Lotusblog

The decade of the nineteen-eighties was responsible for so much of what is good in the world, but similarly, for so much of what is bad. Maybe in twenty years’ time we’ll say that about this decade, too.

But it’s hard to reconcile the fact that Max Headroom, one of the most profound, dark and disturbing TV series ever made was running back-to-back with Webster, Family Ties and The Greatest American Hero. In fact, 20 years on, it’s amazing to see just how much of an influence Max Headroom has had not only on entertainment, but also network broadcasting. Maybe it didn’t actually influence TV network broadcasting in a direct way, but it certainly made predictions and hinted at a future that actually has very much come true. “Embedded journalism”, such as the type we saw throughout Gulf War 2.0, is probably the best example, but as you watch the series, time and time again you see in the fantastic-20-minutes-in-the-future-world things that don’t seem quite so amazing now that we deal with them every day.
In entertainment, you realise the huge debts that SF movies such as the Matrix trilogy and Minority Report owe to our favourite eighties show.

Now that twenty years or so has passed, maybe we are due for a revival. If the movie companies are happy to spend tens of millions making movie versions of TV shows like Starsky and Hutch and Charlie’s Angels, then surely they could do us all a favour and make a Max Headroom movie. The only thorny bit of this plan, is that we all know how much the movie would suck.

To celebrate my acquisition of a Mongoose Fairlane , I decided to head down to my local First Kitchen and try their “The Hamburger”. It was big. Impressive, and another salvo in the current Japanese burger wars. After the beef scares of the last couple of years, all of the major burger chains now offer a huge, luxurious, beefy burger.

But I wasn’t convinced. I don’t think I will be heading down there to try it again. It just lacked something. The beef wasn’t beefy enough, either. It had all the right ingredients, the proportions were great and the presentation was fantastic; sadly, they just couldn’t pull it off.

Robert Plant’s “Big Log” is one of those songs that just never loses its lustre. I don’t know why- it just doesn’t.

I was overcome with a desire this afternoon to hear it and once sated, saddled up and went to work. I got home not too long ago and after showering and drinking copious amounts of water suddenly desired to hear it again. And I was so moved that I even decided to write about it. In the Mood is also a pretty good song, but what really worries me is how Mr Plant could then go on to pen a song with the lyrics “I’m your tall cool one, and I’m built to please”.

Aren’t we all?

As my bed time is fast approaching this will be a quick post, but I was pleased to read that Nicholson Baker has released a new book. You can read an interview with him here , and you’ll see that this time he has written something quite different from any of his previous works.
Maybe.

Anyway, I am eager to read it. Once again I have a feeling that Amazon (yes, yes, the book merchant) will soon be making another sale. I just wish they had the Naqoyqatsi DVD in stock too.

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 watched Lost Highway again the other night. Man, that is one awesome movie. I thought that since it was my third or fourth time I might have some sort of insight and actually get it this time.
Alas, no such insight was forthcoming.

But that funny thing happened (I was chatting about this to a friend recently, I don’t know how to name this phenomenon, so I will explain everything).

I saw Lost Highway years ago when it was released. Loved it. Favourite scene was the party scene, where the freaky old guy (Mystery Man) appears at the party and says to Fred Madison, “Haven’t we met before?”. Fred, already freaked out by the events of the preceding few days starts to panic and then Mystery Man says “As a matter of fact, I am there (in your house) now. Call me” and then produces a mobile phone, hands it to Fred who dials his home number and hears Mystery Man answer. It’s a classic cinematic moment. You don’t know whether to keep watching, howl and run away or turn the movie off.
Anyway, during the duration of this conversation all other sound, background music etc completely fades away. Before and after this scene, however, Barry Adamson’s “Something Pretty Wicked This Way Comes” is playing. I loved that song.

The problem was that I seem to have forgotten it. Over the last couple of years I have heard it a few times on the radio, thought I was hearing a song for the very first time, but could never find out what it was because all I knew was that the title began with the word “Something”. So when I saw Lost Highway the other day, the puzzle was finally solved, the dots were connected and I was at peace. I finally knew who it was.

This phenomenon sometimes happens with people too. I will meet someone. Do the business card exchange thing. Talk. A few months later, see them again, have no idea who they are and therefore ignore them. But then a year later, I will see them again and remember everything about them as clear as crystal. I don’t know why this happens, why I learn/unlearn/remember stuff.
Is it just me?

I was so moved I decided to make a new category.

Anyway, I called a friend (overseas) earlier today, and as always, spent the time before and after the call looking for updated IP Telephony software. It turns out that my telephony provider (Nikotel ) did in fact have a new version of software. But they had so much more than that.

They had this:

Technolust

You can read about it here , but basically it is a phone handset that looks for W-LANs so that it can connect to the internet to conduct calls. I’ll say that again, it automatically detects Wi-Fi hot-spots, and then when you make a call, you are using that network to wirelessly send and receive your voice packets. Did I say for free? And combined with the US telephone number that Nikotel will give you, this means that people can call you anywhere in the world, assuming of course that you’re within a 100 metres of Wi-Fi, on your Californian telephone number.

So that got my pulse going like it was no one’s business. But I was in for a bigger shock, when I came across this:

Technolust Redux

You can some beautiful pictures of it here , and read more about it, but basically, apart from being one of the coolest looking pieces of industrial design on the planet, it’s your standard GSM mobile phone with Wi-Fi built in.
Imagine this… you’re at home. You have a wireless network (who doesn’t?) and you call your buddy. The phone automatically uses Wi-Fi since it is available, and you’re happy, because it’s free. Buddy is telling you about the plot of Caligula and he’s taking a really long time and you have to be on a train in 10 minutes, but that’s OK, because you leave the house and walk to the elevator and just when the phone loses the the Wi-Fi signal from your house it automatically switches over to the GSM network. Seamlessly.