Here, straight from Japanprobe, we have Sentimental Journey, a tasty wad of fresh, chewy video from Nagi Noda, who also claims responsibility for the demented poodle exercise video we posted earlier, because we must have been drunk or something. In fairness, this is quite an achievement; with a cast just slightly smaller than that of Cecil B. DeMille’s Cleopatra, Noda manages to outdo George Lucas in the special effects field without, you know, using any special effects. I have only one question:
Why does that woman walk like she just peed herself?
And here, also from Japanprobe, is what Japan thinks happens when Japanese women marry Westerners. Gee, thanks, I always wondered where Danny DeVito came from.
raincoaster 
Three cheers for bearded babies. I hope my kids are born with beards, and hopefully an innate desire to dance in water…and..horribly deforemed genitalia (I mean..really..what the hell is going on there? Look at it…is that supposed to testes? wheres the penis? is it a vagina? Why is it diagonal? I mean what the hell? And how come beard and no pubes? I just don’t understand anything any more.
Incidentally that video is incredible…though I can only get halfway through it for some reason (technical reasons…not like as soon as it gets halfway through I end up running out of the building and throwing myself of the nearest bridge to a watery doom for no apparent reason)
PS I’m testing you here…prize to anyone who gets the literary allusion in that last paragraph..answers on a post card to blah blah blah blah blah
Ooh…just got the whole thing. Its really cool when they all walk away at the end…yes…cool.
Is it Terry Brooks? Douglas Adams? It’s always one of those two when it’s a literary allusion I don’t get.
I agree with you about the genitalia; I think that’s supposed to be a girl. Or a bi-weenied, nutless deformity unique to demi-gaijin!
Nope on those two. Think more literary…I am an English Graduate after all (I actually suddenly realise how incredibly pretentious I am…shit)
Anyway, I can’t remember, but in either Japanese or one of the Chinese languages doesn’t foreigner and devil translate to the same word?
Weird.
In Mandarin my ex told me it translates to “Big nose” which is unflattering to say the least.
And you’ll have to separate out the literary allusion. I can’t tell what part of your post is allusion and what is ariginal.
Incidentally that video is incredible…though I can only get halfway through it for some reason (technical reasons…not like as soon as it gets halfway through I end up running out of the building and throwing myself of the nearest bridge to a watery doom for no apparent reason)
Contains a concealed allusion..not that concealed…and its a bit smarmy…I feel like I’m being a shit…the guys not incredibly well known (it is a guy). Early twentieth Century (if I remember rightly).
I’ll give you a clue…the guy is so paranoid and intense that a ten week course in him resulted in me going manic depressive every sunday night (no sleep no get out of bed…really fucking nuts) until monday afternoon..once I’d missed the seminar…and then it cleared up until next week or whenever I thought about it.
I got 64% in that course in the end (that’s a middle of the range B…or a 2:1 if you prefer). Crazy sometimes helps.
It’s not HP Lovecraft, is it? I’d feel so incredibly stupid and stoned if it were.
What’s really scary is that if you go to Wikipedia you find this:
Nope…think European. And the writer died of an illness (I cannot remember which). One very famous film (and a couple of less famous ones) by a very famous director is based on one of his novels…
Feel free to give up at any point…you may never have read his stuff and I don’t want you to think that this is an elaborate excuse for me to show off my literary muscle. Its a really obscure reference..I just dumped it in and then made a game…
This has absolutely nothing to do with Japanese Loopy fun any more….How come every time we engage in threadedness we end up going totally off topic with in two posts or so.
Hmm
We’re loopy. Loopy bibiophiles.
Baudelaire? I’m getting desperate, or maybe it has to do with being stoned on the 21st century’s equivalent of laudanum drops, NyQuil.
Kafka?
Good ruddy call. Kafka is the one. Its the end of ‘The Judgement’.
I simultaneously love and hate Kafka…I enjoyed writing an essay on him but i hated trying to actually study him. Odd.
Anwyay, I got the stuffs to be doing. But well done…Kudos and all that.
I studied Ovid before I studied Kafka, so perhaps I was warmed up and you were thrown in cold. Try doing it in that order next time…should you be overcome with the desire to read Kafka, that is. I always thought he was a realist, but maybe that’s just me.
Oh yeah..total realist, in a very strange way. I just found it incredibly claustrophic a lot of the time. Hard to trace…I also had the older translations…which don’t make it easy on you. I think the story I most like to think of with Kafka is his doing a reading to his friends of ‘In the Penal Colony’ and having everyone in stitches, apparently it took him ages to finish because he couldn’t stop laughing. I love that…such a dark story that you can take so seriosly…but there’s an element of comedy and satire and silliness to so much of his work that every now and then you just find yourself laughing at it all…its like a form of escape.
Anyway, I did like Kafka, I just hated studying him…I’ve often had problems with the way literature is studied..but thats a whole different kettle really.
It is indeed. Have you seen Educating Rita?
I have not. Is it worth it? Or can you summarise the whole thing in no more than 30 words?
It’s worth it. I can summarize, but then you’d never see the acting or get to cry.
British class conflict, calling to literature transcends humble surroundings, fails to transcend humble surroundings, transcends humble and posh surroundings and mentor. Bittersweet. Blake. Wordsworth. Michael Caine. Julie Walters.
I’ll keep an eye out for it.
So..why do I like crying at things, and seek these things out…yet most of the time when I cry because of something really happening..it’s a really bad experience?
That’s why weepies are so popular; they allow you to weep for all the things in your life you should be weeping for, without having to think about those awful things. They’re like a valve that lets off excess steam. So cry because of pretend things happening, crying on behalf of real things happening. The Greek dramatists understood this, so did Nietzsche.
In fact, so did Kafka.
I mean.. I get that…the whole catharsis and empathy bit. That makes sense to an extent, but I more often feel totally ruined by certain films that I absolutely love. Dancer in the Dark and Requiem fro a dream are the two obvious examples. And i literally found myself in shock for about two days after watching each. (Well..maybe not literally…but its a good way to emphasise my point a bit). So yeah, it was like a venting of emotions I wouldn’t enjoy in real life, but it seemed to make me really upset for so long afterwards, that it actually caused sadness without that safety net. It hurt a lot and I still love those films. Also there’s the fact that what I described to someone as the best piece of journalism I’ve ever read, a report done in Vice Magazine a coupla months back…reduced me to tears and made me upset for the rest of the day..this happened again the other night when I was reading a blog about the girl with mental difficulties (what’s the polite term these days) who got gang raped and abused by a bundle of boys (she was 17 they were around 14) the whole thing recorded and then distributed by them for profit around the school (apparently it survived on youtube for a bit). Both of these things were the real world…and they reduced me to tears in a similar way to the clearly fictional parts things previous.
Anyway, the only reason I can think of for why I seek out these things is because these kind of emotions go hand in hand with having to re-evaluate the whole world. My whole world view gets shifted a little bit…and I realise there’s things I’ve never really thought about. I seek that kind of shit. I want my mind fucked with so I can figure out what this is all about. Does that make sense? Does that even vaguely answer my original question. I have no idea…Sorry for ranting here…jsut trying to sort these ideas out in my head
No problem. I understand completely. These are the reasons people become Goths, just as one example. HP Lovecraft wrote a very powerful essay on why the horror story fascinates people; I’d look for it and give you the link, but I’m off to bed. Google and find it; you may find that it clarifies a lot of what you’re thinking.