Monthly Archive

2006 has left me reeling, left me wanting more, left me entirely confused. Half way through the year I was whisked back to my home country from my adopted country. The first half of the year I pined for Australia, the second half of the year I have been, and still am, pining for Japan. I don’t know if I know how to live without constantly wanting to be somewhere else? I have been told by many other returned ex-pats that the transition can take longer than a year.
Recently among the blogs I read; the ‘Itunes music shuffle interview’ has been doing the rounds, and as it is probably a darn side more interesting than me rambling about the year that was, here ’tis.

So how is this done you ask? Well….
1. Put your music player on shuffle.
2. Press forward for each question.
3. Use the song title as the answer to the question.

Here goes;

What does next year have in store for me?
Bubble Toes - Jack Johnstone

What’s my love life like?
The Stairs - INXS (Live) (ed;…. at least it’s live?)

What do I say when life gets hard?
The Strangest Party (These are the times) - INXS

What do u think of on waking up?
Rocky Racoon - Beatles

What song will I dance to at my wedding?
Blue - Joni Mitchell (Wedding? been there done that, sad second marriage maybe)

What do you want as a career?
Teardrop (Mad Professor Mazaruni Mix) - Massive Attack

Your favourite saying?
Lets Walk That-a-Way - Doris Day (Doris rocks!)

Favourite place?
The Beat goes on - Talvin Singh

What do you think of your parents?
I kill children - Dead Kennedys (Dude! I swear I did not cheat!!! They don’t, they don’t!)

What’s your Pornstar name?
One Love/People Get Ready - Bob Marley and the Wailers

Where would you go on a first date?
Puccini; Manon Lescaut Act. 4 - Sola (ed;what a classy chic!)

Drug of choice?
Fame - David Bowie (Truly the after affect of all drugs!)

Describe yourself
LDN - Lilly Allen

What is the thing I like doing most?
Soni - Talvin Singh

What is my state of mind like at the moment?
Gone - Jack Johnson (Ha!)

How will I die?
Nuncas Funckarma - Solid State (ed; ain’t even gonna touch that one)

Enough reflection and questioning….. Hurry up 2007!!!

It twas the night before Christmas and all through the house not a creature was stirring not even a mouse…… that was until I broke my crown on my own gingerbread! After some screaming and ‘what shall I do’s’ I decided the best thing to do on Christmas Eve would be to stick it back together with Supaglue. As it is my front tooth, yes, yes I get it… ‘all I want for Christmas is my two front teeth’ I figured I had no choice. If I was to face the world with a great big gaping hole in my mouth I might as well head down to the nearest pub in The Burg and slowly get drunk at the end of the bar like the some dirty old hag, occasionally shouting obscenities to the locals, all the while mumbling to myself about how my life could have turned out all together differently if I had a perfect set of teeth.
So here I am avoiding all ‘crunchy’ looking food items, smiling self consciously and remembering the time I had Chicken Pox for Christmas…. hmm, that was worse for sure.
Now here are my Christmas wishes for you all in ‘Engrish’;

It wishes deeply that the Christmas be of love.
That big laugh be of many and various.
It also wishes that the food items it takes be much good.
Drink is of important too.
But of most important it is the imagination that is of number one it is thinking.
Such imagination is free and its uses various.
Of small people imagination is of big size.
Keep big and make good imagination wherever you go.
It is no money.
The Santa san becomes of happy big smile at the time the use of imagination and all its various by-products.
Please be making happy.

My dear friend Martine, who’s blog is a regular read of mine and inspired my own, recently posted one of the daily comics from ‘xkcd : A webcomic of Romance, Sarcasm, Math and Language’. Sarcasm, ah, apparently the lowest form of wit. I found the comic above on about my 20th click, obviously set in America but totally relevant to Australia nonetheless. Martine’s previous post “Fucking big laugh loud on train”(do yourself a favour and read the comments on that post). had already sent me chuckling to myself as it explained how fun it can be to create your own ‘engrish’ when texting your friends keitai. ‘Engrish‘ usually being the product of direct translations through poor translation software on the internet.

Sarcasm, Engrish and the comic above made me think about John Howard. Let me explain.
A recent article I read online “New plan no problem for ‘fair dinkum’ migrants: Howard” had me rolling my eyes so hard I got a headache. Apparently it is of the utmost importance that all migrants learn english, the language of this country apparently, asap or get out.
This is my response to this in ‘engrish’:
It be not happy. It thinking Jonu Howarudo be of much big feeling of strange and confused. It be thinking to that the brain is of very small in size. It be lacking in the touch with reality. The country that is of big size and many kangaroo has many people from foreign land. This be much good, this be make for interesting life. We be talking many words but we be understanding, it makes for big fun.
The language of that you be speaking of important, it be coming from country of same name. English land. If every person communication be same, you be making “big boredom”, you be saying the ‘fair dinkum’ but this be making me big confused. It wonders why you talk the riddle. ‘Fair dinkum‘ be from Chinese immigrant of most likely… English it be? It be thinking not. And the many kangaroo I be seeing that do big jumping… ‘Kangaroo’ English it be? It be not. Kangaroo meaning in the Aboriginal “I don’t know” it is…..I think Jonu need to be saying “kangaroo” many times from now.

Three years is a long time. It’s a long time in human years, a third of your life for your average dog and the average cat well ….
On Melbourne Cup Day seven years ago I brought home a teeny brown Abyssinian kitten I named Sienna Neko. She entertained us with her cute and strange mannerisms, she ran up walls and flipped backwards off them, chased super balls and brought them back and played hide and seek with me around corners… scaring the bejeezuz out of each other when we jumped out from behind the corner, then she would snuggle up under the covers with me and keep me warm at nights. Ah, those were the days….

Nevertheless all good things come to an end, this end being when she was shipped off to the in-laws when I left for Japan. She, I was reassured, was being well looked after. This I didn’t doubt, and still don’t.
As it turns out she was well looked after VERY well looked after indeed.
When I left Sienna she was tipping the scales at an average four kilos, I picked her up yesterday and she is now…..wait for it……… eight and a half kilos!!!

Carrying her in the cat cage to the car I had to lean sideways to compensate for the additional weight all the time fearing the plastic hand would snap and she would land with a heavy thud to the ground and escape. I was relatively confident I would have no trouble chasing her though.
She has also gained quite a considerable ‘tude’ with the weight. She will be happily purring away and then suddenly hiss and snarl at you. It’s like she has some kind of feline form of tourettes.
She is also so fat (sounds like the start of a bad joke) that she can’t clean herself, this means she has a mass of dreadlocks on her back (not funny). Nothing some light sedative and a pair of clippers won’t fix, however there is only one thing uglier than a really fat cat and that’s a really fat cat naked.

The diet started today, so far she has slept in the beanbag for about 10 hours …….wish me luck.
See before and after photos below (no explanation needed).

Aaah! I do hate these kind of questions. Is Illustration dead? I certainly hope not! Damn I just found a style and a passion for something and suddenly it’s validity is being questioned.
This question was recently featured on the forum of Illustration Mundo.

My problems with this question are these two things ; Firstly, won’t it become a self-fulfillling prophecy if we choose to answer in the affirmative? Secondly, should we question it at all? In my research over the last few months I have found 100’s if not 1000’s of successful illustrators from all over the world and, I might add, doing some incredibly amazing work in all kinds of mediums. I do agree that there seems to be alot more photography in use in advertising, especially here in Australia. As an example of this it has taken me almost 3 months to find a printer that can produce archival quality prints (giclee) on a variety of papers and not just a colour strip, as is used when producing digital prints of photographs, thankfully not only that but he has a brilliant eye for colour and gave me a very thoughtful critique of my work.

So, there is very little regular, well paid, interesting work for freelance illustrators out there wanting to be challenged and they have to work days doing a ‘real’ job…. eh! News flash! I may be fairly new to this gig but I’m not that naive! Was there ever copious amounts of interesting, well paid, challenging work out there?
I don’t see any illustrators names on the worlds rich list that’s for sure.

So if illustration is indeed surely dead then what does an illustrator do, sharpen his/her pencils, stare at the wall and wait for something else to come along or go down fighting and pimp yourself like mad on MySpace?
It might be my fashion background talking but maybe it’s just out of fashion for now, all that crazy work in the 70’s that was imprinted on my childhood brain had to end somewhere, but it does appear to be spewing out of the brains of creative 30 somethings now. I don’t think Illustration is dead, she’s just resting her eyes, meditating, calm before the storm style.
Stop asking questions and start drawing I say!

Today I woke up to an overcast and hazy yellow sky… making me quite nostalgic for my old hometown of Chiba, Japan.
It was not, however, due to the fact that I live amongst steel factories in the Northern hemisphere. Instead it was due to the fact that fires have been burning in Eastern Victoria for over a week now and the wind is bringing the smoke back to us once again. Apparently the haze that covered Melbourne last Saturday was, according to the EPA, Melbourne’s most polluted day in history. People were advised to stay inside and many asthma sufferers, mostly children, were overcome by the smoke that permeated everything.
This and the water restrictions now in force, which has me bucketing my ’shower water’ onto our plants, is making for a rather inconvenient summer.
I had so looked forward to the following things when anticipating my return to Australia; clean air, clean water and a bright blue sky. (Sigh)

Now I hate to get all, “When I was that age I never did that….” but my return to Western “civilization”? this year and some of the things I have experienced involving ‘young ones’ (a friend of my parents used to refer to us kiddies with this label when I was younger….and probably still does) has led me to ponder on the subject of childhood and the point at which it ends. It would seem that age is no longer a prerequisite for the following:
Wearing deodorant - my 8 year old niece will not leave home without it, apparently she has a sticky note attached to said deodorant saying “Do not touch, must use everyday”.
Shouting out rude remarks to strangers - on my daily walk around “The burg” I pass a primary school, on one occasion three boys, aged about 8 years old was my guess, shouted out “Nice Ass!” as I passed by… now I am not questioning the accuracy of this comment as my rear, in my opinion, is in fact rather nice, however I do not condone this behavior from a adult let alone an 8 year old child!
This one however takes the cake! In the early hours of this morning a 12-year-old self-taught driver went out looking for boys in her grandmother’s car and led police on a brief chase that reached 110kmh in a 60kmh zone. Read more here.
Apparently when apprehended she exclaimed ‘I’m just taking grandma’s car for a spin to meet up with some boys’. HUH! (ed)
Now please tell me, am I overreacting here, am I a prude, have a lost touch with the youth of today?
All I know is all of this makes me feel really old.

As I miss my Japanese TV so, so, so very much I find myself searching for episodes of my old favourites (ie: The Fountain of Trivia, Gakko Eko and Wakuwaku Doubutsu Land). I have written about ‘Fountain of Trivia’ before in my previous blog.. can’t get enough of that stuff. Great for those uncomfortable silences at dinner parties, eg: “Did you know that Salvador Dali designed the logo for Chupa Chups?” or “When you pull out a nose hair, your tears come only from the eye on that side?” You can’t tell me that won’t get people talking!

As is the nature of the internet in my travels I have found alot of obscure stuff, including this one entitled Funny Japanese Kid. Thought I would share it with you. If you listen real close in the last few frames I think you can even hear his tiny heart breaking. Kawaii so da ne!

Ah, summer in Melbourne. Hot asphalt, north winds and now … water restrictions. Stage 2. Joy.
Apparently my sister in law and two nieces went for a walk down the street the other day and AI2 (my youngest niece) spied a sprinkler in the front yard of someone’s house. “Oooh, look they have a fountain Mama!” …. AI2 is four years old, this misplacement of nouns was due to the fact that she has never in her life seen a sprinkler and so had no idea what to call it. Long gone are the days when my brothers and I would dance ‘nuddy’ under the sprinkler on a hot summers day.

In other news, entered two works, “Tanabata” (see pic) and “Momotaro”, to an exhibition at Intrude gallery last week. The exhibition entitled “Summer Samples”, is an open show and as long as the works were all under 22 x 22 cm they were included in the show. Not easy to find frames of this size, but I ended up finding them in one of the many 70’s style malls in “the burg”. The frames are strangling the works but it was the best I could do.

In an effort to move into a new phase of creation I have abandoned my previous blog “Curiouser and curiouser”, however if you are new to this blog and find what I have to say remotely entertaining you may want to view previous posts. If so feel free to head on over here.
Insert random cute picture here…..

The original Kewpie was created based on the original illustrations by Rose O’Neill, in the mid 1910’s, I have been a huge fan of these little dolls ever since I received my first Kewpie doll in the early seventies when I was a toddler, it came with a small Kewpie sized baby bath and sponge, often I would even wash my little brothers hair and scoop it up ‘Kewpie style’ with the shampoo froth. I didn’t really question the existence of the Kewpie or ask where it came from …it just was.

Whilst living in Japan and shopping around I noticed this cute little doll in many toy stores, aisles of them in fact. I even found one that had to be at least four foot high, I also noticed the Kewpie icon on several condiments in my local supa…the company being Kewpie Mayonnaise…. producer of the most delicious mayonnaise in the world (in my opinion). Of course, being Japan, this character was integral in the marketing and promotion of the products they had on offer and new toys were constantly being designed and limited editions released as part of promotion. Tarako being the most recent phenomenon.

What I didn’t know however, is that apparently Kewpies were the first case ever of merchandising based on a comic character. Incredible is it not? Rose O’Neill is credited with writing more than 5000 kewpie stories for magazines and with the subsequent creation of the first Kewpie toys (made of celluliod) they soon made her both rich and famous. This got me thinking…

Now, nearly 100 years later, thousands of designers are now turning their illustrated characters into merchandise through companies like ‘Flying Cat’ , craft blogs proliferate the web with women making ’softies’ and other merchandise, and it seems now to be taken for granted that illustration to merchandise is the next logical step for many of these creators. Even as consumers I am sure most people don’t question this phenomen too often either, and if you did I am guessing most people would have suspected Disney or another equally large corporation, most probably Japanese, to be the instigator of all this character merchandising.

I also recently read some statistics, did not bookmark the page however, on the internet that said that over 90% of the illustrators doing character design for merchandising in Japan are women…. interesting, ne!

To come full circle however I found this Japanese toy company, Buildup, on my travels recently and that’s what began this whole sojourn back into Kewpie land. See pic.

They have redesigned the Kewpie, naming them pikew’s, and given each an equally un-cute affliction. What would Rose say?