Just listened to an interview with Michael Hirschorn about his piece in the Atlantic Monthly about “Contemporary Quirk,” worth a read if you’re into indie film/music/culture.

He’s catching some flack for allegedly “attacking” talented directors like Wes Anderson and well-meaning artist/entertainers like Ira Glass of This American Life, but I understand where he’s coming from. In the interview, Hirschorn says that he likes, respects and enjoys the quirky charachters and meandering non-event storylines everywhere now (see Arrested Development, Flight of the Conchords, Napoleon Dynamite), but what started out as fringe culture (think “Ducky” from Pretty in Pink) now dominates the big and small screen. And while these fairly benign non-stories are usually fun today’s talent is capable of much more, if they didn’t use quirk as a crutch.

There’s an undercurrent of baby-boomer melodrama here (or maybe that’s the Gen X cynicism he writes about), but he’s right: instead of making movies with gravity and meaning, today’s top talent tell stories of hanging out and not much else.

Look, as you may have guessed, Blade Runner made a huge impact on me, but c’mon, Ridley. How many versions are you gonna do, anyway? My favorite quote from the recent Reuters piece:

“A good film is like a good book, you might go to the shelf and take it off and revisit it. There are not a lot of films I can do that with from my collection of material,” said Scott, whose other titles include international hits such as the first Alien, Thelma & Louise and Gladiator.

Who approved the pic for this ad? Not the most welcoming gesture I can imagine the good people of India are capable of. Ok, so when you get a little closer, her warm smile wins out, but try walking by this and NOT seeing a woman telling every commuter in Shimbashi Station to fuck off…

I went in to a local convenient store yesterday and saw this staring me in the face:

This is the graphic on some blue soda Suntory is selling under the name “Bingo Bongo.” It is SUCH a rip-off of the almighty J.R. “Bob” Dobbs of the Church of the Subgenius

Hail Bob. I wonder if the CotSG knows?? Or if they care? I doubt it. The Subgenius worship the absurd, and this bottle graphic (Pineapple head, eye-patch, etc) would rank high on their absurd-o-meter.

This video of a wave pool during the Obon holiday has popped up all over the blogosphere in the last few days, but if you haven’t seen it yet, it must be seen to be believed.

Courtesy of Killian Nakamura, Boing Boing, Fucked Gaijin and probably dozens of other sources.

I can’t say enough about the amazingly fun and interesting Radiolab podcast. Imagine the best Discovery Channel-type show you’ve ever seen and then convert it to a radio program that you can stop and start at your leisure (or rewind a bit when a train arrival drowns it out). The latest installment is about emergence, which is basically the theory of how large, complex systems happen almost by accident via thousands or millions of unwitting players. For example, ants: individually, they are incompetent scavengers, but collectively, they are responsible for incredible feats of engineering.

The same ideas can be applied to weather systems, thought processes, google searches and the shape of cities, which made me think of Tokyo: How did it get it’s shape? Why did it spread where and when it did? Most of it was not planned,really, but formed through a series of happy accidents. For example, one guy opens a pizza parlor. It becomes popular, so some other guys opens a shop nearby to get into the action, then another and another and then TA DA! Roppongi is born. No one planned it – it just happened.

Really interesting authors like Steven Johnson (this book is great) and James Surowieki (I’ve mentioned him before) add fascinating examples about how a million small unplanned things can add up to massively amazing accomplishments.

Only 2 days left to check out Yoshiyuki Mitsuzumi’s bizarre and beautiful ceramic sculptures. He morphs all the naughty bits of the body to create new animals, complete with small museum-like panels describing their habitats.

This is one of the better exhibits I’ve seen at The Vanilla Gallery in Ginza. They specialize in erotic/fetish art, and some exhibits have had amazing work, but more often than not it’s WAY too rough or creepy for my taste. Mitsuzumi’s sculptures, however are gentle – even friendly.

Me like…

Seriously, if you haven’t seen Cai Guo-Ciang’s Gun Powder paintings at the Shiseido Gallery, you have four days before it closes on August 12th.

Cai is amazing. No surprise China tapped him to be one of the visual directors for the Beijing Olympics. He’s created some incredible (and arguably dubious) installations using wolves:

and tigers:

But I like his firework-based stuff best. Check out this “Black Rainbow” piece he’s done in Spain and Scotland:

Some homemade vid:

He “paints” with gunpowder, too, brushing and piling it onto massive canvases. Then he covers it all with stencils, cardboard and bricks and lights it. The colors he gets – deep sulphurous ocres, hearty chocolates, stark charcoals – are truly incredible at this scale.

This video shows Cai at work. Wait for it: the good stuff doesn’t happen till the last 5 seconds:

Back near the beginning of the year, the good folks at Information Architects created a super-cool web trends mashup with the Tokyo subway map.

Well, now they’ve improved it even further.

IA’s Oliver Reichenstein will talk about the future of news next Tuesday as part of the Tokyo2point0 series. More info here.

Friend of a friend, Jerome Olivier, creates a beautiful Japan love story set in a coin laundrette.

http://speaking-pictures.com/coinLaundry.html

Interview with Jerome:
http://www.newvenue.com/archives/feature49/about.html

My younger brother is out in London and just got himself a recording contract. He’s making some pretty dencent stuff.Check out some of his tunes here.

Her is his latest video with his other project Black Rabbit. Singer is Loreen, aka the missus.

This is the only vid I got of the bizarre mummies-on-stilts I saw wandering around. If that wasn’t weird enough, they were being led around by some sort of sci-fi traffic controllers with blue LED flashlights:

The Palace or Wonder area has always been my favorite part of the festival. I’ll add more details later, but here’s what your confronted with upon entry:

Giant sculptures made out of scrap metal, trees made out of mufflers, freaks of all stripes and usually some kind of carnival act that revolves around pain and/or danger. This year it was the “Globe of Death”

That’s THREE motorcycles in there. Great cheap thrills. And if that wasn’t enough, the bottom opens up. I caught it as it closed.

Mr. Pop took a spill off the stage a little while ago – he finished the set, but may be hurt. more info later…

From British production house Neo comes Salaryman 6, the tale of a salaryman who looses his memory.

Gonna try to post some video clips here. All depends on how much time and bandwidth I have: only 10 of us have to cover the entire fest for the English side, and because we work out on a tent and an off-season ski lodge, the net service doesn’t win any blue ribbons.

Until then, you can check out our staff blog

Plenty of Fujirock clips already on youtube

Here’s my favorite place of the fest.

What will the world be like if the world looked more like a retirement community? Japan will probably find out first.

The latest episode of the incredibly great Radiolab podcast was about mortality, so naturally there was a segment on Japan – the fastest aging country in the world. They touched on ways Japan is trying to care for legions of senior citizens and keep them happy. My favorite idea is combining a daycare with a retirement community, but one of the most popular options is Paro, the robotic seal. Until kids run on batteries, I’m guessing Paro will retain his number-one spot.

I’m keen to check out Deerhoof again this weekend at Fujirock. Last show I saw was off, but they’ll play twice this weekend, and I’m betting on the tiny Naeba Shokudo stage as the place to be. The stage and place to stand is less space than my apartment, and that kinda vibe will work for them, I reckon. Here’s an interview in the Japan Times from last year.

Fujirock is just round the corner - our staff bus leaves Thursday morning. I and 9 other gaijin will do live reporting from the fest from Thursday evening till Monday morning. Will send the site address once it’s ready, so until then, the schedule

This artsy-craftsy couple won the award by a mile.

Blade Runner turned 25 last week. Not only was this the greatest SciFi movie ever made, but its relevance hasn’t expired in the least. There was some interesting analysis of the movie on my favorite podcast, On the Media last week - basically talking about how Blade Runner was a large analogy for racism.

Another conspicuous birthday is for another harbinger of doom: the AK-47 assault rifle. It turns 60 this year. OTM analysts broke down how the ol’ Kalishnakov became a weapon of the media-savvy, and how it has become a symbol of rebellion of the oppressed (and those who want to appear oppressed).

Phil Brasor’s review of the new Justice album is right on the money.

One of the DJ acts I’m most anticipating at Fujirock is French duo, Justice. I love the animation in this video:

Their label, Ed Banger, uses something similar in a promo here:

Hitotoki is a great new site from some of the same guys that created Tokyo Art Beat. Here you read/write about the Tokyo experience. Some are quite good - few of them are crap - and best of all they’re mapped-out (use the cursor to move it around) and stories are short enough to gobble up several at one sitting.

Dunno how many of y’all kept up with Stippy.com’s story of “George,” a gaijin who spent a couple weeks in a Tokyo holding cell, but he’s at it again, with a straightforward expose on his marriage strife. The comments are almost better (and longer) than the article itself.

I really liked their show at the Misako and Rosen Gallery, but it’s borderline too far away for most people (near Ikebukuro, 10-min walk from the station). Worth it for me. Must be my salaryman state of mind, but when I first saw Okumura’s self-portraits, I thought he was being eaten by his desk instead of being “transported” through it, Doraemon-style.

If you haven’t been watching the New Yorker’s 2012: Stories from the Near Future series, you should. You can get them from the links here, but I just subscribe to them on iTunes.

Broadside subjects like genius, morality, cities, regenerative medicine, gaming and design are examined by today’s experts, talking about what they’ll be like 5 years from now. Especially recommended are the presentations/conversations on Power with James Surowiecki and Serendipity with Malcomb Gladwell.

The mobile technology presentation was disappointing. Not only did Nokia’s Younghee Jung turn it into a Nokia commercial, buut her information was fresh and interesting if you’ve NEVER been to Japan or Korea. Nearly every innovation she speaks of can be seen in one walk down Takeshita Dori. So I guess we’ve already arrived at their forecasts? 2012 already? Shit - that means I’m 40…ouch.

We Make Money Not Art has a review of the book The Loving Machine, a guide to Japanese robots. They also have this amazing photo above.

Slate has an interesting interview with two authors putting out books on sushi history and culture. They both stress how influential the American occupation was towards spreading sushi round the world, but dunno how much I trust them on that – anyone who says that the Japanese don’t eat salmon must have not spent too much time here.

I’ve really been digging all the High Dynamic Range Photography popping up all over the web. Especially shots of Tokyo like this mind-blower I found on Octopus Dropkick:

Also, Yong Fook’s Flickr has some amazing shots of Hong Kong.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/yongfook/sets/72157594263154572/