Sons of Loki

Just ran some errands; posted some letters, signed for JASSO, paid some bills. Doesn’t that sound like fun? Well, not really, but there’s a strange sense of satisfaction in getting small things done.

I was talking to my friend Emily about this. She wants to stay in education, do a Masters. Me, I kind of just want to get out there in the real world. Like Rob Fleming or Jesse (Hawke?) I don’t feel like a real person, living in a single room and eating combini food and scripting visual novels no one will ever play. I want a job – something interesting, mind – and a proper apartment or a real house with more than one room and beanbags and big giclée prints (bizarre fact: the development of giclée printing was spearheaded by none other than Graham Nash of Crosby, Stills and Nash) on the walls and a cat called Noboru Wataya.

Obviously, when I’m working my 9 to 5 in Sainsburys and living in a quiet backstreet in Leeds I’ll miss the student life, so basically the lesson here is never try to do anything, ever. (I’ve become a nihilist, lately. Does it show?)

Last week was a bit of a fugue, a blur of hanami and hikikomorish tendencies. Yesterday, after a sake-induced hangover I kind of snapped out of it and went for a walk in Yuutenji, which Emily told me was a pretty nice area. And it was. I had a proper coffee in a proper coffee shop, visited the temple (awash with sakura, obviously) and wandered through the city of Meguro, which reminded me awfully of some area of Leeds.

I love cities. It’s interesting, though, that all cities are kind of similar… all built from offcuts of each other. Parts of Higashi-Shinjuku are identical to New York (round about the corner of 47th and 6th, near the NHL store). I stumbled across Chicago in Niigata, found Norwich in Harajuku, and this bit of Meguro really nailed that “concrete Holiday Inns and big roundabouts with hundreds of road signs and a dozen pedestrian crossings” bit that cities like Leeds do. You know what I mean – designed for cars, not people.

Down by a weird riverside bit (it had the feeling of a riverside area with cafes and bars, but it was built on a five story embankment above a feeble drainage ditch) there was loads of sakura and a big matsuri (festival), with food stalls and huge throngs of Meguro residents and a fat lady (who did indeed sing, to a large audience) and a wonderful, rejuvenating sense of life.

Of course, it couldn’t stay sunny for long, and now Tokyo is overcast and rainy again.

Stay inside and drink tea, as the Bryce 2 materials browser would commonly recommend. In conclusion, I have one goal in life now, which is to play “Black Out Fall Out” on electric guitar in front of a billion fans and then spontaneously combust, because nothing can top how awesome this song is.

音がない (No sound)
泣き止まないずっと (Don’t cry your heart out)
もうCRY OUT (Keep crying out!)
I know I know la la la la
もう止まらない！ (Don’t stop!)

(oh cool, previously unheard original 2002 version, though I wager the version on 2005′s Polysics or Die!!!! is better)

In the last two days I’ve watched two very different movies.
Forbidden Planet is a classic, of course, and having watched it I can now see the inspiration behind roughly a quarter of all Star Trek scripts (crew beam down to mysterious planet/space station where mad scientist lives in solitude with his wife/daughter but a mysterious monster/alien/force keeps killing people/redshirts) (the other 75% of scripts are of course “Enterprise trapped in energy bubble” and “Troi suffers mysterious, whiny visions”).

It’s enjoyable to watch, mostly because we’ve come to dig the whole retro-futurism aesthetic. It’s hard not to love the valve-tastic design of Robby the Robot, or the old-fashioned ray guns, or the C-57D flying saucer. The captain (Leslie Nielsen, pre-Airplane!) has a little portable communicator thingy, and his executive officer carries around a distant forerunner of the PDA with all the mission information on it, which is pretty forward-thinking.

But the big thing they failed to predict? Feminism. The crew joke that Robby the Robot’s ability to generate food instantly is “a housewife’s dream”. When beautiful Altaira makes her first appearance everyone’s drooling over her in the most lecherous way in front of her father. And in one of the most disturbing scenes for modern sensibilities, the captain basically calls her a slut for wearing such skimpy clothing (having known only her father her entire life, she obviously doesn’t understand what she’s doing wrong anyway) and says that since his all-male crew have been locked up in their ship for the best part of a year’s travel, they can’t be held responsible for what they might do if they happen to see her, you know, walking around and other highly provocative stuff. Broads! Obviously she then falls in love with him because he shouted at her. Dames!

It’s the one downfall of SF: it’s easy to imagine the technological advances in ten years or fifty or a hundred, but it’s a lot more difficult to think about what might happen socially. I know there’s a lot of great SF written more than thirty years ago, but I fear I’ll never read the early stuff because it’s all about teenagers on the moon drinking at soda fountains and the kind of no-nonsense squares who just don’t exist any more doing all their calculations on slide rules, in space.
Of course, with the best stuff (like Asimov) you can just fill in the gaps – “oh, when he says “I’ll check the magnetic tapes” he means to say “I’ll access the holographic memory core” – but the older the SF the more difficult this becomes, and things like changing social mindsets are impossible to explain. (I think the best stab at predicting the future from a sociological viewpoint is Warren Ellis’s Transmetropolitan, where the future is essentially like today’s pop culture only more vapid, more pornographic, and more pointless by a factor of a hundred. It is a joy to read.)

Before Sunrise is a film that has been recommended to me countless times over the years, so I finally decided to watch it. I had a feeling I’d enjoy it: it’s basically a proto-Lost in Translation, and from what I knew about it the film sounded like the kind of arty movie full of those deep pretentious philosophical conversations which I love so much from Murakami’s work.
Imagine my surprise, then, when for the first fifteen minutes I hated it. Lordy. An annoying Yank chats up an annoying French girl on a train. There’s another hour and a half of this? But then it suddenly all changed, at the point where Ethan Hawke asks Julie Delpy to get off the train and spend the night wandering around Vienna. I couldn’t help but be strangely charmed by Hawke: I guess that’s acting.
And then it turns into a rather beautiful love story. I am, at heart, a hopeless romantic and a sucker for this kind of thing, but who wouldn’t want to meet the love of their life on a train in Austria one strange day? It plays out in a heartbreaking and heartwarming fashion, and anyone who’s ever been in love will recognise all the tiny touches of detail in this film. And both actors are just fantastic.
It occurred to me a little way through that as well as Lost In Translation, this film served as the model for another film I watched a year or two back, Quiet City. It’s essentially the same film, only set in New York City and more “mumblecore“. Then it occurred to me that this sub-genre of romances are films where guy meets girl meets city, be it Tokyo, Vienna, or NYC.

Luckily I didn’t have to wait nine years for the sequel. I had heard that Before Sunset wasn’t as good as the original, but then I read a lot of people saying it was their favourite, so I went in with an open mind. And it was fascinating to see how the characters had evolved, but even more fascinating to see it from the point of view of assessing the art of storytelling. To go back to a movie nine years later and make an (entirely unplanned) sequel in real-time is quite an interesting trick to pull. The actors are nine years older, the director and screenwriter are nine years older, and consequently it increases the verisimilitude of the piece in a way that would be very hard to pull off otherwise. When we see the brief flashbacks to the earlier film the characters look so young, because they are, and nine years later they look appropriately old, weathered, battered by time.

I don’t know if I would say Before Sunset is not as good as the original. Certainly I don’t think it’s better, but I love finding out what happens to characters in films after the credits roll, even if it’s rarely as satisfying as conjecture. I think it might be a case of: I love Sunrise more right now, but ask me again in nine years.