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“Actress Hitomi Kuroki took her first air trip in her final year in high school. She traveled alone from her native Fukuoka to Osaka. The purpose of the trip was take entrance exams at Takarazuka Music School (TMS), a premier training ground for aspiring Takarazuka revue starlets. She had the blessing of her parents, who had decided their daughter could at least give it a try before she left high school.
According to her book “Watashi ga Naku Toki” (When I weep) from Gentosha Inc., Kuroki herself knew at the time that she would get over her infatuation with TMS once she saw how out of place she would be there. And she recalls that when her flight was taking off, Beethoven’s “Fifth Symphony” (The Destiny) was playing on the in-flight music channel she was tuned to.
Kuroki passed the exams, which put her among an extremely talented minority. There are preparatory schools for TMS, where intensive singing and dancing courses are offered. Girls aged 15-18 are eligible for enrollment at TMS, but since competition to get in is so severe–only 1 in 20 succeeds–many girls fail the entrance exams and eventually quit.
But TMS is overhauling its entrance tests next spring. It will do away with the compulsory singing and ballet tests, and the preliminary test will be in interview form to evaluate the candidates’ looks and “star quality.” In the follow-up test, the candidates will be judged on their singing and ballet, but the focus will be on whether they have basic abilities.
According to TMS, the overhaul is aimed to throw the doors open wider. Girls who have been thoroughly trained in the “entrance exam technique” are certainly skilled, but they all tend to look the same, down to their hairstyles. Rather than attracting only these cookie-cutter candidates, the school would like amateurs to try out so that truly unique talents might be discovered.
I recently visited a prep school in Tokyo, where black leotard-clad girls were undergoing intensive training despite the summer holiday season. The school’s director, a former Takarazuka revue member, noted: “People talk about discovering diamonds in the rough, but you can’t really spot a future superstar from among total novices. If TMS wants to attract more candidates, a quicker way would be to get more high school girls to see Takarazuka shows on their school trips.”
TMS’s motto is “Kiyoku Tadashiku Utsukushiku,” which translates as “with purity, righteousness and beauty.” But the school is better known for the rigid discipline it expects of its students during their two years there.
Numerous paths are available today for young people aspiring to show business careers, but about 1,000 teen girls still keep knocking on TMS’s heavily guarded doors.
Seen from the outside, Takarazuka’s legendary status appears to be quite intact, but I suppose people inside think differently.
The bigger the fantasy, the more work it seems to require to maintain it.“
The Asahi Shinbun – 28/07/2008
“Judge me for my own merits, or lack of them, but do not look upon me as a mere appendage to this great general or that great scholar, this star that shines at the court of France or that famed author. I am in my own right a whole person, responsible to myself alone for all that I am, all that I say, all that I do. It may be that there are metaphysicians and philosophers whose learning is greater than mine, although I have not met them. Yet, they are but frail humans, too, and have their faults; so, when I add the sum total of my graces, I confess I am inferior to no one.”
Some time ago, I was quite shocked when I read this post about this article by Nicholas Carr that claimed Google is making us stupid. Carr (and also my teachers, actually) says that the internet has changed the way we read things. We now expect texts to be short and full of links, so that we can make a quick navegation through a lot of pages and issues.
I was quite offended, 1. because it didn’t make any sense for me, and I took it as an offense to my generation; and 2. because I’m a huge geek and if you mess with Google, you mess with me (lol). But then I saw a number of my friends not wanting to read too dense or long texts, and it got me thinking about it.
And then, something worse came out.
I’m gonna try to resume it all. Basically, Xuxa, a highly controversial Brazilian celebrity, opened a Twitter account a few weeks ago. Last Monday, her daughter, 11-year-old Sasha, decided to make a post. She wrote:
Sou eu Sasha. Estou aqui filmando e vai ser um ótimo filme. Tenho que ir… vou fazer uma sena com a cobra.
It’s me, Sasha. I’m here filming and it will be a great movie. I have to go… I’m going to shoot a scene with a snake.
The thing here is on the word ‘scene’, which in Portuguese is translated as ‘cena’. Notice that she wrote it with an ‘s’ instead of a ‘c’. This was enough reason for thousands of people to start sending them messages expressing their disapproval on the girl’s bad ortography. Now, ok, I can understand that it is quite shameful that the daughter of a millionaire star, who one would think would receive the best education possible, doesn’t know how to write basic words, but I think it’s very much ironic that Brazilians feel so annoyed by it considering the very low quality grammar I see everywhere. But ok.
So, it would be only another great day for the comedians everywhere – a very famous TV group, of which I’ve already talked about before, started a tag (#çaxaday, a very bad way of writing ‘Sasha Day’) on Twitter making fun of the whole thing -, if it wasn’t for a blog that makes up stories about celebrities. The author of the blog posted a joke saying that Xuxa would sue Twitter and try to ban its services in Brazil. But, you know, there was this red warning under the post saying that everything that is posted on the blog is a big bad joke.
But people don’t like to read. They couldn’t even read the whole post! And then, of course, the news spread like a virus, and everything that we, people who did see the red warning, did was useless. In the beginning of the afternoon, a friend said: “soon the papers will be publishing it”. She didn’t know then how right she was. Not only did the news websites publish the story, they published EXACTLY like it was posted on the blog. Without giving it the credits. Can’t believe it, huh? You can compare the links, and I’m going to publish some printscreens just in case they regret that and decide to leave you in a 404 alley.
The original post
The ‘Meio Norte’ news
I’m particularly annoyed by the paths Brazilian journalism is taking. It’s becoming completely amateur. It should be seriously discussed. And I think that this whole situation will give a lot of food for thought for specialists. It involves children’s (bad) education, premature stardom and public exposure, the internet as a trustworthy tool for news, our capacity of reading something with more than 500 characters, bad journalism, working ethics. But the main point here is that we don’t know how to deal with the internet yet. We are still lost in a huge mass of information and hyperlinks, and we don’t know what to do with them, we don’t know whether to trust them or not. We will need to change our habits to prevent getting dumber. After all, Carr was right.
A dear friend gave me this book before leaving for England. She thought maybe I would like it because I like oriental culture.
At first, I did indeed like it. It is based on the history of Wu Zetian, the only de facto woman ruler of China to assume the title of Empress Regnant. At the time, I was looking for some nice sources about her, and this book was a gift from heavens, so i was very pleased. But with time I began to get bored. Seriously. Shang Sa’s writing is too much poetic. Too much. And she doesn’t make a single critic to Wu’s reign. Ok, it is a novel, and it is told in first person by Wu herself. Still, what’s with the whole unstoppable praising? I’d rather see the empress as a person who had ambitions and did whatever she thought necessary to achieve them. Let’s stop that women-never-want-power thing, please.
Also, one last thing that displeased very much: in the beginning of the novel, Wu has a number of affairs with women. Nice. I liked it. Until she had an affair with a man, later in life, that changed everything. Ok, that happens. But is the omg-I-didn’t-know-what-was-real-sex-until-now really necessary? (I was going to reproduce the original part here, but I can’t find it now; sorry) It’s very disappointing.
.
SA, Shan. Empress : a novel. New York, N.Y.: Harper Perennial, 2006. 324 p. ISBN: 978-0-06-114787-6.
I’ve been studying and working so much since last year that I can hardly remember when was the last time I watched a movie before this week. Then I got a break and decided that I should compensate myself. I have a huge list now of the movies I’ve been wanting to watch for a long time and haven’t yet.
Last Sunday I decided to start. The Godfather was my first choice. Yes, call me a heretic, but I had not watched it yet. I started searching for it on the internet, but couldn’t find a version in any language I could understand. I got pissed and went to a rent shop the next day. I rented the whole trilogy. When I was preparing to leave, I spotted Der Untergang and couldn’t resist. This way, I came home with four movies for the week.
Monday was The Godfather‘s day. Part I. I was eager to watch it because I bought the book last week (it’s an imported version, so it may take a few more weeks to get here). I watched it. And wasn’t much impressed. Or maybe I was too impressed. I even tried to write a post about it when I finished it, but I couldn’t. I was very pissed on the American portrayal of the Italians. Especially, Italian women. But then I chilled out and decided to watch the other parts to see how it would turn out.
On Tuesday, I was still very much angry at Puzo and Coppola, so I decided to move to Hitler to chill out a bit (very funny, I know). Der Untergang is excellent. I won’t say much more. I’ve seen bad critics but, seriously, you have got to be kidding me. Bruno Ganz is great. I guess that’s why many people were somewhat ‘scared’ of this movie. There was a real Hitler there. More importantly, there was a human there. It scares people to associate historical ‘monsters’ to normal people who eat, cry and love, because this way they would be associating these ‘monsters’ to themselves. And I think that is why it is so important to ‘humanize’ them. Because yes, we must remember that it could have been anyone with enough power and brain (or not) there. Power can drive people to insanity.
I was glad to see that Hanna Reitsch had a part in the movie. Yes, she was loyal to Hitler, therefore, the enemy, but she was a woman in WWII and, boy, that I can’t ignore. I respect it. Good job, Anna Thalbach.
One of the most shocking parts of the movie is doubtlessly when Magda Goebbels kills her own children. Last, but not least, I don’t really know what to think of Traudl Junge. The movie turns her into a saint, but… who knows? It’s really easy to regret everything when you’re old and dying and everyone around you condemns what you’ve done. But we will never know whether she really supported Hitler or not, I guess.
On Wednesday, time to go back to the padrino. The second part was… ok. It wasn’t bad, but it also wasn’t much thrilling. But I must admit that I enjoyed very, very much De Niro as the young Vito Corleone. And hey, maybe it’s just my thing for Italian men, but Al Pacino and Robert De Niro were HOT back in the 70′s.
Finally, yesterday I watched the last part and I have to say that it’s by far my favorite. Everything about it. And as I was pretty much convinced of that already, the movie ended by the sound of Cavalleria Rusticana‘s Intermezzo, which is my favorite song ever. I couldn’t resist.
I want to talk about the impressions I had of the Hollywoodian Italian community, but I’ll leave that to another post.
I will end this one with a video of my favorite performance of Mascagni’s song. Enjoy.
