A Day in the Life

In the middle of a wonderful day, with only a moment to post about it before running off to make a train. My friends Yasu and Kawamura took me hiking up a mountain in the morning with a crazy old karate man who had us do some several thousand crunches at a rest point in the middle of the trail, and I learned new words for the different parts of a tree in Japanese. I totally heart Yasu and Kawamura--I think I can say pretty definitively that they're among the best things I've had in my life since coming here. After mountain climbing, Yasu and his girlfriend and I went to this event by the sea side, where a huge part of the ocean had been netted in and a bunch of fish dumped into it, and they gave you a net and a mesh bag and set you loose to go catch as many fish as you could find and scoop up. It was great! Yasu got the first catch, then Toshimi got one, and right when I started to think oh no, is this going to be one of those days where everyone but me tags something?, I caught two big ones right in a row. I got two more later for a total of four, and Yasu and Toshimi ended up with two each. When you caught a few of them, you brought them to a man in a boat and he STABBED THEM THROUGH THE BRAIN WITH A NAIL for you, and then you could put them in your bag without them flopping out and could go trolling around for more. It was great being out in the sun and fishing and stuff, and it was neat being at this big normal summertime community event--lots of parents and kids, lots of teenagers and old folks too, everyone just having fun. It was like Coney Island in rural Japan. Yasu and I also dug for clams, but all we found were these disgusting mud worms and one skippy mudfish that got away before I could net him (can you eat those guys anyway?). We went out for a great lunch too at a fisherman's sushi place with the biggest sushi slices I've ever seen, and ate more than our fill of deliciosity, and I'm sure I was the only foreigner that will ever enter that place between now and kingdom come. It was a really great afternoon, with people whom I really love, and now I'm going into Matsuyama for aikido and staying over at another friend's place to play all day tomorrow too, since I'm skipping work (don't worry, it's cool...I think), and to top it all off, I think I've got a new girlfriend! What a good day! Wooooo!

Image Respond

My pal John Tozzi tells me that he's also teaching himself image play using a pirated copy of Photoshop and a handy dandy book, and apparently he's making miles more progress than I am! Here's a dinosaur project he did. Good job John! Does anybody else have cool photoplayed images they've been working on? Send them in! It'll be a thing!

It should also get noted down for posterity when my awesome stencils are the next Friday night, that the whole thing started up thanks to times with Robin and her DIY, modge-podge sense of fun. Specifically, this came about from a procratinatey introduction to stencilrevolution.com in the King computer room when we were both immersed in crazy paper writing during a finals week in spring, too many years ago (boy, if I coulda majored in procrastinating I would have been at the top of the class). The stenciling never really went further than the computer room for me, but a while later Robin surprised me with this amazing stencil she made and gave to me, a very sweet photo of the two of us having times in London that she printed on brown cardboard in crisp black ink. It looks great, and it was just a really lovely gift--way high up there on the best presents ever list. It's even hanging up in my house right now, in a nice green frame right by the door (and was always a source of consternation for my last girlfriend, Sayo). So yeah, should my stencilized glory score me any big points in the future, the first few should get chalked up on the Times with Robin tally, for anyone who's keeping track. Yo it's cool, I'm happy to share!

GIMP Creation #2

Here's the second finished image I've made using the GIMP, an open-source image editing program I'm trying to learn my way around. My goal with He-Man here was to render a cool image that would be suitable for silkscreening onto a T-shirt or spraypainting onto something.
I still have to print it out at school, cut it out (over probably a few trial and error runs) and then make something with it, but I'm pretty proud of myself for just getting to here so far. I had to take the original image, a color photo of a He-Man toy, and monkey around with its color values and edges and contrasts and things, learning how to use image tools like "colorify" and "threshold," and I ended up getting a result that looks clean and cut-out-able, and it still preserves a lot of the cool details from the original. Hooray! And then I added text. Double hooray! Next is printing and silkscreening. Feel free to do the same with it yourselves (download the file from its location and it should print big onto a B5 sheet of paper), and send me a picture of the result to post up on Japandamonium. For anyone who wants help doing this kind of thing themselves, there's a fantastic website called Instructables that's full of How To guides for doing just about anything cool you can think of. I found a few different guides to help me GIMP my way through He-Man over here. And look at where it got me. I HAVE THE POWER!!! Try it out!

Subtext, Subtitles

Couldn't even stand to finish watching this Monty Clift & Liz Taylor movie I got called A Place in the Sun, which looked promising enough went mostly like this and this with a little bit of this thrown in to make things move even more slowly. The one good moment of it is a scene where cops interrupt Monty and his homely non Liz Taylor girlfriend while they're making out in a car on (ah, yesteryear Americana), and there's this great one-off line where the cop's asked what they're doing and Monty says, after one of his poignant, unreadable Monty Clift pauses, "talking." So the cop fires back this one really funny line with a total no-nonsense face: "Look here boy," he says, "they've invented the house. It's a very good place to talk in. You'd better get back to yours." It's the best line in a movie filled with darling, i loved you since the moment i met you...maybe even before i met you. BUT IT'S NOT THE SAME LINE IN JAPANESE!!! Gosh darn Japanese subtitles seem to work hard at killing all the characterizations in our good movies and flattening out everyone's lines to the shortest approximate statement instead of remaining at all true to the intent of anyone's expressions. In the case of A Place in the Sun, this gem of a line becomes simply, "if you are talking, other places are better for doing it--go home." What happened to "they invented the house?!" It's no wonder most locals don't like any of the good movies from foreign countries; the subtitles kill all the substance!

Japan tends to do a much better job with overdubbing than subtitling in terms of remaining true to the original scripts. Of course, dubbing films is akin in the artistic sense to throwing a bag of puppies off a cliff. Besides, it's not like anyone here in Japan would ever dream of suggesting that foreigners watch The Seven Samurai in English or Italian or French, for goodness sakes. It's a Japanese movie, in Japanese, and it's a superb piece of art. Overdubbing it into another language would be like going to a museum and deciding you like blue more than red so they should go ahead and photoshop Guernica for you. Art doesn't really work like this.

Now this all said, there does seem to be an exception where animation is concerned. Japan's famous for its cartoon industry, but foreigners often see them overdubbed into other languages, and this might actually be the best thing for everyone concerned. If you watch enough anime without letting it destroy your soul and social life, you notice that there seem to be about four or five actors doing all the voices in the industry. This isn't true of course, but most anime relies heavily on a very narrow set of voicing archetypes that can make most shows deftly personality-free. Dragonball Z is an incredibly boring show in Japanese because all of the mains sport identical Macho Fighter voices, while the women use Woman Voice #2, and the bad guys all have Baddy Voice, unless they're robots, in which case it's Baddy Robot Voice. Actioney anime can be much more fun to watch in English because our industry tends to have a much more diverse voice acting pool (there are exceptions, to be sure). Conversely (and rather unexpectedly), the voicing archetypes and rote emotional expressions in Japanese are perfect for lots of American animated films. I just watched The Incredibles in Japanese (bus ride, not my choice) and boy, it was great! Who'd a thought? That's a movie whose original voice acting wowed the boots off everyone, myself included. Now, take something less, er, incredible, like Tim Burton's The Corpse Bride--a movie that did almost nothing but make me yawn in English--and it becomes a freaking masterpiece in Japanese! Seriously, it's an unbelievable transformation. Even the songs are miles better--it becomes a real adventure in Japanese. Maybe the language works better for fake people, or maybe the Japanese dubbing industry just needs to get its act together; either way, don't rent A Place in the Sun, but get your hands on a Japanese Corpse Bride ASAP!

Having cake, eating cake...You know how it goes.

I cleaned! Finally, I cleaned my apartment! It's been so long! But now I seriously have a pretty tidy place once again. I even, get this, I even cleaned my porch! It's AMAZING! Do you want to know how derelict my porch was? My porch was so derelict the landlord complained I had had squatters living there! And get this: I DID! Sometime in the last month or so, the pigeons who hang out above the pachinko parlor next door decided that they'd wing over to my side of the big divide, and then they moved in! I had pigeons NESTING on my porch! Nesting! On two eggs! How the hell long could the thing have been there for? The nest was enormous! I guess it must not have hurt that I had a bunch of dead houseplant skeletons and broken flower pots and closet hangers and other detritus to use as nest-making materials. But still, this is my house! No matter how decrepit it gets!

It's not my house for much longer though. I've got just over two months left of my life here in Imabari, and I suspect that it is going to whizzzz past. No luck so far on the job search in Matsuyama, but then again, I haven't really kicked into too much activity about it yet. Which is worrisome. Partly, I'm wondering how long I want to spend in Japan before coming home...I keep getting all these facebook messages from friends who miss me, and god, I miss them too. I miss being loved by a million people. Not that they don't still love me, but that's the whole idea--they do still love me and I love them all too! And I miss them all! And I want to be able to be loved not from a bazillion miles away. Weird. Life is weird. Things can be so nice here and so melancholic at the same time.

I haven't been to much aikido since getting back from Malaysia either, and that has had its ups and downs...aikido's the thing I'm trying to really focus on now, now that I've decided to stay here and move and do all the stuff, but it's the times I put it on the back burner that I enjoy my Life In Japan life a lot more. Like today; today I cleaned my house and made it really nice to be in again, but when's the next time I'm going to spend more than an hour or two here before going to sleep? I've got aikido keiko (class) every day from tomorrow until the end of time. It ends up feeling like a big one-or-the-other trade off: either I do aikido, or I can have a life. Having cake, eating cake; you know how it goes. I guess that's the idea of me moving to Matsuyama really, is that if I didn't have to spend an extra four hours per class getting to and from the dojo (that's not an exaggeration) then maybe I will be able to have a life style that incorporates my devotion to aikido, instead of a lifestyle which gets put on hold in favor of my devotion of aikido. ("your sad devotion to that ancient religion hasn't helped you conjure up the stolen data tapes, nor has it given you prescience enough to discern the location of the rebels' hidden base...nor does it let you magically teleport yourself home from keiko anytime before midnight three nights a week, nor does it let you find much peace of mind with the retarded Middle School Empire's archaic nonsense, nor have you been able to Force-talk your way into keeping a girlfriend..." man, choke that muthafucka!) For the time being though, even if it's a good sounding plan, since none of it has yet materialized in any form, it's only the not-real-yet-ness that I'm feeling, and it's hard to get excited about a plan that doesn't exist yet. Braaaa. These better be the droids I'm looking for yo.

Me and My Monkey

Back in JAPAAAAAAAAAAN from Malaysia...whoops, I guess I mean MALAAAYYYSIAAAAAA. It was a very different sort of trip from the Thailand experience, which if you haven't seen some evidence of, you should go check out the photo set over on flickr. That was a great god damn time. Why didn't we just go back to Thailand?

The trip had a lot of good things in it. We did have times. Once we were involved in a three way nature battle in the jungle: Josh & Al vs Pit Viper vs. Screaming Alpha-male Monkey. Another time, a ten-year-old Malaysian boy sang James Brown at the top of his lungs inside an ancient spirit cave as we danced to the summit in green light from a rent in the mountainside. This was after the bats attacked us, but before we found the pile of dust-dry butterfly wings, inches deep, the bats' compost heap. We spent three days in the jungles of Borneo, in the care of a tribe called the Iban who may have given up headhunting as far back as a hundred years or so. We stayed in their longhouse and went on treks through pepper plantations, rubber fields and wild, untamable rainforest, minded by a man called "Antelopes" (this was not his given name). My highlight of the trip was when swimming time in the river became bathing time in the river; there was this outrageously spunky, smart, wild and terrific nine-year-old girl named Melissa (mell-EEE-sah) who came down to bathe when I was swimming down with her little brother Monkey Boy. Well, I called him Monkey Boy because he wouldn't tell me his name and because he was a super rambunxious little dude. I'd made friends with him by chasing him around the longhouse on my knuckles like a gorilla, endearing myself to everyone in the tribe. To my surprise, he loved the name Monkey Boy and would go around shouting it to himself to try to make it stick. Wonderful kids. So I'm swimming with Monkey Boy when Melissa comes down to the river with some other girls to bathe. No need to skedaddle; river bathing here isn't nude but done saronged, and isn't a super private thing. Monkey Boy and I were playing on the thick branches of an old tree that had lodged in the river bottom, and I swam over to the shore when Melissa and co came down, and started to splash them. And then Melissa grabbed her bar of soap and handed it to me and held out her hair in both fists, and I got to shampoo her and soap her up; and then she started to do the same for me! It was unbelievably cute and special, that this little girl was sharing this simple intimacy with me after being so aloof for the few days prior to it. It was really endearing and wonderful.

So yes, times. It wasn't all terrific, though a lot of it was great. But thinking back to the little girl in the river makes me feel really happy about it all now, so we'll leave it at that for the evening.