Stuff that missed the bucket.

sh1t Happens

Posted on Jun 4, 2004 in Random Silliness | 4 comments

I really was going to tell a story of Terror on The High Seas, as promised, but I fell down and a couple of litres of beer somehow splashed into my mouth, and well, it all went to hell, basically, and all I could recall of my past while listening to AC/DC’s High Voltage was the unseemly enthusiasm with which my first girlfriend performed fellatio on me those several decades ago, thereby ruining me (in at least one sense) for most of the other women with whom I had sexual relationships in later years.
But you don’t wanna hear about that stuff.
Or maybe you do, I guess, but that’s not the story I wanted to tell tonight, so here’s an amusing image that I’ve stolen from one of the talented goons at the SA Forums, to make you forgive me for the notable lack of blowjob and/or saltydog stories this evening, instead.
here.

4 comments

Horrible But Exceedingly Clever

Posted on May 24, 2004 in Trippy Visuals, Man | 6 comments

When my old rock and roll alco-compadre DV was here for a whirlwind visit last June, one of the missions on his checklist was to try and track down Takashi Miike movies. He figured, quite reasonably, that it might be easier to find them in the black markets in Seoul than in Chicago.
That didn’t turn out to be the case, and we failed Mission Miike miserably, combing the Yongsan black market and Namdaemun in vain. Still, we had a reasonably enjoyable time trying, which is what life’s all about, after all.
Although DV’s tastes have always been more extreme than mine in most things, I was keen to check out these movies that he was so intent on finding. In the last few months, I’ve been bittorrenting my little heart out, and have managed to download and watch a handful of Miike’s movies, and they’ve, like, blown my mind, man. Phrases like ‘fanatical intensity’ and ‘horrible but exceedingly clever’ are used to talk about Miike’s transgressive oeuvre. That doesn’t even begin to describe it.
So far, I’ve watched

and I’ve never seen anything like them. I don’t know if I love or hate them, to be honest, but I’m glad I watched them. I must admit I don’t know bugger-all about Fine Cinema. I don’t have any trace of the fanboy otaku fetishization of things Japanese that seems to elevate some of the lamest Japanese culture-crud to cult status. I like David Lynch, and Kubrick, and I like Gilliam and Jim Jarmusch too, but I couldn’t possibly engage you in an intelligent discussion of why. I just do, OK?
Don’t know much about no art, but I knows what I likes.
Still, I do know when something I’ve seen or heard or read has reached into my skull and scrambled the curds around. I walk around in a daze for a couple of days, and then puke up some poetry, or get valve-clearing drunk and bang my head against the wall for a while in search of the reset button.
Those are good things, in case you were wondering.
But Miike’s stuff? That’s a whole other kind of thing.
Here’s a little quote from a book called ‘Agitator — The Cinema of Takashi Miike’ :

“When Kiyoshi accidentally strangles her in his rage, he takes her home and deposits her corpse in the garden greenhouse. He sends the visitor (who has been filming throughout with Kiyoshi’s consent) into the house to fetch some garbage bags, then continues to mark the parts of Asako’s body that he intends to cut off for easier disposal. He discovers that he becomes aroused by the sight of her naked body, then turns to the camera and says he finally discovered the feeling he couldn’t acknowledge before: a desire to have sex. If this is what he repressed, then he has been denying himself since his children were born. The moment when being a parent became more important than being a lover, he conformed to his duty and repressed his desires. The choice to make him rediscover a desire for sex (which he will then naturally act upon because realisation equals liberation) instead of a random other emotion is therefore anything but exploitative. It’s quite the opposite: being true to the character and to the film’s theme.”

Which sounds a little out there perhaps, but defensible in terms of story and character. If it offends you, though, you’d best not read further.
Because that paragraph doesn’t begin to describe what happens later in the scene — or what happened in the previous scene for that matter (in which Asako is raped and murdered by Kiyoshi) — events so simultaneously horrendous and hilariously bizarre that you find yourself dazed by the utter nastiness of it. Kiyoshi begins to have sex with the corpse — filmed in unswerving, all-revealing Miike style — and finds himself unable to, er, withdraw, apparently due to rigor mortis. After the corpse voids its bowels on him during his struggle to disengage, doglike, things proceed to get worse.
Yes, worse.
Miike’s been making movies for a little over a decade, and in that time he’s made more than 40 of them. The half-dozen or so I’ve seen so far have opened up and played a flashlight around in corners of my brain that see the light rarely, if at all. The sex scene, if that’s what you can call it, in the last ten minutes of Gozu, for example, as illuminating as it is of the allusively Lynchian psychological mysteries of the main character, had me, unshockable me, sitting there with jaw literally agape at the imagery. I won’t go into details, since spoilers suck, but it was the first movie I ever went back and watched again immediately after the climactic (and utterly bizarre) finish, looking for the threads that led to it.
If you want scrape your mind raw, and get down deep inside the churning sh-tpool that is our modern global culture, get right into some Miike. If you can laugh at rape and murder, giggle along with necrophilia and dismemberment, this stuff’s for you. Indelible memories of Miike were part of the engine behind my rhetorical flourishes in this piece I wrote up the other afternoon. The twining of sex and violence is a worrisome thing, of course. Every Miike movie I watch leaves me feeling a little guilty for laughing, and a little dirty for watching, I admit. But I also feel a little awestruck at the artfulness and audacity of it all. And once the distorting lens has been removed as the credits roll, the parodies of human viciousness that I’ve been watching have illuminated some things for me.
Miike brings it together pretty well himself, in an interview here :

C: In the torture scenes, the needles below the frame are like having needles stuck into your own eyes.
MT: Yes, I did want the audience to feel it. Particularly Japanese men, wanting to have a nice wife, a pretty wife, and to be happy – it’s something they all want to do. I knew by getting them to sympathise with the character, I could make them feel the pain that he’s going through.
C: Can you tell me about your use of sound to create atmospheres? Like the noise of the piano wires…
MT: When things are being severed, I’m using meat with a similar-type bone. When we were recording the sound, rather than turn up the recording volume, we put the microphone very close, almost in the hole – I wanted the audience to feel the vibrations, coming through.
[....]
C: Any other influences?
MT: (grins) I like Monty Python.

I’d recommend you watch a few Takashi Miike movies, but you might hate me afterwards.
[Update : In some kind weird blogospheric serendipity, I see Matt's just posted something about The Happiness of The Katakuris, which was a Miike remake of a Korean film, The Quiet Family. Weird.]

6 comments

Flickr Kicks Orkut Ass

Posted on May 4, 2004 in Trippy Visuals, Man | 6 comments

I’m not real big on the ‘social software’ thing, but Stewart and the gang at Ludicorp have made such a cool, cool thing with Flickr. Join me, why don’t you? The water’s fine!


6 comments

Type, Type Everywhere

Posted on Mar 23, 2004 in Metablogging, Random Silliness | 4 comments

Although I’m not really too exercised about it one way or the other, I tend to think more along the lines of Mark than Shelley on this whole TypeKey furor. I must admit TypeKey seems a little like using a hammer to turn a screw to me, but we shall see.
In the meantime, though, I have taken it upon myself offer some more superterrific BumpyCase product enhancements for Six Apart to continue building out their weblogging product line. It is with great pleasure that I submit these modest proposals to leverage the brand, exploit synergies, capture market share and monetarize conversation. TypePad and TypeKey are only the beginning! We have nothing to lose but our privacy!

  • TypeVote - More accurate than Diebold (MS Access backend optional), and totally free from hanging chads! If you’re a voter, get yourself a TypeVote weblog, and really make an Emergent Democracy©™ difference! One blog, one vote!
  • TypeShop - Route all your monetary transactions through your blog! Blog about that sandwich you had for lunch, and ask your grocery store to subscribe to your RSS (Really Simple Shopping) feed, and leave that shopping list at home. Get people to buy diapers for you! The possibilities are limitless!
  • TypeONegative - Cluetrain Item #3172: Healthcare providers are conversations! Or goth metal bands, maybe.

    • Still fleshing this one out.

  • TypePod - You’re not an A-lister until you have an iPod, and what better way to build brand synergy and leverage the design-fetishizing metrosexual music pirate demographic?
  • TyppelGanger - Buy out the drunkmenworkhere autogenerated weblogging technology and let the code write you into existence. No need to do it yourself anymore! That’s so 2001!
  • TypeFire - Hit a button, generate a comments-thread flame. Why waste valuable mental CPU cycles trying to come up with another way to say ‘You’re a donkey-raping sh-tweasel’ in yet another post that includes political commentary with which you disagree? TypeFire will reduce your fifteen-minute-nemesis to charcoal at the click of a button, and get those valuable clickthroughs happening too!
  • TypeAzon - Plug your weblog and yourself straight into the bookflogging mainline! Webloggers read books, right? Well, Google is already useless for finding anything other than Amazon-affiliate clicksinks when you’re looking for information on books, and shifting units is what it’s all about, kids, so why not jump into the moneypool?
  • PadThaipe - Damn, that Thai food is yummy.
  • TypeUp - Want to hold a pomo-moblog-emergent-market-journospam-osphere conference and maybe soak the blogrubes for a few simoleons while you’re at it? A TypePad/MeetUp mashup is the ticket for inviting people who are guaranteed to breathlessly validate your wildest techo-utopian blather!
  • TypeZilla - Serving no other purpose than to piss off IP Lawyers Who Don’t Get It yet. Lessig-approved and somehow licensed under Creative Commons, so it’s got that street-cred every hip weblogger so craves.
  • TypePoint - Taking a page from Microsoft, throw together some leftover code and half-baked ideas and call it a Knowledge Management system. Or portal. Or workgroup document storage. Or something. Hell, we don’t quite know what it does, but it stresses the server something fierce, so it must be good, right?
  • TypeSpam - Hey kids! You know those other webloggers got them some dollars, right? The internet’s awash with disposable income! Use TypeSpam to generate targeted-demographic, GeoURL-enabled, realtime book-sales monitoring, results-oriented weblog comment-thread advertisements for your online drugstore! It’s viral, it’s centrally managed, it’s smartly styled, and it’ll get your Googlejuice flowing!

Kombinat is just the beginning, my friends. This is not your father’s blogosphere.
Now put me on the payroll, already.

4 comments

Lost In Translation

Posted on Dec 27, 2003 in Trippy Visuals, Man | 23 comments

I watched Lost In Translation last night, and it made me feel all funny in my special place. Well, not really, but I can’t figure out if it really was a Fine Filmic Experience or not.

DIRECTOR (in Japanese to the interpreter): The translation is very important, O.K.? The translation.
INTERPRETER: Yes, of course. I understand.
DIRECTOR: Mr. Bob-san. You are sitting quietly in your study. And then there is a bottle of Suntory whiskey on top of the table. You understand, right? With wholehearted feeling, slowly, look at the camera, tenderly, and as if you are meeting old friends, say the words. As if you are Bogie in “Casablanca,” saying, “Cheers to you guys,” Suntory time!
INTERPRETER: He wants you to turn, look in camera. O.K.?
BOB: That’s all he said?
INTERPRETER: Yes, turn to camera.
BOB: Does he want me to, to turn from the right or turn from the left?
INTERPRETER (in very formal Japanese to the director): He has prepared and is ready. And he wants to know, when the camera rolls, would you prefer that he turn to the left, or would you prefer that he turn to the right? And that is the kind of thing he would like to know, if you don’t mind.
DIRECTOR (very brusquely, and in much more colloquial Japanese): Either way is fine. That kind of thing doesn’t matter. We don’t have time, Bob-san, O.K.? You need to hurry. Raise the tension. Look at the camera. Slowly, with passion. It’s passion that we want. Do you understand?
INTERPRETER (In English, to Bob): Right side. And, uh, with intensity.
BOB: Is that everything? It seemed like he said quite a bit more than that.
DIRECTOR: What you are talking about is not just whiskey, you know. Do you understand? It’s like you are meeting old friends. Softly, tenderly. Gently. Let your feelings boil up. Tension is important!
Don’t forget.
INTERPRETER (in English, to Bob): Like an old friend, and into the camera.
BOB: O.K.
DIRECTOR: You understand? You love whiskey. It’s Suntory time! O.K.?
BOB: O.K.
DIRECTOR: O.K.? O.K., let’s roll. Start.
BOB: For relaxing times, make it Suntory time.
DIRECTOR: Cut, cut, cut, cut, cut! (Then in a very male form of Japanese, like a father speaking to a wayward child) Don’t try to fool me. Don’t pretend you don’t understand. Do you even understand what we are trying to do? Suntory is very exclusive. The sound of the words is important. It’s an expensive drink. This is No. 1. Now do it again, and you have to feel that this is exclusive. O.K.? This is not an everyday whiskey you know.
INTERPRETER: Could you do it slower and… ?
DIRECTOR: With more ecstatic emotion.
INTERPRETER: More intensity.
DIRECTOR (in English): Suntory time! Roll.
BOB: For relaxing times, make it Suntory time.
DIRECTOR: Cut, cut, cut, cut, cut! God, I’m begging you.

What do you reckon? I’d like to hear from you, dear reader, what you thought about the movie. I know precisely jack sh-t about film, and place myself firmly in the ‘I dunno much about art, but I knows what I likes’ camp. Bill Murray, as everyone hastens to say, was pretty damn good, I thought, but was the movie all that, really, or just Japanophile pandering?
Inquiring wonderchickens want to know. Great movie, or just goodish?

23 comments

Fluffy Bunnies

Posted on Dec 14, 2003 in Random Silliness | 7 comments

Fluffy Bunnies. Playful kittens. Romantic sunsets. Warm spring breezes. Crisp cotton sheets on a cold winter night. Happy puppies. Burbling babies.
Oh, and Saddam Hussein. What a wonderful world!
I’ve turned over a new leaf, I swear. Nothing but Happy Fun Times from here on in, campers.

[Update : Nah, f--k that.]

7 comments
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