Great Orders of Sterile Lunacy

Revolving round Axis, Bathing in the Lymph of Absurd Deities,

Breathless, Soulless,

Choking on Psalms of Utter Uselessness,

Heretics among Heretics,

Fallen priests draw the pictures,

Of Insane Gods in Minds that are surely soon to be Fucking Dead.


Credits to Vorkreist

J-Horror

No, I did not wait to go to Japan to see a LOT of Japanese movies. Do you know Kurosawa ? No, not this one, though seeing Ran was sort of a life-defining experience for me: the world was not the same after.

Did you hear about know Kiyoshi Kurosawa ? Did you saw Cure ? Were you frightened by Kairo (the Japanese J-Horror masterpiece, not the bad BAD BAD American remake Pulse) ?

OK, I saw Retribution last week. As for a lot of Kurosawa's movies, there's not a lot of action, there's no gore effects, there are some ghosts (who-or which, do few, except stating that they will always be there), and finally there's Japan as an exhausted no-man's land. Unsettling, and a bit morbid, all right, but GREAT !!! And great low-key performance from Koji Yakusho; maybe you will remember him from his role in Babel, but he is a regular of Kurosawa's movies. This time, it is about a policeman, who lives with a strangely absent beautiful young woman. He starts to think that he is maybe the one who killed the woman in red who we see strangled just at the beginning of the movie. Except that he does not remember a thing about that. Except that the ghost of the woman (or is she ?) start to haunt him all the time (doing few, but being scary, because she-or it does not really express the reason why she-or it is here). It appears that just being alive also means being guilty.



The second J-Horror movie I saw just yesterday is Reincarnation, by Takashi Shimizu, who is the one who made the horror series The Grudge. In this movie, a mad professor kills eleven people in a small hotel (including his young daughter and son), while filming all during the killings with a small camera. A lot of years later, a film director starts to make a movie about this story. Apart from its great endings (right through the very last frame, which is very disturbing, though in a purely intellectual way), apart from the beginnings in modern Tokyo (I recognized some of the places they used), this is for me a movie that deals with the power of cinema (some evil power, because it is horror, remember). Needless to say, this film is also scary !!

English wikipedia reach 2 million articles

Maybe you did not see it, be it that you never go to one of wikipedia sites, or you only go to the one of your language.
The English wikipedia has reach 2 million articles some hours ago !!! Cheers !!

Pest Pandemic Contamination

I was yesterday evening at the Paris Le Nouveau Casino concert for the Pest Pandemic Contamination tour. Great unpure night (he he), with three excellent Black Metal bands: Blacklodge, Vorkreist, and Horna.
I took some pics of the show, not all of them are uploaded for now, but some are already there.
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The full set will be there.

Cool people in Takeshita-dori

Takeshita-dori is a small winding street, parallel to Omotesandō, were you can also find a lot of fashion boutiques. The difference is that in Takeshita-dori, a LOT of boutiques sell destroy or extreme Japanese clothes, vaguely in punk or gothic style, but above all Japanese style -which does not need that they sell kimonos). You can see a lot of people going up and down this street: foreigners (though really few of them, as there seems to be NEVER a lot of tourists in Tokyo, except when they are themselves Japanese), women in kimonos, and even young Japanese who try, buy, and wear these strange apparels...

As for all things Japanese, it's not just black T-shirts with regular skulls, or worse exhibition of a red filled circle with a text written on it that says: My brother went to Tokyo and all he bought to me is this lousy T-shirt (this is shit, and for one, I saw no souvenir shops AT ALL in Tokyo). It's... sometimes clothes like this one, with FETISHISM written on it:

or these ones, in elegant destroy style (the term is my invention):

You can also find plenty of the gigantic shoes Gothic girls seem to affectionate here:


OK, I wanted to come back with a Tokyo-only shirt or T-shirt (beware of the Japanese sizes). I also bough a LOVELY necklace with skulls as beads, you should see it, it's cool ;-)
I went in one of these little shops. The woman in charge seemed to be 60 years old or so, with gray hair, and totally unremarkable clothes (I'm not saying they were ugly, they were just not at par with whatever was sold in the shop).
A Japanese punk girl with shaved head and with enormous platform shoes was just quitting the shop after trying some clothes. Conversation was at first entirely commercial and a bit dull, and when I was about to leave... she saw my own T-shirt (which I bought on sales in Paris some months ago, it is a Levi-s T-Shirt made by a Norwegian designer, if I remember well):

She was amazed by the drawings, the contrast between the skeleton at the left and the dark girl at the right. She said the drawing was beautiful ;-)
She tried to decipher the Land Of Dark text above, but it was difficult for her to even spell the letters (though she knew enough English to speak with me). I told her how I bought it, and then talk was on. I don't remember all of what we said, but we talked about Japan and Japanese culture, France, etc... At the end, she asked me to come back to see here in her shop if I come back to Tokyo ;-)
This could happen only in Japan ...

Japan Japan Japan

Eh, eh, I was in Japan from August 3rd to August 16. In fact, you need one day to go back there - 12 hours of direct flight, and more than one day to go there (7 time zones from Paris).

Japan is great, and it is very very different from any European country you can know of. I'm sure it is also very different from any other Asian country too... It is hyper-modern (sometimes extremely), and at the same time it retains a very particular culture and traditions.
For example... when you go to the toilets in Ryokans, or even in some museums, you must use specific slippers, because toilets are considered as a dirty room.


But Japan is much more than that:


You maybe have heard of CosPlay or Gothic Lolita girls. You will find a LOT of them in Japan, and not only in Tokyo Harajuku.

Here you will encounter people going to work in strict costume, people in kimonos,

(or even more traditional than that...)

young women wearing ultra-short skirts,

young boys and girls in school clothes,

and others in the Japanese version of Punk attire (which is not punk)

Here they seem to all live in harmony, as shrines can coexist with giant neon buildings.

No I'm not cheating

By the way, I've finished uploading my Japanese pics. More on Japan later... bet my friends and colleagues are fed up about Japan. I'm talking about it approx. 100 times a day ;-)