Sons of Loki

I just saw a poster downstairs advertising the last party of the 00′s, and I realised – the noughties are ending, the Decade Without A Proper Name. It feels like we barely knew you. And yet everything exciting that ever happened to me happened in these ten short years. There’s a blog post in that.

But for now, I thought I’d just go over a few of my favourite songs of 2009. I’m usually two or three years behind modern popular music (have you heard of these Arctic Monkeys?), but this year I made a mild effort to keep up. Here’s what I have enjoyed:

Jamie T – Sticks ‘n’ Stones
I was vaguely away of Jamie T for a while, but it was only this year that my brother introduced me to him. And what a tune, of past dalliances and teenage frivolities.

University of Chicago’s Voices in your Head – Magic
Ben Folds recorded an a cappella album. Not usually my musical style of choice, I’ll admit, but when someone on Twitter (one of the RPS guys?) linked me to it on Spotify I was immediately hooked. This song in particular will always remind me of my time in Korea, and is possibly the most beautiful song on a fantastic album.

Black Eyed Peas – I Gotta Feeling
You know what made me feel old this year? I looked at one of those “What UCAS didn’t tell you when you signed up for university” groups, and one of the things was “That people will play “I Gotta Feeling” at full volume 24/7.” And that’s when I realised there’s a whole year of new inductees who are just getting their first taste of university life and their soundtrack is a song that came out in the summer, a song that didn’t even exist when I started uni. (Uh, last year.) But still, a great tune.

Florence + The Machine – Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up)
There’s something about this whole song, the simultaneous power and vulnerability in Ms Welch’s voice in lines like “I must become the lion-hearted girl…” Wonderful.

Lazy FLow – Mambo Fever
There’s something about having a keyboard that makes a man go “whoop! whoop-whoop-whoop-whoop!” and “aarg, aag-agg” that appeals to something deep inside me.

Final Fantasy – Lewis Takes Action
I am very excited about Owen Pallett’s upcoming album Heartland. Even with his silly new haircut, he is still spellbinding in a way unlike any other artist. I mean, who else can reference “Be My Baby” and “Ashes to Ashes” (and even Spirited Away?) in the same song?

How many games quote Voltaire, Milton, and Kahlil Gibran without breaking a sweat?

There’s this perennial debate in video gaming as to when games will finally be at the level of “art” rather than “entertainment”. I’d say that Deus Ex was art when it came out way back in 2000, and it was so ahead of its time that I struggle to think of a single game that has lived up to its legacy (Vampire: Bloodlines in 2004, and that’s it).

Consider the big blockbusters like Modern Warfare 2 and Gears of War and the upcoming Final Fantasy XIII, and then consider a game where you can have the following conversation:

Morpheus: The need to be observed and understood was once satisfied by God. Now we can implement the same functionality with data-mining algorithms.
JC Denton: Electronic surveillance hardly inspires reverence. Perhaps fear and obedience, but not reverence.
Morpheus: God and the gods were apparitions of observation, judgment and punishment. Other sentiments towards them were secondary.
JC Denton: No one will ever worship a software entity peering at them through a camera.
Morpheus: The human organism always worships. First, it was the gods, then it was fame (the observation and judgment of others), next it will be self-aware systems you have built to realize truly omnipresent observation and judgment.
JC Denton: You underestimate humankind’s love of freedom.
Morpheus: The individual desires judgment. Without that desire, the cohesion of groups is impossible, and so is civilization.

And all that takes place in a small room hidden away in the corner of one level behind a locked door that the player doesn’t even need to bother opening.

I guess you could criticise the kitchen-sink plot, where the writers threw in every conspiracy theory they could think of (and then some new ones), or JC Denton’s tendency to launch into extended philosophical debates with complete strangers, or the derivative nature (full of standard cyberpunk stuff, with liberal amounts of nanotech applied to any problem), or even the occasionally dodgy voice acting (although JC’s stilted monotone fits the character perfectly, if you ignore the hilariously deadpan “A bomb!”). But it’s as gripping as any cyberpunk thriller, the plot is epic in scale (postdating Dan Brown’s obsession with secret societies by mere months but pulling it off far better), there are some truly novel ideas (Aliens at Area 51? Pfft. It’s far more interesting than that) and it’s a bloody long game: in contrast to today’s six-hour-athons, this is a game that takes you around the world and spends a decent couple of hours in each place, to the point that I can look back now after finishing it for the umpteenth time and have the beginning of the game seem suitably distant.
The locations are beautifully realised. There’s detail worked into every pore, from small talk with strangers to little notes hidden around the place to the design of the buildings; the detailed descriptions behind every piece of technology, the justification for every plot point, no matter how minor; the choices you can make throughout the game, the truly non-linear paths to every objective; the way Gunther holds a grudge against you for the rest of the game if you forget to rescue him in the very beginning; the way your brother praises you for avoiding lethal force while the grunts scoff at your namby-pamby attitude; the little hints of a grander plot hidden throughout the game: I could go on, and on. I haven’t even mentioned just how sharp and perfect the actual gameplay is.

And the endings! There are three endings, in which your choice literally determines the fate of the world; it’s remarkable how the writers managed to concoct such a situation from which three very different outcomes could emerge. And it’s genuinely difficult to choose, when the time comes (and unlike a lot of games I could mention, the conditions for each ending are very clear-cut). I went with my gut feeling just as I did the first time I finished the game all those years ago, picking a kind of benevolent dictatorship, which meant turning my back on an old friend. And I felt genuinely bad for betraying him, for derailing his most worthy intentions. When a game can elicit that kind of emotion for a character who is a few lines of code, some sound files and a 3D model, that’s probably about when you’re hitting the magic criteria of art.

For a change, I did my weekly shop yesterday in Musashi-sakai, one of the endless identical urban centres dotted along the Chuo line in West Tokyo. Did a little Christmas shopping, too, just a few things for the folks back home.

(On Gizmondo recently I saw a post about the amusing “please do it at home” signs fostering good behaviour on the Tokyo Metro, and it occurred to me the things in Japan I now take for granted are genuinely novel and “Japanese” and worthy of note for Western audiences. For example, today the woman on the till at the supermarket put my frozen veg in a paper bag with a plastic bag of ice to keep it cool. Makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? And yet these little things are so commonplace that I barely notice them, and struggle to come up with other examples. Yesterday I noted down just a few: the marks on station platforms indicating where the doors will be when a train stops; the way everyone forms a line on either side of the train door to let passengers get off first; underground bike parks; in restaurants, a bag for your coat so it doesn’t end up smelling of smoke; free water by default; moist towelettes before you eat. And this is just stuff I noted in one evening.)

So as I popped into the bakery on the way back to the station, and as I popped a three-cheese pastry and a chocolate muffin on my tray, I was struck by a sense of … adult community. Like I fit in, like a real person, like this is my city, Fuchu-shi (although I was technically in neighbouring Koganei but it’s still West Tokyo). It’s all part of the fun of growing up and being a crusty old twenty-one years. Like, hey, I’ll do my shopping, and then run some errands like a real person! Obviously I had that independent living thing going on last year, but I never entirely felt like a Leeds resident; I was in halls, still on training wheels, always a train ride away from home. Now I have my own air conditioner and I shop in supermarkets and stop off at bakeries and they are all small things but they all add up to something like independent living, which is very exciting.

Rob tricked me on a night out last night with him and Zo (visiting from Leeds) wherein we visited some people from Hosei University (who were at Leeds last year) for okonomiyaki which was scrumptious, and then for larks did karaoke for the third time in a week and all-night karaoke for the second time in a week which was a bad idea but fun and I wound up joining the tired dregs of Shibuya in their hundreds streaming back to the station for home and bed and sleep.

I’ll leave you with this fascinating report on chimpanzee spirituality:

Gombe. At death of adult male Rix from fall from a tree, group members showed intense excitement, called, paused to stare at his corpse, then performed charging displays away from the corpse, and threw rocks in all directions, while other chimps embraced, touched and mounted one another. Later, some “spent considerable time staring at the body. One male leaned down from a limb, watched the corpse, then whimpered. Others touched or sniffed Rix’s remains. An adolescent female uninterruptedly gazed at the body for more than an hour, during which she sat motionless and in complete silence. After three hours of activity around the corpse, one of the older males finally left the clearing, walking downstream along the valley bottom. Others followed one by one, glancing over their shoulder toward Rix as they departed. One male approached the remains, leaned over for a final inspection, then hurried after the others” (de Waal 1996:56; Goodall 1986:330).

Peter and I, the wee hours of Sunday morning, karaokesuruing it up for Fran and Katy's birthday celebrations.

Things are pretty much just ticking over here. I’ve got bored with my weight and am aiming to lose 10 kg, which means I’m finally taking advantage of the free gym next door and working my way up to 5k runs (so glad I brought my running shoes) and a bit of muscle training. Also, I may be appropriately dressed for winter at last, but the resultant hole in finances means it will be a pretty miserable Christmas until the loan comes in in January and I get paid for my articles, at which point I am hypothetically stable for the rest of the year.

Until I get my mid-term results on Monday and everything falls apart! We did the exam last Monday, and I’m pretty sure I didn’t do so well. And so I I await the the results with great interest. If I get anything near a pass, I’ll be very happy.

I love it here, but I just can’t seem to get my head round the whole, y’know, language side of it. I keep getting urges to run off to photography college or sequester myself in a hotel for a week while I write  a novel, which is obviously not what I should be concentrating on right now. Must do language.

I think I’m going to concentrate on piling through every single goddamn kanji in Heisig’s book, because if there’s a way into Japanese that I can deal with, it’s the kanji characters. They fascinate me, in all their myriad forms and disguises, and I pick them up much easier than the actual vocabulary.

A weird thing just happened; I was listening to “Shibuya”, off the Lost in Translation soundtrack (everyone’s visiting Tokyo this month and they all want to visit the New York Bar and I cannot afford to go there on a weekly basis guysss) and there’s a bit at the end where it segues into the mundane sound of a shinkansen train and the PA chime and the announcer saying “この電車はこだま号、新大阪ゆきです” (“This is a Kodama train bound for Shin-Osaka”) and it suddenly hit me, a memory of listening to that in the UK and thinking “I can’t wait until I’m in Japan and I hear that for real” and it all came back to me, the anticipation of coming to Japan, and now suddenly I’m here and I’ve been here for so long that I forgot it this morning up until that point when it once again hit me – hey, I’m in Japan.

So I have wandering feet again. I want to head out to Yokohama or ride the Tama monorail or, pfft, I don’t know, just go somewhere. I haven’t been anywhere in ages.

I’ve just realised where this has come from. The last time I was in Japan was 72 days. Today is day 71 of this expedition. On Saturday I will have been abroad for longer than ever before. Interesting.

New favourite band: J-technopopsters Perfume, who are irresistibly moe and backed up by some bangin’ choons. Am planning to enter Writers’ And Artists’ 2010 short story competition. In negotiations for possible house to live in next year.

‘Juku! (Not Shinjuku, the Harajuku.) How I love thee, your very un-Japan backstreets, your curious kids, your ridiculously expensive boutiques standing next to 700 yen vintage clothing stores; your Nigerian hawkers, your hipster photographers, your utterly bemused and bored and offended middle-aged tourists.

I found out where the cool men’s fashion shops are (hint: hidden next to the women’s ones) and had a bit of a splurge, but oh-my-god these clothes are so FAB-U-LOUS!!! I probably would have turned gay were it not for the fact that they’re so awesomely masculine.

(I would love to know more about fashion, but I’m just not in the right crowd. This reminds me of last week when I offhandedly remarked that I’d like to try my hand at fashion journalism. To a fashion director. Who asked the obvious question of “Oh, so what designers do you like?” and I blagged a lame “Uhh well it’s so hard to choose I like the ones in Korea”.)

So I was mainly shopping for a winter coat, thinking something stylish and Uniqloish, but then I ended up with one of those fur-hooded ones that puts me in mind of Squall from Final Fantasy VIII only even more awesome, with superfluous clips and pockets. With that, a strange … combination shirt hoodie which I’m not sure if it will fit but hey, it caught my eye. And a scarf, for winter metrosexualism. And a set of Hello Kitty bathroom scales.

Then I unwound with a bit of photography. I wonder where you sign up for the job of just wandering around Harajuku taking photos? Because I’d be happy to do that forever.

This is, uh, for reasons known only to the designer, a lightbox hanging from a pole.