Podcast: Hot Tears of Shame - Episode Twenty-Five

Podcast: Hot Tears of Shame -
Episode #25

Patrick Macias and W. David Marx chill out in Westwood during the J-WAVE USA conference at UCLA by eating "Cool Japan" for lunch. Just when the irony can't get any thicker, the ground cracks open and Paris Hilton and her gang of paparazzi emerge to rudely interrupt the recording process!

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© Hot Tears of Shame Production Committee/jaPRESS Entertainment

Opening "album teaser" by Marxy

Comments

[wildarmsheero]

Hah, Marxy and I share the same blogging philosophy! Make people mad!

[Logan]

Fantastic conversation, guys. My take:

I had some friends who wanted to take a trip to Japan and see "cool" stuff. I actually put my recommendations in the Glossy Japan Cool paper holder you have in the pic up top.

What is so "cool" for me about that glossy is you have Japan trying to figure out what it is that these crazy foreigners think is so cool about Akihabara and Harajuku and "whatever else" it is - and getting it completely wrong!!!

So they up end with this ridiculous red shag rug Puffy is standing on, and the bird and the feather, and the Hokusai print, and Mt. Fuji, and whatever else they can think of, and just sort of hope it hits the mark, right?

It is almost as if Japan, the established society, is furrowing their brow, trying to figure out what the fuss is all about, and then somehow cash in on it.

And what they come up with, the poetry of the failed process, that's what is so cool to me.

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But you guys are working out a second issue at the same time. You're changing from being voices in the dark of what you love, to all of a sudden being thrust out into the light as ambassadors to a wonderful new world. The tragic point is that now you see all the cracks in the foreign populous (and Japan populous) is seeing it as the eye is cast.

So how do you go about continuing to show what you really think is cool (not what you thought others would think was cool) when you are now trapped in the currents of the river that rushes out to the populous sea?