Just wanted to say, publicly, that since starting Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, I don’t really know what I’m gonna read next. This is weird because as long as I can remember I’ve had a working list about five deep of books I would read once I finished the one I was currently on.

Here is a list of books that have gone mysteriously and suspiciously missing from my shelves over the past three years:

• The Picture of Dorian Gray
• Norwegian Wood
• A Player of Games
• The last two books in the Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Series
• Atomised
• Love in the Time of Cholera
• The Language Instinct

If you know of their whereabouts please contact me, there is a handsome cash reward in it for you.

The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler is, even by Chandler standards, highly revered. As well as being his longest Phillip Marlowe novel, it’s also the most fatalistic, the most world-wearied, the most introspective and the most cynical.

Marlowe, the archetypical post-depression era private eye (and vehicle for Humphrey Bogart’s illustrious career as the smooth-talking, womanising, gun-toting detective) is in rare form here. He is cunning and yet optimistic. He knows when to wax lyrical, and he knows when to keep his trap shut. In this day and age it may be harder to believe that women may respond to his gruff manner, constant rebuffs and infinite cynicism by unfastening their bathrobes, but believe it or not, there is an element of romance in Chandler’s writing. It’s not all fast talking and high trousers. As the web of lies and scandal spins itself around him, Marlowe becomes involved in an ever- tenuous struggle to keep his own cool, to hold on to his standards and of course to keep doing his job. It may not be glamorous work, but for Marlowe it seems that in an increasingly fractured society, the private eye beat is the only yardstick by which he can measure his own morality; by remaining honest whilst digging to the deepest recesses of the most corrupt and sordid of characters, Marlowe seeks his own redemption more than that of his misdirected clientele. He knows better than to assume that the coyer the smile, the more innocent the girl.

I guess that leads to my only real criticism of The Long Goodbye; Marlowe himself is often prone to the kind of sentimentality that is incongruous with the sordid line of business he is in. I doubt anybody charging twenty-five dollars per day would repeatedly stick his neck out to such dangerous lengths in order to adhere to some unspoken moral code. He is, at heart, too optimistic to be believable, when his worldview is so sharply cynical and fatalistic. I suppose in that sense you could argue that his optimism acts as a counterbalance and thus a plot device to propel the story – a lesser man would either get dead or give up, and then there’d be no story to tell. Marlowe, and indeed Chandler, don’t necessarily adhere to the adage that “the tragedy of life … is not that the beautiful things die young, but that they grow old and mean,” sage wisdom though it may be.

The violence in Chandler, unlike, say, Hammett, is brief, often takes place behind closed doors or just barely within earshot, and is over in a matter of a few lines. Hammett prefers the dynamic, protracted kind of action sequences, characterised by lots of sneaking around, silent pursuits, foot chases and noisy, bloody gunfights that often result in less people living than dying. On the contrary, more often than not Marlowe just happens upon violence. Indeed, the novel’s most violent moment comes very early on, and the remaining 400 pages sometimes seem like they are, to use the author’s own words, recovering from that one big hangover.

With the violence out of the way early, it allows Chandler and Marlowe room to take their time. Despite the novel’s length, there are days where he does little more than visit a bar and pick up a newspaper; there are extended sequences where he spends time following the faintest of scents in the hope of uncovering some unlikely connection that will link itself to the case. In many ways its languid mood is a reflection of the heat of the Californian summer, and of course this sultry atmosphere is as much a character in Chandler’s writing as Marlowe himself. The measured pacing and heavy atmosphere allow for a lot of reflection, a lot of dialogue and a lot of commentary. Chapters often end abruptly with sarcastic quips such as “[c]ops never say goodbye. They’re always hoping to see you again in the line-up,” but they usually come just as Marlowe has reached the end of his patience, or has had a little too much to drink. After all, what would the hard-boiled genre be without a resigned fatalism? Marlowe is a loner. The nights that he doesn’t spend alone are spent sprawled out drunk one somebody’s couch, for instance, or in resigned talks with marked men who are not long for this world. Under these circumstances it’s understandable that Marlowe would become jaded. Chandler was writing at the pinnacle of Hollywood’s decadence and depravity; before gangs and poverty infiltrated and when rich socialites legitimately ruled the roost, not corporations. There are class struggles aplenty and it’s clear that no amount of refined manners can cover up the inherent flaws in the imaginations of the upper-class. Chandler is a working class author for a working class audience who makes no secret of his disdain for extravagant tastes and lifestyles.

Of course, with The Long Goodbye, Chandler not only proves himself a master of prose but also of plotting. It may seem that all the dead ends and cold trails are all tied-up nice and neat with a little pink bow on top, until we are forced to reflect deeply on the fates of all the characters in the book’s final pages. What was long since dead and buried may just resurface; likewise the glimmers of optimism gradually flicker out. There is a deep sadness embedded within these pages, between all the sharp wit and criticism, and in many ways the title of the novel itself suggests what is to come – a protracted, heart-wrenching outward sigh that can indeed only end in one very particular way.

Yes, dear readers, Valentine’s Day here in Japan is sadly little more than another way to reinforce an embarrassingly outdated social hierarchy and (like almost everything else) utterly void of any real emotion. Giggling girls exchange tacky trinkets instead of  receiving charmingly misspelled love letters, and repressed female members of staff are constantly reminded of their status as doting and passive sex-objects by being expected to ‘gift upwards’ to their male co-workers, who (naturally!) all enjoy a higher social status than they do. Females are expected to give gifts to males on Valentine’s Day, while the males sit back, relax, smoke their cigarettes, play slot machines and daydream about other ways in which they could slow down the country’s birth rate.

Sweet, sweet guilt.

I know this is true, because when I came to work this morning and found chocolates on my desk from the beautiful young Japanese teacher who sits opposite me, my male co-worker actually joked about the chocolates being from him as he gorged himself on his own bounty. I felt so guilty, and I don’t even want to eat these things because of it. But how can I repay the favour without a) going against the grain of my adopted society, or worse, b) looking like a smitten fool? Is there any way to show your appreciation for women, not just in Japan but in any society, without a sexual or at least a romantic connotation? I’ve heard stories about extremist vigilante feminists who don’t like having doors held open for them.

Let’s be honest, part of the fun of Valentine’s Day, and the romantic world in general, is the gamble that you take every time you put your heart on the line in front of somebody. Where would the fun be if we were guaranteed success every time we asked somebody out? It’s a delicate interplay of emotions, appetites and manipulative skill that dictates the outcome of even the most vaguely romantic social interaction.I’m pretty sure Valentine’s Day would give even Christmas a decent run for its money in the biggest-selling Hallmark-endorsed fake holiday stakes, but it’s sad that in this country it has slowly transformed from the one day of the year where people could get unashamedly romantic into yet another rigid institution, and, at least for women, a veiled opportunity for them to exercise their femininity by exchanging sweets and cards with each other, away from the prying, lecherous eyes of the men that govern them.

A final thought (what am I, Jerry Springer?): I’m told that on White Day (March 14th), males are expected to return the favour of the bounty they received on Valentine’s Day. Although, except in the increasingly rare cases of genuine romance, it seems to me that the function of White Day is not so much to return a favour as it is to unburden oneself of the guilt of having received a gift for no reason whatsoever on Valentine’s Day in the first place. The end result, naturally, is that men get away guilt-free and women get a nice gift to pacify their wild and unpredictable emotions. And everybody gets on with their lives. Seems like a fair trade to me.

This probably all sounds like a huge whinge. It’s not. I actually had a pretty great Valentine’s Day with a pretty special person. As a foreigner, I am in the priveliged position of being able to look upon these precedings with an objective sense of irony. Before y’all attack me for being a Nippon playa-hata, just keep in mind that these rants are not intended to be anything more than mildly entertaining. Yoroshiku, ne?

Last year, liking bands that had only ever played one show, under a tarpaulin strung up beside some friend of the band’s step-dad’s caravan, in front of nine fans, and had the show bootlegged off a mobile phone recording onto a series of twelve hand-labelled cassette tapes, and then broke up because they felt they had already sold out too much, so they dispersed and then congealed into six separate side-projects (two each)…liking those kinds of bands became not only cool again, but a necessary requirement for having your opinions cared about.

The highlight and culmination of my year in music was probably when I met that one-man-band Duck Tails in Tokyo, who had just come off playing some shows in Melbourne. I asked him where he played and which bands he played with, and I hadn’t heard of any them. He did compliment me on my jacket, though, which I guess is validation enough for me.

Well, the anti-bourgeois battle plan kinda backfired. Sucks to your assmar, Duck Tails. Pitchfork decreed that bands like No Age and Beach House be unleashed upon the world, and that they be loved, and the ever-reliable legion of blog trolls played along, saturating my beloved internet with wave after Wavve of shitty repetitive lo-fi three-chord noise. The irony, of course, is that it’s now cliche to be into those very bands who were only forced into existence to try to avoid getting fans in the first place.

Luckily a few sage hands showed up to save the day. Here is a brief list of some of my favourites from last year.

best albums of 2010

The Gamits – Parts (click to stream entire album)

It’s fitting that my album of the year is also the biggest surprise, best throwback album, and comeback album of the year. The Gamits have proven once and for all the validity of modern pop punk. This album is gritty, heavy, catchy, but most importantly, it’s meaningful; here is a band that was pushed into obscurity when pop-punk and emo took off on a worldwide scale, and years down the track they have reformed and released a deeply personal, punishing, haunting album that blows away everything they did in the past (which was already very good in it’s own right). It flew under the radar when it was released, and I think The Gamits would almost prefer it that way, because Parts is a huge middle-finger to what pop music has become over the last few years. Put your prejudices aside and give this album an honest go – I doubt you will be disappointed.

The Tallest Man on Earth – The Wild Hunt

I almost stumbled on this one, yet there’s something about The Wild Hunt that came to define the first part of 2010 for me. You will either love his voice or hate it, but there’s no denying this kind of songwriting. There is a starkness to most of the lyrics and they carry an elemental preoccupation, rife with references to weather and landscapes; everything seems very personal, but at the same time it’s hard to pin down. Of course it also helps that Kristian Mattson is also a damn fine geetar player.

Tame Impala – InnerSpeaker

I feel like a dork for including this, but these guys put together one dreamy, breezy album so free of pretension you will forget what year it is.

Robyn – Body Talk

Swedish pop with attitude, enough said.

Miami Horror – Illumination

The latter half of this album isn’t nearly as engaging as the first, but Miami Horror deserve praise for taking some brave steps away from big-beat electro on their debut album. Singles ‘I Look to You,’ and ‘Holidays’ easily take their places among the best Aussie tracks of 2010.

Sufjan Stevens – All Delighted People EP

Sufjan at his elaborate, intimate best; despite it’s extraordinary running time, this EP is remarkably cohesive and melodic, which is a first for him.

The National – High Violet

Like all their albums, High Violet is a slow-burner and one that takes a good while to sink in. It goes without saying, but The National are deceptively complex and reward repeated listens, and High Violet is no different.

The Walkmen – Lisbon

Two Door Cinema Club – Tourist History

Ellie Goulding – Lights

Chromeo – Business Casual

Editor’s note: Chromeo and Ellie Goulding both also qualify as 2010′s biggest guilty pleasures.

Los Campesinos! – Romance is Boring

None More Black – Icons

best songs of 2010

Bag Raiders – Sunlight

Miami Horror – Holidays

Good Shoes – The Way My Heart Beats

Sufan Stevens – Enchanting Ghost

Tokyo Police Club – Favourite Colour

Marina & the Diamonds – Are You Satisfied?

Yeasayer – ONE

The Walkmen – Angela Surf City

Kanye West (feat. everyone) – Monster (Nicki Minaj’s verse is the defining musical moment of 2010.)

Broken Bells – The High Road

Ellie Goulding – Your Biggest Mistake

biggest disappointments

Foals – Total Life Forever (This band’s main appeal to me was the feeling like each of their songs was the result of some mathematical equation designed for maximum tautness and efficiency. It was a world where emotions were simply not allowed. They were about as cold and detached as any rock band could possibly be. With their second album they went for a roomier and more atmospheric sound which is at odds with their cool stoicism. The result? Yawn.)

Bag Raiders (It sucks that the best track on this album is still ‘Shooting Star.’ A few others come close, but most of the album doesn’t make any impression. And what is up with that one track, ‘Always?’ That one sounds like it should be the aural accompaniment  to a Salt’n'Pepa video clip or something, featuring the worst key change and the worst lyrics released by any respectable group in 2010. Truly, truly awful.)

i just don’t get it

Sleigh Bells (The only difference between this band and a bunch of autistic 6 year-olds is that Sleigh Bells have a drum machine to make sure they keep in time.)

The Drums (Is this supposed to be cute or something? This is the musical equivalent of an ankle-high Scottish terrier that just doesn’t shut the fuck up.)

Caribou (One or two atmospheric and groovy tracks doesn’t mean anybody should give a shit. Most overrated crap of the year.)

Klaxons (They were shit back in 2006 and they have somehow gotten worse without changing a god damn thing.)

ok, you got me

The Arcade Fire – The Suburbs (This album is actually pretty great.)

favourite remixes of the year

Now, I’m not pretending like I’m some expert on this kind of stuff. Alls I know is, these tracks feature some of the most insane beats you are likely to encounter and they will no doubt feature prominently when I start making my “special DJ set” appearances in 2011.

Muscles – Sweaty (Shazam remix)

Miike Snow – Black and Blue (NAPT remix)

Marina and the Diamonds – I Am Not a Robot (Passion Pit remix)

Cut Copy – Lights and Music (Moulinex Remix)

most anticipated

Bayside

Iron & Wine

Cut Copy

Kimbra

Tellison

special feature: best inexplicable cover of the year

This kid took yet another GaGa abomination and not only turned it into an actual song, but a fucking emotional roller coaster that will make your hairs stand on end.

So that’s it. I’m sure I’ve missed lots. I’m always open for suggestions so do let me know about my glaring omissions. I might post a “part two” of sorts wherein I talk about films and television and the likes, but then again, I might not. Until next time!

That shouldn’t imply that this whole time I’ve been striving to create some superior blog-like being, down in my lab, dishevelled, calculating, broken test tubes and mice peppering the floor. On the contrary, there is a murky, stale air down there, the lights are all but burnt out, and there are cobwebs on most of the equipment.

A large part of my 2010 involved an utter retreat from confrontation, whether it was with my friends, students, myself, whatever, and instead I often found myself trawling online department stores, trendy-to-the-point-of-sheer-satire style blogs, or the worst offender, tech reviews sites. And as Christmas, that culmination of twelve months worth of material and emotional longing, edges steadily nearer, I am both ashamed yet proud to say I don’t want or need anything. Except maybe a hug.

Have you ever paused in the supermarket, taken a step back and observed all the other consumers around you, and asked youself, ‘where does all this shit come from?’ The walls are stacked high around you with processed, brightly packaged and accessible foods, which are all mostly anonymous (product names often help to obscure the ingredients of what you are eating to a point of utter irrelevance; could any of you tell me the main ingredients in a can of Coke?), appetising and yet tantalisingly affordable.

Take one example; a box of corn flakes, one of the more innocuous staples of any given supermarket. Let’s say the supermarket you are currently standing in has twelve boxes on the shelf. And in the storeroom out the back they have another forty or so. Then in the next supermarket down the road they have a similar amount. So already we are talking about a hundred or so unopened boxes serving a radius of a couple of kilometres at most. This is obviously a highly conservative guess, based on the assumption that there are only two supermarkets in your town. And that is to say nothing of all the half-empty boxes sitting on your (and your neighbours’) shelves.

If an average box is 500g, then in the supermarkets alone we have at least 50kg of dried corn sitting around. Where does all this corn come from? To create this small amount alone would require a pretty decent patch of land.

So first, the land needs to be tilled, the corn planted, and eventually harvested. This is more than likely done by machine, a machine which was manufactured in a completely different place and then transported to the farm at a huge, irreversible environmental cost. Then you must transport this corn to a processing plant (more machines), where it is dried (artificially to increase production) and rolled into flakes by, yep, even more massive machines.

Meanwhile, somewhere else, plastic bags are being made by the millions to hold these little buggers. And there is yet another huge factory dedicated to making boxes, and another dedicated to printing the bright colourful labels. Then, of course, all these components need to be taken to the same place and ‘assembled,’ that is, the corn flakes put into bags, the bags sealed, the boxes folded, the bags inserted, the bags glued shut, and finally, stacked by the tens of thousands onto a vehicle and taken to a distribution warehouse somewhere. There are dozens of massive, heavy machines involved, huge amounts of land, at least four enormous factories, and finally a huge amount of manpower involved just to make sure those crunchy little pellets end up in a correctly labelled carton.

All this for a box of corn flakes.

Then extrapolate these numbers for every single product on the shelves in any given supermarket. I ask again; where does all this shit come from? And what if it were to suddenly disappear?

I first began to ask myself these questions long before I ever saw a movie like The Road. When I started travelling, and visiting grocers and supermarkets in other countries, I was most immediately struck by the similarities more than the differences. Supermarkets are more or less uniform across the entire developed world, with similar price points (comparatively) and similar amounts of stock on their shelves relative to the area they serve.

Admittedly, the population of the ‘developed world’ is dwarfed by those living in poverty or near-poverty without luxuries like supermarkets. Yet proportionately, it is no secret that we as consumers are all taking way more than we are giving back. We all eat an obscene amount of food, and a huge majority of it comes from supermarkets.

What would happen to us if it was all gone?

If we need such huge areas of land to produce that small number of boxes of corn flakes, I dare you to even try to imagine the total amount of land on the planet that is dedicated to making sure our supermarket shelves are constantly stacked high.

If the huge amounts of farmland and other resources required to mass-produce corn flakes, Coke, instant noodles, cooking oil, beer and wine, fruit juice, Mars Bars, whatever, became overloaded and unsustainable, the spill-over effects would likely reduce the efficiency and affordability of supermarkets across entire regions. Eventually, they would cease to be viable, and they would cease to operate. And then, what would you do for food? Does anybody under the age of thirty, living in an urbanised area, know how to grow, harvest and prepare their own food? Personally, I can’t even keep a small bonsai alive for longer than six months. Imagine if we all had to start raising livestock.

These are the feelings I am overcome with when I take a moment to myself at the supermarket. Where does it all come from, and how can there be so much of it without it ever running out?

Overwhelmingly, my thoughts were not with the corn flakes, or the Coca Cola, or even the Pringles or Mars Bars. They were with the meat products. Since these are the freshest products in the supermarket, and since they represent such a huge proportion of our diets, their turnover is orders of magnitude greater than any other product on the shelves.

More significantly, their environmental cost is greater than any other product you can find in the supermarket. And, not insignificantly, the greatest disparity is with fresh fruits and vegetables.

Frankly, I’m not surprised that the Japanese don’t eat much fresh produce. The country is barely bigger than Victoria yet they have nearly 130 million people squeezed in. Most of the places without people are utterly inhabitable. So, where are they gonna grow their apples and oranges? The prices of fresh fruit and vegetables are extortionate, and I frequently get angry that I can’t justify the cost of up to $2 or $3 dollars for an apple or orange.

The Queen Victoria Market, Melbourne. This does NOT exist in Japan.

This is a major reason why my diet, since being in Japan, has gone from ‘not ideal’ to flat-out ‘unhealthy’ over the course of the last two years. I have been irresponsible and more or less lazy in what I eat, whether I am preparing it myself or ordering at a restaurant. But even as a meat eater, I’m constantly shocked and confused at the ubiquity of meat over here. Fast foot outlets routinely advertise portions that come with ‘double the normal amount of meat,’ and it’s not uncommon to encounter items on a menu with not just one, not two, but three or four different kinds of meat on the one plate. This obviously doesn’t sound healthy, and to me, it doesn’t even sound appetising. I don’t think my concerns about eating meat are entirely new, but like so many others, I chose not to think too carefully about them. Everything runs more smoothly that way; grocery shopping and social occasions are just two of the more obvious examples. As some of my friends over here have demonstrated, a diet without meat in Japan is possible, but it’s not exactly easy.

While I had heard bits and pieces of the environmental impact of factory farming, reading Eating Animals helped me to reconcile my suspicions about the ridiculous amount of resources it costs to put cheap meat on your supermarket shelves. Moreover, though, it helped me to align these suspicions about the environment with the very real issue of animal suffering, and see them as equal parts of one huge problem. As a humble consumer, thinking about that stuff is icky and awkward, and more than a little abstracted. How could your juicy fillet of meat have ever had eyes, ears, an imagination, relationships?

Of course, no book of this nature could be completely free of sentimentality. After all, the whole thing is kind of a personal journey for Jonathan Safran Foer, undertaken for the deeply personal reasons of deciding for himself what to feed his son. And any discussion of animal welfare or animal rights is routinely criticised (and often flatly dismissed) for its sentimentality, so I will not be the special exception and pretend that my interest in this subject is wholly environmental or economical. Reading the various accounts of animal abuse at factory farms in Eating Animals - and then discovering their alarming regularity – is confronting, and impossible to ignore.

Safran Foer’s writing is not as quirky or as humorous as in his other (fiction) works, and frankly, it need not be. The material doesn’t call for it. But it is economical, and lets the facts speak for themselves. I did not feel like I was being preached to, and indeed a large part of the book is dedicated to some of the few remaining ‘honourable’ farmers, who still slaughter animals but do it with a measure of dignity that is rapidly disappearing from the Western world. It’s easy to read, insofar as the language is easy to understand. Yet this will probably live on beyond his first two novels as the book that both made the greatest cultural impact and cemented Foer’s reputation as an important modern writer. It’s part memoir, part personal oath, part love story and part scathing expose.

There will come a time where the kinds of farms we rely upon to keep our supermarkets brimming are no longer viable. Simply pausing and observing the shoppers in your local supermarket and all the unnecessary consumption going on around you will convince you of this. If you have ever stopped to consider where all your food comes from, you owe it to yourself to read this book. I don’t think I can continue to eat the meat served up in restaurants and supermarkets knowing the environmental toll it has taken and the suffering that it represents. And this is to say nothing, really, of the unhealthy lifestyle I have found myself sliding into since coming to Japan, where awareness of environmental issues and respect for different cultures and lifestyle choices is so low (how many times have you heard of someone in Japan asking for a vegetarian meal, only to be served up something with bacon or fish in it?).

I don’t want to make empty promises, and I’ve also tried not to get caught up rhetoric, both when I was reading the book and as I was writing this blog. But I can’t, in good conscience, keep living the way I have been living. At the very least, I need to be more responsible with what I eat. I’ve always prided myself on getting things done, even the ugly things, the hard things, the things that need doing. I guess this is another one of those times, maybe the first I’ve come across since moving over here, and it’s going to be one of the hard things, but this is something that I’ve suspected for a while and something that I feel I need to sincerely try.

So long.

Karee raisu is a culinary last resort that caters to all situations: lack of money, lack of creativity in the kitchen, lack of time to source a meal of any real nutritional value, lack of real hunger (but urgent need to consume food; see: Fuji Rock 2009). This latest batch I’ve cooked up is a doozy; I doubled the recommended quantities on the package in a front-page news worthy act of domestic rebellion, and an equally huge ‘fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me’  aimed squarely at those boring instructions printed so coyly on the back of the box. The result? Final confirmation that too much modern Japanese fast food is never enough. Here’s all that remains from my generous helping tonight (went somewhat cold as I was typing about it’s virtuousity, but it’s former splendour is still evidently visible):

I just found out how to embed mp3s into my blog, so from now on, expect this thing to be delivered not only in full color Panavision™ but also in stereoscopic surround sound!

The first little nugget won’t be a big surprise to anybody who knows how excited I was for the debut album from Melbourne electro groovers Miami Horror, or anybody who has been unlucky enough to be pulled up at a traffic light next to me over the past couple of weeks: this track, entitled ‘Holidays,’ is the best example of the group letting their pop smarts take the wheel, while keeping their indie/dance ambitions safely buckled in the child restrainer in the back seat. And don’t forget that the lead single ‘I Look To You’ features the divine Kimbra on lead vox!

What the hell, here’s the YouTube vid as well:

There are a few missteps on the album, which is a shame considering the strength of their first EP and the ridiculous amount of time they spent putting this thing together, but the good tracks are definitely worth the price of admission.

In the past, I’ve always been a little late to the party when it comes to Sufjan Stevens. With his last two or three albums, in particular the magnum opus Illinois, I felt like the hype had already swelled and receded when I finally got around to digesting it fully myself. For that reason, the whole exhibition seemed far too overwrought, too self-referential, too smart for it’s own good and kinda just not cohesive enough. Like different neighbourhoods of the area it was describing, most of the compositions felt too far removed from the ones immediately before or after them, and I was left thinking, ‘maybe I missed the boat on this one?’ Of course, there are a few undeniable heartbreakers on that particular album: ‘Casimir Pulanski Day’ and the haunting ‘John Wayne Gacy Jr.’ are two crushingly intimate songs with an emotional resonance I’ve rarely heard since Elliott Smith died.

So I decided, when he surprised all of us with his latest All Delighted People EP the other week, to jump on this train while it was still picking up speed, so that I might not miss another revelatory Sufjan event that has people up in arms proclaiming yet another second (or third or fourth) coming of our musical saviour. And this time around, it definitely struck a chord. This release is fantastic; not just in the quality of it’s tunes but it’s structure and sequencing. I never thought I could enjoy 20 minutes of what is essentially the same song…and then still want to press play again when it was all over. The two versions of the eponymous title track that bookend this release are reverential, hymnal, intimate and catchy in that uniquely Sufjanese way. Wedged between, as if almost an afterthought, are a couple of sweet little acoustic tunes that would stand tall on their own and deserve definitely not to be overlooked. But it’s the title tracks that inevitably steal the show, and for the first real time I’m drawn in to Sufjan’s wild, sunny, musical world, where small furry animals run free, there is a (double) rainbow all day, every day, and of course, a poison tree lurking in the corner of the garden somewhere, never spoken about, yet constantly tempting everyone to darkness and despair. Consider me a convert.

My HTC Desire Android missile command centre has been chugging along like a champion for the last month or so, and I am yet to encounter any task that it is not fully eager and willing to perform at my behest. It really is the Arnold Schwarzenegger of mobile phones; I’ve pumped it full of ‘roids (overclocked it to 1.3ghz) and it still hasn’t faltered. I’ve put it through stress tests that would make Mr. Incredible’s knees buckle (I have cracked 1800+ on Quadrant). And that’s not to sell it’s brainpower short, either; I’m pretty sure if I pushed it, it would be equally as capable as good old saggy-titted Arny of becoming Governor of any given US state.

In fact, I’m so proud of the little guy that I’m attaching a screenshot just to show off how flexible and understanding he is to my needs and, um, desires. Notice the modern Japanese twist?

Ok. So this next thing isn’t exactly relevatory news or anything, but I feel it deserves a mention on my little blog, just once.

I’ve been known to go off on scathing tangents in the past, spouting pithy and mostly ridiculous garbage about the state of the mainstream media (and it’s audience) in the Western consumerverse, particularly in Australia. I have complained about the way news programs run lead stories featuring death, bloodshed, lies, pollution and corruption as if in some endless attempt to eventually plunge all of us into some equally endless spiral of despair and misanthropy, contrasted with some sick, twisted sociopathic shit that is apparently only included to make us all feel uncomfortable and inadequate about our own boring sex lives.

Take, for example, a random selection of headlines from the front page of www.news.com.au (Australia’s finest and most widely-read conservative news source) on my mobile phone as of this very moment, 8:45pm, Monday August 6th, 2010:

“Dad, why did you kill mum?” son asks.

Broke, scared man hides in shed for a year.

Politician’s wife exposed as prostitute.

KK (ed: who?) gets steamy with two naked men.

Long-distance romance ends in murder.

I don’t think I’m turning into one of those crackpot paranoid conspiracy theorists when I suggest that these headlines seem to be tending towards some pretty dark and violent topics. Why? It not only frustrates and confuses me on a philosophical level, but it makes me angry on a political level, too: there is so much fuss in Australia about censorship, the banning of this and and labelling of that as ‘not suitable’ for your children, or your disabled neighbour, your homosexual school teacher, your terminally ill grandparent who longs for euthanasia, your mixed-race girlfriend or your Nazi sympathiser pit bull terrier. Mainstream media and conservative politicians seem to love nothing more than telling us what is in the best interests of society, and that all these modern fancies (such as sex on TV, bad language and of course, the worst offender of them all, violent video games) are damaging the very fabric of society.

So what do they do in turn? How do they, judges of morality and final word on good taste, remedy this rot and atone for all the ills of the ‘alternative’ media? They jam violence and corruption down our throats, 24 hours per day, seven days per week, 363 days per year (they tend to take Christmas Day off so they can push their pro-Christian agenda a bit harder), with headlines like the ones I quoted above. They commission ads which are, in a word, terrifying, scaring us into taking out expensive insurance policies and making voluntary super annuation deposits in case some horrible accident should befall us. And, judging by the amount of death and decay I see on the news every night, those odds are pretty high.

Then, in their most horrible act of hypocrisy and exploitation of a dumb population, already juiced up, primed and baited to swallow each and every terrifying tidbit thrown their way, the media networks present an endless parade of ‘reality TV,’ manufactured precisely to show us how scary and awful the great big world is: drug traffickers at airports, corrupt CEOs swindling honest-working employees, drug-crazed criminals attacking little old ladies in quiet suburban streets, and of course, their piece de resistance, paedophiles and rapists who are still on the loose, everywhere, in all their different guises, lurking around each and every corner, ready to pounce on your kids as they make their merry way home from school, scarring them for life and opening up your chequebook to years of expensive professional emotional therapy (because what kind of parent would you be if you didn’t provide this kind of professional help for your children?).

It’s the hypocrisy that pisses me off the most: telling us what is and what isn’t acceptable in the media, and then subjecting us to their own twisted brand of news and ‘entertainment,’ the whole while passing it off as wholesome, informative, relevant and appropriate.

I mention this because since living in Japan I have noticed that the predilection with fear and violence is not world-wide. No, friends, in two years living in Japan, I have seen less than ten ads for banks, insurance companies or anything like that. Likewise, news reports are rarely focussed on local crimes, so people aren’t constantly reminded that there are horrible violent crimes occurring just around the corner. The result? A somewhat repressed, but generally upbeat population.

Take Exhibit A. I love this ad. There is no pretension here. There is no pressure. There is no exploitation, no stereotyping, no condescending dialogue. Just a catchy jingle and some dancing around. It’s all over in fifteen seconds. And that girl is seriously such a babe.

Why can’t Australian ads be more like that? Instead, we get this kind horrible shit. Words cannot describe how much this kind of thing infuriates me. If you, humble viewer, can endure this ad from beginning to end, then you are a bigger man than I:

That was a horrible song when it came out ten years ago, and your awful amateur actors aren’t making it any better. The worst thing about this ad, though, is the singularly selfish message behind it. Complaining about your fellow citizens and whinging that you always get the short end of the stick seems to be socially acceptable these days, and even ad-worthy.

Unfortunately, that one particular car insurance ad isn’t even the worst offender. Why didn’t I include an even more offensive one? I was talking to my mum about this the other night. The absolute bottom of the barrel ads, the ones that have been making us hate turning on the television for decades, are so God-awful that neither of us could even remember the name of the company they were advertising, rendering it impossible for me to even look them up on YouTube. That really says something for the effectiveness of television commercials.

Of course, I know I’m not alone in voicing these kinds of sentiments. Michael Ruppert has far more experience (and eloquence) regarding these matters than I do.

Well, that’s enough spite for one day. I’ve been pretty busy over the last week, mostly writing and marking exams under excruciating sweatshop conditions for the powers-that-be at my school. Somebody (me, perhaps) should make a webcomic about Japanese bureaucracy, and how anything slightly out of the ordinary is ‘difficult’ and subsequently muri desu (impossible). Like for example, how I was told that a percentage mark is ‘unfair,’ so instead I should write an exam out of exactly 100 marks. That would be some pretty good material for my first edition.

Tonight I am gonna go home and perhaps get stuck into some video gamin’. By gar, it’s been a while, and that new Metroid game looks like a riot. Maybe I’ll pick up some chewing gum on the way home…

Til next time!

]]> http://ext23.wordpress.com/2010/09/07/moths-to-a-flame/feed/ 0 ext23 curry http://ext23.wordpress.com/2010/08/25/blips-and-beats/ http://ext23.wordpress.com/2010/08/25/blips-and-beats/#comments Tue, 24 Aug 2010 16:09:46 +0000 ext23 http://ext23.wordpress.com/?p=357 ]]> I love being able to spend an hour or two on Hype Machine, and at the end of it all, come away feeling like I’ve just scraped the risen cream off the top of the world’s music blogs, and tapped back into a scene once so near and dear to me. More important, though, is the rush of energy that pulses through me every time I indulge in some piping hot new music which allows me to forget, however briefly, the stifling atmosphere of the country (both in a social and meteorological sense).

Images flash in my mind like portentous fragments of some acid trip in waiting, whether they are scenes from stories waiting to be written, sets from movies waiting to be filmed, or just places I wish I could be, with as-yet-unnamed characters providing the dialogue en masse. And yet another unstoppable urge to take a trip down to Tokyo engulfs me and leaves me powerless to resist. Indeed, it is the only place where this new soundtrack may find an appropriate storyboard to play out against, and the only place where these fantasies of mine might have the slightest chance of materialising into some lasting experiences.

It gives me some distant satisfaction when I see some previously-obscure (yet always terribly dear to me) Aussie act make a small splash on the infinity of the blogosphere, at some random blip in time. Moreover, though, I enjoy being able to sit back and marvel at my own prescience and good taste.

In somewhat geekier news, I can’t get enough of my HTC Desire Android-powered phone. This thing has occupied an unhealthy proportion of my total attention span of late. I love it for all the ways it’s different from my old iPhone; it’s snappy, user-friendly (unlike the iPhone, which actually hates people using it), pushes Gmail, and I can over-clock that mofo like nobody’s business. It may sound trivial, hell, it may even sound like I’m some spoiled white kid playing with his latest tech gadget, but in truth this is yet another part of my personal liberation, some might even say my penance for man’s original sin: giving birth to Apple products (the forbidden fruit).

Not long now until I’m back in Melbourne. I wonder, will she be able to fit me into her busy schedule? If so, will she be as eager to catch up as me? I wonder which trendy magazine I might see poking out the top of her calico book bag, where she might suggest we go to eat before going out. Or will she just play that disinterested, preoccupied card and leave me to make my own fun? Will she be all like she don’t even know me? But distance only makes the heart grow fonder, and I know that whatever happens, however she may feel about me when it’s all said and done, I will be glad we had spent some time together.

But guess what, blogosphere? Today’s your lucky day, cause as of right now I’m admitting to being neglectful, tactless and lazy. My lack of regular posting has nothing to do with being busy – it is only due to being uninspired, which of course is entirely my fault. I came here expecting every single day to be a tidal wave of creative stimuli, but when the initial rush of being an utter alien on a new planet wore off, and the sensation of having my new world spin by like an infinite cascading mess of encoded computer garble became de rigeur, I simply stopped trying. My lack of output has been gnawing at my conscience lately, and as someone who deeply values creativity and an analytical edge in others, I have become somewhat ashamed of my own attitude.

So here’s to yet another e-rebirth, full of hollow promises to my stockholders and Steve Jobs-like overstatement. Boom!

It’s hard to keep up with international current affairs in a country where you do not speak the language. Of course, there is the infinite mystery and wonder of the internet, where tweets can actually premeditate the normal space-time continuum and updates filter through from the other side of the world before even the world’s most punctual news sources have time to catch up. However, nothing beats the palpable sensation of simmering along with the dissenters and antagonists and bystanders in the midst of a common language. Opinions, trends and perspectives are accumulated through a Babel fish-like osmosis, so that when the time comes to sit down at a keyboard and bash out yet another politically-charged manifesto, all the ammunition is already there.

My point is, don’t be disappointed if this blog lacks a political edge from now on. Yeah, like I was ever well-informed in the first place, but you know what I mean. The summer All-Japan High School Baseball Championship is approaching, and my school is only two games away from representing Fukushima-ken. Tomorrow I get a free day off to go and sit in the sun, read, cheer when I feel like it, or mingle with my students when they aren’t too busy shortening their skirts or complaining about the heat. Time moves a little slower in Fukushima-ken…that is, until the students graduate and realise that there’s nothing else to do here than to get pregnant at an early age and settle into a daily routine of kicking about town in old tracksuits, smoking, shaving off their eyebrows and going to Gusto. At which point time really slows down.

I miss Melbourne. I miss the sophistication, the cutting-edge fashion and music and the feeling that despite its grey exterior, there are hidden secrets and new experiences lurking around every turn. I miss the multicultural texture of the streets. I miss feeling like most people are on the same intellectual and existential level, and the unity provided by Australian Rules football and the outspoken pride in the fact something so local and yet so universally beloved is unique in the world. Of course for every snappily dressed hipster and hot Asian girlfriend, there are four or five race-going Melbourne Uni commerce undergrads, and at least the same number of toothless bogans stinking of Woodstock on the Lilydale train, but that all just serves to add yet another patch to the quilt.

In that sense, it’s timely that I’ll be going back there for a short break in September, and this time somebody else will be able to share in that sense of discovery and awakening that can be so overcoming when you first realise you are standing right in the midst of one of the world’s best-kept cultural secrets.

In anticipation of this, I’m noticing a slow trickle of ideas making their way into my day-to-day awareness, from philosophical one-liners to Escher-like short story fragments that are gonna take some serious unravelling. Perhaps it has something to do with repeated exposure to the electric Tokyo nightlife, or the fact that I’m re-reading The Picture of Dorian Gray (admittedly more so to arm myself with some diabolical one-liners than for some critique of decadence and homophobia) but I’ve been wanting to try harder, to challenge and analyse my own opinions and instincts and to make more of a document of them. Full disclosure here, people.

Summer over here is oppressive to say the very least; days that aren’t spent wringing out clothes made sopping by the tropical rains are similarly wasted wringing out clothes on the brink of utter ruination due to sweat caused by the suffocating humidity. This kind of atmosphere is not usually conducive to gettin’ stuff done, which is why I accidentally-on-purpose chose to join a local gentleman’s sporting collective and had my first training with them this weekend. It was good to get the wheels turning again, despite feeling at the same time like I was pulling out from some long-since abandoned station with the accumulated weight of many a winter’s worth of undelivered freight tugging behind me. Competitive sports are cathartic pursuits, and it’s actually interesting (and not wholly useless, I might add) to take note of how people’s personalities manifest themselves on the sporting field. An attacking player is more likely to be feisty in their opinions, and a creative player is almost always going to turn out to be someone engaging. These are the curious cases where, just like in life, ambition isn’t always met with success, but the inspired spark of an idea and the jolt of effort in getting it off the ground ultimately proves to be the true reward, regardless of outcome. What’s even more interesting is seeing those work-week tensions and relationship inadequacies bubble over. If only we were allowed to bash each other on the back of the legs (heads?) with a hockey stick every time something went wrong.

Holy shit the most frightening insect just landed on my wall.

I thought it was pretty interesting how Leonardo ‘Mr. Reliable’ aka ’13 year-old to Scorcese’s Polanski’ DiCaprio’s last two major roles have been basic carbon copies of each other. And to be honest, I’d be hard pressed to say whether I liked Shutter Island or Inception better – both entertained me while I was watching, but the residual images faded from the backs of my eyelids pretty quickly after they ended. In my opinion, Rian Johnson’s criminally neglected and critically underrated The Brothers Bloom does the spiral-shaped meta-fiction thing in a much more original and entertaining way. What’s more, for a serious movie positing itself as a comedy, or vice-versa, or whatever the hell it actually is, its emotional pay-off is a lot more rewarding. With Shutter Island, I was kinda just thinking, ‘lobotomise him already.’

For a good-looking guy, Leo’s certainly got that furrowed brow, too-much-whiskey-and-cigarettes thing down to a fine art. Whatever happened to that Oliver Twist-esque adolescent who so readily convinced Kate Winslet to get her considerable tits out on a trans-Atlantic ocean liner? Now he’s chasing his own over-wrought imagination around rainy warzones and I just don’t know what to think.

As for Inception, my feelings can be pretty neatly summarised with one sentence: for a movie that tries to hard to be clever, I spent more time trying to figure out all the plot deviations than absorbing the philosophical themes of the story itself. It was just too confusing without being thought-provoking enough. With movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey, I was left in a trance, with barely-formed yet naggingly relevant existential notions swimming about my recently-pulped brain matter. That is a movie that opens doors and windows onto all sorts of territory (or lack thereof, as it were) and leaves you thinking about the big picture (really, really big). Inception had so much potential but in the end got buried beneath an avalanche of special effects, plot layers and a score containing way too much trombone.

It comes as no surprise that the best scene in Inception features the infinitely cool Joseph Gordon-Levitt in a dapper suit fighting some thug in a snazzy hotel hallway that keeps tripping over itself. I mean, who could not be into that? Even when he’s drinking gin and juice for breakfast and overdosing on The Smiths in (500) Days of Summer I still wanna date that guy. Put him in zero-gravity and I go to water.

In memoriam of my addiction to David Letterman in eras past, and in homage to the quiet confidence of my former self as demonstrated in this post, here’s a list of top 10 observations made in Tokyo last time I was there.

1. There is a direct correlation between the severity of the blond hue of Shibuya girls’ hair and their sheer volume.
2. Same goes for the guys.
3. Nothing is more white than sitting in Starbucks with an iPhone.
4. Conversely, nothing is more unbecoming on white girls than dressing up like cute Japanese girls. Just stop. That Minnie-chan bow in your hair is awful.
5. There are more wonderful sights and sounds to be experienced in one day in Yoyogi Park than in an entire month in Fukushima.
6. I still fail at navigating the Tokyo Metro. This is some top-serious devil labyrinth designed to lead everyone astray. I have a feeling that it’s actually protecting some magnificent unknowable secret, like the Holy Grail or the lost city of Atlantis.
7. No matter where I am in the world, it’s comforting to be able to have a singalong to The Strokes’ ‘Last Night.’
8. The old-school elderly Tokyoites who hobble their way from place to place must be so frightened, confused and disappointed at what has become of their once-fair city.
9. Nowhere else in the world do business women look so damn sexy.
10. It’s only a matter of time before I become a permanent part of the problem.

This blog has succeeded in extracting from me (like blood from a stone…or some other thing with no blood in it) a few catchy turns of phrase and points about myself that I barely realised were there. So I can only imagine the interminable disappointment it must have been for you, dear reader, to realise how selfish this whole exercise has been. But isn’t that what blogging is all about? At least, that is how it’s always been for me. And it has worked for me in the past, so I plan to keep it going as my ideas and motivation sprout, blossom, and then turn ugly. Now, to congratulate and honour your bravery and tenacity in reaching the end of this mighty quest, I shall reward you with a ‘comment’ link, with which you may do as you please.

So long, friends.

Living in rural Japan is, despite what overzealous travel guides and intrepid tourists may have you believe, very monotonous and uninspiring, particularly when you live in a town with a ratio of about three or four semi-trailers to every one normal-sized car. That’s not to say I don’t enjoy my job or my life here; far from it, however there are certainly times I find myself frustrated and angry as my remaining youth withers away in this oppressive ghost town. To some degree, my silent cultural rebellion has been working. I’m finding more time for exercising, reading, watching movies, and even video gaming, which (contrary to popular opinion) can be both innovative and inspirational. And of course, buying a car has helped the situation to no end.

I’ve also dived into the overwhelming and somewhat intimidating world of Japanese manga. When I say ‘dived,’ of course what I really mean is ‘cautiously dipped a single toe,’ but it’s a start. Does anybody remember those grotty underworld porn shops in the Nick Cage film 8mm? In truth, second-hand manga repositories aren’t too far removed from this kind of fetishism. Long, musky walls of paper swell and bulge with countless discarded volumes. Floorboards creak and groan while low-powered light globes barely provide enough illumination to make out the scrawl of characters along the spines. Dedicated fans, dotted like moths at seemingly random points throughout the network of caves like, spend hours reading entire series from start to finish, barely moving so as to conserve energy. Genre tags warn of all sorts of unimaginable debauchery within the hand-drawn black and white cells of the pages, and an author’s years of toil – scratching away at a dishevelled desk amongst piles of his hero’s works, on a sparse diet of convenience store instant noodles, begging for a publisher and praying for an audience – goes on sale for 300 yen for the entire series, twelve volumes, read once, immediately forgotten. But please don’t misinterpret; I believe the Japanese are lucky to have a pastime which is both so vast and rich, and so culturally unique. The breadth of material and styles which fall under the umbrella of manga is mind-blowing, spanning from the predictably trashy and vapid to highly intelligent, keenly-observed and moving.

One such notable entry is クロ號 (kurogou), a collection of short anecdotal stories about an orphaned black cat, his friends and foes, and his hapless owner. Sure, it sounds childish and simplistic, however this couldn’t be further from the truth. Our hero must deal with rejection, loneliness, disappointment, unrequited love and loss of innocence. Sound heavy? Sure, it is, but that’s what all great authorship somehow manages to do: transport the reader into another world, where separate yet parallel feelings exist as if they were our own. John K. Sampson of the Weakerthans has penned a beautiful couplet of tracks about his own pet cat, casting the creature’s own habits, needs and perspectives in a tangibly human light. Kurogou does the same. It ponders the secret life of felines and exalts their mysterious sentiment, while at the same time distilling their playful nature into its most innocent and adorable. I believe it’s out of print now, so I’ll have to hunt down second-hand copies of the remaining volumes. Looks like more tomb raiding is on the horizon.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, this year I have decided to take on some added initiative with my classes and write their exams myself. I do this because of  the ludicrously regressive approach to assessments that my school takes when it comes to English (memorising a few phrases of vocab without understanding any of the underlying structure, mentally photographing a page of a textbook and then reproducing it verbatim for the test when an embarrassingly low-grade monochromatic photocopy appears with a few blank spaces sporadically added in for dramatic effect.

Of course, when I mentioned that I was making the test myself, and that it would be somewhat more challenging than what they were used to, I was met with the Japanese equivalent of a violent protest rally: stunned, vacant stares from everybody at once. I said that there would be no Japanese on the test, and more desolate confusion ensued. I seem to recall my high school German examinations, when I had to speak for a solid fifteen minutes about a variety of subjects, including a detailed analysis of a politically-charged movie called Sonnenallee about life in the GDR, which incidentally got me hooked on the Stones’ Exile on Main Street (which, aside from going on exchange for six weeks, was probably the most rewarding part of my six years spent studying German).

I just hope that this little experiment of mine generates the reward for effort that I’m hoping for. Realistically I’m probably only making enemies out of my students, and it could be many years before they realise the opportunity they had at high school to make the most of their English education, but I hope they appreciate it one day.

Ocassionally I have these uncomfortably postmodern experiences when I stumble across some beautifully manicured creature in cyberspace. Maybe it’s a blog, a photography portfolio, a delicately-worded Twitter post, or some drunken happy snap that flashes up for a few fleeting moments on my news feed in Facebook, but all it takes is a split-second and inevitably I am immediately overcome with pangs of excitement and jealousy.

Of course, it always involves a girl, always excruciatingly hip, yet always with a knowing eye to the nostalgic appeal of past eras (knitting, second-hand paperbacks, cycling); lists of preferred authors and artists so taut as to withstand even the most strenuous pretentious indie stress-test; and a geographical location that jumps off the screen with all sorts of signifiers attached: venues so underground they are literally underground in New York City, indescribably drunken nights out rubbing shoulders with the indie nomads of the world in London, the schizophrenic fashion of Tokyo.

Maybe it’s just the Photoshop talking, but then again, maybe you are so utterly compatible with this girl, you are convinced that if you could somehow just meet her, make eye contact, offer her a light, then she would instantly see in you the same  hypnotic and addictive qualities you see in her, because you are so clearly soul mates. You are convinced that this girl embodies everything you admire and yearn for in the opposite sex, and that just makes the truth all the more painful: she is so far away, so abstract, and you are, and always will be, so anonymous.

The final insult – and the fatal moment when one resigns himself back to the common existence of the real world – is the recognition of a repeated name upon the wall, a discreet hand around the waste or resting upon a knee in a photo, an ever-so-slightly too prominent link to an ever-so-suspiciously trendy blog…and with this inadvertent pattern recognition (the tell-tale signs of an unfathomably cool, probably superhuman significant other), and the realisation that these kinds of girls exist in a dimension utterly inaccessible to the likes of you.

These are the moments when one leans back from his desk and averts his gaze for a brief few seconds, and is transported from his regressive fantasy back into the world of bricks and mortar, of voices echoing from outside his door, of money and debt and obligation, and of real, tangible opportunity.

You know, at the risk of sounding like a broken record (or a poorly encoded mp3, depending on your generation), I’ve just about had it with all this iPhone talk. I got mine well over a year ago, shortly after they were released in Japan. Let me clarify on one point; while Japan will probably be the first country to manufacture a fully-automated, talking robot-maid (with a short skirt and visibly frilly underpants), or batteries that actually recharge themselves as you use them (I wouldn’t be surprised at this point), they are also surprisingly behind the curve when it comes to normal, everyday technologies that other countries have been taking for granted for years. The most obvious example of this is internet banking. That’s right, you literally can’t log into your bank account on a computer in Japan. What’s worse, is that an obscene amount of banking is still done (shudder) face-to-face. Surely we’ve advanced enough to be able to avoid any and all unnecessary human interaction, haven’t we? But I digress.

The iPhone hit Japan at least a year after everywhere else. This is a country where every single mobile phone (and every baseball-playing highschool boy) looks and acts exactly the same, so I somewhat understand their initial reticence. Alas, those phones were not for me! Shamefully, ruefully, I was actually among the first in Japan to get an iPhone. This was the second concession I had made to the Jobsian Empire, after I got an iPod Nano about 6 months before (can’t argue with that battery life).

For a while there, the iPhone and I got along swimmingly. It was just the two of us, sure we were a little misunderstood, but at least we had our privacy. Things have changed, though. Not for the better. These days, every gaijin and their girlfriend has an iPhone. And I gotta hear about it.

No offence to my friends, but the next time I see an Apple product-related Facebook status update, I’m gonna go climb the clock tower. Likewise, if we’re out having a beer or something, don’t get your iPhone out and start talking about whatever leet new apps you have, or whatever mind-numbingly shit game you’re currently playing with thirteen of your similarly unique friends, or worse still, start posting on Twitter or Facebook. Where’s the iPhone app for beating people over the head? Whatever, it’s probably jailbreak-only.

Initially, the iPhone was a niche product that only the cutting-edge and tech-savvy dabbled in. In the early days of the iPhone’s subtle invasion of Japan, I didn’t mind being a part of that privileged minority. But Apple have yet again conquered the minds of the unsuspecting public, and friends that I thought would have remained immune to their covert psycho-warfare have since fallen victim in the most horrible ways possible. People today revere and depend upon their iPhones like the repenting elderly appeal to God on their deathbeds.

But the point of this rant is not so much a refreshing of my long-standing vendetta against Apple; it’s that yet again I feel like our reliance upon technology is infringing upon our real human relationships. Even though I have cut down a lot, I myself still spend way more time than I would like on Facebook. I am proud to say I have never even visited Twitter’s home page and to be honest I don’t really even know what it is. I don’t really post on forums that much anymore, and most of my time online is spent reading about upcoming video games or watching live sports.  I am trying to take my social life, as much as possible, back to the old analogue way of doing things. Because everyone knows that vinyl sounds better anyway.

It dawned on me that the time to say goodbye was rapidly, unavoidably approaching, and that I had better make the most of what little time I had left with them. Subsequently I have been far more outgoing and active around my schools of late, inviting myself in to eat lunch with my students, taking photos with them, kicking a soccer ball around the corridors until the librarian tells us off, that kind of thing. With this in mind, it should come as no surprise that the last few days with my san-nensei’s have been my best as an ALT (ie. sponsored foreigner) in many months.

This change of attitude in one area of my life has been countered by multiple miniature failures in another.  As I become closer to those people in my life with whom my relationship is bound to be irreparably severed at the hands of fate, I am realising countless missed opportunities to establish relationships which were never doomed to such finality, but rather ones that I let slip due to my own pride or carelessness.

Hard to believe it’s a year since the last round of high school entrance exams, upon which a swarm of foetuses descend upon my school to sit a pointless exam that determines their ability to wear baggy pants (if you’re a boy) or teeny-tiny skirts (if you are girl). These are seemingly the most important criteria for acceptance into my school and I can’t seem to be able to pin down any other common traits amongst my students. Anyway, this year the corridors were even more deserted than last year, so I was forced to partake in my overpriced bentou by myself.

And of course, classes are as frustrating as ever. Today my students whinged and complained about having to take their ‘oral communication’ test, which (you guessed it) involves no speaking whatsoever and requires nothing more than memorising three or four words from any given set phrase and then filling in the gaps. Of course, we had been drilling these same exact phrases for the past two months, yet the students all cry bloody murder and righteously proclaim English to be ‘impossible’ whenever I ask them a question that isn’t branded onto their eyeballs (such mind-bending, challenging things like ‘what’s up?’).

This one particular class has not improved by a single fraction over twelve full months. In fact, I think they have gone backwards. The difficulty of this class started out lower (much, much lower, in fact) than what they had been doing the year before, and has remained consistently ridiculous for the duration of the year. The tests and other assessments follow the exact same formula, week in, week out. It’s at a point now where if I suggest anything that doesn’t ascribe directly to this deadening monotony, the teacher complains that it’s ‘too hard.’ I know it’s too hard, that’s why I’m suggesting it, moron. How else are they ever going to learn anything? And God help me if I suggest undertaking an assignment that might require (gasp! shock! O great hell fury!) homework.

What a rewarding, wholesome approach to learning a new language! I’ve said it before and I will repeat it again: it’s no wonder the children here hate English so much. On days like this, I hate teaching it. I hate identifying myself as a native speaker of a language that can be reduced to something so fucking sterile and lifeless.

With this in mind, I have decided that if I can bare this kind of bullshit format of ‘English education’ (I use both words reluctantly) for another year, then I’m gonna write the tests myself whether they like them or not.

By the same teacher in question, I was also told off for sitting on the ancient oil heater with one of my students before class started. God forbid I should try to relate to them outside the confines of militaristic class time. I was then also scolded for having my phone in class (not really even in class because it was during the break) when there were students sitting not three feet away from us furiously sending emails to their 好きな人 in the precious seconds before class started up again. Yeah, I love the respect I get over here as a teacher.

Perhaps I should also mention at this point that Japanese people don’t ‘get’ The Far Side. Not that there’s much to understand, I would have thought: a majority of them are basically just ‘if animals could talk…’-type gags. I gave a bunch of my students Far Side cartoons with the captions removed, and asked them to write their own, based on the picture. I had heard from a friend of mine that this kind of exercise worked well with his students. Alas, it would seem that by the time the kids have ground out their first year of senior high school, their capacity for lateral thought and well-observed humour has been well and truly beaten out of them. I even told the kids they could write it in Japanese first, and then I would help them translate, but even after that, most of the captions were nothing more than the poor victim exclaiming ‘OH NO!’ Some of the kids even asked me, ‘what’s happening in this picture?’ I nearly blew a fuse. If I told you the punchline of the author’s original joke, wouldn’t that make the whole exercise kind of pointless?

I had other notions about exposing the kids to different styles of Western journalism, social politics, cartoons and humour (all of which The Far Side embodies well), but…well, if they can’t even think of witty captions for funny drawings of animals, then I suppose maybe I’m aiming a little too high. And here I was thinking I could find something that would transgress cultural barriers! Ha!

I guess I’ve been going snowboarding a fair bit lately. After nearly throwing in the towel after numerous failed ordeals and career-threatening injuries (at least, they seemed career-threatening at the time when I needed to be snow mobile’d back down the mountain), the last few times I’ve been have been really great, and with night skiing in full swing it would appear my weekends are booked out for the foreseeable. Last night we had more snow in my little town than I have ever seen before (almost knee-deep outside my apartment this morning) and despite the cries of fear and panic from my Japanese driver, I kinda got a kick out of the whole experience.

Snow is still very much a novelty for me. I feel like it casts of blanket of tranquility over daily proceedings, as if tucking the whole town into bed at once. Snow makes unnecessary haste impossible, and I’ve noticed that it brings people together in a common fight to simply go about their business with such an unwelcome menace pervading their day.

However I admit that if I lived in an even more snow-prone region, shovelling and digging my way out of mountains of frozen white torture every morning – combined with the mere knowledge that I would frequently require the use of gumboots – this whole snow caper would probably get old pretty quickly.

Seems like I’ll be heading down to Tokyo again soon to purge myself of my sins. Until then, take care.

best albums

Future of the Left – Travels With Myself and Another

Bertie Blackman – Secrets and Lies

Phoenix – Wolfgang Amadeus Pheonix (Predictable, but come on.)

Propagandhi – Supporting Caste

Built to Spill – There is no Enemy

Mariachi el Bronx

A Wilhelm Scream EP

best singles

Bag Raiders – Shooting Star (This one actually first surfaced in 2008 but was hands-down the breakout incredible single of the year. Pure euphoric pop bliss. Watch out for Bag Raiders running away with the crown of Aussie electro/pop in 2010 when their album drops.)

80kidz – Frankie

Bertie Blackman – Byrds of Prey

Perfume – Kiss and Music (Warning: cute Japanese girls.)

Phoenix – 1901

Passion Pit – Little Secrets

Paramore – Ignorance

Polar Bear Club – Living Saints

Propagandhi – Supporting Caste (Arguably the hardest-rockin’, smackest-talkin’ track of the year.)

A Wilhelm Scream – Bulletproof Tiger (On second thoughts, this one is the hardest rockin’.)

Mariachi el Bronx – Litigation

Future of the Left – Arming Eritrea

The Maccabees  - Kiss and Resolve

best albums not released in 2009

The Matches – Decomposer (What an album. Bursting with wit and creativity, unlike anything else in the genre and still sounding totally fresh.)

Bodyjar – How it Works

Frank Sinatra and Count Basie – Live at The Sands (Peerless.)

The Fire Theft – S/T

I am the Avalanche – S/T

best discoveries

Bertie Blackman

Perfume (Pitch-perfect electro-charged J-pop.)

The Benevento/Russo Duo

Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings

biggest disappointments

Paramore – Brand New Eyes (The best one-two opening punch of the year besides Phoenix quickly degenerates into boring, predictable soft rock a la Green Day. Snore.)

meWithoutYou – It’s All Crazy! It’s All False! It’s All a Dream! It’s Alright (Supremely accomplished, sophisticated album, but after Brother/Sister, I was hoping for a punishing, challenging listen, which this definitely isn’t.)

Blakroc – S/T (Lazy rhymes and half-arsed beats from the Black Keys. Shame.)

Maxïmo Park – Quicken the Heart (A lazy album from a band that needed to step up to be counted.)

The Maccabees – Kiss and Resolve (Despite a few highlights, here’s another case of a band on the brink that played it way too safe this time around.)

The Decemberists – Her Majesty (wtf?)

i just don’t get it

Animal Collective – Merriweather Post Pavillion (I would rather listen to Jet than this disharmonic pretentious mess. Fuck this band.)

Ladyhawke – S/T (I’m all for Kiwis making it on the world stage, but since when did ‘lame ironic nu-disco’ become a synonym for ‘indie royalty?’)

The Wire (After hearing people go nuts about this show in the same way as The Sopranos, I thought I’d better check it out. Maybe I’m just not in tune enough with lower-class American suburbanality, heroin dealing or wharfies union struggles, but this has left me pretty cold.)

bands that should have quit in 2009

Animal Collective (Spare us. Please.)

Muse (How many albums of Matt Bellamy soothsaying in falsetto do we need?)

Rise Against (Just oh so over.)

Green Day (If I want American politics I’ll watch the Colbert Report. You’re a pop-punk band – talk to me when you feel like writing another song about masturbation.)

bands that shouldn’t have quit in 2009

Bodyjar

most anticipated

Tellison

Bag Raiders

Kimbra

best gigs

Parkway Drive @ Freeway Jam, Koriyama

80Kidz @ Fujirock

Fall Out Boy @ Fujirock (Even Pete Wentz’ idiotic babble didn’t detract from the energy of this show. Cheesy band, great set.)

Polysics @ Fujirock (The only band I’ve ever seen to successfully get a festival-sized crowd pogo-ing in perfect timing. Wacky, wacky shit, with the best recorder solo in pop music.)

best movies

Up

Okuribito

The Road

District 9

Fantastic Mr. Fox (An animated film with a difference. It took Wes Anderson to do it, but finally, something that can go toe-to-toe with Pixar’s efforts.)

worst movies

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Where the Wild Things Are (I never read this as a kid, but how could anybody really get into this film? A bunch of oversized sad-sacks complaining about each other for 90 minutes.)

The Hangover (Come on, everyone. This was just so silly. And as if we needed another movie about loud Americans partying in Las Vegas.)

Sherlock Holmes (I really wanted to like this, but even despite RDJnr’s enthusiastic turn, this is nothing more than an uninspired exercise in dumb action sequences, ignoring every opportunity to turn into a thoughtful and worthwhile new franchise.)

best movies of 2009 that i haven’t seen yet

Inglorious Basterds

(500) Days of Summer

A Serious Man

Moon

Bad Lieutenant

best television shows

Breaking Bad (More times than I can count, this show made me sit up in a state of pure shock and admiration. Great writing, great dramatic timing, and the acting revelation of the year in Brian Cranston.)

Bored to Death (Finally, an American comedy that doesn’t try way too hard.)

Honourable mention: John Safran’s Race Relations (I’m not sure this classifies as a ‘good’ show, but it left me as enthralled as anything else I saw in 2009.  John Safran embarrasses, dishonours and mutilates himself (literally), all just to prove a point to himself. At turns hilarious and repulsive, I’m proud that the Australian censorship board still lets him do whatever the hell he pleases and get away with it.)

worst television shows

30 Rock (Yawn.)

Community/Parks and Recreation (Flaccid, cliched attempts to cash in on the success of The Office.)

Fringe (Halfway through the first episode, when an FBI agent allows an incarcerated mad scientist to submerge her in water and attach diodes to her head in an attempt to sync up her dreams with her catatonic lover in virtual reality – and the plan works – well, that is when I knew this show was not for me. Oh yeah, and the mad scientist said she would have to do it naked, but turns out she was wearing a black sports bra. Worst thing I have seen in ages.)

best books read in 2009

Truman Capote – In Cold Blood

Saul Bellow – The Adventure of Augie March

Stephen Pinker – The Language Instinct

George Orwell – 1984 (again)

best video games

Mario Galaxy (Wii)

New Super Mario Bros. (Wii)

Machinarium (PC) (A wordless old-school adventure with a whole lot of heart.)

GTA Chinatown Wars (DS) (Does so many things right and proves that the DS is still the handheld platform with the most versatility and potential.)

best lifestyle choice made in 2009

Shaving in the shower. Never before have I known such effortless smoothness.

Well, I guess that’s it. Until next time!

]]> http://ext23.wordpress.com/2010/01/24/sugar-high/feed/ 0 ext23 http://ext23.wordpress.com/2009/12/22/holding-hands/ http://ext23.wordpress.com/2009/12/22/holding-hands/#comments Tue, 22 Dec 2009 03:38:14 +0000 ext23 http://ext23.wordpress.com/?p=249 ]]> The only things keeping me grounded at the moment are Nintendo games, Raymond Chandler and Saul Bellow. Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing. My tastes could be decidedly less wholesome, and no doubt they would be were I still in Melbourne, or hanging out in Tokyo with the boys. As for The Adventures of Augie March, I have rarely been so impressed by the density and scope of any work of art, and that it could be the product of a singular mind, calling upon nothing more but narrative skill and delicate observation of the intricacies of human existence just make it all the more inspiring.

It just feels so complete, as Bellow can address everything from nihilism to professional relationships to class struggles through the prism of middle American life in the 20th century with such clarity, and identifies hidden motivations, weaknesses, and agendas in every character it introduces, from lowly union foremen, the the numerous women who come and go, to the matriarchal Grandma, to Augie’s various mentors, and so on.

Not to mention that the plot and pacing are nothing short of immaculate; characters’ true intentions are only ever slightly hinted at so as not to prematurely spoil any eventual climax or create unnecessarily gratuitous tension where there need not be any. Nevertheless, through the strength of Bellow’s descriptions alone we feel like we know the characters well already, so that their actions never come as a complete surprise, either. Everyone is flawed, undoubtedly even more so than Augie himself in all his restlessness. And that’s the thing; it’s so human, it doesn’t romanticise except where absolutely necessary, life is unfair and it doesn’t shy away from this fact. Augie’s biggest struggle is between his desire to preserve his own integrity and the weight of his aspirations.

The thing felt like it lost steam over the last 100 pages or so; since Augie spends the entire first half of the book talking about Grandma Lausch and Einhorn, it seems slightly rushed when he joins the army, goes on three tours of duty, marries, and resolves with his estranged older brother within the space of a couple of chapters.

Anyway, after months of toil, I finally finished it a week ago, and I’m worried that whatever I get stuck into next will either be too lightweight or comparably far too existential and depressing. Options include Tender is the Night, Cat’s Cradle, The Trial, and Speak, Memory, something I’ve been threatening to read for years. I guess this is what happens when I try to prepare reading lists months in advance – my moods and expectations change, and then I feel like a petulant kid being forced into doing some kind of boring homework when I have to start a new book without an entire bookshop at my disposal.

I’m gonna go ahead and call this movie ‘death affirming.’ It’s almost perfectly acted and despite a fairly predictable ending, still works really well. The characters are well balanced, suitably eccentric when they need to be and yet always compelled by real and honest motivations, rooted firmly in compassion for their families and their fellow man.

Personally, I had no idea these kinds of professions were so scorned in Japan, and really, you would think that someone with such responsibility would at least be quietly respected, but apparently not. The movie’s greatest success is how it frames the deceased body as a vessel for transgression, as much for the living as for the dead. It really ends up being quite reverential, and some of the embalming (is that the right word?) scenes are painfully, wonderfully emotional, without any dialogue being necessary.

I wasn’t ever really sure where the cello-playing aspect was supposed to fit in, other than as a showcase for the lead actor’s obvious cello-shredding skills. But that’s OK, as it lent a nice subtle soundtrack to the proceedings.

All in all, a pretty good movie.

Haneke is a director who really matters. This guy makes films that are not only deeply disturbing, but very relevant. Think you know what a scary movie is? Go watch Hidden and get back to me.

Anyway, his new one The White Ribbon is quite a departure from his other films. For a start, it’s much broader in scope, is set eighty years ago and is shot in black and white. I guess many of the themes are familiar: guilt and shame, violence and repression; but given it’s historical context I think this film is even more salient than his other works, even if perhaps it’s not as purely entertaining or thrilling. Haneke has insisted that we’re not supposed to see the movie as simply a foreboding prelude to the atrocities of Nazi Germany and World War 2, but as a snapshot of ignorance, intolerance and terrorism in all it’s forms.

The acting is top-shelf, production values are through the roof, and to be fair there are some truly gripping scenes, but overall I just wasn’t as engaged for the whole duration, like I was with Hidden. This is serious, formal film making, and I fear it’s just too cool, too self-aware, too detached to ever really penetrate. Nevertheless, definitely not for the weak of heart or short of patience.

Also, it became clear to me as I watched The White Ribbon that the only German phrase I have remembered from my high school days is keine ahnung. That figures.

OK, enough of the heavy stuff. Raymond Chandler has been keeping me entertained and rescuing me from the depths of being-foreign-and-alone-at-Christmastime-related despair through the strength of his biting dialogue alone. Here are a few choice cuts from the first fifty or so pages of Farewell, My Lovely:

“His smile was as cunning as a broken mousetrap.”

“Suspicion climbed all over her face, like a kitten, but not so playfully.”

“She was as cute as a washtub.”

“It was Malloy all right, taken in strong light, and looking as if he had no more eyebrows than a French roll.”

“Dames lie about anything – just for practise.”

And, arguably my favourite so far:

“She’s a charming middle-aged lady with a face like a bucket of mud and if she has washed her hair since Coolidge’s second term, I’ll eat my spare tyre, rim and all.”

Man, people just aren’t as eloquent (or as charming, apparently) as they were seventy years ago. I seriously believe that our tendency towards email, in all its benevolent, automated glory, is hampering not only our literacy, but the very stuff of our interpersonal relationships. In the past, a scorned lover would compose page upon tear-stained page of hateful yet poetic hand-written prose in order to purge him or herself of heartache. Nowadays, retribution is as easy as uploading a photo to Facebook. Yikes! The sad thing is, even the retorts are borderline unintelligible.

But seriously. As recently as ten years ago, flirting with a girl involved carefully synchronised ‘chance’ meetings, a delicate dance of hints dropped here and there at measured intervals, and a whole lot of good timing and luck. These days, it’s as easy as dropping a text message: ‘hey. i wna ride u like a black mercedes.’ Charming, no?

Yes, my eloquence is slowly dying, and with it, my patience and tact. I only have myself to blame for this, and I feel the only proper remedy would be self-imposed exile from the internet, and more time spent with the likes of Chandler, Bellow, Nabokov and those countless others who express so much with so (comparatively) little.

I bought a snazzy little netbook computer! It’s an Eee PC 1005HA.

Inluded with the iPhone to give a proper sense of scale.

In fact, I’m using it right now. The rad silver colour is not available outside Japan, so TAKE THAT, WESTERN CONSUMER MARKET! What’s more, the construction feels way more solid than my pricey elite Dell machine. It’s running Windows 7, effortlessly installed off a 4GB SDHC card, and does everything I need, like typing, and wasting my life on stupid websites. Also, with the strengthening of the Aussie dollar, this stuff has become ludicrously cheap. Like $350 kind of cheap. Party!

On a more personal note. I’ve resolved to spend the winter break seriously improving my Japanese. The last couple of months (and in particular, the last month itself) have seen my conversation skills increase significantly, and although I still have more than my fair share of furrowed-brow, panicky ‘wtf was that word again!?’ moments, at least I can keep a conversation more or less going now. I mean, that is, as long as the person I’m talking to doesn’t get bored and give up. To them, it must be like talking to a toddler with learning disabilities.

I did learn something interesting lately though; according to one of my supervisors who studied linguistics at university, dyslexia is far less prevalent in Japan (and presumably also in China and Korea) than in the Western world. This must be something to do with both the form of their characters and their grammatical constructions. After all, it’s hard for most English speakers to imagine a first language where each ‘letter’ corresponds to an entire syllable; where words can be pronounced phonetically without any danger of misplacing stress or timing, and where an entire universe of meaning can be contained within one simple symbol, such as 空, or 人. The Japanese and Chinese don’t learn to spell, so much as they learn to paint pictures of the world through language. Likewise, reading isn’t a constant deconstruction of bunches of letters, or educated guessing at the appropriate phoneme; everything is there as it’s written, except in the case of an unfamiliar kanji character, where, upon encountering these new characters, a Japanese person will simply ask their neighbour,  どういう読むの? or この漢字の読み方は何ですか? (“How the fsk do you read this?”).

Furthermore, owing to the grammatical hierarchy of the language, the relevant reading for any given kanji is immediately apparent to any native speaker of Japanese; there is no guess work necessary. It’s pretty remarkable.

According to The Language Instinct, Japanese (and to an extent, Korean) are something like language orphans which have evolved separately, leaving behind little grammatical resemblance to other East Asian languages. This isn’t so hard for me to believe, because as I’ve said before, Japanese more or less resembles the exact grammatical inverse of something like English, and I’m sure this has a considerable impact on the structure of society over here, especially when compared with our own.

The main point I wanted to make when I started this huge theoretical rant, however, was that I’m at a point where Japanese people no longer feel comfortable gossiping about me in my presence, because they fear I might just be able to understand them. Pretty satisfying in one sense, although I was kinda enjoying being able to eavesdrop as I pleased.

Well, on that note, it looks like I’m gonna be all too alone for Christmas, and unless I get my act together and ask for paid leave, I’ll be sat at my office all day without any other kindred spirit (ie. lost soul) in sight to share the holiday with. I’m not a religious person, but I guess I am a pretty sentimental one, and despite all my misgivings about Christmas and the sham that it is, I do feel an unwelcome sense of isolation as the year draws to an end. It’s not that I’m depressed. There’ll be plenty of time for that come 2010. But I just kinda wish I had stayed in contact with more of you this year. So I’m sorry. I guess that’s it.

Stay tuned for my best and worst of 2009, along with the usual solemn reflections and empty promises, in the next edition!

So long.

I’m advocating a healthy balance between the two. I don’t see why we need to neglect our physical desires, or give inordinate amounts of attention to intellectual appetite. They are both equal parts of the same whole, and what’s more, they both exert the same monolithic influence over it, whether it’s for better or worse. Truly balanced and sensible people should look for pleasure not simply of the body but of the mind, and seek wisdom not only through quiet reflection but through actions.

I’ve been forced into this perspective recently through my own single-mindedness, and the realisation that to absorb oneself either in books or exercise alone is no remedy for restlessness, frustration or inadequacy. Well, the scales have levelled out pretty nicely, or at least they had, until I went ahead and put my foot right into one of the most uncomfortable and regrettable situations of my life in Japan so far on Saturday night. But heaven knows, and I’ve said this a hundred times before, that a public blog full of self-indulgent rants is hardly the place to go into juicy details.

I don’t know why Japanese culture and language attracts such hardcore, militant foreigners. Similarly, I don’t understand the bullshit false modesty that accompanies so many of this country’s permanent foreign residents. Shyness is an inherent part of Japanese culture, sure. But it very unbecoming on foreigners, especially since it makes their endless lust to fit in over here all the more blatant. The irony is that is has the opposite effect: it just makes you look like a wanker, when I ask you if you can speak Japanese, and you say no, and then I find out that you are 1-kyuu level. Have you ever even known what it’s like to not be able to speak Japanese? When my friends and family back home ask me if I can speak the language, I give them the honest answer: I know enough to get around, day to day, enough to order food and ask for directions. Nothing more. But Japan seems to be the only country that gets this kind of cult following from the West, and while modesty might be endearing on the natives, it is pretty sickening on foreigners.

You can’t fire me, I quit.

Way too tired to write anything more in here at the moment. I’ve gone way too hard lately and I’m exhausted. Today was rainy, and my bike was stolen. Not the best conditions under which to decide to write a blog entry, but that’s life. I’m hoping I can straighten myself out over the next week or so and leave this trail of destruction behind.

]]> http://ext23.wordpress.com/2009/10/26/falling-pianos/feed/ 0 ext23 img_7100 http://ext23.wordpress.com/2009/10/16/its-a-jungle-out-there/ http://ext23.wordpress.com/2009/10/16/its-a-jungle-out-there/#comments Fri, 16 Oct 2009 04:37:00 +0000 ext23 http://ext23.wordpress.com/?p=223 ]]> This blog is rapidly turning into a place where I can air my identity crises. The crucial difference between this blog and real life, though, is that around here I can’t be interrupted. In their past lives, my blogs were forums for confidence issues and (barely) veiled jabs at various girls who had gon’ up and don’ me wrong, but I guess these days my problems are more existential in nature, and are probably, in the long run, better off for it.

My desk is a hideous mess of Australiana (dig that rad kookaburra), lollies I use to bribe minors, Japanese textbooks that I have skimmed, not read, and a variety of teaching materials that, surprisingly, have been getting a pretty solid workout of late. While it is true that at times I may have been something of a lazy ALT, that trend has definitely been reversed as I’ve been able to identify the more bothersome areas of my job and work on improving those, rather than the aimless stressing of eras past. I’m steadily realising that bored, unmotivated students aren’t the problem; it’s disorganised co-workers. I am repeatedly inundated by inconsiderate and illogical requests for help with classes that aren’t mine, translations of things of a singularly personal nature, and so on. I believe the thought process resembles something like this: Darren is an ALT, and ALTs aren’t busy or just don’t work very hard. だから、Darren mustn’t be busy. It’s beautifully Socratic.

Anyway, in light of these revelations, job satisfaction is at an unusual high, as I have adopted an even more nihilistic approach to my job: I chat with students whenever I feel like it, and about whatever I please. I play DS with them and snap unflattering photos of them. I ask them about their boyfriends and girlfriends and point out cute girls in magazines. So when it comes to classes, most of them are comfortable enough with me by now to play along with whatever I come up with. However, I think the main thing that has improved my working life is that, as the months have rolled by of late, I have become increasingly willing to strike up a conversation in punctuated Japanese, and the kids have started to realise that I am actually a living organism of equal or greater intellectual capability, one who has thoughts and feelings of his own and the gift of self-expression. Who would have thought – a foreigner!

I’m definitely beyond repair. When I start visiting – and enjoying – websites such as this (a cute girl appears in the day!) there seems to be little chance of redemption. To make things even worse, this link was sent to me by a female Japanese friend of mine. There’s just something irresistible about homely girls posing for coy photos and bashfully describing their personal traits.

The longer I spend observing other cultures, the more convinced I become that the world we inhabit is governed primarily by sex and money. The sex industry in Japan is omnipresent and, as a young woman, there is no better way to make easy money than to become a hostess or waitress in a fancy bar. Middle-aged men pay through the nose to merely be in the company of these creatures, and while prostitution itself is outwardly frowned upon, its no secret that money can buy everything, the porn industry is rampant, and the vast majority of establishments fronting as pleasant, classy lady bars are little more than extortionately-priced brothels. On a more personal level, it seems that wherever I go in the world, the thing that impresses the majority of girls with the most boring regularity is a boy with money and the willingness to flaunt it, both on himself and on his girl. The extravagance that passes for class and style in Japan can be truly sickening, especially when a dude in parachute pants can be considered cool just because they cost hundreds of dollars. Oh, and on that note: fuck you, Ed Hardy. I hate you and everything you create.

I always misspell the word ‘opinion’ and it comes out looking something like ‘onion.’ Perhaps there’s something in that.

Dudes. I’ve been all over this new Paramore single for a week now. How is it better than anything they have done in the past? Let me count the ways: Hayley’s voice isn’t as pitch-perfectly auto-tuned as the last album, and, moreover, she sounds way more pissed off on this track. Whilst ‘Misery Business’ was definitely a catchy (dare I say good?) song, it always seemed a little trite and forced to me. On this one, she simply spits out the lyrics in a much more natural meter, and the whole song is better off for it. Next, this song plays with time signatures and syncopation in a way that would make even the most capable metal bands envious. Its structure consists of multiple layered elements and constantly blurs the verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge distinction. The arpeggios in the pre-chorus and breakdown are simply insane. Paramore’s drummer is awesome and is clearly the most impressive thing about the band besides Hayley’s voice. Listen carefully next time!

This movie was rad. The first half of District 9, in particular, takes the now-familiar mockumentary style into pretty interesting and challenging territory, offering a charicature of bureaucracy that is comical, satirical and confrontingly honest. Its themes are superficially obvious, and its a kind of wonder that it has taken so long for sci-fi films to come up with this idea. But the allegory extends further that just ‘how should governments deal with illegal immigrants,’ into far more personal territory: how do we overcome language barriers with foreigners? Is there any way to deal with the issue whilst retaining personal sensitivities? Indeed, can there even be a non-violent resolution to these kinds of problems? It nods towards the pervasive racism issues with a handful of ingenious quips, the kinds of slips-of-tongue usually reserved for mid-level politicians that are likely to see their superiors caught up in some heated PR backpedalling:

“I mean, you can’t say they don’t look like that, that’s what they look like, right? They look like prawns.”

It is amazingly well-acted, particularly by Sharlto Copley, who carries the second half of the film single-handedly and prevents it from ultimately becoming little more than a gruesome FPS-inspired alien blastfest, although even Copley can’t save it from crashing and bashing its way to a somewhat underwhelming end. District 9 combines some of the cinematic elements of Independence Day, Children of Men, The Host and…well, Starship Troopers, but its South African orientation gives it a pretty unique feel overall. Definitely see this movie!

Well, there was going to be more, but now there isn’t. ‘Til next time!

The last handful of weekends have consisted of some truly devastating nights out, whether measured in terms of financial strain, magnitude of hangovers or accumulated emotional baggage. The cure? Repeating the whole procedure the following weekend (or, ocassionally, during the week). But we won’t get into that now.

For the sake of a yardstick you may use to measure my boredom, I’ve read every book I have with me except one. One of the things I’m most looking forwards to when I visit Melbourne in September is to replace these books with others from my library back home. However my impending trip back hasn’t stopped me from abusing Japanese Amazon and buying copies of books that I already own. Like this one:

Not for some time have I been so captivated by a book. Since living overseas, I have tried to broaden my literary horizons by sampling some of the most well-respected works that those countries and cultures have to offer, from ultra-modern stuff to classics from bygone eras, etc. Along the way I have subjected myself to some real crap, but also to some true diamonds in the rough. Rarely has anything compelled me to (gasp!) blog about it.

I have been reluctant to even open In Cold Blood, simply because I want to savour the whole experience as long as possible and I am scared of taking too big a bite out of it. This might seem like a strange thing to say about a book that is basically a true story, especially one of which everyone knows the ending. But it’s the writing, the pacing…the narrative switches between the reckless road story of two outlaws to a grotesque painting of a once-peaceful town that has been frozen stiff by tragedy and fear. Capote deftly weaves the two together until their numerous inevitable convergences, which, when they finally happen, he treats with simplicity, economy and cool-headedness – the closest he ever gets to plain journalism. There is no fanfare, no cheap page-turning tactics at play here.

The rest of the time, it is so lifelike, so tender, so human that you can often forget that you’re dealing with two murderers. You want to know Perry’s backstory, you want to empathise with him, you want to see him…well, succeed. If there was one failing of the novel, I guess that would be it. But Capote was never trying to pass judgment or condemn anybody; he was only guilty of trying to manipulate his readers, to paint a picture and to bring his characters to life, which every writer invariably strives to do, and in this sense he succeeds completely.

I’m enjoying this so much, especially since the last couple of books I have read have either gone way over my head or just been flat-out not very good.

This one made its Australian debut at the Melbourne Film Festival a couple of weeks ago. I took notice because one day at work the girl who sits opposite me asked if I knew the book she was reading – The Sky Crawlers. I asked her what it was about and got a typically vague Japanese type of answer; I think she said something about ‘romance’ (but let’s be honest – everything in Japan can be classified as roomansu or dorama, usually a combination of the two). She said it was sugoi kanashii, and naturally I was skeptical. But when I saw that it was selected at the film fest, and did a bit of follow-up research, it seemed pretty cool, and it is. The CG animation used for the dogfights is simply astounding, as kinetic as any war film but with just the right amount of artifice and artistry. Anyone who knows me well knows that when it comes to anime, I value art design and mood more than the story itself, and this one is no different.

The one that has really grabbed my attention, though, and subsequently the frontrunner for being the first film I see in general release in Japanese cinemas, is the upcoming Studio 4°C work, First-Squad. International anime collaborations really interest me, and Studio 4°C has a pretty good track record. Monster was, of course, set in Germany, and its strongest attribute in my mind was its representation of Germany in the 1980s. The atmosphere of political suppression and its cultural side-effects permeated every episode/issue. So, long story short, I’m really keen to see First-Squad when it comes out.

This post has succeeded in wasting my time, and yours. Til next time!

I guess I’m caught in some kind of vortex where I am neither in touch with Japan nor completely alien to it. This results in a number of misunderstandings and presumptions. For example, the assumption that as a white guy in Japan I am only here to try to hook up with Japanese women, contrasted with the shocked gasps from my students when they ask me ‘Japanese girl is cute?’ and I say ‘yes.’ Likewise, some people go bananas when they hear me utter even the most basic Japanese phrase, while others refuse to talk to me until I am fluent in the language.

Ironically, the thing that most reliably earns me the admiration and acceptance from Japanese people, particularly my students, is the fact that I carry around my Nintendo DS with a Japanese dictionary loaded on it. Of course, it’s not because of the fact that I’m making an effort to learn the language that they recoil in shock, but rather that I have a DS, and I didn’t buy it over here.

There are probably two easy routes out of this situation: either to become completely immsersed in Japanese language, culture and tradition, or to reject it completely. However, neither of these options appeal to me, for obvious reasons. I guess I should have known before arriving here that I would be destined to remain on the liminality between being a real person and a prop, but I could probably have never predicted the repercussions and reverberations, or how simply being identified as an outsider can effect every facet of my daily life over here.

I have chosen to profile some of my more memorable students in this blog.

Many of them go to my special school. It’s still really hard for me to go there. I’m not fnding the experience any more comfortable even after a year. The kids don’t have any chance of learning a foreign language, so the fact that they insist on even having English classes still doesn’t make sense to me. I would be just as useful, if not more so, in other classes where I could freely participate, instead of standing at the front of the room reciting phrases that they will forget as soon as I produce a picture of a koala (to be fair, this phenomenon is not exclusive to my special school).

Nevertheless, there are a few individuals who make the arduous experience more enjoyable. For example, Yuta. This kid always had a smile on his face. In some ways I kinda envied that about him. I wasn’t ever really sure what he was saying in Japanese, cause my Japanese still wasn’t good enough when I was teaching him. But he did know three or four very important English words: “I like ~,” and “yes.”

Our meetings would proceed as follows, never straying from this basic but effective formula: Yuta would spot me from across the room/hallway/yard, and come barreling over towards me, coming to an unsteadily gleeful stop about a foot away from me. In his eyes was an unbridled lust for life and a complete lack of intimidation.

“I like….sushi!”

“Haha! Really?”

“Yes! Yes!”

“What’s your favourite sushi?”

“Yes! Yes!”

He would then turn on his heels and bound away from me, perhaps at a greater speed than that with which he arrived. Sometimes, he would switch it up.

“I like….hanbaagu (Japanese for ‘hamburger’)!”

“Is that so, Yuta?”

“Yes! Yes!”

Vrooooom.

He was hilarious.

These days I spend the most time at Nishigo hanging out with this girl called Yuka. She’s 16, but owing to whatever disability it is that she has, only looks about 11. I like her because even though she knows I usually can’t understand her, she never slows down what she’s saying and comes to hang out with me week in, week out. She always asks me to sit next to her on the bus and then tells her (speechless) friends about it. She asks me questions like, “are there birds in Australia?” Which may seem stupid, but is actually really cute. She loves singing and, like Yuta, doesn’t let a damn thing bring her down, ever.

She tells me how she fell over on her arse at school, she warned me to take care cause of the swine flu when I went to Hong Kong, and talks about the scary bugs around her house. She comes into my office every Monday at 3:20pm to warn me that the bus is coming soon and I shouldn’t be late. Sometimes I have absolutely no idea what she’s saying and have trouble identifying a single Japanese word amongst the torrent. But I like her because she talks to me more than any student or teacher at that entire school.

Back at Kohnan, there is Yurie. I am not sure whether it is me or Australia that she is in love with (I suspect it is the latter), but we became friends through her proudly presenting me with a new flavour of Tim Tam each week. The first one was something like wild raspberry, and I was suitably impressed. I guess her older sister lives in Tokyo or something, and has more reliable access to strange and exotic (and exorbitantly priced) foreign delicacies. Anyway, she always says to me ‘Australia ikitai! (I want to go to Australia!).’

Her English is, I guess, fairly standard for a san-nensei student at my school, or maybe a little above average. She understands everything I say to her, and I mostly understand everything she says to me. It’s a bad habit, that I usually speak in English to my students and they usually speak in Japanese to me, but in the end I suppose it’s the most reliable way to communicate with them.

She is really pretty and outgoing, which is why it’s hard for me to understand why she’s not somewhere closer to the top of the social pecking order at my school. She always has a dazed, anime-style look in her eyes and an adorable habit of always showing up five seconds too late to whatever it is that has grabbed my students attention, and then lingering around for a few moments after the cacophony has subsided just to smile at me and make sure I had seen it, too.

Nine times out of ten when I see her, she is alone, either knitting or reading in an empty classroom. She enjoys horror movies and I burst out laughing when I was describing No Country for Old Men and she cocked her head and chimed in with a quizzical “splatter!?”

As for the boys, easily the most noteworthy must be The Rock Star. This guy! At my school, wearing a uniform isn’t compulsory, and he takes full advantage of this fact. I’ve never, not once, seen him wearing regulation school pants. Before school, after school, during lunch, even in the ten-minute break between classes, he is perched upon a desk with an acoustic guitar, and a handful of doe-eyed Japanese girls staring up at him. He is also prominent in that he has probably the waviest hair of any of my students, so much so that one of the girls commented that we look ‘like brothers’ together. He also likes to exploit this particular gift that has been bestowed upon him, since he gets his haircut like every two weeks. Needless to say, we look nothing alike.

But by far my favourite moment with The Rock Star, was one day a couple of months ago, when I arrived at school to see him decked out in bright blue skinny jeans, a Strokes-esque vest and a bright white t-shirt underneath. By the start of the fourth period, he was wearing three-quarter length jeans, and a hoodie. After school, he had regressed entirely into a pair of shorts and a V-neck t-shirt, designed entirely to accentuate the fragile lines of Japanese dudes’ shoulder blades and collar bones. Yeah – three costume changes in one regulation day! And not a school tie to be seen. He’s soooo dreamy.

The punchline of the story, however, has to be the fact that this guy hates me, because one sad day he realised that I can play guitar way, way better than him. And I don’t even have to dress up to look like I’m in a rock band.

I guess that’s enough for today. But do not despair, avid reader! I have plenty more anecdotes to share with you. Stay tuned for another edition of ‘serious breaches of privacy and potentially inappopriate student-teacher relations in the Land of the Rising Sun!’

So long!

My hair is the embodiment of all the unchecked and misguided behaviours of the past eleven months. It is a painful reminder of my awkwardness and utter inability to assimilate. It is the end result of what happens when you remove someone who has barely come to terms with his situation in his hometown and the spiritual connection he has forged with it, and place him somewhere that is more or less ignorant of all the values that have become so close to him over the course of his short existence. I hate to trot out all the familiar cliches of culture shock, and to be quite honest I’m not sure that that’s the problem here. Any problems I have encountered on that front can probably be attributed to my own apprehension. No, friends, this is a much more internal conflict.

Hark! The unrepentant tug of loneliness prevails! The blogosphere attracts the isolated, the mediocre, the desperate as if it were an immeasurable whirlpool of the kind you would only read about in the seafaring tales of eras past. Surprised? Neither am I.

I went to China.

The point was to escape the groove that I could feel myself settling into, and you know what? It worked. Although it was but a brief adventure, and it lacked the same sense of discovery that enveloped me the first time I went there, it gave me the perfect respite: anonymity, an absence of expectations, and despite the incessant hustle and bustle of China and Hong Kong, it also gave me some peace and quiet.

I often jot down notes to myself, intended to serve as lightning bolts of inspiration when it comes to actually writing something. Of course, as I’m writing them, I say to myself, “yeah, this is good, there is no way I will look back on this in a few weeks’ time and not know what I was going on about.” I don’t need to point out that it never works out that way. What in the hell does ‘A guide to better living in Japan’ mean?

So long, friends.

]]> http://ext23.wordpress.com/2009/06/23/home-truths/feed/ 1 ext23 http://ext23.wordpress.com/2009/04/06/flutterby/ http://ext23.wordpress.com/2009/04/06/flutterby/#comments Mon, 06 Apr 2009 05:40:44 +0000 ext23 http://ext23.wordpress.com/?p=175 ]]> The onslaught of material worth writing down in Japan is so torrential that it washes away all other consecutive cognitive processes in a mire of fractured memories and splintered shards of recognition. I should resort to poetry or (gasp) lyricism. Alas, all that inspires me to write is that most inappropriate of sources; that want for an audience of sorts, or recognition of the fact that I have but finally put pen to paper, or fingertip to typepad, as it were.

Japan, I’m sorry. You alone cannot force my hand, not this time, no sir. It requires a mocking tenacity, goading persistence of spirit to cause this bird to rear, retreat, take flight, open the gates, surrender the fort. Greatest pleasure of late has been found in mapping out an itinerary for persons not myself, lining up the dominoes in order to hastily and improperly knock them down, setting myself again the task of restructuring and organising, resolving and inevitably abandoning in the larval stages the germs of real accomplishment.

Documentation and opinion to be redirected henceforth towards a more wholesome and practical arena. Endless depths to be explored and then occupied, both here and there, but to different ends.

A handful of albums that have had a considerable effect on my life, my worldview, my perspectives on certain events and my appreciation for art and beauty, presented in the chronological order in which they appeared and ignited something within me. Apologies to those who probably deserve to be on this list but aren’t. These are, after all, my formative years that are in plain view.

• Oasis  - What’s the Story (Morning Glory)?
• Everclear – So Much For the Afterglow
• Propellerheads – Decksanddrumsandrockandroll
• Lagwagon – Double Plaidinum
• Saves the Day – Stay What You Are
• Staring Back – On
• Jimmy Eat World – Clarity
• Jets To Brazil – Orange Rhyming Dictionary
• Smoking Popes – Destination Failure
• Blueline Medic – Text_Bomb
• Miles Davis – Miles Ahead
• The Black Keys – Thickfreakness
• Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros – Streetcore
• The Lawrence Arms – The Greatest Story Ever Told
• Ted Leo and the Pharmacists – Hearts of Oak
• Elliott Smith – X/O
• Built To Spill – Keep It Like a Secret
• Common – Be
• The Hold Steady – Boys and Girls in America
• mewithoutYou – Brother/Sister
• Twin Vickers – Demo
• Muscles – Guns, Babes, Lemonade
• Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds – The Boatman’s Call

Until we meet again – so long, friends.