I have a friend who has denied television of any kind access to his home. He has a daughter who he is purposely raising free of teevee. His wife goes along with him. They're both artists and museum-dependent for their incomes. I think that has something to do with why--well, I'll tell you, I first noticed his hatred of teevee when in a bar one afternoon myself and another friend got to breaking away from our three-way conversation and watching something on the bar's big-screen teevee hanging just above the backbar above us, glaring down at us, and, yes, we were keeping one eye on the teevee while jiving and deep-talking with him. Suddenly he went ape. "Jesus F Christ I hate teevee. You guys are pathetic being hooked on teevee like you are, look at you guys." "Whaaa?" we both screamed at him. "Man, teevee's reality--like newspapers used to be--teevee's most people's window on the rest of the world. Man, every motherfucker on earth, all 6 billion, have teevees." "I don't have a teevee...we don't have a teevee. I don't allow it. My daughter's never seen television." "Bullshit, man, every kid sees teevee--I mean, that's cruel, how's she gonna talk and bullshit with her peers?--like when they start talkin' music and their rock male crushes--and MTV and shit, she'll be out in the cold. She'll have to become antisocial--why she'll cruise into the dull waters of the loner." "That's OK with me. At least her mind won't be poisoned by all the bullshit on teevee." The other guy said, "Ah, come on, teevee's great--it's the dream being enacted out before us 24/7--even the commercials are just little plays--little one-act dramas performed by actors and actresses and even directed by guys who are hi-tech magicians--able to put a whole Shakespeare play down into one 30-second commercial."
I admit, I watch teevee--sort of routinely--certain programs--but mostly just circling around its many provinces, checking out the alleys and the oddball beats some of teevee shows offer us--like a lot of foreign chefs--once there was only Julia Child, the OSS babe turned French chef, but now, holy crap, there must be 40 different chefs on commercial teevee alone, and that doesn't include Chef Tony, the guy who sells the invincible knives (old Miracle Blades and Ginzos from the dark, dusky warehouses of Japan and China) in his own infomercials, or the many chefs who appear on the network morning shows or who are regular guests on the giggly-lady afternoon talk shows, or teevee babes like Martha "The Felon" Stewart--did I say Martha's doin' better at every one of her angles since doing her lightweight prison time ("Six months, that ain't no time/I got friends up in Angola/They doin' 9 right on up to 99" (from "Junco Partner"))--why, Martha had to steal investment tips to manage before but not now--now NBC has built her her own teevee studio and built-in kitchen and shit--and you go by her studio, it's over here behind me in the West 20s, and there's a long line of whoever these women are who go to these kind of shows over there every day she's taping. Amazing ex-con success story that Martha. Wonder how many of those chicks who were serving time with Martha had as much success when they got released? Especially women serving time for a felony like Martha's, you know who worked with their boyfriends to scam some people out of money or sell them illegal substances--wonder how those women are doing these days? Why doesn't Martha have a show where she brings her old cellmates on?--how about a show on cooking in prison?--and use real prison chefs--or how about a show of real chefs who've gone to prison? Wow. Anyway, you get my point I'm sure--why I love teevee and all the characters who abound in its fairy-tale pages.
And so it was while I was watching teevee while trying to wake up from a good night's sleep and there came on screen this story of this Japanese writer--you can't tell how old she is--the only clue was she had been a schoolteacher--but she looks like she's twelve years old, like the Japanese porn stars are famous for looking, you know, underage--ooooooh, how exciting. That's why Amerikan so'jer boyz married Japanese, Korean, and Viet Namese babes after each war we had with these people--WWII dudes brought home their Japanese dolls (I once edited a book written by a WWII soldier who'd married a beautiful Japanese girl--when he brought her back to the states, she immediately went out drinking and dancing every night, ended up having many affairs on the dude, eventually cleaning out his bank account and then leaving him because he couldn't afford her any more--he said she went on to become one of the biggest and most successful madams in the Northwest US and Canada)--yes, those doll-face-and-bodied Japanese women--see the "little girl" connection?--American men have always been perverted--it's the way they're raised--under religions whose sexual taboos make what they're taboo-ing just that much more curiously thrilling--you see sex is so evil, then hell yes, the most evil sex must be the most raunchy and male controlled--the taboos becoming the most thrilling sex--adultery, incest, and of course making it with a 12 year old girl (or boy--and I've known a couple of female school teachers who during truth or dare sessions have admitted they've had the hots for one of their underage students--and I had a close female friend when I was a social worker and she was a caseworker and she was caught shacked up with one of her 16 year old wards--lost her job, her career--but they didn't see that as a jail-time offense in those days because, and I heard the judge say this at her firing, it was wrong under moral laws but it was OK in this case because it was consensual sex and the boy was old enough to know right from wrong. This woman told me later that sex with this kid drove her mad--the most G-spot slam dunks she'd ever had). Of course there are societies that allow adultery, incest, and certainly sex with 12-year-olds (Roman Polanski escaped rape charges overhere to go live in Paris totally above the law--and banging 12 year olds right and left--no problem in France--all around the world marriage at 11 and 12 is common--hell, my mother was 16 when she married my father--he was 20, so when he first banged my mother she was let's say 15--wow, so my father was a pervert--but he wasn't because there was nothing wrong with what they did in those days as long as it ended in marriage. My mother's grandmother married a 75-year-0ld man when she was 13. That man's family to this day admit their patriarch married my great-grandmother though they deny her use of the family name and don't list her in their family tree. She used the family name anyway because she got this old letch's pension from when he was a Colonel in the military and was she legally considered this man's official widow.
Sounds like a great teevee series--something Larry McMurtry probably has already written. I'm ashamed to say though Larry is a Texan, and he went to the same college I did and was there one year when I was there, and he was one of my brother's friends, I've never read but one of his books--Horsemen Pass By--a good book, but that's it--and I've never met the man either, so I'm sure he's written about how tough it was for young white (or any) girls on the wild frontier but I wouldn't know. And while I'm thinking about it, I saw a PBS docu-fable on Andy Jackson--the Manifest Destiny president--and I came away from it totally ashamed to be an American--what a despicable old fool Jackson was; yet, there were white historians there on PBS last night apologizing for this man's dumbass pompousness and brutality by saying, yes he treated Native Americans like dogshit, forced marched their poor trying-to-be-good-American asses out of the South, off those fertile cotton and tobacky fields these birds were nesting on so the white devils could bring their slave workforce in there and get rich quick--fuck the Indians--and Jackson gave us the Trail of Tears, an awfully big wound in white Americans's heritage alongside the bigger wound of slavery--white folks are branded with these two cruelties to the point their history of this country is looked upon by "others" as all fabulous, all tall tales, all white whitewashed legends--Andy Jackson was a pompous, low-life hillbilly hick, with shit on his boots and tobacky juice dribblin' off his chin and onto his slave-starched-and-pressed Massuh white shirtfronts--what a jack-off--and one time, one of the most peaceful places on earth in my life were afternoons spent in the heart of Jackson Square Park facing Andy Jackson on his rearing up horse to declare to the world, "United We Stand; Divided We Fall," which by god is a truth, but a truth about the white man and not anybody else. Such shame to bring on me who had no choice as to the color of my skin. Racism is the product of white American ignorance and it is the white flaw that can never be expunged unless whites one day will be slaves--and that certainly looks more and more possible as the corporate-rule days go fascistically streaming by--our lyin' dog "president" is certainly selling our asses to several nations that are buying up our debt at pennies on the dollar--or the Euro dollar I should say.
A Walk Through the Jabber to Get to This
Text booking. I never heard of it until this morning on the CBS Sunday Morning Show (created by Charles Kurwalt (sic), remember him, the all-American-Mom-and-Apple-Pie dude who was leading two lives--one back east with his wife and kids and the other out in Montana with his mistress of 25 years his wife knew nothing about until Charles left her his money and Montana ranch in his will?--was Charles a pervert?). It seems it's the device used by this Japanese writer to write her novels that's getting her publicity--she writes them on her telephone--she writes her novels (she's written 2 so far) on her phone all day long, wherever she is, on the train, eating lunch, walking around Tokyo--she writes her pages then sends them to her Website where her followers can download books by chapters. So here's this Japanese schoolteacher who looks like a teenager who's written two novels on her cell phone with her thumbs in text messages. Some enterprising older Japanese babe got the bright idea to publish these text books in real book form--and sure enough, "Rin" (I'm spelling it phonetically--I don't know Japanese), is now a millionaire (in Yen or Euros or US dollars I did not hear), her first published text book selling 800,000 copies and she now has her second one out and Rin is the thang among Japanese kiddies--the diaper wearers who are this writer's consumers.
Did you ever notice how most of our kiddie cartoon shows are now very Asian in their characteristics and their actions and their "morals." I'm amazed at how many royal references there are in kiddie shows--the most important person in most kiddy teevee worlds is the king--yeah! And the queen less so. The princes are the young men and the girls are of course either the princesses or the servants of them.
I have a mad desire to start writing my own books for diaper-wearers in love--my Rin text book--everything is teenage these days--the teens rule--just as they have my whole life. My white generation started it--we rebelled against our WASP parents and we decided not to conform to what was expected of us--hell we even loved poetry and poets--and we said, "Hey, fools, God is Dead."
So, hey, you wanna get rich, get a hook--a grab--like when you're writing songs you gotta hook 'em in with the first line of the first verse!
January 23, 2008
Thumbs Race as Japan’s Best Sellers Go Cellular
In this article by NORIMITSU ONISHI for the New York Times.
"Of last year’s 10 best-selling novels, five were originally cellphone novels, mostly love stories written in the short sentences characteristic of text messaging but containing little of the plotting or character development found in traditional novels. What is more, the top three spots were occupied by first-time cellphone novelists, touching off debates in the news media and blogosphere."
thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler
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