Osakatomebaby

Who knew William Gibson reads Murakami? Good for him. I quite enjoyed Neuromancer and would like to get around to reading more of his work sometime. It's on my list anway.

I was introduced to Neuromancer and cyberpunk by a friend who authored a rather successful first novel in the genre (go buy it). His book site needs to be updated, but that's just because he recently moved. Haven't seen a blog from him either. Guess real writers save it for when they'll get paid. Smart. He and his wife are also serious vegans, so I wonder what they think of my recent PETA-bashing. Wonder if I'll ever know...

So, Murakami. Did I mention Murakami? Evidently Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973 have been published in translation and are just impossible to get ahold of*.

I am told HTWS is "available in Japan". Oh dear. If it's not at Kinokuniya I'll have to attempt the trek to the used English book seller in Kobe. Otherwise, I may just have to read one of the million other authors on my shelf. I can obsess but I know there are more things in this world that are dreamt of, etc etc. Anyway, even if I can't get my fix, I've converted at least one person in the last month and that's a high all it's own.

And as far as "getting a fix" of things "available in Japan", I'll hit the big Tower Music (and Video) in Umeda Monday to look for a Wong Kar Wai box set for someone who shall go unnamed.

*Winston Churchill on ending sentences with prepositions: "This is the kind of grammar up with which I will not put!"

I'm going to attempt to go to this onsen tomorrow, north of Kyoto and smack dab in the saddle of the pommel horse--which I assume has something to do with the mountains in that area (which are quite lovely). Not sure quite how to get there. I can get to the town, but after that I am confident that a sufficient amount of hand waving and asking questions like, "which way is north" in Japanese will do the trick.

I'm not sure, but it might have snowed there. hope hope hope.

This brings up another question. How and where did the gymnastic sport of the pommel horse arise? Another question for the universe...

This blog has now officially been around long enough to legitimately have additional content in the archive. In some sad, narcissistic way I miss the stuff that's not on the page anymore.

MoveOn.org's bid for a Super Bowl ad was nixed yesterday by CBS. It's not a shock, considering the controversies (1, 2) around the contest that produced the ad.

(For the record it was a liberal-in-group awards show, not a political debate. So yes there were a lot of entertainers going overboard. It was-gasp-funny, in part because Margaret Cho is so obnoxious and anyway, you can hardly get a sense of a comedy routine from the transcript. The wierdest part is how Michael Moore finally got upstaged).

CBS chalked their response up to a policy against running political issue ads. Fair enough, it's their network and they have to deal with conflicts with other advertisers as well as viewer response so I guess in they can reject it on whatever grounds they like and it's nice that they have a policy to justify it.

Salon.com observes that it's likely MoveOn.org expected the rejection, but knew they'd get some press out of it anyway--exactly what PETA did intentionally on behalf of their unmoving, cheap-shot of an ad. If you ask me, MoveOn.org just played it smart. They probably really wanted to get the Super Bowl slot, but they had a back-up plan.

Unlike the PETA ad, the MoveOn.org ad is classy. Yes it fails to capture their primary issue, opposition to the War in Iraq, but so what? It's not their most effective issue. MoveOn recognized that anti-war rhetoric only preaches to the choir. Instead they went for mainstream appeal. The budget deficit isn't as edgy as opposition to the war or calling Bush being a "big fat liar", or dead soldiers, but the ad is an emotionally compelling story well executed.

I have to disagree that the message is unclear or that the appearance is too polished--contradicting the original aim of the contest which was, in part, to demonstrate grassroots power. For one thing, having an ad on par with a Fortune 500 branding piece does do that. Apart from that, all I can do is quote from verse 17 of the Tao Te Ching (which you might remember is largely a manual on how to maintain and use political power), "When you do not trust the people, you make them untrustworthy." In other words, stop insulting our intelligence.

Ah well, it really is too bad that CBS sees the deficit as too controversial and has decided to run an anti-smoking spot and a commercial from the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy instead. At least people won't have to watch that nasty PETA ad.

Back to beating the dead horse again, Errol Morris was nominated for a DGA award this week for outstanding directorial achievement in commercials for 2003--which also lead me to discover he had directed the Ellen Fleiss Apple commercials of Internet renown and some evidently very successful Miller High Life commecials. I was aware he did commercials, but the Ellen one was a trip to discover. For better or worse I have not seen the commercial for which he was nominated, nor did it turn up in a quick search. So.

At the end of a very impressive list of films that ought to be released on DVD (and which I promise to read in it's entirity someday when I might be able to watch some of them) Jim politely adknowledged my suggestion that Morris' debut, Gates of Heaven, was long overdue. Whether you like Roger Ebert or not, he did put it on his top 10 list (which sadly I cannot locate in it's entirity). In his words:

When I put it on my list of the 10 greatest films ever made, I was not joking; this 85-minute film about pet cemeteries has given me more to think about over the past 20 years than most of the other films I've seen.

Well golly, it's good. But having seen Vernon, Florida first I'm partial, even though GoH preceeded it.

(update: just realized Vernon, Florida isn't on DVD either!, what an unforgivable oversight).

The government is enforcing the unnatural proportions of porno manga? God forbid the pictures be "realistic".

The Japan Supreme Court's definition of pornography:

anything "unnecessarily sexually stimulating, (which) damages the normal sexual sense of shame of ordinary people, or is against good sexual moral principles".

Normal? Ordinary? Shame? Good? Well, that makes it clear. But again, I'm reading in translation. ~sigh~

Not that I like the stuff (pr0n). It is irritating to see the occasional train perv reading it out in the open. Someday (not in my lifetime) people will get inundated enough with media that we'll all max out and get over hollow images.

...I can dream can't I?

No matter what I do, taxes go up and the government bureaucracy keeps increasing in Yourego! And what's with the fact that I'm 31st out of 47 in terms of largest welfare programs? I cut everything but education! How the heck did my political freedoms get to be merely average?

I'll tell you how, because I dismiss half the issues--yet I get bureaucracy. Feh.

I know where I'm going on the next weekend I can get away. The world needs a few ninjas. It's just past Nara where I used to live. For some inexplicable reason I never ventured there...or out of Nara that often for that matter...probably because Nara's just such a nice laid back place it never occurred to me to leave.

Konishiki got married. Come to think of it, I haven't seen him in much advertising lately. He used to be the staple celeb, but now it seems Daid Beckham is.

Don't know who Konishiki is?

Man mountain Konishiki, 40, is nicknamed the Dump Truck and the Meat Bomb, and is [Sumo's] heaviest-ever wrestler.

At one meal, he is said to have washed down plates of roast chicken, beef, lamb and fish with 120 bottles of beer, two-and-half gallons of tequila and ten shots of whisky.

Man mountain??? I take it that's a play on "mountain man"? I'm not going to get over that one...

I just discovered that he released a new film entitled The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara.

Agonies! There is not a chance I will be able to see it. Morris has an astounding ability to elicit from his subjects while totally obscuring his own interaction with them, so it's both alarming and thrilling to know that he has not edited out his own questioning of McNamara--giving us the opportunity to see him at work.

Yes I guess my bias shines through since I'm more interested in the documentarian than his subject matter which is astoundingly short-sighted of me, especially in this context. But then, I can't see it so I don't want to start speculating about the content and anyway, US Military history is not my strong suit. (I'd appreciate good book recommendations. I have plenty of time to read before I get access to this thing).

I have a twisted amateur obsession with his work for other reasons, and every time I hear the soundtrack from Fast, Cheap & Out of Control used as background music on This American Life (or anything else for that matter) I get a little thrill. Once when I was having a really rotten time, I swore off all fiction. In fact, I couldn't have sat through five minutes of the stuff. I started plowing through the documentary sections at Vulcan and I Love Video. It was that kind of mood. After devouring Morris and his worshippers (is that a metaphor? but it's too weird to delete) and a SXSW film festival later I was ready to face the fictional world again--mainly because no one could live up to his style of ironic documentary filmmaking (he's more of less the father of the genre).

I don't know if I could give up fiction for a world of Errol Morrises, but it would certainly be tempting.

I'm adding League of Melbotis to the very short list of blogs I read. I just haven't settled into a pattern (in anything...ever), I flit and float from flower to flower.

Damn, sounds like the chu-hai is talking again.

Melbotis is in fact partly responsible for the existence of this blog even if he doesn't realize it, because I suddenly found the urge to express myself through his holiday media contest and once I started...

By the way, Melbotis mentioned his concern about beating a dead horse. As an art fan I imagine he would appreciate Errol Morris's thoughts on the subject.

There was another attack on school children in Kansai last week (after two last month), this last one was a stone's throw from me.

Meanwhile I still frequently get the comment that America is dangerous (the movie Bowling for Columbine didn't help). My sneaking suspicion is that it's six of one half a dozen of the other. I'm pretty sure there's plenty of violence in Japan, although the stuff that gets reported in English is pretty much of the weird fringe variety because there's such a huge market for it.

My own experience is quite to the contrary. I've been fortunate not to have been a victim of violent crime in the States, and it's not that I've been particularly conservative.

On the other hand I've been directly involved in and have seen other acts of violence on at least four occasions in Japan. Two were street fights, one was when a kid on drugs decided to beat the crap out of my friend because he was hanging out with a foreigner (and mostly just because he was way whacked out--it took five cops in riot gear to subdue him), and one time I got groped on a quiet street by a kid on a bike. (If this happens to you I'd recommend screaming like a girl if you think there's a chance someone might come, I yelled like a sailor and had a very very frightened walking home).

Disclaimer, of course there are a lot more people in close proximity here. Whereas in Texas, I would see maybe a hundred people in a day, I can easily see ten times that walking though the Osaka/Umeda stations. So the odds of seeing violence are certainly higher. What I theorize though, is that there's also just less reporting of crime.

A few days in and I'm breaking one of my original tenets regarding cultural comparisons, but I hope this is in the interest of finding the truth behind the notion that Japan is so safe. That, and looking into the political myth that foreigners are responsible for a disproportionately high amount of crime. More to come...

The earthquake in Osaka the other day was a lot bigger in Mie and Nara. Glad I wasn't there. I'm not used to these things, I'm jumping every time the walls creak.

Jim mentioned the 1966 UT Tower Shootings today, which always takes me back to my freshman year at UT--no, not 1966, 1994. Newly arrived from Tulsa, I was unfamiliar with many of the strange ways of Texans. Like every freshman I knew the story of the shooting. In fact, I vaguely recall also having heard about it when I toured UT as an undergrad. It's something that the University is still addressing.

So one beautiful autumn day, I'm walking up from the six-pack across the mall in front of the tower, on my way to the smurf in the ugly--I mean, on my way to the student microcomputer facility (that's a goofy name too) in the undergraduate library. Anyhow, I'm walking along, happy as can be to be free and independent and all those other great freshman feelings, and a SHOT rings out. I jumped. Then anther one! At this point I was ready to dive for the bushes. I was literally deciding if I could clear the hedge, when it occurred to me that no one else was reacting. It was like I was the only one hearing it--some ghost of the past.

This is where the psychology comes in. There were clearly two shots...then a third. Then a fourth. Meanwhile everyone is acting normal and I start to feel like I'm losing my mind. But I don't dive for cover. In fact I try to act normal--I don't hear it I tell myself. No one's getting shot, but in my mind the people around me are getting massacred. I imagined the wounded crawling behind the bushes and patches of blood streaked across the pebblerock. But the shots are real, and they don't let up till I get to the library, a little shaken.

At the library I got up my nerve and decided to tell the clerk I heard shots. They didn't seem to have any idea what it was, but then, they weren't overly concerned. There there little freshman.

Later when I was walking with a friend I heard shots again.

"Oh that? They shooting blanks at the grackles."

"The what???"

"Grackles, those nasty birds that land in huge flocks and make a whole block of campus smell like bird poop."

It really is an overwhelming stench, these birds. I never noticed them in Tulsa, but they do a tremendous job of making parts of the UT campus totally inhospitable for days at a time. Needless to say, I was relieved to find out I wasn't in the early phases of schizophrenia. I would have gone right on believing they had come from my own mind...

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