12 June 06 in Found
From Wikipedia:
By wearing a body suit or mask, kigurumi cosplayers are able to get closer to the appearance of the original character, especially in the case of animal characters or highly stylised characters. Non-professional animal kigurumi cosplayers painstakingly make detailed heads and bodies from plastic, wire and artificial fur. In animegao kigurumi, the actor playing a humanoid anime character will wear a flesh-coloured body suit and matching facemask usually made from clay.
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More: Japanese,
Cosplay,
Anime,
Weird
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22 May 06 in Commentary
See Wikipedia entry on The Laughing Man (Ghost in the Shell). See also The Laughing Man (Salinger).
See also Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto:
Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.
More: Japanese,
Anime,
Literature,
Simulacra,
Cyborgs
19 February 06 in Media
If you get to bed at a reasonable hour you can be forgiven for missing the quiet revolution happening on late-night cable. Starting at 11pm and continuing well into the wee hours of the morning, the ordinarily kid-friendly Cartoon Network is stormed by the raunchy, potty-mouthed geniuses behind the Adult Swim programming block. Featuring a mashup of absurdist fare like Aqua Teen Hunger Force and Sealab, reruns of long-standing favorites like Futurama and Family Guy, as well as recent Anime hits like Ghost in the Shell, Adult Swim is aimed squarely at the post-South Park generation—a generation that accepts animated programming as a medium for decidedly adult entertainment.
The highlight of the most recent season has been the addition of The Boondocks, a small-screen adaptation of Aaron McGruder’s controversial comic strip. Not surprisingly, The Boondocks was considered too controversial even for Fox—McGruder’s biting commentary on racial politics in America and frequent use of the nigga-bomb ensured that no mainstream network would touch his project. Thankfully, the folks at Adult Swim are no strangers to pushing the envelope of Standards and Practices (something they frequently poke fun at in their own shows), and so we have a show that imagines George Dubya Bush and Donald Rumsfeld as white gangsta thugs (hearing Samuel L. Jackson, who voices the Rummi character, say “the absensce of evidence isn’t the evidence of absence” is alone worth the entire season), a show that awakens Martin Luther King, Jr. from a decades-long coma only to find himself alienated by nigga culture. The Boondocks manages to tip over all our sacred cows at once.
Hey, anything that pisses off Al Sharpton can’t be all bad, right?
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More: Television,
Black,
Anime,
Stereotypes,
The Boondocks,
Aaron McGruder
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