What Do I Do With Those Damn Anime Kids?

Excerpt:

Introductions were made, and more chitchat was had about the problem at hand, namely, the Damn Anime Kid.  “They just wanna draw the same stuff over and over again.  The big eyes, the tiny chins, pointy hair.  Whatever.”  Others commiserated.  “I can’t tell when they’re copying other stuff or when it’s their own characters or what.  And even if they say it’s their own characters, all of it looks the same anyway.  It’s all virtually identical.  So even if it’s technically original, they’re not learning anything anyway.”

At the time I just sat back and took it in, unbelieving.  What do you do with those damn anime kids, huh?  You mean, the kids that are interested in drawing?  The ones that are interested in learning concrete skills that will help them tell stories, with an interest in the human body, in posture and proportion?  Gosh, what is an art teacher to do with such challenging students?

Being an expatriate of the 80′s hardcore punk rock scene I can empathize – some of the tragic shit that passes for ‘punk’ these days is sad, but who am I to judge? Today’s youth are expressing themselves through culture in the exact same way I did – I can’t fault them for being born two decades too late to have the same context. Truth be told, I’m sure there are plenty of 70′s punk or proto-punk scenesters who thought the stuff I’m into is shit. Fair enough. Instead of writing the current generation of fresh minds, we should find out what makes them tick (hint: it’s probably not that different than what made you tick at that age, you old fart…) and treat them like people instead of writing them off as a hopeless cause.

(Spotted at Deb Aoki’s Twitter feed.)

About 25 meters beneath the waters off Japan lies a stepped pyramid. We don’t know who built it, or when; but there it is, plain as day, available for anyone to go down and inspect. Even now at this very minute, the current washes past sharply squared stone blocks standing dark and forbidding, rising nearly high enough to break the surface. It is called the Yonaguni Monument.

The Japanese archipelago stretches for nearly 4,000 kilometers, from Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula to the island of Taiwain, off the coast of mainland China. At its extreme southwestern tip is the small island of Yonaguni, Japan’s most western point, just a scant 100 kilometers from Taiwan. It’s quite small, less than thirty square kilometers, with only 1700 residents, but it’s famous for something found in its waters: Hammerhead sharks.

Lots of hammerhead sharks. They’re so ubiquitous that divers come from all over the world to swim with them. And wherever you have a lot of divers, things under the water tend to be found. And that’s just what happened in 1986, when a representative from the Yonaguni tourism board was out exploring off the southernmost tip of the island, looking for a hammerhead diving spot to promote. What he came across was not what he set out to look for, though.

You can hear the whole thing here…

• A discussion of Japanese director Seijun Suzuki (Branded to Kill)
• Visual Kei band X Japan embarks on first-ever US tour
• An awesome gallery of posters using pop culture images (Superman, Marilyn Monroe) to promote manners on public transit

Share and Enjoy!

Sure, I could probably build my own TARDIS – but it wouldn’t play an arcade-perfect version of Dig Dug, so forget it.

Recruiting fake businessmen is one way to create the image–particularly, the image of connection–that Chinese companies crave. My Chinese-language tutor, at first aghast about how much we were getting paid, put it this way: “Having foreigners in nice suits gives the company face…”

(via BoingBoing via Kottke)

(via MeFi)

(via BoingBoing)

On a side note, Ed and I were joking this weekend that Toni Halliday might have been a better choice of vocalist than Reznor’s wife, Filipina singer Mariqueen Maandig. Not to knock Ms. Maanding, but she’s no Toni Halliday. And what do you know? Reznor’s producer on HTDA is none other than Toni Halliday’s husband, Alan Moulder!

Go figure…

I should preface this by saying that I am no expert in foreign relations; my only experience in that field is occasionally shooting up people from the U.K. in Modern Warfare 2 Xbox Live matches (well, and calling my relatives on the other side of the planet every once in a while).

With tensions rising between North and South Korea, one might be lead to wonder just how tough those crazy bastards on the other side of the 38th parallel are. Well, wonder no more! Planeman, a poster over at militaryphotos.net, has crafted an insanely thorough assessment of North Korea’s military resources, mosty using data sourced via Google.

Honestly, I don’t know enough about this stuff to tell if he’s on the money or not, but there’s enough info here to run one hell of a Twilight 2000 campaign.

Enter Haiku Glenn Beck, which lets you craft your own terse Japanese poetry inspired by Beck’s loony rants. A lot of the submissions thus far seem to be inspired by Beck’s war against ‘social justice’ . Here are a few choice samples:

Oh Glenn, don’t you cry
Your magic blackboard is here
To show us the way.

And my personal favorite:

Glenn’s fallout shelter
Ten–year supply of Twinkies
Well, maybe a week.

In April 2008, I was trying to figure out how Goto knew that I was writing a book about his liver transplant. There was a yakuza real estate broker; he was a good source, and I had paid him. I remembered having a conversation with him a few months back, and he was asking how my book was coming along — I suspected he might have been sounding me out for information. So I went to his office and said, “Listen, did you sell me out on Goto? Did you tell him I’m writing a book”? And he said, “Yeah of course. He pays much more than you do. Why wouldn’t I? It’s not like we’re friends. It’s nothing personal.” He didn’t even try to deny it. So I said to him, “Remember a couple years ago when Sugiura got hit? I’m gonna tell my friends in the Sumiyoshi-kai that you gave away his location. They may not believe me, but they might come ask you some questions, and when they do I don’t think they’ll be very nice to you. Nothing personal.” And as I turned my back to leave, he jumped on me. He started hitting me really hard and kicking me. So I ran to the corner of his room and got a golf club, and kept hitting his knee until his knee broke. I was just running around in circles aiming at his knee. Even after his knee broke, he was still crawling at me. I was like, god! Why don’t you just give up?

This is apparently just the beginning of a slew of Yakuza-centric goodies that Katayama and Adelstein have planned in the near future. Should be fun…

Check out this sweet gallery of vinyage posters from Japanese industrial expositions from the 1920s-1940s.

(via BoingBoing)

At that point, I’d been a fan of Giant Robot magazine for several years. The magazine was a staple of my college existence, turning me on to more cool shit than anything else at that time in my life. It didn’t hurt that the magazine’s core meme – Asian pop-culture, punk rock, Hong Kong action flicks – was like looking into a mirror of my own mind. Where else could you find tips on how to eat Natto, reviews of Shonen Knife records, and an interview with Tsui Hark – all in the same magazine?

So – Giant Robot seemed like a perfect wellspring of inspiration (or a template for me to rip off, depending on your viewpoint). In either case, it goes without saying that without Giant Robot, there would likely be no Yellow Menace. In the video below, when Eric and Martin mention the people they’ve inspired – I suppose I’m one of those people. Just some Filipino-American guy whose dad turned him on to Kurosawa movies as a kid, inspired to write about Asian culture by a couple of guys on the West Coast.

With that in mind – I recently became aware of a fund raiser being held to support Giant Robot, which has recently suffered financial losses thanks to the overall money drain affecting pretty much every magazine publisher on the face of the planet. While there are plenty of causes to which one could donate their money (Haiti being the foremost in my mind), I expect that more than a few of our readers are also fans of the venerable GR. GR‘s goal is to raise $60,000. As of today they’ve got nearly a quarter of that total, $14, 253. What will $60,000 achieve, you ask? One more year of publishing capital. Maybe enough to make it over the hump to solvency, maybe not.

But one more year of Giant Robot is better than none, and if you have a few spare bucks lying around then why not throw it their way? And f you don’t have the  money – spread the word.