Tonsure: shinya sabukaru labo TV
Apr. 22nd, 2009 12:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusIn a split-level, red-walled luxury apartment high in Tange Associates' Tokyo Mode Gakuen Cocoon Tower in West Shinjuku, a beautiful, formerly-successful young woman is trying to come up with ideas for her fourth novel. Mika Kashiwaba's first two books were wildly successful, her third bombed. Holed up with her bald editor Yabu, dressed up to the nines, she's getting a bit fraught. She's swearing like a trooper, ordering Yabu around like a dominatrix. She's got writer's block.
Welcome to Tonsure (トンスラ), a 12-part Japanese TV comedy drama broadcast between October and December of last year, and now available, thanks to piracy, on sites like MySoju (only one episode, but subtitled in English) and VideoNavi (the whole series, subtitled in Korean). As the Wikipedia page explains, Tonsure started life as a novel (2006) by Tsuzuki Hiroshi, turned into the TV show, and also became a weekly manga in KOMIKKU BANCHI magazine.
People (this guy here, for instance) often say that Japanese TV completely lacks the creative spark of other nations' TV, that its productions are low-budget and formulaic. While I agree that mainstream dramas and comedy shows originated within the networks can be fairly sentimental and cookie-cutter, Tonsure shows what Japanese TV is capable of late at night, when it gives itself a little leeway and hires in talent from the worlds of cinema and alternative theatre.
Tonsure runs in a midnightish Saturday slot NTV have called TV Labo. Like Big Nose Knows Best, it's what's known as shinya dorama; late night, a bit experimental, whacky, creative, and tending to avoid agency talent, shinya has more in common with the kind of fringe theatre you might see in a Shimokitazawa fleapit than normal TV.
The 12 episodes of Tonsure employ nine different directors, including big cinema names like Satoshi Miki. It has, in actress Yoshitaka Yuriko, a hot it-girl who shot to fame after appearing nude in Yukio Ninagawa's thriller Snakes and Earrings, and who retains, in Tonsure, some of the S&M trappings of that role. The violent-but-affectionate, gender-inverted relationship between the main characters, Mika and Yabu, reminds me of Oh! Super Milk Chan or Big Nose Knows Best. But what I mostly notice -- and like -- about Tonsure is its playful attitude towards artifice.
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As a fiction about people trying to come up with fiction, Tonsure draws most of its humour out of threadbare or baroque attempts at deception, cajoling and the telling of tales. It's very meta, very theatrical in its fascination with roles and play. In one episode Yabu (whose desk drawer at the office is always filled, bizarrely, with sloshing hot wet food) plays his own imaginary nasty twin brother, staging a fight outside Mika's door; she watches him throwing punches at himself via the doorcam. In another, he amuses her with the tale of his "ugly" stalker. We see the scenes recounted from her perspective, with the stalker played by a fat woman. But it turns out that the real stalker is a beautiful woman, so the whole thing is replayed with a beautiful actress.
There's an episode in which Yabu (always on the lookout for interesting tales to bring his authoress) follows a family who are callously trying to kill their son -- via an industrial accident in a power plant -- for the insurance money, and another in which Yabu (who's meant to resemble the tonsured Jesuit monk Francis Xavier, an important figure in Japanese history) details being chained to a rock by bullies and left to a martyr's death in a rising sea.
The zany liberties Tonsure takes with plot and character recall Gogol, Pirandello or Dario Fo, and the quirkily-subversive sabukaru (subcultural) energy of the show puts it on a par, I think, with anything being produced for TV anywhere right now. I've certainly never heard Hisae laugh so much.
Welcome to Tonsure (トンスラ), a 12-part Japanese TV comedy drama broadcast between October and December of last year, and now available, thanks to piracy, on sites like MySoju (only one episode, but subtitled in English) and VideoNavi (the whole series, subtitled in Korean). As the Wikipedia page explains, Tonsure started life as a novel (2006) by Tsuzuki Hiroshi, turned into the TV show, and also became a weekly manga in KOMIKKU BANCHI magazine.
People (this guy here, for instance) often say that Japanese TV completely lacks the creative spark of other nations' TV, that its productions are low-budget and formulaic. While I agree that mainstream dramas and comedy shows originated within the networks can be fairly sentimental and cookie-cutter, Tonsure shows what Japanese TV is capable of late at night, when it gives itself a little leeway and hires in talent from the worlds of cinema and alternative theatre.
Tonsure runs in a midnightish Saturday slot NTV have called TV Labo. Like Big Nose Knows Best, it's what's known as shinya dorama; late night, a bit experimental, whacky, creative, and tending to avoid agency talent, shinya has more in common with the kind of fringe theatre you might see in a Shimokitazawa fleapit than normal TV.
The 12 episodes of Tonsure employ nine different directors, including big cinema names like Satoshi Miki. It has, in actress Yoshitaka Yuriko, a hot it-girl who shot to fame after appearing nude in Yukio Ninagawa's thriller Snakes and Earrings, and who retains, in Tonsure, some of the S&M trappings of that role. The violent-but-affectionate, gender-inverted relationship between the main characters, Mika and Yabu, reminds me of Oh! Super Milk Chan or Big Nose Knows Best. But what I mostly notice -- and like -- about Tonsure is its playful attitude towards artifice.
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As a fiction about people trying to come up with fiction, Tonsure draws most of its humour out of threadbare or baroque attempts at deception, cajoling and the telling of tales. It's very meta, very theatrical in its fascination with roles and play. In one episode Yabu (whose desk drawer at the office is always filled, bizarrely, with sloshing hot wet food) plays his own imaginary nasty twin brother, staging a fight outside Mika's door; she watches him throwing punches at himself via the doorcam. In another, he amuses her with the tale of his "ugly" stalker. We see the scenes recounted from her perspective, with the stalker played by a fat woman. But it turns out that the real stalker is a beautiful woman, so the whole thing is replayed with a beautiful actress.
There's an episode in which Yabu (always on the lookout for interesting tales to bring his authoress) follows a family who are callously trying to kill their son -- via an industrial accident in a power plant -- for the insurance money, and another in which Yabu (who's meant to resemble the tonsured Jesuit monk Francis Xavier, an important figure in Japanese history) details being chained to a rock by bullies and left to a martyr's death in a rising sea.
The zany liberties Tonsure takes with plot and character recall Gogol, Pirandello or Dario Fo, and the quirkily-subversive sabukaru (subcultural) energy of the show puts it on a par, I think, with anything being produced for TV anywhere right now. I've certainly never heard Hisae laugh so much.
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(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-21 11:33 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-22 08:38 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-22 10:56 am (UTC)[Error: unknown template video]
I got my misinformation, in this instance, from Tokyo Art Beat (http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/2007/07/gherkin-watch-2.html), who say Kenzo Tange designed the tower.
Tange designed
Date: 2009-04-22 01:55 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-22 01:36 am (UTC)I will surely check this out.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-22 01:40 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-22 04:00 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-22 04:34 am (UTC)Not that that's the most interesting thing to discuss about this show.. I'll have to find an episode of this to watch.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-22 06:24 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-22 08:10 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-22 08:22 am (UTC)but when you go to, i dunno, yodobashi camera and see crazy amounts of katakana soup for tech terms, i very much doubt much of that has made it into dictionaries.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-22 09:15 am (UTC)Kōjien (one of the most complete Japanese-to-Japanese dictionaries) is a useful source for finding which language the word entered Japanese from, as it lists in parentheses after the term its original romanised spelling + the language it came from.
(so you can find out, for ex., that ビール for beer is katakana-ised the way it is because it came from the Dutch word bier rather than the pronunciation you might expect if it was coming from English, ビヤ, which is also used in Japanese, just a lot less often and mostly in compound words.)
i actually have no idea why tonsura is not in Kōjien, but i'm sure it's not because it's too new...
what makes it confusing is that it does appear in the run-of-the-mill Eng-Jpn electronic dictionary i checked (Genius Eiwa) in the entry for tonsure; just not in any of the more complete Japanese dictionaries i've checked.
i have no idea how commonly it's used. i translated the word tonsure probably a half-dozen times last year into English from Japanese, mod. and cl., but never from a loanword.
googling around, it looks like it most likely came from the Latin word tonsura (or, i guess, whatever Navarrese language Xavier might have spoken)
but none of this is really important... it obviously means 'tonsure'
(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-22 11:00 am (UTC)トンスラ must be a loan word, though! but i don't know where it comes from...
am I the only female in this geek fest?
(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-22 11:59 am (UTC)Anybody have the OED on hand?
(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-22 07:34 pm (UTC)1390 GOWER Conf. III. 291 For unlust of that aventure Ther was noman which tok tonsure. 1616 BULLOKAR Eng. Expos., Tonsure, a clipping or cutting of the haire. 1650 BULWER Anthropomet. ii. 56 We..reduce our Tonsure to a just moderation and decency. 1770 LANGHORNE Plutarch (1851) I. 3/1 This kind of tonsure, on his account was called Theseis. 1876 C. M. DAVIES Unorth. Lond. 183 The ‘county crop’{em}that species of tonsure which all had undergone.
2. spec. The shaving of the head or part of it as a religious practice or rite, esp. as a preparation to entering the priesthood or a monastic order.
In the Eastern Ch. the whole head is shaven (tonsure of St. Paul); in the Roman Ch. either a circular patch on the crown, as in secular priests, or the whole upper part of the head so as to leave only a fringe or circle of hair, as in some monastic orders and friars (t. of St. Peter); in the ancient Celtic Ch. the tonsure ‘consisted in shaving the head in front of a line drawn from ear to ear’ (t. of St. John). A form of tonsure was also practised by the priests of Isis.
1387 TREVISA Higden (Rolls) VI. 167 He took tonsure and habit of clerk, {th}e {ygh}ere of his age foure and twenty. c1450 St. Cuthbert (Surtees) 1366 And gaf him tonsour and habite. 1530 PALSGR. 183 Les ordres..benet the first tonsure. 1655 FULLER Ch. Hist. II. ii. §96 No mention herein of settling the Tonsure of Priests..according to the Roman Rite. 1753 CHALLONER Cath. Chr. Instr. 153 The Clerical Tonsure..is not properly an Order, but only a Preparation for Orders. The Bishop cuts off the Extremities of their Hair, to signify their renouncing the World and its Vanities; and he invests them with a Surplice, and so receives them into the Clergy. 1829 J. DONOVAN tr. Catech. Counc. Trent II. vii. §14 In tonsure the hair of the head is cut in form of a crown, and should always be worn in that form, enlarging the crown as one advances in orders. 1842 HOOK Ch. Dict. 558 A clerical tonsure was made necessary about the 5th or 6th century. 1846 SHARPE Hist. Egypt xiv. 431 In Rome he was very partial to the Egyptian superstitions, and he had adopted the tonsure, and had his head shaven like a priest of Isis. 1849 ROCK Ch. of Fathers I. I. ii. 186 Of the ecclesiastical tonsure..the Roman form was perfectly round; the Irish was made by cutting away the hair from the upper part of the forehead in the figure of a half-moon, with the convex side before.
b. The part of a priest's or monk's head left bare by shaving the hair.
[1351-2 Rolls of Parlt. II. 244/2 Gentz de Religion portantz tonsure.] 1430-40 LYDG. Bochas IX. xiv. (MS. Bodl. 263) lf. 418/2 As a prest she [Joan] had a brod tonsure. a1625 SIR H. FINCH Law (1636) 65 But if he shew cause which our law alloweth not (as because hee hath not his tonsure, or ornamentum Clericale, &c.) he shall pay a fine, and yet be driuen to take the felon. 1768 STERNE Sent. Journ., Monk, Calais i, The monk, as I judged from the break in his tonsure,..might be about seventy. 1849 JAMES Woodman xiii, You must cover the tonsure with this peasant's bonnet.
{dag}3. The clipping (a) of coin; (b) of shrubs or hedges. Obs. rare.
1621 BOLTON Stat. Irel. 12 (Act 25 Hen. VI) Ireland is greatly impoverished..by the..carriage..into England of the silver plate, broken silver Bullion and wedges of silver made of the great Tonsure of the money. 1691 in Archæologia (1796) XII. 185 His yew hedges with trees of the same..kept in pretty shapes with tonsure. Ibid. 186 A fair gravel walk betwixt two yew hedges with rounds and spires of the same, all under smooth tonsure.
4. attrib. and Comb., as tonsure-cap, -plate (see quot.).
1889 Pall Mall G. 23 July 2/1 His rank..distinguished by the scarlet sash which he wears..and by his tonsure-cap, which is of the same colour. 1891 Cent. Dict., Tonsure-plate, a round thin plate slightly convex so as to fit the top of the head, used to mark the line of the tonsure according to the Roman rite.
verb
Date: 2009-04-22 07:35 pm (UTC)1793 Minstrel I. 90, I must tonsure those fine tresses to the due form. 1843 CARLYLE Past & Pr. II. xiv, Now tonsured into a mournful penitent Monk. 1872 O. SHIPLEY Gloss. Eccl. Terms 459 The Greeks tonsured their whole heads, like St. James and the other Apostles. 1878 MACLEAR Celts viii. (1879) 123 They..were tonsured from ear to ear,{em}that is, the fore part of the head was made bare, and the hair was allowed to grow only on the back part of the head.
b. fig. To make bald-headed.
1876 W. B. SCOTT Sonn. 9 And now that age hath shriven and tonsured me.
Hence {sm}tonsuring vbl. n. and ppl. a.
1811 Henry & Isabella I. 3 He manifested a sufficient genius at the tonsuring business. 1906 Reader 24 Nov. 123/2 He..gladly followed her advice to remedy with a curled scalp the ‘tonsuring action of middle age’.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-23 12:46 am (UTC)sometimes they are pretty indecipherable if you haven't seen them before. I spent a long while confused about ビズ thinking stripy stingy insects, rather than beads. maybe that one was introduced to japan by a toothless glaswegian
(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-22 02:59 am (UTC)Fame scale -- how famous is Lloyd Cole?
Date: 2009-04-22 10:31 am (UTC)"Fame-wise Ascent for Exported UK 1980- Literate Singer/Songwriters:
Momus...Peter Astor...Stephen Duffy...Lloyd Cole...David Sylvian...Morrissey"
Care to comment on the order?
Re: Fame scale -- how famous is Lloyd Cole?
Date: 2009-04-22 11:07 am (UTC)To be honest, "1980s literate singer-songwriter" is a fairly thankless category to be lumped into, and I'm glad it hasn't become my "master identity". I'm peripherally that, but also peripherally a Shibuya-kei producer, an "art rock veteran" (courtesy The Guardian last week), a performance artist, a writer, and the best dish washer the Maldives Hilton ever had.
Re: Fame scale -- how famous is Morrissey?
Date: 2009-04-22 02:04 pm (UTC)Re: Fame scale -- how famous is Morrissey?
Date: 2009-04-22 03:16 pm (UTC)Morrissey
Robert Smith
David Sylvian
Paul Weller
Mike Scott
Green Gartside
Paul Heaton
Mark Hollis
Ian McCulloch
Nick Currie
Shane Macgowan
Martin Gore
Neil Tennant
Peter Astor
Stephen Duffy
Lloyd Cole
Edwyn Collins
Paddy McAloon
Roddy Frame
Re: Fame scale -- how famous is Morrissey?
Date: 2009-04-22 04:41 pm (UTC)Without a doubt, one of the greatest lyricists of our time, and also extremely charismatic. On the downside, Morrissey doesn't write his own music, and tends to yodel rather arbitrarily over other people's rather pedestrian chord sequences and arrangements. And aesthetically he's a conservative; he isn't taking the medium anywhere new.
Robert Smith
"Fat Bob" makes a good contrast to Morrissey, because he's really a very good guitarist who can mesh the words and the chords together in a way Morrissey can't. I've been sporadically interested in Bob's work -- and he helped me out in the early days, giving me my first gig in 1981, and even explaining his guitar amp to me -- and bought some of his records. I like "17 Seconds" and "Lullaby" and the poppier (yet always admirably existentialist) moments, but find some Cure stuff lumpen and dull.
David Sylvian
Sylvian is one of my inner core of admired artists. I've bought most of his solo stuff, and like a lot of Japan too. Sure, he's effete and narcissistic and a bit of a thieving magpie with his lyrics and references, but he's also -- despite that -- created a very original body of work, and collaborated with some great musicians. Respect, basically, especially for the "difficult" stuff, like Ghosts and Pop Song and Blemish. This man does take pop music somewhere interesting.
Paul Weller
Paul Weller has never really hit my buttons. I think it's that Mod/suburban aggression that turns me off, that finger-jabbing, chin-jutting thing. He used to look pretty, though.
Mike Scott
The Waterboys are a bit meh for me, that Whole of the Moon is just slightly-more-respectable stadium rock. I'm not a big fan of this sort of Hibernian romanticism, even when it's The Blue Nile. A bit gooey.
Green Gartside
Seminal! Both early and mid-period Scritti (messthetics and Fairlight) are fabulous. I love the bleating singing, the self-conscious postmodernism, the thematic tussle between the revolution and white chocolate, love of self and love of righteousness, vanity and sickness. Green's structures are gorgeously off-kilter, too. His last album was great, the one before that not-so.
Paul Heaton
Hate hate hate this man and all his works.
Mark Hollis
Talk Talk are one of those bands like The Blue Nile that get routinely overrated because they're supposedly underrated. I've never seen the appeal, myself.
Ian McCulloch
Not really interested in him or his songs, though there was a brief moment when I pricked up my ears (The Cutter, Bring on the Dancing Horses). Good lips, though.
Nick Currie
It's a total mystery why this man isn't better known. Probably too prolific for his own good. Great lyricist, patchy singer, probably underestimated as a composer and arranger.
Shane Macgowan
Alcoholic with a croaky voice, good with words but a bit of a one-trick pony. I think you have to be a Guinness sponge -- and a bit of a conservative -- to really relish this retro folk music. There will no doubt be statues of him in parks one day.
Martin Gore
I'm told he likes my work. On paper, I should dig his mixture of pervery and pathos, but actually I've never found DM terribly compelling. I liked the Violater album, though. Remember listening to that while driving across Europe in a Fiat Panda in 1990.
Neil Tennant
He was once my gay god, and I still think he's a terribly charming and likeable fellow, but I don't think he's done anything very good since... Very. The need to be universal and commercial has really undermined him, and the PSBs sound is now terribly bland and retro. You have to keep moving ahead just to stay in the same place, and they haven't, they've just... stayed in the same place.
Re: Fame scale -- how famous is Morrissey?
Date: 2009-04-22 04:41 pm (UTC)I like Pete a lot as a person, and I really like the soft melancholia of his solo records. I hear he's a lecturer at Goldsmiths College now.
Stephen Duffy
I like him, especially the first couple of Lilac Time records. He reinvented folk music at the time it needed to be reinvented. I suppose I could've said that about Shane MacG too, but I always liked Les Negresses Vertes better than The Pogues.
Lloyd Cole
I tend to think of him as the Franz Ferdinand of his day, ie someone who cannily and rather underhandedly took the Postcard sound and smoothed it down enough to please major labels and shift a lot of units. But it's precisely the rough, eccentric edges which make the Postcard bands valuable.
Edwyn Collins
Edwyn is obviously a national treasure. A good lyricist (though given to twee wordplay sometimes), he's also a very underrated producer, really good with sound and subtly innovative. I like his feel for black music, too, something the Postcard imitators tended to leave out. And his sense of style, especially in the later days of Orange Juice, as exemplified in artwork and stage clothes, was just exemplary postmodernism. He can be vain and bitchy, but Edwyn's an original. It's heartening to see him as popular now as ever; in a sense, the stroke has given him a new persona, a rather lovable Daniel Johnston-like one.
Paddy McAloon
Very very smart guy, I really loved Swoon but thought he got too slick and glib after that. You know, imagine John-Boy Walton singing songs about Princess Diana. A bit squirmy-sweet and pseudo-American. But obviously very talented, and I like the Steely Dan-like time signatures and subtly-placed phrasings.
Roddy Frame
A bit too romantic and cute and self-involved. He was certainly pretty when he was a boy, though -- and he was a boy for about forty fucking years!
Re: Fame scale -- how famous is Morrissey?
Date: 2009-04-22 06:14 pm (UTC)'You only tell me you love when you're drunk' is exquisite. It is true, though, that the b-sides (or whatever they're called now) are nearly always more interesting than the a-sides.
And, yes, 'Yes' is atrocious.
Re: Fame scale -- how famous is Morrissey?
Date: 2009-04-22 07:38 pm (UTC)