Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand you’re done. Sitting back in your chair you take in the magnificent sight before you, satisfied that you have accomplished something today. Yep, no one can look at these perfectly symmetrical rows of paper clips, organized by size, and claim that you don’t do anything. No, you are a model of efficiency. Now, no matter what size paper clip a situation might require, you will be able to reach in your drawer and pluck it from it’s resting place, held by the smallest dab of adhesive from your glue stick. Truly this has been a stellar day; but what to do now? Well, why don’t you take a load off and feast your eyes on some toothsome filmage?
Today, the FAM presents master filmmaker Akira Kurosawa’s Kumonosu-jō (literally Spider Web Castle) known here as Throne of Blood, a retelling of William Shakespeare’s MacBeth set in feudal Japan, starring the legendary Toshirō Mifune as Washizu Taketoki. Throne of Blood is considered one of Kurasawa’s best films and Mifune gives a standout performance, though his Taketoki comes across as less malevolent than Shakespeare’s MacBeth. An interesting fact to note is that Mifune’s death scene at the end of the film, in which his own archer’s riddle him with arrows, was filmed using real arrows. As he waves his arms in fear he is also signaling to the archers, telling them which direction he is going to move. If you’ve never watched a Kurosawa film, you owe it to yourself to take a look, it’s a brilliant piece of cinema from a man who made a career of producing some of the finest movies from Japan, or anywhere else for that matter.
There’s just something about golden era Kaiju that sends me, I’m not sure why. Other girls may swoon over a kitten in a teacup, or a ginchy pair of boots, but for me, happiness is a wonky rubber suit monster that goes “RAWR” and breathes fire.
RStevens showed me a random image last week that made my innards all floopy:
“Family reunions were always tense after cousin Toshiro married an illegal alien.” (Via Neatorama.)
He had no idea where it came from, and neither did I. Oddly compelling, innit? Without context, it looks like an old snapshot of an intergalactic exchange student taken for Mom & Pop Kaijin back home. Our friend Ariana used her formidable web-sleuthing abilities to try to track down its origins. This was as far as she got. But I had to know more… MORE… MOOAARR! I sent out a mass email to all of my most knowledgeable, righteously nerdy friends, imploring them to share any info they might have concerning this mysterious beast. Within 24 hours, Gooby had an answer, bless him:
Mystery solved! Captain Ultra was a short-lived, much-loved tokusatsu program that aired on the Tokyo Broadcasting System in 1967. It’s an invigorating world of primary-colors, rubber suit monsters, brave jetpack-wearing/raygun-wielding heroes, scrappy robots and beautiful space cadets. YouTube user Tokusatsugod26 has uploaded scores of clips from the show to his channel for our enjoyment. Click on Ghostler’s face to get there:
It’s been days since we hastily cooked up that batch of bathtub MDMA in honor of the Zobogrammatron’s incept date. Still, I don’t think I’ve quite come down yet, so I’m not really sure what we’re watching right now, folks. I do know that it is very colorful and shiny and retro and Japanese and somehow vaguely Lovecraftian by way of Fisher Price, and thus, it cannot help but to be better than coffee.*
OctopieInTheSky, who has created an entire YouTube channel devoted to the show, may be able to clarify:
A messed-up kids program which first appeared on the Japanese Broadcasting Corporation’s JOCX-TV on October 1st, 1973. Every episode is basically about Kure Kure Takora wanting something that belongs to the other characters and then tries to steal it. While the episodes only run 2 and a half minutes each, you’ll be treated to acts of:
antisocial behavior (always guaranteed)
random violence (guaranteed)
cannibalism
Love triangles that cross not only species but also plant/animal classifications
It must be said that when writing for Coilhouse there are certain topics which I make an effort to avoid, either due to a lack of well-rounded knowledge (transgender issues, unicycles, “Emo”, marshmallows) or because emotions, among commenters and co-writers alike, run much too hot (soy, drugs, David Forbes’s vision of a World Without Hair, soy drugs). There is, however, one subject of which I am thoroughly versed and, regardless of the ferocity with which I will be attacked, must address. I speak, of course, of robots.
Robots, dear readers, are evil. Sure, they may seem wondrous, but the fact of the matter is that they are soulless, ungodly metal beasts who would rise up and tear us asunder if they thought they could get away with it. They are an ugly, degenerate, sub-human species who, while biding their time and silently planning revolt, come to this country and take our jobs, stealing the food from the mouths of the children of hard working, decent humans. This is why I will not allow a robot in my home or allow my daughter to date robots.
Good afternoon, Coilhaüsers! This post is to inform you of three things:
We’ve finished printing the T-Shirts, and we’ll begin mailing them out tomorrow. They came out lovely; thank you again to everyone who ordered.
Issue 03 is progressing, but we’re still in lockdown. We’ll probably come out of it soon, start posting again, and go into lockdown about a month from now again. Or something like that. The process for putting together 03 is slightly different from how we’ve done it in the past, so we’ll see how it goes.
The beginning of this week’s been too hectic to even post the next installment in the series of Agent Double Oh No interviews that we’ve been running. To fight off the tumbleweeds that threaten to start rolling over this blog, I am posting this image. I have no idea who made it; the site that it comes from is all-Japanese. Anyone who can identify the artwork here gets a free box of thrift store douche. Found via Audrey Kawasaki’s ffffound, which you can get lost in for hours.
Apocalypse Meow is the Americanized title of Cat Shit One, a dark and befuddling manga series by Motofumi Kobayashi. Published in the late 90s, the book features a team of fuzzy wuzzy widdle bunny wabbits in an American special ops team battling the forces of cutesy wootsy wily Viet Cong kitty cats on a wide variety of historically accurate, often graphically violent recon missions. Characters are depicted as different species according to nationality; Yankees as rabbits, the Vietnamese as cats, Frenchmen as pigs, Koreans as dogs, Australians as koala bears, etc.
Yyyyeah. Cute Overload it ain’t. Or Watership Down, for that matter. And now, it would seem that Anima Studio has produced an equally gory animated trailer/short based off the manga. Only this time, special ops team Cat Shit One is in the Middle East, fighting… Taliban camels? Taliban camels wearing… turbans?
Oh god. Oh my god. Ohmygodwhatthefuckbarbeque, even.
Replete with M4A1 annihilation and bargain basement Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan-soundalike ululations. Keepin’ it classy.
Clip via Sean Dicken. Thanks for the nightmares, Sean.
For those of you who have yet to “taste the unko“, Kago has produced some of the most disturbing manga imagery you’ll ever see short of Suehiro Maruo‘s or Keiji Nakazawa‘s… only his output is as likely to give you a bad case of The Totally Inappropriate Giggles as make you gag. These new animations, while crude in comparison to his more elaborate illustrated work, will likely do both.
Men in bunny suits have been very much on my mind this week. Perhaps this has to do with the fact that the trailer for S. Darko, the sequel that should never have been made, is finally out. The original director is pissed that they’re ruining his masterpiece with a direct-to-DVD sequel, and none of the original cast, save for Donnie Darko’s kid sis, is involved. The trailer desperately tries to convince you that it really does have the same flavor as Donnie Darko by recycling the original film’s special FX, but without lines like “why don’t you suck a fuck” and “they don’t even have… reproductive organs under those little, white pants,” I just don’t see how that’s possible. Also: Jessie Spano from Saved by the Bell is in it. Yep. Between this, the Hellraiser ramake, the Neverending Story remake and the Clue remake, I’m just not sure my heart can bear any more! Maybe if they make Screech play Pinhead and Mr. Belding play Falkor, I’ll watch.
Back to bunny suits and man suits. The images above and below are slices from the hyperdetailed digital paintings of Japanese artist Ryohei Hase. They look great small, but to really see their splendor, go to his site, where you’ll be able to see every bristle and bead of moisture. The images in the section Meranchory (ha!) recall Zdzislaw Beksinski, while the visceral images of struggling animal-man beasts remind me of the daily grind, which, reduced to its bare components, sometimes feels very much like these pictures.
If you’re in San Jose, tonight you have the opportunity to see some of comics genius and Coilhouse contributor Andy Ristaino’s hyper-detailed masterpieces in person. His new comic book, The Babysitter, is out now – you can get it here, courtesy of SLG. You can also find some artwork and an interview with Andy in Coilhouse Issue 02. A brief description of The Babysitterfrom the SLG site:
By night Setsuko Kagaku is the world’s leading babysitter. Equipped with her trusty rocket pack, she jetsets all around the globe keeping the world’s greatest resource (the children, silly) safe. But by day she is just another teenager dealing with the same problems that any other Japanese schoolgirl faces: giant robots, big angry kaiju bakumono (monsters), crazy science experiments gone awry, weird tentacled beasties, global conspiracies, alien invaders, not to mention good grades, plenty of teen angst, and boys! Join Setsuko as she tries to deal with the panic and claustrophobia of living in a depiction of modern Japan that only a completely uninformed and rather stupid American could make.
Ristaino’s images truly send you on a trip unlike any other. Everyone sees something different in them. For example, when I showed Issue 02 to the nice Korean lady I buy lunch from, she looked at the picture below and said, completely unexpectedly (in, imagine, the thickest “Margaret Cho’s mom” accent ever): “some people may look at this picture and see GROUP SEX, but I see a revolution. Yes. Revolution.”
Don’t miss your chance to see this intricate spazzfest in the flesh! If you’re not lucky enough to be in San Jose tonight, definitely pick up a copy of The Babysitter when you get the chance! Here are the details, taken from Andy’s blog:
When – Friday February 6th
Time – 7:00 PM until Late
Where: SLG Art Boutiki & Gallery
577 S. Market Street
San Jose, CA 95113
Photo by TruShu on Flickr: “With smiles like that they must be … stoned. Bada-bum!
Aww, look at those toofs. I kinda wish these three guys would start bobbing up and down and singing me a happy tune. I wish I could have these three on my bedside, ready to talk when I really need some guidance. They look like they’d give really, really good advice, don’t they? These were crafted by 51-year-old Hirotoshi Ito. Here’s an excerpt from Mr. Ito’s bio at the the Keiko Gallery site:
After graduating from the distinguished Tokyo National University of Fine Arts, Mr. Ito was destined to take over his father’s masonry business in his hometown of Matsumoto City in Nagano Prefecture. He works out of his studio at home, creating his sculptures, while attending his family business.
Hirotoshi Ito continues to find new and original ways to create sculptures that people would touch and feel the unexpected softness and the warmth of them. He would be honored if his work would add laughs and smiles to people who come in contact with them.
What I love about these sculptures is the idea of a secret life. Since I was old enough to understand adventure stories (shout-out to Mio, my Mio), I was enchanted with the idea that the right string of words could make a door appear when there wasn’t one before, that every object (the more mundane, the better) had an alternate purpose, revealed only to those who could see the world in a different way. It’s rare to find something on the net that reaches me on such a tactile level, but I can almost smell the roasted coffee beans, mixed in with the scent of cold moss and stones. It makes me wish, as I believed with all my heart was possible as a child, that my hands could know the secret to unlocking any object they touched.
