Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Something to Do with Death

I finished getting the Cinema Unit GAS DVDs up-to-date last week, and continue my work on JAMS today. I started two more articles on DVDs in their New Sexy Zone series this morning-- "Flopped out a coupla quicklies" as I am wont to say when I'm in the mood to amuse, confuse, and bemuse myself. I finished the New Sexy Zone series in the evening. Traditional S/M-type stuff of the Japanese variety (men abusing women) never interested me. I find it childish and silly. Ditto the European/American variety: Primitive cosplay. But I have to admit I find these types of videos-- JAMS and IZM-- or at least the video clips, screen shots and DVD covers, which is all I see of them-- to have a certain undeniable charm. Big, bountiful, buxom Asian women pulverize their little male partners. Ah life...

Karen ToudouYours truly, old Dekkappai, has reached the point in his life when mortality is pressing its nose against, and fogging up the window of his consciousness. What did the great men do when faced with thoughts of death? Sibelius responded with his Fourth Symphony. Kurosawa responded with Ikiru. And Dekkappai? He wonders how he can sneak out as easily, quickly and painlessly as possible, hoping that he doesn't make too much of a fool of himself in the process-- blubbering and whimpering or shitting his pants or something... What have I ever asked from life? Big, fleshy-assed, thick-legged, soft-bellied, buxom Asian women. And my life has been blessed in that regard. So, should a long, drawn-out, humiliating death be imminent, and pre-emption by euthanasia look like the best way out, here is how I want to exit this vale of tears: Death by suffocation. Smothered between the breasts and/or buttocks, of a big, fat, bouncy, beautiful Asian lass. (Pictured at right: Karen Toudou unsheathing one of the weapons of mercy by which I, Dekkappai, wish to meet my demise.) Oh, death, where is thy sting?

During the day I gathered the data for my next Boobpedia project, a new series which features supposedly amateur women with immense bazooms. I say "supposedly" because experienced actresses pretending to be amateurs has a long and respected history in Japanese AV. (Something like Wakamatsu's "Second-Time Virgin") And I think-- at first glance-- that I've seen a couple of these gals before... although I can only judge from their breasts, their faces being covered to protect their privacy... or to create the illusion of it. I'll start a few stubs on the new actresses in the JAMS series tomorrow, then start the new DVD series. After my Boobpedia work for the evening, I made my first post here on this blog, about the activities of the previous day, and their distantly-related ramblings, grumblings and rants. That's probably how I'll do things here, or gather up bits and pieces until I've got enough to post. Post it. Then fiddle around with it forever.

Poster to KeomaAfter turning off the computer I watched one of my Mill Creek Spaghetti Westerns, Keoma (1976). It being a late entry in the spaghetti cycle, I wasn't expecting much. But it turned out to be pretty damned good, the last gasp of life from a genre on its death bed. It's an anti-racist statement-- with good old Woody Strode in a supporting role. It had one flaw, however, and that one flaw was so major it will, all by itself, prevent me from watching the film again. That flaw: The soundtrack. Oh sweet Jesus in heaven, just thinking about it makes me cringe. It's an unbearable and interminable narrative ballad which runs through the film, commenting on the action. It's sung by a shrill, screechy-voiced woman apparently trying to imitate Joan Baez or Joni Mitchell, or some folk-pop singer of the 1960s. I prayed, I begged, for another singer to take over. Anyone, I thought, would be better. Then-- God be praised!-- another singer took over! A man... but... wait a minute... good God... he's even WORSE than the woman! I kid you not! He sang like a man who had had a tracheotomy. Nothing against people with tracheotomies, but should they really be singing film soundtracks? Anyway, the male singer's tuneless moaning and mumbling made me miss the shrieking of the old crone... but not for long, as she soon relieved the male crooner.Shizuka Kyouno in Step-Mother's Huge, Fat Tits: Shizuka Kyouno If I could have turned off just the music it would have been a fine little film... I find out from IMDb that the male singer was none other than Franco Nero-- who, in the role of Keoma, was the star of the film. Well, he should have stuck to acting... Hearing that god-awful racket made me think that the poor guy needed to be put out of his misery. I prayed for his and my delivery from this pitiful, excruciating wailing. Over on the right, Nero, there's your relief from suffering, in the body of that angel of mercy, Shizuka Kyouno, in her starring role in Step-Mother's Huge, Fat Tits: Shizuka Kyouno.

Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Thanks for the Ball-Kicks, Will Hays!

I'm starting this blog to record my progress on Japanese (and other Asian) articles at Boobpedia, write down passing thoughts related to that work, thoughts for future work, thoughts and activities only tangentially related to it, and totally unrelated stuff as it may arise in my ramblings. We'll see if this develops into anything fun. If it stops being fun, it stops...

At Boobpedia tonight I started working on bringing the JAMS New Sexy Zone series DVD articles up to date. Started three of them. The new site I found a couple days ago-- Fetish World-- has "synopses" in "English" (emphasis on the scare quotes). Paraphrased they usually say something like "Huge Tits Heckuva Big-ass goddess bouncy on incompetent man! Sucking, fucking and much paizuri!" It's kind of fun spinning this out into faux-sophisticated prose. I have in mind the long-winded, ornate style of the jokes in Playboy behind the centerfold. '60s cool-cat, pretentious twit, obsessed with T&A. (Not much of a stretch for me there, I admit.) I managed to get a little of that into Wikipedia. (I once referred to an actress' genitals as her "nether regions" in an article... some humorless twit changed it of course, probably citing some crackpot policy...) The magnificent Rei Tachibana (pictured at right) was the star of one of the DVD articles: Steamy Huge Boobs! Breast Therapy (or Perfervid Mega-Bazongas! Boobs Therapy to take the Fetish World translation... actually, I prefer that one myself... November 2010). It tells the inspirational story of a large, busty woman (Tachibana, again type-cast in this role) who uses her body to invigorate her clients. Not much of a plot, perhaps, but a simple and direct story that needed to be told. Rei Tachibana has a bit of a half-Asian-looking face, though I've never seen it mentioned that she was not pure Japanese. Gorgeous woman either way.

After the night's editing, I watched a Mill Creek 50 Comedy Kings film-- Goodbye Love (1933) starring Charlie Ruggles. Pretty dull, but, being pre-Hays Code, had a couple enjoyably risque touches. One was Ruggles speaking on the phone to his large, BBW, alimony-demanding ex while she is in the bathtub. Ruggles later addresses her as "my little dromedary". 1933 being in the blessed time before camel-toe pants-- before plumber's ass-crack became a fashion statement-- he can only be addressing her two prominent, large and bouncy fore-humps, which, unless my weak eyes and hyper-active imagination deceive me, we had a fairly good look at in the bathtub... In another scene, Ruggles is walking on the beach, and is stopped by an outraged yelp from a large woman buried in sand. Ruggles is standing where her crotch should be located, and says, "Oh dear! I seem to have put my foot in it!" then leers at the camera. "It" being, one can only presume, the woman's cunt. One more year, and Hays would specifically ban foot-in-cunt jokes... One can only dream of what heights of pudenda-related Tom-foollery US cinema might have reached if not for Hays, in the later '30s, '40s and '50s when even the faintest whiff of genitalia, much less the insertion of a foot into them, was banned from Hollywood's output. And what a loss that is...

Imagine a Harpo Marx free to grab a butt-cheek and a boob or two once he's caught a fine specimen out of that endless stream of blonds he was always chasing... Imagine Larry telling Moe to go fuck himself, and receiving a sharp kick to the groin in return. In fact, had Moe been free to kick his cohorts in the balls, maybe Hollywood would have got the gratuitous ball-kicking out of its system back in the '40s and we wouldn't have to suffer through it in the theater today. Who knows? It worked with the ass-kick.

Take a look at Tillie's Punctured Romance (1914). Here it is at the Internet Archive. Ass-kick, ass-kick, ass-kick. Ass-kick-o-rama. Not an ass appears on screen unless that ass is soon to be kicked. And these ass-kicks are totally at random, without motivation. An ass is kicked simply because it's there... We're told in the history books that this movie made money. In fact it was a huge hit, and a milestone in cinema. But what is left out of the books is that it seems to have rung the death knell for the easy, cheap-laugh that the ass-kick offered comedians. Oh, I'm aware that comedic ass-kicking lingered on through the rest of the 1910s and even rears its head occasionally to this day, but the ass-kick's power to thrill audiences in-and-of-itself had lessened once Sennett dropped 82 minutes of non-stop ass-kicking action on the theater-going public with Tillie. And, except for the occasional well-thought-out ass-kick, the ass-kick with something socially relevant to say (for example, when Laurel and Hardy use ass-kicking as just one step in the escalation of violence in the hilarious closing scene of sidewalk mayhem in You're Darn Tootin', 1928), it's pretty much fizzled out since then. Ball-kicking, on the other hand, like foot-in-cunt jokes, was stifled by that prude Hays, and not allowed to play out naturally, and to eventually be overtaken by more evolved schtick. So the primitive old gratuitous blow-to-the-balls lingers with us in today's cinema, long after its natural time period has passed... Sort of like a gag version of the rhinoceros. Or the coelocanth... And we, the audience, suffer the consequences... Thanks a lot, Will Hays...

God damn all holier-than-thou prudes and censors! God damn 'em to Hell-- or send them Hell's online equivalent: Wikipedia. We keep imagining the human race progresses, but we will never be free from the evil forces of self-important bigotry. Anyone who doubts that need only edit anything slightly controversial or slightly out of the Anglo/WASP-mainstream at Wikipedia. Yank aside the fig-leaves of "notability", "reliability", etc., and you have the same old elitist censorship which kept Edgar Rice Burroughs and L. Frank Baum out of libraries a couple generations ago. (At right, Rei Tachibana returns to give the censors what they deserve.) At least those censors, as hired librarians, had some authority. Wikipedia's censors, while refusing "Original Research" or much anything else from its contributors-- even if they are actual authorities in their area-- have given themselves authority to censor-- by removing sourced information which doesn't meet the rules they created. Wikipedia could have been a great populist encyclopedic project... among other things, a compendium of interesting pop-culture trivia useful for future generations. But that's not respectable enough for the elitist prudes. As always, they've got to save the masses from what the masses want. They-- the prudes-- know what is better for everyone else. So Jimbo Wales allowed the self-appointed, self-important elitist blow-hards to take over, and now Wikipedia aspires to be, at best, a pale imitation of a print encyclopedia. One which will never have any authority whatsoever... but which will have humanity's largest recorded discussion on what some uninformed, arrogant semi-literates think an encyclopedia should be. What a crime.

And with that rant, I wipe the spittle off my chin and stumble off to watch something tonight... a Spaghetti western maybe?...