If there were subtitle capabilities for this thing, the subtitle would be: "Just grommet truth soul う!". The real title is from an article on the NFL love Hunter S. Thompson, called 'Fear & Loathing at the Super Bowl'. I am going back through a HST phase, mostly because i love having his voice in my head. And he's a big fan of paragraph sentences, which, as you may know, i strive to become the queen of. He writes just how he talks, it's perfection. I'd seen 'Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas' many times before, of course, but the most recent viewing (I christened my apartment with it first night i stayed here) stirred something back up and then i discovered the Rolling Stone dedicated to him after his timely/untimely death in 2005 amongst my things recovered from warehouse storage hell. I re-read a couple of the friends' accounts and decided it was about time i actually read some of this man's work. I've watched the documentaries on the Fear&Loathing DVD and read clips of his writing, but i don't even own any of his books.
In a semi-frantic love state, i sat on the floor in the book store and skimmed through biographies and a huge, beautiful coffee table book called 'GONZO' but began to pout in frustration as i realized none of this was written BY HST. So what the hell, why can't i find his own writing? I looked through the 'Modern Events' and 'Social Studies'-and CHRIST, every politician, journalist or general 'person of interest' has a goddamn book of 'Why You Should Trust Me'-then after sitting with 'GONZO', a little, frantic muttered voice said "Turn around dumbass" and i was all "WTF?" and i spun myself around and right behind me on the bottom shelf were all the works of my beloved Duke.
Well, all the ones they had anyway. I ended up with the first volume of Gonzo papers, called 'The Great Shark Hunt'. And now, though i don't have a head full of acid, i do have a head full of Hunter S. Thompson's eternally mad journalistic achievements. God, he was good. He makes reading about football entertaining. well, for the most part. Some of it i struggle with because i don't know who any of these mysterious '70's icons are. For such a pop culture fanatic, one might think that i would have at least heard of some of these people. But nope, Hunter has to teach me, but this is a task i think he is not only up to, but quite clearly, he enjoys. He loved what he did, even when he loathed what he did, when he loathed what was going on around him, which was most of the time, but really he was so fascinated by this reality that everything through his eyes becomes something. He wouldn't miss anything because Jesus, isn't that strange? Let me tell you about it, wait, let me tell me about it. Genius.
The only draw back to being wholly enthralled with HST all over again is that he's gone on to chronicle the after life, which could mean wonderful entertainment for those beings, but we're left with what he had. oh well, he had a terrific body of work and i'm gonna read ALL of it before i really start to morn this loss.
In other news, i drew this: Sachi in sweat pants and a sports bra i had in college that *GASP* i actually wore....Been looking at some old, hilarious photos. I've done some things, yes, even some things i'm not proud of, but you bet your sweet bippy i took pictures of EVERYTHING. Anyway, i thought Sachi is hot enough she can wear just the sports bra and sweats. And the multi-shoe concoction Judd Nelson wore in the breakfast club. i still love that shit. This picture is the only one, i think, to come out during this project i am still working my life away on. It's well over an hour now with 30 plus songs in the soundtrack. it's also on 2 DVD's because the quality on the first one has gone from "excellent" to "very good" to "good". But oh well, i can't cut out the text because then i can't talk about the pictures, and with the text being lengthy it needs to stay on screen long enough to read and with the timing needing to be perfect, the songs are many.I've managed to only repeat a couple of the artists and include music that was actually there when the pictures were taken...well, you know, it was playing in my head or in one of the shops or something. Or it just goes really well with the mood, even if the lyrics don't match up. I found a Go!Go!7188 song (they're a Japanese girl punk band, now don't cringe, they're actually quite skilled, though they do scream quite a bit, but any punk band that can do the punk-rock thing AND the pop-punk thing and then some JAZZ is OK by me) called 'Ukifune' that perfectly describes my feelings inside Shinjuku, it also fits the text intro to that section PERFECTLY. OK OK, enough about 'THE PROJECT'....
The subtitle of this was taken from hitomi's blog, i'm sure that's not what she said, but Babel Fish yields such hilarious 'translations' sometimes, i couldn't resist sharing that one. As usual, i love hitomi. i finally saw and own her first attempt at a film 'Nightmare Detective', which is a Shinya Tsukamoto film, the man behind 'Tetsuo:The Iron Man'. So hitomi's already got one up on poor old Hyde and Gackt, in that she chose a film to make her debut in that was made by an established and very well respected feature film maker, where as the guy who directed 'Moon Child' had previously done...porn. So props to hitomi. So many props. My god, i was clapping at the end and yelling...and i was sitting in the dark, alone in my apartment... But anyway, the film itself tries to play some serious mind games, and i think it accomplishes some of that successfully. But it's hard to say whether it's from the script or from the odd sort of all over the place acting of it's cast. I learned from the 'making of' that Tsukamoto likes to let actors do mostly their own thing, so that's cool for them, but then you also get very different performance styles which sets different moods in the same scene...does that make sense? It's already got a pretty confusing premise (God Bless the Japanese, it wouldn't be Japanese if it weren't somewhat confusing); There's this guy (played by Ryuhei Matsuda, whom you may have last seen being sodomized by a doomed old samurai and tugging poor Asano Tadanobu's heart strings with Beat Takashi overseeing the whole mess in the film 'Taboo') who can hop into people's dreams through a series of questions and mind melding, and he tries to help them discover the root of their nightmares. But sometimes it's horribly dangerous for him and the dreamer, of course. And then there are murders which appear to be committed inside the minds of the victims, enter hitomi as the 'socially inept' detective who wanted a taste of hands-on crime investigation so she had herself transferred to this department.
Then in the police department, of course all the top dogs are intimidated by the presence of this esteemed female super detective. But one of them tries to understand her a little, enough that she'd like to share thoughts with him but he's too dumb to understand (and dudes, this dumb detective is played SO AWESOMELY by one Masanobu Ando whom you may remember played the crazy blonde kid who kills just about everyone in Battle Royale?). So the characters themselves are pretty straight forward, and giving the actors free reign gives the characters their individuality...and i actually think it worked for hitomi instead of against her, because she just let the ever kind and patient Tsukamoto mold her virign performance because she'd just never done it before. He said he casted her because of her epic command of the audience at her shows, with very little going on in the background. Her shows don't have acrobats and dancers and big stage production, it's pretty much hitomi and her band. So he thought he might like to put forth the many sides of hitomi on the screen too.
i think it was a really good film, the dream imagery is, of course, beautiful and the story makes sense if you're willing to take the intial leap that someone can get into someone else's dreams. It's a complete story, though Tsukamoto says he's already written the 2nd and 3rd 'Nightmare Detective' stories. That's another thing about this, there's all these reminders that it's a Japanese horror film combined with music and levels (the hushed, monotones of the actors when they're awake) of a David Lynch movie crossed with a '50's detective movie. You know, it's like what's good, what's great, actually, about Brian DePalma's 'Black Dahlia'.
'Nightmare Detective' completely decimates 'Moon Child' (which, BTW, is a film Gackt wrote to top off his Moon Series of albums, about a group of misfits trying to get by in gangsta times and also, hyde's a vampire, it's super hilariously awesome, but you gotta know who they are in order to truly enjoy the experience) i'm sorry hyde and Gackt, i love you both eternally but ya'all better bow down to the unyielding powers of HITOMI: SUPER EVERYTHING!!!! Her music is the best, her films are the best. She's the best. well, OK, not the best, but better than 'Moon Child'. Which isn't really saying much. But I would recommend 'Nightmare Detective' to anyone interested in this kind of film. i think that aside from the fact that the aforementioned 'queen of my heart' is one of the stars, the movie itself is really quite good. Maybe not as good as 'Tetsuo', as i've heard that film is one of the best Japanese films out there. N.D. is NOT the best film ever by any means, nor is it the best Japanese film ever. In my book, that'll always be Cutie Honey: Warrior of Love. But 'Nightmare' is definitely worth beholding, so please go rent it RIGHT NOW. OK bye bye!
