Don’t know too much about Japanese artist Shohei Otomo except that his work is utterly amazing and he does it all in ball point pen. He mixes traditional and contemporary themes in his drawings successfully. A lot of modern Asian art mixes old themes with modern/western images and a lot of it is simply mundane. For example the image of Chairman Mao eating at McDonalds in a painting in China is a little worn out but you still see similar images all the time. Shohei Otomo’s images are hard line, high contrast drawings and the impact is stunning sometimes. He often leaves much of the drawing surface blank and nestles his finely detailed illustration in the center. Other times he fills in the page with painstakingly drawn imagery. He dabbles in Henati and Manga themes and other times takes traditional Ukiyo-e wood cut themes and warps them around a bit. A couple of the images are fairly adult in themes and at least one I was just not comfortable uploading to the site. I used to do some drawing and preferred the pen and ink medium. When I see work like this I have an ambivalent mixture of  inspiration and despair. On the one hand I want to suddenly draw something again and on the other I become more resolved to never pick up an ink pen again. His site called Hakuchi is here and it is in Japanese but easy enough to navigate or just translate using Google.

MORE SHOHEI OTOMO HERE >>

TODAY’S SEXY ACTION PACKED ADVENTURES FROM NIPPON:

GIRL BOSS GUERILLA w/ CRIMINAL WOMAN-KILLING MELODY

MORE PINKY VIOLENCE RIGHT HERE >>

Got these files in as PDFs and edited them using my trusty Fastsone Image Editor. Not really sure what the title would translate as. I think it is ‘Young Animal’ but it is Japanese and I speak and read zip thereof. There is a website connected to these two magazines at http://www.younganimal.com and I checked it out and it is not, I promise, any sort of bestiality site. If it had any such connection, even remotely, the site or the books would not be here. The images below are not nude images and fall not a type of photography form from Japan called gravure. The word can refer to a printing process or, more in line with the ‘research’ done for this post,  to a type of modeling in Japan where the models pose in usually non-nude shoots. The style ranges in its scope from modeling cosmetic products and fashion wear to borderline porn. The models have the appearance of being nymphets at best. This sort of modeling has spread across across Asia as the standard practically for product promotion. The recurring themes seems to be a coquettish nature mixed with the Japanese penchant for cosplay scenarios. The magazines have the initial appearance of being aimed at teenage girl readers and in fact a certain percentage of the readership are young girls reading the fashion tips and looking for models to imitate. But there seems to be no secret that the bulk of the readership is made of slimy old guys, er, who like looking at girls, um, in bikinis on a ski slope. The lack of nudity keeps the magazine out of the pornography category technically but there is something even more titillating about the non-nude images. One more reason why Japan is the greatest culture in all of Asia. All the girls in the magazine are over 18 as far as I can tell from the web site.

MORE ‘YOUNG ANIMALS’ HERE >>

Here are some selections from the album Teenage Mojo Workout by the surf/rock-a-billy style girl band from Tokyo called The 5,6,7,8’s. So named because they focus their sound on music from the 50’s to 80’s. The core of the band are sisters Sachiko on drums on and Yoshiko (aka Ronnie) Fujiyama on guitar and lead vocals though the girls often take turns wailing into the mic. There have been some lineup changes as far as bass goes but Akiko Yomo has filled the slot since the 1990’s. The band has a garage sound and Quentin Tarantino used them in his Kill Bill film during the House of Blue Leaves sequence. The sound is definitely raw but it is a side of Japanese music I welcome over the sappy J-Pop stuff you hear all over Asia these days. American culture, with good reason, has been more noticable in Japan than any other Asian culture. This is for better or worse and there is a strong fascination with good ol’ Yankee kitsch in Japan that is noticeably absent from countries like China. Their album covers are clever take offs of old 60’s covers by girl bands like the Ronnettes. The songs are usually sung in Japanese but sometimes in a pretty rough English that you will either love or hate. Part of the band’s underground success is their appearance and attitudes. They stay in character most of the time off stage and they sport teenage-deb type tattoos. The gals all typically wear  groovy retro hairdos and rolled up blue jeans or  sleek leather outfits. And hell they’re just cool Japanese chicks so that is a super plus no matter how crumby their songs are. Not for everyone’s taste and that is why there are here at The Uranium Café. More 60′s style Japanese pop music coming in the future.

TEENAGE MOJO WORKOUT

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HARLEM SHUFFLE

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GREEN ONIONS

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HOW TO DOWNLOAD AND SAVE AUDIO/VISUAL FILES FROM THE URANIUM CAFE:
If you want to download and save an audio (or even video) file this is the easiest way to do it:
1) Use Mozilla Firefox
2) Install any number of add-ons that capture Flash Media. I use Fast Video Download. It is straight forward and easy.
3) Play the file let it buffer a bit then click on FVD in your status bar and select the file then rename it after the download completes.

HORRORS OF MALFORMED MENK (Kyôfu Kikei Ningen)

1969/Director: Teruo Ishii/Writers: Teruo Ishii, Masahiro Kakefuda

Cast: Teruo Yoshida, Yukie Kagawa, Teruko Yumi, Mitsuko Aoi

I have been delving back into Japanese cinema of the 60’s and 70’s and focusing on the Pinky Violence variety as well as the b/w noir style films by people like Seijun Suzuki. I have a few films here by director Teru Iishi but had yet to get around to watching one all the way through. I mean I tend to skim over these things for quality assurance purposes before burning them a disk then deleting the files from my hard-drive. I think I have Blind Beast vs. Killer Dwarf, Female Yakuza Tale, Blind Woman’s curse and the focus of this review The Horrors of Malformed Men. I will have to confess something here. I often have no clue as to the history of many of these before I download or that the above films were even all by the same director until I began doing some research for this review. I may download a film simply because I like the title or the poster art and screen captures. I will skim over the review to get some idea of when it was made and what other work the director was involved with then decide whether to use up my bandwidth and hard-drive space with the download. Usually any Japanese film made from the late 50’t to mid 70’s has a better than 50/50 chance of getting downloaded in the first place. So when I saw the review snippets about the Horrors of Malformed Men and how it was banned in its own country for some forty years and never released on VHS I was thoroughly enticed.  My first thought was how freaky could the film be in order to be banned in Japan of all places. Well the lure of a film made in 1969 Japan being banned for so long is something I personally cannot resist but there is actually a slight catch to the banned aspect of this film.

MORE OF THE HORRORS OF MALFORMED MEN HERE >>

TODAY’S AMAZING FEATURE:

THE GREEN SLIME

ENTER HERE TO SEE THE GREEN SLIME >>

TODAY’S THRILLING TOHO FREATURE:

MATANGO-ATATCK OF THE MUSHROOM PEOPLE

SEE THE ISHIRO HONDA CLASSIC MATANGO HERE >>