Lotusblog

I just watched Fahrenheit 9/11. It was classic Michael Moore, but on steroids. The first half of the movie (I was going to call it a film, but let’s face it, we all know it’s really a movie) was so well crafted and assembled I was completely held captive. I couldn’t do anything.
The second half seemed to have a bit too much combat-in-Iraq/grieving-US-and-Iraqi-families but by the end it was all back on track and very tightly wrapped up as a very powerful propaganda package. Talk about precision guided weapons!

Initially, I feared it was going to be a “Republicans are bad, Democrats are good” type of message that was to be incessantly drilled home, but it was not. Republicans are bad, Bush is bad, war is bad and ignorance is bad were the main points (and make no doubt that they certainly were hammered home)- but given that this movie is going to be seen by your average Joe Walmart-shopper, I am not so sure that that they will be able to draw any conclusions and figure out what they should do. Maybe that’s what I like about this movie- it doesn’t condescend to tell you what to do, or what to think. It makes you sick, it makes you sad, it makes you really angry and then just fades away leaving you and your conscience to work out what to do.

Everyone should see it. At the very least, every US citizen should see it.

It’s pouring with rain now in Osaka. It’s about 11pm, Wednesday, and I guess it must have started around 6pm. It’s nice to have a torrential downpour after so many days of relentless heat.
It’s also cool and exciting to ride home in heavy rain. The trade-off of course is that some surfaces become incredibly slippery; not that I didn’t know, but the slipperiness far exceeded my expectations.
The Japanese have a thing for tiles. While pavements and boulevards in my home town are either slabs of concrete or red brick, paths in Japan tend to be tiled. So many apartment buildings are tiled too. The amount of tile has to be seen to be believed (actually, I just remembered, I even went to a tile museum earlier this year! It was actually very interesting).
Anyway, the tiles, as you can imagine, get pretty slippery, and I ended up having my first crash of the year. Luckily I was moving at pretty low speed, and all I was doing was turning while going down a slight incline and BANG! I hit the ground. My left elbow and knee were scraped on the footpath as I slid along, but I was OK. Now however, my knee stings like hell, and my elbow has started to swell.
Hope I can still ride tomorrow.

OK OK. I know how terrible Brown Bunny is. I just read this review (in addition to the others I have read since it was first screened at Cannes).
My favourite line in the review mentioned above is the line that “…the 5 day road trip (seems to be) happening in real time…”.

But, I still really want to see it. The trailer which you can find somewhere online, is actually pretty darn good, I thought. If that is the style of the film, then I reckon it’s gonna be pretty darn good.

Anyway, it can’t be any worse than a lot of the films I saw during my university days. Having said that, I can’t think of one film that was stand-out bad. Scott, Tim, Claire? Fancy reminding me? I know there were some. I remember leaving the cinema fuming. I even remember leaving a cinema during a film. Just can’t for the life of me remember what film it was.

============

Several days after this post, I received the following message from Tim:

…..Pedro Almodovar’s High Heels. We got the hell out of the cinema after
10 minutes. Otherwise all of the bad films have left my memory. There were heaps
though.

He’s right. I remember leaving the cinema feeling as though we had been personally cheated and crossed. I can’t remember what I hated about it, but the bitter taste stayed for some time. I just read about High Heels and now I kind of want to give it a second chance.

Should I? Shouldn’t I?

Took this picture before I left home this afternoon.

Another self portrait

12:15pm, Osaka-ko, August 4, 2004

I was quite sick over the last week or so… so for all those friends and family who heard nothing from me I am sorry. I am back to normal now and regular services will resume. Actually, if anyone who even knows me is reading this, contact me quoting the secret code number XF-564 and I will buy you a beer. Or a muffin. Or something consumable that you like.
I promise.

I just read this interesting article on the International Herald Tribune’s website. It talks about the phenomenon of hoax blogs. The Bill Clinton blog mentioned in the story is definitely worth a look (you’ll have to read the IHT article to get the link yourself).

It’s hilarious. Most of it is plausible, but blog’s achilles heel is the poor writing- in particular the poor grammar. Anyone else, sure, you’d let it slip. But this is Bill Clinton for Pete’s sake. Mr Clinton surely could never write something like:

“I haven’t slept all night. I couldn’t. I got out of bed at 3 am and played online poker till 7 to ease my mind. I lost 5 dollars. A woman from Wisconsin took the pot. First time I lost to a woman. That’s not true. I lost to Julia Roberts at a game a few years ago in Hollywood. I remember that very well. Julia met Lyle Lovett there that night. She married him a few days later. Her luck ran out.“

Take a deep breath.

"Hanging out with friends rules!"

While we are on the topic of time travel, pictures of the past and so on, let’s take a few moments to learn something from this picture.

For those of you who don’t understand Japanese, the headline on the right reads “Hanging out with friends rules!” (to put it into the young person’s parlance). The boxed caption reads; “Winners of the Exciting Group Award”, and the paragraph below talks about their friendship, their group-shopping, their “mysteriously well-coordinated yet unique fashion tastes” and the excitement, energy and youth they exude.

I managed to get hold of the April 18, 1989 Olive magazine. What a classic. This particular issue is the “National Street Fashion Awards” issue, with a bevy of stylists, advisors and people in the know choosing the most fashionably dressed girls (and boys) from the Japan’s 12 major cities.

This magazine is beautiful. It speaks to the generation that, riding on the coat-tails of their parents, experienced all of the benefits of the bubble economy while not having to deal with any of its subsequent nasty side-effects.

When I look around me now I am mostly thankful the asset-inflated bubble economy didn’t keep going. The logical extension of what these people were wearing is too hard and too disturbing to picture. A good, hard recession brought us back to basics and simple tailoring. However, with the recent upturn (in Tokyo’s economy at least) I fear the history will indeed repeat. Twenty-five years is a long time, after all.

I was looking through my photo album and I am came across this picture of myself that I took exactly four years ago.

The old me

“you are getting sleepy, you can no longer keep your eyes open, you are drifting down a very l-o-n-g tunnel…”

Simon said something that resonated with me the other day. He was talking about progressive Australians (we’ll call them Good Australians for the sake of simplicity) such as Peter Garrett. People who recognise that there are serious problems in Australian society and have dedicated, or rather, based their lives on solving these problems. Surely almost every citizen of Australia between the ages of 10 and 60 has heard of a band called Midnight Oil. The generation most familiar with and most fanatical about the band is ironically now the generation that activists such as Garrett are now fighting against (we won’t call them the Bad Australians, we’ll just name them the Sad Australians). The bigots. The racists. The ordinary Aussie battlers who are tired of them coming in and taking our jobs, bringing in their strange religions and customs, wasting their social security benefits, causing problems and mayhem.

So the question is, what on earth were said Battlers thinking when they were singing along with lyrics of US Forces, Power and the Passion and The Dead Heart? Were they just reacting to melodies and rhythms? Completely oblivious to the lyrics?
I was wondering if this was even possible- how can you immerse yourself in a song which is sung in in your pater familias without understanding what it means?

After some deep reflection, I realised that some of the hip-hop songs I think are pretty cool are actually lyrically repugnant to me, once I slow down and try to understand what is being said. (but the difference is that I am aware of that). I also realised that living in Japan, I hear a lot of Japanese songs, which truth be told, I can’t completely understand, yet I like a lot.

So here’s an idea for a project.
Choose an obscure language. A dead language even. Using advanced mathematics, craft a perfect pop-song. Set it to the most ridiculous, offensive, contradictory lyrics imaginable.
And watch it zoom to number one.

And anyone who has been to karaoke in Japan, knows that you can easily sing a song you don’t understand. You just need to have a guide to pronouncing each sound. Actually, probably anybody who has ever been to primary school knows this. I learnt that German Tennenbaum song when I was nine and I know fuck all about German. I know it’s something about a Christmas tree, because I later learned the English version. Japanese kindergarten kids have their repertoire of English and German songs too.

So back to my song… we’ll watch it zoom to number, people of all ages and classes will be singing to their heart’s content.
Send your song lyrics to me. You know where I am.

Billy and Dave no longer exist. It seems. Look at the screen-grab below taken from a QuickTime newsletter from the year 2001

Ah… Billy and Dave

Sadly even the British Web Broadcasting site no longer exists. A visit to their URL transports you secretly to this site which is embarrassing titled “Advanced Payment Solutions for Digital Commerce”.

Ah-hem.

Maybe I have discovered a worm-hole and have traveled back in time to 1999. If that’s true, then I think I think I should buy shares in eBay, Amazon and Chinese ISPs. Oh, and that reminds me. If it is 1999, then how do I warn people about the impending terrorist armageddon without sounding like a loony? And how do I tell them that Y2K-end-of-the-world-doom doesn’t happen?

Actually the last 5 years (or should I now say, the next five years) were pretty big for me. A lot of stuff happened; good and bad, happy and sad. But if I were to live them again… what would I change?

Addendum

It’s now 2009. I just came across this old blog post and clicked on the links above… lo and behold Billy and Dave are still there. Even after 5 years their comic genius is as fresh as ever. But this begs the question, what are they doing now?