Waveforms

Posted on May 16, 2015 by d4vid

 I have to believe these windows are both tinted and untinted at the same time.  

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Pandaflage 

Posted on May 16, 2015 by d4vid

 This stringlicker sat his big head down in front of me at a Comic Con panel about an artist who manipulates Chinese traditional art work in Photoshop to make postmodern pieces.  (Ancient Chinese warriors as stormtroopers, that sort of thing.)

Couldn’t stop looking at this camouflage, though.  It’s like a general thought to himself, “Our boys may need to fight in the desert…or hide amongst panda bears!“

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Snow

Posted on May 15, 2015 by d4vid

 “You know nothing [of body proportions] Jon Snow.” 

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Troopers

Posted on May 15, 2015 by d4vid

  Storm, Snow, and Scout.  Plus AT-AT driver, TIE fighter pilot, and Emperor’s Royal Guard.

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Copyright

Posted on May 15, 2015 by d4vid

 If there’s one thing China is serious about, it’s intellectual property. 

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Ooo

Posted on May 15, 2015 by d4vid

Advenure Time had a booth!  A BMO kiosk… …plus a Jake entrance… …and, um, a Jake exit. 

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Nerds

Posted on May 15, 2015 by d4vid

Spending time with My People at the very first Comic Con in Shanghai.

Here is a list of some of the cosplay I’ve seen today:

  • Chinese Tauriel
  • Chinese Professor Snape
  • Chinese Lucius Malfoy
  • Chinese Captain America
  • Chinese Captain America (gender swap)
  • Chinese Winter Soldier
  • Chinese Winter Soldier (gender swap)
  • Chinese Catwoman
  • Chinese Joker (gender swap)
  • Chinese Anna & Elsa
  • Chinese Belle
  • Chinese Loki (gender swap)
  • Chinese Bane
  • Chinese slave Leia
  • Chinese 2 Broke Girls

But the most common “costume” is an “I Am Your Father” tshirt with the “I” as a red lightsaber.

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Firefly

Posted on May 15, 2015 by d4vid

The Chinese word for “highlighter” is 荧光笔 (yíngguāng bǐ) which translates to “firefly pen”.

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Art

Posted on May 11, 2015 by d4vid

Ten years ago (ten years!) my dear, dear, dear friend Martin and I went to the Festival Fringe in Edinburgh.  We saw the work of a Chinese artist named Cao Guo-Qiang who did ghostly portraits and other pieces using gunpowder.  He even did a “black rainbow” over the castle.  Haunting stuff.

Flash forward to me at the Power Station book shop looking at this child-colored pop up skyline of Shanghai.  I had an immediate emotional reaction to it and declared it “the best art I’ve seen all day!”

 Then I noticed it was just one piece from a collection of pop up art projects for kids.

 Yup. Same fucking guy.

 I love it when an art piece speaks to me.  Love it even more when a whole collection does.  But I love it most when an artist can, over and over.

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Corbijn

Posted on May 11, 2015 by d4vid

 Took this artsy photo of Eli on his cell phone in the Power Station.  Looks like an Anton Corbijn album cover, if I do say so myself.   

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Power

Posted on May 11, 2015 by d4vid

Yesterday, I went with Eli & Nafees to the Power Station of Art.  (The URL for the website is hilarious with a little rebracketing.)  It’s a cavernous, retired power plant that the national government converted to a modern art museum at great expense.  It even has a smoke stack. Though, I was disappointed not to hear Robert Palmer singing “Some Like It Hot” in every gallery.

For the kids, it also boasted this…After the triumph of the first Tomato Art Creative Arts Award, of course.

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Daimyo

Posted on May 11, 2015 by d4vid

Thanks to late 70s/early 80s anime, I grew up kind of obsessed with Japan.  For example, I have long known that a “daimyo” was a feudal ruler back in the era of the shoguns.  But I had only ever seen it written in English.  In Japan, I saw this:

大名

It says “big name”.  And I can read that.  Because those are Chinese characters.  Let me explain.

Long ago, Japan had a spoken language but no written language.  The Chinese, however, had already devised a written language.  The Japanese adopted these Chinese symbols as written representations of their preexisting Japanese words.  The Japanese call these imported Chinese characters “kanji“.

We probably ought to revise my Chinese language matrix to include kanji as one of the places still using traditional characters.  And somewhat old (though not ancient) traditional characters at that.

That’s all well and good for words like “mountain” or concepts like “Zen” but there were a whole host of things that Chinese written characters just couldn’t cover.  For this, the Japanese took bits and pieces of the kanji and devised syllabaries.  (A syllabary is like an alphabet, but for full syllables.)  These are called the “kana” and the Japanese traditionally attribute their invention to a Buddhist priest named Kūkai.  There are two kinds of modern kana:  hiragana and katakana.

Hiragana is largely used to “spell out” Japanese words which have no kanji.  (Or to aid pronunciation of kanji which may be unfamiliar.)

Katakana is usually used for foreign words (like “America” or “television”) or for emphasis (think of Stan Lee onomatopoeia like “kapow!” or “thwack!”)Rounding out the kana are two diacritical marks: the dakuten (゛) marker (to indicate a voiced instead of unvoiced consonant) and the handakuten (゜) marker (to indicate that “h” should be the “p” plosive.)

Whew.  I love this stuff and even I’m exhausted.

TL;DR  Japan has a written language.

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Ultranationalists

Posted on May 5, 2015 by d4vid

Eli and I kept running into a caravan of Japanese ultranationalists around the neighborhood of the American embassy.  Megaphones.  Imperial flags.  Recorded shouts from a Nutemberg-sized crowd.  It was all way more ominous than this merely vaguely ominous plaque by the Meiji Shrine:



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Maids

Posted on May 5, 2015 by d4vid

Some things about Japanese culture I just don’t get.  There are areas where you can’t walk five steps without being solicited by a Japanese teen with a babygirl voice wearing a maid’s uniform.  Solicited for what?  Still unclear to me.

But the sign above the babydoll maid on the second floor balcony with the megaphone reads “This is the most famous MaidCafe in Japan, so you can enjoy very safety!!” [sic]

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Cuddly

Posted on May 5, 2015 by d4vid

Love this Big Hero 6 poster I found in a giant electronics store.  

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