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.

One of the best albums of recent history, The National’s Boxer, is getting its own making-of film! The DVD plus EP package comes out sometime during the second half of May (5/20 USA, 5/19 UK, 5/16 Germany). Yes, that’s totally worth making one of my infrequent blog post before disappearing again for two months! :) Now, if only I could make the band come back to Berlin in the very near future…

Countdown: 4 months till graduation!

I just saw the news that Anthony Minghella died on Tuesday morning :( I couldn’t believe my eyes at first and had to go online to verify it and it turned out to be true… He was still so young, I just cannot believe he’s gone ;_; (I still remember four years ago when he came to Berlin to promote Cold Mountain at the Berlin International Film Festival…)

In related news, science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke who co-wrote the script for Kubrick’s 2001 also died…

And speaking of the Berlinale, I decided to post a few impressions in two back-dated entries, the first of which is located here.

Wait, what happened to January and February? Someone deleted all my blog posts!*
January, January… is pretty much a blur of preparing three presentations, huge presentations which I didn’t fuck up because I know the importance of being brilliant. Or something. February = Berlinale (or Berlin International Film Festival or BIFF or watching too many weird and depressing films to remember in Berlin). February also marked the end of classes for the winter semester and the beginning of a horrible horrible French course. Taking that was probably the biggest mistake in my so-called academical career. But I survived it! Can’t shake the reoccuring bouts of francophobia now, but I’m trying to ease the pain with Versailles no bara and Gankutsuou. The Japanese take on French history is so much more bearable than the French take on French history. Uhuh. I also wrote a kick-ass paper on Japanese ODA for China (you wiki that) last week and now all I have to do is write another kick-ass paper, on Murakami Ryu (ha!), and a translation of … I don’t know, I haven’t decided yet, something for my Japanese class (oh, and I passed the JLPT 2, 今年は一級！？).
Fin.

* No, they didn't. Blogging is so overrated though, seriously.

Hatsu-koi
(Japan 2007, directed by Koichi Imaizumi)

I wouldn’t have bothered writing a review for this movie, this is just too remind myself of what sort of film not to stand in line and pay for ever again: The fact that I did go and see it was because my friend was really interested in the subject of young gay people in Japan. I jokingly mentioned to her that I’d made a promise to myself not to see any Japanese lo-fi indie films at the Berlinale anymore due to some very bad experiences in the past. I told her that most of these films featured very shaky and/or blurry camera work without any sort of aesthetic intention, completely talent-free amateur actors, a thin storyline and at least one disturbing masturbation scene.
Hatsu-koi was no exception. It was basically a commercial to legalize gay marriage in Japan, one scene even featured the older characters (20-somethings) reiterating all arguments for legalization… not the subtlest way of bringing your message across but oh well. The story was so-so, the coming-out story of the school boy Tadashi was kind of cute, though I could’ve done with that godawful masturbation scene, thanks very much. The film handled sex scenes quite explicitly, one in the toilet of a bar felt extremely awkward. Quite a few people left the cinema, I think both due to the slightly gross sex scenes but also because the actors’ performances throughout the whole film where extremely inconvincing. The film had its serious, touching moments but on the whole it was just too silly, too amateurishly executed and too inconvincing on all levels.

Kabei - Our Mother (Kaabee)
(Japan 2008, directed by Yoji Yamada)

During World War II, Kayo Nogami, called Kaabee (a variant of okaa-san) by her children, is left too take care of her daughters Teruyo/Terubee and Hatsuko/Hatsubee (Mirai Shida, I’ve seen her in various dorama before, like 14 sai no haha and Watashitachi no kyôkasho) on her own because her husband Shigeru (Toobee), a professor for German literature, gets imprisoned under the Peace Preservation Law. To get through the hardships the war and her husband’s imprisonment bring with them, she can rely on the help from Yamasaki (Tadanobu Asano), a former student of her husband’s, her sister and an uncle. The film focuses on the everyday life during the war and lets you experience the propaganda and general madness from the inside. The family forms a sort of safe haven from all this. The life in the Noyami’s house is framed by the passing of the seasons, intouched by the war but affecting the house itself and its inhabitants. The movie finds a fine balance between serious, moving scenes, especially those set in prison where Noyami is treated so unfairly and cruelly or when his family reads out his letters, and the more lighthearted, funnier ones (usually involving Yamasaki).
The film was slightly episodic but never boring, always touching, true, convincing and deeply humanistic. Sometimes it was trying a bit too hard to be emotional but I think that’s a common trait of mainstream Japanese movies. The cinematography was solid, on the conventional side of things but offered new insights into a country at war, from the point of view of ordinary people. The set design was brilliant, especially in the town scenes where you could see the propaganda posters and larger crowds of people.
The film ran in the official Berlin International Film Festival competition. The director Yoji Yamada, the screenwriter Teruyo Nogami whose own life story this movie was based upon, Sayuri Yoshinaga (Kaabee), Mitsugoro Bando (Toobee) and Tadanobu Ando (Yamasaki) were present during the premiere screening. They all came up on stage afterwards and told a bit about the making of the film. Nogami, who worked for Akira Kurosawa for a very long time, expressed her gratitude for the fact that his movie had mad its way to Germany because her father who loved German literature so much never had the chance to visit the country himself. Needless to say, the audience was deeply moved by her words.