Watch the music video before reading the rest of this post.

How was that? Did you feel that something didn't quite fit in the picture? That is the music video for 海雪 (umiyuki, “Ocean Snow”) the first single by Jero (ジェロ), released last February in Japan. Jero is a young black American from Pittsburgh… who sings enka. Enka is a form of Japanese popular music which was at its height in Japan during the postwar period. Its main themes are loss, loneliness, unfulfilled love, even suicide. Female singers of enka have been especially popular. I can't help noticing some striking resemblances to Spanish copla; not only in the themes, but also in the staging, the perceived attitudes of the performers, their use of vibrato and the way both genres have gradually become regarded by their respective younger generations as “uncool” and affected. For samples of enka, watch 修羅の花 (shura no hana, “Flower of Carnage”), the beautiful theme song for 修羅雪姫 (shurayukihime, “Lady Snowblood”) sung by Meiko Kaji and later reused by Tarantino in “Kill Bill”; or listen to 川の流れのように (kawa no nagare no yôni, “Like the Currents of the River”) by Hibari Misora, which at some point was proclaimed “the greatest Japanese song of all time” (?). As Jerome C. White himself explains in an interview with CNN International, his maternal grandmother was a native of Yokohama who married an African American. Jerome was born and grew up in Pennsylvania, close to his Japanese grandmother, listening and singing enka even before he could understand the lyrics. Apparently, his debut has been a great success in Japan, where black urban cultures from the United States have been trendy for some years now (as one can gather by the surprisingly large number of shops selling hip-hop-related products in cities like Tokyo and Kyoto). This form of strong cultural hybridisation is still rather unusual in Japan. Although we can find similar cases in other countries, where an “outsider” is “allowed” to succeed in an area that is traditionally perceived as idiosyncratic to that culture, Japan is (still) among the world's most ethnically homogeneous countries. Of course, Jero is not the first performer of enka born outside Japan, but I don't think that there has been any other gaijin before him who brought such distinctive traits of race, nationality, culture and language with him to the genre, all the while being supported by the industry and the media. That said, I must confess that I can't see the influence of rap in his music. Would you have been able to tell, had you listened to umiyuki with your eyes closed?

“In the rise of a new desire for Japan led worldwide by contemporary forms of popular culture, original creations made in Japan are sold to foreign TV networks and media conglomerates (sometimes largely participated or even owned by Japanese companies). Those cultural exports are in effect multimedia content in ‘new’ fields such as animation, videogames and pop music. Cultural content (‘software’) contrasts with the more traditional assets that Japan has been exporting, such as food, bonsai*, martial arts, poetry or, more recently, technology (‘hardware’).*

It is pertinent to ask about the special characteristics of those Japanese cultural products that make them desirable and popular far beyond the Japanese borders, and to reflect on ‘how Japanese’ they are, and in what ways.”

Two days ago I finished this short paper (“Considerations about the nature of Japanese cultural exports”, in PDF) for the university. It is part of the application process for the MA that I want to do this year. Yesterday my future professors confirmed to me, unofficially, that I am accepted. 万歳！ (which translated into Spanish means, roughly, “la que me espera… me voy a cagar la pata abajo”).

Via Kirai I stumbled on the results of this survey that collects information about erogenous zones. Apparently, thousands of men and women were asked to rank different spots in their bodies and the bodies of a partner — in terms of how much they they like to be touched, and how much they desire to touch the other, respectively. The study is interesting, but I found it somewhat annoying that it is difficult to draw what seems to me like an important conclusion: a comparison between where we think that the other likes to be touched and where he or she actually likes to be touched the most. The body maps provided show coloured zones, but it is difficult to compare women's guess to men's desires, for instance, because the variations in hue are quite subtle. Even if the images are displayed side-by-side, bare-eyed it is hard to notice any change at all in most regions of the body. I am always up for a bit of a Gimp-challenge. So I decided to try and edit the original images to obtain a better representation. This is my take on the results of the survey:

The hot colours (no pun intended) dye areas where we are not touched as much as we would like, so to speak. That is yellow, orange, pink, violet and red. In less academic terms, you could read cool colours, i.e. all shades of blue, as “will you put your hand off now”. I find it much easier here to identify those areas at a glance. Now there are some interesting results in here. Boys, did you notice those three orange/red spots in the female body? That's good news or what. Also, it seems that she doesn't like to be touched in her head and face that much, except that apparently you are not kissing her enough. Oh, and for some reason her right arm expects more attention than her left arm (?). About men, feet and knees look a bit frustrated, in contrast with the arms, which are asking for some independence and need more space, you know, to live their lives or whatever. Penises demand more attention (yes, even more). But not the scrotum. The scrotum is fine, thank you. The diagram below summarises the process that I followed using Gimp. The female images are used here, but the same applies to the other case. The single most important step, on the left side of the image, involves inverting the colours of the image that represents where women are touched, and then adding it to the picture that represents where women want to be touched. Effectively, we are substracting one from the other. The branch at the bottom simply emphasizes colours to make them more apparent. The steps on the top-center of the image produce black-on-white edges that are used as a frame so that regions of the body become more recognisable.

Estimados bastardos de EDF Energy Si tan preocupados estáis por la eficiencia energética de mi hogar y por mejorar el aislamiento de mi piso, por que contrate un seguro contra las posibles fugas de agua en las cañerías, por las sequías en Mozambique, por la supervivencia de la biomasa brasileña, por mis emisiones de CO₂, por colocarme una pulserita verde gilipollesca que atestigüe mi compromiso con el «2010 Carbon Challenge», por venderme un depósito de agua para el jardín… si os decís «passionate» por todo eso, ¿os puedo pedir que no imprimáis para mí ni uno más de esos desplegables preciosos a todo color en papel satinado superglossy de 120 gr/m² blanqueado con cloro, hijos de puta? Que si fuese solo eso, pues vale. Pero es que toda esa publicidad ridícula (que descarto sin leerla en cuanto detecto que es publicidad, y no facturas) nos la enviáis siempre por duplicado, mamones. Una vez con la factura del gas, y otra vez con la factura de la electricidad. Cuando no todo por separado. Que digo yo que si es verdad que «every little counts» os podíais aplicar el cuento. No os costará tanto encontrar todos los domicilios que tienen contratado más de un servicio con vosotros (que serán muchos) y contarlos solo una vez cuando os toque hacer el mailing. Una mijita de SQL, hombre; que no es más que un SELECT medio guarro. Yo os lo escribo. Y ya de paso las facturas del gas y de la electricidad me las envían ustedes juntitas también, muchas gracias. Lo que os ahorréis en papel, tinta, mano de obra, infraestructura y gastos de correo me lo descontáis de la factura del mes siguiente. Os dejo que os apuntéis el tanto medioambiental; como si la idea hubiese sido vuestra. ¿No habéis oído hablar de la compañía aérea aquella que se ahorró un pastizal a base de escatimar una aceituna en cada comida? Bueno, eso será una leyenda urbana. Pero, ¿vosotros sabéis lo que me duele a mí echar a reciclar todos esos folletos y sobres inútiles? Atentamente el tripu PD: ¿quién coño querría registrarse en una de esas campañas para entrar en el «Stadium of Heroes» [sic] de vuestro oportunismo pseudoconservacionista?

Oh, how wonderful! Right before submitting this rant, when I was double-checking the facts, Google spat out the picture at the bottom, CC Anthony Grimley — click on the picture to see the notes.

As naïve and twee and theatrical as they may sound, and yet these words by Will Smith really strike a chord on me. I can relate to this exaltation of knowledge and self-discipline; mentally and physically. Lore in its purest form — books. Control through one sport, the sport.

“The keys to life for me are reading and running. The idea that there are millions and billions of people who have lived before us, and they had problems and they solved them and they wrote it in a book somewhere. […] There is no issue we can have that somebody didn’t already write a thousand years ago in a book. […] You know it’s in a book somewhere but you’ve got to find the right one that is going to give you the proper information.” “When you get on the treadmill you deprive yourself of oxygen. What kind of person you are will come out very, very quickly. You’re either the type of person who will say you’re going to run three miles or you stop the treadmill at 2.94 and you hit it and you call 2.94 3 miles, or you get off after a mile, or you’re the type of person that runs hard through the finish line and when you get to 3.0 you realize, ‘God, I could really do 5,’ and you go ahead and do two more. And that little person talks to you and says, 'Man, do you feel our knee? We should stop. I feel we should stop ourselves right now. This is not healthy anymore.’ When you learn to get command over that person on that treadmill, you learn to get command over that person in your life.”

http://dtree.tripu.info

きのうこのビデオをしました。しゃしんはきょねん私の日本にりょこうでとったしゃしんです。おんがくは川井憲次の「GHOST IN THE SHELL」のソウンド-トラックです。 ところで今日日本語のじゅぎょうをさいかいしました！

Richard Dawkins prompts me to a moral dilemma that is also a paradox: I want to worship Richard Dawkins as a god, but I can't because I am an atheist myself.

Frases oídas esta noche en un bar de Londres durante la final de la Eurocopa: «¡Maricón, vuelve a Cataluña!» Esto lo gritó al jugador Xavi uno que había a mi lado. Inmediatamente, otro que estaba cerca se volvió hacia él con cara de disgusto. Entonces el que había gritado empezó a explicarse y a darle palmaditas de buen rollo en la espalda al catalán. Y le oí decir «no, ¡si yo soy vasco!». O sea, que él también se siente oprimido por el Estado Español, así que todo queda entre hermanos. «¡Alemán, hijo de puta!» El deporte, uniendo a las naciones y a los pueblos. «¡España: una, grande y libre!» Esta frase es bonita, pero me suena haberla oído antes en algún sitio, así que como cántico es muy poco original. «¡España! ¡España! ¡España!» Para empezar, estas frases están incompletas, porque no tienen predicado. Tienen un sujeto, pero no tienen un predicado. Me quedé con la intriga de saber qué quería decir la gente con esto. Podría ser «España comparte frontera con Portugal». O bien «España tiene seis letras». O «España da asco», o cualquier otra cosa. Lo más curioso de todo es que el vasco de antes también se desgañitaba gritando esto cuando el partido terminó. «¡Este partido / lo vamos a ganar!» Aún admitiendo que hubiese algún jugador en el bar, no sé cómo pretendía ganar el partido a 900 km de distancia. Lamento profundamente que mi racionalismo cuasi-enfermizo, mi tendencia a no disgustar a los demás si no tengo un buen motivo y mi falta de apego por los colorines me impidan en días como hoy sentirme genuinamente feliz, pasármelo bien y hacer amigos. Creo que esto ya no lo voy a poder cambiar nunca.