‘Now I know how Joan of Arc felt / As the flames rose to her Roman nose and her Walkman started to melt’

typed for your pleasure on 15 October 2005, at 5.39 pm

Sdtrk: ‘Rock me booa’ by Merzbow

I have to apologise for the lack of recent posting or updates and sundry, as I’ve been attempting to keep a rather low profile lately. It seems that the recent Salon.com article has not only produced bandwidth spikes the likes of which neither Shi-chan nor I have ever seen, but also a passel of radical feminists are now literally shrieking for my blood, as I, more than any other man in recorded history, am singlehandedly responsible for the subjugation of all women, simply because I’m an iDollator. It’s True! Ahh, notoriety. Is it Good or Bad? I can’t tell from here…
At any rate, the longer, unadulterated version (with a better title) of Meghan’s excellent article is now online here. Read it! It’s markedly better, and if you’re anything of an open-minded individual who was perhaps unfortunately led away from reason by knife-wielding feminazis*, the full article makes a hell of a lot more sense. It’s literally like watching ‘Blade runner’, then seeing the Director’s cut version — it’s like two different films. Well, stories.

On a more acquisitional note; yesterday, I managed to score an inexpensive copy of the Tetsujin 28 box set — just over $15, compared to the $28 – $30 that most online shops want for it — and my copy of Merzbow’s ‘SCSI duck‘ Cd arrived through the post today, which I’m listening to right this very minute. So far, it’s rather sonically penetrating, which is what I require out of my Japanese power-electronic artists. Good job, Masami-san!
And thanx to a benefactor, yesterday I got a new computer! It’s a Toshiba Satellite M55-S135, that I kinda had to jump through some retail hoops to obtain. I’d recount the story here, but it’s a bitter one, and I’m trying to maintain a rare good mood, here. But the laptop boasts a 80 GB harddrive, 512 MB of RAM, and a DVD burner. It’s got some other bollocks as well, which I’ve not paid a whole lot of attention to, as the three qualities I’d mentioned are the selling points for this difference engine for me. So that’s also a factor in my recent silence; not only have been adding all my old software, I’ve also been trying to configure the look and feel of the fecker, so that it’s similar to my old machine. Colour me satisfied!
However, I have to say without reservation, that touchpads are fucking shite. Ergh. I’ll be getting a mouse for this bad boy really soon..

Annnd back to Synthetik women (heh; that didn’t take long, but I stick to what I know), I ran across a photo on 4chan recently of two Japanese lasses seated on a train. They were twins; one was Synthetik, and the other was Organik, and they were both dressed in the height of Elegant Gothic Lolita fashion. Whoever posted the photo didn’t give any names or details, and as a consequence, I had to repost it in the Request board, to find out what the source was, the lasses’ names, anything. A couple of days later, someone provided the URL http://absolutmetropolis.com, and after duly scouring that site, I learned that the name of the Organik lass was Marie Honda, who worked in conjunction with a doll maker by the name of Erimo. So after a number of minutes grabbing Google Japan by the lapels and shaking the information out it, I successfully located Erimo’s site. I have to say, his work is overall rather fab, but my interest is especially piqued by his life-sized Dolls. But that goes without saying!


left, Marie Honda; right, Marie Honda

Right, I’m off to meet up with Penda, for our (mostly) monthly dinner rendezvous. I am having ridiculous cravings for tendon and that soba with the dipping sauce right now

*I don’t use that term too often, so it really means a lot here

EDIT (05 June 2008): The Pandagon, err, ‘people’, have deleted the above-linked post for reasons unknown. Thankfully it’s archived on the Internet Wayback Machine, so you can view the baseless vitriol here

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I sense a theme. A bizarre one, but a theme nonetheless

typed for your pleasure on 11 October 2005, at 11.54 pm

Sdtrk: ‘Sympathy for the devil’ by Laibach

Funny story: at the bank today, I encountered another bloke with a robotic left arm! He and I didn’t actually speak, as we didn’t know each other, but he entered the queue about four people behind me. But I mean, it was rather strange; it wasn’t just the coincidence that he had a prosthetic arm just like Kyle, but this bloke’s left arm was mechanical, just like Kyle. What the hell is going on here??


It looked exactly like this, to be honest. Without the accessories, of course

I was giggling, however, as I was reminded of the character Martin Finnucane from Flann O’Brien’s surrealist riot of a book, ‘The third policeman‘. He was the self-proclaimed captain of all the one-legged men in Ireland, and a pivotal scene describes him leading a small army of men, each boasting a timber shin, into a rescue operation. A highly recommended book!

If Kyle truly is some sort of mechanised assassin, I’m guessing he probably sent that fellow round to keep an eye on me. How very clever, Kyle… if that is your real name

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A perfect day for iDollators, Part I

typed for your pleasure on 10 October 2005, at 2.37 pm

Sdtrk: ‘Suzunne Erica is Sunohara Yuri’ by Merzbow

It’s finally out!!

128 pages, 72 colour plates, and with a foreword by Elisabeth Alexandre. Plus, dig this: Elena is selling signed copies through her website for $40, which includes the shipping and handling. Why not order one? Why not order a couple?

Also, for those of you residing in West Hollywood, CA, Elena will be signing copies at the Sunset strip location of Book Soup, on 25 Oct, at 7pm. Shake her hand, call her friend, etc.

YEAH!! *throws fist in air, camera freezes, cue Simple minds song, credits roll*

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RELEVANT TO MY INTERESTS

typed for your pleasure on 5 October 2005, at 5.37 pm

Sdtrk: ‘Black moon bog’ by Xenis emputae traveling band

Stuff that Davecat likes that has (almost) nothing to do with RealDolls, Gynoids, or Sixties architecture? Unpossible!!

+ This would be the only reason for me to want to become a father. The Ultraman Dream Stroller. It’s naturally made in Japan, and its colours are red and silver, of course. Raise your infant to want to grow to gigantic proportions and beat the living hell out of kaiju! This is what being a responsible parent is all about

+ Speaking of Ultraman, buy me a replica of the original Ultraman’s beta capsule, and I’ll be your sex slave for the rest of your life. I could display it next to my sonic screwdriver. O wait — I don’t have one of those, either!

+ Here lies a trailer for a Jack Nicholson film. It’s not new — it’s from the Eighties, so I guess it was shelved for quite a while — but it’s proof that not all of his roles are either ‘crazy guy’ or ‘screaming maniac’. Although I have to say it kinda resembles something I’ve seen before..

+ Fab archive of vintage reel-to-reel taperecorders, auf Deutsche. There’s a staggering amount of pages on the site, so make yourself a cuppa, and commence right-clicking in earnest! (arigatou for the link, Steve)

+ Speaking of retromode sound recorders and players, the German team (again with the Germans!) of Markus Bader and Markus Wolf have redesigned three iconic playback devices from the Sixties through the Eighties, with contemporary standards. In other words, they look the same, but they have updated functions, such as the ‘Audio 1 Kompaktanlage’: originally designed by Dieter Rams for Braun in the Sixties, the new ‘ReBraun‘ version sports an integrated .mp3 player and wireless LAN connection. Ooo, sexy

+ Sometime soon, Criterion will be releasing the first Truffaut film I fell in love with (which was also the first French ‘new wave’ film I saw as well), ‘Shoot the piano player‘. It’ll be whenever they get round to it, I guess

+ Also; shitty american cover art notwithstanding, ‘Godzilla: Final wars’ will be out on DVD in December. Ryuhei ‘Versus‘ Kitamura directing? Gigan with twin chainsaws? Gojira beating the living hell out of the hideous american wanna-be Godzilla? Worth the price of admission

+ I’m hoping one day, some enterprising individual at Bandai America will release all of the Gundam Evolve and MS igLoo material on Region 1 DVDs. It’s Gundam! It’s practically a license to print money! I mean, come on.

+ And finally, the last volume of Mitsukazu Mihara’s Doll will be out on the 11th of this month. Of course I had to get something Gynoid-related in there, just so that no-one forgets what blog they’re reading..

‘Shouting to hear the echoes’. Wasting more time than heroin, but infinitely cheaper

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Actroid’s ancestors

typed for your pleasure on 1 October 2005, at 2.52 am

Sdtrk: ‘Square wave’ by Ecstasy of St.Theresa

One of the many things I’d like to do before I expire would be to make a pilgrimage to Switzerland. Apart from the streets being paved with Nazi gold and fountains overflowing with the world’s finest chocolate, it also contains a city named Neuchâtel, which is the home of three of the most well-preserved examples of automata from the 18th century.


The Draftsman, the Musician and the Writer

The three automata were built over a period of four years by the Swiss-born father and son team of watchmakers, Pierre and Henri-Louis Jaquet-Droz. The first one, the Writer (oddly enough, none of them have names) sits at a desk, dips his quill pen into an inkwell, and skilfully writes out one of a handful of phrases. His head moves as he writes, and his eyes follow th motion of his hand.

The Draftsman, the second automata, is a little more fun, as he’s a wee artiste. He can draw up four different things — a profile of Louis XV, profiles of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, ‘my doggie’, and a cherub in a butterfly-drawn chariot (?) — and much like his brother, his head and eyes follow his work. Additionally, as he draws, he moves the hand not holding the pencil away from the paper, so he can evaluate his work, and he actually blows away any dust the pencil makes. An anecdote tells of during an exhibition where Jaquet-Droz was showing off his automata, he was asked to have the Draftsman draw a picture of Louis XV, and the Draftsman drew ‘my doggie’ instead. Luckily, no-one was beheaded.

Both the Writer and the Draftsman are similar in appearance; they both resemble very well-dressed, androgynous, baroque toddlers. The third automata, however, is a young maiden in probably her late teens seated behind an organ. As it says on Lutèce Créations:

This automaton, whose body, head, eyes, arms and fingers have various natural movements, plays itself five different music pieces on an independent organ, with much precision : its head and its eyes are mobile in all directions, so it alternately looks at the music and its fingers. At the end of each tone, it curtseys to the audience, bowing its body and nodding its head. Its throat alternately lifts up and down regularly, so that the spectators believe they can see it breathing.

Very ace, and despite the Jaquet-Droz kids not necessarily being the first automata ever made (I might well cover that topic at a later date), they remain stunning accomplishments for the technology at that time.

I’d just like to point out here that it’s a wee bit difficult finding decent photos of the trio of automatons, and finding footage is even harder. During a break in our filmmaking, Allison De Fren informed me that there’s only one videotape available of them in action, and that’s only because only one person has thought to film them. The somewhat-overpriced tape’s available from the gift shop on the site linked above. *shudders* Ugh, videotape. But yeah; one of the many reasons for me to visit the Museum of Art and History in Neuchâtel would be to get some more film out there in the world, at the very least..

What I personally think would be absolutely perfect, would be if the Osaka lab staffers were to bring the Ando-san version of Actroid to the Museum, and have her present a video segment about them. I’m sure Jaquet-Droz père and fils would approve

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Again with the interviews! / Saturday chicanery

typed for your pleasure on 25 September 2005, at 5.43 pm

Sdtrk: ‘Sooner than you think’ by New order

Just got off the phone with Annette Heide, a writer for a German magazine, who’s conducting interviews with various RealDoll owners, in conjunction with the release of ‘Still Lovers’. The chat lasted for a little over 40 minutes, and was only marred by its brevity and our respective cellphone’s dodgy receptions. We’ll be in contact with each other sometime this week, where I’ll inform you of more details then. It’s a good year to be an iDollator. 🙂

On Saturday, I hauled myself out of bed at 7.30am, in order to meet up with Jeff at Derek & Steph’s digs, so that we could drive out to Ann arbor for one of our periodic shopping trips. We arrived there a little after 10am, and after making tactical strikes on Encore records, Borders, Vault of midnight, and Wizzywig, where I picked up a couple of gashapon figurines of Mikura from ‘Mezzo’, we enjoyed a fine lunch (which was more like a dinner) at Totoro, and took off from A2 round quarter to two. Not bad!
Speaking briefly of anime, I was pretty chuffed to read in the latest issue of Newtype that Vol.1 of ‘Tetsujin No.28‘ is due out in less than a week. Feckin’ ace! I’d better make some space on my DVD shelf..

Having made a quick stop at Jeff’s, he and I sped out to Cranbrook museum, where we met up with Wolfgang and his wife Masako for the Bridget Riley exhibit. As it was a retrospective of Ms Riley’s work from the early Sixties to now, it lacked more of her monochromatic pieces, which are the ones I really love, but nevertheless, it was pretty ace seeing her works in something outside of a book or magazine..
At 4pm, we attended a lecture taking place in one of the auditoriums — really, it wasn’t so much a ‘lecture’ as it was Bridget and a curator lass who handled organising the exhibit, sitting around a coffee table on stage and having a Q-and-A session. Unfortunately, as I had been working off five hours of sleep, followed by a number of hours being out and about, I nodded off a couple of times during the lecture, which made me feel like an uncultured churl.
As a bit of an aside here, I’d like to reaffirm that I love art — depending on what it is, I love some styles and approaches more than others, for obvious reasons — but in general, hearing in-depth artistic discussions bores the knickers off me. A lot of the time I really have no reference points to what’s being said, and I also believe that there’s only so much scrutiny that a person can do with anything.. it gets to a point where it transforms from a simple analysation into a hyper-critical dissection, and when you reduce something into its component parts, the potential for enjoyment of the subject for its own sake disappears. I’m not saying that people shouldn’t be analytical about such things, as wanting to know what, why, and how an artist does what they do is important,
and I’m not saying I’m personally opposed to wanting to learn more about the whys and wherefores of artists, but personally, I can’t over-analyse things like that all the time, as it goes from being less of an enjoyable thing, and quickly shifts into the area of boring academics.
But the Bridget Riley exhibit was fun overall. I just wish they’d had more examples of her black-and-white optical amphetamine paintings..

Round 6.30, Jeff and I returned to his, where we awaited Tim and Derek’s appearance. Derek must’ve fallen asleep or was eaten by badgers, as only Tim showed up. But we spent the rest of the eve watching more episodes of ‘Black books’, the first two eps of ‘Samurai 7‘, a handful of dodgy music videos, and blabbing about the sort of semi-underground media that we’re into; i.e, comic books, anime/manga, DVDs and toys/collectibles, and I took off close to 2am. Hoorej!

And that comprised my week-end! I think there’s a lesson there for all of us

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Any Synthetiks-related news, Davecat? (Sept 05)

typed for your pleasure on 17 September 2005, at 5.47 pm

Sdtrk: ‘Such a sound’ by Birdie

Disappointingly, I’ve not been able to scrape up any new news about my beloved Actroid Repliee or any of her iterations for quite a while now; not only that, the page related to the Actroid projects on the Osaka University Graduate School of Engineering site no longer exists. Either that, or they’ve sussed that I keep checking it once a day to see if it’s back up, and they’ve cleverly switched URLs on me. There hasn’t even been any decent news concerning Synthetiks that’s cropped up recently. (Apart from the fact that Abyss is on the verge of releasing Body 10, but you’ll hear more about that when I do.) Hrm.
Thankfully, my friend Wolfgang of vulne pro studios has sent along this pretty interesting link, ‘Why Japan, and not America, is likely to be the world’s first cyborg society‘, which touches upon simple robots such as the Roomba, and leads up to my current favourite Gynoid:

There’s arguably a reason behind iRobot’s refusal to anthropomorphize Roomba. Deep in its heart, America finds the idea of technology with personalities to be … spooky. After all, the notion of objects with minds of their own runs counter to deeply ingrained Judeo-Christian values — creating devices that can move and think without human intervention veers a little too close to playing God. And what if we do manage to create machines that are smarter, stronger or more capable than humans? Our subconscious paranoia about machines has prompted us to create dystopian visions like “Blade Runner” and “The Matrix.”

and

Japan’s robot love goes farther than respect for function, and deeper than mere pragmatism can explain. Shinto, Japan’s homegrown religion, is an animist faith. The Japanese embrace of robots is a logical extension of ancient beliefs that all things, living and nonliving, organic and inorganic, can possess a transcendent spirit. In Japanese tradition, humanity has never been reserved for humans. Is it any wonder that Japan is welcoming the cyborg future with open arms?

Interesting stuff, and always refreshing to read an article which isn’t three or four paragraphs of ‘zOMG TEH ACTROID GIRLBOT IS CREEPY!!1!’

Also, my copy of ‘Des poupées et des hommes‘ arrived a day or so ago! It’s entirely ace; 155 pages, 40 of those being full-colour photos by Elena D. Shi-chan and I even get our own eight-page chapter! Elisabeth signed the front page: ‘pour mon ami Davecat et pour sa fiancée Sidore. Heir of a long tradition, pionneer of a new one.’ It’s a shame that I didn’t pay more attention during my French classes in gradeschool, so I could comprehend the rest of the book..

So I’m kinda wondering if Japan has a need for stenographers at all. Or, at the very least, Actroid masseuses.. It’s like I say: find a niche, then fill it; if there isn’t a niche, make one and then fill it

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