Yes, Yoshihiko is a blow-up doll of Hulk Hogan. The match lasted over 20 minutes. And it is A-MAZ-ING. Ibushi somehow manages to give himself a piledriver!

Yoshihiko’s gimmick is that he appears as blow-up doll versions of various professional wrestling personalities. Here is another funny match with him.

In case you didn’t know: woodblock prints involve carving a block of wood for EACH color. So a ten-color print (including black but excluding white) takes ten separate woodblocks to print. And these prints are generally no larger than an 8.5″ × 11″ piece of paper. So the carving work is incredibly intricate. It’s also a fascinating process in that practically off of the prints are commissioned by a publisher who hires the artist to draw something. Once the publisher approves the drawing (and the colors), it’s handed over to the carvers who do the actual carving work. Then the prints are mass-produced and sold, sometimes bound in a volume, especially the “series” works (like the 100 Famous Views of Edo and Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji series (which contains “The Great Wave off Kanagawa“) of prints). So it was really a commerce-driven industry, not artist-driven.

I got this swell postcard!

After leaving the museum, we swung by the Fulcrum Gallery in Hilltop to see their latest exhibition, “Seasonal Affective” by Sean Alexander. Mr. Alexander (who has a very sparse website) suffers from seasonal affective disorder (which is pretty common here in the Northwest), and allows it to inform his art. His artwork is intensively, minutely detailed with excruciating and teeny-tiny linework. Like this postcard I picked up at the gallery:

So if for some reason you find yourself in the area during Fulcrum’s business hours, you should definitely pop in and look at them up close. And then after that I came back home.

That’s (counter-clockwise from left) teriyaki salmon, sauteéd spinach with salami and onions, and cucumber sunomono. What’s sunomono, you ask, and how do I know how to make it? EXCELLENT QUESTION! I learned all about it from my good pal’s new Japanese food blog, Cooking Japan.

Here’s the recipe! It’s absurdly simple to make, and it tastes frikkin’ fantastic. It’s light and cool and crisp, perfect for a hot summer day, and it goes great with teriyaki.

I really wanna make the salmon miso-yaki and the salt-broiled salmon.

I especially love the tiny time-lapse helicopter that appears briefly around the 2:55 mark. So adorable—like a tiny dragonfly!

Here I’m going to round-up a big random heaping of things I’ve found interesting recently. Artists, websites, musics, games, whatever. In random order:

Michaela Eaves

I saw her at a studio open house where she had some paintings and prints out for display. I really dug the way her paintings have heavy outlines, and the way the lines break up the colors in such a way that her paintings almost look like stained glass.

She also had an adorable painting of a rocket ship, done in a soft, children’s book style of painting. I dug it, but I can’t find a picture on her website (which is mostly about her graphic design & illustration business):
www.michaelaeaves.com

8-Bit Jesus

I thought this was pretty spectacular. Not only did Doctor Octoroc (sic) make 8-bit chiptune versions of many Christmas songs for his album 8-Bit Jesus, but he also wrote them in the specific styles of various 8-bit video games. My favorites are definitely “Carol of the Belmonts,” “Bubbles We Have Heard on High,” and “8 Days of Master Robots,” which very excellently captures the essence of the Mega Man experience. Also, “Icarus! The Herald Angels Sing” is quite accurate. Check it out:
http://www.doctoroctoroc.com/8BitJesus/

Machinarium

Machinarium is a beautifully done, old-style, point-and-click adventure video game, unbelievably done entirely in Flash. I like it ’cause it’s about robots. But more than that, the world is completely enthralling, and the puzzles all involve robot logic more than real-world logic.

The art style is pretty much spectacular. You can play a demo for free, or buy and download the full version here:
http://machinarium.net/

Kaiju Dance to Thriller

Just what the title says: a bunch of Kaiju dance to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.”

Wonder Woman Pumps

This woman takes shoes and tastefully collages them with pages from Wonder Woman comic books. She tends to use mostly monochromatic images, so the effect is a little subtler than you might expect.

She has an etsy shop where she makes all kinds of shoes and boots (not just Wonder Woman):
http://www.etsy.com/shop/Pachainkapink

Regurgitated Thanksgiving Dinner Scarf

Taisha McGee sells what she calls “Ugly Scarves.” They’re mostly actually quite pretty, but she nevertheless gives them hilarious names based loosely on their color schemes, names like “Mulched Roses,” “Tidy Bowl,” “Moldy Cheese,” “Mushy Froot Loops,” and my favorite, “Regurgitated Thanksgiving Dinner.” She also has the sense of humor to take photos of the scarves wrapped around a cardboard stand-up of John Wayne. Bravo!

Check them all out at her etsy shop:
http://www.etsy.com/shop/TaishaMcGee

Alexis St.John

An artist whose work I saw in a tea shop in Downtown Tacoma (Mad Hat Tea, 1130 Commerce Street) and I liked the humor and simplicity in it. I also really appreciated how most of the paintings were really small; a lot of ‘em were only like 6″ × 6″, and I don’t think anything of hers gets over 20″ in any direction.

You can buy the actual artwork, of if you’d prefer you can buy frameable prints of it.
http://alexisstjohn.com/Gallery.html

TheSixtyOne

TheSixtyOne.com is a fascinating idea for a democratic music website, where the more people like a song the more popular it becomes, and ANYONE can upload ANY song they’ve created (as long as they’re legally allowed to blah, blah, blah, y’know).

Not only that, but it turns listening to music into kind of an RPG. You gain experience (called “reputation”) and rise in levels. There are quests (like “Listen to 7 recently-uploaded songs” or “Listen to the radio stations of 5 other people for 5 minutes each”) that let you earn experience and “hearts,” which you can use to mark a song as a favorite (i.e., you heart the song). And you also earn experience as other people later heart songs that you previously hearted. The more reputation you have, the more likely other people are to listen to your opinions (in theory at least). So you get tangible rewards for finding new, unheard songs that you really like and then getting other people to like them as well, other than the reward of discovering good music.

Also, TheSixtyOne.com is the only place right now where you can hear Taisha’s musc (yes, the same Taisha that makes those scarves). Just go here:
http://www.thesixtyone.com/taisha/

A Very Alan Thickemas

THE Alan Thicke, Leeni, and puppets. Lots and lots of puppets. And Blake Lewis is somehow involved. It exists, I just have no idea of how to see it. Other than these:

That’s about it for now.

Well, the awexomeness continues. You see, a new film called Watashi Dasuwa recently premiered at the Tokyo International Film Festival. It was shot on location in Hakodate. It’s a low-key drama about a woman returning to Hakodate to spread the wealth she made in Tokyo.

The Hakodate tourism board got their hands on the trailer and made some improvements. Take a look:

I mean, seriously, come on! Why can’t any American cities have this much fun and sense of humor when it comes to their tourism promotion? Las Vegas is as close as we get, I guess, but there are no alien squids or giant robots or spaceships in any of their tourism videos or commercials!

Here’s a bonus of an alien squid dancing at a streetcar that’s advertising the movie:

U900 is a Japanese ukulele duo. I heart this video.

Ponyo is a beautiful film that haunted and disturbed me at a very profound level. It is one of the more frightening horror films I’ve seen in ages due in good part to the fact that it’s aimed at children. Yes, that’s right; Miyazaki made a horror movie for children. [Read my full review]