Tag: 21st century

My latest column for Sluice magazine

My latest column for Sluice magazine

New edition of Sluice magazine out now, May 2017.

The Garden of Remember in the App Store

The Garden of Remember in the App Store

An interactive, locative app intended to provide an insight into living with dementia.

The Portland Office for Imaginary History

The Portland Office for Imaginary History

b-side Festival, Portland, Dorset, 10-18 September 2016.

Space Time Agency

Space Time Agency

New (potential) live art project.

NEO-THOREAU

NEO-THOREAU

Talk to the hand

Talk to the hand

On Japan/In Japan

On Japan/In Japan

Alistair's avatarADOXOBLOG

Don_Quijote_in_Shinjuku_at_night

Lafcadio Hearn, in his Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (1894), sums up nicely how I feel about the place over a century later:

“The largest steamer that crosses the Pacific could not contain what you wish to purchase. For, although you may not, perhaps, confess the fact to yourself, what you really want to buy is not the contents of a shop; you want the shop and the shopkeeper, and streets of shops with their draperies and their inhabitants, the whole city and the bay and the mountains begirdling it, and Fujiyama’s white witchery overhanging it in the speckless sky, all Japan, in very truth, with its magical trees and luminous atmosphere, with all its cities and towns and temples, and forty millions of the most lovable people in the universe… ‘And this,’ the reader may say,—’this is all that you went forth to see: a torii, some shells, a small…

View original post 934 more words

“Same old game!”

“Same old game!”

Alistair's avatarADOXOBLOG

An 1890 cartoon by John Tenniel, in which the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street– the Bank of England, so called for the City of London street where it was and still is located– doles out free money to silly, naughty boys, AKA bankers. The more things change the more they stay the same, and all the other appropriate sayings…

Two nice details: firstly, the boys have been playing at cards (emphasising that they’re just gambling and can lose just as easily as they win, no particular skill involved) and secondly, the Old Lady’s costume is made of money bags and bank notes.

"SAME OLD GAME" OLD LADY OF THREADNEEDLE STREET. " “SAME OLD GAME”
OLD LADY OF THREADNEEDLE STREET. “YOU’VE GOT YOURSELVES INTO A NICE MESS WITH YOUR PRECIOUS ‘SPECULATION!’ WELL – I’LL HELP YOU OUT OF IT, – FOR THIS ONCE!!”

View original post

b-side Symposium 2015: The Excursionist

b-side Symposium 2015: The Excursionist

Portland, Dorset, October 8-9 2015.

Retire the future archaeologist

Retire the future archaeologist

Alistair's avatarADOXOBLOG

tumblr_nk306n7L7o1qdjpm4o1_500

Some good advice for writers who would like to get better and a comprehensive demolition of clichés by bad writers in William Zinsser’s book On Writing Well. As I point out every single damn time I do a post about good writing, forty years on from this book’s original publication, people are still making all the mistakes Zinsser pointed out as ancient and trite even at the time. Many a supposedly professional author or journalist is still allowing themselves to be “a writer lives in blissful ignorance that clichés are the kiss of death, if in the final analysis he leaves no stone unturned to use them, we can infer that he lacks an instinct for what gives language its freshness. Faced with a choice between the novel and the banal, he goes unerringly for the banal. His voice is the voice of a hack.”

Old never meets…

View original post 410 more words

NFJ (Normal for Japan)

NFJ (Normal for Japan)

Alistair's avatarADOXOBLOG

dumbo-90

Play all of the videos at once for a reasonably accurate simulation of losing your mind and/or the DTs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTdm0pvQ7Gc

View original post

Say KO.NICHI.WA. to your secret

Say KO.NICHI.WA. to your secret

Alistair's avatarADOXOBLOG

I think a lot of the time weird Japan is weird, weird Japan knows it is weird and weird Japan is laughing about it, e.g.

Japan's food company Kagome employee Shigenori Suzuki tries to eat a tomato which is provided from the newly developed tomato dispenser for marathon runner

“We know. It’s OK, go ahead and laugh. We know.”

But sometimes Japan apparently has no idea it’s peculiar and creepy to invent an AI talkbot bear called (I think) Himitsuno Kumachan– Secret Bear?– then have it introduced in a stilted, badly dubbed video by the 100 Yen Shop version of David Duchovny. Remarkably, even I can tell that the Japanese is even more stiff and unnatural than the English.

“Mr J” also visits a coffee shop to have a little chat with his bear, which isn’t a strange and awkward thing for a grown man to do, no, not at all.

himakuma2

Children are presumably the actual intended users for the product, as opposed to 100 Yen Shop David Duchovny. Here we see a genuine…

View original post 89 more words

Your chocolate is in my banana

Your chocolate is in my banana

Alistair's avatarADOXOBLOG

ChocoBanana2

If you search your heart you will recognise that your life has in truth been a sad and pitiful travesty because you’ve never found any way to conveniently inject bananas with chocolate sauce. Luckily Sonna! Chocobana-na is here to fill your bananas and to plug the aching abyss of your soul hole. そんな！チョコバナ～ナ: Sonna translates as “like that” or something similar, although I’m guessing they mean something more like “Such/So Chocobanana!”. You can also insert cream into your banana if you’re in the mood for even more symbolically charged fruit consumption than that which will ensue from the chocobana-na. You could try some jamu, or other gelatinous substances, but we need to face the fact that this product is called Sonna! Chocobana-na so I’m afraid you’ll just have to accept that chocolate is the orthodox choice. One thing to be said in the ad’s favour is that it’s relentlessly innocent…

View original post 220 more words

Paying artists

Paying artists

Valuing art and artists in the east of England.

All publicity is Vlad publicity

All publicity is Vlad publicity

Alistair's avatarADOXOBLOG

putin-fishing Fishing for compliments.

During Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Russia this May, enjoy this honest and unbiased video in which ORDINARY CHINESE PEOPLE have DEFINITELY NOT BEEN COACHED OR COERCED into giving their opinions of Russia and particularly of its “handsome leader, like President Xi”: Vladimir Putin. Show solidarity to COMPLETELY UNPROBLEMATIC COMRADES WHO ARE IN FULL COMPLIANCE WITH INTERNATIONAL LAWS AND TREATIES by eating bread, consuming dairy products, admiring Putin’s “big muscles” (not shown in these pictures), and repeatedly, SINCERELY expressing your desire to marry him. But REMEMBER to appreciate Putin’s big muscles only in a HETEROSEXUAL MANNER because he strictly forbids any reception upon his person of HOMOSEXUAL EYE BEAMS. Pity all countries which do not have handsome, shirtless, DEFINITELY HETEROSEXUAL leaders with big muscles. Presumably photos of Xi Jinping in his budgie smugglers are to follow shortly. You will ENJOY THEM and praise the…

View original post 19 more words

Good tight, sleep night

Good tight, sleep night

Alistair's avatarADOXOBLOG

zebra-zentai-suit

I’m sure there have been no end of articles and blog posts about ゼンタイ zentai: skin tight, faceless body suits. Originally they’re from Japan, of course, like many other cross-cultural mutations. The term is an abbreviation of 全身タイツ zenshin taitsu, “full body tights”. It’s also a safe bet that most of these articles fall into the categories of a) LOL weirdos b) LOL perverts or c) both of the aforementioned. Frankly, I would advise against uncontrolled internet searching on the subject unless you’re broad-minded because some of the people who are into it are absolute FREAKS and you might well see some obscure corners of the porn world that you’d really rather not. Also beware of YouTube’s “up next” autoplay…

Being an absolute freak is fine by me, actually (just wash your hands and probably have a shower too, before you do anything else) but perhaps especially for those who

View original post 218 more words

The Making II: Makerer

The Making II: Makerer

Alistair's avatarADOXOBLOG

Daruma_doll_sai2011

Even more from the series of Japanese short films about crafts and manufacturing, which was featured yesterday: this time the videos feature the making of clockwork and tin toys, daruma (達磨, the hollow good luck dolls supposedly modelled after Bodhidharma, the founder of Zen Buddhism), oil pastel crayons, oil paint for artists, and mosquito coils.

The film about daruma shows equally fascinating traditional hand-made techniques, and slightly more industrial manufacturing of them. Even so, they’re all still finished individually just like the other items shown in these videos, the paint and the mosquito coils included. The pastel one is a bit tedious at the start, but if you’re an artist like me or otherwise just get excited about colours, stick with it and the one about paint for some huge, lush blobs of intense, glossy pigment erotica. The film about mosquito coils is initially rather alarming because…

View original post 155 more words

(The) Making

(The) Making

Alistair's avatarADOXOBLOG

Food_samples_1

Along the same lines as the aforementioned Fascinating Repairmen, more short documentaries from Japan about crafting, which is apparently a genre. There seem to be dozens if not hundreds of these that have been uploaded to YouTube by the Japan Science and Technology Agency. Apart from a few captions– in Japanese, obviously– the videos are all wordless and self-explanatory. The seven embedded here are the ones I’ve found most interesting so far (listed in ascending order of Japanese-ness, possibly): manufacturing marbles from recycled glass, sculpting and moulding shop mannequins, kendo (Japanese bamboo stick-fighting) armour, paper lanterns, dolls for the annual 雛祭りHinamatsuri (Doll Festival), realistic fishing lures, and creating food samples out of PVC and wax.

View original post

The Helmsdale Helm

The Helmsdale Helm

Vikings in the sky with lasers.

The book

Alistair's avatarADOXOBLOG

babadook

修理、魅せます – Fascinating Repairmen– is, I’m sure, a nice skill to have but in this case it’s not an unusual talent or the first scene of an erotic film. Instead it’s the title of a Japanese series celebrating craftsmen and craftswomen who give new life to various old objects. This one is about a Tokyo bookbinder called Nobuo Okano and his process of restoring a much loved and therefore fairly well trashed English-to-Japanese dictionary. Its owner’s daughter is starting university and he wants to pass it on to her, so Okano does what he can to rescue and regenerate the book.

It’s a fascinating process, and you don’t really need to speak Japanese to appreciate what’s going on. The incidental music’s a bit overpowering, but it goes with the Japanese territory. About the only relevant information you can’t get just from watching is the client actually being quite pleased…

View original post 70 more words