Ohta Rina gravure mook
Nov. 14th, 2008 10:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusOne day last year Hisae and I were walking down a backstreet in Daikanyama when Hisae nudged me and hissed "It's Ohta Rina!" There, sitting in a cranny, chatting to a friend, was a short-haired girl, sipping a soft drink. I didn't know who Ohta Rina was, but Hisae seemed to idolize her. She was certainly pretty, anyway.
Yesterday I happened to interrupt Hisae's websurfing to ask her a question, and found her looking (slightly guiltily) at this page of photos of Ohta Rina, taken by her boyfriend's mother, the actress Miyuki Matsuda. The pictures all come from a new gravure mook (a magazine-type book made up of girly pictures) called Shincho Mook 107: Gekkan Ohta Rina. These mooks come out monthly, and focus on one girl exclusively.
Now, I'm not an unconditional fan of Rina Ohta -- in the video for AOR, her track on Towa Tei's new-but-90s-sounding album, for instance, she just looks too vampy in a Robert Palmer-ish way I find off-putting.
For me, Miyuki Matsuda's imagery is much more seductive. It refers to two visual keypoints I hold particularly dear: the ballerina imagery in the David Hamilton posters I had on my bedroom wall when I was a teenager, and Serge Gainsbourg's film Je T'Aime, Moi Non Plus, featuring short-haired, androgynous heroine Johnny Jane.
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Scroll that vid through to the eight minute mark and you'll see, for instance, the scene in which Jane Birkin and Joe Dallesandro float on rubber tyres in a water sink in a rubbish tip. It's clearly the inspiration for this shot of Rina:
David Hamilton and Je T'Aime Moi Non Plus are both Shibuya-kei references -- Kahimi Karie and I injected Hamilton into Shibuya-kei with our tribute song to the "member of the Royal Photography Society", of course. And this shot of Rina sitting on the loo with her knickers around her ankles...
...also takes me back to the 90s. H magazine ran a sexy photoshoot of Kahimi and Miki Nakatani which included a very similar image of Kahimi on the toilet. A prim KK told me that she'd been wearing two pairs of panties at the time.
Something I find moving -- because it's on the edge of the grotesque, and beauty, as Rilke said, is just the first sight of terror -- is the amazing skinniness of Ohta's legs. Here, for instance, she looks like a spider:
And where exactly are her hips here?
Oh, they're those bobbles at the top of her legs. Cute!
There are many Ohta Rinas out there -- the Rina visualized by Hiromix, the Rina presented in the pop video for her song Puzzle-Riddle, the Rina on the cover of Girlie magazine, the Rina in the inevitable Shiseido commercial. But the one I like best -- and this may be generational, mere 90s nostalgia -- is the Ohta Rina in Miyuki Matsuda's gravure mook.
Yesterday I happened to interrupt Hisae's websurfing to ask her a question, and found her looking (slightly guiltily) at this page of photos of Ohta Rina, taken by her boyfriend's mother, the actress Miyuki Matsuda. The pictures all come from a new gravure mook (a magazine-type book made up of girly pictures) called Shincho Mook 107: Gekkan Ohta Rina. These mooks come out monthly, and focus on one girl exclusively.
Now, I'm not an unconditional fan of Rina Ohta -- in the video for AOR, her track on Towa Tei's new-but-90s-sounding album, for instance, she just looks too vampy in a Robert Palmer-ish way I find off-putting.
For me, Miyuki Matsuda's imagery is much more seductive. It refers to two visual keypoints I hold particularly dear: the ballerina imagery in the David Hamilton posters I had on my bedroom wall when I was a teenager, and Serge Gainsbourg's film Je T'Aime, Moi Non Plus, featuring short-haired, androgynous heroine Johnny Jane.
[Error: unknown template video]
Scroll that vid through to the eight minute mark and you'll see, for instance, the scene in which Jane Birkin and Joe Dallesandro float on rubber tyres in a water sink in a rubbish tip. It's clearly the inspiration for this shot of Rina:
David Hamilton and Je T'Aime Moi Non Plus are both Shibuya-kei references -- Kahimi Karie and I injected Hamilton into Shibuya-kei with our tribute song to the "member of the Royal Photography Society", of course. And this shot of Rina sitting on the loo with her knickers around her ankles...
...also takes me back to the 90s. H magazine ran a sexy photoshoot of Kahimi and Miki Nakatani which included a very similar image of Kahimi on the toilet. A prim KK told me that she'd been wearing two pairs of panties at the time.
Something I find moving -- because it's on the edge of the grotesque, and beauty, as Rilke said, is just the first sight of terror -- is the amazing skinniness of Ohta's legs. Here, for instance, she looks like a spider:
And where exactly are her hips here?
Oh, they're those bobbles at the top of her legs. Cute!
There are many Ohta Rinas out there -- the Rina visualized by Hiromix, the Rina presented in the pop video for her song Puzzle-Riddle, the Rina on the cover of Girlie magazine, the Rina in the inevitable Shiseido commercial. But the one I like best -- and this may be generational, mere 90s nostalgia -- is the Ohta Rina in Miyuki Matsuda's gravure mook.
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Ohta Rina Gravure Mook
Date: 2008-11-14 10:08 am (UTC)Ohta Rina Gravure Mook.
That last image is one of the best things I've ever seen
(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-14 10:52 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-14 11:09 am (UTC)But I also find the rounded forms of pregnant women (http://imomus.livejournal.com/340389.html) very appealing. I guess a pregnant androgynous stick insect is my ideal!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-14 01:36 pm (UTC)High fashion is the culture predominantly associated with the ectopmorph.
I don't really have preference for body types, I like them all, I'm more about faces. That said, if we're talking about which body-type I find the most visually interesting, I'd have to say the Endomorph for numerous reasons.
Mesomorphs are the standard, mainstream ideal. Glamor models, buff guys who go to the gym, jocks... you see it everywhere. It's the easiest to appreciate.
Ectomorphs might seem like the antidote to all this, but they're not. It's the more-than-acceptable alternative if it's dressed up as something pretentious and arty. Heroin chic, supermodels, the fashion world. I find it boring in the say way I find certain types of egg-shell white minimalist decor boring -- it's become nothing more than an empty signifier of the art world rather than a genuine example of creative difference and expression.
Endomorphic bodies aren't idealised anymore in today's society, which makes them harder for us to appreciate and much more interesting to me personally. It wasn't always this way though. If you look at classical paintings, such as this one by Bouguereau of female bathers, endomorphic body types were once held up as shapely and attractive, an example of health and fertility, something classically feminine and beautiful.
Most people would consider the women in this painting fat or chunky by today's standards, you'd never see a woman who looked like those two women in fashion catalogs or on catwalks. I also remember reading somewhere that during the heian period in Japan, plump rounded faces on girls were considered very attractive. Now days, Japan's definition of female beauty is more in line with the west.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-14 06:46 pm (UTC)That's true in social Darwinist bell jars like Manhattan or London--but voluptuous, Reubenesque figures get plenty of play in West Philly.
We all know plenty of wispy, gracile women who are obviously that way naturally, and they are indeed lovely (most seem to derive from the upper classes, as a kind of selection definitely takes place).
But for every one of those extraterrestrials, there are scores of scrawny women seen in places like Manhattan whose frames and weight seem mismatched and are obviously working at it, hence giving off a whiff of status anxiety, fear, and desperation. I think that the drive to maintain such a reptilian genderless figure, at least in the wealthy quarters of the West, is a rough equivalent of sharky architecture: both are obsessed with keeping score. There's an underlying aggression and menace there, which seems partially self-inflicted. You can't help but pity them.
There's definitely an Uncanny Valley with regards to what we deem to be physically attractive, and each of us has a unique analog which largely relies on our own body image (short, tall, thin, heavy). Rail-thin creatures are aesthetically compelling but not at all sexually alluring to me, possibly because I feel like a stocky troll in their presence. Likewise, most women would never even consider someone as short as I am, and I don't blame them: their own personal Uncanny Valleys usually puts me way beyond their consideration, because they would feel like a big galumphing horse in comparison. They seem to be drawn to big men who make them feel "feminine," for lack of a better term.
Most women tend to have a zaftig figure because men over the ages have generally preferred it. There's something very satisfying about putting your arms around those soft, warm curves.
Chubby girls of Earth: I love you.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-14 06:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2008-11-14 01:46 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2008-11-14 01:44 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-14 01:19 pm (UTC)The "spider shot" reminds me alot of the movie's mise-en-scene.
Alex P.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-14 01:28 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-14 03:20 pm (UTC)Kinda, sorta doppelganger
Date: 2008-11-14 04:24 pm (UTC)http://www.opera.com/mag/
(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-14 10:50 pm (UTC)Thanks for the thinspiration!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-15 05:36 am (UTC)gilrs are forced to do by low OL salaries!
marxy
(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-15 11:51 pm (UTC)I certainly don't mind seeing her influence in the next wave of Japanese it-girls.
I do so love the edge-of-grotesque waify-ness of Rina.
Jane B
Date: 2008-11-21 10:10 am (UTC)update for Miles Franklin OBE
Date: 2008-11-21 06:21 pm (UTC)will throw my quick capsule review this way later this eve..I feel a frisson in my slippers
maf