two.
Kare Kano is the only series I “follow” and this was the finale after something like nine years of publication. I always liked it because it wasn’t as retarded about the way the female characters and their relationships are depicted. Yes, there’s a cultural difference about acceptable behavior and attitudes, but 21 volumes without a panty shot is as good as writing “The Feminine Mystique” in manga-land. Anyway, the final issue showed the author’s real plan—save up the skeeze and dump it all on the final chapter. The high school sweethearts the story’s built around get married and have their (unplanned) child. Jumpcut to 16 years later (where all the characters look exactly the same as they did, depicting “age” is not the artist strong suit… they also all have basically the same face) where the main character’s male best friend (approximately 33) is in love with their 15 year old daughter and… she loves him back! Oh, happy day!
Junior High or High School girl dating/marrying her teacher is a pretty regular trope in anime and manga. I’m hoping it’s like teenage wish-fulfillment fantasy and not a regular and accepted part of Japanese culture. It also features heavily in dozens of other stories I’ve read (including the retardo Fruits Basket pictured above… they soften it by making it a Student-Teacher who decides not to become a teacher after all and after fucking his 15-year-old charge).
I decided I want a cool robot costume. I made one more than ten years ago, and I think I could probably do a better job now. I don’t specifically have a show or sketch or anything to use it in, though I’ve discussed it with Silvija.
When I suggested doing a video where we played robots, she said “Isn’t that kind of hack?” I disagreed. I think the hackiness of robots in comedy has gone full cycle (peaking in 2000-1) and now it’s more Zombie that are hack. (Despite my argument, I admit that robots still might be slightly hack so the material has to be extra good… and the costume has to be extra good.) On the pro side, Silvija noted that we both kind of talk like robots naturally, so we won’t have to modify our voices.
I will probably do a head in paper-mache using some kind of helmet as a base… maybe a cheap plastic mask stapled to the front to give it structure. If I could get a very cheap used bike helmet I’d use that. I did a short peruse of Halloween Adventure, but they didn’t have any plain plastic “helmets” to use. The ones they had were kid-sized—too small! I’m probably have to get a bodysuit to wear under it… which is just the slippery slope excuse I need to get into the confusing/claustrophobic “zentai” fetish!
So, I don’t want to do the tinfoil box with dryer vent arms—that really has been done to death—or anything really boxy. I checked the internet to see if there were any robot tutorials, but I haven’t found anything that fits the kind of robot suit I want to make which is on the more art-deco tip. Like somewhere between the “False Maria” from Metropolis and the Will Smith I Robot robots (I didn’t see this movie).
Here’s what I found online:
The unholy union of “furry” and “robot” which I posted in my blog years ago.
CloroxBot step-by-step which also uses stilts (people think robots are tall), but the real prize on the site is this insane cardboard Boba Fett helmet.
A French-Canadian who makes Transformer costumes (in cardboard, no less) that actually tranform….
... but of course the Japanese still do it better
Another week without stuffing my head in an oven? What could be the reasoning that keeps me barely clinging to an empty and pointless a life?
Boom!
(More episodes of Bartender at crunchyroll.com. You have to register, but it’s free.)
In America, to build a show around a bar you load in a lot of wacky mismatched characters and push the drinking into the background and call it “Cheers” (or “Archie’s Place” if you’re a fool). In Japan, you build a show around a “magic” robot-like bartender with dead eyes who solves social ills and the specific life-changing problems of middle-aged salarymen by name-dropping specific brand’s histories and then making gussied-up cocktails. It definitely goes in the “why would anyone make this” category as well as the “who is the audience for this?” category.
The most telling “what the hell” feature is Mitch Magee told me before we knew this show existed a pitch for a 102 show that was almost identical to this show.
I also thrill that it’s animated and NOTHING HAPPENS. There’s no location changes… it’s basically a play with a heavy dose of instructional film (the cartoon Bartender makes the drink, they show the recipe at the end and then under the closing credits a faceless live-action bartender also makes the drink). And as the episodes go in it gets weirder with characters from previous episodes reappearing in jumpcuts to narrate the story as a weird sort of Greek Chorus.
I also love listening to Japanese voice actors glide through Engrish prononciations of “Gin & Tonic” and “Drambuie,” etc.
Although I like that other Zuiiken clip for the drama… this one is more ready to be featured in a mash-up or sampled into a techno song.
If you’re very vaguely naughty, you may be interested in “Sexy English” taught entirely by Russian call girls and the yakuza… no native speakers need apply!
