Monthly Archives: December 2009

Gluey Tart: Crossdress Paradise

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Occasionally you discover something so pleasing, so satisfying, so right that the world is suddenly a better place. The sun shines brighter, the birds sing louder – or if you, like Kinukitty, are sitting in a recliner that’s been temporarily parked in the middle of the dining room for so long you are forced to admit that’s actually where it lives now, and it’s past 1 a.m., and your eyes feel like someone’s scraped them down with extra-fine sandpaper, perhaps it would be more appropriate to say the piles of crap all over the place seem less squalid and the roving dust bunnies seem less aggressive. Playful, even.

I do have a point, and that point is that I’m in love. Again. And I owe it all to the Hooded Utilitarian’s very own Suat, who gave me the best tip ever: Crossdress Paradise. Suat! I don’t have words.

I sat in the recliner and watched three specials all in one go, and when I was done, my face hurt from beaming at the computer. I smiled so much it aggravated my TMJ. It was worth it, though, and I went to sleep with a sense of peace and goodwill and whatever that I have seldom known.

Crossdress Paradise is described as a Japanese game show, but I don’t see much game. All the show you could want, though. I’ll set it up for you they way they do, because frankly, nothing about this show could be improved on, not even if I understood what they were saying. Really. The language of Crossdress Paradise is universal. The show opens with two good-looking young guys chatting amiably. They are immediately likable despite the language barrier, and also unbelievably, hilariously funny, if the laugh track is any indication. When the hosts call out “open curtain” – in English, for reasons that are obscure to me – the glitzy silver curtain goes up, and the camera cuts first to the amazed faces of the hosts, and then to the studio audience full of gleeful, amazingly homogeneous high school girls, a sea of clapping, squealing, foot-stomping young ladies wearing almost exactly the same school cardigan, pleated uniform skirt, and big, baggy socks. These girls are not just happy with the transformation (which the home audience hasn’t seen yet) – they are so happy they are losing their collective mind. Finally, the camera cuts to the main event, a cute high school boy, sitting on throne (well, a flower-festooned, wing-backed wicker chair of the sort that featured in a lot of ‘80s prom photos) and dressed in drag. Not frat party drag, either. These guys are done up to pass.

Their hair is styled, their makeup is luminous, their smiles coy and sparkly. After letting us stare in amazement for a few moments, the boys then perform the ceremonial wink at the camera, which is accompanied by an adorable little sound effect. Then, we get another look at the crowd, still going wild. The first special I watched introduced six boys, unveiled one at a time, with lots of close ups to show off their dewy foundation and pearly lip gloss. There are also lots of close ups of them clutching nervously at their knees, trying not to flash all of Japan in their short skirts. One of the most endearing tells all the boys shared was the constant blinking against the unfamiliar onslaught of heavy mascara and liquid eyeliner. I recognized it instantly as a problem I too suffer from, on the rare occasions when I try to dress up and fit into society. I sympathize, pretty crossdressers!

There are several more specials in this series, and they basically make the same joke over and over and over – take the boys out, fool people into thinking they’re actually girls (sometimes by establishing a romantic attraction), and then, the punch line: Ha, ha! He’s a boy! What? Ha ha ha ha ha ha! They obviously think it never gets old, and I have to say I agree. Over the next two episodes, the boys learn to model, and they do a runway show. People are fooled and then everyone shrieks in amazement and hilarity.

A couple of things struck me about this. First off, it’s all very, very cheerful, and everybody is as good-natured and happy as can be. It’s like stumbling into an alternate universe where social injustice, original sin, and global warming never happened. People abuse Oxycontin to feel like this. Also, the boys really want to do a good job. The show isn’t about cross dressing in the sexual sense (although one of them really, really got into it, and I think a new world might have opened up for him). It’s all about humor, and of course Japanese teenagers are under pressure to do well. Even if what they’re doing well is cross dressing. When the TV star flirts with one of the boys, or the model pokes a couple of fake breasts because she can’t quite believe her eyes, the boys are obviously proud. That’s part of the reason it’s all so much fun. There’s no humiliation.

And that is perhaps the most important thing about the show. It’s about boys wearing dresses and makeup and passing as girls, and none of the humor comes from belittling them, or the girls watching them, or the myriad of bystanders who can’t tell what they’re looking at. (Well, as far as I can tell. They could be saying anything, I guess. But it all looks so damned amiable!) The American viewer thinks, over and over, that this couldn’t possibly happen here. There’s no way any version of a show like this could happen in the U.S. Only in Japan, the home of yaoi and fertility festivals where people carry around enormous carved penises. Also the home of cheese ice cream and caramelized potato KitKats. (They can’t all be gems.)

I urge you to carve out four or five hours and watch Crossdress Paradise until you absolutely have to get out of your recliner RIGHT NOW because you have to pee and get yourself a good old American KitKat (chocolate, as God intended), and then probably go to bed. You can thank me (and Suat) later.

Art and craft: xkcd

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xkcd, webcomic
Randall Munroe

As some of you know, I like to rant blog about the art aspect of the comics I read. I love JH Williams and I love Alphonse Mucha and Caravaggio, and from this, one might reasonably suppose that I abhor a lot of art.

Which I do. But I also love a lot of art. The great thing about successful art is that it communicates. Art doesn’t have to be perfectly anatomically correct, pure of line, based on divine proportion, or created with pigments ground from semi-precious stones in order to make the reader sigh, laugh, or feel that moment of beauty. It just has to work.

Check this out:

I love this. The art is simple, but it’s got a kind of silly grace to it that makes it perfect for its subject matter. There’s no weird lumpy anatomy getting in the way of the joke or the compassion. There’s just the guy on his deck and the woodpecker.

And this, titled “Duty Calls”:

Come on, who hasn’t been there?

The anatomy is perfect. Yes, I know it’s a stick figure, but work with me here. The impact on the keys. The forward focus. The flat screen and the computer chair.

This doesn’t depend on anatomy, but it does depend on perspective and layout. It’s also funny and sweet and warming. I like it.

See, I think there’s a lot to be said for simplicity and humor and just plain getting the point across. The art needs to serve the point of the communication. Some of the, hmmm, shall we say overmuscled super hero comics seem to miss the idea that the art needs to communicate as much as the words do. I often wonder what would happen if the dialog was removed from the mainstream comics I have been reading. Would anyone still look at it? I’m not so sure.

But back to xkcd. It’s funny. And I love that. I am going to leave you with one of my absolute favorite comics of all time, which I have been tempted to buy in tee shirt form. (I have not, as yet, ever been tempted to buy another comic in shirt form.)

This is really better large, so here’s the link.

The Big Skinny

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Carol Lay
The Big Skinny
Villard Books

At the beginning of “Big Skinny,” Carol Lay draws herself being approached by a hostess at a party. “How did you lose all that weight?” the hostess asks. “I count calories and exercise every day,” Lay responds.

And so the conversation coughs once, staggers slightly, and flops down dead.

Lay would have us believe that the problem here was that the hostess wanted a more juicy rationale for the weight-loss: liposuction, pills, bypass surgery, whatever. There’s a simpler explanation, though. Dieting is just boring. The hostess didn’t really want to talk about Lay’s diet; she was just issuing a polite compliment. The correct response would have been, “Oh, thank you! And you look lovely too! Let’s talk about something more interesting, like sports, or Barack Obama’s new puppy, or how to make love to an importunate dolphin (practical tips available here.) Or…we could talk about paint drying? Please?”

But, alas, no. Lay thinks dieting is interesting. She’s written a whole book on the subject, in fact. In it, she talks about her history as an overeater. She provides lists of disgusting foods she’s consumed. She mentions having eaten a pan of Raid-killed ants under the misapprehension that they were chocolate sprinkles. (That bit was pretty funny, actually.) She gives how-to notes on counting calories. She throws in a joke about how she’s got so much willpower she’d even turn down George Clooney if he showed up at her door with McDonald’s take-out. And it’s a comic, so she can actually draw George Clooney at her door — isn’t that clever? Then she talks about her history as an overeater — wait, didn’t she do that already?

Yes she did. And she may have talked about it again, and again, and again for all I know. I only got about 50 pages in, and that was plenty, thank you very much. The intrinsic tediousness of the material would be bad enough, but Lay adds to it the aggressively insufferable moral grandstanding of the recent convert. She used to be depressed and grumpy…but now that her body is burning her brain for fuel, she just feels so cheerful and powerful! Don’t you want to feel cheerful and powerful too? Don’t you want to get a scale that measures your weight to a tenth of a pound? Don’t you want to feel completely morally justified in your ravenous self-obsession? If you do, pick this up. It has pictures too. I only received black-and-white proofs, so I guess they might even look somewhat less generically bland in color. After all, as any sunny self-appointed self-help guru will tell you, anything is possible.

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This review first appeared in The Comics Journal.

Working on It

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The new comics journal site is in beta at the moment; I believe they’re hoping to have it transferred over to the regular TCJ domain today. The new Hooded Utilitarian space is lagging a bit behind that, I think, but hopefully we’ll be over there sometime today…or perhaps later this week at latest.

In the meantime, we’ll roll along here as usual….

Update: Couple more days on this site I guess…so maybe we’ll get over there Thursday or Friday? Something like that, anyway.