Saturday, August 14, 2004
Bubble Boy (redux)
The other day, I posted this as part of my 'Boy In the Bubble' essay.
"Ah, the roaring 80’s! When things got so bloated that even the embodiment of that era’s zeitgeist (on BOTH sides of the Pacific), Pac-Man - whose name derives from a Japanese onomatopoeia ‘paku-paku’, meaning ‘to munch’ - had little choice but to eat his own heart out. All hail the Japanese and their indefatigable language! It was then and still is now the uttermost user-friendly syntax of a hyper-capitalism (a la Baudrillard) itself. This metaphor, logically extended, allows us to imagine the Japanese consuming machine built on an American pre-WWII ‘Classical’ capitalism, functioning as a kind of obsolete ‘machine code’. This metaphor, distended, poses the question: If Japanese is the language of consumption itself, wouldn't it be advisable to articulate a kind of 'KEIGO OF CONSUMPTION'? Where IS the Japanese version of F. Scott Fitzgerald when you need him/her to write 'Za Gureto Gatsby?"
Well, thanks to Marxy (David), I've finally found the answer to my silly question: Where IS the Japanese version of F. Scott Fitzgerald when you need him/her to write 'Za Gureto Gatsby?"
The answer is Yasuo Tanaka, the current Gov. of Nagano Prefecture. Back in the 80's he was a member of the Japanese literati, and during that time he penned a book called 'Nantonaku Kurisutaru' (Somehow Crystal) which is about the gluttony and excess of Japanese mid-bubble consumptive lifestyles. David explained to me that it has a voluminous index of all of the hundreds and hundreds of BRAND NAME products that are mentioned in the novel. I can't wait to sink my teeth into this one. (Click here for an image of the cover.)
"Ah, the roaring 80’s! When things got so bloated that even the embodiment of that era’s zeitgeist (on BOTH sides of the Pacific), Pac-Man - whose name derives from a Japanese onomatopoeia ‘paku-paku’, meaning ‘to munch’ - had little choice but to eat his own heart out. All hail the Japanese and their indefatigable language! It was then and still is now the uttermost user-friendly syntax of a hyper-capitalism (a la Baudrillard) itself. This metaphor, logically extended, allows us to imagine the Japanese consuming machine built on an American pre-WWII ‘Classical’ capitalism, functioning as a kind of obsolete ‘machine code’. This metaphor, distended, poses the question: If Japanese is the language of consumption itself, wouldn't it be advisable to articulate a kind of 'KEIGO OF CONSUMPTION'? Where IS the Japanese version of F. Scott Fitzgerald when you need him/her to write 'Za Gureto Gatsby?"
Well, thanks to Marxy (David), I've finally found the answer to my silly question: Where IS the Japanese version of F. Scott Fitzgerald when you need him/her to write 'Za Gureto Gatsby?"
The answer is Yasuo Tanaka, the current Gov. of Nagano Prefecture. Back in the 80's he was a member of the Japanese literati, and during that time he penned a book called 'Nantonaku Kurisutaru' (Somehow Crystal) which is about the gluttony and excess of Japanese mid-bubble consumptive lifestyles. David explained to me that it has a voluminous index of all of the hundreds and hundreds of BRAND NAME products that are mentioned in the novel. I can't wait to sink my teeth into this one. (Click here for an image of the cover.)
