WITMOT?

My weekly culling from the internets:

Here’s a fascinating/disturbing article about the rich Chinese imitating the American wastefulness and stupidity. Behold, Orange County, China.

Speaking of China, here’s a pic of what happened in Sichuan on May 5, a week before the big earth quake. According the Chinese blogsphere, there were all sorts of rumors that an earthquake was coming.

For our paranoid readers, here’s a step by step way of figuring out if there’s a spy camera in your room. And there’s this step by step guide of what to do if you are approached by the police.

And this unintentionally hilarious police video (set to the Benny Hill soundtrack).

An local LA artist is trying to make traffic medians islands for art.

This blog lists all the things that are younger that John McCain. Things like Plutonium, Alaska, Spam, and Mt. Rushmore.

More about presidential candidates: Mike Gravel has either put together political commercials or performance art pieces. I’m not sure which, but they are REALLY WEIRD.

Here’s a list of weird mythical creatures from around the world. My favorite is the Popobawa from Tanzania, a flying sentient penis that doinks men in their sleep. It was reportedly responsible for another penis panic like the one I reported the other week.

And then there’s this exceptionally creepy ad from the 1970s.

Holy Crap! This is an absolutely amazing Sony Bravia ad. And this is the making of video of the commercial. These Sony ads have been some of the best things committed to film including this one and this one (see making off vids here and here).

Finally, under the shameless self promotion department, here are slideshows I wrote for Yahoo. You can see them here and here.

Akira Kurosawa’s first post-war film, No Regrets for Our Youth, is a strange uneasy movie. The story, which is loosely based on real life events, details the transformation of Yukie, the daughter of a leftist college professor — played by Japanese film icon Setsuko Hara — from a spoiled brat, to dedicated wife of an anti-war dissident (based on Hotsumi Ozaki who worked with Richard Sorge — of Spy Sorge fame — and was the only Japanese to be hung during the war) to a dutiful hardworking farmer girl.

Though Regrets is not of the same caliber as Kurosawa’s later masterpieces it’s always interesting. The rhythm and pacing of the first half of the movie is restless like youthful energy unsure where to channel itself. The student demonstration montage sequences seem lifted straight from Eisenstein. By the end of the film, the pacing slows to match that of rural life and to match Yukie’s new found maturity.

But what’s really interesting about the film is Kurosawa’s struggle to understand what happened to his country. How could left-thinking intellectuals allow Japan to be hijacked by the military? Of course, the US occupying forces, terrified of a return of the crazed nationalism that pushed Japan into war, was very much encouraging this sort of cultural introspection. (For more on this, I really recommend Embracing Defeat by John Dower) And you argue that this movie is as much a propaganda film as his wartime films Sugata Sanshiro or Most Beautiful. Given Kurosawa’s trademark humanism, as seen in Ikiru and Rashomon, I think that part of this film is a real heartfelt working through of guilt and pain of the past decade.

Perhaps because I have this sort of thing one the brain, Regret reminded me of some of these Iraq war movies that have been coming out (and bombing). They also seem to be working through many of the same issues. Both Regret and movies like Redacted or Stop Loss, seem raw and uneasy. The tone brittle and lacerating, asking how the hell did we get here?

New hipster phrase: Scongress. As in a contraction for “sexual congress.” Example: “Me and my lady had some mad scongress last night. It was off the chain.” I called it. I will demand royalty checks from anyone who manages to get the word into a major advertising deal or big budget Hollywood movie.

Movie Pitch Idea: A shot by shot remake of Gus Van Sant’s Psycho. If there’s any big name Hollywood producers out there, look me up.

Another Movie Pitch Idea: An eight hour reconstructed ‘making of’ Andy Warhol’s Empire. A single fixed camera shot, detailing Warhol and Jonas Mekas hanging out, reading magazines, eating Campbell’s soup while waiting to swap out film magazines. In the background is the Empire State Building. A guaranteed blockbuster.

My weekly culling from the internets:

Some fan boys clearly have too much spare time. Behold The Empire Strike Barack.

Riding that fine line between the horrific and the funny, there’s this disturbing report of a seal raping a penguin. With pictures! And there’s something in there about penguin prostitutes too.

There seems to be a problem with incubi (incubuses?) in Washington State.

This is old, but man do I love it. The Day Today’s coverage of 9/11.

Photobombing: the next great American past time.

If there’s one thing that captures my imagination more than proposals to fix LA’s anemic public transportation system, it’s maps of proposals to fix LA’s anemic public transportation system.

And if there’s one city that LA should aspire to, it’s Melbourne.

And this guy drew every single piece of art in MOMA

This book review by Daniel Mendelsohn in the New Yorker caught my eye. The latest translation of Herodotus‘ Histories, while lacking perhaps in style more than makes up for in annotations. The reviewer notes that Herodotus’ famously (or in some circles notoriously) digressive narrative is really best suited for today’s hypertext style of reading. Being about a reckless, blustering leader of a great power who invades a small nation and meets disaster, the Histories is also a painfully current.

In case you missed it, Lars and the Real Girl is a twee indie film about an emotionally crippled young man who believes that a sex doll is his girlfriend. He calls her Bianca, claims she was raised by missionaries in Brazil, and pushes her around in a wheelchair. The spectacle is so pathetic that everyone in the nameless Midwestern town plays along, from his brother to the local doctor to the pastor. As he heals, Bianca grows “sick” and eventually “dies,” paving the way for Lars to pursue a real flesh and blood lass.

Ryan Gosling is the best thing about this flick, delivering a solid, sympathetic performance for a character that could have easily become the freakish butt of cruel jokes. But the movie wears its Capra influences on its sleeve and it grows a little tiresome by the end. The townspeople are so understanding of Lars and his strange delusion that my suspension of disbelief started to fray. Especially towards the end of the film when Bianca was sent to the hospital in an ambulance. I doubt that any HMO would have covered that. It seems like the filmmakers had a crazy idea (Lars loves a sex doll) and then did everything in their power to smooth the set up of any sharp, jarring edges.

I wonder what the film would have been like if Lars weren’t such an obvious basket case and he was not deluded into believing that Bianca was a real girl. Instead, Lars was consciously in love with a silicone and plastic doll. It’s an unsettling thought, not just because it seems so alien but also because it seems so familiar. Who didn’t have a teddy bear or Tickle Me Elmo as a kid? Whose childhood memories don’t have moments of real love and tenderness towards these dolls? And who doesn’t feel a twinge of sadness at the sight of these dolls now? What makes a discarded toys have more pathos than, say, a pitched shoe. (I have a Grover doll in a box in the closet that, I will never throw out) Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg’s wildly underrated A.I. mines these primal loves and fears with particular ruthlessness. We need to love. And if the people around us can’t completely fill that void (and inevitably, they can’t) we fill that void with things – be they sports cars, cools shoes, or buxom sex dolls named Bianca.

This all reminded me of a Savage Love column I read a couple weeks ago that referenced David Levy’s sort of new book Love and Sex with Robots. It speculates that in the near future we will regularly be having sex with and fall in love with robots that are essentially a couple generations above the Real Doll featured in Lars and the Real Girl. The argument for sexbots is pretty obvious if uncomfortable – guilt-free prostitutes that will cater to any fantasy and have no diseases. And given the perverse creativity of humans, there’s no limiting these robots to adult human forms. There are already sex dolls in the form of (shudder) children for sale in Japan. And I’m once the idea catches on, we will start seeing shemale sexbots, robo-dog and horse sexbots and then from there real weirdness like centaurs, unicorns and hobbits. With sex, love often (though not always) follows. Levy argues that in a couple decades we will start seeing human-robot marriages. A development that will no doubt give the Family Values crowd conniptions. Then again, according to some theorists, in a couple decades the line separating human and robot will quickly start to blur. But that’s another entry.

Garfield Factor: President James A. Garfield finds the whole subject distasteful and refuses to delve any further in the matter.

My weekly culling from the internets:

An obese inmate in the dock for a murder charge is hopping mad that he lost over 100 pounds as a result of eating prison food. America: This is you.

Bill Geerhart is clearly a man with too much time on his hands. In the early 90s he wrote to a host of famous/infamous people like Charles Manson and Dick Cheney as a curious 10 year old named Billy. See the results here.

In the insane landlord department, there’s this tale of horror from San Francisco.

And in the insane local tradition department, there’s the cherished Indian baby dropping festival.

Creepy yet beautiful Japanese anatomical drawings.

May is…

Asian Pacific American Heritage Month
Mental Health Month
New Zealand Music Month
Celebrate Older Adults Month
South Asian Heritage Month
Indian Heritage Month (observed in Guyana, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago, and most Caribbean island-nations)
Haitian Heritage Month
Jewish American Heritage Month
Allergy/Asthma Awareness Month
National Good Car Keeping Month
National Strawberry Month
National Chocolate Custard Month
Foot Health Month
National Physical Fitness and Sports Month
National High Blood Pressure Month
National Hamburger Month
Arthritis Month
Better Sleep Month
Better Speech and Hearing Month
Correct Posture Month
National Salad Month
Older Americans Month
National Barbecue Month
National Bike Month
National Mine Month
National Egg Month
National Morrissey History Month
National Artisan Gelato Month
National Asparagus Month
National Salsa Month
National Share A Story Month
Fibromyalgia Awareness
Stroke Awareness Month
&
Fungal Infection Awareness Month

I learned that Ogawa-machi, Japan, the small bucolic town I lived in for two years in the mid-90s is no more. It was more of a collection of rice fields punctuated by the odd house and/or strip of vending machines. There was all of two convenience marts there when I moved there and three when I left. The whole place smelled like onions and, being poor and rural, was a hotbed for the uyoku. There was a strip of businesses down two intersecting streets — most of which were mom and pop stores that eyed me suspiciously on the rare times popped in. To be fair, there were two notable things about Ogawa: a natto museum, which illustrated the history and many varieties of natto in flashy multi-media displays (though sadly, the gift shop didn’t sell T-shirts); and Hyakuri air base, where on a few occasions I went to teach English.

So what happened to Ogawa? It was absorbed into a new franken-berg, combining adjacent towns, Minori-machi and Tamari-mura. Behold, Omitama City. If your Japanese is rusty, the English version can be seen here. Here’s a map of it in relation to the rest of Ibaraki prefecture.

Why the switch? It seems that they are converting Hyakuri from being a strictly military base into the rather unimaginatively titled Ibaraki Airport. The idea is that it will be Tokyo’s third string air hub after Narita and Haneda with domestic flights to places like Naha, Sapporo and Fukuoka. Whether this will work or not, who knows. But the sleepy backwater where I lived is going to quickly change.

My weekly culling from the internets:

A creepily real “untooning” of every geek’s animated wet dream.

A guide for identifying various types in a crowd at a rock concert.

Design porn: robots made out of san-serif fonts.

More design porn: a song dedicated to that annoying promo guy in a design company.

The paintings of Adolf Hitler. He’s not bad, but not brilliant either and his subject matter is pretty hokey. Given the alternative, however, I think I would have preferred that he got into art school.

This is just stooopid.

And finally, rest easy. The Congolese penis thieves have been captured. Penis panics, it turns out, seems to be a weirdly common thing.

Ten years ago, after graduating with a useless Master’s Degree in Japanese Studies, I panicked and fled the country for a wild and woolly trip around the world.

Five years later, after graduating with a largely useless Master’s of Fine Arts in Film and Video, I again panicked and fled the country. This time, I went to Kumamoto, to work at a Japanese production company and live with my then girlfriend and her family. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Over the three so months I was there in 2003, I shot two commercials that aired on Japanese TV (you can see them here and here), read Gravity’s Rainbow, and suffered a low level headache from speaking Japanese pretty much 24/7.

I documented my time there on my first blog Broad Spectrum Antibiotics and now I’m reposting them, cleaned up and with lots of pictures and links, on WITMOT. You can read the first entry here.

Additional material: I also posted blogs entries from my first visit to Kumamoto here. And you can look at more pics of Kumamoto that I took here.