Monday, February 24, 2014

Where are we?

Kia ora, guys! (just google)

We arrived to Auckland  and having a jet lag and a cultural shock after Tokyo. The first impression was like "Too many aggressive extroverts. People on the streets want something from you? *Brain collapses*". However, i'm feeling better today (is it because i haven't gone outside yet?), and it already seems to me that things are going to be ok in the nearest future (and the whole perspective looks pretty good). I mean, look at this new zealand passport holders visa requirements map!




My mornings will start (earlier than Boyfriend's which is nice, i don't like to/just can't sleep more then 5-6 hours) with a coffee to go, gum and a long-long walk up/down hills to my university. I compare my ~passion~ to coffee and gum to drinking alcohol / smoking cigarettes habits. I especially like chewing gum when i drink coffee, like some people smoke only when they drink duh. I even suspect that i chew gum in the same situations as smoking person would reach for a cigarette.

My first day as a Fine Arts student is tomorrow, so when just arrived, we went to look at what our places of study look like. Here's our favorite spot:

The clock tower (Old Arts Building) on the City campus

And here's the emblem of the University of Auckland: kiwi! stars! book with a cute cover!


Truth is, there's always been a problem between me and socialization. Even if i don't find anyone who i could be friends with, it would be perfectly fine if i could just stay by myself. The problem is that people don't usually leave you alone. They start asking you questions/making fun of you + you risk to be remembered/treated as a creep. And that's just how every public educational institution work, *sigh*.

Anyway, tomorrow i'll officially be a student, so today i want to write about another favorite artist of mine (it's supposed to help me not to feel nervous so much) whose art Boyfriend showed me when i first came to his apartment. 

DINO VALLS

i realized, i saw his work once when i was 15 but i didn't know who the author was and there was no google picture search back then. 



His skills is the first thing people talk about when they talk about Dino Valls. Actually, it often upsets me when I see attractive ideas but the technique is lacking. For example, all Shintaro Kago's drawings from the "Art of Shintaro Kagoseries (we have two complete collections of these little albums ^_^). He has several good looking posters, but the drawings from his albums are just 10-minutes sketches.

And sometimes, there's nothing but good skills which I also find depressing.

Dino Valls is nothing like that. He's a full set. He's flawless. I adore how he decided to imitate the techniques from the 15-17 centuries. He even uses egg tempera!





From now on I'll call myself a pagan, but only artists will be my gods.

Monday, February 17, 2014

Pink pigtails

Almost three years ago I bought my first pink wig. I came to a fancy dresses shop with a girlfriend and saw it and put it on and fell in love with it. But! I had no money, so I needed..


"MUM! I WANT A PINK WIG! MUM!"


hehe (¬ ‿ ¬) 

However, there were several problems with it:
  • I had long hair, and there was almost no space under the wig to fit them underneath.
  • I couldn't make pink braids, because the wig wasn't long enough.
  • It was getting too uncomfortable after several hours of wearing it.
And then ideas started to pop into my mind. Should I dye my hair pink? But how about ~all natural~ thing? Moreover, I'll probably damage my hair. And I also will need to dye my hair roots every two weeks.  So, I'd been postponing it for a v long time.


It was November 12 when I tweeted about my "future plans": 
  • pink hair!
  • braces!
  • new rollers skates (I hope, they have size 39)!


But then again, I was scared. Boyfriend told me to think well about it, but he also said he will be ok with it if I decide to finally dye them.

We came to his favorite hair salon, where he always does his haircut, and asked them to dye my hair pink and pointed to the pink sampler they gave to us. They dyed my hair, they did. But what they did NOT do was bleach my dark blond hair first. I cried so hard when I saw the result, I didn't want to take off my beanie. I couldn't understand why, but Boyfriend liked my new hair. I still wanted to cry (and at the first time did) every time I passed the mirror though. 

Here's a picture from the after-halloween morning (I'm a rilakkuma girlfriend, if you didn't get it), you can see my i-don't-even-know-how-to-call-this-colour hair:


A couple of months passed when I woke up one Monday morning and told Boyfriend straight away: "I want my hair pink! But, like, for real this time."

We came to that salon again, but this time I took a picture with me, and Boyfriend made sure they understood that they need to bleach me first.


Bleached! Boyfriend said I looked like this (◕‿◕✿):

Everything seemed ok, so when Boyfriend said he needed to go, I said "Alright, you can go." He double checked that the colour I was going to be dyed was pink ("this is a pink hair-dye, right?") and then he left.

AND THE NIGHTMARE BEGAN. They dyed my hair, then washed it several times with shampoo and all the other things, and then I looked at myself in the mirror and saw this:


You know, there's this infinite question "Why do old women dye their hair purple?". Obv, I don't know the answer, but what I know is that I saw a purple-dyed granny for the first time in Moscow when I was 4. And the last I saw a purple-dyed granny was not so long ago in Tokyo. They're everywhere, it's not a myth!

When it was time to blow-dry my new hair, the owner of the salon came to me.
"So.. you think it's not pink?"  
WHAT? IS IT A JOKE? "Well, it's purple, it's grey, but it's definitely not pink, right." 
"Oh, it's because we didn't have a pink hair-dye, we only had this one, but your hairdresser thought it'll be ok." 
WHAT? WHAT'S WRONG WITH YOU? WHY DIDN'T YOU TELL US THIS BEFORE YOU DAMAGED MY HAIR, YOU BITCH? "Oh." 
"You can come here every day, and we'll try to wash this colour off, and then we'll dye your hair pink on Friday when we receive the right hair-dye." 
WHAT? YOU KNEW YOU DIDN'T HAVE THE RIGHT HAIR-DYE, YOU KNEW IT'LL ONLY COME ON FRIDAY, BUT YOU DYED MY HAIR THE WRONG COLOUR ANYWAY?! "..." 
"You know my number? Call me and tell what time will be convenient for you." 
BITCH BITCH BITCH BITCH. "mmrrhmr" 
"Here, take this shampoo, it's a present from my salon! Call me!"
She even sent us a letter in english:


To Mikhail Svetov and GirlFriend:
"I'm Tagawa Misako. TimTagawa (the name of the hair salon) chief. 
This time is very sorry. 
Please you call me Friday.
Because, I work outside studio Aoyama on Wednesday and Thursday.
If Mikhail calls me on Wednesday or Thursday OK.
Because Mikhail speaks Japanese.
Please, call us. We'll wait your call us."
Of course, we never called.

"Why why why is this happening to me? What's wrong with this place?!" I got on a train and hurried to meet Boyfriend.
"Neeeeh .·´`(>▂<)´`·."
"What is it? What's wrong? I wasn't able to go online.""Look what they did to my hair! I look like a little granny!""... What happened? Why did they do this to you?""Neeeeh .·´`(>▂<)´`·." 
It was almost 8pm. Harajuku. Boyfriend was as angry as I was sad.
"Choose a place, and we'll go there, wash this granny-colour off and make it pink, ok?"
But it wasn't that easy. My hair were bleached and dyed an hour ago, and there was only one way to make them pink  bleach them again and then dye them again. How will my hair look like after all this?

We came to a hair salon in front of our gym, and Boyfriend explained the situation to the stuff. They said they'll try their best, cut off a lock of my hair (to try different kinds of dyeing) and asked us to come the next day.

The hairdressers were no less than magicians. They didn't dye me again but tried to wash the purple off with a special shampoo. Then, they dyed it pink without letting my hair dry, to make them light pink, as I asked.


I tried hard not to burst into tears right on the chair, because I was worried that the stuff will misapprehend the situation.

Now, my hair have a perfect shade of pink (lots of shades actually, because some locks still remained purple), not damaged at all. And I now can make pink pigtails! Because why to dye hair if not to make varicoloured pigtails!

P.S. Hmm.. This incident at the first hair salon. it's still a mystery for us, what happened there. Why, keeping in mind that they didn't have the right hair dye, they said they had it and dyed my hair purple? I know about this japanese feature not to tell the bad news till the dead end. For instance, a japanese guy won't tell you he can't go to Disneyland with you on  this weekend. When the time will come, he'd rather ask you to postpone it for a week and the next weekend he'll tell you that he won't go, apologizing a lot. Never mind, that every one would've win if he'd told that he can't do it right away. Was the situation the same with that hair salon? I will never know. But my hair are finally pink (no more purple/violet no no) and you'll see more pictures of my pink pigtails on instagram soon. OINK!

P.P.S. Another hair-dye colour I like as much as pink is Coraline's blue!

(I don't think it'll look good on me though. At least I have the same yellow gumboots as her!)

Sunday, February 16, 2014

STOKER / TIDELAND / LAWN DOGS

The most frequent question I get, along with "what's wrong with you?", is "can you send me this list of your favorite movies about girls?" The answer is always "er ok", however, every time this question appears in my ask box (or wherever else), I think of finally starting to write about them here.

I'm a kind of person who enjoys watching somebody's (especially girls') stories, to observe their behaviors, to mark their oddities etc. That's why I can rewatch movies countless times without getting bored once they become my favorites. I like to literally "learn how to live" from the protagonists of this movies. I'm a bunch of girls.

The first three movies are about not-really-mentally-normal girls?

s t o k e r



Young girl + her uncle appearing from nowhere =
cannibalism, piano lessons, saddle shoes and ice-cream


How cool is that Chan Wook Park, aka the director of the Oldboy, was the one who got the screenplay out of the "Black List" of best unproduced screenplays and directed it by himself turning it to eye candy!


So, India Stoker loses her father whom she was very attached to, and had no choice but to live with her kinda crazy mother. Then, the uncle Charlie appears, and the fun begins. They're now partners in crime (but literally), they eat people's flesh together, play piano together, she masturbates on how he murders her schoolmate with the belt, and then she enters the game.

p.s. she could be really good pals with Kevin (from the "We need to talk about Kevin") .

Also:

Good point, especially when you advocates the legalization of shooting/selling/buying pornography.

t i d e l a n d


A twelvie + drug addicted parents (dead) = hanging with retarded strangers in the company of the talking barbie heads and squirrels


The most disturbing movie with a little girl as a protagonist I've ever watched. Although, the film made me feel strange/confused/depressed, after thinking over it for a couple of days (or weeks, i can't really remember as I watched it a long time ago) I realized that I'm in awe and rated it 8 (= "wow i like it!").

The main character is a twelvie named Jeliza-Rose, a daughter of the drug addicts who die leaving her at her own. However, she doesn't realize that her father is dead even when he begins to decompose (I warned ya!), and continues spending her days chatting with the barbie heads and squirrels until she meets her autistic neighbor and his witch-like sister. Boom. Adventure time.


p.s. i like this "movie experience" review, 90% agree:
I have never been so terrorized while watching a movie. The tension in this film is so greatly created but it makes you want to leap out of your seat, dash down the aisle, and never think about kissing again. I felt the need to take a long, hot shower after this film, as it left almost a pile of dirt on each my shoulders. 
When coming out of movies, I can usually express right away the emotional turnout the film provided but this left me bewildered, stunned, shocked, more adjectives. 
The art direction was probably some of the most beautiful I've seen, but it's hard to appreciate a film when you keep turning away and groaning in agony at what could happen next. I suggest seeing the film, as it is masterfully done and quite beautiful, but be prepared to be repulsed and saddened by all that you see.

l a w n  d o g s



An odd 10 years old from a wealthy family a poor lawn guy living in the woods escaping from reality


The film is about listening to what this little girl, Devon Stockard, has to say and watch all the things she thinks she has to do, whether it's putting a fly on a cookie instead of a raisin,  or urinating on a windshield of a car, or howling at the full moon on the rooftop naked, or walking down the road shoeless.


This movie is also about being an outcast labeled "trash" and treated respectively, living life in a trailer in the woods aka Baba Yaga house (Devon said it!) and not being able to afford anything but afterwork beer. Everything will be ok though, she will help the guy to escape from his life even if the help of the gun will be needed.


All three films are about exchanging. Girls vs Men. They open something in each other, show each other things they didn't know before. And it's the most beautiful thing from both points of view. A little girl giving a man something he was missing. A man realizing he purely enjoys spending time with a girl without feeling bored.

These films were rated R (Restricted. Children under 17 require accompanying parent or adult guardian), by the way. Cruelty, disturbance, violence,  offensive language. Why to show your kids all that when you can just throw them to school! I got it. But also: you're wrong.

Tuesday, February 4, 2014

wonderfest! [ T O K Y O ]

photo by valkorn

Wonderfest is a place where you can buy the coolest plastic characters you won't be able to see anywhere else. I'll explain. So, Wonderfest is an event which is held twice a year (s/w) in Tokyo, and it only lasts for a day. This day is v important for plastic figures creators as it's their only opportunity to show and sell their works without being fined for the copyright violation. They can create any characters they want without having any rights to, but only these two days a year.

The next Wonderfest is on February, 9th (i.e. next Sunday), and I'll be there for four different reasons:

1. The figures that will be sold there are unique, just because it's prohibited by law to sell most of them anywhere outside the festival.
2. There's a great possibility that it won't be garbage, because it's a place where the chairmen of the big corporations search for talented people to hire.
3. There will be tons of adorable cosplayers there!
4. I need to buy something cute.

I'll go there for the first time next Sunday, so obv I have no pictures to show you. But I know the one who can! Or rather, I know the one whose pictures I can show you. I got interested in this festival after I saw these Valkorn's pictures:





So my point is that everyone from Tokyo who reads me should better be there on February 9th!

Here you'll find more detailed information (admission price/open hours). And here's the exact address in English:

2-1, Nakase, Mihama-ku, Chiba-shi, Chiba-ken 261-0023

I hope, you all will have a great weekend no matter where you spend it (except if you're a socialist)!