it's never too late to shoot for the stars

puck:

I am not a cat

I am work

1. Drill yourself on hiragana and katakana. These are the phonetic building blocks of Japanese, think of them as equivalent to english letters. This site is a good resource in general. Once you have a solid grasp on this, DO NOT LINGER HERE; move to step 2. You will master kana later.

2. Download Anki. This is a flashcard service. They have a paid app if you’re willing to invest for it, but if not, they have a mobile website (create an account and sync it with your computer).

This is the deck you’re going to download. Import it to Anki and do this every day. I have learned the hard way (twice) that skipping this is bad. If you become overwhelmed, you can change the number of new cards and reviews by clicking the cog next to the name of the deck!

3. Cure Dolly (Youtube, grammar) + transcript. She has kind of a posh accent, you might want to turn subtitles on. Watch a few videos when you feel like it but most importantly set up 4 and 5 as soon as possible

4. Yomitan (must have) is a browser extension that functions as a pop-up dictionary. you need to install dictionaries for it to work. here are some dictionaries you can use with yomitan and explanations of what they do

5. READ. DO NOT LET YOURSELF GET STUCK BEFORE THIS STEP. JUST READ!!!! Most people who fail to learn Japanese do so because they are afraid of not being ready to move on, which is counterproductive. Just read. When you were a child did you spend years on vocab and grammar before reading? No I bet you did not. Pick something to read and learn what you don’t already know by reading in Japanese.

Jiten.moe has a list of novels and visual novels that you can read on your computer sorted by difficulty. So does jpdb. There’s also this document. There’s also this document. Hey look this website is cool too

For visual novels: download LunaHook. It “hooks” to your VN and allows you to use Yomitan on words you don’t know. Turn off the translation feature, it does nothing to help you learn

For literary texts: ttsu e-reader supports epub and htmlz files.

You can also learn Japanese by watching anime, but it’s a little more convoluted and requires a lot more patience.

For manga, utilize Mangatan, but I don’t recommend this right out the gate because when you’re first learning sentence structure you’ll want something with complete sentences.

Set your computer up for mining vocab before you start reading. Once you finish your kaishi deck, you can drill your mining cards (I didn’t do mine until after finishing kaishi because it was too much).

Most importantly: reading is going to be hard at first. It is going to piss you off. You need to muscle through with this because this is where the bulk of your learning will happen. After a while you will just feel like reading because you love reading! Try not to pick something too hard for your first read, but if you’re interested in the story you might be able to muscle through something a little tougher.

In the original Japanese GameCube version of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, if glitches are used to take Professor Frankly into the descending spike ceiling chamber in Hooktail Castle, he may randomly ascend.

My brain for 6 hours straight:

untitled

2006

Y’all really gonna just be vague about modern art and how “fantastic” it is or are any of you going to explain how pissing into the glued together pieces of restroom equipment is art? 

Brian Eno didn’t piss into Zhou Wendou’s 2006 Untitled piece (which is the glued-together broken urinal); he emptied a vial of urine into a replica of Duchamp’s 1917 piece “Fountain,” which was a mass-produced urinal laid on its side and signed “R. Mutt.”

Duchamp had a series of what he called “readymades” - mass-produced objects that he presented as art - and “Fountain” is the most famous of these readymade sculptures.

Plenty of people will look at a urinal in an art show and go “this isn’t art!” but in the early Dada movement nobody had thought to question whether a mass-manufactured urinal might be art. It’s a man-made object. What separates industrial craft from individual art? Is it the presentation? The context? The original intended purpose? Again, in 1917 this was a question that not a lot of people had asked before so in very general terms Duchamp put a pissoir on a pedestal and said “This is Art; Prove me Wrong.”

And then 102 years of arguing about art happened.

In 1993 Brian Eno (ambient musician and all-around weird guy) went to an exhibit that included “Fountain” and poured some urine into it. Several other people had done the same thing over the years, which is why Eno couldn’t piss directly in it and had to carry around a jar of his own waste in order to make a point.

So Eno’s point was “you’re glorifying this one particular bit of ceramic and it’s against the spirit of the original piece, this needs to be a pisspot again” and other people have peed in it to make the point that it has a broad context - it is both high art and a low urinal.

These are people who were publicly performing an action in order to make a statement about art - these were people doing performance art.

SO.

Back to 2006.

The Zhou Wendou piece takes a readymade urinal, breaks it down to ceramic, and then remakes it into a vase. It’s being very playful - conceptually remaking Duchamp’s piece into a piece of intentional art again instead of found art is clever and funny, especially when the intentional art it makes mimics something else that could easily be mass produced - it reminds me of Ai Weiwei’s 1995 work “Breaking a Han Dynasty Urn,” which also references Duchamp (it was part of Weiwei’s series about repurposing “cultural readymades”) and that’s likely intentional; I’d be surprised if Wendou wasn’t commenting on this:

“It’s powerful only because someone thinks it’s powerful and invests value in the object.” - Ai Weiwei

So that loops back around to the original piece in 1917.

Is putting a signature on a urinal art?

Is pissing in a piece of conceptual art performance art?

Is breaking an old piece of art art?

Is breaking a urinal and shaping it into a vase art?

And the reason I think all of these questions are so cool is because they boil down to this:

Is making people question the definition of art in itself art?