I’m still a little bit blinded (positively!) by G-Dragon’s debut performance at Inkigayo yesterday. (Oooh, the stage design ♥ And *cringe* at the tomato pants.)

And now that Big Bang are back in Korea and busy with musicals/promoting or recording solo albums/recovering from car accidents, their summer activities in Japan are crowned with a nice new sales record for overseas artists in Japan. I guess all the hard work and slight awkwardness during Japanese TV shows paid off really quickly:

Big Bang’s first Japanese major album “BIGBANG” debuted at #3 in the weekly Oricon album charts dated August 31, 2009. This makes Big Bang the first overseas artists ever to enter the Japanese Top 5 with their first three consecutive releases, i.e. their debut album, their first single (”MY HEAVEN”) and their second single (”GARA GARA GO!!”).

Meanwhile, their best of album “ASIA BEST 2006-2009″ which was released on the same day as their first major album debuted at #20 in the weekly album charts. At the same time, it ranks 4th in the weekly overseas album charts.

Their live DVD “2009 Big Bang Live Concert ‘Big Show’” is at #1 in the Oricon music DVD charts and at #5 in the rental DVD charts.

In a thank you message to the fans posted on Aug 27 at the official Japanese blog their Japanese staff described Big Bang as a band who is – just two months after their major debut – continuing to make the transition from artists representing Korea to a band representing Japan and even all of Asia. They thanked the fans for all of their support which made it possible to achieve such a great success in Japan. Together with Big Bang themselves they want to work just as hard so the band can continue to be just as successful with their future Japanese activities and releases.

Well look, another summer’s almost over and I’ve still not fully recovered from my bad case of blogging fatigue caused by writing too much in other places. But today I come here with something slightly more substantial than nothing, something which doesn’t even require that many words.
Of course I can’t stray too far from the area that has pretty much taken over my real life – literature. Hence this post shall be a TV pop culture meets literature sort of collection:

1. American Writers on Gossip Girl: A Deadly Adventure?

Last September, Gossip Girl came back with its second season in which Dan Humphrey landed himself an internship with a famous writer played by none other than Jay McInerney. How fitting for all parties involved!

But then a few months later, I started to have doubts about what exactly fate might have in store for writers who appear on that show, even just indirectly. Because in “You’ve Got Yale!”, episode 16 of season 2, our budding writer Dan Humphrey could be spooted reading an old paperback of John Updike’s Rabbit Redux in a trendy coffee house.

Now, in any other case I would have said ‘Congratulations, great product placement!’ or rolled my eyes and thought ‘OK, Humphrey’s the quiet, intellectual guy of the show, I get it (only he’s not)!’. But this whole thing seemed completely bizarre because this very episode was aired on January 19, 2009 and only a little more than a week later, on January 27, John Updike died…! When I heard the news of Updike’s death, that image of Humphrey holding Updike’s novel in his hands flashed up in my mind and I couldn’t help but wonder if it’s really safe for a writer to be featured on Gossip Girl… (Insert thoughtful silence here.)

2. Murakami, Murakami everywhere

Look who was scheduled for an operation at Seattle Grace in episode 18 of season 5 of Grey’s Anatomy (airing date March 19, 2009):

Richard Powers? And Murakami Haruki? Seems like the set designers were getting a little too carried away with their love for certain writers… Or maybe there is no such thing? Anyway, I sincerely hope the operation was a success and they sewed up Haruki properly again!

Speaking of my favourite portrayer of the Sheep Man:
I saw the anime movie Kumo no mukou, yakusoku no basho (The Place Promised in our Early Days) the other day and while I was watching it I couldn’t help but notice certain similarities to Murakami Haruki’s works – the atmosphere, the parallel reality issue, the tower, the way the protagonist expressed himself in the monologues etc. Afterwards I saw the interview with the director Shinkai Makoto that was included on the DVD, which was shot in a place that looked like his work office. There were two screens in the background which showed important scenes and background designs for the film and then yes, I noticed in stack of two books drawn for the film one book I actually own:

The blue book at the bottom is the Japanese hardcover edition of the first volume of Murakami Haruki’s Umibe no Kafuka/Kafka on the Shore complete with its obi and everything. I’m not sure if the image of the two books was used directly in the movie itself at some point because I’ve watched it only once so far and saw the interview afterwards, but expressing your love for literature and your favourite authors in every possible way, across all media, is simply admirable and obviously a pleasure for everyone involved ;)

Murakami Haruki’s new book 1Q84, his 12th long novel, went on sale today (technically yesterday, Friday 29th). Shinchosha was being completely secretive about the story before it was published and didn’t even give any hints on the novel’s official site, just that it was more or less connected to Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore which are all in my personal top 5 of the greatest Haruki books ever written. (A Wild Sheep Chase and Dance Dance Dance would be the remaining two titles on that list.)

Now Shinchosha offers a lot more information on the novel which is published in two hardcover volumes (1,890 yen each). The Japanese reading of the novel’s titel, ichi-kyuu-hachi-yon, probably makes it easier to guess that it stands for the year 1984. Whereas Orwell’s 1984, written in 1949, was science fiction in the sense that it presented a possible future, Murakami’s 1Q84 is supposedly a novel about the past as it could have been, depicting some sort of parallel world to the “real” 1984 as it might have happened but, as fiction, didn’t. (Not that 1984 wasn’t a year that hasn’t been extensively written about in the Murakami universe.)

There’s also a Japanese Wikipedia page for the book now, with a short plot summary and character introductions (which I’m trying hard not to read to avoid spoilers), and amazon.co.jp already has a few customer reviews up whereas last night there were none. (I hope no one was crazy enough to read the whole 1000+ pages in one day o_O) Currently there are 6 reviews for book one, 5 of which gave the book 5 stars. Argh, anticipation~ Can’t wait till my books get here!

It must have been maybe three years ago, when simply everybody, especially offline media, started talking about the so-called Web 2.0 phenomenon, that I started to have difficulties with expressing myself properly online until I felt I had to become completely silent. I think I became so sick of coming across all this meaningless triviality both in words and in pictures (15-year olds camwhoring on MySpace etc.) that faced with this flood of trash I just didn’t want to be a part of it anymore and help increase the word pollution.

Now, I certainly haven’t been going online for serious business only. That’s what real life is largely all about, after all. The internet is mainly for keeping myself informed on the more fun stuff, for entertainment. It also used to be about communication, but somewhere along the way, as described above, I simply lost the ability to communicate online, in every form imaginable. This isn’t meant to sound dramatic in any way. It was just a natural process, I guess. And so I became an invisible internet user who didn’t make much noise, who only consumed quietly what the people I still cared about posted. The internet in small doses. That was enough for me.

Slowly but surely I want to start writing again, here and in other places, but I’ve tried to do that so many times and always failed in the end but… maybe this time will be different. I’m so used to doing my fangirling, my obsessing over the things that I appreciate on an academic, hence offline level now that just posting little things and quick notes online isn’t as easy as it used to be. There’s this huge wall that keeps me from finishing up stubs and sketches and finally publish them here because I guess I’m still hesitant when it comes to making noise, making myself visible.

(That said, I don’t think I’ll ever have a page on MySpace or Facebook.)

Now that I’m more or less free to do what I want until next Monday when classes start again, I decided to look through some old stuff that’s accumulated in my room in my parents’ house to throw away the things I don’t need to keep and make room for new things. I found a huge stack of Italian manga which I bought when I was, well, in Italy. They had all the cool stuff back in 1999 or something, when the manga market here wasn’t really as massive as it is now. I bought lots of random stuff, basically anything I could get my hands on, mostly shounen and seinen titles like Macross 7 Trash, Gundam and Cat’s Eye – sadly no shoujo manga, though. No matter where I looked, I couldn’t find any manga for girls even though they were said to be already quite popular in Italy at that time. (We only had Sailor Moon back then.)

I also found old manga scripts that I’d printed out to read Japanese manga. Ah, the good old days as a manga reader! Yes, we actually bought Japanese manga and tried to read them in Japanese with the help of scripts kind souls with admirable Japanese skills had provided for us on the internet. This is how I learnt Japanese! I taught myself hiragana and katakana, got myself a good dictionary and started reading manga with the help of English scripts. I found scripts for Tenshikinryouku/Angel Sanctuary and other old Yuki Kaori titles, CLAMP stuff like X, Tokyo Babylon, RG Veda and Clover and more light-hearted shoujo series like Emura’s W Juliet. This way, I acquired quite an impressive range of vocabulary which I’d probably never been able to use in every-day life in Japan, including words like “organic angel” (yuukitenshi)…

I might not be doing what I’m doing now if I’d gotten into manga just three or four years later when the scanlation business took off and people became lazy and didn’t buy manga anymore but downloaded it and read it in English. Back in the days, you just had to learn Japanese if you wanted access to all the good titles…

(Does anyone remember fansub tape trading? So last century!)

This “as seen on” celebrity-inspired fashion boom is probably just one more item on the list of things to do to try and become part of the whole media-created parallel universe which is really just there to make people buy and daydream instead of making them think and trying to make a change. It’s almost like you haven’t lived if you haven’t acted out the life of someone famous by wearing the same clothes as they are.

It gets really weird and downright ridiculous, though, when someone actually retouches paparazzi shots so the celebrity in it only appears to be wearing a dress they’re trying to sell – like in these pictures of clothes horse Sienna Miller I found on eBay:

  

(Re: Sienna Miller. How did she become a so-called style icon? By being sent a gazillion Yumi and Orion mini dresses. Surely not by being a terribly talented, hard-working actress. Give me the name of just one film you remember she was in and that you’ve actually seen. For what should women admire her other than the clothes she’s wearing as free advertising for the companies which sent her their clothes for free?)

What type of person buys clothes because they were worn by celebrities? I cannot help but frown upon people who need fashion to cover up their lack of identity. Shouldn’t fashion be all about emphasizing your personality and character, and communicating your uniqueness? Sure, everyone’s free to choose what they wear but trying so hard to copy someone’s style is a bit like becoming the victim of something one might call fashion absolutism where celebrities seem to dictate what to wear, but in truth it’s just the industry telling you what to buy (and basically, to buy, to consume so they can make money with stuff people don’t even need).

Today is the first day of my postgrad life. It’s also the day after the day I accidently found out how to connect my phone with my MacBook via Bluetooth. It’s kind of amazing to think of all the data that gets transferred without any cable at all, and it’s happening everywhere, all the time. Admittedly, this thought is also kind of scary and makes me long for the good old analogue days.

Today I continued my series of surprising realizations: I had to learn the hard way why autumn is also called fall when an unusually large acorn crashlanded – massively accelerated due to the height of the tree and the raging storm – right on the top of my head. The sound of the impact was amazing from the inside! And from the outside too, I was told. That little fruit of autumn left a nice throbbing bump on my head. I thought it had also cracked my skull but I’m not so sure anymore. Should I go and have an X-ray or not? I’m kind of hard to crack, though, so I should be OK.