My attention span is almost nil right now, so getting anything down on paper is a serious trial. Honestly, I get about two hundred words in and then end up going and doing something else instead. I've got a job interview tomorrow and I'm going to find it a bit of a challenge and I need to be all smiley and keen. Problem is that I've never felt less smiley than I am now, and since I being made redundant by one part of Imperial I mustn't display by anger and bitterness to them either. Above all I need to display a keenness which is lacking right now since I haven't had a holiday since April, and in that time period I've been made redundant, moved house, had my brother's wedding, and cared for my father during his terminal illness, had his funeral and am now grieving for him.
I am exhausted on every level.
I mustn't show this. I must be Mr Keen McKeen from Keenshire. I must be the keenest interviewee they've ever had. They contacted me, not me them, so that's good news. I just hope the competition is rubbish as I'd rather not leave Imperial as it's a great place to work.
Monday, October 05, 2009
It seems flippant to put this as a status update on facebook... but I'm:
in pieces in shock can't believe it drawing on an inner strength I didn't know I had terribly sorry lost everywhere and nowhere exhausted facing up to what follows life
In short, the road we're on is nearing its end, and my greatest concern is that there is no suffering.
1) I started writing this for a Macmillan Cancer forum but realised that it was best placed on my blog. Those on the forum are well aware of the issues that GBM raises and entails, right down to the acronym itself.
2) Temezedol is a oral (pill) chemotherapy drug. It is relatively new and is used at the same time as radiotherapy. It is 20% more effective when used in conjunction with radiotherapy rather than being taken seperately.
3) I work in medical research which means that I have university access to a wide range of peer reviewed science journals. I find that learning about these conditions help me to understand this condition. Once can google anything but peer reviewed science journals are the most trustworthy sources.
4) I found 3 great articles in The Lancet Oncology which were very informative regarding a new form of chemo only approved for use by the FDA in the US in May 2009. This was the good news.
5) These journals tend to make for grim reading.
6) I haven't and I'm not going to tell my immediate family the statistics for GMB. It would serve no purpose. This is the best portal to put this stuff down.
The story: my father, who is only 69, was diagnosed with a grade 4 Glioblastoma Multiforme (GBM) brain tumour at the beginning of July. He had a seizure whilst driving on the A4 in London but had the presence of mind to stop the car before fainting. 2 miles up the road and he would have been on the motorway doing 80 mph rather than 40mph so for that fortune I have to be thankful. His tumour is inoperable as it is in the grey matter, very deep and behind the right eye.
He had a biopsy at the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead in mid-July which was traumatic for us all, diagnosis was confirmed, and today he had his final dose of radiotherapy having undergone a 6 week course of radio. He managed 5 weeks of Temedol before his quality of life was reduced to there being no quality. For 5 weeks he was an out patient at the Royal Marsden in London, but has been in for the last 10 days.
He has suffered from severe nausea and vomiting to the point that he couldn't keep anything down. He would then be hospitalised, as a result we've had four ambulances and my mother and I have driven him in twice in the early morning. We are fortunate that we only live 15 minutes from the Marsden, and very lucky that he continued to pay health insurance all his life, but saved it for the 'big things' that might come along. The Marsden had a serious fire a few years ago so beds can be hard to come by.
The last 6 weeks have been nothing short of diabolical. As many others here have commented, GBM is so cruel as it reduces sufferers to shadows of their former selves, seemingly rather rapidly. My father has lost his independence - no car - and now seems to be losing part of his mind. I kid myself that this is down to the radio and chemo but the professor (consultant) rang last Friday to say that the confusion he is suffering could be brain damage. He didn't say what the likely cause could be. I know that a side effect of morphine is confusion but then having a raygun fired into your head for 6 weeks can't be too healthy either!
The side-effects of the medication are taking their toll. Dexamethasone may be the wonder drug for reducing brain inflammation but it is destroying his muscle mass. I may be a bit off here but it is my understanding that catabolic steroids are the opposite to anabolic steroids. Still, they are one of the most important pills, those and the anti falling out of bed pills (the anti fitting ones). He's also on Cyclizine, morphine sulphate, a stomach lining protecting one, 2 blood pressure ones, and more paracetemol than you can shake a stick at.
His condition has deteriorated in the last 10 days since he has been an in patient which has presented us with a catch 22. He is physically weakening and now needs, and frankly struggles, to walk with a stick where before he was wobbly but at least he could get about. His short-term memory has completely gone too which means that the time and date have no meaning to him. He is unable to use his email and is so easily muddled. This is one of the worst aspects as he has gone from being perceptive and intelligent to being unable to carry out any work at all. Yet he still trys to work and this leads him to being frustrated and cross, which he never was before, and then he's easily distracted. In the hospital there are no distractions but at home there are so many distractions in particular paperwork such as tying up his business interests because, let's face it, the survival rate for GBM G4 is basically nil. How one can do all this when one struggles to put a password into the PC rather beats me.
I'm trying to be philosophical about it all. There's no one to blame nor anything he could have done differently as we know that no one knows the causal factors for brain tumours. I don't believe that it's God's will, or cruel fate, or bad luck or any other human emotional response. I don't even know if being fair or not comes into it. It is sadly just one of those things.
I now realise that he's not going to make 80 which was my expected target age, and I'm not entirely convinced that he'll make the UK male average life expectancy. He's had a very good life. The tragedy is that my mother will be denied her husband and our family will suffer this great loss. He is also being denied this retirement that he had just set up.
I have hope that his current symptoms of confusion are as a result of the radio and treatment and not due to the tumour or brain damage as was suggested as a possibility by the consultant. I also know that he is receiving world class care and that nothing more can be done. It still seems unreal, and caring for him these last few months has been so very stressful that I can't really remember him before all this. I will one day, just not right now.
I'll end now because I've gone nearly a thousand words. I work in medical research and though I'm not medically minded myself I have friend who is a doctor at Great Ormond St and another who is an oncologist. I know the ramifications of GBM as do they and it helps to discuss it with them.
As a family will shall get through this, after all people die all the time. My brother is getting married this Saturday and that is going to be emotional and deeply shocking for my father's friends to see his state. However it will still be a celebration of life and the future.
Michael Portillo was talking this morning of a scorched earth policy in the House of Commons. Not in the literal sense, more rather in the removal of the bad eggs who have been, let's say, lacking in moral fibre. A shake-up of rules is needed apparently, an end to party politics, transparency. That's great but personally my views on politicians have been scorched. I really couldn't care less what they have to say anymore. In some ways it feels like there's been a general election and in the euphoria that follows when the country is leaderless, parliament has been dissolved, the polling stations are closed but the count isn't in, one feels happiness that the last shower have gone and slight trepidation of the next lot. All magnified by caffeine as you're surruptiously staying up all night to watch it (nobody readily admits to doing this). What I'm driving at is that there is a point in an election when the new lot might or might not be in and the old lot might or might not be out. There's change afoot and no policies.
Which is akin to what we have now. Like most others I would imagine, when the Telegraph's MP expenses bonanza kicked off I was pretty angry with it all. Not just the shameless hands in the till, but the childish 'it wasn't me it's the system wot done it' excuse that somehow absolves anyone from blame. The greed, the sheer avarice of it all, the tax-dodging, the denial, and in some cases the bare faced fraud and that helpless feeling that they just 'don't get it'. Maybe MPs were never this arrogant or maybe MPs think they deserve respect rather than earning it, maybe this was a reason for what happened. But I'm completely mystified as to how this can happen and why it is that only one head has rolled, that of the Speaker yesterday. As has been stated time and again, any normal person would be fired from their job for abusing an employer's expense system. Yet for all the tough talking by the party leaders this hasn't happened. Caught with your hands in the till? Surely a summary dismissal is in order, and not just from the shadow cabinet but from Parliament. Perhaps, constitutionally this can only happen through deselection. That may be the mechanism for removal.
With this blowtorch of public derision searing through Parliament there are no new policy announcements, no select committee reports, indeed its as if not only the government has imploded, which is not unprecedented, but the whole system of government. Sure, they can say this and that but who actually believes them? More so, who actually cares? I've always disliked Gordon Brown, moving from optimism (could be better than Blair/return to the grey man of politics like Major) to pity (the Election that never was highlighted his indecision and I pitied him for that). He is the most disliked PM ever and Labour has its lowest polling ever. It has got to the point that I don't care for anything that comes out of his mouth. His demolition of the UK economy is absolute, as his inability to take responsibility not only for his errors but also any decisions that need to be made. At least Tony Blair had personality even if he was the epitome of spin. Brown is a divisive, indecisive, sulky, bully who has reached the top of the pile and is completely out of his depth. I don't like the man.
But here lies my concern. Parliament has been eviscerated, Gordon Brown is dead man walking, there's no prospect of Labour rising out of the ashes and there's a whole year until the next General Election. That would be fine were it not for the fact that these people are meant to be in charge and presiding over lifting this country out of this recession. Alistair Darling's pronouncements on the economy's recovery by Christmas suggest that he has either completely lost the plot or that bunker mentality really has set in and that he really believes that.
So here we are then. We're stuck with this useless government presiding over a broken Parliament and a ruined economy and we're going to waste a whole year while Gordon refuses to do the decent thing and call an election. It really is a sorry state of affairs.
And what could be done to improve matters? Obviously a change of government, but I'd like to see Proportional Representation, the format of the Chamber reconfigured to a semi-circle as opposed to two benches, the removal of all pomp and ceremony as these traditions seemed to have extended all the way to the antiquated work practices, primaries to choose local MPs, in short a complete revision of how Parliament is conducted. If it is ever going to happen it seems that now is the time.
As some late Sunday evening telly I watched Cast Away last night (BBC1), the Tom Hanks opus where one ends up empathising more with a hapless Wilson basketball than Mr. Method Actor himself.
Cast Away tells the not true story of a Fed Ex manager who lives by the clock who has a big plane crash and washes up on a desert island where, get this, he has loads of time! Tom Hanks is Chuck Noland, a Fed Ex company man through and through, pager in one hand this man thinks, breathes, godammit sweats Fedex. And he's all wrapped up in chunkiest knitwear highlighting his equally chunky frame. He's such a company man that when his pager goes he leaves his big family Christmas dinner because he absolutely must fly to wherever in a Fed Ex Tristar. So this guys a real can-do kinda guy. We see him shouting at his Muscovite employees, and we see him shouting at them in Red Square as they do an impromptu open air Fed-Ex parcel sort to make the last flight out. The next time he's shouting because coconuts are falling off the trees. More of that later. Back to Fed Ex because you can't move for Fed Ex in this film. Its omnipresent. There are even some postal jokes. 'Take 5 days to get there and we'll be US Mail' and 'you wanna be on time fly UPS!' says the pilot of the doomed plane. The crash is karma for his irony. The ironies on him as all the parcels are late so he may as well be US Mail. There are loads of laughs here. They keep on coming when Chuck Noland has his fateful crash where everyone dies except him. Indeed he doesn't suffer a scratch. He's then washed ashore on a South Pacific island. What to do next? He doesn't find any water for a day which was a nice touch, and he eats a coconut. He find a torch on a dead pilot, and cuts his feet and hands and legs on coral and doesn't get infected. Its amazing. Its as though he has antibiotics or something to ward of the sickeningly rapid infection that usually occurs in the tropics from untreated coral cuts. You see coral is often living when it cuts your skin, and then it gets in the wound, and the air is hot and moist and before you know it your foot is the size of, for want of comparison, Wilson.
Not Chuck. He's so confident in his natural healing process that he uses some bubble wrap as a dressing and his legs don't drop off and he can still walk and doesn't get gangrene. The bubble wrap comes from the parcels washed up on the beach. And as this is a non-stop thrill fest we just can't wait to see what's in the parcels. There's Wilson the ball that becomes his best mate, and some ice skates that form a cutting/dental tool and a ballroom dress with a mesh ideal for fishing (who'd have thought) and ice skates! Ice Skates! On a desert island… but they look sharp and… and then when we watch him trying to light a fire for 10 minutes (36 hours in the film).
Four Years Later – and he's Stig of the Dump, and all that chunkiness is now skinny, and he has a caveman beard and curly hair. Ha-ha! His cave is daubed with neanderthal paintings and what-not. All in all he's regressed quite a way.
In the end he builds a raft, and loses Wilson (oh no, I ruined the one interesting plot line) and obviously gets rescued. In a nice twist his wife has remarried and had a child and so that relationship is dead. But this is a Robert Zemickis film so you just know there's some schmaltz coming up. You see good ole Chuck didn't open all the parcels on the beach. No, he was a good employee and kept one sealed and the thought of delivering it 'kept him alive for four years'. Any sane man would have opened it. After all, there could have been a solar powered satellite phone in it which would have saved us all a load of bother.
So in the final frame he's delivered the phone to some bird we saw at the beginning of the film who's a sculptor who coincidentally created a sculpture just like the logo of Fed Ex and incredibly didn't infringe their copyright. Chuck sees this and likes what he sees and he's now standing on a crossroads literally in the middle of nowhere wondering what to do next though hints have been dropped that he'll be heading back up the dusty track to the sculptress who we know is divorced because we saw her Fed Exing her divorce papers at the beginning of the film which like the beginning of this sentence really does feel like it was four and a half years ago.
Oliver Reed made a film called Castaway which was much better. It was based on a true story and that true story may have been written by Oliver Reed. I can't remember really, it doesn't really matter but the point was that Oliver Reed's character created the perfect Oliver Reed Desert Island, not unlike a Mid-Life Crisis Blue Lagoon. He put up an advert for single women to come and live with him on a desert island he owned in the South Pacific and not only did he get responses but they were hot too. Oliver Reed ends up running a South Pacific fiefdom where he drinks rum all day and the women, who either loathe him or just despise him, hang around with their knockers out.
Cast Away is rubbish and Castaway is also rubbish but Castaway has the benefit of Oliver Reed and female tits and Cast Away has Tom Hanks as a caveman. It's a no brainer really. (Look there's a nipple on the video cover!)
The really serious issue that I have with internet films is their unbalanced nature. Good journalism takes a topic, investigates it, then interviews two groups, those who support and those who are against. It then draws a conclusion.
Zeitgeist used the internet as its source material which is a major problem in terms of reliability. I mean if I told you that I was going to make a documentary using Wikipedia as my sole source then (hopefully) you'd think I was mental. Wiki is renowned for being an unreliable source.
So I had a real problem with Zeitgeist other than my opinion that it was a waste of an hour of my life.
Unattributed narration
The film opens with some monologue about how the world is a big joke or whatever. Then at the end a name comes up. Like Fred Blogs. There's no title. Its just a bloke speaking and because he's the introduction to the film it gives his speech further gravitas. But who is he? For all I know he's a mentalist from Speaker's Corner who's been given a global stage.
This technique was used throughout the film, a weakening influence every time it was used.
Quickfire video editing
Interspersing images of 9/11 with atomic tests from the 1950s is meaningless. Unless you're trying to show me that explosions are quite cool, or that wars kill people, or whatever. Or that 9/11 is somehow comparable to Cold War nuclear testing. Or is 9/11 a metaphor for Cold War MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction). Or that 9/11 is the new Cold War?
Religion is a tool to rule the masses
Well done, you learnt something about religion in medieval Europe. I'd also argue that money sets the masses free. Religion also gives hope to the hopeless. Its easy to slate Christian fundamentalism when you think of fat Americans in the mid-west but it's a little different telling a DCR refugee that their entire belief structure is there to repress them not save them.
The 9/11 Truth: Its an opinion not the truth. Basing your thesis on other internet documentaries is not sound. Nor is it sound to use supporting evidence taken from news sources who you then go on to criticise for being controlled by the government/corporations/aliens. Using eyewitness reports isn't that reliable either as what people hear and see is often very different from what actually happens. Early reports of the Mumbai attacks had 100 gunmen running wild, that was reduced to 10.
and on heavily edited quotes such as that of coroner at Shanksville where United 93 crashed who is widely quoted as saying there were no bodies there… (because they had been vaporised by the impact – that's the part people naysayers miss out). As for the architects of the towers. The building was designed with an impact of a Boeing 707 hitting the face of the tower and not slicing through a corner.
The insinuation that 7/7 was an inside job, whilst being grossly offensive, neatly left out the attempt at a repeat bombing two weeks later when there wasn't a drill being conducted.
Listing all the terrorist attacks against the US and suggesting that somehow these were instigated by the US government. Pan Am 103. Why would the US not only bomb its own airline two days before Christmas, but also target an airline in financial trouble. Yeah, lets make Pan Am, icon of the US airlines go bust.
Banking. I didn't bother watching this bit as all I need do is read a paper or walk down the street to see the effects of the collapse in our banking sector. Its easier to portray them as the villains of the piece (the global conspiracy) when they're rolling in money. When they've been part or fully nationalised it's a less compelling argument. Royal Bank of Scotland [UK gov has a majority share], HBOS [Halifax Bank of Scotland] and Lloyds TSB are part nationalised. Northern Rock and Bradford & Bingley are fully nationalised.
If you want the ultimate 9/11 conspiracy film then look up 'Loose Change'. This is another 2 hours I've lost for good plus add another hour for raised blood pressure.
I think that, conspiracy bullshit aside, this is what Zeitgeist was aiming at – that it is fear that provides the impetus for many foreign and domestic policies.
I've also read and seen interviews where the argument is that sometimes people need to have something or someone to blame when something bad happens. How can it be that the mighty US of A can be brought to its knees by some crazy nutjobs with some box cutters? Yet that's what happened.
Personally I reckon the 9/11 Commission Report was so Republican because Bush's government was embarrassingly poor in preventing it. Any PM who had let something like that happen and admitted so would have had to resign. 9/11 went on to provide GWB with a pretext to invade Iraq. It also made him one of the most unpopular US Presidents in history. That's notwithstanding his single-handed destruction of the US economy.
My final issue with the global conspiracy is this: So what?
What does it matter? Really? Do you think if we take the blue pill (like The Matrix) and see the real truth, that it will make things any better? Since these global puppet masters are all but invisible and yet have their fingers in every pie we could be chasing ghosts forever and still never find them.
How about this for a contradiction? Zeitgeist accuses religion of being a tool to control the masses. Their message professes to there being a higher invisible power that rules the world. Its evil and its greedy and it controls the world at its whim. Nobody knows who this power is, nor is there any proof that it exists and yet there it is. Now call me blasphemous but that sounds like a whole new religion. In essence, global conspiracy theorists are a very modern 21st Century internet fundamentalists.
In Word 2007 you can publish blog posts directly from word, by opening a 'blog post' as an option on the new document window. Its dead handy and far better than the rubbish word processor thing on blogger.com.
Only problem is that I haven't yet worked out how to get the inserted pictures to work. Hence the picture here is for the post below.
I bought this thinking that I would be reading a history of atomic weaponry. I suppose that is what I got but this book has given me so much more. You see PD Smith has written a history of all things radioactive. From the discovery of radiation, to the location of the first atomic reactor (a squash court at the University of Chicago) right through to... well I don't know yet. I've been reading this book for months now and I'm only two hundred pages in. I read many books at once and this one is a slow-burner. It is so laden with new information that I can only do a maximum of ten pages at once. That's why, 200 pages in and I'm reading about Einstein in Berlin in the 1920s, a time when the city was the cultural capital of Europe and also chock full with physicists theorising about splitting the atom.
In many ways this book is a magical mystery tour. It is completely different to what I was expecting but nonetheless is extremely readable, amusing, accessible, and contains a veritable font of knowledge and research.
As to what a doomsday weapon is. Nevil Shute wrote about the world after the detonation of a doomsday bomb in his seminal misery book, "On the Beach" which tells the tale of survivors of a nuclear war in Australia awaiting the inevitable, as a cloud of deadly radiation spreads across the world following the detonation of a cobalt bomb. Cobalt is highly radioactive and kills everything it touches and has a half-life of forever or something equally doom like. A doomsday bomb is a hydrogen bomb wrapped in cobalt. When the bomb detonates, the cobalt is thrown into the atmosphere and then carried around the world until everything dies. This can take a bit of time hence "On the Beach" which I can assure you is short on laughs. Nothing like a book where everyone dies.
Why would I want to read about this? Maybe to get an answer as to what is it that drives people to create weapons like these.
I had a dream last night where I was shot by an Italian policeman in a sort of execution stylee. I was first shot in my fingers and then my toes and then right in the centre of my forehead. I didn't feel any pain but what was quite extraordinary was that as the the bullet travelled through my brain I could feel numbness following in its wake, exactly like the creeping cold you get from a general anesthetic injection. The policeman had been surrounded by black, as if suspended in a void, and as the bullet went through me things did lighten up. At which point I woke up, and thought, no more cheese before bed!
There's been far too much death on the news lately. That and a cheesy pizza with extra cheese on top inevitably led to a slew of cheese dreams. I had another mental one and then woke up at 5.30 am. And got up.
I'm listening to Aphex Twin on my shiny new ipod. I've never listened to him before simply because his videos were scary. And he looks very strange in a bikini.
Here's a really really good thing about Word 2007. You can write a blog post, and then press 'Publish' and then it gets published on your blog. No more mincing around with the online editor thing which doesn't quite work as you expect it would.
By the way, Hello Waveforms by William Orbit is a really good album.
I had a high spending weekend of new toys. First off was Office 2007 Ultimate which I found on my work website for £40. I work in a university and so you get special education rates. I'm writing this on Word 2007 and so far it is a considerable improvement on 2003 Pro. Its better because a serious amount of thought and time have been put into the software. It will be interesting to see if the new iteration of Word is as lazy and as buggy as the last time round.
The second new toy is an ipod classic 120gb (black). One of my first posts was a huge rant against Apple. Indeed I went over that ground last week when I brought the old ipod out of retirement and even though I had newer headphones the socket was still broken. Sadly the battery on the venerable Creative Vision: M started going after 2 year's of heavy use. On average I'd say I used the Creative for about 9 hours a week. A replacement needed to be found, and I went for the Creative Zen 32gb. A flash player with a tiny profile and that it was the dog's bollocks for about two weeks, and then noticed that the battery life was utterly useless. I was struggling to get 6 hours out of one charge. What was so frustrating was that technically the machine was very good, but there were shortcomings other than the battery that just made it unacceptable. It did only cost £150 but sadly there was a reason for this.
That went back to Amazon on Friday, and yesterday I bought the new ipod.
I'm very pleased with myself… and why?
Because the ipod is very good. The sound quality in particular is excellent. Don't get me wrong, the Vision: M had very good sound. Its just the ipod sounds better. Crisper and more defined perhaps. I'll miss the navigation on the Vision M. It really is superior to that of the ipod. As well as having listed everything alphabetically, there is also an ABC sidebar where you select which letter it is you're searching for and off you go. On the other hand itunes has a joined up approach to handling the filenames/ID3 and Coverflow is just superb. The Vision had album art but it never really worked properly but then you could customise the themes and put on a wallpaper. What it comes down to is that Creative discontinued and refused to update the Vision, switched to flash players but somehow neglected to really push their tech forward. After all they invented the user interface that Apple then pinched from (and paid for in the courts).
Apple meanwhile have itunes which for me is the killer app. I don't particularly like the clickwheel but the package as a whole is excellent. The Classic feels great too.
A truly woeful film. As a friend of mine commented, 'yet again George Lucas pisses all over our childhood memories'. But where does it go wrong?
I saw an interview with George Lucas this August when he was over in the UK plugging his new Star Wars cartoon which left the cinema after only three weeks becoming the first Star Wars film that I haven't seen on the big screen. I was in Japan so that's my excuse but I saw Caravan of Courage so I've put myself through the mill in the name of Star Wars and I reckon that it could have been ok. Better than Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Blue Screen (IJ4 herein). In the George Lucas interview, which typically I can't find now and quote verbatum from, Lucas said that the direction in the new Indiana Jones was torn in two directions. He said that Spielberg wanted to hark back to the old days and make it like the other films. Well, they were so successful and exactly as the original inspiration denoted, that being the 1930s Flash Gordon serials. George didn't want that though. Oh no, George and his colossal ego wanted to take the film in a new direction, into the future. After all there are new ways of doing things. IJ4 is split into two distinct halves. The first half is evidently Spielberg's. There are some wonderful set pieces laced with that Spielberg touch. Indy's run-in with an Atomic bomb test is especially memorable. Indiana and his protege also have a cracking motorbike chase through Boston or wherever it is his university is based. And then we get to the Lucas half and then film descends into what is essentially an Industrial Light and Magic bucket of shit. That's because the film moves from being on location into a studio, and when I say studio I mean a Green Room where nothing is real. The earlier motorbike chase is so good as not only does it have cracking pace but the attention to detail is all absorbing. Everyone is in period dress (1950s) right down to the cast of thousands of extras in the background. You would have thought that Lucas would have learnt by now that special effects only work when you can't see them. But no, Indiana embarks on what is a pretty boring journey to some jungle being pursued by about 20 Russians in pursuit of this Crystal Skull. I can't remember what it did, probably imbued invincible powers on its holder and I suppose a plot device as simple enough as that could be interwoven quite nicely with the suspicion and paranoia of the Cold War. I digress, but only because the film never did. Highlights of this cinematic shower of shit include a laughably bad ten minute chase through a CG jungle between the Russkies in jeeps and Indy and his gang in an amphibious car. Then the main Russian thug gets eaten by Fire Ants in a scene that is reminiscent of the German bruiser being diced by the propellor in Raiders, except it reminds you that perhaps this format, or at least this format the way Lucas does it, is truly terrible. I'm not asking for some kind of Bergmanesque character introspection but this Russian fella holds no menace and you're just wondering what terrible death he's going to come to, well aware that this is by no means a location shoot and that since we're in CG territory it may well be that the only thing that is real is Harrison Ford, and he looks ancient. Indy escapes, and after more tedious shenanigans involving the dastardly Russians shooting the natives we're all of a sudden in a giant UFO rising out of the jungle. He might even have met some Aliens but my brain has shielded that horror from my memory. It is completely fucking terrible.
IJ 4 had six screenwriters and two massive egos taking the film in two different directions. It has shameless cash-in written all over it and oh, there's a surprise, its scheduled for a DVD release in early November. This film came out in May and its taken me this long to write about it. That's how scarring that experience was.
A friend of mine asked me recently if I'd heard any new music. Since leaving university, actually since I got a real job as opposed to working for that record label I've found it increasingly difficult to find new music. I've ended up like 6 CD man who goes into HMV and buys arm-fulls of any old cack I might have read about or heard something of. Finding good new stuff is all the harder as the magazines I used to read have folded - in particular I really miss Jockey Slut. I don't actually end up in HMV. I'm often to be found rooting through the second hand CDs in the Notting Hill Record Exchange but that place is past its heyday. When ipods really took off there was a firesale as new owners cleared out their physical formats that meant that muggins here made a killing. Normal practice is that you can pick up a good album for £2 and then the ones for £1 are real randomites. I found some really good Layo & Bushwacka stuff there. The alternative is torrenting but I don't really like that for music or, as I said earlier, ending up in HMV. That's how I acquired 'I Created Disco' by Calvin Harris which is pretty cack unless you've never heard electronic music before in which case its new and and exciting and refreshing. Otherwise its pretty much crap. That said his collaboration with Dizzee Rascal is excellent. I bought The Klaxons too. I can't really remember what it was and it sounded pretty shite too. I think it won a Mercury prize or something which is seen as something of a millstone.
So then, Daft Punk.
I was in Japan this summer - more of this later - was in Kyoto escaping the blistering heat outside and ended up in... HMV! But it was a Japanese one and that's ok. Price wise cds are about £10 but DVDs were very pricey especially the Ghibli Studio films. I really wanted to get some good Japanese music but its hard when you can't read the script or speak the language or know anything about it. The 'Lost in Translation' soundtrack has some great Jap-rock (more a ballad) on it.
I ended up in the electronic section looking for a new electro album from former psy-trance egghead Tsuyoshi Suzuki. I'd earlier spent some nights in an out of season ski resort called ZaoOnsen, 40 minutes from Yamagata. Next to the hotel turned out to be a really hip bar with chilled people and using the international language of psy-trance, babelfish, my friend's digital dictionary and beer we talked a bit about, among other things, music. I couldn't find any Suzuki stuff but I did find Alive 2007 by Daft Punk which is a live album recorded last year in Paris. I bought it as I really like Daft Punk, Discovery being one of my favourite albums, and it really is amazingly good.
Electronic albums live are a weird thing. I saw Mylo live in Brixton 2005. My pill was shit so I was more aware of the fact that he had quite limited material but what he had was really good, it was played live, and what wasn't live was mixed in a very clever manner. Now this Daft Punk is live in the sense that they went into a studio, remixed all their music into a tightly wound, very bass heavy set, then dressed up as robots and brought along an amazing light system then spend 70 minutes making the listener wish they'd been there. It helps that you can hear the crowd too. I mean of course its live because like The Chemical Brothers they're tweaking knobs on big mixing desks but essentially there are some massive computers backstage and they are just robots playing the music, but then that's what they've always been.
Highlights for me are Around the World/Harder Better Faster Stronger in which they've unleashed a 303 and put in some epic bass. The production is so great that that stomach quaking bass that you can feel in club loos is carried into your living room or head without your features sliding off your face. It also helps that these are my two favourite songs off Homework and Discovery but then they knew this and that's why they put them together. Face to Face/Short Circuit is a highlight too and later on there is ten minutes of pretty ferocious techno which actually goes somewhere. I wasn't so keen on their new album 'Human After All' but some of the new material live is very good.
All round an excellent purchase.
Its a brilliant album and my best random purchase for quite some time.
Sunset in Kyoto. The hotel may have been expensive but what a view from my room!
A chance reflection of sunset over Kyoto through the glass corridor outside my hotel room.
Interior of Kyoto's magnificent central station. Built in 1997, 8 rail lines merge here. This is the view from the end where our hotel was. The station extends 3 floors underground and 3 million people use it every day.
I spent 20 days in Japan this summer and here's what I wrote:
I’ve been in Japan for just over two weeks now and it is fair to say that I love this country. I’ve always wanted to come here as it to me has always been the capital of Asia. Indeed if I was to think of any kind of Asiatic influence then more or less it would stem from Japan. So much of what we see and do comes from here, nowadays via the factories of China. The Asiatic influence, for me, also comes from films such as Bladerunner and the book Neuromancer by William Gibson which as tediously presumptuous as it sounds, really is visionary. I think I would have died and gone to heaven had I been able to find a clear dome umbrella with a fluorescent stick holding it up. Alas no, I have a clear umbrella but it seems that I will have to wait for the future on that one. Then of course there’s Manga such as Akira and Ghost in the Shell, and the anime from the Ghibli studios. What I’ve attempted to find in Singapore, Shanghai and Bangkok is what ultimately can only be found in Tokyo. I’ve been looking for a mythical future city and whilst I haven’t found that, I found something infinitely better, something that we in Europe will never achieve. I’ve discovered a faultless society, a country where everything works perfectly, where the people are the friendliest and most courteous that I’ve ever met. This is the safest place that I’ve ever been to, and not the safest due to fear of punishment, but safer due to a simple code of honour. Of course I’ve also discovered a land where suddenly Mario and Pokémon make sense. That plinky-plonky music and relentless happiness is in some ways a perfect encapsulation of the craziness of Tokyo, for whilst it is by no way the mentalist cityscape I was expecting and hoping for, it is indeed crazy in a way that Singapore could never be, clean in a way Bangkok could never be, polite in a way that Shanghai is unlikely to ever be again and here’s the surprise, cheap in a way that London could never be.
For those of you who have read Judge Dredd and 2000AD, I’ve also discovered Mega City One, but unlike that warped view of an anarchic future ruled by Fascists, this is a surprisingly quiet affair, not the hectic bustling freneticism that I was expecting. That Mega City 1 is the prefecture of Tokyo. The Tokyo prefecture has a population of over 36 million. It is a massive, vast city. When I arrived in Tokyo I went to the viewing deck of a skyscraper up in a development called Roppongi Hills. From there one can look down on the TokyoTower, a strange red and white piece of ironwork reminiscent of the EiffelTower, nine metres taller but not as elegant. I was up there on a clear night on the 80th floor and in every direction, as far as the eye could see it was city. I have never seen anything like it in my life. It was quite extraordinary. Hundreds of red lights blinking, an aeroplane landing at the airport, the bright orange neon of the docks, and then across the harbour yet more lights on the horizon.
Japan is twice the size of the UK with a population roughly twice that of the UK at 120 million, and yet this population is crammed into a quarter of the area due to the mountainous topography. This means that all the plains are intensively farmed and densely populated. One never sees empty fields as one does in the UK. There are always houses, and rice paddies, and hundreds of pylons and honestly I’ve lost count of the number of times my train has passed through another colossus of a city. Yes its not like China where 5 million population cities are ten a penny, but here these cities are so concentrated. The region encompassing Tokyo, Osaka and Kobe is one of the most the most densely populated regions on the planet.
There are so many great things about this country that its taken me two weeks just to get my head around the beauty of the place. I should start somewhere and what better place than from a Shinkansen bullet train whistling from Kyoto to Tokyo. I see that we’re cruising at 147mph. Fairly pedestrian I’d say but for the fact that these things are, on average six seconds late in a year. Think about that. The Japanese have a rail system where the trains arrive and leave on time. They’ve invented a bus network which is as accurate as their train network and that is honestly something to be really impressed by. I took a bus from a very out of season ski resort called Zao Onsen to the northern city of Yamagata. The bus was scheduled to take forty minutes, and forty minutes it did take. It left as the buzzer sounded in the bus station, wended its way down the hairpins of the mountain road, made its way through the suburbs and then through downtown and as the clock flicked to 14.40 so we pulled up at the bus stand. Astonishing.
Back to the trains. I have a GPS tracker on the window sill which is telling me I’m going at 166mph, and oh look, I’m still in this massive city, essentially the same city and of the same density of buildings as of Kyoto which I left two hours ago. The trains are brilliant, but then train travel has always been my favourite way to travel. I’m listening to the soundtrack of Lost in Translation and I’m very, very happy. Trains are cheap as chips as I bought something called a Japan Rail Travel Pass. For £270 this is giving me unlimited access to the JR network hence I have experienced to the fullest the perfection of the Japanese rail network. I say unlimited. I have to pay full price to go on a Nozomi Shinkansen, the 200 mph non-stop trains. The JR Rail Pass is pure genius.
That’s trains covered then, and roads too but I haven’t been on them too much except in taxis. Taxis are great with excellent air-conditioning which is pretty much essential. They’re very quiet as they run on LPG and the rear doors open and close at the touch of a button. What a great idea. All cabbies wear a shirt and tie, and all the cabs are some kind of specialist Toyota. There are far less scooters and motorbikes than I was expecting, and loads of groovy little superminis and miniature van things made by the likes of Toyota and Honda. I’ve seen a few Mercedes and BMWs but mostly in Tokyo, two Audis, loads of Nissan Skylines but as a rule very few sports cars apart from Subarus aplenty up in the mountains. I’ve seen a few of the new Beetles but what I’ve many of are the original Minis and quite a few of new ones too. The Japanese are after all Anglophiles and what better car for them than a Mini.
Toilets. There’s a kind of technology not oft spoken about mostly because its Victorian technology and its never changed. I have had, prior to coming to Japan, the odd pub conversation along the lines that, “In Japan they have electric loos” which normally leads to discussions on how that would really work but nobody knows and we all move on. I can report with great pleasure that the Japanese do indeed have electric loos and that they are indeed pretty cool. They have a little control pad on the right, numerous warning signs and instructions, nozzles and speed controls. It’s a real smorgasbord of anonymous buttons. The best thing is working out how to flush the thing and conveniently forgetting that one is sitting on an electric device which contains a lot of water. There are an assortment of flushers. There are physical plungers that you have touch. My God the ignominy! Why push plungers when I could be pressing a button. And why should that button be on the loo when it could be on the wall. And why have the button near the loo when it could be near the door. There have been moments when I’ve been puzzled as to how to actually flush the damn thing, and mild concern at the warnings about suffering of light burns if something in Engrish goes wrong. But it’s alright, this is Japan and if something does go wrong then the helmeted and face masked emergency services will get away from their cat rescuing from trees and actually have a real emergency. You see, apart from the volcanoes and earthquakes and typhoons there isn’t any crime and people don’t seem to set themselves on fire. You see I’m segueing quite carefully into the… Emergency Services!
This country appears to be essentially free from the scourge of petty crime. Sure there’s organised crime here in the form of the Yakuza, the Chinese and Russian mafias, and all manner of corporate crimes such as bribery but to the man on the street there is nothing, and I mean nothing. I went to China in 2005 and whilst that was safe it seemed fairly apparent that crimes against foreigners would be dealt with harshly. Though I was never attacked I was ripped off on the odd occasion. Pretty tame stuff but something that I have not only never seen in Japanbut also would never expect to see, and not due to a fear of punishment but an innate sense of honour and manners the Japanese hold and value. There’s no need to check your change as it is always correct. It would be a great dishonour to give the wrong change. There’s no tipping which proves that Mr Brown’s argument in Reservoir Dogs was indeed correct. Why do we tip waiters 12.5% for doing their jobs? Taxi drivers will suggest shorter routes and will never overcharge. That’s petty cash dealt with and brought down to such a level that one forgets to think about money which is a relief.
Japanese love to bow more than they handshake. This can be a little strange at first but one soon gets used to it. The only confusion is when to stop bowing and this comes from learning who is more important. Being British I naturally assume that its all my fault and that I should apologise for everything and that therefore if I get a pre-emptive bow in then that will level everything. A waiter will then bow back at which point I bow again and then we get stuck into repeat bowing until I have to walk away. Bowing is endemic in society but it provides another level of courtesy beyond that of mere good manners. Train conductors having checked a carriage will turn to face the carriage and bow as they leave. When department stores are closing the staff line the exit points and bow. Bowing is a wonderful thing not only as it is fun but it engenders a level of respect to a society which is by no means rigid but simply has better manners than those in Western countries.
That’s crime or lack thereof, the emergency services, transport and manners dealt with so what more can I say. I’m now back in England but having read through the first half of this document I so enjoyed it that I realised that I must finish it. The first half was written on a Shinkansen which I was rather frustrated to leave as I was really in mid-flow with this whole writing thing and I knew that once I returned to Tokyo I would have precious little time to sit down and do a bit more writing. The Crime section took a quick half hour and now its two weeks since I got back and Japan is still pretty fresh in the memory.
On my return I stayed in the Ginza area which is like Bond Street and CanaryWharf rolled into one. It’s the most expensive shopping district and there are all sorts of big offices and its about ten minutes away from Tokyo station, the main station in town which itself is a five minute walk from the Imperial Palace…
And here’s where it tails off, and the reason is tails off is that I did try to do some writing there but there were only two occasions when I could actually be bothered to do any, or felt like it. Partly this was because I needed to switch off and have a holiday, and partly because big foreign cities are frenetic exciting places and I need to time to digest what I’m seeing and feeling before I can put them down on paper. Arriving on Tokyo I knew that I would never finish this piece in exactly the manner I wanted to, as there was so much more that I wanted to say about Japan and the little peculiarities that one finds everyday and yet are so specific to a feeling that though they are easily remembered it is very difficult to write about them a month later with the same verve and passion than if they had happened ten minutes ago.
The other reason that I did less writing than usual is something of a paradox. I normally write lots because I'm by myself and therefore can not really share my thoughts with anyone about what I'm seeing. I mean of course I meet other people but I don't really know them and therefore they may not get my idiosyncratic take on life. As my friend Mairtin commented, it was so good to be travelling with someone who related to the absurdity of the cartoon characters in Tokyo to the same extent as he did. Take Suica for example. I haven't mentioned him yet but Suica rules Japan. Suica is the public transport penguin whose image is everywhere in the expansive Tokyo train system. Suica is a card system just like the Oyster card but whereas we have a dull London Underground logo, Tokyo has this penguin who is everywhere. He's got tv adverts and a mobile phone network. Kyoto meanwhile has Atom Boy, a robot child with rockets for feet. Other characters of note are clean-up Racoon that can be found on the floor polishers, bus frog, a frog who is the bus company's mascot and who is also on the seat covers, laughing baseball mouth aerial head... that's an incomprehensible baseball with a mouth and an aerial who for reasons best known to the Japanese represents the taxis in Tokyo. Then there was the Safety Station elephant to be found in Seven Elevens and Family Marts, ably assisted by the ubiquitous Hello Kitty and Thomas the Tank Engine at railway stations. The unceasing cheerfulness and plinky-plonky music of Mario now makes perfect sense.
I admit readily that I am an oriental junkie. It runs in the family. My brother has lived in Shanghai for the last five years, and my great uncle lived in Shanghai during the 1930s. He saw the bad side of the Japanese being, as he was, interned by them during the Second Word War. And yet there has been a sea change since the end of that war. Japan was destroyed by the fire bombing and two atom bombs. If you need to see the human cost, then watch ‘The Fog of War’ which illustrates just what the firestorms entailed. Yet Japan has risen to become this extraordinary society with this perfect, effortless fusion of good old-fashioned manners and technology.
I asked my friend Mairtin if he could, in one sentence, say what the best thing about Japan is and it is impossible to. So here’s a list:
Its faultless. I saw three things wrong:
1) There was a sign in Zao Onsen with a fluorescent tube in it that was flickering.
2) A close-door button on a lift in Nagano needed pressing twice.
3) There was a rusty lampost in Kyoto.
And the things that are good about the place:
The people are astonishingly friendly and generous, civil and polite.
The food is delicious and fresh that day.
The whole country is tidy and clean and filled with absorbing architecture.
The transport system is effortless and huge fun – those bullet trains are astonishing, and not just the sheer quantity of them but their evil, evil designs.
The countryside is beautiful.
Japan was the absolute pinnacle of all things Oriental. I love that country and it is the best place that I’ve ever been to.
