I must have asked 100 times what the word for that was last night. Still can't remember thought my vocabulary is improving. Hai-Dozo = Here, have this thing, Hai-Domo = I will take this thing and thank you for it. You can seriously get by in Japan just knowing the words for thank you = Arigoto-Gozaimas, and I'm good = Daishoubu. You hear those two words constantly. Thank you thank you thank you thank you, yes yes yes, and I'm happy, thank you, I'm happy thank you, yes. The politest people on the entire earth.
I haven't been to Tokyo yet. Tokyo is the New York of Japan, Osaka is the Chicago, working class. And Shinsaibashi is the Bucktown (but on acid. Shinsiabashi IS like being in Blade Runner) and Namba is the Wicker park. I spent new Years in Namba. A friend of Miron's, AKI, just opened a bar there called, get this, "You'rewelcome GlobalGeneration" Yeah. If I were to write a Japanese character with a bar called that and put it on the radio show we'd get fired for stereotyping. Brief caveat: Only speaking six words in Japanese, I have spoken a lot of English to the Japanese (they all know a teeny bit of English), and I've found the best way to get them to understand english is to speak it like a Japanese-sterotype. Slow with words pronounced Japanese-ey, sometimes even substituting L's and R's. It works.
So Yourwelcome GlobalGeneration is a great bar. It's the size of an efficiency in Chicago, actually everything is the size of an efficiency in Chicago, stores, bars, restaurants. They're a small people. They need less room than us. It looks like a hip Wicker Park bar, at one end of the efficiecy is the elevator you exited to enter and the other end is a glass box that looks six floors down onto the main street in Namba. Actually every street in Japan looks like a main street or an alley. There are no actual alleys, just streets that look like them. Big enough for a tiny Japanese car. Main streets are any street that runs under a Highway (their freeways are ginormous and criss-cross above your head while walking the main streets) or Elevated Train line (there are so many trains running everywhere in Japan).
So we counted down to 2005 in Lost In Translation, then Aki took us to a Temple. Everyone in Japan goes to Temples at midnight. We got there and it was like a County Fair, thousands of people coming to pray for the new year and buy Fair Food. The Japanese have their own regular food, but they also have their versions of Elephant Ears and Funnel Cakes. Check out what I ate; a Flat Waffle cone (same shit they feed the deer in Nara) covered in barbecue sauce with rice krispies sprinkled on it, then and egg with bacon on top of that and the whole thing is covered in mayonaise. What the fuck? I thought, well it's stupid in conception but I bet the taste justifies it's stupidity...NO! It's not even a good combo on any level, they should add oranges just to make it stupider.
Gotta go, people are coming over for Tako-Yaki (Octopus Balls) I'll report back later tonight.
Yeah, I know, Octupus Balls...funny.
Friday, December 31, 2004
Wednesday, December 29, 2004
Ohio-Gojiyma
That is probably the most mispelled Japanese word ever, but it's 2am and I don't feel like doing a google search. Hello, from Japan, fellow travelers. I am currently in Osaka, Japan, using up the valuable real-estate of a holiday combined with a week off of Schadenfreude to make a little trip before we busy ourselves into writing Season 2.5.
So I had this roommate named Miron, he was a Russian who wanted to do children's theatre and he got a job playing Doc Brown from Back To The Future in a show at the Universal Studios in Osaka, Japan. Weird. I know. So as I type I'm overlooking the Osaka shipping harbors from one of Miron's two balconies. Universal Studios treats their boys well. Plus the actors who do the shows at the them parks here, might as well be Brad Pitt. Unlike in America where "theme park actor" has all the prestige of "circuit city commercial actor" the guys have rabid fans visiting the park two or three times a week and giving the actors gifts, mostly picture of them and the actor taken the last time they were int he park in a hand-sewn puffy picture frame. It sounds pretty Play Misty For Me, but it's not actually creepy, because they're Japanese. And Japanese stalkers are very low pressure.
So I've been here 24 hours and it appears as though I'm learning a Japanese phrase every 12 hours. Sumi-Masen = Excuse me. My favorite things so far: how small many restaurants are; they all have a small bar and four to six tables crammed together with the kitchen in view. The front doors step right out onto the sidewalk, they don't open, they slide. I was here for two hours when I got bombarded with Japanese in one of these joints, they found out Miron was Doc Brown and flipped, they all crowded into our booth and I had excited japanese spoken to me for an hour. That was a pretty awesome inauguration.
My next favorite thing are these vending machines that are EVERYWHERE. They dispense, Cola, Hot Tea, Hot Coffee, Soup, gatorade, beer, whisky, cigarettes, saki. Fucking brilliant. I can't walk by one without wanting hot coffee. I've blown like twenty bucks on those machines so far. I want one in my apartment.
So when you think of Japan, what do you think of? Exactly, same here, so the first thing I did was go see a Godzilla movie. Godzilla: Final War, the best Godzilla movie since Destroy All Monsters. I had read that a new one was out, but only playing in Japan. It should hit the states in March, and when it does, HOLY SHIT GO SEE IT! It's awesome, but no time to talk about that, I'm going to Kyoto tomorrow. I'll tell you how it went.
Sumi-Masen,
Adam Witt
Osaka, Japan
So I had this roommate named Miron, he was a Russian who wanted to do children's theatre and he got a job playing Doc Brown from Back To The Future in a show at the Universal Studios in Osaka, Japan. Weird. I know. So as I type I'm overlooking the Osaka shipping harbors from one of Miron's two balconies. Universal Studios treats their boys well. Plus the actors who do the shows at the them parks here, might as well be Brad Pitt. Unlike in America where "theme park actor" has all the prestige of "circuit city commercial actor" the guys have rabid fans visiting the park two or three times a week and giving the actors gifts, mostly picture of them and the actor taken the last time they were int he park in a hand-sewn puffy picture frame. It sounds pretty Play Misty For Me, but it's not actually creepy, because they're Japanese. And Japanese stalkers are very low pressure.
So I've been here 24 hours and it appears as though I'm learning a Japanese phrase every 12 hours. Sumi-Masen = Excuse me. My favorite things so far: how small many restaurants are; they all have a small bar and four to six tables crammed together with the kitchen in view. The front doors step right out onto the sidewalk, they don't open, they slide. I was here for two hours when I got bombarded with Japanese in one of these joints, they found out Miron was Doc Brown and flipped, they all crowded into our booth and I had excited japanese spoken to me for an hour. That was a pretty awesome inauguration.
My next favorite thing are these vending machines that are EVERYWHERE. They dispense, Cola, Hot Tea, Hot Coffee, Soup, gatorade, beer, whisky, cigarettes, saki. Fucking brilliant. I can't walk by one without wanting hot coffee. I've blown like twenty bucks on those machines so far. I want one in my apartment.
So when you think of Japan, what do you think of? Exactly, same here, so the first thing I did was go see a Godzilla movie. Godzilla: Final War, the best Godzilla movie since Destroy All Monsters. I had read that a new one was out, but only playing in Japan. It should hit the states in March, and when it does, HOLY SHIT GO SEE IT! It's awesome, but no time to talk about that, I'm going to Kyoto tomorrow. I'll tell you how it went.
Sumi-Masen,
Adam Witt
Osaka, Japan
Tuesday, December 7, 2004
Stetson Sierra, Booze, and Regret
So Justin's back and we're back in the swing of things. We're meeting tonight to polish Show #38: Winning. The Actual title should be "Songs Loosely Based on the Theme of Winning." As that was the name of the mix CD that I first played for Justin at a party his brother threw at my house in July 04
A MOST INFAMOUS PARTY
Josh (Justin's brother) wanted a place to throw a party after The Fame (http://www.thefameband.com/) played some bar. I said sure, I used to have THE party house, at one time there were seven people living there and it was a party every night, but they are all gone and all I had was my roommate who hates me, or hated me, or hates me, I've lost count. He said I could throw a party as long as I kept things under control and everyone stayed in the basement (I live in the basement). Cool. It was one of the better parties ever, I put on "Songs Loosely Based on the Theme of Winning" which is a collection of songs from 80's movie soundtracks such as "You're The Best (Around)" from the final fight montage in Karate Kid, "Win In The End" from the final basketball montage in Teen Wolf, "Burning Heart" from the Apollo Dies Montage in Rocky IV, "Savin' The Day" from the Saving New York Montage in Ghostbusters, etc. Big hit with the party, and it was 72 minutes of one song after another, and everybody played along, trying to guess what movie the song was from in the fewest bars (this became a sketch in the Winning Episode). Meanwhile I had found a bottle of Stetson Sierra Cologne. This belonged to Justin from High School, Justin bathed himself in the stuff for a sketch we did at The Heartland where Justin played a very gay Dinnerbansky & Ross Sexual Harassment Seminar Instructor named Gene Weathers. It was an interactive sketch akin to smell-o-vision, very innovative...or stupid depending upon how open-minded you are. Anyway, the Sierra was still in my props and it smelled like something you might wear to Homecoming in 1988 so as to not get laid. While "Winning" was playing we were "tagging" each other with this awful stuff. You'd walk up to some unsuspecting person at the party and tag their neck with the cologne. Pretty soon the whole basement was a combination of Stetson and 80's Movie Montage songs. And then my roommate came home to find Adam Taylor (http://www.thefameband.com/) asleep in his bed, me passed out and a person whil shall remain Nick Berry having sex on my couch. It really was pretty tame until then, but from his point of view it must have seemed much less so.
AND THAT IS WHY SCHADENFREUDE SHOULD NOT BE ALOTTED ANY FREETIME
So we decided to write a show around that mix CD. This is where ideas come from, really dumb places. Actually, interesting post-script to that story, there's a free DVD called Cherry Bomb that's given out at various stores as a promotion to for the store (http://www.cherrybombusa.com/), from time to time I have shot commercials for them or submitted shorts (Schadenfreude is on Vol. 1), I had to shoot a commercial the next morning after that debacle, if you see the commercial for Sole' Nail Salon on December's Cherry Bomb, picture me, in that fancy Salon, in the same clothes as the night before wreaking of Stetson Sierra, Booze, and regret.
A MOST INFAMOUS PARTY
Josh (Justin's brother) wanted a place to throw a party after The Fame (http://www.thefameband.com/) played some bar. I said sure, I used to have THE party house, at one time there were seven people living there and it was a party every night, but they are all gone and all I had was my roommate who hates me, or hated me, or hates me, I've lost count. He said I could throw a party as long as I kept things under control and everyone stayed in the basement (I live in the basement). Cool. It was one of the better parties ever, I put on "Songs Loosely Based on the Theme of Winning" which is a collection of songs from 80's movie soundtracks such as "You're The Best (Around)" from the final fight montage in Karate Kid, "Win In The End" from the final basketball montage in Teen Wolf, "Burning Heart" from the Apollo Dies Montage in Rocky IV, "Savin' The Day" from the Saving New York Montage in Ghostbusters, etc. Big hit with the party, and it was 72 minutes of one song after another, and everybody played along, trying to guess what movie the song was from in the fewest bars (this became a sketch in the Winning Episode). Meanwhile I had found a bottle of Stetson Sierra Cologne. This belonged to Justin from High School, Justin bathed himself in the stuff for a sketch we did at The Heartland where Justin played a very gay Dinnerbansky & Ross Sexual Harassment Seminar Instructor named Gene Weathers. It was an interactive sketch akin to smell-o-vision, very innovative...or stupid depending upon how open-minded you are. Anyway, the Sierra was still in my props and it smelled like something you might wear to Homecoming in 1988 so as to not get laid. While "Winning" was playing we were "tagging" each other with this awful stuff. You'd walk up to some unsuspecting person at the party and tag their neck with the cologne. Pretty soon the whole basement was a combination of Stetson and 80's Movie Montage songs. And then my roommate came home to find Adam Taylor (http://www.thefameband.com/) asleep in his bed, me passed out and a person whil shall remain Nick Berry having sex on my couch. It really was pretty tame until then, but from his point of view it must have seemed much less so.
AND THAT IS WHY SCHADENFREUDE SHOULD NOT BE ALOTTED ANY FREETIME
So we decided to write a show around that mix CD. This is where ideas come from, really dumb places. Actually, interesting post-script to that story, there's a free DVD called Cherry Bomb that's given out at various stores as a promotion to for the store (http://www.cherrybombusa.com/), from time to time I have shot commercials for them or submitted shorts (Schadenfreude is on Vol. 1), I had to shoot a commercial the next morning after that debacle, if you see the commercial for Sole' Nail Salon on December's Cherry Bomb, picture me, in that fancy Salon, in the same clothes as the night before wreaking of Stetson Sierra, Booze, and regret.
Friday, December 3, 2004
Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes
Okay, so I've done some research and my thoughts were correct, Blogging is just a diary + technology. So what's the big deal? That people can read other people's honest thoughts? I guess the more honest the blog the better the blog. Some girl got a book deal for writing her thoughts after a breakup, it's pretty brutally honest from what I gather.
The only thing I haven't looked up yet is why blogs were the big deal during the debates, I guess because we were getting Joe Nobody's honest appraisal of the election in real time as opposed to Brit Hume's opinion of the debates after his thoughts had been run by and edited by Rupert Murdoch. How Big Brother is the media right now? The war's going great. Bush is really popular. And nobody disagrees except the pagans. The world is now run like a ratings game, Bush 41 proved that night-vision tracer-bullet footage on the 24 hour news stations were great for his own ratings, and of course CNN saw a huge increase in their own ratings, big enough to justify four more 24 hour news channels, all because of the great TV show The Gulf War. Given the failed ratings of the TV show The Vietnam War, no Executive War Producer would dare greenlight another one until Bush 41, who, like Brandon Tartikoff, had good instincts, and the ratings were good. So good that the next Executive War Producer had to produce his own. It was Kosovo, and while not the box office poison the Vietnam was, it also wasn't the Cosby Show of Wars that the Gulf War was. And the Bush 43, like Francis Coppola going back to the Godfather after the disasterous Cotton Club, went back tot he well. And the media marched us to war all the way, they knew once the tracer bullets started flying, the ad rates would sky rocket. It's like human life isn't even involved. It's so weird, it makes me want to indulge in my most paranoid fantasies and run off and join some underground organization like The Invisibles. Given the big brother state of the Corporate Owned media, perhaps the power of information is in the hands of the blog-nation. Though that last sentence doesn't seem cynical enough for my tastes.
Okay Fuck this, nothing going on at work, I'm going home, I know when I rant about Bush it's out of a lack of other things to do. I have a screenplay to schedule and budget before Schadenfreude goes back into session on Monday, because then all attention refocuses on Episodes 38 and 39.
The only thing I haven't looked up yet is why blogs were the big deal during the debates, I guess because we were getting Joe Nobody's honest appraisal of the election in real time as opposed to Brit Hume's opinion of the debates after his thoughts had been run by and edited by Rupert Murdoch. How Big Brother is the media right now? The war's going great. Bush is really popular. And nobody disagrees except the pagans. The world is now run like a ratings game, Bush 41 proved that night-vision tracer-bullet footage on the 24 hour news stations were great for his own ratings, and of course CNN saw a huge increase in their own ratings, big enough to justify four more 24 hour news channels, all because of the great TV show The Gulf War. Given the failed ratings of the TV show The Vietnam War, no Executive War Producer would dare greenlight another one until Bush 41, who, like Brandon Tartikoff, had good instincts, and the ratings were good. So good that the next Executive War Producer had to produce his own. It was Kosovo, and while not the box office poison the Vietnam was, it also wasn't the Cosby Show of Wars that the Gulf War was. And the Bush 43, like Francis Coppola going back to the Godfather after the disasterous Cotton Club, went back tot he well. And the media marched us to war all the way, they knew once the tracer bullets started flying, the ad rates would sky rocket. It's like human life isn't even involved. It's so weird, it makes me want to indulge in my most paranoid fantasies and run off and join some underground organization like The Invisibles. Given the big brother state of the Corporate Owned media, perhaps the power of information is in the hands of the blog-nation. Though that last sentence doesn't seem cynical enough for my tastes.
Okay Fuck this, nothing going on at work, I'm going home, I know when I rant about Bush it's out of a lack of other things to do. I have a screenplay to schedule and budget before Schadenfreude goes back into session on Monday, because then all attention refocuses on Episodes 38 and 39.
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