I was poking around YouTube looking for more Shoegazer songs when I came across “Bright” from Tokyo Shoegazer, an accurate and wonderfully self-referential name.
That’s only part of the song; the full track comes in at 8 minutes and 19 seconds of reverb-and-sustain drenched fuzzy, blissed-out shoegaze goodness.
That track is off of their debut album 「crystallize」, which evidently just came out November 23. For once I’m not ten years behind the curve! All the tracks are available on iTunes. I’ve already picked up “Bright” (which hits very close to the heart of my Shoegazer sweet spot, which is still Slowdive’s Just for a Day), and may end up buying the rest.
Even if you’re not a Shoegazer fan, you have to admit that this collection of guitar effects peddles on the album cover is impressive:
Once again Japan brings us a classic piece of the “What the Fuck?” cinema at which they excel. Noboru Iguchi, the director of The Machine Girl, which was your typical “girl picked on and humiliated, girl gets machine gun grafted onto her arm, girl racks up serious body count” film, is back with a film that makes that one look like an exercise in good taste and restraint.
After an insane beginning of RoboGeisha-on-RoboGisha combat, we jump back to a flashback that, it turns out, will take up the entire rest of the movie. Two sisters, one older, pretty, and working as a geisha, the other younger-and-even-prettier-but-we’re-going-to-pretend-she’s-homely-for-the-sake-of-the-plot who gets bossed around, exhibit the usual sibling rivalry. Then they get kidnapped by your generic evil corporation and are forced to train as geisha assassins. Oh, as you just might possibly be able to surmise from the title, they sport all sorts of deadly robotic devices implanted in their body.
The biggest difference between this and Machine Girl is that that film was (with a few allowances) a reasonably realistic, conventional film until it went all machine gunny in the third act, while RoboGeisha is pure WTF from start to finish. Just in case you were worried that RoboGeisha would be a deep, introspective examination of sibling rivalry in modern Japan, the shurukens flying out of the female penis goblin guard’s asses and the circular saw blade popping out of another robogeisha’s mouth should convince you of the film’s pure over-the-top, mutant cinema goodness. Swords pop out of deeply unlikely places (as in the quote in the title), breasts sport guns, shattered buildings bleed digital blood (albeit more convincing than the digital blood than found in Ugandan action films) and a cyborg geisha tank takes on a giant robot. Add off-balance dubbing, the hilariously maudlin sister story, and a ridiculously small cast (the same guy gets killed at least four or five times), and you have a strong candidate to show at your next party.
Here’s the trailer, which pretty much puts all the virtues of the film (such as they are) on display:
And it beats the hell out of Wild Zero or Kibakichi.
And speaking of Ofunato City, here is footage of the tsunami coming in there:
Someone has put up a series of videos called “people trying to escape from the tsunami,” some of which I’ve never seen before, and all of which look entirely too close for comfort.
Here’s entirely-too-close footage of the tsunami coming in, including large tugboats and a van trying to escape, right before the cameraman decided he really needed to get to higher ground:
Slashdot posted a story linking a highly speculative piece in The Guardian saying that high levels of radiation might be a sign that molten fuel has leaked through the reactor vessel (not the containment vessel, as the Slashdot summary breathlessly announces). I have not seen any confirmation of this speculation, or indeed seen this speculation repeated outside Slashdot and a few other newspapers in the UK, and it is not confirmed by the most recent IAEA report.
Things are plenty bad at Fukushima, but (with the caveat that I am not even remotely a nuclear engineer) I see no solid evidence to suggest that there has been even a partial meltdown, much less that the core has melted through the reactor pressure vessel, much less that the containment vessel has been breached. Indeed this statement from the IAEA report would suggest a better cause for the radioactivity spike recently observed: “The Nuclear Safety Commission of Japan suggests that higher activity in the water discovered in the Unit 2 turbine building is supposed to be caused by the water, which has been in contact with molten fuel rods for a time and directly released into the turbine building via some, as yet unidentified path.”
Japan suffered a real tragedy, with over 11,000 confirmed dead from the earthquake and tsunami, and Western journalists and bloggers seem unnaturally fixated on a serious but limited nuclear accident that hasn’t claimed any lives yet.
All six of the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant appear to be under control, though there appears to be damage to the reactor cores of reactors 1-3. Those reactors have been given an International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (INES) rating of 5, which would put it on par with Three Mile Island, but well below the 7 assigned to Chernobyl.
Top-down view of the tsunami engulfing a fishing port:
Scenes of post-apocalyptic devastation:
At lot of the videos I’ve put up are from Russia Today. Either they’re very good at getting high-quality source videos, or very good at ignoring copyrights…
A better source for updates on japan’s nuclear reactors: the IAEA. As opposed to sensationalist MSM headlines like this one from CNN: “Japan’s ticking nuclear timebomb”.
Serious damage was sustained by the ports of Hachinohe, Hitachi, Hitachinaka, Ishinomaki, Kamaishi, Kashima, Ofunato, Onahama, Sendai-Shiogama and Soma.
I’m not seeing too many new videos worth putting up. You’ve probably seen a lot of this video before, but here’s one long, continuous aerial take of the tsunami coming in:
More volcano erruption footage:
To end on an encouraging note, here’s a video of two dogs who survived the earthquake and tsunami:
I can’t even pretend to keep up with all the contradictory twists and turns of the nuclear plant saga, but the latest news I saw was things were looking up. Slightly. Maybe.
Gilbert Gottfried fired from his gig as the voice of the AFLAC duck for telling jokes about Japan on Twitter. The jokes, while indeed in somewhat poor taste, are pretty mild for a comedian that appeared in The Aristocrats, and probably compared to the inevitable forthcoming South Park episode.
