Chris Page

When it comes to seeing commercial advantage in nicking the customs or superstitions of other cultures no one does it better than Japan. In fact, probably no one other than Japan does it. Hence the annual Christmas hysteria and Halloween horror. This time of year it is Valentine’s Day and anyone with anything to sell has seized on the theme as if were a matter of social obligation (which it might well be in this country). Being a day of officially prescribed romanticism, couples are encouraged to get out and about and be couples and, more to the point, spend money while doing so.

One of the top romantic spots is Hollywood theme park Universal Studios Japan (USJ) in Osaka. What could be better than a synthetic plastic simulacrum of a fantasy in which to spend quality time with your special other? USJ have been advertising energetically for weeks already. Here’s a detail of the poster that has been all over the trains and subway since January. A merry lass vaults a big, rounded heart … is it just me or does that heart suggest a glans? And does the lady’s posture with legs like that suggest an imminent straddling event? And what about that dreamy, blissy look on Pink Panther’s face as he hovers over his own glans object? What is that about?

And in a further expedition into hyperreality, there seems to be a conflation of the experience of going to USJ and the experience of sex.

I very much like the irony, the disjointedness (the narrative fracture?) of an institution that sells itself on family/kiddy values suddenly promising bouncy sex in its ads.

In another dollop or irony, the appearance of USJ itself has a striking resemblance to the absurd and whimsical designs of Japan’s love hotels. (Or is it the other way round?)

I also like this ad for Valentine chocolate, a huge, backlit screen in the Hankyu department store/railway station — more suggestiveness with a stick. And what’s with the broom otherwise? How did Halloween get into Valentine’s Day?

Or I am embarrassing myself, seeing sexual innuendo where it doesn’t exist. Perhaps I simply need to up my dosage of bromide.

Footnote: USJ’s page in Wikipedia tells us that the site is built directly on top of a toxic waste dump and that ET maimed one of the customers.

A chicken

“Eggs come from sheep, crisps are made of plastic and butterflies produce cheese” — so begins this article on a survey of where British kids think their food comes from.

Quoting the article again, some kids believed: “beef burgers came from McDonalds or Burger King, that yoghurts were made using turkeys or ducks, ham came from the Co-Op, bacon from horses, goats or peacocks and cheese originated from butterflies, rats or mice.”

Apparently crisps come from rabbits, plastic or sheep rather than potatoes, and ice cream comes from cheese, air, fish or potatoes.

The kids surveyed were aged between six and eight which may make the whole survery utterly pointless. Nor do the authors of the survey seem to take into account the possibility that fun-loving British kids faced with a po-faced and apparently inane questionnaire might be inclined to mercilessly take the piss (Where does cheese come from? Duh! Moon mines, of course! Tee hee hee.).

But the last laugh is definitely on the people that conducted the survey, because the bizarre responses the kids gave are all possible correct answers.

In this age of chemically enhanced, processed, synthesised, factory farmed, steroid-packed, genetically modified, artificial, irradiated foodstuff, in which vat-grown animal protein is a real technology, where flavour and colour additives come from crude oil, where fresh food is converted into a simulacrum of itself, who is to say that eggs don’t come from sheep or cheese from butterflies or cream from cats or bananas from mynah birds or sugar from fairies or soy protein from the bodies of dead people?

A Dutch McDonald’s employee is fired for adding an unauthorised slice of cheese to a burger. (Read here.) I love stories like this that illustrate the petty mindedness, rule obsession and control freakery of super-sized corporations.

“We have found out … that we cannot trust some people who are nonconformists. We will make conformists out of them … The organization cannot trust the individual; the individual must trust the organization.”

(At the end of the linked story, sense was enforced by a court that ruled that McDs were wrong to fire the employee and awarded damages against the company.)

This article possibly explains why someone ever thought we needed scientists to come up with the conclusions in this article.

It is a very brave retail outlet that expresses its true feelings in conservative Nara, Japan.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8390220.stm

A JG Ballard moment.

A new blog to promote the novel Weed and short stories of Chris Page. And aren’t you all just sick of hearing about this.