Saturday, May 27, 2006

a message from the one who's gettin' candid


Only Dre could make a beat out of an ambulance alarm. Although I think Da Lench Mob would match him two years later by grooving with an ekg beep.
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Friday, May 26, 2006

WA-WA-WA-WANDAA MO-MO-MO-MOIII


The fanmade movie itself can be safely ignored, you're here for the song. Said song eventually turns into a dual between Halko Momoi's standard, high-as-hell unnervingly cute voice and her AWESOME HARDCORE METAL voice... which, believe it or not, is even cuter than the other one.

If the objective measure for how good an idol is is not cuteness et al, but is rather how completely she absorbs herself with geeky concerns, then in covering a tune from a 20-year-old arcade game Halko has beaten out all others by a mile or two.
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Wednesday, May 24, 2006

Komugi is all class.

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Tuesday, May 23, 2006

Sadly the


Just saw the first episode of Kamisama Kazoku here - it's a fine entry to this year's romantic comedy lineup, although it's not even coming close to Kamichu in terms of the "student who's also a god" niche.

(speaking of Kamichu: where are the rest of my subs?)
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Saturday, May 20, 2006

can anyone understand a word that lady is saying?


Originally I thought that Emm Bee Vee, esp. Loveless, was basically mediocre, go-nowhere songs completely covered over by an impossibly gorgeous sludge of production. This is correct, but I only realized later that I had kind of missed the point. And, as long as I'm talking about this, I should also emphasize the fact that I am extremely attracted to Kevin Shields circa 1991.

Video should ideally be watched in an altered state of experience with the volume up at pain threshhold level.
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Friday, May 19, 2006

I GOT A QUESTION, AS SERIOUS AS CANCER

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Thursday, May 18, 2006

Kasimasi article's up
Hey, it got posted!! And the folks willing to put the effort in seem to have really liked it! Or at least were impressed by the dancing act.

"Bravo for staying true to yourself."

*BEAMS*

Also: I decided, shortly after posting this thing, that I could no longer worry about the fact that I wasn't getting to everyone. One day, perhaps, I will be able to get complex ideas across in three sentences (without semicolons - those are cheating), but that's going to take me years, and it's certainly not going to happen if I continue to just drop messages in bottles. The change I have to be able to make is to begin writing only for those who can learn (or, more properly, those who are open to it). I'm not yet at a point where I can approach those who basically just want to vote for their favorite Bleach character or those who, so to speak, "already understand it all," so I might as well go for the ones willing to pay attention... not necessarily to ME, but paying attention in general (and there are, I think, quite a few of those running around). After that, who knows.

I say over and over again in my analyses that I'm not trying to "explain" anything, if explaining means dissecting a show and tacking the different pieces onto a premade model of "how things are" or ripping away all ambiguity and mystery. What I write and the models I come up with are dependent on the show rather than the other way around... though this does not, of course, mean that I'm necessarily right or that I'm offering the only reading possible, nor does it mean that I avoid the danger of violence. My goal is to think what each show itself thinks, to be able to trace the movement of what it concerns itself with. I try to do this by bringing out, in an explicit way, the "vague" understanding that I already have of it and which allows me to appreciate it at all in the first place... in other words, I try to learn what I already know. This is certainly a method of some kind (it's clearly based in Heidegger), but it's not at all something to be picked up in a class on "literary analysis."

My hope is that there are people out there who are interested in understanding the things they enjoy in more detailed ways, but who find the usual sorts of "this is actually a phallic symbol" stuff silly and superficial. Perhaps these are people who've (in some liberal arts course) had to "apply" Marx or Freud or Campbell or god knows who else to something they liked (say, a novel), and had the results read like very good Marx or Freud or Campbell but have nothing at all to do with whatever the novel was about. These are the ideal folks I'm looking for. If it doesn't sound too pretentious, my hope is that those willing to learn will stumble across what I've done and recognize that there's another way of doing things. Which is not to say that they should be taking up my crap (I'm too long-winded and I talk about love and justice all the freaking time), but rather I'd like them to learn going to the work itself and thinking it through rather than simply comparing it against something else.

The point, if you like, is to teach and to learn paying attention. I myself haven't grasped this well enough yet.
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Monday, May 15, 2006

I can't believe I haven't posted this one yet.


SWING batter batter...
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Sunday, May 14, 2006

IT'S DONE
Well, I finally managed to finish this thing, some two months in the making, without killing myself. The final count before last-minute editing is: 7677 words, approx. 26 pages. I've done far worse... and actually, I think this one came out quite well in terms of readability [EDIT: this is incorrect. I was only thinking this was more readable because I'd forgotten that I spent about a month just trying to get the necessary VOCABULARY together for this thing, and what a vocabulary it is... probably I'm going to get a lot of complaints about this]. It's much more tightly argued than my previous attempts, although as a piece it's necessarily incomplete (for reasons which I note).

I think this'll all fit in the space of one article. But Dagger, as a favor: if it gets cut off, could you tell me so I can resubmit? Arigato gozaimasu! (the last part is a footnote)

I'm really beginning to wonder how much I'm getting accomplished with my writing these things, or really with anything that I'm doing around here. I think these little essays are good work, and I think I'm accomplishing a lot just "practicing my chops" as it were. The difficulty is getting any of this understood, though, or at least getting feedback, which I think I've totally failed at for the past five months. I've said this before. On the one hand I don't want to write scribblings that only "communicate" by setting one cliche off of another (actually I'm not sure if I CAN even write this way anymore, at least when I'm trying to be serious). On the other, getting blank stares and being totally ignored, rarely even worthy of an "I don't know what you're talking about," is getting me nowhere. It's like trying to get traction in alabama mud, I have absolutely no one to speak back to. On the boards, especially, there have been a number of threads where I've tried to work out, as rigorously as I can, the issues in question... only to have the threads continue in the same way as before, frequently going back to the exact same ideas that I did away with in my post. I must conclude that no one is reading these things; previously I thought that it wasn't asking too much to scan a page and a half of text (tops), which now seems hopelessly naive. I can't see what I'm doing "wrong," at least not in a way where I can fix it and still have what I'm trying to do mean a damned thing. Rhetoric isn't going to fix this, neither is compacting all of my "opinions" down to two or three sentences that say nothing. I don't understand, I really don't, and I worry that that will make me, in the end, an exceptionally poor teacher.
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Wednesday, May 10, 2006

I'm hot just like an oven


You can skip Grace Jones' hat and Marvin's cute acceptance speech if you want, the actual performance starts at a little before 3:00. How it is that a pudgy singer in his 40s comes across as pretty much the sexiest dude ever isn't something I really understand, but I will say one thing: at that spot where he unbuttons his coat you can pretty much imagine the entire crowd going :-o
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