NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

  For fun, I used to take anime songs (gi Fino' Chapones) and translate them into Chamoru. Over the years I translated songs from Naruto, Gantz, Cromartie High School, Master Keaton, Evangelion, and Attack on Titan just to name a few. It was an exercise in expressing two things that I am very nerdy about. I hadn't thought about this in a long time though until earlier tonight when Youtube's next song randomness started playing anime theme songs. As I started to feel the chetnot nostalgia hit me, the kids asked what song is this? where is this from? When I described the plot of Evangelion to Sumåhi, her review, "wow sen na'triste enao (wow that is like incredibly depressing)." I told the kids about how I used to translate songs like this into Chamoru. When they asked why, I said, "Ya-hu fino' Chamoru, ya-hu este na kånta. Anggen hu pula' este gi mismo lenguahi-hu, hu na'latatahdong I siniente-ku put este. (I like Chamoru, I like this song. If I

I'll be at the Sukicon this weekend at the Phoenix Center at Father Duenas school in Mangilao. I will have a bunch of interesting things to display and even some stuff to sell. Sukicon is a gathering or cosplayers, gaming nerds, anime/manga nerds and even comic book geeks. There is an artist alley and different booths by exhibitors. For me, I'll be displaying/selling the following things: 1. I'll be displaying some of my grandfather's tools. I have a nice complete set of the seven traditional tools that I'll put out, as well as some examples of the 150 year history of Chamorro blacksmithing in my family, most notably a machete that is more than 100 years old, and made by my great-grandfather Mariano Leon Guerrero Lujan (Bittot). I also have some tools that my grandfather made and one or two that I helped him make more recently. This will be interesting as I'm sure most of the people attending Sukicon think of "culture" a bit differently, as usually

I haven’t done this in a while, but I’m traveling this week and so it gives me quite a bit of down time on planes, with little to do other than get airsick. A few years ago I was watching quite a bit of anime and one thing I really enjoyed doing was taking anime theme songs, from shows like Gantz, Naruto and Cromartie High School and then translating them into Chamorro. Each translation was an interesting experiment, since although many of these shows are considered to be low-plebian culture, pop culture animated shadows on the cave wall for the masses, the lyrics to the theme songs tend to have a very epic and sophisticated feel to them.   These songs presented interesting challenges since translating them directly would be difficult and not necessarily match well with Chamorro. But finding ways of expressing similar epic thoughts in Chamorro, while trying to maintain a sense of the language would be fun and worthwhile. I still read manga regularly even if

INTERVIEW FROM FILM SCHOOL REJECTS: At the start of Doug Liman’s  Edge of Tomorrow   our hero, Lt. Col. Bill Cage ( Tom Cruise ), is a coward. He’s more than ready to runaway from a fight he knows he’s not equipped for. That’s not the kind of hero we expect from a blockbuster, but it’s the type of subversive choice we should expect from screenwriter  Christopher McQuarrie , who had a hand in bring Hiroshi Sakurazak’s graphic novel,  All You Need Is Kill , to the big screen. A protagonist unwilling to help save the world isn’t the only fresh idea in  Edge of Tomorrow . Even when Cage becomes a fierce soldier, he’s still no match for the bad-ass helicopter-blade-wielding Rita Vrastaski   ( Emily Blunt ). She is the hero of this movie. Vrastaski drives the story. Cruise, once again playing a role a lot of movie stars would pass on, consistently pushed for his co-star to be this film’s true hero. Cruise and McQuarrie’s creative partnership is built on risky choices. Valkyr

Siempre bai hu gaige guihi. Anggen "geek" pat "nerd" hao yan sumasaga hao giya Guahan, kao pon saonao lokkue'?

Esta måtto ta’lo i tiempo para bei in che’gue ta’lo “Sakkigake Chamorro!” It’s been a while since I did one of these, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t thought about it. I never was really an Otaku, but rather an anime dilettante, and so I very rarely go through periods of sleep depriving anima obsession, where I make unwise decisions to stay up for most of the nights reading through back issues of mangas such as MPD Psycho or Gantz (ta'lo !) or start watching an entire season of anime late in the evening, knowing full well that each episode I watch will just make me want to watch one more and the closer I get to the end of the season the more I will be able to convince myself that it is tomtom that I stay awake to finish it. The rest of the time however, my approach to anime is very temperate, ko’lo’lo’ña since I moved back to Guam. While in the states, cheap, sometimes pirated anime on Ebay or at flea markets would constantly feed my habit, on Guam finding titles I’m intere

The painting above is called "Samehada Strikes." If you are a geek or a fan of the manga Naruto then you may know what Samehada refers to and therefore what this abstract image is named after. If not, you can still enjoy this somewhat brutal image, which appears like the waves of an ocean, with a geyser of blood emerging from behind them. I painted this piece and a number of other pieces last weekend in preparation for an event coming up next month called Otaku Recon. Its a manga, video games and anime event which will be held on May 15th at the Holiday Resort and Spa in Tumon. For more information you can check out the website by clicking here . There's plenty of info and links to check out. They'll be cosplay, contests, screenings, and what I am most excited about, artist displays and tables. For the past few months, because of work, family and dissertation related afflictions, I haven't had much time to create art. I've made a little here and there, such

Ti Guahu fuma'tinas este na pinenta. Hu sodda' gi Mari Kurisato . An American's Cry for Help By Keith Olbermann Anchor, 'Countdown' Special Comment msnbc.com updated 9:31 p.m. ET Feb. 24, 2010 Finally tonight, a Special Comment about health care reform and tomorrow's summit at Blair House. If I prove to have trouble getting through this, I apologize in advance. Last Friday Night my father asked me to kill him. We were just shy of six months since he was hospitalized and it was the end of a long day at the end of a longer week. Not to get too clinical or too grotesque on you, but he'd had his colon removed at the end of September and that went so well that it was no more complicated than an appendectomy. But what followed was a series of infections, like storms in the monsoon season, one arriving, blossoming, inundating him, my Dad shaking it off and cheerfully bouncing back, and then within days another one coming in to flatten him once again. Pneumoni

For those of you who may not already know it, I'm a big fan of manga and anime. This doesn't mean I'm an otaku or anything (although normals sometimes call me one), but just that there are a handful of titles or franchises which I really read carefully and follow closely. For instance, in July I wrote a long post about how two of my favorite mangas to read, Gantz and Berserk were going on hiatus for a few months. My geek guts started showing when a simple post about how much I'll miss them ended up being a discussion about the aspects of killing God or Gods in the mangas, or the way in which the main characters seemed to be challenging the very order of things, and how exciting it was to try and see an author make that possible. (Este mina'hasso yu' na hu nisisita umespiha kao esta mana'fanhuyong i nuebu na issue Berserk. Esta maloffan dos meses gi iyo-na hiatus, pues sina esta makpo'.) For a few years now I've been translating manga, most notabl

With some of the stress of the writing and defending a dissertation over now, I can finally enjoy the breaths that I take and try to relax a little bit. As some might be familiar with on this blog, one of the ways that I relax is by writing songs or poems in Chamorro, or translating lyrics from songs into Chamorro. The past month while I’ve been furiously writing my dissertation was the longest period of time since 2000 that I went without opening up my Chamorro dictionary. As I’ve been shut away in my computer for so long, and without doing much talking, thinking or writing in Chamorro, I’ve actually felt at times the language fading from my head. That’s why it was exciting recently, after defending my dissertation, to finally open up the dictionary again and start work on translating another song. This post is the fourth installment of a feature that I call Sakigakke Chamorro! In this feature I take a song from a Japanese anime and translate it into Chamorro. The translation is