Further Dispatches

A round of globetrotting opened my eyes to a few things. After a tour of South Indian tech cities, I realised my favourite desibeats mostly come from the UK. Another lesson: getting lost in ghetto squalor on the outskirts of Bangalore is no guarantee of a reprieve from Katy Perry songs. My trip to Istanbul taught me that Turkish-language hip-hop from Turkey is much better than the plodding stuff coming out of Germany and the Netherlands. Adventures in North Spain lead to the discovery of Madrid’s fantastic alt-music scene.

Months late, plagued by scandal, and millions over budget: finally, here are my musical suggestions for the season.

• Breton Armada, Principios De Siglo (Spain). This electroclash album was my mischief-making soundtrack for Madrid. I’ll never get tired of Solo Contra El Mundo and Impasible.
• Capsula, In the Land of Silver Souls (Spain). The award for swaggering rock’n'roll axe-wielding goes to this Basque group. Capsula traffick in that British-style blues-rock that fans of Kasabian will like.
• Ceza, Onuncu Köy (Turkey). Bumming around Istanbul was made more surreal with this hiphop album buzzing from my headphones. Ceza’s strength is jungle-style delivery, most obviously on the track Holocaust from his album Rapstar. That delivery really helps the Turkish syllables bounce. Highlights from the new album include Çivi Gibi Çak, Bir Minik Mikrofon, Onuncu Köy, and Eger Beni Görürsen.
• Enemy Within, Flawed (UK). I can’t get enough of this album. The foundation is a bleepy, atmospheric electronica. Then darker industrial and breakbeat influences get layered on. My Eyes and Believe showcase the style particularly well.
• Bauchklang, Signs (Austria). Voices as instruments: sliced up, distorted, looped. No ordinary human-beatbox act. Philly beat-poet Ursula Rucker makes an appearance.
• Creeptide, Nerul 21 (Germany). Layered, rhythmic electronica with an interesting trundle and hum; makes me think of frantic city motion. If you like this, also listen to Raudive’s Chamber Music album (especially the track Paper).
• Echofikibausik, Echodubsteps (Poland). This is the most challenging dubstep and cyberdub album I’ve enjoyed in a while. Fans of Milanese will approve. For those looking for something more ambient and introspective, the new (self-titled) Clubroot album is a must-have.
• Lykke Li, Wounded Rhymes (Sweden). “Like a shotgun needs an outcome …” A catchy collection of retro tracks, even if the production makes the album sound like it was recorded in a big barrel. Highlights are Youth Knows No Pain, Get Some, and Rich Kid Blues.
• Passarella Death Squad, Passarella Death Squad (UK). Emilie Albisser’s chanting is very tribal, a departure from the robotic chants I usually recommend. Perfect mood music for the candle-lit human sacrifice you were planning for the weekend. A better version of The Fascination of Fire was scored with Perc and goes under the title Temperature’s Rising.
• Anika, Anika (UK). Speaking of spooky English chantresses … there’s much to recommend in this psychedelic dub experiment. Yang Yang and Masters of War are brilliant.
• Perilelle, Damages (Canada). From Canada’s broken-car-window capital (Windsor) comes this dark triphop album. Some great glitch-hop sounds have been thrown into the mix.
• Torpedo Boyz, Return of the Ausländers (Germany). If Fatboy Slim were five wacky blokes in white tracksuits and matching crash-helmets, he’d be the Torpedo Boyz.
• HausHetaere, Syndicate (Germany). This gothic EBM album comes from Chemnitz. Rauschgift, Milieu, and Rotes Sofa show HausHetaere’s truly inventive mixture of industrial, hip-hop, and operatic influences. Yup.
• Crisk., Machlaut (Germany). This punkish EBM album is a few years old, but it’s new to me and I make the rules here. Beute and Machlaut are awesome tracks in the category I call “music by German women who sound like complete badasses”. If you like this, you should already have the Rotersand Remix of Pzychobitch’s Caress.
• Basher, Transmission (UK). I’m keen on this drum’n'bass album’s molten grooves, especially the ones in Transmission. Xerox is a great homage to Saturn-Returnz-era Goldie. In this vein, also check out the tracks Potential, Redshift, and Unbreakable from LM1′s album Redshift.
• Darkpop Band Angelique, God Eat God (Russia). Cabaret crooning layered on drum’n'bass and electro-dub grooves, with nervous breakdowns and didgeridoo freakouts thrown in for extra drama.
• Aes Dana, Perimeters (France). I’m partial to ambient electronica that has a soundtrack quality, especially if it has the usual soundtrack cues for tension, intrigue, and introspection. And that’s why I like this album … a lot.
• Kozzie, The Problem’s Started (UK). Kozzie claims to be the new Dizzee Rascal. This grime album is almost as rude, laddish, and musically challenging as Dizzee’s debut Boy In Da Corner. Back to Take What’s Mine, Cherryade Special, and Im Famous demonstrate that well.
• Tha Trickaz, Cloud Adventure (France). I was about to say that this album shows that there are great things happening in US hiphop too … until I realised it’s from France. Burn. American MCs tho. (yo.)
• Bonjay, Broughtupsy (Canada). Stumble, Shotta, and Creepin are must-have tracks for fans of bleepy, bass-heavy dancehall and dub.
• Grimes, Halfaxa (Canada). Dreamy child-woman vocals layered into a wash of sound. I can’t get enough of Weregild and My Sister Says the Saddest Things. Also check out the Grimes tracks on an album called Darkbloom (notably Urban Twilight).
• Elite Force & Klaus Badelt, Shockland (UK/Germany). Masculine breakbeats for driving angry. Soundtrack maestro Badelt adds cinematic nuance to Elite Force’s aggressive beat throw-down. Mercury Man, Loco, and Brknck are highlights.
• Little Dragon, Ritual Union (Sweden). Little Dragon continue their shift from nujazz to soul. It’s their best album, with some inventive electronica accompanying Yukimi Nagano’s vocals. Crystalfilm and Nightlight are the best examples of that.
• Nosaj Thing, Drift (US). Complex electronic arrangements with some catchy, rumbling grooves. This is the best ticky-glitchy album I’ve heard in the last year.
• Breakbeat’s Son, I Am Here Now … (UK). This is the UK bass-salad selection of the season. Drum’n'bass, dubstep, brokenbeat, breakbeat, hiphop … they’re all there. One track is entitled Who Killed Bhangra? Funny, I was wondering the same thing.
• Tycho, Past Is Prologue (US). Air’s La femme d’argent is my favourite retro-lounge track. Tycho’s Dictaphone’s Lament comes close to unseating it.
• Lamb, 5 (UK). Their best album since their debut, which is high praise indeed. Strong the Root and She Walks are highlights.
• Bremen, Skin (Japan). I’ve left this album until last because it’s a mixture of every genre I’ve just mentioned. Oh, you think I’m joking?

What was my theme song for the summer? It’s a toss up between My Name Is Trouble by Keren Ann and Troublesome by Vladimir Lovkov. It’s been that kind of summer. My recommendation for the coming autumn? Either the dubby soul-stylings of Landslide’s Dig Deeper, the bleepy sing-song of Rainbow Arabia’s Mechanical, or the disco anthem In The Ashes by Late Night Alumni.

My next roundup will be sooner rather than later … and will feature the Korean music scene.

What I Talk About When I Talk About Herbivore Men

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami (Blackstone, 2008; Non-Fiction, Japan)

I workout every day. My training is intense. It lasts a long time. So I listen to audiobooks to overcome the tedium. Audiobooks with athletic themes are best. They motivate. They contain phrases like: “Sweating is just your body getting rid of the cowardly molecules!” or “Super turbo-time that hill, you snivelling bastard!” or “Pull the Earth off its axis or die trying!” But sometimes athletic audiobooks are even more subtle than that.

Take, for example, Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. Murakami is a Japanese novelist and jogger. He compares himself to other runners, judging himself to not quite measure up. He pats himself on the back for trying. He runs every day. He wonders whether his knee hurts or not. It doesn’t, as it turns out. That’s good, because Murakami is preparing for the next marathon. He runs one every year. He describes his favourite shoes, which are very plain looking but he likes them. He describes the clouds. He hopes it doesn’t rain. Then Murakami runs the marathon, gets a cramp, and finishes with a disappointing time. Oh, dear. He’s past his physical peak. No matter, he’ll train harder next time. He does. He talks about the clouds again. And the temperature. He talks about how thirsty he gets while running. And he talks about how running is like writing … or how, at least, both require stamina … and both give him time to be alone. He doesn’t really think about much when he’s running. The really big race is coming up. But Murakami isn’t motivated by competition. He just wants to complete the race with a respectable time. So he runs the race, gets a cramp, and finishes with a disappointing time. Oh, dear. That’s a bit of an anticlimax. But that’s okay because it gives Murakami an excuse to discuss anticlimaxes. He claims that a sane publisher would never publish a book with such a pitiful story-arc. And yet one publisher did just that.

There are worse things to listen to while working out at the gym. A funeral march, for example. Or a recording of an elderly woman crying into a birthday cake, played back at half-speed. Or a medical textbook read by someone with a stammer.

The best part about Murakami’s book is that it’s a hard stare at the mind of a herbivore man. That’s what the Japanese call a meek, anxious, unambitious beta-male, the type of man who lives with his parents for far too long. That might not seem like the ideal protagonist for a book about athletics. It isn’t. Murakami is too old to be classified as a stereotypical grass-eater. But his attitude is almost comedic in its meekness and self-rationalising.

At least Murakami shares some of his writing secrets. For example, he tells us what it takes to be a good writer. It requires talent, he says, full stop. Oh. Well, that explains it.

Despairing with Koji

Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei: The Power of Negative Thinking, Vols. 1-7 by Kumeta Koji (Del Rey, 2009-10; Graphic Novel, Japan)

Japanese humorists have a strange fascination with the one-dimensional character. I’m scratching my head after watching the TV series Conceited Detective (Unubore Deka), about a crime-fighter who proposes marriage to the prime suspect in every episode. And my mind is reeling from the graphic novel Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei, a 70-chapter thought-experiment about a school full of one-dimensional obsessives.

Zetsubou-Sensei—Mr. Despair—is a suicidal mope. For him, everything has a cynical, conspiratorial interpretation, which he’s quick to teach his students. The lessons don’t rub off, however, because the students are all single-minded sociopaths and misfits in their own right. One of the school-girls is absurdly optimistic, offering a positive spin to even the most cruel acts. Another is a perfectionist bully who yearns for a precisely ordered dictatorship. There’s a shut-in (hikikomori) who treats the school as her home. Then there’s the stalker girl … the pathetically ordinary girl … the text-message-slanderer girl … and the dangerous-fetish girl. There’s the dirty, dark-skinned, illegal-immigrant girl … and the blond, sexualised, politically-correct, legal-immigrant girl. And there’s a school bureaucrat nobody ever notices. Other quirky characters pop up now and then. All told, every unspeakable sore-spot in Japanese society has been exaggerated and turned into a character. Each chapter has the group fighting over some cultural problem, such as burdensome career aspirations, the herd-mentality of celebrity worship, and government bureaucrats who are given useless, cushy jobs. There’s a lot of in-your-face finger-wagging conflict, much more than you’d expect in a society known for its avoidance of overt social friction.

What do I make of the series? Subversive satire? Yes, but not the subtle variety. Kumeta Koji’s approach is clever anti-subtlety. Irresponsible provocation? No. I can’t see how anyone could reach that conclusion, unless they’re one of those literal-minded uni-characters being ridiculed by the author. And how could it be irresponsible for Zetsubou-Sensei to give his students suicide kits (complete with Enya albums) or accidentally expose them to pornography and perverts? Politically incorrect? Only the best kind, the kind that highlights prejudice instead of panders to it. Informative? Very. The books are full of obscure historical, linguistic, and pop-culture references—a master-class in Japanese cultural curios—all of which are explained in translator endnotes. Insightful? There is some truth to the series’ subtitle, “The Power of Negative Thinking”. Funny? Darkly humorous. But not gruesome, unlike some manga that I can think of, such as Otsuka & Yamazaki’s The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service. Artistic? I love Koji’s manga style, especially the way he draws hands and feet. Koji also has a gift for visualising concepts with margin sketches. Recommended? Very much so.

Music for the Middle Kingdom

This is about music from China. And music not from China that I listened to before, during, and after going to China. As far as grand unifying-themes go, admittedly, that isn’t my best effort.

Keeping abreast of China’s fragmented alt-music scene is quite an effort. The best way is to follow NeochaEDGE. You’ll notice a lot of rock’n'rollas and indy-pop nerds. But also some stuff that’s more intriguing, notably a compilation sponsored by NeochaEDGE, which is first-up:

• Neocha & Shanghai Restoration Project (Various Artists), eXpo (China). This is a great collection of electronica. I’m particularly fond of the remix of Red Mushroom’s Big Pirate Tyakasha.
• B6, Post Haze (China). I usually played these dubby Eurolounge and trance tracks on my way to evening mischief in Shanghai. Red Sky and Sweet Light are faves. B6 is a cofounder of Neocha.
• Lian-Lian-Kan Festival (Various Artists), A Good Day (China). The folksy indy-pop songs aren’t my style. But I really like Huang Xiaozhen’s Soak and CiaCia Her’s A Dialogue Between Me & My Ghost, both trip-hoppy downtempo jams.
• Queen Sea Big Shark, Queen Sea Big Shark (China). This punkabilly is best listened to while shooting a machine gun from atop a moving surf board. The 19-second song Girl Boss is pretty much the definitive statement on the subject of girl bosses. Money Fucker is my new theme-song for robbing banks and jumping motorcycles.
• Carrchy, Riguangqingcheng (China). Qingdao’s Carrchy is less generic than the usual Chinese-pop fodder. Of note: a couple of great bossanova tracks and a Lily Allen-esque track made out of video-game sounds.
• My Little Airport, Zoo Is Sad, People Are Cruel (Hong Kong). Fans of the retro casio-pop of France’s Stereolab will like My Little Airport. Their latest album, Poetics Between Montparnasse and Mongkok, is a bit too sing-songy clip-clappy, except for the not-so-clap-happy track “Donald Tsang, Please Die”. Oh, and the song “Northern Europe Is Our Terminal Station of Death” is also pretty tambourine-proof. This older album is better, probably because it sounds so much like Stereolab and has less sing-songy death … notwithstanding the track “Gigi Leung is Dead”.

If you’re really interested in the prevailing sound of Beijing electronic music, listen to Chinese Electronics Volume 1 (Substream Records). Quite a few of the city’s composing DJs are on that one.

And here’s the rest of my seasonal round-up of music.

• Clubroot, II – MMX (UK). Dubstep with bass so deep you feel it in your sternum. Angelic voices. Moody atmospherics. One of my favourite albums of the year.
• Moderat, Moderat (Germany). Speaking of albums of the year, Berlin’s Moderat has released an atmospheric, dub-inspired album with lots of variety. It’s a must-have if you’re a fan of Atmo Brtschitsch’s classic Change Your Life. Shout out to Neo Jellyfish, another member of the Neocha crew, for introducing me to Moderat via her blog. I’m also enjoying another album she mentions: the cinematic mix of world-beat and story-rhym’n in Zack Hemsey’s Empty Room.
• Breakage, Foundation (UK). Bass salad for da massive. Open up and Justified are awesome dubstep tracks. Burial makes an appearance to add some haunting soul-sounds. Old Skool Ting is a dutiful homage to Goldie’s drum’n'bass stylee. Sci-fi ragga with Roots Manuva and brokenbeat with Zarif are other highlights. Overall, this is a much better bass salad than Skream’s wobbly new album Outside the Box, although I recommend a few tracks from that album too (I Love the Way and Finally).
• Bassobese, 49 Nights of Twilight (US). This is a turntablist take on dubstep with lots of old-school dub touches and nutty samples.
• Spc-eco, 3-D (UK). Since Curve broke up, I’ve been keeping an eye on what Dean Garcia has been up to. I love the Dirty Bomb album he did with KMFDM’s Lucia Cifarelli and Sascha Konietzko (as KGC). The Ultrashiver album by The Secret Meeting is another great collaboration. Spc-eco is his latest: heavy bass-guitar drones, a wash of sound, and layered female vocals. The Curve sound lives on.
• Filewile, Blueskywell (Switzerland). Electronic funk. I can’t get enough of the tracks Number One Kid, King of the World, and Codeine. That last one was my theme song for sitting in the back of a cab during Beijing’s rush-hour traffic. Fitting.
• Ellen Allien, Dust (Germany). If you’re a fan of moody minimalist techno with robotic chanting women, you’ll like this. I’m talking about fans of Waterlily and Mia (Michaela Grobelny). Also in this vein, check out the Elif Biçer chanting on Ben Klock’s album One.
• The Tanuki Project, Playground for Everyone (Canada). Haunting female vocals overlaying gritty electronic riffs and stomp-clompy trip-hoppy beats.
• Talwar, Savage Messiah (UK). Dark, atmospheric London brokenbeat with a few Burial-esque dubstep tracks.
• Familjen, Mänskligheten (Sweden). This electro-mélange doesn’t start and end well. But the fleshy middle is tasty. Nordic techno is mixed with R&B funkiliciousness, especially in the ew-ew-girl anthems Mitt Bästa and Vinter I April. I love the swagger of Socker. Vems Lilla Hjärta Flyger reminds me of Iceland’s Gus Gus. Plus there’s an instrumental inspired by Chinese folk music.
• Ilya Mosolov, Changes (Russia). This breakbeat album has an airy, clubby sound overall, yet there’s plenty of venom in the tracks Back to the Real World, Distorted Structure, Uranium, and Weird Orchestra.
• Hybrid, Disappear Here (UK). Cinematic breakbeat, as per usual for Hybrid. I’m glad these guys are back to featuring female vocalists. And Charlotte James is great, almost as good as Julee Cruise from their first album.
• The Speaker Tweakerz, Ritual (US). This is mostly a dubstep album featuring lots of heavy wobbling. But four stand-out breakbeat tracks are included: Orlando Love, Inject Da Insane, New World Order, and Lose My Mind. Aggressive. Atmospheric. Techie. Fans of early Crystal Method must plug into these tracks immediately (and get the Tweakerz’ self-titled debut album).
• Quarks, Königin (Germany). I don’t like the new Lali Puna album. Verdict: tonally flat indy-pop with electronic bleeps and buzzes that seem like an afterthought. But I do like the new one from Quarks: a great mix of vocal moods and electronic pallets, much like something Barbara Morgenstern would do.
• Trentemøller, Into the Great Wide Yonder (Denmark). A few tracks would be a perfect soundtrack to a dark futuristic Western. And one (Silver Surfer, Ghost Rider Go!!!) is the perfect surfabilly theme song for a Quenton Tarantino film. Even Though You’re With Another Girl is the best triphop song released so far this year.
• Tua, Grau (Germany). It’s rare for a German rap album to be so varied musically. Unter Druck and Nachtschattengewächs are great jungle tracks.
• The World, The World … According to Brent Hunter and Nina Ramsby (US/Sweden). Baxter is my favourite Swedish group. Their self-titled debut remains one of the greatest drum’n'bass albums ever made. The genre-spanning follow-up album About This isn’t too shabby either. I’m slightly underwhelmed by their new one, Tell Me Like It is. For something more intriguing, check out this album that Baxter’s Nina Ramsby did with Brent Hunter last year (especially tracks Surrounded and Fellowship).

I’m having hard time deciding what my autumn theme-song should be. It’s a toss-up between the aggressive breakz of Casio Hell from London’s Lifecycle or the techno-grime anthem Player by Japan’s Capsule.

The Beijing Flow

You can see the future more clearly from China. The vantage point is excellent in Zhongguancun, Beijing’s so-called Silicon Valley. That’s why I’ve rented an apartment here. Every morning I watch people flood into the area. A new subway-line streams people in. Recently paved streets are crammed with vehicles of every variety. The soundtrack is non-stop honking. The noise echoes around the highrises, some just built, some works in progress. Because of the perma-haze of pollution that wafts through the city, highrises a few blocks away look like ghost buildings. The whole scene is a marvellous frenzy to behold. And it has me wondering about urban movement.

Beijing city planners face a big challenge. China is urbanising at an astonishing pace. It’s the largest mass-migration in human history. Some 400 million people will be moving into cities in the next 20 years. That will require 40 billion square metres of built space, or the equivalent of ten New York cities worth of building. Somehow, all of these people have to be able to move around. So China will build more new roads in the next decade than exist in the entire U.S. Interstate Highway System. In Beijing, half a million vehicles are added to the roads each year. That’s going to slow down because Beijing’s traffic is already half the speed that you’d find in London, Europe’s most congested city.

Managing all of these logistics is a headache. But I’m more interested in how the street-level culture plays into it. That’s something planners can’t control directly. Migrants from the countryside are mostly unused to navigating big-city traffic. Or they carry norms from another city. Even the locals have to adjust to a super-sized city. In any case, the rules aren’t taken seriously or aren’t known. Traffic opportunism reigns. New habits and norms form around that opportunism.

Red is an auspicious colour in China. It’s the colour of happiness, fortune, and joy. It symbolises good luck. And so it is with traffic controls in Beijing. Green means “go.” Red means “ride your luck.”

This morning, like most mornings, I jump on my bike for a white-knuckle ride through the city. The bike lanes are wide. But I still have to weave around double-parked cars, aggressive taxis, and the odd horse-drawn mellon-cart. A steady flow of cyclists ride on the wrong side of the road, heading straight towards me. Inaudible electric-motorcycles and overly audible moto-rickshaws whiz past me from behind. A moto-cart, carrying a stack of computer printers, pushes everyone else out of the way. A massively overburdened rubbish cart presents a slow-moving obstacle. Pedestrians use the bike lane as a sidewalk … or as a place to stand and stare at the sky. Cars cut me off at every intersection from at least two directions. Every mouth is either spitting, smoking, or talking into a phone. And amid it all, at the centre of the maelstrom, is a one-eyed granny in her pyjamas, ambling in no discernible direction.

And everyone comes out unscathed, except when they don’t.

And everyone takes the traffic mayhem with good grace, except when they don’t.

As Mao once said, “Everything under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is excellent.” Well, not really: not really chaos; not really excellent. A simple set of decision-rules is at play: move forward; don’t yield unless about to crash; right-of-way goes to the object with the most momentum or the least likelihood of stopping; try not to make erratic movements; honk a horn if it makes you feel better. Sometimes I have to stare into the middle distance and sense movement through my peripheral vision, as video-game players often do to see the flows emerging from all directions. The decision-rules work, except when they don’t. Cyclists are especially vulnerable: a third of all traffic fatalities in Beijing are cyclists. So if you’re a city planner, how do you keep the flow of people orderly and safe?

Control is the first instinct of the technocrat. And so it is here. Sidewalks and bike lanes are fenced off to prevent j-walking. Traffic wardens regulate pedestrian crossings at busy intersections. Sky bridges and tunnel crossings keep people off major thoroughfares. All of these things are very necessary because, when the wardens aren’t around, pedestrians jump into the street as if it were a swimming pool. That’s why drivers blast their horns constantly, as if to say “coming through”, even if there’s no one blocking the way. At the end of my block, someone graffitied the word “silence!” on the intersection. That person did so in vain.

All of this would work better if there was enforcement of the laws. You only have to ride around Shanghai to see how that would work. People in Shanghai think their traffic is nuts. It’s the model of rectitude compared to Beijing. I wondered why until I saw the wardens and police in action. They get in your face when you don’t obey the rules. And the police don’t hesitate to shout in your face in a very shouty way, even for mild infractions. The authorities can’t be bothered in Beijing. And they certainly don’t get excessively shouty. I reckon that’s partly a cultural difference between the spicy-hot-tamale Shanghanese and the meek, placating Pekingese.

Ignored in all of this is the science of flow. I’ve had plenty of time to contemplate this while stuck in the back of a taxi during rush hour. Traffic on major arteries can move at a walking pace. That has a lot to do with compulsive lane changing. People foolishly change lanes in the hopes of moving faster. Or they wait until the last minute to make an exit. Every lane change ripples through many kilometres of traffic. And the entire bus system is premised on moving in and out of the flow of traffic. Complexity scientists have modelled this sort of thing on computers. They’ve found out how lane changes and over-compensated braking can lead to gridlock with no apparent cause. In cities throughout the world, this analysis has led to redesigned roadways and public transportation—streamlined, in the true sense of the word. I’m guessing that very little of that analysis has been done here. The assumption seems to be: just add another giant Ring Road and hope that helps. However, sometimes the road construction is the culprit, as with the 100-kilometre, 10-day jam that trailed out of Beijing in mid-August.

The car has become the must-have status symbol in Beijing. Since private ownership of cars became legal in the 1990s, a car culture has started to form. Auto clubs are popping up. Middle-class professionals are spending their incomes on apartments and cars that raise their social status. Social status is a major determinant of how serious you’re taken by colleagues and business partners. But it’s more than just that. As Alain de Botton puts it in Status Anxiety (2004), most of us want to become a “somebody” and fear becoming a “nobody”. Having a fancy car in China’s new consumer-society isn’t just a luxury or perk, it’s a matter of self-respect and dignity. It’s about quelling the status anxiety. It’s about being a “somebody” in a place full of bodies. And in China especially, it’s about gaining a sense of “face” and making your family proud.

Does any of this sound familiar? Do you see where this is going? China has just become the largest car producing nation in the world. The economy now has a stake in the growing demand for automobiles. Do you wonder what a North American car culture will look like in the most populous country on Earth? You may not have to wonder for long.

As China undergoes the biggest experiment in urban movement yet devised, a thought comes to mind. Will this experiment yield constructive lessons to copy elsewhere or lessons about what not to do? Here’s hoping that Beijing’s frenzy of move­ment is met with a frenzy of fresh thinking.

(Related article: Parking Hacks 2: Plate Stashing)

Gun World Porn

Gathering (Group Exhibit), Original Design Circle, Sunlitun Village (Beijing, China), June 25-July 1, 2010.

Chunky Bits by Ashley Wood (Three A, 2010; Book of Paintings, Australia)

A while back, I was snooping around a seedy neighbourhood in east Berlin. I stepped into a shop called Big Brobot. To my right was clothing for slacker prodigies. To my left were robot toys and miscellany from the cuteness economy. My quarry was in a small room at the back: design and art books. The shop had a great selection. As I leafed through the graphic design books, I noticed a little shrine in the corner; a lovingly arranged collection of books by the Australian painter Ashley Wood. Closer inspection revealed why Wood’s work was given such prominence. Baggy-trousered hooligans wielding samurai swords. Giant robots with phallic rotary canons. Naked ladies shooting handguns. The subject matter of Wood’s books mirrored the theme of the shop, albeit in a less cutesy form. Was I missing something? Is there some sort of clique revelling in this post-apocalyptic robot porn? I parked that thought.

A few weeks later, I was on the U-Bahn heading back to my apartment. It was late. I’d been out partying. The subway car was mostly empty. At one end sat a brawny guy in denim with a moustache and a mullet. He was curled up in the fetal position, crying like a baby. Next to me were a bunch of pale anorexics dressed like vampires. They were gossiping and smirking. And then the cast of Tank Girl walked in. The two women wore a mishmash of combat gear. One was covered in patches of beige and pink camouflage. The other wore tank-commander goggles on her forehead. Big patches of hair had been shaved off their heads at random. The guy they were with had the right side of head shaved. He wore a hoody with the title “Sesame Strasse” and a picture of Ernie and Bert brandishing AK-47 assault rifles. The two women mocked this guy mercilessly. He was very stoned and generally unresponsive. When they left the subway car, one of the women gave the slow-moving stoner a combat boot to the ass. Everyone laughed, except the guy with the mullet. I guess I’d found the target audience for that post-apocalyptic robot porn.

Fast forward a couple of years. I’m at a gallery opening in Beijing featuring Ashley Wood. The week-long exhibition is called Gathering, as in the summoning of the members of a tribe. Wood isn’t the only one showing his work. Another Australian painter I admire, Jeremy Geddes, is showing here. Rufus Dayglo is here. He’s the artist who currently works on the Tank Girl graphic novels (Jamie Hewlett, of Gorillaz fame, is the original artist; Wood did a stint with Tank Girl too). Also featured is American painter Phil Hale and Hong Kong artists Dorophy Tang and Kenny Wong. All of these artists deserve your attention. I’m going to focus on Wood, however. The paintings he’s showing in Beijing have been turned into a book called Chunky Bits (available here).

Not everything in the book is in the show. And the book is a bit of a grab bag of recent work. With a few exceptions, the best works depict robots and gas-masked soldiers on the battlefield. If you’re mostly interested in nudes, you’re probably better off getting Wood’s 96 Nudes (2009). To best understand the world that Wood has created, get Complete World War Robot (2010) and Complete Popbot (2008). The large, coffee-table dimensions of Chunky Bits do better justice to Wood’s paintings than many of his other short compilations. Indeed, some of the smaller paintings look better in the book than in-person because of the murky colour pallet and the gallery’s harsh lighting.

Galleries like to merchandise artists. I’m talking about keepsakes: coffee cups, postcards, and other tat. Ashley Wood is a new brand of artist who’s taking control of the merchandise and making it part of his oeuvre. Out with the tat. In with the replica robots, action figures, apparel, and print publishing. These all have a presence at the show. They come out of ThreeA, the company Wood co-founded. It’s difficult to tell where the merchandise ends and the show pieces begin. A herd of cubic robots is the centre piece. A full-sized (3.08 metre) Martin robot is the marquee piece (“FUCKING BIG! Articulated. Not a lame statue!” says the also-fucking-big info-card).

The opening is a great spectacle with a capacity crowd. The big party trick is a live painting by the five artists in the show. Below is Wood (left) and Geddes (right) during the group painting session. Second photo: Dayglo (left) talks Tank Girl tactics while poking and pinching an interactive display.

Is there anything that can’t be made better with sexy women, machine guns, and giant robots? My delinquent, reptilian brain thinks: probably not. Wood’s inky, soiled sci-fi style makes all the provocation even better.

Doll Face

Wang Zhijie by Wang Zhijie (Michael Schultz Gallery Beijing, 2008; Book of Paintings, China)

I’ve been rummaging through the Art Zones and art zones of Beijing for three weeks and counting. While at an exhi­bi­tion at the Pan & Wei Gallery in Caochangdi, some Wang Zhijie paintings caught my eye. Or rather, the painting’s eyes caught me. The lashes, which resemble the prongs of a Venus fly-trap, kept me from escaping. (See my heavily cropped photo above.)

I picked up a book of Zhijie’s work shortly thereafter. It was published by a nearby gallery. Earlier works from the same series are shown. “Little Girl” is the title of every painting.

These are highly sexualised dolls with eyes of insect proportions. The eyes are like those of anime figures, yet rendered in three-dimensional gloss. Eyes spaced so far apart, at the edges of the face, is a common style in graffiti and cutesy commercial illustration. It adds to the eery insectoid look.

Wang Zhijie is pushing the doll caricature to extremes while giving it a decidedly Asian look. The innocence of the doll caricature is then juxtaposed with various military and sexual-fetish themes. I’ll let you decide whether that’s subversive or just the continuation of a pop trend.

Travelling with Yokoyama

Travel by Yuichi Yokoyama (PictureBox, 2008; Graphic Novel, Japan)

Yuichi Yokoyama has conducted a wonderful experiment in wordless storytelling.

Three fellows arrive at a train station and board a train. The fellows walk in single file from car to car until they find the right seats. They sit down and watch the world go by. The world watches them go by. And then the three fellows disembark. Those are the basic contours of the plot, if you can call it that. That sounds banal. What’s engrossing about Yokoyama’s graphic novel are the observations—the noticings—that happen along the way. During each stage of the trip, different modes of social interaction and social distance are rendered plain. Nothing is said. But you know tacitly what’s going on because you’ve probably been in similar situations. Usually, you don’t take much time to dwell on the details. Yokoyama compels you to notice them. You see diverse people. You see uniform people. You see subtleties in behaviour. You see the surface textures, the movement, the lighting. You see the patterns formed by water, wind, motion, light, and shadow. You notice curious details about the scenery. Yokoyama is tuning your ability to notice.

I’m fascinated by Yokoyama’s novel because of my interest in visual explanation. Most visual explanation is about pulling a viewer through a chain of actions and consequences. The design intent is to minimise distracting details and emphasize the intended message. It’s all about plot and operative detail. Most graphic novels and genre fiction are stories of that kind. But Yokoyama is using visual storytelling to get you to notice the context; the subtleties of the social situations and physical setting. He’s describing an experience. It’s akin to what some literary critics call “miniaturism”: acute observations about the intricacies of things, as well as their larger meaning. The details can run for pages and pages. Yokoyama does well to translate this approach to a different medium. And he makes me wonder about all the other commonplace experiences that comics can make us more mindful of.

Music for the moulting season

The weather’s getting warm in my habitat. It’s time to shed excess layers … frolic … bask … display plumage … et cetera. I recommend some musical accompaniment.

• Jahcoozi, Barefoot Wanderer (Germany). Massive Attack’s latest album, Heligoland, is okay (I like the track Atlas Air). This album by Berlin’s Jahcoozi is everything that Heligoland should’ve been: heavy, rolling dub and trip-hop beats; dark soul vocals; spooky atmospherics with sci-fi touches. Easily Jahcoozi’s best album, although their best track remains Ali McBills.
• Krystal System, Underground (France). This is industrial-techno dance-music with a French gothic flavour. Elektrostal, Mental, and Slice are great EBM anthems. Listening to this album may cause to you to wear lots of black this summer.
• Psy’Aviah, Eclectric (Belgium). Speaking of EBM, the new album from Psy’Aviah is their best. There’s even a cameo by Jean-Luc De Meyer from Front 242, my favourite group from the industrial olden days. Fans of Belgian EBM should also watch for the new album from Aïboforcen in the next few months.
• Gebo, Gebolution (Japan). Dragon Ash have gone all Spanish flamenco on us. Thumbs down. This album is the antidote for fans of hard-rhyming Japanese hip-hop. There’s lots of eclectic turn-tablism and bazaar sampling that you expect from the better Japanese DJs.
• Xlii, Ego Friendly (Japan). Apparently, the maestro of Tokyo’s growing glitch-hop scene is this Ukrainian dude. This is a candidate for album of the year. Xlii’s tracks are accessible and don’t get mired in glitchy freak-outs. There are even some great desi- and dubstep influences. This is especially good because I need more Ukrainian role-models.
• P.K.14, City Weather Sailing (China). I’m going to spend half the summer in China. Thanks to the club D-22, there’s now a big indy-pop scene in Beijing. So far, P.K. 14 are my favourites. Think of them as a rockus version of Joy Division who sing in Mandarin. My apartment is relatively close to D-22, so I’ll keep you posted on other acts to follow.
• The Big Pink, A Brief History of Love (UK). This will probably be the shoegaze album of the year unless Ulrich Schnauss releases something new.
• Charlotte Gainsbourg, IRM (France). I gave this album a first listen while watching a five-storey brick-building burn to the ground—a very surreal sight … and a very surreal sound. This should actually be considered Beck’s new album, given that he produced it and every track features his hobo-folk/hiphop sound. Excellent stuff.
• Cobra Killer, Uppers & Downers (Germany). Berlin’s punkabilly chantresses have actually created an album that sounds fairly mainstream. It’s certainly better than their bazaar Greek bouzouki album. “Hello, celebrity! Tell me what do you do … in between the wonton soups.” If you like this style, look for an album by London’s Dead Pixels later in the year (hopefully).
• Hyper, Suicide Tuesday (UK). If you like Pendulum and The Prodigy, you’ll love this act because it sounds like a combination of the two bands. Lots of hardcore rave beats and breakz with either vocal samples or full vocals. Hyper sound fresher than the lead-off single from Pendulum’s upcoming album.
• Newham Generals, Generally Speaking (UK). There are lots of interesting things happening in UK grime circles. The Generals have a dark sci-fi touch. Head Get Mangled and Supa Dupe are tracks worth checking out. Also on the grime tip, I recommend the Ultrasound album by Durrty Goodz and Scorcher’s Concrete Jungle.
• Mos Def, The Ecstatic (US). “Super­cali­fragil­istic­expiali­dopeness!” Says it all, really. Brooklyn alternative hip-hop from the scene’s most eccentric character. An uneven album with some great tracks.
• Busdriver, Jhelli Beam (US). L.A.’s Busdriver is my favourite alt-hiphop rapper. He’s the master of the bazaar analogy and rapid-fire, freaky word-play that make you think. This album isn’t as good as Fear of a Black Tangent and Roadkill Overcoat. Parts are very obnoxious. But there are some great Busdriver-isms featured here nonetheless.
• Gustav, Verlass die Stadt (Austria). I love Gustav’s anti-consumerism anthems We Shall Overcome (MP3) and Mein Bruder from their last album. The two songs show a range from old-fashioned protest-song to dungeon-chic beat-poetry. The best parts of the new album are the happy-clappy Eurolounge tracks.

So what’s going to be my anthem this summer? “Gooooooooooooal!!!!!!!” by DJ Baku and Shing02. It’s a World Cup summer. And this is a bad-ass track.

The trouble with pointy objects

Piercing by Ryu Murakami (Penguin, 2007; Fiction, Japan)

Kawashima is a graphic designer with a habit not all that common among graphic designers: he gets up in the middle of the night and looms over his newborn’s crib with an ice-pick. He worries that he might do something impulsive. How to remedy the situation … hmmm? One option is to kill someone else to expend the urge. And because Kawashima is a fastidious and risk-averse nerd, he plans the murder in intricate detail. So much for impulsiveness. The multi-page plan boils down to: get some pointy weapons, lure a prostitute into a nondescript hotel room, then murder, then clean up, then do something else. The problem is that the prostitute he winds up with, Chiaki, is a self-mutilating nutter with a penchant for piercings and psychotic freak-outs. She drugs men surreptitiously for fun. And she’s pack’n a pointy weapon of her own. Before Kawashima has a chance to do anything, Chiaki has already stabbed herself in the legs several times, woken up the neighbours, and gnawed one of Kawashima’s fingers to the bone. Now what? None of this is in the plan … which he foolishly brought with him. The reader is left wondering: who’s going to be the one who gets killed in the end? Psycho number one? Or psycho number two?

Ryu Murakami is perhaps best known outside of Japan for a novel called Audition that became a disturbing Takashi Miike film. I can’t stand Miike’s films. But I like his version of Audition. It’s about a middle-aged widower who finds a lonely young women through a fake film audition. The young woman, however, is a deeply disturbed serial-killer who winds up torturing him. There are quite a few parallels between Piercing and Audition: off-kilter men who lure women under false pretenses; crazy women who turn the tables; abusive childhoods; sexual obsession; haunting memories; druggings mixed with violence. But whereas Audition lapses into horror, Piercing plays more like a thriller with the reader left guessing about who has the upper hand and what drives these damaged people. That makes it a more gripping story. Unlike Audition, there aren’t any sympathetic characters here. It all seems like a big crash between a couple of misfits who are psychologically broken in similar (but not entirely believable) ways.

As an aside, an English-language film based on Murakami’s In the Miso Soup will come out in 2010. It’s too bad that more of Murakami’s books haven’t been translated into English. My francophone compatriots can gloat because his corpus is available in French.

Madiba and the Land of Walls

I’m writing from a place called Melrose Arch. This is a gated community in Johannesburg’s affluent northern suburb of Melrose. In a land of sturdy defences, this place sets quite a high standard of protection. The perimeter fences and walls are electrified on top to discourage climbing invaders. There is a security guard standing on the street every fifteen metres, some disguised as residents. One of them patrols around on a Segway, a law-enforcement vehicle that is sure to strike fear into the hearts of evil-doers. To fill-in the surveillance gaps, guards watch from a central command post using security cameras. Bollards are placed along every sidewalk to prevent smash’n'grabs. And most buildings add another layer of guards and cameras. Everything, it seems, has been designed around security. That’s an easy thing to do given that the entire district was built from scratch in the last few years and caters to the monied few. Suffice it to say, I feel very guarded … almost to the point of suffocation.

I suppose I can’t blame Jo’bergers—especially those of the frou-frou clan—for wanting a big dose of security of person and peace of mind. The affluent have the most to loose and South Africa doesn’t have a thick middle class. Four out of five cars in Melrose is a German luxury sedan, many of which are armored. Most here are clad in fashions designed by the likes of Georgio Armani, Karl Lagerfeld, and Johan Lindeberg. The locals want a place with a proper café culture; a place to relax outdoors to people-watch without having to constantly look over the shoulder in fear. Some might say that there’s also a shallow classism at play. In Carel van der Merwe’s excellent novel Shark (2009) the cynical narrator offers his interpretation of the walls:

… [Stephen Winter] drives past large electrified walls that conceal from curious eyes the sprawling mansions with lawns as big as fairways, past guard huts and armed-response vehicles and close-circuit cameras. But he doesn’t drive past any pedestrians—here their presence is discouraged, and in the unlikely event that any strangers make it past the suburb’s access-control points, the guards will soon see them off. A fortified village, as in the Dark Ages. But what’s wrong with that: what’s the use of money if you can’t keep out the barbarians?

I drove around one of these suburbs on my way to a country club. It’s so easy to get lost. The walls make every street look the same and there are few landmarks. That’s part of the point: the walls provide an architected anonymity. Here in Melrose Arch, the guards forbid me taking pictures of the buildings. That, I’m told, would be a threat to security. We can’t let the curious eyes see anything inside the walls.

Personally, I’m having a hard time gauging the risk. I spent last week in the dodgy Sunnypark neighborhood of central Pretoria (“sunny”: yes; “park”: no). Every time I walked out of my hotel I was accosted by wrinkled panhandlers or followed by leering teens. I was being a bit too nonchalant about the danger. Security guards eventually insisted that they tag along during my late-night errands. I tipped these beefy Kevlar-clad blokes with curried meat pies from the local gas station. I told one of my local contacts that I walked down the street in the middle of the night, all by my lonesome, to sit on a patio and eat a plate of peppered cow stomach. She almost fainted … and not because of my choice of cuisine.

I’ve just read a book called Don’t Panic (2008), edited by Alan Knott-Craig. The book is a collection of commentaries by South Africans from various walks of life. It’s partly an apologia about the current state of the nation and partly a rah-rah pep-talk for those who choose to endure it all. The commentaries come in three forms: (a.) the grass isn’t greener on the other side; (b.) the grass is greener elsewhere, but green is boring; and (c.) keep calm and carry on because we should love our country despite it’s flaws, which are horrific but hopefully manageable. Here’s a representative example: “Even though [my husband] has been highjacked twice (in one incident the gun was held to his head and the trigger jammed), he still has a positive attitude about this country and defends it to the last. We still have the cheapest petrol (even though it is now over R8.00/litre).” (pp. 22-23) The book is filled with these prefatory disclaimers: “We were attacked by four men at our home in 2004. My husband was shot and passed away later in hospital. … Ten days later we were attacked again by four men at my parents’ home. This time my daughter and her friend were held at gunpoint but thankfully there were no fatalities.” (p. 40) Or, “Our closest friends in Joberg were shot in their beds three weeks ago …” (p. 52) After every such preface there is an optimistic rejoinder, as if the casual butchery of friends and loved ones isn’t such a big deal in the grand scheme of things.

One contributor to Knott-Craig’s book refuses to leave South Africa because he’d miss the koeksusters. Apparently, that’s about something you put in your mouth.

Long before my arrival, I knew that Jo’berg is one of the most dangerous cities on Earth. I don’t deny that the security barriers make sense. However, I’d argue that the fences and walls are also a contributor to the problem. Sociologists have a concept called embeddedness. It means that people who intermingle and interact will develop a familiarity with others who are unlike themselves. Exposure leads to exchange, empathy, and interdependence. Members of the populus may scarcely know one another on a personal level because cities, especially big ones, create a social distance and stand-offishness among people that minimises the potential for conflict (a phenomenon called urban reserve). Nonetheless, the intermingling makes it difficult for one group or class of people to vilify another and treat them as less than human. That’s because, in an intermingled society, everyone knows someone from another group that they can relate to. That opens minds. People gain a stake in each others’ fortunes. People become more alike. And over time the social barriers fall away unless one group puts a lot of effort into resisting assimilation into the societal whole, or if one group is shunned by the dominant majority and is compelled to live in isolation. In any case, fences and walls are barriers to embeddedness.

Jo’berg is a deeply segmented place. By segmented, I don’t mean segregated by race or ethnicity. Here in Melrose, there is a wide range of ethnicities on display in the cafés, bistros, and Eurolux boutiques, although Afrikaners and Anglos make up the majority. I’m talking about population distribution and flow. During the aparthied era, the city was divided into districts in a way that made travel difficult. Today, given the lack of public transportation, that design continues to hinder the free flow of people. Some people commute from poor townships by riding from district to district to district on multiple “buses” (private vans packed like sardine cans). The dilemma for Jo’bergers is how the greater intermingling eventually comes to pass. The gates are becoming more permeable over time. Yet any build-up of “social capital” (trust, reciprocity, and interpersonal bonds) that has taken place so far strikes me as a few drops in the bucket. The clock is ticking. The number of South Africans who are getting fed-up is increasing rapidly (hence the Don’t Panic book). The most talented can leave at will. Some of those on the margins of society have recently opted to riot in their townships and attack foreign workers. Tick, tock, says the clock.

It was Nelson Mandela’s birthday the other day. I was in Pretoria in a Euro-style lounge when the clock struck midnight and the birthday began. The place was full of affluent students from a nearby university. Funky electro-house music played on the decks. Everyone was easy going and having fun. I wasn’t the only white guy there. There was this other dude. So, as you can imagine, I blended right in. At no point did I feel unwelcome. Occasionally, dancing students would chant, “Madiba, yah, yah, yah!” These students are the brain-trust who will soon be crossing the fences and walls to live it large. Let’s hope it’s a big cohort. And let’s hope that Madiba lives long enough to see more of the walls come down.

What I’m listening to as I schlep to South Africa

KLM Airlines has a strange habit of naming all of their planes. I’m sitting in battery-hen class aboard a plane called Moeder Teresa. If you know anything about Mother Teresa and her theology, you’ll know that she believed that those who endure worldly suffering are among the most virtuous. Perhaps the name of the plane is fitting given the state of the air-travel “experience” these days. To be fair, I generally like KLM, even when schlepping long distances with the huddled masses. I do know of another airline labeling scheme that is highly apropos. I was at O’Hare and noticed that United Airlines was offering a preferred clientele programme called “explus”. Either the marketing guys didn’t know what the prefix “ex-” means, or that company set a new standard for truth in advertising. I flew United a few months ago and their check-in kiosks now ask for a $15 bribe to wait in a shorter security-check queue. I’m now an ex-client.

I’m off to Amsterdam’s Schipol airport (rhymes with “fish bowl”; not a coincidence) for a quick shower before jumping on a 10-1/2 hour flight to Johannesburg. Did I mention that I’m recovering from a cracked rib? Ouch! I guess I’m going to be the especially virtuous one this weekend.

Here’s a run-down of my musical accompaniment. I have to confess that I don’t have much South African music in my collection. And what I have is mostly from Cape Town. There’s the magnificent Felix LaBand. I recommend his entire corpus of laid-back electronic tunes. There are lots of subtle afro-folk influences, the origins of which I can’t pinpoint. There’s some good turntablism from LaBand’s former band-mate Sibot. They were both in The Constructus Corporation. (I bet if you listen to their wonderfully obnoxious song Jellyfish, your phonological loop will be playing the chorus over-and-over-again in your head for days.) I’m also a fan of Lark, who do vampy female vocals overlaying gritty electronic tracks. These recommendations are admittedly stale. But I’ve got some new stuff from elsewhere.

• Kiln, Dusker (US). One of my favourite atmospheric albums of late comes from Michigan-based Kiln. Complicated percussion and beats, mixed with an ambient wash of sound. Someone from this part of the world has to pick up the mantle from Casino Versus Japan. Maybe Kiln are the ones. They have a lot to do if they’re going to rank along side C vs. J’s Erik Kowalski, who is one of the unheralded Mozart’s of electronic music.
• Huntsville, Eco, Arches & Eras (Norway). I collect albums from Norway’s truly avant garde Rune Grammofon label. I’ve been disappointed in recent years. The latest Huntsville album is promising as an introspective composition with lots of acoustic guitar, ambient buzzing, and tabla.
• Skepta, The Debut Album – Greatest Hits (UK). Wiley’s Roll Deep Crew have recently created a masterful Grime album Rules & Regulations (“Badman”, “Celebrate”, and “Bad Luck” are must-have tracks). So wot’s wif Skepta’s solo album? It’s an awesome ruckus! And there are none of the pathetic compromises that London MCs often make when pandering to US market-share (I’m looking at you Kano).
• Dusk & Blackdown, Margins Music (UK). This is London desibeat mixed with dubstep, with a few tracks featuring Grime MCs on the mic. It’s the perfect soundtrack to a post-apocalyptic Bollywood film set in Brixton.
• Vex’d, Degenerate (UK). Speaking of dubstep and brokenbeat, this album by Vex’d is a proper dose of straight-up dark sci-fi. It even comes with the obligatory Blade Runner sample. It’s not as good as Kode 9, Burial, or Boxcutter. But it’s better than the recent album by Plastician. Vex’d may be one to watch for the future.
• Juana Molina, Un Día (Brasil). The instrumentation is partly electronic and partly acoustic. The sound is truly inventive. Molina has finally found a musical backdrop that compliments her vocal style. Brilliant. If this keeps up, Molina will be the next Fernanda Porto or Bebel Gilberto, but even better.
• Röyksopp, Junior (Norway). Röyksopp are Euro-lounge mainstays, now with more old-school discobeats and acid-grooves. Quite a few Scandinavian divas appear on this album. Good stuff.
• Midival Punditz, Hello Hello (India). Dehli’s Midival Punditz are my favourite Indian DJs, not just because of the superb pun-plus-irony in their name. (Jam For Bread are the only ones with a cooler name.) Unlike the better known trancy-prancy Goa DJs, the Punditz can throw down serious breakz when they want to. With each album, their sound moves further away from generic desibeats. This album has a lot of range and fine production.
• Susumu Yokota, Mother (Japan). I have Yakota’s entire corpus, which is a lot of music. Yakota has even surpassed the mighty Ryuchi Sakamoto in my esteem when it comes to Japanese electronic maestros. (Although the recent Fennesz-Sakamoto album Cendre is nearly perfect; my rainy day soundtrack.) Among Yakota’s recent albums, which are his most mainstream, this one is the most coherent because it relies on a unified vocal style. The vocals don’t always fit, however. My favourite among his recent albums remains Wonder Waltz.
• Polysics, We Ate the Machine (Japan). Given that Afrirampo haven’t released anything in a while, Polysics are my token loud, obnoxious, nutty, alt-pop Japanese band. What’s not to like about these guitar-thrashing Devo wannabes? This album is slightly better than their last one, Polysics Or Die!!!, while being just as Hello-Kitty punkabilly. I recommend the tracks Kagayake and Arigato. They’ll make you want to pick up a tire iron and smash things made of plastic and fur.

Mika the Strange

Tonsure (NTV, Japan, 2008)

Mika is a young writer. She’s a bit posh and a bit goth. Imagine her as a grown-up Japanese version of Emily the Strange. Mika’s irreverent debut novel was a huge hit. Now she has writer’s block. So she cloisters herself in her dungeon-chic high-rise apartment to hammer out the next book. Her only source of inspiration is her editor, Yabu, who she’s holding captive. Yabu is a ridiculous, middle-aged bumbler with no qualms about demeaning himself. Mika procrastinates by torturing the poor fool. What does she do? Mika does what any writer would do if sequestered with an editor. She farts in his face. She tries to hang him. She burns a mole off his bald spot with a magnifying glass, douses him with scalding coffee, dresses him up like a drag queen, and, and …. that’s just for starters. Yabu soaks up all of the humiliation with supplicating bonhomie. He’s desperate for another hit book. So he spends his spare time telling lame jokes and thinking up bizarre plot ideas.

This dark comedy is hilarious if you have an equally dark sense of humour. It also has some provocative themes. The main plot-line is about struggling with personal demons, parental betrayal, and a sense of personal inadequacy. Suicide is a recurring topic. The show is also a parody of Christian proselytizing. Yabu, you see, looks like a Catholic friar because of the circular bald spot on the top of his head (tonsure is the religious practice of cutting hair in that fashion). Many of the episodes mock Christian imagery and ritual. The money-grubbing-Evangelicals episode is particularly biting. Granted, these parodies owe a lot to the mainstream Japanese distain of contaminating foreign religions. Nonetheless, these are some of the funniest parts of the show. They’re almost as funny as the episode about impoverished parents who try to get their kids killed in industrial accidents. As I said, this is a dark comedy.

Faux Handguns, Gibbering Mendicants, and Assertive Asian Women

I’m back in San Francisco. And I’m browsing through a department store full of brick-a-brack in the ChinaTown district. A mangy looking hobo presents a dilemma for the two clerks at the cash register. He wants to buy a plastic replica of a SIG Sauer P226. The P226 is a handgun. And the dude who wants to buy it is visibly unstable. I won’t rush to judgement and diagnose him as a crack-head or head-case. But, by the same token, he’s not exactly compos mentis. The first clue is that he mutters to himself in a language that only he understands. He has a bad case of the shakes. And after he purchases the replica handgun, he can’t find his way out of the store even though the cash register is next to the exit. As the gibbering mendicant is trying to leave, one of the clerks scolds the other. I don’t know what she said because I don’t speak Mandarin. I suspect it was something like, “You shouldn’t have taken his money. That sale will bring bad karma.” It will certainly bring bad karma to somebody.

Thankfully, my shopping karma is in especially good shape. And, as our wise elders have taught us, shopping karma is the best kind of karma to have. I bought some Japanese and Korean television shows on DVD, translated for Chinese audiences and white-boned demons like myself. I’ve got some good picks. Here are the first two.

Worlds Within … [Alternative translation: The World That They Live In] (KBS2 TV, Korea, 2008)

Joo Jun-Young is an ultra-adorable, television director from a wealthy family. Jung Ji-Oh is a strapping lad who also happens to be a television director, although he comes from a family of peasant bumpkins. The two work together. They have an on-again-off-again romance that produces a lot of emotional wreckage. She’s just too impulsive, frivolous, and posh … or so he says. Ji-Oh’s threshold of tolerance for mixed signals and petty disagreement is pretty low, which causes him to dump Jun-Young every once in a while and freeze her out. Somehow, she gets the reputation for being a jerk. A jokey dumb-ass lackey named Soo-Kyung makes matters worse as he goofs off, while the pouting tomboy lackey named Min-Hee struggles to keep a lid on things. Then there are the executive politics, office rivalries, crazy deadlines, and needy actors. Oh, and this being Seoul, much of the dialogue takes place on mobile phones. When the characters are not talking to each other on mobile phones, it’s because they’re not answering their phones.

I don’t normally watch soap operas. This show certainly plays-out like one. Yet, I did find myself hanging around the water-cooler at work, gripped by an uncontrollable sorrow and mewling: “Ji-Oh, why can’t you accept Jun-Young for who she is?” As I discovered, that’s not much of a conversation starter on this side of the Pacific. Overall, I enjoyed the show. But I have to admit that I stuck through it because the actress playing Jun-Young (Song Hye-Kyo) is very easy on the eyes. Rumour has it that she’s been cast in John Woo’s upcoming film 1949. I hope Song speaks a Chinese language better than she speaks English, as she tries to do in the few Singaporean scenes in the show. I didn’t understand a word. She was especially cute in her attempts, however.

Monster Parent (Fuji TV, Japan, 2008)

Takamura Itsuki is an über-babe and power-brokering lawyer working for a prestigious firm. She has the largest designer wardrobe on the planet. And she’s highly successful. Despite all her success, Itsuki is sent on a mission to baby-sit Education Department bureaucrats as a favour to her boss. The bureaucrats have to cope with problem-parents who make outrageous demands and harass teachers. The maniac parents are labeled with the English term “monster parent”, pronounced “mon-STAR pa-REN-tuh”, replete with Tubular Bells theme-music. Itsuki becomes the supreme “mon-STAR BUS-tah.” The job is more about social work and political stage-management than about legal battling. And despite the aggravation and seedy office, Itsuki eventually bonds with the rag-tag team of endearing bureaucrats. The bureaucrats, in turn, come to admire her and depend on her monster-management skills. Unfortunately, the obsessive parents are set on escalating the conflict well beyond rational limits in order to get their way. That means everyone’s careers and mental health are in jeopardy as events unfold.

I thoroughly enjoyed this show. In North America, it’s rare to have fictional TV shows grapple with the street-level politics of government services. (Yes, I’ve heard of The Wire.) Teachers invest so much of themselves in their vocation. Parents invest so much of themselves in their brood. Schools are increasingly expected to offer luxury services at discount prices. Educational curriculums are politics by other means. Something’s gotta give. These bureaucrats are the ones who mitigate the inevitable clash. It’s a great premise. And it’s well executed. I definitely want to watch more shows featuring Yonekura Ryoko, the actress who plays Itsuki. I’m willing to sit through her series Woman Wars for no other reason than the title.

Postcard From Nerdistan

Richard Florida has published a number of studies about the relationship between the nature of urbanism in a city and the type of economic activity a city attracts. Both have implications for the types of people and businesses that settle in a place. I’m thinking of the books The Rise of the Creative Class (2003), The Return of the Creative Class (Cities and the Creative Class, 2005), The Son of the Creative Class (The Flight of the Creative Class, 2007), and The Bride of the Creative Class (Who’s Your City, 2008). All of these books share an important insight. If your city (or broader conurbation) has a diverse population of tolerant and tasteful people who insist on certain civic amenities, such as a vibrant arts and café scene, then it will attract creative industries (such as those devoted to cutting-edge design services). Given that creative industries are swiftly becoming the source of a place’s competitive advantage, the governing politicians ought to take notice. Unfortunately, they don’t.

The mayoral playbook on urban development usually recommends a different tack. That’s why a mayor is more likely to attract a major sports franchise with the bribe of a free stadium, or build corny tourist attractions, or construct more roads to suburban subdivisions and mega-malls, or bully educational institutions into making their curricula pander to businesses. These policies seem, at a superficial level, to promote economic growth and competitiveness. In reality, they wind up creating soulless places full of urban sprawl and run-of-the-mill service-sector jobs. In their dreams, municipal politicians want to create the next Silicon Valley, as in Silicon Valley North (Kanata-Ottawa), Silicon Glen (southern Scotland), Silicon Prairie (Austin), Silicon Wadi (suburban Tel Aviv), and so forth. We’re already seeing this strategy falter as Asian cities make a more tenacious play for the same industries.

I’ve been spending some time in the real Silicon Valley, or what Florida calls Nerdistan. To be specific, I’ve been spending time in San José, the so-called capital of said valley. And you know what? It really is the cultureless exurb of San Francisco. I’m sure that I’m not the only one who’s called up a satellite view of San José and noticed the endless sprawl and over-abundance of parking lots. There are very few places that have the critical mass of population density to support villages of buzzing social life. Central San José certainly has no buzz: on weekends it’s a ghost-town with all the architectural nuance of a low-rent office complex; on weekdays it’s the same ghost-town but with a bit of car traffic. The locals tell me how much more upscale and upbeat this place was during the dot.com boom. I’ll have to take their word for it. And given that we’re already past the next boom, that seems like the distant past; like soooo last millennium.

I’ve discovered an interesting qualification to Florida’s thesis during my visit. Like most of California, San José has the admirable quality of being very ethno-culturally diverse. That is a type of diversity that makes cities attract economic activity in our increasingly cosmopolitan world. Yet, San José is just one of a growing number of boring multi-ethnic suburbs. I’m thinking of the Los Angeles suburb of Irvine and the Toronto suburb of Markham as other examples. These places have some features that make them desirable for a diverse population, such as grocery stores and shopping malls that cater to various ethnic tastes. Yet, these staid places never manage to develop a unique urban character that equals the sum of its parts, let alone exceeds that sum. The situation has a lot to do with the lack of civic engagement. Everyone is holed up, in turn, within identikit suburban houses, cubicled industrial parks, and oversized vehicles stuck in traffic. Street life, as it exists within major cities, is hard to find in these places. At best, you get brief frenzies of activity in shopping malls, big-box retail outlets, and multiplex theaters … and the one or two restaurant chains that surround these shopping magnets.

Oh, I forgot. The big sports franchises also make their paltry contribution to chain-restaurant business. While dining in one of these establishments, I did notice a half-dozen San José Sharks fans filling up on carbs before watching the big game. I don’t know what would possess people to get excited by ice hockey in the middle of Californian scrubland. But given the way that these hockey fans scratch themselves and eat with their mouths open, I’m guessing that they wouldn’t count themselves as members of Richard Florida’s culture-savvy creative-class.

A day without laughter is like a day in Winnipeg

For the Holiday Seasonâ„¢, I travelled to the land of les voyageur, the frigid centre of North America, the prairie nest where I was born. At no point during my visit did the temperature in the city of Winnipeg rise above -25 degrees Celsius. That didn’t stop me from jumping into a SUV and touring around Canada’s mini-van capital. As far as I can tell, Winnipeg is suffering the slowest, most humiliating culture-death of any city in the modern world. There is still the nostalgia for the days when Winnipeg was on the ascendency. Today, it’s difficult to get excited about the soulless suburbs, the two types of Monopoly-game house, the big-box retail outlets, and the derelict city centre. Sad. So very, very sad.

If there’s one thing that Winnipeggers pride themselves on, it’s the size of their big-screen TVs. Because the New York Times gave Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg such a glowing review, I actually had a motive to use one of these oversized televisions. What’s the film about? It’s about a nostalgic film-maker witnessing the slowest, most humiliating culture-death of any city in the modern world.

My Winnipeg by Guy Maddin (Canada, 2007)

This black-and-white film is a combination of archival footage and faux archival-footage describing a series of historical vignettes. Some of the vignettes revolve around Maddin’s memories of growing up above an Ellice Avenue beauty salon in the 1960s. The rest revolve around the wacky episodes of the city’s ascendency and decline—episodes that are an inventive mixture of fantasy and fact. Throughout the vignettes, the Winnipeggers sleepwalk. They sleepwalk with indifference. Or is it parochialism? Or is it the anesthetizing cold? Perhaps it’s all of the above. Those things that give the city a unique flavour are allowed to fade away. All that’s left is a nostalgia for a bunch of odd-ball curiosities and urban myths.

The truth is that this film is just a series of inside jokes. For anyone who grew up in Winnipeg, or know of its cliquish past, these inside jokes are clever. Not all of the jokes are at Winnipeggers’ expense, however. Unions stalking Catholic school girls. The Bolshevik savior-woman of the city. These are parodies of the Canadian Left’s use of the city as a foil for labourite mythology. Indeed, Maddin’s vignettes seem to be a big dare to believe all of the bazaar urban myths and stereotypes he portrays. Spelling it all out seems like spoiling the film.

Urban Accommodation of Cyclists in Amsterdam

How long, do you reckon, did it take before I was hit by a bicycle after arriving in Amsterdam? Five days. I’m quite proud that I was able to avoid a collision for that long. You see, the Wims and Pims of this city like to barrel along on their ‘bijks’ at breakneck speeds with seemingly little observance of any sort of traffic rule. Case in point, I got hit while standing in the middle of a crowd of people on a pedestrian sidewalk. As I turned to my left, the crowd opened up and a cyclist suddenly appeared: “What the … oouufff!” I’ve seen more comical spills. In the Westerpark district, where there’s enough room to build up some speed, a van driver cut off a cyclist, resulting in a nasty bounce: “Ney, ney, ney, aaahhhh … Boof!” The Dutchman limped back to his bike, middle finger held aloft, and continued on his way as if nothing had happened.

What I find most interesting, as a matter of urban planning, are the many ways in which the City of Amsterdam accommodates cyclists. You don’t create a municipality with a higher population of bicycles than residents without building a bicycle-friendly infrastructure. There are some lessons to be gleaned here. Presumably, cities around the world are promoting cycling to reduce pollution, improve fitness, and cope with population density. I’m wondering if Amsterdam is the model.

So what do these accommodations entail? Cycling routes, to start with: cycling lanes, dedicated cycling paths, cycling canal-bridges, and entire streets closed to four-wheeled vehicle traffic. The variety has a lot to do with the city’s limited ability to rebuild holus-bolus. In Berlin, as a contrasting example, the prevalence of very wide sidewalks has allowed that city to simply build cycling lanes on the sidewalks. Here, the one-size fits all solution wouldn’t work. This sometimes creates confusion for pedestrians or just leaves pedestrians with nowhere to walk. More traffic signs for bicycles would help, not that the cyclists pay much attention to the ones that already exist.

The city is also rather flexible about what gets to drive on these routes. Motorcycles, mopeds, and dirt-bikes share the space. I’m not sure whether that’s strictly legal, but motor-bike drivers all do it and no one seems to bat an eyelash. Even big peddle-cars stake their claim to these routes. I was strolling along in the Zuid-Oost district when a peddle-car the size of an ocean kayak almost ran me over on a cycling path. It was going about 60 kilometres an hour.

Then there’s parking. Almost every stationary object in the city has a bike chained to it. But the city has done a great deal to expand the parking space. It has placed bike racks on sidewalks everywhere. And when those spaces run out, spots along the street normally reserved for cars have given way to more bike racks. What’s most astonishing are the giant bike parkades you find in major commuting centres. The banking district in Zuid has several, two of which overhang canal space, which is one way for the city to cope as it runs out of land. Near the Centraal Station, the mother of all bike parkades exists. It’s four stories and fifty metres long. And yet, there is still an overflow of bikes stretching the length of the block in densely packed racks.

Just as important are the smaller accommodations that make up the rest of the infrastructure. The Amsterdam Metro doesn’t just have space for bicycles, as many subways do, some train cars actually have bike racks. Bicycle friendly stairs also make their appearance in subway terminals and other buildings where cyclists dwell. These stairs have ramp-grooves on either side so that people can roll their bikes up and down as they walk, instead of having to hoist them up.

These accommodations come with costs. I’m not just talking about the cost of fishing thousands of stolen bicycles out of the canals each year. Those costs fall disproportionately on car drivers (i.e., fewer roads and parking), which is probably the point. There are construction costs of the infrastructure, although I suspect that those pay for themselves as they are less difficult to maintain than car roads and parkades. And such a system also requires a complementing public transportation system for those unwilling or unable to ride bicycles, as well as for those inclement days. I rate Amsterdam’s tram system highly but not the Metro. (The Metro reminds me of Chicago’s L-train system, which is not a complement.)

And then there are the medical expenses of all those collisions, although I suspect those aren’t too high because the Wims and Pims just seem to bounce off hard surfaces.

What I’m Listening To As I Chill In Berlin

There’s a scene in Guy Richie’s film Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels where the protagonists enter a London pub looking for pints of lager. Instead of proper pints, they get elaborate pineapple cocktails with plastic umbrellas and bendy straws sticking out. Oi! Oi! Wot’s this? Eh, what da ya expect? You’re in a Samoan pub, mate. Of course: a Samoan pub.

I had a similar experience as I walked into an identically decorated bar just down the street from my apartment in Prenzlauer Berg. It was a chilly night here in Berlin … and a bit early to turn-in just yet. So, why not check out the only pub on my block? I walked through the door and found myself standing, ankle deep, in white sand. The place was packed with young Berliners drinking fruity cocktails (that is, mostly ice) and listening to hip-hop versions of cruise-boat dance music. Behind the bar was a Polish guy pretending to be Tom Cruise in the film Cocktail, aided by the identical twin of Meg White from White Stripes. Bamboo bar: check. Fake palm trees: check. Mural of tropical ocean vista: double check. That’s what you get in a Bahamian pub, mate.

I haven’t been doing as much music shopping as I did when I lived here last summer. But I don’t want you to think that I’ve only been drinking rum and listening to rap versions of Jimmy Cliff songs. Here’s my playlist for the month, annotated with Twitteriffic sentence fragments.

• Noblisse Oblige, In Exile (Repo Records). Cabaret tunes performed electro-goth stylee in French, English and German. One song inspired by bongos, another by klezmer, and another by rockabilly punk mixed with a cavalry charge. Easily the album-of-the-year from a Berlin-based band.  
• Water Lilly, Sputnika (Mental Groove). Last summer, Bittersüss by Michaela Grobelney (a.k.a. Mia) was the big hit here. Dark, minimalist electro-beats with haunting, repetitive female vocals. As good as that album is, I have to admit it’s an imitation of this one (released two years earlier) by Geneva’s Water Lilly. And in many ways, this album is better.
• Parov Stelar, Shine (Etage Noir). Jazzy Euro-lounge music from Austria. Lots of piano. Some swing-style jazz influence. A few up-tempo jams, one of which sounds very much like something Groove Armada would release.
• Wolfgang Frisch, The Hundred (Shield and Spear). Heavy (real) drums with electric guitars and electronics. A few flakey vocal tracks. A few good ambient electronic tracks. But the highlights are the dance tracks with the monster-drums and clever guitar work.
• Black Devil Disco Club, In Dub (Lo Recordings). This is a slightly dubby remake of a classic 70s disco album by the Parisian Bernard Fevre. I really like the two remakes of the song “Coach Me”. Very American Gigolo. Yet, the new production work makes it all sound very fresh.
• Martina Topley Bird, The Blue God (Independiente). Bristol’s Topley Bird has been one of my favourite trip-hop singers since she appeared on Trickey’s first album. Both Trickey and Topley Bird are performing here (seperately) after I leave (grrrrr…). This album has lots of art-school electronica tracks that remind me of Barbara Morgenstern (whose next album-release party happens just after I leave too; double grrrrr …). It’s a new sound that works well.
• Asian Dub Foundation, Punkara (Phantom Sound & Vision). Very ADF: jungle MCs, thrashing guitars, and a whole lot of bhangra beats. Amazing production; lots of complexity. Punk oldster Iggy Pop even makes an appearance against type. And did I mention that ADF play in Amsterdam four days before I arrive there and five days after I leave Berlin (triple grrrrr …).
• Skream, Rinse 02 (Rinse Recordings). A DJ mix of various dub-step artists, with several of Skream’s own songs. It’s an uneven collection. And Skream isn’t quite of the same caliber as Burial and Boxcutter. But he does mix in some great South-London banter from Nick Love’s excellent film Football Factory.  

Little Atoms

Little Atoms podcast by Neil Denny, Padraig Reidy, and Anthony Burn (Resonance FM, London, UK)

Some of my favourite BBC Radio 4 podcasts are on Summer hiatus (In Our Times with Melvyn Bragg and Start The Week with Andrew Marr). In order to get my weekly panel-discussion fix, my attention turned to some of the podcasts that don’t download automatically into my iPod. I was shocked (shocked!) to discover that I hadn’t listened to Little Atoms for six months. I missed a lot, notably interviews with Philippe LeGrain (to betray my “pro-migration policy” views), Austin Williams (to betray my interest in contrarianism and urban planning), David Colquhoun and Damian Thompson (astute debunkers), and Derek Pasquill (brave whistle-blower).

Claire Fox (of the free-speech-absolutist Institute of Ideas) makes a great point:

One of the things that annoys me about the dumbing-down debate is it’s assumed that dumbing down means that, you know, the audience are rather dumb and that we’ve given the audience what they want. Whereas, actually, I think it’s the opposite. I think it’s the cultural elites and the media elites who have lost faith with the audience’s capacity to deal with anything complicated. And so, consequently, they kind of think that they’re connecting with the public by giving them rubbish. … Young people, in particular, are treated as though they will never grow up, have no aspirations to do anything but talk in text[-message] language, and so on and so forth. 

I tend to think that the “dumbing down” problem is a more symbiotic relationship between consumers and producers of media (seen YouTube lately?). But I do agree with Fox that most of the problem is on the production end of things because of: (a.) the patronization-disguised-as-populism she describes; (b.) trafficking in rubbish is inexpensive to produce; and (c.) producing quality requires scarce talent. 

I also like Damian Thompson’s term “counter-knowledge” for pseudo-science, faux-history, and conspiracy theories. Thompson runs a blog called counterknowledge.com and has a new book on the subject. I’ll eventually review the book at SmithySmithy. I don’t know how he reconciles his pro-Enlightenment views with his positions at the Daily Telegraph and Catholic Herald, but his arguments here are strong.

Batalla en el cielo

Batalla en el cielo [Battle in Heaven] by Carlos Reygadas (Mexico, 2005)

You’re a fat, beardy Mexican man named Marcos. You’ve kidnapped a baby and the baby dies. So what do you do next? Have sex with the boss’s hippy daughter, of course. But not yet. First, wander around Guadalajara like a stoner. Then bang your wife, the one who looks like a Fernando Botero painting of Hugo Chavez. It’s time to watch football. Then it’s time to climb a mountain. Now it’s time to piss your pants. Is this making any sense to you? No? Well, maybe you just don’t know enough about the Mexican brand of Catholic guilt and sexual obsession.

Reygadas does a lot of interesting camera work—drawn-out pans and strolls—to capture the setting vividly. The themes are obvious enough. But he doesn’t seem to care whether the story is all that coherent. And I can’t figure out why Reygadas stages these clown-car scenes where he fits as many people as he can into full-sized American sedans?