Sons of Loki

I have a weird interest – celebrities, or otherwise famous people, who have a skill in something other than what they’re famous for.  I’ve never been able to adequately explain why I like this kind of thing.

Foreign languages, for example: I was listening to Jens Lekman – a brilliant Swedish singer – and he has a song called “Kanske är jag kär i dig” (“Maybe I’m In Love With You”) where he sings the title lyric precisely once in the entire song. Lekman always sings in English and that song is mostly in English too, so it’s weird and exciting to hear him sing in his native Swedish. Same when you hear Björk singing in Icelandic, like on “Birthday”. Or that dude from Megadeth who’s fluent in Japanese and turns up on Japanese cookery shows. It kind of makes them seem stranger, more exotic.

On the other hand, this kind of thing can make celebrities seem less distant and amazing and more accessible. Knowing that they have a skill or talent that you could have too, a technical skill in something mundane, brings them down to earth. Maybe a little of their magic could rub off on you. For example…

Our Lord, yesterday.

• Jack White is a qualified upholsterer.
• Daniel Day Lewis became an apprentice shoemaker in Italy.
• Charlie Brooker is a PC gamer. A proper PC gamer, because he used to be a games journalist. He could talk to you about rocket jumping and 3dfx Glide and Daikatana. I don’t think anyone else on TV could do that.
• Jesus was, famously, a carpenter, and presumably knew all about the tools and techniques and jargon of 1^st century carpentry.
• Noel Edmonds has a helicopter license and flew performers into Live Aid. Imagine that. You’re Bono or Status Quo or something and you get in the helicopter to fly you across London and the pilot turns around to say hi and it’s NOEL EDMONDS who is flying your helicopter.

You know, after just 136 days here, I’m really starting to settle in. This is my new set up – surrounded by grammar, highlighters, Scarlett Johansson, and motivational quotes. I quite like it like this.

I also worked out how to network my PC to my PS3 to show movies on the television and how to wire my PS3′s AV cables to my PC to play sound from the PS3 through the PC and out the speakers, which is a stupidly roundabout thing to do (it would make a lot more sense to just output my PC to the TV with a cheap cable) but it works, and it cost me not a penny extra. And that’s why I love being able to screw around with stuff until it does something new.

Final exam next Tuesday, and I’m sort of confident that last-minute cramming will be sufficient to pass. I mean, if I get a C, that means doing 300 again, but … actually that would be shit, but I’d be happy to pass.
Everything’s still up in the air, and I’m really bipolar about how I feel about this course. Right now, I really want to do my best (hence the Eminem quote: “Success is the only motherfuckin’ option // Failure’s not”). Tomorrow, I might stub my toe (linguistically speaking) and hate this stupid language and want to give up. But ultimately, I think that I’m bending towards sticking to this, to seeing it through to the end. Ultimately I feel like if I failed, I’d be letting my friends down more than anything. And I don’t want to do that.

Tonight I went back to Mickey House, my old haunt from when I lived in Tokyo in 2007 (good lord, did that really happen?). I went with my mate Kazuya, who was an exchange student at Leeds last year (it was only after he’d gone back to Japan that we realised we were both Mickey House regulars because I realised he’d joined the same Facebook group).

It hadn’t changed a bit, of course. Same nondescript entrance, a lift off the main street in Takadanobaba. Same old Kazu, who didn’t remember me, of course. Same delicious Kirin Ichiban. A few potentially familiar faces – I wasn’t sure. The place was more popular than ever before, heaving with not just English but Spanish, French, and German conversations. Kazu wandered about in the same way he always did, back in the day. The place hadn’t changed a bit. I hadn’t changed a bit.

I spent a few hours there, chatting in a mix of English and Japanese to whoever wandered in and sat at our table. Same old mix of ordinary-looking people who were all quite extraordinary in their own little way – he’s just come back from living in the US for five years, she climbed Fuji and joined a British car firm, her dad was a political prisoner in the last century.

I was speaking to this Chinese woman – well, I was listening to this Chinese woman who was – well. Mainlander Chinese are always a little weird to talk to; despite the opening up of the PRC in the last few decades, there’s still a weird sense of Orwellian doublethink going on. They are, generally speaking, still a world apart from the Western freedoms we take for granted; happy to accept the hand-waving of their government, and turn a blind eye to everything that they must know is going on in their country.
Refreshingly, this woman seemed to be very angry about something, though I wasn’t sure exactly what. I think she was actually unhappy with the government, which is obviously the norm for Westerners but rare from the Chinese people I’ve met. (To be fair, I’ve met very few Chinese people.) At the same time, she had that streak of Chinese nationalism which is so quintessentially Chinese, but even when ranting about those Yankee pigs and their Japanese lapdogs (okay it wasn’t quite that bad) she seemed quite bothered that China’s industrial development and marathon race towards global superpower was coming at the expense of so much in her country. It was, as I said, refreshing.

Back during the Beijing Olympics, I said that 2008 would be the year that China’s dominance of the world began, and I stand by that. It is, as the Chinese say, interesting times right now. Particularly for the West.

Leaving was bittersweet, a little weird. It had been nice to go back, and the Japanese practice was like sweet water for a parched throat, but the problem I always have with those kinds of places is that I rarely have anything in common with anybody. It’s a shame, really. I wandered down the main street, past bars and restaurants and groups of people, taking in the neon beauty of the ukiyo, the floating world.

Ah, the night, friend of Tom Waits, Edward Hopper, Richard Hawley. I popped into an all-night bookstore and bought the first volumes of Crows and Yotsuba-to. (All-night bookstore. Somehow, everything is cooler, more romantic at night.)

the sun has fallen down
and the billboards are all leering
and the flags are all dead,
at the top of their poles

I said: “kiss me, you’re beautiful -
these are truly the last days”

In other news, sunny 11°C in Tokyo. Dammit.

That.

Remember?

There are kids of six and seven and eight! who, unbelievably, never knew a pre-9/11 world. Most ten and eleven year olds probably don’t remember it either. They will probably never understand, the way I probably don’t get the full shocking impact of the Challenger disaster or the Zapruder film, because I knew a world where the Twin Towers stood in New York and would always stand, in the same way that the sun will always rise – i.e. not technically a certainty but never actually going to stop happening, surely – and the idea of a Hollywood Michael Bay Roland Emmerich blockbuster unfolding in the heart of America where evil-doers commit an act of unspeakable terror with big explosions and heroic rescues and tragic losses seemed entirely implausible.

I don’t think we can come to terms with the events on that day. 19 terrorists hijacked and destroyed 4 planes resulting in the structural collapse of 2 buildings and damage to 1 other building resulting in the deaths of 3,017 people. That summary, while accurate, hardly reflects the emotions evident in that photograph up there.

What does it even mean? It feels like the trigger in some hack author’s airport thriller – “In 2001, a terrorist attack sent the United States into turmoil. In the following years, the world was engulfed in war and economic turmoil, as a new empire arose in the East and old foes sparked new rivalries…” What a strange thing this 21st century is, where even history is being all post-modern and ironic.

Bad times ahead, then.