Filed under: Events, Family, Hawaii, Honolulu, Japan, Kids | Tags: christina silva, hawaii kotohira jinsha, moments, shichi-go-san
The Japanese celebrate a number of rite-of-passage events throughout their lives, and these traditionally start with the Shichi-Go-San celebrations. When boys reach the age of three and five, and girls three and seven, it is customary to take them to a shrine to receive a blessing from a priest to ensure a happy and prosperous life. An added benefit realized by contemporary Japanese is that it makes for a tremendous photo-op (see exhibit A above).
Luckily for us, Japanese culture is still alive and well here in Hawaii. We attended the ceremony at Hawaii Kotohira Jinsha, a cute little shrine tucked in along H1, which, judging by the hopping business they were doing, seems to be the place to do it. Christina Silva, a talented local photographer friend of ours, was nice enough to meet us there and help us capture the moment.
Planet B-Boy, a documentary about breakdancing, is much like watching a well-made surf movie. It starts with a historical introduction that seems insufficient and quickly moves into the international – if still somewhat “underground” – scene as it stands today. The film follows five different teams into the Battle of the Year competition held in Germany, the alleged world cup of breakdancing. So what you get is a bit of how the sport/artform has translated into different cultures and some insight into motivation and personal sacrifices made by the dancers. All of which is basically an excuse to watch some downright ridiculous feats of physicality (hence the allusion to surf movies). Not the greatest doc ever made, but pretty upbeat and inspiring.
I am at a crossroads in my relationship with the acclaimed TV show Mad Men. Only having watched four episodes of the initial season does not really qualify me to pass balanced judgment on it, but I’m finding it difficult to find a compelling reason to keep watching. Although the acclaim for the show’s meticulous recreation of the period details is a little misplaced given that the characters are mostly acted in a very contemporary vein and the attitudes of the writers and producers toward the era and industry fairly rigidly drawn, there is something compulsively watchable about many of the performances and storylines. I’d probably keep going if it wasn’t so damn depressing. Based on what I’ve learned from this show, I honestly don’t know how a generation of Americans lived through the early 60s…
Filed under: Music | Tags: aphex twin, autechre, ingenious mashup, mouse on mars, squarepusher
Back before the kids changed my life, I had the time and money to indulge some of my little whims. One of which was building a vinyl collection. Although the stack only grew to about fifty deep, I was pretty proud of my little assemblage of electronica and rare groove, a motley balance of classics and the obscure. Most of it was culled from the abundant back street record shops of Shimokitazawa. There was an upstairs store/cafe/dj bar that I sometimes ventured into – forget the name now – which was always stocked with a modest but amazing selection of what, for lack of a better term, is commonly classified as IDM. I don’t think I ever bought anything there, partly because their prices were pretty outrageous, and partly because nothing I listened to there ever made me think, yes, this is it.
Surprisingly, I recall listening to Mouse on Mars in that store.
I must not have been in the right frame of mind. Because right now there is no electronic music I would rather listen to. I picked up a few of their albums recently, and I feel like I’ve come home. When you start going deeper into any genre of music, you are on a mission. A mission to discover an ideal that exists in your mind and hopefully some artist has come close to approximating.
These Krauts have done it.
Mouse on Mars is the most ingenious mashup of styles, balance of play and intelligence, meticulously composed yet grooving, unexpected and mystifying, fresh on every track electronic music this music lover has ever heard. Maybe the music doesn’t have quite the personality of say an Aphex Twin or a Squarepusher, but I would argue that may be to their advantage as both of the aforementioned can start to grate the ears on excessive listening. Autechre might be the best comparison, but these guys really take their sounds way beyond the repetitive drone of Autechre’s dense, hammering structures.
Yeah so maybe I’m a few years late to the party. They’re still good.
Filed under: Branding, Media | Tags: advertising, Branding, jon stewart, morning joe, old spice, pepsi, post-ironic, snl, snuggies, wayne's world, weezer
A couple weeks ago in this post I mentioned this video of Jon Stewart taking MSNBC’s new morning show Morning Joe to task over their Starbucks sponsorship. As always, Jon is on point, neatly dissecting the absurdity of the MSNBC team’s seemingly odd relationship with their show’s patron.
Or so I thought.
As much as I appreciate Jon’s fiendish logic, I wonder if we haven’t moved into some bizarro cultural landscape that I would characterize as post-ironic. In the post-ironic cultural landscape we are so hyper-aware of the irony of any given situation, rather than using the irony as a tool for critique, we embrace it by drawing attention to it, while simultaneously accepting it. Advertising today teems with examples of this condition. In post-ironic advertising, advertisers and their partners are hyper-aware of the purported soulless/sell-out nature of their business. To appeal to an audience that they perceive (somewhat correctly) as being as cynical about advertising as they are, they demonstrate this awareness in nod-and-wink fashion to demonstrate their authenticity, that they’re on the level, that we’re all in on the game. Thus, in today’s cultural climate, as much as Jon Stewart – idealist that he is – would like it to be different, it is valid for Joe Scarborough to claim that they were being sarcastic (except that he was actually confusing sarcasm and irony, but oh well) about their show’s sponsorship, because we have moved beyond the belief that someone who endorses a product really “loves” it. It’s merely brand association and a way to pump dollars into the programming. Or an attempt to have your cake and eat it too.
We’ve been moving into this space for a long time now. In my mind, the tipping point had to be this infamous clip from Wayne’s World, probably the most epochal example of what I am trying to describe.
More recent examples include:
Brands such as Pepsi buying airtime on SNL to be featured in mockumercials.
The current crop of Old Spice commercials.
Weezer’s post-ironic promotional parody Snuggie infomercial that says, “Isn’t the whole post-industrial mass commercialization of everything just such a farce? That’s why we’re offering a free crap product from those infomercials you see on tv all the time to help promote our new album!”
Filed under: Books | Tags: anxiety, hot flat and crowded, the world is flat, thomas friedman
I did a book swap with my boss a couple months back: Friedman for Friedman. I lent her Hot, Flat and Crowded in exchange for his previous tome, The World Is Flat. If HFC is Friedman’s sober step back from the hype surrounding globalization, TWIF is him taking a Koolaid bath. Not that he doesn’t recognize the inherent challenges presented by the time honored practice of outsourcing all the dirty work to the lowest bidder. If anything, Friedman has to be one of the most honest and balanced writers out there in terms of looking at the issues from a well-rounded perspective. Strangely, reading this book actually made me more anxious about the future than HFC, which describes the doomsday scenario around the corner. What hit home for me was the realities of a highly competitive world in which, barring some dramatic turnaround, the position of the U.S. will continue to slide. Being mainly concerned with the rise of China and India, Friedman doesn’t talk much about Germany, but I always think Germany makes a telling contrast with the U.S. Unlike our service and financial based economy, Germany still relies on manufacturing as the engine of its economy. We, on the other hand, produce things like “social networking tools” to allow out of work PR professionals to have a second career as social media “gurus”. But this is the kind of economy we have created. As Friedman describes, Americans are being forced to scramble in order to keep pace with change and demonstrate their added value above and beyond the folks in other countries we have outsourced most of the real work to. We’ve still got a cushy lead, but how much longer can we stay ahead of the pack? (And, as individuals, stay employed?)
Filed under: Data Visualization, Hawaii, Politics | Tags: furlough fridays, hawaii education, lingle
Governor Lingle is finally buckling under the pressure from various quarters to do something about the Furlough Fridays. Although it would be nice to think the parents’ voices made a difference, the timing of her sudden announcement would seem to indicate one voice counted a bit more than others (although she denied that this was the case).
Anyway, all this Friday Furlough excitement got me thinking about education in Hawaii and how it stacks up against the other 49. So I started rooting around in the data to see what I could find. I was hoping to find some good stuff on high school and college graduation rates, but there don’t seem to be any good conclusive studies out there. Here’s what I was able to uncover. Apologies for any factual misrepresentation. Click on the image to view in full size.
Filed under: Activities, Family, Kids, Sport | Tags: baseball, little league, waikahala
3 for 3. 3 RBI. The kid’s a natural. I guess I should come clean with the knowledge that there are no outs in the Shetland League. The last batter of each inning hits a grand slam every time. I think Taiyo’s enjoying the game, though. Even if he keeps complaining about how hot the uniforms are in Hawaii weather.
Filed under: Hawaii, Honolulu, Media | Tags: flux hawaii, magazine, noble cause
Apparently not everyone is convinced print media is dead in the water. A new magazine is rolling into town: Flux Hawaii. Best I can gather, it is a lifestyle, arts and culture rag. Which I think is a fine and noble cause. I just wonder about the choice of medium. They are allowing prospective readers to choose the first edition cover from five submissions by artists asked to portray “the future of Honolulu”, and have the originals on display over at Borders in Ward Center. I voted for the rather bleak one above, both for the artistry that went into it, and the fact that it most accurately displays the current cultural temperature. I’m a fan of optimism, but let’s be real – this state needs a lot of work.
And your mother, too! This movie simply blew me away. It takes the horny teenage boy plus road trip trope out of Hollywood’s immature hands and turns it into a powerful mediation on life and death, class and politics, interior (personal) and exterior (world at large) realities. Americans can’t handle honest portrayals of sex (let alone much else) in their movies, which comes from an innate sense of prudish restraint and a penchant for substituting sensational gestures for raw emotion. This movie is pure raw emotion (which is not to say it is not intelligent). Some of the best scenes in the film, in my opinion, are the miniature departures from the main narrative – a funeral procession, a wedding, one of the characters’ hometowns – that provide context and new insights. Not the kind of connect-the-dots backstory you would get in an American movie (like, oh, he was abandoned as a child, that explains why he has difficulties forming emotional attachments), but rather the kinds of small details that are all too human. It’s the kind of movie that leaves you lying beaten up on the side of a dusty road breathing air into your lungs with a renewed gratitude at this miracle called life.
