My name is HRP-4C, and I will be your robot today

Ever wonder what a fembot really looks like? HRP-4C makes her début this week courtesy of a many-kanji’d Japanese government research center.

airplane seat

Awesome repurposing of the exit doors of two Boeing 727 jets, and a touch of “argentinian free range cowhide” into a massage table.

I want one of these on my next trans-oceanic flight.

drowning in the why, starving for the how

This is a feeling I often have when teaching my “modernology” class–which is about how people in Japan have developed ways to understand and get to being modern. Modern in a myriad of ways–from sitting on street-corners and drawing people in kimonos and putting them in bar graphs compared to people wearing “western” clothing, to measuring the GNP, to listening to insects to hear if they still sound like they “did” in 11th c. imperial manuals of poetry, to tracking who practices inter-racial international marriage with whom.

The “5 Ws and an H” stuff is hard to come by, and I can understand why, given the focus on stereotype that drives what seem to be the same 5 stories about Japan, written in the rapidly dwindling number of papers that have foreign bureaus.

Students–I mean undergrads here–are often remarkably stubborn about releasing their a priori judgements. Many if not most of which come from  ideas derived from wartime and Occupation-era military anthropology–all those “shame” versus “guilt” studies, the mandatory kissing in movies to show democracy, and on and on. So this statement, in a book I’ve been reading about the Free Software and Open Source software movements, rang true, recommended by my friend J. This is from Chris Kelty’s Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software.

It would be interesting to apply this to, say, cell-phone novels, or video-game music like Katamari Fortissimo Damacy, whose plot is driven by a breakway incident of binge-drinking…

… it is in Free Software and its history that the is-
sues raised—from intellectual property and piracy to online po-
litical advocacy and “social” software—were first figured out and confronted. Free Software’s roots stretch back to the 1970s and crisscross the histories of the personal computer and the Internet, the peaks and troughs of the information-technology and software industries, the transformation of intellectual property law, the innovation of organizations and “virtual” collaboration, and the rise of networked social movements. Free Software does not explain why these various changes have occurred, but rather how individuals and groups are responding: by creating new things, new practices, and new forms of life. It is these practices and forms of life—not the software itself—that are most significant, and they have in turn served as templates that others can use and transform:
practices of sharing source code, conceptualizing openness, writing copyright (and copyleft) licenses, coordinating collaboration, and proselytizing for all of the above. There are explanations aplenty for why things are the way they are: it’s globalization, it’s the network society, it’s an ideology of transparency, it’s the virtualization of work, it’s the new flat earth, it’s Empire. We are drowning in the why, both popular and scholarly, but starving for the how.

her version of the sherwood forest

In the Washington State University library, her version of Sherwood Forest, Corliss walked the poetry stacks. She endured a contentious and passionate relationship with this library. The huge number of books confirmed how much magic she’d been denied for most of her life, and now she hungrily wanted to read every book on the shelf. An impossible task, to be sure, Herculean in its exaggeration, but Corliss wanted to read herself to death. She wanted to be buried in a coffin filled with used paperbacks.

From Sherman Alexie, “The Search Engine,” p. 5, in Ten Little Indians.

There are nine stories in the book. “Nine is a much funnier number than eleven.” True enough. Eleven is dogmatically prime and kinda tries too hard, whereas nine is two primes, like his character Jackson squared, someone also down with the idea of ceremony (a word that appears frequently in characters’ internal monologues).

Also great: more than one absurdist love story about basketball.

the case study seesaw hammock house

I stumbled onto this very fun installation on the way to a very serious concert at the Redcat by Yasunao Tone, an electronic musician, art writer and all-around charming fellow. Part of the charm is that although it is supposed to be kind of miniature–extracting 1 feature out of an idealized California house, in the manner of the postwar Case Study houses–it takes 2 attendants to get it going, kind of palanquin-like.

It’s kind of like a lazy-person’s seesaw. Or a 2-lazy-people’s seesaw, really, as you really need another bum on the other hammock to make the weights work. The attendants remove some sandbag weights, and depending on your respective balances, they move them around, to make it roughly balanced. Then you can push-me and pull-you, tho it is a straight up and down motion, not the arc of a seesaw. Still, it made me laugh like crazy and was immensely fun, especially in such a ’serious’ space.

The installation, by the architecture/space firm Atelier Bow-wow, has 2 other components, which are even more silly/wonderful. One is an area that is like a porch w/stadium seating, filled with some barbecues. The other is a large reclining pit, with pillows, from which you watch (a video projection of) a sunset.

The ABW gets its name, I think, because of its interest in “pet architecture,” which is to say, the built equivalent of pocket parks, “charming, small and humorous,” like pets, as one of their books says.

and that was something completely different

From the official statement released today of Cramps’ lead singer Lux Interior’s death. In Glendale, not half a mile from my house.

Their distinct take on rockabilly and surf along with their midnight movie imagery reminded us all just how exciting, dangerous, vital and sexy rock and roll should be and has spawned entire subcultures. Lux was a fearless frontman who transformed every stage he stepped on into a place of passion, abandon, and true freedom. He is a rare icon who will be missed dearly.

Influenced by the burgeoning punk scene in New York with bands like The New York Dolls and The Ramones setting the standard the two decided they would start their own punk rock band, The Cramps. In contrast to other punk bands at the time however, they also mixed a heavy dose of Rockabilly and B-movie imagery to form their own unique image. It was during this time that Purkhiser took the stage name Lux Interior, taking his name from a car advert. He also created a unique stage personia, one of a complete honky tonky punk wild man, or as one reviewer put it “the psychosexual werewolf/ Elvis hybrid from hell”. The genre they helped create was later known as “Psychobilly” even though Interior denies that that is what their music really is. In 1978 The Cramps showed the world just how deep their love for the weird and the off beat went when they gave a free concert to the patients at the Nappa Valley State Mental Institution. The next year The Cramps released their first official EP, “Gravest Hits”. That same year they released their first LP, “Songs the Lord Taught Us”.

I saw them in SFO, it must have been 1992 or 1993. They were mesmerizing. The pacing was tight, saucy, sweaty, and fun as hell, decadent and seemingly indestructible. I always thought they were an LA band all around, but Cleveland makes sense.

And last but not least, cha cha cha.

adventures in japanese literature–the flower of sublimation

From Ishida Rokurô's depth psychology analysis of Ishikawa Takuboku

A book of lit-crit from Japan in the 1970s- is not complete without a chart of either a baffling and cryptic variety, or a soothingly grid-like abstraction or a nenpyô, or lengthy chronology featuring a year-by-year account that resolves such questions as “what color was Soseki’s dog, purchased in 1911?” or “when did Hayashi Fumiko leave her sixth elementary school?”  Meet Exhibit A, of the former variety–the flower of sublimation.

Sure, the Lacanians had their equations and formulae, but left much to the imagination. This illustration breaks down the psychic topography of ISHIKAWA Takuboku, one of Japan’s most noted early 20th century poets. He is typically known for his socialist fervor, living passionately and dying young like many Meiji-era poets, of tuberculosis; also, for writing many tanka, or short poems (commonly, if sort of wrongly, known in English as haiku). But Ishida, a psychoanalyst medical doctor, gives insight to what drove all of Takuboku’s (we are allowed to call him by his first name because he is beloved) artistic endeavours–not politics, but doomed love. Here is how it blossoms.

The upshot of depth psychology, as Ishida practices it, is you use literary materials and texts to gather a portrait of an artist’s psyche. Character and persona and narrator and author end up being inter-changeable, and life and work inter-mingle. Basically, the volumetric space that is someone’s inner mind is the source of all meaning, and that person rarely if ever grasps his or her own contents or traumas, though that 3-D space compels him/her to act in a consistent manner all through life.

Above ground is conscioueness; the fertilizer-looking underground part is the unconscious. Each petal represents a result–an aesthetic product, or character trait–of sublimation, routed through the “complex,” as indicated in the text box at the bottom. These are comprised of (from the top, clockwise) unrequited love, religious philosophy, Socialism, longing, furusato/hometown, and new-style education. And the “complex,” in turn breaks down into individual, society, nature, and child-spirited-ness.

When I say,
I believe that a new morning will come,
I do not lie, but ….

from Sad Toys

ymo discommunicates on Soul Train

I’m still on something of a YMO tear. Here they are in a 1980 shoot of Soul Train, showing and telling one of my favorite Japanese words, discommunication. It’s not miscommunication, which often results in wounded egos and trade frictions. The ‘dis’ is not the same ‘dis’ of dis-respect, it just means that whatever came out of your mouth or pen or vocoder completely bypasses where it’s supposed to hit. The utterance goes off into outer space, and sender and receiver both go their separate ways. One example I like is what Faulkner said, in a 1955 visit sponsored by the State Department, aka his anti-Communist tour: talking to his hosts was like two people running at top speed on opposite sides of a plate glass window. You get that feeling, more or less, in this clip.

Here Don Cornelius leads in to the q-and-a by admitting to no notion of geography. I’m not sure where I would look to find YMO on a map, myself, given their penchant for city songs (T-O-K-Y-O), as well as chinoiserie (Tong Poo) and more chinoiserie with goofy breathy French dubbing (La femme chinoise). But I think his point was that YMO seemed like they were from really far away, and that if he had at least read the Encyclopedia Britannica memo, he might have had a better take on the mystical whatever of their five-piece combo form.

DC actually gives a really good example of techno-orientalism in this exchange. Throwing up his hands (metaphorically) in bemusement at the discommunication, he horses around with drummer Takahashi Yukihiro–a famous glam rocker who used to be in a Yoko Ono parody band that turned real, called the Sadistic Mika Band. After the band intros, he asks Takahashi to explain “Einstein’s theory of relativity.” This is 2 years after the Walkman debuted, and the portrait of Japanese man-on-the-street as the next-door neighbor of rocket science is well on its way.

I have to say that I found YMO’s plant in the audience, the guy designed to break the fourth wall between the stage and the dance floor (”Japanese gentlemen please stand up!”), to be a bit odd. A guy in a 3-piece grey flannel-ish suit does not seem to help their own purported cause much—the de-mystification of exoticism (yellow magic, fetishism), and its postwar Occupation stereotypes.

The customizing of lyrics, in the Archie Bell song they perform, “Tighten Up,” is kind of great, though–the narration is provided by a pretty famous Japanese radio guy, Kobayashi “Snakeman” (in homage to “Wolfman” Jack) Katsuya. The plant gets so into the actual show, as the band performs, that he keeps dancing and forgets his lines, which is also kind of cool, so I guess the whole image does get a bit unhinged. The keyboardist, Aki’s, buoyant hopping is pretty great, too.

a heart eaten in the first stanza is an exception

From a 2005 interview in Bookslut with Frank Bidart, whom I saw read last week:

When “The Third Hour of the Night” (about Benvenuto Cellini) appeared in the October, 2004 issue of Poetry, readers seemed to react only in one of two ways: awe or outrage. …[another] complaint was that the poem read too much like prose, or was too obscure or esoteric or whatever. The final complaint was something like revulsion. The poem contains disturbing scenes of murder and some sort of ritual/sexual violence. These complaints beg a couple of questions: “How much of a long poem can actually consist of ‘poetry’?” And: “These poems really are very violent. Why?”

If a poem is any good, I don’t think of some parts as “poetry” and other parts as “not poetry.” Each line has to be written with a feeling for its place in the shape, the pulse of the whole: if it does that, it is authentically part of the whatness of the thing. It then has its own eloquence.

Here’s the really good part:

I think the question of violence is only a question because people think of poetry as lyric poetry. In lyric there is often a great deal of psychic violence, but usually little (say) murder. (Even in Browning’s lyrics.) A heart gets eaten in the first sonnet of Dante’s “Vita Nuova,” but that is the exception.

For example, murder. I like how his read of the Dante/Béatrice story is not restricted to love eternal, as flesh aspires to divinity, but also comprises straight out of the gate heart-eating.

I saw him read last week, thanks to my friend E the poet. There isn’t the right clip on YouTube, or I would post, because he was a riveting and transporting reader; every iota of breath goes into the sentence as it comes out. He does a lot of character poems, only some of whom are “I.” It’s very passionate without being lyrical and all self-enclosed, which I like. I find many New England poets provincial; they can’t seem to locate themselves in a “tradition” outside of a few anglo hermetics who, interesting as they are, are treated as freeze-dried and the only stuff on the shelf.

I like going to poetry readings because I like seeing what makes something move and transpire in an audience sitting still. And what kind of reading produces a good provocative question, as opposed to gush; these are good for teaching. I also like hearing how people make the rhetorical moves of written things available to the ear. Some readings feel like spinach, or church.

Here is one of the early ones, or the first few passages, Ellen West, from Ploughshares. It’s one of the anti-confessional first-person ones. 1975, 12 years after The Feminine Mystique. This is a subject I have more vexed by the oftener I think about Mad Men, and talk to my friends about how claustrophobic it is, and why the Betty character seems so smug but bereft in the mid-century dollhouse, until she snaps with hysteria and takes after the birds with a BB gun. I leave the graphic design, because layout and the splattering of space is often important in his poems.

Ellen West

I love sweets,— heaven would be dying on a bed of vanilla ice cream . . . But my true self is thin, all profile and effortless gestures, the sort of blond elegant girl whose body is the image of her soul. —My doctors tell me I must give up this ideal; but I WILL NOT . . . cannot. Only to my husband I’m not simply a “case.” But he is a fool. He married meat, and thought it was a wife.

The combination of purity and obliviousness is quite compelling. The rest of the poem has excerpts from the “case” of Ellen West, in the voice of the physician.

archaic YMO c. 1978

Some interesting interview footage with the three + members of YMO (Yellow Magic Orchestra). The venue is the studio in which Solid State Survivor, the second album, was put together.

I say “+” because usually they have “fourth man,” the synth programmer MATSUTAKE Hideki on deck, but I’m not sure how many people are in the shadows here, in and among the gadgets.

Around 1:10 is a funny sequence where SAKAMOTO Ryûichi shows-and-tells how hard it is for a human to manipulate the piano keys fast enough to get the tempo he wants (it’s in Japanese, but you can see/hear clearly what is going on by watching the demo).