Our guest this episode is the rapper TVBUU. Check out his songs here.

Love notes, engaging with different ideas, dreamworld, politics are boring, polyamory, dropping projects one little piece at a time, Full Metal Alchemist, Naruto, GitS as a vibe piece, music in action scenes, real friends, maintaining levels of quality, Metal Gear Solid, reading people’s minds, becoming cyborgs, Theseus’s Paradox, what it means to be human, our favorite anime of all time, learning Japanese, anonymity, Elyon, Vampire Masquerade, and Elder Scrolls.

David incorrectly identifies the city in GitS as “Tokyo,” even though it’s Hong Kong. Mea culpa.

On this episode, we talk about 1995's Tokyo Fist. It's a film about masculinity, femininity, boxing, and insane gore.

Angry customers, chopped up squirrels, Squid Game stabs, Lost Judgement, Dark Souls III, Cyberpunk 2077, Borderlands 2, Ghost of Tsushima, Sekiro, invasion of privacy, violent simptitude, Hostgator.com, feeling pain to feel alive, the line between pain and pleasure, giving into animalistic urges, money is fake, blockchain as time, the background of Tokyo Fist, the brotherly tension between the director and actor, and being an artist in control of your vision.

Our guest today is rapper and Twitch streamer Lil Durt.

In this episode, David incorrectly states that he is done with Twitter forever. What is a man if not his posts? What is a man to do, at home alone, caring for his only child, if not scroll the TL? These questions I ask you.

I ask you to ponder them. Should a man work with his hands? Should a man create in his spare time, to bring forth his inner light? Should a man ponder the inner workings of his mind, whether he is becoming more machine than man, whether he thinks, therefore he is?

I ask you to consider the hell of our own making. I ask you to consider that black scrying mirror into which we all gaze and ask yourself, what am I? What indeed have I become?

We also talk about 1998's Pornostar, about an autistic guy in a big coat who stabs the dogshit out of yakuzas because he believes in himself. There's also skating and Paul Wall (I think).

Pick up the new Blu Ray Toshiaki Toyoda box set from Third Window Films.

Our guest this week is Infennity, host of the Infennite Conversations podcast, the most prolific rap podcast on the planet. Check out this dude’s output and guests. Crazy shit. He’s like the Takashi Miike of Rap Podcasts.

I say at the beginning I’m not going to talk very much, then I end up talking a lot. I can’t shut the fuck up.

We talk bringing assault rifles to readings, All Gas No Brakes, Cruelty Squad, noise music, swastikas, Blade of the Immortal, snitching at the movies, Dennis Rodman’s broken dick, esoteric shit, Donda, and bodybuilders.

This episode is hilarious. Our guest, Grant, had his echo on the whole time, and Kelby recorded on the road. So it sounds like I'm talking to two ethereal beings. Grant went the extra mile on this one, watching it three times (because he got too high the first two). We talk about tarot, music management, and the film First Love, one of Miike's recent. We all liked it more the second time we watched it. Third for Grant.

Reality can be depressing, but it isn’t *just* depressing. Unspoken resonance. Building your own gun. Creative spirit getting tamped down by public opinion. Being meticulous vs. just going with it. Boots with sticks scraping against the side of a moving train. Suicidal tendencies. Sensitivity readers are dumb. What would Bullet Ballet look like as a book?

In this episode, we actually just straight up talk about the movie. It’s good.

David's in a bad mood. Kelby chopped up our hour long conversation full of bile and invective and made a beautiful ugly collage out of it. I'm really proud of what he did. This is our first really good, maybe great episode. Somewhere in there we mention some stuff about Tetsuo, which might be the hardest movie to talk about. You just have to watch it.

Also: Tetsuo was completed in 1989, not 2019, as David says. That is the only non-factual thing stated in this episode.

I forgot to watch Tetsuo. Dang. These episodes run about two weeks ahead, so I can confidently say that next week we'll be back with an actual review of the movie. On this one, Kelby and I talk about how good it feels to separate yourself from the writing community. There are some interesting folks who are doing their own thing, and that's cool. There are also some really great people who work within the business, and Kelby and I talk about them at length.

But overall it's like any other job, and neither of us started doing this just to have another job.

This one has a lot of ambient noise, as it begins with my trip to the gas station to buy a Monster. Think of it as "experimental." Kelby did a good job cleaning up the audio.

We invite the third wheel of our bromance tricycle, author Lucas Mangum on the show. Our first guest! He's very nice. Kelby and I don't deserve him...

On this episode, we talk about Fudoh, which made Time Magazine's "10 Best Films of 1997" and features a woman with both penis and vagina who fires deadly darts from the latter. People melt! Heads explode! Amazing strip club music! Sounds like classic Miike.

Subjects covered:

Gore effects, translation, responding to author reviews, Make Your Own Damn Podcast, what is happening vs. how it happens, Ace Ventura jokes, hermaphrodite sex scenes, and diversity as a party vs. a shopping experience. How would you write a book version of a movie like Fudoh? What’s the purpose of reviewing anything now? Is there even such a thing as a “good review”?

The podcast Lucas hosts with Jeff Burk is called Make Your Own Damn Podcast. It's about Troma films, and it's really good. You can follow that link or learn how to search for podcasts in your podcatcher. I have faith in you.

Lucas co-wrote the Fulci-inspired The Final Gate with Wesley Southard. Buy that shit here!

JDO recorded this looking at a bunch of mountains. At one point he pretends to be afraid of a bug. Miike tells the story of a gay yakuza and a half-black/half-Japanese bartender/harmonica player. We can see traces of the madness that would come in Dead or Alive. This one is a slow, cozy gangster tale. Are all of Miike's films bangers? Can the man miss? Kelby and JDO investigate.

Watch Blues Harp for free on YouTube here.