Kambodian Karaoke Disc Viewing pt II: My Questionably Offensive Blow By Blow Reportage In Real-Time Viewing of Cambodian Karaoke DIsc Videos That My Friend Sends Me, In Successive E-mail Bursts Collecting Commentary Made By Me and My Husband Joe, All of Which Sound Like Little Poems

Hi AEM,

We are sucking on your barley mints you gave me for my birthday and enjoying the karaoke discs. They are delicious.

The mints, I mean.

Although the discs are delicious as well.

Was I not supposed to eat them?

Liz

---------

This video features a tomboy who both falls for and is rescued by her best friend's boyfriend. The boyfriend drives a Lexus mini van. She's from the wrong side of the tracks, and as the video continues the narrative progresses as a montage of her becoming girlier. When they smash a bottle on the male love interest's head, it makes a loud crash, which is weird for a song. Also weird: the girl is wearing a baseball hat that merely says "80s." Such a tragic ending. Cambodia is not particularly big on the happily ever after videos. Liz

-----------

Joe claims that the "Oh! My Friend" song/video we just watched was really about one of them trying to get train fare from the other.

In this song, we can definitely hear an electric accordion, or maybe it's a keyboard made to sound like an accordion. Unfortunately there is no accordion in this video, just a lady singing in a sack dress missing one shoulder. The dress is missing a shoulder, not the lady, although that would be much more interesting if the lady was missing a shoulder. And she's standing between 2 trees. Not a lot of plotline.

I should mention that each video ends with some text. We speculate that instead of being the credits typically seen at the end of karaoke videos that they're proverbs of some sort, like, "Always stand by your friends if they have their hair combed forword."

This next video shows a lady in different outfits, sometimes in a t-shirt with a skull on it. And sometimes she's in front of some mystical stone structure that has crazy clouds moving in fast forward above her, like an 80s video.  Her mouth is slightly slanted to the right and we speculated that maybe she had a stroke or has Bells palsey.

On the box to this DVD there's a picture of a chicken and it says "Master Grill." Was this disc purchased at a Cambodian fried chicken restaurant? Also, in the video presently on, the woman singing is in front of what looks like a rocking band, but then there's also a keyboard that is clearly not in the music playing. This song sounds like "Masterplan" by Oasis. Do they sell Oasis discs at a Cambodian fried chicken fast food chain?

Also, this woman's jeans are only stonewashed in the front, as if they are chaps. Who wears stonewashed chaps?!

Joe speculated that the maxim at the end of the last video was "We are available for parties and bar mitzvahs."

In the current video, a man walks through a city. Literally, like he's taller than the buidlings.

In another scene he is singing in front of drums, but nobody is actually playing the drums. Maybe he's a one man band and he can only do one thing at a time?

Joe just went upstairs for a second to put on pajamas. I said, "Do you want me to pause it?"

He answered definitively and loudly, "NO!"

Liz

---------- A buddy song! 2 guys! One with a blonde mohawk, and one with a darker mohawk. Sort of Ebony and Sort of Ivory. This song has an English subtitle and chorus refrain, "Oh! My Friend." And a saxophone. An obvious WHAM influence. And that saxaphone is heavy on flourishes. A key change elevates the emphasis of the song's sentiment. When will they have sex? Liz ---------- You'll be happy to hear the video about the tomboy girl ditched by the rich boyfriend who abandoned her after being beat up by his friends, well, there is a sequel. The sequel features the same female protagonist/narrator sitting on a window sill, pensively considering her time with the male love interest. She is older, wiser, and has honed her skills with makeup. She reminisces on her time with the male love interest and how they would go to playgrounds and drink slurpies. Also, she now lives in some sort of villa with a quad. But oh! That was a reconciliation video, where he visits her and they hug. He kind of looks like MC Lars. If MC Lars were Asian and had feathered hair combed forward. Liz --- The guy with a wispy mustache and overly pushed forward hair guy is barging in with a knife. That video ended abruptly. But not before someone got stabbed and died and blood gushed out. Karaoke Horror! Like Ryu Murakami's Karaoke Terror: The Complete Japanese Showa Songbook. Liz ---- Joe and I are wondering: Is this disc all sad ballads? Lots of piano. Why is this man standing by the side of the highway? It's a grey day and nothing is going on in the background. The cinematography is not that good. Also, sometimes the guy singing is standing in front of a bunch of drawings of buildings, which we think might be Wesley Willis drawings. Is he big in Cambodia? Well, he was big everywhere; he was a very large man. Now he is big nowhere because he is dead. OH MY GOD! This video started with someone stabbed and dead and people crying!  And there's all these kids drinking. What is the drinking age in Cambodia?!!?! Liz --- This song features a guy with peroxided hair in a shoe store with pin fixtures. He looks like he's 12.  Both of us agree that he has very nice skin, although his eyebrows are infinitely darker then his hair. There's a very prominent sitar in this song that is very attractive to our ears. Both Joe and I are in strong agreement of this point. Parts of this video feature the singer in front of a carnival ride. Now the love interest is breaking up with him and leaving him stranded with his balloons and roses. As the video ends, Joe reassures me, "That's OK. He's really gay." Pfew. Liz -- Oh my god! Someone got run over by a Chrysler La Baron! Oh, it was just a dream. Pfew. Why is there only one drunk woman in a restaurant being carried out by her boyfriend? He's putting a wet rag on her forehead to help nurse her hangover. Also, they are the only people in a movie theater. And now the guy is drinking a bottle of champagne and throwing it over the bridge. Is this song about a destructive relationship that focuses on the destructiveness of alcohol? Liz ---

OH MY GOD!!! They have a blooper reel.

What you don't know if that they used a green screen for parts of the videos.

Liz

--

Did you eat at the Master Grill? Because their logo is on the DVD we just watched from you (see attached). 

Joe pointed out that they deliver. How late do you think they'll go? I'm starving. And I need some karaoke. I know just the place.

Also, we are excited by the prospect of the company that made the disc (M Production) we just watched can provide treasure hunts: http://mproduction168.com/services

Also, they stated on their website that they are looking for the "Newface in whole world" Does that come with the chicken do you think?

Also, I very much like their operating philosophy as stated on their web site:

Individuals will enjoy a gradually increasing amount of discretionary time, both on and off the job. This is an irony, as most will perceive that they have less time to do the things they want.

Could I have said it better?

No, I think not.

Liz

Dying of a Broken Heart

So I just watched the movie "Karaoke Terror (a.k.a. The Complete Showa Era Song Book)" based on the novel by Ryu Murakami that I read recently. If it has karaoke in the title, no doubt I will be interested. What I want to know is, since when are women in their thirties middle-aged? Because there's this whole kids vs. middle aged-ladies thing in it, and the women make reference to being in their early thirties, which is only about 10 or maybe 12 years older than the guys in the movie. I'm at least 5 years older than the women in the movie, and I don't think of myself as being middle-aged. In Japanese culture, these divorced middle-aged women are called "obasans." One of the quotes in the movie is "It's not the cockroaches that will be left after the apocalypse; it'll be the obasans!"

I think of myself as youngish and with sort of some time in my life left, but with increasing frequency in the past year or so, I am more pensive and sad about death. What I think about is this: no matter how great your life is, you end up at the end of it sick and unhappy and in pain and then dying, most likely alone and scared and sick. I saw it with my mom. I saw it with my husband's mom. I saw it in various stages of progression in the cancer ward when I was sick.

And no matter what anyone says about it, the 2 things that are always the same in any death situation is that it's ghoulish and it's surreal. The body is bloated. The legs turn purple first. Death moves it's way up from the legs up to the head. And the body makes weird noises and weird smells as it shuts down. The surreal thing -- I've seen this a few times now -- within a few minutes of the pronoucement of death everybody standing around the person, everybody switches into "OK, let's make the plans, you're in charge of calling those people, you're in charge of those, what day shall we pick out the coffin or the urn or this or that" and suddenly, it's like you go into event planning mode. I'm not making any judgement. It's just the way it is.

When I look at people I love, I feel like I see them aging by the second and what it will be like when they're gone. What am I going to do when my loved ones die? It will have been like they've never been there.

I was listening to a podcast of All Songs Considered and they had Tom Jones on and they had him talk about songs he liked that had to do with Valentine's Day and he played "He Stopped Loving Her Today" by George Jones. It's a song about how this guy loved this woman until his last dying breath, and then he dies, and that's how he stops loving her. I was standing in the closet picking out a shirt and then I'm all tears and lump in my throat. I thought about what it will be like for either me or my husband, whichever one is left after the other one dies. I thought about how Johnny Cash died just 4 months after June Carter died, no doubt of a broken heart. And then I started thinking about that episode of "Doctor Who" with Madame de Pompadour who waited for the Doctor to come back and he never came back and then the next thing you know they're wheeling her coffin away (wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff) and someone says, "Some say she died of a broken heart."

So a chapter of your life closes and then it's like, boom, you put the photos in the album and close the book and that chapter of your life is over, like it never happened, like all the stuff that's in that photo album is just some past life that is no longer relevant.

So can you die of a broken heart? For real?

I googled "Die of a broken heart" to see what the web had to say about this, and I found a very interesting New York Times article called "Health and the Broken Heart" and what was really interesting was well, YES it is possible to die of a broken fucking heart. Some older women, who developed classic heart attack symptoms after suffering severe emotional stress had consistently elevated blood levels of the stress hormones epinephrine and norepinephrine, which can cause a significant weakening of the heart muscle. Elevated stress hormones interfere with normal blood flow, causing the heart damage. Or it may be that the hormones bind to the heart muscle, causing changes to the heart cells. No wonder they call it heart break. And do you ever get over your early heartbreaks? Do they leave you with scars? Do they do you more harm than good? Does what doesn't kill REALLY make you stronger? Or weaker and more defeated?

Happy fucking Valentine's Day. From an obasan.