Hey, this is a great gallery, fabulous vintage stuff. Bookmarked, for sure. Thanks for the heads up! posted by flapjax at midnite at 8:07 PM on March 19
Cool stuff, but when I heard Drill pop, I was expecting some new genre of music crossing JPop and Drill N Bass. I don't know how it would work, I just know it would be awesome. posted by formless at 8:50 PM on March 19
Oh my god, this blog has made my day. Maybe my week.
Holy cats, it's the Ultraman cast! That shit was my first pro translation gig! Oh, the (awful) memories... posted by pts at 9:04 PM on March 19
Fabulously tacky! The other site linked there - Blond Zombies [also NSFW] is great too. posted by tellurian at 9:29 PM on March 19
We started selling the old civilizations first. Noone was really using them anymore, and the rest of the galaxy ate them up with a spoon. Roman antiquities and quaint latin phrases were obvious items- "Veritas odium pavit" funded a new island nation as I recall, and the Coliseum got us a cure for cancer. The polynesian navigation songs were very popular for a while, alongside most of the greek tragedies and the writings of Confucius.
Soon those were old and worn good, of course. Sure, you could still sell them to the mass market, but it was a commodity market by then and the margins were low. It was cliche and boring stuff to the far spiral arms within a decade or so, and a sign of low taste. Now the real money was to be made in more recent things - skulls and songs from the Pol Pot era were very hot; communist books and furniture; and of course anything to do with The Beatles.
Before too long, we caught up with ourselves and started having to sell options on culture. I made a nice little bundle on a group of students I found right out of college and got to sign a long term contract. One of them ended up a very famous suicidal artist - but I lost at least as much on the musical innovations I thought were sure to be a hit. I did really well on a prediction about punk rock dance forms inspired by the antebellum south, but it was short lived and I lost the rights.
Now everyone that has a new idea starts out thinking what the aliens will want to buy. Since the aliens seem to be most interested in what's most human, and the least influenced by galactic society, it feels like the well is running dry. We've got the fusion sources paid through next year, but fresh water is running low and they're not sending another ice-asteroid until we pay the last few bills. I write this with a pen because the computers have all disconnected themselves, and the aliens only come down to look at the goods once a month now.
Our only hope is to hold out long enough for the wheels of fashion and taste to come around again, and for human culture to break into the retro and kitsch markets. We're turning down the lights and lowering the birth rate to try and make it through, but I worry. It's a tired and stripped-down world we have left, and we turned most of the best parts of ourselves into product. The demand is getting low, and there's not much left to get by on. posted by freebird at 9:35 PM on March 19 [13 favorites has favorites]
Looks nothing like Mifune. Shintaro Katsu, perhaps? And the old man looks like Takashi Shimura. posted by cazoo at 9:57 PM on March 19 [2 favorites has favorites]
Thanks, cazoo. Allergies are making me misremember. posted by Bernt Pancreas at 10:02 PM on March 19
Damn, freebird, that was bleak. Well, and awesome... but now I feel all like guilty and am examining exactly what it is I get out of commercial images from 60's Japan.
Well played, sir. posted by pts at 10:36 PM on March 19
Geez, not really my intent, pts. Please, enjoy the cool links. I didn't mean to lessen this nice post in any way, it just got me thinking about the cycles and reuse of culture. posted by freebird at 11:47 PM on March 19
what was that freebird? justa rant ? Sounds like a treatment for a Cyberpunk film starting the next keanu Reaves ;) posted by mary8nne at 6:07 AM on March 20
is this Duran Duran looking guy the same new-agey flute playing Ryuichi Sakamoto? posted by kuujjuarapik at 6:12 AM on March 20
is this Duran Duran looking guy the same new-agey flute playing Ryuichi Sakamoto?
Yes. That's the same Ryuichi Sakamoto, and that photo is indeed embarrassing. However, it's not exactly fair to Sakamoto-san to characterize him simply as a "new-agey". He's actually had a long and very varied musical career. Yellow Magic Orchestra, for example, being but one phase of it.
I've never seen him playing the flute, though... posted by flapjax at midnite at 6:36 AM on March 20
>is this Duran Duran looking guy the same new-agey flute playing Ryuichi Sakamoto?
If you're thinking of Kitaro, the answer is "no". posted by ardgedee at 6:44 AM on March 20
Oh, right. It was Kitaro I was thinking of. Sakamoto did the film scores. Apologies.
I think the person (people?) behind this is the same person behind the equally cool Bikini Machines, Erotrash, and the aforementioned Blonde Zombies. posted by vertigo25 at 10:51 AM on March 21
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posted by Burhanistan at 8:02 PM on March 19 [2 favorites has favorites]