feed your inner Japanese kid.

I have an inner Japanese kid. He's the one who periodically screams "I need ramen!" or "I need green tea!" or "those people are too loud!" And I usually listen to him. Here are some things that have been appeasing my inner Japanese kid recently:

The Taste of Tea

Katsuhito Ishii's wonderful film about...well, nothing really, but featuring a string of strange situations and charming characters. Movies like this make me wonder if it's possible to make a bad movie in Japan, since there are so many great things to film over there. Simple shots of country roads and high school interiors just look so good, and Ishii really embraces that. It also stars Tadanobu Asano, that guy who is in every Japanese movie.

Ryusuke Works

English blog by the manga artist Ryusuke Hamamoto, who still manages to stand out in the endless sea of global manga artists. You can browse his beautiful drawings on his DeviantArt page. I read his blog for the great Engrish poetry that makes up daily posts:
"I'm eating a lunch with my friend.
I choise a vegetable curry and spinach salad.
My friend choise a honey toast with ice cream.
it's dericious! and I want to eat a honey toast too!"

Merry Daily

Merry Daily is the blog for a Harajuku clothing store called Tokyo Bopper. There are great photos and "style samples" of slick outfits. I'm glad to see Tokyo kids leaning toward more colorful fashions again- the goths and gangstas got old fast.
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"Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon"

...The title of Devendra Banhart's new album, which is excellent. In these days of easy music pirating and pricey CDs, my album buying has been limited to those discs by artists whom I trust to produce a full package of great tunes, and Smokey does not disappoint.



Here he is playing on a boat in England:



And here he is apparently forgetting the words to a song:



Actually, I just put that clip up to make myself feel better, because during my show last night I flat out forgot half the words to "In Your Muscles." But I will always believe that forgetting the words to your own song is more noble than having the lyrics written out in front of you. That's cheating.
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music hall days.

"All disco must end with broken bones."

Whale featuring Bus 75 (Adidas Black Widow), "Four Big Speakers"


Taking you back to '98 with one of the coolest songs you never heard.
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Disney tricks us with...crap.



Crap. Bullocks. Terrible. Contrived, stupid, lame, silly, retarded schlop. Unnecessary bullshit. A cascading stream of media piss onto my senses. This is the kind of thing that at first just annoys me and then makes me flat out angry the more I watch it until I become irate to the point of homicidal intent. But this isn't just harmless YouTube crap, I'm afraid. People are going to great lengths to bring this gut-wrenching tripe into your life.

Meet Marie Digby, a girl with a guitar who can kind of play and kind of sing. She makes videos on YouTube of herself playing and singing other people's songs (she has one or two originals...like that's impressive). A lot of people started responding to her videos, and she was very humble and grateful and put up some more, hoping that maybe she'd finally catch on and get that big break that she really, really doesn't deserve.



The sour note is that she had already gotten that big break. She was signed by Disney's Hollywood Records a year before she even joined YouTube. As Blogging Stocks puts it, "Her YouTube-based PR campaign was carefully constructed by Hollywood Records to launch her in a way that would gain the cache of authenticity viewers grant to user-developed content." Basically, Disney knew that if they presented another boring pop star through the traditional avenues of popular media nobody would care. BUT, if they placed her innocently in everybody's internet path, they would stumble upon her and feel they were discovering her. That old charm of the diamond in the rough. Except this time, the diamond had been already brushed off by the corporate hand, and then carefully, conspicuously, placed back in the rough, with a hidden string leading back to that hand's gold-ringed finger.



What I wish I could point out to everybody - the corporate as well as the commoner - is that this diamond doesn't shine so bright, or rather, that's all it does. Take a look at that video again, and it'll become obvious, if it wasn't already, what this girl's real talent is; her looks. Disney is selling a fantasy, a wet dream, a piece of eye candy wrapped in a singer/songwriter foil. Young girls see her and think "I want to be a singer...and look that good." Young men just see her and think "I want to do her." I mean, the song they are trying to sell as her single is somebody else's song, one that wasn't that great in the first place and actually sounded better in its original form (I hate to give props to Rihanna, but hey... lesser of two evils). On her video home page, "jjax5" leaves the comment "there is something stunning about you that people are really going to like..." It disturbs me that he doesn't specify that 'something' as being purely visual.


















The great thing about YouTube...the only thing about YouTube... is that it's all about the homemade, the amateur, the DIY, the unprofessional. And dammit folks, these words should be exciting. There is nothing exciting about professionals pushing a girl to sing songs by other professionals just so, hopefully, she will become a professional. There is a freedom in broadcasting yourself, a freedom of expression that is ours to utilize, even if it means writing and singing an absurd ballad about chocolate rain:



It may not be the best song of the year, but in the dim light of Marie Digby, Tay Zonday becomes an internet hero. As it reads on his YouTube profile:
"I am a singer-songwriter-vocalist. I might do anything. No style is off-limits. No two videos are alike. From Bach to Tupac, Expect the Unexpected!"
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