126 posts tagged with "in-English"

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.

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.

I must confess that two days ago I had no idea who George Carlin was. I got to know him only yesterday, thanks to one of @ampajaro's tweets announcing his death first thing in the morning. That was followed by a chain of entries coming from a few of the blogs I (helplessly try to) keep up with. I have read such striking superlatives about this comedian that I youtubed him. After watching a few of his routines I now feel that I have to share and honour his talent. So here you have two pieces of different shows by George Carlin. Caution — strong opinions (and language) ahead. The first video is basically about religion being a pile of bullshit (kudos, we need more of that nowadays):

The second video is a somewhat furious yet brilliant sermon against those who are against abortion. (I personally don't agree with all of what Carlin says in this video. I am not against abortion. But unlike most of other left-wing people I know, I am not that sure that I am undoubtfully in favour of abortion, either. Also, I don't buy the theory that equates abortion to women's rights, and to “the choice of one woman”. In any case, I'm an atheist and my position has nothing to do with religion, tradition or customs, so I very much support — and enjoy — Carlin's mockery of religion's mean and simplistic approach to abortion):

What I admire the most about George Carlin is the technique — the round, perfectly-delivered script. He can speak for ten minutes without stumbling over a single syllable, without humming or hesitating. Weaving long enumerations of words or examples, putting the stress in the right place and stopping precisely where required. And I love his strong and brave position on issues as sticky as religion, politics, taboos, gender, death, PC language and abortion. Even if at times he looks more like a fanatical preacher than a comedian and some of his arguments seem debatable to me. But hey, conservatism needs to be balanced. Don't miss his “Seven dirty words" routine (“shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, tits”), which apparently caused a radio station to be sued and sparkled a major debate about censorship in the American airwaves. Here, the video audio in YouTube.

Adorable stuff to shift your mood. My muxtape: tripu.muxtape.com