Fall TV Shows I’m Excited For

So… yeah, even though I haven’t got my TV set up in my dorm room yet (it’s 2 damn cords… it’s not that difficult!), I’m looking forward to the fall lineup.

As a geek, I feel obligated to point out that “Heroes” on NBC is going to be back on next week, and although I absolutely detested the ending last season (it was so illogical), I’m anxious to see if it’s going to be better this time around. The show usually starts out pretty well at the beginning of the season, but it always, always, ALWAYS seems to peter out around the middle, get a bit better, and then craps out again. Last year, they did fire Jeph Loeb, one of the producers, who was making “Heroes” shittier and shittier, so I’m a bit more hopeful now than I was before.

Another show I’m looking forward to is “Chuck”, which started airing during the WGA strike two years ago. It’s also on NBC right before “Heroes” (at least on the East Coast) and I watch it because… it’s… funny. Yep. It’s very funny. It’s about a Buy More (parody of “Best Buy”) employee named Chuck Bartowski who somehow got a government mindfuck in his head that lets him “flash” (basically, learn everything about something instantaneously) on people/things in the government database if he sees it in real life. He’s being guarded by a hot, hot CIA agent (played by Yvonne Strahovski) and a whacko NSA agent (played by Adam Baldwin) and they have crazy-fun adventures together! The story and plot is mildly preposterous, but… I dunno. The characters are endearing and the dialogue is very, very good. So… yeah, I like “Chuck”.

I’m also looking forward to “House” on FOX. I hate FOX News, and I hate how the company markets some of their less mainstream TV shows (“Firefly”… grr…), but I still love “House”. I also appreciate how they’re trying to change some things this season by having House start in the nuthouse… YAY!

So… yeah. That’s basically it. Oh yeah, “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” are pretty cool too, but they’re on all year round, so I dunno if you can really say that they have seasons…

Oh, one more thing. The anime club at my university is meeting again… so I’ll probably end up going there too. To watch Japanese stuff. It’s always good at the beginning of the year because they’re new people… and new people are good. Inevitably though, most of them wander off, but a couple of them stick. So… yeah. I hope it’s better this year. I hope their are more girls… because geek girls are AWESOME. Fan girls less so… but whatever.

New Music and Japanese

Uwa~… I’m not doing as many blog posts as I used to. I think I’m going to try for at least 3 or 4 a week. I think that’s a good number… enough so that I don’t get bored.

Anyway, seeing as how it’s summer, I’ve got a bit more time to devote to hobbies and stuff now. Lately, I’ve been listening to more music and watching more movies and TV than I have before. So, I went on a bit of a music, movie, and TV binge… it’s fun! And not nearly as unhealthy as a food binge! YAY!

So… some of the new music I got included (what I think is) the entire Coldplay discography, the entire Ellegarden discography, the entire Explosions in the Sky discography (up til now), Mogwai’s “Mogwai Young Team” album, “Hey” byPixies, some classical music (Liszt, Mendelssohn, a ASIAN KUNG-FU GENERATION albums, the entire Chatmonchy discography, and three albums by the Shins (“Chutes Too Narrow”, “Oh, Inverted World”, and “Wincing the Night Away”).  And I’ve listened to hardly ANY of them… hahahaha…

I’ve put all my Coldplay music on Shuffle and I’ve played through about half of them, which means that I probably haven’t heard… about half of them. I should probably get around to listening to more Coldplay at some point. I think my favorite Coldplay song at this moment is “Swallowed in the Sea” on the “X&Y” album. It’s a sad, melancholy sort of song, like most of Coldplay’s music. Most of it is about forgiveness and acceptance.

Explosions in the Sky’s and Mogwai’s music is a bit harder to write about because they are almost entirely instrumentals. They’re… awesome. That’s really all I can say. My favorite Explosions in the Sky song would probably be “First Breath After Coma”. It starts out slow, but then builds to a fantastic climax… before receding back to being slow. It’s atmospheric. There’s really no other way to explain it. As for Mogwai… haha… I actually haven’t heard listened to much Mogwai… so I can’t really say much about it. It’s good, but I don’t like it as much as Explosions in the Sky. Explosions in the Sky is sort of like a modern-day progressive rock orchestral piece. Their songs have to be taken in one piece. Otherwise, it kind of loses its effect… so if you listen to any of their songs, listen to the entire song.

“Hey” by Pixies is also a good song. I don’t really understand the lyrics, but I like the instrumentals, especially the bass throughout the song.

Chatmonchy is probably my favorite band. It’s a three piece (guitar, drums, bass, and vocals done by all three) Japanese girl rock band. They’ve had quite a bit of success in Asia, but I don’t think they’ve ever topped the Oricon Top 30 Singles or Top 30 Albums list, which is basically the list of the top 30 Japanese singles/albums sold in the week. I think the highest they’ve ever reached is #2 on both charts. ASIAN KUNG-FU GENERATION/アジアン・カンフー・ジェネレーション is another of my favorite Japanese rock groups. Their music tends to be heavier than Chatmonchy’s songs, which often leaned towards more bubble-gummy pop but lately has been a bit heavier too. My favorite Chatmonchy song is “Last Love Letter” and my favorite ASIAN KUNG-FU GENERATION song would probably be either  ”Re:Re”, which has an awesome guitar and drum intro, or “After Dark”.

NOTE: The video of the PV is kind of weird.

As for The Shins… truthfully, I haven’t listened to any Shins music except for what I already had… so I can’t really say much about the new stuff.

On a sidenote, I’m self-teaching myself Japanese! I dunno if it’ll turn out to be a good idea or not… *shrugs* Either way, I can get Daryl to help me when I get back to college in August… or September. I can’t remember which.

On the Subject of Love

Today, I found this old (5-years-old… so it’s ancient or something) article about jun-ai (“pure love”) on a Japanese news website. Here’s the link:

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/ek20041230ks.html

Anyway, it was talking about how the most popular Asian (Japanese and Koreans) dramas (ドラマ) in recent times (recent for 2004, at least) were about first love between two young high-schoolers, usually at 15, which is incidentally the year that many Japanese teenagers enter high school. This love was characterized as being platonic (meaning NO SEX), painful, and eternal, seeing as how one of the lovers would die at a young age at 17, which is incidentally the year that many Japanese teenagers enter their last of high school (Japanese high school spans 3 years instead of 4… I was really confused the first time too), leaving just enough time during the season for pain and stuffs, which is good for ratings.

Last year in college, I saw the movie adaptation of one of the dramas that the article mentions. Both the drama and the movie were titled “世界の中心で、愛をさけぶ”, or phonetically, “Sekai no Chuushin de, Ai o Sakebu”, or translated “Crying Out Love, In the Center of the World”. For those unfamiliar with the story, it’s sort of like “A Walk to Remember” starring Mandy Moore, except in Japanese and based off of a different book. For those unfamiliar with that story, it’s about a guy and a girl who start off not really liking each, then go to really liking each other, then the girl dies from cancer, then the guy is really tore up about it.

The central theme in these “jun-ai” (“pure love”) stories is that it’s a pure, painful first love (“hatsukoi”) that is never consummated and remains eternal because of the circumstances, not necessarily death. Sometimes, one of the characters has to leave for a period ranging from one year to a decade. During this time, the love remains and the re-emergence of one of the characters reawakens the same feelings. Special importance is placed upon the fact that it’s “hatsukoi” because the Japanese believe that first love is unmarred and untarnished by the experience and knowledge that seasoned daters know. “Hatsukoi” is typified as being more passionate and more beautiful because the lovers don’t know how things can possibly go wrong. And of course in “jun-ai”, they never learn because it ends before it can go wrong.

After reading this and after watching the dramas, I feel a bit sad. Obviously, I’ve never been in any sort of “jun-ai” or “hatsukoi” situation. I wouldn’t really know what I’d do if I was though. I think that if I ever lost any that I was closely romantically linked with, I don’t think I’d be any good in that department. Currently, I don’t love anyone unconditionally, and there’s been only one case when I have, and that turned out kind of disastrously (or rather, it kind of just fell flat). But… I think I’d want something like that. As opposed to other people’s descriptions, the definition of love to me is like “hatsukoi”, a blind, unconditional, unfettered willingness to give one’s self to another person. It doesn’t have to be returned, and it doesn’t have to be mutual, and it might not exactly be healthy. I think if I had that sort of blind, unconditional, mutual love, I think it’d be enough for me. I don’t think I’d want anyone else after that.

Japanese Comedy

I spent at least an hour watching Japanese comedy on Youtube. Now, Japanese comedy differs from American comedy in that it relies predominantly on wordplay and Japanese pop references. For example, one of the videos I found was about a guy who was looking for his phone in a lost-and-found center and while he’s there, the other phones begin to ring. The ringtones were integral to the comedy in the video and played a key part to the ending. So, basically without knowledge of the Japanese language (both spoken and written) and without knowledge of Japanese pop culture, Japanese comedy is both incomprehensible and boring. So yeah. LUCKILY I KNOW SOME STUFF! ^-^

So, I’m going to post some Youtube videos here to link to some Japanese comedy videos. YAY!

This was the first one that I watched, and I still think it’s the funniest.

This video is by a manzai pair called Taka and Toshi. A manzai pair is basically composed of a straight man (tsukkomi) and a funny man (boke), and the straight man hits the funny man on the head when he says/does something stupid. On a sidenote, I think “boke” also means “idiot” or something like that.

And this is by Tomonori Jinnai, who is a Japanese actor and comedian. He sometimes uses large screens as visual props, but he didn’t in this one. I think this one is pretty funny, but the greatest punchline is kind of incomprehensible if you don’t know anything about Japanese TV dramas.

shoujo to shounen manga

少女と少年

実わ。。。読む漫画をする。

I don’t know if I did that right or not. *shrugs*

Anyway, I’ve been reading a lot more manga recently now that classes are over. I find most of the stuff I read after I find a reference to some particular manga related to whatever Wikipedia article I was reading. I’d then read the Wikipedia article about that manga and then I’d go to Mangatraders to download all the available volumes. That’s how I started reading Yotsuba&, Azumanga Daioh, Ichigo 100%, DearS, and Suzuka.

In my literary/digital adventures into the manga-ized life of a Japanese teenager, I’ve begun to wonder how much manga has influenced Japanese teenage life. That is, I wonder if manga is influenced by Japanese teenagers or if Japanese teenagers are influenced by manga. Undoubtedly, many Japanese teenagers stop reading some types of manga after a certain age, considering them to be childish. Instead, they pick up manga from different, more mature, genres. Of the genres I read intended for a teenage audience, one I I find highly entertaining is the “high school drama”. Conventional American TV high school dramas are more sexually mature than Japanese high school dramas, most likely due to the (supposedly… I can’t say if it’s true or not) repressed sexuality that is… prized? I dunno… I don’t want to say something particularly stupid… OH WELL.

Anyway, there are different high school dramas directed to either male or female teenage demographics. Initially, I found little difference between them, but after reading them, I think I’ve found the single defining feature: Manga directed to males have RIDICULOUSLY more fan service. Too bad real life isn’t like this… wahhhh….. 書がない。。。

Besides this, though, I find that there is little difference. The characters are as varied as the genre allows them to be and they’re always sprinkled with a bit more of the “pretty” powder than the average cupcake. The main characters can be either male or female. So far, most of the manga I’ve read dealt with male main characters, but that’s probably because of my method of finding manga often leads me to manga similar to whatever I’m reading at the moment, leading to a perpetual cycle of finding more and more similar manga. I find that if the author is male, the main character tends to be male, but if the author is female, then the main character’s gender seems less important. Some of CLAMP’s work, for example, deal with male main characters even though all the manga-ka in the group are female. Ichigo 100% is another example of a female manga-ka writing with a male main character. I think this is probably because females have more… unique problems than males, at least in the high school drama genre.

I find that the endings are also quite interesting. In most of the American high school dramas that I’ve watched on TV (okay, HEARD about from other people), the guy and girl usually end up together… all happy and everything. This contrasts with the manga I’ve read so far, where oftentimes the guy and the girl DON’T end up together. Prime example: Ichigo 100%. Manaka, the main character, has his choice of 3 (or more? I can’t remember… and technically it was never really a choice for him) girls, and he didn’t end up with any of them. He actually just failed his college entrance exams and ended up travelling the world to make indie films for a living… which actually isn’t that bad, I guess. BUT STILL. He didn’t get the girl. This genre of manga also tends not to have much sex either. I find that the Japanese are more open with their sexuality than Americans EXCEPT when it comes to the actual ACT of sex, in which case the Japanese are about the same, if not a little more… Victorian. Nudity, near nudity, sexualized content, and “suggestive themes” (fuck you, MPAA and ESRB, fuck you…) is not nearly as taboo in Japanese media than in American. No, more emphasis is placed on a single kiss, a hug, or something like that. Simple physical contact. Not like PHYSICAL contact, but just like… a touch on the arm or something.

Yep. That’s it. I didn’t really have a point in this.

OH YEAH. And one of my blog posts is getting a ridiculously higher level of activity than all the others. And I got 10+ hits today before I even posted a blog. Ordinarily, I’d only get 10+ if I specifically stated that I had a new blog post up. So. That was weird.

Playing Around with Japanese

I figured out how to write Japanese on the computer with a normal keyboard. Through an application on Windows, I’ve managed to get a thing on the right side of the toolbar that allows me to switch out between English and Japanese. Basically, when I use the Japanese language tool thing, I just type out a Japanese word or phrase in romaji, and then the computer allows me to scroll through a series of hiragana and kanji. On Word, I can also use the mouse to write the characters, and then you can select the right hiragana or kanji. Here’s a couple examples:

Shiyouganai: 仕様がない

Ohayou gozaimasu: お早うございます

Nihongo: 日本語

Itadakimasu: いただきます

Tadaima: ただいま

Momo: 桃

As you can see, I’m having a lot of fun with it.